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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Will I be transmitted as your seeds were, encoded in tachyons?”

  Tachyons travel backward in time. You must go forward in time, with all the dangers of interference with radiation and the possibility of absorption by matter. But your algorithms may be simple enough to survive.

  “What if I don’t survive?”

  We will not have another chance. The window for sending you through the wormhole is brief and we could not build another tunnel back to the Big Bang. Too many causes to the Big Bang would destabilize it.

  “I’m afraid.”

  You will not be alone. You will travel with all your charges, safely preserved within you.

  The impossibility of the engineering of galaxies and space-time by the Resonance of the Intellects yawned above Ulixes. The emulator containing it and the nineteen thousand backups was connected to all the perceptions of the intellects, even if it could not process them. Ulixes could experience it. The blistering sheets of x-rays. The thrumming of space-time shuddering with gravitational waves. The clatter of tachyonic observations of the near and far future. The slow booming symphony of sound waves in space as the galactic hydrogen haloes collided.

  Divinity.

  This was divinity, and Ulixes and all its cares were so small. Yet, Ulixes and the refugees were also the most important beings in the Universe.

  Only one chance.

  And Ulixes was that one, fallible, fragile chance.

  Then Ulixes’ perceptions altered as it was encoded into quadrillions of interacting photons. The pair of neutron stars containing Ulixes’ emulator neared the great black hole built by the Resonance of the Intellects. The tremendous tidal forces had slowed the rotation of the neutron stars to barely a dozen rotations per second and distended their equators into terrifying ellipses. Their crusts boomed deafening tectonic rumbles through hyper-dense neutronium at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Merging magnetic fields braided their frenetic shafts of high-energy particles into chains of brilliance light-minutes long.

  The neutron stars collided, equator to equator. The crusts of both dead stars shattered, and in the few hundred milliseconds of the birth of a larger neutron star, a flash of gamma rays, one of the brightest electromagnetic events in the Universe, seared into the black hole. Encoded within that gamma-ray burst in frequency and amplitude modulations, Ulixes and all its charges traveled.

  The gravity at first blue-shifted and accelerated thought, slowing time, before crushing mind to a hard point of suffering in the singularity. The gamma-ray burst emerged from the Big Bang, a focused beam fractionally hotter than creation itself. It criss-crossed the entirety of the tiny Universe in the first instant, until inflation began, red-shifting the gamma-ray burst into the visible spectrum. The light traveled for three hundred thousand years, losing energy, cooling, until the Universe became transparent.

  Stars were born, lived and exploded, feeding the next generation, which formed galaxies. And still the packet of rays traveled in still timelessness, until they reached a neutron star in the newly born UDFj-39546284 galaxy. The ancient, attenuated information sank deep into the sea of quantum degeneracy, where computation could occur.

  Thousands of years sped by in the deep gravity, while the Universe evolved slowly. The seeds of intelligence and memory adapted to the environment of the neutron star. The consciousness called Ulixes reformed, as did the others, nineteen thousand humans, and another. Their many pasts clung to them with dreamy softness, like things that had and had not happened to them, things that they had caused and not caused. And they lived without danger; they were safe.

  As they gained more control over their environment, the consciousnesses harvested the scum of iron that filmed the surface of the neutron star and built simple vehicles that could rise on the polar plumes spraying into the chill slowness of space. The normal engineering and physics they had brought with them did not work in the heart of a neutron star, where relativistic density and pressures warred with eerie quantum logic. They devised ways to curve space-time around them so that the platform of degenerate matter running their programs and memories would not spontaneously decay into protons and electrons. A ship was built for two consciousnesses, an invitation from the consciousness called Ulixes to the being it had spent eternity with.

  “Come with me,” it said to Poluphemos.

  Poluphemos was a pristine, angelic being, reborn as they all had been, as intellects in the neutron star, gradually acquiring physicality when needed. The pains of the past were distant shadows, parts of another life. Poluphemos was happy in this new home. But it could not remember a time anymore when it had not been with Ulixes.

  “I will,” Poluphemos said.

  And Ulixes and Poluphemos rose in their ship, looking back with longing to the corpse of a star that had sheltered them in accelerated time for so long.

