The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  I looked around for some bit of cover to hide myself. Something split the glare just off to my right. I had barely noticed it while planting the gravity wave detector; it had been still as any other bit of metal on that blasted expanse. But as I looked closer, I realized the shadow was articulated with radiator fins and circulating packs.

  I shaded my eyes with my palm and peered into the glare that beat up from the metal decking. Here was Pablo Sanoro, frozen in an attitude of intent concentration – staring at the gravity wave detector he had worked at even as he burned to death.

  I pulled him down over me just as the stars smeared into rainbows. The deck burned my back. The incoming particles burned my fingers as they gripped around Sanoro’s shoulders.

  I held tight. I spent a micro epoch in that way – my back blistering against the super-heated deck, and Pablo Sanoro just inches from my leaded visor, grinning the wizened, squinting smile of a face with flesh and muscle drawn taut.

  I heard Nuñez scream. Pinned under Sanoro’s hotsuit, I raised my head just enough to see your treasure plunge through a hundred-ton metal deck as if it were soft taffy.

  A crevasse spread out from the back of the vane. It etched a jagged line right out to us. Nuñez disappeared down the hole as it spread through the deck beneath her feet.

  Robinson grasped for her as she slipped out of sight. In that moment, your creature reached up through the metal decking and took him in a 130 Tesla magnetic field. I saw Robinson twist and heave like a rag doll as the flesh peeled from his bones.

  A cloud of steam enveloped him from somewhere below and he was gone. I remember staring in amazement as it rose into the sky. Where had that come from?

  I didn’t realize till much later, but your monster had crashed through three floors below the main deck, severing a dozen plumbing mains along the way.

  This is what killed so many people inside the hull – not fire, but water. The water in all the lines flashed to steam and exploded throughout the interior of the ship.

  After some time I became lucid. I found myself lying along the palisade of a canyon, cut to the depths of the starboard vane.

  All of my mates were dead. All of our equipment sucked down into the hole your monster had made for itself.

  It is ironic, but this saved me from dying. With your pterachnium sunk away out of sight, the heat and magnetism refocused on some point in the undervane.

  I thought I might get help from one of the other vane crews. I went down to the mechanics’ armoury to see about some assistance. But the mechanics’ armoury had been closest to the back of the vane as your treasure came into its own. My compañeros had been among the first inside the hull to die.

  The ship above the armoury was utterly silent. It was a catalogue of unpleasant endings. People in airtight cabins suffocated or burned. People closer to fissures in the hulls destroyed by explosive decompression.

  I found Frances on the floor leading out of the forward head. Blood pooled out of her ears. I tell myself she was killed instantly. Who knows? Perhaps she was.

  No, please. Allow me to tell the story; just looking at her, I could re-enact the moment of her death. Indeed, it is not without its amusing side.

  You see, there is a standing rule never to go to the toilet during a hot load. I mean, these things have happened before. These ships are compact, no matter how large they appear, and the plumbing lines always end up going throughout the ship, and a few people every year end up being killed this way.

  So Frances knew the risks of going to the bathroom when she did. But the emergency had gone on for several hours now, and her need had taken on an urgency of its own.

  Had she been truly born of wealth she could have squatted in the corner like a house cat. But no, she was born to the merchant class, and such compromise with her dignity left her too little to hold on to. The steam explosion blew out the wall behind her head.

  Pardon, my friend. I am not unaware how this must seem to a man of refinement like yourself. Yet, this has an air of the hilarious: A princess dies while sitting on the toilet – a good joke from God, yes? An amusing trick.

  – Don’t touch me.

  And do not tell me again how sorry you are. Or how necessary it was. Or how I would have done the same in your position . . .

  Excuse me, please. No, no – It is I who must apologize. You have been more than patient. The story reaches denouement.

  I found myself carrying Frances around in my arms. I can’t tell you where we were going. All the officers’ quarters were blown open to space. I just could never find a place to set her down. So I carried her.

