The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  Avram sipped his own beer and coughed slightly; and I realized with a pang how much older than I he was, and that he had absolutely no business being a pinball – nor the only true adventurer I’d ever known. No business at all. He said, “The alternate-universe thing, that’s bullshit. Or if it isn’t, doesn’t matter – you can’t get there from here.” He leaned forward. “You know about Plato’s Cave, Dom Pedro?”

  “The people chained to the wall in the cave, just watching shadows all their lives? What about it?”

  “Well, the shadows are cast by things and people coming and going outside the cave, which those poor prisoners never get to see. The shadows are their only notion of reality – they live and die never seeing anything but those shadows, trying to understand the world through shadows. The philosopher’s the one who stands outside the cave and reports back. You want another beer?”

  “No.” Suddenly I didn’t even want to finish the glass in my hand. “So our world, what we call our world . . . it might be nothing but the shadow of the Overneath?”

  “Or the other way around. I’m still working on it. If you’re finished, let’s go.”

  We went outside, and Avram stood thoughtfully staring at seven and a half miles of docks and warehouses, and seeming to sniff the gray air. I said, “My mother’s family set off for America from here. I think it took them three weeks.”

  “We’ll do better.” He was standing with his arms folded, mumbling to himself: “No way to get close to the harbor, damn it . . . too bad we didn’t fetch up on the other side of the Mersey . . . best thing would be . . . best thing . . . no . . . I wonder . . .”

  Abruptly he turned and marched us straight back into the pub, where he asked politely for the loo. Directed, he headed down a narrow flight of stairs; but, to my surprise, passed by the lavatory door and kept following the stairway, telling me over his shoulder, “Most of these old pubs were built over water, for obvious reasons. And don’t ask me why, not yet, but the Overneath likes water . . .” I was smelling damp earth now, earth that had never been quite dry, perhaps for hundreds of years. I heard a throb nearby that might have been a sump pump of some sort, and caught a whiff of sewage that was definitely not centuries old. I got a glimpse of hollow darkness ahead, and thought wildly, Christ, it’s a drain! That’s it, we’re finally going right down the drain . . .

  Avram hesitated at the bottom of the stair, cocking his head back like a gun hammer. Then it snapped forward, and he grunted in triumph and led me, not into my supposed drain, but to the side of it, into an apparent wall through which we passed with no impediment, except a slither of stones under our feet. The muck sucked at my shoes – long since too far gone for my concern – as I plodded forward in Avram’s wake. Having to stop and cram them back on scared me, because he just kept slogging on, never looking back. Twice I tripped and almost fell over things that I thought were rocks or branches; both times they turned out to be large, recognizable, disturbingly splintered bones. I somehow kept myself from calling Avram’s attention to them, because I knew he’d want to stop and study them, and pronounce on their origin and function, and I didn’t need that. I already knew what they were.

  In time the surface became more solid under my feet, and the going got easier. I asked, half-afraid to know, “Are we under the harbor?”

  “If we are, we’re in trouble,” Avram growled. “It’d mean I missed the . . . no, no, we’re all right, we’re fine, it’s just—” His voice broke off abruptly, and I could feel rather than see him turning, as he peered back down the way we had come. He said, very quietly, “Well, damn . . .”

  “What? What?” Then I didn’t need to ask anymore, because I heard the sound of a foot being pulled out of the same mud I’d squelched through. Avram said, “All this way. They never follow that far . . . could have sworn we’d lost it in Lagos . . .” Then we heard the sound again, and Avram grabbed my arm, and we ran.

  The darkness ran uphill, which didn’t help at all. I remember my breath like stones in my lungs and chest, and I remember a desperate desire to stop and bend over and throw up. I remember Avram never letting go of my arm, literally dragging me with him . . . and the panting that I thought was mine, but that wasn’t coming from either of us . . .

