The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (43 page)

She was staring at him in horror. Jessie forced a smile. “I could use my jet, though, if you happen to have seen where it went.”

Wordlessly, she held out her hand again. This time Jessie took it, and she gunned the engine, flipping them over and accelerating back the way Jessie had come.

As they shot through a volume of clear air she turned in her saddle and frowned at him. “You came here to die, is that it?”

Jessie shook his head. “Not yet. I hope not yet.” He massaged his chest, feeling the deep hurt there, the spreading weakness. “There’s somebody here I want to talk to.”

Chirk nearly flew them into one of the pink stalks. “Someone
here
? Jess, you were with us just now. You heard that . . . song. You know nobody could be alive in here. It’s why nobody’s ever gotten at the wreck.”

He nodded. “Not a —” He coughed. “Not a person, no —” The coughing took over for a while. He spat blood, dizzy, pain behind his eyes now too. When it all subsided he looked up to find they were coming alongside his jet, which was nuzzling a dent in a vast rough wall that cut across the forest of stalks.

He reached for the jet and managed to snag one of its handlebars. Before he climbed onto it he glanced back; Chirk was looking at him with huge eyes. She clearly didn’t know what to do.

He stifled a laugh lest it spark more coughing. “There’s a precipice moth here. I heard about it by chance when my family and me were doing a performance in Batetran. It made the newspapers there: Moth Seen Entering Capital Bug.”

“Precip – Precip moth?” She rolled the word around in her mouth. “Wait a minute, you mean a world-diver? One of those dragons that’re supposed to hide at the edges of the world to waylay travellers?”

He shook his head, easing himself carefully onto the jet. “A defender of the world. Not human. Maybe the one that blew up the royal palace in Slipstream last year. Surely you heard about
that
.”

“I heard about a monster. It was a moth?” She was being uncharacteristically thickheaded. Jessie was ready to forgive that, considering the circumstances.

She showed no signs of hying off to her well-deserved treasure, so Jessie told her the story as he’d heard it – of how Admiral Chaison Fanning of Slipstream had destroyed an invasion fleet, hundreds of cruisers strong, with only seven little ships of his own. Falcon captured him and tortured him to find out how he’d done it, but he’d escaped and returned to Slipstream, where he’d deposed the Pilot, Slipstream’s hereditary monarch.

“Nobody knows how he stopped that invasion fleet,” said Chirk. “It was impossible.”

Jessie nodded. “Yeah, that’s right. But I found out.”

Now she
had
to hear that story, but Jessie was reluctant to tell her. He’d told no one else because he trusted no one else, not with the location of one of the greatest secrets of the world. He trusted Chirk – she had her own treasure now – yet he was still reluctant, because that would mean admitting how he’d been wedged into a dark corner of Rainsouk Amphitheater, crying alone when the place unexpectedly began to fill with people.

For months Jessie had been hearing about Rainsouk; his brothers were so excited over the prospect of performing here. Jessie was the youngest, and not much of an acrobat – he could see that in his father’s eyes every time he missed a catch and sailed on through the weightless air to fetch up, humiliated, in a safety net. Jessie had given up trying to please the family, had in fact become increasingly alone and isolated outside their intense focus and relentless team spirit. When the cough started he tried to hide it, but their little travelling house was just too small to do that for long.

When Father found out, he was just disappointed, that was all. Disappointed that his youngest had gotten himself sick and might die. So Jessie was off the team – and though nobody said it out loud, off the team meant out of the family.

So there he’d been, crying in the amphitheatre he’d never get to perform in, when it began to fill with black-garbed men and women.

As he opened his mouth to refuse to tell her, Jessie found himself spilling the whole story, humiliating as it was. “These visitors, they were terrifying, Chirk. It looked like a convention of assassins, every man and woman the last person you’d want to meet on a dark night. And then the scariest of them flew out to the middle of the place and started to talk.”

