The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  Max was no singer, and neither was the historian. Both sat there, somber if not sober. “It’d be good if you still had some friends from the revolution who could help us if we broke out of here,” the Adarean said.

  “Yeah, it would be,” Max admitted. He tilted his head up at the roof, the room. “Do you know why they call these prayer blocks?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because when you’re here, all your prayers to God are blocked.”

  After the last of the storm passed, they emerged from their blocks to find the tower down and sections of fence ripped away. The waste pits had flooded and overflowed, scattering bones and pieces of bodies with the out house products across the roll call ground. One of the guards ran the camp’s sole bulldozer, pushing waste back into the pits while the minister marched the rest of them up to the meadow.

  All the compost had been washed from the hillsides, mixing with sand and stone until it choked the stream where it flowed between the hills. If they didn’t clear it out, the stream would back up until the bowl filled with water and the camp was threatened.

  Under the guns of the guards, they waded waist-deep in the sludge, using their bodies as dredges, pushing the tangled mats back up the slopes. They scooped the sand-sludge mix with their bare arms until Max’s skin was rubbed rash-raw. And then, when the other men were given a break, the Adareans were told to load up their baskets with rocks pulled from the blocked culvert and carry them down to the jetty.

  “No need to do the same work twice,” the minister explained, seemingly oblivious to the irony.

  They loaded their baskets under the eyes of deacons who were antsy because the minister kept threatening to put them to work. Max groaned when he lifted his basket, even stacked as empty as possible. Too many more days of this would kill him. Today might kill him.

  The historian passed him, taking a rock from the top of his basket and dropping it in his own. Several times, when they came to a hilltop, or a turn in the trail, he passed Max, or let Max pass him, taking a stone from Max’s basket. On the last rise before the long road down to the ocean, he started to sing.

  “A brave little toaster took a rocketship to space

  Where he tried to find a planet that would save the human race.

  But, O, O, O, he found a dog.”

  “You’re terrible,” Max said. “Didn’t they genetically engineer perfect pitch on Adares?”

  “Come on, Max, sing with me.”

  He started over again, and all the Adareans took up the song, which cycled right back to the beginning as soon as the toaster and his dog finished their adventure. It was a quick walk to the ocean. Vasily, the deacon in charge, followed the Adareans, tapping the end of his pipe against the boulders in time with the song. Their guard rode on the rock-jumper, rifle across his lap, parallel to their path until they came to the jetty. Two more guards were out in the boat. They’d found the pontoon dock, towed it back, tied it up again, and were now scouting the coast around the edge of the point.

  Max and the others walked out to the end of the jetty and dumped their baskets. The rocks made a hollow splash, then slowly sank from view. Max stepped aside so the other men could dump their loads. As he stood there, wire grooved in his wrist, staring at the sun sparkling on the bay, water weed-cleared by the storm, he thought it almost a beautiful spot. He wondered if Meredith made it to their safe house. He’d been gone so much, for so many years, for all of their marriage really, that he wondered if she missed him, even if she was there.

  The historian’s hand touched his shoulder, and he stepped past Max onto the dock, shifting his balance as it bobbed unanchored under his weight. He was still humming that ridiculous song about the toaster, basket slung over his shoulder. Max, smiling, opened his mouth to say there was no weed to carry back, as if it were good news, just discovered.

  Then he saw that the basket was still full of rocks, his own load, and half Max’s.

  The historian dropped it off his shoulder, and swung it once, twice, out over the water.

  “Hey,” Max said.

  On the third swing he let go, and the basket arced into the air and dropped into the water with a cavernous splash. The loop was still fastened around the Adarean’s wrist, pulling him after it.

  Vasily was the first one out to the end of the pier, cursing and spinning, half-panicked. When the old man, the diplomat, ran out beside him, dropping his basket, prepared to dive in, Vasily smashed him down with his club. He kicked the old man in the stomach, drove him back along the jetty to the shore.

  “We’re in charge here!” he shouted. “You don’t get to choose when you die, we choose! Now go, go back to the meadow!”

  He ran up and down the line, beating the exhausted Adareans on their arms and shoulders if they didn’t move fast enough. The guard came in close, rifle ready, looking eager to shoot. Max cowered, covering his head with his hands, stumbling all the way back to the camp.

  All that night in the camp, the wail of the Adareans rose over and over again, as sure as the dawn. Because of their grief, Max thought he finally understood them.

  It had always seemed to him as if he only saw half their conversations. They communicated, deliberately, through pheromones and with heightened sensitivity to even the slightest non-verbal cues. Even in a dark room, without words, they were never alone. In that way, they were alien.

  Max sat on his bunk with his back to the wall, as far from them as possible. Yet he could smell their grief, a scent he had no words for, though it reminded him of saltwater and juniper.

  At first he didn’t understand why they wept and tore at their chests: hadn’t he seen another Adarean die his first day in the camp? The one choked to death by Vasily? There had been no dirge then.

  But he came to realize, from the way they tried to comfort one another, that it was not the death they grieved—death was inevitable—but the suicide. The historian’s choice to be alone, to cut himself apart.

