The dogs were circling back, watching Tuuvin.
He screamed at them. Then he crouched down on his heels and covered his eyes with his arm and cried.
I did not feel anything. Not yet.
I whistled the tune that Wanji had taught me to send out the message, and the world went dark. It was something to do, and for a moment, I didn’t have to look at my mother’s bare feet.
The place for the Sckarline dead was up the hill beyond the town, away from the river, but without stabros I couldn’t think of how we could get all these bodies there. We didn’t have anything for the bodies, either. Nothing for the spirit journey, not even blankets to wrap them in.
I could not bear to think of my mother without pants. There were lots of dead women in the snow and many of them did have pants. It may not have been fair that my mother should have someone else’s but I could not think of anything else to do so I took the leggings off of Maitra and tried to put them on my mother. I could not really get them right – my mother was tall and her body was stiff from the cold and from death. I hated handling her.
Veronique asked me what I was doing but even if I knew enough English to answer, I was too embarrassed to really try to explain.
My mother’s flesh was white and odd to touch. Not like flesh at all. Like plastic. Soft looking but not to touch.
Tuuvin watched me without saying anything. I thought he might tell me not to, but he didn’t. Finally he said, “We can’t get them to the place for the dead.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“We don’t have anyone to talk to the spirits,” he said. “Only me.”
He was the man here. I didn’t know if Tuuvin had talked with spirits or not, people didn’t talk about that with women.
“I say that this place is a place of the dead, too,” he said. His voice was strange. “Sckarline is a place of the dead now.”
“We leave them here?” I asked.
He nodded.
He was beardless, but he was a boy and he was old enough that he had walked through the spirit door. I was glad that he had made the decision.
I looked in houses for things for the dead to have with them, but most things were burned. I found things half-burned and sometimes not burned at all. I found a fur, and used that to wrap the woman whose leggings I had stolen. I tried to make sure that everybody got something – a bit of stitching or a cup or something, so they would not be completely without possessions. I managed to find something for almost everybody, and I found enough blankets to wrap Tuuvin’s family and Veronique’s teacher. I wrapped Bet with my mother. I kept blankets separate for Veronique, Tuuvin, and me and anything I found that we could use I didn’t give to the dead, but everything else I gave to them.
Tuuvin sat in the burned-out schoolhouse and I didn’t know if what he did was a spirit thing or if it was just grief, but I didn’t bother him. He kept the dogs away. Veronique followed me and picked through the blackened sticks of the houses. Both of us had black all over our gloves and our clothes and black marks on our faces.
We stopped when it got too dark, and then we made camp in the schoolhouse next to the dead. Normally I would not have been able to stay so close to the dead, but now I felt part of them.
Tuuvin had killed and skinned a dog and cooked that. Veronique cried while she ate. Not like Tuuvin had cried. Not sobs. Just helpless tears that ran down her face. As if she didn’t notice.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
Tuuvin said, “We will try for Toolie Clan.”
I didn’t have any idea where their winter pastures were, much less how to find them, and I almost asked Tuuvin if he did, but I didn’t want to shame his new manhood, so I didn’t.
“The skimmer will come back here,” Veronique said. “I have to wait here.”
“We can’t wait here,” Tuuvin said. “It is going to get darker, winter is coming and we’ll have no sun. We don’t have any animals. We can’t live here.”
I told her what Tuuvin said. “I have, in here,” I pointed to my head, “I call your people. Wanji give to me.”
Veronique didn’t understand and didn’t even really try.
I tried not to think about the dogs wandering among the dead. I tried not to think about bad weather. I tried not to think about my house or my mam. It did not leave much to think about.
Tuuvin had kin with Toolie Clan but I didn’t. Tuuvin was my clankin, though, even if he wasn’t a cousin or anything. I wondered if he would still want me after we got to Toolie Clan. Maybe there would be other girls. New girls, that he had never talked to before. They would be pretty, some of them.
My kin were Lagskold. I didn’t know where their pastures were, but someone would know. I could go to them if I didn’t like Toolie Clan. I had met a couple of my cousins when they came and brought my father’s half brother, my little uncle.
“Listen,” Tuuvin said, touching my arm.
I didn’t hear it at first, then I did.
“What?” Veronique said. “Are they coming back?”
“Hush,” Tuuvin snapped at her, and even though she didn’t understand the word she did.
It was a skimmer.
It was far away. Skimmers didn’t land at night. They didn’t even come at night. It had come to my message, I guessed.
Tuuvin got up, and Veronique scrambled to her feet and we all went out to the edge of the field behind the schoolhouse.
