The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Commissary, your creed of mankind’s evolutionary destiny condemns our own kind to become a swarm of children, granted a few moments of loving and breeding and dying, before being cast into futile war.” Pael glanced at me.

  “But,” Jeru said, “it is a creed that has bound us together for a thousand years. It is a creed that binds uncounted trillions of human beings across thousands of light years. It is a creed that binds a humanity so diverse it appears to be undergoing speciation … . Are you strong enough to defy such a creed now? Come, Academician. None of us chooses to be born in the middle of a war. We must all do our best for each other, for other human beings; what else is there?”

  I touched Pael’s shoulder; he flinched away. “Academician—is Jeru right? Is there a way we can live through this?”

  Pael shuddered. Jeru hovered over him.

  “Yes,” Pael said at last. “Yes, there is a way.”

  The idea turned out to be simple.

  And the plan Jeru and I devised to implement it was even simpler. It was based on a single assumption: Ghosts aren’t aggressive. It was ugly, I’ll admit that, and I could see why it would distress a squeamish earthworm like Pael. But sometimes there are no good choices.

  Jeru and I took a few minutes to rest up, check over our suits and our various injuries, and to make ourselves comfortable. Then, following patrol SOP once more, we made our way back to the pod of immature hides.

  We came out of the tangle and drifted down to that translucent hull. We tried to keep away from concentrations of Ghosts, but we made no real effort to conceal ourselves. There was little point, after all; the Ghosts would know all about us, and what we intended, soon enough.

  We hammered pitons into the pliable hull, and fixed rope to anchor ourselves. Then we took our knives and started to saw our way through the hull.

  As soon as we started, the Ghosts began to gather around us, like vast antibodies. They just hovered there, eerie faceless baubles drifting as if in vacuum breezes. But as I stared up at a dozen distorted reflections of my own skinny face, I felt an unreasonable loathing rise up in me. Maybe you could think of them as a family banding together to protect their young. I didn’t care; a lifetime’s carefully designed hatred isn’t thrown off so easily. I went at my work with a will.

  Jeru got through the pod hull first.

  The air gushed out in a fast-condensing fountain. The baby hides fluttered, their distress obvious. And the Ghosts began to cluster around Jeru, like huge light globes.

  Jeru glanced at me. “Keep working, tar.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  In another couple of minutes I was through. The air pressure was already dropping. It dwindled to nothing when we cut a big door-sized flap in that roof. Anchoring ourselves with the ropes, we rolled that lid back, opening the roof wide. A few last wisps of vapor came curling around our heads, ice fragments sparkling.

  The hide babies convulsed. Immature, they could not survive the sudden vacuum, intended as their ultimate environment. But the way they died made it easy for us.

  The silvery hides came flapping up out of the hole in the roof, one by one. We just grabbed each one—like grabbing hold of a billowing sheet—and we speared it with a knife, and threaded it on a length of rope. All we had to do was sit there and wait for them to come. There were hundreds of them, and we were kept busy.

  I hadn’t expected the adult Ghosts to sit through that, non-aggressive or not; and I was proved right. Soon they were clustering all around me, vast silvery bellies looming. A Ghost is massive and solid, and it packs a lot of inertia; if one hits you in the back you know about it. Soon they were nudging me hard enough to knock me flat against the roof, over and over. Once I was wrenched so hard against my tethering rope it felt as if I had cracked another bone or two in my foot.

  And, meanwhile, I was starting to feel a lot worse: dizzy, nauseous, overheated. It was getting harder to get back upright each time after being knocked down. I was growing weaker fast; I imagined the tiny molecules of my body falling apart in this Ghost-polluted space.

  For the first time I began to believe we were going to fail.

  But then, quite suddenly, the Ghosts backed off. When they were clear of me, I saw they were clustering around Jeru.

  She was standing on the hull, her feet tangled up in rope, and she had knives in both hands. She was slashing crazily at the Ghosts, and at the baby hides that came flapping past her, making no attempt to capture them now, simply cutting and destroying whatever she could reach. I could see that one arm was hanging awkwardly—maybe it was dislocated, or even broken—but she kept on slicing regardless.

  And the Ghosts were clustering around her, huge silver spheres crushing her frail, battling human form.

  She was sacrificing herself to save me—just as Captain Teid, in the last moments of the Brightly, had given herself to save Pael. And my duty was to complete the job.

  I stabbed and threaded, over and over, as the flimsy hides came tumbling out of that hole, slowly dying.

  At last no more hides came.

