The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-II

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Silas," he said.

  Silas did not answer.

  "I was a bit scared," he said. "But I knew you'd come and get me if it got too bad. And Liza was there. She helped a lot."

  "Liza?" Silas's voice was sharp.

  "The witch. From the Potter's Field."

  "And you say she helped you?"

  "Yes. She especially helped me with my Fading. I think I can do it now."

  Silas grunted. "You can tell me all about it when we're home." And Bod was quiet until they landed beside the church. They went inside, into the empty hall, as the rain redoubled, splashing up from the puddles that covered the ground.

  "Tell me everything," he said.

  Bod told him everything he could remember about the day. And at the end, Silas shook his head, slowly, thoughtfully.

  "Am I in trouble?" asked Bod.

  "Nobody Owens," said Silas. " You are indeed in trouble. However, I believe I shall leave it to your foster-parents to administer whatever discipline and reproach they believe to be needed."

  And then, in the manner of his kind, Silas was gone.

  Bod pulled the jacket up over his head, and clambered up the slippery paths to the top of the hill, to the Frobisher vault, and then he went down, and down, and still further down.

  He dropped the brooch beside the goblet and the knife.

  "Here you go," he said. "All polished up. Looking pretty."

  It comes back, said the Sleer, with satisfaction in its smoke-tendril voice. It always comes back.

  The night had been long, but it was almost dawn.

  Bod was walking, sleepily and a little gingerly, past the final resting place of Harrison Westwood, Baker of this Parish, and his wives Marion and Joan, to the Potter's Field. Mr and Mrs Owens had died several hundred years before it had been decided that beating children was wrong, and Mr Owens had, regretfully, that night, done what he saw as his duty, and Bod's bottom stung like anything. Still, the look of worry on Mrs Owens' face had hurt Bod worse than any beating could have done.

  He reached the iron railings that bounded the Potter's Field, and slipped between them.

  "Hullo?" he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn tree. "I hope I didn't get you into trouble, too," he said.

  Nothing.

  He had replaced the jeans in the gardener's hut—he was more comfortable in just his grey winding sheet—but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.

  When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the Potter's Field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

  From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colours, along with the paintpot, and the paintbrush.

  He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters

  E H

  and beneath them he wrote

  we don't forget

  It was almost daylight. Bedtime, soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

  He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and, pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, he went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

  "Not bad," said a pert voice from the Potter's Field, behind him. "Not bad at all."

  But when he turned to look, there was nobody there.

  Last Contact

  Stephen Baxter

  Stephen Baxter (www.stephen-baxter.com) is one of the most important science fiction writers to emerge from Britain in the past thirty years. His "Xeelee" sequence of novels and short stories is arguably the most significant work of future history in modern science fiction. Baxter is the author of more than forty books and over 100 short stories. His most recent book is YA alternate history, The H-bomb Girl.

  Baxter has written a number of novels with Sir Arthur C. Clarke, and the quiet and moving first contact story that follows recalls nothing as much as Clarke's own "The Nine Billion Names of God."

  March 15th

  Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.

  Just at that moment Maureen's mobile phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat and looked at the screen. "Another contact," she called to her daughter.

  Caitlin looked cold in her thin jacket; she wrapped her arms around her body. "Another super-civilisation discovered, off in space. We live in strange times,

  Mum."

  "That's the fifteenth this year. And I did my bit to help discover it. Good for me," Maureen said, smiling. "Hello, love." She leaned forward for a kiss on the cheek.

  She knew why Caitlin was here, of course. Caitlin had always hinted she would come and deliver the news about the Big Rip in person, one way or the other. Maureen guessed what that news was from her daughter's hollow, stressed eyes. But Caitlin was looking around the garden, and Maureen decided to let her tell it all in her own time.

  She asked, "How's the kids?"

  "Fine. At school. Bill's at home, baking bread." Caitlin smiled. "Why do stay-at-home fathers always bake bread? But he's starting at Webster's next month."

  "That's the engineers in Oxford."

  "That's right. Not that it makes much difference now. We won't run out of money before, well, before it doesn't matter." Caitlin considered the garden. It was just a scrap of lawn, really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. "It's the first time I've seen this properly."

  "Well, it's the first bright day we've had. My first spring here." They walked around the lawn. "It's not bad. It's been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow," Maureen said.

  "You mustn't think like that."

  "Well, it's true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I'd pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I'm done."

  Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.

  Maureen showed her patches where the lawn had dried out last summer and would need reseeding. And there was a little brass plaque fixed to the wall of the house to show the level reached by the Thames floods of two years ago. "The lawn is all right. I do like this time of year when you sort of wake it up from the winter. The grass needs raking and scarifying, of course. I'll reseed bits of it, and see how it grows during the summer. I might think about getting some of it re-laid. Now the weather's so different the drainage might not be right anymore."

