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

I knew the old Elizabethan was thinking, why not? There are only numbers to go back to, and benefit traps, and an old, gray city, and an old, gray dying world, a safe world with few promises. Here there’s a world to be made. Here there’s a future of a million years to be shaped. Here there are a thousand different ways of living together to be designed, and if they don’t work, roll them up like clay and start again.

I did not hurry Sean for his answer. He knew as well as I that it was not a clean decision. It was lose a world, or lose each other. These are not choices you make in a day. So, I enjoyed the hotel. One day I was having a long bath. The hotel had a great bathroom and there was a lot of free stuff you could play with, so I abused it. I heard Sean pick up the phone. I could not make out what he was saying, but he was talking for some time. When I came out he was sitting on the edge of the bed with the telephone beside him. He sat very straight and formal.

“I called Jean-Paul,” he said. “I gave him my resignation.”

Two days later, we set out for the Chaga. We went by matatu. It was a school holiday, the Peugeot Services were busy with children on their way back to their families. They made a lot of noise and energy. They looked out the corners of their eyes at us and bent together to whisper. Sean noticed this.

“They’re talking about you,” Sean said.

“They know what I am, what I do.”

One of the schoolgirls, in a black and white uniform, understood our English. She fixed Sean a look. “She is a warrior,” she told him. “She is giving us our nation back.”

We left most of the children in Kapsabet to change onto other matatus; ours drove on into the heart of the Nandi Hills. It was a high, green rolling country, in some ways like Sean’s England. I asked the driver to stop just past a metal cross that marked some old road death.

“What now?” Sean said. He sat on the small pack I had told him was all he could take.

“Now, we wait. They won’t be long.”

Twenty cars went up the muddy red road, two trucks, a country bus and medical convoy went down.

Then they came out of the darkness between the trees on the other side of the road like dreams out of sleep: Meji, Naomi and Hamid. They beckoned; behind them came men, women, children…entire families, from babes in arms to old men; twenty citizens, appearing one by one out of the dark, looking nervously up and down the straight red road, then crossing to the other side.

I fived with Meji, he looked Sean up and down.

“This is the one?”

“This is Sean.”

“I had expected something, um…”

“Whiter?”

He laughed. He shook hands with Sean and introduced himself. Then Meji took a tube out of his pocket and covered Sean in spray. Sean jumped back, choking.

“Stay there, unless you want your clothes to fall off you when you get inside,” I said.

Naomi translated this for the others. They found it very funny. When he had immunized Sean’s clothes, Meji sprayed his bag.

“Now, we walk,” I told Sean.

We spent the night in the Chief’s house in the village of Senghalo. He was the last station on our railroad.

I know from my Dust Girl days you need as good people on the outside as the inside. Folk came from all around to see the black Englishman. Although he found being looked at intimidating, Sean managed to tell his story. I translated. At the end the crowd outside the Chief’s house burst into spontaneous applause and finger-clicks.

“Aye, Tendeleo, how can I compete?” Meji half-joked with me.

I slept fitfully that night, troubled by the sound of aircraft moving under the edge of the storm.

“Is it me?” Sean said.

“No, not you. Go back to sleep.”

Sunlight through the bamboo wall woke us. While Sean washed outside in the bright, cold morning, watched by children curious to see if the black went all the way down, Chief and I tuned his shortwave to the UN frequencies. There was a lot of chatter in Klingon. You Americans think we don’t understand Star Trek? “They’ve been tipped off,” Chief said. We fetched the equipment from his souterrain. Sean watched Hamid, Naomi, Meri and I put on the communicators. He said nothing as the black-green knob of cha-plastic grew around the back of my head, into my ear, and sent a tendril to my lips. He picked up my staff.

“Can I?”

“It won’t bite you.”

He looked closely at the fist-sized ball of amber at its head, and the skeleton outline of a sphere embedded in it.

“It’s a buckyball,” I said. “The symbol of our power.”

He passed it to me without comment. We unwrapped our guns, cleaned them, checked them and set off.

We walked east that day along the ridges of the Nandi Hills, through ruined fields and abandoned villages. Helicopter engines were our constant companions. Sometimes we glimpsed them through the leaf cover, tiny in the sky like black mosquitoes. The old people and the mothers looked afraid. I did not want them to see how nervous they were making me. I called my colleagues apart.

“They’re getting closer.”

Hamid nodded. He was a quiet, thin twenty-two year old…Ethiopian skin, goatee, a political science graduate from the university of Nairobi.

“We choose a different path every time,” he said. “They can’t know this.”

“Someone’s selling us,” Meji said.

“Wouldn’t matter. We pick one at random.”

“Unless they’re covering them all.”

In the afternoon we began to dip down toward the Rift Valley and terminum. As we wound our way down the old hunters’ paths, muddy and slippery from recent rain, the helicopter came swooping in across the hillside. We scrambled for cover. It turned and made another pass, so low I could see the light glint from the pilot’s heads-up visor.

“They’re playing with us,” Hamid said. “They can blow us right off this hill any time they want.”

“How?” Naomi asked. She said only what was necessary, and when.

“I think I know,” Sean said. He had been listening a little away. He slithered down to join us as the helicopter beat over the hillside again, flailing the leaves, showering us with dirt and twigs. “This.” He tapped my forearm. “If I could find you, they can find you.”

I pulled up my sleeve. The Judas chip seemed to throb under my skin, like poison.

“Hold my wrist,” I said to Sean. “Whatever happens, don’t let it slip.”

Before he could say a word, I pulled my knife. These things must be done fast. If you once stop to think, you will never do it. Make sure you have it straight. You won’t get another go. A stab down with the tip, a short pull, a twist, and the traitor thing was on the ground, greasy with my blood. It hurt. It hurt very much, but the blood had staunched, the wound was already closing.

“I’ll just have to make sure not to lose you again,” Sean said.

Very quietly, very silently, we formed up the team and one by one slipped down the hillside, out from under the eyes of the helicopter. For all I know, the stupid thing is up there still, keeping vigil over a dead chip. We slept under the sky that night, close together for warmth and on the third day we came to Tinderet and the edge of the Chaga.

TEN had been leading us a cracking pace, as if she were impatient to put Kenya behind us. Since mid-morning, we had been making our way up a long, slow hill. I’d done some hill-walking, I was fit for it, but the young ones and the women with babies found it tough going. When I called for a halt, I saw a moment of anger cross Ten’s face. As soon as she could, we upped packs and moved on. I tried to catch up with her, but Ten moved steadily ahead of me until, just below the summit, she was almost running.