The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  They might sharpen them until their hands fell off; when morning dawned, they would be slaughtered. De Candia breathed deeply of the thin air and turned from the wall.

  Ruiz de Arce, an infantryman with a face like a clenched fist, hailed him as he passed. “Are those guns of yours ready for some work tomorrow?”

  “We need prayers more than guns.”

  “I’m not afraid of these brownies,” de Arce said.

  “Then you’re a half-wit.”

  “Soto says they have no swords.”

  The man was probably just trying to reassure himself, but de Candia couldn’t abide it. “Will you shut your stinking fool’s trap! They don’t need swords! If they only spit all at once, we’ll be drowned.”

  Pizarro overheard him. He stormed over, grabbed de Candia’s arm, and shook him. “Have they ever seen a horse, Candia? Have they ever felt steel? When you fired the harquebus on the seashore, didn’t the town chief pour beer down its barrel as if it were a thirsty god? Pull up your balls and show me you’re a man!”

  His face was inches away. “Mark me! Tomorrow, Saint James sits on your shoulder, and we win a victory that will cover us in glory for five hundred years.”

  2 December 2001:

  “DEE-fense! DEE-fense!” the crowd screamed. During the two-minute warning, Norwood Delacroix limped over to the Redskins’ special conditioning coach.

  “My knee’s about gone,” said Delacroix, an outside linebacker with eyebrows that ran together and all the musculature that modern pharmacology could load onto his six-foot-five frame. “I need something.”

  “You need the power of prayer, my friend. Stoner’s eating your lunch.”

  “Just do it.”

  The coach selected a popgun from his rack, pressed the muzzle against Delacroix’s knee, and pulled the trigger. A flood of well-being rushed up Delacroix’s leg. He flexed it tentatively. It felt better than the other one now. Delacroix jogged back onto the field. “DEE-fense!” the fans roared. The overcast sky began to spit frozen rain. The ref blew the whistle and the Bills broke huddle.

  Delacroix looked across at Stoner, the Bills’ tight end. The air throbbed with electricity. The quarterback called the signals; the ball was snapped; Stoner surged forward. As Delacroix backpedaled furiously, sudden sunlight flooded the field. His ears buzzed. Stoner jerked left and went right, twisting Delacroix around like a cork in a bottle. His knee popped. Stoner had two steps on him. TD for sure. Delacroix pulled his head down and charged after him.

  But instead of continuing downfield, Stoner slowed. He looked straight up into the air. Delacroix hit him at the knees, and they both went down. He’d caught him! The crowd screamed louder, a scream edged with hysteria.

  Then Delacroix realized the buzzing wasn’t just in his ears. Elation fading, he lifted his head and looked toward the sidelines. The coaches and players were running for the tunnels. The crowd boiled toward the exits, shedding thermoses and beer cups and radios. The sunlight was harshly bright. Delacroix looked up. A huge disk hovered no more than fifty feet above, pinning them in its spotlight. Stoner untangled himself from Delacroix, stumbled to his feet and ran off the field.

  Holy Jesus and the Virgin Mary on toast, Delacroix thought.

  He scrambled toward the end zone. The stadium was emptying fast, except for the ones who were getting trampled. The throbbing in the air increased in volume, lowered in pitch, and the flying saucer settled onto the NFL logo on the forty-yard line. The sound stopped as abruptly as if it had been sucked into a sponge.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Delacroix saw an NBC cameraman come up next to him, focusing on the ship. Its side divided and a ramp extended itself to the ground. The cameraman fell back a few steps, but Delacroix held his ground. The inside glowed with the bluish light of a UV lamp.

  A shape moved there. It lurched forward to the top of the ramp. A large, manlike thing, it advanced with a rolling stagger, like a college freshman at a beer blast. It wore a body-tight red stretchsuit, a white circle on its chest with a lightning bolt through it, some sort of flexible mask over its face. Blond hair covered its head in a kind of brush cut, and two cup-shaped ears poked comically out of the sides of its head. The creature stepped off onto the field, nudging aside the football that lay there.

