The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  “Let me be blunt, Marshal Stalin,” I said. “You want me because I’m a scientist and because you think I might be a British agent, and because you can be certain I’m not one of yours?”

  “Fairly certain,” said Stalin, with a dark chuckle.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Beria flinch. I was startled that Stalin should hint so broadly of Soviet penetration of British intelligence, as well as of his mistrust of Beria. If I survived to return to England, I would make a point of reporting it directly to that chap who – Whitehall rumour had it – was in charge of stopping that sort of thing. What was his name again? Oh, yes – Philby. A moment later I realized that, very likely, Stalin and Beria had cooked up this apparent indiscretion between them, perhaps to test my reaction, or so that my very reporting of it might circuitously advance their sinister aims. But there were more pressing puzzles on my mind.

  “But I’m a palaeontologist!” I said. “What could there possibly be in that field that could be of interest to any intelligence service?”

  “A good question,” said Stalin. “An intriguing question, is it not? I see you are intrigued. All I can say at this point, Dr. Walker, is that you have only one way of finding the answer. If you choose not to help us, then I must say, with regret, that you must take the next flight for London. It may be impossible for you to return, or to dig again for the dinosaur bones of Outer Mongolia which appear to fascinate you so much. If you do choose to help us, not only will you find the answer to your question, but opportunities for further collaboration with our scientists might, one may imagine, open up.”

  The threat, mercifully small as it would have seemed to some, was dire to me; the offer tempting; but neither was necessary. I was indeed intrigued.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Good,” said Stalin. “I now turn you over to the capable hands of . . .”

  He paused just long enough – a heartbeat – to scare me.

  “. . . your esteemed colleague, Trofim Denisovich.”

  But, as though in amends for that small, cat-like moment of sporting with my fear, or perhaps from that sentimental streak which so often characterizes his type, his parting handshake was accompanied by momentary wetness of his yellow eyes and a confidential murmur, the oddest thing I ever heard – or heard of or read of – him say:

  “God go with you.”

  Corridors, guards, stairs, the courtyard, more guards, then Red Square and the streets. Trofim walked fast beside me, hands jammed in his jacket pockets, his chin down; fifty-odd metres behind us, the pacing shadow of the man from the organs of state security. Beefy-faced women in kerchiefs mixed concrete by shovel, struggled with wheelbarrows, took bawled orders from loutish foremen. Above them, on the bare scaffolding of the building sites, huge red-bordered black-on-white banners flapped, vast magnifications of a flattering ink portrait of the face I had seen minutes before. There seemed to be no connection, the merest passing resemblance to the aged, pock-marked man. I recalled something he had, it was told, once snarled at his drunken, vainglorious son, who’d pleaded, “After all, I too am Stalin.” He’d said:

  “You are not Stalin! I am not Stalin! Stalin is a banner . . .”

  At that moment I thought I could quite literally see what he’d meant.

  “Well, David Rigley,” said Lysenko (evidently under the misapprehension that my second name was a patronymic), “the leading comrades have landed you and me in a fine mess.”

  “You know what this is about?”

  “I do, more’s the pity. We may be doomed men. Let us walk a little. It’s the safest way to talk.”

  “But surely—”

  “Nothing is ‘surely’, here. You must know that. Even a direct order from the Boss may not be enough to protect us from the organs. Beria is building atomic bombs out on the tundra. Where he gets his labour force from, you can guess. Including engineers and scientists, alas. At one of their sites they have found something that . . . they want us to look into.”

  “Atomic bombs? With respect, Trofim Denisovich—”

  “I will not argue with you on that. But what Beria’s . . . men have found is more terrifying than an atomic bomb. That is what we have agreed to investigate, you and I.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So that’s what I’ve agreed to. Thanks for clearing that up.”

  The sarcasm was wasted on him.

  “You are welcome, David Rigley.” He stopped at an intersection. A black car drew up beside us. He waved me to the side door. I hung back.

  “It is my own car,” he said mildly. “It will take us to my farm. Tomorrow, it will take us to the airport.”

