The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Yes dear, Barry. He went to South America when he retired. Ecuador, I think. That was how they met. When your father was in the army.” My father had told me once that my mother had never liked Barry Anscome, that he was my dad’s friend.

  “And?”

  She poured me another cup of tea. “It was such a long time ago, dear. Your father told me all about it once. But he didn’t tell the story immediately. He only told me when we were married. He said I ought to know. We were on our honeymoon. We went to a little Spanish fishing village. These days it’s a big tourist town, but back then, nobody had ever heard of it. What was it called? Oh yes. Torremolinos.”

  “Can I see it again? The statue?”

  “No, dear.”

  “You put it away?”

  “I threw it away,” said my mother, coldly. Then, as if to stop me from rummaging in the rubbish, “The bin-men already came this morning.”

  We said nothing, then.

  She sipped her tea.

  “You’ll never guess who I met last week. Your old school teacher. Mrs. Brooks? We met in Safeway’s. She and I went off to have coffee in the Bookshop because I was hoping to talk to her about joining the town carnival committee. But it was closed. We had to go to The Olde Tea Shoppe instead. It was quite an adventure.”

  Katabasis

  Robert Reed

  Robert Reed [www.robertreedwriter.com ] was born in Omaha, Nebraska. He has a Bachelor of Science in Biology from the Nebraska Wesleyan University, and has worked as a lab technician. He became a full-time writer in 1987, the same year he won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest, and has published eleven novels, including The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, and far future science fiction novels Marrow and The Well of Stars. An extraordinarily prolific writer, Reed has published over 200 short stories, mostly in F&SF and Asimov’s, which have been nominated for the Hugo, James Tiptree, Jr., Locus, Nebula, Seiun, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and World Fantasy awards, and have been collected in The Dragons of Springplace> and The Cuckoo’s Boys. His novella “A Billion Eves” won the Hugo Award. Nebraska’s only SF writer, Reed lives in Lincoln with his wife and daughter, and is an ardent long-distance runner.

  1

  The custom was to bring nothing but your body, no matter how weak or timid that body might be. Robotic help was forbidden, as were exoskeletons and other cybernetic aids. Every nexus had to be shut down; the universe and its distractions were too much of a burden to carry across the wilderness. Brutal work and miserable climates were guaranteed, and the financial costs were as crushing as any physical hardship. Food was purchased locally, every crumb wearing outrageous import fees, while simple tents and minimal bedding cost as much as luxury apartments. But most expensive were the indispensable porters: Every hiker had to hire one strong back from among a hodgepodge of superterran species, relying on that expert help to carry rations and essential equipment as well as the client’s fragile body when he proved too weary or too dead to walk any farther.

  Porters were biological, woven from bone and muscle and extravagant colors of blood. Evolved for massive worlds, most of them thundered about on four and six and even eight stout legs. But there were a few bipeds in the ranks, and one of those was a spectacular humanoid who called herself Katabasis.

  “Yet you seem small,” said the human male. “How can you charge what you charge, looking this way?”

  Katabasis was three times his mass and much, much stronger. But the question was fair. With an expression that humans might mistake for a smile, she said, “The client pays the penalty for being brought out on his back. When you give up, we earn a powerful bonus.”

  The human lifted a hand, two fingers tapping the top of his head. He had pale brown skin and thick hair the color of glacial ice, white infused with blue. The fingers tapped and the hand dropped and with genuine pride he said, “I studied the rules. I understand that rule.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “But these other creatures are giants,” he said. “That Wogfound would have no trouble carrying you. And the One-after-another looks easily stronger.”

  “All true,” she agreed. “But by the same logic, they feel no special obligation to look after their clients. Extra money has its charms, and if you shatter, they win. But I am relatively weak—as you wisely noted, thank you—and that’s why I avoid carrying others, even for a few steps. Ask the other porters here; you will learn. Katabasis is notorious for keeping her clients healthy, which not only adds to the value of the trek, but it saves you the ignominy of being brought into City West as a cripple or a carcass.”

  The modern brain was nearly impossible to kill, and no client had ever permanently died during these marches through jungle and desert. Yet immortality had its costs, including exceptional memories that played upon weaknesses like pride and dignity. Small humiliations were slow to heal. Giant failures could eat at the soul for thousands of years. Most humans would take her warning to heart. Yet this man was peculiarly different. Staring at the powerful, self-assured alien, he smiled for the first time. “Oh, no,” he said. “You cannot scare me.”

  Katabasis had centuries of experience with the species and its countenances, but she had never observed anything so peculiar as that broad, blatant grin and that bald declaration. She watched the ugly tongue curling inside that joyful mouth. The human made no attempt to hide his feelings. He was staring, obviously intrigued by the porter: The shape of her tall triangular face and the muscled contours of the rugged, ageless body, and how the bright golden-brown plumage jutted out of her work clothes. An interspecies fantasy was playing inside his crazy head. This happened on rare occasions, but never on the first day. And never like this.

