The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Now that I am here, with this gritty earth under my feet, this warm wind that smells of sage and dry grass whistling by me, it is hard to have the same confidence I had when I planned this in my rooms back in Petersburg. It has taken all three days for me to stop obsessively checking the medical monitors and the inference engines, trying to find in their numbers and images the first symptoms of the Amazon Fever that will most likely kill me.

  By the time I crest the last of a range of low hills, though, and catch my first glimpse of the sea on the eastern horizon, the confidence I felt in Petersburg has returned. I am less worried about Amazon Fever than about being unmasked.

  I have been two days on the coast when I see my first Amazon.

  * * *

  The architecture of the caravanserai is an eclectic mix, imperishable prefabricated sections that predate the Fever joined to adobe and brick and cement, roofed with sheet metal and encircled by a waist-high fence of driftwood and wire. I am not the first traveler to stop here tonight. Two tethered mules and a horse, hobbled, graze in the shade of a stunted live-oak, tugging at the dry grass with a kind of resigned persistence. On the other side of the yard are a pair of open-topped trucks, scratched and dented, their cargo beds piled high with crates and bundles, the tarpaulin awnings over their passenger areas patched with many colors.

  A woman is perched on top of one of the trucks, wearing a sheepskin jacket and blue trousers with sandals. She looks to be about forty, Tieshanese, with a strong jaw, close-cropped black hair and narrow eyes under a blue-and-white striped headscarf.

  My first Amazon. I sketch a greeting, hand to heart, and get no response. She shifts slightly and I notice then that there is a long-barreled pistol on the tarpaulin next to her, inches from her hand. I turn away with a show of nonchalance, and lead my mules to where the others are tethered.

  * * *

  The inside of the caravanserai is dark, lit only by the hand-lanterns the travelers have brought; the yard smelled of the ocean, but here it smells of smoke and sweat and kerosene. There are about a dozen women and girls here, three of them Ezheler, the rest Tieshanese. Two of the Ezheler, a mother and daughter both named Amina, are traders like me, returning to their clans after visiting the market town of Haiming; the mules are theirs. The other, Maryam, the horsewoman, is a doctor traveling north in hopes of buying medicines.

  The Tieshanese truckers keep themselves to themselves, and a suspicious eye on us, and their children close. The Ezheler have been known to steal children.

  "We should steal something of theirs," Amina-the-daughter says. She is fifteen, this is her third trip to Haiming she's coming back from, and though her expression is invisible behind the veil I can guess at it. She knows the Tieshanese don't like her, and because of that she doesn't like them.

  Behind my own veil, I smile. Teenagers must be the same everywhere.

  I had hoped not to encounter any Ezheler on the road—hoped to ride into Haiming a stranger. I stay quiet, concentrating on the steps of my dance. But neither Maryam nor the Aminas ask me any questions, only share their coffee with me and give me some advice on the Haiming markets. Eventually I relax enough to ask a question.

  "Do you know a coca broker named Mei Yueyin?" I ask.

  Amina-the-mother and Maryam, the doctor, both nod.

  "For a city person she is quite honest," Maryam says.

  "She speaks Ezheler," volunteers Amina-the-daughter. "It's creepy."

  "You shouldn't speak ill of her while you're still eating the candy she gave you," her mother says mildly.

  For some reason I glance at Maryam, and I see that she is looking at me. I wish I could see her face.

  * * *

  Mei Yueyin works, or worked, for the Consilium Ethnological Service. She has been on Hippolyta for seventeen years, five of them among the Ezheler. Her last report, the one that mentioned she was working as a broker in Haiming, was nine years ago. I'm glad to hear she's still alive and still there; even with her ties to the Consilium cut, she's the only contact I have.

  Young Amina gives me some of Mei Yueyin's candy. It's rice candy, the kind that comes wrapped in edible paper. While I go to check on the animals I chew it, thoughtfully.

