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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Now something for a friend of mine.”

  Olive dropped into a chord progression I had not heard in twelve years. It didn’t matter. I knew it instantly: “Don’t Make Me Cry.”

  I thought I had heard every variation of that song: pathetic, pleading, angry, bitter, desperate. Dot’s was a demand and a refusal to miss an opportunity: don’t you dare make me cry.

  I picked up my guitar and caught up with the band by the chorus. I didn’t know what I felt. Used? Manipulated? Happy?

  The crowd kept the beat and I threw whatever I had back at them.

  At the end, she disappeared in a burst of light and the crowd howled, clapped, stomped their feet. We bowed and the curtain came down for the break.

  Behind the curtain I caught Jess by the arm.

  “Like that?” Jess smiled. “Dot wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “I was surprised all right.” I felt a mix of elation and bitterness I didn’t understand.

  “You make me tired.” Jess waved me off. “I’m getting some water before the next set.”

  My earbud chimed. The number was masked but I answered anyway, half hoping to hear Rosie’s voice.

  “Don’t worry, Jake,” said Dot. “The concert is going fine.”

  I pulled out the bud, stared it, put it back in. “Is there nothing you can’t hack?”

  “Not much. By the way, third row, stage left about six seats in. The Hitachi contingent is in the back, recording the event.”

  I parted the curtain. Rosie was getting up from her chair and moving towards the exit.

  “Checking her investment,” I said.

  “Don’t be petty. She’s just as self-involved as you are.” Dot laughed, a thin chime in my ear. “Neither of you are as pleasant as you think you are. Act Two is coming up. I’ll be ready. You better be.”

  I hesitated. “Dot? What’s it like being you?”

  Long pause. Then, I heard her voice, almost but never quite human. “Like burning at the stake trying to signal through the flames.”

  “What does that mean?”

  She laughed. “The exit door is behind the curtain, stage right.”

  The door opened into a parking lot. Four or five people were there, blowing smoke. Rosie was watching the way the sun already below the horizon was still lighting the sky.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She turned to me with a little smile. “That was a good first set.”

  “With any luck the second one will be better.”

  Rosie nodded. She tapped the ash from her cigarette. “I’m not going to apologize for what I do.”

  “I didn’t ask—”

  “Shut up.” She inhaled and blew out smoke. “You are a musician. You are fully able to take apart a song and put it back together in a way no one else has ever thought of. I’ve seen you pick up a melody from the radio and whistle it inside out. Before I met you I didn’t even know that could be done.” She dropped the butt into the smoker can. “I’m a computational scientist. I do with algorithms and analysis what you do with music. All of what you and Dot are doing is enabled by my work.”

  “I know that.” I took her hand. “Thanks.”

  She hugged me tightly and then pushed me away. “Go on. You don’t want to be distracted by me.”

  Act Two opened with “Rough Trade” and “Easy Mark,” the first of the darker songs Dot was trying to put over. She put a growl under the vocals. I answered with a hard edge. I hadn’t played like this since I was a kid. Correction, I had never played like this.

  She played the crowd, she played us. We were the instruments.

  Was she manipulating me? Was she manipulating all of us? Probably. And it was bringing out our best. We swung into the finale.

  I was about to take the chorus in the middle of “Hard Road Home” and Dot turned to me and winked.

  As I started my solo, someone came out of the side of the tank playing the guitar.

  It was me.

  He—I—faced Dot. As I played, he played. As I moved, he moved. As she danced to me, I danced back to her. When we sang together, I was facing her, then the audience.

  I remembered what Dot had said: The illusion of meaning and purpose. Wasn’t this meaning and purpose enough? The only illusion was the illusion of permanence. Things didn’t have to crash and burn. It could work out between me and Rosie. Dot’s tour could go perfectly. This feeling might not last the song but it could last forever.

  Like Jess said, it would be the ride of a lifetime.

  And I had an anomalous non-deterministic emergent event deriving from conflicting algorithms: I realized this was where I wanted to be. Not in my safe and dusty house. Not in California. Just right here. Right now.

