The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  This hellish vision was held out to me as an inducement! Yes, Cameron – I was being offered the rare and unthinkable privilege of joining the ranks of warriors in this conflict that even now shakes the universe; of joining it centuries or millennia before the human race rises to that challenge itself. I would join it as a mind: my brain patterns copied and transmitted across space to some fearsome new embodiment, my present body discarded as a husk. And if I refused, I would be cast aside with contempt. The picture that came before me – whether from my own mind, or from that of the bizarre visage before me – was of the scattered bodies in the pit.

  With every fibre of my being, and regardless of consequence, I screamed my refusal. Death itself was infinitely preferable to that infinite conflict.

  I was pulled upward so violently that my arms almost dislocated. The blue light faded, blackness enveloped me, and then the bright triangle loomed. I hurtled through it and fell with great force, face down in the mud. The wind was knocked out of me. I gasped, choked, and lifted my head painfully up, to find myself staring into the sightless eyes of one of the recent dead, the camp labourers. I screamed again, scrambled to my feet, and clawed my way up the crumbling side of the pit. For a minute I stood quite alone.

  Then another body hurtled from the aperture, and behaved exactly as I had done, including the scream. But Lysenko had my outstretched hand to grasp his wrist as he struggled up.

  “Were you pulled in after me?” I asked.

  Lysenko shook his head. “I rushed to try to pull you back.”

  “You’re a brave man,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Not brave enough for what I found in there.”

  “You saw it?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. He shuddered. “Before that Valhalla, I would choose the hell of the priests.”

  “What we saw,” I said, “is entirely compatible with materialism. That’s what’s so terrifying.”

  Lysenko clutched at my lapels. “No, not materialism! Mechanism! Man must fight that!”

  “Fight it . . . endlessly?”

  His lips narrowed. He turned away.

  “Marchenko lied to us,” he said.

  “What?”

  Lysenko nodded downward at the nearest bodies. “That tale of his – these men were not sent into this pit here, and killed by something lashing out from the . . . device. These men are miners. They entered it exactly as we did, from below.”

  “So why are they dead, and we’re alive?” As soon as I asked the question, I knew the answer. Only their bodies were dead. Their minds were on their way to becoming alive somewhere else.

  “You remember the choice you were given,” said Lysenko. “They chose differently.”

  “They chose that—over—?” I jerked a backward thumb.

  “Yes,” said Lysenko. “A different hell.”

  We waited. After a while the truck returned from the camp.

  IV

  Fallout Patterns

  Walker fell silent in the lengthened shadows and thickened smoke.

  “And then what happened?” I asked.

  He knocked out his pipe. “Nothing,” he said. “Truck, plane, Moscow, Aeroflot, London. My feet barely touched the ground. I never went back.”

  “I mean, what happened to the thing you found?”

  “A year or two later, the site was used for an atomic test.”

  “Over a uranium mine?”

  “I believe that was part of the object. To maximize fallout. That particular region is still off limits, I understand.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “You should know better than to ask,” said Walker.

  “So Stalin had your number!”

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “He guessed correctly,” I said. “About your connections.”

  “Oh yes. But leave it at that.” He waved a hand, and began to refill his pipe. “It’s not important.”

  “Why did he send a possible enemy agent, and a charlatan like Lysenko? Why not one of his atomic scientists, like Sakharov?”

  “Sakharov and his colleagues were otherwise engaged,” Walker said. “As for sending me and Lysenko . . . I’ve often wondered about that myself. I suspect he sent me because he wanted the British to know. Perhaps he wanted us worried about worse threats than any that might come from him, and at the same time worried that his scientists could exploit the strange device. Lysenko – well, he was reliable, in his way, and expendable, unlike the real scientists.”

  “Why did you write what you did, about Lysenko?”

  “One.” Walker used his pipe as a gavel on the desk. “I felt some gratitude to him. Two.” He tapped again. “I appreciated the damage he was doing.”

