The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  God will give me strength. Medora puts her hand against her chest, pressing the hidden crucifix against her skin. Even if I am damned, let me help these in need.

  In the past, she was always so weak and useless, going to her hated aunt—and to the woman who is both her cousin and her half-sister, Ada, Countess of Lovelace—for handouts, in desperation. But now, in the modest vineyard, she no longer exists in the eyes of English (or European) high society. The sins of her parents are no longer public gossip: they are between her and God.

  For Medora’s mother was Augusta Byron—the woman after whom Augusta Ada Byron, now the Countess of Lovelace, was named—and everyone knows, though no one says, that Augusta’s own brother, the famous, devil-driven poet, was the unacknowledged father of her bastard girl-child.

  It was Ada who arranged for Medora’s relocation to this remote place. And now, since she sent this new child to be raised forever in secret, there has been no contact at all with England.

  I pray to God that it remains so.

  Here in southern France, Medora is known as the Widow Calzonni. Four-year-old Jean-Pierre, asleep upstairs, is supposed to be the son she bore to a dead fictitious husband; Maria was his wet-nurse.

  Will they ever tell Jean-Pierre of his true parents? That his mother was Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, while his father was Dr. Crosse, son of the man said to have created life from base matter?

  It is a decision Medora has not yet made.

  “I dreamed of Aldo.” Alicia places both hands on her swollen womb. “He was bouncing our daughter on his knee, and she was laughing.”

  “A sign from Providence.” Maria crosses herself.

  But, in the event, it will be two years before they see Aldo again, although his child will indeed be a daughter.

  He will appear in the courtyard, riding bare-back upon a weary half-starved horse. With his right leg shattered, he will be a changed man at first: bitter, given to drunken rages. But later, bolstered by the sight of his daughter’s beauty, his natural optimism will reassert itself.

  By the time of his death, his little empire of olive groves and vineyards will be prosperous indeed. Those riches will remain until the eve of World War II, when disagreements with the local fascisti will cause everything to be lost.

  But now, from the village church, the Angelus bell rings out.

  “Time, my sisters”—Medora hands out well-worn missals—“to pray.”

  SANTA MONICA, 2024

  Arm in arm, Gus and Ives strolled slowly along the boardwalk. Late afternoon, with the surf rolling in below, pale seagulls gliding overhead. Salt tang upon the air; the fresh sea breeze washing over their tanned faces.

  “You know”—Gus stopped, let go of Ives, leaned over the balustrade, and pointed downwards—“I lost my virginity right about there.”

  “Never.” Shaking with gentle laughter, Ives looked over. “After dark, I hope.”

  “Oh, yeah. With a nice post-doc, since you wouldn’t oblige.”

  “Right. I can still see the damp spot.”

  “Ho, ho.”

  They were celebrating, in a fashion: a deliberate way of experiencing today’s events as a positive step forwards. For Ives had come home last night to an empty apartment. Not even a note from his departed lover, Raoul: just empty closets and missing cash. And invective scrawled in toothpaste across the bathroom mirror.

  And Gus had just finalized her divorce—her first divorce, as Ives ironically (and presciently) labelled it—and seen her ex-husband drive away with his new girlfriend: large-bosomed, wearing a gaudy, shocking pink short dress, and a triumphant smirk upon her face.

  That’ll disappear, Gus reckoned, when she finds out who owns everything.

  For the beach house and Sundriver-coupé skimmer were all hers.

  “We’ve come a long way,” she said. “Hey, that sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?”

  “Both of us.” Ives touched his new moustache: it had come out tinged with grey, and he was not sure whether he would keep it. “I’m glad I met you, sweetheart.”

  “Likewise, dearest. Shall we walk to the end?”

  “Why not?” As they walked on, he began to whistle softly—the Pattern theme, from Amber: The Musical—in counterpoint to the rolling surf.

  “Listen.” Gus squeezed his arm. “Are you doing anything tonight?”

