The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The room is dark but warm. A fire glows in the hearth, the walls are lined with books. There are dark marks on the high ceiling, done in other paint.

  Doctor John Faust sits on a high stool before a reading stand; a lamp hangs above. I see another brass head is watching me from the wall.

  "Ahem," says the servant.

  "Oh?" says Faustus, looking up. "I thought you'd be alone, Wagner." He looks at me. "The others they sent weren't very bright. They barely got inside the house."

  "I can imagine," I say. "Your lady's costume needs mending. The feathers aren't sewn in with double-loop stitches."

  He laughs. "I am Doctor Johan Faustus."

  "Please drop the mumming," he says. "I've read your Tamerlane-both parts."

  I look around. "Can we be honest?" I ask.

  "Only one of us," he says.

  "I have been sent here-"

  "Probably to find out to whom I owe my allegiance. And its treasonableness. And not being able to tell whether I'm lying, to kill me; better safe than sorry. Did you enjoy your ride on the ice?"

  There is no way be could have known. I was not followed. Perhaps he is inducing-, if he knows who I am, and that I was in London this morning, only one method could have gotten me here so fast. But no one else who sawi stopped. This is the way fear starts.

  "Very much," I say.

  "Your masters want to know if I plot for the Pope-excuse me, the Bishop of Rome. No. Or the Spaniard. No. Nor French, Jews, Turks, no. I do not plot even for myself. Now you can leave."

  "And I am to take your word?" I ask.

  "I'm taking yours."

  "Easily enough done," I say. Wagner the servant has left the room. Faustus is very confident of himself. "You haven't asked me if I serve the Devil," he says.

  "No one serves the Devil," I say. “There is no Devil."

  Faustus looks at me. "So they have finally stooped so high as to send an atheist. Then I shall have to deal with you on the same high level." He bows to me.

  I bowed back.

  "If you are a true atheist, and I convince you there's magic, will you take my word and go away?"

  "All magic is mumbo-jumbo, sleight-of-hand, mists, legerdemain," I say.

  "Oh, I think not," says Faustus.

  "Blaze away," I say. "Convenient Wagner has gone. Next he'll no doubt appear as some smoke, a voice from a horn, a hand."

  "Oh, Mr Marlowe," says Faustus. "What I serve is knowledge. I want it all. Knowledge is magic; other knowledge leads to magic. Where others draw back, I begin. I ask questions of Catholics, of Jews, of Spaniards, of Turks, if they have wisdom I seek. We'll find if you're a true atheist, a truly logical man. Look down."

  I do. I am standing in a five-pointed star surrounded by a circle, written over with nonsense and names in Greek and Latin. Faustus steps off his stool. Onto another drawing on the floor. The room grows dark, then brighter, and much warmer as he waves his arms around like a conjuror before the weasel comes out the glove. Good trick, that.

  "I tell you this as a rational man," be says. "Stay in the pentagram. Do not step out."

  I felt hot breathing on the back of my neck that moved my hair. "Do not look around," says Faustus, his voice calm and reasoned. "If you look around, you will scream. If you scream, you will jump. If you jump, you will leave the pentagram. If you leave it, the thing behind you will bite off your head; the Sphinx out yonder was but a dim stencil of what stands behind you. So do not look, no matter how much you want to."

  "No," I said. "You've got it wrong. I won't look around, not because I am afraid I'll jump, but because the act of looking will be to admit you've touched a superstitious adytum of my brain, one left over from the savage state. I look, I am lost, no matter what follows."

  Faust regards me anew.

  "Besides," I said, "what is back there"- here whoever it was must have leaned even closer and blew hot breath down on me, though as I remember, Wagner was shorter, someone else then-"is another of your assistants. If they are going to kill me, they should have done it by now. On with your show. I am your attentive audience. Do you parade the wonders of past ages before me? Isis and Osiris and so forth? What of the past? Was Julius Caesar a redhead, as I have heard? How about Beauty? The Sphinx woman should have been able to change costumes by now?"

  "You Cambridge men are always big on Homer. How about Helen of Troy?" asks Faustus.

