The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Pamir cried out and let go.

  But as Sele'ium aimed at his face, for his soul, Pamir slammed at the man's forearm and pushed it backwards again, and he put a hard knee into the elbow, and a weapon that didn't have safeties released its stored energies, a thin blinding beam that coalesced inside the dying man's head, his brain turning to light and ash, a supersonic crack leaving the others temporarily deafened.

  Pamir kicked the corpse away and clung to Sorrel, and she held tight to him, and after another few minutes, as they plunged toward the yellow depths of a living, thriving cloud, he shouted into her better ear, explaining a thing or two.

  XVII

  Again, it was nearly nightfall.

  Once again, Pamir sat outside his apartment, listening to the wild songs of the llano vibra. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. Neighbors strolled past or ran past or flew by on gossamer wings. The janusian couple paused long enough to ask where he had been these last days, and Pamir said a few murky words about taking care of family troubles. The harum-scarum family was outside their apartment, gathered around a cooking pit, eating a living passion ox in celebration of another day successfully crossed. A collection of machines stopped to ask about the facsimile that they had built for Pamir, as a favor. Did it serve its intended role? "Oh, sure," he said with a nod. "Everybody was pretty much fooled, at least until the joke was finished."

  "Was there laughter?" asked one machine.

  "Constant, breathless laughter," Pamir swore. And then he said nothing else about it.

  A single figure was approaching. He had been watching her for the last kilometer, and as the machines wandered away, he used three different means to study her gait and face and manner. Then he considered his options, and he decided to remain sitting where he was, his back against the huge ceramic pot and his legs stretched out before him, one bare foot crossed over the other.

  She stopped a few steps short, watching him but saying nothing.

  "You're thinking," Pamir told her. "Throw me into the brig, or throw me off the ship entirely. That's what you're thinking now."

  "But we had an agreement," Miocene countered. "You were supposed to help somebody, and you have, and you most definitely have earned your payment as well as my thanks."

  "Yeah," he said, "but I know you. And you're asking yourself, 'Why not get rid of him and be done with it?'"

  The First Chair was wearing a passenger's clothes and a face slightly disguised, eyes blue and the matching hair curled into countless tight knots, the cheeks and mouth widened but nothing about the present smile any warmer than any other smile that had ever come from this hard, hard creature.

  "You know me," she muttered.

  A moment later, she asked, "Will you tell me who you are?"

  "Don't you know yet?"

  She shook her head, and with a hint of genuine honesty, she admitted, "Nor do I particularly care, one way or the other."

  Pamir grinned and leaned back a little more.

  "I suppose I could place you in custody," Miocene continued. "But a man with your skills and obvious luck… well, you probably have twelve different ways to escape from our detention centers. And if I sent you falling onto a colony world or an alien world… I suppose in another thousand years or so, you would find your way back again, like a dog or an ugly habit."

  "Fair points," he admitted.

  Then with a serious, warm voice, he asked, "How is Sorrel?"

  "That young woman? As I understand it, she has put her apartment up for sale, and she has already moved away. I'm not sure where — "

  "Bullshit," he interrupted.

  Miocene grinned, just for a moment. "Perhaps I do have an idea or two. About who you might be…"

  "She knows now."

  The woman's face seemed to narrow, and the eyes grew larger and less secure. "Knows what?" she managed.

  "Who her father is," said Pamir. "Her true father, I mean."

  "One man's conjecture," the First Chair reminded him. Then with a dismissive shake of the head, she added, "A young woman in a gullible moment might believe you. But she won't find any corroboration, not for the next thousand years… and eventually, she will have to believe what she has always believed…"

  "Maybe."

  Miocene shrugged. "It's hardly your concern now. Is it?"

  "Perhaps it isn't," he allowed. Then as the overhead lights flickered for the first time, he sat up straighter. "The thief was your idea, wasn't he? The one who came to steal away the Darmion crystal?"

  "And why would I arrange such a thing?"

  "What happened afterwards was exactly what you were hoping for," he said. "An apparently random crime leaves Sorrel trusting me, and the two of us emotionally linked to each other."

  With a narrow grin, Miocene admitted, "But I was wrong in one way."

  "Were you?"

  "I assumed that the killer, whoever he was, would likely put an end to you. Exposing himself in the process, of course."

  A second ripple of darkness passed along the avenue. Pamir showed her a stern face, and quietly, he said, "Madam First Chair. You have always been a remarkable and wondrously awful bitch."

  "I didn't know it was Sele'ium," she admitted.

  "And you didn't know why he was killing the husbands, either." Pamir stood up now, slowly. "Because the old librarian, Leon'rd, pieced together who Sorrel was. He told Sele'ium what he had learned, and he mentioned that Sorrel's father was a woman, and as it happens, that woman is the second most important person onboard the Great Ship."

  "There are some flaws in the public records, yes." She nodded, adding, "These are problems that I'm taking care of now."

  "Good," he said.

  Miocene narrowed her gaze. "And yes, I am a difficult soul. The bitch queen, and so on. But what I do in my life is enormous and very complicated, and for a multitude of good reasons, it is best if my daughter remains apart from my life and from me."

