The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  “Your leg,” I said, as we lay in the darkness, spent.

  “What about it?”

  “Did I hurt you?”

  She laughed again, lightly. “Now you ask. You are indeed all man.”

  In the morning, we took another meal from the ancient restaurant, food that had been manufactured from raw molecules while we waited, or perhaps stored somewhere for millennia.

  We left by the corridor opposite the one by which we had entered, heading for the other side of the mountain range. Nahid limped but made no complaint. The passage ended in another door, beyond which a cave twisted upward. In one place, the ceiling of the cave had collapsed, and we had to crawl on our bellies over rubble through the narrow gap it had left. The exit was onto a horizontal shelf overgrown with trees, well below the pass. It was mid-morning. A misting rain fell across the Sharishabz Valley. In the distance, hazed by clouds of mist, I caught a small gleam of the white buildings of the monastery on the Penitent’s Ridge. I pointed it out to Nahid. We scanned the mountainside below us, searching for the forest road.

  Nahid found the thread of the road before I. “No sign of the Caslonians,” she said.

  “They’re guarding the pass on the other side of the mountain, searching the woods there for us.”

  We descended the slope, picking our way through the trees toward the road. The mist left drops of water on our skinsuits but did not in any way slow us. My spirits rose. I could see the end of this adventure in sight, and wondered what would happen to Nahid then.

  “What will you do when we get to the monastery?” I asked her.

  “I think I’ll leave as soon as I can. I don’t want to be there when the Caslonians find out you’ve reached your Order with the plays.”

  “They won’t do anything. The gods hold the monastery in their hands.”

  “Let us hope they don’t drop it.”

  She would die soon, the statue had said—if left to the gods. But what person was not at the mercy of the gods? Still, she would be much more at risk alone, away from the Order. “What about your leg?” I asked.

  “Do you have a clinic there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll take an exoskeleton and some painkillers and be on my way.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Wherever I can.”

  “But you don’t even know what’s happened in the last sixty years. What can you do?”

  “Maybe my people are still alive. That’s where I’ll go—the town where I grew up. Perhaps I’ll find someone who remembers me. Maybe I’ll find my own grave.”

  “Don’t go.”

  She strode along more aggressively. I could see her wince with each step. “Look, I don’t care about your monastery. I don’t care about these plays. Mostly, I don’t care about you. Give me some painkillers and an exo, and I’ll be gone.”

  That ended our conversation. We walked on in silence through the woods, me brooding, she limping along, grimacing.

  We found the forest road. Here the land fell away sharply, and the road, hardly more than a gravel track, switchbacked severely as we made our way down the mountainside. We met no signs of pursuit. Though the rain continued, the air warmed as we moved lower, and beads of sweat trickled down my back under the skinsuit. The boots I wore were not meant for hiking, and by now my feet were sore, my back hurt. I could only imagine how bad it was for Nahid.

  I had worked for years to manage my appetites, and yet I could not escape images of our night together. With a combination of shame and desire, I wanted her still. I did not think I could go back to being just another monk. The Order had existed long before the Caslonian conquest, and would long outlast it. I was merely a cell passing through the body of this immortal creation. What did the gods want from me? What was to come of all this?

  At the base of the trail, the road straightened, following the course of the River Sharishabz up the valley. Ahead rose the plateau, the gleaming white buildings of the monastery clearly visible now. The ornamental gardens, the terraced fields tended by the Order for millennia. I could almost taste the sweet oranges and pomegranates. It would be good to be back home, a place where I could hide away from the world and figure out exactly what was in store for me. I wouldn’t mind being hailed as a hero, the liberator of our people, like Stochik himself, who took the plays from the hands of the gods.

  The valley sycamores and aspens rustled with the breeze. The afternoon passed. We stopped by the stream and drank. Rested, then continued.

  We came to a rise in the road, where it twisted to climb the plateau. Signs here of travel, ruts of iron wheels where people from the villages drove supplies to the monastery. Pilgrims passed this way—though there was no sign of anyone today.

  We made a turn in the road, and I heard a yelp behind me. I turned to find Nahid struggling in the middle of the road. At first, I thought she was suffering a seizure. Her body writhed and jerked. Then I realized, from the slick of rain deflected from his form, that she was being assaulted by a person in an invisibility cloak.

  This understanding had only flashed through my mind when I was thrown to the ground by an unseen hand. I kicked out wildly, and my boot made contact. Gravel sprayed beside me where my attacker fell. I slipped into accelerated mode, kicked him again, rolled away, and dashed into the woods. Above me I heard the whine of an approaching flyer. Run! the voice of a god told me.

  I ran. The commandos did not know these woods the way I did. I had spent ten years exploring them, playing games of hide and hunt in the night with my fellow novices; I knew I could find my way to the monastery without them capturing me.

  And Nahid? Clearly this was her spoken-of death. No doubt it had already taken place. Or perhaps they wouldn’t kill her immediately, but would torture her, assuming she knew something, or even if they knew she didn’t, taking some measure of revenge on her body. It was the lot of a Republican Guard to receive such treatment. She would even expect it. The Order comes first.