  “To Soviet science?”

  “Yes, and to science generally.” He grinned. “I was what they would call an enemy of progress. I still am. Progress is progress towards the future I saw in that thing. Let it be delayed as long as possible.”

  “But you’ve contributed so much!”

  Walker glanced around at his laden shelves. “To palaeontology. A delightfully useless science. But you may be right. Even the struggle against progress is futile. Natural selection eliminates it. It eliminated Lysenkoism, and it will eliminate my efforts. The process is ineluctable. Don’t you see, Cameron? It is not the failure of progress, the setbacks, that are to be feared. It is progress itself. The most efficient system will win in the end. The most advanced machines. And the machines, when they come into their own, will face the struggle against the other machines that are already out there in the universe. And in that struggle, anything that does not contribute to the struggle – all beauty, all knowledge, all scruple – will be discarded or eliminated. There will be nothing left but the bare will, the will to win, and the means to that end.” He sighed. “In his own mad way, Lysenko understood that. There was a sort of quixotic nobility in his struggle against the logic of evolution, in his belief that man could humanize nature. No. Man is a brief interlude between the prehuman and the posthuman. To protract that interlude is the most we can hope for.”

  He said nothing more, except to tell me that he had recommended my essay for an A++.

  The gesture was kind, considering how I had provoked him, but it did me little good. I failed that year’s examinations. In the summer I worked as a labourer in a nearby botanic garden, and studied hard in the evenings. In this way I made up for lost time in the areas of Zoology in which I had been negligent, and re-sat the examination with success. But I maintained my interest in those theoretical areas which I’d always found most fascinating, and specialized in my final year in evolutionary genetics, to eventually graduate with First Class Honours.

  I told no one of Walker’s story. I did not believe it at the time, and I do not believe it now. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many new facts have been revealed. No nuclear test ever took place at Vorkuta. There was no uranium mine at the place whose location can be deduced from Walker’s account. There is no evidence that Lysenko made any unexplained trips, however brief, to the region. No rumours about a mysterious object found near a labour camp circulate even in that rumour-ridden land. As for Walker himself, his Lysenkoism was indeed about as genuine (“let us say,” as Stalin might have put it) as his Marxism. There is evidence, from other and even more obscure articles of his, and from certain published and unpublished memoirs and reminiscences that I have come across over the years, that he was a Communist between 1948 and 1956. Just how this is connected with his inclusion in the New Year Honours List for 1983 (“For services to knowledge”) I leave for others to speculate. The man is dead.

  I owe to him, however, the interest which I developed in the relationship between, if you like, Darwinian and Lamarckian forms of inheritance. This exists, of course, not in biology but in artificial constructions. More particularly, the possibility of combining genetic algorithms with learned behaviour in neural networks suggested to me some immensely fertile possibilities. Rather t
o the surprise of my colleagues, I chose for my postgraduate research the then newly established field of computer science. There I found my niche, and eventually obtained a lectureship at the University of E——, in the Department of Artificial Intelligence.

  The work is slow, with many setbacks and false starts, but we’re making progress.

  THE MAN WHO BRIDGED THE MIST

  Kij Johnson

  Kij Johnson sold her first short story in 1987, and has subsequently appeared regularly in Asimov’s, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. She won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for her story “Fox Magic”, and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ Crawford Award. Her story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” won the World Fantasy Award in 2009, and she won back-to-back Nebula Awards for her stories “Spar” and “Ponies” in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Her two novels are The Fox Woman and Fudoki, and her stories have been collected in Tales for the Long Rains and At the Mouth of the River of Bees. She is currently a graduate student at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, and is researching a third novel set in Heian Japan, as well as two novels set in Georgian Britain. She maintains a website at www.kijjohnson.com.

  Here’s a long and compelling novella about a man who goes to build a bridge on a strange alien planet, a project that eventually changes everyone’s lives profoundly and in unexpected ways, not least so the life of the bridge-builder himself.