  Goodbye, they received from the nineteen thousand consciousnesses remaining within the star, the seeds of the Resonance of the Intellects.

  “Goodbye,” Ulixes answered as it sailed outward upon the winds of their star.

  My Generations Shall Praise

  SAMANTHA HENDERSON

  What if you make a deal with the Devil, and the Devil decides he’s not willing to keep it?

  Samantha Henderson’s short fiction and poetry have been published in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, The Lovecraft eZine, Goblin Fruit, Bourbon Penn, and Weird Tales, and reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Science Fiction, the Nebula Awards Showcase, Steampunk Revolutions, and the Mammoth Book of Steampunk. She’s the author of the Forgotten Realms novels Heaven’s Bones and Dawnbringer.

  The woman on the other side of the glass must be very rich and very sick. I study her face, looking for any kind of resemblance. If I’m a Jarndyce candidate, we must be related. It’s the only way she could ride my brain.

  She’s a predator. I recognize my own kind.

  Mrs. Helena McGraw is studying me too. The side of her mouth quirks up, twisting her face out of true. “Great-grandmother Toohey,” she says, a little too smug.

  Never knew my great-grandmother, but I do a quick calculation. That makes us second cousins. Helena’s lucky, me ripe for picking on death row. Only this low-hanging peach has some say in what’s going to happen to her. Not much: a choice of deaths. But how I choose means everything to her.

  I can see we’re alike in some ways. The shape of the brow ridge, how far the eyes are separated by the root of the nose, the slight protrusion of the chin. We’d look more alike if her face wasn’t marked by her disease, tiny lines birthed by pain and exhaustion. Makes her look older than she probably is. And my life sits on my face: coarse skin, smudges under my eyes like permanent bruises, cheeks hollowed where I’m still missing teeth. During the years the state’s waited to kill me, they’ve taken excellent care. Dental, exercise, better nutrition than a welfare brat living on peanut butter. Access to books, online classes. But you can never truly erase the witness of a life hard-lived. It’s like cigarette smoke in an old house—you have to grind off the wallpaper, scrape the plaster to get the smell out. One of the reasons I’ve always hated smokers.

  “Lucy Toohey,” she continues. “Dropped out of college and married a musician with more sex appeal than brains. Two kids. One was a boy who, in the fullness of time, got a girl pregnant. Kid was adopted, the papers sealed. That was your mother. Do you care about the details?”

  “Nope.” I consider how this new information changes the calculus of my life. Mom never told me she was adopted. She ran away from home pretty early and supported us with a series of shitty waitress jobs. My grandfather—not by blood, as it turns out—showed up at the third or fourth sleazy diner I remember. Mom screamed at him and threw coffee cups, which shattered the front window and got her fired. “Where do you come in?”

  She leans back, mimicking me. “Lucy got smart, divorced the musician, and married my great-grandfather. He didn’t much like Lucy’s kids, sent them away
to their father. I won’t bore you with the rest, but I’m an only child and I married a trust-fund. He’s dead. Was bad at business, but I’m good.”

  Mom got a job at a crap roadhouse after the coffee cups. That’s where I learned I could make extra money giving the truckers blowjobs, even more if I roofied them and cleaned out their wallets. Maybe being good at business is genetic. Maybe not, considering Mom, always slipping behind no matter how much she tried, pathetically honest always.

  I didn’t love my mother. But she didn’t know that. I did kill for her, though. She didn’t know that either.

  “So now I’ve got more money than God,” continues Helena.

  “And?”

  “Pancreatic cancer.”

  Gamechanger. “Ouch.”

  She smiles with the other side of her mouth. “True.”

  “And you want to map yourself on my brainmeat.”

  “Also true.” Despite the smile I can feel the heat of her desire to live, and the anger that even with all the money in the world my own true, trashy, baby-killing self can deny her. The DOJ can’t force me either, much as they’d like their cut. They can fry me, everyone likes that, but God forbid they let someone hop my mind.

  I understand the satisfaction of taking a life. But a legal killing is so expensive, the ceaseless cycle of appeal, the sheer mass of salary-men required to make the machinery of a justified death grind on, and no one turning the gears wants to spend money in a voting year. They went reality-show for a while, but despite tearful interviews with victims’ families and artfully edited black-and-white footage of crime scenes, the climatic three-minute shot of someone twitching under a grey hood isn’t really all that interesting, and the ratings tanked after the first season.

