Year's Best SF 1

by David G. Hartwell

  THE RED AND BLUE SHIFTS ARISE FROM THE INTENSE PSEUDO-GRAVITATIONAL FORCES WHICH SUSTAIN IT.

  “So theory says. Not something I want to get my hands on.”

  EXCEPT METAPHORICALLY.

  Claire's laugh was jumpy, dry. “No, magnetically.”

  She ordered Erma to settle the Silver Metal Lugger down into the thicket of magnetic flux tubes. Vibration picked up, a jittery hum in the deck. Claire swam impatiently from one wall screen to the other, looking from the worm, judging distances. Hell of a way to fly.

  Their jet wash blurred the wormhole's ebony curves. Like a black tennis ball in blue-white surf, it bobbed and tossed on magnetic turbulence. Nothing was falling into it, she could see. Plasma streamers arched along the flux tubes, shying away. The negative curvature repulsed matter—and would shove Silver Metal Lugger's hull away, too.

  But magnetic fields have no mass.

  Most people found magnetic forces mysterious, but to pilots and engineers who worked with them, they were just big, strong ribbons that needed shaping. Like rubber bands, they stretched, storing energy—then snapped back when released. Unbreakable, almost.

  In routine work, Silver Metal Lugger grabbed enormous ore buckets with those magnetic fingers. The buckets came arcing up from Mercury, flung out by electromagnetic slingshots. Claire's trickiest job was playing catcher, with a magnetic mitt.

  Now she had to snag a bucket of warped space-time. And quick.

  WE CANNOT REMAIN HERE LONG. INTERNAL TEMPERATURE RISES AT 19.3 DEGREES PER MINUTE.

  “That can't be right. I'm still comfortable.”

  BECAUSE I'M ALLOWING WATER TO EVAPORATE, TAKING THE BULK OF THE THERMAL FLUX AWAY.

  “Keep an eye on it.”

  PROBABLE YIELD FROM CAPTURE OF A WORMHOLE, I ESTIMATE, IS 2.8 BILLION.

  “That'll do the trick. You multiplied the yield in dollars times the odds of success?”

  YES. TIMES THE PROBABILITY OF REMAINING ALIVE.

  She didn't want to ask what that number was. “Keep us dropping.”

  Instead, they slowed. The arch's flux tubes pushed upward against the ship. Claire extended the ship's magnetic fields, firing the booster generators, pumping current into the millions of induction loops that circled the hull. Silver Metal Lugger was one big circuit, wired like a slinky toy, coils wrapped around the cylindrical axis.

  Gingerly she pulsed it, spilling more antimatter into the chambers. The ship's multipolar fields bulged forth. Feed out the line.…

  They fought their way down. On her screens she saw magnetic feelers reaching far below their exhaust plumes. Groping.

  Claire ordered some fast command changes. Erma switched linkages, interfaced software, all in a twinkling. Good worker, but spotty as a personality sim, Claire thought.

  Silver Metal Lugger's fields extended to their maximum. She could now use her suit gloves as modified waldoes—mag gloves. They gave her the feel of the magnetic grapplers. Silky, smooth, field lines slipping and expanding, like rubbery air.

  Plasma storms blew by them. She reached down, a sensation like plunging her hands into a stretching, elastic vat. Fingers fumbled for the one jewel in all the dross.

  She felt a prickly nugget. It was like a stone with hair. From experience working the ore buckets, she knew the feel of locked-in magnetic dipoles. The worm had its own magnetic fields. That had snared it here, in the spiderweb arch.

  A lashing field whipped at her grip. She lost the black pearl.

  In the blazing hot plasma she could not see it.

  She reached with rubbery fields, caught nothing.

  OUR ANTI-MATTER BOTTLES ARE IN DANGER. THEIR SUPERCONDUCTING MAGNETS ARE CLOSE TO GOING CRITICAL. THEY WILL FAIL WITHIN 7.4 MINUTES.

  “Let me concentrate! No, wait—Circulate water around them. Buy some time.”

  BUT THE REMAINING WATER IS IN YOUR QUARTERS.

  “This is all that's left?” She peered around at her once-luxurious living room. Counting the bedroom, rec area and kitchen—“How…long?”

