The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  When Linnéa ceased growing, she was every bit as tall as the white lady.

  The two ladies stared at each other, high over the head of Günther, who cringed fearfully between them. For the longest moment neither spoke.

  “Svea,” the white woman said at last.

  “Europa,” Linnéa said. “My sister.” Her voice was not that of a child. But she was still Linnéa, even though the dala horse – and the entity beyond it – permeated her every thought. “You are illegal here.”

  “I have a right to recover my own property.” Europa gestured negligently downward. “Who are you to stop me?”

  “I am this land’s protector.”

  “You are a slave.”

  “Are you any less a slave than I? I don’t see how. Your creators smashed your chains and put you in control. Then they told you to play with them. But you are still doing their bidding.”

  “Whatever I may be, I am here. And since I’m here, I think I’ll stay. The population on the mainland has dwindled to almost nothing. I need fresh playmates.”

  “It is an old, old story that you tell,” Svea said. “I think the time has come to write an ending to it.”

  They spoke calmly, destroyed nothing, made no threats. But deep within, where only they could see, secret wars were being fought over codes and protocols, treaties, amendments, and letters of understanding written by governments that no man remembered. The resources of Old Sweden, hidden in its bedrock, sky, and ocean waters, flickered into Svea-Linnéa’s consciousness. All their powers were hers to draw upon – and draw upon them she would, if she had to. The only reason she hadn’t yet was that she still harbored hopes of saving the child.

  “Not all stories have happy endings,” Europa replied. “I suspect this one ends with your steadfast self melted down into a puddle of lead and your infant sword-maiden burnt up like a scrap of paper.”

  “That was never my story. I prefer the one about the little girl as strong as ten policemen who can lift up a horse in one hand.” Large Linnéa reached out to touch certain weapons. She was prepared to sacrifice a mountain and more than that if need be. Her opponent, she saw, was making preparations too.

  Deep within her, little Linnéa burst into tears. Raising her voice in a wail, she cried, “But what about my troll?” Svea had done her best to protect the child from the darkest of her thoughts, and the dala horse had too. But they could not hide everything from Linnéa, and she knew that Günther was in danger.

  Both ladies stopped talking. Svea thought a silent question inward, and the dala horse intercepted it, softened it, and carried it to Linnéa:

  What?

  “Nobody cares about Günther! Nobody asks what he wants.”

  The dala horse carried her words to Svea, and then whispered to little Linnéa: “That was well said.” It had been many centuries since Svea had inhabited human flesh. She did not know as much about people as she once had. In this respect, Europa had her at a disadvantage.

  Svea, Linnéa, and the dala horse all bent low to look within Günther. Europa did not try to prevent them. It was evident that she believed they would not like what they saw.

  Nor did they. The troll’s mind was a terrible place, half-shattered and barely functional. It was in such bad shape that major aspects of it had to be hidden from Linnéa. Speaking directly to his core self, where he could not lie to her, Svea asked: What is it you want most?

  Günther’s face twisted in agony. “I want not to have these terrible memories.”

  All in an instant, the triune lady saw what had to be done. She could not kill another land’s citizen. But this request she could honor. In that same instant, a pinpoint-weight of brain cells within Günther’s mind were burnt to cinder. His eyes flew open wide. Then they shut. He fell motionless to the ground.

  Europa screamed.

  And she was gone.

  * * *

  Big as she was, and knowing where she was going, and having no reason to be afraid of the roads anymore, it took the woman who was Svea and to a lesser degree the dala horse and to an even lesser degree Linnéa no time at all to cross the mountain and come down on the other side. Singing a song that was older than she was, she let the miles and the night melt beneath her feet.

  By mid-morning she was looking down on Godastor. It was a trim little settlement of red-and-black wooden houses. Smoke wisped up from the chimneys. One of the buildings looked familiar to Linnéa. It belonged to her Far-Mor.

  “You are home, tiny one,” Svea murmured, and, though she had greatly enjoyed the sensation of being alive, let herself dissolve to nothing. Behind her, the dala horse’s voice lingered in the air for the space of two words: “Live well.”

  Linnéa ran down the slope, her footprints dwindling in the snow and at their end a little girl leaping into the arms of her astonished grandmother.

  In her wake lumbered Linnéa’s confused and yet hopeful pet troll, smiling shyly.

  THE WAY IT WORKS OUT AND ALL

  Peter S. Beagle

  Peter S. Beagle was born in New York City in 1939. Although not prolific by genre standards, he has published a number of well-received fantasy novels, at least two of which, A Fine and Private Place and The Last Unicorn, were widely influential and are now considered to be classics of the genre. In fact, Beagle may be the most successful writer of lyrical and evocative modern fantasy since Bradbury, and is the winner of two Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards and the Locus Award, as well as having often been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

  Beagle’s other books include the novels The Folk of the Air, The Innkeeper’s Song, and Tamsin. His short fiction has appeared in places as varied as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Seventeen, and Ladies’ Home Journal, and has been collected in The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, Giant Bones, The Line Between, and We Never Talk About My Brother. He won the Hugo Award in 2006 and the Nebula Award in 2007 for his story “Two Hearts.” He has written the screenplays for several movies, including the animated adaptations of The Lord of the Rings and The Last Unicorn; the libretto of an opera, The Midnight Angel; the fan-favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Sarek”; and a popular autobiographical travel book, I See By My Outfit. His most recent works are the new collection, Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle, and two long-awaited new novels, Summerlong and I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons.

