Year’s Best SF 15

by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

  “You would owe me,” it says at last.

  I almost burst out laughing. “What?”

  “Or I will tell Dixon that you threatened to kill him.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You don’t want him to know.”

  “I don’t care whether he knows or not. What, you think he’ll try and kill me back? You think I’ll lose his love?” I linger on the last word, stretch it out to show how ludicrous it is.

  “You’ll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here.”

  “Oh, right. Trust. The very fucking foundation of this mission!”

  The chimp says nothing.

  “For the sake of argument,” I say, after a while, “suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?”

  “A favor,” the chimp replies. “To be repaid in future.”

  My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.

  We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps toward us in the stop-motion increments of a life’s moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling one another into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer.

  And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works and what doesn’t. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.

  But I believe in the Island, because I don’t have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind-boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can’t help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.

  I believe in the Island. I’ve gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.

  I may yet.

  In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.

  Final approach.

  Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerizing infinite regress of bull’s-eyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.

  Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair—if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—we will be dead. Before we know it.

  Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically displaced mass.

  I turn to the drone’s-eye view relayed from up ahead. It’s a window into history—even now, there’s a time-lag of several minutes—but past and present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, reenlist them for the next build—but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it’s cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.

  A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

  At least we’ve spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

  I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds.

  Angels do not speak to ants.

  Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past anymore; I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.

  Tactical beeps at us.

  “Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank-you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?

  But—

  “It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

  Two minutes.

  “Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”

  “We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

  “Still in front of us! Look at the sun!”

  “Look at the signal,” I tell him.

  Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost—random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky. It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.

  Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

  We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

  The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The worm hole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

  I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.

  “Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.

  “We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

  DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.

  So far, though, nothing’s come out.

  “Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

  Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

  I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a…

  I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.

  “Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”

  “Maybe didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”

  Why would you think that? I wonder. Why would y
ou even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

  My son is trying to comfort me.

  I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

  But I’m better now.

  It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.

  I still have so much to learn.

  At least my son is here to teach me.

  One of Our Bastards Is Missing

  PAUL CORNELL

  Paul Cornell (www.paulcornell.com) is a writer of SF and fantasy for prose, comics, and television, who lives in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, England. He’s written three episodes (two of them Hugo finalists) of the modern Doctor Who, and many titles for Marvel Comics, including Captain Britain and MI-13, and is the creator of Bernice Summerfield. His novels are Something More (2001) and British Summertime (2002). He has published a dozen short stories, including the well-regarded “Catherine Drewe” in 2008, set in the same universe as this story. Well established as a comics and television writer, his prose fiction career is beginning to take off.

  “One of Our Bastards Is Missing,” a story with an amazing opening paragraph, was published in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction 3, edited by George Mann (apparently the last book in that distinguished original anthology series). It involves really complicated alternate universe intrigue featuring virtuality, the folding of space, and many other SF ideas.

  To get to Earth from the edge of the solar system, depending on the time of year and the position of the planets, you need to pass through at least Poland, Prussia, and Turkey, and you’d probably get stamps in your passport from a few of the other great powers. Then as you get closer to the world, you arrive at a point, in the continually shifting carriage space over the countries, where this complexity has to give way or fail. And so you arrive in the blissful lubrication of neutral orbital territory. From there it’s especially clear that no country is whole unto itself. There are yearning gaps between parts of each state, as they stretch across the solar system. There is no congruent territory. The countries continue in balance with each other like a fine but eccentric mechanism, pent up, all that political energy dealt with through eternal circular motion.

  The maps that represent this can be displayed on a screen, but they’re much more suited to mental contemplation. They’re beautiful. They’re made to be beautiful, doing their own small part to see that their beauty never ends.

  If you looked down on that world of countries, onto the pink of glorious old Greater Britain, that land of green squares and dark forest and carriage contrails, and then you naturally avoided looking directly at the golden splendor of London, your gaze might fall on the Thames valley. On the country houses and mansions and hunting estates that letter the river banks with the names of the great. On one particular estate: an enormous winged square of a house with its own grouse shooting horizons and mazes and herb gardens and markers that indicate it also sprawls into folded interior expanses.

  Today that estate, seen from such a height, would be adorned with informational banners that could be seen from orbit, and tall pleasure cruisers could be observed, docked beside military boats on the river, and carriages of all kinds would be cluttering the gravel of its circular drives and swarming in the sky overhead. A detachment of Horse Guards could be spotted, stood at ready at the perimeter.

  Today, you’d need much more than a passport to get inside that maze of information and privilege.

  Because today was a royal wedding.

  That vision from the point of view of someone looking down upon him was what was at the back of Hamilton’s mind.

  But now he was watching the Princess.

