The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  I scrambled to my feet and went for the wall, stumbling as the second bomb went off somewhere down the street. Dragons were quiet, Coody said, and hard as hell to detect; there’d be bombs all across town to create the distraction he was looking for, enough to flood the streets in smoke and fire, to ruin the infrared eyes the doc gave his razorfreaks to let ’em see in the dark. Coody and his clones gave minimal assistance, filling the street with spotlights while they took cover from the gunfire. They didn’t move to help the razorfreaks, just dug in and waited, a dozen of them with rifles not even looking for a shot. Coody stood behind the steel barrels of water we carted in from the reservoir, shotgun on his shoulder as he scanned the streets. The steel plate over his right eye shone in the light; he didn’t notice me coming, not ’til I slid into place beside him. I yelled the word “bomb”, trying to get louder than the din. Coody nodded, looking irritated, and pointed at the carnage.

  “Bomb,” I said, screaming it, and pointed at his eye-plate. This time it sunk in, and he turned a little pale. I closed my eyes as another dynamite charge went off, caught a glimpse of the future. Clearer now, full of shapes, the sounds getting louder and louder as prescience became past. Coody ordered his clones into the street, ordered another two onto the walls to start searching the rooftops for the dragon and take him down with a rifle-shot.

  I peered forward, snatching another glimpse. The gunfire and screaming in the smoke-haze started to die down. It was random now, scattered, the dragon picking the last of the razorfreaks off. My gut said we were out of bombs and out of mobs, so the killing would get real personal from here on in. I heard Coody calling orders, telling his clones to sweep the street, get survivors under cover, and start putting out the fires.

  I knew when I was going to die, if I didn’t do anything stupid with my life. First trick Da taught me, when he figured out I had the sight. You look forward and you see your death, and you know that’s how it’ll end if you don’t mess up destiny too bad in the meantime. The dragon knew it too, and so did my Da. It ain’t writ in stone, but it’s good enough. It takes some real stupidity to mess those visions up.

  Da was supposed to die an old man, but he pushed things too hard. I was supposed to die an older man, and I hadn’t pushed a damn thing, not since the doc came to town. I closed my eyes and looked, forcing my way through the smoke. Somewhere in the future the dragon was going to die and the doc would punish Coody for it. Or the doc was going to die and take Sam Coody with him. There weren’t many ways it come out good for the sheriff, and there were a damn sight fewer where it came out good for the town.

  I got out my Da’s knife and stepped forward, walking into the smoke.

  I found the doors to the doc’s bunker open wide, the locks burned through with dragon-spit and smeared with oil and blood. I stood there a moment, breathing against a handkerchief to avoid choking on the dust. Coody stepped up beside me, shotgun in hand. “He in there?” he asked, and I nodded and tapped my nose. “Sulphur,” I said, and went in, holding my knife out before me like it’d do a damn thing against anything we’d find running loose in the dark of the bunker. Coody followed on behind me, his mechanical eye clicking as it adapted to the darkness.

  “You seen anything?” he asked me. “Like, maybe, who’s going to win?”

  I shook my head, stepped over the body of a dying ’borg. “Get outta here, Sheriff. You don’t want to be close to the doc today.”

  We heard a gunshot, deeper in, the sound of someone scrambling and running. Coody moved a little ahead of me, raised the shotgun. “It ain’t exactly a choice, Paul. Dyin’ comes with the badge.”

  He started moving in, gun at the ready, letting me follow behind. I tried to peek at the future, but there was nothing to see. Not anymore. Too many muddled pieces on the board, too many people trying to bluff and get a better result out of the hand fate dealt them. Occasionally we’d pass a body, see drips of blood on the concrete or smears of it on the wall. It’s a twisty path, heading down to the doc’s lab, and plenty of corridors leading off to the side. We found him hiding in one about halfway down, crouched in the darkness with a bone-saw in his fist. He was bleeding, the doc, but he moved okay when he saw us. “A grazing shot,” he said, “lucky, at best.”

