Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  It was a fine end to the evening. When Stef and Dzhun left the restaurant the air had the lingering chill of spring and the scent of lemon groves that were blossoming in the hills. Dzhun pulled Stef’s arm like a scarf around her neck and started to sing the song again. He leaned over her, hugged her close. It was at moments like this that he almost envied people who were foolish enough to fall in love.

  “I love that song,” she said. “It’s so nice to be sad. Sadness goes with joy like plums with duck.”

  Didn’t statements like that mean that she was, after all, a bit more than just a whore? Stef hugged her tighter, breathing in her offworld perfume with the chilly scent of the lemon groves.

  They had an amorous night and spent next morning lolling on the deck with their usual strong green tea. They were supposed to start back to the city today and Dzhun was looking abstracted.

  “Can’t wait to get back and go to work?” Stef smiled.

  “Stef… there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “My senator wants to set me up in a little house in Karakorum. He’s jealous, and it’ll be the end for you and me.”

  That produced silence. Stef cleared his throat, drank tea.

  “Ah. So this trip was a kiss off.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “Meaning?”

  Dzhun said, eyes cast down, “I’d rather live with you. We don’t have to marry.”

  “No,” said Stef.

  Dzhun sat down, still not looking at him.

  “I thought you’d say that. I’ve never bothered you with my life story because I thought you’d get bored and angry. But let me tell you just a little. My family needed money, so they sold me into the District when I was nine. The owner rented me to one of his customers. The night he raped me, I almost bled to death.

  “By the time I was twelve I was a registered whore, a member of the guild. It took me three more years to pay off my debts because in the District the houses charge you for everything, heat, water, towels, mediscanning, almost for the air you breathe. But I was beautiful and earning good money and I was out of debt by the time I was sixteen. Now I’m almost eighteen and I’m sick of it all. I don’t want to be a robotchi any more.

  “I hear people talk about going to the stars and I’ve never been out of Ulanor. I can barely read and write and if Selina hadn’t taught me some arithmetic so they couldn’t cheat me, I wouldn’t be able to add two and two. I don’t know anything, all I do is live from night to night—up at sixteen, to bed at eight. I’ve had dozens of diseases—sida six times — and the last time it took me a whole month to recover. The house doctor says my immune system’s collapsing, whatever that means.

  “I’ve got to get out of the life, Stef. I want to live with you, but if you don’t want me I’m going with my senator. He has some funny tastes and three wives and he’s old, but he’s also kind-hearted and rich, and that’s enough.”

  She stopped, still looking down at the floor. Stef was staring at Dzhun and clenching his fists. He felt as if a favourite dog had just bitten him. Twice, in fact—once by threatening to leave him, and once by demanding a commitment from him.

  “I don’t want anything fancy,” Dzhun went on. “I want to live in a house with a garden. I want to get up in the morning and go to bed at night. I want to go to school before I’m too old and learn something about the world. I can see you’re angry with me. Well, so be it. If you’re too angry to pay my way back to the city, well screw you. I’ll get the shuttle by myself.”

  She stood up and walked somewhat unsteadily into the house, taking by habit the little mincing steps they taught the girls—and the boys as well—in Radiant Love House.

  Half an hour later she came back out, dressed for the road. Stef was leaning on the railing, looking down into deep and black Lake Bai.

  Stef said, “I’m poor. I’m a loner. I’m a kif head.”

  “So you can’t afford me, don’t want me, and don’t need me because kif’s better. Right? So, goodbye.”

  “Can you fend off your senator for a while?”

  “Not forever. He can buy what he wants, and I don’t want to lose him.”

  “I guess I could set up housekeeping with a hundred thousand,” Stef muttered. “But maybe I can bargain for more.”

  Dzhun collapsed rather than sat down and drew the longest breath of her life. She put her hands over her face as if she was weeping, though in fact she had stopped crying many years before and her face was hot and dry. Her mind was running on many things, but chiefly on her friend Selina’s brainstorm, the wonderful invention of the senator, who, of course, did not really exist.

