The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He looked into the sky.

  The attack wave broke orbit hard and steep above the Wall; five hundred fireballs screeching toward the nest. The insertion scorched inches of ablative armor from most of the ships; fried a few others which came in just fractionally too hard. Clavain knew that was how it was happening: he had studied possible attack scenarios for years, the range of outcomes burned indelibly into his memory.

  The anti-assault guns were already working—locking onto the plasma trails as they flowered overhead, swinging down to find the tiny spark of heat at the head, computing refraction paths for laser pulses, spitting death into the sky. The unlucky ships flared a white that hurt the back of the eye and rained down in a billion dulling sparks. A dozen—then a dozen more. Maybe fifty in total before the guns could no longer acquire targets. It was nowhere near enough. Clavain’s memory of the simulations told him that at least four hundred units of the attack wave would survive both re-entry and the Conjoiner’s heavy defenses.

  Nothing that Galiana could do would make any difference.

  And that had always been the paradox. Galiana was capable of running the same simulations. She must always have known that her provocations would bring down something she could never hope to defeat.

  Something that was always going to destroy her.

  The surviving members of the wave were levelling out now, commencing long, ground-hugging runs from all directions. Cocooned in their dropships, the soldiers would be suffering punishing gee-loads … but it was nothing they were not engineered to withstand; half their cardiovascular systems were augmented by the only kinds of implant the Coalition tolerated.

  The first of the wave came arcing in at supersonic speeds. All around, worms struggled to snatch them out of the sky, but mostly they were too slow to catch the dropships. Galiana’s people manned their cannon positions and did their best to fend off what they could. Clavain clutched his gun, not firing yet. Best to save his ammo-cell power for a target he stood a chance of injuring.

  Above, the first dropships made hairpin turns, nosing suicidally down toward the nest. Then they fractured cleanly apart, revealing falling pilots clad in bulbous armor. Just before the moment of impact each pilot exploded into a mass of black shock-absorbing balloons, looking something like a blackberry, bouncing across the nest before the balloons deflated just as swiftly and the pilot was left standing on the ground. By then the pilot—now properly a soldier—would have a comprehensive computer-generated map of the nest’s nooks and crannies; enemy positions graphed in realtime from the down-looking spysats.

  Clavain fell behind the curve of a dome before the nearest soldier got a lock onto him. The firefight was beginning now. He had to hand it to Galiana’s people—they were fighting like devils. And they were at least as well coordinated as the attackers. But their weapons and armor were simply inadequate. Chameleoflage was only truly effective against a solitary enemy, or a massed enemy moving in from a common direction. With Coalition forces surrounding him, Clavain’s suit was going crazy to trying to match itself against every background, like a chameleon in a house of mirrors.

  The sky overhead looked strange now—darkening purple. And the purple was spreading in a mist across the nest. Galiana had deployed some kind of chemical smoke screen: infrared and optically opaque, he guessed. It would occlude the spysats and might be primed to adhere only to enemy chameleoflage. That had never been in Warren’s simulations. Galiana had just given herself the slightest of edges.

  A soldier stepped out of the mist, the obscene darkness of a gun muzzle trained on Clavain. His chameleoflage armor was dappled with vivid purple patches, ruining its stealthiness. The man fired, but his discharge wasted itself against Clavain’s armor. Clavain returned the compliment, dropping his compatriot. What he had done, he thought, was not technically treason. Not yet. All he had done was act in self-preservation.

  The man was wounded, but not yet dead. Clavain stepped through the purple haze and knelt down beside the soldier. He tried not to look at the man’s wound.

  “Can you hear me?” he said. There was no answer from the man, but beneath his visor, Clavain thought he saw the man’s lips shape a sound. The man was just a kid—hardly old enough to remember much of the last war. “There’s something you have to know,” Clavain continued. “Do you realize who I am?” He wondered how recognizable he was, under the breather mask. Then something made him relent. He could tell the man he was Nevil Clavain—but what would that achieve? The soldier would be dead in minutes; maybe sooner than that. Nothing would be served by the soldier knowing that the basis for his attack was a lie; that he would not in fact be laying down his life for a just cause. The universe could be spared a single callous act.

  “It’s all right,” Clavain said, turning away from his victim.

  And then moved deeper into the nest, to see who else he could kill before the odds took him.

  But the odds never did.

  “You always were lucky,” Galiana said, leaning over him. They were somewhere underground again—deep in the nest. A medical area, by the look of things. He was on a bed, fully clothed apart from the outer layer of chameleoflage armor. The room was gray and kettle-shaped, ringed by a circular balcony.

  “What happened?”

  “You took a head wound, but you’ll survive.”

  He groped for the right question. “What about Warren’s attack?”

  “We endured three waves. We took casualties, of course.”

  Around the circumference of the balcony were thirty or so gray couches, slightly recessed into archways studded with gray medical equipment. They were all occupied. There were more Conjoiners in this room than he had seen so far in one place. Some of them looked very close to death.

