The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (94 page)

Now Alverin raised his straight slim sword and called upon those within the chamber to surrender, saying, “Whoso lays down his arms, shall be spared, and set free, I vow, suffering no hurt nor any dishonor!”

Because the rumor of Alverin’s honesty and clemency was so well known, the knights and pikemen in that chamber instantly threw down their swords and pole-arms. None had heart to fight, seeing their leader, Weston, lay swooning with is life blood bubbling out of him. The weapons fell ringing to the chamber floor.

But one of the Computermen seized up an pike and, with a terrible cry, cast it straight into Alverin’s breast. Alverin staggered backward, pierced through the heart and lungs. In that same instant of time, the man who had cast the pike was stricken through his arm by three arrows. Yet these shots were not ill-aimed; for Alverin’s men, by custom, spoke before they struck, wounded rather than slew.

Alverin drew the pike-head out from his bloody chest and wiped the blood away. The wound closed up into a scar and then Alverin’s chest grew fair and smooth again. He cast the bloody pike aside. “I am an Earthman; I was born beneath blue sky!” he called out. To the wounded man, he said, “The knowledge of the men who made this entire world have made me as I am, and I am not to be slain by your small weapons.” And he ordered his physician to tend to the wounded among the enemy, even the man who had smitten him.

Alverin turned. He saw Valdemar laying motionless, his body crushed beneath the fallen giant. “So,” Alverin whispered, “these secret paths you showed to us were not a trap. Did you play us true, this once, old liar? If so, where is the ring?”

Now he turned again. In the threshold of the golden doors leading to the Main Bridge, a pikeman still crouched above Henwas the Watchman, a steady knife still touching the prone man’s throat. Henwas was bleeding at the shoulder and the leg, and yet his face was remote and calm, as if no wound nor pain could trouble him.

Alverin stepped forward till he could see, laying in the shadow of the door, dying, Acting Captain Weston II, and, in his bloodstained hand, the ring.

Beyond was the Bridge, a large dimly lit cathedral of a space, surrounded on all sides by the darkened screens of the Computer.

Weston croaked, “Pikeman. Slit the Watchman’s throat if the rebel-king steps forward one step more.”

“Weston,” said Alverin in a soft, stern voice, “yield up to me the ring. I will restore to all the world, the light, the power, and the justice, which, by right, should have been ours. You have my solemn promise that all your men shall be dealt with justly.”

“Should I believe a mutineer? You betrayed Valdemar,” hissed Weston wearily.

“After he surrendered to the Enemy. Free men follow leaders into battle, and render him the power of Command, only while he does their will, in pursuit of a just war, or in defense against hostility. That power of Command, incapable of destruction, returned to the free men of this ship, upon Valdemar’s abdication of it. By their fair and uncoerced election, I was tendered the Command, and so am Captain. That trust I hold sacred; render me the ring, and I shall see this world prosper.”

“Prosper? Are we not surrounded by enemy worlds?” Weston asked softly.

“We are too humble for their attention,” Alverin said. “If we do not offend them, they will pay us no more heed.”

“And if the ring is used to launch the fabled Weaponry at World’s Core?” Weston now raised himself on one elbow. His face was pasty-white, his eyes wild and sick.

“Then the world dies, if not in this generation, then in the next.”

The lieutenant, his hand being bandaged by a tall pale doctor, spoke up, “Sire! Yield the ring to Alverin! Even we, so many years his foe, acknowledge his justice, wisdom, and trueheartedness. If any man is deserving of empire, it is such a man as this!”

But Henwas, who still had him by the ankle, said a voice of calm command, “In your last moment, sir, I pray you be a Captain truly. Use the ring, or give it me, to complete the mission of the Twilight of the Gods. We both are dying, you of wounds, me of radiation poison and disease. Should we, in such a time as this, abandon our posts and sue for peace? This whole world was made for war.”

“Pikeman, stand away. Here, Watchman; take the accursed thing. Do your duty; kill all my enemies, you, them, everyone. And be damned to you all.” With a curse on his lips, Weston slid into death, and his cold hand gave the ring to Henwas.

