The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Many weeks of terror and hardship passed, and my supplies grew sparse.

  Once a party of abhumans came upon me by surprise; I slew two of them with my Diskos, though it was a near thing, and I fled when the others stopped to chew their comrades.

  Once a luminous manifestation meant to wrap me in her misty arms; but the fire which spun from my weapon could do hurt to subtle substances even when there was no material substance for the blade to bite; swirled lightning dispelled part of the tension that held her cloudy fingers together, and she flew off, maimed and sobbing.

  Once a Night Hound ran at me suddenly from the darkness, and I chopped him in the neck before he could rend me; the blade of the Diskos shot sparks into the smoldering wound, and the monster’s huge limbs jerked and danced as it fell, and it could not control its jaws enough to bite me. A soft voice from the corpse called me by name and spoke words of ill to me, but I fled. I will not write down the words in this place: it is not good to heed things heard in the Night Lands.

  As I passed through the abhuman lands, they grew aware of me, and hunted me.

  I was driven far away from the Road into lands that grew ever colder. Each time I lay down to sleep, the hills between me and the Pyramid were higher. A time came when I passed beyond the sight of the Last Redoubt; even the tallest tower of the Monstruwacans was not tall enough to see into this land where I now found myself. I was beyond all maps, all reckoning.

  At first, I walked. Each score of hours my dial counted, I slept four. Because there were crevasses, I struck the ice before me with the haft of my weapon as I walked. Then I grew aware of how loudly the echo of my metallic taps floated away across the utter darkness of the icy world, and I grew very afraid.

  After this, I crawled across the ice in utter blackness. I surely crawled in circles.

  After four score more hours, about half a week of crawling, I felt a pressure in the air. It was so malign that I was certain one of the Outer Presences must be standing near. All was utter black, and I saw nothing but ghosts of light starved eyes create.

  For about an hour I crouched with my forearm bare, my hand numb without my gauntlet, and the capsule touching my lips; but the pressure against my spirit grew no greater. I heard no sound.

  So I crawled away. Over many hours I crawled and slept and crawled again, but whatever stood on the ice behind me, I could sense its power even as a blind man can feel when the door of an oven is opened across the room. I took my bearings from this, and kept the power forever behind me.

  A time came when I saw light in the distance. I went toward it, and, over very many hours, I began to sense the downward slope of the ice. The path soon became broken, and I crawled from crag to crag, from high hill to low hill of ice.

  The light grew clearer as I trudged down the mighty slope of ice, and I could see the footing well enough to walk. I put my spyglass to my eye, and scanned the horizon.

  Here I saw, looming huge and strange, the head and shoulders of the Northwest Watching Thing. The crown of its head was mingled with the clouds and smokes of the Night Lands; and to the left and right of his shoulders, like wings, I saw long, streaming shafts of pure and radiant light. This was the reflected glow of the Last Redoubt, bright in the dark air of the night world.

  I was behind the Watcher; seeing it from an angle no human person had ever seen it. The Last Redoubt was blocked from view; I was in the shadow of the monster.

  A cold awe ran through me then, as if a man from the ancient times were to wake to find himself on the side of the moon (back when there was a moon) that forever turned its face away from earth.

  I had come into the Place Where the Silent Ones Kill.

  When Hellenore’s father forbad the courting of Perithoös to go forward, they began to meet by secret, and my father’s mansions, the darkened passages of Darklairstead, were used for the rendezvous. I helped Perithoös because he asked it of me, and I felt obligated to do him a good turn, even though it troubled me. As for Hellenore, she was beautiful and I was young. She barely knew I existed, but I could deny her nothing. She had many suitors; how I envied them!

