The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

“I will do that whether you pay me or not,” I answered.

  “You will not charge me?” he asked.

  “I will not charge you.”

  “Thank you, Koriba!” he said fervently.

  I stood and stared at the blazing hut, trying not to think of the smoldering body of the little girl inside it.

  “Koriba?” said Njoro after a lengthy silence.

  “What now?” I asked irritably.

  “We do not know what to do with the buffalo hide, for it bore the mark of your thahu, and we were afraid to burn it. Now I know that the marks were made by Ngai and not you, and I am afraid even to touch it. Will you take it away?”

  “What marks?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  He took me by the arm and led me around to the front of the burning hut. There, on the ground, some ten paces from the entrance, lay the strip of tanned hide with which Kamari had hanged herself, and scrawled upon it were more of the strange symbols I had seen on my computer screen three days earlier.

  I reached down and picked up the hide, then turned to Njoro. “If indeed there is a curse on your shamba,” I said, “I will remove it and take it upon myself, by taking Ngai’s marks with me.”

  “Thank you, Koriba!” he said, obviously much relieved.

  “I must leave to prepare my magic,” I said abruptly, and began the long walk back to my boma. When I arrived, I took the strip of buffalo hide into my hut.

  “Computer,” I said. “Activate.”

  “Activated.”

  I held the strip up to its scanning lens.

  “Do you recognize this language?” I asked.

  The lens glowed briefly.

  “Yes, Koriba. It is the Language of Kamari.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It is a couplet:

  I know why the caged birds die—

  For, like them, I have touched the sky.”

  The entire village came to Njoro’s shamba in the afternoon, and the women wailed the death chant all night and all of the next day, but before long Kamari was forgotten, for life goes on, and she was, after all, just a little Kikuyu girl.

  Since that day, whenever I have found a bird with a broken wing, I have attempted to nurse it back to health. It always dies, and I always bury it next to the mound of earth that marks where Kamari’s hut had been.

  It is on those days, when I place the birds in the ground, that I find myself thinking of her again, and wishing that I were just a simple man, tending my cattle and worrying about my crops and thinking the thoughts of simple men, rather than a mundumugu who must live with the consequences of his wisdom.

  GREGORY BENFORD

  Alphas

  Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel Timescape won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include The Stars in Shroud, In the Ocean of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, and Across the Sea of Suns. His most recent novels are the best-selling Great Sky River and Tides of Light. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.

  In the vivid and extraordinarily ingenious story that follows, he takes us to Venus, and explores that mysterious planet more thoroughly than it has ever been explored before: from one end to the other—quite literally.

  Alphas

  GREGORY BENFORD

  Chansing did not intend to become famous throughout the solar system. He was a private, close-lipped man, and he disliked media chatter about his sacrifice, his quickness, his daring.

  Still less did he plan to be the butt of a thousand jokes. Or the central element in a standard examination question given to undergraduate physics majors.

  But all this happened because of the Alphas.

  The name stuck to humanity’s first alien visitors, despite the fact that it merely referred to their direction of approach—Alpha Centauri. The Alphas did not come from Earth’s nearest star, and indeed, no one ever did discover their origins.

  Or much else. The Alphas simply decelerated into the solar system and began their tasks. They made no attempt to speak with the burgeoning human society of 2126 that was clinging to the asteroid belts and laboring on its first Mars colony.

  This in itself was vaguely insulting. Matters got worse.

  When a team of linguists did make rudimentary contact with the Alphas, they learned only that the aliens were not particularly interested in the heights of human culture, or in mankind’s view of the meaning of it all, or the wondrous beauties of Earth.

  The Alphas were here for a job, period. Their sole repeated message to mankind, delivered in English, Spanish, and Chinese, was:

  Stay back. Do not attempt to interfere. Our work will be of no harm to your enterprises.

  One might think this would be clear and convincing. After all, the Alphas’ first project was the clearing of the Venusian atmosphere—a task human engineers thought would take centuries. They did it inside eight months.

  With a twist, however. The Alphas did not convert Venus into an Earthlike Eden. The atmosphere was still an unbreathable muck of muggy carbon dioxide and assorted noxious sulphuric winds.

  But one could see through it. For the first time in four billion years the perpetual shroud parted. The great steepled volcanoes and yawning canyons of Venus lay bare.

