The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  But she was less pleased with the vital signs readings on her screen. “You really should go into the sickbay,” she said fretfully.

  “So they could do what for me?” he asked, and of course she had no answer for that. There was no longer much that could be done. To change the subject Rafiel picked up the kitten. “Do you know what’s funny here?” he asked. “These cats. And I’ve seen dogs and birds – all kinds of pets.”

  “Why not? We like pets.” She was only half attentive, most of her concentration on the screen. “Actually, I may have started the fashion myself.”

  “Really? But on Earth people don’t have them. You hardly ever see a pet animal in the arcologies. Aren’t you afraid that they’ll die on you?”

  She turned to look at him, suddenly angry. “Like you, you mean?” she snapped, her eyes flashing. “Do you see what the screen is saying about your tests? There’s blood in your urine sample, Rafiel!”

  For once, he had known that before she did, because he had seen the color of what had gone into the little flask. He shrugged. “What do you expect? I guess my rognons are just wearing out. But, listen, what did you mean when you said you started the fashion—”

  She cut him off. “Say kidneys when you mean kidneys,” she said harshly, looking helpless and therefore angry because she was helpless. He recognized the look. It was almost the way she had looked when she first gave him the bad news about his mortality, so long and long ago, and it chased his vagrant question out of his mind.

  “But I’m still feeling perfectly well,” he said persuasively – and made the mistake of trying to prove it to her by walking a six-tap riff – a slow one, because of the light gravity.

  He stopped, short of breath, after a dozen steps.

  He looked at her. “That didn’t feel so good,” he panted. “Maybe I’d better go in after all.”

  15

  Hakluyt’s sickbay is just about as big as a hospital in an average Earthly arcology, and just about as efficient. Still, there is a limit to what any hospital can do for a short-timer nearing the end of his life expectancy. When, after four days, they wake Rafiel, he is in far from perfect health. His face is puffy. His skin is sallow. But he has left strict orders to wake him up so he can be on hand for the showing of Oedipus. As nothing they can do will make much difference anyhow, they do as he asks. They even fetch the clothes he requests from his room and when he is dressed he looks at himself in a mirror. He is wearing his fanciest and most theatrical outfit. It is a sunset-yellow full dress suit, with the hem of the tails outlined in stitches of luminous red and a diamond choker around his neck. The diamonds are real. With any luck at all, he thinks, people will look at his clothing and not at his face.

  Probably not every one of Hakluyt’s five thousand people were watching Oedipus as the pictures beamed from Earth caught up with the speeding interstellar ship. But those who were not were in a minority. There were twenty viewers keeping them company in the room where Rafiel and Alegretta sat hand in hand, along with Manfred and his brother and a good many people Rafiel didn’t really know – but whom Manfred knew, or Alegretta did, and so they were invited to share.

  It was a nice room. A room that might almost have been Rafiel’s own old condo, open to the great central space within Hakluyt; they could look out and see hundreds of other lighted rooms like their own, all around the cylinder, some a quarter of a kilometer away. And most of the people in them were watching, too. When the four children of Jocasta and Oedipus did their comic little dance at the opening of the show, the people in the room laughed where Mosay wanted them to – and two seconds later along came the distant, delayed laughter from across the open space, amplified enough by the echo-focusing shape of the ship to reach their ears.

  Rafiel hardly looked at the screen. He was content simply to sit there, pleased with the success of the show, comfortable with Alegretta’s presence . . . at least, in a general sense comfortable, comfortable if you did not count the sometimes acute discomforts of his body. He didn’t let the discomforts show. He was fondly aware that Alegretta’s fingers slipped from hand to wrist from time to time, and knew that she was checking his pulse.

  He was not at all in serious pain. Of course, the pain was there. Only the numbing medications they had been giving him were keeping it down to an inconvenience rather than agony. He accepted that, as he accepted the fact that his life expectancy was now measured in days. Neither fact preyed on his mind. There was an unanswered question somewhere in his mind, something he had wanted to ask Alegretta, but what it could have been he could not clearly say. He accepted the fact that his mind was confused. He even drowsed as he sat there, aware that he was drifting off for periods of time, waking only when there was laughter, or a sympathetic sound from the audience. He did not distinguish clearly between the half-dreams that filled his mind and the scene on the screens. When the audience murmured as he – as Oedipus – took his majestic oath to heal the sickness of the city, the murmur mingled in Rafiel’s mind with a blurry vision of the first explorers from Hakluyt stepping out of a landing craft on to a green and lovely new planet, to the plaudits of an improbable welcoming committee. It wasn’t until almost the end that he woke fully, because next to him there was a soft sound that had no relation to the performance on the screen.

  Alegretta was weeping.

  He looked at her in confusion, then at the screen. He had lost an hour or more of the performance. The play was now at the farewell of the chorus to the blinded and despairing Oedipus as, alone and disgraced, he went off to a hopeless future. And the chorus was singing:

  There goes old Oedipus.

