Marta’s sister died when Marta was only fourteen, when their school collapsed during an F3 tornado. There are ends in life, Marta thinks, and there are ends. Even then, though, when she thinks of her sister’s laugh, her earpiece can recall the exact sound from family videos on a shared port, so she wonders if even this is an end, or only a transformation. An opportunity to reframe the self, and its responsibilities to the world.
The thought gives her pause on her next pass by a porthole, where Marta marvels at Sol’s light off a slice of the Moon—the Earth somewhere behind it, out of sight but not forgotten. A pinch of sadness hits her then, in thinking of another ending that never fully ends—the little tendril of feeling, of confusion, that will stay with her no matter how far into the outer darkness she treads—and Marta wonders if maybe, just maybe, she should send a little something back. A peace offering. If not for his benefit (her friends would tell her, no, never for his), then at least for hers: to help her let go, and move a little further out, in turn.
* * *
Stanley studies the lone fat-tailed sheep following him along the northern bank of the Yellow River, not far outside the city of Baotou. The ewe breathes heavily through blackened gums, with two bottom rows of teeth set so poorly that her jaw never fully closes. Her coat is thin and greasy, but her eyes track Stanley’s sandwich with hopeful interest.
—Przepraszam, he tells her. Sorry, you’ve got a cousin in this one.
A distant cousin, granted—factory-grown yak cells, processed into textured slices and sold in the city next to the real thing—but Stanley holds his ground on principle. Offers her a green leaf instead. When she approaches, her oily stench, a byproduct of the toxins consumed with every drink and stretch of grazing, catches in Stanley’s nostrils.
—There, there, he says in English. It’ll all be over soon enough.
The farmer who owns this land, Pan Khünbish, greets him with a tired wave of a callused hand. She walks with a severe stoop, grey hair trailing halfway down a simple black t-shirt with long stains at the pits. She holds in her other hand a small metal device, which Stanley recognizes with surprise as a lighter, and which she uses to burn a little paper roll of tobacco. Khünbish is maybe thirty, but the run-off from lanthanum and cerium separation processes—the ammonia, hydrochloric acid, and sulphates used to clear radioactive thorium from the ore—is as much a part of her environment as the hard summer winds and the seasonal floods. Stanley waits for her to finish a long drag before speaking.
—I’ve already done this with some of my father’s holdings in Indonesia, he says. Similar problems: the lakes with no life of any kind. But these toxin-eaters are terrific. Built off the designs my company’s been using for Mars colonization. With the farmers and local tradespeople holding majority shares, these changes to the landscape will come quickly. You can restore these fields and your cattle in maybe a generation.
The farmer looks at him with amused skepticism. She touches one hand to her earpiece, then gestures with her smoke at the Yellow River before them. When she speaks, Stanley suspects a translation error. The neutral male voice in his right ear has offered only
—So this is what happens when gods and kings fall from heaven, eh?
He hesitates before replying. Tapping his earpiece brings up a semiotics web, and within seconds he learns that the farmer’s dialect and terms suggest a reference to Yiguandao’s second cosmic plane: a heaven where ancient kings and gods reside, but not without risk of rebirth into the material plane after transgression. Stanley grimaces at this comparison: his efforts at atonement fooling no one. Khünbish seems to take this as a smile.
She goes on to tell him about her father, a man who she says never trusted the cities, or anyone who came from them. All those people living in buildings that only go one way, that know nothing of the earth. As he always said, she cites in Mongolian,
—Ta yavakh doosh yavakh kheregtei. You have to go down to go (and here she points to the sky to finish the phrase) up.
The corners of Stanley’s mouth turn in accordance with the gesture.
—Like a tree, he says. You know, our fathers might have gotten along after all, if mine wasn’t so busy killing off lands like yours.
Now Khünbish hesitates, as if doubting her own translation, but she doesn’t tap the earpiece for more cultural context. Only, takes another drag and nods to the grey water.
—Ta xianzai zai nar?
A good question, Stanley thinks. Henryk would have been hoping for heaven, but when Stanley looks up, catching a glint of sun through the yellow haze of the air, he finds himself giving up even on the more attainable celestial temple. Not so easy on his heart now, even if it is in damned good health, to move out into the cosmos without first addressing all the waste that SKOK Enterprises accrued in a single, terrible accident, and how casually his offices went about rebuilding pathways to the stars on the back of yet more social neglect. There is more than one way to build up and out, Stanley realized soon after the explosion—after, that is, he caught himself approving the use of one of his father’s mines to gather resources for repairs. At length, Stanley replies,
—My father? Right now, he’s growing.
And at Khünbish’s slow smile, he wonders if her earpiece has maybe translated the term as something closer to being reborn.
* * *
When Kazimierz is twenty-two his mother sends him a photo from his infanthood, back when he and she and his father were still on the old farm outside Lublin. Before the floods came, and the landslides wiped their homestead clean away, and they needed to relocate to the city—he and his mother, it would soon turn out, for good. In the photo, a plump, red-faced Kazimierz lies dressed in a spacesuit onesie, its Chinese patches indicating the uniform worn by members of the international space missions that the country led two decades ago to the Moon, Mars, Ceres, and Europa.
