The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Influentia?” In England it was best known as the grippe, and killed only sometimes but spread like house-afire. Malcolm wondered what traces it might leave on a body.

  “A great killer of those weakened already by other maladies,” the physician remarked. “Your late countryman was a walking anthology of febrile illnesses, some—” he poked at the viscid spleen—“recently returned. Like a shed rotted through, it collapsed with one kick.”

  The physician pulled the sheet back over the opened body. “Is that fever not now epidemic in England?” he asked as he wiped his hands on a rag.

  “Perhaps only in London,” Malcolm answered weakly. The flap of the sheet had disturbed the air, and the stench of diseased innards blew over him. His last taste of Pitcairn.

  The physician opened the door, and Malcolm followed him with relief into the yard. “What know you of Sydenham?” the Dutchman asked, as though all lettered Englishmen must know each other.

  Malcolm was still seeking to recover the discrimination of his mental faculty, whelmed by the primacy of sight like an owl dazzled by a torch. “I read his book on fevers,” he said vaguely. He had paged through it only to see whether the author had made use of a microscope in his researches. “His energies, if I recall, were devoted to treating the living, not inquiring into the mechanisms of pestilence.”

  “I must look back into it myself.” They had reached the street, and the physician glanced at his watch, as though fain to be off, and scowled. “I do not like diseased foreigners dying in Delft and falling into our waters. My business is done, but I hope future visitors will be healthier.”

  And with a touch of his hat, he took his leave. Malcolm watched him disappear round a corner, feeling impugned by his shared nationality with Pitcairn. He wanted to rush after the physician and confide in him, explaining that the dead man was his persecutor, not countryman. I am as much Dutch as English. Spoken, he realized suddenly, with an undoubted English accent.

  Malcolm felt unsettled in mind and stomach, as though he had had too much tobacco and needed more beer, or perhaps the reverse. As the sight of Pitcairn receded from the forecourts of his consciousness, the remaining mysteries returned, like vapors expanding to fill a void. Malcolm tried to recall what he knew of Sydenham, who practiced medicine in poorer London, despite the fact that his brother, as a founder of the Protectorate, had wielded tremendous power under Cromwell—

  Realization fell on him like a roof collapsing, as though only a bulwark of refusal, holding back facts like a dike, had kept the truth at bay. A piece of it broke free and struck him, like wreckage swept by a flood, and Malcolm felt himself, awash in truth, go under.

  * * *

  What did Monckton know? He could ask Sydenham about febrile contagions, and doubtless had, but what did he know? That the grippe spread quickly, running through households and tenements like plague, while the miasmal fever afflicted only certain geographies. That smallpox ravaged the young, while dysentery proved mainly fatal among the elderly. That a man with plague could infect a city, but no one knew the particulars of contagion.

  Malcolm walked out the town gates and along a canal path, unmindful of his surroundings. A nearby windmill squealed as a quickening breeze pushed its vanes, and ducks in the pond below quacked and thrashed their wings as though feeling the water being drained. Malcolm paused, then looked across the low wet ground that pooled at the foot of the windmill. The drier ground beyond had been divided by perpendicular ditches, as though order were being imposed on the vagaries of nature.

  What did Monckton know? He knew what Leeuwenhoeck had written the Society, though not his every surmise. He had connections with scholars at Cambridge, so would know, if he inquired, that Fracastorius believed contagions to be spread by imperceptible particles, and that Marcus Varro believed that such particles were tiny creatures. Should he ask a professor of history, thought Malcolm with a numb shock, he would know the tale of how the plague reached Christendom when the Mongols besieging Caffa hurled the bodies of plague victims over the walls.

  Pitcairn the factotum came to Holland, and died of a grippe while walking the waters outside Delft. What had he been doing there? Had he been carrying something strange, the sheriff would have asked Malcolm about it. Had he delivered papers to Skerrett? Was he come to collect Malcolm’s?

  Broken glass twinkled at the edge of the embankment, the first trash that Malcolm had seen in scrubbed Delft. The sight was faintly sickening, and he imagined Pitcairn’s body floating in the water, to be seen by some early-rising workman. A carcass would spoil drinking water; he was glad that the town used the river.

