The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Abias stood above them. He danced on the smooth glass, his callused feet slipping. He laughed every time he almost fell. “Can you see us?” he cried to the lens. “Can you see who we are? Can you see who we will become?” Elam looked up at him in wonder, then down at the boy’s tiny, distorted reflection as it cavorted among the twisted trees.

  The sun was suddenly hot, slicing through the trees like a burning edge. Smoke rose as it sizzled across flesh. Elam howled with pain and ran up the slope. He ran until his lungs were dying within him.

  The Neanderthal stopped in a clearing up the side of a mountain. A herd of clouds moved slowly across the sky, cropping the blue grass of the overhead. Around him rocks, the old bones of the earth, came up through its sagging flesh. The trees whispered derisively below him. They talked of death and blood. “You should have died,” they said. “The other should have lived.” The Neanderthal turned his tear-filled eyes into the wind, though whether he wept for Orfea, or for Elam, even he could not have said.

  * * *

  The city burned with a dry thunder. Elam and Reqata ran through the crowded, screaming streets with the arsonists, silent and pure men. In the shifting firelight, their tattooed faces swirled and re-formed, as if made of smoke themselves.

  “The situation has been balanced for years,” Reqata said. “Peace conceals strong forces pushing against each other. Change their alignment, and…” Swords flashed in the firelight, a meaningless battle between looters and some sort of civil guard. Ahead were the tiled temples of the Goddesses, their goal.

  “They feel things we don’t,” she said. “Religious exaltation. The suicidal depression of failed honor. Fierce loyalty to a leader. Hysterical terror at signs and portents.”

  Women screamed from the upper windows of a burning building, holding their children out in vain hope of salvation.

  “Do you envy them?” Elam asked.

  “Yes!” she cried. “To them, life is not a game.” Her hand was tight on his arm. “They know who they are.”

  “And we don’t?”

  “Take me!” Reqata said fiercely. Her fingernails stabbed through his thin shirt. They had made love in countless incarnations, and these golden-skinned, slender bodies were just another to her, even with the flames rising around them.

  He took her down on the stone street as the city burned around them. Her scent pooled dark. It was the smell of death and decay. He looked at her. Beneath him, eyes burning with malignant rage, was Orfea.

  “You are alive,” Elam cried.

  Her face glowered at him. “No, you bastard,” she said. “I’m not alive. You are. You are.”

  His rage suddenly matched hers. He grabbed her hair and pulled her across the rough stone. “Yes. And I’m going to stay that way. Understand? Understand?” With each question, he slammed her head on the stone.

  Her face was amused. “Really, Elam. I’m dead, remember? Dead and gone. What’s the use of slamming me around?”

  “You were always like that. Always sensible. Always driving me crazy!” He stopped, his hands around her throat. He looked down at her. “Why did we hate each other so much?”

  “Because there was really only ever one of us. It was Lammiela who thought there were two.”

  Pain sliced across his cheek. Reqata slapped him again, making sure her nails bit in. Blood poured down her face and her hair was tangled. Elam stumbled back, and was shoved aside by a mob of running soldiers.

  “Are you crazy?” she shouted. “You can’t kill me. You can’t. You’ll ruin everything.” She was hunched, he saw now, cradling her side. She reached down and unsheathed her sword. “Are you trying to go back to your old style? Try it somewhere else. This is my show.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  “Damn you, we’ll discuss this later. In another life.” The sword darted at him.

  “Reqata!” He danced back, but the edge caught him across the back of his hand. “What are you—”

  There were tears in her eyes as she attacked him. “I see her, you know. Don’t think that I don’t. I see her at night, when you are asleep. Your face is different. It’s the face of a woman, Elam. A woman! Did you know that? Orfea lives on in you somewhere.”

  Her sword did not allow him to stop and think. She caught him again, cutting his ear. Blood soaked his shoulder. “Your perfume. Who sent it to you?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Something in you is Orfea, Elam. That’s the only part I really love.”

