The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I anchored likewise and began to help her. The Ghost was massive, the size of a major piece of machinery, and it had built up respectable momentum; at first I couldn’t grab hold of the skin flaps that spun past my hand. As we labored I became aware I was getting uncomfortably hot. The light that seeped into the tangle from that caged sun seemed to be getting stronger by the minute.

  But as we worked those uneasy thoughts soon dissipated.

  At last we got the Ghost under control. Briskly Jeru stripped it of its kit belt, and we began to cram the baggy corpse as deep as we could into the surrounding tangle. It was a grisly job. As the Ghost crumpled further, more of its innards, stiffening now, came pushing out of the holes we’d given it in its hide, and I had to keep from gagging as the foul stuff came pushing out into my face.

  At last it was done—as best we could manage it, anyhow.

  Jeru’s faceplate was smeared with black and red. She was sweating hard, her face pink. But she was grinning, and she had a trophy, the Ghost belt around her shoulders. We began to make our way back, following the same SOP as before.

  When we got back to our lying-up point, we found Academician Pael was in trouble.

  Pael had curled up in a ball, his hands over his face. We pulled him open. His eyes were closed, his face blotched pink, and his faceplate dripped with condensation.

  He was surrounded by gadgets stuck in the tangle—including parts from what looked like a broken-open starbreaker handgun; I recognized prisms and mirrors and diffraction gratings. Well, unless he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to tell us what he had been doing here.

  Jeru glanced around. The light of the fortress’s central star had gotten a lot stronger. Our lying-up point was now bathed in light—and heat—with the surrounding tangle offering very little shelter. “Any ideas, tar?”

  I felt the exhilaration of our infil drain away. “No, sir.”

  Jeru’s face, bathed in sweat, showed tension. I noticed she was favoring her left hand. She’d mentioned, back at the nursery pod, that she’d cracked a finger, but had said nothing about it since—nor did she give it any time now. “All right.” She dumped the Ghost equipment belt and took a deep draft of water from her hood spigot. “Tar, you’re on stag. Try to keep Pael in the shade of your body. And if he wakes up, ask him what he’s found out.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.”

  And then she was gone, melting into the complex shadows of the tangle as if she’d been born to these conditions.

  I found a place where I could keep up 360-degree vision, and offer a little of my shadow to Pael—not that I imagined it helped much.

  I had nothing to do but wait.

  As the Ghost ship followed its own mysterious course, the light dapples that came filtering through the tangle shifted and evolved. Clinging to the tangle, I thought I could feel vibration: a slow, deep harmonization that pulsed through the ship’s giant structure. I wondered if I was hearing the deep voices of Ghosts, calling to each other from one end of their mighty ship to another. It all served to remind me that everything in my environment, everything, was alien, and I was very far from home.

  I tried to count my heartbeat, my breaths; I tried to figure out how long a second was. “A thousand and one. A thousand and two …” Keeping time is a basic human trait; time provides a basic orientation, and keeps you mentally sharp and in touch with reality. But I kept losing count.

  And all my efforts failed to stop darker thoughts creeping into my head.

  During a drama like the contact with the Ghost, you don’t realize what’s happening to you because your body blanks it out; on some level you know you just don’t have time to deal with it. Now I had stopped moving, the aches and pains of the last few hours started crowding in on me. I was still sore in my head and back and, of course, my busted arm. I could feel deep bruises, maybe cuts, on my gloved hands where I had hauled at my knife, and I felt as if I had wrenched my good shoulder. One of my toes was throbbing ominously: I wondered if I had cracked another bone, here in this weird environment in which my skeleton had become as brittle as an old man’s. I was chafed at my groin and armpits and knees and ankles and elbows, my skin rubbed raw. I was used to suits; normally I’m tougher than that.

  The shafts of sunlight on my back were working on me too; it felt as if I was lying underneath the elements of an oven. I had a headache, a deep sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a ringing in my ears, and a persistent ring of blackness around my eyes. Maybe I was just exhausted, dehydrated; maybe it was more than that.

