Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Mom bowed to her husband, telling him, “It's your decision, dear."

  "Then that's what we'll do,” he said, borrowing a map from the counter. “I'll find a good place to pitch the tent. All right?"

  Full of resolve, the men once again left. But Mom remained nervous, sitting forward in her chair—a heavy woman in matronly robes, her hair grayer than ever, thick fingers moving while her expression was stiff and unchanging.

  Kala wanted to ask about her thoughts. Was she disappointed not to see her sisters? Or was she feeling guilty? Unless of course Mom was asking herself what else could be wrong with a car they had bought for almost nothing and done nothing to maintain.

  The sudden deep hissing of brakes interrupted the silence. A traveler had pulled off the highway, parking beside the most distant gas pump. Kala saw the long sky-blue body and thought of a school bus. But the school's old name had been sanded off, the windows in the front covered with iron bars, while the back windows were sealed with plywood. She knew exactly what the bus was. Supplies were stuffed in the back, she reasoned. And a lot more gear was tied up on the roof—bulky sacks running its full length, secured with ropes and rubber straps and protected from any rain with yellowing pieces of thick plastic.

  A man stepped out into the midday glare. He wasn't young, or old. The emerald green shirt and black collar marked him as a member of the Church of Eden. Two pistols rode high on his belt. He looked handsome and strong, and in ways Kala couldn't quite define, he acted competent in all matters important. After glancing up and down the highway, he stared into the open garage. Then he pulled out a key chain and locked the bus door, and he fed the gas nozzle into the big fuel tank, jamming in every possible drop.

  Once again, the fix-it man had stopped working on their car. But unlike the other interruptions, he started to walk out toward the pump, a long wrench in one hand. The always-friendly face was gone. What replaced it wasn't unfriendly, but there was a sense of caution, and perhaps a touch of disapproval.

  "No, sir,” the younger gentleman called out. “I'll come in and pay."

  "You don't have to—"

  "Yeah, I do. Keep your distance now."

  The fix-it man stopped walking, and after a moment, he turned and retreated.

  The younger man hit the bus door once with the flat of his hand, shouting, “Two minutes."

  By then, everybody had moved to the public room. Father glanced at the Lady's Room but then decided it wasn't necessary. He took his position behind Mom's chair, his sore red hands wrapped in gauze. Sandor hovered beside Kala. The fix-it man stood behind the counter, telling the women, “Don't worry,” while opening a cupboard and pulling something heavy into position.

  "It was a gun,” Sandor later told his sister. “I caught a glimpse. A little splattergun. Loaded and ready, I would bet."

  "But why?” Kala would wonder aloud.

  "Because that green-shirt was leaving us,” her brother reminded her. “Where he was going, there's no fix-it shops. No tools, no law. So what if he tried to steal a box of wrenches, you know?"

  Maybe. But the man had acted more worried about them, as if he was afraid somebody would try to steal his prized possessions. Entering the room carefully, he announced, “My brother's still onboard."

  "Good for him,” said the fix-it man.

  "How much do I owe?"

  "Twenty and a third."

  "Keep the change,” he said, handing over two bills. The green-shirted man tried to smile, only it was a pained, forced grin. “Tell me, old man: Anybody ask about me today?"

  "Like who?"

  "Or anybody mention a bus looking like mine? Any gentlemen come by and inquire if you've seen us...?"

  The fix-it man shook his head, nothing like a smile on his worn face. “No, sir. Nobody's asked about you or your bus."

  "Good.” The green-shirted man yanked more money from the roll, setting it on the plastic countertop. “There's a blonde kid. If he stops by and asks ... do me a favor? Don't tell him anything, but make him think you know shit."

  The fix-it man nodded.

  "He'll give you money for your answers. Take all you can. And then tell him I went north from here. Up the Red Highway to Paradise. You heard me say that. ‘North to Paradise.’”

  "But you're going somewhere else, I believe."

