The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (42 page)

“All the same, I knew,” opined Mother Jayaraman, “that he would eventually come in useful for something.”

The old man shook his fist at the boy’s father in mock rage. “Khan Junior! What a fool to expose yourself so! Do you want your family to grow up without a father?”

Khan grinned. “I am sorry, father. I have no idea what came over me.”

“Maybe it is a hereditary condition,” muttered the boy’s mother.

“Well,” said the old man, “at least it has turned out for the best. Had you not jumped out when you did, I might not have made it to the access ladder. One might almost imagine that that was your deliberate intention.”

“I apologize if I did badly, father,” said Khan. “I am more of a farmer by trade.”

The old man walked across the square, to a handcart one of the younger boys had led out. In a fit of patriotic Commonwealther fervour, Father Magnusson had donated a hundred kilos of potatoes for a celebration, and they had been stacked in a neat pile ready for baking.

The old man picked one up, raw, and bit into it.

“Never apologize for being a farmer,” said the old man, chewing gamely for a man with few remaining teeth. “After all, a gun will protect your family’s life only once in a lifetime. But a potato,” he said, gesturing with the tuber to illustrate his point, “is useful
every
day.”

THE HERO

Karl Schroeder

Canadian writer Karl Schroeder was born and raised in Brandon, Manitoba. He moved to Toronto in 1986, and has been working and writing there ever since. He is best known for his far-future Virga series, consisting of
Sun of Suns
,
Queen of Candesce
, and, most recently,
Pirate Sun
, but he has also written the novels
Ventus
,
Permanence
, and
Lady of Mazes
, as well as a novel in collaboration with David Nickle,
The Claus Effect
. He’s also the co-author, with Cory Doctorow, of
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction
. His short fiction has been collected in
Engine of Recall
.

In the evocative story that follows, set in his intricate Virga universe, he takes us along on a young man’s desperate quest to deliver a message that could save the worlds – if anybody would listen to it.

“I
S EVERYBODY READY
?” shouted Captain Emmen. At least, Jessie thought that’s what he’d said – it was impossible to hear anything over the spine-grating noise that filled the sky.

Jessie coughed, covering his mouth with his hand to stop the blood from showing. In this weightless air, the droplets would turn and gleam for every body to see, and if they saw it, he would be off the team.

Ten miles away the sound of the capital bug had been a droning buzz. With two miles to go, it had become a maddening – and deafening – howl. Much closer, and the bug’s defense mechanism would be fatal to an unshielded human.

Jessie perched astride his jet just off the side of the salvage ship
Mistelle
.
Mistelle
was a scow, really, but Captain Emmen had ambitions. Lined up next to Jessie were eight other brave or stupid volunteers, each clutching the handlebars of a wingless jet engine. Mounted opposite the saddle (“below” Jessie’s feet) was a ten-foot black-market missile. It was his team’s job to get close enough to the capital bug to aim their missiles at its noise-throats. They were big targets – organic trumpets hundreds of feet long – but there were a lot of them, and the bug was miles long.

Jessie had never heard of anybody breaking into a capital bug’s pocket ecology while the insect was still alive. Captain Emmen meant to try, because there was a story that a Batetranian treasure ship had crashed into this bug, decades ago. Supposedly you could see it when distant sunlight shafted through the right perforation in the bug’s side. The ship was still intact, so they said.

Jessie wasn’t here for the treasure ship. He’d been told a different story about this particular bug.

Emmen swung his arm in a chopping motion and the other jets shot away. Weak and dizzy as he was, Jessie was slower off the mark, but in seconds he was catching up. The other riders looked like flies optimistically lugging pea-pods; they were lit from two sides by two distant suns, one red with distance, the other yellow and closer, maybe two hundred miles away. In those quadrants of the sky not lit by the suns, abysses of air stretched away to seeming infinity – above, below, and to all sides.

