The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  It was late in the afternoon when he crawled on all fours over the crown of the hill and looked down at the lip of Kalambo Falls and the valley curving away to the distant lake. It was then that he heard the cough and spun painfully around.

  The hyenas were spaced out amongst the trees, in perfect tactical formation. He had nothing. His spear was in the river, along with his axe-head. He’d come so far, he’d climbed up Kalambo, and it seemed unjust that he’d finally be taken down by these evil snouts and bodies with mismatched front and back legs. He pulled himself up into the nearest tree, six feet, eight feet high. The hyenas watched and waited expectantly. Saliva dripped from their muzzles.

  And then he uttered the most heart-felt primal scream, a scream that launched from the solar-plexus, a scream that echoed around the hills, and leapt towards the nearest hyena, screaming and screaming with rage and hatred, screaming the word chimbwi over and over again.

  The hyenas turned and ran.

  The man with the girl’s name walked out of the trees, with six soldiers carrying Kalashnikovs. He beckoned. Jason shook his head slowly. It was a quarter of a mile downhill to the river.

  “You are in Tanzania, now,” Arisa said. “They have no jurisdiction here. I hope you will come willingly. But you will come. You will be well-looked after. We may even give you back to the Zambians when we have what we need from you.”

  “I have nothing you could want,” said Jason. “So, I’ll say goodbye.”

  Arisa was wrapped in a Masai cloth. He raised his long walking stick and pointed. The soldiers moved forwards.

  Four marabous banked their eight-foot wingspan and dived. They spat plasma and the trees around Arisa and his men exploded into flame.

  The white-skinned, bleeding, exhausted warrior turned his back on them and walked down the steep slope towards the lip of the falls.

  Miriam was standing at the other side of the Kalambo. The river was fast but shallow here on the lip of the falls. Shallow, but slippery on the rocks, and eight hundred feet is too long a drop to survive. Jason looked upstream for a safer crossing, then shook his head, and stepped into the water just an arm’s length from the edge. The river was flowing fast. He had no strength. His foot slipped and he stumbled, reaching underwater to grab a split in the rock. He was inches from the gulf. She waded into the water, coming to help him, but he shouted “No!” and she stood still. Slowly he moved away from the lip of the falls and groped his way across the river.

  Miriam said nothing. She took his hand and touched a small rod to his refugee bracelet. It sprang open, and she caught it and handed it to him. He felt a waterfall of emotion sweep through him. Things held back rushed into every part of him. He stood, naked and bleeding, at the lip of the falls and threw the bracelet out into the air and watched it fall into the spray below. He stood and so profoundly wanted to jump.

  “They weren’t stupid, were they, my people?” Miriam asked.

  “No,” he said, “not at all.”

  “So?”

  “Gravity is god. I get it. I really do. All that’s left of me gets it.”

  She splashed him with the cool water until he was clean and rubbed a balm into his lacerated back.

  They walked up the gravel path to the open area where the tourist buses usually stopped. On the way she handed him a sheet of cloth and helped him wrap it around himself. In the car park more than a hundred men, women and children went down on one knee and said, as though with a single voice, “Mwapoleni baChitikela. Greetings, Little Chief.”

  A fat blue pig flew in from the north and landed behind the crowd, who laughed and clapped. “That’s yours, baby. And by the way, you’re not the chief, but you’re the only theoretical physicist ever to do the warrior’s climb, so you’re a chief for today,” Miriam said. There was a pot sitting over a charcoal stove. Jason accepted a length of plastic tube from Chief Mulenga, who was mostly known as the Director of the research institute, pushed it down through the steaming scum on the surface, and sucked long and hard on the hot honey beer. A young girl came up and shyly presented him with a pair of very good shoes. A boy brought him a garland of flame lilies.

  Jason turned to Chief Mulenga, and said “I’d like to meet the last one who did the climb.”

  Mulenga smiled. “That’s a bit difficult,” he said. “To the best of our knowledge, nobody’s done it for a couple of hundred years.”