  A middle-aged couple in matching Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts were staring at her and Ives, close enough to hear. She should have known the kind of answer she would get.

  “Wearing you out, all night long. There’s a position I’ve been meaning to—”

  But the couple walked on then, offended, and there was no point in completing the sentence.

  “Oops.” Ives raised his eyebrows. “Was it something I said?”

  “Ha. Is it just me, or are people more repressed than when I was younger? Even here?”

  “Probably.” Ives looked gloomy for a moment, then cheered up, and gestured at the wide ocean. “Look at that. Are we lucky to be alive, or what?”

  “Yes, lucky.” She squeezed his arm again. “Thanks for being alive, my friend.”

  She was nearly 25, and single once more.

  Saved from a big mistake.

  “We’re good for each other.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Their minds were both similar and complementary. When Gus developed the concepts behind Fractal of the Beast, it was Ives who helped brainstorm the network of developing relationships among the characters. She devised the aliens’ forms, he worked out the structure of the shadow organization which fought them.

  She coded the game; he negotiated the license rights.

  From that first product, Ives insisted that he make no money directly. He already had his earnings from lucrative consultancy; she had nothing. “But I’ll be rich,” he said, as they signed a deal giving him 20 percent of earnings from any future games they might develop together. “And so will you.”

  For the first six months, download figures were minimal. Then, in a fit of nostalgia or desperation, one of the big webnets started promoting a remake of the old X-Files shows, and the whole half-forgotten alien-invasion meme had come alive once more, and sales had rocketed.

  Those fictional invaders would prove more important than anyone realized.

  The alien hunt in the game proceeded through many levels. The stories were labyrinthine; a dark and gloomy sense of being watched was present in almost every scene; and there was action, with tricky clues to decipher. Only three players, since the game’s release over four years before, ever reached the final level. (Unless there was someone else, with an offline copy of the game, who never hooked in with the rest of the world.)

  But three users’ systems had automatically mailed her when they deciphered the final puzzle. She sent each of them a rather substantial amount of money, though the game did not advertise the existence of such a prize.

  One of the three was Arvin Rubens, a protege of Danny Hills—and Arvin himself, when still a teenager, had met Hills’s legendary friend, Richard Feynman—and he transferred the money back to her, with a note saying that he had no need for it.

  “I’d only get myself into trouble,” he said, in an updated Feynmanism, “by spending it on wine, women and a new holoterminal.”

  He also invited both her and Ives to come and work with him in Caltech.

  Sunshine, sea. She could train in JKD at the Inosanto Academy. Why would she want to stay in old, cold Oxford?

  “Even if you don’t come,” Rubens had told her, “you’ve already helped my research.”

  For the game’s final solution involved working out the aliens’ true nature. They appeared in many shapes and guises, but the key lay in realizing that each was a different projection of one fractal shape—a single being of dimension 6.66—into ordinary spacetime. Just as, in the Pickover book which Gus had read in childhood, five disconnected blobs appearing on the surface of a Flatland balloon might really be fingerprints from a
single, otherworldly hand.

  And the underlying equation was useful because it came directly out of Gus’s own research at Oxford, into the fundamental nature of the spacetime continuum.

  “Come back to my place,” she said to Ives, as they turned back from the end of the boardwalk. “I’ve got something to show you.”

  “Whoopee.” Then, “House or lab, do you mean?”

  “I mean the lab, darling. Sorry to disappoint.”

  As they passed a row of bright pastel houses, a drunk came shambling up to them, hand outstretched. If you give me money, the display on his write-capable t-shirt read, I’ll spend it on booze. But at least I’m honest.

  “Here you are.”

  Blinking in the sunshine, the drunk stood looking at the money in his hand—from both of them—as Gus and Ives walked on.

  “If we asked him to tell us how he ended up here,” said Ives, “I wonder what he’d say.”

  “Let’s not go there.” Gus used her watch to summon a cab.

  “All right.”