  Lysenko’s private collective farm – so to speak – in the Gorki-Leninskie hills south of Moscow was of course a showcase, and was certainly a testimony more to Lysenko’s enthusiasm than to his rigour, but I must admit that it was a hospitable place, and that I spent a pleasant enough afternoon there being shown its remarkable experiments, and a very pleasant evening eating some of the results. For that night, Trofim and I could pretend to have not a care in the world – and in that pretense alone, I was of one mind with the charlatan.

  The following morning we flew to the east and north. It was not a civilian flight. Aeroflot’s reputation is deservedly bad enough; but it is in the armed forces that Aeroflot pilots learn their trade. This flight in an LI-2 transport was courtesy of the Army. Even now, the memory of that flight brings me out in a cold sweat. So you will forgive me if I pass over it. Suffice it to say that we touched down on a remote military airfield that evening to refuel and to change pilots, and continued through a night during which I think I slept in my cramped bucket seat from sheer despair. We landed – by sideslip and steep, tight spiral, as if under fire – just after dawn the following morning on a bumpy, unpaved strip in the midst of a flat, green plain. A shack served as a terminal building, before which a welcoming committee of a dozen or so uniformed men stood. Through a small porthole, as the plane juddered to a halt, I glimpsed some more distant structures: a tower on stilts, long low barracks, a mine-head, and great heaps of spoil. There may have been a railway line. I’m not sure.

  Trofim and I unkinked our backs, rubbed grit from our eyes, and made our stooping way to the hatch. I jumped the metre drop to the ground. Trofim sat and swung his long legs over and slid off more carefully. The air was fine and fresh, unbelievably so after Moscow, and quite warm. One of the men detached himself from the line-up and hurried over. He was stocky, blue-jowled, with a look of forced joviality on his chubby, deep-lined face. He wore a cap with the deep blue band of the security organs. Shaking hands, he introduced himself as Colonel Viktor A. Marchenko. He led us to the shack, where he gave us glasses of tea and chunks of sour black bread, accompanied by small talk and no information, while his men remained at attention outside – they didn’t smoke or shuffle – then took us around the back of the shack to a Studebaker flatbed truck. To my surprise, the Colonel took the driver’s seat. Trofim and I squeezed in beside him. The rest of the unit piled perilously on the back.

  We associate Russia’s far north with snow and ice. Its brief summer is almost pleasant, apart from the mosquitoes and the landslides. Small flowers carpet the tundra. Its flat appearance is deceptive, concealing from a distance the many hollows and rises of the landscape. The truck went up and down, its tyres chewing the unstable soil. At the crest of each successive rise the distant buildings loomed closer. The early-morning sun glinted on long horizontal lines in front of them: barbed wire, no doubt, and not yet rusty. It became obvious, as I had of course suspected, that this was a labour camp. I looked at Lysenko. He stared straight ahead, sweat beading his face. I braced my legs in the foot well and gripped my knees hard.

  At the top of a rise the truck halted. The Colonel nodded forward, and made a helpless gesture with his hand. Trofim and I stared in shock at what lay in front of us. At the bottom of the declivity, just a few metres down the grassy slope from the nose of the truck, the ground seemed to h
ave given way. The hole was about fifteen metres across and four deep. Scores of brown corpses, contorted and skeletal, protruded at all angles from the ragged black earth. From the bottom of the hole, an edged metallic point stood up like the tip of a pyramid or the corner of an enormous box. Not a speck of dirt marred the reflective sheen of its blue-tinted, silvery surfaces.

  My first thought was that some experimental device, perhaps one of Beria’s atomic bombs, had crashed here among some of the camp’s occupants, killing and half-burying the poor fellows. My second thought was that it had exposed the mass grave of an earlier batch of similar unfortunates. I kept these thoughts to myself and stepped down from the cab, followed by Lysenko. The Colonel jumped out the other side and barked an order. Within seconds his men had formed a widely spaced cordon around the hole, each standing well back, with his Kalashnikov levelled.

