The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Well, perhaps. Perhaps.” Mr Holland could afford to be generous; he didn’t have to live with the man. “If so, it has been my last. I am weary, gentlemen. And wounded and heart-sore and unwell, but weary above all. All I ask now is a place to settle. A fireside, a view, some company: no more than that. No more adventuring.”

  “Time on Mars may yet restore your health and energy; it is what we are famous for, and why so many retire here after serving Queen and Empire on Earth.” This was our unknown again, pressing again. “But you are not of an age to want or seek retirement, Mr … Holland. Great heavens, man, you can’t be fifty yet! Besides, the adventure I propose will hardly tax your reserves. There’s no need even to leave the hotel, if you will only shift with me into the conservatory. You may want your overcoats, gentlemen, and another round of drinks. No more than that. I’ve had a boy in there already to light the stove.”

  That was presumptuous, from an unknown. Manners inhibited me from twisting around in my chair and staring, but no one objects to a little honest subterfuge; I rose, took two paces towards the fire and pressed the bell by the mantelshelf.

  “My shout, I think. Mr Holland, yours I know is gin and French; gentlemen…?”

  No one resists an open invitation; Marsporter gin is excellent, but imported drinks come dear. The boy needed his notebook to take down a swift flurry of orders.

  “Thanks, Barley.” I tucked half a sovereign into his rear pocket—unthinkable largesse, but we all had reasons to treat kindly with Barley—and turned to face my cohort.

  On my feet and playing host, I could reasonably meet them all eye to eye, count them off like call-over at school. Hereth and Maskelyne, who were not friends but nevertheless arrived together and sat together every time; Thomson, who measured us all through his disguising spectacles and might have been a copper’s nark, might have been here to betray us all except that every one of us had reason to know that he was not; Gribbin the engineer and van Heuren the boatman, Poole from the newspaper and Parringer of course, and Mr Holland our guest for the occasion, and—

  * * *

  Our unannounced visitor, the uninvited, the unknown: he was tall even by Martian standards, and the shortest of us would overtop an average Earthman. Mr Holland must have been tall in his own generation, six foot three or thereabouts; here he was no more than commonplace. In his strength, in his pride I thought he would have resented that. Perhaps he still did. Years of detention and disgrace might have diminished him in body and spirit both, but something must survive yet, unbroken, undismayed. He could never have made this journey else. Nor sat with us. Every tree holds a memory of the forest.

  The stranger was in his middle years, an established man, confident in himself and his position. That he held authority in some kind was not, could not be in question. It was written in his assumptions, as clearly as in the way he stood, the way he waited; the way he had taken charge so effortlessly, making my own display seem feeble, sullen, nugatory.

  Mr Holland apparently saw the same. He said, “I don’t believe we were introduced, sir. If I might venture a guess, I should say you have a look of the Guards about you.” Or perhaps he said the guards, and meant something entirely different.

  “I don’t believe any of us have been introduced,” I said, as rudely as I knew how. “You are…?”

  Even his smile was weighty with that same settled certainty. “Gregory Durand, late of the King’s Own,” with a little nod to Mr Holland: the one true regiment to any man of Mars, Guards in all but name, “and currently of the Colonial Service.”

  He didn’t offer a title, nor even a department. I could hear the doubt in my own voice as I tried to pin him down. “The police?”

  “On occasion,” he said. “Not tonight.”

  If that was meant to be reassuring, it fell short. By some distance. If we were casting about for our coats, half-inclined not to wait for those drinks, it was not because we were urgent to follow him into the conservatory. Rather, our eyes were on the door and the street beyond.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “be easy.” He was almost laughing at us. “Tonight I dress as you do,” overcoat and hat, “and share everything and nothing, one great secret and nothing personal or private, nothing prejudicial. I will not say “nothing perilous”, but the peril is mutual and assured. We stand or fall together, if at all. Will you come? For the Queen Empress if not for the Empire?”

