The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “You can come back in now.” There were thumps and thuds.

  Instead, Blackett went back to the kitchen and made a new pot of coffee. He carried two mugs into the bedroom.

  “Have I frightened you, my boy?”

  “Everything frightens me these days, Professor Massri. You’re about to tell me that you’ve found a monolith in the back garden, alongside the discarded cans and the mangy cats.”

  The Egyptian laughed, phlegm shaking his chest. “Almost. Almost. The Moon is now on orbit a bit over. A million kilometers from Venus. Also retrograde. Exactly the same distance Ganymede. Used to be from Jupiter.”

  “Well, okay, hardly a coincidence. And Ganymede is in the Moon’s old orbit.”

  For a moment, Massri was silent. His face was drawn. He put down his coffee with a shaking hand.

  “No. Ganymede orbits Venus some 434,000 kilometers out. According to the last data I could find before. The net went down for good.”

  “Farther out than the Moon used to orbit Earth. And?”

  “The Sun, from Venus, as you once told me. Looks brighter and larger. In fact, it subtends about 40 minutes of arc. And by the most convenient and. Interesting coincidence. Ganymede now just exactly looks . . .”

  “. . . the same size as the Sun, from the surface of Venus.” Ice ran down Blackett’s back. “So it blocks the Sun exactly at total eclipse. That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “Except for the corona, and bursts of solar flares. As the Moon used to do here.” Massri sent him a glare almost baleful in its intensity. “And you think that’s just a matter of chance? Do you think so, Dr. Blackett?”

  10.

  The thunderstorm on the previous day had left the air cooler. Blackett walked home slowly in the darkness, holding the HP calculator and two books the old man had perforce drawn upon for data, now the internet was expired. He did not recall having carried these particular volumes across the street from the empty library. Perhaps Clare or one of the other infrequent visitors had fetched them.

  The stars hung clean and clear through the heavy branches extending from the gardens of most of the large houses in the neighborhood and across the old sidewalk. In the newer, outlying parts of the city, the nouveaux riches had considered it a mark of potent prosperity to run their well-watered lawns to the very verge of the roadway, never walking anywhere, driving to visit neighbors three doors distant. He wondered how they were managing on Venus. Perhaps the ratio of fit to obese and terminally inactive had improved, under the whip of necessity. Too late for poor Kafele, he thought, and made a mental note to stockpile another batch of pioglitazone, the old man’s diabetes drug, when next he made a foray into a pharmacy.

  He sat for half an hour in the silence of the large kitchen, scratching down data points and recalculating the professor’s estimates. It was apparent that Massri thought the accepted extinction date of the great reptiles, coinciding as it did with the perfect overlap of the greater and lesser lights in the heavens, was no such thing – that it was, in fact, a time-stamp for Creation. The notion chilled Blackett’s blood. Might the world, after all (fashionable speculation!), be no more than a virtual simulation? A calculational contrivance on a colossal scale? But not truly colossal, perhaps no more than a billion lines of code and a prodigiously accurate physics engine. Nothing else so easily explained the wholesale revision of the inner solar system. The idea did not appeal; it stank in Blackett’s nostrils. Thus I refute, he thought again, and tapped a calculator key sharply. But that was a feeble refutation; one might as well, in a lucid dream, deny that any reality existed, forgetting the ground state or brute physical substrate needed to sustain the dream.

  The numbers made no sense. He ran the calculations again. It was true that Ganymede’s new orbit placed the former Jovian moon in just the right place, from time to time, to occult the sun’s disk precisely. That was a disturbing datum. The dinosaur element was far less convincing. According to the authors of these astronomy books, Earth had started out, after the tremendous shock of the X-body impact that birthed the Moon, with a dizzying 5.5 or perhaps eight-hour day. It seemed impossibly swift, but the hugely larger gas giant Jupiter, Ganymede’s former primary, turned completely around in just 10 hours.

