The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (116 page)

Gina Martinelli felt it, the grace that was the glory of God. Only . . . only where was Jesus Christ, the savior and Lord? She couldn’t feel him, couldn’t find him in the oneness . . .

If Christ was not there, then this wasn’t Heaven. It was a trick of the Cunning One, of Satan who knows a million disguises and sends his demons to mislead the faithful. She wasn’t going to be tricked!

She folded her arms and began to pray aloud. Gina Martinelli was a faithful Christian. She wasn’t going anywhere; she was staying right here, waiting for the one true God.

A tiny woman in Shanghai sat at her window, watching her great-grandchildren play in the courtyard. How fast they were! Ai, once she had been so fast.

She felt it come over her all at once, the gods entering her soul. So it was her time! Almost she felt young again, felt strong . . . that was good. But even if had not been good, when the gods came for you, you went.

One last look at the children, and she was taken to the gods.

Anna Chernov, wide awake in the St Sebastian Infirmary that had become her prison, gave a small gasp. She felt power flow through her, and for a wild moment she thought it was the same force that had powered a lifetime of arabesques and jetés, a lifetime ago.

It was not.

This was something outside of herself, separate . . . but it didn’t have to be. She could take it in herself, become it, even as it became her. But she held back.

Will there be dancing
?

No. Not as she knew it, not the glorious stretch of muscle and thrust of limb and arch of back. Not the creation of beauty through the physical body. No. No dancing.

But there was power here, and she could use that power for another kind of escape, from her useless body and this Infirmary and a life without dance. From somewhere distant she head someone cry, “Anna – you can’t!” But she could. Anna seized the power, both refusing to join it or to leave it, and bent it onto herself. She was dead before her next breath.

Henry’s whole body shuddered. It was here. It was him.

Or not. “It’s a choice,” he whispered.

On the one hand, everything. All consciousness, woven into the very fabric of space-time itself, just as Wheeler and the rest had glimpsed nearly a hundred years ago. Consciousness at the quantum level, the probability-wave level, the co-evolvee with the universe itself.

On the other hand, the individual Henry Martin Erdmann. If he merged with the uber-consciousness, he would cease to exist as himself, his separate mind. And his mind was everything to Henry.

He hung suspended for nanoseconds, years, eons. Time itself took on a different character. Half here, half not, Henry knew the power, and what it was, and what humanity was not. He saw the outcome. He had his answer.

“No,” he said.

Then he lay again on his sofa with Carrie’s arms around him, the other two men illuminated dimly by a thin beam of yellow light, and he was once more mortal and alone.

And himself.

Enough merged. The danger is past. The being is born, and is ship, and is enough.

FIFTEEN

Months to identify all the dead. Years to fully repair all the damage to the world’s infrastructure: bridges, buildings, information systems. Decades yet to come, DiBella knew, of speculation about what had actually happened. Not that there weren’t theories already. Massive EMP, solar radiation, extrasolar radiation, extrastellar radiation, extraterrestrial attack, global terrorism, Armageddon, tectonic plate activity, genetically engineered viruses. Stupid ideas, all easily disproved, but of course that stopped no one from believing them. The few old people left said almost nothing. Those that did were scarcely believed.

Jake scarcely believed it himself.

He did nothing with the brain scans of Evelyn Krenchnoted and the three others, because there was nothing plausible he could do. They were all dead, anyway. “Only their bodies,” Carrie always added. She believed everything Henry Erdmann told her.

Did DiBella believe Henry’s ideas? On Tuesdays he did, on Wednesdays not, on Thursdays belief again. There was no replicable proof. It wasn’t science. It was . . . something else.

DiBella lived his life. He broke up with James. He visited Henry, long after the study of senior attention patterns was over. He went to dinner with Carrie and Vince Geraci. He was best man at their wedding.

He attended his mother’s sixty-fifth birthday party, a lavish shindig organized by his sister in the ballroom of a glitzy downtown hotel. The birthday girl laughed, and kissed the relatives who’d flown in from Chicago, and opened her gifts. As she gyrated on the dance floor with his Uncle Sam, DiBella wondered if she would live long enough to reach eighty.

