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Analog SFF, November 2005
by Dell Magazine Authors
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Science Fiction
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Dell Magazines
www.analogsf.com
Copyright ©2005 by Dell Magazines
NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.
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CONTENTS
Sun of Suns, Part 1, by Karl Schroeder
Novella: The Diversification of Its Fancy by John Barnes
Novelette: The Case of the Contumacious Qubit by Thomas R. Dulski
Short Story: 911-Backup by Richard A. Lovett
Science Fact: Retirement Homes of the Gods by Stephen L. Gillett, Ph.D.
Probability Zero: Keeping Track by Richard Foss
EDITORIAL by Stanley Schmidt
THE ALTERNATE VIEW by Jeffery D. Kooistra
THE REFERENCE LIBRARY by Tom Easton
BRASS TACKS
UPCOMING EVENTS: Anthony Lewis
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Sun of Suns, Part 1, by Karl Schroeder
Vengeance is one of the oldest human motivations—but not necessarily the most constructive in a complicated world.
1
Hayden Griffin was plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang. The dull clang penetrated even the thick wooden walls of the corporation inn; it was designed to be heard all over town. Hayden paused, frowned, and experimentally let go of the fish. Four tumbling feathers flashed like candle-flames in an errant beam of sunlight shooting between the floorboards. The fish landed three feet to his left. Hayden watched the feathers dip in a slow arc to settle next to it.
“A bit early for a spin-up, ain't it?” said Hayden. Miles grunted distractedly. The former soldier, now corporation cook, was busily pouring sauce over a steaming turkey that he'd just rescued from the oven's minor inferno. “They might need me all the same,” continued Hayden. “I better go see."
Miles snapped out of his reverie and squinted at Hayden.
“Your Ma left you here,” he said. “You been bad again. Pick up the fish."
Hayden leaned back against the table, crossing his arms. He was trying to come up with a reply that didn't sound like whining when the bell rang again, more urgently. “See?” he said. “They need somebody. Nobody in town's as good with the bikes as I am. Anyway, how you gonna boil this fish if the gravity goes?"
“Gravity ain't gonna go, boy,” snapped Miles. “It's solid right now."
“Then I better go see what else is up."
“You just want to watch your old lady light the sun,” said Miles.
“Don't you?"
“Today's just a test. I'll wait for tomorrow, then they light it for real."
“Come on, Miles. I'll be right back."
The cook sighed. “Go, then. Set the bikes going. Then come right back.” Hayden bolted for the door and Miles shouted, “Don't leave that fish on the floor!"
As Hayden walked down the hall to the front of the inn another stray beam of sunlight spiked up around the plank floorboards. That was a bad sign; Mom would have to wait for deep cloud cover before lighting the town's new sun, lest the Slipstreamers should see it. Slipstream would never tolerate another sun so close to their own. The project was secret—or it had been. By tomorrow the whole world would know about it.
Hayden walked backwards past the well-polished oak bar, waving his lanky arms casually at his side as he said, “Bell rang. Gotta check the bikes.” One of the customers smirked doubtfully at him; Mama Fifty glared at him from her post behind the bar. Before she could reply he was out the front door.
A blustery wind was blowing out here as always, even whistling up between the street boards. Sunlight angled around the edges of the street's peaked roof, bars and rectangles of light sliding along the planking and up the walls of the buildings that crammed every available space. The streetboards gave like springs under Hayden's feet as he ran up the steep curve of the avenue, which was nearly empty at this time of day.
Gavin Town came to life at sunshut, when the workers who slept here flooded back from all six directions, laughing and gossiping. Merchants would unshutter their windows for the night market as the gaslights were lit all along the way. The dance hall would throw open its doors for those with the stamina to take a few turns on the floor. Sometimes Hayden picked up some extra bills by lighting the street lights himself. He was good with fire, after all.
If he went to work on the bikes Hayden wouldn't be able to see the sun, so he took a detour. Slipping down a narrow alleyway between two tall houses, he came to one of the two outer streets of the town—really little more than a narrow covered walkway. Extensions of houses and shops formed a ceiling, their entrances to the left as he stepped into the way. To the right was an uneven board fence, just a crack open at the top. An occasional shuttered window interrupted the surface of the fence, but Hayden didn't pause at any of them. He was making for an open gallery a quarter of the way up the street.
At moments like this—alone and busy—he either completely forgot himself or drowned in grief. His father's death still weighed on him, though it had been a year now; was it that long since he and his mother had moved here? Mother kept insisting that it was best this way, that if they'd stayed home in Twenty-two Town they would have been surrounded by reminders of Dad all the time. But was that so bad?
His father wouldn't be here to see the lighting of the sun, his wife's completion of his project—their crowning achievement as a family. When Hayden remembered them talking about that, it was his father's voice he remembered, soaring in tones of enthusiasm and hope. Mother would be quieter, but her pride and love came through in the murmurs that came through the bedroom wall and lulled Hayden to sleep at night. To make your own sun! That was how nations were founded. To light a sun was to be remembered forever.
