The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Who knows about this so far?”

  “You. Me. No one else.”

  “What about the priest and priestess who found the excavation pit?”

  “They came right to me and told me about it. They hadn’t gone very far inside, no more than five or six paces. Why should they have gone any farther?”

  “They might have,” the Warder said.

  “They didn’t. They had no torch and they had their minds on other things. All they did was look a little way in, just far enough to see that something unusual was going on. They hadn’t even gone far enough to find the thieves. But they didn’t say a thing about dead bodies in the tunnel. They’d certainly have told me about them, if they had come upon them. And they’d have looked a whole lot shakier, too.”

  “The thieves didn’t come in here either?”

  “It doesn’t seem that way to me. I don’t think they got any farther than the place where they pulled that lintel out of the passage wall. They’re dead, in any case.”

  “But what if they did get this far? And what if there was someone else with them, someone who managed to escape when the tunnel caved in? Someone who might be out there right now telling all his friends what he saw in this room?”

  Mericalis shook his head. “There’s no reason to think that. And I could see, when I first came down this passage and into the sepulchral chamber, that nobody had been through here in more years than we can imagine. There’d have been tracks in the dust, and there weren’t any. This place has gone undisturbed a very long time. Long enough for the whole story of how the Visitants died to be forgotten and covered over with a nice pretty myth about their ascent into the heavens on a pillar of fire.”

  The Warder considered that for a moment.

  “All right,” he said finally. “Go back outside, Mericalis.”

  “And leave you here alone?”

  “Leave me here alone, yes.”

  Uneasily Mericalis said, “What are you up to, Diriente?”

  “I want to sit here all by myself and think and pray, that’s all.”

  “Do I have to believe that?”

  “Yes. You do.”

  “If you go wandering around down here you’ll end up trapped in some unknown passageway and most likely we’ll never be able to find you again.”

  “I’m not going to wander around anywhere. I told you what I’m going to do. I’m going to sit right here, in this very room. You’ve brought me face to face with the dead bodies of the murdered gods of the religion that I’m supposed to serve, and I need to think about what that means. That’s all. Go away, Mericalis. This is something I have to do all by myself. You’ll only be a distraction. Come back for me at dawn and I promise you that you’ll find me sitting exactly where I am now.”

  “There’s only one torch. I’ll need it if I’m going to be able to find my way out of the tunnel. And that means I have to leave you in the dark.”

  “I realize that, Mericalis.”

  “But—”

  “Go,” the Warder said. “Don’t worry about me. I can stand a few hours of darkness. I’m not a child. Go,” he said again. “Just go, will you? Now.”

  * * *

  He couldn’t deny that he was frightened. He was well along in years; by temperament he was a sedentary man; it was totally against his nature to be spending a night in a place like this, far beneath the ground, where the air managed to seem both dusty-dry and sticky-moist at the same time, and the sharp, pungent odor of immense antiquity jabbed painfully at his nostrils. How different it was from his pleasant little room, surrounded by his books, his jug of wine, his familiar furnishings! In the total darkness he was free to imagine the presence of all manner of disagreeable creatures of the depths creeping about him, white eyeless toads and fleshless chittering lizards and slow, contemplative spiders lowering themselves silently on thick silken cords from invisible recesses of the stone ceiling. He stood in the center of the room and it seemed to him that he saw a sleek fat serpent, pallid and gleaming, with blind blue eyes bright as sapphires, issue from a pit in the floor and rise up before him, hissing and bobbing and swaying as it made ready to strike. But the Warder knew that it was only a trick of the darkness. There was no pit; there was no serpent.

  He perspired freely. His light robe was drenched and clung to him like a shroud. With every breath it seemed to him that he was pulling clusters of cobwebs into his lungs. The darkness was so intense it hammered at his fixed, rigidly staring eyes until he was forced to shut them. He heard inexplicable sounds coming from the walls, a grinding hum and a steady unhurried ticking and a trickling sound, as of sand tumbling through hidden inner spaces. There were menacing vibrations and tremors, and strange twanging hums, making him fear that the temple itself, angered by this intrusion into its bowels, was preparing to bring itself down upon him. What I hear is only the echoes of Mericalis’ footfalls, the Warder told himself. The sounds that he makes as he retraces his way down the tunnel toward the exit.

  After a time he arose and felt his way across the room toward the coffers in the corner, clinging to the rough stones of the wall to guide himself. Somehow he missed his direction, for the corner was empty when he reached it, and as he continued past it his inquiring fingers found themselves pressing into what surely was the opening that led to the tunnel. He stood quietly for a moment in the utter darkness, trying to remember the layout of the funeral chamber, certain that the coffers must have been in the corner he had gone to and unable to understand why he had not found them. He thought of doubling back his path and looking again. But perhaps he was disoriented; perhaps he had gone in precisely the opposite direction from the one he supposed he had taken. He kept going, past the opening, along the wall on the other side. To the other corner. No coffers here. He turned right, still clinging to the wall. A step at a time, imagining yawning pits opening beneath his feet. His knee bumped into something. He had reached the coffers, yes.

  He knelt. Grasped the rim of the nearest one, leaned forward, looked down into it.

