The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  What could I do to stop Cody from indulging herself with the bleb whenever I was gone from the house? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was either share her or lose her entirely.

  “Okay. I guess. If that’s the way it has to be.”

  “Great!” Cody eased out of the chair and back to her feet, with a gentle, thoughtful assist from the Aeron. “Now, where are you taking me to eat tonight?”

  I had forgotten I was still wearing the earpieces until the bleb spoke to me through the iPod again.

  “Wise choice, man. Be happy. We can love you, too.”

  FLASHMEN

  Terry Dowling

  One of the best-known and most celebrated of Australian writers in any genre, Terry Dowling made his first sale in 1982, and has since made an international reputation for himself as a writer of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. Primarily a short story writer, he is the author of the linked collections Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, and Wormwood, as well as other collections such as Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, and Blackwater Days. As editor, he also produced The Essential Ellison, and, with Van Ikin, the anthology Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF.

  In the nail-bitingly tense story that follows, he takes us along into a numinously strange transfigured landscape with a ragged band of men and women who form the last line of defense for Earth against a bizarre alien invasion – and shows us the terrible price that they have to pay to win.

  SAM WAS SITTING over a pot of Boag’s and a Number 9 at the New Automatic on the banks of the Yarra, watching the old riverside fire sculptures – the pigeon toasters – sending gouts of flame into the night sky.

  That was how Walt Senny and Sunny Jim found him, staring out at the sheets of plasma tearing the dark. Dangerous and wonderful friends to have, Walt and Sunny, and a dangerous and wonderful place to be, given what Melbourne had become – been forced to become. All the coastal axis cities.

  “Sam,” Walt Senny said, just like in the old days, as if grudging the word. He wore his long flashman coat, a genuine Singer flare, and had little hooks of color on his cheeks. They were called divas after famous women singers and each one was a death. Knowing Walt, each one was a ten-count.

  Sam returned the greeting. “Walt.”

  “Sam,” Sunny Jim said, looking splendid as usual in his dapper Rockfall crisis suit.

  “Sunny.”

  Both men carried their dueling sticks in plain sight as if it truly were ten years before and the contract shut-downs and call-backs had never happened.

  “What’s the drift?” Sam asked, falling into the old ways in spite of himself, as if the ten years were like smoke.

  “Raising a crew,” Sunny said. “Trouble out in the Landings.”

  “Someone thinks,” Walt added.

  “Flashpoint?” Sam asked, going straight to it. Major strike? Even: A new Landing?

  Walt studied the crowd, using a part of his skill few people knew about. “Not sure yet.”

  Sam almost smiled at the melodrama. “Someone?”

  “Outatowner,” Sunny replied, which meant protected sources and need to know and told Sam pretty much everything. Possibly no strike, no flashpoint at all. But official. Some other reason.

  Sam was careful not to smile, not to shake his head, just like on those long-ago, never-so-long-ago days when Sam Aitchander, Walt Senny and Sunny Jim Cosimo belonged to as good a flash crew as you were likely to find. “Bad idea right now, Sunny, Walt. The Sailmaker is still there.”

  Telling it like it was. The Landing that could reach out. Snatch and smash even the best.

  “Need to make five,” Walt Senny said, a spade on gravel. Affectation, most like, though how could you know? Sergio Leone and a hundred years of marketing departments had a lot to answer for. “Figured Angel for point and you for star again, Sam,”

  But the ten years were there. Things had changed.

  “Other business right now, Walt,” Sam said, trying to keep the promise he’d made to himself. “Not sure the Landings are the place to be.”

  Walt and Sunny expected it. They played their main card.

  “Another crew going in as well,” Sunny said, which could very well be before the fact knowing Walt and Sunny, a lie but a likelihood and a serious one, what it implied. “Punky Bannas is putting it together. The Crown Regulators ride again!”

  “Punky? Then – ”

  “Right,” Walt Senny said, his ruined voice like a shovel against a sidewalk.

  And got me, Sam thought. Punky and Maisie Day and the rest.

