The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St Martin's) 26

by Gardner Dozois

  The surviving leaders declared war on Adares, although they were in no position to prosecute it at the time. And the people, even those not originally for the revolution, had rallied in their hatred of the impure, genetically-altered Adareans. The pigmen. The abomination. The Beast. It gave all the people of the planet a common enemy to hate besides each other. A rallying cry that saved the planet.

  “Look,” Max said. “What happened to your friend, it’s nothing personal. It’s just politics.”

  Mallove opened his hand with a dramatic flourish. “Exactly. It’s politics. Perhaps you should go protest at the Department of Intelligence.”

  “I did!” Patience said. His hair bristled, moving like grass in the wind. “They said they couldn’t do anything to stop the execution and told me that I needed Education.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Mallove quipped. “Consider today’s execution educational.”

  Mallove walked toward the door, Anatoly in his wake; guards blocked the Adarean to prevent him from following. Max sniffed something sour in the air—the briefing was that Adareans communicated with scent, but no one had any proof.

  “I’ve been looking over your files while we were fighting to get you out of that prison cell,” Mallove was saying as Max caught up.

  “Trying to decide if I was worth the effort?” Max asked.

  Mallove grinned. “You must be. Drozhin did everything in his power to keep us from knowing that he held you prisoner. Fortunately I have my own sources. Of all the senior officers I have, Max, you’ve spent the least amount of time at headquarters.”

  “Yes, sir,” Max said. The guard opened the door. Hot air from the plaza washed over them.

  “For over twenty years, you’ve gone from one field posting to the next,” Mallove said. “Never a desk rotation. That’s not typical at all.”

  He was asking for an explanation.

  “It’s been easier to keep fighting the revolution that way,” Max said, knowing it was the right thing to say, but more than half-believing it. “To change the planet, we have to change one mind at a time, until everyone’s transformed.”

  The cost of terraforming a primitive planet was too high; it required too much sacrifice. People had to be true believers in something to do it.

  “That’s been good so far, Max,” Mallove said with an almost avuncular tolerance. “But we’re moving the battlefield to another level now and we need a bigger vision.”

  Max made a mental note: Mallove repeated his earlier war metaphor—he wanted to be seen by history as a great general, even though he came to the revolution late, after the fighting was over.

  Max scanned the courtyard and reminded himself that the fighting was over. The Department of Political Education sat on a peaceful street. Headquarters was an old school building: the ostensible symbol was that Education was part of the people, right out in the neighborhood, not set off behind barricades like the secret police in Intelligence. Older, smaller buildings bunched up around it, with windowbox gardens and colorful banners hanging from the rooftops.

  Their limousine pulled up to the curb.

  Mallove’s personal bodyguard jumped to open the door. Mallove paused, lifted his head to the sky, and said, with a grin like a vid general’s, “Into the battle!”

  Which is when Max noticed the armed gunmen—soldiers for certain, special forces, but in street clothes, nondescript browns and grays—step out from the alleys and doorways. Education’s goons always made extravagant gestures, eager to be seen and feared. These moved smoothly, almost gliding, with a distinct lack of threat that made Max’s skin prickle.

  He grabbed Anatoly’s shoulder, out of reflex, one comrade to another, and hissed, “Run!”

  The first of the soldiers lifted his gun and shot Mallove’s driver in the back of the head with a sound no louder than a muffled pop.

  Max raised his hands above his head, turned away, dropped his chin toward his chest. Look, I’m no danger, I don’t see a thing. He walked toward the nearest corner.

  Another muffled pop, and a shout to “Get down! Get the hell down!” and Anatoly’s voice, or maybe Mallove’s, shouted his name. One of the gray men stepped out from the corner, gun aimed pointblank at his eye.

  Guards burst out of Education’s lobby at the same moment, firing wildly. Automatic gunfire, old-fashioned ballistics, blasted from the windows directly overhead.

