The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “No, it’s not hard.” Understanding came easily – it was emotion that was hard. Elisa searched for melancholy, or grief. All she could find was discomfort in the harsh heat of the sun. “I’d like to believe that mine died heroically, that somehow a bit of my personality lived in them.”

  “Defenders have no choice. They fight, they return to the nest. They’re designed to have no choice – is that heroic?”

  “You’re a cold-hearted old soldier, Grandfather. They’re not machines. You told me that they can feel.”

  He nodded. “Of course they feel. They feel love for us. Why else would they die for us?”

  Grandfather returned the binoculars to the bag by his feet; when he straightened up, he was holding a small radio or communicator. He extended an aerial and tapped a fingertip on the keys. “Sometimes I wonder who the real defenders are,” he said.

  “What do you mean? You made them. You should know.”

  “And who are the real demons. . . .”

  “Whoever they are, one day you’ll find them and destroy them – right?”

  He smiled at her. “This is their world. Humans are the intruders here.”

  “What are you doing?” she said, pointing a finger at the radio in his hand.

  “Fishing.”

  The sun burned down upon Elisa’s brown shoulders; her pink vest offered little protection. She didn’t want to be here anymore.

  “I’ve seen enough, Grandfather. I want to go back.”

  “Just a little while . . . I’m almost done.”

  “What if the defenders loved themselves more than they loved us?”

  “You’re a strange one, Elisa. Full of questions. No one has asked me such questions before.”

  “Maybe I’m not like everyone else.”

  “They have to love us more than life. Our survival here depends on it. But I’m no fool. I have planned for surprises.”

  “I think I don’t have it in me to be a martyr.”

  “You’ll have time to . . .”

  His words fell away as the sea heaved and the boat rocked as something passed beneath them. Elisa peered into the water, but only glimpsed a darkness through the flashes of reflected sun. A moment of quiet and trepidation, and then a huge shape burst from the water three hundred meters distant. Out of a fountain of spray, a monstrous creature took to the air. It turned in their direction as a wave rushed toward the boat.

  “A defender!” Elisa screamed as the dinghy tossed and threw her about. She clamped her fingers to the seat.

  The creature climbed above them on black reptilian wings, then swooped and circled low, its scythelike claws slicing the wave tops. The massive head retained human characteristics, but exaggerated and drawn forward into a spike-tipped snout. The chitin-plated neck seemed unfeasibly slender, but allowed for maneuverability in the air and for slashing strokes with the serrated tusks. A magnificent beast that had proved the equal of the self-destructive recklessness of the brown-furred demons.

  “It’s one of mine!” Elisa cried. “It must be!”

  The defender rose and blocked out the sun for a moment, sweeping the air back to gain height, then banked and returned to dive toward them.

  “Yes, it’s one of mine,” she said. “And it must be smarter than the rest. It found out how to hide and survive.”

  The defender was calling – a howl as mournful as a lost child’s – as it swept so low over them that Elisa’s hair was blown about her face. She caught the creature’s seaweed scent. “It’s because of me, isn’t it, Grandfather? My defender is different. It has my spirit. It made its own choices. It’s stronger, brighter . . . It could become a leader.”

  The defender came around again and glided overhead, and there came a crack and a thud and a large smouldering blue-sky hole appeared in the creature’s body . . . and it screamed and reeled and plunged from the sky . . . crashed into the water some distance away.

  Elisa cried and grasped the side of the rocking boat. “Grandfather . . .” She saw him push down the aerial. “You killed it! It was you. Why? Why did you kill it?”

  She watched as the great body was sucked beneath the surface. First whirlpools, then cold boiling, then calmness. This was terrible. A tragedy. She could have had the best defender ever!

  “Grandfather?”

  He dropped the transmitter into the bag and stared down at the water. She could not see his face. Though she spoke to him, again and again, he would not reply. Slowly, the boat ceased its agitated motion.

  The sun crawled across the sky.

  Finally, Grandfather started the engine and directed the dinghy toward Homeport.

  MAYFLOWER II

  Stephen Baxter

  Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century, British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for more than a decade now with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the cutting edge of science that bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.

  Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. In 2001, he appeared on the Final Hugo Ballot twice, and won both Asimov’s Readers Award and Analog’s Analytical Laboratory Award, one of the few writers ever to win both awards in the same year. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche – a sequel to The Time Machine – The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, and (in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke) The Light of Other Days, as well as the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and Hunters of Pangaea. His most recent books are a chapbook novella, Mayflower II, and a new novel, Exultant. Coming up is another novel written in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey.

  Here he gives us ringside seats for the painful birth of a new civilization – one destined to spend the next few thousand years confined within four walls.

  Author’s Note:

  My proceeds from this work will be donated to the Asian Elephant Survival Appeal, of which I am a patron.

