Year’s Best SF 15

by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

  5. We don’t hear from my sister for three days. Then we do. She leaves a message on my phone: Not dead, not in Iceland, everything okay. Give you a call when I get home. I forward this message to my mother and scan the limited breakfast options on the hotel’s room-service menu. Hayley and I order raisin toast that comes with not enough butter. Hayley tells me this is her favourite breakfast ever, the only thing she can eat at the start of the day.

  6. It emerges that no-one knows why the attack took place. The merfolk’s statement on the matter is a collection of high-pitched whale songs that remain difficult to decipher, so people develop their own theories to make sense of the destruction. My favourite suggests that perhaps, in retrospect, the statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbour may have been something of a mistake; that the merfolk may have taken it for some kind of taunt.

  My sister visited that statue three times in the past. Each time, she says, regardless of the season or clothing she’s wearing, it’s the coldest place she’s ever been. My sister has been to many cold places. She has seen both the Arctic and Antarctic circles. She is not sorry to hear that the statue was torn down in the wake of the attack.

  7. It should be noted that visiting Iceland is still on my sister’s to-do list, thanks to this horrible tragedy.

  8. There are some people, my friends among them, who will believe the destruction of Copenhagen is an urban myth. Others will believe it’s a cover up for something both more mundane and infinitely more sinister. They will blame the Americans. America is easy to blame in moments like this.

  My sister suffered three injuries during the attack, though all of them were minor. The worst was a sprained right ankle, which ballooned up and forced her to limp along on crutches for a week before it healed. She sent me photographs of her injuries, her ankle dark and swollen like she’s hiding a storm cloud beneath her skin.

  The photographs of my sister’s ankle will do little to convince those who doubt the attack ever truly happened. They will tell me such injuries could have happened to anyone, at any time, and I cannot prove them wrong.

  9. There were five robots in Copenhagen. I told Hayley they were simultaneously works of innovative engineering and one of the poorest designs I had ever seen. She snuggled close and asked me to explain. I closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of her hair.

  The genius of the robots was in their scale: two hundred feet tall and strong enough to smash a building into rubble. The merfolk did this using parts scavenged from sunken ships, each robot a patchwork construct made from metal and waterlogged wood. That the robots worked at all is a marvel, requiring foresight and ingenuity that few human engineers could match.

  The flaws of the robots lay in their scales: the use of the merfolk as the base form, rather than a creature adapted for movement on land. Each war machine was covered in a scaled shell of metal that leaked water every time the robot moved, forcing them to return to the ocean at periodic intervals where they would sink beneath the surface as a flurry of air-bubbles boiled the water. This flaw ensured the rampage was limited to a small section of the Copenhagen shoreline.

  Hayley was impressed by my observations, commenting on my insight. I told her I never wanted to be smart; I wanted to be free to travel the world on a whim, just like my sister.

  10. The games we play to pass the time: Hayley is an Italian maid and I’m the horny tourist she walks in on. She’s a stunning French philosophy student and I’m the horny waiter at her favourite café. She’s a terrified Danish film star and I’m the rampaging robot that picks her up and fights off the air force while clinging to the side of Copenhagen’s tallest tower.

  Then news reports tell us that the rampage is over, that the robots ranged too far from the shore, leaving the pilots gasping for air inside the dormant constructs.

  11. They announce the final death toll. It’s lower than either of us expected. We pack up and go home the next day. The war with the merfolk is over.

  12. The next time I see Hayley she will be older, wiser, less prone to dating men that she meets on the Internet. Her hair will smell like something other than cotton candy. We will spot one another at opposite ends of the cereal aisle at the supermarket. I will be reaching for Coco Puffs; she will be reaching for name-brand muesli. I will be fatter and growing a beard, and I will stop myself from calling out her name when I see her standing next to a friend who may-or-may-not know of Hayley’s double life as Hayley-the-Engineer. I will feel a sudden surge of jealousy: Hayley’s friend will know if her name isn’t really Hayley, but I will never know. My arm will falter. I will smile instead. Hayley will smile back. She will excuse herself and hurry down the aisle so she can kiss me on the cheek. She will ask after my sister. I will tell her my sister is fine, thought she’s currently stuck in Korea, paying off an impressive bar tab generated during a wild night at an underground casino. We will laugh at that. We will not mention our time together. Hayley will excuse herself. She will go back and start talking to her friend, making some comment that explains who I am without mentioning the fact that we once dated.

  The merfolk will have gone underground, censured by the global community for their actions in Denmark. The oceans will be deemed unsafe. We will worry about ships lost at sea; each new incident will become global news. We will lose faith in our navy. Hayley will rejoin her friend. She will choose a more expensive brand of muesli and place it in her shopping cart. I will watch the two of them go, walking away from me, disappearing around the corner of the aisle. I will admire the curve of Hayley’s back. I will wonder if Hayley was ever her real name. I will close my eyes and wish. I will wish that we could sleep together, just one more time. I will wish we were back in the hotel room, that the merfolk invasion could start again. Hayley will be gone. I will miss her. I will wish she still smelt like cotton candy, and I will breathe in the sugar-sweet smell of the Coco-Puffs and pretend that I’m smelling her for a little while longer.

