The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection
Page 62
“Huh,” Max said, looking at their tiny bunker, their too small beds, their emaciated bodies. “And here I always thought of it as the century of poison gas and nuclear bombs, the century of concentration camps and gulags, the century of murder, mass produced.”
“It is that too,” the old Adarean said after a pause. “But we have a choice.”
“Doesn’t feel like a choice to me,” Max said. “So you’re saying you’re here, basically, because we’re a big historical amusement park?”
The tall, green-veined Adarean grunted.
“That’s not —” the old man said.
“Him,” Max interrupted, pointing to the tall one. “Isn’t he the one who said we all drown eventually? That’s not by choice and it’s not amusing.”
“I didn’t say that,” the green Adarean said coldly.
The old Adarean reached out, squeezed the other man’s leg. “We take turns holding each other up so that we don’t drown too soon.”
“If you say so,” Max said.
The old man shifted, picked up something beside him in the dark. “Here,” he said, offering it to Max. “You’ve been swimming for a month. I won my bet. I figure you deserve one of the two cups of soup.”
Max took it in both hands, held it up to his face. It smelled like onion, potato, and dill.
The old Adarean reached out, touched the back of Max’s hand, then went back to his own bunk. One by one, the Adareans stood up, each one touching him, a squeeze on the shoulder, a light clap on the back, before returning to their own space. The green-skinned Adarean was the last to rise, and the only one not to touch Max.
“What I said was, you’re a drowner,” he said. “I still think you’re a drowner.”
When he turned away, Max said, “What’s your name?”
He stopped, his body angled half towards Max, half away. “We don’t have individual names any more. We’re trash, pig-men, monsters. Don’t you listen?”
“Did you ever hear the saying that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it?”
The Adarean stopped. “Yes.”
“Those who do study history are doomed to see the repetition coming.”
The Adarean smirked, then walked back to his bed. Max leaned his mouth over the rim of the cup, resting it there for a long time, savoring the smell, without taking a sip. Outside, the wind kicked up. Sand skittered like thousands of tiny feet over the metal roof of their hut.
Nothing had changed, Max told himself. He needed to be patient, conserve his energy, wait for a chance to improve his situation, then take it. When the chance came, he could do what Vasily did, do what he had to do, and he would have water, extra food, a pair of boots.
He sipped the soup slowly, so that it seemed to last all night, and when it was done, for the first time in a month, his belly felt almost full.
The weeks passed until Turning Day. In the meadow, the hundreds of acres of sludge on the hillsides became dirt faster when it was turned and mixed with sand. The weeds, the volunteer plants, were uprooted and mixed with the compost.
Every part of the camp smelled like decay. From the fecal stench of the waste pits on the edge of the camps, to the rotting vegetable stench of the meadow, to the smell of rust in their beds and bunkers and bowls, to the slow decay of their own bodies. But Turning Day was the worst; on Turning Day the men became one with the decay. The camp’s full count of penitents waded out into the morass, a single long line of misery, churning the decomposing soup with their bare hands. The minister sat beneath an umbrella, occasionally pausing to wipe his goggles, as he described his plans for terraced gardens and a vast expanse of fields.
“What we are going to do here,” the minister shouted, “is cover a square kilometer with topsoil, to a depth of a meter. It’ll be amazing, the biggest, most beautiful city on the planet, right here, right on this spot. General Kostigan has told me personally what great work we’re accomplishing here.”
He went on and on that way, until it was four square kilometers and a new Garden of Eden. But all Max heard was the name of Kostigan, who would be happy to kill him if he ever got the chance. He kept his head down, as if it would avert Kostigan’s gaze, and turned over armful after armful of wet, stinking sludge, until he was caked with it and the stench soaked into his skin and became part of him.
In books and vids, terraforming was always portrayed as some heroic effort, the conclusion foregone. But this is how it was really done, with sludge and sweat and aching backs. Meanwhile, it was hard not to be aware that planets, like men, were incredibly resistant to change. All the colonists of Jesusalem could die tomorrow, and the planet would hardly notice. Year by year it would erase their effort and crawl back toward the course it had previously chosen.
“Look,” whispered a voice next to Max, pulling him from his reverie. He kept his head ducked, plunging his hand back into the muck.
“Look,” the voice repeated. It was the big, green-skinned Adarean.
Max glanced at the camp guards first. The minister, taking a break from his sermon, stood and fanned himself with his hat. The guards were clustered around a keg of water. He turned his head the other way to glance at the Adarean.
The tall man pushed his arms down into the muck, turning over a mixture of greens and weeds. When his hand came out it held a small, yellow potato. He ripped the greens off and tucked the potato inside his shirt, showing Max how to do the same. “We planted them,” he whispered, with a nod of his head toward an outcrop of boulders on the hillside. “Between here and those rocks.”
Max realized that he may have already felt a couple of the potatoes, but dumped them, thinking they were stones. He returned to the sludge with interest. The first potato he found sat in his hand like a lump of gold. With furtive glances to either side, he pretended to wipe his nose, and slipped it into his mouth. When he bit into it one of his teeth came loose, so he chewed slowly, carefully, until every bit was gone. It tasted like the mud, and the raw starch filmed his mouth. But it was glorious. Meredith used to cook potatoes in olive oil with a pinch of salt and some parsley; when he tried to remember what their kitchen looked like, it was just a blur.
