Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  Sure, no need to panic, kids. The world has filled up with murdering Greeks.

  Confronted by a Greek, one I remember seeing in battle before, I am too angry to do anything but to cut him open and keep going. My shoulder bleeds from the wound this Greek gave me. All around me, the mayhem is worse. The women are now naked, the contents of houses spilled onto the roads and alleys. At least half our buildings are on fire. I see Odysseus on a rooftop, as if searching for an untouched corner of the city, unmistakable for his ginger hair and beard, broad-shouldered yet small and wiry.

  I couldn’t save your father, Cassie.

  I run.

  Oh, gods, why have you abandoned us?

  Rage roars out of my throat and I shake my sword at the rooftop behind me where Odysseus the trickster stands.

  Then I run.

  When I am close enough to have a view of Athene’s temple, I see a struggle between man and the goddess. It is Little Aias the Lokrian, a small but strong man whom I knew from battle, apparently pulling at Athene’s statue. His bottom is bare, even though he still wears his breastplate and greaves. Shield slung over his shoulder, sword stuck through the leather thongs behind, he doesn’t have fighting on his mind.

  Then I realize that in the center is Cassandra. Her gown has been shredded away from her shoulders, hanging from her belt. She clings to the goddess, as a frightened child to her mother. “Dear goddess, help me. Please help me! I don’t want to go! Let Agamemnon’s blood spill without me!”

  “Let her go!” I shout, but I’m still too far away.

  Little Aias gives such a heave that the statue breaks in Cassandra’s arms and they both tumble to the ground. She clings to the goddess’s head, broken off in her arms. At the moment that Cassandra sees me coming to help, Little Aias rolls onto her and bites her breast savagely. I can hear him growling even at a distance.

  I run, sword high.

  Then an arrow hits his leg. He half-rises and looks over his shoulder. Another arrow thuds into his neck. He slumps.

  I look to the side. It’s Leo. He’s got a Parthian bow and arrows that he’s picked up from somewhere. He staggers towards me. I see he’s got wounds all over. I realize that I, too, am sticky with blood running from my shoulder.

  Cassie, Leo and I come together, our arms around each other, laughing and weeping at the same time. A little victory celebration. I want to kiss both of them.

  “Coro, we’re forming up at the theatre. Pass the word and meet me there,” Leo says and trots away, grimacing and limping.

  Then Little Aias stirs.

  “Cassie, run. Find a safe place!” I say.

  She gestures at the temple. “This is the goddess’s sanctuary! If not here, where can I go?”

  “Go back to the palace with the other women. I’ll be there soon.”

  She looks at me. Deeply, as she does. But there is still something scary in her eyes. “They will sing of all this forever, Coro.”

  “Cassie…”

  She kisses me and walks away, head down.

  Everything is on fire. It is bright enough to see about five dead Trojans for each dead Greek. The numbers are against us.

  I see a big mob-fight in the marketplace ahead. I don’t know which end is ours or if we have an end. I run across a side-alley, through a courtyard, up over a wall, throwing all my gear down before me, picking it up again, and coming out on the main street. I can see the Horse way down there, burning by the bigger fires.

  I’m out of breath.

  People line the roofs of burning houses, going out tough. They throw down paving stones and tiles on the heads of the fight below, probably hitting as many Trojans as Greeks. Two guys push with wooden bars and drop a whole section of roof on the road.

  I see some Cretan helmets, mostly guys fighting on our side, headed towards the theatre. I follow.

  As I pass an alley, someone sticks a sword in my ribs.

  This has happened to me before; after a battle the slave pours vinegar in it, binds us up to heal in a week or two.

  He pulls his sword out which hurts even more. I turn to face him, Priam’s sword and helmet suddenly feeling too heavy, weighing me down.

  It’s Neoptolemos. He’s grinning. “Young mercenary jerk,” he taunts.

  I slice at him, hating him. “Killed all the babies and old men?” I ask. “Now ready for a real fight?”

