The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

I moved over on the step a little and pushed Foremost with my butt, to move him down and make a space for her next to me. She watched me, startled at the way I touched him, and even more surprised when he accepted it without complaint. She smiled that smile again, and I was damned pleased with myself.

  She drove around the corner, parked, and came back. She sat next to me. She wore a parka with a fur fringe and she fit just right next to me. Foremost passed her the glass jar of moonshine and fish. She wrinkled her nose at the smell.

  "Tony, what is this stuff?"

  "Ancient family drink," I said. I took the jar from her, sipped to show it was safe, then wiped the rim with my shirt sleeve to clean it. I felt awkward and clumsy and about twelve years old while next to me sat the prettiest girl I knew. I waited for her to look up, to see it was really me sitting next to her-not some perfectly turned-out diplomat with ideal manners and looks. Then I figured she would carefully and politely edge away from me and go find someone better to be around. I handed her back the jar. "It's really all right to drink."

  She took the jar, looked up at me with total confidence, and took a small sip. She handed the jar back.

  "What's going on out here?" she asked.

  Main Street was strangely abandoned, even for Summit. Not a car was parked on the street, and the black asphalt was carefully chipped and scraped and cleaned so that it almost gleamed under the street light. A pair of freshly painted white lines, like the guard lines for a pedestrian crossing, stretched across the street.

  "Time for the races," Oly said. Foremost nodded.

  Around the corner came Teddy Wahford on his golf cart, and Indian on his town car. They lined up carefully side by side between the lines. Limbo, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt even as his breath came out in puffs in the cold, stepped between them. He carried two small construction worker flags, one in each hand, their color drained by the overhead sodium light until the flags seemed more like a muddy gray than a bright orange. Foremost leaned back and banged his fist on the pool hall door. Bob opened the door from inside. Waves of noise and heat and light washed over us from inside.

  "Yeah?"

  "First race is ready," Foremost said.

  "About time," Bob said. He shut the door and we heard him pounding on the long bar and shouting. Everything went quiet for a moment and then the door banged open and the crowd spilled outside with a roar. Carole grabbed my arm for balance as the crowd shoved past us. "what the hell is going on?" she asked again.

  Chuck the bartender brought out a metal washtub filled with ice and cans of beer. He looked down at me as he walked past.

  "Race beer should be in bottles"' he growled disapprovingly. "Gets cold faster."

  "It's cold enough already," I said as my breath puffed into the night air. "And you can't cut anyone with a can if someone gets angry about the race results."

  Chuck set down the tub on the curb next to Steve and Rose and Bob. They sold the beer as fast as they could pull the cans out of the ice and water.

  "You sell the beer at a wake? That's one hell of a way to make money," Carole asked. I shook my head.

  "No, we won't make any money off this," I said. "The first round was free, and in the morning we'll take everything we made off all the rest of the beer and donate it to the town emergency heating fund."

  "Then why charge for the beer?"

  "If it was free everyone would take too much. All we'd have left by now would be a bunch of passed-out drunks. This way most of them are still awake."

  "And that is important," Foremost added knowledgeably. Carole looked puzzled.

  "Each person who knew Sam gives back what they did best at his wake," he explained. Steve overheard him and nodded, pleased.

  "Ten on Teddy. I heard he got a new charge in his cart," Steve said.

  "Ten on Indian," Foremost answered. He looked at me almost apologetically. "It would be disloyal to do anything else."

  Limbo dropped the flags and the racers rolled ahead. The golf cart was almost silent, just a high-pitched whine, but Indian's town car roared and screamed. The crowd answered back.

  Foremost leaned next to me and spoke quietly into my ear. "We need to talk," he said.

  "About?"

  "I contacted my friends on the ship after the Synth attack. My enemies obviously know I'm alive and where I'm located. I wanted to give my friends the same advantage."

  "Sounds like a good idea," I said. "I also told them everything we know about the Synth attack," Foremost said.

