The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I tried to speak, but all that emerged was something resembling a roar. Mox started up, gun trained on me.

  I tried again. This time at least it was recognizable as speech.

  “Planck on a half shell, Mox. Put down the gun.” It was my quietest voice, but it reverberated off the walls of the little shack.

  Mox winced and dropped the tranq gun. “Vega?”

  I nodded; the less I spoke, the better.

  “What happened to you?”

  I shrugged. “The archeogenes.”

  “But how?”

  “House.”

  House was hard to kill. I had metabolized ice.

  Mox nodded. He’d seen the data on the stray biologicals, too, and he thought I was a superwoman. He accepted it. He believed me.

  The beast in me quieted.

  “Now what?” he asked.

  “Take me to Hainan Landing.”

  * * * *

  It had been over a year since my disappearance, and my brother Henri was now G-G. Core.

  Unkillable?

  “I did my research after you disappeared,” Mox said. “Killing siblings is regarded as necessary to advancement among your kind.”

  “I was no competition,” I roared. I wished there were something I could do about my beastly voice.

  Mox winced, shaking his head. “Even if you assumed you’d taken yourself out of the running, he didn’t assume that.”

  I don’t know how I thought I could ever get away from House politics.

  Since Mox had originally been ordered to bring me in before I went to find the probe, we decided that was what he would do—arrest me and take me to Henri. That would be the simplest way to get me to a place where I could confront my brother. There was a surge of that emotion again, the one I associated with the beast, a cross between anger and a powerful sense of ritual, like I imagined formal vengeance might once have felt.

  Of course, the risk was that he would kill me on sight, but I was willing to take it. Besides, knowing Henri, he’d be curious to find out how I survived.

  He would want to see me.

  The transporter was a tight fit—it was made for two humans, and I had become very much bulkier.

  As we flew over Hainan Landing, I inspected the changes. Capitol Massif was a mountain of rubble spilling into what was left of Mad Dog Bay. The city itself didn’t look much different, its white low-rises spread like ancient pyramids among an emerald jungle topped with birds and flowers, bucolic existence beneath the gentle, guiding hand of Core. Flatboats and pontoon villages still graced the waterfront—surely new since Capitol Massif had collapsed. That must have been quite a tsunami.

  But not caused by an earthquake, I was certain of that now. Until I saw the city, it had still seemed possible that Henri had capitalized on a natural occurrence to further his ambitions.

  Only too much of Hainan Landing was still standing.

  Interceptors filed into formation with our transporter and accompanied us to the landing pad of what I presumed was the new palace, on the other side of Mad Dog Bay from the remnants of Capitol Massif and in a geologically stable location. A squad of heavy infantry was waiting when we stepped out of the vehicle, me with my clawed hands bound behind my back for verisimilitude. They formed up around us and led us through hallways even more convoluted than those I remembered from childhood.

  Perhaps House really could become Core.

  Then the hallways gave way to a huge audience chamber, paneled in mirrors to make it seem even bigger, and I was confronted by image upon image of what I had become—huge, ungainly, webbed, blue. Inhuman. Ugly as sin and more dangerous. How had Mox been able to converse with me as Vega? Look into my eyes and see the woman who had once been his lover? The sight of me scared even me.

  But then there was my brother, standing at the end of the large room, hands locked behind his back, his stance mirroring my own bound wrists. Except that he still had the deliberately chiseled features of House: a look determined to provoke admiration, a look calculated to command. While I was something Other.

  Beauty and the Beast.

  Henri looked from Mox to me and back again. “This is supposed to be my sister?” he asked, one finely sculpted eyebrow raised for effect.

  “Henri!” I roared before Mox had a chance to answer. My voice shattered the mirrors lining the hall and made my brother finally look at me seriously.

  Henri shook his head. “This does not look like Alicia to me. Your humor is in poor taste.”

  The sense of formal vengeance surged, and I growled, causing everyone, including Mox, to step back.

  Mox caught himself first. “Just talk to her.”

  “This could not have once been a human being.”

  “I think she reconstructed herself out of the archeogenes in the Big Ice.”

  “But what is there in this—thing—to make you think it’s her?”

  “Planck on a half shell!” I bellowed, tired of being ignored. “Henri! Why?” It was all I could do to keep from breaking my bonds and tearing my ostensible brother to shreds.

  Henri winced with everyone else in the hall at the sound of my voice, but now he was looking at me rather than Mox, accepting my transformation, recognizing me by my words if not my voice or my appearance. The calculating smile of House began to curl his lips.

  No, not House. Core.

  “Politics,” Henri said, as if that explained everything. Which, of course, in terms of Core it did. “You were supposed to stay dead down there.”

  “Well, I’m back now,” I said. More glass exploded. Was my voice growing bigger, or only my anger?

