The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Akuin’s mother died prematurely, when he was only forty. Coming down from the mountains through an early snow, he found the usual kind of supplies in the far barn, also a letter. It was from one of his female cousins, telling him the news. A sudden illness, that should not have killed a woman so healthy, not yet old. But it did! Life is full of these kinds of surprises, his cousin wrote in an elegant, flowing script, though Akuin was not thinking about calligraphy at the moment.

  He fell to his knees, chest heaving. The groans inside him would not come out. Beyond the barn’s open door, snow fell in thick soft flakes.

  The gifts would continue, his cousin wrote. She had promised his mother while the woman lay dying. This is not the kind of promise one breaks. Though I have to say, Akuin, that I do not approve of your behavior.

  “So, so,” Akuin said. He got up finally, walking into the snow. No chance the people in the house would see him through this whiteness. He lifted his head and hands, as if to catch something, though he didn’t know what. The life he should have had? The snow flakes melted when they touched his palms.

  More time passed. This is what the real world is like. Instead of the sudden important decisions that heroes must make in plays, everything solved in less than an ikun, real life is gradual.

  His cousin kept her promise. He continued to find gifts in the barn. For many years he saw no people, except at a distance. He always managed to avoid them.

  One summer morning when he was almost fifty, Akuin stepped out his cabin door and saw a monster in his garden. That was his first impression. The thing stood in brilliant sunlight. Akuin, coming out of his cabin’s dimness, could make out nothing except the creature’s shape: upright on two legs like a person, but far too thin and tall. A stick-person. A person made of bones. Like bones, the monster was pale.

  He stepped back into his cabin, picked up his rifle and waited, hoping the monster had not seen him. Maybe it would go away. He’d never had a problem with monsters before.

  The thing remained in the middle of Akuin’s vegetables. He saw it more clearly now. It had on clothing, pants and a red checked shirt. A head rose above the shirt. The face was hairless, the features like no hwarhath features he had ever seen: everything narrow and pushed together, as if someone had put hands on either side of the creature’s head and pressed, forcing the cheeks in, the nose out, the forehead up, the chin into a jutting bulge.

  “It’s a magnificent garden,” the creature said in Akuin’s own language.

  He’d been spotted. Akuin raised his rifle.

  A second voice said, “You are looking at a human. This one is friendly. Put the gun down.”

  Akuin glanced around, until he made out the second person, standing at the forest edge. He was short with steel-gray fur, dressed in hiking shorts and boots. A hwarhath male, beyond any question. But not a relative. Like the monster, he spoke with an accent that wasn’t local. In the case of this man, the accent was southern.

  “Believe me,” added the hwarhath in a quiet voice. “Neither one of us will do you any harm. We are here with the permission of the Atkwa, for recreational purposes.”

  “Hiking in the mountains,” said the monster in agreement.

  “Enemy,” Akuin said in the voice he almost never used. Hah! The word came out like a branch creaking in the wind!

  “The war has ended,” the hwarhath said. “We have peace with the humans.”

  This didn’t seem possible, but the news Akuin got from his cousin was all family news.

  “Put the gun down,” the hwarhath male repeated. “You really must not kill this human. He works for us. His rank is advancer one-in-back.”12

  Akuin had been a carrier. The monster far outranked him. It was definitely wrong to point a gun at a senior officer. He lowered the rifle.

  The hwarhath man said, “Good. Now, come out.”

  Slowly, Akuin moved into the sunlight. The monster remained motionless. So did the man at the edge of the forest.

  What next? Akuin stood with his rifle pointing down. He was making out more details now. There was a patch of hair, or possibly feathers, on top of the monster’s head. The patch was bone-white, like the hairless face. Even the monster’s eyes were white, though a dark spot floated in the middle of each eye. Was this a sign of disease? Could the monster be blind? No. Akuin had a clear sense that the thing was watching. The dark spots moved, flicking from him to the hwarhath male, then back again.

