Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  This, mostly, is the story of Isabel of the Fall as it is commonly told. The days grew duller across the Windfare Hills. The nights lengthened. A ragged figure, failing and arthritic, Isabel finally came to discover, by accidentally thrusting her hand into the pillar of Sabil’s light which poured into her minaret, that the blaze which had caused her so much pain could also bring a blissful end to all sensation. She knew by then that she was dying. And she knew that her ruined, blistered flesh — as she came to resemble an animated pile of the charcoal sticks of the leavings of autumnal fires — was the last of the warnings with which her Church had encumbered her. Limping and stinking, she wandered further afield across the Dawn Church’s island of Jerita. Almost mythical already, she neglected her duties to the extent that her minaret, probably without her noticing in the continuing flicker of short and rainy days, was taken from her. The desire for these seasons had spread by now across Ghezirah. Soon, as acolytes of the Green Church learned how to reactivate the genes of plants which had once coped with such conditions, spring was to be found in Culgaith, and chill winter in Abuzeid. The spinning islands of Ghezirah were changed forever. And, at long last, in this world of cheerful sadness and melancholy joy which only the passing of seasons can bring, the terrors of the War of the Lilies became a memory.

  One day, Isabel of the Fall was dragging herself and what remained of her memories across a place of gardens and fountains. A cool wind blew. The trees here were the colour of flame, but at the same time she was almost sure that the enormous building which climbed ahead of her could only be the Cathedral of the Word. She looked around for Genya and grunted to herself — she was probably off playing hide and seek. Isabel staggered on, the old wrappings which had stuck to her burnt flesh dragging behind her. She looked, as many now remarked, like a crumpled leaf; the very spirit of this new season of autumn. She even smelled of decay and things burning. But she still had the sight which had been so ruthlessly given to her, and the building ahead…The building ahead seemed to have no end to its spires…

  Cold rains rattled across the lakes. Slowly, day by day, Isabel approached the last great citadel of her Church, which truly did rise all the way to the skies, and then beyond them. The Intelligence that dwelt there had long been expecting her, and opened its gates, and refreshed the airs of its corridors and stairways which Isabel, with the instincts of a Dawn-Singer, had no need to be encouraged to climb. Day and darkness flashed through the arrowslit windows as she ascended. Foods and wines would appear at turns and landings, cool and bland for her wrecked palate. Sometimes, hissing silver things passed her, or paused to enquire if they could carry her, but Isabel remained true to the precepts and vanities of her Church, and disdained such easy ways of ascension. It was a long, hard climb. Sometimes, she heard Genya’s husky breath beside her, her exclamations and laughter as she looked down and down into the huge wells which had opened beneath. Sometimes, she was sure she was alone. Sometimes, although her blackened face had lost all sensation and her eyes were made of crystal, Isabel of the Fall was sure she was crying. But still she climbed.

  The roof that covers the islands of Ghezirah is usually accessed, by the rare humans and aliens who do such things, by the use of aircraft and hummingbird caleches. Still, it had seemed right to the forgotten architects of the Dawn Church that there should be one last tower and staircase which ascended all of the several miles to the top of Ghezirah’s skies. By taking the way which always led up, and as the other towers and minarets fell far beneath her, Isabel found that way, that last spire, and followed it. Doorways opened. The Intelligence led her on. She never felt alone now, and even her pain fell behind her. Finally, though, she came to a doorway which would not open. It was a plain thing, round-lipped and with a wheel at its centre which refused to turn. A light flashed above it. Perhaps this was some kind of warning. Isabel considered. She sat there for many days. Food appeared and disappeared. She could go back down again, although she knew she would never survive the journey. She could go on, but that light…Over to her left, she saw eventually, was some sort of suit. A silvered hat, boots, a cape. They looked grand, expensive. Surely not for her? But then she remembered the food, the sense of a presence. She pulled them on over her rags, or rather the things pulled themselves over her when she approached them. Now, the wheel turned easily, even before she had reached out to it. Beyond was disappointing; a tiny space little more than the size of a wardrobe. But then there was a sound of hissing, and a door similar to one which had puzzled her spun its wheel, and opened. Isabel stepped out.

