The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  Bombs, though, are different.

  In space, bombs can be much, much more effective.

  If placed just right, a simple three-pound bomb can destroy an entire colony. Open it to the sterilizing vacuum of the endless night. And ten thousand people dead – a whole community wiped clean in a single explosive decompression.

  He’d seen that once, a long time ago, when this war first began. Seen the bodies floating frozen inside a ruptured hab, the only survivors a lucky few who scrambled into pressure suits. A lucky few like him.

  Because of a three-pound bomb.

  Multiply it by a hundred colonies and a dozen years. Three airless worlds. A fight over territory, culture, religion. The things man has always fought over.

  Humans are as they have always been. In space, though, the cost of zealotry is higher.

  A thousand years ago, nations bankrupted themselves to raise armies. It cost a soldier to kill a soldier. Then came gunpowder, technology, increased population densities – gradually leveraging the cost of death along a sliding scale of labor and raw materials, until finally three pounds of basic chemistry had the power to erase whole swaths of society. Ever more effortless murder, the final statistical flat-line in the falling price of destruction.

  “What is your name?” the old man asked him.

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “We need the names of the others.”

  “I will tell you nothing.”

  “That’s all we need, just the names. Nothing more. We can do the rest.”

  The boy stayed silent.

  They watched the viewscreen. The black hole grew. The expanding darkness compressed the surrounding star field. The old man checked his instruments.

  “We’re traveling at half the speed of light,” he said. “We have two hours, our time, until we approach the Schwarzschild radius.”

  “If you were going to kill me, there are easier ways than this.”

  “Easier ways, yes.”

  “I’m worth nothing to you dead.”

  “Nor alive.”

  The silence drew out between them.

  “Do you know what a black hole is?” The old man asked. “What it is, really?”

  The young man’s face was stone.

  “It is a side-effect. It is a byproduct of the laws of the universe. You can’t have the universe as we know it and not have black holes. Scientists predicted them before they ever found one.”

  “You’re wasting your time.”

  The old man gestured toward the screen. “This is not just a black hole, though, not really. But they predicted this, too.”

  “Do you think you can frighten me with this game?”

  “I’m not trying to frighten you.”

  “It makes no sense to kill me like this. You’d be killing yourself. You must have a family.”

  “I did. Two daughters.”

  “You intend to change course.”

  “No.”

  “This ship has value. Even your life must be worth something, if not to yourself then at least to those whose orders you follow. Why sacrifice both a ship and a man in order to kill one enemy?”

  “I was a mathematician before your war made soldiers of mathematicians. There are variables here that you don’t understand.” The old man pointed at the screen again. His voice went soft. “It is beautiful, is it not?”

  The boy ignored him. “Or perhaps this ship has an escape pod,” the boy continued. “Perhaps you will be saved while I die. But you’d still be wasting a ship.”

  “I cannot escape. The line that pulls us can’t be broken. Even now, the gravity draws us in. By the time we approach the Schwarzschild radius, we’ll be traveling at nearly the speed of light. We will share the same fate, you and I.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The old man shrugged. “You don’t have to believe. You have merely to witness.”

  “This doesn’t make sense.”

  “You think it has to?”

  “Shut up. I don’t want to hear more from a Godless tathuun.”

  “Godless? Why do you assume I am Godless?”

  “Because if you believed in God, you would not do this thing.”

  “You are wrong,” the old man said. “I do believe in God.”

  “Then you will receive judgment for your sins.”

  “No,” he said. “I will not.”

  Over the next several hours, the black hole swelled to fill the screen. The stars along its rim stretched and blurred, torturing the sky into a new configuration.

  The boy sat in silence.

  The old man checked his instruments. “We cross the Schwarzschild radius in six minutes.”

  “Is that when we die?”

  “Nothing so simple as that.”

  “You talk in circles.”

  The old mathematician picked up the scalpel. He touched his finger to the razor tip. “What happens after we cross that radius isn’t the opposite of existence, but its inverse.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “So now you ask the questions? Give me a name, and I’ll answer any question you like.”

  “Why would I give you names? So they can find themselves in chairs like this?”

  The old man shook his head. “You are stubborn, I can see that; so I will give you this for free. The Schwarzschild radius is the innermost orbit beyond which all things must fall inward – even communications signals. This is important to you for this reason: beyond the Schwarzschild radius, asking you questions will serve no purpose, because I will have no way to transmit the information. After that, you will be no use to me at all.”

  “You’re saying we’ll still live once we pass it?”

  “For most black holes, we’d be torn apart long before reaching it. But this is something special. Super-massive, and old as time. For something this size, the tidal forces are more dilute.”

  The image on the screen shifted. The stars flowed in slow-motion as the circular patch of darkness spread. Blackness filled the entire lower portion of the screen.

  “A black hole is a two-dimensional object; there is no inside to enter, no line to cross, because nothing ever truly falls in. At the event horizon, the math of time and space trade positions.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “To distant observers, infalling objects take an infinite period of time to cross the event horizon, simply becoming ever more redshifted as time passes.”

  “More of your circles. Why are you doing this? Why not just kill me?”

