The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (39 page)

“When did you find out she was using an aeai assistant?”

“Oh, at once sir. These things are obvious to us. And if you’ll forgive the parlance, we don’t waste time. Fascination at the first nanosecond. Thereafter, well, as you saw on the unfortunate scene from
Town and Country
, we scripted you.”

“So we thought you were guiding us . . .”

“When it was you who were our go-betweens, yes.”

“So what happens now?” Jasbir slaps his hands on his thighs.

“We are meshing at a very high level. I can only catch hints and shadows of it, but I feel a new aeai is being born, on a level far beyond either of us, or any of our co-characters. Is this a birth? I don’t know, but how can I convey to you the tremendous, rushing excitement I feel?”

“I meant me.”

“I’m sorry sir. Of course you did. I am quite, quite dizzy with it all. If I might make one observation; there’s truth in what your parents say. First the marriage, then the love. Love grows in the thing you see every day.”

Thieving macaques dart around Jasbir’s legs and pluck at the creases of his pants. Midnight metro, the last train home. The few late-night passengers observe a quarantine of mutual solitude. The djinns of unexplained wind that haunt subway systems send litter spiralling across the platform. The tunnel focuses distant shunts and clanks, uncanny at this zero hour. There should be someone around at the phatphat stand. If not he’ll walk. It doesn’t matter.

He met her at a fashionable bar all leather and darkened glass in an international downtown hotel. She looked wonderful. The simple act of her stirring sugar into coffee tore his heart in two.

“When did you find out?”

“Devashri Didi told me.”

“Devashri Didi.”

“And yours?”

“Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness. A very proper, old fashioned Rajput gent. He always called me sir; right up to the end. My house-mate made him. He works in character design on
Town and Country
.”

“My older sister works in PR the meta-soap department at Jazhay. She got one of the actor designers to put Devashri Didi together.” Jasbir has always found the idea of artificial actors believing they played equally artificial roles head-frying. Then he found aeai love.

“Is she married? Your older sister, I mean.”

“Blissfully. And children.”

“Well, I hope our aeais are very happy together.” Jasbir raised a glass. Shulka lifted her coffee cup. She wasn’t a drinker. She didn’t like alcohol, Devashri Didi had told her it looked good for the Begum Jaitly’s modern shaadi.

“My little quiz?” Jasbir asked.

“Devashri Didi gave me the answers you were expecting. She’d told me it was a standard ploy, personality quizzes and psychic tests.”

“And the Sanskrit?”

“Can’t speak a word.”

Jasbir laughed honestly.

“The personal spiritual journey?”

“I’m a strictly material girl. Devashri Didi said . . .”

“. . . I’d be impressed if I thought you had a deep spiritual dimension. I’m not a history buff either. And
An Eligible Boy
?”

“That unreadable tripe?”

“Me neither.”

“Is there anything true about either of us?”

“One thing,” Jasbir said. “I can tango.”

Her surprise, breaking into a delighted smile, was also true. Then she folded it away.

“Was there ever any chance?” Jasbir asked.

“Why did you have at ask that? We could have just admitted that we were both playing games and shaken hands and laughed and left it at that. Jasbir, would it help if I told you that I wasn’t even looking? I was trying the system out. It’s different for suitable girls. I’ve got a plan.”

“Oh,” said Jasbir.

“You did ask and we agreed, right at the start tonight, no more pretence.” She turned her coffee cup so that the handle faced right and laid her spoon neatly in the saucer. “I have to go now.” She snapped her bag shut and stood up. Don’t walk away, Jasbir said in his silent Master of Grooming, Grace and Gentlemanliness voice. She walked away.

“And Jasbir.”

“What?”

“You’re a lovely man, but this was not a date.”

A monkey takes a liberty too far, plucking at Jasbir’s shin. Jasbir’s kick connects and sends it shrieking and cursing across the platform.
Sorry monkey. It wasn’t you
. Booms rattle up the subway tube; gusting hot air and the smell of electricity herald the arrival of the last metro. As the lights swing around the curve in the tunnel, Jasbir imagines how it would be to step out and drop in front of it. The game would be over. Deependra has it easy. Indefinite sick leave, civil service counselling and pharma. But for Jasbir there is no end to it and he is so so tired of playing. Then the train slams past him in a shout of blue and silver and yellow light, slams him back into himself. He sees his face reflected in the glass, his teeth still divinely white. Jasbir shakes his head and smiles and instead steps through the opening door.

