The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Marbet whispers, “It is so beautiful.” Reverently she lifts it from the faint shimmer of the Square.

  Cran is permitted to touch it with one finger, briefly. Only that. The vase will go into the Gallery and thousands will come to view and glory in this rightful human inheritance.

  The Handlers bear away the vase. Cran paces the Project room. It’s well into the artificial lunar night; the lights of Alpha Dome have dimmed on the horizon. Cran can’t sleep; it’s been several nights since he slept. He’s old, but it isn’t that. Desire consumes him, the desire of a young man: not for sex, but for glory. Once, he thought he would be a great artist. Long ago reality killed the dream but not the gnawing disappointment, eating at his innards, his brain, his heart.

  Tulia has a painting chosen for the Gallery.

  His own work is shit, has always been shit, will always be shit.

  Tulia, people are beginning to say, is the real thing. A genuine artist, the kind that comes along once in a generation.

  Cran can’t sit still, can’t sleep, can’t lift himself, yet again, from the black pit into which he falls so often. Only one thing helps, and he has long since gotten past any qualms about its legality.

  He takes the pill and waits. Ten minutes later nothing matters so much, not even his inadequacy. His brain has been temporarily rewired. Nothing works optimally, either, including his hands and his brain, both of which tremble. Small price to pay. The gnawing grows less, the pit retreats.

  A flash of color catches his eye. Square Two lights up. The endlessly scanning Project has found something.

  2018

  “How?” James Glenwood said. And then, “Is anything missing?”

  Of the National’s five Vermeers, Girl with a Flute and Girl with the Red Hat were on loan to the Frick in New York. Woman Holding a Balance and Lady Writing both hung on the walls. So did Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet. Below that, propped against the wall in a room locked all night, sat its duplicate.

  A fake, of course—but how the hell did it get there?

  The guard looked guilty. But Henry had worked for the museum for twenty-five years. And naturally he looked upset—suspicion was bound to fall on him as the person who locked this room last night and opened it this morning. Glenwood, a curator for thirty years, remembered well the 1990 brazen theft of Vermeer’s The Concert from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The picture had never been recovered.

  Except this was not a theft. A prank? A warning of thefts to come—Look how easily I can break into this place?

  Every other room in the National would now have to be meticulously checked, and every work of art. Security would have to be reviewed. The police must be called, and the Director. The curator pulled out his phone.

  Only—

  Phone in hand, he knelt in front of the painting that had so mysteriously appeared. Glenwood had studied seventeenth-century art his entire life. He had thousands and thousands of hours of experience, honed to an intuition that had often proved more correct than reason. He studied the picture propped against the wall, and then the one above it. His cell hung limply at his side, and a deep line crinkled his forehead.

  Something here was not right.

  2270

  Cran has never seen anything like the picture whose image floats in Square Two.

  The Squares seems to capture more three-dimensional objects than paintings, and only eleven have been Transferred since the Project began. Three Picassos, two medieval pictures that ignore perspective, two “abstracts” that seem to him nothing but blobs of paint, a Monet, a Renoir, a Takashi Murakami, and a faded triptych from some Italian church. None of them are like this.

  The light! It falls on the figure, a woman bent over some sort of sewing. It glows on her burgundy gown, on the walls, on a pearl necklace lying on a table. Almost it outshines the soft glow of the Square itself. The woman seems sad, and so real that she makes Cran’s heart ache.

  He stares at the picture for a long time, his mind befuddled by the drug he’s taken but his heart loud and clear. He must have this picture.

  Not the Gallery. Him. For himself.

  Not possible.

  Unless …

  He stumbles to his console and says, “Forgeries by Tulia Anson, complete catalogue, visual, at ten-second intervals.”

