The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Vol. 1 Part 20

"I thought it meant like when some lady is going to have a baby."

Oh no. "Why do you ask?"

"Because I thought maybe you might have a baby in there." He patted her tummy shyly.

"No." Her stomach twisted. "No baby."

Sekou dug in the pocket of the jumpsuit and brought out a tiny action figure, a boy in an environment suit. "But Daddy said-"

"You shouldn't be listening when Daddy and Mama are talking privately." But would there be any privacy once they had settled in to Borealopolis? Even the best paid city hires lived in quarters not much bigger than the pa.s.senger compartment of their rover. Speaking of which, they would probably have to sell the rover. What use do city people have for such a thing?

"Sorry." His voice was very soft.

She had some credit, and she noticed the holding area had a tea dispenser. "Would you like some mint tea? I think they can put sweetener in it."

She figured she had lied to Marcus; it would be a bad thing to lie to Sekou, young though he was.

When they had gotten their tea, which did indeed come with sweetener, she sat opposite Sekou on the little bench and then, in a rush of affection, moved over and grabbed him in a hug.

"Mama was going to have a baby, but something bad happened. You know about radiation, about the accident."

"Yes. I've been thinking. I wanted to ask you something."

She had been poised with a careful explanation, but Sekou's question threw her. "About what?"

"About my camera."

"The camera." She was momentarily at a loss, and then, before he opened his mouth, all in a rush, she guessed what he was about to say.

"Mama, the camera works because light turns the chemical into something different, so it looks black after you develop it."

She dropped her hands and stared at him.

"Mama, radiation comes in different kinds. Light is one kind. But the radiation from our nuke, that would turn the chemical all black too."

She began to giggle.

"Mama, the picture took. So there wasn't any radiation."

Zora's giggles shook her body until, if the fetus was developed enough to be aware, it would have gotten the giggles too. She fingertipped on her com and called Marcus.

How HAD VALKIRI done it? How had she ruined every sensor and monitor in the whole hab and pharm?

They never found Valkiri, of course. But when they went back to the pharm-cautiously, of course, because who trusts the reasoning of a child?-they found that Valkiri-they couldn't believe the other two had abetted her-had dusted the surfaces of every sensor, including the one in Marcus's environment suit, but not her own, with Thorium 230 powder. It had been imported from Earth for some early experiments in plant metabolism. It was diabolic.

It cost a lot of credit to have everything checked out. Several other habs that had been contaminated made vague threats about suing the Smythes for not notifying them, as if they could have known any earlier what happened. But the fact that Sekou (Sekou!) had solved the mystery and pushed back the specter of death made the other pharmholders back down.

Ultimately, Zora and Marcus didn't trust the work of the decon crew. They had to do their own investigation. Nothing else would convince them it was okay. The sensors had to be replaced, and that wasn't cheap. But they had a home. They had a place for Sekou to play.

Sekou didn't get his camera back from the munic.i.p.ality of Borealopolis, but Marcus traded a packet of new freeze-resistant seeds for an antique chemistry set, and that seemed to satisfy the boy.

Why had Valkiri been willing to make her victims homeless but not actually murder them? Zora never figured it out. Marcus said it was because she was afraid that if she had really breached the nuke, their home corp would have charged her with murder. Or maybe she was afraid she herself would be in danger if she sabotaged the nuke.

Or maybe she had some ethics, said Marcus. He always said things like that. Seeing both sides. Zora found it exasperating. Ultimately, though, it made him lovable.

THE BABY, A girl, was pretty and small, always quite small for her age, but with big eyes favoring Zora's and a sly smile favoring Marcus's. Zora treasures a digital image of the two children, boy and girl, taken soon after the birth.

But Marcus prefers the quite deft drawing Sekou did of the family, though of course, as the artist, he put himself in the picture wielding a camera that by that time rusted in a crime lab in Borealopolis.

Four Ladies of the Apocalypse.

Brian Aldiss.

THIS YOU MUST encompa.s.s in your minds. This happens in the distant past, in the distant future. This happens now.

Gigantic epochs carved by cthonian eccentricity into threatening hieroglyphs of basalt. Bizarre and byzantine centuries laid underfoot like lithic linoleum. The air itself, unbreathed by those four ladies progressing there, a condensation of smoke and wormwood and volcanic eructations. For eyes in skulls, little visibility. For senses in carapaces, little actuality.

Just to progress there was to have to part the foliage of an enduring entropy. It painted itself dull brown, yellowy green, mucus red, ocher, all shades of inelegant excretas. Through these mazes the ladies made their way, four ladies and one more, on foot, untiring, undeterred.

An archway of bone was formed of intertwined figures, in which hooves, b.r.e.a.s.t.s, heads, haunches, horns, cogs, coils, carburetor, calves, thighs of enormous size, faces, femurs, the hind quarters of nightmares, all as if designed by some paralytic psychotic Polish painter. Through this enticing arch the four ladies pa.s.sed, to music of a daring discordance.

