The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Other Deacons were converging on the spot, now, and after a moment one of them left the growing bunch of black-clad figures and trotted over to the stage. Again I couldn’t hear what was said, but all the people on the stage obviously did. Their faces told us onlookers that our guess had been right.

  The group of Deacons split and stepped back, except for the original pair, who were now standing on either side of Elvis Bearpaw. One of them jabbed him in the side with the end of his club.

  Elvis Bearpaw’s mouth opened. A strange croaking sound came out, but it wasn’t what you’d call human speech.

  The Deacon poked him again, harder. Elvis straightened up and faced the stage and seemed to shake himself. “Bingo,” he said, so softly I barely heard him. Then, much louder, “Bingo!”

  Everybody breathed in and held it and then breathed out, all together.

  Old Jack Birdshooter had been doing this too long to forget his lines now. “Deacons,” he cried formally, “do we have a Bingo?”

  The Deacon on Elvis Bearpaw’s right raised his club, saluting the stage. “Yes,” he shouted, “we do have a Bingo.”

  And, needless to say, that was when the crowd went absolutely bat-shit crazy, as always, jumping up and down and waving their arms in the air, yelling and hooting and yipping till it was a wonder the leaves didn’t fall off the trees, while the Deacons led Elvis Bearpaw slowly toward the platform. His face, in the dying red light, was something to see.

  * * *

  A long, long time afterward, Grandfather Ninekiller told me the inside story. That was after he had gone on to the spirit world, where he learned all sorts of interesting things.

  “What happened,” Grandfather said, “Elvis Bearpaw did go to see Old Man Alabama, just like we heard. Wanted some kind of charm or medicine for the Game. Old Man Alabama told him no way. Fixing the Game, that was too much even for a crazy old witch.”

  “How’d you learn all this?” I asked, a little skeptically. Grandfather hadn’t been dead very long at the time, and I was still getting used to talking with him in his new form.

  “Old Man Alabama told me,” Grandfather said. “Hell, he died a couple of years ago. He’s been here longer than me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway,” Grandfather went on, “Elvis Bearpaw went on and on, offered all kinds of stuff for payment. Finally Old Man Alabama said he could do one thing for him and that was all. He could tell him where the Bingo was going to fall.”

  “Doyuka?”

  “Would I shit you? And you and I know what the silly bastard went and did.”

  “I was right, then,” I said. “About what he was up to that night. He switched his game board with his neighbor’s. With what’s-his-name, that guy from the Wolf Clan.”

  “Uh-huh. Only he didn’t understand how that kind of a prophecy works,” Grandfather said. “Old Man Alabama told him where the Bingo was going to fall, and that was where it fell. Like I told you that morning,” he added, “these things have a way of working themselves out.”

  * * *

  But as I say, that was a lot of years later. That night, I could only guess and wonder, while they brought Elvis Bearpaw up onto the stage and the medicine men and then the chiefs came by one at a time to shake his hand, and Chief Marilyn with her own hands tied the winner’s red cloth around his head. She was a short woman and she had to stand on tiptoe, but she managed. Then they did the rest of it.

  He screamed a lot while they were doing it to him. They all do, naturally, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Game winner scream as loud and as long as Elvis Bearpaw did. Some Seneca kids I talked with next day said they heard him clear over at their camp, on the far side of the ball field. Well, they do say that that’s the sign of a good strong sacrifice.

  And you know, they must be right, because it rained like a son of a bitch that year.

  MORTIMER GRAY’S HISTORY OF DEATH

  Brian Stableford

  Critically acclaimed British “hard science” writer Brian Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In the Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The Paradox of the Sets, The Realms of Tartarus, and the renowned trilogy consisting of The Empire of Fear, The Angel of Pain, and The Carnival of Destruction. His short fiction has been collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution. His nonfiction books include The Sociology of Science Fiction and, with David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World A.D. 2000–3000. Upcoming is a new novel, Serpent’s Blood, which is the start of another projected trilogy. His acclaimed novella “Les Fleurs Du Mal” was a finalist for the Hugo Award last year. His stories have appeared in our Sixth (two separate stories), Seventh, and Twelfth Annual Collections. A biologist and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading, England.