  The great interior sphere of Ghezirah hung spinning. Everywhere within this glittering ball, there were mirrors wide as oceans. Everywhere, there was darkness and light. And Sabil hung at the centre of it, pluming white; a living fire. Isabel gasped. She had never seen anything so beautiful — not even Genya dancing. She climbed upwards along the gantries through stark shadows. Something of her Dawn-Singer’s knowledge told her that these mirrors were angled for night, and that, even in the unpredictable drift of these new seasons, they would soon bring dawn across Ghezirah. She came to the lip of one vast reflector, and considered it. At this pre-dawn moment, bright though it was, its blaze was a mere ember. Then, leaning over it as she had once leaned over Mirror 28 with Genya, Isabel did something she had never done before. She touched the surface of the mirror. There was no sense left in her ravaged hands, but, even through the gloves of her suit and Sabil’s glare and hard vacuum, it felt smooth, cool, perfect. The mirror was vast — the size of a small planet — and it curved in a near-endless parabola. Isabel understood that for such an object to move at all, and then in one moment, it could not possibly be made of glass, or any normal human substance. But, at the same time, it looked and felt solid. Without quite knowing what she was doing, but sensing that the seconds before dawn were rapidly passing, Isabel climbed onto the edge of the mirror. Instantly, borne by its slippery energies, she was sliding, falling. The seconds passed. The mirror caught her. Held her. She waited. She thought of the insects that she sponged from so many mirrors in her nights as an apprentice, their bodies fried by the day’s heat. But dawn was coming…For the last time, as all the mirrors moved in unison to bear Sabil’s energies towards the sleeping islands of Ghezirah below, Isabel spread her arms to welcome her sun. Joyously, as the light flashed heat on her, she sang in the dawn.

  In some versions of this tale, Isabel is said to have fallen towards Sabil, and thus to have gained her name. In others, she is called simply Isabel of the Autumn and her final climb beyond the sky remains unmentioned. In some, she is tragically beautiful, or beautifully ugly. The real truth remains lost, amid much else about her. But in the Dawn Church itself Isabel of the Fall is still revered, and amidst its many mysteries it is said that one of Ghezirah’s great internal reflectors still bears the imprint of her vaporized silhouette, which is the only blemish on all of its mirrors that the Church allows. And somewhere, if you know where to look amidst all Ghezirah’s many islands, and at the right time of day and in the correct season, there is a certain wall in a certain small garden where Isabel’s shape can be seen, pluming down from the minarets far above; traversing the hours brick to mossy brick as a small shadow.

  As for Genya, she is often forgotten at the end of this story. She touches Isabel’s face for a last time, smiles, bows and vanishes down the stairways of the minaret towards oblivion. But the fact that she was also punished by her Church remains beyond doubt, and the punishment was as cruel and purposeful in its own way as that which was visited on Isabel. Genya retained all her senses, her special fingertips, even briefly her skills as a dancer; what her Church took from her was the ability to understand. She was then set the task of transcribing many manuscripts from one dead language to another, dictating, recording, endlessly reading and reciting with every input of her eyes and flesh. There were urrearth stories of princesses and dragons, equations over which geniuses would have wept, but the meaning of them all passed though Genya unnoticed.
Genya became a stupid but useful vessel, and she grew ancient and proficient and fat in a pillowed crypt in the far depths of the Cathedral of the Word, where the windows look out on the turning stars and new acolytes were taken to see her — the famous Genya who had once loved Isabel and betrayed her Church; now white and huge, busy and brainless as a maggot as she rummaged through endless torrents of words. But there are worse fates, and Genya lacked the wisdom to suffer. And she wasn’t soulless — somewhere, deep within the rolls of fat and emptiness, all those spinning words, she was still Genya. When she died, muttering the last sentence of an epic which no other Librarian or machine could possibly have transcribed, that part of her passed on with the manuscript to echo and remain held forever somewhere amid all the vast cliff-faces of books in the Cathedral of the Word. To this day, within pages such as these, Genya can still sometimes be found, beautiful as she once was, dancing barefoot across the warm rosestone paving on an endless summer’s morning in the time which was always long ago.

