The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Bridges and roads indeed.

  “Why are you here?” the red-robe barks at Nuhane.

  “I’ve come to enlist,” he replies.

  “Why?”

  “To oppose the Qing and restore the Ming!”

  “Prove it!”

  Following the ritual to the letter, Nuhane recites a poem:

  “Draw broadswords,

  the Manchurians stole our land!

  The hour of loyalty

  and blood vengeance is at hand!”

  With that the red-robe moves on, challenging other initiates. They are as varied as Nuhane’s cadet class at the Bureau. This Heaven and Earth Society has not been Chinese, let alone Han, for a very long time.

  Next comes a black-robe, slapping each initiate in the back with the flat of a broadsword, then demanding: “Do you love gold or your brethren?”

  The initiates each reply, “My brethren!” in their turn. Nuhane struggles not to faint after the blow nearly shatters his tiny frame.

  All this for one unauthorized violation. Nuhane was indignant when the Bureau followed his therapy with undercover duty. Since then he has grown numb, having weathered violation withdrawal. Infiltrating the Heaven and Earth Society has been a kind of sleepwalk.

  Sometimes he can’t help wishing that these gangsters would steal a Bureau cutter. He could claim to know how to hack the interface nest, then violate. Where to? Would it matter? He would continue to honor his promise to Lao Wang, of course. It wouldn’t be about the violation alone. He isn’t like that anymore. He hasn’t violated in three years. Not that he’s had the chance.

  “The first oath!” the red-robe shouts. “Once a member of the society, I shall treat the relatives of my brethren as my own. If I don’t keep this oath, I shall be struck down by five thunderbolts!”

  The initiates repeat this. Nuhane finds that he is tired of oaths. To the Bureau, to mentors and gangsters and spacetime, and most of all to himself. He remembers being free of promises in violation space.

  Patrol Officer Nuhane and Lieutenant Lao Wang have followed a debtor’s spacetime fissure from the Small Magellanic Cloud to this system in the heart of the Pavo-Indus Supercluster. Lao Wang locked the violator down before it could fall into the orbit of a world originally terraformed by other violators. The verdant, uninhabited globe hangs in the void, a jewel that shouldn’t exist. The people that sparked the terraforming drift in an old, barely discernible mist of lockdown pockets at the planet’s L2 point.

  The violator ship, locked down only moments ago, blushes slightly. It’s a large cargo vessel, no doubt a second wave of colonists. Their debt stands at three hundred million light-years. They will pay off four hundred and twenty thousand relativistic tons. Young Nuhane still marvels at the weight of these crimes, and the price of getting caught.

  He and Lao Wang, though interfaced in separate nests, share an environ that renders their facial expressions. Lao Wang wears an odd grin. He pings the cargo vessel and says, “Excuse me. Do you know how fast you were going?”

  When there is no response, he shrugs and says to Nuhane: “A joke. Old reference.” He avoids Nuhane’s bewildered gaze. “They shouldn’t have come back,” he says.

  “What?” Nuhane says.

  “I mean, maybe we’re not meant to return from violation space. Maybe we’re supposed to break light speed and stay beyond it, forever.” He meets Nuhane’s eyes again, summons an unconvincing chuckle. “Never mind. Guess I need some R and R. You won’t report what I just said, right?”

  “No sir.”

  They watch the violator fade. Nuhane contemplates the mystery of violation and lockdown. Already the cargo vessel’s spacetime fissure is beginning to heal, even back in the Small Magellanic. True action at a distance, a violation of c in its own right.

  Nuhane can’t believe what he sees in the soul of the man his fellow thugs just killed. The ice ceiling scrolls by the window, and the dead man, formerly a violation savant for the Heaven and Earth Society, slides back and forth across the floor with the motion of the hab, his head encased in a smoking transmigration helmet.

  Nuhane hides his excitement. He has found his ticket off this nightmarish detail. He will be violating again soon—but it’s more than that.

  The helmet sends pertinent memories to Nuhane’s mirror net. His rhythms sift through the complexity of violation math, seeking names and itineraries. He needed something underway, something he could lock down, but he didn’t expect to find it. It was clear right away that the man hadn’t spoken with the Bureau. Perhaps he never intended to. The Heaven and Earth kingpin of this Europa-analog has grown paranoid in his dotage, violation syndrome having burned wormholes through his reason.

