The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  Courage seeped back into Morgan’s heart like the tide rising beneath a sandbar. “Bring him aboard.”

  “What?”

  “You made me a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete. That means I have voice in this floating conclave. Bring him aboard.”

  “Well, well,” said Goins. “Who realized you would have such backbone, Dr. Abutti? No, despite your entreaties, I believe we shall put you ashore. But in company. We did come here for a reason, in all good haste. I do not propose to abandon our mission for the sake of a chaffer with a single churchman, no matter how highly placed. As he is also a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete, the Revered may accompany us up the mountain and amuse himself in discourse with you along the way.”

  “Where?”

  “To where the stars do not lie.”

  Abutti followed Goins down the gangplank. A line of armed men observed from Clear Mountain’s rail, but no one among the assembled Thalassocretes or ship’s crew objected when the Presiding Judge had ordered them to stand down and remain aboard.

  Morgan couldn’t see how one priest would be so immediately dangerous, even this one. Still, people were sprawled at the head of the pier. Injured? Dead?

  “Bilious,” Goins said, shaking hands with the priest, then embracing him.

  “Eraster.” The Revered wore a grudging smile that bespoke the bond that only two ancient enemies could share.

  “You know one another?” Morgan asked.

  The priest turned to him. “The most powerful man in the Thalassojustity and the most feared man in the Lateran? Of course we know one another, Dr. Abutti.” He extended his hand. “The Revered Bilious Quinx.”

  “Revered,” said Morgan, shaking the man’s hand. Though rather larger than Goins, Quinx was still a small man, in that compact way that suggested strength, even at an age that must be approaching seventy. His eyes were sea-gray, set deep in a face dark-skinned enough for any debutante’s ball in Highpassage. He wore a cassock, faded with wear and laundering, but highly serviceable. A small silver Lateran orbicrux hung around his neck. He was otherwise unadorned with the Earthly riches that Morgan associated with high churchmen. “And now I am acquainted with the both of you.”

  “To our great mutual pleasure,” Quinx said in a tone of voice that promised quite the opposite.

  Goins nodded sharply, glancing down the pier. “Enough. We are on an errand of some urgency. Call off your men down there, and you may accompany us. If you simply must interview Dr. Abutti, feel free to do so on the march.”

  “Amid your mob?” Quinx’ voice dropped to a very soft, easy threat. “I am far more accustomed to my own chambers, and tools, for such interviews.”

  “This island is my chamber, Bilious,” Goins snapped. “I’ll thank you not to soil it with my colleague’s vital fluids.”

  “Oh, we gave up soiling with vital fluids generations ago,” Quinx replied. “Our tools are more subtle now. The arts of the mind are powerful.”

  “Call off your men, or the arts of the mind will be powerless this day.”

  Quinx nodded, then walked up the pier toward his guardians.

  “He’s mighty energetic for such an old man,” Morgan said.

  “That old man is the sharp point of a very long blade. We do not fear him, but we have immense respect for his power.”

  Morgan thought for a moment. Then: “I am too young to remember Brother Lupan. But I have read of him.”

  “They teach that in history classes now?” Goins sounded surprised.

  “Not in public school, or even when I was working to my baccalaureate. But in my graduate days, we covered him in a seminar on science, myth, and the public mind. The book about him was in manuscript. It had not yet passed before the censors.”

  The Presiding Judge snorted. “I marvel that you learned nothing from that.” Ahead of them, the priest had reached his deadly minions. Goins tugged on Morgan’s arm again, a habit that was quickly wearing in its novelty and charm. “We go now.”

  They walked up the pier, followed by a parade of Thalassocretes and servants. Approaching Quinx, who was deep in hurried converse, Morgan was shocked to see that his servants were a pair of white people—a hulking, brutish male and a hard-looking female.

  She glanced up at him. Her eyes were reptile cold, and seemed preternaturally alert. Danger, they said, though Morgan never thought to encounter such menace in any woman born.

  His capacity for astonishment had been played out. “Strange company the Revered Quinx keeps, for a priest.”

