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

by Gardner Dozois

  She had assumed as much, yes.

  “We won’t have to worry,” he mentioned. “If anything should happen between us, I mean.”

  Something was going to happen. She had known it from the moment she woke beneath the tattler’s skin. She could deflect his interest today, and probably tomorrow, but unless she was prepared to accept a frightful cost for her stubbornness, they would sleep together. So she did what she had done in similar circumstances during her busy, brief life.

  She rose to her feet.

  To this man, nothing was as real as the woman that he had saved on the rocky shoreline. Food and sleep had healed a body that had never been entirely whole before. She was a strong lovely creature with short black hair and eyes that made the hair seem pale by comparison. With him staring only at her, she pulled off the clothes that had been his but she had retailored to fit herself. Then in that rich, perfect instant when hunger and surprise were in rough balance, she mentioned, “I won’t take any pleasure from this.”

  That was a useful lie.

  Mercer suddenly acted shy — this strange ancient man full of stories that he never quite told. Leaning back in his chair, he managed to say, “You won’t like this, will you?”

  “But if it is a duty, I will comply.”

  He sighed as if injured. Perhaps he would change his plans. But then he stood and approached her, nervous and perhaps eager to impress, and before long he realized that she was not the passionless vessel that he had been warned about.

  Later, as he climbed on top of her again, and then again, she saw in his wide eyes that he was intrigued, and perhaps in useful ways, he was a little bit impressed by what the ocean had brought to him.

  6

  The island was shaped like a short powerful arm, and the man’s private empire stretched from the broad shoulder to the elbow — a rough landscape of high hills and brief winter streams too swift to be absorbed by the forest, each torrent plunging into cisterns or the deep water offshore. And on his ground, the man proved to be neither blind nor foolish. Not one speck of dirt was new to him. Every tiny change was noted and measured for importance. Each day, he took his guest farther and showed her more, mentioning tiny facts and offering anecdotes to help her see with his eyes. Fungi and griefs existed for no purpose but to give him easy meals. Every animal with a memory knew him by sight or by smell. There were only a few species of trees, but even the kinds that she recognized towered above the specimens growing on the mainland. Winter pushed ahead, the sun continued to dim, and the rain fell hard and then harder. Then one day the invisible sun seemed brighter by a little ways. Yet the season refused to weaken, its rains lashing down even as the clouds filled with sunlight and the first teasing hints of heat.

  On the final ridge before the island’s elbow, a giant magna-wood grew halfway to the clouds, providing a natural watching post.

  One morning, Mercer invited her to crawl with him up into the tree, into a blind made of rope and wooden planks and camouflaging bark. A squall line suddenly passed over their hiding place, and they filled their time pleasantly enough. Then the storm was finished, and it was possible to see all the way to the island’s far end — a long narrow and plainly fertile landscape that ended with crooked fingers with half a dozen black bays between.

  “Look through here,” he advised.

  A tube hung on a cord. She peered into the tiny end, and suddenly the distant places were thrown against the back of her astonished eye.

  Quietly, he explained the nature of light and how the clear plastic shells of young haphazard-bugs could be cut to size and polished, producing superior lenses that would bend light and magnify the universe around them. But oxygen always distorted the hydrocarbons, and these lenses had to be replaced each year. The gas was a frequent villain in Mercer’s stories. She let go of the telescope and mentioned as much, adding, “For you, it’s worse than the Nots.”

  That was an amusing observation. He laughed and winked, and then he took his own look at the island’s far end.

  She had heard about enormous Not villages — landscapes that were covered to the horizon with their willowy, skin-draped bodies. But she had never seen as many of the creatures as she had just then, peering through the shells of dead bugs. Giant houses were built close to dozens of wide, well-traveled roads, and between the roads lay fields where winter crops and young groves of wood were kept for lumber. Beyond the farms were stone buildings, some as tall as trees, and there docks and countless little boats not just floating in the narrow bays but riding the wind out into the open water, using the long nets that could never be deployed in summer. The inhuman, incomprehensible creatures numbered in the thousands, and if they were aware that two human monsters were watching over them, no sign of anxiety or hatred could be seen.

