The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24
Page 77
Nakada bowed. Shingen turned to the monks, who were still trying to make the Amida sit up straight. “Level, you blockheads!” he called.
“I heard about these cannibals,” Ishino said. “They cut off your hands and feet and hang your body to dry in the wind.”
“That’s in New Yezo, not down here.” Hayashi said. “I’ve seen it. It’s a ritual. They don’t really eat anybody, it’s all play-acting.”
“I know what I heard,” Ishino insisted.
They were back at the boat. The sun had slipped below the dome of the coliseum. Hayashi was grilling shrimp Korean-style, while Ishino boiled a pot of starchy, vitamin-fortified relief rice.
“Hey.”
Nakada looked up from the chart she and Shiraoka had been studying, and saw a fantastic figure hopping from foot to foot on the tiles beside the boat: a tall, loose-limbed marionette in the threadbare remnants of some kind of civil service uniform from the Varangian Rus, white wool piped with faded blue silk. As the figure came closer, Nakada saw that it was in fact a human being. Beneath a Khazar-style round cap, pale eyes stared at her out of a sunburned, unshaven red face that might have been anywhere between thirty and forty. She saw that the man had no shoes.
“Hey,” the man said again, in Japanese. “You speak Greek? You climb river?”
Climb river?
“I speak Greek,” Nakada said cautiously, in that language.
“Good, good.” The man vaulted aboard, almost knocking over Ishino’s pot of rice. “Sorry. You go upriver, yes?” His Greek, to Nakada, didn’t sound much better than his Japanese, but it came faster and there was clearly more of it. “I am Semyonov, Andrei Karlovitch. Poet. From Novgorod. You must cross the city?”
“We’re going upriver,” Nakada said. “And we have to cross the city. What about it?”
“Ship canal!” the Russian said. He picked up the chart, pushing Shiraoka aside, and held it up. “I show you.” Then he dropped the chart, distracted by Hayashi, who was taking the shrimp off the grill. “Hey! Shrimp!”
“Éfeso, Esmirna, Pérgamo, Tiatira,” the Russian was reciting, from his perch on top of the pilothouse. His bare feet were very dirty. “Sardes, Filadélfia, Laodicéia. Seven cities.”
The ambulance boat was creeping up a wide, garbage-choked ship canal, more or less at the Russian’s direction, though Shiraoka checked his charts constantly, and Ishino and Hayashi were both at the bow, watching for submerged obstacles. “Because of the legend. You know it?”
“What legend?”
Nakada sat with her back against one of the engine nacelles, her feet bare, her arms clasped around her knees. After putting the Russian in Shiraoka’s reluctant charge, she’d paid only intermittent attention to him. Mostly, she was watching the city.
The settlers who originally founded Espírito Santo in the name of the Seven Bishops had built their city on a patch of high ground, between the Acuamagna’s banks on one side and the lakeshore on the other, laden barges carrying building stone from quarries hundreds of kilometers upriver. Now as the ambulance boat maneuvered through the ship canal, skirting the wreckage of fallen cranes and overturned barges, the old Alta Cidad was clearly visible, but the cathedral was a soot-blackened ruin and the surrounding buildings were mostly roofless shells. The streets were full of dirty water and the Praza dos Bispos, running down to the river, was marred by missing tiles as if by the pock-marks of some disease.
“The Last Days,” said Semyonov. “The Christians, in Iberia and the Frankish kingdoms, they tell this story about the seven bishops that escaped the Caliph’s armies. They say the bishops set sail from Oporto with all their followers and all their treasure, and cross the Western Ocean. that through the intercession of the Agía Eylalia they are guided to an island, which they call Antilia.” Talk of religious matters improved the Russian’s Greek, Nakada noticed. “That the bishops start a Christian kingdom there, a new Israel. Seven golden cities, one for each of the seven bishops. That some day the bishops come back and reconquer Christendom.”
“Doesn’t look like they’re going to start here,” Nakada said. The Russian fell silent.
