The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (48 page)

“I will do this thing for you gladly,” Pater Nostrum said. “But you must first cross my palm with slivers, to make our bargain whole and place you under my hieratic seal.”

This I knew as well, and so had brought a cluster of shattered beast-ivory from a sand-filled sea cave recently explored beneath the Hayük Desert. I scattered it over his open hand in a brittle mist.

Pater Nostrum closed his fist and grimaced. I knew with skin like his that the ivory would cut, burn, slice. When he opened his hand, the usual small miracle had occurred. A tooth with four twisted roots lay whole on the bloody palm.

“Well brought, Digger,” the priest said. He smiled. “And of course my debt to you is long-incurred. So speak plainly and tell me what you seek.”

I closed my eyes a moment and let my skin tell me the story of the point-source warmth of ten thousand little flames. The framing of this question had been much on my mind of late, with me working at great length to tease it out. Still, no matter what I said, I’d be wrong. Clearly enough the only choice was to address the moment and trust my friendship with this old priest.

“There is a client. A difficult one. It has charged me with finding the door into death. I would know if ever there was such a thing outside the sliding walls of metaphor. If so, where might I find this door, or evidence of its former existence?”

“A door into death.” The priest stared up at his hyperbolic ceiling, his eyes following the receding curve into some dark infinity. “I will scry,” Pater Nostrum muttered. The air began to swirl around him, dust motes orbiting his upturned face like swallows around a charnel house chimney. His eyes rolled inward until nothing remained within his lids but a silvery glowing sliver. One by one, the flames on the wall niches began going out in tiny pops as the priest drew from their energy in some pattern known only to him.

I settled to watch. The brilliant dust of a thousand millennia of nano-technology meant the world could describe itself, if like any competent priest one only knew how to ask the questions.

So he scried. The flames carried Pater Nostrum inward on a wave of information, a palimpsest of infinitely successive and fractal functional languages, protocols, handshakes, field-gestalts and far stranger, more curious engineering dead ends. I knew there had once been information systems which stored data in the probabilistic matrices of quantum foam, extracting it again in a fractional femtosecond as observational dynamics collapsed the informational field to null. Likewise I knew there had once been information systems which relied upon the death of trees to transmit data at a bit rate so low it could be measured in packets per century.

Pater Nostrum could reach them all. At least on his best days. Each little lamp was a channel into some dead language, some time-hoared data protocol, some methodology which had once swept the world so hard that its fingerprints remained in the noösphere.

One by one, 10,432 flames went out. Slowly we passed through shadow before being cast into darkness. I don’t measure time on the human plan myself, and so hunger, micturation, joint fatigue and the like tend not to impinge overmuch on my situational experience, but Pater Nostrum experienced all those and more, until blood ran gelid-dark from his nose and ears as the last of the lights winked away to leave the two of us alone in lightless splendor demarcated only by the priest’s breathing and my scent map of his body’s sudden advancement into further decay.

Finally he came back to me.

“Well.” Pater Nostrum picked his way through his words with an exaggerated care. “It has not been so in more de cades than I care to admit to.”

“You scry well, Father,” I said politely.

“I should not think to scry so well again. Not as I value my own health.”

“Surely the gods forfend.”

“Gods.” He snorted. “I am a priest. What does my work have to do with gods?”

“I can’t say, Father.” After that I waited for him to find the thread of his thoughts.

Finally Pater Nostrum spoke. “There was a movement during the era of the Viridian Republic. Religious, scientific, cultural.”

A long pause ensued, but that did not seem to require an answer, so I did not answer him.

He gathered himself and continued. “They called themselves Lux Transitum. This movement believed that life is a waveform. So long as you do not collapse the waveform, life continues. Death was viewed not as a biological process but as an unfortunate event within the realm of some very specialized physics.”

“Life is . . . life,” I replied. “Antientropic organization in chemical or electromechanical systems which, when left unattended, tends to metastatize into computers, people, starships, catfish and what have you.”

Lighting a candle from the inner pocket of his vinyl robes, Pater Nostrum shook his head. “As the case may be. I only reflect what I have been told. I do not believe it. Sooner argue with the dead than contend with the noösphere.”

“Wise policy, every bit of it.”

“At least for those of us on the human plan.” He tried another grin, but this one failed.

More silence followed, as if Pater Nostrum was now determined to subdivide his attention into short tranches interspersed by gaps of inertia.

