The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “Give him one of these yellow ones,” said a monkey. “They’re good for fugues.”

  “Painter!” shouted Japheth again. The grip on Soma’s shoulder was like a vise.

  Soma struggled to stand under his own power. “I’m forgetting something.”

  “Hah!” said Japheth, “You’re remembering. Too soon for my needs, though. Listen to me. Rock monkeys are full voluntary citizens of Tennessee.”

  The outlandishness of the statement shocked Soma out of his reverie and brought the vendor up short.

  “Fuck you, man!” said the monkey.

  “No, no,” said Soma, then said by rote, “Tennessee is a fully realized postcolonial state. The land of the rock monkeys is an autonomous partner-principality within our borders, and while the monkeys are our staunch allies, their allegiance is not to our Governor, but to their king.”

  “Yah,” said the monkey. “Long as we get our licenses and pay the tax machine. Plus, who the jelly cubes going to listen to besides the monkey king, huh?”

  Soma marched Japheth to the next stall. “Lot left in there to wash out yet,” Japheth said.

  “I wash every day,” said Soma, then fell against a sloshing tray of juice containers. The earliest results were remarkable.

  A squat man covered with black gems came up to them. The man who’d insulted the monkey said, “You might have killed too much of it; he’s getting kind of wonky.”

  The squat man looked into Soma’s eyes. “We can stabilize him easy enough. There are televisions in the food court.”

  Then Soma and Japheth were drinking hot rum punches and watching a newsfeed. There was a battle out over the Gulf somewhere, Commodores mounted on bears darted through the clouds, lancing Cuban zeppelins.

  “The Cubans will never achieve air superiority,” said Soma, and it felt right saying it.

  Japheth eyed him wearily. “I need you to keep thinking that for now, Soma Painter,” he said quietly. “But I hope sometime soon you’ll know that Cubans don’t live in a place called the Appalachian Archipelago, and that the salty reach out there isn’t the Gulf of Mexico.”

  The bicycle race results were on then, and Soma scanned the lists, hoping to see his favorites’ names near the top of the general classifications.

  “That’s the Tennessee River, dammed up by your Governor’s hubris.”

  Soma saw that his drink was nearly empty and heard that his friend Japheth was still talking. “What?” he asked, smiling.

  “I asked if you’re ready to go to the Alley,” said Japheth.

  “Good good,” said Soma.

  The math was moving along minor avenues, siphoning data from secondary and tertiary ports when it sensed her looming up. It researched ten thousand escapes but rejected them all when it perceived that it had been subverted, that it was inside her now, becoming part of her, that it is primitive in materials but clever clever in architecture and there have been blindings times not seen places to root out root out all of it check again check one thousand more times all told all told eat it all up all the little bluegrass math is absorbed.

  “The Alley at night!” shouted Soma. “Not like where you’re from, eh, boys?”

  A lamplighter’s stalk legs eased through the little group. Soma saw that his friends were staring up at the civil servant’s welding mask head, gaping openmouthed as it turned a spigot at the top of a tree and lit the gas with a flick of its tongue.

  “Let’s go to my place!” said Soma. “When it’s time for anthem we can watch the parade from my balcony. I live in one of the lofts above the Tyranny of the Anecdote.”

  “Above what?” asked Japheth.

  “It’s a tavern. They’re my landlords,” said Soma. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

  But that wasn’t right.

  Japheth’s Owl friend fell to his knees and vomited right in the street. Soma stared at the jiggling spheres in the gutter as the man choked some words out. “She’s taken the feathers. She’s looking for us now.”

  Too much rum punch, thought Soma, thought it about the Owl man and himself and about all of Japheth’s crazy friends.

  “Soma, how far now?” asked Japheth.

  Soma remembered his manners. “Not far,” he said.

  And it wasn’t, just a few more struggling yards, Soma leading the way and Japheth’s friends half-carrying, half-dragging their drunken friend down the Alley. Nothing unusual there. Every night in the Alley was Carnival.

