The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  What a story! Akuin shivered.

  “The pilot of the ship killed himself. The engineer in front of the air lock design team asked to die. But his senior officers decided the problem with the system had not been caused by anything he did, and could not have been foreseen.”

  “What was the problem?” Akuin asked. “Why did the system malfunction?”

  “I never learned. At first, I was in no condition to pay attention. Later, I didn’t care.”

  “Did the pilot have permission to kill himself?”

  “That’s another thing I don’t know,” Tol Chaib said.

  The pilot had panicked in an emergency. That was the one thing Akuin knew about him. Maybe, after he saw the damage he’d done, the pilot had panicked a second time and made the decision to die on his own. A terrible idea! “If he asked for permission and got it, then what he did was right,” Akuin said finally. “And it was right for the engineer to live, after permission had been refused to him, though – hah! He must have wanted to die.”

  “Maybe,” said Tol Chaib.

  There was another thought in Akuin’s mind, which he did not express.

  “You’re wondering why I’m still alive,” Tol Chaib said. “I gave serious thought to taking the option.” He paused, his good hand gently touching the frilly edge of a tropical bloom. “I was a handsome man. Many approached me or watched from a distance, hoping for encouragement. Hah! It was fine to know that I could make another man happy by saying ‘yes.’

  “Then I woke and discovered my leg was gone. What a surprise! Where was the rest of me?”

  Akuin felt uncomfortable. No child wants to know that adults can be unhappy. Heroes in hero plays – yes. They can suffer, and a boy Akuin’s age will be inspired. But a man like Tol Chaib, a teacher and crippled, should never reveal pain.

  “I had no desire to limp and crawl through life,” the teacher said, his dry voice inexorable. “I wanted to be quick and lovely and loved.

  “One of my senior male relatives came to visit me while I was in sick bay. I asked him for permission to die. He said, ‘Wait.’ So I did. My male relatives consulted with each other and with the officers in front of me. This is how such things are done,” the dry voice said. “Except in hero plays.”

  “I know,” Akuin said. In a sense he hadn’t known. Before this moment, the rules for killing oneself had been unreal, something learned as one learns formulae one is never going to use. How fine that I can use sticks and triangles to determine the height of that tall tree! Do I want to know the tree’s height? No.

  “In that kind of situation,” Tol Chaib added, “the kind that occurs in hero plays, when a man is entirely alone or the people around him are confused and wrong, it makes sense for the man to take his fate into his own hands. What choice does he have? But it’s a good idea to be sure that one is a hero and in a heroic situation, before acting in such a way.

  “It was decided I ought to live – for various reasons. My skill as a gardener was remarkable; and I’m good at teaching. Also, I’m an only child; and my mother is well-loved in our family. It was thought she might grieve too much, if I killed myself.”

  Akuin left the greenhouse soon after, trudging back to his dormitory through a new fall of snow. Overhead the sky was full of stars. For once the air was almost still, though stabbingly cold. The boy walked in a cloud of his own breath.

  He reached the middle of a playing field and looked around, first at the snow, unmarked except by the trail he was in the process of making, then at the sky. How brilliant! How many-colored! How difficult to measure!

  All at once he lost his sense of position and direction. Up and down seemed no longer different. The ground beneath his feet was gone; so was his body’s weight; he was falling into the innumerable stars.

  It was a terrible sensation. Akuin closed his eyes. For a moment, the sense of falling continued. Then it was gone, as quickly as it had come. When he opened his eyes, everything was ordinary again.

  Later, he wondered if this had been a vision. Most likely not. He’d never shown any signs of having a diviner’s ability, nor did he want it. Seeing what other people can’t see is unsettling. Diviners tend to be odd ungraceful folk, who go through life out of step and off balance, never fitting into any group. No rational boy wants a fate like this.

  More likely, Akuin thought, he’d been tired and disturbed by his mentor’s story. In any case, the experience was over and did not recur.

  He completed school in the usual period of time. Education is not a race for the hwarhath. No one finishes before the others. How can they? Every hwarhath male goes into the army as soon as he graduates; and no one can enter the army until he has reached the age of adulthood.*

  At twenty, Akuin left school, going home for a long visit. As usual, on visits home, he worked in the family garden. His mother watched with her usual concern. He had turned into a lovely young man, slim and graceful; his pale stippled pelt reminded her of sunlight moving over metal, or water moving over stones. But he was too quiet for a youth his age, too thoughtful and too in love with the plants he tended.

  With luck, she told herself, he’d be assigned to work as a gardener. The teachers at his school had recommended this. According to her male relatives, the officers in charge of making assignments often paid attention to such recommendations. Though not always, of course.

  A little before harvest, Akuin’s assignment came. As expected, it was in space, though where in space the message did not say. He packed the one bag permitted him and said goodbye to his family. It wasn’t easy to bid his mother farewell. Unlike humans, the hwarhath do not express grief by excreting water from the corners of their eyes. Nor do they have the human love of making noise. Given any reason – grief, anger, happiness, a flash of irritation, a momentary surprise – humans will be noisy. An uncomfortable kind of behavior. Maybe it comes from their ancestors, who spent their time (we are told) screaming at the tops of trees. The hwarhath must be descended from animals who spent more time on the ground, where they could see one another, and where noise might attract unwelcome attention. In most situations, they are quiet, at least in comparison to humans.

