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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Tradition!” Mickle sang, straight out of Fiddler on the Roof.

  Tiflin folded his arms.

  “Some of us are fresh out of gum,” I said. “Some of us wear the same clothes for days at a time, and dirty sneakers, and wouldn’t notice if we were sharing, would we?”

  “Go to hell,” Tiflin said.

  “They’re out of Snapple, too,” Mickle said. Oddly, like Dieter, he seemed to be enjoying this, as if it proved something important or at least interesting. Sometimes working with smarter people is infuriating.

  “If we did look at the videos, what would that do?” Dieter asked with little-boy wonder. “I mean, none of us have met... them. Us. The others. If they exist.”

  “They do not exist,” Tiflin said.

  “But has anyone actually seen another?” Dieter asked. “What would happen if we just looked at them?”

  “Collapse the wave function,” Wong said. “Stop all this shit right in its tracks. One non-Abelian programmer can’t exist in the same space or time as another, right?”

  “They’re no more real than the standing wave,” Tiflin said in a high, exhausted growl. He seemed ready to break into tears. Who could blame him?

  “I think we’re way beyond being worried about 8 Ball’s success,” Dieter said. “But we could collapse it all – make all the others vanish, along with their programs. We can pull the plug.”

  “That would kill our bonuses,” Mickle said.

  “Cashing multiple versions of the same check will crash more than the wave function,” I said.

  And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you! That’s what my wife had told me. A female version of me had to have crossed some distance in the multiverse to occupy this world line, didn’t she? She showed up first in China. I go there infrequently. And she figured it all out before I did. She somehow managed to avoid me, but still left me notes to clue me in. Notes apparently don’t flip the state. To everyone else here, I am still male, and she had to act through me if she was to exert any influence in the open – right? Maybe my others, eventually, would come from far enough across the multiverse that I would be the anomaly.

  This was bending my brain big-time.

  “Why aren’t we seeing hundreds of them? Thousands?” Mickle asked, clearly finding it hard to believe he was even asking the question.

  Dieter was our Rottweiler when it came to pure theory. “Our spaces aren’t that big. If more than one dupe meets – however many they are in total – they all vanish!”

  “So if they appear in a clump, they cancel out immediately,” Wong said, firmly in the spirit of this gedanken discussion.

  “Heisenbergian crowd control,” Mickle said. “Lovely.”

  Tiflin was pinking brightly now and couldn’t bring himself to speak. My remark about the gum and the clothes had shaken him. Maybe he was starting to believe.

  “Sorry,” Dieter said, smiling as if at a lovely dream. “One last thought. How many 8 Balls are there? Is our machine in a superposition with all the others? And how could that possibly be stable?”

  “Shoot me now,” Tiflin said, pushing past my arm toward the door.

  THESE DUPES, AS Mickle calls them, are us, smart or smarter. They find themselves in roughly the same environments, covering the same or very similar world lines, attending the same meetings – if they’re not yet clued in about such things – but never more than one per meeting, one per world line. The only way to survive is to avoid meeting yourself. Both will vanish. And their programs or parts of programs, in 8 Ball, might also vanish – which could help explain some weird irregularities in the output. The better programmers you or your dupe are, the more your vanishing affects the success of the standing wave.

  I have employees not on our team going over the tapes, tracking us or versions of us on the security system, letting us know where 8 Ball programmers are congregating. Word is getting out. This is spooking everybody.

  Why aren’t there trillions of us, filling the Earth to capacity? First of all, there’s that problem of encounters. Second, there’s the probability that for every alternate world in the multiverse, we’re sharing dupes. One vanishes from one world and appears in another. Dupes are traded – filling in a hole, like a tunneling electron – but are not actually duplicated.

  And perhaps not even actually destroyed. Who can say?

  Who could ever know?

  And for every alternate Earth, there is an 8 Ball, very little different from the one we made, going through the same processes, running the same Gödelian strings, with the same successful discovery of extraordinarily long primes, the same confirmation of the Enormous Theorem, the same ability to solve problems involving insane levels of number-crunching. If we could coordinate or discover or recover all those programs, running on all those 8 Balls (or their successors), we’d probably have at least a short list of every possible mathematical problem, run to exhaustion or even solved.

  That success will generate more funding for more machines like 8 Ball – bigger machines, newer machines, better and better machines. And all the worlds of the multiverse will begin to fill with people like us at an even faster rate; a surfeit of smart people, clever people, people smarter than me, until perhaps the flash point is reached – more brilliant programmers than any Earth actually needs. Would the multiverse start weeding out these upstarts?

  I don’t want to look at any more security tapes. I don’t want to go home and find my female self in the arms of my wife. And I don’t want to run into myself in Building 10 and pop out of existence.

  I’ve packed a bag, taken a large sum out of my bank, kissed my wife, left a note for my ‘sister,’ gassed up my VW, and pretty soon I’ll drive to a town I’ve never been to before, someplace I wouldn’t think of. If of course I can think of such a place.