  “There are telescopes watching our descent. Recording the footage.”

  “Why?”

  “As warning.”

  “Propaganda, you mean.”

  “To show what will happen to others.”

  “We aren’t afraid to die. Our reward is in the afterlife.”

  The old man shook his head. “As our speed increases, time dilates. The cameras will show that we’ll never actually hit the black hole. We’ll never cross the threshold.”

  The boy’s face showed confusion.

  “You still don’t understand. The line isn’t where we die; it’s where time itself ceases to function – where the universe breaks, all matter and energy coming to a halt, frozen forever on that final mathematical boundary. You will never get your afterlife, not ever. Because you will never die.”

  The boy’s face was blank for a moment, and then his eyes went wide.

  “You don’t fear martyrdom,” the old mathematician gestured to the viewscreen. “So perhaps this.”

  The ship arced closer. Stars streamed around the looming wound in the starfield.

  The old man put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He touched the scalpel to the boy’s throat. “If you tell me the names, I’ll end this quickly, while you still have time. I need the names before we reach the horizon.”

  “So this is what you offer?”

  The old man nodded. “Death.”

  “What did you do to deserve this
mission?”

  “I volunteered.”

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “I’ve been too long at this war. My conscience grows heavy.”

  “But you said you believe in God. You’ll be giving up your afterlife, too.”

  The old man smiled a last smile. “My afterlife would not be so pleasant as yours.”

  “How do you know this is all true? What you said about time. How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen the telescopic images. Previous missions spread out like pearls across the face of the event, trapped in their final asymptotic approach. They are there still. They will always be there.”

  “But how do you know? Maybe it’s just some new propaganda. A lie. Maybe it doesn’t really work that way.”

  “What matters is that this ship will be there for all to see, forever. A warning. Long after both our civilizations have come and gone, we will still be visible. Falling forever.”

  “It could still be false.”

  “But we are good at taking things on faith, you and I. Give me the names.”

  “I can’t.”

  The old man thought of his daughters. One dark-eyed. The other blue. Gone. Because of boys like this boy. But not this boy, he reminded himself.

  The old man looked down at the figure in the chair. He might have been that boy, if circumstances were different. If he’d been raised the way the boy was raised. If he’d seen what he’d seen. The boy was just a pawn in this game.

  As was he.

  “What is death to those who take their next breath in paradise?” the old man asked. “Where is the sacrifice? But this . . .” and the old man gestured to the dark maw growing on the screen. “This will be true martyrdom. When you blow up innocents who don’t believe what you believe, this is what you’re taking away from them. Everything.”

  The boy broke into quiet sobs.

  The horizon approached, a graphic on the screen. One minute remaining.

  “You can still tell me,

  —there is still time.

  —perhaps they are your friends, perhaps your family.

  —do you think they’d protect you?

  —they wouldn’t.

  —we just need names.

  —a few names, and this will all be over. I’ll end it for you before it’s too late.”

  The boy closed his eyes. “I won’t.”

  His daughters. Because of boys like this boy.

  “Why?” the old man asked, honestly confused. “It does not benefit you. You get no paradise.”

  The boy stayed silent.

  “I take your heaven from you,” the old man said. “You receive nothing.”

  Silence.

  “Your loyalty is foolish. Tell me one name, and I will end this.”

  “I will not,” the boy said. There were tears on his cheeks.

  The old mathematician sighed. He’d never expected this.

  “I believe you,” he said, then slashed the boy’s throat.

  A single motion, severing the carotid.

  The boy’s eyes flashed wide in momentary surprise, followed by an emotion more complicated. He slumped forward in his bonds.

  It was over.

  The old man ran a palm over the boy’s eyes, closing them. “May it be what you want it to be,” he said.

  He sat down on the floor against the growing gravity.

  He stared at the screen as the darkness approached.

  The mathematician in him was pleased. A balancing of the equation. “A soldier for a soldier.”

  He thought of his daughters, one brown-eyed, the other blue. He tried to hold their faces in his mind, the final thought that he would think forever.

  Not the reverse of existence, but its inverse.

  And he waited to be right or wrong. To be judged for his sins or not.

  CHIMBWI

  Jim Hawkins

  Jim Hawkins is a “new writer” of an unusual sort, one who made his first sale to New Worlds forty years ago, and didn’t sell another story until placing two in Interzone in 2010. His forty-year hiatus doesn’t seem to have diminished his talents or skills, though, as he demonstrates in the tense story that follows, that sweeps us along with a refugee risking everything to flee from a ruined and war-torn near-future Europe to an Africa grown prosperous and technologically advanced beyond anything known in the Old World he’s left behind. . . .

  A NARROW PLAIN RAN between hills. The grass and small trees were almost colourless in the searing African sunlight. Jason headed across the plain towards a narrow cleft. A group of startled duiker jumped out from behind a bush and escaped up the far hillside into the trees in a series of elegant leaps. He stood, shading his eyes, and watched them, before climbing down the bank into the dried-up bed of the Kalambo River. After a hundred and fifty years the antelope were back.

