The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (61 page)

"But the cities of the Shelf—Foro, Puul—"

"People will survive in caves, underground. But the vast loss of life, the destruction of the ecology, their agricultural support—"

"Well, it serves those bastards right. They lost interest in talking to me decades ago." Which was true. But since the War of the Cities there had been a thousand years of peace on the Shelf, all of which he'd lived through—incredible to be a witness to so much history—and they had built something beautiful and splendid up there, a chain of cities like jewels in the night. In his head he imagined a race of Minas, beautiful, clear-eyed, laughing. "Well. There's nothing I can do for them." He struggled to sit straighter. "But there's something I want you to do for me. You owe me, you artifact. I did everything you asked of me, and more. Now you're going to take away my soul. Well, you can have it. But you can give me something back in return.
I want to see the Caress.
"

"You have only weeks to live. Days, perhaps."

"Take me down into the red. No matter how little time I have left, you can find a pit deep enough on this time-shifted world to squeeze in fifty Platform years." Exhausted, he fell back coughing; a nurse hurried over to catch him and lower him gently to his blankets. "And one more thing."

"More demands?"

"Let this boy go."

When Telni woke again, he found himself staring up at a sky of swirling blue stars. "Made it, by my own blueshifted arse."

A face hovered over him, a woman's. "Don't try to move."

"You're in the way." He tried to sit up, failed, but kept struggling until she helped him up and he could see.

He was on a plain—
on the ground
, his pallet set on red, rusty dirt, down on the ground for the first time in his life. Something like a rail track curled across his view. Buildings of construction material were scattered around like a giant's toys. He got the immediate sense this was a kind of camp, not permanent.

And figures moved in the distance. At first sight they looked human. But then something startled them, and they bucked and fled, on six legs.

"What are
those
?"

"They are called Centaurs." Powpy was standing beside him, his neck umbilical connecting him to the Weapon, which hovered as impassive as ever, though a little rusty dirt clung to its sleek hide. "Human hybrids."

"You were going to let this kid go."

"He will be released," said the woman sternly. "My name's Ama, by the way."

Which had been his mother's name. He felt a stab of obscure guilt. "Glad to meet you."

"You should be. I'm a nurse. I volunteered to stay with you, to keep you alive when they brought you down here."

"No family, I take it."

"Not any more. And when this business is done, I'll be taking Powpy here back up top, to the Platform."

"His mother and father—"

"Long dead," she whispered.

"We're all orphans here, then."

Powpy said solemnly, "We will have to shelter in a construction-material Building to ride out the Caress. We are deep enough that it should be brief—"

"How deep?"

"We are on the Abyss. Once the bed of a deep ocean. Below the offshore plains you call the Lowland . . . Deep enough."

"Nice sky."

"Most of the stars' radiation is blueshifted far beyond your capacity to see it."

"And how long—ow!" There was a sharp pain in his chest.

Ama grabbed him and lowered him back against a heap of pillows. "Just take it easy. That was another heart attack."

"
Another
 . . . "

"They've been coming thick and fast."

"That Weapon won't want me dying out in the open. Not after all this."

"We have a Morgue designated just over there," Ama said. "Your bed's on wheels."

"Good planning."

"Not long now," murmured Powpy.

But he, the boy, wasn't looking at the sky. Telni touched Poppy's chin, and lifted his face. "He should see this for himself."

"Very well," the Weapon said through the boy's mouth.

"Why, Weapon? Why the grand experiment? Why the Platform?
Why are you so fascinated by the Effigies
?"

"We believe the Effigies are not native to the Earth, any more than the spindlings or the lightmoss or—"

"But they're pretty closely bound up to humans. They live and die with us."

"They do not die. So we believe. We have mapped disturbances, deep in the Earth . . . We believe there is a kind of nest of them, a colony of the Effigies that dwells deep in the core of Old Earth. They emerge to combine with humans, with infants at birth. Some infants—we don't know how they choose. And we don't know how they bond either. But after the human carrier's death the Effigy symbiote is released, and returns to the core colony. Something of the human is taken with it. We believe."