  The blazing young Earth spun like a mad top, its almost fatal impact wound subsiding, sucked away into subduction zones created by the impact itself. Venus – the old Venus, at least – lacked tectonic plates; the crust was resurfaced at half billion year intervals, as the boiling magma burst up through the rigid rocks, but not enough to carry down and away the appalling mass of carbon dioxide that had crushed the surface with a hundred times the pressure of Earth’s oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Now, though, the renovated planet had a breathable atmosphere. Just add air and water, Blackett thought. Presumably the crust crept slowly over the face of the world, sucked down and spat back up over glacial epochs. But the numbers –

  The Moon had been receding from Earth at a sluggish rate of 38 kilometers every million years – one part in 10,000 of its final orbital distance, before its removal to Venus. Kepler’s Third Law, Blackett noted, established the orbital equivalence of time squared with distance cubed. So those 65.5 million years ago, when the great saurians were slain by a falling star, Luna had been only 2500 km closer to the Earth. But to match the sun’s sidereal rotation exactly, the Moon needed to be more than 18,000 km nearer. That was the case no more recently than 485 million years ago.

  Massri’s dinosaur fantasy was off by a factor of at least 7.4.

  Then how had the Egyptian reached his numerological conclusion? And where did all this lead? Nowhere useful that Blackett could see.

  It was all sheer wishful thinking. Kafele Massri was as delusional as Clare, his thought processes utterly unsound. Blackett groaned and put his head on the table. Perhaps, he had to admit, his own reflections were no more reliable.

  11.

  “I’m flying down to the coast for a swim,” Blackett told Clare. “There’s room in the plane.”

  “A long way to go for a dip.”

  “A change of scenery,” he said. “Bring your bathing suit if you like. I never bother, myself.”

  She gave him a long, cool look. “A nude beach? All right. I’ll bring some lunch.”

  They drove together to the small airfield to one side of the industrial park in a serviceable SUV he found abandoned outside a 7-Eleven. Clare had averted her eyes as he hot-wired the engine. She wore sensible hiking boots, dark gray shorts, a white wife-beater that showed off her small breasts to advantage. Seated and strapped in, she laid her broad-brimmed straw hat on her knees. Blackett was mildly concerned by the slowly deteriorating condition of the plane. It had not been serviced in many months. He felt confident, though, that it would carry him where he needed to go, and back again.

  During the 90-minute flight, he tried to explain the Egyptian’s reasoning. The young psychiatrist responded with indifference that became palpable anxiety. Her hands tightened on the seat belt cinched at her waist. Blackett abandoned his efforts.

  As they landed at Matagorda Island, she regained her animation. “Oh, look at those lovely biplanes! A shame they’re in such deplorable condition. Why would anyone leave them out in the open weather like that?” She insisted on crossing to the sagging Stearmans for a closer look. Were those tears in her eyes?

  Laden with towels and a basket of food, drink, paper plates and two glasses, Blackett summoned her sharply. “Come along, Clare, we’ll miss the good waves if we loiter.” If she heard bitter irony in his tone, she gave no sign of it. A gust of wind carried away his own boater, and she dashed after it, brought it back, jammed it rakishly on his balding head. “Thank you. I should tie the damned thing on with a leather thong, like the cowboys used to do, and cinch it with a . . . a . . .”

  “A woggle,” she said, unexpectedly.

  It made Blackett laugh out loud. “Good god, woman! Wherever did you get a word like that?”

  “My brother
was a boy scout,” she said.

  They crossed the unkempt grass, made their way with some difficulty down to the shoreline. Blue ocean stretched south, almost flat, sparkling in the cloudless light. Blackett set down his burden, stripped his clothing efficiently, strode into the water. The salt stung his nostrils and eyes. He swam strongly out toward Mexico, thinking of the laughable scene in the movie Gattaca. He turned back, and saw Clare’s head bobbing, sun-bleached hair plastered against her well-shaped scalp.

  They lay side by side in the sun, odors of sun-block hanging on the unmoving air. After a time, Blackett saw the red setter approaching from the seaward side. The animal sat on its haunches, mouth open and tongue lolling, saying nothing.

