The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "Another car," said the voice, diluted to a whisper. "It's in the berth next to yours ... !"

  "What car?" Diu muttered to himself.

  "I believe I know," Miocene replied, eyes darting side to side. "I built two vessels, identical in every way. Including the fact that you never knew they existed."

  Diu didn't seem to hear her.

  Miocene took a step toward him, adding, "It's obvious, isn't it? Someone else is here. Or if they squeezed in together, two someones."

  "So?" Diu replied. "A couple more captains lurking nearby-"

  "Except," Miocene interrupted, "I didn't send my invitation to my captains."

  Diu didn't ask to whom it was sent.

  Washen remembered Miocene had stood on this platform, watching Marrow. Watching for Till, she realized. How long would it have taken him to move the car to the bridge? That was the only question. She had no doubts that once motivated, the Waywards could do whatever they wanted inside the captains' realm.

  "I was hopeful," Miocene confessed. "I was hopeful that my son would be curious, that he would follow me back to the ship and see it for himself."

  There was a sound, sharp and familiar.

  The false Master stopped in mid-stride, then began to collapse in on itself. Then a thin column of light appeared in the smoke, betraying the laser's source.

  Diu started to run. Miocene followed, and Washen chased both of them.

  Beside the platform, in easy earshot, stood a drone. A lone figure was kneeling beneath its ceramic body, wearing breechcloth and holding a crude laser drill against his shoulder, intent on reducing the machine to ash and gas.

  Diu saw him, stopped and aimed. At Locke.

  Maybe he was hesitating, realizing it was his son. Or more likely, he simply was asking himself: Where's Till? Either way, he didn't fire. Instead, Diu started to turn, looking at his surroundings as if for the first time there was a clean hard crack.

  A fat chunk of lead knocked Diu off his feet, opening his chest before it tore through his backside. With the smooth grace of an athlete, Till climbed out from the meshwork below the platform. He seemed unhurried, empty of emotion. Strolling past Wasbe, he didn't give her the tiniest glance. It was like watching a soulless machine, right up until the moment when Miocene tried to block his way, saying, "Son," with a weak, sorrowful voice.

  He shoved her aside, then ran toward Diu. Screaming. At the top of his lungs, screaming, "It's all been a lie-!"

  Diu lifted his hand, reaching into a bloody pocket.

  Moments later, the base camp began to shake violently. Dozens of mines were exploding simultaneously. But the enormous mass of the ship absorbed the blows, then counterattacked, pushing the access tunnel shut for its entire length, and as an afterthought, knocking everyone off their feet.

  Diu grabbed his laser.

  He managed to sit up.

  Washen fought her way to her feet, but too late. She could only watch as Miocene managed to leap, grabbing Till by the head and halfway covering him as the killing blast struck her temple, and in half an instant, boiled away her brain.

  Till rolled, using the body as a shield, discharging his weapon until it was empty. Then a burst of light struck him in the shoulder, removing his right arm and part of his chest even as it cauterized the enormous wound.

  Using his drill, Locke quickly sliced his father into slivers, then burned him to dust.

  Miocene lay dead at Washen's feet, and Till was beside her, oblivious to everything. There was a wasted quality to the face, a mark that went beyond any physical injury. "It's been a lie," he kept saying, without sound. "Everything. A monstrous lie."

  Locke came to him, not to Washen, asking, "What is monstrous, Your Excellence?"

  Till gazed up at him. With a careful voice, he said, "Nothing." Then after a long pause, he added, "We have to return home. Now."

  "Of course. Yes, Your Excellence."

  "But first," he said, "the ship must be protected from its foes!"

  Locke knew exactly what was being asked of him. "I don't see why-?"

  "The ship is in danger!" the prophet cried out. "I say it, which makes it so. Now prove your devotion, Wayward!"

  Locke turned, looking at his mother with a weary, trapped expression.

  Washen struck him on the jaw, hard and sudden.