Henwas came up to his knees and thrust the pikeman down across the dais’ stairs. Such was the strength of his arm that the man was flung many yards away. Alverin and the elves started forward suddenly, but Henwas, leaning inward from the golden door, reached and touched the shining ring against the dark, cold mirrored corner of the nearest of the many computer screens which filled the huge, black bridge.

He spoke the words: “Eternal Fidelity. I am forever loyal.” And all the mirrors flamed to life and shined with purest light. On each screen images appeared, words, symbols, strange letters and equations, and everywhere, the thousand shining lights of all the Enemy stars.

A pure and perfect voice, like no voice ever to be made by lips or tongue of man, rang out: “READY.”

Several of the Computermen screamed in fear or shouted with joy. One sank down to his knees and cried out, “Oh, that I have seen this day!” Even the knights and guards of Weston’s, and the Alverin’s tall men, stood speechless, eyes wide.

But the Chief Computerman called out for the men to avert their eyes, “This is a deception of the Enemy! The Computer cannot speak to men, except through us!” But one of the knights smote him across the face with his fist. The Chief Computerman fell to the deck, and lay sullen, wiping his mouth, weeping and afraid to speak again.

One of the overman knights raised his bow, and spoke in a soft, clear voice, “Noble lord Alverin! We have heard the word which can command the ring. One shot, and all the world shall be yours!”

“Nay, Elromir,” spoke Alverin. “Not even to win empires will I have such a blow be struck, against a man wounded and unarmed.”

The Watchman, kneeling, said, “Computer! Are there weapons at this world’s core, ready to strike out against our enemies?”

“ALL WEAPON SYSTEMS AT READY. TARGETS ACQUIRED. FIRING SEQUENCES READY TO INITIATE. STANDING BY.”

Alverin said, “Watchman, I pray you, wait! You will unleash a storm of fire! None save me aboard this ship even recall the origins of this war, its purpose, or its cause. Why do you condemn all the nations, lands, and peoples, here aboard the Twilight to be obliterated? Think of those born innocent, years after this dreadful ship of war was launched. Our Captain betrayed us; we have surrendered; let it rest at that.”

Henwas said, “When the stranger, whom I now know to have been Valdemar, gave my master Himdall this dread ring, he did so with these words: ‘You alone shall know when the waiting is completed, when the enemy grows lax, and deems us dead.’ Only now do I understand the Captain’s purpose after all these years, even from before my birth. The other ships we know only as names of glory, these ships are hard beset by that great foe which ruined and overthrew our world so long ago; and our true world Earth, though we have forgotten it, still calls to us to fight in her defense. The Captain expected us to fight and die for the glory of the fleet, to die, if need be, to have all the Twilight die, if it would forward the mission goals, and accomplish our duty.”

Alverin said, “But, those aboard the other ships, why do you give such love and loyalty to them, that you are willing to call destruction down on all our world, for the sake of those whom you have never seen, and do not know?”

“I will not live to see salvation, yet I know it comes,” said Henwas. “I never knew the other men who serve aboard those other ships; yet I know that there are those aboard them who would gladly do for me what I now do for them. That knowledge is enough for me.”

One of the knights, evidently realizing the Henwas meant to do an act which would provoke the Enemy to destroy the world, stooped, picked up a fallen dagger, and, before any of Alverin’s men could think to stop him, threw it. The dagger spun and landed fair on the middle of Henwas’ back. Henwas, back arched, eyes blind with pain, now shouted, “Computer! Shut these doors!”

“ACKNOWLEDGED. ALL STATIONS NOTIFIED OF OVERRIDE COMMAND LOCATION.”

The men in the room swept forward like a tide, but too late; the golden doors fell too, and shut in their faces.

Alverin raised his hand, and cried out with a great voice to rally his men. “Alberac’s curse has told all the computer screens now where the ring hides! The Enemy will sweep this area with fire, exploding all the decks below us if they need be! Come! We must be gone! It may be already too late . . .” And he set his men passing swiftly out of the chamber. He and his paladins stood on the dais before the golden doors, unwilling to depart till all the men had gone before them.

And as they stood so, through the doors, they heard the great, chiming and inhuman voice call out, “WEAPONS FREE. INITIATING LAUNCH. WARHEADS AWAY.”

