Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

“Is this the factory where you make the shuttles?” Clavain said.

  “We manufactured parts of them here, yes,” Galiana said. “But that was a side-industry.”

  “Of what?”

  “The tunnel, of course.” Galiana made more lights come on. At the far end of the chamber—they were walking toward it—waited a series of cylindrical things with pointed ends; like huge bullets. They rested on rails, one after the other. The tip of the very first bullet was next to a dark hole in the wall. Clavain was about to say something when there was a sudden loud buzz and the first bullet slammed into the hole. The other bullets—there were three of them now—eased slowly forward and halted. Conjoiners were waiting to board them.

  He remembered what Galiana had said about no one being left behind.

  “What am I seeing here?”

  “A way out of the nest,” Galiana said. “And a way off Mars, though I suppose you figured that part for yourself.”

  “There is no way off Mars,” Clavain said. “The interdiction guarantees that. Haven’t you learned that with your shuttles?”

  “The shuttles were only ever a diversionary tactic,” Galiana said. “They made your side think we were still striving to escape, whereas our true escape route was already fully operational.”

  “A pretty desperate diversion.”

  “Not really. I lied to you when I said we didn’t clone. We did—but only to produce brain—dead corpses. The shuttles were full of corpses before we ever launched them.”

  For the first time since leaving Deimos Clavain smiled, amused at the sheer obliquity of Galiana’s thinking.

  “Of course, there was another function,” she said. “The shuttles provoked your side into a direct attack against the nest.”

  “So this was deliberate all along?”

  “Yes. We needed to draw your side’s attention; to concentrate your military presence in low-orbit, near the nest. Of course we were hoping the offensive would come later than it did…but we reckoned without Warren’s conspiracy.”

  “Then you are planning something.”

  “Yes.” The next bullet slammed into the wall, ozone crackling from its linear induction rails. Now only two remained. “We can talk later. There isn’t much time now.” She projected an image into his visual field: the Wall, now veined by titanic fractures down half its length. “It’s collapsing.”

  “And Felka?”

  “She’s still trying to save it.”

  He looked at the Conjoiners boarding the leading bullet; tried to imagine where they were going. Was it to any kind of sanctuary he might recognize—or to something so beyond his experience that it might as well be death? Did he have the nerve to find out? Perhaps. He had nothing to lose now, after all; he could certainly not return home. But if he was going to follow Galiana’s exodus, it could not be with the sense of shame he now felt in abandoning Felka.

  The answer, when it came, was simple. “I’m going back for her. If you can’t wait for me, don’t. But don’t try and stop me doing this.”

  Galiana looked at him, shaking her head slowly. “She won’t thank you for saving her life, Clavain.”

  “Maybe not now,” he said.

  He had the feeling he was running back into a burning building. Given what Galiana had said about the girl’s deficiencies—that by any reasonable definition she was hardly more than an automaton—what he was doing was very likely pointless, if not suicidal. But if he turned his back on her, he would become something even less than human himself. He had misread Galiana badly when she said the girl was precious to them. He had assumed some bond of affection…whereas what Galiana meant was that the girl was precious in the sense of a vital component. Now—with the nest being abandoned—the component had no further use. Did that make Galiana as cold as a machine herself—or was she just being unfailingly realistic? He found the nursery after only one or two false turns, and then Felka’s room. The implants Galiana had given him were again throwing phantom images into the air. Felka sat within the crumbling circle of the Wall. Great fissures now reached to the surface of Mars. Shards of the Wall, as big as icebergs, had fractured away and now lay like vast sheets of broken glass across the regolith.

  She was losing, and now she knew it. This was not just some more difficult phase of the game. This was something she could never win, and her realization was now plainly evident in her face. She was still moving her arms frantically, but her face was red now, locked into a petulant scowl of anger and fear.

  For the first time, she seemed to notice him.

