The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (41 page)

Are the police here? The army?

Something or someone is scratching at the door. Abdul Karim is transfixed with terror. He stands there, straining to hear over the pitter patter of the rain. On the other side, somebody moans.

Abdul Karim opens the door. The lane is empty, roaring with rain. At his feet there is the body of a young woman.

She opens her eyes. She’s dressed in a salwaar kameez that has been half-torn off her body – her long hair is wet with rain and blood, plastered over her neck and shoulders. There is blood on her salwaar, blood oozing from a hundred little cuts and welts on her skin.

Her gaze focuses.

“Master Sahib.”

He is taken aback. Is she someone he knows? Perhaps an old student, grown up?

Quickly he half-carries, half-pulls her into the house and secures the door. With some difficulty he lifts her carefully on to the divan in the drawing room, which is already staining with her blood. She coughs.

“My child, who did this to you? Let me find a doctor . . .”

“No,” she says. “It’s too late.” Her breath rasps and she coughs again. Tears well up in the dark eyes.

“Master Sahib, please, let me die! My husband . . . my son . . . They must not see me take my last breath. Not like this. They will suffer. They will want revenge . . . Please . . . cut my wrists . . .”

She’s raising her wrists to his horrified face, but all he can do is to take them in his shaking hands.

“My daughter,” he says, and doesn’t know what to say. Where will he find a doctor in the mayhem? Can he bind her cuts? Even as he thinks these thoughts he knows that life is ebbing from her. Blood is pooling on his divan, dripping down to the floor. She does not need him to cut her wrists.

“Tell me, who are the ruffians who did this?”

She whispers:

“I don’t know who they were. I had just stepped out of the house for a moment. My family . . . don’t tell them, Master Sahib! When I’m gone just tell them . . . tell them I died in a safe place . . .”

“Daughter, what is your husband’s name?”

Her eyes are enormous. She is gazing at him without comprehension, as though she is already in another world.

He can’t tell if she is Muslim or Hindu. If she wore a vermilion dot on her forehead, it has long since been washed off by the rain.

His mother is standing at the door of the drawing room. She wails suddenly and loudly, flings herself by the side of the dying woman.

“Ayesha! Ayesha, my life!”

Tears fall down Abdul Karim’s face. He tries to disengage his mother. Tries to tell her: This is not Ayesha, just another woman whose body has become a battleground over which men make war. At last he has to lift his mother in his arms, her body so frail that he fears it might break – he takes her to her bed, where she crumples, sobbing and calling Ayesha’s name.

Back in the drawing room, the young woman’s eyes flicker to him. Her voice is barely above a whisper.

“Master Sahib, cut my wrists . . . I beseech you, in the Almighty’s name! Take me somewhere safe . . . Let me die . . .”

Then the veil falls over her eyes again and her body goes limp.

Time stands still for Abdul Karim.

Then he senses something familiar, and turns slowly. The farishta is waiting.

Abdul Karim picks up the woman in his arms, awkwardly arranging the bloody divan cover over her half-naked body. In the air, a door opens.

Staggering a little, his knees protesting, he steps through the door.

After three universes he finds the place.

It is peaceful. There is a rock rising from a great turquoise sea of sand. The blue sand laps against the rock, making lulling, sibilant sounds. In the high, clear air, winged creatures call to each other between endless rays of light. He squints in the sudden brightness.

He closes her eyes, buries her deep at the base of the rock, under the blue, flowing sand.

He stands there, breathing hard from the exertion, his hands bruised, thinking he should say something. But what? He does not even know if she’s Muslim or Hindu. When she spoke to him earlier, what word had she used for God? Was it Allah or Ishwar, or something neutral?

He can’t remember.

At last he says the Al-Fatihah, and, stumbling a little, recites whatever little he knows of the Hindu scriptures. He ends with the phrase Isha Vasyamidam Sarvam.

Tears run off his cheeks into the blue sand, and disappear without leaving a trace.

The farishta waits.

“Why didn’t you do something!” Abdul Karim rails at the shadow. He falls to his knees in the blue sand, weeping. “Why, if you are truly a farishta, didn’t you save my sister?”

