The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (97 page)

“Why did they send you out here? Why didn’t they
kill
you?”

“I expect they were afraid.” Hilde began to laugh, and cry. “They were afraid of what I’d do if they tried to kill me, so they just sent me away, a long, long way away. What does it matter? We are
dead
, Ruth. You are dead, I am dead, the rest is a fairytale. What does it matter if I’m something forbidden? Something that should never have breathed?”

Forbidden, forbidden . . . I held out my arms, I was crying too.

Embrace, close as you can. Everything’s falling apart, flesh and bone, the ceramic that yields like soft metal, the slippery touch of satin, all vanishing —

As if they never were.

VI

Straight to orientation, then. There were no guards, only the Panhandle system’s bots, but we walked without protest along a drab greenish corridor to the Transit Chamber. We lay down, a hundred of us at least, in the capsules that looked like coffins, our gravegoods no more than neural patterns, speed-burned into our bewildered brains. I was fully conscious. What happened to
orientation
? The sleeve closed over me, and I suddenly realized there was no reprieve, this was it. The end.

I woke and lay perfectly still. I didn’t want to try and move because I didn’t want to know that I was paralysed, buried alive, conscious but dead.
Oh I could be bounded in a walnut shell and count myself the king of infinite space
. I had not asked for a dream, but a moment since I had been in Hilde’s arms. Maybe orientation hasn’t begun yet, I thought, cravenly. The surface I was lying on did not yield like the ceramic fibre of the capsule, there was cool air flowing over my face and light on my eyelids. I opened my eyes and saw the grass: something very like blades of bluish, pasture grass, about twenty centimetres high, stirred by a light breeze.

The resurrected sat up, all around me: like little figures in a religious picture from Mediaeval Europe. The team was mainly together, but we were surrounded by a sea of bodies, mostly women, some men. A whole shipload, newly arrived at Botany Bay. The romance of my dream of the crossing was still with me, every detail in my grasp; but already fading, as dreams do. I saw the captain’s armband on my sleeve. And Hilde was beside me. I remembered that Kitty had said teams like ours were
linked
. Teams like ours: identified by the system as the leaders in the consensus. I’d known what was going on, while I was in the dream, but I hadn’t believed it. I stared at the girl with the cinnamon braids, the shape-changer, the wild card, my lover.

If I’m the captain of this motley crew, I thought, I wonder who
you
are . . .

THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM

Daryl Gregory

New writer Daryl Gregory has made sales to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
MIT Technology Review
,
Eclipse Two
,
Amazing
, and elsewhere. His stories “Second Person, Present Tense” and “Damascus” were in our nineteenth and twentieth annual collections, respectively. He lives in State College, Pennsylvania.

Here he takes us to an embattled country, where a strange, almost surreal war is being fought – one, however, with very real consequences for the people who live there.

T
HE 22ND
I
NVASION
of Trovenia began with a streak of scarlet against a grey sky fast as the flick of a paintbrush. The red blur zipped across the length of the island, moving west to east, and shot out to sea. The sonic boom a moment later scattered the birds that wheeled above the fish processing plant and sent them squealing and plummeting.

Elena said, “Was that – it was, wasn’t it?”

“You’ve never seen a U-Man, Elena?” Jürgo said.

“Not in person.” At nineteen, Elena Pendareva was the youngest of the crew by at least two decades, and the only female. She and the other five members of the heavy plate welding unit were perched 110 meters in the air, taking their lunch upon the great steel shoulder of the Slaybot Prime. The giant robot, latest in a long series of ultimate weapons, was unfinished, its unpainted skin speckled with bird shit, its chest turrets empty, the open dome of its head covered only by a tarp.

It had been Jürgo’s idea to ride up the gantry for lunch. They had plenty of time: for the fifth day in a row, steel plate for the Slaybot’s skin had failed to arrive from the foundry, and the welding crew had nothing to do but clean their equipment and play cards until the guards let them go home.

It was a good day for a picnic. An unseasonably warm spring wind blew in from the docks, carrying the smell of the sea only slightly tainted by odours of diesel fuel and fish guts. From the giant’s shoulder the crew looked down on the entire capital, from the port and industrial sector below them, to the old city in the west and the rows of grey apartment buildings rising up beyond. The only structures higher than their perch were Castle Grimm’s black spires, carved out of the sides of Mount Kriegstahl, and the peak of the mountain itself.

“You know what you must do, Elena,” Verner said with mock sincerity. He was the oldest in the group, a veteran mechaneer whose body was more metal than flesh. “Your first übermensch, you must make a wish.”

Elena said, “Is ‘Oh shit,’ a wish?”

