The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (125 page)

The guys were all scared, then, all confused, and I knew finally I could maybe change their minds. Even Grubbs looked like he was starting to have his doubts, starting to feel like maybe we did have to make a stand.

“Man, you gotta think about it this way. They ain’t gonna copy nobody who don’t play what they like,” I said. “I mean, is this any better than slavery? Having your body copied and the most important part of you carried out into space? Your
soul
?” I said, hoping space Muslims believed in souls.

“Okay, so what can we do? Stop playing?” asked Yakub, still defiant, and though even Grubbs finally looked like he was ready to do something, he was nodding as if to say,
Yeah, what can we do
?

“Nuh-uh,” I said. “We stop playing, maybe they leave us on Jupiter or something. So we keep the contract. We play, but we play shit they
don’t
like. You never know, they might even drop us off at home early. And the only thing I ever promised when I signed up for this was that I’d play
jazz
, man.”

“I’m liking the sound of this,” Big C said, nodding his head. “Anything in mind?”

“Oh yeah, I got something in mind. Let’s go back to my place,” I said. “I got some LPs for us listen to, some new tunes to learn.”

Big C grinned his big old emcee grin and looked out into the crowd of Frogs. “Welcome, ladies, gentlemen, and whatever else you might happen to be. We’re glad to be back on the bandstand after our week off at Jupiter. We’ve got a whole new repertoire lined up for you, which we’ve worked hard to get ready, and we just know it’s gonna make a big splash. Welcome back, and remember:
we’re
the house band for the rest of this tour.”

Then he turned and faced the band, snapping his fingers one, two, one two three four, and then Jimmy Roscoe started the tune with a solo on the piano. “Straight, No Chaser,” it was, that night, my favourite Monk tune.

The band came in after a couple of bars, and not a goddamned one of us blurred. It wasn’t just that we were playing Monk, but we didn’t even blur when we played it. That made them crazy. The arrangement was lifted right off a Monk piano performance, the brass clanging out the tone clusters, and the saxes singing out his jagged solo in unison.

I never saw a roomful of Frogs clear out so fast, man. Not at first, of course; most of them waited until we segued into “Trinkle Tinkle” and they couldn’t stand it no longer. When aliens got sick off Monk, sometimes they even
puked
. It wasn’t pretty. Man, one of the most beautiful things I ever saw in my life was old Heavy Gills slipping on some purple alien puke on the way out, falling right on his bassoon and snapping it in half. I still don’t know what it was about Monk that always turned them upside down like that. Even Monk didn’t know. Later, after I got back, I told him – Monk – about that night, and it cracked him up. He said some scientist had come and seen him, with some kind of theory, equations and charts and numbers, but he told me he figured the answer was a whole lot simpler than that. “It’s just a gift,” he said, and he winked.

Anyway, the trip home, man, it was a lot quicker than we expected. We just played a few Monk tunes at the start of every set, and the few Frogs who even bothered to show up left quick and then we had the ballroom to ourselves. For a while, we started playing around with what we could do in music without blurring. We could still make our fingers remember anything, could still remember any music we’d heard since going on board. I’m still that way, all these years later. I got so many goddamn tunes in my head, it’s like a music library, even now.

But of course we didn’t just work all the time. We jammed, and most of us (except the few who were still trying to be space Muslims) drank all night, and started bringing in the can-can girls – I’d talked Monique into stirring them up, and you know, they were French. They love their revolutions. So they was refusing to blur during their can-can dances, and their auditorium was just as empty as our ballroom, and they had all the time in the world to come drink and hang around with us. All those French girls around, tempting our Muslims from their righteous path and fooling around with the rest of us, it was like heaven for a while.

I think the only people who blurred anymore were the cowboys, because most of them were having the times of their lives chasing those blurred-up cows around all blurred up themselves like that. And some of the animals in the Russian circus, because they didn’t know any better. And maybe that Russian guy, too, though him and the Chinese chicks I never did see again.

So anyway, we were supposed to have gone out to Pluto, but a few days off Jupiter, the complaints got so bad that Big C was called up to go see the man – I mean the Frogs running the ship – but when he came back, he said the Frogs agreed we was playing jazz, just like in the contract, and the contract didn’t say nothing about no Monk, so there was nothing they could do. I half expected them to start lynching our asses, but they didn’t. The ship went ahead and turned around, headed for Earth just as fast as it fucking could. Me and Monique, we had a fine old time partying the nights away, night after night, but we knew this trip wasn’t gonna last forever.