  They stood, waiting for his speech. It was very brief.

  He pointed to his legs and said, “A white man knows he is at home in Africa when he wears shorts every day and grows hair on his knees.”

  Then the drumming started. Multi-coloured laser beams flashed across the valley and intersected. Each intersection caused a crack or boom of sound, deep, sharp, a deafening cascade of pulsating cross-rhythms that sent the storks into ecstatic loopings of the loop and cobra to shift their heads to the beat and even chimbwi the hyena danced on his shrunken back legs, and far downstream on the banks of the flowing Kalambo two leopards twined together amongst the trees and danced and the whole valley flashed with rainbow light and sang, each to his own, including the humans, the ancient songs of life.

  His head was dizzy with the honey beer as she led him up a path he’d never seen, to a rondavel. The walls weren’t made of mud, the thatched roof wasn’t made of reeds, and the window gaps had little force fields to keep out the insects and let in the breeze. But it looked like a hut. The moon was a fat fish struggling to get out of the bright net of the Milky Way.

  She caught hold of his hand and touched his fingertip to the sensor by the door. It swung back, and the interior lights came on, low and warm. “Your new house,” she said. “Feel entirely free to change the decorations.”

  They went in. The door closed softly behind them.

  The bed was wide and covered with golden sheepskin. “I just thought that every Jason should have his fleece.”

  He laughed, and they laughed together, and then they stood close but awkward.

  After a while she said, “I think I read somewhere that you are an expert on Knot Theory.”

  He shrugged modestly.

  “Can you help me with this?” she asked, pointing to knot that tied her chikwembe around her. And so Jason untied the knot and they fell together onto the Golden Fleece, and made love until the moon had long escaped and the sun was getting ready to shine his hot embarrassed face on Africa.

  In the dawn light they were tangled up in the sheepskin and her leg was across his hips.

  Her eyes opened, and suddenly flooded with tears. “We have a terrible thing to ask, baby warrior,” she said.

  He kissed her nose and asked, “What’s that?”

  There was a long pause, and then she said, “We need you to go back to Europe.”

  In the far distance chimbwi, the hyena, laughed and the world and the sun stopped. Down at the edge of Lake Tanganyika lay the bodies of two crocodiles, each drilled neatly through by a laser beam. But Miriam wasn’t going to tell Jason that, and the crocodiles couldn’t.

  DEAD MAN’S RUN

  Robert Reed

  Here’s another novella by Robert Reed, whose “A History of Terraforming” appears elsewhere in this book. Here, Reed does an excellent job of making this simultaneously a murder mystery and a valid science fiction story where the SF element is essential to both the resolution of the plot and the solving of the mystery; it also functions in a vivid way as a sports story, since the sport of running is integral to the plot, and Reed’s obvious familiarity with runners and running – he’s used the sport before in other stories – shows through to excellent effect as Reed sprints the reader along to the finish line. . . .

  One

  THE PHONE WAKES him. Lucas snags it off the nightstand and clips it to the right side of his face. The caller has to be on the Allow list, so he opens the line. Lucas isn’t great with numbers and even worse reading, but he has a genius for sounds, for voices. A certain kind of silence comes across. That’s when he knows.r />
  “When are we running?” the voice says.

  “You’re not running,” Lucas says. “You’re dead.”

  He hangs up.

  Right away, Lucas feels sorry. Guilty, a little bit. But mostly pissed because he knows how this will play out.

  The nightstand clock and phone agree. It’s three minutes after five in the morning. What calls itself Wade Tanner is jumping hurdles right now, trying to slip back on the Allow list. That race can last ten seconds or ten minutes. Sleep won’t happen till this conversation is done. But calling Wade’s home number makes it look like Lucas wants to chat, which he doesn’t. And that’s why he tells his phone to give up the fight, letting every call through.

  The ringing begins.

  “You know what you need?” says a horny foreign-girl voice. “Fun.”