The very world was threatened, he’d said. Only he and his brothers and sisters could save it, for this was a meeting of the Virga home guard. The guard were a myth – so Jessie had been taught. He’d heard stories about them his whole life, of how they guarded the walls of the world against the terrifying monsters and alien forces prowling just outside.

“Yet here they were,” he told Chirk. “And their leader was reminding them that something is trying to get
in
, right now, and the only thing that keeps it out is Candesce. The sun of suns emits a . . . he called it a ‘field,’ that keeps the monsters out. But the same field keeps
us
from developing any of the powerful technologies we’d need to stop the monsters if they did get in. Technologies like radar. . . . and get this:

“It was radar that made Admiral Chaison Fanning’s ships able to run rings around Falcon Formation’s fleet.
Because Fanning had found a key to Candesce
, and had gone inside to shut down the field for a day.”

Chirk crossed her arms, smiling skeptically. “Now this is a tall tale,” she said.

“Believe it or not,” said Jessie with a shrug, “it’s true. He gave the key to the precipice moth that helped him depose the Pilot, and it flew away . . . the home guard didn’t know where. But I knew.”

“Ahh,” she said. “That newspaper article. It came here.”

“Where it could be sure of never being disturbed,” he said eagerly.

“And now you’re, what? – going to duel it for the key?” She laughed. “Seems to me you’re in no state to slay dragons, Jess.” She held out her hand. “Look, you’re too weak to fly, even. Come with me. At least we’ll make you rich before . . .” She glanced away. “You can afford the best doctors, you know they —”

He shook his head, and spun the pedals of the jet’s starter spring. “That moth doesn’t know what I overheard in the amphitheatre. That the walls of the world are failing. Candesce’s shield isn’t strong enough anymore. We need the key so we can dial down the field and develop technologies that could stop whatever’s out there. The moth’s been hiding in here, it doesn’t know, Chirk.”

The jet roared into life. “I can’t slay a dragon, Chirk,” he shouted. “But at least I can give it the news.”

He opened the throttle and left her before she could reply.

They dressed as heroes. Dad wore gold and leather, the kids flame-red. Mom was the most fabulous creature Jessie had ever seen, and every night he fell in love with her all over again. She wore feathers of transparent blue plex, plumage four feet long that she could actually fly with when the gravity was right. She would be captured by the children – little devils – and rescued by Dad. They played all over the principalities, their backdrop a vast wall of spinning town wheels, green ball-shaped parks and the hithering-thithering traffic of a million airborne people. Hundreds of miles of it curved away to cup blazing Candesce. They had to be amazing to beat a sight like that. And they were.

For as long as Jessie could remember, though, there had been certain silences. Some evenings, the kids knew not to talk. They stuck to their picture books, or played outside or just plain left the house for a while. The silence radiated from Mom and Dad, and there was no understanding it. Jessie didn’t notice how it grew, but there came a time when the only music in their lives seemed to happen during performance. Even rehearsals were strained. And then, one day, Mom just wasn’t there anymore.

They had followed the circus from the principalities into the world’s outer realms, where the suns were spaced hundreds of miles apart and the chilly darkness between them was called “winter”.

Jessie remembered a night lit by distant lightning that curled around a spherical stormcloud. They were staying on a little town wheel whose name he no longer remembered – just a spinning hoop of wood forty feet wide and a mile or so across, spoked by frayed ropes and home to a few hundred farm families. Mom had been gone for four days. Jessie stepped out of the hostel where they were staying to see Dad leaning out over the rushing air, one strong arm holding a spoke-rope while he stared into the headwind.

“But where would she go?” Jessie heard him murmur. That was all that he ever said on the matter, and he didn’t even say it to his boys.

They weren’t heroes after that. From that day forward, they dressed as soldiers, and their act was a battle.

The capital bug was hollow. This in itself wasn’t such a surprise – something so big wouldn’t have been able to move under its own power if it wasn’t. It would have made its own gravity. What made Jessie swear in surprise was just how little there was to it, now that he was inside.

