The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  As they passed under the causeway Nakada craned her neck to look up at the bodies, not ten meters overhead.

  “They’ve been there a while,” she said.

  “What about those?” said Ishino. He wasn’t looking up, but ahead, to a railroad bridge and a flock of birds that took wheeling to the air at the ambulance boat’s noisy approach.

  “Those are recent,” said Nakada.

  As they passed under the second row of bodies only Nakada looked up. Everyone tried not to breathe.

  “Is that smoke?” asked Hayashi.

  Beyond the railroad bridge there was an island, wide and low, sandy banks rising to densely packed pines. A gray pall hung over it.

  As Shiraoka took the ambulance boat wide of the island, a semicircle of yellow-brown beach came into view, and a cluster of single-story wooden buildings, silver-gray with age; and hauled up on the beach, a drab green thing like the shell of a metal tortoise, almost as tall as the buildings and longer than any three of them put together. Somewhere back behind the little wooden village, in the interior of the island, black smoke was rising.

  “Amphibious gunboat,” said Shiraoka. “Andalusian.”

  “They’re not supposed to be here,” Hayashi said. “This is still the Zone.”

  “I know,” said Shiraoka grimly. He moved the tiller, and the ambulance boat started to curve toward the beach.

  “What are you doing?” Nakada said.

  “Pulling in,” said Shiraoka.

  “No,” said Nakada.

  “This is still the Zone, Doctor,” Shiraoka said, watching the beach. “We’re responsible for what happens here.”

  “So radio it in,” said Nakada. “The fleet can have a gyro up here in a couple of hours.”

  “Those bodies back there, Doctor – how long you figure it took to string them up?”

  “We’re supposed to be going upriver.”

  “We’re supposed to be saving lives,” Shiraoka said.

  “You said it yourself, Sergeant, we’ve got a job to do,” Nakada told him. “I’m ordering you not to stop. My assignment has priority.”

  “This is my boat, Lieutenant,” said Shiraoka. “Till we get where you’re going, you’re just a passenger.” He glanced back at the crew. “Hayashi, first aid,” he said. “Ishino, stretcher.” Then he turned back to the boat’s console and revved up the fans.

  They pulled up on the beach, twenty or thirty meters from the steel hulk of the gunboat. An Andalusian soldier was sitting in the gunboat’s upper turret, his feet dangling through a hatch. He challenged them as Shiraoka killed the engines; but the surgeon only roared something back at him in Iberian Arabic, and thereafter paid him no attention.

  Ignoring Nakada as deliberately as he ignored the Andalusian sentry, Shiraoka grabbed his own kit and jumped out of the boat. The nurses scrambled to follow, Ishino with one nervous eye on the Andalusian, Hayashi glancing back at Nakada anxiously.

  Nakada followed at a leisurely pace. She could hear shots, and screams.

  It had probably been a fishing village, once. Boats had been drawn high up the beach and carefully stacked, above the flood line; the Andalusians had burned the wooden ones and shot holes in the ones made of sheet metal. The houses were all on short stilts. Some of them leaned at crazy angles, having had one or two or three of their supports hacked away. Not everything had been burned, but it all smelled of fuel oil anyhow. Fuel oil and blood.

  Nakada quickly lost track of Shiraoka and the others. She went toward the sound of the guns. The screams had stopped and the shots had become very methodical.

  There had probably been about twenty pigs, very small ones, each about the size of a Shiba dog. The bodies were piled together in one corner of the pen. An Andalusian soldier with a jezail slung across his back was pulling them out of the pile, one by one, lining them up there in the mud. As he laid each one out, another soldier with a blunderbuss shot it in the head. A third soldier, this one with a camera over his shoulder as well as a jezail, made a mark for each pig in a small notebook.

  As Nakada passed, they paused in their work, and all three of them watched her go by. She didn’t make eye contact, didn’t speak. As she left them behind she heard again the slap of a fifteen-kilo body hitting mud, and the clap of the blunderbuss.

  The village square was only about ten meters across, and not really a square. In it, there had clearly been operating a similar process to the one Nakada had just witnessed, except that in this case the bodies were human.

