The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  “The westbound worm is rested and ready,” she sang out, the clarity of each word taking travelers by surprise. “Leave by way of the door behind me, sirs and madams. If you have a ticket. You must have a ticket. The westbound worm is fed and eager. She will be leaving shortly, my friends.”

  Most of the room stood up.

  “That wasn’t as long as I feared.” An elderly woman wearing elegant clothes and amber gems was smiling at her good fortune. “I was ready to sit for quite a while longer,” she admitted to her companion.

  A handsome man, perhaps half her age, muttered, “I wonder why this is.”

  The rich woman had to laugh at him. “It’s because we are special, darling. What more reason do you need?”

  Jopale was among the last to reach the open doorway. Soldiers were waiting, carefully examining each ticket and every piece of identification. Meanwhile, the uniformed mockman stood beside the long line, smiling happily. Why did that creature make him feel so uneasy? Was it her face? Her voice? No, what bothered Jopale was the way she stared at the other faces, black eyes settling only on those who were human.

  “Good journey,” she said to Jopale.

  Then to Rit, who was directly behind him, she said, “You are in trustworthy hands, sir. No need to worry.”

  She could read the man’s fear.

  A one-in-a-million creature, thought Jopale. Or there was another explanation, and far more sordid too. Glancing over his shoulder, he wondered if she could be a hybrid—a quirk of biology that wasn’t destroyed at birth, but instead was fed and trained for this halfway demanding task. Nothing like her would ever happen in his homeland. It wasn’t allowed. But World’s Edge was a different part of the world, and Jopale’s long journey had taught him many lessons, including that every place had its own culture, and cultures were defined by odd little customs understandable only to themselves.

  “This way, this way!” the old caretaker cried out.

  Jopale showed the soldiers what they wanted to see, his own mockman standing silently to his right.

  Master Brace was at the end of the long platform, shouting for the passengers and waving both arms. Even at a distance, his face betrayed a look of genuine concern. Something bad must have happened. But their giant worm lay motionless on the greased trail, apparently sleeping. Its intestine was still jammed full of half-digested food. The worm’s bloated shape said as much, and looking through the plastic windows, Jopale saw a rich dark mixture of masticated wood pulp and sweet knuckle-roots, happy muscles pressing the feast into new positions, the elastic walls working on the stubborn chunks and bubbles.

  The passengers were being led up toward the stomach.

  Jopale was disgusted, but compliant. The wealthy woman who talked about being special was now first to complain. Shaking an accusing finger at the caretaker, she said, “I did not pay for an acid-bath.”

  The caretaker had discarded his charm. He looked tired and perhaps a little scared, not to mention short of patience. “Her stomach isn’t hungry anymore,” he said with a loud, slow voice. “And it’s thoroughly buffered, madam. You’ll be comfortable enough inside there, I promise.”

  “But my mockmen—”

  “Will ride above, in the open air.” Brace gestured impatiently. The pilothouse was fixed on top of the long blind head, and behind it were ropes and straps and simple chairs. With a loud voice, Brace told every passenger, “If we waited for my baby to empty her bowels, we’d remain here until the next cycle. Which might be just as well. But word just came up from One-Time—”

  An earlier stop, two cycles to the east.

  “A new fissure has broken open there. The situation is dicey. And since there’s room enough inside the stomach, I’m sure you can see … this is the best answer to our many problems…!”

  The passengers turned together, gazing toward the east. While everyone was busily filling his own belly, the bright face of the sun had been covered over. Distant clouds seemed thicker than natural, and blacker, and the clouds were rising up like a great angry wall, towering over the green land that these people had only recently journeyed across.

  A purposeful panic took hold of the crowd.

