The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “Mizir!” Hassan cautioned him, and the exobiologist took a deep calming breath and turned away.

  “Hassan.” It was Bashir’s voice on the radio. “The balloonist is halfway up, but the winds are contrary, keeping him away from the cliff.”

  Hassan cursed and broke his own rule long enough to bark, “Radio silence!” He turned. “What is it, for the love of God? Khalid, I told you to go to the cliff and wait for the balloonist.”

  Khalid glanced at the progress of the battle on the large plasma screen. “Not a fair fight, is it. Here, sir. You may need this.”

  Hassan looked down at his hand and saw that the gate warden had given him a laser pistol.

  “There are only four laser pistols,” Khalid explained, “two in each bus. Ladawan and I keep one each. We are trained marksmen. I give one to you, because you are team captain. Who gets the fourth?”

  “Warden, if the Asraqi attack us here, four laser pistols will do no good. Against a cruise missile?”

  “Sir, they will do more good than if we were utterly disarmed.”

  Hassan tucked the pistol into his waistband. “Klaus?”

  The German lowered his binoculars, saw what the gate warden had, and shook his head. “Military strategy is to me small squares on a map-screen. I have never fired a handgun. Give it to Yance. Americans make the Fickerei to pistols.”

  Soong reached up from his console seat. “I take.”

  Khalid hesitated. “Do you know how to use one?”

  “I show you by burning rabbit.” He pointed to a six-legged rodent on the far side of the meadow.

  Khalid did not ask for the proof, but handed over the pistol. Soong laid it on his console.

  “Do you shoot so well?” Hassan asked him after Khalid had gone to the cliffside.

  “No, but now he does not give pistol to Yance. Too young, like your cousin. Too excitable. Better pistol with me. I not know use. But I know I not know use.”

  “The Batinites must have expected a landing in the park,” Klaus announced. “They have a regiment in the woods concealed. Now they charge while the Asraqi they are scattered!”

  Hassan paused in the act of leaving and watched while ranks and files decked in yellow marched from the woods to the drum-claps of their tympanums and their lower arms. He saw the corporals bawl orders. He saw the ranks dress themselves and two banners – the six-eagle and some device that was probably the regiment’s own – rose aloft. The first rank knelt and both it and the second rank fired in volley, then they sidestepped to allow the next two ranks to pass through and repeat the process while they reloaded.

  They managed the evolution twice before the invaders tore them apart. High velocity rounds from scattered, mobile kill squads firing from shelter shredded the pretty uniforms and the fine banners and splattered the six-cedars and iron-wood and the chartreuse oil-grass with glistening pools of yellow-green ichor. A few cannon shots from the shuttle completed the slaughter. Nothing was left of the regiment but twitching corpses and body parts. Hassan wondered whether the young soldier they had once watched make love to his sweetheart lay among them.

  “O, les braves gens”, Klaus whispered, echoing a long-dead King of Prussia at a long-forgotten battle.

  Hassan could bear to see no more. “Record everything,” he barked. “The rest of you, get those buses packed. Power down any equipment whose source might be traced by those . . . lizards. Klaus . . . Klaus! Estimate the invaders’ capabilities. What can we operate safely? At the moment, the Asraqi are . . . preoccupied; but sooner or later they’ll bring down aircraft – or a satellite will chance to look down on this meadow. Leave nothing behind that those folk may find useful – and they might find anything useful!” He turned to walk to the cliffside, where the balloonist was attempting his ascent. Klaus said, “But, I thought we might . . .” Hassan silenced him with a glare.

  When he reached the edge of the six-cedar grove that grew close to the cliffside, Hassan saw Iman monitoring the balloon through her goggles. She seemed an alien creature herself, with her head wrapped in a scarf and her face concealed by the glasses.

  “He’s using a grappling line,” Bashir announced as Hassan joined them. “He whirls it around, then throws it toward the cliff.”

  “Has he seen you?”

  “No.” It was Iman, who answered without taking her eyes off the balloonist. “A dangerous maneuver,” she added. “He could foul his mooring rope, or rake the balloon above him.”

