The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The scientists had fallen silent. The crew left hurriedly, each taking a last glance at the screen where two mysteries of vastly different order hung, luminous and threatening.

  They ran, but they had no real chance. Five Alpha ships moved fast and hard, their ships taking accelerations beyond human pilots.

  The scientists moaned and grunted in their harnesses as the high g’s came on them. They wanted to know how things were going and got irritated when Chansing didn’t answer. He wondered if they wanted a pep talk while he was trying to move fast and yet stay electromagnetically invisible. He finally had Doyle calm them down.

  Not that it mattered. When the end was obvious, Chansing deployed their last hope of escaping detection: three blinding antennas mounted on the ship’s hull. When the Alpha ship was close enough, he had a few tricks. Until then he simply held to their uniform electromagnetic blackout.

  He was working on the hull when a signal came on comm from Doyle. “Something’s happening with the hoop.”

  Chansing quickly made his way inside. The scientists were already devising new ideas to check, and some of them tried to tell him about it, but he brushed them off.

  The vision that confronted him in the cool geometries of the control vault was mystifying. The hoop had nearly reached the polar axis, he saw. But it was not moving inward now. Instead, it seemed to turn as he watched. Its inward edge, razor-sharp and now ruler-straight, was cutting around the planet’s axis of rotation. One screen gave a simulation, the hoop spinning about its flat edge.

  “It slowed its approach to the axis,” Doyle said. “When it got there, it started this revolving.”

  “Looks like it’s getting faster,” Chansing said.

  “Yes. The magnetic fields are stronger now, too.”

  “Look, it’s slicing around the axis.”

  “Like cutting the core from an apple.”

  “Revolving—”

  “And picking up speed.”

  As he watched, the hoop revolved completely around the axis of Venus. The golden glow brightened further as if the thing was gaining energy.

  “Pretty damn fast,” Chansing said uselessly, wrestling to see what purpose such gigantic movements could have. His mind skipped and jangled with agitated awe. Chansing grimaced.

  The hoop’s inner edge was not exactly along Venus’s axis. Instead, it seemed to stand a tiny fraction out from the line around which the planet itself spun. Chansing watched it revolve with ever-gathering speed. The hoop seemed like a part in some colossal engine, spinning to unknown purpose. It glowed with a high, prickly sheen as fresh impulses shot through it—amber, frosted blue, burnt orange—all smearing and thinning into the rich, brimming honey gold.

  “I’m picking up a high whirring in the magnetic fields.”

  THAT IS THE INDUCTIVE SIGNAL FROM THE COSMIC STRING’S REVOLUTION. IT IS ACTING LIKE A COIL OF WIRE IN A GIANT MOTOR.

  “What for?” Chansing demanded, his throat tight. Without ever having set foot on it, he felt that Venus was somehow his, humanity’s—and damned well not some plaything in a grotesquely gargantuan engine.

  I CANNOT UNDERSTAND. CLEARLY, IT MOVES TO THE BECKON OF SOME UNSEEN HAND. STRINGS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE QUITE RARE, AND SHOULD MOVE AT VERY NEAR THE SPEED OF LIGHT. IF ONE WANDERED INTO THE GALAXY, IT MIGHT WELL COLLIDE WITH STARS AND MOLECULAR CLOUDS. THAT WOULD SLOW IT. PERHAPS THIS ONE DID, AND SOMEHOW THE ALPHAS CAPTURED IT IN A TRAP OF MAGNETIC FIELDS. A SUPREMELY DIFFICULT TASK, OF COURSE, BEYOND THE SCOPE OF THINGS HUMAN—BUT NOT, IN PRINCIPLE, IMPOSSIBLE. IT MERELY DEMANDS THE MANIPULATION OF MAGNETIC FIELD GRADIENTS ON A SCALE UNKNOWN—

  “What’s your point?” Chansing demanded. Though the Advisor-talk streamed through his mind with blinding speed, he had no patience for the smug, arched-eyebrow tone of Felix’s little lectures.

  SIMPLY THAT THE COSMIC STRING IS CLEARLY EMPLOYED HERE IN SOME SORT OF CIVIL ENGINEERING SENSE. DOYLE DETECTS THE INDUCTIVE FIELDS FROM ITS REVOLVING, BUT SURELY THIS CANNOT BE THE PURPOSE. NO, IT IS A SIDE EFFECT. NOTE HOW THE STRAIGHT INNER EDGE OF THE CIRCLE STOPS SHORT OF EXACTLY LYING ALONG THE PLANET’S AXIS. THIS CANNOT BE A MISTAKE, NOT WITH ENGINEERS OF THIS ABILITY. CLEARLY, THE OFFSET IS INTENDED.

