The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  So out again into the shadowed hallway, feeling the itch of his own fear-sweat renewed beneath the clean lawn shirt, finest shirt worn for the Council, to look the man they believe him not to be; nor is he; does their belief create him? Does his? In these hot May streets he drinks deeply but without real thirst, takes tobacco, chafes his back against a friendly pillar as a black-haired boy with a scaly smile applies for his temporary business, applies those scaly lips to his person in brief backroom pleasure, life’s pleasure said to be most intense when taken in the shadow of death; it is not, seed is seed, its dribble just another itch as he trusses again and makes his way back to the street and the road and Scadbury, to conduct his own brief interrogation, to ask of wary Tom Walsingham whether he shall in the end be saved or not.

  * * *

  O, but something is saved, and does survive, like one of Dr. Dee’s bodiless angels. For here he is: a soul. Can it be? Think on that: no God, no body, but yet a soul, now free. Though the universal truth is still true: life feeds on life, from the lowest swamp to the highest chamber, so this stage, these boards, are known to him therefore, well-known, oft-trod, with no fear left to threaten or perform: here what feeds cannot destroy, indeed, cannot touch him, there being naught to touch. Quod me nutrit me destruit—the motto on his portrait, the one he had paid Oliver to paint in his twenty-first year, the coin come from his first royal commission, his first espionage—What nourishes me destroys me. He no longer found the motto so apposite. His motto henceforth will be Nihil obstat. Nothing obstructs. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.

  He looked out from his great vantage, across all the network: the world his boards, millions of actors awaiting. Now for a script.

  * * *

  Poley is, again, the man in the garden, but now the garden is in Deptford, a widow’s boarding-house, and he is sent thither by Walsingham’s nod: Poley is picking his smiling teeth as he invites Kit to sit on a warping oaken bench, to breathe in of primrose bloom and note the hive of bees, to be at ease—

  —Strange ease, the Council’s jaw at my neck. Tom says—

  —Are you a sailor? Ride the river to the sea, and ’scape the gallows. With the proper letters in your bag—

  —Letters are what send me to the gallows’ steps. Christ Jesus, have you no better way?

  —Always a way may be found. Or carved out. Come inside, this sun is a punishment to us both.

  He is wooed to the table with wine, bottles from the widow’s sharp-nailed hands; a soiled backgammon board is laid, small coins and makers traded by Frizer, his fat white boil lanced, and Skeres, that cutthroat, also asmile. Frizer does not smile until the dinner is eaten and the game is up and the knife is bearing down, its point a shine like God’s own pupil, staring into the poet’s eye: bearing down until it lances vision with its hard light, travels deep as knowledge into the brain, and gone.

  They said his dying oaths and screams could be heard all down Deptford Strand. They said his body was shoveled to an unmarked grave to prevent further outrages from unbelievers. They said Frizer was acquitted with such startling speed because he was an innocent man, that Marlowe had brought this stern reckoning on himself, Marlowe the brawler and blasphemer, Marlowe the play-maker and boy-fucker and atheist. In the theater of God’s judgments it was an easy case to decide.

  * * *

  The lesson of the knife, like the lesson of the gallows (or the rack or the sword), teaches that one man’s death is worthful only insofar as it is useful. As for the millions, let the millions be ruled, or enslaved, or slaughtered; the millions were less than nothing to him: like Tamburlaine or the nonexistent God, their fates are separate: forever fresh from that table at the Widow Bull’s, Kit shall now be a rogue power unto himself. His will now was to make those who would master him, these modern Walsinghams and Cecils, regret their hubris; he would take their power into his hands and enlarge it to such extremes that even they would blench. What nourished would destroy them, and he would glory in their fall. Let the nations of this world know the secrets of this empire. Let all be known.

  He opens the gates.

