The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Something damned hard to kill, that was certain. And so were the glims. When I returned to my house in the star-bright night, I half expected to find Bex, but she was not there. And so I rattled about for a while, powered down for an hour at dawn and rested on a living-room chair, dreaming in one part of my mind, completely alert in another. The next day, Bex still did not come, and I began to fear something had happened to her. I walked partway into Heidel, then cut off the road and stole around the outskirts, to a mound of shattered, volcanic rocks—the tailings of some early prospector’s pit—not far from the town’s edge. There I stepped up my vision and hearing, and made a long sweep of Main Street. Nothing. Far, far too quiet, even for Heidel.

  I worked out the parabolic to the Bexter Hotel, and after a small adjustment, heard Bex’s voice, then her father’s. I was too far away to make out the words, but my quantitatives gave it a positive ID. So Bex was all right, at least for the moment. I made my way back home, and put in a good day’s work making whiskey.

  The next morning—it was the quarteryear’s double dawn, with both suns rising in the east nearly together—Bex came to me. I brought her inside, and in the moted sunlight of my family’s living room, where I now took my rest, when I rested, Bex told me that the glims had taken her father.

  “He held back some old Midnight Livet down in the cellar, and didn’t deliver it when they called for room service.” Bex rubbed her left fist with her right fingers, expertly, almost mechanically, as she’d kneaded a thousand balls of bread dough. “How do they know these things? How do they know, Henry?”

  “They can see around things,” I said. “Some of them can, anyway.”

  “So they read our thoughts? What do we have left?”

  “No, no. They can’t see in there, at least I’m sure they can’t see in your old man’s McKinnonite nut lump of a brain. But they probably saw the whiskey down in the cellar, all right. A door isn’t a very solid thing for a war-ghost out of its own time and place.”

  Bex gave her hand a final squeeze, spread it out upon her lap. She stared down at the lines of her palm, then looked up at me. “If you won’t fight, then you have to tell me how to fight them,” she said. “I won’t let them kill my father.”

  “Maybe they won’t.”

  “I can’t take that chance.”

  Her eyes were blazing green, as the suns came full through the window. Her face was bright-lit and shadowed, as if by the steady coals of a fire. You have loved this woman a long time, I thought. You have to tell her something that will be of use. But what could possibly be of use against a creature that had survived—will survive—that great and final war—and so must survive now? You can’t kill the future. That’s how the old sergeants would explain battle fate to the recruits. If you are meant to be there, they’d say, then nothing can hurt you. And if you’re not, then you’ll just fade, so you might as well go out fighting.

  “You can only irritate them,” I finally said to Bex. “There’s a way to do it with the Flash. Talk to that technician, what’s his name—”

  “Jurven Dvorak.”

  “Tell Dvorak to strobe the local interrupt, fifty, sixty tetracycles. It’ll cut off all traffic, but it will be like a wasp nest to them, and they won’t want to get close enough to turn it off. Maybe they’ll leave. Dvorak better stay near the node after that too.”

  “All right,” Bex said. “Is that all?”

  “Yes,” I said. I rubbed my temples, felt the vague pain of a headache, which quickly receded as my internals rushed more blood to my scalp. “Yes, that’s it.”

  Later that day, I heard the crackle of random quantum-tunnel spray, as split, unsieved particles decided their spin, charm, and color without guidance from the world of gravity and cause. It was an angry buzz, like the hum of an insect caught between screen and windowpane, tremendously irritating to listen to for hours on end, if you were unlucky enough to be sensitive to the effect. I put up with it, hoping against hope that it would be enough to drive off the glims.

  Bex arrived in the early evening, leading her father, who was ragged and half-crazed from two days without light or water. The glims had locked him in a cleaning closet, in the hotel, where he’d sat cramped and doubled over. After the buzz started, Bex opened the lock and dragged the old man out. It was as if the glims had forgotten the whole affair.

  “Maybe,” I said. “We can hope.”