  I hear a rumble. With another thrust, I cut into his arm. But he’s looking over my shoulder, stepping back.

  Suddenly, I’m hit, harder and heavier than ever before, thrown to the ground, pinned flat, one arm under me, buried in a broken wall.

  Achilles’s son is over me, tugging on my helmet. Then he looks around, as if he’s heard or seen something. “You’re not going anywhere. I’ll come back for that helmet.”

  I can’t move. I can’t see where he’s gone. I can hear his voice, “Line the Trojans up!” he shouts. “Send them to me! Neoptolemos will kill them all!”

  “Come back, you big bully,” I say, trying hard to push myself out. I can’t move my legs at all and one arm only a fraction.

  I’m exhausted. I can see a little of what’s going on. I see Greeks kill an awful lot of Trojans, then watch several Trojans take what seems a long time to stick enough spears and swords in one Greek to kill him. No one hears me call.

  After a while, the fighting moves somewhere else.

  The wall starts to feel like a pleasant, peaceful bath, but growing colder and colder. The light of the flames melts into gray daylight. Smoke and sparks drift. Sometimes I’m asleep, sometimes not. A kid toddles by, stops, sucking on a date candy, stares at me with big eyes, then wanders away. I don’t even try to speak.

  There is an old man leaning over me. I have a hard time focusing on him. He has pieces of glass held by wire stuck on his face, in front of his eyes. He has an odd expression on his face. Enjoyment? Wonder? Not what you’d expect from someone finding a wounded soldier. Maybe he’s a simpleton.

  “A little water?” I ask. I cough; it hurts to speak.

  He looks at me, crouching not moving. He has strange, tight-fitting clothes, and is balding, without his chin whiskers. He frowns and sticks his finger in his ear and shakes his head violently, then stares at me again, wonder still in his eyes.

  Then he reaches for the helmet.

  I jerk my head back. “Leave it alone.” He’s with Neoptolemos, no doubt. “It doesn’t belong to you.”

  I feel warm and calm somehow. I think about Cassie again as I see the man take the helmet away. It’s crusted and battered and looks ancient.

  Damned looters. Can’t have a war anymore without them.

  Once the helmet was tucked inside his jacket, he climbed up the bank of the trench for a security check. The workers must be on a lunch-break, he thought, not spotting them anywhere. Sophia still chatted to the Turkish officials, but they had moved even further away. Not even a need to send her the signal.

  He hurried to the hut, trying to stroll normally, as if the bulge in his jacket were merely the wind blowing his clothes. Even Dörpfeld was elsewhere; good.

  Inside the hut, he held the helmet in his hands, turning it over and over in awe.

  After all this time, after all the half-successful finds, the criticism, retractions, controversies, accusations. Now, this, now. He could hardly wait to tell the world.

  For surely, certainly, this must be the helmet of the noble Priam!

  “Are we nearly there?” Homer asked the children. He was puffed out after the long climb. It had been much easier when he was a boy.

  “Dad, there are houses here,” said his daughter.

  “Houses?”

  “Yeah, with people living in them,” said his son. “There’s woodsmoke and laundry and dogs. If we had gone a bit further around the hill we could have gone up some steps instead climbing in the dust.”

  Houses? Steps? Homer wondered.

  “Hey, there’s some old wall. Come on, let’s go explore there.”
r />   Homer settled down on the ground, cross-legged. So, Troy was being resettled…. Besides the voices of his two children, he could still hear the wind blowing in the elms and the olive trees, smell the almonds and sea breeze. The sun was warm on his skinny back.

  The last time he had been here had been just before he had taken up with Keleuthetis, in that short apprenticeship. For years now, he had been singing of this hill, inspired by both the Greeks and the Trojans.

  And those ghostly wails which had haunted the hill.

  He waited, listening for the Trojan women.

  For a long time, he sat on his own. Later, a man came to sit with him, chatting about who lived on the high city now. They talked about the war stories. The children played until the chilly dusk approached.