“You can hear it?” I asked Veronique.
She shook her head.
“Listen,” I said. I could hear it. Just a rumble. “The skimmer.”
“The skimmer?” she said. “The skimmer is coming? Oh God. Oh God. I wish we had lights for them. We need light, to signal them that someone is here.”
“Tell her to hush,” Tuuvin said.
“I send message,” I said. “They know someone is here.”
“We should move the fire.”
I could send them another message, but Wanji had said to do it one time a day until they came and they were here.
Dogs started barking.
Finally we saw lights from the skimmer, strange green and red stars. They moved against the sky as if they had been shaken loose.
Veronique stopped talking and stood still.
The lights came towards us for a long time. They got bigger and brighter, more than any star. It seemed as if they stopped but the lights kept getting brighter and I finally decided that they were coming straight towards us and it didn’t look as if they were moving but they were.
Then we could see the skimmer in its own lights.
It flew low over us and Veronique shouted, “I’m here! I’m here!”
I shouted, and Tuuvin shouted, too, but the skimmer didn’t seem to hear us. But then it turned and slowly curved around, the sound of it going farther away and then just hanging in the air. It got to where it had been before and came back. This time it came even lower and it dropped red lights. One. Two. Three.
Then a third time it came around and I wondered what it would do now. But this time it landed, the sound of it so loud that I could feel it as well as hear it. It was a different skimmer from the one we always saw. It was bigger, with a belly like it was pregnant. It was white and red. It settled easily on the snow. Its engines, pointed down, melted snow underneath them.
And then it sat. Lights blinked. The red lights on the ground flickered. The dogs barked.
Veronique ran towards it.
The door opened and a man called out to watch something but I didn’t understand. Veronique stopped and from where I was she was a black shape against the lights of the skimmer.
Finally a man jumped down, and then two more men and two women and they ran to Veronique.
She gestured and the lights flickered in the movements of her arms until my eyes hurt and I looked away. I couldn’t see anything around us. The offworlders’ lights made me quite nightblind.
“Janna,” Veronique called. “Tuuvin!” She waved at
us to come over. So we walked out of the dark into the relentless lights of the skimmer.
I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying in English. They asked me questions, but I just kept shaking my head. I was tired and now, finally, I wanted to cry.
“Janna,” Veronique said. “You called them. Did you call them?”
I nodded.
“How?”
“Wanji give me . . . In my head . . .” I had no idea how to explain. I pointed to my ear.
One of the women came over, and handling my head as if I were a stabros, turned it so she could push my hair out of the way and look in my ear. I still couldn’t hear very well out of that ear. Her handling wasn’t rough, but it was not something people do to each other.
She was talking and nodding, but I didn’t try to understand. The English washed over us and around us.
One of the men brought us something hot and bitter and sweet to drink. The drink was in blue plastic cups, the same color as the jackets that they all wore except for one man whose jacket was red with blue writing. Pretty things. Veronique drank hers gratefully. I made myself drink mine. Anything this black and bitter must have been medicine. Tuuvin just held his.
Then they got hand lights and we all walked over and looked at the bodies. Dogs ran from the lights, staying at the edges and slinking as if guilty of something.
“Janna,” Veronique said. “Which one is Ian? Which is my teacher?”
I had to walk between the bodies. We had laid them out so their heads all faced the schoolhouse and their feet all faced the center of the village. They were more bundles than people. I could have told her in the light, but in the dark, with the hand lights making it hard to see anything but where they were pointed, it took me a while. I found Harup by mistake. Then I found the teacher.
Veronique cried and the woman who had looked in my ear held her like she was her child. But that woman didn’t look dark like Veronique at all and I thought she was just kin because she was an offworlder, not by blood. All the offworlders were like Sckarline; kin because of where they were, not because of family.
The two men in blue jackets picked up the body of the teacher. With the body they were clumsy on the packed snow. The man holding the teacher’s head slipped and fell. Tuuvin took the teacher’s head and I took his feet. His boots were gone. His feet were as naked as my mother’s. I had wrapped him in a skin but it wasn’t very big so his feet hung out. But they were so cold they felt like meat, not like a person.
We walked right up to the door of the skimmer and I could look in. It was big inside. Hollow. It was dark in the back. I had thought it would be all lights inside and I was disappointed. There were things hanging on the walls but mostly it was empty. One of the offworld men jumped up into the skimmer and then he was not clumsy at all. He pulled the body to the back of the skimmer.
They were talking again. Tuuvin and I stood there. Tuuvin’s breath was an enormous white plume in the lights of the skimmer. I stamped my feet. The lights were bright but they were a cheat. They didn’t make you any warmer.