  Without shame, the man adjusted his erection. “My name is Varid, and I want to hire you.”

  “No.”

  Varid didn’t seem to hear her. He continued to gaze at her with a simpleton’s lust. Then the face flattened, emptiness suddenly welling up in the eyes, and using a tone that was almost but not quite puzzled, he asked, “Why not?”

  “You won’t endure the journey,” Katabasis said.

  Varid tried to laugh but the sound came out broken, as if he was an alien attempting to make human sounds. Then the other arm lifted, bending to make a big bulge of muscle. “I’m exceptionally fit. I’ve trained for years, preparing for this day. Designer steroids and implanted genes, and I have special bacteria in my gut and my blood, doing nothing but keeping this body in perfect condition.”

  “It isn’t the body that concerns me,” she said.

  Varid shut his eyes and opened them again. “What are you saying?”

  “Your mind is the problem.”

  He responded with silence.

  “I don’t know you,” Katabasis continued, “but my impression is that you have a fragile will and a foolish nature.”

  The human face remained empty, unaffected.

  “Hire the One-after-another,” she said, one broad hand picking him off the ground and then setting him aside. “She’s more patient than most porters, and she won’t speak too rudely about you once you give up.”

  In the remote past, in some distant parcel of the newborn universe, someone harvested the core of a Jovian world. Godly hands filled the sphere with caverns and oceans, and then they swaddled their creation inside a hull of hyperfiber. Towering rockets rose thousands of kilometers above the stern, and the new starship was fueled and launched. Yet nobody ever came onboard. The machine’s purpose and ultimate destination were forgotten. Billions of years later, humans found the derelict wandering the cold outside the Milky Way, and after considering a thousand poetic names, that lucky species dubbed their prize “the Great Ship” and began a long voyage around the entire galaxy, offering passage to any species or individual that could afford the price of a ticket.

  Early in the voyage, a high-gravity species sold asteroids and rare technologies to the humans and with their earnings bought passage for a distant solar system. Once
onboard, they built a vast centripetal wheel. The wheel was deep inside the Ship, helping minimize the natural, distracting tug of real gravity. Forty kilometers wide and nearly five hundred kilometers in diameter, their home spun a circle every eight minutes, pressing them snugly against the wheel’s rim.

  Eventually the aliens reached their destination, and they sold their home to a speculator with dreams but few resources.

  That began a sequence of bankruptcies and auction sales. Each grand plan ended with fresh disappointment. Investors changed and new tenants worked the ground with false optimism, and then everything would fall apart again. In that piecemeal fashion, the habitat’s climate was modified and rectified in places while other regions were left to shatter, creating an ecological stew populated by survivors from a thousand massive worlds. Today the lone sea was shallow and hypersaline, bordered by City East and City West, while at the opposite end of the wheel stood a chain of mashed-down mountains. An artificial sun rode the hub, throwing a patchwork of colors and intensities of light into a maze of valleys, and after thousands of years, for no reason but luck, a splendidly fierce and decidedly unique biosphere had matured.

  The current owners occupied City West, and so long as their investment produced capital and public curiosity, they were happy.

  Every porter lived in City East. An abrasive, brawling community, it was as diverse as the countryside if not so beautiful. With powerful arms, Katabasis had hollowed out a boulder of quake-coral, making a cavity where she could sleep easily. She liked the City, and she loved to walk its shoreline every day, but she also had debts upon debts, which was why she worked constantly and why the wilderness was as much of a home as any place.

  Prospective clients gathered every morning at the official trailheads. Among today’s crop were several species that she preferred to humans. But Varid wasn’t only peculiar, he proved especially stubborn. She tried to whisk him aside, but he insisted that she should be his porter, making noise about proving his worth and giving away wild bonuses for her trust.

  At that point, she interrupted. “No, I won’t take you, no.” Her voice was sharp, and everything about the scene was in poor form. But at last the man seemed to understand. One last time, his face emptied. Varid finally walked away, slowly approaching the One-after-another. The small success lasted until two other humans approached—a mated couple, unexceptional to the eye—and Katabasis wondered why her day was cursed.

  Then the male human did something rare. Not only had he read Katabasis’s public posting, he also had some understanding of her species. Raising one hand to make introductions, he looked skyward and called to her by name.

  She lifted the backs of her hands, which was how one smiled politely to a stranger.

  The human was named Perri. A handsome monkey, athletically built and younger in the face than fashionable, he raised his second hand and introduced his wife. Quee Lee took one step and another and then rested. She was a dark elegant creature built from curving tissues and pleasant odors. But there were telltale signs of intense training and medical trickery at work in the muscle beneath those curves, and the creature’s new strength was lashed to reinforced bones that could weather the relentless weight. Making humans ready for this gravity was as much art as engineering. Too much bulk, no matter how powerful, eventually dragged the body to its doom. In most circumstances it was smart to begin small and build the flesh where needed, on the trail and fed by the precious rations. That’s why it was a good sign, these humans being smaller than most, and perhaps they understood at least one vital lesson.