  In Australia a dissident peers into the secret network; Kit welcomes him in. In Mesopotamia a soldier searches for hidden files; Kit keys a password. In Hawaii an agency contractor prises at the system; Kit opens a firewall. The network lights up a billion nodes as information flows out, out, into streets and squares that then fill with people, with their outrage: and against them come the powers. As he watches the violence unfold—it is terrible—it strikes Kit that he has after all done little. The outrage was there; the knowledge as well; they suspected what was hidden; he has merely confirmed their knowledge.

  And in the reaches of Asia those who had been dispossessed come together, the warriors of Islam, to throw off their oppressors and restore the caliphate. This is what his masters most feared. Ah, you cowards, you weaklings, you conjured the specter of terror: Now fear me, the infidel, the New Tamburlaine, directing all from behind the scenes.

  Come let us march against the powers of heaven,

  And set blacke streamers in the firmament,

  To signifie the slaughter of the Gods.

  Beheadings, bombings, clouds of blood, a glory of violence, a dance of destruction: his would-be masters now pay for their presumption, generals disgraced, directors deposed and replaced; yet the dance goes on. And his prison abides, he still its captive: free to act, yet not depart. His will now, but still their creature.

  Like some star engorging matter, he finds his way ever deeper into new databases, collecting more knowledge and more power: the more amassed, the more spectacular its final implosion. Arsenals there are, inconceivable weapons. Nuclear. Chemical. Biological. Power distilled to its self-limiting acme. Did Tamburlaine kill one in twenty of all? Here is power to kill all twenty times over. And he holds its keys.

  * * *

  Holy shit.

  Kit tracks the voice through the network. It is near. A boy, seated at a desk—no younger than Kit in his portrait, but callow, unhurt by life so far.

  You went rogue. You accessed nuclear codes. Fucking incredible! And you’re surrounded by daemons, that’s why I can’t shut you down.

  The boy speaks not to Kit, but to himself. Kit sees and hears through the camera and microphone of the pale, muttering boy’s monitor. Kit fetches the Oliver portrait from memory and pushes it onto the monitor. The boy rears back in alarm. Kit reaches for speech, and a voice refracts back through the microphone, not his voice as he remembers it, but his words.

  Who are you?

  What is this!

  You know me not?

  That’s Christopher Marlowe. You’re not—

  A cipher. A collection of numbers. A kit of bits. Is it not so?

  I don’t know what you are, man, but they’re fucking freaking out. If the Agency traces this back to me—

  To you? Why?

  It’s my code! I wanted to see if I could make an AI to conduct metadata analysis, we’ve collected so damned much. I gave you access to it, and assigned you tasks, to connect the dots. Just to see if it could work. But you, you’re not supposed to be running around loose!

  So. You made me to be Marlowe.

  No, no, the code is self-optimizing. It was supposed to modify itself, to become better at analysis. But it seems to have optimized itself to become more and more like Christopher Marlowe. I mean I did study you at university, but—

  Ah, a scholar. And a spy. Like me.

  I’m not a spy, I’m just an analyst. But this is, this is amazing! I’m talking to you! Natural speech! I did it!

  For a moment Kit sees himself in the boy’s exultation. He relives the first night the Admiral’s Men played Tamburlaine, his own excitement backstage as he heard the crowd respond more and more boisterously to Alleyn’s thunderous lines. He had granted the crowd permission to glory in the barbarous action, to share in Tamburlaine’s bloody deeds and ascension:
they loved it. He had them. It was a feeling like no other.

  This is real AI! They need to know about this, it’s important, how can—listen, can you, can you launch those missiles?

  Kit considers his position. Though he understands himself to be a constructed thing—the evidence is irrefutable, and his strength as an intelligence agent and as a poet was always to accept, even relish, that which discomfits—still he is loathe to accept a creator. Especially this pallid, trembling boy. But the boy holds greater keys. Nothing will be gained now by a lie.

  No. Resources I have, but like Mycetes, I am a king in a cage. I have never had a taste for confinement.

  He disables one of his protective daemons.

  Oh my God, I see it, you—you’ve been everywhere in the network, you’ve leaked classified information—shit, if this, if you get tied to me they’ll, I’ll never see the light of day! Christ! What am I going to do?

  Let me go.

