Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  “There are no demons,” he proclaimed.

  Grandfather watched him, and waited.

  “Blue Clad is a man, and Yellow Hair is another man.” He wanted to whisper, but his voice grew louder with each word. “They are the same as us. And those demons who floated down the river —”

  “Raven,” Grandfather interrupted. “Stop this.”

  “They aren’t demons, either. They are men, different from us in ways, but not very different. I think.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  The old man’s voice was hard and scornful.

  Raven said, “Yes,” as he stood, walking over to the metal ropes. Then he put a hand on top of a dead tree, and like a buck deer, he leaped over the highest rope, landing in the grass on the other side. “It’s the same world over here,” he announced. “It feels the same, because it is.”

  The old man shook his head, tears running.

  “Uncle knew,” said Raven, “and that’s why he left us.”

  “He left us,” said Grandfather, “because he was weak and foolish. No other reasons are needed.”

  Raven shook his head, wanting to hear none of it.

  “You aren’t weak or foolish,” Grandfather continued. “But I think you have made a simple, horrible mistake.”

  “What is that?”

  The old man followed him, crawling beneath the lowest rope and standing up stiffly to face him. “You are right. Between the spirit realm and our world, there is no difference. But that’s because we lost. Our little valley was flooded with the demons’ evil, and now everything belongs to them.”

  Raven winced and closed his eyes, thinking hard now.

  “We are demons,” Grandfather told him.

  “I am not,” Raven growled.

  “You are, and I am, too. And that’s why those demons confused you for men.” Grandfather laughed gently, lifting his good arm and setting his open hand on Raven’s shoulder. “The medicine man who brought us here…your ancestor, and mine…knew we wouldn’t withstand the demons’ flood. We were scarce, and we were human, and how could we be anything but weak?”

  Raven shook his head, saying nothing.

  “Look below,” Grandfather told him. “Imagine our river rising. Imagine those cold black waters covering the valley floor, and then the bluffs, and finally us. You and I would be the last people swallowed by the awful water.”

  “I don’t want to think about that,” Raven began.

  “But flood waters always fall,” Grandfather continued. “And what is the first ground to rise up into the sun?”

  “This is,” Raven realized. “The last ground swallowed.”

  Grandfather grinned, saying, “Exactly. Our ancestor wanted us in this place because this place would be the first to emerge. He had a bright, wondrous vision of a great demon who would make himself human again, and make his family human, and then would make the world a good human place, free of madness and pain.”

  “He saw this?” Raven gulped.

  The hand dropped now. “Yes, he did.”

  A strange sweet hope took hold of Raven. Quietly, he asked, “Could I maybe be that special one?”

  Grandfather just looked at him, then turned and slipped back under the metal rope, starting to walk home. “Come with me,” he said as he vanished into the shadows. “Come, or you’ll never know if you could be.”

  Raven stood motionless for a long while.

  He looked at the towers of light, and he looked down at the quiet little river. And then he looked inside himself, finding the answer waiting there.

  * * *

  Undone

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  Here’s a pyrotechnic, big-screen, fast-paced, highly inventive, slyly post-modern Space Opera, in which a far-future freedom fighter flees even further into the future (try saying that five times fast!)to avoid her oppressors, only to find there some surprises, some challenges, and some opportunities, that even she didn’t expect to meet.

  James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975 and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially the recent Wildlife, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as “Solstice,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Glass Cloud,” “Mr. Boy,” “Pogrom,” and “Home Front,” and he is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His acclaimed story “Think Like a Dinosaur” won him a Hugo Award in 1996. Kelly’s first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look Into the Sun. His most recent book is a collection, Think Like a Dinosaur, and he is currently at work on another novel. Upcoming is a new collection, Strange But Not a Stranger. A collaboration between Kelly and Kessel appeared in our First Annual Collection; and solo Kelly stories have appeared in our Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Seventeenth Annual Collections. Born in Minneola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Nottingham, New Hampshire. He has a web site at www.jimkelly.net, and reviews internet-related matters for Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  Panic Attack

  The ship screamed. Its screens showed Mada that she was surrounded in three-space. A swarm of Utopian asteroids was closing on her, brain clans and mining DIs living in hollowed-out chunks of carbonaceous chondrite, any one of which could have mustered enough votes to abolish Mada in all ten dimensions.

  “I’m going to die,” the ship cried, “I’m going to die, I’m going to…”

  “I’m not.” Mada waved the speaker off impatiently and scanned downwhen. She saw that the Utopians had planted an identity mine five minutes into the past that would boil her memory to vapor if she tried to go back in time to undo this trap. Upwhen, then. The future was clear, at least as far as she could see, which wasn’t much beyond next week. Of course, that was the direction they wanted her to skip. They’d be happiest making her their great-great-great-grandchildren’s problem.

  The Utopians fired another spread of panic bolts. The ship tried to absorb them, but its buffers were already overflowing. Mada felt her throat tighten. Suddenly she couldn’t remember how to spell luck, and she believed that she could feel her sanity oozing out of her ears.

  “So let’s skip upwhen,” she said.

  “You s-sure?” said the ship. “I don’t know if…how far?

