The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  The trees stood like attentive gods, their faces so high above her she could not even hear the leaves rustle.

  Dharthi forced herself to turn away from the trees, at last, and begin examining the structures. There were dozens of them – hundreds – sculpted out of the same translucent, mysterious, impervious material as all of the ruins in Aphrodite. But this was six, ten times the scale of any such ruin. Maybe vaster. She needed a team. She needed a mapping expedition. She needed a base camp much closer to this. She needed to give the site a name –

  She needed to get back to work.

  She remembered, then, to start documenting. The structures – she could not say, of course, which were habitations, which served other purposes – or even if the aboriginals had used the same sorts of divisions of usage that human beings did – were of a variety of sizes and heights. They were all designed as arcs or crescents, however – singly, in series, or in several cases as a sort of stepped spectacular with each lower, smaller level fitting inside the curve of a higher, larger one. Several had obvious access points, open to the air, and Dharthi reminded herself sternly that going inside unprepared was not just a bad idea because of risk to herself, but because she might disturb the evidence.

  She clenched her good hand and stayed outside.

  Her shell had been recording, of course – now she began to narrate, and to satlink the files home. No fanfare, just an upload. Data and more data – and the soothing knowledge that while she was hogging her allocated bandwidth to send, nobody could call her to ask questions, or congratulate, or –

  Nobody except Kraken, with whom she was entangled for life.

  “Hey,” her partner said in her head. “You found it.”

  “I found it,” Dharthi said, pausing the narration but not the load. There was plenty of visual, olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic data being sent even without her voice.

  “How does it feel to be vindicated?”

  She could hear the throb of Kraken’s pride in her mental voice. She tried not to let it make her feel patronized. Kraken did not mean to sound parental, proprietary. That was Dharthi’s own baggage.

  “Vindicated?” She looked back over her shoulder. The valley was quiet and dark. A fumarole vented with a rushing hiss and a curve of wind brought the scent of sulfur to sting her eyes.

  “Famous?”

  “Famous!?”

  “Hell, Terran-famous. The homeworld is going to hear about this in oh, about five minutes, given light lag – unless somebody who’s got an entangled partner back there shares sooner. You’ve just made the biggest Cytherean archaeological discovery in the past hundred days, love. And probably the next hundred. You are not going to have much of a challenge getting allocations now.”

  “I –”

  “You worked hard for it.”

  “It feels like...” Dharthi picked at the bridge of her nose with a thumbnail.

  The skin was peeling off in flakes: too much time in her shell was wreaking havoc with the natural oil balance of her skin. “It feels like I should be figuring out the next thing.”

  “The next thing,” Kraken said. “How about coming home to me? Have you proven yourself to yourself yet?”

  Dharthi shrugged. She felt like a petulant child. She knew she was acting like one. “How about to you?”

  “I never doubted you. You had nothing to prove to me. The self-sufficiency thing is your pathology, love, not mine. I love you as you are, not because I think I can make you perfect. I just wish you could see your strengths as well as you see your flaws – one second, bit of a squall up ahead – I’m back.”

  “Are you on an airship?” Was she coming here?

  “Just an airjeep.”

  Relief and a stab of disappointment. You wouldn’t get from Aphrodite to Ishtar in an AJ.

  Well, Dharthi thought. Looks like I might be walking home.

  And when she got there? Well, she wasn’t quite ready to ask Kraken for help yet.

  She would stay, she decided, two more sleeps. That would still give her time to get back to basecamp before nightfall, and it wasn’t as if her arm could get any more messed up between now and then. She was turning in a slow circle, contemplating where to sling her cocoon – the branches were really too high to be convenient – when the unmistakable low hum of an aircar broke the rustling silence of the enormous trees.

  It dropped through the canopy, polished copper belly reflecting a lensed fisheye of forest, and settled down ten meters from Dharthi. Smiling, frowning, biting her lip, she went to meet it. The upper half was black hydrophobic polymer: she’d gotten a lift in one just like it at Ishtar basecamp before she set out.