  “Oh, the Lateran is blind to the color of a man’s skin.” Sarcasm ran thick as mud in Goins’ voice. “But I cannot possibly explain the woman given the Church’s view on their proper role in society.” His hand dropped, flickering through a quick series of motions signaling someone behind them.

  “What of your people?” Morgan pointed toward the bodies beyond.

  “There will be a reckoning,” Goins said. “Quite soon. But not in this moment.”

  The priest and his servants hurried ahead of them, so that Morgan was the first of the Thalassocratic party to reach the downed men. They were four, two with broken necks and the pallor of death upon them already, the other two groaning and bloody.

  He bent to look, but a squad of sailors pushed past him, a pair of them medics with canvas bags bearing the Red Orb.

  Morgan straightened again and followed Goins.

  Fuming, Quinx fell into step beside the heretic Abutti. They were already well above the tiny dockside village, following a path that was not much more than a goat track up the slopes of the island’s central mountain. He could do little about whatever foolishness Goins had in mind. The closer they came to the top of the mountain, the closer they were to rescue—or brute force—courtesy of Blind Justess. Brother Kurts and the woman were under close guard behind him, but the Thalassojustity party did not seem to be armed.

  When this business was over, all he needed was a shot from the flare gun. And perhaps a convenient fall for Dr. Abutti.

  “Revered,” said the heretic. Polite but nervous.

  Quinx had a lifetime of working with those cues. “Dr. Abutti.” And to hell with the listeners crowded not so subtly close around them.

  The path ahead narrowed to little more than a foot’s width, rising sheer on the left and dropping sheer on the right. A chain was fastened to the rock, to which the party clung as they climbed. Almost thirty of them, strung out like flies on a wall.

  “H-how may I be of service to you?”

  Quinx took the matter by the knob. “This is a complex affair. Much history and passion is caught up in what I understand you are even now pursuing. I would have liked to invite you to present your findings at the Lateran before making your thesis public.”

  “I am not yet so public, Revered.” Abutti sounded oddly sad. “I was ejected from the Planetary Society. And, well, these Thalassocretes are not so indiscrete with their confidences.”

  Honeyed words flowed from Quinx’ lips. “So you are saying we could put this affair to rest without widespread comment?”

  A moment of rough breathing and dizzying fear as they crept around a bulge in the side of the mountain. Then Abutti responded. “Would that be a permanent rest for me, Revered? I saw those men at the dock. I know who you are in the hierarchy.”

  “No fool you,” Quinx replied. “To be blunt, you have poked your telescope into matters much better left undiscussed. Externalism is no trifling affair.”

  “So I’ve been told.” Abutti’s breath huffed a bit. “Should you wish your thugs to shove me off a cliff top, Revered, I surely cannot stop you. But I am not the only astronomer on Earth with a telescope. The facts will out. Even your Increate cannot deny this truth written in the skies.”

  “My Increate?” Quinx was both amused and frustrated by the assumptions embedded in that phrasing. “And yes . . . I can hardly ban telescopes across the world. Regardless of whatever you think your truth is.”

  Abutti stopped, tur
ned back to Quinx, clinging to a stanchion as pines whispered in the wind hundreds of feet below him. “Do you not know what I have found?”

  “Not precisely, no,” Quinx admitted. “And in truth, it does not matter. You seek to unseat the holy truth of the Increate and reinstate the Externalist heresy. That is enough for me.”

  “You accuse me of ecclesiastical crimes when all I pursue is the objective truth!”

  “Move it along,” shouted one of the Thalassocretes from behind them. Abutti turned and hurried along to where the path widened to a ledge, then waited in ankle-high grass for the priest to catch up.

  Quinx did, breathing hard as much from the stress of the heights as anything. “Do you not fear I will toss you off myself?” he asked, glancing past Abutti at the slope beyond.

  “No. Men like you do not toss people off cliffs. You have people tossed off cliffs. That’s why you have that monster monk and the dreadful woman.” Abutti paused, obviously chewing on his next words. “Not so long ago, you would have had a tall stake and a hot fire awaiting someone like me.”

