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

by Gardner Dozois

  "Coincidence," Harris said when he mentioned it at supper.

  "Maybe so." Audubon cut meat from a goose drumstick. His stomach was behaving better these days —and the seas stayed mild. "But if it is a coincidence, don't you think it's a large one?"

  "World's a large place." Harris paused to take a sip of wine. "It has room in it for a large coincidence or three, don't you think?"

  "Maybe so," Audubon said again, "but when you look at the maps, it seems as if those matches ought to spring from reason, not happenstance."

  "Tell me how the ocean got in between them, then." Harris aimed a finger at him like a pistol barrel. "And if you say it was Noah's flood, I'll pick up that bottle of fine Bordeaux and clout you over the head with it."

  "I wasn't going to say anything of the sort," Audubon replied. "Noah's flood may have washed over these lands, but I can't see how it could have washed them apart while still leaving their coastlines so much like each other."

  "So it must be coincidence, then."

  "I don't believe it must be anything, mon vieux," Audubon said. "I believe we don't know what it is —or, I admit, if it's anything at all. Maybe they will one day, but not now. For now, it's a puzzlement. We need puzzlements, don't you think?"

  "For now, John, I need the gravy," Harris said. "Would you kindly pass it to me? Goes mighty well with the goose."

  It did, too. Audubon poured some over the moist, dark meat on his plate before handing his friend the gravy boat. Harris wanted to ignore puzzlements when he could. Not Audubon. They reminded him not only of how much he—and everyone else —didn't know yet, but also of how much he —in particular—might still find out.

  As much as I have time for, he thought, and took another bite of goose.

  Avalon rose on six hills. The city fathers kept scouting for a seventh so they could compare their town to Rome, but there wasn't another bump to be found for miles around. The west-facing Bay of Avalon gave the city that bore its name perhaps the finest harbor in Atlantis. A century and a half before, the bay was a pirates' roost. The buccaneers swept out to plunder the Hesperian Gulf for most of a lifetime, till a British and Dutch fleet drove them back to their nest and then smoked them out of it.

  City streets still remembered the swashbuckling past: Goldbeard Way7 Valjean Avenue, Cutpurse Charlie Lane. But two Atlantean steam frigates patrolled the harbor. Fishing boats, bigger merchantmen —some steamers, other sailing ships—and liners like the Maid of Orleans moved in and out. The pirates might be remembered, but they were gone.

  May it not be so with the honkers. Audubon thought as the Maid of Orleans tied up at a pier. Please, God, let it not be so. He crossed himself. He didn't know if the prayer would help, but it couldn't hurt, so he sent it up for whatever it might be worth.

  Harris pointed to a man coming up the pier. "Isn't that Gordon Coates?"

  "It certainly is." Audubon waved to the man who published his work in Atlantis. Coates, a short, round fellow with side whiskers even bushier than Audubon's, waved back. His suit was of shiny silk; a stovepipe hat sat at a jaunty angle on his head. Audubon cupped his hands in front of his mouth. "How are you, Gordon?"

  "Oh, tolerable. Maybe a bit better than tolerable," Coates replied. "So you're haring off into the wilderness again, are you?" He was a city man to the tips of his manicured fingers. The only time he went out to the countryside was to take in a horse race. He knew his ponies, too. When he bet, he won… more often than not, anyhow.

  He had a couple of servants waiting with carts to take charge of the travelers' baggage. He and Audubon and Harris clasped hands and clapped one another on the back when the gangplank went down and passengers could disembark. "Where are you putting us up?" asked Harris, who always thought about things like where he would be put up. Thanks to his thoughts about such things, Audubon had stayed in some places more comfortable than those where he might have if he made his own arrangements.

  "How does the Hesperian Queen sound?" Coates answered.

  "Like a pirate's kept woman," Audubon answered, and the publisher sent up gales of laughter. Audubon went on, "Is it near a livery stable or a horse market? I'll want to get my animals as soon as I can." Harris let out a sigh. Audubon pretended not to hear it.

  "Not too far, not too far," Coates said. Then he pointed up into the sky. "Look— an eagle! There's an omen for you, if you like."