  "You're enjoying getting back in the saddle, aren't you, Mum?"

  Maureen shrugged. "Well, the last couple of years weren't much fun. Nursing your dad, and then getting rid of the house. It's nice to get this old thing back on again." She raised her arms and looked down at her quilted gardening coat.

  Caitlin wrinkled her nose. "I always hated that stupid old coat. You really should get yourself something better, Mum. These modern fabrics are very good."

  "This will see me out," Maureen said firmly.

  They walked around the verge, looking at the plants, the weeds, the autumn leaves that hadn't been swept up and were now rotting in place.

  Caitlin said, "I'm going to be on the radio later. BBC Radio 4. There's to be a government statement on the Rip, and I'll be in the follow-up discussion. It starts at nine, and I should be on about nine thirty."

  "I'll listen to it. Do you want me to tape it for you?"

  "No. Bill will get it. Besides, you can listen to all these things on the websites these days."

  Maureen said carefully, "I take it the news is what you expected, then."


  "Pretty much. The Hawaii observatories confirmed it. I've seen the new Hubble images, deep sky fields. Empty, save for the foreground objects. All the galaxies beyond the local group have gone. Eerie, really, seeing your predictions come true like that. That's couch grass, isn't it?"

  "Yes. I stuck a fork in it. Nothing but root mass underneath. It will be a devil to get up. I'll have a go, and then put down some bin liners for a few weeks, and see if that kills it off. Then there are these roses that should have been pruned by now. I think I'll plant some gladioli in this corner—"

  "Mum, it's October." Caitlin blurted that out. She looked thin, pale and tense, a real office worker, but then Maureen had always thought that about her daughter, that she worked too hard. Now she was thirty-five, and her moderately pretty face was lined at the eyes and around her mouth, the first wistful signs of age. "October 14, at about four in the afternoon. I say 'about.' I could give you the time down to the attosecond if you wanted."

  Maureen took her hands. "It's all right, love. It's about when you thought it would be, isn't it?"

  "Not that it does us any good, knowing. There's nothing we can do about it."

  They walked on. They came to a corner on the south side of the little garden. "This ought to catch the sun," Maureen said. "I'm thinking of putting in a seat here. A pergola maybe. Somewhere to sit. I'll see how the sun goes around later in the year."

  "Dad would have liked a pergola," Caitlin said. "He always did say a garden was a place to sit in, not to work."

  "Yes. It does feel odd that your father died, so soon before all this. I'd have liked him to see it out. It seems a waste somehow."

  Caitlin looked up at the sky. "Funny thing, Mum. It's all quite invisible to the naked eye, still. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, just, but that's bound to the Milky Way by gravity. So the expansion hasn't reached down to the scale of the visible, not yet. It's still all instruments, telescopes. But it's real all right."

  "I suppose you'll have to explain it all on Radio 4."

  "That's why I'm there. We'll probably have to keep saying it over and over, trying to find ways of saying it that people can understand. You know, don't you, Mum? It's all to do with dark energy. It's like an antigravity field that permeates the universe. Just as gravity pulls everything together, the dark energy is pulling the universe apart, taking more and more of it so far away that its light can't reach us anymore. It started at the level of the largest structures in the universe, superclusters of galaxies. But in the end it will fold down to the smallest scales. Every bound structure will be pulled apart. Even atoms, even subatomic particles. The Big Rip.

  "We've known about this stuff for years. What we didn't expect was that the expansion would accelerate as it has. We thought we had trillions of years. Then the forecast was billions. And now—"

  "Yes."

  "It's funny for me being involved in this stuff, Mum. Being on the radio. I've never been a people person. I became an astrophysicist, for God's sake. I always thought that what I studied would have absolutely no effect on anybody's life. How wrong I was. Actually there's been a lot of debate about whether to announce it or not."

  "I think people will behave pretty well," Maureen said. "They usually do. It might get trickier towards the end, I suppose. But people have a right to know, don't you think?"

  "They're putting it on after nine so people can decide what to tell their kids."

  "After the watershed! Well, that's considerate. Will you tell your two?"

  "I think we'll have to. Everybody at school will know. They'll probably get bullied about it if they don't know. Imagine that. Besides, the little beggars will probably have googled it on their mobiles by one minute past nine."

  Maureen laughed. "There is that."

  "It will be like when I told them Dad had died," Caitlin said. "Or like when Billy started asking hard questions about Santa Claus."

  "No more Christmases," Maureen said suddenly. "If it's all over in October."

  "No more birthdays for my two either," Caitlin said.

  "November and January."

  "Yes. It's funny, in the lab, when the date came up, that was the first thing I thought of."

  Maureen's phone pinged again. "Another signal. Quite different in nature from the last, according to this."