  The screen—not a Square, just a normal holoscreen—flashes the forgeries that Tulia has completed so far. Each awaits a Square’s tracking the original somewhere in time. The catalogue is not random; curators and physicists have collaborated to estimate what periods and artworks have the greatest chance of appearing in the Squares. Cran does not, and has never tried to, understand the equations involved, those mysterious mathematical convolutions that make strange attractors out of chaos. He only knows that these are the pictures most likely to appear.

  Several landscapes in various styles appear and disappear on the screen. Some portraits. More hideous abstracts. Tulia, the Project’s best forger, works hard, and quickly. A bunch of still lifes, with and without fruit. And then—

  “Stop catalogue!”

  There it is. Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet, by Johannes Reijniersz Vermeer, 1664. What a mundane name for such perfection. Cran knows this woman, knows her from the sad tilt of her head, the bonnet she sews for her unborn child, the broken toy at her feet, the pearl necklace she has flung off. He is sure that her unseen eyes are filled with tears. She is deeply unhappy; her life has not turned out as she hoped. Cran knows her. He is her.

  How many pills did he take?

  No matter. This is his painting, meant for him. And Tulia, who is 32 percent his genes, has completed a superb forgery. That, too, proves that what he is going to do was meant to be.

  Yes.

  He does not bother with clearances. Actually, he cannot. There must be no traces. Clean and quick. The universe, which has denied him so much, owes him this.

  The Vermeer hangs on the silk-covered wall of what looks in the Square like a private house, although it’s hard to be certain. Vermeer’s house? A patron? It doesn’t matter. Cran works quickly, calling for a ‘bot to bring Tulia’s painting from storage, erasing the bot’s memory record, hoisting the forgery into the Square. Setting the controls. His hands fumble in their eagerness. It all must be done manually, to leave no record.

  He makes the Transfer.

  Tulia’s forgery vanishes. Nothing appears in Square Two.

  Nothing.

  “No!”

  Data flashes on the console below the Square. A mechanical voice says calmly, “Error. Error. Transfer malfunction.”

  And then, “Danger. Deactivate this Square.”

  “No!” Cran gasps, unable to breathe. The Square blinks on and off, as he has never seen a Square blink before. But he knows what this means; spacetime is being affected in what could be a permanent way if the Square is not deactivated immediately. Fingers trembling, he enters and speaks the commands.

  The Square goes dark.

  The console data still glows. Cran stares at it. He shakes his head.

  TRANSFER 653

  Transfer Date: Saturday, Decade 28, 2270

  Transfer to Past:

  Planned Transfer: From present to March 16, 1668

  Achieved Transfer: From present to March 16, 1668

  Status: Transfer Successful

  Transfer to Present:

  Planned Transfer: From March 16, 1668 to present

  Achieved Transfer: From March 16, 1668 to Unknown Time

  Status: Transfer failed

  Reason for Failure: Incomplete Data Entry (Clearances 60–75)

  Cran wills the data holo to change, to say something else. It does not. Because he did not complete the clearances, which were not merely the stupid bureaucracy he had assumed, the Transfer has failed. Tulia’s forgery has gone to 1668, replacing the original on some silk-covered wall. The real Vermeer has not come all the way forward in time. Where is it? Cran doesn’t know. All he knows is that Transfers send
forgeries to where there is a similar article, which always before has meant the original being brought forward to 2270. That’s how the strange attractors formed by the mathematics of chaos theory work—they attract. Only, due to Cran’s haste—or possibly his intoxicated fumbling—Tulia’s forgery has gone to some other attractor of Vermeers. Are there now two of the paintings on that silk-covered wall in 1668? Or has the original stopped somewhere else in time, snagged on a strange attractor someplace/sometime?

  He doesn’t know. And it doesn’t matter where the original has gone—he cannot retrieve it.

  Cran slumps to the floor. But after a few minutes, he staggers again to his feet. Why did he panic so? No one knows what happened. No one knows why the Square malfunctioned. All he has to do is erase the record—a task well within his skills—and report a malfunction. The Squares are a machine; machines break. No one ever has to know. All he has to say is that it spontaneously broke before he made any Transfer. That way, no one will blame him for an anomaly loose somewhere in the past.