  Max blocked his ears, but he still heard the dirging. He pulled a blanket over his head, but that didn’t help.

  Late into the night, the other bunks shouted at them to stop, their voices sometimes rising above the dirge, sometimes falling into the cracks of silence.

  Near morning, exhausted, depleted, Max heard a rattling at the door and then it came open.

  Vasily stood there.

  “Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut the hell up so we can sleep!”

  He seemed fearful to come inside alone. When the Adareans ignored him, he turned to Max, whose bunk was beside the door. “You’ve got to help me out here. The other penitents, they blame me for this. I told them there was no way to stop the pig-man from drowning, but they don’t care. We’re all exhausted, nobody’s slept, and we have to work all day tomorrow. And now the lights just came on in the minister’s cabin. The other deacons, they say I got to fix this, or I’m going to lose my spot.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  Vasily licked his lips, checked to see who was outside. “Look, I don’t want to come in there, all right. But you, you make them shut up, you make them be quiet, and I promise we get you out. You don’t belong in here with these animals. You make them shut up, you get moved to a regular bunker.”

  Max turned his head away.

  “Right now, I’ll take you with me right now, over to our block. Just do what you need to do, make them shut up.”

  Max held his head in his hands, squeezed it to make the pounding stop. So. Vasily came through for him after all; one of the seeds Max had planted was finally ready for harvest. If he got into a better block, if he worked less, if he got more food, he could survive. Eventually, the purge would end.

  “Look, you’ve got to decide fast,” Vasily said. “There’s something going on in the minister’s office, so we got to fix this now or I get blamed for everything.”

  It would be easy, Max thought. If he killed the diplomat, maybe broke his neck, it would break the rhythm of their lament and cha
nge their mood completely. He might not even have to kill him, just hurt him, maybe leave him unconscious. All he would need was six, seven seconds. No more than he needed to murder that double agent Lukinov during his last mission. During the brief moment of confusion that followed, he could get out the door with Vasily.

  “There are guards coming,” Vasily said, “so it’s now or never. If the guards come, I can’t be responsible for what they do. They might just compost everyone in the bunker, including you. You have to choose now—are you in or out?”

  Max swung his legs off the bunk, walked over to the old man, who was seated on the floor, and kneeled behind him. He slid his hands up the old man’s shoulders, leaned forward, and whispered in his ear.

  “Still swimming,” Max said. “Remember that we’re still swimming.”

  The diplomat turned his head and the dirge faltered.

  “Hey, Vasily,” Max said. “You can go choke yourself.”

  When Vasily didn’t respond, he looked up. The deacon was flanked by two guards, guns drawn, standing to either side of him in the doorway. So, Max thought, he might not swim that much longer after all.

  “Are you Colonel Maxim Nikomedes?” the first guard asked.

  Max said, “Huh?”

  “Are you Colonel Nikomedes?” he snapped.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “You have to come with us right away.” The guard gave him a hurry-along gesture with the gun.

  Max went at his own pace, neither hurrying nor dragging his feet. As he passed through the door, they left it open, pointing him toward the main gate. He heard the crunch of footsteps in gravel behind him, and he drew in his breath, waiting for the gunshot in the back of his head, wondering how much he would feel before he died. The gate still lay in ruins, smashed by the fall of the tower in the hurricane, open to the desert.

  “Go on,” the guard said. Still standing well back. His voice shook, as if he were frightened.

  “Go where?” Max asked.

  “To them,” the guard said.

  Dawn spied over the horizon; its pale smear of light glinted on two government cars. Half a dozen elite troops in body armor, with heavy weapons, stared down the guards. The dark blots of troop carriers hovered overhead. A thin, scholarly man stepped out of the first ground car, stood there, hands behind his back. He had a gun in the holster at his waist.

  “It’s good to see you again, Nick,” he said.

  Nick? Who called him Nick? “Anatoly?”

  He walked toward Max, stopped abruptly when he saw Max’s face. “Yes, it’s me.”

  So there had been another mole in Mallove’s office after all.

  One of the soldiers held open a door in the second car for a very old man who had wisps of white hair at his temples and a beard like a biblical patriarch. He stepped out too quickly and lost his balance, though he reached out and grabbed the door handle to steady himself before he fell. His military uniform was insignia-less. On his feet he wore fuzzy, pink bunny slippers.

  He stared at Max with almost vacant eyes, then scratched his cheek with the backs of his fingernails. “Hi, Max.” His voice was faint, as if barely any air remained in his lungs.

  “What’s going on, here?” the minister shouted. The first light of the day reflected off his goggles. He stomped out of the gate, flanked by his guards. The bunkers were emptying, the whole camp coming to witness this new tableau. “If there’s a problem here, I assure you I can deal with it.”

  He spoke over the tan-uniformed soldiers, who blocked his way, and tried to address the men in the cars.

  The camp guards and the deacons mobbed together behind him, guns in some hands, pipes in others. The ragged penitents, in their filthy orange uniforms, spread out to see what was happening, which made the guards and deacons nervous. The minister shouted at the soldiers, and the soldiers shouted at him to back off. Any second, a lot of people could die.