Wondered how many others in the world would reach eighty.

“It was only because enough of them chose to go that the rest of us lost the emerging power,” Henry had said, and DiBella noted that
them
instead of
us
. “If you have only a few atoms of uranium left, you can’t reach critical mass.”

DiBella would have put it differently: if you have only a few neurons, you don’t have a conscious brain. But it came to the same thing in the end.

“If so many hadn’t merged, then the consciousness would have had to . . .” Henry didn’t finish his sentence, then or ever. But DiBella could guess.

“Come on, boy,” Uncle Sam called, “get yourself a partner and dance!”

DiBella shook his head and smiled. He didn’t have a partner just now and he didn’t want to dance. All the same, old Sam was right. Dancing had a limited shelf life. The sell-by date was already stamped on most human activity. Someday his mother’s generation, the largest demographic bulge in history, would turn eighty. And Henry’s choice would have to be made yet again.

How would it go next time?

OLD FRIENDS

Garth Nix

New York Times
bestselling Australian writer Garth Nix worked as a book publicist, editor, marketing consultant, publicist, and literary agent before launching the bestselling Old Kingdom series, which consists of
Sabriel
,
Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr
,
Abhorsen
, and
The Creature in the Case
. His other books include the Seventh Tower series, consisting of
The Fall, Castle, Aenir, Above the Veil, Into Battle
, and
The Violet Keystone
; the Keys to the Kingdom series, consisting of
Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday
, and
Sir Thursday
; as well as stand-alone novels such as
The Ragwitch
and
Shade’s Children
. His short fiction has been collected in
Across the Wall: Tales of the Old Kingdom and Beyond
. His most recent book is a new novel in the Keys to the Kingdom sequence,
Superior Saturday
. Born in Melbourne, he now lives in Sydney.

In the vivid story that follows, he shows us that old friends can make the most dangerous of enemies.

I
’
D BEEN LIVING
in the city for quite a while, lying low, recovering from an unfortunate jaunt that had turned, in the immortal words of my sometime comrade Hrasvelg, “irredeemably shit-shape”.

Though I had almost completely recovered my sight, I still wore a bandage around my eyes. It was made from a rare stuff that I could see through, but it looked like a dense black linen. Similarly, I had regrown my left foot, but I kept up the limp. It gave me an excuse to use the stick, which was, of course, much more than a length of bog oak carved with picaresque scenes of a pedlar’s journey.

I had a short lease apartment near the beach, an expensive but necessary accommodation, as I needed both the sunshine that fell into its small living room, and the cool, wet wind from the sea that blew through every open window.

Unfortunately, after the first month, that wind became laden with the smell of rotting weed and as the weeks passed, the stench grew stronger, and the masses of weed that floated just past the breakers began to shift and knit together, despite the efforts of the lifesavers to break up the unsightly, stinking rafts of green.

I knew what was happening, of course. The weed was a manifestation of an old opponent of mine, a slow, cold foe who had finally caught up with me. “Caught” being the operative word, as the weed was just the visible portion of my enemy’s activities. A quick examination of almanac and lodestone revealed that all known pathways from this world were denied to me, shut tight by powerful bindings that I could not broach quickly, if at all.

I watched the progress of the weed every morning as I drank my first coffee, usually leaning back in one white plastic chair as I elevated my supposedly injured leg on another. The two chairs were the only furniture in the apartment. I had rigged a hammock above the bath to sleep in.

The day before I adjudged the weed would reach its catalytic potential and spawn servitors, I bought not just my usual black coffee from the café downstairs, but also a triple macchiato that came in a heavy, heat-resistant glass. Because I lived upstairs they always gave me proper cups. The barista who served me, a Japanese guy who worked the espresso machine mornings and surfed all afternoon, put the coffees in a cardboard holder meant for takeaways and said, “Got a visitor today?”

“Not yet,” I said. “But I will have shortly. By the way, I wouldn’t go surfing here this afternoon . . . or tomorrow.”

