Ziyi said, “Look, Sergey Polzin, I’ll be straight with you. I don’t know who he really is or where he came from. He helps me on the beach. He helps me find things. All the good stuff I brought in, that was because of him. Don’t spoil a good thing. Let me use him to find more stuff. You can take a share. For the good of the town. The school you want to build, the water treatment plant in a year, two years, we’ll have enough to pay for them…”
But Sergey wasn’t listening. He’d seen the man’s eyes. “You see?” he said to Aavert Enger. “You see?”
“He is a person,” Ziyi said. “Like you and me. He has a wife. He has children.”
“And did you tell them you had found him?” Sergey said “No, of course not. Because he is a dead man. No, not even that. He is a replica of a dead man, spun out in the factory somewhere.”
“It is best we take him to town. Make him safe,” the policewoman said.
The man was looking at Ziyi.
“How much?” Ziyi said to the policewoman. “How much did he offer you?”
“This isn’t about money,” Sergey said. “It’s about the safety of the town.”
“Yes. And the profit you’ll make, selling him.”
Ziyi was shaking. When Sergey started to pull the man towards the vehicles, she tried to get in his way. Sergey shoved at her, she fell down, and suddenly everything happened at once. The dogs, Jung and Cheung, ran at Sergey. He pushed the man away and fumbled for his pistol and Jung clamped his jaws around Sergey’s wrist and started to shake him. Sergey sat down hard and Jung held on and Cheung darted in and seized his ankle. Sergey screaming while the dogs pulled in different directions, and Ziyi rolled to her feet and reached into the tangle of man and dogs and plucked up Sergey’s pistol and snapped off the safety and turned to the policewoman and told her to put up her hands.
“I am not armed,” Aavert Enger said. “Do not be foolish, Ziyi.”
Sergey was screaming at her, telling her to call off her dogs.
“It’s good advice,” Ziyi told the policewoman, “but it is too late.”
The pistol was heavy, slightly greasy. The safety was off. The hammer cocked when she pressed lightly on the trigger.
The man was looking at her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and shot him.
The man’s head snapped back and he lost his footing and fell in the mud, kicking and spasming. Ziyi stepped up to him and shot him twice more, and he stopped moving.
Ziyi called off the dogs, told Aavert Enger to sit down and put her hands on her head. Sergey was holding his arm. Blood seeped around his fingers. He was cursing her, but she paid him no attention.
The man was as light as a child, but she was out of breath by the time she had dragged him to her jeep. Sergey had left the keys in the ignition of his Humvee. Ziyi threw them towards the forest as hard as she could, shot out one of the tyres of Aavert Enger’s Range Rover, loaded the man into the back of the jeep. Jung and Cheung jumped in, and she drove off.
Ziyi had to stop once, and throw up, and drove the rest of the way with half her attention on the rear-view mirror. When she reached the spot where the roadtrain had been ambushed, she cradled the man in her arms and carried him through the trees. The two dogs followed. When she reached the edge of the cliff her pulse was hammering in her head and she had to sit down. The man lay beside her. His head was blown open, showing layers of filmy plastics. Although his face was untouched you would not mistake him for a sleeper.
After a little while, when she was pretty certain she wasn’t going to have a heart attack, she knelt beside him, and closed his eyes, and with a convulsive movement pitched him over the edge. She didn’t look to see where he fell. She threw Sergey’s pistol after him, and sat down to wait.
She didn’t look around when the dogs began to bark. Aavert Enger said, “Where is he?”
“In the same place as Sergey’s pistol.”
Aavert Enger sat beside her. “You know I must arrest you, Ziyi.”
“Of course.”
“Actually, I am not sure what you’ll be charged with. I’m not sure if we will charge you with anything. Sergey will want his day in court, but perhaps I can talk him out of it.”
“How is he?”
“The bites are superficial. I think losing his prize hurt him more.”
“I don’t blame you,” Ziyi said. “Sergey knew he was valuable, knew I would not give him up, knew that he would be in trouble if he tried to take it. So he told you. For the reward.”
“Well, it’s gone now. Whatever it was.”
“It was a man,” Ziyi said.
She had her cache of treasures, buried in the forest. She could buy lawyers. She could probably buy Sergey, if it came to it. She could leave, move back to the capital and live out her life in comfort, or buy passage to another of the worlds gifted by the Jackaroo, or even return to Earth.
But she knew that she would not leave. She would stay here and wait through the days and years until the factory returned her friend to her.
The Stars Do Not Lie
JAY LAKE
Highly prolific writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last few years, including Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, Jim Baen’s Universe, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction that he has already released four collections, even though his career is only a few years old: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, Dogs in the Moonlight, and The Sky That Wraps. His novels include Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, Escapement, Green, Madness of Flowers, and Pinion, as well as three chapbook novellas, Death of a Starship, The Baby Killers, and The Specific Gravity of Grief. He’s the coeditor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, now in six volumes, and has also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, Other Earths, with Nick Gevers, and Spicy Slipstream Stories, with Nick Mamatas. His most recent books include Endurance, a sequel to Green, and a chapbook novella, Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh. Coming up are new novels Kalimpura and Sunspin. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.
Here he takes us to a world whose inhabitants have forgotten (and, in fact, vehemently deny) their origins, for an elegant and somewhat steampunkish tale, evocatively written and peopled with characters of real psychological complexity, all embroiled on one side or another in a political and religious war between those who want to reveal the truth and those who want to surpress it.
In the beginnings, the Increate did reach down into the world and where They laid Their hand was all life touched and blossomed and brought forth from water, fire, earth and air. In eight gardens were the Increate’s children raised, each to have dominion over one of the eight points of the Earth. The Increate gave to men Their will, Their word and Their love. These we Their children have carried forward into the opening of the world down all the years of men since those first days.
—Librum Vita, Beginnings 1:1—4; being the Book of Life and word entire of the Increate