The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Well, pretty natural, anyway. I didn’t want to look old.

  I didn’t, of course. By the time I was bathed and my hair was fixed and I was wearing a simple dress that showed off my pretty good legs, actually, I looked as good as I ever had. “Almost there,” Hypatia called. “You better hang on to something. I have to match velocities, and it’s a tricky job.” She sounded annoyed, as she usually does when I give her something hard to do. She does it, of course, but she complains a lot. “Faster than light I can do, slower than light I can do, but when you tell me to match velocity with somebody who’s doing exactly c you’re into some pretty weird effects, so – Oh, sorry.”

  “You should be,” I told her, because that last lurch had nearly made me spill my third cup of coffee. “Hypatia? What do you think, the pearls or the cameo?”

  She did that fake two- or three-second pause, as though she really needed any time at all to make a decision, before she gave me the verdict. “I’d wear the cameo. Only whores wear pearls in the daytime.”

  So of course I decided to wear the pearls. She signed but didn’t comment. “All right,” she said, opening the port. “We’re docked. Mind the step, and I’ll keep in touch.”

  I nodded and stepped over the seals into the PhoenixCorp mother ship.

  There wasn’t any real “step”. What there was was a sharp transition from the comfortable one gee I kept in my own ship to the gravityless environment of the PhoenixCorp ship. My stomach did a quick little flip-flop of protest, but I grabbed a hold-on bar and looked around.

  I don’t know what I’d expected to find, maybe something like the old Gateway asteroid. PhoenixCorp had done itself a lot more lavishly than that, and I began to wonder if I hadn’t maybe been a touch too open-handed with the financing. The place certainly didn’t smell like Gateway. Instead of Gateway’s sour, ancient fug, it had the wetly sweet smell of a greenhouse. That was because there were vines and ferns and flowers growing in pots all around the room – spreading out in all directions, because of that zero-gee environment, and if I’d thought about that ahead of time, I wouldn’t have worn a skirt. The only human being in sight was a tall, nearly naked black man who was hanging by one toe from a wall bracket, exercising his muscles with one of those metal-spring gadgets. (“Humphrey Mason-Manley,” Hypatia whispered in my ear. “He’s the archeologist-anthropologist guy from the British Museum.”) Without breaking his rhythm, Humphrey gave me a look of annoyance.

  “What are you doing here, miss? No visitors are permitted. This is private property, and –”

  Then he got a better look at me and his expression changed. Not to welcoming exactly, but to what I’d call sort of unwillingly impressed. “Oh, crikey,” he said. “You’re Gelle-Klara Moynlin, are you not? That’s a bit different. Welcome aboard, I guess.”

  CHAPTER II

  It wasn’t the most affable greeting I’d ever had. However, when Humphrey Mason-Manley woke up the head engineer for me, she turned out to be a lot more courteous. She didn’t have to be, either. Although I had put up the seed money to get the project started, PhoenixCorp was set up as a nonprofit institution, owned by nobody but itself. I wasn’t even on the board.

  The boss engineer’s name, Hypatia whispered to me, was June Thaddeus Terple – Doctor Terple. I didn’t really need the reminder. Terple and I had met before, though only by screen, when she was trying to scare up money for this venture and somebody had given her my name. In person she was taller than I’d thought. She looked to be about the age I looked to be myself, which is to say, charitably, thirtyish. She was wearing a kind of string bikini, plus a workman’s belt of little pouches around her waist so she could keep stuff in it. She took me into her office, which was a sort of wedge-shaped chamber with nothing much visible in it but handholds on the walls and a lot more of those flowering plants. “Sorry I wasn’t there to meet you, Dr Moynlin,” she said.

  “I’m not a doctor of anything, except honorary, and Klara’s good enough.”

  She bobbed her head. “Anyway, of course you’re welcome here any time. I guess you wanted to see for yourself how we’re coming along.”

