The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  I pricked up my ears. A political subtext? Perhaps not; maybe our director was just a tone-deaf drone. I glanced around; several people near me had dropped their eyes, more than one held fists clenched tight. Okay.

  "One of the equally classic Great Filters must screen out potential intelligent life and leave the heavens exactly as they'd have to be if there is no life at all out there. No intelligent, starfaring life, anyway.

  "So now we're faced with a new paradox. Fermi remains unanswered—and yet we have this old vehicle made by beings not of our own species, but apparently related. The likelihood of that coincidence being due to chance alone is impossibly small. I see only three remaining possibilities."

  "Barney did it," someone called, muted but clear across the room. A wave of tittering. I felt my jaw tighten, and a flush creep into my cheeks.

  "A previous civilization sprung from dinosaur stock on Cretaceous Earth, or even earlier, yes," said Dr. Namgoog evenly. "The opinion represented here today by our guest, Sensei Park."

  A pattering of polite applause, some even more muted groans.

  "We have evidence in the form of preliminary scans by our Naval remote viewer, Colonel Meagle, that the creature . . . the being, forgive me . . . in charge of the craft has just such an origin. Leaving aside the improbability of parallel evolution. If so, this leaves the earlier and larger Fermi question unanswered: where are its kindred now, why haven't they conquered the whole galaxy? Tipler and others proved decades ago that this could have been achieved at plausible sub-light speeds within a million years. If they have, why don't we see them?"

  Hearing it stated so flatly, I was dizzied, as always, by the prospect. Flotillas of starcraft fleeing into the spiral arms at a tenth of light speed, crammed with dragon seed or our own. Or minute nanoscale pods fired toward a hundred million stars by magnetic catapult, or driven on filmy wings by laser light. Yet these, too, were last year's dreams, last century's. We had stepped from Earth to Ganymede to Titan entangled on a light beam, and without waiting to be shoved here by sailboat. The moment entangled luminal portage became a reality for my own species, it opened the yawning cavern: why not for them, as well? What the hell was a starship doing here? Why bother? It was so last week, like finding a steam locomotive under the ice.

  Namgoog was enunciating his other solutions to Fermi, but I didn't care. I was entranced by the mystery of the sleeping creature, sedate under his bedding of live flowers. It was a hunger like my endless appetite for chow. I wanted to step straight through the damned shell of the ship and look the critter in the eye, man to man. Even if it decided to eat me.

  That's what dragons do, isn't it?

  And so to bed. Where I lay in the dark in a lather of fright for fifteen minutes. Fearful and weak. Bleak. Needing a leak. I climbed out and thudded to the sanitary personal. When I got back, after a swab up and down and across with a wet face cloth to dab away the worse of the flopsweat, my door was slightly open. Through it came the never-stopping background clanging and banging of humans and machines keeping the place ticking over. Snapping my fingers, I clicked the room light up to dim. Dr. Jendayi Shumba, chubby string looper, stretched at ease on my bed, clad in sensible pajamas with a mission blaze on the collar. Of course, I jumped and squealed.

  "What the—Is there some—"

  "Hush up, dear man, and come over here." She grinned.

  "You're not serious. Are you?"

  In evidence, she slithered out of her pjs and raised her eyebrows.

  "Absurd. I'd crush you like a bug."

  "Myeong-hui, you don't weigh any more, here, than my little boy."

  "You have a—?" I swallowed, and crept closer. "I had a son once."

  "Let us be in this moment, Sensei," she said without reproach.

  "I'm disgusting to look upon," I said frankly. "And I don't need a pity—"

  She had her fingers across my mouth, and then pulled me down through several clunky jumpy evolutions. "There are other ways to convey one's . . . intimacy," she said.

  "Ulp," I protested.

  "An easy mouth is a great thing on a long journey, is it not, old fellow?" she said, releasing mine and patting my neck.

  "Ex-cuse me?"

  Jendayi burst out laughing, a slightly husky, wonderfully exciting sound. "A quote from an old British classic about a horse. Nineteenth century, I believe. You might have read it as a child. Black Beauty."

