The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “And then the Clouds and Rain District,” said a man’s voice, and the native Earthlings all broke into guffaws.

  The black box paused politely while the disturbance quieted, then resumed its spiel. Dyeva had turned a delicate pink. The brothel district (named for a poetic Chinese description of intercourse, the “play of clouds and rain”) had been denounced in Old Believer churches ever since she could remember. And while she no longer was a believer herself, she retained a lively sense of the degradation endured by the women and men (and even children) who worked there.

  She reflected that such exploitation formed the dark reverse of the civilization she loved and hoped to restore. Perhaps after all there was something to be said for the near-empty Earth of today. Then, impatiently, Dyeva shook the thought out of her head. This was no time for doubt. Not now. Not now.

  Stef was still frowning, with the mouthpiece between his lips, when his mashina chimed inside the apartment. Irritated because somebody was calling during his relaxing hour, he padded inside, evading the shadows of junk furniture, stepping over piles of unwashed clothing. He told the mashina, “Say,” and it flickered into life. Inside the box hovered the glowing head of Colonel Yamashita of the Security Forces.

  “Hai, Korul Yama.”

  “I need something private done. Come see me now, Gate 43.”

  No waste words there. The image expired into a glowing dot. Sighing, Stef dropped his robe among the other castoffs on the floor and plowed into a musty closet, looking for something clean.

  On the roof of the old building a hovercab with the usual black box for a driver nosed up when Stef pushed a call button. He climbed in and gave orders for the Lion House; Gate 43.

  “Gratizor,” said the black box. Thank you, sir. Why were black boxes always more polite than people?

  As they zipped down Genghis Khan Allee, Stef viewed the flood-lit facades of Government of the Universe Place without much interest. He had long ago realized that they were a stage set and that all the action was behind the scenes. Bronze statues honored the Yellow Emperor, Augustus Caesar, Jesus, Buddha, Alexander the Great, and of course the ubiquitous Genghis Khan. All of them Great Unifiers of Humankind. Forerunners of the Worldcity and its denizens.

  Genghis even had a pompous tomb set amid the floodlights—not that his bones were in it; nobody had ever found them. But yokels from the offworlds visited Ulanor specifically to gaze upon the grave of this greatest (and bloodiest) Unifier of them all.

  Near the tomb foreshortened vendors were selling roasted nuts, noodles wrapped in paper, tiny bundles of kif, seaweed, bowls of miso and kimshi, and babaku chicken with texasauce. The scene was orderly; people strolled and ate at all hours and never feared crime. Breaking the law led to the Palace of Justice off Government of the Universe Place and the warren of tiled cells beneath that were called collectively the White Chamber. The formidable Kathmann, head of Earth Security, ruled the White Chamber, and his reputation alone was enough to keep Ulanor law-abiding.

  The cab turned off the main drag, zipped down back alleys at a level twenty meters above the street, and drew up at a deep niche in a blank white slab of a building. Stef flashed his ID at the black box and a flicker of light acknowledged payment. He stepped into the foyer and a bored guard in a kiosk looked up.

  “Hai?”

  “Hai. Ya Steffens Aleksandr. Korul Yamashita ha’kallá.”

  His voice activated a monitor. The guard stared at the resulting picture, then searched Stef’s face as if another, unauthorized face might be concealed beneath it. Finally he spoke to the security system, which silently opened a bronze-plated steel door.

  In the public areas of the Lion House multicolored marble and crimson carved shishi were everywhere, but here where the action was the hallways were blank, slapped together out of semiplast and floored with dusty gray mats. Light panels glowed in the ceiling, doors were blank, to confuse intruders. Stef, who knew the corridor well, counted nineteen doors and knocked.

  He gasped as a stench that would have done honor to a real lion house hit him in the face. The door had been opened by a Darksider, and its furry mandrill face gazed at him with black cat pupils set in huge around eyes the color of ripe raspberries. The creature had two big arms and two little ones; one big arm held the door, one rested on its gunbelt, and the two little ones scratched the thick fur on its chest.