  "I wonder if we'll get any of those signals decoded in time."

  Maureen waggled her phone. "It won't be for want of trying, me and a billion other search-for-ET-at-home enthusiasts. Would you like some tea, love?"

  "It's all right. I'll let you get on. I told Bill I'd get the shopping in, before I have to go back to the studios in Oxford this evening."

  They walked towards the back door into the house, strolling, inspecting the plants and the scrappy lawn.

  June 5th

  It was about lunchtime when Caitlin arrived from the garden centre with the pieces of the pergola. Maureen helped her unload them from the back of a white van, and carry them through the gate from the drive. They were mostly just prefabricated wooden panels and beams that they could manage between the two of them, though the big iron spikes that would be driven into the ground to support the uprights were heavier. They got the pieces stacked up on the lawn.

  "I should be able to set it up myself," Maureen said. "Joe next door said he'd lay the concrete base for me, and help me lift on the roof section. There's some nailing to be done, and creosoting, but I can do all that."

  "Joe, eh." Caitlin grinned.

  "Oh, shut up, he's just a neighbour. Where did you get the van? Did you have to hire it?"

  "No, the garden centre loaned it to me. They can't deliver. They are still getting stock in, but they can't rely on the staff. They just quit, without any notice. In the end it sort of gets to you, I suppose."

  "Well, you can't blame people for wanting to be at home."

  "No. Actually Bill's packed it in. I meant to tell you. He didn't even finish his induction at Webster's. But the project he was working on would never have got finished anyway."

  "I'm sure the kids are glad to have him home."

  "Well, they're finishing the school year. At least I think they will, the teachers still seem keen to carry on."

  "It's probably best for them."

  "Yes. We can always decide what to do after the summer, if the schools open again."

  Maureen had prepared some sandwiches, and some iced elderflower cordial. They sat in the shade of the house and ate their lunch and looked out over the garden.

  Caitlin said, "Your lawn's looking good."

  "It's come up quite well. I'm still thinking of re-laying that patch over there."

  "And you put in a lot of vegetables in the end," Caitlin said.

  "I thought I should. I've planted courgettes and French beans and carrots, and a few outdoor tomatoes. I could do with a greenhouse, but I haven't really room for one. It seemed a good idea, rather than flowers, this year."

  "Yes. You can't rely on the shops."

  Things had kept working, mostly, as people stuck to their jobs. But there were always gaps on the supermarket shelves, as supply chains broke down. There was talk of rationing some essentials, and there were already coupons for petrol.

  "I don't approve of how tatty the streets are getting in town," Maureen said sternly.

  Caitlin sighed. "I suppose you can't blame people for packing in a job like street-sweeping. It is a bit tricky getting around town though. We need some work done on the roof, we're missing a couple of tiles. It's just as well we won't have to get through another winter," she said, a bit darkly. "But you can't get a builder for love or money."

  "Well, you never could."

  They both laughed.

  Maureen said, "I told you people would cope. People do just get on with things."

  "We haven't got to the end game yet," Caitlin said. "I went into London the other day. That isn't too friendly, Mum. It's not all like this, you know."

  Maureen's phone pinged, and she checked the screen. "
Four or five a day now," she said. "New contacts, lighting up all over the sky."

  "But that's down from the peak, isn't it?"

  "Oh, we had a dozen a day at one time. But now we've lost half the stars, haven't we?"

  "Well, that's true, now the Rip has folded down into the Galaxy. I haven't really been following it, Mum. Nobody's been able to decode any of the signals, have they?"

  "But some of them aren't the sort of signal you can decode anyhow. In one case somebody picked up an artificial element in the spectrum of a star. Something that was manufactured, and then just chucked in to burn up, like a flare."

  Caitlin considered. "That can't say anything but 'here we are,' I suppose."

  "Maybe that's enough."

  "Yes."

  It had really been Harry who had been interested in wild speculations about alien life and so forth. Joining the cell-phone network of home observers of ET, helping to analyse possible signals from the stars in a network of millions of others, had been Harry's hobby, not Maureen's. It was one of Harry's things she had kept up after he had died, like his weather monitoring and his football pools. It would have felt odd just to have stopped it all.

  But she did understand how remarkable it was that the sky had suddenly lit up with messages like a Christmas tree, after more than half a century of dogged, fruitless, frustrating listening. Harry would have loved to see it.

  "Caitlin, I don't really understand how all these signals can be arriving just now. I mean, it takes years for light to travel between the stars, doesn't it? We only knew about the phantom energy a few months ago."

  "But others might have detected it long before, with better technology than we've got. That would give you time to send something. Maybe the signals have been timed to get here, just before the end, aimed just at us."

  "That's a nice thought."

  "Some of us hoped that there would be an answer to the dark energy in all those messages."