The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Jonas nodded, and Damjan nodded to copy him. “Is uncle here because of the revolution?” he asked.

  Lately all things had to do with the revolution. Ever since the flickery blue holo-footage, broadcast from a pirate satellite, that had been projected on the back wall of old Derozan’s shop one night. The whole village had crowded around to watch as the rebels, moving like ghosts, took the far-off capital and dragged the aristos out from their towers. Jonas had cheered along with everyone else.

  “He is,” father said, exchanging a look with Jonas’s mother. “Yes. He is. A lot of people had to leave the cities, after the revolution. Do you remember when the soldiers came?”

  Jonas remembered. They came in a roaring hover to hand out speakaloud pamphlets and tell the village they were Liberated now. That they could keep the whole harvest, other than a small token of support to the new government of Liberated People.

  “Some of them were looking for your uncle,” father said. “If anyone finds out he’s here, he’ll be killed. So don’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. Pretend he’s not here.”

  Jonas’s new uncle had no expression on his gaunt face, but on top of the wooden table his hands clenched so hard that the knuckles throbbed white.

  * * *

  After supper is over and Jonas goes to bed, Fox stays behind to speak to his parents. There is a new batch of bacteria beer ready and Petar pours each of them a tin cup full. It’s dark and foamy and the smell makes Fox’s stomach turn, but he takes it between his small hands. His cousin Petar is tall and handsome in a way Fox never was, but he has aged a decade in the weeks since Damjan fell. There are streaks of gray at his temples and his eyes are bagged. He slumps when he sits.

  His wife Blanka conceals it better. She is the same mixture of cheery and sharp-tongued as she was before. In public she holds to Fox’s hand and scolds and smiles as if he really is Damjan, so realistic Fox worried for her mind at first. But he knows now it’s only that she’s a better actor than her husband, and more viscerally aware of what will happen if someone discovers the truth: that Damjan’s brain-dead body is inhabited by a fugitive poet and enemy of the revolution. She drinks the stinking bacteria beer every night, even when Petar doesn’t.

  “Jonas and I found something in the field today,” Fox says, hating how his voice comes shrill and high when he’s trying to speak of something so important. “A ship.”

  Petar was using his thumb to wipe the foam off the top of his cup, but now he looks up. “What kind of ship?” he asks.

  “Just a dinghy,” Fox says. “Small. One pod. But everything’s operational. It only needs a refuel.” He takes a swallow of beer too big for his child’s throat, and nearly chokes. “Someone was going to use it to break the blockade before a nanodart finished them off,” he says. “Now that someone could be me. If you help me again. With this one last thing.”

  His chest is tight with hope and fear. Petar looks to Blanka.

  “You would leave,” Blanka says. “In Damjan’s body.”

  Fox nods his bandaged head. “The transfer was a near thing,” he said. “Even if we could find that bastard with the autosurgeon again, trying to extract could wipe me completely.”

  That isn’t true, not strictly true. He would probably survive, but missing memories and parts of his personality, the digital copy lacerated and corrupted. That might be worse than getting wiped.

  “So, we would have another funeral,” Petar says. “Another funeral for Damjan, but this time with all the village watching and with no body to bury.”

  “You can tell people it was a blood clot,” Fox says. “An aftereffect from the fall. And the casket can stay closed.”

  Petar and Blanka look at each other again, stone-faced. People are different out here in the villages. Hard to read. It makes Fox anxious.

  “Then you can be at peace,” he says. “You don’t have to see … This.” He encompasses his body with one waving hand. “You just have to help me one more time. It might be the best shot I’ll ever have at getting off-world.”

  “Maybe the ship was put there as a trap,” Blanka says. “Did you think of that, poet? To draw you or other aristos out of hiding.”

  Fox hadn’t thought of that, but he shakes his head. “They wouldn’t go to that much trouble,” he says. “Not for me or anyone else that’s left. All the important people digicast out before the capital fell.” He leans forward, toes barely scraping the floor. “I’ll never forget what your family has done for me.”

  “Family helps family,” Petar mutters. “Family over everything.” He looks up from his beer and Fox sees his eyes are wet. “I’ll need to see the ship,” he says. “You’ve been safe like this, in Damjan’s body. Maybe now you can escape and be safe forever. Maybe that is why Damjan fell. His life for your life.”