“Marry me,” I said to her one night when we were lying in bed, both of us smoking. I wasn’t sure I meant it, wasn’t sure I wanted to marry anyone at all, but it sounded like the thing to say.

“Robbie,” she said, “I know you. You are
musicien
. You don’t need a wife. You are like a bluebird in the sky.”

I puffed on the cigarette. “I guess you’re right, baby.”

“Let’s enjoy the time we ’ave, and when we get ’ome, we don’t say goodbye, only ‘See you around the later.’”

I laughed a little. “Naw, you mean, ‘See you later.’ Or ‘See you around,’ baby. Not . . .”

“Whatever,” she said, and yanked the sheets off me.

You know, when we got to Earth, we landed in Africa.

Africa, man, the motherland, the place where all our music started. I was in Africa and the funny thing was, I didn’t give a shit. I wanted to get back to New York, to the clubs on West 52nd, to Minton’s.

But it took time. We came down an elevator near some city whose name I can’t remember, in what was then still Belgian Congo, which was lousy with wealthy Belgian refugees by then, and we rode down into town in jeeps. Monique sat with me, held my hand, but I couldn’t see her face through the sunglasses she wore. She had this big sun hat on, too, huge thing I’d never seen before, and she kept looking out across the hillsides.

Finally, when we got into the city, that was it. I lifted her suitcase out of the back of the jeep, and there we were, the guys from the band off to one side, waiting for me so we could all catch a flight back to New York, and all them can-can girls off to the other side waiting for her so they could all go back to Paris.

And there we were in the middle.

“What you gonna do?” I said.

“I am not coming to New York,” she said.

“I know. What
are
you gonna do?”

“I am going to go to Paris,” she said, but the French way,
Paree
. “I’m going to tell people what I ’ave seen, and ask the everyone to stop cooperating wit’
les grenouilles
.” Which was exactly what she did, too, on and on until the Frogs finally just up and left. Not that they left because of her, I don’t think, but she never stopped fighting them.

“That sounds good,” I said, and I looked at her hands.

“’Ow about you?” she said, a little more softly.

“Me? I’m a musician, Monique. I’m gonna go home and play me some music.”

I kissed her, and I wanted that kiss to be magic, like in the stories your folks read you when you’re a little kid. When a kiss wakes up a princess or saves the world, that kind of shit. But all that happened was that she kissed me back for a little while, and then she was gone.

It was a hell of a thing, getting back to New York like that. Not just all the new buildings, or them new flying cars zipping around like they owned the place, crashing into one another. The goddamned Frogs, they were pissed at all of us from that tour. Those sons of bitches over at the Onyx, they had already tore up all the contracts, and I didn’t ever see more than a few thousand dollars from the whole thing, which was bullshit, really, since I’d signed up for a cool million, and been gone for almost half the time I’d signed up for.

But you know, in the end, I didn’t give a shit. Those pills I took, none of them had worn off yet. (Most of them still haven’t, even now, and it’s been decades.) My mama, she used to say, “Take whatever lemons you get in life, boy, and you go on and make yourself some lemonade.” My mama, she couldn’t cook to save her life, but she knew something, alright.

So I started making lemonade. I got myself one of those new typewriter-phones that everyone was buying, and sent a phone-letter to my buddies from the band, and on Monday nights, we started meeting down under the 145th Street Bridge.

Man, down under that bridge, with them new flying cars buzzing overhead, we invented a new kind of music. It was all about playing together, at the same time, like in old-fashioned Dixieland music, except that we were swinging it hard, real hard, and half of it was made of chunks of music from the libraries in our heads. Everyone who showed up there, we’d been up on the ships, so we all had libraries in our heads. Our fingers were programmed, you know, so we could play anything back that we wanted. You could start with a little Monk, then switch over to Bird, throw in a little Prez, and of course there was room for whatever else you wanted to play up in there, too, and
man
did we play.

All that memory and all those programmable chops that they gave us to make up for the fact that playing blurred was so hard, we used all of that. After a few months, we found none of us could blur anymore even if we wanted to, but we didn’t even care. We were doing something new, man, and all the music that’s come after, you can hear some of what we did right in there, still!

