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

by Gardner Dozois

Without question, the habitat’s second half was lovelier than the first. Forests were older, more complex. Landlords hadn’t reworked the ground as often or as ineptly. And the weather was a little less awful than before. But even the strongest clients were usually worn down by now: They couldn’t appreciate the artful winding of streams. Rare blossoms and brilliant worms could barely rouse them out of the tedium. Typically, Katabasis looked forward to a glade of unique trees—each one lovely, each representing one species that couldn’t be found anywhere else inside a thousand-light-year radius—and she usually made a point of camping inside the glade, lingering for two nights and a full day. But they entered in mid-morning, the weather kind but cloudy, and fearing rain and more delays, she marched her humans through the gorgeous woods, barely looking to her side as she held the slow, withering pace.

  Other clients and other porters began to catch them. They could hear them closing, often for a full day, and then some happy voice would beg for a wider trail, please. Those first clients were always riding strong porters. Nobody recognized Varid, and the anonymity suited him. But a few rich travelers, human and otherwise, knew the married couple, and they would shout out greetings and teasings before offering some obligatory words about admiring their courage.

  But starvation kept eating at the faces and the bodies, and eventually the best friends stopped recognizing them.

  Perri was a frail body shrunk down to a child’s proportions while his face remained pretty in a rail-slender fashion. Except on the hottest days, he was cold, and the hair had dropped off his scalp and face, but the eyes seemed only to have grown larger from the experience, gazing at nothing but the ground that looked flat and looked level but might at any moment tip him over, breaking him in the same dreary, frustrating ways.

  Quee Lee was even less recognizable. She was hairless, genderless. Breasts and hips had vanished, the black hair was scattered all the way back to the mountains, and with a tired, dry, amazed voice she would admit that she hadn’t even attempted relations with her husband in fifty or sixty or a hundred nights. She counted those nights. She laughed weakly and dabbed at the crumbs of her day’s rations, and then she would collapse into Perri’s little arms, whispering a few words when she found the energy.

  “Thank you so much for inviting me along,” she told her husband.

  With a slight laugh, he said, “You’re welcome,” and then dabbed up a few more crumbs. The source of these little feasts was uncertain, but he always attempted to put his finger into Quee Lee’s mouth, and she would suck hard and cry and then pull the finger out again, urging his closer ear to her mouth, ready to whisper whatever was next.

  Walking clients began to catch them. Even weak and inept hikers passed by, as if the humans were trees standing in a glade. Various eyes stared at the couple, probably assuming they were alien, not human. And then they noticed the human porter with his little pack that hadn’t carried anything in a very long while. What was that man’s story? Sometimes they struck up a conversation, with the strangers or with each other, and it became the day’s high point to watch their emotions when a woman’s voice emerged from the tiniest, weakest of the apparitions.

  Quee Lee had digested most of her face. Her mouth was a sliver without more than a few tired teeth, and the cheekbones had collapsed into a skull that was perforated like an aerogel sponge. But her voice remained, and a shred of humor, and the first time that she begged for food was meant as a joke.

  One brick of high-density fat helped save the trek.

  She promised that she was joking. She and Perri were sharing the unexpected feast at camp, and she was honestly remorseful for pleading as she had. What kind of person had she become? The next three groups didn’t hear begging, and they didn’t leave gifts. But the hunger returned, and Quee Lee used her voice and bizarre appearance to find sympathy with everybody who passed them by. Most strangers didn’t want to part with their wealth, but a few were more amenable. Ten days of humiliation and charm produced enough nourishment to put them twenty or thirty days farther down the endless trail, giving them enough leeway to consider their situation very carefully.

  In the night, inside a warm bramble-filled valley, Quee Lee and Perri lay together beneath the aerogel bedding. Katabasis could hear pieces of their conversation. Certain words and the long silences pointed at a grim topic, and the porter listened and ached and in the next moment corrected herself. Nobody was doomed. No souls were bound for the Final World where all the species of People shared the breath of life. These two creatures were simply discussing matters of time and energy and the pragmatic limits of desire, and after a while they fell into sleep, and preparing her own bed, Katabasis felt peculiarly honored for being allowed this chance to study their lives.

  One blue light shone in the darkness.

  A little stiffly, the porter rose again, walking to the man lying in his bed. Varid was holding the torch to his eyes. What once was deeply peculiar had become ordinary. The man couldn’t sleep in the usual sense. Holding brightness against his eyes seemed to relax him or busy him or do something else worthwhile. Katabasis had never asked why he did this. She didn’t intend to ask now. But looking down at Varid, she enjoyed the same epiphanies that had struck her again and again over these last days:

  This was not a human being.

  And whatever Varid was, he was unique—a species with a population of precisely one.

  She knelt beside him, watching the light and the open eyes.

  After a long while, he noticed. Taking a long breath, he set the torch aside, and when he felt ready he said, “It helps me remember, the light does.”

  “Remember what?”

  He was too tired to sit up. The first attempt proved it, but he tried again, glad for her help when it came, and then he regretted the choice and slowly fell back into the aerogel. After more breathing, he said, “I suffered this medical situation. I was caught inside a very large fire.”

