The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Great.” I held up the empty cookie basket and smiled at him. “We could pack a picnic dinner.”

  Zana wasn’t amused.

  * * *

  “Father would explode if he knew you were seeing a rep.”

  “I’m not seeing him.” Zana was a darkness on the shadowy bed across the room. “He’s a friend, that’s all. And it’s all been messaging until recently.”

  “Except now you’re making dates to tour the ruins.”

  It was always sweltering in our house because of the ovens, even late at night after Father shut them down. In the summer Zana and I would sprawl on our beds, sweat prickling our skin. Most nights we kicked the sheets off, sometimes it was too hot for clothes. Unable to sleep, we’d talk of boys and dreams in the dank gloom, our conversation flickering like a candle.

  “He’s going to show you things nobody has seen.” I chuckled. “Where have I heard that joke before? He’s the tourist and you’re the baker’s beautiful daughter.”

  “That’s not what this is. Besides, now you’re coming too, even though nobody asked you.”

  “I’m only going to make sure that you don’t do anything stupid.” We never kept our flings a secret from one another, so this Quin worried me. “Okay, so maybe he’s not a tourist, but he’s not here to stay.” Zana was my twin, and even if we weren’t playmates anymore, she was the only one in our family I was close to. The silence was tickled by the scratch of slinks running up the walls and across the floor. In the warm weather the lizards stayed active at night, scavenging for crumbs and squeezing into the chinks in our stone walls.

  “You don’t think I can handle him?” said Zana. “I’m twenty-one years old.”

  “And he’s two hundred years old. Or maybe two thousand.”

  “Oh, stop it.”

  “He works for the Institute, Zana. You go squirting through wormholes for a living, you’ve got to allow for time dilation. People like him replicate what…? Five, six times at least.”

  I heard her torturing her pillow into a new shape, but neither of us found much comfort that night.

  “He’s definitely got a look,” I said. “I understand the attraction.”

  The slats beneath her mattress creaked when she sat up. “You know the problem with living at home?” She was silhouetted against the window, her bare back to me. “I can never get away from you two.”

  “That’s not fair. When you bring a boy home, don’t I give you the room? Just like when I was with Bibby, you got scarce. And Father hasn’t a clue who we’ve had in here.”

  Silence.

  “I watch for you and you watch for me, remember? That’s what sisters do.”

  She gave an unhappy grumble.

  “But if sex is what you want, why not fuck a human? Moya knows, you can have your choice.”

  I ducked as her pillow sailed across the room.

  * * *

  We didn’t pack cookies for the picnic. When you bake for a living, you lose the taste. Instead we brought salted cutthroat from the river and pickled figs. A cold squash soup. A round of cheese and a bottle of fay brandy. Quin insisted on carrying it at first, even though Zana and I had spent most of our lives lugging heavy baskets of fruit and flour and oils and spices.

  I couldn’t help but envy the way the tell built into his fingernail synced with the Institute’s security at Shellgate. A wave of his hand, and the projectors went dark; as soon as we passed through, solid blue light once again barred the entryway. I’d never seen communication tech that small. For a moment, Quin seemed magical.

  The ruins were part of our neighborhood, even though they were run by the Institute. We were threading our way around broken buildings back when we were toddlers. But that night, it was as if we’d stepped from Sanctuary onto one of the Thousand Worlds. We knew the structures by the names the first settlers had given them, but Quin identified the Grandmother Stones as Boundary Markers 11n through 11t. He explained that Half Boat and the Jagged Spike were part of a complex he called the Western Quadrant Early Classic Superstructure. When we insisted that Ellipsoidal Buildings 43, 58 and 70 were properly Bird Shell, Crazy Shell and the Bride, he chuckled. Giving commonplace names was how people coped with their terror of the alien, he claimed. A way of pretending we understood the civilization of the mighty Exotics.

  He had a talent for annoying me. “Maybe,” I said, “assigning them numbers is your way of coping.”

