The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

* * *

  As they rolled into the city proper it was impossible for Elena to tell where they would find the front line of the battle, or if there was a front line at all. Damage seemed to be distributed randomly. The truck would roll through a sleepy side street that was completely untouched, and twenty yards away the buildings would be cracked open, their contents shaken into the street.

  The drivers seemed to possess some sixth sense for knowing where the injured were waiting. The truck would slow and men and women would emerge from the dark and hobble toward the headlights of the truck, or call for a litter. Some people stood at street corners and waved them down as if flagging a bus. Elena helped the drivers lift the wounded into the back, and sometimes had to force them to leave their belongings.

  “Small boats,” the largest driver said over and over. A Trovenian saying: In a storm, all boats are too small.

  Eventually she found herself crouched next to a burned dragoon who was half-welded to his jet pack. She held his hand, thinking that might give him something to feel besides the pain, but he only moaned and muttered to himself, seemingly oblivious to her presence.

  The truck slammed to a stop, sending everyone sliding and crashing into each other. Through the slats Elena glimpsed a great slab of blue, some huge, organic shape. A leg. A giant’s leg. The U-Man had to be bigger than an apartment building. Gunfire clattered, and a voice like a fog horn shouted something in English.

  The truck lurched into reverse, engine whining, and Elena fell forward onto her hands. Someone in the truck bed cried, “Does he see us? Does he see us?”

  The truck backed to the intersection and turned hard. The occupants shouted as they collapsed into each other yet again. Half a block more the truck braked to a more gradual stop and the drivers hopped out. “Is everyone okay?” they asked.

  The dragoon beside Elena laughed.

  She stood up and looked around. They were in the residential district, only a few blocks from her apartment. She made her way to the gate of the truck and hopped down. She said to the driver, “I’m not going back with you.”

  The woman nodded, not needing or wanting an explanation.

  Elena walked slowly between the hulking buildings. The pain in her hand, her face, all seemed to be returning.

  She emerged into a large open space. She realized she’d been mistaken about where the truck had stopped—this park was nowhere she recognized. The ground in front of her had been turned to glass.

  The sky to the east glowed. For a moment she thought it was another super-powered UM. But no, only the dawn. Below the dark bulk of Mount Kriegstahl stood the familiar silhouette of the Slaybot Prime bolted to its gantry. The air battle had moved there, above the factories and docks. Or maybe no battle at all. There seemed to be only a few flyers in the air now. The planes and TDs had disappeared. Perhaps the only ones left were U-Men.

  Power bolts zipped through the air. They were firing at the Prime.

  A great metal arm dropped away from its shoulder socket and dangled by thick cables. Another flash of energy severed them. The arm fell away in seeming slow motion, and the sound of the impact reached her a moment later. The übermenschen were carving the damn thing up.

  She almost laughed. The Slaybot Prime was as mobile and dangerous as the Statue of Liberty. Were they actually afraid of the thing? Was that why an army of them had shown up for an ordinary hostage rescue?

  My God, she thought, the morons had actually believed Lord Grimm’s boasting.

  She walked west, and the rising sun turned the glazed surface in front of her into a mirror. She knew now that she wasn’t lost. The scorched buildings surrounding the open space were too familiar. But she kept walking. After a while she noticed that the ground was strangely warm beneath her feet. Hot even.

  She looked back the way she’d come, then decided the distance was shorter ahead. She was too tired to run outright but managed a shuffling trot. Reckoning by rough triangulation from the nearest buildings she decided she was passing over Mr. Bojars’s favorite spot, the corner of Glorious Victory Street and Infinite Progress Avenue. Her own apartment building should have loomed directly in front of her.

  After all she’d seen tonight she couldn’t doubt that there were beings with the power to melt a city block to slag. But she didn’t know what strange ability, or even stranger whim, allowed them to casually trowel it into a quartz skating rink.

  She heard another boom behind her. The Slaybot Prime was headless now. The southern gantry peeled away, and then the body itself began to lean. Elena had been inside the thing; the chest assembly alone was as big as a cathedral.

