Li and two campaign wizards were conferring at the center of the limousine. Polls were a painful topic. They were still critical points behind the frontrunners, and the propaganda wing of his empire was getting worried. Ideas for new campaigns were offered, and then buried. Finally the conversation fell into glowering silences and hard looks at a floor carpeted with cultured white ermine.
That was when Joe unfastened his harness and approached.
Li seemed to notice him. But his assistant—a cold little Swede named Hussein—took the trouble to ask, “What do you need, Mr. Carroway?”
“Just want to offer my opinion,” he said.
“Opinion? About what?”
Joe made a pistol with his hand and pointed it at Hussein, and then he jerked so suddenly that the man flinched.
“What is it, Joe?”
Asked Li.
“People are idiots,” Joe said.
The candidate looked puzzled, but a moment later, something about those words intrigued him. “In what way?”
“We can’t see into the future.”
“We can’t?”
“None of us can,” said Joe. He showed a smile, a little wink. “Not even ten seconds ahead, in some cases.”
“Yet we do surprisingly well despite our limitations.” The candidate leaned back, trying to find the smoothest way to dismiss this famous name.
“We can’t see tomorrow,” said Joe, “but we are shrewd.”
“People, you mean?”
“Particularly when ten billion of us are thinking hard about the same problem. And that’s why you aren’t going to win this race. Nobody sees what will happen, but in this case, it’s very easy to guess how the Li presidency will play out.”
Hussein bristled.
But Li told him and everyone else to let the man speak.
“You’re assuming that I hate these other species,” Joe told him. “In fact, you’ve counted on it from the start. But the truth is . . . I don’t have any compelling attachment to sapiens. By and large, I am a genuinely amoral creature. While you, sir . . . you are a bigot and a genocidal asshole. And should you ever come to power, the solar system has a respectable chance of collapsing into full-scale civil war.”
Li took a moment. Then he pointed out, “In my life, I have killed no one. Not a single Rebirth, or for that matter, a sapien.”
“Where I have slaughtered thousands,” Joe admitted. “And stood aside while millions more died.”
“Maybe you are my problem. Perhaps we should drop you from the ticket.”
“That is an option,” Joe agreed.
“Is this what you wanted to say to me? That you wish to quit?”
Joe gave the man a narrow, hard-to-read smile.
“My life,” he said.
“Pardon?” Li asked.
“Early in life, I decided to live as if I was very important. As if I was blessed in remarkable ways. In my hand, I believed, were the keys to a door that would lead to a worthy future, and all that was required of me was that I make hard calculations about matters that always seem to baffle everyone else.”
“I’m sorry, Joe. I’m not quite sure—”
“I have always understood that I am the most important person there is, on the Earth or any other world within our reach. And I have always been willing to do or say anything that helps my climb to the summit.”
“But how can you be that special? Since that’s my place to be . . .”
Li laughed, and his assistants heartily joined in.
Again, Joe made a pistol with his hand, pointing his index finger at the candidate’s face.
“You are a scary individual,” Li remarked. Then he tried to wave the man back, looking at no one when he mentioned, “Perhaps a medical need needs to be diagnosed. A little vacation for our dear friend, perhaps.”
Hussein gave an agreeable nod.
In the distance, a single soft pop could be heard.
Joe slipped back to his seat.
His security man was sitting beside him. Bothered as well as curious, he asked, “What was that all about?”
“Nothing,” said Joe. “Never mind.”
Another mild pop was followed by something a little louder, a little nearer.
Just in case, the security man reached for his weapon. But he discovered that his holster was empty now.
Somehow his gun had found its way into Joe’s hand.
“Stay close to me,” Joe said.
“You know I will,” the man muttered weakly.
Then came the flash of a thumb-nuke, followed by the sharp wail of people screaming, begging with Fortune to please show mercy, to please save their glorious, important lives.
WORLD’S END
Three terms as President finally ended with an assortment of scandals—little crimes and large ones, plus a series of convenient nondisclosures—and those troubles were followed by the sudden announcement that Joseph Carroway would slide gracefully into retirement. After all that, there was persistent talk about major investigations and unsealing ancient records. Tired allegations refused to die. Could the one-time leader of humanity be guilty of even one-tenth of the crimes that he was rumored to have committed? In judicial circles, wise minds discussed the prospects of charging and convicting the Old Man on the most egregious insults to common morality. Politicians screamed for justice without quite defining what justice required. Certain species were loudest in their complaints, but that was to be expected. What was more surprising, perhaps, were the numbers of pure sapiens who blamed the President for every kind of ill. But most of the pain and passion fell on one-time colleagues and allies. Unable to sleep easily, they would sit at home, secretly considering their own complicities in old struggles and more recent deeds, as well as non-deeds and omissions that seemed brilliant at the moment, but now, in different light, looked rather ominous.
But in the end, nothing substantial happened.
In the end, the Carroway Magic continued to hold sway.