  "Oh, a little ways.” Laughing, the would-be Father turned and started back to his bus.

  That's when Sandor asked, “Do you really have one?"

  "Quiet,” Father cautioned.

  But the green-shirted man felt like smiling. He turned and looked at the thirteen year-old-boy, asking, “Why? You interested in these things?"

  "Sure I am."

  Laughing, the man said, “I bet you are."

  Sandor was small for his age, but he was bold and very smart about many subjects, and in circumstances where most people would feel afraid, he was at his bravest best. “A little Class D, is it?"

  That got the man to look hard at him. “You think so?"

  "Charged and ready,” Sandor guessed. He named three possible manufacturers, and then said, “You've set it up in the aisle, I bet. Right in the middle of the bus."

  "Is that how I should do it?"

  "The rip-zone reaches out what? Thirty, thirty-five feet? Which isn't all that big."

  "Big enough,” said the man.

  Just then, someone else began pulling on the bus horn. Maybe it was the unseen brother. Whoever it was, the horn was loud and insistent.

  "You're not taking livestock,” Kala's brother observed.

  This time, Mom told Sandor to be quiet, and she even lifted a hand, as if to give him a pop on the head.

  "Hedge-rabbits,” the man said. “And purple-hens."

  Both parents now said, “Quiet."

  The horn honked again.

  But the green-shirted man had to ask, “How would you do it, little man? If you were in my boots?"

  "A Class-B ripper, at least,” Sandor declared. “And I'd take better animals, too. Milking animals. And wouldn't bother with my brother, if I had my choice."

  "By the looks of it, you don't have a brother."

  "So how many of them do you have?” Sandor asked. Just the tone of his voice told what he was asking. “Six?” he guessed. “Eight? Or is it ten?"

  "Shush,” Mom begged.

  The green-shirted man said nothing.

  "I'm just curious,” the boy continued, relentlessly focused on the subject at hand. “Keep your gene pool as big as possible. That's what everybody says. In the books, they claim that's a good guarantee for success."

  The man shook his longest finger at Sandor. “Why, little man? You think I should take along another? Just to be safe?"

  In an instant, the room grew hot and tense.

  The green-shirted man looked at both women. Then with a quiet, furious voice, he snarled, “Lucky for you ladies, I don't have any more seats.” Then he turned and strode out to the bus and unlocked the door, vanishing inside as somebody else hurriedly drove the long vehicle away from the pump.

  For several moments, everybody was enjoying hard, deep breaths.

  Then the fix-it man said, “I see a pretty miserable future for that idiot."

  "That's not any way to leave,” Father agreed. “Can you imagine making a life for yourself with just that little pile of supplies?"

  "Forget about him,” Mom demanded. “Talk about anything else."

  Alone, Kala returned to the poster displaying photographs of all the lost women. It occurred to her that one or two of those faces could have been onboard the bus, and perhaps not by their own choice. But she also understood that no one here was going to call the proper authorities. The men would throw their insults at the would-be Father, and Mom would beg for a change in topics. But no one mentioned the idiot's poor wives. Even when Kala touched the prettiest faces and read their tiny biographies, it didn't occur to her that some strong brave voice should somehow find the words to complain.

&nbs
p; 2

  No figure in history was half as important as the First Father. He was the reason why humans had come to this fine world, and every church owed its existence to him. Yet the man remained mysterious and elusive—an unknowable presence rooted deep in time and in the imagination. No two faiths ever drew identical portraits of their founder. A traditional biography was common to all schoolbooks, but what teachers offered was rather different from what a bright girl might find on the shelves of any large library. The truth was that the man was an enigma, and when it came to his story, almost everything was possible. The only common features common were that he was born on the Old Earth in the last days of the 20th century, and on a Friday morning in spring, when he was a little more twenty-nine years of age, the First Father claimed his destiny.

