Asimov's SF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  But Brod cared little for the Speaker's mood. “To observe what, the death of your son?”

  “The conclusion of this, Brod. This strange affair that began the whole diameter of the world away. At least it will end here.”

  “And somebody's going to die,” Khilli said. “Then when my forces arrive we will tear down yon monument, as it should have been demolished long ago, and leave the world with only a single righteous focus of worship—the Navel.”

  There was a flare of light from above, bright enough to be dazzling. Brod glanced toward the monument, distracted.

  And in that instant Khilli hurled himself forward. Brod raised his musket, but Khilli's blade flashed, slicing away the musket before it could be fired, and two joints of Brod's trigger finger with it. Brod cried out, and blood pumped; he staggered backward, out of Khilli's reach, and curled his fist into a ball to try to staunch the bleeding.

  Khilli stood back, laughing. “One encounter, one blow and you have already lost your main weapon, and the use of your good hand. Give it up, rapist. Kneel before me and suck on my sword. I'll be quick—you'll hardly notice it's inside you—”

  Brod sneered. “That's what all your lovers say.”

  And he charged, right shoulder first, his blade raised in his left hand. As he rammed into Khilli he smelled meat and blood and sweat and grease. As the man was knocked back, skidding on the icy rock underfoot, Brod brought his own blade swinging down. But Khilli went with the skid, let himself fall and rolled, and Brod's blade slammed harmlessly on the ground. Khilli swept his own blade, and Brod had to jump to avoid his legs being taken out below the knees. But Khilli was on his feet even as Brod came down, and they closed again. Brod raised his blade, two-handed now, but Khilli raised his own fists to meet Brod's, over their heads.

  Again they were still, locked together, face to face. The strange light was bright now, coming from above, whatever it was, and Brod stared into Khilli's eyes as they strained to bring the blades down. He could see Khilli's face clearly, every stitch-mark in that scar, every blackened pore on his cheeks. “By all that's holy,” Brod said, “the Sim Designers made you ugly.”

  “Then let my ugly features be the last thing you see before I send you back to Memory.” He spat in Brod's face, and lunged.

  And Brod, his right arm weakening, could not resist him. He gave way. The two blades swept down and slammed against the ground, and both shattered. Khilli lowered his head and butted Brod in the mouth, and Brod felt teeth shatter. He staggered back, and a shove in the chest sent him flying to the ground.

  Khilli straddled him, a dagger held up in both gloved hands. “Goodbye, rapist.” He straightened up, tensing for the lunge.

  And he convulsed, a look of shock on his face, his mouth wide, his eyes staring. He looked down at Brod, and blood spilled from his mouth. His hands loosened, and he dropped his knife harmlessly. Then he fell back like a toppling tree.

  Elios stood motionless, a blood-stained dagger in his hand, a spatter of his son's ichor on his cloak. He considered the fallen Khilli, apparently without emotion. Then he turned to Brod. “You could not have won. He wore armor under his cloak. A coward's defense, really. But I have seen him dress and undress; I remembered the chinks, the gaps.” He held up the knife, looked at its bloody blade, then dropped it to the ground beside Brod. It landed on the frozen rock with a bell-like chime.

  Vala called. “Father! Is that you? Father—oh, Brod!”

  Brod, fallen, cradling his hand, could not turn to see her. He tried to speak, but he spat blood and bits of broken tooth onto a ground that was bright beneath him—bright and sparkling with light, reflected from scraps of ice.

  Vala ran up, her hood pulled back. As she took in the scene, the fallen Brod, her father, the corpse of Khilli, her face was wide with shock—and, just for a moment, Brod saw her brother in her, his face at the moment of his death, at the hands of his father. Then she fell to her knees and cradled Brod's head.

  “Ow! Careful—my teeth.”

  “Sorry. Oh, and your hand! I must bandage it before you bleed out.” She dug in a pocket and pulled out a scarf, and wrapped it around his hand. She seemed reluctant even to look at Khilli. “My brother—”

  “He's dead,” Brod said.

