The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “This is not good,” she said. “Smoke, from Menengai.”

  “Menengai?”

  “Where we’re going. Meji is trying to raise them on the radio.”

  I looked over Ten’s head to Meji, one hand held to his ear, looking around him. He looked worried.

  “And?”

  “Nothing.”

  “And what do we do?”

  “We go on.”

  We descended through microclimates. The valley floor was fifteen degrees hotter than the cool, damp Nandi Hills. We toiled across brush and overgrown scrub, along abandoned roads, through deserted villages. The warriors held their weapons at the slope. Ten regularly scanned the sky with her all-seeing eye. Now even I could see the smoke, blowing toward us on a wind from the east, and smell it. It smelled like burned spices. I could make out Meji trying to call up Menengai. Radio silence.

  In the early afternoon, we crossed terminum. You can see these things clearly from a distance. At ground level, they creep up on you. I was walking through tough valley grasses and thorn scrub when I noticed lines of blue moss between the roots. Oddly regular lines of moss, that bent and forked at exactly one hundred and twenty degrees, and joined up into hexagons. I froze. Twenty meters ahead of me, Ten stood in one world … I stood in another.

  “Even if you do nothing, it will still come to you,” she said. I looked down. The blue lines were inching toward my toes. “Come on.” Ten reached out her hand. I took it, and she led me across. Within two minutes walk, the scrub and grass had given way entirely to Chaga vegetation. For the rest of the afternoon we moved through the destroying zone. Trees crashed around us, shrubs were devoured from the roots down, grasses fell apart and dissolved; fungus fingers and coral fans pushed up on either side, bubbles blew around my head. I walked through it untouched like a man in a furnace.

  Meji called a halt under an arch of Chaga-growth like a vault in a medieval cathedral. He had a report on his earjack.

  “Menengai has been attacked.”

  Everyone started talking asking question, jabbering. Meji held up his hand. “They were Africans. Someone had provided them with Chaga-proof equipment, and weapons. They had badges on their uniforms: KLA.”

  “Kenyan Liberation Army,” the quiet one, Naomi said.

  “We have enemies,” the clever one, Hamid said. “The Kenyan Government still claims jurisdiction over the Chaga. Every so often, they remind us who’s in charge. They want to keep us on the run, stop us getting established. They’re nothing but contras with western money and guns and advisers.”

  “And Menengai?” I asked. Meji shook his head.

  “Most High is bringing the survivors to Ol Punyata.”

  I looked at Ten.

  “Most High?”

  She nodded.

  We met up with Most High under the dark canopy of the Great Wall. It was an appropriately somber place for the meeting: the smooth soaring trunks of the trees; the canopy of leaves, held out like hands, a kilometer over our heads; the splashes of light that fell through the gaps to the forest floor; survivors and travelers, dwarfed by it all. Medieval peasants must have felt like this, awestruck in their own cathedrals.

  It’s an odd experience, meeting someone you’ve heard of in a story. You want to say, I’ve heard about you, you haven’t heard about me, you’re nothing like I imagined. You check them out to make sure they’re playing true to their character. His story was simple and grim.

  A village, waking, going about its normal business, people meeting and greeting, walking and talking, gossiping and idling, talking the news, taking coffee. Then, voices; strange voices, and shots, and people looking up wondering, What is going on here? and while they are caught wondering, strangers running at them, running through, strangers with guns, shooting at anything in front of them, not asking questions, not looking or listening, shooting and running on. Shooting, and burning. Bodies left where they lay, homes like blossoming flowers going up in gobs of flame. Through, back, and out. Gone. As fast, as off-hand as that. Ten minutes, and Menengai was a morgue. Most High told it as casually as it had been committed, but I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped his staff.

  To people like me, who come from a peaceful, ordered society, violence like that is unimaginable.

  I’ve seen fights and they scared me, but I’ve never experienced the kind of violence Most High was describing, where people’s pure intent is to kill other people. I could see the survivors—dirty, tired, scared, very quiet—but I couldn’t see what had been done to them. So I couldn’t really believe it. And though I’d hidden up there on the hill from the helicopter, I couldn’t believe it would have opened up those big gatlings on me, and I couldn’t believe now that the people who attacked Menengai, this Kenyan Liberation Army, whose only purpose was to kill Chaga-folk and destroy their lives, were out there somewhere, probably being resupplied by airdrop, reloading, and going in search of new targets. It seemed wrong in a place as silent and holy as this … like a snake in the garden.

  Meji and Ten believed it. As soon as we could, they moved us on and out.

  “Where now?” I asked Ten.

  She looked uncertain.

  “East. The Black Simbas have a number of settlements on Kirinyaga. They’ll defend them.”

  “How far?”

  “Three days?”

