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

by Gardner Dozois

“No,” he said.

  “You mean, in—” I coughed, “like, Arabia?”

  “There, yes.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I want,” said Niu Jian, “to go.”

  “OK,” I said. “Why not? It’s like the Taj Mahal, right? I’m sure it’s a sight to see. So go. Wait until the press conference, and then take the next available flying transport from Heathrow’s internationally renowned port-of-air.” But he was shaking his head, so I said: “Jesus, go now if you like. If you must. Miss the announcement. That doesn’t matter—or it only matters a little bit. But if it’s like, urgent, then go now. But you don’t have to quit! Why do you have to quit? You don’t have to quit.”

  His nod, though wordless, was very clearly: I do.

  “OK, Noo-noo, you’re really going to have to lay this out for me, step by baby-step,” I said. “Blame my baby-beshrunken brain. Walk me through it. Why do you want to go to Mecca?”

  “To go before I die.”

  “Wait—you’re not dying, are you? Jesus on a boson, are you ill?”

  “I’m not ill,” said Niu Jian. “I’m in perfect health. So far as I know, anyway. Look: I’m not trying to be mysterious. All Muslims must visit Mecca once in their lives.”

  I thought about this. “You’re a Muslim? I thought you were Chinese.”

  “One can be both.”

  “And that bottle of wine you shared with Prévert and myself last night, in the Godolfin?”

  “Islam is perfect, individuals are not.” He picked more energetically at the skin on the back of his knuckles.

  “I just never knew,” I said, feeling stupid. “I mean, I thought Muslims aren’t supposed to drink alcohol.”

  “I thought pregnant women weren’t supposed to drink alcohol,” he returned, and for the first time in this whole strange conversation I got a glimpse of the old Niu Jian, the sly little flash of wit, the particular look he had. But then it was gone again. “Yesterday, in the Elephant, you were talking about the suit you would wear for the press conference. You were all, oh my mother will be watching the television, the whole world will be watching the—oh I must have a smart suit. Oh I must go to a London tailor. What happened to the London tailor?”

  He said: “I spoke to Tessimond.”

  I believe this was the first time I ever heard his name. Not the last; very much not the last time. “Who?”

  “Prévert’s friend.”

  “Oh—the doleful-countenance guy? The ex-professor guy from Oregon?”

  “Yes.”

  “You spoke to him—when?”

  Niu Jian looked at the ceiling. “Half an hour ago.”

  “And he told you to quit the team? C’mon, Noo-noo! Why listen to him?”

  “He didn’t tell me to quit the team.”

  “So he told you—what?”

  “He told me about the expansion of the universe,” said Niu Jian. “And after he had done that, I realised that I had to quit the team and go to Mecca.”

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I said. At that precise moment my little Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator gave a little kick and thwunked my spleen—or whatever organ it is, down in there, that feels like a sack of fluid-swelled nerves. I grunted, shifted my position in my chair. “He told you about the expansion of the universe? You mean you told him! He’s not a shoo-in for the Nobel—you are.” When he didn’t reply, I started to lose my temper. “What did he tell you about the expansion of the universe, precisely?”

  For the second time Niu Jian’s glance went to my belly. Then he stood up, his knees making drawn out little bleating noises as they were required to assume his weight. “Ana, good-bye,” he said. “You know how it is.”

  “Do not.”

  “I don’t want to give the wrong impression. You know, I wouldn’t even say he told me anything. He pointed out the obvious, really. You know how it is, Ana, when somebody says something that completely changes the way you see the cosmos, but that afterwards you think: that’s so obvious, how could I not have noticed it before?”

  “That’s what he did?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it made you want to quit the team? Rather than wait a few weeks and receive the Nobel Prize for Physics?”

  Nod.

  “So what was it? What did he say? What could he possibly say that would provoke that reaction in you? You’re the least flaky of the whole team!”