  The gray man lifted his eyes for a split second as the shots sounded above him. Max attacked, closing his hand over the barrel of the gun and turning it back into the man’s chest, squeezing the trigger with his finger over the other man’s. Volts shot through the body, dropped him twitching to the ground. Max’s arm went numb to his elbow.

  For the next few seconds everything dissolved in the chaos of crossfire and men diving for cover. With the gun still in his hand, Max emptied the man’s pockets into his—a little cash, nothing more. He rounded the corner, ran to the next one, turned. Shop keep ers and residents were coming out into the street at the sounds of fighting.

  So Mallove had been wrong. Intelligence did mean to have a battle in the streets. And Max had let himself get trapped on the wrong side of the front lines. He would have been safer in his original prison cell.

  He dodged down another alley, buttons flying as he ripped off his telltale charcoal-colored uniform shirt. His plain tee would draw less attention from snipers looking for the other color. Jamming the gun into his pants, he shoved his way into a group of old women with shopping bags full of bread and produce. He slouched, keeping his head down as he crossed the street in their midst.

  “What—you didn’t have time to get dressed when her husband came in?” one of the old ladies sneered.

  I’m not happy to see you, Max wanted to say. And that really is a gun in my pocket. He broke away from them at the far curb.

  An unmarked government car—but black, with tinted windows, same as being marked—blew down the street toward Education. Max flattened into a doorway to let it pass.

  A block away, on the edge of a rougher neighborhood, he slpped into a small shop and bought a phonecard, probably an illegal phonecard since the clerk accepted cash. Max stood in a corner by the window and watched the street. As he punched in the private number to Drozhin’s gatekeeper, the one he’d memorized and never used, he noticed scratch marks on his hand. He must’ve gotten them from the guard, when they struggled for the gun—

  “What is it?” the voice on the other end said before the phone even rang.

  “I need to speak to Uncle Wiggly,” Max said. “Peter Rabbit’s in troub—”

  “Sorry, you have a wrong number.”

  He was disconnected.

  Just like he had been in Drozhin’s prison.

  A thought hit Max with all the power of a sniper’s shot: what if Drozhin had already died? The mean old son of a bitch had to go sometime and, like everything else he did, he would probably do it in secret.

  Max was screwed if that was the case. Who would take over Intelligence? Hubert was the nominal second in command, but he had no real power. Kostigan was the one to watch out for, but Drozhin probably had standing orders to have him assassinated on his own death. He wouldn’t trust that one without a thumb on him. The only one who knew Max personally was Obermeyer. He’d been Max’s case officer for years and reported directly to Drozhin. He was also certainly the one assigned to assassinate Kostigan, and it was unlikely he would live out the day after that.

  So if Drozhin was dead, and Mallove had just been assassinated, which seemed to be the case, Max was unlikely to live out the day either. Anyone who didn’t kill him on purpose would do it by accident.

  The clerk stared at him, at the bloody back of his hand, the half-uniform. Pictures of the coup were being broadcast on the screen. If the media was involved already, then the whole thing had been staged. So, yeah, he was screwed.

  Max yanked a phonecard from the rack, shoved it at the clerk, tossed money at the counter. “Activate i
t.”

  The clerk shook his head, pushed the money back.

  The gun came out of Max’s pocket and the barrel came to rest on the clerk’s temple: Max nodded at the wedding ring on the man’s hand. “I’m going to use this to call my wife, tell her she’s in trouble. You let me do that, and then I’m gone.”

  Keeping one eye on Max, the clerk rang up the sale and activated the phone.

  It rang and rang until her voicemail clicked on. “This is the house of,” she used Max’s other name, his original one. Her voice was a bit rough—she joked it was from yelling at their children, but it was too many years spent outside in the planet’s harsh landscape, breathing grit. “He’s unable to speak to you right now, but leave a message and we’ll call back.”