  “That woman back there, Hope. She won’t be able to go on very much longer.” I had been speaking to her, she was heavily pregnant. Eight months, I reckoned. She had no English, and I had Aid-Agency Swahili, but she appreciated my company, and I found her big belly a confirmation that life was strong, life went on.

  “I know,” Ten said. She might wear the gear and carry the staff and have a gun at her hip, but she was facing decisions that told her, forcefully, You’re still in your teens, little warrior.

  We wound between the colossal buttressed roots of the roof-trees. The globes on the tops of the staffs gave off a soft yellow light—bioluminescence, Ten told me.

  We followed the bobbing lights through the dark, dripping wall-forest. The land rose, slowly and steadily. I fell back to walk with Hope. We talked. It passed the time. The Great Wall gave way abruptly to an ecosystem of fungi. Red toadstools towered over my head, puff-balls dusted me with yellow spores, trumpetlike chanterelles dripped water from their cups, clusters of pin-head mushrooms glowed white like corpses. I saw monkeys, watching from the canopy.

  We were high now, climbing up ridges like the fingers of a splayed out hand. Hope told me how her husband had been killed in the raid on Menengai. I did not know what to say. Then she asked me my story. I told it in my bad Swahili. The staffs led us higher.

  “Ten.”

  We were taking an evening meal break. That was one thing about the Chaga, you could never go hungry. Reach out, and anything you touched would be edible. Ten had taught me that if you buried your shit, a good-tasting tuber would have grown in the morning. I hadn’t had the courage yet to try it. For an alien invasion, the Chaga seemed remarkably considerate of human needs.

  “I think Hope’s a lot further on than we thought.”

  Ten shook her head.

  “Ten, if she starts, will you stop?”

  She hesitated a moment.

  “Okay. We will stop.”

  She struggled for two days, down into a valley, through terribly tough terrain of great spheres of giraffe-patterned moss, then up, into higher country than any we had attempted before.

  “Ten, where are we?” I asked. The Chaga had changed our geography, made all our maps obsolete. We navigated by compass, and major, geophysical landmarks.

  “We’ve passed through the Nyandarua Valley, now we’re going up the east side of the Aberdares.”

  The line of survivors became strung out. Naomi and I struggled at the rear with the old and the women with children, and Hope. We fought our way up that hillside, but Hope was flagging, failing.

  “I think … I feel …” she said, hand on her belly.

&nb
sp; “Call Ten on that thing,” I ordered Naomi. She spoke into her mouthpiece.

  “No reply.”

  “She what?”

  “There is no reply.”

  I ran. Hands, knees, belly, whatever way I could, I made it up that ridge, as fast as I could. Over the summit the terrain changed, as suddenly as Chaga landscapes do, from the moss maze to a plantation of regularly spaced trees shaped like enormous ears of wheat.

  Ten was a hundred meters downslope. She stood like a statue among the wheat-trees. Her staff was planted firmly on the ground. She did not acknowledge me when I called her name. I ran down through the trees to her.

  “Ten, Hope can’t go on. We have to stop.”

  “No!” Ten shouted. She did not look at me, she stared down through the rows of trees.

  “Ten!” I seized her, spun her round. Her face was frantic, terrified, tearful, joyful, as if in this grove of alien plants was something familiar and absolutely agonizing. “Ten! You promised!”

  “Shone! Shone! I know where I am! I know where this is! That is the pass, and that is where the road went, this is the valley, that is the river, and down there, is Gichichi!” She looked back up to the pass, called to the figures on the tree-line. “Most High! Gichichi! This is Gichichi! We are home!”

  She took off. She held her staff in her hand like a hunter’s spear, she leaped rocks and fallen trunks, she hurdled streams and run-offs; bounding down through the trees. I was after her like a shot but I couldn’t hope to keep up. I found Ten standing in an open space where a falling wheat-tree had brought others down like dominoes. Her staff was thrust deep into the earth. I didn’t interrupt. I didn’t say a word. I knew I was witnessing something holy.

  She went down on her knees. She closed her eyes. She pressed her hands to the soil. And I saw dark lines, like slow, black lightning, go out from her fingertips across the Chaga-cover. The lines arced and intersected, sparked out fresh paths.

  The carpet of moss began to resemble a crackle-glazed Japanese bowl. But they all focused on Ten. She was the source of the pattern. And the Chaga-cover began to flow toward the lines of force. Shapes appeared under the moving moss, like ribs under skin. They formed grids and squares, slowly pushing up the Chaga-cover. I understood what I was seeing. The lines of buried walls and buildings were being exhumed. Molecule by molecule, centimeter by centimeter, Gichichi was being drawn out of the soil.

  By the time the others had made it down from the ridge, the walls stood waisthigh and service units were rising out of the earth, electricity generators, water pumps, heat-exchangers, nanofacturing cells. Refugees and warriors walked in amazement among the slowly rising porcelain walls.

