The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (12 page)

Erasmus smiled then, and the smile was full of pain and melancholy and an awful understanding. “But they’re not killing us, Carlotta. They’re rapturing us up.”

One time in school, when she was trying unsuccessfully to come to grips with
The Merchant of Venice
, Carlotta had opened a book about Elizabethan drama to a copy of an old drawing called Utriusque Cosmi. It was supposed to represent the whole cosmos, the way people thought of it back in Shakespeare’s time, all layered and orderly: stars and angels on top, hell beneath, and a naked guy stretched foursquare between divinity and damnation. Made no sense to her at all. Some antique craziness. She thinks of that drawing now, for no accountable reason. But it doesn’t stop at the angels, girl. I learned that lesson. Even angels have angels, and devils dance on the backs of lesser devils.

Her mother in her bloodstained nightgown hovers in the doorway of Carlotta’s bedroom. Her unblinking gaze strafes the room until it fixes at last on her daughter. Abby Boudaine might be standing right here, Carlotta thinks, but those eyes are looking out from someplace deeper and more distant and far more frightening.

The blood fairly drenches her. But it isn’t Abby’s blood.

“Oh, Carlotta,” Abby says. Then she clears her throat, the way she does when she has to make an important phone call or speak to someone she fears. “Carlotta . . .”

And Carlotta (the invisible Carlotta, the Carlotta who dropped down from that place where the angels dice with eternity) understands what Abby is about to say, recognizes at last the awesome circularity, not a paradox at all. She pronounces the words silently as Abby makes them real: “Carlotta. Listen to me, girl. I don’t guess you understand any of this. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for many things. But listen now. When it’s time to leave, you leave. Don’t be afraid, and don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast.”

Then she turns and leaves her daughter cowering in the darkened room.

Beyond the bedroom window, the coyotes are still complaining to the moon. The sound of their hooting fills up the young Carlotta’s awareness until it seems to speak directly to the heart of her.

Then comes the second and final gunshot.

I have only seen the Enemy briefly, and by that time, I had stopped thinking of them as the Enemy.

Can’t describe them too well. Words really do fail me. And by that time, might as well admit it, I was not myself a thing I would once have recognized as human. Just say that Erasmus and I and the remaining timesliders were taken up into the Enemy’s embrace along with all the rest of the Fleet – all the memories we had deemed lost to entropy or warfare were preserved there. The virtualities the Enemies had developed across whole kalpas of time were labyrinthine, welcoming, strange beyond belief Did I roam in those mysterious glades? Yes I did, girl, and Erasmus by my side, for many long (subjective) years, and we became – well, larger than I can say.

And the galaxies aged and flew away from one another until they were swallowed up in manifolds of cosmic emptiness, connected solely by the gentle and inexorable thread of gravity. Stars winked out, girl; galaxies merged and filled with dead and dying stars; atoms decayed to their last stable forms. But the fabric of space can tolerate just so much emptiness. It isn’t infinitely elastic. Even vacuum ages. After some trillions and trillions of years, therefore, the expansion became a contraction.

During that time, I occasionally sensed or saw the Enemy – but I have to call them something else: say, the Great Old Ones, pardon my pomposity – who had constructed the dark matter virtualities in which I now lived. They weren’t people at all. Never were. They passed through our adopted worlds like storm clouds, black and majestic and full of subtle and inscrutable lightnings. I couldn’t speak to them, even then; as large and old as I had become, I was only a fraction of what they were.

I wanted to ask them why they had destroyed the Earth, why so many people had to be wiped out of existence or salvaged by the evolved benevolence of the Fleet. But Erasmus, who delved into these questions more deeply than I was able to, said the Great Old Ones couldn’t perceive anything as tiny or ephemeral as a rocky planet like the Earth. The Earth and all the many planets like her had been destroyed, not by any willful calculation, but by autonomic impulses evolved over the course of many cosmic conflations – impulses as imperceptible and involuntary to the Old Ones as the functioning of your liver is to you, girl.

