The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Hush." She kissed me, and for a moment the world went away: "My brave, butch, bullish, Ralphie!" She sighed again. "I was going to hold out until after the race! But I had just checked into the Hilton when I received a telephone call saying there was a gentleman waiting to see me in the lobby."

  Jealousy stabbed at me. "Who was it?" I asked, cringing and glancing away as Edgestar rolled past, having transformed himself into a tentacularly enhanced chaise lounge for the amusement of the blonde bimbettebot, who appeared to be riding him around the room using his unmentionables as a joystick.

  "I don't remember," she said dreamily. "I woke up here, waiting for my prince—you! I do declare—but Toshiro said he was arranging a surprise for you, and there'd be a party, and then it all went a little vague—"

  I can tell you, I was freezing inside as I began to realize just how disoriented she was. "Laura, what's gotten into you?"

  "Not you, not lately!" she said sharply, then lapsed back into dreamy incoherence: "But you came to rescue me, Ralphie, oh! He said you would. I swoon for you! Be my love rocket again!"

  I saw a small, silver receptacle on a nearby table, and my heart sank: she'd clearly been at the happy juice. Then I sneaked a peek at the sockets on the back of her neck, under her hairline, and gasped. Someone had planted a hedonism chip and a mandatory override on her! No wonder she was acting out of sorts.

  I plucked the ghastly thing out and dropped it on the floor. "Laura, stand up!" I cajoled. "We've got to be leaving. There's a party to be going to, don't you know? Let's go."

  "But my—" She wobbled, then toppled against me: "Whoops!" She giggled. "Hic." I might have pulled the chips out of the fryer but my fish was still thoroughly pickled.

  I hadn't expected this, but Miss Feng had insisted I take a reset pill, just in case. I hated to use the thing on her—or rather, Laura hated it, and this invariably led to a fight afterward—but sobriety is a lesser evil than being trapped in a castle by a mad vizier while subjected to mood-altering implants, what? So I pressed the silver cap against the side of her neck and pushed the button.

  Laura's jaws closed with an audible click, and she tensed in my arms for a second. "Ouch," she said, very quietly. "You bastard, you know I hate that. What's going on?"

  "You're on Mars and we're in a bally fix, that's what's going on. This Ibn Cut-Throat fellow's a thoroughly bad egg. He's sneaked a spinal crab onto old Abdul, I think he picked you up because he wants a handle on me, and doubtless that's why the rest of the Club's all here—we'd be first to notice a change in our boy Abdul's behavior, wouldn't we? The cad's obviously set up the sticky wicket so he can bowl us all out in one inning."

  "Dear me." Laura stood up straight and took a step away from me. "Well, then we'd better be going, darling." She straightened her attire and looked around, raising one sculpted eyebrow at my dishevelment. "Do you know how to get out of here?"

  "Certainly." I took her hand in mine, and led her toward the central lounge. "I'm sure there must be a way out around here somewhere . . .."

  "Over there," offered bin-Sawbones, pointing: "You can't miss it, head for the two hulking eunuchs and the evil vizier." She pushed me hard in the small of my back. "Sorry, but business is business and when you're trying to marry the second richest man on Mars you can't be too picky, eh?"

  13. Jeremy pulls it off

  The exit was unfortunately obstructed by Ibn Cut-Throat and his merry headsmen—with Abdul in tow, glassy-eyed and arms outstretched, muttering about brains. And Ibn Cut-Throat had spotted us!

  One thing I will credit the blighter with: his sense of spectacle was absolutely classical. "Ah, Mister MacDonald!" he cried, menacingly twirling the anti-chemwar vibrissae glued to his upper lip. "How disappointing to see you here! I must confess I hoped you'd have sense enough to stay in your room and keep out of trouble. I suppose now you hope I'm going to tell you all my plans, then lock you in an inadequately secured cell so you can escape? I'm afraid not: I shall simply have you cut off shortly, chop-chop. My game's afoot, and none will stop it now, for the ineluctable dialectic of history is on my side!"

  "I don't care what your dastardly scheme is, I have a bone to pick with you, my man!" I cried. The two headsmen took a step forward, and Laura clung to me in fear—whether feigned or otherwise I could not tell. "How dare you kidnap my concubine on the eve of a drop! That's not cricket, or even baseball, and it'll be a cold day in hell before I see you in any of my clubs, even by the tradesmen's entrance!" Meanwhile, Laura thrust a shapely arm inside my abaya and was fumbling with something in my dinner jacket pocket; but my attention was fixed on the villain before me.

  "Clubs." The word dropped from his lips with stony disinterest. "As if the degenerate recreations of the class enemy would be of any interest to me!" I shuddered: it's always a bad sign when the hired help starts talking in polysyllables. One of his nostrils flared angrily. "Clubs and sports and jolly capers, that's all you parasites think of as you gobble down our surplus wealth like the monstrous leeches you are!" I'd struck a nerve, as I could see from the throbbing vein in his temple to the set of his jaw. "Bloated ticks languishing in the lap of luxury and complaining about your parties and fashions while millions slave for your banquets! Bah." Laura unwrapped her arm from my robe and covered her face, evidently to shield herself from the scoundrel's accusations. "When we strive to better ourselves you turn your faces away and sneer and when we give up you use us as beasts of burden! Well, I've had enough. It's time to return your stolen loot to the toiling non-U proletarian masses."