  * * *

  Into Greenwood

  JIM GRIMSLEY

  Jim Grimsley is a playwright and novelist who lives in Atlanta. His first novel, Winter Birds, was published in 1994 and won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. His second novel, Dream Boy, won the American Library Association GLBT Award for Literature and was a Lambda Award Finalist. He is playwright-in-residence at 7 Stages Theater. His third novel, My Drowning, was released in 1997 by Algonquin Books. His first genre novel, the fantasy Kirith Kirin, was published by Meshia Merlin in 2000, and he has just signed a contract to write a science fiction novel for Tor. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction and Bending the Landscape. His story “Free in Asveroth” was in our Sixteenth Annual Collection.

  Here’s a complex, lyrical, and compelling novella that takes us deep into an alien environment of startling strangeness and even stranger beauty, for the engrossing story of two siblings, literally caught between two worlds — siblings who must weigh family loyalties against political necessities, with the stakes as high as they ever get for everyone.

  One

  To visit the Dirijhi one leaves coastal Jarutan by putter to travel to one of the towns near the forest where they staff a trade mission; there are no roads in Greenwood, only waterways, so one must find a boat that travels one of these routes, in my case the River Silas. One heads into the part of Aramen that the Hormling have, by treaty, excluded from settlement in order not to crowd the forest preserve. The Dirijhi no longer grow all the way to the sea as they used to, stopping about a hundred standard land units north of the coast. They never grew on the rest of Aramen, according to what we have learned since we gave them symbionts and began to communicate.

  Nowadays, Aramenians live in settlements and farms right up to the edge of the Dirijhi preserve. Before entering the forest, I stayed the night in the last village along Silas, at the place where the river emerges from the canopy, a town called Dembut where a lot of early Hormling colonists settled. Though they don’t call themselves Hormling any more, except in terms of ancestry, and they have no loyalty to Senal or the Mage. They’re Aramenian these days, they’ll tell you so stoutly, and most of them are for independence, though they keep quiet about it.

  I had arrived on Aramen during one of the quiet times, when the colonial assembly and the colony’s Prin administrators were getting along with some degree of harmony. I was returning from a decade-long trip to Paska, another Mage colony inside the Cluster, three years’ passage each way on the Hormling Conveyance. On Paska, the independence movement was foundering, as ours was. Like my organization, People for a Free Aramen, the Paskan movement had achieved a certain ceiling of success and been stalled ever since. Their group was twenty-odd years old, ours about twice that. Forty thousand subscriber members and enough committed workers to stage a decent rally every few months. Internal arguments about what mix of sedition and pressure could be used to convince the Mage and the Prin that allowing us self government was a good idea. I learned what I could from four years with the Free Paska Coalition, but I was glad to come home again, though somewhat discouraged, after so long an absence, to find that the colonial administration seemed more entrenched than ever.

  I think we could beat the Hormling, take the planet from them, but I’m not sure about the Prin. Whatever explanation you believe for the powers they exercise, we all know from experience that those powers are very real. They are the key that holds the Hormling empire together. We have seen time and again under the Prin that it is possible to make people happy even when they are not free. The Prin are good at creating contentment, complacency. All over the southern continent the rains fall regularly on the farms, the crops grow, the industries run smoothly, machinery functions, the ships and aircraft land and take off on time. Aramen is the end of the Conveyance line because the gate to Senal is here, and therefore our world is very important to the Mage. On Aramen, the Prin do their jobs carefully, everything works well, nobody goes hungry, sick people get treatment, crime is kept low, smuggling and the black market are marginal, and nearly every crime is justly punished, since nobody can fool a Prin. Hard to fight that. Hard, sometimes, to justify it even to myself, that I think we should be free of their rule.

