The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Should I ask him?” she said.

  “No,” said Lucas. “I know that he regards you as a trusted member of his family entourage. See what he comes out with.”

  Hospital routine reclaimed the doctor; he looked at his silver watch.

  “I shall be late, like the White Rabbit,” he said. “Come.…”

  They walked hand in hand down a shady path and kissed under several chosen trees. They arranged to meet in the grove after luncheon next day and parted in a back corridor of the main building that smelled of carbolic.

  Rosalind set out for the west wing again and found it ringing with music and song. A clear tenor voice was singing together with a rich contralto, the countess herself: the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore. Besides the piano accompaniment the sounds of balalaika and mandolin could be distinguished.

  When she entered the salon she received a rapturous welcome from the Ostrov family: The countess embraced her, weeping and laughing; Marie-Louise sprang up from the piano bench. They led her up to Leonid, who was changed, as remarkably as Maud Courtney: He was clear-skinned, vigorous, with a direct gaze. He had been singing with his mother. Now Rosalind was pressed to join in and sing of the happy life of the roving gypsy with Marie-Louise thumping the keys, the countess playing her mandolin, and young Vasily the balalaika. Even the coachman had been pressed into service, striking the fender with the poker for the clang of the anvils.

  She registered, dispassionately, that the Ostrovs were the nicest, most lovable human beings that she was ever likely to meet; if she could never completely approve of them the fault lay in her own prejudices, her own upbringing. Dinner was sent up and afterward they played cards. Rosalind gave everyone the presents she had brought and began to persuade Marie-Louise to think about bedtime. Leonid called her out onto the balcony to watch the stars; she found him staring raptly at the sky above the mountains.

  “Look!” he said. “There is the Great Bear!”

  He turned to her eagerly and came to the point.

  “You can see I’m better,” he said. “A new treatment…”

  “I’m so happy for you, Leonid, and for your mother!”

  “I’m so much better we thought of sending for Irina Fedorona,” he brought out. “But the news from Serbia is unsettling.”

  Leonid had been betrothed for five years to a beautiful cousin; they had almost given up hope. Rosalind had heard of the assassination in Sarajevo but rumors of war were mixed up in her mind with riot and civil strife in Odessa, with embarrassing defeats in the Sea of Japan. She could not think of a war that interfered with Irina Fedorona’s travel plans.

  “I was right about one thing!” exclaimed Leonid. “The doctor does love you, chère Rosaline.”

  She felt herself blushing but could not put him off.

  “Perhaps he does.”

  “Has he spoken of the new treatment at all?”

  “Only to say it must be kept secret,” she said. “I am sure only the patients concerned and their immediate families…”

  “Did Dr. Tilmann say that a new and special kind of hypnosis is used?”

  “No,” said Rosalind. “Really we have not discussed—”

  He still could not let her finish; he was carried away.

  “One side effect of the treatment can be vivid dreams and visions that—that purport to explain the patient’s situation.”

  “But surely the dream theory comes from Vienna,” she said. “Lucas—the doctor has already made some use of it.”

  “I was healed by a holy man, a starets, or even a shaman,” said Leonid Ostrov, bluntly. “He came from the woods and forests of my native land.”

  “But you know it is a dream,” she said. “A metaphor…”

  “The holy man bore the features of a bear,” said Leonid, raising his head again to the constellations overhead in the clear night sky. “He spoke to me in the language of bears. He entered my mind, filled my whole being, filled me with pure joy, pure love.”

  Rosalind was momentarily filled with unreason: She felt again the sensation of euphoria that had seized her as she approached the chalet; she thought of the secret “patient” who lived there and of Sister Luise’s shining look. One of her best qualifications for work as a governess or companion was an ability to keep a straight face.

  “That is a beautiful healing dream,” she said to Leonid. “Why, you could write a poem or folktale—like your cousin, Prince Azlov.”

  Leonid burst out laughing at the very idea.

