The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  “And you should see the beauty of it, Major, the rainbows and the darkness and the feeling that one is … finally close to the centre of understanding.”

  Hamilton licked his dry lips. “Why does all this happen?”

  “We don’t know, exactly,” admitted Castor. “We’ve approached this as engineers, not theorists. ‘God does not flay space,’ that’s what Newton is supposed to have said. He theorised that God provides a frame of reference for all things, relative to Him. But these spooky changes in mass and time depending on speed … that seems to say there’s a bit more going on than Newton’s miniscule gravitation and miniscule causality!”

  Hamilton nodded in the direction of Lustre. “I gather she wasn’t on that first trip?”

  “No,” said Pollux. “That’s what I’m coming to. When the carriage started decelerating towards Nemesis, we began to see signs of what we initially took to be a solar system surrounding the star. Only as we got closer did we realise that what we had taken to be small worlds were actually carriages. Ones the size of which human beings have not dreamt. The carriages of foreigners.”

  Hamilton’s mouth set in a line. That these had been the first representatives of humanity! And the foreigners were so close! If any of this could be true. He didn’t let his gaze move upwards as if to see them. He could almost feel the balance juddering. It was as if something dear to him was sliding swiftly away, into the void, and only destruction could follow. “So,” he said, “you drew alongside and shook hands.”

  “No,” laughed Pollux. “Unfortunately. We could see immediately that there were enormous symbols on the carriages, all the same design, though we couldn’t make anything of them. They were kind of … like red birds, but deformed, unfocussed. You needed to see two to realise they were a symbol at all. We approached with all hulloos and flags, and suddenly our embroidery was flooded with what might have been voices, but sounded like low booming sounds. We yelled back and forth, uselessly, for about an hour. We were preparing a diagram to throw into the void in a canister, stick figures handing each other things—”

  “I’ll bet,” said Hamilton.

  “—when they switched on lights that just illuminated their insignia. Off, then again. Over and over. It was like they were demanding for us to show ours.”

  Hamilton pointed at the monstrosity over the fireplace. “Didn’t you have that handy?”

  “That’s a later invention,” said Castor, “in response to this very problem.”

  “When we didn’t have any insignia of our own to display,” said Pollux, “they started firing at us. Or we assume it was firing. I decided to get out of it, and we resumed acceleration, rounded the star, and headed home.”

  Hamilton couldn’t conceal a smile.

  “Before the next expedition,” continued Castor, “we built the biggest carriage we could and had the coats of arms painted all over it. But we needed one more thing: something to barter with.” He gestured towards Lustre. “The contents of her head, the locations of the missing mass, the weight of all those living minds, a trading map of the heavens. Depending on where the foreigners came from, we might have information they didn’t. Or at least we could demonstrate we were in the game. And if one group of foreigners didn’t like us, we could go find another.”

  “But she proved to be made of strong stuff,” said Hamilton.

  “After she’d tried to shock herself into either death or deadlock, we kept her on ice,” said Castor. “We sent her with the staff on the main carriage, in the hope they could find a way to breach her along the way, or maybe offer her to the foreigners as sealed goods.” Hamilton was certain the twin was enjoying trying Lustre’s modesty with his words. “But their response this time was, if anything, more aggressive. Our people left a number of orbiting automatics, and a number of houses ready for occupation, but barely escaped with their lives.”

  “It seems they don’t like you any more than we do,” said Hamilton. “I can understand why you’d want her back. But why am I still alive?”

  The twins looked at each other like they’d come to an unpleasant duty sooner than they would have liked. Castor nodded to the air, the doors opened by themselves, and a number of the pantomime guards strode into the room.

  Hamilton controlled his breathing.

  “Chain him to the fireplace,” said Pollux.

  * * *

  They pulled the shackles from the same folds where Hamilton had been certain they’d kept weapons trained on him. His kind retired, if they did, to simple places, and didn’t take kindly to parties in great houses. A room was never a room when you’d worked out of uniform.

  They fixed his wrists and ankles to the top of the fireplace, and stripped him. Hamilton wanted to tell Lustre to look away, but he was also determined to not ask for anything he couldn’t have. He was going to have to die now, and take a long time about it. “You know your duty,” he said.

  She looked horribly uncertain back at him.

  Pollux nodded again, and a control pedal appeared out of the floor, light flooding with it. He placed his foot on it. “Let’s get the formalities out of the way,” he said. “We’d give you a staggering amount of money, in carbon, for your cooperation.”

  Hamilton swore lightly at him.

  “And that’s the problem with the world. All right, I tried. What I’m going to do now is to open a very small fold in front of your genitals. I’ll then increase the gravity, until Miss Saint Clair elects to stop using Enochian and says the words that will allow us to observe the package in her mind. Should she cut herself off from the world with her own language, I’ll start by pulling off your genitalia, and then move on to various other parts of your body, using folds to staunch the blood flow, killing you slowly while she’s forced to watch. Then I’ll do the same to her.” He looked quickly to Lustre, and for a moment it looked to Hamilton like he was even afraid. “Don’t make me do this.”

