The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (90 page)

Until one dusk, I saw the strangest thing picking its way down toward our lagoon.

It looked like a fine and handsome young girl, beautifully formed though very very long in the trunk. She raised her head from drinking and her mane fell back. The top of her face was missing, from right above the eyes. It was terrible to see, someone so young but so deformed. She whinnied in hope and fear, and I ronfled back comfort to her, and then asked her name. But she couldn’t talk.

A horse. I was looking at a full-blooded horse. I felt a chill on my legs and wondered: did they bring the Ancestors back, too?

“Leveza?” I asked it, and it raised and lowered its head, and I thought the creature knew the name. It suddenly took fright, started, and trotted away into the night, as someone else once had.

Then there was a sound like thousands of cards being shuffled, and a score of the creatures emerged from the trees. They bent their long necks down to drink. Their legs worked backward.

A voice said softly, “Is that Akwa?” Against a contrast sky, I saw the silhouette of a monster, two headed, tall. Then I recognized the gun.

She had trained one of the things to carry her, so she would always sit tall and have her hands free. I couldn’t speak. Somewhere beyond the trees carts rumbled.

“Hello, my love,” she said. I was hemorrhaging memory, a continual stream; and all of it about her – how she spoke, how she smelled, how she always went too far, and how I wished that I’d gone with her too all those years ago.

“We’re going south, to find the Bears, get us some of that writing. Want to come?” I still could not speak. “It’s perfectly safe. We’ve bought along something else for them to eat.”

I think that word “safe” was the trigger. I did the giggle of embarrassment and fear. I drank sweet water and then followed. We found writing, and here it is.

CITY OF THE DEAD

Paul McAuley

Here’s another story by Paul McAuley, whose “Incomers” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one he takes us to a distant world that’s littered with the ruins of vanished civilizations to unravel an enigmatic – and deadly – biological mystery.

H
ow M
ARILYN
C
ARTER
first met Ana Datlovskaya, the Queen of the Hive Rats: late one afternoon she was driving through the endless tracts of alien tombs in the City of the Dead, to the west of the little desert town of Joe’s Corner, when she saw a pickup canted on the shoulder of the rough track, its hood up. She pulled over and asked the woman working elbow-deep in the engine of the pickup if she needed any help; the woman said that she believed that she needed a tow truck, this bloody excuse for a pickup she should have sold for scrap long ago had thrown a rod.

“I am Ana Datlovskaya,” she added, and stuck out an oily hand.

“Marilyn Carter,” Marilyn said, and shook Ana Datlovskaya’s hand.

“Our new town constable. That incorrigible gossip Joel Jumonville told me about you,” the woman said. She was somewhere in her sixties, short and broadhipped, dressed in a khaki shirt and blue jeans and hiking boots. Her white hair, roughly cropped, stuck up like ruffled feathers; her shrewd gaze didn’t seem to miss much. “Although he didn’t mention that you have a dog. He is a police dog? I met one once, in Port of Plenty. At the train station. It told me to stand still while its handler searched me for I don’t know what.”

The black Labrador, Jet, was standing in the loadbed of Marilyn’s Bronco, watching them with keen interest.

“He’s just a dog,” Marilyn said. “He doesn’t talk or anything. We can give you a lift into town, if you need one.”

“No doubt Joel told you that I am the crazy old woman who lives with hive rats,” Ana Datlovskaya said to Marilyn, as they drove off towards Joe’s Corner. “It is true I am old, as you can plainly see. And it’s true also that I study hive rats. But I am not crazy. In fact, I am the only sane person in this desert. Everyone else hopes to make fortune by finding treasure, or by swindling people looking for treasure.
That
is craziness, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“I don’t mind in the least, because that’s not why I’m here,” Marilyn said.

She’d become town constable by accident. She’d stopped for the night in Joe’s Corner and had been sitting in its roadhouse, minding her own business, nursing a beer and half-listening to the house band blast out some twentieth-century industrial blues, when a big man a few stools down took exception to something the bartender said and tried to haul him over the counter by his beard. Marilyn intervened and put the big guy on the floor, and the owner of the roadhouse, Joel Jumonville, had given her a steak dinner on the house. Joel was an ex-astronaut who like Marilyn had fought in World War Three. He also owned two of the little town’s motels, ran its radio station and its web site, and was, more by default than democracy, its mayor. He and Marilyn got drunk together and told war stories, and by the end of the evening she’d shaken hands on a contract to serve as town constable for one year, replacing a guy who’d quit when a scrap of plastic he’d dug up in one of the tombs had turned out to be a room temperature superconductor.

It wasn’t exactly how she’d imagined her life would turn out when she’d won a lottery place on one of the arks.

