The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Or enough old people for this ‘group consciousness’?” Carrie said. “But why only old people?”

  “How the hell should I know?” DiBella said. “Maybe the brain needs to have stored enough experience, enough sheer time.”

  Geraci said, “Do you read Dostoyevsky?”

  “No,” DiBella said. He didn’t like Geraci. “Do you?”

  “Yes. He said there were moments when he felt a ‘frightful’ clarity and rapture, and that he would give his whole life for five seconds of that and not feel he was paying too much. Dostoyevsky was an epileptic.”

  “I know he was an epileptic!” DiBella snapped.

  Carrie said, “Henry, can you sense it now? That thing that’s coming?”

  “No. Not at all. Obviously it’s not quantum-entangled in any classical sense.”

  “Then maybe it’s gone away.”

  Henry tried to smile at her. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think it’s coming for us.”

  “What do you mean, coming for you?” Geraci said skeptically. “It’s not a button man.”

  “I don’t know what I mean,” Henry said irritably. “But it’s coming, and soon. It can’t afford to wait long. Look what we did . . . that plane . . .”

  Carrie’s hand tightened on Henry’s fingers. “What will it do when it gets here?”

  “I don’t know. How could I know?”

  “Henry —” Jake began.

  “I’m more worried about what we may do before it arrives.”

  Geraci said, “Turn on CNN.”

  DiBella said pointedly, “Don’t you have someplace you should be, Detective?”

  “No. Not if this really is happening.”

  To which there was no answer.

  At 9:43 pm, the power grid went down in a city 200 miles away. “No evident reason,” said the talking head on CNN, “given the calm weather and no sign of any —”

  “Henry?” Carrie said.

  “I . . . I’m all right. But I felt it.”

  Jake said, “It’s happening farther away now. That is, if it was . . . if that was . . .”

  “It was,” Henry said simply. Still stretched full-length on the sofa, he closed his eyes. Geraci stared at the TV. None of them had wanted any food.

  At 9:51, Henry’s body jerked violently and he cried out. Carrie whimpered, but in a moment Henry said, “I’m . . . conscious.” No one dared comment on his choice of word. Seven minutes later, the CNN anchor announced breaking news: a bridge over the Hudson River had collapsed, plunging an Amtrak train into the dark water.

  Over the next few minutes, Henry’s face showed a rapid change of expression: fear, rapture, anger, surprise. The expressions were so pronounced, so distorted, that at times Henry Erdmann almost looked like someone else. Jake wondered wildly if he should record this on his cell camera, but he didn’t move. Carrie knelt beside the sofa and put both arms around the old man, as if to hold him here with her.

  “We . . . can’t help it,” Henry got out. “If one person thinks strongly enough about – ah, God!”

  The lights and TV went off. Alarms sounded, followed by sirens. Then a thin beam of light shone on Henry’s face; Geraci had a pocket flashlight. Henry’s entire body convulsed in seizure, but he opened his eyes. DiBella could barely hear his whispered words.

  “It’s a choice.”

  The only way was a choice. Ship didn’t understand the necessity – how could any single unit choose other than to become part of its whole? That had never happened before. Birthing entities came happily to join themselves. The direction of evolution was toward greater complexity, always. But choice must be the last possible action here, for this misbegotten and unguided being. If it did not choose to merge –

  Destruction. To preserve the essence of consciousness itself, which meant the essence of all.

  FOURTEEN

  Evelyn, who feared hospitals, had refused to go to Redborn Memorial to be “checked over” after the afternoon’s fainting spell. That’s all it was, just fainting, nothing to get your blood in a boil about, just a —

  She stopped halfway between her microwave and kitchen table. The casserole in her hand fell to the floor and shattered.

  The light was back, the one she’d dreamed about in her faint. Only it wasn’t a light and this wasn’t a dream. It was there in her mind, and it was her mind, and she was it . . . had always been it. How could that be? But the presence filled her and Evelyn knew, beyond any doubt, that if she joined it, she would never, ever be alone again. Why, she didn’t need words, had never needed words, all she had to do was choose to go where she belonged anyway . . .

