Year's Best SF 8

by David G. Hartwell

  Geisen hastily dabbed at his own lips with his napkin, and was mortified to see the clean cloth come away with enough stains to represent a child’s immoderate battle with an entire chocolate cake.

  “Oh, Gep Carrabas, I hope I am not interrupting your gustatory pleasures.”

  “Nuh—no, young lady, not at all. I am fully sated. And you are?”

  “Gep Bloedwyn Vermeule. You may call me by my first name, if you grant me the same privilege.”

  “But naturally.”

  “May I offer an alternative pleasure, Timor, in the form of a dance? Assuming your satiation does not extend to all recreations.”

  “Certainly. If you’ll make allowances in advance for my clumsiness.”

  Bloedwyn allowed the tip of her tongue delicately to traverse her patinaed lips. “As the Dompatta says, ‘An earnest rider compensates for a balky steed.’ ”

  This bit of familiar gospel had never sounded so lascivious. Geisen was shocked at this unexpected temptress behavior from his ex-fiancée. But before he could react with real or mock indignation, Bloedwyn had whirled him out onto the floor.

  They essayed several complicated dances before Geisen, pleading fatigue, could convince his partner to call a halt to the activity.

  “Let us recover ourselves in solitude on the terrace,” Bloedwyn said, and conducted Geisen by the arm through a pressure curtain and onto an unlit open-air patio. Alone in the shadows, they took up positions braced against a balustrade. The view of the moon-drenched arroyos below occupied them in silence for a time. Then Bloedwyn spoke huskily.

  “You exude a foreign, experienced sensuality, Timor, to which I find myself vulnerable. Perhaps you would indulge my weakness with an assignation tonight, in a private chamber of Stoessl House known to me? After any important business dealings are successfully concluded, of course.”

  Geisen seethed inwardly, but managed to control his voice. “I am flattered that you find a seasoned fellow of my girth so attractive, Bloedwyn. But I do not wish to cause any intermural incidents. Surely you are affianced to someone, a young lad both bold and wiry, jealous and strong.”

  “Pah! I do not care for young men, they are all chowder-heads! Pawing, puling, insensitive, shallow, and vain, to a man! I was betrothed to one such, but luckily he revealed his true colors and I was able to cast him aside like the churl he proved to be.”

  Now Geisen felt only miserable self-pity. He could summon no words, and Bloedwyn took his silence for assent. She planted a kiss on his cheek, then whispered directly into his ear. “Here’s a map to the boudoir where I’ll be waiting. Simply take the east squeezer down three levels, then follow the hot dust.” She pressed a slip of paper into his hand, supplementing her message with extra pressure in his palm, then sashayed away like a tainted sylph.

  Geisen spent half an hour with his mind roiling before he regained the confidence to return to the party.

  Before too long, Grafton corralled him.

  “Are you enjoying yourself, Timor? The food agrees? The essences elevate? The ladies are pliant? Haw! But perhaps we should turn our minds to business now, before we both grow too muzzy-headed. After conducting our dull commerce, we can cut loose.”

  “I am ready. Let me summon my aide.”

  “That skun—That is, if you absolutely insist. But surely our marchwarden can offer any support services you need. Notarization, citation of past deeds, and so forth.”

  “No. I rely on Hepzibah implicitly.”

  Grafton partially suppressed a frown. “Very well, then.”

  Once Ailoura arrived from the servants’ table, the trio headed toward Vomacht’s old study. Geisen had to remind himself not to turn down any “unknown” corridor before Grafton himself did.

  Seated in the very room where he had been fleeced of his patrimony and threatened with false charges of murder, Geisen listened with half an ear while Grafton outlined the terms of the prospective sale: all the Carrabas properties and whatever wealth of strangelets they contained, in exchange for a sum greater than the Gross Plantetary Product of many smaller worlds.

  Ailoura attended more carefully to the contract, even pointing out to Geisen a buried clause that would have made payment contingent on the first month’s production from the new fields. After some arguing, the conspirators succeeded in having the objectionable codicil removed. The transfer of funds would be complete and instantaneous.

