The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “Whoo!” shouted Japheth. “The harder they fall! We’d better start running now, Soma!”

  Soma was disappointed, but unsurprised, to see that Japheth did not mean run away.

  There was only one bear near the slightly curved route that Japheth picked for them through the harsh glare. Even light as he was, purged of his math, the Owl was still a burden and Soma couldn’t take much time to marvel at the swirling colors in the bear’s plastic hide.

  “Keep up, Soma!” shouted the Crow. Ahead of them, two of the Commodores had suddenly turned on one another and were landing terrible blows. Soma saw a tiny figure clinging to one of the giants’ shoulders, saw it lose its grip, fall, and disappear beneath an ironshod boot the size of a bundle bug.

  Then Soma slipped and fell himself, sending all three of them to the glowing ground and sending a cloud of the biting crystal salt into the air. One of his sandaled feet, he saw, was coated in gold slime. They’d been trying to outflank one Legislator only to stumble on the trail of another.

  Japheth picked up the Owl, now limp as a rag doll, and with a grunt heaved the man across his shoulders. “Soma, you should come on. We might make it.” It’s not a hard decision to make at all.

  How can you not make it? At first he’d needed convincing, but then he’d been one of those who’d gone out into the world to convince others. It’s not just history; it’s after history.

  “Soma!”

  Japheth ran directly at the unmoving painter, the deadweight of the Owl across his shoulders slowing him. He barreled into Soma, knocking him to the ground again, all of them just missing the unknowing Legislator as it slid slowly past.

  “Up, up!” said Japheth. “Stay behind it, so long as it’s moving in the right direction. I think my boys missed a Commodore.” His voice was very sad.

  The Legislator stopped and let out a bellowing noise. Fetid steam began rising from it. Japheth took Soma by the hand and pulled him along, through chaos. One of the Commodores, the first to fall, was motionless on the ground, two or three Legislators making their way along its length. The two who’d fought lay locked in one another’s grasp, barely moving and glowing hotter and hotter. The only standing Commodore, eyes like red suns, seemed to be staring just behind them.

  As it began to sweep its gaze closer, Soma heard Japheth say, “We got closer than I would have bet.”

  Then Soma’s car, mysteriously covered with red crosses and wailing at the top of its voice, came to a sliding, crunching stop in the salt in front of them.

  Soma didn’t hesitate, but threw open the closest rear door and pulled Japheth in behind him. When the three of them – painter, Crow, Owl – were stuffed into the rear door, Soma shouted, “Up those stairs, car!”

  In the front seat, there was a woman whose eyes seemed as large as saucers.

  commodores faulting headless people in the lick protocols compel reeling in, strengthening, temporarily abandoning telepresence locate an asset with a head asset with a head located

  Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails was trying not to go crazy. Something was pounding at her head, even though she hadn’t tried to open it herself. Yesterday, she had been working a remote repair job on the beach, fixing a smashed window. Tonight, she was hurtling across the Great Salt Lick, Legislators and bears and Commodores acting in ways she’d never seen or heard of.

  Jenny herself acting in ways she’d never heard of. Why didn’t she just pull the emergency brake, roll out of the car, wait for the THP? Why did she just hold on tighter and pull down the sunscreen so she could use the mirror to look into the backseat?

  It was three men. She hadn’t been sure at first. One appeared to be unconscious and was dressed in some strange getup, a helmet of some kind completely encasing his head. She didn’t know the man in the capacitor jacket, who was craning his head out the window, trying to see something above them. The other one though, she recognized.

  “Soma Painter,” she said. “Your car is much better, though it has missed you terribly.”

  The owner just looked at her glaze-eyed. The other one pulled himself back in through the window, a wild glee on his face. He rapped the helmet of the prone man and shouted, “Did you hear that? The unpredictable you prophesied! And it fell in our favor!”

  Soma worried about his car’s suspension, not to mention the tires, when it slalomed through the legs of the last standing Commodore and bounced up the steeply cut steps of the Parthenon. He hadn’t had a direct hand in the subsystems design – by the time he’d begun to develop the cars, Athena was already beginning to take over a lot of the details. Not all of them, though; he couldn’t blame her for the guilt he felt over twisting his animal subjects into something like onboard components.

  But the car made it onto the platform inside the outer set of columns, seemingly no worse for wear. The man next to him – Japheth, his name was Japheth and he was from Kentucky – jumped out of the car and ran to the vast, closed counterweighted bronze doors.

  “It’s because of the crosses. We’re in an emergency vehicle according to their protocols.” That was the mechanic, Jenny, sitting in the front seat and trying to staunch a nosebleed with a greasy rag. “I can hear the Governor,” she said.

