The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  But this man’s wife was dying, needlessly. And Robert was tired of keeping secrets. Some wars required it, but others were better won with honesty.

  He said, “I know you hate H. G. Wells. But what if he was right, about one little thing?”

  Robert told him everything, glossing over the technicalities but leaving out nothing substantial. Hamilton listened without interrupting, gripped by a kind of unwilling fascination. His expression shifted from hostile to incredulous, but there were also hints of begrudging amazement, as if he could at least appreciate some of the beauty and complexity of the picture Robert was painting.

  But when Robert had finished, Hamilton said merely, “You’re a grand liar, Stoney. But what else should I expect, from the King of Lies?”

  Robert was in a somber mood on the drive back to Cambridge. The encounter with Hamilton had depressed him, and the question of who’d swayed the nation in the debate seemed remote and abstract in comparison.

  Helen had taken a house in the suburbs, rather than inviting scandal by cohabiting with him, though her frequent visits to his rooms seemed to have had almost the same effect. Robert walked her to the door.

  “I think it went well, don’t you?” she said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I’m leaving tonight,” she added casually. “This is goodbye.”

  “What?” Robert was staggered. “Everything’s still up in the air! I still need you!”

  She shook her head. “You have all the tools you need, all the clues. And plenty of local allies. There’s nothing truly urgent I could tell you, now, that you couldn’t find out just as quickly on your own.”

  Robert pleaded with her, but her mind was made up. The driver beeped the horn; Robert gestured to him impatiently.

  “You know, my breath’s frosting visibly,” he said, “and you’re producing nothing. You really ought to be more careful.”

  She laughed. “It’s a bit late to worry about that.”

  “Where will you go? Back home? Or off to twist another branch?”

  “Another branch. But there’s something I’m planning to do on the way.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you remember once, you wrote about an Oracle? A machine that could solve the halting problem?”

  “Of course.” Given a device that could tell you in advance whether a given computer program would halt, or go on running forever, you’d be able to prove or disprove any theorem whatsoever about the integers: the Goldbach conjecture, Fermat’s Last Theorem, anything. You’d simply show this “Oracle” a program that would loop through all the integers, testing every possible set of values and only halting if it came to a set that violated the conjecture. You’d never need to run the program itself; the Oracle’s verdict on whether or not it halted would be enough.

  Such a device might or might not be possible, but Robert had proved more than twenty years before that no ordinary computer, however ingeniously programmed, would suffice. If program H could always tell you in a finite time whether or not program X would halt, you could tack on a small addition to H to create program Z, which perversely and deliberately went into an infinite loop whenever it examined a program that halted. If Z examined itself, it would either halt eventually, or run forever. But either possibility contradicted the alleged powers of program H: if Z actually ran forever, it would be because H had claimed that it wouldn’t, and vice versa. Program H could not exist.

  “Time travel,” Helen said, “gives me a chance to become an Oracle. There’s a way to exploit the inability to change your own past, a way to squeeze an infinite number of timelike paths—none of them closed, but some of them arbitrarily near to it—into a finite physical system. Once you do that, you can solve the halting problem.”

  “How?” Robert’s mind was racing. “And once you’ve done that … what about higher cardinalities? An Oracle for Oracles, able to test conjectures about the real numbers?”

  Helen smiled enigmatically. “The first problem should only take you forty or fifty years to solve. As for the rest,” she pulled away from him, moving into the darkness of the hallway, “what makes you think I know the answer myself?” She blew him a kiss, then vanished from sight.

  Robert took a step toward her, but the hallway was empty.

  He walked back to the car, sad and exalted, his heart pounding.

  The driver asked wearily, “Where to now, sir?”

  Robert said, “Further up, and further in.”

  4

  The night after the funeral, Jack paced the house until three A.M. When would it be bearable? When? She’d shown more strength and courage, dying, than he felt within himself right now. But she’d share it with him, in the weeks to come. She’d share it with them all.

