The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  What came next was that five months later he still hadn’t been allowed inside ZIAP. He did know that the buildings at ground level were window-dressing and the real labs were deep underground.

  “It’s not personal,” she said, as they sat on a log in the dappled shade of a pair of miombo trees, drinking the cold beer she’d brought out to him. She pointed upwards. “If this tree had just one leaf, we’d burn. The leaf there doesn’t know what that leaf on the other side is doing. It doesn’t need to know to do its job, which is to keep the whole tree alive.”

  He was getting used to the fact that the Bemba had a proverb for everything, and if they didn’t have one, they made one up on the spot. But he also knew that a lot of the Zambian scientists here did not have access to the main part of the Institute. He was not alone.

  “Left to its own devices,” he said, “one caterpillar can eat a lot of leaves.”

  It wasn’t her style to giggle, but she did. Then she was suddenly sober-faced again. She reached into her bag, took out a sheet of smart paper, and threw it in front of them, clapping her hands and speaking a command in ChiBemba. The paper unwrapped itself and hovered upright, turning from ivory to silver. For a moment he could see the reflection of both of them – his white skin now a gently even brown, her black hair touched with just a hint of grey over her ears, her dark eyes capable of flashing from warmth to anger in a moment, his grey-green eyes half-closed against the sunlight.

  “We didn’t want you to see this until you’d recovered,” she said. “But now I must show you.”

  The smart paper listened to her voice, and then the images began: in England, Bradford laid waste, Muslims and Hindus crucified, black bodies in the streets of south London, pyres of burning bodies like sick cattle, dark-skinned children dying of radiation sickness. In France and Germany, heaps of Arabic people awaiting the bulldozers, and following the collapse of the EU as more and more countries pulled out, constant nationalist wars. In America, Harlem poisoned with a dirty bomb, the trees of the Carolinas full of rotting human fruit, and everywhere the lightning-flash flags and the pasty triumphalism. Half the world had imploded as the seas rose and the green land scorched. Dark-skinned peoples raced for rain-blessed regions, economies collapsed, and the blood of scapegoats began to flow.

  The video ended and the screen silvered. He looked at Miriam’s face in the mirror.

  “It’s much worse than you thought,” she said. “We cannot let them have the technology. We cannot! Our neighbours will sell it to them. We can trust nobody.”

  “Including me.”

  He turned away from her and felt salt tears run down onto his lips. She said nothing for a long while, and then her hand gently took his, and their fingers interlocked.

  Eventually he said, “I understand. Europe’s the new Rwanda and Sudan, and, oh Christ, everywhere!” He looked at her and realised that her eyes were wet.

  “We have a saying . . .” she started.

  “Of course, of course, there will be a saying. I thought English had a lot of proverbs, but we’re amateurs.”

  “Chimbwi afwile intangalila. The greedy hyena wants to eat everything but dies in the effort and eats nothing.”

  Across the stiff grass, in the orange evening light, children were playing football. The cicadas were starting to scrape their legs. Small birds pecked and flew and squabbled. A crowned eagle soared above the low hilltops as the sun descended ever faster towards the tree tops, polished by the thick air into brass and gold. Miriam tucked her legs up and the soles of her feet were a perfect match with the pink of the sunset on the high clouds.

  During the brief few minutes of twilight he said, “You asked me to do some thinking about the relationship between gravity and quantum vacuum foam, which, of course, there can’t be, according to theory. I suspect that was what you meant by specifically.”

  The kids picked up their football and ran off shouting towards the lights that were coming on here and there on the stoeps of the low houses across the fields.

  “How long do I have to wait for a but?” she asked. He was suddenly aware of her hand on his arm.

  “But,” he said. “It’s a big BUT! Well – actually it’s a Planck-level BUT. At the point where the relativistic equations start to become doubtful, there might, just might, be a few little holes and loops in the chikwembe of space-time.”

  She pulled her hand away and spoke quickly in ChiBemba at her silver bracelet. He heard a deep voice responding, and then she stood up.

  “Come,” she said. “The Chief’s invited us for supper.”

