The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (117 page)

I took off the blindfold and tied it around my neck, returning it to its original use as a scarf. It became my only item of apparel, as I shucked white cotton trousers, white T-shirt and underwear.

The stick I gently broke across my knee, sliding the two lengths of wood apart to reveal the sword within. I took the weapon up and made the traditional salute towards my enemies on the beach.

Courtesies complete, I shaded my skin, hair and eyes dark, a green almost heavy enough to match the blackness of the night, and with a moment’s concentration grew a defensive layer of young bark, being careful not to over-do it, while overlaying the sheaths in such a way that it would not limit my movement. Novices often made the mistake of armouring up too much, and found themselves extraordinarily tough but essentially sessile. I had not made that mistake since my distant youth.

The wind lifted a little, and the stink of the weed changed, becoming more fragrant. I heard thirteen soft popping noises come from the beach, and knew that the nodules were opening.

There was little point in dragging things out, so I simply walked down the street to the beach, pausing to bid a silent farewell to the café. Their coffee had been quite good.

I paused at the promenade railing, near the block of stone surmounted by the bronze mermaid, and looked across the beach. There was a little starlight, though no moon, and I thought both sea and sand had never looked prettier. The humans should turn the lights off more often, though even then they would not see the way I saw.

The thirteen had emerged from their nodules, or perhaps I should call them pods. Now that I saw them clearly, I knew I had even less chance than I’d thought. I had expected the blocky, bad imitations of human women that looked like Bulgarian weightlifters, armed with slow, two-handed axes that, though devastating when they hit, were fairly unlikely to do so provided I didn’t make a mistake.

But my enemy had sent a much superior force, testament I suppose to the number of times I had defeated or evaded previous attempts to curtail my activities. This time they were indeed what long-gone inhabitants of this world had called Valkyries: female human in form, tall, long-limbed and very fast, and the sensing tendrils that splayed back from their heads could easily be mistaken for a wing’d helmet, as their rust-coloured exoskeleton extrusions could look like armour.

They lifted their hatchets – twenty-six of them, as they held one in each hand – when they saw me, and offered the salute. I returned the greeting and waited for the eldest of them (by a matter of seconds, most like) to offer up the obligatory statement, which also served as a disclaimer, thrust all liability for collateral damage upon me and usually offered a chance to surrender.

“Skrymir, renegade, oathbreaker and outcast!”

I inclined my head.

“Called to return eight times; sent for, six times.”

Had it been so many? I’d lost count. Too many years, across too many worlds.

“Surrender your sword!”

I shook my head, and the Valkyries attacked before I could even straighten my neck, running full-tilt at the seawall that bordered the promenade. Six stopped short before the wall and six leaped upon their backs to vault the railing, while the last, the senior, stood behind in a position of command.

I lopped two heads as I fell back, the valkyries concerned momentarily confused as their major sensory apparatus went bouncing back down to the sand. As per their imprinting, they stopped still and if it had not been for the others I could have felled them then. But the others were there, attacking me from all sides as I danced and spun back to the road, my sword meeting the helves of their hatchets, nicking at their fibrous flesh, but their weapons in turn carved long splinters from my body.

If they could surround me, I would be done for, so I fought as I had not fought since the wars. I twisted and leaped and slid under parked cars and over them, around rubbish bins and flagpoles, changing sword-hand, kicking, butting, deploying every trick and secret that I knew.

It was not enough. A skilled and vicious blow caught my knee as I took off another head, and in the second I was down a dozen other blows put paid to my legs. I rolled and writhed away, but it was to no avail. The valkyries pinned me down and began to chop away.

The last memory I have from that expression of myself was of the starry sky, the sound of the surf a deeper counterpoint to the thud of axework, and the blessed smell of fresh salt air, the stench of that particular rotten weed gone forever.

I cannot smell anything where I am now, nor see. I can sense light and shade, the movement of air, the welcome sensation of moisture on my extremities, whether above or below the earth.