  Once he was the best of us.

  Down from the top he is,

  Proof that all happiness

  Can’t be known until you’re dead.

  Rafiel thought that over for some time. Then, blinking himself awake, he reached to touch Alegretta’s cheek. “But I do know that now,” he said, “and, look, I’m not dead yet.”

  “Know what, Rafiel?” she asked, huskily, not stopping what she was doing. Which, curiously, was pressing warm, sticky, metallic things to his temples and throat.

  “Oh,” he said, understanding, “the show’s over now, isn’t it?” For they weren’t in the viewing room any more. He knew that, because he was in a bed – in their room? No, he decided, more likely back in the ship’s sickbay. Another doctor was in the room, too, hunched over a monitor, and in the doorway Manfred was standing, looking more startled than grieving, but too grieving to speak.

  Rafiel could see that the boy was upset and decided to say something reassuring, but he drifted off for a moment while he tried to think of what to say. When he looked again the boy was gone. So was the other doctor. Only Alegretta sat beside him, her eyes closed wearily and her hands folded in her lap; and at that moment Rafiel remembered the question on his mind. “The cats,” he said.

  Alegretta started. Her eyes flew open, guiltily turning to the monitor before they returned to him. “What? Oh, the cats. They’re fine, Rafiel. Manfred’s been taking care of them.” Then, looking at the monitor again, “How do you feel?”

  That struck Rafiel as a sensible question. It took him a while to answer it, though, because what he felt was almost nothing at all. There was no pain in the gut, nor anywhere else, only a sort of generalized numbness that made it hard for him to move.

  He summed it all up in one word. “Fine. I feel fine.” Then he paused to rehearse the question that had been on his mind. When it was clear he spoke. “Alegretta, didn’t you say you started the fashion of having pets?”

  “Pets? Yes, I was one of the first here on Hakluyt, years and years ago.”

  “Why?” he asked. And then, because he felt a need to hurry, he made his thickening tongue come out with it: “Did you do it so you could get used to things you loved dying? Things like me?”

  “I didn’t know you were a psychotherapist, dear Rafiel,” she whispered. It was an admission, and she knew he understood i
t . . . though his eyes had closed and she could not tell whether he had heard the words. She did not need the confirmation of the screen or of the other doctor as he came running in to know that Rafiel had joined the minority of the dead. She kissed the unresponding lips and retired to the room they had shared, to weep, and to think of what, some day, she would tell their son about his father; that he had been famous, and loved, and brave . . . and most of all that, certainly, yes, Rafiel had after all been happy in his life, and known that to be true.

  FORGIVENESS DAY

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of high fantasy and young adult writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for children’s literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Searoad, Always Coming Home, and The Telling. She has had eight collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tales of Earthsea, and The Birthday of the World. Her most recent books are a collection of her critical essays, The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, and a YA novel, Gifts. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon. She was named SFFWA Grand Master in 2003.

  In the powerful novella that follows, Le Guin returned for the first time in a number of years to the star-spanning, Hainish-settled interstellar community known as the Ekumen, the same fictional universe as her famous novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, for a thoughtful and passionate story of clashing cultural values, politics, violence, religion, and terror – and of the star-crossed relationship of a man and a woman who are literally worlds apart.

  Solly had been a space brat, a Mobile’s child, living on this ship and that, this world and that; she’d traveled five hundred light-years by the time she was ten. At twenty-five she had been through a revolution on Alterra, learned aiji on Terra and farthinking from an old hilfer on Rokanan, breezed through the Schools on Hain, and survived an assignment as Observer in murderous, dying Kheakh, skipping another half millennium at near-lightspeed in the process. She was young, but she’d been around.

  She got bored with the Embassy people in Voe Deo telling her to watch out for this, remember that; she was a Mobile herself now, after all. Werel had its quirks – what world didn’t? She’d done her homework, she knew when to curtsy and when not to belch, and vice versa. It was a relief to get on her own at last, in this gorgeous little city, on this gorgeous little continent, the first and only Envoy of the Ekumen to the Divine Kingdom of Gatay.

  She was high for days on the altitude, the tiny, brilliant sun pouring vertical light into the noisy streets, the peaks soaring up incredibly behind every building, the dark blue sky where great near stars burned all day, the dazzling nights under six or seven lolloping bits of moon, the tall black people with their black eyes, narrow heads, long, narrow hands and feet, gorgeous people, her people! She loved them all. Even if she saw a little too much of them.

  The last time she had had completely to herself was a few hours in the passenger cabin of the airskimmer sent by Gatay to bring her across the ocean from Voe Deo. On the airstrip she was met by a delegation of priests and officials from the King and the Council, magnificent in scarlet and brown and turquoise, and swept off to the Palace, where there was a lot of curtsying and no belching, of course, for hours – an introduction to his little shrunken old majesty, introductions to High Muckamucks and Lord Hooziwhats, speeches, a banquet – all completely predictable, no problems at all, not even the impenetrable giant fried flower on her plate at the banquet. But with her, from that first moment on the airstrip and at every moment thereafter, discreetly behind or beside or very near her, were two men: her Guide and her Guard.

