The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels Page 9

  She swung around. Her eyes were wide with horror.

  “Are you serious, Charles?”

  “Of course.”

  “No,” she murmured. “No. Everything you’ve said to me today is monstrous nonsense. Don’t you realize that?”

  He reached for her hand and enclosed her fingertips in his. “All I’m trying to do is find some way for you and me to—”

  “Don’t say any more,” she said. “Please.” Quickly, as though drawing back from a suddenly flaring flame, she tugged her fingers free of his and put her hand behind her. Though his face was just inches from hers he felt an immense chasm opening between them. They stared at one another for a moment; then she moved deftly to his left, darted around him, and ran from the patio.

  Stunned, he watched her go, down the long marble corridor and out of sight. It was folly to give pursuit, he thought. She was lost to him: that was clear, that was beyond any question. She was terrified of him. Why cause her even more anguish? But somehow he found himself running through the halls of the hotel, along the winding garden path, into the cool green groves of the Paneium. He thought he saw her on the portico of Hadrian’s palace, but when he got there the echoing stone halls were empty. To a temporary that was sweeping the steps he said, “Did you see a woman come this way?” A blank sullen stare was his only answer.

  Phillips cursed and turned away.

  “Gioia?” he called. “Wait! Come back!”

  Was that her, going into the Library? He rushed past the startled mumbling librarians and sped through the stacks, peering beyond the mounds of double-handled scrolls into the shadowy corridors. “Gioia? Gioia!” It was a desecration, bellowing like that in this quiet place. He scarcely cared.

  Emerging by a side door, he loped down to the harbor. The Lighthouse! Terror enfolded him. She might already be a hundred steps up that ramp, heading for the parapet from which she meant to fling herself into the sea. Scattering citizens and temporaries as if they were straws, he ran within. Up he went, never pausing for breath, though his synthetic lungs were screaming for respite, his ingeniously designed heart was desperately pounding. On the first balcony he imagined he caught a glimpse of her, but he circled it without finding her. Onward, upward. He went to the top, to the beacon chamber itself: no Gioia. Had she jumped? Had she gone down one ramp while he was ascending the other? He clung to the rim and looked out, down, searching the base of the Lighthouse, the rocks offshore, the causeway. No Gioia. I will find her somewhere, he thought. I will keep going until I find her. He went running down the ramp, calling her name. He reached ground level and sprinted back toward the center of town. Where next? The temple of Poseidon? The tomb of Cleopatra?

  He paused in the middle of Canopus Street, groggy and dazed.

  “Charles?” she said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Right here. Beside you.” She seemed to materialize from the air. Her face was unflushed, her robe bore no trace of perspiration. Had he been chasing a phantom through the city? She came to him and took his hand, and said, softly, tenderly, “Were you really serious, about having them make you age?”

  “If there’s no other way, yes.”

  “The other way is so frightening, Charles.”

  “Is it?”

  “You can’t understand how much.”

  “More frightening than growing old? Than dying?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose not. The only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want you to get old, Charles.”

  “But I won’t have to. Will I?”

  He stared at her.

  “No,” she said. “You won’t have to. Neither of us will.”

  Phillips smiled. “We should get away from here,” he said after a while. “Let’s go across to Byzantium, yes, Gioia? We’ll show up in Constantinople for the opening. Your friends will be there. We’ll tell them what you’ve decided to do. They’ll know how to arrange it. Someone will.”

  “It sounds so strange,” said Gioia. “To turn myself into – into a visitor? A visitor in my own world?”

  “That’s what you’ve always been, though.”

  “I suppose. In a way. But at least I’ve been real up to now.”

  “Whereas I’m not?”

  “Are you, Charles?”

  “Yes. Just as real as you. I was angry at first, when I found out the truth about myself. But I came to accept it. Somewhere between Mohenjo and here, I came to see that it was all right to be what I am: that I perceive things, I form ideas, I draw conclusions. I am very well designed, Gioia. I can’t tell the difference between being what I am and being completely alive, and to me that’s being real enough. I think, I feel, I experience joy and pain. I’m as real as I need to be. And you will be, too. You’ll never stop being Gioia, you know. It’s only your body that you’ll cast away, the body that played such a terrible joke on you anyway.” He brushed her cheek with his hand. “It was all said for us before, long ago:

  “Once out of nature I shall never take

  My bodily form from any natural thing,

  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

  Of hammered gold and gold enameling

  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake—”

  “Is that the same poem?” she asked.

  “The same poem, yes. The ancient poem that isn’t quite forgotten yet.”

  “Finish it, Charles.”

  “—Or set upon a golden bough to sing

  To lords and ladies of Byzantium

  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

  “How beautiful. What does it mean?”

  “That it isn’t necessary to be mortal. That we can allow ourselves to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, that we can be transformed, that we can move on beyond the flesh. Yeats didn’t mean it in quite the way I do – he wouldn’t have begun to comprehend what we’re talking about, not a word of it – and yet, and yet – the underlying truth is the same. Live, Gioia! With me!” He turned to her and saw color coming into her pallid cheeks. “It does make sense, what I’m suggesting, doesn’t it? You’ll attempt it, won’t you? Whoever makes the visitors can be induced to remake you. Right? What do you think: can they, Gioia?”