It is as he suspected. The last phatphat has gone home for the night from the rank at Barwala metro station. It’s four kays along the pitted, flaking roads to Acacia Bungalow Colony behind its gates and walls. Under an hour’s walk. Why not? The night is warm, he’s nothing better to do and he might yet pull a passing cab. Jasbir steps out. After half an hour a last, patrolling phatphat passes on the other side of the road. It flashes its light and pulls around to some in beside him. Jasbir waves it on. He is enjoying the night and the melancholy. There are stars up there, beyond the golden airglow of great Delhi.

Light spills through the french windows from the verandah into the dark living room. Sujay is at work still. In four kilometres Jasbir has generated a sweat. He ducks into the shower, closes his eyes in bliss as the jets of water hit him. Let it run let it run let it run he doesn’t care how much he wastes, how much it costs, how badly the villagers need it for their crops.
Wash the old tired dirt from me.

A scratch at the door. Does Jasbir hear the mumble of a voice? He shuts off the shower.

“Sujay?”

“I’ve, ah, left you tea.”

“Oh, thank you.”

There’s silence but Jasbir knows Sujay hasn’t gone.

“Ahm, just to say that I have always . . . I will . . . always. Always . . .” Jasbir holds his breath, water running down his body and dripping on to the shower tray. “I’ll always be here for you.”

Jasbir wraps a towel around his waist, opens the bathroom door and lifts the tea.

Presently Latin music thunders out from the brightly lit windows of Number 27 Acacia Bungalows. Lights go on up and down the close. Mrs Prasad beats her shoe on the wall and begins to wail. The tango begins.

SHINING ARMOUR

Dominic Green

British writer Dominic Green’s output has to date been confined almost entirely to the pages of
Interzone
, but he’s appeared there a lot, selling them eighteen stories in the last few years. The exciting story that follows, though, about a retired warrior reluctantly taking to arms again in the face of extreme need, appeared not in
Interzone
but in
The Solaris Book of Science Fiction 2
.

Green lives in Northampton, England, where he works in information technology and teaches kung fu part time. He has a website at homepage.ntlworld.com/lumpylomax, where the text of several unpublished novels and short stories can be found.

I
T WAS CLOSE
to dawn. The sun was a sliver of brilliance just visible over the mass of canyons on the western horizon. There was no reason why the direction the sun rose in should not be arbitrarily defined as East; the only reason why the sun rose in the West on this planet was that, if looked at from the same galactic direction as Earth, it span retrograde. Even at this number of light years’ distance, men still had an apron-string connecting them to their homeworld.

The old man was still doing his exercises.

The boy didn’t realize why the exercises had to take so long. They didn’t look hard to do, although when he tried to copy them, the old man laughed as if he were doing them in the most ridiculous manner possible. The old man used a sword while he did the exercises, but not even a real one – it had no edge, and was made of aluminium which could not even be made to take one. He held the sword-stick ridiculously, not even using his whole hand most of the time; usually he held it with only his middle finger and forefinger, some of the time with only the little and ring fingers. Both of his hands, in fact, were held in that peculiar crab claw, with the fingers separated.

Finally, though, there were signs that the old man was coming to the end of the set, stabbing around him to right and left with his stick. The boy now had something to do. Gradually, he scurried out among the rusting steel shells, carrying the basket of fruit. It was, of course, spoiled fruit, fruit the old man would not have been able to sell at market. There would have been no point in wasting saleable produce.

The boy arranged a marrow to the west, a pineapple to the east, a durian to the north, and a big juicy watermelon to the south. Each piece of fruit sat on its own square of rice paper. He was careful to leave the empty basket in a spot where it would not interfere with the old man’s movements. Then, just as his elder and better was turning into his final movement, facing into the sun as it blazed up into the sky, the boy ran to the long half-buried shelf the old man called the dead hulk’s ‘glacis plate,’ and unwrapped the Real Sword.

The Real Sword was taller than he was. He had been instructed to unwrap it carefully. The old man had illustrated why by dropping a playing card onto the blade. The card had stuck fast, its weight driving the blade a good half centimetre into it.