  The last light of the sun snuffed itself out as the terminator rushed across the Congo River, and over Angola towards the Atlantic. An invisible hand threw a billion stars across the sky and went back for more.

  She stomped her foot down. “Remember not to walk so lightly,” she said. “You keep forgetting the way snakes hear through the ground. Stay away from the bushes where puff adders could be hiding. Don’t walk under trees at night in case a boomslang is waiting to fall on you. Lift the lavatory seat before you sit down because the bite of a hunting spider is an unfortunate thing for the testicles, so they tell me. Shake out your shoes before you put them on because the scorpion likes nothing better than to curl up in them. Remember that it’s said, maybe wrongly, but as a warning, that a mamba can slide after you as fast as a horse, and its strike is incurable and its neuro-poison agonising.”

  “Health and Safety’s got to be a booming industry here,” he said.

  “That’s why we have proverbs, Jason. Your castles and fine walls rise and fall. Words have served for us. But then you know very well that most physics is proverbs. All the same – we really don’t want the possibility of an insight into quantum gravity squashed by a million-year-old venom designed to kill frogs, do we?”

  A cloud of moths and other flying things surrounded each light on the path in a moving beating dodging darting halo. The air temperature dropped from nicely warm to nicely cool.

  All this and more passed through his mind as he sat naked in the bone-shaped flyer as it followed the road down to Lake Tanganyika. Halfway down the steep hill Stephen Makonde, the laid-back pilot with a clutch of PhDs, veered off the track and settled the flyer in a patch of sugarcane. He climbed out with a machete and came back lopping the tops off two sticks. He handed them to Jason.

  “You may need this,” he said, “and this.” He reached under the seat and produced a spear with a fire-blackened tip.

  “Any other advice?” Jason asked.

  “Try not to die.” Makonde laughed. “Warriors have done this for thousands of years, but they haven’t all made it to the top.”

  “Thanks.”

  The flyer lifted off again and they flew over the little port of Mpulugu. Night was falling and the fishermen were testing the brilliant lights on their boats as they sailed out into the gathering darkness of the lake.

  He stood alone at the mouth of the valley amongst the tumbled rocks. Makonde’s flyer was a bone-shaped blackness moving across the vast bright swath of the Milky Way and then was gone.

  Strategy is a wonderful thing. He’d worked it all out in advance. Unfortunately, strategy is a child of daylight reason, and starts to fray at the edges when you’re surrounded by shadows, starlight, and the coughing and barking of the unseen and unforgiving biology that surrounds you.

  Strategy dictated that sitting under a rock shelf would be as dangerous as trying to climb a steep valley in the darkness. He walked back down the valley and sat near the edge of the lake, spear in one hand and sharp stone in the other, and waited for the sun or the crocodiles, whichever came first. Strangely, though, he wasn’t afraid. Not even when he heard a quiet splash.

  At 6:05 the sun launched itself over the hills and started to cut through the mist on the lake. He was going to burn badly. He crouched down by the water’s edge and plastered himself with grey mud. Shouldn’t have had your hair cut short, stupid, he thought. That’s what it’s for. H
e chewed on some sugarcane and tried to ignore his thirst.

  The Kalambo valley was a few hundred yards wide here where it joined the lake, and the going was easy for half a mile across gently shelving sheets of light grey rock. Then the forest closed in around the zigzagging riverbed and the boulders blocking the way were bigger. His bare feet were sore already. The cracks and crevices in the rocks chewed at what tough skin he had. The mud was already baked dry on his skin and itching. The flies liked him and camped on his back and he had to keep flicking his hand in front of his face.

  He was walking on the eastern side of the valley on a shelf that now had a thirty-foot sheer drop to his left. And there it was: a yard of emerald green mamba, coiling and uncoiling in front of him. He had no boots, no thick trousers. If the mamba struck him in the leg, he’d live for about five painful minutes. If it struck on his chest, his heart would stop in a few seconds. He froze.

