Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  And then he thought: Yes, that’s it! It’s like poachers and gamekeepers. It’s set a thief to catch a thief. I am in this work because I feel like a shifter myself — a shifter or a refugee. That’s why I chose to patrol the border. So I could look over at the other side.

  He became suddenly very aware of the two “seeds” that the police had handed over, now in his briefcase right in front of him.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” he said aloud, shaking himself.

  There was a knock at the door. It was a police officer from the custody suite.

  “Sorry to disturb you Mr Davis. I’ve been asked to let you know. That Wayne Furnish has disappeared. Vanished from a locked cell. Could you spare a moment to come down and talk to the officers on duty?”

  Back in the police wing the duty sergeant and another officer were waiting. They showed Huw the empty cell and watched him while he went in. The smell in there was unmistakable: a burnt, electrical, ozone tang.

  “Yes, he’s done a shift all right,” Huw said. “Don’t worry. There was absolutely nothing you or anyone could have done.”

  He looked at the stunned faces of the sergeant and the two young officers. “A bit disturbing for you, yes?”

  “Nothing like this has ever happened to any of us,” said the sergeant. “We’re a bit spooked by it, to be honest with you.”

  Huw turned back into the room and sniffed the hot, burnt smell.

  “It is uncomfortable, I know. One of them disappeared right in front of me once. Just a kind of popping sound as the air rushed into the vacuum where he had been. Then nothing. There’s something violent about it, isn’t there? Something violent and shocking.”

  “Violent I can cope with,” the sergeant said, “shocking I can cope with. But this…”

  Huw nodded. “Listen. There’s one thing I should warn you about. We don’t really know how the seeds work, but it’s something more like a force field than a drug. You can get some side-effects if you’ve been near a shifter, especially if you’ve been near him when he crosses over: strange dreams, vivid images, unfamiliar impulses…”

  The three policemen waited expectantly. They wanted something more from him. They wanted him to take the nightmare away. He was the expert. It was his job. Again he felt angry, though he would have found it difficult to say exactly why. But he managed a reassuring tone.

  “Don’t worry. These things do pass. But you may not sleep very well tonight.”

  Huw interviewed all the staff and residents at the Assessment Unit as well as two young men picked up by the police at the same time as Wayne Furnish. When he got back to his flat at just before 10 pm, he phoned his supervisor, Roger to report back.

  “No leads to other shifters at all, I’m afraid. It’s possible that Wayne really was the only one here. Anyway you’ll have my written report in the morning.”

  Roger told him that it had been a busy day for the whole section. A group of three shifters had been picked up in a Shropshire public school, and as many as eight missing persons were now thought to be linked to their arrival.

  “That’s why I couldn’t give you any back-up. It’s getting silly. Whitehall’s going to have to get its head out of the sand and give us some real support with this or we may as well throw in the towel.”

  “The police took two seeds off this Furnish man. I should have brought them back to the office for safekeeping, but I didn’t get round to it. Sorry. They’re locked in my briefcase. I’ll bring them in first thing.”

  “That’s fine. And there you are…Look, Huw, we’ve achieved something. That’s two less new shifters!”

  Huw said nothing.

  “Huw? Are you still there?”

  “Yes, sorry. Attention wandered. Tired I suppose. Two less shifters, you said? I don’t quite…”

  “A good day’s work, Huw. Now forget all about it and get some sleep.”

  Roger had only recently transferred from general immigration work at Heath-row, and was not personally familiar with the effects of dealing with shifters. Otherwise he might have realized that wishing Huw a good night’s sleep was a little unkind.

  Huw put down the phone. He felt vertiginous and slightly nauseous. It was the same each time. It didn’t diminish with experience.

  He made himself heat a small meal in the microwave. Then he poured himself a drink and sat down to draft the report of the day’s investigations.

  It was after one in the morning when he finished work — and then the sudden absence of a task left him feeling disturbingly empty, as if busy-ness had been a kind of screen. He remembered the insight that had come to him as he looked at the picture of Tamsin Pendant.