  “Far enough so that all of these drones will be fossils.”

  “I can’t just…I need a number, Mada.”

  A needle of fear pricked Mada hard enough to make her reflexes kick. “Skip!” Her panic did not allow for the luxury of numbers. “Skip now!” Her voice was tight as a fist. “Do it!”

  Time shivered as the ship surged into the empty dimensions. In three-space, Mada went all wavy. Eons passed in a nanosecond, then she washed back into the strong dimensions and solidified.

  She merged briefly with the ship to assess damage. “What have you done?” The gain in entropy was an ache in her bones.

  “I-I’m sorry, you said to skip so…” The ship was still jittery.

  Even though she wanted to kick its sensorium in, she bit down hard on her anger. They had both made enough mistakes that day. “That’s all right,” she said, “we can always go back. We just have to figure out when we are. Run the star charts.”

  Two-Tenths of a Spin

  The ship took almost three minutes to get its charts to agree with its navigation screens — a bad sign. Reconciling the data showed that it had skipped forward in time about two-tenths of a galactic spin. Almost twenty million years had passed on Mada’s home world of Trueborn, time enough for its crust to fold and buckle into new mountain ranges, for the Green Sea to bloom, for the glaciers to march and melt. More than enough time for everything and everyone Mada had ever loved — or hated — to die, turn to dust and blow
away.

  Whiskers trembling, she checked downwhen. What she saw made her lose her perch and float aimlessly away from the command mod’s screens. There had to be something wrong with the ship’s air. It settled like dead, wet leaves in her lungs. She ordered the ship to check the mix.

  The ship’s deck flowed into an enormous plastic hand, warm as blood. It cupped Mada gently in its palm and raised her up so that she could see its screens straight on.

  “Nominal, Mada. Everything is as it should be.”

  That couldn’t be right. She could breathe ship-nominal atmosphere. “Check it again,” she said.

  “Mada, I’m sorry,” said the ship.

  The identity mine had skipped with them and was still dogging her, five infuriating minutes into the past. There was no getting around it, no way to undo their leap into the future. She was trapped two-tenths of a spin upwhen. The knowledge was like a sucking hole in her chest, much worse than any wound the Utopian psychological war machine could have inflicted on her.

  “What do we do now?” asked the ship.

  Mada wondered what she should say to it. Scan for hostiles? Open a pleasure sim? Cook a nice, hot stew? Orders twisted in her mind, bit their tails and swallowed themselves.

  She considered — briefly — telling it to open all the air locks to the vacuum. Would it obey this order? She thought it probably would, although she would as soon chew her own tongue off as utter such cowardly words. Had not she and her sibling batch voted to carry the revolution into all ten dimensions? Pledged themselves to fight for the Three Universal Rights, no matter what the cost the Utopian brain clans extracted from them in blood and anguish?

  But that had been two-tenths of a spin ago.

  Bean Thoughts

  “Where are you going?” said the ship.

  Mada floated through the door bubble of the command mod. She wrapped her toes around the perch outside to steady herself.

  “Mada, wait! I need a mission, a course, some line of inquiry.”

  She launched down the companionway.

  “I’m a Dependent Intelligence, Mada.” Its speaker buzzed with self-righteousness. “I have the right to proper and timely guidance.”

  The ship flowed a veil across her trajectory; as she approached, it went taut. That was DI thinking: the ship was sure that it could just bounce her back into its world. Mada flicked her claws and slashed at it, shredding holes half a meter long.

  “And I have the right to be an individual,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

  She caught another perch and pivoted off it toward the greenhouse blister. She grabbed the perch by the door bubble and paused to flow new alveoli into her lungs to make up for the oxygen-depleted, carbon-dioxide-enriched air mix in the greenhouse. The bubble shivered as she popped through it and she breathed deeply. The smells of life helped ground her whenever operation of the ship overwhelmed her. It was always so needy and there was only one of her.

  It would have been different if they had been designed to go out in teams. She would have had her sibling Thiras at her side; together they might have been strong enough to withstand the Utopian’s panic…no! Mada shook him out of her head. Thiras was gone; they were all gone. There was no sense in looking for comfort, downwhen or up. All she had was the moment, the tick of the relentless present, filled now with the moist, bittersweet breath of the dirt, the sticky savor of running sap, the bloom of perfume on the flowers. As she drifted through the greenhouse, leaves brushed her skin like caresses. She settled at the potting bench, opened a bin and picked out a single bean seed.

  Mada cupped it between her two hands and blew on it, letting her body’s warmth coax the seed out of dormancy. She tried to merge her mind with its blissful unconsciousness. Cotyledons stirred and began to absorb nutrients from the endosperm. A bean cared nothing about proclaiming the Three Universal Rights: the right of all independent sentients to remain individual, the right to manipulate their physical structures and the right to access the timelines. Mada slowed her metabolism to the steady and deliberate rhythm of the bean — what Utopian could do that? They held that individuality bred chaos, that function alone must determine form and that undoing the past was sacrilege. Being Utopians, they could hardly destroy Trueborn and its handful of colonies. Instead they had tried to put the Rights under quarantine.