  Lucas hangs up and watches. A dozen calls beg to be answered. Two dozen. Obvious adult crap and beach sale crap are flagged. He picks from what’s left over, and a man says, “Don’t hang up, I beg you.” The accent is familiar and pleasant, making English sing. “I live in Goa and haven’t money for air conditioning and food too. But I have a daughter, very pretty.”

  Lucas groans.

  “And a little son,” the voice says, breaking at the edges. “Do you know despair, my friend? Do you understand what a father will do to save his precious blood?”

  Lucas hangs up and picks again.

  The silence returns, that weird nothing. And again, what isn’t Wade says, “What time are we running?”

  “Seven o’clock,” Lucas says.

  “From the Y?”

  “Sure.” Lucas has a raspy voice that always seems a little loud, rolling out of the wide, expressive mouth. Sun and wind can be rough on runners, but worse enemies have beaten up his face. The bright brown eyes never stop jumping. The long black hair is graying and growing thin up high. But the forty-year-old body is supremely fit – broad shoulders squared up, the deep chest and narrow trunk sporting a pair of exceptionally long legs.

  “Are you running with us?” says Wade.

  “Yeah.” Lucas sits up in bed, the cold dark grabbing him.

  “Who else is coming?”

  Whenever Wade talks, other sounds flow in. It feels as if the dead man is sitting in a big busy room, everybody else trying to be quiet while he chats. That’s how Lucas pictures things: Too many people pushed together, wanting to be quiet but needing to whisper, to breathe.

  Wade says, “Who else?”

  “Everybody, I guess.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah, but I need to sleep now.”

  “Sleep’s overrated,” says Wade.

  “Most things are.”

  The voice laughs. It used to be crazy, hearing that laugh. And now it’s nothing but normal.

  “So I’ll leave you alone,” says Wade. “Besides, I’ve got other calls to make.”

  And again, that perfect nothing comes raining back. The sound the world makes when it isn’t saying anything.

  Lucas can’t sleep, but he can always drink coffee.

  By six-thirty, an entire pot is in his belly and his blood. Fifty-two degrees inside the house, and he’s wearing the heavy polypro top and blue wind-breaker and black tights, all showing their years. But the shoes are mostly new. On the kitchen television, Steve McQueen chases middle-aged hit men instead of doing what makes sense, which is scrogging Jacqueline Bisset. McQueen drives, and Lucas cleans the coffee machine and counter and the Boston Marathon ’17 cup. A commercial comes on – another relief plea – and Lucas turns it off in mid-misery. Then he drops the thermostat five degrees and puts on clean butcher gloves and the wool mittens that he’s had for fifteen years. The headband slides around his neck and he pulls on the black stocking cap that still smells like mothballs. His pack waits beside the back door, ready to go. He straps it on, leaving only one more ritual – throwing his right foot on a stool and twisting the fancy bracelet so it rides comfortably on the bare ankle, tasting flesh, telling the world that he is sober.

  The outside air is frigid and blustery. Lucas trots down the driveway and turns into the wind. Arms swing easy, lending momentum to a stride that needs no help. Even slow, Lucas looks swift. Every coach dreams of discovering a talent like his – this marriage of strength, grace, and blood-born endurance. Set a mug of beer on that head and not a drop splashes free. The stride is that smooth, that elegant. That fine. But biology demands that a brain has to inhabit that perfect body, and there’s more than one way to drain a damn mug of beer.

  A person doesn’t have to read the news to know the news.

  Two sets of sirens are wailing in the distance, chasing different troubles. Potholes and slumping slabs make the street interesting, and half of the streetlights have had their bulbs pulled, saving the city cash and keeping a few lumps of coal from being burned. Every house is dark and sleepy, stuffed full of insulation and outfitted with wood-burning stoves. Most yards have gardens and compost piles and rain barrels. Half the roofs are dressed in solar panels. When Lucas moved into his house, big locusts and pin oaks lined the street. But most of those trees have been chopped down for fuel and to let the sun feed houses and gardens. Then the lumberjacks planted baby trees – carbon patriots lured by the tax gimmicks – except the biggest of those trees are already being sacrificed for a few nights of smoky heat.