  The Guide, whose name was San Ubattat, was provided by her hosts in Gatay; of course he was reporting on her to the government, but he was a most obliging spy, endlessly smoothing the way for her, showing her with a bare hint what was expected or what would be a gaffe, and an excellent linguist, ready with a translation when she needed one. San was all right. But the Guard was something else.

  He had been attached to her by the Ekumen’s hosts on this world, the dominant power on Werel, the big nation of Voe Deo. She had promptly protested to the Embassy back in Voe Deo that she didn’t need or want a bodyguard. Nobody in Gatay was out to get her and even if they were, she preferred to look after herself. The Embassy sighed. Sorry, they said. You’re stuck with him. Voe Deo has a military presence in Gatay, which after all is a client state, economically dependent. It’s in Voe Deo’s interest to protect the legitimate government of Gatay against the native terrorist factions, and you get protected as one of their interests. We can’t argue with that.

  She knew better than to argue with the Embassy, but she could not resign herself to the Major. His military title, rega, she translated by the archaic word “Major,” from a skit she’d seen on Terra. That Major had been a stuffed uniform, covered with medals and insignia. It puffed and strutted and commanded, and finally blew up into bits of stuffing. If only this Major would blow up! Not that he strutted, exactly, or even commanded, directly. He was stonily polite, woodenly silent, stiff and cold as rigor mortis. She soon gave up any effort to talk to him; whatever she said, he replied Yessum or Nomum with the prompt stupidity of a man who does not and will not actually listen, an officer officially incapable of humanity. And he was with her in every public situation, day and night, on the street, shopping, meeting with businessmen and officials, sightseeing, at court, in the balloon ascent above the mountains – with her everywhere, everywhere but bed.

  Even in bed she wasn’t quite as alone as she would often have liked; for the Guide and the Guard went home at night, but in the anteroom of her bedroom slept the Maid – a gift from His Majesty, her own private asset.

  She remembered her incredulity when she first learned that word, years ago, in a text about slavery. “On Werel, members of the dominant caste are called owners; members of the serving class are called assets. Only owners are referred to as men or women; assets are called bondsmen, bondswomen.”

  So here she was, the owner of an asset. You don’t turn down a king’s gift. Her asset’s name was Rewe. Rewe was probably a spy too, but it was hard to believe. She was a dignified, handsome woman some years older than Solly and about the same intensity of skin color, though Solly was pinkish brown and Rewe was bluish brown. The palms of her hands were a delicate azure. Rewe’s manners were exquisite and she had tact, astuteness, an infallible sense of when she was wanted and when not. Solly of course treated her as an equal, stating right out at the beginning that she believed no human being had a right to dominate, much less own, another, that she would give Rewe no orders, and that she hoped they might become friends. Rewe accepted this, unfortunately, as a new set of orders. She smiled and said yes. She was infinitely yielding. Whatever Solly said or did sank into that acceptance and was lost, leaving Rewe unchanged: an attentive, obliging, gentle physical presence, just out of reach. She smiled, and said yes, and was untouchable.

  And Solly began to think, after the first fizz of the first days in Gatay, that she needed Rewe, really needed her as a woman to talk with. There was no way to meet owner women, who lived hidden away in th
eir bezas, women’s quarters, “at home,” they called it. All bondswomen but Rewe were somebody else’s property, not hers to talk to. All she ever met was men. And eunuchs.

  That had been another thing hard to believe, that a man would voluntarily trade his virility for a little social standing; but she met such men all the time in King Hotat’s court. Born assets, they earned partial independence by becoming eunuchs, and as such often rose to positions of considerable power and trust among their owners. The eunuch Tayandan, majordomo of the palace, ruled the King, who didn’t rule, but figureheaded for the Council. The Council was made up of various kinds of lord but only one kind of priest, Tualites. Only assets worshiped Kamye, and the original religion of Gatay had been suppressed when the monarchy became Tualite a century or so ago. If there was one thing she really disliked about Werel, aside from slavery and gender-dominance, it was the religions. The songs about Lady Tual were beautiful, and the statues of her and the great temples in Voe Deo were wonderful, and the Arkamye seemed to be a good story though long-winded; but the deadly self-righteousness, the intolerance, the stupidity of the priests, the hideous doctrines that justified every cruelty in the name of the faith! As a matter of fact, Solly said to herself, was there anything she did like about Werel?

  And answered herself instantly: I love it, I love it. I love this weird little bright sun and all the broken bits of moons and the mountains going up like ice walls and the people – the people with their black eyes without whites like animals’ eyes, eyes like dark glass, like dark water, mysterious – I want to love them, I want to know them, I want to reach them!