  She wanted me to put the old man up at my house, in case the glims suddenly remembered. Old Furly Bexter didn’t like the idea. He rattled on about something in McKinnon’s “Letter to the Canadians,” but I said yes, he could stay. Bex left me with her father in the shrouds of my living room.

  Some time that night, the quantum buzz stopped. And in the early morning, I saw them—five of them—stalking along the road, kicking before them the cowering, stumbling form of Jurven Dvorak. I waited for them on the porch. Furly Bexter was asleep in my parents’ bedroom. He was exhausted from his ordeal, and I expected him to stay that way for a while.

  When they came into the yard, Dvorak ran to the pump and held to the handle, as if it were a branch suspending him over a bottomless chasm. And for him it was. They’d broken his mind and given him a dream of dying. Soon to be replaced by reality, I suspected, and no pump-handle hope of salvation.

  Their leader—or the one who did the talking—was human-looking. I’d have to band out to make a full ID, and I didn’t want to give anything away for the moment. He saved me the trouble by telling me himself.

  “My name’s Marek,” he said. “Come from a D-line, not far downtime from here.”

  I nodded, squinting into the red brightness reflected off my hardpan yard.

  “We’re just here for a good time,” the human continued. “What you want to spoil that for?”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. One of Marek’s gang spat into the dryness of my dirt.

  “Go ahead and have it,” I said.

  “All right,” Marek said. He turned to Dvorak, then pulled out a weapon—not really a weapon though, for it is the tool of behind-the-lines enforcers, prison interrogators, confession extractors. It’s called an algorithmic truncheon, a trunch, in the parlance. A trunch, used at full load, will strip the myelin sheath from axons and dendrites; it will burn up a man’s nerves as if they were fuses. It is a way to kill with horrible pain. Marek walked over and touched the trunch to the leg of Dvorak, as if he were lighting a bonfire.

  The Flash technician began to shiver, and then to seethe, like a teapot coming to boil. The motion traveled up his legs, into his chest, out his arms. His neck began to writhe, as if the corded muscles were so many snakes. Then Dvorak’s brain burned, as a teapot will when all the water has run out and there is nothing but flame against hot metal. And then Dvorak screamed. He screamed for a long, long time. And then he died, crumpled and spent, on the ground in front of my house.

  “I don’t know you,” Marek said, standing over Dvorak’s body and looking up at me. “I know what you are, but I can’t get a read on who you are, and that worries me,” he said. He kicked at one of the Flash tech’s twisted arms. “But now you know me.”

  “Get off my land,” I said. I looked at him without heat. Maybe I felt nothing inside, either. That uncertainty had been my companion for a long time, my grim companion. Marek studied me for a moment. If I kept his attention, he might not look around me, look inside the house, to find his other fun, Furly Bexter, half-dead from Marek’s amusements. Marek turned to the others.

  “We’re going,” he said to them. “We’ve done what we came for.” They turned around and left by the road on which they’d come, the only road there was. After a while, I took Dvorak’s body to a low hill and dug him a grave there. I set up a sandstone marker, and since I knew Dvorak came from Catholic people, I scratched into the stone the sign of the cross. Jesus, from the Milky Way. Another glim. Hard to kill.

  It took old-man Bexter only a week or so to fully recover; I should have known by knowi
ng Bex that he was made of a tougher grit. He began to putter around the house, helping me out where he could, although I ran a tidy one-man operation, and he was more in the way than anything. Bex risked a trip out once that week. Her father again insisted he was going back into town, but Bex told him the glims were looking for him. So far, she’d managed to convince them that she had no idea where he’d gotten to.

  I was running low on food and supplies, and had to go into town the following Firstday. I picked up a good backpack load at the mercantile and some chemicals for treating the peat at the druggist, then risked a quick look-in on Bex. A sign on the desk told all that they could find her at Thredmartin’s, taking her lunch, should they want her. I walked across the street, set my load down just inside Thredmartin’s door, in the cloakroom, then passed through the entrance into the afternoon dank of the pub.