  They waited silently until a vehicle slid to the curb, and its gull-door rose up. Gus slid inside first, announcing their destination loudly to the cab’s AI, knowing that her vestigial accent could cause recognition problems.

  Ives crossed his arms, as the door descended and the street began to slide past.

  “People always draw family trees,” Gus said suddenly, as though she herself had not told him to drop the topic of past lives, “upside down. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “Qué?” Ives spread his hands. “No comprendo. Sorry.”

  “Branching out downwards, with increasing time. But the further back you go, the more ancestors you have.”

  “Right. Ten generations back—”

  “You have 1,024 ancestors.”

  “Assuming no incest. Yee-hah. You know you’re a redneck when—” Ives stopped, looked at her, then patted her hand. “Gus, dear. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s. Life just turns out like that.”

  “I know.”

  But Gus’s sudden wealth had come too late to keep her mother alive. Genetic defect in the heart, the consultant had told her. The neuro-degeneration weakened her, and we still don’t know the cause of that.

  Silent tears, unbidden, tracked down Gus’s cheeks.

  A holo landscape half-filled the room, hanging above the desktop and extending outwards, so that Ives appeared to be standing in the middle of a mountain range.

  “I’ve modified here, and here.” Gus pointed at additional free-floating holovolumes in which equations scrolled. “But it’s little different from the standard mosaic.”

  The landscape represented a simplified three-dimensional spacetime—two spatial, one time—as an overall brane, formed of interwoven sub-branes. Gus pointed at the “zoom” icon. The image expanded until gaps were visible: the holes between linked Planck-length tessellae which form the vacuum itself.

  “I reworked the topology”—Gus smiled—“using not-knots. Remember them?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  The image flipped into a kind of mirror-converse. What had seemed a landscape was now a moirée pattern draped across something else: an underlying jagged sub-landscape which supported reality.

  “Then I got more interested in the continuum’s context than in spacetime itself. Modelling the not-knot—”

  Ives nodded. “The power of metaphor. Well done, dear.”

  Faraday used the notion of fields purely as a metaphor, explaining electromagnetic action at a distance. Yet modern researchers thought of fields as the underlying reality, while everything else—particles, twistors, branes, tessellae—was illusion. Physicists gained the concept “with their mother’s milk,” as Einstein said.

  But Gus’s work changed the metaphor. In her model, the eleven dimensions of realspace were the illusory projection, draped across the underlying fractal context which shapes both this and other universes. She had a name for the context: mu-space.

  “The ultimate continuum,” she said.

  “If you’re right, there’s a Nobel prize in—”

  “And I’ve already sent a signal through it.”

  ASHLEY COMBE, 1852

  Hot flames crackle in the fireplace. A vision of eternal Hell awaiting her? Pain insinuates its claws between the deadening layers of laudanum intoxication: it is the crab, this disease which is killing her.

  “My father—” Ada’s voice is a whimper. “I want to be buried—with him.”

  “Hush, my dear.” A hand pats hers. “That will be taken care of.”

  For a moment, she does not know who this is: William, perhaps Andrew Crosse, or Faraday ... Last week, she believes, her old friend Dickens read to her. To her. Daughter of the great poet, but a strange, maddened fool in her own right.

  I’ve done so much wrong.

  Has Charles Babbage been to see his failing Queen of Engines, his dying Enchantress of Numbers? But it is John Crosse, her former lover, who is with her now. For a time, her old friends were barred from visiting; now it is too late for foolishness.

  It hurts—

  Her body is soaked. William and her sons—her three acknowledged sons—have been pouring cold water upon her bared, so-thin midriff to ease the pain. But for now, only Crosse is here with her.

  “I received a letter,” he whispers. “About ... Jean-Pierre. Our son thrives. He thrives, my love.”

  My son?

  “He has a constant playmate,” Crosse adds. “Daughter of the man who took him abroad. Giuliani? Something like that. Someday, says Medora, they’ll be—”

  The whimpering begins again.

