The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Plaquette,” said Ma, “what for you steal Msieur’s machine?” It wasn’t a shout but a low, scared, angry murmur – far worse. In the lamplight scattered into the yard from the main street, Claude’s white-gloved hands glowed eerily.

  Plaquette clattered down the stairs to confront the problem. “I know you think he yours, but girl, he don’t belong to you!” Ma had come down behind her. Plaquette didn’t even need to turn to know the way Ma was looking at her: hard as brass and twice as sharp.

  “I – I set him to follow me.” Plaquette faltered for words. This was the part she hadn’t told them.

  Ma only said, “Oh, Lord. We in for it now.”

  Pa replied, “Maybe not.”

  “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE going!”

  Plaquette muttered an apology to the man she’d jostled. Even late like this – it must have been nearly midnight – New Orleans’ Union Station was thronged with travelers. But in Ma’s wake Plaquette and Claude made slow yet steady headway through the chattering crowds. A makeshift packing crate disguised her mechanical friend; Plaquette held a length of clothesline which was supposed to fool onlookers into thinking she hauled it along. Of course the line kept falling slack. Ma looked back over her shoulder for the thirteenth time since they’d left home. But it couldn’t be much farther now to the storage room where Pa had said they could hide Claude overnight. Or for a little longer. But soon as the inevitable hue and cry over his disappearance died down Plaquette could return him to Msieur’s. So long as no one discovered Claude where they were going to stash him –

  “Stop! Stop! Thief!” Angry as she’d feared, Msieur’s shout came from behind them. It froze her one long awful second before she could run.

  Ahead Ma shoved past a fat man in woolens and sent him staggering to the right. Behind them came more exclamations, more men calling for them to halt, their cries mixed with the shrieks and swearing of the people they knocked aside. How’d he know where to look for her? Trust a man whose business was numbers to put two and two together. Msieur had friends with him – How many? Plaquette barely glanced back. Two? Four? No telling – she had to run to stay in front of Claude so he’d follow her to – an opening! She broke away from the thick-packed travelers and ran after Ma to a long brick walk between two puffing engines. Good. Cover. This must be why Ma had taken such an unexpected path. Swaying like a drunk in a hurricane, Claude in his crate lumbered after her.

  The noise of their pursuers fell to a murmur. Maybe she’d lost them?

  But when Plaquette caught up with Ma, Ma smacked her fists together and screamed. “No! Why you follow me over here? Ain’t I told you we putting your fool mistake in the storage the other side of the tracks?”

  “B-but you came this w-w-ay!” Plaquette stammered.

  “I was creating a distraction for you to escape!”

  The clatter and thump of running feet sounded clear again above the engines’ huff and hiss. Coming closer. Louder. Louder. Ma threw her hands in the air. “We done! Oh, baby, you too young for jail!”

  One of the dark train carriages Plaquette had run past had been split up the middle – hadn’t it? A deeper darkness – a partially open door? Spinning, she rushed back the way they’d come. Yes! “Ma!” Plaquette pushed the sliding door hard as she could. It barely budged. Was that wide enough? She jumped and grabbed its handle and swung herself inside.

  But Claude! Prisoned in slats, weighed down by his treads, he bumped disconsolately against the baggage car’s high bottom. Following her and the wardenclyffe, exactly as programmed. Should she drop it? She dug through the deep pockets frantically and pulled it out so fast it flew from her hand and landed clattering somewhere in the carriage’s impenetrable darkness.

  Hidden like she wished she could hide from the hoarsely shouting men. But they sounded frustrated as well as angry now, and no nearer. Maybe the engine on the track next to this was in their way?

  The train began moving. From Plaquette’s perch it looked like the bricks and walkway rolled off behind her. Claude kept futile pace. The train was pulling up alongside Ma, standing hopelessly where Plaquette had left her, waiting to be caught. Now she was even with them. Plaquette brushed her fingers over Ma’s yellow headscarf. It fell out of reach. “Goodbye, Ma! Just walk away from Claude! They won’t know it was you!” Fact was, Plaquette felt excited almost as much as she was scared. Even if Msieur got past whatever barrier kept them apart right now, she was having her adventure!