  His shoulders begin to shake, and Blanka puts her arm across them. She pulls Fox’s beer away and pours it slowly into her empty cup. “It’s time for you to go to bed,” she tells him, not looking into his eyes—into Damjan’s eyes.

  Fox goes. The room he shares with Jonas is tiny, barely big enough to fit the two quickfab slabs that serve as beds. Jonas isn’t asleep, though. He’s sitting upright with his blanket bunched around his waist.

  “You’re going to take the ship, aren’t you?” he says. “You’re going to go up into space and visit the other worlds and see all the stars up close. That’s what aristos do.” The penultimate word is loaded with disdain.

  “I’m going to get away from the people who want me executed,” Fox says.

  Jonas slides down into his bed, turned away facing the wall. “Aristos go up and we sit in the mud, teacher says. Aristo bellies are full of our blood.”

  “Your teacher spouts whatever the propaganda machine sends him,” Fox says wearily. “Bellies bloated with the blood of the masses. That was my line. Bet your teacher didn’t tell you that.”

  Jonas doesn’t reply.

  Fox undresses himself and climbs into bed. He tries, and fails, to sleep.

  * * *

  Jonas doesn’t sleep right away either. He’s wary of bad dreams since the day he climbed the godtree. The day they learned, in school, about the smooth white storage cone embedded in the backs of the aristos’ soft-skinned necks.

  Their new teacher was a tall stern man dressed all in black, replacing the chirping AI that had taught them songs and games, but everyone got brand-new digipads so they didn’t mind. All the lessons were about the revolution, about the aristos who’d kept their boot on the throat of the people for too long and now were reaping the harvest, which made no sense to Jonas because the teacher also said aristos were weak and lazy and didn’t know how to work in the fields.

  One day the teacher projected a picture on the wall that showed a man without skin or muscles, showing his gray skeleton, and a white knob sunk into the base of the skull.

  “This is where aristos keep a copy of themselves,” the teacher said, pointing with his long skinny finger. “This is what lets them steal young healthy bodies when their old ones die. It’s what lets them cross the stars, going from world to world, body to body, like a disease. Like digital demons.”

  Jonas thought of his uncle who stayed in the basement, the hood he always wore. That, and his soft hands, his way of speaking that swallowed no sounds, made it obvious.

  He was an aristo. It made Jonas frightened and excited at the same time. Had he lived in a sky-scraping tower in the city and eaten meat and put his boot on the throat of the good simple people? Had he skipped through the stars and been to other worlds?

  When Jonas came home from school, he tried to ask his father, but his father shook his head.

  “Whatever he was, he’s family,” he said. “Family over everything. So you can’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. Promise me, Jonas.”

  But it was hard to not think about. Especially hard to not think about the stars and the other worlds. Jonas knew the branches of the godtree were the be
st place to watch the stars from. To dream from. Sometimes they looked close enough to touch, if he could only climb high enough and stretch out his arms. Jonas was a good climber. Feeling electric with new excitement, he dodged his mother’s chores that day and went out to the fields.

  He barely noticed Damjan following, how he always followed.

  * * *

  Fox is waiting outside the small quickcrete cube of a building that serves as the village school. The pocked gray walls are painted over with a mural, a cheery yellow sun and blooming flowers. All the children streamed out a few minutes ago, chattering, laughing. Some of them came over to touch Fox gingerly on the head and ask if he was better yet. Fox encounters this question often and finds it easiest to nod and smile vaguely. He knows Damjan was never much of a talker.

  But the last of the children have gone home now, and Jonas still hasn’t come out. It’s making Fox anxious. He stands up from his squat—he can squat for ages now, Damjan’s small wiry legs are used to it more than they are to chairs—and walks around the edge of the building, towards the window. The smart glass is dimmed, and scratched, besides, but when he stands on tiptoe he can see silhouettes. One is Jonas and the other a tall, straight-backed teacher with his arms folded across his chest. The conversation is muffled.