  “Well, I did want that, yes. I also wanted to set something up, if you don’t mind.” That was me returning courtesy for courtesy, however unnecessary it was in either direction. “Do you know who Wilhelm Tartch is?”

  She thought for a moment. “No.”

  So much for his galaxywide fame. I explained. “Bill’s a kind of roving reporter. He has a programme that goes out all over, even to the Heechee in the Core. It’s sort of a travelogue. He visits exciting and colourful places and reports on them for the stay-at-homes.” He was also my present main lover, but there wasn’t any reason to mention that to Terple; she would figure it out for herself fast enough.

  “And he wants to do PhoenixCorp?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said again. “I did clear it with the board.”

  She grinned at me. “So you did, but I sort of lost track of it. We’ve been deploying the drones, so it’s been kind of busy.” She shook herself. “Anyway, Hans tells me your shipmind displayed the actual supernova explosion to you on the way out.”

  “That’s right, she did.” In my ear Hypatia was whispering that Hans was the name of their shipmind, as though I couldn’t figure that out for myself.

  “And I suppose you know what it looks like from Earth now?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  I could see her assessing how much “sort of” amounted to, and deciding to be diplomatic to the money person. “It wouldn’t hurt to take another look. Hans! Telescopic view from Earth, please.”

  She was looking towards one end of her office. It disappeared, and in its place we were looking out at a blotchy patch of light. “That’s it. It’s called the Crab Nebula. Of course, they named it that before they really knew what it was, but you can see where they got the name.” I agreed that it did look a little like some sort of deformed crab, and Terple went on. “The nebula itself is just the gases and stuff that the supernova threw off, a thousand years or so later. I don’t know if you can make it out, But there’s a little spot in the middle of it that’s the Crab pulsar. That’s all that’s left of the star. Now let’s look at the way it was before it went super.”

  Hans wiped the nebula away, and we were looking into the same deep, black space Hypatia had shown me already. There were the same zillion stars hanging there, but as the shipmind zoomed the picture closer, one extraordinarily bright one appeared. “Bright” didn’t do it justice. It was a blazing golden yellow, curiously fuzzy. It wasn’t really hot. It couldn’t be; the simulation was only optical. But I could almost feel its heat on my face.

  “I don’t see any planet,” I offered.

  “Oh, you will, once we get all the optical segments in place.” Then she interrupted herself. “I forgot to ask. Would you like a cup of tea or something?”

  “Thanks, no. Nothing right this minute.” I was peering at the star. “I thought it would be brighter,” I said, a little disappointed.

  “Oh, it will be, Klara. That’s what we’re building that five-hundred-kilometre mirror for. Right now we’re just getting the gravitational lensing from the black hole we’re using – there’s a little camera in the mirror. I don’t know if you know much about black holes, but – oh, shit,” she interrupted herself, suddenly stricken. “You do know, don’t you? I mean, after you were stuck in one for thirty or forty years . . .”

  She looked as though she had inadvertently caused me great pain. She hadn’t. I was used to that sort of reaction. People rarely brought up the subject of black holes in my presence, on the general principle that you don’t talk about rope when there’s been a hanging in the house. But the time I was trapped in one of them was far back in the past. It had gone like a flash for me in the black hole’s time dilation, whatever the elapsed time was on the outside, and I wasn’t sensitive about it.

  On the other hand, I wasn’t interested in discussing it one more
damn time, either, so I just said, “My black hole didn’t look like that. It was a creepy kind of pale blue.”

  Terple recovered quickly. She gave me a wise nod of the head. “That would have been Cerenkov radiation. Yours must have been what they call a naked singularity. This one’s different. It’s wrapped up in its own ergosphere and you can’t see a thing. Most black holes produce a lot of radiation – not from themselves, from the gases and stuff they’re swallowing – but this one has already swallowed everything around it. Anyway.” She paused to recollect her train of thought. Then she nodded. “I was telling you about the gravitational lensing. Hans?”