Neither can I speak, save in a very limited fashion, the conveyance of some slight meaning without words.

But I am not alone. Palameides is here, and Balan, and Anax too. They have grown tall, and overshadow me, but this will not last. I will grow mighty once more, and one day They will have need of us again . . . and then, as we whisper, tapping with our roots, signalling with the rustle of our leaves, then our hearts will bud new travellers, and we shall go forth to do the bidding of our masters, and perhaps, for as long as we can, we four friends shall once again be free.

THE RAY-GUN:
A LOVE STORY

James Alan Gardner

Sometimes your life can turn on the simplest of things, the most seemingly trival of decisions. Such as, do you happen to be looking down as you pass a certain spot? And if you are, and if you see something on the ground, do you pick it up?

James Alan Gardner has made many fiction sales to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing, Tesseracts, On Spec, Northern Stars
, and other markets. His books include the SF novels
Expendable, Commitment Hour, Vigilant, Hunted, Ascending
, and
Trapped
. His most recent novel is
Radiant
. His short fiction has been collected in
Gravity Wells: Speculative Fiction Stories.

T
HIS IS A
story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, “It shoots rays.”

They are dangerous rays. If they hit you in the arm, it withers. If they hit you in the face, you go blind. If they hit you in the heart, you die. These things must be true, or else it would not be a ray-gun. But it is.

Ray-guns come from space. This one came from the captain of an alien starship passing through our solar system. The ship stopped to scoop up hydrogen from the atmosphere of Jupiter. During this refueling process, the crew mutinied for reasons we cannot comprehend. We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood but we wouldn’t. Our brains only know how to be human.

Although alien thoughts are beyond us, alien actions may be easy to grasp. We can understand the “what” if not the “why”. If we saw what happened inside the alien vessel, we would recognize that the crew tried to take the captain’s ray-gun and kill him.

There was a fight. The ray-gun went off many times. The starship exploded.

All this happened many centuries ago, before telescopes. The people of Earth still wore animal skins. They only knew Jupiter as a dot in the sky. When the starship exploded, the dot got a tiny bit brighter, then returned to normal. No one on Earth noticed – not even the shamans who thought dots in the sky were important.

The ray-gun survived the explosion. A ray-gun must be resilient, or else it is not a ray-gun. The explosion hurled the ray-gun away from Jupiter and out into open space.

After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t burn up.

The ray-gun fell at night during a blizzard. Travelling thousands of miles an hour, the ray-gun plunged deep into snow-covered woods. The snow melted so quickly that it burst into steam.

The blizzard continued, unaffected. Some things can’t be harmed, even by ray-guns.

Unthinking snowflakes drifted down. If they touched the ray-gun’s surface they vaporized, stealing heat from the weapon. Heat also radiated outward, melting snow nearby on the ground. Melt-water flowed into the shallow crater made by the ray-gun’s impact. Water and snow cooled the weapon until all excess temperature had dissipated. A million more snowflakes heaped over the crater, hiding the ray-gun till spring.

In March, the gun was found by a boy named Jack. He was fourteen years old and walking through the woods after school. He walked slowly, brooding about his lack of popularity. Jack despised popular students and had no interest in anything they did. Even so, he envied them. They didn’t appear to be lonely.

Jack wished he had a girlfriend. He wished he were important. He wished he knew what to do with his life. Instead, he walked alone in the woods on the edge of town.

The woods were not wild or isolated. They were crisscrossed with trails made by children playing hide-and-seek. But in spring, the trails were muddy; most people stayed away. Jack soon worried more about how to avoid shoe-sucking mud than about the unfairness of the world. He took wide detours around mucky patches, thrashing through brush that was crisp from winter.

Stalks broke as he passed. Burrs stuck to his jacket. He got farther and farther from the usual paths, hoping he’d find a way out by blundering forward rather than swallowing his pride and retreating.

In this way, Jack reached the spot where the ray-gun had landed. He saw the crater it had made. He found the ray-gun itself.

