The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (132 page)

“I don’t change. You know that. I see it as a virtue. Some things are solid, some things endure. Not everything changes with the seasons. But fear, you said. That’s clever. Do you remember, that last time I saw you, back in the Manifold House. Do you remember what I said?”

“Nejben remembers you asking, where are they migrating to? And what are they migrating from?”

“In all your seminars and tutorials and conferences, in all those questions about the shape of the universe – oh, we have our intelligences too, less broad than the Anpreen’s, but subtler, we think – did you ever think to ask that question: why have you come here?” Cjatay’s chubby, still childish face was an accusation. “You are fucking her, I presume?”

In a breath, Fejannen had slipped from his seat into the Third Honorable Offense Stance. A hand on his shoulder; the tea-shop owner. No honor in it, not against a Lonely. Fejannen returned to his seat, sick with shuddering rage.

“Tell him,” Cjatay said.

“It’s very simple,” Seriantep said. “We are refugees. The Anpreen Commonweal is the surviving remnant of the effective annihilation of our sub-species of Panhumanity. Our eight hundred habitats are such a minuscule per centage of our original race that, to all statistical purposes, we are extinct. Our habitats once englobed an entire sun. We’re all that’s left.”

“How? Who?”

“Not so much
who
, as
when
,” Cjatay said gently. He flexed cold-blued fingers and pulled on his gloves.

“They’re coming?”

“We fear so,” Seriantep said. “We don’t know. We were careful to leave no traces, to cover our tracks, so to speak, and we believe we have centuries of a headstart on them. We are only here to refuel our habitats, then we’ll go, hide ourselves in some great globular cluster.”

“But why,
why
would anyone do this? We’re all the same species, that’s what you told us. The Clade, Panhumanity.”

“Brothers disagree,” Cjatay said. “Families fall out, families feud within themselves. No animosity like it.”

“Is this true? How can this be true? Who knows about this?” Serejen strove with Fejannen for control and understanding. One of the first lessons the Agisters of the Manifold House had taught was the etiquette of transition between conflicting Aspects. A war in the head, a conflict of selves. He could understand sibling strife on a cosmic scale. But a whole species?

“The governments,” Cjatay said. To the tea-man, “Open the shutter again. You be all right with us. I promise.” To Serejen, “Politicians, some senior academics, and policy makers. And us. Not you. But we all agree, we don’t want to scare anyone. So we question the Anpreen Prebendaries on our world, and question their presence in our system, and maybe sometimes it bubbles into xenophobic violence, but that’s fine, that’s the price, that’s nothing compared to what would happen if we realized that our guests might be drawing the enemies that destroyed them to our homes. Come on. We’ll go now.”

The tea-man lifted the shutter. Outside, the protestors stood politely aside as Cjatay led the refugees out onto the street. There was not a murmur as Seriantep, in her ridiculous, life-threatening house-clothes, stepped across the cobbles. The great Winter Clock on the tower of Alajnedeng stood at twenty past five. The morning shift would soon be starting, the hot-shops firing their ovens and fry-pots.

A murmur in the crowd as Serejen took Seriantep’s hand.

“Is it true?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

He looked up at the sky that would hold stars for another three endless months. The aurora coiled and spasmed over huddling Jann. Those stars were like crystal spearpoints. The universe was vast and cold and inimical to humanity, the greatest of Great Winters. He had never deluded himself it would be otherwise. Power had been restored, yellow street light glinted from the helmets of riot control officers and the carapaces of counterinsurgency drones. Serejen squeezed Seriantep’s hand.

“What you asked.”

“When?”

“Then. Yes. I will. Yes.”

TORBEN, MELTING

The Anpreen shatter-ship blazed star-bright as it turned its face to the sun. A splinter of smart-ice, it was as intricate as a snowflake, stronger than any construct of Taynish engineering. Torben hung in free-fall in the observation dome at the centre of the cross of solar vanes. The Anpreen, being undifferentiated from the motes seeded through the hull, had no need for such architectural fancies. Their senses were open to space; the fractal shell of the ship was one great retina. They had grown the blister – pure and perfectly transparent construction-ice – for the comfort and delight of their human guests.

