The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  Max returned to his bench—he thought of it as his bench now, every man had marked out his two square feet of bus—and grunted as he sat. His whole body ached, needing exercise, a chance to stretch. Normally, he’d walk, if only to pace the aisle of the bus, but the aisle was filled too. A few men had stretched across the bench backs, feet on one seat, hands on another, to do push-ups, and others did chin-ups on the hanging straps. Max would do that soon, if he had to, to keep his strength. Of course, that was a hard choice too: spend his energy, not knowing when he’d eat or drink next, or save it in reserve.

  Vasily plopped down, hair plastered to his head. He was scraping drops of water off his face, pushing them into his mouth. “I wouldn’t treat animals this way,” he told Max.

  “That’s rather the point,” Max said, imitating him, feeling the scratch of his unshaven skin under the droplets.

  “Your face is cut up pretty bad.”

  “Is it?” He tasted the sharpness of blood on his fingertips, saw the bright red. “Must have been some glass shards in the window, got blown out by the blast of water.”

  “When will we stop?”

  “We’ve been on the road maybe twelve, fourteen hours. I forget where all the camps are now, but we’re not even halfway there.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Vasily said.

  In the old days, during the schism, the men sent off to the reclamation camps for their religious beliefs—or disbeliefs—would pray to God. Max prayed to Drozhin. During the purge, Intelligence would be desperate for information. Obermeyer would check the dropboxes, realize Max was out there, and start looking for him. Survive long enough to give them time to find him: that was Max’s sole faith.

  “I can’t believe they’re sending me to the reclamation camps,” Vasily said. “I didn’t do anything to deserve being treated like a murderer or a rapist.”

  “So don’t let them turn you into one,” Max said. “Besides, the worst crime is still having the wrong beliefs.”

  “But I did everything I was supposed to do, I enlisted in the government after my mandatory service, I—”

  “Get over it. Keep your head low, do what you need to do to survive.”

  “Do what I have to do to survive,” Vasily said, letting out a deep breath. He seemed like a decent guy, Max thought, not used to thinking, but thinking hard now. “Why did we have a revolution?” he asked. “I thought it was supposed to put a stop to this.”

  Max remembered those days. The church schismed, and different groups insisted that they had the only true beliefs. With life depending on limited resources, each side wanted everything for the true believers. Even after the terra forming increased their yields, the two sides had been willing to kill each other to prove who had the direct word from God. “The revolution bought us twenty years.”

  “What?”

  “It’s been twenty years since we had this kind of purge,” Max said. Sure, there were individual murders here and there, usually arranged to look like accidents or poor health. But that was politics as usual anywhere. “We bought twenty years of peace where we hadn’t had it more than three years in a row for two generations. You grew up in peace, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “The revolution bought you that. So it was worth it. And if this purge buys us another twenty years, maybe it’ll be worth it too.”

  Vasily shook his head. “I don’t know if I can think that way. I don’t know if I can ever think that way.”

  “Maybe you won’t have to,” Max said, but doubtfully.

  The bus continued all day, stopping only to relieve the drivers and escorts. Sometime that night, while they shivered to keep warm, one of the sick men died. The man next to him must’ve noticed he was cold, called his name, saying, “Pete, Piotr, aw, man, Pete, wake up, man, aw, I can’t believe this, aw, Pete, aw, man.”

  The body had a noticeable reek, even above the stench of piss and shit and sweat that permeated the bus. By the time the sun came up again, all the men were collapsed in a mixture of exhaustion and depression. There were no more push-ups or chin-ups. The wind blew sand in through the broken windows, turning everyone a dusty brown. Max had grit in his eyes, his hair, in every wrinkle in his clothes and body.

  With the hot sun baking down through the windows as they drove north toward the equator, Max leaned against the wall, listless, conserving his energy. An impromptu morgue was formed under the seats at the front of the bus, the corpse shrouded with what was left of his clothes, pulled up to cover his face. The next row back remained empty, even though there weren’t enough places to sit.

  Max was light-headed, weak from lack of food and lack of water. They’d gone so far. But then the reclamation camps had to be isolated. Only after the new one was turned into a settlement, like Faraway, would they fill in the space between with cistern stations and rest spots.

  Terrafarms. That’s what the first colonists had called them. Until the prisoners changed the name to terrorfarms. He closed his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” Vasily shook his arm.

  “Fine,” Max said.

  “No, I mean, just now, I thought you were a corpse.”

  “Funny,” Max rasped. “Back in the space fleet my nickname was the Corpse, because I always look this way.”

  “Look, I’m counting on you,” Vasily said, leaning over earnestly, speaking low. “I don’t want to end up dead.”

  Max felt sorry for him. Trying to swallow the dust in his throat, he said, “Here’s the thing you need to know to survive—”

  He started coughing then, the grit in his dry throat damming the words, and he couldn’t stop. He needed something to drink, just a sip, and it would be fine, but there was nothing. Not even sucking on his shirt, which had been soaked, gave him any moisture, just more dust, the taste of salt, and more reason to cough.

