The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I straighten the burka, trying to find the position that lets me see the most through the lace-bordered veil. My muscles are alive with false memories, a combination of generic feminine movements and simulated Ezheler kinesthetics created from Consilium ethnologists' AV recordings.

  There are technologies, readily available, with which I could have rebuilt myself completely, from the chromosomes upward—making part of my disguise impenetrable, no longer deception but the truth. (Undoubtedly there are women on Hippolyta today whose ancestors, in the first days of the Fever, did just that.) I could preserve not only my disguise, but my life.

  But in doing so, I would prove nothing. If it were enough to test my hypotheses with equations and proofs, I could have done it from the safety of my rooms in Petersburg. I must test them with myself.

  Besides, as my old ballet master used to say, for a swan there is no art in being a swan.

  It helps that my audience will not expect me to be anything else.

  * * *

  Four hours later Lieutenant Addison is belting me into the capsule that will take me to Hippolyta. The capsule is made for inserting Marine commandos behind enemy lines, or something similarly exciting and dangerous. It seems to me that for landing on Hippolyta, the capsule is overkill—especially since it will have to be abandoned, and perhaps destroyed. But Addison is feeling guilty that he can't take me exactly where I want to go, and his people have seemed to enjoy themselves so much—programming the capsule's camouflage, plotting a course to minimize the chance that someone will see me entering the atmosphere—that I haven't the heart to object.

  There is supposed to be room in the capsule for a half-dozen armored Marines and their equipment, but except for the medical equipment, my gear isn't built to Republic specifications. After it has all been packed in around me, Addison, to shake my hand, has to lean awkwardly over a plastic-wrapped bale that might hold rice or dried apricots or coca leaves.

  He looks around the cramped capsule one more time, the trade goods, the medical pods, the two mules in their cocoons, the half-felt presence of the quantum inference engines. Then he looks down at me.

  "Well," he says, with a helpless shrug, "good luck, then."

  Then he leans back, and the hatch closes, and the capsule swings out on its track, and at last they let me go.

  * * *

  The capsule is three days and fifty kilometers behind me, camouflaged and buried at the bottom of a dry creekbed, when I pick up the road to the coast. The coast road is older, harder than the narrow dirt track I have been following out of the dry hills: concrete laid down before the coming of the Fever and cracked now into broken slabs by a century of summers and winters. The grass of the shoulder is brown, tramped down into a footpath, and I guide the mules along that softer way, to spare their hooves and ankles. I can see the tracks of others before me, in the dirt.

  A simultaneity channel links the medical pods, buried with the capsule, to telemetry implants laced through my body, and tells me that so far I am healthy, sore muscles and saddle galls aside. This is Republic technology, simple and reliable, and the pods will probably survive me, whatever happens. The inference engines, more delicate and abstract, I carry with me. They were made in Damascus, and their existence is largely mathematical; it is not likely they will be noticed by anyone who does not know to look for them. For now they are quiet, their transformation of local phase space still undisturbed. I am a kink in the braid of improbability that makes Hippolyta what it is, a bubble of reality suspended in the medium of the unreal.

  Now that I am here, with this gritty earth under my feet, this warm wind that smells of sage and dry grass whistling by me, it is hard to have the same confidence I had when I planned this in my rooms back in Petersburg. It has taken all three days for me to stop obsessively checking the medical monitors and the inference engines, trying to find in their numbers and images the first symptoms of the Amazon Fever that will most likely kill me.

  By the time I crest the last of a range of low hills, though, and catch my first glimpse of the sea on the eastern horizon, the confidence I felt in Petersburg has returned. I am less worried about Amazon Fever than about being unmasked.

  I have been two days on the coast when I see my first Amazon.

