The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (128 page)

He’ll suck everything out of you.

Mahuizoh could not have known the truth behind his words, back when he had spoken them to me. There was no way he could have known.

Tecolli’s eyes met mine, and must have seen the loathing I felt for him. All pretence fled from his face. “I did not kill her,” he said. “I swear to you I did not kill her.” He looked as though he might weep.

I spat, from between clenched teeth, “Take him away. We’ll deal with him at the tribunal.”

Yi Mei-Lin, one of the clerks, entered my office as I was typing the last of my preliminary report.

“How is he?” I asked.

“Still protesting his innocence. He says he found her already dead, and only used the extra half-hour to wipe off any proof that he might have tampered with the holograms – removing his fingerprints and wiping the pedestals clean.” Yi Mei-Lin had a full cardboard box in her hands, with a piece of paper covering it. “These are his things. I thought you might want a look.”

I sighed. My eyes ached from looking at the computer. “Yes. I probably should.” I already knew that although we’d found the missing chips in the black-market shop, the swan hologram’s audio chip had been nowhere to be found. Tecolli denied taking it. Not that I was inclined to trust him currently.

“I’ll bring you some jasmine tea,” Yi Mei-Lin said, and slipped out the door.

I rifled through Tecolli’s things, absentmindedly. The usual: wallet, keys, copper yuans – not even enough to buy tobacco. A metal lip-plug, tarnished from long contact with the skin. A packet of honey-toasted gourd seeds, still wrapped in plastic.

A wad of papers, folded over and over. I reached for it, unwound it, and stared at the letters. It was part of a script – the swan’s script, I realized, my heart beating faster. Tecolli had been the voice of the hummingbird, and Papalotl’s script was forcefully underlined and annotated in the margins, in preparation for his role.

The swan – Papalotl’s voice – merely recited a series of dates: the doomed charge of the Second Red Tezcatlipoca Regiment during Xuya’s Independence War with China; the Tripartite War and the triumph of the Mexica-Xuyan alliance over the United States.

And, finally, the Mexica Civil War, twelve years ago: the Xuyan soldiers dispatched to help restore order; the thousands of Mexica feeing their home cities and settling across the border.

The swan then fell silent, and the hummingbird appeared. It was there that Tecolli’s role started.

Tonatiuh, the Fifth Sun, has just risen, and outside my cell I hear the priests of Huitzilpochtli chanting their hymns as they prepare the altar for my sacrifice.

I know that you are beyond the border now. The Xuyans will welcome you as they have welcomed so many of our people, and you will make a new life there. I regret only that I will not be there to walk with you —

Puzzled, I turned the pages. It was a long, poignant monologue, but it did not feel like the other audio chips I’d heard in Papalotl’s workshop. It felt . . .

More real, I thought, chilled without knowing why. I scanned the bottom of the second-to-last page.

They will send this letter on to you, for although they are my enemies they are honourable men.

Weep not for me. I die a warrior’s death on the altar, and my blood will make Tonatiuh strong. But my love is and always has been yours forever, whether in this world of fading flowers or in the god’s heaven.

Izel.

Izel.

Coaxoch’s fiancé.

It was the Third Bi-Hour when I arrived at The Quetzal’s Rest, and the restaurant was deserted, all the patrons since long gone back to their houses.

A light was still on upstairs, in the office. Gently, I pushed the door open, and saw her standing by the window, her back to me. She wore a robe with embroidered deer, and a shawl of maguey fibres – the traditional garb of women in Greater Mexica.

“I was waiting for you,” she said, not turning around.

“Where’s Mahuizoh?”

“I sent him away.” Coaxoch’s voice was utterly emotionless. On the desk stood the faded picture of Izel, and in front of the picture was a small bowl holding some grass – a funeral offering. “He would not have understood.”

She turned, slowly, to face me. Two streaks of black makeup ran on either side of her cheeks: the markings put on the dead’s faces before they were cremated.

Surprised, I recoiled, but she made no move towards me. Cautiously, I extended Tecolli’s crumpled paper to her. “Papalotl stole the original letter from you, didn’t she?”

Coaxoch shook her head. “I should have seen her more often, after we moved here,” she said. “I should have seen what she was turning into.” She laid both hands on the desk, as stately as an Empress. “When it went missing, I didn’t think of Papalotl. Mahuizoh thought that maybe Tecolli —”

“Mahuizoh hates Tecolli,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Coaxoch said. “I went to Papalotl, to ask her whether she’d seen it. I didn’t think.” She took a deep breath to steady herself. Her skin had gone red under the makeup. “When I came in, she opened the door to me – naked, and she didn’t even offer to dress herself. She left me downstairs and headed for her workshop, to finish something, she said. I followed her.”