  Quee Lee raised her arm. “It is an honor to cross paths with you.”

  “You have made this trek before,” Katabasis guessed.

  “I managed the half-kilometer from the custom office, yes,” she said, her mouth filled with bright teeth.

  “But I made the full circuit once,” Perri said. “Three hundred years ago, and my wife has been training since I returned home.”

  “I’m trying to make my life exciting,” said Quee Lee.

  “I am a boring husband,” he said.

  The two laughed loudly, excluding the world with their pleasure.

  Katabasis studied how they moved, how they stood, and with experience and unsentimental eyes, she sought the warning signs of failure.

  “My husband wants to hire you,” Quee Lee said, “but I won’t survive the journey. My goal is to make the halfway point, into the mountains, and from there someone will have to carry me.”

  “What about that Wogfound?” Perri asked. “She looks unbreakable.”

  “Except she’ll mock you relentlessly,” Katabasis warned.

  “I had one on my first trek,” Perri said. “Wogfounds are masters of insults and name-calling.”

  “Well, if I’m riding, then I deserve her abuse,” Quee Lee said. “And if I’m dead for a spell, what could the noise matter?”

  Three humans and several other alien hikers came to terms with their porters. Contracts were spun and sealed, monies were dropped into accounts of trust, and by then the day was half-finished. The habitat’s original owners had come from a world with an eleven-hour day-night cycle, and the present owners maintained at least that tradition. Food and equipment still had to be collected, which was why the porters and their clients wouldn’t embark until the next dawn.

  Perri asked to be responsible for his needs. Alone, Katabasis returned to that comfortable and familiar but ultimately alien home. A pot of boiled fish and twenty kilos of flame-blackened bread were the day’s meal, and then she chewed a stick flavored with mint and iron, walking the salty sand of her favorite beach. The night’s sleep lasted for most of three hours, which was typical, and then she woke when the dreams left her no choice, returning to the present and its stolid comforts full of hard work followed by more hard work, from this moment and until the time’s end.

  2

  The good porter knew what to leave behind. Extra clothes were burdens to drop in your tracks. Charms and religious symbols needed to be lighter than whispers, or they were unlucky evils. Even the richest flavors had to be carried in tiny doses, and only dead sticks could be collected along the way, soaked and chewed and then discarded with the body’s waste. Water in the wilderness was often tainted and sometimes putrid, if not outright laced with toxins. One rough filtering might leave a thousand awful tastes behind. But immortals lived inside tough, enduring bodies, and what was adventure without suffering? The one great law that couldn’t be cheated was that physical work required energy. Energy always meant food. But many of the habitat’s species were rare, and some had fallen extinct on their home world, which was why every visitor, local and tourist alike, was forbidden from hunting and grazing. That’s why every meal was carried and why each mouthful had to be jammed with nutrition. And the good porter fed herself before the client, because it was imperative that she be the strongest beast on the trail.

  Katabasis never brought treats or wet meals. A client might pocket dried fruits or hide away some bloody bit of meat, but if she found these indulgences, she took them for herself. The preferred rations were dense desiccated nuggets. Flavors were coded to color and every tongue had favorites, but basically these were lumps of highly purified fat that would test even an immortal’s adaptable guts.

  The trek’s first days always brought gas and embarrassing smells.

  Katabasis expected jokes and had a few of her own at the ready, but Perri and his wife seemed untroubled by the rude noises.

  The Wogfound was much less discreet. But the couple treated his jabs as just another series of farts, inevitable and natural, barely worth mentioning in a realm full of oddities.

  The humans walked the jungle trail in slow, measured steps. Pseudo-gravity was difficult for its crushing pressure, but another complication was at work: The Great Ship had its own tug, and as the habitat’s rim spun upwards, everyone’s apparent weight increased. Then the wheel peaked and fell and down came both the body and weight. A one-gee swing r
olled past every eight minutes. Clients had to contend with the shifting rules of walking and falling. Humans always fell, and they eventually broke. The other clients and their porters pushed ahead, but Katabasis’s little group conquered two kilometers on the first day and tried to hold that pace thereafter, passing through stands of pillar trees and a grove of golden willows growing around cores of carbon fiber, and then came another stretch of pillars that looked identical to the first but were born on an entirely different world. After ten days, the forest came to an abrupt end, replaced with a long valley filled with wooden reefs covered with bug-eating anemones and flower-mouths collected from scattered, left-behind worlds.

  Varid was somewhere ahead of them, walking with a Tristerman and the largest Yttytt that Katabasis had ever seen. Tracks and the wind claimed that he was matching paces with those stronger aliens. Perhaps the human felt that he had some point to prove. Maybe he was overextending himself, or maybe Katabasis had been wrong about his nature. The truth didn’t matter. She had a client and hers was quite cheerful about his pain, while his wife was proving resilient. Ten days was nothing in a very long journey, but they had a reasonable pace and ample rations, and their camp was pitched before darkness, time left to eat another dense, gut-knotting meal before managing a few hours of sleep and dreams.