The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  Lustre looked shocked at him.

  But now a man looking like a typical patron of an inn had looked in at their booth. “Excuse me,” he said, in Dutch with an accent Hamilton’s eye notes couldn’t place, “do you know where the landlord’s gone? I’m meant to have a reservation—”

  A little something about the man’s expression.

  He was getting away with it.

  He wasn’t.

  Hamilton jerked sidelong rather than stand up, sending the knife up into the man’s groin. He twisted it out as he grabbed for the belt, throwing him forward as blood burst over the tablecloth and he was up and out into the main bar just as the man started screaming—

  There was another man, who’d been looking into the kitchen, suddenly angry at a landlord who, expecting the usual sort of trouble, had turned up the piped band. He turned now, his hand slapping for a gun at his waist—

  Amateurs!

  Hamilton threw the bloody knife at his face. In that moment, the man took it to be a throwing knife, and threw up a hand as it glanced off him, but Hamilton had closed the gap between the two of them, and now he swung his shoulder and slammed his fist into the man’s neck. The man gurgled and fell, Hamilton grabbed him before he did and beat his hands to the gun.

  He didn’t use it. The man was desperately clutching at his own throat. Hamilton let him fall.

  He swung back to the booth, and saw the other twitching body slide to the floor. Lustre was already squatting to gather that gun too.

  He turned to the landlord coming out of the kitchen and pointed the gun at him. “More?!”

  “No! I’ll do anything—!”

  “I mean, are there more of them?!”

  “I don’t know!” He was telling the truth.

  Professionals would have kept everything normal and set up a pheasant shoot when Hamilton had answered a call of nature. So, amateurs, so possibly many of them, possibly searching many inns, possibly not guarding the exits to this one.

  It was their only hope.

  “All right.” He nodded to Lustre. “We’re leaving.”

  He got the landlord to make a noise at the back door, to throw around pots and pans, to slam himself against a cupboard. Gunfire might cut him down at any moment, and he knew it, but damn one Dane in the face of all this.

  Hamilton sent Lustre to stand near the front door, then took his gun off covering the landlord and ran at it.

  He burst out into the narrow street, into the freezing air, seeking a target—

  He fired at the light that was suddenly in his eyes.

  But then they were on him. Many of them. He hurt some of them. Possibly fatally. He didn’t get off a shot.

  He heard no shots from Lustre.

  They forced something into his face and at last he had to take a breath of darkness.

  Hamilton woke with a start. And the knowledge that he was a fool and a traitor because he was a fool. He wanted to bask in that misery, that he’d failed everyone he cared about. He wanted to lose to it, to let it halt his hopeless trying in favour of certainty.

  He must not.

  He sought his clock, and found that it was a few hours, not years, later. He’d kept his eyes closed because of the lights. But the light coming at him from all around was diffuse, comfortable.

  Whatever situation he found himself in, his options were going to be limited. If there was no escape, if they were indeed in the hands of the enemy, his job now was to kill Lustre and then himself.

  He considered that for a moment and was calm about it.

  He allowed himself to open his eyes.

  He was in what looked like the best room at an inn. Sun-like light shone through what looked like a projection rather than a window. He was dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing on the street. A few serious bruises. He was lying on the bed. He was alone. Nobody had bothered to tuck him in.

  The door opened. Hamilton sat up.

  It was a waiter, pulling a service trolley into the room. He saw that Hamilton was awake and nodded to him.

  Hamilton inclined his head in return.

  The waiter took the cover off the trolley, revealing dinner: what looked like real steak and eggs. He placed cutlery appropriately, bowed, and left once more. There was no sound of the door being locked.

  Hamilton went to the trolley and looked at the cutlery. He ran his finger on the sharp, serrated edge of the steak knife. There was a message.

  He sat down on the bed and ate.

  He couldn’t help the thoughts that swept through him. He felt them rather than discern them as memories or ideas. He was made from them, after all. They all were, those who kept the balance, those who made sure that the great powers shared the solar system carefully between them, and didn’t spin off wildly into a war which everyone knew would be the last. That end of the world would free them all from responsibility, and join them with the kingdom which existed around the universe and inside every miniscule Newton Length. The balance, having collapsed, would crest as a wave again, finally, and stay there, finally including all who had lived, brought entirely into God. That much rough physics Keble had drummed into him. He’d never found himself wanting the final collapse. It was not to be wished for by mortals, after all. It was the shape of the very existence around them, not something they could choose the moment of. He enjoyed his duty, even enjoyed suffering for it, in a way. That was meaning. But concussions like this, explosions against the sides of what he understood, and so many of them, so quickly . . . No, he wouldn’t become fascinated with the way the world around him seemed to be shaking on its foundations. This was just a new aspect to the balance, a new threat to it. It had many manifestations, many configurations. That was a line from some hymn he barely remembered. He would be who he was and do what had to be done.

  That thought he heard as words, as the part of himself that had motive and will. He smiled at this restoration of strength and finished his steak.

  The moment he’d finished eating, someone came for him.

