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

by Gardner Dozois

  The ship had known where he would go even as they bucked the stormy cape of the wandering neutron star. It had never even attempted to follow him; instead, it had always known that it must lay in a course that would whip it round to Tay. That meant that even as he escaped the holocaust at Milius 1183, it had known who he was, where he came from, had seen through the frozen layers of smart-ice to the Torben below. The ship had come from around the planet. It was an enemy ship, but not the Enemy. They would have boiled Tejaphay down to its iron heart. Long Oga contemplated these things as he looped out into the wilderness of the Oort cloud. Out there among the lonely ice, he reached a conclusion. He turned the ship over and burned the last of his reaction in a hypergee deceleration burn. The enemy ship responded immediately, but its ramjet drive was less powerful. It would be months, years even, before it could turn around to match orbits with him. He would be ready then. The edge of the field brushed Oga as he decelerated at fifteen hundred gravities and he used his external sensors to modulate a message on the huge web, a million kilometres across: I surrender.

  Gigayears ago, before the star was born, the two comets had met and entered into their far, cold marriage. Beyond the dramas and attractions of the dust cloud that coalesced into Tay and Tejaphay and Bephis, all the twelve planets of the solar system, they maintained their fixed-grin gazes on each other, locked in orbit around a mutual centre of gravity where a permanent free-floating haze of ice crystals hovered, a fraction of a Kelvin above absolute zero. Hidden amongst them, and as cold and seemingly as dead, was the splinter ship. Oga shivered. The cold was more than physical – on the limits of even his malleable form. Within their thermal casing, his motes moved as slowly as Aeo Taea Parents. He felt old as this ice and as weary. He looked up into the gap between ice worlds. The husband-comet floated above his head like a halo. He could have leaped to it in a thought.

  Lights against the starlight twinkle of the floating ice storm. A sudden occlusion. The Enemy was here. Oga waited, feeling every targeting sensor trained on him.

  No, you won’t, will you? Because you have to know.

  A shadow detached itself from the black ship, darkest on dark, and looped around the comet. It would be a parliament of self-assembling motes like himself. Oga had worked out decades before that Enemy and Anpreen were one and the same, sprung from the same nanotechnological seed when they attained Class Two status. Theirs was a civil war. In the Clade, all war was civil war, Oga thought. Panhumanity was all there was. More like a family feud. Yes, those were the bloodiest fights of all. No quarter and no forgiveness.

  The man came walking around the small curve of the comet, kicking up shards of ice crystals from his grip soles. Oga recognized him. He was meant to. He had designed himself so that he would be instantly recognizable, too. He bowed, in the distances of the Oort cloud.

  “Torben Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben, sir.”

  The briefest nod of a head, a gesture of hours in the slow-motion hypercold.

  “Torben. I’m not familiar with that name.”

  “Perhaps we should use the name most familiar to you. That would be Serejen, or perhaps Fejannen, I was in that Aspect when we last met. I would have hoped you still remembered the old etiquette.”

  “I find I remember too much these days. Forgetting is a choice since I was improved. And a chore. What do they call you now?”

  “Oga.”

  “Oga it shall be, then.”

  “And what do they call you now?”

  The man looked up into the icy gap between worldlets. He has remembered himself well, Oga thought. The slight portliness, the child-chubby features, like a boy who never grew up. As he says, forgetting is a chore.

  “The same thing they always have: Cjatay.”

  “Tell me your story then, Cjatay. This was never your fight, or my fight.”

  “You left her.”

  “She left me, I recall, and, like you, I forget very little these days. I can see the note still; I could recreate it for you, but it would be a scandalous waste of energy and resources. She went to you.”

  “It was never me. It was the cause.”

  “Do you truly believe that?”

  Cjatay gave a glacial shrug.

  “We made independent contact with them when they came. The Council of governments was divided, all over the place, no coherent approach or strategy. “Leave us alone. We’re not part of this.” But there’s no neutrality in these things. We had let them use our system’s water. We had the space elevator they built for us, there was the price, there was the blood money. We knew it would never work – our hope was that we could convince them that some of us had always stood against the Anpreen. They torched Tay anyway, but they gave us a deal. They’d let us survive as a species if some of us joined them on their crusade.”

