Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition

by Rich Horton

  "You were the one who said so!” Murphy objected.

  "I was joking,” said Vins.

  "Your joke may be coming true,” said Murphy. He coughed, loud and long. Then he said, “the sun rises in the west and the stars don't move. You know what that is? That's things that the human eye was not supposed to see. That's a realm of magic—faery, that's where we are, and the faery queen is probably gathering her hounds to hunt us down for seeing this forbidden place."

  "Amusing, Murphy,” said Edwards, in a bland voice. “Very fanciful and imaginative. Your fancy and your imagination, I find them amusing."

  "I'm going to sleep,” Murphy sulked, picking himself up and going back inside the ship. “I'll meet my fate tomorrow with a clear head at least."

  The other stayed outside under the splendid, chilly, glittering stars and under that silkily-cold black sky. They talked, and reduced the possibilities to an order of plausibility. They discussed what to do. They discussed the possibility of making the ship whole again; perhaps by dismantling one of the thirty-six thrust engines and reassembling it as a sort of welding torch, so as to make good the breaches in the plasmetal hull. Nobody could think how to launch into space, though: the craft had not been built to achieve escape velocity unaided. They had not been planning on landing on Venus, after all. (The very idea!) Finally the sky started to pale and ease, as if the arc of the western horizon were a heated element thawing the black into rose and pearl and then into blushed tones of white.

  The sun lifted itself into the sky.

  "Well,” said Vins, with a tone of finality, “that settles it. Clearly we are rotating. The lack of movement of the stars and the apparent movement of the sun: these data contradict one another. Seem to. It's hard to advance a coherent explanation that includes both of these pieces of observational data. Are we agreed?"

  "I can't think what else,” said Edwards. “We assume the sky is a simulation of some sort. Do we assume that?"

  "We do,” said Sinclair.

  "One of two explanations, then,” said Vins. “Either the sky is a total simulation, upon which is projected a moving sun by day and motionless stars by night. Or else the sky is a real feature but some peculiarity of optics distorts the actual motion of the stars in some way."

  "It's hard to think what sort of phenomenon...” began Sinclair. But he stopped talking. He wasn't sure what he was going to say; and—anyway—the dawn was so very beautiful. They all sat looking down, all distracted by the loveliness of the view from their highland vantage-point: down across sloping grasslands and marsh and the beaming seas and gleaming channels of water. And, woken by the light, the first birds were up; in nimble flight and giving voice to agile birdsong, bouncing their tenor and soprano trills off the blue ceiling of the sky—or, whatever it was.

  They were all tired. They'd been up all night. Eventually they went inside the spaceship and slept.

  * * * *

  The third day and the third night.

  Vins, Sinclair and Edwards woke sometime in the afternoon, the sun already declining towards the east.

  Murphy had gone.

  They searched for him, in a slightly desultory manner, round and about the ship; but it was clear enough where he had gone: a trail scuffed, slightly kinked but more-or-less straight, through the wet grasses and downwards. Clambering onto the top of the ship Edwards could follow this with his eye, and with binoculars, down and down, a wobbly ladder in the sheen tights-material of the fields all the way to where forest drew a dark line.

  "He's gone into a forest. Down there, kilometres away.” He wanted to say something like: imagine a stretch of gold velvet, all brushed one way to smoothness, and a finger dragged through the velvet against the grain of the brushing—that's what his path looks like. But he couldn't find the words to say that. “Should we go after him?” he called. “Should we go?"

  "He knows where we are,” said Sinclair. “He knows how to get back here. He's probably just exploring."

  "And if he gets into trouble?"

  "It's his look-out. He must take responsibility for himself,” said Vins. “We all must shift for ourselves, after all."

  The three of them breakfasted on ship's-supplies, sitting in the warm air and listening to the meagre, distant chimes of the birds and watching the flow and glitter of wind upon the grass. “I could sit here forever,” said Edwards, in a relaxed voice.

  The other two were silent, but it was a silent agreement.

  "We need to get on,” said Vins, as if dragging the sentence up from great deeps. “We need to explore. To fix the ship. That's what we need to do."

