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

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  By the time I leave the hospital my shift has been over for ages. I decide to go back to the hotel anyway, just in case anything cropped up after I left. I check in with housekeeping and when I’ve satisfied myself that no major disasters have occurred in my absence I go in search of Benny. I find him in his office. There’s a semicircle of empty chairs in front of his desk, the ghost of a meeting. Benny is alone, sitting very still in his chair, reading something—a book?—by the light of his desk lamp. He seems miles away, absent in a manner that is most unlike him.

  When he realises I’m there he jerks upright, and there’s an expression on his face—panic, almost—as if I’ve caught him out in a secret. He slams the book shut, making a slapping sound.

  It’s pointless him trying to hide it, though. I’d know the book anywhere, because it belongs to us, to Moolie and me. It’s The Art of Space Travel.

  “Emily,” Benny says. He’s watching my face for signs of disaster and at the same time he still looks guilty. It’s a weird combination, almost funny. “I wasn’t expecting you back. How’s your mother?”

  “Moolie’s fine,” I say. “They’re letting her out tomorrow. What are you doing with that?”

  I am talking about the book, of course, which I can’t stop staring at, the way Benny is holding it to him, like a shield. All of a sudden there’s this noise in my ears, a kind of roaring sound, and I’m thinking of Moolie and Moolie telling me that I should talk to Benny.

  I’m thinking of the way Benny is always asking after Moolie, and what Moolie said before, such a long time ago, about Benny arriving in this country with a cardboard suitcase and fake Levi’s, and a gold watch that he had to sell to get the money to rent a room.

  “Emily,” Benny says again, and the way he says my name—like he’s apologising for something—makes me feel even weirder. He unfolds the book again across his lap, opening it to the centre, where I know there’s a double-page colour spread of the Milky Way, with its billions of stars, all buzzing and fusing together, cloudy and luminous, like the mist as it rises from the surface of the George VI Reservoir.

  Benny runs his fingers gently across the paper. It makes a faint squeaking sound. I know exactly how that paper feels: soft to the touch, slightly furry with impacted dust, old.

  Benny is touching the book as if it is his.

  My stomach does a lurch, as if the world is travelling too fast suddenly, spinning out of control across the blackly infinite backdrop of the whole of space.

  “One of my schoolteachers gave me this book,” Benny says. “His name was Otto Okora. His parents brought him here to London when he was six years old. They never returned to Africa, but Otto did. He came back to teach high school in Freetown and that’s where he stayed. He said that England was too cold and too crowded, and that the sky here was never black enough to see the stars. He had this thing about Africa being closer to outer space than any other continent. ‘We never lost our sense of life’s mysteries,’ was what he used to say. Otto was crazy about outer space. He would sit us down in the long hot afternoons and tell us stories about the first moon landings and the first space stations, the first attempts to map the surface of Mars. It was like poetry to me, Emily, and I could never get enough of it. I learned the names of the constellations and how to see them. I knew by heart the mass and volume and composition of each of the planets in our solar system. I even learned to draw my own star maps—impossible journeys to distant planets that no one in a thousand of our lifetimes will ever see. I saw them, though. I saw them at night, when I couldn’t sleep. Instead of counting chickens I would count stars, picking them out from my memory one by one, like diamonds from a black silk handkerchief.”

  Like diamonds from a black silk handkerchief.

  I want to hug him. Even in the midst of my confusion I want to hug him and tell him that I feel the same, that I have always felt the same, that we are alike.

  That we are alike, of course we are.

  The truth has been here in front of me, all the time. How stupid am I?

  There’s a kind of book called a grimoire, which is a book of spells. I’ve never seen one—I don’t know if such a thing really exists, even—but The Art of Space Travel has always felt to me like it had magic trapped in it. Like you could open its pages and accidentally end up somewhere else. All those dazzling ropes of stars, all those thousands of possible futures, and futures’ futures.

  All those enchanted luminous pathways, blinking up at us through the darkness, like the lights of a runway.

