The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  “The old islands are broken into hundreds of pieces,” he offered. “Plenty of fresh surfaces ready to rot away.”

  “That’s part of it,” she allowed. “But as much as anything, it’s because of the moisture. Three large islands were compressed and splintered to make the Tanglelands, and each one had tremendous reserves of fresh water underground. Which the saprophytes need as much as they need food, of course.”

  He nodded amiably.

  “And besides, rain likes hilly country,” she continued. “Given its choice, a storm will drop its wealth on broken ground.”

  “How about your Good Mountain? Is it very wet…?”

  She shook her head. “Not particularly. That country is very flat and very boring. And beneath the surface, the wood is exceptionally dry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the island on the surface can’t reach the Ocean anymore.” Do-ane put one tiny hand beneath the other, as an illustration. “I think I mentioned: There’s a second island resting under it, thick and solid, blocking almost every root.”

  “That’s your Mountain? The underneath island?”

  She hesitated, making some kind of delicate calculation. Then she looked out the window again, saying, “No,” in the tone people use when they want to say a good deal more.

  Jopale waited. Then he said, “Tell me more.”

  She squinted, saying nothing.

  “About your undersea mountain,” he coaxed. “What do you do down there?”

  “Research,” she allowed.

  “In biology?” he asked. And when she didn’t responded, he offered a mild lie. “I was once an avid biology student. Some years ago now.”

  Do-ane glanced at the passengers. Rit was sleeping. None of the others were paying attention to the two of them. Yet the young woman whispered so softly that Jopale could barely hear her words. “No,” she said. “It’s not really biology that I’m studying, no.”

  “Not really?” he pushed.

  She wasn’t supposed to speak, but she also wanted to explain herself. With a slender smile, she said, “I can’t.”

  “I don’t mean to interrogate,” he lied.

  The young woman’s life was wrapped around her work. It showed in her face, her manners. In her anxious, joyful silence.

  “Forget it,” he muttered. An enormous fungus stood beside the trail—a pillar topped with fruiting bodies that bled a bright purple light. It was a common species whose name he had already forgotten. Staring at that apparition of rot and death, Jopale remarked with the coldest possible voice, “It’s not as if the world is going to end soon.”

  “But it won’t end,” Do-ane said.

  He gave a little sniff, and that’s when he discovered that he was crying. It was the sort of manipulative gesture Jopale might have attempted and would have failed at. But his tears were as honest as anything he had ever done, a fabulous pain hiding inside him, any excuse good enough to make it surge into public view.

  “This disaster has happened before,” the young woman promised.

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “But it’s true. A new continent always grows on the sunlit face of the world. The water below is always choked of its free oxygen. Old wood compresses and shatters, and the methane rises up through the fissures and holes.”

  “What about wildfires?” he asked.

  “There have been big fires before.” She smiled to herself, betraying a deep fascination, as if describing an enjoyable novel full of fictional tragedies. Then she added, “These world-consuming fires have come seventeen other times.”

  Not sixteen times, or fifty thousand.

  Jopale invested several long minutes contemplating her precision. Then he asked, “How do you know that? An exact number?”

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You can’t tell me?”

  “No.”

  He stared at her face, letting his own anger bubble up. “This place where you’re going,” he started to ask. “This peculiar mountain…?”

  “Yes?”

  “Your colleagues, those scientists who discovered the feature … I don’t think they used the old word ‘mountain’ because it reaches in any particular direction. Toward the sky or toward the world’s core, either.”

  Do-ane avoided his weepy eyes.

  “My guess? The object was named for its composition. That’s another quality inherent in the word. The mythical mountain is supposed to be harder and far more enduring than any wood. Am I right?”

  The young woman was standing on her stocking feet, staring through the window again. The Tanglelands were beginning to thin out and turn flat, stretches of empty dead ground between the occasional giant fungi. Now the brightest stars were visible through the window, twinkling and jumping as the worm slid along. Do-ane was standing close enough to Jopale to touch him, and she was taking quick shallow breaths, her face growing brighter even as the empty land around them turned blacker.

  Jopale held his breath.

  Then very quietly, his companion said, “The great fire,” and touched the plastic of the window with the tips of two fingers.

  Do-ane announced, “It is coming…!”

  THE HEART OF THINGS

  When a worm like theirs was a baby, it was abused in the most awful ways—or so it might seem to somebody who didn’t concern himself with the rough necessities of the world. Stolen from its mother, the newborn creature was cut through in several places and the wounds were kept open until they became permanent holes, ready for the first in a series of increasingly large sphincters. Then its diet was strictly controlled while professional handlers assessed its tendencies and potential uses. Intelligent and mild-tempered worms were given over to passenger duties. Many of the candidates didn’t survive the conditioning of their digestive tracts or the additional surgeries. Among the alterations, inflatable bladders were inserted into the region directly behind the head, producing a series of permanent cavities where individual caretakers could live, each fitting with a rubber doorway leading into a narrow, astonishingly dry esophagus.

