The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (43 page)

Right now their teapot was filling the kitchen with a smoky aroma, so Thorn fished a mug out of the sink to help herself. Maya said, “So what were the Incorruptibles doing?”

“Burning the school,” Thorn said in a seen-it-all-before tone. She glanced at the third visitor, a stranger. The woman had a look of timeshock that gave her away as a recent arrival in Glory to God via lightbeam from another planet. She was still suffering from the temporal whiplash of waking up ten or twenty years from the time she had last drawn breath.

“Annick, this is Thorn, Maya’s daughter,” Clarity said. She was the talkative, energetic one of the pair; Bick was the silent, steady one.

“Hi,” Thorn said. “Welcome to the site of Creation.”

“Why were they burning the school?” Annick said, clearly distressed by the idea. She had pale eyes and a soft, gentle face. Thorn made a snap judgement: Annick was not going to last long here.

“Because it’s a vector of degeneracy,” Thorn said. She had learned the phrase from Maya’s current boyfriend, Hunter.

“What has happened to this planet?” Annick said. “When I set out it was isolated, but not regressive.”

They all made sympathetic noises, because everyone at the table had experienced something similar. Lightbeam travel was as fast as the universe allowed, but even the speed of light had a limit. Planets inevitably changed during transit, not always for the better. “Waster’s luck,” Maya said fatalistically.

Clarity said, “The Incorruptibles are actually a pretty new movement. It started among the conservative academics and their students, but they have a large following now. They stand against the graft and nepotism of the Protectorate. People in the city are really fed up with being harrassed by policemen looking for bribes, and corrupt officials who make up new fees for everything. So they support a movement that promises to kick the grafters out and give them a little harsh justice. Only it’s bad news for us.”

“Why?” Annick said. “Wouldn’t an honest government benefit everyone?”

“You’d think so. But honest governments are always more intrusive. You can buy toleration and personal freedom from a corrupt government. The Protectorate leaves this Waster enclave alone because it brings them profit. If the Incorruptibles came into power, they’d have to bow to public opinion and exile us, or make us conform. The general populace is pretty isolationist. They think our sin industry is helping keep the Protectorate in power. They’re right, actually.”

“What a Devil’s bargain,” Annick said.

They all nodded. Waster life was full of irony.

“What’s Thorn going to do for schooling now?” Clarity asked Maya.

Maya clearly hadn’t thought about it. “They’ll figure something out,” she said vaguely.

Just then Thorn heard Hunter’s footsteps on the iron stairs, and she said to annoy him, “I could help Hunter.”

“Help me do what?” Hunter said as he descended into the kitchen. He was a lean and angle-faced man with square glasses and a small goatee. He always dressed in black and could not speak without sounding sarcastic. Thorn thought he was a poser.

“Help you find Gmintas, of course,” Thorn said. “That’s what you do.”

He went over to the Turkish coffee machine to brew some of the bitter, hyperstimulant liquid he was addicted to. “Why can’t you go to school?” he said.

“They burned it down.”

“Who did?”

“The Incorruptibles. Didn’t you hear them chanting?”

“I was in my office.”

He was always in his office. It was a mystery to Thorn how he was going to locate any Gminta criminals when he disdained going out and mingling with people. She had once asked Maya, “Has he ever actually caught a Gminta?” and Maya had answered, “I hope not.”

All in all, though, he was an improvement over Maya’s last boyfriend, who had absconded with every penny of savings they had. Hunter at least had money, though where it came from was a mystery.

“I could be your field agent,” Thorn said.

“You need an education, Thorn,” Clarity said.

“Yes,” Hunter agreed. “If you knew something, you might be a little less annoying.”

“People like you give education a bad name,” Thorn retorted.

“Stop being a brat, Tuppence,” Maya said.

“That’s not my name anymore!”

“If you act like a baby, I’ll call you by your baby name.”

“You always take his side.”

“You could find her a tutor,” Clarity said. She was not going to give up.

“Right,” Hunter said, sipping inky liquid from a tiny cup. “Why don’t you ask one of those old fellows who play chess in the park?”

“They’re probably all pedophiles!” Thorn said in disgust.

“On second thought, maybe it’s better to keep her ignorant,” Hunter said, heading up the stairs again.

“I’ll ask around and see who’s doing tutoring,” Clarity offered.

“Sure, okay,” Maya said non-committally.

Thorn got up, glowering at their lack of respect for her independence and self-determination. “I am captain of my own destiny,” she announced, then made a strategic withdrawal to her room.

The next forenote Thorn came down from her room in the face-masking veil that women of Glory to God all wore, outside the Waste. When Maya saw her, she said, “Where are you going in that getup?”

“Out,” Thorn said.

In a tone diluted with real worry, Maya said, “I don’t want you going into the city, Tup.”

Thorn was icily silent till Maya said, “Sorry – Thorn. But I still don’t want you going into the city.”

“I won’t,” Thorn said.

“Then what are you wearing that veil for? It’s a symbol of bondage.”

“Bondage to God,” Thorn said loftily.

“You don’t believe in God.”

Right then Thorn decided that she would.

When she left the house and turned toward the park, the triviality of her home and family fell away like lint. After a block, she felt transformed. Putting on the veil had started as a simple act of rebellion, but out in the street it became far more. Catching her reflection in a shop window, she felt disguised in mystery. The veil intensified the imagined face it concealed, while exoticizing the eyes it revealed. She had become something shadowy, hidden. The Wasters all around her were obsessed with their own surfaces, with manipulating what they
seemed
to be. All depth, all that was earnest, withered in the acid of their inauthenticity. But with the veil on, Thorn
had
no surface, so she was immune. What lay behind the veil was negotiated, contingent, rendered deep by suggestion.

