The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  “You do us an injustice.”

  “It was probably Javeed who brought me—the lying monk attached to our unit.”

  I recognized the name. Brother Javeed, a bent, bald man of great age, had run the monastery kitchen. I had never thought twice about him. He had died a year after I joined the order.

  “Why do you think I was sent on this mission?” I told her. “We mean to set Helvetica free. And we shall do so, if we reach Sharishabz.”

  “How do you propose to accomplish that? Do you want to see your monastery vaporized?”

  “They will not dare. I have something of theirs that they will give up the planet for. That’s why they tried to board my ship rather than destroy it; that’s why they didn’t bother to disintegrate the escape pod when they might easily have shot us out of the sky.”

  “And this inestimably valuable item that you carry? It must be very small.”

  “It’s in my head. I have stolen the only copies of the Foundational Dramas.”

  She looked at me. “So?”

  Her skepticism was predictable, but it still angered me. “So—they will gladly trade Helvetica’s freedom for the return of the plays.”

  She lowered her head, rubbed her brow with her hand. I could not read her. She made a sound, an intake of breath. For a moment, I thought she wept. Then she raised her head and laughed in my face.

  I fought an impulse to strike her. “Quiet!”

  She laughed louder. Her shoulders shook, and tears came to her eyes. I felt my face turn red. “You should have let me die with the others, in battle. You crazy priest!”

  “Why do you laugh?” I asked her. “Do you think they would send ships to embargo Helvetican orbital space, dispatch squads of soldiers and police, if what I carry were not valuable to them?”

  “I don’t believe in your fool’s religion.”

  “Have you ever seen the plays performed?”

  “Once, when I was a girl. I saw The Archer’s Fall during the year-end festival in Tienkash. I fell asleep.”

  “They are the axis of human culture. The sacred stories of our race. We are human because of them. Through them the gods speak to us.”

  “I thought you monks heard the gods talking to you directly. Didn’t they tell you to run us directly into the face of the guards securing the escape pod? It’s lucky you had me along to cut our way out of that umbilical, or we’d be dead up there now.”

  “You might be dead. I would be in a sleep tank having my brain taken apart—to retrieve these dramas.”

  “There are no gods! Just voices in your head. They tell you to do what you already want to do.”

  “If you think the commands of the gods are easy, then just try to follow them for a single day.”

  We settled into an uncomfortable silence. The sun set, and the rings became visible in the sky, turned pink by the sunset in the west, rising silvery toward the zenith, where they were eclipsed by the planet’s shadow. The light of the big moon still illuminated the open rock face before us. We would have a steep 300-meter climb above the tree line to the pass, then another couple of kilometers between the peaks in the darkness.

  “It’s cold,” I said after a while.

  Without saying anything, she reached out and tugged my arm. It took me a moment to realize that she wanted me to move next to her. I slid over, and we ducked our heads to keep below the wind. I could feel the taut muscles of her body beneath the skinsuit. The paradox of our alienation hit me. We were both the products of the gods. She did not believe this truth, but truth does not need to be believed to prevail.

  Still, she was right that we had not escaped the orbiting commandos in the way I had expected.

  The great clockwork of the universe turned. Green Roshanak sped past Mahsheed, for a moment in transit looking like the pupil of a god’s observing eye, then set, and an hour later, Mahsheed followed her below the western horizon. The stars shone in all their glory, but it was as dark as it would get before Roshanak rose for the second time that night. It was time for us to take our chance and go.

  We came out of our hiding place and moved to the edge of the scrub. The broken granite of the peak rose before us, faint gray in starlight. We set out across the rock, climbing in places, striding across rubble fields, circling areas of ice and melting snow. In a couple of places, we had to boost each other up, scrambling over boulders, finding hand and footholds in the vertical face where we were blocked. It was farther than I had estimated before the ground leveled and we were in the pass.