  Zana shot me a look but Quin nodded, as if considering what I’d said. “You may be right. Numbering the world is what we humans do, isn’t it?” We were standing on a parapet called Frost’s Overlook, gazing down at the three Shells. “They’re not buildings, you know. They’re sculptures.”

  “Sculptures?” I said. “Of what?”

  “We see similar construction in several other ruins. I stopped at Destination and Kenning and before I came here. I’m certain that your Shells were never occupied. Nor were they even functional. My research leads me to the idea that they’re propaganda art on a monumental scale, like Ravi’s Tomb or the Lubinarium.”

  “The Statue of Liberty on Earth,” said Zana. This took me by surprise. Why was she learning trivia about that dead planet?

  “Not familiar with that one.” Quin hefted the picnic basket. “Most scholars claim that Ellipsoidal Sculptures are Post Classic, but I believe they’re actually from the end of the Persistent Era, just before the last of the Exotics disappeared.”

  “Sculptures of what?” I repeated. “And what kind of propaganda?”

  “I’ve heard that’s a particularly interesting view.” He aimed his chin at the opening at the top of the Bride. “Eat up there?”

  As we scuttled down the rubble-strewn grade, he told us about his work. Nobody knew what had become of the Exotics. The galaxy-wide culture that built the wormholes vanished between fifty and sixty thousand years ago. Judging from their enigmatic ruins, Exotic civilization had begun to hollow out in its Post Classic Era, which was followed by the long decline of the Persistent Era. Quin believed that Sanctuary’s shells might have been among the last things the Exotics ever built.

  The wind had died in the dusk and the sun-baked façade of the Crazy Shell radiated heat as we passed on the way to the Bride. “I think these shells were meant to persuade the Persistents who remained behind to follow their ancestors.” Quin set the basket down on the stump of a pillar and wiped sweat from his eyes. “Maybe to shame them into it because Exotic culture had moved on. What were they waiting for?” He’d been talking non-stop and was out of breath.

  I was enjoying the effect our summer heat had on this overconfident upsider. “This is the theory that says they all uploaded and went to where? Exotic toyland?”

  “The evidence does point to a massive departure over a very short time, with a longer period of stragglers hanging on. Some claim there was a mass suicide but yes, I’d like to think they went elsewhere. Maybe to somewhere else in our universe or to some designed reality.”

  Zana hefted the picnic basket. “I can’t imagine anyone could get bored sailing through wormholes.”

  He pretended not to notice that she was relieving him. “Not sure they got bored. One thing is certain, they were very tidy. They took great pains to erase themselves from their worlds.” He tugged at his shirt where it had stuck to his chest. “All their ruins are built of native materials, mostly stone and ceramics. Some metals. We’re pretty sure that no Exotics lived in them, but then we have no idea where they did live. We know nothing of what they looked like, their biology, what they believed. Were these structures ceremonial? Administrative? Religious?”

  “And this bothers you?” I asked. “Why? Because it’s not fair to archeologists?”

  “They might’ve done better by us.” He grinned. “I’d like to think there are answers out there, but maybe I’m just fooling myself.”

  * * *

  Father said that before the Institute took over the ruins, Moyans had tried to clean them up: restacking
stones, filling holes, pulling weeds and cutting brush. The upsiders had stopped all reconstruction and limited public access to a handful of the structures. They said it was to preserve the archeological record; wallrats said it was to drive customers away. Whatever the truth, navigating the ruins was a challenge. The footing was uncertain, and the direct path to any given destination was often blocked.

  “So what does Moya…” Quin was laboring again as we reached the base of the Bride. “… have to say … to all of this?”

  “It’s not for us to know Moya’s mind.” Zana vaulted onto the fallen slab in front of the crude entrance someone had chiseled into the Bride.

  “Come on,” I said. “It’s obvious the Exotics knew the Divine’s ratio.”

  “Did they?”

  “Just look.” I gestured at the white whorls carved into the casing stones on the wall above us.