The offworlders wanted to go back to the bodies, so we did. “Your teachers,” Veronique said. “Where are your teachers?”
I remembered Wanji’s body. It had no face, but it was easy to tell it was her. Ayudesh’s body was still naked under the blanket I had found. The blanket was burned along one side and didn’t cover him. Where his sex had been, the frozen blood shone in the hand lights. I thought the dogs might have been at him, but I couldn’t tell.
They wanted to take Wanji’s and Ayudesh’s bodies back to the skimmer. They motioned for us to pick up Ayudesh.
“Wait,” Tuuvin said. “They shouldn’t do that.”
I squatted down.
“They are Sckarline people,” Tuuvin said.
“Their spirit is already gone,” I said.
“They won’t have anything,” he said.
“If the offworlders take them, won’t they give them offworld things?”
“They didn’t want offworld things,” Tuuvin said. “That’s why they were here.”
“But we don’t have anything to give them. At least if the offworlders give them things they’ll have something.”
Tuuvin shook his head. “Harup—” he started to say but stopped. Harup talked to spirits more than anyone. He would have known. But I didn’t know how to ask him and I didn’t think Tuuvin did either. Although I wasn’t sure. There wasn’t any drum or anything for spirit talk anyway.
The offworlders stood looking at us.
“Okay,” Tuuvin said. So I stood up and we picked up Ayudesh’s body and the two offworld men picked up Wanji’s body and we took them to the skimmer.
A dog followed us in the dark.
The man in the red jacket climbed up and went to the front of the skimmer. There were chairs there and he sat in one and talked to someone on a radio. I could remember the word for radio in English. Ayudesh used to have one until it stopped working and he didn’t get another.
My thoughts rattled through my empty head.
They put the bodies of the teachers next to the body of Veronique’s teacher. Tuuvin and I stood outside the door, leaning in to watch them. The floor of the skimmer was metal.
One of the blue jacket men brought us two blankets. The blankets were the same blue as his jacket and had a red symbol on them. A circle with words. I didn’t pay much attention to them. He brought us foil packets. Five. Ten of them.
“Food,” he said, pointing to the packets.
I nodded. “Food,” I repeated.
“Do they have guns?” Tuuvin asked harshly.
“Guns?” I asked. “You have guns?”
“No guns,” the blue jacket said. “No guns.”
I didn’t know if we were supposed to get in the skimmer or if the gifts meant to go. Veronique came over and sat down in the doorway. She hugged me. “Thank you, Janna,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
Then she got up.
“Move back,” said the red jacket, shooing us.
We trotted back away from the skimmer. Its engines fired and the ground underneath them steamed. The skimmer rose, and then the engines turned from pointing down to pointing back and it moved off. Heavy and slow at first, but then faster and faster. Higher and higher.
We blinked in the darkness, holding our gifts.
OCEANIC
Greg Egan
Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the big new names to emerge in SF in the ’90s, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic.” His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels Distress, Diaspora, and Teranesia, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. His most recent book is a new novel Schild’s Ladder. He has a Web site at http://www.netspace.netau/^gregegan/.
Here he takes us into the far-future and across the Galaxy for a powerful, evocative, and compelling study of a young boy’s coming-of-age, as that boy struggles to understand the world and his place in it, and grapples with controversial and perhaps potentially deadly issues of faith and acceptance and God’s Plan For The World, as well as diving deep into a literal ocean of mystery in search of answers to the kinds of quest
ions it’s always been dangerous to ask, in any age and on any world.
One
The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again.
In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, “Do you believe in God?”
My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn’t reply straight away. I’d never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects.
“Martin?”
“I’m awake.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Of course.” Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since he’d joined the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau before dawn. I’d often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted gratefully back to sleep.
Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen, old enough to choose for himself. My mother accepted this with diplomatic silence, but my father seemed positively proud of Daniel’s independence and strength of conviction. My own feelings were mixed. I’d grown used to swimming in my older brother’s wake, but I’d never resented it, because he’d always let me in on the view ahead: reading me passages from the books he read himself, teaching me words and phrases from the languages he studied, sketching some of the mathematics I was yet to encounter firsthand. We used to lie awake half the night, talking about the cores of stars or the hierarchy of transfinite numbers. But Daniel had told me nothing about the reasons for his conversion, and his ever-increasing piety. I didn’t know whether to feel hurt by this exclusion, or simply grateful; I could see that being Transitional was like a pale imitation of being Deep Church, but I wasn’t sure that this was such a bad thing if the wages of mediocrity included sleeping until sunrise.
The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 75