  Up front, one of the men screamed, roared in senseless rage. Within seconds the gangly redhead flung himself at the walls of the bus, one side, then the other, then kicked and stomped and slapped the men scattered on the benches and the floors, demanding that they do something, ordering them to get up and do something. The dustskimmers zipped in close, flanking the sides of the bus.

  “Make him shut up,” Max yelled hoarsely between hacks. “Hold him down.” Others said the same thing from the safety of a similar distance.

  At first, the men close by just tried to get out of the berserker’s way, but he grabbed one and began beating his face. Others tried to pull him away, but he lashed out at them, demanding water, demanding to be let off, demanding justice—things none of them had to give him. The more they held him, the harder he thrashed, until finally one of them lost it and punched him, telling him to “Shut up, just shut up,” and then they all started hitting him until they tumbled in a crushing pile to the floor.

  One of the older men, a paunchy bureaucrat in his thirties, began pulling men off, ordering them to stop the beating. When they did, the berserker lay still in the aisle. Men went back to their seats, ignoring him; after a while, some came and checked on him, and later two of them dragged him up to the morgue at the front of the bus.

  Vasily held his stomach. “How long is it before someone suggests we start eating the corpses?”

  “Won’t happen,” Max said, hoping it was true.

  He was thinking that another reason for having the reclamation camps out so far was that bodies could be dumped into the compost pits, and then the prisoners reported escaped and missing instead of being sent back for burial. The families got a letter saying their loved one had escaped, please report to the authorities if he shows up: it gave them hope and the dead man some dignity. But prisoners marked as escaped were always dead.

  “It’ll be worse when we get to the camps,” he said.

  The camps were still a couple hundred kilometers away. Sometime during the night, Max reached that stage of hunger and sleeplessness where he drifted in and out of consciousness, caught in the no-man’s land between the minefield o
f his hallucinations and the barbed-wire of reality. With his face against the cool glass, eyes half-lidded, and a heavy weight pressing on him, he first mistook the smell of rotting algae for a dream. Then he snapped awake.

  At the sudden movement, Vasily’s head fell off Max’s shoulder and he sagged into Max’s lap. Max shook him. “Come on,” he whispered. “We have to get off here.”

  “Huh,” Vasily said, drowsily. “What?”

  “Sh,” Max said. “We won’t live to the next camp.” He shoved Vasily aside and stepped over the bodies and around the seats to the doorwell. He grabbed the man propped upright on the steps. “Hey, there’s a bench open, back there—I need to stand a while.”

  The man, sunken-eyed, peered over the seats, full of desire and mistrust.

  “You won’t get a second chance,” Max said. “Promise I won’t want it back.”

  The man rose awkwardly, crabbed his way past Vasily to the empty bench. Vasily squeezed into the doorwell next to Max. Every time he tried to ask a question, Max held up his hand for silence in case others listened.

  Dawn rose like a wail of despair, thin and piercing. No man wanted to face another day of sun and heat. The bus rattled and shook, kicking up dust over the unfinished, unpaved road, so that only Max, who was looking for it as they came over each rise, saw the bunkers floating in a little pond of green surrounded by the ocean of sand and rock.

  When the other men finally saw it, some declared it a mirage while others raised a feeble cheer, thinking it their destination. Max knew Intelligence would never leave them all at one camp—it would be some here, some at the next one, divided among camps, spread among strangers.

  The mirage came steadily closer, resolving in dreary detail—the rounded corrugated roofs of the half-buried huts, scoured by the wind and sand to the same dull tones as the landscape; the surrounding fence, topped by razor-wire, its sharp points cutting the sky so that it bled light; the little bowl of brown and green mud visible beyond the camp.

  Bodies pressed behind Max as the bus rolled slowly to a stop and the cloud of dust settled. Past the last bunkers, Max saw the camp population standing in lines for the morning roll. The sign above the gate read:

  RECL AMATION CAMP 42

  “THEY WERE JUDGED EVERY MAN

  ACCORDING TO THEIR WORKS.”

  The guards jumped off their skimmers. Most of them stood, jawing, while one went to the gate to meet the camp staff.

  Max beat on the door. “Pray,” he grunted to Vasily.

  “For what?”

  “That they come to this car, not the second one.” That Drozhin got my message and has someone waiting for us, he would have added. His fist grew numb, so he banged his forearm on the door. Other men, not sure what was up, followed his lead, beating the walls and window frames.

  The camp minister limped to the gate with his assistant and several guards. Dusty gray clothes, indistinguishable of rank, hung loose on their lean forms. Camp supervisors were still called ministers, instead of directors, despite the changes following the revolution, because the camps were nominally for rehabilitation. Drozhin, come get me, Max heresied to himself, and I promise to be a better man.

  The minister argued with the guards, pointing at the front half of the bus: he wanted men still alive and with some fight in them—he could get more work from them before they broke. The guard listened indifferently, yelled something to the other guards, who came to Max’s door aiming weapons.

  Sixty bodies pressed against Max, trying to elbow their way in front of him. Max elbowed back, hooking his arm around Vasily to keep him close.

  “Ten,” shouted the main guard, spreading his fingers. “Just ten of you!”

