The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The sailor turned to look Malcolm’s way, and Malcolm spun to present his back. Red hair, Dutch jacket, he thought; and there is no reason for Skerrett to think me in Leiden. He took a few steps, then glanced sidelong over his shoulder. The sailor was continuing up the street, his pace unaltered.

  Malcolm’s heart was pounding against his ribs like an importunate fist. What in sweet heaven’s name was Skerrett doing in Leiden? If the knavish sailor was engaged as a sergeant of spies, as seemed plain, he did no good to enter the field of battle himself. Or had he another spy in Leiden, whom he came now to see?

  Malcolm faded into the back streets like a mouse into shadows, then took the most circuitous of routes back to the canal. The hours he would have spent studying the technology of Dutch astronomers were expended sitting in a carters’ tavern, keeping his head down and waiting for the last canal boat to leave. Malcolm watched it depart through a window, then bought passage on a cargo ship. He spent the evening lying on sacks of corn—not even ground meal, he realized with dismay—and looking at the stars in the half-clouded sky.

  When the first drops of rain spattered his face, he started awake, the dream enveloping him dispelled like a pond’s reflection shattered by a stone. What was the dream? Malcolm knew that to chase would but drive it away, while returning to the position of sleep might coax it back. Positioning himself uncomfortably, he closed his eyes and sought to recapture the instant before waking. A splotch of cold rain struck his eyelid.

  “It’s coming down now,” remarked the pilot, his voice carrying clearly over the still boat.

  “Going to wet the young scholar,” replied his companion with a snigger.

  “He should be wet. He’s spent few enough nights in the open, I’ll warrant.”

  They didn’t realize he was English, thought Malcolm with a stab of pleasure. And abruptly he had it: He had been dreaming of being Girolamo Fracastoro, of all things. What currents had pulled the unmoored boats of his mind thither?

  The second man climbed back and began dragging a tarpaulin over the sacks. Malcolm stood and helped, still wondering whether his drowsing mind had muttered wisdom or foolishness.

  “Like the big sky?” the man asked, not unfriendly. Malcolm realized that he meant the perfect unobstructed half-dome of firmament evident between towns in this tabletop country. Dark clouds were scudding across it, visible only by the absence of stars.

  Malcolm looked up, trying to imagine the heavens blown free of clouds and moonless. Such a sight would perhaps greet a sailor at sea, did he climb the topmost mast. “It’s lovely,” he said. “It makes me feel like a lens.” There, what had he meant by that?

  “Eh?” asked the man, thinking he had heard amiss.

  “It makes me feel so small,” Malcolm amended. “Like a mite beneath a great lens.” But he knew he spoke truth the first time.

  The man snorted and climbed back onto the seat, and the pilot returned him his pipe. But it’s true, Malcolm thought as he crept under the canvas. It is by lenses that researchers discern the nature of the heavens, those same lenses that disclose the microworld, which stands in relation to us as we do to the vastness above. Philosophers use the term microcosme to describe the world of human nature; but the true microcosme lies beneath the lens of the microscope: And we inhabit but an intermediate level between the great and small of the universe.

  And I am a simple lens, to be turned upon either world at the instruction of those who would know. Is that what the dream about Fracastoro meant: that he looked to both stars and tiny creatures?

  Malcolm fell asleep beneath the blanketing comfort of the tarpaulin, and woke only as they bumped against the bank to a stop. He peeked out and saw a loading dock and, beyond, the lights of a tavern: not Vrouw Kluyver’s, but the one from which he had been rousted to visit the astronomers, a ruder establishment. Journey’s end, evidently: Malcolm climbed out as the men began to unload the sacks.

  A cup of ale seemed suddenly a needful thing, air for a smothering man. Malcolm spied through the windows to confirm that Skerrett did not sit within. His nerves wrung like laundry, he at last entered the tavern, each step a recitation of his back’s aches and cricks. It was smokier than in the afternoons he had visited, and the clamor of voices was louder. Malcolm sat at the end of a bench and smiled at the carters who looked at him.

  “What will you have, stranger?” asked the barmaid as she removed empty flapkan tankards from the table.

