Future War

by Gardner Dozois

  “And you an arm, Quillin.”

  “Stalemate, then.”

  “Not quite. See, which of us is more likely to survive? Me inside, with all the medical systems aboard this ship, or you all on your lonesome outside? Frankly, I don’t think it’s any contest.”

  Her eyes opened wider. Quillin gave a shriek of anger and entered one final furious wrestling match with the bayonet.

  I managed to laugh. “As for your question, it’s true, every word of it.” Then, with all the calm I could muster, I thumbed the control. “Pisser, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  I made it, of course.

  Several minutes after the closing of the door, demons had lathered a protective cocoon around the stump and stomach wound. They allowed me no pain—only a muggy sense of detachment. Enough of my mind remained sharp to think about my escape—problematic given that the ship still wasn’t fixed.

  Eventually I remembered the evac pods.

  They were made to kick away from the ship fast, if some quackdrive system went on the fritz. They had thrusters for that; nothing fancy, but here they’d serve another purpose. They’d boost me from the splinter, punch me out of its grav well.

  So I did it.

  Snuggled into a pod and blew out of the wreck, feeling the gee-load even within the thick. It didn’t last long. On the evac pod’s cam I watched the splinter drop away until it was pebble-sized. The main body of the kinetic attack was hitting it by then, impacts every ten or so seconds. After a minute of that the splinter just came apart. Afterwards, there was only a sooty veil where it had been, and then only the Swirl.

  I hoped the Queen had made it. I guess it was within her power to transmit what counted of herself out to sisters in the halo. If so, there was a chance for Yarrow as well. I’d find out eventually. Afterwards, I used the pod’s remaining fuel to inject into a slow elliptical orbit, one that would graze the halo in a mere 50 or 60 years.

  That didn’t bother me. I wanted to close my eyes and let the thick nurse me whole again—and sleep an awful long time.

  A DRY, QUIET WAR

  by Tony Daniel

  One of the fastest-rising new stars of the ’90s, Tony Daniel grew up in Alabama, lived for a while on Vashon Island in Washington State, and in recent years, in the best tradition of the young Bohemian artist, has been restlessly on the move—from Vashon Island to Europe, from Europe to New York City, from New York City to Alabama, and, most recently, back to New York City again. He attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 1989, and since then has become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as to markets such as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, SF Age, Universe, Full Spectrum, and elsewhere.

  Like many writers of his generation, Tony Daniel first made an impression on the field with his short fiction. He made his first sale, to Asimov’s, in 1990 with “The Passage of Night Trains,” and followed it up with a long string of well-received stories both there and elsewhere throughout the first few years of the ’90s, stories such as “The Careful Man Goes West,” “Sun So Hot I Froze To Death,” “Prism Tree,” “Death of Reason,” “Candle,” “No Love in All of Dwingeloo,” “The Joy of the Sidereal Long-Distance Runner,” “The Robot’s Twilight Companion,” and many others. His story “Life on the Moon” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1996, and won the Asimov’s Science Fiction Readers Award poll. His first novel, Warpath, was released simultaneously in America and England in 1993, and he subsequently won $2000 and the T. Morris Hackney Award for his as-yet-unpublished mountain-climbing novel Ascension. In 1997, he published a major new novel, Earthling, which has gotten enthusiastic reviews everywhere from Interzone to The New York Times.

  In “A Dry, Quiet War,” he spins a colorful and exotic story of a battle-weary veteran who returns from a bewilderingly strange high-tech future war only to face his greatest and most sinister challenge right at home . . .

  * * *

  I cannot tell you what it meant to me to see the two suns of Ferro set behind the dry mountain east of my home. I had been away twelve billion years. I passed my cabin to the pump well, and taking a metal cup from where it hung from a set-pin, I worked the handle three times. At first it creaked, and I believed it was rusted tight, but then it loosened, and within fifteen pulls, I had a cup of water.

