The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  The thing radiated gravitational waves.

  We were all of us silent a long moment. I think we all knew what we saw, but no one wanted to say the words.

  Of course, you know what we saw, don’t you. Here is your treasure, compañero. Here is the pearl beyond price.

  Vacuum3. Pterachnium.

  – The Blue Angel.

  Did you know what you were building when you perfected your scheme? Did you fathom the fundamental forces you brought to bear? Indeed, did you think of anything beyond this little moon? These sun-dappled orchards? Those fearsome paladins who guard your sleep?

  Pterachnium is not a baryon emitter, like the fissionable actinides. It does not betray itself in high-energy photons, as do the other metallic plasmas. Pterachnium nuclei have only one use to men like you – they are the vessels of choice for binding exotic vacuum states.

  I speak of energies at which the quantum vacuum itself trembles on the verge of fluctuation. In the twentieth century, such a fluctuation was credited with the creation of the universe. Cosmologists presumed another fluctuation, if it ever really happened, would sweep across the heavens at light speed, ploughing all the rules of Nature in its wake.

  Those worthies never counted on ingenious fellows like yourself, creating industrial grades of more- and less-perfect quantum vacuum states – bottling up the lightning of the universe behind an event horizon, like amethyst encrusting the gut of a fire egg.

  As I said, mi compañero, you are a clever fellow.

  I could tell you the names of ships killed by pterachnium. You would be awe-struck to hear their fates – the Queen of Wands, burned by X-rays with all hands in the Venturi Thermals; the Ace of Cups, shattered by proton decay; the Tower, stripped of its screens at relativistic speeds.

  Have you ever seen a ship stripped of its screens at light speed? The leading edge of every span, every deck plate, is pitted and torn as if pecked away by ferocious birds. Sometimes salvage crews find tellolites lying about – tiny deposits of matter left by the energy of particles interacting with the deck (energy, you see, converts to matter, if the exchange is great enough).

  At these energies, one’s problems are quickly over. Make no mistake, my friend, I speak of a hard end. But at least there are no lingering deaths from burns or radiation sickness. Certainly, Fate can be more unkind.

  Exotic vacuum states are infamous for the electrical potential that attends them. Under the deforming compulsion of these fields, a ship’s polarizing screens begin to cycle, like wire coiled around a giant dynamo. Charged particles slip between cycling screens and the metal deck. Potential builds to discharge.

  If you imagine some display of lightning, your vision is too modest. Scale your thoughts up by a factor of a million – electrical discharge on this scale powers the jet streams of exotic stellar objects.

  I boarded a ship once, destroyed by successive discharges of 100 terawatts. I will never forget the smell in the mechanics’ armoury. It was sweet, you know? Like smoked meat . . .

  No, no, no. Forgive these morbid thoughts, my friend. These things are none of your concern. I merely wish to lend you understanding of our desperate state of mind as we realized the poisoned cargo you had bequeathed us.

  Our screens were infected. Our false men were gone. Pope said she could burn the heart from your monster and we gratefully accepted her word. Indeed, I had seen her look into the blue-hot glare off a burning lump of plutonium and split it in two from five hundred metres.

  But plutonium was not so fierce as your treasure. We could study plutonium through our leaded face shields. Pope figured to lose her eyesight. I told her she was being ridiculous.

  We had an elaborate sensor array in the mule’s equipment bay – gamma ray imaging, magnetic resonance, collimated radar. I made sure she had the entire spectrum at her disposal. Nuñez stood in the bay and handed out each piece of equipment. I tested each scope and monitor and staked it into the deck.

  But I was the ridiculous one. At some point, Pope would grow frustrated with her prosthetic eyes. She and I both knew this. She would look away into the inferno with her own eyes and press the trigger even as her retinas went forever dark. She did not complain about this. She asked only that she be informed how her aim fared – demanded would be a better word.

