The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Then she would slow her breathing and heartbeat, and wait for the perfect calm when her chi settled into tan tien, and see only in her mind’s eye the screens, matrices, graphs, and equations, and endlessly devise graphs to portray, and statistics to measure, the recursion and circularity of her own thoughts, and consider whether thoughts about recursion should be intrinsically, or just accidentally, more or less recursive than other thoughts, and watch as all those thoughts drifted down onto the unknown, unknowing surfaces of those first known-to-be-unanswerable questions.

  When she was finally cool and beautiful inside, she would softly ask the opsball to let the stars dim out, watch them till the last star was gone from the blackness, then swim back to Mtepic’s quarters, where she would often find him sleeping fitfully and uneasily, drifting all over the compartment because he had fallen asleep outside the sleepsack. Then she would bathe him and rub him till he fell asleep smiling, and curl up against him for lovely, deep, dreamless sleep. The nightmares of her childhood were mostly gone now, and no more than pale shadows when they returned.

  * * * *

  In the Sigdracone system, she still had enough of her gravity-bone to stand up and raise her hand, down on the surface of Aloysio, and receive her freedom under the open air. She wasn’t quite sure why she chose to do that. It all seemed so harsh and uncomfortable and when she returned to the ship, it felt as if she really received her freedom at the dinner they had for her. Though they treated her just as they always had, as an equal, it mattered to her that now they were supposed to.

  She affirmed and they voiceprinted it, making Xhrina a shareholder in 9743, backvested with all the equity that she had built up in the trust fund they had kept for her, while she had not been allowed to own property in case the ship had to touch base, and face a books inspection, on a Karkh-Convention world. They drank a toast.

  The slowtime people at Aloysio wanted a total cargo changeover, something that only happened once in a century or so of eintime. An organization that the translators called the “Aloysio Museum of Spiritual Anger Corporation” bought the whole cargo, and sold 9743 an entirely new cargo: 1,024 cubes, sixty meters on a side, with identifier strips on every face.

  None of 9743’s ship people had known in a long time what ships carried, except that they never carried slaves, because they refused to, or any living thing that needed tending, because none of them wanted to learn how. So they knew the containers in the hold had nothing alive, or at least nothing actively alive, in them.

  Other than that they knew nothing; over the slow correspondence of decades between ship people on other ships, there was an eternal argument about why no crew knew what was in the cargo. Some said it was because in the wars of fifteen thousand years ago, a tradition had been established that no ship people were ever to be responsible for anything they carried. Others said it was simply that the hundreds of thousands of cultures in slowtime changed so much and so fast compared with ship people that no one could have understood what the cargo was anyway. And still others said that the people on the worlds did not trust ship people not to steal it if they knew what it was, but most people said that was the silliest of all ideas, since anyone knew that the most valuable thing on a ship was hold space, and who would want to keep cargo and never be able to use the hold space again? Or who would buy or sell something when all contracts were broadcast openly, and it would be obvious to anyone that it was stolen?

  Actually even if she had known, she would not have cared what was in the cargo. She did know where the cargo was going—that was what a mathematician did, after all—and she liked that very much. The ship would be making a very long haul, out into the north polar section of the Third Pulse worlds, where the inhabited stars were too distant to have ancient names because they had not been naked-eye visible from Earth, and so had been named for abstract qualities by the Second Pulse surveyors; she loved the idea that the suns all had names like Perspicacity, Charity, and Preternaturalness. And it would be six years eintime before their next system entry, perhaps more if the PPDs broke right.

  On her twenty-ninth birthday, they were outbound and life had settled into the most comfortable of routines; after the small gifts and the warm feeling of attention, she rubbed Mtepic to sleep—he was just a soft, thin cover of lumpy bones, anymore, she thought—and drifted off herself, glad Mtepic had been there for her first birthday as a free person, hoping she could complete her mathematics preps and qualify for ship’s mathematician while he could congratulate her for it.

  * * * *

  Mtepic’s soft palms and fingers pressed for one light instant on her shoulder blades. “It’s strange how it happens on birthdays.”

  She glanced at the clock; she and Mtepic had been asleep for five hours since they had celebrated her birthday. Xhrina turned and held him in a light embrace; he sometimes woke up, now, talking to people he had been talking to in dreams, and she didn’t like to startle him.

  He embraced her in return, firmly and strongly, and now she knew he was awake, just starting in the middle as he tended to do. She waited to see what he would do or say. After a sigh—he liked holding her and she knew he might have been glad to do it much longer—Mtepic said, “There will be ghosts in the opsball tonight. I am going to watch them again. Would you like to come with me?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Does it happen on everyone’s birthday?”

  “Just mine, I thought. But now yours. Dress quickly. There’s never much warning. We must be there and silent before the ghost-power lights up the opsball.”

  They dressed, swam through the main crewpipe, and entered the opsball.

  Everything that evening was as before, except that the ghosts were different. First the Dopplered stars, and then the corrected stars, dimmer even than when Xhrina came in here to meditate. The fast-moving cloud made of ghosts zoomed silently up out of the Southern Cross to surround them in less than a minute. The ghosts in their thousands swarmed around the outside of (the ship? the opsball? But the opsball was 750 meters inside the ship, and yet the twenty or so ghosts who came inside seemed to merge directly from the projected stars to their positions in the opsball).