  I started to think back over my operation with Jeru, and the regrets began.

  Okay, I’d stood my ground when confronted by the Ghost and not betrayed Jeru’s position. But when she launched her attack I’d hesitated, for those crucial few seconds. Maybe if I’d been tougher the commissary wouldn’t find herself hauling through the tangle, alone, with a busted finger distracting her with pain signals.

  Our training is comprehensive. You’re taught to expect that kind of hindsight torture, in the quiet moments, and to discount it—or, better yet, learn from it. But, effectively alone in that metallic alien forest, I wasn’t finding my training was offering much perspective.

  And, worse, I started to think ahead. Always a mistake.

  I couldn’t believe that the Academician and his reluctant gadgetry were going to achieve anything significant. And for all the excitement of our infil, we hadn’t found anything resembling a bridge or any vulnerable point we could attack, and all we’d come back with was a belt of field kit we didn’t even understand.

  For the first time I began to consider seriously the possibility that I wasn’t going to live through this—that I was going to die when my suit gave up or the sun went pop, whichever came first, in no more than a few hours.

  A brief life burns brightly. That’s what you’re taught. Longevity makes you conservative, fearful, selfish. Humans made that mistake before, and we finished up a subject race. Live fast and furiously, for you aren’t important—all that matters is what you can do for the species.

  But I didn’t want to die.

  If I never returned to Mercury again I wouldn’t shed a tear. But I had a life now, in the Navy. And then there were my buddies: the people I’d trained and served with, people like Halle—even Jeru. Having found fellowship for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to lose it so quickly, and fall into the darkness alone—especially if it was to be for nothing.

  But maybe I wasn’t going to get a choice.

  After an unmeasured time, Jeru returned. She was hauling a silvery blanket. It was Ghost hide. She started to shake it out.

  I dropped down to help her. “You went back to the one we killed—”

  “—and skinned him,” she said, breathless. “I just scraped off the crap with a knife. The Planck-zero layer peels away easily. And look …” she made a quick incision in the glimmering sheet with her knife. Then she put the two edges together again, ran her finger along the seam, and showed me the result. I couldn’t even see where the cut had been. “Self-sealing, self-healing,” she said. “Remember that, tar.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  We started to rig the punctured, splayed-out hide as a rough canopy over our LUP, blocking as much of the sunlight as possible from Pael. A few slivers of frozen flesh still clung to the hide, but mostly it was like working with a fine, light metallic foil.

  In the sudden shade, Pael was starting to stir. His moans were translated to stark bioluminescent icons.

  “Help him,” Jeru snapped. “Make him drink.” And while I did that she dug into the med kit on her belt and started to spray cast material around the fingers of her left hand.

  “It’s the speed of light,” Pael said. He was huddled in a corner of our LUP, his legs tucked against his chest. His voice must have been feeble; the bioluminescent sigils on his suit were fragmentary and came with possible variants extrapolated by the translator software.

  “Tell us,” Jer
u said, relatively gently.

  “The Ghosts have found a way to change lightspeed in this fortress. In fact to increase it.” He began talking again about quagma and physics constants and the rolled-up dimensions of spacetime, but Jeru waved that away irritably.

  “How do you know this?”

  Pael began tinkering with his prisms and gratings. “I took your advice, Commissary.” He beckoned to me. “Come see, child.”

  I saw that a shaft of red light, split out and deflected by his prism, shone through a diffraction grating and cast an angular pattern of dots and lines on a scrap of smooth plastic behind.

  “You see?” His eyes searched my face.

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “The wavelength of the light has changed. It has been increased. Red light should have a wavelength, oh, a fifth shorter than that indicated by this pattern.”

  I was struggling to understand. I held up my hand. “Shouldn’t the green of this glove turn yellow, or blue … ?”

