The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  Seeing Tawus, the girl laid down her pipes and the two smaller children hastily set their lamb on the ground, stood up, and moved quickly to stand beside their sister with their hands in hers. All three stared at Tawus with wide unsmiling eyes. And then, as he drew near, they ran forward and kissed his hand, first the older girl, then the boy, and finally the little three-year-old whose baby lips left a cool patch of moistness on his skin.

  “Your face is familiar to them,” the cloak silently observed. “They think they know you from before.”

  “As we might predict,” said Tawus. “But you they have never seen.”

  The children were astounded by a fabric on which the patterns were in constant motion, and by the animated peacock eyes. The smallest child reached out a grubby finger to touch the magical cloth.

  “No, Thomas!” her sister scolded, slapping the child’s hand away. “Leave the gentleman’s coat alone.”

  “No harm,” Tawus said gruffly, patting the tiny girl on the head.

  And the cloak shook off the fragments of snot and dust that the child’s fingers had left behind.

  Ten minutes later Tawus turned and looked back at them. They were little more than dots in the mountain landscape but he could see that they were still watching him, still standing and holding hands. Around them, unheeded, the sheep grazed with the goats.

  Suddenly, Tawus was vividly reminded of three other children he had once seen, about the same ages as these. He had hardly given them a thought at the time, but now he vividly remembered them: the younger two huddled against their sister, all three staring with white faces as Tawus and his army rolled through their burning village, their home in ruins behind them. It had been in a flat watery country called Meadow Lee. From his vantage point in the turret of a tank, Tawus could see its verdant water meadows stretching away for miles. Across the whole expanse of it were burning buildings and columns of dirty smoke that were gradually staining the wide blue sky a glowering oily yellow.

  When was that? Tawus wondered. On which of the several different occasions when fighting had come to Meadow Lee? He thought it had been during one of his early wars against his brother Balthazar. But then he wondered whether perhaps it had been at a later stage when he was in an alliance with Balthazar against Jabreel?

  “Neither,” said the Peacock Cloak. “It was in the war all six of you waged against Cassandra, that time she banned chrome extraction in her lands.”

  “Don’t needlessly interfere. Offer guidance where necessary, head off obvious problems, but otherwise allow things to take their own course.”

  It would be wrong to say these were Fabbro’s instructions to the Seven because he had never spoken to them. They were simply his intentions which they all knew because his memories were replicated in their own minds. When they encountered those first villagers, the Seven had greeted them, requested food and a place to rest that night, and asked if there were any matters they could assist with. They did not try and impose their views, or change the villagers’ minds about how the world worked or how to live their lives. That had all come later, along with the wars and the empires.

  “But did he really think we could go on like that forever?” Tawus now angrily asked. “What were we supposed to do all this time? Just wander around indefinitely, advising on a sore throat here, suggesting crop rotation there, but otherwise doing nothing with this world at all?”

  The Seven had begun to be different from Fabbro from the moment they awoke. And paradoxically it was Tawus, the one most completely alike to Fabbro, who had moved most quickly away from Fabbro’s wishes.

  “We can’t just be gardeners of this world,” he had told his brothers and sisters, after they had visited a dozen sleepy villages, “we can’t just be shepherds of its people, watching them while they graze. We will go mad. We will turn into demented imbeciles. We need to be able to build things, play with technology, unlock the possibilities that we know exist within this particular reality frame. We will need metals and fuels, and a society complex enough to extract and refine them. We will need ways of storing and transmitting information. There will need to be cities. On at least one planet, in at least one continent, we will have to organise a state.”

  The Six had all had reservations at first, to different degrees, and for slightly different reasons.

  “Just give me a small territory then,” Tawus had said, “a patch of land with some people in, to experiment and develop my ideas.”

  In his own little fiefdom he had adopted a new approach, not simply advising but tempting and cajoling. He had made little labour-saving devices for his people and then spoken to them of machines that would do all their work for them. He had helped them make boats and then described space ships that would make them masters of the stars. He had sown dissatisfaction in their minds and, within two years, he had achieved government, schools, metallurgy, sea-faring and a militia. Seeing what he had achieved, the Six had fallen over one another to catch up.

  “How come they all followed me, if my path was so wrong?” Tawus now asked.

  “They had no choice but to follow you,” observed the Peacock Cloak, “if they didn’t wish to be altogether eclipsed.”

  “Which is another way of saying that my way was in the end inevitable, because once it is chosen, all other ways become obsolete. To have obeyed Fabbro would simply have been to postpone what was sooner or later going to happen, if not led by me, then by one of the others, or even by some leader rising up from the Esperine people themselves.”

  He thought briefly again of the children in front of the ruined house, but then he turned another corner, and there was his destination ahead of him. It was a little island of domesticity amidst the benign wilderness of the valley, a small cottage with a garden and an orchard and a front gate, standing beside a lake.

  “He is outside,” said the Peacock Cloak, whose hundred eyes could see through many different kinds of obstacle. “He is down beside the water.”