In a glorious garden where, on a placid lake, an ebony sloop lay moored, a diligent sun focused its gentlest rays on a group of persons at picnic. They sat on the greenest gra.s.s ever devised. Among them, his fundament protected from contact with the ground by four silkette cus.h.i.+ons, sat the world's last and greatest dictator.

His companions, lovely and lissome and of alternating s.e.x, were all simulacra. They turned their artificial heads to unsee the four approaching ladies and one more.

"We are picnicking of cheese and fruit," said the dictator in a subdued bellow. "The fruit is pear and raspberry, the cheese Dolcelatte, the bread ground-down bones of my nearest and dearest. Will you join me, ladies, before you are exterminated for encroaching on my sacred preserves?" The noise of his converse was slipped between the speed of his speech.

He laughed in a falsetto, although his face, the product of surgery, was of deep red and testicular purple.

Then spoke the four ladies in turn. Said the first formidable dame, whose thin form was clad in armor, "Sir, we are unable to fear your threats since you are a mere byproduct of our designs. We are agents of destruction, whereas you are just a figment of destruction."

The second lady spoke in a deep tone from the depths of a great metal helmet, from which only the glint of her yellow cat eyes could be seen.

"Sir, we come to you on foot because our patrons, the four hors.e.m.e.n, are worn out by constant activity over many centuries. Likewise, their four steeds are ground down to shadows."

"You should have stayed away," said the dictator. His speaking voice was deep with hints of fathomless seas and the monstrous forms living there. "In this place you will be decapitated when you have had your meaningless say."

Then spoke the third lady, a skeletal creature who wore only a plastic loincloth, exposing her worn and useless b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "I am the agent of starvation in the world. My name is Famine. What my sisters of war have failed to exterminate, my agency lays low. What was once a world of plenty is now a field of ashes and corpses. This you have achieved, in collaboration with many men as wicked as you, if not as powerful."

"No one is as powerful as I," said the dictator. An element of uncertainty was discernable in his voice, as he surveyed the four phantasmal females, and the one other, before him.

The fourth lady was an upstanding ghoul of dried and withered skin, from which fountains of pus erupted. She spoke now in a shrill whisper. "Our male predecessors rode on four horses, a white, a red, a black, and my predecessor on a pale horse. I am the ultimate of the four and my name is Pestilence. All dread things find termination with me. All great senators and ministers finish in a pile before my feet, their cells smoldering like candle ends. I have but to breathe on you and you will slowly deliquesce."

"You have no breath left to breathe, you vile hag!" roared the dictator. But then the fifth guest spoke, a childish figure with long crinkly fair hair and a face carved from a small pumpkin. "I am but a child," it said in a mouse voice." I am brought to you to tell you that all you have achieved in the name of ruin is solely because you are the culmination of the wicked aspect of the human race, of those who have no feeling for the suffering of others. My name is Empathy and I am already dead."

"THEN YOU SHALL be dead again," roared the dictator, casting aside his Dolcelatte sandwich and jumping to his feet. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a great sword that had been lying ready by his side. This he swung with all his might. This sword he loved more than all his weapons of ma.s.s destruction, for this sword brought him close to the moments of the deaths of others. He could savor the deaths, he could taste them on his blade. Other deaths were mere abstractions.

But these ladies would not die. They were themselves mere abstractions. Hack them apart, slice through their skulls, slice off their limbs-they instantly reformed. As they reformed, they uttered hideous laughter. They did not suffer, they could not bleed.

He swung the savage blade and continued to swing. He never tires. He swings that blade yet.

The Accord.

Keith Brooke.

Tish Goldenhawk.

Tish Goldenhawk watched the gaudy Daguerran vessel slide into the harbor. If she had known then what she was soon to learn, she might even have settled for her humdrum existence, and even now she and Milton would be living a quiet life, seeing out their days before finally joining the Accord.

But no, unblessed with foresight, Tish stood atop the silver cliffs of Penh.e.l.lion and watched-no, marveled-as the Lady Cecilia approached the crooked arm of the dock.

The s.h.i.+p was unlike any she had seen. Far taller than it was long, it rose out of the mirrored waters like some kind of improbable island. Its flanks were made of polished wood and ma.s.sed ranks of high arched windows, these revealing bodies within, faces pressed against gla.s.s as the grand touristas took in yet more of the sights of the worlds.

He might have been among them. Another face staring out, its perfect features only distinguished by a crooked incisor. But no, he wouldn't have been part of that gawping crowd. She would have known that if she had been blessed with foresight, if she had somehow known that there was a "he" of whom she could speculate just so at this moment.

The s.h.i.+p, the Lady Cecilia... it towered unfeasibly. Only vastly advanced engineering could keep it from toppling this way or that. The thing defied gravity by its very existence. It sailed, a perfect vertical, its array of silken sails bulging picturesquely, its crew scrambling over the rigging like squirrels.

At a distant screech, Tish tipped her head back and stared until she had picked out the tiny scimitar shapes of gliding pterosaurs. It was a clear day, and the world's rings slashed a ribbon across the southern sky. Why did beauty make her sad?