  Later I will remember that my sister still hasn’t made it to Iceland. It’s the one place I can still go that she has never been.

  The Fixation

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  Alastair Reynolds (voxish.tripod.com) lives in Wales. He worked as a space scientist in the Netherlands until 2004, and returned to the UK a couple of years ago. His first novel, Revelation Space, was published in 1999. He became an icon of the new British space opera and of hard sf writers emerging in the mid and late 1990s, in the generation after Baxter and McAuley, and originally the most “hard SF” of the new group. He has now published about fifty short stories; two collections of his stories were published in 2006, Zima Blue and Galactic North. House of Suns (2008) is an expanded version of the Zima Blue collection. His ninth novel, Terminal World, a far-future, steampunk-influenced planetary romance, will appear in 2010. He says, “I am currently at work on a big trilogy about an optimistic, spacefaring future spanning the next 11,000 years.

  “The Fixation” was published 2009 in The Solaris Book of New SF 3. It was first published in a limited-run tribute book for a prominent Finnish fan and disc jockey and Reynolds’ friend, Hannu Blomilla. It is an alternate universe physics story, with an unusual twist.

  FOR HANNU BLOMMILA

  Inside the corroded rock was what looked like a geared embryo—the incipient bud of an industrial age that remained unborn for a millennium.

  —John Seabrook, The New Yorker, May 14, 2007

  Katib, the security guard who usually works the graveyard shift, has already clocked on when Rana swipes her badge through the reader. He gives her a long-suffering look as she bustles past in her heavy coat, stooping under a cargo of document boxes and laptops. “Pulling another all-nighter, Rana?” he asks, as he has asked a hundred times before. “I keep telling you to get a different job, girl.”

  “I worked hard to get this one,” she tells him, almost slipping on the floor, which has just been polished to a mirrored gleam by a small army of robot cleaners. “Where else would I get to do this a
nd actually get paid for it?”

  “What ever they’re paying you, it isn’t enough for all those bags under your eyes.”

  She wishes he wouldn’t mention the bags under her eyes—it’s not as if she exactly likes them—but she smiles anyway, for Katib is a kindly man without a hurtful thought in his soul. “They’ll go,” she says. “We’re on the home stretch, anyway. Or did you somehow not notice that there’s this big opening ceremony coming up?”

  “Oh, I think I heard something about that,” he says, scratching at his beard. “I just hope they need some old fool to look after this wing when they open the new one.”

  “You’re indispensable, Katib. They’d get rid of half the exhibits before they put you on the street.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself, but…” He gives a burly shrug, and then smiles to let her know it isn’t her business to worry about his problems. “Still, it’s going to be something, isn’t it? I can see it from my balcony, from all the way across the town. I didn’t like it much at first, but now that’s up there, now that it’s all shining and finished, it’s starting to grow on me. And it’s ours, that’s what I keep thinking. That’s our museum, nobody else’s. Something to be proud of.”

  Rana has seen it too. The new wing, all but finished, dwarfs the existing structure. It’s a glittering climate-controlled ziggurat, the work of a monkish British architect who happens to be a devout Christian. A controversial choice, to be sure, but no one who has seen that tidal wave of glass and steel rising above the streets of the city has remained unimpressed. As the sun tracks across the sky, computer-controlled shutters open and close to control the flood of light into the ziggurat’s plunging atrium—the atrium where the Mechanism will be the primary exhibit—and maintain the building’s ideal ambient temperature. From afar, the play of those shutters is an enchanted mosaic: a mesmerizing, never-repeating dance of spangling glints. Rana read in a magazine that the architect had never touched a computer until he arrived in Greater Persia, but that he took to the possibilities with the zeal of the converted.

  “It’s going to be wonderful,” she says, torn between making small talk with the amiable Katib and getting started on her work. “But it won’t be much of an opening ceremony if the Mechanism isn’t in place, will it?”

  “Which is a kind way of saying, you need to be getting to your office.” He’s smiling as he speaks, letting her know he takes no offense. “You need some help with those boxes and computers, my fairest?”

  “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  “You call me if you need anything. I’ll be here through to six.” With that he unfolds a magazine and taps the sharp end of a pencil against the grid of a half-finished puzzle. “And don’t work too hard,” he says under his breath, but just loud enough that she will hear.

  Rana doesn’t pass another human being on her way to the office. The public part of the museum is deserted save for the occasional cleaner or patrolling security robot, but at least the hallways and exhibits are still partially illuminated, and from certain sightlines she can still see people walking in the street outside, coming from the theater or a late restaurant engagement.

  In the private corridors, it’s a different story. The halls are dark and the windows too high to reveal anything more than moonlit sky. The robots don’t come here very often and most of the offices and meeting rooms are locked and silent. At the end of one corridor stands the glowing sentinel of a coffee dispenser. Normally Rana takes a cup to her room, but tonight she doesn’t have a free hand; it’s enough of a job just to shoulder her way through doors without dropping something.

