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

by Gardner Dozois

  There was only desultory hooting when he rejoined the road. leaving the road and rejoining it after a four-wheel-drive short-cut was common. The four-by-fours were clearly visible now, crammed with whatever men the police chiefs had been able to get their hands on at short notice – some in military uniform, some in T-shirts, some with government-issue sidearms, some with war-era AKMs, yawning, pulled out of bed in the early hours.

  The crawler was taking up three lanes of traffic, drawing a horde of honking AfriCars behind it like a bridal train. Despite the horns, the crawler was probably not moving much slower than the cars would have done – the expressway was still a mass of blast craters.

  “I can’t believe this,” said Mativi, hugely affronted. “How can they think they can haul a million-tonne object across town without me noticing?”

  Ngoyi stared. “You think that thing’s got – things on it?”

  Mativi nodded. “One of the things is on board – one of the containers. They’re taking it across town because they can’t bear to lose it…I wonder why.” He winked at Ngoyi. “Maybe they’re in the pay of the office of sanitation?” The car plunged into yet another black void unilluminated by its headlights. “Jesus, I wish those streetlights were working.” He blinked as the car bonnet surged up again into the light.

  Then he realized. Not only were there no streetlights, there were also no lights in the city around the road.

  “That’s it, isn’t it.”

  “What?”

  “They’re going to the power company. You dumb fucks have been plugging power into it as well. haven’t you.”

  Ngoyi hesitated, then gave up the game and nodded. “It started out as a theoretical weapons project in the last days of the war. But,” he insisted defiantly, “it was a peaceful use we put it to! One of our office juniors, a very clever young man, a PhD from CalTech, suggested that if we aimed an infrared laser beam at the event horizon at a certain angle, it would come out as a gamma-ray beam, which we used to heat a tank of mercury…we tried water first, but it flash evaporated and fused the rock around the tank to glass.” He licked his lips nervously. “The hardest part was designing a turbine system that would work with evaporating mercury. We lost a lot of men to heavy metal poisoning…”

  Realisation dawned on Mativi. “You were one of the researchers in lissouba’s government.”

  “You think I could have got away with living in the old People’s Democratic Republic with a physics degree without being a weapons researcher?” Ngoyi laughed hollowly. “Dream on, brother. But this is peacetime now. The technology is being used to power the houses of five million people – ”

  “Uh-uh. There’s no sidestepping the laws of Thermodynamics. You only get out less than what you put in. You’re only getting power out because you’re sapping the angular momentum of what’s inside the container. I’ll lay a bet that what’s inside the container was created illegally using the lubumba Collider that President lissouba convinced the UN to build to ‘rejuvenate the Congolese economy’.”

  Ngoyi squirmed. “He also said scientify the Congolese economy. He actually used the word ‘scientify’.”

  Mativi nodded. “In any case, that angular momentum was put into the container by gigawatts of energy pumped into the Collider from the city power grid. Effectively all you’re doing is using up energy someone stole and stored fifteen years ago. It’s no more a power source than a clockwork doll is, Jean-Baptiste. You have to wind it up to watch it go. And all you’ll be left with, in the end, is a non-rotating very heavy lump of extremely bad shit.”

  “Well, I must admit,” admitted Ngoyi ruefully, “the amount of juice we can squeeze out of it is getting smaller every year.”

  The tractor in front suddenly rumbled to a halt in a cloud of dust big enough to conceal a herd of rhinos. A wall of immobile metal barred the carriageway, and three lanes of drivers performed the peculiarly Congolese manoeuvre of stepping on their brakes and leaning on their horns simultaneously. One of them shrieked suddenly in dismay when a length of caterpillar track resembling a chain of house façades clipped together with traffic bollards slammed down onto his bonnet and crushed it flat, before slapping his saloon into a cabriolet. Paint flakes flew everywhere. The car was a steel one, too

  – an old Proton model produced under licence in Afghanistan. Mativi hoped the driver had survived.

  Troops poured out of the four-by-fours, ignoring the barrage of horns. They were staring at the side of the tractor. Some good Catholics were even crossing themselves.