  “So you’ll do it,” said Yama.

  “For a million khans. Paid in advance. I want something to leave to my heirs in the event I don’t come back.”

  “That’s a bunch of fucking money.”

  “There’s one more thing I want. Get those two kids I captured turned loose. Otherwise Kathmann will sooner or later cut their heads off on general principles.”

  Yama frowned. “He’ll never turn them loose. They’re young and the girl’s beautiful, so he’ll want to mutilate them. In my opinion, he’s saving them for something special. That’s the way Kathmann is—he’s a fucking sadist, as you of all people ought to know.”

  “Try anyway.”

  “It’s hopeless. But if I can save them I will.”

  When Stef had gone, Yama set out to sell his prize agent to the fromazbi. He expected trouble with Kathmann but none developed, the chief of Earth Security was assembling an assassination team to kill Dyeva and viewed Stef’s mission as a chance to test the wormholer. Ugaitish, Admiral Hrka and Xian were ready to try anything and put their chops on the proposal without a murmur. It was Yama’s own boss, Oleary, who objected because of the cost.

  “Why don’t you go yourself?” he demanded. “It’d be cheaper.”

  “Sir, I’ll go if you say to. But I got a wife and four kids.”

  “That’s two more than the ecolaws allow.”

  “I got an exemption.”

  Oleary stared at Stef’s file, frowning.

  “What’s wrong with this guy? I don’t trust him. Why did he have to leave the service in the first place?”

  “Sir, he’s a great agent. Brave, quick, adaptable. But he’s got a soft spot in his head. He’s sentimental. You can’t be a cop and be sentimental. A long time ago he helped a woman thief who was headed for the White Chamber to escape. Well, I found out about it, so I did my duty and turned Steffens in.”

  Oleary kept on frowning.

  “If he’s sentimental about women, what about when he has to kill, what’s her name, Dyeva?”

  “Sir, she’s different. She’s threatening his whole world, including this little tart he seems to be in love with.”

  “Oh, well,” said Oleary, shrugging. “Send him, I guess. Can’t hurt. But take the money back if he doesn’t succeed. How could I justify a budget item like that for a failure?”

  “You go tomorrow,” said Yama. “Here’s some stuff to study tonight.”

  Stef took the packet of copy, caught an official hovercar, and flew straight to Radiant Love House. The long farewell that followed left Stef weeping, and Dzhun—once the door had closed behind him—smiling at prospects that seemed equally bright whether he survived his mission or not.

  Back home, he settled down on the balcony to study the three items that Yama had provided him: a hologram of Dyeva, a summary of her life on Ganesh and a map of ancient Moscow. The map got little more than a glance; he needed to be in situ to use it. Dyeva’s hologram was another matter. Stef studied it as closely as if she and not Dzhun was his lover, imprinting on his mind Dyeva’s round Tartar face, high cheekbones and unreadable eyes.

  Then he read her biography. To his surprise, the hardcopy with its STATE SECRET/BEHEADER stamp had been written by Professor Yang. Liking the taste of polizi money, he’d gone to work for Yama as a volunteer
agent, and his first task had been writing up and annotating Dyeva’s life story.

  Settlers of the Shiva system had been led by a devout Hindu who had hoped to establish a refuge for members of all the old faiths—Muslims, Christians, Jews and Buddhists as well as his own people—where, far from corruption and unbelief, peace and justice and the worship of God could reign for all time.

  “The actual results of this noble experiment,” wrote Yang, “were not without irony.” In the process of settling the system, three intelligent species had been destroyed, and among the humans religious wars and bitter sectarian disputes had constituted much of the system’s subsequent history.

  Akhmatova Maria was born to a devout family on the third planet, Ganesh. They maintained Christian belief according to the Russian Orthodox rite and hated both their neighbours of other faiths and the depraved and godless civilization of other planets. In time she lost her own faith in God but adopted in its place the religion of humanity. Her private life remained austere; she had neither male nor female lovers, and the name she took in the movement which she helped to found, Dyeva, meant virgin in Russian, her native dialect.