  "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships, etc.?" I ask. "I think not. Convince me, Faustus. Do your shilly-shally."

  "You asked for it," he says. I expected the knife to go through my back. Whoever was behind me was breathing slowly, slowly.

  Faustus waved his arms, his lips moved. He threw his arms downward. I expected smoke, sparkles, explosion. There is none.

  It is fourteen feet tall. It has a head made of rocks and stones. Its body is brass; one leg of lead, the other of tin. I know this because the room was bright from the roaring fires that crackled with flame from each foot. This was more like it.

  "Speak, spirit!" said Faustus.

  "Hissssk. Snarrrz. Skazzz," it said, or words to that effect.

  And then it turned into the Queen, and the Queen turned into the King of Scotland. I don't mean someone who looked like him, I mean him. He shifted form and shape before me. He turns, his hair is longer, his nose thinner, his moustache flows. He changes to another version of himself, and his head jumped off bloodily to the floor. He turns into a huge sour-faced man, then back to someone who looks vaguely like the King of Scotland, then another; then a man and woman joined at the hip, another king, a woman, three fat Germans, a thin one, a small woman, a fat bearded man, a thin guy with a beard, a blip of light, another bearded man, a woman, a tall thin man, his sonthis was very good indeed. Would we had him at the Rose.

  "Tell him of what lies before, Spirit."

  "Tell him," I said to Faustus, "to tell me of plots."

  "PLOTS!" the thing roared. "You want the truth?" It was back fourteen feet tall and afire, stooping under the ceiling. "You live by a government. Governments NEED plots! Else people ask why they die? Where's the bread? Human. Human! You are the ones in torment! We here are FREE!

  "PLOTS! BEWARE ESSEX!" Essex? The Queen's true right arm? Her lover?

  "BEWARE Guido and his dark SHINING lantern! BEWARE the House in the RYE-fields! Beware the papers in the TUB OF flour! Beware pillars! BEWARE POSTS! BEWARE the Dutch, the FRENCH, the colonists in VIRGINIA!" Virginia? They're lost? "BEWARE RUSSIA and the ZULU and the DUTCHAFRICANS! Beware EVERYTHING! BEWARE EVERYBODY! AIIII!!!"

  It disappears. Faustus slumps to the floor, sweating and pale. The light comes back to normal.

  "He'll be like that a few minutes," says Wagner, coming in the door with a jug of wine and three glasses. "He said maimsey's your favourite. Drink?"

  We shook hands at the doorway early next morning. "I was impressed," I said. "All that foofaraw just for me."

  "If they're sending atheists, I had better get out of this country. No one will be safe."

  "Goodbye," I said, putting the box in my pack. The door closed. I walked out past the hitching post. Tied to it with a leather-strap was a carpenter's sawhorse. Strapped about the middle of it, hanging under it, was a huge stoppered glass bottle filled with hay. How droll of Wagner, I thought.

  I went to the river, put on my skates, and headed back out the Churn to the Thames-Isis, back to London, uneventfully, one hand behind me, the other counterweight, the pack swinging, my skates thin and sharp.

  Skizz skizz skizz.

  When I got back to my lodgings, there was a note for me in the locked room. I took the token of proof with me, and went by back ways and devious alleys to an address. There waiting was another high lord of the realm. He saw the box in my hand, nodded. He took the corner of my sleeve, pulled me to follow him. We went through several buildings, downward, through a long tunnel, turning, turning, and came to a roomful of guards beyond a door. Then we went upstairs, passing a few clerks and other
stairwells that led down, from whence came screams. Too late to stop now.

  "Someone wants to hear your report besides me," said the high lord. We waited outside a room from which came the sounds of high, indistinct conversation, The door opened; a man I recognised as the royal architect came out, holding a roll of drawings under his arm, his face reddened. "What a dump!" said a loud woman's voice from the room beyond. "What a dump! what a dump!" came a high-pitched voice over hers. I imagined a parrot of the red Amazonian kind. "Shut up, you!" said the woman's voice.

  "What a dump! What a dump!"

  "Be sure to make a leg, man," said the high lord behind me, and urged me into the room.

