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

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Were they sick when they arrived?"

  "No. But they carried the plague bugs. People started dying. They weren't im—"

  "Immune."

  "Immune like the refugees."

  "Why not?"

  "Time goes faster up on the Shelf. Bugs change quickly. You get used to one, but then another comes along."

  "Your understanding is clear."

  "My mother hated you. She was unhappy when you visited me that time, when I was six. She says you meddle in our lives."

  "'Meddle.' We created the Platform, gathered the sentient Buildings. We designed this community. Your life, and the lives of many generations of your ancestors, have been shaped by what we built. We 'meddled' long before you were born."

  "Why?"

  Silence again. "That's too big a question. Ask smaller questions."

  "Why are there so many roads coming in across the Lowland to the Loading Hub?"

  "I think you know the answer to that."

  "Time goes twenty-five times slower down there. It's as if you're trying to feed a city twenty-five times the size."

  "That's right. Now ask about something you don't know."

  He pointed to the lightmoss. "Is this the same stuff as makes the light storms, down on the Lowland?"

  "Yes, it is. That's a good observation. To connect two such apparently disparate phenomena—"

  "I tried to eat the lightmoss. I threw it up. You can't eat the spindlings' straw either. Why?"

  "Because they come from other places. Other worlds than this. Whole other systems of life."

  Telni understood some of this. "People brought them here, and mixed everything up." A thought struck him. "Can spindlings eat lightmoss?"

  "Why is that relevant?"

  "Because if they can it must mean they came from the same other place."

  "You can find that out for yourself."

  He itched to go try the experiment, right now. "Did people make you?"

  "They made our grandfathers, if you like."

  "Were you really weapons?"

  "Not all of us. Such labels are irrelevant now. When human civilizations fell, sentient machines were left to roam, to interact. There was selection, of a brutal sort, as we competed for resources and spare parts. We enjoyed our own long evolution. A man called Bayle mounted an expedition to the Lowland, and found us."

  "You were farming humans. That's what my mother said."

  "It wasn't as simple as that. The interaction with Bayle's scholars led to a new generation with enhanced faculties."

  "What kind of faculties?"

  "Curiosity."

  Telni considered that. "What's special about me? That I might have an Effigy inside me?"

  "Not just that. Your mother rebelled when you were born. That's very rare. The human community here was founded from a pool of scholars, but that was many generations ago. We fear that we may have bred out a certain initiative. That was how you came to our attention, Telni. There may be questions you can answer that we can't. There may be questions you can ask that we can't."

  "Like what?"

  "You tell me."

  He thought. "What are the Formidable Caresses?"

  "The ends of the world. Or at least, of civilization. In the past, and in the future."

  "How does time work?"

  "That's another question you can answer yourself."

  He was mystified. "How?"

  A seam opened up on the Weapon's sleek side, like a wound, revealing a dark interior. Powpy had to push his little hand inside and grope around for something. Despite the Weapon's control Telni could see his revulsion. He drew out something that gleamed, complex. He handed it to Telni.

  Telni turned it over in his hands, fascinated. It was warm. "What is it?"

  "A clock. A precise one. You'll work out what to do with it." The Weapon moved, gliding up another meter into the air. "One more question."

  "Why do I feel . . . sometimes . . . " It was hard to put into words. "Like I should be somewhere else? My mother said everybody feels like that, when they're young. But . . . Is it a stupid question?"

  "No. It is a very important question. But it is one you will have to answer for yourself. We will see you again." It drifted away, two metres up in the air, with the little boy running beneath, like a dog on a long lead. But it paused once more, and the boy turned. "What will you do now?"

  Telni grinned. "Go feed moss to a spindling."

  At twenty-five, Telni was the youngest of the Platform party selected to meet the Natural Philosophers from the Shelf, and MinaAndry, a year or two younger, was the most junior of the visitors from Foro. It was natural they would end up together.

