Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  All of us froze, trying to see the snowplume trail of the avalanche, hoping against hope that it would come out onto the glacier far behind us. It came off the face and across the bergeschrund a quarter of a mile directly above us and picked up speed, coming directly at us. It looked like a white tsunami. The roar was deafening.

  “Run!” shouted Gary and we all took off downhill, not worrying if there were bottomless crevasses directly in front of us, not caring at that point, just trying against all logic to outrun a wall of snow and ice and boulders roiling toward us at sixty miles per hour.

  I remember now that we were roped with the last of our spidersilk — sixty-foot intervals — the lines clipped to our climbing harnesses. It made no difference to Gary, Paul, and me since we were running flat out and in the same direction and at about the same speed, but I have seen mantispids move at full speed since that day — using all six legs, their hands forming into an extra pair of flat feet — and I know now that K could have shifted into high gear and run four times as fast as the rest of us. Perhaps he could have beaten the avalanche since just the south edge of its wave caught us. Perhaps.

  He did not try. He did not cut the rope. He ran with us.

  The south edge of the avalanche caught us and lifted us and pulled us under and snapped the unbreakable spidersilk climbing rope and tossed us up and then submerged us again and swept us all down into the crevasse field at the bottom of the glacier and separated us forever.

  Washington, D.C.

  Sitting here in the secretary of state’s waiting room three months after that day, I’ve had time to think about it.

  All of us — everyone on the planet, even the bugs — have been preoccupied in the past couple of months as the Song has begun and increased in complexity and beauty. Oddly enough, it’s not that distracting, the Song. We go about our business. We work and talk and eat and watch HDTV and make love and sleep, but always there now — always in the background whenever one wants to listen — is the Song.

  It’s unbelievable that we’ve never heard it before this.

  No one calls them bugs or mantispids or the Listeners anymore. Everyone, in every language, calls them the Bringers of the Song.

  Meanwhile, the Bringers keep reminding us that they did not bring the Song, only taught us how to listen to it.

  I don’t know how or why I survived when none of the others did. The theory is that one can swim along the surface of a snow avalanche, but the reality was that none of us had the slightest chance to try. That wide wall of snow and rock just washed over us and pulled us down and spat out only me, for reasons known, perhaps, only to K2 and most probably not even to it.

  They found me naked and battered more than three-quarters of a mile from where we had started running from the avalanche. They never found Gary, Paul, or Kanakaredes.

  The emergency CMGs were there within three minutes — they must have been poised to intervene all that time — but after twenty hours of deep-probing and sonar searching, just when the marines and the bureaucrats were ready to lase away the whole lower third of the glacier if necessary to recover my friends’ bodies, it was Speaker Aduradake — Kanakaredes’s father and mother, it turned out — who forbade it.

  “Leave them wherever they are,” he instructed the fluttering UN bureaucrats and frowning marine colonels. “They died together on your world and should remain together within the embrace of your world. Their part of the song is joined now.”

  And the Song began — or at least was first heard — about one week later.

  A male aide to the secretary comes out, apologizes profusely for my having to wait — Secretary Bright Moon was with the president — and shows me into the secretary of state’s office. The aide and I stand there waiting.

  I’ve seen football games played in smaller areas than this office.

  The secretary comes in through a different door a minute later and leads me over to two couches facing each other rather than to the uncomfortable chair near her huge desk. She seats me across from her, makes sure that I don’t want any coffee or other refreshment, nods away her aide, commiserates with me again on the death of my dear friends (she had been there at the memorial service at which the president had spoken), chats with me for another minute about how amazing life is now with the Song connecting all of us, and then questions me for a few minutes, sensitively, solicitously, about my physical recovery (complete), my state of mind (shaken but improving), my generous stipend from the government (already invested), and my plans for the future.

  “That’s the reason I asked for this meeting,” I say. “There was that promise of climbing Olympus Mons.”

  She stares at me.