Her voice quavered, but she steadied it. “I saw the letter on her table – she’d taken it. And when I asked her about it, she told me about the hologram, told me we were going to be famous when she sold this, and the Prefect’s Office would put it where everyone could see it . . .”

I said nothing. I remained where I was, listening to her voice grow more and more intense, until every word tore at me.

“She was going to . . . sell my pain. To sell my memories just for a piece of fame. She was going —” Coaxoch drew a deep breath. “I told her to stop. I told her it was not right, but she stood on the landing, shaking her head and smiling at me – as if she just had to ask for everything to be made right.

“She didn’t understand. She just didn’t understand. She’d changed too much.” Coaxoch stared at her hands, and then back at the picture of Izel. “I couldn’t make her shut up, you understand? I pushed and beat at her, and she wouldn’t stop smiling at me, selling my pain —”

She raised her gaze towards me, and I recognised the look in her eyes: it was the look of someone already dead, and who knows it. “I had to make her stop,” she said, her voice lower now, almost spent. “But she never did. Even after she fell she was still smiling.” There were tears in her eyes now. “Still laughing at me.”

I said at last, finding my words with difficulty, “You know how it goes.”

Coaxoch shrugged. “Do you think I care, Hue Ma? It ceased to matter a long time ago.” She cast a last, longing glance towards Izel’s picture, and straightened her shoulders. “It’s not right either, what I’ve done. Do what you have to.”

She did not bend, then, as the militia came into the room – did not bend as they closed the handcuffs over her wrists and led her away. I knew she would not bend on the day of her execution either, whatever the manner of it.

As we exited the restaurant, I caught a glimpse of Mahuizoh among the few passers-by who had gathered to watch the militia aircar. His gaze met mine, and held it for a second – and there were such depths of grief behind the spectacles that my breath caught and could not be released.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Justice has to be done.” But I did not think he could hear me.

Back at the tribunal, I sat at my desk, staring at my computer’s screensaver – one of Quetzalcoatl’s butterflies, multiplying until it filled the screen. There was something mindlessly reassuring about it.

I had to deal with Tecolli, had to type a report, had to call Zhu Bao to let him know his trust had not been misplaced and that I had found the culprit. I had to –

I felt hollow, drained of everything. At last I moved, and knelt before my small altar. Slowly, with shaking hands, I lit a stick of incense and placed it upright before the lacquered tablets. Then I sat on my knees, trying to banish the memory of Coaxoch’s voice.

I thought of her words to me:
it ceased to matter a long time ago
.

And my own, an eternity ago:
the War does that to you
.

I thought of Papalotl, turning away from Mexica customs to forget her exile and the death of her parents, of what she had made of her life. I saw her letting go of the railing, slowly falling towards the floor; and saw Coaxoch’s eyes, those of someone already dead. I thought of my turning away from my inheritance, and thought of Xuya, which had taken me in but not healed me.

Which could never heal me, no matter how far away I ran from my fears.

I closed my eyes for a brief moment, and, before I could change my mind, got up and reached for the phone. My fingers dialled a number I hadn’t called for years but still had not forgotten.

The phone rang in the emptiness. I waited, my throat dry.

“Hello? Who is this?”

My stomach felt hollow – but it wasn’t fear, it was shame. I said in Nahuatl, every word coming with great difficulty, “Mother? It’s me.”

I waited for anger, for endless reproaches. But there was nothing of that. Only her voice, on the verge of breaking, speaking the name I’d been given in Tenochtitlán, “Oh, Nenetl, my child. I’m so glad.”

And though I hadn’t heard that name in years, still it felt right, in a way that nothing else could.

THE TEAR

Ian McDonald

British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in
Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction,
and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel
King of Morning, Queen of Day
. His other books include the novels
Out on Blue Six
and
Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya
, a chapbook novella
Tendeleo’s Story, Ares Express
, and
Cyberabad,
as well as two collections of his short fiction,
Empire Dreams
and
Speaking in Tongues
. His novel
River of Gods
was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, and a novella drawn from it,
The Little Goddess
, was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula. His most recent book is another new novel that’s receiving critical raves,
Brasyl
. Coming up is a new collection,
Cyberabad Days
. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and he now lives and works in Belfast. He has a website at lysator. liu.se/^unicorn/mcdonald/.

The lyrical and dazzling story that follows is filled with enough wild new ideas, evocative milieus, bizarre characters, and twists and turns of plot to fill many another author’s four-book trilogy. He takes us to a quiet waterworld to follow a young boy setting out on a voyage of discovery that will take him to many unexpected destinations both across the greater universe and in the hidden depths of his own soul, one that will embroil him in the deadly clash of galactic empires and take him home the long way to find that enemies can be as close and familiar as friends.