  Unless someone discovers that Tulia’s forgery is missing from storage.

  But why would they look? The only reason to call up a forgery is if the original appears in a Square. Only—

  He can’t think. He is afraid of what he has set loose in the timestream. He needs to get out of here. But he can’t, not yet. At his console, he carefully composes a report of spontaneous Square malfunction while not engaged in Transfer operations.

  In his mind, he can still see the glowing light of his lost Vermeer.

  2018

  The two paintings sat on easels at the front of the room. Guards stood outside. All cell phones had been collected and stored in a lockbox. Everyone had been scanned for cameras and voice recorders, a procedure that at least half of those present found insulting. A few said so, loudly. But no one was protesting now. They were too enraptured.

  Side by side, the two paintings of Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet looked identical to anyone but a trained observer. Half the people in the room were trained observers, art historians. The other half were forensic scientists.

  Glenwood listened to one of the scientists’ summary of his long-winded analysis. He’d barely looked at the paintings, consulting only his notes. “This painting,” he said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the Vermeer that had hung in the National since being privately donated sixteen years ago, “shows aging commensurate with having come from the mid-1600’s. As I explained, carbon dating is not particularly accurate when applied to time spans as short as a few hundred years. But the frame, canvas, and pigments in the paint are aged appropriately, and nearly all of them are ones that, you have told me, Vermeer habitually used. That has been verified by both Atomic Absorption Spectrophotometry and Pyrolysis-gas chromatog-raphy-mass spectrometry.”

  “Almost all?” Glenwood said. “Some of the pigments are not from Vermeer’s historical period?”

  “No,” said the expert from New York’s Met, “but they could have been added later during restoration attempts. After all, the provenance of this painting is clearly documented, and it includes several dealers throughout the centuries, some of whom might have tried to clean or repair the Vermeer for resale. And, of course, it has a provenance, which your newcomer does not.”

  The New York expert had already made her position clear. She thought the “newcomer” was a clear forgery and Painting #1 the real thing. Glenwood was not so sure. He thought scientists, and even art experts, oversimplified.

  Really skillful forgeries were notoriously hard to detect, and Vermeer’s art had been plagued by imitators. At one point, “experts” had attributed seventy paintings to him. Today the number was thirty-four, with more in dispute even under scientific analysis. Vermeer’s Young Woman Seated at the Virginals was considered genuine until 1947, a fake from 1947 to 2004, and then genuine again, with some disagreement. Science could only go so far.

  A craquelure expert spoke next, and scornfully. “I don’t know, ladies and gentlemen, why we are even here. Painting #1 is clearly the real thing. Its pattern of surface cracking is completely in keeping with an age of 354 years, and with the Dutch template of connected networks of cracking. The “new-comer” has almost no craquelure at all. Furthermore, look how bright and new its colors are—it might have been painted last year. Its total lack of aging tags it as a forgery to anyone actually looking at it. Dr. Glenwood, why are we here?”

  Everyone looked at Glenwood. He pushed down the temper rising in response to the craquelure expert’s tone.

  “We are here because I, and not only I, am bothered by other differences between these two paintings—differences that were not obvious when we had only Painting #1 and could not compare them side by side. Now we can. Look at the pearl necklace in the second painting. Vermeer painted pearls often, and always they have the sparkle and luster of the second painting, which the first mostly lacks. The second also contains far more tiny detail in the painting-within-a-painting on the wall behind the woman sewing. That sort of painstaking detail is another Vermeer trademark. Look at the woman’s gown. Both versions feature the underpainting in natural ultramarine that Vermeer did beneath his reds to get a purplish tinge—but in Painting #2, the result is crisper. And Painting #2—I regard this as significant—was revealed by the X-ray analysis to have underlying elements that the artist painted over. Vermeer was obsessive about getting his pictures exactly right, and so very often he painted out elements and replaced them with others. Painting #1 shows no overpainting. I think Painting #2 is the original, and the picture we have hung in the National for sixteen years is the forgery.”

