The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  I watch from the chain-link fence, leaning back on it. Oxford’s form is still smooth levers and pistons, but when I get a glimpse of his face I can see he is not smiling how he smiled in the gym. I manage to lock eyes with him, and I give him a nod, then give him some privacy by walking down to the other end of the court. I hear him start talking to his pa in what my audio implant tells me is Serer.

  I’m thinking the contract is as good as signed, and I’m about to tell as much to my boss when I hear the ball slam into the chain-link fence, sending ripples all down the length. I turn to see Oxford’s pa shrugging off his orange jacket, face tight and livid mad. He looks right at me, the sort of look you give something stuck to the bottom of your bomb-as-fuck shoe, then turns to his son.

  “You think I cannot remember what it feels like to run?” he says. “You pity me?”

  Oxford shakes his head desperately, saying something in Serer again, but his pa is not listening.

  “We will play, then,” he says, and I get that he’s talking in English so I’ll understand. “You beat me, you can get the mesh surgery. Yes?”

  “I did not want. . . . ” Oxford trails off. He stares at me, confused, then at his pa, hurt.

  “It will be easy,” Diallo senior says. “I am old. I have bad lungs.” He scoops the ball off the pavement and fires it into Oxford’s chest. His son smothers it with his big hands but still has to take a step back, maybe more from the surprise than from the impact.

  Oxford puts it on the floor and reluctantly starts his dribble. “Okay,” he says, biting at his lips again. “Okay.”

  But he sleepwalks forward and his pa slaps the ball away, way quicker than I would have thought possible. Diallo senior bullies his son back into the post, hard dribble, fake to the right and then a short sharp jump hook up over his left shoulder. It’s in the net before Oxford can even leave his feet.

  They’re playing make it take it, or at least Oxford’s pa is. He gets the ball again and bangs right down to another post-up, putting an elbow into Oxford’s chest. Oxford stumbles. The same jump hook, machine precision, up and in. The cords swish.

  “I thought you want it now,” Diallo senior says. “I thought you want your mesh.”

  Oxford looks stricken, but he’s not looking over at me anymore. He’s zeroed in. The next time his pa goes for the hook, he’s ready for it, floating up like an astronaut and slapping the shot away hard. Diallo senior collects it in the shadows, brings it back, but the next time down on the block goes no better. Oxford pokes the ball away and dribbles it back to the arc, near enough to me that I can hear a sobbing whine in his throat. I remember that he’s really still a kid, all seven feet of him, and then he drills the three-pointer with his pa’s hand right in his face.

  And after that it’s an execution. It’s Oxford darting in again and again breathing short angry breaths, sometimes stopping and popping the pull-up jumper, sometimes yanking it all the way to the rack. He’s almost crying. I don’t know if they’re playing to sevens, or what, but I know the game is over when Oxford slips his pa on a spin and climbs up and under from the other side of the net, enough space to scoop in the finger roll nice and easy, but instead his arm seems to jack out another foot at least, impossibly long, and he slams it home hard enough that the backboard shivers. He comes down with a howl ripped out of his belly, and the landing almost bowls his pa over, sends him back staggering.

  Diallo senior gathers himself. Slow. He goes to pick up the ball, but suddenly his grimace turns to a cough and he doubles over. The rusty wracking sound is loud in the cold air and goes on forever. Oxford stands there frozen, panting how he never panted in the gym, staring at his pa, and I stand there frozen staring at both of them. Then Diallo senior spits up blood in a ragged parabola on the sticky blue court, and his son breaks the frieze. He stumbles over, wraps his arms around him.

  A call from my boss blinks onto my retinal, accompanied by a sample from one of the latest blip-hop hits. It jangles back and forth across my vision while I stand there like a statue. Finally, I cancel the call and take a breath.

  “You don’t have to sign right away,” I say.

  Oxford and his pa both look up, remembering I’m there. I shouldn’t be.