  UNTIL YOUR WATER BEGINS TO EVAPORATE? ALMOST AN HOUR.

  “But when it evaporates, it's boiling.”

  TRUE. I AM MERELY TRYING TO REMAIN FACTUAL.

  “The emotional stuff's left to me, huh?” She punched in commands on her suit board. In the torpid, warming water her fingers moved like sausages.

  She ordered bots out onto the hull to free up some servos that had jammed. They did their job, little boxy bodies lashed by plasma winds. Two blew away.

  She reached down again. Searching. Where was the worm?

  Wispy flux tubes wrestled along Silver Metal Lugger's hull. Claire peered into a red glare of superheated plasma. Hot, but tenuous. The real enemy was the photon storm streaming up from far below, searing even the silvery hull.

  She still had worker-bots on the hull. Four had jets. She popped their anchors free. They plunged, fired jets, and she aimed them downward in a pattern.

  “Follow trajectories,” she ordered Erma. Orange tracer lines appeared on the screens.

  The bots swooped toward their deaths. One flicked to the side, a sharp nudge. “There's the worm! We can't see for all this damned plasma, but it shoved that bot away.”

  The bots evaporated, sprays of liquid metal. She followed them and grabbed for the worm.

  Magnetic field lines groped, probed.

  WE HAVE 88 SECONDS REMAINING FOR ANTIMATTER CONFINEMENT.

  “Save a reserve!”

  YOU HAVE NO PLAN. I DEMAND THAT WE EXECUTE EMERGENCY—

  “OK, save some antimatter. The rest I use—now.”

  They ploughed downward, shuddering. Her hands fumbled at the wormhole. Now it felt slippery, oily. Its magnetic dipoles were like greasy hair, slick, the bulk beneath jumping away from her grasp as if it were alive.

  On her screens she saw the dark globe slide and bounce. The worm wriggled out of her grasp. She snaked inductive fingers around it. Easy, easy.… There. Gotcha.

  “I've got a good grip on it. Lemme have that antimatter.”

  Something like a sigh echoed from Erma. On her ship's operations screen, Claire saw the ship's magnetic vaults begin to discharge. Ruby-red pouches slipped out of magnetic mirror geometries, squirting out through opened gates.

  She felt a surge as the ship began to lift. Good, but it wasn't going to last. They were dumping antimatter into the reaction chamber so fast, it didn't have time to find matching particles. The hot jet spurting out below was a mixture of matter and its howling enemy, its polar opposite. This, Claire directed down onto the flux tubes around the hole. Leggo, damn it.

  She knew an old trick, impossibly slow in ordinary free space. When you manage to force two magnetic field lines close together, they can reconnect. That liberates some field energy into heat and can even blow open a magnetic structure. The process is slow—unless you jab it with turbulent, rowdy plasma.

  The antimatter in their downwash cut straight through flux tubes. Claire carved with her jet, freeing field lines that still snared the worm. The ship rose further, dragging the worm upward.

  It's not too heavy, Claire thought. That science officer said they could come in any size at all. This one is just about right for a small ship to slip through—to where?

  YOU HAVE REMAINING 11.34 MINUTES COOLING TIME—

  “Here's your hat—” Claire swept the jet wash over a last, large flux tube. It glistened as annihilation energies burst forth like bonfires, raging in a place already hot beyond imagination. Magnetic knots snarled, exploded. “—What's your hurry?”

  The solar coronal arch burst open.

  She had sensed these potential energies locked in the peak of the arch, an intuition that came through her hands, from long work with the mag gloves. Craftswoman's knowledge: Find the stressed flux lines. Turn the key.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  The acceleration slammed her to the floor, despite the water. Below, she saw the vast vault of energy stored in the arch blow out and up, directly
below them.

  YOU HAVE MADE A SOLAR FLARE!

  “And you thought I didn't have a plan.”

  Claire started to laugh. Slamming into a couch cut it off. She would have broken a shoulder, but the couch was water-logged and soft.

  Now the worm was an asset. It repulsed matter, so the upjetting plume blew around it, around Silver Metal Lugger. Free of the flux tubes' grip, the wormhole itself accelerated away from the Sun. All very helpful, Claire reflected, but she couldn't enjoy the spectacle—the rattling, surging deck was trying to bounce her off the furniture.

