The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  I have never been sure if he knew he was dying. If he knew, he did not mention it, nor did I press him.

  In my gloomier hours – when I sat with my nephew as he struggled to sleep, or as I lay listening to the ominous, mysterious rumbles of my own failing body, cumulatively poisoned, wracked by the strange distortions of lunar gravity – I wondered how much farther we must descend.

  The heavy molecules of our thick atmosphere are too fast-moving to be contained by the Moon’s gravity. The air will be thinned in a few thousand years: a long time, but not beyond comprehension. Long before then we must have reconquered this world we built, or we will die.

  So we gather metals. And, besides that, we will need knowledge.

  We have become a world of patient monks, endlessly transcribing the great texts of the past, pounding into the brains of our wretched young the wisdom of the millennia. It seems essential we do not lose our concentration as a people, our memory. But I fear it is impossible. We are Stone Age farmers, the young broken by toil even as they learn. I have lived long enough to realize that we are, fragment by fragment, losing what we once knew.

  If I had one simple message to transmit to the future generations, one thing they should remember lest they descend into savagery, it would be this: People came from Earth. There: cosmology and the history of the species and the promise of the future, wrapped up in one baffling, enigmatic, heroic sentence. I repeat it to everyone I meet. Perhaps those future thinkers will decode its meaning, and will understand what they must do.

  Berge’s decline quickened, even as the sun slid down the sky, the clockwork of our little universe mirroring his condition with a clumsy, if mindless, irony. In the last hours I sat with him, quietly reading and talking, responding to his near-adolescent philosophizing with my customary brusqueness, which I was careful not to modify in this last hour.

  “. . . But have you ever wondered why we are here and now?” He was whispering, the sickly gold of his face picked out by the dwindling sun. “What are we, a few million, scattered in our towns and farms around the Moon? What do we compare to the billions who swarmed over Earth in the final years? Why do I find myself here and now rather than then? It is so unlikely . . .” He turned his great lunar head to me. “Do you ever feel you have been born out of your time, as if you are stranded in the wrong era, an unconscious time traveller?”

  I had to confess I never did, but he whispered on.

  “Suppose a modern human – or someone of the great ages of Earth – was stranded in the sixteenth century, Leonardo’s time. Suppose he forgot everything of his culture, all its science and learning –”

  “Why? How?”

  “I don’t know . . . But if it were true – and if his unconscious mind retained the slightest trace of the learning he had discarded – wouldn’t he do exactly what Leonardo did? Study obsessively, try to fit awkward facts into the prevailing, unsatisfactory paradigms, grope for the deeper truths he had lost?”

  “Like Earth’s systems being analogous to the human body.”

  “Exactly.” A wisp of excitement stirred him. “Don’t you see? Leonardo behaved exactly as a stranded time traveller would.”

  “Ah.” I thought I understood; of course, I didn’t. “You think you’re out of time. And your Leonardo, too!” I laughed, but he didn’t rise to my gentle mockery. And in my unthinking way I launched into a long and pompous discourse on feelings of dislocation: on how every adolescent felt stranded in a body, an adult culture, unprepared . . .

  But Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated sun. “All this will pass,” he said. “The sun will die. The universe may collapse on itself, or spread to a cold infinity. In either case it may be possible to build a giant machine that will recreate this universe – everything, every detail of this moment – so that we all live again. But how can we know if this is the first time? Perhaps the universe has already died, many times, to be born again. Perhaps Leonardo was no traveller. Perhaps he was simply remembering.” He looked up, challenging me to argue; but the challenge was distressingly feeble.

  “I think,” I said, “you should drink more soup.”

  But he had no more need of soup, and he turned to look at the sun once more.

  It seemed too soon when the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho Sea.

  I summoned his friends, teachers, those who had loved him.

  I clung to the greater goal: that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc which had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus – killing us all, in fact, at one rate or another – would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow us. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel which had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit which would lift the first of our ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.

  Perhaps. But it was cold comfort.

  We ate the soup, of his dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. We took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening our lives as he had.

  I have never been a skilful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. I talked with Berge’s teachers, but we had little to say to each other; I was merely his uncle, after all, a genetic tributary, not a parent. I wasn’t sorry to be left alone.

  Before I slept again, even before the sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warm air that had cradled me was treacherously fleeing after the sinking sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho Sea. My seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Callisto ice.

  GREEN TEA

  Richard Wadholm

  Here’s a compelling hard-science adventure, almost extravagantly inventive, that takes us to a strange, complex, and impressively imagined high-tech future, for a compelling tale of disaster, betrayal, and revenge, old things that never change, no matter how much everything else may . . .

  New writer Richard Wadholm has only made two sales to date, both in 1999, both to Asimov’s Science Fiction, but both of them have clearly marked him as a strong new talent, and as a Writer To Watch in the new century ahead. A graduate of the 1997 Clarion West, he lives in California.

  FRIEND BELTRAN, this moment has weighed on me for the past six days. At last we meet.

