The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  “Tyche? Is there something wrong?” the Brain asked.

  Tyche’s heart jumped. Her mind raced. “It’s fine,” she said. “I think . . . I think I just banged my sensor a bit. I’m just getting ready now.” She tried to make her voice sound sweet, like a girl who always keeps her promise.

  “Your Treatment will be ready soon,” the Brain said and was gone. Heart pounding, Tyche started to put on her suit.

  There was a game that Tyche used to play in the lava tube: how far could she get before she was spotted by the grags? She played it now, staying low, avoiding their camera eyes, hiding behind rock protrusions, crates and cryogenic tanks, until she was in a tube branch that only had othos in it. The Brain did not usually control them directly, and besides, they did not have eyes. Still, her heart felt like meteorite impacts in her chest.

  She pushed through a semi-pressurising membrane. In this branch, the othos had dug too deep for calcium, and caused a roof collapse. In the dim green light of her suit’s fluorescence, she made way her up the tube’s slope carefully. There. She climbed on a pile of rubble carefully. The othos had once told her there was an opening there, and she hoped it would be big enough for her to squeeze through.

  Boulders rolled under her, suddenly, and she banged her knee painfully. The suit hissed at the sudden impact. She ignored the pain and ran her fingers along the rocks, following a very faint air current she could not have sensed without the suit. Then her fingers met regolith instead of rock. It was packed tight, and she had to push hard at it with her aluminium rod before it gave away. A shower of dust and rubble fell on her, and for a moment she thought there was going to be another collapse. And suddenly, there was a patch of velvet sky in front of her. She widened the opening, made herself as small as she could and crawled towards it.

  Tyche emerged onto the mountainside. The sudden wide open space of rolling grey and brown around her felt like the time she had eaten too much sugar. Her legs and hands were wobbly, and she had to sit down onto the regolith for a moment. She shook herself: she had an appointment to keep. She checked that the ruby was still in its pouch, got up and started downwards with the Rabbit’s lope.

  The Secret Door was just the way Tyche had left it. She eyed the crater edge nervously, but there were no ants in sight. She bit her lip when she looked at the Old One and the Troll.

  What’s wrong? the Old One asked.

  “I’m going to have to go away.”

  Don’t worry. We’ll still be here when you come back.

  “I might never come back,” Tyche said, choking a bit.

  Never is a very long time, the Old One said. Even I have never seen never. We’ll be here. Take care, Tyche.

  Tyche crawled through to the Other Moon, and found the Magician waiting for her.

  He was very thin and tall, taller than the Old One even, and cast a long cold finger of a shadow in the crater. He had a sad face and a scraggly beard and white gloves and a tall top hat. Next to him lay his flying panther, all black, with eyes like tiny rubies.

  “Hello, Tyche,” the Magician said, with a voice like the rumble of the sandworm.

  Tyche swallowed and took out the ruby from her pouch, holding it out to him.

  “I made this for you.” What if he doesn’t like it? But the Magician picked it up, slowly, eyes glowing, held it in both hands and gazed at it in awe.

  “That is very, very kind of you,” he whispered. Very carefully, he took off his hat and put the ruby in it. It was the first time Tyche had ever seen the Magician smile. Still, there is a sadness to his expression.

  “I didn’t want to leave before giving it to you,” she said.

  “That’s quite a fuss you caused for the Brain. He is going to be very worried.”

  “He deserves it. But I promised I would go with him.”

  The Magician looked at the ruby one more time and put the hat back on his head.

  “Normally, I don’t interfere with the affairs of other people, but for this, I owe you a wish.”

  Tyche took a deep breath. “I don’t want to live with the grags and the othos and the Brain anymore. I want to be in the Right Place with Mum and Dad.”

  The Magician looked at her sadly.

  “I’m sorry, Tyche, but I can’t make that happen. My magic is not powerful enough.”

  “But they promised —”

  “Tyche, I know you don’t remember. And that’s why we Moon People remember for you. The space sharks came and took your parents, a long time ago. They are dead. I am sorry.”

