The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2016 Edition
Page 67
They have decided that I am to lead them to glory, or, more likely, to death. It’s justice, I suppose. I have visions you see—pula flashbacks. It works differently on Terrenes than Thents. Oh, they’re hard-headed enough not to believe in divine inspiration or any of that rubbish. They need a figurehead—the repentant mercenary is a good role, and the odd bit of mumbo-jumbo from the inside of my addled head doesn’t go amiss.
Is your tea all right? It’s very hard to get the water hot enough this high. Have I said that before? Ignore me—the flashbacks. Did I tell you I’m dying? But it’s good to see you; oh how long is it?
And Richard? The children? And Grangegorman? And is Ireland . . . of course. What I would give for an eyeful of green, for a glimpse of summer sun, a blue sky.
So, I have been a conman and a lover, a soldier and an addict, and now I end my time as a revolutionary. It is surprisingly easy. The Group of Seven Altiplano Peoples’ Liberation Army do the work: I release gnomic pronouncements that run like grassfire from here to Egayhazy. I did come up with the Blue Empress motif: the Midnight Glory: blooming in the dark, under the breath of the high snows. Apt. They’re not the most poetic of people, these potters. We drove the Duke of Yoo from the Valley of the Kilns and the Ishtar Plain: she is resisted everywhere, but she will not relinquish her claim on the Altiplano so lightly. You’ve been in Egayhazy—you’ve seen the forces she’s moving up here. Armies are mustering, and my agents report ’rigibles coming through the passes in the Palisades. An assault will come. The Duke has an alliance with House Shorth—some agreement to divide the altiplano up between them. We’re outnumbered. Outmanoeuvred and out-supplied, and we have no where to run. They’ll be at each other’s throats within a Great Day, but that’s a matter of damn for us. The Duke may spare the kilns—they’re the source of wealth. Matter of damn to me. I’ll not see it, one way or other. You should leave, Ida. Pula and local wars—never get sucked into them.
Ah. Unh. Another flashback. They’re getting briefer, but more intense, Ida, you are in danger. Leave before night—they’ll attack in the night. I have to stay. The Merciful One, the Seer, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl, can’t abandon his people. But it was good, so good of you to come. This is a terrible place. I should never have come here. The best traps are the slowest. In you walk, through all the places and all the lives and all the years, never thinking that you are already in the trap, and then you go to turn around, and it has closed behind you. Ida, go as soon as you can . . . go right now. You should never have come. But . . . —oh, how I hate the thought of dying up here on this terrible plain! To see Ireland again . . .
V volanti musco: Altiplano Air-moss. The papercut shows part of a symbiotic lighter-than-air creature of the Ishtari Altiplano. The plant part consists of curtains of extremely light hanging moss that gather water from the air and low clouds. The animal part is not reproduced.
Shredded paper, gum.
He came to the door of his porcelain house, leaning heavily in a stick, a handkerchief pressed to mouth and nose against the volcanic fumes. I had tried to plead with him to leave, but whatever else he has become, he is a Hyde of Grangegorman, and stubborn as an ould donkey. There is a wish for death in him; something old and strangling and relentless with the gentlest eyes.
“I have something for you,” I said and I gave him the box without ceremony.
His eyebrows rose when he opened it.
“Ah.”
“I stole the Blue Empress.”
“I know.”
“I had to keep it out of Patrick’s hands. He would have broken and wasted it, like he broke and wasted everything.” Then my slow mind, so intent on saying this confession right, that I had practised on the space-crosser, and in every room and every mode of conveyance on my journey across this world, flower to flower, story to story: my middle-aged mind tripped over Arthur’s two words. “You knew?”
“All along.”
“You never thought that maybe Richard, maybe Father, or Mammy, or one of the staff had taken it?”
“I had no doubt that it was you, for those very reasons you said. I chose to keep your secret, and I have.”
“Arthur, Patrick is dead, Rathangan is mine. You can come home now.”
“Ah, if it were so easy!”
“I have a great forgiveness to ask from you, Arthur.”