  “The dragon,” Coody said. He pumped his shotgun for emphasis, chambering a live shell.

  “Deeper in,” Doc Cameron said, “there’s a few boys towards the lab, trying to contain it.” He paused a moment, stared at Coody. “They’re doing your job, Sheriff, unless I miss my guess. Perhaps you should go join them.” There was steel in his voice as he said it, and his good hand at his belt hovering over the little box patched into his computer.

  “The dragon’s your mess,” Coody said. “What if I say no?”

  The doc’s gaze slid over to me, then back up to Coody. “I gather you’ve been informed of that,” he said. The laugh that followed was high-pitched, a trill of amusement.

  Down the corridors, in the doc’s lab, we heard someone screaming. “Probably best if you hurry,” Doc said. He laughed again, winced, put his hook against the wall to steady himself. Blood loss, I figured. The scratch in his side weren’t as minor as he made out. Prescience said the doc was already dead, just running out the final moments before the injury put him down. The only question now was whether the dragon and Coody went with him.

  He wheezed for breath, leaning forward, and the hand over his computer box strayed a little too far. His eyes were stuck on Coody, waiting for the decision. I thought about Da for a moment, about dying old and safe, then I trusted my gut and Da’s knife and went at the doc with a bloody yell and the knife twisting straight for stomach.

  It cost me a hook across the face, stabbing the doc in the gut. He slashed me hard, but it didn’t kill me; didn’t even hurt when he followed up, jamming the hook in my stomach and ripping a shallow trench through the skin and the gizzards. The pain was bad, even looking back with hindsight, but I figure it was worth it. I got the knife in the doc two or three times in return, kept him busy while Coody lined up the shot and let the shotgun go boom ’til he ran out of ammo. I weren’t conscious to see it happen, but the doc went down. Went down hard, a bloody mess, and Coody standing over him with the gun just-in-case, calling down the clones to stitch me up and get me walking.

  I spent a week or two in bed, healing up from my injuries, and would have myself some nice scars to show off by the time I was healed. The dragon was gone by the time I came to, walked out of town by Coody with supplies and a warning. There weren’t much left for him in town, with the doc laid out for burial, and there were plenty of folks out for his blood after the business with the explosions. He went quiet, which surprised me, and he was missing an eye to go with his broken horn.

  We were due some hardness, everyone knew that, and there were a couple-a folks held grudges against Coody for doing in the doc. But we held off against the scavenger beasts and the retaliatory raids by the last of doc’s ’borgs, found ways to make do when his tech ran down and people started limping ’round town on malfunctioning limbs. I started wearing my Da’s gun, when Coody asked me for help. He was running short of clones, now. There were men in Doc’s labs trying to fix the machines, but they weren’t none as smart as him and it would take a while to get things running, if they ever did.

  Things are good, though, since the dragon came. Tougher, yes, but not so bad as they were. My Da used to tell me that people cope, that the war proved that more than anything. But they’ll do more than cope, if you ask them to, if you show them there’s another option. That they’ll do the right thing, eventually, ’cause doing otherwise there ain’t much to life. I’m not saying he were right, mind, but he saw a lot of what might happen. He was a smart man, Da, and he were better at lookin’ forward than me.

  But that was him, and he did his part. Now there’s me and Coody and a bunch of broken parts, a town that needs savin’ and a future stretchin’ forward. And maybe I get to make it to the end I’m meant
to have, and maybe I get sidetracked a little along the way. It doesn’t seem so bad, not knowing, not like it used to.

  And Da always used to tell me there were worse things than dying young.

  CANTERBURY HOLLOW

  Chris Lawson

  Chris Lawson is an Australian speculative fiction writer with an eclectic approach to subject matter that has skittered across the hard sciences of genetic engineering and epidemiology to unapologetic fantasy about the voyages of the Argo at the end of the age of myths to ambiguous ghost stories set in the Great War. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Eidolon, Dreaming Down-Under, and several year’s best anthologies; his collection Written in Blood is available through MirrorDanse Books (www.tabula-rasa.info/MirrorDanse/). In non-fictional life, Chris is a family medicine practitioner and university teacher with a special interest in public health, evidence-based medicine, and statistics. He lives on the Sunshine Coast with his spouse, two children, and a hyperdog. He blogs, irregularly, at Talking Squid (www.talking-squid.net).