  The train stopped. Plaquette’s heart just about did, too. Her only adventure would be jail. How could she help Ma and Pa from inside the pokey? She scanned the walkway for Msieur and his friends, coming to demand justice.

  But no one showed. The shouts for her and Ma to stop grew fainter. The train started again, more slowly. Suddenly Ma was there, yanking Claude desperately by his cord. She’d pulled his crate off. It was on the platform, slowly disappearing into the distance. Together, Ma and Plaquette lifted Claude like he was luggage, tilting him to scrape over the carriage’s narrow threshold. As they did, the tray holding the books caught on the edge and was dragged open – and it held more than book scrolls. Cool metallic disks, crisp or greasy slips of paper – Msieur’s money!

  How? Plaquette wasted a precious moment wondering – he must have put the day’s take into Claude when she surprised him in the showroom.

  Ma’s eyes got wide as saucers. She was still running to keep up, puffing as she hefted Claude’s weight. With a heave, she and Plaquette hauled him into the car. He landed with a heavy thump. The train was speeding up. There was no time to count it; Plaquette fisted up two handfuls of the money, coins and bills both, and shoved it into Ma’s hands. Surely it was enough to suffice Ma and Pa for a while. “I’ll come back,” she said.

  The train kept going, building speed. Ma stopped running. She was falling behind fast. “You a good girl!” she yelled.

  When it seemed sure the train wasn’t stopping again anytime soon Plaquette stuck her head out – a risk. A yellow gleam in the shadows was all she could see of Ma. Plaquette shoved the sliding door closed.

  Well. She’d gone and done it now. Pa’s note was no use; this wasn’t the train making the Frisco run. It for sure wasn’t no sleeping-car train. A porter had no business here. The train could be going to the next town, or into the middle of next week. She had no way of knowing right now. For some reason, that made her smile.

  She fumbled her way to Claude’s open drawer. The money left in there was all coins, more than she could hold in one hand. She divided it amongst the deep, deep pockets in her trousers and jacket.

  She was a true and actual thief, and a saboteur.

  Finally she found the wardenclyffe. Feeling farther around her in the loud blackness, she determined the carriage was loaded as she’d imagined with trunks, suitcases, parcels of all shapes and sizes. Nothing comfortable as the beds at home, the big one or the little. She didn’t care.

  When the train stopped she’d count the money. When the train stopped she’d calculate what to do, where to go, how to get by. She could slip off anywhere, buy herself new clothes, become a new person.

  She settled herself as well as she could on a huge, well-stuffed suitcase and closed her eyes.

  Claude would help. She would punch more books for him to read, and collect from the people who came to listen. Send money home to Pa and Ma every few weeks.

  She’d write the books herself. She’d get him to punch them. She’d punch a set of instructions for how to punch instructions for punching. She’d punch another set of instructions and let Claude write books too. And maybe come back one day soon. Find Billy. Take him away and show him a new life.

  The train ran toward the north on shining steel rails. Plaquette’s dreams flew toward the future on pinions of shining bright ideas.

  A MURMURATION

  Alastair Reynolds

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS (www.alastairreynolds.com) was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. He has lived in Cornwall, Scotland
, the Netherlands, where he spent twelve years working as a scientist for the European Space Agency, before returning to Wales in 2008 where he lives with his wife Josette. Reynolds has been publishing short fiction since his first sale to Interzone in 1990. Since 2000 he has published fourteen novels: the Inhibitor trilogy, British Science Fiction Association Award winner Chasm City, Century Rain, Pushing Ice, The Prefect, House of Suns, Terminal World, the Poseidon’s Children series, Blue Remembered Earth, On the Steel Breeze, and Poseidon’s Wake, Doctor Who novel The Harvest of Time. His short fiction has been collected in Zima Blue and Other Stories, Galactic North, and Deep Navigation. Coming up is collaboration with Stephen Baxter, The Medusa Chronicles, an as-yet-untiled new novel, and new collection Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds. In his spare time he rides horses.