  “Korul Yamashita mi zhdat,” Stef managed to say without choking. Colonel Yama awaits me. The Darksider moved aside and he made his way through the dim guardroom followed by an unblinking red/ black stare. He knocked again, and at last entered Yamashita’s office.

  “Hai,” said Stef, but Yama wasted no time.

  “Stef, I got a problem,” he began. Everything in the office was made of black or white duroplast, as if to withstand an earthquake or a revolution. Stef slipped into a black chair that apparently had been consciously shaped to cause discomfort.

  “Why the animal outside? Can’t you afford a human guard?” asked Stef, looking around for a kif pipe and seeing none.

  “Everybody important has a Darksider now. More reliable, even if they do stink. Now listen. This information is absolutely a beheader, so I hope your neck tingles if you ever feel an urge to divulge it. For months I been getting vague reports from the Lion Sector about terrorists who are interested in time travel. Now something’s happened here on Earth. Somebody’s pirated a wormholer from the University.”

  “Oh, shit.” Since Stef hadn’t even known that a real wormholer existed, his surprise was genuine.

  “The people who were responsible for the machine are now with Kathmann in the White Chamber and I assure you that if it was an inside job the Security Forces will soon know.”

  “I bet they will.”

  “I don’t have to spell out for you the danger if some glupetz gets at the past. Ever since the technology came along, assholes have been wanting to go back and change this, change that. They don’t understand the chaotic effect of such changes. They don’t see how things can spin out of control.”

  Yamashita sat brooding, a man who had devoted his life to control.

  “They think they can manage the time process. They don’t see how some little thing, some insignificant thing, can send history spinning off in some direction they haven’t foreseen, nobody’s foreseen.”

  Stef nodded. He was thinking about someone monkeying with the past, suddenly causing himself, or Dzhun, or the genius who had synthesized kif to wink out of existence. It was hard to maintain Holy Indifference in the face of possibilities like that.

  “What can I do?”

  But Yama hadn’t finished complaining.

  “Why don’t these svini do something useful?” he fretted. Svini meant swine. “Why don’t they try to change the future instead of the past, try to make it better?”

  “Possibly because you’d execute them if they did.”

  Suddenly Yama grinned. He and Stef went back a long way; the academy, service on Io, on Luna. They had been rivals once but no longer. Yama headed the Security Service at the Lion House, a fat job; the Lion Sector which it administered was a huge volume of space with hundreds of inhabited worlds stretching up the spiral arm toward the dense stars of the galactic center.

  Meanwhile Stef was out on his ass, picking up small assignments to solve problems Yama didn’t want to go public with. Like the present one: Yama had no authority on Earth, but suspected a connection between a local happening and one in Far Space. As an agent, Stef had two great advantages—he was reliable and deniable.

  “It’s true,” Yama went on, “I like things as they are. Humanity’s been through a lot of crap to get where it is. We need to conserve what we’ve got.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Yama looked suspiciously at Stef’s bland face. He didn’t like Stef to say things that might be either sincere or ironic, or might wag like a dog’s tail, back and forth.

  Stef grinned just a little. “Yama, I really do agree with you.
Against all logic I’m happy, and happy people don’t want change. Now, how can I find this wormholer thief?”

  Yama was instantly all business again. “I’ll tell you everything you need to know,” he said.

  “And not a bit more.”

  “Absolutely,” said Yama, who really did have a sense of humor, colonel of security or not. He began by transferring one hundred khans to Stef’s meager bank account, knowing that Stef would promptly spend it and need more, and his need would keep him working.

  As Yama talked, across the city in his big, heavily mortgaged house Professor Yang Li-Qutsai was in his study, lecturing to his mashina under staring vaporlamps.

  His famous course at the University of the Universe, Origa Nash Mir (Origin of Our World), drew a thousand students every time he gave it. The reason was not profound scholarship—Yang plagiarized almost everything he said—but his brilliance as a speaker. At times he seemed to be a failed actor rather than a successful academic. His image included a long gray beard, a large polished skull, a frightening array of fingernails, and a deep, sonorous voice that made everything he said seem important, whether it was or not. A memory cube recorded his lecture for resale to the off-worlds where dismal little academies under strange suns would thrill to the echoes of his wisdom.