  She had covered almost a hundred meters before the laser drill bit into her calf, making her stumble. But she forced herself to keep running, slipping behind the drone with only two more burns cut deep into her back.

  It was as if Locke was trying to miss.

  Hours later, watching from the dormitory, Washen saw her son carrying four of the comatose baboons out into the courtyard, where he piled them up and turned the lasers on them. Then he showed the ashes to Till, satisfying him, and without a backward glance, the two walked slowly in the direction of the bridge.

  Washen hid for several days, eating and drinking from the old stores.

  When she finally crept into the bridge, she found Disc's sophisticated car cut into pieces, and Miocene's fused to its berth. But what startled her-what made her sick and sad-was Marrow itself. The captains' new bridge had been toppled. Wild fires and explosions were sweeping across the visible globe. A vast, incoherent rage was at work, erasing every trace of the despised captains, and attacking anyone that might pose any threat to a lost prophet.

  In that crystalline moment of horror, Washen understood what she had to do. And without a wasted moment, she turned and began to make ready.

  MISSION DATE-INCONSEQUENTIAL

  At the ship's center, a seamless night has been born.

  The figure moves by memory through the darkness, picking her way across a tangle of conduits and scrap parts. In a few moments, energy milked from hundreds of tube-cars will flow into an enormous projector, and for a fleeting instant or two, the darkness will be repelled. If her ink-and-paper calculations are correct, and if more than a century of single minded preparation succeeds, a message of forgiveness and rebirth will skate along the chamber's wall, encircling and embracing the world. But that is just the beginning.

  Wearing a pressure suit and two bulky packs, she climbs over the railing and leaps, bracing for the impact.

  Boom.

  The blister is thick, but she began the hole decades ago. Tools wait in a neat pile. With a minimum of cuts, the hole opens, and a sudden wind blows past her, trying to coax her into joining it, nothing outside but Marrow's high cold stratosphere. The buttresses have vanished, at least for the moment.

  There's no time to waste. She obeys the wind, letting it carry her through the hole and downward in a wild tumbling spiral. The sky behind her erupts in light.

  In the colors of fire and hot iron, it cries out, "A BUILDER IS COMING. SHE COMES TO LEAD YOU OUT OF YOUR MISERY!"

  The Builder grabs the cord of her parachute, then begins to scream. Not out of fear. Not at all.

  It's the full-throated, wonderstruck scream of a girl who has forgotten just how very much fun it is to fall.

  Heart of Whitenesse

  Howard Waldrop

  Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short story writers in the business, and his famous story "The Ugly Chickens" won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in the collections: Howard Who?, All about Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories, and Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories, with more collections in the works. Waldrop is also the author of the novel The Texas-Israeli War: 1999, in collaboration with lake Saunders, and of two solo novels, Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs. He is at work on a new novel, tentatively titled The Moon World.

  His most recent book is a new collection, Going Home Again. His stories have appeared in our First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Twelfth Annual Collections. A long-time Texan, Waldrop now lives in the tiny town of Arlington, Washington, outside Seattle, as close to a trout stream as he can possibly get without actually living in it. He does not
have a computer or a phone but he has a Web site at http://www.sffnet/people/waldrop/.

  I'm not even going to try to describe the weird, vivid, and funny story that follows, except to say that no one but Howard would ever even have thought of it, let alone written it. So fasten your seat belt, take a deep breath, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

  FOR JOHN CLUTE: THE HUM OF PLEROMA

  "Doctor Faustus?-He's dead."

  Down these mean cobbled lanes a man must go, methinks, especially when out before larkrise, if larks there still be within a thousand mile of this, A bone-breaking cold. From the Rus to Spain the world is locked in snow and ice, a sheet of blue glass. There was no summer to speak of; bread is dear, and in France we hear they are eating each other up, like the Cannibals of the Western Indies.

  It's bad enow I rehearse a play at the Rose, that I work away on the poem of the celebrated Hero and Leander, that life seems more like a jakes each day. Then some unseen toady comes knocking on the door and slips a note through the latchhole this early, the pounding fist matching that in my head. I'd come up from the covers and poured myself a cup of malmsey you could have drowned a pygmy in, then dressed as best I could, and made my way out into this cold world. Shoreditch was dismal in the best of times, and this wasn't it.