There came a noise like thunder. And a great voice echoing from every wall rang out; and it was the Watchman’s voice, tremendously amplified, and echoing throughout every corridor of every nation of the great ship. They heard the Watchman call out, saying, “I have seen it! I have seen it! And the heavens are consumed with light!”

Then, more softly, they heard the great voice say, “Father! If you see this, you shall know; I did not leave my post . . .”

And then, even more softly: “Computer, now destroy this ring, and let its curse be ended, and return all functions to their proper stations and commands . . .”

Light returned to the chamber where they where, and they heard, as from far off, a great noise of wonder, as of many voices of people near and far, all crying out at once. And they knew that light returned to darkened places which had known no light for years beyond count.

One of the knights took hold of Alverin’s cape. “Sire, look!” and he pointed to where the giant Carradock lay.

Of Valdemar’s body there was no sign. He was gone.

“Look there.” One of the knights, in wonder, pointed upward to where the two black birds were huddled among the pillar-tops, bundles of black feathers, croaking.

“They are his magpies,” said Alverin softly. “Even in ancient times, from before he was blind, he always kept such birds near him, to remind him of what he dared not forget.” And, to himself, he murmured, “Or perhaps, since all this was arranged by his cunning, perhaps it is I who am blind, or who have forgotten . . .”

One of the black birds croaked, and spoke in a voice like a man’s voice: “No matter what the cost. The Mission goals must be accomplished. No matter what the cost.”

The other black bird croaked and said, “All’s fair in war. All’s fair. All’s fair.”

Alverin and his men departed from that place, and did not look back.

BLOOD DAUBER

Ted Kosmatka and Michael Poore

New writer Ted Kosmatka has been a zookeeper, a chem tech, and a steelworker, and is now a self-described “lab rat” who gets to play with electron microscopes all day. He made his first sale, to
Asimov’s
, in 2005, and has since made several subsequent sales there, as well as to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Seeds of Change, Ideomancer, City Slab, Kindred Voices, Cemetery Dance
, and elsewhere. He’s placed several different stories with several different Best of the Year series over the last couple of years, including this one. He lives in Portage, Indiana, and has a website at tedkosmatka.com.

Michael Poore has appeared in both literary and speculative magazines nationwide, including
StoryQuarterly, Fiction, Talebones
, and
The Nth Degree.
He was runner-up for the 2006 Fountain Award for literary excellence in speculative fiction and has new work coming up in
Glimmer Train.

Here the two join forces to investigate an intricate biological mystery that doesn’t begin to come close to the mysteries of the human heart.

T
HE ANIMALS HATE
you

You get used to that, working at a zoo. Over time, it becomes a thing you can respect.

Bell trudged up the path, pushing the wheelbarrow before him, already sweating under his brown khaki uniform. He squinted in the bright sunlight, eyeing the exhibits as he ascended the hill: the goats and their pandering; the silly, horny monkeys; the slothful binturongs – all moving to the front of their enclosures as he approached.

Most zoo animals eventually came to an understanding with those who brought the food. An uneasy truce.

But Bell knew better than to trust it.

He’d seen the scars.

Mary had scars on her arms. Garland was missing the tip of one finger, and John, the assistant super, had a large divot in the calf of his right leg.

“Zebra,” was all he’d say.

Bell was the newest zookeep. No scars yet. But a wariness.

Walking up the hill that morning, Bell noticed Seana up ahead of him on the asphalt path. As he walked, he noticed she wore two different-colored socks – one red, the other white. He wondered if she were absent-minded, or just quirky. He hadn’t been at the zoo long, didn’t know her well.

As he closed the distance, he saw that she was crying. And he realized why she wore one red sock. Her calf was gashed open, bleeding streams.

He followed her into the staff room, and she explained that the juvenile baboon had attacked her.

She was outraged. Betrayed.

“Why did you go in there?” he asked.

“I always go in there,” she said. “I was here when it was born. I raised it.”

“Animals are unpredictable.”

She shook her head. “It’s never done that before.”

Never done that before.

Bell thought about that on the way home. Surprises puzzled him.

On one hand, it seemed there should never be any surprises. The world tended toward order, didn’t it? It circled the sun at the same speed all the time. Water boiled predictably, froze predictably. People weighed the same in Dallas as they did in Quebec. The speed of sound, in dry air, was 767 miles an hour.