  “Poor old Kyril Mihailovitch is using his folklore to keep himself from revolutionary thoughts over there in Irkutsk or wherever he is.”

  They were called to join in the game of whist: Nothing indicated more clearly that Leonid was healed than his ability to play cards again. The countess herself was no match for her son. The doors onto the balcony were still open and the scent of the woods and the summer fields drifted in upon them. The scene imprinted itself upon Rosalind’s memory, a palimpsest of this last innocent summer.

  She had reached St. Verena’s on the thirtieth of June, 1914. Every day following her return brought Europe and the assorted Europeans gathered in the hospital closer to war. She noted carefully in her journal the affecting scenes in which patients had to be removed from care and made ready for travel. The first Russians fled before the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia and some were forced to return. Travel through the Balkan states had become too disturbed; the way back into the mother country led over Berlin.

  Rosalind was filled with unrest: She had seldom felt a strong personal preference about where she spent her life with the Ostrovs but now she wanted very badly to remain at St. Verena’s, to remain close to Lucas Tilmann. She perceived a conflict approaching: between love, yes, love at last, and duty. It was against this darkening background and in this state of internal tension that she became one of the initiates. After the fifth of July she made no more notes, no more entries at all in her journal—the equivalent of a stunned silence and a ban of absolute secrecy.

  It began with a long talk in their enchanted glade; Lucas was speaking of natural history, cosmology, the place of the Earth in the universe. Rosalind believed that he was leading up to a confession of his religious belief, or rather his lack of it, his rationalism. He was dismayed that she had not really got on to an English writer, Wells, and she was not game enough to confide that it was one of those ridiculous class things. He was surely an awfully common little man, a counter-jumper, as her mother would have said, and she did not trust his fantastic stories.

  They sat there talking until the stars came out and lamps were lit in the hospital down below. The gypsies were at the cooking place outside their caravan and the man’s wife crossed the glade with two tiny cups of warm spirit, which they obediently tossed off. Lucas began to question Rosalind about poor Prince Azlov, spending his Siberian exile in the neighborhood of Irkutsk.

  “Does he write of—cosmic events?” he asked. “Falling stars?”

  “You mean meteorites?” said Rosalind. “Yes of course. And there was an especially large one a few years ago, before I came to Russia. Kyril Mihailovitch believed there should have been a scientific expedition—but there it is. The district where it fell, the taiga, is unbearably remote.…”

  “Six years ago,” said Lucas. “Come, let us go up to the annex. My patient will be awake now.”

  He took her by the hand and they walked briskly up the path to the annex. At some point, more than halfway there, the extraordinary sensation began again; she had not imagined it. Rosalind found that she experienced it a little differently this second time because she knew that it was somehow outside herself, streaming out of the chalet like golden mist.

  “You feel the influence then,” said Lucas.

  He turned her toward him, unsmiling, and took her pulse. She might have burst out again, questioning, but he put his finger to his lips. They went up the steps and Lucas Tilmann said loudly in Russian: “I am here and I have brought my sweetheart, th
e English girl.”

  From the largest bedroom, at the back of the house, there came a curious sound. Rosalind trembled; only the grip Lucas had upon her arm and the reassuring waves of serenity and well-being kept her from crying out. She thought of Leonid’s tale: “a starets, a holy man …”

  The back bedroom was very dark and filled with a distinctive odor, the natural smell of a warm body, as a stable smelled of horses or a railway carriage of human sweat. She fixed her eyes upon the dark shape in the large carved bedstead among the tumbled featherbeds. A voice, hoarse and resonant, dropping words like stones into a mountain pool, said in Russian, “Do not be afraid.”

  Her eyes were becoming accustomed to the gloom and she was accustomed, certainly, to men who grew luxuriant hair and beards, but the large head propped on the pillows was—unusual. Then Lucas Tilmann drew back a corner of the window curtains, a ray of light penetrated the dark chamber, and Rosalind found that she had been addressed by a bear.

  “No,” continued the voice, “everyone thinks that, chère Rosaline. Come closer. Do not be afraid.”