  Monckton, did he care to, knew enough. Sages had suggested since antiquity that the bad air and bad water that carried contagion might harbor minute particles as the actual agents; that certain fevers were spread by their victims did not contradict this. And with the advent of Hooke’s micrographia and Leeuwenhoeck’s improved instruments, these teachings could at last be tested.

  The enormity of the realization crashed over Malcolm like a wave of nausea. Silas Monckton wanted to know whether the sources of contagion could be identified and marshaled, like weapons pressed into service. And Malcolm, of the Royal Society, had been cozened into assisting this project, on the grounds (less ignoble) of spying out Holland’s researches in a different science.

  So distracted was he that Malcolm was long minutes shifting his wonder from What did Monckton know? to Is it true? Do the diertgens thrive in the blood and humors like pond water, there to multiply and give affliction? That the venerall diseases were spread by the contact of genital mucosa, swarming with various living fluids (Malcolm winced at this), suggested as much. He wondered whether Pitcairn, drudge of the unspeakable, had been poking about the pestholes of England to contract the ague that had killed him.

  To the north the trekvaart cut a straight line across the cultivated fields: Malcolm noticed it only when he saw a canal boat cruising stately through a field of grain. A half mile away the canal crossed a stream, becoming an aqueduct notched with waste-weirs like a castle wall. Like animalcules carried through blood vessels, the boats slipped through the saturated tissues of Holland; and what they carried within them no one, at a distance, could say.

  Malcolm returned to town and went to Leeuwenhoeck’s office, where he knew the draper would be preparing sections from the lens of a cow’s-eye he had lately acquired. Malcolm presented himself, but was turned away by a young medical student, who told him brusquely that Heer Leeuwenhoeck would not be able to receive him. A spyglass, which Malcolm had lent the draper as an example of British lenscraft, was thrust into his hands, and without ceremony he was bid good day.

  And what, Malcolm thought, does this leave him? He did not care to wonder what Leeuwenhoeck knew or believed; the uncertainty of his own prospects was concern enough. He imagined being sent back to England to oversee researches into miasmic fevers on the Yorkshire moors, perhaps dying like Pitcairn in the process.

  He turned the spyglass over in his hands, wishing he could make a present of it to young Moete. A triumph of English lensmakers, who labor to perfect the refraction of light while others strive to make it bounce. Would Moete appreciate the gesture? “I would rather Reflect than prove Refractory,” he says in Malcolm’s imagination. With the smile that, Malcolm now realized, he shall never see again.

  He put the spyglass in his pocket, touching as he did so the folded letter. Harder to imagine Skerrett’s response to Malcolm’s offering. He wouldn’t read it in the twilight, assuming he could read. Why meet in darkness and seclusion, when Malcolm could pass over the letter behind a privy? The arrangement seemed decidedly sinister.

  Malcolm walked to the brewery, a white-washed structure built up against a stream, which carried for a hundred yards the smell of scorched mash. The brewers, unsurprisingly, made use of the city’s sweetest and most fast-moving water; the ceramics manufacturies made do with the others. Malcolm followed the north side of the stream out of town,
to an impoldered field so low that a river dike kept the stream in its banks. The interwaarden that lay between the water and the dike measured perhaps a hundred yards long, a fallow strip of land, probably submerged in winter, that even the enterprising Dutch could not put to use.

  Malcolm sat and smoked a pipe as he watched a rain front roll in from the sea. The windmill turning a half mile away was, he realized after a moment, the same one he had seen earlier: The field it drained ran up to the dike. Below the windmill, an Archimedean screw reached down into the pond like a giant proboscis supping at a puddle.

  A thin drizzle fell, and Malcolm hunched into his collar, willing himself not to grow soaked. Skerrett was (his vantage told him) not in the area; and Malcolm wanted to observe his arrival, so not to cede advantage to the rogue. Huddling in the open ground, he fell into a shallow doze, as midafternoon quickly deepened under the pall of cloud. The dreams that come take no coherent form: diertgens with snapping jaws; a conviction of nameless dread. Malcolm wakes in horror, neck-cricked and wet, and sees the sun settling onto the western horizon, flattening like a yolk about to break. He stood, looking around wildly for fear that Skerrett had already arrived.

