The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Lagrange leaned back. “He humiliated you.”

  She nodded. “In front of everybody,” she whispered.

  “You left the conference?”

  “Of course. I studied the minutes afterwards.”

  He pictured her, alone in some small room, a high school girl who’d missed the senior prom, reading about it instead in some dry secondhand report. He wanted to hug her, tell her he was a kindred soul in personal disappointment.

  But almost as if reading his thoughts – and rejecting them – she drew herself up. “I was angry. I felt” – her eyes blazed – “I may be an inferior scientist, but sometimes an inferior does good work. A hack writer comes up with a great novel. A poor soccer team beats a much better one.” She thrust out her chin. “An average detective has a magnificent insight that cracks an impossible case.”

  Lagrange nodded. “So you felt you were onto something and were being ignored.”

  “More accurately, I felt Giorgio was missing something. I guess, at bottom, what was really bothering me was the old grandfather paradox. You know, somebody goes back in time and kills their own grandfather, so that they were never born . . . which means they weren’t around to go back in time.”

  Lagrange crossed his legs. “You didn’t buy the many-universe theories? As I understand it, the concept is that when someone goes back in time he is really travelling to another universe, which is identical with the first up to the instant of his arrival, but different thereafter because of his presence. That way –”

  “In the universe he leaves, his grandfather is alive and he is born. In the one he enters, his grandfather dies, and he isn’t born.” She shook her head. “That was Giorgio’s explanation and most of the others’. The melting of the Higgs field produced closed timelike curves, CTCs, between universes.” She chuckled mirthlessly. “To me, it sounded like magic. Invoke enough different universes and you can explain anything. It wasn’t true understanding. And I had my experiments. There’s something that working with actual hardware gives you – I know it sounds mystical – But there’s something that world travellers get out of touch with.”

  The door opened then and two men entered, dressed casually in slacks and open-collar shirts. Lagrange stood up, withdrew his wallet, and flashed his badge. “Gentlemen, I’m sorry, but I must ask you to leave. We’ll only be another five minutes.”

  The men seemed uncertain, but eventually departed.

  “You know them?” asked Lagrange when they’d gone.

  “Not well,” said Elizabeth. “The younger one’s been here a year, some kind of mathematician from Collège de France. The other fellow I believe is Russian, specializes in muon detectors.”

  “Tell me when Giorgio got his bright idea. Do you think it was always in the back of his mind?”

  She shrugged. “I doubt it. I think it was one of those spur-of-the-moment things, one of those flamboyant I-am-the-boss megalomaniac power moves he loved so much.”

  “Then it was for the benefit of the Japanese?”

  “Partly, yes. They had sent in a large visiting delegation. They were talking about a huge funding increment – that’s what it’s all about in high-energy physics, as it’s always been – and Giorgio was anxious to make a grand impression.”

  “And that’s when you picked to tell him you thought the experiments might not be safe.” He raised his eyebrows. “Awkward timing, no?”

  She bristled. “It wasn’t ‘timing’ at all. I broached it to him as soon as I felt I had a solid basis for it. A couple of the Japanese just happened to be in the room. Should I have whispered?”

  Lagrange didn’t answer. “And your concern was –”

  “The small spatial dislocations I’d mentioned earlier. I was worried about what might happen if an object interpenetrated an earlier version of itself.”

  “But Dr Parino did not share your anxiety.”

  “He was furious with me for bringing it up. As it turned out, he was right. There was a problem, but that wasn’t it.”

  “Nevertheless, he decided to demonstrate the process safety by using himself as the subject of an experiment.” Lagrange began tapping his foot. “How did he justify that?”

  “He didn’t, really. In his position, you didn’t have to. Oh, later on he offered up some mumbo jumbo about taking a bit of future information into the past, something that required a human mind, in order to test or dispel the so-called knowledge paradox. An example would be paintings brought from the future to the original artist in the past, who copies them. The process eliminates the creative work. Anyway, no one considered that seriously. We all knew Giorgio was just being Giorgio.”

  “Was it his idea to go a full five seconds backwards? Wasn’t that trillions of times longer than you’d sent anything else?”

  “It had already been shown that the regression in time depended exponentially on the rate at which you melted the Higgs domains, not the collision energy. It meant only that we had to increase our luminosity and scanning speed. Giorgio claimed five seconds was the minimum duration required for his future self to record and bring back a number they could be photographed with next to a sealed clock.”

  “The Paris closing gold price.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did the other physicists think of his plan?”

  “That he was entirely crazy, of course. But it was a genius move for publicity.”

  “And were they worried, too, about safety?”

  “Oh, most agreed it was rash, but no one could justify their feelings in terms of specifics.” She removed a small mirror and some lipstick from a tiny purse she carried. “Giorgio was not the kind of person who inspired feelings of protection.”

  “Except in you.”

  She stopped applying the lipstick. “I was up the entire night before the experiment. That was when I figured everything out.”

  “You could see him from the control room?”