  Jopale claimed his belongings from his mockman and ordered her to climb on top of the worm. Then he passed through the cramped sphincter and into the stomach, sniffing the air as an afterthought, pleased to find it fresh enough and even a little scented. The shaggy pink floor was a little damp but not truly wet. Worm stomachs were shorter than the duodenum, and most of the floor had been claimed. A simple latrine stood in back. Do-ane sat alone in the middle of the remaining space, hiking boots beside her. She showed Jopale a polite smile, nothing more. Where else could he go? Nowhere. Claiming the empty stomach to her right, he threw open his traveling blanket and inflated his pillow. Setting the pillow on the highest portion of his floor, he tried to ignore her. Then Rit knelt on the other side of the young woman, carefully laying out his blanket, preparing his fragile nerves for the next leg of this very long journey.

  Jopale was terrified, genuinely terrified, right up until the moment when the alarms were sounded.

  The sharp wailing of sirens began in the distance, diluted and distorted by the worm’s body. Then the station’s sirens joined in, and the floor rolled ominously. Was it a quake, or was the worm waking? Probably both reasons, he decided. Then the stomach sphincter closed, choking off the worst of the noise, and the giant creature gulped air into its long lungs and into its empty belly, needing little prompting to begin squirming against the trail’s slick surface. Rolling muscle and the long powerful tail created a sound unlike any other in nature. Jopale was reminded of a thick fluid being forced down a very narrow drain. Slowly, slowly, the creature built its momentum, the trail’s oils eliminating most of the friction, allowing its bulk to gradually become something swift and relentless.

  Passengers held their air masks in their hands, waiting for instructions or the telltale stink of a gas cloud. Because there had to be gas somewhere close. A quake wasn’t reason enough to sound the city’s alarms. Yet curiously, in the midst of this obvious emergency, Jopale felt much calmer. He knew he had to remain vigilant and clear-headed. And gas was only an inconvenience to a man with the proper equipment. Standing beside one of the few stomach windows, he watched the station vanish behind them, replaced by broad government buildings and assorted shops, and then suddenly, by countless homes stacked three deep and set beside narrow, shade-drenched streets. A few mockmen were walking with purposeful shuffles; otherwise no one appeared in the open. Most of the homes were shuttered and sealed. If poisons were boiling up from below, private detectors would smell them, and people would huddle inside their little safe rooms, breathing filtered air or oxygen from bottles, or breathing nothing but the increasingly stale air. An awful experience, Jopale knew. There was no more helpless feeling in the world. Yet his overriding emotion now was a tremendous, almost giddy relief.

  He had escaped again, just in time.

  Do-ane joined him. The window was quite tiny, not designed for looking outside, but instead to let in sunlight and allow the caretakers to monitor the mockmen who normally rode here. Do-ane stood on her toes to look outside. She seemed prettier when she was nervous, and rather more appealing. In her hand was the most sophisticated gas-gauge that Jopale had ever seen. In a whisper, she said, “Hydrogen sulfide.”

  His own confidence fell to pieces. Methane was awful—suffocating and flammable—but the putrid hydrogen sulfide gas was far worse. There were places beneath the Continent where the dissolved oxygen had been exhausted. The living wood and dark currents couldn’t freshen that water any more. And different types of rot took hold there, anaerobic bacteria creating a sour poison that could kill within minutes.

  The city kept sliding past.

  “Is that a body?” she asked suddenly.

  What might be a mockman was lying on its side, tucked against the foundation of a long house. Or was it just trash dressed in a bl
anket? Jopale wasn’t sure, and then they had passed both the body and the street. With his own quiet voice, he said, “It was nothing.”

  “It was human,” Do-ane said.

  “A sleeping mockman,” he offered. “Or a dead one, maybe. But that means nothing. Disease or age, or boys out damaging property, maybe.”

  “Do you think so?” Do-ane asked hopefully.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. And because it felt good, he again said that word. “Yes.” Then he added with his most reasonable tone, “If the gas was that terrible, the streets would be jammed with suffocating bodies.”

  She looked at him, desperate to believe those sordid words.