Time came years later when all of that would start to sound old-fashioned, when people would start talking shit about us for that, criticizing us for ever having gone onto them Frogships and even blaming us for what happened in Russia and Europe, which is just crazy. Man, when we were fighting back, that was the first time ever where anything like that had been done, at least with the Frogs. It was all new. It’s easy to disrespect people making mistakes before you were born, way easier than worrying about not making your own mistakes. That’s just bullshit, trying to fill us up with regret for what’s all long gone now, like the Frogs.

Shit, maybe there
are
things I regret, like leaving Francine the way I did, or how I totally stopped visiting J.J. in the asylum after we got back. But most my regrets are for things that ain’t my fault. I regret seeing Prez the way he ended up, for instance, and I regret never seeing Big C again, and Monique for that matter. I used to think about all that a lot, after I first got back. Man, I remember lots of times when I used to stand there under the bridge while everyone was playing back all their favourite lines from old records we all knew, and I’d look up into the sky and find Jupiter. It’s easy, you know, just look up. It looks like a star, a bright old star up there. I’d stare on up at Jupiter, back then, and think of Prez, and blow a blues on my horn, the baddest old motherfucker of a blues that anybody anywhere ever heard in the world.

BUTTERFLY, FALLING AT DAWN

Aliette de Bodard

New writer Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who was born in the United States but grew up in France, where she still lives. Only a couple of years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in
Interzone, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, Fictitious Force, Shimmer
, and elsewhere.

Here she takes us sideways in time to an alternate world, where the details of history and the fortunes of empires may be very different from those we know, but heartache, loneliness, jealousy, and passion remain very much the same.

E
VEN SEEN FROM
afar, the Mexica District in Fenliu was distinctive: tall, whitewashed buildings clashing with the glass-and-metal architecture of the other skyscrapers. A banner featuring Huitzilpochtli, protector god of Greater Mexica, flapped in the wind as my aircar passed under the security gates. The god’s face was painted as dark as blood.

A familiar sight, even though I’d turned my back on the religion of my forefathers a lifetime ago. I sighed, and tried to focus on the case ahead. Zhu Bao, the magistrate in charge of the district, had talked me into taking on this murder investigation because he thought I would handle the situation better than him, being Mexica-born.

I wasn’t quite so sure.

The crime scene was a wide, well-lit dome room on the last floor of 3454 Hummingbird Avenue, with the highest ceiling I had ever seen. The floor was strewn with hologram pedestals, though the holograms were all turned off.

A helical stair led up to a mezzanine dazzlingly high, somewhere near the top of the dome. At the bottom of those stairs, an area had been cordoned off. Within lay the naked body of a woman. She was Mexica, and about thirty years old – she could have been my older sister. Morbidly fascinated, I let my eyes take in everything: the fine dust that covered the body, the yellow make-up she’d spread all over herself, the soft swell of her breasts, the unseeing eyes still staring upwards.

I looked up at the railing high above. I guessed she’d fallen down. Broken neck probably, though I’d have to wait for the lab people to be sure.

A militiaman in silk robes was standing guard near one of the hologram pedestals. “I’m Private Li Fai, ma’am. I was the first man on the scene,” he said, saluting as I approached. I couldn’t help scrutinising him for signs of contempt. As the only Mexica-born magistrate in the Xuyan administration, I’d had my fair share of racism to deal with. But Li Fai appeared sincere, utterly unconcerned by the colour of my skin.

“I’m Magistrate Hue Ma of Yellow Dragon Falls District,” I said, giving him my Xuyan name and title with scarcely a pause. “Magistrate Zhu Bao has transferred the case over to me. When did you get here?”

He shrugged. “We got a call near the Fourth Bi-Hour. A man named Tecolli, who said his lover had fallen to her death.”

I almost told him he was pronouncing “Tecolli” wrong, that a Mexica wouldn’t have put the accent that way, and then I realized this was pointless. I was there as a Xuyan magistrate, not a Mexica refugee – those days were over, long past. “They told me it was a crime, but this looks like an accident.”

Li Fai shook his head. “There are markings on the railing above, ma’am, and her nails are all ragged and bloody. Looks like she struggled, and hard.”

“I see.” It looked I wasn’t going to get out of this so easily.

I wasn’t trying to shirk my job. But any contacts with Mexica made me uneasy – reminded me of my childhood in Greater Mexica, cut short by the Civil War. Had Zhu Bao not insisted . . .

No. I was a magistrate. I had a job to do, a murderer to catch.

