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

by Gardner Dozois

  That was her answer: she had to continue, all the way to Massa. With the hope, but no promise, that Jasim would have thought the same way.

  The decision made, she lingered in the scape. Not from any second thoughts, but from a reluctance to give up lightly the opportunity she’d fought so hard to attain. She didn’t know if any member of the Aloof was watching and listening to her, reading her thoughts, examining her desires. Perhaps they were so indifferent and incurious that they’d delegated everything to insentient software, and merely instructed their machines to baby-sit her while she made up her mind where she wanted to go. She still had to make one last attempt to reach them, or she would never die in peace.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Maybe you’ve watched us for the last million years, and seen that we have nothing to offer you. Maybe our technology is backwards, our philosophy naive, our customs bizarre, our manners appalling. If that’s true, though, if we’re so far beneath you, you could at least point us in the right direction. Offer us some kind of argument as to why we should change.”

  Silence.

  Leila said, “All right. Forgive my impertinence. I have to tell you honestly, though, that we won’t be the last to bother you. The Amalgam is full of people who will keep trying to find ways to reach you. This is going to go on for another million years, until we believe that we understand you. If that offends you, don’t judge us too harshly. We can’t help it. It’s who we are.”

  She closed her eyes, trying to assure herself that there was nothing she’d regret having left unsaid.

  “Thank you for granting us safe passage,” she added, “if that’s what you’re offering. I hope my people can return the favour one day, if there’s anywhere you want to go.”

  She opened her eyes and sought out her destination: deeper into the network, on towards the core.

  * * * *

  10

  The mountains outside the town of Astraahat started with a gentle slope that promised an easy journey, but gradually grew steeper. Similarly, the vegetation was low and sparse in the foothills, but became steadily thicker and taller the higher up the slope you went.

  Jasim said, “Enough.” He stopped and leant on his climbing stick.

  “One more hour?” Leila pleaded.

  He considered this. “Half an hour resting, then half an hour walking?”

  “One hour resting, then one hour walking.”

  He laughed wearily. “All right. One of each.”

  The two of them hacked away at the undergrowth until there was a place to sit.

  Jasim poured water from the canteen into her hands, and she splashed her face clean.

  They sat in silence for a while, listening to the sounds of the unfamiliar wildlife. Under the forest canopy it was almost twilight, and when Leila looked up into the small patch of sky above them she could see the stars of the bulge, like tiny, pale, translucent beads.

  At times it felt like a dream, but the experience never really left her. The Aloof had woken her at every node, shown her the view, given her a choice. She had seen a thousand spectacles, from one side of the core to the other: cannibalistic novas, dazzling clusters of newborn stars, twin white dwarfs on the verge of collision. She had seen the black hole at the galaxy’s centre, its accretion disk glowing with X-rays, slowly tearing stars apart.

  It might have been an elaborate lie, a plausible simulation, but every detail accessible from disk-based observatories confirmed what she had witnessed. If anything had been changed, or hidden from her, it must have been small. Perhaps the artifacts of the Aloof themselves had been painted out of the view, though Leila thought it was just as likely that the marks they’d left on their territory were so subtle, anyway, that there’d been nothing to conceal.

  Jasim said sharply, “Where are you?”

  She lowered her gaze and replied mildly, “I’m here, with you. I’m just remembering.”

  When they’d woken on Massa, surrounded by delirious, cheering Eavesdroppers, they’d been asked: What happened in there? What did you see? Leila didn’t know why she’d kept her mouth shut and turned to her husband before replying, instead of letting every detail come tumbling out immediately. Perhaps she just hadn’t known where to begin.

  For whatever reason, it was Jasim who had answered first. “Nothing. We stepped through the gate on Tassef, and now here we are. On the other side of the bulge.”

  For almost a month, she’d flatly refused to believe him. Nothing? You saw nothing? It had to be a lie, a joke. It had to be some kind of revenge.

  That was not in his nature, and she knew it. Still, she’d clung to that explanation for as long as she could, until it became impossible to believe any longer, and she’d asked for his forgiveness.

  Six months later, another traveller had spilled out of the bulge. One of the die-hard Listening Party pilgrims had followed in their wake and taken the short cut. Like Jasim, this heptapod had seen nothing, experienced nothing.

  Leila had struggled to imagine why she might have been singled out. So much for her theory that the Aloof felt morally obliged to check that each passenger on their network knew what they were doing, unless they’d decided that her actions were enough to demonstrate that intruders from the disk, considered generically, were making an informed choice. Could just one sample of a working, conscious version of their neighbours really be enough for them to conclude that they understood everything they needed to know? Could this capriciousness, instead, have been part of a strategy to lure in more visitors, with the enticing possibility that each one might, with luck, witness something far beyond all those who’d preceded them? Or had it been part of a scheme to discourage intruders by clouding the experience with uncertainty? The simplest act of discouragement would have been to discard all unwelcome transmissions, and the most effective incentive would have been to offer a few plain words of welcome, but then, the Aloof would not have been the Aloof if they’d followed such reasonable dictates.