  “I am a shifter too,” he thought, “or worse than that: I am the shifter equivalent of a voyeur. I like to watch. At least Tamsin and Wayne have the guts to really do it.”

  And again he felt that alarmingly powerful urge to take the seeds from his briefcase and swallow one himself. It would be like suicide, as a shifter had once said to him, “like suicide but without the drawbacks.”

  “Come on,” he tried to tell himself. “Don’t be silly. This is just…”

  But he was too tired. He exhausted himself daily trying to defend a frontier which lay wide open all around him and which nobody else seemed to really see. It was too much to keep on fighting now when it had opened up inside his own head.

  “I will go to bed and wait until morning,” he said out loud. “And if I feel the same way then I will do it.”

  He was amazed to hear what had emerged from his own mouth.

  All night his mind divided in the darkness, fecund as Igga, like bacteria multiplying in a Petri dish.

  He walked along dim corridors with many doors; he climbed enormous flights of stairs with missing steps and broken banisters. He teetered on the top of a precarious pinnacle above an ocean that seethed with fish and whales. He glimpsed Wayne Furnish on a headland in the distance brandishing Dunner’s hammer. He saw Janet Rogers and all her management team round a table in the middle of the sea. Many times he felt himself falling. Once Jazamine appeared and whispered to him, so clearly that he was jolted awake by the shock.

  “I could love you,” she whispered.

  Another time she held out a seed to him.

  Towards dawn, with extraordinary clarity, he had a vision of Tamsin Pendant, alone in one of the neat, grassy spaces of Perry Meadows. She was standing still but the houses were dancing around her, appearing and disappearing again, changing in shape and size as the worlds passed her by. Once a block of flats six storeys high appeared right in front of Tamsin’s face. A few seconds later a lorry honked and swerved as she appeared, fleetingly, in the middle of a road. Tamsin was green with nausea.

  A mean little shopping precinct appeared around her. Startled faces turned in her direction, then vanished. For just a moment she was standing in the pouring rain. There was another shopping precinct, then another. Some sort of grey civic sculpture began to skip and jump around her, changing shape from a man to a bird to a cube of welded girders…Then it vanished. The buildings vanished too. The dance had reached an end.

  It was a sunny day. She was in a wide meadow full of buttercups. A lark sang high above her. A mild breeze blew in her face. Tamsin dropped to her knees and was violently sick.

  In the distance was a wire perimeter fence with cranes and bulldozers parked alongside it. It was the same in every direction. The wide meadow was a building site. They were about to build a new estate.

  As Huw’s alarm bleeped the universe split into three.

  In one universe he jumped out of bed and swallowed the seeds in his brief case, following Tamsin Pendant before he had time to consider the warning in his dream.

  In another he renounced not only the shifter pills, but also Jazamine Bright. “I will phone her from the office today and cancel the drink,” he decided, fore-swearing love and friendship for his lonely and thankless calling.

  And in a third universe, he made a different choic
e again.

  “No. No seeds,” he told his reflection in the shaving mirror “But I will see Jazamine. Boundaries are important, but they’re not the only important thing.”

  He smiled. He had a pleasant smile, when he took off his marcher’s helmet and laid down his marcher’s shield.

  * * *

  The Human Front

  KEN MACLEOD

  Ken MacLeod graduated with a B.S. in Zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research in bio-mechanics at Brunel University, he worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh. He’s now a fulltime writer and widely considered to be one of the most exciting new SF writers to emerge in the ’90s. His first two novels, The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, each won the Prometheus Award and were followed by three more novels, The Sky Road. The Cassini Division, and Cosmonaut Keep. His most recent book is the novel, Dark Light. He lives in West Lothian, Scotland, with his wife and children.

  Here’s a rich, compelling, and compassionate study of a boy growing to manhood in a troubled world where the details of life are just a little bit off from things as we know them — and nothing whatsoever is as it appears to be.

