The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (67 page)

He’d got his money out of the station master’s office – hadn’t even had to talk to Station Master Lee, who maybe, from the things he was hearing, wasn’t going to be station master much longer. You could either be ineffectual or you could piss off your political officer. Not both at once. And her secretary so very obviously didn’t want to bother her that it was easy to say, “We had a contract,” and to plant his feet and smile. It wasn’t the doubled fee she’d promised him, but he didn’t even want that. Just the money he was owed.

So his business was taken care of. He’d brought Mongoose out to the Erich Zann, and insofar as he and Captain Alvarez could tell, the boojum and the Cheshire liked each other. He’d bought himself new underwear and let Mongoose pick out a new pair of earrings for him. And he’d gone ahead and splurged, since he was, after all, on Kadath Station and might as well make the most of it, and bought a selection of books for his reader, including
The Wind in the Willows.
He was looking forward, in an odd, quiet way, to the long nights out beyond Neptune: reading to Mongoose, finding out what she thought about Rat and Mole and Toad and Badger.

Peace – or as close to it as Izrael Irizarry was ever likely to get.

He’d cleaned out his cubby in the Transient Barracks, slung his bag over one shoulder with Mongoose riding on the other, and was actually in sight of the Erich Zann’s dock when a voice behind him called his name.

Colonel Sanderson.

He froze in the middle of a stride, torn between turning around to greet her and bolting like a rabbit, and then she’d caught up to him. “Mr Irizarry,” she said. “I hoped I could buy you a drink before you go.”

He couldn’t help the deeply suspicious look he gave her. She spread her hands, showing them empty. “Truly. No threats, no tricks. Just a drink. To say thank you.” Her smile was lopsided; she knew how unlikely those words sounded in the mouth of a political officer.

And any other political officer, Irizarry wouldn’t have believed them. But he’d seen her stand her ground in front of a breeder rath, and he’d seen her turn and puke her guts out when she got a good look at what Mongoose did to it. If she wanted to thank him, he owed it to her to sit still for it.

“All right,” he said, and added awkwardly, “Thank you.”

They went to one of Kadath’s tourist bars: bright and quaint and cheerful and completely unlike the spacer bars Irizarry was used to. On the other hand, he could see why Sanderson picked this one. No one here, except maybe the bartender, had the least idea who she was, and the bartender’s wide-eyed double take meant that they got excellent service: prompt and very quiet.

Irizarry ordered a pink lady – he liked them, and Mongoose, in delight, turned the same color pink, with rosettes matched to the maraschino “cherry.” Sanderson ordered whisky, neat, which had very little resemblance to the whisky Irizarry remembered from planetside. She took a long swallow of it, then set the glass down and said, “I never got a chance to ask Spider John this: how did you get your Cheshire?”

It was clever of her to invoke Spider John and Demon like that, but Irizarry still wasn’t sure she’d earned the story. After the silence had gone on a little too long, Sanderson picked her glass up, took another swallow, and said, “I know who you are.”

“I’m nobody,” Irizarry said. He didn’t let himself tense up, because Mongoose wouldn’t miss that cue, and she was touchy enough, what with all the steelship captains, that he wasn’t sure what she might think the proper response was. And he wasn’t sure, if she decided the proper response was to rip Sanderson’s face off, that he would be able to make himself disagree with her in time.

“I promised,” Sanderson said. “No threats. I’m not trying to trace you, I’m not asking any questions about the lady you used to work for. And, truly, I’m only asking how you met this lady. You don’t have to tell me.”

“No,” Irizarry said mildly. “I don’t.” But Mongoose, still pink, was coiling down his arm to investigate the glass – not its contents, since the interest of the egg-whites would be more than outweighed by the sharp sting to her nose of the alcohol, but the upside-down cone on a stem of a martini glass. She liked geometry. And this wasn’t a story that could hurt anyone.

He said, “I was working my way across Jupiter’s moons, oh, five years ago now. Ironically enough, I got trapped in a quarantine. Not for vermin, but for the black rot. It was a long time, and things got . . . ugly.”

He glanced at her and saw he didn’t need to elaborate.

“There were Arkhamers trapped there, too, in their huge old scow of a ship. And when the water rationing got tight, there were people that said the Arkhamers shouldn’t have any – said that if it was the other way ’round, they wouldn’t give us any. And so when the Arkhamers sent one of their daughters for their share . . .” He still remembered her scream, a grown woman’s terror in a child’s voice, and so he shrugged and said, “I did the only thing I could. After that, it was safer for me on their ship than it was on the station, so I spent some time with them. Their Professors let me stay.