  They did nothing. After breakfast they dozed in the sun. Murphy did not return. Who knew where he had gone?

  * * * *

  The one thing so obvious that none of them bothered to point it out was that this world was paradisical compared to the wrecked and wasted landscapes of home. And that because it was paradisical it was very obviously not a real place. They were dead, and had gone to a material heaven, perhaps on account of some sort of oversight. They had died in the crash. Or they had been transported through a different sort of spatial-discontinuity, one that translated them from real to mythic space. They were to feed forever amongst the mild-eyed melancholy lotos-eaters now.

  The land of the sirens, in which Odysseus's crew had languished so pleasantly and purposelessly. Was that a forbidden world? Was it banned to subsequent explorers? Why else was it never again discovered?

  It may still be there, some island or stretch of coast in the Mediterranean protected by a cloak of invisibility, some magic zone or curtain through which only a few, select and lucky mariners stumble. Who knows?

  All this culture and learning bounced around their heads: Vins, Sinclair and Edwards. They knew all about Homer and Mohammed, and they knew all about Shakespeare and Proust, even though these people about whom they were so knowledgeable were a completely different sort of creature to themselves. These Homers and Van Goghs were all super-beings, elevated, godlike; and the residue of their golden-age achievements in the minds of our scientists has the paradoxical effect of shrinking us by comparison. Don't you think?

  Best not think about it. What and if they are in the land of the Lotos? Maybe they're lucky, that's all. Don't you wish you could go there?

  * * * *

  The sun set in the east. Colour and brightness drained out of the western sky, out of the zenith flowing down to the east with osmotic slowness, and leaving behind a purply black dotted with perfectly motionless stars. The last of the day was a broad stretch of white-yellow sky over the eastern horizon, patched with skinny horizontal clouds of golden brown. For long minutes the last of the sunlight, coming up over the horizon, touched the bottom line of these clouds with fierce and molten light, so that it looked as if several sinuous heating elements, glowing bright and hot with the electricity passing through them, had been fixed to the matter of the sky. Then the light faded away from the clouds, and they browned and blackened against a compressing layer of sunset lights: a sky honey and marmalade, and then a grey-orange, and finally blue, and after that black.

  It was night again.

  Something agitated Vins enough to get him up and huffing around. “The stars have moved a little,” he said. “There—that's the arc of the corona australis. Say what you like but don't tell me I don't know my constellations."

  "So?"

  "It's higher. Yesterday the lowest star was right on the horizon, on that little hill silhouetted there. Today it's a fraction above."

  "So we're rotating real slow,” said Sinclair. “I can't say I care. I can't say I'm bothered. I'm going to sleep."

  * * * *

  The fourth day and the fourth night.

  In the morning Vins left the ship. He set off in the opposite direction to Murphy; not down the slope towards the forest and the long shining stretches of open water; but up, higher into the highlands. He had no idea where Murphy had gone, or what he had been after; but something i
nside him prompted him to go higher. Go up, Moses. He had a vision of himself climbing and climbing until he reached the summit of some snow-clenched mountain top at the very heart of the world from which the whole planet—or at least this whole hemisphere—would be visible. Like Mount Purgatory, he thought, from Dante. As if he had anything to do with Dante! Godlike figures from the golden age.

  Vins didn't creep away as Murphy had done. He prepared a pack, some supplies, some tools, a couple of scientific instruments. Then he woke the other two. He told them what he wanted to do; and they sat, looking stupidly at him from under their overhanging foreheads, and didn't say anything. “You sure you don't want to come with me?” he said. He felt an obscure and disabling fear deep inside him, a terror that if he stayed at the crash site he'd slide into torpor and that would be the end of him. Who was it had said that word? Torpor, torpor. Oh, he had to get out and away. He had to move.

  "Do what you like,” said Sinclair.

  "It makes no sense to me,” said Edwards, “to go marching off without any sort of objective. Shouldn't you have an objective? As a scientist?"

  "My objective is to explore. What's more scientific than exploration?"