  Even as he spoke, lucidly, stabbing the air with a long thin index finger that ended in nine centimeters of nail, Yang was calculating what resale and residual rights on the lecture might bring him. Enough to purchase a villa at the fashionable south end of Lake Bai? Peace at home, among his four wives? At least an expensive whore?

  On the whole, he thought, I’d better settle for the whore. Half of his two-track mind dreamed of girls even while the other half was retelling the most calamitous event in the brief, horrid history of civilized man. The first lecture of his course was always on the Time of Troubles.

  “Considering that the Troubles created our world,” he declared, “it is shocking—yes, shocking—that we know so little about how the disaster began. In two brief years (2091–2093) twelve billion people died, with all their memories. Seven hundred vast cities were obliterated, with all their records; three hundred-odd governments vanished, with all their archives of hardcopy, records, discs, tapes and the first crude memory cubes. No wonder we know so little!

  “Where and why did the fighting start? The Nine Plagues—when did they break out? Blue Nile hemorrhagic fever and multiple-drug-resistant blackpox were raging in Africa as early as the 2070s. Annual worldwide outbreaks of lethal influenza had become the rule by 2080. It seems that the Time of Troubles was well under way even before the outbreak of war.”

  Introductions were always troublesome: students, realizing they were in for a long hour, began to sink into a trancelike state accompanied by fluttering eyelids and restless movements of the pelvis. A warning light on the box glowed green and Yang headed at once into the horror stories that gave the course much of its appeal.

  “But the war of 2091 produced the most spectacular effects: the destruction of the cities, the Two Year Winter, and the Great Famine. Let us take as an example the great city of Moscow, where robot excavators have recently given us an in-depth picture—if I may be pardoned a little joke—of the horrors that attended its destruction. A city of thirty million in 2090 …”

  Detail after horrendous detail followed: the skeleton-choked subway with its still beautiful mosaics recording the reign of Tsar Stalin the Good; the dry trench of the Moskva River whose waters had been vaporized in one glowing instant and blocked by rubble so that the present river flowed fifteen clicks away; the great Kremlin Shield of fused silicon stretching over the onetime city center, with its radioactive core that would glow faintly for at least 50,000 years.

  Observing with satisfaction that his indicator light was turning from unlucky green to lucky red, Professor Yang moved onto the horrors of London, Paris, Tokyo, Beijing, and New York. Then he spoke briefly about the closed zones that still surrounded the lost cities, of irradiated wildlife undergoing rapid evolutionary change in bizarre and clamorous Edens where the capitals of great empires had stood, only three hundred years ago …

  The interest indicator glowed like a Darksider’s eye. Professor Yang strode up and down, his voice deepening, his gray beard swishing in the wind, his long fingers clawing at the air.

  “Precisely how did it happen—this great calamity?” he demanded. “How much we know, and how little! Will it remain for the scholars of your generation to solve these riddles finally? I confess that mine has shed only a little light around the edges of the forbidding darkness that we call—the Time of Troubles!”

  As usual, his lecture lasted exactly the time allotted, a one-hundred-minute hour. As usual, it ended with a key phrase, reminding the drowsy student of what he had been hearing at the rim of his clouded consciousness.

  The power light in the mashina winked off, and Professor Yang shouted: “Tea!” A door flew open and a scurrying domestic wheeled in the tea caddy, the cup, the molko, the tins of oolong and Earl Grey.

  “Sometimes,” muttered Yang, “I think I’ll die of boredom if I ever have to talk about the Troubles again.”

  “One lump or two?” asked the domestic, and Yang, who drank tea after the ancient English fashion, turned anxious attention to the small, ridiculously expensive lumps of natural brown sugar.

  “Two, I think,” he said.

  If residuals from the lecture didn’t buy him a girl, at least they would, he hoped, keep him supplied with sugar for some time to come.

