The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “It would be nice,” I say repressively, “to speculate about that if we had nothing else to do.”

  We venture into the darkness, turn down this corridor and that one. Under a red light the semiplast flooring’s been burst out from below. I have no trouble recognizing the narrow slot in the stonework beneath, the steps leading down. I even catch a brief glimpse of painted walls.

  “You know,” Eloise tells me as we edge past and hurry on, “if circumstances were just a bit different, my sympathies would be with the Cousins. It’s their world . . . turn here.”

  Suddenly we’re slamming through a door onto the pad and the shuttle is sitting there, completely empty except for the black box that runs it. Standing in a hangar nearby are two others: one half-dismantled, one that looks service-ready. That fact may be important. Then we’re inside the waiting flyer and I’m locking the door and shouting an order to take off. The black box is perfectly calm. “Hearing and obeying,” it says.

  Abruptly we’re soaring into light rain, and as we tilt and turn, Main Base except for a few security lights is plunged in darkness as deep as the jungle below it.

  Now we’re over the bay, nothing to be seen below but faint crescents of white foam as another in the endless succession of squalls blows in from the ocean. Why do I have these repetitive nightmares, and why do they all turn out to be real?

  Emerging from wind-driven rain, we see Alfa’s lights still on. A valve is stuck open somewhere and the slurry from the mine – pollution, humanity’s signature – is gushing downslope in an oily torrent toward the bay. Eloise makes a faint sound and points.

  A guy and a young woman are sitting on top of Alfa’s brightly lit power station. He’s armed, and they wave at us. There’s a dead bearpig lying below. As we bank and turn on our spotlight, something flickers, an arrow maybe, and the two flatten themselves as it flies over.

  I doubt that our black box has been programmed for the current circumstances, so I wedge myself into the pilot’s seat, hit the manual cutoff and take control of the flyer myself. It’s a cranky little machine, and I have some trouble getting it under control. Meanwhile Eloise grabs the pistol and opens the right-side door. As I start swinging back over the power station she fires twice. There’s a commotion in the shadows.

  “Get something?”

  “I don’t know. I think there was a bunch of – of whatever, getting ready to attack.”

  I finally figure out how to bring us to a low hover. The attitude control’s stiff – probably a long time since the machine’s been on manual. We tip this way and that, then steady and move closer to the shed.

  Over the whine of the engine I yell, “What about the others?”

  Can the answer really be, “All dead.”?

  ITEM (6)

  From Doctor Li’s Report

  This person regrets intruding herself again.

  However, I have a positive contribution to make, for Colonel Kohn’s absence left him without knowledge of events at Main Base during many crucial hours.

  I may state at the outset that locking the doors of the dining hall proved to be impossible. Regrettably, all the locks were electronic and failed when the power went down. How we longed for an antique mechanical bolt or two!

  Fortunately the doors opened inward, and piling furniture against them provided a partial defense. Almost at once the doors began to move, pushing back the chairs, tables, etc. Our enemies had no machines but an abundance of muscle, and we were hard put to it to hold them out.

  Then noises were heard from the kitchens. Antonelli led a small group of us to the source. When the tiles composing the floor began to shift and then to be knocked out from below, he was waiting.

  An Arkie appeared wielding a bronze axe, and Antonelli’s shot went through his body and killed also the warrior behind him, who was armed with a sort of barbed hook. Wild scurrying and scampering followed, leaving the mouth of the tunnel empty save for the bodies.

  This gave me an idea. After the corpses had been dragged out, I found that I could just fit into the passage, being quite a small person. I asked to borrow Antonelli’s weapon. Instead of waiting for a new attack, I proposed to drive back our enemies. And he agreed.

  So for the first time I entered the subterranean world of which we had all heard so much and seen so little. I confess that my motive was far more curiosity than any desire to kill Arkies. I believed that the passages provided them protection from heat and cold, all-weather connections between the buildings that used to stand on the surface of Zamók, as well as storerooms and robing rooms where priests prepared themselves for public ceremonies. All this proved to be true as far as it went – which was not very far!

