In the opening centuries of the long, slow war, the Clade’s expansion was checked and turned back. Trillions died. Planets were cindered; populations sterilized beneath a burning ultraviolet sky, their ozone layers and protective magnetic fields stripped away; habitat clusters incinerated by induced solar flares or reduced to slag by nanoprocessor plagues; Dyson spheres shattered by billions of antimatter warheads. The Clade was slow to realize what the Enemy understood from the start: that a war for the resources that intelligence required—energy, mass, gravity—must be a war of extermination. In the first two thousand years of the War, the Clade’s losses equaled the total biomass of its original pre-starflight solar system. But in its fecundity, in the sheer irrepressibility of life, was the Clade’s strength. It fought back. Across centuries it fought; across distances so vast the light of victory or defeat would be pale, distant winks in the night-sky of far future generations. In the hearts of globular clusters they fought, and the radiant capes of nebulae; through the looping fire-bridges on the skins of suns and along the event horizons of black holes. Their weapons were gas giants and the energies of supernovae; they turned asteroid belts into shotguns and casually flung living planets into the eternal ice of interstellar space. Fleets ten thousand a side clashed between suns, leaving not a single survivor. It was war absolute, elemental. Across a million star systems, the Clade fought the Enemy to a standstill. And, in the last eight hundred years, began to drive them back.
Now, time dilated to the point where a decade passed in a single heartbeat, total mass close to that of a thousand stars, the Clade Heart-world Seydatryah and its attendant culture-cluster plunged at a prayer beneath light-speed toward the closed cosmic string loop of Verthandi’s Ring. She flew blind; no information, no report could outrun her. Her half trillion sentients would arrive with only six months forewarning into what might be the final victory, or the Enemy’s final stand.
Through the crystal shell of the Heart-world, they watched the Clade attack fleet explode like thistledown against the glowing nebula of the Enemy migration. Months ago those battleships had died, streaking ahead of the decelerating Seydatryah civilization to engage the Enemy pickets and by dint of daring and force of fortune, perhaps break through to attack a habitat-cluster. The greater mass of the Clade, dropping down the blue shift as over the years and decades they fell in behind Seydatryah, confirmed the astonished reports of those swift, bold fighters. All the Enemy was here; a caravanserai hundreds of light-years long. Ships, worlds, had been under way for centuries before Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity located and destroyed one of the pilgrim fleets. The order must have been given millennia before; shortly after the Clade turned the tide of battle in its favor. Retreat. Run away. But the Enemy had lost none of its strength and savagery as wave after wave of the cheap, fast, sly battleships were annihilated.
Scented Coolabar and Harvest Moon and Rose of Jericho huddled together in the deep dark and crushing pressure of the ocean at the bottom of the world. They wore the form of squid; many tentacled and big-eyed, communicating by coded ripples of bioluminescent frills along their streamlined flanks. They did not doubt that they had watched themselves die time after time out there. It was likely that only they had died a million deaths. The Chamber of Ever-Renewing Waters would never permit its ace battleship crew to desert into the deep, starlit depths of Pterimonde. Their ploads had doubtless been copied a million times into the swarm of fast-attack ships. The erstwhile crew of the Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity blinked their huge golden eyes. Over the decades and centuries, the light of the Enemy’s retreat would be visible over the entire galaxy, a new and gorgeous ribbon nebula. Now, a handful of light-months from the long march, the shine of hypervelocity particles impacting the deflection fields was a banner in the sky, a starbow across an entire quadrant. And ahead, Verthandi’s Ring, a starless void three light-years in diameter.
“You won them enough time,” Scented Coolabar said in a flicker of blue and green. The game was over. It ended at the lowest place in the world, but it had been won years before, she realized. It had been won the moment Rose of Jericho diverted herself away from the Soulhouse into a meditation tree on the Holy Plains of Hoy.
“I believe so,” Rose of Jericho said, hovering a kiss away from the crystal wall, holding herself against the insane Coriolis storms that stirred this high-gravity domain of waters. “It will be centuries before the Clade arrives in force.”
“The Chamber of Ever-Renewing Waters could regard it as treachery,” Harvest Moon said. Rose of Jericho touched the transparency with a tentacle.
“Do I not serve them with heart and mind and life?” The soft fireworks were fewer now; one by one they faded to nothing. “And anyway, what would they charge me with? Handing the Clade the universe on a plate?”
“Or condemning the Clade to death,” said Scented Coolabar.
“Not our Clade.”
She had been brilliant, Scented Coolabar realized. To have worked it out in those few minutes of subjective flight, and known what to do to save the Clade. But she had always been the greatest strategic mind of her generation. Not for the first time Scented Coolabar wondered about their lost forebear, that extraordinary female who had birthed them from her ploaded intellect.
What is Verthandi’s Ring? A closed cosmic string. And what is a closed cosmic string? A time machine. A portal to the past. But not the past of this universe. Any transit of a closed timelike loop lead inevitably to a parallel universe. In that time-stream, there too was war; Clade and Enemy, locked in Darwinian combat. And in that universe, as the Enemy was driven back to gaze into annihilation, Verthandi’s Ring opened and a second Enemy, a duplicate Enemy in every way, came out of the sky. They had handed the Clade this universe; the prize for driving its parallel in the alternate time-stream to extinction.