  About a dozen still-living Antilians were kneeling on the ground, lined up in front of what had probably been a church but was now only a blackened wooden frame. There were both boys and girls. None of them looked younger than ten or older than fifteen. Most had burns, or wounds of one kind or another, which Hayashi was busy treating; one, tended by Shiraoka, had an arm that was badly broken.

  Several Andalusian soldiers stood watching. The square was silent apart from the whimpering of the children and Shiraoka’s low comforting murmur as he worked on the girl’s broken arm. Ishino was off to one side, squatting in the dirt, staring at the folding stretcher that lay on the ground next to him. He stood up as Nakada approached.

  “What’s going on?” she asked him.

  “The captain there” – Ishino nodded to one of the Andalusians, a square-built man with close-cropped black hair, a sparse beard, and features that, apart from the eyes, might almost have been Japanese – “says he’ll take these kids somewhere if we can get them patched up. We go along, make sure they get there.” The nurse’s voice was flat, his expression blank.

  Nakada looked at the Andalusian captain, then at Shiraoka and the girl.

  “Somewhere like where?” she asked, pitching her voice for Shiraoka to hear.

  “Refugee camp, west bank,” said the Andalusian captain in heavily accented Japanese. “Safe territory.”

  “A slave camp, you mean,” said Nakada in Arabic. “In Andalusian territory.”

  The captain inclined his head and smiled wryly, a sort of acknowledgment of complicity between professionals. Nakada smiled back.

  “It’ll save lives, Doctor,” Shiraoka said, not looking up from the girl with the broken arm. “Which is our job.”

  “Our job,” Nakada said. “Right.” She looked at the shivering children, and over at the Andalusian captain, and at Shiraoka. Then she knelt down and opened her formulary kit. Setting aside a can of tincture base and a ten-grain packet of refined opium, she put together the small brazier; while it heated, she filled the enameled cup with tincture base, and started to measure out a careful half-grain from the opium packet.

  Then she looked at the children again, and dumped the whole packet into the cup. She took out a second packet and poured that one in after it.

  When the tincture was well mixed, she took the cooling cup and went to the end of the line of children, giving each of them two full spoons. What was left over after that she gave to the girl with the broken arm.

  Shiraoka’s look of grudging approval turned to anger as one by one, starting with the youngest and smallest, the children began to pass out. The eyelids of the girl in his arms fluttered and closed, and she went limp. Shiraoka felt for the pulse in her throat and, not finding it, looked up at Nakada.

  “What did you do?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.

  Nakada finished repacking her formulary kit and stood up.

  Calmly, she answered: “I told you not to stop.” To the nurses, she said: “Pack up; we’re going.”

  Shiraoka set the dead girl down, very gently, and came to his feet, his hands clenching and unclenching.

  “Back to the boat, Sergeant,” Nakada said. “Let’s go. That’s an order.”

  The surgeon’s jaw clenched. Then he bowed, stiffly but with great precision, and went.

  Nakada sat in the shade of one of the aft prop nacelles, eyes half-closed.

  “Maybe it’s better,” she heard Hayashi say. “I mean, better to die, than . .
.” She trailed off.

  “Hayashi,” Shiraoka said. “That a bushi name?”

  “No, Sergeant.”

  “You ride a horse, shoot a bow? You come from a bushi family?”

  “No, Sergeant,” she said. “Hyakusho. Farmers.” Nakada saw Hayashi glancing back at her.

  “Then I don’t want to hear any more of that bushido bullshit.”

  I’d thought Espírito Santo was beautiful. I knew this wasn’t

  We’re supposed to be neutral. But humanitarian aid always benefits one side or the other in any conflict. Sometimes it benefits both, but never in any way that balances out. Every Antilian mouth we fed in the occupied territories was a mouth the Andalusian occupiers didn’t have to feed. Every wounded Antilian we patched up in the bishops’ lands was another fighter who could go back into the bush and maybe kill someone else. Meanwhile my salary got paid and the Pure Landers got to feel good about themselves and the Ministry got to dole out fat no-bid contracts to their favorite companies to rebuild Espírito Santo’s broken levees.