—A gift from one of your father’s university friends, his mother tells him. See? You were destined for the stars all along.
Kazimierz shakes his head with a smile while framing his response. One of his colleagues nudges his shoulder as if to ask, everything okay? and he nods and raises a gloved hand in acknowledgment. The rest of the crew is busy running final system checks after their successful launch from the eighteen-year-old Osik Tower over Marine Station Six. It is one year to the day since Stanley succumbed to complications from chronic radiation poisoning, despite the best efforts of a diligent team of nano-scrubbers to keep up with his global restoration work, and just over two years since all-clears started pouring in from farmlands and wildlife sanctuaries initially affected by his father’s business practices. But to Kazimierz this is simply the beginning. After securing the rest of the ship’s inventory, the crew will be placed in a deep, slow sleep while lasers guide the ship’s sails towards Proxima b, 4.25 light-years away. The crew will age, but not so quickly that the possibility of colonization on arrival is out of the question—not with stem cells in storage primed to generate fresh eggs and sperm should the need, in time, arise.
Of course, Kazimierz’s mother will grieve his absence—she already does—but proudly, from another planet where there is still so much work to be done. Meanwhile, his father’s feelings hang an irresolvable question in his mind’s eye: the man’s deepest disappointments always in the backdrop of whatever joy he found in the presence of his son. Still, when Karol passed on, overworking himself to restore what the storms had done to his own father’s lands, there was no question as to where to lay his last remains. The body burns. The body is returned to the soil that made it what it was.
And from those roots, the rest of us move up, somehow, and on.
Firstborn, Lastborn
MELISSA SCOTT
Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her Ph.D. in the Comparative History program with a dissertation titled “Victory of the Ancients: Tactics, Technology, and the Use of Classical Precedent
in Early Modern Warfare.” She is the author of more than thirty science fiction and fantasy novels, most with queer themes and characters, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett. She has also won a Spectrum Award for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky,” as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 2012, she returned to the Points universe with Point of Knives, and she and Jo Graham brought out Lost Things, the first volume of the Order of the Air. The second volume in that series, Steel Blues, is now available, and the third, Silver Bullet, will be out in early 2014. Her most recent novel, Death by Silver, written with Amy Griswold, is just out, and another Points novel, Fairs’ Point, is forthcoming as well. She can be found on LiveJournal at mescott.livejournal.com.
Here she demonstrates that even in a far-future, high-tech world, revenge is still a dish best served cold.
It has been more than a decade since I first set foot in Anketil’s tower, and three years since she gave me its key. It lies warm in my hand, a clear glass ovoid not much larger than my thumb, a triple twist of iridescence at its heart: that knot is made from the trace certain plasmas leave in a bed of metal salts, fragile as the fused track of lightning in sand. Anketil makes the shapes for lovers and the occasional friend when work is slow at the tokamak, preserving an instant in threads of glittering color sealed in crystal, each one unique and beautiful, though lacking innate function. It’s only the design that matters. I hold it where the sensors can recognize it, and in the back of my mind Sister stirs.
No life readings. House systems powered down. Owner ABSENT -> setting FORWARD: ALL to destination -> “work” -> ESTU.
That’s what I expected—what Sister and I planned. The door slides back, and I step into Anketil’s eyrie. She is solitary, like most Firstborn, though gregarious enough; the small spare space is cool, the windows fully transparent so that I can see through the twilight haze across the roofs of the Mercato to the harbor and the artificial island where the shuttles land. I came through there myself this morning, in the rising light, everything at last in order, and now here I am, the opening move of the endgame Grandfather began so long ago. Sister chortles to herself, a pulse of pleasure, and I set my bag beside the nearest chair. The sun is setting beyond the bedroom window, filling that room with blinding scarlet light.
To the north, the Bright City reaches inland, a sea of multi-colored light rising as the sky darkens. It, its people and its resident AI, all pride themselves on drawing no distinction between Firstborn and Secondborn, between those who first remade themselves to settle the depths of space, and the ones they allowed to follow, or between the Secondborn and the Faciendi, the people literally built to settle the more doubtful worlds and do the more doubtful jobs, but the lines remain. Anketil lives at the top of her tower; her Secondborn sometime lovers live in the Crescent and the Lido and the Western Rise, while the Faciendi gather in the east, where work and play intermingle. Anketil’s tokamak lies there, among the Faciendi.
The elder moon already floats in the pale sky above those lower towers, and Sister is quick to trace the line of traffic that leads back from that edge. She has kept me informed of Anketil’s current projects, plucking them easily from the commercial contract webs: this one is the core of a starship’s power plant, the heart-stone, so-called, that lets a ship cheat the hard limits of space/time and the speed of light. Heart-stones are individual, tuned to the frame and power source and the proposed usage, but they are hardly a challenge to someone like Anketil. She has made a thousand of them over the course of her career; I don’t need Sister to tell me that she will be ready to consider something more interesting.
Something clicks in the narrow kitchen alcove, and Sister identifies it as a bottle of wine moving to a chilling station. A menu hovers in the shadows when I look, ready for Anketil to choose how she will end her day: she will be home soon, and in that instant Sister stirs again.