The sole occupant of the dome, Torben was also the sole passenger on this whole alien, paradoxical ship. Another would have been good. Another could have shared the daily, almost hourly shocks of strange and new and wonder. His other Aspects had felt with Torben the breath-catch of awe, and even greater privilege, when he had looked from the orbital car of the space elevator – the Anpreen’s gift to the peoples of Tay – and seen the shatter-ship turn out of occultation in a blaze of silver light as it came in to dock. They had felt his glow of intellectual vindication as he first swam clumsily into the star-dome and discovered, with a shock, that the orbital transfer station was no more than a cluster of navigation lights almost lost in the star fields beyond. No sense of motion. His body had experienced no hint of acceleration. He had been correct. The Anpreen could adjust the topology of space-time. But there was no one but his several selves to tell it to. The Anpreen crew – Torben was not sure whether it was one or many, or if that distinction had any meaning – was remote and alien. On occasion, as he swam down the live-wood panelled corridors, monoflipper and web-mittens pushing thick, humid air, he had glimpsed a swirl of silver motes twisting and knotting like a captive waterspout. Always they had dispersed in his presence. But the ice beyond those wooden walls, pressing in around him, felt alive, crawling, aware.

Seriantep had gone ahead months before him.

“There’s work I have to do.”

There had been a party; there was always a party at the Anpreen Mission among the ever-green slopes of generous, volcanic Sulanj. Fellow academics, press and PR from Ctarisphay, politicians, family members, and the Anpreen Prebendaries, eerie in their uniform loveliness.

“You can do the research work on
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
, that’s the idea,” Seriantep had said. Beyond the paper lanterns hung in the trees and the glow of the carbon-sink lagoon, the lights of space-elevator cars rose up until they merged with the stars. She would ride that narrow way to orbit within days. Serejen wondered how he would next recognise her.

“You have to go.” Puzhay stood in the balcony of the Tea Lane Ladyhearth, recently opened to allow spring warmth into rooms that had sweated and stifled and stunk all winter long. She looked out at the shooting, uncoiling fresh green of the trees along Uskuben Avenue.
Nothing there you have not seen before
, Nejben thought.
Unless it is something that is the absence of me
.

“It’s not forever,” Nejben said. “I’ll be back in a year, maybe two years.”
But not here
, he thought. He would not say it, but Puzhay knew it. As a returnee, the world’s conservatoriums would be his. Bright cities, sun-warmed campuses far from the terrible cold on this polar continent, the winter that had driven them together.

All the goodbyes, eightfold goodbyes for each of his Aspects. And then he took sail for the ancient hospice of Bleyn, for sail was the only right way to come to those reefs of ceramic chapels that had clung to the Yesger atoll for 3,000 hurricane seasons.

“I need . . . another,” he whispered in the salt-breezy, chiming cloisters to Shaper Rejmen. “The curiosity of Serejen is too naive, the suspicion of Fejannen is too jagged, and the social niceties of Kekjay are too too eager to be liked.”

“We can work this for you,” the Shaper said. The next morning, he went down into the sweet, salt waters of the Othering Pots and let the programmed palps swarm over him, as he did for twenty mornings after. In the thunder-heavy gloaming of a late spring night storm, he awoke to find he was Torben. Clever, inquisitive, wary, socially adept and conversationally witty Torben. Extreme need and exceptional circumstances permitted the creation of Nineths, but only, always, temporarily. Tradition as strong as an incest taboo demanded that the number of Aspects reflect the eight phases of Tay’s manic seasons.

The Anpreen shatter-ship spun on its vertical axis and Torben Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben looked on in wonder. Down, up, forward: his orientation shifted with every breath of air in the observation dome. An eye, a monstrous eye. Superstition chilled him, childhood stories of the Dejved whose sole eye was the eye of the storm and whose body was the storm entire. Then he unfolded the metaphor. An anti-eye. Tejaphay was a shield of heartbreaking blue, streaked and whorled with perpetual storms. The Anpreen space habitat
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
, hard-docked these two years past to the anchor end of the space elevator, was a blind white pupil, an anti-pupil, an unseeing opacity. The shatter-ship was approaching from Tejaphay’s axial plane, the mechanisms of the orbital pumping station were visible beyond the habitat’s close horizon. The space elevator was a cobweb next to the habitat’s 300-kilometre bulk, less even than a thread compared to enormous Tejaphay, but as the whole assemblage turned into daylight, it woke sparkling, glittering as sun reflected from its billions of construction-ice scales. A fresh metaphor came to Torben: the sperm of the divine.
You’re swimming the wrong way!
he laughed to himself, delighted at this infant Aspect’s unsuspected tendency to express in metaphor what Serejen would have spoken in math, Kekjay in flattery, and Fejannen not at all.
No, it’s our whole system it’s fertilizing
, he thought.