This was in the heady years immediately after the Jackaroo had arrived in the aftermath of World War Three, and had given the survivors a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking fifteen M-class red dwarf stars in exchange for rights to the rest of the Solar System; a brief, anarchic age of temporary kingdoms, squabbling emirates, and gloriously foolish attempts at building every kind of Utopia; an age of exploration, heroic ambition, and low farce. Like every other lottery winner, Marilyn had imagined a fresh start, every kind of exotic adventure, but after she’d arrived in Port of Plenty, on the planet of first Foot, short of cash and knowing no one, she’d ended up working for a security firm, which is what she’d been doing before she left Earth. She guarded the mansions and compounds of the city’s rich, rode as bodyguard for their wives and children. Some had earned vast fortunes founded on novel principles of physics or mathematics wrested from discarded alien machineries; others were gangsters feeding on the underbelly of Port of Plenty’s fast and loose economy. Marilyn’s last job had been with an Albanian involved in all kinds of dubious property deals; after he’d been killed by a car bomb, she’d had to get out of Port of Plenty in a hurry because his family suspected that the assassination had been an inside job. She’d drifted west along the coast of first Foot’s single continent and ended up in Joe’s Corner, but, as she told Ana Datlovskaya, she didn’t plan to stay.

“When the year’s up I’m moving on. I have a whole new world to explore. And plenty more besides.”

“Ha. If I had a euro for every time I’d heard that from people who thought they were passing through but couldn’t find a reason to leave,” Ana Datlovskaya said, “I’d be riding around the desert in style, instead of nursing that broken-down donkey of a pickup.”

Ana was a biologist who’d moved out to the western desert to study hive rats, supporting her research with her savings and the sale of odd little figurines. Like Marilyn, she was originally from London, England, but their sex and nationality were about all they had in common – Marilyn had been born and raised in Streatham, her mother a nurse and her father a driver on the Underground, while Ana’s parents had been Russian exiles, poets who’d escaped Stalin’s postwar purges and had set up residence in Hampstead. Still, the two women quickly became friends. Ana was a prominent member of Joe’s Corner’s extensive cast of eccentrics, but she was also an exemplar of the legion of stout-hearted, sensible, and completely fearless women who before World War Three had explored and done every kind of good work in every corner of the globe. Marilyn had met several of these doughty heroines during her service in the army and had admired them all. The evening she gave Ana a lift into town they had a fine time in the roadhouse, swapping war stories and reminiscing about London and how they’d survived World War Three, and on her next free day Marilyn was more than happy to make a fifty kilometre trip beyond the northern edge of the City of the Dead to visit Ana’s desert camp.

By then, Joel Jumonville had told Marilyn a fair number of tall tales about the Queen of the Hive Rats. According to him, the old woman had once shot a bandit who’d tried to rob her, and cut up his body and fed it to her hive rats. Also, that the little figurines she sold to support herself, found nowhere else in the City of the Dead, were rumoured to come from the hold of an ancient spaceship she’d uncovered, she kept a tame tigon she’d raised from a kitten, and she’d learned how to enter hive rat gardens without being immediately attacked and killed. Joel was an inveterate gossip and an accomplished fabulist, so Marilyn also took his stories with large pinches of salt, but when she pulled up by Ana’s shack, on a bench terrace cut into a stony ridge that overlooked a broad arroyo, she was amazed to see the old woman pottering about the edge of a hive rat garden. The garden stretched away down the arroyo, crowded with the tall yellow blades of century plants. Columns of hardened mud that Marilyn later learned were ventilation chambers stood here and there, hive rat sentries perched on their hind legs at intervals along the perimeter, and there was a big mound with a hole in its flat top that no doubt led to the heart of the nest.

Jet went crazy over the scent of the hive rats. By the time Marilyn had calmed him down, Ana was climbing the path to her shack, cheerfully helloing them. “How nice to see you, my dear. And your lovely dog. Did you by any chance bring any tea? I ran out two days ago.”

Sitting on plastic chairs under a canvas awning that cracked and boomed in the hot breeze, they made do with stale instant coffee and flat biscuits, tasting exactly like burnt toast, that Ana had baked using flour ground from cactus tree bark. There wasn’t any trick to walking amongst the hive rats, the old woman told Marilyn. She had worked out the system of pheromonal signals that governed much of their cooperative behaviour, and wore a dab of scent that suppressed secretion of alarm and aggression pheromones by sentries and soldiers, so that the hive rats accepted her as one of their own.