  “Take a walk around it,” said Marchenko.

  We did, keeping a few steps away from the raw edge of the circular gash. About three metres of each edge of the object was exposed. Lysenko stopped and walked to the brink. I followed, to peer at a corpse just below our feet. Head, torso, and one outflung arm poked out of the soil. Leathery skin, a tuft of hair, empty sockets, and a lipless grin.

  “From the . . . Yezhovschina?” I asked, alluding to the massacres of a decade earlier.

  Trofim leaned forward and pointed down. “I doubt,” he said drily, “that any such died with bronze swords in their hands.”

  I squatted and examined the body more closely. Almost hidden by a fall of dirt was the other hand, clutching a hilt that did indeed, between the threads of a rotten tassel, have a brassy gleam. I looked again at what shock had made me overlook on the others: stubs of blades, scraps of gear, leather belts and studs, here and there around withered necks a torque of a dull metal that might have been pewter.

  “So who are they?” I asked.

  Lysenko shrugged. “Tartars, Mongols . . .”

  His knowledge of history was more dubious than his biology. These peoples had never migrated so far north, and no Bronze Age people was native to the area. The identity and origin of the dead barbarians puzzles me to this day.

  Around the other side of the pit, the side that faced the camp, things were very different. The upper two metres of that face of the pyramid were missing, as if it was the opened top of that hypothetical box’s corner. And the bodies – I counted ten – scattered before it were definitely those of camp labourers: thin men in thin clothes, among flung shovels. The corpses looked quite fresh. Only their terrible rictus faces were like those of the other and more ancient dead.

  “What is this?” I asked Lysenko. “One of Beria’s infernal machines?”

  He shot me an amused, impatient glance. “You overestimate us,” he said. “This is not a product of our technology. Nor, I venture to suggest, is it one of yours.”

  “Then whose?”

  “If it is not from some lost civilization of deep antiquity, then it is not of this world.”

  We gazed for a while at the black empty triangle and then completed our circuit of the pit and returned to Marchenko, who still stood in front of the truck.

  “What happened here?” Lysenko asked.

  Marchenko pointed towards the camp, then down at the ground.

  “This is a mining camp,” he said. “The mine’s galleries extend beneath our feet. Some days ago, there was a cave-in. It resulted in a rapid subsidence on the surface, and exposed the object, and the slain warriors. A small squad of prisoners was sent into the pit to investigate, and to dig out the bodies and artefacts. To be quite frank, I suspect that they were sent to dig for valuables, gold and whatnot. One of them, for reasons we can only speculate, tried to enter the aperture in the object. Within moments, they were all dead.”

  “Tell us plainly,” said Lysenko. “Do you mean they were shot by the guards?”

  The colonel shook his head. “They could have been,” he said, “for disobeying orders. But as it happens, they were not. Something from the object killed them without leaving a mark. Perhaps a poisonous gas – I don’t know. That is for you to find out.”

  His story struck as improbable, or at least incomplete, but this was no time to dispute it.

  “For heaven’s sake, man!” I cried out. “And get killed ourselves?”

  Marchenko bared a gold incisor. “That is the problem, yes? You are scientists. Solve it.”

  This insouciance for a moment infuriated us, but solve it we did. An hour or two later, after the truck had returned from the camp with the simple equipment we’d demanded, Lysenko and I were standing in the pit a couple of metres from the black aperture. Behind us the truck chugged, its engine powering a searchlight aimed at the dark triangle. Trofim guided a long pole, on the end of which one of the truck’s wing mirrors was lashed. I stood in front of him, the pole resting on my shoulder, and peered at the mirror with a pair of binoculars requisitioned from (no doubt) a camp guard. Nothing happened as our crude apparatus inched above the dark threshold. We moved about, Trofim turning the mirror this way and that. The magnified mirror image filled a large part of the close-focus view.

  “What do you see?” Lysenko asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Well, the joins of the edges. They go as far as I can see. Below it there’s just darkness. It’s very deep.”