  The bodies slammed forward again, banging Max’s head into the doorframe. Hands tried to claw him back. The guard removed the locks and the doors opened halfway, stopped by the press of men. Max yanked his head free from a fist in his hair, bit a finger that clutched at his face, and gripped the door so that no one could push past him. A grunt, as punches landed in his kidneys, then he ducked as the gun’s electric sizzle flew over their heads, setting their hair on end. One guard was yelling, “Back, back!” and another grabbed a fistful of Max’s shirt since he was in front, and pulled him through the door, calling, “One.”

  Max still had an elbow hooked around Vasily’s arm, who tumbled after him. They both sprawled in the dirt.

  “Make that two.”

  Max stood up quickly before anyone could jerk him to his feet, smoothing his clothes, tugging up his pants, as the guard counted, “Nine, Ten, and that’s it. Get the hell back!” A roar of protest was followed by the sizzle of the guns, cries of pain, and the doors snapping shut.

  “They’re all yours,” the guard told the minister. Turning to his second, he said, “Call 43, tell them they need to be ready to take fifty, water a hundred, and they have to put us up for the night.” To the rest of the guards he shouted, “Wheel up, wheel up, we’re moving out!”

  Guards closed and locked the camp gate. The minister walked up and down the short line of prisoners, sucking on his teeth, as mean-looking as a rib-thin dog. He wore goggles to keep the sand out of his eyes, which kept Max from reading his expressions. Finally, with the bus already a plume of dust over the hill, he turned and walked back toward the roll call. The guards shoved Max and the other prisoners after him, back toward the compound’s waste pits. Max tried not to choke on the stench; he made careful note of the dead bodies laid out at pit’s edge. Escapees. Nine of them, in various states of decomposition.

  Vasily nudged his shoulder, whispered. “At least we’re not starting off on the lowest rung in the camp.”

  He glanced in the other direction. In front of the razor-wire fence, apart from the other rows of men, stood a clump of sunburned, emaciated Adareans. Max had noticed them, but he found it more interesting that Vasily seemed determined to ignore the dead bodies.

  “Take your clothes off,” one of the guards ordered. He offered no reason for them to strip, no pretense of inspection or health check, but he seemed so bored by the command, so ready to use his gun, that they did what he said immediately. The earlier conditioning was already paying off.

  As soon as they were naked, a guard gathered up their clothes.

  The minister grinned at them. “Welcome to Camp Revelations.”

  Of course, thought Max. The camp would be named for the Bible book its verse came from. He looked again at the dead bodies and wondered if the sea or hell had delivered them up.

  “Many of you noticed the verse inscribed above the entrance of our humble enterprise,” the minister said. “I promise each of you that during your time here you will be judged according to your deeds.”

  He pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, shook the dust from it, and wiped his goggles clean. Then he walked down the line, looking each one of them over.

  “My name is Minister Pappas, but you may call me sir. If you ever address me at all, which is not something I encourage you to do. You are penitents and you are here to do penance for your crimes. There are guards and deacons in this camp, and you will respect them just as if they were me.”

  The guards were regular service, but Max knew if they posted out here they either weren’t very bright or had some kind of pathology. Deacons were prisoners trusted to act like guards, except they weren’t trusted enough to have their fingerprints keyed to the guns.

  “Your work here will be to turn this valley from desert to oasis,” the minister said. Behind him, a few hundred prisoners stood in ranks, like cans on a store shelf or pieces off an assembly line. Beyond them, beyond the razor-wire fence, the low green slopes reached up to the raw, wind-scarred hilltops and the sere blue sky.

  “Three kilometers over that hill lies the sea. All of you remember the stories about the first settlers—that’s what you do now. You carry the rocks to the sea, bring back the algae, and we seed it with enzymes and bacteria and earthworms to create topsoil for farming. In a decade,
these hills will be covered with plants and trees.”

  Max didn’t plan on being here in a decade to see it, though he knew some of these men would.

  “At this moment,” the minister said, tucking the handkerchief back in his pocket, “I would draw your attention to the corpses you see in front of you. Those are your camp uniforms. You are expected to dress appropriately at all times.”

  Max was old enough to remember the shortages of food and basic supplies the winter after the nuclear bombing of New Nazareth. Without the meanest rags to wear, even the strongest died. So he broke the line and ran to the corpses, hurrying to the end where they looked only a day or two dead instead of weeks. There was a cleaner uniform on one of the bigger Adareans, but he grabbed the ankle of the one closest to his own size—the body weighed no more than a stick—and yanked off the soiled, foul-smelling overalls. He felt the arms crack as he tugged the top off the dead man’s back.

  This was meant to shame him, classic psychological manipulation, but he would not be shamed by survival. He thrust his legs into the pants one at a time. The orange uniform, dulled by sun and sand, fit him no worse than his other clothes and had the advantage of needing no belt. The sandals were no worse than his shoes. He took the straw hat off the dead man’s face, and put it on his head, returning to his place in line while the others pulled on their uniforms.

  Only Vasily remained, wandering naked from corpse to corpse. “What? What am I supposed to wear?”