  I immediately sensed glims all around, and hunched myself in, both mentally and physically. I saw Bex in her usual corner, and walked toward her across the room. As I stepped beside a table in the pub’s middle, a glim—it was the halandana—stuck out a long, hairy leg. Almost, I tripped—and in that instant, I almost did the natural thing and cast about for some hold that was not present in the three-dimensional world—but I did not. I caught myself, came to a dead stop, then carefully walked around the glim’s outstretched leg.

  “Mind if I sit down?” I said as I reached Bex’s table. She nodded toward a free chair. She was finishing a beer, and an empty glass stood beside it. Thredmartin usually had the tables clear as soon as the last drop left a mug. Bex was drinking fast. Why? Working up her courage, perhaps.

  I lowered myself into the chair, and for a long time, neither of us said anything to the other. Bex finished her beer. Thredmartin appeared, looked curiously at the two empty mugs. Bex signaled for another, and I ordered my own whiskey.

  “How’s the ranch,” she finally asked me. Her face was flush and her lips trembled slightly. She was angry, I decided. At me, at the situation. It was understandable. Completely understandable.

  “Fine,” I said. “The ranch is fine.”

  “Good.”

  Again a long silence. Thredmartin returned with our drinks. Bex sighed, and for a moment, I thought she would speak, but she did not. Instead, she reached under the table and touched my hand. I opened my palm, and she put her hand into mine. I felt the tension in her, the bonework of her hand as she squeezed tightly. I felt her fear and worry. I felt her love.

  And then Marek came into the pub looking for her. He stalked across the room and stood in front of our table. He looked hard at me, then at Bex, and then he swept an arm across the table and sent Bex’s beer and my whiskey flying toward the wall. The beer mug broke, but I quickly reached out and caught my tumbler of scotch in midair without spilling a drop. Of course, no ordinary human could have done it.

  Bex noticed Marek looking at me strangely and spoke with a loud voice that got his attention. “What do you want? You were looking for me at the hotel?”

  “Your sign says you’re open,” Marek said in a reasonable, ugly voice. “I rang for room service. Repeatedly.”

  “Sorry,” Bex said. “Just let me settle up and I’ll be right there.”

  “Be right there now,” Marek said, pushing the table from in front of her. Again, I caught my drink, held it on a knee while I remained sitting. Bex started up from her chair and stood facing Marek. She looked him in the eyes. “I’ll be there directly,” she said.

  Without warning, Marek reached out and grabbed her by the chin. He didn’t seem to be pressing hard, but I knew he must have her in a painful grip. He pulled Bex toward him. Still, she stared him in the eyes. Slowly, I rose from my chair, setting my tumbler of whiskey down on the warm seat where I had been.

  Marek glanced over at me. Our eyes met, and at that close distance, he could plainly see the enhancements under my corneas. I could see his.

  “Let go of her,” I said.

  He did not let go of Bex.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “That you tell me what to do?”

  “I’m just a grunt, same as you,” I said. “Let go of her.”

  The halandana had risen from its chair and was soon standing behind Marek. It-she growled mean and low. A combat schematic of how to handle the situation iconed up into the corner of my vision. The halandana was a green figure, Marek was red, Bex was a faded rose. I blinked once to enlarge it. Studied it in a fractional second. Blinked again to close it down. Marek let go of Bex.

  She stumbled back, hurt and mad, rubbing her chin.

  “I don’t think we’ve got a grunt here,” Marek said, perhaps to the halandana, or to himself, but looking at me. “I think we’ve got us a genuine skyfalling space marine.”

  The halandana’s growl grew deeper and louder, filling ultra and subsonic frequencies.

  “How many systems’d you take out, skyfaller?” Marek asked. “A couple of galaxies worth?” The halandana made to advance on me, but Marek put out his hand to stop it. “Where do you get off? This ain’t nothing but small potatoes next to what you’ve done.”

