The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  “I don’t know you,” Marek said, standing over Dvorak’s body and looking up at me. “I know what you are, but I can’t get a read on who you are, and that worries me,” he said. He kicked at one of the Flash tech’s twisted arms. “But now you know me.”

  “Get off my land,” I said. I looked at him without heat. Maybe I felt nothing inside, either. That uncertainty had been my companion for a long time, my grim companion. Marek studied me for a moment. If I kept his attention, he might not look around me, peer inside the house, to find his other fun, Furly Bexter, half-dead from Marek’s amusements. Marek turned to the others.

  “We’re going,” he said to them. “We’ve done what we came for.” They turned around and left by the road on which they’d come, the only road there was. After a while, I took Dvorak’s body to a low hill and dug him a grave there. I set up a sandstone marker, and since I knew Dvorak came from Catholic people, I scratched into the stone the sign of the cross. Jesus, from the Milky Way. Another glim. Hard to kill.

  It took old man Bexter only a week or so to recover fully; I should have known by knowing Bex that he was made of a tougher grit. He began to putter around the house, helping me out where he could, although I ran a tidy one-man operation, and he was more in the way than anything. Bex risked a trip out once that week. Her father again insisted he was going back into town, but Bex told him the glims were looking for him. So far, she’d managed to convince them that she had no idea where he’d gotten to.

  I was running low on food and supplies, and had to go into town the following Firstday. I picked up a good backpack load at the mercantile and some chemicals for treating the peat at the druggist, then risked a quick look-in on Bex. A sign on the desk told all that they could find her at Thredmartin’s, taking her lunch, should they want her. I walked across the street, set my load down just inside Thredmartin’s door, in the cloakroom, then passed through the entrance into the afternoon dank of the pub.

  I immediately sensed glims all around, and hunched myself in, both mentally and physically. I saw Bex in her usual corner and walked toward her across the room. As I stepped beside a table in the pub’s middle, a glim – it was the halandana – stuck out a long hairy leg. Almost, I tripped – and in that instant, I almost did the natural thing and cast about for some hold that was not present in the three-dimensional world – but I did not. I caught myself, came to a dead stop, then carefully walked around the glim’s outstretched leg.

  “Mind if I sit down?” I said as I reached Bex’s table. She nodded toward a free chair. She was finishing a beer, and an empty glass stood beside it. Thredmartin usually had the tables clear as soon as the last drop left a mug. Bex was drinking fast. Why? Working up her courage, perhaps.

  I lowered myself into the chair, and for a long time, neither of us said anything to the other. Bex finished her beer. Thredmartin appeared, looked curiously at the two empty mugs. Bex signaled for another, and I ordered my own whiskey.

  “How’s the ranch?” she finally asked me. Her face was flush and her lips trembled slightly. She was angry, I decided. At me, at the situation. It was understandable. Completely understandable.

  “Fine,” I said. “The ranch is fine.”

  “Good.”

  Again a long silence. Thredmartin returned with our drinks. Bex sighed, and for a moment, I thought she would speak, but she did not. Instead, she reached under the table and touched my hand. I opened my palm, and she put her hand into mine. I felt the tension in her, the bonework of her hand as she squeezed tightly. I felt her fear and worry. I felt her love.

  And then Marek came into the pub looking for her. He stalked across the room and stood in front of our table. He looked hard at me, then at Bex, and then he swept an arm across the table and sent Bex’s beer and my whiskey flying toward the wall. The beer mug broke, but I quickly reached out and caught my tumbler of scotch in midair without spilling a drop. Of course no ordinary human could have done it.

  Bex noticed Marek looking at me strangely and spoke with a loud voice that got his attention. “What do you want? You were looking for me at the hotel?”

  “Your sign says you’re open,” Marek said in a reasonable, ugly voice. “I rang for room service. Repeatedly.”

  “Sorry,” Bex said. “Just let me settle up and I’ll be right there.”

  “Be right there now,” Marek said, pushing the table from in front of her. Again, I caught my drink, held it on a knee while I remained sitting. Bex started up from her chair and stood facing Marek. She looked him in the eyes. “I’ll be there directly,” she said.

