The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  ALEXANDER JABLOKOV

  The Death Artist

  With only a handful of elegant, coolly pyrotechnic stories, like the one that follows, Alexander Jablokov has established himself as one of the most highly regarded and promising new writers in SF. He is a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing, and other markets. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is involved in working on a projected anthology of “Future Boston” stories being put together by the Cambridge Writer’s Workshop; he himself has written several stories set in the “Future Boston” milieu. His story “At the Cross-Time Jaunters’ Ball” was in our Fifth Annual Collection, and his novella “A Deeper Sea” was in our Seventh Annual Collection. He has just released his first novel, Carve the Sky, to wide critical acclaim, and I have little doubt that he will come to be numbered among the Big Names of the ’90s. Upcoming is a new novel, A Deeper Sea.

  Here he takes us deep into a very strange far future, for a vivid and evocative pavane of identity and revenge … and murder.

  The Death Artist

  ALEXANDER JABLOKOV

  The snowshoe hare’s half-eaten carcass lay under the deadfall of the figure-four trap, frozen blood crystallized on its fur, mouth still closed around the tiny piece of desiccated carrot which had served as bait. The snow was flattened around it, the rabbit’s fur thrown everywhere. Jack London sniffed at the trap, laid its ears back, and growled. Canine bona fides reaffirmed, it settled back on its haunches and looked expectantly up at the man. Part samoyed, part husky, Jack’s thick white fur concealed a body thin from hunger.

  Elam didn’t have to sniff. The stink of wolverine was malevolent in the still air. It turned the saliva that had come into his mouth at the thought of roasted hare into something spoiled. He spat. “Damn!” The trap couldn’t be descented. He’d have to make another. No animal would come anywhere near a trap that smelled like that. The wolverine probably hadn’t even been hungry.

  He pulled the dry carrot from the rabbit’s mouth and flung the remains off among the trees. The deadfall and the sticks of the figure four followed it, vanishing in puffs of snow.

  “That’s the last one, Jack,” Elam said. “Nothing, again.” The dog whined.

  They set off among the dark smooth trunks of the maples and beeches, Elam’s snowshoes squeaking in the freshly fallen snow. The dog turned its head, disturbed by the unprofessional noise, then loped off to investigate the upturned roots of a fallen tree. A breeze from the great lake to the north pushed its way through the trees, shouldering clumps of snow from the branches as it passed. A cardinal flashed from bough to bough, bright against the clearing evening sky.

  Elam, a slender, graceful man, walked with his narrow shoulders hunched up, annoyed by the chilly bombardment from above. His clothing was entirely of furry animal pelts sewn crudely together. His thick hat was muskrat, his jacket fox and beaver, his mittens rabbit, his pants elk. At night he slept in a sack made of a grizzly’s hide. How had he come to be here? Had he killed those animals, skinned them, cured their hides? He didn’t know.

  At night, sometimes, before he went to sleep, Elam would lie in his lean-to and, by the light of the dying fire, examine these clothes, running his hands through the fur, seeking memories in their thick softness. The various pelts were stitched neatly together. Had he done the sewing? Or had a wife or a sister? The thought gave him a curious feeling in the pit of his stomach. He rather suspected that he had always been alone. Weariness would claim him quickly, and he would huddle down in the warmth of the bear fur and fall asleep, questions unanswered.

  Tree roots examined, Jack London returned to lead the way up the ridge. It was a daily ritual, practiced just at sunset, and the dog knew it well. The tumbled glacial rocks were now hidden under snow, making the footing uncertain. Elam carried his snowshoes under one arm as he climbed.

  The height of the ridge topped the bare trees. To the north, glowing a deceptively warm red, was the snow-covered expanse of the great lake, where Elam often saw the dark forms of wolves, running and reveling in their temporary triumph over the water that barred their passage to the islands the rest of the year.

  Elam had no idea what body of water it was. He had tentatively decided on Lake Superior, though it could have been Lake Winnipeg, or, for that matter, Lake Baikal. Elam sat down on a rock and stared at the deep north, where stars already gleamed in the sky. Perhaps he had it all wrong, and a new Ice Age was here, and this was a frozen Victoria Nyanza.