Mistelle
became a spindle-shape of wood and iron, its jets splayed behind it like an open hand. Ahead, the capital bug was too big to be seen as a single thing: it revealed itself to Jessie as landscapes, a vertical flank behind coiling clouds, a broad plain above that lit amber by the more distant sun. The air between him and it was crowded with clouds, clods of earth, and arrowing flocks of birds somehow immune to the bug’s sound. Balls of water shot past as he accelerated; some were the size of his head, some a hundred feet across. And here and there, mountain-sized boluses of bug-shit smeared brown across the sky.

The jet made an ear-splitting racket, but he couldn’t hear it over the sound of the bug. Jessie was swaddled in protective gear, his ears plugged, eyes protected behind thick goggles. He could hear the sound inside his body now, feel it vibrating his heart and loosening the bloody mess that was taking over his lungs. He’d start coughing any second, and once he did he might not be able to stop.

Fine
, he thought grimly.
Maybe I’ll cough the whole damn thing out.

The noise had become pure pain. His muscles were cramping, he was finding it hard to breathe. Past a blur of vibration, he saw one of the other riders double up suddenly and tumble off his jet. The vehicle spun away, nearly hitting somebody else. And here came the cough.

The noise was too strong, he
couldn’t
cough. The frozen reflex had stopped his breathing entirely; Jessie knew he had only seconds to live. Even as he thought this, curtains of cloud parted as the jet shot through them at a hundred miles an hour, and directly ahead of him stood the vast tower of the bug’s fourth horn.

The jet’s engine choked and failed; Jessie’s right goggle cracked; the handlebars began to rattle loose from their fittings as his vision grayed. A rocket contrail blossomed to his right and he realized he was looking straight down the throat of the horn. He thumbed the firing button and was splashed and kicked by fire and smoke. In one last moment of clarity Jessie let go of the handlebars so the jet wouldn’t break his bones in the violence of its tumble.

The ferocious scream stopped. Jessie took in a huge breath, and began to cough. Blood sprayed across the air. Breath rasping, he looked ahead to see that he was drifting toward some house-sized nodules that sprouted from the capital bug’s back. The broken, smoking horns jutted like fantastically eroded sculptures, each hundreds of feet long. He realized with a start that one of them was still blaring, but by itself it could no longer kill.

In the distance, the
Mistelle
wallowed in a cloud of jet exhaust, and began to grow larger.

I did it, Jessie thought. Then the grey overwhelmed all thought and sense and he closed his eyes.

Bubbles spun over the side of the washtub. In the rotational gravity of Aitlin Town, they twirled and shimmered and slid sideways from Coriolis force as they descended. Jessie watched them with fascination – not because he’d never seen bubbles before, but because he’d never seen one fall.

They’d both gotten into trouble, so he and his oldest brother Camron were washing the troupe’s costumes today. Jessie loved it; he never got a chance to talk to Camron, except to exchange terse barks during practice or a performance. His brother was ten years older than he, and might as well have lived in a different family.

“That’s what the world is, you know,” Camron said casually. Jessie looked at him quizzically.

“A bubble,” said Camron, nodding at the little iridescent spheres. “The whole world is a bubble, like that.”

“Is naaawwt.”

Camron sighed. “Maybe Father isn’t willing to pay to have you educated, Jessie, but he’s sent me to school. Three times. ‘The world of Virga is a hollow pressure-vessel, five thousand miles in diameter.’”

One big bubble was approaching the floor. Sunlight leaned across the window, a beam of gold from distant Candesce that was pinioning one spot of sky as the ring-shaped wooden town rotated through it. After a few seconds the beam flicked away, leaving the pearly shine of cloud-light.

“The whole world’s a bubble,” repeated Camron, “and all our suns are man-made.”

Jessie knew the smaller suns, which lit spherical volumes only a few hundred miles diameter, were artificial: they’d once flown past one at night, and he’d seen that it was a great glass-and-metal machine. Father had called it a “polywell fusion” generator. But surely the greatest sun of all, so ancient it had been there at the beginning of everything, so bright and hot no ship could ever approach it – “Not Candesce,” said Jessie. “Not the sun of suns.”

Camron nodded smugly. “Even Candesce. ’Cept that in the case of Candesce, whoever built it only made so many keys – and we lost them all.” Another shaft of brilliance burst into the laundry room. “People made Candesce – but now nobody can turn it off.”