“Where is this . . . Tecolli?” I asked, finally.

“We’re holding him,” Li Fai said. “You want to talk to him?”

I shook my head. “Not right now.” I pointed to the landing high above. “Have you been there?”

He nodded. “There’s a bedroom, and a workshop. She was a hologram designer.”

Holograms were the latest craze in Xuya. Like all works of art, they were expensive: one of them, with the artist’s electronic signature, would be worth more than my annual stipend. “What was her name?”

“Papalotl,” Li Fai said.

Papalotl. Butterfly, in Nahuatl. A graceful name given to beautiful Mexica girls. There had been one of them in my school, back in Tenochtitlán, before the Civil War.

The Civil War . . .

Abruptly, I was twelve again, jammed in the aircar against my brother Cuauhtemoc, hearing the sound of gunfire splitting the window —

No. No. I wasn’t a child any more. I’d made my life in Xuya, passed the administrative exams and risen to magistrate, the only Mexica-born to do so in Fenliu.

“Ma’am?” Li Fai asked, staring at me.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll just have a look around, and then we’ll see about Tecolli.”

I moved towards the nearest hologram pedestal. A plaque showed its title: the journey. It was engraved in Nahuatl, in English and in Xuyan, the three languages of our continent. I turned it on, and watched a cone of white light widen from the pedestal to the ceiling; a young Xuyan coalesced at its centre, wearing the grey silk robes of a eunuch.

“We did not think it would go that far,” he said, even as his image faded, replaced by thirteen junks sailing over great waves. “To the East, Si-Jian Ma said as we departed China; to the East, until we struck land —”

I turned the hologram off. Every child on the continent knew what was coming next: the first Chinese explorers landing on the West Coast of the Lands of Dawn, the first tentative contacts with the Mexica Empire, culminating in Hernán Cortés’ aborted siege of Tenochtitlán, a siege cut short by Chinese gunpowder and cannon.

I moved to the next hologram, spring among the emerald flowers: a Mexica woman recounting a doomed love story between her and a Xuyan businessman.

The other holograms were much the same: people telling their life’s story – or, rather, I suspected, the script Papalotl had written for them.

I headed for the hologram nearest the body. Its plaque read homewards. When turned on, it displayed the image of a swan, the flag-emblem Xuya had chosen after winning its independence from the Chinese motherland two centuries ago. The bird glided, serene, on a lake bordered by weeping willows. After a while, a hummingbird, Greater Mexica’s national bird, came and hovered by the swan, its beak opening and closing as if it were speaking.

But there was no sound at all.

I turned it off, and on again, to no avail. I felt around in the pedestal, and confirmed my suspicions: the sound chip was missing. Which was not normal. All holograms came with one – an empty one if necessary, but there was always a sound chip.

I’d have to ask the lab people. Perhaps the missing chip was simply upstairs, in Papalotl’s workshop.

I moved around the remaining holograms. Four of the pedestals, those furthest away from the centre, had no chips at all, neither visu nor sound. And yet the plaques all bore titles.

The most probable explanation was that Papalotl had changed the works on display; but given the missing sound chip, there could have been another explanation. Had the murderer touched those holograms – and if so, why?

I sighed, cast a quick glance at the room for anything else. Nothing leapt to my eyes, so I had Li Fai bring me Tecolli, Papalotl’s lover.

Tecolli stood watching me without fear – or indeed, without respect. He was a young, handsome Mexica man, but didn’t quite have the arrogance or assurance I expected.

“You know why I’m here,” I said.

Tecolli smiled. “Because the magistrate thinks I will confide in you.”

I shook my head. “I’m the magistrate,” I said. “The case has been transferred over to me.” I took out a small pad and a pen, ready to take notes during the interview.

Tecolli watched me, no doubt seeing for the first time the unobtrusive jade-coloured belt I wore over my robes. “You are not —” he started, and then changed his posture radically, moving in one fluid gesture from a slouch to a salute. “Apologies, Your Excellency. I was not paying attention.”

Something in his stance reminded me, sharply, of my lost childhood in Tenochtitlán, Greater Mexica’s capital. “You are a Jaguar Knight?”

He smiled like a delighted boy. “Close,” he said, switching from Xuyan to Nahuatl. “I’m an Eagle Knight in the Fifth Black Tezcatlipoca Regiment.”

