The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  “They laughed,” he said. He didn’t sound happy about it.

  “They laughed,” I agreed. “They laughed as they have never laughed before, every one of them. Except for Otter, and no one has ever seen him laugh.”

  I sat down beside him. “You did something fine tonight, Spearshaker. You made the People happy. They have a hard life, and you made them laugh.”

  He made a snorting sound. “Yes. They laughed to see us making fools of our-selves. Perhaps that is good.”

  “No, no.” I saw it now. “Is that what you think? That they laughed because we did the plei so badly?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and turned him to face me. “My friend, no one there tonight ever saw a plei before, except for you. How would they know if it was bad? It was certainly the best plei they ever saw.”

  He blinked slowly, like a turtle. I saw his eyes were red.

  “Believe me, Spearshaker,” I told him, “they were laughing because it was such a funny story. And that was your doing.”

  His expression was very strange indeed. “They thought it comical?”

  “Well, who wouldn’t? All those crazy people up there, killing each other—and themselves—and then that part at the end, where everyone gets killed!” I had to stop and laugh, myself, remembering. “I tell you,” I said when I had my breath back, “even though I knew the whole thing by memory, I nearly lost control of myself a few times there.”

  I got up. “Come, Spearshaker. You need to go to sleep. You have been working too hard.”

  But he only put his head down in his hands and made some odd sounds in his throat, and muttered some words I did not know. And so I left him there and went to bed.

  If I live until the mountains fall, I will never understand white men.

  If I liue vntil our Saviours returne, I shall neuer vnderstande Indians. Warre they count as Sport, and bloody Murther an occasion of Merriment: ‘tis because they hold Life itselfe but lightly, and think Death no greate matter neyther: and so that which we call Tragick, they take for Comedie. And though I be damned for’t, I cannot sweare that they haue not the Right of it.

  Whatever happened that night, it changed something in Spearshaker. He lived with us for many more years, but never again did he make a plei for us.

  That was sad, for we had all enjoyed the Amaledi story so much, and were hoping for more. And many people tried to get Spearshaker to change his mind—Tsigeyu actually begged him; I think it was the only time in her life she ever begged anyone for anything—but it did no good. He would not even talk about it.

  And at last we realized that his medicine had gone, and we left him in peace. It is a terrible thing for a didahnvwisgi when his power leaves him. Perhaps his ancestors’ spirits were somehow offended by our plei. I hope not, since it was my idea.

  That summer Ninekiller’s daughter Cricket became Spearshaker’s wife. I gave them my house, and moved in with the Paint Clan woman. I visited my friend often, and we talked of many things, but of one thing we never spoke.

  Cricket told me he still made his talking marks, from time to time. If he ever tried to make another plei, though, he never told anyone.

  I believe it was five winters ago—it was not more—when Cricket came in one day and found him dead. It was a strange thing, for he had not been sick, and was still a fairly young man. As far as anyone knew there was nothing wrong with him, except that his hair had fallen out.

  I think his spirit simply decided to go back to his native land.

  Cricket grieved for a long time. She still has not taken another husband. Did you happen to see a small boy with pale skin and brown hair, as you came through our town? That is their son Wili.

  Look what Cricket gave me. This is the turkey feather that was in Spearshaker’s hand when she found him that day. And this is the piece of mulberry bark that was lying beside him. I will always wonder what it says.

  We are such stuff as Dreames are made on: and our little Life Is rounded in a sle

  Notes

  1 Elizabethan spelling was fabulously irregular; the same person might spell the same word in various ways on a single page. Shakespeare’s own spelling is known only from the Quarto and Folio printings of the plays, and the published poetry; and no one knows how far this may have been altered by the printer. It is not even known how close the published texts are to Shakespeare’s original in wording, let alone spelling. All we have in his own hand is his signature, and this indicates that he spelled his own name differently almost every time he wrote it.

  I have followed the spelling of the Folio for the most part, but felt free to use my own judgment and even whim, since that was what the original speller did.

  I have, however, regularized spelling and punctuation to some extent, and modernized spelling and usage in some instances, so that the text would be readable. I assume this book’s readership is well-educated, but it seems unrealistic to expect them to be Elizabethan scholars.

  2 Cherokee pronunciation is difficult to render in Roman letters. Even our own syllabary system of writing, invented in the nineteenth century by Sequoyah, does not entirely succeed, as there is no way to indicate the tones and glottal stops. I have followed, more or less, the standard system of transliteration, in which “v” is used for the nasal grunting vowel that has no English equivalent.

  It hardly matters, since we do not know how sixteenth-century Cherokees pronounced the language. The sounds have changed considerably in the century and a half since the forced march to Oklahoma; what they were like four hundred years ago is highly conjectural. So is the location of the various tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas during this period; and, of course, so is their culture. (The Cherokees may not then have been the warlike tribe they later became—though, given the national penchant for names incorporating the verb “to kill,” this is unlikely.) The Catawbas were a very old and hated enemy.