  In the vivid and compelling novella that follows, Stableford takes us to an ultrarich, ultracivilized far future where humanity has almost—almost—conquered the oldest and coldest Enemy of them all …

  1

  I was an utterly unexceptional child of the twenty-ninth century, comprehensively engineered for emortality while I was still a more-or-less inchoate blastula, and decanted from an artificial womb in Naburn Hatchery in the country of York in the Defederated States of Europe. I was raised in an aggregate family which consisted of six men and six women. I was, of course, an only child, and I received the customary superabundance of love, affection, and admiration. With the aid of excellent internal technologies, I grew up reasonable, charitable, self-controlled, and intensely serious of mind.

  It’s evident that not everyone grows up like that, but I’ve never quite been able to understand how people manage to avoid it. If conspicuous individuality—and frank perversity—aren’t programmed in the genes or rooted in early upbringing, how on earth do they spring into being with such determined irregularity? But this is my story, not the world’s, and I shouldn’t digress.

  In due course, the time came for me—as it comes to everyone—to leave my family and enter a community of my peers for my first spell at college. I elected to go to Adelaide in Australia, because I liked the name.

  Although my memories of that period are understandably hazy, I feel sure that I had begun to see the fascination of history long before the crucial event which determined my path in life. The subject seemed—in stark contrast to the disciplined coherency of mathematics or the sciences—so huge, so amazingly abundant in its data, and so charmingly disorganized. I was always a very orderly and organized person, and I needed a vocation like history to loosen me up a little. It was not, however, until I set forth on an ill-fated expedition on the sailing-ship Genesis in September 2901, that the exact form of my destiny was determined.

  I use the word “destiny” with the utmost care; it is no mere rhetorical flourish. What happened when Genesis defied the supposed limits of possibility and turned turtle was no mere incident, and the impression that it made on my fledging mind was no mere suggestion. Before that ship set sail, a thousand futures were open to me; afterward, I was beset by an irresistible compulsion. My destiny was determined the day Genesis went down; as a result of that tragedy, my fate was sealed.

  * * *

  We were en route from Brisbane to tour the Creationist Islands of Micronesia, which were then regarded as artistic curiosities rather than daring experiments in continental design. I had expected to find the experience exhilarating, but almost as soon as we had left port, I was struck down by sea-sickness.

  Sea-sickness, by virtue of being psychosomatic, is one of the very few diseases with which modern internal technology is sometimes impotent to deal, and I was miserably confined to my cabin while I waited for my mind to make the necessary adaptation. I was bitterly ashamed of myself, for I alone out of half a hundred passengers had fallen prey to this strange atavistic malaise. While the others partied on deck, beneath the glorious light of the tropic stars, I lay in my bunk, h
alf-delirious with discomfort and lack of sleep. I thought myself the unluckiest man in the world.

  When I was abruptly hurled from my bed, I thought that I had fallen—that my tossing and turning had inflicted one more ignominy upon me. When I couldn’t recover my former position after having spent long minutes fruitlessly groping about amid all kinds of mysterious debris, I assumed that I must be confused. When I couldn’t open the door of my cabin even though I had the handle in my hand, I assumed that my failure was the result of clumsiness. When I finally got out into the corridor, and found myself crawling in shallow water with the artificial bioluminescent strip beneath instead of above me, I thought I must be mad.

  When the little girl spoke to me, I thought at first that she was a delusion, and that I was lost in a nightmare. It wasn’t until she touched me, and tried to drag me upright with her tiny, frail hands, and addressed me by name—albeit incorrectly—that I was finally able to focus my thoughts.

