The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (91 page)

He raised his arms as if he was orating in front of an audience. Tubes dangled from his wrists.

“Serenes and Adventurers will join together in a grand alliance! And present the humans with a united species!”

“I couldn’t offer the humans a united front if every Adventurer on the planet joined us. We aren’t a united species anymore. We stopped being a united species when you sent your warning.”

“You said you still had the support of the Integrators.”

“There’s been a revolt against the Integrators. Mansita Jano refused to accept their decision to keep me in charge of the Visitation.”

“We’re at war? We’re going through another Turbulence?”

“No one has died. Yet. Hundreds of people have been forced into dormancy on both sides. Some cities are completely controlled by Mansita Jano’s supporters. We have a serious rift in our society – so serious it could throw us into another Turbulence if we don’t do something before more visitors arrive from the human system. If we make the offer and the humans accept – I think most people will fall in behind the idea.”

“But you feel you need the support of the Adventurer community?”

“Yes.”

The men in the cityscape tapped their poles when they stopped to talk. The ribbons dangling from the ends of the poles complemented the color of their facial feathers.

“That’s a risk in itself, Overseer. Why would the serenes join forces with a mob of irresponsible risk takers? Why would anyone follow me? Everything they had ended when I sent my warning.”

“You’re underestimating yourself. You’re a potent figure. I’ll lose some serenes but the projections all indicate I’ll get most of the Adventurer community in exchange. You may look like an irresponsible innovator to most serenes but most of your own people see you as an innovator who was willing to set a third of the galaxy on a new course.”

“And what do you see, Varosa Uman?”

“I see an irresponsible interloper who may have opened up a new possibility. And placed our entire species in peril.”

“And if I don’t help you pursue your great enterprise I’ll be shoved into a box.”

“I want your willing cooperation. I want you to rally your community behind the biggest adventure our species has ever undertaken – the ultimate proof that we need people with your personality structure.”

“You want to turn an irritating escapader into a prophet?”

“Yes.”

“Speech writers? Advisors? Presentation specialists?”

“You’ll get the best we have. I’ve got a communications facility in the next room. I’d like you to sit through a catch-up review. Then we’ll send a simultaneous transmission to both visitors.”

“You’re moving very fast. Are you afraid someone will stop you?”

“I want to present our entire population—opponents and supporters – with an accomplished act. Just like you did.”

“They could turn on you just like they turned on me. The revolt against the Integrators could intensify. The humans may reject your offer.”

“We’ve examined the possibilities. We can sit here and let things happen or we can take the best choice in a bad list and try to make it work.”

“You’re still acting like a gambler. Are you sure they didn’t make a mistake when they classified you?”

“You take risks because you like it. I take risks because I have to.”

“But you’re willing to do it. You don’t automatically reach for the standard course.”

“Will you help me, Revutev Mavarka? Will you stand beside me in one of the boldest moments in the history of intelligence?”

“In the history of intelligence, Overseer?”

“That’s what it is, isn’t it? We’ll be disrupting a chain of self-isolating intelligent species – a chain that’s been creeping across our section of the galaxy for hundreds of millennia.”

He picked up another food disk. It was dull stuff – almost tasteless – but it supplemented the nutrients from the cart with material that would activate his digestive path. It was, when you thought about it, exactly the kind of food the more extreme serenes would want to encounter when they came out of dormancy.

“Since you put it that way. . . .”

THE COLD STEP BEYOND

British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, publishing a slew of strong stories in
Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
and elsewhere and his work continued to grow in power and deepen in maturity as we moved through the first decade of the new century. Much of his work has been gathered in four collections,
Voyages by Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, Past Magic,
and
Journeys.
His first novel,
The Great Wheel,
was published in 1997. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his novella “The Summer Isles”, and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette “The Chop Girl”. In 2003, he published his first fantasy novel, and his most critically acclaimed book,
The Light Ages,
followed by a sequel,
The House of Storms,
in 2005, and then by
Song of Time,
which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the John W. Campbell Award, in 2008. A novel version of
The Summer Isles
also appeared in 2005. His most recent book is a new novel,
Wake Up and Dream.
MacLeod lives with his family in the West Midlands of England.

Here he takes us to a far, far future where, in Arthur C. Clarke’s famous phrase, the technology is so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, for a melancholy study of a bioengineered warrior sent to fight a monster who ultimately turns out to be not at all what she expected it to be.

I
N A CLEARING
in an unnamed forest in a remote part of the great Island City of Ghezirah, there moved a figure. Sometimes, it moved silently as it swirled a sword in flashing arcs. Sometimes, it made terrible cries. It was high noon in midsummer, and the trees and the greensward shimmered. The figure shimmered as well; it was hard to get a proper sense of the method of its motion. Sometimes, it was here. Sometimes, there. It seemed to skip beyond the places that lay between. Then, when the figure finally stopped moving and let the sword thing fall to its side and hung its head, it became clear that it was scarcely human, and that it was tired and hot.