  He tripped over a fallen body. He rolled and tried to get to his feet. He found himself facing the point of her sword, still on his knees.

  “Please, Reqata,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Well, isn’t that the cutest thing.” Her blade pushed into his chest, cold as ice. “Why don’t you figure out who you are first?”

  * * *

  He awoke in his adytum. His eyes generated dots of light to compensate for the complete darkness. His blood vessels burned as if filled with molten metal. He moved, pushing against the viscous fluid. Damp hair swirled around him, thick under his back, curling around his feet. It had gathered around his neck. There was no air to breathe. Elam. Where was Elam? He seemed to be gone at last, leaving only—

  Elam awoke, gasping, on a pallet, still feeling the metal of Reqata’s sword in his chest. So it had been her. Not satisfied with killing everyone else, she had needed to kill him as well, repeatedly. He, even now, could not understand why. Orfea.

  He stood silently in the middle of the room and listened to the beating of his own heart. Only it wasn’t his own, of course, not the one he had been born with. It was a heart that Abias had carefully grown in a tank somewhere below, based on information provided by a gene sample from the original Elam. The real Elam still slept peacefully in his adytum. Peacefully.… He had almost remembered something this time. Things had almost become clear.

  He walked down to Abias’s bright kingdom. Abias had tools there, surgical devices with sharp, deadly edges. It was his art, wasn’t it? And a true artist never depended on an audience to express himself.

  He searched through cabinets, tearing them open, littering the floor with sophisticated devices, hearing their delicate mechanisms shatter. He finally found a surgical tool with a vibratory blade that could cut through anything. He carried it upstairs and stared down at the ovoid of the adytum. What was inside of it? If he penetrated, perhaps, at last, he could truly see.

  It wasn’t the right thing, of course. The right instrument had to burn as it cut, cauterizing flesh. He remembered its bright, killing flare. This was but a poor substitute.

  Metal arms pinioned him. “Not yet,” Abias said softly. “You cannot do that yet.”

  “What do you mean?” Elam pulled himself from Abias’s suddenly unresisting arms and turned to face him. The faceless eyes stared at him.

  “I mean that you don’t understand anything. You cannot act without finally understanding.”

  “Tell me, then!” Elam shouted. “Tell me what happened. I have to know. You say you didn’t kill Orfea. Who did then? Did I? Did I do it?”

  Abias was silent for a long time. “Yes. Your mother has, I think, tried to forgive you. But you are the murderer.”

  * * *

  “You were not supposed to remember.” Lammiela sat rigidly in her most private room, her mental adytum. “The Bound told me you would not. That part of you was to vanish. Just as Laurance vanished from me.”

  “I haven’t remembered. You have to help me.”

  She looked at him. Until today, the hatred in her eyes would have frightened him. Now it comforted him, for he must be near the truth.

  “You were a monster as a child, Elam. Evil, I would have said, though I loved you. You were Laurance, returned to punish me for having killed him…”

  “I tortured animals,” Elam said, hurrying to avoid Lammiela’s past and get to his own. “I started with frogs. I moved up to cats, dogs.…”

  “And pe
ople, Elam. You finally moved to people.”

  “I know,” he said, thinking of the dead Orfea, who he feared he would never remember. “Abias told me.”

  “Abias is very forgiving,” Lammiela said. “You lost him his body, and nearly his life.”

  “What did I do with him?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know, Elam. He has never said. All these years, and he has never said. You hated Orfea, and she hated you, but somehow you were still jealous of each other. She cared for Abias, your friend from the village, and that made you wild. He was so clever about that ancient Bound knowledge the Incarnate never pay attention to. He always tried to undo the evil that you did. He healed animals, putting them back together. Without you, he may never have learned all he did. He was a magician.”

