The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  “I’d better not,” I say, and back away from them.

  “Let’s go then,” Lissa says to Neil, and they start off across the sand. Lissa is limping badly, and before they have gone very far, Neil stops and takes off his shoes.

  The sky behind the Pyramids is purple-blue, and the Pyramids stand out flat and black against it.

  “Come on,” Zoe calls from the top of the steps. She is holding the flashlight and looking at the guidebook. “I want to see the Weighing of the Soul.”

  Chapter 7: Off the Beaten Track

  Zoe is already halfway down the steps when I get back, shining her flashlight on the door below her. “When the tomb was discovered, the door was plastered over and stamped with the seals bearing the cartouche of Tutankhamun,” she says.

  “It’ll be dark soon,” I call down to her. “Maybe we should go back to the hotel with Lissa and Neil.” I look back across the desert, but they are already out of sight.

  Zoe is gone, too. When I look back down the steps, there is nothing but darkness. “Zoe!” I shout and run down the sand-drifted steps after her. “Wait!”

  The door to the tomb is open, and I can see the light from her flashlight bobbing on rock walls and ceiling far down a narrow corridor.

  “Zoe!” I shout, and start after her. The floor is uneven, and I trip and put my hand on the wall to steady myself. “Come back! You have the book!”

  The light flashes on a section of carved-out wall, far ahead, and then vanishes, as if she has turned a corner.

  “Wait for me!” I shout and stop because I cannot see my hand in front of my face.

  There is no answering light, no answering voice, no sound at all. I stand very still, one hand still on the wall, listening for footsteps, for quiet padding, for the sound of slithering, but I can’t hear anything, not even my own heart beating.

  “Zoe,” I call out, “I’m going to wait for you outside,” and turn around, holding onto the wall so I don’t get disoriented in the dark, and go back the way I came.

  The corridor seems longer than it did coming in, and I toy with the idea that it will go on forever in the dark, or that the door will be locked, the opening plastered over and the ancient seals affixed, but there is a line of light under the door, and it opens easily when I push on it.

  I am at the top of a stone staircase leading down into a long wide hall. On either side the hall is lined with stone pillars, and between the pillars I can see that the walls are painted with scenes in sienna and yellow and bright blue.

  It must be the anteroom because Zoe said its walls were painted with scenes from the soul’s journey into death, and there is Anubis weighing the soul, and, beyond it, a baboon devouring something, and, opposite where I am standing on the stairs, a painting of a boat crossing the blue Nile. It is made of gold, and in it four souls squat in a line, their kohl-outlined eyes looking ahead at the shore. Beside them, in the transparent water, Sebek, the crocodile demigod, swims.

  I start down the steps. There is a doorway at the far end of the hall, and if this is the anteroom, then the door must lead to the burial chamber.

  Zoe said the tomb consists of only three rooms, and I saw the map myself on the plane, the steps and straight corridor and then the unimpressive rooms leading one into another, anteroom and burial chamber and Hall of Judgment, one after another.

  So this is the anteroom, even if it is larger than it was on the map, and Zoe has obviously gone ahead to the burial chamber and is standing by Tutankhamun’s coffin, reading aloud from the travel guide. When I come in, she will look up and say, “‘The quartzite sarcophagus is carved with passages from The Book of the Dead.’”

  I have come halfway down the stairs, and from here I can see the painting of the weighing of the soul. Anubis, with his jackal’s head, standing on one side of the yellow scales, and the deceased on the other, reading his confession from a papyrus.

  I go down two more steps, till I am even with the scales, and sit down.

  Surely Zoe won’t be long—there’s nothing in the burial chamber except the coffin—and even if she has gone on ahead to the Hall of Judgment, she’ll have to come back this way. There’s only one entrance to the tomb. And she can’t get turned around because she has a flashlight. And the book. I clasp my hands around my knees and wait.

  I think about the people on the ship, waiting for judgment. “It wasn’t as bad as they thought,” I’d told Neil, but now, sitting here on the steps, I remember that the bishop, smiling kindly in his white suit, gave them sentences appropriate to their sins. One of the women was sentenced to being alone forever.