  The hatch opened. In the cramped space within, Kraken sat behind the control board. She half-rose, crouched under the low roof, came to the hatch, held out one her right hand, reaching down to Dharthi. Dharthi looked at Kraken’s hand, and Kraken sheepishly switched it for the other one. The left one, which Dharthi could take without strain.

  “So I was going to take you to get your arm looked at,” Kraken said.

  “You spent your allocations –”

  Kraken shrugged. “Gonna send me away?”

  “This time,” she said, “... no.”

  Kraken wiggled her fingers.

  Dharthi took it, stepped up into the GEV, realized how exhausted she was as she settled back in a chair and suddenly could not lift her head without the assistance of her shell. She wondered if she should have hugged Kraken. She realized that she was sad that Kraken hadn’t tried to hug her. But, well. The shell was sort of in the way.

  Resuming her chair, Kraken fixed her eyes on the forward screen. “Hey. You did it.”

  “Hey. I did.” She wished she felt it. Maybe she was too tired.

  Maybe Kraken was right, and Dharthi should see about working on that.

  Her eyes dragged shut. So heavy. The soft motion of the aircar lulled her. Its soundproofing had degraded, but even the noise wouldn’t be enough to keep her awake. Was this what safe felt like? “Something else.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “If you don’t mind, I was thinking of naming a tree after you.”

  “That’s good,” Kraken said. “I was thinking of naming a kid after you.”

  Dharthi grinned without opening her eyes. “We should use my Y chromosome. Color blindness on the X.”

  “Ehn. Ys are half atrophied already. We’ll just use two Xs,” Kraken said decisively. “Maybe we’ll get a tetrachromat.”

  THE MACHINE STARTS

  Greg bear

  GREG BEAR (www.gregbear.com) is one of the most important science fiction writers of the past forty years. He is the multiple Hugo and Nebula awardwinning author of more than 35 novels, including Blood Music; Eon and sequels Eternity and Legacy; The Forge of God and sequel Anvil of Stars; Queen of Angels and sequel /Slant; Moving Mars; Darwin’s Radio and sequel Darwin’s Children; City at the End of Time, War Dogs and most recent novel, Killing Titan. Bear’s short fiction has won or been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards on multiple occasions, and has been collected in The Wind From a Burning Woman, Tangents, The Collected Stories of Greg Bear, and other volumes. His major stories include “Petra”, “Hardfought”, “Blood Music” and “Tangents”. His complete short fiction will be published in three volumes in 2016. Bear is the father of two young writers, Erik and Alexandra, and is married to Astrid Anderson Bear. The Bears make their home in Seattle.

  THOUGH I AM otherwise relentlessly normal, I have one peculiarity: I get along well only with people who are smarter than me. My wife, for example, is smarter than me. I am happy in my marriage.

  In my present employment I should be very happy, because everyone around me is smarter and often at pains to prove that fact. It is my duty to reinforce their positive opinions, but at the same time to exert, now and then, small course corrections. Nothing shores up a fine self-opinion better than success.

  So far, five years into our project,
we had known nothing but failure.

  The first thing you saw as you approached the perimeter site was the warehouse, large, square, and painted a brilliant titanium white. Surrounded by two high hurricane fences topped with glittering rolls of razor wire, it looked like the kind of place where you might store an A-bomb. Access to the site was on a strictly controlled, need-to-go basis. Parking was several hundred yards away, on a small lot covered with pulverized rubber. You were told not to drive a loud car, not to cut out your exhaust or rev your engine, not to sing or even shout, upon penalty of being fired.

  On the morning of the test, I drove into the lot and parked my white VW, old and shabby. I had owned it since college. My colleagues favored Teslas or Mercedes-Benzes. I liked my Rabbit.

  In the lane between the fences, small robots rolled night and day – nonlethal, but capable of shooting barb-tipped wires that carried a discouraging shock. The robots inspected me with their tiny black eyes and, bored by my familiarity, rolled away.

  The warehouse was made entirely of wood, no nails or brackets. It covered half an acre and sat on a thick pad of cement reinforced with plastic rebar and mesh. Beneath the pad lay a series of empty vaults that discouraged ground water, rodents, or anything else that might disturb the peace. No pipes or wires were allowed, except for those that fed directly into the warehouse.