  “You tell me if I miss,” she said. “I’ll put one in right next to it. I won’t need my eyes for that. If you let me take the gun sights off the target, I won’t be able to sight in again. All our deaths will hang on your head.”

  Such gentle persuasion. How could I refuse?

  In the midst of our preparations, something caused me to look up, some change in the light maybe, I don’t know.

  The burning of the starboard vane had filled the sky above us with a haze of metallic aerosols. I saw them begin to move.

  Your monster was flexing its muscle.

  I touched helmets with Pope. I pointed out the milky swirls passing across the stars.

  She glared at me as if I bothered her, threw off her concentration. “I’ll never get this done, you keep interrupting me,” she declared. “Maybe I should just hand the gun to you.” She turned back to her monitors without waiting for a response.

  Snatches of radio conversation were getting through the static. I heard the screen crews fighting with some upper-level deformation of the #4 screen, the electron/anti-proton screen.

  All the hairs on my body went straight up. The static surge detectors suddenly pegged off the scale. Robinson and Nuñez waved to me from the equipment bay at the back of the mule. It only occurred to me then – of course, the equipment bay was surrounded in conducting metal. It would be completely insulated.

  I called to Pope as they dragged me in behind them. She refused even to acknowledge me.

  Nuñez was still closing the door as a flash lit up the sky across the entire plain of fused metal. It was an ancient light, a light from the dawn of creation. Through my leaded visor – through my closed eyelids – I saw the bones of my hands, clamped across my face.

  The door slammed. The deck heaved beneath us. I crashed into the ceiling and then back to the floor, came up tasting blood and swallowing chipped teeth. A hurricane shrieked in my helmet radio, loud enough to split open my head.

  My thoughts were on Pope. She was outside the door, just beyond my reach. How had she fared? Had she gotten off her shot?

  We stepped outside even while the superheated light receded. The mule was over on its side, and the door was sprung. I had to shove at the door with Nuñez and Mister Robinson to get it open. Pope was gone. I have no idea what happened to her. She was simply gone.

  I called out for her, scanned the deck as best I could for some sign of her. None of us ever saw Pope again. However, as I came around the side of the mule, I saw something that will stay with me always.

  Rolling out of the shade of a distant cargo bay came the little crew tractor carrying Esteban Contreras’ unlucky Hot Shots.

  I took it to be some sort of drifting retinal artifact from the burning light. But it was real. It crossed the blasted desert with the leisurely air of a family on a beach holiday.

  Each person in the crew cabin sat up straight in their seats, utterly unconcerned about the excursion lighting up the sky before us. They rolled right into it, rigid as a six-pack of cerveza.

  I called out to them, but of course they were dead – burned to a blackened husk right inside their bright, shiny hotsuits. Up in the chief’s cabin was Contreras himself, hanging from the window, his hands dragging along the deck as the little train pushed forward into the raging brilliance at the back of the starboard vane.

  There was no question we had moments left to us. Already I could see my surge detector flickering again. Your monster had magnetized everything out beyond its moat of liquid metal – the lead shielding as well as the steel in the decking. Its magnetic lair increased even as we hunkered behind our shattered railhead.

  Soon it would begin pulling down the polarizing sc
reens. Particles would be unloaded across the ship. They would scatter through the soft parts of the hull and kill everyone standing nearby. Behind the collapsing screens would come the in-falling sky, igniting the fissionable materials on all four vanes.

  Mister Robinson and I had no use for panic. Huddled together against the roar of radio interference, we considered our options as if we were discussing the price of 3:00 perbladium on the futures floor at Santa Buenaventura.

  Normal circumstances, we would try to heat the site somehow, and cause it to melt in with the metal around it. Even if it remained in a critical configuration, it might be contaminated by melted steel from the deck, or lead, or boron from the surrounding shielding to poison the reaction chain.

  That seemed a dubious proposal in this case. Any lump of matter that held Vacuum3 in its heart already knew more about heat than anything we could teach it.

