Year’s Best SF 15 (12 page)

A handful of moments passed. The character for
message
drew itself in the upper right corner. Ling Yun touched the tip of her brush to it.

The general's response was, simply:
Come.

Shaking slightly, Ling Yun waited until her escort arrived. Under her breath, she hummed one of the variations from Mesketalioth's piece. In composing the suite, she had attuned herself to the pilots and their cause, but she did this by choice.

Be awake
, she urged him, urged all the young pilots.
Be prepared.
Would the music pluck at the inner movements of their souls, the way it happened in the stories of old?

The escort arrived. “You are dedicated to work so long into the night,” the taller of the two soldiers said, with every appearance of sincerity.

“We do what we can,” Ling Yun said, thinking,
You have no idea.
People thought musicians were crazy, too. Perhaps everybody looked crazy to someone.

After tonight, she was going to look crazy to everyone, assuming Phoenix Command allowed the story to escape.

The Phoenix General met her in a different room this time. It had silk scrolls on the walls. “They're pretty, aren't they?” he said. Ling Yun was eerily reminded of Periet looking at her glider. “Some of them are generations old.”

One of the scrolls had crisp, dark lines. Ling Yun's eyes were drawn to it: a phoenix hatching from a
wei qi
stone. “You painted that,” she said.

“I was younger,” the general said, “and never subtle. Please, there's tea. Your profile said you preferred citron, so I had them brew some for us.”

The citron smelled sweet and sharp. Ling Yun knew that if she tasted it, she would lose her nerve. But courtesy was courtesy. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

She held the first five movements of the dragon suite in her head, to give her Wu Wen Zhi's fixity of purpose and
Ko's relaxed mien, Mesketalioth's reflexes and Periet's hidden ferocity, and Li Cheng Guo's quick wits.

The braided silk strings slipped down into Ling Yun's palm. She whipped them around the Phoenix General's neck. He was a large man, but she was fighting with the strength of six, not one. And she was fighting for five ashworlds rather than one empire.

As the Phoenix General struggled, Ling Yun tightened the strings. She fixed her gaze upon the painting of the hatching stone.

Ling Yun had been the Phoenix General's creature. The phoenix destroyed itself; it was only fitting that she destroy him.

It would not occur to her until later that it had begun with the general assassinating the ashworlders' leader, that justice was circular.

Now I know what it is like to kill.

There was—not happiness, precisely, but a peculiar singing relief that the other was dead, and not she. She let go of the strings and listened to the thump as the general's body hit the floor.

The door crashed open. Wen Zhi and Periet held pistols. Wen Zhi's was pointed straight at Ling Yun.

Ling Yun looked up, heart thudding in her chest. She pulled her shoulders back and straightened. It turned out that she cared to die with some dignity, after all. “Make it quick,” she said. “You have to get out of here.”

Ko showed up behind the other two; he had apparently found a cord to tie his braid. “Come
on
, madam,” he said. “We haven't any time to waste.”

“So you were right,” Wen Zhi said to him, sounding irritable. “The musician took care of the general, but that doesn't guarantee that she's an ally.”

“Is this really the best time to be arguing?” Periet asked, with an air of,
Have you ever known me to be wrong
?

The other girl lowered her pistol. “All right, Perias. Are you coming with us, Musician?”

It was unlikely that Ling Yun's family would ever forgive her, even if she evaded capture by the imperial magis
trates. She hurried after the pilots, who seemed to know exactly where they were going. “Perias?” she asked Periet, hoping that she might get an answer where Phoenix Command had not.

“Was the sixth one,” Mesketalioth said without slowing down.

“What exactly is your plan for getting out of here?” Ling Yun said diffidently, between breaths. “We'll be hunted—”

“You of all people have no excuse to be so slow-witted,” Cheng Guo called back. He was at the head of the group. “How do you think we got here?”

“All we need is a piece of sky,” Periet said yearningly. She struck the wall with the heel of her hand.

I was right
, Ling Yun thought. The edges of her vision went black; the reverberations sounded like a great gong.

Mesketalioth caught her. His arm was steady and warm. “Next time, a warning would be appreciated,” he said, dead-pan as ever.

The wall split outwards.
Metal cuts wood.

“Let's fly,” Periet said. A great wind was blowing through the hallway. They stepped through the hole in the wall, avoiding the jagged, broken planks. Above them, stars glittered in the dark sky.

“The void is the sixth element,” Ling Yun said, looking up.

Five dragons manifested in a half circle, summoned through the void, white black blue yellow red. In the center, tethered to the red dragon by shimmering cables, was an unpainted glider. The sleek curves of its fuselage reminded Ling Yun of her zither.