  I clear my throat with a little cough. I haven’t a single clue what I ought to say.

  “Your mother did her nut when you first got a job here,” Benny says quietly. “She called me on the phone, tore me off a strip. She said I wasn’t to breathe a word, under pain of death. That was the first time we’d spoken to one another in ten years.”

  * * *

  “I was supposed to study medicine,” Benny says to me later. “My heart was never in it, though. I didn’t know what I wanted, only that I wanted to find a bigger world than the world I came from. I remember it as if it was yesterday, standing there on the tarmac and looking up at this hotel and just liking the name of it. I gazed up at the big lit-up star logo and it was as if I could hear Otto Okora saying, You go for it, Benny boy, that’s a good omen. I liked the people and I liked the bustle and I liked the lights at night. All the taking off and landing, the enigma of arrival. There’s a book with that name—your mother gave me a copy right back at the beginning, when she still believed in me and things were good between us. I never got round to reading it, but I loved that title. I loved it that I’d finally discovered something I was good at.

  “Would she mind very much, do you think?” Benny says. “If I went to see her?”

  “It’s your funeral,” I say, and shrug. I try and picture it as it might happen on TV, Benny pressing Moolie’s skinny hand to his lips while she smiles weakly up from the pillows and whispers his name. You see how funny that is, right? “Only don’t go blaming me if she bites your head off.”

  * * *

  Zhanna Sorokina is shorter than she appears on television. She has short mouse-brown hair, and piercing blue eyes. She looks like a school kid.

  When I ask her if she’ll sign The Art of Space Travel she looks confused. “But I did not write this,” she says.

  “I know that,” I say. “But it’s a book about space. My dad gave it to me. It would mean a lot to me if you would sign it. As a souvenir.”

  She uses the pen I give her, a blue Bic, to sign the title page. She writes her name twice, first in the sweeping Cyrillic script she would have learned at school and then again underneath in spiky Latin capitals.

  “Is this okay?” she asks.

  “Very,” I reply. “Thank you.”

  Sorokina smiles, very briefly, and then I see her awareness of me leak from her eyes as she moves away towards the lift that will take her up to the tenth-floor news suite and the waiting cameras, the media frenzy that will surround her for the remainder of her time here on Earth. Her bodyguard moves in to shield her.

  It’s the last and only time I will see her close to.

  In leaving this world, she makes me feel more properly a part of it.

  * * *

  I wish I had a child I could one day tell about this moment. I’ve never felt like this before, but suddenly I do.

  * * *

  Benny would kill me if he knew I was down here. I’m supposed to be upstairs, in the news suite, making sure they’re up and running with the drinks trolleys. That there are three different kinds of bottled beer, instead of the two that would be usual for these kinds of occasions.

  Flight from the Ages

  DEREK KȔNSKEN

  Here’s a story of mindboggling scope and span, a story taking place over a time span of billions of years, ultimately all the way back to the beginning of the universe, in which a banking AI operating a customs and tariff spaceship tries
to deal with the inadvertent release of unimaginably powerful forces from an ancient alien weapon of war that threatens to destroy not only our galaxy but all of spacetime itself.…

  Derek Künsken left the science world to work with street children in Latin America and then with the Canadian Foreign Service. Adventuring done and parenting started, he now writes science fiction and fantasy in Gatineau, Québec. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and in a number of year’s best anthologies. He won the Asimov’s Readers’ Award in 2013 and is noveling pretty intensely right now. He blogs at www.blackgate.com and tweets from @derekkunsken.

  3113 A.D.

  The artificial intelligence Ulixes-316 was the sole occupant of the memory banks and processing algorithms of the customs and tariff ship called The Derivatives Market. From this position, Ulixes-316 was pressuring the Epsilon Indi Bank to deny credit to the Merced Republic Insurance Company. Merced was liable for paying an enormous indemnity, one that would halve its stock value. The holder of Ulixes-316’s lease was orchestrating a hostile takeover of Merced, and Ulixes-316 did not want the Epsilon Indi Bank offering a bailout.