  “You have to get up, Mr. Mortimer,” she said. “The boat’s upside down.”

  She was only eight years old, but she spoke quite calmly and reasonably.

  “That’s impossible,” I told her. “Genesis is unsinkable. There’s no way it could turn upside down.”

  “But it is upside down,” she insisted—and, as she did so, I finally realized the significance of the fact that the floor was glowing the way the ceiling should have glowed. “The water’s coming in. I think we’ll have to swim out.”

  The light put out by the ceiling-strip was as bright as ever, but the rippling water overlaying it made it seem dim and uncertain. The girl’s little face, lit from below, seemed terribly serious within the frame of her dark and curly hair.

  “I can’t swim,” I said, flatly.

  She looked at me as if I were insane, or stupid, but it was true. I couldn’t swim. I’d never liked the idea, and I’d never seen any necessity. All modern ships—even sailing-ships designed to be cute and quaint for the benefit of tourists—were unsinkable.

  I scrambled to my feet, and put out both my hands to steady myself, to hold myself against the upside-down walls. The water was knee-deep. I couldn’t tell whether it was increasing or not—which told me, reassuringly, that it couldn’t be rising very quickly. The upturned boat was rocking this way and that, and I could hear the rumble of waves breaking on the outside of the hull, but I didn’t know how much of that apparent violence was in my mind.

  “My name’s Emily,” the little girl told me. “I’m frightened. All my mothers and fathers were on deck. Everyone was on deck, except for you and me. Do you think they’re all dead?”

  “They can’t be,” I said, marveling at the fact that she spoke so soberly, even when she said that she was frightened. I realized, however, that if the ship had suffered the kind of misfortune which could turn it upside down, the people on deck might indeed be dead. I tried to remember the passengers gossiping in the departure lounge, introducing themselves to one another with such fervor. The little girl had been with a party of nine, none of whose names I could remember. It occurred to me that her whole family might have been wiped out, that she might now be that rarest of all rare beings, an orphan. It was almost unimaginable. What possible catastrophe, I wondered, could have done that?

  I asked Emily what had happened. She didn’t know. Like me she had been in her bunk, sleeping the sleep of the innocent.

  “Are we going to die too?” she asked. “I’ve been a good girl. I’ve never told a lie.” It couldn’t have been literally true, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was eight years old, and she had every right to expect to live till she was eight hundred. She didn’t deserve to die. It wasn’t fair.

  I knew full well that fairness didn’t really come into it, and I expect that she knew it too, even if my fellow historians were wrong about the virtual abolition of all the artifices of childhood, but I knew in my heart that what she said was right, and that insofar as the imperious laws of nature ruled her observation irrelevant, the universe was wrong. It wasn’t fair. She had been a good girl. If she died, it would be a monstrous injustice.

  Perhaps it was merely a kind of psychological defense mechanism that helped me to displace my own mortal anxieties, but the horror that ran through me was all focused on her. At the moment, her plight—not our plight, but hers—seemed to be the only thing that mattered. It was as if her dignified fear and her placid courage somehow contained the essence of human existence, the purest product of human progress.

  Perhaps it was only my cowardly mind’s refusal to contemplate anything else, but the only thing I could think of while I tried to figure out what to do was the awfulness of what she was saying. As that awfulness possessed me, it was magnified a thousandfold, and it seemed to me that in her lone and tiny voice there was a much greater voice speaking for multitudes: for all the human children that had ever died before achieving maturity; all the good children who had died without ever having the chance to deserve to die.

  “I don’t think any more water can get in,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice. “But there’s only so much air. If we stay here too long, we’ll suffocate.”

  “It’s a big ship,” I told her. “If we’re trapped in an air-bubble, it must be a very large one.”

  “But it won’t last forever,” she told me. She was eight years old and hoped to live to be eight hundred, and she was absolutely right. The air wouldn’t last forever. Hours, certainly; maybe days—but not forever.