  Then Ten chose to recognize me.

  She looked up. Her teeth were clenched, her hair was matted, sweat dripped from her chin and cheekbones. Her face was gaunt, she was burning her own body-mass, ramming it through that mind/Chaga interface in her brain to program nanoprocessors on a massive scale.

  “We control it, Shone,” she whispered. “We can make the world any shape we want it to be. We can make a home for ourselves.”

  Most High laid his hand on her shoulder.

  “Enough, child. Enough. It can make itself now.”

  Ten nodded. She broke the spell. Ten rolled onto her side, gasping, shivering.

  “It’s finished,” she whispered. “Shone …”

  She still could not say my name right. I went to her, I took her in my arms while around us Gichichi rose, unfolded roofs like petals, grew gardens and tiny, tangled lanes. No words. No need for words. She had done all her saying, but close at hand, I heard the delighted, apprehensive cry of a woman entering labor.

  WE begin with a village, and we end with a village. Different villages, a different world, but the name remains the same. Did I not tell you that names are important? Ojok, Hope’s child, is our first citizen. He is now two, but every day people come over the pass or up from the valley, to stay, to make their homes here. Gichichi is now two thousand souls strong. Five hundred houses straggle up and down the valley side, each with its own garden-shamba and nanofactory, where we can make whatever we require. Gichichi is famous for its nanoprocessor programmers. We earn much credit hiring them to the towns and villages that are growing up like mushrooms down in the valley of Nyeri and along the foothills of Mt. Kenya. A great city is growing there, I have heard, and a mighty culture developing; but that is for the far future. Here in Gichichi, we are wealthy in our own way; we have a community center, three bars, a mandazi shop, even a small theater. There is no church, yet. If Christians come, they may build one. If they do, I hope they call it St. John’s. The vine-flowers will grow down over the roof again.

  Life is not safe. The KLA have been joined by other contra groups, and we have heard through the net that the West is tightening its quarantine of the Chaga zones. There are attacks all along the northern edge. I do not imagine Gichichi is immune. We must scare their powerful ones very much, now. But the packages keep coming down, and the world keeps changing. And life is never safe. Brother Dust’s lesson is the truest I ever learned, and I have been taught it better than many. But I trust in the future. Soon there will be a new name among the citizens of Gichichi, this fine, fertile town in the valleys of the Aberdares. Of course, Sean and I cannot agree what it should be. He wants to call her after the time of day she is born, I want something Irish.

  “But you won’t be able to pronounce it!” he says. We will think of something. That is the way we do things here. Whatever her name, she will have a story to tell, I am sure, but that is not for me to say. My story ends here, and our lives go on. I take up mine again, as you lift yours. We have a long road before us.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following material:

  “The Juniper Tree,” by John Kessel. Copyright © 2000 by John Kessel. First published in Science Fiction Age, January 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Antibodies,” by Charles Stross. Copyright © 2000 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, July 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Birthday of the World,” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 2000 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, The Virginia Kidd Literary Agency.

  “Savior,” by Nancy Kress. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Reef,” by Paul J. McAuley. Copyright © 2000 by Paul J. McAuley. First published in Skylife (Harcourt), edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Going After Bobo,” by Susan Palwick. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Crux,” By Albert E. Cowdrey. Copyright © 2000 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Cure for Everything,” by Severna Park. Copyright © 2000 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, June 22. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Suspect Genome,” by Peter F. Hamilton. Copyright © 2000 by Interzone. First published in Interzone, June 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O,” by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 2000 by Michael Swanwick. First published in Tales of Old Earth (Tachyon). Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Radiant Green Star,” by Lucius Shepard. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Great Wall of Mars,” by Alastair Reynolds. Copyright © 2000 by Alastair Reynolds. First published in Spectrum SF 1. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Milo and Sylvie,” by Eliot Fintushel. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Mag
azines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction. March 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Snowball in Hell,” by Brian Stableford. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “On the Orion Line,” by Stephen Baxter. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Oracle,” by Greg Egan. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Obsidian Harvest,” by Rick Cook and Ernest Hogan. Copyright © 2000 by Dell Magazines. First published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2000. Reprinted by permission of the authors.

  “Patient Zero,” by Tananarive Due. Copyright © 2000 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2000. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “A Colder War,” by Charles Stross. Copyright © 2000 by Charles Stross. First published in Spectrum SF 3. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Real World,” by Steven Utley. Copyright © 2000 by SCIFI.COM. First published electronically on SCI FICTION, September 6. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Thing About Benny,” by M. Shayne Bell. Copyright © 2000 by M. Shayne Bell. First published in Vanishing Acts (Tor), edited by Ellen Datlow. Reprinted by permission of the author.