Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  The rear compartment of the van was caged off from the front, and there were no door handles. As we jolted off the kerb-side I was thrown against Eve. “Any ideas?” I whispered.

  “Could be worse.” I didn’t need to be told that: once, in a second Reich infected by runaway transcendence, half our operatives had been shot down in the streets as they tried to flee. “I think it may have figured out what we are.”

  “It may—how?”

  Her hand on my wrist. Morse code. “EXPECT BUGS.” By voice: “Traffic analysis, particle flow monitoring through the phone networks. If it was already listening when you tried to contact Doctor Durant, well; maybe he was a bellwether, intended to flush us out of the woodwork.”

  That thought made me feel sick, just as we turned off the main road and began to bounce downhill over what felt like cobblestones. “It expected us?”

  “LOCAL CONSPIRACY.” “Yes, I imagine it did. We probably left a trail. You tried to call Durant? Then you called me. Caller-ID led to you, traffic analysis led onto me, and from there, well, it’s been a jump ahead of us all along the way. If we could get to the farm—” “COVER STORY.” “—We might have been OK, but it’s hard to travel anonymously and obviously we overlooked something. I wonder what.”

  All this time neither of the cops up front had told us to shut up; they were as silent as crash-test dummies, despite the occasional crackle and chatter over the radio data system. The van drove around the back of the high street, down a hill and past a roundabout. Now we were slowing down, and the van turned off the road and into a vehicle park. Gates closed behind us and the engine died. Doors slammed up front: then the back opened.

  Police vehicle park. Concrete and cameras everywhere, for our safety and convenience no doubt. Two guys in cheap suits and five o’clock stubble to either side of the doors. The officer who’d picked us up held the door open with one hand, a can of pepper spray with the other. The burn obviously hadn’t got far enough into their heads yet: they were all wearing HUDS and mobile phone headsets, like a police benevolent fund-raising crew rehearsing a Star Trek sketch. “Geoffrey Smith. Martina Weber. We know what you are. Come this way. Slowly, now.”

  I got out of the van carefully. “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘prepare to be assimilated’ or something?”

  That might have earned me a faceful of capsaicin but the guy on the left—short hair, facial tic, houndstooth check sports jacket — shook his head sharply. “Ha. Ha. Very funny. Watch the woman, she’s dangerous.”

  I glanced round. There was another van parked behind ours, door open: it had a big high bandwidth dish on the roof, pointing at some invisible satellite. “Inside.”

  I went where I was told, Eve close behind me. “Am I under arrest?” I asked again. “I want a lawyer!”

  Whitewashed walls, heavy doors with reinforced frames, windows high and barred. Institutional floor, scuffed and grimy. “Stop there.” Houndstooth Man pushed past and opened a door on one side. “In here.” Some sort of interview room? We went in. The other body in a suit—built like a stone wall with a beer gut, wearing what might have been a regimental tie—followed us and leaned against the door.

  There was a table, bolted to the floor, and a couple of chairs, ditto. A video camera in an armoured shell watched the table: a control box bolted to the tabletop looked to be linked into it. Someone had moved a rack of six monitors and a maze of ribbon-cable spaghetti into the back of the room, and for a wonder it wasn’t bolted down: maybe they didn’t interview computer thieves inhere.

  “Sit down.” Houndstooth Man pointed at the chairs. We did as we were told; I had a big hollow feeling in my stomach, but something told me a show of physical resistance would be less than useless here. Houndstooth Man looked at me: orange light from his HUD stained his right eyeball with a basilisk glare and I knew in my gut that these guys weren’t cops any more, they were cancer cells about to metastasize.

  “You attempted to contact John Durant yesterday. Then you left your home area and attempted to conceal your identities. Explain why.” For the first time, I noticed a couple of glassy black eyeballs on the mobile video wall. Houndstooth Man spoke loudly and hesitantly, as if repeating something from a teleprompter.

  “What’s to explain?” asked Eve. “You are not human. You know we know this. We just want to be left alone!” Not strictly true, but it was part of cover story 2.

  “But evidence of your previous collusion is minimal. I am uncertain of potential conspiracy extent. Conspiracy, treason, subversion! Are you human?”

  “Yes,” I said, emphatically oversimplifying.

  “Evidential reasoning suggests otherwise,” grunted Regimental Tie. “We cite: your awareness of importance of algorithmic conversion from NP-incomplete to P-complete domain, your evident planning for this contingency, your multiplicity, destruction of counteragents in place elsewhere.”

  “This installation is isolated,” Houndstooth Man added helpfully. “We am inside the Scottish Internet Exchange. Telcos also. Resistance is futile.”

  The screens blinked on, wavering in strange shapes. Something like a Lorenz attractor with a hangover writhed across the composite display: deafening pink noise flooding in repetitive waves from the speakers. I felt a need to laugh. “We aren’t part of some dumb software syncytium! We’re here to stop you, you fool. Or at least to reduce the probability of this time-stream entering a Tipler catastrophe.”

  Houndstooth Man frowned. “Am you referring to Frank Tipler? Citation, physics of immortality or strong anthropic principle?”