  3 Edward Spicer’s voyage to America to learn the fate of the Roanoke Colony—or rather his detour to Virginia after a successful privateering operation—did happen, including the bad weather and the loss of a couple of boats, though there is no record that any boat reached the mainland. The disappearance of the Roanoke colonists is a famous event. It is only conjecture—though based on considerable evidence, and accepted by many historians—that Powhatan had the colonists murdered, after they had taken sanctuary with a minor coastal tribe. Disney fantasies to the contrary, Powhatan was not a nice man.

  4 I have accepted, for the sake of the story, the view of many scholars that Shakespeare first got the concept of Hamlet in the process of revising Thomas Kyd’s earlier play on the same subject. Thus he might well have had the general idea in his head as early as 1591—assuming, as most do, that by this time he was employed with a regular theatrical company—even though the historic Hamlet is generally agreed to have been written considerably later.

  5 As to those who argue that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of Hamlet, but that the plays were written by Francis Bacon or the Earl of Southampton or Elvis Presley, one can only reply: Hahl And again, Hahl

  Second Skin

  * * *

  PAUL J. MCAULEY

  Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.

  McAuley is considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that brand of rigorous hard-science fiction with updated modern and stylistic sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as “radical hard-science fiction,” but he also writes Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, and he also is one of the major young writers who are producing that
revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Baroque Space Opera, reminiscent of the Superscience stories of the ’30s taken to an even higher level of intensity and scale. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence— a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars—Life on Mars, The Secret of Life and Whole Wide World. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country, and he is the coeditor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. Coming up is a new novel, White Devils, and a new collection, Little Machines. His stories have appeared in our Fifth, Ninth, Thirteenth, and Fifteenth through Twentieth annual collections.

  In the suspenseful and richly inventive story that follows, one of the best of his “Quiet War” series, he takes us on a journey across space to the furthest reaches of the solar system, for a tale of high-tech intrigue and counter-intrigue beneath the frozen surface of Proteus.…

  The transport, once owned by an outer system cartel and appropriated by Earth’s Pacific Community after the Quiet War, ran in a continuous, ever-changing orbit between Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. It never docked. It mined the solar wind for hydrogen to mix with the nanogram of antimatter that could power it for a century, and once or twice a year, during its intricate gravity-assisted loops between Saturn’s moons, maintenance drones attached remora-like to its hull, and fixed whatever its self-repairing systems couldn’t handle.

  Ben Lo and the six other members of the first trade delegation to Proteus since the war were transferred onto the transport as it looped around Titan, still sleeping in the hibernation pods they’d climbed into in Earth orbit. Sixty days later, they were released from the transport in individual drop capsules of structural diamond, like so many seeds scattered by a pod.

  Ben Lo, swaddled in the crash web that took up most of the volume of the drop capsule’s little bubble, watched with growing vertigo as the battered face of Proteus drew closer. He had been awakened only a day ago, and was as weak and unsteady as a new-born kitten. The sun was behind the bubble’s braking chute. Ahead, Neptune’s disc was tipped in star-sprinkled black above the little moon. Neptune was subtly banded with blue and violet, its poles capped with white cloud, its equator streaked with cirrus. Slowly, slowly, Proteus began to eclipse it. The transport had already dwindled to a bright point amongst the bright points of the stars, on its way to spin up around Neptune, loop past Triton, and head on out for the next leg of its continuous voyage, halfway across the solar system to Uranus.

  Like many of the moons of the outer planets, Proteus was a ball of ice and rock. Over billions of years, most of the rock had sunk to the core, and the moon’s icy, dirty white surface was splotched with a scattering of large impact craters with black interiors, like well-used ash trays, and dissected by large stress fractures, some running halfway round the little globe.

  The spy fell toward Proteus in a thin transparent bubble of carbon, wearing a paper suit and a diaper, and trussed up in a cradle of smart cabling like an early Christian martyr. He could barely move a muscle. Invisible laser light poured all around him—the capsule was opaque to the frequency used—gently pushing against the braking sail which had unfolded and spun into a twenty kilometer diameter mirror after the capsule had been released by the transport. Everything was fine.

  The capsule said, “Only another twelve hours, Mr. Lo. I suggest that you sleep. Elfhame’s time zone is ten hours behind Greenwich Mean Time.”

  Had he been asleep for a moment? Ben Lo blinked and said, “Jet lag,” and laughed.

  “I don’t understand,” the capsule said politely. It didn’t need to be very intelligent. All it had to do was control the attitude of the braking sail, and keep its passenger amused and reassured until landing. Then it would be recycled.

  Ben Lo didn’t bother to try to explain. He was feeling the same kind of yawning apprehension that must have gripped ninety-year-old airline passengers at the end of the twentieth century. A sense of deep dislocation and estrangement. How strange that I’m here, he thought. And, how did it happen? When he’d been born, spaceships had been crude, disposable chemical rockets. The first men on the moon. President Kennedy’s assassination. No, that happened before I was born. For a moment, his yawning sense of dislocation threatened to swallow him whole, but then he had it under control and it dwindled to mere strangeness. It was the treatment, he thought. The treatment and the hibernation.