Finally I stepped into the conversation again. “Did Lux Transitum have a laboratory or a temple? Is there some place where they addressed this uncollapsed waveform?”

“Hmm?” Pater Nostrum looked at me as if noticing me for the first time. “Oh, well, yes.”

“Father.” I imbued my voice with infinite patience, something this body was fairly good at. “Where might I find their holy place?”

He woke to my question with a non sequitur. “How long have you been alive, Digger?”

“Me?” I stopped and considered that. “At least 7,313 years, by the most conservative view. Counting since the last cold restart of my cognitive processes.”

“How long have I been alive?”

“I shouldn’t know with any certainty,” I said, “but we met shortly after the Andromachus strike. Which was 4,402 years ago the second Thursday of next month.”

“You are not on the human plan, but I am.” He leaned close, almost touching me. “Do you think the human plan called for four thousand year old priests? When was the last time you saw a child?”

I tried to remember when I’d last encountered a juvenile of any species. Not just human. “Surely people must breed somewhere.”

“Surely,” said Pater Nostrum. “But not here on Earth, it seems.”

“This would not come naturally to my attention,” I pointed out. “But you might have noticed it somewhere along the way.”

“You know,” the priest said vaguely. “The days are bathed in almost endless red light. There is always something to do. So few people roam the world . . .”

“A thought-block,” I said sympathetically.

He seemed shocked. “On the entire human race?”

“What human race?”

We walked outside under the dying sun and argued long over whether Lux Transitum had the right of it, and what had been done with people. Most of all, whether to wake them up.

You’re wondering now, aren’t you? How long ago did this happen? What did Dog the Digger do next? Did I wake the exogen and what did I tell him when I did?

Look around you. What do you see? Quiet place we’ve got. That line of hills over there is a linear city from the Vitalist Era. Bury it in a quarter million years of rain and three major eruptions due west of here, and there’s nothing left but low hills covered with scrub. Until you go digging.

Now beneath your feet. The red sand dusting your boots is rust accumulation from when teratons of asteroidal iron were brought down by the Wolfram Bund to clad the world in an impermeable metal shell.

Feel how the air tickles your throat when you breathe? You’d be appalled at how much processing power goes into your lungs, and what percentage of that crosses through the alveoli into your bloodstream. There’s a reason that access to this damned planet is so heavily restricted.

So we live here in our lowtowns and our cathedrals and our shanties and caverns and buried mansions, and nothing ever changes. That was the big secret the exogen was searching for. You can transcend death, but only through stasis. The whole point and purpose of life on the human plan is death. Otherwise you are us, grubbing in the ruins of a million years of dreaming.

And you are us, now. Check in with your shuttle. I can promise you it’s not going back up in this lifetime. My fourth and sixth bodies have already dis assembled the engines and control surfaces. You will live forever, too, my friends, trapped in the same story as the rest of us.

The exogen?

He’ll wake up eventually. We’re letting him sleep. He’s already found the answer. He just doesn’t have to dig holes under a bloodred sky to earn it every day.

I am called Dog the Digger. I am not mighty, neither am I fearsome. But I am all you will ever know now.

Or maybe this is just a story, like you asked for. Under the crimson light of a dying sun, is there any real difference between a story and the truth?

Welcome to my Earth.

THE ISLAND

Peter Watts

Self-described as “a reformed marine biologist,” Peter Watts is quickly establishing himself as one of the most respected hard science writers of the twenty-first century. His short work has appeared in
Tesseracts, The Solaris Book of Science Fiction, On Spec, Divine Realms, Prairie Fire
, and elsewhere. He is the author of the well-received “Rifters” sequence, including the novels
Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth: B-Max
, and
Behemoth: Seppuku.
His short work has been collected in
Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes.
His most recent book is the novel
Blindsight
, which has been widely hailed as one of the best hard SF books of the de cade. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

In the powerful and innovative story that follows, he paints a picture of a work crew compelled to labor on through all eternity, even though they’re no longer sure whom they’re working for or why, and who come smack up against an obstacle unlike any, even they have ever seen.

Y
OU SENT US
out here. We do this for you: spin your webs and build your magic gateways, thread the needle’s eye at 60,000 kilometers a second. We never stop, never even dare to slow down, lest the light of your coming turn us to plasma. All so you can step from star to star without dirtying your feet in these endless, empty wastes between.