  Tyche closed her eyes. A picture in a window, a domed crater. Two bright things arcing over the horizon, like sharks. Then, brightness —

  “You’ve lived with the Brain ever since. You don’t remember because it makes you forget with the Treatments, so you don’t get too sad, so you stay the way your parents told it to keep you. But we remember. And we always tell you the truth.”

  And suddenly they were all there, all the Moon People, coming from their houses: Chang’e and her children and the Jade Rabbit and the Woodcutter, looking at her gravely and nodding their heads.

  Tyche could not bear to look at them. She covered her helmet with her hands, turned around, crawled through the Secret Door and ran away, away from the Other Moon. She ran, not a Rabbit run but a clumsy jerky crying run, until she stumbled on a boulder and went rolling higgedly-piggedly down. She lay curled up in the chilly regolith for a long time. And when she opened her eyes, the ants were all around her.

  The ants were arranged around her in a half-circle, stretched into spiky pyramids, waving slightly, as if looking for something. Then they spoke. At first, it was just noise, hissing in her helmet, but after a second it resolved into a voice.

  “—hello,” it said, warm and female, like Chang’e, but older and deeper. “I am Alissa. Are you hurt?”

  Tyche was frozen. She had never spoken to anyone who was not the Brain or one of the Moon People. Her tongue felt stiff.

  “Just tell me if you are all right. No one is going to hurt you. Do you feel bad anywhere?”

  “No,” Tyche breathed.

  “There is no need to be afraid. We will take you home.” A video feed flashed up inside her helmet, a spaceship that was made up of a cluster of legs and a globe that glinted golden. A circle appeared elsewhere in her field of vision, indicating a tiny pinpoint of light in the sky. “See? We are on our way.”

  “I don’t want to go to the Great Wrong Place,” she gasped. “I don’t want you to cut me up.”

  There was a pause.

  “Why would we do that? There is nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Because Wrong Place people don’t like people like me.”

  Another pause.

  “Dear child, I don’t know what you have been told, but things have changed. Your parents left Earth more than a century ago. We never thought we would find you, but we kept looking. And I’m glad we did. You have been alone on the Moon for a very long time.”

  Tyche got up, slowly. I haven’t been alone. Her head spun. They would do anything to have you?

  She backed off a few steps.

  “If I come with you,” she asked in a small voice, “will I see Kareem and Sofia again?”

  A pause again, longer this time.

  “Of course you will,” Alissa the ant-woman said finally. “They are right here, waiting for you.”

  Liar.

  Slowly, Tyche started backing off. The ants moved, closing their circle. I am faster than they are, she thought. They can’t catch me.

  “Where are you going?”

  Tyche switched off her radio, cleared the circle of the ants with a leap and hit the ground running.

  Tyche ran, faster than she had ever run before, faster even than when the Jade Rabbit challenged her to a race across the Shackleton Crater. Finally, her lungs and legs burned and she had to stop. She had set out without direction, but had gone up the mountain slope, close to the cold fingers. I don’t want to go back to the Base.
The Brain never tells the truth either. Black dots danced in her eyes. They’ll never catch me.

  She looked back, down towards the crater of the Secret Door. The ants were moving. They gathered into the metal sheet again. Then its sides stretched upwards until they met and formed a tubular structure. It elongated and weaved back and forth and slithered forward, faster than even Tyche could run, a metal snake. The pyramid shapes of the ants glinted at its head like teeth. Faster and faster it came, flowing over boulders and craters like it was weightless, a curtain of billowing dust behind it. She looked around for a hiding place, but she was on open ground now, except for the dark pool of the mining crater to the west.

  Then she remembered something the Jade Rabbit had once said. For anything that wants to eat you, there is something bigger that wants to eat it.

  The ant-snake was barely a hundred meters behind her now, flipping back and forth in sinusoid waves on the regolith like a shiny metal whip. She stuck out her tongue at it, accidentally tasting the sweet inner surface of her helmet. Then she made it for the sunless crater’s edge.

