The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (32 page)

Later.

We’ve completed our first orbit and failed to find any trace of Sarkka’s ship. There’s only one place he could have gone, and there’s no question about what we have to do, even though we are perilously low on fuel. Now we’re on final approach. We’ve been videoing everything, transmitting it via q-phone directly to Terminus. If we fail, others will follow.

The black mirror of the wormhole’s throat rushes towards us, and then stars bloom all around.

Thousands of stars, bright burning jewels flung in handfuls everywhere we look. Stars of all colours, and threads of luminous gas strung between them.

We’re in the heart of a globular cluster, in orbit around a planet twice the size of Earth and clad in ice from pole to pole. There are so many stars in the sky and they are all so bright and so close together that it takes a few minutes to locate the planet’s sun, an undistinguished red dwarf as dim and humble as any of the fifteen stars gifted us by the Jackaroo, outshone by many of its neighbours. Millions of kilometres beyond the ice-planet’s limb is a cluster of six wormholes, arranged in the points of a hexagon. Sarkka’s ship is moving towards them, riding the blue flame of his solid fuel motor.

All around me, a babble of cross talk erupts as the ship’s crew speculate wildly on where those wormholes might lead, about whether the ice-planet is habitable, whether there are habitable planets or moons or planoformed rocks in this system or elsewhere.

“It’s a new empire!” someone says.

My q-phone rings.

“Do you see?” Niles Sarkka says. “Dare you follow?”

“You haven’t found what you are looking for.”

“I’ve found something better.”

One of the crew tells me that we are critically low on fuel. We have barely enough to return to the wormhole from which we emerged. And if we don’t return, the resupply ship will never find us. We’ll be stranded here.

I ask Niles Sarkka to come back with us, but he laughs and cuts the connection. And then, as he closes on the wormhole throat, he sends a brief video message. It’s startling to see him after all this time. He was once a handsome and powerfully built man, but after six months alone in close quarters and minimal rations he looks like a shipwrecked outcast, long grey hair tied back, an untrimmed beard over hollow cheeks, sores around his mouth, his eyes sunken in bruised sockets. But his gaze is vital, and his smile is that of someone cresting the tape at the end of a long and arduous marathon.

“I name this star, the gateway to untold wonders, Sarkka’s Star. I came here for all mankind, and I go on, in the name of mankind. One day I will return with the full and final answer to Fermi’s paradox. Do not judge me until then.”

And then he’s gone. We swing past and fall towards the wormhole that will take us back to the G0 star, and the crew is still babbling about new worlds and stars to be explored, and I think: suppose he’s right?

Suppose he is the hero after all, and I’m the villain?

SEVENTH FALL

Alexander Irvine

The compelling story that follows takes us to a fragmented society that is slowly fading into barbarism after a great disaster brings it to its knees, and where a few isolated people try to hang on to some of the learning and culture of the Old Days – at great cost to themselves.

Alexander Irvine made his first sale in 2000, to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, and has since made several more sales to that magazine, as well as to
Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Live Without a Net, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Starlight 3, Polyphony, Electric Velocipede
, and elsewhere. His novels include
A Scattering of Jades, One King, One Soldier
, and
The Narrows.
His short fiction has been collected in
Rossetti Song, Unintended Consequences
, and
Pictures from an Expedition.
His most recent books are a new novel,
Buyout
, and a media novel,
Iron Man: Virus.
He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

O
LD VARNER SHED
tears on the rotting boards of the stage. A thousand miles I rode, he thought, this late in the season, and even here the books are ashes long since blown away with fallen leaves. He did not cry because he had strayed too far north, too late, and now winter would surely catch him before he could get south again, and he would be lucky indeed to survive the journey. He did not cry for Sue and the child she might or might not have borne him. Old Varner shed tears for the voices that had once echoed in the theater he stood in, for the pages of books that had once held the words those voices spoke. I will die without seeing it, he thought, and spoke without meaning to.

“Look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me,” he said. “You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck at the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ . . .” He trailed off and stood silently weeping. After a moment he recovered enough to finish.

“Yet you cannot make it speak.”

The empty ruins of the Mendelssohn Theater, on what had once been the campus of the University of Michigan, did not answer, and Varner did not know the rest.

“It’s every actor’s dream to play the Dane,” Varner’s father said.

“Who’s the Dane?” Varner asked. He was eleven, and still playing mostly women’s roles. Ophelia, one of the witches in Macbeth, Rosalind. His father said he had promise. “In three years, my boy, you’ll be playing men,” he said, and young Varner burned for the passage of time. The only time he was permitted onstage as a man was as Puck, but Midsummer was a tricky choice in some parts of the country. The more God-fearing the area, the more likely it was that playing elves and fairies could get you burned.

