The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  I couldn’t take her to me, hold her, not after she’d told me about Rall. Needing something to do, I took some tangled banwood from the tinderbox and struggled to get a fire going from the burnt-down coals in my hearth. I blew into the fireplace and only got a nose full of ashes for my trouble. “Didn’t anybody fight?” I asked.

  “Not after that. We just waited them out. Or they got bored. I don’t know. It was bad for everybody, not just Rall.” Bex shook her head, sighed, then saw the trouble I was having and bent down to help me. She was much better at it than I, and the fire was soon ablaze. We sat back down and watched it flicker.

  “Sounds like war-ghosts,” I said.

  “The glims?”

  “Soldiers who don’t go home after the war. The fighting gets into them, and they don’t want to give it up, or can’t. Sometimes they have . . . modifications that won’t let them give it up. They wander the timeways – and since they don’t belong to the time they show up in, they’re hard to kill. In the early times, where people don’t know about the war or have only heard rumors of it, they had lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies.”

  “What can you do?”

  I put my arm around her. It had been so long. She tensed up, then breathed deeply, serenely.

  “Hope they don’t come back,” I said. “They are bad ones. Not the worst, but bad.”

  We were quiet for a while, and the wind, blowing over the chimney’s top, made the flue moan as if it were a big stone flute.

  “Did you love him, Bex?” I asked. “Rall?”

  She didn’t even hesitate in her answer this time. “Of course not, Henry Bone. How could you ever think such a thing? I was waiting to catch up with you. Now tell me about the future.”

  And so I drew away from her for a while, and told her – part of it at least. About how there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together again, not enough mass to undulate in an eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but dim night. I told her about the twilight armies gathered there, culled from all times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy-to-galaxy, system-to-system, fighting until the critical point is reached when entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless stagnant pools of nothing. No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain . . . inherit the dark field. They win.

  “And did you win?” she asked me. “If that’s the word for it.”

  The suns were going down. Instead of answering, I went outside to the woodpile and brought in enough banwood to fuel the fire for the night. I thought maybe she would forget what she’d asked me – but not Bex.

  “How does the war end, Henry?”

  “You must never ask me that.” I spoke the words carefully, making sure I was giving away nothing in my reply. “Every time a returning soldier tells that answer, he changes everything. Then he has two choices. He can either go away, leave his own time, and go back to fight again. Or he can stay, and it will all mean nothing, what he did. Not just who won and who lost, but all the things he did in the war spin off into nothing.”

  Bex thought about this for a while. “What could it matter? What in God’s name could be worth fighting for?” she finally asked. “Time ends. Nothing matters after that. What could it possibly matter who won . . . who wins?”

  “It means you can go back home,” I said. “After it’s over.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I shook my head and was silent. I had said enough. There was no way to tell her more, in any case – not without changing things. And no way to say what it was that had brought those forces together at the end of everything. And what the hell do I know, even now? All I know is what I was told, and what I was trained to do. If we don’t fight at the end, there won’t be a beginning. For there to be people, there has to be a war to fight at the end of things. We live in that kind of universe, and not another, they told me. They told me, and then I told myself. And I did what I had to do so that it would be over and I could go home, come back.

  “Bex, I never forgot you,” I said. She came to sit with me by the fire. We didn’t touch at first, but I felt her next to me, breathed the flush of her skin as the fire warmed her. Then she ran her hand along my arm, felt the bumps from the operational enhancements.

  “What have they done to you?” she whispered.

  Unbidden the old words of the skyfallers’ scream, the words that were yet to be, surfaced in my mind.

  They sucked down my heart

  to a little black hole

  You cannot stab me.

  They wrote down my brain

  on a hard knot of space,

  You cannot turn me.

  Icicle spike

  from the eye of a star

  I’ve come to kill you.

  I almost spoke them, from sheer habit. But I did not. The war was over. Bex was here, and I knew it was over. I was going to feel something, once again, something besides guile, hate, and rage. I didn’t yet, that was true, but I could feel the possibility.

