Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 14

Perhaps Sluggo, perhaps Tyrone, perhaps a saur I would have least expected, but he or she sang one clear phrase with that nonsense dinosaur word: "Yar-wooo!"

And sang it again: "Yar-wooo!"

The third time, the other saurs joined in: a few at first, then more. It was the old song, the lullaby theyhad been trained and designed to sing in the innocent days when they sprang forth from the lab/factories.

It reminded me of old fieldworkers singing slave songs generations after abolition.

But even the most insubstantial melody can have a certain power. The urge to sing is stronger than any song. They were taught to sing it for their owners. Now they sang it for themselves.

I listened as they sang against the unrelenting thunder, and then I joined in, with my own croaky voice, with the same nonsense dinosaur word-"Yar-wooo!"

"Yar-wooo!"

I sang with them until the thunder subsided and sleep took us all at last, even Axel.

Russian Vine

SIMON INGS.

Simon Ings' [www.fisheye.demon.co.uk/home.html] novels include Hot Head (1992), City of the Iron Fish (1994), and Hotwire (1995), none yet published in the U.S. He says, in a manifesto on his website, "I'm not surprised to find that my work's called Cyberpunk. That, surely, was the point of it-before the fas.h.i.+on fairies and the literalists got hold of it-that it wasn't about the future, but rather used the future as a metaphor to say things about the world as it is. And in that, Cyberpunk was, not a special sort of science fiction, but simply fiction." And later: "Suddenly, fiction needs the tools of SF. It needs ways to write about the world that aren't consensual, that reinvent the ordinary, that handle speculation: not because people need speculative fantasy but because the world itself has become speculative and fantastical."

"Russian Vine," published only online at SciFiction and thus appearing for the first time in print here, is a morally challenging story about a humanoid alien invasion and occupation that robs the human race of literacy and focuses on an affair between an alien who reads human literature and a human woman who tells stories. It is a story with a strong subtext. It is in addition a highly complex and accomplished stylistic success.

One.

That afternoon in Paris-a cloudy day, and warmer than the late season deserved-they met for the last time. She wore her red dress. Did she intend to make what he had to say more difficult? (He felt his scribe hand tingle, that he should blame her for his own discomfort.) Perhaps she only meant a kind of closure. For the sake of her self-esteem, she was making it clear to him that n.o.body ever really changes anybody. Even her hair was arranged the same as on that first day.

"And the king said, Bring me a sword. And they brought a sword before the king."

They sat on the terra.s.se, away from the doors, seeking privacy. The preacher-if that was the right word for him, for he did not preach, but had instead launched into an apparently endless recitation-stabbed them irregularly with a gaze from eyes the color of pewter.

His testament tangled itself up in the couple's last words to each other.

Connie called for the bill. (He had long since conformed his name to the range of the human palate.

Being the kind of animal he was, he was not bothered by its effeminate connotations.) He said to her: "This deadening reasonableness. I wish we had smashed something."

She said: "You wish I had smashed something. I've let you down today."

"And the king said, Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other."

She said: "You've left us both feeling naked. We can't fight now. It would be undignified: emotional mud-wrestling."

Connie let the reference slide by him, uncomprehended.

"Then spake the woman whose living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said,Let it be neither mine or thine, but divide it."

With a gesture, the girl drew Connie's attention to the man's recitation. "You see?" she said.

"Undignified. Like it says in the Bible." She laughed at the apposite verses, a laugh that choked off in a way that Connie thought might be emotion.

But how could he be sure? His ear was not-would never be-good enough. He was from too far away. He was, in the parochial parlance of these people, "alien."

He picked up his cup with his bludgeon hand-a das.h.i.+ng breach of his native etiquette-and dribbled down the last bitter grounds. Already he was preening; showing off his rakish "masculinity." His availability, even. As though this choice he had made were about freedom!

He found himself, in that instant, thinking coldly of Rebecca, the woman who lived with him, and for whom (though she did not know this) he had given up this enchanting girl.

"Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof.

"And all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king: for they saw that the wisdom of G.o.d was in him to do judgment."

Still listening, the girl smiled, and bobbed her head to Connie, in a mock bow.

She had done nothing, this afternoon, but make light of their parting. He hoped it was a defense she had a.s.sembled against sentiment. But in his heart, he knew she had not been very moved by the end of their affair. She would forget him very quickly.

Hadmuhaddera's cra.s.s remarks, the day Connie arrived on this planet, seemed strangely poignant now: "Trouble is, my friend, we all look the b.l.o.o.d.y same to them!"

"And these were the princes which he had..."

There was no purpose to that man's recitation, Connie thought, with irritation, as he kissed the girl goodbye and turned to leave. There was no reasoning to it; just a blind obedience to the literal sequence.

