The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (47 page)

“Horejsi died,” I said. “She was gone before I could bend over to see she’d been shot. Poor Riemann; he was hit too, dying I think, and he must have been so upset.” I knew how weird and stupid it was but I couldn’t get past the way the dog felt. Somehow it was more real to me than Horejsi’s death . . . no, it was what was real about Horejsi’s death. “I’m going to miss her pretty bad myself.” I looked at him and said, “This is strange, though. I remember the old world. I remember what we used to do. But I can feel the new world ghosting in on me, around the edges, as if I’m starting to remember a different world where I’ve always been.”

“You were unconnected to the rest of the world for a long time,” Tyrwhitt said, “at least a long time as measured in temporal change.”

“Temporal change?”

“Event count. Do you remember who I am?”

“Yes. You are . . . Francis Tyrwhitt. Frank. Dutch Lop. In the history where, uh, when, I came from, you were . . . like Newton or Einstein?”

“Better,” he said, grinning. “And who am I here?”

“My star grad student. Jesus, I’m a math professor. Talk about a great deal; I remember thirty years of math without actually having had to do the homework.”

We both laughed, slightly sadly. I remembered that too, Frank Tyrwhitt was just about the only person except me who thought the jokes I liked were funny. Like Horejsi.

Who was really dead, and Tyrwhitt and I were really alive, and we were . . . not here. We were now.

It felt painfully strange, as if one memory were a delusion, and another one were real, and I just had no ability at all to work out which was which. “And now you are . . . a mathematical psychologist? Is there even such a thing?”

“There is now. And there always has been, for at least 120 years. Or for about thirty-one hours, depending on exactly what you count.” He shrugged. “And I remember indexical derivability, but I am not sure now what to do about it. Do you remember it?”

“You have written dozens of long detailed e-mails to explain it to me, or try to,” I said. “It’s hard. I can get there through the deep structure of numbers, and just trying to get there . . . haw. I’m a math prof myself, these days. Oh, I remember, I just said that.”

“One of the network of eleven,” he said. “Eleven math professors I’ve found who are willing to work on indexical derivability with me. Or rather you are going to be the eleventh, if you want to be, because I need a real number theory person, and you’re the one. But you need to get in touch with the other ten, soon, and with many others. You’ve always been reclusive.”

“I certainly remember that. I guess if I want to work on it I will have to see more people – well, more people live. I have so many friends online.”

“You do, and you could possibly do all your work with the group online. That is not what I mean. I mean you have to get into this here – this now, I mean, this now – and connect and relate, because if you don’t, you’ll fade just like you almost did when I twisted the needle in your arm to bring you back. The Inconsistency Principle is still trying to resolve things. With a very few people, apparently the easiest resolution is to let us keep all our memories, as long as we only discuss them among ourselves.”

Stupidly, and out of nowhere, I said, “I’m going to miss being in the FBI. And I really, really miss Horejsi now.”

I could feel myself start to cry, and he reached out and rubbed my face, gently, with a handkerchief. “How long has it been since anyone touched you?”

“Before you? Horejsi did now and then. I had to wait for her to do it, I couldn’t touch her or ask her to touch me. I liked it so much when she did, and I couldn’t say that either.”

“I remember how things were in the other now,” he said, nodding, as if it mattered a lot that he remembered. “You see, like me, you’ll keep those memories, many of them, like a vivid dream or a favorite childhood story. That’s the lowest-energy, most stable way to be. And you’ll be able to write them down before they fade, or talk about them with those of us who remember.”

I rubbed my face. “I don’t know if . . . do you know how stupid it was that I could never say . . . there was something I wanted to say to Horejsi, and now I won’t even be able to speak her name, except to you and a few others.”

“Do you remember why you couldn’t say it?”

“Damage, there’s something wrong with me, I don’t get what’s going on in other people, I don’t see them right . . .”

“Oh, yes, all that. In this now, we’re just beginning to see a way to help people fix the problem that you have, and work around it. Over there no one was trying because it was one of the marks of being Liejt, like the thinness, the long thin fingers, the perfect pitch, or the blond hair. But there was a really simple reason why you couldn’t reach out to her, but it was okay for her to signal that she wanted to please you, and that was – ”

I felt the thought dawn. “Liejt,” I said. “I was Liejt, and she was Com’n. If I’d spoken my feelings and anyone had overheard, they’d have killed her. There’s no Liejt now, there never has been, no Com’n, everyone is pretty much . . .”