"Memories."

"Perhaps."

"And are these memories brought back up from this core pit the next time an Effigy surfaces?"

"Perhaps. Everything about this world is designed, or modified. Perhaps the purpose is to preserve something of the memory of humanity across epochal intervals."

"Maybe this is why I always felt like something in me really doesn't belong in this time or place."

"Perhaps. We must study this at second hand. It is something about humanity that no machine shares."

"I think you're jealous. Aren't you, machine? You can farm us, keep us as lab animals. But you can't have
this
."

"No reliable mapping between human emotions and the qualia of our own sensorium . . . "

But he didn't hear the rest. Another stabbing in his chest, a pain that knifed down his left arm. The nurse leaned over him.

And the sky exploded. They weren't just new stars. They were stars that detonated, each flaring brighter than the rest of the sky put together, then vanishing as quickly, blown-out matches.

"Supernovas," said the boy, Powpy. "That is the ancient word. A wave of supernovas, triggered by the galaxy collision, giant exploding stars flooding nearby space with lethal radiation, a particle sleet . . . "

But Telni couldn't talk, couldn't breathe.

"He's going," the nurse said. "Get him to the Morgue."

He glimpsed two creatures running up—they were six-legged people, Centaurs—and his bed was shoved forward, across the rusty dirt towards the enclosure of a Building. He tried to protest, to cling to his view of that astounding sky as long as he could. But he couldn't even breathe, and it felt as if a sword were being twisted in his chest.

They got him indoors. He lay back, rigid with pain, staring at a construction material roof that seemed to recede from him.

And a glow, like the glow of the sky outside, suffused the inside of his head, his very eyes.

"It's happening," he heard the nurse say, wonder in her voice. "Look, it's rising from his limbs . . . His heart has stopped." She straddled him and pounded at his chest, even as a glow lit up her face, the bare flesh of her arms—a glow coming from
him
.

He remembered a glimmering tetrahedron, looming, swallowing him up.

He heard Powpy call, "Who are you? Who are you?"

And suddenly
he knew
, as if his eyes had suddenly focused, after years of myopia. With the last of the air in his lungs he struggled to speak. "Not again. Not again!"

The nurse peered into his eyes. "Stay with me, Telni!"

"
Who are you
?"

"My name is Michael Poole."

The light detonated, deep inside him.

Suddenly he filled this box of Xeelee stuff, and he rattled, anguished. But there was the door, a way out. Somehow he fled that way, seeking the redshift.

And then—

Geoff Ryman is the author of
The Warrior Who Carried Life
, the novella "The Unconquered Country",
The Child Garden
,
Was
,
Lust
, and
Air
. His work
253, or Tube Theatr
e was first published as hypertext fiction. A print version was published in 1998 and won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award. He has also won the World Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award (two times), the British Science Fiction Association Award (once for novel, twice for short fiction), the Sunburst Award, The James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and Gaylactic Spectrum awards. His most recent novel,
The King's Last Song
, is set in Cambodia, both at the time of Angkorean emperor Jayavarman VII, and in the present period. He has recently edited
When it Changed,
a collection of commissioned collaborations between writers and scientists. He currently lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.

I dreamed this in Sihanoukville, a town of new casinos, narrow beaches, hot bushes with flowers that look like daffodils, and even now after nine years of peace, stark ruined walls with gates that go nowhere.

In the dream, I get myself a wife. She's beautiful, blonde, careworn. She is not used to having a serious man with good intentions present himself to her on a beach. Her name is Agnete and she speaks with a Danish accent. She has four Asian children.

Their father had been studying permanently in Europe, married Agnete and then "left", which in this world can mean several things. Agnete was an orphan herself and the only family she had was that of her Cambodian husband. So she came to Phnom Penh only to find that her in-laws did not want some strange woman they did not know and all those extra mouths to feed.