  This time Xhrina mostly watched two young men, apparently twins, trying to solve what she thought must be an equation, though on each side of the equals sign there was only a rotating projection of a lumpy ellipsoid in several colors.

  Or perhaps it was a game. They were both laughing very hard about it, whatever it was, and Xhrina liked the way they threw arms around each other and rested their heads on each other’s shoulders, then went back to their game or problem or whatever it was, sitting left shoulder to right shoulder, making little blobs of multicolor swim off one blob and across the equals sign to stick to the blob on the other side. Whenever they did that, both blobs would reorganize into different colors and shapes, and the two of them would clap, together, rhythmically, silently, as if to an unheard song.

  A teenaged girl that Xhrina thought might have been a daughter or some other relative to the smashed-headed woman from last time—or was it the same woman at an earlier stage of life?—was working her screen, whose language looked like some late Konglish derivative, with a gymnast’s concentration.

  Another woman, old and stout with jowls, thin short gray hair like velvet, and something rough and wrong with the skin of her neck, wore a military uniform that could have been Late Brazilian Empire, Old Lunar Mexico, or Old Taucetian Guinea; somewhere in the First Interpulse, anyway, around the time of the Trade and Momentum Wars, because she looked just like the characters in a story, with bank codes on her sleeves, Mahmud boots, and a vibratana in a back scabbard.

  Xhrina looked more closely, flapping her hands very gently to move herself toward the older woman in the military uniform. Bank trademarks on the shoulders; an admiral, then. Skull-jewels, gold with ruby eyes, in her pierced lower lip; four of them, four battle victories. The bank’s symbol had the ancient dollar and yen signs, crossed, in two pairs, on either
side of a balance, which could be any of the dozens of military-and-financial-services companies in any of the three millennia of that era.

  The admiral was worried, her fingers gliding over a screen that kept changing its display but always showed a cluster of white points surrounded by a swarm of red points, sometimes labeled in the blocky letters of ancient Romantisco, sometimes connected by varicolored lines, sometimes with little translucent spheres around them and clocks ticking beneath them, sometimes in a view that tumbled and rotated to show the shape that the whole formation made in space.

  She kept touching the white dots like a mother cat checking her kittens. Abruptly Xhrina understood; the squadron was bunching together to try to make a run through the closing bag, and the admiral didn’t want to lose any of them. It was a classic situation, so common during those wars; the red dots were ringoes, robot ships that came in at a single target at 100 g, expending their entire magazines at the target and fuel supplies in acceleration, trying to ram just as they ran empty.

  Once a ringo locked on and cranked its gammor to full power, they just kept coming, everything about them bent toward pure raw violence, game pieces intended to sacrifice at one to one, but they knew that they were too valuable to throw way on a bad risk, so they would not lock on until they decided they were close enough for a high probability of a kill. The admiral was trying to get her squadron out of a bag of ringoes, losing as few as she could manage. It did not look like that number would be zero, and it would be many hours before the brief burst of their violent escape, so she could choose to save any ship, but not all of them.

  A very overweight, brown-skinned older woman dressed in a sleeveless coverall like Xhrina’s own opened an application that Xhrina knew well. Xhrina gently paddled through the air to see better what the woman was doing and found that she was bumping up against Mtepic, paddling over from the other side.

  He floated, reflecting the glow of the ghost in front of them. His rounded, reflecting surfaces—forehead, nose, knuckles, knees—glowed gray in the dim light; these seemed to shrink back, as if he were falling back away from the ghosts and the stars beyond them, into utterly lightless dark.

  Across Mtepic’s face, shoulders, and chest, a tangle of bright-glowing filaments emerged as if rising through his skin, like noodles in a colander slowly surfacing from boiling water.

  The filaments broadened, stuck to each other, filled in gaps between. The dense, glowing web merged into the pale white shape of a newborn baby, like a bas relief just a centimeter or so above Mtepic’s ghost-lit wrinkled old skin. The baby stretched and yawned. Its light washed over Mtepic’s gray, still form and seemed to suck the color out of even his red coverall, leaving his lips blue-gray as dried mold.

  The baby’s tiny feet on apostrophes of legs barely reached the bottom of Mtepic’s ribcage, but its head was almost as big as his. The arms, ending in hands too small to fully wrap Xhrina’s thumb, reached out to fathom space around the baby but did not extend as far as Mtepic’s slumped-in shoulders on either side. But the puckered face opened in a toothless, radiant smile of pure What? How? What’s all this? Then the vast, deep eyes, clear and wide, focused on Xhrina, and the tiny soft mouth twisted and folded in the expression with which Mtepic always favored her best jokes. She could not help smiling back.

  Not knowing why, she placed the palm of her right hand on the baby’s chest, ever so gently, as if sure it would sink through to the sleeping Mtepic. She was surprised that the baby’s chest was warm, damp, and firm under her hand for that instant.