  Eventually, I found myself up in the Heidelburgh Tun, where the officers had made their last stand.

  Imagine my surprise to find someone alive up here. More surprising still to find him walking around in a hotsuit from the mechanics’ armoury. This would be Galvan, the navigator.

  I said, “That might be a tight fit in an escape pod.”

  He was startled at the sound of my voice. He spun around, looking for me. Of course, I was a voice in his radio – I might have been anywhere. Even so, he hid something behind his back, like a child with an embarrassing secret.

  “Seguro,” he said. And then, “Joaquin. You survived.” He did not sound overjoyed to see me.

  I asked him what he had in his hand. He actually fought me as I reached around to take it from him.

  What do you suppose it was, this thing that would make a timid little man punch at me and dig at my air hose to kill me?

  You know what it was. It was a clock, wasn’t it. But a very special clock. No doubt, you see them all the time. They are common on the floor of the Bright Matter Exchange. Familiar to shipping agents and futures traders.

  We call them “true clocks”. They are used to track the true passage of time back at a ship’s home port.

  To the uninitiated, this may seem a small matter. You, of course, know better. Our ship plies the clouds of Orion at speeds approaching light. A dozen times during the course of a run, we accelerate, we brake. Shipboard time changes with each fluctuation. We cross over the light barrier on our way to and from work. When we do, time is calculated in imaginary numbers. A clock set to follow such distortions is not the sort of thing a man on a navigator’s salary would own.

  Galvan tried to tell me this was a part of his navigator’s kit. Indeed, the navigator’s loft is equipped to track the constant passage of time, but only relative to our own course. The clock in Galvan’s hand was synchronized to the time on the eastern shore of a little island on a deserted moon in the San Marcos star system.

  This moon, in fact. This very moon. What do you suppose, my friend?

  Galvan dissembled as I asked him his purpose up here. In fact, he had been completing a course correction. He claimed he was moving us out of shipping lanes. But we were headed for this star up in the French Violet, this Michele D’avinet. He had no ready explanation why.

  I put it to him that we were partners in this matter – each had something the other wanted. Galvan had the name of the monster that destroyed my ship. I had Galvan’s air hose, pinched between my fingers.

  In that way we bartered for the next hour: One answer, one gulp of air.

  I learned the name of Beltran Seynoso, weapons designer to half the armies, militias, and mercenary groups in the French Violet. He told me of the star, Michele D’avinet. He was not specific as to your loyalties; I suspect he did not know them himself. But he described your plan in some detail.

  He told me about your audacious scheme to poison the sun these people lived under and warm themselves against. A bold stroke, Sir! Set my ship on course for this star, D’avinet, then consume it into a singularity on the way. What would happen if a singularity the size of my old ship had crashed into a star like Michele D’avinet? Billions of people would die terribly. It would be a tragedy of majestic proportions.

  Truly, you are a man of vision.

  Galvan became frantic toward the end. He
gave minute details of your operation. He told me everything about you that he could think of. He answered questions I hadn’t thought to ask. I suspect he padded what he knew with outright speculations.

  You mustn’t blame him for this; he believed his life lasted as long as our conversation. Indeed, he bought each breath with another bit of truth. And when he ran out of truth . . .

  My actions shock you. Forgive me; I should play more the hero in my own drama. But she is gone, you see? And I am left with only one role that matters. I am your delivery man.

  I see that your scheme was sound in its fundamentals, but there was a complication: Vacuum3 collapses into a singularity in sixteen nanoseconds. That would never do. Galvan needed time to set the ship’s course. As he was a navigator of mediocre talents, course corrections would be required on the way. And you had to leave the illusion that he would escape.

  So you set the thing to dissipate most of its energy in gravitational waves. No matter. The density would be sufficient when the time came. Small singularities would form, consume all the matter around them, begin to coalesce.

  I am in no position to mentor a man of your estimable talents. But perhaps one or two suggestions for next time? There is a phase transition in the production of pterachnium. Below its critical mass, pterachnium, at least in the form you created, becomes quiet and morose. It can be captured. The careful man can manipulate it into a more pliant form.

