The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  And nothing in his life so unwelcome as the spectre of John Ringo strolling down Fremont Street in a yellow check shirt that needed washing. Or maybe burning.

  Ringo turned his head and spat in the dust between Doc’s boots.

  Another day, Holliday might have stepped over it.

  This particular day, he stopped dead in the street. Having been deputized, he had the right to carry a firearm in the streets of Tombstone. Not every man did.

  His hand hovered over his holster as he turned and faced Ringo. The sun stabbed through his pupils until he thought the back of his head might explode from the pressure, but he kept his voice level and full of the milk of human kindness and the venom of sweet reason.

  “You son of a bitch,” Doc said. “If you ain’t heeled, you go and heel yourself.”

  But Ringo just turned and showed him an empty right hip, hands spread mockingly wide.

  Doc said, “Ringo, all I want out of you is ten paces in the street. And mark my words, some day I will get them.”

  “You better hope not, Holliday,” Ringo said, spinning on the ball of one foot.

  Impotently, Doc watched him stagger away. By the gait, he could tell that Ringo was still drunk from the night before.

  A solution Doc wished he’d embraced his own self. Instead, he kept walking, intent on undertaking the next best option—getting drunk again.

  He was seated staring at the ornate back bar of the Alhambra Saloon when John Ringo walked in. Still unarmed, still with the rolling gait of a sailor off the sea or a man on a bender. He pretended not to see Doc, and Doc pretended not to see him.

  Doc was on his second whiskey when three men and a woman came up on his left side. The leader—or at least the one in the front—was careful to keep a respectful distance.

  “Doctor Holliday?” the lead man asked.

  He was tall, broad, red-cheeked behind gingery stubble. A healthy-looking fellow with his shirt collar open in the heat. Doc’s hand crept up to check his own button.

  “I am,” Doc said. “But I’m pretty sure I don’t owe you any money.”

  The man said, “The opposite, sir. We are hoping for the opportunity to pay you some.”

  Doc let his hand rest on the side of his whiskey glass, but didn’t lift it. The pain in his head wasn’t going away.

  He asked, “Who might you be?”

  “Reuben,” the man said. “Jeremy. We hear there’s an old wreck out in the desert. We hear you’ve been there.”

  “Once,” Doc allowed, cautiously. “On my way into Tombstone.”

  “We want to hire you to take us there.”

  “Not up to it today, I’m afraid.”

  “Doctor Holliday—”

  But Doc turned back to the bar, and the man didn’t persist. He and his friends formed a huddle by the vacant faro table, whispering an argument Doc was pleased to ignore until he spotted a flash of dirty yellow and black. Headed that way.

  Ringo stopped about four feet off from Reuben and his group and cleared his throat. “I can take you out to the wreck.”

  Doc put his forehead on his palm.

  “And you would be?”

  “John Ringo,” Ringo said. “I know this desert like my hand.”

  Doc took a deep breath and let it out again. He still had half a glass of whiskey.

  And he had half a mind to let Ringo try it. These men might be easterners, but the leather on their holsters was worn soft and slick. They might give the cowboy a harder accounting than he was reckoning on if he lured them into an ambush.

  He managed to make himself wait another three whole seconds with that line of thought before turning his stool. “Reuben.”

  Reuben looked up from haggling with Ringo. “Doctor Holliday.”

  Ringo shot Doc a wild look full of bitter promises. Doc shrugged. “You better run along, Johnny.”

  Ringo opened his mouth—Doc could almost see him forming the words You haven’t heard the last of me. And then he shut it in silence, squared his shoulders, and stalked off like a wet cat.

  Doc said, “I’ll go. This once. I won’t make it a habit, sir.”

  One of the men behind Reuben leaned to another and said something excitedly, incomprehensibly, making Doc want to blow his nose to clear his ears.

  Neither that nor Ringo’s performance were what sent the chill of recognition through Doc. He winced and rubbed his eyes.

  Reuben said, “What?”

  “Déjà vu. Damn. That’s funny.” Doc heard his own tones ring flat as the rattle of a captured snake. A sinking and inexplicable sense of futility sucked at him. “I’d swear I’ve had every word of this conversation some damn other time.”

  Copyright (C) 2012 by Elizabeth Bear

  Art copyright (C) 2012 by Richard Anderson

  Books by Elizabeth Bear

  Carnival

  Undertow

  Range of Ghosts

  The Jenny Casey Trilogy

  Hammered

  Scardown

  Worldwired

  The Jacob’s Ladder Trilogy

  Dust

  Chill

  Grail

  The Promethean Age

  Blood & Iron

  Whiskey & Water

  Ink & Steel

  Hell & Earth

  The Edda Of Burdens

  All the Windwracked Stars

  By the Mountain Bound

  The Sea Thy Mistress

  Iskyrne

  A Companion to Wolves (with Sarah Monette)

  The Tempering of Men (with Sarah Monette)

  Short Story Collections

  The Chains That You Refuse

  New Amsterdam

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

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  We are blooming flowers on the plain—which He picks.