  “They are the Anpreen.”

  “Were the Anpreen. I know. They took me to pieces. They made us into something else. Better, I think. All of us, there were twenty-four of us. Twenty-four, that was all the good people of Tay, in their eyes. Everyone who was worth saving.”

  “And Puzhay?”

  “She died. She was caught in the Arphan conflagration. She went there from Jann to be with her parents. It always was an oil town. They melted it to slag.”

  “But you blame me.”

  “You are all that’s left.”

  “I don’t believe that. I think it was always personal. I think it was always revenge.”

  “You still exist.”

  “That’s because you don’t have all the answers yet.”

  “We know the kind of creatures we’ve become; what answers can I not know?”

  Oga dipped his head, then looked up to the halo moon, so close he could almost touch it.

  “Do you want me to show you what they fear so much?”

  There was no need for the lift of the hand, the conjuror’s gesture; the pieces of his ship-self Oga had seeded so painstakingly through the wife-comet’s structure were part of his extended body. But I do make magic here, he thought. He dropped his hand. The star-speckled sky turned white, hard painful white, as if the light of every star were arriving at once. An Olbers sky, Oga remembered from his days in the turrets and cloisters of Jann. And as the light grew intolerable, it ended. Blackness, embedding, huge and comforting. The dark of death. Then Oga’s eyes grew familiar with the dark, and, though it was the plan and always had been the plan, he felt a plaint of awe as he saw ten thousand galaxies resolve out of the Olbers dazzle. And he knew that Cjatay saw the same.

  “Where are we? What have you done?”

  “We are somewhere in the region of 230 million light-years outside our local group of galaxies, more precisely, on the periphery of the cosmological galactic supercluster known as the Great Attractor. I made some refinements to the scalarity drive unit to operate in a one dimensional array.”

  “Faster-than-light travel,” Cjatay said, his upturned face silvered with the light of the 10,000 galaxies of the Great Attractor.

  “No, you still don’t see it,” Oga said, and again turned the universe white. Now when he flicked out of hyperscalarity, the sky was dark and starless but for three vast streams of milky light that met in a triskelion hundreds of millions of light-years across.

  “We are within the Bootes Supervoid,” Oga said. “It is so vast that if our own galaxy were in the centre of it, we would have thought ourselves alone and that our galaxy was the entire universe. Before us are the Lyman alpha-blobs, three conjoined galaxy filaments. These are the largest structures in the universe. On scales larger than this, structure becomes random and grainy. We become grey. These are the last grand vistas, this is the end of greatness.”

  “Of course, the expansion of space is not limited by light-speed,” Cjatay said.

  “Still you don’t understand.” A third time, Oga generated the dark energy from the ice beneath his feet and focused it into a narrow beam between the wife-comet and its unimaginably distant
husband. Two particles in contact will remain in quantum entanglement no matter how far they are removed, Oga thought. And is that true also for lives? He dismissed the scalarity generator and brought them out in blackness. Complete, impenetrable, all-enfolding blackness, without a photon of light.

  “Do you understand where I have brought you?”

  “You’ve taken us beyond the visible horizon,” Cjatay said. “You’ve pushed space so far that the light from the rest of the universe has not had time to reach us. We are isolated from every other part of reality. In a philosophical sense, we are a universe in ourselves.”

  “That was what they feared? You feared?”

  “That the scalarity drive had the potential to be turned into a weapon of unimaginable power? Oh yes. The ability to remove any enemy from reach, to banish them beyond the edge of the universe. To exile them from the universe itself, instantly and irrevocably.”

  “Yes, I can understand that, and that you did what you did altruistically. They were moral genocides. But our intention was never to use it as a weapon – if it had been, wouldn’t we have used it on you?”

  Silence in the darkness beyond dark.

  “Explain then.”

  “I have one more demonstration.”

  The mathematics were critical now. The scalarity generator devoured cometary mass voraciously. If there were not enough left to allow him to return them home . . . Trust number, Oga. You always have. Beyond the edge of the universe, all you have is number. There was no sensation, no way of perceiving when he acitivated and deactivated the scalarity field, except by number. For an instant, Oga feared number had failed him, a first and fatal betrayal. Then light blazed down onto the dark ice. A single blinding star shone in the absolute blackness.

