The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (106 page)

At the edge of the pond, the terrified physicist and the equally traumatized colonel were arguing. The intricacies of their respective viewpoints were lost, but they were obviously exhausted, shouting wildly, cold fingers caught in mid-thrust and the chests pumped up, neither combatant noticing the boy who slipped between them before leaping into the waterless pond, tucking those big arms against his chest, pointing his toes as he fell into the deep, deep hole.

Damaged aspects returned to the nub on occasion, begging for repairs or death. Death was the standard solution, but sometimes the attached soldier could be healed and sent out again. There weren’t enough soldiers, and the first assault hadn’t begun. But the defender had to be relentlessly careful. Infiltrators moved among the wounded. Sabotage was licking at the edges and the soft places, at the less-than-pivotal functions, and worse were the lies and wild thoughts that would begin in one place and flow everywhere, doing their damage by cultivating confidence, by convincing some routine that it was strong – one little portion of the defender believing itself a bold rock-solid savior of the redoubt, shrugging aside ten microseconds of lucid doubt as it did what was less than ideal.

Among the mangled and failed was an aspect carried inside a sack of water. Tiny in endless ways, the aspect managed to escape notice until it had arrived – a dull fleck of material that would never accomplish any mission or accidentally hinder even the smallest task. Ignoring such debris was best, but some little reflex took charge eventually. The defender told that aspect to be still and wait, and it was very still and very patient while tools of considerable precision were brought to bear on what had never worked properly. The aspect was removed from its surroundings. The aspect was destroyed. And different tools reached for what seemed like common water, ready to harvest a drop or two of new fuel.

But then flourishes and little organs appeared on the wetness, or maybe they were always there, and one of the organs spoke.

*     *     *

“I’m not here to fight,” Bloch said to the darkness.

It was his original voice, mostly. There was gravel at the edges, and it felt a little quick, but he liked how the words sounded in his head. And it was his head again, and his big old comfortable, clunky body. Time was again running at its proper speed, and the air was like a sauna, no oxygen to be found. “I’m not here to fight,” he said, and then his head began to spin. One moment he was standing in some imprecise volume never intended to be a room, and then he was on his knees, gasping.

The uneven floor flattened. New air rushed in, and light came from everywhere while the floor rose around him, creating a bright bubble that isolated him from everything else.

The boy breathed until he could remember what felt normal, and he got up on his knees, wiping his mouth with the gray sleeve of his sweatshirt.

“Better,” he said.

Then, “Thanks.”

Nothing changed.

“I’m not here to fight,” Bloch repeated. “I’m just delivering a message, and the other side went through a lot of trouble to put me here, which means maybe you should be careful and kill me now.”

Then he paused, waiting.

Anticipating this moment, Bloch imagined a creature similar to what he found inside the spaceship. It would be larger and more menacing, but the monster of his daydreams always sported green eyes that glared down at the crafty little human. Except there were no eyes and nothing like a face, and the only presence inside the bubble room was Bloch.

He laughed and said, “I thought I might get scared. But nope, I’m not.”

Then he sat, stretching his legs out before him.

“Maybe this sounds smug,” he said. “But for the last half-day or so, I’ve been telling myself that I was always part of some big plan. Your aspect gets loose. The leopard picks it up with his front paw. Some careful scheme puts the cat where he can find me, and he cuts me, and I get infected, and after running wild and getting strong, I find my brother. Then Matt gives me a heads-up and points me on my way.

“Except that’s not how it works, is it?

“If there was a fancy plan, it could be discovered. It could be fooled with or a million things could go wrong naturally, or maybe the gains wouldn’t match the hope. And that’s why real intelligence doesn’t bother with plans. You don’t, I bet. You’ve got a set of goals and principles and no end of complications, and everything changes from minute to second, and what the smart mind does is bury itself inside the possibilities and hope for the best.”

Bloch paused, listening to nothing. Maybe the world outside was still shaking, but he felt nothing. Probably nobody was listening, but he had nothing else to do with his day. Pulling his legs in, he crossed them, Indian-style.

“I’m here because I’m here,” he said. “Your enemy didn’t go looking for a mentally defective human who couldn’t feel fear. It’s just chance that you’re not facing down that blonde girl or the leopard or maybe a little penguin. Any creature would have worked, and I shouldn’t take this personally.

“But I bring something odd and maybe lucky to this table. I don’t get scared, and that’s an advantage. When everybody else charges around, hands high and voices screaming, I’m this clear-eyed animal watching everything with interest. When you bounced along Pender, I saw people wrestling with every kind of fear. You were dumped into the water, and I studied Mr. Rightly’s face. Then there’s my mother who gets scared on her happiest day, and the government people and the professors trying to deal with you and each other, and everybody and everything else too. I’ve been paying attention. I doubt if anybody else has. The world’s never been this lost or this terrified, and during these last couple days, I’ve learned a great deal about the pissing of pants.”

Bloch paused for a moment. Then he said. “I would make a lousy soldier. Matt told me that more than once. ‘If you don’t get scared, you get your head shot off,’ he said. Which means, Mr. Monster, that you’re probably sick with worry now, aren’t you? A good soldier would have to have some feat. You’re little more than nothing to your enemy. You’re just one grunt-soldier, in his hole and facing down an army. Except that army isn’t the real monster either. From what I’ve been told, the invader is pretty much sure to lose. No, the scary boy in this story is what turns the sun against its planet, scorching all this down to where everything is clean again. Clean but nearly dead. The monster is those laws and customs trying to keep the galaxy from getting consumed by too much life trying to do everything at once. That’s the real beast here. You know it and your enemy would admit as much, I bet, and that’s not the only similarity you two have.