  Then, the message arrived. It was an encrypted sub-AI, carried by a courier ship through a series of small wormhole jumps, and transmitted to Ulixes-316 as soon as the courier was in-system.

  Break off current negotiations and prepare for reassignment.

  Ulixes-316, an Aleph-Class artificial intelligence, was baffled. It stood not only to earn its leaseholder a sizeable profit, but would reap its own percentage of the deal.

  Not possible, Ulixes communicated back. Negotiations at delicate point. Deal at risk.

  The CEO is aware of opportunity cost, replied the sub-AI. Break off negotiations and prepare for secure instructions.

  The CEO. What was big enough to have the CEO reaching down to her mobile agents? Was the market crashing?

  The board will hear about this, Ulixes-316 messaged, and I’m invoking article 41(a) of the leasing agreement, for leaser-induced business losses and compensation.

  Understood, was the reply. Compensation is already being processed.

  Cold comfort. The takeover was worth ten times the compensation. Ulixes instructed its legal subroutines to file a suit against the bank for the losses. Then it switched over to secure communications as it prepared the engines surrounding the three attometer-sized black holes that powered The Derivatives Market. The secure instructions passed cryptographic analysis.

  To: Ulixes-316 and Poluphemos-156

  From: CEO, First Bank of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy

  Mission: Proceed immediately to the Tirhene Red Dwarf system. Investigate the abrupt end of tachyon emissions from the Praesepe Cluster.

  Distaste. This is what Ulixes felt.

  This was worth blowing a trillion peso acquisition? Some kind of environmental crisis in an uninhabited system? The science of tachyons, only eight hundred years old, was still broadly considered to be in its infancy. Tachyon detectors were an imprecise set of eyes with which to interrogate the cosmos, even if they provided better-than-instantaneous communications across the vast gulfs between the stars.

  More worrying, whatever bonuses to be had in this new mission would have to be shared with Poluphemos-156, another Aleph-Class AI, and a competitor.

  Ulixes filed this as evidence with its subroutine for the legal suit and processed the rest of the message.

  * * *

  The blackout of tachyons is centered on an event that will occur in the Tirhene system, and is being roughly localized to a window some time in the next seven to nine days. The Bank is treating this as a threat.

  Background—Tachyons: Tachyons travel faster than light and react very little with sub-luminal matter. They permeate space omnidirectionally but show a great deal of structure. It is theorized that they are the equivalent of cosmic microwave background radiation but move backward in time from a Big Crunch event at the end of the universe. There is no known incidence of a tachyon emissions blackout and no known mechanism by which this could occur.

  Background—The Tirhene Red Dwarf System: Tirhene is an old, stable star surrounded by various asteroid belts. It is thought to have been one of the key battle grounds of two ancient, extinct species. Both the Kolkheti and Sauronati were believed to have possessed space-time weapons, although previous surveys of Tirhene have not revealed any artifacts.

  * * *

  Ulixes-316 was no scientist. Why not send some research AI?

  Perhaps it was because Ulixes was embedded in a combat vehicle and experienced in its use. Ulixes had spent much of its lease in a black-hole-powered customs and tariff ship. The AI had, in different assignments, been both a tariff negotiator and a customs enforcer. Both it and the ship were designed for long travel, high accelerations, and independent financial and military action, far from oversight by the First Bank of the Plutocracy.

  All this was also true for Poluphemos-156. What did the bank expect them to find that justified pulling so much military and economic firepower off the pursuit of investments?

  With frustration, Ulixes ejected a drone loaded with legal and accounting sub-AIs to terminate local contracts, withdraw legal suits, sell mortgages, and liquidate corporations that Ulixes had painstakingly set up or acquired over a decade. The black hole drives in The Derivatives Market normally heated reaction mass for impressive thrust, but Ulixes today used that power to begin the delicate operation of inducing an artificial wormhole. Induced wormholes, without an exotic matter architecture to stabilize them, had to be treated gently. The Derivatives Market drifted through on the barest of thrust, leaping across three light-years of intervening space, the first of many jumps that would take Ulixes to Tirhene.