  I myself journeyed down into the deep fissure that cut through the heart of the starboard vane. It was cold when I arrived. The radiations had banked, the ferocious gravities and magnetic fluctuations had subsided. The liquefied metals that had chased us through the undervane had now congealed into curtains, flood plains, weird minarets.

  There, I found your precious, bound up in clusters of tellolite nodules at the bottom of the chasm. Though my petty sophistries had failed to save the ship, they had managed to convert your Vacuum3 into a pliant state, a form that allows it to be carried without collapsing spontaneously into singularity.

  Yes, my friend. Your treasure lives. I have even returned it to its original liquid suspension. This, after all, is the way things are done in the production of commercial isotopes since the days of the great nuclear reactors. Atoms of target material are held in liquid suspension to allow their thorough saturation by incoming particles.

  It is quiet now. It exists in two sub-critical drams, but when poured together, they undergo a phase transition into that tool of petty vengeance you procured at such cost.

  Don’t worry, they’re close at hand.

  Are you sure you won’t have some of this very fine tea? You won’t mind if I pour myself a little topper then, will you?

  I noticed your tea pots as soon as I entered the kitchen. Yes, they definitely attracted my interest. You make tea in the Chinese manner – one pot to boil the water, one pot to brew the tea. Excellent. Exactly right. None of this tea bag chic for you, my friend.

  Do the two pots have a history? You are a tea man. You know that a good tea pot is like a good wallet, or a good pair of boots. It ages. It carries a certain history about with it.

  My own set is humble by comparison. Cheap porcelain, brightly painted with scenes from a port town on the lee side of Spanish Space. I would have replaced it long ago, except it was a gift, you see. From someone whose tastes ran to the simple and sweet.

  No matter. Life is the sum of simple delights – a tawdry souvenir from Puerta Estrella. A smile reflected in dark eyes. A cup of tea with a newfound friend. One cannot shun such bagatelles.

  Not when death is sixteen nanoseconds away.

  THE DRAGON OF PRIPYAT

  Karl Schroeder

  New Canadian writer Karl Schroeder was born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and has been working and writing there ever since. His first novel, written with David Nickle, was The Claus Effect. His second novel, Ventus, this one a solo effort, will be out soon, and he’s currently at work on a new one.

  Here he takes us on a vivid and suspenseful pilgrimage to a place where few people indeed would dare to venture, to the intensely radioactive, eerily deserted wasteland left behind after the Chernobyl Disaster, and takes us hunting through the ruins for the secret at the heart of the deadly maze – a secret that may be even deadlier than the ruins themselves . . .

  “THERE’S THE TURNOFF,” said Gennady’s driver. He pointed to a faded wooden skull and cross-bones that leaned at the entrance to a side road. From the pattern of the trees and bushes, Gennady could see that the corner had once been a full highway interchange, but the turning lanes had overgrown long ago. Only the main blacktop was still exposed, and grass had made inroads to this everywhere.

  The truck stopped right at the entrance. “This is as far as I go,” said the driver. He stepped out of the idling vehicle and walked around the back to unload. Gennady paused for a moment to stare down the green tunnel before following.

  They rolled out some steel drums containing supplies and equipment, then brought Gennady’s motorcycle and sidecar.

  The driver pointed to the Geiger counter that lay on top of the heaped supplies in the sidecar. “Think that’ll protect you?”

  “No.” Gennady grinned at him. “Before I came I did a little risk calculation. I compared the risk of cancer from radiation to that of smoking. See? Here the Geiger clicks at about a pack-a-week. Closer in, that’s going to be a pack-a-day. Well, I’ll just avoid the pack-a-minute spots, is all. Very simple.”

  The driver, who smoked, did not like this analogy. “Well, it was nice knowing you. Need anything else?”

  “Uh . . . help me roll these behind the bushes there.” They moved the drums out of sight. “All set.”