  The formal welcomes were made at the lip of the Platform, under the vast, astonishing bulk of the tethered airship. The Shelf folk looked as if they longed to be away from the edge, and the long drop to the Lowland below. Then the parties broke up for informal discussions and demonstrations. The groups, of fifty or so on each side, were to reassemble for a formal dinner that night in the Hall, the largest and grandest of the Platform's sentient Buildings. Thus the month-long expedition by the Shelf Philosophers would begin to address its goals, the start of a cultural and philosophical exchange with the Platform. It was a fitting project. The inhabitants of the Platform, drawn long ago from Foro, were after all distant cousins of the Shelf folk.

  And Telni found himself partnered with MinaAndry.

  There was much good-natured ribbing at this, and not a little jealousy in the looks of the older men, Telni thought. But Mina was beautiful. All the folk from the Shelf were handsome in their way, tall and elegant—not quite of the same stock as the Platform folk, who, shorter and heavier-built, were themselves different from the darker folk of the Lowland. They were three human groups swimming through time at different rates; of course they would diverge. But whatever the strange physics behind it, MinaAndry was the most beautiful girl Telni had ever seen, tall yet athletic-looking with a loose physical grace, and blonde hair tied tightly back from a spindling-slim neck.

  They walked across the Platform, through the city of living Buildings. It was a jumble of cubes and rhomboids, pyramids and tetrahedrons—even one handsome dodecahedron. The walls were gleaming white surfaces, smooth to the touch, neither hot nor cold, and pierced by sharp-edged doorways and windows.

  "This place is so strange." Mina ran her hand across the smooth surface of a Building. Within its bland surface, through an open door, could be glimpsed the signs of humanity, a bunk bed made of wood hauled up from the plain, a hearth, a cooking pot, cupboards and heaps of blankets and clothes, and outside a bucket to catch the rain. "We build things of stone, of concrete, or wood. But this—"

  "We didn't build these structures at all. The Buildings grew here. They bud from units we call Flowers, and soak up the light from the storms. Like the Weapons, the Buildings are technology gone wild, made things modified by time."

  "It all feels new, although I suppose it's actually very old. Whereas Foro feels old. All that lichen-encrusted stone! It's like a vast tomb . . . "

  But Telni knew that the town she called Foro was built on the ruins of a city itself called New Foro, devastated during the war he remembered watching as a boy. He had naïvely expected the Shelf folk to be full of stories of that war when they came here. But the war was fifteen Platform years over, more than two hundred and fifty Shelf years, and what was a childhood memory to Telni was long-dead history to Mina.

  "Is it true you feed your dead to the Buildings?" She asked this with a kind of frisson of horror.

  "We wouldn't put it like that . . . They do need organic material. In the wild, you know, down on the Lowland, they preyed on humans. We do let them take our corpses. Why not?" He stroked a wall himself. "It means the Buildings are made of us, our ancestors. Sometimes people have to die inside a Building. The Weapon decrees it."

  "Why?"

  "It seems to be studying Effigies. It thinks that the construction material of wh
ich Buildings are made excludes Effigies. Some of us are born inside Buildings, so no Effigy can enter us then. Others die within a Building, a special one we call the Morgue, in an attempt to trap the Effigies when they are driven out of their bodies. My own aunt died recently, and had to be taken inside the Morgue, but no Effigy was released."

  "It seems very strange to us," Mina said cautiously. "To Shelf folk, I mean. That here you are living out your lives on a machine, made by another machine."

  "It's not as if we have a choice," Telni said, feeling defensive. "We aren't allowed to leave."

  She looked down at her feet, which were clad in sensible leather shoes—not spindling, like Telni's. "I think you can tell that a machine built this place. It lacks a certain humanity." She glanced at him uncertainly. "Look, I'm speaking as a Philosopher. I myself am studying geology. The way time stratification affects erosion, with higher levels wearing away faster than the low, and the sluggish way rivers flow as they head down into the red . . . " She wasn't concentrating on what she was saying, but inspecting her surroundings. "For instance there's the thinness of this floor. On the Shelf we all grew up on a cliff-top. But here we are suspended in the air on a paper-thin sheet! Logically, perhaps, we're even safer here than standing on the Shelf. But it doesn't feel safe. A human designer would never have done it like this."