  “On Mars,” I add needlessly.

  Secretary Betty Willard Bright Moon nods and sits back in the cushions. She brushes some invisible lint from her navy blue skirt. “Ah, yes,” she says, her voice still pleasant but holding some hint of that flintiness I remember so well from our Top of the World meeting. “The Bringers have confirmed that they intend to honor that promise.”

  I wait.

  “Have you decided who your next climbing partners will be?” she asked, taking out an obscenely expensive and micron-thin platinum palmlog as if she is going to take notes herself to help facilitate this whim of mine.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Now it was the secretary’s turn to wait.

  “I want Kanakaredes’s brother,” I say. “His…creche brother.”

  Betty Willard Bright Moon jaw almost drops open. I doubt very much if she’s reacted this visibly to a statement in her last thirty years of professional negotiating, first as a take-no-prisoners Harvard academic and most recently as secretary of state. “You’re serious,” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “Anyone else other than this particular bu — Bringer?”

  “No one else.”

  “And you’re sure he even exists?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “How do you know if he wants to risk his life on a Martian volcano?” she asks, her poker face back in place. “Olympus Mons is taller than K2, you know. And it’s probably more dangerous.”

  I almost, not quite, smile at this news flash. “He’ll go,” I say.

  Secretary Bright Moon makes a quick note in her palmlog and then hesitates. Even though her expression is perfectly neutral now, I know that she is trying to decide whether to ask a question that she might not get the chance to ask later.

  Hell, knowing that question was coming and trying to decide how to answer it is the reason I didn’t come to visit her a month ago, when I decided to do this thing. But then I remembered Kanakaredes’s answer when we asked him why the bugs had come all this way to visit us. He had read his Mallory and he had understood Gary, Paul, and me — and something about the human race — that this woman never would.

  She makes up her mind to ask her question.

  “Why…,” she begins. “Why do you want to climb it?”

  Despite everything that’s happened, despite knowing that she’ll never understand, despite knowing what an asshole she’ll always consider me after this moment, I have to smile before I give her the answer.

  “Because it’s there.”

  * * *

  When this World is All on Fire

  WILLIAM SANDERS

  William Sanders lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. A former pow-wow dancer and sometime Cherokee gospel singer, he appeared on the SF scene in the early ’80s with a couple of alternate-history comedies, Journey to Fusang (a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award) and The Wild Blue and Gray. Sanders then turned to mystery and suspense, producing a number of critically acclaimed titles under a pseudonym. He credits his old friend Roger Zelazny with persuading him to return to SF, this time via the short story form. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and numerous anthologies. One, “The Undiscovered,” was on the Final Nebula and Hugo ballots a couple of years back. He has also re
turned to novel writing, with books such as The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan, recently reissued by Wildside Press, and an acclaimed new SF novel, J. His stories have appeared in our Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fifteenth Annual Collections.

  For those of you who think that things can’t get any worse, here he gives us an unsettling and melancholy vision of what it’ll be like when they do.

  Squatters,” Jimmy Lonekiller said as he swung the jeep off the narrow old blacktop onto the narrower and older gravel side road. “I can’t believe we got squatters again.”

  Sitting beside him, bracing himself against the bumping and bouncing, Sergeant Davis Blackbear said, “Better get used to it. We kick this bunch out, there’ll be more.”

  Jimmy Lonekiller nodded. “Guess that’s right,” he said. “They’re not gonna give up, are they?”

  He was a husky, dark-skinned young man, and tall for a Cherokee; among the women of the reservation, he was generally considered something of a hunk. His khaki uniform was neat and crisply pressed, despite the oppressive heat. Davis Blackbear, feeling his own shirt wilting and sticking to his skin, wondered how he did it. Maybe fullbloods didn’t sweat as much. Or maybe it was something to do with being young.

  Davis said, “Would you? Give up, I mean, if you were in their shoes?”