  “Hello, Sporky,” Blackett said. “Beach patrol duties?”

  “Howdy, Doc. Saw the Cessna coming in. Who’s the babe?”

  “This is Dr. Clare Laing. She’s a psychiatrist, so show some respect.”

  Light glistened on her nearly naked body, reflected from sweat and a scattering of mica clinging to her torso. She turned her head away, affected to be sleeping. No, not sleeping. He realized that her attention was now fixed on a rusty bicycle wheel half buried in the sand. It seemed she might be trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them, with the rim and broken spokes of this piece of sea drift serving as some kind of spinal metaphor.

  Respectful of her privacy, Blackett sat up and began explaining to the dog the bibliophile’s absurd miscalculation. Sporky interrupted his halting exposition.

  “You’re saying the angular width of the sun, then and now, is about 32 arc minutes.”

  “Yes, 0.00925 radians.”

  “And the Moon last matched this some 485 million years ago.”

  “No, no. Well, it was a slightly better match than it is now, but that’s not Massri’s point.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that the sun’s rotational period and the Moon’s were the same in that epoch. Can’t you see how damnably unlikely that is? He thinks it’s something like . . . I don’t know, God’s thumbprint on the solar system. The true date of Creation, maybe. Then he tried to show that it coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but that’s just wrong, they went extinct — ”

  “You do know that there was a major catastrophic extinction event at the Cambrian-Ordovician transition 488 million years ago?”

  Dumbfounded, Blackett said, “What?”

  “Given your sloppy math, what do you say the chances are that your Moon-Sun equivalence bracketed the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction? Knocked the living hell out of the trilobites, Doc.”

  A surreal quality had entered the conversation. Blackett found it hard to accept that the dog could be a student of ancient geomorphisms. A spinal tremor shook him. So the creature was no ordinary genetically upgraded dog but some manifestation of the entity, the force, the ontological dislocation that had torn away the Moon and the world’s inhabitants, most of them.

  Detesting the note of pleading in his own voice, Blackett uttered a cry of heartfelt petition. He saw Clare roll over, waken from her sun-warmed drowse. “How can I get back there?” he cried. “Send me back! Send us both!”

  Sporky stood up, shook sand from his fur, spraying Blackett with stinging mica.

  “Go on as you began,” the animal said, “and let the Lord be all in all to you.”

  Clouds of uncertainty cleared from Blackett’s mind, as the caustic, acid clouds of Venus had been sucked away and transposed to the relocated Moon. He jumped up, bent, seized the psychiatrist’s hand, hauled her blinking and protesting to her feet.

  “Clare! We must trace out the ceremony of the Great Temple! Here, at the edge of the ocean. I’ve been wasting my time trying this ritual inland. Venus is now a world of great oceans!”

  “Damn it, Robert, let me go, you’re hurting — ”

  But he was hauling her down to the brackish, brine-stinking sea shore. Their parallel footprints wavered, inscribing a semiotics of deliverance. He began to tread out the Petran temple perimeter, starting at the Propylecum, turned a right angle, marched them to the East Excedra and to the very foot of the ancient Cistern. He was traveling backward into archeopsychic time, deeper into those remote, somber half-worlds he had glimpsed in the recuperative paintings of his mad patients.

  “Robert! Robert!”

  They entered the water, which lapped sluggishly at their ankles and calves like the articulate tongue of a dog as large as the world. Blackett gaped. At the edge of sea and sand, great three-lobed arthropods shed water from their shells, moving slowly like enormous wood lice.

  “Trilobites!” Blackett cried. He stared about, hand still firmly clamped on Clare Laing’s. Great green rolling breakers, in the distance, rushed toward shore, broke, foamed and frothed, lifting the ancient animals and tugging at Blackett’s limbs. He tottered forward into the drag of the Venusian ocean, caught himself. He stared over his shoulder at the vast, towering green canopy of trees. Overhead, bracketing the sun, twin crescent moons shone faintly against the purple sky. He looked wildly at his companion and laughed, joyously, then flung his arms about her.

