The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  An assortment of passports and identity cards, each with a photograph of younger versions of his mother, made out to different names and nationalities. A slim tight roll of old high-denomination banknotes, yuan, naira, and U.S. dollars, more or less worthless thanks to inflation and revaluation. Blank credit cards and credit cards in various names, also worthless. Dozens of sleeved data needles. A pair of AR glasses.

  Lucas studied one of the ID cards. When he brushed the picture of his mother with his thumb, she turned to present her profile, turned to look at him when he brushed the picture again.

  He pocketed the ID card and the data needles and AR glasses, then walked along the ridge to the apple tree at the far end, and stared out across the Flood that spread glistening like shot silk under the sun. Thoughts moved through his mind like a slow and stately parade of pictures that he could examine in every detail, and then there were no thoughts at all and for a little while no part of him was separate from the world all around, sun and water and the hot breeze that moved through the crooked branches of the tree.

  Lucas came to himself with a shiver. Windfall apples lay everywhere amongst the weeds and nettles that grew around the trees, and dead wasps and hornets were scattered amongst them like yellow-and-black bullets. Here was a dead bird too, gone to a tatter of feathers of white bone. And here was another, and another. As if some passing cloud of poison had struck everything down.

  He picked an apple from the tree, mashed it against the trunk, and saw pale threads fine as hair running through the mash of pulp. He peeled bark from a branch, saw threads laced in the living wood.

  Dragon stuff, growing from the seed he’d planted. Becoming something else.

  In the wood of the tree and the apples scattered all around was a treasure men would kill for. Had killed for. He’d have more than enough to set him up for life, if he sold it to the right people. He could build a house right here, buy the shrimp farm or set up one of his own. He could buy a ticket on one of the shuttles that travelled through the wormhole anchored between the Earth and the Moon, travel to infinity and beyond . . .

  Lucas remembered the hopeful shine in Damian’s eyes when he’d talked about those new worlds. He thought of how the dragon-shard had killed or damaged everyone it had touched. He pictured his mother working at her tablet in her sickbed, advising and challenging people who were attempting to build something new right here on Earth. It wasn’t much of a contest. It wasn’t even close.

  He walked back to the caravan. Took a breath, unlocked the padlock, stepped inside. Everything had been overturned or smashed. Cupboards gaped open, the mattress of his mother’s bed was slashed and torn, a great ruin littered the floor. He rooted amongst the wreckage, found a box of matches and a plastic jug of lamp oil. He splashed half of the oil on the torn mattress, lit a twist of cardboard and lobbed it onto the bed, beat a retreat as flames sprang up.

  It didn’t take ten minutes to gather up dead wood and dry weeds and pile them around the apple tree, splash the rest of the oil over its trunk, and set fire to the tinder. A thin pall of white smoke spread across the island, blowing out across the water as he raised the sail of his boat and turned it into the wind.

  Heading south.

  A SOLDIER OF THE CITY

  David Moles

  The vivid story that follows plunges us deep into a war between spacefaring civilizations from a future where humans serve literal gods whom they love and worship – and who sometimes prove not to be worthy of either.

  David Moles has sold fiction to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Engineering Infinity, Polyphony, Strange Horizons. Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Say?, Flytrap, and elsewhere. He coedited with Jay Lake 2004’s well-received “retro-pulp” anthology All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, as well as coedited with Susan Marie Groppi the original anthology Twenty Epics. He won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short fiction of the year with his story “Finisterra.”

  ISIN 12:709 13” N:10 18” / 34821.1.9 10:24:5:19.21

  Color still image, recorded by landscape maintenance camera, Gulanabishtüdinam Park West.

  At the top of the hill is a football court, the net nearly new but the bricks of the ground uneven, clumps of grass growing up from between the cracks. On the same side of the net are a man and a young girl. The hollow rattan ball is above the girl’s head, nearing the apex of its trajectory; the girl, balanced on the toes of her bare right foot, her left knee raised, is looking toward the man.

  The man is looking away.