“Yeah, I think you must be shit-in-your-pants scared. Aren’t you?”

Bloch stood again. The message had to be delivered, and he would do that on his feet. That felt best. He straightened and shook his arms, a heart indistinguishable from his original heart beating a little faster now. Then with the gravelly voice, he said, “Your enemy wants you to fight. It expects nothing but your best effort, using every trick and power to try to delay him. But your walls are going to collapse. He will absorb you and push to the Pacific and those next battles, and nothing will be won fast enough, and then the sun is going to wash this world with so much wild raw energy.

“Your enemy doesn’t believe in plans,” Bloch said. “But possibilities are everywhere, and I’m bringing you one of the best. Not that it’s perfect, and maybe you won’t approve. But the pain and terror are going to look a little more worthwhile in the end, if you accept what I am offering you.

“I have a set of aspects inside me. They’re hiding other aspects, and I think they might be inside my stomach.

“You’ll have to cut me open to find them, and sorry, I can’t help you decipher them. But you’re supposed to hold them until you’re beaten, and then you can choose to accept your enemy’s offer. Or refuse it. The decision is going to be yours. But talking for my sake and the survival of most everybody I know and love, I sure hope you can find the courage to push the fear aside.

“Shove the terror where it doesn’t get in the way.

“And make your decision with those eyes open. Would you do that much for me, please?”

Bloch stopped talking.

He wasn’t standing in the bubble anymore. He was floating in a different place, and there was no telling how much time had passed, but the span felt large. Bloch floated at one end of an imprecise volume that was a little real but mostly just a projection – one enormous realm populated by tens of millions of earthly organisms.

Closest were the faces he knew. His mother and Mr. Rightly were there, and the scientists and that blonde girl whose name he still didn’t know. And the camel had been saved, and the rest of the surviving zoo animals, and two hundred thousand humans who in the end were pulled from their basements and off their front porches. The penguins hadn’t made it to town in time, and the leopard was still dead, and Matt eventually died in the Pacific – an honored fighter doing what he loved.

Billions of people were lost. They had been gone for so long that the universe scarcely remembered them, and nobody ever marked their tragic passing. But inside this contrived, highly compressed volume, his species persisted. The adventure continued. Another passenger asked to hear Simon Bloch’s story, and he told it from the beginning until now, stopping when he had nothing to add, enjoying the stares and the respectful silence.

Then he turned, throwing his gaze in a better direction.

Their starship was born while a great world died, and the chaos and rage of a solar flare had thrown it out into deepest space. Onboard were the survivors of many worlds, many tragedies, collected as a redoubt against the inevitable. The galaxy had finally fallen into that final war, but Bloch preferred to look ahead.

In the gloom and cold between galaxies, a little thread of gas and weak suns beckoned – an island where clever survivors could make a second stab at perfection.

It made a man think hard about his future, knowing that he was bound for such a place.

A different man might be scared.

But not Bloch, no.

THE VICAR OF MARS

One of the most acclaimed British writers of her generation, Gwyneth Jones was a co-winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for work exploring gender issues in science fiction, with her 1991 novel
White Queen
, and has also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, with her novel
Bold as Love
, as well as receiving two World Fantasy Awards – for her story “The Grass Princess” and her collection
Seven Tales and a Fable
. Her other books include the novels
North Wind, Flowerdust, Escape Plans, Divine Endurance, Phoenix Café, Castles Made of Sand, Stone Free, Midnight Lamp, Kairos, Life, Water in the Air, The Influence of Ironwood, The Exhange, Dear Hill, The Hidden Ones
, and
Rainbow Bridge
, as well as more than sixteen young adult novels published under the name Ann Halam. Her too-infrequent short fiction has appeared in
Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Off Limits
, and in other magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in
Identifying the Object: A Collection of Short Stories
, as well as
Seven Tales and a Fable
. She is also the author of the critical study
Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality
. Her most recent books are a new SF novel,
Spirit: or The Princess of Bois Dormant
and two collections,
The Buonarotti Quartet
and
The Universe of Things
. She has a website at
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gwynethann/
. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat.

In the chiller that follows, she takes us to a realistically described colonized Mars for what may – or may not – be a ghost story.

T
HE REVEREND BOAAZ
Hanaahaahn, High Priest of the Mighty Void, and a young Aleutian adventurer going by the name of “Conrad”, were the only resident guests at the Old Station, Butterscotch. They’d met on the way from Opportunity, and had taken to spending their evenings together, enjoying a snifter or two of Boaaz’s excellent Twin Planets blend in a cosy private lounge. They were an odd couple: the massive Shet, his grey hide forming ponderous, dignified folds across his skull and over his brow, and the stripling immortal, slick strands of head-hair to his shoulders, black eyes dancing with mischief on either side of the dark space of his nasal. But the Aleutian, though he had never lived to be old – he wasn’t the type – had amassed a fund of fascinating knowledge in his many lives, and Boaaz was an elderly priest with varied interests and a youthful outlook.