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

by Gardner Dozois

  “That’s why is has to be tonight,” Martin explained.

  Larry opened his mouth to speak. Nothing came out. He nodded and left the room.

  You said you’d take care of this, Artie said reproachfully.

  “Isn’t that what happened last month, when he shaved and changed his clothes and stopped going native? When he sent that message to the king, that he was ill and recovering in his favorite temple? Isn’t that what I just did, again, now?”

  Artie said nothing. Martin scowled, then tapped the desktop. The latest schedule appeared.

  “Did you send our final message to our people in the tribes? About which gate is going to be opened? And did you pay off the guards at the gate?”

  Yes, yes and yes. A little after midnight the gate will be opened. The tribes will storm inside.

  And Nineveh will burn.

  Nineveh: Midnight, August, 612 BCE

  The timber, stone and mud brick building was a full three floors tall, a solid but undistinguished presence near the main temple district. It overlapped the streets where the business of God transitioned into the business of man.

  Martin, his skinsuit tuned to no see’um, sat on a small bench on the roof, in the darkness, and looked up and out, over the walls of Nineveh toward the hills which loomed over the city.

  Martin heard the door behind him open, then close, and the soft crunch of sandals on the loose gravel spread across the roof. He extended his senses.

  “It’s beautiful up here at night.”

  Martin said nothing. He vaguely recognized the voice as one of the servants or slaves who worked on the first floor of the temple, the floor that was open to the locals.

  A man-sized shape, a silhouette of darkness outlined against the stars, detached itself from the side wall of the small pillar that rose out of the center of the roof. The shape walked over to the bench and sat next to Martin.

  “I can’t see you or hear you,” the shape said, conversationally.

  The shape spoke in a soft, deep soprano. Martin realized she was a woman.

  “But I know you’re here. I saw you climb up the ladder and shut the door behind you. No one came after you and the door never opened for you to come back down,” she said matter-of-factly. “So I know you are here. I also understand that when you wear your special clothes you can become as a ghost to me.”

  She stretched, bare arms up and out, her back arched, chin up, like a cat ready for its nightly prowl outside. Martin changed to daylight vision. He recognized her now as one of the senior women who worked as official temple prostitutes in the back of the first floor, in the sacred rooms behind the great tapestries that framed the holy images and statues.

  That she knew him, that she watched him, that she followed him and spoke to him, was all new.

  And anything that was new was dangerous. He considered killing her and leaving her body on the roof. In a few hours it would not make any difference.

  But … his eyes looked out and up, at the stars overhead.

  Enough with killing tonight. He felt a deep weariness. To hell with everything.

  He stayed invisible and tuned his voice to a deep rumble, to appear more mysterious. If she ran away, that was fine. If she stayed …

  “So why do you sit here, when I clearly want to be left alone? On the roof of my own temple? With my own thoughts?” he said.

  She faced up and out to the darkness.

  “My name is Achadina,” she said.

  Female diminutive of “ancient city,” Artie said to him. Like a reference and distorted oral transmission form of Akkad.

  And Martin remembered the city of Akkad.

  “Danger level?” Martin asked in silent mode.

  None, Artie replied. She carries no weapons, no poisons and nothing that can hurt you. You are also far stronger than she is.

  “So what does she want?”

  Good question, Artie said drily. Why don’t you ask her?

  Martin opened his mouth to snap back and then changed his mind. Argue with software? He’d done it before, many times, too many to count, and it had all the satisfaction of masturbation. A mechanical exercise with no real pleasure.

  He turned off no see’um. He became another shape in the darkness on the bench.

  Achadina did not acknowledge he was now, officially, next to her. Instead, she pointed to the hills above and outside the walls, to the sparkle and flicker of countless campfires, all around the city in unbroken, thick, circles.

  “Who are they?” she asked, apologetically. “My clients are not very forthcoming with information.”

  “They are all of our enemies,” he explained. He pointed to different areas, from left to right, in a circle around the city. “A few Babylonians. A Mede named Cyaxeres and his army. Persians. Scythians. Chaldeans. Cimmerians.”

  “And why do they want to kill us? Why do they want to kill us now?”

  Martin thought of the usual answers, the glib words he had spoken to the king and his ministers and the great priests and the nobles over the last three months of the siege.

  And he was just sick of it all.

  “I could say they want our gold and silver. I could say they want our men and women and children as slaves. I could say they want to burn our temples and palaces and grind us into the dirt so we are never a threat to them, ever again.”

  “Is that the real answer?” Achadina asked.

  Martin shrugged.

  “It’s part of the answer but, no, it’s not the real answer.”

  “And the real answer is…?”

  “Because now it’s time for them to do all those things,” he said. He wanted to sound bitter but he could not make it come out right. All he sounded was tired. “They’re here to kill us because now it is August, 612 BCE, and the time is right.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, hesitantly. “I don’t understand.”

  “I know,” Martin said.

  “But I understand more than you think,” she snapped.