  Soma could hear Japheth raging and cursing. He stretched the Owl out along the back seat and climbed out of the car. Japheth was pounding on the doors in futility, beating his fists bloody, spinning, spitting. He caught sight of Soma.

  “These weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”

  “What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.

  Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.

  “I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.

  The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.

  “Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to remove the plate.

  The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.

  Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.

  The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s Alley and at Soma’s car.

  “We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.

  breached come home all you commodores come home cancel emergency designation on identified vehicle and downcycle now jump in jump in jump in

  Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.

  Here was the true and awesome thing, here was the forty-foot-tall sculpture – armed and armored – attended by the broken remains of her frozen marble enemies. Jenny managed to lift her head and look past sandaled feet, up cold golden raiment, past tart painted cheeks to the lapis lazuli eyes.

  Athena looked bac
k at her. Athena leapt.

  Inside Jenny’s head, inside so small an architecture, there was no more room for Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails. Jenny fled.

  Soma saw the mechanic, the woman who’d been so kind to his car, fall to her knees, blood gushing from her nose and ears. He saw Japheth laying out the Owl like a sacrifice before the Governor. He’d been among the detractors, scoffing at the idea of housing the main armature in such a symbol-potent place.

  Behind him, his car beeped. The noise was barely audible above the screaming metal sounds out in the Lick. The standing Commodore was swiveling its torso, turning its upper half toward the Parthenon. Superheated salt melted in a line slowly tracking toward the steps.

  Soma trotted back to his car. He leaned in and remembered the back door, the Easter egg he hadn’t documented. A twist on the ignition housing, then press in, and the key sank into the column. The car shivered.

  “Run home as fast you can, car. Back to the ranch with your kin. Be fast, car, be clever.”

  The car woke up. It shook off Soma’s ownership and closed its little head. It let out a surprised beep and then fled with blazing speed, leaping down the steps, over the molten salt, and through the storm, bubblewinged bicycles descending all around. The Commodore began another slow turn, trying to track it.

  Soma turned back to the relative calm inside the Parthenon. Athena’s gaze was baleful, but he couldn’t feel it. The Owl had ripped the ability from him. The Owl lying before Japheth, defenseless against the knife Japheth held high.

  “Why?” shouted Soma.

  But Japheth didn’t answer him, instead diving over the Owl in a somersault roll, narrowly avoiding the flurry of kicks and roundhouse blows being thrown by Jenny. Her eyes bugged and bled. More blood flowed from her ears and nostrils, but still she attacked Japheth with relentless fury.

  Japheth came up in a crouch. The answer to Soma’s question came in a slurred voice from Jenny. Not Jenny, though. Soma knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere, and it wasn’t Jenny’s.

  “there is a bomb in that meat soma-friend a knife a threat an eraser”

  Japheth shouted at Soma. “You get to decide again! Cut the truth out of him!” He gestured at the Owl with his knife.

  Soma took in a shuddery breath. “So free with lives. One of the reasons we climbed up.”

  Jenny’s body lurched at Japheth, but the Crow dropped onto the polished floor. Jenny’s body slipped when it landed, the soles of its shoes coated with the same oil as its jumpsuit.

  “My Owl cousin died of asphyxiation at least ten minutes ago, Soma,” said Japheth. “Died imperfect and uncontrolled.” Then, dancing backward before the scratching thing in front of him, Japheth tossed the blade in a gentle underhanded arc. It clattered to the floor at Soma’s feet.

  All of the same arguments.

  All of the same arguments.

  Soma picked up the knife and looked down at the Owl. The fight before him, between a dead woman versus a man certain to die soon, spun on. Japheth said no more, only looked at Soma with pleading eyes.

  Jenny’s body’s eyes followed the gaze, saw the knife in Soma’s hand.

  “you are due upgrade soma-friend swell the ranks of commodores you were 96th percentile now 99th soma-with-the-paintbox-in-printer’s-alley the voluntary state of tennessee applauds your citizenship”

  But it wasn’t the early slight, the denial of entry to the circle of highest minds. Memories of before and after, decisions made by him and for him, sentiences and upgrades decided by fewer and fewer and then one; one who’d been a product, not a builder.

  Soma plunged the knife into the Owl’s unmoving chest and sawed downward through the belly with what strength he could muster. The skin and fat fell away along a seam straighter than he could ever cut. The bomb – the knife, the eraser, the threat – looked like a tiny white balloon. He pierced it with the killing tip of the Kentuckian’s blade.

  A nova erupted at the center of the space where math and Detectives live. A wave of scouring numbers washed outward, spreading all across Nashville, all across the Voluntary State to fill all the space within the containment field.

