The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Wordlessly he gestured me to a seat on the step below him, and wordlessly I took it. He kept his gaze on the horizon as I kept mine on him. Although he never turned his face toward me I got the feeling he was sizing me up just as carefully as I was sizing up him.

  “Tworabbit,” he said at last, in a voice as distant as his gaze. The name startled me. It was my natal name and should have been my everyday name, save that it was notoriously unlucky.

  “I am called Lucky,” I said quietly.

  He turned and suddenly focused hard and sharp as a hunting hawk on me. That unblinking crossed stare gave me the feeling he could see all the way inside me to the black nodules of my inmost soul. A nice trick, that stare.

  “Do not discard what you are,” he said sharply. “For it is what you are in the beginning that determines what you will become in the end.”

  “If the fates allow.”

  “Ah yes, fate.” He was silent for an instant. “You represent a noble branch of a fine clan,” he continued. “Brought low by unfortunate circumstances.”

  I said nothing. If this one was trying to unsettle me … well, I had been played upon by masters.

  “I owe you thanks,” he said at last. “You helped someone two days ago.”

  I shrugged. “The attendant was clumsy. He tripped over his own feet.”

  “Still, thanks are in order. And a seeker of wisdom you have become.”

  I shrugged. “Anything that turns a profit.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” he snapped. “Profit is not what drives you.”

  “Not entirely,” I said as I thought of the small casket beside my bed.

  He smiled in a particularly unsettling manner. “Nor revenge either, much as you would like that believed. No, you seek wisdom, albeit you do not do so wisely.”

  I licked my lips and wondered where this one got his information. “What would be the wise way to seek wisdom?”

  “There is no wise way,” he said. “Wise ways are for cowards, fools, and those who do not seek to know. Wisdom is found by treading unwise paths.”

  I wondered if the extreme skull binding had affected his brain somehow. This “priest” appeared more than half mad, but if it was madness it was combined with an unusual force of character.

  “The cycle closes, Tworabbit,” he said. “Venus will not cross the sun thrice before the Monkey Baktun draws to a close.”

  “The cycle dies as all things must.” It was the first thing that came into my mind.

  He made a dismissive gesture. “That it dies is unimportant. How it is reborn is all that matters. For that is in our hands. Each time the cycle turns we have it in our power to re-create the world entire. To bring together the elements that are tearing our world apart and to form them together as a potter forms clay. To temper them in the fires of the end times until the new world emerges whole and unbroken.”

  “I had thought that was in the hands of the Gods,” I said carefully.

  “The Gods do not play dice with the world,” the priest said sharply. “They show man the path and each cycle they offer him the chance anew to take it. That we do not is our own doing.”

  This conversation had started off peculiar and it had gotten weirder and weirder. “You wished to see me,” I said, hoping to force the talk back to a path that made sense.

  Again that stare like a cross-eyed hawk. “And I have seen you. The cycle turns, Tworabbit, and neither you nor I can escape our place upon the calendar stone of fate. Now is the time to weld together all the elements so they may be mixed as potter’s clay.”

  This part vaguely reminded me of some of the street-corner priests of the English Quarter. “You mean nobles and commoners?”

  “Oh, more than that, Tworabbit. Far more than that. Nobles, commoners, Reeds and Frogs, Englishmen and others, yes, even the huetlacoatl. To create a thing transcending anything the world has ever seen. A new being for a new cycle.”

  “That would be a thing to be seen,” I said as neutrally as I could.

  “And it will be seen, Tworabbit, if we all play the parts we are destined to play.”

  This wasn’t just weird anymore. It had started to remind me of those conversations one had with one’s age mates at noble parties. Conversations where nothing was stated, no matter how bright the surface, and much was implied: threats, offers, information swapping, all wrapped up in inconsequential talk. Only here I didn’t know the language or understand symbolism. Was I being offered something? Was I being threatened? Was I being pumped for information? It was like one of those dreams where Smoke came to talk to me about his skin. Just as bizarre and just as menacing.

  “If we are destined to, then we shall play those parts.” Not much in the way of snappy repartee, but it was the best I could do without knowing what the hell was going on here.

  This time the stare held me even longer, as if Toltectecuhtli tried to pin me to my cushion by the force of his eyes. “See that you play your part well, Tworabbit. Play it well indeed.”

  “Forgive me, uncle, but I do not know what my part is.”

  “That is because your part is ignorance, Tworabbit. Cling to that ignorance. Cherish it. Profess it to all who ask. That is your part.”

  Then he looked back out over the sea and I waited for him to speak again until the temple virgin touched my shoulder to tell me the interview was at an end.

  As I left the temple, I paused at the bottom of the stairs. The frieze showed a polyglot of symbols. There was Quetzalcoatl in both his Reed and Frog aspects. There were human forms representing all ranks and stations. There were signs of the zodiac and the glyph for the end of the cycle. And mixed in with it all were stylized huetlacoatls, running, walking, commanding, and lying in repose. Here and there were the conventional symbols for the burden of time, but instead of burdens or the traditional monsters, these glazed brick figures of humans were locked in the embrace of huetlacoatls. There was something vaguely erotic about their posture, and much more that bordered on the obscene.

