The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

Starlight Express ^{MICHAEL SWANWICK}

Flaminio the water carrier lived in the oldest part of the ancient city of Roma among the popolo minuto, the clerks and artisans and laborers and such who could afford no better. His apartment overlooked the piazza dell’Astrovia, which daytimes was choked with tourists from four planets who came to admire the ruins and revenants of empire. They coursed through the ancient transmission station, its stone floor thrumming gently underfoot, the magma tap still powering the energy road, even though the stars had shifted in their positions centuries ago and anyone stepping into the projector would be translated into a complex wave front of neutrinos and shot away from the Earth to fall between the stars forever.

Human beings had built such things once. Now they didn’t even know how to turn it off.

On hot nights, Flaminio slept on a pallet on the roof. Sometimes, staring up at the sparkling line of ionization that the energy road sketched through the atmosphere, he followed it in his imagination past Earth’s three moons and out to the stars. He could feel its pull at such times, the sweet yearning tug that led suicides to converge upon it in darkness, furtive shadows slipping silently up the faintly glowing steps like lovers to a tryst.

Flaminio wished then that he had been born long ago when it was possible to ride the starlight express away from the weary old Republic to impossibly distant worlds nestled deep in the galaxy. But in the millennia since civilization had fallen, countless people had ridden the Astrovia off the planet, and not one had ever returned.

Except, maybe, the woman in white.

Flaminio was coming home from the baths when he saw her emerge from the Astrovia. It was election week and a ward heeler had treated him to a sauna and a blood scrub in exchange for his vote. When he stepped out into the night, every glint of light was bright and every surface slick and shiny, as if his flesh had been turned to glass and offered not the least resistance to the world’s sensations. He felt genuinely happy.

Then there was a pause in the constant throb underfoot, as if the great heart of the world had skipped a beat. Something made Flaminio look up, and he thought he saw the woman step down from the constant light of the landing stage.

An instant only, and then he realized he had to be wrong.

The woman wore a white gown of a cloth unlike any Flaminio had ever seen before. It was luminously cool, and with every move she made it slid across her body with simple grace. Transfixed, he watched her step hesitantly out of the Astrovia and seize the railing with both hands.

She stared out across the plaza, looking confused and troubled, as if gazing into an unfamiliar new world.

Flaminio had seen that look before on the future suicides. They came to the Astrovia during the daylight first, accompanying tours that stopped only briefly on their way to the Colosseum and the Pantheon and the Altair Gate, but later returned alone and at night, like moths compulsively circling in on death and transformation in smaller and more frenzied loops before finally cycling to a full stop at the foot of the Aldebaranian Steps, quivering and helpless as a wren in a cat’s mouth.

That, Flaminio decided, was what must be happening here. The woman had gotten as far as the transmission beam, hesitated, and turned around. As he watched, she raised a hand to her mouth, the pale blue gems on her silver bracelet gleaming. She was very lovely, and he felt terribly sorry for her.

Impulsively, Flaminio took the woman’s arm and said, “You’re with me, babe.”

She looked up at him, startled. Where Flaminio had the ruddy complexion and coarse face of one of Martian terraformer ancestry, the woman had aristocratic features, the brown eyes and high cheekbones and wide nose of antique African blood. He grinned at her as if he had all the carefree confidence in the world, thinking: Come on. You are too beautiful for death. Stay, and rediscover the joy in life.

For a breath as long as all existence, the woman did not react. Then she nodded and smiled.

He led her away.

Back at his room, Flaminio was at a loss as to what to do. He had never brought a woman home for anything other than romantic purposes and, further, to his astonishment, discovered he felt not the least desire to have sex with this one. So he gave her his narrow bed and a cup of herbal tea. He himself lay down on a folded blanket by the door, where she would have to step over him if she tried to return to the Astrovia. They both went to sleep.

In the morning he rose before dawn and made his rounds. Flaminio had a contract with a building seven stories high and though the denizens of the upper floors were poor as poor, everybody needed water. When he got home, he made his guest breakfast.

“Stat grocera?” she asked, holding up a sausage squash. Then, when Flaminio shook his head and spread his hands to indicate incomprehension, she took a little bite and spat it out in disgust. The bread she liked, however, and she made exclamations of surprise and pleasure over the oranges and pomegranolos. The espresso she drank as if it were exactly what she were used to.