  The Alphas apparently wanted clear air in order to more easily build massive, sprawling complexes around both poles of the Venusian spin axis.

  Earth ships hovered tens of millions of kilometers away, the closest the Alphas would permit anyone to approach. Their instruments showed that these Alpha polar stations produced enormous magnetic fields that oscillated fiercely.

  More than this no one knew. Even the linguists had never actually seen an Alpha.

  Unmanned ships sent to nose about the Venusian area came back as burnt crisps. One would have thought this was ample warning.

  But when a secret government expedition sought out Chansing to pilot a high-tech, stealth-augmented mission into polar orbit around Venus, Chan-sing considered it carefully. He had always been a risk-taker; three high-velocity missions to the Jovian moons and multiple scars attested to that. He was the most famous daredevil in the system.

  He also knew that if he turned this down, the government would go looking for somebody of lesser repute. And if that guy made it back from Venus, nobody would remember Chansing anymore.

  Pursuit of fame was not the fulcrum of his character. Simple pride, calm and sure and laconic, accounted for nearly everything he did. Here was a gamble that could pay off far larger than any ore strike.

  So he went. He had never had much of a head for science itself; few pilots did. Even though this was a scientific expedition, designed to ferret out the secrets of the Alphas, Chansing did not think he would need to know much more than how to dodge and swerve at high speeds.

  This was only the first thing he was wrong about.

  * * *

  Matters went well at first. The expedition ship slipped into orbit under cover of an extensive solar storm, supported by an electromagnetic scrambling burst from the massed radio telescopes on Earth and the Moon.

  But by then there was something else in orbit around Venus.

  At first Chansing did not believe that the image floating in the large screen could be real.

  “You check for malfs?” he asked Doyle, the ship’s systems officer.

  After a long moment she said, “Everything checks. That thing’s real.”

  Chansing did not want to believe in the glowing circle that passed in a great arc through free space and then buried a ninth of its circumference in the planet. Without understanding it, he knew immediately that this was tech-work on a scale that made their mission look pitifully inadequate. And dangerous.

  “Magnify,” he ordered curtly. He knew not to show alarm. The sc
ientists around him in the control vault were visibly shaken. They had been arrogant enough on the trip out, sure that their stealth shielding and projectors would work fine. Now their drawn mouths and hooded eyes told Chansing more than any tech-talk could about their chances.

  The hoop was half again larger than Venus. Its uniform golden glow seemed to dim the sun’s glare. The opticals zoomed in for a close-up. As the image swelled, Chansing expected to see detail emerge. But as the rim of Venus grew and flattened on the screen, the golden ring was no thicker than before, a brilliant hard line scratched across space.

  Except where it struck the planet’s surface. There a swirl of fitful radiance simmered. Chansing saw immediately that the sharp edges of the ring were cutting into the planet. Venus’s thick blanket of air roiled and rushed about the ring’s hard edge.

  “Max mag,” he said tensely. “Hold on the foot, where it’s touching.”

  No, not touching, he saw. Cutting.

  The blue-hot flashes that erupted at the hoop’s foot point spoke of vast catastrophe. Clouds boiled like fountains. A green tornado swirled, its thick rotating disk rimmed by bruised clouds. At the vortex violence sputtered in angry red jets.

  Yet even at this magnification the golden hoop was still a precise, scintillating line. It seemed absolutely straight on this scale, the only rigid geometry in a maelstrom of dark storms and rushing energies.

  The physicists and astronomers gaped. He felt their presence at his back. The ship was cramped and they were always kibitzing.

  “Give us some room,” he said irritably, even though they were only peering through the rear hatch.

  “It’s moving,” Doyle whispered, awed.

  Chansing could barely make out the festering foot point as it carved its way through a towering mountain range. The knife-edge brilliance met a cliff of stone and seemed to simply slip through it. Puffs of gray smoke burst all along the cut. Winds sheared the smoke into strands. Then the hoop sliced through the peak of a high mountain, its rate not slowing at all.

  He peered carefully through the storm. Actual devastation was slight; the constant cloudy agitation and winds gave the impression of fevered movement, but the cause of it all proceeded forward with serene indifference to obstacles.

  “Back off,” he said.

