Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  On the sheet was a list of equipment. I skimmed to the bottom and cried out at the total mass.

  "Christ, Ashley, fifty kilos? La Bamba just about blew NASA's budget for the year."

  "All very necessary. And I'm sure Halihunt still has some money socked away."

  I sighed, nodding. Whole political parties had disappeared by underestimating the wealth of oil companies. And Ashley's idea had one unmistakable advantage: It got me off the hook. I imagined long, luxurious days of worrying about solar arrays and oil drills instead of batting orders.

  "Have you talked to Dr. Chirac about this?"

  He nodded vigorously. "She's thrilled with the idea. Wants to do a comparative study and all that. But I leave convincing Mr. McGill to you."

  "And you think we can win?"

  He sighed. "If you insist on putting it in those narrow terms, yes. There are certain tactical advantages which I would be glad to explain."

  "Spare me." I took a deep breath and nodded. "If NASA and Halihunt are game, I am. Just one thing: Do you really need the uniforms? We've got some already."

  "But we have baseball uniforms, my dear colonel. They have colors on them, for God's sake. If we want the Tau to have a genuine cultural experience, we simply can't take the field in anything other than all white."

  "Because …?"

  He sighed, rolling his eyes. "It just wouldn't be cricket."

  · · · · ·

  Four days later, I visited Ashley in the field.

  "No, you're supposed to be at third man!" he was yelling at Jenny Flagg. "Third man, I said! You're at fine leg! Get over to third man! Good heavens. Look, just move over to bloody left field!"

  She finally nodded and jogged across the outfield.

  Or perhaps it was the infield. Backfield? It was hard to tell. The two wickets were placed about twenty meters apart in the middle of the field, and there were two Taus batting. I seem to remember that cricket switched directions every half-dozen pitches or so. There were fielders dotted all around me, dressed in the fresh new white uniforms that had cost Pasadena its air-conditioning for three long summer nights.

  As Ashley Newkirk continued his battle with field placements, I found Alex standing close to one of the batters, just to one side of the newly rolled rectangle of dirt between the wickets. She took off her helmet as I approached.

  "How's it going, Captain?"

  "Pretty well so far. We got their first batter—sorry, batsman—on a deflection. The one with red spots, and we got her for only twenty runs."

  "Only twenty?"

  "It's okay; they're chasing our score of three ninety, and that's just our first innings."

  I shook my head.

  "Bit funny playing without gloves, though," she added.

  I looked around. "Hunter's got some."

  "He's the wicket-keeper."

  "Ah. And how come you're the only one with a helmet?"

  "Because I'm at silly mid-off."

  "I recognize all those words, Alex, but not in that order."

  She cleared her throat. "I'm standing right next to the batsman, in case she tips it short. But it's a bit dangerous if she hits it hard, which is what 'silly' means. Yoshi's at short leg on the other side. And take a look at that slips cordon."

  I followed her gesture to the row of five fielders strung out behind one of the Tau batters. If only we'd thought of that for baseball: just put the fielders behind the batter. Any foul tip would go straight into their hands.

  Of course, you can't put your fielders in foul territory. Wouldn't be baseball.

  "How do the Taus like it?"

  "They love it. The attendance is bigger, at least. It's the perfect sport for the Taus. You can hit the ball in any direction and score."

  "So how come they aren't beating us yet?"

  "Because you can't get a walk in cricket. Simple as that. And we can put fielders in position all three hundred and sixty degrees around them. The field placements are totally up to the captain, um, to Ashley. We have a chance of catching any deflection they make."

  I nodded. Simple as that.

  "What if they come up with something unexpected? Like their foul tipping in baseball?"

  She shrugged. "Ashley says the game's been played for eight hundred years. Seems like it'd be hard to come up with any new tricks."

  "Yeah, we'll see."

  "Colonel, please?" Ashley had set his field, and waved me off.