  “My enemies,” he whispered.

  She sat close enough to feel the heat of his body. With unassisted eyes, she could see every piece of the Nots’ realm. The telescope might have its value, but narrowing a soul’s vision carried risks too.

  “You think my neighbors aren’t my enemies?”

  “I know they help you,” she admitted.

  “And how do you know this?”

  Now she had reason to laugh. “I see where you go when you leave me. Not every day, but sometimes. And you come back from these visits with things you can’t find or make for yourself. Like last night’s food.”

  They had feasted on real monster fare — green leaves and long white roots, bitter but rejuvenating, and fresh, and crisp, and precious.

  Mercer said nothing.

  So she guessed, “The Nots grow those plants for you.”

  He smiled.

  She pointed, singling out the green smudge in a distant field.

  “That isn’t quite accurate.”

  “No?”

  “Because of me, they cultivate those old weeds. That’s all.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Our meal was an offering,” he explained. “A good-natured attempt to earn my gratitude. At set times, a few of my neighbors approach the barricade to leave gifts at the feet of my likeness.”

  “What likeness?”

  “Down there,” he said, gesturing at the bottom of the hill. “You can’t see it now. But it’s a rather impressive statue.”

  “Of you?”

  “As well as they can manage it,” he mentioned. “Since none of them have ever seen my face and survived.”

  “All right,” she said. “Name some other enemies.”

  “Oxygen, always,” he whispered.

  She gazed off in a new direction.

  “By the way,” he said. “Life did come from one of the moons.”

  “I knew that.”

  “But I mean the life that is not us. What we think of as the natives plants and animals.” Mercer pointed his telescope at one patch of clouds, perhaps knowing where the moon was hiding. “For the first two or three billion years, this world was too hot, too volcanic. It remained sterile until a few spores drifted down here from the Gold Moon that you seem to like so much.”

  She hadn’t expected this answer.

  “Our original home can’t be seen,” he continued. “Not by any number of polished bug asses. But I promise you: our cradle didn’t have as much free oxygen in its atmosphere as there is in this one. And if we had arrived here wearing our original bodies, we would have died. Since oxygen is always a little bit toxic, and in these doses, inevitably fatal.”

  That final word was offered with a loud voice and a sly tilt of the head.

  She repeated one word as a question. “Fatal?”

  “Long ago, we were rather like the Nots. Except for every detail, of course. We had a different home world and a very different history, and our future wasn’t at all like theirs, and our outlook wasn’t even remotely similar. Plus, we enjoyed a huge array of technological wonders that we had invented ourselves or that we were given.”

  When she looked south across the open water, like n
ow, she thought she could almost see the mainland lurking in the squall line. But that was an illusion. Nothing was out there but the watery horizon, Mercer had promised. The currents and then the leviathans had carried her an enormous distance, which was why this was an isolated and remarkably safe island.

  “In our youth, we could and often did die.”

  “We can die now,” she pointed out.

  “But not like Nots die. Not like bugs and birds either.” With an ageless hand, he dismissed everything that wasn’t human. “In ancient times, a fall from this height would have shattered our bodies, and even if we survived, we’d have been crawling through our days as cripples.”

  “We are different than them,” she conceded. “I know that.”

  He released his telescope to look at her eyes.

  “We’re aliens,” she said, repeating one of his favorite words.

  “How long have those Nots and I shared this island?”

  “One hundred years.”

  He grinned. “Why that number?”

  “It’s about as long as they can live, or so I’ve heard.”

  “Clever,” he admitted. Then he rephrased the question, asking, “When did Nots carve that statue of me?”

  She offered a huge number.

  He said, “Triple that number. And in human years too.”

  Which were twice as long as Not years, he had told her.