PTEY, SAILING

O
N THE NIGHT
that Ptey voyaged out to have his soul shattered, eight hundred stars set sail across the sky. It was an evening at Great Winter’s ending. The sunlit hours raced toward High Summer, each day lavishly more full of light than the one before. In this latitude, the sun hardly set at all after the spring equinox, rolling along the horizon, fat and idle and pleased with itself. Summer-born Ptey turned his face to the sun as it dipped briefly beneath the horizon, closed his eyes, enjoyed its lingering warmth on his eyelids, in the angle of his cheekbones, on his lips. To the Summer-born, any loss of the light was a reminder of the terrible, sad months of winter and the unbroken, encircling dark.

But we have the stars
, his father said, a Winter-born.
We are born looking out into the universe.

Ptey’s father commanded the little machines that ran the catamaran, trimming sail, winding sheets, setting course by the tumble of satellites; but the tiller he held himself. The equinoctial gales had spun away to the west two weeks before and the catboat ran fast and fresh on a sweet wind across the darkening water. Twin hulls cut through the ripple-reflections of gas flares from the Temejveri oil platforms. As the sun slipped beneath the huge dark horizon and the warmth fell from the hollows of Ptey’s face, so his father turned his face to the sky. Tonight, he wore his Steris Aspect. The ritual selves scared Ptey, so rarely were they unfurled in Ctarisphay: births, namings, betrothals and marriages, divorces and deaths. And of course, the Manifoldings. Familiar faces became distant and formal. Their language changed, their bodies seemed slower, heavier. They became possessed by strange, special knowledges. Only Steris possessed the language for the robots to sail the catamaran and, despite the wheel of positioning satellites around tilted Tay, the latitude and longitude of the Manifold House. The catamaran itself was only run out from its boathouse, to strong songs heavy with clashing harmonies, when a child from Ctarisphay on the edge of adulthood sailed out beyond the outer mole and the feet of oil platforms to have his or her personality unfolded into eight.

Only two months since, Cjatay had sailed out into the oily black of a late winter afternoon. Ptey was Summer-born, a Solstice boy; Cjatay a late Autumn. It was considered remarkable that they shared enough in common to be able to speak to each other, let alone become the howling boys of the neighbourhood, the source of every broken window and borrowed boat. The best part of three seasons between them, but here was only two moons later, leaving behind the pulsing gas flares and maze of pipe work of the sheltering oil fields, heading into the great, gentle oceanic glow of the plankton blooms, steering by the stars, the occupied, haunted stars. The Manifolding was never a thing of moons and calendars, but of mothers’ watchings and grandmothers’ knowings and teachers’ notings and fathers’ murmurings, of subtly shifted razors and untimely lethargies, of deep-swinging voices and stained bedsheets.

On Etjay Quay, where the porcelain houses leaned over the landing, Ptey had thrown his friend’s bag down into the boat. Cjatay’s father had caught it and frowned. There were observances. Ways. Forms.

“See you,” Ptey had said.

“See you.” Then the wind caught in the catamaran’s tall, curved sails and carried it away from the rain-wet, shiny faces of the houses of Ctarisphay. Ptey had watched the boat until it was lost in the light dapple of the city’s lamps on the winter-dark water. See Cjatay he would, after his six months on the Manifold House. But only partially. There would be Cjatays he had never known, never even met. Eight of them, and the Cjatay with whom he had stayed out all the brief Low Summer nights of the prith run on the fishing staithes, skinny as the piers’ wooden legs silhouetted against the huge sun kissing the edge of the world, would be but a part, a dream of one of the new names and new personalities. Would he know him when he met him on the great floating university that was the Manifold House?

Would he know himself?

“Are they moving yet?” Steris called from the tiller. Ptey shielded his dark-accustomed eyes against the pervasive glow of the carbon-absorbing plankton blooms and peered into the sky.
Sail of Bright Anticipation
cut two lines of liquid black through the gently undulating sheet of biolight, fraying at the edges into fractal curls of luminescence as the sheets of micro-organisms sought each other.

“Nothing yet.”

But it would be soon, and it would be tremendous. Eight hundred stars setting out across the night. Through the changes and domestic rituals of his sudden Manifolding, Ptey had been aware of sky-watch parties being arranged, star-gazing groups setting up telescopes along the quays and in the campaniles, while day on day the story moved closer to the head of the news. Half the world – that half of the world not blinded by its extravagant axial tilt – would be looking to the sky. Watching Steris rig
Sail of Bright Anticipation
, Ptey had felt cheated, like a sick child confined to bed while festival raged across the boats lashed beneath his window. Now, as the swell of the deep dark of his world’s girdling ocean lifted the twin prows of
Sail of Bright Anticipation
, on his web of shock-plastic mesh ahead of the mast, Ptey felt his excitement lift with it. A carpet of lights below, a sky of stars above: all his alone.