  On the street, Indian's town car suddenly swerved into Teddy and bounced off the protective rubber bumpers attached all around the body of his golf cart. Teddy swore and shook his fist at Indian. Indian smiled back, his eyes glazed, and tipped his hat to Teddy. The crowd roared its approval.

  "And?" I asked Foremost when it got quiet enough to hear him.

  "They asked me to give you their thanks, for keeping me alive. They also put a protective air and space patrol over Summit for tonight. In the morning they'll be down with transport to take me home," Foremost said.

  He sat next to me on the stoop, the cowl of his robe thrown back so he could use all his peripheral vision, his snout pointed straight at me. His eyes were very flat and black, with the silky gleam you see on creek stones when just the barest sheet of water flows over them.

  "Sounds like a plan," I said. "Why wait until morning?"

  "Because I wanted to talk with you," he said.

  I sipped the last of my fish and put the jar down on the street, out of the way next to the steps so no one would accidentally break the glass. Foremost and I seemed to be locked inside our own little bubble of silence, the noise of the crowd unimportant and distant. I looked at him directly.

  "What do you want to talk about?" I asked.

  "You've heard that we plan to take some humans with us when we leave?"

  "I've heard," I said. "I never understood why."

  "From each world we take a society," he said quietly. "The ship is huge, but space is bigger. We will never come back here again. But we want to take part of you with us."

  "Why?"

  "Because we never know what we'll face out there," Foremost said. "All we know is that every planet is going to be different. And the more differences we have on the ship to choose from, the greater the chance that someone we have on-board will be able to talk with and understand whoever it is we meet."

  The town car was more powerful, but Indian couldn't seem to steer a straight line. Foremost had bought him all the beer he could drink after the burial, to pay him back for his work that afternoon. Indian's capacity for alcohol was tremendous, but by now I was sure he saw three or four roads, not just one. Teddy, on the other hand, figured out the best path and held to it, his head tucked down as if to reduce his wind resistance.

  I looked around me, at my line and all the others that made up Summit. Every year there were fewer of us, as more and more children left for the cities. I remembered those children, the exiles as they called themselves, from the East Coast reunions. They always seemed angry and lost, as if they never quite fit in outside of Dakota.

  As I never quite fit in.

  I leaned back to Foremost.

  "We can talk," I said. I leaned forward and took a fresh jar of fish from Oly. I sipped and tried to figure out what kind of fish was in this batch. Northern Pike was my guess. "But tomorrow. Not tonight. Tonight is for Sam."

  Foremost nodded and I handed the jar to Carole.

  Indian's town car swept by me and kicked up gravel and I felt something sting my cheek.

  "That bastard put the blade back on his town car to make it go faster! Indian, get your butt over here .."

  Escape Route

  Peter F. Hamilton

  Prolific new British writer Peter F. Hamilton has sold to Interzone, In Dreams, New Worlds, Fears, and elsewhere. He sold his first novel, Mind star Rising, in 1993, and quickly followed it up with two sequels, A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower. Hamilton's first three boo
ks managed to slip into print without attracting a great deal of attention, on this side of the Atlantic, at least, but that changed dramatically with the publication of his next novel, The Reality Dysfunction, a huge modern Space Opera (it needed to be divided into two volumes for publication in the United States) that is itself only the start of a projected trilogy of stag gering size and scope. The Reality Dysfunction has been attracting the reviews and the acclaim that his prior novels did not and has suddenly put Hamilton on the map as a writer to watch, perhaps a potential rival for writers such as Dan Simmons, Iain M. Banks, Paul I. McAuley, Greg Benford, C. J. Cherryh, Stephen R. Donaldson, Colin Greenland, and other major players in the expanding subgenre of Modern Baroque Space Opera, an increasingly popular area these days. The second novel in the trilogy, The Neutronium Alchemist, is out in Britain, and generating the same kind of excited critical buzz. Upcoming is the third novel in the trilogy, The Naked God, and Hamilton's first collection, A Second Chance at Eden.

  In the pyrotechnic novella that follows, one as packed with intriguing new ideas and fast-paced action and suspense as many another author's four-hundred-page novel, he unravels the mystery of an enigmatic object found in deep space, one that may prove to be harder-and considerably more dangerous-to get out of than it was to get in ...

