The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  The room, on an upper floor of one of the mock-sandstone ruins, was dark, claustrophobie, its doors, its narrow windows and the squared-off arch of its ceiling all built to two-thirds scale. Nakada’s hair brushed the ceiling, and the pair of weatherbeaten female fighters who held her arms had to stoop to enter.

  “What is your religion, Doctor? Are you a Buddhist?”

  Dos Orsos’ Greek was fluent, almost unaccented, reminding Nakada of her professors in Kostantiniyye. The ex-nun sat on a low cot, a stripe of gray light from one of the windows falling across her face as she looked up for Nakada’s answer.

  “I’m a doctor,” Nakada said. “Healing is my religion.”

  Nakada’s bag sat on the pallet in front of Dos Orsos. She watched as the ex-nun upended it, dumping the formulary kit, the packet containing Kawabata’s ampoules of antipsychotic, the larger packet containing what was left of the opium base from the crooked supply-dock apothecary. Dos Orsos picked up that packet and tossed it so it lay unopened on the floor halfway between the cot and Nakada.

  “You’re an addict,” Dos Orsos pronounced. “Opium is your religion.”

  Nakada opened her mouth, then closed it again. She had no answer to that.

  “What is this place?” she asked, eventually.

  “What place?”

  “This place. This island. These buildings.” Nakada nodded her head toward the window. “That square.”

  “The island?” said Dos Orsos. “Seven Cities? It was a theme park, once. Éfeso, Esmirna, Pergamo, Tiatira, Sardes, Filadelfia, Laodiceia . . . seven. This bit, this was Esmirna.” Nakada recognized the names from the Russian poet’s litany. “For the Christian tourist trade, the Romans and Franks.” Dos Orsos smiled sadly. “Your people built most of it, as it happens. It wasn’t very successful.”

  “And now?” asked Nakada.

  Dos Orsos was quiet for a long time. Then, she responded with a question: “Did they tell you why, Doctor? Why they wanted you to . . . treat my condition?”

  “They told me you were schizophrenic,” Nakada said. She seemed to be hearing her own voice from a long way away, clinical, emotionless, physician’s notes, an audio-cylinder voice. “That you might be psychotic.”

  In the darkness, Dos Orsos’ eyes closed.

  “They told me that you were responsible for the Espírito Santo . . . incident,” Nakada continued. “That your people built the . . . device.”

  “The bomb,” Dos Orsos said, eyes still closed. “We must always strive to call things by their true names . . .” Her eyes opened. “And am I responsible, Doctor?”

  Nakada looked around the room. It had never been meant for human habitation. The walls were unfinished wood, the floor rough cement. Water was running down one wall, pooling in a corner. Dos Orsos’ cot had been nailed together from unfinished logs, wrist-thick saplings cut down and crudely stripped. The beaded dress the ex-nun wore under her striped woolen mantle had been beautiful once but was now patched and stained.

  “I don’t know about responsible,” Nakada said. “But from what I’ve seen, I’m not sure your people here could build a roof to keep out the rain.”

  The women took Nakada to another building, a shockingly ordinary twelve-story tower block that, apart from the fact that it appeared to have been abandoned half-finished, would not have looked out of place in the suburbs of Naniwa or Kostantiniyye. It was only as they led Nakada through the deserted lobby and past the steel door of the fire stairs that she realized it was supposed to be a hotel.

  Most of the rooms on the fourth floor were unfinished, their doorways gaping empty, but one had been fitted with a crude metal grill, something that looked salvaged from a factory or a foundry. One of the women slid it open, and the other pushed Nakada into the room. There was a cot there like Dos Orsos’, its mattress a simple slab of Annamese latex, yellow foam mottled with brown stains and blue mold. There were rawhide straps at each corner.

  The women pushed her toward it. Nakada balked then, but her Ministry self-defense kenpo course was far behind her now and unlike the corrupt apothecary back at the supply dock, Nakada’s Antilian guards were ready for her. After a brief struggle she was tied securely down, gasping for breath and trying fruitlessly to curl around the pain of a sharp knee in the kidneys.

  She expected more beating, or worse, but instead she heard the metal grill clang shut, and the women left her alone, with herself.

