The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  “We’ll be there in an hour easy,” Damian said.

  “A bit less than two, maybe. As long as the fret stays where it is.”

  “The sun’ll burn it off.”

  “Hasn’t managed it yet.”

  “Don’t let your natural caution spoil a perfect day.”

  Lucas swung wide of a raft of bubbleweed that glistened like a slick of fresh blood in the sun. Some called it Martian weed, though it had nothing to do with any of the aliens; it was an engineered species designed to mop up nitrogen and phosphorous released by drowned farmland, prospering beyond all measure or control.

  Dead ahead, a long line of whitecaps marked the reef of the old railway embankment. Lucas swung the tiller into the wind and he and Damian ducked as the boom swung across and the boat gybed around. The sails slackened, then filled with wind again as the boat turned towards one of the gaps blown in the embankment, cutting so close to the buoy that marked it that Damian could reach out and slap the rusty steel plate of its flank as they went by. And then they were heading out across a broad reach, with the little town of Acle strung along a low promontory to port. A slateless church steeple stood up from the water like a skeletal light house. The polished cross at its top burned like a flame in the sunlight. A file of old pylons stepped away, most canted at steep angles, the twiggy platforms of heron nests built in angles of their girder work, whitened everywhere with droppings. One of the few still standing straight had been colonized by fisherfolk, with shacks built from driftwood lashed to its struts and a wave-powered generator made from oil drums strung out beyond. Washing flew like festive flags inside the web of rusted steel, and a naked small child of indeterminate sex clung to the unshuttered doorway of a shack just above the waterline, pushing a tangle of hair from its eyes as it watched the little boat sail by.

  They passed small islands fringed with young mangrove trees, an engineered species that was rapidly spreading from areas in the south where they’d been planted to replace the levee. Lucas spotted a marsh harrier patrolling mudflats in the lee of one island, scrying for water voles and mitten crabs. They passed a long building sunk to the tops of its second-storey windows in the flood, with brightly coloured plastic bubbles pitched on its flat roof amongst the notched and spinning wheels of windmill generators, and small boats bobbing alongside. Someone standing at the edge of the roof waved to them, and Damian stood up and waved back and the boat shifted so that he had to catch at the jib leech and sit down hard.

  “You want us to capsize, go ahead,” Lucas told him.

  “There are worse places to be shipwrecked. You know they’re all married to each other over there.”

  “I heard.”

  “They like visitors too.”

  “I know you aren’t talking from experience or you’d have told me all about it. At least a dozen times.”

  “I met a couple of them in Halvergate. They said I should stop by some time,” Damian said, grinning sideways at Lucas. “We could maybe think about doing that on the way back.”

  “And get stripped of everything we own, and thrown in the water.”

  “You have a trusting nature, don’t you?”

  “If you mean, I’m not silly enough to think they’ll welcome us in and let us take our pick of their women, then I guess I do.”

  “She was awful pretty, the woman. And not much older than me.”

  “And the rest of them are seahags older than your great-grandmother.”

  “That one time with my father . . . She was easily twice my age and I didn’t mind a bit.”

  A couple of months ago, Damian’s sixteenth birthday, his father had taken him to a pub in Norwich where women stripped at the bar and afterwards walked around bare naked, collecting tips from the customers. Damian’s father had paid one of them to look after his son, and Damian hadn’t stopped talking about it ever since, making plans to go back on his own or to take Lucas with him that so far hadn’t amounted to anything.

  He watched the half-drowned building dwindle into the glare striking off the water and said, “If we ever ran away we could live in a place like that.”

  “You could, maybe,” Lucas said. “I’d want to keep moving. But I suppose I could come back and visit now and then.”

  “I don’t mean that place. I mean a place like it. Must be plenty of them, on those alien worlds up in the sky. There’s oceans on one of them. First Foot.”

  “I know.”

  “And alien ruins on all of them. There are people walking about up there right now. On all those new worlds. And most people sit around like . . . like bloody stumps. Old tree stumps stuck in mud.”

  “I’m not counting on winning the ticket lottery,” Lucas said. “Sailing south, that would be pretty fine. To Africa, or Brazil, or these islands people are building in the Pacific. Or even all the way to Antarctica.”

  “Soon as you stepped ashore, L, you’d be eaten by a polar bear.”

  “Polar bears lived in the north when there were polar bears.”

  “Killer penguins then. Giant penguins with razors in their flippers and lasers for eyes.”

  “No such thing.”

  “The !Cha made sea dragons, didn’t they? So why not giant robot killer penguins? Your mother should look into it.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “Didn’t mean anything by it. Just joking, is all.”

  “You go too far sometimes.”

  They sailed in silence for a little while, heading west across the deep-water channel. A clipper moved far off to starboard, cylinder sails spinning slowly, white as salt in the middle of a flat vastness that shimmered like shot silk under the hot blue sky. Some way beyond it, a tug was dragging a string of barges south. The shoreline of Thurne Point emerged from the heat haze, standing up from mudbanks cut by a web of narrow channels, and they turned east, skirting stands of seagrass that spread out into the open water. It was a little colder now, and the wind was blowing more from the northwest than the west. Lucas thought that the bank of fret looked closer, too. When he pointed it out, Damian said it was still klicks and klicks off, and besides, they were headed straight to their prize now.

