The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Watching this action, Jael was not entirely sure which side she wanted to win. If the Prador took out the two remaining golem they would go after the Atheter in the chamber behind her. Maybe they would just ignore her, maybe they would kill her out of hand. If the golem finished off the Prador they might turn their attention on her. And she really did not know what to expect from whatever now controlled them. Retreating and finding some other way out was not an option—she had already scanned Penny Royal’s network of tunnels and knew that any other route back to Kobashi would require a diversion of some miles, and she rather suspected that thing back there would not give her the time.

  The decoy second-child lucked out with the next golem, or rather it lucked out with its elder kin. Firing its rail-gun into the gap between a spherical electric furnace and the wall, where one of the golem was crouching, the second-child advanced. The golem shot out underneath the furnace toward the Prador child. A turquoise bar stabbed out, nailing the golem, but it passed through the second-child on the way. An oily explosion centered on a mass of legs collapsed out of sight. The first-child used its other claw to nudge out its final sibling into play. The remaining golem, however, which Jael had earlier seen on the far side of the room, dropped down from above to land between them.

  It happened almost too fast to follow. The golem spun, and in a spray of green the second-child slid in half along a diagonal cut straight through its body. The first-child’s claw and half its armored visual turret and enclosing visor fell away. Its fluids fountained out as it fell forward, swung in its remaining claw, and bore down. The golem collapsed, pinned to the floor under the claw containing the particle weapon. A turquoise explosion followed underneath the collapsing Prador, then oily flames belched out.

  Jael remained where she was, watching carefully. She scanned around the chamber, but there seemed no sign of any more of those horrible golem. The Prador just lay there, its legs sprawled, its weaponized claw trapped underneath it, its now exposed mandibles grinding, ichor still flowing from the huge incision from its visual turret. Jael realized she couldn’t have hoped for a better outcome. After a moment she stepped out, her weapon trained on the Prador.

  “Jael Feogril,” its translator intoned, and it began scrabbling to try and get some purchase on the slick floor.

  “That’s me,” said Jael, and fired two explosive rounds straight into its mouth. The two detonations weren’t enough to break open the Prador’s enclosing artificial armor, but their force escaped. Torn flesh, organs, ichor, and shattered carapace gushed from the hole the golem had cut. Jael stood there for a moment, hardly able to see through the green sludge on her visor. She peered down at something like a chunk of liver hanging over her arm, and pulled it away. Yes, a satisfactory outcome, apart from the mess.

  “Jael Feogril,” said a different voice. “Drop the gun, or I cut off your legs.”

  I was telling myself at the time that I needed detail on the location of the memstore. Rubbish, of course. The energy readings had located it in the chamber beyond— somewhere near to the gabbleduck. I should have just fried her on the spot then gone on to search. Twenty years earlier I would have, but now I was less tuned-in to the exigencies of surviving this sort of game. Okay, I was rusty. She froze, seemed about to turn, then thought better of it and dropped the weapon she’d just used to splash that Prador.

  With Gene walking out to my left, I moved forward, crosshairs centered on Jael’s torso. What did I want? Some grandstanding, some satisfaction in seeing her shock at meeting someone she’d left for dead, a moment or two to gloat before I did to her what she had done to the first-child? Yeah, sure I did.

  With her hands held out from her body, she turned. It annoyed me that I couldn’t see her face. Glancing up I saw that the beetlebots had about closed off the hole, because the earlier wind had now diminished to a breeze.

  “Take off your helmet,” I ordered.

  She reached up and undogged the manual outer clips, lifted the helmet carefully, then lowered it to clip it to her belt. Pointless move—she wouldn’t be needing it again. Glancing aside I saw that Gene had moved in closer to me. No need to cover me now, I guessed.

  “Well, hello, Rho,” said Jael, showing absolutely no surprise on seeing me at all. She smiled. It was that smile, the same smile I had seen from her while she had peeled strips of skin from my torso.

  “Goodbye, Jael,” I said.

  The flicker of a high-intensity laser punched smoke, something slapped my multigun, and molten metal sprayed, leaving white trails written across the air.

  “Total malfunction. Safe mode—power down,” my helmet display informed me. I pulled the trigger anyway, then gazed down in bewilderment at the slagged hole through the weapon.

  “Mine, I think,” said Jael, stooping in one to pick up her weapon and fire. Same explosive shell she’d used against the Prador. It thumped into my chest, hurling me back, then detonated as it ricocheted away. The blast flung me up, trailing flame and smoke, then I crashed down feeling as if I’d been stepped on by some irate giant. My chainglass visor was gone and something was sizzling ominously inside my suit. Armored plates were peeled up from my arm, which I could see stretched out ahead of me, and my gauntlet was missing.

  “What the fuck are you doing here with him?” Jael inquired angrily.

  “He turned up on Arena before I left,” Gene replied. “Just to be on the safe side I was keeping to the Pens until Penny Royal’s golem left.”

  “And you consider that an adequate explanation?”

  “I put Arena Security onto him, but he somehow escaped them and ambushed me outside.” Gene sounded somewhat chagrined. “I let him persuade me to give him the U-signal code from the gabbleduck.”