  “I suppose.” He gathered himself for the scramble. “It’s math, after all. But you Moyans … you see your ratio everywhere.”

  I offered a hand to help him up. “Don’t you?”

  He reached for me and missed. “I lack your stamina.” I caught his damp wrist and boosted him to my side.

  After he’d caught his breath, Quin insisted on telling us that the white limestone façade of the Bride had been quarried from Kunlun’s Crease, even though everyone knew this. The Bride resembled the Ivory Snails some wallrats harvested from the river for soup. The ones that tasted like dirty socks. The difference was that the Bride was enormous—some thirty meters tall—and was upside down. The mouth of the shell pointed up at the sky. We ducked through the makeshift entrance into the interior. The air was dank here and smelled like the inside of a well. A wooden scaffold climbed to the light. We crunched across a floor littered with broken tiles that had fallen off the walls, each decorated with a tessellated spiral flower pattern. Some wallrats believed that if you found an intact tile, whoever you gave it to would fall in love with you. Unfortunately, undamaged tiles were hard to come by since the ban on removing artifacts from the ruins. However, the Naras did a brisk trade in reproductions from their stall near Rivergate.

  I bent to retrieve a shard and showed it to Quin. It was hard to see detail in the feeble light from the opening above us, so he lit his fingernail.

  “The Divine’s ratio.” I traced several shapes. “In case you’re still in doubt about what the Exotics knew.”

  “Yes.” He waved his nail off. “That claim has been made. But it’s not quite 1.618, is it?”

  I bristled and let it fall to the floor. “So close you can hardly tell the difference.”

  “Right,” he said. “Especially in the dark.”

  “Quin likes to scoff,” said Zana. “Best to ignore him when he gets like that.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Your sister has been teaching me manners, but I’m afraid I’m not much of a student.”

  I prayed the numbers while we climbed to calm myself. One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five … By the time I got to seventeen thousand, seven hundred and eleven I was feeling more like myself. Quin heaved himself up the first two ladders in succession, but after that he had to rest on each platform. He took longer to recover the higher we went until he collapsed onto the tenth stage, gasping and as damp as if we had pulled him from the river. The planking was slick with mildew from exposure to the weather and left a smudge on Quin’s pants. Zana worried over him, but he reassured us that he was exhausted only because his last replication had been on a world where the gravity was 0.68 that of Sanctuary. “And I’m not good with heights,” he added.

  He revived once we climbed the last ladder to the wide stone lip at the top of the Shell. While Zana sat him down so the two of them could unpack our meal, I walked out to the edge and the view. It had been years since I’d made this climb. The shadowy ruins sprawled at my feet while the lights of our little village twinkled in the middle distance. Skytown was a glow on the horizon. Although the air was warmer up here, it was a relief from the sticky interior of the Bride. I took a deep breath and felt blessed to be able to take in my whole world at a glance.

  Zana was murmuring to Quin. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but there was a note to her voice, at once innocent and earnest and tender, that made me shudder.

  What if this was more than a fling?

  * * *

  Quin thought the cutthroat tasted too fishy but he raved about the pickled figs and asked to take a sample of Father’s squash soup for gastronomical analysis. He said the cheese was better than the framenthakler that the data monks on Encyclopedia printed from their secret recipe. We talked a lot about food. Zana pumped him for his favorite dishes but I knew she was more interested in hearing stories about the Thousand Worlds than she was learning about upsider cooking. He said that most reps preferred printed food, of which there was an infinite variety. Those who travelled the wormholes took little interest in local culture, but were passionately invested in trying the latest cuisines.

  “Nobody much cares about books and songs,” he said. “What sells on the upside are new menus.” He waved our brandy bottle at the sky. “Come up with a fresh taste with a new smell and you can write your own ticket to the stars.” When he offered me a refill, I covered my cup with my hand. “Take your cookies, for example. With the right marketing, they might pay your way off Sanctuary.”