  * * *

  The architecture of the caravanserai is an eclectic mix, imperishable prefabricated sections that predate the Fever joined to adobe and brick and cement, roofed with sheet metal and encircled by a waist-high fence of driftwood and wire. I am not the first traveler to stop here tonight. Two tethered mules and a horse, hobbled, graze in the shade of a stunted live-oak, tugging at the dry grass with a kind of resigned persistence. On the other side of the yard are a pair of open-topped trucks, scratched and dented, their cargo beds piled high with crates and bundles, the tarpaulin awnings over their passenger areas patched with many colors.

  A woman is perched on top of one of the trucks, wearing a sheepskin jacket and blue trousers with sandals. She looks to be about forty, Tieshanese, with a strong jaw, close-cropped black hair and narrow eyes under a blue-and-white striped headscarf.

  My first Amazon. I sketch a greeting, hand to heart, and get no response. She shifts slightly and I notice then that there is a long-barreled pistol on the tarpaulin next to her, inches from her hand. I turn away with a show of nonchalance, and lead my mules to where the others are tethered.

  * * *

  The inside of the caravanserai is dark, lit only by the hand-lanterns the travelers have brought; the yard smelled of the ocean, but here it smells of smoke and sweat and kerosene. There are about a dozen women and girls here, three of them Ezheler, the rest Tieshanese. Two of the Ezheler, a mother and daughter both named Amina, are traders like me, returning to their clans after visiting the market town of Haiming; the mules are theirs. The other, Maryam, the horsewoman, is a doctor traveling north in hopes of buying medicines.

  The Tieshanese truckers keep themselves to themselves, and a suspicious eye on us, and their children close. The Ezheler have been known to steal children.

  "We should steal something of theirs," Amina-the-daughter says. She is fifteen, this is her third trip to Haiming she's coming back from, and though her expression is invisible behind the veil I can guess at it. She knows the Tieshanese don't like her, and because of that she doesn't like them.

  Behind my own veil, I smile. Teenagers must be the same everywhere.

  I had hoped not to encounter any Ezheler on the road—hoped to ride into Haiming a stranger. I stay quiet, concentrating on the steps of my dance. But neither Maryam nor the Aminas ask me any questions, only share their coffee with me and give me some advice on the Haiming markets. Eventually I relax enough to ask a question.

  "Do you know a coca broker named Mei Yueyin?" I ask.

  Amina-the-mother and Maryam, the doctor, both nod.

  "For a city person she is quite honest," Maryam says.

  "She speaks Ezheler," volunteers Amina-the-daughter. "It's creepy."

  "You shouldn't speak ill of her while you're still eating the candy she gave you," her mother says mildly.

  For some reason I glance at Maryam, and I see that she is looking at me. I wish I could see her face.

  * * *

  Mei Yueyin works, or worked, for the Consilium Ethnological Service. She has been on Hippolyta for seventeen years, five of them among the Ezheler. Her last report, the one that mentioned she was working as a broker in Haiming, was nine years ago. I'm glad to hear she's still alive and still there; even with her ties to the Consilium cut, she's the only contact I have.

  Young Amina gives me some of Mei Yueyin's candy. It's rice candy, the kind that comes wrapped in edible paper. While I go to check on the animals I chew it, thoughtfully.

  I give the animals—Maryam's horse and my mules and the Aminas'—some water and some dried apricots. They pick the apricots daintily from my fingers with their mobile lips and great chomping teeth, and I'm glad to see my fingers are steady.

/>   The medical monitors have my temperature a shade over thirty-seven; my immune system shows no sign yet of turning against itself. We are no closer here to the center of the Fever, that blank spot on Addison's maps, than where I landed, but the border between consensus reality and Hippolyta's causal anomaly (what Lieutenant Addison—inaccurately—called the "probability boundary") is fluid, fractal, and it has timelike components. So far, though, the inference engines are quiet. So far my predictions are validated.

  This far out, I expect, my machines could keep me alive indefinitely—long enough, at any rate, to die of something other than Amazon Fever. I pat the shoulder of Maryam's mare and toy, briefly, with the idea of staying here.

  I know I won't, though.