  Like most people of my generation, I remember exactly where I was on March 17, 1963, the day Stalin died. I was in the waiting room of my father’s surgery, taking advantage of the absence of waiting patients to explore the nicotine-yellowed stacks of Reader’s Digests and National Geographics, and to play in a desultory fashion with the gnawed plastic soldiers, broken tin tanks, legless dolls, and so forth that formed a disconsolate heap, like an atrocity diorama, in one corner. My father must have been likewise taking advantage of a slack hour towards the end of the day to listen to the wireless. He opened the door so forcefully that I looked up, guiltily, though on this particular occasion I had nothing to feel guilty about. His expression alarmed me further, until I realized that the mixed feelings that struggled for control of his features were not directed at me.

  Except one. It was with, I now think, a full awareness of the historic significance of the moment, as well as a certain sense of loss, that he told me the news. His voice cracked slightly, in a way I had not heard before.

  “The Americans,” he said, “have just announced that Stalin has been shot.”

  “Up against a wall?” I asked, eagerly.

  My father frowned at my levity and lit a cigarette.

  “No,” he said. “Some American soldiers surrounded his headquarters in the Caucasus mountains. After the partisans were almost wiped out they surrendered, but then Stalin made a run for it, and the American soldiers shot him in the back.”

  I almost giggled. Things like this happened in history books and adventure stories, not in real life.

  “Does that mean the war is over?” I asked.

  “That’s a good question, John.” He looked at me with a sort of speculative respect. “The Communists will be disheartened by Stalin’s death, but they’ll go on fighting, I’m afraid.”

  At that moment there was a knock on the waiting-room door, and my father shooed me out while welcoming his patient in. The afternoon was clear and cold. I mucked about at the back of the house and then climbed up the hill behind it, sat on a boulder, and watched the sky. A pair of eagles circled their gerie on the higher hill opposite, but I didn’t let that distract me. After a while my patience was rewarded by the thrilling sight of a V-formation of American bombers high above, flying east. Their circular shapes glinted silver when the sunlight caught them and shadowed black against the blue.

  The newspapers always arrived in Lewis the day after they were printed, so two days passed before the big black headline of the Daily Express blared STALIN SHOT, and I could read, without fully comprehending, the rejoicing of Beaverbrook, the grave commentary of Cameron, the reminiscent remarks of Churchill, and frown over Burchett’s curiously disheartening reports from the front, and smile over the savage raillery of Cummings’s cartoon of Stalin in hell, shaking hands with Satan while hiding a knife behind his back.

  Obituaries traced his life: from the Tiflis seminary, through the railway yards and oilfields of Baku, the bandit years as Koba, the October Revolution and the Five-Year plans, the Purges and the Second World War, his chance absence from the Kremlin during the atomic bombing of Moscow in Operation Dropshot, and his return in old age to the ways and vigor of his youth as a guerrilla leader, rallying Russia’s remaining Reds to the protracted war against the Petrograd government to the contested, gruesome details of his death and the final, bloody touch, the fingerprint identification of his hacked-off hands.

  By then I had already had a small aftershock of the revolutionary’s death myself, at school on the eighteenth. Hugh Macdonald, a pugnacious boy of nine or so but still in my class, came up to me in the playground and said: “I bet you’re pleased, mac a dochter.”

  “Pleased about what?”

  “About the Yanks killing Stalin, you cac.”

  “And why should I not be? He was just a murderer.”

  “He killed Germans.”

  Hugh looked at me to see if this produced the expected change of mind, and when it didn’t he thumped me. I kicked his shin and he ran off bawling, and I got the belt for fighting.

  That evening I played about with the dial of my father’s wireless and heard through a howl of atmospherics a man with a posh Sassenach accent reading out eulogies on what the Reds still called Radio Moscow.

  The genius and will of Stalin, great architect of the rising world of free humanity, will live forever.

  I had no idea what it meant, or how anyone even remotely sane could possibly say it, but it remained in my mind, part of the same puzzle as that unexpected punch.