  After I passed through the fences, a single thick oak door gave access to the warehouse interior. I was scheduled to meet Hugh Tiflin, project manager and chief researcher. He was always prompt, but I was deliberately early. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the architecture, the atmosphere, the implications – to feel the place again.

  I summoned up my image of Alan Turing. It is my habit to sometimes talk to the founder of modern computing, hoping for a reflection of his peculiar, sharp wisdom. What we were in the final stages of creating (we all hoped they were the final stages!) could transform the human race. A machine that would end all our secrets. What would Mr. Turing think of such a New Machine?

  He never answered, of course. But then, so far, neither did our machine. I entered the security cage and listened to questions spoken by a soft, automated voice – personal questions that were sometimes embarrassing, sometimes sad, sometimes funny. I answered each of them truthfully enough and the cage opened.

  Next to the cage, a small illuminated counter revealed the number of my recent visits: 4. In the last month, I had only been here twice. The counter reset every day. I take it as a personal affront when automated systems make mistakes.

  A soft rain began to fall on the high, hollow roof, adding to my damp mood and the penetrating chill in the building. The warehouse was dark, except for a light in the far corner that glowed like a pale sun. I approached a low wood rail and stood in the long, curved shadow of a big black sphere, bloated and shiny, rising on tiny fins almost to the ceiling, silent but for the low hum of the power that kept it alive. A bank of heavily insulated pipes passed under the rails and through the wooden wall to dedicated generators and a refrigeration complex outside.

  Early in its development, Tiflin had named the sphere Magic 8 Ball, soon shortened to 8 Ball because, as Tiflin insisted, there was nothing magical about our machine – just good solid physics. It retained a window on one side, however, like the old toy. Tiflin had asked it to be painted on after we finished the first phase.

  The window’s message: Try Again Later.

  Reading that again, I experienced an odd sort of dizzy spell, as if there were too many of me in one place – a symptom of stress and hard work, I presumed.

  8 Ball was our third major attempt at a fully operational and manageable quantum computer. No doubt you’ve heard something about quantum computing. The underlying ideas are spooky and new, so a lot of what you’ve heard is bound to be wrong. A quantum computer works not with bits but with qubits, or quantum bits. A classic bit, like a light switch, is either on or off, one or zero. A quantum bit can be kept in superposition, neither on nor off, nor both, nor neither – like Schrödinger’s cat until you open its very special box.

  Off in far corners, two other big spheres peered from the shadows: 8 Ball’s defunct siblings, Mega and Mini. Mini was ten meters across and had once contained 128 qubits. In its scavenged condition – white insulation peeling, surrounded by a tangle of pipes and wires leading nowhere – it resembled a giant golf ball. We had turned it off – killed it – three years ago. Standing in the opposite corner, Mega was eleven meters wide and resembled a moldy Florida orange. It had contained 256 qubits, all niobium or aluminum circuits bathed in liquid helium. It had sort of worked, for a time – and then it didn’t. Thumbs-down on Mega.

  Filling the expanded north end of the building, 8 Ball was twelve meters in diameter and contained 1024 qubits, each a two-dimensional electron cloud clamped between plates of gallium arsenide and cooled to just a femto-fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The qubits lined the sphere’s penultimate outer layer, and each one communicated, if that’s the right word, through braided world lines across a central vacuum to an entangled twin on the other side of the sphere. Entanglement meant the paired qubits duplicated each other’s quantum state. If one was changed or measured, the other would reflect that interference, no matter how far apart they were. They would be superposed.

  Each electron cloud became a new variety of matter, known as an anyon, confirmation of the existence of which we were particularly proud. The qubits’ spooky vacuum jive would, we hoped, help make 8 Ball the most stable quantum computer yet.

  But despite a promising beginning, 8 Ball refused to work as designed. Sampling its output caused a catastrophic early collapse of the program strings, which themselves seemed to have been turned into useless nonsense. That had forced us to take a radically new approach. It seemed very possible that if this effort failed, 8 Ball would soon join Mega and Mini as little more than another archaeological curiosity.

