The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Then the cobaltic reached directly into the cerulean’s mouth orifice. The soldier grew very taut and still and laid its bowl of batin-hummus slowly aside. With its own tentacles it stroked the other’s scent receptors or touched briefly certain of the pits on the cobaltic’s headball. Mizir, entranced by the ritual, made careful note of which pits were touched on a sketch of the headball. Iman made notes as well, though with different purpose.

  Using its large middle hands, the soldier took the cobaltic by the torso and pushed gently until the other had disengaged and the two pulled away from each other. “Look! What is that?” Bashir asked. “Inside the soldier’s mouth!”

  “A ‘tongue’ perhaps,” Mizir said. “See how it glistens! Perhaps a mucous coating. A catalyst for digestion?”

  Iman looked at him a moment. “Do you think so?” Then she turned her attention to the screen and watched with an awful intensity. She placed a hand on Bashir’s shoulder and leaned a little on him. When the two Batinites brought their mouths together, her grip grew hard. Bashir said, “Why, they’re kissing!”

  Mizir said doubtfully, “We’ve seen no such kisses before among them. Only the brief frond stroke.”

  “This is more serious than the frond stroke, I think,” Iman said.

  “It’s a rather long kiss,” said Bashir.

  “The mouth and tongue are the most sensitive organs of touch that humans possess,” she told him, “aside from one other.”

  Hassan, drawn by the interest of the three clustered before the telescreen, had come up behind them. Now he said, “Turn that screen off!” with a particular firmness.

  It was at that moment that Bashir realized. “They weren’t kissing! They were . . . I mean . . .” He blacked the screen, then turned to Iman. “You knew!” But Iman had turned round to face Hassan.

  “You’re right,” she said. “They deserve their privacy.”

  Klaus and Ladawan had joined them. “What is befallen?” the technologist asked.

  Iman answered him without turning away from Hassan. “There is a struggle coming, a jihad of some sort, and two who may never see each other again have stolen a precious night for their own.”

  Klaus said, “I don’t understand.”

  Ladawan told him. “A lover is bidding her soldier-boy good-bye.”

  Mizir was doubtful. “We don’t know which one is ‘he’ or ‘she.’ They may be either, or neither, or it may be a seasonal thing. Among the fungi – ”

  “Oh, to Gehenna with your fungi!” said Iman, who then turned from the still-silent Hassan and stalked to her own tent. Mizir watched, puzzled, then turned to Hassan and continued, “I really must study the process. That ‘tongue’ must have been a . . .”

  “Have the Intelligence study it, or do it in private,” Hassan ordered. “Grant these people their dignity.”

  Klaus tugged Mizir on the sleeve as the biologist was leaving. “The soldier is probably the male. At this level of technology, no society can afford to sacrifice its females in combat.”

  Oddly, it was Ladawan, who was usually very quiet, who had the last word. “Sometimes,” she said, “I do not understand you people.” She told Soong about it later and Soong spoke certain words in Mandarin, of which tongue Ladawan also knew a little. What he said was, “Treasure that which you do not understand.”

  Two things happened the next day, or maybe more than two. The first was quite dramatic, but not very important. The second was not so dramatic.

  Yance Darby brought forewarning. He had taken the ultralight out in the morning and had flown a wide circuit around the backside of the Misty Mountain to avoid being seen from East Haven. The ultralight was stealthed in the same manner as the drones and its propeller was hushed by MEMS; but it was larger and hence more likely to be detected, so he needed a flight path that would gain him sufficient altitude before passing over habitations. Yance had followed a river across the Great Western Valley to where it plunged through a purple gorge in the mountain range and so onto the coastal plain.

  There was a small town at the gorge and another a little farther downstream on the coastal side of the mountains, but the mouth of this river was a morass of swamps and bayous and there was no city there as there was at East Haven. Yance reported, “Cajuns in the delta,” but no one at the base camp understood what he meant at first: namely, trappers and fishers living in small, isolated cabins.

  “Two of ’em looked up when I flew past,” he mentioned.