  A babble of voices:

  “You can’t believe that!”

  “Perhaps a young artist, not yet proficient in his craft—”

  “We have a clear chain of ownership going all the way back to Pieter van Ruijven—”

  “The scientific evidence—”

  “The lack of aging—”

  In the end, Glenwood’s was the only dissenting voice. He was a Vermeer expert but not a forgery expert, and not the Director of the National Gallery. The painting that had mysteriously appeared would be banished to basement storage so that no one else would be fooled into paying some exorbitant sum for it. And the one that had hung in the museum for sixteen years would continue to hang there. It had been declared the real thing.

  2270

  The physicists spend six days trying to fix the Square. Finally they give up, because they can’t find any indicator that it is actually broken. Cran, who knows that it is not, insists over and over that the Square simply went dark. For six days, he holds his breath, not knowing what might happen. There are now two versions of the Vermeer loose in the timestream—what if that turns out to be so significant that something terrible happens to the present?

  Nothing does.

  Scientists and engineers wait for something—anything—to appear in Square Two. On the sixth day, something does: a crude Paleolithic figurine. Everyone goes crazy: this is the oldest piece of art the Squares have ever found. The expert on Stone Age art is summoned. The Director is summoned. The stone figurine is replaced with a lump of rock. No Transfer this early will disturb the timestream, not even if it’s witnessed; the Transfer will just be attributed to gods, or magic, or witchcraft. The fertility carving is reverently taken to the Gallery. Toasts are drunk. The past is being recovered; the Square works fine; all is well. Cran’s chest expands as he finally breathes normally.

  As he leaves, the chief physicist gives Cran a long, hard look.

  A few days later Cran goes to the Gallery to attend the presentation of Tulia’s painting. It is so beautiful that his heart aches. The picture is neither abstract nor mimetic but, rather, something of both. What moves Cran so much is the way she has painted light. It is always the use of light that he cares about, and Tulia has captured starlight on human figures in a way he has never seen done before. The light, and not their facial expressions, seems to indicate the mood of e
ach of her three human subjects, although so subtly that it does not feel forced. The emotion feels real. Everything about the painting feels real.

  A woman behind him says, “Pretty, yes—but actually, it’s just an exercise in an archaic and irrelevant art. Flat painting in a holo age? I mean, who cares?”

  Cran wants to slug her. He does not. He congratulates Tulia, forcing words past the tightening in his throat, and leaves.

  At home, he can’t sleep. He is agitated, dispirited, depressed. No—he is jealous, so jealous that his skin burns and his head feels as if it might explode. He hates himself for his jealousy, but he can’t help it. It drives him to pace, to almost—but not quite—cry out in the silence of his room. He can’t sit still. In the middle of the night he takes the underground tram to the Project dome.

  No one is here. Constant attendance isn’t required; when a Square glows, it keeps on glowing until someone makes a Transfer. One of the Squares is glowing now. Inside is the image of Lady Sewing a Child’s Bonnet.

  Cran is not really surprised. Previously, the Square had found, through the obscure mathematics of chaos, a strange attractor linked to this Vermeer. Once found, there was a strong chance it would find it again. But which picture is this—the original or Tulia’s forgery?

  It is the original. He knows. The judgment isn’t reasoned; it doesn’t have to be. Cran knows, and he is prepared.

  From a closet he takes one of his own pictures. The same size and shape as the Vermeer, it’s a portrait of Tulia, painted from memory and so bad that no one else has ever seen it. The Vermeer in the Square is surrounded by a wooden crate in darkness. Someone has, for whatever reason, boxed it up and stored it. Maybe it will be missed, maybe not. It no longer matters to him. All his movements are frenzied, almost spastic. Some small part of his mind thinks I am not sane. That doesn’t matter either.