  “I think it would be easier to talk, if you put the gun down entirely,” the hwarhath said.

  A calm voice, low and even, but Akuin recognized the tone. This was authority speaking. He laid the rifle on the ground and straightened up, trying to remember the way he used to hold himself, back when he was a soldier.

  “Much better,” said the hwarhath. He walked forward and picked up the rifle, handing it to the monster.

  For a moment, Akuin was afraid. But the monster held the rifle properly, barrel pointed down. The oddly shaped hands did not reach for the trigger. The backs of the hands were pale and hairless. Was the creature the same all over? White and as hairless as a fish?

  The hwarhath man looked at Akuin, who glanced down at once. This was a very senior officer. It showed in his tone of voice, the way he moved, the way he treated the monster, expecting obedience, which the monster gave him. Not a man you looked at directly.

  If the man had questions, he did not ask them. Instead, he explained their arrival. It had been an accident. They’d gotten off their trail and lost. “Though not by much, I suspect. If your relatives become worried, they will be able to find us.”

  The night before had been spent at the entrance to Akuin’s valley. This morning, curious, they had hiked in. “I don’t think we could find this place again. In fact, we’ll need your help to get back to our trail.”

  “I’ll give it in return for news,” Akuin said, then felt surprise at what he’d said.

  The hwarhath man tilted his head in agreement. “That can be done.”

  Akuin remembered he was the host and got busy making tea. The two visitors wandered through his garden. The human still carried Akuin’s rifle. There was another rifle in the cabin. If necessary, Akuin could kill both of them.

  But if they vanished, Akuin’s relatives would look for them and keep looking till the men were found. Hospitality required as much. So did respect for rank and the connections far-in-front officers always had. The hwarhath picked a flower—a yellow midsummer bloom — and handed it to his companion, who took it with a flash of teeth. A smile. Then the two of them strolled back toward the cabin, the hwarhath first, the monster following, rifle in one hand, flower in the other.

  This was a peculiar situation! And likely to turn out badly. If the men became curious about him, they’d discover that he was AWOL. His family would be shamed in public. He would have to kill himself.

  His mother should have turned him in twenty-five years before. The result would have been the same for him: death by suicide or execution. But the Atkwa would have escaped embarrassment. At least his mother wasn’t alive to see the result of her affection.

  Maybe it would be better to ask no questions, send the men off as quickly as possible, and hope they did not become curious. But his longing for information was intense. In any case, they must suspect that he was a runaway. How could they not? He was alone in the mountains and so ignorant that he didn’t know the war with the humans was over.

  There was a flat rock near his cabin door. He used it as a table, setting out teapot and cups. His two guests settled down, the monster leaning Akuin’s rifle against the cabin where Akuin could not reach it, though the monster could. He kept the flower, twirling its stem between oddly proportioned fingers. “It really is a very fine garden.”

  What kind of news do you want to hear?” asked the hwarhath.

  “The war,” Akuin said.

  “It turned out to be a mistake. Humans can be reasoned with, though I can’t say the process is easy; and we live
at such great distances from one another that there isn’t much to fight over.”

  “Some fool, apparently a human fool, fired at the first strange ship he encountered,” the monster added. “That’s how the war began. He showed his teeth to Akuin, another smile. It wasn’t quick and friendly like a hwarhath smile, but wide and slow. Disturbing. “It continued because the two sides lacked a way to communicate, unless one calls the firing of weapons a form of communication. In the end, we learned each other’s languages.”

  “That helped,” the hwarhath said. “Though once a war has gotten going, it’s hard to stop. This proved no exception.”

  Akuin asked about Kushaiin, the station where he and Thev had met and become lovers. The hwarhath man was silent.

  “It’s not an important place,” Akuin said. “Maybe you haven’t heard of it.”

  “Why do you want to know about it?” the man asked.

  “I had a friend who was assigned there, a man named Gehazi Thev.”