  “We’ve been watching the battle,” Bashir said, “on our hand comms.”

  Iman lowered her glasses and turned around. Hassan glanced at Khalid, who squatted on his heels a little behind the others in the brush; but the warden’s face held no expression. Hassan rubbed his fist and did not look at any of them. “It’s not a battle. It’s a massacre. I think the Batinites have killed two Asraqi. Maybe. The invaders evacuated their wounded into their shuttle, so who can say?”

  “We have to do something!” Bashir cried.

  Hassan whirled on him. “Do we? What would you have us do, cousin? We have no weapons, but the four handguns. Soong is clever, and perhaps he could create a super-weapon from the components of our equipment, but I do not think Soong is quite that clever. Yance could fly out in the ultralight and perhaps drop the gas chromatograph on someone’s head – but he could never do that twice.”

  Iman turned ’round again. “Stop that! Stop mocking him! He wants to help. We all do.”

  “I want him to face reality. We can do nothing – but watch and record.”

  “We could send one of the buses back to Earth,” Bashir entreated him, “and show them what’s happening here. They’ll send help. They’ll send the Legion, or the American Marines, and we’ll see how those lizards like being on the other side of the boot!”

  “What makes you think that the Union, or the Americans, or anyone would send so much as a policeman? What interests do they have here?”

  Bashir opened his mouth and closed it and opened it a second time. “They’d, they’d have to. These people need help!”

  “And if they did send the Legion,” Hassan continued remorselessly, “every last trooper would have to come through the gate. The Asraqi may be brutal, but they can not be stupid. One cruise missile to take out the gate and the whole expeditionary force would be trapped, cut off from home forever. Or the Asraqi would simply pick off whoever came through, seize the buses, and . . . what general would be mad enough to propose such a plan? What politician fool enough to approve it? What legionnaire suicidal enough to obey?”

  Khalid spoke up. “And you haven’t yet asked how we would move a force large enough to matter down a sheer cliff onto the plains.”

  “Thank you, warden,” Hassan said, “but I think my cousin begins to understand. But there is one thing we can do,” he added quietly.

  Bashir seized on hope. “What? What can we do?”

  “Little enough. We can give information – if the Intelligence has mastered enough of their speech. We can tell our balloonist friend about asymmetric warfare. About the Spanish guerrilla that tormented Napoleon. About Tito’s partisans.”

  “Will that help?”

  Hassan wanted to tell him no, that few irregular forces had ever triumphed without a secure refuge or a regimented army to back them. The guerrilla had had Wellington; Tito’s partisans, the Red Army. “Yes,” he told Bashir. Khalid, who may have known better, said nothing.

  “He’s latched hold,” said Iman.

  “What?”

  “The balloonist,” she told him. “His grapple. He’s pulling the balloon toward the edge of the cliff to moor it.”

  “Ah. Well. Time to welcome the poor bastard.”

  “Why,” asked Khalid of no one in particular, “with all that is happening to his city, does he insist on reaching this peak?”

  “I think,” said Hassan, “because he has nothing else left to reach for.”

  The Batinite headball cannot show expression, at least no ex
pression that humans can read. Yet it was not hard to discern the emotions of the balloonist when, after he had clambered from the balloon’s basket onto solid ground and secured it by a rope to the stump of a tree, the waiting humans rose from concealment. The Batinite reared nearly vertical, waving his tentacled upper arms in the air, and staggered backward. One step. Then another.

  “No!” said Iman. “The cliff!” And she moved toward him.

  Groping behind into the basket, the balloonist pulled out a musket and, before Hassan could even react to the sight, fired a load of shot that ripped Iman across the throat and chest. Hassan heard a pellet pass him by like an angry bee and heard, too, Bashir cry out in pain.

  Grapeshot is not a high-velocity round; it did not throw Iman back. She stood in place, swaying, while her hijab turned slowly from checkerboard to black crimson. She began to turn toward Hassan with a puzzled look on her face, and Hassan thought she meant to ask him what had happened, but the act unbalanced her, and, sighing, she twisted to the ground.