  I looked up, blinking to get the salt sweat out of my eyes. A few hides were still tumbling around the interior of the pod, but they were inert and out of my reach. Others had evaded us and gotten stuck in the tangle of the ship’s structure, too far and too scattered to make them worth pursuing further. What I had got would have to suffice.

  I started to make my way out of there, back through the tangle, to the location of our wrecked yacht, where I hoped Pael would be waiting.

  I looked back once. I couldn’t help it. The Ghosts were still clustered over the ripped pod roof. Somewhere in there, whatever was left of Jeru was still fighting.

  I had an impulse, almost overpowering, to go back to her. No human being should die alone. But I knew I had to get out of there, to complete the mission, to make her sacrifice worthwhile.

  So I got.

  Pael and I finished the job at the outer hull of the Ghost cruiser.

  Stripping the hides turned out to be as easy as Jeru had described. Fitting together the Planck-zero sheets was simple too—you just line them up and seal them with a thumb. I got on with that, sewing the hides together into a sail, while Pael worked on a rigging of lengths of rope, all fixed to a deck panel from the wreck of the yacht. He was fast and efficient: Pael, after all, came from a world where everybody goes solar sailing on their vacations.

  We worked steadily, for hours.

  I ignored the varying aches and chafes, the increasing pain in my head and chest and stomach, the throbbing of a broken arm that hadn’t healed, the agony of cracked bones in my foot. And we didn’t talk about anything but the task in hand. Pael didn’t ask what had become of Jeru, not once; it was as if he had anticipated the commissary’s fate.

  We were undisturbed by the Ghosts through all of this.

  I tried not to think about whatever emotions churned within those silvered carapaces, what despairing debates might chatter on invisible wavelengths. I was, after all, trying to complete a mission. And I had been exhausted even before I got back to Pael. I just kept going, ignoring my fatigue, focusing on the task.

  I was surprised to find it was done.

  We had made a sail hundreds of meters across, stitched together from the invisibly thin immature Ghost hide. It was roughly circular, and it was connected by a dozen lengths of fine rope to struts on the panel we had wrenched out of the wreck. The sail lay across space, languid ripples crossing its glimmering surface.

  Pael showed me how to work the thing. “Pull this rope, or this …” the great patchwork sail twitched in response to his commands. “I’ve set it so you shouldn’t have to try anything fancy, like tacking. The boat will just sail out, hopefully, to the cordon perimeter. If you need to lose the sail, just cut the ropes.”

  I was taking in all this automatically. It made sense for both of us to know how to operate our little yacht. But then I started to pick up the subtext of what he was saying.

  Befor
e I knew what he was doing he had shoved me onto the deck panel, and pushed it away from the Ghost ship. His strength was surprising.

  I watched him recede. He clung wistfully to a bit of tangle. I couldn’t summon the strength to figure out a way to cross the widening gap. But my suit could read his, as clear as day.

  “Where I grew up, the sky was full of sails …”

  “Why, Academician?”

  “You will go further and faster without my mass to haul. And besides—our lives are short enough; we should preserve the young. Don’t you think?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. Pael was much more valuable than I was; I was the one who should have been left behind. He had shamed himself.

  Complex glyphs criss-crossed his suit. “Keep out of the direct sunlight. It is growing more intense, of course. That will help you … .”

  And then he ducked out of sight, back into the tangle. The Ghost ship was receding now, closing over into its vast egg shape, the detail of the tangle becoming lost to my blurred vision.

  The sail above me slowly billowed, filling up with the light of the brightening sun. Pael had designed his improvised craft well; the rigging lines were all taut, and I could see no rips or creases in the silvery fabric.

  I clung to my bit of decking and sought shade.

  Twelve hours later, I reached an invisible radius where the tactical beacon in my pocket started to howl with a whine that filled my headset. My suit’s auxiliary systems cut in and I found myself breathing fresh air.

  A little after that, a set of lights ducked out of the streaming lanes of the fleet, and plunged toward me, growing brighter. At last it resolved into a golden bullet shape adorned with a blue-green tetrahedron, the sigil of free humanity. It was a supply ship called The Dominance of Primates.

  And a little after that, as a Ghost fleet fled their fortress, the star exploded.

  As soon as I had completed my formal report to the ship’s commissary—and I was able to check out of the Dominance’s sick bay—I asked to see the captain.

  I walked up to the bridge. My story had got around, and the various med patches I sported added to my heroic mythos. So I had to run the gauntlet of the crew—“You’re supposed to be dead, I impounded your back pay and slept with your mother already”—and was greeted by what seems to be the universal gesture of recognition of one tar to another, the clenched fist pumping up and down around an imaginary penis.