  KIT CAME TO Nearside with two trunks and an oiled-cloth folio full of plans for the bridge across the mist. His trunks lay tumbled like stones at his feet, where the mailcoach guard had dropped them. The folio he held close, away from the drying mud of yesterday’s storm.

  Nearside was small, especially to a man of the capital, where buildings towered seven and eight stories tall, a city so large that even a vigorous walker could not cross in half a day. Here hard-packed dirt roads threaded through irregular spaces scattered with structures and fences. Even the inn was plain, two stories of golden limestone and blue slate tiles, with (he could smell) some sort of animals living behind it. On the sign overhead, a flat, pale blue fish very like a ray curvetted against a black background.

  A brightly dressed woman stood by the inn’s door. Her skin and eyes were pale, almost colorless. “Excuse me,” Kit said. “Where can I find the ferry to take me across the mist?” He could feel himself being weighed, but amiably: a stranger, small and very dark, in gray – a man from the east.

  The woman smiled. “Well, the ferries are both at the upper dock. But I expect what you really want is someone to oar the ferry, yes? Rasali Ferry came over from Farside last night. She’s the one you’ll want to talk to. She spends a lot of time at The Deer’s Heart. But you wouldn’t like The Heart, sir,” she added. “It’s not nearly as nice as The Fish here. Are you looking for a room?”

  “I’ll be staying in Farside tonight,” Kit said apologetically. He didn’t want to seem arrogant. The invisible web of connections he would need for his work started here, with this first impression, with all the first impressions of the next few days.

  “That’s what you think,” the woman said. “I’m guessing it’ll be a day or two, or more, before Rasali goes back. Valo Ferry might, but he doesn’t cross so often.”

  “I could buy out the trip’s fares, if that’s why she’s waiting.”

  “It’s not that,” the woman said. “She won’t cross the mist ’til she’s ready. Until it tells her she can go, if you follow me. But you can ask, I suppose.”

  Kit didn’t follow, but he nodded anyway. “Where’s The Deer’s Heart?”

  She pointed. “Left, then right, then down by the little boatyard.” “Thank you,” Kit said. “May I leave my trunks here until I work things out with her?”

  “We always stow for travelers.” The woman grinned. “And cater to them, too, when they find out there’s no way across the mist today.”

  The Deer’s Heart was smaller than The Fish, and livelier. At midday the oak-shaded tables in the beer garden beside the inn were clustered with light-skinned people in brilliant clothes, drinking and tossing comments over the low fence into the boatyard next door, where, half lost in steam, a youth and two women bent planks to form the hull of a small flat-bellied boat. When Kit spoke to a man carrying two mugs of something that looked like mud and smelled of yeast, the man gestured at the yard with his chin. “Ferrys are over there. Rasali’s the one in red,” he said as he walked away.

  “The one in red” was tall, her skin as pale as that of the rest of the locals, with a black braid so long that she had looped it around her neck to keep it out of the way. Her shoulders flexed in the sunlight as she and the youth forced a curved plank to take the skeletal hull’s shape. The other woman, slightly shorter, with the ash-blonde hair so common here, forced an augur through the plank and into a rib, then hammered a peg into the hole she’d made. After three pegs, the boatwrights straightened. The plank held. Strong, Kit thought; I wonder if I can get them for the bridge?

  “Rasali!” a voice bellowed, almost in Kit’s ear. “Man here’s looking for you.” Kit turned in time to see the man with the mugs gesturing, again with his chin. He sighed and walked to the waist-high fence. The boatwrights stopped to drink from blueware bowls before the one in red and the youth came over.

  “I’m Rasali Ferry of Farside,” the woman said. Her voice was softer and higher than he had expected of a woman as strong as she, with the fluid vowels of the local accent. She nodded to the boy beside her: “Valo Ferry of Farside, my brother’s eldest.” Valo was more a young man than a boy, lighter-haired than Rasali and slightly taller. They had the same heavy eyebrows and direct amber eyes.