The gallery was just a stretch of street empty of fence, but with a railing you could look over. Mother called it a “braveway"; Miles used the more interesting term “pukesight.” Hayden stepped up to the rail and clutched it with both hands, staring.
A gigantic mountain of cloud wheeled in front of him, nearly close enough to touch. The new sun must be behind it; the ropes of the road from Gavin Town to the construction site stabbed the heart of the cloud and vanished inside it. Hayden was disappointed; if the sun came on right now he wouldn't see it.
He laughed. Oh, yes he would. Father had impressed it upon him again and again: when the sun came on, there would be no missing it. “The clouds for miles around will evaporate—poof,” he'd said with a wave of his fingers. “The temperature will instantly shoot up—in fact, everything within a kilometer is going to catch fire. That's why the sun is situated so far from any towns. That, and security reasons, of course. And the light ... Hayden, you have to promise not to look at it. It's going to be brighter than anything you can imagine. Up close, it could burn your skin and dazzle you through your closed eyelids. Never look directly at it, not until we've moved the town."
The cloud turned about Hayden as he gazed at it; Gavin town was a wheel like all towns, after all, and spun to provide its inhabitants with centrifugal gravity. It was the only form of gravity they would ever know, and it was a precious resource, costly and heavily taxed. Grant's Chance, the next nearest town, lay a
dozen miles beyond the sun site, invisible for now behind cloud.
Cloud was why the Griffins had come here. At the edges of the zone lit by Slipstream, the air cooled and condensation began. White mist in all its shapes made a wall here separating the sunlit realm from the vast empty spaces of Winter. This was the frontier. Here you could hide all manner of things—secret projects, for instance.
The town continued to turn and now sky opened out beyond the barrier of mist—sky with no limits, either up, down, or to either side. Two distant suns carved out a sphere of pale air from this endless firmament, a volume defined by thousands upon thousands of clouds in all shapes and sizes, most of them tinged with dusk colors of rose and amber. There were ragged streamers indicating currents and rivers of air; puffballs and many-armed star shapes; and many miles away, its outlines blurred by intervening dust and mist, a mushroom head was forming as some current of cold impacted a mass of moist air. Below and above, walls of white blocked any further view, while whatever lay on the other side of the suns was obscured by dazzle and golden detail.
As it radiated through hundreds of miles of air, that light would fade and redden, or be shadowed by the countless clouds and objects comprising the nation of Aerie. If you traveled inward or up to civilized spaces, the light from other distant suns would begin to brighten before you ran out of light from yours; but if you went down or back, you would eventually reach a point where their light was completely obscured. There, a creeping chill took over. In the dark and cold, nothing grew. There began the volumes of Winter that made up much of the interior of the planet-sized balloon of air, called Virga, where Hayden lived.
Gavin Town hovered at the very edge of civilization, where the filtered light of distant fires could barely keep crops alive. It wasn't lonely out here, though; above, below, and all about hung the habitations of Man. Three miles up to the left, a farm caught the suns’ light: within a net a hundred feet across, the farmer had gathered pulverized rock and soil, and was growing a crop of yellow canola. Each plant clutched its own little ball of mud and they all tumbled about slowly, catching and losing the light in one another's shadow. The highway that passed near the farm was busy, a dozen or more small cars sailing along guided by the rope that was the highway itself. The rope extended off into measureless distance, heading for the enemy's city, Rush. Below and to the right, a sphere of water the size of a house shimmered, its surface momentarily ridged by a passing breeze. Hayden could see a school of wetfish swirling inside the sphere like busy diamonds.
There was way too much to take in with a single glance, so Hayden almost didn't spot the commotion. Motion out of the corner of his eye alerted him; leaning over the railing and sighting left along the curving wall of the town, he saw an unusually dense tangle of contrails. The trails led back in the direction of the sun and as he watched, three gleaming shapes shot out of the cloud and arrowed in the same direction.
Strange.
Just as he was wondering what might be happening, the gravity bell rang again. Hayden pushed himself back from the rail and ran for the main street. It wouldn't do for somebody else to get the bikes running after he'd promised Miles he'd be there.
The stairwell to the gravity engines led off the center of the street. Gravity was a public service and the town fathers had insisted on making its utilities both visible and accessible to everyone. Consequently, Hayden was very surprised when he clattered down the steps into the cold and drafty engine room and found nobody there.
Bike Number Two still hung from its arm above the open hatchway in the floor. It wasn't a bike in the old gravity-bound sense; the fan-jet was a simple metal barrel, open at both ends, with a fan in one end and an alcohol burner at its center. You spun up the fan with a pair of pedals and then lit the burner, and you were away. Hayden's own bike lay partly disassembled in the corner. He'd been meaning to get it running tonight.
When started and lowered through the hatch, Bikes one and two would produce enough thrust to spin Gavin Town back up to a respectable five revolutions per minute. This had to be done once or twice a day so normally the engine room would have somebody in it either working, topping up the bike's tanks, or doing maintenance. Certainly if the gravity bell rang, somebody would always be here in seconds and the bike operational in under a minute.
