The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  She reached down and shook the woman’s shoulder. She sat up.

  “Yes?”

  “Know where I can find the doctor in charge?” Nakada asked.

  The apothecary shook her head. “Killed,” she said. “Stray rocket, two days ago.” Then her eyes focused on Nakada’s name-tag. “Nakada, is that your name?”

  “Who else’s would it be?” Nakada asked.

  “Wait,” said the apothecary. She stood up and went to a bag marked POST, rummaged around in it, and took out a scroll case. Attached to it was a paper tag that read NAKADA.

  Nakada accepted the scroll case and tucked it into her sleeve. She took one last look around the dispensary. “Got any opium?” she asked the apothecary.

  The woman only stared at her.

  “Forget it,” said Nakada.

  Out on the deck, Nakada opened the scroll case. The letter inside was dated about a week after her meeting with Araki aboard Mappô Maru. She unrolled it and read:

  Two months ago Doctor-Lieutenant Sawako Noda, a five-year Ministry veteran with considerable experience in Antilia and the Varangian Rus, was sent up the Acuamagna on an assignment identical to yours.

  As all contact with Noda was lost after she reached La Vitoria, the Ministry assumed she had been killed. At the time of your briefing, therefore, it was not deemed necessary to provide you with this information.

  However, circumstances have changed. Three days after the incident in Espírito Santo, Andalusian agents intercepted a film reel believed to originate in Dos Orsos’ organization. The film reel and accompanying audio cylinder comprised a number of short segments of propaganda. Sawako Noda appeared in one of these segments. Her participation is believed to have been voluntary.

  Your assignment remains the same. However, you should be aware that, given this state of affairs, and particularly in light of the incident at Espírito Santo, the security of your assignment may be compromised.

  Nakada rolled the note back up and replaced it in the case. Without bothering to tighten the cap, she tossed the case into the water. It bobbed for a moment in the foam, then sank.

  She found Ishino sitting on the steel cable that marked off one of the cement ship’s destroyed sections, dangling his sandaled feet over the black water, watching the rockets arc overhead.

  “Come on,” she said.

  The boy dutifully climbed down off the cable and followed her to the floating dock.

  “You find the doctor in charge?” Shiraoka asked.

  Nakada shook her head. “Nobody’s in charge here.” She stepped onto the boat, sat down and dropped her kit to the deck. “Go ahead and fuel up, and let’s get moving.”

  “Which way, Doctor?” Shiraoka asked.

  Nakada stared at him blankly for a moment, then turned her head away.

  “You know which way,” she said.

  The surgeon came around into her field of vision.

  “You see that out there, Doctor?” he asked, nodding to the men dying as they struggled up the banks toward La Vitoria. “That’s what this war is. That’s what Antilia is. People coming over here from across the ocean trying to change things, trying to run things – people been trying that ever since those goddamn bishops showed up here a thousand goddamn years ago! What makes you think you can do better?”

  Nakada picked up her kit and stood up. It was starting to rain.

  “Just get us upriver,” she said.

  “Why?” Shiraoka demanded. “Look at this place! What fucking assignment could you even have up here?”

  “Just get us upriver!” Nakada barked.

  She stared at the surgeon till he moved aside.

  Nakada went below. She stretched out on the operating table and closed her eyes. After a little while, under the clatter of the rain on the plastic hull, she heard the engines starting up, and felt the boat begin to move.

  Upriver.

  After La Vitoria, the East Branch was a different world. A series of blue and yellow banners erected by the Ministry optimistically promised peace and safety to anyone passing into the Exclusion Zone; and though the ambulance boat passed them in the wrong direction, it was as if those hopeful words had some force nevertheless. Past the banners, the rain closed in behind them like a curtain drawn across war and memory. They continued upstream between green banks that seemed untouched by violence, quiet without the unnatural silence of Espírito Santo, and they were the only thing moving on the river. Ishino began to speak again, and Hayashi to smile, and even Shiraoka seemed to have decided on a truce with Nakada, or at any rate a cease-fire.