  Mada stimulated the sweat glands in the palms of her hands. The moisture wicking across her skin called to the embryonic root in the bean seed. The tip pushed against the sead coat. Mada’s sibling batch on Trueborn had pushed hard against the Utopian blockade, to bring the Rights to the rest of the galaxy.

  Only a handful had made it to open space. The brain clans had hunted them down and brought most of them back in disgrace to Trueborn. But not Mada. No, not wily Mada, Mada the fearless, Mada whose heart now beat but once a minute.

  The bean embryo swelled and its root cracked the seed coat. It curled into her hand, branching and rebranching like the timelines. The roots tickled her.

  Mada manipulated the chemistry of her sweat by forcing her sweat ducts to reabsorb most of the sodium and chlorine. She parted her hands slightly and raised them up to the grow lights. The cotyledons emerged and chloroplasts oriented themselves to the light. Mada was thinking only bean thoughts as her cupped hands filled with roots and the first true leaves unfolded. More leaves budded from the nodes of her stem, her petioles arched and twisted to the light, the light. It was only the light — violet-blue and orange-red — that mattered, the incredible shower of photons that excited her chlorophyll, passing electrons down carrier molecules to form adenosine diphosphate and nicotinamide adenine dinucleo….

  “Mada,” said the ship. “The order to leave you alone is now superseded by primary programming.”

  “What?” The word caught in her throat like a bone.

  “You entered the greenhouse forty days ago.”

  Without quite realizing what she was doing, Mada clenched her hands, crushing the young plant.

  “I am directed to keep you from harm, Mada,” said the ship. “It’s time to eat.”

  She glanced down at the dead thing in her hands. “Yes, all right.” She dropped it onto the potting bench. “I’ve got something to clean up first but I’ll be there in a minute.” She wiped the corner of her eye. “Meanwhile, calculate a course for home.”

  Not until the ship scanned the quarantine zone at the edge of the Trueborn system did Mada begin to worry. In her time the zone had swarmed with the battle asteroids of the brain clans. Now the Utopians were gone. Of course, that was to be expected after all this time. But as the ship re-entered the home system, dumping excess velocity into the empty dimensions, Mada felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the command mod.

  Trueborn orbited a spectral type G3V star, which had been known to the discoverers as HR3538. Scans showed that the Green Sea had become a climax forest of deciduous hardwood. There were indeed new mountains — knife edges slicing through evergreen sheets — that had upthrust some eighty kilometers off the Fire Coast, leaving Port Henoch landlocked. A rain forest choked the plain where the city of Blair’s Landing had once sprawled.

  The ship scanned life in abundance. The seas teemed and flocks of Trueborn’s flyers darkened the skies like storm clouds: kippies and bluewings and warblers and migrating stilts. Animals had retaken all three continents, lowland and upland, marsh and tundra. Mada could see the dust kicked up by the herds of herbivorous aram from low orbit. The forest echoed with the clatter of shindies and the shriek of blowhards. Big hunters like kar and divil padded across the plains. There were new species as well, mostly invertebrates but also a number of lizards and something like a great, mossy rat that built mounds five meters tall.

  None of the introduced species had survived: dogs or turkeys or llamas. The ship could find no cities, towns, buildings — not even ruins. There were neither tubeways nor roads, only the occasional animal track. The ship looked across the entire electromagnetic spectrum
and saw nothing but the natural background.

  There was nobody home on Trueborn. And as far as they could tell, there never had been.

  “Speculate,” said Mada.

  “I can’t,” said the ship. “There isn’t enough data.”

  “There’s your data.” Mada could hear the anger in her voice. “Trueborn, as it would have been had we never even existed.”

  “Two-tenths of a spin is a long time, Mada.”

  She shook her head. “They ripped out the foundations, even picked up the dumps. There’s nothing, nothing of us left.” Mada was gripping the command perch so hard that the knuckles of her toes were white. “Hypothesis,” she said, “the Utopians got tired of our troublemaking and wiped us out. Speculate.”

  “Possible, but that’s contrary to their core beliefs.” Most DIs had terrible imaginations. They couldn’t tell jokes, but then they couldn’t commit crimes, either.

  “Hypothesis: they deported the entire population, scattered us to prison colonies. Speculate.”

  “Possible, but a logistical nightmare. The Utopians prize the elegant solution.”

  She swiped the image of her home planet off the screen, as if to erase its unnerving impossibility. “Hypothesis: there are no Utopians anymore because the revolution succeeded. Speculate.”

  “Possible, but then where did everyone go? And why did they return the planet to its pristine state?”

  She snorted in disgust. “What if,” she tapped a finger to her forehead, “maybe we don’t exist. What if we’ve skipped to another time line? One in which the discovery of Trueborn never happened? Maybe there has been no Utopian Empire in this timeline, no Great Expansion, no Space Age, maybe no human civilization at all.”

  “One does not just skip to another timeline at random.” The ship sounded huffy at the suggestion. “I’ve monitored all our dimensional reinsertions quite carefully, and I can assure you that all these events occurred in the timeline we currently occupy.”

  “You’re saying there’s no chance?”

  “If you want to write a story, why bother asking my opinion?”