  With a few bounds, she was over the crater lip. It was like diving into icy water. Her suit groaned, and she could feel its joints stiffening up. But she kept going, towards the bottom, almost blind from the contrast between the pitch-black and the bright sun above. She followed the vibration in her soles. Boulders and pebbles rained on her helmet and she knew the ant-snake was right at her heels.

  The lights of the sandworm almost blinded her. Now. She leapt up, as high as she could, feeling weightless, reached out for the utility ladder that she knew was on the huge machine’s topside. She grabbed it, banged painfully against the worm’s side, felt its thunder beneath her.

  And then, a grinding, shuddering vibration as the mining machine bit into the ant-snake, rolling right over it.

  Metal fragments flew into the air, glowing red-hot. One of them landed on Tyche’s arm. The suit bubbled it up and spit it out. The sandworm came to an emergency halt, and Tyche almost fell off. It started disgorging its little repair grags, and Tyche felt a stab of guilt. She sat still until her breathing calmed down and the suit’s complaints about the cold got too loud.

  Then she dropped to the ground and started the climb back up, towards the Secret Door.

  There were still a few ants left around the Secret Door, but Tyche ignored them. They were rolling around aimlessly, and there weren’t enough of them to build a transmitter. She looked up. The ship from the Great Wrong Place was still a distant star. She still had time.

  Painfully, bruised limbs aching, she crawled through the Secret Door for one last time.

  The Moon People were still there, waiting for her. Tyche looked at them in the eye, one by one. Then she put her hands on her hips.

  “I have a wish,” she said. “I am going to go away. I’m going to make the Brain obey me, this time. I’m going to go and build a Right Place, all on my own. I’m never going to forget again. So I want you all to come with me.” She looked up at the Magician. “Can you do that?”

  Smiling, the man in the top hat nodded, spread his white-gloved fingers and whirled his cloak that had a bright red inner lining, like a ruby—

  Tyche blinked. The Other Moon was gone. She looked around. She was standing on the other side of the Old One and the Troll, except that they looked just like rocks now. And the Moon People were inside her. I should feel heavier, carrying so many people, she thought. But instead she felt empty and light.

  Uncertainly at first, then with more confidence, she started walking back up Malapert Mountain, towards the Base. Her step was not a rabbit’s, nor a panther’s, nor a maiden’s silky glide, just Tyche’s own, for the first time.

  THE WRECK OF THE “CHARLES DEXTER WARD”

  Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear

  Elizabeth Bear was born in Connecticut, and now lives in Brookfield, Massachusetts, after living for several years in the Mohave Desert near Las Vegas. She won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer in 2005, and in 2008 she took home a Hugo Award for her short story “Tideline,” which also won her the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award (shared with David Moles). In 2009, she won another Hugo Award for her novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom.” Her short work has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, SCI FICTION, Interzone, The 3rd Alternative, Strange Horizons, On Spec, and elsewhere, and has been collected in The Chains That You Refuse and New Amsterdam. She is the author of three highly acclaimed SF novels, Hammered, Scardown, and Worldwired, and of the alternate history fantasy Promethean Age series, which includes the novels Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, Ink and Steel, and Hell and Earth. Her other books include the novels Carnival, Undertow, Chill, Dust, All the Windwracked Stars, By the Mountain Bound, Range of Ghosts, a novel in collaboration with Sarah Monette, The Tempering of Men, and two chapbook novellas, Bone and Jewel Creatures and Ad Eternum. Her most recent book is a new collection, Shoggoths in Bloom. Forthcoming are a new novel, Shattered Pillars, and a new novella, The Book of Iron. Visit her website at www.elizabethbear.com. Her solo story “In the House of Aryaman, A Lonely Signal Burns” appears elsewhere in this anthology.

  Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. Having completed her Ph.D. in Renaissance English drama, she now lives and writes in a ninety-nine-year-old house in the upper Midwest. Her Doctrine of Labyrinths series consists of the novels Melusine, The Virtu, and The Mirador. Her short fiction has appeared in many places, including Strange Horizons, Aeon, Alchemy, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and has been collected in The Bone Key. Upcoming is a new novel in the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, Corambis. Her website is located at www.sarahmonette.com.