  That troubled Mizir. “I think the indigenes sense into the infrared. The waste heat of our engines is minimal, but . . .” The team had occasionally noted locals glancing toward passing drones, much as a human might glance toward a half-seen flicker of light. Hassan made a note to schedule fewer night flights, when the contrast of the engine exhaust against the deep sky was greater.

  A large covered wagon accompanied by five horsemen set out from East Haven on the Grand Trunk Road, but the humans paid it no mind, as there was often heavy traffic in that direction.

  Yance followed the line of the mountains out to sea. Soong thought that there might be islands in that direction, a seamount continuation of the mountain range, and Mizir lusted to study insular species to see how they might differ from those they had found on the coastal plain, the river valley on the western slope, and their own alpine meadow. To this end, Yance carried several drones slaved to the ultralight to act as outriders.

  What they found was a ship.

  “You should see the sunuvabitch!” he told them over the radio link. “It’s like an old pirate ship, sails all a-billow, gun-ports down the sides, cutting through the water like a plough. Different shape hull, though I couldn’t tell you just how. Wider maybe, or shorter. And the sails – the rigging – aren’t the same, either. There’s a sunburst on the main sail.”

  “They don’t use a sunburst emblem in the city,” Klaus said. “The six-eagle seems to be the local totem.” He meant the ferocious bird with claws on its wings and feet and covert.

  “It’s not a totem,” Hassan said. “It’s an emblem. Didn’t your people use an eagle once?”

  “The Doppeladler,” Klaus nodded. “But it was a totem,” he added, “and we sacrificed a great many to it.”

  “Maybe it’s an invasion force,” Bashir said. “Maybe this is why the Haven folk have been preparing for war.”

  “A single ship?” said Hassan.

  “A first ship,” Bashir said, and Hassan acknowledged the possibility.

  “I would hate to see these people attacked,” Bashir continued. “I like them. They’re kind and they’re clever and they’re industrious.”

  Hassan, who had bent over the visual feed from Yance’s drone, straightened to look at him. “Do you know of Philippe Habib?”

  “Only what I was taught in school.”

  “He was clever and industrious, and they say that he was kind – at least to his friends, though he had not many of those.”

  “He was a great man.”

  “He was. But history has a surfeit of great men. We could do with fewer. The Légion Étrangère was never supposed to enter France. But what I tried to tell you is that we do not know the reasons for this coming struggle. The ‘clever and industrious’ folk we have been observing may be the innocent victims of a coming attack – or an oppressive power about to be overthrown. When the Safavid fought the Ak Kolunyu, which side had justice?”

  “Cousin, I do not even know who they are!”

  “Nor do you know these folk on the plains. Yance, conduct a search pattern. See if there is a flotilla or only this one vessel.”

  But it was only the one vessel and it furled its sails and entered East Haven under steam to a tumultuous but wary welcome. There was much parading and many displays and the sailors and marines aboard the ship – who wore uniforms of crimson and gold decked with different braid and signifiers – had their backs slapped and their fronds stroked by strangers in the city and not a few had their orifices entertained in the evening th
at followed.

  (“Sailors,” observed Klaus, “are much the same everywhere.”)

  A ceremony was held in the park. Flags were exchanged – a ritual apparently of some moment, for the ruffles and paradiddles of drum-like chatter rose to a crescendo. Ugly and entirely functional sabers were exchanged by the ship’s captain and a high-ranking Haven soldier.

  “I believe they are making peace,” Iman said. “These are two old foes who have come together.”

  “That is a seductive belief,” Hassan said. “We love it because it is our belief. How often in Earth’s past have ancient enemies clasped hands and stood shoulder to shoulder?”

  “I like the Havenites better than the Sunburst folk,” Bashir stated.

  Hassan turned to him. “Have you chosen sides, then – at a peace ceremony?”

  “Remember,” said Iman, “that Haven uses a bird of prey as its sigil. A golden sun is entirely less threatening an emblem.”

  “It’s not that. It’s their uniforms.”

  “You prefer yellow to crimson?”

  “No. The Havenite uniforms fit more poorly, and their insignia are less splendid. This is a folk who make no parade of fighting.”

  Hassan, who had begun to turn away, turned back and looked at his young cousin with new respect. “You are right. They are no peacocks about war, like these fancy folk from over the sea. And that is well, for it is no peacock matter. But ask yourself this: Why do old enemies come together?”

