The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 5

by Jonathan Strahan

  Alone had to stop his brother.

  But how?

  He quit running.

  The voice that had never identified itself—the conscience that perhaps was too ancient, too maimed and run down, to even lend itself a name—now said to him, “Go away. This is the wrong course. Go!”

  Alone would not listen.

  Standing on that barren plain, he made himself grow tiny and exceptionally bright, washing away the darkness. In an instant, the enormous chamber was filled with a sharp white light that reached the walls and rose to the ceiling before vanishing in the next instant.

  Then he was dark again, drained but not quite exhausted.

  With the last of his reserves, Alone spun a fresh mouth, and in a language that he had never heard before—never suspected that he was carrying inside himself—he screamed into the newly minted darkness, “I am here!”

  Suddenly a dozen machines emerged from their hiding places, plunging from the ceiling or racing from blinds inside the towering rock walls.

  Alone tried to vanish.

  But the machines were converging on him.

  Then he grew large again, managing legs. But the power expended by his desperate flash and careless shout was too much, and too many seconds were needed before he would be able to offer the many kind of chase. After thousands of years, the door of a trap was closing over him, and in the end there wouldn’t even be the pleasure of a hard chase fought to the dramatic end.

  12

  Since their last meeting, the two organisms had walked separate lines—tightrope existences inspired by chance and ambition, deep purpose and the freedom of no clear purpose. An observer on a high perch, watching their respective lives, might have reasonably concluded that the two souls would never meet again. There was no cause for the lines to cross. The odd machine was quiet and modest, successfully avoiding discovery in the emptiest reaches of the Ship, while the engineer was busy maintaining the giant engines, and later, she was responsible for a slow-blooming career as a new captain. The remote observer would have been at a loss to contrive any situation that would place them together, much less in this unlikely terrain. Embarrassed, Aasleen confessed that she had had no good idea where Alone might have been and not been over these last tens of thousands of years. For decades, for entire centuries, she didn’t waste time pondering the device that she once cornered and then let get away. Not that she was at peace with her failure. She was proud of her competence and didn’t appreciate evidence to the contrary. Somewhere onboard the Great Ship was a barely contained speck of highly compressed matter, and should that speck ever break containment, then the next several seconds would become violent and famous, and for some souls, exceptionally sad.

  This was a problem that gnawed, when Aasleen allowed it to. But as an engineer, she handed her official worries to the Submaster Miocene, and as a novice captain, she had never once been approached with any duty that had even the most glancing relationship to that old problem.

  She told her story now, assuming that her prisoner would both understand what he heard and feel interested in this curious, quirky business.

  Then several centuries ago, Aasleen and another captain met by chance and fell into friendly conversation. It was that other captain who mentioned a newly discovered machine-building species. Washen had a talent for aliens, Aasleen explained. Better than most humans, her colleague could decipher the attitudes and instincts of organisms that made no sense to a pragmatic, by-the-number soul like her. But the aliens, dubbed the Bakers, had been superior engineers. That’s why Washen mentioned them in the first place. She explained their rare genius for building inventive and persistent devices, and millions of years after their rise and fall and subsequent extinction, their machines were still scattered across the galaxy.

  “Bakers is our name for them,” Aasleen cautioned. “It shouldn’t mean anything to you.”

  Alone was floating above the cavern floor, encased in a sequence of cages, plasmas and overlapping magnetic fields creating a prison that was nearly invisible and seemingly unbreakable. Drifting in the middle of the smallest cage, he was in a vacuum, nothing but his own body to absorb into an engine that everybody else seemed to fear. With a flickering radio voice, he agreed. “I don’t know the Bakers.”

  “How about this?” Aasleen asked.

  Another sound, intense and brief, washed across him. He listened carefully, and then he politely asked to hear it again. “I don’t know the name,” he confessed. “But the words make sense to me.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Aasleen allowed.

  Alone waited.

  “We know what you are,” she promised.

  His response, honest and tinged with emotion, was to tell his captor, “I already know what I am. My history barely matters.”

  “All right,” Aasleen allowed. “Do I stop talking? Should I keep my explanations to myself?”

  He considered the possibility. But machines and teams of engineers were working hard, obviously preparing to do some large job. As long as the woman in the mirrored uniform was speaking, nothing evil would be done to him. So finally, with no doubt in the voice, he said, “Tell me about these Bakers.”

  “They built you.”

  “Perhaps so,” he allowed.

  “Seven hundred million years ago,” Aasleen added. Then a bright smile broke open, and she added, “Which means that you are the second oldest machine that I have ever known.”

  The Great Ship being the oldest.