  But what man wants to see a look of grim endurance on his mother’s face?

  It was a relief to get outside. The plants that bordered the garden were waist-high now. Their long sharp leaves seemed (to Akuin) like a fence of swords, inlaid with precious metals and encrusted with jewels, so they shone red, blue, yellow, green. The green especially was a shade so intense and pure that it seemed to pierce him. Hah! He could feel it in his throat and chest!

  Bugs with the same rich late-summer colors floated in the hot air. Bending down and peering, Akuin could see ripe fruits and vegetables nestled among the leaves of the plants raised for food. He found a few last pests, pressed them to death between his fingers, then turned toward the waiting car.

  One of his female cousins drove him to the nearest rail line. They parted quietly. He went by train to the regional airport, then by plane to one of the rocket islands. From the island he went (by rocket of course) to a keeping-pace-with-the-place-below station.* At each stage of this journey, his environment became more closed-in and artificial, till at last in the station it was a maze of grey metal corridors. No windows opened out on space. If they had, what would he have seen?

  His unreachable home planet.

  Akuin felt his spirit shrink like a plant shriveling in a drought. How was he going to survive? His grandmother’s voice, speaking in his mind, gave the answer: through loyalty and discipline. In his imagination he made the gesture of acknowledgement.

  An FTL transport carried him (along with other men) to a station in the most remote region of hwarhath-explored space. This was not a place where the hwarhath would usually have built a station. It was too far out, and the route that led to it was not easy to follow.

  But when the hwarhath came to this region, they found many stars in close proximity. By itself this would have been i
nteresting. The stars in hwarhath space are, for the most part, scattered as thinly as trees on Great Central Plain; and in general they are solitary rather than communal. It’s rare to find more than two or three together.

  If ordinary stars are like a bottle tree, standing alone on the dusty plain, with at most a couple of offshoots or companions, then this group was like a grove or thicket, gathered around some hidden reason for their gathering: a spring or sunken pool.

  Of course the hwarhath scientists wanted to study the grove, and they had enough influence to get the station built. But they did not get the resources they wanted. Remember that a war was on. This region was far distant from the hwarhath home planet and from the region where humans were a recurring problem. The work done here did not seem important to the men who made decisions. Akuin’s new home was inadequately funded.

  Imagine a metal cylinder orbiting a dim and dusty, unimpressive star. The cylinder is small and plain, with none of the additions characteristic of the great stations, which unfold over time like flowering plants, producing metal stalks, blossoms, and pods. Around them move attendant bodies: maintenance craft, shuttles, satellites devoted to research or specialized manufacture, so the great station seems enveloped in a cloud of glittering bugs.

  Akuin’s destination was nothing like this. There was only the cylinder, a simple geometric shape, orbiting its primary, which had no planets. In the distance were other stars, packed closely together, all of them dim and red.

  “Like an army camped on a plain,” said one of the new arrivals. (Not Akuin.) “How long the night has been! The army’s fires have burnt down. Now they are almost out.”

  “It may look like an army to you,” another soldier commented. “To me it looks like a group of stars.” *

  Scattered through the star-grove (or if you like the image, the army-camp of stars) were other bodies, which the new arrivals could not see. These came in several varieties. Most were burning-into-darkness stars, which had exhausted their fuel, turning into the stellar equivalent of cinders. Others, less numerous, were breaking-into-pieces stars, which had become so dense that gravity had crushed their matter, so it became a kind of puree or thick soup. The last group, least numerous of all, were called falling-into-strangeness; and these were the stars that interested the hwarhath scientists.†

  Akuin paid little attention to the grove (or camp) of stars. Instead he noticed the interior of the station: a cramped maze of corridors and rooms. There were no windows, of course, and most of the holograms (there were some, though not as large and splendid as the ones in a great station) showed more impressive parts of the galaxy.

  At the end of one corridor a huge planet turned, surrounded by moons and braided rings. At the end of another corridor was a human ship, which exploded over and over, hit by hwarhath missiles. Hah! It was a thing to see! Dramatic and encouraging!

  He was assigned to a room with four other young men, also new arrivals. Each got a bed, a storage locker, and a niche in the wall, where a hologram could be installed. Three of his companions put scenes of home, as did Akuin: his grandmother’s garden at midsummer. The last man, a thin lad with the most amazingly ugly markings on his pale grey fur, put nothing in his niche.

  The ugly lad was named Gehazi Thev. He seemed remarkably calm and friendly, for a man who looked as if he’d been used to blot up ink. How could any family have kept a child like this one?

  “Easy enough to explain,” Thev said on the second or third day that Akuin knew him. “My mother is a mathematician, the best in our lineage; and the semen used to produce me came from a family – the Thevar – who are famous scientists. They also have a tendency toward splotchiness, which shows up rarely. It’s a defect they have tried to eliminate.

  “In any case – ” No question that Thev was a talker. “My mother had a terrible pregnancy. Not only did she feel sick, but her ability to think about math vanished almost entirely, either due to her queasiness or to some change in her hormones.