  We were just cresting the last ridge when glaring white light shone down on us, and an amplified voice called from above. “Do not move! Drop your weapons and lie flat on the ground!”

  I tongued my body into acceleration. In slow motion, Nahid crouched, raised her blaster, arm extended, sighted on the flyer and fired. I hurled my body into hers and threw her aside just as the return fire of projectile weapons splattered the rock where she had been into fragments. In my head, the voices of the gods screamed: Back. We will show you the way.

  “This way!” I dragged Nahid over the edge of the rock face we had just climbed. It was a three-meter drop to the granite below; I landed hard, and she fell on my chest, knocking the wind from me. Around us burst a hail of sleep gas pellets. In trying to catch my breath I caught a whiff of the gas, and my head whirled. Nahid slid her helmet down over her face, and did the same for me.

  From above us came the sound of the flyer touching down. Nahid started for the tree line, limping. She must have been hit or injured in our fall. I pulled her to our left, along the face of the rock. “Where—” she began.

  “Shut up!” I grunted.

  The commandos hit the ledge behind us, but the flyer had its searchlight aimed at the trees, and the soldiers followed the light. The fog of sleep gas gave us some cover.

  We scuttled along the granite shelf until we were beyond the entrance to the pass. By this time, I had used whatever reserves of energy my body could muster, and passed into normal speed. I was exhausted.

  “Over the mountain?” Nahid asked. “We can’t.”

  “Under it,” I said. I forced my body into motion, searching in the darkness for the cleft in the rock which, in the moment of the flyer attack, the gods had shown me. And there it was, two dark pits above a vertical fissure in the granite, like an impassive face. We climbed up the few meters to the brink of the cleft. Nahid followed, slower now, dragging her right leg. “Are you badly hurt?” I asked her.

  “Keep going.”

  I levered my shoulder under her arm, and helped her along the ledge. Down in the forest, the lights of the commandos flickered, while a flyer hovered above, beaming bright white radiance down between the trees.

  Once inside the cleft, I let her lean against the wall. Beyond the narrow entrance the way widened. I used my suit flash, and, moving forward, found an oval chamber of three meters with a sandy floor. Some small bones give proof that a predator had once used this cave for a lair. But at the back, a small passage gaped. I crouched and followed it deeper.

  “Where are you going?” Nahid asked.

  “Come with me.”

  The passage descended for a space, then rose. I emerged into a larger space. My flash showed not a natural cave, but a chamber of dressed rock, and opposite us, a metal door. It was just as my vision had said.

  “What is this?” Nahid asked in wonder.

  “A tunnel under the mountain.” I took off my helmet and spoke the words that would open the door. The ancient mechanism began to hum. With a fall of dust, a gap appeared at the side of the door, and it slid open.

  * * *

  THE DOOR CLOSED behind us with a disturbing finality, wrapping us in the silence of a tomb. We found ourselves in a corridor at least twice our height and three times that in width. Our lights showed walls smooth as plaster, but when I laid my hand on one, it proved to be cut from the living rock. Our boots echoed on the polished but dusty floor. The air was stale, unbreathed by human be
ings for unnumbered years.

  I made Nahid sit. “Rest,” I said. “Let me look at that leg.”

  Though she complied, she kept her blaster out, and her eyes scanned our surroundings warily. “Did you know of this?”

  “No. The gods told me, just as we were caught in the pass.”

  “Praise be to the Pujmanian Order.” I could not tell if there was any sarcasm in her voice.

  A trickle of blood ran down her boot from the wound of a projectile gun. I opened the seam of her suit, cleaned the wound with antiseptic from my suit’s first aid kit, and bandaged her leg. “Can you walk?” I asked.

  She gave me a tight smile. “Lead on, Brother Adlan.”

  We moved along the hall. Several smaller corridors branched off, but we kept to the main way. Periodically, we came across doors, most of them closed. One gaped open upon a room where my light fell on a garage of wheeled vehicles, sitting patiently in long rows, their windows thick with dust. In the corner of the room, a fracture in the ceiling had let in a steady drip of water that had corroded the vehicle beneath it into a mass of rust.