  But ten years. Probably not Maisie. Still, Punky Bannas liked known players no less than Sunny and Walt did. His Regulators would need to be solid, as familiar as he could get.

  “Who’s their pure?” Which was saying yes, of course. Let’s reactivate the Saltline Trimmers. Sunny even managed his lopsided grin, two, three seconds of one.

  Walt Senny knew better than to smile. “Kid named Jacko. Henna Jacko. First class.”

  “Who’s ours?” Sam asked. Should have been: who’s yours? but he slipped.

  “New kid. Thomas Gunn, if you can believe it. Thomas not Tommy. He’s prime. Talent scout found him in a doss out in Dryport.”

  “The rest,” Sam said. “I need it all.”

  Sunny gave his grin. Walt Senny spun his stick in a splendid bonham. Spectators ahhh’d. One, trying too hard, called out: “Bravo!”

  “Not here,” Walt said. “Come out to Tagger’s. Meet the crew.”

  Sam had to grin back at them. Tagger’s. All of it, just like ten years before. Ghosts out of the smoke.

  And the possibility of Maisie Day.

  Sam didn’t have to wait until Tagger’s. Sunny had borrowed a clean van from Raph Swale, and as soon as they were on the city road and he’d switched on the dampeners, Sam asked it.

  “A new Landing?”

  “Not as easy as that,” Sunny said.

  “Sailmaker’s had a kid,” Walt said from the back. “Replicated.”

  Sam was truly surprised. One hundred and eighty-six Landings across the planet and all of them pretty much stable since The Sailmaker had arrived. “Hadn’t heard.”

  Sam didn’t need to look back. Walt would be giving that look.

  “Have to know if it’s something local or a new arrival,” Sunny added, hardly necessary but these were new days. Maybe Sunny was worried that Sam would ask him to pull over and let him out. “Couldn’t risk it back in the Automatic. World Health wants known teams. Two of the best.”

  The World Health Organization in full stride again. The WHO doctors!

  “How bad?” Sam asked, remembering how the original Sailmaker had started, how it had changed everything, destroyed so many crews, discouraged the rest.

  “Nowhere near mature, but they’ve tracked fourteen towns to date, half in Europe, rest in Asia. None in the Americas this time. Another six are possible, but overlaps are still making it hard to tell.”

  “Stats?”

  “Last posting for the fourteen: 240,000 people down. Recovery teams got to the European sites, but you know how Asia can be.”

  Used to know, Sam almost said, ready with attitude. But kept it back. Nothing ever really changes, considering.

  “How far from the original?” he asked, thinking of The Sailmaker out there in the hot desert on the edge of the Amadeus Basin, so far away

  “Right near Dancing Doris. Sixty k’s outside Broken Hill.”

  “It’ll all depend on our pure!” Sam said, stating the obvious, the too obvious, but giving them the old Sam Aitchander standard. Part of him, too big a part of him really, suddenly wanted things as they were back then. Known.

  They let it be. He let it be. They drove the rest of the way to the Bendigo Gate in silence. Another time it would have been companionable and welcome. Now there was too much fear.

  A Sailmaker almost at the perimeter, Sam thought. They’re closing in.

 
Tagger’s was on the very edge of the Krackenslough, that glinting landflow from the only Landing phenomenon, globally, ever to involve striking back at civilization from inside a Landing perimeter with large-scale coarse action above and beyond the shut-down fugues. There was that single calamitous event, tearing up so much of eastern Australia, then The Sailmaker arriving eight years later. Perhaps, experts argued, The Sailmaker had caused that singular event, already on its way.

  Now this. Sailmaker Two. Sailmaker Redux, whatever you could call it, and here in Australia again, would you believe? However it fell, proof that the Landings were there: a constant in all their lives. Ongoing.

  They left the clean van in the holding yard at Becker’s, and Sam went with Walt and Sunny through the Bendigo Gate, finally made it to the large taproom of Tagger’s with the windows showing the red land and red sky before them. The forty-six Australian Landings were a day away, scattered over three hundred and forty thousand hectares, twenty days across on foot, six by WHO slow-mo ATV. The Sailmaker Redux was two days in.