  Elios, awkwardly, reached down and touched her shoulder. “It's over, my child. Many things will change now. Nothing will be the same . . .”

  “You have that right, Speaker.” Tripp came lumbering up, with Astiv in her wake. Tripp glanced around at the fallen Khilli, the wounded Brod, the blood-stained Elios. “Whatever happened here—oh! How limited, how petty we humans are, slaying each other in the light of that!” And she pointed up.

  Brod glanced up, shading his eyes to see for the first time the brightening, pinkish-white light that bathed the scene. It was like the Star, he thought, or a scrap of it, somehow flung into the sky above the Antistellar. But since the Star was on the far side of the world, that, of course, was impossible. Wasn't it?

  Vala stroked his brow. “Isn't it wonderful? And we did it, when we cleared away the Slime—or so Tripp thinks.”

  “There's a mirror,” Tripp said. “A Substrate mirror, hanging in space. Orbiting up there, all these hundreds of millions of Great Years. Seen by Venus and Helen Gray, apparently, who spotted orbital architecture around this world—and it seems to have a twin in the sky over the Navel, perhaps a lens to deflect the light rather than to gather it. Controlled from this tower on the ground, it seems, by reflected starlight, in as simple a way as possible—the builders planned for the long term, planned for a system that would keep on working even if their own children forgot what it was! But they didn't plan for the Slime, which came after the uplift wars, and wiped out the builders’ children, and covered over their grand mirrors, feeding on the very light that it was blocking out. And when the mirror in the sky turned away, the Slime itself died, but froze in place. And so things stayed, for uncounted millions of Great Years—until now.”

  “It will warm the world,” Vala said, full of wonder. “Think of it, Brod! Tripp says the mirror gathers up the warmth of the Star and throws it back at this Darkside, and lights it up. Not all of it, not at once —”

  “But enough to melt this ice cap, I'll wager,” Tripp said, her face raised to the light in the sky. “Once it let life spread over this Darkside—the life we saw frozen, dead. Now the light comes again, enough to allow the green things to grow—and people to live here permanently on Darkside. It's as if we discovered a whole new planet.”

  Astiv grunted, skeptical. “Maybe. If so, it's thanks to the engineering of those Substrate builders, four hundred and fifty million Great Years dead. We haven't done anything to shout about.”

  Vala had seemed distracted, with the sudden presence of her father, Brod's injuries, the miraculous light in the sky. But now it was as if she remembered Khilli. She released Brod, and went to her brother's body. She touched his cheek with her fingers, as if wondering. “He came to save me, I suppose, as he saw it. And it's finished up like this.” She looked up at her father. “But I won't go back with you, despite his sacrifice.”

  Elios had not moved. Now he stepped closer to Brod, and indicated the knife that still lay on the ground, out of Vala's sight. He murmured, “Pick it up, if you want. Let her think you killed him. It might be better that way. . . .”

  “She's no fool. The truth will come out.”

  He sighed. “Yes. And I suppose I will have to deal with that. Especially if she is to become my successor, as Speaker—for in spite of her protestations, that is her fate now.”

  Brod stared. “You can think of such matters, at a time like this?”

  “But that is what this has been about. The longer term. That is why I had to stop Khilli. He has changed our world, thanks to his campaign of conquest—united it, in a sense, under the Shuttle Flag. And now we have this, like a whole new world to conquer, as Tripp said. Who knows what wonders will follow?” He raised his face to the reflected
sunlight. “But Khilli wished to replace me. He'd have destroyed me to do it, in the end—and destroyed the faith, and then the world. You are more like him than I am; you must understand how it would have been. So I had to deal with him—and this was my one chance, this one last moment of weakness as he made his dash for vengeance, when I had him alone, before he gathered his loyal troops around him once more.”

  “And you took that chance.”

  “I had no choice. Surely you see that...”

  Brod heard Vala weeping softly. Tripp went to her.

  Elios, his face raised, was murmuring softly.

  “What are those words, Speaker?”