  Edwards looked at him, blinked, looked again. “We should stay here,” he said, slowly. He turned to look at the buckled ship. “We should mend the ship."

  "We should,” agreed Vins. “But we don't. You notice that? There's something here that's rendering us idle. Idleness doesn't suit us."

  Sinclair laughed at this. “Let him go,” he said, stretching himself on a broad boulder with a westward-facing facet to warm himself in the new sunlight. “He's the hairiest of us all."

  Vins winced at this insult. “Don't be like that. What is this, school?"

  "It's true,” said Sinclair. “Murphy was the hairiest, but he's gone God-knows-where. You're the hairiest now, and you'll go, and good riddance. Go after Murphy. Go pick fleas from his pelt. I'm the smoothest of the lot of you and I'll stay here and thank you."

  "I'm not going after Murphy, I'm going higher, into the highlands."

  "Go where you like."

  Edwards wouldn't meet Vins’ gaze, so Vins shouldered his pack and marched off, striding westward into the setting sun. He could feel Sinclair's eyes upon his back as he went, almost a heat, like a ray; Sinclair just lounging there like a lazy great ape, watching him go. The hairiest indeed!

  Then Vins had a second thought. He wanted to get up high, didn't he? He could lift himself clean off the ground.

  It surprised him how much courage it took to turn about and stomp back down to the ship again. Sinclair was still there on his rock, watching him with lazy insolence. Edwards had taken off his shoes and climbed to the top of the wreckage, clinging to the dew-wet surface with his toes and the palms of his feet. He was gazing east, down, away.

  Vins didn't say anything to either of them. Instead he went into the ship and retrieved a bundle of gossamer-fabric and plastic cord and tied it to the top of his backpack. Then he pulled out a small cylinder of helium, no longer or thicker than a forearm though densely heavy. He tied a grapple-rope to this and dragged it after him.

  There were no more goodbyes. He stomped away.

  * * * *

  Something was bugging Vins, preying on his mind. It was as if he'd caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye without exactly noticing it, such that it had registered only in his subconscious (that gift of the gods, the unconscious mind). He felt he should have understood by now. Something was wrong, or else something was profoundly and obviously right and he couldn't see it.

  What?

  He marched on, the cylinder dragging through the turf behind him and occasionally clanging on the upcrops of rock that poked through the grass. It was an effort with every step to haul the damn thing, but Vins had found in stubbornness and ill-temper a substitute for willpower. He marched on. He didn't know where he was going. He had, as Edwards might say, no objective. But on he went.

  The grass grew shorter the higher he went, and the wind became fresher. The sun was directly above him, and then it was behind him, and he was chasing his own waggish shadow, marching up and up. His field of view was taken up with the pale-green and yellow grass sloping up directly in front of him. Each strand moved with slightly separate motion in the burly wind, like agitated worms, or the fronds of some impossibly massive underwater polypus.

  He stopped, sat on a stool of bare rock and drank from his water bottle. Looking back the direction he had come he could see the ship now, very distant. Edwards was no longer standing on its back. Nor could he see Sinclair. From this eagle's vantage point, the path the crashing ship had gouged in the soil was very visible, a mottled painterly scar through the grasslands culminating in the broken-backed hourglass of the ship itself. It seemed unlikely, Vins thought, that in crashing they had not simply dashed themselves to atoms.

  Beyond the wreck that the grasslands stretched away. Vins could see a great deal more of the terrain from up here. They had come-down directly above a broad hilly spit of land that lay between what looked like two spreading estuaries, north and south. Each of these estuaries widened and spilled into what Vins took to be separate seas—one reaching as far north as he could see and one as far south. It wasn't possible to see whether these seas were connected; whether, in other words, the two estuaries were inlets into one enormous ocean.

  The sun setting threw a broadcast spread of lights across these two bodies of water, and they glowed ferociously, beautifully. As he sat there looking down on this landscape Vins felt the disabling intensity of it all. As if its loveliness might just drain all his willpower and leave him just sitting here, on this saddle of bare rock, sitting in the afternoon warmth gazing down upon it.