In the tiny triangular park in front of the blackened shell of the school, life went on as if nothing had changed. The tower fans turned lazily, creating a pleasant breeze tinged a little with soot. Under their strutwork shadows, two people walked little dogs on leashes, and the old men bent over their chessboards. Thorn scanned the scene through the slit in her veil, then walked toward a bench where an old man sat reading from an electronic slate.

She sat down on the bench. The old man did not acknowledge her presence, though a watchful twitch of his eyebrow told her he knew she was there. She had often seen him in the park, dressed impeccably in threadbare suits of a style long gone. He had an oblong, drooping face and big hands that looked as if they might once have done clever things. Thorn sat considering what to say.

“Well?” the old man said without looking up from his book. “What is it you want?”

Thorn could think of nothing intelligent to say, so she said, “Are you a historian?”

He lowered the slate. “Only in the sense that we all are, us Wasters. Why do you want to know?”

“My school burned down,” Thorn said. “I need to find a tutor.”

“I don’t teach children,” the old man said, turning back to his book.

“I’m not a child!” Thorn said, offended.

He didn’t look up. “Really? I thought that’s what you were trying to hide, behind that veil.”

She took it off. At first he paid no attention. Then at last he glanced up indifferently, but saw something that made him frown. “You are the child that lives with the Gminta hunter.”

His cold tone made her feel defensive on Hunter’s behalf. “He doesn’t hunt all Gmintas,” she said, “just the wicked ones who committed the Holocide. The ones who deserve to be hunted.”

“What do you know about the Gmintan Holocide?” the old man said with withering dismissal.

Thorn smiled triumphantly. “I was there.”

He stopped pretending to read and looked at her with bristly disapproval. “How could you have been there?” he said. “It happened 141 years ago.”

“I’m 145 years old, sequential time,” Thorn said. “I was 37 when I was five, and 98 when I was seven, and 126 when I was twelve.” She enjoyed shocking people with this litany.

“Why have you moved so much?”

“My mother got pregnant without my father’s consent, and when she refused to have an abortion he sued her for copyright infringement. She’d made unauthorized use of his genes, you see. So she ducked out to avoid paying royalties, and we’ve been on the lam ever since. If he ever caught us, I could be arrested for having bootleg genes.”

“Who told you that story?” he said, obviously skeptical.

“Maya did. It sounds like something one of her boyfriends would do. She has really bad taste in men. That’s another reason we have to move so much.”

Shaking his head slightly, he said, “I should think you would get cognitive dysplasia.”

“I’m used to it,” Thorn said.

“Do you like it?”

No one had ever asked her that before, as if she was capable of deciding for herself. In fact, she had known for a while that she
didn’t
like it much. With every jump between planets she had grown more and more reluctant to leave sequential time behind. She said, “The worst thing is, there’s no way of going back. Once you leave, the place you’ve stepped out of is gone forever. When I was eight I learned about pepcies, that you can use them to communicate instantaneously, and I asked Maya if we could call up my best friend on the last planet, and Maya said, ‘She’ll be middle-aged by now.’ Everyone else had changed, and I hadn’t. For a while I had dreams that the world was dissolving behind my back whenever I looked away.”

The old man was listening thoughtfully, studying her. “How did you get away from Gmintagad?” he asked.

“We had Capellan passports,” Thorn said. “I don’t remember much about it; I was just four years old. I remember drooping cypress trees and rushing to get out. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

He was staring into the distance, focused on something invisible. Suddenly, he got up as if something had bitten him and started to walk away.

“Wait!” Thorn called. “What’s the matter?”

He stopped, his whole body tense, then turned back. “Meet me here at four hours forenote tomorrow, if you want lessons,” he said. “Bring a slate. I won’t wait for you.” He turned away again.

“Stop!” Thorn said! “What’s your name?”

With a forbidding frown, he said, “Soren Pregaldin. You may call me Magister.”

“Yes, Magister,” Thorn said, trying not to let her glee show. She could hardly wait to tell Hunter that she had followed his advice, and succeeded.

What she wouldn’t tell him, she decided as she watched Magister Pregaldin stalk away across the park, was her suspicion that this man knew something about the Holocide. Otherwise, how would he have known it was exactly 141 years ago? Another person would have said 140, or something else vague. She would not mention her suspicion to Hunter until she was sure. She would investigate carefully, like a competent field agent should. Thinking about it, a thrill ran through her. What if she were able to catch a Gminta? How impressed Hunter would be! The truth was, she wanted to impress Hunter. For all his mordant manner, he was by far the smartest boyfriend Maya had taken up with, the only one with a profession Thorn had ever been able to admire.

She fastened the veil over her face again before going home, so no one would see her grinning.

Magister Pregaldin turned out to be the most demanding teacher Thorn had ever known. Always before, she had coasted through school, easily able to stay ahead of the indigenous students around her, always waiting in boredom for them to catch up. With Magister Pregaldin there was no one else to wait for, and he pushed her mercilessly to the edge of her abilities. For the first time in her life, she wondered if she were smart enough.

He was an exacting drillmaster in mathematics. Once, when she complained at how useless it was, he pointed out beyond the iron gridwork of the dome to a round black hill that was conspicuous on the red plain of the crater bed. “Tell me how far away the Creeping Ingot is.”

The Creeping Ingot had first come across the horizon almost a hundred years before, slowly moving toward Glory to God. It was a near-pure lump of iron the size of a small mountain. In the Waste, the reigning theory was that it was molten underneath, and moving like a drop of water skitters across a hot frying pan. In the city above them, it was regarded as a sign of divine wrath: a visible, unstoppable Armageddon. Religious tourists came from all over the planet to see it, and its ever-shrinking distance was posted on the public sites. Thorn turned to her slate to look it up, but Magister Pregaldin made her put it down. “No,” he said, “I want you to figure it out.”