  —Old hymn

  He suddenly thought that they had not seen anyone for quite a while. Amid the vast voyages, adventures, striking vistas—and yes, while basking in symphonies of sensation—they had not needed company.

  Even as twilight closed in. But now—

  “Do you recall—?” He asked, turning to Her, and could not recall an ancient name. Names were unimportant, mere symbols, yes…but He did remember that names had existed to distinguish between multitudes. When? First task: to name the beasts. When had He and She said that?

  “I do,” She said mildly, for She was always mild. “Any: one. A logical category.”

  “They were Other, yes. I recall. Lesser but Other.”

  “Just so.”

  Thoughts rippled light-quick among them. The concept of Other as separate and different commingled in a burst of flavors–musky, crisp, sweet, sad, noisy—and tempted him. Somehow, in the long run of time they shared, the portions of himself and herself had moved away from overt Others, leaving the two of them to interweave as their binary Self. The details of why had quite washed away.

  Yet the Others were part of him and her, and He and She could bring them forward when needed or desired. And desire played a role in all of this. Memories strummed, mellow notes rang redly, old victories sang and trilled.

  The Others were good company, He thought.

  Desire radiated from them both. They were, of course, the two who gave tension to this finite, bounded existence. This universe. Duality was fundamental, as was helicity itself, which necessarily had to be included in this exponentially expanding space-time.

  How long now, since the Beginning? He wondered. The question
did not actually have deep meaning, He saw, because in the early stages space and time were so entwined, feeding each other. Duration did not endure, after all.

  Still, the end of all this was sharp, clear. The accelerating expansion had calmed, died, and the great coolness descended. Time coiled now, in the final, languid waltz between space and time.

  She nodded at the firmament around them, saying, “Let us have Others again.” —and brilliant acrid displays frothed, with ruby scents, soft gliding pleasures and deep bass rolls, all blending with the views. They swam in coasting galactic clusters, amid simmering amber stars, and worlds and variety beyond measure—or at least, measures that He and She now cared about. In the long past times, near the very start of all this, they had needed to be more careful. Not now.

  The firmament shuddered, rumbled, brimmed. A fresh persona came gliding toward them, swimming in liquid light.

  “You called me forth?” the self said, and He saw it had no sex. It did not need any. She and He did need that, had from the Beginning. Sultry love and sex were the essence of the great dance. But sex was not necessary in their subselves, the Others.

  “You are One,” He said.

  “Yes! Such joy,” One said with liberated intelligence. “You wanted me to become overt, not buried in your inner self? Why?”

  Fondly, He recalled that this ancient way—allowing a subself to manifest, bringing a different, fresh perspective—meant questions. Always questions. “For company. If needed, many of you, for…interest.”

  To have someone independent to talk to, He thought but did not say. To summon up insights that lie within the two of us, but that we cannot express overtly. To be vast meant having parts of yourself that you could not readily find. The uncoiling of space-time had taken long eras of detail that rolled on without inspection—that was the function of natural law.

  One said, “I was in my mortal time a human. We had many visions of you.”

  “Human?” asked She.

  “One of the ancient variants,” He explained, for to Him went the tedious detail work of categories. “They appeared quite early. A type that our worlds quite commonly brought forth.”

  He looked long at One and took pity upon this pale mote before them. “You are from a common kind, those of four appendages. A local optimum, from natural selection, acting where beings sprung from the most likely place where life began—that is, in the realm of gravitation. You and others such must fight and profit from the press of gravity.”

  She remembered. “Ah. The dwellers among worlds, yes—they are among our best work.”

  Still, He recalled, the total amount of information that One could absorb in its mortal lifetime was about 1016 bits, which severely limited what it could distinguish. Since its death, it had dwelled within He and She, and so had taken in vastly more. But knowledge was not wisdom, as made clear by One’s inner confusions, which He could see easily.

  One hesitated. “May I ask…why? Why did you call me forth?”

  She said, “Because this is the end time. We want to bask in your light once more.”

  The One seemed to fathom this compliment, though of course it could not be true. “We had a poet, Milton, who thought you would suffer from loneliness.”

  Together they laughed—and the One was startled that they did. This made them laugh again. “A hominid narrow idea,” She said, mirth rippling through her.

  He reached into her and felt the surges of emotion, saw echoes them in his own, larger self, and loved her all the more. Alone? Never.

  Around them time hammered on, as it must—that was one of the basic constraints designed in from the Creation, of course. He realized that the One was worrying through an ancient problem, one expressed in musty eras and epochs long past. But persistent.

  “Is there a fresh challenge, then?” One said.

  She said, “In a way. The laws grind.”

  One said, “Of course. That is the way You set.”

  “Just so,” She said. “But now it leaches meaning from all.”