  We paused in our discussion as a cluster of tellolites levitated half a metre over the deck, only to land a few centimetres from the tip of my boot. Mister Robinson’s eyes rose from the bit of mongrel matter at our feet to the inferno before us.

  “We seem to be in the presence of primordial symmetry,” he said.

  This is what reached out to the little pebbles on the deck around us, what had crushed a tractor into a coolant pipe on the far side of the Blue Highway – the four fundamental forces of nature had rediscovered that symmetry they lost in the first billion-billion-billionth of a second after creation.

  “This, from Vacuum?”

  “Or Vacuum. We’re in no position for a precise assay.”

  It was hard not to be over-awed by the majesty of your art. And yet, what did we cower before, after all? A bit of vacuum! The apotheosis of nothingness. Perhaps we wasted our time attacking the pterachnium; the vacuum state bound within might be manipulated more easily.

  I put it to Mister Robinson: “These vacuum states run in chains of progression, just like the decay chain of any unstable nucleotide. A couple of steps up from Vacuum is a stable plateau not dissimilar to the quantum vacuum state we call home.”

  I remember the way he nodded to himself; Mister Robinson was not hurried by desperation or despair.

  “If we could define the right particles with our screens, we could push our load of Vacuum3 up to that plateau.”

  “Right this second, you know what the temperatures are like beyond those polarizing screens? What kind of particles are going to get through that?”

  “Dark matter,” I said. “Weakly interacting super-luminals. They have no electric charge to become entangled in the firestorm. They touch this universe with nothing but the slender fingers of gravity, and nothing but dense matter draws them in. Perhaps they will be sufficient to our needs.”

  Mister Robinson considered the proposal for a long moment. “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “No matter what happens to the pterachnium, we’ll be sitting out here when the ship goes super-luminal. The hull will be protected, but out here, we will be exposed to whatever comes down. It hardly matters that these particles are ‘weakly interacting’, anything will kill you if you get hit by enough of them.”

  Mister Robinson began reminiscing about a man he had known in the French Violet, killed by neutrinos – neutrinos of all things. He saw the youngster watching us all wide-eyed. He stopped himself.

  I started to suggest we might yet escape. Mister Robinson indicated the impassable blastscape behind us with a single look. “This ship has maybe two minutes to live. What do you think, Mister Seguro? Two minutes before the screens are all bound in a huge magnetic source and start cycling? Where are we going to go in the next two minutes?”

  I said, “I’m certainly open to suggestions, Mister Robinson.” He laughed. Mister Robinson and I went back a ways. Neither of us had any particular trouble doing what was necessary to save the ship.

  But the youngster, she troubled us some. This was her training flight. This should have been safe and easy. We would never have brought along some young niña on anything more dangerous than nice, easy morghium 414.

  I asked her if she understood what we were discussing. She said she did. I asked her if she agreed with our assessment.

  She said she did. I detected a softness to her voice. She might have been holding back her emotions. Yet she never cried for any sort of consideration for her youth or her status. She understood that we were all about to die, and that only the ship mattered now.

  I called back to Frances Cruz and made our proposal.

  Frances would not hear of it. She found a thousand reasons to doubt my solution. Yet she could find nothing better. I did not have the time to argue, but for her I made the time. It wasn’t easy. How do you explain a decision like this to a special friend and confidant?

  I gave myself thirty seconds, and then, when she still could not understand, I gave myself thirty seconds more. I needed to speak to Captain Diaz about our plan, but I couldn’t leave Frances till she understood that the sweetness of my life had been hers, and the only horror I felt at leaving was bound up with her as well.

  Captain Diaz cut into our conversation to hear out our proposal. Captain was a decent man, but he could count – three lives against twenty-seven. He told us they would need a gravitational wave detector as near the pterachnium as we could get. Sanoro’s detector had gone dark moments after it had showed us the face of your creature. We had to replace it, so that the nuclear chemistry committee would know how our mission fared. When he went to initiate the screen dump, Frances did not return to the line.