  The hoop revolved faster and faster. Through Doyle’s comm line he could hear the distant whump-whump-whump of magnetic detectors in the control vault.

  “A giant engine? What for?” Chansing persisted.

  THE REGION NEAR THE POLE IS THE MOST AFFECTED, I WOULD VENTURE. THIS QUICK REVOLUTION EVOKES A PRESSURE ALL AROUND THE POLAR AXIS. THE FASTER THE STRING REVOLVES, THE MORE SMOOTH IS THIS PRESSURE. IT SLICES FREE THE ROCK CLOSE TO THE AXIS. THIS LIBERATES THE INNER CORE CYLINDER IT HAS CARVED AWAY, FREES THE ROCK. THE RESULTS OF THIS I CANNOT SEE, HOWEVER.

  “Humph!” Chansing snorted in exasperation. “Let me know when you have an idea.”

  * * *

  They did not have long to wait. The Alphas were more than an hour from rendezvous when the central axis tube, formed by the revolving cosmic string, pulsed with fresh brilliance.

  Chansing listened to the scientists and got some idea of what might be happening. Still, even though he could see it, the truth was hard to believe. He stared at the four-color simulation.

  The liquid oozing of rock far below, at the planetary core, pressed hard against the beating sssttttppp-sssttttppp-sssttttppp of the revolving, scintillant hoop. In one revolution the white-hot nickel-iron liquid at the core flowed into the depressurized cylinder. Then the passing hoop chopped it off, liberating it from the pressure of fluid behind it. The pipe was filling.

  The whirring hoop formed a blurred donut envelope around Venus, moving with the mad buzzing frenzy of a huge insect. Now the flux tube hummed with new life deep in the rock of Venus. The tube walls kept back the pressing solid rock on all sides—except at the core, where immense pressures forced more metal into the tube with each revolution.

  Vast stresses fought along the tube walls. The strumming tube gnawed, burning a cylinder of stone free of its mother world. Liberated pressures pushed the freed rock upward from below. The axial flux tube filled.

  Then its pearly, transparent walls of force dulled to gray. A plug of rock was streaming out.

  The golden lance had now struck a tube into the center of this world, to its treasure. The tube throat was artfully shaped, fattening slightly as the white-hot metal funneled up from the core. The gusher flowed without restraint or turbulence, molten metal rushing from the vast core pressure to the void of space. The riches squirted up and out, fleeing the groaning weight of Venus.

  Delicate streamers of green and amber danced amid the white torrent of metal—the only horde this planet boasted. The tube sucked this treasure above the blanket of gas.

  Doyle made their view tilt, following a black fleck of impurity up the glowing pipeline, starward, into sucking void, high beyond air’s clutching. There, flexing magnetic fields peeled away streamers, finding orbits for the molten pap. The yellowing, shuddering fluid, free of gravity’s strangle, shot out into the chill. Returned to the spaces it once knew, the metal cold-formed, mottled, its skin crusted with impurities. The birthing thread creaked and groaned in places as it unspooled. It fractured in spots, yet kept smoothly gliding along its gentle orbit.

  Cooling, it grayed. Graying, threads formed into enormous webbed structures.

  “They’re … making a home,” Chansing said hollowly.

  “Sucking a whole planet dry,” one of the scientists said. “No wonder they ignore us.”

  He found Doyle gazing at him raptly. Did she think he had a solution? Then he saw that she was simply sharing what both of them knew. They were competent and quick, but there were limits, and they were about to meet them.

  He didn’t trust anyone in the slim crew to handle their last-ditch blinding cannons. The bulky antennas were electromagnetically isolated from the rest of the ship, and they had to be commanded from someone directly on the hull.

  So he did it himself. It meant
delegating his primary responsibility of piloting—but there was going to be damn little of that to do unless they managed to fool the Alphas.

  Chansing got himself into the command brace just as the Alpha craft began decelerating. Venus lay close below, beneath the shimmering whirl of the golden cosmic string.

  He didn’t have much experience with the gear, but then nobody did. This was black-tech stuff, secret stickers all over it.