  I give the animals—Maryam's horse and my mules and the Aminas'—some water and some dried apricots. They pick the apricots daintily from my fingers with their mobile lips and great chomping teeth, and I'm glad to see my fingers are steady.

  The medical monitors have my temperature a shade over thirty-seven; my immune system shows no sign yet of turning against itself. We are no closer here to the center of the Fever, that blank spot on Addison's maps, than where I landed, but the border between consensus reality and Hippolyta's causal anomaly (what Lieutenant Addison—inaccurately—called the "probability boundary") is fluid, fractal, and it has timelike components. So far, though, the inference engines are quiet. So far my predictions are validated.

  This far out, I expect, my machines could keep me alive indefinitely—long enough, at any rate, to die of something other than Amazon Fever. I pat the shoulder of Maryam's mare and toy, briefly, with the idea of staying here.

  I know I won't, though.

  The Tieshanese guard I saw earlier, the one I fancifully called my first Amazon, is gone. Her replacements are a pair of older women who squat in the dust, playing dice by the light of a fluorescent lamp. One of them smiles at me, but it is like the careless smile of a statue. They look as though they could squat there forever.

  * * *

  The next morning the doctor, Maryam, indicates in a roundabout way that, as we are both bound for Haiming, I would be welcome to travel with her. I don't know why this startles me, but it does, and before I really know what I am doing I have accepted.

  After the morning prayer we make breakfast together—griddle cakes and rice porridge, with dried fruit and coca tea from my trade bales—and share it with the Aminas, before seeing them on their way south. As we ourselves are leaving, the sun is coming up over the hills, and the Tieshanese travelers are starting to rise. Two of the women have daughters who are very young, not more than four or five, and I see Maryam looking at them—wistfully, I think, though it is not easy to tell through the veil.

  * * *

  "I was just a child when I had my daughter," Maryam tells me. We are three days from the caravanserai, riding side by side along a road now lined with twisting pines, and Haiming is only two days away, a petrochemical smudge on the northeastern horizon. "Fourteen. A child." She glances at me. "I was a mission girl, you see. When we graduated they took twenty of us up the river, to Themiscyra, in Erethea." She looks out into the distance, beyond Haiming's haze, as if trying to see into the past. "I don't have the words to describe the north, Yazmina." She shakes her head in frustration. "I left the words there. . . when I came down the river again.

  "But it was very beautiful. I remember that."

  She glances back at me.

  "Even that far north the odds of a spontaneous conception are very low—perhaps one in a hundred, if that." She gives a small laugh. "I was lucky, I suppose, or unlucky." She turns in the saddle to face me directly. "How old are you, Yazmina?"

  "Twenty-one." It's a lie, by seven years, but a twenty-eight-year-old Ezheler could never be as ignorant as I am.

  Maryam turns back to the road. "My Rabiah would be twenty-two this year."

  Making Maryam thirty-six. I look at her, what I can see of her through the burka, the straight back and thin shoulders, the small weathered hands with their long surgeon's fingers loose on the reins. The lie about my age feels like less of one, all of a sudden. There's a wide gap between my life and the life this woman has lived, and eight years aren't enough to measure it.

  "What happened?" I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  "It doesn't matter."

  We ride quietly for a little while, the silence broken only by the distant surf and the slow, plodding hooves.

  Quietly, without turning—almost as
if she is alone—Maryam says:

  "I hope you will be happy here."

  She says it in Arabic, not Ezheler. Her Arabic is classical and very pure, the accent of a judge or a hadith scholar.

  Then she spurs her horse ahead, ten, twenty meters. It is several kilometers before she lets me catch up to her again.

  * * *

  The old road is broken only once, where the sea-cliffs suddenly give way to a narrow gash of an inlet, perhaps a kilometer across. To the east the valley extends indefinitely, its path improbably, mechanically straight.

  There is nothing like this on my pre-Fever maps. Closer, though, and inland, where the water is shallower, the reason becomes clear. A hump of charcoal-colored material runs straight down the center of the valley, rising from the sand and water like the back of some submerged serpent.