  "You are the black beauty," I said, noticing a cue when it smacked me between the eyes. I raised my voice and said, "Door close," and it did.

  "You've got a way to break into the ship, don't you?" she said, after a time without time.

  I was reeling and reckless. "Yes. Probably."

  "So you really are a poltergeist." She stroked my contemptible belly, as if it were a friendly animal sharing the bed with us. "Tony nearly poked his damn eye out." Her laugh was throaty, dirty, a tonic.

  "Don't blame me," I said, and found a glass of water, drained it. "It's like being able to wiggle your ears."

  In the near-dark, she wiggled hers, and more.

  But before she left, Jendayi said, "Bring me back a sample. A skin scraping, anything with DNA. Just for me, honey, okay?" Oh, so that's why you're here? Had to be some reason. Exploitative bitch. But that's life, right?

  Looking like a well-laid but annoyed and put-upon squat polar bear in my bodyglove, some hellish number of minus degrees on the far side of its skin, I stood gazing down from the edge of the excavation. The spacecraft was unaltered, every bloom precisely where it had been several days before, where it had been, perhaps, several tens of millions of years before. Unless it was salted here recently as a snare for gullible humans. In which case, it might be younger than I. Not so likely, though.

  "Ready when you are, Sensei," said the political officer, doing Mr. Kim's bidding, and damn the scientists' caution.

  I raised one thumb and let myself drift. Cause and effect unbraided, started their long, looping dance of etiological distortion, swirling, curdling. I was the still center of the spinning world. Certainties creaked, cracked. A favorite poem entered my heart, by Ji-Hoon Cho, "Flower petals on the sleeves":

  The wanderer's long sleeves

  Are wet from flower petals.

  Twilight over a riverside village

  Where wine is mellow.

  Had this saurian person below me, trapped now in timelessness, known wine? Crushed release and perhaps moments of joy from some archaic fruit not yet grape? I thought, with a wrenching mournfulness:

  When this night is over

  Flowers will fall in that village.

  "Hey!"

  And there went the flowers, drawn up and tossed away from the hull of the starship. They were scattering in the methane wind, lifted and flung by the bitter gusts, floral loveliness snap-frozen, blown upward and falling down in drifts into the alien snow.

  "The stationary shield is discontinued," said a clipped voice in my ears.

  I stepped forward, ready to enter the ancient, imprisoned place. To meet my dinosaur, who had either died or even now lived, freed from timeless suspension. A hand caught my encased arm.

  "Not yet, Sam. We have a team prepped. Thanks, you've done good here today." I turned, hardly able to see through my tears, and it was not that bastard Tony Caetani groveling his apologies, the universe could not be so chirpy as that. I hadn't met this one before, although he'd picked up my dining room nickname and used it with a certain familiar breeziness; a beefy functionary of some armed service division, grinning at me in his bluff farmboy way. I nodded, and watched the team of marines go down, and remembered my dear boy and the way he had gone forward fearlessly into darkness and then into the fire falling from the sky. It did not matter one whit that I thought his cause wrong-headed. I remembered a poem in that book I'd found in the ruined library, a poem by an Englishman named Kipling that had torn my heart as I sat before Song-Dam's closed coffin. There was no comfort this tide, the poem warned me, nor in any tide, save t
his:

  he did not shame his kind—

  Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

  Without shame, I sobbed, but then drew myself up and turned back to Huygens agora. Perhaps, I told myself, ten or sixty million years ago, another father had laid his son on these cruel snows and bade him farewell. I murmured to that reptilian father, offering what poor borrowed comfort I might to us both, across all that void of space and time: "Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!"

  I looked straight up above me, at the photodiode display before my eyes in the viewmask, swallowing hard, to follow the streaming tide of blossoms on the wind, and there was Saturn, old Father Time, hanging in the orange smoke of the sky, an arrow through his heart. I gave him a respectful nod, and raised one gloved thumb in salute.