  The voices from within had gone quiet. The war was over.

  * * *

  Moby Quilt

  ELEANOR ARNASON

  Eleanor Amason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel which won the prestigious James Tipree, Jr., Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel is Ring of Swords. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo finalist in 2000. Her story “Dapple: A Hwarhath Historical Romance” was in our Seventeeth Annual Collection.

  In the fast-paced and exotic adventure that follows, she takes us along to a distant alien planet, with interstellar location-scout Lydia Duluth, as Lydia encounters a strange and powerful menace — and makes a rather peculiar new friend as well.

  Later on, Lydia Duluth referred to this adventure as “Moby Quilt,” though the animal in question was not named Moby, and there was no one on the ship like Ahab. It began on Newtucket, an Earth-normal world orbiting a gas giant. The system’s star was smaller and cooler than Sol, and the giant’s average distance from its primary was about one AU. As a result, Newtucket existed in an ice age that ebbed and flowed, but never ended. Glaciers covered most of the land, and life was almost all in the ocean, floating in chilly surface waters, rooted in cold shallows or clustered at the edges of boiling deep-sea vents. These last were common. The giant’s tidal pull, and that of its other moons, kept Newtucket active.

  As Lydia climbed from the spaceport cab, she saw a volcano on an offshore island, its plume trailing into the deep blue sky. Newtucket’s primary floated above the plume: a crescent softly banded in tan and pink. The crescent was large enough to be impressive, though Lydia had seen larger giants in the skies of other moons. Most of those moons no longer rotated, and many had been sterilized by their giant’s radiation. Newtucket was far enough out from its primary to be habitable and to have a day that was only slightly longer than Earth standard. Some grandeur had been lost through distance. One should not complain. This was still a pretty world, with potential for drama.

  The volcano might erupt, for example; or a story’s hero might be chained to a rock, as one of Newtucket’s high tides rolled in, rising — how many meters? Twenty? Thirty?

  She slung the satchel holding her recorder over one shoulder, picked up her bag, and walked into the waterfront hotel. Whenever possible, she stayed in sight of an ocean. It must have to do with her childhood, spent on the broad inland plains of a distant planet.

  The desk clerk was human. “Do you really work for Stellar Harvest?” he asked, as he processed her reservation.

  Of course she did. It said so right on his screen. Lydia nodded.

  “Do you know Wazati Tloo?”

  The company’s rising star. Lydia had discovered him, but was not about to admit this to a fan.

  “I’m in love with Tloo,” the clerk went on. “So handsome! So masculine! That golden skin! That mane of dark red hair!”

  It wasn’t hair, actually, but a crest of feathers.

  “I’ve activated your key, Miss Duluth. The elevator’s at the end of the hall. Your room is no smoking, with a view of the harbor. Have a nice visit in scenic Newtucket Town.”

  Lydia thanked him and rode up to a generic human hotel room, made familiar by years of travel among the stars. She unpacked, showered, put on new clothes, and went onto her balcony. As promised, it overlooked the harbor. In the distance, the volcanic island smoked, its icy shoulders gleaming in the afternoon sunlight. A few boats were tied to the docks. In the middle of the harbor was a sleek, white vessel, bristling with instrumentation. This was her destination: the research ship Persistent.

  She leaned on the balcony’s railing, enjoying the view. Somewhere out there, most likely beyond the breakwater, was her personal reason for coming to this world: a fifteen meter long marine creature from another star system. Like Lydia, K’r’x was intelligent, and like her, he had an AI woven into his nervous system. This, combined with the radios used for ordinary communication between his species and humanity, ought to mean that she could speak to him directly, mind-to-mind. This kind of closeness with a human would be embarrassing and disturbing. But an ocean predator with five eyes and a multitude of tentacles could hardly sit in judgment on her. For one thing, he was physically incapable of sitting.

  Remember, her AI said. Your conversation will be mediated by two AIs. This will not be a duet, but rather a quartet.

  You’re getting metaphoric, Lydia thought.

