The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  Huh. Only one other parent: Kai. I wonder if that's just coincidence, or if the chimp drew too many conclusions from our torrid little fuckfest back in the Cyg Rift. Doesn't matter. He's as much yours as mine, Kai, time to step up to the plate, time to—

  Oh shit. Oh no. Please no.

  (There are rules. And there are risks.)

  Three builds back, it says. Kai and Connie. Both of them. One airlock jammed, the next too far away along Eri's hull, a hail-Mary emergency crawl between. They made it back inside but not before the blue-shifted background cooked them in their suits. They kept breathing for hours afterwards, talked and moved and cried as if they were still alive, while their insides broke down and bled out.

  There were two others awake that shift, two others left to clean up the mess. Ishmael, and—

  "Um, you said—"

  "You fucker!" I leap up and hit my son hard in the face, ten seconds' heartbreak with ten million years' denial raging behind it. I feel teeth give way behind his lips. He goes over backwards, eyes wide as telescopes, the blood already blooming on his mouth.

  "Said I could come back—!" he squeals, scrambling backwards along the deck.

  "He was your fucking father! You knew, you were there! He died right in front of you and you didn't even tell me!"

  "I—I—"

  "Why didn't you tell me, you asshole? The chimp told you to lie, is that it? Did you—"

  "Thought you knew!" he cries, "Why wouldn't you know?"

  My rage vanishes like air through a breach. I sag back into the 'pod, face in hands.

  "Right there in the log," he whimpers. "All along. Nobody hid it. How could you not know?"

  "I did," I admit dully. "Or I—I mean . . . "

  I mean I didn't know, but it's not a surprise, not really, not down deep. You just—stop looking, after a while.

  There are rules.

  "Never even asked," my son says softly. "How they were doing."

  I raise my eyes. Dix regards me wide-eyed from across the room, backed up against the wall, too scared to risk bolting past me to the door. "What are you doing here?" I ask tiredly.

  His voice catches. He has to try twice: "You said I could come back. If I burned out my link . . . "

  "You burned out your link."

  He gulps and nods. He wipes blood with the back of his hand.

  "What did the chimp say about that?"

  "He said—it said it was okay," Dix says, in such a transparent attempt to suck up that I actually believe, in that instant, that he might really be on his own.

  "So you asked its permission." He begins to nod, but I can see the tell in his face: "Don't bullshit me, Dix."

  "He—actually suggested it."

  "I see."

  "So we could talk," Dix adds.

  "What do you want to talk about?"

  He looks at the floor and shrugs.

  I stand and walk towards him. He tenses but I shake my head, spread my hands. "It's okay. It's okay." I lean back against the wall and slide down until I'm beside him on the deck.

  We just sit there for a while.

  "It's been so long," I say at last.

  He looks at me, uncomprehending. What does long even mean, out here?

  I try again. "They say there's no such thing as altruism, you know?"

  His eyes blank for an instant, and grow panicky, and I know that he's just tried to ping his link for a definition and come up blank. So we are alone. "Altruism," I explain. "Unselfishness. Doing something that costs you but helps someone else." He seems to get it. "They say every selfless act ultimately comes down to manipulation or kin-selection or reciprocity or something, but they're wrong. I could—"

  I close my eyes. This is harder than I expected.

  "I could have been happy just knowing that Kai was okay, that Connie was happy. Even if it didn't benefit me one whit, even if it cost me, even if there was no chance I'd ever see either of them again. Almost any price would be worth it, just to know they were okay.

  "Just to believe they were . . . "

  So you haven't seen her for the past five builds. So he hasn't drawn your shift since Sagittarius. They're just sleeping. Maybe next time.

  "So you don't check," Dix says slowly. Blood bubbles on his lower lip; he doesn't seem to notice.

  "We don't check." Only I did, and now they're gone. They're both gone. Except for those little cannibalized nucleotides the chimp recycled into this defective and maladapted son of mine. We're the only warm-blooded creatures for a thousand lightyears, and I am so very lonely.

  "I'm sorry," I whisper, and lean forward, and lick the gore from his bruised and bloody lips.

  Back on Earth—back when there was an Earth—there were these little animals called cats. I had one for a while. Sometimes I'd watch him sleep for hours: paws and whiskers and ears all twitching madly as he chased imaginary prey across whatever landscapes his sleeping brain conjured up.