  The northern continent, Ajhevan, is a different story from the south. The Prin do not administer the weather here, or adjust the growing season, by virtue of the fact that the Dirijhi are a protected species, and this continent is under Dirijhi jurisdiction. The trees have made it clear to the Mage, through the symbionts, that the Prin are not welcome to come to Ajhevan. For some reason none of us have ever understood, the Mage prefers that the Dirijhi be left alone and gives them what they want. So Ajhevan belongs to them, and we humans who live here are truly free, except for Hormling taxes, in a way that nearly no one else can claim. Because we don’t have the Prin here to read our minds whether we like it or not, to look over our shoulders and meddle in our affairs. But even my friends in Ajhevan have become resigned to the notion that independence will only come a long time from now. Since my return, I noticed that some of the people inside the movement had begun to speak in the same terms.

  What we needed, what we had always needed, was an ally. I had hoped to find something like that on Paska. But then, a few days after I returned, a letter arrived from my brother Binam asking me to visit him in Greenwood.

  The trees don’t care for outsiders, though they make a lot of money running tours into the forest. They rarely grant anyone permission to stay in Dirijhi country for any length of time. But my brother was a symbiont, and I had not seen him since the change. I’d been asking him to allow me to visit for years, to spend time with him but also to sound him out about what the trees might think of independence. All of us with ties to the Dirijhi were making the same request. After many years of refusal, Binam had suddenly agreed. So I was on my way.

  The Dirijhi permit only a certain kind of flat-bottomed boat to travel upriver under the canopy, so I spent the afternoon in Dembut trying to line up transportation. The river guides are all licensed, and there was actually a symbiont on duty to check my pass in the outpost station; the Dirijhi hire human staff to deal with the tourist traffic, though the sym was clearly in charge. He or she must have been melded to one of the nearer trees, though even then it’s an effort for a sym to be apart from the tree for any length of time. I knew that much from Binam, who sent me letters, written ones on paper, from time to time; the only scripted letters I ever got in my life. This sym had a pinched look in the face, eyes of that iridescent silver that is the result of the tree-feeding, the pupils small in the light, though they could dilate completely in the dark, enabling the sym to see as if the world were in full noon. Binam would look like that, I reminded myself. He would still be my brother, but he would be changed.

  Once I cleared my papers and booked passage on one of the riverboats, I
found a hotel room for the night. I was tempted to think of the place as primitive or backward, since we were so far from what I had come to think of as civilization, but Dembut had every convenience you could ask for. Up-links to the whole Hormling data mass, entertainment parlors that were 4D capable, clean VR stalls, good restaurants. The Dirijhi don’t like big power matrices, so everything on Ajhevan runs on portable fusion generators; cold boxes, they’re called, and for a village the size of Dembut, about a dozen were required to power the town. Hormling technology, like nearly everything that works in the Cluster. This and much other interesting information was piped to the screen in my hotel room, the loop playing as I keyed the door and entered. I muted the sound and threw my bag onto the little bed.

  I bought a girl for the night. Her name was Tira and she had a brother who was a symbiont, too. Ajhevanoi are pretty free sexually, and prostitution is considered a nice way to make some extra money, especially in a tourist town, as Dembut is, so there are a lot of people registered with the agencies. People in Ajhevan are not usually hung up about lesbians, though now and then you still get a feeling that they don’t know altogether what to make of us in the smaller towns, so I was apprehensive. Tira was a free spirit, though, and we had a nice dinner and went to the room and she gave me a massage and I returned the favor and then we wrapped round each other and got serious for a while. She had no problem with lesbians, clearly, and I felt worlds better when we were done. We talked about our brothers and I asked if she had seen hers since he made the change. She saw him often, she said to be near him, she had taken up her trade in Dembut — her trade being rune-reading for tourists in the market, the sex was a sideline. She liked the forest, she liked her brother, she liked the difference since he underwent the change, she had thought about becoming a sym herself. “Beats having to work for a living,” she said.