  The deceased in the painting looks frightened, standing by the scale, and I wonder what sentence Anubis will give him, what sins he has committed.

  Maybe he has not committed any sins at all, like the clergyman, and is worried over nothing, or maybe he is merely frightened at finding himself in this strange place, alone. Was death what he expected?

  “Death is the same everywhere,” Zoe’s husband said. “Unexpected.” And nothing is the way you thought it would be. Look at the Mona Lisa. And Neil. The people on the ship had planned on something else altogether, pearly gates and angels and clouds, all the modern refinements. Prepare to be disappointed.

  And what about the Egyptians, packing their clothes and wine and sandals for their trip. Was death, even on the Nile, what they expected? Or was it not the way it had been described in the travel guide at all? Did they keep thinking they were alive, in spite of all the clues?

  The deceased clutches his papyrus and I wonder if he has committed some horrible sin. Adultery. Or murder. I wonder how he died.

  The people on the ship were killed by a bomb, like we were. I try to remember the moment it went off—Zoe reading out loud and then the sudden shock of light and decompression, the travel guide blown out of Zoe’s hands and Lissa falling through the blue air, but I can’t. Maybe it didn’t happen on the plane. Maybe the terrorists blew us up in the airport in Athens, while we were checking our luggage.

  I toy with the idea that it wasn’t a bomb at all, that I murdered Lissa, and then killed myself, like in Death on the Nile. Maybe I reached into my bag, not for my paperback but for the gun I bought in Athens, and shot Lissa while she was looking out the window. And Neil bent over her, solicitous, concerned, and I raised the gun again, and Zoe’s husband tried to wrestle it out of my hand, and the shot went wide and hit the gas tank on the wing.

  I am still frightening myself. If I’d murdered Lissa, I would remember it, and even Athens, notorious for its lack of security, wouldn’t have let me on board a plane with a gun. And you could hardly commit some horrible crime without remembering it, could you?

  The people on the ship didn’t remember dying, even when someone told them, but that was because the ship was so much like a real one, the railings and the water and the deck. And because of the bomb. People never remember being blown up. It’s the concussion or something, it knocks the memory out of you. But I would surely have remembered murdering someone. Or being murdered.

  I sit on the steps a long time, watching for the splash of Zoe’s flashlight in the doorway. Outside it will be dark, time for the Son et Lumière show at the pyramids.

  It seems darker in here, too. I have to squint to see Anubis and the yellow scales and the deceased, awaiting judgment. The papyrus he is holding is covered with long, bordered columns of hieroglyphics and I hope they are magic spells to protect him and not a list of all the sins he has committed.

  I have not murdered another, I think. I have not committed adultery. But there are other sins.

  It will be dark soon, and I do not have a flashlight. I stand up. “Zoe!” I call, and go down the stairs and between the pillars. They are carved with animals—cobras and baboons and crocodiles.

  “It’s getting dark,” I call, and my voice echoes hollowly among the pillars. “They’ll be wondering what happened to us.”

  The last pair of pillars is carved with a bird, its
sandstone wings outstretched. A bird of the gods. Or a plane.

  “Zoe?” I say, and stoop to go through the low door. “Are you in here?”

  Chapter Eight: Special Events

  Zoe isn’t in the burial chamber. It is much smaller than the anteroom, and there are no paintings on the rough walls or above the door that leads to the Hall of Judgment. The ceiling is scarcely higher than the door, and I have to hunch down to keep from scraping my head against it.

  It is darker in here than in the anteroom, but even in the dimness I can see that Zoe isn’t here. Neither is Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, carved with The Book of the Dead. There is nothing in the room at all, except for a pile of suitcases in the corner by the door to the Hall of Judgment.

  It is our luggage. I recognize my battered Samsonite and the carry-on bags of the Japanese tour group. The flight attendants’ navy-blue overnight cases are in front of the pile, strapped like victims to their wheeled carriers.

  On top of my suitcase is a book, and I think, “It’s the travel guide,” even though I know Zoe would never have left it behind, and I hurry over to pick it up.

  It is not Egypt Made Easy. It is my Death on the Nile, lying open and face-down the way Lissa left it on the boat, but I pick it up anyway and open it to the last pages, searching for the place where Hercule Poirot explains all the strange things that have been happening, where he solves the mystery.