  Delacroix, who majored in public relations at Michigan State, went forward to greet it. This could be the beginning of an entirely new career. His knee felt great.

  He extended his hand. “Welcome,” he said. “I greet you in the name of humanity and the United States of America.”

  “Cocaine,” the alien said. “We need cocaine.”

  Today:

  I sit at my desk writing a science fiction story, a tall, thin man wearing jeans, a white T-shirt with the abstract face of a man printed on it, white high-top basketball shoes, and gold-plated, wire-rimmed glasses.

  In the morning I drink coffee to get me up for the day, and at night I have a gin and tonic to help me relax.

  16 November 1532:

  “What are they waiting for, the shitting dogs!” the man next to de Arce said. “Are they trying to make us suffer?”

  “Shut up, will you?” De Arce shifted his armor. Wedged into the stone building on the side of the square, sweating, they had been waiting since dawn, in silence for the most part except for the creak of leather, the uneasy jingle of cascabels on the horses’ trappings. The men stank worse than the restless horses. Some had pissed themselves. A common foot soldier like de Arce was lucky to get a space near enough to the door to see out.

  As noon came and went with still no sign of Atahualpa and his retinue, the mood of the men went from impatience to near panic. Then, late in the day, word came that the Indians were moving toward the town again.

  An hour later, six thousand brilliantly costumed attendants entered the plaza. They were unarmed. Atahualpa, borne on a golden litter by eight men in cloaks of green feathers that glistened like emeralds in the sunset, rose above them. De Arce heard a slight rattling, looked down, and found that his hand, gripping the sword so tightly the knuckles stood out white, was shaking uncontrollably. He unknotted his fist from the hilt, rubbed the cramped fingers, and crossed himself.

  “Quiet now, my brave ones,” Pizarro said.

  Father Valverde and Felipillo strode out to the center of the plaza, right through the sea of attendants. The priest had guts. He stopped before the litter of the Inca, short and steady as a fence post. “Greetings, my lord, in the name of Pope Clement VII, His Majesty the Emperor Charles V, and Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

  Atahualpa spoke and Felipillo translated: “Where is this new god?”

  Valverde held up the crucifix. “Our God died on the cross many years ago and rose again to Heaven. He appointed the pope as his viceroy on earth, and the pope has commanded King Charles to subdue the peoples of the world and convert them to the true faith. The king sent us here to command your obedience and to teach you and your people in this faith.”

  “By what authority does this pope give away lands that aren’t his?”

  Valverde held up his Bible. “By the authority of the word of God.”

  The Inca took the Bible. When Valverde reached out to help him get the cover unclasped, Atahualpa cuffed his arm away. He opened the book and leafed through the pages. After a moment he threw it to the ground. “I hear no words,” he said.

  Valverde snatched up the book and stalked back toward Pizarro’s hiding place. “What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “The saints and the Blessed Virgin, the bleeding wounds of Christ himself cry vengeance! Attack, and I’ll absolve you!”

  Pizarro had already stridden into the plaza. He waved his kerchief. “Santiago, and at them!”

  On the far side, the harquebuses exploded in an enfilade. The lines of Indians jerked like startled cats. Bells jingling, de Soto’s and Hernando’s cavalry burst from the lines of doorways on the adjoining side. De Arce clutched his sword and rushed out with the others from the t
hird side. He felt the power of God in his arm. “Santiago!” he roared at the top of his lungs, and hacked halfway through the neck of his first Indian. Bright blood spurted. He put his boot to the brown man’s shoulder and yanked free, lunged for the belly of another wearing a kilt of bright red-and-white checks. The man turned and the sword caught between his ribs. The hilt was almost twisted from de Arce’s grasp as the Indian went down. He pulled free, shrugged another man off his back, and daggered him in the side.

  After the first flush of glory, it turned to filthy, hard work, an hour’s wade through an ocean of butchery in the twilight, bodies heaped waist-high, boots skidding on the bloody stones. De Arce alone must have killed forty. Only after they’d slaughtered them all and captured the Sapa Inca did it end. A silence settled, broken only by the moans of dying Indians and distant shouts of the cavalry chasing the ones who had managed to break through the plaza wall to escape.