Ana talked a long streak about hive rat biology, explaining how their nests were organised in different castes like ants or bees, how they made their gardens. This garden was the largest known, Ana said, and it was unique not only because it was a monoculture of century plants, but because there was an elaborate system of irrigation ditches and dykes scratched across the arroyo floor. She showed Marilyn views from camera feeds she’d installed in the kilometres of tunnels and shafts and chambers of the nest beneath the garden: workers gnawing at the car-sized tuber of a century plant; endless processions of workers toiling up from the deep aquifer, their bellies swollen with water; one of the fungal gardens that processed the hive rats’ waste; a chamber in which a hive rat queen, fed and groomed by workers one-tenth her size, extruded blind, squirming pups with machine-like regularity. Unlike other nests, this one housed many queens, Ana said; it had never split into daughter colonies.

“When I know you better, perhaps I’ll tell you why. But enough of my work. Tell me about the world.”

Marilyn gave Ana the latest local gossip, and ended up promising to do a supply run for the old woman, who said that she would be grateful not to have to bother with dealing with other people: she was far too busy with her research, which was at a very interesting stage. So Marilyn took a dozen little figurines back to Joe’s Corner, smoothly knotted shapes fashioned from some kind of resin that when handled induced a pleasant, dreamy sensation that reminded her of her habit, when she’d been eleven or twelve, of standing at the bathroom sink with her hands up to the wrists in warm water, staring into the fogged mirror, wondering what she would become when she grew up. She sold them to the Nigerian assayer in Joe’s Corner, bought supplies and picked up several packages from an electronics supplier along with the rest of Ana’s mail, and on her next free day took everything out to the old woman’s camp.

After a couple of supply runs, Ana gave Marilyn a tiny brown bottle containing a couple of millilitres of oily suppressor scent, telling her that she could use it to check out tombs that happened to be in the middle of hive rat gardens. “Foolish people try to poison or smoke them out. And they usually get bitten badly because the rats are smarter than most people think. They know how to avoid poison, and their nests are extremely well-ventilated. But if you wear just a dab of suppressor, my dear, you can walk right into those tombs, all of them untouched by looters, and pick up any treasures you might find.”

Marilyn promised she’d give it a try, but the bottle ended up unopened in the junk-filled glove compartment of her Bronco. For one thing, she wasn’t convinced that it would work, and she knew that you could die from infection with flesh-eating bacteria after a single hive rat bite. For another, she didn’t really need to supplement her income from sale of scraps looted from tombs. Her salary as town constable was about a quarter of what she’d received for guarding the late unlamented Albanian businessman, but she had a rent-free room in the Westward Ho! motel and ate for free in Joel’s roadhouse most nights, and for the first time in her life she was able to put a little money by for a rainy day.

It occurred to her around this time that she was happy. She had a job she liked, and she liked most of the people in Joe’s Corner and could tolerate the rest, and she liked the desert, too. When she wasn’t visiting Ana Datlovskaya, she spent most of her free time pottering around the tombs of the City of the Dead, exploring the salt-flats and arroyos and low, gullied hills, learning about the patchwork desert ecology, plants and animals native to first Foot and alien species imported from other worlds by previous tenant races. Camping out in the desert at night, she’d lie in her sleeping bag and look up at the rigid pattens of alien constellations, the two swift moons, the luminous milk of the Phoenix nebula sprawled across the eastern horizon. Earth was about two thousand light years beyond the nebula: the wormhole network linked only fifteen stars, but it spanned the Sagittarius arm of the Galaxy. How strange and wonderful that she should be here, so far from Earth. On an alien world twice the size of Earth, where things weighed half as much again, and the day was a shade over twenty hours long. In a desert full of the tombs of a long-vanished alien race . . .

One day, Marilyn was out at the northern edge of the City of the Dead, sitting on a flat boulder on a low ridge and eating her lunch, when Jet raised up and trotted smartly to the edge of the ridge and began to bark. A few moments later, Marilyn heard the noise of a vehicle off in the distance. She finished what was left of her banana in two quick bites, walked over to where her dog stood, and looked out across the dry playa towards distant hills hazed by dusty air and shimmering heat. The hummocks of ancient tombs in ragged lines amongst drifts of sand and rocks; silvery clouds of saltbush and tall clumps of cactus trees; the green oases of hive rat gardens. The nearest garden was only a kilometre away; Marilyn could see the cat-sized, pinkly naked sentries perched upright amongst its piecework plantings. Beyond it, a thin line of dust boiled up, dragged by a black Range Rover. As it drew nearer, the hive rat sentries started drumming with their feet, a faint pattering that started Jet barking. Soldiers popped up from the mound in the centre of the garden, two or three times the size of the sentries, armoured with scales and armed with recurved claws and strong jaws that could bite through a man’s wrist, running towards the Range Rover as it drove straight across the garden. It ploughed through them, leaving some dead and dying and the rest chasing its dusty wake all the way to the garden’s boundary, where they tumbled to a halt and stared after it as it headed up a bare apron of rock towards the ridge.