  Cross-reference with temple records identifies the man as Ishmenininsina Ninnadiïnshumi, age twenty-eight, temple soldier of the 219th Surface Tactical Company, an under-officer of the third degree, and the girl as his daughter Mâratirs¸itim, age nine.

  Magnification of the reflection from the man’s left cornea indicates his focus to be the sixty-cubit-high image of Gula, the Lady of Isin, projected over the Kârumishbiïrra Canal.

  Comparison of the reflection with the record of the Corn Parade ceremonies suggests a transmission delay of approximately three grains.

  I

  Corn Parade

  In the moment of the blast, Ish was looking down the slope, toward the canal, the live feed from the temple steps and the climax of the parade. As he watched, the goddess suddenly froze; her ageless face lost its benevolent smile, and her dark eyes widened in surprise and perhaps in fear, as they looked – Ish later would always remember – directly at him. Her lips parted as if she was about to tell Ish something.

  And then the whole eastern rise went brighter than the Lady’s House at noonday. There was a sound, a rolling, bone-deep rumble like thunder, and afterwards Ish would think there was something wrong with this, that something so momentous should sound so prosaic, but at the time all he could think was how loud it was, how it went on and on, louder than thunder, than artillery, than rockets, louder and longer than anything Ish had ever heard. The ground shook. The projection faded, flickered and went out, and a hot wind whipped over the hilltop, tearing the net from its posts, knocking Mâra to the ground and sending her football flying, lost forever, out over the rooftops to the west.

  From the temple district, ten leagues away, a bright point was rising, arcing up toward the dazzling eye of the Lady’s House, and some trained part of Ish’s mind saw the straight line, the curvature an artifact of the city’s rotating reference frame; but as Mâra started to cry, and Ish’s wife Tara and all his in-laws boiled up from around the grill and the picnic couches, yelling, and a pillar of brown smoke, red-lit from below, its top swelling obscenely, began to grow over the temple, the temple of the goddess Ish was sworn as a soldier of the city to protect, Ish was not thinking of geometry or the physics of coriolis force. What Ish was thinking – what Ish knew, with a sick certainty – was that the most important moment of his life had just come and gone, and he had missed it.

  34821.1.14 10:9:2:5.67

  Annotated image of the city of Isin, composed by COS Independence, on Gaugamela station, Babylon, transmitted via QT to Community Outreach archives, Urizen. Timestamp adjusted for lightspeed delay of thirteen hours, fifty-one minutes.

  Five days after the strike the point of impact has died from angry red-orange to sullen infrared, a hot spot that looks like it will be a long time in cooling. A streamer of debris trails behind the wounded city like blood in water, its spectrum a tale of vaporized ice and iron. Isin’s planet-sized city-sphere itself appears structurally intact, the nitrogen and oxygen that would follow a loss of primary atmosphere absent from the recorded data.

  Away from the impact, the myriad microwave receivers that cover the city’s surface like scales still ripple, turning to follow the beams of power from Ninagal’s superconducting ring, energy drawn from the great black hole called Tiamat, fat with the mass of three thousand suns, around which all the cities of Babylon revolve. The space around Isin is alive with ships: local orbiters, electromagnetically accelerated corn cans in
slow transfer orbits carrying grain and meat from Isin to more urbanized cities, beam-riding passenger carriers moving between Isin and Lagash, Isin and Nippur, Isin and Babylon-Borsippa and the rest – but there is no mass exodus, no evacuation.

  The Outreach planners at Urizen and Ahania, the missionaries aboard Liberation and Independence and those living in secret among the people of the cities, breathe sighs of relief, and reassure themselves that whatever they have done to the people of the cities of Babylon, they have at least not committed genocide.

  Aboard COS Insurrection, outbound from Babylon, headed for the Community planet of Zoa at four-tenths the speed of light and still accelerating, the conscientious objectors who chose not to stay and move forward with the next phase of the Babylonian intervention hear this good news and say, not without cynicism: I hope that’s some comfort to them.