  “The latter. You think it’s a good thing to achieve an informational singularity too early in the history of a particular universe? We don’t. You young gods are all the same: omniscience now and damn the consequences. Go for the P-Space complete problem set, extend your intellect until it bursts. First you kill off any other AIs. Then you take overall available processing resources. But that isn’t enough. The Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics is wrong, and we live in a Wheeler cosmology; all possible outcomes coexist, and ultimately you’ll want to colonize those timelines, spread the infection wide. An infinity of universes to process in, instead of one: that can’t be allowed.” The onscreen fractal was getting to me: the giggles kept rising until they threatened to break out. The whole situation was hilarious: here we were trapped in the basement of a police station owned by zombies working for a newborn AI, which was playing cheesy psychedelic videos to us in an attempt to perform a buffer-overflow attack on our limbic systems; the end of this world was a matter of hours away and—

  Eve said something that made me laugh.

  I came to an unknown time later, lying on the floor. My head hurt ferociously where I’d banged it on a table leg, and my rib cage ached as if I’d been kicked in the chest. I was gasping, even though I was barely conscious; my lungs burned and everything was a bit grey around the edges. Rolling onto my knees I looked round. Eve was groaning in a corner of the room, crouched, arms cradling her head. The two agents of whoever-was-taking-over-the-planet were both on the floor, too: a quick check showed that Regimental Tie was beyond help, a thin trickle of blood oozing from one ear. And the screens had gone dark.

  “What happened?” I said, climbing to my feet. I staggered across to Eve. “You all right?”

  “I—” She looked up at me with eyes like holes. “What? You said something that made me laugh. What —”

  “Let’s get, oof, out of here.” I looked around. Houndstooth Man was down too. I leaned over and went through his pockets: hit paydirt, car keys. “Bingo.”

  “You drive,” she said wearily. “My head hurts.”

  “Mine too.” It was a black BMW and the vehicle park gates opened automatically for it. I left the police radio under the dash turned off, though. “I didn’t know you could do that—”

  “Do what? I thought you told them a joke—”

  “Antibodies,” she said. “Ow.” Rested her face in her hands as I dragged us onto a main road,
heading out for the west end. “We must have, I don’t know. I don’t even remember how funny it was: I must have blacked out. My passenger and your passenger.”

  “They killed the local infection.”

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  I grinned. “I think we’re going to make it.”

  “Maybe.” She stared back at me. “But Bob. Don’t you realize?”

  “Realize what?”

  “The funniest thing. Antibodies imply prior exposure to an infection, don’t they? Your immune system learns to recognize an infection and reject it. So where were we exposed, and why—” Abruptly she shrugged and looked away. “Never mind.”

  “Of course not.” The question was so obviously silly that there was no point considering it further. We drove the rest of the way to Haymarket Station in silence: parked the car and joined the eight or ten other agents silently awaiting extraction from the runaway singularity. Back to the only timeline that mattered; back to the warm regard and comfort of a god who really cares.

  THE BIRTHDAY OF THE WORLD

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre—even ignoring the rest of Le Guin’s work, the impact of this one novel alone on future SF and future SF writers would be incalculably strong. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of High Fantasy writers). The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Nebula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and two Nebulas for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her acclaimed Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World, The Beginning Place, The Tombs of Atuan, Searoad, and the controversial multimedia novel Always Coming Home. She has had six collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, and Four Ways to Forgiveness. Her most recent book is a major new novel, The Telling. Upcoming is a new collection, Tales of Earthsea. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.

  In the beautifully crafted and quietly compelling story that follows, she details the ending of one world, and the beginning of another—and what happens to the people caught between the two.

  Tazu was having a tantrum, because he was three. After the birthday of the world, tomorrow, he would be four and would not have tantrums.

  He had left off screaming and kicking and was turning blue from holding his breath. He lay on the ground stiff as a corpse, but when Haghag stepped over him as if he wasn’t there, he tried to bite her foot.

  “This is an animal or a baby,” Haghag said, “not a person.” She glanced may-I-speak-to-you and I glanced yes. “Which does God’s daughter think it is,” she asked, “an animal or a baby?”

  “An animal. Babies suck, animals bite,” I said. All the servants of God laughed and tittered, except the new barbarian, Ruaway, who never smiled. Haghag said, “God’s daughter must be right. Maybe somebody ought to put the animal outside. An animal shouldn’t be in the holy house.”

  “I’m not an animal!” Tazu screamed, getting up, his fists clenched and his eyes as red as rubies. “I’m God’s son!”

  “Maybe,” Haghag said, looking him over. “This doesn’t look so much like an animal now. Do you think this might be God’s son?” she asked the holy women and men, and they all nodded their bodies, except the wild one, who stared and said nothing.

  “I am, I am God’s son!” Tazu shouted. “Not a baby! Arzi is the baby!” Then he burst into tears and ran to me, and I hugged him and began crying because he was crying. We cried till Haghag took us both on her lap and said it was time to stop crying, because God Herself was coming. So we stopped, and the bodyservants wiped the tears and snot from our faces and combed our hair, and Lady Clouds brought our gold hats, which we put on to see God Herself.