  The Empire had given us little enough reason to love it, which he knew. An appeal to the Widow, though, will always carry weight. There is something irresistible in that blend of sentimentality and strength beyond measure, endurance beyond imagination: we had cried for her, we would die for her. We were on our feet almost before we knew it. I took that so much for granted, it needed a moment for me to realise that Mr Holland was still struggling to rise. Unless he was simply slower to commit himself, he whose reasons—whose scars—were freshest on his body and raw yet on his soul.

  Still. I reached out my hand to help him and he took it resolutely, quick of thought and quick to choose. Quick to go along. A lesson learned, perhaps. I was almost sad to see it, in a man who used to disregard protocol and convention so heedlessly; but it was sheer wisdom now to keep his head down and follow the crowd. Even where that crowd was disreputable and blind itself, leading none knew where.

  Being led, I should say. Through a door beside the hearth, that was almost never open this time of year. Beyond lay the unshielded conservatory, like an open invitation to the night.

  An invitation that Mr Holland balked at, and rightly. He said, “You gentlemen are dressed for this, but I have a room here, and had not expected to need my coat tonight.”

  “You’ll freeze without it. Perhaps you should stay in the warm.” Perhaps we all should, but it was too late for that. Our company was following Durand like sheep, trusting where they should have been most wary. Tempted where they should have been most strong.

  And yet, and yet. Dubious and resentful as I was, I too would give myself over to this man—for the mystery or for the adventure, something. For something to do that was different, original, unforeseen. I was weary of the same faces, the same drinks, the same conversations. We all were: which was why Mr Holland had been so welcome, one reason why.

  This, though: I thought he of all men should keep out of this. I thought I should keep him out, if I could.

  Here came Durand to prevent me: stepping through the door again, reaching for his elbow, light and persuasive and yielding nothing.

  “Here’s the boy come handily now, just when we need him. I’ll take that, lad,” lifting the tray of refreshments as though he had been host all along. “You run up to Mr Holland’s room and fetch down his overcoat. And his hat too, we’ll need to keep that great head warm. Meanwhile, Mr Holland, we’ve a chair for you hard by the stove…”

  * * *

  The chairs were set out in a circle: stern and upright, uncushioned, claimed perhaps from the hotel servants’ table. Our companions were milling, choosing, settling, in a cloud of their own breath. The conservatory was all glass and lead, roof and walls together; in the dark of a Martian winter, the air was bitter indeed, despite the stove’s best efforts. The chill pressed in from every side, as the night pressed against the lamplight; there was no comfort here to be found, there would be no warmth tonight.

  On a table to one side stood a machine, a construction of wires and plates in a succession of steel frames with rubber insulation. One cable led out of it, to something that most resembled an inverted umbrella, or the skeleton of such a thing, bones of wire.

  “What is that?”

  “Let me come to that. If you gentlemen would take your seats…”

  Whoever laid the chairs out knew our number. There was none for Durand; he stood apart, beside the machine.

  “Nation shall speak peace unto nation—and for some of us, it is our task to make it so. Notoriously, traditionally we go after this by sending in the army first and then the diplomats. Pro
bably that’s backwards, but it’s the system that builds empires. It’s the system of the world.

  “Worlds, I should say. Here on Mars, of course, it’s the merlins that we need to hold in conversation. Mr Holland—”

  “I am not a child, sir. Indeed, I have children of my own.” Indeed, I travel now under their name, the name they took at their mother’s insistence; I can still acknowledge them, even if they are obliged to disown me. “I have exactly a child’s understanding of your merlins: that is to say, what we were taught in my own schooldays. I know that you converse with them differently, in their different stages: by sign language with the youngster, the nymph, and then by bubbling through pipes at the naiad in its depths, and watching the bubbles it spouts back. With the imago, when the creature takes to the air, I do not believe that you can speak at all.”

  “Just so, sir—and that is precisely the point of our gathering tonight.”

  Actually, the point of our gathering had been ostensibly to celebrate and welcome Mr Holland, actually to fester in our own rank company. Durand had coopted it entirely.