  Malcolm might have been unknown to the evening crowd, but he wasn’t an evening’s transient. “Where is Grietje?” he asked, by way of establishing this.

  The barmaid pulled a long face. “Taken ill,” she said. “Like as not with the pox.” She grinned as Malcolm paled, and flipped the lid of a flapkan in coarse parody. “Too many kisses, you know?”

  Malcolm felt a pit open in his stomach, widening as its edges crumbled. “I am sorry to hear it,” he said numbly. He did not know what his face betrayed, could not summon concern.

  The barmaid, counting up orders from the rest of the table, asked Malcolm if he wanted one of the same. Nodding, he found his hands straying to his pockets, and set them on the table. The ale, when it came, proved to be cheap kuyte beer, harsher than the plum or honey brews he had sampled elsewhere. He drank without tasting it, and made his way through the tangle of drinkers like a sleepwalker. Outside the cold air sharpened his senses, and he noticed as he emptied his bladder that he was at least not afflicted by burning water.

  And when might that come? Malcolm imagined himself consulting one of the physicians of Delft, and shuddered. He might have studied the progression of venerall maladies at Leiden today had he known. Dreaming of being Fracastoro indeed!

  Gales of self-reproach gave way, on the walk home, to a moment of more temperate assessment. What did a tavern girl know of diagnostick? Poor Grietje might be suffering from any manner of ailment or pox: a word by which that spiteful goose might have meant anything.—But so, he told himself, might she have caught a fever or ague from her easy commerce with rogues, which she may have easily transmitted to Malcolm. If coition spread the clap or the pox, what other contagions could be contracted by the lesser embraces that accompany the act?

  In the candlelight of his room, Malcolm shamefacedly examined himself for signs of infection. Nothing; which merely displaced his anxiety with a more definite mortification: the shame of the child who has stolen fruit uncaught. Tossing in bed, Malcolm dreams of fornication with a Dutchwoman who swells alarmingly. Feeling her distended abdomen, he wonders what he has engendered; but her waters break with a rush, drenching him in a mephitic flood that swarms with tiny creatures.

  Pounding on the door, breaking the membrane of sleep. Authoritarian voices called his name, demanding admission. Malcolm kicked loose his blankets in a panic, then caught his breath and managed to shout, “One moment!” Straightening his clothing, he looked at his desk—clear of papers—then opened the door.

  A swart Dutchman, red-nosed, looked at him with mingled officiousness and curiosity. “I am bailiff for the Sheriffs of Delft,” he said, raising slightly one shoulder, which was draped with a sash. “The sheriffs require your assistance on a matter of official business. You do understand Dutch?”

  Assistance in official business? Was this some lowland euphemism for present arrest? Malcolm followed the man downstairs, past a curious Vrouw Kluyver and two brewery men carrying in the morning’s barrel. The streets were nearly empty: It was still early, not yet breakfast-time. Wondering, Malcolm hurried after the bailiff, who strode off in the direction of the sheriffs’ chambers.

  The building was a fine one, but Malcolm was led round back, to a mean outhouse at the end of the yard. The bailiff bid Malcolm stand fast and returned with a sheriff, who glowered at Malcolm before unlocking the door with an iron key. A bad smell struck them as it swung open.

  The room was small-windowed and dim, and Malcolm saw only a littered bench. “Be these an Englishman’s shoes?” the sheriff asked, h
olding up a pair of low boots.

  Bemused, Malcolm examined the pair, which smelled wet. “They appear so,” he said, reluctant to touch them.

  The sheriff grunted, then pointed behind Malcolm. “The body was found near an embankment at dawn. Though immersed, it appears not to have drowned.”

  Reluctantly Malcolm turned. Against the far wall stood a long table, a draped form atop it. Even in the poor light Malcolm could plainly recognize the human shape beneath.

  The sheriff seized a pole and pushed open a skylight overhead, admitting a thin column of light into the room. Malcolm had not moved toward the table, and with an impatient sound the sheriff stepped forward and yanked back the sheet.

  The body beneath—middle-aged, blanched blue like drained veal—seemed no Englishman that Malcolm could recognize, but rather a member of some strange race, a citizen of the republic of the dead. Though its eyes were closed, it resembled a sleeping man less than a statue would, although Malcolm could not say why. It was only as he stood over the supine figure (merely damp-haired now, but a trickle of water running from one ear) that he realized it was Pitcairn.