Verner pivoted on his rubber-tipped stump to follow her gaze. The figure in red had turned about over the eastern sea, and was streaking back toward the island. Sunlight glinted on something long and metallic in its hands.

The UM dove straight toward them.

There was nowhere to hide. The crew sat on a naked shelf of metal between the gantry and the sheer profile of the robot’s head. Elena threw herself flat and spread her arms on the metal surface, willing herself to stick.

Nobody else moved. The men were all veterans, former zoomandos and mechaneers and castle guards. They’d seen dozens of U-Men, fought them even. Elena didn’t know if they were unafraid or simply too old to care much for their skin.

The UM shot past with a whoosh, making the steel shiver beneath her. She looked up in time to take in a flash of metal, a crimson cape, black boots – and then the figure crashed
through
the wall of Castle Grimm. Masonry and dust exploded into the air.

“Lunch break,” Jürgo said in his Estonian accent, “is over.”

Toolboxes slammed, paper sacks took to the wind. Elena got to her feet. Jürgo picked up his lunch pail with one clawed foot, spread his patchy, soot-stained wings, and leaned over the side, considering. His arms and neck were skinny as always, but in the past few years he’d grown a beer gut.

Elena said, “Jürgo, can you still fly?”

“Of course,” he said. He hooked his pail to his belt and backed away from the edge. “However, I don’t believe I’m authorized for this air space.”

The rest of the crew had already crowded into the gantry elevator. Elena and Jürgo pressed inside and the cage began to slowly descend, rattling and shrieking.

“What’s it about this time, you think?” Verner said, clockwork lungs wheezing. “Old Rivet Head kidnap one of their women?” Only the oldest veterans could get away with insulting Lord Grimm in mixed company. Verner had survived at least four invasions that she knew of. His loyalty to Trovenia was assumed to go beyond patriotism into something like ownership.

Guntis, a grey, pebble-skinned amphibian of Latvian descent, said, “I fought this girlie with a sword once, Energy Lady —”

“
Power Woman
,” Elena said in English. She’d read the
Illustrated Biography of Lord Grimm
to her little brother dozens of times before he learned to read it himself. The Lord’s most significant adversaries were all listed in the appendix, in multiple languages.

“That’s the one,
Par-wer Woh-man
,” Guntis said, imitating her. “She had enormous —”

“Abilities,” Jürgo said pointedly. Jürgo had been a friend of Elena’s father, and often played the protective uncle.

“I think he meant to say ‘tits’,” Elena said. Several of the men laughed.

“No! Jürgo is right,” Guntis said. “They were more than breasts. They had
talents
. I think one of them spoke to me.”

The elevator clanged down on the concrete pad and the crew followed Jürgo into the long shed of the 3000 line. The factory floor was emptying. Workers pulled on coats, joking and laughing as if departing on holiday.

Jürgo pulled aside a man and asked him what was going on. “The guards have run away!” the man said happily. “Off to fight the übermensch!”

“So what’s it going to be, boss?” Guntis said. “Stay or go?”

Jürgo scratched at the cement floor, thinking. Half-assembled Slaybot 3000’s, five-meter-tall cousins to the colossal Prime, dangled from hooks all along the assembly line, wires spilling from their chests, legs missing. The factory was well behind its quota for the month. As well as for the quarter, year, and quinquennium. Circuit boards and batteries were in particularly short supply, but tools and equipment vanished daily. Especially scarce were acetylene tanks, a home-heating accessory for the very cold and the very stupid.

Jürgo finally shook his feathered head and said, “Nothing we can do here. Let’s go home and hide under our beds.”

“And in our bottles,” Verner said.

Elena waved good-bye and walked toward the women’s changing rooms to empty her locker.

A block from her apartment she heard Mr Bojars singing out, “Guh-RATE day for sausa-JEZ! Izza GREAT day for SAW-sages!” The mechaneer veteran was parked at his permanent spot at the corner of Glorious Victory Street and Infinite Progress Avenue, in the shadow of the statue of Grimm Triumphant. He saw her crossing the intersection and shouted, “My beautiful Elena! A fat bratwurst to go with that bread, maybe. Perfect for a celebration!”

“No thank you, Mr Bojars.” She hoisted the bag of groceries onto her hip and shuffled the welder’s helmet to her other arm. “You know we’ve been invaded, don’t you?”

The man laughed heartily. “The trap is sprung! The crab is in the basket!” He wore the same clothes he wore every day, a black nylon ski hat and a green, grease-stained parka decorated at the breast with three medals from his years in the motorized cavalry. The coat hung down to cover where his flesh ended and his motorcycle body began.

“Don’t you worry about Lord Grimm,” he said. “He can handle any American muscle-head stupid enough to enter his lair. Especially the Red Meteor.”