  Tiflin had asked me to meet him at the warehouse to help check out the newest part of our installation. I was about to stoop to look underneath the black sphere when I noticed a small yellow piece of paper stuck to the rail -- a Post-it Note. Other than me, nobody in the lab used Post-its, and I only used them in my office. I pulled up the note. Written on one side in my squared-off printing was, Don’t try to find me. I did not remember either writing this message or sticking it on the rail. Maybe I had simply forgotten. Maybe someone was messing with me and had put it there to screw with my day. There were plenty of smart-asses in our division capable of playing mind games. Work had been painfully difficult the last few weeks. Pressure on our entire team was intense.

  I tried to think back and retrace my steps. Parking, walking, answering the absurdly personal questions, my little talk with Mr. Turing –

  Plus the dizzy spell.

  I had never written a note.

  Outside the warehouse, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by feet on gravel. A key clicked in the outer lock. Tiflin entered the security cage and muttered his own answers to the cage’s questions. The inner gate opened. He seemed even more distracted than I was. As he approached 8 Ball, he patted all of his pockets – shirt, pants, leather jacket – as if he’d forgotten something.

  I crumpled the Post-it into a ball and hid it in my pants pocket.

  When Tiflin came within a few steps, he glanced up at me, startled, and stopped patting, head cocked like a cat considering where to lick next. He broke that off with a long wink, meant to reassure me that Dr. Hugh Tiflin was indeed still in the building, then smoothed his hands down his coat.

  At forty-two, Tiflin was a slender man whose upper torso was taller than average and whose legs were shorter. His neck was pale and swanlike, with distinct cords and veins that revealed frequent changes of emotion. His head was large and well-formed, with a chiseled chin and handsome eagle nose, topped by ebullient wavy brown hair. He wore a signature quilted black leather jacket over a cotton shirt, usually green or pink – green today – tucked into cotton-
duck hiking pants. His running shoes were cheap and gray. He replaced them every two or three weeks, but somehow they always looked dirty. He was eldest in our team – older than me by a year. He was a genius, of course, or I’d never have worked with him.

  “Good morning, Bose. How’s the scint?” he asked.

  Four weeks ago, he had decided to eavesdrop on the qubits’ secret communications using a scintillation detector scavenged from a defense division CubeSat. The detector had originally been designed to monitor radiation from orbit over Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan. Tiflin had personally tuned the device to detect disturbances in 8 Ball’s vacuum – bursts of virtual radiation provoked by the passage of our qubits’ entangled photons. New stuff, amazing stuff. Who knew that a vacuum could act like a cloud chamber in a science museum? Tiflin knew – or knew people who knew. That’s why he was Tiflin.

  I stooped again to peer at 8 Ball’s lower belly. A wide concrete platform between the main supports – the fins – steadied a stainless steel tube that poked up through 8 Ball’s shell and deep into its central vacuum. “Rudely intrusive,” I said.

  Tiflin chuckled. “Right up the ass. We need to wake up this beast.” He looked for himself. “Seems good,” he said, sucking on his cheeks. “Should help us track our progress.” He rose, gripped the rail with both hands, and looked on 8 Ball with pique mixed with adoration. I understood completely. I, too, regarded the black sphere with both love and dread. 8 Ball was beyond doubt the strangest human construct on Earth, and if Tiflin’s plans were all that he hinted, it was about to go through a sea change of procedure and programming.

  “We’re due to meet with Cate in thirty minutes,” he said, again patting his pockets. Was he looking for his phone? A pen? A lighter? “Dieter’s got the strings ready to load. Need a ride?”

  I didn’t, but the VW could wait. Tiflin and I needed time to reintegrate our states, to normalize. He sounded reasonably cheerful, but I knew the stress he was under. For a year, tough minds whose job it was to decide which funds should go where had been circling our project like sharks. They were far from convinced 8 Ball was in the division’s best interests. Other groups, however, were still making plans that assumed our success. Both were pressing hard on Tiflin.