  Bear and Monette have collaborated before, on the story “The Ile of Dogges” and on the novel, A Companion to Wolves, as well as on other stories set in the same universe as this one, such as “The Boojum” and “Mongoose.” Here they join forces again to take us on a quest for a lost spaceship — one that it might be a good idea not to find!

  Part One

  Six weeks into her involuntary tenure on Faraday Station, Cynthia Feuerwerker needed a job. She could no longer afford to be choosy about it, either; her oxygen tax was due, and you didn’t have to be a medical doctor to understand the difficulties inherent in trying to breathe vacuum.

  You didn’t have to be, but Cynthia was one. Or had been, until the allegations of malpractice and unlicensed experimentation began to catch up with her. As they had done, here at Faraday, six weeks ago. She supposed she was lucky that the crew of the boojum-ship Richard Trevithick had decided to put her off here, rather than just feeding her to their vessel — but she was having a hard time feeling the gratitude. For one thing, her medical skills had saved both the ship and several members of his crew in the wake of a pirate attack. For another, they’d confiscated her medical supplies before dumping her, and made sure the whole of the station knew the charges against her.

  Which was a death sentence too, and a slower one that going down the throat of a boojum along with the rest of the trash.

  So it was cold desperation that had driven Cynthia here, to the sharp side of this steel desk in a rented station office, staring into the face of a bald old Arkhamer whose jowls quivered with every word he spoke. His skin was so dark she could just about make out the patterns of tattoos against the pigment, black on black-brown.

  “Your past doesn’t bother me, Doctor Feuerwerker,” he said. His sleeves were too short for his arms, so five centimeters of fleshy wrist protruded when he gestured. “I’ll be very plain with you. We have need of your skills, and there is no guarantee any of us will be returning from the task we need them for.”

  Cynthia folded her hands over her knee. She had dropped a few credits on a public shower and a paper suit before the interview, but anybody could look at her haggard face and the bruises on her elbows and tell she’d been sleeping in maintenance corridors.


  “You mentioned this was a salvage mission. I understand there may be competition. Pirates. Other dangers.”

  “No to mention the social danger of taking up with an Arkhamer vessel.”

  “If I stay here, I face the social danger of an airlock. I am a good doctor, Professor Wandrei. I wasn’t stripped of my license for any harm to a patient.”

  “No-oo,” he agreed, drawing it out. She knew he must have her C.V. in his heads-up display. “But rather for seeking after forbidden knowledge.”

  She shrugged and gestured around the rented office. “Galileo and Derleth and Chen sought forbidden knowledge, too. That got us this far.” Onto a creaky, leaky, Saturn-orbit station that stank of ammonia despite exterminators working double shifts to keep the toves down. She watched his eyes and decided to take a risk. “An Arkhamer Professor ought to be sympathetic to that.”

  Wandrei’s lips were probably lush once, but years and exposure to the radiation that pierced inadequately shielded steelships had left them lined and dry. Despite that, and the jowls, and the droop of his eyelids, his homely face could still rearrange itself beautifully around a smile.

  Cynthia waited long enough to be sure he wouldn’t speak before adding, “You know I don’t have any equipment.”

  “We have some supplies. And the vessel we’re going to salvage is an ambulance ship, the Charles Dexter Ward. You should be able to procure everything you need aboard it. In my position as a senior officer of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, I am prepared to offer you a full share of the realizations from the salvage expedition, as well as first claim on any medical goods or technology.”

  Suspicion tickled Cynthia’s neck. “What else do you expect to find aboard an ambulance, Professor?”

  “Data,” he said. “Research. The Jarmulowicz Astronomica is an archive ship.”

  Next dicey question: “What happened to your ship’s surgeon?”

  “Aneurysm,” he said. “She was terribly young, but it took her so fast — there was nothing anyone could do. She’d just risen from apprentice, and hadn’t yet taken one of her own. We’ll get another from a sister ship eventually— but there’s not another Arkhamer vessel at Faraday now, or within three days’ travel, and we’ll lose the salvage if we don’t act immediately.”