The wind whistled through the angled walls of the room. Hayden heard no voices, no running feet.
After a few seconds, though, something else came echoing up through the floor. Somewhere within a mile or two, an irregular popping had started.
It was the unmistakable sound of rifle fire.
A cracking roar shook the engine room. Hayden dropped to his stomach to look out the floor hatch, just in time to see a bike shoot by just meters below. It flashed Slipstreamer gold. A second later another that gleamed Aerie green followed it. Then the town had curved up and away and there was nothing out there but empty sky. The firing continued, dulled now by the bulk of the town.
Now he heard pounding footsteps and shouting from overhead. Shots rang out from nearby, making Hayden jump. The volleys were erratic, undisciplined, while in the distance he heard a more even, measured response.
As he ran back up the steps something whistled past his ear and hit the wall with a spang. Splinters flew and Hayden ducked down to his hands and knees, knowing full well that it wouldn't do any good when this section of the town rotated into full view of whoever was firing. The bullets would come straight up through the decking.
He emerged onto the still-empty street and ran to the right, where he'd heard people firing. A narrow alley led to the town's other outer street. He skidded around the corner to face the braveway—and saw bodies.
Six men had taken up firing positions at the rail. All were now slumped there or sprawled on the planks, their rifles carelessly flung away. The wood of the rail and flooring was splintered in dozens of places. And for the first time in his life, Hayden saw blood.
Something glided into view beyond the railing, and he blinked at it in astonishment. The red and gold sails of a Slipstream warship spun majestically there, not two hundred yards below. Hayden could make out the figures of men moving inside the open hatches of the thing. Beyond it, partly eclipsed, lay another ship, and another. Contrails laced the air between and around them.
Hayden took a step toward the braveway and stopped. He looked at the bodies and at the warships, and took another step.
Something shot past the town and he heard a shout from the empty air outside. Gunshots sounded from below his feet and now a wavering contrail dissipated in the air not ten feet past the railing.
He ran to the braveway and took one of the rifles from the nerveless fingers of its former owner. He vaguely recognized the man as someone who'd visited the inn on occasion.
“What do you think you're doing?” Hayden whirled, to find Miles bearing down on him. The cook's mouth was set in a grim line. “If you poke your head out they're gonna shoot it off."
“But we have to do something!"
Miles shook his head. “It's too late for that. Take it from somebody who's been there. Nothing we can do now except get killed, or wait this out."
“But my mother's at the sun!"
Miles jammed his hands in his pockets and looked away. The sun was the Slipstreamers’ target, of course. The secret project had been discovered. If Aerie could field its own sun, it would no longer be dependent on Slipstream for light and heat. Right now, Slipstream could choke out Aerie's agriculture by shading their side of the sun; all the gains that Hayden's nation had made in recent years—admittedly the result of Slipstream patronage—would be lost. But the instant that his parents’ sun came on the situation would change. Aerie's neighbors to the up and down, left and right would suddenly find a reason to switch allegiances. Aerie could never defend its sun by itself, but by building it out here, on the edge of darkness, they stood to open up huge volumes of barren air to settlement. That real estate would be a tremendous incentive to their neigh
bors to intercede. That, at least, had been the plan.
But if the sun were destroyed before it could even be proven to work ... It didn't matter to Hayden, not right now. All he could think was that his mother was out there, probably at the focus of the attack.
“I'm the best flyer in town,” Hayden pointed out. “These guys made good targets ‘cause they weren't moving. Right now we need all the riflemen we can get in the air."
Miles shook his head. “Listen, kid,” he said, “there's too many Slipstreamers out there to fight. You have to pick your battles. It ain't cowardice to do that. If you throw your life away now, you won't be there to help when the chance comes later on."
“Yeah,” said Hayden as he backed away from the braveway.
“Drop the rifle,” said Miles.
Hayden spun and raced down the alley, back to main street. Miles shouted and came after him.
Hayden clattered down the stairs to the engine room, but only realized as he got there that his bike was still in pieces all over the floor. He'd planned to roll it out the open hatch and fire it up when he was in the air. The spin of the town meant he would leave it at over a hundred miles an hour anyway; plenty of airflow to get the thing running, if it had been operable.
He was sitting astride the hoist that held Bike Number Two when Miles arrived. “What do you think you're doing? Get down!"
Glaring at him, Hayden made another attempt to pull the pins that held the engine to the hoist. “She needs me!"
“She needs you alive! And anyway, how are you gonna steer—"
The pin came loose, and the bike fell. Hayden barely kept his hold on it, and in doing so he dropped the rifle.
Wind burst around him, blinding him and taking his breath away. Fighting it, he managed to wrap his legs around the barrel-shape of the bike and used his own body as a fin to turn it so that the engine faced into the airstream. Then he grabbed the handlebars and hit the firing solenoid.
Analog SFF, November 2005 Page 1