  Without warning, Marek reached out and grabbed her by the chin. He didn’t seem to be pressing hard, but I knew he must have her in a painful grip. He pulled Bex toward him. Still, she stared him in the eyes. Slowly, I rose from my chair, setting my tumbler of whiskey down on the warm seat where I had been.

  Marek glanced over at me. Our eyes met, and at that close distance, he could plainly see the enhancements under my corneas. I could see his.

  “Let go of her,” I said.

  He did not let go of Bex.

  “Who the hell are you?” he asked. “That you tell me what to do?”

  “I’m just a grunt, same as you,” I said. “Let go of her.”

  The halandana had risen from its chair and was soon standing behind Marek. It-she growled mean and low. A combat schematic of how to handle the situation iconed up into the corner of my vision. The halandana was a green figure, Marek was red, Bex was a faded rose. I blinked once to enlarge it. Studied it in a fractional second. Blinked again to close it down. Marek let go of Bex.

  She stumbled back, hurt and mad, rubbing her chin.

  “I don’t think we’ve got a grunt here,” Marek said, perhaps to the halandana, or to himself, but looking at me. “I think we’ve got us a genuine skyfalling space marine.”

  The halandana’s growl grew deeper and louder, filling ultra – and subsonic frequencies.

  “How many systems’d you take out, skyfaller?” Marek asked. “A couple of galaxies worth?” The halandana made to advance on me, but Marek put out his hand to stop it. “Where do you get off? This ain’t nothing but small potatoes next to what you’ve done.”

  In that moment, I spread out, stretched a bit in ways that Bex could not see, but that Marek could – to some extent at least. I encompassed him, all of him, and did a thorough ID. on both him and the halandana. I ran the data through some trans-d personnel files tucked into a swirl in n-space I’d never expected to access again. Marek Lambrois. Corporal of a back-line military police platoon assigned to the local cluster in a couple of possible worlds, deserters all in a couple of others. He was aggression-enhanced by trans-weblink anti-alg coding. The squad’s fighting profile was notched to the top level at all times. They were bastards who were now preprogrammed bastards. Marek was right about them being small potatoes. He and his gang were nothing but mean-ass grunts, small-time goons for some of the nonaligned contingency troops.

  “What the hell?” Marek said. He noticed my analytics, although it was too fast for him to get a good glimpse of me. But he did understand something in that moment, something it didn’t take enhancement to figure out. And in that moment, everything was changed, had I but seen. Had I but seen.

  “You’re some bigwig, ain’t you, skyfaller? Somebody that matters to the outcome,” Marek said. “This is your actual, and you don’t want to fuck yourself up-time, so you won’t fight.” He smiled crookedly. A diagonal of teeth, straight and narrow, showed whitely.

  “Don’t count on it,” I said.

  “You won’t,” he said, this time with more confidence. “I don’t know what I was worrying about. I can do anything I want here.”

  “Well,” I said. “Well.” And then I said nothing.

  “Get on over there and round me up some grub,” Marek said to Bex. “I’ll be waiting for it in Room Forty-five, little lady.”

  “I’d rather – ”

  “Do it,” I said.
The words were harsh and did not sound like my voice. But they were my words, and after a moment, I remembered the voice. It was mine. From far, far in the future. Bex gasped at their hardness, but took a step forward, moved to obey.

  “Bex,” I said, more softly. “Just get the man some food.” I turned to Marek. “If you hurt her, I don’t care about anything. Do you understand? Nothing will matter to me.”

  Marek’s smiled widened into a grin. He reached over, slowly, so that I could think about it, and patted my cheek. Then he deliberately slapped me, hard. Hard enough to turn my head. Hard enough to draw a trickle of blood from my lip. It didn’t hurt very much, of course. Of course it didn’t hurt.

  “Don’t you worry, skyfaller,” he said. “I know exactly where I stand now.” He turned and left, and the halandana, its drugs unfinished on the table where it had sat, trailed out after him.