  "We live as best we can."

  "I'm sure."

  He took her to the very centre of the Platform, and the wheel which turned as always, drawn by teams of patient spindlings. The cargo jockeys, unloading buckets and pallets of supplies drawn up from the Lowland, stared with curiosity as MinaAndry patted the necks of the laboring beasts. "How charming these beasts are! You know that on the Shelf they were driven to extinction during the War of the Cities. We are slowly restocking with animals drawn up from the Lowland herds, but it's ferociously expensive . . . "

  Something about the way she patted and stroked the tall, elegant creatures moved Telni, deep inside. But he had to pull her aside when he saw a spindling was ready to cough; spindlings lacked anuses and vomited their shit from their mouths. Mina was astonished at the sight.

  Anyhow he hadn't brought her here for spindlings. He took Mina's hand and led her to the centre of the Hub, close to the great hatch in the floor of the Platform, which revealed the cables that dangled down to the Lowland far below.

  Mina squealed and drew back. "Oh! I'm sorry. Vertigo—what a foolish reaction that is!"

  "But evidently a very ancient one. Look." He pointed down through the hole. "I brought you here to see my own work. I earn my living through my studies with an apothecary. But this is my passion . . . "

  Holding tight to the rail, pushing a stray strand of hair back from her face, she peered down through the floor. From here, Terni's cradles of pendulums, of bobs and weights and simple control mechanisms, were clearly visible, attached in a train along one of the guide ropes that tethered the Platform to the Lowland plain.

  "Pendulums?"

  "Pendulums. I time their swing. From here I can vary the length and amplitude . . . " He showed her a rigging-up of levers he had fixed above the tether's anchor. "Sometimes there's a snag, and I go down in a harness, or send one of the cargo jockeys."

  "How do you time them?"

  "I have a clock the Weapon gave me. I don't understand how it works," he said, and that admission embarrassed him. "But it's clearly more accurate than any clock we have. I have the pendulums spread out over more than a quarter of a kilometer. There's no record of anybody attempting to make such measurements over such a height difference. And by seeing how the period of the pendulums vary with height, what I'm trying to measure is—"

  "The stratification of time. The higher up you raise your pendulums, the faster they will swing." She smiled. "Even a geologist understands that much. Isn't it about five per cent per meter?"

  "Yes. But that's only a linear approximation. With more accurate measurements I've detected an underlying curved function . . . " The rate at which time flowed faster, Telni believed, was inversely proportional to the distance from the centre of Old Earth. "It only looks linear, simply proportional to height, if you pick points close enough together that you can't detect the curve. And an inverse relationship makes sense, because that's the same mathematical form as the planet's gravitational potential, and time stratification is surely some kind of gravitational effect . . . " He hoped this didn't sound naïve. His physics, based on the philosophies extracted from Foro centuries ago with the Platform's first inhabitants, was no doubt primitive compared to the teachings Mina had been exposed to.

  Mina peered up at a sky where an unending storm of star clouds passed, brightly blueshifted. "I think I understand," she said. "My mathematics is rustier than it should be. That means that the time distortion doesn't keep rising on and on. It comes to some limit."

  "Yes! And that asymptotic limit is a distortion factor of around three hundred and twenty thousand—compared to the Shelf level, which we've always taken as our benchmark. Actually it corresponds to the five percent rule applied across the radius of Old Earth. So one year here corresponds to nearly a third of a million years, up there in the sky."

  "Or," she said, "one year out there—"

  "Passes in about a hundred seconds on the Self. We are falling into the future, Mina! Some believe that once Earth was a world without this layering of time, a world like many others, perhaps, hanging among the stars. And its people were more or less like us. But Earth came under some kind of threat. And so the elders of Earth pulled a blanket of time over their world and packed it off to the future: Earth is a jar of time, stopped up to preserve its children."

