The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven

by Jonathan Strahan

  There was no grand opening of my library. In fact, I was anxious to get all the builders and conservators, both human and otherwise, out of the way so I could have the place entirely to myself. Then I just stood there. Breathing in the air, with its savour of lost forests and the dreams.

  There were first editions of great novels by Nabokov, Dos Passos, Stendhal, Calvino and Wells, and an early translation of Cervantes, and a fine collection of Swift’s works. Even, in a small nod to Rob, a long shelf of pulp magazines with titles like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, although their lurid covers of busty maidens being engulfed by intergalactic centipedes were generally faded and torn. Not that I cared about the pristine state of my whispering pages. Author’s signatures—yesĩthe thrill of knowing Hemingway’s hands had once briefly grasped this edition, but the rest didn’t matter. At least, apart from the thrill of beating others in my quest. Books, after all, were old by definition. Squashed moths. Old bus tickets. Coffee cup circles. Exclamations in the margin. I treasured the evidence of their long lives.

  After an hour or two of shameless gloating and browsing, I decided to call Rob. My avatar had been busy as me with the finishing touches to my library, and now it struggled to find him. What it did eventually unearth was a short report stating that Callum Holm, a fish-farmer on the Isle of Harris, had been drowned in a boating accident a week earlier.

  Of course, Rob would be there now. Should I contact him? Should I leave him to mourn undisturbed? What kind of friend was I, anyway, not to have even picked up on this news until now? I turned around the vast, domed space I’d created in confusion and distress.

  “Hey.”

  I span back. The Rob Holm who stood before me looked tired, but composed. He’d grown a beard, and there were a few flecks of silver now in it and his hair. I could taste the sea air around him. Hear the cry of gulls.

  “Rob!” I’d have hugged him, if the energy field permissions I’d set up in this library had allowed. “I’m so, so sorry. I should have found out, I should haveĩ”

  “You shouldn’t have done anything, Lita. Why do you think I kept this quiet? I wanted to be alone up here in Harris to sort things out. But…” He looked up, around. “What a fabulous place you’ve created!”

  As I showed him around my shelves and acquisitions, and his ghost fingers briefly passed through the pages of my first edition Gatsby, and the adverts for X-Ray specs in an edition of Science Wonder Stories, he told me how his father had gone out in his launch to deal with some broken tethers on one of the kelp beds, and been caught by a sudden squall. His body, of course, had been washed up, borne by to the same stretch of shore where Rob’s mother had been found.

  “It wasn’t intentional,” Rob said. “I’m absolutely sure of that. Dad was still in his prime, and proud of what he was doing, and there was no way he was ever going to give up. He just misjudged a coming storm. I’m the same, of course. You know that, Lita, better than anyone.”

  “So what happens next? With a business, there must be a lot to tie up.” “I’m not tying up anything.”

  “You’re going to stay there?” I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “Why not? To be honest, my so-called scientific career has been running on empty for years. What I’d like to prove is never going to get backing. I’m not like you. I mean…” He gestured at the tiered shelves. “You can make anything you want become real.”

  6.

  ROB WASN’T THE sort to put on an act. If he said he was happy ditching research and filling his father’s role as a marine farmer on some remote island, that was because he was. I never quite did find the time to physically visit him in Harris—it was, after all, on the other side of the globe—and he, with the daily commitments of the family business, didn’t get to Seoul. But I came to appreciate my glimpses of the island’s strange beauty. That, and the regular arrival of chilled, vacuum-packed boxes of fresh scallops. But was this really enough for Rob Helm? Somehow, despite his evident pride at what he was doing, and the funny stories he told of the island’s other inhabitants, and even the occasional mention of some woman he’d met at a cleigh, I didn’t think it was. After all, Creagach was his mother and father’s vision, not his.