The gun seized Jack’s attention, but he didn’t know what it was. Its design was too alien to be recognized as a weapon. Its metal was blackened but not black, as if it had once been another colour but had finished that phase of its existence. Its pistol-butt was bulbous, the size of a tennis ball. Its barrel, as long as Jack’s hand, was straight but its surface had dozens of nubs like a briarwood cane. The gun’s trigger was a protruding blister you squeezed till it popped. A hard metal cap could slide over the blister to prevent the gun from firing accidentally, but the safety was off; it had been off for centuries, ever since the fight on the starship.

The alien captain who once owned the weapon might have considered it beautiful, but to human eyes, the gun resembled a dirty wet stick with a lump on one end. Jack might have walked by without giving it a second look if it hadn’t been lying in a scorched crater. But it was.

The crater was two paces across and barren of plant life. The vegetation had burned in the heat of the ray-gun’s fall. Soon enough, new spring growth would sprout, making the crater less obvious. At present though, the ray-gun stood out on the charred earth like a snake in an empty birdbath.

Jack picked up the gun. Though it looked like briarwood, it was cold like metal. It felt solid: not heavy, but substantial. It had the heft of a well-made object. Jack turned the gun in his hands, examining it from every angle. When he looked down the muzzle, he saw a crystal lens cut into hundreds of facets. Jack poked it with his baby-finger, thinking the lens was a piece of glass that someone had jammed inside. He had the idea this might be a toy – perhaps a squirt-gun dropped by a careless child. If so, it had to be the most expensive toy Jack had ever seen. The gun’s barrel and its lens were so perfectly machined that no one could mistake the craftsmanship.

Jack continued to poke at the weapon until the inevitable happened: he pressed the trigger blister. The ray-gun went off.

It might have been fatal, but by chance Jack was holding the gun aimed away from himself. A ray shot out of the gun’s muzzle and blasted through a maple tree ten paces away. The ray made no sound, and although Jack had seen it clearly, he couldn’t say what the ray’s colour had been. It had no colour; it was simply a presence, like wind-chill or gravity. Yet Jack was sure he’d seen a force emanate from the muzzle and strike the tree.

Though the ray can’t be described, its effect was plain. A circular hole appeared in the maple tree’s trunk where bark and wood disintegrated into sizzling plasma. The plasma expanded at high speed and pressure, blowing apart what remained of the surrounding trunk. The ray made no sound, but the explosion did. Shocked chunks of wood and boiling maple sap few outward, obliterating a cross-section of the tree. The lower part of the trunk and the roots were still there; so were the upper part and branches. In between was a gap, filled with hot escaping gases.

The unsupported part of the maple fell. It toppled ponderously backwards. The maple crashed onto the trees behind, its winter-bare branches snagging theirs. To Jack, it seemed that the forest had stopped the maple’s fall, like soldiers catching an injured companion before he hit the ground.

Jack still held the gun. He gazed at it in wonder. His mind couldn’t grasp what had happened.

He didn’t drop the gun in fear. He didn’t try to fire it again. He simply stared.

It was a ray-gun. It would never be anything else.

Jack wondered where the weapon had come from. Had aliens visited these woods? Or was the gun created by a secret government project? Did the gun’s owner want it back? Was he, she or it searching the woods right now?

Jack was tempted to put the gun back into the crater, then run before the owner showed up. But was there really an owner nearby? The crater suggested that the gun had fallen from space. Jack had seen photos of meteor impact craters; this wasn’t exactly the same, but it had a similar look.

Jack turned his eyes upward. He saw a mundane after-school sky. It had no UFOs. Jack felt embarrassed for even looking.

He examined the crater again. If Jack left the gun here, and the owner never retrieved it, sooner or later the weapon would be found by someone else – probably by children playing in the woods. They might shoot each other by accident. If this were an ordinary gun, Jack would never leave it lying in a place like this. He’d take the gun home, tell his parents, and they’d turn it over to the police.