  He hesitated. “Honey, it’s me. I’m in the capital, but may be traveling soon. Don’t know when I’ll be back—”

  Footsoldiers, dressed in the tan uniforms of Intelligence infantry, ran by the window. Max faded back behind the rack of apple chips.

  “—I, I,” he couldn’t bring himself to say love, so he switched to their private code, “wish I was with you at the beach. Take care of yourself.”

  He clicked off and looked up to see the clerk pointing the barrel of a shockprod at him.

  Max let the phonecard slip from his hand. It clattered on the floor. For the second time in less than a half hour, he put his hands up in visible surrender, backing quickly toward the door.

  He shoved the gun back in his pocket and hit the street running blind. The street was oddly quiet now except for shouts from one alley. Max turned the opposite way, sprinted down a residential street and over a wall into somebody’s garden, running through backyards and past astonished faces until he came to a corner lot occupied by one of the old Plain Churches, a long, low building that could have been a bunker if you bricked in the windows.

  The revolutionaries had not eliminated the churches when they took over the government. Pastors who supported the new regime prospered; some churches, like this one, the Falter Sanctuary, found other uses as dropboxes where Drozhin’s spies passed information to Intelligence.

  Max entered, circling the pews to reach the Holy Spirit Stations in the side chapel. Whispering a prayer, he opened the thumb-worn, ancient Bible at random, more for the sake of ritual than insight.

  He closed his eyes, stabbed his finger at a page, and opened them again. Deuteronomy 14.2: “You are a people holy to the LORD your God, and he has chosen you out of all peoples on earth to be his special possession.”

  And what exactly did that mean when they were no longer on earth? Theology had never been Max’s strong point, so he didn’t worry about it. He snatched up a slip of prayer paper and a pencil stub, then walked to the kneeling wall. He chose the spot farthest from the two women, probably mother and daughter, heads covered in similar red scarves, who were earnestly and quietly scratching out their prayer requests. The television screen in the corner cycled through the old videos of Renee Golden, the Golden Prophet, founder of the Plain Christians.

  “God’s plan for us can be seen in the tests he sends us,” the Golden Prophet said.

  Max recognized the sermon, the one she made on the banks of the river in Rostovon-Don, in southern Russia. Golden was American, but she proselytized heavily during two long missions to the old Soviet republics, returning through Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. Hundreds of thousands followed her call to go into space. When she died before making the journey herself, it only made her more like Moses, destined never to reach the Holy Land. Her followers formed a polyglot community that never came together except by force—the force of her personality in the beginning, the force of hardship during the settlement of Jesusalem, and then, finally, under the Patriarchs and the revolution, the force of force.

  Max hadn’t used this church dropbox in over a decade. He folded his hands and said an earnest prayer to the god of spies and all men caught behind enemy lines that there was still someone out there to receive it.

  Picking up his pencil, he began to write. He hoped that whoever saw the old code recognized it.

  “—Those of you who are listening to me now by way of satellite, I want you to join hands with us. Reach out and put your hand on the television screen—”

  He wrote slowly. The old code was all language for family. Aunt meant one thing, uncle meant another, with trigger words that keyed off the meanings.

  “—God has given us the design for a ship the same way He gave Noah the blueprints for the ark. Only now we are invited to ascend directly into heaven. Bring your prayers with you, into heaven, and hand-deliver them to God—”

  Max folded the paper and dropped it in the slot.

  “May I help you?”

  A young pastor stood there in his ceremonial suit and tie. One of the angry young pastors, bent on reclaiming the church’s glory in the face of the secular regime, if Max guessed correctly.

  “—God tells us not to mix with sinners, but this fallen world is full of sinners. Our only choice is to leave this world behind, to ascend—”

  “Just making a prayer request,” Max replied softly. He dropped the pencil stub into the little cup.

  “I don’t recognize you as a regular communicant.”

  “The church is a sanctuary for all,” Max said.

  The pastor glanced at Max’s state of half undress, his sweat, his bloody hand. “It’s funny how those who persecute the church run to it when it suits their needs.”