  Saint James had indeed sat on their shoulders. Six thousand dead Indians, and not one Spaniard nicked. It was a pure demonstration of the power of prayer.

  31 January 2002:

  It was Colonel Zipp’s third session interrogating the alien. So far the thing had kept a consistent story, but not a credible one. The only thing that kept Zipp from panic at the thought of how his career would suffer if this continued was the rumor that his fellow case officers weren’t doing any better with any of the others. That, and the fact that the Krel possessed technology that would reestablish American superiority for another two hundred years. He took a drag on his cigarette, the first of his third pack of the day.

  “Your name?” Zipp asked.

  “You may call me Flash.”

  Zipp studied the red union suit, the lightning bolt. With the flat chest, the rounded shoulders, pointed upper lip, and pronounced underbite, the alien looked like a cross between Wally Cleaver and the Mock Turtle. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “What is a joke?”

  “Never mind.” Zipp consulted his notes. “Where are you from?”

  “God has ceded us an empire extending over sixteen solar systems in the Orion arm of the galaxy, including the systems around the stars you know as Tau Ceti, Epsilon Eridani, Alpha Centauri, and the red dwarf Barnard’s Star.”

  “God gave you an empire?”

  “Yes. We were hoping he’d give us your world, but all he kept talking about was your cocaine.”

  The alien’s translating device had to be malfunctioning. “You’re telling me that God sent you for cocaine?”

  “No. He just told us about it. We collect chemical compounds for their aesthetic interest. These alkaloids do not exist on our world. Like the music you humans value so highly, they combine familiar elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen—in pleasing new ways.”

  The colonel leaned back, exhaled a cloud of smoke. “You consider cocaine like—like a symphony?”

  “Yes. Understand, Colonel, no material commodity alone could justify the difficulties of interstellar travel. We come here for aesthetic reasons.”

  “You seem to know what cocaine is already. Why don’t you just synthesize it yourself?”

  “If you valued a unique work of aboriginal art, would you be satisfied with a mass-produced duplicate manufactured in your hometown? Of course not. And we are prepared to pay you well, in a coin you can use.”

  “We don’t need any coins. If you want cocaine, tell us how your ships work.”

  “That is one of the coins we had in mind. Our ships operate according to a principle of basic physics. Certain fundamental physical reactions are subject to the belief system of the beings promoting them. If I believe that X is true, then X is more probably true than if I did not believe so.”

  The colonel leaned forward again. “We know that already. We call it the ‘observer effect.’ Our great physicist Werner Heisenberg—”

  “Yes. I’m afraid we carry this principle a little further than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Flash smirked. “I mean that our ships move through interstellar space by the power of prayer.”

  13 May 1533:

  Atahualpa offered to fill a room twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide with gold up to a line as high as a man could reach, if the Spaniards would let him go. They were skeptical. How long would this take? Pizarro asked. Two months, Atahualpa said.

  Pizarro allowed the word to be sent out, and over the next several months, bearers, chewing the coca leaf in order to negotiate the mountain roads under such burdens, brought in tons of gold artifacts. They brought plates and vessels, life-sized statues of women and men, gold lobsters and spiders and alpacas, intricately fashioned ears of maize, every kernel reproduced, with leaves of gold and tassels of spun silver.

  Martin Bueno was one of the advance scouts sent with the Indians to Cuzco, the capital of the empire. They found it to be the legendary city of gold. The Incas, having no money, valued precious metals only as ornament. In Cuzco the very walls of the Sun Temple, Coricancha, were plated with gold. Adjoining the temple was a ritual garden where gold maize plants supported gold butterflies, gold bees pollinated gold flowers.

  “Enough loot that you’ll shit in a different gold pot every day for the rest of your life,” Bueno told his friend Diego Leguizano upon his return to Cajamarca.

  They ripped the plating off the temple walls and had it carried to Cajamarca. There they melted it down into ingots.