So why, Bell wondered, can’t he and his wife keep track of money, plan ahead, and stop living in a trailer? In an orderly world, this shouldn’t be impossible. In an orderly world, you shouldn’t have to choose between buying food and keeping your car insurance.

Bell knew things were always more complicated than they looked. Water froze predictably, but strangely. It expanded. Crystals crashed and splintered. Sound moved faster underwater.

“And you can’t keep from buying shit,” he thought aloud, driving home.

He popped over the curb into the Lil’ Red Barn parking lot.

They weren’t going to spend anything this week, Bell and Lin had agreed. They didn’t need to. Food in the fridge, gas in both cars. This week they wouldn’t spend.

That morning, they’d run out of toilet paper.

“It’s not an insurmountable problem,” he’d told Lin. “We have paper towels.”

“You’re not,” said Lin, “supposed to put anything besides toilet paper in the toilet.”

“But you can,” argued Bell, “if you need to.”

Bell thought it was a spending problem. They knew how much money was coming in. If they controlled what went out, their money would be orderly, would increase. Lin disagreed.

“It’s a matter of supply,” she had pointed out. “Your job needs to supply more money.”

“So does yours.” Lin worked in the mall.

She glared ice. Splinters and crystals.

In Lin’s world, it was okay for her to criticize Bell. It was not okay for Bell to criticize Lin. Not if things were to be orderly. In every mating pair, Bell knew, one animal always bit harder than the other.

Lin was the biter.

And in their two-mammal world where daily life was defined by constant, grinding poverty, it seemed she bit constantly.

It was important, they had once agreed, to do what they loved. To love their work.

“I love my work,” Bell had told Lin a thousand times. Last month, in bed, he had told her how he loved his work, and they’d argued, and she’d scratched him with her fingernails. Drew blood. Made him want to hit her, and he almost did.

But he didn’t. There were light years between wanting to hit a woman and actually doing it. Bell wasn’t that kind of man. Wasn’t that kind of animal. What kind of animal was he?

He wondered if she knew. Wondered if she’d seen it in his eyes, the almost-hitting. The wanting to.

He quit saying how much he loved his job.

Most zookeepers, he knew, were women whose husbands made better money. They could afford the love.

Lin knew this, too.

“Shelly Capriatti’s husband sells guitars,” she had told him, just the night before. Shelly Capriatti was someone she worked with or worked out with, he couldn’t recall. “High end stuff, like for professionals. Like if Eric Clapton needed a new guitar. There’s no reason you couldn’t do something like that. He makes a ton of money.”

And he was on the edge, as he often was, of admitting to himself that he wished he hadn’t gotten married, when she stretched herself across his lap in front of their eleven-year-old TV and was nice for a while. Long enough for him to sweep some hard truth under the rug. Again. It was easier that way.

He focused on that – the niceness – while he paid the cashier at the Lil’ Red Barn.

She could be nice. Things in general, sometimes, were nice.

Sometimes she was predictable, which was easier, but you had to be ready for both. Driving into the trailer park, he thought about that.

The baboon had never attacked anyone. Then, today, it did.

There’s a first time for everything.

“You’re cute the way a dog is cute,” Lin had told him, in front of the TV.

You run out of toilet paper.

Things fall apart.

Not having money was a theme in Bell’s life. Even the zoo was a poor zoo, poorly funded.

Sometimes people complained. Once, a woman had come in, and when she’d seen the conditions in which the lions were housed, she’d been angry. People loved the lions.

“It’s a cage,” she said.

Bell had agreed with her.

“Zoos are supposed to be . . . natural,” she continued. “They’re supposed to be habitats, and the animals aren’t even supposed to reahze they’re confined.”

Bell understood. He sympathized. He’d been to zoos like that, too, in towns that weren’t dying.

“Do you think they don’t know?” he asked.

She only stared at him.

“Do you think, in these other zoos, that the animals don’t know they’re locked in?”

“A disgrace,” she said, walking away.