The Anpreen ship drew closer, manipulating space-time on the centimetre scale. Surface details resolved from the ice glare. The hull of
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
was a chaotic mosaic of sensors, docks, manufacturing hubs, and still less comprehensible technology, all constructed from smart-ice. A white city. A fight of shatter-ships detached from docking arms like a furry of early snow. Were some of those icy mesas defensive systems; did some of those ice canyons, as precisely cut as a skater’s figures, conceal inconceivable weapons? Had the Anpreen ever paused to consider that to all cultures of Tay, white was the colour of distrust, the white of snow in the long season of dark?

Days in free-gee had desensitised Torben sufficiently so that he was aware of the subtle pull of nanogravity in his belly. Against the sudden excitement and the accompanying vague fear of the unknown, he tried to calculate the gravity of
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
, changing every hour as it siphoned up water from Tejaphay. While he was still computing the figures, the shatter-ship performed another orientation flip and came in to dock at one of the radial elevator heads, soft as a kiss to a loved face.

On tenth days, they went to the Falls, Korpa and Belej, Sajhay and Hannaj, Yetger and Torben. When he stepped out of the elevator that had taken him down through thirty kilometres of solid ice, Torben had imagined something like the faculty of Jann; wooden-screen cloisters and courts roofed with ancient painted ceilings, thronged with bright, smart, talkative students boiling with ideas and vision. He found Korpa and Belej, Sajhay, Hannaj, and Yetger all together in a huge, windy construct of cells and tunnels and abrupt balconies and netted-in ledges, like a giant wasps’ nest suspended from the curved ceiling of the interior hollow.

“Continuum topology is a tad specialized, I’ll admit that,” Belej said. She was a sting-thin quantum-foam specialist from Yeldes in the southern archipelago of Ninnt, gone even thinner and bonier in the attenuated gravity of
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
. “If it’s action you’re looking for, you should get over to
Twenty-Eighth
. They’re sociologists.”

Sajhay had taught him how to fly.

“There are a couple of differences from the transfer ship,” he said as he showed Torben how to pull up the fish-tail mono-tights and how the plumbing vents worked. “It’s lo-gee, but it’s not
no
-gee, so you will eventually come down again. And it’s easy to build up too much delta-vee. The walls are light but they’re strong and you will hurt yourself. And the nets are there for a reason. Whatever you do, don’t go through them. If you end up in that sea, it’ll take you apart.”

That sea haunted Torben’s unsettled, nanogee dreams. The world-sea, the 220-kilometre-diameter sphere of water, its slow, huge nanogee waves forever breaking into globes and tears the size of clouds. The seething, dissolving sea into which the Anpreen dissipated, many lives into one immense, diffuse body which whispered to him through the paper tunnels of the Soujourners’ house. Not so strange, perhaps. Yet he constantly wondered what it would be like to fall in there, to swim against the tiny but non-negligible gravity and plunge slowly, magnificently, into the boil of water-borne motes. In his imagination, there was never any pain, only the blissful, light-filled losing of self. So good to be free from the unquiet parliament of selves.

Eight is natural, eight is holy
, the Bleyn Shaper Yesger had whispered from behind ornate cloister grilles.
Eight arms, eight seasons. Nine must always be unbalanced
.

Conscious of each other’s too-close company, the guest scholars worked apart with their pupils. Seriantep met daily with Torben in a bulbous chapter house extruded from the mother nest. Tall hexagon-combed windows opened on the steeply downcurving horizons of
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
, stippled with the stalactite towers of those Anpreen who refused the lure of the sea. Seriantep flew daily from such a tower down around the curve of the world to alight on Torben’s balcony. She wore the same body he had known so well in the Jann Conservatorium, with the addition of a pair of functional wings in her back. She was a vision, she was a marvel, a spiritual creature from the aeons-lost motherworld of the Clade: an
angel
. She was beauty, but since arriving in
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
, Torben had only had sex with her twice. It was not the merman-angel thing, though that was a consideration to metaphor-and-ludicrous-conscious Torben. He didn’t love her as Serejen had. She noticed, she commented.