  Henri actually laughed. “Yes, but bound.”

  This time I couldn’t control the surge of emotion, and I snapped the buckyfiber bonds as if they were twine. Half a dozen guards stormed me, but I reached out one long, clawed arm and slapped them away, surprised at my own power. One guard began to rise, his weapon trained on me, but I broke his back and left him howling on the marble floor. I would have broken more, but then I saw the way Mox was looking at me, his expression even more horrified than the first time he had seen me.

  “Halt!” Henri cried out, uselessly; by this time, no one was moving except the screaming soldier.

  He approached me and stopped, facing me at arm’s length. “As you look to be quite difficult to kill, sister, I have a proposal to make.”

  I could slay him before anyone shot me, I knew it—arm’s length was not nearly distance enough for his safety. The being I had become calculated the speed and distance and moves without even thinking, and I kept this form’s inherent need for formal vengeance in check only through the greatest effort.

  And the awareness in my peripheral vision that three of the soldiers still standing had moved closer to Mox, weapons ready.

  I had not moved my head, but I saw somehow that Henri was cognizant of my assessment of the situation, knowing in the same way that I knew exactly how to break his neck.

  “Proposal?” I echoed.

  Henri smiled, sure of himself—Core. “I could use a creature like you at my side, you know. You would make a fearsome bodyguard. And you are no threat to my ambitions now… like this.”

  Like this. A monster, no longer House. What I had always wanted –but not like this.

  “I might kill you,” I bellowed.

  He shook his head. “No. Because you, too, are Core. Sister.”

  “I’m not Core.”

  His smile grew even wider. “What then?”

  Yes, what? A killing machine, obviously. And I could kill my brother—who, after all, had killed me first—kill him, and free Hutchinson’s World of Core.

  Two aides hurried in and loaded the wounded guard onto a stretcher. The man’s screams faded to whimpers as they hauled him away.

  In the moment of departure, I could scent everyone. The wounded man’s blood and pain and bodily fluids, Henri’s brittle confidence, and fear everywhere. They were all scared—Mox, the guards, even Henri
. Everyone was scared of the beast I had become.

  What was underneath the Big Ice? What was so dreadful, so powerful, it had to be buried in such a huge grave?

  Me. Something like me.

  Did it have a conscience? Did I have a conscience?

  I turned that thought over in my head. I was big, powerful, Housetrained, angry—and back from the dead. I could challenge Henri here and now on his own ground. Somewhere inside me, that sense of formal vengeance stirred again. Some actions were fitting.

  I gave that thought long consideration. Slow as the Big Ice, I turned it around and around. Some actions were fitting, but some actions were not.

  Perhaps Core was not such a bad thing after all. And, as Henri had pointed out, if House Powys had become Core on this planet, then I, too, was Core—albeit monstrous Core now. But Core or not, I couldn’t stay here, where I would likely kill anyone who crossed me. I could be better than whatever the Big Ice’s archeogenes had made me, better than what House had made me.

  I could be better than my brother. I could be more than the sum of my biology. I did not have to accept his offer.

  “I will not be your bodyguard.”

  My brother’s smile disappeared. “Then I will have to kill you again, you know.”

  That he might. But what choice did I have? And how successful would he be this time? I looked at Mox, whose fear of me seemed to have fled. He held my gaze a long moment, and I imagined I saw some flicker of our old companionship.

  Mox understood. And for his sake, I had to go.

  I glanced once more at Henri. “I am not Core, and I never will be. Dead or alive, that will not change.” I turned, expecting energy lances in my back.

  Henri surprised me. None came.

  I walked through the shards of shattered mirrors and down the long corridors and out of the New Palace, walked down to Mad Dog Bay and into it, walked beneath the waters and across the face of the land for days until I got home to the Big Ice.

  Broad, deep, a world within a world. My place now. My family, my House. My Core. Perhaps if I dug deep enough, I could find a new brother.

  <>

  * * * *

  BOW SHOCK

  Gregory Benford

  Here’s as authentic a look into the world of the working scientist as you’re ever likely to see—a world that comes complete with frustrations, obsessions, rivalries… and some stunning surprises profound enough to change our view of the universe forever.

  Gregory Benford is one of the modern giants of the field. His 1980 novel, Timescape, won the Nebula Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award, and is widely considered to be one of the classic novels of the last two decades. His other novels include Beyond Jupiter, The Stars in Shroud, In the Ocean of Night, Against Infinity, Artifact, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, Sailing Bright Eternity, Cosm, Foundation’s Fear, and The Martian Race. His short work has been collected in Matter’s End, Worlds Vast and Various, and Immersion and Other Short Novels; his essays have been assembled in a nonfiction collection, Deep Time. His most recent book is a new novel, Beyond Infinity. Coming up is another new novel, The Sunborn. Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine.