  For the third time, the glimpse towards Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator, in his bag of fluid, swaddled by his sheath of my flesh. Just a little downward flick of the eyes, and then back to my face. And then he shook my hand with that weird manner he’d picked up from Jane Austen novels or, I don’t know what, and then he left. I saw him the following morning pulling his suitcase across the forty-metre sundial that looks like a giant manhole cover outside the Human Resources Building. I called to him, and waved; and he waved back, and then he got into the taxi he had called and was driven away, and I never saw him again.

  :2:

  Naturally I wanted to talk to this Tessimond geezer, to find out why he was spooking my horses. I had taken pains to assemble the very best team; intellectual thoroughbreds. I texted Prévert to come to my office, and when he neither replied nor came I hauled myself, balanced Phylogeny-Ontology-Recapitulator as well as I could over my hips and did my backward-leaning walk along the corridor to his office. I didn’t knock. I was the team leader, the ring-giver, the guardian of the treasure. Knocking wasn’t needful.

  Prévert was inside, and so was Sleight, and the two of them were having a right old ding-dong. Prévert was standing straight up, and he was halfway through either putting on or taking off his coat.

  “Niu Jian just quit the team,” I said, lowering myself into a chair with the cumbrous grace unique to people in my position. “He just came into my office and quit,”

  “We know, boss,” said Sleight. “Prévert too.”

  “He said it was your friend who persuaded him, Jack.” Prévert’s first name was not Jack; it was Stephane. But naturally we all called him Jack. “Why—wait a minute, what do you mean Prévert too?”

  “He means, Ana,” Jack said, “that I too am leaving the team. I apologise. I apologise with a full heart. It is late in the day. If I had known earlier I would have not inconvenienced you in this fashion—and with your . . .” and like Niu Juan had done, he cast a significant look at the bump of P-O-R, and then returned his gaze to my face.

  “You are kidding me,” I said.

  “I regret to say, Ana, that I am not kidding you.”

  “But we just got your ths to come out right.” Prévert’s English was more-or-less flawless, his accent somewhere in between David Niven and a BBC newsreader, but he had held stubbornly to that French trick of pronouncing “th’s” as “t” or “z,” variously.

  “I’ve been remonstrating with him,” said Sleight. “He won’t tell me why.”

  “You spoke to your friend Tessimond,” I said, panting a little from the exertion of walking along a corridor.

  “That’s right—is that what Noo-noo did?” Sleight asked.

  “What did he say to you?”

  “It’s no good asking, boss,” Sleight told me. “I’ve been leaning on him for an hour, and he won’t cough up. Whatever it was it can’t have taken more than ten minutes.”

  “The time period was approximately that,” Prévert confirmed. He slid his right arm into the vacant tube of his coat sleeve, thereby confirming that he was putting the garment on, not taking it off.

  “He’s a friend of yours?”

  “Tessimond? He used to be, many years ago. I was surprised to see him. I suggested we have breakfast—Sleight too, although he turned up late. As he always does.”

  “I was quarter of an hour late,” said Sleight. “And that was long enough to the Tessimond geezer to persuade Jack to leave the project! One quarter hour!”

  “He did not persuade me to leave. He ma
de no reference to my being on the team, or collecting the Nobel Prize. He simply pointed out something—ah, how-to-say, something rather obvious. Something I am ashamed I did not notice before.”

  “And this something overturns years of work, convinces you that you shouldn’t collect a Nobel Prize?”

  Prévert shrugged. “There is a woman who lives in Montpellier, called Suzanne,” he announced. “I am going to visit her.”

  “You’re crazy. You can’t take your name off the—your name will still be on the citation, you know!” Sleight’s voice had a raspy, edge-of-hysteria quality. “We’re not taking your name off the citation.”

  “I have no preference one way or the other,” Prévert replied. “You must do as you please—as shall I.”

  “Wait a sec, Jack,” I said. “Please.” Because he was eyeing the door, now, and I could see he was about to scarper. “At least tell us what he told you.”

  “You may ask him yourself. He’s staying in the Holiday Inn. Sleight has his number.”

  “Come, now, come alone, now, Jack, I’ve known you ten years. Jack, you’re a friend, for the love of Jesus, you’re my friend.” I ran the tip of my ring-finger across one eyebrow, then the other. I was trying to think how to do this. “Don’t play games with me, Jack. I’m asking you, as a friend. Tell me what is going on.”