  But anything more respectful just wouldn’t feel normal.

  The captain turned out to be a grizzled veteran type with a vast laser burn scar on one cheek. She reminded me of First Officer Till.

  I told her I wanted to return to active duty as soon as my health allowed.

  She looked me up and down. “Are you sure, tar? You have a lot of options. Young as you are, you’ve made your contribution to the Expansion. You can go home.”

  “Sir, and do what?”

  She shrugged. “Farm. Mine. Raise babies. Whatever earthworms do. Or you can join the Commission for Historical Truth.”

  “Me, a commissary?”

  “You’ve been there, tar. You’ve been in among the Ghosts, and come out again—with a bit of intelligence more important than anything the Commission has come up with in fifty years. Are you sure you want to face action again?”

  I thought it over.

  I remembered how Jeru and Pael had argued. It had been an unwelcome perspective, for me. I was in a war that had nothing to do with me, trapped by what Jeru had called the logic of history. But then, I bet that’s been true of most of humanity through our long and bloody history. All you can do is live your life, and grasp your moment in the light—and stand by your comrades.

  A farmer—me? And I could never be smart enough for the Commission. No, I had no doubts.

  “A brief life burns brightly, sir.”

  Lethe, the captain looked like she had a lump in her throat. “Do I take that as a yes, tar?”

  I stood straight, ignoring the twinges of my injuries. “Yes, sir!”

  Oracle

  GREG EGAN

  Looking back at the century that’s just ended, it’s obvious that Australian writer Greg Egan was one of the Big New Names to emerge in SF in the nineties, and is probably one of the most significant talents to enter the field in the last several decades. Already one of the most widely known of all Australian genre writers, Egan may well be the best new “hard-science” writer to enter the field since Greg Bear, and is still growing in range, power, and sophistication. In the last few years, he has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere; many of his stories have also appeared in various “Best of the Year” series, and he was on the Hugo final ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. He won the Hugo Award in 1999 for his novella “Oceanic.” His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992; his second novel, Permutation City, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1994. His other books include the novels, Distress and Diaspora, and three collections of his short fiction, Axiomatic, Luminous, and Our Lady of Chemobyl. His most recent book is a major new novel, Teranesia. He has a web site at http:llwww.netspace.netau/^gregegan/.

  In the strange and eloquent story that follows, he takes us to a slightly altered version of our own familiar Earth in the days just after World War II, for a memorable battle of ideas between two of the smartest humans alive—a deceptively quiet battle, fought with words broadcast over the radio, that could nevertheless change our view of the universe forever … and perhaps even change the universe itself.

  1

  On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

  He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days—the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement—had been able to dull his sense of panic. He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation.

  That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimize his discomfort, sometimes he couldn’t, but he’d been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him. That wasn’t true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of the night, the way he might have ached with grief, or love. He’d always cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he’d failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.

  Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was somewhere deep in the countryside, with nothing to be heard in the middle of the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay fever, but in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped from his face into the bowl of lukewarm oats they’d given him. He stanched the flow with the back of his hand, but suffered a moment of shuddering revulsion when he couldn’t find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean on his trousers. Soon he’d need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber pot whenever he asked, but they always waited two or three hours before removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the fact that it took up space in the cage was worse.

  Toward the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. “How are we today, Prof?” Robert didn’t reply. Since the day Quint had responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an appropriate name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the man’s expense every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his mind was blank, and, in retrospect the whole exercise seemed like an insane
distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points against some predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.

  “Many happy returns,” Quint said cheerfully.

  Robert took care to betray no surprise. He’d never lost track of the days, but he’d stopped thinking in terms of the calendar date; it simply wasn’t relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own birthday would have been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be taken as proof of his deterioration, and imminent surrender.

  If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without looking up. “You know I almost qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadn’t done my hip in just before the trials, I might have competed.” He tried a self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose I was never really much of an athlete. But I’m only forty-six. I’m not ready for a wheelchair yet.” The words did help: he could beg this way without breaking down completely, expressing an honest fear without revealing how much deeper the threat of damage went.

  He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. “I just can’t bear the thought of being crippled. All I’m asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my health.”

  Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone of thoughtful sympathy. “It’s unnatural, isn’t it? Living like this: bent over, twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you. I’m glad you can finally see that.”

  Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time … as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?

  He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. “I don’t suppose you know Franz Kafka?”

  “Kafka?” Quint could never hide his voracity for names. “One of your Commie chums, is he?”