“It was Most Excellent Man,” Elena said, using the Trovenian translation of his name. “I saw the Staff of Mightiness in his hand, or whatever he calls it.”

“Even better! The man’s an idiot. A U-Moron.”

“He’s defeated Lord Grimm several times,” Elena said. “So I hear.”

“And Lord Grimm has been declared dead a dozen times! You can’t believe the underground newspapers, Elena. You’re not reading that trash, are you?”

“You know I’m not political, Mr Bojars.”

“Good for you. This Excellent Man, let me tell you something about – yes sir? Great day for a sausage.” He turned his attention to the customer and Elena quickly wished him luck and slipped away before he could begin another story.

The small lobby of her apartment building smelled like burnt plastic and cooking grease. She climbed the cement stairs to the third floor. As usual the door to her apartment was wide open, as was the door to Mr Fishman’s apartment across the hall. Staticky television laughter and applause carried down the hallway: It sounded like
Mr Sascha’s Celebrity Polka Fun-Time
. Not even an invasion could pre-empt Mr Sascha.

She knocked on the frame of his door. “Mr Fishman,” she called loudly. He’d never revealed his real name. “Mr Fishman, would you like to come to dinner tonight?”

There was no answer except for the blast of the television. The living room was dark except for the glow of the TV. The little set was propped up on a wooden chair at the edge of a large cast iron bathtub, the light from its screen reflecting off the smooth surface of the water. “Mr Fishman? Did you hear me?” She walked across the room, shoes crinkling on the plastic tarp that covered the floor, and switched off the TV.

The surface of the water shimmied. A lumpy head rose up out of the water, followed by a pair of dark eyes, a flap of nose, and a wide carp mouth.

“I was watching that,” the zooman said.

“Some day you’re going to pull that thing into the tub and electrocute yourself,” Elena said.

He exhaled, making a rude noise through rubbery lips.

“We’re having dinner,” Elena said. She turned on a lamp. Long ago Mr Fishman had pushed all the furniture to the edge of the room to make room for his easels. She didn’t see any new canvasses upon them, but there was an empty liquor bottle on the floor next to the tub. “Would you like to join us?”

He eyed the bag in her arms. “That wouldn’t be, umm, fresh catch?”

“It is, as a matter of fact.”

“I suppose I could stop by.” His head sank below the surface.

In Elena’s own apartment, Grandmother Zita smoked and rocked in front of the window, while Mattias, nine years old, sat at the table with his shoe box of coloured pencils and several grey pages crammed with drawings. “Elena, did you hear?” Matti asked. “A U-Man flew over the island! They canceled school!”

“It’s nothing to be happy about,” Elena said. She rubbed the top of her brother’s head. The page showed a robot of Matti’s own design marching toward a hyper-muscled man in a red cape. In the background was a huge, lumpy monster with triangle eyes – an escaped MoG, she supposed.

“The last time the U-Men came,” Grandmother Zita said, “more than robots lost their heads. This family knows that better than most. When your mother —”

“Let’s not talk politics, Grandmother.” She kissed the old woman on the cheek, then reached past her to crank open the window – she’d told the woman to let in some air when she smoked in front of Matti, to no avail. Outside, sirens wailed.

Elena had been only eleven years old during the last invasion. She’d slept through most of it, and when she woke to sirens that morning the apartment was cold and the lights didn’t work. Her parents were government geneticists – there was no other kind – and often were called away at odd hours. Her mother had left her a note asking her to feed Baby Matti and please stay indoors. Elena made oatmeal, the first of many breakfasts she would make for her little brother. Only after her parents failed to come home did she realize that the note was a kind of battlefield promotion to adulthood: impossible to refuse because there was no one left to accept her refusal.

Mr Fishman, in his blue bathrobe and striped pajama pants, arrived a half hour later, his great webbed feet slapping the floor. He sat at the table and argued with Grandmother Zita about which of the 21 previous invasions was most violent. There was a time in the 1960’s and seventies when their little country seemed to be under attack every other month. Matti listened raptly.

Elena had just brought the fried whitefish to the table when the thumping march playing on the radio suddenly cut off. An announcer said, “Please stand by for an important message from His Royal Majesty, the Guardian of our Shores, the Scourge of Fascism, Professor General of the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Savior of Trovenia —”

Mr Fishman pointed at Matti. “Boy, get my television!” Matti dashed out of the room.

After a frantic minute of table-clearing and antenna-fiddling, the screen suddenly cleared to show a large room decorated in Early 1400s: stone floors, flickering torches, and dulled tapestries on the walls. The only piece of furniture was a huge oaken chair reinforced at the joints with iron plates and rivets.