  My jaw dropped. "Dash it all, man, you can't be serious! Are you telling me you're a . . .?"

  "Yes," he grated, his eyes aflame with vindictive glee: "The crisis of capitalism is finally at hand, at long last! It's about seven centuries and a Great Downsizing overdue, but it's time to bring about the dictatorship of the non-U and the resurrection of the proletariat! And your friend Abdul al-Matsumoto is going to play a key role in bringing about the final raising of class consciousness by fertilizing the soil of Olympus with the blood of a thousand maidens, and then crown himself Big Brother and institute a reign of terror that will—"

  Unfortunately I can't tell you how the Ibn Cut-Throat Committee for the Revolution intended to proceed, because we were simultaneously interrupted by two different people: namely, by Laura, who extended her shapely hand and spritzed him down with after-shave, and then by Jeremy.

  Now, it helps to be aware that hareems are not exactly noted for their testosterone-drenched atmosphere. I was, of course, the odd squishie out. Old Edgy was clearly hors de combat or combat des whores (if you'll strangle my French) and the Toadster was also otherwise engaged, exploring conic sections with the fembot he'd been chasing earlier. But aside from myself and Ibn Cut-Throat—and, I suppose, Abdul, if he was still at home upstairs what with that crab-thingie plastered to his noggin—we were the only remotely butch people present.

  Jeremy had been in smelly, sullen retreat for the past week. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was in musth, that state in which a male mammoth or elephant hates and resents other males because the universe acquires a crystal clarity and his function in life is to . . . well, Edgestar and Toadsworth got there first, minus the trumpeting and displays of aggression, but I'm sure you understand? There were no other small male mammals present, but Jeremy was well aware of his enemy, and his desperate need to assert his alpha-male dominance before he could go in search of cows to cover—and more importantly, there was one particular scent he associated with the enemy from long mutual acquaintance. His enemy smelled like me. But I was shrouded in a blackly occlusive robe, while Ibn Cut-Throat had just been doused in my favorite splash. And whatever Jeremy's other faults, he's never been slow to jump to a conclusion.

  I do not know what passed through the 80 percent of Jeremy's cranial capacity that serves as target acquisition and fire control, but he made his choice almost instantly and launched himself straight for where Ibn Cut-Throat's crown jewels had
once resided. Proboscideans are not usually noted for their glide ratio, but, in the weaker than accustomed Martian gravity, Jeremy was positively aerobatic, as he jumped with grace and elegance and tusks, straight for Toshiro's tushie.

  "Tally ho, old boy!" I shouted, giving him the old school best, as Laura took two steps smartly forward and, raising her skirts, daintily kick-boxed headsman number one in the forehead with one of her most pointed assets—for her ten centimeter stiletto heels are not only jolly fine pins, they're physical extensions of her chrome-plated ankles.

  Now I confess that things looked dicey when headsman number two turned on me with his axe and bared his teeth at me. But I'm not the Suzuki of MacDonald for nothing, and I know a thing or two about fighting! I threw the abaya back over my head to free my arms, and pointed Toadsworth's Inebriator—which he had earlier entrusted to my safe keeping in order to free up a socket for his Inseminator—at the villain. "Drop it! Or I'll drop you!" I snarled.

  My threat didn't work. The thug advanced on me, and as he raised his blade I discovered to my horror that the Toadster must have some very double-jointed fingers in order to work that trigger. But just as the barber of Baghdad was about to trim my throat, a svelte black silhouette drew up behind him and poured a canister of vile brown ichor over his head! Screaming and burbling imprecations, he sank to the floor clawing at his eyes, just in time for Laura to finish him off with a flamenco stomp.

  Miss Feng cleared her throat apologetically as she lowered the empty firkin to the floor. (The brightly painted tiles began to blur and run where its damp rim rested on them.) "Sir might be pleased to note that one has taken the liberty of moving his yacht round to the tradesmen's entrance and disabling the continental defense array in anticipation of Sir's departure. Was Sir planning to stay for the bombe surprise, or would he agree that this is one party that he would prefer to cut short?"

  I glanced at Ibn Cut-Throat, who was still writhing in agony under Jeremy's merciless onslaught, and then at the two pithed headsmen. "I think it's a damned shame to outstay our welcome at any party, don't you agree?" (Laura nodded enthusiastically and knelt to tickle Jeremy's trunk.) "By all means, let's leave. If you'd be so good as to pour a bucket of cold water over Edgy and the Toadster, I'll take Abdul in hand and we can drop him off at a discreet clinic where they treat spinal crabs, what-what?"