  Someone had kept the pump up. Someone had seen to the house and the land while I was away at the war. For me, it had been fifteen years; I wasn’t sure how long it had been for Ferro. The water was tinged red and tasted of iron. Good. I drank it down in a long draft, then put the cup back onto its hanger. When the big sun, Hemingway, set, a slight breeze kicked up. Then Fitzgerald went down and a cold, cloudless night spanked down onto the plateau. I shivered a little, adjusted my internals, and stood motionless, waiting for the last of twilight to pass, and the stars—my stars—to come out. Steiner, the planet that is Ferro’s evening star, was the first to emerge, low in the west, methane blue. Then the constellations. Ngal. Gilgamesh. The Big Snake, half-coiled over the southwestern horizon. There was no moon tonight. There was never a moon on Ferro, and that was right.

  After a time, I walked to the house, climbed up the porch, and the house recognized me and turned on the lights. The place was dusty, the furniture covered with sheets, but there were no signs of rats or jinjas, and all seemed in repair. I sighed, blinked, tried to feel something. Too early, probably. I started to take a covering from a chair, then let it be. I went to the kitchen and checked the cupboard. An old malt-whiskey bottle, some dry cereal, some spices. The spices had been my mother’s, and I seldom used them before I left for the end of time. I considered that the whiskey might be perfectly aged by now. But, as the saying goes on Ferro, we like a bit of food with our drink, so I left the house and took the road to town, to Heidel.

  It was a five-mile walk, and though I could have enhanced and covered the ground in ten minutes or so, I walked at a regular pace under my homeworld stars. The road was dirt, of course, and my pant legs were dusted red when I stopped under the outside light of Thredmartin’s Pub. I took a last breath of cold air, then went inside to the warm.

  It was a good night at Thredmartin’s. There were men and women gathered around the fire hearth, usas and splices in the cold corners. The regulars were at the bar, a couple of whom I recognized—so old now, wizened like stored apples in a barrel. I looked around for a particular face, but she was not there. A jukebox sputtered some core-cloud deak, and the air was thick with smoke and conversation. Or was, until I walked in. Nobody turned to face me. Most of them couldn’t have seen me. But a signal passed and conversation fell to a quiet murmur. Somebody quickly killed the jukebox.

  I blinked up an internals menu into my peripheral vision and adjusted to the room’s temperature. Then I went to the edge of the bar. The room got even quieter . . .

  The bartender, old Thredmartin himself, reluctantly came over to me.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked me.

  I looked over him, to the selection of bottles, tubes, and cans on display behind him. “I don’t see it,” I said.

  “Eh?” He glanced back over his shoulder, then quickly returned to peering at me.

  “Bone’s Barley,” I said.

  “We don’t have any more of that,” Thredmartin said, with a suspicious tone.

  “Why not?”

  “The man who made it died.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Twenty years, more or less. I don’t see what business of—”

  “What about his son?”

  Thredmartin backed up a step. Then another. “Henry,” he whispered. “Henry Bone.”

  “Just give me the best that you do have, Peter Thredmartin,” I said. “In fact, I’d like to buy everybody a round on me.”

  “Henry Bone! Why, you looked to me like a bad ’un indeed when you walked in here. I took you for one of them glims, I did,” Thredmartin said. I did not know what he was talking about. Then he s
miled an old devil’s crooked smile. “Your money’s no good here, Henry Bone. I do happen to have a couple of bottles of your old dad’s whiskey stowed away in back. Drinks are on the house.”

  And so I returned to my world, and for most of those I’d left behind it seemed as if I’d never really gone. My neighbors hadn’t changed much in the twenty years local that had passed, and of course, they had no conception of what had happened to me. They knew only that I’d been to the war—the Big War at the End of Time—and evidently everything turned out okay, for here I was, back in my own time and my own place. I planted Ferro’s desert barley, brought in peat from the mountain bogs, bred the biomass that would extract the minerals from my hard ground water, and got ready for making whiskey once again. Most of the inhabitants of Ferro were divided between whiskey families and beer families. Bones were distillers, never brewers, since the Settlement, ten generations before.