  “What is going,” said Prévert, “is me. Goodbye.” He was always a touch too proud of his little Anglophone word-games.

  “What did Tessimond tell you?”

  Prévert stopped at the door, looked not at me but at my bump, and said: “he only pointed out what is right in front of us. Us, in particular—you, Sleight, me. It should be more obvious to us than to anybody! Although it should be obvious to anyone who gives it more than a minute’s thought.”

  “Don’t do this, Jack.”

  “Goodbye, Ana, and—you too, Sleight.”

  “Is it God?” I said. It was my parting shot. “Noo-noo is going to Mecca. Is that what he is, this Tessimond, a preacher? Has he somehow converted you to religion and turned you into a—Christ, what does it say in the Old, I mean, New Testament? About leaving your homes and families and becoming fishers of men.”

  Prévert smiled, and his sideburns moved a little further apart from one another. A big beamy smile. “I am, Ana, you will be relieved to hear—I am precisely as atheistical as I have always been. There is no God. But there is a woman called Suzanne, and she lives in Montpellier.” And he walked out.

  I sat staring at Sleight, as if it were his fault. He had been standing up, because Prévert had been standing up. Now that it was just the two of us, he sat down.

  “So,” I said. “Are you pissing-off too? Is my entire team deserting me?”

  “No, boss!” he said, looking genuinely hurt that I would say such a thing. “Never! Loyalty means something to me, at any rate. That, and the fact that—you know. I fancy getting the Nobel Prize.”

  “Is it a joke? Are Jack and Niu Jian in cahoots?”

  “In what?”

  “Cahoots. I mean, are they conspiring together to trick us, or something?”

  “I know what cahoots means,” said Sleight. “I just didn’t quite hear you.” He sat back and began looking around Prévert’s office, as if the answer might lie there.

  “Cold feet,” he said. “I think they’re genuine, both of them, about leaving. I mean, I don’t think it’s a joke, boss. Who would joke about a thing like this! But maybe the timing is the key—we’re so close to announcing. Maybe they’ve got cold feet.”

  “I could maybe believe that of Niu Jian, but not Prévert,” I said. “And do you know what, now that I think of it, I couldn’t believe it of Noo-noo either. Cold feet?”

  “Then what, boss? Why would they both drop out—today?”

  “Ring up this Tessimond guy,” I instructed him. “Find out what he said. Better yet, tell him to unsay it. Tell him to get in touch with both of my boys and persuade them to come back. What does he think he’s playing at, anyway? Disassembling my team on the brink of our big announcement?”

  Sleight got out his phone, held it in his hand for a bit, and then balanced it on his head. It wasn’t an unusual thing for him to balance a mobile phone on his head. The peculiar shape of his bald cranium was such that above his tassel-like eyebrows there was a sort of semi-indentation, a thirty-degree slope in amongst the phrenological landscape, and it so happened than an iPhone fitted snugly there. Sleight had started resting his device there for a joke, but he had done it so often that it had become an unremarkable gesture. “Maybe it would make sense for you to speak to him, boss?”

  “Scared?”

  “No!” he said, with a quickness and emphasis that strongly implied yes. “Only, you are the team leader.” I put my head to one side. “And I once read a story,” he added.

  “Science fiction story?”

  “Of course.” As if there were any other kind of story for Sleight! “It was about a thing called a blit. You ever heard of a blit?”

  “If this is going to be a porn reference, I swear I’ll have you disciplined for sexual harassment, Sleight.”

  “No, no! It’s science and it’s fiction, in one handy bundle. A blit is a thing, and once you’ve seen it—once it’s gone in your eyes—it starts to occupy your mind. You can’t stop thinking about it, and it expands fractally until it takes up all your thoughts and you go mad.”

  “And?”

  “And—what if this Tessimond is going to say something like a verbal blit?”