  Bex looked at me. I tried to meet her gaze, but did not. I did not look down, but stared off into Thredmartin’s darkness. She reached over and wiped the blood from my chin with her little finger.

  “I guess I’d better go,” she said.

  I did not reply. She shook her head sadly, and walked in front of me. I kept my eyes fixed, far away from this place, this time, and her passing was a swirl of air, a red-brown swish of hair, and Bex was gone. Gone.

  They sucked down my heart

  to a little black hole

  You cannot stab me.

  “Colonel Bone, we’ve done the prelims on Sector 1168, and there are fifty-six class-one civilizations along with two-hundred seventy rationals in stage one or two development.”

  “Fifty six. Two hundred seventy. Ah. Me.”

  “Colonel, sir, we can evac over half of them within thirty-six hours local.”

  “And have to defend them in the transcendent. Chaos neutral. Guaranteed forty percent casualties for us.”

  “Yes, sir. But what about the civs at least? We can save a few.”

  They wrote down my brain

  on a hard knot of space.

  You cannot turn me.

  “Unacceptable, soldier.”

  “Sir?”

  “Unacceptable.” “Yes, sir.”

  All dead. All those millions of dead people. But it was the end of time, and they had to die, so that they – so that we all, all in time – could live. But they didn’t know, those civilizations. Those people. It was the end of time, but you loved life all the same, and you died the same hard way as always. For nothing. It would be for nothing. Outside, the wind had kicked up. The sky was red with Ferro’s dust, and a storm was brewing for the evening. I coated my sclera with a hard and glassy membrane, and, unblinking, I stalked home with my supplies through a fierce and growing wind.

  That night, on the curtains of dust and thin rain, on the heave of the storm, Bex came to my house. Her clothes were torn and her face was bruised. She said nothing as I closed the door behind her, led her into the kitchen, and began to treat her wounds. She said nothing as her worried father sat at my kitchen table and watched, and wrung his hands, and watched because there wasn’t anything he could do.

  “Did that man . . . ,” her father said. The old man’s voice broke. “Did he?”

  “I tried to take the thing, the trunch, from him. He’d left it lying on the table by the door.” Bex spoke in a hollow voice. “I thought that nobody was going to do anything, not even Henry, so I had to. I had to.” Her facial bruises were superficial. But she held her legs stiffly together and clasped her hands to her stomach. There was vomit on her dress. “The trunch had some kind of alarm set on it,” Bex said. “So he caught me.”

  “Bex, are you hurting?” I said to her. She looked down, then carefully spread her legs. “He caught me and then he used the trunch on me. Not full strength. Said he didn’t want to do permanent damage. Said he wanted to save me for later.” Her voice sounded far away. She covered her face with her hands. “He put it in me,” she said.

  Then she breathed deeply, raggedly, and made herself look at me. “Well,” she said. “So.”

  I put her into my bed, and he sat in the chair beside it, standing watch for who knew what? He could not defend his daughter, but he must try, as surely as the suns rose, now growing farther apart, over the hard pack of my homeworld desert.

  Everything was changed.

  “Bex,” I said to her, and touched her forehead. Touched her fine brown skin. “Bex, in the future, we won. I won, my command won it. Really, really big. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re all here.”

  Bex’s eyes were closed. I could not tell if she’d already fallen asleep. I hoped she had.

  “I have to take care of some business, and then I’ll do it again,” I said in a whisper. “I’ll just have to go back up-time and do it again.”

  Between the first and second rising, I’d reached Heidel, and as Hemingway burned red through the storm’s dusty leavings, I stood in the shadows of the entrance foyer of the Bexter Hotel. There I waited.

  The halandana was the first up – like me, they never really slept – and it came down from its room looking, no doubt, to go out and get another rubber of its drug. Instead, it found me. I didn’t waste time with the creature. With a quick twist in n-space, I pulled it down to the present, down to a local concentration of hate and lust and stupidity that I could kill with a thrust into its throat. But I let it live; I showed it myself, all of me spread out and huge, and I let it fear.

  “Go and get Marek Lambrois,” I told it. “Tell him Colonel Bone wants to see him. Colonel Henry Bone of the Eighth Sky and Light.”