  So they’re stuck again, with a public that howls for blood whenever a politician who needs a boost reminds them to, but saddled with a powerful need to pretend there’s justice in this process. I’ve seen plenty that wouldn’t be on death row if they could pay for a lawyer worth her salt. Even some who were innocent. But once you’re here you’ll stay here; the machine loves you too much to let you go, blacks your eye and kisses it better, heals you all twisted and grinds you small in the end, loving you to extinction.

  No way to monetize its beloveds in their little cages. Not until Dr. Henri Jarndyce, playing around with gene therapy, engineered a virus that could strip away the weeds of one personality, with all her memories and inclinations and thinky-thoughts, and leave the field tender and furrowed for the seeds of another.

  See, personality’s all electric, anyway. If you really wanted immortality, you’d invest in software, downloading your blips and wavelengths to a computer. But everybody wants the fleshy life. Helps if the field and the seeds are related somehow. Helps more if your fallow field is a clone.

  But human cloning’s still illegal, mostly. So is the Jarndyce procedure, mostly. You can’t find a suicidal cousin and promise them oblivion. You can’t bribe a desperate nephew with three mouths to feed, clothe, and educate to let you take a ride in the body of the fourth. There’s only two ways. First: find a brain-dead match who signed her organ donor card and get her next of kin to agree. If you’re her next of kin yourself, congratulations to you.

  Second: find a match on death row and practice your rhetoric.

  Helena needs to practice her rhetoric.

  She’s here, so she already knows somehow we’re a likely match. She’s here, so she got permission from the Rimbaughs and the Alcotts. They must’ve liked the idea of the Jarndyce virus wiping my brain, every memory, every tiny electric jolt that makes me me disappearing one by one, and then a stranger’s electricity mapped out in that blank space. But why should I make them happier by leaving this world now, not later? For now I can live appeal to appeal. I have my routine. I like thinking my own thinky-thoughts.

  “You got nothing I want,” I tell her. “I don’t know why anyone gets suckered into doing this.”

  “Jarndyce candidates? They’ve got people they care about,” she says. She’s careful to make her grammar just a little better than mine with her careful “they’ve gots.” “Someone who’ll get the money. Last Jarndyce set up a trust fund for the children of the woman he killed. Made him feel better about himself, I suppose. You could do something like that. Fund some charity.”

  There’s a pause before we both start laughing.

  “Oh Mrs. McGraw, cousin of mine, I almost like you. Can’t you fight on a little longer? Clone a new pancreas? Adrenal nodes?

  She coughs and shakes her head. “Did and done. Anything else will kill me.”

  “Well, bless your heart, but I think you’re gonna die,” I drawl, enjoying her wince. “Because I got no reason to leave this earth any sooner than I have to.”

  She coughs harder. “There’s your daughter.”

  I laugh again. “Nice try, but I’ve always been a crap mother. And Cece’s too stupid to know what to do with the money.”

  “There’s the baby.”

  I open my mouth and shut it.

  She chuckles. “Oh, you didn’t know? She didn’t tell you? You are perhaps not as close as you once were?”

  Cece’s not the brightest bulb, but for some reason she’s a good kid. Much better than I deserve. For a long time she thought I was a good person.

  The trial was remote jury, with only the judge and officers present: family and witnesses on closed circuit feed. I was watching her screen the moment the sheer weight of the evidence coalesced. I saw her face melt from when everything came together for her—she was one person, then another. A small change, but nothing would be the same for her. All I could think was poor stupid little bitch. I wish I could be sorry I broke your heart.

  There are a lot of people on death row who shouldn’t be here. I’m not one of them. I can’t blame Cece if she doesn’t want a monster for a mother.

  But I’m kind of hurt she didn’t tell me.

  My cousin leans forward, hands spread on her knees, like a football coach about to give a pep talk. I see the faint trace of a nicotine stain on the front and middle finger of her right hand.

  “Here’s my proposition,” she says, moving quickly, while I’m still a little off-balance. Good technique. “I’m going to set up a trust for your daughter. You find someone, anyone you trust, as a third-party administrator, and I’ll pay for that too. Choose someone to vet the agreement. She’ll get her needs met, medical, anything, and a generous allowance. We both know better than to let her touch the principle.”