  My son looks like that when the chimp worms its way into his dreams.

  It's almost too literal for metaphor: the cable runs into his head like some kind of parasite, feeding through old-fashioned fiberop now that the wireless option's been burned away. Or force-feeding, I suppose; the poison flows into Dix's head, not out of it.

  I shouldn't be here. Didn't I just throw a tantrum over the violation of my own privacy? (Just. Twelve lightdays ago. Everything's relative.) And yet I can see no privacy here for Dix to lose: no decorations on the walls, no artwork or hobbies, no wraparound console. The sex toys ubiquitous in every suite sit unused on their shelves; I'd have assumed he was on antilibinals if recent experience hadn't proven otherwise.

  What am I doing? Is this some kind of perverted mothering instinct, some vestigial expression of a Pleistocene maternal subroutine? Am I that much of a robot, has my brain stem sent me here to guard my child?

  To guard my mate?

  Lover or larva, it hardly matters: his quarters are an empty shell, there's nothing of Dix in here. That's just his abandoned body lying there in the pseudopod, fingers twitching, eyes flickering beneath closed lids in vicarious response to wherever his mind has gone.

  They don't know I'm here. The chimp doesn't know because we burned out its prying eyes a billion years ago, and my son doesn't know I'm here because––well, because for him, right now, there is no here.

  What am I supposed to make of you, Dix? None of this makes sense. Even your body language looks like you grew it in a vat—but I'm far from the first human being you've seen. You grew up in good company, with people I know, people I trust. Trusted. How did you end up on the other side? How did they let you slip away?

  And why didn't they warn me about you?

  Yes, there are rules. There is the threat of enemy surveillance during long dead nights, the threat of—other losses. But this is unprecedented. Surely someone could have left something, some clue buried in a metaphor too subtle for the simpleminded to decode . . .

  I'd give a lot to tap into that pipe, to see what you're seeing now. Can't risk it, of course; I'd give myself away the moment I tried to sample anything except the basic baud, and—

  —Wait a second—

  That baud rate's way too low. That's not even enough for hi-res graphics, let alone tactile and olfac. You're embedded in a wireframe world at best.

  And yet, look at you go. The fingers, the eyes—like a cat, dreaming of mice and apple pies. Like me, replaying the long-lost oceans and mountaintops of Earth before I learned that living in the past was just another way of dying in the present. The bit rate says this is barely even a test pattern; the body says you're immersed in a whole other world. How has that machine tricked you into treating such thin gruel as a feast?

  Why would it even want to? Data are better grasped when they can be grasped, and tasted, and heard; our brains are built for far richer nuance than splines and scatterplots. The driest technical briefings are more sensual than this. Why settle for stick-figures when you can paint in oils and hologra
ms?

  Why does anyone simplify anything? To reduce the variable set. To manage the unmanageable.

  Kai and Connie. Now there were a couple of tangled, unmanageable datasets. Before the accident. Before the scenario simplified.

  Someone should have warned me about you, Dix.

  Maybe someone tried.

  And so it comes to pass that my son leaves the nest, encases himself in a beetle carapace and goes walkabout. He is not alone; one of the chimp's teleops accompanies him out on Eri's hull, lest he lose his footing and fall back into the starry past.

  Maybe this will never be more than a drill, maybe this scenario—catastrophic control-systems failure, the chimp and its backups offline, all maintenance tasks suddenly thrown onto shoulders of flesh and blood—is a dress rehearsal for a crisis that never happens. But even the unlikeliest scenario approaches certainty over the life of a universe; so we go through the motions. We practice. We hold our breath and dip outside. We're on a tight deadline: even armored, moving at this speed the blueshifted background rad would cook us in hours.

  Worlds have lived and died since I last used the pickup in my suite. "Chimp."

  "Here as always, Sunday." Smooth, and glib, and friendly. The easy rhythm of the practiced psychopath.

  "I know what you're doing."

  "I don't understand."

  "You think I don't see what's going on? You're building the next release. You're getting too much grief from the old guard so you're starting from scratch with people who don't remember the old days. People you've, you've simplified."

  The chimp says nothing. The drone's feed shows Dix clambering across a jumbled terrain of basalt and metal matrix composites.