  “You said he didn’t rat,” says Plutarch, a hulking gangster eight times the size of Nuhane. “So why are we still here? If he’s so interesting, grab the helmet. But let’s go.”

  Nuhane does not want to decapitate the savant. The crystalline mass that was once his head is permanently merged with the helmet. Nuhane has done many things for Heaven and Earth, things far worse than decapitating a corpse, but he feels he has reached a critical mass.

  He just needs another minute to confirm what he saw: a very improbable name.

  Outside, the hab lights flash on particles suspended in the inky water. The media wall maps the local ice ceiling and the other habs as they converge on a stable rendezvous point to form yet another temporary city. That’s how society works here in Baroque Pearl. Nuhane tried to convince himself he liked it, at first. It was a sub-surface existence. His sordid duties for Heaven and Earth were part of the mission, just as important as locking down violators. He didn’t miss violating. So went the flimsy monologue.

  He confirms the name attached to the violation-in-progress: William Valentin Willard, aka Phlogiston. He smiles.

  Nuhane is eleven years old, and feels much older, when the harriers drop from the sky to liberate his camp. He clutches the chain-link fence and watches the Iomangan guards flee across the heath under a leaden sky. One by one the giants vanish as plasma rains down. Nuhane tries to feel glad, to feel anything in fact, and fails. He has learned many things in this camp. He has learned to tolerate the open sky, beneath which he has learned what humans really are. He knows that the Iomangans are descendants of violators, and that his liberators are also violators. He does not know what that means.

  What he finally feels is dread. He’s going to have to leave the camp, and enter a wider world.

  Three hundred and fifty billion light-years.

  He often wondered how far he would go before succumbing to violation syndrome—and now he knows. Three fifty is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not the stuff of legend, but it’s respectable. At least he knows he has the syndrome. He tells himself that’s something. Perhaps it means he’s not so far gone.

  It was these last two violations that did it. He knows that on a level below the cellular.

  “Shall I lock him down?” Wen Ting asks. She floats with him in the new cutter’s sensorium, wide-eyed with the thrill of the hunt. Nuhane envies her youth, her cold pure hunter’s psychopathy, though he doesn’t fully understand it. The Church of the Indemnity has wired her up good. When she locked down that last rig, she curled into a fetal position, moaning with something beyond divine communion. “Commander?” she says.

  He’s forgotten why they’re here, and it terrifies him. He blinks up the dossier of their current mark: William Valentin Willard, aka Phlogiston, quantum information physicist and outspoken Bureau sympathizer. Trillions of humans call him a Bureau lapdog and want him dead. He understands that the Bureau holds the universe together, understands it in a way that Wen Ting and her brethren never will. He doesn’t need their leap of faith. He invented the machine that images the universe’s scars.

  “Violating c,” he said famously, “is worse than murder.”

  And yet here he is, after a serious galaxy hop. What possessed him?

  His shuttle falls toward Nuhan
e’s cutter. Beneath them hangs the mysterious machine, alive with its puzzling gravitational waves. None of Nuhane’s scans or Wen Ting’s mystic sensing find weapons in the fine-woven ring of exotic matter. Far below it, dark storms roil over the surface of the dim red L-T dwarf. Nuhane wonders what role, if any, Willard means this substar to play in whatever he’s up to.

  “Congratulations,” Willard transmits. “You’ve got me.”

  With his voice comes the visual of a surprisingly youthful man: middle aged, gray-bearded but healthy and vital. For a moment Nuhane can’t reconcile this with what he knows. Willard ought to be decrepit by now, even if he’s had longevity treatments. Then Nuhane remembers that Willard has traveled relativistically. The man has lived a decade or so of the last five hundred years.

  Wen Ting shows him a scan of the orbiting machine. “What is it?”

  His brief grin is barely perceptible. “Ah, one of the Bureau’s pet zealots.” He understands—or understood—that the Bureau needs all the support it can get, even if that means employing delusional jihadists.

  What has become of the far-seeing creature Willard used to be?

  “What are you waiting for?” he says.