  But he had used similar, less powerful rigs in the asteroids to escape government regulators. He cross-correlated the dishes and waited. There wasn’t long. Of the original five Alpha ships sent to intercept the Earth expedition team, only one craft came forward like a hornet, and when it was a few hundred kilometers out, Chansing fired his first concealing burst.

  The tangle of electromagnetic fields was supposed to confuse and blind the very best microwave detectors, and elude other frequencies altogether.

  Chansing never got a second shot.

  He had only an instant before a violent whoosh drew him head-first out of his brace. He realized the air lock had fractured.

  He windmilled his arms in the rushing air, whirling away from the shining skin of the ship. Tumbling. Spinning.

  Small cries sought him. Screams. They were dying back in the ship.

  Everyone had worn helmets, that was standard. But the Alphas had used something special. The bulkheads crackled with electrical surges. Lightning sought and fried the slow, vulnerable humans.

  Chansing heard them die, horrible gasping pain forcing shrill pleas from their throats.

  And time slowed for him. One of the attributes of a first-class pilot is the almost languorous extension of events in a crisis. For Chansing, all motion became silky, sure, with infinite time to consider possibilities. But no time to mourn those he could do nothing to help any longer. He found that the only one whose face came to his was Doyle. Then he carefully put the image aside.

  He vectored hard to correct his plunge, and the jumble of impressions began to make sense. He hung above the dayside of Venus, near the north pole. Far below, the ruddy twilight stretched shadows of mountains across the beaten gray plains. All this lay behind the incandescent golden aura left by the cosmic string as it spun with endless energy. One edge of it arrowed straight down along the pole, impossibly straight. The other side bulged out far beyond the planet’s equator.

  The hoop spun faster than the eye could follow, making a hovering tapestry diffused over the entire world. Chansing could see no gray jet of matter spewing up along the polar axis. When the outflowing cylinders of yellow metal-lava struck the sucking vacuum in orbit, the glare and exploding fog were obvious, serving to obscure what fervid process was at work there.

  Now he was going to get a close look. He was nearly over the pole, and far away, nearly over the soft curve of the world, hung vast gray warrens.

  This he took in with the barest glance, unable to react, because something came looming into his view, swelling with the speed of its approach.

  His own ship floated like a helpless insect beside a predatory bird as the Alpha craft slowed and stopped. The comparison came to Chansing because of both size and a certain tantalizing, evocative sweep of the larger ship’s lines. It had flared wings made of intricate intersecting hexagons, as though spun out from a single thread. Its forward hull bulged like a gouty throat, while the blackened thrusters at its rear puckered wide. While the Earth ship expressed mechanical rigidities, this huge craft seemed sculpted by minds expressing body symmetries and senses beyond his fathoming.

  Speculation ceased. Something big rushed forth from a darkened oval hole in the craft’s side, moving far swifter than a human could. It headed for him.

  Chansing turned immediately and sped away. There was nowhere to go, but he was damned if he would wait to be caught. His turn brought into view the pole again, and the golden glow of the spinning hoop below. From this angle the shimmering covered the whole of Venus, a vast radiance beyond the puny concerns of a single fleeing man.

  Chansing tried to angle away from the onrushing form and gain the small shelter of his own ship. But a quick glance behind him showed that the alien object was closing fast. He veered sideways once, then again, darting furiously in hopes that the oncoming thing could not match him. But at each turn it was closer, following him with almost contemptuous ease. It loomed so large now Chansing could see large straight sections of bossed metal, studded with protuberances. Between the riveted metal sections was a rough, crusted stuff that seemed to flex and work with effort.

  He realized abruptly that the thing was alive, that muscles rippled through it. Six sheathed legs curled beneath it, ending in huge claws.

  The head—Chansing saw eyes, more than he could count, moving independently on stalks. But beside them microwave dishes rotated. Above, telescoping arms socketed in shiny steel. They opened into many-grappling arrays of counter-posed pads.

  The thing was at least ten times the size of a human. A bulging throat throbbed beneath stiff crusted gray-green skin. Its rear quarters were swollen as though thruster tubes lodged there. Yet they were also banded with alternating yellow-brown rings, like the markings of a living creature. Chansing was the first human to see an Alpha, and for an instant he was lost in curiosity. This was all he could think before the gaping pads spread farther to clasp him in a rough but sure embrace.

  The thing brought him up toward its moving eye array. It studied him for a long moment. Chansing was so rapt upon the oval-shaped orange eyes that only after a while did he notice the steady tug of acceleration. The thing was carrying him, not back to its ship, but toward the pole. It tossed him from one oval array of pads to another, letting him tumble for seconds in space before snagging him again.