  Pael sighed. “No. Because the color you see depends, not on the wavelength of a photon, but on its energy. Conservation of energy still applies, even where the Ghosts are tinkering. So each photon carries as much energy as before—and evokes the same ‘color.’ Since a photon’s energy is proportional to its frequency, that means frequencies are left unchanged. But since lightspeed is equal to frequency multiplied by wavelength, an increase in wavelength implies—”

  “An increase in lightspeed,” said Jeru.

  “Yes.”

  I didn’t follow much of that. I turned and looked up at the light that leaked around our Ghost-hide canopy. “So we see the same colors. The light of that star gets here a little faster. What difference does it make?”

  Pael shook his head. “Child, a fundamental constant like lightspeed is embedded in the deep structure of our universe. Lightspeed is part of the ratio known as the fine structure constant.” He started babbling about the charge on the electron, but Jeru cut him off.

  She said, “Case, the fine structure constant is a measure of the strength of an electric or magnetic force.”

  I could follow that much. “And if you increase lightspeed—”

  “You reduce the strength of the force.” Pael raised himself. “Consider this. Human bodies are held together by molecular binding energy—electromagnetic forces. Here, electrons are more loosely bound to atoms; the atoms in a molecule are more loosely bound to each other.” He rapped on the cast on my arm. “And so your bones are more brittle, your skin more easy to pierce or chafe. Do you see? You too are embedded in spacetime, my young friend. You too are affected by the Ghosts’ tinkering. And because lightspeed in this infernal pocket continues to increase—as far as I can tell from these poor experiments—you are becoming more fragile every second.”

  It was a strange, eerie thought: that something so basic in my universe could be manipulated. I put my arms around my chest and shuddered.

  “Other effects,” Pael went on bleakly. “The density of matter is dropping. Perhaps our structure will eventually begin to crumble. And dissociation temperatures are reduced.”

  Jeru snapped, “What does that mean?”

  “Melting and boiling points are reduced. No wonder we are overheating. It is intriguing that bio systems have proven rather more robust than electromechanical ones. But if we don’t get out of here soon, our blood will start to boil … .”

  “Enough,” Jeru said. “What of the star?”

  “A star is a mass of gas with a tendency to collapse under its own gravity. But heat, supplied by fusion reactions in the core, creates gas and radiation pressures that push outward, counteracting gravity.”

  “And if the fine structure constant changes—”

  “Then the balance is lost. Commissary, as gravity begins to win its ancient battle, the fortress star has become more luminous—it is burning faster. That explains the observations we made from outside the cordon. But this cannot last.”

  “The novae,” I said.

  “Yes. The explosions, layers of the star blasted into space, are a symptom of destabilized stars seeking a new balance. The rate at which our star is approaching that catastrophic moment fits with the lightspeed drift I have observed.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “A single cause predicating so many effects. It is all rather pleasing, in an aesthetic way.”

  Jeru said, “At least we know how the ship was destroyed. Every control system is mediated by finely tuned electromagnetic effects. Everything must have gone crazy at once … .”

  We figured it out. The Brief Life Burns Brightly had been a classic GUTship, of a design that hasn’t changed in its essentials for thousands of years. The lifedome, a tough translucent bubble, contained the crew of twenty. The ’dome was connected by a spine a klick long to a GUTdrive engine pod.

  When we crossed the cordon boundary—when all the bridge lights failed—the control systems went down, and all the pod’s superforce energy must have tried to escape at once. The spine of the ship had thrust itself up into the lifedome, like a nail rammed into a skull.

  Pael said dreamily, “If lightspeed were a tad faster, throughout the universe, then hydrogen could not fuse to helium. There would only be hydrogen: no fusion to power stars, no chemistry. Conversely if lightspeed were a little lower, hydrogen would fuse too easily, and there would be no hydrogen, nothing to make stars—or water. You see how critical it all is? No doubt the Ghosts’ science of fine-tuning is advancing considerably here on the Orion Line, even as it serves its trivial defensive purpose …”

  Jeru glared at him, her contempt obvious. “We must take this piece of intelligence back to the Commission. If the Ghosts can survive and function in these fast-light bubbles of theirs, so can we. We may be at the pivot of history, gentlemen.”