  And as for the war itself that was a force of nature, no more point in trying to stop it than in trying to stop the typhoon.

  I remembered a Christian pageant in Kostantiniyye. Forgive them, the martyred god had said, for they know not what they do.

  Well, I knew. It was a game, and I was done playing games.

  Shiraoka was too straight to understand that. But I thought Dos Orsos might.

  – from the pillow book of Doctor-Lieutenant Chië Nakada

  La Vitoria – or as the occupying Andalusians called it, al-Qahirah – was at the edge of the Exclusion Zone. The east and west branches of the Acuamagna came together there, the East Branch coming down from the low coastal mountains some sixteen hundred kilometers away, the headwaters of the West Branch still unmapped, somewhere in the western steppes. The town, on the north shore between the two branches, had been a port, a gathering point for the commerce of half a continent. Now the ambulance boat moved across a broad, glassy, fogbound expanse of water that seemed perfectly empty and perfectly still. Even the rumble of the engines seemed muted, and what Nakada was mostly conscious of was Shiraoka’s muttering over his charts and his radio navigation system. She could smell smoke.

  The surgeon-sergeant looked up. “Ishino,” he said. “Get the lights.”

  The boy went to the electrical panel, and with a hum the two rotating lights that identified the boat as an ambulance, one forward and one aft, spun up, washing the fog alternately with red and yellow.

  “Is that a good idea?” Nakada asked.

  “Want ’em to know we’re coming,” said Shiraoka.

  Then Nakada heard the rattle of automatic weapons fire. Without warning, turbines roared to life somewhere in the fog off to the left, and the green-black bulk of an Andalusian gunboat heaved itself across the ambulance boat’s path, close enough that Nakada fancied she glimpsed a pale face behind one of its slit gunports; then it vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving the ambulance boat to leap and plunge across its broad wake. From the direction in which the gunboat had disappeared came more automatic fire, and the deeper thumping of a heavier gun, like the working of some monstrous pump or press.

  A muffled cry came from Ishino at the bow. Indistinct shapes, low on the water, became the sharp hulls of steel canoes, dozens or hundreds of them, long and narrow, each holding perhaps a dozen men, each separated from the others by no more than its own length, their bows pointing northwest, as precisely aligned as iron filings in a magnetic field. Shiraoka reduced speed to avoid running them down, and with a swift movement of paddles the flotilla parted silently to let the ambulance boat pass. Nakada looked down into expressionless black eyes, flat beardless faces, some of them tattooed, some painted with tiger stripes of red and black; noted the Frankish-style fatigue jackets and the fringed Antilian leggings, the jezails and rockets that lay in the bottoms of the canoes, the long paddles caught in mid-stroke. Then the ambulance boat passed through the flotilla and the paddles dipped silently back into the water.

  A coleopter whirred overhead, invisible in the fog. More gunfire came from either side now, punctuated from time to time by larger explosions. Small waves, apparently without cause or origin, passed under the ambulance boat’s hull. The air smelled of gunpowder and wood smoke.

  The fog cleared.

  La Vitoria was on fire.

  The warehouses that lined the riverbanks had already been reduced to charred skeletal frames; the commercial buildings behind were an inferno, sending up gouts of black smoke, red-lit from below. Waves of the steel canoes were crossing the lake, and men were scrambling out of them, up the pilings of broken piers and over the concrete-lined banks. Hovering coleopters poured fire into them, shells from the steel gunboats blew them apart, but they kept going, and as Nakada watched a rocket caught one of the coleopters, converting its starboard rotor nacelle into a ball of flame and sending it spinning down into the water.

  In the midst of the lake, a rotating beacon like their own glowed yellow and red. Shiraoka steered toward it.

  A ship was anchored, or had run aground, in the middle of the East Branch channel, and at first Nakada thought it was a Ministry hospital ship. But nearer to, it became clear that the grounded ship was too small, and also that the bright yellow was only a layer of paint hastily splashed over a hull of poured cement. A collection of yellow plastic shells, air-dropped field hospital units, had colonized the deck like some bright fungus.