  THE ‘HUT’ IS a couple of insulated portable cabins, with a few smaller sheds containing generators, fuel, wind turbine parts and so on. There is a chemical toilet, a wash basin, basic cooking facilities. Two or three of us can share the hut at a time, but there is not normally a need for more than one to keep an eye on the equipment. Resources being tight, lately we tend to come out on our own.

  In all honesty, I prefer it this way. Birds draw out the solitude in us. They repay patience and silence – long hours of a kind of alert, anticipatory stillness. The days begin to blur into each other; weekends and weekdays becoming arbitrary distinctions. I find myself easily losing track of the calendar, birds and weather my only temporal markers. I watch the migration patterns, record their altering plumage, study the changeful skies. I could not be happier.

  There is just one thing to spoil my contentment, but even that, I am confident, will soon be behind me.

  I will finish the paper.

  IT SOUND EASY, put like that. A vow. A recommitment, a redoubling of my own efforts. One last push.

  But I have been here before.

  It started easily enough – the usual set of objections, no real hint of the trouble to come. Very few papers ever go through without some amendments, so none of us were bothered that there were a few issues that needed addressing.

  But when we had fixed those, the anonymous referee came back with requests for more changes.

  We took care of those. Hoped that the paper would now be judged fit for publication. But still the referee wanted more of us. This kept going on. Just when we think we have addressed all possible doubts, the referee somehow manages to find something new to quibble with. I do my best to be stoic, reminding myself that the anonymous referee is just another scientist doing their job, that they too are under similar pressures, and that I should not feel under any personal attack.

  But I only have to glance at their comments.

  The authors are inconsistent in their handling of the normalisation terms for the correlation function of the velocity modulus. I am not convinced that their treatment of the smoothed Dirac delta-function is rigorous across the quoted integral.

  My blood boils. I entertain a momentary fantasy of meeting the referee out here, on some lonely strip of marshland, of swerving violently and running them into a ditch.

  Asking, as I watch them gag on muddy water: “Rigorous enough for you now?”

  THE BASIS OF our experiment is a ring of twenty tripods, arranged in a two kilometre circle. The hut is on one side of the circle, the wind turbine the other. During the day I check all the tripods, picking the least waterlogged path in the 4WD.

  Each unit carries a pair of stereometric digital cameras. The lenses need to be kept the power and electronic connections verified. The cameras should be aimed into the middle of the perimeter, and elevated sufficiently to stand a good chance of catching the murmuration’s epicentre. The cameras are meant to be steerable, but not all of the motors work properly now.

  Beneath each camera is a heavy grey digital control box. The boxes contain microprocessor boards, emergency batteries, and the blue plastic rectangles of their internal ethernet modules, flickering with yellow and red LEDs. The boxes are supposedly weatherproof but the rain usually finds a way into them. Like the motors, there have been some failures of the circuit board, and our spares supplies are running low.

  About one in five of the stations have more equipment. On these units we also included laser/radar rangefinders and Doppler velocity recorders. These in turn require extra processors and batteries in the control boxes, which is yet more to go wrong.

  The effort is worth it, though.

  The equipment allows us to track the instantaneous vectors of anything up to two hundred and fifty thousand birds, perhaps even half a million, in a single compact formation. Our spatial/temporal resolution is sufficient to determine wing movements down to the level of specific feather groups. At the same time we also gather data on the attentional shifts implied by eye and head tracking of individual birds.

  The human eyes see a blurring of identities, birds becoming the indistinguishable, amorphous elements of some larger whole. The cameras and computers see through all of that. I know the science, I know the algorithms, I know our data-carrying capacity. All the same, I am still quietly astonished that we can do this.