The logic of it is this: life-bearing worlds generate civilizations that eventually begin playing with dark matter, posing a potential threat to the continuity of the Old Ones. Some number of these intrusions can be tolerated and contained – like the Fleet, they were often an enriching presence – but too many of them would endanger the stability of the system. It’s as if we were germs, girl, wiped out by a giant’s immune system. They couldn’t see us, except as a somatic threat. Simple as that.

But they could see the Fleet. The Fleet was just big enough and durable enough to register on the senses of the Old Ones. And the Old Ones weren’t malevolent: they perceived the Fleet much the way the Fleet had once perceived us, as something primitive but alive and thinking and worth the trouble of salvation.

So they raptured up the Fleet (and similar Fleet-like entities in countless other galaxies), thus preserving us against the blind oscillations of cosmic entropy.

(Nice of them, I suppose. But if I ever grow large enough or live long enough to confront an Old One face to face, I mean to lodge a complaint. Hell yes we were small – people are some of the smallest thought-bearing creatures in the cosmos, and I think we all kind of knew that even before the end of the world . . . you did, surely. But pain is pain and grief is grief It might be inevitable, it might even be built into the nature of things; but it isn’t good, and it ought not to be tolerated, if there’s a choice.)

Which I guess is why I’m here watching you squinch your eyes shut while the sound of that second gunshot fades into the air.

Watching you process a nightmare into a vision.

Watching you build a pearl around a grain of bloody truth.

Watching you go fast.

The bodiless Carlotta hovers a while longer in the fixed and changeless corridors of the past.

Eventually, the long night ends. Raw red sunlight finds the window.

Last dawn this small world will ever see, as it happens, but the young Carlotta doesn’t know that yet.

Now that the universe has finished its current iteration, all its history is stored in transdimensional metaspace like a book on a shelf – it can’t be changed. Truly so. I guess I know that now, girl. Memory plays tricks that history corrects.

And I guess that’s why the Old Ones let me have access to these events, as we hover on the brink of a new creation.

I know some of the questions you’d ask me if you could. You might say, Where are you really? And I’d say, I’m at the end of all things, which is really just another beginning. I’m walking in a great garden of dark matter, while all things known and baryonic spiral up the ladder of unification energies to a fiery new dawn. I have grown so large, girl, that I can fly down history like a bird over a prairie field. But I cannot remake what has already been made. That is one power I do not possess.

I watch you get out of bed. I watch you dress. Blue jeans with tattered hems, a man’s lumberjack shirt, those thrift-shop Reeboks. I watch you go to the kitchen and fill your vinyl Bratz backpack with bottled water and Tootsie Rolls, which is all the cuisine your meth-addled mother has left in the cupboards.

Then I watch you tiptoe into Abby’s bedroom. I confess I don’t remember this part, girl. I suppose it didn’t fit my fantasy about a benevolent ghost. But here you are, your face fixed in a willed indifference, stepping over Dan-O’s corpse. Dan-O bled a lot after Abby Boudaine blew a hole in his chest, and the carpet is a sticky rust-colored pond.

I watch you pull Dan-O’s ditty bag from where it lies half under the bed. On the bed, Abby appears to sleep. The pistol is still in her hand. The hand with the pistol in it rests beside her head. Her head is damaged in ways the young Carlotta can’t stand to look at. Eyes down, girl. That’s it.

I watch you pull a roll of bills from the bag and stuff it into your pack. Won’t need that money where you’re going! But it’s a wise move, taking it. Commendable forethought.

Now go.

I have to go too. I feel Erasmus waiting for me, feel the tug of his love and loyalty, gentle and inevitable as gravity. He used to be a machine older than the dirt under your feet, Carlotta Boudaine, but he became a man – my man, I’m proud to say. He needs me, because it’s no easy thing crossing over from one universe to the next. There’s always work to do, isn’t that the truth?

But right now, you go. You leave those murderous pills on the nightstand, find that highway. Don’t be afraid. Don’t wait. Don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast. And excuse me while I take my own advice.