  LIKE A CAT PLAYING WITH A MOUSE.

  his Felix Advisor had said mournfully.

  Chansing’s mind whirled, empty of terror and rage. He felt only a distant, painful remorse at all he was about to leave behind—laughter, silky love, a friend’s broad unthinking grin, the whole warm clasp of the humanity he had failed, and would now die for in a meaningless sacrifice to something beyond human experience.

  He tried to wrench away from the coarse black pads, but they seemed to be everywhere. They pushed and caught him, in the growing golden glow that now suffused everything.

  Then he came to rest in a thick knot of pads. They pressed against him so that he could not jerk away.

  He wondered abstractly how the thing would kill him. A crushing grasp, or legs pulled off, or electrocution …

  A rage came into him, then, and he tried to kick against the thing. He got a knee up into it and pushed, struck sidewise with his arms—

  —and was free. Impossibly, he glided away at high speed from the long pocked form of worked steel and wrinkled brown flesh. It did not follow.

  He spun to get his bearings and saw nothing but a hard glow. He was close to the hoop. No, not merely close—it surrounded him.

  Chansing looked behind him. Above him hung the fast-shrinking alien. The thing now lay at the end of a glowing tube that stretched … stretched and narrowed around him as Chansing watched.

  He was speeding along the planetary axis, down the throat of the pipe made by the whirring hoop. Shimmering radiance closed in on him.

  He righted himself and fired jets. The alien had given him a high velocity straight down into the hoop tube. Plunging along the polar axis. If he could correct for it in time—

  But the brilliant walls drew nearer. He applied maximum thrust to stop himself, even though that meant his fuel would burn less efficiently. His insuit thrusters were small, weak, intended only for maneuvers in free fall.

  The alien had so carefully applied accelerations that Chansing did not veer sidewise against the looming hoop walls. He was plunging precisely toward the pole of Venus. Through the shimmering translucent walls he could see a dim outline of Venus, as ghostly as a lost dream.

  His thrusters chugged, ran smoothly for a moment, and
then coughed and died. He fell in sudden eerie silence.

  He had been simpleminded, thinking that the alien anthology of flesh and steel would kill him in some obvious way. Instead, from some great and twisted motive, it had given him this strange trajectory into the mouth of a huge engine of destruction.

  At any moment, he supposed, the tube would vent more liquid metal outward. In an instant Chansing would vanish into singed smoke.

  Vainly, he tried his sensorium. No human tracers beckoned. He grimaced, his breath coming rapidly in the sweat-fogged helmet.

  The shimmering walls drew closer. He almost felt that he could touch them, but kept his arms at his side. He fell feet first, watching a small yellow dot between his boots slowly grow. His Felix Advisor remarked,

  WE ARE INSIDE THE BORE OF THAT TUBE THAT STRETCHES OUT ALONG THE POLAR AXIS. LET US HOPE THE ENTIRE TUBE HAS BEEN EMPTIED BY THE ALIEN MINING OPERATIONS. IT APPEARS WE DO HAVE A QUITE EXACT TRAJECTORY. THE ALIEN SENT US FALLING STRAIGHT ALONG VENUS’S SPIN AXIS. WE MAY WELL FALL ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE PLANET.

  Chansing tried to think. “How … how long will that take?”

  LET ME CALCULATE FOR A MOMENT. YES, I RETAIN DATA ON VENUS. WHICH YIELDS … I AM PERFORMING THE DYNAMICAL INTEGRAL ANALYTICALLY …

  Across Chansing’s in-suit field of view appeared:

  TIME TO PASS THROUGH TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET IS 36.42 MINUTES. I WOULD ADVISE YOU TO START A RUNNING CLOCK.

  Chansing called up a time-beeper in his right eye, set it to zero, and watched the spool of yellow digits run. He grunted sourly. Let Felix the Advisor read it. Time was of no importance when the outcome was so barrenly clear.

  Chansing fell.

  He had long been used to the sensation of free fall, but always in the silent enormity of open space, or the confines of a ship.

  It had been easy then to convince his reflexes that he was in some sense flying, airy and buoyant, oblivious to gravity’s cruel laws.

  Here … here he plunged downward between mottled glowing sheets that rushed past with dizzying speed. He felt the silvery rim of Venus thrusting up to meet him as the planet flattened into a plain and crinkled mountains grew, detail getting finer with every moment.