He sees now that he has been a fool – this shadow creature is no angel, and he, Abdul Karim, no Prophet.

He weeps for Ayesha, for this nameless young woman, for the body he saw in the ditch, for his lost friend Gangadhar.

The shadow leans toward him. Abdul Karim gets up, looks around once, and steps through the door.

He steps out into his drawing room. The first thing he discovers is that his mother is dead. She looks quite peaceful, lying in her bed, her white hair flowing over the pillow.

She might be asleep, her face is so calm.

He stands there for a long time, unable to weep. He picks up the phone – there is still no dial tone. After that he goes about methodically cleaning up the drawing room, washing the floor, taking the bedding off the divan. Later, after the rain has stopped, he will burn it in the courtyard. Who will notice another fire in the burning city?

When everything is cleaned up, he lies down next to his mother’s body like a small boy and goes to sleep.

When you left me, my brother, you took away the book
In which is writ the story of my life . . .

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pakistani poet (1911–84)

The sun is out. An uneasy peace lies over the city. His mother’s funeral is over. Relatives have come and gone – his younger son came, but did not stay. The older son sent a sympathy card from America.

Gangadhar’s house is still empty, a blackened ruin. Whenever he has ventured out, Abdul Karim has asked about his friend’s whereabouts. The last he heard was that Gangadhar was alone in the house when the mob came, and his Muslim neighbors sheltered him until he could join his wife and children at her parents’ house. But it has been so long that he does not believe it anymore. He has also heard that Gangadhar was dragged out, hacked to pieces and his body set on fire. The city has calmed down – the army had to be called in – but it is still rife with rumors. Hundreds of people are missing. Civil rights groups comb the town, interviewing people, revealing, in clipped, angry press statements, the negligence of the state government, the collusion of the police in some of the violence. Some of them came to his house, too, very clean, very young people, burning with an idealism that, however misplaced, is comforting to see. He has said nothing about the young woman who died in his arms, but he prays for that bereft family every day.

For days he has ignored the shadow at his shoulder. But now he knows that the sense of betrayal will fade. Whose fault is it, after all, that he ascribed to the creatures he once called farishte the attributes of angels? Could angels, even, save human beings from themselves?

The creatures watch us with a child’s curiosity, he thinks, but they do not understand. Just as their own worlds are incomprehensible to me, so are our ways to them. They are not Allah’s minions.

The space where the universes branch off – the heart of the metacosmos – now appears remote to him, like a dream. He is ashamed of his earlier arrogance. How can he possibly fathom Allah’s creation in one glance? No finite mind can, in one meager lifetime, truly comprehend the vastness, the grandeur of Allah’s scheme. All we can do is to discover a bit of the truth here, a bit there, and thus to sing His praises.

But there is so much pain in Abdul Karim’s soul that he cannot imagine writing down one syllable of the new language of the infinite. His dreams are haunted by the horrors he has seen, the images of his mother and the young woman who died in his arms. He cannot even say his prayers. It is as though Allah has abandoned him, after all.

The daily task of living – waking up, performing his ablutions, setting the little pot on the gas stove to boil water for one cup of tea, to drink that tea alone – unbearable thought! To go on, after so many have died – to go on without his mother, his children, without Gangadhar . . . Everything appears strangely remote: his aging face in the mirror, the old house, even the litchi tree in his courtyard. The familiar lanes of his childhood hold memories that no longer seem to belong to him. Outside, the neighbors are in mourning; old Ameen Khan Sahib weeps for his grandson; Ramdas is gone, Imran is gone. The wind still carries the soot of the burnings. He finds little piles of ashes everywhere, in the cracks in the cement of his courtyard, between the roots of the trees in the lane. He breathes the dead. How can he regain his heart, living in a world so wracked with pain? In this world there is no place for the likes of him. No place for henna-scented hands rocking a child to sleep, for old-woman hands tending a garden. And no place at all for the austere beauty of mathematics.