  “I don’t really breathe anymore, Bex; I pretend to so I won’t put people off,” I told her. “It’s been so long, I can’t even remember what it was like to have to.”

  Bex kissed me then. At first, I didn’t remember how to do that, either. And then I did. I added wood to the fire, then ran my hand along Bex’s neck and shoulder. Her skin had the health of youth still, but years in the sun and wind had made a supple leather of it, tanned and grained fine. We took the sheet from the couch and pulled it near to the warmth, and she drew me down to her on it, to her neck and breasts.

  “Did they leave enough of you for me?” she whispered.

  I had not known until now. “Yes,” I answered. “There’s enough.” I found my way inside her, and we made love slowly, in a manner that might seem sad to any others but us, for there were memories and years of longing that flowed from us, around us, like amber just at the melting point, and we were inside and there was nothing but this present with all of what was, and what would be, already passed. No time. Finally, only Bex and no time between us.

  We fell asleep on the old couch, and it was dim half-morning when we awoke, with Fitzgerald yet to rise in the west and the fire a bed of coals as red as the sky.

  Two months later, I was in Thredmartin’s when Bex came in with an evil look on her face. We had taken getting back together slow and easy up till then, but the more time we spent around each other, the more we understood that nothing basic had changed. Bex kept coming to the ranch, and I took to spending a couple of nights a week in a room her father made up for me at the hotel. Furly Bexter was an old-style McKinnonite. Men and women were to live separately and only meet for business and copulation. But he liked me well enough, and when I insisted on paying for my room, he found a loophole somewhere in the Tracts of McKinnon about cohabitation being all right in hotels and hostels.

  “The glims are back,” Bex said, sitting down at my table. I was in a dark corner of the pub. I left the fire for those who could not adjust their own internals to keep them warm. “They’ve taken over the top floor of the hotel. What should we do?”

  I took a draw of beer – Thredmartin’s own thick porter – and looked at her. She was visibly shivering, probably more from agitation than fright.

  “How many of them are there?” I asked.

  “Six. And something else, some splice I’ve never seen, however many that makes.”

  I took another sip of beer. “Let it be,” I said. “They’ll get tired, and they’ll move on.”

  “What?” Bex’s voice was full of astonishment. “What are you saying?”

  “You don’t want a war here, Bex,” I replied. “You have no idea how bad it can get.”

  “They killed Rall. They took our money.”

  “Money.” My voice sounded many years away, even to me.

  “It’s muscle and worry and care. You know how ha
rd people work on Ferro. And for those . . . things . . . to come in and take it. We cannot let them – ”

  “ – Bex,” I said. “I am not going to do anything.”

  She said nothing; she put a hand on her forehead as if she had a sickening fever, stared at me for a moment, then looked away.

  One of the glims chose that moment to come into Thredmartin’s. It was a halandana, a splice – human and jan – from uptime and a couple of possible universes over. It was nearly seven feet tall, with a two-foot-long neck, and stooped to enter Thredmartin’s entrance. Without stopping, it went to the bar and demanded morphine.

  Thredmartin was at the bar. He pulled out a dusty rubber, little used, and before he could get out an injector, the halandana reached over, took the entire rubber, and put it in the pocket of the long gray coat it wore. Thredmartin started to speak, then shook his head and found a spray shooter. He slapped it on the bar and started to walk away. The halandana’s hand shot out and pushed the old man. Thredmartin stumbled to his knees.

  I felt the fingers of my hands clawing, clenching. Let them loosen; let them go.

  Thredmartin rose slowly to one knee. Bex was up, around the bar, and over to him, steadying his shoulder. The glim watched this for a moment, then took its drug and shooter to a table, where it got itself ready for an injection.