  “Hi, Aitch,” Angel Fleet said, meeting them at the tap-stage. She looked older, leaner, wasted with too much sun and not enough care, but it was so good seeing her, seeing her alive and still keen, though what other careers were there really for hard-luck warriors, God’s gift crusader knights, once you’d fought against dragons? “The kid’s in the blue room swotting the manuals. Sunny said you’d do good cop on this.”

  Sam had expected it, but it was beside the point. Being at Tagger’s again overwhelmed everything. Seeing Angel, any version of Angel.

  “How have you been, Ange?”

  “Managing. Glad to have this. You, Aitch?”

  “Coming round.” He nodded to the door. “What’ve you told him?”

  “Standard run. They’re alien zones. Dangerous. We came on hard, Sunny and me. Figured bad cop was the way to go.”

  “Get much?”

  “You kidding? He glazed over two minutes in. These kids can name the flash crews up and down the spread, but the basics – forget it. Walt said leave it to you. Just like old times.”

  “Just like old times.”

  His name was Thomas Gunn and no-one called him Tommy. He was sixteen, lean, of medium height, with a good open face, pleasing enough features, the habit of tipping his head to one side when he was really listening.

  “Glad they sent you, Mr. Aitch,” he said when Sam took the other hardwood chair in the blue room. “They’re all so intense. I was hoping you’d be good cop.”

  The kid knew the procedures.

  “And why’s that, Thomas?” Though Sam knew the answer. When had it ever been different? Sam had steeled himself to give a listen-or-else, grassroots spiel: the first Landings appearing, going active, shutting down whole communities across the planet with no pattern, no apparent pattern, sending thousands, hundreds of thousands into catatonic fugue. The flash crews going in to break the signal before too many out of those thousands started dying. Getting some back. But Thomas had been playing doggo.

  “You’re – more approachable. They say.”

  “Used to be, It’s been a while.”

  “You came back. I checked that. Some keep away.”

  Sam made himself stay civil. It was how you started any working relationship.

  “You don’t reach escape velocity, you keep coming back, yes.”

  “Born to it.”

  No use denying. “Bit like that.”

  “So, which are we going to, Mr. Aitch?”

  Sam paused, studying the newbie, liking most of what he saw – the alertness so at odds with what Angel and Sunny had seen, been allowed to see, the edginess sensed. Though the Mr. Aitch got him. His shelf name. Field name. Damn Walt and Sunny. Sam endured it, just as he had so many times before.

  “Not sure going in. Not this early. Out near The Horse, I think. Not as far as The Pearl.”

  “The Horse, I really want to see that. What about The Sailmaker?”

  “We keep clear. Always. It’s a cull set-up.”

  “You think?” Thomas’s eyes were wide at the prospect.

  “Work it out. Nothing for years. Teams getting cocky. Then the Krackenslough. Eight years later The Sailmaker arrives.” Treating him like he did know.

  Thomas was nodding. “It’s like the name, isn’t it? Landings. Something has landed. Something has come in, been sent.” Talk jumping all over the place, but obvious stuff, common with any newbie.

  “Surely seems like it, Thomas.”

  “But not ships? Heard Mr. Senny say loose lips sink ships. What it sounded like. Didn’t like to bother ’im.”

  “Not as easy as that. But you’re right in a way. It’s where something has come in. Arrived. Best to think of them as nodes. Accretion points.”

  “Scusing, gov.”

  “Sampling probes, some say.”

  “Not tracking, Mr. Aitch.”

  “Places where things appear. Gather things to them.”

  “They’ll go someday, you think?” Jumping again.

  “Twenty-three years this summer. They may simply go, like you say. But something is needed now. To get us through. That’s why the scout picked you.”

  “They bombed them.”