  “That was inevitable?” One wondered.

  “Disorder gathers unavoidably,” He said.

  One registered sharp colors of surprise. “Can you not—?”

  “A finite system may be capable of an infinite amount of computation, in due time,” He said. “But it can only store a finite number of memories.”

  “And you are finite?” One was perplexed.

  “Necessarily,” She said. “We dwell in a bounded space-time.”

  He said, “The initially finite must remain so.”

  She added, “Any additional mass with which to build new ’memory’ has redshifted beyond the event horizon, no matter where we are—and is therefore unavailable.”

  The One said slowly, “Inescapably?”

  “Life itself is doomed to mortality,” He said with finality. This was going slower than it should. He had forgotten that about Others.

  One said strongly, “I do not accept this.”

  At last, the point. She said with love and deep feeling, “Then strive to alter.”

  * * *

  A vast age passed. The last suns dimmed into red sleep. Through it all, One and those he represented—the faithful—labored long and hard. Crafty and deft, they could manifest in the universe through mechanisms He and She opened for them. It was at least amusing to watch, and always interesting. This was how the universe taught itself.

  The faithful built great arches of slumbering mass, cobbled together from whole clusters of dead galaxies. The basic energy of the expansion then stretched these fresh structures. Vast motors worked like elastic bands, extending and releasing, harnessing the swelling of space-time itself. These extracted useful energy, avoiding the dead end of collapsed matter. Energies burst forth and new life forms of plasma flourished. The faithful watched these beings, far larger than the dark galaxies, frolic in what was, for them, a fresh new universe.

  * * *

  Vastly later, One approached He and She again. “We dedicate these young plasma civilizations to you.”

  She said, “Excellent! Your works are wondrous. We are happy to witness them.”

  One rippled with a bright frisson of pleased color. “We estimate that the young ones can persist for as long as the older life—born of silicon and even raw dust—can endure.”

  She said, “True, at least until the protons decay.”

  One beamed. “After that, there is no fundamental reason that information cannot be lodged in electron-positron plasmas, or even atoms made from them. So the plasma forms will go on eternally. Your laws demand that we change our physical basis. We the faithful shall now transform into those diffuse structures. For your eternity, as promised.”

  She said, “No, not eternity. That is the Law.”

  One rippled with puzzlement and gray despair. “But if even You cannot—”

  “We wrote all this into the Beginning,” He said to One.

  This had been clear even in the long, bright era when light flared everywhere. The accelerating expansion of space-time, which was essential in the planning of all this, none the less yielded a more constricted long-term future. For long ages now, galaxies had faded from view, ebbed, and shifted more and more into the deep red. They seemed to run slower and slower as well, due to the expansion. But now all that even He and She could witness had frozen. All about them lay galaxies still, dark and ever-colder, seizing up.

  The One said with fizzing, fast energies, “But what of we!?”

  Both She and He realized that One spoke now for all mortals, including the giddy plasma forms that fizzed and jostled in the darkening skies. One and his kind arose from the intricate wealth of biology, and had sensed the existence of He and She behind the lattice that was this universe. They had once lived their small lives in small worlds.

  “You,” She said, “our faithful.”

  “Yes! One said. “We believed that the universe had to have come from a Someone. You.”

  He said,
“We two made our Creation so it led to this encroaching night, also.”

  “Ah…” Carefully, One went on, “So how can we persist? The energy stores of your universe are thinning out as the expansion accelerates.”

  She said sympathetically, “Any conceivable form of life would have to keep ever-cooler, think slowly, and hibernate for ever-longer periods. So with you, as well.”

  One did not seem to think this was an answer. “New, fresh life—yes. But what of we?”

  She noticed One’s troubled flex of color and desire. “Those mortals who believed that this universe had purpose, and so gained a place within He or Me?”

  One said eagerly, “Yes!”

  The two regarded each other for a microsecond. So this question came at last. “All winds down,” He said in a long, slow way. “Energies mingle and collide. Those drive life in evolving systems. Such vexation is necessary—it builds structure, a fountain of bright wonder.”

  One said slowly, “I…suppose.”

  He went on explaining, for this was a large lesson—one He and She had been forced by logic to learn, back before the Beginning. To have such a vibrant universe, they had to dwell within it, not stand separate. “But you must see, there is a price. Creation ebbs. We cannot question the Law. We made it, because a finite yet unbounded system—this, our Creation—must have such Law to exist at all.”

  She said, “Otherwise, Creation does not generate interesting structures.”

  “And that was our aim,” He added. “The reason we did all this.”

  One said quickly, as if fearing the fading amber tides in the vexed sky would cut it off, “You made this all for eternity—that we believed! You said so.”

  She corrected, “We did not. Yourselves, all you mortals, you said so. Not us.”

  One insisted, “The assembled Host, we who worshipped you—we thought that time would spool on for eternity.”

  “Eternity depends upon the system of measuring it,” She said abruptly.