  "A ladder to heaven," Maryam says, looking out into the valley. "That's what it was, once." In her voice there is some emotion that I can't identify.

  She turns to me, obviously sensing my mystification even through the veil.

  "A space elevator," she says dryly, using the modern, bazaar-Arabic words.

  Now I understand. I nod, and look down at the gray ribbon. A piece of skyhook cable, some fragment of the forty thousand kilometers of cable that once connected Hippolyta to the stars—cut when Hippolyta's equatorial ring station was destroyed to enforce the quarantine.

  If I am successful here, people will have to come to terms with the painful knowledge that many millions might have been saved—if outside powers like the Consilium and the Erewhon Republic had, instead of that quarantine, devoted themselves to evacuation. But I can't help that.

  We have to detour many kilometers inland before the water becomes shallow enough to ford.

  * * *

  The old city of Haiming is a long green island, topped with white and blue, set in the middle of a wide brown river. The Otrera flows north to south for two thousand kilometers, before taking a left turn, just south of here, and emptying itself into Hippolyta's eastern ocean. On the east side of the river, in Tieshan proper, the shore is lined with ironworks and concrete, and the horizon is smudged with smoke.

  Here on the west side, the market side, the buildings are low and brown and poor—all of them seemingly either made of clay, and very old, or made of wood, and very flimsy. The effect should be depressing, but the rooftops are lined with flapping colored banners, the air smells of earth and river water and spices, and the streets are filled with people, shouting and laughing and dickering in Ezheler and Arabic and Chinese.

  I leave Maryam at the ferry terminal, where the north-bound boats stop before heading upriver.

  She lingers on the gangway. "This is probably my last chance, you know," she says.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I'm thirty-six," she says. "I don't have any other daughters, or granddaughters. That's why I'm going north."

  Into Erethea. Into the blank space on the map, the center of the causal anomaly. Where my goal has been all along.

  I don't know what to say, except:

  "I'm sure you'll be successful," I tell her, "God willing."

  "God willing," she echoes.

  "Perhaps I'll come north myself, some day soon," I say.

  She laughs, and, unexpectedly, puts her arms around me, pressing her veiled cheek against mine.

  "You're too young, little daughter," she tells me. "Live for yourself first."

  The boat's whistle blows, and she draws back. She takes a pen and a bit of paper from one of her bags and scribbles a name and an address. She hands it to me, and I read:

  Dr. Aysun Orbay, 23 Marpesia 4, Themiscyra.

  "My friend," she says. "In case you are too foolish to listen to me."

  Then the boat's whistle is blowing again, and she is gone, leading her horse up the gangway.

  * * *

  A Tieshanese mule trader named Zhou Xiling buys my animals at what would be a vicious discount, if I'd ever paid for them. Mules, their hybrid histories stripped from them, breed better on Hippolyta than they do anywhere else, or the Aminas would never have had their two beasts; but in Aella's southern highlands, far from the center of the anomaly, they breed no better than human beings do. In this relationship women like Zhou, who can import stock from farther north, have all the power.

  I lift the bales of coca onto my shoulders. I am not tall—Maryam, for instance, was taller than I am—but I am taller than most of the women in East Haiming's streets. As I carry the bales to the coca market, the crowds give me a wide berth.

  * * *

  Mei Yueyin has hardly said twenty words since I identified myself to her in the coca market. She stalks a little ahead of me—walking quickly, as if she would like to leave me behind, or at least make her unwilling association with me less obvious.

  It's no use, though; I'm the only Ezheler on the bridge to Haimingdao, and I can't help but draw stares.

  The bridge is wide, and lined with ancient gingko trees; the sidewalk under our feet is strewn with their fallen leaves, golden green and soft as flower petals. Eddies from the passing motor traffic stir the humid air, and the swirling of the leaves is like some exotic danse de caractère.

  "What's that?" I ask, pointing ahead to the island, where at the southern end the blue and white of the city gives way to a broad green hill dotted with gray structures. At its crest the low evening sun winks off something gold.