  “The Whisper Fire,” she said.

  “Have I told you this before?”

  “No.”

  A slow nod. “I don’t remember very much. Not the day or being scared, or anything like that. But I do remember the last thing that I saw: This impossibly bright light. They say . . . the doctors explained this to me . . . they claimed that I took shelter inside a hyperfiber blister, and the inferno ate through the walls, and as soon as the last layer was pierced, this thread of plasmas found me. But my eyes didn’t die immediately, and my brain survived afterwards. Something about the shape of that little space not only saved my mind, but it allowed my eyes to watch this most amazing light.”

  She said nothing.

  “Then I was dead and blind,” he said. “I was lost and mostly unconscious. But if you’re buried for a thousand years, thoughts happen. You remember what you can, but I couldn’t remember much. So much had been turned to fire.” He paused, smiling weakly. “But you probably realized that on our first day together, didn’t you?”

  “The light,” she said.

  “It helps my head work better. Brilliance somehow makes it easier for me to practice what I learned today and fifty thousand years ago.”

  She said, “Good then.”

  “This is crazy, yes. But when I was dead, the fire that killed me . . . nearly killed me, and murdered my family . . . that fire was my largest best memory. It seemed so lovely and wonderful. I don’t think I could have remained sane for even a hundred years, if it wasn’t for me thinking about that searing magical light.”

  Watching him, Katabasis weighed questions.

  Varid answered an unasked question. “I don’t need sleep anymore. It’s a consequence of my injuries, and it’s because this is how far I was fixed before the fixing stopped.”

  “Why did the fixing stop?” she asked.

  Varid picked up the torch again, holding it against his right eye. He didn’t act interested in the question, and maybe he didn’t notice it. Katabasis still didn’t know what the man could learn or how well idea
s would play inside his head. But he wasn’t the insane idiot that she had imagined. He was a mystery, relentlessly frustrating but compelling, and instead of working to avoid this creature, she wanted to share the solitude forced on both of them by bad and wonderful forces.

  “Could I become a porter?” he asked abruptly.

  “What?”

  The torch and hand pulled away from his face. The dark center of the eye was a pinprick point. He wasn’t as starved as the others, his bluish-white hair still alive, though thin and not growing any longer, and his face was very much like the face that she first met. She had passed her colleague enough rations to keep up his strength, and she had quit bristling whenever she thought of Varid that way: Her colleague.

  “I don’t know if you could be a porter,” she said.

  He remained silent.

  “You’re tiny and you’re weak,” she said.

  “Like you,” he said. “But you manage to make your living.”

  She laughed with her hands, her face. She laughed as close to the human sound of laughter as she could manage.

  “I stopped the fixing where it is,” Varid said.

  “Did you?”

  He nodded.

  “Was it a question of money?” she asked.

  “No, I have money. A sliver from the original estate, they tell me. But it’s still more than most passengers enjoy.”

  She watched his face.

  “No, the doctors let me choose,” he said. “They gave me permission to decide how much new bioceramic I wanted grown, and how giant my mind would be. They thought they were going to get rich doing the work. But I surprised them. I told them thank you, but no, and to leave me alone.”

  She watched his empty hand, fingers spread out on his hungry belly.

  “A thousand years spent underground, and almost everything from before was gone,” he said. “I didn’t think about my dead family, and I didn’t forget and think about them being alive either. I had memories of the past and disjointed facts learned, but there wasn’t one story pulling the mess together. I was dead. My mind was gone, only pieces left, and those pieces slowly assembled themselves into something that was familiar to me . . . that became me . . . and I don’t know how to explain this.”

  “Don’t,” she advised.

  But Varid showed a stubborn face. “I don’t have much humor left. But maybe I didn’t have any to begin with. I don’t feel much empathy for others, and I know I forget most of what I learn. But that doesn’t mean that I’ll stop learning or making myself better or doing whatever good thing it is that I’m supposed to do. And I do like to attempt whatever is difficult. Which isn’t the way I used to be, they tell me. Certain strangers who knew me before. They don’t like me, they like to say, but I don’t see how they liked the man who died. I’ve studied him. For years and years after getting out into the world again . . . I know I’m rambling, I do this if I’m not careful . . . but I do appreciate, very much, getting lost in passions that he couldn’t even imagine. Like this adventure. He would never, ever have envisioned walking through wilderness accompanied by a beautiful alien creature.”

  Katabasis sat motionless, watching all of the man.

  “You can sleep,” Varid said. “Sleep now, and it will help you tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She stood and said, “I will.”

  Three days later, Perri found the right place and proper circumstances. He called Quee Lee to his side and they spoke to each other with just those big eyes. Standing beneath a ripe tashaleen tree, they looked vulnerable and worried. But when Varid walked into the tree’s shadow, they calmly warned him to back away.

  Little seams were opening in the swollen bladder. The stink of sulfuric acid began to pervade the calm forest air, but it might take another day or two for the flesh to burst wide, scouring the nearby ground.

  Varid slowly backed away, studying the scene. Comprehension took longer for him, but he accepted the obvious quickly, and approaching Katabasis, he said, “We have all of the rations.”

  She was carrying every bit of food, including the treats given out of pity.