  It wasn’t until she called upon me that I heard the first hints of the troubles that had come. Her name was Alinda Bexter, but since we played together under the floorplanks of her father’s hotel, I had always called her Bex. When I left for the war, she was twenty, and I twenty-one. I still recognized her at forty, five years older than I was now, as she came walking down the road to my house, a week after I’d returned. She was taller than most women on Ferro and she might be mistaken for a usa-human splice anywhere else. She was rangy, and she wore a khaki dress that whipped in the dry wind as she came toward me. I stood on the porch, waiting for her, wondering what she would say.

  “Well, this is a load off of me,” she said. She was wearing a brimmed hat. It had ribbon to tie under her chin, but Bex had not done that. She held her hand on it to keep it from blowing from her head. “This damn ranch has been one big thankless task.”

  “So it was you who kept it up.” I said.

  “Just kept it from falling apart as fast as it would have otherwise,” she replied. We stood and looked at one another for a moment. Her eyes were green. Now that I had seen an ocean, I could understand the kind of green they were.

  “Well then,” I finally said. “Come on in.”

  * * *

  I offered her some sweetcake I’d fried up, and some beer that my neighbor, Shin, had brought by, both of which she declined. We sat in the living room, on furniture covered with the white sheets I had yet to remove. Bex and I took it slow, getting to know each other again. She ran her father’s place now. For years, the only way to get to Heidel was by freighter, but we had finally gotten a node on the Flash, and even though Ferro was still a backwater planet, there were more strangers passing through than there ever had been—usually en route to other places. But they sometimes stayed a night or two in the Bexter Hotel. Its reputation was spreading, Bex claimed, and I believed her. Even when she was young, she had been shrewd but honest, a combination you don’t often find in an innkeeper. She was a quiet woman—that is, until she got to know you well—and some most likely thought her conceited. I got the feeling that she hadn’t let down her reserve for a long time. When I knew her before, Bex did not have many close friends, but for the ones she had, such as me, she poured out her thoughts, and her heart. I found that she hadn’t changed much in that way.

  “Did you marry?” I asked her, after hearing about the hotel and her father’s bad health.

  “No,” she said. “No, I very nearly did, but then I did not. Did you?”

  “No. Who was it?”

  “Rall Kenton.”

  “Rall Kenton? Rail Kenton whose parents run the hops market?” He was a quarter-splice, a tall man on a world of tall men. Yet, when I knew him, his long shadow had been deceptive. There was no spark or force in him. “I can’t see that, Bex.”

  “Tom Kenton died ten years ago,” she said. “Marjorie retired, and Rall owned the business until just last year. Rail did all right; you’d be surprised. Something about his father’s passing gave him a backbone. Too much of one, maybe.”

  “What happened?”

  “He died,” she said. “He died too, just as I thought you had.” Now she told me she would like a beer after all, and I went to get her a bottle of Shin’s ale. When I returned, I could tell that she’d been crying a little.

  “The glims killed Rall,” said Bex, before I could ask her about him. “That’s their name for themselves, anyway. Humans, repons, kaliwaks, and I don’t know what else. They passed through last year and stayed for a week in Heidel. Very bad. They made my father give over the whole hotel to them, and then they had a . . . trial, they called it. Every house was called and made to pay a tithe. The glims decided how much. Rall refused to pay. He brought along a pistol—Lord knows where he got it—and tried to shoot one of them. They just laughed and took it from him.” Now the tears started again.

  “And then they hauled him out into the street in front of the hotel.” Bex took a moment and got control of herself. “They burnt him up with a p-gun. Burned his legs off first, then his arms, then the rest of him after they’d let him lie there a while. There wasn’t a trace of him after that; we couldn’t even bury him.”