  Jason walked carefully, avoiding sharp stones. His bare feet were tougher now than they’d ever been, but he still hadn’t developed the iron-hard soles that evolution had provided for and a life of shoe-wearing had made feeble. He’d never been much good at walking on pebbles.

  The sides of the riverbed were the rusty red-brown of laterite, soft and crumbly, rising about ten feet above him on either side. To his left, on the Zambian side, the bank was dark and damp in the shade, but on the right, where it was Tanzania, it was baked hard in the afternoon sun, overhung by thorn trees. The light was intense, almost heavy, and he rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his forearm and wiped it on his grey shorts.

  Where a small stream course met the river he looked up the lowered bank to where the terracotta pantiled roof of the John Desmond Clark Centre was shaded by a grove of eucalyptus trees. A little further down the bank, as if on cue, a lump of flint was exposed near the top of the gully. Jason prised it out and held it in his hand. It was a good axe-head, but not perfect. The strike-plane was ragged. It was a reject. A hundred and sixty thousand years ago an axe maker had thrown it down in disgust. He wondered where archaeologists like Clark would have got to if Stone Age quality control had been a bit more lax. If all these tools had gone out to do their job these sites would never have been found. This was ancient concentrated industrial waste, but more natural, more appropriate in some way, than the devastated spoil heaps of Dagenham and Longbridge, the twisted steel spaghetti of what were once high-speed railway tracks that weaved between the fallen cooling towers of defunct power stations in the ruins of a far-off England.

  The shadows had hard edges, like the flint tool he held as he walked. Fifty yards more and another artefact lay on the riverbed – a flat tin the size of his hand, corroded but intact, its label long gone. He turned it over with his toe: Italian rations from the First World War, washed down from a trench somewhere, possibly still edible after two hundred years, but he didn’t have a can opener, so he’d never know. Still, he bent down, picked it up and put it in his pocket.

  On either side of the river the elegant, impossibly thin towers of solar fusion reactors reached two hundred feet above the scrubby savannah trees, occasionally flashing blinding stars of reflected sunlight, strange flashing flowers reaching for the wispy floating thermal clouds.

  The noise of the cicadas came and went like the sound of a vast orchestra of string-less violins. And then the call of something, perhaps a dog, perhaps a hyena, echoed from afar.

  Ahead, the riverbed was beginning to widen, but was still narrow, only about thirty feet from side to side. The soil underfoot was turning to patchy grey rock cut with a channel by millions of years of water flow.

  Jason walked out from the banks of the river to the gorge. Hills reached up on either side. The valley opened up in front of him as he walked, sweat soaking his shirt, his feet hot, and went to the lip of the falls. The river stopped here on a knife edge and fell a thousand feet to the gorge floor below. He was standing at the narrowest point of a sheer-sided gulf. A few billion years ago the land had dropped to make the vast cleft of the Great Rift Valley. He st
ood on the edge of the rock. Marabou storks circled above the jumbled rocks of the river course below on wide dark wings. He was so high that these huge birds were flying beneath him. In the far distance, he knew, lay Lake Tanganyika, but the heat haze caused the landscape to fade out into indistinct brightness and blur.

  He stood on the edge of the rock shelf and looked down. Suddenly he almost wanted to leap out and soar with the marabou if only for a few seconds. It would be easier to fall than to resist. A marabou wheeled close to the cliff as though challenging him to fly. There was no voice in his head, but a force that welled up from the ancient parts of him pushing him towards the drop and the silence, and then something clamped the force, stifled it.

  He stepped back a few feet, took the ration tin from his pocket and hurled it out over the lip. It arced steeply downwards, and then a quick laser light flashed from above him and to the left. The ration tin vapourised and the marabou scattered down the valley into the blue green mist.

  Jason looked up the path into the hills on his left. Miriam Bwalya stood, wrapped in a brightly-coloured chikwembe, her Bemba skin so black it had midnight blue highlights. She was completely still, watching. How many seconds passed in this subjective moment? Time stopped for him as he stood between the lip of the dried-up waterfall, the thousand foot drop, and the unmoving form of the woman with the cloth wrapped around her and a laser pistol in her hand.

  He walked slowly up the gravel path until he came to her and went down on one knee, held his hands together in front of him, and said “Mwapolenipo baMiriam.”

  “Mwapoleni mukwai,” she said. At last, after a few seconds, but many subjective centuries, he lifted his face and looked into her brown eyes.

  “Yes or no?” she asked. He nodded. “Eya mukwai.”

  She turned and walked up the steep path. Jason stood and followed her. In the clearing halfway up the hill, where an area had been flattened for tourist buses, was a small flyer, hovering on an anti-gravity field that Jason, despite his physics PhD and maybe a hundred research papers, found technically inexplicable. It looked like an ivory thigh bone, but he knew they could make it in whatever shape they felt like. Around the flyer there were groups of people, black, silent, and an old man sitting in a chair slowly waving a fly-whisk in front of his face. Jason walked slowly towards the Chief and went again on bended knee, looking only downwards to the gravel chips, suddenly aware of the loudness of the cicadas and the distant call of the storks.