  I carried a battery-powered lamp detached from the wall. It was dim and red, and I kept watching uneasily for side chambers, where anything might be hiding. But for twenty meters the passage ran straight and unbroken. It was profoundly silent, and I guessed that our enemies had abandoned any hope of getting at us by this approach.

  Then I heard noises ahead, birdsong voices that sounded strangely in these caverns. I switched off the lamp, and stood for a time in profound darkness. Then I began to see very dimly, the way one does on a clouded night – peripherally, while the center of the retina registers only a blur.

  This seemed strange to me, for of course the eyes do not work where no light at all exists. There was light, then, although very little, and I soon realized that microscopic fungi lived on the walls, emitting a dim greenish bioluminescence. Thus the lamp I carried had never been essential; but when we were looking down from the kitchen, the tunnel had appeared perfectly dark.

  I placed the extinguished lamp on the floor, stepped over it with some difficulty, and moved on. The pistol was heavy, and I now held it with both hands, ready for action.

  My next discovery was that my shoulders no longer brushed against the walls, though I still had to bow my head. The passage was widening, and I could see an opening ahead with something moving just inside it.

  I stopped at once. When the obscure movement ceased, I advanced very, very cautiously, well aware that as the space opened around me I would be subject to attack. The tunnel widened into a broad room, where long slabs of stone stretched away into the dimness in mathematically straight lines.

  On each slab lay terra-cotta trays a few centimeters deep, and in each the familiar larvae were swarming.

  This was an impressive sight. Clearly, the Arkies no longer depended on the natural development of their kind in the forest. I heard whistling and movement toward the other end of this strange nursery, saw an Arkie emerge from the dimness and post itself beside a tray. Something began to trickle, and I realized that the adult was urinating into the trays, a few drops to each, and I caught the penetrating “smell of lions,” as the Colonel called it.

  No doubt, I thought, the urine contains hormones which speed the development of the larvae into the Arkies’ form: a most fascinating achievement for a species that, so far as we know, has nothing that can properly be called science!

  Well, and why not? I asked myself. Folk medicine gave us humans quinine for malaria and inoculation for smallpox. I was full of these thoughts when suddenly the Arkie spotted me and broke into a frenzy of birdsong.

  ITEM (7)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  We have them aboard now, the two Alfans, and yes, everybody else in the mining camp is dead.

  The technique reminded me a bit of Ted Szczech’s abduction. Something broke the slurry pipe, that set off alarms, and when a repair crew went out to fix it the Cousins ambushed them. The Arkies used poisoned arrows as well as bronze hand weapons, and with the bearpigs to aid them soon forced their way inside.

  The Alfans say two species fight together like humans with war dogs or war horses or war elephants. Only here there’s a family connection much more direct than ours with our symbionts. They recognize each other by smell, and seem to feel a kind of tribal loyalty. There may even be a telepathic bon
d – the Arkies seem to give orders at a distance. They’re the most intellectual members of the clan, but even the ones we think of as beasts are – as Mayakovsky noted so long ago – disturbingly intelligent. In fighting, the bearpigs display initiative and cunning as well as savagery.

  Down below, they’re dragging the bodies out into the open, into the glaring lights. The bearpigs begin to feed and the scene is garish, horrible, a kind of Grand Guignol theater. The Arkies look on, but don’t share the meal. Clearly, humans are not eligible for the company of their gods in Valhalla.

  Watching the butchery, I know we’ve lost the war. Period. We have to assume that the four of us in this flyer and the people holding out at Main Base and maybe the guards at the shuttleport are the only survivors. So back we go.

  ITEM (8)

  From Dr. Li’s Report

  As I retreated down the tunnel, I could hear and sense rather than see them following me, and I fired the pistol.

  The place was so narrow that I did not have to aim. Of course, neither did they. Something came sliding and scraping along the floor and touched my shoe, and it proved to be a short throwing or thrusting spear with a leaf-shaped bronze point.