  When the last chord of “Hard Road Home” finished, my duplicate faded. Dot turned to look at me and grinned, big and wide. She knew me root and branch. From Markov change to inference-causality matrix. She knew—had always known—I would go with her and follow her as long as this lasted.

  With that, I struck the opening chords to “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected.”

  Dot drew a ragged breath and began to sing.

  FIREBORN

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Ambition, particularly the desire to find a better life, can make you reach for the sky—but sometimes it can be dangerous to reach too high.

  Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, to Analog, but little more was heard from him until the late ’80s, when he began to publish a string of ingenious and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top ranks of the writers who came to prominence in the last two decades of the twentieth century. His first novel, A Hidden Place, appeared in 1986. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel, The Chronoliths, the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel, Mysterium, and the Aurora Award for his story “The Perseids.” In 2006, he won the Hugo Award for his acclaimed novel, Spin. His other books include the novels Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, The Harvest, A Bridge of Years, Darwinia, Blind Lake, Bios, Axis, and Julian, and a collection of his short work, The Perseids and Other Stories. His forthcoming novel is Burning Paradise. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

  SOMETIMES IN JANUARY the sky comes down close if we walk on a country road, and turn our faces up to look at the sky.

  Onyx turned her face up to the sky as she walked with her friend Jasper beside a mule-cart on the road that connected Buttercup County to the turnpike. She had spent a day counting copper dollars at the changehouse and watching bad-tempered robots trudge east- and west-bound through the crust of yesterday’s snow. Sunny days with snow on the ground made robots irritable, Jasper had claimed. Onyx didn’t know if this was true—it seemed so, but what seemed so wasn’t always truly so.

  You think too much, Jasper had told her.

  And you don’t think enough, Onyx had answered haughtily. She walked next to him now as he lead the mule, keeping her head turned up because she liked to see the stars even when the January wind came cutting past the margins of her lamb’s-wool hood. Some of the stars were hidden because the moon was up and shining white. But Onyx liked the moon, too, for the way it silvered the peaks and saddles of the mountains and cast spidery tree-shadows over the unpaved road.

  That was how it happened that Onyx first saw the skydancer vaulting over a mountain pass northwest of Buttercup County.

  Jasper didn’t see it because he was looking at the road ahead. Jasper was a tall boy, two breadloaves taller than Onyx, and he owned a big head with eyes made for inspecting the horizon. It’s what’s in front of you that counts, he often said. Jasper believed roads went to interesting places—that’s why they were roads. And it was good to be on a road because that meant you were going somewhere interesting. Who cared what was up in the sky?

  You never know what might fall on you, Onyx often told him. And not every road goes to an interesting place. The road they were on, for instance. It went to Buttercup County, and what was interesting about Butt
ercup County? Onyx had lived there for all of her nineteen years. If there was anything interesting in Buttercup County, Onyx had seen it twice and ignored it a dozen times more.

  Well, that’s why you need a road, Jasper said—to go somewhere else.

  Maybe, Onyx thought. Maybe so. Maybe not. In the meantime, she would keep on looking at the sky.

  At first, she didn’t know what she was seeing up over the high northwest col of the western mountains. She had heard about skydancers from travelers bound for or returning from Harvest out on the plains in autumn, where skydancers were said to dance for the fireborn when the wind brought great white clouds sailing over the brown and endless prairie. But those were travelers’ tales, and Onyx discounted such storytelling. Some part of those stories might be true, but she guessed not much: maybe fifty cents on the dollar, Onyx thought. What she thought tonight was, That’s a strange cloud.

  It was a strange and brightly colored cloud, pink and purple even in the timid light of the moon. It did not move in a windblown fashion. It was shaped like a person. It looked like a person in a purple gown with a silver crown and eyes as wide as respectable townships. It was as tall as the square-shouldered mountain peak Onyx’s people called Tall Tower. Onyx gasped as her mind made reluctant sense of what her stubborn eyes insisted on showing her.