  When Grafton had finally finished explaining the conditions, Geisen roused himself. He found it easy to sound bored with the whole deal, since his elaborate scam, at its moment of triumph, afforded him surprisingly little vengeful pleasure.

  “All the details seem perfectly managed, Gep Stoessl, with that one small change of ours included. I have but one question. How do I know that the black sheep of your House, Geisen, will not contest our agreement? He seems a contrary sort, from what I’ve heard, and I would hate to be involved in judicial proceedings, should he get a whim in his head.”

  Grafton settled back in his chair with a broad smile. “Fear not, Timor! That wild hair will get up no one’s arse! Geisen has been effectively rendered powerless. As was only proper and correct, I assure you, for he was not a true Stoessl at all.”

  Geisen’s heart skipped a cycle. “Oh? How so?”

  “The lad was a chimera! A product of the ribosartors! Old Vomacht was unsatisfied with the vagaries of honest mating that had produced Gitten and myself from the noble stock of our mother. Traditional methods of reproduction had not delivered him a suitable toady. So he resolved to craft a better heir. He used most of his own germ plasm as foundation, but supplemented his nucleotides with dozens of other snippets. Why, that hybrid boy even carried bestient genes. Rat and weasel, I’m willing to bet! Haw! No, Geisen had no place in our family.”

  “And his mother?”

  “Once the egg was crafted and fertilized, Vomacht implanted it in a host bitch. One of our own bestients. I misapprehend her name now, after all these years. Amorica, Orella, something of that nature. I never really paid attention to her fate after she delivered her human whelp. I have more important properties to look after. No doubt she ended up on the offal heap, like all the rest of her kind.”

  A red curtain drifting across Geisen’s vision failed to occlude the shape of the massive aurochs-flaying blade hanging on the wall. One swift leap and it would be in his hands. Then Grafton would know sweet murderous pain, and Geisen’s bitter heart would applaud—

  Standing beside Geisen, Ailoura let slip the quietest cough.

  Geisen looked into her face.

  A lone tear crept from the corner of one feline eye.

  Geisen gathered himself and stood up, unspeaking.

  Grafton grew a trifle alarmed. “Is there anything the matter, Gep Carrabas?”

  “No, Gep Stoessl, not at all. Merely that old hurts pain me, and I would fain relieve them. Let us close our deal. I am content.”

  The star liner carrying Geisen, Ailoura, and the stasis-bound Carrabas marchwarden to a new life sped through the interstices of the cosmos, powered perhaps by a strangelet mined from Stoessl lands. In one of the lounges, the man and his cat nursed drinks and snacks, admiring the exotic variety of their fellow passengers and reveling in their hardwon liberty and security.

  “Where from here—son?” asked Ailoura with a hint of unwonted shyness.

  Geisen smiled. “Why, wherever we wish, Mother dear.”

  “Rowr! A world with plenty of fish, then, for me!”

  The Names of All the Spirits

  BY J. R. DUNN

  J. R. Dunn lives in New Jersey, which he describes as “a small, barbarous region between New York and Pennsylvania.” He’s sold to most of the magazines, including Analog, Asimov’s, Omni, Century, and Amazing. Most of his stories have been cited on best-of-year lists, with many selected for anthologies. His novels include This Side of Judgment (1994), Days of Cain (1997), and Full Tide of Night (1998). He is an accomplished writer with a clear, lucid style
.

  “The Names of all the Spirits” appeared online at SciFiction, and this is its first print appearance. It concerns the isolated space miners who work in the outer solar system, in an era when powerful, threatening artificial intelligences are on the loose outside the sphere of human control. But Dunn’s vision of the situation, seen through the investigation of a Mandate agent into the mystery of a miner who survived when he should not have, transforms this standard SF situation in a compelling way.

  It was a busier sky than I was used to. The stars were invisible, outshone by an apparently solid tower of light dominating the view out the window. It was about as wide as an outstretched hand, narrowing steadily to a point high enough to make me tilt my head before twisting into a curve and vanishing from sight. Or perhaps not completely so: obscured by a fog of leakage, a thin filament that might be its distant tail extended into a darkness not quite the absolute black of space. At eye level another stream flowed off at a right angle, pure white to the tower’s mottled yellow, ending in a sunburst bright enough to make me squint.