  I hid my face in my hands. There was a tussle between the laugh-aloud angel sitting on my right shoulder, and the burst-into-tears devil sitting on my left. I took control of myself. Pregnancy hormones have real, chemical effects upon even the strongest will. I dropped my hands. “Please never again say the phrase verbal blit in my hearing. Call Tessimond.”

  Sleight, sheepishly, called. He waited only a short time before saying, “Oh, hello, is that Mr. Tessimond, oh, hello, oh, my name is Sleight and Stephane Prévert gave me your number.” Then a long pause, and Sleight’s eyes tracked left-to-right and right-to-left, and I felt a mild panic, as if he were being Derren Brown-hypnotised by this stranger, and over the phone too. But then he said. “Anyway, my team leader, Professor Radonjic, is here and she was wondering if she could—sure, sure.” Silence, an intense expression on Sleight’s face. Then: “both of them have left the team, somewhat, eh, ah, somewhat abruptly, you know. And they both spoke with you about the—yes, yes.” Nodding. Why do people nod when they’re talking on the phone? It’s not as if their interlocutor can see them. “I see. I understand. We were just wondering what . . .”

  “Let me speak to him,” I said, holding out my hand. Sleight passed the phone straight to me. “Hello, Mr. Tessimond? This is Ana Radonjic.”

  “May I call you Ana?” Tessimond asked. He had a pleasant, low-slung voice; a Midwest American accent, a slight buzz in the consonants that suggested he might be a smoker. I was a little taken aback by this—a micron aback, or thereabouts. “All right. And what should I call you?”

  He hummed; a little, musical burr. “My name is Tessimond,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to speak to you, Ana. I’ve immense respect for what you’ve been doing.”

  “What do you know about what I’ve been doing?” I daresay I sounded slightly more paranoid than was warranted.

  “I was Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at CUNY for a number of years,” he said. “Years ago—before your time. I left that post decades ago.”

  “You were at CUNY? Why have I not heard of you?”

  “I didn’t publish,” he burred. “What’s the point?”

  This piqued me, so I rattled off: “the point is that we have made a breakthrough with regard to dark energy, and I don’t think any physicists have ever been more sure of getting a Nobel citation, and two key members of my team have, this morning, walked away. That is the point.”

  “There seem to be several points, there, Ana
,” he said, mildly. But his slow delivery only infuriated me further.

  “I don’t know what games you are playing,” I snapped. “This is serious. This is my career as a serious scientist, and the Nobel Prize—not the, er, pigeon-fancier’s red rosette.” I said this last thing because a pigeon arrived on the outside ledge of Prévert’s office windowsill, in a flurry of wings that sounded like a deck of cards being shuffled. Then it folded the wings into its back and stood looking, insolently, through the glass at us. “This is the culmination of everything we have been working for,” I said, apparently to the pigeon.

  “I was talking to Stephane about this a couple of hours ago,” came Tessimond’s voice on the phone. “Your research truly sounds fascinating.”

  “Stephane has gone to catch a flight to Montpellier!” I snapped. “Do you know why?”

  Tessimond released a small sigh at the other end of the phone line. “I’m afraid I’ve no idea, Ana.”

  “No? You said something to him, and it made him walk away from everything he has been working towards for years.”

  There was a silence. Then: “that wasn’t my intention, Ana.”

  “No? Well that’s the mess you’ve made. Perhaps you’d like to help me clear it up, mm?”

  “I very much doubt,” he said, sadly, “if there’s anything I can do.” Then he said: “the rate of expansion of the cosmos is accelerating.”

  “I,” I said. “Yes it is.”

  “That’s been known for a while. You’re going to announce that you know why this is happening?”

  “Professor Tessimond—” I said.

  “Dark energy,” he said. Then: “would you like to have lunch?”

  I bridled at this. Blame the hormones, I suppose. “I’m afraid I’m going to be far too busy today clearing up the mess you have made to be able to take time out for lunch!” For all the world as if he were listening in on my conversation, and objecting to the notion of skipping a meal, P-O-R chose that moment to stretch and squeeze my stomach painfully against my ribs. I grimaced, but kept going. “I’m going to have to explain to university management why not-one-but-two key members of my team have jumped ship mere weeks before we go public with our research.”