  High above, a marabou stork adjusted its huge wings and dipped slightly to allow the camera a better view. In her cool office five miles away and a thousand feet down in the nuclear-hardened depths of ZIAP Miriam found herself unexpectedly sweating as she watched the pictures from the seven bird-shaped drones that circled over the valley. She moved her finger over the screen from the marabou’s view and a targeting cross-hair appeared. She was lining the attack laser up on the mamba when she felt a hand on her shoulder.

  Director Nskoshi Mulenga was wearing a beautifully-tailored sand-coloured suit that looked expensively tasteful and a red and blue tie that didn’t. “Don’t kill the snake,” he said. “Give him back his faculties. He is a man, not a refugee.”

  “But if we lose quantum gravity . . . ?” she said.

  He reached over her and touched an icon. The display changed to a panel of virtual sliders, like a mixing desk in an old-fashioned recording studio, and under each slider an image and a hint. His finger touched the square knob of a slider and pushed it from minimum to maximum. The word FEAR drifted across the screen and vanished. He reached for the knob labelled LOVE and she smacked his hand away.

  Chief Mulenga squeezed her shoulder and walked towards the door. “Don’t settle for half a man just because you can,” he said as the door closed.

  “Eya, baChiti,” she said under her breath. Yes, Chief!

  What seemed like an electric shock ran up Jason’s arm from his wrist band and jolted his spine. The mamba weaved left and right uncertainly, something threatening between it and its young. It became more solid in his eyes. It became a focused streak of death and beauty. He felt a terrible knowledge of things that were not on smart boards or papers or cinemas or even memory. This snake was utterly now.

  Very slowly he slid his feet backwards. He retreated ten feet or so and then slowly reached up to the nearest tree and snapped off a dead branch. Very carefully he stripped twigs off until he had a staff as long as he was tall. He gripped it like a cricket bat, or baseball bat, or maybe a club somebody’s ancestors had held here long ago.

  Stephen Makonde’s voice whispered from his wrist into his ear. “As your companion, I am allowed to give you one assist. Do you want it now?”

  Jason whispered back, “How many snakes in this valley?”

  “Probably a thousand, maybe two thousand. Jason, I can pick you up now. You don’t have to do this. You have our respect already.”

  “Forget it. My Chief, His Britannic Majesty, is dead and I need a new one. We made refugees pass an exam in Englishness. I decided to try this very old exam because it’s the nearest I can get to being a Bemba. I’ll take the assist.”

  “There’s a proverb that says . . .”

  “Fuck the proverb, Stephen. Tell me what I need to know.”

  “If you aim for the head, you will probably miss. A blow to the spine is a good start, but not infallible. The snake moves very slowly until it strikes. Be the snake.”

  Jason moved the branch to the side, trying to get some idea of range. He stepped an inch at a time forward until he was within about six feet of the side to side moving triangle of the mamba’s head, holding his breath. Very slowly he raised the branch above his head, took aim, and unleashed all his strength in a blow to the mamba’s back. The snake was paralysed. Maybe. Jason smashed at the head until it was a splatter on the rock. He scooped the body over the edge of the rock with the branch and it fell with a dull splash into the muddy pool below.

  “Thanks, Stephen,” he whispered.

  “Pleasure. What I didn’t tell was that very few people can do that. Bet you never knew you were a snake killer, Professor Johns. Put it on the CV.”

  A dozen snakes later, a few painful slips, with the mud cracking off his skin, leaving it exposed, he was several miles up the valley and rounding the bend that led to the falls. It was narrower here, the sides of the cleft closing in, the rocky sides higher, the jumbled rocks bigger. The sun was high overhead and the contrast between light and shadows impossible for the eyes.

  Far away, on the other side of the riverbed, he saw a flicker of movement. Two patches of tawny light appeared and then vanished. He sat very still and watched, in turn watched by the watching pair of leopards. Every minute the pattern moved. Towards him.

  Overhead real and fictitious marabou circled.

  Lion kill only when they’re hungry. Leopards enjoy killing. Yeah, you told me that. Great.

  There was a small but intent crowd standing behind Miriam’s chair. Two of the monitors showed close-ups of the leopard. Their noses were raised, nostrils wide, as they grabbed any scent they could catch on the air currents. Their eyes were grey and squeezed half-closed to get the maximum depth of field on their prey. But still they waited. Cat waiting. Slow, patient, killer stillness.