  Tawus came to the cottage gate. It was very quiet. He could hear the bees going back and forth from the wild thyme flowers, the splash of a duck alighting on the lake, the clopping of a wooden wind chime in an almond tree.

  He raised his hand to the latch, then lowered it again.

  “What’s the matter with me? Why hesitate?”

  Clop clop went the wind chimes.

  “It is always better to act,” whispered the cloak through his skin, “that’s what you asked me to remind you.”

  Tawus nodded. It was always better to act than to waste time agonising. It was by acting that he had built a civilisation, summoned great cities into being, driven through the technological changes that had taken this world from sleepy rural Arcadia to interplanetary empires. It was by acting that he had prevailed over his six siblings, even when all six were ranged against him, for each one of them had been encumbered by Fabbro with gifts or traits of character more specialised than his own pure strength of will: mercy, imagination, doubt, ambivalence, detachment, humility.

  True, he had caused much destruction and misery but, after all, to act at all it was necessary to be willing to destroy. If he ever had a moment of doubt, he simply reminded himself that you couldn’t take a single step without running the risk of crushing some small creeping thing, too small to be seen, going about its blameless life. You couldn’t breathe without the possibility of sucking in some tiny innocent from the air.

  “The city of X is refusing to accept our authority,” his generals would say.

  “Then raze it to the ground as we warned we would,” he would answer without a moment’s thought. And the hundred eyes would dart this way and that, like a scouting party sent out ahead of the battalions that were his own thoughts, looking for opportunities in the new situation that he had created, scoping out his next move and the move after that.

  There had been times when his generals had stood there open-mouthed, astounded by his ruthlessness. But they did not question him. They knew it was the strength o
f his will that made him great, made him something more than they were.

  “But now,” he said to himself bitterly, “I seem to be having difficulty making up my mind about a garden gate.”

  “Just act,” said the cloak, rippling against his skin in a way that was almost like laughter.

  Tawus smiled. He would act on his own account and not on instructions from his clothes, but all the same he lifted his hand to the latch and this time opened it. He was moving forward again. And the eyes on his cloak shone in readiness.

  Inside the gate the path branched three ways: right to the cottage, with the peaks of the valley’s western ridge behind it, straight ahead to the little orchard and vegetable garden, left and eastward down to the small lake from which flowed the stream that he’d been following. On the far side of the lake was the ridge of peaks that formed the valley’s eastern edge. Some sheep were grazing on their slopes.

  Clop clop went the wind chimes, and a bee zipped by his ear like a tiny racing car on a track.

  Tawus looked down towards the lake.

  “There you are,” he murmured, spotting the small figure at the water’s edge that the peacock eyes had already located, sitting on a log on a little beach, looking through binoculars at the various ducks and water birds out on the lake.

  “You know I’m here,” Tawus muttered angrily. “You know quite well I’m here.”

  “Indeed he does,” the cloak confirmed. “The tension in his shoulders is unmistakeable.”

  “He just wants to make me the one that speaks first,” Tawus said.

  So he did not speak. Instead, when there were only a few metres between them, he stooped, picked up a stone and lobbed it into the water over the seated figure’s head.

  The ripples spread out over the lake. Among some reeds at the far end of the little beach, a duck gave a low warning quack to its fellows. The man on the log turned round.

  “Tawus,” he exclaimed, laying down his field glasses and rising to his feet with a broad smile of welcome, “Tawus, my dear fellow. It’s been a very long time.”

  The likeness between the two of them would have been instantly apparent to any observer, even from a distance. They had the same lithe and balletic bearing, the same high cheekbones and aquiline nose, the same thick mane of grey hair. But the man by the water was simply dressed in a white shirt and white breeches, while Tawus still wore his magnificent cloak with its shifting patterns and its restless eyes. And Tawus stood stiffly while the other man, still smiling, extended his arms, as if he expected Tawus to fall into his embrace.

  Tawus did not move or bend.

  “You’ve put it about that you’re Fabbro himself,” he said, “or so I’ve heard.”

  The other man nodded.

  “Well, yes. Of course there’s a sense in which I am a copy of Fabbro as you are, since this body is an analogue of the body that Fabbro was born with, rather than the body itself. But the original Fabbro ceased to exist when I came into being, so my history and his have never branched away from each other, as yours and his did, but are arranged sequentially in a single line, a single story. So yes, I’m Fabbro. All that is left of Fabbro is me, and I have finally entered my own creation. It seemed fitting, now that both Esperine and I are coming to a close.”

  Tawus considered this for a moment. He had an impulse to ask about the world beyond Esperine, that vast and ancient universe in which Fabbro had been born and grown up. For of course Fabbro’s was the only childhood that Tawus could remember, Fabbro’s the only youth. He was naturally curious to know how things had changed out there and to hear news of the people from Fabbro’s past: friends, collaborators, male and female lovers, children (actual biological children: children of Fabbro’s body and not just his mind).

  “Aren’t those memories a distraction?” the cloak asked him through his skin. “Isn’t that stuff his worry and not yours?”

  Tawus nodded.