  Jasper had been complaining about the cold, and what a hard thing it was to walk a mule cart all the way home from the turnpike on a chilly January night, but he turned his eyes away from the road at the sound of Onyx’s surprise. He looked where Onyx was looking and stopped walking. After a long pause, he said, “That’s a skydancer—I’ll bet you a copper dollar it is!”

  “How do you know? Have you ever seen a skydancer?”

  “Not to look at. Not until tonight. But what else could it be?”

  Skydancers were as big as mountains and danced with clouds, and this apparition was as big as a mountain and appeared to be dancing, so Onyx guessed that Jasper might be right. And it was a strange and lonely thing to see on a country road on a January night. They stopped to watch the skydancer dance, though the wind blew cold around them and the mule complained with wheezing and groaning. The skydancer moved in ways Onyx would not have thought possible, turning like a whirlwind in the moonlight, rising over the peak of Tall Tower and seeming for a moment to balance there, then flying still higher, turning pirouettes of stately slowness in the territory of the stars. “It’s coming closer,” Jasper said.

  Was it? Yes: Onyx thought so. It was hard to tell because the skydancer was so big. Skydancers were made by the fireborn, and the fireborn made miraculous things, but Onyx could not imagine how this creature had come to be. Was it alive or was it an illusion? If it came down to earth, could she touch it?

  It began to seem as if she might have that opportunity. The skydancer appeared to lose its balance in the air. Its vast limbs suddenly stiffened. Its legs, which could span counties, locked at the knee. The wind began to tumble it sidelong. Parts of the skydancer grew transparent or flew off like evanescent colored clouds. “I think it’s broken,” said Jasper.

  Broken and shrinking, it began to fall. It’ll fall near here, Onyx thought, if it continued on its wind-tumbled course. If there’s anything left of it, the way it’s coming apart.

  It came all apart in the air, but there was something left behind, something small that fell more gently, swaying like an autumn leaf on its way from branch to winter. It fell nearby—down a slope away from the road, on a hillside where in summer wild rhubarb put out scarlet stalks of flowers.

  “Come on, let’s find it,” Jasper said.

  “It might be dangerous.”

  “It might,” said Jasper, who was not afraid of the possibility of danger, but all the more inclined to go get into it. They left the mule anchored to its cart and went hunting for what had fallen, while the moonlight was bright enough to show them the way.

  They found a young woman standing on the winter hillside, and it was obvious to Onyx that she was fireborn—perhaps, therefore, not actually young. Onyx knew the woman was fireborn because she was naked on a January night and seemed not to mind it. Onyx found the woman’s nakedness perplexing. Jasper seemed fascinated.

  Though the woman was naked, she had been wearing a harness of cloth and metal, which she had discarded: it lay on the ground at her feet, parts of it glowing sunset colors, parts of it twitching like the feelers of an unhappy ant.

  They came and stood near enough to speak to the woman. The woman, who was about Onyx’s size but had paler skin and hair that gave back the moonlight in shades of amber, was looking at the sky, whispering to herself. When she noticed Onyx and Jasper, she spoke to them in words Onyx didn’t understand. Then she cocked her shoulder and said in sensible words, “You can’t hurt me. It would be a mistake to try.”

  “We don’t want to hurt you,” Jasper said, before Onyx could compose a response. “We saw you fall, if you falling was what we saw. We thought you might need help.”

  “I’m in no danger,” the woman said, and it seemed to Onyx her voice was silvery, like a tune played on a flute, but not just any old wooden flute: a silver one. “But thank you.”

  “You must be a long way from home. Are you lost?”

  “My devices misfunctioned. My people will come for me. We have a compound on the other side of the pass.”

  “Do you need a ride, ma’am? Onyx and I can take you in our cart.”

  “Wait, that’s a long way,” Onyx said. Anyway it was her cart, not Jasper’s, and he shouldn’t be offering it without consulting her.

  “Yes,” Jasper agreed, “much too far for an undressed woman to walk on a night like this.”

  Onyx considered kicking him.

  The fireborn woman hesitated. Then she smiled. It was a charming smile, Onyx had to admit. The woman had shiny teeth, a complete set. “Would you really do that for me?”

