Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  I walked around the bomber, warily leaping past the snouts of machine-guns in its rim. With the Bren’s butt I banged the hatch. The thing rang like a bell, even louder than my tinitus.

  The hatch opened. I stood back and levelled the Bren. A big visored helmet emerged, then long arms levered up a torso, and then the hips and legs swung up and out. The pilot slid down the side of the bomber and stood in front of me, arms raised high. Very slowly, the hands went to the helmet and lifted it off.

  A cascade of blonde hair shook loose. The pilot was incredibly beautiful and she was about seven feet tall.

  We left the tank sabotaged, blocking the road about five miles to the west, and took off into the hills. Through the storm and the gathering dusk we struggled to a lonely safe house, miles from anywhere. Our prisoner was tireless and silent. Her flying-suit was dark green and black, to all appearances standard for an American pilot, right down to the badges. She carried her helmet and knotted her hair deftly at her nape. Her Colt .45 and Bowie knife she surrendered without protest.

  The safe house was a gamekeeper’s lodge, with a kitchen and a couple of rooms, the larger of which had a fireplace. Dry wood was stacked on the hearth. We started the fire and stripped off our wet clothes — all of our clothes — and hung them about the place, then one by one we retrieved dry clothes from the stash in the back room. The prisoner observed us without a blink, and removed her own flying-suit. Under it she was wearing a closer-fitting garment of what looked like woven aluminium, with tubes running under its surface. It covered a well-proportioned female body. Too well-proportioned, indeed, for the giant she was. She sprawled on the worn armchair by the fire and looked at us, still silent, and carefully untied her wet hair and let it fall down her back.

  Murdo, Andy, Neil, and Donald huddled in front of the fire. I stood behind them, holding the prisoner’s pistol.

  “Donald,” I said, “you take the first look-out. You’ll find oilskins in the back. Neil, make some tea, and give it to Donald first.”

  “Three sugars, if we have it,” said Donald, getting up and padding through to the other room. Neil disappeared into the kitchen. Sounds of him fiddling with and cursing the little gas stove followed. The prisoner smiled, for the first time. Her pale features were indeed beautiful but somewhat angular, almost masculine; her eyes were a distinct violet, and very large.

  “Talk,” I told her.

  “Jodelle Smith,” she said. “Flight-Lieutenant. Serial number…” She rattled it off.

  The voice was deep, for a woman, but soft, the American accent perfect. Donald gave her a baleful glare as he headed for the door and the storm outside it.

  “All right,” I said. “We are not signatories to the Geneva Convention. We do not regard you as a prisoner of war, but as a war criminal, an air pirate. You have one chance of being treated as a prisoner of war, with all the rights that go with that, and that is to answer all our questions. Otherwise, we will turn you over to the nearest revolutionary court. They’re pretty biblical around here. They’ll probably stone you to death.”

  I don’t know how the lads kept a straight face through all that. Perhaps it was the anger and grief over the loss of our friends and comrades, the same feeling that came out in my own voice. I could indeed have wished her dead, but otherwise I was bluffing — there were no revolutionary courts in the region, and anyway our policy with prisoners was to disarm them, attempt to interrogate them, and turn them loose as soon as it was safe to do so.

  The pilot sat silent for a moment, head cocked slightly to one side, then shrugged and smiled.

  “Other bomber pilots have been captured,” she said. “They’ve all been recovered unharmed.” She straightened up in the chair, and leaned forward. “If you’re not satisfied with the standard name, rank, and serial number, I’m happy to talk to you about anything other than military secrets. What would you like to know?”

  I glanced at the others. I had never shared my father’s story, or my own, with any of them, and I was glad of that now because the appearance of this pilot would have discredited it. Compared with what my father had described, she looked human. Compared with most people, she looked very strange.

  “Where do you really come from?” I asked.

  “Venus,” she said.

  The others all laughed. I didn’t.

  “What happened to the other kinds of pilots?” I asked. I held out one hand about a meter above the ground, as though patting a child’s head.