  Quee Lee called to Varid, saying, “You’ll have to carry me from here on. So of course you’ll earn your bonus.”

  Perri slowly bent over, grabbing a small rock.

  Katabasis was thinking about acid and its effects on flesh and how the flow would roll when the bladder burst.

  Perri tried to throw the pebble at the bladder, but it weighed tons and tons.

  “I won’t break the tree for you,” Katabasis warned.

  “I have a suggestion,” Varid said. Then to the couple waiting in that dark, fume-laced shade, he said, “Lie down inside your bed.”

  With a reasonable, perfectly calm voice, he said, “The aerogel won’t dissolve, but it will let the acid seep through. Your brains will stay where they are, which is good. We won’t have to chase either of you downstream.”

  9

  At dawn, eighty-nine People crawled beneath the tattered shelters. There were no rations to eat, nothing to drink. They lay quietly, in pain, listening to the world bake and blister, and sometimes they slept but mostly they watched their own vague thoughts form and shift before being lost. When the sun finally dropped behind the new world, eighty-three People found enough reason to stand again, stowing the shelters in the final three carts and grabbing hold of the wagon that carried the rusted steel box, slowly pushing away from the dead.

  The new world began with towering black cliffs. Through telescopes, rivers could be seen plunging over the side of the volcano, wasted water turning to mists and serpentine clouds that were consumed before drifting halfway to the desert. Those cliffs were the goal, the dream, but the walk would take another four or five or perhaps six nights, and worse, there was no obvious path leading up the imposing and very smooth face of rock.

  The Five had become the Three. The ice-sucking woman refused to die, along with her two youngest husbands. The woman always rode on the back end of the wagon. Every night she made optimistic noises about imminent rescue and the abiding decency of the human animal. She insisted that she knew the animal well. She and the godlike emissary had spoken many times by radio. They were allies, collaborators, sometimes friends. But the final radio died out on the salt, and she didn’t have her friend to speak to anymore. She was making noise, half-mad and often feverish, and her noise had an erosive effect on the last shreds of hope.

  Her husbands didn’t bother lying. Working beside the strongest bodies, they pushed wheels up long slopes and used their scant weight to keep the wagon and their wife from rolling wild downhill. Sometimes one or the other would climb ahead, scouting the ground for the least-awful route. Just short of the night’s center, the older man went up to the ridge crest and then came back again. He was running. He fell suddenly. He got up and fell and got up laughing with his arms, and with more disbelief than joy, he announced, “We reached the world early. Over this hill is a mine.”

  The next long reach of desert had been stripped away. Deep gouges were cut into the pale rock, roads and paths leading down to giant electric machines working in the depths of the deepest hole. The machines took no interest in them. Any miners were equally oblivious. Eighty-two People looked down on the mayhem, and one of them sat for a moment and died and the others backed away from the mine’s edge, aiming for the nearest road.

  The first miner had a strange oval face and a fancy mask over his mouth and eyes. He stared at the filthy parade of bodies, and with a string of peculiar words, he spoke into a tiny radio, presumably asking a question or soliciting advice.

  Peculiar words came out of the radio, and he responded by clambering into a burly electric cart and riding away.

  After that, they didn’t see one miner.

  But someone had left rations and fresh water stacked together in some form of way station. The People fell on what they assumed were gifts, drinking enough and eating more than enough, and another one of the
ir ranks died from the indulgence.

  The station had a roof full of tubes that leaked cold air, and several sets of rails ended here but led off toward the world. The rails stood empty until a heavy railcar arrived and parked. The husbands conferred and then gave orders. The car was long enough for all of the People to ride in comfort, with room remaining for a battered wagon and its precious cargo. Once loaded, the railcar began rolling back from where it had come, bearing the People across the last bits of wasteland, diving into a long tunnel as the sun burst into view. And even at that moment, the girl sitting on the aluminum floor of the car was unable to believe that she would survive one day longer.

  * * *

  Their old world was nearly nothing. It had been a low ridge, dry and thinly populated, while this world was a hundred times larger, tall enough for permanent ice and wet everywhere, its belly full of hot rock and deep springs powering geothermal plants which made the entire realm hum with electrical activity. Perhaps a million generations separated the People from these citizens. They looked that different, that alien. Every face was grossly round, and the plumage wasn’t just wrong in its color but longer and gaudily colored, and these new People smelled different and sounded odd, talking about the railcar that was sliding past their homes and businesses. Their day had just begun. The old People, their lost cousins, deserved notice and some idle chatter. The girl stared at the bright buildings passing by and the endless metal and how every window was filled with light, the faces behind glass staring at her for a moment or two, curious but not curious, ready for any excuse to pull back to their own busy lives.

  If the girl and her People had arrived here in full force, they would have meant nothing. They were too scarce, too primitive, and much too stupid to generate anything more than polite disinterest.

  That was the morning’s first awful lesson.

  The long railcar was driven by a machine’s mind, turns taken and turns avoided until they arrived at a fresh volcanic crater, barren land encircling a turquoise lake. On the black rock stood a different kind of building, round like a half-ball and woven from slick gray material that didn’t look like any steel.