  I retreated to the edge of the impact crater. Alex was right. There were at least two hundred Taus around the field, raptly watching the new game. According to Dr. Chirac's first report, the aliens had decided to learn this new set of rules by more usual methods: sign language and direct example rather than passive observation. The xeno team was having its first face-to-face conversations with the Taus, pointing and miming to explain wickets and bowling and whatever the hell silly mid-off was.

  A breakthrough of cosmic proportions.

  Ashley had backed up to a spot about thirty meters from one wicket. He ran toward it, charging all the way up to the little wooden triptych and releasing the ball straight toward the Tau at the other wicket. The ball bounced short, flying up from the divoted ground at an unexpected angle. The Tau swung the broad, flat bat and got a piece of it. It soared over her right shoulder, just above the cordon of fielders behind her. She started running as Jenny, placed deeper, ran it down and threw it in.

  The two Taus held up their run, having changed positions once.

  "Not a bad stroke, eh, Colonel?"

  Iain Claymore had appeared next to me. He held one of Yoshi's cameras and a small flask.

  "You understand this game?"

  He looked around and lowered his voice. "My mother's from Manchester. Tell no one."

  "Your secret is safe with me."

  We watched another delivery. The batter clipped it, angling it away at ninety degrees, just over Alex's reach and almost to the edge. The Taus ran again, switching places twice.

  "Two runs, I presume?"

  "Aye. They're learning to play cricket even faster than they did that daft American game."

  I nodded, smiling to myself. "I just hope Ashley knows what he's in for."

  "How do you mean?"

  "It's not much fun to have your national game taken away from you."

  Claymore lifted his head and laughed. "You Americans crack me up. Cricket, taken away from the English? Those poor bastards havenae won a cricket series in decades. The Indians, the Sri Lankans, the South Africans all kick the crap out of them on a regular basis. Christ, they were put out of the Cup by bloody Yemen last year."

  I shook my head. "But what are they going to do when the tube opens for good, and aliens show up and beat them at their own game?"

  "Ach, that happened about two hundred years ago. Only they were called Australians."

  I swallowed. "It's not the same."

  "Don't be daft, Colonel. The English are wankers, but at least they gave up their empire gracefully. You lot could learn something from that. They don't mind losing a friendly game against the old possessions. They don't need to win. They're just happy that two billion people on the Indian subcontinent drive on the left side of the road. It may not be much of a legacy, but it's a damn sight better than the mess that you Yanks are going to leave behind in the Middle East."

  I turned to Iain with surprise. I'd never heard him say anything remotely political before, unless his relentless attacks on Ashley Newkirk's cooking counted.

  "But enough of that," he said. "Let's watch the game."

  · · · · ·

  Of course, these days everyone on Earth has a opinion about Iain Claymore.

  All those years, as we all know now, our charming half-Scot had been brewing up more than whisky in his still. Slowly and surely, he had engineered a bacterium distantly related to the ones that eat oil slicks off the ocean surface, but adapted for Tau's deep underground reserves.

  For a Greenpeace radical, he was quite an intervent
ionist. By the time we started pumping, he had infected every oil reserve within a thousand clicks of our facility. Like metal spikes driven into old-growth trees, Iain's creation made Tau crude useless for earthly consumption. No amount of retooling at our refineries back at home could save the tainted oil.

  But not everyone knows what really became of him. Contrary to the official story, "St. Iain" was not executed. As a United European subject, I didn't consider him a traitor, whatever my commanders said. Besides, after all our labor and heartache on that planet, killing was too good for him.

  Instead, I exiled him on Tau after it was clear that the oil was useless, the array not worth maintaining, the tube closing forever on Earth's first contact era after the last of us had stepped back through. And I made sure that Claymore had all the equipment and supplies necessary for a long, lonely life on an alien planet, surrounded by a hundred thousand inhuman creatures who wanted nothing to do with him except to play a very English game.

  Of course, to give him a fighting chance of staying sane, I let him keep his still.