  I cannot find it. I thumb back through the book, looking for a map. There is always a map in Agatha Christie, showing who had what stateroom on the ship, showing the stairways and the doors and the unimpressive rooms leading one into another, but I cannot find that either. The pages are covered with long unreadable columns of hieroglyphics.

  I close the book. “There’s no point in waiting for Zoe,” I say, looking past the luggage at the door to the next room. It is lower than the one I came through, and dark beyond. “She’s obviously gone on to the Hall of Judgment.”

  I walk over to the door, holding the book against my chest. There are stone steps leading down. I can see the top one in the dim light from the burial chamber. It is steep and very narrow.

  I toy briefly with the idea that it will not be so bad after all, that I am dreading it like the clergyman, and it will turn out to be not judgment but someone I know, a smiling bishop in a white suit, and mercy is not a modern refinement after all.

  “I have not murdered another,” I say, and my voice does not echo. “I have not committed adultery.”

  I take hold of the doorjamb with one hand so I won’t fall on the stairs. With the other I hold the book against me. “Get back, you evil ones,” I say. “Stay away. I adjure you in the name of Osiris and Poirot. My spells protect me. I know the way.”

  I begin my descent.

  FRIENDSHIP BRIDGE

  Brian W. Aldiss

  One of the true giants of the field, Brian W. Aldiss has been publishing science fiction for more than thirty years, and has more than two dozen books to his credit. His classic “Hothouse” series (assembled into the novel The Long Afternoon of Earth) won a Hugo Award in 1962. “The Saliva Tree” won a Nebula Award in 1965, and his novel Starship won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove. His other books include the acclaimed Helliconia trilogy—Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter—The Malacia Tapestry, An Island Called Moreau, Frankenstein Unbound, and Cryptozoic!. His latest books include the collections Seasons In Flight and A Tupolev Too Far, the novels Dracula Unbound and Remembrance Day, and a memoir, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s. Upcoming is a new novel, Somewhere East of Life, and a collection of poems, Home Life with Cats. His story “FOAM,” to which “Friendship Bridge” is a sequel of sorts (and both of these are related to his upcoming novel), was in our Ninth Annual Collection. He lives with his family in Oxford, England.

  In the sly and darkly witty story that follows, Aldiss takes us to a distant and war-torn country in company with a man on a quest to find himself, quite literally—or all the pieces of him that are left, anyway.…

  * * *

  Someone he did not know was with him. They passed a place where light bulbs were made. He accepted all this. And this square was named after an enemy he could not recall. Everything was wooden.

  He—or it was someone like him—was climbing wooden stairs. Laughter from an upper room. When he got there, after enormous effort, a madman with his hair alight was waiting to cut his head off. To remove it slice by slice.

  And he seemed to want to have it done to him.

  The noise was awful, as of cracking bone …

  1. The Speech

  The sound of firing in the Prospekt Svobody roused Burnell. He sat on the side of his bed, shaking, trying to compose himself. When the shots ceased, and the sound of running feet, he got up and went over to the window. Outside lay the avenue, lined with acacias, bathed in the acidic light of another Central Asian day. He could see no bodies. Perhaps the army had been celebrating an imagined victory.

  Burnell spent some while soaking his face and regarding it disapprovingly in the mirror. Then he washed, rebandaged his leg and turned out his suitcase looking for a clean shirt. His dirty one he threw over a chair in distaste. He struggled into the ill-fitting suit which a Shi’ite tailor had run up for him. Before leaving the room he locked his suitcase.

  The elevators of the Hotel Ashkhabad had ceased working, possibly during the war with Uzbekistan. The war with Uzbekistan could be blamed for many discomforts. A notice on the elevator gates said: PLEASE DESCEND TOMORROW. Burnell took the unswept staircase down to the foyer. A number of men in shaggy hats, some of them with light machine-guns hitched over their shoulders, stood about smoking. There was this to be said for Burnell’s locally made suit; he appeared less foreign in it, and less an object of suspicion.