Finally, because he could think of nothing else to do, he took her to see the Great Albino.

The Great Albino was being displayed in a cellar off of via Dolorosa. Once he had been able to draw crowds large enough that he was displayed in domes and other spaces where he could stand and stretch out his limbs to their fullest. But that was long ago. Now he crouched on all fours in a room that was barely large enough to accommodate him. There were three rows of wooden bleachers, not entirely filled, from which tourists asked questions, which he courteously answered.

Flaminio was able to visit the Great Albino as often as he liked, because when he was young he had discovered that Albino knew things that no one else did. Thirteen times in a single month he had managed to scrape together a penny so he could pepper the giant with questions. On the last visit, Albino had said, “Let that one in free from now.”

So of course, the first question the young Flaminio had asked on being let in was “Why?”

“Because you don’t ask the same questions as everyone else,” Albino had said. “You make me call up memories I thought I had forgotten.”

Today, however, the tourists were asking all the same dreary questions as usual. “How old are you?” a woman asked.

“I am three thousand eight hundred forty seven years and almost eleven months old,” Albino said gravely.

“No!” the tourist shrieked. “Really?”

“I was constructed so that I would never age, back when humanity had the power to do such things.”

“My tutor-mentor says there are no immortals,” a child said, frowning seriously.

“Like any man, I am prone to accident and misfortune so I am by no means immortal. But I do not age, nor am I susceptible to any known diseases.”

“I hear that and I think you are the very luckiest man in the world,” a man with a strong Russikan accent said. “But then I reflect that there are no women your size, and I think maybe not.”

The audience laughed. Albino waited for the laughter to subside and with a gentle smile said, “Ah, but think how many fewer times I have to go to confession than you do.”

They laughed again.

Flaminio stood, and the woman in white did likewise. “Have you brought your bride-to-be for me to meet, water carrier?” Albino asked. “If so, I am honored.”

“No, I have rather brought you a great puzzle—a woman who speaks a language that I have never heard before, though all the peoples of the worlds course through Roma every day.”

“Does she?” Albino’s great head was by itself taller than the woman was. He slowly lowered it, touching his tremendous brow to the floor before her. “Madam.”

The woman looked amused. “Vuzet gentdom.”

“Graz mairsy, dama.”

Hearing her own language spoken, woman gasped. Then she began talking, endlessly it seemed to Flaminio, gesturing as she did so: at Flaminio, in the direction of the Astrovia, up at the sky. Until finally Albino held up a finger for silence. “Almost, I think she must be mad,” he said. “But then… she speaks a language that before this hour I believed to be dead. So who is to say? Whatever the truth may be, it is not something I believed possible a day ago.”

“What does she say?” one of the audience members asked.

“She says she is not from this planet or any other within the Solar System. She says she comes from the stars.”

“No one has come back from the stars for many centuries,” the man scoffed.

“Yes. And yet here she is.”

The woman’s name was Szette, Albino said. She claimed to come from Opale, the largest of three habitable planets orbiting Achernar. When asked whether she had been contemplating suicide, Szette looked shocked and replied that suicide was a sin, for to kill oneself was to despair of God’s mercy. Then she had asked what planet this was, and when Albino replied “Earth,” adamantly shook her head.

Much later, in Flaminio’s memory, the gist of the conversation, stripped of the torrents of foreign words and the hesitant translation, which was curtailed because the paying customers found it boring but continued at some length after the show was over, was as follows:

“That is not possible. It was Earth I meant to visit. So I studied it beforehand and it is not like this. It is all very different.”

“Perhaps,” Albino said, “you studied a different part of Earth. There is a great variety of circumstance in a planet.”

“No. Earth is a rich world, one of the richest in the galaxy. This place is very poor. It must have been named after Earth so long ago that you have forgotten that the human race was not born here.”

At last, gently, Albino said, “Perhaps. I think, however, that there is a simpler explanation.”

“What explanation? Tell me!”

But Albino only shook his head, as ponderously and stubbornly as an elephant. “I do not wish to get involved in this puzzle. You may go now. However, leave me here with my small friend for a moment, if you would. I have something of a personal nature to say to him.”