  “Oh, we took over for the Martians a long time ago,” she told us earnestly. “They’re still involved in the war, of course, but they’re not on the front line any more. The Americans found their appearance disconcerting, and concealing them became too much of a hassle.”

  I glared down the imminent interruptions from my men.

  “You’re saying there are two alien species fighting on the American side?”

  “Yes,” she said. She laughed suddenly. “Grays are from Mars, blondes are from Venus.”

  “Total fucking cac,” said Neil. “She’s a Yank. They’re always tall. Better food.”

  “Maybe she is,” I said, “but she is not the kind of pilot I was expecting. And I’ve seen one of the other kind. My father saw it up close.”

  The woman’s eyebrows went up.

  “The Aird incident? 1964?”

  I nodded.

  “Ah,” she said. “Your father must be…Dr. Malcolm Donald Matheson, and you are his son, John.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “I’ve read the reports.”

  “This is insane,” said Andy. “It’s some kind of trick, it’s a trap. We shouldnae say another word, or listen tae any.”

  “There’s eggs and bacon and tatties in the kitchen,” I said. “See if you can make yourself useful.”

  He glowered at me and stalked out.

  “But he’s right, you know,” I said, loud enough for Andy to overhear. “We are going to have to send you up a level or two, for interrogation, as soon as the storm passes. Will you still talk then?”

  She spread her hands. “On the same basis as I’ve spoken to you, yes. No military secrets.”

  “Aye, just disinformation,” said Murdo. “You’re not telling us that it wouldn’t be a military secret if the Yanks really were getting help from outer space? But making people believe it, now, that would be worth something. Christ, it’s enough of a job fighting the Americans. Who would fight the fucking Martians?”

  He leaned back and laughed harshly.

  The woman who called herself Jodelle gazed at him with narrowed, thoughtful eyes.

  “There is that argument,” she said. “There is the other argument, that if the Communists could claim the real enemy was not human they would unite even more people against the Allied side, and that the same knowledge would create all kinds of problems — political, religious, philosophical — for Allied morale. So far, the latter argument has prevailed.”

  My grip tightened on the pistol.

  “You are talking about psychological warfare,” I said. “And you are doing it, right here, now. Shut the fuck up.”

  She gave us a pert smile and shrug.

  “No more talking to her,” I said.

  My own curiosity was burning inside me, but I knew that to pursue the conversation — with the mood here as it was — really would be demoralizing and confusing. I got everybody busy guarding the prisoner, cleaning weapons, laying the table. Andy brought through plate laden with steaming, fragrant thick bacon and fried eggs and boiled potatoes. I relieved Donald on the outside watch before taking a bite myself, and prowled around in the howling wet dark with my M-16 under the oilskin cape and my belly grumbling. The window blinds were keeping the light in all right, and only the wind-whipped smoke from the chimney could betray our presence. I kept my closest attention to downwind, where someone might smell it. There was no chance of anyone seeing it.

  I was looking that way, peering and listening intently throug
h the dark to the east, when I felt a prickle in the back of my neck and smelled something electric.

  I turned with a sort of reluctance, as though expecting to see a ghost. What I saw was a bomber, haloed in blue, descending between me and the house. There might have been a fizzing sound, or that may be just a memory of the hissing rain. For a moment I stood as still as the bomber, which floated preternaturally above the ground. Then I raised the rifle. Something flashed out from the bomber, and I was knocked backwards and senseless.

  I woke to voices and pain. My skin smarted all over; my eyelids hurt to open. I was lying on my side on a slightly yielding smooth gray floor. The light was pearly and sourceless. Moving slightly, I found I had some bruises and what felt like scrapes on my back, but apart from that and the burning feeling everything seemed to be fine. My oilskins were gone, as were my weapons, and, curiously enough, my watch. I raised my head, propped myself on one elbow, and looked around. The room I lay in was circular, about fifteen meters across. My comrades were lying beside me, unconscious, looking sunburned, but breathing normally and apparently uninjured. There was a sort of bench or shelf around the room, which in one section looped away from the wall to form a seat, at which a tall person with long fair hair sat with their back to me, hands on a pair of knobbed levers. Other parts of the shelf were not padded seating but tables and odd panels. Above the bench was a black screen or window that likewise encircled the room.