  Clavain reached up and examined his head, gingerly. There was some dried blood on the scalp, matted with his hair; some numbness, but it could have been a lot worse. He felt normal—no memory drop-outs or aphasia. When he made to stand from the bed, his body obeyed his will with only a tinge of dizziness.

  “Warren won’t stop at just three waves, Galiana.”

  “I know.” She paused. “We know there’ll be more.”

  He walked to the railing on the inner side of the balcony and looked over the edge. He had expected to see something—some chunk of incomprehensible surgical equipment, perhaps—but the middle of the room was only an empty, smooth-walled, gray pit. He shivered. The air was colder than any part of the nest he had visited so far, with a medicinal tang which reminded him of the convalescence ward on Deimos. What made him shiver even more was the realization that some of the injured—some of the dead—were barely older than the children he had visited only hours ago. Perhaps some of them were those children, conscripted from the nursery since his visit, uploaded with fighting reflexes through their new implants.

  “What are you going to do? You know you can’t win. Warren lost only a tiny fraction of his available force in those waves. You look like you’ve lost half your nest.”

  “It’s much worse than that,” Galiana said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not quite ready yet. But I can show you in a moment.”

  He felt colder than ever now. “What do you mean, not quite ready?”

  Galiana looked deep into his eyes now. “You took a serious head wound, Clavain. The entry wound was small, but the internal bleeding … it would have killed you, had we not intervened.” Before he could ask the inevitable question she answered it for him. “We injected a small cluster of medichines into your head. They undid the damage very easily. But it seemed provident to allow them to grow.”

  “You’ve put replicators in my head?”

  “You needn’t sound so horrified. They’re already growing—spreading out and interfacing with your existing neural circuitry—but the total volume of glial mass that they will consume is tiny: only a few cubic millimeters in total, across your entire brain.”

  He wondered if she was callin
g his bluff. “I don’t feel anything.”

  “You won’t—not for a minute or so.” Now she pointed into the empty pit in the middle of the room. “Stand here and look into the air.”

  “There’s nothing there.”

  But as soon as he had spoken, he knew he was wrong. There was something in the pit. He blinked and directed his attention somewhere else, but when he returned his gaze to the pit, the thing he imagined he had seen—milky, spectral—was still there, and becoming sharper and brighter by the second. It was a three-dimensional structure, as complex as an exercise in protein-folding. A tangle of loops and connecting branches and nodes and tunnels, embedded in a ghostly red matrix.

  Suddenly he saw it for what it was: a map of the nest, dug into Mars. Just as the Coalition had suspected, the base was deeper than the original structure; far more extensive, reaching deeper down but much further out than anyone had imagined. Clavain made a mental effort to retain some of what he was seeing in his mind, the intelligence-gathering reflex stronger than the conscious knowledge that he would never see Deimos again.

  “The medichines in your brain have interfaced with your visual cortex,” Galiana said. “That’s the first step on the road to Transenlightenment. Now you’re privy to the machine-generated imagery encoded by the fields through which we move—most of it, anyway.”

  “Tell me this wasn’t planned, Galiana. Tell me you weren’t intending to put machines in me at the first opportunity.”

  “No; I wasn’t planning it. But nor was I going to let your phobias stop me from saving your life.”

  The image grew in complexity. Glowing nodes of light appeared in the tunnels, some moving slowly through the network.

  “What are they?”

  “You’re seeing the locations of the Conjoiners,” Galiana said. “Are there as many as you imagined?”

  Clavain judged that there were no more than seventy lights in the whole complex now. He searched for a cluster which would identify the room where he stood. There: twenty-odd bright lights, accompanied by one much fainter. Himself, of course. There were few people near the top of the nest—the attack must have collapsed half the tunnels, or maybe Galiana had deliberately sealed entrances herself.

  “Where is everyone? Where are the children?”

  “Most of the children are gone now.” She paused. “You were right to guess that we were rushing them to Transenlightenment, Clavain.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the only way out of here.”

  The image changed again. Now each of the bright lights was connected to another by a shimmering filament. The topology of the network was constantly shifting, like a pattern seen in a kaleidoscope. Occasionally, too swiftly for Clavain to be sure, it shifted toward a mandala of elusive symmetry, only to dissolve into the flickering chaos of the ever-changing network. He studied Galiana’s node and saw that—even as she was speaking to him—her mind was in constant rapport with the rest of the nest.

  Now something very bright appeared in the middle of the image, like a tiny star, against which the shimmering network paled almost to invisibility. “The network is abstracted now,” Galiana said. “The bright light represents its totality: the unity of Transenlightenment. Watch.”

  He watched. The bright tight—beautiful and alluring as anything Clavain had ever imagined—was extending a ray toward the isolated node which represented himself. The ray was extending itself through the map, coming closer by the second.

  “The new structures in your mind are nearing maturity,” Galiana said. “When the ray touches you, you will experience partial integration with the rest of us. Prepare yourself, Nevil.”

  Her words were unnecessary. His fingers were already clenched sweating on the railing as the light inched closer and engulfed his node.

  “I should hate you for this,” Clavain said.