“No need. I did it freely. And do you know what, I don’t regret what I did. I was notorious—the Honourable Arthur Hyde, jewel thief and scoundrel. That has currency out in the worlds. It speaks reams that none of the people I used it on asked to see the jewel, or the fortune I presumably had earned from selling it. Not one. Everything I have done, I have done on reputation alone. It’s an achievement. No, I won’t go home, Ida. Don’t ask me to. Don’t raise that phantom before me. Fields of green and soft Kildare mornings. I’m valued here. The people are very kind. I’m accepted. I have virtues. I’m not the minor son of Irish gentry with no land and the arse hanging out of his pants. I am the Merciful One, the Prophet of the Blue Pearl.”
“Arthur, I want you to have the jewel.”
He recoiled as if I had offered him a scorpion.
“I will not have it. I will not touch it. It’s an ill-favoured thing. Unlucky. There are no sapphires on this world. You can never touch the Blue Pearl. Take it back to the place it came from.”
For a moment, I wondered if he was suffering from another one of his hallucinating seizures. His eyes, his voice were firm.
“You should go, Ida. Leave me. This is my place now. People have tremendous ideas of family—loyalty and undying love and affection: tremendous expectations and ideals that drive them across worlds to confess and receive forgiveness. Families are whatever works. Thank you for coming. I’m sorry I wasn’t what you wanted me to be. I forgive you—though as I said there is nothing to forgive. There. Does that make us a family now? The Duke of Yoo is coming, Ida. Be away from here before that. Go. The town people will help you.”
And with a wave of his handkerchief, he turned and closed his door to me.
I wrote that last over a bowl of altiplano mate at the stickmen’s caravanserai in Yelta, the last town in the Valley of the Kilns. I recalled every word, clearly and precisely. Then I had an idea; as clear and precise as my recall of that sad, unresolved conversation with Arthur. I turned to my valise of papers, took out my scissors and a sheet of the deepest indigo and carefully, from memory, began to cut. The stickmen watched curiously, then with wonder. The clean precision of the scissors, so fine and intricate, the difficulty and accuracy of the cut, absorbed me entirely. Doubts fell from me: why had I come to this world? Why had I ventured alone into this noisome valley? Why had Arthur’s casual accepting of what I had done, the act that shaped both his life and mine, so disappointed me? What had I expected from him? Snip went the scissors, fine curls of indigo paper fell from them on to the table. It had always been the scissors I turned to when the ways of men grew too much. It was a simple cut. I had the heart of it right away, no false starts, no new beginnings. Pure and simple. My onlookers hummed in appreciation. Then I folded the cut into my diary, gathered up my valises, and went out to the waiting spider-car. The eternal clouds seem lower today, like a storm front rolling in. Evening is coming.
I write quickly, briefly.
Those are no clouds. Those are the ’rigibles of the Duke of Yoo. The way is shut. Armies are camped across the altiplano. Thousands of soldiers and javrosts. I am trapped here. What am I to do? If I retreat to Glehenta I will meet the same fate as Arthur and the Valley people—if they even allow me to do that. They might think that I was trying to carry a warning. I might be captured as a spy. I do not want to imagine how the Duke of Yoo treats spies. I do not imagine my Terrene identity will protect me. And the sister of the Seer, the Blue Empress! Do I hide in Yelta and hope that they will pass me by? But how could I live with myself knowing that I had abandoned Arthur?
There is no way forward, no way back, no way around.
I must persuade her to call off the attack.
Impossible! A middle-aged Irish widow, armed only with a pair of scissors. What can she do; kill an army with gum and tissue? The death of a thousand papercuts?
Perhaps I could buy her off. A prize beyond prize: a jewel from the stars, from their goddess itself. Arthur said that sapphires are unknown on this world. A stone beyond compare.
I am writing as fast as I am thinking now.
I must go and face the Duke of Yoo, female to female. I am of Ireland, a citizen of no mean nation. We confront the powerful, we defeat empires. I will go to her and name myself and I shall offer her the Blue Empress. The true Blue Empress. Beyond that, I cannot say. But I must do it, and do it now.