  Humans had only recently built the first rippers. The machines were brutal, ill-tempered research tools, and physicists were using them to punch temporary holes in the local reality. Most of those holes led to hard vacuums and a fabulous cold; empty space is the standard state throughout most of the multiverse. But quantum effects and topological harmonics showed the way: If the ripper cut its hole along one of the invisible dimensions, an island of stability was waiting. The island had separated from the Now two billion years ago, and one the other side of that hole were an infinite number of sister-earths, each endowed with the same motions and mass of the human earth.

  Suddenly every science had a fierce interest in the work. Large schools and small nations had to own rippers. Biologists retrieved microscopic samples of air and soil, each sample contaminated with bacteria and odd spores. Every species was new, but all shared the ingredients of earth-life: DNA coded for the same few amino acids that built families of proteins that were not too unlike those found inside people and crabgrass.

  The Creation was a tireless, boundless business. That's what human beings were learning. And given the proper tool and brief jolts of titanic energy, it was possible to reach into those infinite realms, examining a miniscule portion of the endlessness.

  But rippers had a second, more speculative potential. If the same terrific energies were focused in a slightly different fashion, the hole would shift its shape and nature. That temporary disruption of space would spread along the three easiest dimensions, engulfing the machine and local landscape in a plasmatic bubble, and that bubble would act like a ship, carrying its cargo across a gap that was nearly too tiny measure and too stubborn to let any normal matter pass.

  Whoever he was, the First Father understood what rippers could do. Most churches saw him as a visionary scientist, while the typical historian thought he was too young for that role, describing him instead as a promising graduate student. And there were always a few dissenting voices claiming that he was just a laboratory technician or something of that ilk—a little person armed with just enough knowledge to be useful, as well as access to one working ripper.

  Unnoticed, the First Father had absconded with a set of superconductive batteries, and over the course of weeks and months, he secretly filled them with enough energy to illuminate a city. He also purchased or stole large quantities of supplies, including seeds and medicines, assorted tools and enough canned goods to feed a hundred souls for months. Working alone, he crammed the supplies into a pair of old freight trucks, and on the perfect night in April, he drove the trucks to a critical location, parking beside No Parking signs and setting their brakes and then flattening their tires. A third truck had to be maneuvered down the loading dock beside the physics laboratory, and using keys or passwords, the young man gained access to one of the most powerful rippers on the planet—a bundle of electronics and bottled null-spaces slightly larger than a coffin.

  The young man rolled or carried his prize into the vehicle, and with quick, well-rehearsed motions, he patched it into the fully charged batteries and spliced in fresh software. Then before anyone noticed, he gunned the truck's motor, driving off into the darkness.

  Great men are defined by their great, brave deeds; every worthy faith recognizes this unimpeachable truth.

  According to most accounts, the evening was exceptionally warm, wet with dew and promising a beautiful day. At four in the morning, the First Father scaled a high curb and inched his way across a grassy front yard, slipping between an oak tree and a ragged spruce before parking tight against his target—a long white building decorated with handsome columns and black letters pulled from a dead language. Then he turned off the engine, and perhaps for a moment or two, he sat motionless. But no important doubts crept into his brave skull. Alone, he climbed down and opened the back door and turned on the stolen ripper, and with a few buttons pushed, he let the capacitors eat the power needed to fuel a string of nanosecond bursts.

  Many accounts of that night have survived; no one knows which, if any, are genuine. When Kala was eleven, her favorite story was about a young student who was still awake at that early hour, studying hard for a forgotten examination. The girl thought it was odd to hear the rumbling of a diesel motor and then the rattling of a metal door. But her room was at the back of the sorority house; she couldn't see anything but the parking lot and a tree-lined alley. What finally caught her attention was the ripper's distinctive whine—a shriek almost too high for the human ear—punctuated with a series of hard little explosions. Fresh holes were being carved in the multiverse, exposing the adjacent worlds. Tiny breaths of air were retrieved, each measured against a set of established parameters. Hearing the blasts, the girl stood and stepped to her window. And that's when the ripper paused for a moment, a hundred trillion calculations made before it fired again. The next pop sounded like thunder. Every light went out, and the campus vanished, and a sphere of ground and grass, air and wood was wrenched free of one world. The full length of the house was taken, and its entire yard, as well as both supply trucks and the street in front of the house and the parking lot and a piece of the alley behind it. And emerging out of nothingness was a new world—a second glorious offering from God, Our Ultimate Father.

