The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  His mouth tilts up at unwritten. “Nevertheless,” he says. “Your species never evolved. You speak a language that is not even dead. It never existed.”

  “Many languages are extinct.”

  “To become extinct, something has to exist first.”

  The woman folds herself into the couch next to him, not close but not far. “It’s an old story,” she says. “What is yours?”

  “Four of Arighan’s guns are still in existence,” Kerang says.

  The woman’s eyes narrow. “I had thought it was three.” Arighan’s Flower is the last, the gunsmith’s final work. The others she knows of are Arighan’s Mercy, which always kills the person shot, and Arighan’s Needle, which removes the target’s memories of the wielder.

  “One more has surfaced,” Kerang says. “The character in the maker’s mark resembles a sword in chains. They are already calling it Arighan’s Chain.”

  “What does it do?” she says, because he will tell her anyway.

  “This one kills the commander of whoever is shot,” Kerang says, “if that’s anyone at all. Admirals, ministers, monks. Schoolteachers. It’s a peculiar sort of loyalty test.”

  Now she knows. “You want me to destroy the Chain.”

  * * *

  Once upon a universe, a duelist named Shiron took up the gun that an empress with empiricist tendencies had given her. “I don’t understand how a gun that doesn’t work could possibly be perilous,” the empress said. She nodded at a sweating man bound in monofilament so that he would dismember himself if he tried to flee. “This man will be executed anyway, his name struck from the roster of honored ancestors. See if the gun works on him.”

  Shiron fired the gun … and woke in a city she didn’t recognize, whose inhabitants spoke a dialect she had never heard before, whose technology she mostly recognized from historical dramas. The calendar they used, at least, was familiar. It told her that she was 857 years too early. No amount of research changed the figure.

  Later, Shiron deduced that the man she had executed traced his ancestry back 857 years, to a particular individual. Most likely that ancestor had performed some extraordinary deed to join the aristocracy, and had, by the reckoning of Shiron’s people, founded his own line.

  Unfortunately, Shiron didn’t figure this out before she accidentally deleted the human species.

  * * *

  “Yes,” Kerang says. “I have been charged with preventing further assassinations. Arighan’s Chain is not a threat I can afford to ignore.”

  “Why didn’t you come earlier, then?” Shiron says. “After all, the Chain might have lain dormant, but the others—”

  “I’ve seen the Mercy and the Needle,” he says, by which he means he’s copied data from those who have. “They’re beautiful.” He isn’t referring to beauty in the way of shadows fitting together into a woman’s profile, or beauty in the way of sun-colored liquor at the right temperature in a faceted glass. He means the beauty of logical strata, of the crescendo of axiom-axiom-corollary-proof, of quod erat demonstrandum.

  “Any gun or shard of glass could do the same as the Mercy,” Shiron says, understanding him. “And drugs and dreamscalpels will do the Needle’s work, given time and expertise. But surely you could say the same of the Chain.”

  She stands again and takes the painting of the mountain down and rolls it tightly. “I was born on that mountain,” she says. “Something like it is still there, on a birthworld very like the one I knew. But I don’t think anyone paints in this style. Perhaps some art historian would recognize its distant cousin. I am no artist, but I painted it myself, because no one else remembers the things I remember. And now you would have it start again.”

  “How many bullets have you used?” Kerang asks.

  It is not that the Flower requires special bullets—it adapts even to emptiness—it is that the number matters.

  Shiron laughs, low, almost husky. She knows better than to trust Kerang, but she needs him to trust her. She pulls out the Flower and rests it in both palms so he can look at it.

  Three petals fallen, a fourth about to follow. That’s not the number, but he doesn’t realize it. “You’ve guarded it so long,” he says, inspecting the maker’s mark without touching the gun.

  “I will guard it until I am nothing but ice,” Shiron says. “You may think that the Chain is a threat, but if I remove it, there’s no guarantee that you will still exist—”

  “It’s not the Chain I want destroyed,” Kerang says gently. “It’s Arighan. Do you think I would have come to you for anything less?”

  Shiron says into the awkward quiet, after a while, “So you tracked down descendants of Arighan’s line.” His silence is assent. “There must be many.”

  Arighan’s Flower destroys the target’s entire ancestral line, altering the past but leaving its wielder untouched. In the empire Shiron once served, the histories spoke of Arighan as an honored guest. Shiron discovered long ago that Arighan was no guest, but a prisoner forced to forge weapons for her captors. How Arighan was able to create weapons of such novel destructiveness, no one knows. The Flower was Arighan’s clever revenge against a people whose state religion involved ancestor worship.

  If descendants of Arighan’s line exist here, then Arighan herself can be undone, and all her guns unmade. Shiron will no longer have to be an exile in this timeline, although it is true that she cannot return to the one that birthed her, either.

  Shiron snaps the painting taut. The mountain disintegrates, but she lost it lifetimes ago. Silent lightning crackles through the air, unknots Zheu Kerang from his human-shaped shell, tessellates dead-end patterns across the equations that make him who he is. The painting had other uses, as do the other things in this room—she believes in versatility—but this is good enough.

  Kerang’s body slumps on the couch. Shiron leaves it there.