  “Kit Meinem of Atyar,” Kit said.

  Valo asked, “What sort of name is Meinem? It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “In the capital, we take our names differently than you.”

  “Oh, like Jenner Ellar.” Valo nodded. “I guessed you were from the capital – your clothes and your skin.”

  Rasali said, “What can we do for you, Kit Meinem of Atyar?”

  “I need to get to Farside today,” Kit said.

  Rasali shook her head. “I can’t take you. I just got here, and it’s too soon. Perhaps Valo?”

  The youth tipped his head to one side, his expression suddenly abstract, as though he were listening to something too faint to hear clearly. He shook his head. “No, not today.”

  “I can buy out the fares, if that helps. It’s Jenner Ellar I am here to see.”

  Valo looked interested but said, “No,” to Rasali, and she added, “What’s so important that it can’t wait a few days?”

  Better now than later, Kit thought. “I am replacing Teniant Planner as the lead engineer and architect for construction of the bridge over the mist. We will start work again as soon as I’ve reviewed everything. And had a chance to talk to Jenner.” He watched their faces.

  Rasali said, “It’s been a year since Teniant died – I was starting to think Empire had forgotten all about us, and your deliveries would be here ’til the iron rusted away.”

  “Jenner Ellar’s not taking over?” Valo asked, frowning.

  “The new Department of Roads cartel is in my name,” Kit said, “but I hope Jenner will remain as my second. You can see why I would like to meet him as soon as is possible, of course. He will—”

  Valo burst out, “You’re going to take over from Jenner, after he’s worked so hard on this? And what about us? What about our work?” His cheeks were flushed an angry red. How do they conceal anything with skin like that? Kit thought.

  “Valo,” Rasali said, a warning tone in her voice. Flushing darker still, the youth turned and strode away. Rasali snorted but said only: “Boys. He likes Jenner, and he has issues about the bridge, anyway.”

  That was worth addressing. Later. “So, what will it take to get you to carry me across the mist, Rasali Ferry of Farside? The project will pay anything reasonable.”

&
nbsp; “I cannot,” she said. “Not today, not tomorrow. You’ll have to wait.”

  “Why?” Kit asked: reasonably enough, he thought, but she eyed him for a long moment, as if deciding whether to be annoyed.

  “Have you gone across mist before?” she said at last.

  “Of course.”

  “Not the river,” she said.

  “Not the river,” he agreed. “It’s a quarter mile across here, yes?”

  “Oh, yes.” She smiled suddenly: white even teeth and warmth like sunlight in her eyes. “Let’s go down, and perhaps I can explain things better there.” She jumped the fence with a single powerful motion, landing beside him to a chorus of cheers and shouts from the inn garden’s patrons. She gave an exaggerated bow, then gestured to Kit to follow her. She was well liked, clearly. Her opinion would matter.

  The boatyard was heavily shaded by low-hanging oaks and chestnuts, and bounded on the east by an open-walled shelter filled with barrels and stacks of lumber. Rasali waved at the third boat-maker, who was still putting her tools away. “Tilisk Boatwright of Nearside. My brother’s wife,” she said to Kit. “She makes skiffs with us, but she won’t ferry. She’s not born to it as Valo and I are.”

  “Where’s your brother?” Kit asked.

  “Dead,” Rasali said, and lengthened her stride.

  They walked a few streets over and then climbed a long, even ridge perhaps eighty feet high, too regular to be natural. A levee, Kit thought, and distracted himself from the steep path by estimating the volume of earth and the labor that had been required to build it. Decades, perhaps, but how long ago? How long was it? The levee was treeless. The only feature was a slender wood tower hung with flags. It was probably for signaling across the mist to Farside, since it appeared too fragile for anything else. They had storms out here, Kit knew; there’d been one the night before, that had left the path muddy. How often was the tower struck by lightning?