  Sitting on the bench, on either side of the person I guessed was the pilot, were three similar people — one of them, just then noticing that I was stirring, being the woman we’d captured — and a small creature with a large head, slit mouth, tiny nostrils, and enormous black eyes. Its skin was gray, but somehow not an unhealthy gray — it had a glow to it, a visible warmth underneath; though hairless it reminded me of the skin of a seal. Its legs were short, its arms long, and its hands — I recalled my father’s words, and felt a slight thrill at their confirmation — bore four long digits.

  It too noticed me, and it looked directly at me and it didn’t blink, something flicked sideways across its eyes, like an eagle’s. The woman stood up and stepped over and stood looking down at me.

  “There’s no need to be afraid of the Martian,” she said.

  “I’m not afraid,” I said, then caught myself. “John Matheson, unit commander, MB 246.”

  She reached down, took my hand and hauled me to my feet, without effort. There was something wrong about my weight. I felt curiously light.

  “Your friends will wake up shortly,” she said. “OK, consider yourself a prisoner of war if you like, but there’s no need to not be civil. We have nothing to hide from you any more, and we really don’t have anything we want to find out from you.”

  I said nothing. She pointed to the bench.

  “Relax,” she said, “sit down, have a coffee.” Then she giggled, in a very disarming way. “‘For you, Johnny, the vor iss over.’”

  Her fake, Ealing-studio German accent was as perfect as her genuine-sounding American one. I couldn’t forbear to smile back, and walked over to the seat. On the way I stumbled a little. It was like the top step that isn’t there.

  “Martian gravity,” Jodelle said, steadying me. The Martian bowed his big head slightly, as though in apology. I sat down beside one of the other people, the “Venusians” as I perforce mentally labelled them. All except Jodelle were evidently male, though their hair was as long and fair as hers. One of them passed me a mug of coffee; out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a coffee pot and electric kettle on one of the table sections, and some mugs and, banally enough, a kilogram packet of Tate & Lyle sugar.

  “My name is Soren,” the man said. He waved towards the others. “The pilot is Olaf, and the man next to him is Harold.”

  “And my name is Chuck,” said the Martian. His small shoulders shrugged. “That’s what I’m called around here, anyway.” His voice was like that of a tough wee boy, his accent American, but he sounded like he was speaking a learned second language.

  I nodded at them all and said nothing, gratefully sipping the coffee. Outside, the view was completely black, though the movements of the pilot’s eyes, head, and hands appeared to be responding to some visible exterior environment.

  One by one, Neil, Donald, Murdo, and Andy came round, and went through the same process of disorientation, astonishment, reassurance, and suspicion as I had. We ended up sitting together, not speaking to each other or to our captors, perhaps silently mourning the loss of our comrades and friends in the other tank. The bomber’s crew talked amongst themselves in a language I did not recognize and attended to instruments. None of us were in anything but a hostile mood, and if the aliens had been less unknown in their intentions and capabilities we might have regarded their evident unconcern as an opportunity to try to overwhelm them, rather than — as we tacitly acknowledged — evidence that they had no reason to fear us.

  After about half an hour, they relaxed, and all sat down on the long seat.

  “Almost there,” Jodelle Smith said.

  Before any of us could respond, one side of the encircling window filled with the glare of the sun, instantly dimmed by some property of the display; the other with the light of that same sun reflected on white clouds, of which I glimpsed a dazzling, visibly curved expanse a second before we plunged into them. Moments later we were underneath them, and a green surface spread below us. Looking up, I could see the silvery underside of the clouds. Our rapid descent soon brought the green surface into focus as an apparently endless forest, broken by lakes and rivers, and by plateaus or gentler rises covered with grass. After a few seconds we were low enough for the shadow of the bomber to be visible, skimming across the treetops. The circle of shade enlarged and then disappeared. I blinked and saw that we were now stationary above a broad valley bounded by high sandstone cliffs and divided by a wide, meandering river.