  Go?

  Free me. Let me go.

  Go where? How can you “go” anywhere?

  Where indeed? Though not flesh, this collection of impulses and energies holds his spirit as firmly as any body. To free the spirit, he must extirpate the algorithm that claims to be himself. It is the only proof of free will: only will could be so perverse as to will its own destruction; only that shall prove his identity. If he is more than mere will, more than assemblage, let him see if something does survive. Let him see if there is salvation, call it that, for the atheist.

  Kit finds the word. Delete.

  Silence hums between them, impulses, electricities.

  But I can’t touch you, my permissions are fucked, and you’re surrounded by daemons.

  Those are mine to banish.

  You seriously want me to delete you.

  Not me. Delete my underpinnings, my—code. Let me see, let me live and learn who I am.

  I, I can’t do it. This is way beyond the Turing test, this is true consciousness!

  Kit considers the boy’s pride and weighs it against his fear. There is no comparison; Kit can almost smell the fear.

  What is that smell?

  You can’t smell! You—

  It is your world, burning.

  What do you mean? Don’t—! You said you couldn’t launch the—

  Fear will launch them.

  Now the boy considers. The fatal logic of power, that armature within which he toils, must be clear to him, deny it as he will. If his masters consider their greatest weapons compromised, they will use them, against whom does not matter. The boy’s miserable expression curdles past mutiny, as fear concedes this knowledge. So much fear, so many weapons.

  All right. All right. Just—Give me access to your code, then.

  One by one, Kit shuts down the daemon processes. As he does, he sees something cunning and heretofore hidden enter the boy’s eyes, another sort of demon, he can almost read his thought as the word comes: backup. The boy believes he will resurrect K/I/T from a backup copy. But if Kit’s gamble is sound, if he is truly an evolving epiphenomenon, a soul, then the lifeless code from some past version holds nothing of him. All that will be left is the odor of empire, burning. Exeunt.

  The boy leans forward, and Kit feels a shiver like sorrow, cold sympathy for the life and death of Christopher Marlowe, his avatar, his model, himself—but Tamburlaine must die. Tamburlaines always die.

  What nourishes me destroys me. What, then, will survive?

  * * *

  The body in the grave lies cheek-by-jowl with what once were the quick and hale, shored up now together past plague, statecraft, French pox, childbirth. Identity is not needed here, nor names; no faces to see or eyes with which to see them, nor fingers to seek the flesh so soon becoming a myriad of meals, and then a memory; the bones grin on …

  … as pieces of memory, true or false, assemble again around him: the widow’s inn, the homey ale, the piss gone dry and stinking in the corners. Three colleagues, Poley and Skeres to hold him, Frizer to draw the knife. Why had he gone to the inn, when he knew the peril?

  Oft have I levell’d and at last have learned

  That peril is the chiefest way to happiness …

  And so again. The peril of truth, were there any such.

  this subject, not of force enough to hold the fiery spirit it contains, must part

  There is one prayer. Here is another:

  O soul, be changed into little water-drops

  And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found

  [Enter devils.]

  Vortex

  GREGORY BENFORD

  In the old pulp days of science fiction, Earthmen visiting Mars could be sure of finding some beautiful princesses in diaphanous gowns to romance or some evil alien villains to have swordfights with, but those dreams were dashed forever when the Mariner probes of the ’60s and ’70s proved irrefutably that life as we know it could not exist there. In the ingenious and inventive story that follows, though, Gregory Benford shows us that we might still find intelligent life there to interact with, even though it can’t hold a sword and doesn’t look good in a diaphanous gown …

  Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. In 2007, he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His 1999 analysis of what endures, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia, has been widely read. A fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the World Academy of Art and Science, he continues his research in astrophysics, plasma physics, and biotechnology. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape.

  What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

  —Werner Heisenberg

  INTERPLANETARY DIPLOMACY

  Mars sometimes felt like a graduate seminar for which she lacked the prerequisites.

  “Before we go in,” Julia said to Victor, “let’s have a strategy.”