  And what do I see on gaining the lane but a man making steaming water into the street-ditch from a great bull pizzle of an accouterment.

  He sees me and winks. I winks back. His wink said I see you're interested.

  My wink back says I'm usually interested but not at this instant but keep me in mind if you see me again.

  He immediately smiles, then turns his picauventure beard toward the cold row of houses to his left.

  Winking is the silent language full of nuance and detail: we are after all talking about the overtures to a capital offence.

  I come to the shop on the note, I go in; though I've never been there before I know I can ignore the fellows working there (it is a dyer's, full of boiling vats and acrid smells and steam; at least it is warm) and go through a door up some rude steps, to go through another plated with strips of iron, and into the presence of a High Lord of the Realm.

  He is signing something, he sees me and slides the paper under another; it is probably the names of people soon to decorate a bridge or fence.

  This social interaction is, too, full of nuance; one of them is that we two pretend not to know who the other is. Sometimes their names are Cecil, Stansfield, Salisbury, sometimes not. Sometimes my name is Christopher, or Chris, familiar Kit, or the Poet, or plain Marlowe. We do pretend, though, we have no names, that we are the impersonal representatives of great ideas and forces, moved by large motives like the clockwork Heavens themselves.

  "A certain person needs enquiring about," said the man behind the small table. "Earlier enquiries have proved ... ineffectual. It has been thought best the next devolved to yourself. This person is beyond Oxford; make arrangements, go there quietly. Once in Oxford," he said, taking out of his sleeve a document with a wax seal upon it and laying it on the table, "you may open these, your instructions and knowledges; follow them to the letter. At a certain point, if you must follow them-thoroughly," he said, coming down hard upon the word, "we shall require a token of faith."

  He was telling me without saying that I was to see someone, do something to change their mind, or keep them from continuing a present course. Failing that I was to bring back to London their heart, as in the old story of the evil step-queen, the huntsman, and the beautiful girl who ended up consorting with forest dwarves, eating poison, and so forth.

  I nodded, which was all I was required to do.

  But he had not as yet handed me the missive, which meant he was not through.

  He leaned back in his chair.

  "I said your name was put forth," he said, "for this endeavor. But not by ille. I know you to be a godless man, a blasphemer, most probably an invert. I so hate that the business of true good government makes occasional use of such as you. But the awkward circumstances of this mission, shall we say, make some of your peccadilloes absolute necessities. Only this would make me have any dealings with you whatsoever. There will come a reckoning one fine day."

  Since he had violated the unspoken tenets of the arrangement by speaking to me personally, and, moreover, telling the plain unvarnished truth, and he knew it, I felt justified in my answer. My answer was, "As you say, Lord_," and I used his name.

  He clenched the arms of his chair, started up. Then he calmed himself, settled again. His eyes went to the other papers before him.

  "I believe that is all," he said, and handed me the document.

  I picked it up, turned and left.

  Well, work on Hero and Leander's right out for a few days, but I betook me as fast as the icy ways would let, from my precincts in Shoreditch through the city. Normally it would mean going about over London Bridge, but as I was in a hurry I walked straight across the River directly opposite the Rose to the theatre itself in Southwark.

  The River was, and had been for two months, frozen to a depth of five feet all the way to Gravesend. Small boys ran back and forth across the river. Here and there were set up booths with stiff frozen awnings; the largest concatenation of them was farther up past the town at Windsor, where Her Majesty the Queen had proclaimed a Frost Fair and set up a Royal Pavilion. A man with a bucket and axe was chopping the River for chunks of water. Others walked the ice and beat at limbs and timbers embedded in it-free firewood was free, in any weather. A thick pall of smoke hung over London town, every fire lit. A bank of heavy cloud hung farther north than that. There were tales that when the great cold had come, two months agone, flocks of birds in flight had fallen to the ground and shattered; cattle froze standing.