  It was all very impressive, an undertaking of a scale you don’t often find inside the system, almost astronomical in both scope and imagery. And I was impressed, on the intellectual, so-many-megatons-per-second level. But nothing more. Similar operations were going on all across this lobe of the cometary halo. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. I’ve seen one.

  Somebody Solward needed ice cubes. That’s what it came down to. Those two streams were stripped comets, hydro-carbons separated from volatiles and each sent off in different directions, to freeze again in the cold of extrasolar space. The ice would be shipped in while the hydrocarbons and solids remained. They wouldn’t go far, not as we judge distances these days, and somebody, someday in the fullness of time, would find a use for them.

  A rustle of impatience recalled me to the room. The window reflected the scene behind me: a dozen or so figures in a motley array of gear centered on a man perched on a small chair. One of them seemed to have grown a second head directly atop his first in the time my back had been turned. I realized it was a piece of scrim resting on a shelf behind him. Not even jacks are that weird.

  I turned to the seated man. Through some means I couldn’t detect (the place wasn’t spinning, that much was certain), they’d created a one-gee field. If meant as a courtesy, it was misplaced—I’d been out in Kuiper-Oort as long as any of them. “Let’s hear your side, Morgan. That’s what I came for.”

  The only sound was a voice muttering, “…n’t have a side.”

  Morgan himself simply stared, saying nothing, the same as he had the first two times I’d asked the question. He could well have been tranced, lost in a private world or daydream, though some small tremor of attention told me he was not.

  I’d thought it was going to be easy. Open and shut, as the ancient phrase went. Get the story out of Morgan, lase it in, take him into custody and back to the System by the swiftest means possible, without even waiting for a reply. They’d given me the impression he’d talked, which was obviously not the case. I shouldn’t have questioned him in front of them. A single glance at this crew—Morgan’s workmates, the “Powder Monkeys,” of all conceivable names—was enough to strike terror into a sponge.

  But I didn’t think it was fear holding Morgan back. It was something else. Something I was going to get at, however deep I had to go. Because this was no mere legal matter, and Rog Morgan was not simply a jack in trouble. This was an impi problem, and Morgan was my ticket home.

  I saw no point in anymore questions. I turned to Witcove. “You’ve got a secure spot for him?”

  “He ain’t going noplace, Sandoval.” Witcove snorted. “We got his processor and remotes.”

  I raised a hand. “Why don’t you give me those.”

  Witcove frowned. He hadn’t quite worked out how to handle me yet. Who was I, after all, but one man come out of the dark? What gave me the right to throw my mass around? Where did I get off giving orders to the foreman of the Powder Monkeys?

  Mystique came to my rescue. Back on the Blue Rock, at a time when Texas was—in the mind’s system of measurement, anyway—only marginally smaller than the Halo, there existed an organization with a mission not at all unlike the Mandate’s and the motto, “One riot, one Ranger.” A single Texas Ranger could be relied on to ride into any given bad town and straighten the place out with only his two hands and the sure knowledge that hundreds just like him were ready to saddle up. It seldom failed.

  It didn’t fail now. With a grunt, Witcove reached into a thigh pouch and pulled out what appeared to be a handful of black geometrical solids of various sizes. Forgetting we were under gee, he made as if to toss them to me, curtailing the throw at the very last second as the thought occurred to him. He succeeded only in scattering components across the floor between us.

  That triggered the kind of laughter you’d expect, along with the first visible reaction from Morgan as he gazed at the components with an expression mixing frustration and annoyance. Somebody was living behind that vacuum-habituated mask after all.

  At my feet the scattered remotes began to move, sliding together to form a little pile. Witcove swung on Morgan with a wordless roar.

  The components went still. With a sigh of impatience Morgan looked away. “Once more, mister,” Witcove told him. “You issue one more command and I will personally—”

  “Foreman…” Witcove raised his eyebrows. Someone stepped forward to collect the remotes and hand them to me. I was absently thanking him when I felt a burst of heat in my palm. The jack kept his eyes lowered. “Foreman, can we break things up for the moment?”