  There was no need, Nakada thought, for the Antilians to torture her; her addict’s body quickly took that task for its own. Her head ached. Her muscles ached. Her spine. She itched, all over her skin, outside and inside too, as if the ants eating at the corpse of the crucified bishop had finished that meal and started on Nakada’s living flesh. She shook as if with fever, and quickly became fevered. When she was awake, she strained to sleep; when she was asleep, her dreams were prolonged bouts of hallucinatory terror, in which Shiraoka, Hayashi, the dead children of the river village and the charred dead of Espírito Santo all came to her in turn.

  She saw the Russian, Semyonov, there, sitting at the foot of the bed, back straight, legs crossed, arms slack at his sides, palms outward.

  “I came here thinking the New World was a metaphysical battlefield,” the poet said. His Greek, in this hallucination, was much better than Nakada remembered it; or perhaps it was not Greek he was speaking at all, but Russian, a language which as far as Nakada knew she had never heard. “Wanderers from the Old World, like you and me, we enter at our peril! But I was wrong.”

  He had acquired another tattoo, Nakada noticed, this one a stylized fish made from two intersecting curves; the scab had not yet healed, and the skin around it was swollen and red. She thought he should get it looked at.

  “My people,” the Russian continued, “your people, the Caliph’s people, even the bishops – all wrong. The arrogance! It’s beyond preposterous – it’s perverse.”

  “You think all this – ” said Shiraoka, who was suddenly there, at the tiller of the boat; he waved an arm to take in the dilapidated hotel room, the island, the entire continent – “is just props, for the break-up of one petty Japanese mind. You’re wrong.”

  She had other visitors, more tangible.

  Sometimes it was silent Noda at her bedside, checking her temperature and her pulse, bathing her itching skin, salving the raw places on Nakada’s wrists and ankles where she strained against the rawhide straps, forcing cups of this or that remedy – but never opium – down her throat.

  Other times it was Dos Orsos. She would take over Noda’s nursing duties; or she would simply sit and listen, while Nakada screamed and wept and begged for opium, for death, for release from her captivity or from her nightmares.

  During this time Nakada had a recurring dream. She was standing in a narrow, deserted street in a great white city under a gray sky, before an open pair of wide wooden doors. Beyond them a long staircase led up into darkness. In the shadow at the top of the stairs there waited, Nakada knew, two women dressed in black, one plump, one thin, though she could not see them in the gloom. She was about to make them, or their master, a promise – a solemn promise, founded on a lie. She knew this was wrong, but the white city at her back pushed her forward on a wave of expectation and obligation.

  She stepped through the doorway.

  The sky went bright.

  Nakada woke. She had the feeling she’d been awake for a long time, but she didn’t know how long, didn’t know how long she’d been lying on the cot with her eyes open, staring at the dirty plaster ceiling. The rawhide straps that had bound her wrists and ankles were gone.

  She stood up. Sunlight was coming through a window. She shuffled over to it. Her joints seemed to be full of sand. She felt a thousand years old.

  She wanted opium. Not in a desperate way. Just for medicinal purposes. She thought that for anyone who felt the way she did, opium should be a basic human right.

  Outside the window, a long way down, she saw Noda. She was in the middle of a w
ide expanse of gray concrete, wearing a striped Antilian garment like Dos Orsos’, going through a very slow taikyokuken routine. A ring of Antilian children, perhaps a hundred of them, sat and watched her; Ishino was among them, wearing a fringed Antilian shirt over his faded blue Ministry trousers.

  Noda finished her routine. She turned to face the building Nakada was in, and saluted in the Chinese manner, back straight, hands together in front of her chest. Then her hands dropped to her sides and she lowered her head. She stood there like that, while her audience drifted away in ones and twos. Ishino was one of the first to leave. The children were all gone, and Noda was still standing there, when Nakada turned away.

  “Come out,” said Clara Dos Orsos. “It’s not locked.”

  Nakada had the run of the park, more or less. She thought she probably could have left at any time, taken the ambulance boat and gone back across the lake and down the Río Baldío, but something she couldn’t put a name to kept her there.