  II

  Men Giving Orders

  Ish was leading a team along a nameless street in what had been a neighborhood called Imtagaärbeëlti and was now a nameless swamp, the entire district northwest of the temple complex knee-deep in brackish water flowing in over the fallen seawall and out of the broken aqueducts, so that Ish looked through gates into flooded gardens where children’s toys and broken furniture floated as if put there just to mar and pucker the reflection of the heavens, or through windows whose shutters had been torn loose and glass shattered by the nomad blast into now-roofless rooms that were snapshots of ordinary lives in their moments of ending.

  In the five days since the Corn Parade Ish had slept no more than ten or twelve hours. Most of the rest of the 219th had died at the temple, among the massed cohorts of Isin lining the parade route in their blue dress-uniforms and golden vacuum armor – they hadn’t had wives, or hadn’t let the wives they did have talk them into extending their leaves to attend picnics with their in-laws, or hadn’t been able to abuse their under-officers’ warrants to extend their leaves when others couldn’t. Most of the temple soldiery had died along with them, and for the first three days Ish had been just a volunteer with a shovel, fighting fires, filling sandwalls, clearing debris. On the fourth day the surviving priests and temple military apparatus had pulled themselves together into something resembling a command structure, and now Ish had this scratch squad, himself and three soldiers from different units, and this mission, mapping the flood zone, to what purpose Ish didn’t know or much care. They’d been issued weapons but Ish had put a stop to that, confiscating the squad’s ammunition and retaining just one clip for himself.

  “Is that a body?” said one of the men suddenly. Ish couldn’t remember his name. A clerk, from an engineering company, his shoulder patch a stylized basket. Ish looked to where he was pointing. In the shadows behind a broken window was a couch, and on it a bundle of sticks that might have been a man.

  “Wait here,” Ish said.

  “We’re not supposed to go inside,” said one of the other men, a scout carrying a bulky map book and sketchpad, as Ish hoisted himself over the gate. “We’re just supposed to mark the house for the civilians.”

  “Who says?” asked the clerk.

  “Command,” said the scout.

  “There’s no command,” said the fourth man suddenly. He was an artillerist, twice Ish’s age, heavy and morose. These were the first words he’d spoken all day. “The Lady’s dead. There’s no command. There’s no officers. There’s just men giving orders.”

  The clerk and the scout looked at Ish, who said nothing.

  He pulled himself over the gate.

  The Lady’s dead. The artillerist’s words, or ones like them, had been rattling around Ish’s head for days, circling, leaping out to catch him whenever he let his guard down. Gula, the Lady of Isin, is dead. Every time Ish allowed himself to remember that it was as if he was understanding it for the first time, the shock of it like a sudden and unbroken fall, the grief and shame of it a monumental weight toppling down on him. Each time Ish forced the knowledge back the push he gave it was a little weaker, the space he created for himself to breathe and think and feel in a little smaller. He was keeping himself too busy to sleep because every time he closed his eyes he saw the Lady’s pleading face.

  He climbed over the windowsill and into the house.

  The body of a very old man was curled up there, dressed in nothing but a dirty white loincloth that matched the color of the man’s hair and beard and the curls on his narrow chest. In the man’s bony hands an icon of Lady Gula was clutched, a cheap relief with machine-printed colors that didn’t quite line up with the ceramic curves, the Lady’s robes more blue than purple and the heraldic dog at her feet more green than yellow; the sort of thing that might be sold in any back-alley liquor store. One corner had been broken off, so that the Lady’s right shoulder and half her face were gone, and only one eye peered out from between the man’s knuckles. When Ish moved to take the icon, the fingers clutched more tightly, and the old man’s eyelids fluttered as a rasp of breath escaped his lips.

  Ish released the icon. Its one-eyed stare now seemed accusatory.

  “Okay,” he said heavily. “Okay, Granddad.”

