The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  “Who said anything about staying?” the cat said sharply.

  “If, I said. Or even if you mean to visit from time to time, I should introduce myself.” She put out one small hand, fingers blue with ink stains. “I’m Bonida.”

  Marmalade considered the fingers while scratching rapidly for a moment behind his ear. He replied before he was done with his scratch, and the words emerged in a curious burble, as if he were speaking while gargling. “I see. All right.” Somewhat to her surprise, he stood, raised his right front paw with dignity and extended it. Her fingertips scarcely touched the paw before it was withdrawn, not hastily, but fast enough to keep Bonida in her place. She smiled secretly.

  “You may sit on my lap if you wish,” she told the cat, moving her legs aside from the table and smoothing her deep-blue skirt.

  “Surely you jest.” The cat stalked away to investigate a hole in the wainscoting, returned, sat cattycorner from her and groomed diligently. Bonida waited for a time, pleased by the animal’s vivid coat, then rose and made herself an infusion of herbs. “So,” the cat said, with some indignation. “You make the offer, you snatch it away.”

  “Soon I must leave for my place of employment,” she told him patiently. “If you are still here when I return, there will be a bowl of milk for you.”

  “And the lap?”

  “You are always welcome on my lap, m’sieur,” she said, and drank down her mug of wake-me-up, coughing hard several times.

  “You’d certainly better not be thinking of locking me in!”

  “I shall leave a window ajar,” she told him, head reeling slightly from the stimulating beverage. She cleared her throat. “That’s dangerous in this neighborhood, you know, but nothing is too good for you, my dear pussycat.”

  The cat scowled. “Sarcasm. I suppose that’s preferable to foolish sentimental doting. I’ll spare you the trouble.” With an athletic spring, he was across the floor and at the door. “Perhaps I’ll see you this evening, Bonida Oustorn, so have some more of that guts ready for me.” And he was off, just the tip of his orange tail flirted at the jamb, curiously radiant in the dim ruby light of the Skydark.

  Bonida stared thoughtfully. “So you knew my name all along,” she murmured, fetching her bonnet. “Passing strange.”

  Above the great ramparts of the Heights, which themselves plunged upward for twenty-five kilometers, the Skydark was an immense contusion filling most of heaven, rimmed at the horizon by starry blackness. In half a greatday, forty sdays, Regio city would stand beneath another sky displaying blackness entire choked with bright star pinpoints, and a bruised globe half as wide as a man’s hand at arm’s length, with dull, tilting rings, a diminutive, teasing echo of the Skydark globe itself. Then the Skydark would be lost to sight until its return at dawn, when its faint glow would once again relentlessly drown out the stars, as if it were swallowing them.

  These were mysteries beyond any hope of resolution. Others might yet prove more tractable.

  The vivid, secret ambition of this woman, masked by an air of diffidence, was to answer just one question, the cornerstone of her late mother’s cryptic teaching in the Sodality, and one implication of that answer, whatever it might be: What, precisely, was the nature of the ancient Skyfallen Heights; and from whence (and why) were they fallen? That obscurity was linked by hidden tradition, although in no obvious way, to the ancient allegory of Lalune, the Absent Goddess.

  Certainly it had been no part of her speculations, entertained since late childhood, to venture that the key to the mystery might be a cat, one of the supposedly inarticulate creatures from lost Earth, skulking in this city positioned beside the world-girdling and all-but-impassable barrier of the Heights. Now the possibility occurred to her. It seemed too great a coincidence that the orange beast had insinuated himself into her dismal routine in the very week dedicated to the Sodality’s summer Plenary. Marmalade had designs upon her.

  With an effort, Bonida put these matters out of her mind, patiently showing her identity scars as she entered the guarded portico of the district Revenue Agency. As always, the anteroom to her small office, one of five off a hexagonal ring, stank with the sweat of the wretches awaiting their appointments. She avoided their resentful gaze, their eyes pleading or reddened with weeping and rage. At least nobody was howling at the moment. That would come soon enough. Seated at her desk, check-marking a document of assessment with her inky nib, she read the damning evidence against her first client. Enough pilfering to warrant a death sentence. Bonida closed her eyes, shook her head, sighed once, and called his name and her room number through the annunciator.