  “Mother—”

  She glared at him. “You strapped him down, Elam. You wanted to … to castrate him. Cloning you called it. You said you could clone him. He might have been able to clone you, I don’t know, but you certainly could do nothing but kill him. Orfea tried to stop you, and you fought. You killed her, Elam. You took that hot cutting knife and you cut her apart. It explodes flesh, if set right, you know. There was almost nothing left.”

  Despite himself, Elam felt a surge of remembered pleasure.

  “As you were murdering your sister, Abias freed himself. He struggled and got the tool away from you.”

  “But he didn’t kill me.”

  “No. I never understood why. Instead, he mutilated you. Carefully, skillfully. He knew a lot about the human body. You were unrecognizable when they found you, all burned up, your genitals destroyed, your face a blank.”

  “And they punished Abias for Orfea’s murder. Why?”

  “He insisted that he had done it. I knew he hadn’t. I finally made him tell me. The authorities didn’t kill him, at my insistence. Instead, they took away his body and made him the machine he now is.”

  “And you made him serve me,” Elam said in wonder. “All these years, you’ve made him serve me.”

  She shook her head. “No, Elam. That was his own choice. He took your body, put it in its adytum, and has served you ever since.”

  Elam felt hollow, spent. “You should have killed me,” he whispered. “You should not have let me live.”

  Lammiela stared at him, her eyes bleak and cold. “I daresay you’re right, Elam. You were Laurance before me, the man I can never be again. I wanted to destroy you, totally. Expunge you from existence. But it was Abias’s wish that you live, and since he had suffered at your hands, I couldn’t gainsay him.”

  “Why then?” Elam said. “Why do you want to kill me now?” He stretched his hands out towards his mother. “If you want to, do it. Do it!”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about, Elam. I haven’t tried to kill you. I gave up thinking about that a long time ago.”

  He sagged. “Who then? Reqata?”

  “Reqata?” Lammiela smirked. “Go through all this trouble for one death? It’s not her style, Elam. You’re not that important to her. Orfea was an artist too. Her art was scent. Scents that stick in your mind and call up past times when you smell them again.”

  “You wore one of them,” Elam said, in sudden realization. “The day my death in the north woods ended.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly taut again. “Orfea wore that scent on the last day of her life, Elam. You probably remember it.”

  The scent brought terror with it. Elam remembered that. “Did you find some old vial of it? Whatever made you wear it?”

  She looked at him, surprised. “Why, Elam. You sent it to me yourself.”

  * * *

  Abias stood before him like a technological idol, the adytum between them.

  “I’m sorry, Abias,” Elam said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Abias said. “You gave yourself up to save me.”

  “Kill me, Abias,” he said, not paying attention to what the cyborg had just said. “I understand everything now. I can truly die.” He held the vibratory surgical tool above the adytum, ready to cut in, to kill what lay within.

  “No, Elam. You don’t understand everything, because what I told Lammiela that day was not the truth. I lied, and she believed me.” He pushed, and a line appeared across the adytum’s ovoid.

  “What is the truth then, Abias?” Elam waited, almost uninterested.

  “Orfea did not die that day, Elam. You did.”

  The adytum split open slowly.

  “You did try to kill me, Elam,” Abias said softly, almost reminiscently. “You strapped me down for your experiment. Orfea tried to stop you. She grabbed the hot cutting knife and fought with you. She killed you.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The interior of an adytum was a dark secret. Elam peered inside, for a moment seeing nothing but yards and yards of wet, dark hair.

  “Don’t you understand, Orfea? Don’t you know who you are?” Abias’s voice was anguished. “You killed Elam, whom you hated, but it was too much for you. You mutilated yourself, horribly. And you told me what you wanted to be. I loved you. I did it.”

  “I wanted to be Elam,” Elam whispered.

  The face in the adytum was not his own. Torn and mutilated still, though repaired by Abias’s skill, it was the face of Orfea. The breasts of a woman pushed up through the curling hair.