Then, when he and Flaminio were alone, Albino said, “Do not become emotionally involved with this Szette. There is no substance to her. She is only a traveler—wealthy, by your standards, but a butterfly who flits from star to star, without purpose or consequence. Do you honestly think that she is worthy of your admiration?”

“Yes!” The words were torn from the depths of Flaminio’s soul. “Yes, I do!”

Albino had said that he did not wish to be involved. But apparently he cared enough to notify the protettori, for later that day they came to arrest Szette and take her to the city courts. There, she was duly charged, declared a pauper, issued a living allowance, and released on Flaminio’s recognizance. During the weeks while her trial was pending, he taught her how to speak Roman. She rented a suite of rooms which Flaminio found luxurious, though she clearly did not, and moved them both into it. Daytimes, after work, he showed her all the sights.

At night, they slept apart.

This was a baffling experience for Flaminio, who had never shared quarters with a woman other than his mother on anything but intimate terms. He thought about her constantly when they were apart but in her physical presence, he found it impossible to consider her romantically.

Their conversations, however, were wonderful. Sitting at the kitchen table, Flaminio would ask Szette questions, while she practiced her new language by telling him about the many worlds she had seen.

Achernar, she said, spun so rapidly that it bulged out at the equator and looked like a great blue egg in the skies of Opale. Its companion was a yellow dwarf and when the planet and both stars were all in a line, a holiday was declared in which everyone dressed in green and drank green liqueurs and painted their doors and cities green and poured green dye in their rivers and canals. But such alignments were rare—she had seen only one in all her lifetime.

Snowfall was an ice world, in orbit around a tight cluster of three white dwarfs so dim they were all but indistinguishable from the other stars in a sky that was eternally black. Their mountains had been carved into delicate lacy fantasias, in which were tangled habitats where the air was kept so warm that their citizens wore jewelry and very little else.

The people of Typhonne, a water world whose surface was lashed by almost continuous storms, had so reshaped their bodies that they could no longer be considered human. They built undersea cities in the ocean shallows and when they felt the approach of death would swim into the cold, dark depths of the trenches, to be heard from no more. Their sun was a red dwarf, but not one in a hundred of them knew that fact.

On and on, into the night, Szette’s words flew, like birds over the tiled roofs of the Eternal City. Listening, occasionally correcting her grammar or providing a word she did not know, Flaminio traveled in his imagination from star to star, from Algol to Mira to Zaniah.

The day of Szette’s trial arrived at last. Because Albino was a necessary witness and the city courts could not hold his tremendous bulk, the judges came to him. The bleachers were dismantled to make room for their seven-chaired bench, from which they interviewed first Flaminio, then Albino, and then Szette. The final witness was an engineer-archivist from the Astrovia.

“This has happened before,” the woman said. She was old, scholarly, stylishly dressed. “But not in our lifetimes. Well… in his of course.” She nodded toward Albino and more than one judge smiled. “It is a very rare occurrence and for you to understand it, I must first explain some of the Astrovia’s workings.

“It is an oversimplification to say that the body of a traveler is transformed from matter to energy. It is somewhat closer to the truth to say that the traveler’s body is read, recorded, disassembled, and then transmitted as a signal upon a carrier beam. When the beam reaches—or, rather, reached—its destination, the signal is read, recorded, and then used to recreate the traveler. The recordings are retained against the possibility of an interrupted transmission. In which case, the traveler can simply be sent again. As a kind of insurance, you see.”

The engineer-archivist paused for questions. There being none, she continued. “I have examined our records. Roughly two thousand years ago, a woman identical to the one you see before you came to Earth. She stayed for a year, and then she left. What she thought of our world we do not know. She is, no doubt, long dead. Recently, there was an earth tremor, too small to be noticed by human senses, which seems to have disrupted something in the workings of the Astrovia. It created a duplicate of that woman as she was when she first arrived in Roma and released her onto the streets. This duplicate is the woman whose fate you are now deciding.”

One of the judges leaned forward. “You say this has happened before. How many times?”

“Three that we know of. It is of course possible there were more.”

As the testimony went on, Szette had grown paler and paler. Now she clutched Flaminio’s arm so tightly that he thought her nails would break.