  Jopale stood beneath a glow-light, shouting Brace’s name. A voice called back to him. A few moments later, the old caretaker stepped from inside one of the little rooms, wiping his sleepy face while asking what was wrong.

  With words and manic gestures, Jopale explained the situation.

  For an instant, the caretaker didn’t believe him. The weathered face looked doubtful, and the pursed lips seemed ready to downplay what he was being told. But then one of the worm’s drivers ran down the narrow esophagus, shouting the same essential news.

  “Where are we now?” the caretaker asked her.

  The woman offered a number and letter designation that might as well have been in another language.

  But the old man instantly absorbed the knowledge. “We’ll stop at Kings Crossing,” he ordered. “The station’s gone, but the ground is up on the last ridge. We’ll be able to see how bad things are. And any good news too.”

  Jopale couldn’t imagine anything good.

  Then the caretaker turned to him, saying, “Sir,” with a firm tone. “I need to know. Have the other passengers noticed?”

  “Just one. The girl—”

  The caretaker hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “Say nothing. I’ll see if I can raise some voices on the radiophone, get the latest news … and then I’ll walk through the belly and offer a few words…”

  Brace’s voice fell away. What kind of encouragement could he offer anyone now?

  There was tense silence, then a deep slow rumbling. The sound that came and then came again, making the great throat shiver.

  “What is that?” Jopale had to ask.

  “That would be the worm’s heart,” the caretaker offered. He tilted his head and held his breath, listening carefully. “And you can hear her lungs working too. Which is why we live up here, sir. So we can keep tabs on our baby.”

  Jopale nodded.

  Then the caretake
r touched the rough pink wall, and the driver did the same, both using that pause to fight back their own tears.

  * * *

  Do-ane had abandoned the window, sitting alone on her blanket, using her electric torch to read her book. Everyone else was sitting too, including Rit. The old map was unfolded before him. Glancing up, he said nothing to Jopale. Then he looked down again, asking the map, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Jopale lied, as a reflex.

  The tall man glanced at Do-ane, and with the heightened senses of a paranoid, he announced, “Something is wrong.”

  She started to look at the window, then stopped herself.

  But Rit noticed. He decided to take his own look, pulling his long legs under his body, taking a deep breath, and another. But there wasn’t enough courage inside him to stand. His legs stretched out again, and a long hand wiped his mouth dry, and then he carefully fixed his eyes on the old map, nourishing his own faltering sense of ignorance.

  “Did you tell?” Do-ane whispered, closing the book on her thumb.

  Jopale nodded.

  She stared at his face, his eyes. Something about her expression was new—a hard stare meant to reach down to his soul, seemingly. Then she made her decision, whatever that might be. Opening the book again, she flipped through pages until she found what she wanted. Placing her back to Rit, she pushed the book toward Jopale and handed him her torch, giving his face one last study, just to convince herself that her feelings were right.

  The page was blank.

  No, it unfolded. Jopale found a corner bent up by use, and he lifted the slick paper and gave the book a quarter turn, an elaborate drawing showing what looked to be the configuration for some type of worm.

  “Is it—?” he began.

  “The mountain,” she interrupted, fingers held to her mouth.

  Rit seemed to notice nothing. No one was paying attention to the two of them. The wealthy old woman who had complained at World’s End was making her male companion look out the window. But she only wanted to know what was approaching, and he only looked ahead, reporting with a matter-of-fact voice, “There’s some long slope. And that’s all I can tell.”

  Was the mountain a worm? Jopale wondered.

  He returned to the diagram, finding a scale that gave him a sense of size. But surely there was a mistake here. Even if the scale were wrong by a factor of ten, this worm would be larger than a dozen rust-fins set in a row. And if the scale were right, then the mountain would dwarf a hundred and twenty full-grown rust-fins … making it larger than most cities, wouldn’t it…?

  He looked up. “Is it alive?” he whispered.

  Do-ane had no simple answer for that. She shrugged and said, “It isn’t now,” in a soft voice. And then even softer, she said, “Look again.”

  He was no expert about worms. But he knew enough to tell that the mountain shared little with the creatures he had grown up with. Its mouth was enormous but without true jaws, forming a perfect circle from which every tooth had been removed. The throat was straight and wide, and then like a funnel, it collapsed on itself, becoming too tiny to show on this diagram. The anus was an equally tiny opening at the very tip of the tail. And between mouth and anus was a digestive tract that filled only a portion of the worm’s enormous body.

  “What are these?” he asked.

  She touched the lines and the spaces within them, saying, “Chambers. Cavities. Rooms, of a kind.”

  He didn’t understand. “How could a creature survive this much surgery?” he asked. And when she didn’t answer, he looked up, realizing, “But this isn’t any species of worm, is it?”

  She mouthed the word, “No.”

  “It is a machine,” he muttered.

  She tilted her head, as if to say, “Maybe.”

  “Or is it alive?”

  “Not now, no. Not anymore. We think.”