  “Really?”

  “Achadina is a very old name,” she said. She stared along with him, out into the darkness and up at the hills.

  After a moment she turned and pointed up behind and above them, to the top of the wall just above the staircase pillar. There, high up on the stone, visible to the streets in every direction, was the carved image of a stone eagle.

  “When the Stone Eagle flies, it’s time to run.”

  Martin stiffened.

  She knows! Artie said, startled. How can she know?

  Martin turned to face her. For a moment, wildly, he wondered if she was someone sent back to rescue him.

  “Akkad? You remember Akkad?”

  Achadina looked at him, tried to study him in the darkness. He thought for a moment she scowled, but then realized it was something else.

  She was desperate.

  She shook her head.

  “I am not a priest. None of my tribe are priests. So what you see when you look at me is what you get. I was born here and now, and I grow old and I die here and now. Akkad was born and flourished and burned to ash a thousand years ago and I never walked its streets. But my family and my tribe remember Akkad.”

  Relax, Artie whispered. Martin felt the familiar cool edge as his heart rate slowed and settled, his thoughts channeled and focused. He gave himself a moment until he was under control, then continued.

  “Tell me about your tribe and your family,” Martin ordered.

  “My family is simplest. I have a daughter and a son. Aurya and Nabo Pal.”

  “His father was Nabo,” Martin said, aloud. Achadina nodded.

  “Nabo also served you, in this house, as a sweeper, until the army caught him out on the street one day. They claimed he owed ilko—

  Conscription into national service, Artie explained.

  —and was dragged away. I have not heard from him since,” she said. She went silent for a moment. “He was a good man.”
/>   Checking, Artie supplied. I tagged him with a monitor chip when he started to work for us.

  “And?”

  And he’s dead. He caught typhus. He was left behind after he collapsed on the march south from here. One of his friends wrapped him in a blanket and gave him a water skin. After the Assyrians lost the big battle, the Babylonians came north and found him. They stole his clothes and blanket and his water and left him naked in the dirt. He died of thirst and exposure the next day.

  “He is dead,” Martin said. He looked at her again and then he lied. “He fought bravely. His death was swift and painless.”

  Achadina dipped her head, then nodded her thanks.

  “I suspected as much,” she admitted. She looked up at him, her expression fierce and determined. “He might be dead. But I intend to live. And I will make sure my children live. And free, not as slaves.”

  “What do you know?” Martin asked.

  Achadina hesitated, then seemed to make a decision.

  “Many of my tribe work in the Stone Eagle,” she said, and gestured to include the temple and the neighborhood around it. “We live in the buildings all around here. All of us trace our line back, through many generations, to Akkad. To the first empire. To the first Stone Eagle.”

  Martin was tempted to argue with her but decided against it. He remembered earlier eagles than the eagle at Akkad. He remembered eagles sketched on rock outside of caves or stitched onto the skins of shelters on the plains. He remembered eagles carved and painted on the outside walls of taverns and temples in Jericho and Shediet and Varanasi and Chang’an and Barada. But it was better if she did not know about them. It gave him a change point for this timeline as a reference.

  “Go on.”

  “One of my greats—a woman,” she said defiantly, as if she expected him to argue with her, “was very clever. She realized that whenever anything bad was about to occur in Akkad, the stone eagle above the tavern or the temple or wherever it was carved, disappeared off the wall. It didn’t matter if it was plague or flood or fire or war, the stone eagle always flew away before the badness began. You always escaped.”

  “I am merely a man,” he said mildly. “I may have some powers but I can hardly claim to be old enough to have walked the streets of Akkad.”

  “Do not lie to me, priest,” she said, tiredly. “Do not play with me as you would a child. I’m not a child. I’m not as old as you, but I’m not a child. I have children of my own. I’ve buried parents and brothers, children and grandparents. And now a husband, if I can find him. I may not have your years, but I know how life works and what pain is like.”

  He was silent for a moment, then nodded. Perhaps Larry was right when he told Martin he spent too much time on the upper floors of the temple. Perhaps he needed to get down to the first floor more often, to see the crowds around them as people, not just as a faceless ocean they swam in as they lived their way toward home.

  “My apologies,” Martin said, and he meant it. “There are times when I forget.”

  “This great was a potter and an artist,” Achadina continued. “She shaped a small statue of you and the other priest, Larry. You both look exactly the same now as you did all those years ago in Akkad. She also used the wedge to write what she knew on a small tablet.

  “And, when she was dying, she passed these on to her own daughter. And to her daughter. And on and on.”

  This is a disaster! Artie wailed. An entire tribe that knows about us? My God, we’ll have to go back and fix this. And after we go back, how many years will we have to re-live? A thousand? Two thousand? No, no, no …

  “Shut up,” Martin said in silent, precisely and sharply. “So far we have to do exactly nothing.”

  But they know about us—

  “And so far nothing has changed,” Martin interrupted. “Nothing has gone off the trail. We are still living the path back home. History is happening exactly as it should.”