  Wen Ting scans the orbital machine again, hoping this time the Angels of Indemnity will grant revelation. It appears conclusive that the thing is not a weapon. There are signs of a spin foam hack about it, but the configuration is wrong for violation or lockdown tech.

  “Do you need me to confess?” Willard says impatiently.

  Nuhane wonders if the man craves the portal to the future that lockdown represents. Perhaps he has grown weary of his small-minded contemporaries. Then why not take off at relativistic speed, like he has before?

  Nuhane hesitates to impose lockdown. He may be slipping into dotage, but he senses he’s being manipulated.

  Wen Ting, however, does not hesitate. She and the cutter have developed an understanding in the face of Nuhane’s decline. She doesn’t need his authorization. She imposes with relish.

  “Thank you,” Willard says, as yet barely redshifted.

  Nuhane feels Wen Ting’s confusion through her bio feed. Violators aren’t supposed to be thankful. They’re supposed to beg for mercy. But Willard is no masochist. Nuhane also feels the grav waves from the orbiter changing tune, and knows something fundamental is happening to local spacetime. He perceives a disturbance, much like the fractures caused by violation, blossoming between Willard’s shuttle, the orbiter, and the dwarf below. A lockdown pocket encloses the orbiter, seeming to mirror Willard’s.

  Wen Ting panics. “What’s this?”

  “I’m sorry to have led you so far,” Willard replies, “but I needed at least a seventy million light-year debt for this trial run.”

  “Of what?”

  “My machine is crude. The first of its kind. It won’t respond to anything less than a seventy mil debt.”

  This transmission arrives at an unchanging radio wavelength. Willard’s redshifting has ceased. This is stunning, unprecedented, but Nuhane’s attention is drawn to the machine, now shivering and glowing under some unfathomable workload. Nuhane senses that it is channeling something—Hilbert distortion? inertia?—from Willard’s shuttle down into the murky furnace of the dwarf.

  “I approached the Bureau first,” he says, “but they didn’t believe me. Or didn’t want to. They tried to kill me, you know. Maybe you won’t believe that, but it’s true. So I had to go to Heaven and Earth. It is regrettable that the savant in Baroque Pearl had to die, but I needed you to believe that lead and come after me. I should also apologize for having Lao Wang wiped. Canny, that one. He was on to me before I was ready. And it was my man in the Bureau who got you assigned to that duty in Baroque Pearl. I don’t imagine it was pleasant. All for a greater good, as you’ll see.”

  Far below, a darkness blossoms between two ribbons of turbulent black cloud. One might almost take it for another storm of raining iron, but for the speed of its formation. It expands like an ink stain through the hydrogen blood-glow, devouring thousands of cubic kilometers per second. Nuhane remembers that the dwarf was already radiating in the long visible wavelengths, that lockdown of such matter would mean swift blackness. He tunes his vision and watches the still-growing lockdown pocket—the largest one ever, as far as he knows—dimming down its trapped matter through infrared and radio. The pocket soon encloses a fifth of the substar, and keeps expanding. Great storms flash and gleam along the moving perimeter, and the Jupiter-like band-flow is thrown into chaos.

  “Debt transfer,” Nuhane says. The words are packed with mythic weight.

  “Impossible,” Wen Ting declares.

  “It’s working,” Willard says, “but something’s wrong.”

  Over one third of the dwarf is now enclosed, the remainder stirred to frenzy by the process and made to radiate like the accretion disk of a black hole. The lockdown pocket behaves like a collapsed star in many ways, though it has no real event horizon. As the brighter material is swallowed, Nuhane can judge how far along the lockdown is, what fraction of c it is equivalent to. The hottest free matter radiates in the extreme ultraviolet to soft X-ray range, but attenuates after falling in. And still the pocket grows.

  “My shuttle and I weigh about seven tons,” Willard says. His self-satisfaction is gone, replaced by mounting horror. “It seems we’ve discovered a new law of physics. The Law of the Transfer Fee.”

  Nuhane gets there just after him, he is sure they’re wondering the same thing now: how much of a fee?