His successor was a talented and noble soul. No one doubted her passion for peace or the decency of her instincts. And she was the one citizen of the inhabited Worlds who could sit at a desk and sign one piece of parchment, forgiving crimes and transgressions and mistakes and misjudgments. And then she showed her feline face to the cameras, winning over public opinion by pointing out that trials would take decades, verdicts would be contested for centuries, and every last one of the defendants had been elected and then served every citizen with true skill.
The new president served one six-year term before leaving public life.
Joseph Carroway entered the next race at the last moment, and he won with a staggering seventy percent mandate. But by then the Old Man was exactly that: A slowed, sorry image of his original self, dependent on a talented staff and the natural momentum of a government that achieved the ordinary without fuss or too much controversy.
Fifteen months into Joe’s final term, an alien starship entered the solar system. In physical terms, it was a modest machine: Twenty cubic kilometers of metal and diamond wrapped around empty spaces. There seemed to be no crew or pilot. Nor was there a voice offering to explain itself. But its course was clear from the beginning. Moving at nearly one percent of light speed, the Stranger, as it had been dubbed, missed the moon by a few thousand kilometers. Scientists and every telescope studied its configuration, and two nukes were set off in its vicinity—neither close enough to cause damage, it was hoped, but both producing EM pulses that helped create a detailed portrait of what lay inside. Working separately, teams of AI savants found the same awful hypothesis, and a single Antfolk nest dedicated to the most exotic physics proved that hypothesis to everyone’s grim satisfaction. By then, the Stranger was passing through the sun’s corona, its hull red-hot and its interior awakening. What might have been a hundred thousand year sleep was coming to an end. In less than a minute, this very unwelcome guest had vanished, leaving behind a cloud of ions and a tiny flare that normally would trouble
no one, much less spell doom for humankind.
They told Joe what would happen.
His science advisor spoke first, and when there was no obvious reaction on that perpetually calm face, two assistants threw their interpretations of these events at the Old Man. Again, nothing happened. Was he losing his grip finally? This creature who had endured and survived every kind of disaster . . . was he suddenly lost, at wits end and such?
But no, he was just letting his elderly mind assemble the puzzle that they had given him.
“How much time?” he asked.
“Ten, maybe twelve minutes,” the science advisor claimed. “And then another eight minutes before the radiation and scorching heat reach us.”
Others were hoping for a longer delay. As if twenty or thirty minutes would offer some kind of help.
Joe looked out the window, and with a wry smile pointed out, “It is a beautiful day.”
In other words, the sun was up, and they were dead.
“How far will the damage extend?” he asked.
Nobody replied.
The Antfolk ambassador was watching from her orbital embassy, tied directly into the President’s office. For a multitude of reasons, she despised this sapien. But he was the ruler of the Great Nest, and in awful times, she was willing to do or say anything to help him, even if that meant telling him the full, undiluted truth.
“Our small worlds will be vaporized. The big asteroids will melt and seal in the deepest parts of our nests.” Then with a sad gesture of every hand, she added, “Mars is worse off than Earth, what with the terraforming only begun. And soon there won’t be any solid surfaces on the Jovian moons.”
Joe turned back to his science advisor. “Will the Americas survive?”
“In places, maybe.” The man was nearly sobbing. “The flares will finish before the sun rises, and even with the climate shifts and the ash falls, there’s a fair chance that the atmosphere will remain breathable.”
Joe nodded.
Quietly, firmly, he told everyone, “I want an open line to every world. In thirty seconds.”
But before anyone could react, the youngest assistant screamed out, “Why? Why would aliens do this awful thing to us?”
Joe laughed, just for a moment.
Then with a grandfatherly voice, he said, “Because they can. That’s why.”
“It has been an honor to serve as your President,” Joe told an audience of two and then three and then four billion. But most citizens were too busy to watch this unplanned speech—an important element in his gruesome calculations. “But my days are done. The sun has been infiltrated, its hydrogen stolen to use in the manufacture of an amazing bomb, and virtually everybody in the range of my voice will be dead by tomorrow.
“If you are listening to me, listen carefully.
“The only way you will survive in the coming hell is to find those very few people whom you trust most. Do it now. Get to your families, hold hands with your lovers. Whoever you believe will watch your back always. And then you need to search out those who aren’t aware of what I am telling you to do.
“Kill those other people.
“Whatever they have of value, take it.
“And store their corpses, if you can. In another week or two, you might relish the extra protein and fat.”
He paused, just for a moment.
Then Joe said, “For the next ten generations, you will need to think only about yourselves. Be selfish. Be vicious. Be strong, and do not forget.
“Kindness is a luxury.
“Empathy will be a crippling weakness.
“But in another fifty generations, we can rebuild everything that we have lost here today. I believe that, my friends. Goodness can come again. Decency can flower in any rubble. And in fifty more generations after that, we will reach out to the stars together.
“Keep that thought close tonight, and always.
“One day, we will punish the bastards that did this awful thing to us. But to make that happen, a few of you must find the means to survive . . . !”