Should he do the same for
this
gun? No. He didn’t want to.

But he didn’t know what he wanted to do instead. Questions buzzed through his mind, starting with, “What should I do?” then moving on to, “Am I in danger?” and, “Do aliens really exist?”

After a while, he found himself wondering, “Exactly how much can the gun blow up?” That question made him smile.

Jack decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the gun – not now and maybe not ever. He would take it home and hide it where it wouldn’t be found, but where it would be available if trouble came. What kind of trouble? Aliens . . . spies . . . supervillains . . . who knew? If ray-guns were real, was anything impossible?

On the walk back home, Jack was so distracted by “What ifs?” that he nearly got hit by a car. He had reached the road that separated the woods from neighbouring houses. Like most roads in that part of Jack’s small town, it didn’t get much traffic. Jack stepped out from the trees and suddenly a sports-car whizzed past him, only two steps away. Jack staggered back; the driver leaned on the horn; Jack hit his shoulder on an oak tree; then the incident was over, except for belated adrenaline.

For a full minute afterward, Jack leaned against the oak and felt his heart pound. As close calls go, this one wasn’t too bad: Jack hadn’t really been near enough to the road to get hit. Still, Jack needed quite a while to calm down. How stupid would it be to die in an accident on the day he’d found something miraculous?

Jack ought to have been watching for trouble. What if the threat had been a bug-eyed monster instead of a car? Jack should have been alert and prepared. In his mind’s eye he imagined the incident again, only this time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a tree. That’s how you’re supposed to cheat death if you’re carrying a ray-gun: with cool heroic fair.

But Jack couldn’t do somersaults. He said to himself,
I’m Peter Parker, not Spider-Man
.

On the other hand, Jack
had
just acquired great power. And great responsibility. Like Peter Parker, Jack had to keep his power secret, for fear of tragic consequences. In Jack’s case, maybe aliens would come for him. Maybe spies or government agents would kidnap him and his family. No matter how farfetched those things seemed, the existence of a ray-gun proved the world wasn’t tame.

That night, Jack debated what to do with the gun. He pictured himself shooting terrorists and gang lords. If he rid the world of scum, pretty girls might admire him. But as soon as Jack imagined himself storming into a terrorist stronghold, he realized he’d get killed almost immediately. The ray-gun provided awesome firepower, but no defense at all. Besides if Jack had found an ordinary gun in the forest, he never would have dreamed of running around murdering bad guys. Why should a ray-gun be different?

But it
was
different. Jack couldn’t put the difference into words, but it was as real as the weapon’s solid weight in his hands. The ray-gun changed everything. A world that contained a ray-gun might also contain flying saucers, beautiful secret agents . . . and heroes.

Heroes who could somersault away from oncoming sports-cars. Heroes who would cope with any danger. Heroes who
deserved
to have a ray-gun.

When he was young, Jack had taken for granted he’d become a hero: brave, skilled and important. Somehow he’d lost that belief. He’d let himself settle for being ordinary. But now he wasn’t ordinary: he had a ray-gun.

He had to live up to it. Jack had to be ready for bug-eyed monsters and giant robots. These were no longer childish daydreams; they were real possibilities in a world where ray-guns existed. Jack could picture himself running through town, blasting aliens and saving the planet.

Such thoughts made sense when Jack held the ray-gun in his hands – as if the gun planted fantasies in his mind. The feel of the gun filled Jack with ambition.

All weapons have a sense of purpose.

Jack practised with the gun as often as he could. To avoid being seen, he rode his bike to a tract of land in the country: twenty acres owned by Jack’s Great-Uncle Ron. No one went there but Jack. Uncle Ron had once intended to build a house on the property, but that had never happened. Now Ron was in a nursing home. Jack’s family intended to sell the land once the old man died, but Ron was healthy for someone in his nineties. Until Uncle Ron’s health ran out, Jack had the place to himself.