The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

slowly. It had spent fifteen years docked at Babylon-Borsippa, and, having been launched some four months before the attack on the Corn Parade, was now on its way back to the star the Congregation called Metta. The star’s name, in the ancient liturgical language of the monks and nuns of the Congregation, meant kindness.

* * *

Ish was very nearly dead when Upekkha’s monks brought him aboard. His heart had been stopped for some weeks, and it was the acceleration support system rather than Ish’s bloodstream that was supplying the last of the platform’s oxygen reserves to his brain, which itself had been pumped full of cryoprotectants and cooled to just above the boiling point of nitrogen. The rescue team had to move very quickly to extricate Ish from that system and get him onto their own life support. This task was not made any easier by the militarized physiology given to Ish at Lagash, but they managed it. He was some time in recovering.

Ish never quite understood what had brought Upekkha to Babylon. Most of the monks and nuns spoke good Babylonian—several of them had been born in the cities—but the concepts were too alien for Ish to make much sense of them, and Ish admitted to himself he didn’t really care to try. They had no gods, and prayed—as far as Ish could tell—to their ancestors, or their teachers’ teachers. They had been looking, they said, for someone they called Tathagata, which the nun explaining this to Ish translated into Babylonian as “the one who has found the truth.” This Tathagata had died many years ago on a planet circling the star called Metta, and why the monks and nuns were looking for him at Babylon was only one of the things Ish didn’t understand.

“But we didn’t find him,” the nun said. “We found you.”

They were in Upekkha’s central core, where Ish, who had grown up on a farm, was trying to learn how to garden in free fall. The monks and nuns had given him to understand that he was not required to work, but he found it embarrassing to lie idle—and it was better than being alone with his thoughts.

“And what are you going to do with me?” Ish asked.

The nun—whose own name, Arrakhasampada, she translated as “the one who has attained watchfulness”—gave him an odd look and said:

“Nothing.”

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll—do something? Damage something? Hurt someone?” Ish asked.

“Will you?” Arrakhasampada asked.

Ish had thought about it. Encountering the men and women of Upekkha on the battlefield he could have shot them without hesitation. In Apsu, he had not hesitated. He had looked forward to killing the nomads responsible for the Corn Parade with an anticipation that was two parts vengefulness and one part technical satisfaction. But these nomads were not those nomads, and it was hard now to see the point.

It must have been obvious, from where the monks and nuns found Ish, and in what condition, what he was, and what he had done. But they seemed not to care. They treated Ish kindly, but Ish suspected they would have done as much for a wounded dog.

The thought was humbling, but Ish also found it oddly liberating. The crew of Upekkha didn’t know who Ish was or what he had been trying to do, or why. His failure was not evident to them.

* * *

The doctor, an elderly monk who Ish called Dr. Sam—his name, which Ish couldn’t pronounce, meant something like “the one who leads a balanced life”—pronounced Ish fit to move out of the infirmary. Arrakhasampada and Dr. Sam helped Ish decorate his cabin, picking out plants from the garden and furnishings from Upekkha’s sparse catalog with a delicate attention to Ish’s taste and reactions that surprised him, so that the end result, while hardly Babylonian, was less foreign, more Ish’s own, than it might have been.

Arrakhasampada asked about the mended icon in its block of resin, and Ish tried to explain.

She and Dr. Sam grew very quiet and thoughtful.

* * *

Ish didn’t see either of them for eight or ten days. Then one afternoon as he was coming back from the garden, dusty and tired, he found the two of them waiting by his cabin. Arrakhasampada was carrying a bag of oranges, and Dr. Sam had with him a large box made to look like lacquered wood.

Ish let them in, and went into the back of the cabin to wash and change clothes. When he came out they had unpacked the box, and Ish saw that it was an iconostasis or shrine, of the sort the monks and nuns used to remember their predecessors. But where the name-scroll would go there was a niche just the size of Ish’s icon.

He didn’t know who he was. He was still—would always be—a soldier of the city, but what did that mean? He had wanted revenge, still did in some abstract way. There would be others, now, Lion-Eagles out to avenge the Lord of Lagash, children who had grown up with images of the Corn Parade. Maybe Mara would be among them, though Ish hoped not. But Ish himself had had his measure of vengeance in Apsu and knew well enough that it had never been likely that he would have more.

He looked at the icon where it was propped against the wall. Who was he? Tara: “I don’t think I ever knew you.” But she had, hadn’t she? Ish was a man in love with a dead woman. He always would be. The Lady’s death hadn’t changed that, any more than Ish’s own death would have. The fact that the dead woman was a goddess hadn’t changed it.

Ish picked up the icon and placed it in the niche. He let Dr. Sam show him where to place the orange, how to set the sticks of incense in the cup and start the little induction heater. Then he sat back on his heels and they contemplated the face of the Lady of Isin together.

“Will you tell us about her?” Arrakhasampada asked.

THE BEANCOUNTER’S CAT by Damien Broderick

Australian writer, editor, futurist, and critic Damien Broderick, a senior fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, made his first sale in 1964 to John Carnell’s anthology New Writings in SF 1. In the decades that followed, he has kept up a steady stream of fiction, nonfiction, futurist speculations, and critical work, which has won him multiple Ditmar and Aurealis Awards. He sold his first novel, Sorcerer’s World, in 1970; it was later reissued in a rewritten version in the United States as The Black Grail. Broderick’s other books include the novels The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, Striped Holes, and The White Abacus, as well as books written with Rory Barnes and Barbara Lamar. His many short stories have been collected in A Man Returns, The Dark Between the Stars, Uncle Bones: Four Science Fiction Novellas, and most recently, The Quilla Engine: Science Fiction Stories.

He also wrote the visionary futurist classic The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technology, critical study of science fiction Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction, and edited the nonfiction anthology Year Million: Science at the Far End of Knowledge, the SF anthology Earth Is But a Star: Excursions Through Science Fiction to the Far Future, and three anthologies of Australian science fiction, The Zeitgeist Machine, Strange Attractors, and Matilda at the Speed of Light. His most recent publication is a nonfiction book written with Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985–2010.

Here he shows us that the longest—and strangest—journey begins with a single step.