“They’re not bad people,” he added, suddenly urgent. “I don’t say I understand what they believe, or why, but they were good to me, and they did share their water with the crew of the ship in the next berth. And of course, they had Cheshires. Cheshires all over the place, cleanest steelship you’ve ever seen. There was a litter born right about the time the quarantine finally lifted. Jemima – the little girl I helped – she insisted they give me pick of the litter, and that was Mongoose.”

Mongoose, knowing the shape of her own name on Irizarry’s lips, began to purr, and rubbed her head gently against his fingers. He petted her, feeling his tension ease, and said, “And I wanted to be a biologist before things got complicated.”

“Huh,” said Sanderson. “Do you know what they are?”

“Sorry?” He was still mostly thinking about the Arkhamers, and braced himself for the usual round of superstitious nonsense: demons or necromancers or what-not.

But Sanderson said, “Cheshires. Do you know what they are?”

“What do you mean, ‘what they are’? They’re Cheshires.”

“After Demon and Spider John . . . I did some reading and I found a Professor or two – Arkhamers, yes – to ask.” She smiled, very thinly. “I’ve found, in this job, that people are often remarkably willing to answer my questions. And I found out. They’re bandersnatches.”

“Colonel Sanderson, not to be disrespectful—”

“Sub-adult bandersnatches,” Sanderson said. “Trained and bred and intentionally stunted so that they never mature fully.”

Mongoose, he realized, had been watching, because she caught his hand and said emphatically, Not.

“Mongoose disagrees with you,” he said, and found himself smiling. “And really, I think she would know.”

Sanderson’s eyebrows went up. “And what does Mongoose think she is?”

He asked, and Mongoose answered promptly, pink dissolving into champagne and gold: Jagular. But there was a thrill of uncertainty behind it, as if she wasn’t quite sure of what she stated so emphatically. And then, with a sharp toss of her head at Colonel Sanderson, like any teenage girl: Mongoose.

Sanderson was still watching him sharply. “Well?”

“She says she’s Mongoose.”

And Sanderson really wasn’t trying to threaten him, or playing some elaborate political game, because her face softened in a real smile, and she said, “Of course she is.”

Irizarry swished a sweet mouthful between his teeth. He thought of what Sanderson had said, of the bandersnatch on the Jenny Lind wriggling through stretched rips in reality like a spiny, deathly puppy tearing a blanket. “How would you domesticate a bandersnatch?”

She shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d be an Arkhamer, wouldn’t I?” Gently, she extended the back of her hand for Mongoose to sniff. Mongoose, surprising Irizarry, extended one tentative tendril and let it hover just over the back of Sanderson’s wrist.

Sanderson tipped her head, smiling affectionately, and didn’t move her hand. “But if I had to guess, I’d say you do it by making friends.”

PARADISO LOST

Albert E. Cowdrey

Albert E. Cowdrey quit a government job to try his hand at writing. So far, his work has appeared almost exclusively in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, usually with darkly comic supernatural horror stories, many of them taking place in a New Orleans haunted by demons and dark magic. In 2000, he took a sudden, unexpected turn away from horror and into science fiction, producing two of the year’s best science fiction novellas,
Crux
and its sequel,
Mosh
, which were expanded in 2004 into a novel called
Crux.
Although the bulk of Cowdrey’s output remains fantasy, he continues to turn his hand occasionally to science fiction as well, with results that make readers wish he’d do it more often, as he did a few years back with “The Tribes of Bela,” or as he does here with “Paradiso Lost,” a prequel to “The Tribes of Bela,” and also a pure-quill old-fashioned science fiction adventure story that takes the reader along on a military transport ship headed for a recalcitrant colony planet, and bearing with it a cargo of secrets and deceptions, most of them deadly. . . .

A reluctant refugee from Hurricane Katrina, Cowdrey now lives in Natchez, Mississippi.

D
EAR JESÚS SON
of Jesús!

I’ve been reading the letter you left on my omni. Yes, I knew your father well, and yes, he died far too soon. And I’ll be happy to tell you my memories of him, provided you’re ready to get an earful.

Looking at the hologram you sent along with the text, so many things come back to me. I see the guy I used to square off with in martial arts training at the Academy, when we were both ridiculously young. Also the guy I went into space with, on my first voyage out of our customary world and universe.

Well, I’m in my anecdotage now, and for the moment all alone and ready to talk. My wife Anna’s in China, seeing to some ancient relatives who need assistance. I’m left here at Manypalms Oasis in the Great American Desert – generally a good place to live, but not in August! 48 bloody degrees outside, enough to fry a scorpion. Makes me think of Planet Bela in its summertime, though fortunately ours doesn’t last for half a century. When the house bot serves me a cool drink made with pears and mangoes, I say politely, “This is excellent, Tycho,” because it’s programmed to repeat actions it gets compliments on, and I need all the liquid intake it can provide.