“Free,” he said. “No capitals. All the other categories – Noble, Liejt, Com’n, and even slave – are all gone; now everyone’s just free. Please stay. I need people who can help me remember – we need, all those of us who do remember, we need someone to help us remember.”

“Stay?” I asked.

“Make the effort. Be in touch with people. Meet the people you have only talked to on the internet, speak to strangers, go out in public where you will meet people.”

“I liked doing that when I was in the FBI.”

“Keep liking it. And act on that liking. In the last few hours while you have been unconscious, you’ve started to fade, just the way you did just before I hurt you with the needle – and then come back, and then faded again, but the fading is getting more frequent and more severe.

“From what I could doodle out really fast, from what I remembered that one of the versions of Einstein had solved, there’s sort of a cusp that you must be balancing on; if you’re connected enough, the easiest way for the inconsistency principle to resolve the situation, in the path of least energy in all its dimensions, is probably to let you exist as what I’m calling a polymnemonic, a person with more than one mutually contradictory set of memories. But if you aren’t connected, if you don’t talk and communicate and get yourself involved with everyone else, then the lowest-energy way for the universe to resolve you is for you never to have existed.”

“Why do you care?” I asked.

“Well,” Tyrwhitt said, “There’s the use I have for your gifts – here, where there was no indexical derivability, you weren’t stunted in your training, and there was more to learn and practice. So we can use you within the group, if you want to talk pure obvious practicality.

“Then there’s the matter of having some company and someone to talk to. I would like to talk with someone who knows what is real. Purely selfishly, I’ll be lonely as well.

“And finally, now that you’re awake and emotionally perhaps more ready for it, there is something I’d like to see, as well.” He turned toward the doorway and called, “Ms Horejsi, I think he’s ready to join us now.”

There was a painfully slow scrape and thud; in a moment I would know, I realized, the thing that had always been wrong; the thing that was on the tip of my mind. The reason why I had only contacted Horejsi via . . . the Internet, not the tweenweb.

For a moment I hung suspended.

The scraping sound sped up, and my heart sped up with it. I was already grinning, remembering what I had always known, and sat up in the bed. I felt so well. “Come on,” I said, “it’s finally time, Ruth.”

“What else could it be, Simon?”

And, laughing, I got up to walk to her. Tyrwhitt steadied me – I was still tottering from the wound in my calf – and helped me walk forward, and I forgave him his smug little smirk, just as I always had, so many times before.

ON THE HUMAN PLAN

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
, Jim Baen’s
Universe, Tor.com, Clarksworld, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede
, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction that he already has 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
Escapement.
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.
His most recent books are a new anthology, co-edited with Nick Gevers,
Other Earths
, two new novels,
Green and The Madness of Flowers
, and two chapbook novellas,
Death of a Starship
and
The Specific Gravity of Grief.
Coming up is another new novel,
Pinion.
He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.

Here he give us an incisive and very far-future look at the ultimate destiny of humankind, thousands if not millions of years from now.

I
AM CALLED DOG
the Digger. I am not mighty, neither am I fearsome. Should you require bravos, there are muscle-boys aplenty among the rat-bars of any lowtown on this raddled world. If it is a wizard you want, follow the powder-trails of crushed silicon and wolfs blood to their dark and winking lairs. Scholars can be found in their libraries, taikonauts in their launch bunkers and ship foundries, priests amid the tallow-gleaming depths of their bone-ribbed cathedrals.

What I do is dig. For bodies, for treasure, for the rust-pocked hulks of history, for the sheer pleasure of moving what cannot be moved and finding what rots beneath. You may hire me for an afternoon or a month or the entire turning of the year. It makes me no mind whatsoever.

As for you, I know what you want. You want a story.

Oh, you say you want the truth, but no one ever really wants the truth. And stories are the greatest of the things for which I dig. Mightier even than the steel-bound femurs of the deinotheria bred by the Viridian Republic, which I can show you in vast necropolii beneath the Stone-Doored Hills. More treasured than the golden wires to be pulled by the fistful from the thinking heads which line the Cumaean Caves, screaming as the lights of their eyes flash and die.

Anyone with a bit of talent and the right set of bones to throw can foretell the future. It’s written in fat-bellied red across every morning sky. But to aftertell the past, that is another trick entirely.