  It wasn’t Ishino. The boy, when Nakada saw him, gave no sign of recognizing her, while the islanders for their part treated the young nurse like some sort of holy fool, the women giving him food, the children leading him by the hand. With Nakada they were more wary, as if Dos Orsos’ attention and protection came at the cost of some contagious bad luck.

  The inhabitants left her largely alone, and so it was alone that she wandered through the ruined park, among the imitation ruins that seemed somehow even less real now that they were truly ruined, stood under the great sign over the park’s main entrance that spelled out SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD in Antilian, Latin, and Greek; climbed the frames of the broken rides and examined the still dioramas formed by unmoving marionettes meant to illustrate the legends of the Christian apocalypse, watched the islanders go about their lives, watched from a distance as Noda taught them the rudiments of reiki and acupuncture.

  In the “city” called Filadélfia, there was a more or less fully functional film studio. It was here, Nakada supposed, that Noda had made the propaganda segment referred to in the message given to her at La Vitoria, but it seemed to have fallen into disuse since then. Nakada played a few of the audio cylinders, selected more or less at random. The recordings, almost invariably of Dos Orsos’ voice, were in Antilian, but she could make out a word here and there. Mainly these were familiar names: Antilia, Andalus, Espírito Santo; but there were other words as well, that grew familiar through repetition: bispos, mártires, bomba, Anticristo, Babilônia.

  And, eventually, always, she found herself returning to Dos Orsos’ room, in the section of park the ex-nun had called Esmirna.

  “You know I’m not cured,” she told Dos Orsos once. “You can’t cure opium addiction through simple withdrawal. The drug causes long-term changes in the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dos Orsos told her. “And perhaps if you were cured you’d no longer be of any use to me.”

  Nakada knew that by this the ex-nun was referring, obliquely, to Noda, though she didn’t know just what Dos Orsos meant.

  “Like the bishops weren’t of any use?” Nakada asked, glancing down into the courtyard.

  Dos Orsos didn’t answer. Instead, she asked: “Have you ever been to Córdoba, Doctor?”

  “Once,” said Nakada.

  “Did you visit the Mathaf al-Andalus, the great museum in Madinat as-Zahra, the palace of Abd ar-Rahman?”

  Nakada shook her head. She had visited the Andalusian capital on a holiday, with a dozen other students from Kostantiniyye. Her memories of the greatest city of the Western world mostly involved a series of drinking houses, dance halls and hashish parlors along the lower Wadi al-Kabîr.

  “Before the convent, I lived in Córdoba for seven years,” Dos Orsos said. “There are a great many poor Antilians in Iberia and Italia, did you know that? The languages are easier than most for an Antilian to learn, and the moros hardly distinguish one Christian from another. A group of Roman missionaries took me and seventeen other girls from our homes here and brought us to Compostela. For a few years they taught us Latin and Greek, then they ran out of money. With three other girls I made it to Córdoba, because if you are poor and alone in Iberia that is what you do, you go to Córdoba . . . And there we fell in with a procurer. Is procurer correct?” The word she used was προαγωγος.

  “Ματρυλλος,” Nakada supplied: pimp.

  “Ah, yes.” Dos Orsos said. “It’s not a word much used in ecclesiastical Greek, you know, though perhaps it should be . . . Well, this pimp, he was a clever man. The three other girls and I, we were still too young for the ordinary sort of work. But we could read and write. We spoke Antilian and Greek. And he had some other girls our age who spoke Frankish and Arabic – even one who, don’t ask me how, spoke Chinese. And he sent us out to Madinat as-Zahra and the courtyard of the Mathaf al-Andalus to beg.

  “Now, you will be asking yourself: ‘What’s so clever about that?’ ”

  Nakada, who had not had any thought so concrete, said nothing.

  “What is clever,” said Dos Orsos, “is this: He didn’t simply send us out to beg. First he dressed us in respectable clothes. He had one of the older girls do our hair in a respectable way – sober, with white scarves, like little moro schoolgirls. And he went to a printer, and had the printer make up some forms that said, in five or six languages, Association for the meritorious relief of the poor and dispossessed, or something similarly impressive and official. And suddenly we weren’t a mob of little beggar girls, we were collectors of alms for a charitable cause. We took in more money in an hour than most of the Mathaf beggars made in a day, and everyone who gave it to us got a carbon-copied receipt.”

