The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18 by Gardner Dozois

Author:Gardner Dozois
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780337210
Publisher: Constable & Robinson Ltd

* * *

At the bridge, he leans against the concrete wall looking into the dark water. This is one of his familiar haunts; how many people has he saved on this bridge? The pipal tree sapling still grows in a crack in the cement – the municipality keeps uprooting it, but it is buried too deep to die completely. Behind him there are cars and lights and the sound of horns, the jangle of bicycle bells. He sets his notebook down on top of the wall, wishing he had given it to someone, like that girl at the bus stop. He can’t make himself throw it away. A peculiar lassitude, a detachment, has taken hold of him and he can think and act only in slow motion.

He’s preparing to climb on to the wall of the bridge, his hands clammy and slipping on the concrete, when he hears somebody behind him say, “Wait!” He turns. It is like looking into a distorting mirror. The man is hollow-cheeked, with a few days’ stubble on his chin, and the untidy thatch of hair has thinned and is streaked with silver. He holds a bunch of cards in his hand. A welt mars one cheek, and his left sleeve is torn and stained with something rust-coloured. His eyes are leopard’s eyes, burning with a dreadful urgency. “Aseem,” says the stranger who is not a stranger, panting as though he has been running, his voice breaking a little. “Don’t . . .” He is already starting to fade. Aseem reaches out a hand and meets nothing but air. A million questions rise in his head, but before he can speak the image is gone.

Aseem’s first impulse is a defiant one. What if he were to jump into the river now – what would that do to the future, to causality? It would be his way of bowing out of the game that the city’s been playing with him, of saying: I’ve had enough of your tricks. But the impulse dies. He thinks instead about Om Prakash’s second-order causal loops, of sunset over the Red Fort, and the twisting alleyways of the old city, and death sleeping under the eyelids of the citizenry. He sits down slowly on the dusty sidewalk. He covers his face with his hands; his shoulders shake.

After a long while he stands up. The road before him can take him anywhere, to the faded colonnades and bright bustle of Connaught Place, to the hush of public parks, with their abandoned cricket balls and silent swings, to old government housing settlements where, amid sleeping bungalows, ancient trees hold court before somnolent congresses of cows. The dusty bylanes and broad avenues and crumbling monuments of Delhi lie before him, the noisy, lurid marketplaces, the high-tech glass towers, the glitzy enclaves with their citadels of the rich, the boot-boys and beggars at street corners . . . He has just to take a step and the city will swallow him up, receive him the way a river receives the dead.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.