The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  Powpy turned to look at Mina. "She will not stay here. This girl, MinaAndry. Her home is on the Shelf. Her family, the Andry-Feri, is an ancient dynasty. She has responsibilities, to bear sons and daughters. That is her destiny. Not here."

  "I will stay if I wish," Mina said. She was trembling, Telni saw, evidently terrified of the Weapon, this strange, ancient, wild machine from the dark Lowland. Yet she was facing it, answering it back.

  Telni found himself snarling, "Maybe she'll bear my sons and daughters."

  "No," said the boy.

  "What do you mean, no?"

  "She is not suitable for you."

  "She's a scholar from Foro! She's from the stock you brought here in the first place."

  "It is highly unlikely that she has an Effigy, as few in her family do. Your partner should have an Effigy. That is why—"

  "Selective breeding," Mina gasped. "It's true. This machine really is breeding humans like cattle . . . "

  "I don't care about Effigies," Telni yelled. "I don't care about you and your stupid projects." He stalked over to the boy, who stood trembling, clearly afraid, yet unable to move from the spot.

  "Telni, don't," Mina called.

  The boy said calmly, "Already you have done good and insightful work which—"

  Telni struck, a hard clap with his open hand to the side of the boy's head. Powpy went down squealing.

  Mina rushed forward and pushed herself between Telni and the boy. "What have you done?"

  "He, it—all my life—"

  "Is that this boy's fault? Oh, get away, you fool." She knelt down and cradled the child's head on her lap. With the umbilical still dangling from the back of his neck, Powpy was crying, in a strange, contained way. "He's going to bruise. I think you may have damaged his ear. And his jaw—no, child, don't try to talk." She turned to the Weapon, which hovered impassively. "Don't make him speak for you again. He's hurt."

  Telni opened his hands. "Mina, please—"

  "Are you still here?" she snarled. "Go get help. Or if you can't do that, just go away. Go!"

  He knew he had lost her, in this one moment, this one foolish blow.

  He turned away and headed towards the Platform's hospital to find a nurse.

  The little boy walked into Terni's cell, trailing a silvery rope from the back of his neck.

  Telni was huddled up in his bunk, a spindling-skin blanket over his body. He was shivering, drying out, not for the first time. He scowled at the boy. "You again."

  "Be fair," the boy said. "We have not troubled you for twenty years."

  "Not for you." His figuring was cloudy. "Down on Lowland, less than a year—"

  "This boy is not yet healed."

  Telni saw his face was distorted on the right-hand side. "I apologize." He sat up. "I apologize to you—what in the blue was your name?"

  "Powpy."

  "I apologize to you, Powpy. Not to the thing that controls you. Where is it, by the way?"

  "It would not fit through the door."

  He lay back and laughed.

  "We did not expect to find you here."

  "In the drunk tank? Well, I got fired by the apothecary for emptying her drug cabinet one too many times. So it was the drink for me." He patted his belly. "At least it's putting fat on my bones."

  "Why this slow self-destruction?"

  "Call it an experiment. I'm following in my father's footsteps, aren't I? After all, thanks to you, I have no more chance of happiness, of meaning in my life, than he did. And besides, it's all going to finish in a big smash soon, isn't it? As you smart machines no doubt know already."

  It didn't respond to that immediately. "You never had a wife. Children."

  "Sooner no kids at all than to breed at your behest."

  "You have long lost contact with MinaAndry."

  "You could say that." When the month-long tour of the Shelf Philosophers was concluded, she had gone home with them, leaping seventeen months to continue her interrupted life on Foro. Since then, the accelerated time of the Shelf had whisked her away from him forever. "After—what, three hundred and forty years up there?—she's dust, her descendants won't remember her, even the language she spoke will be half-forgotten. The dead get deader, you know, as every trace of their existence is expunged. That's one thing life on Old Earth has taught us. What do you want, anyway?"

  "Your research into the Formidable Caress."

  "If you can call it research."