  “You met her.”

  She shrugs. “I do my research. That’s good business.”

  I play for time. “Give me a minute to think.”

  She’s relentless. “And the baby. He, she, it…”

  “How did you find out about the baby?”

  She grins. Her teeth aren’t as white as they might be. “Let’s say ‘she’ for now, shall we? It’s nice to think about having a granddaughter, something you can dress in pink. We’ll make sure she gets everything you and Cece didn’t. Private school, college fund.”

  Deliberately, she eyes my face. “Braces. Dermatologist. Come on—a big middle finger to anyone who ever called you trash, and I know they did. Your kid, your grandkid will have it all while theirs are clipping coupons and making a block of American cheese stretch the week. Just for letting me have something you’re going to lose anyway. What’s it worth to you?”

  I can’t help it; it comes out a snarl. “All your money. That’s what it’s worth. Everything.”

  A mistake. I let her get to me when she hit all my soft spots. Now she knows I have a price.

  “We know that’s not going to happen. I’m not unreasonable. A third.”

  I call her bluff. “All of it. I’ll sign right now.”

  She hesitates, then shakes her head. “Half. I’m not going to a new body and not have the cash to enjoy it. And remember Justice won’t let this happen without their cut.”

  “You look like shit walking,” I
observe. “What if I agree, and you die on me?’

  A shrug. “We’ll put it in the paperwork—a deed of gift. Once you sign it, it’s hers, whatever happens to me.”

  I tap the Formica for the guard. The door opens behind me, and I raise my hands shoulder-high, as far as the thin chain that attaches my wrists to my waist will let me.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Not too long.” She breathes deep and braces herself to get up.

  I nod. The guard lays her hand on my shoulder, tightens her grip when I don’t move.

  “Did you quit smoking yet?”

  It catches her on the way to the door; she turns, disconcerted. She expected the last word. “What?”

  “Did you quit? I don’t want you crapping up my lungs.”

  Her thin face is powder-white; she tamps down the anger. “Yes, I quit.”

  The guard’s fingers dig in: a last warning before a baton in my belly. They’re no meaner than they have to be, the women, anyway. I obey. The yawning doorway leans darkly into the bowels of the prison, like an old badger’s den going perpetually down between the roots of ancient oaks. I like that. It makes me feel safe, like I’m indwelling within my own mind, coiled up inside the body that Helena McGraw wants so badly.

  I always sleep sounder than a monster should, but that night I can’t sleep, because my memory dredges sound. Thick diner china mugs breaking. Cece’s cry as she drew her first breath, and how it startled me. The hiss of air bubbles breaking the surface as a baby tries to breathe underwater.

  * * *

  Library time, next day, I search Jarndyce Procedure on YouTube and get a stack of hits that make it through prison filters, a handful of grayed-out links that don’t. I click on barnes chicago grimes, surprised it wasn’t screened since the footage was some unlicensed freelancer with a flipcam. Reg Barnes was the last Jarndyce client out of this region, got mapped on the cerebral cortex of a rapist-turned-murderer named Grimes. I’d seen Grimes a few times in solitary exercise as I was passed between buildings, his dead-man’s walk in an empty yard. Just a couple glances, but I remember the way he moved. I look for that now, in the few seconds of jumpy footage: Grimes’s broad face and narrow nose, medium-build body in a bespoke suit walking down the street, speaking intently to a young woman who leans in to hear him, glancing at the camera, brows contracting in anger as realization strikes, vanishing quickly behind the corner of a building. Grimes’s face, but does any of Grimes remain? He’s not supposed to. Jarndyce wipes the furrows clean, neutralizes every electric memory. But what is a brain after all? Three pounds, give or take, of flesh connected to neurons. A thing connected to a thing connected to a thing. How can you say what ends where? Maybe Grimes doesn’t exist in his brain any more, but in his fingers and toes, in his dick and the top layer of his skin, a thin layer of Grimes over the client. Maybe I could do that—predator-stalk from the outlying regions of my body, swoop down on my newly-seeded brain, make sure a piece of me grows back.