  You don’t have to travel the world to know what’s happening.

  The last house on the block is the Florida compound. Those immigrants rolled in a couple years ago, boasting about their fat savings and their genius, sports hero kids. But there aren’t any jobs outside the Internet and grunt work in the windmill fields, and savings never last as long as you wish. Their big cars got dumped on the Feds during an efficiency scheme. Extra furniture and jewelry were sold to make rent. A cigarette boat and trailer were given FOR SALE signs to wear, and they’re still wearing them, sitting on the driveway where they’ve been parked forever. Then came the relatives from Miami begging for room, and that’s when police started getting calls about drinking and fighting, and then a couple of the sports heroes were jailed for trafficking. Then it was official: These were refugees, and not even high-end refugees anymore.

  Cheeks ache when Lucas runs at the wind, but nothing else. Turning west, the world warms ten degrees. In the dark it’s best to keep to the middle of the street, watching for anything that can trip or chase. People will abandon family and homes on drowning beaches, but not their pit bull and wolf-mutts. It’s also smart to run with your phone off, but Lucas is better than most when it comes to handling two worlds at once. His piece of Finland is a sweet little unit powered by movement, by life. A tidy projection hangs in front of his right eye. He’s ignoring the screen for the moment, running the street with the imaginary dogs, and that’s when the ringing starts.

  “Yeah?”

  “You leave yet?” Wade says.

  “Nope, still sitting,” says Lucas. “Drinking coffee, watching dead people on TV.”

  That wins a laugh. “According to GPS, you’re running. An eight-minute pace, which is knuckle-walking for you.”

  “Do the cops know?” says Lucas.

  “Know what?”

  “That you’re borrowing their tracking system.”

  “Why? You going to turn me in?”

  No, but that’s when Lucas cuts the line, and an old anger comes back, making his legs fly for the next couple blocks.

  Bodies stand outside the downtown YMCA. Swimmers and weightlifters sport Arctic-ready coats, while the runners are narrower, colder souls wearing nylon and polypro. Gym bags clutter up the sidewalk. Every back is turned to the wind. When someone breathes or speaks, twists of vapor rise, illuminated by the bluish glare escaping from the Y’s glass door.

  Lucas slows.

  A growly voice says, “Somebody got the early jump.”

  Passing from the trot into a purposeful walk, Lucas looks at faces, smiling at Audrey before anybody else.

  “W
here’s your bike?” the voice asks.

  “Pete,” says Audrey. “Just stop.”

  But the temptation is too great. With amiable menace, Pete Kajan says, “Did the cops take your bike too?”

  “Yeah,” says Lucas. “My bike and skates and my skis. I had that pony, but they shot him. Just to be safe.”

  Everybody laughs at the comeback, including Pete.

  Lucas slips off the pack and shakes his arms. The straps put his fingers to sleep.

  “Seven o’clock,” Pete says, shaking one of the locked doors. “What are the big dogs doing today?”

  “Sitting on the porch, whining,” Lucas says.

  Runners laugh.

  “How far?” Audrey says.

  Pete says, “Twelve, maybe fourteen.”

  “Fourteen sounds right,” says Doug Gatlin. Fast Doug. He’s older than the rest of them but blessed with a whippet’s body.

  Doug Crouse is the youngest and heaviest. “Ten miles sounds better,” he says.

  “Sarah and Masters are coming,” says Fast Doug.

  “They wish,” says Pete, laughing.

  Rolling his eyes, Gatlin tells Crouse, “They’ll meet us here and turn early. You can come back with them.”

  “Where’s Varner?” Crouse says.

  Pete snorts. “He’ll be five minutes late and need to dump.”

  Runners laugh.

  Then a big-shouldered swimmer rattles the locked door.

  Crouse looks at Lucas. “Did he call you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He called me twice,” Gatlin says.

  “Everybody got at least one wake-up call,” Pete says.

  The runners stare into the bright empty lobby.

  “He usually doesn’t bother me,” says Crouse.