He’s thinking this when a shadow falls across the ground in front of him. He has been sitting in his courtyard, idly writing mathematical expressions with his stick on the dusty ground. He does not know whether the knife bearer is his son, or an enraged Hindu, but he finds himself ready for his death. The creatures who have watched him for so long will witness it, and wonder. Their uncomprehending presence comforts him.

He turns and rises. It is Gangadhar, his friend, who holds out his empty arms in an embrace.

Abdul Karim lets his tears run over Gangadhar’s shirt. As waves of relief wash over him he knows that he has held Death at bay this time, but it will come. It will come, he has seen it. Archimedes and Ramanujan, Khayyam and Cantor died with epiphanies on their lips before an indifferent world. But this moment is eternal.

“Allah be praised!” says Abdul Karim.

THINGS UNDONE

John Barnes

John Barnes is one of the most prolific and popular of all the writers who entered SF in the 1980s. His many books include the novels
A Million Open Doors, The Mother of Storms, Orbital Resonance, Kaleidoscope Century, Candle, Earth Made of Glass, The Merchant of Souls, Sin of Origin, One for the Morning Glory, The Sky So Big and Black, The Duke of Uranium, A Princess of the Aerie, In The Hall of the Martian King, Gaudeamus, Finity, Patton’s Spaceship, Washington’s Dirigible, Caesar’s Bicycle, The Man Who Pulled Down the Sky
, and others, as well as two novels written with astronaut Buzz Aldrin,
The Return
and
Encounter with Tiber.
Long a mainstay
of Analog
, and now a regular at Jim Baen’s
Universe
, his short work has been collected in
. . . And Orion and Apostrophes and Apocalypses.
His most recent book is the novel
The Armies of Memory.
Barnes lives in Colorado and works in the field of semiotics.

The sly story that follows demonstrates a variation on that old saying about the weather – if you don’t like reality, just wait a minute.

W
ITH TWO CONTRACTS
last spring, both successful, Year of Grace 2014 had already been lucrative by early December; better still, with just over three months left in the year, we had yet another contract. “We are looking for someone who will probably sound as if he has a Dutch accent,” Horejsi said. As always she was speaking from an index card, pulled from the envelope that had only just dropped out of the slot on the FBI-only blue phone about ten minutes ago.

“Date of arrival, March 16, YoG 2013, so right before the new year. He can’t possibly have survived in Denver for nine months without having had extensive contact with other people, so there’s no hope of a true isolation.” She was getting that off the card where they set the rate, skipping all the numbers; they never meant much to her.

I said, “Slow down slightly. What are the top and bottom rates they’re offering?”

“Seventy per cent of the standard for a fully discreet termination, one hundred and forty-three per cent if it turns out we can do a true isolation, but we won’t be able to – ”

“One hundred and forty-three per cent is the exact inverse of seventy per cent,” I commented. “Rounded to the nearest per cent.”

Horejsi looked at me, multiple apertures in her Riemann eyes opening and polyfocusing so that she could catch every nuance of the pulse in my neck and the infrared flush of my skin. “There will be a reason why that thing about exact inverses is useful, and that reason is eluding me.”

Numbers elude Horejsi like faces and names elude me. But time travelers never elude us for very long, I thought. I enjoyed thinking it.

I said, “The penalty for having to resort to killing him is exactly the same as the reward for getting him all the way into the WPP. Normally the reward is much lower than the penalty – when they pay seventy for a complete screw-up where we have to shoot him and grind him, they only pay maybe one hundred and ten for true isolation. So for some reason they are incenting us very, very hard to achieve true isolation, even though it’s obvious that true isolation is impossible. That is interesting.”

“You’re right,” she said.

“Furthermore,” I said, (Horejsi is a good partner, the best actually, the only one I’ll ever want, but she always stops talking about numbers just before it gets really good), “this means that they are incenting us to improve, if only by the slightest margin, across the whole spectrum from barely acceptable failure to triumphant success.”

Horejsi nodded. “I think I get it, Rastigevat. The pay scale is telling you that the case is much more important than the usual ballast-tracking job; they want all the results we can squeeze out no matter what it takes, and there’s no such thing as ‘good enough, we can coast.’ Has there ever been a case with a pay scale like this before?”