  “Holy Mother Church never burned anyone,” Quinx replied, stung.

  “No, you merely passed sentence and had the secular authorities carry it out. I have trained in logic, Revered. I know who holds the responsibility there.”

  A line of Thalassocretes pushed past them, though both Brother Kurts and the woman were pulled aside by their guards rather than go ahead of Quinx and Abutti.

  “When one raises rebellion against the Increate, one bears responsibility for one’s penalty.”

  “Rebellion against the Church is not rebellion against the Increate,” Abutti grumbled. “And I raise neither. Only truth.”

  Quinx had no answer to that, but he knew he had the measure of this man now. Smart but weak. Too willing to be turned aside.

  Still, the astronomer had the right of it. There were more telescopes in the world.

  “What did you find?” he asked as they began following the line of march again, finally drawn back to the question despite himself.

  “Evidence of an aetheric vessel.” A stubborn pride swelled in Abutti’s voice. “The Increate’s ship of space, that brought us to this world.”

  “I do not believe you,” Quinx replied. “Simply not possible.”

  “Then why are we tramping up the side of Thera?”

  They both looked ahead, to where Goins was long vanished at the head of a receding column of Thalassocretes variously in their blue-green robes and khaki excursion wear.

  Archaeology represents one of our greatest challenges in unraveling the mysteries of the human experience. Geology tells us much about the age of the world, and through the sciences we understand that the Creation narrative of the Librum Vita is a grand metaphor for the natural processes of the universe. Yet archaeology shows us a literal view of the Increate’s placement of human beings upon this Earth. How to integrate the inarguable inerrancy of the Increate’s word with the interpolations of the geological sciences remains one of the greatest doctrinal challenges of our century, and perhaps centuries to come.

  —His Holiness Lamboine XXII, Posthumous Commentaries

  Morgan drew away from the priest as the group summited the crest of Thera and began clambering down into the crater within. Quinx’ retainers, for all that they were under guard, frightened him. He was certain that at a word from the Revered, the two would tear free of their bonds and throw him from the cliffs.

  Goins gathered his group in a sloping meadow a few hundred feet below the rim. Already the Presiding Judge was talking, urgently and low. Not an exhortation. Morgan hurried to catch up and hear. They knew his evidence already, everyone who had been in the lounge of Clear Mountain the night before.

  Whatever Goins had to show them here fit with Morgan’s own work like a ratchet into a gear.

  “. . . passed into our trust with the foundering of the Bear Cult at Truska.”

  Thalassocretes nodded in return.

  “Only certain among you know anything of this secret. None of us, not even me, have ever come to this place. Even those who maintain the upward path along the outer face of the mountain are forced to spend their lives on this island.” His voice dropped. “Until Dr. Abutti’s telescope opened the heavens to our eyes, this was without doubt the deepest truth upon this Earth. Brother Lupan had the right of it.”

  “The Increate’s Chariot?” Quinx stepped up next to Morgan. “A ridiculous fantasy embedded in a foolish heresy.”

  “A truth, embedded in the heart of each of the Eight Gardens,” Goins replied, his voice booming now. “I give you the Chariot of Cycladia.”

  He turned, walked across the meadow, and began tearing at the vines that draped a grove there.

  Quinx reached into his robes and pulled out a firearm. A fat-barreled gun. Morgan stared a moment, incredulous, then tackled the priest as he raised his weapon and fired it into the sky.

  The next few moments were blinding confusion. Something hissed high before popping—fireworks? Shouting echoed around Morgan as the enormous monk and the woman with him broke free of their guards as he’d feared. Morgan stumbled back to his feet, fleeing the priest and the lopsided fight behind him toward the dubious safety of Goins and the Thalassocretes who were tearing down plants to reveal a mottled wall of . . . something?

  Engines strained overhead as an airship circled low in the sky. He looked up to see a narrow bag with a knife hull beneath. Copper lances protruding from the hull crackled with visible energy.

  Morgan ran toward the Chariot. “Judge Goins, we are betrayed!”