  They pulled in at a floating dock belonging to an abandoned farm on the south bank: little more than a mismatched pair of wooden sheds with their roofs caved in, overlooking a weed-choked melon field guarded by a single scarecrow made out of a flapping leather coat stretched over two crossed boards. Ishino and Hayashi went to pick melons while Shiraoka worked on one of the rotor nacelles. Nakada stretched out on the roof of the pilothouse. The rain had stopped for the moment, and Nakada stared up into the blank gray sky with an extraordinary sense of inversion, as if she were not beneath the clouds but above them, looking down onto a silent unknown world. She was not sure whether she actually drifted off. But she had a definite sense of being startled from sleep, just before she heard Hayashi’s shriek.

  Nakada sat up, and saw the young nurse running – stumbling, staggering, falling – away from the larger shed, swatting at something Nakada couldn’t see, while from across the field Ishino watched, dumbstruck.

  Shiraoka must have seen something Nakada had not; he grabbed an aid kit and a sack of signal flares and jumped out onto the dock. By the time Nakada caught up with him, he had already lit a pair of smoke bombs, and it was through a sulfurous yellow cloud that Nakada, coughing, approached the surgeon and the fallen nurse.

  “Anaphylactic shock,” said Shiraoka curtly. Lemon-yellow hornets, dozens of them, their black-banded, bullet-shaped bodies as long as the first joint of Nakada’s little finger, crawled over Hayashi’s blue uniform, dazed by the smoke. The nurse’s face and hands and feet were swollen with stings, and she was not breathing.

  Shiraoka pounded Hayashi’s chest, tried to blow air into her lungs. Nakada set up her formulary kit and started mixing a dose of synthetic ephedra; it seemed that the little brazier had never taken so long to bring the dosage cup to a boil.

  “Get the ventilator!” Shiraoka yelled to Ishino. He took a tracheotomy tube from the aid kit and a utility knife from his belt and made an incision across Hayashi’s swollen throat, while Nakada turned up the heat on the brazier.

  It didn’t matter. Long before the mixture was ready, or Ishino returned with the heavy bag containing the air compressor, Hayashi was dead.

  Shiraoka took the bag containing the remaining smoke bombs and flares, set fire to one end of it, and tossed it through the open door of the large shed. Nakada caught a glimpse of a giant, grotesque lump, more like a termite mound of Ifriqiya than any sort of hornet’s nest; there had been some sort of machine in the shed, a vehicle or some piece of farm equipment, but the nest had swollen to completely engulf it, and now pressed against the sides of the small building.

  Then the yellow smoke billowed out and obscured Nakada’s view.

  They burned Hayashi’s body on the bank, an aluminum stretcher for her bier, for her pyre bits of the lattice that had held the melon vines and flat boards pried from the siding of the smaller shed. They all three lit incense, and Ishino read a sutra. It began to rain again; the wet wood burned stubbornly, even after Shiraoka drenched it in fuel oil, and produced a great deal of white smoke, which drifted up until it mixed with the low clouds. The wind kept shifting erratically, and in the end Nakada and the boat’s crew had to stand several tens of meters away.

  After the fire had burned out, Shiraoka handed Nakada a pair of chopsticks, keeping another for himself. Nakada stared uncomprehendingly at them for a long moment; then she understood. Wordlessly, she and the surgeon gat
hered Hayashi’s bones and placed them in a Ministry-issue steel urn. Nakada found herself thinking of the young nurse’s round face and tanned muscular limbs; for all that solidity she’d had in life, her blackened bones were surprisingly light.

  “Get me up the Río Baldío,” Nakada told him. “To whatever the first town is, up there. I’ll make my own way after that; you and the boy can head back.”

  “Anything you say, Doctor,” Shiraoka replied coldly. He took the urn and stored it below decks, and they continued upriver.

  A little while later the rain stopped. About the same time the trees along the north bank gave way to an open field filled with glossy-leaved shrubs bearing flowers of white and pale yellow, as far as the eye could see. It must have been a plantation, before the war, but it was overgrown now, the flowers rioting out of control, spilling down the bank.

  The sun came out. No one spoke.