  “You leave the Arxon no choice,” she told the shaking petitioner. A powerfully built farmer from the marginal croplands along the rim of Cassini Regio, and slightly retarded, Bai Rong Bao had withheld the larger portion of his tax for the tenth part of a greatyear. Was the foolish fellow unaware of the records kept by the bureaucracy, the zeal with which these infractions were pursued and punished? Perhaps not unaware, but somehow capable of suppressing the bleak knowledge of his eventual fate. As, really, were they all, if the doctrines of the Sodality were justified true knowledge, as her mother had insisted.

  “I just need more time to pay,” the man was blubbering.

  “Yes, farmer Bai, you will indeed pay every pfennig owed. But you have attempted very foolishly to deceive our masters, and you know the penalty for that. One distal phalange.” Her hand was tingling. Her loathing for the task was almost unendurable, but it was her duty to endure it.

  “Phal—What’s that?” He clutched his hands desperately behind his back. “They say you tear off a hand or a foot. Oh, please, good mistress, I beg you, leave me whole. I will pay! In time. But I cannot work without a foot or a hand.”

  “Not so great a penalty as that, farmer. The tip of one finger or toe.” She extended her own hand. “You may choose which one to sacrifice in obedience to the Arxon.” The man was close to fainting. Reaching through depression for some kindness, she told him, “The tip of the smallest finger on the left hand will leave you at only a small disadvantage. Here, put it out to me.” The beancounter took his shaking, roughened hand by the nail-bitten phalange, and held it tightly over the ceramic sluice bowl. She murmured a cantrip, and the machines of the Arxon hummed through her own fingers. The room filled with the sickening stench of rotted meat and she was holding a pitted white bone, her fingers slimy. The farmer lurched away from the desk, shoving the rancid tip of his finger into his mouth like a burned child, flung it away again at the taste. His face was pale. In a moment his rage might outmatch his fear. Bonida wiped her fingers, rose, handed him a document attesting to his payment. “See the nurse on your way out, Mr. Bai. She will bandage your wound.” She laid her hand upon him once again, felt the virtue tremble. “It should bud and regrow itself within a year, or sooner. Here is a word of advice: next season, do not tarry in meeting your obligations. Good sday.”

  She poured water into the bowl, washed and dried, then in a muttered flash of steam flushed away the stink of decomposition together with the scum in the bowl. The beancounter sighed, found another bill of particulars, announced the next name. “Ernö Szabó. Office Four.”

  Marmalade the cat was waiting on her doorstep. He averted his nose.

  “Madame, you smell disgusting.”

  “I beg your pardon!” Bonida was affronted. From childhood, she had been raised to a strict regimen of hygiene, as befitted a future maiden of the Sodality. Poor as she was, by comparison with the finest in the Regio, nonetheless she insisted on bathing once a sweek at the springs, and was strict with her teeth brushing. Although, admittedly, that onion-flavored brioche at lunch—

  “The smell of death clings to you.”

  The beancounter squeezed her jaw tight, flung off her bonnet, hitched her provender bag higher on her shoulder. Without thinking, she hid her right hand inside a fold of her robe. Catching herself, she deliberately withdrew it and waved her inky fingers in fr
ont of the beast.

  “It is my skill, my duty, my profession,” she told him in a thin voice. “If you have objections to my trade, I will not trouble you to share my small repast.” But when she made to open her door, the animal was through it before her, sinuous and sly, for a moment more the quicksilver courtier than the bully.

  “Enough of your nonsense,” the cat said, settling on a rug. “Milk, and be quick about it.”

  The audacity was breathtaking, and indeed the breath caught for an instant in her throat, then choked out in a guffaw. Shaking her head, Bonida took the stoppered jug from her bag and poured them both a draught. In a vase on the table, nightblooms had sagged, their green leaves parched and drooping.

  “What do you want, m’sieur? Clearly you are not stalking me because you treasure my fragrance.” The beancounter emptied the stale water, refilled the vase, touched the posy. Virtue flowed. It was not hers; she was merely the conduit, or so her mother had instructed her. The flowers revived in an ordinary miracle of renewal; heavy scents filled the room, perhaps masking her own alleged odor. Why did she care? An animal, after all, even if one gifted with speech and effrontery.