  Who knew?

  Happily, the former Evelyn Krenchnoted became part of those waiting for her, even as her body dropped to the linguini-spattered floor.

  In a shack in the slums of Karachi, a man lay on a pile of clean rags. His toothless gums worked up and down, but he made no sound. All night he had been waiting alone to die, but now it seemed his wait had truly been for something else, something larger than even death, and very old.

  Old. It sought the old, and only the old, and the toothless man knew why. Only the old had earned this, had paid for this in the only coin that really mattered: the accumulation of sufficient sorrow.

  With relief he slipped away from his pain-wracked body and into the ancient largeness.

  No. He wasn’t moving, Bob thought. The presence in his mind terrified him, and terror turned him furious. Let them – whoever – try all their cheap tricks, they were as bad as union negotiators. Offering concessions that would never materialize. Trying to fool him. He wasn’t going anywhere, wasn’t becoming anything, not until he knew exactly what the deal was, what the bastards wanted.

  They weren’t going to get him.

  But then he felt something else happen. He knew what it was. Sitting in the Redborn Memorial ER, Bob Donovan cried out, “No! Anna – you can’t!” even as his mind tightened and resisted until, abruptly, the presence withdrew and he was alone.

  In a luxurious townhouse in San José, a man sat up abruptly in bed. For a long moment he sat completely still in the dark, not even noticing that the clock and digital-cable box lights were out. He was too filled with wonder.

  Of course – why hadn’t he seen this before? He, who had spent long joyful nights debugging computers when they still used vacuum tubes – how could he have missed this? He wasn’t the whole program, but rather just one line of code! And it was when you put all the code together, not before, that the program could actually run. He’d been only a fragment, and now the whole was here . . .

  He joined it.

  Erin Bass experienced satori.

  Tears filled her eyes. All her adult life she had wanted this, longed for it, practised meditation for hours each day, and had not even come close to the mystical intoxication she felt now. She hadn’t known, hadn’t dreamed it could be this oneness with all reality. All her previous striving had been wrong. There was no striving, there was no Erin. She had never been created; she was the creation and the cosmos; no individual existed. Her existence was not her own, and when that last illusion vanished so did she, into the all.

  Gina Martinelli felt it, the grace that was the glory of God. Only . . . only where was Jesus Christ, the savior and Lord? She couldn’t feel him, couldn’t find him in the oneness . . .

  If Christ was not there, then this wasn’t Heaven. It was a trick of the Cunning One, of Satan who knows a million disguises and sends his demons to mislead the faithful. She wasn’t going to be tricked!

  She folded her arms and began to pray aloud. Gina Martinelli was a faithful Christian. She wasn’t going anywhere; she was staying right here, waiting for the one true God.

  A tiny woman in Shanghai sat at her window, watching her great-grandchildren play in the courtyard. How fast they were! Ai, once she had been so fast.

  She felt it come over her all at once, the gods entering her soul. So it was her time! Almost she felt young again, felt
strong . . . that was good. But even if had not been good, when the gods came for you, you went.

  One last look at the children, and she was taken to the gods.

  Anna Chernov, wide awake in the St Sebastian Infirmary that had become her prison, gave a small gasp. She felt power flow through her, and for a wild moment she thought it was the same force that had powered a lifetime of arabesques and jetés, a lifetime ago.

  It was not.

  This was something outside of herself, separate . . . but it didn’t have to be. She could take it in herself, become it, even as it became her. But she held back.

  Will there be dancing?

  No. Not as she knew it, not the glorious stretch of muscle and thrust of limb and arch of back. Not the creation of beauty through the physical body. No. No dancing.

  But there was power here, and she could use that power for another kind of escape, from her useless body and this Infirmary and a life without dance. From somewhere distant she head someone cry, “Anna – you can’t!” But she could. Anna seized the power, both refusing to join it or to leave it, and bent it onto herself. She was dead before her next breath.

  Henry’s whole body shuddered. It was here. It was him.