  Jasim said, “You know what I think. You wanted to wake so badly, they couldn’t refuse you. They could tell I didn’t care as much. It was as simple as that.”

  “What about the heptapod? It went in alone. It wasn’t just tagging along to watch over someone else.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it acted on the spur of the moment. They all seem unhealthily keen to me, whatever they’re doing. Maybe the Aloof could discern its mood more clearly.”

  Leila said, “I don’t believe a word of that.”

  Jasim spread his hands in a gesture of acceptance. “I’m sure you could change my mind in five minutes, if I let you. But if we walked back down this hill and waited for the next traveller from the bulge, and the next, until the reason some of them received the grand tour and some didn’t finally became plain, there would still be another question, and another. Even if I wanted to live for ten thousand years more, I’d rather move on to something else. And in this last hour ...” He trailed off.

  Leila said, “I know. You’re right.”

  She sat, listening to the strange chirps and buzzes emitted by creatures she knew nothing about. She could have absorbed every recorded fact about them in an instant, but she didn’t care, she didn’t need to know.

  Someone else would come after them, to understand the Aloof, or advance that great, unruly, frustrating endeavour by the next increment. She and Jasim had made a start, that was enough. What they’d done was more than she could ever have imagined, back on Najib. Now, though, was the time to stop, while they were still themselves: enlarged by the experience, but not disfigured beyond recognition.

  They finished their water, drinking the last drops. They left the canteen behind. Jasim took her hand and they climbed together, struggling up the slope side by side.

  * * * *

  THE ILE OF DOGGES

  Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette

  New writer Elizabeth Bear was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and now lives in the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas. She won the John W. Campb
ell Award for Best New Writer in 2005. Her short work has appeared in SCI FICTION, Interzone, The Third Alternative, On Spec, and elsewhere, and she is the author of three highly acclaimed SF novels, Hammered, Scardoum, and Worldwired. Her most recent books are a novel, Carnival, and a collection of her short works, The Chains That You Refuse. Coming up are a number of new novels, including Undertow, Blood and Iron, Whiskey and Water, and New Amsterdam.

  New writer Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. Having completed her Ph.D. in Renaissance English drama, she now lives and writes in a ninety-nine-year-old house in the upper Midwest. Her first novel, Melusine, was published in 2005. Her most recent novel is The Virtu, the sequel to Melusine, and two more novels in the sequence are scheduled to follow: The Mirador and Summerdown. Her short fiction has appeared in many places, including Strange Horizons, Aeon, Alchemy, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and has received four honorable mentions from The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Sarah’s Web site is www.sarahmonette.com.

  In the sly little story that follows, the authors demonstrate that although the forces of censorship and repression are everywhere, and everywhen, there are also those who will go to considerable lengths to ensure that works of art do not perish from the Earth…

  * * * *

  THE LIGHT WOULD LAST LONG ENOUGH.

  Sir Edmund Tylney, in pain and reeking from rotting teeth, stood before the sideboard and crumbled sugar into his sack, causing a sandy yellowish grit to settle at the bottom of the cup. He swirled the drink to sweeten it, then bore it back to his reading table where an unruly stack of quarto pages waited, slit along the folds with a pen-knife.

  He set the cup on the table in the sunlight and drew up his stool, its short legs rasping over the rush mats as he squared it and sat. He reached left-handed for the wine, right-handed for the playscript, drawing both to him over the pegged tabletop. And then he riffled the sheets of Speilman’s cheapest laid with his nail.

  Bending into the light, wincing as the sweetened wine ached across his teeth with every sip, he read.

  He turned over the last leaf, part-covered in secretary’s script, as he drank the last gritty swallow in his cup, the square of sun spilling over the table-edge to spot the floor. Tylney drew out his own pen knife, cut a new point on a quill, and—on a fresh quarter-sheet—began to write the necessary document. The Jonson fellow was inexperienced, it was true. But Tom Nashe should have known better.

  Tylney gulped another cup of sack before he set his seal to the denial, drinking fast, before his teeth began to hurt. He knew himself, without vanity, to be a clever man—intelligent, well-read. He had to be, to do his job as Master of Revels and censor for the queen, for the playmakers, too, were clever, and they cloaked their satires under layers of witty language and misdirection. The better the playmaker, the better the play, and the more careful Tylney had to be.

  The Ile of Dogges was a good play. Lively, witty. Very clever, as one would expect from Tom Nashe and the newcomer Jonson. And Tylney’s long-practiced and discerning eye saw the satire on every page, making mock of—among a host of other, lesser targets—Elizabeth, her Privy Council, and the Lord Chamberlain.

  It could never be performed.

  * * * *

  RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

  Why is’t named Ile of Dogges?