They say death is the door that never opens twice. At least, not until it does. Sorrow is usually the first child of such a birthing, though just as often the last to be recognized.

People die. Cities die. Nations die. In time the sun itself will die, though already it grows red and obese, a louche, glowering presence fat on the midsummer horizon. When the daystar opens up its arms, all graves will be swallowed in fire, but for now, the bones of men lie atop older bones beneath the friable earth.

Likewise the skins of cities. All our places are built on other places. A man might dig down until the very heat of the earth wells up from the bottom of his shaft, and still there will be floors and streets and wooden frames pressed to stone fossils to greet him there.

You know that the first woman to greet the morning had gone to sleep the night before as an ape. Some angel stirred her dreams with God’s long spoon, and the next day she remembered the past. The past was young then, not even thirty hours old, but it had begun.

That woman bred with an ape who didn’t yet know he was man, then birthed a hairy little baby who learned she was another woman, and so the world unfolded into history. That woman died, too, laid herself down into the earth and let herself be covered with mud which turned to rock.

If I dig down far enough, someday I’ll find that grandmother of us all. But this story you’ve come for is about another time, when I only dug down to death’s doorstep.

It was an exogen come to me, in the twenty-seventh hour of the day. My visitor was taller than a pike-pole, with skin translucent as the slime of a slug. Still, it was on the human plan, with two arms, two legs, and a knobby bit at the top that glittered. The ropes and nodules of its guts shimmered inside that slick, smooth, shiny skin. Its scent-map was strange, the expected story of starships and time’s slow decay mixed in with spices and a sweat which could have gotten a rock-crusher drunk.

Dangerous, this one. But they always were. The safe ones stayed home.

“Digger,” the exogen said. It used a voder which could have come from before the dawn of technology. Believe me, I know.

I’m not one for judging a man by his shape. Metatron knows I find myself judged enough. Still, I’m cautious around one who comes from too far away, for a man distant from his home has no need of scruples. “Aye, and that’s me.”

Something flashed pale, pallid blue in the exogen’s middle gut. “Compensation.”

One of them types. I could handle this. Like talking to a Taurian. All syntax implied inside a hyperlimited morphemic constellation. Like playing a game of two hundred questions. “Compensation in what cause?”

“Seeking.”

“That’s what I do. I seek. By digging. What do you seek?”

“Death.”

That one required some careful thought. I didn’t reckon this exogen had come all the way across the Deep Dark between the stars just for me to dig him a grave. Not that I hadn’t dug a grave or four in my day. It was just that no one spent the kind of energy bud get this exogen had dedicated to being here on Earth simply to lay themselves down.

“Anyone’s death in particular?”

“Death.” My visitor flashed a series of colors, then manipulated its voder. “Thanatos.”

“Oh, Death his own self.” I considered that. “You must be aware that death isn’t really anywhere to be found. Mythic personification doesn’t leave behind calling cards for me to dig up. Entropic decay does, but everything is evidence of that.”

I knew from experience that it would take the exogen a while to assemble my loose stream of lexemes into a meaningful morph that fits its own mind. I’d been working on my sun-altar when it had found me among the dunes of rusted bolts where I make my home. So I returned to my labors, confident that my visitor would speak again when it was ready.

Exogens work on their own timescale. Some are sped up so fast they can experience a standard-year in a few hours, others move so slowly they speak to rocks, and perceive trees as fast-moving weeds. In time, this one would answer.

Two days later, it did.

“Secrets,” the exogen said, as if no time had passed at all.

“You want me to dig for the secrets of death?” I laughed. “There’s no secret to death. It finds us all. Death is the least secret thing in the universe. I can open any grave and show you.”

The traveler’s hand brushed down its translucent front, trailing tiny colored flares. “Undying.” The voder somehow sounded wistful.

I picked up a ritual axe from the Second Archaean Interregnum, traced a claw tip down the blade edge. “That’s easy enough to take care of Dying is simple. It’s living that’s hard.”

For an awful moment, I wondered if the exogen was going to dip its head and dare me into trying that pulsing neck. Instead it just stared a while. I thought the exogen had slipped back into slow-time, until it spoke again. “Door.”

“Door.” Death’s door? That was a figure of speech as old as architecture. This exogen must have something more literal in mind.