  How many of me will think the same? Where would I never want to live? What if we all flee to the same safe, awful hellhole? And is it worth my survival to live there? Between me and my dupes, there’s only one white VW Rabbit, and I seem to have the only set of keys. Dupes bring along their clothes but not their cars. Maybe her keys don’t fit. Maybe she drives a Volvo. Smarter, right?

  Again, this bends my brain. I’m trying to imagine the mass exodus. We’ll empty the United States in our Teslas and Mercedeses and then rental cars and motorbikes and maybe bicycles and then just walking or running. A flood of the world’s finest programmers spreading out from North America. Biblical!

  An even more frightening thought –

  Perhaps every universe has trillions of worlds with intelligent beings on them that are only now beginning to build machines like 8 Ball. Will the entire mass of all these universes be converted into programmers?

  There is of course a theoretical safety valve, a choke point that could make all these frightening machines moot. It was Gödel himself who proved that mathematics would never be perfect and logically complete. Will that save us? If that limitation, that very wise act of cautious creation, brings all of this to a soft end, do we say thank God?

  Or thank Gödel?

  I leave these problems to those who are smarter than me. Maybe I think too much, worry too much. But please don’t search for me. Don’t tell me where I am, where I have been seen, or who’s looking for me.

  I don’t want to know.

  BLOOD, ASH, BRAIDS

  Genevieve Valentine

  GENEVIEVE VALENTINE’S (www.genevievevalentine.com) first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti , won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, appeared in 2014 to acclaim. Science fiction novel Persona appeared in 2015 and sequel Icon is due later this year. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Tor.com, and others; several stories have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, the AV Club, and The New York Times. She has written Catwoman comics for DC, and is currently
writing a new Xena: Warrior Princess comic for Dynamite! Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable.

  1943

  IT DIDN’T TAKE them long to find a name for us; almost as soon as they knew it was women inside the rickety planes they couldn’t catch, the Germans called us witches.

  It was because of the sounds our idling engines made from the ground, the story went, as if the German soldiers had spent a lot of time with brooms and knew what they sounded like, engineless and gliding fifty feet above them in the dark.

  The wires holding the wings in place made the whistle. The canvas pulled taut around the plywood made the hush. I still suspect the thing that sounded supernatural was the whirr of our engines starting up again, as they realized we had already struck them, and it was too late to escape the blasts.

  The officer who told us had half a smile on his face; he’d thought of the job as a demotion – most of them did, at first, to be in a camp full of girls – but if the Germans were already bleating back and forth about bounties for the heads of the Night Witches, then maybe he had real fighters on his hands.

  Popova cracked a laugh when she heard, turned to me with grin that was all teeth. “I like that,” she said. “Should we start screeching when we sail through, do you think?”

  “I think not,” I said. “The best witches know not to give away their position.” And she laughed a little louder than she had to, as if she thought it was actually funny.

  A couple of the girls glanced over from across the runway. They never took Popova’s cue in being kind to me, but they were never cruel, and that might have been all Popova could hope for.

  “She’d love being called a witch by the enemy; she might already be one,”

  Popova said after a second, sounding circumspect, sounding a little reverent. (She was Commander Raskova; at some point, she hadn’t needed a name any more.)

  But Raskova was elsewhere now, with only her shadow cast over us.

  Bershanskaya was the commander who lined us up and sent us out. She was as steady as they came, and her humor was thin and dry as air. The first time Bershanskaya heard the name, she raised an eyebrow, and glanced quickly at me before she turned to Popova. Then she nodded, hands behind her, and said, “Let them call us what they like, if it suits them.”

  “Suits me, too,” said Popova.

  It suited all of them, I think, even if I was the only witch the 588th ever had.

  ONE OF THE important things about the 588th was how little it cared where you came from. If you could take the recruiter’s withering stare and the doctors’ lingering hands and the open loathing of the men who ran you through your paces, and you managed to crawl under the stalled train cars to reach the station from the farthest set of tracks they could find to park your train, by the time you got to training they had no doubts about your nerves, and that was all they needed to know about you before they put you in a plane.

  I’d come to the 588th out of necessity; my village had reached the end of their patience for someone who seemed always to know when it was going to rain and yet couldn’t call it down for you even if you paid her. Easier to go find an open fight than to wait for the one that was brewing back home.

  There was no way I could have accommodated village needs. It’s too hard to do small magic.

  From a one-room farmhouse or a palace in Moscow, anyone you ask will talk to you until their tongues turn blue about all the magic they’ve seen or heard of, even if they say they don’t believe in it. They’ll all know how it’s being used against them even as they speak, and the hundreds of whispers shared in the depth of the forest by the witches, who gather there for market days and trade in secret spells in a currency of dirty looks.

  It’s all very well to keep people out of the woods at night, but it’s foolish.

  There are only three kinds of magic: water, ash, and air. For ash to work, you give blood. For water, you spill tears. For air, you give your breath. They all run out; our gifts are designed to be spent.

  The woods will never be a gathering of witches. We don’t live long enough.

