The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (53 page)

“Keep that thought close tonight, and always.

“One day, we will punish the bastards that did this awful thing to us. But to make that happen, a few of you must find the means to survive . . . !”

THE SKY THAT WRAPS THE WORLD ROUND, PAST THE BLUE AND INTO THE BLACK

Jay Lake

Highly prolific new writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last few years, including
Asimov’s
,
Interzone
,
Clarkesworld
,
Jim Baen’s Universe
,
Tor.com
,
Strange Horizons
,
Aeon
,
Postscripts
,
Electric Velocipede
,
Futurismic
, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction to already have released four collections even though his career is only a few years old:
Greetings from Lake Wu
,
Green Grow the Rushes-Oh
,
American Sorrows
, and
Dogs in the Moonlight
. His novels include
Rocket Science
,
Trial of Flowers
,
Mainspring
, and, most recently,
Escapement
and
Madness of Flowers
. He’s the co-editor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, now in six volumes, and has also edited the anthologies
All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories
, with David Moles, and
TEL: Stories
. Coming up is a new novel,
Green
, a new anthology, co-edited with Nick Gevers,
Other Earths
, and a space opera trilogy,
Sunspace
. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.

In the deceptively quiet story that follows, he shows us an artisian hard at work at his craft – one he has no choice but to pursue, no matter what the cost.

I
BELIEVE THAT
all things eventually come to rest. Even light, though that’s not what they tell you in school. How do scientists know? A billion billion years from now, even General Relativity might have been demoted to a mere Captain. Photons will sit around in little clusters of massless charge, bumping against one another like boats in the harbour at Kowloon.

The universe will be blue then, everything from one cosmic event horizon to the other the colour of a summer sky.

This is what I tell myself as I paint the tiny shards spread before me. Huang’s men bring them to me to work with. We are creating value, that gangster and I. I make him even more immensely wealthy. Every morning that I wake up still alive is his gratuity to me in return.

It is a fair trade.

My life is comfortable in the old house along the alley with its central court crowded with bayberry trees. A narrow gutter trickles down the centre of the narrow roadway, slimed a greenish black with waste slopped out morning and evening from the porch steps alongside. The roofs are traditional, with sloping ridges and ornamented tile caps. I have studied the ones in my own courtyard. They are worn by the years, but I believe I can see a chicken stamped into each one. “Cock,” my cook says with his thick Cantonese accent, never seeing the vulgar humour.

Even these tired old houses are topped with broadband antennae and tracking dishes which follow entertainment, intelligence or high finance beamed down from orbit and beyond. Sometimes the three are indistinguishable. Private data lines sling on pirated staples and cable ties from the doddering concrete utility poles. The poles themselves are festooned with faded prayer flags, charred firecracker strings, and remnants of at least half a dozen generations of technology dedicated to transmission of
something
.

Tesla was right. Power is nothing more than another form of signal, after all. If the lights come on at a touch of your hand, civilization’s carrier wave is intact.

Despite the technology dangling overhead in rotting layers, the pavement itself holds life as old as China. Toddlers wearing only faded shirts toss stones in the shadows. A mangy chow dog lives beneath a vine-grown cart trapped against someone’s garden wall. Amahs air their families’ bedding over wooden railings worn shiny with generations of elbows. Tiny, wrinkled men on bicycles with huge trays balanced behind their seats bring vegetables, newspapers, meat and memory sticks to the back doors of houses. Everything smells of ginger and night soil and the ubiquitous mould.

I wake each day with the dawn. Once I overcome my surprise at remaining alive through another sunrise, I tug on a cheaply printed yukata and go hunting for coffee. My cook, as tiny and wrinkled as the vendors outside but decorated with
tong
tattoos that recall another era long since lost save for a few choppy-sockie movies, does not believe in the beverage. Instead he is unfailing in politely pressing a bitter-smelling black tea on me at every opportunity. I am equally unfailing in politely refusing it. The pot is a delicate work of porcelain which owes a great deal to a China before electricity and satellite warfare. It is painted a blue almost the shade of cornflowers, with a design of a round-walled temple rising in a stepped series of roofs over some Oriental pleasaunce.

I’ve seen that building on postage stamps, so it must be real somewhere. Or had once been real, at least.

After the quiet combat of caffeine has concluded its initial skirmish, I shuffle to my workroom where my brushes await me. Huang has that strange combination of stony patience and sudden violence which I have observed among the powerful in China. When my employer decides I have failed in my bargain, I am certain it is the cook who will kill me. I like to imagine his last act as the light fades from my eyes will be to pour tea down my throat as a libation to see my spirit into the next world.

There is a very special colour that most people will never see. You have to be out in the Deep Dark, wrapped in a skinsuit amid the hard vacuum where the solar wind sleets in an invisible radioactive rain. You can close your eyes there and let yourself float in a sensory deprivation tank the size of the universe. After a while, the little mosaics that swirl behind your eyelids are interrupted by tiny, random streaks of the palest, softest, sharpest electric blue.

I’ve been told the specks of light are the excitation trails of neutrinos passing through the aqueous humour of the human eye. They used to bury water tanks in Antarctic caves to see those things, back before orbit got cheap enough to push astronomy and physics into space where those sciences belong. These days, all you have to do is go for a walk outside the planet’s magnetosphere and be patient.

That blue is what I capture for Huang. That blue is what I paint on the tiny shards he sends me wrapped in day-old copies of the high orbital edition of
Asahi Shimbun
. That blue is what I see in my dreams.

That blue is the colour of the end of the universe, when even the light is dying.