  Marcus Calvert had never seen an asteroid cavern quite like Sonora's before; it was disorientating even for someone who had spent 30 years captaining a starship. The centre of the gigantic rock had been hollowed out by mining machines, producing a cylindrical cavity twelve kilometres long, five in diameter. Usually, the floor would be covered in soil and planted with fruit trees and grass. In Sonora's case, the environmental engineers had simply flooded it. The result was a small freshwater sea that no matter where you were on it, you appeared to be at the bottom of a valley of water.

  Floating around the grey surface were innumerable rafts, occupied by hotels, bars, and restaurants. Taxi boats whizzed between them and the wharfs at the base of the two flat cavern walls.

  Marcus and two of his crew had taken a boat out to the Lomaz bar, a raft which resembled a Chinese dragon trying to mate with a Mississippi paddle steamer.

  "Any idea what our charter is, Captain?" asked Katherine Maddox, the Lady Macbeth's node specialist.

  "The agent didn't say," Marcus admitted. "Apart from confirming it's private, not corporate."

  "They don't want us for combat, do they?" Katherine asked. There was a hint of rebellion in her voice. She was in her late 40s, and like the Calverts her family had geneered their offspring to withstand both freefall and high acceleration. The dominant modifications had given her thicker skin, tougher bones, and harder internal membranes; she was never sick or giddy in freefall, nor did her face bloat up. Such changes were a formula for blunt features, and Katherine was no exception.

  "If they do, we're not taking it," Marcus assured her.

  Katherine exchanged an unsettled glance with Roman Zucker, the ship's fusion engineer, and slumped back in her chair.

  The combat option was one Marcus had considered possible. Lady Macbeth was combat-capable, and Sonora asteroid belonged to a Lagrange-point cluster with a strong autonomy movement. An unfortunate combination. But having passed his 67th birthday two months ago be sincerely hoped those kinds of flights were behind him.

  "This could be them," Roman said, glancing over the rail. One of Sonora's little taxi boats was approaching their big resort raft.

  The trim cutter curving round towards the Lomaz had two people sitting on its red leather seats.

  Marcus watched with interest as they left the taxi. He ordered his neural nanonics to open a fresh memory cell, and stored the pair of them in a visual file. The first to alight was a man in his mid-30s, dressed in expensive casual clothes; a long face and a very broad nose gave him a kind of imposing dignity.

  His partner was less flamboyant. She was in her late 20s, obviously geneered; Oriental features matched with white hair that had been drawn together in wide dreadlocks and folded back aerodynamically.

  They walked straight over to Marcus's table, and introduced themselves as Antonio Ribeiro and Victoria Keef. Antonio clicked his fingers at the waitress, and told her to fetch a bottle of Norfolk Tears.

  "Hopefully to celebrate the success of our business venture, my friends," he said. "And if not, it is a pleasant time of day to imbibe such a magical potion. No?"

  Marcus found himself immediately distrustful. It wasn't just Antonio's phoney attitude; his intuition was scratching away at the back of his skull. Some friends called it his paranoia programme, but it was rarely wrong. A family trait, like the wanderlust which no geneering treatment had ever eradicated.

  "The cargo agent said you had a charter for us," Marcus said. "He never mentioned any sort of business deal."

  "If I may ask your indulgence for a moment, Captain Calvert. You arrived here without a cargo. You must be a very rich man to afford that."

  "There were ... circumstances requiring us to leave Ayachcho ahead of schedule."

  "Yeah," Katherine muttered darkly. "Her husband."

  Marcus was expecting it, and smiled serenely. He'd heard very little else from the crew for the whole flight.

  Antonio received the tray and its precious pear-shaped bottle from the waitress, and waved away the change.

  "If I may be indelicate, Captain, your financial resources are not optimal at this moment," Antonio suggested.

  "They've been better."

  Antonio sipped his Norfolk Tears, and grinned in appreciation. "For myself, I was born with the wrong amount of money. Enough to know I needed more."