  The Tieshanese guard I saw earlier, the one I fancifully called my first Amazon, is gone. Her replacements are a pair of older women who squat in the dust, playing dice by the light of a fluorescent lamp. One of them smiles at me, but it is like the careless smile of a statue. They look as though they could squat there forever.

  * * *

  The next morning the doctor, Maryam, indicates in a roundabout way that, as we are both bound for Haiming, I would be welcome to travel with her. I don't know why this startles me, but it does, and before I really know what I am doing I have accepted.

  After the morning prayer we make breakfast together—griddle cakes and rice porridge, with dried fruit and coca tea from my trade bales—and share it with the Aminas, before seeing them on their way south. As we ourselves are leaving, the sun is coming up over the hills, and the Tieshanese travelers are starting to rise. Two of the women have daughters who are very young, not more than four or five, and I see Maryam looking at them—wistfully, I think, though it is not easy to tell through the veil.

  * * *

  "I was just a child when I had my daughter," Maryam tells me. We are three days from the caravanserai, riding side by side along a road now lined with twisting pines, and Haiming is only two days away, a petrochemical smudge on the northeastern horizon. "Fourteen. A child." She glances at me. "I was a mission girl, you see. When we graduated they took twenty of us up the river, to Themiscyra, in Erethea." She looks out into the distance, beyond Haiming's haze, as if trying to see into the past. "I don't have the words to describe the north, Yazmina." She shakes her head in frustration. "I left the words there. . . when I came down the river again.

  "But it was very beautiful. I remember that."

  She glances back at me.

  "Even that far north the odds of a spontaneous conception are very low—perhaps one in a hundred, if that." She gives a small laugh. "I was lucky, I suppose, or unlucky." She turns in the saddle to face me directly. "How old are you, Yazmina?"

  "Twenty-one." It's a lie, by seven years, but a twenty-eight-year-old Ezheler could never be as ignorant as I am.

  Maryam turns back to the road. "My Rabiah would be twenty-two this year."

  Making Maryam thirty-six. I look at her, what I can see of her through the burka, the straight back and thin shoulders, the small weathered hands with their long surgeon's fingers loose on the reins. The lie about my age feels like less of one, all of a sudden. There's a wide gap between my life and the life this woman has lived, and eight years aren't enough to measure it.

  "What happened?" I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  "It doesn't matter."

  We ride quietly for a little while, the silence broken only by the distant surf and the slow, plodding hooves.

  Quietly, without turning—almost as if she is alone—Maryam says:

  "I hope you will be happy here."

  She says it in Arabic, not Ezheler. Her Arabic is classical and very pure, the accent of a judge or a hadith scholar.

  Then she spurs her horse ahead, ten, twenty meters. It is several kilometers before she lets me catch up to her again.

  * * *

  The old road is broken only once, where the sea-cliffs suddenly give way to a narrow gash of an inlet, perhaps a kilometer across. To the east the valley extends indefinitely, its path improbably, mechanically straight.

  There is nothing like this on my pre-Fever maps. Closer, though, and inland, where the water is shallower, the reason becomes clear. A hump of charcoal-colored material runs straight down the center of the valley, rising from the sand and water like the back of some submerged serpent.

  "A ladder to heaven," Maryam says, looking out into the valley. "That's what it was, once." In her voice there is some emotion that I can't identify.

  She turns to me, obviously sensing my mystification even through the veil.

  "A space elevator," she says dryly, using the modern, bazaar-Arabic words.

  Now I understand. I nod, and look down at the gray ribbon. A piece of skyhook cable, some fragment of the forty thousand kilometers of cable that once connected Hippolyta to the stars—cut when Hippolyta's equatorial ring station was destroyed to enforce the quarantine.

  If I am successful here, people will have to come to terms with the painful knowledge that many millions might have been saved—if outside powers like the Consilium and the Erewhon Republic had, instead of that quarantine, devoted themselves to evacuation. But I can't help that.