  The girl was the only witness to a historic event, which was why the young Kala found her tale so appealing.

  The First Father saw nothing. At the pivotal moment of his life, he was hunkered over the stolen ripper, reading data and receiving prompts from the AI taskmaster.

  The girl started to run. By most accounts she was a stocky little creature, not pretty but fearless and immodest. Half-dressed, she dashed through the darkened house, screaming for the other girls to wake up, then diving down the stairs and out the front door. Kala loved the fact that here was the first human being to take a deep breath on another earth. The air was thick and unsatisfying. Out from the surrounding darkness came living sounds. Strange creatures squawked and hollered, and flowing branches waved in a thin moonlight. The girl thought to look at the sky, and she was rewarded with more stars than she had ever seen in her life. (Every sister world is a near-twin, as are the yellow sun and battered moon. But the movement of the solar system is a highly chaotic business, and you never know where inside the Milky Way you might end up.) Standing on the sidewalk, the girl slowly absorbed the astonishing scene. Then she heard pounding, and when she turned, she saw the long truck parked against a tangle of juniper shrubs. On bare feet, she climbed into the back end and over a stack of cold black batteries. The First Father was too busy to notice her. One job was finished, but another essential task needed his undivided attention. Having brought a hundred young women to an empty, barely livable world, the man had no intention of letting anyone escape now. Which was why he wrenched open the hot ripper, exposing its intricate guts, and why he was using a crowbar to batter its weakest systems—too consumed by his work to notice one of his future wives standing near him, wearing nothing but pants and a bra and a slightly mesmerized expression.

  3

  For more than a week, Kala's family lived inside a borrowed tent, and without doubt, they never enjoyed a better vacation than this. The campground was a rough patch of public land set h
igh on a mountainside. Scattered junipers stood on the sunny ground and dense spruce woods choked an adjacent canyon. A stream was tucked inside the canyon, perfect for swimming and baths. A herd of semi-tame roodeer grazed where they wanted. Rilly birds and starlings greeted each morning with songs and hard squawks. Their tent was in poor condition, ropes missing and its roof ripped and then patched by clumsy hands. But a heat wave erased any danger of rain, and even after the hottest days, nights turned pleasantly chilly, illuminated by a moon that was passing through full.

  Kala was the perfect age for adventures like these: Young enough to remember everything, yet old enough to explore by herself. Because this wasn't a popular destination, the woods felt as if they belonged to her. And best of all, higher in the mountains was a sprawling natural reserve.

  Where her brother loved machinery, Kala adored living creatures.

  By law, the reserve was supposed to be a pristine wilderness. No species brought into this world could live behind its high fences. But of course starlings flew where they wanted, and gold-weed spores wandered on the softest wind, and even the best intentions of visitors didn't prevent people from bringing seeds stuck to their clothing or weaknesses tucked into their hearts.

  One morning they drove into the high alpine country—a risky adventure, since their car still ran hot and leaked antifreeze. The highway was narrow and forever twisting. A shaggy black forest of native trees gave way to clouds, damp and cold. Father slowed until the following drivers began to pull on their horns, and then he sped up again, emerging into a tilted, rock-strewn landscape where black fur grew beside last winter's snow. Scenic pullouts let them stop and marvel at an utterly alien world. Kala and her brother made snowballs and gamely posed for pictures on the continental divide. Then Father turned them around and drove even slower through the clouds and black forest. In the same instant, everyone announced: “I'm hungry!” And because this was a magical trip, a clearing instantly appeared, complete with a wide glacial stream and a red granite table built specifically for them.