The First Since Ancient Persia

The First Since Ancient Persia

By John Brunner

A letter (in Nature) signed by 134 scientists from Argentina’s Center for Animal Virology concluded:” … we feel that our country has been illegally used as a test field for a kind of experiment that is not yet accepted in the countries where the basic research on this vaccine had originated.” (New Scientist, 26 May 1988).

All day the lurching bus trailed its filthy wake of dust and diesel fumes across the drab and level countryside. Throughout this province the reads were no better than tracks, for there was nothing to metal them with, not even gravel, although, as Elsa Kahn had noticed, some attempt was being made to fill the worst of the potholes. Now and then the bus forded (could one say forded when there was no water? Well, then: traversed) one of the rare riverbeds of the region, dry as they would all remain for perhaps another three months, until the onset of the summer rains. Even then they would run no better than knee-deep. This was a land without bridges.

There she saw gangs or ragged men loading rocks on to the backs of burros fitted with saddles like double wooden hods. But they were not numerous, for even the timber had to be, so to say, imported. No trees save those planted by human hands grew closer than the foothills of the mountains that loomed on the western skyline.

Ancient Persia. Photo : Elena

There had been other wood along the road, in the shape of phone poles. They, however, had been rendered obsolete, replaced by line-of-sight microwave relays, cheaper and less vulnerable to sabotage. Near the towns that punctuated the bus’s route they had been torn down; the few that survived, too distant to be worth dragging away, served only to support the curious double-chambered nests of ovenbirds. Even so, passing one constituted an even and a distraction, comparable with the sight of a windmill in the distance, pumping water for an isolated farm, though not a match for an encounter with another vehicle. So far they had met four trucks and a bus plying in the opposite direction. Also they had overtaken sundry burros, pedestrians, and farm carts. Slow though their progress was, nothing had overtaken them

The sluggish changelessness of the landscape seemed to have infected Elsa’s fellow passengers, of whom there were at present eight, including an armed policeman seated behind the driver. He was the sole person on board who had spoken to her, and then only to demand a sight of her passport. The rest had merely glanced at her and retreated into the privacy of their own thoughts.

Now and then she felt the same lethargy was debilitating her. The first time they crossed one of the dry riverbeds she had automatically thought of it as a wadi, having encountered its like in North Africa. Although she had realised at once that that was wrong, it had taken her long minutes to recapture the proper term, arroyo seco.

Not that it was much help. Where she was bound, people might well use an entirely different word, drawn like so much of their vocabulary from the ancient language of the Chichiami.

That, at any rate, was what she had been told.

(Excerpt from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, eighth annual collection, edited by Gardner Dozois, 2008)