  No one was on the dike, but after a moment Malcolm saw motion in the field. A small boat, no larger than those wherrymen use to carry single passengers across the Thames, was making its way down a narrow ditch toward the dike. The seated figure—Malcolm instantly recognized Skerrett—was probably invisible to anyone at ground level, a drifting shadow on the darkening plain.

  Malcolm also realized that Skerrett had certainly seen him—standing against the sky like an archer’s target. An awful pang cut through him: He had come early to anticipate the spy, but his strategy had misfired: First possession of the interwaarden betrayed one’s presence to the latecomer, who sees you search for him.

  The sun sank to a slice while Skerrett tied up his boat and climbed leisurely up the graded embankment. Even thus his gait bespoke insolence, and he did not trouble to look at Malcolm until he was ten feet away. “Early to the dance?” he asked sardonically.

  Malcolm pulled the report from his pocket. “As commissioned,” he said.

  The sailor simply held out his hand. After a moment Malcolm, flushing, took the three steps forward to give it to him. Skerett scarcely glanced at the sheets before tucking them away. “And so?” he said.

  Malcolm faced him squarely. “The Dutch do not have the capacity to construct a burning mirror,” he said solemnly.

  “Pah,” spat Skerrett. “You’re not so stupid as that. Tell me you didn’t inquire after Leeuwenhoeck’s knowledge of plagues and I’ll cut your throat right now.”

  Malcolm felt his belly tighten. “Your master wants to know whether Leeuwenhoeck’s studies of microphenomena have disclosed the agents of contagion,” he said, foolish with indignation. “Leeuwenhoeck won’t say. He’s a respectable man, and declined to speak much of experiments with human fluids. I also suspect he thought the knowledge dangerous. So you may tell Mr. Monckton that the Dutchman might share his surmise, but that natural philosophers, in England or Holland, will not turn their skills to warcraft.”

  Skerret laughed. “They don’t, do they? While you’ve been gabbling with the close-mouthed Dutch, your betters in Cambridge have solved the problem. Your report will prove no more than an addendum to the true matter.”

  Malcolm gaped. Skerrett turned to go, then glanced back contemptuously, one foot already on the downward slope. “You lightbenders can make far things look near, but you don’t actually do anything, do you? Spectacle-makers! Lens-wrights! If Leeuwenhoeck keeps quiet, so much the better for us: Englishmen make use of what they know.”

  “And is that how Pitcairn came to die?” asked Malcolm. “Taking samples from pest-houses, that a tame microscopist might assay them for your armory?” Shame for his suborned colleagues fanned the coals of Malcolm’s ire.

  “Die?” The sailor stared.

  “They found his body floating. He expired from a medley of contagions.”

  “Thomas dead!” Skerrett seemed genuinely shocked. He drew a breath and asked, “Did they find aught on his body?”

  “Nothing at all,” Malcolm said. He remembered the six empty inner pockets of Pitcairn’s waistcoat.

  “Then he died a hero. The arrows are over the wall! Whether they fire the roofs or no, more shall follow.” Fierce jubilance entered his voice.

  Malcolm stared at Skerrett. “You what?” he demanded. A second passed, as comprehension charged one like a sulphur globe and sparked comprehension in the other; then both men leaped.

  Malcolm was the slower, but his better footing saved him. He saw the knife flash in the twilight, then turned and was running. Downhill in near darkness: madness, even with the Dutch builders’ smooth inclines. He stumbled, plunged headlong, and hit the ground fast, then was rolling and on his feet without pausing to look back.

  The smell of asparagus rose about him as he tore through planted rows, then a slip on muddy ground sent him sprawling forward. He realized that he was falling into a ditch an instant before he struck water, and the cold shock cleared his mind as though the depths shone with sunlight. A man who stands up in a ditch is immediately overtaken, while one who swims underwater is invisible and soundless. Malcolm kicked, feeling his coat trail the surface for a second before he angled deeper, and brushed his hand against the shallow bottom. Ten strokes, his lungs burning, and he surfaced as quietly as he could. Angry thrashing noises reached him from some near distance, and he pushed his heels along the bottom, faceup like an otter as he drifted slowly away.