  Although he remained coy about the details, I knew he still longed to bring his many worlds experiment to life. That, and that it would be complicated, controversial and costly to do so. I’d have been more than happy to offer financial help, but I knew he’d refuse. So what else could I do? My media company had grown. I had mentors, advisors and consultants, both human and AI, and Rob would have been genuinely useful, but he had too many issues with the lack of rigour and logic in this world to put up with all glitches, fudges and contradictions of virtual ones. Then I had a better idea.

  “You know why nothing ever changes here, don’t you?” he asked me as our avatars sat together in the Eldon late one afternoon. “Not the smell from the toilets or the unfestive Christmas decorations or that dusty Pernod optic behind the bar. This isn’t a feed from the real pub any longer. The old Eldon was demolished years ago. All we’ve been sitting in ever since is just a clever formation of what the place would be like if it still existed. Bar staff, students, us, and all.”

  “That’s...” Although nothing changed, the whole place seemed to shimmer. “How things are these days. The real and the unreal get so blurry you can’t tell which is which. But you know,” I added, as if the thought had just occurred to me, “there’s a project that’s been going the rounds of the studios here in Seoul. It’s a series about the wonders of science, one of those proper, realtime factual things, but we keep stumbling over finding the right presenter. Someone fresh, but with the background and the personality to carry the whole thing along.”

  “You don’t mean me?”

  “Why not? It’d only be part time. Might even help you promote what you’re doing at Creagach.”

  “A scientific populariser?”

  “Yes. Like Carl Sagan, for example, or maybe Stephen Jay Gould.”

  I had him, and the series―which, of course, had been years in development purgatory―came about. I’d thought of it as little more than a way of getting Rob some decent money, but, from the first live-streamed episode, it was a success. After all, he was still charming and persuasive, and his salt-andpepper beard gave him gravitas―and made him, if anything, even better looking. He used the Giant’s Causeway to demonstrate the physics of fractures. He made this weird kind of pendulum to show why we could never predict the weather for more than a few days ahead. He swam with the whales off Tierra del Fuego. The only thing he didn’t seem to want to explain was the odd way that photons behaved when you shot them down a double-slotted tube. That, and the inconsistencies between how galaxies revolved and Newton’s and Einstein’s laws.

  In the matter of a very few years, Rob Holm was rich. And of course, and although he never actively courted it, he grew famous. He stood on podiums and looked fetchingly puzzled. He shook a dubious hand with gurning politicians. He even turned down offers to appear at music festivals, and had to take regular legal steps to protect the pirating of his virtual identity. He even finally visited me in Seoul, and experienced the wonders of my library at first hand.

  At last, Rob had out-achieved me. Then, just when I and most of the rest of the world had him pigeon-holed as that handsome, softly accented guy who did those popular science things, his avatar returned the contract for his upcoming series unsigned. I might have forgotten that getting rich was supposed to be the means to an end. But he, of course, hadn’t. “So,” I said as we sat together for what turned out to be the last time in our shared illusion of the Eldon. “You succeed with this project. You get a positive result and prove the many worlds theory is true. What happens after that?”

  “I publish, of course. The data’ll be public, peer-reviewed, and—”

  “Since when has being right ever been enough?”

  “That’s...” He brushed a speck of virtual beer foam fr
om his grey beard. “... how science works.”

  “And no one ever had to sell themselves to gain attention? Even Galileo had to do that stunt with the cannonballs.”

  “As I explained in my last series, that story of the Tower of Pisa was an invention of his early biographers.”

  “Come on, Rob. You know what I mean.”

  He looked uncomfortable. But, of course, he already had the fame. All he had to do was stop all this Greta Garbo shit, and milk it.

  So, effectively I became PR agent for Rob’s long-planned experiment. There was, after all, a lot for the educated layman, let alone the general public, or us so-called media professionals, to absorb. What was needed was a handle, a simple selling point. And, after a little research, I found one.