  Goins turned, stared into the sky a moment, watching in apparent disbelief as lightning forked across the sky to ground into the trees behind him with a series explosive cracks. He began to laugh as smoke rose. Now his voice boomed like a parade sergeant’s. “Quinx, you are a greater fool than even I thought. Do you doubt the Increate’s Chariot can defend itself?”

  Another bolt lanced from the airship, striking down half a dozen shrieking Thalassocretes in a groaning mass. Quinx scuttled toward Goins, trailed by his dangerous guardians. Above them, the airship strained lower, barking bullets that sprayed across the meadow in a scythe of flying dirt that somehow claimed no lives on the first pass.

  The flash of light erupting from the trees blinded Morgan for a moment. A sizzling noise followed, which terminated in a thunderclap. He rolled over, rubbing his eyes, to see the airship aflame and lurching toward the other side of Thera’s crater. Quinx was still on his feet but stumbling. The monk was down, while the woman howled at the sky a long moment before rushing toward Morgan and Goins.

  “You are all mad,” the doctor shouted. “All of you!”

  The woman headed straight toward him. Her eyes glowed with a death-madness that Morgan had never before witnessed, having only read of such things in his scientific romances. Goins simply stood, staring down a hundred and fifty pounds of racing anger. Above them, something exploded aboard the airship.

  Still running, the woman caught up to Quinx, grabbing the priest by the arms. She continued to sprint toward Morgan and Goins, carrying the shuddering Quinx over one shoulder. Instead of plowing into them, she pulled up short, her breath a bellows.

  “Show me the Chariot,” she demanded. Her voice was a deep, threatening growl. Behind her, the monk arose and stumbled toward them.

  “Who are you to ask?” Goins asked.

  “A Machinist.” Her voice was a growl. “This is my future. The future of my faith.”

  “The past,” Morgan said, correcting her. “The future is coming in the sky.”

  Behind them, the mottled wall whirred. He turned to see a section slide upward to create an opening. Faint crimson light glowed beyond. The airship crashed in the distance with another whoosh of flame and heat.

  The Machinist continued to stare them both down. “My lover is dead, as is my captain. You allowed them to die. You owe me this.”

  The monk caught up to her, tackling from behind w
ith his hands spread wide to catch her eyes and the edges of her mouth. The woman dropped Quinx, who bit off a scream as he hit, then she bent to seize the monk and wrestle him to the ground in front of her.

  He bounced up, obviously rattled, but ready to engage. Goins tugged Morgan’s arm. “Back,” he hissed. “This is not our fight.”

  “None of this is my fight,” Morgan growled.

  Goins tapped the wall of the Increate’s Chariot. “This is one of eight aetheric ships here on Earth. You have found their origin, the great ship that is their mother. You were right all along. Do you now doubt that our history is coming home in the sky, from your libration point?”

  “No, I do not doubt.” Behind them, a screech. The monk and the Machinist were circling dangerously as Quinx staggered to his feet.

  Strangely, Goins was ignoring the battle, focusing his entire attention on Morgan. That in turn drew Morgan’s gaze back to the judge. For all his curiosity, he was terribly loath to step within. He hadn’t wished to be this right, to confront the meaning of his discovery so personally. “But I did not summon it.”

  “Then who did?” the judge asked impatiently.

  That, he could answer. “All of us. With our telelocutors and our airships and our engines, sending rays of energy into the aether as surely as if we’d lit a bonfire in the night. If this Chariot knows enough to defend itself, doubtless the mother ship can watch our Earth for us to rise high enough to see it in return. We have had electrickifcation for a generation. It can see that.”

  With a flicker of his eyes, Goins drew a gun of his own and shot past Morgan in one motion. Startled, Morgan turned to see the monk falling to the ground, his face bloody. The woman was on her hands and knees. Quinx lurched slowly toward the two of them with a slightly unfocused look on his face.

  The Presiding Judge handed the pistol to Morgan. “You choose. The past, or the future.”

  Morgan promptly dropped the weapon into the grass. He’d wanted the truth, by the Increate, not such a mess of power and violence. “I am a scientist. I do not have people thrown off cliffs.”