  "Maybe so," he allowed.

  "Look at these last few days. Do you need more reasons than this?" she asked. Then she took a step closer, adding, "But you are wrong, in one critical matter. Whoever you are."

  "Wrong where?"

  "You assume I wanted you to be killed, and that's wrong. It was a possibility and a risk. But as a good captain, I had to consider the possibility and make contingency plans, just in case." She took another little step, saying, "No, what all of this has been… in addition to everything else that it seems to have been… is what I have to call an audition."

  "An audition?" Pamir muttered, genuinely puzzled.

  "You seem to be a master at disappearing," Miocene admitted. Then she took one last step, and in a whisper, she said, "There may come a day when I cannot protect my daughter anymore, and she'll need to vanish in some profound and eternal fashion…"

  A third ripple of darkness came, followed by the full seamless black of night.

  "That's your task, if you wish to take it," she said, speaking into the darkness. "Whoever you happen to be… are you there, can you hear me… ?"

  XVIII

  Sorrel had been walking for weeks, crossing the Indigo Desert one step at a time. She traveled alone with her supplies in a floating pack tied to her waist. It was ten years later, or ten thousand. She had some trouble remembering how much time had passed, which was a good thing. She felt better in most ways, and the old pains had become familiar enough to be ignored. She was even happy, after a fashion. And while she strolled upon the fierce landscape of fire-blasted stone and purple succulents, she would sing, sometimes human songs and occasionally tunes that were much harder to manage and infinitely more beautiful.

  One afternoon, she heard notes answering her notes.

  Coming over the crest of a sharp ridge, she saw something utterly unexpected—a thick luxurious stand of irrigated llano vibra.

  Louder now, the vegetation sang to her.

  She started to approach.

  In the midst of the foliage, a shape was sitting. A human shape,
perhaps. Male, by the looks of it. Sitting with his back to her, his face totally obscured by the shaggy black hair. Yet he seemed rather familiar, for some reason. Familiar in the best ways, and Sorrel stepped faster now, and smiled, and with a parched voice, she tried to sing in time with the alien weed.

  * * *

  A Case of Consilience

  Ken MacLeod

  Ken MacLeod (kenmacleod.blogspot.com) lives in West Lothian, Scotland. He became prominent in the late 1990s with his early novels, the four politically engaged books in the Fall Revolution series, that began in the UK in 1995 with The Star Fraction, and in the U.S. in 1999 with the reprinting of The Cassini Division. His next three novels are The Engines of Light trilogy, and his latest novels are Newton's Wake (subtitled A Space Opera in the UK in 2004) and Learning the World (2005, subtitled or, The New Intelligence: A Scientific Romance). He wrote an essay on "The New Space Opera" for Locus in 2004, and is generally regarded as central to British space opera in this generation. He has published very little short fiction.

  "A Case of Consilience " was published in Nova Scotia. It is in dialogue with James Blish's classic, "A Case of Conscience." The first twist is that MacLeod's Christian, Donald Maclntyre, is a Scots Presbyterian, not a Catholic priest. The second is that the intelligent alien is a vast subterranean mycoid—a fungus. Maclntyre's belief motivates him to bring the gospel to the alien. But then there is the alien point of view.

  * * *

  When you say it's Providence that brought you here," said Qasim, "what I hear are two things: it's bad luck, and it's not your fault."

  The Rev. Donald Maclntyre, M.A. (Div.), Ph.D., put down his beer can and nodded.

  "That's how it sometimes feels," he said. "Easy for you to say, of course."

  Qasim snorted. "Easy for anybody! Even a Muslim would have less difficulty here. Let alone a Buddhist or Hindu."

  "Do tell," said Donald. "No, what's really galling is that there are millions of Christians who would take all this in their stride. Anglicans. Liberals. Catholics. Mormons, for all I know. And my brethren in the, ah, narrower denominations could come up with a dozen different rationalizations before breakfast, all of them heretical did they but know it—which they don't, thank the Lord and their rigid little minds, so their lapses are no doubt forgiven through their sheer ignorance. So it's given to me to wrestle with. Thus a work of Providence. I think."

  "I still don't understand what your problem is, compared to these other Christians."

  Donald sighed. "It's a bit hard to explain," he said. "Let's put it this way. You were brought up not to believe in God, but I expect you had quite strong views about the God you didn't believe in. Am I right?"

  Qasim nodded. "Of course. Allah was always…" He shrugged. "Part of the background. The default."

  "Exactly. Now, how did you feel when you first learned about what Christians believe about the Son of God?"

  "It was a long time ago," said Qasim. "I was about eight or nine. In school in Kirkuk. One of my classmates told me, in the course of… well, I am sorry to say in the course of a fight. I shall pass over the details. Enough to say I was quite shocked. It seemed preposterous and offensive. And then I laughed at myself!"

  "I can laugh at myself too," said Donald. "But I feel the same way as you did—in my case at the suggestion that the Son was not unique, that He took on other forms, and so forth. I can hardly even say such things. I literally shudder. But I can't accept, either, that He has no meaning beyond Earth. So what are we to make of rational beings who are not men, and who may be sinners?"