  I fired again. There was no use trying to evade the necessity to kill or be killed. My heel struck an obstacle and I almost fell over backward, saved only by the narrowness of the tunnel. It was the lamp. I stepped over it and continued my fighting retreat.

  The sounds at the end of the tunnel indicated that bodies were being pulled out of the way. I fired again, producing much agitated noise. My heel encountered another obstacle: the first step.

  It is no easy task to retreat up a staircase that is both narrow and steep, at the same time keeping one’s head down and one’s guard up. With a metallic ping an arrow struck the riser of a step I had just vacated and the wooden shaft broke. Then friendly hands were pulling me out of the slot, into what seemed at first the blinding light of the kitchen.

  I had hardly begun to tell the others of the mysterious world beneath our feet when a deafening impact rocked us all. We stumbled over one another rushing into the dining hall, now adrift in dust and shattered fragments.

  The wounded, still shocked, had not yet begun to scream. One of the piles of furniture had been blown to bits and the door to the hall was a gaping hole.

  Captain Mack had used another missile, and used it well. Our enemies were upon us.

  ITEM (9)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  I think the Cousins are awestruck – it’s the only word I can think of. Stunned by Mack’s demonstration of godlike power.

  I left the Alfans at the pad with orders to rev up the other workable flyer to aid the evacuation. Then Eloise guided me to this scene of ruin.

  In the dim red glow of the hallway outside the mess hall our enemies stand, small and great shadows under a forest of glinting spearpoints and axes with curved blades. Clouds of smoke and dust are billowing around them, masking shapes and distorting outlines. I bet their ears are deafened and ringing, just like mine.

  For some of the animals it’s too much. Frightened, they begin to lumber away, colliding with one another and the Arkies and the walls. The moment of confusion is perfect.

  I can see Mack, wigless, with the missile launcher still on her shoulder. I take careful aim at her, fire, and hit a bearpig that lurches between us at the critical moment.

  Then Jamal and Anna run out of the mess hall, both armed, firing too, and panic hits our foes. The coughing of the impact weapons is almost inaudible, and creatures large and small start falling over. Some scream, just like wounded humans.

  Then they’re running, fading into the darkness of the corridors, maybe some retreating into the underground passages until they can figure out what’s going on. Mack’s gone too – at any rate, I can’t see her distinctive figure anywhere.

  We stumble over bodies, shouting. Jamal hugs Eloise, glares at me. That left hook I gave him seems to have made me an enemy. Then Anna mistakes me for something hostile and almost shoots me before I yell at her.

  The mess hall’s in ruins, some people dead, some wounded, some stunned. We don’t have a minute to lose, we grab the living and run. It’s a total rout. We’re like Spaniards fleeing Mexico City on the noche triste. Or like Americans fleeing conquered Saigon.

  Eloise and Anna are leading the way through the corridors with their smears of red light, and I’m hearing our enemies roar and sing and reassemble for a new attack.

  The walking wounded have to take care of themselves; the helpless ones are hauled and dragged by the shoulders or even by the feet. We’ve got four weapons but only about a dozen shots left, as near as I can figure.

  Then we’re out onto the pad. In the rainy dark the lights of the two functional flyers cast frenzied shadows everywhere. Those of us who are armed prepare to resist while the others are jamming people aboard. Two who died on the retreat from the mess hall get thrown aside like rubbish.

  Anna has given her weapon back to Antonelli. She’s in medical mode, doing a sort of instant triage. She orders the bad cases stacked like cordwood in one flyer so she can ride with them and try to treat them.

  Meantime figures are gathering just inside the doors and arrows begin to flicker and ping. A young woman I don’t know turns a frightened face toward the door of Main Base and takes an arrow soundlessly in her throat. It’s short, about thirty centimeters, and it only pricks her, yet suddenly she’s flopping helplessly on the ground, her face cyanosing.

  We abandon her, too.

  I don’t really notice the last moments. All at once I’m hanging half out of the door of a flyer, there’s no room inside for all of me because I’m too goddamn big, and arrows with little barbed brazen points are sticking in the skin of the machine.