The judges consulted in unhurried whispers. Finally, one said, “Will the woman calling herself Szette stand forth?”

She complied.

“We are agreed that, simply by being yourself—or, more precisely, a simulacrum of yourself—you know a great deal about an ancient era and the attitudes of its people that would be of interest to the historians at the Figlia della Sapienze. You will make yourself available to be interviewed there by credentialed scholars, three days a week. For this you will be paid adequately.”

“Two days,” snapped the lawyer that the Great Albino had hired for Szette. “More than adequately.”

The judges consulted again. “Two,” their spokeswoman conceded. “Adequately.”

The lawyer smiled.

That night, Szette took off her bracelet, which Flaminio had never seen her without, opened her arms to him, and said, “Come.”

He did.

The way that Szette clutched Flaminio as they made love, as if he were a log and she a sailor in danger of drowning, and the unsettling intensity with which she studied his face afterwards, her own expression as unreadable as a moon of ice, told Flaminio that something had changed within her, though he could not have said exactly what.

All that Flaminio knew of Szette was this: That she came from a world called Opale orbiting the stars Achernar A and B. That she loved the darkness of the night sky and the age of Roma’s ruins. That she would not eat meat. That she was very fond of him, but nothing more.

This last hurt Flaminio greatly, for he was completely in love with her.

Flaminio was a light sleeper. In the middle of the night, he heard a noise—a footstep on the landing, perhaps, or a door closing—and his eyes flew open.

Szette was gone.

All the rooms of the apartment were empty and when Flaminio went to look for her on the balcony, she wasn’t there either. He stared up at the battle-scarred moons and they looked down on him with contempt. Then all the sounds of the city at night drew away from him and in that bubble of silence a sizzle of terror ran up his spine. For he knew where Szette had gone.

It was not difficult to catch up with her. Szette did not hurry and Flaminio ran as hard as he could. But when he stood, panting, before her, she held up a hand in warning. The pale blue stones on her bracelet flashed bright.

He could not move.

He could not speak.

“You have been so very kind to me,” Szette said. “I hope you will not hate me too much when you realize why.”

She turned her back on him. With casual grace, she climbed the steps. Like many another before her, she hesitated. Then, with sudden resolution, Szette plunged into the beam.

There was nothing Flaminio could have done to stop her. But simultaneous with the dematerialization of Szette’s body, he heard an extraordinary noise, a scream, issuing from his own mouth.

What Flaminio did next could not be called an impulsive act. He thought it through carefully, and though that took him only an instant, his resolve was firm. He ran up the steps toward the beam, determined to join Szette in her endless voyage to nowhere. He would offer his body to the universe and his soul to oblivion. He would not, he was certain, hesitate when he reached the beam.

A shoulder in his chest stopped him cold. A hand gripped his shoulder and another his elbow. Three protettori closed in upon him, scowling. “You must come with us, sir,” said one, “to have this suicidal impulse removed.”

“I’m a citizen! I know my rights! You can’t stop me without a contract!”

“Sir, we have a contract.”

They dragged him to a cellular. It closed about him and took him away.

When he was released from therapy, incapable then or ever after of ending his own life, Flaminio went to see the only individual in all the world who might have taken out a contract on him and asked, “Why wouldn’t you let me die?”

“To me, your lives are as those of mayflies,” the Great Albino said. “Enjoy what precious seconds remain.”

“And the bracelet? Why didn’t you tell me about Szette’s bracelet?”

“Until that night, I had forgotten about them. Such things were commonly worn by travelers back when the world was rich. To protect themselves from molestation. To enlist aid when in need. But they were a small and unimportant detail in a complex and varied age.”

Flaminio had only one more question to pose: “If I was only doing the bracelet’s bidding, then why haven’t these feelings gone away?”

Albino looked terribly sad. “Alas, my friend, it seems you really did fall in love with her.”

That same day, Flaminio left Roma to become a wanderer. He never married, though he took many lovers, both paid and not. Nor did he ever settle down in one place for any length of time. In his old age he frequently claimed to have been around the world forty-eight times and to have seen everything there was to see on all four occupied planets of the Solar System, and much else as well. All of which was verifiably true, were one to search through the records for his whereabouts over the decades. But, in his cups, he would admit to having never gone anywhere or seen anything worth seeing at all.