  Fear prickles in Fox’s stomach again, the fear that’s threatened to envelop him ever since a friend woke him in the middle of the night and showed him his face on the blacklist, declared an enemy of the Liberated People. The new government isn’t stupid. They know to start with the children. Jonas’s head is full of the vitriol Fox helped spark not so long ago, back when he’d fooled himself into thinking the violence of the revolution would be brief and justified.

  Fox’s heart pounds now. He sees Jonas’s silhouette turn to leave, and he quickly darts back to his usual waiting place outside the main door. The boy comes out with a scowl on his face that falters, then deepens, when he catches sight of Fox. He gives only the slightest jerk of his head as acknowledgement, then goes to walk past.

  Fox doesn’t let him. “What did you tell him?” he demands in a whisper, seizing Jonas’s arm.

  Jonas wrests it away. His expression turns hard to read, like his parents’. Then a hesitant smirk appears on his face.

  Fox feels the panic welling up. “What did you do?” he demands, grabbing for him again.

  Jonas grabs back, pinching his hand hard with his nails. “Come on, Damjan,” he says with a fake cheeriness, tugging him along. “Home time, Damjan.”

  “You stupid little shit,” Fox rasps, barely able to speak through the tightness in his chest. “They’ll take your parents, you know that? They’ll take them away for helping me. You’ll never see them again.” He can already hear the whine of a hunter drone, the stamp of soldiers’ boots. His head spins. “The fall wasn’t my fault,” he says, with no aim now but lashing out like a cornered animal. “It was yours.”

  Jonas’s face goes white. His hand leaps off Fox’s like it’s been burnt. “He followed me,” Jonas says. “I told him to wait on the low branch. But he didn’t.” He’s gone still as a statue. A sob shudders through him. “I didn’t tell teacher anything.”

  “What?” Fox feels a wave of relief, then shame.

  “I didn’t tell teacher about you,” Jonas hiccups, and then his eyes narrow. “I should have. I should tell him. If I tell him, they’ll forgive my parents. They aren’t aristos. They’re good. They’re Liberated People.”

  Suddenly, Jonas is turning back towards the school, his jaw set like his father’s. The red mark on his forehead is back.

  “Wait,” Fox pleads. “Jonas. Let me explain myself.”

  Jonas stops, turns. Giving him a chance.

  Fox’s mind whirls through possibilities. “The fall wasn’t your fault,” he says slowly. “And Damjan knows that.”

  “Damjan is dead,” Jonas says through clenched teeth. “His brain had no electric in it.”

  “But when they did the transfer,” Fox says. “You remember that, yes? The surgery? When they put my storage cone into Damjan’s brainstem, I got to see his memories. Just for a moment.”

  Jonas’s eyes narrow again, but he stays where he is. He wipes his nose, smearing snot across the heel of his hand.

  “I saw Damjan wanted to follow you up the tree,” Fox says slowly, feeling his way into the lie. “Because he always wanted to be like you. He knew you were strong and brave and honest. He was trying to be like you, even though he knew he should have waited on the lower branch. And when he fell, he didn’t want you to feel bad. He didn’t want you to feel guilty.” Fox taps the back of his bandaged head, where the storage cone is concealed. “That was the last thing Damjan thought.”

  Tears are flowing freely down Jonas’s cheeks now. “I wanted to go higher,” he says. “When I go high enough, it feels like I can touch the sky.”

  Fox reaches up and puts his hand on Jonas’s shoulder, softly this time. His panic is receding. He has Jonas solved now. There’s a bit of guilt in his gut, but he’s told worse lies. He would tell a dozen more to make sure nothing goes wrong, not now that Petar has seen the ship and agrees it will fly. Not now that he’s so close to escaping.

  * * *

  Jonas’s father has forbidden him to go near the granary again, but he still goes out to the fields the next day. He has always bored quickly of the games the other children play, even though he can throw the rubber ball as hard as anyone and dodges even better. He’s always preferred to wander.

  His nameless uncle is with him. It’s still hard to look at Damjan’s face and know Damjan is not behind it, but talking comes a little easier since what happened yesterday. When his uncle asks why he was kept behind after school by the teacher, Jonas tells him the truth.