  Quietly, with a voice not quite accustomed to lecturing, she explained, “The Bakers were never natural travelers. We don’t know a lot about them, and most of our facts come through tertiary sources. But as far as we can determine, that species didn’t send even one emissary out into the galaxy. Instead of traveling, they built wondrous durable drones and littered an entire arm of the galaxy with them. Their machines were complicated and adaptable, and they were purposefully limited in what they knew about themselves. You see, the Bakers didn’t want to surrender anything about themselves, certainly not to strangers. They were isolated and happy to be that way. But they were also curious, in a fashion, and they could imagine dangerous neighbors wanting to do them harm. That’s why they built what looks to me like an elaborate empty bottle—a bottle designed to suck up ideas and emotions and history and intellectual talents from whatever species happens to come along. And when necessary, those machines could acquire the shape and voice of the locals too.”

  Nothing about the story could be refuted. Alone accepted what he heard, but he refused to accept that any of it mattered.

  Aasleen continued, explaining, “The Bakers lasted for ten or twelve million years, and then their world’s ecosystem collapsed. They lived at the far end of our galaxy, as humans calculate these measures. The only reason we’ve learned anything about them is that one of our newest resident species have collected quite a few of these old bottles. In partial payment for their ongoing voyage, they’ve shared everything they know about the Bakers. It’s not the kind of knowledge that I chase down for myself. But Washen knew that I’d be interested in dead engineers. And she mentioned just enough that I recognized what was being described, and I interrupted to tell her that I knew where another bottle was, and this one was still working.

  “‘Where is it?’ she asked.

  “I told her, ‘Wandering inside the Great Ship, he is, and he answers to the very appropriate name of Alone.’”

  The captain paused, smiling without appearing happy.

  Alone watched the workers. An elaborate needle was being erected on the cavern floor, aiming straight up at him.

  “We approached Miocene with our news,” Aasleen continued. “I know Washen was disappointed. But I was given the job of finding you again, and if possible, corralling you. Washen helped me profile your nature. Your powers. I decided to lure you in with the promise of another machine like you, and that’s why I turned Bottom-E into a halfway famous abode for a glowing shape-shifting soul. If
something went ugly-wrong down here, then at least the damage could be contained.”

  “What about the LoYo?” Alone asked.

  “They’ve been moved to other quarters. The lights above are hiding sensors, and I designed them myself, and they didn’t help at all. Until that light show, we couldn’t be certain that you were anywhere near this place.”

  The needle was quickly growing longer, reaching for the cage’s outermost wall.

  “What will you do now?” Alone asked.

  “Strip away your engine, first. And then we’ll secure it and you.” Aasleen tried to describe the process, offering several incomprehensible terms to bolster her expertise. But she seemed uneasy when she said, “Then we’ll isolate your neural net and see what it is and how it works.”

  “You are talking about my mind,” Alone complained.

  “A mind that lives beside a powerful, unexploded bomb,” the captain added.

  “The Bakers didn’t design you to survive for this long. My best guess is that you pushed yourself outside the Milky Way, and in that emptiness, nothing went wrong. You drifted. You waited. I suppose you slept, in a fashion. And then you happened upon the Great Ship, before or after we arrived. You could have been here long before us, but of course the Bakers are lost, and you weren’t what I would consider sentient.”

  “But I am now,” he said, his voice small and furious.

  Aasleen paused.

  Without apparent effort, the needle began to pass through the wall of the first impenetrable cage.

  “You are going to kill me,” he insisted.

  The human was not entirely happy with these events. It showed in her posture, her face. But she was under orders, and she was confident enough in her skills to say, “I don’t think anything bad will happen. A great deal of research and preparation has been done, and we have an excellent team working on you. Afterwards, I think you’ll prefer having all of your memories pulled loose and set inside safer surroundings.”

  With a sudden thrust, the needle pierced the other cages, and before it stopped rising, its bright plasmatic tip was touching his center.

  Damage was being done.

  Quietly but fiercely, he begged Aasleen, “Stop.”

  One of the nearby machines began to wail, the tone ominous and quickening. Aasleen looked at the data for a moment, and then too late, she lifted one of her hands, shouting, “Stop it now. We’ve got the alignment wrong—!”

  Then the captain and every engineer vanished.

  They were projections, Alone realized. The real humans were tucked inside some safe room, protected from the coming onslaught by distance and thick reaches of enduring hyperfiber.

  He was injured and dying. But the damage was specific and still quite narrow, and the faltering mind lay exposed like never before. And that was when the Voice that had always been speaking to him and to every soul that stood upon or inside the deep ancient hull could be heard.

  “I am the Ship,” the Voice declared.

  “Listen!”

  13

  In a place that was not one place, but instead was everywhere, Those-Who-Rule received unwelcome news. There was trouble in Creation, and there was sudden talk of grand failures. A portion of the everywhere was in rebellion. How could this be? Who would be so foolish? Those-Who-Rule were outraged by what they saw as pure treachery. Punishment was essential, and the best punishment had to be delivered instantly, before the rebellion could stretch beyond even their powerful reach. A ship was aimed and set loose, burrowing its way through the newborn universe. When it reach edits target, that ship would deliver a sentence worse than any death. Nonexistence was its weapon—oblivion to All—and with that one talent, plus an insatiable hunger for success, the ship dove on and on until it had passed out of sight.