  The screen pulled away from the impossibly sharp line. The hoop, no longer a perfect circle, pressed steadily in toward the axis of Venus. It flattened on the side that pushed inward.

  “Lined up with the pole,” Doyle said. “See? I’ve projected it onto the planet’s image.”

  Computer-processed graphics coalesced. With clouds eliminated, he could see the entire structure.

  The hoop’s flat side was parallel to the axis of Venus’s rotation. It held steady on the planet’s surface, so it must be revolving at the same rate as the planet.

  “Where’d it come from?” one of the physicists asked.

  Chansing smothered the impulse to cackle with manic laughter. Somehow the Alphas had brought this thing, or made it, without anybody detecting it. A planet-sized surgical knife.

  “Probably just wasn’t lit up before,” Doyle said reasonably. “Now that they’re using it, we can see it.”

  Yet in a way his instincts warred with his intelligence. The hoop shared a planet’s smooth curves, its size, its immense uncaring grace. Chansing struggled to conceive of it as something made by design. This was tech beyond imaging.

  “It’s moving toward the poles,” Doyle said, her voice a smooth lake that showed no ripples. Chansing liked her nerve. If he ever settled down and had a wife, he knew it would be a woman like Doyle.

  The scientists, though, muttered uneasily. Chansing had felt crews get jittery before and didn’t like the sound of those amateurs.

  “Let’s get closer,” said Eardley, a small woman nominally in charge of scientific matters. Chansing was supposed to follow her orders. But not if it endangered the ship.

  “Don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said.

  “The closer we are to the planetary surface, the better we’ll avoid infrared detection,” Eardley said, reciting what everyone knew already. That was her style and Chansing had to make himself ignore it.

  “Okay.” He went through the motions of bringing them slightly closer in. They were still farther out than the strange luminous ring, and he was damned if he would go much nearer. He checked the stealth radiators that were supposed to hide them from the Alphas. Everything still looked good.

  The hoop glowed brighter and flattened more and more as its inner edge approached the center of Venus. Chansing felt suspended, anxious, all his clever plans for this mission dashed to oblivion by this immense simple thing that sailed so blithely through a planet.

  His imagination was numbed. He struggled to retain some grip on events by digressing into detail. “How … how thick is it?”

  Doyle’s glance told him that she had noticed the same strange lack of dimension. “Smaller than a ship, I’d judge,” she said, her eyes narrowing.

  “That small,” Chansing said distantly, “but it’s cutting through…”

  Doyle said, “The planet doesn’t split.”

  Chansing nodded. “Some places you can see where the thing’s cut through rock and left a scar. But things close up behind it.”

  “Pressure seals the scar again,” Doyle agreed. She smiled and Chansing recognized the look of almost sexual relish. She liked problems—real ones that you could get a grip on. So did he.

  “It’s no kind of knife I ever saw,” Chansing said, the words out before he saw how useless they were. Doyle arched an eyebrow at him. But he had to say something and keep his voice calm and matter-of-fact; he could sense the scientists getting itchy at his back.

  “If it eats rock, how come it’s so thin?” he said with elaborate casualness. Somebody laughed merrily, and somehow the meaningless joke relaxed the small party.

  This released the scientists, and a torrent of speculation broke among them. Chansing couldn’t follow it. Instead, he consulted his chip-imbedded Advisor, a partial intelligence culled from a long-dead genius named Felix. The thin voice spoke in his mind.

  I DO HAVE AN IDEA, IF YOU WOULD CARE TO HEAR.

  Chansing caught the waspish, haughty air the Advisor sometimes projected when it had been consulted too infrequently for its own tastes. It rode in a small pocket in his lower neck. Perpetual monkey on his back, Chansing often said. He murmured a subvocal phrase to entice Felix to go on.

  I BELIEVE IT TO BE WHAT WAS CALLED BY THEORETICIANS A COSMIC STRING. I HAVE STUDIED SUCH MATTERS IN MY YOUTH, AND RECALL THE PHYSICS UNDERLYING SUCH HYPOTHETICAL OBJECTS.

  Chansing grimaced at the Advisor’s supercilious tone, but again indicated his interest. He thought in a private cloister of his mind, Advisors smell better if you give ‘em some air, and resolved to let Felix tap into his visual and other sensory webs more often. It kept them from getting the Advisor equivalent of cabin fever.