  Max turned to Anatoly. “May I have your gun?”

  Anatoly looked to the old man, who nodded approval, then drew it, flicked off the safety, and offered it to Max butt-first. Max sighed when he felt it in his hand. As he walked toward the gate, the minister was saying, “Look, if you want revenge on those pig-men, for the way they treated you—”

  “Shut up,” Max ordered in the tone of a man used to being obeyed.

  The minister’s mouth clamped shut. His eyes revealed nothing behind the dusty goggles, but he tried to look past Max to the cars for an answer.

  The guards and deacons began to back away, feet scuffling over the sand and stone.

  “Stop!” Max ordered.

  They stopped. A breeze passed through the camp, carrying the scent of the dead along with the smell of the sea and the promise of another hell-hot day. It rattled the Bible verse sign that had greeted Max on his arrival to the camp.

  “Max, we’re friends, right? I tried to help you, right?”

  Vasily stepped forward from the mob, one hand up in surrender, the other still clutching the metal club.

  “Get me out with you, Max,” he said. “I did my best to help you. I was just doing what I had to do—”

  “Shut up, Vasily.”

  “I don’t have anything to do with politics—”

  Max pointed the gun at Vasily’s face. “Shut up! We’re all prisoners to our politics. We make our choices, and we have to accept the direction those choices take us.”

  Vasily covered his face and shut his eyes.

  “I don’t know who you are, I couldn’t know,” the minister said. “But I’ll make it right. If you want to kill that deacon, go ahead. He’s a worthles—”

  Max moved his arm sideways until the barrel tapped the minister’s goggles.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The minister’s head snapped backward, body flung to the ground. The tan-uniformed soldiers lunged forward with their weapons, shouting at the camp guards to stand down. A metal pipe thudded into the ground, followed by the clatter of the others. A second later, the guards’ guns rattled on the stony soil as they too were dropped.

  Max went back to the cars. “Thank you, general,” he said. “Nice slippers.”

  “They’re a gift from Isabelle, my granddaughter, Anna’s girl.” His voice was raspy, his words punctuated with long pauses. “Max, my feet, they’re always cold these days. These slippers don’t keep them that much warmer, but maybe a little bit. A little girl’s love, that’s what it is. She’s a good girl, likes chocolate too much, but I still give her chocolate.” He paused for a second, looked off as if he was trying to remember something. “Meredith is worried sick about you, Max. Some kind of phonecall you left her? She wouldn’t leave me alone, kept after me and after me, over a month, until I promised to come find you.”

  A knot formed in Max’s throat. “That sounds like her.”

  Drozhin turned his body half away from Max, scowled, scratching at his beard. “See, I didn’t understand. I kept telling her you were safe. I’d thought I’d set it up that you were away in deep space. Safe, far away, during the purge. Keeping an eye on that bastard Lukinov for me.”

  “The mission got canceled,” Max said. “Lukinov was killed.”

  The eyes fired, suddenly present. “You killed Lukinov?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Good!” He paused. “No, wait, we were using him to feed false information to—no, wait, Mallove’s dead now too.”

  “Right.”

  “Good.” Drozhin lifted one bunny slipper to rub the back of his ankle and lost his balance again. Max reached out to catch him, and special forces men suddenly appeared in front of him. He realized he was still holding the gun.

  Drozhin steadied himself by holding onto the door. “I want to go home. Is there anything else to do here, Max? There are flyers in the air. We can burn the place to the ground, erase it, kill everyone. Just say the word.”

  “Thank you, general. I know what I want to do.”

  He turned to the guards and deacons, aimed the gu
n at them, then pointed it south.

  “Faraway is, well, it’s very far away,” he shouted. “But Camp 43 is only fifty kilometers north. You’ve got an hour’s headstart before we come for you. That’s the best you’re going to get from me.”

  Vasily sprinted away instantly; the others followed a second later. Soon, only the penitents were left standing there, confused, their lines broken.

  Drozhin sat down on the edge of his seat. “Max, just tell Anatoly who should die. We’ll kill them all. Come see me next week. I’ll have Anna make peanut butter cookies.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” As the door closed, Max walked over to the second car and handed the gun back to Anatoly. “I owe you a bullet.”

  “Consider it a gift,” he said, holding the door open for Max. “Can you sit and talk for a minute?”

  “Yes.” They climbed into the car and sat across from each other. Max said, “So Drozhin still hates to fly.”

  “Still hates it. He was going to visit every camp personally until he found you.”

  “I’m glad I got off at the first stop.”

  Anatoly pulled the door shut. “You know you nearly got me killed outside Mallove’s office?”

  Max stared through the tinted window at the camp. “What?”

  “Mallove’s car was sent by Intelligence. It was a set-up. We were supposed to climb in back and be whisked away to safety while Mallove was killed.”

  “Ah. That would have been much simpler. I’m sorry.”

  “No, you had no way of knowing. Frankly, I was amazed by your recognition and action. I just wanted to tell you, so you wouldn’t think you’d been forgotten. You moved so quickly, it was damn hard to find you once we started looking. When Obermeyer checked some old dropboxes and found your note, that finally narrowed our search in the right direction.”