  “Why don’t you? Hate’s always the easier option.”

  “Because …” Because it made no difference now. His old life was over. He reached out for Galiana, needing some anchor against what was about to hit him. Galiana squeezed his hand and an instant later he knew something of Transenlightenment. The experience was shocking; not because it was painful or fearful, but because it was profoundly and totally new. He was literally thinking in ways that had not been possible microseconds earlier.

  Afterward, when Clavain tried to imagine how he might describe it, he found that words were never going to be adequate for the task. And that was no surprise: evolution had shaped language to convey many concepts, but going from a single to a networked topology of self was not among them. But if he could not convey the core of the experience, he could at least skirt its essence with metaphor. It was like standing on the shore of an ocean, being engulfed by a wave taller than himself. For a moment he sought the surface; tried to keep the water from his lungs. But there happened not to be a surface. What had consumed him extended infinitely in all directions. He could only submit to it. Yet as the moments slipped by it turned from something terrifying in its unfamiliarity to something he could begin to adapt to; something that even began in the tiniest way to seem comforting. Even then he glimpsed that it was only a shadow of what Galiana was experiencing every instant of her life.

  “All right,” Galiana said. “That’s enough for now.”

  The fullness of Transenlightenment retreated, like a fading vision of Godhead. What he was left with was purely sensory; no longer any direct rapport with the others. His state of mind came crashing back to normality.

  “Are you all right, Nevil?”

  “Yes …” His mouth was dry. “Yes; I think so.”

  “Look around you.”

  He did.

  The room had changed completely. So had everyone in it.

  His head reeling, Clavain walked in light. The formerly gray walls oozed beguiling patterns; as if a dark forest had suddenly become enchanted. Information hung in veils in the air; icons and diagrams and numbers clustering around the beds of the injured, thinning out into the general space like fantastically delicate neon sculptures. As he walked toward the icons they darted out of his way, mocking him like schools of brilliant fish. Sometimes they seemed to sing, or tickle the back of his nose with half-familiar smells.

  “You can perceive things now,” Galiana said. “But none of it will mean much to you. You’d need years of education, or deeper neural machinery for that—building cognitive layers. We read all this almost subliminally.”

  Galiana was dressed differently now. He could still see the vague shape of her gray outfit, but layered around it were billowing skeins of light, unravelling at their edges into chains of Boolean logic. Icons danced in her hair like angels. He could see, faintly, the web of thought linking her with the other Conjoiners.

  She was inhumanly beautiful.

  “You said things were much worse,” Clavain said. “Are you ready to show me now?”

  She took him to see Felka again, passing on the way through deserted nursery rooms, populated now only by bewildered mechanical animals. Felka was the only child left in the nursery.

  Clavain had been deeply disturbed by Felka when he had seen her before, but not for any reason he could easily express. Something about the purposefulness of what she did; performed with ferocious concentration, as if the fate of creation hung on the outcome of her game. Felka and her surroundings had not changed at all since his visit. The room was still austere to the point of oppressiveness. Felka looked the same. In every respect it was as if only an instant had passed since their meeting; as if the onset of war and the assaults against the nest—the battle of which this was only an interlude—were only figments from someone else’s troubling dream; nothing that need concern Felka in her devotion to the task at hand.

  And what the task was awed Clavain.

  Before he had watched her make strange gestures in front of her. Now the machines in his head revealed the purpose that those gestures served. Around Felka—cordoning her like a barricad
e—was a ghostly representation of the Great Wall.

  She was doing something to it.

  It was not a scale representation, Clavain knew. The Wall looked much higher here in relation to its diameter. And the surface was not the nearly invisible membrane of the real thing, but something like etched glass. The etchwork was a filigree of lines and junctions, descending down to smaller and smaller scales in fractal steps, until the blur of detail was too fine for his eyes to discriminate. It was shifting and altering color, and Felka was responding to these alterations with what he now saw was frightening efficiency. It was as if the color changes warned of some malignancy in part of the Wall, and by touching it—expressing some tactile code—Felka was able to restructure the etchwork to block and neutralize the malignancy before it spread.

  “I don’t understand,” Clavain said. “I thought we destroyed the Wall; completely killed its systems.”

  “No,” Galiana said. “You only ever injured it. Stopped it from growing, and from managing its own repair-processes correctly … but you never truly killed it.”

  Sandra Voi had guessed, Clavain realized. She had wondered how the Wall had survived this long.

  Galiana told him the rest—how they had managed to establish control pathways to the Wall from the nest, fifteen years earlier—optical cables sunk deep below the worm zone. “We stabilized the Wall’s degradation with software running on dumb machines,” she said. “But when Felka was born we found that she managed the task just as efficiently as the computers; in some ways better than they ever did. In fact, she seemed to thrive on it. It was as if in the Wall she found …” Galiana trailed off. “I was going to say a friend.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because the Wall’s just a machine. Which means if Felka recognized kinship … what would that make her?”

  “Someone lonely, that’s all.” Clavain watched the girl’s motions. “She seems faster than before. Is that possible?”