  Her chestnut hair had been knotted high on her head, baring her neck, a fashion which Hamilton appreciated for its defiance of the French, and at an official function too, though that gesture wouldn’t have been Liz’s alone, but would have been calculated in the warrens of Whitehall. She wore white, which had made a smile come to Hamilton’s lips when he’d first seen it in the Cathedral this morning. In this gigantic function room with its high arched ceiling, in which massed dignitaries and ambassadors and dress uniforms orbited from table to table, she was the sun about which everything turned. Even the King, in the far distance, at a table on a rise with old men from the rest of Europe, was no competition for his daughter this afternoon.

  This was the reception, where Elizabeth, escorted by members of the Corps of Heralds, would carelessly and entirely precisely move from group to group, giving exactly the right amount of charm to every one of the great powers, briefed to keep the balance going as everyone like she and Hamilton did, every day.

  Everyone like the two of them. That was a useless thought and he cuffed it aside.

  Her gaze had settled on Hamilton’s table precisely once. A little smile and then away again. As not approved by Whitehall. He’d tried to stop watching her after that. But his carefully random table, with diplomatic corps functionaries to his left and right, had left him cold. Hamilton had grown tired of pretending to be charming.

  “It’s a marriage of convenience,” said a voice beside him.

  It was Lord Carney. He was wearing open cuffs that bloomed from his silk sleeves, a big collar, and no tie. His long hair was unfastened. He had retained his rings.

  Hamilton considered his reply for a moment, then opted for silence. He met Carney’s gaze with a suggestion in his heart that surely his Lordship might find some other table to perch at, perhaps one where he had friends?

  “What do you reckon?”

  Hamilton stood, with the intention of walking away. But Carney stood too and stopped him just as they’d got out of earshot of the table. The man smelled like a Turkish sweet shop. He affected a mode of speech beneath his standing. “This is what I do. I probe, I provoke, I poke. And when I’m in the room, it’s all too obvious when people are looking at someone else.”

  The broad grin stayed on his face.

  Hamilton found a deserted table and sat down again, furious at himself.

  Carney settled beside him, and gestured away from Princess Elizabeth, toward her new husband, with his neat beard and his row of medals on the breast of his Svenska Adelsfanan uniform. He was talking with the Papal ambassador, doubtless discussing getting Liz to Rome as soon as possible, for a great show to be made of this match between the Protestant and the Papist. If Prince Bertil was also pretending to be charming, Hamilton admitted that he was making a better job of it.

  “Yeah, jammy fucker, my thoughts exactly. Still, I’m on a promise with a couple of members of his staff, so it’s swings and roundabouts.” Carney clicked his tongue and wagged his finger as a Swedish serving maid ran past, and she curtsied a quick smile at him. “I do understand, you know. All our relationships are informed by the balance. And the horror of it is that we all can conceive of a world where this isn’t so.”

  Hamilton pursed his lips and chose his next words carefully. “Is that why you are how you are, your Lordship?”

  “’Course it is. Maids, lady companions, youngest sisters, it’s a catalog of incompleteness. I’m allowed to love only in ways that don’t disrupt the balance. For me to commit myself, or, heaven forbid, to marry, would require such deep thought at the highest levels that by t
he time the Heralds had worked it through, well, I’d have tired of the lady. Story of us all, eh? Nowhere for the pressure to go. If only I could see an alternative.”

  Having shown the corner of his cards, the man had taken care to move back to the fringes of treason once more. It was part of his role as an agent provocateur. And Hamilton knew it. But that didn’t mean he had to take this. “Do you have any further point, your Lordship?”

  “Oh, I’m just getting—”

  The room gasped.

  Hamilton was up out of his seat and had taken a step toward Elizabeth, his gun hand had grabbed into the air to his right where his .66 mm Webley Corsair sat in a knot of space and had swung it ready to fire—

  At nothing.

  There stood the Princess, looking about herself in shock. Dress uniforms, bearded men all around her.

  Left, right, up, down.

  Hamilton couldn’t see anything for her to be shocked at.

  And nothing near her, nothing around her.

  She was already stepping back, her hands in the air, gesturing at a gap—

  What had been there? Everyone was looking there. What?

  He looked to the others like him. Almost all of them were in the same sort of posture he was, balked at picking a target.

  The Papal envoy stepped forward and cried out. “A man was standing there! And he has vanished!”

  Havoc. Everybody was shouting. A weapon, a weapon! But there was no weapon that Hamilton knew of that could have done that, made a man, whoever it had been, blink out of existence. Groups of bodyguards in dress uniforms or diplomatic black tie leapt up, encircling their charges. Ladies started screaming. A nightmare of the balance collapsing all around them. That hysteria when everyone was in the same place and things didn’t go exactly as all these vast powers expected.