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

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The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four Page 47

by Jonathan Strahan


  "Very well," the Weapon said through the boy's mouth.

  "Why, Weapon? Why the grand experiment? Why the Platform? Why are you so fascinated by the Effigies?"

  "We believe the Effigies are not native to the Earth, any more than the spindlings or the lightmoss or—"

  "But they're pretty closely bound up to humans. They live and die with us."

  "They do not die. So we believe. We have mapped disturbances, deep in the Earth . . . We believe there is a kind of nest of them, a colony of the Effigies that dwells deep in the core of Old Earth. They emerge to combine with humans, with infants at birth. Some infants—we don't know how they choose. And we don't know how they bond either. But after the human carrier's death the Effigy symbiote is released, and returns to the core colony. Something of the human is taken with it. We believe."

  "Memories."

  "Perhaps."

  "And are these memories brought back up from this core pit the next time an Effigy surfaces?"

  "Perhaps. Everything about this world is designed, or modified. Perhaps the purpose is to preserve something of the memory of humanity across epochal intervals."

  "Maybe this is why I always felt like something in me really doesn't belong in this time or place."

  "Perhaps. We must study this at second hand. It is something about humanity that no machine shares."

  "I think you're jealous. Aren't you, machine? You can farm us, keep us as lab animals. But you can't have this."

  "No reliable mapping between human emotions and the qualia of our own sensorium . . . "

  But he didn't hear the rest. Another stabbing in his chest, a pain that knifed down his left arm. The nurse leaned over him.

  And the sky exploded. They weren't just new stars. They were stars that detonated, each flaring brighter than the rest of the sky put together, then vanishing as quickly, blown-out matches.

  "Supernovas," said the boy, Powpy. "That is the ancient word. A wave of supernovas, triggered by the galaxy collision, giant exploding stars flooding nearby space with lethal radiation, a particle sleet . . . "

  But Telni couldn't talk, couldn't breathe.

  "He's going," the nurse said. "Get him to the Morgue."

  He glimpsed two creatures running up—they were six-legged people, Centaurs—and his bed was shoved forward, across the rusty dirt towards the enclosure of a Building. He tried to protest, to cling to his view of that astounding sky as long as he could. But he couldn't even breathe, and it felt as if a sword were being twisted in his chest.

  They got him indoors. He lay back, rigid with pain, staring at a construction material roof that seemed to recede from him.

  And a glow, like the glow of the sky outside, suffused the inside of his head, his very eyes.

  "It's happening," he heard the nurse say, wonder in her voice. "Look, it's rising from his limbs . . . His heart has stopped." She straddled him and pounded at his chest, even as a glow lit up her face, the bare flesh of her arms—a glow coming from him.

  He remembered a glimmering tetrahedron, looming, swallowing him up.

  He heard Powpy call, "Who are you? Who are you?"

  And suddenly he knew, as if his eyes had suddenly focused, after years of myopia. With the last of the air in his lungs he struggled to speak. "Not again. Not again!"

  The nurse peered into his eyes. "Stay with me, Telni!"

  "Who are you?"

  "My name is Michael Poole."

  The light detonated, deep inside him.

  Suddenly he filled this box of Xeelee stuff, and he rattled, anguished. But there was the door, a way out. Somehow he fled that way, seeking the redshift.

  And then—

  BLOCKED

  Geoff Ryman

  Geoff Ryman is the author of The Warrior Who Carried Life, the novella "The Unconquered Country", The Child Garden, Was, Lust, and Air. His work 253, or Tube Theatre was first published as hypertext fiction. A print version was published in 1998 and won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. He has also won the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award (two times), the British Science Fiction Association Award (once for novel, twice for short fiction), the Sunburst Award, The James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and Gaylactic Spectrum awards. His most recent novel, The King's Last Song, is set in Cambodia, both at the time of Angkorean emperor Jayavarman VII, and in the present period. He has recently edited When it Changed, a collection of commissioned collaborations between writers and scientists. He currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.