“See?” Ko said. “I told you we'd fix it.”

“Thank you,” Ling Yun said, overwhelmed. They had written her into the game after all.

“It only works if there's six of us,” Cheng Guo said. “You're the sixth pilot.”

Mesketalioth helped Ling Yun into the glider's cockpit. “When we release the cables,” he said, “follow Cheng Guo. He understands glider theory best, and he'll safely keep you on the void's thermal paths.” Despite the scars, his expression was almost kind.

“It's time!” Wen Zhi shouted from her white dragon. There were now ten red marks on it. “We have to warn the seedworlds.”

Soldiers shouted from the courtyard. A bolt glanced from one dragon in a shower of sparks. Mesketalioth's dragon reared up and laid down covering fire while Wen Zhi's dragon raked the ground with its claws. The soldiers, overmatched, scattered.

Then they were aloft, all six of them, dragons returning to the sky where they had been born.

Ling Yun spared not a glance backwards, but sang a quiet little melody to herself as they headed for the stars.

Bruce Sterling
(www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/)
lives usually in exotic places in Europe, from which he continues his lifelong habit of cultural commentary. He reports that he “is dividing his atemporal time-zones among Austin, Turin, and Belgrade, and his alternate global identities as Bruce Sterling, Bruno Argento, and Boris Srebro.” “Black Swan” is one of those “Bruno Argento” efforts, written in Torino and originally published in Italy. His most recent novel is SF,
The Caryatids
(2009). His short fiction is collected in
Ascendancies: The Best of Bruce Sterling
(2007). Throughout Sterling's career, his project has been to put us in touch with the larger world in which we live, giving us glimpses of not only speculative and fantastic realities but also the bedrock of politics in human behavior. He is an American and citizen of the world, drawn to events and especially people tipping the present over into the future. His short fiction, now as likely to be fantasy as SF, is one of the finest bodies of work in the genre over the last three decades.

“Black Swan” originally appeared in Italian as “Cigno Nero” in the Spring 2009 issue of
ROBOT
magazine. It was subsequently published in
Interzone,
which in spite of its small circulation continues to be a major venue for SF and fantasy. The title refers to the concept behind Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

T
he ethical journalist protects a confidential source. So I protected ‘Massimo Montaldo,' although I knew that wasn't his name.

 

Massimo shambled through the tall glass doors, dropped his valise with a thump, and sat across the table. We were meeting where we always met: inside the Caffe Elena, a dark and cozy spot that fronts on the biggest plaza in Europe.

The Elena has two rooms as narrow and dignified as mahogany coffins, with lofty red ceilings. The little place has seen its share of stricken wanderers. Massimo never confided his personal troubles to me, but they were obvious, as if he'd smuggled monkeys into the cafe and hidden them under his clothes.

Like every other hacker in the world, Massimo Montaldo was bright. Being Italian, he struggled to look suave. Massimo wore stain-proof, wrinkle-proof travel gear: a black merino wool jacket, an American black denim shirt, and black cargo pants. Massimo also sported black athletic trainers, not any brand I could recognize, with eerie bubble-filled soles.

These skeletal shoes of his were half-ruined. They were strapped together with rawhide boot-laces.

To judge by his Swiss-Italian accent, Massimo had spent a lot of time in Geneva. Four times he'd leaked chip secrets to me—crisp engineering graphics, apparently snipped right out of Swiss patent applications. However, the various
bureaus in Geneva had no records of these patents. They had no records of any ‘Massimo Montaldo,' either.

Each time I'd made use of Massimo's indiscretions, the traffic to my weblog had doubled.

I knew that Massimo's commercial sponsor, or more likely his spymaster, was using me to manipulate the industry I covered. Big bets were going down in the markets somewhere. Somebody was cashing in like a bandit.

That profiteer wasn't me, and I had to doubt that it was him. I never financially speculate in the companies I cover as a journalist, because that is the road to hell. As for young Massimo, his road to hell was already well-trampled.

Massimo twirled the frail stem of his glass of Barolo. His shoes were wrecked, his hair was unwashed, and he looked like he'd shaved in an airplane toilet. He handled the best wine in Europe like a scorpion poised to sting his liver. Then he gulped it down.

Unasked, the waiter poured him another. They know me at the Elena.

Massimo and I had a certain understanding. As we chatted about Italian tech companies—he knew them from Alessi to Zanotti—I discreetly passed him useful favors. A cellphone chip—bought in another man's name. A plastic hotel pass key for a local hotel room, rented by a third party. Massimo could use these without ever showing a passport or any identification.

