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

by Gardner Dozois

  After morning Shift class, Serejen went down to the Old Great Pool, the ancient flooded piazza that was the historic heart of the Manifold House, and used the techniques he had learned an hour before to effortlessly transfer from Serejen to Nejben. Then he went down into the waters and swam with Puzhay. She was teary and confused, but the summer-warmed water and the physical exercise brightened her. Under a sky lowering with the summer storm that the gulls had promised, they sought out the many secret flooded colonnades and courts where the big groups of friends did not go. There, under the first crackles of lightning and the hiss of rain, he kissed her and she slipped her hand into his swimsuit and cradled the comfortable swell of his cock.

  SEREJEN, LOVING

  Night, the aurora and sirens. Serejen shivered as police drones came in low over the Conservatorium roof. Through the high, arched windows, fires could still be seen burning on Yaskaray Prospect. The power had not yet been restored, the streets, the towering apartment blocks that lined them, were still dark. A stalled tram sprawled across a set of points, flames flickering in its rear carriage. The noise of the protest had moved off, but occasional shadows moved across the ice beneath the mesmerism of the aurora; student rioters, police security robots. It was easy to tell the robots by the sprays of ice crystals thrown up by their needle-tip, mincing legs.

  ‘Are you still at that window? Come away from there, if they see you they might shoot you. Look, I’ve tea made.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who might shoot me? The rioters or the police?’

  ‘Like you’d care if you were dead.’

  But he came and sat at the table and took the bowl of thin, salty Bedenderay maté.

  ‘But sure I can’t be killed.’

  Her name was Seriantep. She was an Anpreen Prebendary ostensibly attached to the College of Theoretical Physics at the Conservatorium of Jann. She looked like a tall, slim young woman with the dark skin and blue-black hair of a Summer-born Archipelagan, but that was just the form that the swarm of Anpreen nano-processor motes had assumed. She hived. Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben wondered how close you had to get before her perfect skin resolved into a blur of microscopic motes. He had had much opportunity to make this observation. As well as being his notional student—though what a functionally immortal hive-citizen who had crossed one hundred and twenty light-years could learn from a fresh twentysomething meat human was moot—she was his occasional lover.

  She drank the tea. Serejen watched the purse of her lips around the delicate porcelain bowl decorated with the ubiquitous Lord of the Fishes motif, even in high, dry continental Jann. The small movement of her throat as she swallowed. He knew a hundred such tiny, intimate movements, but even as she cooed and giggled and gasped to the stimulations of the Five Leaves, Five Fishes ritual, the involuntary actions of her body had seemed like performances. Learned responses. Performances as he made observations. Actor and audience. That was the kind of lover he was as Serejen.

  ‘So what is it really like to fuck a pile of nano-motes?’ Puzhay had asked as they rolled around with wine in the cosy warm fleshiness of the Thirteenth Window Coupling Porch at the ancient, academic Ogrun Menholding. ‘I’d imagine it feels . . . fizzy.’ And she’d squeezed his cock, holding it hostage, watch what you say boy.

  ‘At least nano-motes never get morning breath,’ he’d said, and she’d given a little shriek of outrage and jerked his dick so that he yelped, and then they both laughed and then rolled over again and buried themselves deep into the winter-defying warmth of the piled quilts.

  I should be with her now, he thought. The months-long winter nights beneath the aurora and the stars clouds of the great galaxy were theirs. After the Manifold House, he had gone with her to her Bedenderay and her home city of Jann. The City Conservatorium had the world’s best theoretical physics department. It was nothing to do with small, boyish, funny Puzhay. They had formalised a partnering six months later. His parents had complained and shivered through all the celebrations in this cold and dark and barbarous city far from the soft elegance of island life. But ever after winter, even on the coldest mornings when carbon dioxide frost crusted the steps of the Tea Lane Ladyhearth where Puzhay lived, was their season. He should call her, let her know he was still trapped but that at the first sign, the very first sign, he would come back. The cell net was still up. Even an email. He couldn’t. Seriantep didn’t know. Seriantep wouldn’t understand. She had not understood that one time when he tried to explain it in abstracts; that different Aspects could—should—have different relationships with different partners, love separately but equally. That as Serejen, I love you, Anpreen Prebendary Seriantep, but as Nejben, I love Puzhay. He could never say that. For an immortal, starcrossing hive of nano motes, Seriantep was very singleminded.