  The cat lapped up the milk in silence, licked his whiskers clean, then sat back neatly, nostrils twitching at the scent. “Your mother Elisetta.”

  “She died three years ago, during a ruction in the square.” It still wrenched at her heart to speak of it. “So you knew her,” she said, suddenly certain of it. And yet her late mother had never mentioned so singular an acquaintance. Another mystery of the Sodality, no doubt.

  “I introduced her to your father.”

  “I have no father.”

  The cat gave one sharp sardonic cough, as if trying to relieve himself of a hairball. “So you burst forth full-formed from your mother’s forehead?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Nobody ever remembers the old stories. Especially the coded ones.”

  “What?”

  “Your lap.”

  “You wouldn’t prefer that I go out and bathe first?”

  “Actually yes, but we don’t have time. Come on, woman, make a lap.”

  She did so, and the beast leapt with supernatural lightness, circled once to make a nest, and snuggled down. His head, she realized, was almost as large as her own. He slitted his eyes and emitted an unbearably comforting noise. A sort of deep, drumming, rhythmic music. Her mouth opened in surprise. She had read of this in old verses of romance. Marmalade was purring.

  “Your father was the Arxon,” the cat told her, then. “Still is, in fact.”

  At Ostler’s Corner, on the advice of the cat, the beancounter engaged the services of a pedlar. Marmalade sprang into the rickshaw cabin, waited with ill-disguised irritation as a groom handed Bonida up with her luncheon basket and settled her comfortably, accepting a coin after a murmured consultation with his bank. The great brute stirred at a kick, its reptilian hide fifteen shades of green, and lurched its feet into their cage quill constraints, tail flared beneath the platform. Soon its immense quadriceps and hams were pumping furiously, pedaling their rickshaw with increasing celerity along the central thoroughfare of the Regio and out into the countryside, making for the towering cliffs that formed the near-vertical foothills of the Skyfallen Heights. Now and then it registered its grievance at this usage, trying to wrench its snout far enough to bite at its tormentors, but sturdy draught-poles held its head forward.

  “We approach the equatorial ridge of Iapetus,” the cat told her. “Does your Sodality teach you this much? That this small world has its breathable air held close and warmed by design and contrivance? That its very gravity is augmented by deformations?”

  “Certain matters I may not speak of,” she said, averting her gaze, “as you must know since you profess knowledge of my mother and her guild.” Eye-yapper-tus, she thought. Whatever could that—

  “Yes, yes,” Marmalade said. “Elisetta learned the best part of her arcane doctrines from me, so you can rest easy on that score.”

  “Ha! So you might assert if you intended to hornswoggle me.”

  The cat uttered a wheezing laugh, “Hornswoggle? Ha! You are not my type, madame.”

  Bonida tightened her lips. “You are offensive, m’sieur.” She was silent long enough to convey her displeasure, but then said, “I see we are drawing to a stop. Will you tell me finally why you have lured me out to this inhospitable territory?”

  “Why, I have information to impart to the daughter of the Arxon.” He leapt lightly from the cabin, waited as she lowered herself, hampered by her hamper. “Stay here,” he snarled at the pedlar. “We shall return within the hour.”

  “Why must I take orders from a beast?” the reptile asked, slaver at his lips. “I am indentured to humans, not cats.”

  “Hold your tongue, you, or you’ll be catmeat by dawn.”

  Something in Marmalade’s tone gave the great green creature pause; it fell silent and averted its gaze, withdrawing its long toes from the quills and settling uncomfortably between the traces. “I shall be here, your highness,” it said in a bitter tone.

  “Follow me, woman,” said the cat. “You can leave your picnic basket. Wait, bring the milk jug.”

  “You can’t seriously expect me to climb this cliff?”

  “There are more ways than one to skin—” Marmalade broke off with a cough. “You are familiar with the principle of the tunnel?” They stood before a concealed cleft in the rock face. He went forward in a graceful leap and vanished into the shadows.