  BABYLON CITY 1:1 5” N:1 16” / 34821.1.14 7:15

  LORD NINURTA VOWS JUSTICE FOR LADY OF ISIN

  POLICE TO PROTECT LAW-ABIDING NOMADS

  LAWLESSNESS IN SIPPAR

  —headlines, temple newspaper Marduknaşir, Babylon City

  BABYLON CITY 4:142 113” S:4 12” / 34821.1.15 1:3

  POINTLESS REVENGE MISSION

  LYNCHINGS IN BABYLON: IMMIGRANTS TARGETED

  SIPPAR RISES UP

  —headlines, radical newspaper Iïnshushaqiï, Babylon City

  GISH, NIPPUR, SIPPAR (various locations) / 34821.1.15

  THEY CAN DIE

  —graffiti common in working-class and slave districts after the nomad attack on Isin

  III

  Kinetic penetrator

  When Tara came home she found Ish on a bench in the courtyard, bent over the broken icon, with a glue pot and an assortment of scroll clips and elastic bands from Tara’s desk. They’d talked, when they first moved into this house not long after Mâra was born, of turning one of the ground-floor rooms into a workshop for Ish, but he was home so rarely and for such short periods that with one thing and another it had never happened. She kept gardening supplies there now.

  The projector in the courtyard was showing some temple news feed, an elaborately animated diagram of the nomads’ weapon – a “kinetic penetrator,” the researcher called it, a phrase that Tara thought should describe something found in a sex shop or perhaps a lumberyard – striking the city’s outer shell, piercing iron and ice and rock before erupting in a molten plume from the steps directly beneath the Lady’s feet.

  Tara turned it off.

  Ish looked up. “You’re back,” he said.

  “You stole my line,” said Tara. She sat on the bench next to Ish and looked down at the icon in his lap. “What’s that?”

  “An old man gave it to me,” Ish said. “There.” He wrapped a final elastic band around the icon and set it down next to the glue pot. “That should hold it.”

  He’d found the broken corner of the icon on the floor not far from the old man’s couch. On Ish’s orders they’d abandoned the pointless mapping expedition and taken the man to an aid station, bullied the doctors until someone took responsibility.

  There, in the aid tent, the man pressed the icon into Ish’s hands, both pieces, releasing them with shaking fingers.

  “Lady bless you,” he croaked.

  The artillerist, at Ish’s elbow, gave a bitter chuckle, but didn’t say anything. Ish was glad of that. The man might be right, there might be no command, there might be no soldiery, Ish might not be an under-officer any more, just a man giving orders. But Ish was, would continue to be, a soldier of the Lady, a soldier of the city of Isin, and if he had no lawful orders that only put the burden on him to order himself.

  He was glad the artillerist hadn’t spoken, because if
the man had at that moment said again the Lady’s dead, Ish was reasonably sure he would have shot him.

  He’d unzipped the flap on the left breast pocket of his jumpsuit and tucked both pieces of the icon inside. Then he’d zipped the pocket closed again, and for the first time in five days, he’d gone home.

  Tara said: “Now that you’re back, I wish you’d talk to Mâra. She’s been having nightmares. About the Corn Parade. She’s afraid the nomads might blow up her school.”

  “They might,” Ish said.

  “You’re not helping.” Tara sat up straight. She took his chin in her hand and turned his head to face her. “When did you last sleep?”

  Ish pulled away from her. “I took pills.”

  Tara sighed. “When did you last take a pill?”

  “Yesterday,” Ish said. “No. Day before.”

  “Come to bed,” said Tara. She stood up. Ish didn’t move. He glanced down at the icon.

  An ugly expression passed briefly over Tara’s face, but Ish didn’t see it.

  “Come to bed,” she said again. She took Ish’s arm, and this time he allowed himself to be led up the stairs.

  At some point in the night they made love. It wasn’t very good for either of them; it hadn’t been for a long while, but this night was worse. Afterwards Tara slept.

  She woke to find Ish already dressed. He was putting things into his soldiery duffel.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Lagash.”

  “What?”

  Tara sat up. Ish didn’t look at her.

  “Lord Ninurta’s fitting out an expedition,” Ish said.