  “A prayer to the Sim Controllers. A prayer for forgiveness.” He closed his eyes, and the pinkish light bathed his face.

  Copyright © 2010 Stephen Baxter

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS: THIRD WORLD WORLDS

  by Norman Spinrad

  THE WALLS OF THE UNIVERSE

  By Paul Melko

  Tor, $25.95 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-0-7653-1997-5

  Melko takes on a classic SF theme and gives it an up-to-date feel—as well as a fair number of very satisfactory twists.

  The story, expanded from the Asimov's Readers’ Award winning novella of the same name, is built around John Rayburn, an eighteen-year-old farm boy from Ohio, who has a more or less normal life at the point when the tale begins. He's a starter on the school basketball team, has a good record in school, is a bit shy around girls, and works hard on the family farm. He's just gotten in a bit of a scrape after beating up another kid in school, but he can probably get out of it without serious consequences. The victim, Ted Carson, is a known troublemaker, and an apology will probably smooth things over.

  Then, in the midst of an argument with his parents over the apology, John stomps out of the house into the night and encounters—himself. John Prime (as the other John designates himself) introduces himself as a traveler from a parallel universe. He convinces John to hide him in the barn overnight.

  Then, playing on John's natural curiosity, Prime talks him into trying the device that transfers him to another universe—and the ride is on. Prime says John can return home after twelve hours, the time it takes the battery to recharge. That, however, is a lie. John quickly discovers that the device only works in one “direction.” He can move to a new universe with the push of a button, but he can't go back to any of those he's been in—most definitely not his own. Prime has stolen his home, his parents, his entire life.

  Prime doesn't really want all the benefits of John's accomplishments. He has no idea of how to play basketball, no interest in apologizing to Carson's family, and no intention of going to college. His plan is simple: get rich quick by using ideas that have made huge amounts of money in other universes. (Stephen King novels and Rubik's Cube are two of them.) And while he's at it, he strikes up a relationship with Casey, a cheerleader whose analogue Prime has seduced in one universe after another—and whom John had longed for at a distance.

  Melko splits the plot between the two Johns, as they find their way in worlds they aren't quite at home in. A reprise of Prime's journeys before finding John shows just how dangerous some of those worlds are: a North America where prehistoric mammals still roam, or others with oppressive governments.

  John's travels end up in a world very close to his own, but where his parents are childless. He takes a job as their farmhand, and finds his way to college to study physics, hoping to find out how cross-universe travel can work—with the ultimate goal of returning home and evening the score with Prime—and getting his life back.

  Both Johns run into complications. For one thing, Prime inherits John's troubles with Carson, whose father is foreman at the only place he can get a job. For another, it turns out to be a lot harder for an uneducated nobody to market his “inventions” than Prime expected. Writing a King novel involves a lot more than just remembering the plot of the movie.

  Meanwhile, John finds himself sidetracked by a lucrative “invention"—pinball—that he hadn't planned on introducing to his world. In the process, he finds out there are other travelers between worlds—and they don't appreciate competition.

  Melko brings the two plots to a highly satisfactory joint conclusion, with just enough new twists on the parallel-worlds plot to keep even long-time SF readers from figuring it all out. With its young protagonists and fast pace, this would be a great book to give to a high-schooler who's shown an interest in the genre.

  * * * *

  THE CITY & THE CITY

  by China Mieville

  Del Rey, $26.00 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-0-345-4951-2

  Mieville's latest is a police procedural of sorts, but it's got more in common with Jorge Luis Borges than with Ed McBain.

  Tyador Borlu, the protagonist, is a police detective in the city of Beszel, capital of a society best described as Balkan in its general ambience. The story begins with the discovery of a murder victim, a young woman who appears at first to be a prostitute dumped in a park. As expected, the detective doesn't buy the surface explanation, and starts off on a trail of evidence that takes him much farther than he could have foreseen. In the process, the reader learns all about his world—which is considerably stranger than it first appears.