“Why not?”

“That weed,” I replied. “It’s toxic. Try another beach.”

“How do you know?” he asked as he slid the tray into my waiting fingers. “I mean, you can’t . . .”

“I can’t see it,” I said, as I backed away, turned and started tapping towards the door. “But I can smell it. It’s toxic all right. Stay clear.”

“OK, thanks. Uh, enjoy the coffee.”

I slowly made my way upstairs, and set the coffees down on the floor. My own long black in front of one white chair, and the macchiato at the foot of the other. I wouldn’t be resting my leg on the spare chair today.

I had to wait a little while for the breeze to come up, but as it streamed through the room and teased at the hair I should have had cut several weeks before, I spoke.

“Hey, Anax. I bought you a coffee.”

The wind swirled around my head, changing direction 270 degrees, blowing out the window it had come in by and in by the window it had been going out. I felt the floor tremble under my feet and experienced a brief dizziness.

Anax, proper name Anaxarte, was one of my oldest friends. We’d grown up together and had served together in two cosmically fucked-up wars, one of which was still slowly bleeding its way to exhaustion in fits and starts, though the original two sides were long out of it.

I hadn’t seen Anax for more than thirty years, but we wrote to each other occasionally, and had spoken to each other twice in that time. We talked a lot about meeting up, maybe organizing a fishing expedition with some of the old lads, but it had never come together.

I knew that if he were able to, he would always answer my call. So as the coffee cooled, and the white plastic chair lay vacant, my heart chilled, and I began to grieve. Not for the loss of Anax’s help against the enemy, but because another friend had fallen.

I sat in the sunshine for an hour, the warmth a slight comfort against the melancholy that had crept upon me. At the hour’s end, the wind shifted again, roiling around me counter-clockwise till it ebbed to a total calm.

Even without the breeze, I could smell the weed. It had a malignant, invasive odour, the kind that creeps through sealed plastic bags and airtight lids, the smell of decay and corruption.

My options were becoming limited. I took up my stick and went downstairs once more to the café. The afternoon barista did not know me, though I had seen her often enough through my expansive windows. She did not comment on my order, though I doubt she was often asked for a soy latte with half poured out after it was made, to be topped up again with cold regular milk.

Upstairs, I repeated the summoning, this time with the chill already present, a cold presence of somber expectation lodged somewhere between my heart and ribs.

“Balan,” I called softly. “Balan, your luke-warm excuse for a drink is ready.”

The wind came up and carried my words away, but as before, there was no reply, no presence in the empty chair. I waited the full hour to be sure, then poured the congealed soy drink down the sink.

I could see the weed clearly in the breakers now. It was almost entirely one huge, long clump that spanned the length of the beach. The lifesavers had given up trying to break it apart with their Jet Skis and Zodiac inflatables, and there were two “Beach Closed” signs stuck in the sand, twenty metres apart. Not that anyone was swimming. The beach was almost empty. The reek of the weed had driven away everyone but a sole lifesaver serving out her shift, and a fisherman who was dolefully walking along in search of a weed-free patch of sea.

“Two of my old friends taken,” I whispered to the sun, my lips dry, my words heavy. We had never thought much about our futures, not when we were out among the worlds, free. The present was our all, our time the now. None of us knew what lay ahead.

For the third time, I trod my careful way downstairs. There were a dozen people outside the café, a small crowd which parted to allow me passage, with muttered whispers about blindness and letting the sightless man past.

The crowd was watching the weed, while trying not to smell it.

“There, that bit came right out of the water!”

“It kind of looks alive!”

“Must be creating a gas somehow, the decomposition . . .”

“. . . check out those huge nodules lifting up . . .”

“. . . a gas, methane, maybe. Or hydrogen sulfide . . . nah . . . I’m just guessing. Someone will know . . .”

As I heard the excited comments I knew that I had mistimed my calls for assistance. The weed was very close to catalysis and would very soon spawn its servitors, who would come ashore in search of their target.