“Hamlet,” his father said. “The greatest role ever written for the stage, in the greatest play ever written. One of these days you’ll play it.” Varner studied in the whispery pages of a Riverside Shakespeare as the caravan rattled and creaked its way down Old 55 from Chicago toward St. Louis. When they stopped for the night at a rest area, pitching tents behind a sign that said
PET EXERCISE AREA
, his father stopped him. “There’s only twenty-six hours in the day, my boy,” he said. “Three hundred and thirty-seven days in the year. You can’t read them all away.” They looked up at the stars and ate beef jerky and flat bread. A garland of moonlets trailed the crescent smile of Luna. Some of them were large enough to be named – Varner’s father called most of them after the names of the mechanicals in Midsummer – while others came and went too quickly to merit a name. It had only been fifty years since the Fall.

Varner heard the whisper of falling leaves in his voice, the faint rasp of the grave. It is too much to dream in these times, he thought wearily. When I wake, I cry to dream again. He mounted his horse Touchstone and rode down State Street to William, collapsed storefronts on either side with trees grown through their fallen roofs. At William he left the weedy street and entered a grove of trees that must have once been a quadrangle. Varner’s father had taught him that word, when he was a boy and he listened to the older generations tell stories of life before the Fall, and the Long Winter that followed. It was a forbidden word, reeking as it did of the pursuit of knowledge. Missionaries of the Book had been known to kill a man for speaking it.

Buildings of brick and sandstone, stately even in their decay, stood all around Varner. One of them would be a library, and perhaps this library would be the one they had missed. He tied Touchstone to a rusted railing at the foot of a stair, and walked slowly into a marble-floored atrium. Right away he knew that he had chosen correctly; through a doorway he could see the battered husks of computers, and beyond them toppled bookshelves blackened with old fire. Failure again. Too much could happen in a hundred years. “Is there nowhere you have not reached?” Varner asked softly of men absent, or long dead. “Must the rest be silence?”

Knowing what he would find, he went through the stacks from floor to floor, wandered into unlocked rooms and broke locks where he found them. And – even though the Missionaries of the Book had been here, and left ashes and ruin behind – he sometimes found books crumbling in these locked rooms: technical manuals, management texts, business books. But no novels, no poems or plays. No Hamlet.

“You are too old, Varner,” he said to himself “Too old to play the role anyway. Why do you search?” He said this every time; it was his ritual, his sacrament of failure, repeated in libraries from the Rocky Mountains to the drowned ghosts of the great Eastern cities. And as he always did, Varner reached in his pack and found the thin bound sheaf of papers that was all he had of the play he had dedicated his life to. He read it through: Act One nearly complete, salvaged from his father’s belongings; halves and fragments of Acts Two and Three, with the third scenes of both complete (Varner spoke the King’s praying monologue aloud when traveling, to stay awake on Touchstone’s back, and answered with Hamlet’s “am I then revenged?”, crying out to the forests and fields of what had once been the United States of America); a few lines only from Acts Four and Five. It had struck him more than once how unlikely it was that his knowledge of the play decreased so steadily from beginning to end. Shouldn’t he have expected to have a few bits from each part? Words, words, words. Himself a story, Varner went on.

Having the play as he did, though, strengthened Varner’s conviction that he was doing the work of destiny. Every page, every line he found moldering in libraries and schools and the homes whose long-dead own ers had not burned all their books for fuel during the Long Winter spurred him toward completeness. Varner lived only for the day when he could bring together the text, assign parts, find a theater far from Missionaries and hear the words spoken again as they were meant to be.

St Louis looked worse than Chicago, or Cleveland. Varner had seen drawings and even some photographs of the East Coast cities, or what was left of them. St Louis looked much the same as those photographs. The Fall had unleashed every fault in the Earth’s crust, and according to Varner’s father, Memphis and St. Louis had been leveled by quakes before fire and flood had reduced them the rest of the way to ruin. From across the Mississippi, Varner saw the stumps of the Arch, one higher than the other. The river swirled around their bases, and lapped over the ruins of Laclede’s Landing. On this side of the river, they stood in the midst of a vast trainyard, with engines and cars lying where the quakes had flung them from the tracks. They came gingerly to the edge of the water and waited at the foot of a collapsed pier where a handwritten sign said
FOR FERRY WAVE WHITE FLAG.
“Fat Otis,” Varner’s father said, “your shirt is the best white flag we’ve got.” So Fat Otis tied his shirt to the end of a stick and waved it until an answering flag waved from the Missouri side. To the north and south, the pilings of fallen bridges thrust up from the river. A ferry approached them, and they negotiated passage. On the way across, Varner’s father asked where they might play. The ferryman shrugged. “Depends on which way you’re headed,” he said. “You go north, it’s wet. Don’t know who lives out there. You go south, it’s wet. You go too far west, into the County, you get bandits. In town, maybe you talk to Pujols. He’s at the stadium.”