  “Who am I, Jack? Do you know?”

  The dog regarded him quizzically, used to the question by now. The man who’s supposed to get us some food, the look said. Philosophical discussions later.

  “Did I come here myself, Jack, or was I put here?”

  Weary of the pointless and one-sided catechism, the dog was barking at a jay that had ventured too close. It circled for a moment, squawked, and shot off back into the forest.

  The lake wind freshened and grew colder, driving the last clouds from the sky. The exposed skin on Elam’s cheeks tightened. “Let’s go, Jack.” He pulled off a mitten and plunged his hand into a pocket, feeling his last chunk of pemmican, greasy and hard.

  Aside from a few pathetically withered bits of carrot, which he needed to bait his traps, this was the last bit of food left him. He’d been saving it for an emergency. Every trap on the trapline that ran through these woods had been empty or befouled by wolverines, even in a hard winter that should have driven animals to eat anything. He would eat the pemmican that night.

  Man and dog started their descent down the twilit reach of the ridge’s other side. As they reached the base, Elam, his hand once again feeling the pemmican, afraid that it too would vanish before he could eat it, took too long a step and felt his right foot slide on the icy face of a tilted rock. His left foot caught in the narrow crack of an ice-shattered boulder, which grabbed him like a tight fist. The world flung itself forward at him. He felt the dull snap in his leg as the icy rock met his face.

  He awoke to the warm licks of Jack London’s tongue turning instantly cold on his face. He lay tumbled on his back among the rocks, head tilting downward, trees looming overhead. Annoyed, he pushed back and tried to stand. Searing agony in his leg brought bile to the back of his throat and a hot sweat over his body. He moaned and almost lost consciousness again, then held himself up on his elbows. His face was cut, some of his teeth were cracked, he could taste the blood in his mouth, but his leg, his leg … he looked down.

  His left leg bent at an unnatural angle just below the knee. The leather of his trousers was soaked black with blood. Compound fracture of the … tibia? Fibula? For one distracted instant naming the shattered bone was the most important thing in the world. It obscured the knowledge that he was going to die.

  He shifted position and moaned again. The biting pain in his leg grew sharp burning teeth whenever he moved, but wore the edges off if he lay still, subsiding to a gnaw. With a sudden effort, he pulled the leg straight, then fell back, gasping harshly. It made no difference, of course, but seeing the leg at that angle made him uncomfortable. It looked better this way, not near so painful.

  He patted the dog on the head. “Sorry, Jack. I screwed up.” The dog whined in agreement. Elam fell back and let the darkness take him.

  His body did not give up so easily. He regained consciousness some time later, the frenzied whining and yelping of his dog sounding in his ears. He lay prone in the snow, his hands dug in ahead of him. His mittens were torn, and he could not feel his hands.

  He rolled over onto his back and looked over his feet. Full night had come, but the starlight and the moon were enough to see the trail his body had left through the snow. Elam sighed. What a waste of time. The pain in his broken leg was almost gone, as was all other feeling from the thighs down. He spat. The spittle crackled on the snow. Damn cold. And the dog was annoying him with its whining.

  “Sure boy, sure,” he said, gasping from the cold weight of death
on his chest. “Just a minute, Jack. Just a minute.”

  He pulled what was left of the fur glove off with his chin and reached the unfeeling claw of his hand into his pocket. It took a dozen tries before it emerged holding the pemmican.

  He finally managed to open the front of his jacket and unlace his shirt. Cold air licked in eagerly. He smeared the greasy, hard pemmican over his chest and throat like a healing salve. Its rancid odor bit at his nose and, despite himself, he felt a moment of hunger. He shoved the rest of the piece down deep into his shirt.

  “Here, Jack,” he said. “Here. Dinner.” The moon rode overhead, half in sunlight, the other half covered with glittering lines and spots.

  The dog snuffled, suddenly frightened and suspicious. Elam reached up and patted it on the head. Jack London moved forward. Smelling the meat, its hunger overcame its caution at its master’s strange behavior and it began to lick eagerly at Elam’s throat and chest. The dog was desperately hungry. In its eagerness, a sharp tooth cut the man’s skin, and thick, warm, blood welled out. The tongue licked more quickly. More cuts. More blood, steaming aromatically in the cold air. And the dog was hungry. The smell penetrated to the deepest parts of its brain, finally destroying the overlay of training, habit, and love. The dog’s teeth tore and it began to feed.

