“What do we do?” I whispered hoarsely.
Beeman turned his skinless face to me. “We slay it,” he said. “Follow me.”
Lurching awkwardly on his creaking knees, he ran for a tall stack of cinderblocks patched with garbage. The movement set the watchdrone off, and as I chased behind Beeman, gunfire sent up clots of mud at my heels. Panting, I threw myself to the ground and rolled myself up into a ball. Impacting bullets powdered the cinderblocks. The drone shrieked and grumbled closer.
“Don’t be afraid,” Beeman said, making his voice loud, but still even and calm.
“We’re going to die,” I shot back. “I’ll be as afraid as I want.”
“No, that’s wrong. If you’re too afraid, you won’t be able to aim this.” He had to raise his voice even more as the gunfire intensified. I covered my head with my hands. Little jagged chunks of flying cinderblock peppered my knuckles.
“Open your eyes,” he said. “And I will make you a dragon-slayer.”
I felt his cool plastic fingers pry my hands off my head. I couldn’t fight him. Beeman wasn’t combat-grade strong, but he was still stronger than me.
“Here,” he said, putting in my hand an apple-shaped ball of something hard, wrapped in crinkly brown paper. A stiff piece of string curled from its top.
“Is this… a grenade?”
“It’s what the alchemist gave me. I’ll light it, you throw it.” He activated his thumb igniter—useful for lighting candles in restaurants, he’d told me—and leaned in toward the grenade.
“Wait! Why do I have to throw it?”
“I have a hitch in my shoulder joint,” he said. “I might miss.”
He might miss.
I might not let go of the grenade and end up blowing my hand off.
I heard something whiz by my ear. The bullets were coming through the wall.
To do this right, I’d have to take aim. That meant I had to stand up and poke my head over the wall, then lob the grenade over. The thought of exposing myself to the drone’s guns made my legs feel like water.
“I don’t think I can,” I said, hearing the tears in my voice and not caring.
Beeman didn’t argue with me. He thrust his thumb forward and lit the grenade. Sparks hissed from the fuse.
I think I screamed. I think I stood and saw the drone’s guns turn toward me, and I think the targeting lasers shined in my eyes. What I know is that the grenade was no longer in my hand, and that twisted pieces of armor plating and aluminum sensor rods and fleximesh were raining down on me, and there was a thunderous boom that knocked me back. It felt like having a baseball bat shoved down my ears.
I lay on the ground with my eyes squeezed tight, expecting to hear the clatter-clack of gunfire start up again. But, after a while, the only thing I heard was my own breathing. I opened my eyes. Beeman stood over me.
“You’re a dragon-slayer now,” he said, helping me up.
“Shit,” I said, scared and relieved and pissed at Beeman. And really proud of myself for killing the drone. I giggled. “Shit.”
Beeman plodded through the wreckage of the drone. “Get your salvage bag,” he said. “Dragon parts can be valuable.”
* * * *
Two days later, we came to the road. I had seen roads before—even Ex-Town had roads—but not like this. This road was raised above the ground by thick pillars, like some kind of monument. The constant roar of traffic sounded like wind mixed with rushing water. I didn’t need Beeman to tell me this was the Above Road. We knew about the Above Road in Ex-Town. I never thought I would see it. Just hearing the traffic, I got a strong sense of speed, of motion, of people going somewhere, of people having somewhere to go.
I looked for a way up. There was a tall fence topped with coils of razor wire spinning so fast they blurred. On the other side of it were the butchered bodies of people who’d tried to scale it anyway. So, the fence was no-go.
“One does not go over the Above Road,” Beeman declared. “One goes beneath it.”
We walked alongside the road for miles. Beeman’s camera kept clicking away, but he wouldn’t say what he was looking for. I followed him, even when he veered away from the road and headed for some dust dunes in the distance. He finally came to a stop before a metal hatch half-buried in the dunes. I helped him brush some of the dust from its waffled surface, and with a couple of yanks, we got it open. A rusted ladder plunged into darkness.
“No way,” I said. “This is too easy.”
“Wait till we’re down,” Beeman said. “See if it’s still too easy then.”
* * * *
We walked beneath the road. A greenish, witchy glow from the ceiling gave us enough light to see a few yards in front of us, but not more than that. The traffic overhead rumbled big and heavy, so much that the floor shuddered.
“If this leads to the good parts of town, shouldn’t somebody be on guard?” We’d been walking for some time and hadn’t encountered anything more than fat deadbelly lizards with pale, glowing eyes.
Beeman’s voice clicked, forming half-words, as if he wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. “There are guardians,” he said at last. “They just haven’t shown themselves yet.”
