Year's Best Science Fiction 01 # 1984

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Suddenly she was filled with anger. “You’ll give it up? Did I expect too much? How strongly?”

  “Perhaps even more strongly than you,” he said. “I knew the order was coming down. And still I didn’t leave. That may hurt my chances with the supreme overs.”

  “Then at least I’m worth more than your breeding history?”

  “Now you are history. History the way they make it.”

  “I feel like I’m dying,” she said, amazement in her voice. “What is that, Clevo? What did you do to me?”

  “I’m in pain, too,” he said.

  “You’re hurt?”

  “I’m confused.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said, her anger rising again. “You knew, and you didn’t do anything?”

  “That would have been counter to duty. We’ll be worse off if we fight it.”

  “So what good is your great, exalted history?”

  “History is what you have,” Clevo said. “I only record.”

  —Why did they separate them?

  —I don’t know. You didn’t like him, anyway.

  —Yes, but now …

  —See? You’re her. We’re her. But shadows. She was whole.

  —I don’t understand.

  —We don’t. Look what happens to her. They took what was best out of her. Prufrax.

  went into battle eighteen more times before dying as heroes often do, dying in the midst of what she did best. The question of what made her better before the separation—for she definitely was not as fine a fighter after—has not been settled. Answers fall into an extinct classification of knowledge, and there are few left to interpret, none accessible to this device.

  —So she went out and fought and died. They never even made fibs about her. This killed her?

  —I don’t think so. She fought well enough. She died like other hawks died.

  —And she might have lived otherwise.

  —How can I know that, any more than you?

  —They—we—met again, you know. I met a Clevo once, on my ship. They didn’t let me stay with him long.

  —How did they react to him?

  —There was so little time, I don’t know.

  —Let’s ask … .

  In thousands of duty stations, it was inevitable that some of Prufrax’s visions would come true, that they should meet now and then. Clevos were numerous, as were Prufraxes. Every ship carried complements of several of each. Though Prufrax was never quite as successful as the original, she was a fine type. She—

  —She was never quite as successful. They took away her edge. They didn’t even know it!

  —They must have known.

  —Then they didn’t want to win!

  —We don’t know that. Maybe there were more important considerations.

  —Yes, like killing history.

  Aryz shuddered in his warming body, dizzy as if about to bud, then regained control. He had been pulled from the mandate, called to his own duty.

  He examined the shapes and the human captive. There was something different about them. How long had they been immersed in the mandate? He checked quickly, frantically, before answering the call. The reconstructed Mam had malfunctioned. None of them had been nourished. They were thin, pale, cooling.

  Even the bloated mutant shape was dying; lost, like the others, in the mandate.

  He turned his attention away. Everything was confusion. Was he human or Senexi now? Had he fallen so low as to understand them? He went to the origin of the call, the ruins of the temporary brood chamber. The corridors were caked with ammonia ice, burning his pod as he slipped over them. The brood mind had come out of flux bind. The emergency support systems hadn’t worked well; the brood mind was damaged.

  “Where have you been?” it asked.

  “I assumed I would not be needed until your return from the flux bind.”

  “You have not been watching!”

  “Was there any need? We are so advanced in time, all our actions are obsolete. The nebula is collapsed, the issue is decided.”

  “We do not know that. We are being pursued.”

  Aryz turned to the sensor wall—what was left of it—and saw that they were, indeed, being pursued. He had been lax.

  “It is not your fault,” the brood mind said. “You have been set a task that tainted you and ruined your function. You will dissipate.”

  Aryz hesitated. He had become so different, so tainted, that he actually hesitated at a direct command from the brood mind. But it was damaged. Without him, without what he had learned, what could it do? It wasn’t reasoning correctly.

  “There are facts you must know, important facts—”

  Aryz felt a wave of revulsion, uncomprehending fear, and something not unlike human anger radiate from the brood mind. Whatever he had learned and however he had changed, he could not withstand that wave.

  Willingly, and yet against his will—it didn’t matter—he felt himself liquifying. His pod slumped beneath him, and he fell over, landing on a pool of frozen ammonia. It burned, but he did not attempt to lift himself. Before he ended, he saw with surprising clarity what it was to be a branch ind, or a brood mind, or a human. Such a valuable insight, and it leaked out of his permea and froze on the ammonia.

  The brood mind regained what control it could of the fragment. But there were no defenses worthy of the name. Calm, preparing its own dissipation, it waited for the pursuit to conclude.

  The Mam set off an alarm. The interface with the mandate was severed. Weak, barely able to crawl, the humans looked at each other in horror and slid to opposite corners of the chamber.

  They were confused: which of them was the captive, which the decoy shape? It didn’t seem important. They were both bone-thin, fithy with their own excrement. They turned with one motion to stare at the bloated mutant. It sat in its corner, tiny head incongruous on the huge thorax, tiny arms and legs barely functional even when healthy. It smiled wanly at them.

  “We felt you,” one of the Prufraxes said. “You were with us in there.” Her voice was a soft croak.