There were eight ‘Massimo Montaldos' on Google and none of them were him. Massimo flew in from places unknown, he laid his eggs of golden information, then he paddled off into dark waters. I was protecting him by giving him those favors. Surely there were other people very curious about him, besides myself.

The second glass of Barolo eased that ugly crease in his brow. He rubbed his beak of a nose, and smoothed his unruly black hair, and leaned onto the thick stone table with both of his black woolen elbows.

“Luca, I brought something special for you this time. Are you ready for that? Something you can't even imagine.”

“I suppose,” I said.

Massimo reached into his battered leather valise and brought out a no-name PC laptop. This much-worn machine, its corners bumped with use and its keyboard dingy, had one of those thick super-batteries clamped onto its base. All that extra power must have tripled the computer's weight. Small wonder that Massimo never carried spare shoes.

He busied himself with his grimy screen, fixated by his private world there.

The Elena is not a celebrity bar, which is why celebrities like it. A blonde television presenter swayed into the place. Massimo, who was now deep into his third glass, whipped his intense gaze from his laptop screen. He closely studied her curves, which were upholstered in Gucci.

An Italian television presenter bears the relationship to news that American fast food bears to food. So I couldn't feel sorry for her—yet I didn't like the way he sized her up. Genius gears were turning visibly in Massimo's brilliant geek head. That woman had all the raw, compelling appeal to him of some difficult math problem.

Left alone with her, he would chew on that problem until something clicked loose and fell into his hands, and, to do her credit, she could feel that. She opened her dainty crocodile purse and slipped on a big pair of sunglasses.

“Signor Montaldo,” I said.

He was rapt.

“Massimo?”

This woke him from his lustful reverie. He twisted the computer and exhibited his screen to me.

I don't design chips, but I've seen the programs used for that purpose. Back in the 1980s, there were thirty different chip-design programs. Nowadays there are only three survivors. None of them are nativized in the Italian language, because every chip geek in the world speaks English.

This program was in Italian. It looked elegant. It looked like a very stylish way to design computer chips. Computer chip engineers are not stylish people. Not in this world, anyway.

Massimo tapped at his weird screen with a gnawed fingernail. “This is just a cheap, 24-K embed. But do you see these?”

“Yes I do. What are they?”

“These are memristors.”

In heartfelt alarm, I stared around the cafe, but nobody in the Elena knew or cared in the least about Massimo's stunning revelation. He could have thrown memristors onto their tables in heaps. They'd never realize that he was tossing them the keys to riches.

I could explain now, in gruelling detail, exactly what memristors are, and how different they are from any standard electronic component. Suffice to understand that, in electronic engineering, memristors did not exist. Not at all. They were technically possible—we'd known that for thirty years, since the 1980s—but nobody had ever manufactured one.

A chip with memristors was like a racetrack where the jockeys rode unicorns.

I sipped the Barolo so I could find my voice again. “You brought me schematics for memristors? What happened, did your UFO crash?”

“That's very witty, Luca.”

“You can't hand me something like that! What on Earth do you expect me to do with that?”

“I am not giving these memristor plans to you. I have decided to give them to Olivetti. I will tell you what to do: you make one confidential call to your good friend, the Olivetti Chief Technical Officer. You tell him to look hard in his junk folder where he keeps the spam with no return address. Interesting things will happen, then. He'll be grateful to you.”

“Olivetti is a fine company,” I said. “But they're not the outfit to handle a monster like that. A memristor is strictly for the big boys—Intel, Samsung, Fujitsu.”

Massimo laced his hands together on the table—he might have been at prayer—and stared at me with weary sarcasm. “Luca,” he said, “don't you ever get tired of seeing Italian genius repressed?”

The Italian chip business is rather modest. It can't always make its ends meet. I spent fifteen years covering chip tech in Route 128 in Boston. When the almighty dollar ruled the tech world, I was glad that I'd made those connections.

But times do change. Nations change, industries change. Industries change the times.

Massimo had just shown me something that changes industries. A disruptive innovation. A breaker of the rules.

“This matter is serious,” I said. “Yes, Olivetti's people do read my weblog—they even comment there. But that doesn't mean that I can leak some breakthrough that deserves a Nobel Prize. Olivetti would want to know, they would
have
to know, the source of that.”

He shook his head. “They don't want to know, and neither do you.”

“Oh yes, I most definitely do want to know.”

“No, you don't. Trust me.”

“Massimo, I'm a journalist. That means that I always want to know, and I never trust anybody.”