  Gunfire cracked in the crystal night, far and flat.

  ‘I think it’s dying down,’ Seriantep said.

  ‘I’d give it a while yet.’

  So strange, so rude, this sudden flaring of anti-alien violence. In the dreadful dead of winter too, when nothing should rightfully fight and even the trees along Yaskaray Prospect drew down to their heartwood and turned to ice. Despite the joy of Puzhay, Serejen knew that he would always hate the Bedenderay winter. You watch out now, his mother had said when he had announced his decision to go to Jann. They all go dark-mad there. Accidie and suicide walked the frozen canals of the Winter City. No surprise then that madness should break out against the Anpreen Prebendaries. Likewise inevitable that the popular rage should be turned against the Conservatorium. The university had always been seen as a place apart from the rest of Jann, in summer aloof and lofty above the sweltering streets, like an over-grand daughter; in winter a parasite on this most marginal of economies. Now it was the unofficial alien embassy in the northern hemi sphere. There were more Anpreen in its long, small-windowed corridors than anywhere else in the world.

  There are no aliens, Serejen thought. There is only the Clade. We are all family. Cjatay had insisted that. The ship had sailed over the horizon, they hadn’t called, they had drifted from each other’s lives. Cjatay’s name occasionally impinged on Serejen’s awareness through radio interviews and opinion pieces. He had developed a darkly paranoid conspiracy theory around the Anpreen Presence. Serejen, high above the frozen streets of Jann in deeply abstract speculation about the physical reality of mathematics, occasionally mused upon the question of at what point the migration had become a Presence. The Lonely often obsessively took up narrow, focused interests. Now the street was listening, acting. Great Winter always was a dark, paranoid season. Here’s how to understand, Serejen thought. There are no aliens after you’ve had sex with them.

  Helicopter blades rattled from the walls of the College of Theoretical Physics and then retreated across the Central Canal. The silence in the warm, dimly-lit little faculty cell was profound. At last, Serejen said, ‘I think we could go now.’

  On the street, cold stabbed even through the quilted layers of Serejen’s greatcoat. He fastened the high collar across his throat and still he felt the breath crackle into ice around his lips. Seriantep stepped lightly between the half bricks and bottle shards in nothing more than the tunic and leggings she customarily wore around the college. Her motes gave her full control over her body, including its temperature.

  ‘You should have put something on,’ Serejen said. ‘You’re a bit obvious.’

  Past shuttered cafés and closed up stores and the tall brick faces of the student Hearths. The burning tram on the Tunday Avenue junction blazed fitfully, its bitter smoke mingling with the eternal aromatic hydrocarbon smog exhaled by Jann’s power plants. The trees that lined the avenue’s centre strip were folded down into tight fists, dreaming of summer. Their boot heels rang loud on the street tiles.

  A darker shape upon the darkness moved in the narrow slit of an alley between two towering tenement blocks. Serejen froze, his heart jerked. A collar turned d
own, a face studying his—Obredajay from the Department of Field Physics.

  ‘Safe home.’

  ‘Aye. And you.’

  The higher academics all held apartments within the Conservatorium and were safe within its walls; most of the research staff working late would sit it out until morning. Tea and news reports would see them through. Those out on the fickle streets had reasons to be there. Serejen had heard that Obredajay was head-over-heels infatuated with a new manfriend.

  The dangers we court for little love.

  On the intersection of Tunday Avenue and Yaskaray Wharf, a police robot stepped out of the impervious dark of the arches beneath General Gatoris Bridge. Pistons hissed it up to its full three meters; green light flicked across Serejen’s retinas. Seriantep held up her hand, the motes of her palm displaying her immunity as a Prebendary of the Clade. The machine shrank down, seemingly dejected, if plastic and pumps could display such an emotion.