  I looked at it closely now. It was female, but that did not mean much in halandana splices. I could see it phase around the edges with dead, gray flames. I clicked in wideband overspace, and I could see through the halandana to the chair it was sitting in and the unpainted wood of the wall behind it. And I saw more, in the spaces between spaces. The halandana was keyed in to a websquad; it wasn’t really an individual anymore. Its fate was tied to that of its unit commander. So the warghosts – the glims – were a renegade squad, most likely, with a single leader calling the shots. For a moment, the halandana glanced in my direction, maybe feeling my gaze somewhere outside of local time, and I banded down to human normal. It quickly went back to what it was doing. Bex made sure Thredmartin was all right, then came back over to my table.

  “We’re not even in its time line,” I said. “It doesn’t think of us as really being alive.”

  “Oh God,” Bex said. “This is just like before.”

  I got up and walked out. It was the only solution. I could not say anything to Bex. She would not understand. I understood – not acting was the rational, the only, way – but not my way. Not until now.

  I enhanced my legs and loped along the road to my house. But when I got there, I kept running, running off into the red sands of Ferro’s outback. The night came down, and as the planet turned. I ran along the length of the Big Snake, bright and hard to the southwest, and then under the blue glow of Steiner when she rose in the moonless, trackless night. I ran for miles and miles, as fast as a jaguar, but never tiring. How could I tire when parts of me stretched off into dimensions of utter stillness, utter rest? Could Bex see me for what I was, she would not see a man, but a kind of colonial creature, a mash of life pressed into the niches and fault lines of existence like so much grit and lichen. A human is anchored with only his heart and his mind; sever those, and he floats away. Floats away. What was I? A medusa fish in an ocean of time? A tight clump of nothing, disguised as a man? Something else?

  Something damned hard to kill, that was certain. And so were the glims. When I returned to my house in the star-bright night, I half expected to find Bex, but she was not there. And so I rattled about for a while, powered down for an hour at dawn and rested on a living-room chair, dreaming in one part of my mind, completely alert in another. The next day, Bex still did not come, and I began to fear something had happened to her. I walked partway into Heidel, then cut off the road and stole around the outskirts, to a mound of shattered volcanic rocks – the tailings of some early prospector’s pit – not far from the town’s edge. There I stepped up my vision and hearing, and made a long sweep of the main street. Nothing. Far, far too quiet, even for Heidel.

  I worked out the parabolic to the Bexter Hotel and, after a small adjustment, heard Bex’s voice, then her father’s. I was too far away to make out the words, but my quantitatives gave it a positive ID. So Bex was all right, at least for the moment. I made my way back home, and put in a good day’s work making whiskey.

  The next morning – it was the quarteryear’s double dawn, with both suns rising in the east nearly together – Bex came to me. I brought her inside, and in the moted sunlight of my family’s living room, where I now took my rest, when I rested, Bex told me that the glims had taken her father.

  “He held back some old Midnight Livet down in the cellar, and didn’t deliver it when they called for room service.” Bex rubbed her left fist with her right fingers, expertly, almost mechanically, as she’d kneaded a thousand balls of bread dough. “How do they know these things? How do they know, Henry?”

  “They can see around things,” I said. “Some of them can, anyway.”

  “So they read our thoughts? What do we have left?”

  “No, no. They can’t see in there, at least I’m sure they can’t see in your old man’s McKinnonite nut lump of a brain. But they probably saw the whiskey down there in the cellar, all right. A door isn’t a very solid thing for a war-ghost out of its own time and place.”

  Bex gave her hand a final squeeze, spread it out upon her lap. She stared down at the lines of her palm, then looked up at me. “If you won’t fight, then you have to tell me how to fight them,” she said. “I won’t let them kill my father.”

  “Maybe they won’t.”

  “I can’t take that chance.”