“Thirty-nine cases since I started working with you, after six cases with Gomez, and in every case the bonus was less than eighty per cent of the inverse of the penalty. So no. Never. Not only is this the most urgent case ever, it’s the most urgent by a wide margin.”

Horejsi nodded. “We’re not supposed to notice that.”

“If we didn’t, we wouldn’t be smart enough to catch time jumpers.”

“Right.” She gave me her weird grimace that meant smile. (She didn’t get Riemann eyes till she was in her twenties – she was born blind and Com’n – so she hadn’t had the right feedback to develop proper facial expressions when she was young.)

I grinned back. It was nice to work with someone who got jokes.

I estimated that I knew at least 2,000 per cent more than I was supposed to know about Horejsi. For example, her first name was Ruth, but since I could never call her that, I called her Horejsi, same as she called me Rastigevat, even though she knew my first name was Simon. I estimated that we covertly shared between 820 and 860 simple declarative statements about each other that we were not supposed to know.

We also were the only two people in the world who knew each other at all. I looked a little more normal, but I didn’t get to know people much. Except for Horejsi they were boring. And if anyone found out that Horejsi didn’t bore me, she’d be gone, literally before I ever knew her. When a Com’n becomes important to a Liejt, there’s a waiver on the temporal rules.

Her grimace/grin got more intense and she focused her vision apertures directly at my face. The Lord of Grace alone knows why – knowing Horejsi better than anyone else in the world is like knowing just one fact about a star no astronomer has seen. It was good that I knew how to be fascinated without showing it.

At last she said, “All right, shall I resume reading cards?”

“Please.” I took a sip of coffee, careful to set the cup down without making a bump or disturbance that might draw either of our attention from what she was doing, because if we missed anything, it was gone for good – regulations required that as she finished each card she dropped it into the combustor; she had to pull them from their package one at a time, then put them down the combuster.

Basics: Ballast tracking job. Date of ballast’s origin, 28 May 1388. Location, Southwark, London, England. She dropped the card into the slot. The combustor made a soft brak! as the swirling white-hot oxygen turned the card to gas and a wisp of glassy ash.

Mass, twenty gallonweights, almost exactly. Cylinder of enclosure, 70 x 11 decifeet, so he was about average height and girth. Into the slot, brak!, more gas and ash.

Our mystery man was the ballast load for the backward journey of Alvarez Peron, which was the alias for a man named
CONFIDENTIAL
who had worked for the Federal government as a
AVAILABLE ON
A
NEED TO KNOW BASIS
while leading a double life. It noted that in his real life he was Liejt and had family, and therefore we should avoid any inquiries in that direction unless specifically authorized.

Peron had departed from an apartment near 30th and Downing, apartment destroyed in fire of suspicious origin. That was unsurprising. It takes time to build an illegal time machine and prepare to use it, so he’d taken a place in the bad side of town under another name, and then probably firebombed it just after the ballast came through. That was a pretty common trick, not least because it forced the ballast to run instead of doing the natural thing and holing up in the place where the time machine had been. Horejsi and me had caught eight ballasts who had barely had a second to realize they were naked or in rags, bleeding and hurt, in a strange place, before the room had gone up in flames and they’d fled for their lives into the street.

30th and Downing was a logical place – in the scummy boho end of town, where many Liejt had apartments for mistresses or for drug parties, and near a levrail station where gravitic power was easy to steal with just an Edison tube of mercury for an antenna.

We could have had the case the day after he left. The Royal Temporal Division had measured the power draw, mass, and cyl-enc but hadn’t seen fit to tell us till we asked, and of course we hadn’t asked till we detected it by our methods, which meant not until after anomalies began to accumulate and casopropagate forward around the disappearance of Peron’s ballast. That was typical; RTD cops gave no cooperation to anyone, least of all us feebs.