I meet the children. The youngest is Gerda, who cannot speak a word of Khmer. She's tiny, as small as an infant though three years old, in a splotched pink dress and too much toy jewellery. She just stares, while her brothers play. She's been picked up from everything she knows and thrown down into this hot, strange world in which people speak nonsense and the food burns your mouth.

I kneel down and try to say hello to her, first in German, and then in English.
Hello Gertie, hello little girl. Hello.
She blanks all language and sits like she's sedated.

I feel so sad, I pick her up and hold her, and suddenly she buries her head in my shoulder. She falls asleep on me as I swing in a hammock and quietly explain myself to her mother. I am not married, I tell Agnete. I run the local casino.

Real men are not hard, just unafraid. If you are a man you say what is true, and if someone acts like a monkey, then maybe you punish them. To be a crook, you have to be straight. I sold guns for my boss and bought policemen, so he trusted me, so I ran security for him for years. He was one of the first to Go, and he sold his shares in the casino to me. Now it's me who sits around the black lacquered table with the generals and Thai partners. I have a Lexus and a good income. I have ascended and become a man in every way but one. Now I need a family.

Across from Sihanoukville, all about the bay are tiny islands. On those islands, safe from thieves, glow the roofs where the Big Men live in Soriya-chic amid minarets, windmills, and solar panels. Between the islands hang white suspension footbridges. Distant people on bicycles move across them.

Somehow it's now after the wedding. The children are now mine. We loll shaded in palm-leaf panel huts. Two of the boys play on a heap of old rubber inner tubes. Tharum with his goofy smile and sticky-out ears is long legged enough to run among them, plonking his feet down into the donut holes. Not to be outdone, his brother Sampul clambers over the things. Rith the oldest looks cool in a hammock, away with his earphones, pretending not to know us.

Gerda tugs at my hand until I let her go. Freed from the world of language and adults she climbs up and over the swollen black tubes, sliding down sideways. She looks intent and does not laugh.

Her mother in a straw hat and sunglasses makes a thin, watery sunset smile.

Gerda and I go wading. All those islands shelter the bay, so the waves roll onto the shore child-sized, as warm and gentle as caresses. Gerda holds onto my hand and looks down at them, scowling in silence.

Alongside the beach is a grounded airliner, its wings cut away and neatly laid beside it. I take the kids there, and the boys run around inside it, screaming. Outside, Gerda and I look at the aircraft's spirit house. Someone witty has given the shrine tiny white wings.

The surrounding hills still have their forests; cumulonimbus clouds towering over them like clenched fists.

In the evening, thunder comes.

I look out from our high window and see flashes of light in the darkness. We live in one whole floor of my casino hotel. Each of the boys has his own suite. The end rooms have balconies, three of them, that run all across the front of the building with room enough for sofas and dining tables. We hang tubes full of pink sugar water for hummingbirds. In the mornings, the potted plants buzz with bees, and balls of seed lure the sarika bird that comes to sing its sweetest song.

In these last days, the gambling action is frenetic: Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Malays, they play baccarat mostly, but some prefer the one-armed bandits.

At the tables of my casino, elegant young women, handsome young men and a couple of other genders besides, sit upright ready to deal, looking as alert and frightened as rabbits, especially if their table is empty. They are paid a percentage of the take. Some of them sleep with customers too, but they're good kids; they always sent the money home. Do good, get good, we in Cambodia used to say. Now we say
twee akrow meen lay
, Do bad, have money.

My casino is straight. My wheels turn true.
No guns
, says my sign.
No animals, no children
. Innocence must be protected.
No cigarettes or powders
. Those last two are marked by a skull-and-crossbones.

We have security but the powders don't show up on any scan, so some of my customers come here to die. Most weekends, we find one, a body slumped over the table.

I guess some of them think it's good to go out on a high. The Chinese are particularly susceptible. They love the theatre of gambling, the tough-guy stance, the dance of the cigarette, the nudge of the eyebrow. You get dealt a good hand, you smile, you take one last sip of Courvoisier, then one sniff. You Go Down for good.