  She nodded. Lagrange remembered the tape – control room activity was always recorded. Sixty television monitors. Two dozen physicists sitting at consoles, hunched over screens, harried, looking up to scan a readout, to shout something, to scream a command. On one of the consoles, Giorgio strides confidently toward the pit in the hangar floor. Underground area fifteen, or UA15, the time travel experiment. He says something to one of the Japanese visitors and the man smiles. Giorgio is wearing an orange jumpsuit, a white lined pad under his arm.

  WAITING FOR A COMMAND scrolls down one of the monitors. WAITING FOR A COMMAND.

  “Is the counter working?” shouts a physicist.

  “Firing away,” says another. “I got it in the logbook.”

  A mechanical voice announces, “Proton check,” and three of the screens fill up with numbers and graphs. A moment later, the voice declares, “SPS ready,” and more numbers tumble onto additional displays.

  The camera catches Elizabeth, sitting at the main control panel. Her face is gaunt, her eyes wide. She uses a microphone to address people in the hangar. “Giorgio, I beg you not to do this. I beg you.”

  Giorgio waves and smiles, pats the Japanese on the shoulder.

  Lagrange shook his head. “Why did he make you the SLIMI?” SLIMI was Shift Leader In Matters of Information.

  Elizabeth spoke in a near whisper. “It wasn’t that unusual. I had done it before.” She inhaled sharply. “I suppose it was further punishment.”

  Lagrange recalled the final moments. Giorgio descending the ladder into the pit. Signal light going on indicating Time Travel Chamber secured. The mechanical voice saying, “Beam scanning sequence ready,” and Elizabeth making one futile last attempt.

  “Giorgio, please . . . please . . .”

  And the response: “Is the gold price in? As soon as it comes in, close the fucking switch and read me the fucking number when the counter goes down to two. I order it, Elizabeth.”

  She hesitates several seconds, looks around at the other physicists, whose expressions are maintained at careful n
eutrality. A man wearing headphones approaches her and whispers something. She delays another moment and then, finally, chest heaving, she presses a key. The mechanical voice says, “Cycle one,” and begins a countdown from nine to zero.

  At two, Elizabeth reads in the Paris close in New Dollars per ounce, 29.32. At zero, small dips appear on lines crossing three of the monitors.

  Even in the hangar, there never was any sound. When the Time Chamber disappeared, it happened in vacuum; no air was present to rush in.

  Lagrange stood up and stretched. “You knew immediately, of course.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “All instrument readouts from the chamber went dead.”

  He began to slowly pace, ignoring the hamstring twinges. “You knew where he’d be?”

  “Not exactly. I knew how far, but not precisely the direction.”

  “So it was more or less luck that Farside II happened to be pointed towards that sector.”

  “I suppose. Chances were some telescope would catch it.”

  “Your distance was correct?”

  A faint grin. “Within experimental error.”

  “Your so-called equivalence principle . . .”

  She puffed her lips. “It seemed reasonable. Travel through space requires time; therefore, travel through time might very well require space.”

  “It resolves the grandfather paradox.”

  “It occurred to me the night before the experiment. You can’t kill your grandfather if you can’t reach him. If you travel through time, you can’t affect anything before you left – or have anything affect you – if you’re flung far enough away from your original position.”

  “But how far is ‘far enough’?”

  “In general, the speed of light multiplied by the time interval. Nothing could travel back fast enough to cause a problem. The universe could protect itself from inconsistencies and non-causal events, it didn’t need other universes to help.”

  He pondered a moment. “But what if you’re transported right near your grandfather, whom you immediately murder?”

  She shook her head. “Either he’d have already sired your parent, so it wouldn’t matter, or he couldn’t have been your grandfather. In tech-speak, in the time interval you went back, no concatenation of world lines could traverse as much distance as you did.”

  Lagrange was content to grasp the essence. “So, therefore, when Monsieur Parino was popped back five seconds in time, in space he was thrust –”

  Her eyebrows rose. “A million and a half kilometres.”

  Lagrange gave a low whistle. “Dr Parkes, thank you. The interview is officially concluded. If you could see me back to UA15 . . .”

  She stood. “Of course.”

  They exited the Megatek room. The two men who’d entered before were waiting outside and eyed them venomously as they receded down the hall. “So tell me, Inspector,” she asked, “am I to be charged?”

  Lagrange looked at her alongside him, pursed his lips. “Well, that is not for me to decide, mademoiselle. I only make a report.” He could not keep a straight face. “But I think not.” At a corner, he dared take her arm. “I think not.”

  He had heard talk that it was she now who might get the Nobel, sharing it with the departed Giorgio for “the Parkes–Parino principle”.

  “Have you seen the actual pictures from Farside II, Inspector?”

  “Oh yes,” said Lagrange. “Quite beautiful, in an eerie sort of way.” He tried for a moment to imagine himself in Parino’s shoes. There was a porthole in the chamber and he undoubtedly had looked out. Lagrange wondered if he’d been able to see the Earth from his position, how small it must’ve appeared from a million kilometres beyond the moon, how resplendent amidst the jewelled background of scattered stars, how achingly, utterly unreachable . . . “The glare made the chamber look almost like a comet.”

  “Well,” said Elizabeth, “there is a fair amount of energy associated with temporal re-entry.” An impish expression crossed her face. “And, of course, Giorgio always was brilliant.”