  A man in a business suit had arrived at Tokyo airport in the summer of 1954. He was Caucasian, but spoke reasonable Japanese, and everything about him seemed normal apart from his passport. It looked genuine, but was from somewhere called Taured, which the officials couldn’t find in any of their directories. The visitor was as baffled as they were. When a map was produced, he pointed to Andorra, a tiny but ancient republic between France and Spain, which he insisted was Taured. The humane and sensible course was to find him somewhere to sleep while further enquiries were made. Guards were posted outside the door of a secure hotel room high in a tower block, but the mysterious man had vanished without trace in the morning, and the Visitor from Taured was never seen again.

  Rob was dubious, then grew uncharacteristically cross when he learned that the publicity meme had already been released. To him, and despite the fact that I thought he’d been reading this kind of thing for years, the story was just another urban legend, and would further alienate the scientific establishment when he desperately needed their help. In effect, what he had to obtain was time and bandwidth from every available gravitational observatory, both here on Earth and up in orbit, during a crucial observational window, and time was already short.

  It was as the final hours ticked down in a fervid air of stop-go technical problems, last minute doubts, and sudden demands for more money, that I finally took the sub-orbital from Seoul to Frankfurt, then the skytrain on to Glasgow, and some thrumming, windy thing of string and carbon fibre along the Scottish west coast, and across the shining Minch. The craft landed in Stornoway harbour in the Isle of Lewis―the northern part of the long landmass of which Harris forms the south―where I was rowed ashore, and eventually found a bubblebus to take me across purple moorland and past scattered white bungalows, then up amid ancient peaks.

  Rob stood waiting on the far side of the road at the final stop, and we were both shivering as we hugged in the cold spring sunlight. But I was here, and so was he, and he’d done a great job at keeping back the rest of the world, and even I wouldn’t have had it any other way. It seemed as if most of the niggles and issues had finally been sorted. Even if a few of his planned sources had pulled out, he’d still have all the data he needed. Come tomorrow, Rob Holm would either be a prophet or a pariah.

  7.

  HE STILL SLEPT in the same narrow bed he’d had as a child in the rusty-roofed cottage down by the shore at Creagach, while his parents’ bedroom was now filled with expensive processing and monitoring equipment, along with a high-band, multiple-redundancy satellite feed. Downstairs, there was a parlour where Rob kept his small book collection in an alcove by the fire―I was surprised to see that it was almost entirely poetry; a scatter of Larkin, Eliot, Frost, Dickinson, Pope, Yeats and Donne and standard collections amid a few Asimovs, Clarkes and Le Guins―with a low tartan divan where he sat to read these works. Which, I supposed, might also serve as a second bed, although he hadn’t yet made it up.

  He took me out on his launch. Showed me his scallop beds, and the glorious views of this ragged land with its impossibly wide and empty beaches, and there, just around the headland, was the stretch of bay where both Rob’s parents had been found, and I almost hear the Blue Men of the Minch calling to us over the sigh of the sea. There were standing stones on the horizon, and an old whaling station at the head of a loch, and a hill topped by a medieval church filled with the bodies of the chieftains who had given these islands such a savage reputation through their bloody feuds. And meanwhile, the vast cosmic shudder of the collision of two black holes was travelling toward us at lightspeed.

  There were scallops, of course, for dinner. Mixed in with some fried dab and chopped mushroom, bacon and a few leaves of wild garlic, all washed down with malt whisky, and with whey-buttered soda bread on the side, which was the Highland way. Then, up in the humming shrine of his parents’ old bedroom, Rob checked on the status of his precious sources again.

  The black hole binaries had been spiralling toward each other for tens of thousands of years, and observed here on earth for decades. In many ways, and despite their supposed mystery, black holes were apparently simple objects―nothing but sheer mass―and even though their collision was so far off it had actually happened when we humans were still learning how to use tools, it was possible to predict within hours, if not minutes, when the effects of this event would finally reach Earth.