  The Slaybot Prime slowly bowed, deeper, deeper, until it tumbled off the pillars of its legs. Dust leaped into the sky where it fell. The tremor moved under Elena, sending cracks snaking across the glass.

  The collapse of the Prime seemed to signal the end of the fighting. The sounds of the energy blasts ceased. Figures flew in from all points of the city and coalesced above the industrial sector. In less than a minute there were dozens and dozens of them, small and dark as blackcap geese. Then she realized that the flock of übermenschen was flying toward her.

  Elena glanced to her left, then right. She was as exposed as a pea on a plate. The glass plain ended fifty or sixty meters away at a line of rubble. She turned and ran.

  She listened to the hiss of breath in her throat and the smack of her heavy boots against the crystalline surface. She was surprised at every moment that she did not crash through.

  Elongated shadows shuddered onto the mirrored ground ahead of her. She ran faster, arms swinging. The glass abruptly ended in a jagged lip. She leaped, landed on broken ground, and stumbled onto hands and knees. Finally she looked up.

  Racing toward her with the sun behind them, the U-Men were nothing but silhouettes—shapes that suggested capes and helmets; swords, hammers, and staffs; bows and shields. Even the energy beings, clothed in shimmering auras, seemed strangely desaturated by the morning light.

  Without looking away from the sky she found a chunk of masonry on the ground in front of her. Then she stood and climbed onto a tilting slab of concrete.

  When the mass of U-Men was directly above her she heaved with all her might.

  Useless. At its peak the gray chunk fell laughably short of the nearest figure. It clattered to the ground somewhere out of sight.

  Elena screamed, tensed for—longing for—a searing blast of light, a thunderbolt. Nothing came. The U-Men vanished over the roof of the next apartment building, heading out to sea.

  * * *

  Weeks after the invasion, the factory remained closed. Workers began to congregate there anyway. Some mornings they pushed around brooms or cleared debris, but mostly they played cards, exchanged stories of the invasion, and speculated on rumors. Lord Grimm had not been seen since the attack. Everyone agreed that the Savior of Trovenia had been dead too many times to doubt his eventual resurrection.

  When Elena finally returned, eighteen days after the invasion, she found Verner and Guntis playing chess beside the left boot of the Slaybot Prime. The other huge components of the robot’s body were scattered across two miles of the industrial sector like the buildings of a new city.

  The men greeted her warmly. Verner, the ancient mechaneer, frankly noted the still-red cuts that cross-hatched the side of her face, but didn’t ask how she’d acquired them. If Trovenians told the story of every scar there’d be no end to the talking.

  Elena asked about Jürgo and both men frowned. Guntis said that the birdman had taken to the air during the fight. As for the other two members of the heavy plate-welding unit, no news.

  “I was sorry to hear about your brother,” Verner said.

  “Yes,” Elena said. “Well.”

  She walked back to the women’s changing rooms, and when she didn’t find what she was looking for, visited the men’s. One cinderblock wall had caved in, but the lockers still stood in orderly rows. She found the locker bearing Jürgo’s name on a
duct tape label. The door was padlocked shut. It took her a half hour to find a cutting rig with oxygen and acetylene cylinders that weren’t empty, but only minutes to wheel the rig to the changing rooms and burn off the lock.

  She pulled open the door. Jürgo’s old-fashioned, rectangle-eyed welding helmet hung from a hook, staring at her. She thought of Grandmother Zita. What possesses a person to put a bucket on their head?

  The inside of the locker door was decorated with a column of faded photographs. In one of them a young Jürgo, naked from the waist up, stared into the camera with a concerned squint. His new wings were unfurled behind him. Elena’s mother and father, dressed in their red Gene Corps jackets, stood on either side of him. Elena unpeeled the yellowed tape and put the picture in her breast pocket, then unhooked the helmet and closed the door.

  She walked back to the old men, pulling the cart behind her. “Are we working today or what?” she asked.

  Guntis looked up from the chess board with amusement in his huge wet eyes. “So you are the boss now, eh, Elena?”