  Once elephants could be found throughout Asia, India, Africa, and North America. Their remains, with tusks like sculptures and teeth like carbstones, are still dug out of the ground in Los Angeles and London. Today all the elephants are gone, save only three species. But now human population pressure is endangering one of these: the Asian (or Indian) elephants. It is highly likely they will be gone in decades.

  The North of England Zoological Society, a nonprofit conservation organization, is spearheading an international program to sustain the Asian elephant in its native ranges, as well as to establish a reserve breeding population in European zoos. Preserving the elephant will bring the additional benefit of preserving the wider ecosystem it inhabits, while respecting the economic and cultural interests of neighboring human populations.

  For more details or to make a donation please contact:

  Asian Elephant Survival Appeal

  Chester Zoo

  FREEPOST

  Chester CH2 1LH

  UK

  or visit www.chesterzoo.co.uk.

  T WENTY DAYS BEFORE the end of his world, Rusel heard that he was to be saved.

  “Rusel. Rusel . . .” The whispered voice was insistent. Rusel rolled over, trying to shake off the effects of his usual mild sedative. His pillow was soaked with sweat. The roo
m responded to his movement, and soft light coalesced around him.

  His brother’s face was hovering in the air at the side of his bed. Diluc was grinning widely.

  “Lethe,” Rusel said hoarsely. “You ugly bastard.”

  “You’re just jealous,” Diluc said. The Virtual made his face look even wider than usual, his nose more prominent. “I’m sorry to wake you. But I just heard – you need to know – ”

  “Know what?”

  “Blen showed up in the infirmary.” Blen was the nanochemist assigned to Ship Three. “Get this: he has a heart murmur.” Diluc’s grin returned.

  Rusel frowned. “For that you woke me up? Poor Blen.”

  “It’s not that serious. But, Rus – it’s congenital.”

  The sedative dulled Rusel’s thinking, and it took him a moment to figure it out.

  The five Ships were to evacuate the last, brightest hopes of Port Sol from the path of the incoming peril. But they were slower-than-light transports, and would take many centuries to reach their destinations. Only the healthiest, in body and genome, could be allowed aboard a generation starship. And if Blen had a hereditary heart condition –

  “He’s off the Ship,” Rusel breathed.

  “And that means you’re aboard, brother. You’re the second-best nanochemist on this lump of ice. You won’t be here when the Coalition arrives. You’re going to live!”

  Rusel lay back on his crushed pillow. He felt numb.

  Diluc kept talking. “Did you know that families are illegal under the Coalition? Their citizens are born in tanks. Just the fact of our relationship would doom us, Rus! I’m trying to fix a transfer from Five to Three. If we’re together, that’s something, isn’t it? I know it’s going to be hard, Rus. But we can help each other. We can get through this . . .”

  All Rusel could think about was Lora, whom he would have to leave behind.

  The next morning Rusel arranged to meet Lora in the Forest of Ancestors. He took a bubble-wheel surface transport, and set out early.

  Port Sol was a ball of friable ice and rock a couple of hundred kilometers across. It was actually a planetesimal, an unfinished remnant of the formation of Sol system. Inhabited for millennia, its surface was heavily worked, quarried and pitted, and littered by abandoned towns. But throughout Port Sol’s long human usage some areas had been kept undamaged, and as he drove Rusel kept to the marked track, to avoid crushing the delicate sculptures of frost that had coalesced here over four billion years.

  This was the very edge of Sol system. The sky was a dome of stars, with the ragged glow of the Galaxy hurled casually across its equator. Set in that diffuse glow was the sun, the brightest star, bright enough to cast shadows, but so remote it was a mere pinpoint. Around the sun Rusel could make out a tiny puddle of light: That was the inner system, the disc of worlds, moons, asteroids, dust and other debris that had been the arena of all human history before the first interplanetary voyages some three thousand years earlier, and still the home of all but an invisible fraction of the human race. This was a time of turmoil, and today humans were fighting and dying, their triumphs and terror invisible. Even now, from out of that pale glow, a punitive fleet was ploughing toward Port Sol.

  And visible beyond the close horizon of the ice moon was a squat cylinder, a misty sketch in the faint rectilinear sunlight. That was Ship Three, preparing for its leap into the greater dark.

  The whole situation was an unwelcome consequence of the liberation of Earth from the alien Qax.

  The Coalition of Interim Governance was the new, ideologically pure and viciously determined authority that had emerged from the chaos of a newly freed Earth. Relentless, intolerant, unforgiving, the Coalition was already burning its way out through the worlds and moons of Sol system. When the Coalition ships came, the best you could hope for was that your community would be broken up, your equipment impounded, and that you would be hauled back to a prison camp on Earth or its Moon for “reconditioning.”

  But if you were found to be harboring anyone who had collaborated with the hated Qax, the penalties were much more extreme. The word Rusel had heard was “resurfacing.”