  Or not. “It’s a choice,” he whispered.

  On the one hand, everything. All consciousness, woven into the very fabric of space-time itself, just as Wheeler and the rest had glimpsed nearly a hundred years ago. Consciousness at the quantum level, the probability-wave level, the co-evolvee with the universe itself.

  On the other hand, the individual Henry Martin Erdmann. If he merged with the uber-consciousness, he would cease to exist as himself, his separate mind. And his mind was everything to Henry.

  He hung suspended for nanoseconds, years, eons. Time itself took on a different character. Half here, half not, Henry knew the power, and what it was, and what humanity was not. He saw the outcome. He had his answer.

  “No,” he said.

  Then he lay again on his sofa with Carrie’s arms around him, the other two men illuminated dimly by a thin beam of yellow light, and he was once more mortal and alone.

  And himself.

  Enough merged. The danger is past. The being is born, and is ship, and is enough.

  FIFTEEN

  Months to identify all the dead. Years to fully repair all the damage to the world’s infrastructure: bridges, buildings, information systems. Decades yet to come, DiBella knew, of speculation about what had actually happened. Not that there weren’t theories already. Massive EMP, solar radiation, extrasolar radiation, extrastellar radiation, extraterrestrial attack, global terrorism, Armageddon, tectonic plate activity, genetically engineered viruses. Stupid ideas, all easily disproved, but of course that stopped no one from believing them. The few old people left said almost nothing. Those that did were scarcely believed.

  Jake scarcely believed it himself.

  He did nothing with the brain scans of Evelyn Krenchnoted and the three others, because there was nothing plausible he could do. They were all dead, anyway. “Only their bodies,” Carrie always added. She believed everything Henry Erdmann told her.

  Did DiBella believe Henry’s ideas? On Tuesdays he did, on Wednesdays not, on Thursdays belief again. There was no replicable proof. It wasn’t science. It was . . . something else.

  DiBella lived his life. He broke up with James. He visited Henry, long after the study of senior attention patterns was over. He went to dinner with Carrie and Vince Geraci. He was best man at their wedding.

  He attended his mother’s sixty-fifth birthday party, a lavish shindig organized by his sister in the ballroom of a glitzy downtown hotel. The birthday girl laughed, and kissed the relatives who’d flown in from Chicago, and opened her gifts. As she gyrated on the dance floor with his Uncle Sam, DiBella wondered if she would live long enough to reach eighty.

  Wondered how many others in the world would reach eighty.

  “It was only because enough of them chose to go that the rest of us lost the emerging power,” Henry had said, and DiBella noted that them instead of us. “If you have only a few atoms of uranium left, you can’t reach critical mass.”

  DiBella would have put it differently: if you have only a few neurons, you don’t have a conscious brain. But it came to the same thing in the end.

  “If so many hadn’t merged, then the consciousness would have had to . . .” Henry didn’t finish his sentence, then or ever. But DiBella could guess.

  “Come on, boy,” Uncle Sam called, “get yourself a partner and dance!”

  DiBella shook his head and smiled. He didn’t have a partner just now and he didn’t want to dance. All the same, old Sam was right. Dancing had a limited shelf life. The sell-by date was already stamped on most human activity. Someday his mother’s generation, the largest demographic bulge in history, would turn eighty. And Henry’s choice would have to be made yet again.

  How would it go next time?

  OLD FRIENDS

  Garth Nix

  New York Times bestselling Australian writer Garth Nix worked as a book publicist, editor, marketing consultant, publicist, and literary agent before launching the bestselling Old Kingdom series, which consists of Sabriel, Lirael: Daughter of the Clayr, Abhorsen, and The Creature in the Case. His other books include the Seventh Tower series, consisting of The Fall, Castle, Aenir, Above the Veil, Into Battle, and The Violet Keystone; the Keys to the Kingdom series, consisting of Mister Monday, Grim Tuesday, Drowned Wednesday, and Sir Thursday; as well as stand-alone novels such as The Ragwitch and Shade’s Children. His short fiction has been collected in Across the Wall: Tales of the Old Kingdom and Beyond. His most recent book is a new novel in the Keys to the Kingdom sequence, Superior Saturday. Born in Melbourne, he now lives in Sydney.