  “—Are you ready for the test? You have a choice to make: you can die with the sinners or turn your face toward heaven and join the angels—”

  The old woman at the other end of the pew grunted as she rose to her feet with the help of her daughter. “Anyone can change,” she chided the pastor. “Sometimes crisis is God’s way of showing us the need to repent.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Yevenko,” the pastor said.

  Max slipped away when the pastor spoke to her. There was nothing else to do here except hope that Obermeyer, or whoever, got his message and understood it. He pushed open the side door; the sun over the metal rooftops glared blindingly, and he blinked.

  The hard muzzle of a gun pressed against his neck. “I’ll be happy to kill you,” a voice said. “Just give me an excuse.”

  Max raised his hands in the air, for the third time today, this time in true surrender. “No need for that.”

  The muzzle shoved hard against his head, knocking him off-balance. “I’ll decide what is and isn’t needed.” He reached into Max’s pocket and retrieved the gun. “Now walk toward Calvary Park.”

  “Yes, sir,” Max said, obeying. These men were on his side, he had to remember that: they all served Intelligence, they all served Jesusalem. He’d tell them who he was right now, except for the possibility that Kostigan was in charge.

  He walked at a non-provocative pace, neither too slow nor too fast. Close to the square, he saw other men being rounded up. No, not just men: there was a woman carrying a baby, tugging a cap down over its head. A little boy clutched the hem of her skirt, running to keep up. This district housed the employees and families of those who worked for the Department of Education. So they were all being rounded up, even the civilians. A clean sweep.

  Two other men marched along under the gun of another soldier. One of them was in a tee-shirt, like Max, with a cross on the same chain as his dogtags. The other was a major from Education.

  “Can you take this one for me?” shouted Max’s keeper.

  The other soldier nodded yes, used his weapon to wave all three men up against a flat concrete wall. “Go stand over there—now!”

  Perfect wall for an execution, Max thought as he stood against it. Lots of room for burn marks and bloodstains to impress and cow the public for years to come. Jesusalem was full of walls like that, but most of them were old.

  While the soldier talked into his link, the other two prisoners whispered. The one with the cross said, “Hey, it’s me. Hey.”

  The voice st
artled Max. The stupid-but-earnest guard—what was his name? “Vasily?”

  “Yeah, what a mess. What’s going on?”

  The major had different plans. “If we run three different directions, he can’t get us all.”

  Vasily brushed his thumb nervously against his cross. “Yeah, but what about the one he does get?”

  “Look,” Max whispered, covering his mouth with his hand like he was scratching his nose. “The guard’s just pretending to talk. He’s watching, waiting for us to run.”

  Probably hoping for them to run. That way he could just shoot them and walk away. He might do it anyway, Max thought, even without provocation.

  “I’ll go left first, draw his attention,” the major whispered. “You two take off the other way.”

  It didn’t matter to Max if the guy got himself killed, but he didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. When the major leaned, ready to spring away, Max slammed him into the wall. “Don’t do it!”

  “Your mother’s a pig!”

  “Move again and I’ll shoot all of you!” the guard yelled, running over with his weapon up.

  Max looked him in the eye, held up his hands in what was turning into a habitual gesture. “Hey, I’m on your side—”

  “Shut up!”

  The guard hesitated. He wasn’t used to killing yet, wasn’t even used to hurting people. Maybe Drozhin recognized that problem with this generation of troops and was trying to blood them. That was possible too, if Drozhin was still alive. That was something Drozhin would do. Any explanation was possible at this point: it was making Max crazy. All he needed to do was hold on until he could make his contact and get away.

  The guard listened to something in his ear bud, gestured with the gun. “That way. The transports are lined up in Calvary Park.”

  “Transports?” the major asked. “Where are we—”

  The butt of the rifle interrupted his sentence, scattering his words, along with his blood, over the road ahead of him as he sprawled.