  “They did, yes. Lots of times. They keep trying in some places, trying new things, sending troops in, poor sods. Hit squads. But it gooses them, gets them active. Regardless of what people say, World Health’s way is better. There’s the other thing to consider too. When they go active, start locking on to folks, a Landing in Australia locking onto a street, a town, maybe half a world away, you bomb them then, all the downers die, every one of them. Some sort of broadband trauma. We think we’re ahead of things there. Better it’s done gently. Flash crews are told which Landing has struck down a community somewhere, we go in, target the particular flashpoint, tweak and twist things there in little bits so the Landing never quite knows what’s happening and switches modes. It seems. That’s all we ever hope to do. Switch modes.”

  “But in those towns – whole groups of downers come back.”

  “Right. So better to keep the WHO quarantine, track which Landings become active, go in and tweak. That’s the extent of it, Thomas, though some will tell you otherwise. The WHO authorities track which communities have been targeted, counted out – ”

  “Whole communities. It’s like they’ve been assigned or something.”

  “ – then we go in, tweak and retrieve. That’s all it is, all we do. We get some back.”

  “Some die.”

  “Most don’t.”

  “And you just happen to have the power?” He was marveling, not being sarcastic. His head was tipped to the side.

  “Right. Again, why the scout picked you. Gave you all those tests.”

  “They’re revived just so they can get shut-down again some other time.”

  “Sometimes goes like that. But it all has to do with numbers. We work to cut down the thousands who die through neglect, arriving too late to help. You saw the stats.”

  The kid nodded, which could have meant anything. Angel was right. So many newbies didn’t know any of this.

  “Do I get a coat and a cane?” Thomas said, perhaps working to hide his smarts. “Like the leones wear? Learn the bonhams. Wear the divas.” Jumping again. Newbies always jumped, dealing with the excitement, the nerves; the fear. But likely dumbing down, this time.

  “You decide to stay on, sure. If it works out. That’s up to you.” As if.

  “The blue serge crisis suits.”

  Maybe the kid was just a kid after all. Sam allowed it.

  “We have them – if you want one.”

  “You don’t? None of you.”

  “People used to like the official look. Prefer this now.”

  “You mean business but you don’t like looking owned. It’s the Robin Hood. The Zorro.”

  “Borderline outlawry is what it is. We’ve gone through official. Survivors reassure more than badges sometimes.”

/>   “Go figure.”

  “Go figure.”

  “You’re a hard lot. I like that. I like all that.”

  “Merely flashmen, Thomas. We channel power. Deflect the bad kind. Break the signals from the Landings so the modes switch and people come back. Restore some of what the Landings shut down.”

  Thomas paused, just sat looking out. Such a silence boded well. It was the 70/30 again – 70 per cent action, 30 per cent thoughtful.

  “How do you?” Thomas finally asked.

  Sam shrugged. It was easy to answer the old unanswerables in a way. “No idea. Some people can. All magic bird stuff.”

  “Magic bird?”

  “Old saying. Put us in a team, the right mix, we can do it. Just can. For all we know the Landings did that too. Created an antidote system.” It was a favorite line, all that made it tolerable ultimately, the chance of being part of an auto-immune system against the bogeyman.

  “The Landings retaliate.”

  “Seems they do. No-one’s sure about any of that. May be just power readjustments. But better a hundred dead than five thousand in shutdown, yes?”

  “That’s the old 70/30. The old WHO/UN ruling!”

  Sam blinked. The kid had surprised him again. “It is. What do you think?”

  “Seems right. Seems fair. What do you think, Mr. Aitch?” Also unexpected.

  “No matter what I think. People insist on it. Would rather gamble that way than stay a zombie, maybe die through neglect when there aren’t enough carers soon enough.”

  “True death is better.”

  “They reckon.”

  “You reckon?”

  “We’re merely flashmen, Thomas. All we are. Do what we’re hired to do.”

  “You’ve been out of it ten years.”

  Here it was.

  “That’s the cafard, the funk, the downtime debt. It drains you, wastes you. Gets so you need to be away.” The words ran off his tongue.

  “But the shut-downs continued. How could you?”

  “There are always other crews. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  It was a slap-down – none of your business – but the kid accepted it. “So why now? Why this?” Why me? he didn’t say. Or: What happened to your last pure? He just needed reassurance.