  There were gravitational observatories, vast-array laser interferometers, in deep space, and underground in terrestrial sites, all waiting to record this moment, and Rob was tapping into them. All everyone else expected to see―in fact, all the various institutes and faculties had tuned their devices to look for―was this… Leaning over me, Rob called up a display to show a sharp spike, a huge peak in the data, as the black holes swallowed each other and the shock of their collision flooded out in the asymmetrical pulse of a gravitational wave.

  “But this isn’t what I want, Lita. Incredibly faint though that signal is ―a mere ripple deep in the fabric of the cosmos―I’m looking to combine and filter all those results, and find something even fainter.

  “This…” He dragged up another screen. “Is what I expect to see.” There was the same central peak, but this time it was surrounded by a fan of smaller, ever-decreasing, ripples eerily reminiscent of the display Rob had once shown me of the ghost-flicker of those photons all those years ago in Leeds. “These are echoes of the black hole collision in other universes.”

  I reached out to touch the floating screen. Felt the incredible presence of the dark matter of other worlds.

  “And all of this will happen tonight?”

  He smiled.

  8.

  THERE WAS NOTHING else left to be done―the observatories Rob was tapping into were all remote, independent, autonomous devices―so we took out chairs into the dark, and drank some more whisky, and collected driftwood, and lit a fire on the shore.

  We talked about books. Nothing new, but some shared favourites. Poe and Pasternak and Fitzgerald. And Rob confessed that he hadn’t got on anything like as well as he’d pretended with his first forays into literature. How he’d found the antique language and odd punctuation got in the way. It was even a while before he understood the obvious need for a physical bookmark. He’d have given up with the whole concept if it hadn’t been for my shining, evident faith.

  “You know, it was Gulliver’s Travels that finally really turned it around for me. Swift was so clever and rude and funny and angry, yet he could also tell a great story. That bit about those Laputan astronomers studying the stars from down in their cave, and trying to harvest sunbeams from marrows. Well, that’s us right here, isn’t it?”

  The fire settled. We poured ourselves some more whisky. And Rob recited a poem by Li Po about drinking with the Moon’s shadow, and then we remembered those days back in Leeds when we’d gone out onto the moors, and drank and ingested far more than was good for us, and danced like savages and, yes, there had even been that time he and I had gazed up at the stars.

  We stood up now, and Rob led me away from the settling fire. The stars were so bright here, and the night sky was so black, that it felt like falling merely to look up. Over there in the west, Lita, is the Taurus Co
nstellation. It’s where the Crab Nebula lies, the remains of a supernova the Chinese recorded back in 1054, and it’s in part of the Milky Way known as the Perseus Arm, which is where our dark binaries will soon end their fatal dance. I was leaning into him as he held his arms around me, and perhaps both of us were breathing a little faster than was entirely due to the wonders of the cosmos.

  “What time is it now, Rob?”

  “It’s…” He checked his watch. “Just after midnight.”

  “So there’s still time.”

  “Time for what?”

  We kissed, then crossed the shore and climbed the stairs to Rob’s single bed. It was sweet, and somewhat drunken, and quickly over. The earth, the universe, didn’t exactly move. But it felt far more like making love than merely having sex, and I curled up against Rob afterwards, and breathed his cinnamon scent, and fell into a well of star-seeing contentment.

  “rOB?”

  The sky beyond the window was already showing the first traces of dawn as I got up, telling myself that he’d be next door in his parents’ old room, or walking the shore as he and his avatar strove to deal with a torrent of interview requests. But I sensed that something was wrong.

  It wasn’t hard for me to pull up the right screen amid the humming machines in his parents’ room, proficient at mek as I now was. The event, the collision, had definitely occurred. The spike of its gravitational wave had been recorded by every observatory. But the next screen, the one where Rob had combined, filtered and refined all the data, displayed no ripples, echoes, from other worlds.

  I ran outside shouting Rob’s name. I checked the house feeds. I paced back and forth. I got my avatar to contact the authorities. I did all the things you do when someone you love suddenly goes missing, but a large part of me already knew it was far too late.