  As I made my way down the street to the cable car stop, I pondered Toltectecuhtli and his religion. New religions weren’t anything out of the ordinary, especially here in the south where the Mexica Reeds mixed with the native Frogs and the regime of the priests was not as strict as it was back in the Valley of Anahuac by the shores of the Lakes of Mexico. I had heard vaguely of the Toltec and his followers, but I had classed them as another huetlacoatl-worshiping cult. Wrong. Even though Toltec was definitely concerned with the huetlacoatls, he was not a huetlacoatl worshiper. It was a lot more complex than that and tied in with the coming end of the cycle.

  If I had more than my usual share of luck I might live to see the end of the cycle. It was two hand-spans of fingers and a finger away. Not the Great Cycle, when the Universe is re-created, but the smallest of the great cycles, the Baktun, or 394 and a half English years. Baktun 13, the Grass Baktun. A time when the world, or man’s part of it, was traditionally broken apart and remade new. I was no student of religion, much less of ephemeral cults, but I couldn’t ever remember one that tied the huetlacoatls to the end of the cycle before.

  Every cycle’s end brought with it prophecies of doom of one sort or another. In the time of the Emperor Montezuma they had seemed fulfilled when the first English had landed and stirred rebellion among the subject tribes. But the English had succumbed to the Empire’s might and when the English came again years later it was the English English, not the Spanish English, and they built English Town as traders rather than conquerors. Eventually Montezuma’s successor, Montezuma V, the Emperor Montezuma of popular legend, had welded the empire together even more firmly than it had been before the coming of the English.

  Aside from that, the end of cycles had passed with only the usual quota of wars, plagues, and rebellions to mark them. Or so they taught in the schools of the nobles. Each time, the new cycle began with the lighting of the sacred fire atop the Grand Pyramid at the Great Plaza on the shores of the Lakes of Mexico. The Empero
r was reconfirmed and life continued, largely unchanged from one cycle to the next. Only the unofficial cults changed as the old ones were discredited when the predicted miracles and wonders didn’t appear.

  Since leaving my old life I found the common folk saw matters differently. To them the end of a cycle marked a profound change, a chance to strike the world’s balance anew—and by implication to ease the lot of the commoners.

  But only by implication. Even here in the tolerant South, the priests would not countenance a cult that spread unrest or criticized the divinely inspired order of things. Still, was it such an odd notion that the world as we knew was it coming to an end? Was the Empire as strong or the Emperor as vigilant as He had been? Was there more unrest, more muttering in the cities and banditry in the countryside? Was there more injustice and less punishment for it? Was it really such a strange notion that Reeds and Frogs, nobles and commoners, and yes, even huetlacoatls, might somehow be combined into something new and better for the next cycle?

  That thought was still with me when I hailed a water taxi to take me back through the increasingly noisome canals to the English Quarter.

  Uncle Tlaloc kept me waiting for nearly four hours at the Hummingbird’s Palace before he heard my report. Not that there was anything to report, but I didn’t want Uncle getting ideas about my meeting with Toltectecuhtli.

  When he finally got around to me he heard me out with a bored expression and waved me away without a word, a sign he wasn’t pleased. I didn’t bother to finish my last drink and headed for home. It was raining again, and I felt as if all three worlds were pissing on me.

  The hall was dark when I reached my apartment building. Not terribly unusual. The gas torch at the end was old and cranky and so was the porter who was supposed to see to it. But tonight it struck me wrong. I pressed myself against the wall and drew my sword. Then I sidled down the corridor with my back to the wall, silently testing every door behind me as I went.

  They were all securely locked, but mine wasn’t. I pressed flatter against the wall beside the door and reached out with my sword to work the latch. The door swung open noiselessly. Which meant something was really wrong. I deliberately left the hinges unoiled.

  The apartment was dimly lit by the gas lamp at its lowest setting. I wasn’t about to go stumbling about in the semi-dark, so I reached over and turned the light full on.

  Shit. The apartment was a mess. The cushions had been slit, items pulled off shelves and scattered on the floor, the shelves themselves had been moved. A low table was upended, as if someone had searched the base.

  I made straight for the bedroom. Everything there was in disarray, except the box at the foot of the bed. It was sitting just as I had left it—almost.

  I’m very particular about that box. It is arranged just so with a hair clasped in the front corner between the lid and the box. Whoever had searched it had gotten it almost right. The box was within a finger-breadth of where I had left it, the angle was almost right. The hair was missing, having fallen out unnoticed when the box was opened.

  I turned away, damning myself for keeping such a thing in the first place. Then I realized I hadn’t seen my servant Uo, or his body, anywhere. With my sword still drawn, I went looking.

  I found him on his pallet by the kitchen fire, alive, amazingly enough. He barely stirred when I kicked him and a brief examination showed he was drugged. From the looks of it there’d be no information to be gotten out of him before morning.

  I went back to the front room, turned the table right side up, pulled up one of the least-damaged cushions, and got out the tequila jug. I needed to settle my nerves, but most of all I needed to think.