  “In that long ago time, I came here. I discovered their ancestors inhabiting this ground, and for generations, we fought. I killed them, and they tried their best to defeat me. But our war eventually turned into something else. Something more. Larger and more subtle, and in ways neither side can define precisely, we have created a relationship larger than any hatred. Deeper than simple worship. More enduring than any love.”

  “Do you understand their language?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She shrugged, admitting, “I haven’t met anyone who does.”

  “Then why ask me that?”

  “Because you know so much about the Nots down there. And apparently, you hear news about Nots living beyond the horizon too.”

  “My neighbors like to talk. Yes.”

  “Do they understand you?”

  He smiled with pride. “By various routes, and only when necessary, they understand exactly what I am saying to them.”

  “Some humans pick a little village and terrorize it,” she said. “But there’s usually more than one human working together, and the Nots don’t have the numbers or wealth that your little neighbors have.”

  “What do you see out there?” he asked.

  “One of those bays . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t understand what I’m seeing.” She took the telescope, squinting at a line of stone barely holding itself above the high tide.

  He seemed pleased that she was puzzled.

  “I saw you talking to those friendly fanhearts of yours,” she mentioned. “And then the flock flew out over the open water, moving south.”

  “On patrol,” he said.

  She considered what that might mean.

  The man kept returning to the oxygen. “Once we were rather like the Nots. But then we learned tricks and improved our bodies and minds, and we left our green world for other places. Good, promising worlds.”

  She had no idea what he might say next.

  “There was once a ship of human colonists, a boat built for deep space and bound across the emptiness. And for years and years, everything happened according to a very thorough plan. And then quite suddenly, nothing went right. There was a tragedy. There were regrettable mistakes. Those immortal humans had to watch helplessly as their new home was lost. Inside their injured starship, they could do nothing but push on and on, deeper into a realm without uranium, with little iron, and often without the elements essential to making a good human mind.”

  She listened carefully to each word. Who knew what would prove valuable tomorrow or in a hundred years? But she learned more by piecing together little clues and asking what he didn’t expect.

  “What do your fanhearts hunt for?”

  The man smiled, but he was unwilling to answer.

  “In the winter,” she continued, “when the ocean water is open, I think strange Nots sail out this far.”

  “I can’t remember a winter when they don’t wander by.”

  “Why come here?”

  “For every imaginable purpose.”

  “As raiders?”

  “Some.”

  “And what do you do then?”

  The gray eyes held steady.

  She smiled. “This is what I think. Raiders attack your precious Nots, and they call up their resident monster to wreak vengeance.”

  He let her enjoy her imagined success.

  Then he dropped his mouth to her ear, and with an intense and distinctly proud whisper, he mentioned, “These Nots, my Nots, have enemies. But what truly terrifies them isn’t their own kind. And from what little I know of your life story, Dream . . . I think you know full well what murderous horrors make my neighbors beat the warning drums in terror.”

  7

  A body might persist across centuries and millennia, healing from every injury and insult; and it was much the same for the personality trapped inside that tenacious, wondrous skull. Mercer had always been an organized creature, and in ordinary times he had been pragmatic and stubborn. But despite living a life that was strange by any measure, he was still the man that he had always been. Patterns mattered to him. Routine was his most reliable, trustworthy friend. And because he was an organized creature who kept thorough, precise records of the island’s weather and the passage of its seasons, he knew at once that this auspicious summer had arrived eighteen days before the mean date for such milestones — an early heat by a considerable ways, though still three days short of the ancient and probably unbreakable record.

  He woke in the dark and immediately knew why he was awake. With eyes closed, he smelled the drier air, and he heard the telltale noises coming through the ventilation pipes and distant microphones: scared scrubbers croaking and a male draconia begging for mates and the distant fanhearts warning their babies that the easy days were finished. For one sweet moment, he could remember every first summer night. It was as if those hundreds and thousands of milestones had been pushed together and supercooled, forming a condensate where each swam united with all; and for just that instant, it felt that if he could lie still with eyes shut, then perhaps he could inhabit every one of these promising days, forever.