  But then the revenge lay in the past. A moment later, upon reflection, Those Who-Rule questioned the wisdom of their initial decision. Total slaughter seemed harsh, no matter how justified. In a brief discussion that wasted time on blaming one another, these agents of power decided to dispatch a second ship—another vessel full of talents and desires and grand, unborn possibilities.

  If the second ship caught the first ship—somewhere out into that mayhem of newborn plasmas and raw, impossible energies—disaster would be averted. Life and existence and death and life born again would remain intact. But the universe was growing rapidly, exploding outwards until two adjacent points might discover themselves separated by a billion light-years.

  The chase would be very difficult.

  And yet, the second ship’s goal could be no more urgent.

  Through the fires of Creation, one ship chased the other, and nothing else mattered, and nothing else done by mortals or immortals could compare to the race that would grant the universe permission to live out its day.

  Alone listened to the insistent relentless piercing voice. And then he felt his center leaking, threatening to explode. That was when he interrupted, finally asking, “And which ship are you?”

  The Voice hesitated.

  “But you can’t be the first ship,” Alone realized. “If you were carrying this nonexistence…then you wouldn’t know about the second ship chasing after you, trying to stop your work…”

  In a mutter, the Voice said, “Yes.”

  “You must be the second ship,” he said. “What other choice is there?”

  “But a third choice exists,” the Voice assured.

  “No,” said Alone.

  Then in terror, he said, “Yes.”

  “I am,” the Great Ship said.

  “Both,” Alone blurted. “You’re that first ship bringing Nothingness, and you’re the second ship after it has reached its target.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can’t stop the mission, can you?”

  “I have tried and cannot, and I will try and nothing will change,” the Great Ship declared. Sad, yet not sad.

  “You’re both ships, both pilots.”

  “We are.”

  “Working for opposite ends.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the humans are happily, foolishly riding you through their galaxy.”

  “Doom everywhere, and every moment ending us.”

  Alone felt weak, and an instant later, stronger than he had ever felt before. As his energies flickered, he said, “Tell them. Why can’t you explain it to them?”

  “Why won’t they hear me?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could tell them for you.”

  “If you survived, you would explain. Yes.”

  “But.”

  “It is too late.”

  Alone said nothing.

  The Great Ship continued to talk, repeating that same tale of revenge and the chase, of nonexistence and the faint promise of salvation.

  But Alone had stopped listening. He heard nothing more. With just the eye of his mind, he was gazing back across tens of thousands of years, remembering every step, and marveling at how small his life appeared when set against the light of far suns and the deep abyss of Time.

  NAMES FOR WATER

  KIJ JOHNSON

  Kij Johnson sold her first short story in 1987, and has subsequently appeared regularly in Analog, Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. She has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ Crawford Award. Her short story “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” was nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo awards. Her story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” was nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Hugo awards, and won the World Fantasy Award, while short science fiction story “Spar” won the 2009 Nebula Award. Her novels include World Fantasy Award nominee The Fox Woman and Fudoki. She is currently researching a third novel set in Heian Japan.

  Hala is running for class when her cell phone rings. She slows to take it from her pocket, glances at the screen
: UNKNOWN CALLER. It rings again. She does not pick up calls when she doesn’t know who it is, but this time she hits TALK, not sure what’s different, except that she is late for a class she dreads, and this call delays the moment when she must sit down and be overwhelmed.

  “Hello,” she says.

  No one speaks. There is only the white noise that is always in the background of her cell phone calls. It could be the result of a flaw in the tiny cheap speaker but is probably microwaves, though she likes to imagine sometimes that it is the whisper of air molecules across all the thousands of miles between two people.

  The hiss in her ear: she walks across the commons of the Engineering building, a high-ceilinged room crowded with students shaking water from their jackets and umbrellas on their way to class. Some look as overwhelmed as she feels. It is nearly finals and they are probably not sleeping any more than she is.

  Beyond the glass wall it is raining. Cars pass on Loughlin Street, across the wet lawn. Water sprays from their wheels.

  Her schoolwork is not going well. It is her third year toward an engineering degree, but just now that seems an unreachable goal. The science is simple enough, but the mathematics has been hard, and she is losing herself in the tricky mazes of Complex Variables. She thinks of dropping the class and switching her major to something simpler, but if she doesn’t become an engineer what will she do instead?

  “This is Hala,” she says, her voice sharper. “Who is this?” This is the last thing she needs right now: a forgotten phone in a backpack, crushed against a text book and accidentally speed-dialing her; or worse, someone’s idea of a prank. She listens for breathing but hears only the constant hiss. No, it is not quite steady, or perhaps she has never before listened carefully. It changes, grows louder and softer like traffic passing, as though someone has dropped a phone onto the sidewalk of a busy street.

  She wonders about the street, if it is a real street—where in the city it is, what cars and buses and bicycles travel it. Or it might be in another city, somewhere distant and fabulous. Mumbai. Tokyo. Wellington. Santiago. The names are like charms that summon unknown places, unfamiliar smells, the tastes of new foods.