  The huge influx of gold into Europe was to cause an economic catastrophe. In Peru, at the height of the conquest, a pair of shoes cost $850, and a bottle of wine $1,700. When their old horseshoes wore out, iron being unavailable, the cavalry shod their horses with silver.

  21 April 2003:

  In the executive washroom of Bellingham, Winston, and McNeese, Jason Prescott snorted a couple of lines and was ready for the afternoon. He returned to the brokerage to find the place in a whispering uproar. In his office sat one of the Krel. Prescott’s secretary was about to piss himself. “It asked specifically for you,” he said.

  What would Attila the Hun do in this situation? Prescott thought. He went into the office. “Jason Prescott,” he said. “What can I do for you, Mr.…?”

  The alien’s bloodshot eyes surveyed him. “Flash. I wish to make an investment.”

  “Investments are our business.” Rumors had flown around the New York Merc for a month that the Krel were interested in investing. They had earned vast sums selling information to various computer, environmental, and biotech firms. Several of the aliens had come to observe trading in the currencies pit last week, and only yesterday, Jason had heard from a reliable source that they were considering opening an account with Merrill Lynch. “What brings you to our brokerage?”

  “Not the brokerage. You. We heard that you are the most ruthless currencies trader in this city. We worship efficiency. You are efficient.”

  Right. Maybe there was a hallucinogen in the toot. “I’ll call in some of our foreign-exchange experts. We can work up an investment plan for your consideration in a week.”

  “We already have an investment plan. We are, as you say in the markets, ‘long’ in dollars. We want you to sell dollars and buy francs for us.”

  “The franc is pretty strong right now. It’s likely to hold for the next six months. We’d suggest—”

  “We wish to buy $50 billion worth of francs.”

  Prescott stared. “That’s not a very good investment.” Flash said nothing. The silence grew uncomfortable. “I suppose if we stretch it out over a few months, and hit the exchanges in Hong Kong and London at the same time—”

  “We want these francs bought in the next week. For the week after that, a second $50 billion. Fifty billion a week until we tell you to stop.”

  Hallucinogens for sure. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “We can take our business elsewhere.”

  Prescott thought about it. It would take every trick he knew—and he’d have to invent some new ones—to c
arry this off. The dollar was going to drop through the floor, while the franc would punch through the sell-stops of every trader on ten world markets. The exchanges would scream bloody murder. The repercussions would auger holes in every economy north of Antarctica. Governments would intervene. It would make the historic Hunt silver squeeze look like a game of Monopoly.

  Besides, it made no sense. Not only was it criminally irresponsible, it was stupid. The Krel would squander every dime they’d earned.

  Then he thought about the commission on $50 billion a week.

  Prescott looked across at the alien. From the right point of view, Flash looked like a barrel-chested college undergraduate from Special Effects U. He felt an urge to giggle, a euphoric feeling of power. “When do we start?”

  19 May 1533:

  In the fields the purics, singing praise to Atahualpa, son of the sun, harvested the maize. At night they celebrated by getting drunk on chicha. It was, they said, the most festive month of the year.

  Pedro Sancho did his drinking in the dark of the treasure room, in the smoke of the smelters’ fire. For months he had been troubled by nightmares of the heaped bodies lying in the plaza. He tried to ignore the abuse of the Indian women, the brutality toward the men. He worked hard. As Pizarro’s squire, it was his job to record daily the tally of Atahualpa’s ransom. When he ran low on ink, he taught the purics to make it for him from soot and the juice of berries. They learned readily.

  Atahualpa heard about the ink and one day came to him. “What are you doing with those marks?” he said, pointing to the scribe’s tally book.

  “I’m writing the list of gold objects to be melted down.”

  “What is this ‘writing’?”

  Sancho was nonplussed. Over the months of Atahualpa’s captivity, Sancho had become impressed by the sophistication of the Incas. Yet they were also queerly backward. They had no money. It was not beyond belief that they should not know how to read and write.

  “By means of these marks, I can record the words that people speak. That’s writing. Later other men can look at these marks and see what was said. That’s reading.”