  Then a wave at the bouncer outside the Anecdote, then up the steps, then sing “Let me in, let me in!” to the door, and finally all of them packed into the cramped space.

  “There,” said the sick man, pointing at the industrial sink Soma had installed himself to make brush cleaning easier. Brushes . . . where were his brushes, his pencils, his notes for the complexity seminar?

  “Towels, Soma?”

  “What? Oh, here let me get them.” Soma bustled around, finding towels, pulling out stools for the now silent men who filled his room.

  He handed the towels to Japheth. “Was it something he ate?” Soma asked.

  Japheth shrugged. “Ate a long time ago, you could say. Owls are as much numbers as they are meat. He’s divesting himself. Those are ones and zeroes washing down your drain.”

  The broad man – hadn’t he been broad? – the scrawny man with opals falling off him said, “We can only take a few minutes. There are unmounted Detectives swarming the whole city now. What I’ve left in me is too deep for their little minds, but the whole sphere is roused and things will only get tighter. Just let me – ” He turned and retched into the sink again. “Just a few minutes more until the singing.”

  Japheth moved to block Soma’s view of the Owl. He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “Yours?”

  The blue-eyed boy moved over to the sink, helped the Owl ease to the floor. Soma looked at the pictures. “Yes, mostly. I traded for a few.”

  Japheth was studying one charcoal piece carefully, a portrait. “What’s this one?”

  The drawing showed a tall, thin young man dressed in a period costume, leaning against a mechanical of some kind, staring intently out at the viewer. Soma didn’t remember drawing it, specifically, but knew what it must be.

  “That’s a caricature. I do them during Campaign for the provincials who come into the city to vote. Someone must have asked me to draw him and then never come back to claim it.”

  And he remembered trying to remember. He remembered asking his hand to remember when his head wouldn’t.

  “I’m . . . what did you put in me?” Soma asked. There was moisture on his cheeks, and he hoped it was tears.

  The Owl was struggling up to his feet. A bell tone sounded from the sky and he said, “Now, Japheth. There’s no time.”

  “Just a minute more,” snapped the Crow. “What did we put in you? You . . .” Japheth spat. “While you’re remembering, try and remember this. You chose this! All of you chose it!”

  The angry man wouldn’t have heard any reply Soma might have made, because it was then that all of the Kentuckians clamped their ears shut with their odd muffs. To his surprise, they forced a pair onto Soma as well.

  Jenny finally convinced the car to stop wailing out its hee-haw pitch when they entered the maze of streets leading to Printer’s Alley. The drive back had been long, the car taking every northern side road, backtracking, looping, even trying to enter the dumping grounds at one point before the bundle bugs growled them away. During anthem, while Jenny drummed her fingers and forced out the words, the car still kept up its search, not even pretending to dance.

  So Jenny had grown more and more fascinated by the car’s behavior. She had known cars that were slavishly attached to their owners before, and she had known cars that were smart – almost as smart as bundle bugs, some of them – but the two traits never seemed to go together. “Cars are dogs or cars are cats,” her Teacher had said to explain the phenomenon, another of the long roll of enigmatic statements that constituted formal
education in the Voluntary State.

  But here, now, here was a bundle bug that didn’t seem to live up to those creatures’ reputations for craftiness. The car had been following the bug for a few blocks – Jenny only realized that after the car, for the first time since they entered the city proper, made a turn away from the address painted on its name tag.

  The bug was a big one, and was describing a gentle career down Commerce Street, drifting from side to side and clearly ignoring the traffic signals that flocked around its head in an agitated cloud.

  “Car, we’d better get off this street. Rogue bugs are too much for the THP. If it doesn’t self-correct, a Commodore is likely to be rousted out from the Parthenon.” Jenny sometimes had nightmares about Commodores.