  "That's all speculation."

  "Yes. But it would explain such a high rate. And, Mina, I think this rate should be observable. The interval we call a "year" is just a counting-up of days, but it's thought to be a folk memory of what was a real year, the time it took Old Earth to circle its sun. We can't distinguish that sun, whatever is left of it. But we ought to be able to see the stars shifting back and forth, every hundred seconds, as we turn around the sun. I'm trying to encourage the astronomers to look for this, but they say they're too busy mapping other changes." He waved a hand at the sky. "Those chains of stars—"

  "They evolve faster than seen from Foro," she breathed, her upturned face bathed in the shifting blue starlight.

  "They are not as previous generations witnessed them. Something new in the sky. However, if the astronomers could be persuaded to measure the external year it would confirm my mathematics . . . I'm always trying to improve my accuracy. The pendulums need to be long enough to give a decent period, but not too long or else the time stratification becomes significant even over the length of the pendulum itself, and the physics gets very complicated—"

  She slipped her hand into his. "It's a wonderful discovery. Nobody before, maybe not since the last Caress, has worked out how fast we're all plummeting into the future."

  He flushed, pleased. But something made him confess, "I needed the Weapon's clock to measure the effects. And it set me asking questions about time in the first place."

  "It doesn't matter what the Weapon did. This is your work. You should be happy."

  "I don't feel happy," he blurted.

  She frowned. "Why do you say that?"

  Suddenly he was opening up to her in ways he'd never spoken to anybody else. "Because I don't always feel as if I fit. As if I'm not like other people." He looked at her doubtfully, wondering if she would conclude he was crazy. "Maybe that's why I'm turning out to be a good Philosopher. I can look at the world from outside, and see patterns others can't. Do you ever feel like that?"

  Still holding his hand, she walked him back to the wheel and stroked a spindling's stubby mane, evidently drawing comfort from the simple physical contact. "Sometimes," she said. "Maybe everybody does. And maybe it's a reaction to the unnatural environment of the Platform. But the world is as it is, and you just have to make the best of it. D
o you get many birds up here?"

  "Not many. Just caged songbirds. Hard for them to find anywhere to nest."

  "I used to watch birds as a kid. I'd climb up to a place we call the Attic . . . The birds use the time layers. The parents will nest at some low level, then go gathering food higher up. They've worked out they can take as long as they like, while the babies, stuck in slow time, don't get too hungry and are safe from the predators. Of course the parents grow old faster, sacrificing their lives for their chicks."

  "I never saw anything like that. I never got the chance." He shook his head, suddenly angry, resentful. "Not on this island in the sky, a creature of some machine. Sometimes I hope the next Caress comes soon and smashes everything up."

  She took both his hands and smiled at him. "I have a feeling you're going to be a challenge. But I like challenges."

  "You do?"

  "Sure. Or I wouldn't be here, spending a month with a bunch of old folk while seventeen months pass at home. Think of the parties I'm missing!"

  His heart hammered, as if he had been lifted up into the blue. "I've only known you hours," he said. "Yet I feel—"

  "You should return to your work." The familiar child's voice was strange, cold, jarring.

  Telni turned. The Weapon was here, hovering effortlessly over the hole in the floor. His tethered boy stood some metres away, tense, obviously nervous of the long drop. The spindlings still turned their wheel, but the cargo jockeys stood back, staring at the sudden arrival of the Weapon, the maker and ruler of the world.

  Telni's anger flared. He stepped forward towards the child, fists clenched. "What do you want?"

  "We have come to observe the formal congress this evening. The Philosophers from Shelf and Platform. There are many questions humans can address which we—"

  "Then go scare all those old men and women. Leave me alone." Suddenly, with Mina at his side, he could not bear to have the Weapon in his life, with its strange ageless boy on his umbilical. "Leave me alone, I say!"