  Jimmy didn’t reply for a moment, being busy fighting the wheel as the jeep slammed over a series of potholes. They were on a really bad stretch now, the road narrowed to a single-lane dirt snaketrack; the overhanging trees on either side, heavy with dust-greyed festoons of kudzu vine, shut out the sun without doing anything much about the heat. This was an out-of-the-way part of the reservation; Davis had had to check the map at the tribal police headquarters to make sure he knew how to get here.

  The road began to climb now, up the side of a steep hill. The jeep slowed to not much better than walking speed; the locally distilled alcohol might burn cooler and cleaner than gasoline but it had no power at all. Jimmy Lonekiller spoke then: “Don’t guess I would, you put it that way. Got to go somewhere, poor bastards.”

  They were speaking English; Davis was Oklahoma Cherokee, having moved to the North Carolina reservation only a dozen years ago, when he married a Qualla Band woman. He could understand the Eastern dialect fairly well by now, enough for cop purposes anyway, but he still wasn’t up to a real conversation.

  “Still,” Jimmy went on, “you got to admit it’s a hell of a thing. Twenty-first century, better than five hundred years after Columbus, and here we are again with white people trying to settle on our land. What little bit we’ve got left,” he said, glancing around at the dusty woods. “There’s gotta be somewhere else they can go.”

  “Except,” Davis said, “somebody’s already there too.”

  “Probably so,” Jimmy admitted. “Seems like they’re running out of places for people to be.”

  He steered the jeep around a rutted hairpin bend, while Davis turned the last phrase over in his mind, enjoying the simple precision of it: running out of places for people to be, that was the exact and very well-put truth. Half of Louisiana and more than half of Florida under water now, the rest of the coastline inundated, Miami and Mobile and Savannah and most of Houston, and, despite great and expensive efforts, New Orleans too.

  And lots more land, farther inland, that might as well be submerged for all the good it did anybody: all that once-rich farm country in southern Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, too hot and dry now to grow anything, harrowed by tornadoes and dust storms, while raging fires destroyed the last remnants of the pine forests and the cypress groves of the dried-up swamplands. Not to mention the quake, last year, shattering Memphis and eastern Arkansas, demolishing the levees and turning the Mississippi loose on what was left of the Delta country. Seemed everybody either had way too much water or not enough.

  He’d heard a black preacher, on the radio, declare that it was all God’s judgment on the South because of slavery and racism. But that was bullshit; plenty of other parts of the country were getting it just as bad. Like Manhattan, or San Francisco — and he didn’t even want to think about what it must be like in places like Arizona. And Africa, oh, Jesus. Nobody in the world wanted to think about Africa now.

  The road leveled out at the top of the hill and he pointed. “Pull over there. I want to do a quick scout before we drive up.”

  Jimmy stopped the jeep and Davis climbed out and stood in the middle of the dirt road. “Well,” Jimmy said, getting out too, “I wish somebody else would get the job of running them off now and then.” He gave Davis a mocking look. “It’s what I get, letting myself get partnered with an old ’breed. Everybody knows why Ridge always puts you in charge of the evictions.”

  Davis didn’t rise to the bait; he knew what Jimmy was getting at. It was something of a standing joke among the reservation police that Davis always got any jobs that involved dealing with white people. Captain Ridge claimed it was because of his years of experience on the Tulsa PD, but Jimmy and others claimed it was really because he was quarter-blood and didn’t look all that Indian and therefore might make whites less nervous.

  In his own estimation, he didn’t look particularly Indian or white or anything else, just an average-size man with a big bony face and too many wrinkles and dark brown hair that was now getting heavily streaked with gray. He doubted that his appearance inspired much confidence in people of any race.

  The dust cloud was beginning to settle over the road behind them. A black-and-white van appeared, moving slowly, and pulled to a stop behind the jeep. Corporal Roy Smoke stuck his head out the window and said, “Here?”

  “For now,” Davis told him. “I’m going to go have a look, scope out the scene before we move in. You guys wait here.” He turned. “Jimmy, you come with me.”