  “Clare,” he cried, alive on Venus, “Clare, we made it!”

  SEVEN YEARS FROM HOME

  Naomi Novik

  Born in New York City, where she still lives with her mystery-editor husband, their family, and six computers, Naomi Novik is a first-generation American who was raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. After doing graduate work in computer science at Columbia University, she participated in the development of the computer game Neverwinter Nights: Shadows of Undrentide, and then decided to try her hand at novels. A good decision! The resultant Temeraire series – consisting of His Majesty’s Dragon, Black PowderWar, The Throne of Jade, Empire of Ivory, and Victory of Eagles – describing an alternate version of the Napoleonic Wars where dragons are used as living weapons, has been phenomenally popular and successful. Her most recent books are a new Temeraire novel, Tongues of Serpents, and a graphic novel, Will Supervillains Be On the Final?

  Here she takes us on an evocative visit to a distant planet of intricate and interlocking biological mysteries, for a harrowing demonstration that it’s unwise to strike at an enemy before you’re sure they can’t strike back. . . .

  Preface

  SEVEN DAYS PASSED for me on my little raft of a ship as I fled Melida; seven years for the rest of the unaccelerated universe. I hoped to be forgotten, a dusty footnote left at the bottom of a page. Instead I came off to trumpets and medals and legal charges, equal doses of acclaim and venom, and I stumbled bewildered through the brassy noise, led first by one and then by another, while my last opportunity to enter any protest against myself escaped.

  Now I desire only to correct the worst of the factual inaccuracies bandied about, so far as my imperfect memory will allow, and to make an offering of my own understanding to that smaller and more sophisticate audience who prefer to shape the world’s opinion rather than be shaped by it.

  I engage not to tire you with a recitation of dates and events and quotations. I do not recall them with any precision myself. But I must warn you that neither have I succumbed to that pathetic and otiose impulse to sanitize the events of the war, or to excuse sins either my own or belonging to others. To do so would be a lie, and on Melida, to tell a lie was an insult more profound than murder.

  I will not see my sisters again, whom I loved. Here we say that one who takes the long midnight voyage has leaped ahead in time, but to me it seems it is they who have traveled on ahead. I can no longer hear their voices when I am awake. I hope this will silence them in the night.

  Ruth Patrona

  Reivaldt, Janvier 32, 4765

  The First Adjustment

  I disembarked at the port of Landfall in the fifth month of 4753. There is such a port on every world where the Confederacy has set its foot but not yet its flag: crowded and dirty and charmless. It was on the Esperigan continent, as the
Melidans would not tolerate the construction of a spaceport in their own territory.

  Ambassador Kostas, my superior, was a man of great authority and presence, two meters tall and solidly built, with a jovial handshake, high intelligence, and very little patience for fools; that I was likely to be relegated to this category was evident on our first meeting. He disliked my assignment to begin with. He thought well of the Esperigans; he moved in their society as easily as he did in our own, and would have called one or two of their senior ministers his personal friends, if only such a gesture were not highly unprofessional. He recognized his duty, and on an abstract intellectual level the potential value of the Melidans, but they revolted him, and he would have been glad to find me of like mind, ready to draw a line through their name and give them up as a bad cause.

  A few moments’ conversation was sufficient to disabuse him of this hope. I wish to attest that he did not allow the disappointment to in any way alter the performance of his duty, and he could not have objected with more vigor to my project of proceeding at once to the Melidan continent, to his mind a suicidal act.

  In the end he chose not to stop me. I am sorry if he later regretted that, as seems likely. I took full advantage of the weight of my arrival. Five years had gone by on my homeworld of Terce since I had embarked, and there is a certain moral force to having sacrificed a former life for the one unknown. I had observed it often with new arrivals on Terce: their first requests were rarely refused even when foolish, as they often were. I was of course quite sure my own were eminently sensible.

  “We will find you a guide,” he said finally, yielding, and all the machinery of the Confederacy began to turn to my desire, a heady sensation.