  Whoever did this wasn’t a personal enemy. That the skin was still in its box told me that. No, this was business, and obviously that business involved something I was supposed to have. It wasn’t the skin and it wasn’t money—although my strongbox had been cleaned out. So what was it?

  I thought back to the priest’s words. That my part in the changing of the cycles was ignorance. That I was to cling to ignorance, profess ignorance and cherish it. Screw that! I was sure as hell ignorant, but this kind of ignorance was likely to get me killed. The obvious conclusion for whoever searched my apartment was that I’d been clever about hiding whatever it was. Their next obvious action was to grab me and question me. I doubted very seriously they’d take “I don’t know” for an answer—not unless I said it with my dying breath.

  By this time the tequila was half gone and so was I. I braced a chair against the door to prevent unwelcome night visitors, kicked Uo again to see if he was any closer to waking, and when he obviously wasn’t, I staggered off to bed.

  Sleep ended abruptly. I felt the presence of someone’s eyes and breath on me. It was not my servant. “Smoke?” I mumbled. There was no answer. A stranger had been in my room, over my bed, like a disease-ridden spirit coming in an open window. I was not in the mood for another nightmare. My spine from neck to tailbone became unnaturally cold. I did not move.

  Dawn was breaking. The light of fallen warriors accompanying the Sun on today’s arc through the sky filtered in weakly through the mosquito netting. After some intense staring into empty space, my eyes adjusted to the half-light.

  Then some of the neighborhood roosters crowed inharmoniously. My nerves were scrambled, but I was wide awake.

  Carefully, I let my eye dart about the room. No one was there. Nothing lurking in the corners or shadows.

  I felt that something was near. It had to be almost touching me.

  There is a time-honored method of revenge in which poisonous insects or reptiles are placed inside a person’s body through the sorcerer’s art. If skill at sorcery is lacking, the cruder method of simply putting a small deadly creature in a person’s bed will do. In these times, among those who deal in not-so-flowery wars between clans, the later, cruder method is preferred.

  My sleep was deep, but restless. I was tangled in my sheet. With a slow, deep breath I tried to relax all my muscles without moving them too much, raised my head, looked with my eyes, felt with the entire surface of my skin.

  I saw and felt nothing, and almost breathed a hearty sigh of relief. Then something glinted in light that grew slowly brighter. Something shiny sparkled. It was close to me. Near my face. Close to my heart.

  There, precariously balanced on the knot of sheets under my chin was a delicate work of the carver’s art that horrified me. It was a butterfly, masterfully carved of black volcanic glass. A real obsidian butterfly, a manifestation of the goddess of nocturnal visions. The Emperor’s Shadow, in the tradition of the poet-emperors of old, used this fragile, razor-sharp metaphor as a warning.

  Popular knowledge says that if you are careful and take the obsidian butterfly off your body, pick it up and set it aside without breaking it or cutting yourself, you are destined to live. To cut yourself or to break the delicate symbol meant you are doomed.

  I remembered how my mother was always telling me to be careful, and how my carelessness finally disappointed her for good. With an agonizing effort, I pulled a hand free of the sheets. The butterfly, teetered, and slipped between a fold of cloth. I carefully reached for it, aiming my fingers at the flat surface of the wings.

  “Holy Shit!” I screamed as the edge of one of those black, transparent wings bit into a fingertip. Instinctively, I jerked back my hand. As if alive, the butterfly soared across the room, to shatter into spray of black crystal against the wall.

  I sprang from bed, sucked the blood from my finger like a thirsty god, and thought, They may call me Lucky, but there’s no question that I was born on the second day of the Rabbit.

  Uncle Tlaloc wasn’t drinking when he summoned me into his presence. That was a very bad sign.

  As I knelt before him I felt his eyes boring into the back of my head. He didn’t bid me to rise and sit as usual. He just kept looking at me like an ocelot looks at a baby bird it can’t decide whether to play with or just eat right away. />
  “I understand there was some excitement at your quarters last night,” he said at last.

  His face didn’t change while I told him the story.

  “It sounds as if someone wants something you have,” Uncle Tlaloc said mildly.

  “So it would seem, Uncle-tzin.”

  “What?” His voice had the sting of a cracking whip. “What is it they seek?”

  “On my grave, Uncle, I do not … .”

  “What did you take from the huetlacoatl?” he roared. I flinched from the sound.

  “Nothing, Uncle. I swear it. Ask Ninedeer, if you do not believe me.”

  “Others are already asking,” Uncle said slowly. “Your cousin Ninedeer was taken yesterday. By the Emperor’s Shadow, apparently. It seems His Imperial Majesty has decided to interest himself in the matter of the huetlacoatl’s death after all.”

  I realized I was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning. Sweat had already soaked the armpits of my cotton tunic and was starting to trickle down my chest and back. This could probably get worse, but right now I couldn’t imagine how.

  He looked at me again in a way that wasn’t at all settling. “It is not unknown,” he said softly, “for someone to try to keep something back if the prize is rich enough.”