  I dreamed this in Sihanoukville, a town of new casinos, narrow beaches, hot bushes with flowers that look like daffodils, and even now after nine years of peace, stark ruined walls with gates that go nowhere.

  In the dream, I get myself a wife. She's beautiful, blonde, careworn. She is not used to having a serious man with good intentions present himself to her on a beach. Her name is Agnete and she speaks with a Danish accent. She has four Asian children.

  Their father had been studying permanently in Europe, married Agnete and then "left", which in this world can mean several things. Agnete was an orphan herself and the only family she had was that of her Cambodian husband. So she came to Phnom Penh only to find that her in-laws did not want some strange woman they did not know and all those extra mouths to feed.

  I meet the children. The youngest is Gerda, who cannot speak a word of Khmer. She's tiny, as small as an infant though three years old, in a splotched pink dress and too much toy jewellery. She just stares, while her brothers play. She's been picked up from everything she knows and thrown down into this hot, strange world in which people speak nonsense and the food burns your mouth.

  I kneel down and try to say hello to her, first in German, and then in English. Hello Gertie, hello little girl. Hello. She blanks all language and sits like she's sedated.

  I feel so sad, I pick her up and hold her, and suddenly she buries her head in my shoulder. She falls asleep on me as I swing in a hammock and quietly explain myself to her mother. I am not married, I tell Agnete. I run the local casino.

  Real men are not hard, just unafraid. If you are a man you say what is true, and if someone acts like a monkey, then maybe you punish them. To be a crook, you have to be straight. I sold guns for my boss and bought policemen, so he trusted me, so I ran security for him for years. He was one of the first to Go, and he sold his shares in the casino to me. Now it's me who sits around the black lacquered table with the generals and Thai partners. I have a Lexus and a good income. I have ascended and become a man in every way but one. Now I need a family.

  Across from Sihanoukville, all about the bay are tiny islands. On those islands, safe from thieves, glow the roofs where the Big Men live in Soriya-chic amid minarets, windmills, and solar panels. Between the islands hang white suspension footbridges. Distant people on bicycles move across them.

  Somehow it's now after the wedding. The children are now mine. We loll shaded in palm-leaf panel huts. Two of the boys play on a heap of old rubber inner tubes. Tharum with his goofy smile and sticky-out ears is long legged enough to run among them, plonking his feet down into the donut holes. Not to be outdone, his brother Sampul clambers over the things. Rith the oldest looks cool in a hammock, away with his earphones, pretending not to know us.

  Gerda tugs at my hand until I let her go. Freed from the world of language and adults she climbs up and over the swollen black tubes, sliding down sideways. She looks intent and does not laugh.

  Her mother in a straw hat and sunglasses makes a thin, watery sunset smile.

  Gerda and I go wading. All those islands shelter the bay, so the waves roll onto the shore child-sized, as warm and gentle as caresses. Gerda holds onto my hand and looks down at them, scowling in silence.

  Alongside the beach is a grounded airliner, its wings cut away and neatly laid beside it. I take the kids there, and the boys run around inside it, screaming. Outside, Gerda and I look at the aircraft's spir
it house. Someone witty has given the shrine tiny white wings.

  The surrounding hills still have their forests; cumulonimbus clouds towering over them like clenched fists.

  In the evening, thunder comes.

  I look out from our high window and see flashes of light in the darkness. We live in one whole floor of my casino hotel. Each of the boys has his own suite. The end rooms have balconies, three of them, that run all across the front of the building with room enough for sofas and dining tables. We hang tubes full of pink sugar water for hummingbirds. In the mornings, the potted plants buzz with bees, and balls of seed lure the sarika bird that comes to sing its sweetest song.

  In these last days, the gambling action is frenetic: Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Malays, they play baccarat mostly, but some prefer the one-armed bandits.

  At the tables of my casino, elegant young women, handsome young men and a couple of other genders besides, sit upright ready to deal, looking as alert and frightened as rabbits, especially if their table is empty. They are paid a percentage of the take. Some of them sleep with customers too, but they're good kids; they always sent the money home. Do good, get good, we in Cambodia used to say. Now we say twee akrow meen lay, Do bad, have money.