  The large, white-headed bird sailed off toward the south. Audubon knew it was likely bound for the city dump, to scavenge there. White-headed eagles had thrived since men came to Atlantis. Seeing this one secretly disappointed Audubon. He wished it were a red-crested eagle, the Atlantean national bird. But the mighty raptors—by all accounts, the largest in the world —had fallen into a steep decline along with the honkers, which were their principal prey.

  "Well," he said, "the Hesperian Queen."

  The last time he was in Avalon, the hotel had had another name and another owner. It had come up in the world since. So had Avalon, which was visibly bigger and visibly richer than it had been ten years —or was it twelve now?—before.

  Harris noticed, too. Harris generally noticed things like that. "You do well for yourselves here," he told Gordon Coates over beefsteaks at supper.

  "Not too bad, not too bad," the publisher said. "I'm about to put out a book by a chap who thinks he's written the great Atlantean novel, and he lives right here in town. I hope he's right. You never can tell."

  "You don't believe it, though," Audubon said.

  "Well, no," Coates admitted. "Everybody always thinks he's written the great Atlantean novel —unless he comes from Terranova or England. Sometimes even then. Mr. Hawthorne has a better chance than some —a better chance than most, I daresay—but not that much better."

  "What's it called?" Harris asked.

  "The Crimson Brand" Coates said. "Not a bad title, if I say so myself—and I do, because it's mine. He wanted to name it The Shores of a Different Sea" He yawned, as if to say authors were hopeless with titles. Then, pointing at Audubon, he did say it: "I'd have called your books something else, too, if they weren't also coming out in England and Terranova. Birds and Critters, maybe. Who remembers what a quadruped is, let alone a viviparous one?"

  "They've done well enough with the name I gave them," Audubon said.

  "Well enough, sure, but they might've done better. I could've made you big" Coates was a man with an eye for the main chance. Making Audubon big — he lingered lovingly over the word—would have made him money.

  "I know why folks here don't know quadrupeds from a hole in the ground," Harris said. "Atlantis hardly had any before it got discovered. No snakes in Ireland, no… critters" —he grinned —"here, not then."

  "No viviparous quadrupeds." Audubon had drunk enough wine to make him most precise —but not too much to keep him from pronouncing viviparous. "A very great plenty of lizards and turtles and frogs and toads and salamanders —and snakes, of course, though snakes lack four legs of quadrupedality." He was proud of himself for that.

  "Sure enough, snakes haven't got a leg to stand on." Harris guffawed.

  "Well, we have critters enough now, by God," Coates said. "Everything from mice on up to elk. Some of 'em we wanted, some we got anyway. Try and keep rats and mice from coming aboard ship. Yeah, go ahead and try. Good luck—you'll need it."

  "How many indigenous Atlantean creatures are no more because of them?" Audubon said.

  "Beats me," Coates answered. "Little too late to worry about it now, anyway, don't you think?"

  "I hope not," Audubon said. "I hope it's not too late for them. I hope it's not too late for me." He took another sip of wine. "And I know the viviparous creature responsible for the greatest number of those sad demises here."

  "Rats?" Coates asked.

  "Weasels, I bet," Harris said.

  Audubon shook his head at each of them in turn. He pointed an index finger at his own chest. "Man," he said.

  He rode out of Avalon three days later. P
art of the time he spent buying horses and tackle for them; that, he didn't begrudge. The rest he spent with Gordon Coates, meeting with subscribers and potential subscribers for his books; that, he did. He was a better businessman than most of his fellow artists, and normally wouldn't have resented keeping customers happy and trolling for new ones. If nobody bought your art, you had a devil of a time making more of it. As a younger man, he'd worked at several other trades, hated them all, and done well at none. He knew how lucky he was to make a living doing what he loved, and how much work went into what others called luck.

  To his relief, he did escape without painting portraits. Even before he set out from New Orleans, he'd felt time's hot breath at his heels. He felt himself aging, getting weaker, getting feebler. In another few years, maybe even in another year or two, he would lack the strength and stamina for a journey into the wilds of central Atlantis. And even if he had it, he might not find any honkers left to paint.