  Mizir chortled over the images he and Iman were collecting of the newcomers. “Definite morphological differences. The fronds on their headballs show a different distribution of colors. There are more of the greenish sort than we have seen in the city. And the Sunbursters are shorter on the average.”

  Ladawan told them that the Intelligence had found close matches between the phonemes used by the sailors and those used by the city folk. “They are distinct tongues – or perhaps I should say distinct ‘drums’ – but of the same family. That which the cobaltics here sometimes speak is quite different.”

  After the ceremony in the park, there was raucous celebration. Music was created – by plucking and beating and bowing. “They know the cymbal and the xylophone and the fiddle,” said Iman, “but not the trumpet or the reed.”

  “One needs a mouth connected to a pair of lungs for that sort of thing,” Mizir told her.

  “But, oh, what four hands can do with a tunbur!” And indeed, their stringed instruments were marvels of complexity beside which tunbur, guitar, sitar, violin were awkward and simple. Clawtips did for plectrums and tentacles fretted and even bowed most wondrously.

  There was dancing, too, though not as humans understood the dance. They gyrated in triplets, Sunbursters and Havenites together, clapping with their lifting arms while they did. Mizir could not tell if the triplets were single or mixed gender. “You have to reach into the thorax opening and call forth the organ,” he said. “Otherwise, who can tell?”

  “Not I,” Iman answered. “I wonder if they can. A people whose gender is known only through discovery will have . . . interesting depths.” She glanced first at Hassan, then at Mizir, who winked. The sound of the clapping in the parkland evolved from raindrop randomness to marching cadence and back again, providing a peculiar ground to the intricate, contrapuntal melodies.

  The team gave up trying to make sense of the great babble and settled for recording everything that transpired. But dance is contagious, and soon Khalid and Bashir had coaxed the other men into a line that strutted back and forth while Iman clapped a rhythm and Soong and Ladawan looked on with amused detachment. Caught up, Hassan broke from the line into a mesri, and Iman with him. They bent and swiveled and they twisted their arms like serpents in challenge and response, while Khalid and Bashir clapped 11/4-time and Mizir mimed throwing coins at them until, finally exhausted, they came to a panting halt, face to face.

  It was only a moment they stood that way, but it was a very long moment and whole worlds might have whirled about like Sufis while they caught their breath. Then Iman straightened her hijab, which the dance had tugged askew. Hassan thought he saw a dark curl of escaped hair on her shiny forehead. She gave him a high look, cocking her head just so, and departed for her tent. Hassan was left standing there, wondering if he was supposed to follow or not, while Soong and Mizir looked to each other.

  He did pass by her tent on his way to sleep and, standing by the closed flap – he did not dare to lift it – said, “When we return to Earth, we will speak, you and I.” He waited a moment in case there was a reply, but there was none, unless the tinkling of wind chimes was her laughter.

  The morning dawned with mist. A fog had rolled in from the Eastern Sea and lay, a soft blanket, over everything. Hilltops emerged like islands from a sea of smoke. A few of the tallest buildings in Haven thrust above the fog, suggesting the masts of a sunken shipwreck. Frustrated, the drones crisscrossed the shrouded landscape, seeking what could be found on frequencies non-visual. Yance took the ultralight out again, and from a great height spied a speckling of islands on the horizon. Delighted, Soong placed them on the map and, with droll humor added, “Here there be dragons” to the blank expanse beyond. The Intelligence dutifully created a virtual globe and dappled it in greens and browns and blues. Yet it remained for the most part a disheartening black, like a lump of coal daubed with a few specks of paint.

  “The Havenites came here from somewhere near where the Sunbursters live,” Iman declared, tracing with an uncertain finger curlicues within the darkened part of the globe. “If only we knew where. The cobaltic folk may be indigenes, but I think they come from still a third place, and are strangers on these shores as well.”

  But fog is a morning sort of thing and the sun slowly winnowed it. The park, lying as it did on a swell of land, emerged early, as if from a receding flood and, as in any such ebb, was dotted with bits of debris left behind.