  I turned my head slightly but only got a view of tangled metal and a few silver golem bones. “Ulriss,” I whispered, but received only a slight buzzing in response.

  “So much for your wonderful ECS training.”

  “It was enough to convince him that I still worked for them.”

  So, no ECS action here, no Polity dreadnought on the way. I thought about that encounter I’d seen between the Prador cruiser and the dreadnought. I’d told Gene about it and she’d used the information against me, convincing me that the Polity was involved. Of course, what I’d seen was the kind of saber-rattling confrontation between Prador and Polity that had been going on in the Graveyard for years.

  “What’s the situation here?” Gene asked.

  “Fucked,” Jael replied. “Something’s intervened. We have to get out of here now.”

  I heard the sounds of movement. They were going away, so I might survive this. Then the sounds ceased too abruptly.

  “You used an explosive shell,” Gene noted from close by.

  “What?”

  “He’s still alive.”

  “Well,” said Jael, “that’s a problem soon solved.”

  Her boots crunched on the floor as she approached, and gave me her location. I reached out with my bare hand and slid it into slick silvery metal. Finger controls there. I clamped down on them and saw something shimmering deep into twisted metal.

  “Collar!” I said, more in hope than expectation, before heaving myself upright. Jael stood over me, and beyond her I saw Gene reach up toward her neck, then abruptly drop to the floor. I swung my arm across as Jael began to bring her multigun up to her shoulder. A slight tug—that was all. She stood there a moment longer, still aiming at me, then her head lifted and fell back, attached still at the back of her neck by skin only, and a red stream shot upward. Air hissing from her severed trachea, she toppled.

  I carefully lifted my fingers from the controls of the golem weapon, then caught my breath, only now feeling as if someone had worked me over from head to foot with a baseball bat. Slowly climbing to my feet I expected to feel the pain of a broken bone somewhere, but there was nothing like that. No need to check on Jael’s condition, so I walked over to Gene. She was unconscious and would be for some tim
e. I stooped over her and unplugged the power cable and control optics of her weapon from her suit, then plugged them into mine. No response and of course no visor readout. I set the weapon to manual and turned away. I decided that once I’d retrieved the memstore—if that was possible—I would come back in here and take her suit, because mine certainly would not get me to Ulriss Fire.

  The hum of power and the feeling of distorted perception associated with U-jumping greeted me. I don’t know what that thing was poised over the gabbleduck, nor did I know what kind of force-field surrounded it and that other entity that seemed the bastard offspring of a sea urchin and an octopus. But the poised thing was fading, and as it finally disappeared, the field winked out and numerous objects crashed to the floor.

  I moved forward, used the snout of my weapon to lift one tentacle, and then watched it flop back. Penny Royal, I guessed. It was slumped across the floor beams and other machinery here. The gabbleduck turned its head as if noticing me for the first time, but it showed no particular signs of hostility, nor did it seem to show any signs of it containing some formidable alien intelligence. I felt sure the experiment here had failed, or rather, had been curtailed in some way. Something’s intervened, Jael had said. Nevertheless, I kept my attention focused on the creature as I searched for and finally found the memstore. It was fried but I pocketed it anyway, for it was my find, not something ECS had put in the path of my sifting machine.

  Returning to the other chamber, I there stripped Gene of her spacesuit and donned it myself.

  “Ulriss, we can talk now.”

  “Ah, you are still alive,” the AI replied. “I was already composing your obituary.”

  “You’re just a bundle of laughs. You know that?”

  “I am bursting with curiosity and try to hide that in levity.”

  I explained the situation to which Ulriss replied, “I have put out a call to the Polity dreadnought we sighted and given it this location.”

  “Should we hang around?”

  “There will be questions ECS will want to ask, but I don’t see why we should put ourselves at their disposal. Let their agents find us.”

  “Quite right,” I replied.

  I bagged up a few items, like that golem weapon, and was about to head back to my ship when I glanced back and saw the gabbleduck crouching in the tunnel behind.

  “Sherber grodge,” it informed me.

  Heading back the way I’d come into this hellhole, I kept checking back on the thing. Gabbleducks don’t eat people apparently—they just chew them up and spit them out. This one followed me like a lost puppy and every time I stopped it stopped too and sat on its hindquarters, occasionally issuing some nonsensical statement. I got the real weird feeling, which went against all my training and experience, that this creature was harmless to me. I shook my head. Ridiculous. Anyway, I’d lose it at the airlock.

  When I did finally reach the airlock and began closing that inner door, one big black claw closed around the edge and pulled it open again. I raised my gun, crosshairs targeting that array of eyes, but I just could not pull the trigger. The gabbleduck entered the airlock and sat there, close enough to touch and close enough for me to fry if it went for me. What now? If I opened the outer airlock door the creature would die. Before I could think of what to do, a multijointed arm reached back and heaved the inner door closed, while the other arm hauled up the manual handle of the outer door, and the lock air pressure blew us staggering into the pipe beyond.

  I discovered that gabbleducks can survive in vacuum … or at least this one can.

