The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Hello, Ana,” said Tessimond. “Are you well?”

  I had seen him only once before, I think; when Jack had introduced him to everybody by the water cooler, all those months earlier—before he’d said whatever he said and sent my boys scurrying away from the prospect of the Nobel. He had struck me then as a tall, rather sad-faced old gent; clean shaven and with a good stack of white hair, carefully dressed, with polite, old-school manners. I remember Jack saying, “This is a friend of mine from Oregon, a professor no less.” I don’t remember if he passed on the man’s name, that first time.

  “You stalking me, Professor?” I said. I felt remarkably placid, seeing him standing there. “I googled you, you know.”

  “If Google suggests I have a history of stalking people, Ana, then I shall have to seek legal redress.”

  “Go on, sit down,” I instructed him. “You can’t do any more damage now. I’m—” I added, aware that it was boasting but not caring, “off to Stockholm tomorrow to collect the Nobel Prize for Physics.”

  Tessimond sat himself, slowly, down. “I’ve seen the media coverage of it all, of course. Many congratulations.”

  “It belongs to all four of us. Have you been in touch with the other three?”

  “You mean Professors Niu Jian and Prévert and Doctor Sleight? I have not. Why would you think I have?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I took a sip of hot chocolate. “You want a drink?”

  “No thank you,” he said. He was peering into the buggy. “What a lovely infant! Is it a boy?”

  “She is a girl,” I said. “She is called Marija.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s been a big year. Childbirth and winning the Nobel Prize.”

  “Congratulations indeed.”

  We sat in silence for a little while. “You spoke to my three colleagues,” I said, shortly. “And then after that conversation they all left my team. What did you tell them?”

  Tessimond looked at me for a long time, with blithe eyes. “Do you really want me to tell you?” he asked eventually, looking down to my sleeping child and then back up to me.

  “No,” I said, feeling suddenly afraid. Then: “Yes, hell. Of course. Will it take long?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Will you then leave me alone and not bother me any more?”

  “By all means.”

  “No, don’t tell me. I’ve changed my mind. What are you anyway? Some kind of Ancient Mariner figure, going around telling people this thing personally? Why not publish it—post it to your blog. Or put it on a T-shirt.”

  “It has crossed my mind to publish it,” Tessimond said. “It emerged from my academic research. We usually publish our academic research, don’t we.”

  “So you didn’t, because?”

  “I didn’t see the point. Not just in publication, but in academia. Really, I realized, what I wanted to do was: travel.” He looked through the wide glass windows of the coffee shop at the shoppers traversing and retraversing the esplanade. Markets, temples, warehouses and wide paved streets. Tree-shaded squares where the bombastic statues of dead magnates and generals waited, quietly. Two clouds closed upon one another, shutting in front of the sun like a lizard’s horizontal eyelids. What is it the poet said? Dark dark dark, they all go into the dark. He said: “I read your work. It’s very elegantly done. Very elegant solutions to the dark energy problem; a real… I was going to say intuitive sense of the geometry of the cosmos.”

  “Were going to say?”

  “Well it’s—I’m afraid it’s wrong. So your intuition has led you astray. But it’s a very bold attempt at…”

  I interrupted him with: “Wrong?”

  “I’m afraid so. I’m afraid you’re coming at the question from the wrong angle. Not just you, of course. The whole scientific community.”

  I laughed at this, but, I hope, not unkindly. Marija stirred, twitched her little mitten-clad hands like she was boxing in her sleep, and fell motionless again. “You’d better let the Nobel Committee know,” I said. “Before it’s too late!” It was all too absurd. Really it was.

  The late autumn sky was as blue as water, and as cold.

  “Five minutes, you said,” I told him, nodding in the direction of the shop clock. “And you’ve had more than one of those five already.”

  He breathed in, and out, calmly enough. Then he said: “Why is the universe so big?”

  “Why questions rarely lead physicists anywhere good. Why is there something rather than nothing? Why was there a big-bang? Who knows? Not a well-formulated question.”

  He put his head on one side, and tried again. “How did the universe get so big?”

  “That’s better,” I said, indulgently. “It got so big because fourteen billion years ago the big bang happened, and one consequence of that event was the expansion of spacetime—on a massive scale.”

  “All these galaxies and stars moving apart from one another like dots on an inflating balloon,” he said. “Only the surface of the balloon is 2D and we have to make the conceptual leap to imagining a 3D surface.”

  “Exactly,” I told him. “As every schoolkid knows.”

  “Still: why expansion? Why should the big bang result in the dilation of space?”

  I took another sip from my chocolate. “Three minutes to go, and you’ve tripped yourself into another why question.”

  “Let me ask you about time,” he said, unruffled. “We appear to be moving through time. We go in one direction. We cannot go backwards, we can only go forwards.”

  I shrugged. “According to maths we can do backwards. The equations of physics are reversible. It just so happens that we go in one direction only. It’s no big deal.”

  “Quite right,” he said, nodding. “The science says we ought to be able to go in any direction. Yet we never,” he said, stroking his own cheek, “actually do. That’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I can’t say it bothers me.”