  Lustre stood straight and didn’t answer.

  “Say what you have to say to cut yourself off,” said Hamilton. “Say it now.”

  But, to his fury and horror she maintained the same expression, and just looked quickly between them.

  “For God’s sake—!” he cried out.

  Pollux pressed gently with his foot, and Hamilton tensed at the feel of the fold grabbing his body. It made him recall, horribly, moments with Lustre, and, even worse, moments with Annie. He didn’t want that association, so he killed it in his mind. There could be no thoughts of her as he died. It would be like dragging a part of her through this with him. There was no pain, not yet. He reserved his shouts for when there would be. He would use his training, go cursing them, as loud as he could, thus controlling the only thing he could. He was proud to have the chance to manage his death and die for king, country and balance.

  Pollux looked again at Lustre, then pressed slightly more. Now there was pain. Hamilton drew in a breath to begin telling this classless bastard what he thought of him—

  —when suddenly there came a sound.

  Something had crunched against something, far away.

  The twins both looked suddenly in the same direction, startled.

  Hamilton let out a choked laugh. Whatever this was—

  And that had been an explosion!

  A projection of a uniformed man flew up onto the wall. “Somehow there are three carriages—!”

  “The church bells!” said Hamilton, realising.

  Castor ran for the door, joining a great outflowing of guards as they grabbed arms from the walls, but Pollux stayed where he was, a dangerous expression on his face, his foot poised on the pedal. One guard had stayed beside Lustre also, his rifle covering her. “What?!”

  “The bells of Saint Mary’s in Copenhagen. Ten o’clock.” He was panting at the pain and the pressure. “You said the city became a British possession at 9:59. While we were falling.” He swore at the man who was about to maim him, triumphant. “They must have put a fold in me with a tracker inside, as w
e fell! Didn’t harm the balance if we landed in Britain!”

  Pollux snarled and slammed his foot down on the pedal.

  Hamilton didn’t see what happened in the next few seconds. His vision distorted with the pain, which reached up into his jaw and to the roots of his teeth.

  But the next thing he knew, Lustre had slammed a palm against the wall, and his shackles had disappeared. There was a shout of astonishment. The pressure cut off and the pain receded. He was aware of a guard somewhere over there in a pool of blood. Reflexively, he grabbed the rifle Lustre held. She tried to hold onto it, as if uncertain he could use it better than she could. They each scrabbled at it, they only had seconds—!

  He was aware of regimental cries converging on the room, bursting through the doors.

  He saw, as if down a tunnel, that Pollux was desperately stamping at the pedal, and light had suddenly blazed across his foot again.

  Pollux raised his foot, about to slam it down, to use the fold in the centre of the room, opened to its fullest extent, to rip apart Hamilton and everyone else!

  Hamilton shoved Lustre aside and in one motion fired.

  The top of Pollux’s head vanished. His foot spasmed downwards.

  It seemed to be moving slowly, to Hamilton’s pain dulled eyes.

  The sole of the man’s shoe connected with the control.

  For a moment it looked like it had done so with enough force that Pollux Ransom would not die alone.

  But it must have landed too softly. By some miniscule amount.

  The corpse fell aside. Its tormented soul had, a moment before, vanished from the universe.

  “That’ll be a weight off his mind,” said Hamilton.

  And then he passed out.

  * * *

  Six weeks later, following some forced healing and forced leave, Hamilton stood once again in front of Turpin. He had been called straight in, rather than return to his regiment. He hadn’t seen Lustre since the assault on the mansion. He’d been told that she had been interviewed at length and then returned to the bosom of the diplomatic corps. He assumed that she’d told Turpin’s people everything, and that, thus, at the very least, he was out of a job. At the worst, he could find himself at the end of the traitor’s noose, struggling in the air above Parliament Square.

  He found he couldn’t square himself to that. He was full of concerns and impertinent queries. The lack of official reaction so far had been trying his nerves.

  But as Turpin had run down what had happened to the various individuals in the mansion, how Castor was now in the cells far beneath this building, and what the origins and fates of the toy soldiers had been, how various out-of-uniform officers were busy unravelling the threads of the twins’ conceits, all over the world, Hamilton gradually began to hope. Surely the blow would have landed before now? King Frederik had been found, hiding or pretending to hide, and had been delighted, once the situation had been starkly explained to him, to have the British return him to his throne. Denmark remained a British protectorate while His Majesty’s forces rooted out the last of the conspirators in the pay of the Ransoms. And, since a faction in that court had been found and encouraged that sought to intermarry and unify the kingdoms, perhaps this would remain the case for some considerable while.

  “Of course,” said Turpin, “they weren’t really twins.”

  Hamilton allowed the surprise to show on his face. “Sir?”

  “We’ve found family trees that suggest they’re actually cousins, similar in appearance, with a decade or so between them. We’ve got carriages on the way to what we’re going to call George’s Star, and people examining that projection. We don’t expect to find anything beyond a single automatic in orbit.”

  “So … the girl—” He took a chance on referring to her as if he didn’t know her, hoping desperately that she’d kept the secret of what he hadn’t reported, all those years ago.