  The heat was brutal as they walked down the road, even in the shady patches. At the bottom of the hill, though, Davis led the way off the road and up a dry creek bed, and back in the woods it was a little cooler. Away from the road, there wasn’t enough sunlight for the kudzu vines to take over, and beneath the trees the light was pleasantly soft and green. Still too damn dry, Davis thought, feeling leaves and twigs crunching under his boot soles. Another good reason to get this eviction done quickly; squatters tended to be careless with fire. The last bad woods fire on the reservation, a couple of months ago, had been started by a squatter family trying to cook a stolen hog.

  They left the creek bed and walked through the woods, heading roughly eastward. “Hell,” Jimmy murmured, “I know where this is now. They’re on the old Birdshooter place, huh? Shit, nobody’s lived there for years. Too rocky to grow anything, no water since the creek went dry.”

  Davis motioned for silence. Moving more slowly now, trying to step quietly though it wasn’t easy in the dry underbrush, they worked their way to the crest of a low ridge. Through the trees, Davis could see a cleared area beyond. Motioning to Jimmy to wait, he moved up to the edge of the woods and paused in the shadow of a half-grown oak, and that was when he heard the singing.

  At first he didn’t even recognize it as singing; the sound was so high and clear and true that he took it for some sort of instrument. But after a second he realized it was a human voice, though a voice like none he’d ever heard. He couldn’t make out the words, but the sound alone was enough to make the hair stand up on his arms and neck, and the air suddenly felt cooler under the trees.

  It took Davis a moment to get unstuck; he blinked rapidly and took a deep breath. Then, very cautiously, he peered around the trunk of the oak.

  The clearing wasn’t very big; wasn’t very clear, either, any more, having been taken over by brush and weeds. In the middle stood the ruins of a small frame house, its windows smashed and its roof fallen in.

  Near the wrecked house sat a green pickup truck, its bed covered with a boxy, homemade-looking camper shell — plywood, it looked like from where Davis stood, and painted a dull uneven gray. The truck’s own finish was badly faded
and scabbed with rust; the near front fender was crumpled. Davis couldn’t see any license plates.

  A kind of lean-to had been erected at the rear of the truck, a sagging blue plastic tarp with guy-ropes tied to trees and bushes. As Davis watched, a lean, long-faced man in bib overalls and a red baseball cap came out from under the tarp and stood looking about.

  Then the red-haired girl came around the front of the truck, still singing, the words clear now:

  “Oh, when this world is all on fire

  Where you gonna go?

  Where you gonna go?”

  She was, Davis guessed, maybe twelve or thirteen, though he couldn’t really tell at this distance. Not much of her, anyway; he didn’t figure she’d go over eighty pounds or so. Her light blue dress was short and sleeveless, revealing thin pale arms and legs. All in all, it didn’t seem possible for all that sound to be coming from such a wispy little girl; and yet there was no doubt about it, he could see her mouth moving:

  “Oh, when this world is all on fire

  Where you gonna go?”

  The tune was a simple one, an old-fashioned modal-sounding melody line, slow and without a pronounced rhythm. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered but that voice. It soared through the still mountain air like a whippoorwill calling beside a running stream. Davis felt his throat go very tight.

  “Run to the mountains to hide your face

  Never find no hiding place

  Oh, when this world is all on fire

  Where you gonna go?”

  The man in the baseball cap put his hands on his hips. “Eva May!” he shouted.

  The girl stopped singing and turned. Her red hair hung down her back almost to her waist. “Yes, Daddy?” she called.

  “Quit the damn fooling around,” the man yelled. His voice was rough, with the practiced anger of the permanently angry man. “Go help your brother with the fire.”

  Fire? Davis spotted it then, a thin trace of bluish-white smoke rising from somewhere on the far side of the parked truck. “Shit!” he said soundlessly, and turned and began picking his way back down the brushy slope.