  I turned to Nuñez and Robinson. “I set the wave detector myself,” I told them.

  Mister Robinson made a gesture of indifference. “We have no place to go,” he said. “We might as well come with you.”

  “We come along,” Nuñez said in a husky voice. “You falter, we’re there.” She looked ready to make a fight of it if I ordered her back; Sanoro’s death weighed heavy on her.

  I had my eye on a spot twenty metres ahead of us. A stub of metal reared up from the smooth-blasted decking. What had been there before your undertaking? I recalled a nuclear furnace near that point. Two storeys tall it had been. The tiny mesa in its place rose perhaps a metre tall now.

  “We reach that hump in the deck and plant the detector on its further side.” I pointed.

  Beyond that little rise lay a final circle of hell, smooth as the surface of an egg. Liquefied steel, I realized, boiling away to gas at its centre. Your treasure had corrupted all the metal across the back of the molten mirror. Beneath the shade of my palm, it looked like the gilt of a Rococo picture frame.

  I moved forward till the heat in my suit was unbearable. I could hardly swallow for the metallic taste of hard radiation in my mouth. Probing tendrils of lightning thick as rope played over our suits and slammed the deck at our feet. The heat burned through the soles of our boots till I could barely walk.

  I planted the spike in the metal decking at the point I could go no further.

  I felt the deck tremble beneath me as the ship accelerated. I remember bracing myself for the gauntlet of particles awaiting me on the far side of the light barrier – Would it burn me? Would I have time to feel anything?

  But something was wrong. Frances was in my headset, saying something about losing the signal. I was delirious by then. Her words barely made sense.

  She was telling me the wave detector that we had just put out had gone silent, even as the energy output had grown more intense. She was asking if I could still see it above the pterachnium site. She thought it had been destroyed.

  That wasn’t why she had lost the signal anyway, was it, my friend? Your jewel was gathering itself up, as a giant coastal wave will gather all the water off a beach before it rolls in.

  Your creature was coming to fruition at last.

  Of course, I was past caring by this time. Zone angels appeared and evaporated before my eyes, as vivid as childhood memories. I doubt I was even conscious.

  In my blindness, I stum
bled and crashed to the deck. A dire circumstance; the deck glowed red hot. The flesh of my shoulder burned from the heat of it. Indeed, this is where my shoulders and back acquired those handsome keloids you have been admiring so surreptitiously.

  I was a breath away from unconsciousness, and that would have meant my death. Seeking relief, I took a sip from my water hose. Nothing came out but superheated air. The water had gone to steam and been recycled into a safety reservoir till it could recondense. Of course, I would be long dead by then.

  In the middle of this horror came a sudden vision of preternatural quiet. I saw the village square in Santa Susana de la Reina – the wind funnels creaking in the cupola of the old mission, the black moss and the purple, the smell of the constant rain.

  – Rain!

  How vivid the memory of rain came to me in that moment. In my mouth I held the sweet smell of the wet timbers beneath Boregos Bridge. I could see the mirrored pools filling the broken streets, their surfaces cut by black lizards.

  I saw rain running in sheets beyond a limp curtain. I saw a bare shoulder, silhouetted against the milky light. A friend in the street below called up to us to unlock the door and let him in, while we lay in the dark and laughed at him and everyone else in the world who knew not what we knew in that moment.

  I heard the shouting again, but it wasn’t Esteban Contreras calling up to Frances and me from the street. It was Mister Robinson. He was calling to me from a ripple of metal just a few metres to port. He might have been on the other side of the French Violet for the gulf of pain and light between us.

  Nuñez was stranded behind a small rise just beyond him. She was waving to us, making some gesture. I could not make it out. A clearing of silence breached the static roar just long enough that I could catch her words.

  “Here it comes,” she cried. Somehow, Nuñez had heard the countdown to light speed on her suit radio: The sky was coming in.