  “Here!” Avram gasped. “Here!” and he let go and vanished between two boulders – or whatever they really were – so close together that I couldn’t see how there could be room for his stout figure. I actually had to give him a push from behind, like Rabbit trying to get Pooh Bear out of his burrow; then I got stuck myself, and he grabbed me and pulled . . . and then we were both stuck there, and I couldn’t breathe, and something had hold of my left shoe. Then Avram was saying, with a calmness that was more frightening than any other sound, even the sound behind me, “Point yourself. You know where we’re going – point and jump . . .”

  And I did. All I can remember is thinking about the doorman under the awning at my cousin’s place . . . the elevator . . . the color of the couch where I would sleep when I visited . . . a kind of hissing howl somewhere behind . . . a shiver, as though I were dissolving . . . or perhaps it was the crevice we were jammed into dissolving . . .

  . . . and then my head was practically in the lap of Alice on her mushroom: my cheek on smooth granite, my feet somewhere far away, as though they were still back in the Overneath. I opened my eyes in darkness – but a warm, different darkness, smelling of night grass and engine exhaust – and saw Avram sprawled intimately across the Mad Hatter. I slid groggily to the ground, helped to disentangle him from Wonderland, and we stood silently together for a few moments, watching the headlights on Madison Avenue. Some bird was whooping softly but steadily in a nearby tree, and a plane was slanting down into JFK.

  “Seventy-fifth,” Avram said presently. “Only off by four blocks. Not bad.”

  “Four blocks and a whole park.” My left shoe was still on – muck and all – but the heel was missing, and there were deep gouges in the sole. I said, “You know, I used to be scared to go into Central Park at night.”

  We didn’t see anyone as we trudged across the park to the West Side, and we didn’t say much. Avram wondered aloud whether it was tonight or tomorrow night. “Time’s a trifle hiccupy in the Overneath, I never know how long . . .” I said we’d get a paper and find out, but I don’t recall that we did.

  We parted on Seventy-ninth Street: me continuing west to my cousin’s building, and Avram evasive about his own plans, his own New York destination. I said, “You’re not going back there.” It was not a question, and I may have been a little loud. “You’re not.”

  He reassured me instantly—“No, no, I just want to walk for a while, just walk and think. Look, I’ll call you tomorrow, at your cousin’s, give me the number. I promise, I’ll call.”

  He did, too, from a pay phone, telling me that he was staying with old family friends in Yonkers, and that we’d be getting together in the Bay Area when we both got back. But we never did; we spoke on the phone a few times, but I never saw him again. I was on the road, in Houston, when I heard about his death.

  I couldn’t get home for the funeral, but I did attend the memorial. There were a lot of obituaries – some in the most remarkable places – and a long period of old friends meeting, formally and informally, to tell stories about Avram and drink to his memory. That still goes on today; it never did take more than two of us to get started, and sometimes I hold one all by myself.

  And no, I’ve never made any attempt to return to the Overneath. I try not to think about it very much. It’s easier than you might imagine: I tell myself that our adventure never really happened, and by the time I’m decently senile I’ll believe it. When I’m in New York and pass Grand Central Station I never go in, on principle. Whatever the need, it can wait.

  But he went back into the Overneath, I’m sure – to work on his map, I suppose, and other things I can’t begin to guess at. As to how I know . . .

  Avram died on May 8th, 1993, just fif
teen days after his seventieth birthday, in his tiny dank apartment in Bremerton, Washington. He closed his eyes and never opened them again. There was a body, and a coroner’s report, and official papers and everything: books closed, doors locked, last period dotted in the file.

  Except that a month later, when the hangover I valiantly earned during and after the memorial was beginning to seem merely colorful in memory rather than willfully obtuse, I got a battered postcard in the mail. It’s in the file with the others. A printed credit in the margin identifies it as coming from the Westermark Press of Stone Heights, Pennsylvania. The picture on the front shows an unfrosted angel food cake decorated with a single red candle. The postmark includes the flag of Cameroon. And on the back, written in that astonishing, unmistakable hand, is an impossible message.