  To make matters worse, the Plague, which had closed the theatres for three months this last, long-forgotten summer, had not gone completely away, as all hoped, and was still taking thirty a week on the bills of mortality. It would probably be back again this summer and close the Theater, the Curtain and the Rose once more. Lord Strange's and Lord Nottingham's Men would again have to take touring the provinces beyond seven mile from London.

  But as for now, cold or no, at the Rose, we put on plays each afternoon without snow in the open-air ring. At the moment we do poor old Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay-Greene not dead these seven months, exploded from dropsy in a flop, they sold the clothes off him and buried him in a diaper with a wreath of laurel about his head-we rehearse mine own Massacre at Paris, and Shaxber's Harry Sixt, while we play his T. Andronicus alternate with Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, of which Andronicus is an overheated feeble Romanish imitation.

  Shaxber's also writing a longish poem, his on the celebrated Venus and Adonis, which at this rate will be done before my hero. This man, the same age as me, bears watching. (Unlike when I did at Cambridge, I take no part in the Acting; Will Shaxber is forever being messenger, third murderer, courtier; he tugs ropes when engines are needed; be counts receipts, he makes himself useful withal.

  No one here this early but Will Kemp-, he snores as usual on his bed of straw and ticking in the 'tiring house above and behind the stage. He sounds the bear that's eaten All the dogs on a good day at the Pit. I find some ink (almost frozen) and leave a note for John Alleyn to take over for me, pleading urgent business down country, to throw off the scent, and make my way, this time over the Bridge, back to Shoreditch.

  Shoreditch is the place actors live, since it was close to the original theatres, and so it is the place actors die. Often enough first news you hear on a morning is "another actor dead in Shoreditch." Never East Cheap, or Spital Fields, not even Southwark itself; always Shoreditch. At a tavern, at their lodgings, in the street itself. Turn them over; if it's not the Plague, it's another actor dead from a knife, fists, drink, pox, for all that matter cannonfire or hailstones in the remembered summers.

  I make arrangements; I realign myself to other stations; my sword stays in its corner, my new hat,
my velvet doublet all untied, hung on their hooks. I put on round slops, a leathern tunic, I cut away my beard; in place of sword a ten-inch poignard, a pointed slouch-hat, a large sack for my back.

  In an hour I am back at River-side, appearing as the third of the three P's in John Heywood's The Four PPPP'S, a 'pothecary, ready to make my way like him, at least as far as Oxenford.

  The ferrymen are all on holiday, their boats put up on timbers above the ice. Here and there people skate, run shoed on the ice, slip and fall; the gaiety seems forced, not like the fierce abandon of the early days of the Great Frost. But I have been watching on my sojourn each day to and from the Rose, and I lick my finger and stick it up (the spit freezing almost at once) to test the wind, and as I know the wind, and I know my man, I walk about halfway out on the solid Thames and wait.

  As I wait, I see two figures dressed much like the two Ambassadores From Poland in my Massacre at Paris (that is, not very well, one of them being Kemp) saunter toward me on the dull grey ice. I know them to be a man named Frizier and one named Skeres, Gram and Nicholas I believe, both to be bought for a shilling in any trial, both doing the occasional cony-catching, gulling and sharping; both men I have seen in taverns in Shoreditch, in Deptford, along the docks, working the theatres.

  There is little way they can know me, so I assume they have taken me for a mark as it slowly becomes apparent they are approaching me. Their opening line, on feigning recognition, will be, "Ho, sir, are you not a man from (Hereford) (Cheshire) (Luddington) known to my Cousin Jim?"

  They are closer, but they say to my surprise, "Seems the man is late this day, Ingo."

  "That he be, Nick."

  They are waiting for the same thing I am. They take no notice of me standing but twenty feet away.

  "Bedamn me if it's not the fastest thing I ever seen," says one.

  "I have seen the cheater-cat of Africa," says the other, "and this man would leave it standing."

  "I believe you to be right."