A STORY, WITH BEANS

Steven Gould

Here, as advertised, is a story, with beans. Oh, and also a few metal-eating robots, who don’t mind chewing through human flesh if it happens to get in the way. . . .

Steven Gould is a frequent contributor to Analog but has also appeared in Asimov’s, Amazing, New Destinies, and elsewhere, and has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula awards. He’s best-known for the “Jumper” series, including
Jumper, Reflex
, and
Jumper: Griffin’s Story.
The first of these was made into the big-budget movie
Jumper
in 2008. Gould’s other novels include
Wildside, Greenwar
(with Laura J. Mixon),
Help
, and
Blind Waves.
Gould lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife, writer Laura J. Mixon, and their two daughters.

K
IMBALL CROUCHED IN
the shade of the mesquite trees, which, because of the spring, were trees instead of their usual ground-hugging scrub. He was answering a question asked by one of the sunburned tourists, who was sprawled by the water, leaning against his expensive carbon-framed backpack.

“It takes about a foot of dirt,” Kimball said. “I mean, if there isn’t anything electrical going on. Then you’ll need more, depending on the current levels and the strength of the EMF. You may need to be underground a good ten feet otherwise.

“But it’s a foot, minimum. Once saw a noob find a silver dollar that he’d dug up at one of the old truck stops west of Albuquerque. ‘Throw it away!’ we yelled at him. Why did he think they replaced his fillings before he entered the territory? But he said it was a rare coin and worth a fortune. The idiot swallowed it.

“We could have buried him. Kept his face clear but put a good foot of dirt over him. That could’ve worked, but there were bugs right there, eating those massive hydraulic cylinders buried in the concrete floor of the maintenance bays, the ones that drove the lifts.

“We scattered. He ran, too, but they were all around and they rose up like bees and then he stepped on one and it was all over. They went for the coin like it was a chewy caramel center.”

There were three college-aged tourists – two men and a girl, a pair of Pueblo khaki-dressed mounted territorial rangers that Kimball knew, and Mendez, the spring keeper. There was also a camel caravan camped below the spring, where the livestock were allowed to drink from the runoff, but the drovers, after filling their water bags, stayed close to their camels.

There were predators out here, both animal and human.

“What happened to the noob?” the tourist asked.

“He swallowed the coin. It was in his abdomen.”

“What do you mean?”

“Christ, Robert,” the girl said. “Didn’t you listen to the entrance briefing? He died. The bugs would just go right through him, to the metal. There aren’t any trauma centers out here, you know?”

One of the Rangers, silent until now, said, “That’s right, Miss.” He slid the sleeve of his khaki shirt up displaying a scarred furrow across the top of his forearm. “Bug did this. Was helping to dig a new kiva at Pojoaque and didn’t see I’d uncovered the base of an old metal fencepost. Not until the pain hit. There weren’t many bugs around but they came buzzing after that first one tasted steel and broadcast the call. I was able to roll away, under the incoming ones.”

“Why are you visiting the zone?” asked Mendez. He sat apart, keeping an eye on the tourists. The woman had asked about bathing earlier and the rangers explained that you could get a bath in town and there was sometimes water in the Rio Puerco, but you didn’t swim in the only drinking water between Red Cliff and the Territorial Capitol.

“You can bathe without soap in the runoff, down the hill above where the cattle drink. Wouldn’t do it below,” Mendez had elaborated. “You can carry a bit of water off into the brush if you want to soap ’n’ rinse.”

Kimball thought Mendez was still sitting there just in case she did decide to bathe. Strictly as a public service, no doubt, keeping a wary eye out for, uh, tan lines.

The woman tourist said, “We’re here for Cultural Anthropology 305. Field study. We meet our prof at his camp on the Rio Puerco.”

“Ah,” said Kimball, “Matt Peabody.”

“Oh. You know him?”

“Sure. His camp is just down stream from the Duncan ford. He likes to interview the people who pass through.”