  Then she realized the baby was male, for a stream of phosphorescence poured wet and warm onto her sternum, making a glowing patch on her coverall, and she glanced down to see that the ghost baby, if that was what it was, had no more bladder control than a real one.

  It was so unexpected that she giggled, carefully not making a sound but letting her chest convulse, and under her palm she felt the baby’s chest pulse with the baby’s giggle, sharing her delight. Her hand sank a tiny fraction forward, and the baby was gone. Her palm lightly pressed Mtepic’s chest, where his heart thundered and his breath surged in and out as if he had worked too long and hard in the gym again, as he did so often despite her gentle scolding. His bony old hands closed around her strong young fingers, and he smiled at her, squeezing her hand.

  For the rest of the night they held hands as they watched the laughing twins, the motherly admiral, the fat mathematician, and the rest of the ghostly crew. At last the shift chimes sounded, and the ghosts faded away, and then the stars. “Lights up slow,” she said, and the opsball appeared around them, its surfaces matte gray, shut-down and inert, the same old opsball it was for months and years at a time.

  “Breakfast in our quarters and a long talk?” she asked.

  “Surely! And I am so pleased.”

  “At what?”

  “You said ‘our quarters,’ not ‘your quarters.’ That is the first time in six years.”

  “It was important to you? I would have said it much sooner if I had known it mattered.”

  “It was important to me that you say it without my asking. And it was not important at all, at first, but it is now.” They swam through the irising door of the opsball. “And when it became important, I began to count. You wouldn’t laugh at my silly senility?”

  “You are not senile and I would not laugh at you.”

  “Well, then, as it became important, I calculated backward to your arrival, and then began to count, and so I know that it has been 2,222 days eintime since you came aboard, and this is the first time you have said ‘our quarters.’ “

  “Other people might find something odd in that number,” she said, “all those twos.”

  They swam into their quarters. Mtepic flipped over like a seal resting at sea, hands on his belly. “Other people might find something odd in that number, but you and I know about numbers, eh?”

  “Exactly so,” she said. “In octal it is merely 4,256, and in duodecimal an even less meaningful 1,352. 32,342 in quintal is about as close as you can get to meaningful expression in any other base, and that’s not very meaningful. And I would say that if meaning is not invariant we can ignore it.”

  “Except when we can’t, of course?”

  That struck them both as funny, for reasons that they knew no one else would understand, and they laughed as they filled out their breakfast order, and filed their official intention to serve their shifts on call in their quarters that day.

  Mtepic’s sweet tooth had grown ever stronger as he aged. His favorite breakfast was now a fluffy, sweet pancake spread with blueberry jam and wrapped around vanilla ice cream, and as he slowly ate that this morning, he seemed to relish it more than ever. “Well,” he asked, “what would you like to know?”

  “Was it real?”

  He pointed to her chest; the damp spot still glowed.

  She ran a finger over it; the very tip of the finger glowed for an instant, and then faded.

  “How does it work?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t even know why I wake up knowing there will be ghosts. Or why it was so important to show them to you, or why I want to see them, myself.” He took another bite of his pancake and caressed it in his mouth until it dissolved; she waited until at last he said, “I would have gone, you know. That ghost was Sudden Crow, my wife before you—not that you are my wife, though the offer is open if you want it, it meant a great deal to her, but you’ve never seemed to care.”

  “I don’t. ‘Not slave’ is all the title I ever wanted, and you gave me that, and you know I’ll be with you as long as you live—maybe I should say as long as you want to stay. But you almost… left? Do you miss Sudden Crow?”

  “Not very much, to tell the truth. She was bad-tempered and sometimes rough with me. I wouldn’t mind saying hello again but I hope I wouldn’t have to spend any time with her as a ghost. Thirty years of combined time on this side was enough.”

  “Do you say ‘this
side’ because it feels spatial?”

  Frowning, he thought, and then at last shook his head. “More like the sides of a game or a question than the sides of a segment or a surface.” He pondered more, then took another delighted bite of his breakfast. “Really, your friendship is one good reason to stay on this side, more than enough reason all by itself, but this breakfast could be another, and when I think of all the other things I still enjoy, I can understand why so few people want to go before they have to. It was just that seeing her there, somehow I knew how I could go, if I wanted to go. And the old body is such a nuisance, you know, sometimes, it gets so sore and itchy and hurty. So I did want to, just for that moment, but now I’m glad I didn’t.”

  “Do the ghosts come aboard often?”

  “You’ve been with me the last two times. Out of six in all. Five on my birthdays, now one on yours. And I’ve never told anyone else, but I knew you were the right one to see it. I’ve searched through all twenty-seven thousand years of star trader history, and records from more than a million ships—traders but also slavers, military, scout, and colony—and though there are many accounts of ghosts, most are just fiction, labeled as such, and many of the rest seem to be merely some bit of culture that came loose from its old moorings in some folktale and washed up in the star trader culture. And 9743 itself records the ghosts but doesn’t perceive them; they are there on camera recordings but if you ask 9743 to look for the ghosts in all its thousands of years of recordings of the opsball, it won’t see any ghosts, and it can look right at a camrec full of ghosts and does not perceive them, it only sees an empty, dark opsball.”