  Mativi put the handbrake on and left his car. Someone hooted at him. He ignored them. One whole side of the tractor had collapsed into the asphalt. The torsion bars of the vehicle’s suspension, each one a man’s waist thick and made of substances far, far stronger than steel, had snapped like seaside rock. The load on top of the tractor had slumped sideways underneath its canvas blanket.

  Now that he was outside the car, he was aware of a hissing sound. The sound was coming from a hole punched in the canvas cover.

  Some of the troopers were walking up towards the load. Mativi danced out onto the grass verge, waving his arms like an isangoma. “No! Non! Get away! Trés dangereux!”

  One of the men looked at Mativi as if he were an idiot and took another step forward. His sleeve began to rustle and flap in the direction of the hole in the canvas. Then his hand slapped down onto the canvas cover, and he began to scream, beating on his hand, trying to free it. His comrades began to laugh, looking back towards Mativi, enjoying the joke their friend was having at the crazy man’s expense.

  Then he vanished.

  Not quite vanished – Mativi and the troops both heard the bones in his hand snap, saw the hand crumple into the canvas like a handkerchief into a magician’s glove, followed by his arm, followed by his shoulder, followed by his head. They saw the flare of crimson his body turned into as skin, bone, blood vessels, all the frail materials meant to hold a body together, degenerated into carmine mulch and were sucked up by the structure. A crimson blot of blood a man wide sprayed onto the canvas – out of which, weirdly, runnels of blood began trailing inward toward the hole, against and at angles to gravity.

  The police troops turned and looked at Mativi, then looked back at the tractor.

  “alors, chef,” one of them said to him, “qu’est-ce qu’on fait maintenant?”

  “It’s loose,” said Ngoyi, his eyes glazed, seeing the ends of worlds. “It’s loose, and I am responsible.”

  Mativi shook his head. “It’s not loose. Not yet. We can still tell exactly where it is, just by feeding it more policemen. But its casing’s corroded. It’s sucking in stuff from outside.”

  “Not corroded.” Ngoyi shook his head. “It won’t corrode. It’s made of nickel alloy, very strong, very heavy. It’s one of the cases we bored a hole in deliberately, in order to shine in the infrared beam. There’ll be another hole in the casing on the far side. Where the gamma comes out.”

  Mativi nodded. One of the machines the demons live in.

  Ngoyi still seemed to be wary of even looking at the container. “Could it topple over?”

  “No. If it begins to topple, it’ll right itself immediately. It’s probably scrunched itself down into the top of the tractor doing that already. Remember, it’s a small thing rotating, rotating fast, and it weighs over a thousand tonnes. The gyroscopic stability of an object like that doesn’t bear thinking about – ”

  “CETAWAYO BRIAN MATIVI! I AM HEREBY BY THE ORDER OF THE UNITED NATIONS PEACEKEEPING FORCES OF THE CONGO PLACING YOU UNDER ARREST.”

  Mativi turned. The voice had come from a senior police officer. The amount of shiny regalia on the uniform confused matters, but he was almost certain the man was a lieutenant.

  Mativi sighed. “lieutenant – ” he began.

  “Major,” corrected the Major.

  “ – Major, I am engaged in preventing a public disaster of proportions bigger than anything that might possibly be prevented by arresting
me. Do you know what will happen if that load falls off that wagon?”

  The Major shrugged. “Do you know what will happen if I see you and don’t drag you down to the cells? I will lose my job, and my wife and children will go hungry.”

  Mativi began to back away.

  “Hey!” The Major began to pointedly unbutton his revolver.

  “I know what will happen to you if you don’t bring me in. And you forgot to mention that there’ll be no power in the city either, and that as a consequence a great number of wives and children will go hungry,” said Mativi, circling around the danger area of bowed, permanently windblown grass near the tractor’s payload. He waved his arms in the direction of the dark horizon. “You can see the evidence of this already. The device on this tractor has been uncoupled from the grid, and immediately there is no power for refrigeration, no power for cooking, or for emergency machinery in hospitals. I know all that.” Slowly, he put his hands up to indicate he was no threat. Then, with one hand, he swung himself up onto the side of the tractor, with the payload between himself and the Major. “But you truly cannot begin to comprehend what will happen to those wives and children if I allow this load to continue on to Djelo-Binza, sir. You see, I understand at a very deep level what is in this container. You do not.”