  * * * *

  Ralph slid into the booth where Irene was already waiting, looking perky and sipping on a bottle of Snapple tea. “How’d it . . .” She let the rest slide away, seeing his face.

  “Tell me something really awful, so it won’t make today seem so bad.”

  She said carefully, “Yes sir, coming right up, sir. Um . . .” A wicked grin. “Once I had a pet bird that committed suicide by sticking his head between the cage bars.”

  “W-what . . .?”

  “Okay, you maybe need worse? Can do.” A flash of dazzling smile. “My sister forgot to feed her pet gerbils, so one died. Then, the one that was alive ate its dead friend.”

  Only then did he get that she was kidding, trying to josh him out of his mood. He laughed heartily. “Thanks, I sure needed that.”

  She smiled with relief and turned her head, swirling her dirty-blonde hair around her head in a way that made him think of a momentary tornado. Without a word her face gave him sympathy, concern, inquiry, stiff-lipped support—all in a quick gush of expressions that skated across her face, her full, elegantly lipsticked red mouth collaborating with her eggshell blue eyes.

  Her eyes followed him intently as he described the paper he had found that left his work in the dust.

  “Astronomy is about getting there first?” she asked wonderingly.

  “Sometimes. This time, anyway.” After that he told her about the talk with the department chairman—the whole scene, right down to every line of dialog, which he would now remember forever, apparently—and she nodded.

  “It’s time to solicit letters of recommendation for me, but to who? My work’s already out of date. I . . . don’t know what to do now,” he said. Not a great last line to a story, but the truth.

  “What do you feel like doing?”

  He sighed. “Redouble my efforts—”

  “When you’ve lost sight of your goal?” It was, he recalled, a definition of fanaticism, from a movie.

  “My goal is to be an astronomer,” he said stiffly.

  “That doesn’t have to mean academic, though.”

  “Yeah, but NASA jobs are thin these days.” An agency that took seven years to get to the moon the first time, from a standing start, was now spending far more dollars to do it again in fifteen years.

  “You have a lot of skills, useful ones.”

  “I want to work on fundamental things, not applied.”

  She held up the cap of her Snapple iced tea and read from the inner side with a bright, comically forced voice, “Not a winner, but here’s your Real Fact number two thirty-seven. The number of times a cricket chirps in fifteen seconds, plus thirty-seven, will give you the current air temperature.”

  “In Fahrenheit, I’ll bet,” he said, wondering where she was going with this.

  “Lots of ‘fundamental’ scientific facts are just that impressive. Who cares?”

  “Um, have we moved on to a discussion of the value of knowledge?”

  “Valuable to whom, is my point.”

  If she was going to quote stuff, so could he. “Look, Mark Twain said that the wonder of science is the bounty of speculation that comes from a single hard fact.”

  “Can’t see a whole lot of bounty from here.” She gave him a wry smile, another hair toss. He had to admit, it worked very well on him.

  “I like astronomy.”

  “Sure, it just doesn’t seem to like you. Not as much, anyway.”

  “So I should . . .?” Let her fill in the answer, since she was full of them today. And he doubted the gerbil story.

  “Maybe go into something that rewards your skills.”

  “Like . . .?”

  “Computers. Math. Think big! Try to sign on with a hedge fund, do their analysis.”

  “Hedge funds . . .” He barely remembered what they did. “They look for short-term trading opportunities in the market?”

  “Right, there’s a lot of math in that. I read up on it online.” She was sharp; that’s what he liked about her. “That data analysis you’re doing, it’s waaay more complicated than what Herb Linzfield does.”

  “Herb . . .?”

  “Guy I know, eats in the same Indian buffet place some of us go for lunch.” Her eyes got veiled and he wondered what else she and Herb had talked about. Him? “He calculates hedges on bonds.”

  “Corporate or municipal?” Just to show he wasn’t totally ignorant of things financial.

  “Uh, I think corporate.” Again the veiled eyes.

  “I didn’t put in six years in grad school and get a doctorate to—-”

  “I know, honey.” Eyes suddenly warm “But you’ve given this a real solid try now.”


  “A try? I’m not done.”

  “Well, what I’m saying, you can do other things. If this doesn’t . . . work out.”

  Thinking, he told her about the labyrinths of academic politics. The rest of the UC Irvine astro types did nearby galaxies, looking for details of stellar evolution, or else big scale cosmological stuff. He worked in between, peering at exotic beasts showing themselves in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum. It was a competitive field and he felt it fit him. So he spelled out what he thought of as The Why. That is, why he had worked hard to get this far. For the sake of the inner music it gave him, he had set aside his personal life, letting affairs lapse and dodging any long-term relationship.