I cannot make the driver of my spider-car take me into the camp of the enemy. I have asked her to leave me and make her own way back to Yelta. I am writing this with a stub of pencil. I am alone on the high altiplano. Above the shield wall, the cloud layer is breaking up. Enormous shafts of dazzling light spread across the high plain. Two mounted figures have broken from the line and ride towards me. I am afraid—and yet I am calm. I take the Blue Empress from its box and grasp it tight in my gloved hand. Hard to write now. No more diary. They are here.
V. Gloria medianocte: The Midnight Glory, or Blue Empress.
Card, paper, ink.
Asymptotic
Andy Dudak
The cadets stand at attention for their passing-out ceremony, a random sample of the motley gamut of branched sapiens, and Nuhane is the smallest by far—but he adds his voice to their oath with towering conviction:
“We swear to uphold the Einsteinian limit! We vow to impose relativistic lockdown when a debt is owed to the universe, to deal out justice like a blind law of physics, thereby safeguarding the integrity of the vacuum!”
Nuhane fights down the terror of open sky intrinsic to his branch of humanity. Although a spin foam hack keeps the atmosphere of this Titan-analog at bay, the shield is invisible. Stacked worlds of orange-glowing cloud present nauseating vistas. A darkling methane sea surrounds this rocky isle, this remote outpost of the Collection Bureau. Nuhane reminds himself that the oppressive distance to the horizon is not an existential threat. Still, he is of the Fey. He can’t help longing for a nice underground bunker, a womb-cave, or the intimate companionways of a space hab.
The cadets march to the far end of the parade ground. Weird, brazen music issues from pipes attached to robotic air-bladders. It’s all part of some ancient police ritual whose roots have been forgotten. Wisps of proxy tech haunt the margins of the field, proud instances of family and friends. Nuhane finds the scene rather grim. The intended effect is stark majesty, but he wants to get it over with, to join the fight he’s been training for.
He has no people among the spectators, and none to speak of otherwise.
From his childhood on a backward world, from concentration camps to this: lifetimes already, and he’s only a hundred. He knows all too well what humanity is capable of. He can’t fight for people alone, no matter how seemingly just the cause. In the Bureau he’s found the only mission left to him.
Without the fabric of the cosmos, even hatred is impossible.
He wonders suddenly if he’s remembering this moment, rather than living it. The future—if there is such a thing—comes to him like a divine revelation. It is a new past on the other side of “now,” but he is powerless to act on the knowledge. He’s locked inside this young cadet he once thought of as himself. The sensation is terrifying and glorious.
Simultaneously, this passive observer inhabits many other Nuhanes, including a middle-aged Nuhane, a lieutenant radically interfaced with a Bureau patrol cutter.
The debtor’s sign is plain to his augmented eye. The arcing spacetime fissure propagated like a magnetic field line from a gutted metal worldlet and out over the galactic plane. The nearest light-years of its length dissipate like an old contrail, undermining nearby vacuum. It is one of thousands of discernible violations. He sees them as an ominous glowing net tangled through the Milky Way, with stray threads arcing off to other galaxies and clusters. So much work to do. So much debt to collect.
If he tunes up his perception of the universal spin foam, he sees a second, thinner net woven through the first: debts collected, scars on spacetime. It sooths him to gaze upon all that the Bureau has accomplished. To him the scar tissue is a fundamental good, a rare thing in this universe. Never mind how little the tissue has done to shore up the collapsing seawall.
“Fresh enough,” says Lao Wang. “Bureau’s giving it to us.” The old baseline human sounds tired. Nuhane’s mentor and partner has locked down thirty-one violators, collecting over ten million relativistic tons of debt, a Bureau record. Soon he’ll vanish into lockdown himself, to pay off his Noble Debt. Nuhane will miss him. He wonders if this is their last mission together.
A younger Nuhane imposes his first lockdown with a sense of dark wonder. The violator ship, a converted Shinasian junk, dims and reddens inside its pocket of pseudo-acceleration, a pulsating sphere of apparently warped spacetime.
