The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Then this is a kind of quipu?” Atahualpa’s servants had demonstrated for Sancho the quipu, a system of knotted strings by which the Incas kept tallies. “Show me how it works,” Atahualpa said.

  Sancho wrote on the page: God have mercy on us. He pointed. “This, my lord, is a representation of the word ‘God.’”

  Atahualpa looked skeptical. “Mark it here.” He held out his hand, thumbnail extended.

  Sancho wrote “God” on the Inca’s thumbnail.

  “Say nothing now.” Atahualpa advanced to one of the guards, held out his thumbnail. “What does this mean?” he asked.

  “God,” the man replied.

  Sancho could tell the Inca was impressed, but he barely showed it. That the Sapa Inca had maintained such dignity throughout his captivity tore at Sancho’s heart.

  “This writing is truly a magical accomplishment,” Atahualpa told him. “You must teach my amautas this art.”

  Later, when the viceroy Estete, Father Valverde, and Pizarro came to chide him for the slow pace of the gold shipments, Atahualpa tested each of them separately. Estete and Valverde each said the word “God.” Atahualpa held his thumbnail out to the conquistador.

  Estete chuckled. For the first time in his experience, Sancho saw Pizarro flush. He turned away. “I don’t waste my time on the games of children,” Pizarro said.

  Atahualpa stared at him. “But your common soldiers have this art.”

  “Well, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was a swineherd. Swineherds don’t need to read.”

  “You are not a swineherd now.”

  Pizarro glared at the Inca. “I don’t need to read to order you put to death.” He marched out of the room.

  After the others had left, Sancho told Atahualpa, “You ought not to humiliate the governor in front of his men.”

  “He humiliates himself,” Atahualpa said. “There is no skill in which a leader ought to let himself stand behind his followers.”

  Today:

  The part of this story about the Incas is as historically accurate as I could make it, but this Krel business is science fiction. I even stole the name “Krel” from a 1950s sf flick. I’ve been addicted to sf for years. In the evening my wife and I wash the bad taste of the news out of our mouths by watching old movies on videotape.

  A scientist, asked why he read sf, replied, “Because in science fiction the experiments always work.” Things in sf stories work out more neatly than in reality. Nothing is impossible. Spaceships move faster than light. Atomic weapons are neutralized. Disease is abolished. People travel in time. Why, Isaac Asimov even wrote a story once that ended with the reversal of entropy!

  The descendants of the Incas, living in grinding poverty, find their most lucrative crop in coca, which they refine into cocaine and sell in vast quantities to North Americans.

  23 August 2008:

  “Catalog number 208,” said John Bostock. “Georges Seurat, Bathers.”

  FRENCH GOVERNMENT FALLS, the morning Times had announced. JAPAN BANS U.S. IMPORTS. FOOD RIOTS IN MADRID. But Bostock had barely glanced at the newspaper over his coffee; he was buzzed on caffeine and adrenaline, and it was too late to stop the auction, the biggest day of his career. The lot list would make an art historian faint. Guernica. The Potato Eaters. The Scream. Miró, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gauguin, Matisse, Constable, Magritte, Pollock, Mondrian. Six desperate governments had contributed to the sale. And rumor had it the Krel would be among the bidders.

  The rumor proved true. In the front row, beside the solicitor Patrick McClannahan, sat one of the unlikely aliens, wearing red tights and a lightning-bolt insignia. The famous Flash. The creature sat there lazily while McClannahan did the bidding with a discreetly raised forefinger.

  Bidding on the Seurat started at a million and went orbital. It soon became clear that the main bidders were Flash and the U.S. Government. The American campaign against cultural imperialism was getting a lot of press, ironic since the Yanks could afford to challenge the Krel only because of the technology the Krel had lavished on them. The probability suppressor that prevented the detonation of atomic weapons. The autodidactic antivirus that cured most diseases. There was talk of an immortality drug. Of a time machine. So what if the European Community was in the sixth month of an economic crisis that threatened to dissolve the unifying efforts of the past twenty years? So what if Krel meddling destroyed humans’ capacity to run the world? The Americans were making money, and the Krel were richer than Croesus.