  "Perhaps they are left outside," said Qasim. "Like most people are, if I understand your doctrines."

  Donald flinched. "That's not what they say, and in any case, such a question is not for me to decide. I'm perplexed."

  He leaned back in the seat and stared gloomily at the empty can, and then at the amused, sympathetic eyes of the friendly scoffer to whom he had found he could open up more than to the believers on the Station.

  Qasim stood up. "Well, thank God I'm an atheist, that's all I can say."

  He had said it often enough.

  "God and Bush," said Donald. This taunt, too, was not on its first outing. Attributing to the late ex-President the escalating decades-long cascade of unintended consequences that had annexed Iraq to the EU and Iran to China was probably unfair, but less so than blaming it on God. Qasim raised a mocking index finger in response.

  "God and Bush! And what are you having, Donald?"

  "Can of Export."

  "Narrow it down, padre. They're all export here."

  "Aren't we all," said Donald. "Tennent's, then. And a shot of single malt on the side, if you don't mind. Whatever's going."

  As Qasim made his way through the crowd to the bar, Donald reflected that his friend was likely no more off-duty than he was. A chaplain and an intelligence officer could both relax in identical olive T-shirts and chinos, but vigilance and habit were less readily shrugged off than dress-codes. The Kurdish colonel still now and again called his service the mukhabarat. It was one of his running gags, along with the one about electronics and electrodes. And the one about extra-terrestrial intelligence. And the one about… yes, for running gags Qasim was your man.

  As I am for gloomy reflections, Donald thought. Sadness, tristia, had been one of the original seven deadly sins. Which probably meant every Scottish Presbyterian went straight to hell, or at least to a very damp purgatory, if the Catholics were right. If the Catholics were right! After three hundred and seventeen days in the Extra-Terrestrial Contact Station, this was among the least heretical of the thoughts Donald Maclntyre was willing to countenance.

  Qasim came back with the passing cure, and lasting bane, of the Scottish sin; and with what might have been a more dependably cheering mood-lifter: a gripe about his own problems. Problems which, as Donald listened to them, seemed more and more to resemble his own.

  "How am I supposed to tell if an underground fungoid a hundred meters across that communicates by chemical gradients is feeding us false information? Or if an operating system written by an ET AI is a trojan? Brussels still expects files on all of them, when we don't even know how many civs we're dealing with. Bloody hell, Donald, pardon my English, there's one of the buggers we only suspect is out there because everyone comes back from its alleged home planet with weird dreams." Qasim cocked a black eyebrow. "Maybe I shouldn't be telling you that one."

  "I've heard about the dreams," said Donald. "In a different context." He sighed. "It's a bit hard to explain to some people that I don't take confession."

  "Confessions are not to be relied upon," Qasim said, looking somewhere else. "Anyway… what I would have to confess, myself, is that the Etcetera Station is a bit out of its depth. We are applying concepts outside their context."

  "Now that," said Donald with some bitterness, "is a suspicion I do my best to resist."

  It was one the Church had always resisted, a temptation dangled in different forms down the ages. As soon as the faith had settled on its view of one challenge, another had come along. In the Carpenter's workshop there were many clue-sticks, and the whacks had seldom ceased for long. In the beginning, right there in the Letters, you could see the struggle against heresies spawned by Greek metaphysics and Roman mysticism. Barely had the books snapped shut on Arius when Rome had crashed. Then the Muslim invasions. The split between the Eastern and Western churches, Christendom cloven on a lemma. Then the discovery of the New World, and a new understanding of the scope and grip of the great, ancient religions of the Old. The Reformation. The racialist heresy. The age of the Earth. Biblical criticism. Darwin. The twentieth century had brought the expanding universe, the gene, the unconscious—how quaint the controversies over these now seemed! Genetic engineering, human-animal chimerae, artificial intelligence: in Donald's own lifetime he'd seen Synods, Assemblies and Curia debate them and come to a Christian near-consensus acceptable to all but the lunatic—no, he must be charitable—the f
undamentalist fringe.

  And then, once more, just when the dust had settled, along had come—predictable as a planet, unpredicted like a comet—another orb in God's great orrery of education, or shell in the Adversary's arsenal of error-mongery, the greatest challenge of all—alien intelligent life. It was not one that had been altogether unexpected. Scholastics had debated the plurality of worlds. The Anglican C. S. Lewis had considered it in science fiction; the agnostic Blish had treated it with a literally Jesuitical subtlety. The Christian poet Alice Meynell had speculated on alien gospels; the godless ranter MacDiarmid had hymned the Innumerable Christ. In the controversies over the new great discovery, all these literary precedents had been resurrected and dissected. They pained Donald to the quick. Well-intended, pious, sincere in their seeking they might be; or skeptical and satirical; it mattered not: they were all mockeries. There had been only one Incarnation; only one sufficient sacrifice. If the Reformation had meant anything at all, it meant that. To his ancestors Donald might have seemed heinously pliant in far too much, but like them he was not to be moved from the rock. In the matter of theological science fiction he preferred the honest warning of the secular humanist Harrison. Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Ashkelon…