  “The physicist.”

  “You know about him,” said Akuin. “Is he still alive?”

  “He wasn’t at the station when it disappeared.”

  Hah! Akuin thought and refilled the cups. The monster had barely touched his tea, but the hwarhath male was obviously a drinker. “Did the region collapse, as he said it would? Was the station swallowed by strangeness?”

  The hwarhath male was silent for a moment. Finally he spoke. “At first, we knew only that something had happened to the gate next to the station. We could no longer use it, though the scientists couldn’t tell us why — or if the gate still existed or where it might be, if it still existed. In any case, we could no longer reach the station or communicate with it, except at the speed of light.

  “The nearest gate we could use was light-years from Kushaiin. Obviously we sent people there. Looking from a distance, everything around the station — your station — seemed fine. The star grove shone as it always had. The station’s beacon was still on; and its signal indicated no problems. But we were looking into the past, and the information we needed would not reach us for years. We set up an observation post and sent an STL probe, though light from the station would reach our post long before the probe reached its destination. The universe is a large place, if one doesn’t have access to the Heligian highway system. Then we waited, and the physicists wove theories. It’s an activity they love, as you must have noticed.”

  “Yes,” said Akuin. “Didn’t Gehazi tell you his ideas? You said he had survived.”

  “Yes.” The hwarhath gave him a proper smile, small and quick, not the least bit threatening. “The other scientists had their doubts about his theory, and there were some fine loud arguments. As far as I could determine, nothing was settled, though the physicists kept knotting and un-knotting ideas.

  “Finally the star grove vanished. It happened from one moment to the next, almost without warning. By looking closely, the scientists were able to find abnormalities in the star grove’s spectrum immediately prior to the vanishing. In addition, there was radiation, which originated in the station’s region at the time when the station vanished. But none of this was dramatic. Nothing like a nova. I’m not sure how much we would have noticed, if we hadn’t been watching closely. When the probe reached the place where the stars had been, it found only empty space.”

  “How is that possible?” Akuin asked.

  “Gehazi Thev revised his theory. If you know him, you know that nothing pushes him back. His first ideas did not explain what happened, so he brought new ideas to the fore. He now thinks the collapse served to separate the region from our universe.”

  “What do you mean?” Akuin asked. “What happened to the station? Does it still exist?”

  “How can we know?” the man said in answer. “If it has survived, then it’s in another universe, along with the stars that vanished. A very small universe, according to Gehazi Thev, who has described the place. There is no way to check his ideas, but it’s a fine description.

  “At first, according to Gehazi Thev, the new universe would be dark, except for the stars around the station. Imagine how that would look!” The man exhaled. Akuin couldn’t tell if the exhalation meant horror or interest. Horror seemed more reasonable. “In time the light produced by the stars will be bent back. Then it will seem that new stars are appearing in the distance, all dim and red, like the stars around the station. If the men in the station had good enough instruments, they’d be able to see themselves. They will certainly be able to see and hear the messages they send.”

  “The men in the station must be dead,” Akuin said.

  “Most likely, though Gehazi Thev thinks — or did, the last time I heard him speak — there’s a slight possibility they are alive. It depends on what happened to all the strangeness in the region when it collapsed, not to mention the energy which should have been generated by the collapse. If these went into this new universe, then the universe is almost certainly uninhabitable. But if the strangeness and energy were somehow dissipated or used up in the creation of the universe –”

  It was, Akuin realized, another one of Thev’s terrible ideas. “When did this happen?”

  “Twenty-three years ago,” the hwarhath said.

  Akuin would have been there, when the station vanished. He almost certainly knew men who had died or gone into their own universe. Had Thev’s lover, the hands-on physicist, been among them? He could no longer remember the fellow’s name. Akuin looked toward his garden, but did not see its midsummer brightness. Instead, for a moment, he imagined darkness and isolation, relieved — finally — by dim red stars that were an illusion, light bent back toward its origin. What a fate!