  Since the dining room of the hotel did not open before two P.M., Burnell went out into the street to his favourite café. Heat was already beginning to bite and the smog to thicken. He liked the tree-lined streets about the centre of the city; he had been in worse places.

  The Koreans had established a fast-food restaurant called Tony’s. Entering, Burnell found himself a seat by the window, where he ordered coffee and yoghurt. By local standards, Tony’s was both clean and elegant. At eight in the morning, it was already full of customers, all male, who appeared to have settled in comfortably for the day. The yoghurt was excellent.

  Unsmiling but polite, the Koreans moved among the tables. Joseph Stalin had exiled their grandfathers here in the 1950s.

  Sympathy with countries trying to live down their abysmal past and come to terms with an uncertain present was part of Burnell’s survival kit in troubled parts of the world. He nevertheless disliked appointments that were not kept and contacts who never turned up. He prepared himself now, as he crunched a sweet, hard biscuit with his coffee, to meet one such contact three days later than arranged.

  Through the throng, a broad-built man with a powerful face was bearing down on Burnell. Abed Assaad drew up a chair from another table and seated himself opposite Burnell.

  Roy Burnell was slenderly built, in his early forties; he felt himself fragile against this mountainous man, whose head sat like a boulder on his frame. He smiled and greeted Burnell, enquiring after his wound.

  “Which wound?” Burnell asked.

  Assaad said, “The leg, isn’t it, no?”

  “I thought you meant … Never mind.” Hastily, Burnell brought from his breast-pocket the crumpled business card he had found awaiting him in his pigeonhole in the hotel. He smoothed it.

  It read:

  Dr. Abed Assaad

  Curator-in-Chief

  Archaeological Intensities Museum

  1 Khiva Street

  Ashkhabad

  Turkmenistan Soviet Union

  Seeing it, Assaad said, “Is my old card. You see a misprint there, unfortunately. Also this
nation naturally does not longer belong to the Soviet Union since the days of Boris Yeltsin.”

  Burnell nodded. He added, compressing his lips, that his arrangements for this visit to Ashkhabad had been made in Frankfurt. It was understood that Dr. Assaad or a deputy would meet him at Ashkhabad airport. No one had come. Nor had his hotel been booked, as promised.

  Burnell had had to make his own arrangements, with some rather unofficial assistance from Murray-Johnson at the British Consulate. He had been in the city for three days, frustrated at every turn when it came to meeting qualified people. His work was almost done and only now had Dr. Assaad appeared.

  Dr. Assaad nodded his head as he listened to Burnell’s complaints, commenting only that the city was full of tourists, each with various demands. As he did so, he retrieved his card and tucked it into the breast pocket of his grey jacket.

  “You received my letter, Dr. Assaad?”

  By way of answer, Assaad summoned a waiter and ordered two glasses of wine. He also suggested cake, but Burnell refused.

  “Cake is good when not stale. But maybe too sweet for your British taste, possibly? I am sorry not to meet at the aeroport. Frankfurt is one place and Ashkhabad another. What cities have you seen?”

  Burnell said that Murray-Johnson and a Unesco representative had driven him to Mary, with its five walled cities, but his parent body, World Cultural Heritage, had already registered the site.

  With a non-committal shrug, Assaad said, “I know Mr. Murray-Johnson, naturally. Maybe he understands the problems of a new nation like Turkmenistan, maybe not. Possibly not. Since we have democracy, there are problems at all levels with bureaucracy. Is difficulty with organizations, you understand? New times, new problems.”

  “I understand the same people are in power under President Diyanizov since the coup as were before.”

  Assaad swept this statement away with a broad gesture. He hunched himself over the table, so that his powerful chest made a considerable approach towards Burnell. In a low voice, he said, “Careful what names you mention. Get to know the immense changes which—what is it?—yes, convulse Central Asia. Get to know me better, Mr. Burnell. You will find a good man in a sea of imbeciles, unhappily. Don’t take offence. New avenues are difficult to open. Much has been closed down since the war. I tell you, confidentially. The Archaeological Antiquities Museum is closed down. Even worst, is now a school for sons of mullahs, you understand? I have no job, though I do it still, as I can. Otherwise, I have to trade to support myself and my wife, indefinitely…”