  “Bone,” said the halandana. “I thought – ”

  I reached out and grabbed the creature’s long neck. This was the halandana weak point, and this halandana had a ceramic implant as protection. I clicked up the power in my forearm a level and crushed the collar as I might a teacup. The halandana’s neck carapace shattered to platelets and shards, outlined in fine cracks under its skin.

  “Don’t think,” I said. “Tell Marek Lambrois to come into the street, and I will let him live.”

  This was untrue, of course, but hope never dies, I’d discovered, even in the hardest of soldiers. But perhaps I’d underestimated Marek. Sometimes I still wonder.

  He stumbled out, still partly asleep, onto the street. Last night had evidently been a hard and long one. His eyes were a red no detox nano could fully clean up. His skin was the color of paste.

  “You have something on me,” I said. “I cannot abide that.”

  “Colonel Bone,” he began. “If I’d knowed it was you –

  “Too late for that.”

  “It’s never too late, that’s what you taught us all when you turned that offensive around out on the Husk and gave the Chaos the what-for. I’ll just be going. I’ll take the gang with me. It’s to no purpose, our staying now.”

  “You knew enough yesterday – enough to leave.” I felt the rage, the old rage that was to be, once again. “Why did you do that to her?” I asked. “Why did you – ”

  And then I looked into his eyes and saw it there. The quiet desire – beaten down by synthesized emotions, but now triumphant, sadly triumphant. The desire to finally, finally die. Marek was not the unthinking brute I’d taken him for after all. Too bad for him.

  I took a step toward Marek. His instincts made him reach down, go for the trunch. But it was a useless weapon on me. I don’t have myelin sheaths on my nerves. I don’t have nerves anymore; I have wiring. Marek realized this was so almost instantly. He dropped the trunch, then turned and ran. I caught him. He tried to fight, but there was never any question of his beating me. That would be absurd. I’m Colonel Bone of the Skyfalling Eighth. I kill so that there might be life. Nobody beats me. It is my fate, and yours, too.

  I caught him by the shoulder, and I looped my other arm around his neck and reined him to me – not enough to snap anything. Just enough to calm him down. He was strong, but had no finesse.

  Like I said, glims are hard t
o kill. They’re the same as snails in shells, and the trick is to draw them out – way out. Which is what I did with Marek. As I held him physically, I caught hold of him, all of him, over there, in the place I can’t tell you about, can’t describe. The way you do this is by holding a glim still and causing him great suffering so that he can’t withdraw into the deep places. That’s what vampire stakes and Roman crosses are all about.

  And like I told Bex, glims are bad ones, all right. Bad, but not the worse. I am the worse.

  Icicle spike

  from the eye of a star

  I’ve come to kill you.

  I sharpened my nails. Then I plunged them into Marek’s stomach, through the skin, into the twist of his guts. I reached around there and caught hold of something, a piece of intestine. I pulled it out. This I tied to the porch of the Bexter Hotel.

  Marek tried to untie himself and pull away. He was staring at his insides, rolled out, raw and exposed, and thinking – I don’t know what. I haven’t died. I don’t know what it is like to die. He moaned sickly. His hands fumbled uselessly in the grease and phlegm that coated his very own self. There was no undoing the knots I’d tied, no pushing himself back in.

  I picked him up, and, as he whimpered, I walked down the street with him. His guts trailed out behind us, like a pink ribbon. After I’d gotten about twenty feet, I figured this was all he had in him. I dropped him into the street.

  Hemingway was in the northeast and Fitzgerald directly east. They both shown at different angles on Marek’s crumple, and cast crazy, mazy shadows down the length of the street.

  “Colonel Bone,” he said. I was tired of his talking. “Colonel – ”

  I reached into his mouth, past his gnashing teeth, and pulled out his tongue. He reached for it as I extracted it, so I handed it to him. Blood and drool flowed from his mouth and colored the red ground even redder about him. Then, one by one, I broke his arms and legs, then I broke each of the vertebrae in his backbone, moving up his spinal column with quick pinches. It didn’t take long.