  Suddenly Jopale couldn’t remember why the young woman had bothered him. He smiled and she did the same, and with that, they leaned against the living wall, watching the city fall away and the countryside reemerge. Tall epiphytes spread their leaves to the waning light. Rain showers were soaking the land to the south. Maybe those clouds would drift north; that would lessen the chances of a fire, at least for a little while. Right? Meanwhile, Do-ane’s sensor continued to record the fluctuating levels of sulfides, plus the usual methane and ethane that were pulled inside whenever the worm belched and swallowed more air. But none of the toxins reached a suffocating level, and except for a foul taste in the back of the mouth, they remained unnoticed by the other passengers.

  Finally the sun merged with the horizon and the numbers began to fall again, working their way back toward levels that were normal enough, at least over the last few years.

  Jopale sat on his blanket, enjoying his good fortune.

  Then for no clear reason, he thought about the hybrid woman back at the station—the black-haired creature with the big lovely voice—and it occurred to him that unlike the human soldiers, she’d had no air mask riding upon her hip.

  Had she survived?

  And why, in the face of everything, did he seem to care?

  PLANS OF ESCAPE

  At the school where Jopale taught, the conclusion of each term meant a party thrown for the faculty and staff. Liquor was involved, and school politics, and during that final gathering, some extraordinarily raw emotions. Radiophone broadcasts had just reported a cluster of villages in the distant north destroyed by an eruption of poisons. Sober voices were repeating rumors—false rumors, as it happened—that the local engineers and mockmen crews couldn’t stop the enormous jets of methane. The party soon divided itself into two camps: Some wanted to embrace their doom, while others clung to any excuse for hope. Jopale found himself on the fringes of the argument, unsure which stance to take. Then a colleague wandered past, his cup drained and his mind intoxicated. Listening to a few declarations of terror, the normally timid fellow found a buoyant courage. “The situation is not that dangerous,” he declared. “Believe me, we can seal up holes ten times worse than what I’ve heard described in these stories!”

  The optimists happily embraced those defiant words.

  But the teacher shrugged off their praise. “You’re as silly as the rest of them,” he declared. “And at least as ignorant, too.”

  “What do you know?” someone asked.

  “More than anybody else here, I can tell you that.” Then the drunken man scanned the room. Searching for an escape route? No, he wanted the big bowl set on the central table—a leather bowl where sweet punch and fermented gig-berries created a small pond. “Look here,” he called out. “I’ll show you exactly what I mean.”

  His audience gathered at the table, maintaining a skeptical silence.

  Using the thick decorative leaves of a hush-woad, the teacher began covering the pond’s surface. And while he worked, he lectured about the wooden Continent and the bottomless Ocean and how things like rot and methane were the inevitable end products in a very ancient cycle.

  Jopale understood it all, or he thought he did.

  Then a third teacher—the most accomplished science instructor on their staff—cleared his throat before mentioning, “This isn’t your professional area, you know.”

  “My area?” The lecturer with the leaves asked, “What is my area? Remind me now.”

  “Maps,” the scientist said, that single word wrapped inside a smug and blatantly dismissive tone.

  Anger showed on the colleague’s face. But he didn’t lose his temper. He just shook his head for a moment and set another layer of leaves on the pond. Then with a quiet, brittle voice, he said, “Jopale.”

  “Yes?”

  “What do you know about the Man-and-Sky texts?”

  Jopale had read excerpts in college. But even in these modest academic circles, it was best to appear well trained. “I studied them for a semester,” he replied with a careful tone. “What about them?”

  “How old are they?”

  “No one knows.”

  “But judging by the different dead languages, we can assume they’re probably several different ages … a mishmash of writings from a series of unnamed authors. Yes?”

  Jopale offered a nod.

  His colleague took a deep breath. “Scholars believe the Man-and-Sky offers at least three descriptions of the world, possibly four. Or five. Or even six. What’s certain is that each description is not that much different from our world. There is a large continent and a motionless sun. Only the names of every location have been changed, and the peoples use different languages, and sometimes the animals and vegetation are not quite recognizable.”

  Like bored students, the teachers began to mutter among themselves.