  The worm carrying them was attacking the last long slope, slowing as it crawled higher. Another person stood to look outside. But he was on the north side of the worm, and from that angle, nothing was visible behind them.

  “The tail and some of the mid-section cavities are flooded,” Do-ane told him.

  Those were drawn with blue ink.

  He asked, “Is the tail the deepest part?”

  She nodded.

  “And the mouth?”

  “Buried inside a fossil island,” she reported.

  “Choked while eating its lunch?” He meant it as a joke, forcing himself to laugh.

  But Do-ane just shook her head. “We don’t know what it ate in life,” she reported. “But this organism, this machine … whatever it was … it probably required more energy than you could ever pull out of wood pulp and stolen sap.”

  Jopale closed the book and turned it in his hands, examining the binding. But there was nothing to read except a cryptic “Notes” followed by a date from several years earlier.

  “What I am,” Do-ane began.

  He reopened the book and unfolded the diagram again. “What are you?”

  “In the sciences, I have no specialty.” She smiled, proud to say it. “I belong to a special project. A confidential research project, you see. My colleagues and I are trained in every discipline. The hope is … was … that we could piece together what this thing might be…”

  “It’s metal,” Jopale guessed.

  “Within its body,” she said, “we have found more iron and copper and zinc than all of the peoples of the world have gathered. Plus there’s gold and silver, and elements too unusual to have common names.”

  Jopale wanted to turn through the pages, but he still couldn’t make sense of this one.

  “Yet the body is composed mostly of other substances,” she continued. “Plastics and compounds that look plastic. Ceramic materials. And lining the mouth and what seems to be the power plant … well, there are things too strong to cut samples from, which means we can’t even test them in any useful fashion…”

  “And what are you?” he asked again.

  “One member of a large, secret team trying to make sense of this.” She showed him a grim smile, adding, “I’m just a novice still. Some of us have worked forty years on this project.”

  “And have you learned anything?”

  A hopeful expression passed across her face. But again, they had reached a juncture where Do-ane didn’t want to say anything more. Jopale sensed that she’d already told him too much. That they were pushing into codes and laws that had to be obeyed, even when Catastrophe walked across their world.

  Again, their worm was slowing.

  Passengers noticed, and in a moment, they grew uneasy.

  “Where?” Jopale asked.

  Do-ane ran a finger over the giant mouth. “What are you asking?”

  “Its origin,” he said. “Do you know that much?”

  “Guess,” she whispered.

  He could see only two possibilities. “It comes from the world’s center,” he offered. “There are metals down there. I remember that much from school. Deep inside the world, the temperatures and chemistries are too strange for us to even imagine.”

  “What’s the second possibility?”

  He remembered what she had said earlier. “Our ocean,” she mentioned, as if there could be more than one. Then he pointed at the sky.

  “In my little profession,” she sighed, “those are the two islands of opinion. I’m one of the other-world people, and I believe that this object is a kind of ship meant to cross from star to star.”

  Jopale closed the book and pushed it back to her.

  By then, their worm had pulled to a stop, and the passengers were looking at each other, plainly wondering what was happening. But Master Brace was absent, probably still listening to the radiophone. Which was why Jopale took it upon himself to stand and say to the others, “This is Kings Crossing.”

  Rit pulled the map to his face, asking, “Why here?”

  Like any good caretaker, Jopale managed to smile. But he could
n’t maintain the lie past that point. Shaking his head and looking at the warm damp floor, he reminded everyone, “We’re alive still.” And then he started marching toward the still-closed sphincter.

  FIRE

  The night air was cool and dry, and it blew softly toward the east—a breeze at this moment, but gaining strength and urgency with the passage of time. Years ago, a tidy little city had grown up on this ridge, but then the sun vanished, and the city had died. Homes and shops quickly became piles of anonymous rubble. But the worm station must have survived for more years. The facility was only recently stripped of its metal, but otherwise it had been left intact. Only a few saprophytic weeds were rooted in the softest planks, while the damp faces of the main building were painted with a rough fungus. Regardless of color, every surface glowed with a steady red light. Jopale read “Kings Crossing” on the greeting arch, painted in a flowing script that was popular back when he was a child. Behind him, the other passengers were slowly stepping onto the platform, talking in breathless whispers. He didn’t hear their words so much as he listened to the terror in their voices, and Jopale did nothing for the moment but stare at the planks beneath his feet and at his own trembling hands. Then when he felt ready—when no other choice seemed left for him—he forced himself to breathe and turn around, staring wide-eyed at the burning world.

  Jopale once toured a factory where precious iron was melted inside furnaces built from equally precious ceramic bricks. He remembered watching the red-hot liquid being poured into thin syrupy ribbons that were quickly attacked by the artisans in charge. He decided that this wildfire possessed the same fierce, unworldly glow. It was crimson and brilliant enough to make eyes tear up, and it seemed as if some wickedly powerful artist, inspired by his malevolent urges, must have pulled molten metal across the entire eastern horizon.