  Unlike a black hole, a lockdown pocket doesn’t exert gravity, so the remaining dwarf material—plasmas of hydrogen and helium, trace metals and silicates—overcomes its own gravitation and shreds away wildly into space.

  It doesn’t occur to Nuhane to get out of the way, not until he sees Willard and his machine doing so. Wen Ting reacts first, matching Willard’s escape vector, worlds of fire blooming under them. The pocket swells and consumes, but slower than before.

  Wen Ting is chanting again. Occasionally she forgets a phrase or a line and has to start over. Nuhane scans her mind and sees that her Church mod is short-circuiting, overloaded with a cumbersome truth.

  “You’ve got to help me,” Willard says.

  The pocket finally stops expanding, content with the mass of forty-five Jupiters. The remaining one-fourth of the dwarf continues to burn and diffuse into space. The holy grail of debt transfer is possible, but hideously expensive. The transfer fee in this case was 1.2 octillion percent of the debt.

  Nuhane scans Willard and confirms he is debt free. The machine seems to be powering down. Wen Ting is curled in a fetal position again, this time with excruciating pain. She shivers, sweating and whimpering with Church withdrawal.

  “I’ve violated but can’t be locked down,” Willard says. “So arrest me. Take me to a hub.”

  Nuhane understands. Willard’s shuttle can’t achieve relativistic speeds, let alone violate. There is no concentrated source of matter for light-years around, so he can’t get his long-range rig out of lockdown. He’s at Nuhane’s mercy.

  “It wasn’t just you and your partner and that savant,” he admits. “You don’t know the half of it. Maybe I deserve to die out here, but it can’t all be for nothing.” With that, his shuttle lights up with high-power transmissions aimed at a few hundred of the nearest inhabited systems and galaxies. Nuhane takes a sample: the machine specs and documentation of what happened to the dwarf.

  “What have you done?” Nuhane says.

  “Freed humanity.”

  “And that’s a good thing, is it? Perhaps we need a cage.” Before it’s out of his mouth, he wonders if his heritage, or the Bureau, speaks through him. Maybe it’s neither. Maybe it’s the boy who got used to a concentration camp, and hated himself for it.

  He turns his attention to Wen Ting, tweaking her neurochemistry to ease the trauma of her disillusionment. He marvels at the delicacy of her Church tweak, but something so absurd could be no other way—no
t without undermining her basic functionality.

  “Debtor,” she whispers, “make satisfaction for thy sin.”

  Nuhane tries to imagine what will become of the debt transfer universe. Matter will soon be at a premium, if he knows anything about mankind. Then what? Cycles of lockdown and emergence? Relativistic dark ages followed by renaissances of violation? Perhaps the stars must wink out, one by one, to become readily accessible. What about expansion, deprived of all that gravitating matter? What about dark matter and energy? Are lockdowns that vast even possible?

  The Bureau as Nuhane knows it will be obsolete, regardless. Perhaps it will be relegated to catalyzing debt transfer, facilitating the violations it once policed. That would still be holding the universe together. That would still be his mission, wouldn’t it?

  Nuhane is four years old when his parents take him to the Hall of Star Ancestors for the first time. The cavern is the biggest space he’s ever seen.

  But not the biggest you’ll ever see, says the man in his skull.

  Nuhane gapes at the distant ceiling. It is a field of lights that his people call stars. “They’re actually colonies of bioluminescent fungus,” Father says.

  “Don’t teach him blasphemies,” Mother whispers. The vast space is relatively quiet as hundreds of people walk the Great Circle and show proper awe.

  His people are the Fey. Mother says they came from the stars.

  Someday you’ll travel to the real stars, the man in his skull says, but Nuhane doesn’t believe him. You’ll forget about me for a long time, then remember me again. But we won’t be able to talk like this anymore.

  “Why not?” Nuhane asks aloud, and Mother shushes him.

  “Leave him be,” Father says.

  “And let him anger the priests?” Mother hisses. “And get us sent to the sulfur farms?” She looks up at the fake stars. “Ancestors, why did you curse me with such a husband?”

  Nuhane’s parents always quarrel when he talks to the man in his skull. Father says it’s a gift, a sign he’s destined for great things. It was Father who named him Nuhane, which in some ancient language means speaker with the ghosts of ancestors.