Is it really too much to ask, that you might talk to us now and then?

I know about evolution and engineering. I know how much you’ve changed. I’ve seen these portals give birth to gods and demons and things we can’t begin to comprehend, things I can’t believe were ever human; alien hitchikers, perhaps, riding the rails we’ve left behind. Alien conquerers.

Exterminators, perhaps.

But I’ve also seen those gates stay dark and empty until they faded from view. We’ve inferred diebacks and dark ages, civilizations burned to the ground and others rising from their ashes – and sometimes, afterwards, the things that come out look a little like the ships we might have built, back in the day. They speak to each other – radio, laser, carrier neutrinos – and sometimes their voices sound something like ours. There was a time we dared to hope that they really were like us, that the circle had come round again and closed on beings we could talk to. I’ve lost count of the times we tried to break the ice.

I’ve lost count of the eons since we gave up.

All these iterations fading behind us. All these hybrids and posthumans and immortals, gods and catatonic cavemen trapped in magical chariots they can’t begin to understand, and not one of them ever pointed a comm laser in our direction to say Hey, how’s it going?, or Guess what? We cured Damascus Disease!, or even Thanks, guys, keep up the good work!.

We’re not some fucking cargo cult. We’re the backbone of your goddamn empire. You wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for us.

And – and you’re our children. Whatever you’ve become, you were once like this, like me. I believed in you once. There was a time, long ago, when I believed in this mission with all my heart.

Why have you forsaken us?

And so another build begins.

This time, I open my eyes to a familiar face I’ve never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter on the left than the right. His ears are too big. He looks almost natural.

I haven’t spoken for millennia. My voice comes out a whisper: “Who are you?” Not what I’m supposed to ask, I know. Not the first question anyone on Eriophora asks, after coming back.

“I’m yours,” he says, and just like that, I’m a mother.

I want to let it sink in, but he doesn’t give me the chance: “You weren’t scheduled, but Chimp wants extra hands on deck. Next build’s got a situation.”

So the chimp is still in control. The chimp is always in control. The mission goes on.

“Situation?” I ask.

“Contact scenario, maybe.”

I wonder when he was born. I wonder if he ever wondered about me, before now.

He doesn’t tell me. He only says, “Sun up ahead.Halflightyear.Chimp thinks, maybe it’s talking to us. Anyhow . . .” My – son shrugs. “No rush. Lotsa time.”

I nod, but he hesitates. He’s waiting for The Question but I already see a kind of answer in his face. Our reinforcements were supposed to be pristine, built from perfect genes buried deep within Eri’s iron-basalt mantle, safe from the sleeting blueshift. And yet this boy has flaws. I see the damage in his face, I see those tiny flipped base-pairs resonating up from the microscopic and bending him just a little off-kilter. He looks like he grew up on a planet. He looks borne of parents who spent their whole lives hammered by raw sunlight.

How far out must we be by now, if even our own perfect building blocks have decayed so? How long has it taken us? How long have I been dead?

How long? It’s the first thing everyone asks.

After all this time, I don’t want to know.

He’s alone at the tac tank when I arrive on the bridge, his eyes full of icons and trajectories. Perhaps I see a little of me in there, too.

“I didn’t get your name,” I say, although I’ve looked it up on the manifest. We’ve barely been introduced and already I’m lying to him.

“Dix.” He keeps his eyes on the tank.

He’s over ten thousand years old. Alive for maybe twenty of them. I wonder how much he knows, who he’s met during those sparse de cades: does he know Ishmael, or Connie? Does he know if Sanchez got over his brush with immortality?

I wonder, but I don’t ask. There are rules.

I look around. “We’re it?”

Dix nods. “For now. Bring back more if we need them. But . . .” His voice trails off.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

I join him at the tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We’re on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials. Formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the tank: the chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten to care about.

“So fill me in,” I say.

His glance is impatient, even irritated. “You too?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like the others. On the other builds. Chimp can just squirt the specs, but they want to talk all the time.”

Shit, his link’s still active. He’s online.

I force a smile. “Just a – a cultural tradition, I guess. We talk about a lot of things, it helps us – reconnect. After being down for so long.”

“But it’s slow,” Dix complains.

He doesn’t know. Why doesn’t he know?