  And in that instant, Elam remembered. He saw the warm forests of his youth, and the face, so much like his, that had become his own. Justice had at last been done. Elam was going to die. He smiled slightly, gasped once, then his eyes glazed blank.

  When it was sated, and realized what it had done, the dog howled its pain at the stars. It then sprang into the forest and ran madly, leaving the man’s tattered remains far behind.

  * * *

  “Is that all you are going to do from now on?” Reqata said. “Commit suicide? Just lie down and die? Nice touch, I admit, the dog.” She held his shoulder in a tight grip and looked past him with her phosphorescent eyes. “A real Elam touch.”

  Five dark ribs supported the smooth yellow stone of the dome. They revealed the green gleam of beetle carapaces in the light of the flames hanging in a hexagon around the central axis of the view chamber. Rows of striated marble seats climbed the chamber in concentric circles. The inhabitants of these seats stared down at the corpse lying in the snow at their feet.

  Elam was himself startled at his clone’s acquiescence in its own death, but he was surrounded by admirers before he could answer her. They moved past him, murmuring, gaining haut by their admiration for the subtlety of his work.

  Elam stared past them at his own corpse, a sheen of frost already obscuring the face, turning it into an abstract composition. He had died well. He always did. His mind, back from the clone with its memories restored, seemed to rattle loosely around his skull. His skin was slick with amniotic fluid, his joints gritty. Nothing fit together. Reqata’s hand on his shoulder seemed to bend the arbitrarily shaped bones, reminding him of his accidental quality.

  “An artist who works with himself as both raw materials and subject can never transcend either,” Reqata said.

  Her scorn cut through the admiration around him. He looked up at her, and she smiled back with ebony teeth, flicking feathery eyelashes. She raised one hand in an angular gesture which identified her instantly, whatever body she was in.

  “And how does the choreographer of mass death transcend her material?” Elam’s mind had been gone for weeks, dying in a frozen forest, and Reqata had grown bored in his absence. She needed entertainment. Even lovers constantly dueled with haut, the indefinable quality that all players at the Floating Game understood implicitly. Reqata had much haut. Elam had more.

  He squirmed. Was his bladder full, or did he always feel this way?

  “Mass death, as you put it, is limited by practical problems,” Reqata answered. “Killing one man is an existential act. Killing a million would be a historic act, at least to the Bound. Killing them all would be a divine act.” She ran her fingers through his hair. He smelled the winy crispness of her breath. “Killing yourself merely smacks of lack of initiative. I’m disappointed in you, Elam. You used to fight before you died.”

  “I did, didn’t I?” He remembered the desperate struggles of his early works, the ones that had gained him his haut. Men dying in mine shafts, on cliff sides, in predator-infested jungles. Men who had never stopped fighting. Each of those men had been himself. Something had changed.

  “Tell me something,” Reqata said, leaning forward. Her tongue darted across his earlobe. “Why do you always look so peaceful just before you die?”

  A chill spread up his spine. He’d wondered the same thing himself. “Do I?” He squeezed the words out. He always paid. Five or ten minutes of memory, the final instants of life. The last thing he remembered from this particular work was pulling the pemmican from his pocket. After that, blackness. The dying clone Elam understood something the resurrected real Elam did not.

  “Certainly. Don’t be coy. Look at the grin on that corpse’s frozen face.” She slid into the seat next to him, draping a leg negligently into the aisle. “I’ve tried dying. Not as art, just as experience. I die screaming. My screams echo for weeks.” She shuddered, hands pressed over her ears. Her current body, as usual, had a high rib cage and small, firm breasts. Elam found himself staring at them. “But enough.” Reqata flicked him with a fingernail, scratching his arm. “Now that you’re done, I have a project for you to work on—”

  “Perhaps each of you just gets a view of what awaits on the other side,” a voice drawled.