  But his eyes had to open, one illusion surrendering to another.

  She was close beside him and hard asleep, and he wanted her to remain that way. But in his life, he had known perhaps only three people more alert than this wild girl. Unfamiliar sounds never seemed to pass unnoticed. An unexpected touch could startle, even scare. Obviously that was how she had survived in the world. But Mercer was possibly the most graceful person that she had ever met, and what he heard from outside didn’t sound that different from last night’s prattle. He managed to slip out of their bed, never disturbing her breathing, never interrupting the jittering eyes or the fearful dreams that they signified.

  For an instant, he allowed himself the pleasure of staring at the woman’s strong new body.

  Then on bare toes, he moved into the darkened hallway, navigating by memory, climbing stairs and then a creaky rope ladder before entering an important room perched high inside his rambling, oversized house. His first chore was to find a sharp knife and slice off his braided hair. One haircut each year was his habit: It earned him a useful length of free rope and a cooler scalp for the coming season. Then he turned to the masks perched on the various shelves, organized according to a rigorous private code, each mask with its purpose, and its occasion, and a distinct aesthetics. Nots liked to see faces, which was why he kept his hidden — a visceral, instinctive unease always gave him a slight advantage. And they had sensitive, quirky eyes. Mercer
selected a bold bright gigantic mask, and he opened a jar and used two fingers, surrounding the eyeholes with a radiant gel made from the guts of a roach-like bug found nowhere but in this island’s caves. The gel lent the mask a wild, fiery glow, particularly in the near-infrared. Then he secured it to his face. Except for the giant mask, he wore nothing. He carried nothing. He was a fearless god, or at least he wanted to appear fearless. Then the naked god slipped through a hidden doorway, stepping out into a deep crevice and its secret path.

  The strong south wind had pushed away every cloud, revealing a hundred thousand nameless suns. In principle, this summer could be a lie. It was possible that the wind would shift, winter returning tomorrow or the day after. But that had happened only once, which was effectively the same as never. Looking at the brilliant stars and the soft, clouded face of the Gold Moon, he knew the summer was genuine, and with it would come many hot days and drought, explosive fires and the possibility of new wealth.

  “Poor in metal, rich in sky.”

  Who first said those words? One of the colonists had described their new world with that bittersweet phrase, probably during the first summer. But ancient memories, and particularly the trivial ones, were difficult. Was it Lota? Or Tesstop? Though it sounded like Ming. Unless of course Mercer said it, which wouldn’t be the first time that he had allowed his ghosts to steal his best lines.

  “Poor in metal, rich in sky,” he whispered, breaking into a steady run.

  The Milky Way was surrounded by thousands of ancient star clusters, and on occasion, one of the clusters would pass through the body of the galaxy— like a breath of dense smoke dropping through a thin wisp of fog. Disaster and lousy luck had pushed the colonists’ ship past their target world and then past both of the viable alternates. They were riding a dying machine, streaking through a dense cluster of elderly suns. But there was one world in this difficult wilderness that had life as well as land and bearable water. Its lone sun was smallish and stable, and not even the most paranoid models saw any looming collisions with neighboring suns. Where the majority of the old local planets had lost their tectonics, this tidal-wracked body retained that critical blessing. But what made it their home inevitable was pure chance: They happened to spot the world with just enough time to spare, the last sips of hydrogen fuel placing them in orbit around the brown dwarf primary. One hundred and ninety-one colonists and crew were still alive, in one form or another. Most were grateful to finally escape the battered, inadequate ship. A rough little settlement was established near the equator, hugging a deep bay that would eventually serve as their harbor; and the colony’s first fifty years brought nothing but measured successes as well as those good days when the community could tell itself, with honest conviction, that at least some portion of their hopes would come true.