  I hear the black box – so calm, so cool, a voice from another world – as it says, “Hearing and obeying,” and we’re lifting away from Main Base.

  So slowly, so slowly. And I’m riding like that, arm crooked around a stanchion, and some friendly hand’s holding on to my belt as we wobble and yaw out over the estuary and the white-crested black waves of the sea.

  ITEM (10)

  From Dr. Li’s Report

  We were packed together like rice in sushi. At first I couldn’t do anything for my patients, because I couldn’t move.

  Two of them died right there, and with great difficulty we extracted the corpses and threw them into the sea, making a little more room so that Colonel Kohn at last found a place to sit inside.

  I discovered that eleven of us were on that little flyer, which was built to handle four plus luggage. That it stayed aloft at all was quite wonderful. I feared, however, that the excess fuel consumption might drop us into the sea before we reached the shuttleport.

  It was the darkest part of the night, and I shall not soon forget the trip. Sometimes a soft moan, the rank marshy smell of human bodies that have been sweating with fear. The odor of blood. Fortunately, the wounded were in shock from their injuries and burns, and lay quiet.

  Exhaustion was our great friend, and I suddenly opened my eyes to find that I had been sleeping, and that a pale gray misty dawn had begun to filter through the clouds.

  Soon every eye was trying to pierce the veils of rain for our first sight of the promontory and the egg-shaped green dome. What we would find there no one knew – whether it had been attacked, whether its two guards survived – and I was thinking also of the months that must elapse before the next supply ship came.

  It is no light thing to be at war with a whole world.

  And then I saw something – I saw something – I saw a smooth geometrical shape rising out of the clouds and mist, and it was still there, the portal by which humans enter and leave Bela. I thought: Oh, that we may yet leave it alive!

  ITEM (11)

  Extract from the Bela Shuttleport Log

  7.56. Have spoted 2 flyers approaching. Linda and me didnt hardly have time to jump out the sack and put our d
raws on when they come boncing down on to the pad and a bunch of people come spiling out. Memo: file complant with Krebs re (1) unskeduled flyte and (2) overloded flyers. (Singed) Cpl Vizbee, Securty.

  ITEM (12)

  From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  Vizbee and Smelt are looking pretty sour and disheveled, and give us minimum help carrying the wounded. They keep saying they take orders only from Mack and I have to get a bit rough to convince them they now take orders from me.

  We number twenty-two, of whom nine are too seriously injured to work or fight.

  Brief tour of inspection shows a freezer stocked with foodstuffs for the guards and the loading parties who used to bring in the ingots. I ask Antonelli to check it out. He says that if all the wounded recover, we’ll starve before the supply ship gets here.

  Medicines: the shuttleport has a small dispensary, but Anna looks grim when she inventories the drug locker. I suspect Vizbee and Smelt have been into it for recreational purposes, though of course they deny it.

  The port contains about three hundred square meters of floor space. Walls and floor are thick translucent duroplast – solid stuff, nothing will break in. Power source: another antique reactor housed in its own dome and accessible by a protected corridor.

  Escape possibilities: We now have three flyers, but the two we brought with us are almost out of fuel – that overloaded last trip, among other things. The flyer V&B came down in is usable, with enough fuel for a return flight to Zamók, where, of course, we don’t dare go. One dismantled flyer remains there – I hope beyond repair.

  Outside it is, surprise, raining. The pad is wet and shining. There’s a bare space, maybe half a hectare in all, where everything except a kind of lichen has been killed off by the retros of incoming and departing shuttles.

  Beyond are gray rocks and clumps of stunted trees. A neck of barren land connects us to the shore and the usual gray-green-purple wall of jungle.

  Situation summary: We’re in good shape, with ample space, bedded down warm and dry, with lights on and medical care and nothing to do but wait for the supply ship. It’s due in about sixty-seven days – local days, that is. If it’s late (and it often is) we’ll be living on air and water. Lots of water.