  He focused back on Achadina.

  “What do you know about this time? Why do you think the eagle is about to fly?”

  “We work in every corner of the temple, in all the jobs you priests do not want to do for yourself,” Achadina said. “We know about the holy places on the first floor where the ordinary people of the city visit. But we also cook and clean and have sex with the travellers who visit the restaurant on the second floor.”

  “Travellers?”

  “The odd ones from the future and the past,” she said, matter-of-factly. “The ones who taught us that the past and future are not one simple path but more like a basket full of loose threads. And all these threads are strung together with different starting points and ending points and different events, like knots, along the thread.”

  Timelines, Artie said. They know about the timelines.

  “Shut up,” Martin said once more in silent. “I will not tell you again. But I will override you and put you into watch-only mode.”

  “Yes?” he encouraged Achadina.

  “But you do not travel that way,” Achadina said, thoughtfully. “You live each day as we do, each day as it comes, one small step each day. Toward what? Why not jump around as the others do? Why live among us? Why take the time?”

  Martin hesitated. He looked up at the hills, at the thousands of campfires and imagined the men around each speck of light as they sharpened their weapons.

  Don’t do it, Artie warned. Martin ignored him. Somehow, for some reason, talking to Achadina made him feel better, made things hurt less.

  “This time, now, is far in my past. Akkad was farther still. And even Akkad was only a short distance to me. My original goal was far, far, earlier than Akkad,” Martin said. “But I had a job to do. I went back. Many, many greats- back. I did what I set out to do and then tried to go home. I could not. I could go farther back, but not forward. Not to any future I recognized.”

  “Your thread was gone from the basket,” Achadina said. “Fallen out and lost.”

  Martin nodded. It was a different kind of analogy but it fit.

  “The only way for me to go home is one day at time,” he explained. “I must make sure the future I remember is created. I must weave my thread again.”

  “Larry?”

  “We met later. He was also stranded. We work together to make our future.”

  “He comes from the same future as you?”

  Martin hesitated, then shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Our futures are the same for a long time yet to come but then there will have to be a … separation.”

  “One of you will get the future you want,” Achadina said. “One of you will be stranded. You will either have to start over or live into a different future.”

  “Yes,” Martin admitted. “But that time is not yet. So, for now, we are friends.”

  “The travellers from the past and the future? And the lesser priests? The ones who take your orders?”

  Martin shrugged.

  “The travellers have pasts and futures that still exist. We set up the Stone Eagle clubs as a way to attract them, to give them a taste of home. They get to relax and we are paid in information and different … gifts, they provide us.”

  “They don’t know you are stranded?”

  “No.”

  “The lesser priests? The ones who stay here in the temple and live each day, like you do.”

  “They are like Larry and myself. They’ve also lost their home … thread, but they are only stranded for a limited time. When we reach their closest change point they will leave us and try to live in something that should resemble their home timelines.”

  Achadina sat silent for a moment. Finally she came to a decision and nodded to herself.

  “There is something you may not know,” she said slowly.

  “Yes?”

  “I always keep people watching the outside of the temple, as well as the inside,” she said. “A little time ago, on the first floor, I saw the senior priest Larry, accompanied by two of the lesser priest
s, walk to the main entrance and leave the temple. He wore his special clothes, the ones that cling to your skin and let you take on any image. He looked unusually grim. It made me uneasy, so I checked with my outside watchers.

  “They swore that Larry never left the temple. Instead they saw General Assur, the king’s closest advisor, leave the temple with two of his bodyguards. They rode away toward the palace.”

  She turned to face Martin.

  “Then I came to the second floor. It was empty, all the guests gone, the kitchen cold, the bar closed. I glimpsed you and the look on your face as you turned the last lock. So I followed you up the ladder to the roof.”

  “Artie!”

  Yes?

  “He’s gone native!”

  I gathered that, Artie said drily. So what do you want me to do about it?

  “Stop him!”

  With what? He’s gone and he’s blocked my tracker. I can only guess his location and anything I do to stop him will have to be big.

  “Big enough to go into the histories?”

  Yes.

  “Damn it,” Martin swore.

  We could lift early, Artie suggested.

  “Leave him behind. Let him fend for himself.”

  Yes.

  Martin hesitated.

  “No,” Martin said. He sat up straighter on the bench, then stood. He indicated Achadina.

  “Have you finished your analysis?” Martin asked Artie.

  What analysis?

  “Please,” Martin said, exasperated. “How long have we worked together? How much of your if-then have I written? As soon as she started to tell us her story, you started an analysis. Is she lying or telling the truth?”

  Every member of our staff, except for the few timeliners who have joined us, are from her tribe, Artie admitted. Cross-reference and genetic indicators.

  “Outside?”

  Most, if not all, of the neighborhood is related and part of her tribe. We are nestled in the middle of an invisible cocoon.

  “You had no idea?”