Tish breathed deep, and she knew she should be back at the Falling Droplet helping Milton and their fifteen year-old son Druce behind the bar.

And then she looked again at the golden, jeweled, bannered sailing s.h.i.+p now secured in the harbor and she felt an almighty welling of despair that this should be her lot in a world of such beauty and wonder.

She walked back along a road cut into the face of the cliff. She was lucky. She lived in a beautiful place. She had a good husband, a fine son. She could want for nothing. n.o.body starved or suffered in the worlds of the Diaspora, unless it was their choice to do so. People were born to different lots and hers was a good one.

She was lucky, she told herself again. Blessed by the Accord.

THE FALLING DROPLET was set into the silver cliffs of Penh.e.l.lion, its floor-to-ceiling windows giving breathtaking views out across the bay to where the coast hooked back on itself and the Grand Falls plunged more than a thousand meters into the sea.

Rainbows played and flickered across the bay, an ever-changing color masque put on by the interplay of the Falls and the sun. Pterosaurs and gulls and flying fish cut and swooped through the spray, while dolphins and merfolk arced and flipped in the waves.

Tish was staring at the view again, when the stranger approached the bar.

"I... erm..." He placed coins on the age-polished flutewood surface.

Tish dragged her gaze away from the windows. She smiled at him, another anonymous grand tourista with perfect features, flawless skin, silky hair, a man who might as easily have been twenty as a century or more.

He smiled back.

The crooked tooth was a clever touch. A single tooth at the front, just a little angled so that there was a gap at the top, a slight overlap at the bottom. An imperfection in the perfect, a mote in the diamond.

In that instant Tish Goldenhawk was transfixed, just as she had been by the sight of the Lady Cecilia earlier.

She knew who he was, or rather, what he was, this stranger, this not quite perfect visitor. A made man should always have a flaw, if he were not to look, immediately, like a made man.

"I... erm..." she said, inadvertently repeating his own words from a moment before. "What'll it be?"

"I..." He gestured at one of the pumps.

"Roly's Scrumpy?" she said, reaching for a long gla.s.s. "You'd better be watching your head in the morning, if you're not used to it. That stuff's an a.s.s-drink it full in the face and you're fine, but as soon as you turn your back it'll kick you."

She put the drink before him and helped herself to some of the coins he had spread out.

"Been on Laverne for long?" she said, knowing the answer he would give. He had just landed, along with all these other touristas. Struggling with the dialect and the coins. These poor over-rich sods must be constantly disoriented, she realized, as they took their grand tours of the known. The poor lambs.

He shook his head, smiled again. A day ago- even a few hours ago-he had probably been in a jungle, or in a seething metropolis, or deep in an undersea resort, ten, a hundred, a thousand light years away, along with others on the grand tour.

Or that, at least, was probably what she was supposed to think. But Tish stuck with her hunch instead. She often constructed stories about the people she served in the Falling Droplet-the spies, the adulterers, the scag addicts, and the gender-confused. Sometimes she even turned out to be right, but usually she never confirmed her hunches one way or the other. This man was no grand tourista, although he might indeed be a new arrival.

"You on the Lady Cecilia?" she asked him, hoping he would give himself away but knowing he wouldn't.

"I am," he said, and then dipped his head to take a long draw of the cider. He glanced around. "Or at least," he added, "I was..."

"Tish?"

Milton. He gestured. They had customers lined up at the bar. The Droplet had grown crowded and Tish had barely noticed. She moved away from the stranger, and served old Ruth with her usual Brewer's Gold and nuts.

Later, she noticed the three men as they came in from the darkening evening. They were strangers too, as were many of this evening's clientele, but they didn't look like they were on any kind of grand tour. Their eyes scanned the crowd, and as one of the men fixed on her for the briefest of instants she felt skewered, scanned by some kind of machine.

But no, these three were men, if clearly enhanced. They wore identical dark-gray outfits, and now she saw what appeared to be weapons at their belts.

Tish had never seen a weapon before, unless you counted harpoons and ginny traps and the like. She had never seen men who looked like machines, although up in Daguerre she had seen machines like men and women.

One of the men pointed, and the other two swiveled their heads in unison until all three looked in the same direction, motionless like a sandfisher poised to drop. The pointing man opened his hand and a beam of light shone from it across the crowded bar.

Tish turned and saw a single man picked out by the beam, a long gla.s.s poised partway to his mouth, a mouth which revealed one imperfection in its otherwise flawless ranks of teeth.

The stranger dropped his gla.s.s, ducked down, darted into the pack of bodies near to the bar.

The three... they were no longer there by the door, they were across the room, standing where the stranger had been, motionless again, robot eyes surveying the crowd.

Tish revised her earlier a.s.sessment. These men could not be mere humans-enhanced or not- and move as they did. They must be more than that. Other than that.

The stranger... a tussle by the far door, and there he was, reaching for the handle.

But the handle vanished, the door blurred, its boundaries softening, merging... and it was wall, not door. There was no exit there. There never had been.