  She was attending the local academy when news of the technical advances which allowed invention of the wormholer gave her the great project of her life. She was one of a group of people loosely connected with the academy who formed a scheme to undo the Time of Troubles by returning to the past. Some members of her group transferred to the University of the Universe in Ulanor, where they made converts to their views and laid plans to build—later on, learning that one had already been built, to steal—a wormholer.

  Then came a part of the account that Yama had marked in red. Dyeva’s theory that the Troubles could be prevented rested upon a verbal tradition among the Russian Christians of Ganesh: that a man named Razruzhenye, the defence minister of ancient Russia when the troubles began, ordered the first thermo/bio strike upon China and that this attack launched the Time of Troubles. Killing this one individual might well prevent the war and undo the whole course of disasters that followed.

  “So,” muttered Stef. It seemed a little strange to him that Dyeva, who believed in the absolute value of life, was returning to the past to kill someone. But Yang in a footnote pointed out that such things had happened many times in the past: people who believed in freedom imprisoned freedom’s enemies; those who believed in life murdered anybody who seemed to threaten it.

  His study finished, Stef ate a little, then fell into bed. He woke when his mashina chimed and managed to stumble through a bath. Then he confronted a large box of ridiculous clothing that had been prepared according to Professor Yang’s designs, based on what men wore in the mosaics of the Moscow subway.

  At seven-seventy-five a government hovercar picked Stef off the roof and flew him to a neighborhood that he knew only too well, a cluster of huge anonymous buildings with vaguely menacing forms. They descended past the ziggurat Palace of Justice and the Central Lockup in whose subterranean rooms he had tasted the joys of interrogation.

  This time, however, the huge pentagonal block of Earth Central was the goal. The hovercar descended through a well in the central courtyard that wits called the Navel of the Earth. Yama met Stef as he emerged in a sunless court of black hexagonal stone blocks and led him down one narrow blank corridor after another, past huge stinking Darksiders armed with impact weapons, into a vaulted underground room with a gleaming contraption standing in the centre of the floor among a jungle of thick grey cables.

  “So that’s it,” said Stef, interested by his own lack of interest. At the centre of the wormholer was a two-metre cube with a round opening in one side, whose purpose he could easily guess.

  Blue-coated techs helped him into a heavy coat with wide lapels and big pockets, slipped an impact pistol into the right-hand coat pocket, and slid a black powerpack with a small control box into the left. Somebody stuck a chilly metal button into his left ear.

  “Pay attention to the control,” said Yama. “Take it in your hand. Now. Red button: job’s done, bring me home. oké? White button: I need help, send backup now. Black button: hold onto your ass, Dyeva’s succeeded and your world is finished. The powerpack feeds a little tiny built-in mag space transponder that emits a kind of cosmic squeak for one microsecond. The signal crosses time exactly the way it crosses space, don’t ask me why. That’s what we’ll be listening for. Then we have to pull you back, send help, or—”

  “Grab your butts. I see. But that also means you could just cut me off, leave me there, save yourselves a million.”

  “Yeah, we could, but we won’t. Hell with that, I really mean I won’t. Not,” he smiled, “for a measly million that isn’t even my money.”

  They stared at each other until Stef managed a weak grin.

  “That’s good enough. Any problems?”

  “Yes,” said Stef, “lots. I don’t speak Russian. I’ve got no goddamn idea how to find Dyeva even if I land in Moscow at the right time. I—”

  Yama took Stef’s arm and began to walk him toward the wormholer.

  “Don’t worry about the language. That thing in your ear will translate for you. And don’t worry about the time. A register inside the machine recorded the day Dyeva chose, the 331st day of 2091. So we’re sending you to that same date in hopes she’s close to the point of exit. If she’s not, you’ll have to find her.”

  “How?”

  “Come on, Stef. I sold the others on you because of your adaptability. This whole world you’re going into vanished in a cloud of dust. How much can anybody know about it? There’s just no way to be systematic.”

  They stopped beside the huge glittering gadget.