  “It is not fair,” said a woman’s voice behind Miriam.

  “Why?” Miriam snapped. “I am told I cannot intervene. He chose it.”

  “No man has ever done this without the water.” Many voices agreed.

  Miriam lifted her bracelet and spoke urgently to it. Far above at ground level klaxons wailed and children hurried up the dry banks of the river. In the deep cisterns powerful pumps spun up and pipes filled with water that had once lapped the shores of India. The Kalambo began to flow, slowly at first, and then in full rainy season flood. Down through the village it ran, past the houses and research buildings and football pitches, until it came to the lip of the falls and flung itself over.

  Jason heard a sudden roaring sound from above and then a plume of water jetted from high above him in a perfect unbroken fall to the dark green ancient pool below the cliffs. The leopards padded slowly towards him. He could see their markings clearly now. He could see the male flick his tongue around his lips and shake the flies away from his head.

  Jason backed up against a rock face and tried to wipe the sweat from his hands on some grass. He held the spear in his left hand and the stone axe-head in his right.

  The leopard crouched at the far side of the riverbed and prepared to attack. Its thigh muscles flexed. As it launched, Jason threw the stone axe. He missed, but the leopard was distracted for a moment. That was when the boiling, foaming wall of water swept down the gorge, carrying stones, branches and leopard with it. Spray launched up and drenched him. He watched the animal carried downstream for a while and then it reached the side of the river, climbed out and shook itself. The female padded slowly down towards her mate. The pair stood and looked back at the figure standing on the rock, naked, holding a sharpened stick. They turned, and walked away down the valley towards the lake.

  He had to strain his head back to look up to the top of the impossibly high column of water that was like a shimmering sky-scraper standing in a roaring pool of green and silver foam. It was a thing of beauty and terror. And the people a thousand feet above him could turn it off and turn it on again at their will.

  He found the best crossing point after a lot of indecision. Was this shallower or faster? Did this have better hand holds? The river ran from the pool at the base of the wa
terfall through a jumble of rocks. It was fast. It was powerful. But he had to get across the river. His legs were trembling with muscle spasms, and he still had a thousand-foot climb to the escarpment.

  He touched his wrist band and said “The water was great. Thanks. Can you turn it off again?”

  Silence. He looked at the wrist band. There was something he hadn’t seen before about it; it was inert in some way. It was, he realised, switched off.

  He climbed down at his chosen point to where there was a four-foot gap between two rocks with a cascade driving through. He put his hands into the water and drank deeply. Then he held the spear shaft across the rocks, lowered himself into the rushing flood and fought his way across until he could drag himself out and lie exhausted on the bank, looking up at the falling water. He was all body. His mind was elsewhere – up with the marabou, or somewhere behind him amongst the abandoned husks of chewed sugarcane. The pool at the bottom of the falls was wreathed in spray but had a dangerous aura. Tradition said that twins were thrown over here, and babies whose top teeth came out first, and upstarts who annoyed the chiefs. A flicker of intellect said that it would be an interesting archaeological dive, but the Bemba, now holders of the deepest secrets of the universe, would protect the bones of their ancestors with a fury of fundamental plasma fire.

  From below, the scree slope looked like a near-vertical five-hundred-foot high disaster waiting to happen. The rocks were anything from a few inches to a foot wide and very eager to fall down. His feet were bleeding. When he climbed on a lump of rock it would either be firm or shoot off down the hill, causing a chain-reaction that could reach the rocks above him and put him into their target zone. It took him two hours to reach the trees, and even they were sticking out from a steep hillside. He was covered in bruises from flinging himself out of the way of falling rocks.

  It was cooler amongst the trees. He pulled himself up from branch to branch and trunk to trunk, slithering back sometimes on the grass and digging his fingers in. And then he really fell, turning over and scouring bleeding trenches in his back. The flies came in squadrons to feast. His arms were wrecked. It was so far, so far up, and he was becoming impossibly heavy.