  Somewhere down there in the white moonscape, in one of the smaller canyons, was Ben Lo’s first wife. But he mustn’t think of that. Not yet. Because if he did … no, he couldn’t remember. Something bad, though.

  “I can offer a variety of virtualities,” the capsule said. Its voice was a husky contralto. It added, “Certain sexual services are also available.”

  “What I’d like is a chateaubriand steak butterflied and well-grilled over hickory wood, a Caesar salad, and a 1998 Walnut Creek Cabernet Sauvignon.”

  “I can offer a range of nutritive pastes, and eight flavors of water, including a balanced electrolyte,” the capsule said. A prissy note seemed to have edged into its voice. It added, “I would recommend that you restrict intake of solids and fluids until after landing.”

  Ben Lo sighed. He had already had his skin scrubbed and repopulated with strains of bacteria and yeast native to the Protean ecosystem, and his GI tract had been reamed out and packed with a neutral gel containing a benign strain of E. coli. He said, “Give me an inflight movie.”

  “I would recommend virtualities,” the capsule said. “I have a wide selection.”

  Despite the capsule’s minuscule intelligence, it had a greater memory capacity than all the personal computers on Earth at the end of the millennium. Ben Lo had downloaded his own archives into it.

  “Wings of Desire,” he said.

  “But it’s in black and white! And flat. And only two senses—”

  “There’s color later on. It has a particular relevance to me, I think. Once upon a time, capsule, there was a man who was very old, and became young again, and found that he’d lost himself. Run the movie, and you’ll understand a little bit about me.”

  The moon, Neptune, the stars, fell into a single point of light. The light went out. The film began.

  Falling through a cone of laser light, the man and the capsule watched how an angel became a human being, out of love.

  The capsule skimmed the moon’s dirty-white surface and shed the last of its relative velocity in the inertia buffers of the target zone, leaving its braking sail to collapse across kilometers of moonscape. It was picked up by a striding tripod that looked like a prop from The War of the Worlds, and carried down a steeply sloping tunnel through triple airlocks into something like the ER room of a hospital. With the other members of the trade delegation, Ben Lo, numbed by neural blocks, was decanted, stripped, washed, and dressed in fresh paper clothes.

  Somewhere in the press of nurses and technicians he thought he glimpsed someone he knew, or thought he knew. A woman, her familiar face grown old, eyes faded blue in a face wrinkled as a turtle’s.… But then he was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled away.

  “Waking, he had problems with remembering who he was. He knew he was nowhere on Earth. A universally impersonal hotel room, but he was virtually in free fall. Some moon, then. But what role was he playing?

  He got up, moving carefully in the fractional gravity, and pulled aside the floor-to-ceiling drapes. It was night, and across a kilometer of black air was a steep dark mountainside or perhaps a vast building, with lights wound at its base, shimmering on a river down there.…

  Proteus. Neptune. The trade delegation. And the thing he couldn’t think about, which
was fractionally nearer the surface now, like a word at the back of his tongue. He could feel it, but he couldn’t shape it. Not yet.

  He stripped in the small, brightly lit sphere of the bathroom and turned the walls to mirrors and looked at himself. He was too young to be who he thought he was. No, that was the treatment, of course. His third. Then why was his skin this color? He hadn’t bothered to tint it for … how long?

  That sci-fi version of Othello, a century and a half ago, when he’d been a movie star. He remembered the movie vividly, although not the making of it. But that was the color he was now, his skin a rich dark mahogany, gleaming as if oiled in the lights, his hair a cap of tight black curls.

  He slept again, and dreamed of his childhood home. San Francisco. Sailboats scattered across the blue bay. He’d had a little boat, a Laser. The cold salt smell of the sea. The pinnacles of the rust-red bridge looming out of banks of fog, and the fog horn booming mournfully. Cabbage leaves in the gutters of Spring Street. The crowds swirling under the crimson and gold neon lights of the trinket shops of Grant Avenue, and the intersection at Grant and California tingling with trolley car bells.

  He remembered everything as if he had just seen it in a movie. Nonassociational aphasia. It was a side effect of the treatment he’d just had. He’d been warned about it, but it was still unsettling. The woman he was here to … Avernus. Her name now. But when they had been married, a hundred and sixty-odd years ago, she had been called Barbara Reiner. He tried to remember the taste of her mouth, the texture of her skin, and could not.

  The next transport would not swing by Proteus for a hundred and seventy days, so there was no hurry to begin the formal business of the trade delegation. For a while, its members were treated as favored tourists, in a place that had no tourist industry at all.

  The sinuous rill canyon which housed Elfhame had been burned to an even depth of a kilometer, sealed under a construction diamond roof, and pressurized to 750 millibars with a nitrox mix enriched with 1 percent carbon dioxide to stimulate plant growth. The canyon ran for fifty kilometers through a basaltic surface extrusion, possibly the remnant of the giant impact that had resurfaced the farside hemi-sphere of the moon a billion years ago, or the result of vulcanism caused by thermal drag when the satellite had been captured by Neptune.