  This one was dressed in the uniform that Lustre had mentioned. Hamilton contained his reaction to it. To his eyes, it looked halfway to something from a carnival. Bright colours that nevertheless had never seen a battlefield, with no history to be read therein. The man wearing it looked like he’d been trained in a real army, he walked, Hamilton behind him, like he’d known a parade ground. A former officer, even. One who’d bought himself out or deserted. He ignored Hamilton’s attempts to start a conversation. Not questions, because he was already preparing himself for the forthcoming interrogation, and pointless questions were a hole in the dam. Instead Hamilton asked only about the weather, and received just a wry look in return. A wry look from this bastard who’d sold his comrades for a bright coat.

  Hamilton gave him a smile, and imagined what he’d do to him, given the chance.

  He’d left the knife beside his plate.

  The corridors were bright and smooth, made of space, cast with colours and textures for the comfort of those who lived here. Hamilton followed the man to the door of what looked like an office and waited as he knocked on it and was called to enter. The door slid open on its own, as if servants were in short supply.

  The chamber they stepped into was enormous. It was a dome, with a projected ceiling, on which could be seen . . .

  Above them was a world. For a moment, Hamilton thought it must be Jupiter, on its night side. But no. He reeled again, without letting his face show it. This was a world he hadn’t seen before. Which was impossible. But the notes in his eyes told him the projection was hallmarked as real space, not as an imagined piece of art. The sphere was dark and enormous. Its inky clouds glowed dully like the coals of hell.

  “Hey,” said a voice from across the room, in a breezy North Columbian accent, “good evening, Major Hamilton. Delighted you could join us.”

  Hamilton tore his gaze away from the thing above them.

  Across the chamber were standing two men, one to each side of an enor
mous fireplace, above which was carved, and Hamilton was sure it had actually been carved, a coat of arms. Normally, the out-of-uniform man would have recoiled, but he was now in a world of shock, and this latest effrontery couldn’t add to it. The arms weren’t anything the International Brotherhood of Heralds would have approved of, but something . . . personal . . . the sort of thing a schoolboy would doodle in his rough book and then crumple before his peers saw it. Arms of one’s own! The sheer presumption.

  The two men were smiling at him, and if he hadn’t been before, now Hamilton was ready to hate them. They were smiling as if the coat of arms and the unknown world they claimed was real were a joke. Like their pantomime guards were to Hamilton, though he wondered if these two saw them like that.

  “Am I addressing the two . . . Mr. Ransoms?” He looked between them. And found a mystery had been repeated.

  The men were both tall, nearly seven footers. They both had thinning hair, the furrowed brows of an academic, and had decided to wear glasses. More ostentation. They were dressed not like gentlemen, but in the sort of thing one of the husbands who came home to those little boxes in Kent might have worn for an evening at the golf club. They were similar in build, but . . .

  One had at least a decade on the other.

  And yet—

  “These are Castor and Pollux Ransom, yes,” said Lustre, from where she stood on the other side of the room. She had a glass of brandy in her hands, which were shaking. “The twins.”

  Hamilton looked between them. Everything about them was indeed exactly the same, apart from their ages. This must have the same cause as Lustre’s situation, but what?

  The younger man, Pollux, if Hamilton recalled correctly, separated himself from the fireplace and came to regard him with that same mocking gaze. “I assume that was Enochian for the obvious answer. It’s true, Major. We were born, in a place that had the Iroquois name of ‘Toronto,’ but which people like you call Fort York, on the same day in 1958.”

  Hamilton raised an eyebrow. “What’s the difference, then? Clean living?”

  “Far from it,” laughed the older twin. “In either case.”

  “I guess you’d like some answers,” said Pollux. “I’ll do my best. You certainly left chaos in your wake. At 9:59 P.M., the Court of Saint James officially declared Denmark a ‘protectorate of His Majesty,’ and dispatched forces ‘in support of King Frederik,’ whom they allege—”

  “They declare,” corrected Hamilton.

  Pollux laughed. “Oh, let’s get the manners right, and never mind the horrors they describe! All right. They declare that the mad old bastard has been the victim of some sort of coup, and intend to return him to his throne. A coup very much in the eye of the beholder, I should think. A lie more than a declaration, I’d call it. I wonder if Frederik will survive it?”

  Hamilton gave no reply. He was pleased to hear it. But it only underlined how important the contents of Lustre’s head were.

  Pollux continued his explanations with a gesture around him. “We’re in a mansion, a perfectly normal one, in lunar orbit.” He gestured upwards. “That’s an intelligent projection from another of our properties, one considerably beyond the political boundaries of the solar system. We’ve named that object ‘Nemesis.’ Because we discovered it. It’s the sun’s twin, much less bright.” He shared a smile with Castor. “No metaphor intended.” He looked back to Hamilton. “Travelling at the speed of light, it’d take around a year to get there.”

  “You speak of a property there—” Hamilton wondered if they’d sent some automatic carriage out to the place and were calling it by a lofty name.

  “We’ve got several properties there,” said Castor, stepping forward to join his brother. “But I think Pollux was referring to the star itself.”

  Hamilton knew they were goading him. So he gave them nothing.