  In the quietly moving story that follows, he takes us to a colony world whose immensely hostile environment has called forth harsh and inflexible social customs that the colony must employ in order to survive, and shows us what complying with those customs means to a young couple in love.

  OF ALL THE trillions of people who have lived and who will live, Arlyana and Moko were not especially important, nor heroic, nor beautiful, but for a few moments they were cradled by the laws of nature. In a universe that allows humans to survive in a minuscule sliver of all possible times and places, this is a rare accomplishment.

  They met under the Sundome.

  Arlyana wanted to see the killing sun for herself so she took the Long Elevator to the surface. The Sundome was a hemispheric pocket of air trapped under massive polymer plates on the crust of a dying planet called Musca. The Sundome persisted only through the efforts of robotic fixers, and the robots themselves needed constant repair from the ravages of the sun.

  Through the transparent ceiling of the dome, Arlyana watched the sun rise over the world it had destroyed. The sun was a boiling disc, white and fringed with solar arcs. Ancient archived images showed a turquoise sky, but the sun had long since blown the atmosphere to wisps and now the sky was black and the stars visible in full daylight. A few degrees to one side, the sun’s companion star glowed a creamy yellow.

  Dawn threw sunlight across the ruins of the Old City. Rising from the centre of the city was a tower many kilometers tall. The tower had been even taller once: it had reached all the way to orbit.

  As the sun rose in the sky, the number of visitors to the Sundome thinned out. Even knowing they were protected by the dome, it was a terrifying experience for many people to stand beneath the killing sun. They hurried to the Long Elevator and scuttled back home. Not Arlyana: she wanted to face the sun, to challenge its authority to kill her. While the bulk of the people around her withdrew to the safety of the rock beneath their feet, Arlyana chose to go further outwards.

  The Sundome hosted a number of small buses, life supports on wheels, that allowed visitors to tour the old city. They were rarely used in daylight hours. Arlyana went to the bus bay, now completely emptied of people, and found a bus that was leaving in a few minutes.

  At its allotted time the bus gave a little warning beep, the doors closed shut with a pneumatic sigh, and then it trundled out the airlock gates. As the bus moved over the blighted landscape, it gave an automated commentary.

  “Different astronomers on Old Earth,” said the bus, “reported different colors for our sun over different centuries. When people first settled Musca it was thought that the colors had been misreported due to the primitive telescopes of the time. Now we know that the old astronomers were seeing signs of instability . . .”

  Arlyana tuned out the words, but the sound of the voice was soothing.

  The bus made its way over to the great, ruined tower. The tower was impressive but once it had been majestic, almost godlike in its engineering. Now it was a candle stub of eroded carbon. The soil at the foot of the tower had been baked to glass.

  The bus interrupted its commentary. “My apologies,” said the bus, “but a high energy sunburst has erupted and high levels of radiation are expected. The bus will now return for your own protection.”

  “I have been balloted,” Arlyana said. She held up her ballot card. “Continue the tour.”

  “You are not the only person in the cabin,” said the bus.

  As the bus spoke, a man at the back of the bus leapt to his feet. This was Moko.

  Moko, shaking off his sleep and orienting himself to the situation, held up his own ballot card. “I’ve been balloted too,” he said. “Continue the tour.”

  “As you wish,” said the bus.

  Moko said to Arlyana, “I didn’t mean to startle you. I lay down on the seat at the back and I must have fallen asleep.”

  “No need to apologize,” she replied. “Come sit with me and enjoy the tour.”

  The bus took them around the Old City. The voice pointed out the Old Port, and the Old Synod, and the Old Settlement Memorial. Every one of them had long since crumbled to an abstract mass.