That was when I started hearing the voices. They floated and swirled in the air like a film of dish soap, forming no words that I could understand.
“Did the alchemist give you any more grenades?” I asked. But Beeman only clicked in his throat.
After a while, the voices started to sound smoky and gravelly, like old women. They were scary, but they also made me miss Mom. I wondered if she’d gotten off the sofa yet. I’d left her enough salvage to trade for a few weeks of food, so if she was just sitting there, letting herself starve, I’d be really mad. “I shouldn’t have left her,” I said.
“It’s the voices. They fish for your fears and hurts.”
“So what? I still shouldn’t have left her.”
“Once fired, the bullet cannot question its trajectory.”
I thought about that for a while, as the voices snaked around us like seeker cables.
“But I fired myself out of the gun.”
“And it’s the finest thing you ever did. This way, you won’t end up like the others. No matter what happens, you will have done something with your life. Or at least tried to. It doesn’t even matter what that something is. It’s the doing that’s important.”
I thought that sounded real nice. I didn’t care about nice words. “I don’t want my mom to starve,” I said.
“She won’t. The effects of pump don’t last more than the length of two shifts. She’ll come out of it, and she’ll see your note, and you left her well provided. Also, your mom is fat.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess that’s good.”
Beeman clicked loudly. Three figures stood a few yards ahead of us. They wore skirts of twistgrass and no shirts, revealing the bluish flesh of their swollen bellies and flat, splayed breasts. They were tattooed or painted all over their bodies, one with eyes, one with ears, one with mouths and tongues.
Beeman gave a stiff little bow. “We offer our respects, road witches.”
The one with the ear tattoos turned her body a little and leaned in toward us. Then the one with the eyes took a step closer to us, breathing in a way that made her eyes seem to open wider.
“You’ve made a mistake,” said the one with the tongues. “We’re not the witches of the road. Those gals were soft. They perished. Are they the ones who took your skin, plastic man?”
“If they are,” said Beeman, “then they also took my memory of it. I think I passed this way, but I can’t be sure. I’m never sure. Who are you ladies?”
“We’re worse things. We exact a higher price, we witches of the lost.”
“But we’re not lost,” I protested. “We’re going to the sea. We’ve smelled it. We’re going to remove fish from their environment and eat them.”
The one with the tongues laughed a little, and her laughter echoed off the
walls of the tunnel so it sounded like more than three witches laughing.
“One of you might,” she said. “But not both.”
“Well, Beeman doesn’t eat,” I noted. I thought that was pretty obvious.
But Beeman clicked. “That’s not what they mean.”
“The question,” said the tongued one, “is which of you will it be? Both will cross, but only one will pass. That is our toll.”
I got it. One of us had to die so that the other could go on. I did a lot of trading in Ex-Town, and I understood how transactions worked. They wanted a life. “We should have come with a bigger party,” I said.
Beeman clicked.
“C’mon,” I said, tugging on his arm. “We’ll find another way around.”
But Beeman wouldn’t budge. And what he did next, he did so fast I couldn’t stop him. He pulled up his T-shirt and popped open the access hatch in the middle of his chest and pulled out his power supply. It was just a small black box with a few trailing cables. He let it fall to the ground and then sank to his knees. If hard plastic could deflate, it would be like that.
Beeman was such an idiot. I picked up his power supply and blew grime off the connectors so I could plug it back in without doing him any more damage. But hands scuttled from the shadows. Maybe they were spiders, or crabs, or factory graspers. But they looked liked hands to me. I screamed when they crawled up my legs and arms, and I thrashed and kicked and spat, but I didn’t let go of Beeman’s power supply. Not until their fingers forced mine open, and they stole Beeman’s life.
They ran off with their prize and scattered. I chased after them, but I couldn’t tell which one had the power supply, and I was running around in circles and cussing and crying until I lost the hands in the darkness.
“Oh, shit, Beeman.” I wanted to kick his body. “Fucking shit.”
He had a small reserve power battery. It was only supposed to keep his clock going and prevent him from having to do a full start-up when his power supply was being recharged. I think that’s the only reason his eyes didn’t go dark right away. It’s the only reason he was able to say to me, before his final click, “Go somewhere. Do something.”
I looked up toward the witches. Maybe I could negotiate something. But they weren’t there anymore. They’d vanished along with the thieving hands.
I tried to lift Beeman, but he was dead weight. Then I dragged him, his plastic skin scraping on rocks and debris. It was slow going, and I knew it was really hopeless, because we’d had to go down a ladder to get here, and I figured we’d have to go up a ladder to get out, and I didn’t know how I’d manage both of us.