  I knew she was right. The primary duty of the Commission for Historical Truth is to gather and deploy intelligence about the enemy. And so my primary duty, and Pael’s, was now to help Jeru get this piece of data back to her organization.

  But Pael was mocking her.

  “Not for ourselves, but for the species. Is that the line, Commissary? You are so grandiose. And yet you blunder around in comical ignorance. Even your quixotic quest aboard this cruiser was futile. There probably is no bridge on this ship. The Ghosts’ entire morphology, their evolutionary design, is based on the notion of cooperation, of symbiosis; why should a Ghost ship have a metaphoric head? And as for the trophy you have returned—” He held up the belt of Ghost artifacts. “There are no weapons here. These are sensors, tools. There is nothing here capable of producing a significant energy discharge. This is less threatening than a bow and arrow.” He let go of the belt; it drifted away. “The Ghost wasn’t trying to kill you. It was blocking you. Which is a classic Ghost tactic.”

  Jeru’s face was stony. “It was in our way. That is sufficient reason for destroying it.”

  Pael shook his head. “Minds like yours will destroy us, Commissary.”

  Jeru stared at him with suspicion. Then she said, “You have a way. Don’t you, Academician? A way to get us out of here.”

  He tried to face her down, but her will was stronger, and he averted his eyes.

  Jeru said heavily, “Regardless of the fact that three lives are at stake—does duty mean nothing to you, Academician? You are an intelligent man. Can you not see that this is a war of human destiny?”

  Pael laughed. “Destiny—or economics?”

  I looked from one to the other, dismayed, baffled. I thought we should be doing less yapping and more fighting.

  Pael said, watching me, “You see, child, as long as the explorers and the mining fleets and the colony ships are pushing outward, as long as the Third Expansion is growing, our economy works. The riches can continue to flow inward, into the mined-out systems, feeding a vast horde of humanity who have become more populous than the stars themselves. But as soon as that growth falters …”

  Jeru was silent.

  I understood some of thi
s. The Third Expansion had reached all the way to the inner edge of our spiral arm of the galaxy. Now the first colony ships were attempting to make their way across the void to the next arm.

  Our arm, the Orion Arm, is really just a shingle, a short arc. But the Sagittarius Arm is one of the galaxy’s dominant features. For example, it contains a huge region of star-birth, one of the largest in the galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. It was a prize indeed.

  But that is where the Silver Ghosts live.

  When it appeared that our inexorable expansion was threatening not just their own mysterious projects but their home system, the Ghosts began, for the first time, to resist us.

  They had formed a blockade, called by human strategists the Orion Line: a thick sheet of fortress stars, right across the inner edge of the Orion Arm, places the Navy and the colony ships couldn’t follow. It was a devastatingly effective ploy.

  This was a war of colonization, of world-building. For a thousand years we had been spreading steadily from star to star, using the resources of one system to explore, terraform and populate the worlds of the next. With too deep a break in that chain of exploitation, the enterprise broke down.

  And so the Ghosts had been able to hold up human expansion for fifty years.

  Pael said, “We are already choking. There have already been wars, young Case: human fighting human, as the inner systems starve. All the Ghosts have to do is wait for us to destroy ourselves, and free them to continue their own rather more worthy projects.”

  Jeru floated down before him. “Academician, listen to me. Growing up at Deneb, I saw the great schooners in the sky, bringing the interstellar riches that kept my people alive. I was intelligent enough to see the logic of history—that we must maintain the Expansion, because there is no choice. And that is why I joined the armed forces, and later the Commission for Historical Truth. For I understood the dreadful truth which the Commission cradles. And that is why we must labor every day to maintain the unity and purpose of mankind. For if we falter we die; as simple as that.”