  “And the pimp got a copy of the receipt, too,” Nakada guessed. “So he knew you weren’t holding out on him.”

  “Very good.”

  “And the bishops? The προαγωγοι?” Nakada asked.

  “Make not thy daughter a common strumpet, lest the land he defiled, and filled with wickedness,” Dos Orsos recited, and Nakada supposed that was her answer.

  But she thought then that it was not understanding the ex-nun expected from her, but something else.

  I was there for days; maybe for weeks.

  They all wanted the same thing – the Ministry, Doctor-General Araki, Araki’s slick Caliphate drinking companion, even Dos Orsos. Even Noda probably preferred Dos Orsos the martyr to Dos Orsos the prophet.

  But I wasn’t there for them. Not for Noda and Dos Orsos, not for Araki and the politicians, and I couldn’t even pretend any more that I was there for the Ministry.

  The Pure Land School believes that through the intercession of the Amida buddha we can all reach salvation in a single lifetime. As to the exact mechanism by which this is to be achieved, opinions differ. Some say that through repetition of Amida’s name one achieves rebirth not in this world but in the Pure Land, where all who are born are reborn into Nirvana. Others say that Nirvana is the Pure Land itself.

  All I know is, Amida has his work cut out for him.

  – from the pillow book of Doctor-Lieutenant Chië Nakada

  One night, Nakada woke to the sound of bells.

  She looked out the window of her room – not the room in the unfinished hotel but another that she had appointed for herself, in a faux-Roman building in the city called Pérgamo – and saw the square below filled by a procession of silent marchers. The marchers wore long white robes and tall black hoods; they carried pale candles, and the candles were as tall as the marchers themselves. Their bare feet made no noise on the flagstones.

  The bells were carried by a small handful of marchers, perhaps one in ten; these were followed by great gilded palanquins, on which more candles were arrayed around central figures, seated or standing: a bearded king in purple robes, a woman all in white carrying an infant child, another woman in black, weeping. Canopies were stretched above each palanquin, from which hung glittering drops of crystal and tiny silver mirrors like coins, t
hat caught the candlelight and reflected it in all directions; Nakada could hear them tinkling, over the ringing of the bells.

  She went down into the square. In the dark beyond the candles, a crowd of islanders watched the procession go by. From time to time one of the marchers would call out, and the crowd, together, would chant a response. Many of the crowd wore uniforms of a sort Nakada didn’t recall seeing before: red, with a crest in the shape of a seven-pointed star. The uniforms were threadbare but clean; some had name badges.

  It was only when she noticed the same crest pressed into the concrete cornerstone of a building that Nakada realized that many of the islanders that she had taken for guerrilla fighters, or aboriginal Antilian savages in a state of nature, were only the theme park’s former employees and their families.

  And then, behind the palanquins and the silent marchers with their candles, came the machines.

  There were riders, larger than life, electrically lit from within and mounted on horses that leaked steam from their joints. There was the dragon that had roared at the ambulance boat from the river, its burnt-out head again in working order. There were monsters whose heads were the heads of beasts and whose bodies were covered in eyes. There were cities and temples and castles that moved on wheels, lights twinkling behind every tiny window.

  The procession moved through the seven cities, in the order Semyonov and Dos Orsos had named them: Éfeso, Esmirna, Pérgamo, Tiatira, Sardes, Filadélfia, Laodicéia. Nakada followed.

  In the central square, the crucified skeletons of the bishops watched over a mock battle between a great red snake and an angel in golden armor. Nakada saw Ishino looking up at the battling figures in awe. A trap door opened, and the snake sank down into it, and a cheer went up from the crowd.

  Dos Orsos was nowhere to be seen. Nakada looked up toward the ex-nun’s window, and saw a flash of white. She made her way to the back of the crowd and went up into Dos Orsos’ building.

  The ex-nun was seated on the bed. Nakada’s formulary kit lay open on the mattress in front of her. Dos Orsos had found, or someone – Noda? Nakada didn’t think so – had shown her, the trick panel that concealed Kawabata’s ampoules of experimental antipsychotic.