  "Mr Ribeiro, I've heard all the get-rich-quick schemes in existence. They all have one thing in common, they don't work. If they did, I wouldn't be sitting here with you."

  "You are wise to be cautious, Captain. I was, too, when I first heard this proposal. However, if you would humour me a moment longer, I can assure you this requires no capital outlay on your part. At the worst you will have another mad scheme to laugh about with your fellow captains."

  "No money at all?"

  "None at all, simply the use of your ship. We would be equal partners sharing whatever reward we find."

  "Jesus. All right, I can spare you five minutes. Your drink has bought you that much attention span."

  "Thank you, Captain. My colleagues and I want to fly the Lady Macbeth on a prospecting mission."

  "For planets?" Roman asked curiously.

  "No. Sadly, the discovery of a terracompatible planet does not guarantee wealth. Settlement rights will not bring more than a couple of million fuseodollars, and even that is dependant on a favourable biospectrum assessment, which would take many years. We have something more immediate in mind. You have just come from the Dorados?"

  "That's right," Marcus said. The system had been discovered six years earlier, comprising a red dwarf sun surrounded by a vast disc of rocky particles. Several of the larger chunks had turned out to be nearly pure metal. Dorados was an obvious name; whoever managed to develop them would gain a colossal economic resource. So much so that the governments of Omuta and Garissa had gone to war over who had that development right.

  It was the Garissan survivors who had ultimately been awarded settlement by the Confederation Assembly. There weren't many of them. Omuta had deployed twelve antimatter planetbusters against their homeworld. "Is that what you're hoping to find, another flock of solid metal asteroids?"

  "Not quite," Antonio said. "Companies have been searching similar disc systems ever since the Dorados were discovered, to no avail. Victoria, my dear, if you would care to explain."

  She nodded curtly and put her glass down on the table. "I'm an astrophysicist by training," she said. "I used to work for Forrester-Courtney; it's a company based in the O'Neill Halo that manufactures starship sensors, although their speciality is survey probes. It's been a very healthy business recently. Consortiums have been flying survey missions through every catalogued disc sys
tem in the Confederation. As Antonio said, none of our clients found anything remotely like the Dorados. That didn't surprise me, I never expected any of Forrester-Courtney's probes to be of much use. All our sensors did was run broad spectrographic sweeps. If anyone was going to find another Dorados cluster it would be the Edenists. Their voidhawks have a big advantage; those ships generate an enormous distortion field which can literally see mass. A lump of metal 50 kilometres across would have a very distinct density signature; they'd be aware of it from at least half a million kilometres away. If we were going to compete against that, we'd need a sensor which gave us the same level of results, if not better."

  "And you produced one?" Marcus enquired.

  "Not quite. I proposed expanding our magnetic anomaly detector array. It's a very ancient technology; Earth's old nations pioneered it during the 20th century. Their military maritime aircraft were equipped with crude arrays to track enemy submarines. Forrester-Courtney builds its array into low-orbit resource-mapping satellites-, they produce quite valuable survey data. Unfortunately, the company turned down my proposal. They said an expanded magnetic array wouldn't produce better results than a spectrographic sweep, not on the scale required. And a spectrographic scan would be quicker."

  "Unfortunate for Forrester-Courtney," Antonio said wolfishly. "Not for us. Dear Victoria came to me with her suggestion, and a simple observation."

  "A spectrographic sweep will only locate relatively large pieces of mass," she said. "Fly a starship 50 million kilometres above a disc, and it can spot a 50kilometer lump of solid metal easily. But the smaller the lump, the higher the resolution you need or the closer you have to fly, a fairly obvious equation. My magnetic anomaly detector can pick out much smaller lumps of metal than a Dorado."

  "So? If they're smaller, they're worth less," Katherine said. "The whole point of the Dorados is that they're huge. I've seen the operation those ex-Garissans are building up. They've got enough metal to supply their industrial stations with specialist microgee alloys for the next 2,000 years. Small is no good."