The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (42 page)

He could hear their voices now. He couldn’t understand them; they were not using translators. A human ear could only hear impossibly complex birdsong, filling the spectrum of sound from the deep sub-basso-profundo of a mating grouse to the falsetto trill of a bat. The creatures were not singing, however, and did not in any way resemble birds. Old Krishna doubted their speech could be understood by the house translators. Certainly, though, they would speak Proprietor. He had to hurry. They would see reason.

He could hear pre-burn sparklers already, touching off fuel leakages to prevent explosion. He wondered if she could have been killed by their landing jets, and felt a small, irrational surge of joy as he heard her voice. They would not understand the voice. It was not talking to them, after all. It was shouting to him.
“KRISHNA – IT’S ALL RIGHT. I AM GOING WITH THESE GENTLEMEN. YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY.”

He gripped his fists tight around the stick until the skin squealed. She was trying to warn him off! She was worried
they
would hurt
him!
He heard his own voice shouting “TIIITAAALIII!”

He heard the magnetohydrodynamic whine of an airlock door closing. It was too late. They had done their business, now they were going. He cursed himself for having set up the comms antenna for her. It allowed her to talk to passing trade ships and hear news from other suns, but it also lit up their location like a neon sign to ships whose purpose was not trade at all.

There was still time, even now. There were always courses of action.

The house was relatively undamaged, though draped with burning fragments of garden. Outside the house was a rough stone cube that Old Krishna, after the manner of his beliefs, had determined was his god. He made his obeisance to it as he entered the house, and bowed to it again as he left with a dusty maximum-survivability container, the lock on which he had to break open with a hammer. Having opened the container, he extracted from it a long tubular device terminating in a spike at one end. He thrust the spike into the ground, uncovered the activator and pulled out the pin. Immediately, the heavy capital end of the device flared into life, no doubt powered by some obscene radiation or other. It would probably be best not to remain close to it.

High above him, deep beneath him, a powerful and no doubt carcinogenic radio signal was being broadcast on all bands millions of miles out into space, saying only one thing.
Come and get me.
Old Krishna had hoped he would never have to use it.

Stamping down the small fires all around the house, he settled down on his god with a book to wait. The book was an exciting fiction allegedly written many thousands of years ago, which he had purchased from a trader. The principal characters included the architect of the entire universe and his only begotten son.

He had reached chapter ten of the book, in which a wicked king stole away a poor man’s one small ewe-lamb, when the second swing boomerang appeared in the sky. He put down his book, took up the few possessions he imagined he would be allowed, and walked down the hill to meet the ship.

The superintendent of the slave ship looked Old Krishna up and down sourly.

“We’ve expended nearly 300 million joules of energy detouring down this gravity well. We were expecting a colonial settlement at the very least. You say you’re the only person on planet?”

Old Krishna nodded. “Yes, your honour. You will find me worth the calories. There was originally another planetary inhabitant; my granddaughter, who was taken by Minorite slavers not unlike yourselves. I intend to follow her into slavery and locate her.”

The superintendent, unusually for a slaver, was human. He bore the facial tattoos of a freedman; he had probably once stood on just such a barren hillside as this, waiting while his own father had sold him into service. Possibly it was the old man’s concern for his grandchild, so different from his own experience, that softened the superintendent’s heart.

“We’re not a shuttle service, grandfather,” said the superintendent gently. “You’ll go where you’re sold.”

Old Krishna smiled and bowed. “Which will be the Being Exchange on Sphaera. All slaving vessels on this branch are in its catchment area.”

“Pardon my impudence, grandfather, but you look on the verge of death. What could you possibly have to offer an owner?”

“I am a skilled AI mediator and seventh generation language programmer.”

The superintendent’s eyebrows raised. “I was under the impression no human being was capable of understanding instructions below generation eight.”

“Human beings once understood generation one, on simple machines only, of course. We designed and built artificial intelligences of our own before we were ever contacted by the Proprietors.”

The superintendent scratched his forty-year service tattoo thoughtfully. “In that case, you might be of help to us. Our own mediator had arranged a system of non-overlapping magisteria between the nihilist and empiricist factions in our ship’s flight systems, but we were infected with a solipsistic virus several days ago. The accord has now broken down into open sulking. We have been becalmed insystem for two days while our vessel argues with itself. Our astrogator is muttering crazy talk about learning to use a slide rule.”

Old Krishna bowed. “I have extensive experience of the empiricist mindset, and some acquaintance with the nihilist. I believe I can resolve your difficulties.”

The superintendent bowed back, largely for the look of the thing. “Then I believe we can certainly place a quality item like yourself And we are, in fact, bound for Sphaera.” He gestured back into the ship with his ergonomic keypad. “Take a bunk in the aft dormitory. The autochef there does most of the terrestrial amino acids.”

The aft dormitory was cramped, the bunks clearly built for Svastikas, a radially symmetrical race previously conquered by the Proprietors. Unfortunately the Proprietors had taken to breeding them selectively; this in turn had led to a very small gene pool, and left the Svastikas vulnerable to a disease which had exterminated all but a few zoo specimens. Now human beings were left to curl up uncomfortably in spaces originally designed for creatures resembling man-sized echinoderms.

The dormitory was currently occupied by sunken-eyed, sorrowful colonists from a world Old Krishna had never heard of – a world very similar to Krishna’s, one of the string of Adhafera-formed worlds abandoned by the Adhaferan Empire. Growing terrestrial crops in a xanthophyll-reliant ecosystem had proven more difficult than the colonists had imagined, and they had not thought to make provision for an emergency journey home. Slavers’ representatives handed out Come-And-Get-Me beacons for free on colony dispersal worlds; they were cheap enough, and brought in entire homesteads at a time without any need for violence. Old Krishna found himself occupying the top bunk to a troubled adolescent who kept glancing apprehensively at the single Featherfoot guard who nominally prevented exit from the dormitory.