  OUR PLANES WERE crop dusters, wood frames covered in canvas, held together with metal cords. They were the leftovers of aviation, planes given to people for whom no one had much hope.

  But they were so flimsy and so slow that they made a kind of magic – gold out of hay. The German planes couldn’t drop down to our speed or they’d stall out and plummet, so when they aimed for us we turned and they hit nothing but air; their anti-aircraft bombs would pop right through our wings and keep going, bursting a hundred feet above us as we banked a turn and the explosion illuminated our path back home.

  Raskova courted us with those planes, showed us how to make them spin and make lazy loops in the air like the plaits of a braid, leapt down from the cockpit with her dark eyes glittering behind her goggles, and you could hear her heart pounding even from where you were standing. It was easy to want to go to war, to make Raskova proud.

  And once you learned them, those planes were kinder to us than horses, and to sit inside one was to feel strangely invisible, a thrill crawling up the back of your neck like a ghost every time you settled in.

  You settled in four, five, eight times a night: the plane couldn’t carry more than two bombs at once, and you had work to do.

  “YOU GO OUT at sundown,” says Bershanskaya.

  Her lips are drawn thin, her hands folded behind her, her buttons marching a straight line to her chin. (She didn’t want to lead, when Raskova appointed her. She hated sending us out to die.)

  It’s a bridge; we all know why it has to disappear – the Germans can’t be allowed to move anything else into place. But they’ve stopped underestimating us, witches or not. They’re prepared to throw us a flak circus now, every time they see us coming.

  It’s rows of guns blooming outward from the ground like flowers made from teeth, and searchlights by the dozens that flood the sky for fifty miles in each direction, and you can’t get free of it no matter how you try; when you twist long enough this way and that way like a rabbit, you start to panic for your life.

  We lost a team that way, not long back. Their cots are still folded up on the barracks, two thin mattresses for girls who won’t be needing any more rest.

  “You’ll go in three planes at once,” says Bershanskaya.

  Next to me, the muscles in Popova’s jaw shift as she realizes what Bershanskaya means.

  Decoys. We’ll be drawing fire in our little ghost planes.

  WE LOST OUR hair to be here.

  They made us cut it when we were first preparing for combat; for practicality, the commander said, though I had seen one or two of the training men glare at a line of girls walking off the field those first days, their long glossy braids swinging at their waists, and I always wondered.

  I didn’t mind, for myself – my hair was the watery brown of old deerhide, and there was no husband or want of a husband to stay my hand from the knife. For me to cut it just meant fewer pins I’d have to scramble for every time the sirens went up. But you can’t tell girls for a hundred years that her hair is her crowning glory and then one day tell her to hack it off and not have her pause before the scissors.

  We all did it, in the end, every last one of us submitting to the shears, slicing one another’s braids off to the jaw.

  Recklessly, I offered to burn the hair for any girl that wanted. It was forbidden to leave the base alone – it wasn’t safe – but some things go deeper than regulations, and some superstitions aren’t worth testing.

  You never leave so much hair where anyone can take it from you; petty magic has uses for that, and none of them are good.

  I was an odd fit in the barracks, just strange enough that we all knew I was strange, but this superstition was so well-known that not even Petrova looked twice at me as they each thanked me and handed me their braids of brown and black and gold.

  As I headed for the woods with three dozen braids draped like pelts across my arms, Bershans
kaya saw me. She was standing outside, near the engineers who were patching the planes. Her hands were behind her, and she had the narroweyed look of someone who had been watching the sunset longer than was wise.

  I held my breath and kept going. If she called out to stop me, I’d keep walking until she shot. Some orders are holy; I had a duty deeper than hers.

  She didn’t say a word, but she watched me carry the plaits like a sacrifice into the cover of the trees.

  In the woods, I built a fire and burned them – one at a time, until there was nothing left. I didn’t start a new fire for each plait (we were tied close enough to withstand a little ash), but it was powerful enough that I was careful. I breathed steadily in and out; I thought carefully about nothing at all.

  When I came back after dark, stinking of singe, Bershanskaya was standing outside the barracks and scanning the edge of the woods, waiting.

  “Commander,” I greeted when I was close enough, and waited for whatever she would do to me.

  For a long time she looked me in the eye until it felt like I was canvas stretched across a wooden frame, and I could feel the question building on her tongue in the space just behind her front teeth, where people’s worst suspicions lived.

  If she asks me, I thought, she’ll have her answer.

  (I could cut myself deep enough to bleed. Blood and tears would summon something, I could hope I had enough willpower to make her forget what I’d done.)

  She stepped aside, eyes still on me, and as I passed she said my name low, like she’d checked my name off a very short list; like a spell.

  Raskova would have asked me. I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

  IN 1938, WHEN I was still in school, Raskova had flown across the country for glory with Polina Denisovna Osipenko and Valentina Grizodubova. When they were recovered after their landing, the news was everywhere: that she and her copilots had broken flight records in the Rodina, that it was a marvelous feat of flying, that they were heroes of the nation.