  The bidding reached $1.2 billion, at which point the American ambassador gave up. Bostock tapped his gavel. “Sold,” he said in his most cultured voice, nodding toward the alien.

  The crowd murmured. The American stood. “If you can’t see what they’re doing to us, then you don’t deserve our help!”

  For a minute, Bostock thought the auction was going to turn into a riot. Then the new owner of the pointillist masterpiece stood, smiled. Ingenuous, clumsy. “We know that there has been considerable disquiet over our purchase of these historic works of art,” Flash said. “Let me promise you, they will be displayed where all humans—not just those who can afford to visit the great museums—can see them.”

  The crowd’s murmur turned into applause. Bostock put down his gavel and joined in. The American ambassador and his aides stalked out. Thank God, Bostock thought. The attendants brought out the next item.

  “Catalog number 209,” Bostock said. “Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa.”

  26 July 1533:

  The soldiers, seeing the heaps of gold grow, became anxious. They consumed stores of coca meant for the Inca messengers. They fought over women. They grumbled over the airs of Atahualpa. “Who does he think he is? The governor treats him like a hidalgo.”

  Father Valverde cursed Pizarro’s inaction. That morning, after Matins, he spoke with Estete. “The governor has agreed to meet and decide what to do,” Estete said.

  “It’s about time. What about Soto?” De Soto was against harming Atahualpa. He maintained that, since the Inca had paid the ransom, he should be set free, no matter what danger this would present. Pizarro had stalled. Last week he had sent de Soto away to check out rumors that the Tahuantinsuyans were massing for an attack to free the Sapa Inca.

  Estete smiled. “Soto’s not back yet.”

  They went to the building Pizarro had claimed as his, and found the others already gathered. The Incas had no tables or proper chairs, so the Spaniards were forced to sit in a circle on mats as the Indians did. Pizarro, only a few years short of threescore, sat on a low stool of the sort that Atahualpa used when he held court. His left leg, whose old battle wound still pained him at times, was stretched out before him. His loose white shirt had been cleaned by some puric’s wife. Valverde sat beside him. Gathered were Estete, Benalcázar, Almagro, de Candia, Riquelme, Pizarro’s young cousin Pedro, the scribe Pedro Sancho, Valverde, and the governor himself.

  As Valverde and Estete had agreed, the viceroy went first. “The men are jumpy, Governor,” Estete said. “The longer we stay cooped up here, the longer we give these savages the chance to plot against us.”

  “We should wait until Soto returns,” de Candia said, already looking guilty as a dog. “We’ve got nothing but rumors so far. I won’t kill a man on a rumor.”

  Silence. Trust de Candia to speak aloud what they were all thinking but were not ready to say. The man had no political judgment—but maybe it was just as well to face it directly. Valverde seized the opportunity. “Atahualpa plots against us even as we speak,” he told Pizarro. “As governor, you are responsible for our safety. Any court would convict him of treason, and execute him.”

  “He’s a king,” de Candia said. Face flushed, he spat out a cud of leaves. “We don’t have authority to try him. We should ship him back to Spain and let the emperor decide what to do.”

  “This is not a king,” Valverde said. “It isn’t even a man. It is a creature that worships demons, that weaves spel
ls about half-wits like Candia. You saw him discard the Bible. Even after my months of teaching, after the extraordinary mercies we’ve shown him, he doesn’t acknowledge the primacy of Christ! He cares only for his wives and his pagan gods. Yet he’s satanically clever. Don’t think we can let him go. If we do, the day will come when he’ll have our hearts for dinner.”

  “We can take him with us to Cuzco,” Benalcázar said. “We don’t know the country. His presence would guarantee our safe conduct.”

  “We’ll be traveling over rough terrain, carrying tons of gold, with not enough horses,” Almagro said. “If we take him with us, we’ll be ripe for ambush at every pass.”

  “They won’t attack if we have him.”

  “He could escape. We can’t trust the rebel Indians to stay loyal to us. If they turned to our side, they can just as easily turn back to his.”

  “And remember, he escaped before, during the civil war,” Valverde said. “Huáscar, his brother, lived to regret that. If Atahualpa didn’t hesitate to murder his own brother, do you think he’ll stop for us?”

  “He’s given us his word,” Candia said.