It took time to get there, but it turned out I was right about the ladder.
I hid him under stones. Not garbage, but clean stones, the cleanest I could find, that I arranged over his body in a mound. With a screwdriver, I scratched the letter B on the biggest one, but I turned it so that the B was facedown, because I didn’t want anybody knowing there was something very important under there.
Then I did what Beeman told me. I flew like a bullet fired from a gun.
* * * *
He was wrong about the beach. The sand was white like bone, and there was glass glittering in it and all sorts of barrels and cans marked with signs—circles, triangles, stink lines, skulls and crossbones—and a lot of the containers were leaking. But there was other stuff, too, lots of discards worth collecting, some of it better than the stuff I found in Ex-Town. So, I did what I knew how to do. I scavenged.
Camps of people lived in shacks and in gaps under piles of rocks, and I learned to identify the ones to trade with and the ones to avoid, and after a couple of weeks, nothing about the beach made me think I couldn’t live there.
The black-green ocean stretched all the way out to the foot of the sky. It was always in motion, shimmering, reaching, spreading, crashing against the shore with rippling suds. Sometimes I crawled out on the rocks and lay on my belly, looking down into the water. Silver ghosts darted beneath me, and even though I’d made a good spear, I decided not to remove the fish from their environment. Not unless I got really hungry.
I did eat some crabs I found in the sand, because I felt they deserved it. They reminded me of the witches’ hands.
Every evening, the sun went down, all big and low over the water. It was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen, maybe the prettiest thing in the world.
I kept moving.
Enough time passed that I lost track of time, so I don’t know how long I’d been living on the beach when I spotted the city out there in the water. It was a clear day, I’d never been able to see farther, and I saw the sparkling towers near the horizon. It looked like a city of orange glass, the same color as the setting sun. Maybe when Beeman was telling me about the sea, that’s what he was remembering.
I didn’t know how to swim, but maybe I could sail out there. And I was kind of collecting driftwood and plastic siding and other things I figured I could use to build a raft when I found a black box, half-buried in the sand. I knew what it was before fully excavating it.
I weighed it in my hands and brushed sand off the connectors.
In the end, Beeman wasn’t my spirit guide, or some wizard pushing and pulling me through a knightly quest. He was a robot with a broken brain, and I couldn’t know for sure why he’d convinced me to take a journey with him, or why he’d given up his life so that I could finish it. It only made sense if you took into account his broken hardware and bad code. Or, if you figured that we were friends.
Before me, the golden city on the water glimmered. And far behind me, Beeman, or whatever was left of him, lay dead on the road beneath the road.
I waited for the sun to set again, and then I headed off the beach, hoping that the heart in my hands was a good one.
<
* * * *
GOOD MOUNTAIN
Robert Reed
Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling many stories to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And—also like Baxter and Stableford—he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice.” “Brother Perfect.” “Decency.” “Savior.” “The Remoras.” “Chrysalis.” “Whiptail.” “The Utility Man.” “Marrow.” “Birth Day.” “Blind.” “The Toad of Heaven.” “Stride.” “The Shape of Everything.” “Guest of Honor.” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the eighties and nineties. Many of his best stories were assembled in his first collection, The Dragons of Springplace. Nor is he nonprolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the eighties, including The Leeshore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, and Sister Alice. His most recent books include two chapbook novellas, Mere and Flavors of My Genius, a collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and a novel, The Well of Stars. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Reed has visited the far future in his Sister Alice stories and in his sequence of stories about the Great Ship, as well as in stories such as “Whiptail” and “Marrow,” but here he takes us deeper into the future than he ever has before, to a world whose origin is lost in the labyrinth of time, a world where, as a group of randomly thrown together travelers is about to learn, everything is about to change—and not for the better.
* * * *
A DOT ON OLD PAPER
“World’s edge. Approaching now… World’s Edge
!”
The worm’s caretaker was an elderly fellow named Brace. Standing in the middle of the long intestinal tract, he wore a dark gray uniform, patched but scrupulously clean, soft-soled boots and a breathing mask that rode on his hip. Strong hands held an angelwood bucket filled with a thick, sour-smelling white salve. His name was embossed above his shirt pocket, preceded by his rank, which was Master. Calling out with a deep voice, Master Brace explained to the several dozen passengers, “From this station, you may find your connecting trails to Hammer and Mister Low and Green Island. If World’s Edge happens to be your destination, good luck to you, and please, collect your belongings before following the signs to the security checkpoints. And if you intend to stay with this splendid worm, that means Left-of-Left will be our next stop. And Port of Krauss will be our last.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 58