The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  “Go through with what? What has he been saying?”

  That was when Jack learned that Mark was determined to prove that Ahlgren Rees was a spy, was determined to pay him back for the humiliating incident in the cemetery chamber. Jack tried to phone him, but Mark was blocking his calls, and wouldn’t answer his door when Jack went to his apartment. But by then Jack suspected what he was planning to do. Every Monday, Ahlgren Rees had a rendezvous with someone. They’d followed him to an airlock last Monday, which meant that it was probably somewhere outside the city . . .

  Jack knew that he couldn’t tell either his parents or Mark’s about this. He was as guilty as Mark, and would get into as much trouble. He’d have to sort this out himself, and because Mark was refusing to talk to him he’d have to catch him in the act, stop him before he did something really dumb.

  When he asked Sky to help him out, Sky refused at first, saying he’d heard what happened—Mark had been ranting to him too, he wanted nothing to do with it, thank you very much—but he quickly changed his mind when Jack told him that if Mark was caught, everything would come out, including the cloned override card. Sky had hacked into the apartment block’s CCTV system long ago, and told Jack he’d download the hack into Jack’s spex, and patch a face recognition program over it, so that Jack could use the CCTV system to follow Mark wherever he went in the public spaces of the big building. After Jack told him about what he thought Mark was going to do, Sky said that he’d add an AI that would alert Jack if Mark got anywhere near any of the apartment building’s airlocks.

  “And that’s all I’m doing. And if anyone asks you where you got this stuff, tell them you made it yourself.”

  “Absolutely,” Jack said. “I know all of this is my fault. If I hadn’t told him about the market, and the funny guy selling herbs—”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Sky said. “Mark would have got into trouble all by himself sooner or later. He’s bored, and he hates living here. It’s quite obvious that this whole thing, it’s a silly rebellion.”

  “So do you,” Jack said. “But you didn’t break into someone’s apartment, and steal a gun.”

  “I don’t care for the place and the people who live here,” Sky said, “but as long as I’m left alone to get on with my own thing it doesn’t matter. Mark though, he’s like a tiger in a cage. Be careful, Jack. Don’t let him get you into any more trouble.”

  The AI woke Jack in the early hours of Monday morning. He’d worn his spex to bed. After he’d managed to shut off the alarm lay there in the dark, staring at a skewed view of Mark sitting in a dressing frame that was assembling a pressure suit around him, until he woke up enough to realize that this was it. That Mark really was going through with it.

  The main airlock complex of the apartment building was an ancillary structure reached by a long slanting tunnel. By the time Jack reached it, Mark was long gone, but he remembered his training and after the dressing frame had fitted him with a pressure suit he carefully checked that its electronic systems and power and air reserves were fully functional before making his way through the three sets of doors.

  The airlock opened onto a flat apron of dusty ice that, trodden everywhere with cleated bootprints, reminded Jack of the snow around the ski lifts at the mountain resort where he and his parents had several times gone on holiday. It was six in the morning by city time, but outside it was the middle of Rhea’s long day. Saturn’s slender crescent was cocked overhead, lassoed by the slender ellipse of his rings. The sun was a cold diamond, a hundred times less bright than it appeared from Earth. Its light gleamed on the swept-back tower of the apartment block and on the other towers of the new city and the great curve of the scarp behind them, shone wanly on the crests of the rumpled ridges of ice that stretched to the close horizon.

  Ordinarily, Jack would have been transfixed by the alien beauty of the panorama, but he had a mission to accomplish. He tried and failed to pick up the radio transponder of Mark’s pressure suit—presumably Mark had switched it off—but that didn’t matter. Jack knew exactly where his friend was going. He crossed to the racks where the cycles were charging, and found every one occupied. Mark wasn’t qualified to use a pressure suit (he must have used the cloned override card to force the dressing frame to give him one) and either he didn’t know about the cycles, or he didn’t know the simple code which unlocked them.

  They were three-wheeled, with fat diamond mesh tyres, a low-slung seat and a simple control yoke. Jack slid into one and set off along the road that headed towards the eastern end of the old city, feeling a blithe optimism. He was on a cycle and Mark was on foot. It was no contest.

  But the road bent wide to the south, skirting the fans of ice-rubble and fallen boulders at the base of the huge cliff of the crater’s rimwall, and Jack quickly realized that someone on foot, taking a straight path instead of the road’s wide detour, would have far less distance to travel. To his left, the rumpled plain of the crater floor stretched away to the cluster of the central peaks; to his right, the lighted circles of the endwalls of the old city’s buried chambers glowed with green light in the face of the cliffs two miles away, like the portholes of a huge ocean liner.