  She nodded in a barely perceptible way. “I think so,” she said faintly. “It’s very strange. But I think it ought to be possible. Why not, Charles? Why not?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Why not?”

  In the morning they hired a vessel in the harbor, a low sleek pirogue with a blood-red sail, skippered by a rascally-looking temporary whose smile was irresistible. Phillips shaded his eyes and peered northward across the sea. He thought he could almost make out the shape of the great city sprawling on its seven hills, Constantine’s New Rome beside the Golden Horn, the mighty dome of Hagia Sophia, the somber walls of the citadel, the palaces and churches, the Hippodrome, Christ in glory rising above all else in brilliant mosaic streaming with light.

  “Byzantium,” Phillips said. “Take us there the shortest and quickest way.”

  “It is my pleasure,” said the boatman with unexpected grace.

  Gioia smiled. He had not seen her looking so vibrantly alive since the night of the imperial feast in Chang-an. He reached for her hand – her slender fingers were quivering lightly – and helped her into the boat.

  SURFACING

  Walter Jon Williams

  Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy Of Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, Aristoi, Metropolitan, City on Fire, a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Trek novel, Destiny’s Way. His most recent books are the first two
novels in his acclaimed modern space opera epic, Dread Empire’s Fall, Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis and Dread Empire’s Fall: The Sundering. Coming up are two new novels, Orthodox War and Conventions of War. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World,” and took another Nebula in 2005 with his story “The Green Leopard Plague.”

  In the vivid adventure that follows, he takes us sailing on mysterious alien seas in distant alien worlds, in search of elusive and dangerous prey.

  There was an alien on the surface of the planet. A Kyklops had teleported into Overlook Station, and then flown down on the shuttle. Since, unlike humans, it could teleport without apparatus, presumably it took the shuttle just for the ride. The Kyklops wore a human body, controlled through an n-dimensional interface, and took its pleasures in the human fashion.

  The Kyklops expressed an interest in Anthony’s work, but Anthony avoided it: he stayed at sea and listened to aliens of another kind.

  Anthony wasn’t interested in meeting aliens who knew more than he did.

  The boat drifted in a cold current and listened to the cries of the sea. A tall grey swell was rolling in from the southwest, crossing with a wind-driven easterly chop. The boat tossed, caught in the confusion of wave patterns.

  It was a sloppy ocean, somehow unsatisfactory. Marking a sloppy day.

  Anthony felt a thing twist in his mind. Something that, in its own time, would lead to anger.

  The boat had been out here, both in the warm current and then in the cold, for three days. Each more unsatisfactory than the last.

  The growing swell was being driven toward land by a storm that was breaking up fifty miles out to sea: the remnants of the storm itself would arrive by midnight and make things even more unpleasant. Spray feathered across the tops of the waves. The day was growing cold.

  Spindrift pattered across Anthony’s shoulders. He ignored it, concentrated instead on the long, grating harmonic moan picked up by the microphones his boat dangled into the chill current. The moan ended on a series of clicks and trailed off. Anthony tapped his computer deck. A resolution appeared on the screen. Anthony shaded his eyes from the pale sun and looked at it.

  Anthony gazed stonily at the translation tree. “I am rising toward and thinking hungrily about the slippery-tasting coordinates” actually made the most objective sense, but the right-hand branch of the tree was the most literal and most of what Anthony suspected was context had been lost. “I and the oily current are in a state of motion toward one another” was perhaps more literal, but “We (the oily deep and I) are in a cold state of mind” was perhaps equally valid.

  The boat gave a corkscrew lurch, dropped down the face of a swell, came to an abrupt halt at the end of its drogue. Water slapped against the stern. A mounting screw, come loose from a bracket on the bridge, fell and danced brightly across the deck.

  The screw and the deck are in a state of relative motion, Anthony thought. The screw and the deck are in a motion state of mind.

  Wrong, he thought, there is no Other in the Dwellers’ speech.

  We, I and the screw and the deck, are feeling cold.

  We, I and the Dweller below, are in a state of mutual incomprehension.

  A bad day, Anthony thought.

  Inchoate anger burned deep inside him.

  Anthony saved the translation and got up from his seat. He went to the bridge and told the boat to retrieve the drogue and head for Cabo Santa Pola at flank speed. He then went below and found a bottle of bourbon that had three good swallows left.

  The trailing microphones continued to record the sonorous moans from below, the sound now mingled with the thrash of the boat’s propellers.

  The screw danced on the deck as the engines built up speed.

  Its state of mind was not recorded.

  The video news, displayed above the bar, showed the Kyklops making his tour of the planet. The Kyklops’ human body, male, was tall and blue-eyed and elegant. He made witty conversation and showed off his naked chest as if he were proud of it. His name was Telamon.