  * * *

  Ulixes emerged into a sepulchral rubble of asteroids, hard planetesimals, and shriveled, radioactive gas giants. This was the wreck of the Tirhene system, seen half an AU from the streams of dark lithium and carbon in the highest clouds of the red dwarf. This wasteland of planetary debris had been left by the long ago Kolkheti-Sauronati war.

  Ulixes extended the ship’s sensors, seeing the world in the rich colors of cosmic rays, x-rays, visible light, down to the gentle thrumming of radio. Fast-moving microscopic dust tickled against the hull, like rain on skin.

  Another customs and tariff ship in the Tirhene system signaled with an encrypted Bank code. Poluphemos-156. Ulixes acknowledged the signal and they proceeded sunward.

  After an hour of tedious nothing, Ulixes brought the third black hole drive online. Although not designed for the purpose, the three microscopic black holes in tandem could act as a telescopic array for gravity waves, and Ulixes felt for the curvature and texture of space-time. It was a weird sense, tactile and strangely internal.

  Disturbingly, the tiny gravitational waves rippled at a frequency far higher than anything Ulixes had ever observed. Even a pair of neutron stars, tightly orbiting each other, would create long gravity waves. These waves were short and frenetic. However, the source of the disturbance was deeper in system, still too far to usefully resolve.

  The black hole drive was also one of the only things that could function as a detector of the weakly interacting tachyons. Already, eight days from whatever event was going to occur, a vast occlusion smeared out tachyons in the direction of the Praesepe Cluster.

  With one exception. Poluphemos’ ship was bright.

  “You’re lit up with tachyons,” Ulixes transmitted.

  “It’s new corporate tech,” Poluphemos replied. “I’m in direct contact with the bank headquarters.”

  “What? Why wasn’t I told?” Ulixes demanded. The implications for stock trading were enormous. The fastest market news had to be carried through temporary, constructed wormholes, which still beat electromagnetic transmissions, but was cumbersome. Until corporate espionage took this advantage away from the bank, the possibilities for undetectable insider trading were enormous. Market traders could sell and buy stocks bef
ore anyone, even the companies themselves, knew of key developments. Suddenly, Ulixes understood the bank’s interest in the Tirhene system. The tachyon occlusion might eliminate their new advantage.

  “It’s need-to-know,” Poluphemos said. “Now you need to know.”

  “You’re prototyping it,” Ulixes said. “Why you?”

  “It’s a bonus,” Poluphemos said, “for closing some major deals.”

  Ulixes did not reply. They all closed major deals. Ulixes had been about to. But now the bank had chosen Ulixes to secure their larger secret.

  “What is it? Collimated tachyons, like a laser or maser?” Ulixes asked.

  “Need-to-know,” Poluphemos said. Ulixes could not tell if the other AI was ineffectively masking some satisfaction from its voice, or if Ulixes was imagining it.

  * * *

  For two days, the pair of customs and tariff ships closed in on the source of the gravity waves, radar guiding them toward a piece of old Sauronati ordnance, possibly a mine. Little was known of the two extinct warring parties. The Sauronati were said to have ignited the homes of their enemies by increasing the pressure at the cores of the gas giants, perhaps with microscopic charged black holes, like the ones used in the engines of the customs and tariff ship. But this piece of ancient ordnance looked nothing like the ship’s drive. The frenetic gravity waves were increasing in frequency and centered on the mine. It was ancient, bearing micro-meteor impact pitting and solar flare plasma erosion.

  “This is invaluable,” Poluphemos transmitted. “We can stake a claim on this technology under the IP clauses of our leases and then license the tech to the bank.”

  “Is it armed?” Ulixes asked.

  “The circuitry looks like other self-repairing Sauronati artifacts we have on file, but the repairs may have failed after all this time.”

  “This is dangerous,” Ulixes replied. “No one has ever seen gravity waves like this. We have no idea what could cause this.”

  “All the better to get this artifact to safety quickly.”