  Once, not entirely by accident, I came across where Perithoös and Hellenore sat alone in a bower before a fountain in the greenhouse down the corridor not far from the doors of my father’s officer’s country. The greenhouse was built along the stairs of Waterfall Park, downstream from where a main broke a thousand years ago. Near the top, it is a sloping land of green ferns under bright lamps, and the water bubbles white as it tumbles from stair to stair, with small ponds shining at the landings. Near the bottom, the ceiling is far away, and the lamps were dim. At the bottom landing is a statue of the Founder’s Lady, surrounded by naiads, and water poured from their ewers into a pond bright with dappled fish whose fins were fine as moth-wings.

  Through the obscuring leaves that half-hid them, I saw Perithoös sitting on the grass, his back resting on the fountain’s raised lip, and one arm around Hellenore’s bare shoulders. In his other hand, he held a little book of metal, of the kind whose pages turn themselves, and the letters shined like gems; ferns and flowering iris grew to their left and right, half-surrounding the pair in flowery walls. Her head was on his shoulder, and her dark hair was like a waterfall of darkness, clouding his neck and chest.

  In this wing of the greenhouse, many of the lamps had died a century ago, and so the air was half as bright here as elsewhere. To me, the view seemed like a cloudy day, or a sunset; but I was the only one in all mankind who knew what twilight was. How strange that, so many millions of years after it could not ever be found again, lovers still sought twilight.

  As I approached, I heard Hellenore’s soft laugh – but when she spoke, her whisper was cross. “Here he comes, just as I foresaw.”

  Perithoös whispered back, “The boy is sick for love of you, but too polite to say aloud what is in his mind.”

  “But not polite enough to stay where he is not welcome!” she scolded.

  “Hush! He hears us now.”

  I pushed aside the leafy mass of fern. Crystal drops, as small as tears, clung to the little leaves, and wetted me when I stepped forward.

  Now she was primly kneeling half a yard from him, and her elbows were in the air, for she had pulled her hair up, and, in some fashion I could not fathom, fixed it in place with a swift and single twist of her hands. The same gesture had drawn her silken sleeves (that had been falling halfway to her elbow) back up to cover her shoulders.

  Perithoös, one elbow languidly on the fountain lip, waved his book airily at me, the most casual of salutes. “Telemachos! The lad who lived a million lives before! What a surprise this would have been, eh?” And he smiled at Hellenore.

  I bowed toward her and nodded toward him. “Milady. Perithoös. Excuse me. I was just . . .”

  Hellenore favored me with one cool glance from her exotic, tip-tilted eyes, and turned her head, her slender hands still busy pinning her hair in place. If anything, her profile was more fair than her straight glance, for now she was looking down (I saw that there were amethyst-tipped hair-pins driven point-first in the soil at her knees), and the drop of her lashes gave her an aspect both pensive and demure, achingly lovely.

  Seeing himself ignored, Perithoös plucked up a fern-leaf, and reached over to tickle Hellenore’s ear. She frowned (though, clearly, she was not displeased) and made as if to stab his hand with one of her jeweled pins.

  Perithoös playfully (but swifter than the eye could see) grabbed her slender wrist with his free hand before she could stab him, and perhaps would have done more, but he saw my eyes on him, and casually released her. I wondered how he dared be so rough with a woman so refined and reserved; but she was smothering a smile, and her dark eyes danced when she looked on him.

  I said awkwardly in the silence, “I had not expected to find you here.”

  Perithoös, “By which you mean, you expected us to flee before we let ourselves be found. Come now! There is no need to be polite with me: I see
your dark thoughts. You came to gaze on Hellenore. Well, who would not? She knows it as well. How many suitors have you now, golden girl? Three hundred?”

  My heartbeat was in my face, for I was blushing. But I said merely, “I hope you see my brighter thoughts as well. Of the three of us, surely one should be polite.”

  Perithoös laughed loudly, and was about (I could see from his gesture) to tell me to go away; but Hellenore, her calm unruffled, spoke in her voice that I and I alone knew had the cooing of doves in it: “Please sit. We were reading from a new book. There are scholars in South Bay Window, on level 475, who have challenged all the schoolmen, and wish to reform the ways the young are taught.”