  What saved them in the end was their magnetic grapple. It deflected most of the solar flare protons around the ship. Pushed out at a speed of five hundred kilometers per second, they still barely survived baking. But they had the worm.

  Still, the scientific officer was not pleased. He came aboard to make this quite clear. His face alone would have been enough.

  “You're surely not going to demand money for that?” He scowled and nodded toward where Silver Metal Lugger's fields still hung onto the wormhole. Claire had to run a sea-blue plasma discharge behind it so she could see it at all. They were orbiting Mercury, negotiating.

  Earthside, panels of experts were arguing with each other; she had heard plenty of it on tightbeam. A negative-mass wormhole would not fall, so it couldn't knife through the Earth's mantle and devour the core.

  But a thin ship could fly straight into it, overcoming its gravitational repulsion—and come out where? Nobody knew. The worm wasn't spewing mass, so its other end wasn't buried in the middle of a star, or any place obviously dangerous. One of the half-dozen new theories squirting out on tightbeam held that maybe this was a multiply-connected wormhole, with many ends, of both positive and negative mass. In that case, plunging down it could take you to different destinations. A subway system for a galaxy; or a universe.

  So: no threat, and plenty of possibilities. Interesting market prospects.

  She shrugged. “Have your advocate talk to my advocate.”

  “It's a unique, natural resource—”

  “And it's mine.” She grinned. He was lean and muscular and the best man she had seen in weeks. Also the only man she had seen in weeks.

  “I can have a team board you, y'know.” He towered over her, using the usual ominous male thing.

  “I don't think you're that fast.”

  “What's speed got to do with it?”

  “I can always turn off my grapplers.” She reached for a switch. “If it's not mine, then I can just let everybody have it.”

  “Why would you—no, don't!”

  It wasn't the right switch, but he didn't know that. “If I release it, the worm takes off—antigravity, sort of.”

  He blinked. “We could catch it.”

  “You couldn't even find it. It's dead black.” She tapped the switch, letting a malicious smile play on her lips.

  “Please don't.”

  “I need to hear a number. An offer.”

  His lips compressed until they paled. “The wormhole price, minus your fine?”

  Her turn to blink. “What fine? I was on an approved flyby—”

  “That solar flare wouldn't have blown for a month. You did a real job on it—the whole magnetic arcade went up at once. People all the way out to the asteroids had to scramble for shelter.”

  He looked at her steadily and she could not decide whether he was telling the truth. “So their costs—”

  “Could run pretty high. Plus advocate fees.”

  “Exactly.” He smiled, ever so slightly.

  Erma was trying to tell her something but Claire turned the tiny voice far down, until it buzzed like an irritated insect.

  She had endured weeks of a female personality sim in a nasty mood. Quite enough. She needed an antidote. This fellow had the wrong kind of politics, but to let that dictate everything was as dumb as politics itself. Her ship's name was a joke, actually, about long, lonely voyages as an ore hauler. She'd had enough of that, too. And he was tall and muscular.

  She smiled. “Touché. OK, it's a done deal.”

  He beamed. “I'll get my team to work—”

  “Still, I'd say you need to work on your negotiating skills. Too brassy.”

  He frowned, but then gave her a grudging grin.

  Subtlety had never been her strong suit. “Shall we discuss them—over dinner?”

  Downloading

  Midnight

  WILLIAM BROWNING SPENCER

  William Browning Spencer is a recent emigrant into the SF community after years spent successfully scaling the walls of literary fiction. One of his two earlier novels, Resume With Monsters, alludes to Lovecraftian monsters. A collection in 1994, The Return of Count Electric, contained a fantasy story, “A Child's Christmas in Florida,” that drew some genre attention. His first novel published as fantasy, Zod Wallop, was released in 1995 by St. Martin's Press. “Downloading Midnight” is, to the best of my knowledge, one of his first SF stories and bodes well for his future in the field. It is cyberpunk in the tradition of George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails as much as of William Gibson's Neuromancer. It appeared in Tomorrow, the SF magazine published and edited by Algis Budrys.

  There was a big surge down at C-View, and a hologram from the American Midnight show went amok.

  We got the contract for the cleanup, and Bloom was desperate to do it.