“Right. He’s published some fascinating papers on the distribution of micro-cultures here in the zone.”

“Micro-cultures. Huh,” said Kimball. “Give me an example.”

“Oh, some of the religious or political groups who form small communities out here. Do you know what I mean?”

“I do.” Kimball, his face still, exchanged a glance with the two rangers.

As the woman showed no sign of imminent hygiene, Mendez climbed to his feet groaning and returned to his one room adobe-faced dugout, up the hill.

The woman student became more enthusiastic. “I think it’s so cool how the zone has ended up being this great nursery for widely diverse ways of life! I’m so excited to be able to see it.”

Kimball stood up abruptly and, taking a shallow basket off of his cart, walked downstream where the cattle watered. He filled the basket with dried dung: some camel, horse, and a bit of cow. He didn’t walk back until his breathing had calmed and his face was still. When he returned to the spring, one of the rangers had a pile of dried grass and pine needles ready in the communal fire pit and the other one was skinning a long, thin desert hare.

Kimball had a crock of beans that’d been soaking in water since he’d left Red Cliff that morning. Getting it out of the cart he added more water, a chunk of salt pork, pepper, and fresh rosemary, then wedged it in the fire with the lid, weighted down by a handy rock.

“What do you do, out here?” the woman tourist asked him. Kimball smiled lazily and, despite her earlier words, thought about offering her some beans.

“Bit of this, bit of that. Right now, I sell things.”

“A peddler? Shouldn’t you be in school?”

Kimball decided he wasn’t going to offer her any of his beans after all. He shrugged. “I’ve done the required.” In fact, he had his GED, but he didn’t advertise that. “It’s different out here.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“How old are you?”

She grinned. “Personal question, eh? Okay. I’m nineteen.”

“I’m sixteen. Sweet, never been kissed.”

She cocked her head sideways. “Yeah, right.”

“Kimball,” one of the rangers called from across the firepit, “a quarter of the hare for some beans.”

“Maybe. Any buwa, Di-you-wi?” Kimball asked.

“Of course there’s buwa.”

“Buwa and a haunch.”

The two rangers discussed this in Tewa, then Di-you-wi said, “Buwa and a haunch. Don’t stint the beans.”

They warmed the buwa, rolled up blue-corn flatbread, on a rock beside the fire. Kimball added a salad of wide-leaf flame-flower and purslane that he’d harvested along the trail. The rangers spoke thanks in Tewa and Kimball didn’t touch his food until they were finished.

The woman watched out of the corner of her eyes, fascinated.

The tourists ate their radiation-sterilized ration packs that didn’t spoil and didn’t have to be cooked and weren’t likely to give them the runs. But the smell of the hare and beans wafted through the clearing and the smell of the packaged food didn’t spread at all.

“That sure smells good,” the girl said.

Kimball tore off a bit of buwa and wrapped it around a spoonful of beans and a bit of the hare. He stretched out his arm. “See what you think.”

She licked her lips and hesitated.

“Christ, Jennifer, that rabbit had ticks all over it,” said the sunburned man. “Who knows what parasites they – uh, it had.”

The rangers exchanged glances and laughed quietly.

Jennifer frowned and stood up, stepping over sunburn boy, and crouched down on her heels by the fire, next to Kimball. With a defiant look at her two companions, she took the offered morsel and popped it into her mouth. The look of defiance melted into surprised pleasure. “Oh, wow. So buwe is corn bread?”

“Buwa. Tewa wafer bread – made with blue corn. The Hopi make it too, but they call it piki.”

“The beans are wonderful. Thought they’d be harder.”

“I started them soaking this morning, before I started out from Red Cliff.”

“Ah,” she lowered her voice. “What did they call you earlier?”

“Kimball.”

She blinked. “Is that your name?”

“First name. I’m Kimball. Kimball . . . Creighton.”

Di-you-wi laughed. Kimball glared at him.

“I’m Jennifer Frauenfelder.” She settled beside him.