  I did sit, and I thought that Hellenore must have been well-bred indeed, to invite so unwelcome an intruder as I was, to consume the brief time she had to share with her young wooer.

  She passed the book to me, but I read nothing. Instead, I was staring at sketches that had been penned into the flyleaves. “Whose hand is this?” I said, my voice hoarse.

  Hellenore tilted her head, puzzled, but answered that the drawings were her own, taken from her dreams.

  “I know,” I said, my head bowed. And by the time I raised my eyes, I had remembered many strange things, things that had happened to me, but not in this life.

  They both looked so young, so achingly young, so full of the pompous folly and charming energy of youth. So inexperienced.

  Perithoös was looking at me oddly. Though I do not have his gift, I would venture that I knew his thought, then: He saw what I was thinking, but did not know how someone my age could be thinking it.

  Perithoös said, “Telemachos will be against it, no matter what the South Bay Window scholars suggest. All new things pucker up his mouth, for they are sour to his taste.”

  “Only when they are worse than the old things,” I said.

  Perithoös tossed a leaf at me: “For you, that is each time.”

  “Almost each time. Mostly, what is called ‘new’ is nothing more than old mistakes decked out in new garb.”

  “The New Learning is revolutionary and hopeful. Come! Shake off the old horrors of old dreams! The world is less hideous than we thought. These studies prove that the outside was never meant for man; do you see the implication?”

  I shook my head.

  He said happily: “It implies that our ancestors did not come from the Night Lands. We are not the last of a defeated people, no, but the first of a race destined to conquer! The Bay scholars claim that we have always dwelt in this pyramid, and deny what the old myths say. Look at the size and shape of the doors and door-handles. It was clear that men first evolved from marmosets and other creatures in the zoological gardens. Our ancestors kept other creatures who bore live young, cats and dogs and homunculi, you see, in special houses, this was back before the Second Age of Starvation. I assume our ancestors ate them to extinction.”

  I blinked at him, wondering if he had lost his mind, or if I had lost my ability to tell when he was joking.

  “‘Evolved’?”

  “By natural selection. Blind chance. We were the first animals who were of a size and stature to pass easily down these corridors and enter and exist the places here. Other creatures were too large or too small, and these were cast out in the Night Lands after many unrecorded wars of prehistory. The New Learning allows us hope to escape from the promise of universal death for our race: We need merely wait for the time when we will evolve to be suited to fit the environment outside; and we will be changed; and those horrors will no longer seem hideous to the changed brains of the creatures we shall become.”

  I said sternly: “The Old Learning speaks of such a possibility as well. It is hinted that the abhumans were once True Men, before the House of Silence altered them. The tradition of the Capsule of Release is not without roots.”

  “Prejudice! Antique parochialism! The only reason why what we think of as True Men prevailed, is because our hands were best fitted to work the controls of the lifts and valves, our eyes best adapted to the lighting conditions, and we were small enough to enter the crawlspaces if giants chased us. Those giants outside are outside because they were too big for these chambers.”

  “And if we never dwelt in any place except this pyramid, whence came the ancestress of Hellenore? Whence came Mirdath? Or does your book prove she does not exist as well?”

  He opened his mouth, glanced at Hellenore (who gave him an arch look), and closed it again. He dismissed the question with an airy wave of his hand. “Whatever might be the case here, skepticism will break down all the old rules and old ways, and leave us free. To live as we wish and love as we wish! Who could not long for such a thing?”

  “Those who know the barren places where such wishful thinking leads,” I said heavily, climbing to my feet.

  Unexpectedly, Perithoös seemed angry. He shook his finger at me. “And where does thinking like yours lead, Telemachos? Are we always to be frozen in place, living the lives our ancestors lived?”

  I did not then guess (though I should have) what provoked him. The traditional way of arranging a marriage, and so, by extension, the traditional way of doing anything, could not have had much appeal for him, not just then.