  For four or five kilometers it went on like that, as if heaven had fallen to earth in the form of gardenias.

  Then the trees closed in again, and the rain.

  It was near nightfall of the second day after Hayashi’s funeral when they came to the confluence of the East Fork and the Baldío, and turned southeast, up the smaller river. The banks narrowed, closed in, became the sloping concrete walls of a canal. The rain came down harder, hammering at the green surface of the water, deforming it like metal. Shapes of incomprehensible buildings rose on either shore, presenting blank faces to the river, cutting ragged edges against the lowering sky, but there was nothing that looked like an inhabited town. The current was strong and the boat seemed to be making almost no headway. Shiraoka’s eyes were moving constantly, relentlessly scanning the water ahead for floating debris.

  “Can’t see shit,” he muttered.

  They passed a boat ramp, wide and shallow, its surface a sheet of running water. Drawn up on it were ten or a dozen bizarre craft, leaning against one another, looking long abandoned: each as long as the ambulance boat but narrower, their decks enclosed in riveted plates of sheet-metal and inset with pop-eyed domes of glass, their profiles spiked and finned as if in imitation of some evil marine reptile of a past age. The hulls were rusted and some of the glass domes had been shattered, so the rainwater poured through dark gaping sockets.

  Then came a weirdly narrow railroad bridge, not cantilevered like the gallows-bridges over the Acuamagna but hanging in a loose catenary curve, the cars of a stopped train huddled in the center like beads strung on a wire, all of them painted in garish colors, glistening in the rain. When the train was directly overhead Nakada suddenly realized it was a miniature, the cars no larger than quarter-scale.

  They rounded a bend.

  Abruptly, something huge and horrible rose from the river in front of them. An iron-black monster with seven dragon heads, each nearly half as large as the boat itself, its eyes small and red and evil. Water poured off its spiky black scales as it reared itself to its full height.

  From forty meters above, the seven heads looked down at the ambulance boat, and white fire crackled along their crests as all seven opened their mouths and roared in challenge.

  Shiraoka swore, dropped the ground-effect skirt and threw the tiller hard over. The boat roared up out of the water and onto the sloping concrete bank.

  Nakada looked back at the monster. It was paying them no attention, the seven heads still roaring down at the empty stretch of river where the boat had been. As she watched, one head crackled with blue sparks and the red light in its eyes went out.

  “It’s just a machine, damn it!” she yelled into Shiraoka’s ear. “It’s a puppet! They’re trying to scare us!”

  Fireworks or gunshots were going off on either side of the canal. More roars, electric, distorted, came out of the rain. The surgeon-sergeant rounded on her, his eyes wild.

  “How the fuck do you know, Doctor?” he shouted. “You don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing here! You don’t know a fucking thing!”

  The boat roared over the lip of the bank, plowed through a chain-link fence and down a broad muddy slope. A lake spread out before them, and in the middle of it a fantastic island rose, crowded with towers, lit with torches and colored lights. Shiraoka turned to shout at Nakada again.

  A line of multicolored globes flickered to life, just in front of them. Nakada ducked. Shiraoka turned back, and the cable caught him across the throat. It picked the surgeon up, snagged on the cages surrounding the forward fans, and dropped him, as with an awful cracking sound like living bone breaking the fan nacelles were wrenched loose from their mountings. Nakada was thrown forward, into the pilothouse. Her head slammed against the console.

  When she recovered her senses, Nakada was staring at Shiraoka’s mottled face. His windpipe had been crushed. She felt for the utility knife on her belt, uncapped it. She had never performed a tracheotomy before. The procedure that had failed to save Hayashi’s life was the first one Nakada had ever seen. Cutting was surgeon’s work.

  As she hesitated, trying to decide where to make the incision, she saw Shiraoka looking at her. She didn’t know what was in his eyes – professional contempt? or simple hatred?

  She moved the knife up to cut, and the surgeon grasped her wrist. The strength in his broad hand was incredible. She struggled to pull away, and found her back up against the side of the pilothouse. Shiraoka squeezed, until Nakada imagined she could feel her bones grinding together, and the utility knife droped. The surgeon’s hand relaxed. His eyelids closed, and then rolled slowly open.