“We’ve got half a lightyear,” I point out. “There’s some rush?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Vons went out on schedule.” On cue, a cluster of violet pinpricks sparkle in the tank, five trillion klicks ahead of us. “Still sucking dust mostly, but got lucky with a couple of big asteroids and the refineries came online early. First components already extruded. Then Chimp sees these fluctuations in solar output – mainly infra, but extends into visible.” The tank blinks at us: the dwarf goes into time-lapse.

Sure enough, it’s flickering.

“Non-random, I take it.”

Dix inclines his head a little to the side, not quite nodding.

“Plot the time-series.” I’ve never been able to break the habit of raising my voice, just a bit, when addressing the chimp. Obediently (obediently, now there’s a laugh-and-a-half) the AI wipes the spacescape and replaces it with

“Repeating sequence,” Dix tells me. “Blips don’t change, but spacing’s a log-linear increase cycling every 92.5 corsecs. Each cycle starts at 13.2 clicks/corsec, degrades over time.”

“No chance this could be natural? A little black hole wobbling around in the center of the star, something like that?”

Dix shakes his head, or something like that: a diagonal dip of the chin that somehow conveys the negative. “But way too simple to contain much info. Not like an actual conversation. More – well, a shout.”

He’s partly right. There may not be much information, but there’s enough. We’re here. We’re smart. We’re powerful enough to hook a whole damn star up to a dimmer switch.

Maybe not such a good spot for a build after all.

I purse my lips. “The sun’s hailing us. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Maybe. Hailing someone. But too simple for a rosetta signal. It’s not an archive, can’t self-extract. Not a bonferroni or fibonacci seq, not pi. Not even a multiplication table. Nothing to base a pidgin on.”

Still. An intelligent signal.

“Need more info,” Dix says, proving himself master of the blindingly obvious.

I nod. “The vons.”

“Uh, what about them?”

“We set up an array. Use a bunch of bad eyes to fake a good one. It’d be faster than high-geeing an observatory from this end or retooling one of the onsite factories.”

His eyes go wide. For a moment, he almost looks frightened for some reason. But the moment passes and he does that weird head-shake thing again. “Bleed too many resources away from the build, wouldn’t it?”

“It would,” the chimp agrees.

I suppress a snort. “If you’re so worried about meeting our construction benchmarks, Chimp, factor in the potential risk posed by an intelligence powerful enough to control the energy output of an entire sun.”

“I can’t,” it admits. “I don’t have enough information.”

“You don’t have any information. About something that could probably stop this mission dead in its tracks if it wanted to. So maybe we should get some.”

“Okay. Vons reassigned.”

Confirmation glows from a convenient bulkhead, a complex sequence of dance instructions that Eri’s just fired into the void. Six months from now, a hundred self-replicating robots will waltz into a makeshift surveillance grid; four months after that, we might have something more than vacuum to debate in.

Dix eyes me as though I’ve just cast some kind of magic spell.

“It may run the ship,” I tell him, “but it’s pretty fucking stupid. Sometimes you’ve just got to spell things out.”

He looks vaguely affronted, but there’s no mistaking the surprise beneath. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know.

Who the hell’s been raising him all this time? Whose problem is this?

Not mine.

“Call me in ten months,” I say. “I’m going back to bed.”

It’s as though he never left. I climb back into the bridge and there he is, staring into tac. DHF428 fills the tank, a swollen red orb that turns my son’s face into a devil mask.

He spares me the briefest glance, eyes wide, fingers twitching as if electrified. “Vons don’t see it.”

I’m still a bit groggy from the thaw. “See wh – ”

“The sequence!” His voice borders on panic. He sways back and forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Show me.”

Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri’s-eye view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has these past ten months. On the right, a compound-eye composite: an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely-spaced vons, their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarfs endless winking for merely human eyes.

Except that it’s only winking from the left side of the display. On the right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle.

“Chimp: any chance the grid just isn’t sensitive enough to see the fluctuations?”

“No.”

“Huh.” I try to think of some reason it would lie about this.

“Doesn’t make sense,” my son complains.

“It does,” I murmur, “if it’s not the sun that’s flickering.”

“But is flickering – ” He sucks his teeth. “You see it – wait, you mean something behind the vons? Between, between them and us?”

“Mmmm.”

“Some kind of filter.” Dix relaxes a bit. “Wouldn’t we’ve seen it, though? Wouldn’t the vons’ve hit it going down?”

I put my voice back into ChimpComm mode. “What’s the current field-of-view for Eri’s forward scope?”