Cold-blooded beneath millions of tons of deep cold pressure, Scented Coolabar shivered. Rose of Jericho had assessed the tactical implications and made the only possible choice: delay the Chamber of Ever-Renewing Waters and the Deep Blue Something so they could not prevent the Enemy exiting this universe. A bloodless win. An end to war. Intelligence the savior of the blind, physical universe. While in the second time-stream, Clade habitats burst like crushed eyeballs and worlds were scorched bare and the Enemy found its resources suddenly doubled.
Scented Coolabar doubted that she could ever make such a deal. But she was an engineer, not a mistress of arms. Her tentacles caressed Rose of Jericho’s lobed claspers; a warm sexual thrill pulsed through her muscular body.
“Stay with us, stay with me,” Harvest Moon said. Her decision was made, the reluctant incarnation; she had fallen in love with the flesh and would remain exploring the Heart-world’s concentric tiers in thousands of fresh and exciting bodies.
“No, I have go.” Rose of Jericho briefly brushed Harvest Moon’s sexual tentacles. “They won’t hurt me. They knew I had no choice, as they had no choice.”
Scented Coolabar turned in the water. Her fins rippled, propelling her upward through the pitch-black water. Rose of Jericho fell in behind her. In a few strong strokes, the lights of Harvest Moon’s farewell faded, even the red warmth of her love, and all that remained was the centuries-deep shine of the starbow beyond the wall of the world.
Sea Change
UNA MCCORMACK
New writer Una McCormack has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Surrey and teaches organizational theory at the University of Cambridge. Her short fiction has appeared in Foundation 100, Doctor Who Magazine, and Glorifying Terrorism. She is the author of two Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novels, Cardassia: The Lotus Flower and Hollow Men.
In the powerful story that follows, she shows us that even in the future, the gap between the haves and the have-nots will remain wide—and perilous to try to cross.
We went back to Callie’s bedroom after evening classes pretending we were going to force-feed ourselves Chinese verbs. Really we were talking about what we’d do with the
tutor if we could get our hands on him. You’ve seen the Level 12 ’casts, you know the guy I mean. When I realized all our witty lust had turned into monologue, I glanced over at Callie. She was sitting back in the sofa with her feet up on the table, her tongue sticking out, and a piece of glass pressed up against her forearm.
“You’ll ruin the carpet,” I said.
“Fuck the carpet.”
“Mm, you know, I think I’ll pass.”
I watched with interest, wondering how far she’d get. God only knows how she’d found something sharp—everything round here is so smooth, no rough edges. Nothing to mark you, no way to leave your mark. Callie cut into the flesh, and blood surged out, a shock of bright colour. She went paler beneath her skin bleach and her hand started to shake. “Shit,” she muttered, as blood dripped onto the table. Her mother had told me at least twice how expensive that had been, so I dread to think how often she must have said it to Callie.
I took the piece of glass from her. “I’ll do it.” One quick surgical strike from me, and her tracker was out. It’s been bugging her ever since it went in. Ho-ho. By now Callie was starting to get a thin, papery look—sort of see-through—so I wrapped a towel tight around her arm and made her hold it above her head like they’d shown me in the public hospital when I was getting my social credits. Then, to show moral support, I nicked my fingertip. A ruby-red bead welled up, and I waved my hand at Callie. “Hey, we can be blood sisters!”
She pulled a face. “That’s disgusting!” Maybe, but it made her forget to feel sick, and she jumped up and went over to the door that led out onto the balcony. “Let’s go out.”
“Out? It’ll be hot, Cal, you won’t like it.”
“I mean really out. Leave your key on the table.”
I knew then what she had planned for us. I glanced over at the tutorial that was still playing through, and bit my lip. Callie hissed with impatience. “Come on! We’ve got to be there in ten minutes!”
Well, it’s Callie’s home, and I’m the guest, so I unclipped my key from my belt, and put in on the table next to her tracker. Off we went, leaving the tutor talking to the empty room, and all the while our accounts were racking up the study points for the modules he laboured through.
We walked down the main lane that runs through the estate. All the houses are on one side and the school stuff on the other. We went past the arts block and then along by the tennis courts where the teams were out practicing. We were heading roughly toward the cinema, but before we got there, Callie led me down a side path. We cut through some bushes, and soon we came to the wall, smooth and tall and impregnable. Except for a gap where it ended and the railings began where the bushes hadn’t grown thick. Someone very slim could slip through. So we did.
We started down the road into town. There was still pavement most of the way, although in some places it had gone completely and there was only dust. Callie was already complaining about her shoes. The road was walled on either side of its entire length, the back of our estate and another one, and I think some government agency has houses round here. I’d been down this road in the car hundreds of times, but it’s a lot different up close with those walls looming over you. The not-so-homely home counties. After about five minutes, Callie stopped by an old bus shelter and said, “Okay, now we wait.”