  I may not find any now, he thought. That ate at him like vitriol. He kept seeing a hunter or a lumberjack with a shotgun…

  Setting out from Avalon, Audubon might almost have traveled through the French or English countryside. Oh, the farms here were larger than they were in Europe, with more meadow between them. This was newly settled land; it hadn't been cultivated for centuries, sometimes for millennia. But the crops —wheat, barley, maize, potatoes—were either European or were Terranovan imports long familiar in the Old World. The fruit trees came from Europe; the nuts, again, from Europe and Terranova. Only a few stands of redwoods and Atlantean pines declared that the Hesperian Gulf lay just a few miles to the west.

  It was the same with the animals. Dogs yapped outside of farmhouses Chickens scratched. Cats prowled, hoping for either mice —also immigrants —or unwary chicks. Ducks and geese —ordinary domestic geese—paddled in ponds. Pigs rooted and wallowed. In the fields, cattle and sheep and horses grazed.

  Most people probably wouldn't have noticed the ferns that sprouted here and there or the birds on the ground, in the trees, and on the wing. Some of those birds, like ravens, ranged all over the world. Others, such as the white-headed eagle Audubon had seen in Avalon, were common in both Atlantis and Terranova (on Atlantis' eastern coast, the white-tailed eagle sometimes visited from its more usual haunts in Europe and Iceland). Still others —no one knew how many—were unique to the great island.

  No one but a specialist knew or cared how Atlantean gray-faced swifts differed from the chimney swifts of Terranova or little swifts from Europe. Many Atlantean thrushes were plainly the same sorts of birds as their equivalents to the west and to the east. They belonged to different species, but their plumages and habits were similar to those of the rest. The same held true for island warblers, which flitted through the trees after insects like their counterparts on the far side of the Hesperian Gulf. Yes, there were many similarities. But…

  "I wonder how soon we'll start seeing oil thrushes," Audubon said.

  "Not this close to Avalon," Harris said. "Not with so many dogs and cats and pigs running around."

  "I suppose not," Audubon said. "They're trusting things, and they haven't much chance of getting away."

  Laughing, Harris mimed flapping his fingertips. Oil thrushes' wings were bigger than that, but not by much—they couldn't fly. The birds themselves were bigger than chickens. They used their long, pointed beaks to probe the ground for worms at depths ordinary thrushes, flying thrushes, couldn't hope to reach. When the hunting was good, they laid up fat against a rainy day.

  But they were all but helpless against men and the beasts men had brought to Atlantis. It wasn't just that they were good eating, or that their fat, rendered down made a fine lamp oil. The real trouble was, they didn't seem to know enough to run away when a dog or a fox came after them. They weren't used to being hunted by animals that lived on the ground; the only viviparous quadrupeds on Atlantis before men arrived were bats.

  "Even the bats here are peculiar," Audubon muttered.

  "Well, so they are, but why do you say so?" Harris asked.

  Audubon explained his train of thought. "Where else in the world do you have bats that spend more of their time scurrying around on the ground than flying?" he went on.

  He thought that was a rhetorical question, but Harris said, "Aren't there also some in New Zealand?"

  "Are there?" Audubon said in surprise. His friend nodded. The painter scratched at his side whiskers. "Well, well. Both lands far from any others, out in the middle of the sea…"

  "New Zealand had its own honkers, too, or something like them," Harris said. "What the devil were they called?"

  "Moas," Audubon said. "I do remember that. Didn't I show you the marvelous illustrations of their remains Professor Owen did recently? The draftsmanship is astonishing. Astonishing!" The way he kissed his bunched fingertips proved him a Frenchman at heart.

  Edward Harris gave him a sly smile. "Surely you could do better?"

  "I doubt it," Audubon said. "Each man to his own bent. Making a specimen look as if it were alive on the canvas—that I can do. My talent lies there, and I've spent almost forty years now learning the tricks and turns that go with it. Showing every detail of dead bone —I'm not in the least ashamed to yield the palm to the good professor there."

  "If only you were a little less modest, you'd be perfect," Harris said.

  "It could be," Audubon said complacently, and they rode on.

  The slow, deep drumming came from thirty feet up a dying pine. Harris pointed. "There he is, John! D'you see him?"