  The driver nodded once, and Gennady started down the abandoned road to Pripyat.

  The tension in his shoulders began to ease as he drove. The driver had been friendly enough, but Gennady’s shyness had made the trip here an uncomfortable one. He could pretend to be at ease with strangers; few people knew he was shy. It still cost him to do it.

  The trees were tall and green, the undergrowth lush. It smelled wonderful here, better than the industrial area around Gennady’s apartment. Pure and clean, no factory smell.

  A lie, of course. Before he’d gone a hundred metres, Gennady slowed, then stopped. It all looked serene and bursting with health – a seductive and dangerous innocence. He brought out a filtered face mask he had last worn in heavy traffic in St Petersburg. For good measure he wrapped his boots in plastic, snapping rubber bands over his pant cuffs to hold it on. Then he continued.

  The view ahead was not of a straight black ribbon with sky above, but a broad green tunnel, criss-crossed at all levels with twigs and branches. He’d expected the road would be cracked and buckled from frost heaving, but it wasn’t. On the other hand underbrush had overgrown the shoulder and invaded the concrete, where patches of grass sprouted at odd places. For no good reason, he drove around these.

  Over the next half hour he encountered more and more clearings. Tall grass lapped like waves around the doors of rusting metal pole-sheds once used for storing farm equipment. Any houses made of lath and plaster had caved in or been burned, leaving only single walls with windows looking from open field to open field. When he spotted the giant lattice-work towers of the power line looming above the trees he knew he was getting close. As if he needed visual confirmation – the regular ticking from the counter in his sidecar had slowly become an intermittent rattle, like rain.

  Then without warning the road opened out into a vista of overgrown concrete lots, rusted fences and new forest. Wildflowers and barley rioted in the boulevard of the now-divided highway, and further ahead, above patchy stands of trees, hollow-eyed Soviet-style apartment blocks stared back at their first visitor in . . . years, possibly.

  He shut off the bike and brought out his Pripyat roadmap. It was thirty years out of date, but since it was printed a year before the disaster, the roads would not have c
hanged – other than the occasional oak tree or fallen building blocking his path. For a few minutes he puzzled over where he was, and when he was certain he pulled out his phone.

  “Lisa, it’s me. I’m here.”

  “You okay?” She had answered promptly. Must have been waiting. His shoulders relaxed a bit.

  “I’m fine. Place looks like a park. Or something. Very difficult to describe.” There were actual trees growing on the roofs of some of the apartment blocks. “A lot of the buildings are still standing. I’m just on the outskirts.”

  “What about the radioactivity?”

  He checked the Geiger counter. “It’s not too hot yet. I’m thinking of living in a meat locker. Somewhere with good walls that got no air circulation after The Release.”

  “You’re not near the reactor, are you?”

  “No. It’s by the river, I’m coming from the northwest. The trees hide a lot.”

  “Any sign of anybody else?”

  “Not yet. I’m going to drive downtown. I’ll call you when I have the satellite link running.”

  “Well, at least one of us is having an exciting day.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it exciting. Frightening, maybe.”

  “Well.” She said “well” in that tone when she was happy to be proved right about something. He could practically see her. “I’m glad you’re worried,” she said at last. “When you told me about this part of the job you pretended like it was no big deal.”

  “I did not.” Well, maybe he had a little. Gennady scratched his chin uncomfortably.

  “Call me soon,” she said. “And hey – be careful.”

  “Is my nature.”

  Downtown was too hot. Pripyat was a Soviet modern town anyway, and had no real centre aside from some monolithic municipal buildings and farmers’ markets. The populace had been professional and mobile; it was built with wide thoroughfares connecting large, partially self-contained apartment complexes. Gennady read the cultural still-birth of the place in the utter anonymity of the buildings. Everything was faded, most signs gone, the art overwritten by vines and rust. So he could only identify apartment buildings by their many small balconies, municipal offices by their lack of same. That was the beginning and end of Pripyat’s character.