  May 9, 1993

  To the Illustrissimo Dom Pedro, Companero de Todos mis Tonterias and Skittles Champion of Pacific Grove (Senior Division), Greetings!

  It’s a funny thing about that Cave parable of Plato’s. The way it works out and all. Someday I’ll come show you.

  Years have passed with nothing further . . . but I still take corners slowly, just in case.

  All corners.

  Anywhere.

  THE ICE OWL

  Carolyn Ives Gilman

  Carolyn Ives Gilman has sold stories to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, Bending the Landscape, and elsewhere. She is the author of five non-fiction books on frontier and American Indian history, and two SF novels, Halfway Human and Arkfall. Her most recent novels are Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles. She lives in St. Louis, where she works as a museum exhibition developer.

  Here she gives us a moody and melancholy story – one that resonates with echoes of loss, of worlds vanished and loved ones destroyed, even of genocide – about a young girl, living with her irresponsible mother in a slum neighborhood in a city on an alien planet, who meets an old man with an enigmatic past who eventually becomes her tutor and mentor, and who will end up changing her life forever in unexpected ways.

  TWICE A DAY, stillness settled over the iron city of Glory to God as the citizens turned west and waited for the world to ring. For a few moments the motionless red sun on the horizon, half-concealed by the western mountains, lit every face in the city: the just-born and the dying, the prisoners and the veiled, the devout and the profane. The sound started so low it could only be heard by the bones; but as the moments passed the metal city itself began to ring in sympathetic harmony, till the sound resolved into a note – The Note, priests said, sung by the heart of God to set creation going. Its vibratory mathematics embodied all structure; its pitch implied all scales and chords; its beauty was the ovum of all devotion and all faithlessness. Nothing more than a note was needed to extrapolate the universe.

  The Note came regular as clockwork, the only timebound thing in a city of perpetual sunset.

  On a ledge outside a window in the rustiest part of town, crouched one of the ominous cast-iron gargoyles fancied by the architects of Glory to God – or so it seemed until it moved. Then it resolved into an adolescent girl dressed all in black. Her face was turned west, her eyes closed in a look of private exaltation as The Note reverberated through her. It was a face that had just recently lost the chubbiness of childhood, so that the clean-boned adult was beginning to show through. Her name, also a recent development, was Thorn. She had chosen it because it evoked suffering and redemption.

  As the bell tones whispered away, Thorn opened her eyes. The city before her was a composition in red and black: red of the sun and the dustplain outside the girders of the dome; black of the shadows and the works of mankind. Glory to God was built against the cliff of an old crater and rose in stairsteps of fluted pillars and wrought arches till the towers of the Protectorate grazed the underside of the dome where it met the cliff face. Behind the distant, glowing windows of the palaces, twined with iron ivy, the priest-magistrates and executives lived unimaginable lives – though Thorn still pictured them looking down on all the rest of the city, on the smelteries and temples, the warring neighborhoods ruled by militias, the veiled women, and at the very bottom, befitting its status, the Waster enclave where unrepentent immigrants like Thorn and her mother lived, sunk in a bath of sin. The Waste was not truly of the city, except as a perennial itch in its flesh. The Godly said it was the sin, not the oxygen, that rusted everything in the Waste. A man who came home with a red smudge on his clothes might as well have been branded with the address.

  Thorn’s objection to her neighborhood lay not in its sin, which did not live up to its reputation, but its inauthenticity. From her rooftop perch she looked down on its twisted warrens full of coffee shops, underground publishers, money launderers, embassies, tattoo parlors, and art galleries. This was the ninth planet she had lived on in her short life, but in truth she had never left her native culture, for on every planet the Waster enclaves were the same. They were always a mother lode of contraband ideas. Everywhere, the expatriate intellectuals of the Waste were regarded as exotic and dangerous, the vectors of infectious transgalactic ideas – but lately, Thorn had begun to find them pretentious and phony. They were rooted nowhere, pieces of cultural bricolage. Nothing reached to the core; it was all veneer, just like the rust.