So I’ll sip quietly and remember bygone adventures and talk into my omni, and you can read the result whenever you’re not too busy helping to govern Luna. I hear rumors that one day you’ll be a Councilor of State and a maker of history. Well, tuck this away in your memory, as a warning of how hard history can be on the innocent.

The story really began before your Papa and I were born.

A cult had been launched by an Italian mystic who called himself Innocente, under the name Scala d’Amore, or Ladder of Love. Innocente taught that love can rise from the gross and carnal to the sublime and universal. That made his doctrine a good vehicle for everything from orgies to sainthood, and brought in a nice wide spectrum of believers. For a little while the cult flourished like mushrooms after rain.

Its symbol was the DNA molecule (which does look a bit like a ladder, or maybe a double spiral staircase) inside a crystal sphere. All parts of the icon had prodigious meanings, if you chose to see them. The sphere meant unity, the crystal meant clarity, the molecule was the ladder of life and consequently of love. For a while, women wore them on charm bracelets and men hung them around their necks on chains. Temples sprouted in every city with the icon on top lighted up at night. Like God it was ubiquitous – or else omnipresent, I forget which.

Its popularity made it a lightning rod for controversy and even violence. Established religions did not fail to notice that it was taking believers away from them, and persecution followed in various parts of the world. The government (as its habit is) decided to blame the victims, and show trials followed, with some cult members accused of outlandish sexual practices and plotting sedition. Pontius Pilate would have grasped the situation in a flash.

That was when Innocente announced that he and a select group of followers called the Seven Hundred were leaving Earth to prepare a refuge for all true believers in the depths of space. Like other mystics he claimed paranormal powers – prevision and clairvoyance – and he foresaw wonderful things for his colony. Skeptics said he was taking his followers someplace where he could control them better. Not an unknown ploy for cult leaders, by the way!

Well, at that time the Council of State was promoting emigration for a number of reasons, one of which was to rid the Earth of potential troublemakers, including religious fanatics. (The kings of England had the same idea when they invited the Puritans to go the hell to America and stay there.) Innocente and his 700 disciples – actually 642; some had second thoughts and dropped out – were quickly granted visas and transported to a system identified as H2223 in the New Catalog. They were deposited on the third or gamma planet, which Innocente hopefully renamed Paradiso, there to live or die by their own resources and a pile of supplies that were dumped with them.

The planet was not prime real estate. Prime real estate was reserved for mining and military colonies. Paradiso had no moon, and the system was meager – closer to the sun were two cinders called alpha and beta, and farther away two remote gasballs named delta and epsilon. Plus the usual ash and trash, some interesting comets that visited at intervals of centuries, and leftovers of unconsolidated or destroyed planets that gave periodic meteor showers of uncommon brilliance.

The planet had almost the mass of Neptune, though as a solid body it was much smaller. The high gravity must have required some serious adaptations by local life forms, and cartoonists had a field day showing colonists shaped like bowlegged gnomes trying unsuccessfully to climb the Ladder of Love. While the believers were settling down, Innocente died of coronary artery disease (maybe related to the increase in gravity?) and was succeeded by his son, who also claimed to possess paranormal powers.

Then Earth lost contact, as a series of skirmishes began in the same general neighborhood with unknown but well-equipped assailants. Dignified by the title of the First Alien War, the fighting went on and off (mostly off) for forty-four standard years. You may recall from history classes that we didn’t do too well, although we did manage to smash one of their ships with a faster-than-light missile, or FTLM. A boarding party spent enough time poking through the wreckage to bring back tissue samples which showed that the aliens weren’t one species, they were at least five, and – unlike the so-called Cousins of Planet Bela – not even closely related.

Maybe they were all living in symbiotic harmony (the nice theory) or maybe four of them had been enslaved by the fifth (the nasty theory). Anyway, for lack of any idea what they might call themselves, hostile journalists called them collectively the Zoo, and cartoonists showed them as a cageful of bizarre monsters.

That capture was our sole achievement. In return we lost some very expensive ships and several hundred highly trained members of the Space Service. More cautious Councils of State then adopted a policy of Retrenchment – pulling back colonists from the dangerous region in order to strengthen closer and more defensible worlds. (This time it was the Emperor Hadrian who would have nodded his wise old head and muttered Sic transit, or something.) Ill-feeling toward the Ladder of Love had declined because, in the absence of its leader, the cult itself had withered on both Terra and Luna, and was no longer seen as a threat. So the Council dedicated a single starship (the big old
Zhukov)
to the task of relocating the folks on Paradiso, and preparations for the expedition began.