“So,” I said, “just rechecking your memory with mine; we have it that Peron had no prior record of experimenting with time machines, but given that you can make one out of three old radios and any pre-1985 ultrasonic clothes-cleaner – ”

She nodded. “And he could have gotten the physics from the tweenweb – plenty of articles there. Or with his confidential background, and being from a Liejt family, good odds he’s a high-level physicist or mathematician.”

She turned another card. “This is the longest kinegraph of him they can find, and it’s only about forty seconds. He liked tango, so he made it to most of the Argentú clubs here in town.”

I watched; faces are all alike, but I remember gaits.

Peron sent his partner through a quick, neat boleo and led her out in a nice cruzada; he took good care of her axis without fussing about it, and I could tell his lead was firm and clear (letting her look good), but not very imaginative (he didn’t particularly make her look good). “He’s good,” I said. “But not great.”

“You . . . dance?” She sounded equally astonished on each word. Add one more declarative statement to things she knew.

“Yeah. I met Peron; we danced in some of the same places. He was around for a while – till a few months ago, in fact.” I looked at the kinegraph more closely. “You sure can tell he’s been gone for nine months, can’t you? His face is blurring badly. I don’t really remember it well, either, but I don’t think that’s an effect of the time travel; I think I just never paid much attention to him.”

“You’d know him if you saw him again?”

“Yeah, no question. If they drop me back for an exchange, I can do it. Mention it in your daily to the FBI, but they aren’t going to want to try. My fuzzy memory is bound to be better than that kinegraph, so combust it.”

Brak. Horejsi pulled out the next card. “Peron had a lot of friends.”

“How many?”

“Forty-one identified.”

“That’s a lot for you or me, not so much for a regular social dancer.”

“Sounded like a lot.”

“Always give me the number.”

“Sorry, Rastigevat. You’re right.” She was checking me, opening apertures to see if I was upset with her, so I smiled and nodded to let her know it was okay. That was Horejsi, always worrying whether I liked her.

Better to get her off that worry. I asked, “So, forty-one friends, in what kind of relationships?”

“Very casual, all of them. Hanging out, bars and movies together, that kind of thing. Nine from dancing, thirty-two from Specthink, which is a philosophy e-kiosk on tweenweb. Now his old cronies on Specthink are arguing about who he was, where he went, and so on.”

“May I look at the card?”

She handed it over. I could listen to Horejsi try to explain a table of numbers all month and not learn anything; she just didn’t see numbers. If she let me look and then explain to her, we both knew a lot more.

Frequency of contact, frequency of mention, and trust in mention all showed the usual pattern after someone jumps back: his friends were talking about him less and less, being troubled by not quite remembering Old Whatsisname. In the last three months, four of them had decided he was a hoax invented by the rest of the group, and five more were sympathetic to that view. He had been the most frequently quoted member of his personal web; 85 per cent of quotes originating with him had already been reattributed. “Popular guy,” I said. “But one of the things I like about the dance communities, you don’t have to talk more than you want to, and most people prefer it if you don’t get too involved with each other. And it’s nice precise exercise. I love all that. So since I didn’t dance with him and wasn’t much of a talker, I just didn’t interact with him much. The only thing I remember is that there were always people around him. I think I’d recognize him from his gait, though. If he came back.”

“You don’t think we’ll retrieve him.”

“No way. He has almost already gotten away with it. It’s a miracle the random searches found him when they did; whatever Peron has done, it’s already melding with reality. There’s going to be uproar, I’m afraid.”

Her apertures opaqued and she rubbed the back of her head. “Shit.”

Horejsi hates uproar. Me, I barely notice it.

Six hundred years ago, in the One Great Lecture of 1403, Francis Tyrwhitt articulated the theory of indexical derivability, and after his death, his eleven students carried the work on. In 1421, a six-page calculation overthrew all of Aristotelian mechanics and Ptomelaic astronomy, and told them how to build the telescopes and chronometers with which to confirm it. In 1429, Marlow discovered the periodic table of the elements, valence, and carbon chains in his calculations in a single thick codex; Tyrwhitt’s last living student, Christopher Berkeley Maxwell, laid out the basic equations of electromagnetism in the notes found in his rooms after his death.