  “What good is the word of a pagan?”

  Pizarro, silent until now, spoke. “He has no reason to think the word of a Christian much better.”

  Valverde felt his blood rise. Pizarro knew as well as any of them what was necessary. What was he waiting for? “He keeps a hundred wives! He betrayed his brother! He worships the sun!” The priest grabbed Pizarro’s hand, held it up between them so they could both see the scar there, where Pizarro had gotten cut preventing one of his own men from killing Atahualpa. “He isn’t worth an ounce of the blood you spilled to save him.”

  “He’s proved worth twenty-four tons of gold.” Pizarro’s eyes were hard and calm.

  “There is no alternative!” Valverde insisted. “He serves the Antichrist! God demands his death.”

  At last Pizarro seemed to have gotten what he wanted. He smiled. “Far be it from me to ignore the command of God,” he said. “Since God forces us to it, let’s discuss how He wants it done.”

  5 October 2009:

  “What a lovely country Chile is from the air. You should be proud of it.”

  “I’m from Los Angeles,” Leon Sepulveda said. “And as soon as we close this deal, I’m going back.”

  “The mountains are impressive.”

  “Nothing but earthquakes and slag. You can have Chile.”

  “Is it for sale?”

  Sepulveda stared at the Krel. “I was just kidding.”

  They sat at midnight in the arbor, away from the main buildings of Iguassu Microelectronics of Santiago. The night was cold and the arbor was overgrown and the bench needed a paint job—but then, a lot of things had been getting neglected in the past couple of years. All the more reason to put yourself in a financial situation where you didn’t have to worry. Though Sepulveda had to admit that, since the advent of the Krel, such positions were harder to come by, and less secure once you had them.

  Flash’s earnestness aroused a kind of horror in him. It had something to do with Sepulveda’s suspicion that this thing next to him was as superior to him as he was to a guinea pig, plus the alien’s aura of drunken adolescence, plus his own willingness, despite the feeling that the situation was out of control, to make a deal with it. He took another Valium and tried to calm down.

  “What assurance do I have that this time-travel method will work?”

  “It will work. If you don’t like it in Chile, or back in Los Angeles, you can use it to go into the past.”

  Sepulveda swallowed. “O.K. You need to read and sign these papers.”

  “We don’t read.”

  “You don’t read Spanish? How about English?”

  “We don’t read at all. We used to, but we gave it up. Once you start reading, it gets out of control. You tell yourself you’re just going to stick to nonfiction—but pretty soon you graduate to fiction. After that, you can’t kick the habit. And then there’s the oppression.”

  “Oppression?”

  “Sure. I mean, I like a story as much as the next Krel, but any pharmacologist can show that arbitrary cultural, sexual, and economic assumptions determine every significant aspect of a story. Literature is a political tool used by ruling elites to ensure their hegemony. Anyone who denies that is a fish who can’t see the water it swims in. Or the fascist who tells you, as he beats you, that those blows you feel are your own delusion.”

  “Right. Look, can we settle this? I’ve got things to do.”

  “This is, of course, the key to temporal translation. The past is another arbitrary construct. Language creates reality. Reality is smoke.”

  “Well, this time machine better not be smoke. We’re going to find out the truth about the past. Then we’ll change it.”

  “By all means. Find the truth.” Flash turned to the last page of the contract, pricked his thumb, and marked a thumbprint on the signature line.

  After they sealed the agreement, Sepulveda walked the alien back to the courtyard. A Krel flying pod with Vermeer’s The Letter varnished onto its door sat at the focus of three spotlights. The painting was scorched almost into unrecognizability by atmospheric friction. The door peeled downward from the top, became a canvas-surfaced ramp.

  “I saw some interesting lines inscribed on the coastal desert on the way here,” Flash said. “A bird, a tree, a big spider. In the sunset, it looked beautiful. I didn’t think you humans were capable of such art. Is it for sale?”

  “I don’t think so. That was done by some old Indians a long time ago. If you’re really interested, though, I can look into it.”

  “Not necessary.” Flash waggled his ears, wiped his feet on Mark Rothko’s Earth and Green and staggered into the pod.