  STRINGS WERE MADE AT THE VERY EARLIEST MOMENTS OF OUR UNIVERSE. YOU CAN ENVISION AT THAT TIME A COOLING, EXPANDING MASS. IT FAILED TO BE PERFECTLY SYMMETRICAL AND UNIFORM. SMALL FLUCTUATIONS PRODUCED DEFECTS IN THE VACUUM STATE OF CERTAIN ELEMENTARY PARTICLES—

  What the hell’s that mean? Chansing thought irritably. He watched the hoop slowly cut through a slate-gray plain. Around him tech-chatter filled the control vault. Scientists needed only the tip of an iceberg to start them endlessly guessing.

  A GOOD ANALOGY. THINK OF ICE FREEZING ON THE SURFACE OF A POND. AS IT FORMS, THERE IS NOT QUITE ENOUGH AREA, PERHAPS, AND SO SMALL CRINKLES AND OVERLAPS APPEAR. RIDGES OF DENSER ICE MARK THE BOUNDARY BETWEEN REGIONS THAT DID MANAGE TO FREEZE OUT SMOOTHLY. ALL THE ERRORS, SO TO SPEAK, ARE SQUEEZED INTO A SMALL PERIMETER. SO IT WAS WITH THE EARLY UNIVERSE. THESE EXOTIC RELICS HAVE MASS, BUT THEY ARE HELD TOGETHER PRIMARILY BY TENSION. THEY ARE LIKE CABLES WOVEN OF WARPED SPACE-TIME ITSELF.

  So what?

  WELL, THEY ARE EXTRAORDINARY OBJECTS, WORTHY OF AW
E IN THEIR OWN RIGHT. ALONG THEIR LENGTHS THERE IS NO IMPEDIMENT TO MOTION. THIS MAKES THEM SUPERCONDUCTORS, SO THEY RESPOND STRONGLY TO MAGNETIC FIELDS. AS WELL, THEY EXERT TIDAL FORCES. ONLY OVER A SHORT RANGE, HOWEVER—A FEW METERS. I SHOULD IMAGINE THAT THIS TIDAL STRETCHING ALLOWS IT TO EXERT PRESSURES AGAINST SOLID MATERIAL AND CUT THROUGH IT.

  Like a knife?

  YES. THE BEST KNIFE IS THE SHARPEST, AND COSMIC STRINGS ARE THINNER THAN A SINGLE ATOM. THEY CAN SLIDE BETWEEN MOLECULAR BONDS.

  So why’s this one cutting through Venus? It just fall in by accident?

  I SINCERELY DOUBT THAT SUCH A VALUABLE OBJECT WOULD BE SIMPLY WANDERING AROUND. THE ALPHAS ARE SOPHISTICATED ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND THEIR USES.

  Using it? For what?

  THAT I DO NOT KNOW. I WOULD IMAGINE HANDLING SUCH A MASS IS A SEVERE TECHNICAL DIFFICULTY. SINCE IT IS A PERFECT SUPERCONDUCTOR, HOLDING IT IN A MAGNETIC GRIP SUGGESTS ITSELF. THUS THE ALPHAS’ POLAR STATIONS.

  Chansing recognized Felix’s usual pattern—explain, predict, then pretend haughty withdrawal until Chansing or somebody else could check the Advisor’s prediction. He shrugged. The idea sounded crazy, but it was worth following up.

  To Doyle he said, “Analyze the magnetic fields near that thing.”

  Doyle quickly nodded. “I’m getting something else, too.”

  “Where?”

  “Coming up from near the south pole. A lot of fast signals—”

  “What kind?”

  “Like a ship.”

  “Alphas.” It was not a question.

  “Looks like.”

  Chansing peered at the screen. The glorious squashed circle had cut slightly farther into the planet. It was still aligned with its flattened face parallel to the rotation. He estimated the inner edge would not reach the planet’s axis for several more hours at least. As it intruded farther, the hoop had to cut through more and more rock, which probably slowed its progress.

  Doyle shifted the view, searching the southern polar region. A white dab of light was growing swiftly, coming toward them. It was a dim fleck compared with the brilliant cosmic string.

  “Better get us buttoned up,” Chansing said.