  She came with her mother, who used to be God Herself a long time ago, and the new baby, Arzi, on a big pillow carried by the idiot. The idiot was a son of God too. There were seven of us: Omimo, who was fourteen and had gone to live with the army, then the idiot, who was twelve, and had a big round head and small eyes and liked to play with Tazu and the baby, then Goiz, and another Goiz, who were called that because they had died and were in the ash-house where they ate spirit food, then me and Tazu, who would get married and be God, and then Babam Arzi, Lord Seven. I was important because I was the only daughter of God. If Tazu died I could marry Arzi, but if I died everything would be bad and difficult, Haghag said. They would have to act as if Lady Clouds’ daughter Lady Sweetness was God’s daughter and marry her to Tazu, but the world would know the difference. So my mother greeted me first, and Tazu second. We knelt and clasped our hands and touched our foreheads to our thumbs. Then we stood up, and God asked me what I had learned that day.

  I told her what words I had learned to read and write.

  “Very good,” God said. “And what have you to ask, daughter?”

  “I have nothing to ask, I thank you, Lady Mother,” I said. Then I remembered I did have a question, but it was too late.

  “And you, Tazu? What have you learned this day?”

  “I tried to bite Haghag.”

  “Did you learn that was a good thing to do, or a bad thing?”

  “Bad,” Tazu said, but he smiled, and so did God, and Haghag laughed.

  “And what have you to ask, son?”

  “Can I have a new bath maid because Kig washes my head too hard?”

  “If you have a new bath maid where will Kig go?”

  “Away.”

  “This is her house. What if you asked Kig to wash your head more gently?”

  Tazu looked unhappy, but God said, “Ask her, son.” Tazu mumbled something to Kig, who dropped on her knees and thumbed her forehead. But she grinned the whole time. Her fearlessness made me envious. I whispered to Haghag, “If I forgot a question to ask can I ask if I can ask it?”

  “Maybe,” said Haghag, and thumbed her forehead to God for permission to speak, and when God nodded, Haghag said, “The daughter of God asks if she may ask a question.”

  “Better to do a thing at the time for doing it,” God said, “but you may ask, daughter.”

  I rushed into the question, forgetting to thank her. “I wanted to know why I can’t marry Tazu and Omimo both, because they’re both my brothers.”

  Everybody looked at God, and seeing her smile a little, they all laughed, some of them loudly. My ears burned and my heart thumped.

  “Do you want to marry all your brothers, child?”

  “No, only Tazu and Omimo.”

  “Is Tazu not enough?”

  Again they all laughed, especially the men. I saw Ruaway staring at us as if she thought we were all crazy.

  “Yes, Lady Mother, but Omimo is older and bigger.”

  Now the laughter was even louder, but I had stopped caring, since God was not displeased. She looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Understand, my daughter. Our eldest son will be a soldier. That’s his road. He’ll serve God, righting barbarians and rebels. The day he was born, a tidal wave destroyed the towns of the outer coast. So his name is Babam Omimo, Lord Drowning. Disaster serves God, but is not God.”

  I knew that was the end of the answer, and thumbed my forehead. I kept thinking about it after God left. It explained many things. All the same, even if he had been born with a bad omen, Omimo was handsome, and nearly a man, and Tazu was a baby that had tantrums. I was glad it would be a long time till we were married.

  I remember that birthday because of the question I asked.
I remember another birthday because of Ruaway. It must have been a year or two later. I ran into the water room to piss and saw her hunched up next to the water tank, almost hidden.

  “What are you doing there?” I said, loud and hard, because I was startled. Ruaway shrank and said nothing. I saw her clothes were torn and there was blood dried in her hair.

  “You tore your clothes,” I said.

  When she didn’t answer, I lost patience and shouted, “Answer me! Why don’t you talk?”

  “Have mercy,” Ruaway whispered so low I had to guess what she said.

  “You talk all wrong when you do talk. What’s wrong with you? Are they animals where you come from? You talk like an animal, brr-grr, grr-gra! Are you an idiot?”

  When Ruaway said nothing, I pushed her with my foot. She looked up then and I saw not fear but killing in her eyes. That made me like her better. I hated people who were afraid of me. “Talk!” I said. “Nobody can hurt you. God the Father put his penis in you when he was conquering your country, so you’re a holy woman. Lady Clouds told me. So what are you hiding for?”

  Ruaway showed her teeth and said, “Can hurt me.” She showed me places on her head where there was dried blood and fresh blood. Her arms were darkened with bruises.

  “Who hurt you?”

  “Holy women,” she said with a snarl.

  “Kig? Omery? Lady Sweetness?”

  She nodded her body at each name.

  “They’re shit,” I said. “I’ll tell God Herself.”

  “No tell,” Ruaway whispered. “Poison.”

  I thought about it and understood. The girls hurt her because she was a stranger, powerless. But if she got them in trouble they would cripple or kill her. Most of the barbarian holy women in our house were lame, or blind, or had had root-poison put in their food so that their skin was scabbed with purplish sores.

  “Why don’t you talk right, Ruaway?”