  Outside, now – she looked past the spiked gates into Glory to God proper – there lay dark desires and age-old hatreds, belief so unexamined it permeated every tissue like a marinade. The natives had not chosen their beliefs; they had inherited them, breathed them in with the iron dust in their first breath. Their struggles were authentic ones.

  Her eyes narrowed as she spotted movement near the gate. She was, after all, on lookout duty. There seemed to be more than the usual traffic this afternote, and the cluster of young men by the gate did not look furtive enough to belong. She studied them through her pocket binoculars and saw a telltale flash of white beneath one long coat. White, the color of the uncorrupted.

  She slipped back through the gable window into her attic room, then down the iron spiral staircase at the core of the vertical tower apartment. Past the fifth-floor closets and the fourth-floor bedrooms she went, to the third-floor offices. There she knocked sharply on one of the molded sheet-iron doors. Within, there was a thump, and in a moment Maya cracked it open enough to show one eye.

  “There’s a troop of Incorruptibles by the gate,” Thorn said.

  Inside the office, a woman’s voice gave a frightened exclamation. Thorn’s mother turned and said in her fractured version of the local tongue, “Worry not yourself. We make safely go.” She then said to Thorn, “Make sure the bottom door is locked. If they come, stall them.”

  Thorn spun down the stair like a black tornado, past the living rooms to the kitchen on street level. The door was locked, but she unlocked it to peer out. The alarm was spreading down the street. She watched signs being snatched from windows, awnings rolled up, and metal grilles rumbling down across storefronts. The crowds that always pressed from curb to curb this time of day had vanished. Soon the stillness of impending storm settled over the street. Then Thorn heard the faraway chanting, like premonitory thunder. She closed and locked the door.

  Maya showed up, looking rumpled, her lovely honey-gold hair in ringlets. Thorn said, “Did you get her out?” Maya nodded. One of the main appeals of this apartment had been the hidden escape route for smuggling out Maya’s clients in emergencies like this.

  On this planet, as on the eight before, Maya earned her living in the risky profession of providing reproductive services. Every planet was different, it seemed, except that on all of them women wanted something that was forbidden. What they wanted varied: here, it was babies. Maya did a brisk business in contraband semen and embryos for women who needed to become pregnant without their infertile husbands guessing how it had been accomplished.

  The chanting grew louder, harsh male voices in unison. They watched together out the small kitchen
window. Soon they could see the approaching wall of men dressed in white, marching in lockstep. The army of righteousness came even with the door, then passed by. Thorn and Maya exchanged a look of mutual congratulation and locked little fingers in their secret handshake. Once again, they had escaped.

  Thorn opened the door and looked after the army. An assortment of children was tagging after them, so Maya said, “Go see what they’re up to.”

  The Incorruptibles had passed half a dozen potential targets by now: the bank, the musical instrument store, the news service, the sex shop. They didn’t pause until they came to the small park that lay in the center of an intersection. Then the phalanx lined up opposite the school. With military precision, some of them broke the bottom windows and others lit incendiary bombs and tossed them in. They waited to make sure the blaze was started, then gave a simultaneous shout and marched away, taking a different route back to the gate.

  They had barely left when the Protectorate fire service came roaring down the street to put out the blaze. This was not, Thorn knew, out of respect for the school or for the Waste, which could have gone up in flame wholesale for all the authorities cared; it was simply that in a domed city, a fire anywhere was a fire everywhere. Even the palaces would have to smell the smoke and clean up soot if it were not doused quickly. Setting a fire was as much a defiance of the Protectorate as of the Wasters.

  Thorn watched long enough to know that the conflagration would not spread, and then walked back home. When she arrived, three women were sitting with Maya at the kitchen table. Two of them Thorn knew: Clarity and Bick, interstellar wanderers whose paths had crossed Thorn’s and Maya’s on two previous planets. The first time, they had been feckless co-eds; the second time, seasoned adventurers. They were past middle age now, and had become the most sensible people Thorn had ever met. She had seen them face insurrection and exile with genial good humor and a cannister of tea.