  To his surprise he was able to see a little now, to make out the harsh, angular lines of the skeleton it contained. How was that possible? Perhaps his eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness. No, that wasn’t it. A nimbus of light seemed to surround the coffer. A faint reddish glow had begun to rise from it and with the aid of that unexpected illumination he could actually see the outlines of the elongated shape within.

  An illusion? Probably. Hallucination, even. This was the strangest moment of his life, and anything was to be expected, anything at all. There is magic here, the Warder found himself thinking, and then he caught himself up in amazement and wonder that he should have so quickly tumbled into the abyss of the irrational. He was a prosaic man. He had no belief in magic. And yet—and yet—

  The glow grew more intense. The skeleton blazed in the darkness. With eerie clarity he saw the alien crests and spines, the gnarled alien vertebrae, everything sending up a strange crimson fire to make its aspect plain to him. The empty eye sockets seemed alive with fierce intelligence.

  “Who are you?” the Warder asked, almost belligerently. “Where did you come from? Why did you ever poke your noses into our affairs? Did you even have noses?” He felt strangely giddy. The closeness of the air, perhaps. Not enough oxygen. He laughed, too loudly, too long. “Oberith, is that who you are? Aulimiath? And that’s Vonubius in the center box, yes? The tallest one, the leader of the mission.”

  His body shook with sudden anguish. Waves of fear and bewilderment swept over him. His own crude joking had frightened him. He began to sob.

  The thought that he might be in the presence of the actual remains of the actual Three filled him with confusion and dismay. He had come over the years to think of the tale of the Advent as no more than a myth—the gods who came from the stars—and now he was stunned by this evidence that they had been real, that they once were tangible creatures who had walked and eaten and breathed and made water—and had been capable of dying
, of being killed. He had reached a point long ago of not believing that. This discovery required him to reevaluate everything. Did it trivialize the religion he served into mere history? No—no, he thought; the existence here in this room of these bones elevated history into miracle, into myth. They truly had come. And had served, and had departed: not to the stars, but to the realm of death. From which they would return in the due course of time, and in their resurrection would bring the redemption that had been promised, the forgiveness for the crime that had been committed against them.

  Was that it? Was that the proper way to interpret the things this room held?

  He didn’t know. He realized that he knew nothing at all.

  The Warder shivered and trembled. He wrapped his arms around himself and held himself tight.

  He fought to regain some measure of control over himself.

  “No,” he said sternly. “It can’t be. You aren’t them. I don’t believe that those are your names.”

  From the coffers no answer came.

  “You could be any three aliens at all,” the Warder told them fiercely. “Who just happened to come to Earth, just dropped in one afternoon to see what might be here. And lived to regret it. Am I right?”

  Still silence. The Warder, crouching down against the nearest coffer with his cheek pressed against the dry cold stone, shivered and trembled.

  “Speak to me,” he begged. “What do I have to do to get you to speak to me? Do you want me to pray? All right, then, I’ll pray, if that’s what you want.”

  In the special voice that he used for the evening invocation he intoned the three Holy Names:

  “Oberith … Aulimiath … Vonubius.”

  There was no reply.

  Bitterly he said, “You don’t know your names, do you? Or are you just too stubborn to answer to them?”

  He glowered into the darkness.

  “Why are you here?” he asked them, furious now. “Why did Mericalis have to discover you? Oh, damn him, why did he ever have to tell me about you?”

  Again there was no answer; but now he felt a strange thing beginning to occur. Serpentine columns of light were rising from the three coffers. They flickered and danced like tongues of cold fire before him, commanding him to be still and pay heed. The Warder pressed his hands against his forehead and bowed his head and let everything drain from his mind, so that he was no more than an empty shell crouching in the darkness of the room. And as he knelt there things began to change around him, the walls of the chamber melted and dropped away, and he found himself transported upward and outward until he was standing outside, in the clear sweet air, under the golden warmth of the sun.

  The day was bright, warm, springlike, a splendid day, a day to cherish. But there were ugly dissonances. The Warder heard shouts to his right, to his left—harsh voices everywhere, angry outcries.

  “There they are! Get them! Get them!”

  Three slender grotesque figures came into view, half again as tall as a man, big-eyed, long-limbed, strange of shape, moving swiftly but with somber dignity, as though they were floating rather than striding, keeping just ahead of their pursuers. The Warder understood that these were the Three in their final moments, that they have been harried and hunted all this lovely day across the sweet meadows of this lush green valley. Now there is nowhere further for them to go, they are trapped in a cul-de-sac against the flank of the mountain, the army of their enemies is closing in and all hope of escape is impossible.

  Now the Warder heard savage triumphant screams. Saw reddened, swollen, wrathful faces. Weapons bristling in the air, clubs, truncheons, pitchforks, hatchets. Wild eyes, distended lips, clenched fists furiously shaken. And on a little mound facing their attackers are the Three, standing close together, offering no resistance, seemingly at peace. They appear perplexed by what is happening, perhaps, or perhaps not—how can he tell? What do their alien expressions mean? But almost certainly they are not angry. Anger is not an emotion that can pertain to them in any way. They have a look about them that seems to indicate that they had expected this. Forgive them, for they know not what they do. A moment of hesitation: the mob suddenly uneasy at the last, frightened, even, uncertain of the risks in what they are doing. Then the hesitation was overcome, the people surged forward like a single berserk creature, there was the flash of steel in the sunlight—

  The vision abruptly ended. He was within the stone chamber again. The light was gone. The air about him was dry and stale, not sweet and mild. The tomb was dark and empty.