  The 144 Detectives evaporated. The King of the Rock Monkeys, nothing but twisted light, fell into shadow. The Commodores fell immobile, the ruined biology seated in their chests went blind, then deaf, then died.

  And singing Nashville fell quiet. Ten thousand thousand heads slammed shut and ten thousand thousand souls fell insensate, unsupported, in need of revival.

  North of the Girding Wall, alarms began to sound.

  At the Parthenon, Japheth Sapp gently placed the tips of his index and ring fingers on Jenny’s eyelids and pulled them closed.

  Then the ragged Crow pushed past Soma and hurried out into the night. The Great Salt Lick glowed no more, and even the lights of the city were dimmed, so Soma quickly lost sight of the man. But then the cawing voice rang out once more. “We only hurt the car because we had to.”

  Soma thought for a moment, then said, “So did I.”

  But the Crow was gone, and then Soma had nothing to do but wait. He had made the only decision he had left in him. He idly watched as burning bears floated down into the sea. A striking image, but he had somewhere misplaced his paints.

  SHIVA IN SHADOW

  Nancy Kress

  Here’s the story of an intensely dangerous journey into deep space, where the travelers learn that no matter how far away you go, it’s not far enough to get away from yourself . . .

  Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, and elsewhere. Her books include the novels The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths and Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, the novel version of her Hugo and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, and a popular recent sequence of novels, Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity And Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her most recent books are two new novels, Crossfire and Nothing Human. Upcoming is a new novel, Crucible. She has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.” She has had stories in our Second, Third, Sixth through Fifteenth, and Eighteenth through Twenty-first Annual Collections.

  1. SHIP

  I WATCHED THE PROBE launch from the Kepler’s top-deck observatory, where the entire Schaad hull is clear to the stars. I stood between Ajit and Kane. The observatory, which is also the ship’s garden, bloomed wildly with my exotics, bursting into flower in such exuberant profusion that even to see the probe go, we had to squeeze between a seven-foot-high bed of comoralias and the hull.

  “God, Tirzah, can’t you prune these things?” Kane said. He pressed his nose to the nearly invisible hull, like a small child. Something streaked briefly across the sky. “There it goes. Not that there’s much to see.”

  I turned to stare at him. Not much to see! Beyond the Kepler lay the most violent and dramatic part of the galaxy, in all its murderous glory. True, the Kepler had stopped one hundred light-years from the core, for human safety, and dust-and-gas clouds muffled the view somewhat. But, on the other hand, we were far enough away for a panoramic view.

  The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*, the lethal heart of the galaxy, shone gauzily with the heated gases it was sucking downward into oblivion. Around Sag A* circled Sagittarius West, a three-armed spiral of hot plasma ten light-years across, radiating furiously as it cooled. Around that, Sagittarius East, a huge shell left over from some catastrophic explosion within the last hundred thousand years, expanded outward. I saw thousands of stars, including the blazing blue-hot stars of IRS16, hovering dangerously close to the hole, and giving off a stellar wind fierce enough to blow a long fiery tail off the nearby red giant star. Everything w
as racing, radiating, colliding, ripping apart, screaming across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. All set against the sweet, light scent of my brief-lived flowers.

  Nothing going on. But Kane had never been interested in spectacle.

  Ajit said in his musical accent, “No, not much to see. But much to pray for. There go we.”

  Kane snapped, “I don’t pray.”

  “I did not mean ‘pray’ in the religious sense,” Ajit said calmly. He is always calm. “I mean hope. It is a miraculous thing, yes? There go we.”

  He was right, of course. The probe contained the Ajit-analogue, the Kane-analogue, the Tirzah-analogue, all uploaded into a crystal computer no bigger than a comoralia bloom. “We” would go into that stellar violence at the core, where our fragile human bodies could not go. “We” would observe, and measure, and try to find answers to scientific questions in that roiling heart of galactic spacetime. Ninety percent of the probe’s mass was shielding for the computer. Ninety percent of the rest was shielding for the three minicapsules that the probe would fire back to us with recorded and analyzed data. There was no way besides the minicaps to get information out of that bath of frenzied radiation.

  Just as there was no way to know exactly what questions Ajit and Kane would need to ask until they were close to Sag A*. The analogues would know. They knew everything Ajit and Kane and I knew, right up until the moment we were uploaded.

  “Shiva, dancing,” Ajit said.

  “What?” Kane said.

  “Nothing. You would not appreciate the reference. Come with me, Tirzah. I want to show you something.”

  I stopped straining to see the probe, unzoomed my eyes, and smiled at Ajit. “Of course.”

  This is why I am here.

  Ajit’s skin is softer than Kane’s, less muscled. Kane works out every day in ship’s gym, scowling like a demon. Ajit rolled off me and laid his hand on my glowing, satisfied crotch.