  In the vivid story that follows, he shows us that old friends can make the most dangerous of enemies.

  I’D BEEN LIVING in the city for quite a while, lying low, recovering from an unfortunate jaunt that had turned, in the immortal words of my sometime comrade Hrasvelg, “irredeemably shit-shape”.

  Though I had almost completely recovered my sight, I still wore a bandage around my eyes. It was made from a rare stuff that I could see through, but it looked like a dense black linen. Similarly, I had regrown my left foot, but I kept up the limp. It gave me an excuse to use the stick, which was, of course, much more than a length of bog oak carved with picaresque scenes of a pedlar’s journey.

  I had a short lease apartment near the beach, an expensive but necessary accommodation, as I needed both the sunshine that fell into its small living room, and the cool, wet wind from the sea that blew through every open window.

  Unfortunately, after the first month, that wind became laden with the smell of rotting weed and as the weeks passed, the stench grew stronger, and the masses of weed that floated just past the breakers began to shift and knit together, despite the efforts of the lifesavers to break up the unsightly, stinking rafts of green.

  I knew what was happening, of course. The weed was a manifestation of an old opponent of mine, a slow, cold foe who had finally caught up with me. “Caught” being the operative word, as the weed was just the visible portion of my enemy’s activities. A quick examination of almanac and lodestone revealed that all known pathways from this world were denied to me, shut tight by powerful bindings that I could not broach quickly, if at all.

  I watched the progress of the weed every morning as I drank my first coffee, usually leaning back in one white plastic chair as I elevated my supposedly injured leg on another. The two chairs were the only furniture in the apartment. I had rigged a hammock above the bath to sleep in.

  The day before I adjudged the weed would reach its catalytic potential and spawn servitors, I bought not just my usual black coffee from the café downstairs, but also a triple macchiato that came in a heavy, heat-resistant glass. Because I lived upstairs they always gave me proper cups. The barista who served me, a Japanese guy who worked the espresso machine mornin
gs and surfed all afternoon, put the coffees in a cardboard holder meant for takeaways and said, “Got a visitor today?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “But I will have shortly. By the way, I wouldn’t go surfing here this afternoon . . . or tomorrow.”

  “Why not?”

  “That weed,” I replied. “It’s toxic. Try another beach.”

  “How do you know?” he asked as he slid the tray into my waiting fingers. “I mean, you can’t . . .”

  “I can’t see it,” I said, as I backed away, turned and started tapping towards the door. “But I can smell it. It’s toxic all right. Stay clear.”

  “OK, thanks. Uh, enjoy the coffee.”

  I slowly made my way upstairs, and set the coffees down on the floor. My own long black in front of one white chair, and the macchiato at the foot of the other. I wouldn’t be resting my leg on the spare chair today.

  I had to wait a little while for the breeze to come up, but as it streamed through the room and teased at the hair I should have had cut several weeks before, I spoke.

  “Hey, Anax. I bought you a coffee.”

  The wind swirled around my head, changing direction 270 degrees, blowing out the window it had come in by and in by the window it had been going out. I felt the floor tremble under my feet and experienced a brief dizziness.

  Anax, proper name Anaxarte, was one of my oldest friends. We’d grown up together and had served together in two cosmically fucked-up wars, one of which was still slowly bleeding its way to exhaustion in fits and starts, though the original two sides were long out of it.

  I hadn’t seen Anax for more than thirty years, but we wrote to each other occasionally, and had spoken to each other twice in that time. We talked a lot about meeting up, maybe organizing a fishing expedition with some of the old lads, but it had never come together.

  I knew that if he were able to, he would always answer my call. So as the coffee cooled, and the white plastic chair lay vacant, my heart chilled, and I began to grieve. Not for the loss of Anax’s help against the enemy, but because another friend had fallen.