  There she was, Gloriana herself. From the waist down it looked as if she'd been swallowed by some huge spangled velvet clam while stealing from it the pearls that adorned her torso, arms, neck and hair.

  "Your Majesty," I said, dropping to my knees. The lord bowed behind me.

  "What a dump!" said the other voice. I looked over. On a high sideboard, the royal dwarf, whose name I believed to be Monarch, was dressed as a baby in a diaper and a bonnet, his legs dangling over the sides, four feet from the floor. "Well?" asked the Queen. "(You look horrible without your face hair.) Well?"

  I nodded toward the box under my arm.

  "Oh, give that to someone else; I don't want to see those things." She turned her head away, then back, becoming the Queen again.

  "Were we right?"

  I looked her in the eyes, below her shaven brow and the painted-in browline, at the red wig, the pearls, the sparkling clamshell of a gown.

  "His last words, Majesty," I said, "were of the Bishop of Rome, and of your late cousin."

  "I knew it," she said. "I knew it!"

  "I knew it!" yelled Monarch.

  The Queen threw a mirror at him. He jumped down with a thud and waddled off to torment the lapdog.

  "You have been of great service," she said to me. "Reward him, my lord, but not overmuch. (Don't ever appear again in my presence without at least a moustache.) "

  I made the knee again.

  "Leave," she said to me. "You. Stay," she said to the lord. I backed out. The door swung. "Builders!" she was yelling. "What a dump!"

  "What a dum-" said Monarch, and the door closed with a thud.

  So now it is another wet summer, in May, and I am lodging in Deptford, awaiting the pleasure of the Privy Council to question me.

  At first I was sure it dealt with the business of this winter last, as rumour had come back to me that Faustus had been seen alive in France. If I had heard, other keener ears had heard a week before.

  But no! The reason they sent the bailiff for me, while I was staying at Walsingham's place in Kent, was because of that noddy-costard Kyd.

  For he and his friends had published a scurrilous pamphlet a month ago. Warrants had been sworn; searches made, and in Kyd's place they found some of my writings done, while we were both usually drunk, when we roomed together three years ago cobbling together old plays. I had, in some of them, been forthright and indiscreet. Kyd even more so.

  So they took him downstairs, and just showed him the tongue-tongs, and he began to peach on his 104-years-old great naunt.

  Of course, he'd said all the writings were mine.

  And now I'm having to stay in Deptford (since I can get away to Kent if ever they are through with me) and await, every morning, and the last ten mornings, the vagaries of the Privy Council. And somewhat late of each May evening, a bailiff comes out, says, "You still here?" and "They're gone; be back here in the morning."

  But not this morning. I come in at seven o' the clock, and the bailiff says, "They specifically and especially said they'd not get to you today, be back tomorrow." I thanked him.

  I walked out. A day (and a night) of freedom awaited me.

  And who do I spy coming at me but my companions in the adventure of the iceboat, Nick Skeres and Ingram Frizier, along with another real piece of work I know of from the theatres (people often reach for their purses and shake hands with him) named Robert Poley. "What ho, Chris!" he says. "How's the playhouse dodge?"

  "As right as rain till the Plague comes back," I say.

  I watch, but neither Skeres nor Frizier seem to recognise me; I am dressed as a gentleman again; my beard and moustache new-waxed, my hat a perfect comet of colour and dash.

  "Well, we're heading for Mrs Bull's place," says Poley. "She owes us each a drink from the cards last night; it is our good fortune, and business has been good," he says, holding up parts of three wallets. "How's about we stands you a few?"

  "Thanks be," I say, "but I am at liberty for the first time in days, and needs be back hot on a poem, now that Shaxber's Venus and Adonis is printed."

  "Well, then," says Poley, "one quick drink to fire the Muse?"

  And then I see that Skeres is winking at me, but not one of the winks I know. Perhaps his eye is watering. Perhaps he is crying for the Frenchmen who we hear are once again eating each other up like cannibals. Perhaps not.

  Oh well, I think, what can a few drinks with a bunch of convivial invert dizzards such as myself harm me? I have been threatened with the Privy Council; I walk away untouched and unfettered.