  She didn’t say what she wanted from Hans, but evidently he could figure it out for himself. The stars disappeared, and a sort of wall of misty white appeared in front of us. Terple poked at it here and there with a finger, drawing a little picture for me:

  “That little dot on the left, that’s the Crabber planet we want to study. The circle’s the black hole. The arc on the right is our mirror, which is right at the point of convergence – where the gravitational lensing from the black hole gives us the sharpest image. And the little dot next to it is us, at the Cassegrain focus of the mirror. I didn’t show the Crabber sun – actually we have to avoid aiming the camera at it, because it could burn out our optics. Am I making sense so far?”

  “So far,” I agreed.

  She gave me another of those assessing looks, then said, “We’ll actually be doing our observing by looking towards the mirror, not towards the Crab planet. There too we’ll have to block out the star itself, or we won’t see the actual planet at all, but that’s just another of the things we’ll be adjusting. Then we’ll actually be looking diametrically away from the planet in order to observe it.”

  I hadn’t been able to resist the temptation with Hypatia, and I couldn’t now with June Terple. “For four or five days,” I said in my friendliest voice.

  I guess the tone wasn’t friendly enough. She looked nettled. “Listen, we didn’t put the damn black hole where it is. It took us two years of searching to find one in the right position. There’s a neutron star that we could’ve used. Orbitwise it was a better deal because it would have given us nearly eighty years to observe, but it’s just a damn neutron star. It wouldn’t have given us anywhere the same magnification, because a neutron star just doesn’t have anywhere near as much mass as a black hole, so the gravitational lensing would’ve been a lot less. We’ll get a lot more detail with our black hole. Anyway,” she added, “once we’ve observed from here we’ll move this whole lash-up to the neutron star for whatever additional data we can get – I mean, uh, if that seems advisable, we will.”

  What she meant by that was if I was willing to pay for it. Well, I probably was. The capital costs were paid; it would only mean meeting their payroll for another eighty years or so.

  But I wasn’t ready to make that commitment. To take her mind off it, I said, “I thought we were supposed to have almost thirty days of observing right here.”

  She looked glum. “Radio observing. That’s why we built the mesh dish. But it turns out there’s no radio coming from the Crabber planet at all, so we had to get the mirror plates to convert it to optical. Took us over three weeks, which is why we lost so much observing time.”

  “I see,” I said. “No radio signals. So there might not be any civilization there to observe, anyway.”

  She bit her lip. “We know definitely that there’s life there. Or was, anyway. It’s one of the planets the Heechee surveyed long ago, and there were advanced living organisms there at the time – pretty primitive, sure, but they certainly looked as though they had the potential to evolve.”

  “The potential to evolve, right. But whether they did or not we just don’t know.”

  She didn’t answer that. She just sighed. Then she said, “As long as you’re here, would you like a look around?”

  “If I won’t be in the way,” I said.

  Of course I was in the way. June Terple didn’t let it show, but some of the others barely gave me the courtesy of looking up when we were introduced. There were eight of them altogether, with names like Julia Ibarruru and Mark Rohrbeck and Humphrey Mason-Manley and Oleg Kekuskian and – well, I didn’t have to try to retain them all; Hypatia would clue me as needed. Humphrey Mason-Manley was the guy who’d been building his pecs when I came in. Julia was the one who was floating in a harness surrounded by fifteen or twenty 3-D icons that she was busy poking at and glowering at and poking at again, and she gave me no more than a quick and noncommittal nod. If my name meant anything to her, or to most of the others, they didn’t show any signs of being impressed. Especially Rohrbeck and Kekuskian didn’t, because they were sound asleep in their harnesses when we peeked in on them, and Terple had a finger to her lips. “Third shift,” she whispered when we’d closed the flaps on their cubicles and moved away. “They’ll be waking up for dinner in a little while, but let’s let them get their sleep. And there’s only one other. Let’s go find her.”