  Her room is in the basement: a cool, windowless crypt that is half laboratory and half office. Her colleagues think she’s mad for working at night, but Rana has her reasons. By day she has to share her facilities with other members of the staff, and what with all the talk and interruptions she tends to get much less work done. If that’s not enough of a distraction, there is a public corridor that winds its way past the glass-fronted rooms, allowing the museum’s visitors to watch cataloging and restoration work as it actually happens. The public make an effort to look more interested than they really are. Hardly surprising, because the work going on inside the offices could not look less interesting or less glamorous. Rana has been spending the last three weeks working with microscopically precise tools on the restoration of a single bronze gearwheel. What the visitors would imagine to be a morning’s work has consumed more of her life than some relationships. She already knows every scratch and chip of that gearwheel like an old friend or ancient, bitter adversary.

  There’s another reason why she works at night. Her mind functions better in the small hours. She has made more deductive leaps at three in the morning than she has ever done at three in the afternoon, and she wishes it were not so.

  She takes off her coat and hangs it by the door. She opens the two laptops, sets them near each other, and powers them up. She keeps the office lights low, with only enough illumination to focus on the immediate area around her bench. The gearwheel is centermost, supported on an adjustable cradle like a miniature music stand. On either side, kept in upright stands, are various chrome-plated tools and magnifying devices, some of which trail segmented power cables to a wall junction. There is a swing-down visor with zoom optics. There are lasers and ultrasound cleaning baths. There are duplicates of the gearwheel and its brethren, etched in brass for testing purposes. There are plastic models of parts of the Mechanism, so that she can take them apart and explain its workings to visitors. There are other gearwheels which have already been removed from the device for restoration, sealed in plastic boxes and racked according to coded labels. Some are visibly cleaner than the one she is working on, but some are still corroded and grubby, with damaged teeth and scabrous surface deterioration.

  And there is the Mechanism itself, placed on the bench on the far side of the gearwheel she is working on. It is the size of a shoebox, with a wooden casing, the lid hinged back. When it arrived the box was full of machinery, a tight-packed clockwork of arbors and crown wheels, revolving balls, slotted pins and delicate, hand-engraved inscriptions. None of it did anything, though. Turn the input crank and there’d just be a metallic crunch as stiff, worn gears locked into immobility. No one in the museum remembers the last time the machine was in proper working order. Fifty years ago, she’s heard someone say—but not all of the gearing was in place even then. Parts were removed a hundred years ago and never put back. Or were lost or altered two hundred years ago. Since then the Mechanism has become something of an embarrassment: a fabled contraption that doesn’t do what everyone expects it to.

  Hence the decision by the museum authorities: restore the Mechanism to full and authentic functionality in time for the reopening of the new wing. As the foremost native expert on the device, the work has naturally fallen to Rana. The authorities tried to foist a team on her, but the hapless doctoral students soon realized their leader preferred to work alone, unencumbered by the give and take of collaboration.

  Share the glory? Not likely.

  With the wall calendar reminding her how few weeks remain to the opening, Rana occasionally wonders if she has taken on too much. But she is making progress, and the most difficult parts of the restoration are now behind her.

  Rana picks up one of her tools and begins to scrape away the tiniest burr of corrosion on one of the gear’s teeth. Soon she is lost in the methodical repetitiveness of the task, her mind freewheeling back through history, thinking of all the hands that have touched this metal. She imagines all the people this little clockwork box has influenced, all the lives it has altered, the fortunes it has made and the empires it has crushed. The Romans owned the Mechanism for 400 years—one of their ships must have carried it from Greece, perhaps from the island of Rhodes—but the Romans were too lazy and incurious to do anything with the box other than marvel at its computational abilities. The idea that the same clockwork that accurately predicted the movements of
the sun, moon, and the planets across an entire Metonic cycle—235 lunar months—might also be made to do other things simply never occurred to them.

  The Persians were different. The Persians saw a universe of possibility in those spinning wheels and meshing teeth. Those early clocks and calculating boxes—the clever devices that sent armies and navies and engineers across the globe, and made Greater Persia what it is today—bear scant resemblance to the laptops on Rana’s desk. But the lineage is unbroken.

  There must be ghosts, she thinks: caught in the slipstream of this box, dragged by the Mechanism as it ploughed its way through the centuries. Lives changed and lives extinguished, lives that never happened at all, and yet all of them still in spectral attendance, a silent audience crowding in on this quiet basement room, waiting for Rana’s next move.

  Some of them want her to destroy the machine forever.

  Some of them want to see it shine again.

  Rana doesn’t dream much, but when she does she dreams of glittering brass gears meshing tight against each other, whirring furiously, a dance of metal and geometry that moves the heavens.

  Safa dreams of numbers, not gears: she is a mathematician. Her breakthrough paper, the one that has brought her to the museum, was entitled “Entropy Exchange and the Many Worlds Hypothesis.”