  In bed, in the darkness, he tried to sense her presence around him. But it was forced, it was premature. It was one thing to have faith that she was watching over him, but quite another to expect to be spared every trace of grief, every trace of pain.

  He waited for sleep. He needed to get some rest before dawn, or how would he face her children in the morning?

  Gradually, he became aware of someone standing in the darkness at the foot of the bed. As he examined and reexamined the shadows, he formed a clear image of the apparition’s face.

  It was his own. Younger, happier, surer of himself.

  Jack sat up. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to come with me.” The figure approached; Jack recoiled, and it halted.

  “Come with you, where?” Jack demanded.

  “To a place where she’s waiting.”

  Jack shook his head. “No. I don’t believe you. She said she’d come for me herself, when it was time. She said she’d guide me.”

  “She didn’t understand, then,” the apparition insisted gently. “She didn’t know I could fetch you myself. Do you think I’d send her in my place? Do you think I’d shirk the task?”

  Jack searched the smiling, supplicatory face. “Who are you?” His own soul, in Heaven, remade? Was this a gift God offered everyone? To meet, before death, the very thing you would become—if you so chose? So that even this would be an act of free will?

  The apparition said, “Stoney persuaded me to let his friend treat Joyce. We lived on, together. More than a century has passed. And now we want you to join us.”

  Jack choked with horror. “No! This is a trick! You’re the Devil!”

  The thing replied mildly, “There is no Devil. And no God, either. Just people. But I promise you: people with the powers of gods are kinder than any god we ever imagined.”

  Jack covered his face. “Leave me be.” He whispered fervent prayers, and waited. It was a test, a moment of vulnerability, but God wouldn’t leave him naked like this, face-to-face with the Enemy, for longer than he could endure.

  He uncovered his face. The thing was still with him.

  It said, “Do you remember, when your faith came to you? The sense of a shield around you melting away, like armor you’d worn to keep God at bay?”

  “Yes.” Jack acknowledged the truth defiantly; he wasn’t frightened that this abomination could see into his past, into his heart.

  “That took strength: to admit that you needed God. But it takes the same kind of strength, again, to understand that some needs can never be met. I can’t promise you Heaven. We have no disease, we have no war, we have no poverty. But we have to find our own love, our own goodness. There is no final word of comfort. We only have each other.”

  Jack didn’t reply; this blasphemous fantasy wasn’t even worth challenging. He said, “I know you’re lying. Do you really imagine that I’d leave the boys alone here?”

  “They’d go back to America, back to their father. How many years do you think you’d have with them, if you stay? They’ve already lost their mother. It would be easier for them now, a single clean break.”

  Jack shouted angrily, “Get out of my house!”

  The thing came closer, and sat on the
bed. It put a hand on his shoulder. Jack sobbed, “Help me!” But he didn’t know whose aid he was invoking anymore.

  “Do you remember the scene in The Seat of Oak? When the Harpy traps everyone in her cave underground, and tries to convince them that there is no Nescia? Only this drab underworld is real, she tells them. Everything else they think they’ve seen was just make-believe.” Jack’s own young face smiled nostalgically. “And we had dear old Shrugweight reply: he didn’t think much of this so-called ‘real world’ of hers. And even if she was right, since four little children could make up a better world, he’d rather go on pretending that their imaginary one was real.

  “But we had it all upside down! The real world is richer, and stranger, and more beautiful than anything ever imagined. Milton, Dante, John the Divine are the ones who trapped you in a drab, gray underworld. That’s where you are now. But if you give me your hand, I can pull you out.”

  Jack’s chest was bursting. He couldn’t lose his faith. He’d kept it through worse than this. He’d kept it through every torture and indignity God had inflicted on his wife’s frail body. No one could take it from him now. He crooned to himself, “In my time of trouble, He will find me.”