  We have to detour many kilometers inland before the water becomes shallow enough to ford.

  * * *

  The old city of Haiming is a long green island, topped with white and blue, set in the middle of a wide brown river. The Otrera flows north to south for two thousand kilometers, before taking a left turn, just south of here, and emptying itself into Hippolyta's eastern ocean. On the east side of the river, in Tieshan proper, the shore is lined with ironworks and concrete, and the horizon is smudged with smoke.

  Here on the west side, the market side, the buildings are low and brown and poor—all of them seemingly either made of clay, and very old, or made of wood, and very flimsy. The effect should be depressing, but the rooftops are lined with flapping colored banners, the air smells of earth and river water and spices, and the streets are filled with people, shouting and laughing and dickering in Ezheler and Arabic and Chinese.

  I leave Maryam at the ferry terminal, where the north-bound boats stop before heading upriver.

  She lingers on the gangway. "This is probably my last chance, you know," she says.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm thirty-six," she says. "I don't have any other daughters, or granddaughters. That's why I'm going north."

  Into Erethea. Into the blank space on the map, the center of the causal anomaly. Where my goal has been all along.

  I don't know what to say, except:

  "I'm sure you'll be successful," I tell her, "God willing."

  "God willing," she echoes.

  "Perhaps I'll come north myself, some day soon," I say.

  She laughs, and, unexpectedly, puts her arms around me, pressing her veiled cheek against mine.

  "You're too young, little daughter," she tells me. "Live for yourself first."

  The boat's whistle blows, and she draws back. She takes a pen and a bit of paper from one of her bags and scribbles a name and an address. She hands it to me, and I read:

  Dr. Aysun Orbay, 23 Marpesia 4, Themiscyra.

  "My friend," she says. "In case you are too foolish to listen to me."

  Then the boat's whistle is blowing again, and she is gone, leading her horse up the gangway.

  * * *

  A Tieshanese mule trader named Zhou Xiling buys my animals at what would be a vicious discount, if I'd ever paid for them. Mules, their hybrid histories stripped from them, breed better on Hippolyta than they do anywhere else, or the Aminas would never have had their two beasts; but in Aella's southern highlands, far from the center of the anomaly, they breed no better than human beings do. In this relationship women like Zhou, who can import stock from farther north, have all the power.

  I lift the bales of coca onto my shoulders. I am not tall—Maryam, for instance, was taller than I am—but I am taller
than most of the women in East Haiming's streets. As I carry the bales to the coca market, the crowds give me a wide berth.

  * * *

  Mei Yueyin has hardly said twenty words since I identified myself to her in the coca market. She stalks a little ahead of me—walking quickly, as if she would like to leave me behind, or at least make her unwilling association with me less obvious.

  It's no use, though; I'm the only Ezheler on the bridge to Haimingdao, and I can't help but draw stares.

  The bridge is wide, and lined with ancient gingko trees; the sidewalk under our feet is strewn with their fallen leaves, golden green and soft as flower petals. Eddies from the passing motor traffic stir the humid air, and the swirling of the leaves is like some exotic danse de caractère.

  "What's that?" I ask, pointing ahead to the island, where at the southern end the blue and white of the city gives way to a broad green hill dotted with gray structures. At its crest the low evening sun winks off something gold.

  Yueyin glances in the direction I've indicated.

  "That's where they buried all the men," she says.

  She doesn't want me here.

  I don't know what gave me away. Something about my voice, my walk, something about the shape of my body, even merely hinted at through the folds of the burka. Perhaps nothing more than the fact that of all the women on Hippolyta, Mei Yueyin is the only one to have seen a man with her own eyes.

  I stop, suddenly.

  Yueyin continues a few steps, then stops and turns.

  "Listen," I say, in Arabic. "I'm not here to get you in trouble. I'm not here to threaten you. I'm certainly not here to drag you back, if that's what you're worried about. I just want a little information. And if you won't give it to me, I'll do without."