  His real body, Anthony knew, was a tenuous uncorporeal mass somewhere in n-dimensional space. The human body had been grown for it to wear, to move like a puppet. The nth dimension was interesting only to a mathematician: its inhabitants preferred wearing flesh.

  Anthony asked the bartender to turn off the vid.

  The yacht club bar was called the Leviathan, and Anthony hated the name. His creatures were too important, too much themselves, to be awarded a name that stank of human myth, of human resonance that had nothing to do with the creatures themselves. Anthony never called them Leviathans himself. They were Deep Dwellers.

  There was a picture of a presumed Leviathan above the bar. Sometimes bits of matter were washed up on shore, thin tenuous membranes, long tentacles, bits of phosphorescence, all encrusted with the local equivalent of barnacles and infested with parasites. It was assumed the stuff had broken loose from the larger Dweller, or were bits of one that had died. The artist had done his best and painted something that looked like a whale covered with tentacles and seaweed.

  The place had fake-nautical decor, nets, harpoons, flashing rods, and knicknacks made from driftwood, and the bar was regularly infected by tourists: that made it even worse. But the regular bartender and the divemaster and the steward were real sailors, and that made the yacht club bearable, gave him some company. His mail was delivered here as well.

  Tonight the bartender was a substitute named Christopher: he was married to the owner’s daughter and got his job that way. He was a fleshy, sullen man and no company.

  We, thought Anthony, the world and I, are drinking alone. Anger burned in him, anger at the quality of the day and the opacity of the Dwellers and the storm that beat brainlessly at the windows.

  “Got the bastard!” A man was pounding the bar. “Drinks on me.” He was talking loudly, and he wore gold rings on his fingers. Raindrops sparkled in his hair. He wore a flashing harness, just in case anyone missed why he was here. Hatred settled in Anthony like poison in his belly.

  “Got a thirty-foot flasher,” the man said. He pounded the bar again. “Me and Nick got it hung up outside. Four hours. A four-hour fight!”

  “Why have a fight with something you can’t eat?” Anthony said.

  The man looked at him. He looked maybe twenty, but Anthony could tell he was old, centuries old maybe. Old and vain and stupid, stupid as a boy. “It’s a game fish,” the man said.

  Anthony looked into the fisherman’s eyes and saw a reflection of his own contempt. “You wanna fight,” he said, “you wanna have a game, fight something smart. Not a dumb animal that you can outsmart, that once you catch it will only rot and stink.”

  That was the start.

  Once it began, it didn’t take long. The man’s rings cut Anthony’s face, and Anthony was smaller and lighter, but the man telegraphed every move and kept leading with his right. When it was over, Anthony left him on the floor and stepped out into the downpour, stood alone in the hammering rain and let the water wash the blood from his face. The whiskey and the rage were a flame that licked his nerves and made them sing.

  He began walking down the street. Heading for another bar.

  GRACE(2) meant grace in the sense of physical grace, dexterity, harmony of motion, as opposed to spiritual grace, which was GRACE(l). The Dweller that Anthony was listening to was engaged in a dialogue with another, possibly the same known to the computer as 41, who might be named “Upwelling Reflection,” but Deep Dweller naming systems seemed inconsistent, depending largely on a context that was as yet opaque, and “upwelling reflection” might have to do with something else entirely.

  Anthony suspected the Dweller had just said hello.

  Salt water smarted on the cuts on Anthony’s face. His swollen knuckles pained him as he tapped the keys of his computer deck. He never suffered from hangover, and his mind seemed filled with an exemplary clarity; he worked rapidly, with burning efficiency. His body
felt energized.

  He was out of the cold Kirst Current today, in a warm, calm subtropical sea on the other side of the Las Madres archipelago. The difference of forty nautical miles was astonishing.

  The sun warmed his back. Sweat prickled on his scalp. The sea sparkled under a violet sky.

  The other Dweller answered.

  Through his bare feet, Anthony could feel the subsonic overtones vibrating through the boat. Something in the cabin rattled. The microphones recorded the sounds, raised the subsonics to an audible level, played it back. The computer made its attempt.

  A9140 was a phrase that, as yet, had no translation.

  The Dweller language, Anthony had discovered, had no separation of subject and object; it was a trait in common with the Earth cetaceans whose languages Anthony had first learned. “I swim toward the island” was not a grammatical possibility: “I and the island are in a condition of swimming toward one another” was the nearest possible approximation.

  The Dwellers lived in darkness, and, like Earth’s cetaceans, in a liquid medium. Perhaps they were psychologically unable to separate themselves from their environment, from their fluid surroundings. Never approaching the surface – it was presumed they could not survive in a nonpressurized environment – they had no idea of the upper limit of their world.

  They were surrounded by a liquid three-dimensional wholeness, not an air-earth-sky environment from which they could consider themselves separate.

  A high-pitched whooping came over the speakers, and Anthony smiled as he listened. The singer was one of the humpbacks that he had imported to this planet, a male called The One with Two Notches on His Starboard Fluke.

  Two Notches was one of the brighter whales, and also the most playful. Anthony ordered his computer to translate the humpback speech.