  On the way to that one other member of the crew, Hypatia was whispering bits of biography in my ear. Kekuskian was the quite elderly and bisexual astrophysicist. Rohrbeck the quite young and deeply depressed program designer, whose marriage had just come painfully apart. And the one remaining person was . . .

  Was a Heechee.

  I didn’t have to be told that. Once you’ve seen anyone Heechee, you know what they all look like; skeletally thin front to back, squarish, skull-like faces, their data pod hanging between their legs where, if they were male, their balls should be, and if female (as this one turned out to be), there shouldn’t be anything much at all. Her name, Terple said, was Starminder, and as we entered her chamber she was working at a set of icons of her own. But as soon as she heard my name she wiped them and barrelled over to me to shake my hand. “You are very famous among us in the Core, Gelle-Klara Moynlin,” she informed me, hanging on to my hand for support. “Because of your Moynlin Citizen Ambassadors, you see. When your Rebecca Shapiro person came to our city, she was invited to stay with the father of my husband’s family, which is where I met her. She was quite informative about human beings; indeed, it was because of her that I volunteered at once to come out. Do you know her?”

  I tried to remember Rebecca Shapiro. I had put up grant money for a good many batches of recruits since I funded the program, and she would have had to be one of the earliest of them. Starminder saw my uncertainty and tried to be helpful. “Young woman. Very sad. She sang music composed by your now-dead Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for our people, which I almost came to enjoy.”

  “Oh, right, that Rebecca,” I said, not very honestly. By then I’d paid the fare to the Core for – what? – at least two or three hundred Rebeccas or Carloses or Janes who volunteered to be Citizen Ambassadors to the Heechee in the Core because they had lives that were a shambles. That was a given. If their lives hadn’t been, why would they want to leave the people and places they couldn’t ever come back to?

  Because, of course, the Core was time-dilated, like any black hole. I knew what that meant. When you were time-dilated in the Core, where a couple of centuries of outside time went by every day, the problems you left behind got really old really fast. Time dilation was better than suicide – though, when you came to think of it, actually a kind of reverse suicide is pretty much what it was. You didn’t die yourself, but every troublesome person you’d ever known did while you were gone.

  I wish all those Citizen Ambassadors of mine well. I hope it all works out for them . . . but being in a black hole hadn’t done a thing for me.

  Once I’d met all the people on the PhoenixCorp ship, there wasn’t much else to see. I had misjudged my budget-watchers. Terple hadn’t been that spendthrift after all. If you didn’t count the opulent plantings – and they were there primarily to keep the air good – the PhoenixCorp ship actually was a pretty bare-bones kind of spacecraft. There were the sleeping quarters for the help, and some common rooms – the
big one I’d come into when I first entered, plus a sort of dining room with beverage dispensers and netting next to the hold-ons to keep the meals from flying away, a couple of little rooms for music or virtuals when the people wanted some recreation. The rest of it was storage and, of course, all the machinery and instrumentation PhoenixCorp needed to do its job. Terple didn’t show me any of the hardware. I didn’t expect her to. That’s the shipmind’s business, and that sort of thing stays sealed away where no harm can come to it. So, unless somebody had been foolish enough to open up a lot of compartments that were meant to stay closed, there wouldn’t have been anything to see.

  When we were finished, she finally insisted on that cup of tea – really that capsule of tea, that is – and while we were drinking it, holding with one hand to the hold-ons, she said, “That’s about it, Klara. Oh, wait a minute. I haven’t actually introduced you to our shipmind, have I? Hans? Say hello to Ms Moynlin.”

  A deep, pleasant male voice said, “Hello, Ms Moynlin. Welcome aboard. We’ve been hoping you’d visit us.”

  I said hello back to him and left it at that. I don’t particularly like chatting with machine intelligences, except my own. I finished my tea, slid the empty capsule into its slot, and said, “Well, I’ll get out of your way. I want to get back to my own ship for a bit anyway.”