  BY MOONLIGHT

  Peter S. Beagle

  Peter S. Beagle was born in Manhattan on the same night that Billie Holiday was recording "Strange Fruit" and "Fine and Mellow" just a few blocks away. Raised in the Bronx, Peter originally proclaimed he would be a writer when he was ten years old. Today he is acknowledged as an American fantasy icon, and to the delight of his millions of fans around the world is now publishing more than ever. He is the author of the beloved classic The Last Unicorn, as well as the novels A Fine and Private Place, The Innkeeper's Song, and Tamsin. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Mythopoeic awards. His most recent book is the collection Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle. Upcoming are two new novels, I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons and Summerlong, and four short collections featuring new stories about Schmendrick the Magician, unicorns from other cultures, Shakespeare, and his own teenage years in the Bronx.

  Darlington was desperately glad to see the little fire as he came over the moor from Bramham. I can make it that far. There was less snow on the ground here to betray him with footprints, but the cold was harder because of that, and while his coat could keep the wind off yet awhile, his boot soles had worn as thin as his hopes. He had sent the horse off in a different direction more than an hour ago, but he knew his pursuers too well to imagine that the trick would deceive them for long, if at all. At very best he was buying time; which, Darlington decided, could well be considered the entire story of his life. Wrapping his arms around his own shoulders, he stumbled up the low hill toward the fire. I think I can make it that far.

  It was reassuring to see that there was only one figure observing his approach. He'd not have expected to encounter any but fleeing, freezing high-tobys like himself on the moor . . . but he had always found the supposed brotherhood of outlaws greatly overrated: none could be trusted after sunset, and few in broad daylight. But even from such a distance the man near the fire was clearly no bandit. He was tall and white-haired—white-bearded as well—and wrapped in a cloak of intriguing design that Darlington determined was coming away with him, should they survive the night. He saw, as well, that the man's face was curiously ageless in the feeble, wavering firelight, with a paradoxical mix of old sadness and equally profound tranquility. It made him nervous, as contradictions always did.

  Showing no trepidation on his own part, the white-haired man beckoned Darlington to the fire, saying in a deep, quiet voice, "Warm yourself, good highwayman. I fear the pickings must have been slim on such a day."

  Darlington's legs made the decision to sit before he did, and when he tried to speak, no sound at all came out of his mouth. The stranger nodded understandingly, and offered him a leathern flask plainly meant to contain brandy or schnapps; but what Darlington tasted was so astonishingly rich and alive inside him that he very nearly threw up, as though his body were trying to vomit out the whole terror of the day. When he was able, he gasped hoarsely, "Thank you. Whatever that was, thank you."

  "Nectar of the gods," the stranger responded. "Or as close to it as either of us is ever likely to come. Rest now, and tell me what you will, or rest and be still. Those on your track will surely follow no further until morning, at the earliest. I will find more wood."

  Too weary to wonder about anything, Darlington promptly fell asleep, and was only wakened by the increased heat of the revived fire on his face. The stranger offered him another swallow from the flask, and the heel-end of a battered loaf of brown bread. "The last of my provender, forgive me. I was making for Wetherby, more or less, but that's impossible now, in this cold. I may as well turn toward Ilkley—or even Harrogate, why not? Yes . . . perhaps Harrogate."

  He was obviously debating an important issue with himself, and Darlington was near drowsing off again; but the unnerving oddity of a man who seemed neither mad nor a beggar knowing him on sight for an outlaw prodded him fully awake against his will. He spoke warily to his benefactor therefore, saying, "Sir, if your kindness is meant but to delay me until the High Sheriff's men have their hands on me, I feel bound to inform you that the pistol under my coat is pointed directly at your charitable heart. Let me be hanged at Leeds Assizes next month, I will at least swing for something grander than a mail coach that turned out to carry nothing but solicitors' accounts and begging letters from the colonies." And he patted his breast meaningfully and smiled what he dearly hoped was his most elegantly menacing smile.

  "Roger Darlington, you would be," the stranger mused, smiling back at him. "A good Dalesman's name—I hear it everywhere on the moors lately, though I somehow feel I'll have forgotten it utterly by tomorrow's dawn. Wensleydale, most likely?"