The bug’s perforated back let in sunlight, and in those shafts he beheld a vast oval space, bigger than any stadium he had ever juggled in. The sides and bottom of the place were carpeted in trees, and more hung weightless in the central space, the roots of five or six twined together at their bases so that they thrust branch and leaf every which way. Flitting between these were mirror-bright schools of long-finned fish; chasing those were flocks of legless crimson and yellow birds. As Jessie watched, a struggling group of fish managed to make it to a thirty-foot-diameter ball of water. The pursuing birds peeled away at the last second as the punctured water ball quivered and tossed off smaller spheres. This drama took place in complete silence; there was no sound at all although the air swarmed with insects as well as the larger beasts.

Of course, nothing could have made itself heard over the buzz of the capital bug itself. So, he supposed nothing tried.

The air was thick with the smell of flowers, growth, and decay. Jessie took the jet in a long curving tour of the vast space, and for a few moments he was able to forget everything except the wonder of being here. Then, as he returned to his starting point, he spotted the wreck, and the
Mistelle
. They were high up in something like a gallery that stretched around the “top” of the space, under the perforated roof. Both were dwarfed by their setting, but he could clearly see his teammates’ jets hovering over the wreck. The stab of sorrow that went through him almost set him coughing again. It would only take seconds and he’d be with them. At least he could watch their jubilation as they plundered the treasure he’d helped them find.

And then what? They could shower him with jewels but he couldn’t buy his life back. At best he could hold such baubles up to the light and admire them for a while, before dying alone and unremarked.

He turned the jet and set to exploring the forested gut of the capital bug.

Jessie had seen very few built-up places that weren’t inhabited. In Virga, real estate was something you made, like gravity or sunlight. Wilderness as a place didn’t exist, except in those rare forests that had grown by twining their roots and branches until their whole matted mass extended for miles. He’d seen one of those on the fringe of the principalities, where Candesce’s light was a mellow rose and the sky permanently peach-tinged. That tangled mass of green had seemed like a delirium dream, an intrusion into the sane order of the world. But it was nothing to the wilderness of the capital bug.

Bugs were rare; at any one time there might only be a few dozen in the whole world. They never got too close to the sun of suns, so they were never seen in the principalities. They dwelt in the turbulent middle space between civilization and winter, where suns wouldn’t stay on station and nations would break up and drift apart. Of course, they were also impossible to approach, so it was likely that no one had ever flown through these cathedrals walled by gigantic flowers, these ship-sized grass stalks dewed by beads of water big as houses. Despite his pain and exhaustion, the place had its way with him and he found himself falling into a meditative calm he associated with that moment before you make your jump – or, in midair, that moment before your father catches your hand.

In its own way, this calm rang louder than any feeling he’d ever had, maybe because it was
about
something, about death, and nothing he’d ever felt before had grown on such a foundation.

He came to an area where giant crystals of salt had grown out of the capital bug’s skin, long geodesic shapes whose inner planes sheened in purple and bottle-green. They combined with the dew drops to splinter and curl the light in a million ways.

Stretched between two sixty-foot grass stalks was the glittering outline of a man.

Jessie throttled back and grabbed a vine to stop himself. He’d come upon a spider’s web; the spider that had made it was probably bigger than he was. But someone or something had used the web to make a piece of art, by placing fist- to head-sized balls of water at the intersections of the threads, laying out a pattern shaped like a man standing proudly, arms out, as though about to catch something.

Jessie goggled at it, then remembered to look for the spider. After a cautious minute he egged the jet forward, skirting around the web. There were more webs ahead. Some were twenty or more feet across, and each one was a tapestry done in liquid jewels. Some of the figures were human; others were of birds, or flowers, but each was exquisitely executed. It came to Jessie that when the capital bug was in full song, the webs and drops would vibrate, blurring the figures’ outlines until they must seem made of light.

Spinning in the air, he laughed in surprise.

Something reared up sixty feet away and his heart skipped. It was a vaguely humanoid shape sculpted in rusted metal and moss-covered stone. As it stood it unfolded gigantic wings that stretched past the tops of the grass stalks.