  After all the whisky I'd drunk from it, I thought that only cricket.

  © 2003 by Scott Westerfeld and SCIFI.COM

  GARTH NIX

  Garth Nix (born 19 July 1963) is an Australian writer who specialises in children's and young adult fantasy novels, notably the Old Kingdom series, The Seventh Tower series, and The Keys to the Kingdom series. He has frequently been asked if his name is a pseudonym, to which he has responded, "I guess people ask me because it sounds like the perfect name for a writer of fantasy. However, it is my real name."

  Born in Melbourne, Nix was raised in Canberra. Subsequent to a period working for the Australian Government, he traveled in Europe before returning to Australia in 1983 and undertaking a BA in professional writing between 1984 and 1986 at the University of Canberra. He worked in a Canberra bookshop after graduation, before moving to Sydney in 1987, where he worked his way up in the publishing field. He was a sales rep and publicist before becoming a Senior editor at HarperCollins. In 1993 he commenced further travel in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe before becoming a full-time marketing consultant, founding his own company Gotley Nix Evans Pty Ltd.

  Fire Above, Fire Below, by Garth Nix

  “Fire Above, Fire Below” is about the crisis that the dying of a dragon living below a major city causes, and the pact made many years earlier to deal with such a situation.

  The bubbling tarmac on the lower level of the car park below the office block was the first sign, but no one noticed it, because there was no one parked there at midnight on a Friday night. The second sign was the smoke curling and twisting through the expansion joints of the concrete pillars. No one noticed this either, because the car park attendant was four levels up, and fast asleep in his booth.

  The third sign could not be missed, as the tarmac reached a critical temperature and exploded into fire, fire that leaped to the nearer vehicles and set their gas tanks off one after another like fireworks, for the fire was already far, far hotter than it should have been.

  Sensors sent their warning even as they melted, and the sprinkler system worked for a full thirty seconds before the heads and pipes turned to slag and dripped from the ceiling.

  The fire raced through the level above, exploding more cars as it passed. The attendant saw his CCTV monitors flash yellow and orange and white and go blank in a second. He reached for the phone to call it in, but his instincts were good, and as the monitors for two levels below him flared and died at the same time, and he felt the first flush of the wave of superheated air from below, he dropped the phone and ran from the booth instead, sprinting up the ramp as the fire bells chattered, high and sharp above the bass boom of exploding cars.

  The attendant kept on running when he got outside, which saved his life. He was around the next corner, panting like a fish snatched from water, when the fire roared up from the car park into the building, and within a minute, turned it into a torch fifteen stories high.

  Later analysis showed the time from the first radiant heat detector trip in the lowest car park floor to the immolation of the entire building was six and a half minutes. The first firefighting unit was on the scene in seven and a half minutes, but there was nothing they could do, save to try and establish a perimeter to stop the fire from spreading. This, with the help of seventy other units, eighty trucks, three hundred sixty firefighters, and eight million gallons of water, they eventually managed to do, though the core fire within the rubble of the building continued to burn throughout the night and well into the next day.

  Three people died in the fire. Two cleaners in an office on the twelfth floor; and one firefighter, who had a heart attack as he put on his breathing apparatus. But everyone knew if the fire had happened on a working day, there would have been at least a thousand dead. The fire was so hot and so fast there would have been no chance of evacuation.

  Even before the forensic teams had finished sifting the twisted, ruined remnants of concrete and steel, the fire chief called an emergency meeting with the mayor. Unusually, the chief requested they meet on the roof of Ladder Company Number One’s firehouse, one of the oldest public buildings in the city, a six-story gothic revival tower of black stone that squatted darkly between two gleaming new skyscrapers of glass and shining steel.

  The mayor thought it must be for some PR gimmick, and was surprised when he found the chief alone, without a television crew or reporters. The mayor had a troupe of PR advisors, aides, and followers himself, all lined up behind him.