  “Wow, American Midnight! I'm your man for this one, Marty.” Bloom was moving around the room in a highly charged state. He stopped and leaned across the desk. “I mean, maybe I can do a repair. I mean, this is American Midnight. This is Captain Armageddon. This is—Marty! What's gonna happen to Zera? Are they gonna close the whole thing down? What about Zera Terminal? Look, you just gotta let me go. I'm an authority on American Midnight.”

  Bloom was a tall, skinny kid with a sheaf of straight blond hair and round, incredulous blue eyes. He was no respecter of personal space, and his style of argument consisted of leaning into me, filling my field of vision with his manic gaze.

  I leaned back, away from his rhetoric.

  “Watching the flat reruns of American Midnight until you wear a loop in your brain doesn't necessarily make you an authority,” I said.

  American Midnight was C-View's big success, a sex holoshow that had been on the Highway for eight months. These days, a month is considered a good run, and most shows don't make it past a week. The show's hero, Captain Armageddon, had fragmented and was causing disturbances up and down the Highway. Someone had to go in and systematically delete the ghosts.

  “I don't want a zealot on this one,” I said. “We are way past repair here. Armageddon is out of control, and I need someone to do a no-nonsense wipe.”

  “I can do that,” Bloom said, trying for some sort of solid expression (he looked like a guy trying to hold back a sneeze). “I've done plenty of wipes.”

  “Not like this,” I said.

  This one was different. It was a big surge. The sicker the bigger we say in the business, and there was plenty of psychic rot here.

  American Midnight was fantasy sex and, of course, generated entirely by artificial intelligence. The peeps at Morals are ever-vigilant. One incident of a human-acted holo and Jell Baker and everyone else at C-View would have been lodged in a federal behavior mod without recall or a mitigating hearing.

  A guy named Seek Trumble was the human-map for Captain Armageddon, and his job, like that of any actor in a sex holoshow, was to routinely plug into the artificial for personality updates, emotional fine-tuning, that sort of thing. But it was the holo that did the acting. Anything else would have been obscene, although you can still find anonymous bulletin rants arguing that explicit sex between fantasy mock-ups is no different than explicit sex narrated visually by real humans. Those rants are probably generated by kids who have no memory of the Decadence. You have to log some experience before you can think reasonably about obscenity.

  So Seek Trumble had done a routine update, gone
home and committed suicide, burning a hole through his forehead with a utility laser. His holo had gone amok and litigation was pouring into C-View.

  “Marty, I can do the job,” Bloom said. “Come on.”

  I had reservations. Human/artificial feedback loops are not an exact science. One holo of recent memory, a pretty fashion gridlet named Spanskie Lark, went online, stuck a finger in her mouth, and bit it off. Before they could get her off-line, she had eaten all the fingers of one hand. Turned out her source was anorexic. That was recognizable cause-and-effect, but often the human kink was deeper, harder to search.

  Bloom wore me down. I let him go. He went on-line for the clean up, and three weeks later he still wasn't back.

  C-View was one of the biggest studios out on the Broad Highway. Control there was a guy named Jell Baker.

  “You think you are getting paid by the hour?” Baker screamed. “Look, I got about ten thousand trauma actions filed against me, and I want this rift closed.”

  I didn't like Baker, so it's just as well he signed off before I could express myself. The guy had come up through the glitter shows, and he didn't just have a file at Morals, he had a whole subdirectory.

  My immediate concern wasn't Baker. It was Bloom. The job should have taken four days, a week max. Where was he?

  I shouldn't have let him go. He was just a kid, still trapped in adolescence despite being a year out of the teens. He was a late-bloomer, one of those pale, V-wise, obsessive kids that don't really have a niche in the system. The sort of kid who grows up watching the Highway, an arcane data-freak with a head full of old holoshows and stats. I hired him because he was so crazy in love with the Highway. He'd been with me three years now.

  I liked having the energy around. I'm forty. I'm not in love with any of it. Big R/Little R, I cast a cold eye on it all.

  I went down to the waystation at Com Wick where Bloom floated in Deprive, threads flowing out of him, undulating like a giant jellyfish in a sea of brown ink. His long white face seemed to pulse under the monitor light.