  It was like finding oneself immured inside an enormous pipe, perhaps a garden hose for watering the stars, Bonida decided. The walls were smooth as ice, but warm to the touch. Something thrummed, deeper than the ear could hear, audible through skin and bone. She stood at the edge of a passage from infinity (or so it seemed in the faint light) at her left to infinity at her right.

  “This is where Father Time built his AI composites,” the cat said, and his voice, thinned, seemed to vanish into the huge long, wide space. “It’s an accelerator as big as a world. Here is where the Skydark dyson swarms were congealed from the emptiness and flung into the sky.”

  “The what? Were what?”

  “The Embee,” said the cat absently. He was looking for something. His paw touched a place in the smooth wall, raised from it an elaborately figured cartouche, smote it thrice. They rose into the middle of the air and rushed forward down the infinite corridor, the wind of their motion somehow almost wholly held in abeyance. If it were not for that breeze, they might have been suspended motionless. Yet somehow, through her terror, she sensed tremendous velocity. “Don’t drop the milk.” He added, at her scowl, “Embee – the MBrain. The M-Brane. Not to be confused with the Mem-brain.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, never mind.”

  She puzzled it out, as they fled into an endlessness of the same. “You’re saying that the Skyfallen Heights did not fall? That it was built?”

  “Oh, it was built, all right, and it fell from the sky. Father Time broke up another moon and rained it down like silt in a strip around the equator. Compiled the accelerator, you might say.” The cat, afloat in the air, gave her a feline grin. “Two thirds of it has worn away by now. It was a long time ago. But it can still get you from here to there in a hurry.”

  The breeze was gone. They had stopped, or paused. The cat lifted his head. A vast rumbling above them; something was opening. They rose, flung upward like bubbles in a flute, and then moved fast in the great darkness, yet still breathing without effort, warm enough, the curving contusion of the Skydark to one side – the Embee, the cat had named it, if that is what he had meant – the smaller ring-cradled sphere on the other and, directly above, something like a dull ruby the size of a palace falling to crush them, or rather they fell upward into it. And were inside its embrace, light blossoming to dazzle her eyes, so that she cried out and did in fact drop the jug, which shattered on a surface like ripp
led marble, spilling milk in a spray that caught the cat’s left ear and whiskers. He turned in fury, raised one clawed paw, made to strike, held his blow at the last instant from scratching a welt in her flesh.

  “Clumsy! Oh well.” He visibly forced himself to sink down on all four limbs, slitting his eyes, then rose again. “Come and meet your parents, you lump.”

  Her mother was dead and ceremonially returned to Cycling. Bonida knew this with bitter regret, for she had stood by the open casket and pressed the cold pale hand, speaking aloud in her grief, hopelessly, the cantrip of renewal. Was there a trembling of the virtue? She could not be sure. Imagination, then. Nothing, nothing. They swiftly closed the casket and whisked it away. But no, here she was after all, at first solemn and then breaking into a smile to see her daughter running in tears to catch up her hands and kiss them, Bonida on her knees, shaking her head in disbelief, eyes swimming.

  “Mother Elisetta!”

  “Darling girl! And Meister Marmalade.” She curtsied to the cat.

  “Hi, toots.”

  “Now allow me to introduce you to your sire.”

  A presence made itself known to them.

  “Welcome, my daughter. I am Ouranos. We have a task for you to fulfill, child. For the Sodality. For the world.”

  The beancounter recoiled, releasing her mother’s hands. She stared wildly about her.

  “This is a machine,” she cried in revulsion.

  From the corner of her eye she seemed to see a form like a man.

  The cat said, “Enough sniffling and jumping at shadows. We have work to do.”

  “How can I be the daughter of a machine?” Bonita remained on her knees, closed in upon herself, whimpering. “This is deceit! All of it! My mother is dead, this isn’t her. Take me away, you wretched animal. Return me home and then stay the hell away from me.”

  “No deception in this, my darling.” Her mother touched the crown of her head in a gesture Bonida had known from infancy, bringing fresh tears. “You are upset, and we understand why. It was cruel to allow you to think I had been taken into death, but a necessary cruelty. We had the most pressing and urgent reasons, dear child. We had tasks to perform which brooked no interference. The night has a thousand thousand eyes. Now it is your turn to embrace your destiny. Come, stand up beside me, the hour grows late.”