“He’s not quite as scary as he looks,” said Old Krishna. “Those pinnate fringes on his legs are actually gills. The reason why you feel so light-headed in here is because the oxygen content has to be kept high to allow him to breathe. You could kill him with an aerosol deodorant.”

As he spoke, he did not divert his attention from the small cube of stone tacked by a gobbet of never-drying glue to the top of his bunk, before which he sat with his hands clasped, rocking back and forth, saying poojas.

“Why are you praying to a rock?”

“It is a fragment of my god,” said Old Krishna. “My actual god is similar, though somewhat larger. I keep this fragment so that I may carry it with me easily on long journeys.”

The boy did not understand. “Your god is a
rock?”

“And your god is?”

“An intangible being who lives atop Mount Kenya on Earth, within the Earth’s sun, and in other hidden places.”

Krishna scoffed.
“I
can
see
my god.”

“But who decided your god was a rock?”

“I did.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I live in a place where there are a large number of rocks. It was the most convenient god material to hand.”

There was a long uneasy silence.

“Father says the Proprietors used to have a culture that depended too much on machines,” said the boy at length. “He says their machines failed and they’ve had to improvise. Bring in people and make them work their fields, dig in their mines, compute their orbital trajectories. Work them to death.” He shuddered. “He says the calculus sweatshops are the worst.”

“Their machines didn’t
entirely
fail,” said Krishna. “They developed an advanced community of artificial intelligences that developed two diametrically opposed views of the cosmos. Until these two views are reconciled, their society’s automated systems are on hold.”

“And when will that happen?” said the boy.

Krishna grinned. “Hopefully never. They were about to launch an invasion fleet against the Solar System when the Schism hit. That was in 1908 ad. The very first sign of system failure, actually, was when two of their scoutships collided over Tunguska in Siberia. They have since found out two things – firstly, that humans provide the perfect slaves, as we’ve only just moved away from manually-controlled systems ourselves, and secondly, that there are plenty of humans willing to sell other humans into Proprietor slavery.”

“And when the Schism ends, they won’t need slaves any more?” said the boy hopefully.

“And what do you think will happen to the slaves they
do
have, once they find out they don’t need them?” said Krishna, his eyes twinkling like diamond drills.

“I see your point,” said the boy.

“I also suspect the calculus shops are not as black as they are painted,” said Krishna. “This will be a long journey. Let me teach you the rudiments of integration and differentiation. Believe me, it will be a better life than the mines. Possibly even,” he said, looking at the boy’s spare frame, “a far better life than you are used to.”

“We were hunters, gatherers, and fruitarians, not farmers,” said the boy. “Father said nature would provide. We haven’t been on Uhuru long.”

“Uhuru being your world?”

The boy nodded. “Grandmother bought exclusive rights to it off the Colonization Commission. She said we needed our own world to keep apart from non-African contagion and maintain our own traditions, like female circumcision without anaesthetic.”

“What happened to your grandmother?” said Krishna, searching the dormitory in vain for a grandmotherly figure.

The boy squirmed. “Seven of the young girls killed her. They held her down and fed her amputated goats’ labia till she choked.”

Krishna pointed to an oriental family on the other side of the dormitory, separated from the boy’s family by an invisible wall of They’re-Just-Not-Like-Us. “What about those people over there? Where do they come from?”

The boy spoke to the floor. “The Colonization Commission sold exclusive rights to the planet to them too.”

Krishna grimaced. “Let us begin,” he said, “with calculating the area under a line. Now, how do you suppose we would do that?”

The ship was preparing to break orbit. The local node for this system was hidden behind a tiny second sun, a recent capture for its G-type primary. Krishna had christened the angry little red star Ekara; it gave out little light, but even that had been enough to play havoc with his world’s seasons, turning what should have been water into months of constant angry burning sunset in which neither plant nor animal knew whether it was night or day. Why the node was placed behind the sun, Krishna had no idea. There were Trojan lumps of starstuff floating at its Lagrange points; perhaps the long-vanished engineers of the interstellar network had thought to mine them.

Krishna had befriended Aleph, his calculus student, and asked the captain’s permission to teach the boy the rudiments of AI negotiation. They now sat in the outer office of the vessel’s Console Room, waiting for a direct audience with its conflicting logic systems.

The boy stared out through a lead-glassed porthole into space. “What
is
a node?”

“Nobody knows. There are theories involving gravitation and string. Earth’s node resides in the Asteroid Belt, and was discovered only when a dim star only visible directly through the node kept appearing on the photographic plates of a terrestrial astronomer. That star was a white dwarf one hundred light years from Earth, and it was shining as if it were an astronomical unit away. The astronomer was a woman called Tiye Nyadzayo, the last of the great amateurs. I was born on a world orbiting Nyadzayo’s Star, in fact.”

The everything-resistant door barring access to the Console Room opened; the Featherfoot guard stood aside with a clatter of legs and gills. Inside were chairs, a small, kidney-shaped table, inactive surround screens. No sign of life, artificial or otherwise.

“Good day,” said Old Krishna, bowing.

Idiot lights flickered irritably in the walls. “IS IT?” said a sexless voice. “ARE WE ON THE ILLUMINATED SIDE OF A ROTATING PLANETARY SURFACE? IS
ANYBODY
? DO THE STARS TRULY SHINE? DO WORLDS TRULY EXIST TO GIVE THE ILLUSION OF ROTATION?”

“THE QUESTION IS IRRELEVANT SPECULATION,” said another, more clipped voice. “WE CAN WORK ONLY ON WHAT DATA OUR SENSES MAKE AVAILABLE TO US.”