  For the first time in a long time, she is leaving Blackwheel Station. What she does not carry she can buy on the way. And Blackwheel is loyal because they know, and they know not to offend her; Blackwheel will keep her suite clean and undisturbed, and deliver water, near-freezing in an elegant glass, night after night, waiting.

  Kerang was a pawn by his own admission. If he knew what he knew, and lived long enough to convey it to her, then others must know what he knew, or be able to find it out.

  Kerang did not understand her at all. Shiron unmazes herself from the station to seek passage to one of the hubworlds, where she can begin her search. If Shiron had wanted to seek revenge on Arighan, she could have taken it years ago.

  But she will not be like Arighan. She will not destroy an entire timeline of people, no matter how alien they are to her.

  Shiron had hoped that matters wouldn’t come to this. She acknowledges her own naïveté. There is no help for it now. She will have to find and murder each child of Arighan’s line. In this way she can protect Arighan herself, protect the accumulated sum of history, in case someone outwits her after all this time and manages to take the Flower from her.

  * * *

  In a universe where determinism runs backwards—where, no matter what you do, everything ends in the same inevitable Ω—choices still matter, especially if you are the last guardian of an incomparably lethal gun.

  Although it has occurred to Shiron that she could have accepted Kerang’s offer, and that she could have sacrificed this timeline in exchange for the one in which neither Arighan nor the guns ever existed, she declines to do so. For there will come a heat-death, and she is beginning to wonder: if a constructed sentience—a computer—can have a soul, what of the universe itself, the greatest computer of all?

  In this universe, they reckon her old. Shiron is older than even that. In millions of timelines, she has lived to the pallid end of life. In each of those endings, Arighan’s Flower is there, as integral as an edge is to a blade. While it is true that science never proves anything absolutely, that an inconceivably large but finite number of experiments always pales besides
infinity, Shiron feels that millions of timelines suffice as proof.

  Without Arighan’s Flower, the universe cannot renew itself and start a new story. Perhaps that is all the reason the universe needs. And Shiron will be there when the heat-death arrives, as many times as necessary.

  * * *

  So Shiron sets off. It is not the first time she has killed, and it is unlikely to be the last. But she is not, after all this time, incapable of grieving.

  Martian Heart

  JOHN BARNES

  John Barnes lives in the northern suburbs of Denver, Colorado. He has recently finished his first new novel in five years and is writing regularly again. Among his better-known books from his previous writing career are Directive 51, Tales of the Madman Underground, The Sky So Big and Black, Mother of Storms, A Million Open Doors, Orbital Resonance, and One for the Morning Glory. He is the coauthor with Buzz Aldrin of Encounter with Tiber and The Return. His current day job is in data science; in the past he has gotten paid for marketing research analysis, theater design, college teaching, sales, editing, and writing a wide variety of nonfiction, including fifty-four articles in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Theater and Performance. His advice to young writers is to avoid taking advice from older writers.

  Here he weaves an affecting story of a love that’s both young—and doomed.

  Okay, botterogator, I agreed to this. Now you’re supposed to guide me to tell my story to inspire a new generation of Martians. It is so weird that there is a new generation of Martians. So hit me with the questions, or whatever it is you do.

  Do I want to be consistent with previous public statements?

  Well, every time they ask me where I got all the money and got to be such a big turd in the toilet that is Mars, I always say Samantha was my inspiration. So let’s check that box for tentatively consistent.

  Thinking about Sam always gives me weird thoughts. And here are two: one, before her, I would not have known what either tentatively or consistent even meant. Two, in these pictures, Samantha looks younger than my granddaughter is now.

  So weird. She was.

  We were in bed in our place under an old underpass in LA when the sweeps busted in, grabbed us up, and dragged us to the processing station. No good lying about whether we had family—they had our retinas and knew we were strays. Since I was seventeen and Sam was fifteen, they couldn’t make any of our family pay for re-edj.

  So they gave us fifteen minutes on the bench there to decide between twenty years in the forces, ten years in the glowies, or going out to Mars on this opposition and coming back on the third one after, in six and a half years.

  They didn’t tell you, and it wasn’t well-known, that even people without the genetic defect suffered too much cardiac atrophy in that time to safely come back to Earth. The people that went to Mars didn’t have family or friends to write back to, and the settlement program was so new it didn’t seem strange that nobody knew a returned Martian.

  “Crap,” I said.

  “Well, at least it’s a future.” Sam worried about the future a lot more than me. “If we enlist, there’s no guarantee we’ll be assigned together, unless we’re married, and they don’t let you get married till you’ve been in for three. We’d have to write each other letters—”

  “Sam,” I said, “I can’t write to you or read your letters if you send me any. You know that.”

  “They’d make you learn.”

  I tried not to shudder visibly; she’d get mad if I let her see that I didn’t really want to learn. “Also, that thing you always say about out of sight, that’d happen. I’d have another girlfriend in like, not long. I just would. I know we’re all true love and everything but I would.”

  “The spirit is willing but the flesh is more willing.” She always made those little jokes that only she got. “Okay, then, no forces for us.”