  “Most likely the station was destroyed,” the hwarhath said in a comfortable tone, then excused himself and went off to eliminate tea.

  The monster stayed where he was, his cup still full. “I have bad reactions to a number of hwarhath foods,” he said. “It’s better not to experiment.”

  “How did you end up working for us?” Akuin asked.

  “I was offered a job. I took it.”

  “Was this after the war ended?”

  The monster smiled his slow, disturbing smile. “No.”

  “Is this acceptable behavior among humans?” Akuin asked.

  “To change sides in the middle of a war? No.”

  Obviously Akuin found the monster interesting. This was a person who’d done something worse than running away. “What would happen if your people got hold of you?”

  “Nothing now. There is a treaty. I’m a hwarhath officer. That should protect me. But the usual penalty for disloyalty is death.”

  Akuin wanted to ask the monster why he’d changed sides, but there wasn’t time.13 The hwarhath male was returning, moving through Akuin’s garden, pausing to pick another flower, this one red. He laid the flower down on Akuin’s rock table, then resettled himself on the ground. “Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “What are you going to do about me?” Akuin asked and was surprised by the question. Surely it would have been wiser to keep quiet.

  The hwarhath tilted his head, considering. “We’re both on leave at the moment. Our work, when we are at work, is not for the Corps that keeps track of hwarhath men. And we are guests in this country. I assume the Atkwa know about you. Let them deal with you. I don’t see that your behavior is our business.”

  He was not going to die. His relatives were not going to suffer embarrassment. In his relief, he offered them vegetables from his garden.

  “We can’t carry much,” the hwarhath said. “And my friend can’t eat most of our edible plants. Either they don’t nurture him, or they make him ill. So he lives on specially prepared rations. It’s a hard fate for a human. Eating is an amusement for them. They expect their food to be as entertaining as a good play. Our human rations are— I have been told — dull.”

  “This is true,” the monster said.

  “But I’ll accept your offer,” his hw
arhath companion concluded. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen handsomer looking vegetables. This is something worthy of respect, though I don’t have the human attitude toward food.”14

  That afternoon, Akuin led them back to their trail. After he left them, heading back toward home, he realized that he hadn’t learned their names. Nor had they learned his, but he was obviously Atkwa. If they wanted to find his records, they’d be able to do it without difficulty.

  He reached his cabin late in the afternoon. Shadows covered the valley’s floor and lower slopes, but light still filled the sky and touched the eastern hilltops. A copperleaf tree stood high on one of these, shining as if it were actually made of uncorroded copper. Lovely!

  He gathered the teapot and cups, carrying them inside, then came out and picked up the yellow flower, which had been left. The red one had gone with his visitors, tucked under a flap on the hwarhath man’s pack. He’d seen it go bobbing down the trail, as the hwarhath followed his long-legged companion. Easy to see who the athlete in the pair was.

  Holding the withered flower, Akuin realized the two were lovers. It was as clear as something seen in a vision, though he was not a diviner and did not have visions. None the less, he knew.

  Impossible! was his first reaction. But how could he tell what was possible these days? He’d heard a monster speak his native language and been told the monster was a hwarhath officer. If this could happen, and a station vanish out of the universe, who could say what other events might occur?

  He laid the flower down, unwilling to discard it yet, and watched as sunlight faded off the copperleaf tree. A disturbing day, though he was glad to hear that Thev was still alive and apparently famous. It was what Thev wanted. The news brought by the two men made him feel isolated and ignorant, for a moment doubtful about the choice he’d made.

  Overhead the sky seemed limitless, not a roof, but an ocean into which he could fall and sink — if not forever, then far enough to drown.

  Hah! That was an unpleasant idea! And also untrue. He stood with his feet in the dirt of Atkwa. Below the dirt was granite and the great round planet, which held him as a mother holds a child. There was no way for him to fall into the sky.