  “Don’t lecture me on the absolute inertia of the soul,” Reqata said, disconcerted. “No one’s giving our clones a free peek at eternity, Lammiela.”

  “Perhaps not.” A long, elegant woman, Lammiela always looked the same, to everyone’s distress, for she only had one body. She smiled slowly. “Or perhaps heaven is already so filled with the souls of your clones that there won’t be any room for you when you finally arrive.”

  Reqata stood up, fury in the rise of her shoulders. Because of her past irregularities, Lammiela had an ambiguous status, and Reqata hated risking haut in arguing with her. Usually, Reqata couldn’t help herself. “Be careful, Lammiela. You don’t know anything about it.” And perhaps, Elam found himself thinking, perhaps Reqata feared Death indeed.

  “Oh, true enough.” Lammiela sat. “Ssarna’s passing has everyone on edge. I keep forgetting.” Her arrival had driven the last of the connoisseurs away, and the three of them sat alone in the viewing chamber.

  “You don’t forget, Mother,” Elam said wearily. “You do it quite on purpose.”

  “That’s unfair, Elam.” She examined him. “You look well. Dying agrees with you.” She intertwined her long fingers and rested her chin on them. Her face was subtly lined, as if shaded by an engraver. Her eyes were dark blue, the same as Elam’s own. “Ssarna, they say, was withered in her adytum, dry as dust. The last time I saw her, which must have been at that party on top of that miserable mountain in the Himalayas, she was a tiny slip of a girl, prepubescent. Long golden … tresses. That must be the correct word.” She shook her head with weary contempt. “Though she disguised herself as young, old age found her in her most private chamber. And after old age had had his way with her, he gave her to Death. They have an arrangement.”

  “And the first of them is enjoying you now,” Reqata said. “How soon before the exchange comes?”

  Lammiela’s head jerked but she did not turn. “How have you been, Elam?” She smiled at him, and he was suddenly surrounded by the smell of her perfume, as if it were a trained animal she wore around her neck and had ordered to attack. The smell was dark and spicy. It reminded him of the smell of carrion, of something dead in the hot sun, thick and insistent. He found himself holding his breath, and stood up quickly, suddenly nauseated. Nauseated, yet somehow excited. A child’s feeling, the attraction of the vile, the need to touch and smell that which disgusts. Children will put anything in their mouths. He felt as if magg
ots were crawling under his fingernails.

  “Air,” Elam muttered. “I need.…” He walked up the striated marble stairs to the balcony above. Locked in their own conflict, neither woman followed. The warm summer air outside smelled of herbs and the dry flowers of chaparral. He clamped his teeth together and convinced himself that the flowers did not mask the smell of rotting flesh.

  Sunset turned the day lavender. The view chamber’s balcony hung high above the city, which flowed purposefully up the narrow valleys, leaving the dry hills bare, covered with flowers, acacia trees, and the spiky crystal plants that had evolved under some distant sun. The Mediterranean glinted far below.

  Lights had come on in the city, illuminating its secret doorways. No one lived here. The Incarnate had other fashions, and the Bound were afraid of the ancient living cities, preferring to build their own. A Bound city could be seen burning closer to the water, its towers asserting themselves against the darkening sky. Tonight, many of the Incarnate who had witnessed Elam’s performance would descend upon it for the evanescent excitements of those who lived out their lives bound to one body.

  So this place was silent, save for the low resonance of bells, marking the hours for its absent dwellers. The city had been deserted for thousands of years, but was ready for someone to return. The insectoidal shapes of aircars fluttered up against the stars as Elam’s audience went their separate ways.

  A coppery half moon hung on the horizon, the invisible half of its face etched with colored lines and spots of flickering light. When he was young, Lammiela had told him that the Moon was inhabited by huge machines from some previous cycle of existence. The whole circle of a new moon crawled with light, an accepted feature. No one wondered at the thoughts of those intelligent machines, who looked up at the ripe blue-green planet that hung in their black sky.

  “You should lie down,” Lammiela said, “and rest.” Her perfume was cloying and spicy. Though it did not smell even remotely of carrion, Elam still backed away, pushing himself against the railing, and let the evening breeze carry the scent away from him. Starlings swooped around the tower.