  “It’s long been believed,” he said, “that the imagos—”

  “—imagines—”

  —to our shame that came as a chorus, essential pedantry—

  “—that imagos,” he went on firmly, having no truck with ridiculous Greek plurals, “had no tongue, no way to speak, perhaps no wit to speak with. As though the merlins slumped into senescence in their third stage, or infantilism might say it better: as though they lost any rational ability, overwhelmed by the sexual imperative. They live decades, perhaps centuries in their slower stages here below, nymph and naiad; and then they pupate, and then they hatch a second time and the fire of youth overtakes them once more: they fly, they fight, they mate, they die. What need thought, or language?

  “So our wise men said, at least. Now perhaps we are grown wiser. We believe they do indeed communicate, with each other and perhaps their water-based cousins too, it may be that nymphs or naiads or both have the capacity to hear them. We don’t, because they do not use sound as we understand it. Rather, they have an organ in their heads that sends out electromagnetic pulses, closer to Hertzian waves than anything we have previously observed in nature. Hence this apparatus,” with a mild gesture towards the table and its machinery. “With this, it is believed that we can not only hear the imagos, but speak back to them.”

  A moment’s considerate pause, before someone asked the obvious question. “And us? Why do you want to involve us?”

  “Not want, so much as need. The device has existed for some time; it has been tried, and tried again. It does work, there is no question of that. Something is received, something transmitted.”

  “—But?”

  “But the first man who tried it, its inventor occupies a private room—a locked room—in an asylum now, and may never be fit for release.”

  “And the second?”

  “Was a military captain, the inventor’s overseer. He has the room next door.” There was no equivocation in him, nothing but the blunt direct truth.

  “And yet you come to us? You surely don’t suppose that we are saner, healthier, more to be depended on…?”

  “Nor more willing,” Durand said, before one of us could get to it. “I do not. And yet I am here, and I have brought the machine. Will you listen?”

  None of us trusted him, I think. Mr Holland had better reason than any to be wary, yet it was he whose hand sketched a gesture, I am listening, and a glance around showed that he spoke for all.

  “Thank you, gentlemen. What transpired from the tragedy—after a careful reading of the notes and as much interrogation as proved possible of the victims—was that the mind of an imago is simply too strange, too alien, for the mind of a man to encompass. A brain under that kind of pressure can break, in distressing and irrecoverable ways.”

  “And yet,” I said, “we speak to nymphs, to naiads.” I had done it myself, indeed. I had spoken nymphs on the great canals when I was younger, nimble-fingered, foolish and immortal. For all the good it had done me, I might as well have kept my hands in my pockets and my thoughts to myself, but nevertheless. I spoke, they replied; none of us ran mad.

  “We do—and a poor shoddy helpless kind of speech it is. Finger-talk or bubble-talk, all we ever really manage to do is misunderstand each other almost entirely. That ‘almost’ has made the game just about worth the candle, for a hundred years and more—it brought us here, and keeps us here in more or less safety, and ferries us home again—but this is different. When the imagos speak to each other, they speak mind-to-mind. It’s not literally telepathy, but it is the closest thing we know. And when we contact them through this, we encounter the very shape of their minds, almost from the inside; and our minds—our individual minds—cannot encompass this. No one man’s intellect can stand up to the strain.”

  “And yet,” again, “here we are. And here you are, and your maddening machine. I say again, why are we here?”

  “Because you chose to be”—and it was not at all clear whether his answer meant in this room or in this hotel or in this situation. “I am the only one here under orders. The rest of you are free to leave at any time, though you did say you’d listen at least. And I did say “one man’s intellect”. Where one man alone cannot survive it without a kind of mental dislocation—in the wicked sense, a disjointment, his every limb pulled each from each—a group of men working together is a different case. It may be that the secret lies in strength, in mutual support; it may lie in flexibility. A group of officers made the endeavour, and none of them was harmed beyond exhaustion and a passing bewilderment, a lingering discomfort with each other; but neither did they make much headway. Enlisted men did better.”

  He paused, because the moment demanded it, because drama has its natural rhythms and he did after all have Mr Holland in his audience. We sat still, uncommitted, listening yet.