  The cool hand tightened its grip on his shoulder. “You can be with her, now. Just say the word, and you will become a part of me. I will take you inside me, and you will see through my eyes, and we will travel back to the world where she still lives.”

  Jack wept openly. “Leave me in peace! Just leave me to mourn her!”

  The thing nodded sadly. “If that’s what you want.”

  “I do! Go!”

  “When I’m sure.”

  Suddenly, Jack thought back to the long rant Stoney had delivered in the studio. Every choice went every way, Stoney had claimed. No decision could ever be final.

  “Now I know you’re lying!” he shouted triumphantly. “If you believed everything Stoney told you, how could my choice ever mean a thing? I would always say yes to you, and I would always say no! It would all be the same!”

  The apparition replied solemnly, “While I’m here with you, touching you, you can’t be divided. Your choice will count.”

  Jack wiped his eyes, and gazed into its face. It seemed to believe every word it was speaking. What if this truly was his metaphysical twin, speaking as honestly as he could, and not merely the Devil in a mask? Perhaps there was a grain of truth in Stoney’s awful vision; perhaps this was another version of himself, a living person who honestly believed that the two of them shared a history.

  Then it was a visitor sent by God, to humble him. To teach him compassion toward Stoney. To show Jack that he, too, with a little less faith, and a little more pride, might have been damned forever.

  Jack stretched out a hand and touched the face of this poor lost soul. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

  He said, “I’ve made my choice. Now leave me.”

  Obsidian Harvest

  RICK COOK & ERNEST HOGAN

  Rick Cook is a frequent contributor to Analog, and has also sold fiction to New Destinies, Sword and Sorceress, and elsewhere. His many novels include Wizard’s Bane, The Wizardry Compiled, The Wizardry Consulted, The Wizardry Cursed, The Wizardry Quested, The Wiz Biz (an omnibus volume of the first two titles in the Wiz series), Limbo System, and Mall Purchase Night. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

  Ernest Hogan has sold stories to Analog, Amazing, New Pathways, Semiotext (e), Last Wave, Pulphouse, and Science Fiction Age. His novels include Cortez on Jupiter and High Aztech.

  In the flamboyant, colorful, and hugely entertaining story that follows, audaciously mixing the mystery genre with the Alternate History tale, they join forces to take a hard-boiled Private Eye down some Mean Streets much meaner, much weirder, and much more profoundly dangerous, than any ever seen by Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade …

  “I have always liked you, my boy,” Uncle Tlaloc rumbled. He smiled at me, showing a row of jade-inlaid teeth.

  I nodded politely, sipped my bitter chocolate and listened to my head throb. I wondered what the old bastard had in store for me this time.

  Classical music keened and thumped to a crescendo on the main floor of the Hummingbird’s Palace as the tone-deaf current object of Uncle Tlaloc’s affections belted out the line about the unhappy ending of the romance between Smoking Mountain and White Lady. She didn’t even come near the high note. In the old days they skinned singers for performances like that. But times change and the world decays as cycles end; so she smiled, bowed and received enthusiastic applause as she blushed through her yellow skin dye. The combination of the blush and the dye made her look more jaundiced than attractive.

  The pungent mixture of tobacco and drug smoke stung my eyes as it blended with the piney-sweet reek of burning copal incense, almost hiding the odors of spices, citrus flowers—and a hint of stale urine creeping in from the privy in back.

  Uncle Tlaloc, as fat and ugly as his Rain God namesake, leaned back in his chair, the one with Death carved beneath his right hand and the Earth Monster beneath his left. “In fact I consider you more of a nephew than an employee.”

  Something bad. Whenever Uncle went into that almost-a-relative routine it meant he had something especially nasty in store for me.

  He signaled the kneeling pulque girl, and she glided forward to refill his cup. Her eardrums had been pierced so she could not hear, but he kept silent until she had withdrawn, as noiselessly as she had come.