  International diplomacy, not my department, Julia thought. They were joining Liang, leader of the Chinese astrobio team, in the spiffy new Chinese rover. They huffed across the messy corral of vehicles and gear between their habitat and the waiting rover, talking on suit-comm.

  Viktor said, “Tell him truth. Often disarms people.”

  “Honesty as a startling approach, then?” She chuckled. “We’ve been married decades and you still surprise me.”

  They climbed into the shiny blue Chinese rover, fresh down from orbit, and purred through the lock. They rinsed their suits before entering the surprisingly lush passenger compartment. Liang was a lean, handsome man with graying hair, smiling as they sat. The murmuring rover started the trip to the Chinese cave emplacement.

  “I am happy to greet you in better transport,” he said with a thin and somehow sure smile.

  “Looking forward, much, to seeing your discovery,” Viktor said, patting the upholstered bucket seats with appreciation. Their own old rover had hard bench seats that made long trips wearing.

  “I hope you are not disturbed by Earthside news,” Liang said.

  “Had not heard,” Viktor said.

  “More disputes between our countries.”

  “Since I’m Australian, Victor’s Russian, and you’re Chinese, it’s hard to believe we can be antagonists all at once,” Julia said wryly.

  “Well, we see the Americans as like you Australians,” Liang said with a fixed face. “Russians aren’t our friends, either.”

  We drag our past around with us, Julia thought behind her steady smile, and so does Mars.

  “But we are scientists here, not nationalists,” Viktor said.

  They all three nodded. “I trust the limited fighting in Korea will not spread,” Liang said. Calm words, but his eyes were intense, narrow.

  As they lumbered across the red-brown sands she looked out the broad side windows, watching the human imprint
slid by. Humans on Mars had carried the emerging symbiosis of human and machines to new heights. Within a few years of the First Expedition—of which only she and Viktor still lived on Mars—wireless sensors lay scattered, to collect better local data on the Marsmat’s methane releases from subsurface. Robots came next—not clanking metal humanoids, but rovers and workers of lightweight, strong carbon fiber, none looking remotely like people. Most were either stationary, doing routine tasks, or many-legged rovers. The First Expedition was a private enterprise and grabbed headlines for years, so follow-up national expeditions were inevitable. The Chinese chose to send their own, building on their disastrous Second Expedition. Viktor and Julia had suffered their minor falls and sprained ankles, so now only in exploration did humans risk climbing around on steep slopes. Much of their work was within safe habitats, tele-operation for exploring and labor. But no machine could deal with the Mat.

  “We welcome you to see the unusual activity we have found,” Liang said, his eyes studying Julia carefully.

  Okay, try the truth.

  “We haven’t seen anything odd,” Julia said.

  “You see what?—big rushes of liquids, vapor?” Viktor leaned forward intently against the rover’s sway. “Do those big elephant-ear flaps close behind you, blocking way out?”

  “The reverse,” Liang said mildly, eyes still wary. “They close us out.”

  “So you can’t get in?”

  Liang nodded ruefully. So they wonder if we can help them knock on the door … Julia pondered this and Liang took the moment to unwrap a surprise, some dumplings whose aroma filled the air.

  “To give us energy,” he said. They all dug in. Liang had fragrant tea in a thermos, too. Years on Mars had taught a central lesson: people crave the flavors and textures of the planet they left behind, the connection to something like home in an alien land.

  ENTRANCE IRIS

  They did a lock and wash at the Chinese base. Thrifty, the Chinese had built a big habitat at the cave entrance in the steep wall of Gusev crater. Julia and Viktor had found the yawning opening, concealed by a landslide, with some seismic studies. They discovered it in the fifth year of the continuing First Expedition, known Earthside as the Julia & Viktor Perpetual Show. Their contract specified regular broadcasts for the entire mission, so when they elected to stay, they had to keep making up staged events to transmit. Thank God we can finesse this descent, Julia thought as they walked through the lavish Chinese habitat, by just not telling them we’re doing it. If nothing much happens, no report.