  He shook himself. He couldn't allow this place to suck out his strength of purpose. Maybe he was a homo neanderthalis, but he was a scientist. He flew spacecraft between the planets.

  He picked himself up and marched on, uphill all the way, until the light had thickened and blackened around him. Eventually, exhausted, he stopped and ate some food and rolled himself into his sleeping bag and tried to sleep on the grass. But, tired as he was, he was awake a long time. Something nagging at him. Something about the perspective downhill—those two broad estuaries draining into whatever wide sea, hidden in distance, in haze and clouds and the curve of the world's horizon. What about it? Why did it seem familiar? He couldn't think why.

  * * * *

  The fifth day.

  He was woken by something crawling on his face, a lacy caterpillar or beetle with legs like twitching eyelashes. He sat up, rubbing his cheeks with the back of his hand, he brushed it away.

  It was light.

  The sun was up over the crown of the hill westward and shining straight in his eyes.

  He wiped his face with a dampee, and munched some rations and drank a tab of coffee. The wind stirred around him. The landscape below him was, in material terms, the same one before which he had gone to sleep; but under the different orientation of sunlight, under white morning illumination instead of rosy sunset, it seemed somehow radically different. The two estuaries were still there, kinked and coastlined in that maddeningly familiar way, but now their waters were gunmetal- and broccoli-coloured, a hard and almost tangible mass of colour upon which waves could not be made out. The grassland was dark with dew, hazed over in stretches by a sort of blue blur. The ship was still there, black as a nut, but Vins couldn't make out either of his shipmates.

  "So,” he said to himself. “Let's get a proper look."

  He unrolled the balloon fabric and fitted the helium cylinder into its inflation tube. Then he untangled the harness, and manoeuvred himself into it, knotting the rest of his backpack to a strap so that it would dangle beneath him as ballast. Then, steadily, he inflated the balloon.

  It took only a few minutes, the flop of fabric swelling and then popping up, like a featureless cartoon head of prodigious size, to loll and nod above him. Soon the
material was taut and the breeze was pushing Vins down the hill and across. His feet danced over the turf, keeping up with the movement for a while with a series of balletic leaps, and dragging the pack behind him. Then he was up, the cylinder in his lap and his bag a pendulum below.

  He rose quickly through the dawn air. The breeze was taking him diagonally down the hill, but only slowly. At first he looked behind himself, straining over his shoulder to see what was over the brow of the hill. But the upwards sloping land didn't seem to come to a peak; or at least not one over which Vins could peek.

  He turned his attention to the eastward landscape. To his right he could see, as he rose higher, that there was a vast north-south coastline, a tremendous beach bordering an ocean that reached all the way to the horizon. To his left he could see the more northern of the two estuaries; its north shoreline revealed itself to be in fact a long, skinny neck of land. There was a third estuary, even further to the north. The shape of these arrangements of land and water seemed so familiar to Vins, naggingly so, but he couldn't place it.

  He fixed his gaze on the easternmost horizon, but even though he was getting higher and higher he didn't seem to be seeing over the curve of it. In fact, by some peculiar optical illusion or other it appeared to be rising as he rose. That wasn't right.

  Vins tried looking up, but the balloon obscured his vision. He thought again about the peculiarities of this world. Was the sky really nothing but a huge blue-painted dome? Would he bump into it momentarily? Perhaps not a physical barrier, but some sort of forcefield, or holographic medium, upon which the motionless stars and the hurtling sun could be projected? Were they in some private high-tech parkland?

  The air was thin. It had gotten thin surprisingly rapidly.

  Maybe I am the hairiest, Vins thought to himself; but I'm a scientist for all that.

  Chill. And blue-grey.

  Looking down, looking eastward, Vins knew he had risen high enough. He stared. He gawped. Then, with automatic hand, he began venting gas from his balloon. He commenced his descent. He started coming down. The landscape below him had finally clicked with his memory. It was the map of Europe rendered in some impossible geographical form of photographic-negative: the green land coloured blue for sea, the blue sea coloured green for land.