  Now the Coalition had turned its attention to Port Sol. This ice moon was governed by five Pharaohs, who had indeed collaborated with the Qax – though they described it as “mediating the effects of the occupation for the benefit of mankind” – and they had received antiageing treatments as a reward. So Port Sol was a “nest of illegal immortals and collaborators,” the Coalition said, which its troops had been dispatched to “clean out.” They seemed indifferent to the fact that in addition to the Pharaohs, some fifty thousand people called Port Sol home.

  The Pharaohs had a deep network of spies on Earth, and they had had some warning. As the colonists had only the lightest battery of antiquated weaponry – indeed the whole moon, a refuge from the occupation, was somewhat low-tech – nobody expected to be able to resist. But there was a way out.

  Five mighty Ships were hastily thrown together. On each Ship, captained by a Pharaoh, a couple of hundred people, selected for their health and skill sets, would be taken away: a total of a thousand, perhaps, out of a population of fifty thousand, saved from the incoming disaster. There was no faster-than-light technology on Port Sol; these would be generation starships. But perhaps that was well: between the stars there would be room to hide.

  All of these mighty historical forces had now focused down on Rusel’s life, and they threatened to tear him away from his lover.

  Rusel was an able nanochemist, he was the right age, and his health and pedigree were immaculate. But unlike his brother he hadn’t been good enough to win the one-in-fifty lottery and make the cut to get a place on the Ships. He was twenty-eight years old: not a good age to die. But he had accepted his fate, so he believed – for Lora, his lover, had no hope of a place. At twenty she was a student, a promising Virtual idealist but without the mature skills to have a chance of competing. So at least he would die with her, which seemed to him some consolation. He was honest with himself; he had never been sure if this serenity would have survived the appearance of the Coalition ships in Port Sol’s dark sky – and now, it seemed, he was never going to find out.

  Lora was waiting for him at the Forest of Ancestors. They met on the surface, embracing stiffly through their skinsuits. Then they set up a dome-tent and crawled through its collapsible airlock.

  In the Forest’s long shadows, Rusel and Lora made love: at first urgently, and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. In the habs, inertial generators kept the gravity at one-sixth standard, about the same as Earth’s Moon. But there was no gravity control out here in the Forest, and as they clung to each other they drifted in the tent’s cool air, light as dreams.

  Rusel told Lora his news.

  Lora was slim, delicate. The population of this low-gravity moon tended to tallness and thin bones, but Lora seemed to him more elfin than most, and she had large, dark eyes that always seemed a little unfocussed, as if her attention were somewhere else. It was that sense of other-world fragility that had first attracted Rusel to her, and now he watched her fearfully.

  With blankets bundled over her legs, she took his hand and smiled. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m the one who’s going to live. Why should I be afraid?”

  “You’d accepted dying. Now you’ve got to get used to the idea of living.” She sighed. “It’s just as hard.”

  “And living without you.” He squeezed her hand. “Maybe that’s what scares me most. I’m frightened of losing you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  He gazed out at the silent, watchful shapes of the Ancestors. These “trees,” some three or four meters high, were stumps with “roots” that dug into the icy ground. They were living things, the most advanced members of Port Sol’s low-temperature aboriginal ecology. This was their sessile stage. In their youth, these creatures, called ‘Toolmakers,” were mobile, and were actually intelligent. They would haul th
emselves across Port Sol’s broken ground, seeking a suitable crater slope or ridge face. There they would set down their roots and allow their nervous systems, and their minds, to dissolve, their purposes fulfilled. Rusel wondered what icy dreams might be coursing slowly through their residual minds. They were beyond decisions now; in a way he envied them.

  “Maybe the Coalition will spare the Ancestors.”

  She snorted. “I doubt it. The Coalition only care about humans – and their sort of humans at that.”

  “My family have lived here a long time,” he said. “There’s a story that says we rode out with the first colonizing wave.” It was a legendary time, when the great engineer Michael Poole had come barnstorming all the way to Port Sol to build his great starships.

  She smiled. “Most families have stories like that. After thousands of years, who can tell?”

  “This is my home,” he blurted. “This isn’t just the destruction of us, but of our culture, our heritage. Everything we’ve worked for.”

  “But that’s why you’re so important.” She sat up, letting the blanket fall away, and wrapped her arms around his neck. In Sol’s dim light her eyes were pools of liquid darkness. “You’re the future. The Pharaohs say that in the long run the Coalition will be the death of mankind, not just of us. Somebody has to save our knowledge, our values, for the future.”

  “But you – ” You will be alone, when the Coalition ships descend. Decision sparked. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She pulled back. “What?”

  “I’ve decided. I’ll tell Andres . . . and my brother. I can’t leave here, not without you.”

  “You must,” she said firmly. “You’re the best for the job; believe me, if not the Pharaohs wouldn’t have selected you. So you have to go. It’s your duty.”

  “What human being would run out on those he loved?”

  Her face was set, and she sounded much older than her twenty years. “It would be easier to die. But you must live, live on and on, live on like a machine, until the job is done, and the race is saved.”