  “That was my place,” it replied. “My only place.”

  “What function, what name?”

  “I’m … I know that. I’m a researcher. In there. I knew myself in there.”

  They squinted at the shape. The head. Something familiar, even now. “You’re a Clevo …”

  There was the noise all around them, cutting off the shape’s weak words. As they watched, their chamber was sectioned like an orange, and the wedges peeled open. The illumination ceased. Cold enveloped them.

  A naked human female, surrounded by tiny versions of herself, like an angel circled by fairy kin, floated into the chamber. She was thin as a snake. She wore nothing but silver rings on her wrists and a narrow torque around her waist. She glowed blue-green in the dark.

  The two Prufraxes moved their lips weakly but made no sound in the near vacuum. Who are you?

  She surveyed them without expression, then held out her arms as if to fly. She wore no gloves, but she was of their type.

  As she had done countless times before on finding such Senexi experiments—though this seemed older than most—she lifted one arm higher. The blue-green intensified, spread in waves to the mangled walls, surrounded the freezing, dying shapes. Perfect, angelic, she left the debris behind to cast its fitful glow and fade.

  They had destroyed every portion of the fragment but one. They left it behind unharmed.

  Then they continued, millions of them thick with mist, working the spaces between the stars, their only master the overness of the real.

  They needed no other masters. They would never malfunction.

  The mandate drifted in the dark and cold, its memory going on, but its only life the rapidly fading tracks where minds had once passed through it. The trails writhed briefly, almost as if alive, but only following the quantum rules of diminishing energy states. Finally, a small memory was illuminated.

  Prufrax’s last
poem, explained the mandate reflexively.

  How the fires grow! Peace passes

  All memory lost.

  Somehow we always miss that single door,

  Dooming ourselves to circle.

  Ashes to stars, lies to souls,

  Let’s spin round the sinks and holes.

  Kill the good, eat the young.

  Forever and more

  You and I are never done.

  The track faded into nothing. Around the mandate, the universe grew old very quickly.

  JOE HALDEMAN

  Manifest Destiny

  Joe Haldeman is usually thought of as a “hard science” writer—his stories most typically deal with lasers, black holes, tachyons, L5 colonies, clones, high-speed computers, FTL drives, and the like, everything worked out with a scrupulous attention to scientific accuracy that sometimes costs him weeks of research and scores of notebooks closely packed with equations—but here in a change of pace, he takes us instead on a visit to the Old West of the 1840s, with sly and delightful results.

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had already garnered Nebula and Hugo awards for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the ’70s. His next novel, Mindbridge, sold for a record six-figure advance, and he took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial.” His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year, the SF novels Worlds, All My Sins Remembered, and (in collaboration with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II) There Is No Darkness; a short-story collection, Infinite Dreams, and as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent novel was the well-received Worlds Apart, the sequel to Worlds, published by Viking in 1983. Upcoming are the third volume in the Worlds trilogy, Worlds Enough and Time, as well as several other novels “in various stages of incompletion.” He and his wife Gay are currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a visiting professor in the writing department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaching a SF writing workshop.

  This is the story of John Leroy Harris, but I doubt that name means much to you unless you’re pretty old, especially an old lawman. He’s dead anyhow, thirty years now, and nobody left around that could get hurt with this story. The fact is, I would’ve told it a long time ago, but when I was younger it would have bothered me, worrying about what people would think. Now I just don’t care. The hell with it.

  I’ve been on the move ever since I was a lad. At thirteen I put a knife in another boy and didn’t wait around to see if he lived, just went down to the river and worked my way to St. Louis, got in some trouble there and wound up in New Orleans a few years later. That’s where I came to meet John Harris.

  Now you wouldn’t tell from his name (he’s changed it a few times), but John was pure Spanish blood, as his folks had come from Spain before the Purchase. John was born in Natchitoches in 1815, the year of the Battle of New Orleans. That put him thirteen years older than me, so I guess he was about thirty when we met.

  I was working as a greeter, what we called a “bouncer,” in Mrs. Carranza’s whorehouse down by the docks. Mostly I just sat around and looked big—which I was then, and no fat, but sometimes I did have to calm down a customer or maybe throw him out, and I kept under my weskit a Starr pepperbox derringer in case of real trouble. It was by using this weapon that I made the acquaintance of John Harris.

  Harris had been in the bar a few times, often enough for me to notice him, but to my knowledge he never put the boots to any of the women. Didn’t have to pay for it, I guess; he was a handsome cuss, more than six feet tall, slender, with this kind of tragic look that women seem to like. Anyhow it was a raw rainy night in November, cold the way noplace else quite gets cold, and this customer comes downstairs complaining that the girl didn’t do what he had asked her to, and he wasn’t going to pay her extra. The kate come down right behind him and told what it was, and that she had too done it, and he hadn’t said nothing about it when they started, and you can take my word for it that it was something nasty.