  Later, when I ordered Ulriss to open the door to the small hold of my ship, the gabbleduck waddled meekly inside. I thought then that perhaps something from the memstore had stuck. I wasn’t sure—certainly this gabbleduck was not behaving like its kind on Masada.

  I also discovered that gabbleducks will eat raw recon bacon.

  I hold the fried memstore and think about what it might have contained, and what the fact of its existence means. A memstore for an Atheter mind goes contrary to the supposed nihilism of that race. A race so nihilistic could never have created a space-faring civilization, so that darkness must have spread amid them in their last days. The Atheter recorded in the memstore could not have been one of the kind that wanted to destroy itself, surely?

  I’m taking the gabbleduck back to Masada—I feel utterly certain now that it wants me to do this. I also feel certain that to do otherwise might not be a good idea.

  The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate

  TED CHIANG

  Ted Chiang has made a big impact on the field with only a handful of stories, five stories all told, published in places such as Omni, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Full Spectrum 3, Starlight 2, and Vanishing Acts. He won the 1990 Nebula Award with his first published story “Tower of Babylon,” and won the 1991 Asimov’s Readers Award with his third, “Understand,” as well as winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in that same year. After 1991, he fell silent for several years before making a triumphant return in 1998 with the novella, “Story of Your Life,” which won him another Nebula Award in 1999. Since then, he returned in 2000 with another major story, “Seventy-Two Letters,” which was a finalist for the Hugo and for the World Fantasy Award, with “Hell Is the Absence of God” in 2001, which won him another Hugo and a Nebula Award, and in 2002 with “Liking What You See: A Documentary.” The same year, his first short-story collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, was published, and won the Locus Award as the year’s Best Collection. His most recent book is the chapbook The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. It will be interesting to see how he develops in the decade to come, as he could well turn out to be one of the significant new talents of the new century. He lives in Kirkland, Washington.

  In the crafty, intricate, and richly ornamented story that follows, he shows us that gates can take you to many places, but not always to where you really want to go … .

  O Mighty Caliph and Commander of the Faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence; a man can hope for no greater blessing as long as he lives. The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one’s eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.

  My name is Fuwaad ibn Abbas, and I was born here in Baghdad, City of Peace. My father was a grain merchant, but for much of my life I have worked as a purveyor of fine fabrics, trading in silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold. I was prosperous, but my heart was troubled, and neither the purchase of luxuries nor the giving of alms was able to soothe it. Now I stand before you without a single dirham in my purse, but I am at peace.

  Allah is the beginning of all things, but with Your Majesty’s permission, I begin my story with the day I took a walk through the district of metalsmiths. I needed to purchase a gift for a man I had to do business with, and had been told he might appreciate a tray made of silver. After browsing for half an hour, I noticed that one of the largest shops in the market had been taken over by a new merchant. It was a prized location that must have been expensive to acquire, so I entered to peruse its wares.

  Never before had I seen such a marvelous assortment of goods. Near the entrance there was an astrolabe equipped with seven plates inlaid with silver, a water-clock that chimed on the hour, and a nightingale made of brass that sang when the wind blew. Farther inside there were even more ingenious mechanisms, and I stared at them the way a child watches a juggler, when an old man stepped out from a doorway in the back.

  “Welcome to my humble shop, my lord,” he said. “My name is Bashaarat. How may I assist you?”

  “These are remarkable items that you have for sale. I deal with traders from every corner of the world, and yet I have never seen their like. From where, may I ask, did you acquire your merchandise?”

 
“I am grateful to you for your kind words,” he said. “Everything you see here was made in my workshop, by myself or by my assistants under my direction.”

  I was impressed that this man could be so well versed in so many arts. I asked him about the various instruments in his shop, and listened to him discourse learnedly about astrology, mathematics, geomancy, and medicine. We spoke for over an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn, until he mentioned his experiments in alchemy.

  “Alchemy?” I said. This surprised me, for he did not seem the type to make such a sharper’s claim. “You mean you can turn base metal into gold?”

  “I can, my lord, but that is not in fact what most seek from alchemy.”

  “What do most seek, then?”

  “They seek a source of gold that is cheaper than mining ore from the ground. Alchemy does describe a means to make gold, but the procedure is so arduous that, by comparison, digging beneath a mountain is as easy as plucking peaches from a tree.”

  I smiled. “A clever reply. No one could dispute that you are a learned man, but I know better than to credit alchemy.”

  Bashaarat looked at me and considered. “I have recently built something that may change your opinion. You would be the first person I have shown it to. Would you care to see it?”

  “It would be a great pleasure.”

  “Please follow me.” He led me through the doorway in the rear of his shop. The next room was a workshop, arrayed with devices whose functions I could not guess—bars of metal wrapped with enough copper thread to reach the horizon, mirrors mounted on a circular slab of granite floating in quicksilver—but Bashaarat walked past these without a glance.

  Instead he led me to a sturdy pedestal, chest high, on which a stout metal hoop was mounted upright. The hoop’s opening was as wide as two outstretched hands, and its rim so thick that it would tax the strongest man to carry. The metal was black as night, but polished to such smoothness that, had it been a different color, it could have served as a mirror. Bashaarat bade me stand so that I looked upon the hoop edgewise, while he stood next to its opening.