  “When I was born, they thought of killing me. Just look!” He ran one hand over an arm disfigured by a great dark blotch. “How could I possibly have a normal life? But my mother had already announced that she would never allow her family to breed her again. These were her good years, when she could do original work. She wasn’t going to waste them on motherhood. So – ” The calm friendly voice sounded amused. “My relatives could kill me, and lose my mother’s genetic material, or they could keep me. There was no reason to believe that I would be stupid.”

  “It doesn’t bother you?” asked Akuin.

  “My lack of stupidity? No. The Goddess has made sure that the universe is well provided with stupid people. As far as I can tell from their behavior, humans are as dim as most hwarhath. What is this war about, for example? How can we fight people when we can’t even talk with them? What has war been about, through our entire history? The taking of land! The acquisition of women and children! But what good are human females to us? If they even have females, as we understand that term. For all we know, humans may have five different sexes, none of them producing children in a way we understand. As for their land, how can we use it? It isn’t likely that our plants will grow on their planet. So, what are we fighting for? Women who cannot mother hwarhath children, and land which is – for us – infertile. The humans are just as stupid. Unless, of course, they have another reason for killing people.” Thev tilted his head, considering the idea of a new reason for war.

  “I was talking about your looks,” said Akuin. He touched a patch of fur that wasn’t blotchy. Instead, it shone like silver. “If you had been like this all over – ”

  “Hah! I would have been something! There would have been men lined up at our door, and very inconvenient it would have been for the rest of you.” Thev paused. He was sprawled on his bed, resting on his elbows, regarding Akuin with resin-yellow eyes. “Yes, it has bothered me at times,” he said at last. “When I first realized how very ugly I was, and again when I was in school and the age when boys begin to fall in love. No one would ever love me, I thought. I would have to be content with my hands, and the programs about safe and healthy sexual behavior which the Public Health Corps makes.” *

  “Has that happened?” Akuin said.

  Thev smiled. “I have seen a lot of public health programs. But I have discovered that some men like intelligence. Believe me, I am intelligent!”

  They became friends, though the other roommates couldn’t understand why. Akuin was lovely and also sad, the kind of youth that older men – some older men – liked to comfort. No one would ever try to comfort Thev. He was too confident and happy. In addition, they were slightly different ages. Thev had stayed on the home world for two extra years, studying at the famous Helig Institute. Instead of being twenty or twenty-one, he was twenty-three, though he didn’t seem especially old. His time had been devoted to ideas rather than experience. It was stars he knew, not manners.

  They stayed together through the period when new arrivals were oriented to life in space. “Like two burrs,” said the other roommates, who began to suspect it was Akuin’s beauty that drew the other man. But what drew Akuin to a man whose conversation was so often impossible to understand? All these kinds of stars that fell into themselves, changing (as they did so) the nature given them by the Goddess, and even in some cases (according to Thev) falling out of the universe the Goddess had created. This was unexpected! Who could make sense of it? Who could find it interesting or erotic?

  When the orientation period was over, Thev began to spend his time with other physicists. Akuin started his new job, in the station’s garden.

  A garden, you may think. The lad had been saved. He’d found his natural environment.

  The garden occupied a series of rooms, grey metal like everything else in the station. The plants, all useful rather than ornamental, grew in raised beds like metal boxes. Light came from panels in the ceiling. Moisture was provided by a network of tubes, which dripped water directly on the roo
ts. Nothing was wasted. Nothing was present unless it was needed.

  Akuin discovered that gardening (for him) comprised many things besides the garden itself. He missed sunlight, clouds, rain, bugs, raiding tli, the sight of hills rising in the distance, the smell of a nearby forest or ocean. It was home he missed, the home world in its entirety. Most especially he missed his home country: the valleys full of stones and stony rivers, the indomitable granite mountains.

  But he could not go home, except for an occasional brief visit, until he was eighty. To think of sixty years in stations like this one! The idea was horrible!

  “Don’t be morose,” Thev said. “You have a gift for gardening. The senior gardener has said that often. In time you’ll be transferred to one of the big stations, where there are ornamental plants and bugs, maybe even a hologram of the home world sky. Think of that above you, while you pick suckers off stems! And I, by then, will be a distinguished physicist. They’ll bring me in to lecture, and we’ll make jokes about the way our lives used to be.”

  Akuin felt doubtful and said as much.

  “And then, finally, when you are a success, I’ll confess to you that I’ve always loved you. And only the Goddess can know why, because you have an awful disposition.”

  Akuin looked at his friend. “Do you mean that?”

  “About your disposition? Absolutely!”

  “About loving me?”

  “From the first moment I laid eyes on your shining pelt. From the first time I heard you complain.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. Remember that my area of competence is stars, not people.”

  Akuin kept looking at Thev, who was (as usual) sprawled on his bed, under the empty wall niche. He’d just come from the communal shower. Naked, it was possible to see all the blotches on his front. One covered half his forehead. Another, even larger and just as badly shaped, covered half a thigh.

  “Did you ever think of coloring your fur?” Akuin asked.