  “The lungs are empty,” said a new voice. Malcolm turned to see an older man enter the room. After a second he recognized him as one of Delft’s physicians, an acquaintance of Leeuwenhoeck’s. The doctor stepped up to the body and struck the chest with his fist. Malcolm jumped. “See?” asked the physician, nodding wisely. “Dead before he slid into the water.”

  “Do you recognize this body?” asked the sheriff.

  “No,” said Malcolm shakily. “Is he not from town?”

  “Never saw him in my life,” the sheriff answered. He returned to the bench and began poking among the effects.

  The physician drew off the rest of the sheet, disclosing the body’s nakedness. “No buboes,” he remarked, lifting one knee to separate the legs. “Neither pocks nor lenticulae on the skin. Had the body not been in the water, one could prove dysentery by examining the breeches.”

  Malcolm recoiled. “How do you know it was not death by natural means?” he asked.

  “Feel,” said the physician, placing a hand under the lolling jaw. “Enlargement of the lymphatic vessels denotes febrile illness.” Malcolm made no move to copy him.

  Malcolm’s head was spinning. Why had they brought him here? Had Pitcairn—impossibly in Holland; in Delft—carried papers naming him? He looked sidelong at the sheriff, who was going through the pockets of a dripping waistcoat. Despite himself, Malcolm stared. Pitcairn had been traveling in the dress of a prosperous merchant.

  The sheriff looked up, catching Malcolm’s expression. Malcolm looked away, cursing himself: Had the sheriff noted his surprise? But the Dutchman only said mildly, “Do English coats usually have so many pockets?”

  Malcolm looked back. The waistcoat, held open, contained three slits on each inner side, into which the sheriff thrust his fingers one by one. “Empty,” he said. “Now one, for money, I could understand.”

  Malcolm stepped closer. “I am not familiar with the cut of merchants’ coats,” he said. But would they hold three pairs of inner pockets, like serried gills? The sheriff matter-of-factly inverted the garment and pulled out the six puffs of lining, and Malcolm suddenly felt sick.

  “Engorgement of the spleen,” said the doctor, pressing down on Pitcairn’s pallid belly. The cadaver farted in response, prompting a laugh from the sheriff.

  “I am sorry I cannot help you,” said Malcolm, wishing desperately to be gone. “If you worry about plague in England, I only know news of London, which is yet vexed with the dysentery. But men are not so quickly afflicted as to die of it while walking out.”

  “That is true,” said the physician. “An autopsy would tell us more.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” the sheriff told him. He looked at Malcolm. “Thanks for your help. If you learn anything about missing countrymen, I want to know of it.”

  Malcolm left the building, shaken to his heels. He needed an ale, and didn’t feel that he could walk all the way back to Vrouw Kluyver’s before getting it. Standing in a tavern filled with breakfasting workmen, he drained a tankard of mead-flavored brew and found his wits softening like stewing beef while the bone of anxiety remained. He returned to the street, now filling with purposeful Dutch, and yearned for coffee.

  What in God’s name brought Pitcairn here? Malcolm worried the question like a beetle scrabbling to escape a pisspot, slipping back only to seek frantic purchase elsewhere. Grant that Skerrett was a sergeant of spies, where in this covert command stood Pitcairn? who could know neither science nor Dutch, nor possessed (Malcolm was certain) any quality save the willingness to carry out dirty jobs.

  Work lay before him, for which enlightenment must wait. In the Kluyvers’s back room Malcolm drew ink and coffee close, the backsides of old papers before him like a place-matt. Striving to focus his thoughts, he essayed a scheme for his report: a synopsis of Leeuwenhoeck’s recent studies in microscopy, with the letter’s true matter, of lenses and burning mirrors, concealed in a seeming aside. Methodically he commenced, but the repeated references to tiny organisms—in semen, pond water, man’s very bowels—awoke in Malcolm something close to horror, he knew not why. Treat it in a sentence, he thought: Devote the rest to lens-grinding and details of snowflakes.