  Shiraoka brought the ambulance boat around to the side facing the western shore, where they found an apparently empty floating dock. They drew up next to it and Hayashi jumped up to make the boat fast to a cleat. Nakada climbed out after her.

  There was something yellow in the brown water just ahead of them. Nakada looked down and realized it was an ambulance boat identical to theirs, still tied to the dock but half-sunken; it had settled until the innate buoyancy of the bullet-riddled plastic and its styrofoam core were enough to balance the weight of the fans.

  “We’re short on fuel,” Shiraoka said to Nakada. He nodded to an unattended fuel pump. “Supplies too.”

  “I’ll find the doctor in charge,” she said.

  “I’ll go with you,” said Hayashi. Since the river village Hayashi had treated Nakada with special delicacy, as if Nakada were a traumatized patient in need of emotional support, paying careful attention to her moods, constantly trying to do Nakada small kindnesses.

  “No you won’t,” said Shiraoka. “Ishino, you go.”

  A steel ramp led from the floating dock, along the cement ship’s length, up to the deck. The corrugated metal was brown with old blood.

  “Watch your step,” Nakada told Ishino.

  The boy said nothing. Nakada glanced back at him. The nurse’s beautiful face was blank as a sleepwalker’s. She couldn’t remember hearing him speak after We go along, make sure they get there.

  As she climbed, Nakada saw that the cement ship’s back had been broken in several places. Brown water boiled up through the gaps, between rusted reinforcing bars that had been pulled loose from the cement. The deck, between the yellow hospital shells, reminded her of Pachacamac after the earthquake: a badland of scaffolding, wooden planks, and steel cables bearing fluttering pennants of white danger tape.

  Nakada took one look inside the first hospital shell and told Ishino to wait on deck.

  She’d seen triage wards before, but never like this. Corpses – nearly all of them young men, some in Andalusian fatigues, others in the Frankish jackets and traditional leggings of the Antilian troops – were piled haphazardly at one end. Those near the bottom of the pile were soaked in their own blood and the blood of those above them, which had pooled on the floor despite the drainage holes cut into the plastic every few centimeters. Nearby, more dead men occupied several rows of cots: these presumably the ones that someone, erroneously, had thought might be saved.

  A lone nurse, about Ishino’s age, sat slumped in a chair
at the far end of the shell from the corpses. He was asleep. Nakada was about to try to rouse him when she heard a voice from another nearby hospital shell.

  The patients in this shell were not dead yet. There were four operating tables, a surgeon-sergeant and a group of nurses and orderlies bloody to the elbow busy at each one; there were more cots, and more nurses prepping the patients on the cots for surgery – and more bodies, those that had died on the operating tables.

  Nurses and surgeons alike moved with the jerkiness of deep fatigue. The voice Nakada had heard, she thought at first was coming from one of the patients; it reminded her of sounds she had once heard in Siam, made by the comatose victim of an antipersonnel mine, during a trepanning operation to remove a large piece of shrapnel from the front of the brain. That patient’s voice had sounded like this, slow and thick and somehow coming from a long way away, as if the speaker were conversing with the inhabitants of a world no one else could see.

  This voice came, Nakada realized, from one of the surgeons. She watched him for a moment, wondering how long he had been working without real sleep, wondering if it was the patient in front of him he was operating on, or one that existed only in his dreams.

  Nakada returned to the sleeping nurse in the triage area.

  “Nurse,” Nakada said. She had to repeat the word twice before the boy looked up.

  “What?”

  “Who’s the doctor in charge here?” Nakada asked.

  The nurse rubbed his face, looked around the hospital shell with eyes that seemed not to see the bodies, and then looked up at Nakada.

  “Aren’t you?” he asked.

  Nakada stood up. “Never mind,” she said.

  She passed through the surgery again, through the recovery area in the next shell, and on to the one behind, which looked as though it would have been the dispensary, if there had been any drugs in it, and the office, if there had been any officers. Nakada found neither; only a middle-aged Apothecary-Corporal, asleep on the floor behind a writing table.