  The chief was waiting by the door at the top of the stairs, which was shut. He shook hands with the mayor and said, “Send your people back down, please, sir. We need a few minutes private discussion, and there’s something you need to see up here.”

  The mayor shrugged and sent his assembled flackery back downstairs. The chief waited till they were gone, then opened the door to the roof and escorted the mayor outside.

  “What’s this about, Hansen?” growled the mayor.

  “The Oldgate building fire,” replied the chief. He pointed at the small shed over on the corner of the roof. It had chicken wire walls and a corrugated iron roof, and pigeons were roosting on top of it. “Let’s go over there.”

  “What’s the Oldgate fire got to do with a pigeon house?” asked the mayor suspiciously.

  “Nothing directly,” said the chief. He led the way, shooing some pigeons off so he could open the door. “But there is something you need to know about the fire.”

  “Listen, your people said it was some kind of one-in-a-thousand gas main explosion. We told the media it was a gas explosion! Why do you need to drag me up to a pigeon house to tell me anything different?”

  “I wanted to show you something,” said the chief. “Which happens to be here, with the pigeons.”

  He brushed the straw from the floor to reveal a trapdoor fastened with a big brass padlock. He opened this with a key he wore on a chain around his neck. The key was iron, big and old, and the mayor thought it must be damned uncomfortable to have it hanging around your neck. He began to wonder about the sanity of his fire chief.

  Then the chief opened the trapdoor, and the mayor began to wonder about his own sanity. Under the trapdoor was a cavity, and curled up on a bed of gold twenty-dollar pieces, there was a small dragon. Its eyes were closed, but its scaly, scarlet chest slowly rose and fell, suggesting it merely slept.

  “What the hell is that?” asked the mayor.

  “A messenger,” said the chief. “Listen, did your predecessor ever talk to you about . . . the Dragonborn?”

  The mayor scowled and looked around. Then he looked down at the small, sleeping dragon.

  “Yeah,” he said reluctantly. “I thought he’d gone senile. Something about people who were half dragon and half human, and they’d done a deal with the city a long time ago. I don’t remember all of it.”

  “We do,” said the chief. “Everyone here in Ladder Company Number One remember
s. You ever wonder why, if you look at any chief’s record, they always did time with Ladder Number One?”

  “No, why the hell would I?” asked the mayor. “And what’s with this Dragonborn thing?”

  “First things first. The fire, the Oldgate building inferno. A dragon started it—”

  “What!?”

  “Let me finish. A dying dragon started the fire. It would have been coming up from the hot center of the earth for its final flight. Only it didn’t make it. Now it’s stuck down there, and until we get rid of it, it’s going to cause more fires. Very intense, very fast fires, like the one last week. It could destroy a lot of the city.”

  “So sort it out,” said the mayor. He took off his hat and wiped his forehead. Even this talk of very hot fires made him sweat, and the thought of another one like the Oldgate fire . . . It would finish his chances for reelection. Plus, a lot of people might die.

  “Even with our most advanced suits, chiller technology, the works, we can’t get anywhere close enough to a dying dragon to deal with it,” said the chief. “But one of the Dragonborn could. It’s what they do.”

  “So what’ll it cost?” asked the mayor reluctantly. “Your budget is already over—”

  “There’s a small amount of gold involved, nothing significant,” said the chief. “The most important thing is that we have to reaffirm the pact. The mayor and the fire chief together. We personally guarantee it, with our lives.”

  “The what? What pact?”

  “The agreement between the city and the Dragonborn,” replied the chief evenly. He was taller than the mayor, and had to look down at him for their eyes to meet. This reinforced the politician’s suspicion that the firefighter didn’t think much of him as the leader of his city. “Two hundred years back, the mayor and the head of what was called the Fire Watch agreed with a representative of the Dragonborn that we would keep their secret, protect them if necessary from our citizenry, and in return they would deal with any dying dragons who came up from beneath the earth.”