  “You can think about it,” I stammer, ashamed like I’ve never been. “More. About the contract.”

  I want to tell them to forget the contract. Forget the mesh. We’ll make you famous without it. But instead I skulk away, out through the cold metal gate, leaving the Diallos huddled there under the floodlight, breathing a single cloud of steam.

  Alastair Reynolds is the bestselling author of over a dozen novels. He has received the British Science Fiction Award for his novel Chasm City, as well as the Seiun and Sidewise awards, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards. He has a Ph.D in Astronomy and worked for the European Space Agency before he left to write full time. His short fiction has been appearing in Interzone, Asimov’s, and elsewhere since 1990. Alastair’s latest novel is The Medusa Chronicles, co-written with Stephen Baxter.

  After spending many years in the Netherlands, he has now returned to Wales.

  A MURMURATION

  Alastair Reynolds

  What we call the “hut” is a couple of insulated portable cabins, with a few smaller sheds containing generators, fuel, wind turbine parts and so on. The main cabin contains a chemical toilet, a wash basin, basic cooking facilities and a set of bunk-beds. The second cabin holds our desks, computer equipment and supply stores. Two or three of us can share the hut at a time, but there is not normally a need for more than one to keep an eye on the experiment. Resources being tight, lately we tend to come out on our own.

  In all honesty, I prefer it this way. Birds draw out the solitude in us. They repay patience and silence—long hours of a kind of alert, anticipatory stillness. The days begin to blur into each other; weekends and weekdays becoming arbitrary distinctions. I find myself easily losing track of the calendar, birds and weather becoming my only temporal markers. I watch the migration patterns, record the nuances of altering plumage, study the changeful skies. I could not be happier.

  There is just one thing to spoil my contentment, but even that, I am confident, will soon be behind me.

  I will finish the paper.

  It sounds easy, put like that. A vow. A recommitment, a redoubling of my own efforts. One last push.

  It started easily enough—the usual set of objections, no real hint of the trouble to come. Very few papers ever go through without some amendments, so none of us were bothered that there were a few issues that needed addressing. But when we had fixed those, the anonymous referee came back with requests for more changes.

  We took care of those, but still the referee wanted more of us. This kept going on. Just when we think we have addressed all possible doubts, the referee somehow manages to find something new to quibble with. I do my best to be stoic, reminding myself that the referee is just another scientist doing her job, that they too are under similar pressures, and that I should not feel under any personal attack.

  But I only have to glance at their comments.

  The authors are inconsistent in their handling of the normalisation terms for the correlation function of the velocity modulus. I am not convinced that their treatment of the smoothed Dirac delta-function is rigorous across the quoted integral.

  My blood boils. I entertain a momentary fantasy of meeting the referee out here, on some lonely strip of marshland, of swerving violently and running them into a ditch.

  Asking, as I watch them gag on muddy water: “Rigorous enough for you now?”

  The basis of our experiment is a ring of twenty tripods, arranged in a two kilometre circle. The hut is on one side of the circle, the wind turbine offset a short distance from the other side. During the day I check all the tripods, picking the least waterlogged path in the 4WD.

  Each unit carries a pair of stereometric digital cameras. The lenses need to be kept clean, the power and el
ectronic connections verified. The cameras should be aimed into the middle of the perimeter, and elevated sufficiently to catch the murmuration’s epicentre. The cameras are meant to be steerable, but not all of the motors work properly now.

  Beneath each camera is a grey digital control box. The boxes contain microprocessor boards, emergency batteries, and the rectangles of their internal ethernet modules, flickering with yellow LEDs. The boxes are supposedly weatherproof but the rain usually finds a way into them. Like the motors, there have been some failures of the circuit boards.

  About one in five of the stations have more equipment. On these units we also included laser/radar rangefinders and Doppler velocity recorders. These in turn require extra processors and batteries in the control boxes, which is yet more to go wrong. The effort is worth it, though.