  “The enlisted men did better, we believe, because their lives are more earthy, less refined. They live cheek by jowl, they sleep all together and bathe together, they share the same women in the same bawdy-houses. That seems to help.”

  “And so you come to us? To us? Because you find us indistinguishable from common bloody Tommies?”

  “No, because you are most precisely distinguishable. The Tommies were no great success either, but they pointed us a way to go. The more comfortable the men are with each other, physically and mentally, the better hope we have. Officers inhabit a bonded hierarchy, isolated from one another as they are from their men, like pockets of water in an Archimedes’ screw. Cadets might have done better, but we went straight to the barracks. With, as I say, some success—but enlisted men are unsophisticated. Hence we turn to you, gentlemen. It is a bow drawn at a venture, no more: but you are familiar with, intimate with the bodies of other men, and we do believe that will help enormously; and yet you are educated beyond the aspiration of any Tommy Atkins—some of you beyond the aspiration of any mere soldier, up to and including the generals of my acquaintance—and that too can only prove to the good. With the one thing and the other, these two strengths in parallel, in harmony, we stand in high hopes of a successful outcome. At least, gentlemen, I can promise you that you won’t be bored. Come, now: will you play?”

  “Is that as much as you can promise?” Thomson raised his voice, querulous and demanding. “You ask a lot of us, to venture in the margins of madness; it seems to me you might offer more in return.”

  “I can offer you benign neglect,” Durand said cheerfully. “Official inattention: no one watching you, no one pursuing. I can see that enshrined in policy, to carry over ad infinitum. If you’re discreet, you can live untroubled hereafter; you, and the generations that follow you. This is a once-and-for-all offer, for services rendered.”

  There must be more wrapped up in this even than Durand suggested or we guessed. A way to speak to the imagines might prove only the gateway to further secrets and discoveries. If we could speak di
rectly to the chrysalid pilots of the aetherships, perhaps we might even learn to fly the great ships ourselves, and lose all our dependence on the merlins …

  That surely would be worth a blind eye turned in perpetuity to our shady meeting-places, our shadier activities.

  Mr Holland thought so, at least. “Say more, of how this process works. Not what you hope might come of it; we all have dreams. Some of us have followed them, somewhat. I am here, after all, among the stars,” with a wave of his hand through glass to the bitter clarity of the Martian night sky. “How is it that you want us to work together? And how do we work with the machine, and why above all do we have to do it here, in this wicked cold?”

  “To treat with the last first: Mr Heaviside has happily demonstrated here as well as on Earth, that aetheric waves carry further after dark. We don’t know how far we need to reach, to find a receptive imago; we stand a better chance at night. Besides, you gentlemen tend to forgather in the evenings. I wasn’t certain of finding you by daylight.”

  Someone chuckled, someone snorted. I said, “I have never seen an imago fly by night, though. I don’t believe they can.”

  “Not fly, no: never that. But neither do they sleep, so far as we can tell. All we want to do—all we want you to do—is touch the creature’s mind, fit yourselves to the shape of it and find whether you can understand each other.”

  “I still don’t understand how you mean us to achieve that?”

  “No. It’s almost easier to have you do it, than to explain how it might be done. We’re stepping into an area where words lose their value, against lived experience. It’s one reason I was so particularly hoping to enlist your company, sir,” with a nod to Mr Holland, “because who better to stand before the nondescript and find means to describe it? If anyone can pin this down with words, it will be you. If anyone can speak for us to an alien power—”

  “Now that,” he said, “I have been doing all my life.”

  The run of laughter he provoked seemed more obligatory than spontaneous, but came as a relief none the less. Durand joined in, briefly. As it tailed away, he said, “Very well—but there is of course more to it than one man’s dexterity with language. Our wise men speak of the, ah, inversion of the generative principle, as a bonding-agent stronger than blood or shared danger or duty or sworn word—but again, there is more than that. You gentlemen may be a brotherhood, drawn from within and pressed close from without; we can make you something greater, a single purpose formed from all your parts. The wise men would have me flourish foreign words at you, gestalt or phasis or the like; but wise men are not always the most helpful.