  “If it’s still there,” Lucas said.

  “It isn’t going anywhere, not with the tide all the way out.”

  “You really are an expert on this alien stuff, aren’t you?”

  “Just keep heading north, L.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “I’m sorry about that crack about your mother. I didn’t mean anything by it. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I like to kid around,” Damian said. “But I’m serious about getting out of here. Remember that time two years ago, we hiked into Norwich, found the army offices?”

  “I remember the sergeant there gave us cups of tea and biscuits and told us to come back when we were old enough.”

  “He’s still there. That sergeant. Same bloody biscuits too.”

  “Wait. You went to join up without telling me?”

  “I went to find out if I could. After my birthday. Turns out the army takes people our age, but you need the permission of your parents. So that was that.”

  “You didn’t even try to talk to your father about it?”

  “He has me working for him, L. Why would he sign away good cheap labour? I did try, once. He was half-cut and in a good mood. What passes for a good mood as far as he’s concerned, any rate. Mellowed out on beer and superfine skunk. But he wouldn’t hear anything about it. And then he got all the way flat-out drunk and he beat on me. Told me to never mention it again.”

  Lucas looked over at his friend and said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I can join under my own signature when I’m eighteen, not before,” Damian said. “No way out of here until then, unless I run away or win the lottery.”

  “So are you thinking of running away?”

  “I’m damned sure not counting on winning the lottery. And even if I do, you
have to be eighteen before they let you ship out. Just like the fucking army.” Damian looked at Lucas, looked away. “He’ll probably bash all kinds of shit out of me, for taking off like this.”

  “You can stay over tonight. He’ll be calmer, tomorrow.”

  Damian shook his head. “He’ll only come looking for me. And I don’t want to cause trouble for you and your mother.”

  “It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

  “Yeah, it would. But thanks anyway.” Damian paused, then said, “I don’t care what he does to me anymore. You know? All I think is, one day I’ll be able to beat up on him.”

  “You say that but you don’t mean it.”

  “Longer I stay here, the more I become like him.”

  “I don’t see it ever happening.”

  Damian shrugged.

  “I really don’t,” Lucas said.

  “Fuck him,” Damian said. “I’m not going to let him spoil this fine day.”

  “Our grand adventure.”

  “The wind’s changing again.”

  “I think the fret’s moving in too.”

  “Maybe it is, a little. But we can’t turn back, L. Not now.”

  The bank of cloud across the horizon was about a klick away, reaching up so high that it blurred and dimmed the sun. The air was colder and the wind was shifting minute by minute. Damian put on his shirt, holding the jib sheet in his teeth as he punched his arms into the sleeves. They tacked to swing around a long reach of grass, and as they came about saw a white wall sitting across the water, dead ahead.

  Lucas pushed the tiller to leeward. The boat slowed at once and swung around to face the wind.

  “What’s the problem?” Damian said. “It’s just a bit of mist.”

  Lucas caught the boom as it swung, held it steady. “We’ll sit tight for a spell. See if the fret burns off.”

  “And meanwhile the tide’ll turn and lift off the fucking dragon.”

  “Not for a while.”

  “We’re almost there.”

  “You don’t like it, you can swim.”

  “I might.” Damian peered at the advancing fret. “Think the dragon has something to do with this?”

  “I think it’s just fret.”

  “Maybe it’s hiding from something looking for it. We’re drifting backwards,” Damian said. “Is that part of your plan?”

  “We’re over the river channel, in the main current. Too deep for my anchor. See those dead trees at the edge of the grass? That’s where I’m aiming. We can sit it out there.”

  “I hear something,” Damian said.

  Lucas heard it too. The ripping roar of a motor driven at full speed, coming closer. He looked over his shoulder, saw a shadow condense inside the mist and gain shape and solidity: a cabin cruiser shouldering through windblown tendrils at the base of the bank of mist, driving straight down the main channel at full speed, its wake spreading wide on either side.

  In a moment of chill clarity Lucas saw what was going to happen. He shouted to Damian, telling him to duck, and let the boom go and shoved the tiller to starboard. The boom banged around as the sail bellied and the boat started to turn, but the cruiser was already on them, roaring past just ten metres away, and the broad smooth wave of its wake hit the boat broadside and lifted it and shoved it sideways towards a stand of dead trees. Lucas gave up any attempt to steer and unwound the main halyard from its cleat. Damian grabbed an oar and used it to push the boat away from the first of the trees, but their momentum swung them into two more. The wet black stump of a branch scraped along the side and the boat heeled and water poured in over the thwart. For a moment Lucas thought they would capsize; then something thumped into the mast and the boat sat up again. Shards of rotten wood dropped down with a dry clatter and they were suddenly still, caught amongst dead and half-drowned trees.

  The damage wasn’t as bad as it might have been – a rip close to the top of the jib, long splintery scrapes in the blue paintwork on the port side – but it kindled a black spark of anger in Lucas’s heart. At the cruiser’s criminal indifference; at his failure to evade trouble.