  Yueyin glances in the direction I've indicated.

  "That's where they buried all the men," she says.

  She doesn't want me here.

  I don't know what gave me away. Something about my voice, my walk, something about the shape of my body, even merely hinted at through the folds of the burka. Perhaps nothing more than the fact that of all the women on Hippolyta, Mei Yueyin is the only one to have seen a man with her own eyes.

  I stop, suddenly.

  Yueyin continues a few steps, then stops and turns.

  "Listen," I say, in Arabic. "I'm not here to get you in trouble. I'm not here to threaten you. I'm certainly not here to drag you back, if that's what you're worried about. I just want a little information. And if you won't give it to me, I'll do without."

  She gives me a long, level stare. In her face, something softens for a moment—then hardens again.

  "You're here to threaten everyone on this world," she says. "You do that just by being here."

  Then she turns away, and starts walking again.

  * * *

  After that, I didn't really expect Yueyin to hide my identity from her partner, and sure enough, when we reach her house—an aged but clean two-story block tucked behind a vine-covered wall, in some neighborhood of narrow alleys on Haimingdao's east side—her first words to her partner are:

  "Liwen, we have a visitor. He's from Earth."

  She says this in Arabic. The pronouns of spoken Chinese have no gender.

  "Yazmina Tanzikbayeva," I say.

  "That's not your real name," says Yueyin.

  "It is now," I tell her.

  Yueyin's partner is tall, probably taller than I am, and thin, with high cheekbones, and braided hair that goes to her waist. There is a little girl in her lap, six or eight years old, who looks shyly up at me—whether Yueyin's or her partner's I can't tell; at this age she is all eyes and elbows and knees. They are playing some game with colored tiles like dominoes.

  "Peace be with you," the woman says. "Welcome to Hippolyta." Her Arabic is strongly accented, much more than Yueyin's.

  "My partner," Yueyin says. "Fu Liwen. She's a rocket engineer for the Tieshanese government."

  A rocket engineer.

  I miss the little girl's name, and the rest of the introductions. I give distracted answers while Yueyin mechanically makes tea and Liwen sends the little girl upstairs.

  A rocket engineer.

  "You know they haven't forgotten you, out there," I tell Liwen, as Yueyin sits down. "There's a battleship at L2, waiting to kill any of you who
try to leave." Calling the Tenacious a battleship feels like a lie. But to Liwen's industrial-age rockets, the Republic's little picket, with its quaint collection of lasers and particle beams, is just as deadly as a Consilium stabilizer-swarm.

  Liwen shrugs. "I understand how they feel," she says. "If we leave Hippolyta, hundreds of billions might die. If it were the other way around, if we were out there, and the men were trapped down here—we would do the same thing."

  "But you're building rockets anyway," I say.

  "Because I don't want my daughter to grow up in a prison," Liwen says, taking a sip of tea. She puts down the cup with a determined finality. "Sooner or later, they will forget. And when they do, we'll be ready."

  To kill hundreds of billions, I think. But I don't say it. The truth is that I don't think this—the fear of the Consilium and the Republic—is likely, that the Amazon Women would carry with them whatever makes Hippolyta what it is, and spread it. I think the universe is much more likely to make Hippolyta like itself, sooner or later, than the other way around. If I didn't think that I wouldn't be here.

  But I could be wrong.

  I'm glad it's not my decision.

  "Take off your veil," Yueyin says, suddenly.

  "What?"

  "You're not Ezheler," she says. "You're not even a woman. I want to see who I'm talking to."

  It's not a simple as that, of course. I have to take off the burka, pulling my arms out of the sleeves and lifting fold after fold of cloth over my head. Even though I still have my blouse and trousers and boots, once the burka is completely off—a sad puddle of violet cloth on the couch next to me—I feel naked. I understand suddenly why the women of Hippolyta continue to wear hijab, why it was so horrifying when the men of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century secular governments tried to abolish the veil by force.