  “I must warn you not to attempt to escape custody,” said the Major, raising his pistol. “I am empowered to shoot.”

  “How can I be trying to escape custody?” said Mativi, looking down the barrel of the pistol as if his life depended on it, and sinking in his stance, causing the Major to lower the pistol by a couple of centimetres, still training it on his heart. “I’m climbing on board a police vehicle.”

  “Get down off that police vehicle, now,” said the Major. “Or I will shoot.”

  Mativi licked his lips, looking up a pistol barrel for the second time that day, but this time attempting to perform complex orbital calculations in his head as he did so. have I factored in relativity properly? It needs to travel dead over the hole –

  “Shan’t.”

  The gun fired. It made quite a satisfactory boom. There was a red flash in mid-air, and Mativi was still there.

  The Major stared at Mativi.

  “As I said,” said Mativi, “I understand what is in this cargo. You do not. Do I have your full cooperation?”

  The Major’s eyes went even wider than his perceived Remit To Use Deadly Force. He lowered the gun, visibly shaken.

  “You do,” he said. “Sir,” he added.

  The Hyundai became bogged down by bodies – fortunately living ones

  – in the immediate vicinity of the Heavy Weapons Alert site. A crowd of perhaps a thousand goggling locals, all dressed in complementary rayon T-shirts handed out by various multinationals to get free airtime on Third World famine reports, were making road and roadside indistinguishable. But the big blue bull bars parted the crowd discreetly, and Mativi dawdled forward to a hastily-erected barrier of velcrowire into which several incautious onlookers had already been pushed by their neighbours. Velcrowire barbs would sink a centimetre deep into flesh, then open up into barbs that could only be removed by surgeons, providing the owner of the flesh desired to keep it. Barbed wire was not truly barbed. Velcrowire was.

  The troops at the only gap in the fence stood aside and saluted for the UN car, and Mativi pulled up next to an ancient Boeing v22 VTOL transport, in the crew door of which a portly black man in a bad safari suit sat juggling with mobile phones. The casings of the phones, Mativi knew, were colour coded to allow their owner to identify them. The Boeing had once been United Nations White. After too many years in the Congo, it was now Well-Used latrine White.

  Mativi examined what was being done at the far end of the containment area. The site was a mass of specialized combat engineering machinery. Mativi recognized one of the devices, a Japanese-made tractor designed for defusing unexploded nuclear munitions – or rather, for dealing with what happened when a human nuclear UxB disposal operative made a mistake. Hair trigger sensors on the tractor would detect the incipient gamma flare of a fission reaction, then fire a hundred and twenty millimetre shell into the nuke. This would kill the bomb disposal man and fill the area around the bomb with weapons-grade fallout, but probably save a few million civilians in the immediate area–

  Mativi walked across the compound and yelled at the man in the Boeing. “louis, what the hell are your UxB monkeys doing?”

  Grosjean’s head whipped round. “Oh, hello, Chet. We’re following standard procedure for dealing with an unexploded weaponized gamma source.”

  “Well, first off, this isn’t a weapon – ”

  Grosjean’s smile was contemptuous. “It’s something that can annihilate the entire planet, and it isn’t a weapon?”

  “It’s thirty-nine things that can annihilate the planet, and they’re not weapons any more. Think about it. Would anyone use a weapon that would blow up the whole world?”

  Grosjean actually appeared to seriously consider the possibility; then, he nodded to concede the point. “So what sort of weapon were these things part of?”

  “Not weapons,” corrected Mativi. “Think of them as weapons waste. They were the principal components in a Penrose Accelerator.”

  “You’re making it up.”

  “You damn fool security guy, me weapons inspector. We’ve suspected the People’s Democratic Republic of Congo used Penrose weapons in their war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Congo for some time. They had guns capable of lobbing hundred tonne shells full of plague germs at Pretoria from a distance of four thousand kilometres, for instance. When we examined those guns after UNPEFORCONG overran their positions, what we found didn’t fit. They had magnetic accelerators in their barrels, but at the sort of muzzle velocities they’d have had to have been using, the magnets in the barrels would only have been any use in aiming, not in getting the payload up to speed. And the breech of each weapon had been removed. Something had been accelerating those projectiles, but it wasn’t magnetism, and it wasn’t gunpowder. The projectiles were big, and they were moving fast. You remember that outbreak of airborne rabies in New Zealand two years back? That was one of theirs. A Congolese shell fired too hot and went into orbit. The orbit decayed. The shell came down. Thirteen years after the war. Gunpowder and magnetism don’t do that.”