  The clocks of the Worldcity were nearing 21 when Yamashita, dining comfortably at home with his wife Hariko, heard his security-coded mashina chime and hastened into his den to receive a secret report from Earth Security. Somebody had cracked under interrogation. Yama listened to the report with growing dismay.

  “Shit, piss, and corruption,” he growled. “Secretary!”

  “Sir?” murmured the box in a soft atonal voice.

  “Contact Steffens Aleksandr. If he’s not at home—and of course he won’t be—start calling the houses in the Clouds and Rain District. Make it absolutely clear that this is a security matter and that we expect cooperation in finding him.”

  “Yes, sir. His home is not answering.”

  “Try Brother and Sister House. Try Delights of Spring House. Try Radiant Love House. Then try all the others.”

  “And when I find Steffens Aleksandr?”

  “Tell him to wipe his cock and get to my office soonest.”

  “Is that message to be conveyed literally?”

  “Yes!”

  Back at the table, he had barely had time to fold his legs under him when Hariko told him to stop using bad language in the house where the children might hear him.

  “Yes, little wife,” said the man of power meekly.

  “I suppose you have to go to the office again.”

  “Yes, little wife. An emergency—”

  “Always your emergencies,” said Hariko. “Why do I waste hours making you good food to eat if you’re never here to eat it? And why do you employ that awful Steffens person? He’s a disgrace, a man his age who lives like a tomcat. Not everyone can be as happy as we are, but everybody can have a decent, conventional life.”

  Yama ate quietly, occasionally agreeing with her until she ran out of words. Then he went upstairs, removed his comfortable kimono, and put on again the sour uniform he’d worn all day.

  On the way down, pinching his thick neck as he tried to close the collar, he stopped in the children’s bedrooms to make sure they were all asleep. The boys in their bunk beds slept the extravagant sleep of childhood. Looking at them, gently patting their cheeks, Yama reflected that adults and animals always slept as if they half expected to be awakened—children never.

  Then to the girls’ room, where his daughter Kazi slumbered in the embrace of a stuffed haknim. Yama smiled at her but lingered longest at the bedside of his smallest daughter. Rika was like a doll dreaming, with a tiny bub
ble forming on her half-parted pink lips. He was thinking: if someone changes the past, she may vanish, never have a chance to live at all. To prevent that, he resolved to destroy without mercy every member of the time-travel conspiracy.

  At the front door Hariko tied a scarf around his neck and gave him a hug; she was too modest to kiss her husband in the open doorway, even though they were twenty meters above the street. He patted her and stepped into the official hovercar that had nosed up to his porch.

  “Lion House, Gate 43,” he told the black box, and sank back against the cushions.

  At Radiant Love House, Professor Yang relaxed from his scholarly labors on one side of a double divan in the midprice parlor and viewed 3-D images of young women to the ancient strains of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker.

  “Do you see anything that pleases you?” asked the box that was projecting the images.

  “Truly, it is a Waltz of the Flowers,” replied Yang sentimentally. The smell of kif wafted through the room, presumably from a hidden censer.

  “The dark beauty of Miss Luvblum contrasts so markedly with the rare—indeed, unique—blondness of Miss Sekzkitti,” murmured the box, going through its recorded spiel. “The almond eyes of Miss Ming remind us of the splendor of the dynasty from which she takes her nom d’amour. Every young lady is mediscanned on a daily basis to insure her absolute purity and freedom from disease. Miss Gandhi is skilled in all the acts of the famous Kama Sutra. For a small additional fee, an electronic room may be rented in which the most modern appliances are available to heighten the timeless joys of love.”

  Professor Yang had already halfway made his selection—the most expensive of the “stable.” Miss Selassie was a tall, slender woman of Ethiopian descent who had been genetically altered into an albino. The box referred to her as “the White Tiger of the Nile,” and bald, bearded, long-nailed Yang, at ninety-nine reaching the extreme limits of middle age, found his thoughts turning more and more to her astounding beauty. Her body is like a living Aphrodite of ancient Greece, he thought, while her face is like a living spirit mask of ancient Africa.