  “Time is a manifold, like space. We can move in any direction in space. But we can only move in one direction in time.”

  “This really is kindergarten stuff,” I said. “And much as I have enjoyed our little chat…”

  “What moves an object through the manifold of space?”

  After a moment, I said: “Force.”

  “Impulse. Gravity. Those two things only. You can push an object to give it kinetic energy, or you can draw it towards you. You fire your rocket up; Earth pulls your rocket down. Kinetic energy is always relative, not absolute. The driver of a car passing by a pedestrian has kinetic energy from the pedestrian’s point of view; but from the point of view of the person in the passenger seat that same driver has zero kinetic energy.”

  It was, in a strange sort of way, soothing to hear him elucidate elementary physics in this way. “All well and good,” I said.

  “That’s how things go in the physical manifold, which we call spacetime. Relocate the model to the temporal manifold—let’s call it timespace.”

  This was when the fizzing started in my stomach. “For the sake of argument, why not,” I said. I couldn’t prevent a defensive tone creeping into my voice. “Although it’ll be nothing but a thought-experiment.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked, blandly.

  “We’ve centuries of experimental data about the actual manifold, the spacetime manifold. Your ‘timespace’ manifold is pure speculation.”

  “Is it? I would say we move through it every day of our lives. I’d say we’ve a lifetime’s experience of it. The question is—no, the two questions are: why are we moving through it, and why can we only move through it in one direction.”

  There was a blurry rim to my vision. My heart had picked up the pace. “More why questions.”

  “If you prefer: what is drawing us towards it, through timespace?”

  “You’re saying the reason we feel time as a kind of motion, one hour per hour, is because something is dra
wing us, with its gravitational pull—is that it? Because it seems to me that we might just as well have been launched forward by some initial impulse. Don’t you agree?”

  “The reason I don’t agree is the fact that we’re stuck moving in one temporal direction.” I saw, then, where he was going; but I sat quietly as he spelled it out. “Think of the analogue from the physical manifold. There’s no force that could propel an object, let alone a whole cosmos, so rapidly that it was locked into a single trajectory. But there is a force in the universe that can draw an object in with such a force—draw it such that it has no option but to move in one direction, towards the centre of the object.”

  “A black hole.”

  He nodded.

  “Your theory,” I said, in a just-so-as-we’re-clear voice, “is that the reason we move along the arrow of time the way we do is that we’re being drawn towards a supermassive temporal black hole?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” I said, with an insouciance I did not feel. “It’s an interesting theory, although it is only a theory.”

  “Not at all. Consider the data.”

  “What data?”

  “I understand your resistance, Ana,” he said, gently. “But you can do better than this. Who knows the data better than you? What happens as a physical object approaches the event horizon of a physical black hole?”

  “Time,” I said, “dilates.”

  “So what must happen as a temporal object approaches the event horizon of a temporal black hole? Physics dilates. Space expands—until it approaches an asymptote of reality. From the point of view of an observer not present at the event horizon itself space would seem to expand until it appeared infinite.” He looked through the big glass again. “What else do we see, when we look around?”

  “So we’re still,” I said, my voice gravelly, “outside the event horizon?”

  “If we were outside the event horizon, the rate of apparent expansion of space would be an asymptote approaching a fixed rate—a simple acceleration. And until a few decades ago that was what the data showed. But then the data starting showing that the rate of apparent expansion of the universe is speeding up. That can only mean that we’re approaching the event horizon itself. That also explains why we locked into the one direction of time. In the timespace manifold generally speaking we ought to be able to go forwards, backwards, whatever we wanted. But we’re not in the manifold generally; we’re in a very particular place. Like an object falling into a black hole, we’re locked into a single vector.”

  I thought about it. Well, I say I thought about it; but the truth is I didn’t need to think very hard. It fell into place in my mind; like the others, I found myself thinking how could I not see this before? It is so very obvious. “But if you’re right—wait,” I said. “Wait a moment.”

  I pulled out my phone, and jabbed up the calculus app. It took me a few moments to work through the crucial equations. Of course everything fitted. Of course it was true.

  Of course it was right.

  I looked at him, feeling removed from myself. “When we reach the actual temporal event horizon,” I said, “tidal forces will rip us apart.”

  “Will rip time apart,” he said, nodding slowly. “Yes. Of course that amounts to the same thing.”

  “When?”

  “You’ve got the equations there,” he said, looking at my phone as it lay, like a miniature 2001-monolith, flat on the table. “But it’s hard to be precise. The scale is fourteen billion years; the tolerances are not seconds, or even days. Years. I worked out a seven years plus or minus. That was a decade ago.”

  I shook my head, the way a dog shakes water of its pelt; but there was no way this idea could be shaken out of my mind. It was true; it was there. “It could be—literally—any day now,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Not for you, so much, as for the fact of you having a small kid.”

  “That’s why Noo-noo was so circumspect with me,” I said. “I see. But what difference does it make? And, yes, alright I see why you haven’t published this. It’d be wandering the highways with an End Is Nigh sandwich board.”