  Hassan caught her and lowered her gently the rest of the way. Speaking her name, he yanked the sodden hijab away and held her head to his breast. Her hair was black, he noted. Black, and wound tightly in a coiled braid.

  The Batinite was meanwhile methodically reloading his musket, ramming a load down the muzzle, preparing for a second murder. With a cry, Hassan rose to his feet, tugged the pistol from his waistband, and aimed it at the thing that had come in the balloon. The red targeting spot wavered across the alien’s headball. The laser would slice the leathery carapace open, spilling – not brains, but something like a ganglion that served to process sense impressions before sending them to the belly. Hassan shifted his aim to the belly, to the orifice from which might emerge slimy, unclean organs, behind the diaphragm of which Mizir had named the creature’s life and thought.

  He almost fired. He had placed his thumb on the activation trigger, but Khalid shoved his hand down and fired his own laser four times with cruel precision, burning the hands of the beast, so that it dropped the musket and emitted sounds like a mad percussionist. With a fifth and more sustained burn, Khalid ran a gash along the body of the balloon hovering in the sky beyond. The colorful fabric sighed – much like Iman had sighed – and crumpled in much the same way, too, hanging for a while on the rocky escarpment while the wind teased its folds.

  Hassan dropped his pistol to the dirt unfired. He turned and walked into the alien cedars.

  Khalid indicated the thrumming prisoner. “Wait! What are we to do with him?”

  Hassan did not look back. “Throw it over the cliff.”

  Soong found Hassan at last in the place where he ought to have looked first, by the endless falls and bottomless pool at the far end of the mountain valley. There the team leader knelt on a prayer rug that he had rolled out on the damp earth and rock and prostrated himself again and again. Soong watched for a time. He himself honored his ancestors and followed, when the mood struck, an Eight-Fold Path. Perhaps there was a god behind it all, perhaps not. His ancestors were not forthcoming on the subject. Soot from the burning city had begun to settle on the plateau. Explosions boomed like distant thunder. If that were the work of a god, it was one beyond Soong’s comprehending.

  Hassan sat back on his haunches. “Why did she have to die?” he cried, loudly enough that even the roar of the falls was overcome.

  Soong wondered momentarily whether Hassan had addressed him or his god before he answered. “Because pellets sever carotid artery.”

  Hassan hesitated, then turned around. “What sort of reason is that?”

  “No reason,” Soong said. “Westerners think reason, always reason. But, no reason. ‘Shit happens.’ Life is wheel. Someday you escape.”

  “Do not presume to question God.”

  “Gods not answer, however often asked. Maybe they not know, either.”

  “I can’t even blame that poor bastard in the balloon.” Hassan covered his face with his hands. “His planet has been invaded, his people massacred, the proudest achievements of his civilization exposed as less than nothing. What were we to him but more invaders? Tell me Khalid did not throw him over the cliff.”

  “He know not lawful order. But survival up here, more cruel. Without balloon, how he descend? With hands burned so, how he fend?”

  “It was my fault, Soong. What sort of captain am I? I let al-Batin lull me. I should never have allowed Iman to approach him like that, without taking time to calm his fears.”

  “Not matter,” said Soong. “He no fear. He hate.”

  “What do you mean? How can you know that?”

  Soong spread his hands. “Maybe Intelligence not translate well. But say headball drum hate and loathing. We question him. Mizir, Khalid, me. This not first visit from Blue Planet. Asraqi come once before. Come in peace. Trade, discovery, I think. And Batinites kill all – for defiling holy soil of Batin.”

  “Without provocation?”

  “Arrival provocation enough, balloonist say. Asraqi ship damaged, but some escape, come to Haven. Warn of terrible revenge, next approach, but Batinites not care. No logic, just fury. Kill survivors too. Balloonist one of them. Proud to defend al-Batin. Remember, Hassan, he bring balloon here before Asraqi land, and bring gun already loaded. Not know who up here or why, only someone up here. Come to kill, not to greet.”

  “Xenophobes . . .” Hassan could not reconcile that with the gentle, carefree folk he had been observing for so long. And yet, the one never did preclude the other.

  Soong shook his head. “Balloonist not hate Asraqi; only hate that they come.”