I had meant to ask the owner of the café, a short, bearded man who was always called “Mister Jeff” by the staff, if he could give me a glass of brandy, or at a pinch, whisky. A fine Armagnac would be best, but I doubted they’d have any of that. The café had no liquor licence but I knew there was some spirituous alcohol present, purely for Jeff’s personal use, since I’d smelled it on his breath often enough.

But as I said, it was too late for that. Palameides might have answered to a double brandy, but I secretly knew that he too must have succumbed. It had been too long since his last missive, and I accounted it one of my failings that I had not been in touch to see where he was, and if all was well with him.

“Someone should do something about that weed,” complained a thickset young man who habitually double-parked his low-slung sports car outside the café around this time. “It really stinks.”

“It will be gone by morning,” I said. I hadn’t meant to use the voice of prophecy, but my words rang out, harsh and bronze, stopping all other conversation.

Everyone looked at me, from inside and outside the café. Even the dog who had been asleep next to one of the outside tables craned his neck to look askance. All was silent, the silence of the embarrassed audience who wished they were elsewhere without knowing why, and were fearful about what was going to come next.

“I am a . . . biologist,” I said in my normal tones. “The weed is a known phenomenon. It will disperse overnight.”

The silence continued for a few seconds, then normal service resumed, at a lower volume. Even the double-parking guy was more subdued.

I spoke the truth. One way or another, the weed would be gone, and likely enough, I would be gone with it.

As the afternoon progressed, the stench grew much worse. The café was shut, staff and customers retreating to better-smelling climes. Around five o’clock, nearby residents began to leave as well, at the same time the Fire Brigade, the Water Board, the police and several television crews arrived.

An hour after that, only the firefighters remained, and they were wearing breathing apparatus as they went from door to door, checking that everyone had left. Farther afield, way down the northern end of the beach, I could see the television crews interviewing someone who was undoubtedly an expert trying to explain why the noxious odours were so localized, and dissipated so quickly when you got more than three hundred metres from the centre of the beach.

The “DO NOT CROSS” tapes with the biohazard trefoils got rolled out just before dusk, across the street about eighty metres up from my apartment. The firefighters had knocked at my door and called out, gruff voices muffled by masks, but I had not answered. They could probably have seen me from the beach, but no one was heading closer to the smell, however well-protected they were. The sea was bubbling and frothing with noxious vapours, and weedy nodules the size of restaurant refrigerators were bobbing up and down upon the waves. After a while the nodules began to detach from the main mass of weed and the waves carried them in like lost boards, tendrils of weed trailing behind them, reminiscent of Velcro-failed leg-ropes.

I watched the nodules as the sun set behind the city, mentally mapping where they were drifting ashore. When the sun was completely gone, the street lights and the high lamps that usually lit the beach didn’t come on, but that didn’t matter much to me. Darkness wasn’t so much my friend as a close relative. The lack of artificial light caused a commotion among the HAZMAT teams though, particularly when they couldn’t get their portable generators and floodlights to work, and the one engine they sent down the street choked and stalled before it had even pulled away from the curb.

I had counted thirteen nodules, but more could be out in the weed mass, or so low in the water I’d missed them. My enemy was not underestimating me, or had presumed I would be able to call upon assistance.

I had presumed I would be able to call upon assistance, a foolish presumption built upon old camaraderie, of long-ago dangers shared, of the maintenance of a continuum. I had not thought that my friends, having survived our two wars, could have had a full stop put to their existence in more mundane environments. For surely they must have been victims of some foe, as the transformations we endured in our training rendered termination by illness or accident extraordinarily unlikely.

“Anax, Balan, Palameides,” I whispered. By now there would be three new death-trees laid out in a nice row in the arborial necropolis, with those nameplates at their feet,. There was probably a Nethinim carving my name onto a plaque right now, and readying a sapling. They always knew beforehand, the carriers of water and hewers of wood.

I dismissed this gloomy thought. If my time had come, it had come, but I would not wait in a dark apartment, to acquiesce to my fate like a senescent king grown too tired and toothless to act against his assassins.