  After ten minutes, Jack spotted a twinkle of movement amongst the boulderfields at the foot of the cliffs. He stopped the cycle, used the magnification feature of his visor, and saw a figure in a white pressure suit bounding in huge strides amongst tumbled blocks of dirty ice as big as houses. He tried to hail his friend, but Mark must have switched off the suit’s phone as well as its transponder, so he drove the cycle off the roadway, intending to cut him off. At first the going was easy, with only a few outlying blocks to steer around, but then the ground began to rise up and down in concentric scarps like frozen waves, and the rubble fallen from the cliffs grew denser. Jack kept losing sight of Mark, spotting him only when he crested the tops of the scarps, and he piled on the speed in the broad depressions between them, anxious that he’d lose sight of his friend completely.

  He was bowling alongside a row of boulders when the inky shadow ahead turned out to be hiding a narrow but deep crevice which trapped the cycle’s front wheel. The cycle slewed, Jack hit the brakes, everything tipped sideways, and then he was hanging by his safety harness, looking up at Saturn’s ringed crescent in the black sky. He managed to undo the harness’s four-way clasp and scramble free, and checked the integrity of the joints of his pressure suit before he heaved the cycle’s front tyre out of the crevice. Its mesh was badly flattened along one side, and the front fork was crumpled beyond repair: there was no way he could ride another yard.

  Well, his suit was fine, he wasn’t injured, he had plenty of air and power, and if he got into trouble he could always phone for help. There was nothing for it. He was going to have to follow Mark on foot.

  It took two hours hour to slog four miles across the rough terrain, clambering over piles of boulders, climbing down into the dips between scarps and climbing back out again, finding a way around jagged crevices. Sometimes he could see Mark’s pressure-suited figure slogging ahead of him, on Earth Jack could have shouted to him, but not even the sound of a nuclear bomb would carry in the vacuum here—but most of the time he had only his suit’s navigation system to guide him. He was drenched with sweat, his ankles and knees were aching, and he had just switched to his reserve air pack, when at last he reached the road that led to the airlock of the city’s cemetery, the place where he had guessed that Mark would lie in wait for Ahlgren Rees. He went slowly, moving between the rubble at the edge of the road, creeping from shadow to shadow, imagining the worst. Mark crouched behind a boulder with a gun he’d stolen from his mother or father, waiting for Ahlgren Rees . . .

  But there was no need for caution. Mark’s white pressure suit was sprawled on the roadway, about two hundred yards from the airlock. Jack knew at once that something was wrong, adrenalin kicked in, and he reached the figure in three bounds. A red light flashed on the suit’s backpack; its oxygen supply was exh
austed. Jack managed to roll it over. Behind the gold-filmed visor, Mark stared past him, eyes half-closed and unseeing, skin tinged blue.

  Jack hit his suit’s distress beacon and began to drag Mark’s pressure-suited body towards the yellow-painted steel door of the airlock. He was halfway there when the door slid open and a figure in a pressure suit stepped out.

  “You kids again,” Ahlgren Rees said over the phone link. “I swear you’ll be the death of me.”

  Three days later, after the scary confusion when Jack and Ahlgren Rees had dragged Mark’s body inside the cemetery chamber and the medivac crew had arrived, after Jack had explained everything to Davis and Marika, after the visit to the hospital where Mark was recovering (when its oxygen supply had run dangerously low, his pressure suit had put him in a coma and cooled him down to keep him alive for as long as possible, but it had been a close run thing), Ahlgren Rees took him to see the place he visited each and every week.

  There was a kind of ski lift that carried them half a mile up a sheer face of rock-hard black ice to the rim of the huge crater’s rimwall, and a path of steel mesh that followed the curve of a frozen ridge to a viewpoint that looked out across a cratered terrain. There was a steel pillar a yard high, with a plaque set into its angled top, and an induction loop that would play a message over the phone system if you pressed its red button, but Ahlgren Rees told Jack that there was no need to look at the plaque or use the loop because he wanted to explain why they had come here.

  It was early in the morning and the brilliant star of the sun low on the horizon, throwing long tangled shadows across the glaring moonscape, but the long scar that Ahlgren Rees had brough Jack to see was clearly visible, still fresh after fifteen years, a gleaming sword cutting through shadows, aimed at the western horizon.

  “Her name was Rosa Lux,” Ahlgren Rees told Jack. “She was flying a small freighter. One of those freelance ships that are not much bigger than tugs, mostly engine, a little cargo space, a cabin not much bigger than a coffin. She was carrying in her hold a special cargo—the mayor of the city of Camelot, on Mimas. He had been one of the architects of the rebellion that started the Quiet War. His city had fallen, and if he had reached Xamba he would have been granted political asylum. My job was to stop him. I was a singleship pilot then, part of the picket which orbited Rhea to prevent ships leaving or arriving during the aftermath of the war. When Rosa Lux’s freighter was detected, I was the only singleship in a position to intercept her, and even then I had to burn almost all my fuel to do it. She was a daring pilot and had came in very fast, skimming the surface of Rhea just a mile up and using its gravity to slow her so that she could enter into a long orbit and come into land when she made her second pass. That was what she was doing when my orbit intercepted hers. I had only one chance to stop her, and I made a mess of it. I fired two missiles. One missed by several miles and hit the surface; the other missed too, but only by a a few hundred yards, and it blew itself up as it zoomed past. It didn’t destroy her ship, but it damaged its main drive and changed her vector—her course. She was no longer heading for Xamba’s spaceport, but for the rimwall, and the city.