  “Do you remember the story of Newton and the worm, Major?” asked Pollux, as if they were all sharing the big joke together. But the man wasn’t attempting courtesy, his tone of voice scathing, as if addressing a wayward child. “It’s part of the balance nursery curriculum in Britain, right? You know, old Isaac’s in his garden, an apple falls on his head, he picks it up and sees this tiny worm crawling across its surface, and so he starts thinking about the very small. Unaligned historians have sunk almost every detail of that old tale, by the way, but never mind that. Isaac realised that space needs an observer, God, to make reality keep happening when there’s none of us around. You know, he’s the guy in the forest when the tree falls, and because of him it makes a noise. He’s part of the fabric of creation, part of and the motive behind the ‘decreed and holy’ balance. And the stars and the galaxies and the tremendous distances between them are like they are just because that’s how he set up the stage, and that’s all there is to it. The balance in our solar system is the diamond at the centre of an ornate setting, the further universe. But it is just a setting. Or at least that’s the attitude that great powers academia has always encouraged. It keeps everything fixed. Held down.”

  “But you know, we’re not much for academia, we like to get our hands dirty,” said Castor, who sounded a little more affable. “The two of us have our feet planted in the muddy battlefields of mother Earth, where we’ve made our money, but we’ve always looked at the stars. Part of our fortune has gone towards the very expensive hobby of first-class astronomy. We have telescopes better than any the great powers can boast, placed at various locations around the solar system. We also make engines. A carriage that slides down a fold, altering gravity under itself at every moment, is capable, in the void, of only a certain acceleration. The record keeps inching up, but it’s a matter of gaining a few miles an hour because of some technical adjustment. And once you’ve reached any great acceleration inside the solar system, you’re going to need to start decelerating in a few days, because you’ll need to slow down at your destination. It wouldn’t be out of the question to send an automatic carriage out into the wilds beyond the comet cloud, but somehow nobody’s gotten around to doing it.”

  “That always puzzled us.”

  “Until we heard whispers about the great secret. Because people talk to us, we sell weapons and buy information. It became clear that for a nation to send such a carriage, to even prepare a vehicle that greatly exceeded records, would be to have every other nation suspect they’d found something out there, and become suddenly aggressive toward them, in a desperate attempt to keep the balance.”

  Hamilton kept his silence.

  “When we stumbled on Nemesis in a photographic survey, we realized that we had found something we had always sought, along with so many other disenfranchised inhabitants of Earth—”

  “Land,” said Hamilton.

  They laughed and applauded like this was a party game. “Exactly,” said Castor.

  “We tossed a coin,” said Pollux, “I was the one who went. With a small staff. I took a carriage with a fold full of supplies, and set it accelerating, using an engine of our own, one limited by physical rather than political principles. I struck out for a new world. I opened up a new frontier. For us, this time. For all the people shut out when the great powers closed down the world—” He noticed that his brother was frowning at him, and visibly reined himself in. “The carriage accelerated until after a year or so we were approaching the speed of light. We discovered, to our shock, that as we did so, the demands on the fold became extraordinary. It seems, incredibly, that there is a speed limit on the universe!”

  Hamilton tried to keep his expression even, but knew he was failing. He didn’t know how much of this he could believe.

  “By my own internal clock, the round trip took four years—”

  “But I remained here as fifteen years passed,” said Castor. “Because when you approach the speed of light, time slows down. Just for you. Yeah, I know how mad it sounds! It’s like God starts looking at you differently!”

  “And you should see the beauty of it, Major, the rainbo
ws and the darkness and the feeling that one is . . . finally close to the centre of understanding.”

  Hamilton licked his dry lips. “Why does all this happen?”

  “We don’t know, exactly,” admitted Castor. “We’ve approached this as engineers, not theorists. ‘God does not flay space,’ that’s what Newton is supposed to have said. He theorized that God provides a frame of reference for all things, relative to Him. But these spooky changes in mass and time depending on speed . . . that seems to say there’s a bit more going on than Newton’s miniscule gravitation and miniscule causality!”

  Hamilton nodded in the direction of Lustre. “I gather she wasn’t on that first trip?”

  “No,” said Pollux. “That’s what I’m coming to. When the carriage started decelerating towards Nemesis, we began to see signs of what we initially took to be a solar system surrounding the star. Only as we got closer did we realise that what we had taken to be small worlds were actually carriages. Ones the size of which human beings have not dreamt. The carriages of foreigners.”

  Hamilton’s mouth set in a line. That these had been the first representatives of humanity! And the foreigners were so close! If any of this could be true. He didn’t let his gaze move upwards as if to see them. He could almost feel the balance juddering. It was as if something dear to him was sliding swiftly away, into the void, and only destruction could follow. “So,” he said, “you drew alongside and shook hands.”

  “No,” laughed Pollux. “Unfortunately. We could see immediately that there were enormous symbols on the carriages, all the same design, though we couldn’t make anything of them. They were kind of . . . like red birds, but deformed, unfocused. You needed to see two to realize they were a symbol at all. We approached with all hulloos and flags, and suddenly our embroidery was flooded with what might have been voices, but sounded like low booming sounds. We yelled back and forth, uselessly, for about an hour. We were preparing a diagram to throw into the void in a canister, stick figures handing each other things—”