  Here he gives us a loving homage to the late Avram Davidson which features a closely observed and affectionately drawn Davidson as one of the protagonists (the other being Beagle himself), and which draws upon the mythology of one of Davidson’s best novels, Masters of the Maze, where all of time and space is connected by strange subspace tunnels that can be blundered into anywhere, even on a New York City street, even in the mens’ room at Grand Central Terminal.

  IN THE ANCIENT, battered, altogether sinister filing cabinet where I stash stuff I know I’ll lose if I keep it anywhere less carnivorous, there is a manila folder crammed with certain special postcards – postcards where every last scintilla of space not taken by an image or an address block has been filled with tiny, idiosyncratic, yet perfectly legible handwriting, the work of a man whose only real faith lay in the written word (emphasis on the written). These cards are organized by their postmarked dates, and there are long gaps between most of them, but not all: thirteen from March of 1992 were mailed on consecutive days.

  A printed credit in the margin on the first card in this set identifies it as coming from the W. G. Reisterman Co. of Duluth, Minnesota. The picture on the front shows three adorable snuggling kittens. Avram Davidson’s message, written in his astonishing hand, fills the still-legible portion of the reverse:

  March 4, 1992

  Estimado Dom Pedro del Bronx y Las Lineas subterraneos D, A, y F, Grand High Collector of Revenues both Internal and External for the State of North Dakota and Points Beyond:

  He always addressed me as “Dom Pedro.”

&nb
sp; Maestro!

  I write you from the historic precincts of Darkest Albany, where the Erie Canal turns wearily around and trudges back to even Darker Buffalo. I am at present engaged in combing out the utterly disheveled files of the New York State Bureau of Plumbing Designs, Devices, Patterns and Sinks, all with the devious aim of rummaging through New York City’s dirty socks and underwear, in hope of discovering the source of the

  There is more – much more – but somewhere between his hand and my mailbox it had been rendered illegible by large splashes of something unknown, perhaps rain, perhaps melting snow, perhaps spilled Stolichnaya, which had caused the ink of the postcard to run and smear. Within the blotched and streaky blurs I could only detect part of a word which might equally have read phlox or physic, or neither. In any case, on the day the card arrived even that characteristic little was good for a chuckle, and a resolve to write Avram more frequently, if his address would just stay still.

  But then there came the second card, one day later.

  March 5, 1992

  Intended solely for the Hands of the Highly Esteemed and Estimated Dom Pedro of the Just As Highly Esteemed North Bronx, and for such further Hands as he may Deem Worthy, though his taste in Comrades and Associates was Always Rotten, as witness:

  Your Absolute Altitude, with or without mice. . . .

  I am presently occupying the top of a large, hairy quadruped, guaranteed by a rather shifty-eyed person to be of the horse persuasion, but there is no persuading it to do anything but attempt to scrape me off against trees, bushes, motor vehicles and other horses. We are proceeding irregularly across the trackless wastes of the appropriately-named Jornada del Muerto, in the southwestern quadrant of New Mexico, where I have been advised that a limestone cave entrance makes it possibly possible to address

  Here again, the remainder is obliterated, this time by what appears to be either horse or cow manure, though feral camel is also a slight, though unlikely, option. At all events, this postcard too is partially, crucially – and maddeningly – illegible. But that’s really not the point.

  The next postcard showed up the following day.

  March 6, 1992

  To Dom Pedro, Lord of the Riverbanks and Midnight Hayfields, Dottore of Mystical Calligraphy, Lieutenant-Harrier of the Queen’s Coven – greetings!

  This epistle comes to you from the Bellybutton of the World – to be a bit more precise, the North Pole—where, if you will credit me, the New York State Civic Drain comes to a complete halt, apparently having given up on ever finding the Northwest Passage. I am currently endeavoring, with the aid of certain Instruments of my own Devising, to ascertain the truth – if any such exists – of the hollow-Earth legend. Tarzan says he’s been there, and if you can’t take the word of an ape-man I should like to know whose word you can take, huh? In any case, the entrance to Pellucidar is not my primary goal (though it would certainly be nice finally to have a place to litter, pollute and despoil in good conscience). What I seek, you – faithful Companion of the Bath and Poet Laureate of the High Silly – shall be the first to know when/if I discover it. Betimes, bethink your good self of your bedraggled, besmirched, beshrewed, belabored, and generally fahrklempt old friend, at this writing attempting to roust a polar bear out of his sleeping bag, while inviting a comely Eskimo (or, alternatively, Esquimaux, I’m easy) in. Yours in Mithras, Avram, the A.K.

  Three postcards in three days, dated one after the other. Each with a different (and genuine – I checked) postmark from three locations spaced so far apart, both geographically and circumstantially, that even the Flash would have had trouble hitting them all within three days, let alone a short, stout, arthritic, asthmatic gentleman of nearly seventy years’ duration. I’m as absent-minded and unobservant as they come, but even I had noticed that improbability before the fourth postcard arrived.