  My casino is straight. My wheels turn true. No guns, says my sign. No animals, no children. Innocence must be protected. No cigarettes or powders. Those last two are marked by a skull-and-crossbones.

  We have security but the powders don't show up on any scan, so some of my customers come here to die. Most weekends, we find one, a body slumped over the table.

  I guess some of them think it's good to go out on a high. The Chinese are particularly susceptible. They love the theatre of gambling, the tough-guy stance, the dance of the cigarette, the nudge of the eyebrow. You get dealt a good hand, you smile, you take one last sip of Courvoisier, then one sniff. You Go Down for good.

  It's another way for the winner to take all. For me, they are just a mess to clear up, another reason to keep the kids away.

  Upstairs, we've finished eating and we can hear the shushing of the sea.

  "Daddy," Sampul asks me and the word thrums across my heart. "Why are we all leaving?"

  "We're being invaded."

  So far, this has been a strange and beautiful dream, full of Buddhist monks in orange robes lined up at the one-armed bandits. But now it goes like a stupid kids' TV show, except that in my dream, I'm living it, it's real. As I speak, I can feel my own sad, damp breath.

  "Aliens are coming," I say and kiss him. "They are bringing many many ships. We can see them now, at the edge of the solar system. They'll be here in less than two years."

  He sighs and looks perturbed.

  In this disrupted country two-thirds of everything is a delight, two thirds of everything iron nastiness. The numbers don't add up, but it's true.

  "How do we know they're bad?" he asks, his face puffy.

  "Because the government says so and the government wouldn't lie."

  His breath goes icy. "This government would."

  "Not all governments, not all of them all together."

  "So. Are we going to leave?"

  He means leave again. They left Denmark to come here, and they are all of them sick of leaving.

  "Yes, but we'll all go together, OK?"

  Rith glowers at me from the sofa. "It's all the fault of people like you."

  "I made the aliens?" I think smiling at him will make him see he is being silly.

  He rolls his eyes. "There's the comet?" he asks like I've forgotten something and shakes his head.

  "Oh, the comet, yes, I forgot about the comet, there's a comet coming too. And global warming and big new diseases."

  He tuts. "The aliens sent the comet. If we'd had a space program we could meet them halfway and fight there. We could of had people living in Mars, to survive."

  "Why wouldn't the aliens invade Mars too?"

  His voice goes smaller, he hunches even tighter over his game. "If we'd gone into space, we would of been immortal."

  My father was a drunk who left us; my mother died; I took care of my sisters. The regime made us move out of our shacks by the river to the countryside where there was no water so that the generals could build their big hotels. We survived. I never saw a movie about aliens, I never had this dream of getting away to outer space. My dream was to become a man.

  I look out over the Cambodian night, and fire and light dance about the sky like dragons at play. There's a hissing sound. Wealth tumbles down in the form of rain.

  Sampul is the youngest son and is a tough little guy. He thumps Rith, who's fifteen years old and both of them gang up on gangly Tharum. But tough-guy Sampul suddenly curls up next to me on the sofa as if he's returning to the egg.

  The thunder's grief looks like rage. I sit and listen to the rain. Rith plays on, his headphones churning with the sound of stereophonic war.

  Everything dies, even suns; even the universe dies and comes back. We already are immortal.

  Without us, the country people will finally have Cambodia back. The walled gardens will turn to vines. The water buffalo will wallow; the rustics will still keep the fields green with rice, as steam engines chortle past, puffing out gasps of cloud. Sampul once asked me if the trains made rain.

  And if there are aliens, maybe they will treasure it, the Earth.

  I may want to stay, but Agnete is determined to Go. She has already lost one husband to this nonsense. She will not lose anything else, certainly not her children. Anyway, it was all part of the deal.

  I slip into bed next to her. "You're very good with them," she says and kisses my shoulder. "I knew you would be. Your people are so kind to children."