  "I'm not likely to miss him, not when he's the size of a raven," Audubon answered. Intent on grubs under the bark, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker went on drumming. It was a male, which meant its crest was also scarlet. A female's crest would have been black, with a forward curl the male's lacked. That also held true for its close relatives on the Terranovan mainland, the ivory-bill and the imperial woodpecker of Mexico.

  Audubon dismounted, loaded his shotgun, and approached the bird. He could get closer to the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker than he could have to one of its Terranovan cousins. Like the oil thrush, like so many other Atlantean birds, the woodpecker had trouble understanding that something walking along on the ground could endanger it. Ivory-bills and imperial woodpeckers were less naive.

  The woodpecker raised its head and called. The sound was high and shrill, like a false note on a clarinet. Audubon paused with the gun on his shoulder, waiting to see if another bird would answer. When none did, he squeezed the trigger. The shotgun boomed, belching fireworks-smelling smoke.

  With a startled squawk, the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker tumbled out of the pine. It thrashed on the ground for a couple of minutes, then lay still. "Nice shot," Harris said.

  "Merci," Audubon answered absently.

  He picked up the woodpecker. It was still warm in his hands, and still crawling with mites and bird lice. No one who didn't handle wild birds freshly dead thought of such things. He brushed his palm against his trouser leg to get rid of some of the vagrants. They didn't usually trouble people, who weren't to their taste, but every once in a while…

  A new thought struck him. He stared at the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker. "I wonder if the parasites on Atlantean birds are as different as the birds themselves, or if they share them with the birds of Terranova."

  "I don't know," Harris said. "Do you want to pop some into spirits and see?"

  After a moment, Audubon shook his head. "No, better to let someone who truly cares about such things take care of it. I'm after honkers, by God, not lice!"

  "Nice specimen you took there, though," his friend said. "Scarlet-cheeks are getting scarce, too."

  "Not so much forest for them to hunt in as there once was," Audubon said with a sigh. "Not so much of anything in Atlantis as there once was —except men and farms and sheeps." He knew that was wrong as soon as it came out of his mouth, but let it go. "If we don't show what it was, soon it will be no more, and then it will be too late
to show. Too late already for too much of it." Too late for me? he wondered. Please, let it not be so!

  "You going to sketch now?" Harris asked.

  "If you don't mind. Birds are much easier to pose before they start to stiffen."

  "Go ahead, go ahead." Harris slid down from his horse. "I'll smoke a pipe or two and wander around a bit with my shotgun. Maybe I'll bag something else you can paint, or maybe I'll shoot supper instead. Maybe both —who knows? If I remember right, these Atlantean ducks and geese eat as well as any other kind, except canvasbacks." He was convinced canvasback ducks, properly roasted and served with loaf sugar, were the finest fowl in the world. Audubon wasn't so sure he was wrong.

  As Harris ambled away, Audubon set the scarlet-cheeked woodpecker on the grass and walked over to one of the pack horses. He knew which sack held his artistic supplies: his posing board and his wires, his charcoal sticks and precious paper.

  He remembered how, as a boy, he'd despaired of ever portraying birds in realistic poses. A bird in the hand was all very well, but a dead bird looked like nothing but a dead bird. It drooped, it sagged, it cried its lifelessness to the eye.

  When he studied painting with David in France, he sometimes did figure drawings from a mannequin. His cheeks heated when he recalled the articulated bird model he'd tried to make from wood and cork and wire. After endless effort, he produced something that might have done duty for a spavined dodo. His friends laughed at it. How could he get angry at them when he wanted to laugh at it, too? He ended up kicking the horrible thing to pieces.

  If he hadn't thought of wires… He didn't know what he would have done then. Wires let him position his birds as if they were still alive. The first kingfisher he'd posed —he knew he was on to something even before he finished. As he set up the posing board now, a shadow of that old excitement glided through him again. Even the bird's eyes had seemed to take on life again once he posed it the way he wanted.

  As he worked with wires now to position the woodpecker as it had clung to the tree trunk, he wished he could summon more than a shadow of the old thrill. But he'd done the same sort of thing too many times. Routine fought against art. He wasn't discovering a miracle now. He was… working.