  My father, Dr. Malcolm Donald Matheson, was a native of the bleak long island. His parents were crofters who had worked hard and scraped by to support him in his medical studies at Glasgow in the 1930s. He had only just graduated when the Second World War broke out. He volunteered for combat duty and was immediately assigned to the Royal Army Medical Corps. Of his war service, mainly in the Far East, he said very little in my hearing. It may have been some wish to pay back something to the community that had supported him, which led him to take up his far from lucrative practice in the western parish of Uig, but of sentiment towards that community he had none. He insisted on being addressed by the English form of his name, instead of as “Calum” and I and my siblings were likewise identified: John, James, Margaret, Mary, Alexander — any careless references to Iain, Hamish, Mairead, Mairi or Alasdair met a frown or a mild rebuke. Though a fluent native speaker of Gaelic, he spoke the language only when no other communication was possible — there were, in those days, a number of elderly monoglots, and a much larger number of people who never used the English language for any purpose other than the telling of deliberate lies. There are two explanations, one fanciful and the other realistic, for the latter phenomenon. The fanciful one is that they believed that the Gaelic was the language of heaven (was the Bible not written in it?) and that the Almighty did not hear or did not understand the English, or, at the very least, that a lie not told in Gaelic didn’t count. The realistic one is that English was the language of the state, and lying in its hearing was indeed legitimate, since the Gaels had heard so many lies from it, all in English.

  My mother, Morag, was a Glaswegian of Highland extraction, who had met and married my father after the end of the Second World War and before the beginning of the Third. She, somewhat contrarily, taught herself the Gaelic and used it in all her dealings with the locals, though they always thought her dialect and her accent stuck-up and affected. The thought of her speaking a pure and correct Gaelic in a Glasgow accent is amusing; her neighbors’ attitude towards her well-meant efforts less so, being an example of the characteristic Highland inferiority complex so often mistaken for class or national consciousness. The Lewis accent itself is one of the ugliest under heaven, a perpetual weary resentful whine — the Scottish equivalent of Cockney — and the dialect thickly
corrupted with English words Gaelicised by the simple expedient of mispronouncing them in the aforementioned accent.

  Before marriage she had been a laboratory assistant. After marriage she worked as my father’s secretary, possibly for tax reasons, while raising me and my equally demanding brothers and sisters. Like my father, she was a smoker, a whisky-drinker, and an atheist. All of these were, at that time and place, considered quite inappropriate for a woman, but only the first was publicly known. Our non-attendance at any of the three doctrinally indistinguishable but mutually irreconcilable churches the parish supported was explained by the rumor — perhaps arising from my father’s humanitarian contribution to the war effort — that the dochter was a Quaker. It was a notion he did nothing to encourage or to dispel. The locals wouldn’t have recognised a Quaker if they’d found one in their porridge.

  Because of my father’s military service and medical connections, he had stroll-in access at the nearby NATO base. This sprawling complex of low, flat-roofed buildings, Nissen huts, and radar arrays disfigured the otherwise sublime headland after which the neighboring village, Aird, was named. My father occasionally dropped in for cheap goods — big round tins of cigarettes, packs of American nylons for my mother, stacks of chewing-gum for the children, and endless tins of corned beef — at the NAAFI store.

  It was thus that I experienced the event which became the second politically significant memory of my childhood, and the only time when my father expressed a doubt about the Western cause. He was, I should explain, a dyed-in-the-wool-conservative and unionist, hostile even to the watery socialism of the Labor Party, but he would have died sooner than vote for the Conservative and Unionist Party. “The Tories took our land,” he once spat, by way of explanation, before slamming the door in the face of a rare, hopeless canvasser. He showed less emotion at Churchill’s death than he did at Stalin’s. So, like most of our neighbors, he was a Liberal. The Liberals had, in their wishy-washy Liberal way, decried the Clearances, and the Highlanders have loyally returned them to Parliament ever since.