  Midway through the tour, the bus announced that the sunburst had intensified and even balloted citizens, and buses for that matter, would be damaged by the flood of radiation coming. There was no time to return to the Sundome, so the bus scuttled over to the Old Tower and sheltered in its shadow.

  “Well,” said Arlyana to Moko, “it appears we are stuck here for now.”

  “So it does.”

  She watched him closely. He had a handsome face, if a little pinched at the mouth. He had continued to shave after being balloted, which she looked on approvingly even though she quite liked beards. She extended her hand to him.

  “I should let you know that I’m not much in favor of balloted romances,” she said.

  Moko looked back at her. She was tall and muscular with dark blue skin that had gone out of fashion fifteen years ago but seemed to suit her.

  “I agree.” he said. “Too desperate.”

  “I would go so far as to say ‘cloying’. ”

  “Not to mention ‘desperate’. It bears repeating.”

  “So we’re in agreement then. Against balloted romances.”

  “I believe we are.” He reached out and took her hand.

  It took three hours for the shadow of the tower to connect with the entrance to a safety tunnel. For those three hours they sat together in the bus, hiding in the shade while the sun showered the world with light of many frequencies and particles of many energies, with some that knocked lesser particles off the land around them and made the world glow.

  They took the Long Elevator back to Moko’s unit because it was closer. It was also much smaller and after skinnings of elbows and barkings of knees, they decided that Arlyana’s apartment would have been more suitable after all. But that was three hours down the Grand Central Line and they were already together, if not entirely comfortable, so they lay wedged between Moko’s bunk and the bulkhead above it and negotiated their future plans.

  “My top three,” said Arlyana, “would be to see the First Chamber, to put a drop of blood in the Heritage Wall, and to climb Canterbury Hollow.”

  “You want to climb Canterbury Hollow? Isn’t it enough to just visit?”

  “I’m going to climb it and I want you to climb with me.”

  Moko sighed. “I’m not sure I’m fit enough. Isn’t it around eight hundred metres high?”

  “Eight-twenty-two,” said Arlyana. “But there’s only a hundred or so of hard climbing.”

  “I’d need to get into shape. I’m not sure that’s what I want to do with my time.”

  Arlyana tried to prop herself up on her elbow to read his expression, but she only succeeded in hitting her head. “I know this is a gauche thing to ask,” she said, “but how much time do you have?”

  �
�Two weeks.”

  She sagged back into the mattress. “You could have some of my time. I’ve got three months.”

  “I couldn’t do that. It’s too much to ask.”

  They lay in silence, thinking. After several minutes Arlyana spoke up. “So what do you want to do with your time?” she asked.

  Moko pursed his lips, then said, “I would like to visit the First Chamber, add a drop of blood to the Heritage Wall, and visit Canterbury Hollow.”

  She laughed at that. “That’s quite a coincidence.”

  “Truth to tell, I’ve had no idea what to do with myself since I was balloted. If you’ve got some plans, I might as well use them.”

  Moko and Arlyana donned pressure suits to explore the First Chamber. Artificial lights illuminated the cavern. Rust-red trails of iron oxide dripped down the walls of the cavern.

  The Chamber was smaller than they expected. Much, much smaller. Accustomed as they were to living in tight spaces, they still found it incredible that tens of thousands of citizens had once occupied a cavern the size of a sports chamber.

  The first Deep Citizens had lived here for decades while they had drilled away at iron and stone, following fissures and air pockets to speed their excavation. As they dug down, deeper into the crust, they had built new cities in the spaces they carved out of bare rock. At first they had merely hoped to escape the solar irradiation, but after two centuries it had become inescapably apparent that the sun was not merely going to scorch the surface. The ferocity of its light was growing and soon it would burn the atmosphere off.

  Having built one civilization, the Deep Citizens had to build another, this time sealed from the outside world. They adapted their existing cities and spaces where they could, but not everything could be saved. The First Chamber was too close and too open to the surface and so it had to be abandoned.