  Well, we had some words about that and he tried to walk out without paying, so I sort of brought him back in and emptied out his pockets. He didn’t even have the price of a drink on him (he’d given Mrs. Carranza the two dollars, but that didn’t get you anything fancy). He did have a nice overcoat, though, so I took that from him and escorted him out into the rain headfirst.

  What happened was about ten or fifteen minutes later he barges back in, looking like a drowned dog but with a Navy Colt in each hand. He got off two shots before I blew his brains out (pepperbox isn’t much of a pistol, but he wasn’t four yards away), and a split second later another bullet takes him in the lungs. I turned around and everybody was on the floor or behind the bar but John Harris, who was still perched on a stool looking sort of interested and putting some kind of foreign revolver back into his pocket.

  The cops came soon enough but there was no trouble, not with forty witnesses, except for what to do with the dead meat. He didn’t have any papers and Mrs. Carranza didn’t want to pay the city for the burial. I was for just taking it out back and dropping it in the water, but they said that was against the law and unsanitary. John Harris said he had a wagon and come morning he’d take care of the matter. He signed a paper and that satisfied them.

  First light Harris showed up in a fancy landau. Me and the driver, an old black, we wrestled the wrapped-up corpse into the back of the carriage. Harris asked me to come along and I did.

  We just went east a little ways and rolled the damned thing into a bayou, let the gators take it. Then the driver smoked a pipe while Harris and me talked for a while.

  Now he did have the damnedest way of talking. His English was like nothing you ever heard—Spanish his mother tongue and then he learned most of his English in Australia—but that’s not what I really mean. I mean that if he wanted you to do something and you didn’t want to do it, you had best put your fingers in your ears and start walking away. That son of a gun could sell water to a drowning man.

  He started out asking me questions about myself, and eventually we got to talking about politics. Turns out we both felt about the same way toward the U.S. government, which is to say the hell with it. Harris wasn’t even really a citizen and I myself didn’t exist. For good reasons there was a death certificate on me in St. Louis, and I had a couple of different sets of papers a fellow on Bourbon Street printed up for me.

  Harris had pointed out that I spoke some Spanish—Mrs. Carranza was Mexican and so were most of her kates—and he got around to asking whether I’d like to take a little trip to Mexico. I told him that sounded like a really bad idea.

  This was late 1844, and that damned Polk had just been elected promising to annex Texas. The Mexicans had been skirmishing with Texas for years and they said it would be war if they got statehood. The man in charge was that one-legged crazy greaser Santa Anna, who’d been such a gentleman at the Alamo some years before. I didn’t fancy being a gringo stuck in that country when the shooting started.

  Well, Harris said I hadn’t thought it through. It was true there was going to be a war, he said, but the trick was to get in there early enough to profit from it. He asked whether I’d be interested in getting ten percent of ten thousand dollars. I told him I could feel my courage returning.

  Turns out Harris had joined the army a couple of years before and got himself into the quartermaster business, the ones who shuffle supplies back and forth. He had managed to slide five hundred rifles and a big batch of ammunition into a warehouse in New Orleans. The army thought they were stored in Kentucky, and the m
an who rented out the warehouse thought they were farming tools. Harris got himself discharged from the army and eventually got in touch with one General Parrodi, in Tampico. Parrodi agreed to buy the weapons, and pay for them in gold.

  The catch was that Parrodi also wanted the services of three Americans, not to fight but to serve as “interpreters,” that is to say spies, for as long as the war lasted. We would be given Mexican citizenship if we wanted it, and a land grant, but for our own protection we’d be treated as prisoners while the war was going on. (Part of the deal was that we would eavesdrop on other prisoners.) Harris showed me a contract that spelled all of this out, but I couldn’t read Spanish back then. Anyhow, I was no more inclined to trust Mexicans in such matters than I was Americans, but as I say, Harris could sell booze to a Baptist.

  The third American was none other than the old buck who was driving, a runaway slave from Florida name of Washington. He had grown up with Spanish masters, and not as a field hand, but some kind of butler. He had more learning than I did and could speak Spanish like a grandee. In Mexico, of course, there wasn’t any slavery, and he reckoned a nigger with gold and land was just as good as anybody else with gold and land.

  Looking back I can see why Washington was willing to take the risk, but I was a damned fool to do it. I was no roughneck, but I’d seen some violence in my seventeen years; that citizen we’d dumped in the bayou wasn’t the first man I had to kill. You’d think I’d know better than to put myself in the middle of the war. Guess I was too young to take dying seriously—a thousand dollars was real money back then.

  We went back into town and Harris took me to the warehouse. What he had was fifty long blue boxes stenciled with the name of a hardware outfit, and each one had ten Hall rifles, brand-new in a mixture of grease and sawdust.

  (This is why the Mexicans were right enthusiastic. The Hall was a flintlock, at least these were, but it was also a breechloader. The old muzzle-loaders that most soldiers used, Mexican and American, took thirteen separate steps to reload. Miss one step and it can take your face off. Also the Hall used interchangeable parts, which meant you didn’t have to find a smith when it needed repairing.)