  "But you can't raise a human child, not on your own." I know it tried: there's no record of Dix anywhere on the crew manifest until his mid-teens, when he just showed up one day and nobody asked about it because nobody ever . . .

  "Look what you've made of him. He's great at conditional If/Thens. Can't be beat on number-crunching and Do loops. But he can't think. Can't make the simplest intuitive jumps. You're like one of those—" I remember an Earthly myth, from the days when reading did not seem like such an obscene waste of lifespan—"one of those wolves, trying to raise a Human child. You can teach him how to move around on hands and knees, you can teach him about pack dynamics, but you can't teach him how to walk on his hind legs or talk or be human because you're too fucking stupid, Chimp, and you finally realized it. And that's why you threw him at me. You think I can fix him for you."

  I take a breath, and a gambit.

  "But he's nothing to me. You understand? He's worse than nothing, he's a liability. He's a spy, he's a spastic waste of O2. Give me one reason why I shouldn't just lock him out there until he cooks."

  "You're his mother," the chimp says, because the chimp has read all about kin selection and is too stupid for nuance.

  "You're an idiot."

  "You love him."

  "No." An icy lump forms in my chest. My mouth makes words; they come out measured and inflectionless. "I can't love anyone, you brain-dead machine. That's why I'm out here. Do you really think they'd gamble your precious never-ending mission on little glass dolls that needed to bond."

  "You love him."

  "I can kill him any time I want. And that's exactly what I'll do if you don't move the gate."

  "I'd stop you," the chimp says mildly.

  "That's easy enough. Just move the gate and we both get what we want. Or you can dig in your heels and try to reconcile your need for a mother's touch with my sworn intention of breaking the little fucker's neck. We've got a long trip ahead of us, chimp. And you might find I'm not quite as easy to cut out of the equation as Kai and Connie."

  "You cannot end the mission," it says, almost gently. "You tried that already."

  "This isn't about ending the mission. This is only about slowing it down a little. Your optimal scenario's off the table. The only way that gate's going to get finished now is by saving the Island, or killing your prototype. Your call."

  The cost-benefit's pretty simple. The chimp could solve it in an instant. But still it says nothing. The silence stretches. It's looking for some other option, I bet. It's trying to find a workaround. It's questioning the very premises of the scenario, trying to decide if I mean what I'm saying, if all its book-learning about mother love could really be so far off-base. Maybe it's plumbing historical intrafamilial murder rates, looking for a loophole. And there may be one, for all I know. But the chimp isn't me, it's a simpler system trying to figure out a smarter one, and that gives me the edge.

  "You would owe me," it says at last.

  I almost burst out laughing. "What?"

  "Or I will tell Dixon that you threatened to kill him."

  "Go ahead."

  "You don't want him to know."

  "I don't care whether he knows or not. What, you think he'll try and kill me back? You think I'll lose his love?" I linger on the last word, stretch it out to show how ludicrous it is.

  "You'll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here."

  "Oh, right. Trust. The very fucking foundation of this mission."

  The chimp says nothing.

  "For the sake of argument," I say after a while, "suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?"

  "A favor," the chimp replies. "To be repaid in future."

  My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.

  We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps towards us in the stop-motion increments of a life's moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling each other into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer.

  And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works, and what doesn't. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.

  But I believe in the Island, because I don't have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can't help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.

  I believe in the Island. I've gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.

  I may yet.

  In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.

  Final approach.

  Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerising infinite regress of bullseyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.

  Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair—if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—we will be dead. Before we know it.

  Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically-displaced mass.

  I turn to the drone's-eye view relayed from up ahead. It's a window into history—even now, there's a timelag of several minutes—but past and present race closer to con
vergence with every corsec. The newly-minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, re-enlist them for the next build—but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it's cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.

  A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

  At least we've spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

  I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds. Angels do not speak to ants.

  Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri's incidental time machine barely looks into the past any more, I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.

  Tactical beeps at us. "Getting a signal," Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the Tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thankyou, perhaps? A cure for heat death? But—

  "It's ahead of us," Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

  Two minutes.

  "Miscalculated somehow," Dix whispers. "Didn't move the gate far enough."

  "We did," I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

  "Still in front of us! Look at the sun!"

  "Look at the signal," I tell him.

  Because it's nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we've followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It's almost—random, somehow. It's spur-of-the-moment, it's panicky. It's the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.