While all this history was going on, your Papa and I got ourselves born and grew into the kind of strong, adventurous, and dumb youngsters for whom the Services always have an appeal. Then as now, the Security Forces had their own troops to suppress rebellions, plus a police side to attack crime – sort of like the old Russian Interior Ministry, only not quite as nasty. We chose the military side, and together completed basic and advanced officers’ training and received our shoulder straps and the right to be saluted by serfs of our own calling. I was senior to him by nine minutes or so, because the roster at graduation was alphabetical and K for Kohn, Robert came before M for Morales, Jesús. We’d become friends while knocking each other around in martial arts classes and chasing women on leave, and that was a comfort because our first assignment looked to be a tough one.

The running of the Zhukov was the business of the Space Service, but overall command of the expedition had been vested in a Security Forces general, Colonel-General Schlacht. He was supposed to corral and ride herd on the colonists who, it was felt, might be somewhat unhappy over being uprooted from a place they’d lived for several generations. Schlacht had a reputation for eating junior officers alive, preferably after first dipping them in hot sauce, so Morales and I were less than thrilled when we were assigned to command the two infantry platoons that were going along to police the repatriated colonists.

“So young to die,” sighed your Papa. Only of course he didn’t quite say that. In training we’d learned that words are merely loose gravel until glued together by the mortar of obscenity. You should imagine him actually saying, “*#%&!! So *#%& young to *#%& die!”

I couldn’t have agreed more.

We met the General on Orbital Station One, where many years later I had some interesting experiences. The Big Wheel, as everybody called it then, was in fine trim on that first visit, no monks as yet but lots of scientists – white lab coats instead of white habits – plus all sorts of people in transit from here to there. As usual, Basic English was everybody’s second language, and the place resounded with a Babel of accents, including ours. We saw military types sporting flashy uniforms and civilians wearing a variety of dumb getups (balloon pants and formal T-shirts and lacquered wigs were in that year, for both men and women). We had time to gaze down at the blue ball of the Earth while getting a bite in the military canteen, and at the remainder of our very large universe over coffee in the Darkside Lounge. Then our omnis started squealing, and we were invited to haul our butts to the General’s office soonest.

I didn’t have much time to get to know Schlacht, for reasons I’ll explain later, and I never developed any warmth of feeling for him. But I have to admit he was impressive – roughly 2 meters high and 80 centimeters wide, with a face resembling a water buffalo beset by biting flies, all frowns and snorts and bristling mustaches. His hair was white, untidy, and too abundant – totally unmilitary – and sent the message that while scum like Morales and me had to worry about regs, he didn’t. Same message from his shoulder straps. He was authorized seven stars but wore none, because he didn’t need little bits of shiny metal to tell people how godawful important he was.

For what seemed like half an hour he sat in silence, gazing at us with evident loathing, and then spoke in a kind of hoarse bellow. “So you characters are supposed to be my platoon leaders.”

While we were yelling, “Yes, sir!” in parade-ground style, he perused a printout and when quiet had been restored, grunted, “Morales and Kohn. Jesus and a Jew.”

“Sir, my name is pronounced Hayzoose,” said your Papa bravely.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mister, your name is pronounced Crap. That’s mierda, in case you have trouble with English.”

After that the interview went rapidly downhill. About an hour later, Jesús and I were having several stiff drinks in the Officers’ Lounge while waiting for our ears to stop burning.

“Well,” he said at last, “I guess we know where we stand with the *#%& General.”

I answered that it seemed we’d embarked on a rough voyage. Luckily, as yet neither of us had a clue just how rough.

Via a lighter, we boarded the
Zhukov
a couple of days later. It belonged to what was called the Alexander class of starships, which were almost round only not quite, oblate spheroid I think is the term. All the vehicles were named for famous generals and admirals, so there was a Sun Tzu and a Saladin and a Caesar and a Nelson and I don’t know who else. They were supposed to be virtually indestructible, with triple hulls of nuclear steel and all kinds of redundancies built in to make them “structurally impervious.” A piece of human chutzpah, I might add, properly punished when three of them were blown up by enemy FTLM’s during the First Alien War.

Now the reconditioned
Zhukov
was being used to shuffle colonials around, mainly because it was so big you could crowd a lot of folks into it if you only allowed them 1.5 cubic meters apiece, or about as much space as a large refrigerator.
Zhukov
was, by the way, still well armed, with four Alpha-class cold-fusion missiles and a particle-beam generator, because it was going into a dicey region where close encounters of the worst kind remained a possibility.