  “Not that,” he said, his glittering eyes meeting mine. “More that it’s so obvious. When you think about it, how could the expanding universe be anything other than this? Travelling near the ultimate spatial speed makes time dilate; so obviously travelling near the ultimate temporal speed will make space dilate. We should—all of us, we should just… see it.”

  “I’m going home now,” I told him. But I embraced him before I left, and felt the sharkskin roughness of his unshaved cheek against my own. Then I wheeled Marija home. I called M. and told him to leave work and join me. He was puzzled, but acquiesced.

  He hasn’t gone back.

  6

  The equations depend upon precision over prodigious lengths of time—since the big bang, or (rather) since the dilation effect first affected what until then must have been a stable cosmos existing within an open temporal manifold. But I’ve done my best. Tessimond’s +/-7 years was, I suspect, deliberately vague; erring on the side of generosity. I think the timescale is much shorter. Download the data on the rate of acceleration of cosmic expansion, and you can do your own sums.

  Of course I never flew to Stockholm. Why would I waste three days away from my child? None of that matters anyway. We realized what money we could, and bought a small place by the sea. I won’t say what sea. That doesn’t matter either; except that, when the dusk comes each day, and the net curtains are sucked against the open windows and go momentary starch-stiff; and when the moths congregate to worship their electric sun-gods; and when the moon lies carelessly in the sky over the purple marine horizon like a pearl of great price—when Marija is fed and happy and M. and I take our turns holding her, and then lay her down and hold one another—there is a contentment spun from finitude that my previous, open-ended existence could not comprehend. I have busied myself writing this account, although only a little every day, for there is no rush, or else there is too much rush and I don’t wish to be troubled by the latter. And as for everything else, it helps to know what is really important.

  ADVENTURE STORY

  NEIL GAIMAN

  Neil Gaiman [www.neilgaiman.com] was born in England and worked as a freelance journalist before co-editing Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kim Newman) and writing Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. He started writing graphic novels and comics with Violent Cases in 1987, and with the seventy-five installments of award-winning series The Sandman established himself as one of the most important comics writers of his generation. His first novel, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), appeared in 1991, and was followed by Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, Anansi Boys, and The Graveyard Book. Coming up is new novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Gaiman’s work has won the Carnegie, Newbery, Hugo, World Fantasy, Bram Stoker, Locus, Geffen, International Horror Guild, Mythopoeic, and Will Eisner Comic Industry awards. Gaiman currently lives near Minneapolis.

  In my family “adventure” tends to be used to mean “any minor disaster we survived” or even “any break from routine”. Except by my mother, who still uses it to mean “what she did that morning.” Going to the wrong part of a supermarket parking lot and, while looking for her car, getting into a conversation with someone whose sister, it turns out, she knew in the 1970s would qualify, for my mother, as a full-blown adventure.

  She is getting older, now. She no longer gets out of the house as she used to. Not since my father died.

  My last visit to her, we were clearing out some of his possessions. She gave me a black leather lens-case filled with tarnished cuff-links, and invited me to take any of my father’s old sweaters and cardigans I wanted, to remember him by. I loved my father, but couldn’t imagine wearing one of his sweaters. He was much bigger than me, all my life. Nothing of his would fit me.

  And then I said, “What’s that?”

  “Oh,” said m
y mother. “That’s something that your father brought back from Germany when he was in the army.” It was carved out of mottled red stone, the size of my thumb. It was a person, a hero or perhaps a god, with a pained expression on its rough-carved face.

  “It doesn’t look very German,” I said.

  “It wasn’t, dear. I think it’s from. Well, these days, it’s Kazakhstan. I’m not sure what it was back then.”

  “What was Dad doing in Kazakhstan in the army?” This would have been about 1950. My father ran the officer’s club in Germany during his national service, and, in none of his post-war army after-dinner stories, had ever done anything more than borrow a truck without permission, or take delivery of some dodgily sourced whisky.

  “Oh.” She looked as if she’d said too much. Then she said, “Nothing, dear. He didn’t like to talk about it.”

  I put the statue with the cuff-links, and the small pile of curling black and white photographs I had decided to take home with me to scan.

  I slept in the spare bedroom at the end of the hall, in the narrow spare bed.

  The next morning, I went into the room that had been my father’s office, to look at it one final time. Then I walked across the hall into the living room, where my mother had already laid breakfast.

  “What happened to that little stone carving?”

  “I put it away, dear.” My mother’s lips were set.

  “Why?”

  “Well, your father always said he shouldn’t have held on to it in the first place.”

  “Why not?”

  She poured tea from the same china teapot she had poured it from all my life.

  “There were people after it. In the end, their ship blew up. In the valley. Because of those flappy things getting into their propellers.”

  “Flappy things?”

  She thought for a moment. “Pterodactyls, dear. With a P. That was what your father said they were. Of course, he said the people in the airship deserved all that was coming to them, after what they did to the Aztecs in 1942.”

  “Mummy, the Aztecs died out years ago. Long before 1942.”