  “You wanted to be the brother you had killed. After I did as you said, no one knew the difference. You were Elam. The genes were identical, since you were split from the same ovum. No one questioned what had happened. The Incarnate are squeamish, and leave such vile business to the Bound. And you’ve been gone ever since. Your hatred for who you thought you were caused you to kill yourself, over and over. Elam was alive again, and knew that Orfea had killed him. Why should he not hate her?”

  “No,” Elam said. “I don’t hate her.” He slumped down slowly to his knees, looking down at the sleeping face.

  “I had to bring her back, you understand that?” Abias’s voice was anguished. “If only one of you can live, why should it be Elam? Why should it be him? Orfea’s spirit was awakening, slowly, after all these years. I could see it sometimes, in you.”

  “So you brought it forth,” Elam said. “You cloned and created creatures in which her soul could exist. The zeppelin. The dragon.”

  “Yes.”

  “And each time, she was stronger. Each time I died, I awoke … she awoke for a longer time in the adytum.”

  “Yes!” Abias stood over him, each limb raised glittering above his head. “She will live.”

  Elam rested his fingers in her wet hair and stroked her cheek. She had slept a long time. Perhaps it was indeed time for him to attempt his final work of art, and die forever. Orfea would walk the earth again.

  “No!” Elam shouted. “I will live.” Abias loomed over him as the dragon had, ready to steal his life from him. He swung the vibrating blade and sliced off one of Abias’s limbs. Another swung down, knocking Elam to the floor. He rolled. Abias raised himself above. Elam stabbed upwards with the blade. It penetrated the central cylinder of Abias’s body and was pulled from his hands as Abias jerked back. Elam lay defenseless and awaited the ripping death from Abias’s manipulator arms.

  But Abias stood above him, motionless, his limbs splayed out, his eyes staring. After a long moment, Elam realized that he was never going to move again.

  The adytum had shut of its own accord, its gray surface once again featureless. Elam rested his forehead against it. After all these years he had learned the truth, the truth of his past and his own identity.

  Abias had made him seem an illegitimate soul, a construct of Orfea’s guilt. Perhaps that was indeed all he was. He shivered against the roughness of the adytum. Orfea slumbered within it. With sudden anger, he slapped its surface. She could continue to sleep. She had killed him once. She would not have the chance to do it again.

  Elam stood up wearily. He leaned on the elaborate sculpture of the dead Abias
, feeling the limbs creak under his weight. What was Elam without him?

  Elam was alive. He smiled. For the first time in his life, Elam was alive.

  JOHN BRUNNER

  The First Since Ancient Persia

  One of the most prolific and respected authors in the business, with more than fifty books to his credit—including, in addition to his science fiction, thrillers, contemporary novels, historical novels, and volumes of poetry—British writer John Brunner has been a prominent figure in science fiction publishing for more than forty years. His massive and widely acclaimed novel Stand on Zanzibar won him a Hugo Award and was one of the landmark books of the ’60s, and he produced several of the most notable novels of the ’70s as well with books like The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and the remarkably prescient The Shockwave Rider—which, in retrospect, can not only be seen as an ancestor of cyberpunk, but which may have been the first serious fictional speculation about the workings of an “information economy” world; it even predicted computer viruses. In addition to the Hugo, Brunner has won the British Fantasy Award, two British Science Fiction Awards, the Prix Apollo, two Cometa D’Argento awards, the Gilgamesh Award, and the Europa Award as Best Western European SF Writer. His many other books include the novels The Whole Man, The Squares of the City, The Atlantic Abomination, Polymath, Age of Miracles, Players at the Game of People, The Stone That Never Came Down, The Crucible of Time, and The Tides of Time, and the collections The Book of John Brunner, The Fantastic Worlds of John Brunner, and The Compleat Traveller in Black. His most recent books are a collection, The Best of John Brunner, and a novel, Children of the Thunder.

  In the angry and suspenseful novella that follows, he demonstrates that, yes, Progress always marches on—but that sometimes even those leading the parade and beating the drums may turn out not to really understand just where it is marching us to.…