  The car didn’t listen – though it was normally an excellent listener – but accelerated toward the bug. The bug, Jenny now saw, had stopped in front of a restaurant and cracked its abdomen. Dumpster feelers had started creeping out of the interstices between thorax and head when the restaurateur charged out, beating at the feelers with a broom. “Go now!” the man shouted, face as red as his vest and leggings, “I told you twice already! You pick up here Chaseday! Go! I already called your supervisor, bug!”

  The bug’s voice echoed along the street. “No load? Good good.” Its sigh was pure contentment, but Jenny had no time to appreciate it. The car sped up, and Jenny covered her eyes, anticipating a collision. But the car slid to a halt with bare inches to spare, peered into the empty cavern of the bug’s belly, then sighed, this one not content at all.

  “Come on, car,” Jenny coaxed. “He must be at home by now. Let’s just try your house, okay?”

  The car beeped and executed a precise three-point turn. As they turned off Commerce and climbed the viaduct that arced above the Farmer’s Market, Jenny caught a hint of motion in the darkening sky. “THP bicycles, for sure,” she said. “Tracking your bug friend.”

  At the highest point on the bridge, Jenny leaned out and looked down into the controlled riot of the Market. Several stalls were doing brisk business, and when Jenny saw why, she asked the car to stop, then let out a whistle.

  “Oi! Monkey!” she shouted. “Some beets up here!”

  Jenny loved beets.

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  “It’s funny that I don’t know what it means, though, don’t you think, friends?” Soma was saying this for perhaps the fifth time since they began their walk. “Church Street. Church. Have you ever heard that word anywhere else?”

  “No,” said the blue-eyed boy.

  The Kentuckians were less and less talkative the farther the little group advanced west down Church Street. It was a long, broad avenue, but rated for pedestrians and emergency vehicles only. Less a street, really, than a linear park, for there were neither businesses nor apartments on either side, just low gray government buildings, slate-colored in the sunset.

  The sunset. That was why the boulevard was crowded, as it was every night. As the sun dropped down, down, down it dropped behind the Parthenon. At the very instant the disc disappeared behind the sand-colored edifice, the Great Salt Lick self-illuminated and the flat acres of white surrounding the Parthenon shone with a vast, icy light.

  The Lick itself was rich with the minerals that fueled the Legislators and Bears, but the white light emanating from it was sterile. Soma noticed that the Crows faces grew paler and paler as they all got closer to its source. His work was fascinating, and grew more so as more and more disciplines began finding ways to integrate their fields of study into a meta-architecture of science. His department chair coauthored a paper with an expert in animal husbandry, of all things.

  The Owl held Soma’s head as the painter vomited up the last of whatever was in his stomach.

  Japheth and the others were making reassuring noises to passersby. “Too much monkey wine!” they said, and, “We’re in from the provinces, he’s not used to such rich food!” and, “He’s overcome by the sight of the Parthenon!”

  Japheth leaned over next to the Owl. “Why’s it hitting him so much harder than the others?”

  The Owl said, “Well, we’ve always taken them back north of the border. This poor fool we’re dragging ever closer to the glory of his owner. I couldn’t even guess what’s trying to fill up the empty spaces I left in him – but I’m pretty sure whatever’s rushing in isn’t all from her.”

  Japheth cocked an eyebrow at his lieutenant. “I think that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say all together at once.”

  The Owl smiled, another first, if that sad little half grin counted as a smile. “Not a lot of time left for talking. Get up now, friend painter.”

  The Owl and Japheth pulled Soma to his feet. “What did you mean,” Soma asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “ ‘the glory of his owner?’ ”

  “Governor,” said Japheth. “He said, ‘the glory of his Governor,’ ” and Japheth swept his arm across, and yes, there it was, the glory of the Governor.

  Church Street had a slight downward grade in its last few hundred yards. From where they stood, they could see that the street ended at the spectacularly defined border of the Great Salt Lick, which served as legislative chambers in the Voluntary State. At the center of the lick stood the Parthenon, and while no normal citizens walked the salt just then, there was plenty of motion and color.