A rock bounced off his shoulder. A guard standing clear of the muck shouted at him. “Back to work!”
He bent over at once and began turning the sludge. “I’m swimming,” he mumbled as he dog-paddled the knee-deep sludge. “I’m still swimming.”
Although he wasn’t sure where he was swimming to anymore. That’s when he knew he might be sinking.
They woke up to winds so strong that sand whistled through every crack in their bunker, forming tiny dunes in the corners and around the legs of their cots.
On the way to roll call, beneath the black roil of sky, Max saw three escapees laid out by the waste pits, one of them new since the day before, and all of them from prayer blocks with easier work than his. He wondered how long it would be until he ended up there too. He’d lost two teeth and a third was loose; what little body fat he had before was gone, and his knee buckled every time he put weight on it wrong; the sores on his back wept constantly.
They had to hold their hats on their heads while they stood in line, and the gusts were so powerful that they picked men up off their feet and tumbled them into the fence. Max was lucky he had the bigger Adareans for a windbreak. The camp second shouted something about an off-season hurricane, too far north, gave them all a second serving of breakfast and told them to save it, then dismissed them back to their prayer blocks for the duration.
By the time the rain pelted the roof like an avalanche of gravel, they were sitting around the small room in the dark, filling their cups from drips in the roof. It was enough not to be working for a day.
Max looked at the tall green Adarean and said, “It feels like Christmas, only we need something to celebrate with.”
“I see sand and water,” he said. “If we mix them together we could have mud.”
“No, outside,” Max said. “While
the storm’s at its worst, before anyone else thinks of it.”
They squeezed out the door, the wind banging it shut behind them, and, with Max clinging to the bigger man, made their way over to the camp kitchen. No one could see them in the deluge – they could barely see a few feet in front of their own faces.
Max wiped the water from his eyes and peered into the darkened room. “Be quick,” he shouted above the roar of the storm. “Grab anything you can carry.”
While the Adarean gathered up loaves of pumpkin bread and raw vegetables, Max used a can to smash the lock off a side closet. “Bullseye.”
“What is it?” the Adarean asked.
“I never yet knew a military officer who, given access to potatoes and time, would not construct a still.” The door banged behind them and they jumped, but it was only a trick of the wind. Max tucked bottles in his shirt until it was full, took another in his hand. “Let’s go. By lunch time, the minister will think to place a guard here.”
When they shoved their way back into the bunker, soaked like a pair of muddy sponges, they were greeted with concern, then celebration. While the Adareans passed around the first loaf of bread, Max opened a bottle and swallowed what was simultaneously the worst and sweetest alcohol he’d ever tasted.
After that, Max listened to hours of conversation, long talks about people and places back home. The tall green Adarean was a historian, the grey-haired old man some kind of freelance diplomat, the brown-skinned one a collectibles trader. Everyone had a job and a family they were concerned about. That discussion turned to plans for escape, ultimately declared impractical because there were too many men to kill – never mind the moral objections to killing, and no offence intended, Max – or too far to go once they escaped, or no one to help them once they got where they were going.
“We could always just build his garden for him,” the collectibles trader said of the minister, and that led to calculations – four square kilometers to a depth of a meter was how many cubic meters, with half a cubic meter of weed per basket load.
“How many men in camp?” the diplomat asked.
“Total or just prisoners?” the trader wanted to know.
“Penitents,” the diplomat said.
And while several offered a number, Max said, “You mean penitents and pig-men.” Which was greeted with silence, then a burst of laughter, and a discussion of whether Max counted as a penitent or pig-man, until the old man picked up the math again by asking, “What’s the most loads you’ve ever carried in a day?”
“Seventeen,” said the green Adarean, the historian, and several others thought that was too many, although one other remembered that day, and then, after an argument on maximum loads versus average, they were dividing the total number of cubic yards by the number of trips per man to get a minimum number of days, no, years counted in decades, to reach the goal.
“It’s too many,” the historian said to the final number. “I’ve been here almost a year and it would be too many if it were one day more.”
The diplomat said something encouraging but the comment had turned the mood dark for a minute and everyone fell silent. They all sat on their beds because the floor of the bunker was flooded. Outside the wind was so strong that rain sprayed through every crack and seam, and for a moment it felt that everywhere was water and the room would fill up to the ceiling with it. Max poured the dregs of a bottle down his throat.
“You remind me of Drozhin,” he said, because the silence was unbearable and it was the only thing he could think to say. That provoked outrage and questions and laughter and disbelief, and, dizzy with drink, dizzy because the aches in his body were momentarily numbed to the point he could bear them, Max heard himself saying, “No, no, I know him personally, he’s just like that.”
The diplomat took the bottle from Max, found it empty, and opened another. “But I thought you were a political officer. You worked in Education for Mallove, right?”