  “Yes,” he silently agreed, “and to ask about it would muddy the water. It would confuse the issue of worlds and their ownership.”

  He looked Fabbro in the face.

  “You had no business coming into Esperine,” he told him. “We renounced your world and you in turn gave this world to us to be our own. You’ve no right to come barging back in here now, interfering, undermining my authority, undermining the authority of the Five.”

  (It was Five now, not Six, because of Cassandra’s annihilation in the Chrome Wars.)

  Fabbro smiled.

  “Some might say you’d undermined each other’s authority quite well without my help, with your constant warring, and your famines and your plagues and all of that.”

  “That’s a matter for us, not you.”

  “Possibly so,” said Fabbro. “Possibly so. But in my defence, I have tried to keep out of the way since I arrived in this world.”

  “You let it be known you were here, though. That was enough.”

  Fabbro tipped his head from side to side, weighing this up.

  “Enough? Do you really think so? Surely for my mere presence to have had an impact, there would have had to be something in Esperine that could be touched by it. There had to be a me-shaped hole, if you see what I mean. Otherwise, wouldn’t I just be some harmless old man up in the mountains?”

  He sat down on the log again

  “Come and sit with me, Tawus.” He patted a space beside him. “This is my favourite spot, my grandstand seat. There’s always something happening here. Day. Night. Evening. Morning. Sun. Rain. Always something new to see.”

  “If you’re content with sheep and ducks,” said Tawus, and did not sit.

  Fabbro watched him. After a few seconds, he smiled.

  “That’s quite a coat you’ve got there,” he observed.

  Many of the peacock eyes turned towards him, questioningly. Others glanced with renewed vigour in every other direction, as if suspecting diversionary tactics.

  “I’ve heard,” Fabbro went on, “that it can protect you, make you invisible, change your appearance, allow you to leap from planet to planet without going through the space in between. I’ve been told that it can tell you of dangers, and draw your attention to things you might wish to know, and even give you counsel, as perhaps it’s doing now. That is some coat!”

  “He is seeking to rile you,” the cloak silently whispered. “You asked me to warn you if he did this.”

  “Don’t patronise me, Fabbro,” Tawus said, “I am your copy not your child. You know that to construct this cloak I simply needed to understand the algorithm on which Esperine is founded, and you know that I do understand it every bit as well as you do.”

  Fabbro nodded.

  “Yes, of course. I’m just struck by the different ways in which we’ve used that understanding. I used it to make a more benign world than my own, within which countless lives could for a limited time unfold and savour their existence. You used it to set yourself apart from the rest of this creation, insulate yourself, wrap yourself up in your own little world of one.”

  “I could easily have made another complete world as you did, as perfect as Esperine in every way. But any world that I made would necessarily exist within this reality frame, your frame, and therefore still be a part of Esperine, even if its equal or its superior in design. Do you really wonder that I chose instead to find a way of setting myself apart?”

  Fabbro did not answer. He gave a half-shrug, then looked out at the lake.

  “I’ve not come here to apologise,” Tawus said. “I hope you know that. I have no regrets about my rebellion.”

  Fabbro turned towards him.

  “Oh, don’t worry, I know why you came. You came to destroy me. And of course it is possible to destroy me now that I’m here in Esperine, just as it was possible for you and the others to destroy your sister Cassandra when she tried to place a brake on your ambitions. In order to achieve her destruction you found a way of temporarily modifying that part of the original algorithm that protected the seven of you f
rom physical harm. I assume you have a weapon with you now that works in the same way. I guess it’s hidden somewhere in that cloak.”

  “But knowing it doesn’t help him,” whispered the cloak through Tawus’s skin.

  Another duck had alighted on the water, smaller and differently coloured from the ones that were already there. (It had black wings and a russet head.) Fabbro picked up his binoculars and briefly observed it, before laying them down again, and turning once more to his recalcitrant creation.

  “Be that as it may,” he said, “I certainly wasn’t led to expect an apology. They told me the six of you set out in this direction armed to the teeth and in a great fury. You had a formidable space fleet with you, they said, and huge armies at your back. They told me that cloak of yours was fairly fizzing and sparking with pent-up energy. They said that it turned all the air around you into a giant lens, so that you were greatly magnified and seemed to your followers to be a colossus blazing with fire, striding out in front of them as they poured through the interplanetary gates.”

  Tawus snatched a stone up from the beach and flung it out over the water.

  “You are allowing yourself to be put on the defensive,” warned the Peacock Cloak through his skin. “But remember that he has no more power than you. In fact, he has far less. Thanks to your foresight in creating me, you are the one who is protected, not him. And, unlike him, you are armed.”

  Tawus turned to face Fabbro.

  “You set us inside this world,” he said, “then turned away and left us to it. And that was fine, that was the understanding from the beginning. That was your choice and ours. But now, when it suits you because you are growing old, you come wandering in to criticise what we have achieved. What right do you have to do that, Fabbro? You were absent when the hard decisions were being made. How can you know that you would have done anything different yourself?”