  Darlington let his hand fall, the pistol being empty anyway, since the last shot over his shoulder that had killed a trooper's horse. "Aye, born and bred in Skipton myself, but there've been Darlingtons in Wensleydale since the bloody Ark. But you have the advantage of me, sir."

  "Ah, my name? Elias Patterson, at your service." The stranger offered his hand across the fire. "Reverend Elias Patterson that was, as you might say."

  Accepting the handshake, Darlington frowned in some puzzlement. "You're a minister, then?"

  Elias Patterson cocked his head slightly, as though the word were new to him. "Perhaps I am still. It's hard to know, you understand."

  Darlington did know, having passed a fair number of entertaining evenings drinking, gambling, whoring and weeping with variously fallen clerics. "A woman, was it?" With this one, it would have to be a woman.

  Again the thoughtful tilt of the head, the narrowing of the gray eyes, the least breath of a smile. "In a manner of speaking."

  "Well, it's a good man's failing. Not like what I do."

  He said it in his most swaggering manner, having once slipped into Lincoln's Inn Fields, with a price already on his head, to see The Beggar's Opera. Elias Patterson's eyes were neither impressed nor unsympathetic. "You hold a low opinion of your chosen trade, is it?"

  "I never said that." Darlington found himself distinctly irritated with his own irritation. "But I hardly expect it to make me,"—he gestured with his thumb toward the cold black sky "—welcome up there."

  "But why not? You work hard, you have so far harmed no one—you see, I know a bit of you, Mr. Darlington—and the worst that can be said is that you have a certain passion for redistributing the doubtless ill-gotten wealth of that class which can afford to ride about in coaches, whether public or privately-owned. As a former man of the cloth, I can tell you honestly that the Savior might very well approve."

  There was humor in the voice, but no mockery. Darlington had the alarming sense that the man meant exactly what he was saying. "I redistribute the wealth to myself, Reverend Patterson—Robin Hood's a long time gone. Now and then I do toss a coin or two into the poor box or the collection plate, but that's the end of it, believe me." Weary as he was, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What sort of a minister are you, anyway?"

  Elias Patterson did not reply, being occupied with placing more fallen branches on the fire. They blazed up quickly, sputtering a little because of the snow. He leaned toward the flames himself, his ey
es and voice speculative, almost dreamy. "How strange, when you think about it," he mused in a near-whisper. "And we should think about it, you and I. A gentleman of the road and a—what?—a preacher who dares not even enter a church, for fear that the very blessed timbers might all come down on his head. Oh, we are indeed well met—one forever in flight, a poor fox, with no faithful vixen, no cubs waiting to warm and welcome him, celebrating him for losing the hounds one more time—"

  "And just how would you know that, my wise Reverend Patterson?"

  "—and the other in fact a hunter, a pursuer, wandering the same mazes over and over, endlessly searching for something he begins to feel he dreamed . . . " The voice dried to a meaningless insect drone.

  Born a Dalesman, as Elias Patterson had guessed, Darlington had grown up with the silence of the moors. For him it was a sound in itself: a bleak, deeply elusive music, to be felt along the scalp, and in the soles of the feet, rather than heard with the ears. Tonight, listening intently for hoofbeats, for men's voices calling to each other and the yelping of hounds—suddenly he could not endure the stillness a moment longer. "No matter our need, it's clear that neither of us will be sleeping tonight," he said. "My story is entirely as you imagine it, barring perhaps a trifle more education than most robbers on horseback, and consequently a dream of my own. A dull dream, certainly, for it involves living to retirement and then starting up a good little inn in Whitby or Wensleydale, catering quietly to the profession . . . oh, an extremely dull dream, believe me. I would much prefer to hear any tale told by a minister of the Gospel who fears to walk into a church." Elias Patterson began to protest, but Darlington continued, "We haven't got wood enough to see us through the night. As an earnest of my intent, I promise to gather what we need before you begin. If you will begin."