  Verner, however, said nothing. He seemed to recognize that she was not quite the person she had been. Damaged components had been stripped away, replaced by cruder, yet sturdier approximations. He was old enough to have seen the process repeated many times.

  Elena reached into the pockets of her coat and pulled on her leather work gloves. Then she wheeled the cart over to the toe of the boot and straightened the hoses with a flick of her arm.

  “Tell us your orders, Your Highness,” Guntis said.

  “First we tear apart the weapons,” she said. She thumbed the blast trigger and blue flame roared from the nozzle of the cutting torch. “Then we build better ones.”

  She slid the helmet onto her head, flipped down the mask, and bent to work.

  Utriusque Cosmi

  ROBERT CHARLES WILSON

  Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, to Analog, but little more was heard from him until the late eighties, when he began to publish a string of ingenious and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top ranks of the writers who came to prominence in the last two decades of the twentieth century. His first novel, A Hidden Place, appeared in 1986. He won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Chronoliths, the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel Mysterium, and the Aurora Award for his story “The Perseids.” In 2006, he won the Hugo Award for his acclaimed novel Spin. His other books include the novels Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, The Harvest, A Bridge of Years, Darwinia, Blind Lake, Bios, Axis, Julian, Axis, Vortex, and a collection of his short work, The Perseids and Other Stories.

  Here he tells the compelling story of a young woman faced with the most significant choice she will ever make in her life—after which, nothing will ever be the same.

  Diving back into the universe (now that the universe is a finished object, boxed and ribboned from bang to bounce), Carlotta calculates ever-finer loci on the frozen ordinates of spacetime until at last she reaches a trailer park outside the town of Commanche Drop, Arizona. Bodiless, no more than a breath of imprecision in the Feynman geography of certain virtual particles, thus powerless to affect the material world, she passes unimpeded through a sheet-aluminum wall and hovers over a mattress on which a young woman sleeps uneasily.

  The young woman is her own ancient self, the primordial Carlotta Boudaine, dewed with sweat in the hot night air, her legs caught up in a spindled cotton sheet. The bedroom’s small window is cranked open, and in the breezeless distance a coyote wails.

  Well, look at me, Carlotta marvels: skinny girl in panties and a halter, sixteen years old—no older than a gnat’s breath—taking shallow little sleep-breaths in the moonlit dark. Poor child can’t even see her own ghost. Ah, but she will, Carlotta thinks—she must.

  The familiar words echo in her mind as she inspects her dreaming body, buried in its tomb of years, eons, kalpas. When it’s time to leave, leave. Don’t be afraid. Don’t wait. Don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast.

  Her ancient beloved poem. Her perennial mantra. The words, in fact, that saved her life.

  She needs to share those words with herself, to make the circle complete. Everything she knows about the nature of the physical universe suggests that the task is impossible. Maybe so … but it won’t be for lack of trying.

  Patiently, slowly, soundlessly, Carlotta begins to speak.

  * * *

  Here’s the story of the Fleet, girl, and how I got raptured up into it. It’s all about the future—a bigger one than you believe in—so brace yourself.

  It has a thousand names and more, but we’ll just call it the Fleet. When I first encountered it, the Fleet was scattered from the core of the galaxy all through its spiraled tentacles of suns, and it had been there for millions of years, going about its business, though nobody on this planet knew anything about it. I guess every now and then a Fleet ship must have fallen to Earth, but it would have been indistinguishable from any common meteorite by the time it passed through the atmosphere: a chunk of carbonaceous chondrite smaller than a human fist, from which all evidence of ordered matter had been erased by fire—and such losses, which happened everywhere and often, made no discernable difference to the Fleet as a whole. All Fleet data (that is to say, all mind) was shared, distributed, fractal. Vessels were born and vessels were destroyed; but the Fleet persisted down countless eons, confident of its own immortality.