  “I really envy you,” said Yama in a choked voice. “This is the most crucial moment in human history. You’re the plumed knight of our world, like Yoshitsune, like Saladin, like Richard the Lion-Hearted.”

  Yama embraced him. “Take care, my old friend, and kill that fucking virgin.”

  An instant later the techs had helped Stef into the wormholer and closed the heavy door, which looked like a nine-petal steel chrysanthemum. Yama stepped back, wiping his eyes. Kathmann had now arrived to observe the action and Yama joined him.

  “Well, that’s one less friend I got,” said Yama. “This job of mine is hell. How are the preparations going for your assassination team?”

  “As fast as possible. Of course they’re the ones who’ll really do the job.”

  “There’s a chance that Steffens might pull it off alone.”

  “Yeah,” said Kathmann, “and there’s a chance I might be the next Solar System Controller. Svidanye,” he added, “see you later. Some more members of Crux have been arrested and I got work to do in the Chamber.”

  In the Wormholer, seated as he had been instructed, knees drawn up, chin down, arms around his shins, sweltering in the heavy coat, feeling the pistol grate against his ribs, Stef tried to imagine Dzhun’s face, but found that it, like everything else, was inadequate to explain to him why he was where he was. The excitement he’d felt earlier was gone, replaced by mere dread. He could only suppose that his entire life had been leading up to one moment of supreme folly, and this was it.

  Then a great violet-white light flashed through him, he felt an instant of supernatural cold, and he was sitting on a gritty sidewalk against a damp stuccoed wall.

  He raised his face. The day was overcast, and a restless throng of thick-bodied people wrapped up against the autumn chill hurried past, not one of them paying him the slightest heed.

  He looked higher. Behind the solid walls of elderly, three-storey buildings with flaking plaster and paint he saw high polished towers of what looked like mirror duroplast. Immense crimson letters hovered just below the lowest layer of murk.

  Since Alspeke was written mostly in Cyrillic letters, he had no trouble reading Moskovskaya a Fondovaya Birzha, and when he murmured it aloud a soft atonal voice in his ear translated: Moscow Stock Exchange. Below the Stock Exchange sign was a
huge blue banner saying “1991-2091”.

  Slowly he got to his feet, staggered, caught himself against the wall. A pretty young woman paused, stared at him, then drew a pale furry hood around her face and hurried on.

  A couple of teenagers stopped also, looked at him and grinned. They squawked to each other in seabirds’ voices.

  “What’s this asshole dressed up for?”

  “Must think he’s Stalin or something. Hey, asshole—where’d you get that coat?”

  A stout woman stopped suddenly and shook her fist at the kids.

  “You leave that man alone! Can’t you see he’s crazy? He’s got troubles enough without you hooligans pestering him.”

  A little man in a checquered coat stopped and joined her.

  “Show some respect!” he shouted at the kids.

  “What, for a guy dressed up like Stalin, for Christ’s sake? Hey you,” said a teenager to Stef. “You going to a party?”

  Unfortunately, the translator didn’t answer questions, and Stef just stared at him.

  “My God, he’s deaf and dumb, and you’re harassing him,” said the woman in scandalized tones.

  By now a little crowd had gathered. Everybody had an opinion. It was the adults against the teenagers.

  “You little bastards got no respect for anybody!”

  “Not for you, Grandaddy.”

  “Call me Grandaddy? Yes, I’ve got grandchildren, but thank God they’re nothing like you, you little pimp.”

  In the confusion, Stef managed to slip away, leaving them arguing behind him. In an alleyway he unbuttoned the coat and stared down at the tunic and coarse trousers jammed into boots. The clothes were nothing like what people were wearing on the street. Already the stiff, knee-high boots of faux leather were beginning to chafe his toes, and he hadn’t walked more than a hundred metres.

  Cursing Yang, he tried to decide what to do. While he pondered, he worked his way from alleyway to alleyway until he suddenly spotted, among the hundreds of small shops lining the street—Boris Yeltsin Street—a shop with a sign that said Kostyumi. He didn’t need the translator for that.