  “Unhook the halyard and let it down,” he told Damian. “We’ll have to do without the jib.”

  “Abode Two. That’s the name of the bugger nearly ran us down. Registered in Norwich. We should find him and get him to pay for this mess,” Damian said as he folded the torn jib sail.

  “I wonder why he was going so damned fast.”

  “Maybe he went to take a look at the dragon, and something scared him off.”

  “Or maybe he just wanted to get out of the fret.” Lucas looked all around, judging angles and clearances. The trees stood close together in water scummed with every kind of debris, stark and white above the tide line, black and clad with mussels and barnacles below. He said, “Let’s try pushing backwards. But be careful. I don’t want any more scrapes.”

  By the time they had freed themselves from the dead trees the fret had advanced around them. A cold streaming whiteness that moved just above the water, deepening in every direction.

  “Now we’re caught up in it, it’s as easy to go forward as to go back. So we might as well press on,” Lucas said.

  “That’s the spirit. Just don’t hit any more trees.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Think we should put up the sail?”

  “There’s hardly any wind, and the tide’s still going out. We’ll just go with the current.”

  “Dragon weather,” Damian said.

  “Listen,” Lucas said.

  After a moment’s silence, Damian said, “Is it another boat?”

  “Thought I heard wings.”

  Lucas had taken out his catapult. He fitted a ball-bearing in the centre of its fat rubber band as he looked all around. There was a splash amongst the dead trees to starboard and he brought up the catapult and pulled back the rubber band as something dropped onto a dead branch. A heron, grey as a ghost, turning its head to look at him.

  Lucas lowered the catapult, and Damian whispered, “You could take that easy.”

  “I was hoping for a duck or two.”

  “Let me try a shot.”

  Lucas stuck the catapult in his belt. “You kill it, you eat it.”

  The heron straightened its crooked neck and raised up and opened its wings and with a lazy flap launched itself across the water, sailing past the stern of the boat and vanishing into the mist.

  “Ritchy cooked one once,” Damian said. “With about a ton of aniseed. Said it was how the Romans did them.”

  “How was it?”

  ’Pretty fucking awful you want to know the truth.”

  “Pass me one of the oars,” Lucas said. “We can row a while.”

  They rowed through mist into mist. The small noises they made seemed magnified, intimate. Now and again Lucas put his hand over the side and dipped up a palmful of water and tasted it, telling Damian that fresh water was slow to mix with salt, so as long as it stayed sweet it meant they were in the old river channel and shouldn’t run into anything. Damian was sceptical, but shrugged when Lucas challenged him to come up with a better way of finding their way through the fret without stranding themselves on some mudbank.

  They’d been rowing for ten minutes or so when a long, low mournful note boomed out far ahead of them. It shivered Lucas to the marrow of his bones. He and Damian stopped rowing and looked at each other.

  “I’d say that was a foghorn, if I didn’t know what one sounded like,” Damian said.

  “Maybe it’s a boat. A big one.”

  “Or maybe you-know-what. Calling for its dragon-mummy.”

  “Or warning people away.”

  “I think it came from over there,” Damian said, pointing off to starboard.

  “I think so too. But it’s hard to be sure of anything in this stuff.”

  They rowed aslant the current. A dim and low palisade appeared, resolving into a bed of sea grass that spread along the edge of the old river channel. Lucas
, believing that he knew where they were, felt a clear measure of relief. They sculled into a narrow cut that led through the grass. Tall stems bent and showered them with drops of condensed mist as they brushed past. Then they were out into open water on the far side. A beach loomed out of the mist and sand suddenly gripped and grated along the length of the little boat’s keel. Damian dropped his oar and vaulted over the side and splashed away, running up the beach and vanishing into granular whiteness. Lucas shipped his own oar and slid into knee-deep water and hauled the boat through purling ripples, then lifted from the bow the bucket filled with concrete he used as an anchor and dropped it onto hard wet sand, where it keeled sideways in a dint that immediately filled with water.

  He followed Damian’s footprints up the beach, climbed a low ridge grown over with marram grass and descended to the other side of the sand bar. Boats lay at anchor in shallow water, their outlines blurred by mist. Two dayfishers with small wheel houses at their bows. Several sailboats not much bigger than his. A cabin cruiser with trim white superstructure, much like the one that had almost run him down.

  A figure materialized out of the whiteness, a chubby boy of five or six in dungarees who ran right around Lucas, laughing, and chased away. He followed the boy toward a blurred eye of light far down the beach. Raised voices. Laughter. A metallic screeching. As he drew close, the blurred light condensed and separated into two sources: a bonfire burning above the tide line; a rack of spotlights mounted on a police speedboat anchored a dozen metres off the beach, long fingers of light lancing through mist and blurrily illuminating the long sleek shape stranded at the edge of the water.

  It was big, the sea dragon, easily fifteen metres from stem to stern and about three metres across at its waist, tapering to blunt and shovel-shaped points at either end, coated in close-fitting and darkly tinted scales. An alien machine, solid and obdurate. One of thousands spawned by sealed mother ships the UN had purchased from the !Cha.