  The equipment allows us to track the instantaneous vectors of anything up to two hundred and fifty thousand birds, perhaps even half a million, in a single compact flock. Our spatial/temporal resolution is sufficient to determine wing movements down to the level of specific feather groups. At the same time we also gather data on the attentional shifts implied by eye and head tracking of individual birds.

  The human eye sees a blurring of identities, birds becoming the indistinguishable, amorphous elements of some larger whole. The cameras and computers see through all of that. I know the science, I know the algorithms, I know our data-carrying capacity. All the same, I am still quietly astonished that we can do this.

  When the cameras are checked, which can take anywhere between three and six hours, I have one final inspection to perform. I drive to the wind turbine, and make a visual inspection of the high grey tower and the swooping blades. More often than not there is nothing to be done. The blades turn, the power flows, our electrical and computer systems work as they are meant to.

  The rest is down to the birds.

  It’s odd, really, but there are times when I find even the hut a little too closed-in and oppressive for my tastes. Sometimes I just stop the 4WD out here, wind the window down, and watch the light change over the marsh. I like it best when the day is overcast, the clouds sagging low over the trees and bushes of the marsh, their greyness relieved only by a bold supercilial swipe of pale yellow above the horizon. Birds come and go, and but it’s too early for the roosting. I watch herons, curlew, reed warblers—sometimes even the slow, methodical patrol of our resident marsh harrier. She quarters the ground with the ruthless precision of a surveillance drone.

  Beyond the birds, the only constancy is the regular swoosh of the turbine blades.

  It’s a good time to catch up on work or reading.

  I pull laser-printed pages from the unruly nest of the glove compartment, along with tissues, cough sweets, empty medicine packets, a scuffed CD without a case. I rest a stiff-backed road atlas on the steering wheel, so that I can write on the pages.

  I’ve already marked up certain problematic passages in yellow highlighter. Now I use a finer pen to scribble more detailed notes in the margins. Eventually I’ll condense these notes into a short email to the journal editor. In turn they’ll forward them on to the author of the paper I am refereeing.

  This is how it works. I’m engaged in a struggle with my own anonymous referee, half-convinced that they’ve got it in for me, while at the same time trying to be just as nit-picking and difficult for this other author. Doubtless they feel just as irritated by me. But from my end, I know that there’s nothing personal in it. I just want the work to be as good as it can be, the arguments as lucid, the analysis as rigorous. So what if I know the lead author, and don’t particularly care for her? I can rise above that.

  I hold one of the sheets up to the yellowing sky, so that the band of light pushes through the highlit yellow passages. I read back my own scrawl in the margins:

  Sloppy handling of the synthetic correlation function—doesn’t inspire confidence in rest of analysis.

  Am I being too harsh with them?

  Perhaps. But then we’ve all been through this mill.

  Starlings gather, arriving from all directions, concentrating in the air above the copse of trees and bushes near the middle of the study area. They come in small numbers, as individuals or in flocks of a few dozen, before falling into the greater mass. There is no exact threshold at which the concentration of birds becomes a recognisable murmuration, but it needs at least a few thousand before the form begins to emerge as a distinct phenomenon in its own right, with its swooping, gyring, folding cohesiveness—a kind of living membrane in the sky.

  Meanwhile, our instruments record. One hundred parametric data points per bird per millisecond, on average, or upwards of fifty gigabytes of data for the whole murmuration. Since the murmuration may persist for several tens of minutes, our total data cube for the whole observation may contain more than thirty terabytes of data, and a petabyte is not exceptional. We use some of the same data-handling and compression routines as the particle physicists in CERN, with their need to track millions of microscopic interaction events. They are tracking tiny bundles of energy, mass, spin and charge. We are tracking warm, feathery bodies with hearts and wings and twitchy central nervous systems!

  All of it is physics, though, whether you are studying starlings or quarks.

  On my workstation I sift through slices of the data with tracker-wheels and mouse glides.