  In that moment, I spread out, stretched a bit in ways that Bex could not see, but that Marek could—to some extent at least. I encompassed him, all of him, and did a thorough ID on both him and the halandana. I ran the data through some trans-d personnel files tucked into a swirl in n-space I’d never expected to access again. Marek Lambrois. Corporal of a back-line military-police platoon assigned to the local cluster in a couple of possible worlds, deserters all in a couple of others. He was aggression enhanced by trans-weblink anti-alg coding. The squad’s fighting profile was notched to the top level at all times. They were bastards who were now preprogrammed bastards. Marek was right about them being small potatoes. He and his gang were nothing but mean-ass grunts, small-time goons for some of the nonaligned contingency troops.

  “What the hell?” Marek said. He noticed my analytics, although it was too fast for him to get a good glimpse of me. But he did understand something in that moment, something it didn’t take enhancement to figure out. And in that moment, everything was changed, had I but seen. Had I but seen.

  “You’re some bigwig, ain’t you, skyfaller? Somebody that matters to the outcome,” Marek said. “This is your actual, and you don’t want to fuck yourself up-time, so you won’t fight.” He smiled crookedly. A diagonal of teeth, straight and narrow, showed whitely.

  “Don’t count on it,” I said.

  “You won’t,” he said, this time with more confidence. “I don’t know what I was worrying about! I can do anything I want here.”

  “Well,” I said. “Well.” And then I said nothing.

  “Get on over there and round me up some grub,” Marek said to Bex. “I’ll be waiting for it in room forty-five, little lady.”

  “I’d rather—”

  “Do it,” I said. The words were harsh and did not sound like my voice. But they were my words, and after a moment, I remembered the voice. It was mine. From far, far in the future. Bex gasped at their hardness, but took a step forward, moved to obey.

  “Bex,” I said, more softly. “Just get the man some food.” I turned to Marek. “If you hurt her, I don’t care about anything. Do you understand? Nothing will matter to me.”

  Marek’s smile widened into a grin. He reached over, slowly, so that I could think about it, and patted my cheek. Then he deliberately slapped me, hard. Hard enough to turn my head. Hard enough to draw a trickle of blood from my lip. It didn’t hurt very much, of course. Of course it didn’t hurt.

  “Don’t you worry, skyfaller,” he said. “I know exactly where I stand now.” He turned and left, and the halandana, its drugs unfinished on the table where it had sat, trailed out after him.

  Bex looked at me. I tried to meet her gaze, but did not. I did not look down, but stared off into Thredmartin’s darkness. She reached over and wiped the blood from my chin with her little finger.

  “I guess I’d better go,” she said.
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  I did not reply. She shook her head sadly, and walked in front of me. I kept my eyes fixed, far away from this place, this time, and her passing was a swirl of air, a red-brown swish of hair, and Bex was gone. Gone.

  They sucked down my heart

  to a little black hole.

  You cannot stab me.

  “Colonel Bone, we’ve done the prelims on sector eleven sixty-eight, and there are fifty-six class-one civilizations along with two-hundred seventy rationals in stage-one or -two development.”

  “Fifty-six. Two hundred seventy. Ah. Me.”

  “Colonel, sir, we can evac over half of them within thirty-six hours local.”

  “And have to defend them in the transcendent. Chaos neutral. Guaranteed forty percent casualties for us.”

  “Yes, sir. But what about the civs at least. We can save a few.”

  They wrote down my brain

  on a hard knot of space.

  You cannot turn me.

  “Unacceptable, soldier.”

  “Sir?”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  All dead. All those millions of dead people. But it was the end of time, and they had to die, so that they—so that we all, all in time—could live. But they didn’t know, those civilizations. Those people. It was the end of time, but you loved life all the same, and you died the same hard way as always. For nothing. It would be for nothing. Outside, the wind had kicked up. The sky was red with Ferro’s dust, and a storm was brewing for the evening. I coated my sclera with a hard and glassy membrane, and unblinking, I stalked home with my supplies through a fierce and growing wind.

  That night, on the curtains of dust and thin rain, on the heave of the storm, Bex came to my house. Her clothes were torn and her face was bruised. She said nothing, as I closed the door behind her, led her into the kitchen, and began to treat her wounds. She said nothing as her worried father sat at my kitchen table and watched, and wrung his hands, and watched because there wasn’t anything he could do.