  “There are five,” Hassan told the others when he pulled his binoculars off. “Two of the bodies lie together, but the other three lie solitary. One is a marine off the foreign ship.”

  “Suicide?” wondered Iman. “But why?”

  Soong said, “Not so strange. Hopelessness often follow unreasonable hope.”

  “Why was their hope unreasonable?” Bashir challenged him; but Soong only spread his hands in a helpless gesture, and Bashir cursed him as an unbeliever.

  Hassan cased the binoculars. “People will do things behind a curtain that they otherwise entertain only in their hearts. There is something disheartening and solitary about fog. I suspect there are other bodies in the bushes.”

  “But, so many?” Mizir asked with mixed horror and fascination; for the Prophet, praise be upon him, had forbidden suicide to the Faithful.

  Hassan turned to the tele-pilots. “Khalid, Bashir, Ladawan. Quickly. Send your drones to the park and retrieve tissue samples from the corpses. Seed the bodies with micromachines, so Mizir can explore their inner structures.” Glancing at Mizir, he added, “That should please you. You’ve longed for a glimpse of their anatomy ever since we arrived.”

  Mizir shook his head. “But not this way. Not this way.”

  Bashir cried in distress. “Must you, cousin?”

  Yet they did as they were told, and the drones swooped like buzzards onto the bodies of the dead. Clever devices no larger than dust motes entered through wounds and orifices, where they scurried up glands and channels and sinuses and took the metes and bounds of the bodies. “Quickly,” Hassan told them. “Before the folk from the city arrive to carry them off.”

  “The folk in the city may have other concerns,” Iman said. When Hassan gave her a question in a glance, she added, “Other bodies.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Bashir. “They seemed so happy yesterday, at the peace ceremony.”

  “How can you know what they felt?” Hassan asked him. “We may have no name for what they felt.”

  Yance said, “Maybe it was a sham, and the Sunburs
ters pulled a massacre during the night.” But as a practical matter, Hassan doubted that. The ship had not borne enough marines to carry out such a task so quickly and with so little alarm.

  Before the fog had entirely dissipated Hassan ordered the drones home, and thither they flew engorged with the data they had sucked from the bodies, ready to feed it to the waiting Intelligence. On the scrublands south of the park, a covered wagon had left the road and stood now near the base of the Misty Mountain exposed in the morning sun and bracketed by three tents and a picket line of six-horses. Sensors warding the cliffside approach revealed five Batinites in various attitudes: tending the campfires, feeding the horses, and when the drones passed above, two of them turned their headballs to follow the heat track and one sprang to a tripod and adjusted its position.

  “A surveyor’s tripod,” Klaus said when Hassan showed him the image. “They survey a new road, perhaps to those fishing villages in the southern Delta.”

  “I think these folk have seen our drones,” Hassan decided.

  “But our drones are stealthed,” Bashir objected.

  “Yes. And hushed and cooled, but they still leave a heat footprint, and against the ocean chill of this morning’s mist they must stand out like a silhouette on the skyline.”

  “Still . . .”

  “Among humans,” said Iman, “there are those who may hear the softest whisper. Or see the shimmering air above the sands of At Rub al-Khali. Is it so strange if some of our Batinites have glimpsed strange streaks of sourceless heat in the sky?”

  Hassan continued to study the last, backward-glancing image captured by the drones as they passed over the surveying party. A short-statured Batinite crouched behind the tripod, his tentacles adjusting verniers on an instrument of some sort. “If so, they may have taken a bearing on what they perceived.”

  “If they have,” said Bashir, “what can they do? The cliff is sheer.”

  Hassan ordered that all drones be grounded for the time being and that no one stand in sight of the cliff’s edge. “We can watch the city with the peepers we have already emplaced.” Yance was especially saddened by the order and said that he could still fly over the western slope of the mountains, but Hassan pointed out that to gain the altitude he needed he must first circle over the very scrublands across which the surveying party trekked. “It will be for only a little while,” he told his team. “Once they have laid out the road and have returned to the City, we will resume the flights.” The one thing he had not considered was that the party might not be blazing a road. This did not occur to him until after Iman brought him the strange report from the Intelligence.