  That is your influence. We’re too closely connected. I am not the AI I used to be.

  She thought she caught a hint of humor, but this was hardly likely. The AIs were a notoriously humorless crew.

  She got her recorder and panned the harbor. By leaning off one end of the balcony, she could record the town as well. Concrete buildings with metal roofs climbed a steep hill. Beyond them rose a range of mountains, black stone peaks streaked white with ice and snow. One mountain smoked a little, its thin plume half-veiling the amber-yellow sun.

  A very pretty world. After a while, she pulled on a jacket and went out for a walk. In many ways, this was her favorite part of any journey: wandering alone with her recorder over one shoulder. The cold air had a tangy, unfamiliar scent, and the gravity was light compared to the last world she’d been on. Her step felt bouncy. The fatigue of a long trip fell away.

  There were racks near the harbor. The local sea life hung from them: long red streamers that faded as they dried. Like most of the animal life on this planet, they were flat and almost featureless, except for grooves that made them look quilted. The creatures here were no wider than her arm and maybe twice as long. Out in the ocean were huge, rectangular mats that measured ten thousand square meters. Like their small relatives, they were grooved. Unlike their relatives, they were not harvested. The Persistent was going out to study the mats. Lydia was going along.

  She had dinner in a waterfront café. The tide was coming in. The docks, which had looked ridiculously tall, looked ordinary now, and more boats were tied up. One was unloading. A crane lifted a net full of red sea ribbons into air. Lydia recorded the scene, getting the giant’s crescent above the black, angular crane. Years of working for Stellar Harvest had given her a pretty good eye.

  She was on a final cup of decaf coffee when someone stopped at her table. “Lydia Duluth?”

  Looking up, Lydia saw a broad, strong-looking human woman with dark brown skin. Her bright blue hair was cropped short. Her eyes were topaz-yellow. “Yes?”

  The woman held out a hand. “I’m Jez Bombay, captain of the Persistent.”

  They shook. Lydia gestured. The captain sat down. “We’re leaving tomorrow on the tide, which means you should be on board by noon.”

  Lydia nodded. A human wait came over; Captain Bombay ordered a beer.

  “Where is K’r’x?” Lydia asked.

  “Beyond the breakwater. He says the harbor tastes funny and
is far too noisy. All these engines! A squid can’t hear himself think.”

  “He isn’t a squid,” Lydia observed.

  Jez nodded. “But there is a similarity — superficial, I will grant you, and his name for his people can’t be said by humans.”

  Deep Divers, they called themselves. Fast Swimmers. The Great-Eyed. Those of Many Grasping Tentacles.

  Why are you so interested in this creature? her AI asked.

  The Divers may not be the strangest intelligent life humanity has ever met, Lydia thought in reply. But beyond question, they are different.

  The captain drank her beer; she and Lydia chatted about Stellar Harvest. It was the inevitable conversation. Did she know Wazati Tloo? Had she known the legendary Ali Khan, now retired and growing roses on Earth? What was Cy Melbourne really like?

  Actually, it was easy to talk about all three. Tloo was a dear, sweet fellow with the looks of a bodhisattva and the brains of a brick. Ali Khan — a gentle, intelligent man of awesome physical ability — had been a pleasure to know. Cy was less likable, due to his fondness for practical jokes; but he got the job done and didn’t screw his fellow workers over, most likely because he’d come up through the ranks, starting as a stunter. Still and all, this was a conversation about phantoms. The people that fascinated Jez Bombay did not exist, were figures made of light. The people Lydia knew — gentle Ali, naïve Tloo, and crude Cy — were something else entirely.

  They parted finally. Lydia walked back to the hotel.

  In the morning, she packed, left the hotel, and found a watercab that took her to the Persistent. The ship was fifty meters long, with a knife-thin prow and two massive engines. She couldn’t see the engines, but she’d read a description, and the twin screws were visible as the cab came around the stern, sunlight slanting through the water to light their thick shafts and broad, thick blades.