  A solitary tea-shop stood open on the corner of Silver Spider Entry and the Wharf, its windows misty with steam from the simmering urns. Security eyes turned and blinked at the two fleeing academics.

  On Tannis Lane, they jumped them. There was no warning. A sudden surge of voices rebounding from the stone staircases and brick arches broke into a wave of figures lumbering around the turn of the alley, bulky and shouldering in their heavy winter quilts. Some held sticks, some held torn placards, some were empty handed. They saw a man in a heavy winter coat, breath frosted on his mouth-shield. They saw a woman almost naked, her breath easy, unclouded. They knew in an instant what she saw. The hubbub in the laneway became a roar.

  Serejen and Seriantep were already in flight. Sensing rapid motion, the soles of Serejen’s boots extended grips into the rime. As automatically, he felt the heart-numbing panic-rush ebb, felt himself lose his grip on his body and grow pale. Another was taking hold, his flight-or-fight Aspect; his cool, competent emergency service Fejannen.

  He seized Seriantep’s hand.

  ‘With me. Run!’

  Serejen-Fejannen saw the change of Aspect flicker across the tea-shop owner’s face like weather as they barged through his door, breathless between his stables. Up to his counter with its looming, steaming urns of hot hot water. This tea-man wanted them out, wanted his livelihood safe.

  ‘We need your help.’

  The tea-man’s eyes and nostrils widened at the charge of rioters that skidded and slipped around the corner into Silver Spider Entry. Then his hand hit the button under the counter and the shutters rolled down. The shop boomed, the shutters bowed to fists striking them. Rocks banged like gunfire from metal. Voices rose and joined together, louder because they were unseen.

  ‘I’ve called the police,’ Seriantep said. “They’ll be here without delay.’

  ‘No, they won’t,’ Fejannen said. He pulled out a chair from the table closest the car and sat down, edgily eying the grey slats of the shutter. ‘Their job is to restore order and protect property. Providing personal protection to aliens is far down their list of priorities.’

  Seriantep took the chair opposite. She sat down wary as a settling bird.

  ‘What’s going on here? I don’t understand. I’m very scared.’

  The café owner set two glasses of maté down on the table. He frowned, then his eyes opened in understanding. An alien at his table. He returned to the bar and leaned on it, staring at the shutters beyond which the voice of the mob circled.

  ‘I thought you said you couldn’t be killed.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m scared of. I’m scared of you, Serejen.’

  ‘I’m not Serejen. I’m Fejannen.’

  ‘Who, what’s Fejannen?’

  ‘Me, when I’m scared, when I’m angry, when I need to be able to think clearly and coolly when a million things are happening at once, when I’m playing games or hunting or putting a big funding proposal together.’

  ‘You sound . . . different.’

  ‘I am different. How long have you been on our world?’

  ‘You’re hard. And cold. Serejen was never hard.’

  ‘I’m not Serejen.’

  A huge crash—the shutter bowed under a massive impact and the window behind it shattered.

  ‘Right, that’s it, I don’t care what happens, you’re going.’ The tea-man leaped from behind his counter and strode towards Seriantep. Fejannen was there to meet him.

  ‘This woman is a guest in your country and requires your protection.’

  ‘That’s not a woman. That’s a pile of . . . insects. Things. Tiny things.’

  ‘Well, they look like mighty scared tiny things.’

  ‘I don’t think so. Like you said, like they say on the news, they can’t really die.’

  ‘They can hurt. She can hurt.’

  Eyes locked, then disengaged. The maté-man returned to his towering silos of herbal mash. The noise from the street settled into a stiff, waiting silence. Neither Fejannen nor Seriantep believed that it was true, that the mob had gone, despite the spearing cold out there. The lights flickered once, twice.

  Seriantep said suddenly, vehemently, ‘I could take them.’

  The tea-man looked up.

  ‘Don’t,’ Fejannen whispered.

  ‘I could. I could get out under the door. It’s just a reforming.’