“Are we getting the bus, Cal?”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“I don’t have any actual money, that’s all—”
“Don’t be stupid.”
A couple of cars sped past, and each time my heart jumped—I look young for fifteen and you don’t tend to see people hanging around much on the main roads. But soon enough a car pulled up, and this guy—nineteen, maybe twenty—leaned out. “Hi, Cal,” he said. “Hop in.” He looked at me, hanging back, and laughed. “And your little friend too, if she’s coming.” I went red and scrambled into the back while Callie graced the passenger seat.
If we’re speaking geographically, I’ve no idea where we went, but it was a party, of course, and it was up in a second-floor flat. Music was thumping out of the open windows and inside it was all sweat and noise and bodies. How Callie finds out about this kind of thing I don’t know, but somehow she manages. She was in the thick of it straight away, but I stayed back near the drinks table and tried not to look conspicuous.
It wasn’t long before some guy started talking to me—well, yelling, really; he had to, over the music. “You from that estate up the road? The one with the school?”
“Yeah.”
“Very nice.” He was tanned, and when he smiled I noticed his bottom teeth were slightly crooked.
I shrugged. “It’s all right.” Usually I can do more than monosyllables, but it was really noisy and his smile had made me feel self-conscious. “Bit dull.”
“I bet.” He nodded at Callie. “That your friend?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s something else, isn’t she?”
That’s me—gateway to Callie. I did what I was there for and introduced them, although he didn’t get very far with her, because about five minutes after that the police kicked the door in and started yanking us all out. They’d put an emergency dispersal order on the place. I suppose one of the neighbours had got fed up with the noise.
The police pulled me and Callie out of the crowd right away. It’s not that they profile, but … look, I know it sounds bad, but a lot’s been spent on the two of us, from before we were conceived, and our skin looks good and our hair looks good and our teeth look good, and … you can just tell, all right? That there’s money around. As we were taken off to a car everyone else was being piled into vans. I saw the guy we’d been talking to, and he shrugged at me and gave me his crooked smile, as if to say, “What can you do?” When we got to the station, a policewoman made us tea while Callie’s mother drove out to get us. She was laughing and apologizing as she paid the fine, but once we were in the car it came out about the tracker and that was the cue for tears and shouting.
“I’m particularly disappointed in you, Miranda.” Mrs. Banville glared back at me in the rearview mirror. She’s monstrous; done far too much to her face. “I would have expected you to have shown more sense. For gratitude’s sake, if nothing else.”
I stared out of the window at the walls speeding past. Of course. I’m supposed to be glad to have a home. But what could she expect, from someone with my background?
“The whole idea,” Penny said later, “is to keep you safe.” They were in Bombay—or was it L.A.? I didn’t quite catch it. They move around a lot because they can’t live here and won’t get citizenship anywhere else out of principle.
“I know …”
“The Banvilles are being exceptionally kind letting you stay with them.”
“I know …”
“I know we can’t always be perfect, Em, but you really shouldn’t be causing them any trouble.”
A tiny white scar had formed on my fingertip, like the shadow of the crescent of my nail. Most of the time I’m never quite sure where they are. Why can’t I go exploring for once?
“What we need to consider now are your options,” Fran said. “The school’s saying they’ll have to invalidate all this year’s marks.”
That stupid tutorial. If only I’d switched it off before we left. “I did that once!”
“We believe you, Em,” Penny said, kindly. Talking to them together can be like good cop, bad cop. One with the teapot, the other with the van. “But we’re not the ones handing out the marks. As far as the school can tell, every single one of your credits this year hasn’t actually been earned.”
I slumped back in my chair. All that work. Sometimes I could murder Callie. But who’d look after her, if I didn’t?
“So here’s what I’ve got planned,” Fran said, laying it out briskly, clearly, and with no room for argument. This is why she makes so much money as a lawyer. Penny winked at me like she always does when Fran gets going, but I felt too miserable to wink back. “I’ve
got a much better plan,” I said, when Fran finished. “I come and join you and we can be a family again.”
My mothers glanced at each other. “Em,” Penny said, “I know you think it’d be chic, and cosmopolitan, but actually it’s dreary. Plane, hotel, plane, hotel—you can’t tell one from the other.”
“This way you’re getting a proper education,” Fran said.
“Both of us are working all the hours god sends, sweetheart—you’d be alone most of the time, you’d get bored, and lonely—”
“Not to mention you’re getting the passport, and I surely don’t need to outline the tangible benefits of that—”
“You’ll be at college soon, love. Then you won’t want to bother with us at all.”
See what I mean? After all that, saying, “but I’d still rather be with you,” just sounds lame, so I said nothing, and studied my tiny scar. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them look at each other and smile. Mother’s face softened, Mum’s went sort of serene. They’re still crazy about each other, even after all this time, and all the trouble. I think that scares me most—that maybe now I’m not there, they’re discovering how much I got in the way. That maybe they shouldn’t have gone to all the bother of having me in the first place.
The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 18