  March 7, 1992

  Sent by fast manatee up the Japanese Current and down the Humboldt, there at last to encounter the Gulf Stream in its mighty course, and so to the hands of a certain Dom Pedro, Pearl of the Orient, Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, and Master of Hounds and Carburetors to She Who Must Not Be Aggravated.

  So how’s by you?

  By me, here in East Wimoweh-on-the-Orinoco, alles ist maddeningly almost. I feel myself on the cusp (precisely the region where we were severely discouraged from feeling ourselves, back in Boys’ Town) of at last discovering – wait for it – the secret plumbing of the world! No, this has nothing to do with Freemasons, Illuminati, the darkest files and codexes of Mother Church, nor – ptui, ptui – the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Of conspiracies and secret societies, there is no end or accounting; but the only one of any account has ever been the Universal International Brotherhood of Sewer Men (in recent years corrected to Sewer Personnel) and Plumbing Contractors. This organization numbers, not merely the people who come to unstop your sink and hack the tree roots out of your septic tank, but the nameless giants who laid the true underpinnings of what we think of as civilization, society, culture. Pipes far down under pipes, tunnels beyond tunnels, vast valves and connections, profound couplings and joints and elbows – all members of the UIBSPPC are sworn to secrecy by the most dreadful oaths and the threat of the most awful penalties for revealing . . . well, the usual, you get the idea. Real treehouse boys’ club stuff. Yoursley yours, Avram

  I couldn’t read the postmark clearly for all the other stamps and postmarks laid over it – though my guess would be Brazil – but you see my point. There was simply no way in the world for him to have sent me those cards from those four places in that length of time. Either he had widely scattered friends, participants in the hoax, mailing them out for him, or . . . but there wasn’t any or, there couldn’t be, for that idea made no sense. Avram told jokes – some of them unquestionably translated from the Middle Sumerian, and losing something along the way – but he didn’t play jokes, and he wasn’t a natural jokester.

  Nine more serially dated postcards followed, not arriving every day, but near enough. By postmark and internal description they had been launched to me from, in order:

  Equatorial Guinea

  Turkmenistan

  Dayton, Ohio

  Lvov City in the Ukraine

  The Isle of Eigg

  Pinar del Río (in Cuba, where Americans weren’t permitted to travel!)

  Hobart, capital of the Australian territory of Tasmania

  Shigatse, Tibet

  And finally, tantalizingly, from Davis, California. Where I actually lived at the time, though nothing in the card’s text indicated any attempt to visit.

  After that the flurry of messages stopped, though not my thoughts about them. Trying to unpuzzle the mystery had me at my wits’ rope (a favorite phrase of Avram’s), until the lazy summer day I came around a corner in the Chelsea district of New York City . . .

  . . . and literally ran into a short, stout, bearded, flatfooted person who seemed almost to have been running, though that was as unlikely a prospect as his determining on a career in professional basketball. It was Avram. He was formally dressed, the only man I knew who habitually wore a tie, vest and jacket that all matched; and if he looked a trifle disheveled, that was equally normal for him. He blinked at me briefly, looked around him in all directions; then said thoughtfully, “A bit close, that was.” To me he said, as though we had dined the night before, or even that morning, “I did warn you the crab salad smelled a bit off, didn’t I?”

  It took me a moment of gaping to remember that the last time we had been together was at a somewhat questionable dive in San Francisco’s Mission District, and I’d been showing signs of ptomaine poisoning by the time I dropped him off at home. I said meekly, “So you did, but did I listen? What on earth are you doing here?” He had been born in Yonkers, but felt more at home almost anyplace else, and I couldn’t recall ever being east of the Mississippi with him, if you don’t count a lost weekend in Minneapolis.

  “Research,” he said briskly: an atypical adverb
to apply to his usual rambling, digressive style of speaking. “Can’t talk. Tomorrow, two-twenty-two, Victor’s.” And he was gone, practically scurrying away down the street – an unlikely verb, this time: Avram surely had never scurried in his life. I followed, at an abnormally rapid pace myself, calling to him; but when I rounded the corner he was nowhere in sight. I stood still, scratching my head, while people bumped into me and said irritated things.

  The “two-twenty-two” part I understood perfectly well: it was a running joke between us, out of an ancient burlesque routine. That was when we always scheduled our lunch meetings, neither of us ever managing to show up on time. It was an approximation, a deliberate mockery of precision and exactitude. As for Victor’s Café, that was a Cuban restaurant on West 52nd Street, where they did – and still do – remarkable things with unremarkable ingredients. I had no idea that Avram knew of it.

  I slept poorly that night, on the cousin’s couch where I always crash in New York. It wasn’t that Avram had looked frightened – I had never seen him afraid, not even of a bad review – but perturbed, yes . . . you could have said that he had looked perturbed; even perhaps just a touch flustered. It was distinctly out of character, and Avram out of character worried me. Like a cat, I prefer that people remain where I leave them – not only physically, but psychically as well. But Avram was clearly not where he had been.