  My son!

  Ada fights the pain, but neither guile nor ferocity will beat this last, implacable foe. Finally, though it takes two more pain-racked days, metastasized cervical can cer shuts down her internal organs one by one, her ragged breath rattles, and she lies still.

  In the fireplace, lowering flames sputter. Grey ash spills upon the floor.

  It was perhaps a mesmeric demonstration, at a soirée held on her 26th birthday, which opened the Pandora’s box of Ada’s mind, released the dark spirit which could never be contained again. She blamed that experiment—undertaken for sensation’s sake—and her own impetuous nature for all that followed. Equations burned, pure thoughts soared, but her inner drives would always deny her peace.

  Years earlier, her father’s body, with massive pageantry, was conveyed by carriage, drawn by six black steeds, through London’s streets (which were thronged with onlookers), and laid to rest in the family vault. Ada’s own funeral is more modest; her narrow corpse travels by modern train, black smoke billowing in lieu of stallion’s manes.

  Finally, she lies interred beside the father she was not allowed to know.

  Crosse, meanwhile, crouches beneath his mantelpiece, burning, one by one, every letter he received from the woman he loved, and every note from the forgotten half-sister entrusted with raising their secret child: the son he will never see.

  SANTA MONICA, 2024

  That night, her demonstration seemed nothing special. Gus shone red laser light into her kludged lab-bench setup—draining power from the campus mesoreactor: she would get complaints—where the beam simply disappeared.

  But, at the far end of the half-lit lab, a red spot glowed in mid-air.

  To an onlooker, it would have seemed the simplest of holograms. Ives whistled as he examined the apparatus; whatever the underlying mechanism, the results were spectacular. Red light shone into nothingness, reappeared some seven yards away. He realized, though it would take decades for other minds to catch up all the way with his intuition, that this simple demonstration transformed everything.

  Shortly before dawn, they were back at the beach, sitting upon damp sand, breathing in the ocean air. Stars still glittered overhead, though dark-green painted the horizon behind them.

  “We’re going to get there.” Ives, craning back, stared straight up. “Thanks to you.”

&nbs
p; “I hope so.”

  They stayed there until the rising sun draped orange fire across steel-grey waves, lighting the warm salt fluid which gave birth to life, splashing endlessly against the shore.

  HIGH EARTH ORBIT, 2102

  Sapphire, wreathed in soft cotton. The entire world lies beneath her: a jewel upon black velvet.

  So wonderful.

  Over her right shoulder floats the tiny biographer-globe, recording everything except what’s important: her thoughts and feelings. The orbital station’s view-bubble is reserved just for her.

  If I’d listened to what everyone knew was “right,” I wouldn’t be here.

  Gus has overridden both lawyers’ and medics’ wishes many times. (“There’s no such thing, as escape velocity,” she told them weeks before. “Not with continuous thrust. I’ll use a slow-shuttle. Perfectly safe.”) The occasional lie will not hurt them: she came up fast.

  They don’t have her perspective on the world.

  After all this time.

  Seventy-eight too-short years have passed since her discovery. Lightspeed spinglobes, forming stasis fields within, were created 120 years after Einstein’s blistering insights into the relativistic nature of spacetime. Her own research (she does not consider herself in Einstein’s league) has taken this long to come to technological fruition.

  “Two minutes, ma’am.” A respectful voice in her earpiece.

  Wealth comes from her corporations, more than intellectual endeavours. One of her companies owns the patent for this bubble’s material: a transparent paramagnetic ceramic. She has always invested ten percent of income, given ten percent away (to children’s foundations, mainly) and wisely spent the rest.

  But none of it had meaning ...

  Her own researchers, at her insistence, use her as a guinea pig, for telomere replenishment and femtocytic re-engineering: for every life-extending treatment which looks likely to work. Equally importantly, she practices Yang-style t’ai chi every morning. Gus refuses to die too soon.