The air was hot as a sulfur spring, hot as fresh ashes. The sky was a deep blue, and completely clear. Of the looters and cannibals Ishino feared, there was no sign. There were no living people in sight, no fish, no birds. The wooden maze of the lower city, where the vast majority of the city’s inhabitants had lived and worked, was simply gone. Of the canals indicated on the charts, there remained only a vague geometry picked out in burnt pilings that rose here and there among oily slicks of garbage, with slowly turning drifts of wreckage captured in lazy eddies, the corpses of dogs and pigs and human beings grounded against accidental dams of capsized boats and fallen timbers.
Nakada surveyed the prospect with a feeling of pleasant melancholy. There’d been less than a grain of opium in the packet she’d stolen from the formulary cart in the burn ward, maybe a quarter of her normal dose, but enough to take the edge off, enough to let Nakada appreciate what was around her. She felt suffused with mono no aware, the sense of inherent pathos in ordinary things: a category which at the moment seemed to her to encompass the boat, the dirty water, the vanished buildings, the corpses, the clear sky; to encompass the world. She looked out over the ruin of Espírito Santo, and in the bathhouse heat, shivered at its tragic beauty.
She felt, for the first time in months, alive.
If what happened to Espírito Santo had happened to Iskandariya or Massalia, to Nanjing or Kokura or Kumbi Saleh – if it had happened anywhere in what we’re pleased to call the civilized world – it would have cut human history in two. Before and after. Innocence and experience. The former and the latter days of the Law. The end of one Yuga, and the beginning of another.
Instead it happened in Antilia. And like most things that happen in the dark places of the earth, it passed almost without notice from the world outside.
That was all right with me. That meant I didn’t have to share it.
– from the pillow book of Doctor-Lieutenant Chië Nakada
The Russian left them at the shattered locks, taking as payment a bag of relief rice, some packets of dried soy flakes, and a few cans of tincture base – distilled water, powdered green tea, and rice alcohol at forty percent by volume.
“You’re here to take her away, aren’t you,” he said quietly to Nakada as he was climbing out of the boat. “Like the other one.”
“Take who away?” Nakada asked.
“The Virgin.” When the Russian saw Nakada’s incomprehension, he added, in Antilian, “La Virxe da ’Palaxia.”
“Dos Orsos?” Nakada asked. “What do you know about her?”
Semyonov looked to either side, as if the flat, burnt, waterlogged landscape might hide eavesdroppers. The back of one of his hands, Nakada noticed only now, had been tattooed with a rude cross.
“Up the Río Baldío,” he said eventually. “Town called San Lucas. There’s a lake. Artificial. An island.” Then, as if he’d said too much, the Russian turned his head down and away.
“An island,” Nakada repeated, and shook her head. She nodded to Shiraoka, who started the engines.
“It’s all true!” the Russian called out, as the ambulance boat pulled away. “Seven bishops,” he continued, his voice growing fainter. “Seven cities. Seven spirits of God. Seven seals. Seven angels, with seven trumpets! Seven heads! Seven horns!”
Then they were out in the Acuamagna’s rain channel, and Nakada could no longer hear the Russian’s voice. His awkward white figure watched them from the bank of the ship canal for a little while, then turned and headed north, toward the Praza and the ruined cathedral.
Nakada paged through Shiraoka’s book of charts until she found the lake the Russian had spoken of, and the town.
“How far are we going, Doctor?” Shiraoka asked.
“I can’t tell you that,” said Nakada automatically. Then: “Pretty far.”
“How far?”
Shiraoka turned to look at her. “That’s outside the Zone.”
“Maybe.” Nakada shrugged again. “But that’s where we’re going.”
By the time they were a day or two north of Espírito Santo, the Acuamagna was beginning to come to life again. The ambulance boat passed northbound barges carrying supplies, southbound barges carrying casualties; was passed, itself, by Ministry patrol hydrofoils and other ambulance boats. Fishing smacks with smoke-belching oil-fueled motors and fat canal boats with wide lateen sails moved up and down the river as if there had never been an occupation, or a war; but a close eye noted that the crews were composed of women, and children, and men too old to fight.
