Gardner Dozois - The Years Best Science Fiction, Vol. 18

“You expect to hit the prize first time?” Heino said as we bounced along the dirt track in an MSF Landcruiser to Don Dul.

I had better luck in Don Dul, if you can call it that. Ten had definitely been here two months ago. But she had left eight days later. I saw the log in, the log out, but there was no record of where she had gone.

“No shortage of camps either,” Heino said. He was a dour bastard. He couldn’t take me any further but he squared me an authorization to travel on Red Cross/ Crescent convoys, who did a five hundred mile run through the camps along the northern terminum. In two weeks I saw more misery than I ever thought humanity could take. I saw the faces and the hands and the bundles of scavenged things and I thought, why hold them here? What are they saving them from? Is it so bad in the Chaga? What is so terrible about people living long lives, being immune from sickness, growing extra layers in their brains? What is so frightening about people being able to go into that alien place, and take control of it, and make it into what they want?

I couldn’t see the Chaga, it lay just below the southern horizon, but I was constantly aware of its presence, like they say people who have plates in their skulls always feel a slight pressure. Sometimes, when the faces let me sleep, I would be woken instead by a strange smell, not strong, but distinct; musky and fruity and sweaty, sexy, warm. It was the smell of the Chaga, down there, blowing up from the south.

Tent to truck to camp to tent. My three weeks were running out and I had to arrange a lift back along the front line to Samburu and the flight to Mombasa. With three days left, I arrived in Eldoret, UNECTA’s Lake Victoria regional center. It gave an impression of bustle, the shops and hotels and cafes were busy, but the white faces and American accents and dress sense said Eldoret was a company town. The Rift Valley Hotel looked like heaven after eighteen days on the front line. I spent an hour in the pool trying to beam myself into the sky. A sudden rain-storm drove everyone from the water but me. I floated there, luxuriating in the raindrops splashing around me. At sunset I went down to the camps. They lay to the south of the town, like a line of cannon-fodder against the Chaga. I checked the records, a matter of form. No Tendeleo Bi. I went in anyway. And it was another camp, and after a time, anyone can become insulated to suffering. You have to. You have to book into the big hotel and swim in the pool and eat a good dinner when you get back; in the camps you have to look at the faces just as faces and refuse to make any connection with the stories behind them. The hardest people I know work in the compassion business. So I went up and down the faces and somewhere halfway down some row I remembered this toy Jean-Paul had given me. I took it out. The display was flashing green. There was a single word: lock.

I almost dropped it.

I thought my heart had stopped. I felt shot between the eyes. I forgot to breathe. The world reeled sideways. My fucking stupid fingers couldn’t get a precise reading. I ran down the row of tents, watching the figures. The digits told me how many meters I was to north and east. Wrong way. I doubled back, ducked right at the next opening and headed east. Both sets of figures were decreasing. I overshot, the cast reading went up. Back again. This row. This row. I peered through the twilight. At the far end was a group of people talking outside a tent lit by a yellow petrol lamp. I started to run, one eye on the tracker.

I stumbled over guy-ropes, kicked cans, hurdled children, apologized to old women. The numbers clicked down, thirty five, thirty, twenty five meters…I could see this one figure in the group, back to me, dressed in purple combat gear. East zero, North twenty, eighteen…Short, female, Twelve, ten. Wore its hair in great soft spikes. Eight, six. I couldn’t make it past four. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I was shaking.

Sensing me, the figure turned. The yellow light caught her.

“Ten,” I said. I saw fifty emotions on that face. Then she ran at me and I dropped the scanner and I lifted her and held her to me and no words of mine, or anyone else’s, I think, can say how I felt then.

NOW our lives and stories and places come together, and my tale moves to its conclusion.

I believe that people and their feelings write themselves on space and time. That is the only way I can explain how I knew, even before I turned and saw him there in that camp, that it was Sean, that he had searched for me, and found me. I tell you, that is something to know that another person has done for you. I saw him, and it was like the world had set laws about how it was to work for me, and then suddenly it said, no. I break them now, for you Tendeleo, because it pleases me. He was impossible, he changed everything I knew, he was there.

Too much joy weeps. Too much sorrow laughs.

He took me back to his hotel. The staff looked hard at me as he picked up his keycard from the lobby.

They knew what I was. They did not dare say anything. The white men in the bar also turned to stare.

They too knew the meaning of the colors I wore.

He took me to his room. We sat on the verandah with beer. There was a storm that night-there is a storm most nights, up in the high country-but it kept itself in the west among the Nandi Hills. Lightning crawled between the clouds, the distant thunder rattled our beer bottles on the iron table. I told Sean where I had been, what I had done, how I had lived. It was a story long in the telling. The sky had cleared, a new day was breaking by the time I finished it. We have always told each other stories, and each other’s stories.

He kept his questions until the end. He had many, many of them.

“Yes, I suppose, it is like the old slave underground railroads,” I answered one.

“I still don’t understand why they try to stop people going in.”

“Because we scare them. We can build a society in there that needs nothing from them. We challenge everything they believe. This is the first century we have gone into where we have no ideas, no philosophies, no beliefs. Buy stuff, look at stuff. That’s it. We are supposed to build a thousand years on that? Well, now we do. I tell you, I’ve been reading, learning stuff, ideas, politics. Philosophy. It’s all in there. There are information storage banks the size of skyscrapers, Sean. And not just our history. Other people, other races. You can go into them, you can become them, live their lives, see things through their senses. We are not the first. We are part of a long, long chain, and we are not the end of it. The world will belong to us; we will control physical reality as easily as computers control information.”

“Hell, never mind the UN…you scare me, Ten!”

I always loved it when he called me Ten. Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One.

Then he said, “and your family?”

“Little Egg is in a place called Kilandui. It’s full of weavers, she’s a weaver. She makes beautiful brocades. I see her quite often.”

“And your mother and father?”

“I’ll find them.”

But to most of his questions, there was only one answer: “Come, and I will show you.” I left it to last. It rocked him as if he had been struck.

“You are serious.”

“Why not? You took me to your home once. Let me take you to mine. But first, it’s a year…And so so much…”

He picked me up.

“I like you in this combat stuff,” he said.

We laughed a lot and remembered old things we had forgotten. We slowly shook off the rust and the dust, and it was good, and I remember the room maid opening the door and letting out a little shriek and going off giggling.

Sean once told me that one of his nation’s greatest ages was built on those words, why not? For a thousand years Christianity had ruled England with the question: “Why?” Build a cathedral, invent a science, write a play, discover a new land, start a business: “why?” Then came the Elizabethans with the answer: “Why not?”