  She could not speak but a profound curiosity, stronger than her fear, led her closer to the bed. She was, after all, the child of a medical officer and the grandchild of an explorer. Rosalind saw what could not be believed, she saw a large furred head, bearlike indeed, but without a bear’s snout. The fur—black, brown, and gold—grew very flat and soft around the large yellow eyes, thicker on the wide dewlaps; the small roundish ears twitched, all alert. She saw dark lips working under a drooping fringe of hair.

  “Give me your hand.…”

  She saw that the hand that took hers was four-fingered, covered with finest tawny fur, the long digits closing in pairs like pincers. She heard her own voice whispering urgently: “What? Where?”

  “We have evolved a formula together,” said Lucas Tilmann, at her side. “Our honored guest is the inhabitant of another world, one of the planets revolving around a distant sun.”

  In fact the whole question of provenance had been reduced to a series of simple formulae, which she heard in turn from Lucas and from the guest.

  “A civilization that has progressed in mechanical sciences.…”

  “A cosmic vessel on a first circumnavigation of the Earth, experiencing engine failure…”

  “An escape mechanism meant to propel survivors to safety in small rescue craft…”

  “I am alone,” said the guest, filling Rosalind with an aching loneliness. “My poor comrades have slid into the depths of Lake Baikal, in our little nutshell.”

  At last the significance of the meteorites, of Lake Baikal, near Irkutsk, all came to her—the traveler had come down in Siberia, whose cold wastes were separated from this place, the Altalm, by thousands of miles.

  “How did—our friend—get here?”

  She asked this clutching Lucas’s arm for support but never taking her eyes from the stranger’s face.

  “The power of the mind,” said Lucas Tilmann. “Isn’t that so, Medvekhin?”

  She was glad that the guest had been given a name, even an Earthly one; Medvekhin was one of the Russian surnames related to the word for bear. Yet she could not make much sense of the answer Lucas had given to her question, and Medvekhin understood this.

  “I persuaded the inhabitants to understand my situation and to help me.”

  There was a trace of understatement in all of Medvekhin’s explanations. Rosalind was able to picture the scenes of the journey afterward, when she was no longer in the presence of the guest. But she understood at once that the “persuasion” was inescapable: The lake fisherman and his family, the peddler-woman, the beekeeper, the exiled students, the telegraph operator—they had no choice. The sweet influence, the power of this mind, was compelling: Rosalind experienced a moral revulsion and this aroused a protest.

  “I chose self-preservation,” said Medvekhin humbly. “No other way but this ‘persuasion’ was open to me. None of these chosen helpers came to the least harm, only brought this lost one a certain distance upon its way.”

  “Right here! To your haven!” said Lucas heartily.

  “What sort of place or person were you looking for?” asked Rosalind.

  “A healer. A doctor who might understand my plight,” replied Medvekhin. “A mountain, where the air is not so rich.…”

  The odyssey had included a few minor officials, many humble folk; after three years in Siberia and almost three more in the Urals, near a telegraph station, Medvekhin came upon Kaspar, the gypsy, and his wife Marja. At one time they had traveled with a real bear, whom they loved and mourned when it died, long after its dancing days were over. More than once Medvekhin had worn poor Prince’s muzzle and cowered in the shadows of the wagon while some official glanced at him. Kaspar taught his new companion to make bearlike noises.

  Already they knew their goal: The estate personnel of a rich mill-owner in the region of Tyumen brought forth the name of the Drs. Tilmann, senior and junior, and the alpine clinic of St. Verena. It seemed the ideal place for Medvekhin, who had by now a good command of Russian and a smattering of German and English.…

  As the story was told Rosalind found another most important question and asked it at once rather than have the stranger pluck it from her mind. Lucas chuckled when she was so direct.

  “We are accustomed to distinguish between the two sexes,” she said. “The males and the females. How is this arranged among your race?”

  “A little differently,” came the reply. “It is not an out-and-out dichotomy. More choice is involved.”