“Freuenfelder.” Kimball said it slowly, like he was rolling it around in his mouth. “German?”

“Yes. It means field-of-women.”

Di-you-wi blinked at this and said something in Tewa to his partner who responded, “Huh. Reminds me of someone I knew who was called Left-for-dead.”

Kimball rubbed his forehead and looked at his feet but Jennifer said, “Left-for-dead? That’s an odd name. Did they have it from birth or did something happen?”

“Oh,” said Di-you-wi, “something happened all right.” He sat up straight and spoke in a deeper voice, more formal.

“Owei humbeyô.”

(His partner whispered, almost as if to himself, “Once upon a time and long ago.”)

“Left-for-dead came to a village in the Jornada del Muerte on the edge of the territory of the City of God, where the People of the Book reside.” Di-you-wi glanced at Jennifer and added, “It was a ‘nursery of diverse beliefs.’

“Left-for-dead was selling books, Bibles mostly, but also almanacs and practical guides to gardening and the keeping of goats and sheep and cattle.

“But he had other books as well, books not approved by the Elders – the plays of Shakespeare, books of stories, health education, Darwin.

“And he stole the virtue of Sharon – ”

The two male tourists sat up at that and the sunburned one smacked his lips. “The dawg!”

Di-you-wi frowned at the interuption, cleared his throat, and went on. “And Left-for-dead stole the virtue of Sharon, the daughter of a Reader of the Book, by trading her a reading primer and a book on women’s health.”

“What did she trade?” asked the leering one.

“There was an apple pie,” said Di-you-wi. “Also a kiss.”

Jennifer said, “And that’s how she lost her virtue?”

“It was more the primer. The women of the People of the Book are not allowed to read,” added his partner.

“Ironic, that,” said Kimball.

“Or kiss,” Di-you-wi said with a quelling glance. He raised his voice. “They burned his books and beat him and imprisoned him in the stocks and called on the people of the village to pelt him but Sharon, the daughter of the Reader, burned the leather hinges from the stocks in the dusk and they ran, northwest, into the malpaís where the lava is heated by the sun until you can cook buwa on the stones and when the rain falls in the afternoon it sizzles like water falling on coals.

“The Elders chased them on horse back but the malpaís is even harder on horses than men and they had to send the horses back and then they chased them on foot but the rocks leave no prints.

“But the water in the malpaís is scarce to none and Left-for-dead and the girl were in a bad way even though they hid by day and traveled by night. Once, in desperation, Left-for-dead snuck back and stole a water gourd from the men who chased them, while they lay sleeping, but in doing so he put them back on the trail.

“Two days later, Sharon mis-stepped and went down in a crack in the rock and broke both bones in her lower leg. Left-for-dead splinted the leg, made a smoke fire, and left her there. The People of the Book found her and took her back, dragged on a travois, screaming with every bump and jar.

“They discussed chasing Left-for-dead and then they prayed and the Reader said God would punish the transgressor, and they went back to their village and spread the story far and wide, to discourage the weak and the tempted.

“Left-for-dead walked another day, to the north hoping to reach the water at Marble Tanks, but he had been beaten badly in the stocks and his strength failed him. When he could go no further he rolled into a crevice in the lava where there was a bit of shade and got ready to die. His tongue began to swell and he passed in and out of darkness and death had his hand on him.”

Here Di-you-wi paused dramatically, taking a moment to chase the last of his beans around the bowl with a bit of buwa.

Jennifer leaned forward. “And?”

“And then it rained. A short, heavy summer thunderstorm. The water dripped down onto Left-for-dead’s face and he drank, and awoke drinking and coughing. And then drank some more. He crawled out onto the face of the malpaís and drank from the puddles in the rock and was able to
fi
ll the water gourd he’d stolen from the Reader’s men, but he didn’t have to drink from it until the next day when the last of the rain evaporated from the pockets in the lava.

“He made it to Marble Tanks, and then east to some seeps on the edge of the lava flows, and hence to the Territorial Capitol.”