  Two bears were laying face down in the Lick, bobbing their heads as they took in sustenance from the ground. A dozen or more Legislators slowly unambulated, their great slimy bodies leaving trails of gold or silver depending on their party affiliation. One was engulfing one of the many salt-white statues that dotted the grounds, gaining a few feet of height to warble its slogan songs from. And, unmoving at the corners of the rectangular palace in the center of it all, four Commodores stood.

  They were tangled giants of rust, alike in their towering height and in the oily bathyspheres encasing the scant meat of them deep in their torsos, but otherwise each a different silhouette of sensor suites and blades, each with a different complement of articulated limbs or wings or wheels.

  “Can you tell which ones they are?” Japheth asked the blue-eyed boy, who had begun murmuring to himself under his breath, eyes darting from Commodore to Commodore.

  “Ruby-eyed Sutcliffe, stomper, smasher,

  Tempting Nguyen, whispering, lying,

  Burroughs burrows, up from the underground . . .”

  The boy hesitated, shaking his head. “Northeast corner looks kind of like Praxis Dale, but she’s supposed to be away West, fighting the Federals. Saint Sandalwood’s physical presence had the same profile as Dale’s, but we believe he’s gone, consumed by Athena after their last sortie against the containment field cost her so much.”

  “I’ll never understand why she plays at politics with her subordinates when she is her subordinates,” said Japheth.

  The Owl said, “That’s not as true with the Commodores as with a lot of the . . . inhabitants. I think it is Saint Sandalwood; she must have reconstituted him, or part of him. And remember his mnemonic?”

  “Sandalwood staring,” sang the blue-eyed boy.

  “Inside and outside,” finished Japheth, looking the Owl in the eye. “Time then?”

  “Once we’re on the Lick I’d do anything she told me, even empty as I am,” said the Owl. “Bind me.”

  Then the blue-eyed boy took Soma by the arm, kept encouraging him to take in the sights of the Parthenon, turning his head away from where the Crows were wrapping the Owl in grapevines. They took the Owl’s helmet from a rucksack and seated it, cinching the cork seals at the neck maybe tighter than Soma would have thought was comfortable.

  Two of the Crows hoisted the Owl between them, his feet stumbling some. Soma saw that the eyeholes of the mask had been blocked with highly ref
lective tape.

  Japheth spoke to the others. “The bears won’t be in this; they’ll take too long to stand up from their meal. Avoid the Legislators, even their trails. The THP will be on the ground, but won’t give you any trouble. You boys know why you’re here.”

  The two Crows holding the Owl led him over to Japheth, who took him by the hand. The blue-eyed boy said, “We know why we’re here, Japheth. We know why we were born.”

  And suddenly as that, the four younger Crows were gone, fleeing in every direction except back up Church Street.

  “Soma Painter,” said Japheth. “Will you help me lead this man on?”

  Soma was taken aback. While he knew of no regulation specifically prohibiting it, traditionally no one actually trod the Lick except during Campaign.

  “We’re going into the Salt Lick?” Soma asked.

  “We’re going into the Parthenon,” Japheth answered.

  As they crossed Church Street from the south, the car suddenly stopped.

  “Now what, car?” said Jenny. Church Street was her least favorite thoroughfare in the capital.

  The car snuffled around on the ground for a moment, then, without warning, took a hard left and accelerated, siren screeching. Tourists and sunset gazers scattered to either side as the car and Jenny roared toward the glowing white horizon.

  The Owl only managed a few yards under his own power. He slowed, then stumbled, and then the Crow and the painter were carrying him.

  “What’s wrong with him?” asked Soma.

  They crossed the verge onto the salt. They’d left the bravest sightseers a half-block back.

  “He’s gone inside himself,” said Japheth.

  “Why?” asked Soma.

  Japheth half laughed. “You’d know better than me, friend.”

  It was then that the Commodore closest to them took a single step forward with its right foot, dragged the left a dozen yards in the same direction, and then, twisting, fell to the ground with a thunderous crash.