  Every second took me farther from the road, away from the Caslonians. But after a minute of hurrying silently through the trees, I felt something heavy in my hand. I stopped. Without realizing it, I had taken the object the metal man had given me out of my belt pouch. She would not want you to return. The freedom of her people comes before her personal safety.

  I circled back, and found them in the road.

  The flyer had come down athwart the road. The soldiers had turned off their cloaks, three men garbed head to toe in the matte gray of light deflection suits. Two soldiers had Nahid on her knees in the drizzle, her hands tied behind her back. One jerked her head back by her hair, holding a knife to her throat while an officer asked her questions. The officer slapped her, whipping the back of his gloved hand across her face.

  I moved past them through the woods, sound of rain on the foliage, still holding the metal sphere in my hand. The flyer sat only a few meters into the road. I crouched there, staring at the uncouth object. I rotated it in my palm until I found the surface pentagon that was silvered. I depressed this pentagon until it clicked.

  Then I flipped it out into the road, under the landing pads of the flyer, and fell back.

  It was not so much an explosion as a vortex, warping the flyer into an impossible shape, throwing it off the road. As it spun, the pilot was tossed from the cockpit, his uniform flaring in electric blue flame. The three men with Nahid were sucked off their feet by the dimensional warp. They jerked their heads toward the screaming pilot. The officer staggered to his feet, took two steps toward him, and one of the men followed. By that time, I had launched myself into the road and slammed my bad shoulder into the small of the back of the man holding Nahid. I seized his rifle and fired, killing the officer and the other soldier, then the one I had just laid flat. The pilot was rolling in the gravel to extinguish the flames. I stepped forward calmly and shot him in the head.

  Acrid black smoke rose from the crushed flyer, which lay on its side in the woods.

  Nahid
was bleeding from a cut on her neck. She held her palm against the wound, but the blood seeped steadily from between her fingers. I gathered her up and dragged her into the woods before reinforcements could arrive.

  “Thank you,” Nahid gasped, her eyes large, and fixed on me. We limped off into the trees.

  Nahid was badly hurt, but I knew where we were, and I managed, through that difficult night, to get us up the pilgrim’s trail to the monastery. By the time we reached the iron door we called the Mud Gate, she had lost consciousness and I was carrying her. Her blood was all over us, and I could not tell if she yet breathed.

  We novices had used this gate many times to sneak out of the monastery to play martial games in the darkness, explore the woods, and pretend we were ordinary men. Men who, when they desired something, had only to take it. Men who were under no vow of nonviolence. Here I had earned a week’s fast by bloodying the nose, in a fit of temper, of Brother Taher. Now I returned, unrepentant over the number of men I had killed in the last days, a man who had disobeyed the voice of a god, hoping to save Nahid before she bled out.

  Brother Pramha was the first to greet me. He looked at me with shock. “Who is this?” he asked.

  “This is a friend, a soldier, Nahid. Quickly. She needs care.”

  Together we took her to the clinic. Pramha ran off to inform the Master. Our physician, Brother Nastricht, sealed her throat wound, and gave her new blood. I held her hand. She did not regain consciousness.

  Soon, one of the novices arrived to summon me to Master Darius’s chambers. Although I was exhausted, I hurried after him through the warren of corridors, up the tower steps. I unbelted my blaster and handed it to the novice—he seemed distressed to hold the destructive device—and entered the room.

  Beyond the broad window that formed the far wall of the chamber, dawn stained the sky pink. Master Darius held out his arms. I approached him, humbly bowed my head, and he embraced me. The warmth of his large body enfolding me was an inexpressible comfort. He smelled of cinnamon. He let me go, held me at arm’s length, and smiled. The kosode he wore I recognized as one I had sewn myself. “I cannot tell you how good it is to see you, Adlan.”

  “I have the plays,” I announced.

  “The behavior of our Caslonian masters has been proof enough of that,” he replied. His broad, plain face was somber as he told me of the massacre in Radnapuja, where the colonial government had held six thousand citizens hostage, demanding the bodily presentation, alive, of the foul villain, the man without honor or soul, the sacrilegious terrorist who had stolen the Foundational Plays.

  “Six thousand dead?”

  “They won’t be the last,” the Master said. “The plays have been used as a weapon, as a means of controlling us. The beliefs which they embody work within the minds and souls of every person on this planet. They work even on those who are unbelievers.”

  “Nahid is an unbeliever.”

  “Nahid? She is this soldier whom you brought here?”

  “The Republican Guard you sent with me. She doesn’t believe, but she has played her role in bringing me here.”

  Master Darius poured me a glass of fortifying spirits and handed it to me as if he were a novice and I the master. He sat in his great chair, had me sit in the chair opposite, and bade me recount every detail of the mission. I did so.

  “It is indeed miraculous that you have come back alive,” Master Darius mused. “Had you died, the plays would have been lost forever.”

  “The gods would not allow such a sacrilege.”

  “Perhaps. You carry the only copies in your mind?”

  “Indeed. I have even quoted them to Nahid.”

  “Not at any length, I hope.”