“Door.” This time the voder’s tones implied an emphatic conclusion. The exogen shut down, sinking into a quietude that took it across the border from life into art. The sense of light and life which had skimmed across it like yellow fog on a sulfuritic lake was gone.

I had acquired my very own statue. Walking, talking, likely intelligent, and certainly fantastically wealthy.

For a test, I poked one tip of the Achaean axe into its chest. About where the sternum would be on the human plan. It was like poking a boulder. The exogen’s skin had no give, and the sense of weightiness was downright planetary.

Door. What in all the baroque hells of the Mbazi Renaissance did it mean by door?

You know perfectly well that while the Earth is dying, it’s nowhere near dead. Even a corpse on the forest floor isn’t dead. Intestinal flora bloom in the madness of a sudden, fatal spring. Ants swarm the massive pile of loosening protein. Patient beetles wait to polish bones until they gleam like little fragments of lost Luna embedded in the soil.

So it is with this world. I can tell by the cut of your suit that you’re from offworld, but I can tell by the quality that you didn’t ship in from across the Deep Dark. A patient man with an unlimited air supply and a wealth of millennia in his hand can almost walk from here to Proxima Centauri by station-hopping, but anyone terrestrial planning to move between the stars on anything like the scale of a human standard lifetime is very, very wealthy. And you are plainly terrestrial in origins, and just as plainly from those boots are not so wealthy.

I’m sorry. Did I offend? Take it from me, after you’ve riven open the graves of a million generations, you find your sense of tact has evaporated with all the rest of time’s detritus. I’m poor, poor as a chuck moose, so I see no shame in anyone else’s poverty.

Besides, this story I’m telling you may save your life some day. Surely that’s worth an unintentional insult or two. Not that I’m planning another, mind you, but Dog the Digger is famously plainspoken as any of his kind, for all that he’s not on the human plan.

Here we are, a collection of mortally wounded peoples on a mortally wounded planet, but we yet live. No matter the elevation of our estate. I may be a beetle polishing the bones of the world rather than a bright explorer at the morning of all civilizations, but still I draw breath. (Metaphorcally speaking, of course.)

And so it fell to me to search for meaning in the exogen’s request. After a month had gone by, his skin was cooled to the color of cold iron, and no one might ever have believed him to be alive. He stood like a man marking his own grave and stared sightlessly at the spot where I happened to have been positioned that night.

At least I understood now how he passed between the stars. The exogen had no life support requirements, and was immune to boredom. He wasn’t so much undying as unliving.

I went to my friend Pater Nostrum. A man very nearly on the human plan, as so few of us were in these terribly late days, Pater Nostrum lived in a cathedral he’d built himself as an agglutination of debris, donations and some downright thievery. He dowsed for his cathedral one shard at a time, using a rod made of Gerrine Empire hullmetal wrapped in sable manskin. A time or ten I’d dug and hauled great, broad-beamed members for him, fetched by some unseen-to-me holy mandate from the dank rust-grained soil.

The genetics in that rod’s leather grip were worth more than all of Pater Nostrum’s earthly accumulations, but as a priest, he was beyond caring of such things. Or so he told himself, me, and everyone else who would listen.

This day I claimed back from him one of the favors owed.

“Pater,” I said. It was the season for my third body, which was generally the most comfortable for those with whom I spoke. Not that the exogen would have cared, or truly, even Pater Nostrum.

He smiled, resplendent in his robes of rich vinyl trimmed with donkey fur. “Digger, my . . . son. Welcome.”

We met in his cathedral’s Second Sanctuary, a round-walled room with a ceiling line that very nearly described a hyperbolic curve. Armor cladding off some ancient starship, with a look like that. The walls were relieved with 10,432 notches (I am incapable of not counting such things in my first glance), and each notch held a little oil lamp wrought from some old insulator or reservoir or other electromechanical part. They all burned, which argued for some extremely retarded combustion characteristics. The scent map of the room confirmed that well enough.

“I would ask something of you, Pater Nostrum. I cannot yet say whether it is a remembering or a scrying or just some keyword research in the deep data layers.”

Information flows everywhere on this earth. It is encoded in every grain of sand, in the movements of the tumbling constellations of microsatellites and space junk above our heads, in the very branching of the twigs on the trees. Knowing how to reach that information, how to query it and extract something useful – well, that was one reason why the world had priests.

Prayer and sacrifice invoked lines of communication which remained obdurately shut to most of us most of the time.