  The tea-man’s eyes were wide. A demon, a winter-grim in his prime location canal-side tea-shop!

  ‘You scare them enough as you are,’ Fejannen said.

  ‘Why? We’re only here to help, to learn from you.’

  ‘They think, what have you got to learn from us? They think that you’re keeping secrets from us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Them. Don’t scare them any more. The police will come, eventually, or the Conservatorium proctors. Or they’ll just get bored and go home. These things never really last.’

  ‘You’re right.’ She slumped back into her seat. ‘This fucking world . . . Oh, why did I come here?’ Seriantep glanced up at the inconstant lumetubes, beyond to the distant diadem of her people’s colonies, gravid on decades of water. It was a question, Fejannen knew, that Serejen had asked himself many times. A postgraduate scholar researching space-time topologies and the cosmological constant. A thousand-year-old post-human innocently wearing the body of a twenty-year-old woman, playing the student. She could learn nothing from him. All the knowledge the Anpreen wanderers had gained in their ten thousands year migration was incarnate in her motes. She embodied all truth and she lied with every cell of her body. Anpreen secrets. No basis for a relationship, yet Serejen loved her, as Serejen could love. But was it any more for her than novelty; a tourist, a local boy, a brief summer loving?

  Suddenly, vehemently, Seriantep leaned across the table to take Fejannen’s face between her hands.

  ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Where? Who?’

  ‘Who?’ She shook her head in exasperation. ‘Ahh! Serejen. But it would be you as well, it has to be you. To my place, to the Commonweal. I’ve wanted to ask you for so long. I’d love you to see my worlds. Hundreds of worlds, like jewels, dazzling in the sun. And inside, under the ice, the worlds within worlds within worlds . . . I made the application for a travel bursary months ago, I just couldn’t ask.’

  ‘Why? What kept you from asking?’ A small but significant traffic of diplomats, scientists, and journalists flowed between Tay and the Anpreen fleet around Tejaphay. The returnees enjoyed global celebrity status, their opinions and experiences sought by think-tanks and talk shows and news-site columns, the details of the faces and lives sought by the press. Serejen had never understood what it was the people expected from the celebrity of others but was not so immured behind the fortress walls of the Collegium, armoured against the long siege of High Winter, that he couldn’t appreciate its personal benefits. The lights seemed to brighten, the sense of the special hush outside, that was not true silence but waiting, dimmed as Serejen replaced Fejannen. ‘Why didn’t you ask?’

  ‘
Because I thought you might refuse.’

  ‘Refuse?’ The few, the golden few. ‘Turn down the chance to work in the Commonweal? Why would anyone do that, why would I do that?’

  Seriantep looked long at him, her head cocked slightly, alluringly, to one side, the kind of gesture an alien unused to a human body might devise.

  ‘You’re Serejen again, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am that Aspect again, yes.’

  ‘Because I thought you might refuse because of her. That other woman. Puzhay.’

  Serejen blinked three times. From Seriantep’s face, he knew that she expected some admission, some confession, some emotion. He could not understand what.

  Seriantep said, ‘I know about her. We know things at the Anpreen Mission. We check whom we work with. We have to. We know not everyone welcomes us, and that more are suspicious of us. I know who she is and where she lives and what you do with her three times a week when you go to her. I know where you were intending to go to -night, if all this hadn’t happened.’

  Three times again, Serejen blinked. Now he was hot, too hot in his winter quilt in this steamy, fragrant tea-shop.

  ‘But that’s a ridiculous question. I don’t love Puzhay. Nejben does.’

  ‘Yes, but you are Nejben.’

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you. . . .’ Serejen bit back the anger. There were Aspects hovering on the edge of his consciousness like the hurricane-front angels of the Bazjendi Psalmody; selves inappropriate to Seriantep. Aspects that in their rage and storm might lose him this thing, so finely balanced now in this tea-shop. ‘It’s our way,’ he said weakly. ‘It’s how we are.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ Seriantep fought for words. ‘It’s you, there, that body. You say it’s different, you say it’s someone else and not you, not Serejen, but how do I know that? How can I know that?’