As though the feat of memory were itself a devotional act.

"Ahinadab the son of Iddo had Mahanaim..."

In spite of himself, Connie stopped to listen. The "preacher" faced him: was that a look of aggression?

It was so impossibly hard to learn the body language of these people-of any people, come to that, other than one's own.

So Connie stood there like a lemon, knowing full well he looked like a lemon, and listened:

"Ahimaaz was in Naphtali; he also took Basmath the daughter of Solomon to wife: "Baanah the son of Hushai was in Asher and in Aloth: "Jehoshaphat the son of Paruah, in Issachar: "s.h.i.+mei the son of Elah, in Benjamin ..."

Connie realized that he had given too little mind to these feats of recitation. This was more than a display of the power of human memory. This was more than a display of defiance toward the Puscha invader: "See how we maintain our culture, crippled as we are!"

"Geber the son of Uri was in the country of Gilead, in the country of Sihon king of the Amorites, and of Og king of Bashan; and he was the only officer which was in the land."

Connie bowed his head. Not out of respect; surely, since this was, when you came down to it, absurd: to raise an ancient genealogy to a pedestal at which educated men must genuflect. But it said something about the will of this people, that they should have so quickly recovered the skills and habits of a time before reading and writing.

The man might have been an evangelistic scholar of the 1400s by the Christian calendar, and the subsequent six hundred years of writing and printing and reading no more than a folly, a risky experiment, terminated now by shadowy authorities.

When Connie pa.s.sed him, on his way to the Gare du Nord and the London train, the man did not cease to speak. "Judah and Israel were many," he declaimed, from memory, "as the sand which is by the sea in mult.i.tude, eating and drinking, and making merry!"

It was only twenty years since the Puscha had established a physical presence upon the planet, though their husbandry of the human animal had begun some thirty years before first contact. It took time and care to strike upon the subtle blend of environmental "pollutants" that would engineer illiteracy, without triggering its cousin afflictions: autism in all its extraordinary and distressing manifestations-not to mention all the variform aphasias.

Faced with the collapse of its linguistic talent, the human animal had, naturally enough, blamed its own industrial processes. The Puscha armada had hung back, discrete and undetected, until the accusations dried up, the calumnies were forgotten, and all the little wars resolved-until transmissions from the planet's surface had reduced to what they considered safe levels.

Human reactions to the Puscha arrival were various, eccentric, and localized-and this was as it should be. Concerted global responses, the Puscha had found, were almost always calamitous.

So, wherever Connie appeared along the railway line-and especially at the Suffolk terminus where he drank a cup of milkless tea before driving out in the lorry the thirty miles to his orchard-there was a respect for him that was friendly. He had been traveling back and forth, in the same way, for ten years.

There was a clubhouse at the junction: an old white house with lofty, open rooms, where he sometimes had a quick breakfast before driving onto the orchards. There was also an army station near, and as the pace of Autonomy quickened, the club had become a mere transit camp, with both Puscha and human administrators piling bedrolls in the halls, and noisy behavior in the compounds. There were often civilian hangers-on there too, and the woman who lived with him now-the woman to whom he was faithful once again (the idea of being "faithful again" made more sense in his culture than hers)-had been one of these.

Her name was Rebecca-a name that translated fluently and comically into his own tongue, as a kind of edible, greasy fish. When he first laid eyes on her, she was drinking c.o.c.ktails with a party of Puscha newcomers lately recruited to some dismal section of government finance (and who were in consequence behaving like abandoned invaders). Quite how she had fallen in with them wasn't clear. She was simply one of those maddening, iconic figures that turbulent events throw up from time to time: less real people, so much as windows onto impossible futures, no less poignant for being chimerical.

A few days later, on the connecting train to Paris, as he considered where to sit, vacillating as usual, he nearly walked straight past her.

She was sitting alone. She was white-skinned. Her hair was long and straight, gold-brown, and a fold of it hung down over one eye, lending her face an asymmetry that appealed to him.

The seat opposite her was invitingly empty.

He sat and read a while, or pretended to, racking his brain for the correct form, the correct stance, for an introduction. Horror stories abounded in the clubs and cla.s.ses: a visiting male dignitary of the Fifty-Seventh Improvement, informed that human women are flattered by some moderate reference to their appearance, congratulates the First Lady of the North Americas on the b.u.t.tery yellowness of her teeth- And how, after all, could you ever learn enough to insure yourself against such embarra.s.sments?

Eventually, it was she who spoke: "What is it you're reading?"

His scribe hand tingled, that he had left the opening gambit to her.