  “We kept an eye on her after the interviews. She told us she’d learned the access codes for Ransom’s embroidery from when she was on that enormous carriage she mentioned. Another thing we tellingly haven’t found, by the way, along with any high performance carriages in the Ransom garages. But she hadn’t quite got enough detail on the earliest years of Lustre Saint Clair’s life. A brilliant cover, a brilliant grown flesh job, but not quite good enough. She faltered a little when we put it to her that, struggling over that gun with you, she was actually trying to save Pollux Ransom’s life. We decided to let her out of the coop and see where she led us. As we expected, she realised we were on to her and vanished. Almost certainly into the Russian embassy. Certainly enough that we may find ourselves able to threaten the Czar with some embarrassment. You must have wondered yourself, considering the ease of your escape from the embassy, her reluctance to take the observer machine…” He raised an eyebrow at Hamilton. “Didn’t you?”

  Hamilton felt dizzy, as if the walls of his world had once more vibrated under an impact. “What were they after?”

  “Easy enough to imagine. The Russians would love to see us move forces out of the inner solar system in order to secure an otherwise meaningless territory in the hope that these fictitious foreigners might return. And just in the week or so while we were interviewing her, you should have seen the havoc this story caused at court. The hawks who want to ‘win the balance’ were all for sending the fleet out there immediately. The doves were at their throats. The Queen Mother had to order everyone to stop discussing it. But fortunately, we soon had an answer for them, confirmed by what we got out of Castor. An elegant fable, wasn’t it? The sort of thing Stichen would put together out of the White Court. I’ll bet it was one of his. You know, the strange-looking wounds, red birds, booming sounds, fine fly detail like that. If we hadn’t planted that tracker on you, the girl would have had to find some way to signal us herself. Or, less wasteful, you’d have been allowed to escape. Of course, the Ransoms’ worldwide network isn’t quite the size they made it out to be, not when you subtract all the rubles that are vanishing back to Moscow. But even so, clearing all that out makes the balance a bit safer tonight.”

  Hamilton didn’t know what to say. He stood there on the grown polished wood timbers and looked down at the whorls within whorls. An odd thought struck him. A connection back to the last certainty he recalled feeling. When his world had been set on sturdier foundations. “Ambassador Bayoumi,” he said. “Did he make it out?”

  “I’ve no idea. Why do you ask?”

  Hamilton found he had no reason in his head, just a great blankness that felt half merciful and half something lost. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “He seemed kind.”

  Turpin made a small grunt of a laugh, and looked back to his papers. Hamilton realised that he’d been dismissed. And that the burdens he’d brought with him into the room would not be ended by a noose or a pardon.

  As he made his way to the door, Turpin seemed to realise that he hadn’t been particularly polite. He looked up again. “I heard the record of what you said to him,” he said. “You said nobody would care if she killed you. It’s not true, you know.”

  Hamilton stopped, and tried to read the scarred and stitched face of the man.

  “You’re greatly valued, Jonathan,” said Turpin. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t still be here.”

  * * *

  A year or so later, Hamilton was woken in the early hours by an urgent tug on the embroidery, a voice that seemed familiar, trying to tell him something, sobbing and yelling in the few seconds before it was cut off.

  But he couldn’t understand a word it said.

  The next morning, there was no record of the exchange.

  In the end, Hamilton decided that it must have been a dream.

  The Invasion of Venus

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Stephen Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Anal
og, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific writers in science fiction, one who works on the cutting edge of science, whose fiction bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His many other books include the novels Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, the Mammoth trilogy: Silverhair, Longtusk, Icebones, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent, Conqueror, Navigator, Firstborn, The H-Bomb Girl, Weaver, Flood, Ark, and two novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke: The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye (Book one of a Time Odyssey). His short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and The Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. His most recent novels include the trilogy Stone Spring, Bronze Summer, and Iron Winter (forthcoming) as well as a nonfiction book, The Science of Avatar. Coming up is a new series, The Long Earth, to be cowritten with Terry Pratchett.

  Here he shows us a future in which humans are bystanders to an immense cosmic battle between forces that, to our dismay, ignore us completely.

  For me, the saga of the Incoming was above all Edith Black’s story. For she, more than anyone else I knew, was the one who had a problem with it.

  When the news was made public I drove out of London to visit Edith at her country church. I had to cancel a dozen appointments to do it, including one with the Prime Minister’s office, but I knew, as soon as I got out of the car and stood in the soft September rain, that it had been the right thing to do.

  Edith was pottering around outside the church, wearing overalls and rubber boots and wielding an alarming-looking industrial-strength jackhammer. But she had a radio blaring out a phone-in discussion, and indoors, out of the rain, I glimpsed a widescreen TV and laptop, both scrolling news—mostly fresh projections of where the Incoming’s decelerating trajectory might deliver them, and new deep-space images of their “craft,” if such it was, a massive block of ice like a comet nucleus, leaking very complex patterns of infrared radiation. Edith was plugged into the world, even out here in the wilds of Essex.