  "Your work is good, from what we have seen of that portion you have shared with other scholars. You cannot help but do good work, Telni. The curiosity I saw burning in that ten-year-old boy, long ago, is still bright."

  "Don't try to analyze me, you—thing."

  "Tell me what you have discovered . . . "

  After his discovery of the huge rate at which the inhabitants of Old Earth were plummeting into the future, Telni had become interested in spans of history. On the Shelf, written records went back some four thousand years of local time. These records had been compiled by a new civilization rising from the rubble of an older culture, itself wrecked by a disaster known as the Formidable Caress, thought to have occurred some six thousand years before that.

  "But in the external universe," Telni said, "ten thousand Shelf years corresponds to over three billion years. So much I deduced from my pendulums, swinging away amid streams of spindling shit and cargo jockey piss . . . Everybody has always thought that the Caresses come about from local events. Something to do with the planet itself. But three billion years is long enough for events to unfold on a wider scale. Time enough, according to what Shelf scholars have reconstructed, for stars to be born and to die, for whole galaxies to swim and jostle . . . I wondered if the Caresses could have some cosmic cause."

  "So you started to correspond with scholars on the Shelf."

  "Yes. After that first visit by Mina's party we kept up a regular link, with visits from them once every couple of years for us, once a generation for them . . . " It had helped that six hundred years after the shock of the War of the Cities, the Shelf cities had not indulged in another bout of warfare on any significant scale. "I spoke to the astronomers over there, about what they saw in the sky. And their archaeologists, for what had been seen in the past. There was always snobbishness, you know. Those of us down in the red think we are better because we are closer to the original stock of Old Earth; those up in the blue believe they are superior products of evolution. None of that bothered me. And as their generations ticked by, I think I helped shape whole agendas of academic research by my sheer persistence."

  "It must have been a rewarding time for you."

  "Academically, yeah. I've never had any problem, academically. It's the rest of my life that's a piece of shit."

  "Tell us what you discovered."

  "I don't have my notes, my books—"

  "Just tell us."

  He sat up and stared into the face of the eerily unchanged boy—who, to his credit, did not flinch. "The first Caress destroyed almost everything of what went before, on the Shelf and presumably elsewhere. Almost, but not all. Some trace inscriptions, particularly carvings on stone, have survived. Images, fragmentary, and bits of text. Records of something in the sky."

  "What something?"

  "The Galaxy is a disc of stars, a spiral. We, on a planet embedded in the disc, see this in cross-section, as a band of light in the sky. Much of it obscured by dust."

  "And?"

  "The ancients' last records show two bands, at an angle to each other. There is evidence that the second band grew brighter, more prominent. The chronological sequence is difficult to establish—the best of these pieces were robbed and used as hearths or altar stones by the fallen generations that followed . . . "

  "Nevertheless," the boy prompted.

  "Nevertheless, there is evidence that something came from out of the sky. Something huge. And then there are crude, fragmentary images—cartoons, really—of explosions. All over the sky. A million suns, sudd
enly appearing." He imagined survivors, huddled in the ruins of their cities, scratching what they saw into fallen stones. "After that—nothing, for generations. People were too busy reinventing agriculture to do much astronomy. That was ten thousand years ago.

  "The next bit of evidence comes from around three thousand years back, when a Natural Philosopher called HuroEldon established a new centre of scholarship, at Foro and down on the Lowland . . . Once again we started getting good astronomical records. And about that time, they observed in the sky—"

  "Another band of stars."

  "No. A spiral—a spiral of stars, ragged, the stars burning and dying, a wheel turning around a point of intense brightness. This object swam towards Old Earth, so it seemed, and at its closest approach there was a flare of dazzling new stars, speckled over the sky—but there was no Caress, not this time. The spiral receded into the dark."

  "Tell us what you believe this means."