  Along the main corridor our lights revealed hieroglyphics carved above doorways, dead oval spaces on the wall that might once have been screens or windows. We must have gone a kilometer or more when the corridor ended suddenly in a vast cavernous opening.

  Our lights were lost in the gloom above. A ramp led down to an underground city. Buildings of gracious curves, apartments like heaps of grapes stacked upon a table, halls whose walls were so configured that they resembled a huge garment discarded in a bedroom. We descended into the streets.

  The walls of the buildings were figured in abstract designs of immense intricacy, fractal patterns from immense to microscopic, picked out by the beams of our flashlights. Colored tiles, bits of glass and mica. Many of the buildings were no more than sets of walls demarcating space, with horizontal trellises that must once have held plants above them rather than roofs. Here and there, outside what might have been cafes, tables and benches rose out of the polished floor. We arrived in a broad square with low buildings around it, centered on a dry fountain. The immense figures of a man, a woman, and a child dominated the center of the dusty reservoir. Their eyes were made of crystal, and stared blindly across their abandoned city.

  Weary beyond words, hungry, bruised, we settled against the rim of the fountain and made to sleep. The drawn skin about her eyes told me of Nahid’s pain. I tried to comfort her, made her rest her legs, elevated, on my own. We slept.

  When I woke, Nahid was already up, changing the dressing on her bloody leg. The ceiling of the cave had lit, and a pale light shone down, making an early arctic dawn over the dead city.

  “How is your leg?” I asked.

  “Better. Do you have any more anodynes?”

  I gave her what I had. She took them, and sighed. After a while, she asked, “Where did the people go?”

  “They left the universe. They grew beyond the need of matter, and space. They became gods. You know the story.”

  “The ones who made this place were people like you and me.”

  “You and I are the descendants of the re-creation of a second human race three million years after the first ended in apotheosis. Or of the ones left behind, or banished back into the material world by the gods for some great crime.”

  Nahid rubbed her boot above the bandaged leg. “Which is it? Which child’s tale do you expect me to believe?”

  “How do you think I found the place? The gods told me, and here it is. Our mission is important to them, and they are seeing that we succeed. Justice is to be done.”

  “Justice? Tell the starving child about justice. The misborn and the dying. I would rather be the random creation of colliding atoms than subject to the whim of some transhumans no more godlike than I am.”

  “You speak out of bitterness.”

  “If they are gods, they are responsible for the horror that occurs in the world. So they are evil. Why otherwise would they allow things to be as they are?”

  “To say that is to speak out of the limitations of our vision. We can’t see the outcome of events. We’re too close. But the gods see how all things will eventuate. Time is a landscape to them. All at once they see the acorn, the seedling, the ancient oak, the woodsman who cuts it, the fire that burns the wood, and the smoke that rises from the fire. And so they led us to this place.”

  “Did they lead the bullet to find my leg? Did they lead your order to place me on a shelf for a lifetime, separate me from every person I loved?” Nahid’s voice rose. “Please save me your theodical prattle!”

  “‘Theodical.’ Impressive vocabulary for a soldier. But you—”

  A scraping noise came from behind us. I turned to find that the giant male figure in the center of the fountain had moved. As I watched, its hand jerked another few centimeters. Its foot pulled free of its setting, and it stepped down from the pedestal into the empty basin.

  We fell back from the fountain. The statue’s eyes glowed a dull orange. Its lips moved, and it spoke in a voice like the scraping together of two files: “Do not flee, little ones.”

  Nahid let fly a shot from her blaster, which ricocheted off the shoulder of the metal man and scarred the ceiling of the cave. I pulled her away and we crouched behind a table before an open-sided building at the edge of the square.