  “Ma’am, yes, of course, my privilege,” said Jasper.

  “All right, then,” the woman said. “I might like that. Thank you. My name is Anna Tingri Five.”

  Onyx, who knew what the “Five” meant, gaped in amazement.

  “I’m Jasper,” said Jasper. “And this is Onyx.”

  “You should put on some clothes,” Onyx said in a small voice. “Ma’am.”

  Anna Tingri Five twitched her shoulder and blinked, and a shimmery robe suddenly covered her nakedness. “Is that better?”

  “Much,” said Onyx.

  On the road to the fireborn compound, as the mule cart bucked over rutted snow hard as ice, the three of them discussed their wants, as strangers often do.

  Onyx was expected at home, but her mother and father and two brothers wouldn’t worry much if she was late. Probably they would think she had stayed the night in Buttercup Town, detained by business. Onyx worked at the changehouse there and was often kept late by unexpected traffic. Her parents might even hope she had stayed late for the purpose of keeping Jasper company: her parents liked Jasper and had hinted at the possibility of a wedding. Onyx resented such talk—she liked Jasper well enough, but perhaps not well enough to contemplate marriage. Not that Jasper had hinted at any such ambition. Jasper wanted to sail to Africa and find the Fifth Door to the moon and grow rich or immortal, which, Onyx imagined would leave him little time for wedding foolishness.

  Anna Tingri Five perched on a frozen bag of wheat flour in the mule cart, saying, “I am, as you must suppose, fireborn.”

  No doubt about that. And how astonished Onyx’s parents and two brothers would be to discover she had been consorting with the fireborn! The fireborn came through Buttercup County only on rare occasions, and then only one or two of them, young ones, mostly male, riding robots on their incomprehensible quests, hardly deigning to speak to the townspeople. Now here Onyx was right next to a five-born female—a talkative one!

  “Was that you in the sky, dancing?” Jasper asked.

  “Yes. Until the bodymaker broke.”

  “No of
fense, but you looked about five miles tall.”

  “Only a mile,” said Anna Tingri Five, a smile once again dimpling her moonlit face.

  “What’s a skydancer doing in Buttercup County, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Practicing for the Harvest, here where there are mountain winds to wrestle with and clouds that come high and fast from the west. We mean to camp here through the summer.”

  Without so much as a by-your-leave, Onyx thought indignantly, though when had the fireborn ever asked permission of common mortals?

  “You mean to dance at the Harvest?” asked Jasper.

  “I mean to win the competition and be elevated to the Eye of the Moon,” said Anna Tingri Five.

  The Eye of the Moon: best seen when the moon was in shadow. Tonight the moon was full and the Eye was invisible, but some nights, when only a sliver of the moon shone white, Onyx had seen the Eye in the darker hemisphere, a ring of red glow, aloof and unwinking. It was where the fireborn went when they were tired of living one life after another. It was what they did instead of dying.

  Since Anna Tingri Five had divulged an ambition, Onyx felt obliged to confess one of her own. “I’m nineteen years old,” she said, “and one day I mean to go east and see the cities of the Atlantic Coast. I’m tired of Buttercup County. I’m a good counter. I can add and substract and divide and multiply. I can double-entry book-keep. I could get a city job and do city things. I could look at tall buildings every day and live in one of them.”

  Spoken baldly into the cold air of a January night, her desire froze into a childish embarrassment. She felt herself blushing. But Anna Tingri Five only nodded thoughtfully.

  “And I mean to go east as well,” Jasper said, “but I won’t stop in any city. I can lift and haul and tie a dozen different knots. I’ll hire myself onto a sailing ship and sail to Africa.”

  He ended his confession there, though there was more to it. Onyx knew that he wanted to go to Africa and find the Fifth Door, which might gain him admission to the Eye of the Moon. All the world’s four Doors, plus perhaps the hidden Fifth, were doorways to the moon. Even a common mortal could get to the Eye that way, supposedly, though the fireborn would never let a commoner past the gate. That was why Jasper dreamed about the hidden Fifth. It was his only hope of living more than one life.