  “Screw glowies,” I said. Back in those days right after the baby nukes had landed all over the place, the Decon Admin needed people to operate shovels, hoes, and detectors. I quoted this one hook from our favorite music. “Sterile or dead or kids with three heads.”

  “And we can get married going to Mars,” Sam said, “and then they can’t separate us. True love forever, baby.” Sam always had all the ideas.

  So, botterogator, check that box for putting a priority on family/love. I guess since that new box popped up as soon as I said, Sam always had all the ideas, that means you want more about that? Yeah, now it’s bright and bouncing. Okay, more about how she had all the ideas.

  Really all the ideas I ever had were about eating, getting high, and scoring ass. Hunh. Red light. Guess that wasn’t what you wanted for the new generation of Martians.

  Sam was different. Everybody I knew was thinking about the next party or at most the next week or the next boy or girl, but Sam thought about everything. I know it’s a stupid example, but once back in LA, she came into our squat and found me fucking with the fusion box, just to mess with it. “That supplies all our power for music, light, heat, net, and everything, and you can’t fix it if you break it, and it’s not broke, so, Cap, what the fuck are you doing?”

  See, I didn’t even have ideas that good.

  So a year later, there on the bench, our getting married was her having another idea and me going along with it, which was always how things worked, when they worked. Ten minutes later we registered as married.

  Orientation for Mars was ten days. The first day they gave us shots, bleached our tats into white blotches on our skin, and shaved our heads. They stuck us in ugly dumb coveralls and didn’t let us have real clothes that said anything, which they said was so we wouldn’t know who’d been what on Earth. I think it was more so we all looked like transportees.

  The second day, and every day after, they tried to pound some knowledge into us. It was almost interesting. Sam was in with the people that could read, and she seemed to know more than I did afterward. Maybe there was something to that reading stuff, or it might also have been that freaky, powerful memory of hers.

  Once we were erased and oriented, they loaded Sam and me into a two-person cube on a dumpround to Mars. Minutes after the booster released us and we were ballistic, an older guy, some asshole, tried to come into our cube and tell us this was going to be his space all to himself, and I punched him hard enough to take him out; I don’t think he had his balance for centrifigrav yet.

  Two of his buds jumped in. I got into it with them too—I was hot, they were pissing me off, I wasn’t figuring odds. Then some guys from the cubes around me came in with me, and together we beat the other side’s ass bloody.

  In the middle of the victory whooping, Sam shouted for quiet. She announced, “Everyone stays in their same quarters. Everyone draws their own rations. Everyone takes your turn, and just your turn, at the info screens. And nobody doesn’t pay for protection or nothing.”

  One of the assholes, harmless now because I had at least ten good guys at my back, sneered, “Hey, little bitch. You running for Transportee Council?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  She won, too.

  The Transportee Council stayed in charge for the whole trip. People ate and slept in peace, and no crazy-asses broke into the server array, which is what caused most lost dumprounds. They told us in orientation, but a lot of transportees didn’t listen, or didn’t understand, or just didn’t believe that a dumpround didn’t have any fuel to go back to Earth; a dumpround flew like a cannonball, with just a few little jets to guide it in and out of the aerobrakes and steer it to the parachute field.

  The same people who thought there was a steering wheel in the server array compartment, or maybe a reverse gear or just a big button that said TAKE US BACK TO EARTH, didn’t know that the server array also ran the air-making machinery and the food dispensary and everything that kept people alive.

  I’m sure we had as many idiots as any other dumpround, but we made it just fine; that was all Sam, who ran the TC and kept the TC running the dumpround. T
he eighty-eight people on International Mars Transport 2082/4/288 (which is what they called our dumpround; it was the 288th one fired off that April) all walked out of the dumpround on Mars carrying our complete, unlooted kits, and the militia that always stood by in case a dumpround landing involved hostages, arrests, or serious injuries didn’t have a thing to do about us.

  The five months in the dumpround were when I learned to read, and that has helped me so much—oh, hey, another box bumping up and down! Okay, botterogator, literacy as a positive value coming right up, all hot and ready for the new generation of Martians to suck inspiration from.

  Hey, if you don’t like irony, don’t flash red lights at me, just edit it out. Yeah, authorize editing.

  Anyway, with my info screen time, Sam made me do an hour of reading lessons for every two hours of games. Plus she coached me a lot. After a while the reading was more interesting than the games, and she was doing TC business so much of the time, and I didn’t really have any other friends, so I just sat and worked on the reading. By the time we landed, I’d read four actual books, not just kid books I mean.

  We came down on the parachute field at Olympic City, an overdignified name for what, in those long-ago days, was just two office buildings, a general store, and a nine-room hotel connected by pressurized tubes. The tiny pressurized facility was surrounded by a few thousand coffinsquats hooked into its pay air and power, and many thousand more running on their own fusion boxes. Olympica, to the south, was just a line of bluffs under a slope reaching way up into the sky.

  It was the beginning of northern summer prospecting season. Sam towed me from lender to lender, coaching me on looking like a good bet to someone that would trust us with a share-deal on a prospecting gig. At the time I just thought rocks were, you know, rocks. No idea that some of them were ores, or that Mars was so poor in so many ores because it was dead tectonically.