The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (21 page)

RABIŞILA:
Your people are gone. Your weapon’s been destroyed. You might as well tell us everything.

SUSPECT:
It accomplished its purpose.

RABIŞILA:
Which was?

SUSPECT:
To give you hope.

RABIŞILA:
What do you mean, “hope”?

SUSPECT:
Men are fighting gods now, in Gish and Sippar.

RABIŞILA:
A few criminal lunatics. Lord Anshar will destroy them.

SUSPECT:
Do you think they’ll be the last? Two of your gods are dead. Dead at the hands of mortals. Nothing Anshar’s soldiers do to Sippar will change that. Nothing you do to me.

RABIŞILA:
You’re insane.

SUSPECT:
I mean it. One day – not in my lifetime, certainly not in yours, but one day – one day you’ll all be free.

VII

A soldier of the city

A ship found Ish a few months later: a ship called
Upekkhâ,
from a single-system nomad civilization based some seventeen light-years from Babylon and known to itself as the Congregation. The ship, the name of which meant
equanimity,
was an antimatter-fueled ion rocket, a quarter of a league long and twice that in diameter; it could reach two-tenths the speed of light, but only very, very slowly. It had spent fifteen years docked at Babylon-Borsippa, and, having been launched some four months before the attack on the Corn Parade, was now on its way back to the star the Congregation called
Mettâ.
The star’s name, in the ancient liturgical language of the monks and nuns of the Congregation, meant
kindness.

Ish was very nearly dead when
Upekkhâ’s
monks brought him aboard. His heart had been stopped for some weeks, and it was the acceleration support system rather than Ish’s bloodstream that was supplying the last of the platform’s oxygen reserves to his brain, which itself had been pumped full of cryoprotectants and cooled to just above the boiling point of nitrogen. The rescue team had to move very quickly to extricate Ish from that system and get him onto their own life support. This task was not made any easier by the militarized physiology given to Ish at Lagash, but they managed it. He was some time in recovering.

Ish never quite understood what had brought
Upekkhâ
to Babylon. Most of the monks and nuns spoke good Babylonian – several of them had been born in the cities – but the concepts were too alien for Ish to make much sense of them, and Ish admitted to himself he didn’t really care to try. They had no gods, and prayed – as far as Ish could tell – to their ancestors, or their teachers’ teachers. They had been looking, they said, for someone they called
Tathâgata,
which the nun explaining this to Ish translated into Babylonian as “the one who has found the truth.” This Tathâgata had died many years ago on a planet circling the star called Mettâ, and why the monks and nuns were looking for him at Babylon was only one of the things Ish didn’t understand.

“But we didn’t find him,” the nun said. “We found you.”

They were in
Upekkhâ’s
central core, where Ish, who had grown up on a farm, was trying to learn how to garden in free fall. The monks and nuns had given him to understand that he was not required to work, but he found it embarrassing to lie idle – and it was better than being alone with his thoughts.

“And what are you going to do with me?” Ish asked.

The nun – whose own name,
Arrakhasampada,
she translated as “the one who has attained watchfulness” – gave him an odd look and said:

“Nothing.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll – do something? Damage something? Hurt someone?” Ish asked.

“Will you?” Arrakhasampada asked.

Ish had thought about it. Encountering the men and women of
Upekkhâ
on the battlefield he could have shot them without hesitation. In Apsu, he had not hesitated. He had looked forward to killing the nomads responsible for the Corn Parade with an anticipation that was two parts vengefulness and one part technical satisfaction. But these nomads were not those nomads, and it was hard now to see the point.

It must have been obvious, from where the monks and nuns found Ish, and in what condition, what he was, and what he had done. But they seemed not to care. They treated Ish kindly, but Ish suspected they would have done as much for a wounded dog.

The thought was humbling, but Ish also found it oddly liberating. The crew of
Upekkhâ
didn’t know who Ish was or what he had been trying to do, or why. His failure was not evident to them.

*     *     *

The doctor, an elderly monk who Ish called Dr. Sam – his name, which Ish couldn’t pronounce, meant something like “the one who leads a balanced life” – pronounced Ish fit to move out of the infirmary. Arrakhasampada and Dr. Sam helped Ish decorate his cabin, picking out plants from the garden and furnishings from
Upekkhâ’s
sparse catalog with a delicate attention to Ish’s taste and reactions that surprised him, so that the end result, while hardly Babylonian, was less foreign, more Ish’s own, than it might have been.

Arrakhasampada asked about the mended icon in its block of resin, and Ish tried to explain.

She and Dr. Sam grew very quiet and thoughtful.

Ish didn’t see either of them for eight or ten days. Then one afternoon as he was coming back from the garden, dusty and tired, he found the two of them waiting by his cabin. Arrakhasampada was carrying a bag of oranges, and Dr. Sam had with him a large box made to look like lacquered wood.

Ish let them in, and went into the back of the cabin to wash and change clothes. When he came out they had unpacked the box, and Ish saw that it was an iconostasis or shrine, of the sort the monks and nuns used to remember their predecessors. But where the name-scroll would go there was a niche just the size of Ish’s icon.