The Fifth Regiment – nicknamed “Black Tez” by the Xuyans – was the one guarding the Mexica embassy. I had not put Tecolli down as a soldier, but I could see now the slight callus under his mouth, where the turquoise lip-plug would usually chafe.

“You weren’t born here,” Tecolli said. His stance had relaxed. “Xuyan-born can’t tell us apart from commoners.”

I shook my head, trying to dislodge old, unwelcome memories – my parents’ frozen faces after I told them I’d become a magistrate in Fenliu, and that I’d changed my name to a Xuyan one. “I wasn’t born in Xuya,” I said, in Xuyan. “But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.”

“No,” Tecolli said, coming back to Xuyan. There was fear in his face now. “You want to know about her.” His eyes flicked to the body, and back to me. For all his rigid stance, he looked as though he might be sick.

“Yes,” I said. “What can you tell me about this?”

“I came early this morning. Papalotl said we would have a sitting.”

“A sitting? I saw no hologram pieces with you.”

“It was not done yet,” Tecolli snapped, far too quickly for it to be the truth. “Anyway, I came and saw the security system was disengaged. I thought she was waiting for me —”

“Had she ever done this before? Disengaged the security system?”

Tecolli shrugged. “Sometimes. She was not very good at protecting herself.” His voice shook a little, but it didn’t sound like grief. Guilt?

Tecolli went on: “I came into the room, and I saw her. As she is now.” He paused, choking on his words. “I – I could not think. I checked to see if there was anything I could do . . . but she was dead. So I called the militia.”

“Yes, I know. Near the Fourth Bi-Hour. A bit early to be about, isn’t it?” In this season, on the West Coast, the sun wouldn’t even have risen.

“She wanted me to be early,” Tecolli said, but did not elaborate.

“I see,” I said. “What can you tell me about the swan?”

Tecolli started. “The swan?”

I pointed to the hologram. “It has no sound chip. And several other pieces have no chips at all.”

“Oh, the swan,” Tecolli said. He was not looking at me – in fact, he was positively sweating guilt. “It is a commission. By the Fenliu Prefect’s Office. They wanted something to symbolize the ties between Greater Mexica and Xuya. I suppose she never had time to complete the audio.”

“Don’t lie to me.” I was annoyed he would play me for a fool. “What’s the matter with that swan?”

“I do not see what you are talking about,” Tecolli said.

“I think you do,” I said, but did not press my point. At least, not yet. Tecolli’s mere presence at the scene of the crime gave me the right to bring him back to the tribunal’s cells to secure his testimony – and, should I judge it necessary, to ply him with drugs or pain to make him confess. Many Xuyan magistrates would have done that. I found the practice not only abhorrent, but needless. I knew I would not get the truth out of Tecolli that way. “Do you have any idea why she’s naked?” I asked.

Tecolli said, slowly, “She liked to work that way. At least with me,” he amended. “She said it was liberating. I . . .” He paused, and waited for a reaction. I kept my face perfectly blank.

Tecolli went on, “It turned her on. And we both knew it.”

I was surprised at his frankness. “So it isn’t surprising.” Well, that was one mystery solved – or perhaps not. Tecolli could still be lying to me. “How did you get along with her?”

Tecolli smiled – a smile that came too easily. “As well as lovers do.”

“Lovers can kill each other,” I said.

Tecolli stared at me, horrified. “Surely you do not think —”

“I’m just trying to determine what your relationship was.”

“I loved her,” Tecolli snapped. “I would never have harmed her. Are you satisfied?”

I wasn’t. He seemed to waver between providing glib answers and avoiding my questions altogether.

“Do you know if she had any enemies?” I asked.

“Papalotl?” Tecolli’s voice faltered. He would not look at me. “Some among our people felt she had turned away from the proper customs. She did not have an altar to the gods in her workshop, she seldom prayed or offered blood sacrifices —”

“And they hated her enough to kill?”

“No,” Tecolli said. He sounded horrified. “I do not see how anyone could have wanted to —”

“Someone did. Unless you believe it’s an accident?” I dangled the question innocently enough, but there was only one possible answer, and he knew it.

“Do not toy with me,” Tecolli said. “No one could have fallen over that railing by accident.”

“No. Indeed not.” I smiled, briefly, watching the fear creep across his face. What could he be hiding from me? If he’d committed the murder, he was a singularly fearful killer – but I had seen those too, those who would weep and profess regrets, but who still had blood on their hands. “Does she have any family?”