  I couldn’t take her to me, hold her, not after she’d told me about Rall. Needing something to do, I took some tangled banwood from the tinder box and struggled to get a fire going from the burnt-down coals in my hearth. I blew into the fireplace and only got a nose full of ashes for my trouble. “Didn’t anybody fight?” I asked.

  “Not after that. We just waited them out. Or they got bored. I don’t know. It was bad for everybody, not just Rail.” Bex shook her head, sighed, then saw the trouble I was having and bent down to help me. She was much better at it than I, and the fire was soon ablaze. We sat down and watched it flicker.

  “Sounds like war-ghosts,” I said.

  “The glims?”

  “Soldiers who don’t go home after the war. The fighting gets into them and they don’t want to give it up, or can’t. Sometimes they have . . . modifications that won’t let them give it up. They wander the timeways—and since they don’t belong to the time they show up in, they’re hard to kill. In the early times, where people don’t know about the war, or have only heard rumors of it, they had lots of names. Vampires. Hagamonsters. Zombies.”

  “What can you do?”

  I put my arm around her. It had been so long. She tensed up, then breathed deeply, serenely.

  “Hope they don’t come back,” I said. “They are bad ones. Not the worst, but bad.”

  We were quiet for a while, and the wind, blowing over the chimney’s top, made the flue moan as if it were a big stone flute.

  “Did you love him, Bex?” I asked. “Rall?”

  She didn’t even hesitate in her answer this time. “Of course not, Henry Bone. How could you ever think such a thing? I was waiting to catch up with you. Now tell me about the future.”

  And so I drew away from her for a while, and told her—part of it at least. About how there is not enough dark matter to pull the cosmos back together again, not enough mass to undulate in an eternal cycle. Instead, there is an end, and all the stars are either dead or dying, and all that there is is nothing but dim night. I told her about the twilight armies gathered there, culled from all times, all places. Creatures, presences, machines, weapons fighting galaxy-to-galaxy, system-to-system, fighting until the critical point is reached, when entropy flows no more, but pools, pools in endless, stagnant pools of nothing. No light. No heat. No effect. And the universe is dead, and so those who remain . . . inherit the dark field. They win.

  “And did you win?” she asked me. “If that’s the word for it.”

  The suns were going down. Instead of answering, I went outside to the woodpile and brought in enough banwood to fuel the fire for the night. I thought maybe she would forget what she’d asked me—but not Bex.

  “How does the war end, Henry?”

  “You must never ask me that.” I spoke the words carefully, making sure I was giving away nothing in my reply. “Every time a returning soldier tells t
hat answer, he changes everything. Then he has two choices. He can either go away, leave his own time, and go back to fight again. Or he can stay, and it will all mean nothing, what he did. Not just who won and who lost, but all the things he did in the war spin off into nothing.”

  Bex thought about this for a while. “What could it matter? What in God’s name could be worth fighting for?” she finally asked. “Time ends. Nothing matters after that. What could it possibly matter who won . . . who wins?”

  “It means you can go back home,” I said. “After it’s over.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  I shook my head and was silent. I had said enough. There was no way to tell her more, in any case—not without changing things. And no way to say what it was that had brought those forces together at the end of everything. And what the hell do I know, even now? All I know is what I was told, and what I was trained to do. If we don’t fight at the end, there won’t be a beginning. For there to be people, there must be a war to fight at the end of things. We live in that kind of universe, and not another, they told me. They told me, and then I told myself. And I did what I had to do so that it would be over and I could go home, come back.

  “Bex, I never forgot you,” I said. She came to sit with me by the fire. We didn’t touch at first, but I felt her next to me, breathed the flush of her skin as the fire warmed her. Then she ran her hand along my arm, felt the bumps from the operational enhancements.

  “What have they done to you?” she whispered.

  Unbidden the old words of the skyfallers’ scream, the words that were yet to be, surfaced in my mind.

  They sucked down my heart

  to a little black hole.

  You cannot stab me.

  They wrote down my brain

  on a hard knot of space.

  You cannot turn me.