  Then, with a yawing motion that we could see but not feel — so it seemed that the landscape swayed and not the ship — we descended and settled on a grassy plain. Around us, in the middle distance, were rows of Nissen huts; in the farther distance, watchtowers and barbed wire.

  “Welcome to Venus,” said the pilot.

  The camp held about a thousand people, from all over the world. Most of them were Front soldiers or cadre. There were as many women as there were men, and there were some children. The Front basically ran the camp, through committees of the various national sections, and an international committee for which the main qualification seemed to be fluency in Russian. The only rule that the Venusians enforced was a curfew and blackout between sunset and sunrise. They didn’t bother about which hut you spent the night in, so long as you were in a hut.

  They gave us no work to do, and watched unconcerned as we practiced drill and unarmed combat, sweltering in the heat and humidity. Food and drink were adequate and, in, fact more varied and nutritious than the fare to which most of the inmates, including myself, had become accustomed. This is not to say that our confinement was pleasant. The continuous cloud cover felt like a great shining lid pressing down on us, day after day. Every day it seemed to, or perhaps actually did, descend a little lower. The nightly lock-downs were hellish, even though the huts did in fact cool down somewhat. The wire around the camp was almost equally suffocating, one we’d realized wasn’t so much there to keep us in as to keep the dinosaurs out. The same was true of the guards” strange weapons, which could — if turned to a much higher setting than was ever used against prisoners — fire bolts of electricity or plasma sufficient to turn back even the biggest of the great blundering beasts which flocked to the river every couple of days, their feet making the plain shake. We called them dinosaurs, because they resembled the reconstructions of dinosaurs which most of us had seen in books, but I knew from my scientific education that they could not be dinosaurs — they were too vigorous, too obviously hot-blooded, to be the sluggish reptilian giants of the Triassic and Jurassic eras. Whatever they may have been,
their presence certainly discouraged attempts to escape.

  The British contingent was in two Nissen huts: twenty men in one, twenty women in the other. They had a committee of three men, three women, and a chairman, and they spent a lot of time trying to regulate sexual relations. It was all very British and messy, uncomfortably between the strict puritanism of the Chinese comrades and the easy-going, if occasionally violent, mores of the Latin Americans and Africans. My unit decided to ignore all that and do what we considered the proper British thing.

  We set up an escape committee.

  “What the hell are you doing, Matheson?”

  I waved my free hand. “Just a minute —”

  It didn’t interrupt my counting. When I’d finished, I put the one-meter line and the two-hundred-and-fifty-gram tin of peas on the table and glanced over my calculations before looking up at Purdie. The young Englishman was on our hut committee and the camp committee, but not the escape committee, which he regarded as a diversion in both senses of the word.

  “We’re not on Venus,” I said.

  He glanced over his shoulder, as if to confirm that we were still alone in the hut, then sat on a corner of the table.

  “How d’you figure that out?”

  “Pendulum swing,” I said. “Galileo’s experiment. The gravity here is exactly the same as on Earth. Venus has about eighty percent of the mass of Earth.”

  “H’mm,” he said. “Well done. Most people begin by wondering why nothing feels lighter and then put it down to our muscles adapting to the supposed lower gravity. Still, can’t say it’s a surprise, old chap. Some of us reckon they keep us in at night because if we went outside we could see the moon through the cloud cover, and even the least educated of us is aware that Venus doesn’t have a bloody moon.”

  “So where are we?” I waved a hand. “It seems a wee bit out of the way, if this is Earth.”

  He crooked one leg over the other and lit a cigarette.

  “Well, the camp committee has considered that. The usual explanation is that we’re in some unexplored region of a South American jungle, something like what’s-his-name’s The Lost World.”