  WITWORTH:

  Because here are men like wild dogges. Haue they numbers, they will sauage a lyon: but if the lyon come vpon one by himselfe, he will grouel and showe his belye. And if the lyon but ask it, he will sauage his friends.

  RIGHTEOUS-IN-THE-CAUSE SAMSON:

  But is that not right? For surely a dogge should honour a lyon.

  WITWORTH:

  But on this island, even the lyon is a dogge. 1

  * * * *

  It could never be performed, but it was. A few days later, despite the denial, Jonson and the Earl of Pembroke’s Men staged The Ile of Dogges at the Swan. Within the day, Jonson and the principal actors were in chains at the Marshalsea, under gentle questioning by the Queen’s own torturer, Topcliffe himself. The other playwright, Thomas Nashe, fled the city to elude arrest. And The Theatre, The Curtain, The Swan—all of London’s great playhouses languished, performances forbidden.

  The Ile of Dogges languished, likewise, in a pile on the corner of Tylney’s desk, weighted by his pen-knife (between sharpenings). It lay face down, cup-ringed pages adorned with the scratch of more than one pen. The dull black oakgall ink had not yet begun to fade, nor the summer’s heat to wane, when Tylney, predictably, was graced by a visit from Master Jonson.

  Flea bites and shackle gall still reddened the playwright’s thick wrists, counterpoint to the whitework of older scars across massive hands. Unfashionably short hair curled above his plain, pitted face. He topped six feet, Ben Jonson. He had been a soldier in the Low Countries.

  He ducked to come through the doorway, but stood straight within, stepping to one side after he closed the door so that the wall was at his back. “You burned Tom’s papers.”

  “He fled London. We must be sure of the play, all its copies.”

  “All of them?” For all his rough bravado, Jonson’s youth showed in how easily he revealed surprise. “‘Tis but a play.”

  “Master Jonson,” Tylney said, steepling his hands before him, “it mocks the Queen. More than that, it might encourage others to mock the Queen. ‘Tis sedition.”

  Recovering himself, Jonson snorted. He paced, short quick steps, and turned, and paced back again. “And the spies Parrot and Poley as were jailed in with me? Thought you I’d aught to tell them?”

  “No spies of mine,” Tylney said. “Perhaps Topcliffe’s. Mayhap he thought you had somewhat of interest to him to impart. No Popist sympathies, Master Jonson? No Scottish loyalties?”

  Jonson stopped at the furthest swing of his line and stared at the coffered paneling. That wandering puddle of sun warmed his boots this time. He reached out, laid four blunt fingertips and a thumb on the wall—his hand bridged between them—and dropped his head so his arm hid the most of his face. His other hand, Tylney noticed, brushed the surface of the sideboard and left something behind, half-concealed beside the inkpot. “No point in pleading for the return of the manuscript, I take it?”

  “Destroyed,” Tylney said, without letting his eyes drop to the pages on his desk. And, as if that were all the restraint he could ask of himself, the question burst out of him: “Why do it, Master Jonson? Why write it?”

  Jonson shrugged one massive shoulder. “Because it is a good play.”

  Useless to ask for sense from a poet. One might as well converse with a tabby cat. Tylney lifted the bell, on the other corner of his desk from the play that ought already to be destroyed, and rang it, a summons to his clerk. “Go home, Master Jonson.”

  “You’ve not seen the last of me, Sir Edmund,” Jonson said, as the door swung open—not a threat, just a fact.

  It wasn’t the usual clerk, but a tall soft-bellied fellow with wavy black hair, sweet-breathed, with fine white teeth.

  “No,” Tylney said. He waited until the click of the latch before he added, “I don’t imagine I have.”

  * * * *

  ANGELL:

  Hast sheared the sheep, Groat?

  GROAT:

  Aye, though their fleece be but siluer.

  he handeth Angell a purse

  ANGELL:

  Then thou must be Iason and find the golden fleece: or mayhap needs merely shear a little closer to the skin.

  GROAT:

  Will not the sheep grow cold, without their wool?

  ANGELL:

  They can grow more. And, loyal Groat, wouldst prefer thy sheep grow cold, or thy master grow hot?

  GROAT:

  The sheep may shiuer for all I care.

  * * * *

  Tylney waited until Jonson’s footsteps retreated into silence, then waited a little more. When he was certa
in neither the clerk nor the playmaker were returning, he came around his table on the balls of his feet and scooped up the clinking pouch that Jonson had left behind. He bounced it on his hand, a professional gesture, and frowned at its weight. Heavy.

  He replaced it where Jonson had laid it, and went to chip sugar from the loaf and mix himself another cup of sack, to drink while he re-read the play. He read faster this time, standing up where the light was better, the cup resting on the sideboard by the inkpot and Jonson’s bribe. He shuffled each leaf to the back as he finished. When he was done, so was the sack.