  Unprofessional as it was, Lagrange laughed.

  SON OBSERVE THE TIME

  Kage Baker

  Prolific new writer Kage Baker made her first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1997, and has since become one of that magazine’s most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-travelling agents of the Company; her stories have also appeared in Amazing, Realms of Fantasy, and elsewhere. Her first novel, In the Garden of Iden, also a tale of the Company, was published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. Her second Company novel, Sky Coyote, was published in 1999, a third, Mendoza in Hollywood, early in 2000, and she has several more novels already sold and in the pipeline. Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.

  In the intricate and eloquent novella that follows, perhaps the best of the Company stories to date, she take us back in time to Old San Francisco, to the breathless moments just before the Great San Francisco Earthquake, for a taut and suspenseful tale of conspiracy, conflict, political intrigue, revenge, and redemption in the shadow of onrushing catastrophe.

  ON THE EVE OF DESTRUCTION we had oysters and champagne. Don’t suppose for a moment that we had any desire to lord it over the poor mortals of San Francisco, in that month of April in that year of 1906; but things weren’t going to be so gracious there again for a long while, and we felt an urge to fortify ourselves against the work we were to do.

  And who were we, you may ask? The present-time operatives of Dr Zeus Incorporated, a twenty-fourth-century cabal of investors who have presided over the development of immortality and time travel, amongst other things. Neither of those inventions is terribly practical, I regret to say; nevertheless they can be utilized to provide a satisfactory profit for Company shareholders. Assuming, of course, that we immortals – their servants – are able to perform our tasks in a satisfactory manner.

  London before the Great Fire, Delhi before the Mutiny, even Chicago – I was there and I can tell you, it requires a great deal of mental and emotional self-discipline to live side by side with mortals in a Salvage Zone. You must look, daily, into the smiling faces of those who are to lose all, and walk beside them in the knowledge that nothing you can do will affect their fates. Even the most prosaic of places has a sort of haunted glory at such times; judge then how it looked to us, that gilded fantastical butterfly of a city, quite unprepared for its approaching holocaust.

  The place was made even queerer by the fact that there were so many Company operatives there at the time. The very ether hummed with our transmissions. In any street you might have seen us dismounting from carriages or the occasional automobile, we immortal gentlemen tipping our derbies to the ladies, our immortal ladies responding with a graceful inclination of their picture hats, smiling as we met each other’s terrified eyes. We dined at the Palace and as guests at Nob Hill mansions; promenaded in Golden Gate Park, drove out to Woodward Gardens, attended the theatre and everywhere saw the pale set faces of our own kind, busy with their own particular preparations against what was to come.

  Some of us had less pleasant places to go. I was grateful that I was not required to brave the Chinese labyrinth by Waverly Place, but my associate Pan had certain business there amongst the Celestials. I myself was obliged to venture, too many times, into the boarding-houses south of Market Street. Beneath the Fly Trap was a Company safe house and HQ; we’d meet there sometimes, Pan and I, at the end of a long day in our respective ghettoes, and we’d sit shaking together over a brace of stiff whiskies. Thus heartened, it was time for a costume change: dock labourer into gentleman for me, coolie into cook for him, and so home by cable car.

  I lodged in two rooms on Bush Street. I will not say I slept there; one does not rest well on the edge of the maelstro
m. But it was a place to keep one’s trunk, and to operate the Company credenza necessary for facilitating the missions of those operatives whose case officer I was. Salvaging is a terribly complicated affair, requiring as it does that one hide in History’s shadow until the last possible moment before snatching one’s quarry from its preordained doom. One must be organized and thoroughly co-ordinated; and timing is everything.

  On the morning of the tenth of April I was working there, sending a progress report, when there came a brisk knock at my door. Such was my concentration that I was momentarily unmindful of the fact that I had no mortal servants to answer it. When I heard the impatient tapping of a small foot on the step, I hastened to the door.

  I admitted Nan D’Araignee, one of our Art Preservation specialists. She is an operative of West African origin with exquisite features, slender and slight as a doll carved of ebony. I had worked with her briefly near the end of the previous century. She is quite the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and happily married to another immortal, a century before I ever laid eyes on her. Timing, alas, is everything.

  “Victor.” She nodded. “Charming to see you again.”

  “Do come in.” I bowed her into my parlour, acutely conscious of its disarray. Her bright gaze took in the wrinkled laundry cast aside on the divan, the clutter of unwashed teacups, the half-eaten oyster loaf on the credenza console, six empty sauterne bottles and one smudgily thumbprinted wineglass. She was far too courteous to say anything, naturally, and occupied herself with the task of removing her gloves.

  “I must apologize for the condition of the place,” I stammered. “My duties have kept me out a good deal.” I swept a copy of the Examiner from a chair. “Won’t you sit down?”

  “Thank you.” She took the seat and perched there, hands folded neatly over her gloves and handbag. I pulled over another chair, intensely irritated at my clumsiness.

  “I trust your work goes well?” I inquired, for there is of course no point in asking one of us if we are well. “And, er, Kalugin’s? Or has he been assigned elsewhere?”