  Shortly after the body is found, Borlu asks his assistant, a woman constable named Corwi, a question that the reader will only understand after gaining considerably more context: could this be an instance of “breach"? Corwi rejects the hypothesis, on the grounds that the area where the body was found is “almost total,” and there is no nearby “cross-hatching.” Exactly what these terms mean will only become clear over several chapters.

  What emerges is that Beszel is in an odd relationship with the rival city of Ul Qoma, where even the language is different. Traffic between the two is as rigidly controlled as between the two halves of Berlin during the Cold War. As the novel progresses, we learn that the two cities have different status in the international community—Beszel, for example, is not on good terms with the United States, whereas Ul Qoma is. This favorable relationship with the U.S. gives Ul Qoma considerable financial advantages over its rival city. So when it turns out that Borlu's murder victim is an American student at a university in Ul Qoma, the case takes on far more serious implications.

  Ultimately, the chase requires Borlu to travel to Ul Qoma and work with the police in that city. An outsider whom the local cops automatically close ranks against, he decides to push the investigation on his own—to the annoyance of his Ul Qoman contact, another veteran detective who's willing to bend a few rules to get to the bottom of things. After poking around at the university—and at the archaeological dig where the victim had been working—they learn that the murdered student had been involved in political conspiracies that revolved around the two cities and their joint-yet-separate histories. One of the victim's faculty advisors and a fellow grad student are also involved, and Borlu decides that saving them (and solving the case) requires smuggling them back to Beszel.

  Of course, things go badly awry just as Borlu thinks he's pulled off his plan. At that point, the complexities of the connection between the two cities jump to another level, and the truly bizarre relation between them becomes fully evident.

  Mieville takes an apparently impossible premise and turns it into a virtuoso examination of perception and reality, with a paranoid energy worthy of Philip K. Dick. Without any overt fantastic or futuristic element, the book is probably most easily categorized as an alternate reality. But its gritty use of everyday detail and its tough, cynical protagonist make it easy to accept as a realistic portrayal of a society that in many ways makes sense. If you haven't tried Mieville before—and even if his other fiction hasn't grabbed your interest—give this one a try.

  Powerful—and convincing—work from a writer who's being touted as one of the hottest in the business.

  * * * *

&nb
sp; THE EMPRESS OF MARS

  by Kage Baker

  Tor, $ 25.95 (hc)

  ISBN: 978-0-7653-1890-9

  Baker's latest is another novel that comes from an Asimov's novella. It takes place during the frontier days of a Martian colony, and most of the action is set in the only bar on the planet—after which the book is named.

  In this future, Mars is a British colony —settled and administered by the British Arean Company, on the model of the British East India Company. Not surprisingly, the British Martian enterprise has many of the flaws and quirks of its terrestrial predecessor. The administrators are short-sighted, often incompetent, and far more interested in the quarterly profit than in the long-range health of the colony or its economy. Not surprisingly, the terraforming of the planet is in a decidedly rudimentary state.

  Mary Griffith, who immigrated to Mars with her three daughters, is the founder and proprietress of the Empress, serving beer and whiskey brewed from the local grain. A Celtic clan that has emigrated to the planet provides both the grain and a significant quota of her customers. So when the head of Clan Morrigan tells her that the settler who raises the only barley on the planet has been chosen to return to Earth to look after the clan's affairs, it falls to Mary to buy the land or see it revert to the Arean Company—which she knows would plow under the barley crop just to put her out of business. That puts her in a tight spot, because she barely has the cash to keep her own operation going.

  Luckily, Mary finds allies—a motley crew, but that's what you get on a frontier world. They include a con man who figures out that Mars is going to require newer and bigger schemes; the ne'er-do-well son of an Italian business magnate, who thinks of Mars as a Western movie; the genius son of the Morrigan headsman, who's invented robot bees. Her enemies are an equally odd lot, including a group of priestesses from Luna who decide she's a heretic, and the head of the Arean Company, who wants to keep the planet under his thumb. Baker draws them all with a rich sense of humor, and piles one outrageous surprise on another as she generates a rip-snorter of an action plot.