Low funding required management get creative when provisioning the animals. In addition to supplies bought on the open market, there were arrangements with local grocery stores, and butchers, and meat processors. A truck was taken around each day to be filled with heaps of food – loaves of bread that had passed their freshness dates, meat that had begun to turn, gallons of milk that had expired. Occasionally there was carrion brought in – deer which had been struck on the highway and then picked up by the county. All of it fed into the bottomless maw of the zoo.

The trucks would drive around back and unload their cargo into the kitchen. It was called the kitchen, but it was not a kitchen. It was a room with several huge stainless steel tables on which food was piled and sorted and divided.

Bell was on his way to the castle when a voice on his walkie-talkie stopped him. “Bell, there’s something you need to see.”

Lucy, one of the kitchen workers, out of breath.

He got there fast. Came in through the back door.

“It’s a bug,” said Lucy, hands at her collar.

“What kind?” he asked.

She shrugged. “It’s a bug.” She pointed at a bowl turned upside-down on the counter.

Bell lifted the bowl. Put it down again.

He stood perfectly still.

He lifted the bowl and stole another quick glance.

“Hmm,” he said and lowered the bowl.

The kitchen workers stared. “What is it?”

“I’m working on it,” he said. He looked into the distance. “I think it’s a grub of some kind.”

“I didn’t think grubs got that big,” Lucy said.

“No,” Bell said. “Neither did I.”

Bell looked again. The grub was large, fleshy and blood red. 5 inches long.

“Where did it come from?” he asked.

She shrugged again. “The table.”

Bell looked at the table. There were watermelons, and apples, and bread, and the partially disarticulated hock of a deer. Several bunches of blackened bananas made a mountain in the center, along with a smaller mound of more exotic fruit shipped in from Lord-knew-where.

“It could have come in with anything,” she said. “I found it crawling along the edge of the table there.” She shuddered. “It was moving pretty fast.”

Bell retrieved a glass jar from the cabinet, opened the lid, then dragged the bowl across the edge of the table so the strange grub dropped into the jar. He stepped outside and plucked some grass, put the grass inside, and closed the lid. Poked holes.

He took the jar across the zoo to the castle and placed it on a shelf in the back room.

“The castle” was the name used for the entomology building. Bell could only imagine what the structure’s original use had been, with its block construction and odd turrets; but whatever that long ago intent, it now housed all manner of creepy crawlers – hissing cockroaches, and ant farms, and snakes, and lizards and frogs. Anything that required darkness or careful temperature control.

The building was a box within a box. There was an open, central area ringed on three sides by walls and exhibits – and just behind these walls was a space called the back room, closed to the public, which was actually a single narrow hall that conformed to the outside perimeter of the building, a gap space where you could access the back side of the cages. At the far end of this hall, in a dead-end spot furthest from the entry door was a table and chairs, a TV, a desk and several terrariums. These extra terrariums were where the sick were boarded, those unfit for public examination.

Bell did the rest of his chores for the day. In the evening he checked on the grub. It was still there, happily curling up the sides of the glass jar. Bell had studied entomology in college, and he’d never seen anything like it; the insect’s sheer bulk seemed to push the cubed-square law to its limit. Perhaps beyond its limit. He hadn’t thought insects could be that big. When he opened the lid, the grub reared up at him, strange mouth-parts writhing.

Bell was in charge of the castle, the petting zoo and the convicts. This had not always been the case. He was in charge of the castle because he was the only zookeeper who’d taken college-level entomology. The petting zoo was meant as an insult. And the convicts were punishment.

The convicts came in most weekdays. You could point them out in the parking lot – men and women who were there too early, hours before the gates opened. Bell would feed the insects, drink a cup of coffee and then walk to open the front gates.

“Here for community service?” he’d ask.

“Yeah,” they’d say.

Sometimes there were two or three. Sometimes none. They handed Bell their paperwork, and Bell passed it to the zoo superintendent at the end of the day.

The number of hours worked was the all-important statistic. Because they all had a number they were working down from. 150 hours, 200 hours, 100 hours.

Sometimes they talked about their crimes, and sometimes they didn’t.

Bell never asked. Not his business.

Bell often talked to himself in the bathroom mirror.

“In this world,” he said, “you are not an apex predator. Humans are, as a species, but you, yourself, are not.”

You do not always win. Problems are not always solved.

There are defeats and surrenderings. Small but important.