  Will you take tea with me? Not to worry, I am not here to poison you with tainted tea. Not from a beautiful service like this, certainly. This tea kettle is pewter, yes? And the brew pot – terra cotta, in the manner of the great smuggling mandarins of the Blanco Grande? Quite so. I must beg your indulgence for its use. I was very thirsty; I have come a long way to see you.

  Perhaps my name escapes you. That is the way in this profession we share. Say that I am your delivery man. Indeed, the item you procured at such dear cost is close to hand.

  My fee? Whatever you arranged with the navigator Galvan will suffice. A cup of tea from this excellent terra cotta pot would do nicely. And, if you are not too pressed, the answer to a simple question?

  Who was it for, the thing you berthed on our ship? Was it for the mercenaries on Michele D’avinet? Or for the Chinese smugglers who used the glare of D’avinet to hide their passing?

  I suppose it doesn’t matter much either way. Whoever your treasure was intended for, they were someone’s enemy, but they were no enemy of Beltran Seynoso’s, yes? And we, the crew of the Hierophant, we were merely witnesses. Our only offence was that we could connect you with the destruction of a little star in the outer reaches of Orion.

  I wronged you, my friend. You are indeed a man of pitiless resolve. Sitting here, making tea in your kitchen, in this rambling manse, on this pretty little moon of yours, I underestimated you. I pictured a dilettante, playing at a rough game.

&nbs
p; Forgive, forgive.

  That story you told our captain, that you represented an Anglo syndicate dealing in – what was it? April pork bellies? We took that for naïveté. No one goes from trading in April pork bellies to dealing in Tuesday morning perbladium. Not even the Anglos.

  And then there was that improbable load you hired us to turn.

  Do you recall the terms of our arrangement, on the floor of the Bright Matter Exchange in Santa Buenaventura? Our contract called for 1200 pennyweight of perbladium to be bombarded by heavy tungsten ions for 14 hours. The result was supposed to be equal amounts of morghium 414 and commercial grade protactinium.

  You recall? Morghium 414! Los Abuelitos! Hardly fitting for a ship like the Hierophant. Once we might have passed on such paltry fare. Indeed, Mateo Diaz, the captain of the Hierophant, laughed as we took your load into space. We in the vane crews laughed as we loaded your job into our targeting shelves.

  Why would somebody pay for the use of the starboard vane – always the hot vane on any ship – to turn a mild-mannered little isotope used only by metallurgists? Captain Diaz took you for some sort of cerezadito, just starting out in the commodities market.

  Oh, you are very good, Señor Seynoso. My compliments.

  Not all of us were fooled. I had a friend, a very dear friend, on the Hierophant’s nuclear chemistry committee. She doubted the decay chain you provided us even before we committed your load to space.

  She led me along the chain of isotopes as you had outlined the order of their appearance. Perbladium 462 would indeed transmutate to morghium and protactinium, but only under very idealized circumstances.

  Her calculations said your load would turn to unmarketably small amounts of junk isotopes. She was afraid you didn’t know what you were doing.

  She need not have worried on that score. Between you and our ship’s high-speed navigator – whose services you cheaply bought – you knew precisely what you were doing.

  No, don’t apologize. I am congratulating you: Well played, Sir.

  I was chief to the crew that packed the target material for your load. I spent ten hours with it, hauling it out to its own special quadrant of the starboard vane, injecting it into a section of lead and boron-lined target ampoules; sealing each dram over with paraffin, to control the speed of the particles bombarding your treasure.

  If anyone should have known what you were doing, it should have been me, yes? I was the perfect foil. Like all cuckolds, my confidence in my own ability was paramount.

  We came in off the starboard vane after we finished and Esteban Contreras asked my opinion about piggy-backing a load of thaogol around this benign little load of morghium.

  Esteban had already talked to the nuclear chemistry committee, and they had all given their approval. All except for my friend, Frances Cruz. She had doubts.

  But I knew Frances very well. I knew she was a cautious person. Cautious, quiet, thoughtful. I added up my cut for anything Contreras sold in Buenaventura. I told him to go ahead with his scheme.

  You see, my friend? I am in no position to cast blame; you and I share responsibility for everything that followed.

  Unfortunate that Contreras himself can’t be here to speak with you. He had a great belief in the catalytic power of sheer human Will. You and your remorseless skill would have proven something to him that he dearly wished to believe in.

  But Esteban Contreras and his Hot Shots were out on the vane, loading their thaogol targets, when your jewel took its first turn.

  I was up in the bridge tower, what we in the fleet call the Heidelburgh Tun. I had my eye on a wall full of particle detectors, waiting for a sign of disaster. In this way, Contreras and I had watched out for each other since our cerezadito days.

  But disaster is supposed to announce itself in neutron showers, or gamma rays, or a huge heat ramp. The first warning your treasure gave me was nothing more than the burr of a pencil on my desktop.