As for what he was reading-or pretending to read-it was dull enough: a glib verse narrative from his own culture. In his day bag, Connie carried more interesting material: novels from the last great centuries of human literacy; but he had felt that it would be indelicate to read them in front of her.

By the end of the journey, however, she had all too easily teased out his real enthusiasms, persuading him, finally, to fetch from his bag and read to her-eagerly and loudly and not too well-two stories by Saki and some doggerel by Ogden Nash. They were old, battered paperback editions, the pages loose in both, and once a page of Saki fell by her foot. She stooped to pick it up for him. She studied it a moment, while he in turn studied the fold of her hair hanging over her eye; he surprised in himself a strongdesire to sweep it behind her ear.

He saw with a pang that she was studying the page upside-down.

"I sing," she told him later, as they pa.s.sed through the Parisian suburbs. "I am a singer."

He made some callow remark, something she must have heard a hundred times before: how human singing so resembles Puscha weeping (itself never formless, but a kind of glossolalia peculiar to the Puscha species).

"I sing for people," she said, "not for Puscha." (She made the usual mistake, lengthening the "u" in Puscha to an "oo.") It was not a severe put-down, and anyway, he deserved it. So why did it hurt so much?

It maddened him afterward to think that she must have drawn him out-she must have got him to admit his interest in her people's literature, and read to her-only so she might sit there quietly despising him: the eloquent invader, drip-feeding the poor native whose own throat he had so effectively glued shut!

But all this was eight years ago, and Connie was too much the newcomer to know what undercurrents might run beneath such stilted conversations.

And on the return journey, the same coincidence! This time, she nearly walked past him-would have done so, had he not called her.

Well, their being on the same train yet again was not much of a fluke. He had traveled to Paris to glad-hand the farmers gathered there, and address their concerns about trade links after Autonomy; Rebecca, for her part, had gone to sing for them.

These days, public events had a tendency to run into each other: a trade fair with a concert tour, a concert tour with a religious festival. They were arranged so to do. A non-literate culture can only sustain so much complexity.

In a society without literacy, the eccentric routines of individuals and cliques cannot be reliably communicated and accommodated; so everything moved now to the rhythm of established social customs-even to the patterns of the seasons.

On their return journey, Connie spoke of these things to Rebecca-and then he wished he hadn't. He had an uneasy sensation of describing to her the bars of her prison.

Suddenly he was aware of wanting to say something to her; to make, as casually as he could, a desperate suggestion.

He began to make it, and then found himself trembling unexpectedly.

"What were you going to say?"

"Oh! It was an idea. But then I remembered it wouldn't-it wasn't possible."

"What?"

"Well-" he said. "Well-I was going to suggest you come to visit the orchard I run, for the weekend I mean. The clubhouse is no place-I mean, it's very crowded just now, and you could breathe. Breathe easier. If you came."

"But why is that impossible?"

"Not impossible. I mean-"

He started telling her about the orchard. About the apples, and what his work with them entailed. The busy-ness of the season. Then, warming to his subject, about the savor apples had upon the Puscha palate, their goodness in digestion. And from that, to the premium his crops might fetch among his kind.

And all the time he talked, losing himself in this easy, boastful, well-rehea.r.s.ed chatter, he wondered at the wastefulness of the world, that animals crossed unimaginable gulfs of interstellar s.p.a.ce, only to compare with each other the things that filled their guts, and satisfied their palates.

It was not until she was in the lorry with him, her hands resting lightly on her bare knees, her back arched in an elegant curve, and the fold of gold-brown hair hanging still over her eye, that it dawned on him: she was still with him. Silent. Smiling. Improbably patient. She had said yes.

The orchards fanned east in an irregular patchwork from the outskirts of Woodbridge, gathering finally along the banks of the Alde and the Ore. The rivers-wide, muddy, tidal throats-gathered and ran forsome miles parallel to each other, and to the sea, which lay behind a thin band of reclaimed land. This ribbon of land-more a sea defense than anything else-was not given over to agriculture, but retained its ancient fenland garb of broken jetties, disused windmills and high, concealing reeds.

Rebecca glimpsed it only once, as Connie drove her through the deserted town of Orford, with its view over mudflats. Then they turned away from the coast, the road shrinking beneath them to a narrow gravel track, as it wound its way among the apple trees.

The monotony of the view was broken only once, by the Alde and the Ore, mingling indirectly through a knot of winding ditches and narrow (you might jump across them) surgically straight ca.n.a.ls. The land here was riddled with old channels and overgrown oxbow lakes, as though someone had scrunched up the land and then imperfectly flattened it.

A pontoon bridge and an even narrower driveway led Connie and his companion, at last, to his house.