“This is way before that,” Max said, leaning forward, resting on his knees. “This is back when the revolution was still a civil war. Drozhin had been Minister of Police before this purge, and when they tried to kill him, he went underground and started organizing the army that overthrew the government.” It was more complicated than that, Drozhin let other people be the leaders for one thing, but those details were beside the point. “I was a teenager, but looked much younger, so I ended up being one of the first men on his staff right after the purge. He used me as a spy, since I could get in and out of the cities easily.”
“Why’d you hook up with Drozhin?” the collectibles dealer interrupted.
Max shrugged. “It was a civil war. We all had to pick sides. Being on Drozhin’s side probably saved my life.” He took a loaf of bread that was passed to him, broke off a bite, and handed it on. “Anyway, Drozhin was just like you. He was always doing what he called victory math. How many recruits to overrun a certain post, how much fabric to make coats for all his men, how many generations until we could get back to the stars. He had his hand in everything, always adding and readding to get the result he wanted. He even . . .”
“Even what?”
A lump of bread stuck in his throat. Max swallowed. It was no secret, the things Drozhin had done. “He even calculated the number of Adareans he needed to kill to unite the people against a common enemy instead of fighting each other. He had a theory of proportions, that the more gruesome the murders, the fewer he would need to tip the scales.”
This produced the same silence as before. The Adareans stared at him in the dark. They had human shapes but their faces were genderless silhouettes and their limbs, in shadow, looked like weapons. Finally, the historian said, “Drozhin wanted to go back to space? After all your people did, to preserve their technologically primitive way of life here?”
“The first space flights were in the twentieth century. Drozhin always said we had betrayed the stars by staying here.” The roar of the storm, loud enough to smash all the buildings and compartments into one, suddenly disturbed Max, so he kept talking. “Anyway, and this is no shit, I won my wife from Drozhin in a card game.”
There were sounds of disbelief, a bit muted, and a curious tang to the room’s stale air. “Her name’s Meredith,” Max said. “Means guardian of the sea. I loved her smile, the way it made her cheeks dimple. Still love that. Her father had been one of Drozhin’s officers in the ministry – he was killed at New Hope during the purge, so Drozhin promised to be like a father to her. We wanted to marry but Drozhin didn’t approve, since I wasn’t an officer and wasn’t good enough for her. This went on for a while; it doesn’t seem like long now, but back then we expected to be dead any day, and a month felt like forever.” He reached for the bottle, took another drink.
“We were playing poker one night – there’d been a setback, and for a couple weeks the whole revolution amounted to six of us stuck in a basement at a farmhouse on the escarpment – so we were playing poker one night, during a storm like this one, when we couldn’t do anything else, and I was beating Drozhin badly, beating everyone, but he was the one that mattered. Drozhin hated to lose, hated it more than anything, but he was out of money. He didn’t have anything else I wanted, so I asked him for a commission, which meant I could marry Meredith, against everything I had, all in. He couldn’t resist because he never gave up. I won with a straight.”
The old man chuckled. “So you got your commission.”
“Sort of,” Max said, wiggling the loose tooth with his tongue. “Drozhin said I could have the commission, like he had promised me, but I had to pay for it. ‘To support the revolution.’“ He paused for effect. “He charged me the exact amount I’d won.”
There was enough laughter at that to break the mood of despair and jumpstart discussion among the other Adareans. Max left out the part that he was unwilling to pay that price, but Meredith hounded him until he finally gave in.
The big green Adarean, the historian, said, “You still know Drozhin?”
“Too bad.” He reached out and squeezed Max’s shoulder.
Outside, the noise stopped abruptly as the eye of the storm passed overhead. The camp was so small that any loud sound in one of the blocks carried to another, so suddenly distant conversations came through cracks widened by the wind. One of the Adareans started to sing a silly verse about a talking toaster and its pet dog, and others took up the song. Other bunkers began to sing back, trying to drown out the Adarean melody with religious hymns and patriotic songs.
Max was no singer, and neither was the historian. Both sat there, sombre if not sober. “It’d be good if you still had some friends from the revolution who could help us if we broke out of here,” the Adarean said.
“Yeah, it would be,” Max admitted. He tilted his head up at the roof, the room. “Do you know why they call these prayer blocks?”
“No. Why?”
“Because when you’re here, all your prayers to God are blocked.”
After the last of the storm passed, they emerged from their blocks to find the tower down and sections of fence ripped away. The waste pits had flooded and overflowed, scattering bones and pieces of bodies with the outhouse products across the roll call ground. One of the guards ran the camp’s sole bulldozer, pushing waste back into the pits while the minister marched the rest of them up to the meadow.
All the compost had been washed from the hillsides, mixing with sand and stone until it choked the stream where it flowed between the hills. If they didn’t clear it out, the stream would back up until the bowl filled with water and the camp was threatened.
Under the guns of the guards, they waded waist-deep in the sludge, using their bodies as dredges, pushing the tangled mats back up the slopes. They scooped the sand-sludge mix with their bare arms until Max’s skin was rubbed rash-raw. And then, when the other men were given a break, the Adareans were told to load up their baskets with rocks pulled from the blocked culvert and carry them down to the jetty.