  He glanced around conspiratorially and leaned forward toward where I knelt at his feet, took a hefty swig of pulque out of the skull he used for a chalice and belched malodorously. “I have a small task for you.”

  “I am yours to command, Lord Uncle.”

  “Your cousin, Ninedeer …”

  About as bad as it can fucking get!

  “I know him, Uncle-tzin.” My voice betrayed nothing.

  “He is an acolyte of the Death Master, I believe.”

  “So I have heard.”

  “The Death Master has—something—in his temple. I would like to know how it came to die and whatever else your cousin might know about it.”

  “Am I permitted to know what this thing is, Uncle-tzin?”

  Uncle Tlaloc paused, as if considering whether to tell me, and leaned even closer.

  “It is a huetlacoatl. An important one.”

  It was raining when I stepped out of the Hummingbird’s Palace, a soft, warm drizzle that felt like Tlaloc Himself was pissing on me. Just like his whoreson namesake inside. I pulled my cloak tighter around me, fingering the single row of featherwork at the neck of my cape. Hummingbird feathers, the mark of a warrior, of the war god, Left-Handed Hummingbird Himself, and hence an inalienable symbol of nobility. Of course, the greater nobles supplemented hummingbird feathers with the plumes of the quetzal, symbol of Lord Quetzalcoatl; but it had been a while since I had any dealings with the nobility, minor or otherwise.

  It had been a good deal longer since I had dealt with any of my clansmen. My relatives and I would much rather it stayed that way. But Uncle Tlaloc commanded, and his word was the closest thing there was to law down in English Town. I stepped over a sleeping beggar on the sidewalk, threw back my head, squared my shoulders, and marched off toward the Death Master’s temple—every inch a Child of the Hummingbird on his way to his destiny on the Field of Flowers.

  The guards at the Temple Precinct passed me on the strength of my cloak, the clan tattoo on my cheeks—and my bearing. None of Uncle’s other employees could have entered the sacred quarter of the Atlnahuac so easily, which was why the old bastard had chosen me for this job.

  The Death Master’s temple was at the far end of the sacred quarter, close to the bay and downwind of the major temples. I strolled easily and unremarked among the other nobles, priests, and servants who were out at this hour. Floodlights cast the painted and carved friezes in garish light. Here and there neon tubes outlined the temples on top of the pyramids in reds, the color of fresh blood, and p
urples, the shade of clotted blood. It was different—harsher—than I remembered, and yet I knew the sacred quarter hadn’t changed.

  Ninedeer hadn’t changed either. He was as thin and gangly as I remembered him. Adulthood hadn’t cured his weak chin, and the elaborate jade lip plug he affected only heightened the deficiency. We had never particularly liked each other.

  “I didn’t expect to ever see you again,” he said when a temple servant ushered me into his presence.

  I cast an arm at the stone tables behind him and the draped burdens a few of them bore. “Working here? Surely I would have thought you’d expect me to turn up sooner or later.”

  The years had done as much to improve his sense of humor as they had to improve his jawline. “I didn’t expect to see you alive,” he amended. “You’re not even supposed to be here.”

  I smiled in the way I had learned since I had been with Uncle Tlaloc. “You could call the guards and have me sent away,” I said mildly. “Of course, then I would have to seek you elsewhere to conduct our business.”

  His expression told me that rumors about what had happened to the last relative who crossed me had leaked into clan gossip. “What do you want?” he asked sullenly.

  “I want a look at one of your charges,” I said. “And I want to know what you can tell me about it.”

  “It? You mean an animal?” That was possible, of course. The Death Master’s duties included collecting the bodies of animals who had died in the city, as well as dead humans, sacrificial victims, and executed criminals. But he knew damn well it wasn’t any animal, and his voice showed it.

  “I mean the huetlacoatl.”

  Ninedeer flinched as if I had slapped him. “No! Absolutely not.”

  I leaned against the wall in an attitude of exaggerated ease. “One way or another, cousin. One way or another.”