  We backed out and scrambled up.

  “How big is this thing?” I asked Marchenko.

  He shifted and looked sideways, then jabbed a finger downward.

  “A similar apex,” he said, “pokes down into the gallery beneath us.”

  “How far beneath us?”

  His tongue flicked between his lips for a moment. “About a hundred metres.”

  “If this is a cube,” I said, “four hundred feet diagonally – my God!”

  “We have reason to think it is a cube,” said Marchenko.

  “Take us to the lower apex,” said Lysenko.

  “Do you agree?” Marchenko asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  A sign arched over the camp entrance read: “Work in the USSR is a matter of honour and glory.” For all that we could see as the truck drove in, nobody in the camp sought honour and glory that day. Guards stood outside every barracks door. Three scrawny men were summoned to work the hoist. Marchenko’s squad took up positions around the mine-head. Lysenko, Marchenko, and I – with one of Marchenko’s sergeants carrying the pole and mirror – descended the shaft in a lift cage to the gallery. Pitchblende glittered in the beams from our helmet lamps. We walked forward for what seemed like many hours, but according to my watch was only fifty-five minutes. The cave-in had been cleared. Down like the point of a dagger came the lower apex of the cube, its tip a few inches above the floor. Its open face was not black but bright. It cast a blue light along the cavern.

  “Well,” said Lysenko, with a forced laugh, “this looks more promising.”

  This time it was I who advanced with the pole and angled the mirror in; Lysenko who looked through the Zeiss. I saw a reflected flash, as though something had moved inside the object. Blue light, strangely delimited, strangely slow, like some luminous fluid, licked along the wooden pole. With a half-second’s warning, I could have dropped it. But as that gelid lightning flowed over my hands, my fingers clamped to the wood. I felt a forward tug. I could not let go. My whole body spasmed as if in electric shock, and just as painfully. My feet rose off the ground, and my legs kicked out behind me. At the same moment I found myself flying forward like a witch clinging to a wayward broom. With a sudden flexure that almost cracked my spine, I was jerked through the inverted triangular aperture and upward into the blue-lit space above. That space was not empty. Great blocks of blue, distinct but curiously insubstantial, floated about me. I was borne upwards, then brought to a halt. I could see, far above, a small triangle of daylight, in equally vivid contrast to the darkness immediately beneath it and the unnatural light around me. Apart from my hands, still clutched around the p
ole, my muscles returned to voluntary control. I hung there, staring, mouth open, writhing like a fish on a hook. My throat felt raw, my gasps sounded ragged. I realized that I had been screaming. The echoes of my screams rang for a second or two in the vast cubical space.

  Before my eyes, some of the blocky shapes took on a new arrangement: a cubist caricature of a human face, in every detail down to the teeth. Eyes like cogwheels, ears like coffins. From somewhere came an impression, nay, a conviction, that this representation was meant to be reassuring. It was not.

  What happened next is as difficult to describe as a half-remembered dream: a sound of pictures, a taste of words. I had a vision of freezing space, of burning suns, of infinite blackness shot through with stars that were not eternal: stars that I might outlive. I heard the clash of an enormous conflict, remote in origin, endless in prospect, and pointless in issue. It was not a war of ideals, but an ideal war: what Plato might have called the Form of War. Our wars of interests and ideologies can give only the faintest foretaste of it. But a foretaste they are. I was given to understand – how, I do not know – that joining in such a war is what the future holds for our descendants, and for all intelligent species. It is conducted by machines that carry in themselves the memories, and are themselves the only monuments, of the races that built them and that they have subsumed. This is a war with infinite casualties, infinite woundings, and no death that is not followed – after no matter what lapse of time – by a resurrection and a further plunge into that unending welter. No death save that of the universe itself can release the combatants, and only at that terminus will it have meaning, and then only for a moment, the infinitesimal moment of contemplating a victory that is final because it precedes, by that infinitesimal moment, the end of all things: victory pure and undefiled, victory for its own sake, the victory of the last mind left.