  "You don't tell me that you love me," I say.

  "Give it time," she says, finally.

  That night lightning strikes the spirit house that shelters our neak ta. The house's tiny golden spire is charred.

  Gerda and I come down in the morning to give the spirit his bananas, and when she sees the ruin, her eyes boggle and she starts to scream and howl.

  Agnete comes downstairs, and hugs and pets her, and says in English, "Oh, the pretty little house is broken."

  Agnete cannot possibly understand how catastrophic this is, or how baffling. The neak ta is the spirit of the hotel who protects us or rejects us. What does it mean when the sky itself strikes it? Does it mean the neak ta is angry and has deserted us? Does it mean the gods want us gone and have destroyed our protector?

  Gerda stares in terror, and I am sure then, that though she is wordless, Gerda has a Khmer soul.

  Agnete looks at me over Gerda's shoulder, and I'm wondering why she is being so disconnected when she says, "The papers have come through."

  That means we will sail to Singapore within the week.

  I've already sold the casino. There is no one I trust. I go downstairs and hand over the keys to all my guns to Sreang, who I know will stay on as security at least for a while.

  That night after the children are asleep, Agnete and I have the most terrifying argument. She throws things; she hits me; she thinks I'm saying that I want to desert them; I cannot make her listen or understand.

  "Neak ta? Neak ta, what are you saying?"

  "I'm saying I think we should go by road."

  "We don't have time! There's the date, there's the booking! What are you trying to do?" She is panicked, desperate; her mouth ringed with thin strings of muscle, her neck straining.

  I have to go and find a monk. I give him a huge sum of money to earn merit, and I ask him to chant for us. I ask him to bless our luggage and at a distance bless the boat that we will sail in. I swallow fear like thin sour spit. I order ahead, food for Pchum Ben, so that he can eat it, and act as mediary so that I can feed my dead. I look at him. He smiles. He is a man without guns, without modernity, without family to help him. For just a moment I envy him.

  I await disaster, sure that the loss of our neak ta bodes great ill; I fear that the boat will
be swamped at sea.

  But I'm wrong.

  Dolphins swim ahead of our prow leaping out of the water. We trawl behind us for fish and haul up tuna, turbot, sea snakes and turtles. I can assure you that flying fish really do fly—they soar over our heads at night, right across the boat like giant mosquitoes.

  No one gets seasick; there are no storms; we navigate directly. It is as though the sea has made peace with us. Let them be, we have lost them, they are going.

  We are Cambodians. We are good at sleeping in hammocks and just talking. We trade jokes and insults and innuendo sometimes in verse, and we play music, cards, and bah angkunh, a game of nuts. Gerda joins in the game and I can see the other kids let her win. She squeals with delight, and reaches down between the slats to find a nut that has fallen through.

  All the passengers hug and help take care of the children. We cook on little stoves, frying in woks. Albatrosses rest on our rigging. Gerda still won't speak, so I cuddle her all night long, murmuring. Kynom ch'mooah Channarith. Oun ch'mooah ay?

  I am your new father.

  Once in the night, something huge in the water vents, just beside us. The stars themselves seem to have come back like the fish, so distant and high, cold and pure. No wonder we are greedy for them, just as we are greedy for diamonds. If we could, we would strip-mine the universe, but instead we strip-mine ourselves.

  We land at Sentosa. Its resort beaches are now swallowed by the sea, but its slopes sprout temporary, cantilevered accommodation. The sides of the buildings spread downwards like sheltering batwings behind the plastic quays that walk us directly to the hillside.

  Singapore's latest growth industry.

  The living dead about to be entombed, we march from the boats along the top of pontoons. Bobbing and smooth-surfaced, the quays are treacherous. We slip and catch each other before we fall. There are no old people among us, but we all walk as if aged, stiff-kneed, and unbalanced.

  But I am relieved; the island still burgeons with trees. We take a jungle path, through humid stillness, to the north shore, where we face the Lion City.

 

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