  “There are survival pods under the bunks,” she said. She had obviously been paying attention to the welcoming speeches that the captain and the chief steward had delivered in the lounge the evening after embarkation. She’d plugged the chips they’d handed out into her trusty handbook, like the good girl she was, and inwardly digested what they had to teach her—unlike those of us who were blithely careless and wretchedly seasick.

  “We can both fit into one of the pods,” she went on, “but we have to get it out of the boat before we inflate it. We have to go up—I mean down—the stairway into the water and away from the boat. You’ll have to carry the pod, because it’s too big for me.”

  “I can’t swim,” I reminded her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, patiently. “All you have to do is hold your breath and kick yourself away from the boat. You’ll float up to the surface whether you can swim or not. Then you just yank the cord and the pod will inflate. You have to hang on to it, though. Don’t let go.”

  I stared at her, wondering how she could be so calm, so controlled, so efficient.

  “Listen to the water breaking on the hull,” I whispered. “Feel the movement of the boat. It would take a hurricane to overturn a boat like this. We wouldn’t stand a chance out there.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she told me. She didn’t have both hands out to brace herself against the walls, although she lifted one occasionally to stave off the worst of the lurches caused by the bobbing of the boat.

  But if it wasn’t a hurricane which turned us over, I thought, what the hell was it? Whales have been extinct for eight hundred years.

  “We don’t have to go just yet,” Emily said, mildly, “but we’ll have to go in the end. We have to get out. The pod’s bright orange, and it has a distress beacon. We should be picked up within twenty-four hours, but there’ll be supplies for a week.”

  I had every confidence that modern technology could sustain us for a month, if necessary. Even having to drink a little sea-water if your recycling gel clots only qualifies as a minor inconvenience nowadays. Drowning is another matter; so is asphyxiation. She was absolutely right. We had to get out of the upturned boat—not immediately, but some time soon. Help might get to us before then, but we couldn’t wait, and we shouldn’t. We were, after all, human beings. We were supposed to be able to take charge of our own destinies, to do what we ought to do. Anything less would be a betrayal of our heritage. I knew that, and understood it.

  But I couldn’t swim.

&nbs
p; “It’s okay, Mr. Mortimer,” she said, putting her reassuring hand in mine. “We can do it. We’ll go together. It’ll be all right.”

  * * *

  Emily was right. We could do it, together, and we did—not immediately, I confess, but, in the end, we did it. It was the most terrifying and most horrible experience of my young life, but it had to be done, and we did it.

  When I finally dived into that black pit of water, knowing that I had to go down and sideways before I could hope to go up, I was carried forward by the knowledge that Emily expected it of me, and needed me to do it. Without her, I’m sure that I would have died. I simply would not have had the courage to save myself. Because she was there, I dived, with the pod clutched in my arms. Because she was there, I managed to kick away from the hull and yank the cord to inflate it.

  It wasn’t until I had pulled Emily into the pod, and made sure that she was safe, that I paused to think how remarkable it was that the sea was hot enough to scald us both.

  We were three storm-tossed days afloat before the helicopter picked us up. We cursed our ill-luck, not having the least inkling how bad things were elsewhere. We couldn’t understand why the weather was getting worse instead of better.

  When the pilot finally explained it, we couldn’t immediately take it in. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that the geologists were just as astonished as everyone else. After all, the sea-bed had been quietly cracking wherever the tectonic plates were pulling apart for millions of years; it was an ongoing phenomenon, very well understood. Hundreds of black smokers and underwater volcanoes were under constant observation. Nobody had any reason to expect that a plate could simply break so far away from its rim, or that the fissure could be so deep, so long, and so rapid in its extension. Everyone thought that the main threat to the earth’s surface was posed by wayward comets; all vigilant eyes were directed outward. No one had expected such awesome force to erupt from within, from the hot mantle which lay, hubbling and bubbling, beneath the earth’s fragile crust.