The Sky That Wraps
the World Round, Past
the Blue and Into the Black
JAY LAKE
Highly prolific new writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last few years, including Asimov’s, Interzone, Clarksworld, Jim Baen’s Universe, Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, Futurismic, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction to already have released four collections even though his career is only a few years old: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, and Dogs in the Moonlight. His novels include Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, and, most recently, Escapement and Madness of Flowers. He’s the co-editor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, now in six volumes, and has also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, and TEL: Stories. Coming up is a new novel, Green, a new anthology, co-edited with Nick Gevers, Other Earths, and a space opera trilogy, Sunspace. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.
In the deceptively quiet story that follows, he shows us an artisian hard at work at his craft—one he has no choice but to pursue, no matter what the cost.
I believe that all things eventually come to rest. Even light, though that’s not what they tell you in school. How do scientists know? A billion billion years from now, even General Relativity might have been demoted to a mere Captain. Photons will sit around in little clusters of massless charge, bumping against one another like boats in the harbor at Kowloon.
The universe will be blue then, everything from one cosmic event horizon to the other the color of a summer sky.
This is what I tell myself as I paint the tiny shards spread before me. Huang’s men bring them to me to work with. We are creating value, that gangster and I. I make him even more immensely wealthy. Every morning that I wake up still alive is his gratuity to me in return.
It is a fair trade.
My life is comfortable in the old house along the alley with its central court crowded with bayberry trees. A narrow gutter trickles down the center of the narrow roadway, slimed a greenish black with waste slopped out morning and evening from the porch steps alongside. The roofs are traditional, with sloping ridges and ornamented tile caps. I have studied the ones in my own courtyard. They are worn by the years, but I believe I can see a chicken stamped into each one. “Cock,” my cook says with his thick Cantonese accent, never seeing the vulgar humor.
Even these tired old houses are topped with broadband antennae and tracking dishes which follow entertainment, intelligence or high finance beamed down from orbit and beyond. Sometimes the three are indistinguishable. Private data lines sling on pirated staples and cable ties from the doddering concrete utility poles. The poles themselves are festooned with faded prayer flags, charred firecracker strings, and remnants of at least half a dozen generations of technology dedicated to transmission of something.
Tesla was right. Power is nothing more than another form of signal, after all. If the lights come on at a touch of your hand, civilization’s carrier wave is intact.
Despite the technology dangling overhead in rotting layers, the pavement itself holds life as old as China. Toddlers wearing only faded shirts toss stones in the shadows. A mangy chow dog lives beneath a vine-grown cart trapped against someone’s garden wall. Amahs air their families’ bedding over wooden railings worn shiny with generations of elbows. Tiny, wrinkled men on bicycles with huge trays balanced behind their seats bring vegetables, newspapers, meat and memory sticks to the back doors of houses. Everything smells of ginger and night soil and the ubiquitous mold.
I wake each day with the dawn. Once I overcome my surprise at remaining alive through another sunrise, I tug on a cheaply printed yukata and go hunting for coffee. My cook, as tiny and wrinkled as the vendors outside but decorated with tong tattoos t
hat recall another era long since lost save for a few choppy-sockie movies, does not believe in the beverage. Instead he is unfailing in politely pressing a bitter-smelling black tea on me at every opportunity. I am equally unfailing in politely refusing it. The pot is a delicate work of porcelain which owes a great deal to a China before electricity and satellite warfare. It is painted a blue almost the shade of cornflowers, with a design of a round-walled temple rising in a stepped series of roofs over some Oriental pleasaunce.
I’ve seen that building on postage stamps, so it must be real somewhere. Or had once been real, at least.
After the quiet combat of caffeine has concluded its initial skirmish, I shuffle to my workroom where my brushes await me. Huang has that strange combination of stony patience and sudden violence which I have observed among the powerful in China. When my employer decides I have failed in my bargain, I am certain it is the cook who will kill me. I like to imagine his last act as the light fades from my eyes will be to pour tea down my throat as a libation to see my spirit into the next world.
There is a very special color that most people will never see. You have to be out in the Deep Dark, wrapped in a skinsuit amid the hard vacuum where the solar wind sleets in an invisible radioactive rain. You can close your eyes there and let yourself float in a sensory deprivation tank the size of the universe. After a while, the little mosaics that swirl behind your eyelids are interrupted by tiny, random streaks of the palest, softest, sharpest electric blue.
I’ve been told the specks of light are the excitation trails of neutrinos passing through the aqueous humor of the human eye. They used to bury water tanks in Antarctic caves to see those things, back before orbit got cheap enough to push astronomy and physics into space where those sciences belong. These days, all you have to do is go for a walk outside the planet’s magnetosphere and be patient.
That blue is what I capture for Huang. That blue is what I paint on the tiny shards he sends me wrapped in day-old copies of the high orbital edition of Asahi Shimbun. That blue is what I see in my dreams.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual Page 43