  Something had broken through her shell, Clavain thought. For the first time in years, something was happening that was beyond her control; something that threatened to destroy the neat, geometric universe she had made for herself. She might not have distinguished his face from all the other people who came to see her, but she surely recognized something…that now the adult world was bigger than she was, and it was only from the adult world that any kind of salvation could come.

  Then she did something that shocked him beyond words. She looked deep into his eyes and reached out a hand.

  But there was nothing he could do to help her.

  Later—it seemed hours, but in fact could only have been tens of minutes—Clavain found that he was able to breathe normally again. They had escaped Mars now; Galiana, Felka and himself, riding the last bullet.

  And they were still alive.

  The bullet’s vacuum-filled tunnel cut deep into Mars; a shallow arc bending under the crust before rising again, two thousand kilometers away, well beyond the Wall, where the atmosphere was as thin as ever. For the Conjoiners, boring the tunnel had not been especially difficult. Such engineering would have been impossible on a planet that had plate tectonics, but beneath its lithosphere Mars was geologically quiet. They had not even had to worry about tailings. What they excavated, they compressed and fused and used to line the tunnel, maintaining rigidity against awesome pressure with some trick of piezo-electricity. In the tunnel, the bullet accelerated continuously at three gees for six minutes. Their seats had tilted back and wrapped around them, applying pressure to the legs to maintain blood flow to the head. Even so, it was hard to think, let alone move, but Clavain knew that it was no worse than what the earliest space explorers had endured climbing away from Earth. And he had undergone similar tortures during the war, in combat insertions.

  They were moving at ten kilometers a second when they reached the surface again, exiting via a camouflaged trapdoor. For a moment the atmosphere snatched at them…but almost as soon as Clavain had registered the deceleration, it was over. The surface of Mars was dropping below them very quickly indeed.

  In half a minute, they were in true space.

  “The Interdiction’s sensor web can’t track us,” Galiana said. “You placed your best spysats directly over the nest. That was a mistake, Clavain—even though we did our best to reinforce your thinking with the shuttle launches. But now we’re well outside your sensor footprint.”

  Clavain nodded. “But that won’t help us once we’re far from the surface. Then, we’ll just look like another ship trying to reach deep space. The web may be late locking onto us, but it’ll still get us in the end.”

  “It would,” Galiana said. “If deep space was where we were going.”

  Felka stirred next to him. She had withdrawn into some kind of catatonia. Separation from the Wall had undermined her entire existence; now she was free-falling through an abyss of meaninglessness. Perhaps, Clavain, thought, she would fall forever. If that was the case, he had only brought forward her fate. Was that much of a cruelty? Perhaps he was deluding himself, but with time, was it out of the question that Galiana’s machines could undo the harm they had inflicted ten years earlier? Surely they could try. It depended, of course, on where exactly they were headed. One of the system’s other Conjoiner nests had been Clavain’s initial guess—even though it seemed unlikely that they would ever survive the crossing. At ten klicks per second it wou
ld take years…

  “Where are you taking us?” he asked.

  Galiana issued some neural command which made the bullet seem to become transparent.

  “There,” she said.

  Something lay distantly ahead. Galiana made the forward view zoom in, until the object was much clearer.

  Dark—misshapen. Like Deimos without fortifications.

  “Phobos,” Clavain said, wonderingly. “We’re going to Phobos.”

  “Yes,” Galiana said.

  “But the worms—”

  “Don’t exist anymore.” She spoke with the same tutorly patience with which Remontoire had addressed him on the same subject not long before. “Your attempt to oust the worms failed. You assumed our subsequent attempt failed…but that was only what we wanted you to think.”

  For a moment he was lost for words. “You’ve had people in Phobos all along?”

  “Ever since the cease-fire, yes. They’ve been quite busy, too.”

  Phobos altered. Layers of it were peeled away, revealing the glittering device which lay hidden in its heart, poised and ready for flight. Clavain had never seen anything like it, but the nature of the thing was instantly obvious. He was looking at something wonderful; something which had never existed before in the whole of human experience.