  "I think it's clear. This other spiral is a galaxy like our own. The two orbit each other." He mimed this with his fists, but his hands were shaking; shamed before the boy's steady gaze, he lowered his arms. "As twin stars may orbit one another. But galaxies are big, diffuse structures. They must tear at each other, ripping open those lacy spirals. Perhaps when they brush, they create bursts of starbirth. A Formidable Caress indeed.

  "The last Caress was a first pass, when the second galaxy came close enough to our part of our spiral to cause a great flaring of stars—and that flaring, a rain of light falling from the blue, was what shattered our world. Then in HuroEldon's time, two billion years later, there was another approach—this one not so close; it was spectacular but did no damage, not to us. And then . . . "

  "Yes?"

  He shrugged, peering up at the construction-material roof of the cell. "The sky is ragged, full of ripped-apart spiral arms. The two galaxies continue to circle each other, perhaps heading for a full merger, a final smash. And that, perhaps, will cause a new starburst flare, a new Caress."

  The boy stood silently, considering this, though one leg quivered, as if itchy. He asked: "When?"

  "That I don't know. I tried to do some mathematics on the orbit. Long time since I stayed sober enough to see that through. But there's one more scrap of information in the archaeology. There was always a tradition that the second Caress would follow ten thousand years after the first, Shelf time. Maybe that's a memory of what the smart folk who lived before the first Caress were able to calculate. They knew, not only about the Caress that threatened them, but also what would follow. Remarkable, really."

  "Ten thousand years," the boy said. "Which is—"

  "About now." He grinned. "If the world ends, do you think they will let me out of here to see the show?"

  "You have done remarkable work, Telni. This is a body of evidence extracted from human culture which we could not have assembled for ourselves." Even as he spoke the boy trembled, and Telni saw piss swim down his bare leg.

  Telni snorted. "You really aren't too good at running the people you herd, are you, machine?"

  Ignoring the dribble on his leg, Powpy spoke on. "Regarding the work, however. We are adept at calculation. Perhaps we can take these hints and reconstruct the ancients' computations, or even improve on them."

  "So you'll know the precise date of the end of the world. That will help. Come back and tell me what you figure out."

  "We will." The boy turned and walked away, leaving piss footprints on the smooth floor.

  Telni laughed at him, lay back on his bunk, and tried to sleep.

  It was to be a very long time before Telni saw the Weapon and its human attendant again.

  "He refuses to die. It's as simple as that. There's nothing but his own stubbornness keeping him alive."

  His hearing was so bad now that it was as if his ears were stuffed full of wool. But, lying there on his pallet, he could hear every word they said.

  And, though he needed a lot of sleep now, he was aware when they moved him into the Morgue, ready for him to die, ready to capture his Effigy-spirit when it was released from his seventy-two-year-old body. "You can wheel me in here if you like, you bastards." He tried to laugh, but it just made him cough. "I'm just going to lie here as long as it takes."

  "As long as it takes for what?"

  "For it to come back again."

  But, more than thirty years since his last visitation, only a handful of the medical staff knew what he was talking about.

  In the end, of course, it came.

  He woke from another drugged sleep to find a little boy standing beside his bed. He struggled to sit up. "Hey, Powpy. How's it going with you? For you it must be, what, a year since last time? You've grown. You're not afraid of me, are you? Look, I'm old and disgusting, but at least I can't slap you around the head any more, can I?"

  He thought he saw a flicker of something in the boy's eyes. Forgiveness? Pity? Contempt? Well, he deserved the latter. But then the kid spoke in that odd monotone, so familiar even after all these years. "We were here at the beginning of your life. Now here we are at the end."

  "Yes." He tried to snap his fingers, failed. "Just another spark in the flames for you, right? And now you've come to see me give up my Effigy so you can trap it in this box of yours."

  "We would not describe it as—"

  He grabbed the boy's arm, trying to grip hard. "Listen, Weapon. You can have my Effigy. What do I care? But I'm not going to die like this. Not here, not now."

  "Then where, and when?"