It is Lao Wang’s bust, but he let Nuhane do the honors—a taste of imposition for the green junior officer.
“Please,” one of the debtors weeps. “I don’t deserve this!” The transmission redshifts as it climbs out of the pocket. “I’m a licensed interface pilot! I was forced into this—”
“By a violator called Phlogiston,” Lao Wang supplies. “I know, and I’m afraid it makes no difference.”
The pilot is in the Mayall II globular cluster of Andromeda much sooner than he should be. His mass contributed to the vacuum deterioration in the junk’s wake, however minutely. He is therefore a debtor.
“It’s Phlogiston’s debt!” the pilot argues. That name again. Nuhane wants to ask Lao Wang what’s going on, but he’s distracted by the spectacle of lockdown. He’s seen it before, of course, but this one is different, no matter what the record will say. This one is his.
“Phlogiston’s debt,” Lao Wang says, “and yours, and the junk’s. Anything that violates, sentient or not, guilty or innocent, must be locked down. You’re an interface pilot. You know what’s at stake.”
“But the debt . . . ” he chokes.
“Approximately two million, seven hundred and forty-nine thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five point two two seven light-years.”
“So how long . . . ”
“Ten minutes ship-time,” Lao Wang says. “For your debt, lockdown is equivalent to point nine nine nine nine nine one seven c. Be thankful you won’t suffer the gravities.” He doesn’t need to add that meanwhile the resting universe will age 2.75 million years. This debtor is an interface-pilot, after all. He understands the law he has violated.
The junk continues to redshift, as though accelerating toward redemption. Soon it will be like a dim 3D snapshot printed on reality, beyond time and reproach. For 2.75 million years it will function like a head on London Bridge, a warning to those who would violate sacred law. Nuhane is proud to have finally contributed his first head. His pride waxes as the debtor’s personal clocks slow. The ship will gain millions of relativistic tons before it pays its mass-energy debt to the universe. By the time it heals the rent it tore in spacetime, all that the pilot loves will be gone, or radically transformed.
Nuhane is drunk on the power he wields. Perhaps sensing this, Lao Wang says: “Never forget that we are bound for the same fate.”
How could he forget with Lao Wang constantly reminding him? You sooner than me, old man, he wants to say. Nuhane has accrued seventy million light-years of so-called Noble Debt or VLOD (Violation in the Line of Duty), certainly a small fraction of Lao Wang’s. Nuhane is a young god, free to ignore Einstein when he sees fit, and to punish other
s for doing so. He worked hard to be so elite. Most Bureau officers end up with a local, sub-c jurisdiction, lying in wait for violators rather than hunting them. Their only taste of violation is the occasional use of a Bureau ansible. They are part of the vast, slow, relativistic two-thirds of humanity, trapped by distances that might as well be infinite.
Nuhane was never willing to settle for that. The last thing he wants to hear is Lao Wang urging him to humility.
“We aren’t so different from our prey,” the old man says.
Nuhane wonders if the bastard has developed violation syndrome. It’s new, the idea that too much time beyond c can lead to symptoms of senility. Some researchers go further, claiming that violation decouples consciousness from time.
Master Patrol Officer Nuhane is still high from his last “Noble” violation. He’s already looking forward to the next one. Between ecstasy and the grand future there is no room for doubt. Nuhane is immortal.
Beyond c there is no time and no speed. Bureau officers call the speed of light the “last speed.” Here in violation space, all of Nuhane’s violating selves are united. Beyond time there is exultant joy, infinite peace, and the “eldest” of Nuhane’s violation selves will find it hard to condescend back to the universe. They will leave pieces of themselves here.
The “younger” Nuhanes fear the dissolution of self that must result from perfect bliss. They flee back below c, cherishing what little exultation they’ve allowed themselves. All of the violating Nuhanes, young and old, remain in violation space for precisely the same amount of time—none—regardless of the light years skipped in the sub-c universe.
And so, coincident with their unification, the united Nuhanes split along their seams of self. They become again old and young and middle-aged, returning to the sub-c murk once and for all.