Bess of the Warrior Church sunk to a squat. The plates of her body armor – mottled greenish to blend with the landscape – were ribboned with sweat. Her limbs ached. Her head throbbed in its enclosing weight of chitin and metal. She swept her gaze around the encircling sweep of forest, willing something to come. She had been here many weeks now; long enough for grass to have grown back in the seared space beneath the caleche that had brought her here, and for its landing gear and rusty undersides to become hazed in bloodflowers.

She looked up across Ghezirah, arching away from her under Sabil’s mirrored glare. There, off to the east and rising into the distance, hung the placid browns of the farm islands of Windfell. The other way flashed the grey-blue sea-wall of the Floating Ocean. Somewhat closer, looming smudgy and indistinct over the forest, lay the fabled Isle of the Dead. But she knew she had no calling in any of those places.

The intelligences of her church had directed her to this clearing. Yet until her foe arrived in whatever shape or form it might take, until the killing moment came, all she could do was practice. And wait.

Yet something told her that, today, she was no longer alone. Her fingers retensed upon the hilt of her sword. She opened her mind and let her senses flow. Something was moving, small and quick, at the shadow edge of the forest. The movement was furtive, yet predatory. If Bess had still possessed hairs along the back of her spine, they would have crawled. She would also have shivered, had she not learned in her novitiate that tension is part of the energy of killing, and thus must be entirely reabsorbed.

Slowly, and seemingly more wearily than ever, Bess hauled her torso upright in a gleam of sweating plates. She even allowed herself to sway slightly. The weariness was genuine, and thus not difficult to fake. By then she was certain that she was being watched from the edge of the forest.

The blade of her sword seemed to flash in the hairsbreadth of an instant before movement itself. It flashed again. Bess seemed to slide across the placid meadow in cubes and sideways protrusions. She was there. Then she wasn’t. She was under the trees perhaps a full half-second after she had first levered herself up from a squat.

Three severed leaves were floating down in the wake of her sword’s last arc, and the thing crouched before her was small and bipedal. It also looked to be young, and seemed most likely human, and probably female, although its sole piece of clothing was a dirty swatch wrapped around its hips. Not exactly the sort of foe Bess had been expecting to end her vigil; just some feral forest-rat. But it hadn’t scurried off into the green dark at her arrival even now that the three leaves had settled to the ground. It was holding out, in something that resembled a threatening gesture, a small but antique lightgun. The gun was live. Bess could hear the battery’s faint hum.

“If you try to shoot that thing . . .” She said, putting all the power of command into her voice. “. . . you will die.” The sound boomed out.

“And if I don’t?” The little creature had flinched, but it was still wafting that lightgun. “I’ll probably die anyway, won’t I? You’re a warrior – killing’s all you’re good for.”

Bess’s expression, or the little of it which was discernible within her face’s plated mask, flickered. Since first leaving the iron walls of her church and setting out across Ghezirah in her caleche three moulids ago, she had discovered that warriors were most often thought of by those who lived outside her calling as little more than heedless bringers of death. Scarcely better, in essence, than the monstrous things they were trained to kill. Not to mention the stories that had passed in her wake of soured milk, broken mirrors, and malformed births. Or the taunts, and the curses, and the things thrown . . .

“I’ll put this gun down if you put down your sword,” the little creature said. “You’re quick – I’ve seen that. But I don’t think you’re quicker than light itself . . .”

Technically, of course, the runt was right – but was it worth explaining that the killing movement of any weapon was the last part of a process that could be detected long before it began by those trained in the art of death? Bess decided that it was not. It was apparent from the thing’s stance that it was used to using this lightgun, but also that it had no intention of doing so within the next few moments.

Bess lowered her sword to her side.

The creature did the same with the lightgun.

“What’s your name?” Bess asked.

“Why should I tell you that? And who are you?”

“Because . . .” If there were any particular reasons, she couldn’t immediately think of them. “My name is Bess.”

The creature smirked. “Shouldn’t you be called something more terrible than that? But I’ll call you Bess if you want . . .”

“Do you have a name?”

“I’m Elli.” The smirk faded. “I think I am anyway.”

“You only
think?
Don’t you know who you are?”

“Well, I’m
me,
aren’t I?” The creature – although Bess now felt that she could safely assume that she was merely female and human, and not some monstrous anomaly or djinn – glanced down at her grubby, near-naked self. “Names are just things other people give you, aren’t they? Or just plain make up . . . ?”

The helm of Bess’s head, which had now absorbed the forest’s shades, gave a ponderous nod. She understood the Elli-thing’s remark, for she, too, had no proper idea of how she had got her name.

“Been watching you . . .” Elli nodded across the clearing. “Dead clever, the way you flicker in and out as if you’re there and then not there.”

“So why in the name of all the intelligences didn’t you back off when I approached?”

Elli shrugged. “I could tell you were just practicing. That you didn’t mean it . . .”

Not meaning it
being about the worst insult that, in all Bess’s long years of training within the walls of her church, had ever been flung her way.