Year's Best SF 17

“Then what are you wearing that veil for? It’s a symbol of bondage.”

“Bondage to God,” Thorn said loftily.

“You don’t believe in God.”

Right then Thorn decided that she would.

When she left the house and turned toward the park, the triviality of her home and family fell away like lint. After a block, she felt transformed. Putting on the veil had started as a simple act of rebellion, but out in the street it became far more. Catching her reflection in a shop window, she felt disguised in mystery. The veil intensified the imagined face it concealed, while exoticizing the eyes it revealed. She had become something shadowy, hidden. The Wasters all around her were obsessed with their own surfaces, with manipulating what they seemed to be. All depth, all that was earnest, withered in the acid of their inauthenticity. But with the veil on, Thorn had no surface, so she was immune. What lay behind the veil was negotiated, contingent, rendered deep by suggestion.

In the tiny triangular park in front of the blackened shell of the school, life went on as if nothing had changed. The tower fans turned lazily, creating a pleasant breeze tinged a little with soot. Under their strutwork shadows, two people walked little dogs on leashes, and the old men bent over their chessboards. Thorn scanned the scene through the slit in her veil, then walked toward a bench where an old man sat reading from an electronic slate.

She sat down on the bench. The old man did not acknowledge her presence, though a watchful twitch of his eyebrow told her he knew she was there. She had often seen him in the park, dressed impeccably in threadbare suits of a style long gone. He had an oblong, drooping face and big hands that looked as if they might once have done clever things. Thorn sat considering what to say.

“Well?” the old man said without looking up from his book. “What is it you want?”

Thorn could think of nothing intelligent to say, so she said, “Are you a historian?”

He lowered the slate. “Only in the sense that we all are, us Wasters. Why do you want to know?”

“My school burned down,” Thorn said. “I need to find a tutor.”

“I don’t teach children,” the old man said, turning back to his book.

“I’m not a child!” Thorn said, offended.

He didn’t look up. “Really? I thought that’s what you were trying to hide, behind that veil.”

She took it off. At first he paid no attention. Then at last he glanced up indifferently, but saw something that made him frown. “You are the child that lives with the Gminta hunter.”

His cold tone made her feel defensive on Hunter’s behalf. “He doesn’t hunt all Gmintas,” she said, “just the wicked ones who committed the Holocide. The ones who deserve to be hunted.”

“What do you know about the Gmintan Holocide?” the old man said with withering dismissal.

Thorn smiled triumphantly. “I was there.”

He stopped pretending to read and looked at her with bristly disapproval. “How could you have been there?” he said. “It happened 141 years ago.”

“I’m 145 years old, sequential time,” Thorn said. “I was 37 when I was five, and 98 when I was seven, and 126 when I was twelve.” She enjoyed shocking people with this litany.

“Why have you moved so much?”

“My mother got pregnant without my father’s consent, and when she refused to have an abortion he sued her for copyright infringement. She’d made unauthorized use of his genes, you see. So she ducked out to avoid paying royalties, and we’ve been on the lam ever since. If he ever caught us, I could be arrested for having bootleg genes.”

“Who told you that story?” he said, obviously skeptical.

“Maya did. It sounds like something one of her boyfriends would do. She has really bad taste in men. That’s another reason we have to move so much.”

Shaking his head slightly, he said, “I should think you would get cognitive dysplasia.”

“I’m used to it,” Thorn said.

“Do you like it?”

No one had ever asked her that before, as if she was capable of deciding for herself. In fact, she had known for a while that she didn’t like it much. With every jump between planets she had grown more and more reluctant to leave sequential time behind. She said, “The worst thing is, there’s no way of going back. Once you leave, the place you’ve stepped out of is gone forever. When I was eight I learned about pepcies, that you can use them to communicate instantaneously, and I asked Maya if we could call up my best friend on the last planet, and Maya said, ‘She’ll be middle-aged by now.’ Everyone else had changed, and I hadn’t. For a while I had dreams that the world was dissolving behind my back whenever I looked away.”

The old man was listening thoughtfully, studying her. “How did you get away from Gmintagad?” he asked.

“We had Capellan passports,” Thorn said. “I don’t remember much about it; I was just four years old. I remember drooping cypress trees and rushing to get out. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

He was staring into the distance, focused on something invisible. Suddenly, he got up as if something had bitten him and started to walk away.

“Wait!” Thorn called. “What’s the matter?”

He stopped, his whole body tense, then turned back. “Meet me here at four hours forenote tomorrow, if you want lessons,” he said. “Bring a slate. I won’t wait for you.” He turned away again.

“Stop!” Thorn said. “What’s your name?”

With a forbidding frown, he said, “Soren Pregaldin. You may call me Magister.”

“Yes, Magister,” Thorn said, trying not to let her glee show. She could hardly wait to tell Hunter that she had followed his advice, and succeeded.

What she wouldn’t tell him, she decided as she watched Magister Pregaldin stalk away across the park, was her suspicion that this man knew something about the Holocide. Otherwise, how would he have known it was exactly 141 years ago? Another person would have said 140, or something else vague. She would not mention her suspicion to Hunter until she was sure. She would investigate carefully, like a competent field agent should. Thinking about it, a thrill ran through her. What if she were able to catch a Gminta? How impressed Hunter would be! The truth was, she wanted to impress Hunter. For all his mordant manner, he was by far the smartest boyfriend Maya had taken up with, the only one with a profession Thorn had ever been able to admire.

She fastened the veil over her face again before going home, so no one would see her grinning.

Magister Pregaldin turned out to be the most demanding teacher Thorn had ever known. Always before, she had coasted through school, easily able to stay ahead of the indigenous students around her, always waiting in boredom for them to catch up. With Magister Pregaldin there was no one else to wait for, and he pushed her mercilessly to the edge of her abilities. For the first time in her life, she wondered if she were smart enough.

He was an exacting drillmaster in mathematics. Once, when she complained at how useless it was, he pointed out beyond the iron gridwork of the dome to a round black hill that was conspicuous on the red plain of the crater bed. “Tell me how far away the Creeping Ingot is.”

The Creeping Ingot had first come across the horizon almost a hundred years before, slowly moving toward Glory to God. It was a near-pure lump of iron the size of a small mountain. In the Waste, the reigning theory was that it was molten underneath, and moving like a drop of water skitters across a hot frying pan. In the city above them, it was regarded as a sign of divine wrath: a visible, unstoppable Armageddon. Religious tourists came from all over the planet to see it, and its ever-shrinking distance was posted on the public sites. Thorn turned to her slate to look it up, but Magister Pregaldin made her put it down. “No,” he said, “I want you to figure it out.”

“How can I?” she said. “They bounce lasers off it or something to find out where it is.”

“There is an easier way, using tools you already have.”

“The easiest way is to look it up!”

“No, that is the lazy way.” His face looked severe. “Relying too much on free information makes you as vulnerable as relying too much on technology. You should always know how to figure it out yourself, because information can be falsified, or taken away. You should never trust it.”

So he was some sort of information survivalist. “Next you’ll want me to use flint to make fire,” she grumbled.

“Thinking for yourself is not obsolete. Now, how are you going to find out? I will give you a hint: you don’t have enough information right now. Where are you going to get it?”

She thought a while. It had to use mathematics, because that was what they had been talking about. At last