  Nakada stood up shakily. The ambulance boat was on the lake, turning in a slow circle.

  “Ishino,” she called. “Come up here and take the tiller.”

  The nurse pulled himself up from the bottom of the boat and came forward. He stopped when he saw Shiraoka’s body.

  “He’s dead,” Nakada said shortly. “Take the tiller.”

  Ishino shook himself and did as he was told, muttering some hypnotic Nichiren chant under his breath.

  “Steer toward the island,” Nakada said. “Toward the lights.”

  A pair of long piers stretched out into the lake, lit by lines of torches in standing brackets. At Nakada’s nod, Ishino steered the boat between them, toward a broad, floodlit dock at the end. The piers were crowded with people.

  “Cut the engine,” Nakada said quietly.

  Ishino kept muttering. His eyes were half closed.

  Nakada looked at the lines of men and women on the piers. These were not the disciplined, tiger-striped canoe soldiers of La Vitoria. Fringed buckskin jackets were worn over ragged Andalusian uniforms, or over incongruous beaded leggings and chests bare but for elaborate tattoos. The neck of each watcher was hung with a magpie litter of necklaces and medals and medallions. Some had jezails or air-guns, and bandoliers or ammunition belts slung across their chests; others had quivers and long straight bows.

  “Ishino!” she said, sharp now. “Cut the damned engine!”

  The boy opened his eyes, focusing immediately on the boat’s console, to the exclusion of everything outside. He cut the engine, and momentum carried them toward the dock, the boat yawing slightly, an eddying current starting to swing the stern around.

  Nakada stepped out onto the bow and uncoiled a few meters of line. When the dock was close enough, she jumped across and made the line fast to a cleat. Then she looked up.

  The structure that loomed above the dock, lit starkly from below by hidden electric lamps, was a squat, blocky trapezoid ten meters high, with faceless winged statues at the corners, an imitation of some sandstone ruin of Egypt or Persia in concrete and plaster, but overgrown now with crawling vines that would have no place in those desert lands. Silhouettes of more people topped the roofline.

  Nakada went up the slope. The facsimile temple or tomb was only a few meters thick, little more than an archway; a path lined with worn nonskid led up through the half-darkness to light beyond.

  As Nakada left the darkness of the archway, the breeze seemed to
shift, bringing with it a taint of rottenness, like preserved meat badly cured and left to spoil in its packaging. She came out from under the arch into a wide courtyard of concrete flagstones. More buildings surrounded it, in the same grandiose, antique style, and more fanciful statues.

  Along one side of the square was a row of crosses, crude things cut from raw yellow timber, each perhaps three meters tall and two across the arms. On each cross, nailed there with thick railroad spikes through the bones of forearms and ankles, was a man.

  A crowd was gathering at the opposite edge of the square: ragged fighters like the ones on the canal, but others, too: women, and old men, and many children, all quietly watching the newcomer. One of the women was Japanese.

  “Noda?” said Nakada.

  The woman watched her with the same impassive concentration as the others. There was no sign she had heard.

  Nakada approached the nearest cross. The man on it had been dead, she guessed, at least a week. Birds had plucked out the eyes, and a wide trail of tiny ants, each no larger than a poppyseed, crawled in and out of the open mouth and down the upright post. The man’s clothes, gold and white Chinese silk stained with blood and vomit and heavy rain, were those of a high functionary of the Christian church. Greek letters had been branded crudely into the man’s forehead before he died, with something like a hot steel wire. Nakada made out the word PPOAGWGOS, which she understood as leader onward. She stepped back.

  The crowd parted to reveal a small, upright figure: a woman, dressed in a colorful Antilian garment as shapeless as a horse blanket, her long, gray-shot black hair falling free on either side of a simple central part. Clara Dos Orsos was older now than when Kawabata’s photograph was taken, but there was no mistaking the eyes in her flat Antilian face.

  The Virgin of Apalaxia raised a hand toward Nakada, and the crowd fell in around her.