  “I saw what she what she did then. I saw her fire her manouvering thrusters. I saw her dump fuel from her main tank. I saw her sacrifice herself so that she would miss the city. Everything happened in less than five seconds, and she barely missed the top of the rimwall, but miss it she did. And crashed there, and died. Rosa Lux had only five seconds to live, and she used that little time to save the lives of a hundred thousand people.

  “The funny thing was, the mayor of Camelot survived. He was riding in the cargo section of the ship in a coffin filled with impact gel, cooled down much the same way your friend was cooled down. The cargo section pinwheeled across the landscape for two kilometres, but it survived more or less intact. After the mayor was revived, he claimed asylum. He still lives in Xamba. He married a local woman, and runs the city’s library.”

  There was a silence. Jack watched the scar shine in the new sunlight, waiting for Ahlgen Rees to finish his story. He was certain that there would be a moral; it was the kind of story that always had a moral. But Ahlgren Rees showed no sign of speaking, and at last Jack asked him why he’d come to Rhea.

  “After the war, I went back to Greater Brazil. I left the navy and trained as a paramedic, and got on with my life. My children grew up, and then my wife died. I decided to make a last visit to the place where the most intense and most important thing in my life had happened, and bought a roundtrip ticket. And when I got here, I fell in love with someone. You have met her, actually.”

  “The woman who owns the café!”

  “We were in love, and then we fell out of love, but by that time I had begun a new life here, and I stayed on. But what brought me here to begin with was a chance encounter with another woman—the bravest person I know about. A single moment, a chance encounter, can change everything. Perhaps you’re too young to know it, but I think it’s happened to you, too.”

  Jack thought about this, thought about all that had happened in the past week, and realized that his new friend was right.

  Crystal Nights

  GREG EGAN

  Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the big new names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Many of his stories have appeared in other best of the year series, and he was on the Hugo final ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella Oceanic. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels, Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, and Schild’s Ladder and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chernobyl. Egan fell silent for a couple of years at the beginning of the oughts but is back again with a vengeance, with news stories in markets such as Asimov’s, Interzone, The New Space Opera, One Million A.D., MIT Technology Review, and Foundation 100. His most recent books are a new novel, Incandescence, and a new collection, Dark Integers and Other Stories. He has a Web site at netspace.netau/^gregegan/.

  In the unsettling story that follows he suggests that the problem with playing God is that you might turn out to be too good at it.

  1

  More caviar?” Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and the cover irised from opaque to transparent. “It’s fresh, I promise you. My chef had it flown in from Iran this morning.”

  “No thank you.” Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked the Golden Gate bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was growing impatient with his small talk.

  Daniel said, “I’d like to show you something.” He led her into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. “Take a seat,” he suggested.

  Julie complied. “If this is some kind of audition, you might have warned me,” she said.

  “Not at all,” Daniel replied. “I’m not going to ask you to jump through any hoops. I’d just like you to tell me what you think of this machine’s performance.”

  She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with one finger. There were a lot more than she’d been expecting, but she wasn’t seeing double.

  “That’s extraordinary,” she said. “Is this whole building packed with networked processors, with only the pent house for humans?”

  Daniel said, “You tell me. Is it a clus
ter?”

  “Hmm.” So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it wasn’t really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried out strictly in sequence.

  The FLOPS rating was unchanged.

  Julie said, “All right, it’s a single processor. Now you’ve got my attention. Where is it?”

  “Turn the keyboard over.”

  There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square and five millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined it, but it bore no manufacturer’s logo or other identifying marks.

  “This connects to the processor?” she asked.

  “No. It is the processor.”

  “You’re joking.” She tugged it free of the dock, and the wall screen went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screwdriver and take the thing apart, probably. He said, “If you break it, you own it, so I hope you’ve got a few hundred spare.”

  “A few hundred grand? Hardly.”

  “A few hundred million.”

  Her face flushed. “Of course. If it was a few hundred grand, everyone would have one.” She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought slid it a little further from the edge. “As I said, you’ve got my attention.”

  Daniel smiled. “I’m sorry about the theatrics.”

  “No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?”

  “A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No electronics to slow it down; every last component is optical. The architecture was nanofabricated with a method that I’d prefer not to describe in detail.”