  "Fifty years," he whispered. He glanced at the medical staff, who hovered at the edges of the Building. "I did my own calculations. Took me ten years. Well, I had nothing better to do . . . Fifty years, right? That's all we've got left, until the fireworks."

  The boy said gravely, "We imagine our model of the galaxies' interaction is somewhat more sophisticated than yours. But your answer is substantially correct. You understand that this Caress will be different. Those on the Platform will survive. The construction material of the Buildings will shelter them. That was one purpose of the Platform in the first place. And from this seed the recovery after the Caress should be much more rapid."

  "But the cities of the Shelf—Foro, Puul—"

  "People will survive in caves, underground. But the vast loss of life, the destruction of the ecology, their agricultural support—"

  "Well, it serves those bastards right. They lost interest in talking to me decades ago." Which was true. But since the War of the Cities there had been a thousand years of peace on the Shelf, all of which he'd lived through—incredible to be a witness to so much history—and they had built something beautiful and splendid up there, a chain of cities like jewels in the night. In his head he imagined a race of Minas, beautiful, clear-eyed, laughing. "Well. There's nothing I can do for them." He struggled to sit straighter. "But there's something I want you to do for me. You owe me, you artifact. I did everything you asked of me, and more. Now you're going to take away my soul. Well, you can have it. But you can give me something back in return. I want to see the Caress."

  "You have only weeks to live. Days, perhaps."

  "Take me down into the red. No matter how little time I have left, you can find a pit deep enough on this time-shifted world to squeeze in fifty Platform years." Exhausted, he fell back coughing; a nurse hurried over to catch him and lower him gently to his blankets. "And one more thing."

  "More demands?"

  "Let this boy go."

  When Telni woke again, he found himself staring up at a sky of swirling blue stars. "Made it, by my own blueshifted arse."

  A face hovered over him, a woman's. "Don't try to move."

  "You're in the way." He tried to sit up, failed, but kept struggling until she helped him up and he could see.

  He was on a plain—on the ground, his pallet set on red, rusty dirt, down on the ground for the first time in his life. Something like a rail track curled across his view. Buildings of construction material were scattered around
like a giant's toys. He got the immediate sense this was a kind of camp, not permanent.

  And figures moved in the distance. At first sight they looked human. But then something startled them, and they bucked and fled, on six legs.

  "What are those?"

  "They are called Centaurs." Powpy was standing beside him, his neck umbilical connecting him to the Weapon, which hovered as impassive as ever, though a little rusty dirt clung to its sleek hide. "Human hybrids."

  "You were going to let this kid go."

  "He will be released," said the woman sternly. "My name's Ama, by the way."

  Which had been his mother's name. He felt a stab of obscure guilt. "Glad to meet you."

  "You should be. I'm a nurse. I volunteered to stay with you, to keep you alive when they brought you down here."

  "No family, I take it."

  "Not any more. And when this business is done, I'll be taking Powpy here back up top, to the Platform."

  "His mother and father—"

  "Long dead," she whispered.

  "We're all orphans here, then."

  Powpy said solemnly, "We will have to shelter in a construction-material Building to ride out the Caress. We are deep enough that it should be brief—"

  "How deep?"

  "We are on the Abyss. Once the bed of a deep ocean. Below the offshore plains you call the Lowland . . . Deep enough."

  "Nice sky."

  "Most of the stars' radiation is blueshifted far beyond your capacity to see it."

  "And how long—ow!" There was a sharp pain in his chest.

  Ama grabbed him and lowered him back against a heap of pillows. "Just take it easy. That was another heart attack."

  "Another . . . "

  "They've been coming thick and fast."

  "That Weapon won't want me dying out in the open. Not after all this."

  "We have a Morgue designated just over there," Ama said. "Your bed's on wheels."

  "Good planning."

  "Not long now," murmured Powpy.

  But he, the boy, wasn't looking at the sky. Telni touched Poppy's chin, and lifted his face. "He should see this for himself."