He didn’t know who he was. He was still – would always be – a soldier of the city, but what did that mean? He had wanted revenge, still did in some abstract way. There would be others, now, Lion-Eagles out to avenge the Lord of Lagash, children who had grown up with images of the Corn Parade. Maybe Mâra would be among them, though Ish hoped not. But Ish himself had had his measure of vengeance in Apsu and knew well enough that it had never been likely that he would have more.

He looked at the icon where it was propped against the wall. Who was he? Tara: “I don’t think I ever knew you.” But she had, hadn’t she? Ish was a man in love with a dead woman. He always would be. The Lady’s death hadn’t changed that, any more than Ish’s own death would have. The fact that the dead woman was a goddess hadn’t changed it.

Ish picked up the icon and placed it in the niche. He let Dr. Sam show him where to place the orange, how to set the sticks of incense in the cup and start the little induction heater. Then he sat back on his heels and they contemplated the face of the Lady of Isin together.

“Will you tell us about her?” Arrakhasampada asked.

THE BEANCOUNTER’S CAT

Australian writer, editor, futurist, and critic Damien Broderick, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, made his first sale in 1964 to John Carnell’s anthology
New Writings in SF 1.
In the decades that followed, he has kept up a steady stream of fiction, non-fiction, futurist speculations, and critical work, which has won him multiple Ditmar and Aurealis Awards. He sold his first novel,
Sorcerer’s World,
in 1970; it was later reissued in a rewritten version in the United States as
The Black Grail.
Broderick’s other books include the novels
The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, Striped Holes,
and
The White Abacus,
as well as books written with Rory Barnes and Barbara Lamar. His many short stories have been collected in
A Man Returns, The Dark Between the Stars, Uncle Bones: Four Science Fiction Novellas,
and most recently,
The Quilla Engine: Science Fiction Stories.
He also wrote the visionary futurist classic
The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technology,
critical study of science fiction
Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction,
and edited the non-fiction anthology
Year Million: Science at the Far End of Knowledge,
the SF anthology
Earth Is But a Star: Excursions Through Science Fiction to the Far Future,
and three anthologies of Australian science fiction,
The Zeitgeist Machine, Strange Attractors,
and
Matilda at the Speed of Light.
His most recent publication is a non-fiction book written with Paul Di Filippo,
Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985–2010.

Here he shows us that the longest – and strangest – journey begins with a single step.

A
HUMBLE BEANCOUNTER LIVED
in Regio city near the middle of the world. Those of her credentials known outside the Sodality were modest but respectable. By dint of dedicated service and her particular gift, she had won herself a lowly but (she hoped) secure position with the Arxon’s considerable staff of
publicani.
Still, on a certain summer’s smorning, she carelessly allowed her heart to be seduced by the sight of a remarkable orange-furred cat, a rough but handsome bully of the back alleys. He stood outside her door, greeting the smallday in a fine yodeling voice, claws stropped to a razor finish, whiskers proud like filaments of new brass.

“Here, puss,” she called into the dusty lane.

The beancounter poured milk into a blue-rimmed bowl, inviting this cat inside the doorway of her little house, which was located in the noisy, scrofulous Leechcraft District. She watched the elegant animal lapping, and pressed the palms of her hands together in front of her modest but respectable breast.

“I believe I shall name you Ginger,” she told the cat with considerable satisfaction.

The orange cat sat back and licked his whiskers delicately, then bent to attend to his hindquarters, raising one leg. Holding the leg in the air he gave her a sour look.

“For Skydark’s sake,” said the cat, “must I abide this arrant sentimentality?” He nosed a little more, then lowered his leg and rose to all four feet, still bristling. “In any event, if you’re interested, I already possess a name.”

The beancounter had fallen upon her bottom, goggling at the loquacious and shockingly illegal animal.

“You can spea—” But she cut off the rest of the banal sentence that was about to escape her mouth, which she clamped shut. The cat gave her a sardonic glance and returned to the bowl, polishing off the last of the milk.

“Slightly rancid, but what else can you expect in this weather? Thank you,” he added, and made for the door.

As the luminous tip of his tail vanished, the beancounter cried, “Then what
is
your name, sir?”

“Marmalade,” the cat said, in a muffled tone. And then he was gone.

At the sleeping hour, she sat on piled cushions in a nook, peeling and eating slivers of a ripe golden maloon, and read to herself verses from a sentimental book, for she had nobody else to speak them to her. She read these tender verses by the guttering light of an oil-fruit lamp, the blood mounting in her cheeks. Secretly she knew it was all make-believe and artful compensation for a delayed life held pendent in her late mother’s service, and she was ashamed and depressed by her fate. The beancounter was comely enough, but her profession stank in the nostrils of the general company. Suitable men approached her from time to time, in the tavern, perhaps, or at a concert, and expressed an initial interest in flattering terms. Every one of them swiftly recoiled in distaste when he learned of her trade. To a handsome poet she had tried an old justification: “It is a punishment, not a life-long deformity!” The fellow withdrew, refusing her hand.