“Pujols?” Varner’s father asked. “Really?”

The ferryman cracked a smile. “Says he was his father. ’Tween you and me, I doubt it. But don’t say that to him.”

“Who’s Pujols?” Varner asked.

“Baseball player,” his father said. “One hell of a baseball player, back before the Fall.” Varner had seen teams of players barnstorming. His father had warned him about them, especially if they came to see a play. The boys who played women’s roles excited other kinds of interest, Varner’s father said. Don’t ever let them get you alone. He couldn’t imagine that baseball had ever been played in front of as many people as it would have taken to fill the stadium in St. Louis. The seats, rows and rows of them, in two decks above which hooked the ruins of the girders that had supported a third, seemed enough to accommodate every person Varner had ever seen, all at once. Pujols was about as old as Varner’s father, his face brown and seamed where it showed through a white waterfall of a beard. He wore a shirt with an insignia of a cardinal perched on a baseball bat, and held a bat in both hands throughout their conversation. He asked what the company could perform.

“Any and all Shakespeare,” Varner’s father said, “except the ones that aren’t worth performing. Some musical revues, which are for later in the Evening. And we do a story about the Fall.”

“Shakespeare,” Pujols said. “A funny one. I will feast you after, and then we’ll see about your songs.”

Leaving Ann Arbor, Varner turned south, following US-23 until it merged into 75, which went all the way to Florida. There would be snow here soon. He would need to get back to Cincinnati and down the river soon. As he got older, he made a seasonal ritual of letting the river take him back to the life he remembered from his youth – the boats, days spent dangling fishing lines into the warm brown water near Natchez or the shattered ruins of Memphis. And he still held out hope of finding Sue, so he stopped by the shipwreck castle every other year to catch up with the Schulers and learn what could be learned. Forty years had passed with no word of Sue, but he still held out hope. More, in fact, than he had in his quest to honor his father. Since he could not do that, perhaps he would yet be able to meet his child.

On the outskirts of a town called Monroe, which his father had said was the birthplace of a general famous for dying, Varner came to a camp, forty or fifty people in lean-tos and a few huts built of scavenged timber, all arranged around a central block house. Three men rode out to meet him with guns. “State your business, stranger,” one of them said.

“My name is Varner, and I am an actor,” Varner said. “Also I can sing, and I’ll tell a story for my supper.”

The three horse men exchanged glances. “What kind of a story?” the first asked. Varner had them figured for a father and his sons. The resemblance was strong through the jaw and the set of the eyes. Hard eyes.

“Any kind. Tell me what you want.” Touchstone snorted and Varner patted his neck. “I and my equine fool here travel the land, telling stories and looking for pages out of old books.” Often it was dangerous to admit this, but Varner hadn’t survived forty years on his own by not being able to recognize a Missionary – or any other brand of fanatic. These were honest people, or if not honest, not zealots or casual killers.

The second horse man, one of the boys, asked, “What kind of books?”

“I’m interested in any kind, but I’m a literary man. It’s the old stories, the great stories, that I want the most.”

“You know the Odyssey?”

“Not in Greek,” Varner said, daring a joke. “But the story? Oh yes. From ‘Sing me, O Muse’ to the slaughter of the suitors, I know the Odyssey. Would you like to hear it tonight?”

“We heard part of the Odyssey the last time an actor came by,” the boy said. “Only he didn’t get to finish because – ”

“It’ll be up to Marquez what we hear tonight,” the first horse man interrupted. “He’ll want to meet you.” He turned and rode back toward the camp. The two boys fell in behind Varner. Neither of them spoke to him again.

They spent the remainder of the day in a parking lot behind the stadium, rehearsing
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Varner’s father considered it the funniest of Shakespeare’s plays, and Varner was glad for the chance to play without wearing a dress. Fat Otis would play Bottom. Varner’s father would play Oberon and Theseus. Since Pujols didn’t appear to be a Bible-thumper, Otis’ wife Charlie would play Titania and Hippolyta. And so on. They ran through scenes, added bits of business to cater to the stadium setting – Snug the joiner would add an aside about the poor condition of the play house, and Varner himself would tinker with Puck’s “now the hungry lion roars” monologue. “Here’s what you say,” his father instructed him. “The last couplet, instead of saying ‘I am sent with broom before, / To sweep the dust behind the door’ say sweep the Cubs behind the door.” He gave Varner a shirt with a cardinal on the front, like Pujols’. “This was the team that played here. The Cubs were rivals. They’ll eat it up.”