  He was looking at a starship.

  “We’ll be leaving soon,” Galiana said. “They’ll try and stop us, of course. But now that their forces are concentrated near the surface, they won’t succeed. We’ll leave Phobos and Mars behind, and send messages to the other nests. If they can break out and meet us, we’ll take them as well. We’ll leave this whole system behind.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Shouldn’t that be where are we going? You’re coming with us, after all.” She paused. “There are a number of candidate systems. Our choice will depend on the trajectory the Coalition forces upon us.”

  “What about the Demarchists?”

  “They won’t stop us.” It was said with total assurance—implying, what? That the Demarchy knew of this ship? Perhaps. It had long been rumored that the Demarchists and the Conjoiners were closer than they admitted.

  Clavain thought of something. “What about the worms’ altering the orbit?”

  “That was our doing,” Galiana said. “We couldn’t help it. Every time we send up one of these canisters, we nudge Phobos into a different orbit. Even after we sent up a thousand canisters, the effect was tiny—we changed Phobos’s velocity by less than one tenth of a millimeter per second—but there was no way to hide it.” Then she paused and looked at Clavain with something like apprehension. “We’ll be arriving in two hundred seconds. Do you want to live?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Think about it. The tube in Mars was two thousand kilometers long, which allowed us to spread the acceleration over six minutes. Even then it was three gees. But there simply isn’t room for anything like that in Phobos. We’ll be slowing down much more abruptly.”

  Clavain felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. “How much more abruptly?”

  “Complete deceleration in one fifth of a second.” She let that sink home. “That’s around five thousand gees.”

  “I can’t survive that.”

  “No; you can’t. Not now, anyway. But there are machines in your head now. If you allow it, there’s time for them to establish a structural web across your brain. We’ll flood the cabin with foam. We’ll all die temporarily, but there won’t be anything they can’t fix in Phobos.”

  “It won’t just be a structural web, will it? I’ll be like you, then. There won’t be any difference between us.”

  “You’ll become Conjoined, yes.” Galiana offered the faintest of smiles. “The procedure is reversible. It’s just that no one’s ever wanted to go back.”

  “And you still tell me none of this was planned?”

  “No; but I don’t expect you to believe me. For what it’s worth, though…you’re a good man, Nevil. The Transenlightenment could use you. Maybe at the back of my mind…at the back of our mind…”

  “You always hoped it might come to this?”

  Galiana smiled.

  He looked at Phobos. Even without Galiana’s magnification, it was clearly bigger. They would be arriving very shortly. He would have liked longer to think about it, but the one thing not on his side now was time. Then he looked at Felka, and wondered which of them was about to embark on the stranger journey. Felka’s search for meaning in a universe without her beloved Wall, or his passage into Transenlightenment? Neither would necessarily be easy. But together, perhaps, they might even find a way to help each other. That was all he could hope for now.

  Clavain nodded assent, ready for the loom of machines to embrace his mind.

  He was ready to defect.

  MILO AND SYLVIE

  Eliot Fintushel

  Eliot Fintushel made his first sale in 1993, to Tomorrow magazine. Since then, he has become a regular in Asimov’s Science Fiction, with a large number of sales there, has appeared in Amazing, Science Fiction Age, Crank!, Aboriginal SF and other markets, and is beginning to attract attention from cognoscenti as one of the most original and inventive writers to enter the genre in many years, worthy to be ranked among other practitioners of the fast-paced Wild And Crazy Gonzo modern tall tale such as R.A. Lafferty, Howard Waldrop and Neal Barrett, Jr. Fintushel, a baker’s son from Rochester, New York, is a performer and teacher of mask theatre and mime, has won the National Endowment for the Arts’ Solo Performer Award twice, and now lives in Santa Rosa, California.