  Oh, I know you don’t understand the big words, child! It’s not important for you to hear them—not these words—it’s only important for me to say them. Why? Because a few billion years ago tomorrow, I carried your ignorance out of this very trailer, carried it down to the Interstate and hitched west with nothing in my backpack but a bottle of water, a half-dozen Tootsie Rolls, and a wad of twenty-dollar bills stolen out of Dan-O’s old ditty bag. That night (tomorrow night: mark it) I slept under an overpass all by myself, woke up cold and hungry long before dawn, and looked up past a concrete arch crusted with bird shit into a sky so thick with falling stars it made me think of a dark skin bee-stung with fire. Some of the Fleet vectored too close to the atmosphere that night, no doubt, but I didn’t understand that (any more than you do, girl)—I just thought it was a big flock of shooting stars, pretty but meaningless. And, after a while, I slept some more. And come sunrise, I waited for the morning traffic so I could catch another ride … but the only cars that came by were all weaving or speeding, as if the whole world was driving home from a drunken party.

  “They won’t stop,” a voice behind me said. “Those folks already made their decisions, Carlotta. Whether they want to live or die, I mean. Same decision you have to make.”

  I whirled around, sick-startled, and that was when I first laid eyes on dear Erasmus.

  Let me tell you right off that Erasmus wasn’t a human being. Erasmus just then was a knot of shiny metal angles about the size of a microwave oven, hovering in mid-air, with a pair of eyes like the polished tourmaline they sell at those roadside souvenir shops. He didn’t have to look that way—it was some old avatar he used because he figured that it would impress me. But I didn’t know that then. I was only surprised, if that’s not too mild a word, and too shocked to be truly frightened.

  “The world won’t last much longer,” Erasmus said in a low and mournful voice. “You can stay here, or you can come with me. But choose quick, Carlotta, because the mantle’s come unstable and the continents are starting to slip.”

  I half believed that I was still asleep and dreaming. I didn’t know what that meant, about the mantle, though I guessed he was talking about the end of the world. Some quality of his voice (which reminded me of that actor Morgan Freeman) made me trust him despite how weird and impossible the whole conversation was. Plus, I had a confirming sense that something was going bad somewhere, partly because of the scant traffic (a Toyota zoomed past, clocking speeds it had never been built for, the driver a hunched blur behind the wheel), partly because of the ugly g
reen cloud that just then billowed up over a row of rat-toothed mountains on the horizon. Also the sudden hot breeze. And the smell of distant burning. And the sound of what might have been thunder, or something worse.

  “Go with you where?”

  “To the stars, Carlotta! But you’ll have to leave your body behind.”

  I didn’t like the part about leaving my body behind. But what choice did I have, except the one he’d offered me? Stay or go. Simple as that.

  It was a ride—just not the kind I’d been expecting.

  There was a tremor in the earth, like the devil knocking at the soles of my shoes. “Okay,” I said, “whatever,” as white dust bloomed up from the desert and was taken by the frantic wind.

  Don’t be afraid. Don’t wait. Don’t get caught. Just go. Go fast.

  Without those words in my head, I swear, girl, I would have died that day. Billions did.

  * * *

  She slows down the passage of time so she can fit this odd but somehow necessary monologue into the space between one or two of the younger Carlotta’s breaths. Of course, she has no real voice in which to speak. The past is static, imperturbable in its endless sleep; molecules of air on their fixed trajectories can’t be manipulated from the shadowy place where she now exists. Wake up with the dawn, girl, she says, steal the money you’ll never spend—it doesn’t matter; the important thing is to leave. It’s time.

  When it’s time to leave, leave. Of all the memories she carried out of her earthly life, this is the most vivid: waking to discover a ghostly presence in her darkened room, a white-robed woman giving her the advice she needs at the moment she needs it. Suddenly Carlotta wants to scream the words: When it’s time to leave—

  But she can’t vibrate even a single mote of the ancient air, and the younger Carlotta sleeps on.

  Next to the bed is a thrift-shop night table scarred with cigarette burns. On the table is a child’s night-light, faded cut-outs of SpongeBob SquarePants pasted on the paper shade. Next to that, hidden under a splayed copy of People magazine, is the bottle of barbiturates Carlotta stole from Dan-O’s ditty-bag this afternoon, the same khaki bag in which (she couldn’t help but notice) Dan-O keeps his cash, a change of clothes, a fake driver’s license, and a blue steel automatic pistol.