  26 July 1533:

  Atahualpa looked out of the window of the stone room in which he was kept, across the plaza where the priest Valverde stood outside his chapel after his morning prayers. Valverde’s chapel had been the house of the virgins; the women of the house had long since been raped by the Spanish soldiers, as the house had been by the Spanish god. Valverde spoke with Estete. They were getting ready to kill him, Atahualpa knew. He had known ever since the ransom had been paid.

  He looked beyond the thatched roofs of the town to the crest of the mountains, where the sun was about to break in his tireless circuit of Tahuantinsuyu. The cold morning air raised dew on the metal of the chains that bound him hand and foot. The metal was queer, different from the bronze the purics worked or the gold and silver Atahualpa was used to wearing. If gold was the sweat of the sun, and silver the tears of the moon, what was this metal, dull and hard like the men who held him captive, yet strong, too—stronger, he had come to realize, than the Inca. It, like the men who brought it, was beyond his experience. It gave evidence that Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World, was not all the world after all. Atahualpa had thought none but savages lived beyond their lands. He’d imagined no man readier to face the ruthless necessity than himself. He had ordered the death of Huáscar, his own brother. But he was learning that these men were capable of enormities against which the Inca civil war would seem a minor discomfort.

  That evening they took him out of the building to the plaza. In the plaza’s center, the soldiers had piled a great heap of wood on flagstones, some of which were still stained with the blood of his six thousand slaughtered attendants. They bound him to a stake amid the heaped fagots, and Valverde appealed one last time for the Inca to renounce Satan and be baptized. He promised that if Atahualpa would do so, he would earn God’s mercy: they would strangle him rather than burn him to death.

  The rough wood pressed against his spine. Atahualpa looked at the priest, and the men gathered around, and the women weeping beyond the circle of soldiers. The moon, his mother, rode high above. Firelight flickered on the breastplates of the Spaniards, and from the waiting torches drifted the smell of pitch. The men shifted nervously. Creak of leather, clin
k of metal. Men on horses shod with silver. Sweat shining on Valverde’s forehead. Valverde stared at Atahualpa as if he desired something, but was prepared to destroy him without getting it if need be. The priest thought he was showing Atahualpa resolve, but Atahualpa saw that beneath Valverde’s face he was a dead man. Pizarro stood aside, with the Spanish viceroy Estete and the scribe. Pizarro was an old man. He ought to be sitting quietly in some village, outside the violence of life, giving advice and teaching the children. What kind of world did he come from, that sent men into old age still charged with the lusts and bitterness of the young?

  Pizarro, too, looked as if he wanted this to end.

  Atahualpa knew that it would not end. This was only the beginning. These men would suffer for this moment as they had already suffered for it all their lives, seeking the pain blindly over oceans, jungles, deserts, probing it like a sore tooth until they’d found and grasped it in this plaza of Cajamarca, thinking they sought gold. They’d come all this way to create a moment that would reveal to them their own incurable disease. Now they had it. In a few minutes, they thought, it would at last be over, that once he was gone, they would be free—but Atahualpa knew it would be with them ever after, and with their children and grandchildren and the million others of their race in times to come, whether they knew of this hour in the plaza or not, because they were sick and would pass the sickness on with their breath and semen. They could not burn out the sickness so easily as they could burn the Son of God to ash. This was a great tragedy, but it contained a huge jest. They were caught in a wheel of the sky and could not get out. They must destroy themselves.

  “Have your way, priest,” Atahualpa said. “Then strangle me, and bear my body to Cuzco, to be laid with my ancestors.” He knew they would not do it, and so would add an additional curse to their faithlessness.

  He had one final curse. He turned to Pizarro. “You will have responsibility for my children.”

  Pizarro looked at the pavement. They put up the torch and took Atahualpa from the pyre. Valverde poured water on his head and spoke words in the tongue of his god. Then they sat him upon a stool, bound him to another stake, set the loop of cord around his neck, slid the rod through the cord, and turned it. His women knelt at his side and wept. Valverde spoke more words. Atahualpa felt the cord, woven by the hands of some faithful puric of Cajamarca, tighten. The cord was well made. It cut his access to the night air; Atahualpa’s lungs fought, he felt his body spasm, and then the plaza became cloudy and he heard the voice of the moon.