  “Sure, you…got enough for now.”

  “I do.”

  Behind him two crewmen hustled Morgan to his feet and out the exit. I moved off, pretending interest in the scrim collection. Scrim is the vacuum jack’s one notable hobby, dignified as art by some. Small carvings comprised of asteroidal junk, scrap, what have you, of a size easily carried in a suit pouch and worked on at odd moments with atelier remotes and occasionally heavier machinery. Scrim touches every subject matter conceivable: women, ships, animals, vehicles, instruments, self-portraits, and items not easily catalogued. It wasn’t crude. They worked on it too long for that, almost obsessively, often overshooting the baroque to land deep in the grotesque. I didn’t care for scrim. It spoke to me only of loneliness and exile.

  Witcove sidled up next to me. “You come to a decision, you’ll…”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  That wasn’t precisely what he wanted to hear. “Look…” he glanced behind him. Morgan had vanished. “He’s not gonna tell you anything. It’s locked up. Something wrong there. When the runaways grab a guy—”

  “Shift change in five,” somebody said. The room began clearing. I gestured at Witcove, half thanks, half dismissal.

  “I’ll let you know,” I repeated.

  Clearly dissatisfied, he walked off. A crewman intercepted him to talk operations. With a final glance in my direction, Witcove left.

  The room empty at last, I reached into my pocket. The components made a handful. The big one, an inch and a half by two, had to be the processor, a lifetime of experience and training imbedded within it. I wondered what Witcove would do if somebody abused his. The other nine were remote sensors, appendages, actuators, the vacuum jack’s tools of the trade. With these, a jack could see into the infrared and radio ranges, expand his sensory horizon a hundred or a thousand miles, control instruments and machinery that far away and more. I examined one resembling a length of thick wire. A jack would be able to tell exactly what make it was, its capabilities, its cost. Hard to believe that zero-gee work was once done with tools held in gloved hands….

  Something in my palm emitted a flash. I looked down. Five seconds passed before the flash repeated. Dropping the thin piece, I picked up a sphere that my thumb revealed to be flattened on one end. A glow appeared as I held it at eye level, a glow made up
of words. I smiled. A tap and a shake failed to evoke anything further. I popped the remote into a pocket and stared off into space, only to have my gaze arrested by a particularly odd piece of scrim. I picked it up. Close inspection failed to tell me what in Heaven, Hell, or the Halo it was supposed to represent. It fell over when I set it down. Someone once told me that oceanic sailors had produced something like scrim. It seems unlikely. Hard to see what they’d have used for material.

  Whoever cracks the impi problem can write his own ticket. They were out there. That much was known. Rogues, duppies, runaways…impis, in a word. Artificial Intelligences that had slipped away, one day here, overseeing a refinery, shepherding a comet, repairing a system, the next gone, with never a sign of where. Only five or six a year, but numbers build. Surely they existed in the hundreds by now, a group large enough to leave undeniable evidence of its presence: signals encoded so deeply that ages wouldn’t decrypt them, resources diverted to open trajectories, hacking that revealed the signature of machine capabilities, along with missing vessels, inexplicable damage to isolated machinery, individuals vanished into night.

  Discover a path into the impi’s kingdom, learn the names of the spirits, find the hidden places where they slept, and you would be set. You’d be the man with the expert’s badge, and everyone would have to come to you. Back amid civilization, operating from behind a screen at Charon or even Triton, with a sun in the sky and a society around you. No more years spent in the cold and dark, enduring the grinding boredom of Kuiper-Oort, no more confrontations with misfits suitable only for work on the edge of civilization.

  Standing orders stated that suspect human-renegade interaction took precedence over all other activities—criminal investigation, medical evacuation, mercy mission, what have you. We had no idea where they were, what they were doing, what motivated them. The stories were legion—they were evolving into something alien and malevolent. They were duplicating themselves, running off copies like cheap commercial ware, pushing their numbers into the millions or even higher. They were out to take over the Halo or sweep back into the system and brush humanity right off the board. All no more than rumor, urban legend on the grand scale.