  Her eyes were blazing green as the suns came full through the window. Her face was bright-lit and shadowed, as if by the steady coals of a fire. You have loved this woman a long time, I thought. You have to tell her something that will be of use. But what could possibly be of use against a creature that had survived – will survive – that great and final war – and so must survive now? You can’t kill the future. That’s how the old sergeants would explain battle fate to the recruits. If you are meant to be there, they’d say, then nothing can hurt you. And if you’re not, then you’ll just fade, so you might as well go out fighting.

  “You can only irritate them,” I finally said to Bex. “There’s a way to do it with the Flash. Talk to that technician, what’s his name – ”

  “Jurven Dvorak.”

  “Tell Dvorak to strobe the local interrupt, fifty, sixty tetracycles. It’ll cut off all traffic, but it will be like a wasp nest to them, and they won’t want to get close enough to turn it off. Maybe they’ll leave. Dvorak better stay near the node after that, too.”

  “All right,” Bex said. “Is that all?”

  “Yes,” I said. I rubbed my temples, felt the vague pain of a headache, which quickly receded as my internals rushed more blood to my scalp. “Yes, that’s it.”

  Later that day, I heard the crackle of random quantum tunnel spray, as split unsieved particles decided their spin, charm, and color without guidance from the world of gravity and cause. It was an angry buzz, like the hum of an insect caught between screen and windowpane, tremendously irritating to listen to for hours on end, if you were unlucky enough to be sensitive to the effect. I put up with it, hoping against hope that it would be enough to drive off the glims.

  Bex arrived in the early evening, leading her father, who was ragged and half-crazed from two days without light or water. The glims had locked him in a cleaning closet, in the hotel, where he’d sat cramped and doubled over. After the buzz started, Bex opened the lock and dragged the old man out. It was almost as if the glims had forgotten the whole affair.

  “Maybe,” I said. “We can hope.”

  She wanted me to put the old man up at my house, in case the glims suddenly remembered. Old Furly Bexter didn’t like the idea. He rattled on about something in McKinnon’s Letter to the Canadians, but I said yes, he could stay. Bex left me with her father in the shrouds o
f my living room.

  Sometime that night, the quantum buzz stopped. And in the early morning, I saw them – five of them – stalking along the road, kicking before them the cowering, stumbling form of Jurven Dvorak. I waited for them on the porch. Furly Bexter was asleep in my parents’ bedroom. He was exhausted from his ordeal, and I expected him to stay that way for a while.

  When they came into the yard, Dvorak ran to the pump and held to the handle, as if it were a branch suspending him over a bottomless chasm. And for him it was. They’d broken his mind and given him a dream of dying. Soon to be replaced by reality, I suspected, and no pump-handle hope of salvation.

  Their leader – or the one who did the talking – was human-looking. I’d have to band out to make a full ID., and I didn’t want to give anything away for the moment. He saved me the trouble by telling me himself.

  “My name’s Marek,” he said. “Come from a D-line, not far downtime from here.”

  I nodded, squinting into the red brightness reflected off my hardpan yard.

  “We’re just here for a good time,” Marek continued. “What you want to spoil that for?”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. One of Marek’s gang spat into the dryness of my dirt.

  “Go ahead and have it,” I said.

  “All right,” Marek said. He turned to Dvorak, then pulled out a weapon – not really a weapon though, for it is the tool of behind-the-lines enforcers, prison interrogators, confession extractors. It’s called an algorithmic truncheon, a trunch, in the parlance. Used at full load, a trunch will strip the myelin sheath from axons and dendrites; it will burn up a man’s nerves as if they were fuses. It is a way to kill with horrible pain. Marek walked over and touched the trunch to the leg of Dvorak, as if he were lighting a bonfire.

  The Flash technician began to shiver, and then to seethe, like a teapot coming to boil. The motion traveled up his legs, into his chest, out his arms. His neck began to writhe, as if the corded muscles were so many snakes. Then Dvorak’s brain burned, as a teapot will when all the water has run out and there is nothing but flame against hot metal. And then Dvorak screamed. He screamed for a long, long time. And then he died, crumpled and spent, on the ground in front of my house.