  What else floated in this water? Fevers bred in the miasma rising from stagnant waters; could such effluvia be introduced in a bottle, like holy water? Malcolm spat away the ditchwater on his lips.

  The thought that the draining waters were infected brought horror, with an aftertaste of shame. Englishmen had done this, naturalists? Those who bent light had bent their neck to the yoke of Charles, who bent his in turn to the moneyed tyrant Louis.

  The wind shifted, and the sound of the creaking windmill was suddenly louder. Shivering, Malcolm climbed from the water under the cover of noise and made for its source, invisible in the cloudy night. He did not hear pursuit, but neither stopped to listen.

  Those who warp the light can shape the world. Malcolm hadn’t believed it—what present use for those who count moons, or describe a louse’s leg?—but he did now. The realm of other worlds is far away, but the microrealm is all about us: We are it, as a foundry is its bricks. Who knows the strength of bricks shall be heeded by builders.

  The ground grew wetter as he approached the windmill, and Malcolm found himself making shallow splashes with each step. Worried that these would betray him, he broke into a run. A wooden stairway hugged the bulwark, and Malcolm reached it in a spray of long strides. He had climbed three steps when he was hit from behind.

  He crashed against the steps before him, losing his footing and kicking out (his nerves reacting faster than his mind) with one upended sole. The foot struck flesh, driving his shoulder against a step. Cold rain touched his back, and Malcolm realized that his coat had been slashed.

  He kicked again, making glancing contact. Skerrett fell atop him, and Malcolm heard a soft thunk by his ear, the unmistakable sound of a knife biting wood. In a frenzy he kicked and scrambled upward. The middle of the staircase swayed beneath him.

  A hand grabbed his foot, and Malcolm snatched at a banister, which came loose as he pulled at it. In terror he swung it round, and it knocked against bone with a thrill. The hand let go, and Malcolm scrambled over the top.

  The rain stung his spine, and Malcolm reached back to touch sticky warmth. How could he have been cut, and no pain? yet there seemed a lot of blood. Slipping in the mud, he stumbled toward the windmill, a great invisible rumbling overhead. The Archimedean screw emerged beneath the structure, disgorging into a channel that ran away from the windmill and across the plain like a highway. The water spill
ing from the screw was inaudible beneath the rain and the cavernous rumble of the gearing.

  Feeling carefully along the canal wall, Malcolm found the edge of the sluice-gate with his fingertips. The screw was turning, and uplifted water was pushing open the gate to flow through. He crawled forward several feet, until his hat brushed the cross-beam of the trestle. He was underneath the windmill, out of the rain but in total darkness.

  Fumbling with his flint and touchwood, Malcolm got his pipe lit; then drawing hard on the tobacco (he had no paper on him), he produced enough of a light to see a few inches around. As beneath any mill, the ground under the trestle was scattered with sawdust and loose splints, some not yet wet. After a minute Malcolm got a small torch smoldering, and cast wavering shadows across the low space. And with the return of light Malcolm (to his surprise) could suddenly think.

  What had Pitcairn done? Broken glass; spleen like cheese. Was Malcolm truly thinking, to think this?

  Wooden-toothed but regular as crystal, the gearing of the shaft and bevel wheel turned as steadily as a wagon wheel meeting its reflection in a puddle. Malcolm could only see the topmost flange of the screw, which revolved like the bore of a drill that dug out water instead of shavings. The yield seemed less than you could produce with a pump, yet it would in time drain a marsh.

  Sawdust was sticking to his hands, which he noticed were black with blood. How badly was he hurt? He could not twist far enough to see.

  The ground was littered with rubbish and broken bricks; Malcolm picked up the largest one and crawled over to the sluice. He lowered himself into the water—ah God, it was cold!—as the torch guttered out. The water was but three feet deep, yet the chill penetrated instantly to the bone.

  Malcolm bent and wedged the brick between the sluice-gate and its stop, preventing it from swinging shut when the upflow of water ebbed. When the screw ceased turning, the water would run down it like a cascade.