  Few would take notice of such a trifle. Only a lifetime among the big ships of the fleet Buenaventura teaches one to see the signs and read them for what they are: Some vibration had passed through the ship from dorsal to keel, touching every little tea cup and paper clip on its way. It was the subtle harmonic of a nuclear excursion.

  I opened a channel to Contreras. I called to him to get off the vane. Contreras had just time to call my name, and then . . .

  Are you listening, friend Beltran? Do you hear them?

  You must not shy away now. We are hard men, you and I. We take what we want and we do not flinch from the sad and human business of dying. The young mother who will never see her sons grow up – unfortunate, we say. Business is business. The youth who prays to his patron saint to end his suffering – we reckon this heart-breaking. The old veteran who growls her agony through clenched teeth – tragic and heroic.

  Would that it were unnecessary.

  Steady-on, friend Beltran. Tears and remorse won’t bring them back now, will they? And we have far to go.

  I was with Captain Diaz as he searched for the source of the screams. I studied the particle detectors as half the starboard vane crumbled under the weight of some unknown force. And then the monitors and detectors themselves began to go, one by one all across the starboard vane, like votives being snuffed out by a choir boy. In a moment, Captain Diaz and I found ourselves in silence and darkness.

  Were the Hot Shots all dead? Had some of them made their way into the compartments underneath the starboard vane? Maybe they were out there still, burning to death in some tight space, waiting for us to come for them.

  We have all thought about being in that place, Señor Seynoso. Do you see?

  We have all seen compañeros walk out of anaerobic fires, their skin cauterized to the inside of their hotsuits. We have all fetched water for someone so burned they could feel nothing but the unquenchable thirst. We do not leave people behind to die that way.

  The monitors told a horrendous tale – Spot temperatures were above 2,000 Kelvins, 130 Tesla magnetic fields had buckled 100-ton deck plates all across the dorsal- and ventral-side vanes.

  My crew could have stayed in the ship. They had spent ten hours on the vane, and were not scheduled to go out again for another two shifts. No one would have said a word to them.

  I made this clear when I explained the situation. Without a word, my mates returned to their armourers and prepared themselves. You should have seen them, those people who died for you. Hard as money, my crew. Hard as coin.

  Our good trust rested with Katherine Pope, an Anglo from one of the little worlds along the French Violet. She specialized in “action at a distance”. She had a microwave torch with a collimated radar sight. Normal times, we called upon her to burn small portions of hot metal into gas, for spectrographic analysis at a safe remove. On rare occasions, we called upon her to melt hot metal out of its critical configuration.

  You might not have cared for Pope, had you met her. Pope had the temperament of an artist, the arrogance of a diva in a chorus line. We always seemed to be distracting her from something more important. Yet all who knew her work bore her high-handed ways.

  Mister Robinson was my second. He ran the crew of false men who interceded for us in the tight spaces. He was a taciturn and disapproving man. Not easy to be around always, but we had been together twelve years and I never doubted my back when he was near.

  He had two assistants with him. The more experienced was a young aesthete named Pablo Sanoro. Pablo was the son of Luz Sanoro, the wet dock contractor. He held the splendid air of a young noble working out his summer in some Arcadian vineyard. He was ever gracious and kind. He made a point of joking and chatting up the older man. This always led to his rebuke.

  Pablo’s charms were not entirely lost. Mister Robinson had taken on an apprentice as we shipped out of Buenaventura. Rosalie Nuñez was a cerezadita from mechanics school, brought in to replace Eduardo Callé, who had died of burns the previous week. Mister Robinson intimidated her, as I suspect he did Pa
blo and most people. But she was determined to make her place on our crew, and so she stood up to his sarcasm and silent moods. Pablo Sanoro had cheered her on.

  One other person is most relevant to this history. But for Frances Cruz, I might have foregone the trip out to this sleepy little plantation of yours.

  She was our liaison with the nuclear chemistry group, a serious young woman, who loved jokes, but never knew how to tell any of her own.

  She did not seem fretful as we prepared to go out. She was gay and easy. She kidded with my crew, and gave a sisterly hug to Mister Robinson’s new mechanic. She was, in short, completely unlike herself.

  I took her aside as the others spread on their electrolytic salves and locked themselves into their armour. I asked her what was wrong. She handed me the spectrographs taken from the burning shelf on the starboard vane.

  It was not completely blank, of course. There were lines of titanium and iron from the burning deck, carbon from the diamond super-structure, sodium from burst-open coolant pipes.

  All the things one expects in a ship-board catastrophe, save one –

  What exactly was burning?

  Frances had an idea. She showed me a photograph of the sky above the starboard vane. I didn’t know what I was looking at until she drew an imaginary ring. Outside the ring, the stars shone plain and hard, as always. Inside they burned fat and over-bright.

  “Gravitational lensing,” she explained.

  I tried to think of something that could bend light waves so hard. “Are you talking about a black hole?” I asked her. “Some sort of gravitational singularity?”

  She shook her head at this. “Not a black hole. A black hole would have killed us quick. Whatever is out there seems intent on killing us slowly.”