  I spoke more sternly than I should have: “We are men born in a land of eternal darkness. We grope where we cannot see clearly. Why mistrust what ancient books say? Why mistrust what our souls say? Our forefathers gave us this lamp, and the flame was lit in brighter days, when men saw further. I agree the lamp-light of such far-off lore is dim for us; but surely that proves it to be folly, not wisdom, to cast the lamp aside: for then we are blind.”

  He said: “What use is light to us, if all it shows us is images of horror?”

  I said, “There are still great deeds to be done; there will be heroes in times to come.” And I did not say aloud, but surely Perithoös saw my thought: unless this generation makes all its children to forget what heroism is.

  “Bah!” said Perithoös. His anger was hidden now, smothered somewhat beneath a show of light-heartedness. He smiled. “Will our writings be published in any other place than within these walls? Why will we do praiseworthy acts, when we know there will be nothing and no one left to sing our praises? Even you, who claims you will be born once more, will have no place left to be born into, when this redoubt falls.”

  I said, “Do not be jealous. I am not unlike you. This life could be my final one. You both have had others you forget; but this could be the first you will remember next time.”

  Perithoös looked troubled when I said this; I saw on his face how eerie my words (which seemed so normal to me) must have sounded to him.

  Hellenore said eagerly, “What do you remember of us? Were Perithoös and I – ” But then she broke off and finished haltingly, “How did the three of us know each other before?”

  I said, “You were one of Usire’s company, and lived in a strong place, a place of encampment, in a valley our telescopes no longer see, for the Watching Thing of the Northwest moved to block the view, once the House of Silence smothered the area with its influence. You, milady, were an architect, for women studied the liberal arts in those strange times; and you were possessed of the same gift you have now. In those times, you saw these ages now, and you sculpted one of the orichalcum doors before the main museum of Usire’s stronghold, and wrought the door-panels with images of things to come.”

  Perithoös smiled sourly. “What Telemachos is not willing to say is. . . .”

  I interrupted him. “Madame, I was favored by you then, though I was of high rank and you were not. I helped sculpt the other door with images of things that had been.”

  Hellenore looked embarrassed. I hoped my face did not show the shame I felt.

  I turned to Perithoös, but I continued speaking to Hellenore, though I did not look at her. “Since we are being honest and free with each other’s secrets: what Perithoös is not willing to say is, he cannot fathom why I am not jealous of your love for him, even
though he sees in my mind that I am not. He sees it, but he does not believe it. But that is the answer. Last time, he lost. This time, me. It does not mean we are not friends and always will be.”

  Hellenore was disquieted: I could see the look in her eye. “So I have not loved the same man in all ages, in every life . . .”

  She was no doubt thinking of Mirdath the Beautiful, whose own true love was constant through all time.

  I said awkwardly: “You have always loved noble men.”

  But she was looking doubtfully at Perithoös, and he was looking angrily at me. Odd that he was now angry. Surely I had said no more than what he had been about to say was in my mind. But perhaps he did not expect Hellenore to take seriously the thought that they were not eternal lovers.

  Perithoös said: “No doubt if we three are born in some remote age in the future, and find ourselves the very last left living of mankind, you will seek to do the noble deed of poisoning minds against me, and worming your way into to intimacies where you are not wanted! Is this the kind of praiseworthy and noble things you practice, Telemachos?”

  Angry answers rose to my lips, but I knew that, even if I did not say them aloud, Perithoös would see them burning in my heart. With no more than a nod, and a muttered apology (how glad I was later to have uttered it, even if they did not hear!) I spun on my heel and marched from the grove, dashing the wet ferns away from my face with awkward gestures. The scattered drops dripped down my cheeks.

  Behind me, I heard Hellenore saying, “Don’t speak ill of Telemachos!”

  Perithoös spoke in a voice of surprise. “What is this?” (which I took to be a sign that she had not had in her mind what to say before she spoke).