It was near evening, about a week after they’d left the Russian at the locks, when they heard the music. Nakada saw a pale glow like swamp gas wavering on the western bank. As the boat drew closer it resolved itself into a swinging line of paper lanterns, suspended over the water, illuminating a thing like a long white colonnaded building, three or four stories tall, set right at the water’s edge. This in turn proved to be a fantastical flatboat or barge, its lower hull and tall smokestacks painted black, its superstructure a curling thicket of white-painted wooden fretwork, the intricacy of its carving enough to rival the incised calligraphy walls of an Andalusian palace.
Smaller lanterns hung over catwalks and promenades. Under the lantern’s light the decks were crowded with men in Ministry blue, shouting and singing and vomiting over the rail. The music, electrically amplified, half-drowned in its own feedback, carried over the water. There was a brewery smell, of yeast and hot water.
“It’s a festival,” said Ishino.
“Ôbon?” Hayashi asked.
“Ôbon’s in July,” Nakada reminded her.
“Supply dock,” said Shiraoka. “We’ll tie up here, get some fuel.”
“Can we get some beer?” asked Ishino.
The supply dock was a repurposed pleasure barge, an imitation river ferry built to take advantage of some pre-war jurisdictional loophole, exempting it from the bishops’ moral regulations and sumptuary laws. The dispensary, when Nakada found it, was at the back of a converted drinking hall, with red baize gaming tables and framed posters on the walls, advertising music or alcohol or prostitution or all three at once. On the stage, a horse-faced Doctor-Colonel, very drunk, was crooning a lugubrious love ballad into a microphone for an audience of orderlies, junior officers, and Antilian prostitutes.
The skinny, unshaven Apothecary-Sergeant that ran the dispensary didn’t like having his dice game interrupted, but he filled Nakada’s supply list with surly efficiency, packing two portable formulary kits.
“. . . and eighty grains of opium,” Nakada said when the second kit was nearly full. “Refined yellow base.” She said it offhandedly, as if it were no more important than the spirulina and the powdered ginseng.
The apothecary looked up at her. “I can’t give out opium without a supply order countersigned by the camp chief.”
“It’s for an ambulance boat,” Nakada said. To her annoyance, she could not keep a certain whining tone from creeping into her voice. “We’re heading upriver, and we’re leaving in the morning.”
“Sorry,” the apothecary said with a shrug. “No supply order, no opium.”
Something of Nakada’s dismay must have shown on her face, because the apothecary smiled then. “Unless . . .” He came around the counter and looked her up and down, clearly trying to see the body beneath the shapeless blue uniform. “You do something for me, maybe I could let you have, say, five grains . . .”
Nakada stared back at him. She could tell he was enjoying it, that it wasn’t just the thought of sex but the thought of having power over her, not just the thought of having power over a woman but the thought of having a higher-ranking woman, a doctor and an officer, needing something that only he could give her. The smile was still on his lips. Nakada thought maybe he’d done this before.
It was the smile that did it. Nakada snapped. She stepped in close to him, seeing the smile widen, and hooked her right leg behind his, at the same time gripping his collar with one hand and his right arm with the other, pushing and twisting. His feet skidded out from under him and his head banged against the counter as he went down, knocking it over. Nakada flipped him over, using his pinioned right arm as a lever, and planted her knee in the small of his back.
With her free hand she took the scroll case with her orders out of her bag, and held it in front of his sweating face.
“See this?” she said. “This is a priority order from the Incident Fucking Commander for the whole Antilian Mission. You want me to do something for you, all right, I’ll do something for you. I’ll not tell Doctor-General Araki that the apothecary on her supply dock here is trading Ministry supplies for sexual favors. How’s that sound?”
“All right,” the apothecary said, and Nakada warily let him up. He rubbed the back of his head. “No harm in asking, is there?”
“Eighty grains,” said Nakada.
Then, as the apothecary went to unlock the opium chest: “On second thought – make it a hundred.”
By daylight the supply dock had a looted, abandoned look, furniture overturned, posters askew, the deserted companionways strewn with crumpled cigarillo packets, used prophylactics, empty cans of rice wine and Antilian maize beer. Nakada sat on the afterdeck overlooking the purely decorative paddlewheel, smoking a sweet Malay-style flavored cigarillo, one of a case she’d won from an Okinawan epidemiologist at mah-jongg the night before.