  When the cameras are checked, which can take anywhere between three and six hours, I have one final inspection to perform. I drive to the wind turbine, and make a visual inspection of the high grey tower and the swooping blades. More often than not there is nothing to be done. The blades turn, the power flows, our electrical and computer systems work as they are meant to.

  The rest is down to the birds.

  IT’S ODD, REALLY, but there are times when I find even the hut a little too closed-in and oppressive for my tastes. Sometimes I just stop the 4WD out here, wind the window down, and watch the light change over the marsh. I like it best when the day is overcast, the clouds sagging low over the trees and bushes of the marsh, their greyness relieved only by a bold supercilial swipe of pale yellow above the horizon. Birds come and go, but it’s too early for the roosting. I watch herons, curlews, reed warblers – sometimes even the slow, methodical patrol of our resident marsh harrier, quartering the ground with the ruthless precision of a surveillance drone.

  Beyond the birds, the only constancy is the regular swoosh of the turbine blades.

  It’s a good time to catch up on work or reading.

  I pull laser-printed pages from the unruly nest of the glove compartment, along with tissues, cough sweets, empty medicine packets, a scuffed CD without a case. I rest a stiff-backed road atlas on the steering wheel, so that I can write on the pages.

  I’ve already marked up certain problematic passages in yellow highlighter. Now I use a finer pen to scribble more detailed notes in the margins. Eventually I’ll condense these notes into a short email to the journal editor. In turn they’ll forward them on to the author of the paper I am refereeing.

  This is how it works. I’m engaged in a struggle with my own anonymous referee, half-convinced that they’ve got it in for me, while at the same time trying to be just as nit-picking and difficult for this other author. Doubtless they feel just as irritated by me, as I am irritated with my own referee. But from my end, I know that there’s nothing personal in it. I just want the work to be as good as it can be, the arguments as lucid, the analysis as rigorous. So what if I know the lead author, and don’t particularly care for her? I can rise above that.

  I hold one of the sheets up to the yellowing sky, so that the band of light pushes through the highlit yellow passages. I read back my own scrawl in the margins:

  Sloppy handling of the synthetic correlation function – doesn’t inspire confidence in rest of analysis.

  Am I being too harsh with them?

  Perhaps. But the we’ve all been through this mill.

  STARLINGS GATHER, ARRIVING from all directions, concentrating in the air above the copse of trees and bushes near the middle of the study area. They come in small numbers, as individuals or in flocks of a few dozen, before falling into the greater mass. There
is no exact threshold at which the concentration of birds becomes a recognisable murmuration, but it needs at least a few thousand before the form begins to emerge as a distinct phenomenon in its own right, with its swooping, gyring, folding cohesiveness – a kind of living membrane in the sky.

  Meanwhile, our instruments record. One hundred parametric data points per bird per millisecond, on average, or upwards of fifty gigabytes of data for the whole murmuration. Since the murmuration may persist for several tens of minutes, our total data cube for the whole observation may contain more than thirty terabytes of data, and a petabyte is not exceptional. We use some of the same data-handling and compression routines as the particle physicists in CERN, with their need to track millions of microscopic interaction events. They are tracking tiny bundles of energy, mass, spin and charge. We are tracking warm, feathery bodies with hearts and wings and twitchy central nervous systems!

  All of it is physics, though, whether you are studying starlings or quarks.

  On my workstation I sift through slices of the data with tracker-wheels and mouse glides.

  I graph up a diagram of the murmuration at a moment in time, from an arbitrary viewing angle. It is a smear-shaped mass of tiny dots, like a pixelated thumbprint. On the edges of the murmuration the birds are easily distinguishable. Closer to the core the dots crowd over each other, forming gradients of increasing concentration, the birds packing together with an almost Escher-like density. Confronted with those black folds and ridges, it is hard not to think of the birds as blending together, clotting into a suspended, gravity-defying whole.

  I mouse click and each dot becomes a line. Now the smear is a bristly mass, like the pattern formed by iron filings in the presence of a magnetic field. These are the instantaneous vectors for each bird – the direction and speed in which they are moving.