  I graph up a diagram of the murmuration at a moment in time, from an arbitrary viewing angle. It is a smear-shaped mass of tiny dots, like a pixelated thumbprint. On the edges of the murmuration the birds are easily distinguishable. Closer to the core the dots crowd over each other, forming gradients of increasing concentration, the birds packing together with an almost Escher-like density. Confronted with those black folds and ridges, it is hard not to think of the birds as blending together, clotting into a suspended, gravity-defying whole.

  I mouse click and each dot becomes a line. Now the smear is a bristly mass, like the pattern formed by iron filings in the presence of a magnetic field. These are the instantaneous vectors for each bird—the direction and speed in which they are moving.

  We know from previous studies that each starling has a direct influence on—and is in turn influenced by—about seven neighbours. We can verify this with the vector plots, tracking the change in direction of a particular bird, and then noting the immediate response of its neighbours. But if that were the limit of the bird’s influence, the murmuration would be sluggish to respond to an outside factor, such as the arrival of a sparrowhawk.

  In fact the entity responds as a whole, dividing and twisting to outfox the intruder. It turns out that there is a correlation distance much greater than the separation between immediate neighbours. Indeed, that correlation between distant birds may be as wide as the entire murmuration. It is as if they are bound together by invisible threads, each feeling the tug of the other—a kind of rubbery net, stretching and compressing.

  In fact, the murmuration may contain several distinct “domains” of influence, where the flight patterns of groups of birds are highly correlated. In the plot on my workstation, these show up as sub-smears of strongly aligned vectors. They come and go as the murmuration proceeds, blending and dissipating—crowds within the larger crowd.

  This is where the focus of our recent research lies. What causes these domains to form? What causes them to break up? Can we trace correlation patterns between the domains, or are they causally distinct? How sharp are the boundaries—how permeable?

  This paper, the one that is bouncing back and forth between us and the referee, was only intended to set out the elements of our methodology— demonstrating that we had the physical and mathematical tools to study the murmuration at any granularity we chose. Beyond that, we had plans to produce a series of papers which would build on this preliminary work with increasingly complex experiments. So far we have been no more than passive observers. But if we have any claim to understand the murmuration, then we should be able to predict its resp
onse to an external stimulus.

  I am starting to sense an impasse. Can we honestly go through this all over again with our next publication, and the one after? The thought of that leaves me drained. We have the tools for the next phase of our work, so why not push ahead with the follow-up study, and fold the results of that back into the present paper? Steal a march on our competitors, and dazzle our referee with the sheer effortless audacity of our work?

  I think so.

  The next day I set up the sparrowhawk.

  I need hardly add that it is not a real sparrowhawk. Designed for us by our colleagues at the robotics laboratory, it is a clever, swift-moving drone. It has wings and a tail and its flight characteristics are similar to those of a real bird. It has synthetic feathers, a plastic bill, large glassy eyes containing swivel-mounted cameras. To the human eye, it looks a little crude and toy-like—surely too caricatured to pass muster. But the sparrowhawk’s visual cues have been exaggerated very carefully. From a starling’s point of view, it is maximally effective, maximally terrifying. It lights up all the right fear responses.

  Come the roost, I set down a folding deck chair, balance the laptop in my lap, stub my gloved fingers onto the scuffed old keyboard, with half the letters worn away, and I watch the spectacle. The sparrowhawk whirrs from the roof of the 4WD, soars into the air, darts forward almost too quickly for my own eyes to track.

  It picks a spot in the murmuration and arcs in like a guided missile. The murmuration cleaves, twists, recombines.

  The sparrowhawk executes a hairpin turn and returns for the attack. It skewers through the core of the flock, jackknifes its scissor wings, zigzags back. It makes a low electric hum. Some birds scatter from the periphery, but the murmuration as a whole turns out to be doggedly persistent, recognising on some collective level that the sparrowhawk cannot do it any real damage, only picking off its individual units in trifling numbers.