  “We’re learning about the revolution,” he says. “About the heroes. Stanko was my favorite. He took the capital with a hundred fighters and he’s got an eye surgery to see in the dark. But yesterday the lesson changed on my pad.” He motions with his hand, trying to capture how the text all dissolved and then reformed, so quick he barely noticed it. “Now it says General Bjelica took the capital. It says Stanko was a traitor and they had to execute him. So I told teacher it wasn’t right.”

  Damjan’s face screws up how it does before he cries, but no tears come out, and Jonas knows it’s because grown-ups don’t cry. “I met Stanislav once,” his uncle says. “He was a good man. Maybe too good. An idealist.”

  “You met Stanko?” Jonas demands. “What did his eyes look like?”

  His uncle blinks. “Bright,” he says. “Like miniature suns.”

  Jonas stops where he is, the tall grass rustling against his legs, as he envisions Stanko tall and strong with eyes blazing. “Like stars,” he murmurs.

  His uncle nods. “Maybe he got away,” he says. “There’s a lot of false reports. Maybe he’s in hiding somewhere.”

  Jonas asks the question, then, the one that has been bubbling in the back of his mind for days. “The revolution is good,” he says. “Isn’t it?”

  His uncle gives a laugh with no happiness in it. “I thought it was,” he says. “Until the bloodshed. Until cynics and thugs like Bjelica took over. After everything I did for their cause—all the rallies, all the writing—they turned on me. Ungrateful bastards.”

  “Why did you want the revolution if you’re an aristo?” Jonas asks plainly.

  “Because there weren’t meant to be aristocrats or underclass after the revolution,” his uncle says, with a trace of anger in Damjan’s shrill voice. “Everyone was meant to be equal. But history is a wheel and we always make the same mistakes. The only difference is who gets crushed into the mud.” He picks anxiously at a stalk. “The ruling families were bad,” he says. “The famines, and all that. But this is worse.”

  Jonas considers it. The teacher told them that there would be no famines anymore. They would keep their whole crop, except for a small token of support to the government of Liberated People. “Did yo
u lose many in the famine?” he asks, because it’s a grown-up question. “I had a little sister who died. And that’s why Damjan is different. Was different. Because mother couldn’t feed him well enough.”

  Damjan’s mouth twists. For a moment his uncle doesn’t respond. “No,” he finally says. “Not many.” Damjan’s face is red, and Jonas realizes his uncle is ashamed of something, though what he can’t guess. “I wrote a poem series about the famine,” he says. “Years ago. I still remember it. Do you want to hear some of it, maybe?”

  Jonas hesitates. He doesn’t know if he likes poetry. But maybe if he listens to the poetry, he can ask more questions about Stanko and the capital, and then about the stars and the other worlds his uncle will soon go to.

  “Alright,” he agrees. “If it’s not really long.”

  * * *

  The week passes at two speeds for Fox, agonizingly slow and terrifyingly fast. Petar has spread word that the old granary past the edge of the terraform has broken glass and an old leaking oil drum inside it, to ensure the other parents keep their children away. Fox’s nights are spent poring over schematics with Blanka or else sneaking out to the ship itself with Petar.

  During the day, he spends most of his time with Jonas. The boy is bright and never runs dry of questions, and ever since Fox’s first recitation he’s been devouring poetry. Not necessarily Fox’s—he prefers it when Fox recites the older masters, the bolder and more rhythmic styles. He has even started scribbling his own poem using charcoal on the wall of their bedroom, which made Petar and then Blanka both shake their heads.

  He reminds Fox a little bit of himself as a child. Too clever to get along with the other children, too brash and too stubborn, worryingly so. But Fox has other concerns. The ship is tuned and refueled and finally ready to fly, and the village’s weather probe predicts a rolling storm in a fortnight. That’s when Fox will launch, while the thunder and lightning masks the take-off. His days in the village, his days in Damjan’s body, are finally numbered.

  Fox is in the cramped bedroom, laboring with a piece of Jonas’s charcoal. The boy’s favorite poem is a short one, but even so it takes a long time for Fox to transcribe it onto the clear stretch of wall. He’s only halfway finished the memento, his small hands smeared black, when he hears Jonas arrive home from the school. A moment later, he hears a shriek from Blanka.