  “And you, yourself?” she pursued.

  “I could be described as a neuter-worker, like a honeybee,” replied Medvekhin, “adapted for travel among the star systems. I have accepted the use of the masculine or the neuter pronoun. I have done this because of certain problems of status and dominance which I discovered adhering to the feminine pronoun.”

  Rosalind tried to keep separate in her mind all that she learned directly from this being, from Medvekhin, and things that were reported by Lucas, by Sister Luise, and by Kaspar. What remained wonderfully clear was the buoyant atmosphere of those numbered days and nights. When Lucas described the chance encounter with Maud Courtney, the marvelous consequences, she had questions: Was the effect intentional? Had Medvekhin meant to heal the young woman?

  “From a certain point in our encounter yes, of course,” replied Medvekhin. “There are close analogies between certain aspects of the human brain and the brain of the Akuine.”

  Words, concepts, pictures from the other world were not very numerous and mostly dealt with things that were like, not unlike. There was, for example, a relationship between Lucas Tilmann’s profession and the work of Medvekhin aboard the large vessel that had been lost. The Akuine race, endowed with such intense, richly orchestrated mind powers, became untuned under the stress of star voyaging. Medvekhin could have been described, like Lucas Tilmann, as an alienist.

  Rosalind was disturbed by the way the patients were made to forget their healing encounter. But this was no more than a demonstration of the way in which Medvekhin had survived—leaving behind a swathe of forgetfulness from Lake Baikal to the Alps. Now Lucas had been brought into cahoots with his guest, when he put forward the story of “a new treatment involving hypnosis.”

  “I had to try it,” said Lucas. “When I saw the improvement in Maud Courtney … She had been slipping away, approaching catatonia. Now she became well before my eyes and she remembered nothing.”

  He had brought only six patients into the presence of Medvekhin; all had been diagnosed as suffering from the constellation of disorders that was beginning to be called schizophrenie. All were healed after application of Akuine “mind power;” a couple of the patients retained some memory of the treatment. A German woman believed that in her hypnotic trance she walked through the woods and talked to the animals. Leonid Ivanovitch Ostrov had a dream encounter with a starets, a holy man, who came to him in the guise of a bear.
Rosalind never knew the name of the German woman or of the other patients besides Miss Courtney and Count Ostrov who had received this unique treatment.

  Medvekhin had no impulse to write down or dictate notes; he enquired for methods of recording information that existed, perhaps, in the distant laboratories of the Edison Company but were by no means in common use. Lucas recorded dialogues with their guest and his own conclusions in a thick black notebook, illustrated with his own sketches, which he wrote up privately, out of Medvekhin’s presence.

  He understood Rosalind’s reservations about the treatment and the silence that hedged it. But the mere existence of this being could overwhelm all human judgment. What was to be done? Men of science, civil authorities … surely they must be informed?

  They sat whispering madly in the room of the chalet furthest from the large bedroom where Medvekhin was sleeping.

  “Whatever our friend believes,” she said, reassuring Lucas, “traces of the large vessel must be found, eventually, even in the remote forests of the taiga. The matter will be out of our hands.…”

  The survivor had been scarcely able to find words to describe the nature of the explosion that marked the disintegration of his “Life Ship.” Now Lucas took Rosalind’s cold hands and confided the saddest fact of all. Medvekhin, who had been in his care for six months, might not live long. Internal injury was suspected; even mountain air did not suit the patient in the long run.

  Dr. Tilmann could not neglect his duties, these consisting more and more of seeing patients off, closing down the facilities of St. Verena’s hospital, on the eve of what came to be called The Great War. Rosalind was busy packing for the Ostrov family. Yet every day they snatched certain hours in the annex, high up among the pines. In these evening hours Medvekhin preferred to sleep. Lucas and Rosalind moved to that distant room, intended as a servant’s bedroom, and there made love. This was that last golden summer of which poets were to speak. These were the last days, a time of wonders.…