The riverbank was a solid mass of green, not the deep green-black of a Kalimantan jungle or the serene unity of a bamboo forest but a motley patchwork, six or seven different shades dappled with sunlight and mottled with shadow. In the space of one cigarillo Nakada had glimpsed three different kinds of bird she’d never seen before, and heard the calls of as many more.
Hayashi lay asleep on the bristly plastic sheeting that carpeted the deck, stripped to her white undercoat in the heat, head resting on her bare arms, uniform folded for a pillow. As Nakada watched, a mosquito landed on the girl’s bare shoulder, just above the pucker of an immunization scar; Nakada blew a stream of clove-scented smoke at it, and it flew away.
Shiraoka came up the stairs.
“We’d best get moving, Doctor,” he said.
Nakada looked down at Hayashi. The nurse stirred in her sleep and curled a little tighter on the rough carpet. Nakada let out a cloud of smoke.
“What’s the rush?” she asked. She nodded to Hayashi. “Let the kids sleep it off.”
The surgeon looked at her, his face flat and unreadable.
“We’ve got a job to do,” he said. Then he turned from Nakada to Hayashi, bent down and shook the girl’s knee.
“Haya-chan,” he said.
When this produced no response he straightened up and barked: “Nurse Third Class Maiko Hayashi! Front and center!”
In an instant the girl rolled to her feet and stood to attention.
“Yes, Surgeon-Sergeant!” she barked back; and to Nakada only after that did she actually seem awake.
“Nurse Hayashi, you’re out of uniform!” Shiraoka said. “In five minutes I want you on deck, dressed, and looking like a Relief Ministry staffer who’s proud to represent her country abroad, do you hear me?”
“Yes, Surgeon-Sergeant!” Hayashi bent to pick up her folded uniform, and scrambled down the stairs.
After a last glance at Nakada, Shiraoka followed her.
Nakada sighed, stood up, and flicked the butt of her cigarillo over the rail. She watched the water carry it away, and then trailed after the nurse and the surgeon.
“Doctor?”
Hayashi’s voice came to Nakada in a golden haze, sunlight filtered through the ambulance boat’s yellow plastic hull. She’d thrown a sheet over the stained but clean t
able in the boat’s below-decks operating theater and stretched out for a nap, after dissolving three grains of the crooked apothecary’s refined opium in a cup of tincture base. She remembered that clearly, but it took her a little while to remember anything else, like who and where she was.
“Yeah,” she said.
“You might want to see this,” said Hayashi.
Nakada opened her eyes. She sat up, fumbled for a sterile wipe, tore open the packet with her teeth and ran the wipe over her face and hands, the sudden chill of the evaporating alcohol making her shiver.
She felt great.
My husband and son think I’m an unnatural mother.
When I was in Japan I thought my problem was that I was addicted to helping people. It’s a syndrome so common in the Ministry that there’s a name for it. Sukuidaorë. “To bring ruin upon oneself through extravagance in providing aid.” As one might bring ruin upon oneself through extravagance in eating, or drinking, or gambling. There are counseling programs.
I thought I recognized it in myself. And, like most sufferers, I didn’t really see it as a problem. Truth be told, counseling programs or no counseling programs, it’s not a syndrome the Ministry is all that interested in curing. As long as they can still get useful work out of you, sukuidaorë is to them essentially benign.
My problem, as it turned out, was not essentially benign.
– from the pillow book of Doctor-Lieutenant Chië Nakada
“Don’t like the look of that,” Hayashi said, as she came on deck.
The river was very wide here, the banks lost beyond fields of drowned reeds that seemed to stretch to the horizon. That morning they’d passed a line of stone pilings, the remnants of some vanished causeway, crumbled like Europe’s pre-Islamic ruins. The causeway ahead of them now was concrete and steel, much newer, and largely intact. But it wasn’t the causeway Hayashi was looking at; it was the blackened bodies hanging from it. Dozens of them, and even at a distance Nakada could see that they were of all ages and sizes, infants and grown men, children and old people, some hanging by the neck and others by the ankles. There were animals, too: dogs, pigs, something that might have been a cat or a rabbit. Birds had been at them, and here and there Nakada could see right through them, the bright blue sky framed by bones and tattered rags.