The bubble flared in purples, greens, and gold, an inch above the floorboards.

“That’s just silly,” scoffed Jessie. “’Cause if the whole world were just a bubble, then that would make it —”

The bubble touched the floor, and vanished.

“— mortal,” finished Camron. He met Jessie’s eye, and his look was serious.

Jessie shivered and wiped at his mouth. Dried blood had caked there. His whole chest ached, his head was pounding, and he felt so weak and nauseous he doubted he’d have been able to stand if he’d been under gravity.

He hung weightless in a strange fever-dream of a forest, with pale pink tree trunks that reached past him to open into, not leaves, but a single stretched surface that had large round or oval holes in it here and there. Beyond them he could see sky. The tree trunks didn’t converge onto a clump of soil or rock as was usual with weightless groves, but rather tangled their roots into an undulant plain a hundred yards away from the canopy.

The light that angled through the holes shone off the strangest collection of life forms Jessie had ever seen. Fuzzy donut-shaped things inched up and down the “tree” trunks, and mirror-bright birds flickered and flashed as the light caught them. Something he’d taken to be a cloud in the middle distance turned out to be a raft of jellyfish, conventional enough in the airs of Virga, but these were gigantic.

The whole place reeked, the sharp tang reminding Jessie of the jars holding preserved animal parts that he’d seen in the one school he briefly attended as a boy.

He was just under the skin of the capital bug. The jet volunteers had taken turns squinting through the
Mistelle
’s telescope, each impressing on him- or herself as many details of the giant creature’s body as they could. Jessie recalled the strange skin that patched the monster’s back; it’d had holes in it.

It was through these holes that they’d caught glimpses of something that might be a wrecked ship. As the fog of pain and exhaustion lifted, Jessie realized that he might be close to it now. But where were the others?

He twisted in midair and found a threadlike vine or root within reach. Pulling himself along it (it felt uncomfortably like skin under his palms) he reached one of the “tree trunks” which might really be more analogous to hairs for an animal the size of the capital bug. He kicked off from the trunk, then off another, and so manoeuvered himself through the forest and in the direction of a brighter patch.

He was so focused on doing this that he didn’t hear the tearing sound of the jet until it was nearly on him. “Jessie! You’re alive!” Laughter dopplered down as a blurred figure shot past from behind.

It was Chirk, her canary-yellow jacket an unmistakable spatter against the muted colours of the bug. As she circled back, Jessie realized that he could still barely hear her jet; he must be half-deaf from the bug’s drone.

Chirk was a good ten years older than Jessie, and she was the only woman on the missile team. Maybe it was that she recognized him as even more of an outsider than herself, but for whatever reason she had adopted Jessie as her sidekick the day she met him. He indulged her – and, even three months ago, he would have been flattered and eager to make a new friend. But he hid the blood in his cough even from her – particularly from her – and remained formal in their exchanges.

“So?” She stopped on the air, ten feet away, and extended her hand. “Take a lift from a lady?”

Jessie hesitated. “Did they find the wreck?”

“Yes!” She almost screamed it. “Now come on! They’re going to beat us there – the damned
Mistelle
itself is tearing a hole in the bug’s back so they can come up alongside her.”

Jessie stared at her, gnawing his lip. Then: “It’s not why I came.” He leaned back, securing his grip on the stalk he was holding.

The bug was turning ponderously, so distant sunlight slid down and across Chirk’s astonished features. Her hand was still outstretched. “What the’f you talking about? This is it! Treasure! Riches for the rest of your life – but you gotta come with me
now
!”

“I didn’t come for the treasure,” he said. Having to explain himself was making Jessie resentful. “You go on, Chirk, you deserve it. You take my share too, if you want.”

Now she drew back her hand, blinking. “What is this? Jessie, are you all right?”

Tears started in his eyes. “No, I’m not all right, Chirk. I’m going to die.” He stabbed a finger in his mouth and brought it out, showed her the red on it. “It’s been coming on for months. Since before I signed on with Emmen. So, you see, I really got no use for treasure.”