They were not stars. They were the 826 space habitats of the Anpreen Commonweal, spheres of nano-carbon ice and water five hundred kilometers in diameter that for twice Ptey’s lifetime had adorned Bephis, the ringed gas giant, like a necklace of pearls hidden in a velvet bag, far from eye and mind. The negotiations fell into eras. The Panic, when the world of Tay became aware that the gravity waves pulsing through the huge ripple tank that was their ocean-bound planet were the bow-shocks of massive artifacts decelerating from near light-speed. The Denial, when Tay’s governments decided it was Best Really to try and hide the fact that their solar system had been immigrated into by eight hundred and some space vehicles, each larger than Tay’s petty moons, falling into neat and proper order around Bephis. The Soliciting, when it became obvious that Denial was futile – but on our terms, our terms. A feet of space probes was dispatched to survey and attempt radio contact with the arrivals – as yet silent as ice. And, when they were not blasted from space or vaporized or collapsed into quantum black holes or any of the plethora of fanciful destructions imagined in the popular media, the Overture. The Sobering, when it was realized that these star-visitors existed primarily as swarms of free-swimming nano-assemblers in the free-fall spherical oceans of their eight hundred and some habitats, one mind with many forms; and, for the Anpreen, the surprise that these archaic hominiforms on this backwater planet were many selves within one body. One thing they shared and understood well. Water. It ran through their histories, it flowed around their ecologies, it mediated their molecules. After one hundred and twelve years of near-light-speed flight, the Anpreen Commonweal was desperately short of water; their spherical oceans shriveled almost into zero gravity teardrops within the immense, nanotech-reinforced ice shells. Then began the era of Negotiation, the most prolonged of the phases of contact, and the most complex. It had taken three years to establish the philosophical foundations: the Anpreen, an ancient species of the great Clade, had long been a colonial mind, arranged in subtle hierarchies of self-knowledge and ability, and did not know who to talk to, whom to ask for a decision, in a political system with as many governments and nations as there were islands and archipelagos scattered across the world ocean of the fourth planet from the sun.

Now the era of Negotiation had become the era of Open Trade. The Anpreen habitats spent their last drops of reaction mass to break orbit around Bephis and move the Commonweal in-system. Their destination was not Tay, but Tejaphay, Tay’s sunward neighbour, a huge waterworld of unbroken ocean one hundred kilometers deep, crushing gravity, and endless storms. A billion years before the seed ships probed the remote star system, the gravitational interplay of giant worlds had sent the least of their number spiraling sunwards. Solar wind had stripped away its huge atmosphere and melted its mantle of water ice into a planetary ocean, deep and dark as nightmares. It was that wink of water in the system-scale interferometers of the Can-Bet-Merey people, half a million years before, that had inspired them to fill their night sky with solar sails as one hundred thousand slow seed ships rode out on flickering launch lasers toward the new system. An evangelically pro-life people were the Can-Bet-Merey, zealous for the Clade’s implicit dogma that intelligence was the only force in the universe capable of defeating the physical death of space-time.

If the tens of thousand of biological packages they had rained into the world-ocean of Tejaphay had germinated life, Tay’s probes had yet to discover it. The Can-Bet-Merey did strike roots in the afterthought, that little blue pearl next out from the sun, a tear spun from huge Tejaphay.

One hundred thousand years ago, the Can-Bet-Merey had entered the post-biological phase of intelligence and moved to that level that could no longer communicate with the biological life of Tay, or even the Anpreen.

“Can you see anything yet?” A call from the tiller.
Sail of Bright Anticipation
had left behind the carbon-soaked plankton bloom, the ocean was deep dark and boundless. Sky and sea blurred; stars became confused with the riding lights of ships close on the horizon.

“Is it time?” Ptey called back.

“Five minutes ago.”

Ptey found a footing on the webbing, and, one hand wrapped in the sheets, stood up to scan the huge sky. Every child of Tay, crazily tilted at 48 degrees to the ecliptic, grew up conscious that her planet was a ball rolling around the sun and that the stars were far, vast and slow, almost unchanging. But stars could change; Bephis, that soft smudge of light low in the south-east, blurred by the glow of eight hundred moon-sized space habitats, would soon be once again the hard point of light by which his ancestors had steered to their Manifoldings.

“Give it time,” Ptey shouted. Time. The Anpreen were already voyaging; had switched on their drives and pulled out of orbit almost an hour before. The slow light of their embarkation had still not reached Tay. He saw the numbers spinning around in his head, accelerations, vectors, space and time all arranged around him like fluttering carnival banners. It had taken Ptey a long time to understand that not everyone could see numbers like him and reach out and make them do what they wanted.

“Well, I’ll be watching the football,” Cjatay had declared when Teacher Deu had declared a Special Class Project in conjunction with the Noble Observatory of Pteu to celebrate the Anpreen migration. “We’re all jumping up and down, Anpreen this, Anpreen that, but when it comes down to it, they aliens and we don’t know what they really want, no one does.”