The old man bowed to the sun – why? Did it ever bow back? – walked over to the sword, nodded stiffly to the boy, and picked up the weapon. He executed a few practice cuts and parries, jumping backwards and forwards across the sand. This was more exciting – he was moving quickly now, with a sword of spring steel.

Then, he became almost motionless, the sword whipped up into a position of readiness up above his head. As always, he was directly between all four pieces of fruit. Sometimes there were five pieces of fruit, sometimes six or seven.

The sword moved up and down, one, two, three, four times, the old man lashing out at all quarters, turning on his heel on the sand. There were four soft tearing sounds, but no sparks or sounds of metal hitting metal.

The old man stood finally upright, ready to slide the sword back into a nonexistent scabbard. He had lost the scabbard somehow years ago, nobody seemed to know how – nobody could convince him to shell out the money for a new one.

He walked over to inspect the fruit. All four pieces now lay in two pieces, making eight pieces. In all four cases, the cut had been deep enough to completely halve the fruit right down to the rind. In not one case had the rice paper underneath been touched. In some cases, the old man’s activities had cut the rot clean out of the fruit. The boy gathered up the good pieces, which would now be breakfast.

The rotten pieces he slung away into the desert.

When they walked back toward the village, the General Alarm was sounding. This, the boy knew, could be very bad, as no alarm practice was scheduled for today.

General Alarm could mean that another boy like him had fallen down a melt-hole like a damned fool and the whole village was out looking for his corpsicle. Or it could mean that a flash flood was on the way and every homeowner had to rush out and bolt the streamliner onto the north end of his habitat, then rush back in and dog all the hatches. It might mean a flare had been reported, and everyone except Mad Farmer Bob who carried on digging his ditches in all weathers despite skin cancer and radiation alopoecia had to go underground till the All Clear.

But it was clear, when they reached the outskirts of the village, that this was none of these things. There was a personal conveyor in the Civic Square, with its green lights flashing to indicate it had been set to automatic guidance. Someone had used towing cable to secure three long irregular wet red shapes to the back of it, shapes the grown-ups would not let him see. But he had a horrible idea what they were, or what they had once been. Dragging your enemy behind a conveyor was a
badabing-badaboum
thing to do, and normally the boys in the village would have run and jostled to see such a marvellous sight. But when the men who had been dragged, probably alive, were Mr d’Souza, big friendly Mr d’Souza who had three hairy Irish wolfhounds, and Mr Bamigboye, who told rude jokes about naked ladies, and even Mr Chundi, who told kids to get off his property – then things did not seem so exciting.

Mr d’Souza, Mr Bamigboye, and Mr Chundi were Town Councillors, and they had gone up to the Big City to argue with the authorities about the mining site. Although there was nothing there now but a few spray-painted rocks and prospectors’ transponders, the boy knew that some Big City men had found rocks they called Radioactives upriver. But the boy’s father said the Big City men were too lazy to dig the rocks out of the ground using shovels and the Honest Sweat Of Their Brow. Instead, they planned to build a sifting plant downstream of the village, and set off bombs also made of Radioactives in the regolith upstream. A handsome stream of Radioactives would thus flow downriver to the sifting plant, but the village’s water would be poisoned. The villagers had all been offered what were described as ‘generous offers’ to leave by the Big City men; but the Town Councillors had voted to stay. The Big City men had been rumoured to be hiring a top Persuasion Consultancy to deal with the situation. Now it seemed that the rumours had come true.

“We ought to take a few guns into town and sort out those City folk,” said old father Magnusson, who thought everyone didn’t know he ordered sex pheromones and illegal subliminal messaging software through the mail from Big City, but Aunt Raisa knew. Now no woman in town would either visit him or call him on the videophone.

“How many guns do we have? And small-bore ones, too, for seeing off interlopers, not armour-piercing stuff. The combine bosses will be protected by men in armour, ten feet tall, with magnetic accelerators that shoot off a million rounds through you POW-POW-POW before you pop your first round off! You are maximally insane.” This was old mother Tho. Despite her insulting mode of communication, many of the older and wiser heads in the square were nodding their agreement.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Mother Murdo. “Magnetic accelerators are illegal.”