  “What is that?”

  “I pushed a single proton beyond the horizon of this horizon. I pushed it so far that space and time tore.”

  “So I’m looking at . . .”

  “The light of creation. That is an entire universe, new born. A new big bang. A young man once said to me, “Every particle will be so far from everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own.” An extended object like this comet, or bodies, is too gross, but in a single photon, quantum fluctuations will turn it into an entire universe-in-waiting.”

  The two men looked up a long time into the nascent light, the surface of the fireball seething with physical laws and forces boiling out. Now you understand, Oga thought. It’s not a weapon. It’s the way out. The way past the death of the universe. Out there beyond the horizon, we can bud off new universes, and universes from those universes, forever. Intelligence has the last word. We won’t die alone in the cold and the dark. He felt the light of the infant universe on his face, then said, “I think we probably should be getting back. If my calculations are correct – and there is a significant margin of error – this fireball will shortly undergo a phase transition as dark energy separates out and will undergo catastrophic expansion. I don’t think that the environs of an early universe would be a very good place for us to be.”

  He saw portly Cjatay smile.

  “Take me home, then. I’m cold and I’m tired of being a god.”

  “Are we gods?”

  Cjatay nodded at the microverse.

  “I think so. No, I know I would want to be a man again.”

  Oga thought of his own selves and lives, his bodies and natures. Flesh indwelled by many personalities, then one personality – one aggregate of experience and memory – in bodies liquid, starship, nanotechnological. And he was tired, so terribly tired beyond the universe, centuries away from all that he had known and loved. All except this one, his enemy.

  “Tejaphay is no place for children.”

  “Agreed. We could rebuild Tay.”

  “It would be a work of centuries.”

  “We could use the Aeo Taea Parents. They have plenty of time.”

  Now Cjatay laughed.

  “I have to trust you now, don’t I? I could have vapourized you back there, blown this place to atoms with my missiles. And now you create an entire universe . . .”

  “And the Enemy? They’ll come again.”

  “You’ll be ready for them, like you were ready for me. After all, I am still the enemy.”

  The surface of the bubble of universe seemed to be in more firenetic motion now. The light was dimming fast.

  “Let’s go then,” Cjatay said.

  “Yes,” Oga said. “Let’s go home.”

  OGA, RETURNING

  HONORABLE MENTIONS

  2008

  Forrest Aguirre, “The Auctioneer and the Antiquarian, or, 1962,” Asimov’s, June.

  Brian W. Aldiss, “Peculiar Bone, Unimaginable Key,” Celebrations.

  Lee Allred, “And Dream Such Dreams,” Otherworldly Maine.

  Erik Amundssen, “Turnipseed,” Fantasy, March 3.

  Charlie Anders, “Love Might Be Too Strong a Word,” Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, 22.

  _____, “Suicide Drive,” Helix 7.

  Lou Antonelli, “The Witch of Waxahachie,” JBU, April.

  Catherine Asaro, “The Spacetime Pool,” Analog, January/February.

  Neal Asher, “Mason’s Rats: Auto Tractor,” Solaris Book of SF II.

  _____, “Mason’s Rats: Black Rat,” Solaris Book of SF II.

  _____, “Owner Space,” Galactic Empires.

  _____, “The Rhine World’s Incident,” Subterfuge.

  Paolo Bacigalupi, “Pump Six,” F&SF, September.

  Kage Baker, “Caverns of Mystery,” Subterranean: Tales of Dark Fantasy.

  _____, “I Begyn As I Mean to Go On,” Fast Ships, Black Sails.

  _____, “Running the Snake,” Sideways in Crime.

  _____, “Speed, Speed the Cable,” Extraordinary Engines.

  Peter M. Ball, “The Last Great House of Isla Tortuga,” Dreaming Again.

  _____, “On Finding the Photographs of My Former Loves,” Fantasy, June 2.

  Tony Ballantyne, “Undermind,” Subterfuge.

  Jamie Barras, “The Endling,” Interzone, April.

  Neal Barrett Jr., “Radio Station Saint Jack,” Asimov’s, August.