  The Warder felt stunned by what he had seen, and shamed. A sense of almost suicidal guilt overwhelmed him. Blindly he rushed back and forth across the dark room, frenzied, manic, buffeting himself against the unseen walls. Then, exhausted, he paused for a moment to gasp for breath and stared into the darkness at the place where he thought the coffers were situated. He would break through those transparent coverings, he told himself, and snatch up the three strange skulls and carry them out into the bright light of day, and he would call the people together and show them what he has brought forth from the depths of the Earth, brandishing the skulls in their faces, and he would cry out to them, “Here are your gods. This is what you did to them. All your beliefs were founded on a lie.” And then he would hurl himself from the mountain.

  No.

  He will not. How can he crush their hopes that way? And having done it, what good would his death achieve?

  And yet—to allow the lie to endure and persist—

  “What am I going to do about you?” the Warder asked the skeletons in their coffers. “What am I going to tell the people?” His voice rose to a wild screech. It echoed and reechoed from the stone walls of the room, reverberating in his throbbing skull. “The people! The people! The people!”

  “Speak to me!” the Warder cried. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do!”

  Silence. Silence. Silence. They would give him no answers.

  He laughed at his own helplessness. Then he wept for a time, until his eyes were raw and his throat ached from his sobbing. He fell to his knees once more beside one of the coffers. “Who are you?” he asked, in nothing more than a whisper. “Can you really be Vonubius?”

  And this time imagines that he hears a mocking answer: I am who I am. Go in peace, my son.

  Peace? Where? How?

  At last, a long while later, he began to grow calm once more, and thought that this time he might be able to remain that way. He saw that he was being ridiculous—the old Warder, running to and fro in a stone chamber underground, crying out like a lunatic, praying to gods in whom he didn’t believe, holding conversations with skeletons. Gradually his churning soul moved away from the desperate turbulence into which it had fallen, the manic frenzy, the childish anger. There was no reddish glow, no. His overwrought mind had conjured up some tormented fantasy for him. Darkness still prevailed in the chamber. He was unable to see a thing. Before him, he knew, were three ancient stone boxes containing age-old dry bones, the earthly remains of unearthly creatures long dead.

  He was calm, yes. But there seemed no way even now to hide from his despair. These relics, he knew, called his whole life into question. The whole ugly truth of it stood unanswerably revealed. He had served a false creed, knowingly offering people the empty hope that they would be redeemed by benevolent gods. Night after night standing up there on the portico, invoking the Three, praying for their swift return to this troubled planet. Whereas in truth they had never left Earth at all. Had perished, in fact, at the hands of the very people they had come here—so he supposed—to redeem.

  What now? the Warder asked himself. Reveal the truth? Display the bodies of the Three to the dismayed, astounded faithful, as he had imagined himself doing just a short time ago? Would he do any such thing? Could he? Your beliefs were founded on a lie, he pictured himself telling them. How could he do that? But it was the truth. Small wonder that I lost my own faith long ago, he thought. He had known the truth before he ever knew he knew it. It was th
e truth that he had sworn to serve, first and always. Was that not so? But there was so much that he did not understand—could not understand, perhaps.

  He looked in the direction of the skeletons, and a host of new questions formed in his mind.

  “Why did you want to come to us?” he asked, not angrily now, but in a curious tranquillity of spirit. “Why did you choose to serve us as you did? Why did you allow us to destroy you, since surely it was in your power to prevent it?”

  Powerful questions. The Warder had no answers to them. But yet who knew what miracles might grow from the asking of them. Yes. Yes. Miracles! True faiths can arise from the ruined fragments of false ones, was that not so?

  He was so very tired. It had been such a long night.

  Gradually he slipped downward until he was lying completely prone, face pillowed in his arms. It seemed to him that the gentle light of morning was entering the chamber, that the long vigil was over at last. How could that be, light reaching him underground? He chose not to pursue the question. He lay quietly, waiting. And then he heard footsteps. Mericalis was returning. The night was over indeed.

  * * *

  “Diriente? Diriente, are you all right?”

  “Help me up,” the Warder says. “I’m not accustomed to spending my nights lying on stone floors.”

  The custodian flashes his torch around the room as if he expects it to have changed in some fashion since he last saw it.

  “Well?” he says, finally.

  “Let’s get out of here, shall we?”

  “You’re all right?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m all right!”

  “I was very worried. I know you said you wanted to be alone, but I couldn’t help thinking—”

  “Thinking can be very dangerous,” says the Warder coolly. “I don’t recommend it.”

  “I want to tell you, Diriente, that I’ve decided that what I suggested last night is the best idea. The evidence in this room could blow the Church to pieces. We ought to seal the place up and forget we ever were in here.”