Out in the Deep Dark we called them caltrops. They resemble jacks, that old children’s toy, except with four equally-spaced arms instead of six, and slightly larger, a bit less than six centimeters tip to tip. Many are found broken, some aren’t, but even the broken ones fit the pattern. They’re distributed in a number of places around the belt, almost entirely in rocks derived from crustal material. The consensus had long been that they were mineral crystals endemic to Marduk’s surface, back before the planet popped its cork 250 megayears ago. Certainly their microscopic structure supported the theory – carbon lattices with various impurities woven throughout.

I couldn’t say how many of the caltrops were discarded, damaged, or simply destroyed by being slagged in the guts of some ore processor along with their enclosing rock. Millions, maybe.

One day someone discovered that the caltrops had been manufactured. They were technology remnants so old that our ancestors hadn’t even gotten around to falling out of trees when the damned things were fabricated. The human race was genetic potential lurking in the germline of some cynodont therapsid when those caltrops had been made.

It had not occurred to anyone before that discovery to consider this hypothesis. The fact that the question came up at all was a result of a serious misunderstanding of which I was the root cause. In my greed and misjudgment I forced the loss of a device one of my crewmates discovered, an ancient piece of tech that could have allowed us to do
something
with those caltrops. My contribution to history, in truth, aside from some miniscule role in creating a portion of Huang’s ever-growing millions. That the discovery of the caltrops’ nature arose from human error is a mildly humorous grace note to the confirmation that we are indeed not alone in the universe.

Or at least weren’t at one point.

The artificial origin of the caltrops has been generally accepted. What these things are remains a question that may never be answered, thanks to me. Most people prefer not to discuss the millions of caltrops lost to Belt mining operations over the decades that Ceres Mineral Resources has been in business.

Despite their carbon content, caltrops viewed under Earth-normal lighting conditions are actually a dull grayish-blue. This fact is not widely known on Earth. Not for the sake of being a secret – it’s not – but because of
Deep Dark Blues
, the Academy Award-winning virteo about Lappet Ugarte. She’s the woman who figured so prominently in the discovery of the artificial origin of the caltrops. The woman I tried to kill, and steal from. In their wisdom, the producers of that epic Bollywood docudrama saw fit to render the caltrops about twice as large as they are in real life, glowing an eerie Cherenkov blue. I suppose the real thing didn’t look like much on camera.

So most of the citizens of planet Earth don’t believe that they’re seeing actual outer space caltrops unless they’re seeing end-of-the-universe blue.

Huang sends me paint in very small jars. They’re each cladded with lead foil, which makes them strangely heavy. When I take the little lead-lined caps off, the paint within is a sullen, radioactive copy of the colour I used to see behind my eyelids out there in the Deep Dark.

Every time I dip my brush, I’m drawing out another little spray of radiation. Every time I lick the bristles, I’m swallowing down a few drops of cosmic sleet. I’m the last of the latter day Radium Girls.

Huang doesn’t have to order the old cook to kill me. I’m doing it myself, every day.

I don’t spend much time thinking about where my little radioactive shards go when they leave my house off the alleyway here in Heung Kong Tsai. People buy them for hope, for love, to have a piece of the unspeakably ancient past. There’s a quiet revolution in human society as we come to terms with that history. For some, like a St Christopher medal, touching it is important. Cancer will be important as well, if they touch them too often.

The truly odd thing is that the shards I sit here and paint with the electric blue of a dying heaven are actual caltrop shards. We’re making fakes out of the real thing, Huang and I.

A truth as old as time, and I’m dressing it in special effects.

I swear, sometimes I kill myself.

This day for lunch the cook brings me a stir fry of bok choi and those strange, slimy mushrooms. He is as secretive as one of the Japanese soldiers of the last century who spent decades defending a lava tube on some Pacific island. There is tea, of course, which I of course ignore. We could play that ritual with an empty pot just as easily, but the cook executes his culinary warfare properly.

The vegetables are oddly ragged for having recently spent time in a searing hot wok. They are adorned with a pungent tan sauce the likes of which I had never tasted before entering this place. The whole mess sits atop a wad of sticky rice straight from the little mauve Panasonic cooker in the kitchen.

Food is the barometer of this household. When the cook is happy, I eat like a potentate on a diplomatic mission. When the cook is vexed by life or miffed about some slight on my part, I eat wretchedly.

I wonder what I have done this day to anger him. Our morning ritual was nothing more than ritual, after all.

When I meet the cook’s eyes, I see something else there. A new distress lurks in the lines drawn tight across his forehead. I know what I gave up when I came here. It was no more than what I’d given up long ago, really, when the fates of people and planets were playing out somewhere in the Deep Dark and I went chasing the fortune of a dozen lifetimes. Still, I am not prepared for this new tension on the part of my daily adversary.

“Have you come to kill me?” I ask him in English. I have no Cantonese, and only the usual fractured, toneless pidgin Mandarin spoken by non-Chinese in the rock ports of the asteroid belt. I’ve never been certain he understands me, but surely the intent of my question is clear enough.

“Huang.” There is a creaky whine in his voice. This man and I can go a week at a time without exchanging a single word. I don’t think he speaks more than that to anyone else.

“He is coming here?”

The cook nods. His unhappiness is quite clear.

I poke the bok choi around in my bowl and breathe in the burnt ginger-and-fish oil scent of the sauce. That Huang is coming is a surprise. I have sat quietly with my incipient tumors and withering soul and made the caltrop shards ready for market. They are being handled by a True Hero of the Belt, just as his advertising claims. Our bargain remains intact.