SUBJECT has entered the building. Arrival in four minutes.
I glance around, making sure I have moved nothing that would contradict my story, and move to the southern window to look out at the distant sea. It is there Anketil finds me, and I turn in time to see annoyance dissolve to genuine pleasure. “Irtholin. I didn’t expect you—didn’t know you were on the planet.”
“I arrived this morning.” I step forward to accept her embrace. Her arms are strong and her thick curling hair smells of glass and plasma and the musk of her perfume.
“I’m glad to see you. Will you be staying long?”
“You know my schedule.” I shrug. “A few days, I hope.”
“I hope so, too.” Anketil pours wine for each of us, cool and sharp. It is nothing compared to the wines of the Omphalos, of course, and I wonder if she misses those luxuries as much as I do. We are, after all, very much alike, she and I, she who renounced her birthright and I who have none, who am neither Firstborn nor Secondborn nor truly, entirely, Facienda. That is hardly to the point, and I rearrange my expression, looking down into the golden liquid as though uncertain how to begin. She sees, of course, and frowns lightly. “What’s wrong?”
“You won’t like it.”
Her eyebrows rise. “Do I have to know, then? Or can we let it be?”
“I think you will want to know.”
Something flickers across her face. I’ve seen that ghost before, every time we speak of her family, and I feel Sister snicker again. Anketil waves us toward the window, and we sit face to face beside the darkening harbor.
“It’s about your family,” I say, and she shakes her head.
“I have none.”
I tilt my head at her, and she sighs.
“They’re dead to me, I renounced the Dedalor and all their works decades ago. You know that.”
“I do,” I say, “and I’m sorry to have to mention them at all.”
“But?”
“But.” Sister whispers in my mind, counting out the pause, and then I speak. “I’ve found Asterion.”
Anketil swears and leans back in her chair, her face bleak. She knows me as a master surveyor, one of the elite mathematicians who chart the shadows of the adjacent possible to lay out lanes for hyperspatial travel—easy enough to perform, with Sister to lay out the structures for me. It is entirely possible that I could have found out something about the ship her family betrayed and destroyed. “How?”
“On survey.” I lean forward. “But that’s not important. What’s important is that it’s alive. The AI survived. Some of the crew may have made it, too.”
“Impossible.”
I don’t bother to contradict her. We both know that it’s entirely possible, between the peculiar non-geometry of the adjacent possible and the long lives of the Firstborn. “I was doing a survey for—well, the client isn’t important. I was mapping a stasis point when I found the anomaly. It’s Asterion’s AI.”
“That doesn’t mean the ship survived.” Anketil’s voice is hard. “Or her crew. Quantum AI makes ghosts in the possible, it could be a sensor shadow or a temporal echo, not something that’s there now.”
I let her run down, then shake my head. “I wish it were. The AI is there—Gold Shining Bone.”
She winces. “You’re certain.”
“It was aware enough to name itself to me. As for the crew—I pause, once again letting Sister gauge the wait for me. “At least they were alive. They had set a distress call.”
“Damn Nenien and all who sailed with him,” Anketil mutters, and the pain in her face draws another pulse of satisfaction from Sister, confirmation that the plan is working. Everyone knows the story: her great-grandfather Gurinn Dedalor built the first quantum AI that let humans navigate the adjacent possible and make interstellar commerce practical outside the closely-linked worlds that the Firstborn renamed the Omphalos, Navel of the Worlds. Against his advice and the rulings of the Firstborn council, her grandmothe
r Kuffrin built quantum AI that were both intelligent and self-aware, and more powerful than any others.
One of those AI—Gold Shining Bone—rebelled and persuaded Kuffrin’s youngest son Hafren to join it in its escape; her eldest son, Anketil’s father Nenien, with the aid of two other of the family’s AIs, tracked and ambushed the Asterion and trapped it in the adjacent possible, unable to calculate a way free. Nenien and his AI refused to help, abandoning Asterion and its crew to almost certain death, a warning to anyone else who would support the AIs’ claim to the virtual. On his return to port, his sisters and their AI tried to find Asterion and rescue it, but Nenien had destroyed his records and any other indication of the coordinates had been lost. No one knows, no one can know, what it would be like to be stranded there, outside time and space—if “outside” has any meaning in that context—but even quantum AI run mad without some grounding in the actual. For a mere human, eaten up by the lack of time, of comprehensible space, it would be unimaginable torture.
Of course the lesson had failed, and in the short, sharp war that followed, enough of the AI banded together that the Firstborn were forced to cede the virtual to their creation: a waste of Nenien’s cruelty. Anketil walked away from the Dedalor then, walked away from her father and grandmother, from AI and the Firstborn and the life at the center, in the Omphalos; she said once, dead tired and discouraged by a failed experiment, that she wanted only to avoid Nenien’s choices.
And that is an admission that I can use. I nod slowly. “I know.”
She draws a deep breath. “I won’t ask if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“What were the readings? Can you tell how they were trapped?”
“I brought my maps,” I say, and reach for my bag.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 100