  “So what was it?”

  “A Penrose accelerator. You get yourself a heavy-duty rotating mass, big enough to have stuff orbit round it, and you whirl ordnance round those orbits, contrary to the direction of the mass’s rotation. Half of your ordnance separates from the payload, and drops into the mass. The other half gets kicked out to mind-buggering velocities. The trouble is, none of this works unless the mass is dense enough to have an escape velocity greater than light.”

  “A black hole.”

  “Yes. You have yourself thirty-nine charged rotating black holes, formerly used as artillery accelerators, now with nowhere to go. Plus another hole lodged precariously on the back of a tractor on the public highway halfway between here and Djelo-Binza. And the only way for us to find enough energy to get rid of them, I imagine, would be to use another black hole to kick them into orbit. They also give off gamma, almost constantly, as they’re constantly absorbing matter. You point one of those UxB defuser tractors at them and throw the safety on the gun, and – ”

  “JESUS.” Grosjean stared at the ground floor entrance where his men had been preparing to throw heavy artillery shells at the problem, jumped up, and began frantically waving his arms for them to stop. “OuI! OuI! arrÊTe! arrÊTe! And we thought getting rid of nuclear waste was difficult.”

  “looks easy to me,” said Mativi, nodding in the direction of the highway. Two trucks with UNSMATDEMRECONG livery, their suspensions hanging low, had stopped just short of the military cordon in the eastbound lane. Their drivers had already erected signs saying light heat here for dollars, and were handing out clear resin bricks that glowed with a soft green light to
housewives who were coming out of the darkened prefabs nearby, turning the bricks over in their hands, feeling the warmth, haggling over prices.

  “Is that what I think it is?” said Grosjean. “I should stop that. It’s dangerous, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t concern yourself with it right now. Those bricks can only kill one family at a time. Besides,” said Mativi gleefully, “the city needs power, and Jean-Baptiste’s men are only supplying a need, right?”

  Ngoyi, still in the passenger seat of the Hyundai, stared sadly as his men handed out radionuclides, and could not meet Mativi’s eyes. He reached in his inside pocket for the gun he had attempted to kill Mativi with, and began, slowly and methodically, to clear the jam that had prevented him from doing so.

  “Once you’ve cordoned the area off,” said Mativi, “we’ll be handling things from that point onwards. I’ve contacted the IAEA myself. There’s a continental response team on its way.”

  In the car, Ngoyi had by now worked the jammed bullet free and replaced it with another. At the Boeing, Grosjean’s jaw dropped. “You have teams set up to deal with this already?”

  “Of course. You don’t think this is the first time this has happened, do you? It’s the same story as with the A-bomb. As soon as physicists know it’s possible, every tinpot dictator in the world wants it, and will do a great deal to get it, and certainly isn’t going to tell us he’s trying. Somewhere in the world at a location I am not aware of and wouldn’t tell you even if I were, there is a stockpile of these beauties that would make your hair curl. I once spoke to a technician who’d just come back from there…I think it’s somewhere warm, he had a sun-tan. He said there were aisles of the damn things, literally thousands of them. The UN are working on methods of deactivating them, but right now our best theoretical methods for shutting down a black hole always lead to catastrophic Hawking evaporation, which would be like a thousand-tonne nuclear warhead going off. And if any one of those things broke out of containment, even one, it would sink through the Earth’s crust like a stone into water. It’d get to the Earth’s centre and beyond before it slowed down to a stop – and then, of course, it’d begin to fall to the centre again. It wouldn’t rise to quite the same height on the other side of the Earth, just like a pendulum, swinging slower and slower and slower. Gathering bits of Earth into itself all the time, of course, until it eventually sank to the centre of the world and set to devouring the entire planet. The whole Earth would get sucked down the hole, over a period which varies from weeks to centuries, depending on which astrophysicist you ask. And you know what?” – and here Mativi smiled evilly. This was always the good part.