  The statue raised its arms in appeal. “Your shoes are untied,” it said in its ghostly rasp. “We know why you are here. It seems to you that your lives hang in the balance, and of course you value your lives. As you should, dear ones. But I, who have no soul and therefore no ability to care, can tell you that the appetites that move you are entirely transitory. The world you live in is a game. You do not have a ticket.”

  “Quite mad,” Nahid said. “Our shoes have no laces.”

  “But it’s also true—they are therefore untied,” I said. “And we have no tickets.” I called out to the metal man, “Are you a god?”

  “I am no god,” the metal man said. “The gods left behind the better part of themselves when they abandoned matter. The flyer lies on its side in the woods. Press the silver pentagon. You must eat, but you must not eat too much. Here is food.”

  The shop behind us lit up, and in a moment the smell of food wafted from within.

  I slid over to the entrance. On a table inside, under warm light, were two plates of rice and vegetables.

  “He’s right,” I told Nahid.

  “I’m not going to eat that food. Where did it come from? It’s been thousands of years without a human being here.”

  “Come,” I said. I drew her inside and made her join me at the table. I tasted. The food was good. Nahid sat warily, facing out to the square, blaster a centimeter from her plate. The metal man sat on the plaza stones, cross-legged, ducking its massive head in order to watch us. After a few moments, it began to croon.

  Its voice was a completely mechanical sound, but the tune it sang was sweet, like a peasant song. I cannot convey to you the strangeness of sitting in that ancient restaurant, eating food conjured fresh out of nothing by ancient machines, listening to the music of creatures who might have been a different species from us.

  When its song was ended, the metal man spoke: “If you wish to know someone, you need only observe that on which he bestows his care, and what sides of his own nature he cultivates.” It lifted its arm and pointed at Nahid. Its finger stretched almost to the door. I could see the patina of corrosion on that metal digit. “If left to the gods, you will soon die.”

  The arm moved, and it pointed at me. “You must live, but you must not live too much. Take this.”

  The metal man opened the curled fingers of its hand, and in its huge palm was a small, round metallic device the size of an apple. I took it. Black and dense, it filled my hand completely. “Thank you,” I said.

  The man stood and returned to the empty fountain, climbed onto the central pedestal, and resumed its position. There it froze. Had we not been
witness to it, I could never have believed it had moved.

  Nahid came out of her musing over the man’s sentence of her death. She lifted her head. “What is that thing?”

  I examined the sphere, surface covered in pentagonal facets of dull metal. “I don’t know.”

  In one of the buildings, we found some old furniture, cushions of metallic fabric that we piled together as bedding. We huddled together and slept.

  Selene: Hear that vessel that docks above?

  It marks the end of our lives

  And the beginning of our torment.

  Stochik: Death comes

  And then it’s gone. Who knows

  What lies beyond that event horizon?

  Our life is but a trifle,

  A child’s toy abandoned by the road

  When we are called home.

  Selene: Home? You might well hope it so,

  But—

  [Alarums off stage. Enter a god]

  God: The hull is breached!

  You must fly.

  In the night I woke, chasing away the wisps of a dream. The building we were in had no ceiling, and faint light from the cavern roof filtered down upon us. In our sleep, we had moved closer together, and Nahid’s arm lay over my chest, her head next to mine, her breath brushing my cheek. I turned my face to her, centimeters away. Her face was placid, her eyelashes dark and long.

  As I watched her, her eyelids fluttered and she awoke. She did not flinch at my closeness, but simply, soberly looked into my own eyes for what seemed like a very long time. I leaned forward and kissed her.

  She did not pull away, but kissed me back strongly. She made a little moan in her throat, and I pulled her tightly to me.

  We made love in the empty, ancient city. Her fingers entwined with mine, arms taut. Shadow of my torso across her breast. Hard, shuddering breath. Her lips on my chest. Smell of her sweat and mine. My palm brushing her abdomen. The feeling of her dark skin against mine. Her quiet laugh.

  “Your leg,” I said, as we lay in the darkness, spent.