  Here, in something of a change of pace for him (although still wry, funny and almost extravagantly inventive), a story to me reminiscent of Theodore Sturgeon at his poetic best, he takes a lyrical, tender and bittersweet look at an odd relationship between two very peculiar people.

  Everything has its portion of smell,” Milo said. His skin and bones were enthroned in a plush, gold club chair facing the doctor’s more severe straight-back with the cabriole legs. Milo strummed his fingers nervously against the insides of his thighs as he looked around the room, richly dark, with scrolled woodwork, diplomas in gilded frames hanging on the wall behind the doctor’s mahogany rolltop next to the heavily curtained window. He could smell the doctor’s aftershave. He could smell the last client too, a woman, a large woman, a sweating carnivore with drugstore perfume.

  “Smell?” Doctor Devore always looked worried. Inquisitive and worried—the look was like a high trump, drawing out all your best cards before you had planned to play them. He had white, curly hair. He wore sweaters and baggy pants that made him look like a rag doll. He was old.

  His cheeks and jowls sagged like the folds of drapery beside him. He wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses that made his tired eyes look bigger and even more plaintive. He was small, a midget, almost; one got over that quickly, though, because he never acted short.

  “It’s something my sister used to say.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t remember.” Like so much else. Milo moved too quickly for memories to adhere, or for sleep for that matter, except in evanescent snatches. Memories, sleep, haunted him. They were never invited guests. His sister’s name, for example, which he did not remember, did not remember, did not remember, was death to pronounce or even think of.

  There was a long pause. Devore was trying to use the silence to suck something out of him—horror vacui—but it didn’t work. Milo had a practised grip. The things he had to hold down bucked harder than this shrink.

  Dr Devore broke the silence: “Have you been sleeping any better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Taking the prescription, hmm?”

  “Yes.” That was a trade-off. The pills let him sleep dreamlessly for longer spells, but with the danger that his grip would loosen.

  “Let’s talk about one of your dreams. Do you have one you want to talk about?”

  Grudgingly, Milo said, “Yes.” Could he snatch the cheese an
d escape the wire?

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s dark. The fog is rolling in.”

  “Where are you?” Devore said. Milo began to cry. “That’s all right. Just let the tears come. You don’t have to answer right away, you know?”

  “I have another dream.”

  “OK… “

  “A Dumpster. One of those big, steel Dumpsters full of scraps and garbage. A car runs into it.”

  “Are you driving the car?”

  “You don’t get it!” Milo hooked one thumb over the side of his pants and tugged down the waist, hiking up his shirt so that Dr Devore could see his hip. “It was all smashed up! Everything was steaming and sputtering and dripping.”

  “What are you showing me? Are you telling me you hurt yourself? I don’t see any marks, Milo—we’re talking about a dream, yes?”

  “Yeah. That was while I was in the waiting room just now. I dozed off.”

  “You dreamed that you hurt your hip in a car crash, is that it?”

  “No, no! The fender, the hood, the engine! That’s what was hurt!” Milo began crying again. “I’m a monster, that’s all! Give me some more medicine! Give me something stronger! I can’t hold on much longer!”

  Dr Devore paused. “Milo, when the car crashed into the Dumpster, where were you?”

  “I have another dream,” Milo blurted. He was angry, like a small child choking back tears to shout his malediction.

  “Let’s stay with the last one… “

  “A window shatters.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.” Milo felt his skin and skull shattering like glass. He was collapsing into his own pelvis and lacerating the soft tissue of his remaining viscera—but it was the dream. He shouted too loudly, as if trying to be heard against the roar of a hurricane. “It hurts!”

  “The glass hits you?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think I follow, Milo. In all these dreams, where are you?”

  “The fog, the Dumpster and the car, the window… “ Milo clamped his bony fingers around the scrolls at the edges of his armchair as if it were an electric chair. He stared straight ahead, straight through Dr Devore, focusing on ghosts three thousand miles distant, waving from the past like dead men from the ports of a sunken ship.