  He threw his notes in the fire, returned to his room and clean papers, and wrote his report in the form of a letter to Mr. Oldenburgh of the Royal Society, full of praise for the peace-loving Dutch and their hospitality to English naturalists. Writing about the diertgens troubled him, but a trip downstairs for a second ale dissolved at last the breakwater of his anxiety. Feeling better, Malcolm agreed to join Heer Kluyver in a pipe. If my compatriots tar me a Dutchman, he thought giddily, let me enjoy a Dutchman’s pleasures.

  The first lungful burned, and the second made him feel as though his head were adrift. “If it weren’t for the beer and coffee, you’d be feeling a touch sick,” said Kluyver judiciously. Inhaling carefully, Malcolm felt his senses sharpen, as though the world’s soft moistness were drying. His anxieties, formless as spilling liquid, he caught within the confines of reason, a container any capable mind can wield.

  At once relaxed and alert, he returned to his letter and discoursed: upon the possibility of tiny animals swarming through raindrops and dust motes even as their larger brethren fill seas and continents; of further animalcules lying beyond the resolving power of present lenses; of animalcules that may bite Man, as wolves and fleas do, though the victim never know it. Sportively he even proposed that the bite of some tiny creatures may prove venomous like an adder’s, so their victims fall sick without comprehending the cause. Report on Leeuwenhoeck’s studies? Let Skerrett, who wanted an innocuous-seeming report, rage.

  “Commission accomplished,” he declared, tucking the papers in a pocket. He strode out into full sunlight, wondering what face Skerrett would present to him when he handed the report over. Did the sailor know that Pitcairn was dead? Would he know that Malcolm knew? Perhaps he would not appear at all, his plans exploded with the death of his confederate, all plots in disarray.

  Malcolm wondered what these plots were. He imagined that Pitcairn would be good at firing a lens-grinder’s shop, or perhaps breaking a craftsman’s fingers. Was Monckton insinuating a band of wreckers into Holland?

  Without knowing it, his steps traced a path back toward the sheriff’s hall, which he realized only when he looked up to see the bailiff, conversing before the gate with some burgher, pause to eye him curiously. Malcolm almost turned around, but then realized how odd this would look. Nodding slightly, he passed through the gate and went back to the yard, as though he had come with this intention. The door to the outbuilding was ajar, and he approached it cautiously. “Doctor?” he inquired.

  “Come in,” the physician called. Malcolm pushed the door open. A bad smell wafted out. The physician was standing over the far table, his back to the door. He turned, showing a hand red to the
elbow. “Ah, the Englishman. I hoped you’d return. Come have a look at this.”

  “I don’t think I should,” said Malcolm quaveringly. The physician turned back to his work. He recognized now the smell: blood, as in a butcher’s yard. The thought made his legs weak.

  “The spleen,” said the physician, “is a mass of disease, and filled with a foul matter, like the lees of oil.’ He continued to work, and Malcolm realized that he was expected to reply.

  “Miasmal fever,” he said. He had never worked with a medical specimen larger than a pea, but his book studies held good.

  “Indeed,” replied the physician. “An intermittent rather than a continuous fever, as your Sydenham classifies them. Rarely fatal by itself or quickly: and such splenetic ravage is the work of years. Your late countryman was weakened by the ague, but borne off by another illness. Come look at this.”

  With enormous reluctance, Malcolm took a step forward. The covering sheet was stained red, not the liquid splashes of fresh blood, but the turbid stains of paint. Pitcairn’s face was untouched, but the underside of his jaw had been expertly dissected, and his chest opened down the middle like a gutted pig’s. Beside the body lay three brownish nodes: each as small as a thumb joint and so dessicated that the ducts at their narrow ends were fraying in paper-thin layers, like an old hornet’s nest. Malcolm stared at them in horror.

  The physician noticed and dropped them in his pocket. “For my wife,” he said. “She would rather plant new bulbs than get a bouquet of tulips.” He twitched the sheet farther back. “Note the abscesses in the liver, also (I believe) the lungs. They argue dysentery, as perhaps I should. But these are chronic, not raging, ailments, and not what pushed this man down the embankment and into his grave. Had I to guess that, I would hazard what older physicians called the celestial influences, influentia coeli.”