  "That's a capital idea, Sir. I shall see to it at once." Miss Feng set off to separate the miscreants from their amorous attachments.

  I turned to Laura, who was still tickling Jeremy—who by now was lying on his back, panting—and raised an eyebrow. "Isn't he sweet?" she sang.

  "If you say so. You're carrying him, though," I said, ungratefully. "Let's hie thee well and back to Castle Pookie. This has been altogether too much of the wrong kind of company for me, and I could do with a nightcap in civilized company."

  "Darling!" She grabbed me enthusiastically by the trousers: "And we can watch a replay of your jump together!"

  And indeed, to cut a long story short, that's exactly what we did—but first I took the precaution of locking Jeremy in the second best guest suite's dungeon with a bottle of port, and gave Miss Feng the night off.

  After all, two's company but three's jolly confusing, what?

  Glory

  Greg Egan

  Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) published his first story in 1983, and followed it with more than fifty short stories and seven novels, including Permutation City, Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, and Schild's Ladder. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction—mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes—that established him as one of the most important writers working in science fiction. His work has won the Hugo, John W. Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. Upcoming is a new novel, Incandescence.

  Having written very little during the first half of the decade, Egan has returned to science fiction recently with a handful of excellent stories, arguably the best of which is this rich, strange space opera that follows.

  1

  An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a metre long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

  A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

  A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check.

  The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into the space that had separated the original ingots. First neutrons, then antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters were ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering their constituents and preventing them from annihilating their counterparts. The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.

  The gamma ray lasers shut down, the Zeno effect withdrew its prohibitions. For the time it took a beam of light to cross a neutron, the needle sat motionless in space. Then it began to burn, and it began to move.

  The needle was structured like a meticulously crafted firework, and its outer layers ignited first. No external casing could have channelled this blast, but the pattern of tensions woven into the needle's construction favoured one direction for the debris to be expelled. Particles streamed backwards; the needle moved forwards. The shock of acceleration could not have been borne by anything built from atomic-scale matter, but the pressure bearing down on the core of the needle prolonged its life, delaying the inevitable.

  Layer after layer burnt itself away, blasting the dwindling remnant forward ever faster. By the time the needle had shrunk to a tenth of its original size it was moving at ninety-eight percent of light-speed; to a bystander this could scarcely have been improved upon, but from the needle's perspective there was still room to slash its journey's duration by orders of magnitude.

  When just one thousandth of the needle remained, its time, compared to the neighbouring stars, was passing five hundred times more slowly. Still the layers kept burning, the protective clusters unravelling as the pressure on them was released. The needle could only reach close enough to light-speed to slow down time as much as it required if it could sacrifice a large enough proportion of its remaining mass. The core of the needle could survive only for a few trillionths of a second, while its journey would take two hundred million seconds as judged by the stars. The proportions had been carefully matched, though: out of the two kilograms of matter and antimatter that had been woven together at the launch, only a few million neutrons were needed as the final payload.

  By one measure, seven years passed. For the needle, its last trillionths of a second unwound, its final layers of fuel blew away, and at the moment its core was ready to explode it reached its destination, plunging from the near-vacuum of space straight into the heart of a star.

  Even here, the density of matter was insufficient to stabilise the core, yet far too high to allow it to pass unhindered. The core was torn apart. But it did not go quietly, and the shock waves it carved t
hrough the fusing plasma endured for a million kilometres: all the way through to the cooler outer layers on the opposite side of the star. These shock waves were shaped by the payload that had formed them, and though the initial pattern imprinted on them by the disintegrating cluster of neutrons was enlarged and blurred by its journey, on an atomic scale it remained sharply defined. Like a mould stamped into the seething plasma it encouraged ionised molecular fragments to slip into the troughs and furrows that matched their shapes, and then brought them together to react in ways that the plasma's random collisions would never have allowed. In effect, the shock waves formed a web of catalysts, carefully laid out in both time and space, briefly transforming a small corner of the star into a chemical factory operating on a nanometre scale.

  The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding the last traces of the shock wave's momentum: a few nanograms of elaborate, carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave. Travelling at seven hundred kilometres per second, a fraction below the velocity needed to escape from the star completely, they climbed out of its gravity well, slowing as they ascended.

  Four years passed, but the molecules were stable against the ravages of space. By the time they'd travelled a billion kilometres they had almost come to a halt, and they would have fallen back to die in the fires of the star that had forged them if their journey had not been timed so that the star's third planet, a gas giant, was waiting to urge them forward. As they fell towards it, the giant's third moon moved across their path. Eleven years after the needle's launch, its molecular offspring rained down onto the methane snow.

  The tiny heat of their impact was not enough to damage them, but it melted a microscopic puddle in the snow. Surrounded by food, the molecular seeds began to grow. Within hours, the area was teeming with nanomachines, some mining the snow and the minerals beneath it, others assembling the bounty into an intricate structure, a rectangular panel a couple of metres wide.