  The lecturer placed a hand upon the floating leaves. “My area … my intellectual passion … is too complicated for ordinary minds. I’ll grant you that. Thousands upon thousands of islands coalesce into a single body, each island fighting with its stubborn neighbors to remain on the Ocean’s surface, basking in the brightest possible sunshine. It makes for a grand, glorious puzzle that would baffle most of you…”

  Feeling the insult, his audience fell silent.

  “The Man-and-Sky texts give us the best maps of those earlier continents. And they offer some of the most compelling accounts of how the old continents fell to pieces.” The geographer picked a pale yellow straw off the table, his mouth pressed into a wide, painful smile. “You probably don’t know this. Those lost continents were barely half the size of ours. There is no evidence—none—that the islands in the past have ever managed to cover the entire day-face of our world. Which makes what is happening now into a singular event. An elaborate collision of random events, and perhaps selective forces too.”

  “What about selective forces?” the scientist grumbled.

  “Which islands prosper?” their colleague asked. “The strong ones, of course. And those that remain on the surface for the longest time. Those that can resist the poisons in the bad times, and those that will endure the longest, darkest famines.” Then he shrugged, adding, “In earlier cycles, the wood beneath us would have been dead long ago. The collapses would have come sooner; the tragedies would have been smaller. But this time—in our time—the islands have descended from a few durable lineages. And what’s more, every other force at play in the world has pushed us to the worst stage imaginable.”

  Even in his blackest moods, Jopale didn’t want to believe that.

  “We don’t know how much methane is under our toes,” the lecturer admitted. “But even the median guesses are awful.”

  A small, sorry voice said, “The entire world could suffocate.”

  Jopale had offered those words.

  “Oh, but it’s far worse than that!” His colleague stuck the long straw into his mouth, then slipped the other end into a small wooden flask hidden in his coat pocket. He sucked up the liquid and covered the straw’s upper end with his thumb, lifting the leaves until he could see the open punch, then he set the bottom of the straw against the sweet drink. “Of course I mean this as an illustration,” he mentioned. Then he winked at the scientist, saying, “I know, I know. There’s no genuine consensus among the exper
ts. Or should I say specialists? Since there is, if you think about it, an important difference between those two words…”

  “Don’t,” Jopale cautioned.

  But the man struck a long match, making a yellow flame. Then winking at his audience, he said, “Of course, the Continent might collapse slowly, over many generations. A little gas here, a lot of gas there. People die, but not too many of us. And maybe we will marshal the necessary resources. Cut holes to the Ocean below and let out the bubbles in manageable little breaths. Or pump pure oxygen down under our feet, freshening the cold dead water.” He waved the flame in front of his eyes. “Perhaps humans can do whatever it takes, and our atmosphere isn’t destroyed when the hydrocarbons eat up our precious free oxygen.”

  “You’re drunk,” the scientist complained.

  “Wonderfully drunk, yes.” Then the teacher of city names and island positions laughed, and he lowered the flame.

  Everyone stared at the leaf-covered punch.

  Jopale assumed that the liquid from the vial was pure alcohol. But his colleague had decided to make a more effective demonstration of his argument, which was why he used a collection of long-chain hydrocarbons purchased from an industrial source—a highly flammable concoction that made a soft but impressive wooshing sound as it set the leaves on fire, and then the drunken man’s hand, and a moment later, his astonished, pain-wracked face.

  THE EVENING AIR

  Left-of-Left was the next official stop—a safe station where the hard-pressed worm could catch its breath and empty its swollen bowels. Most of the passengers had fallen asleep by then. The only light inside the crowded stomach came from a bioluminescent culture hung on an acid-etched brass hook. Do-ane hadn’t bothered with a sleeping hood, curled up on her blanket, hands sweetly tucked between her pillow and face. Rit didn’t seem able to relax, sitting up occasionally to adjust his hood or take another white melatonin pill. Only Jopale didn’t feel tired—an illusion brought on by too much nervous energy—and that was why he stepped outdoors, using this brief pause to check on his mockman’s health, breathe the open air, and absorb the depressing sights.