  “Does the difference matter? And is the Asraqi punishment not worse than the original crime?” Hassan did not expect an answer. He did not think that there ever would be an answer. He rolled his prayer rug and slung it over his shoulder. “Are the buses ready to go?”

  Soong nodded. “Waiting for captain.”

  “Is . . . is Iman on board?”

  “In specimen locker.”

  Hassan winced. “I’m ordering Khalid to seal the gate. No one comes back here. Ever.”

  “Too dangerous,” Soong agreed.

  “Not in the way you think.”

  From a world named The Hidden by humans, humans departed. The gate closed on a pleasant mountain glade, far above the flaming cities on the plains below. Gates swung where God willed, and man could only submit. Perhaps they opened where they did for a reason, but it was not man’s place to question God’s reasons.

  Hassan Maklouf was their leader, a man who had walked on eighteen worlds and bore in consequence eighteen wounds. To ten of those worlds, he had followed another; to eight, others had followed him. From four, he had escaped with his life. With two, he had fallen in love. On one, he had lost his soul.

  TOURISM

  M. John Harrison

  M. John Harrison is not a prolific writer, and, until recently, was little-known to the American SF readership at large. In Britain, however, he has been an influential figure behind the scenes since the days of Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds in the late sixties, and has had a disproportionate effect with a relatively small body of work; in fact, recently he was given the Richard Evans Memorial Award, a new award designed to honor just that sort of career and reputation. Harrison made his first sale, to New Worlds, in 1975, and in the decades that followed, has also sold to Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Other Edens, Little Deaths, Sisters of the Night, MetaHorror, Elsewhere, New Terrors, Tarot Tales, The Shimmering Door, Prime Evil, The New Improved Sun, and other markets, stories that have been collected in The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories, The Ice Monkey, Travel Arrangements: Short Stories, and, most recently, Things That Never Happen. It was the stories and novels about the enigmatic city of Viriconium, though, work on the shifting and amorphous borderland of science fiction and fantasy, that would prove to be among his most influential work in the genre. The Viriconium cycle has recently been reissued in an omnibus volume, Viriconiu
m, consisting of the novels The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and the collection Viriconium Nights.

  In the nineties, Harrison would turn away from genre work to produce a sequence of ostensibly “mainstream” novels (although many of them contain subtle fantastic elements) such as Climbers and Signs of Life, but recently he has returned to core science fiction with a stylish and intricate Space Opera, Light, which is attracting enough attention that it may gain him the wide American audiences that have eluded him up till now. Harrison’s other books include the novels The Committed Men and The Centauri Device. Coming up is a new novel, The Course of the Heart. He had a story in our Seventeenth Annual Collection.

  In the atmospheric and inventive story that follows, he takes us to a tourist destination you won’t find in any of today’s guidebooks . . .

  JACK SEROTONIN SAT IN A bar on Strait Street, just inside the aureole of the Raintown event, in conversation with a fat man from another planet who called himself Antoyne. They had been playing dice all night. It was just before dawn, and a brown light, polished but dim at the same time, crept out the streetlights to fill the place.

  “I was never in there,” the fat man admitted, meaning the event zone, “but what I think – ”

  “If this is going to be bullshit, Antoyne,” Serotonin advised him, “don’t even start.”

  The fat man looked hurt.

  “Have another drink,” Jack said.

  The bar was about halfway down Strait, a cluttered, narrowish street of two-storey buildings, along which two out of three had their windows boarded up. Like all the streets in that part of Raintown, Strait was full of cats, especially at dawn and dusk, when they went in and out of the event site. As if in acknowledgement, the bar was called Black Cat White Cat. It featured a zinc counter slightly too high for comfort. A row of bottles that contained liquids of unlikely colours. A few tables. The long window steamed up easily, no one but Antoyne cared. In the morning the bar smelled of last night’s garlic. Some mornings it smelled of mould too, as if something had crept out of the event aureole in the dark and, after a few attempts to breathe the air in the bar, died underneath a corner table. Shadow operators hung high up in the join between the walls and the ceiling, like cobwebs. There wasn’t much for them to do.