  "Right!" I say, and we head off toward Deptford and Mrs Bull's, though I keep a tight hold on my purse. "A drink could be just what the doctors ordered."

  The Wisdom of Old Earth

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980 and has gone on to become one of the most popular and respected of all that decade's new writers.

  He has several times been a finalist for the Nebula Award, as well as for the World Fantasy Award and for the John W. Campbell Award, and has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov's Readers Award poll.

  In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story "Radio Waves." His other books include his first novel, In the Drift, which was published in 1985, a novella-length book, Griffin's Egg, 1987's popular novel, Vacuum Flowers, and a critically acclaimed fantasy novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity's Angels and in a collection of his collaborative short work with other writers, Slow Dancing Through Time. His most recent books are a new novel, Jack Faust, a collection of critical essays titled The Postmodern Archipelago, and a new story collection, A Geography of Unknown Lands. He's had stories in our Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Annual Collections. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter, and their son, Sean, who, much to their annoyance, is now taller than either of them.

  Here he takes us to a bizarre and vividly realized far future to learn an ancient lesson: if you want wisdom, you must be prepared to pay for it ...

  Judith Seize-the-Day was, quite simply, the best of her kind. Many another had aspired to the clarity of posthuman thought, and several might claim some rude mastery of its essentials, but she alone came to understand it as completely as any offworlder.

  Such understanding did not come easily. The human mind is slow to generalize and even slower to integrate. It lacks the quicksilver apprehension of the posthuman. The simplest truth must be repeated often to imprint even the most primitive understanding of what comes naturally and without effort to the spacefaring children of humanity. Judith had grown up in Pole Star City, where the shuttles slant down through the zone of permanent depletion in order to avoid further damage to the fragile ozone layer, and thus from childhood had associated extensively with the highly evolved. It was only natural that as a woman she would elect to turn her back on her own brutish kind and strive to bootstrap herself into a higher order.

  Yet even then she was like an ape trying to pass as a philosopher. For all her laborious ponderings, she did not yet comprehend the core wisdom of posthumanity, which was that thought and action must be as one. Being
a human, however, when she did comprehend, she understood it more deeply and thoroughly than the posthumans themselves. As a Canadian she could tap into the ancient and chthonic wisdoms of her race. Where her thought went, the civilized mind could not follow.

  It would be expecting too much of such a woman that she would entirely hide her contempt for her own kind. She cursed the two trollish Ninglanders who were sweating and chopping a way through the lush tangles of kudzu, and drove them onward with the lash of her tongue.

  "Unevolved bastard pigs!" she spat. "Inbred degenerates! If you ever want to get home to molest your dogs and baby sisters again, you'll put your backs into it!"

  The larger of the creatures looked back at her with an angry gleam in his eye, and his knuckles whitened on the hilt of his machete. She only grinned humorlessly, and patted the holster of her ankh. Such weapons were rarely allowed humans. Her possession of it was a mark of the great respect in which she was held.

  The brute returned to his labor.

  It was deepest winter, and the jungle tracts of what had once been the midatlantic coastlands were traversable. Traversable, that is, if one had a good guide. Judith was among the best. She had brought her party alive to the Flying Hills of southern Pennsylvania, and not many could have done that. Her client had come in search of the fabled bell of liberty, which many another party had sought in vain. She did not believe he would find it either. But that did not concern her. All that concerned her was their survival.

  So she cursed and drove the savage Ninglanders before her, until all at once they broke through the vines and brush out of shadow and into a clearing.

  All three stood unmoving for an instant, staring out over the clumps and hillocks of grass that covered the foundations of what had once been factories, perhaps, or workers' housing, gasoline distribution stations, grist mills, shopping malls ... Even the skyline was uneven. Mystery beckoned from every ambiguous lump.

  It was almost noon. They had been walking since sundown.

  Judith slipped on her goggles and scanned the grey skies for navigation satellites. She found three radar beacons within range. A utility accepted their input and calculated her position: less than a hundred miles from Philadelphia. They'd made more distance than she'd expected. The empathic function mapped for her the locations of her party: three, including herself, then one, then two, then one, strung over a mile and a half of trail. That was wrong. Very wrong indeed.