  _____, “Slidin’,” Asimov’s, April/May.

  Laird Barron, “The Lagerstatte,” Del Rey Book of SF.

  William Barton, “In the Age of the Quiet Sun,” Asimov’s, September.

  Lee Battersby, “In from the Snow,” Dreaming Again.

  Stephen Baxter, “Eagle Song,” Postscripts 15.

  _____, “Fate and the Fire-Lance,” Sideways in Crime.

  _____, “The Ice War,” Asimov’s, September.

  _____, “The Jubilee Plot,” Celebrations.

  _____, “Repair Kit,” The Starry Rift.

  _____, “The Seer and the Silverman,” Galactic Empires.

  Peter S. Beagle, “King Pelles the Sure,” Strange Roads.

  _____, “The Rabbi’s Hobby,” Eclipse Two.

  _____, “The Tale of Junko and Sayur,” OSC’sIGMShow, July.

  _____, “What Tale the Enchantress Plays,” A Book of Wizards.

  Elizabeth Bear, “The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder,” Tor.com.

  _____, “Shoggoths in Bloom,” Asimov’s, March.

  _____, “Sonny Liston Takes the Fall,” Del Rey Book of SF.

  Chris Beckett, “Greenland,” Interzone 218.

  _____, “Poppyfields,” Interzone 218.

  Peter J. Bentley, “Loop,” Cosmos, February/March.

  Beth Bernobich, “Air and Angels,” Subterranean, Spring.

  _____, “The Golden Octopus,” Postscripts 15.

  Deborah Biancotti, “Watertight Lies,” 2012.

  Michael Bishop, “Vinegar Peace, or, the Wrong-Way Used-Adult Orphanage,” Asimov’s, July.

  Terry Bisson, “Captain Ordinary,” Flurb 5.

  _____, “Catch ’Em in the Act,” Del Rey Book of SF.

  _____, “Private Eye,” F&SF, October/November.

&
nbsp; _____, “The Stamp,” Lone Star Stories, April.

  Jenny Blackford, “Trolls’ Night Out,” Dreaming Again.

  Russell Blackford, “Manannan’s Children,” Dreaming Again.

  Moal Blaikie, “Offworld Friends Are Best, GUD, Spring.

  Jayme Lynn Blaschke, “The Whale Below,” Fast Ships, Black Sails.

  Michael Blumlein, “The Big One,” Flurb 6.

  _____, “The Roberts,” F&SF, July.

  Aliette de Bodard, “The Dragon’s Tears,” Electric Velocipede, 15/16.

  _____, “Horus Ascending,” OSC’sIGMShow, April.

  Ben Bova, “Moon Race,” JBU, December.

  _____, “Waterbot,” Analog, June.

  Richard Bowes, “AKA St Marks Place,” Del Rey Book of SF.

  _____, “The Cinnamon Cavalier,” Fantasy, April 21.

  _____, “If Angels Fight,” F&SF, February.

  Scott Bradfield, “Dazzle Joins the Screenwriter’s Guild,” F&SF, October/November.

  Marie Brennan, “A Heretic by Degrees,” OSCIMS, December.

  _____, “A Mask of Flesh,” Clockwork Phoenix.

  David Brin, “Shoresteading,” JBU, October.

  Keith Brooke, “Hannah,” Extraordinary Engines.

  _____, “The Man Who Built Heaven,” Postscripts 15.

  Corey Brown, “Child of Scorn,” Electric Velocipede, 15/16.

  Eric Brown, “Sunworld,” Solaris Book of SF II.

  John Brown, “From the Clay of His Heart,” OSC’sIGMShow, April.

  Molly Brown, “Living with the Dead,” Celebrations.

  Simon Brown, “The Empire,” Dreaming Again.

  _____, “Oh, Russia,” 2012.

  Tobias S. Bucknell, “Manumission,” JBU, April.

  _____, “The People’s Machine,” Sideways in Crime.

  _____, “Resistance,” Seeds of Change.

  Mark Budz, “Faceless in Gethsemane,” Seeds of Change.

  Sue Burke, “Spiders,” Asimov’s, March.

  Pat Cadigan, “Found in Translation,” Myth-Understandings.

  _____, “Jimmy,” Del Rev Book of SF.