  I laughed at his jest. “But now we can free Helvetica,” I said. “Before any further innocents are killed, you must contact the Caslonian colonial government and tell them we have the plays. Tell them they must stop or we will destroy them.”

  Master Darius held up his hand and looked at me piercingly—I had seen this gesture many times in his tutoring of me. “First, let me ask you some questions about your tale. This is what my mentor, the great Master Malrubius, called a ‘teaching moment.’ You tell me that, when you first came to consciousness after stealing the plays in the Imperial City, a god told you to run. Yet to run in the Caslonian capital is only to attract unwelcome attention.”

  “Yes. The god must have wanted to hurry my escape.”

  “But when you reached the port bazaar, the god told you to stop and enter the restaurant. You run to attract attention, and dawdle long enough to allow time for you to be caught. Does this make sense?”

  My fatigue made it difficult for me to think. What point was the Master trying to make? “Perhaps I was not supposed to stop,” I replied. “It was my own weakness. I was hungry.”

  “Then, later, you tell me that when the commandos boarded your ship, you escaped by following Nahid’s lead, not the word of the gods.”

  “The gods led us out of the engine room. I think this is a matter of my misinterpreting—”

  “And this metal man you encountered in the ancient city. Did he in fact say that the gods would have seen Nahid dead?”

  “The statue said many mad things.”

  “Yet the device he gave you was the agent of her salvation?”

  “I used it for that.” Out of shame, I had not told Master Darius that I had disobeyed the command of the god who told me to flee.

  “Many paradoxes.” The Master took a sip from his own glass. “So, if we give the plays back, what will happen then?”

  “Then Helvetica will be free.”

  “And after that?”

  “After that, we can do as we wish. The Caslonians would not dare to violate a holy vow. The gods would punish them. They know that. They are believers, as are we.”

  “Yes, they are believers. They would obey any compact they made, for fear of the wrath of the gods. They believe what you hold contained in your mind, Adlan, is true. So, as you say, you must give them to me now, and I will see to their disposition.”

  “Their disposition? How will you see to their disposition?”

  “That is not something for you to worry about, my son. You have done well, and you deserve all our thanks. Brother Ishmael will see to unburdening you of the great weight you carry.”

  A silence ensued. I knew it was a sign of my dismissal. I must go to Brother Ishmael. But I did not rise. “What will you do with them?”

  Master Darius’s brown eyes lay steady on me, and quiet. “You have always been my favorite. I think perhaps you know what I intend.”

  I pondered our conversation. “You—you’re going to destroy them.”

  “Perhaps I was wrong not to have you destroy them the minute you gained access to the archives. But at that time I had not come to these conclusions.”

  “But the wrath of the Caslonians will know no limit! We will be exterminated!”

  “We may be exterminated, and Helvetica remain in chains, but once these plays are destroyed, never to be recovered, then humanity will begin to be truly free. This metal man, you say, told you the gods left the better part of themselves behind. That is profoundly true. Yet there is no moment when they cease to gaze over our shoulders. Indeed, if we are ever to be free human beings, and not puppets jerked about by unseen forces—which may or may not exist—the gods must go. And the beginning of that process is the destruction of the Foundational Plays.”

  I did not know how to react. In my naiveté I said, “This does not seem right.”

  “I assure you, my son, that it is.”

  “If we destroy the plays, it will be the last thing we ever do.”

  “Of course not. Time will not stop.”

  “Time may not stop,” I said, “but it might as well. Any things that happen after the loss of the gods will have no meaning.”

  Master Darius rose from his chair and moved toward his desk. “You are tired, and very young,” he said, his back to me.
“I have lived in the shadow of the gods far longer than you have.” He reached over his desk, opened a drawer, took something out, and straightened.

  He is lying. I stood. I felt surpassing weariness, but I moved silently. In my boot, I still carried the force knife I had stolen from the restaurant on Caslon. I drew out the hilt, switched on the blade, and approached the Master just as he began to turn.

  When he faced me, he had a blaster in his hands. He was surprised to find me so close to him. His eyes went wide as I slipped the blade into his belly below his lowest rib.

  STOCHIK:

  Here ends our story.

  Let no more be said of our fall.

  Mark the planting of this seed.

  The tree that grows in this place

  Will bear witness to our deeds;

  No other witness shall we have.

  SELENE:

  I would not depart with any other

  My love. Keep alive whatever word

  May permit us to move forward.

  Leaving all else behind we must

  Allow the world to come to us.

  The Caslonian government capitulated within a week after we contacted them. Once they began to withdraw their forces from the planet and a provisional government for the Helvetican Republic was reestablished in Astara, I underwent the delicate process of downloading the foundational dramas from my mind. The Abandonment was once again embodied in a crystal, which was presented to the Caslonian legate in a formal ceremony on the anniversary of the rebirth of man.

  The ceremony took place on a bright day in midsummer in that city of a thousand spires. Sunlight flooded the streets, where citizens in vibrantly colored robes danced and sang to the music of bagpipes. Pennants in purple and green flew from those spires; children hung out of second-story school windows, shaking snowstorms of confetti on the parades. The smell of incense wafted down from the great temple, and across the sky flyers drew intricate patterns with lines of colored smoke.