“Anything illegal is legal if nobody is prepared to enforce the law. Have you not been up to the City recently? The mining combines have been making their own militaria for months. After they had to start making their own machine tools and coining their own money, weapons were the logical next step.”

“But we are still citizens of the Commonwealth of Man,” said father Magnusson, drawing himself up to his full one hundred and thirty-five centimetres, “and an attack on us would be an attack on the Commonwealth itself.”

“Pshaw! The Commonwealth doesn’t even bother to send out ships to collect taxes any longer,” said mother Tho. “And when the taxman doesn’t call, you
know
the government is in disrepair.”

There were slow nods of appreciation from the crowd, most of whom were secretly glad that the tribute ships had not visited for so many years, but all of whom were alarmed at the prospect that those ships might have funded services whose unavailability might now kill the village.

“Well, in any case,” said father Magnusson, “if they dare to come up
here
and attempt their person-dragging activities, the State will repel them instantly.”

Mother Tho was unimpressed. “We must be pragmatic,” she said. “The Guardian has not moved for sixty Good Old Original Standard Years. Not since the last Barbarian incursion.”

Father Magnusson smacked his lips stolidly. “But I remember,” he said, “when it last moved. And it operated most satisfactorily on that occasion. The Barbarians’ ships filled the skies like locusts, but our Guardian was equal to them.”

Mother Tho looked up into the sky, where the silhouette of the Guardian took a huge bite out of the sunrise. “Father, you are only one of perhaps two or three people still alive who remember the Guardian moving. And it is a machine, and machines rust, corrode, and biodegrade.”

“The Guardian was built to last forever.”

“But a Guardian also needs an operator. And where is ours?”

The old man put a hand upon the boy’s shoulder, and moved away among the buildings before the conversation grew more heated.

“There are foreigners in the village,” said the boy’s mother, folding clothes with infinite precision. “Men from the mining company. They are asking for Khan by name, and you know why, old man.”

The old man tucked the sword away in a crevice by the side of the atmosphere detoxifier. “Khan can look after himself.”

“They had guns, by all accounts, and you know he can’t.” The boy’s mother ran the iron over a fresh set of clothes. “Khan is fat and slow and has long since ceased to be any use in a fight. It isn’t fair for him to be put through this.” She looked up at the old man. “Something must be done.”

The old man looked away. “They have heard the name Khan, heard that this Khan is the man who is our Guardian’s operator. They perhaps mean harm. I will radio to Khan in the clear to stay out fixing watercourses and not return home until these men have gone. They will be listening, of course. This will inform them that their task is pointless, and then maybe they will leave.”

“Or they will go out and search the watercourses till they find him.”

“Khan knows the watercourses, and is more resourceful than you give him credit for. They will not find him.”

“Khan is not as young as he once was. It will be cold tonight. You think that just because people are not as old as you, they are striplings who can accomplish anything.”

“I think nothing of the sort, woman. Now boil me some water. I have a revitalizing tea to prepare for Mother Murdo’s
fin-de-siècle ennui
.”

Khan’s mother gathered up the heap of ironing and made her way out of the kitchen past the floor maintenance robot. “Boil your own water, and lower your underparts into it.”

In order to defuse a family quarrel, the boy walked across the kitchen and turned on the water heater himself. He could not, however, meet the old man’s eyes. Khan was, after all, his father.

The next morning, underneath the Guardian’s metal legs, there was a gaggle of young men jostling for position.

“
I
will save the village!”

“You are wrong! It will be I!”

“No, I!”

The boy, who was running a flask of tea to Mother Murdo, saw Mother Tho rap three of them on the occiput with her walnut-wood staff in quick succession.

“Fools! Loblollies! What would you do, if you were even able to gain access to the Guardian’s control cabin?” She pointed upward with her polyethylene ferrule at the ladder that led up the Guardian’s right leg, with a dizzying number of rungs, up to the tiny hatch in its Under Bridge Area where a normal person’s back body would be. Once, the boy had climbed all those rungs and touched the hatch with his hand for a bet, before being dragged down by his father, who told him not to tamper with Commonwealth property. His father had had hair then, and much of it had been dark.

“If I gained access,” swaggered the most audacious of the three, “I would march to the Big City and trample the mining syndicate buildings beneath boots of iron.” And he blew kisses to those girls of marriageable age who had gathered to watch.