  I waited for Zana to point out that we had no plans to leave home. She didn’t, so neither did I.

  I expected Quin would continue to do most of the talking, but he wanted to hear about us, or at least Zana. He asked about our schools and what we’d been told about the upside. Zana talked about what she’d learned using the Institute’s portal; he said it had good access but was by no means complete. He wondered what we thought about the controversies that flared continually between the wallrats and the Institute over management of the ruins. Then he got us telling stories about dumb things that tourists did.

  “I don’t understand why they need to haggle,” I said, “after what they spend to get here. We’d have to move a mountain of cookies just to get to the orbital.”

  “So we let them talk our prices down…” Zana giggled, “… and we then make up the difference in tax.”

  “Only there is no tax.”

  “Sure there is,” I said. “Stupidity tax.”

  We were all laughing now as Zana filled our cups with the last of the brandy.

  “Then there was that buzzy woman who wanted to buy all our takeout paper. Where was she from?”

  “She said it tasted better than our cookies.”

  “And then they ask the dumbest questions about the Divine’s ratio.”

  That earned me a sisterly glare until Quin raised his hand. “Guilty.”

  I didn’t want to start liking him, so I said, “You don’t believe in the Divine, do you?”

  When Zana hissed, it sounded like a seam ripping.

  “You know I don’t,” he said.

  Nobody was laughing now.

  “Or any god,” I said.

  Quin studied me. His silence was scary.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Jix!” Zana came to her knees, but I knew she wanted to hear his answer.

  “Have you ever heard of the God spot, Jix?” said Quin.

  “Doesn’t exist.” Zana said, as if to end the conversation.

  “No,” I said. “What is it?”

  “People used to look for the place of our brains where mystical experiences come from. Some tagged the right parietal lobe, others the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. There was evidence that N,N-dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland play a role. But over time they realized they’d got it wrong, and so they developed a different model. There’s no button in the brain that you push for instant spirituality. The neural correlates are scattered across the entire brain, systems that give rise to self-awareness, emotion, your sense of your own body.” He fumbled at the pocket of the shirt
he was wearing. “And what’s interesting is that in order to have a religious experience, you don’t stimulate these brain systems.” He shook his head. “You suppress them. Inhibit those areas that create the illusion of self, and you open the door to transcendence.”

  “So?” I said.

  He pulled a pressure syringe from the pocket and showed it to us. “Want to see Moya?”

  * * *

  Sometimes I wonder if Zana had poured our futures from a bottle of fay brandy. How could two drunken sisters hope to protect one another? Or maybe I was daring my sister even as she was daring me in some alcohol-fueled dance of sibling rivalry? Or it was simply that we each were trying to impress her upsider, in our own ways and for our own reasons?

  The syringe looked like a glass thumb, cylindrical but with a flat applicator pad to one side. “This won’t take long.” Quin pressed the syringe to the artery in Zana’s neck. “Say fifteen minutes to work past the blood-brain barrier.” The syringe left a faint pink swelling. “The actual experience comes and goes. Maybe five minutes, although it might feel longer subjectively.” He turned to me. “But everyone’s different. Some people feel like they’ve disappeared, some become one with everything.”

  I tilted my head. “And is it real?” The injection felt like being kissed on the neck.

  He laughed. “That’s for you to decide.” He injected himself last, then tucked the syringe back into his pocket.

  “You planned this,” said Zana.

  “We’ve talked about it,” he said, “haven’t we?”

  “I never said yes.”

  He smirked. “You just did.”

  “So what do we do now?” I said.

  He sat on the stone pavers facing the view and crossed his legs. “We wait for the elevator.”

  We arranged ourselves into a triangle and watched each other for signs. Zana settled back onto her heels. Her back was straight and she sniffed, nose pointed, as if she might catch Moya’s scent. I squirmed on the cold, hard floor. The silence made me more self-conscious, not less. Was my heart in the right place? Would this change my life? What was I supposed to do with my hands?