He slapped the table. “Maybe you were a ‘journalist' when they still printed paper ‘journals.' But your dot-com journals are all dead. Nowadays you're a blogger. You're an influence peddler and you spread rumors for a living.” Massimo shrugged, because he didn't think he was insulting me. “So: shut up! Just do what you always do! That's all I'm asking.”

That might be all that he was asking, but my whole business was in asking. “Who created that chip?” I asked him. “I know it wasn't you. You know a lot about tech investment, but you're not Leonardo da Vinci.”

“No, I'm not Leonardo.” He emptied his glass.

“Look, I know that you're not even ‘Massimo Montaldo'—whoever that is. I'll do a lot to get news out on my blog. But I'm not going to act as your cut-out in a scheme like this! That's totally unethical! Where did you steal that chip? Who made it? What are they, Chinese super-engineers in some bunker under Beijing?”

Massimo was struggling not to laugh at me. “I can't reveal that. Could we have another round? Maybe a sandwich? I need a nice toasty pancetta.”

I got the waiter's attention. I noted that the TV star's boyfriend had shown up. Her boyfriend was not her husband. Unfortunately, I was not in the celebrity tabloid business. It
wasn't the first time I'd missed a good bet by consorting with computer geeks.

“So you're an industrial spy,” I told him. “And you must be Italian to boot, because you're always such a patriot about it. Okay: so you stole those plans somewhere. I won't ask you how or why. But let me give you some good advice: no sane man would leak that to Olivetti. Olivetti's a consumer outfit. They make pretty toys for cute secretaries. A memristor chip is dynamite.”

Massimo was staring raptly at the TV blonde as he awaited his sandwich.

“Massimo, pay attention. If you leak something that advanced, that radical…a chip like that could change the world's military balance of power. Never mind Olivetti. Big American spy agencies with three letters in their names will come calling.”

Massimo scratched his dirty scalp and rolled his eyes in derision. “Are you so terrorized by the CIA? They don't read your sorry little one-man tech blog.”

This crass remark irritated me keenly. “Listen to me, boy genius: do you know what the CIA does here in Italy? We're their ‘rendition' playground. People vanish off the streets.”

“Anybody can ‘vanish off the streets.' I do that all the time.”

I took out my Moleskin notebook and my shiny Rotring technical pen. I placed them both on the Elena's neat little marble table. Then I slipped them both back inside my jacket. “Massimo, I'm trying hard to be sensible about this. Your snotty attitude is not helping your case with me.”

With an effort, my source composed himself. “It's all very simple,” he lied. “I've been here a while, and now I'm tired of this place. So I'm leaving. I want to hand the future of electronics to an Italian company. With no questions asked and no strings attached. You won't help me do that simple thing?”

“No, of course I won't! Not under conditions like these. I don't know where you got that data, what, how, when, whom, or why…I don't even know who you are! Do I look like that kind of idiot? Unless you tell me your story, I can't trust you.”

He made that evil gesture: I had no balls. Twenty years ago—well, twenty-five—and we would have stepped outside the bar. Of course I was angry with him—but I also knew he was about to crack. My source was drunk and he was clearly in trouble. He didn't need a fist-fight with a journalist. He needed confession.

Massimo put a bold sneer on his face, watching himself in one of the Elena's tall spotted mirrors. “If this tiny gadget is too big for your closed mind, then I've got to find another blogger! A blogger with some guts!”

“Great. Sure. Go do that. You might try Beppe Grillo.”

Massimo tore his gaze from his own reflection. “That washed-up TV comedian? What does he know about technology?”

“Try Berlusconi, then. He owns all the television stations and half the Italian Internet. Prime Minister Berlusconi is just the kind of hustler you need. He'll free you from all your troubles. He'll make you Minister of something.”

Massimo lost all patience. “I don't need that! I've been to a lot of versions of Italy. Yours is a complete disgrace! I don't know how you people get along with yourselves!”

Now the story was tearing loose. I offered an encouraging nod. “How many ‘versions of Italy' do you need, Massimo?”

“I have sixty-four versions of Italy.” He patted his thick laptop. “Got them all right here.”

I humored him. “Only sixty-four?”

His tipsy face turned red. “I had to borrow CERN's supercomputers to calculate all those coordinates! Thirty-two Italies were too few! A hundred twenty-eight…I'd never have the time to visit all those! And as for
your
Italy…well…I wouldn't be here at all, if it wasn't for that Turinese girl.”

“Cherchez la femme,” I told him. “That's the oldest trouble-story in the world.”

“I did her some favors,” he admitted, mournfully twisting his wineglass. “Like with you. But much more so.”

I felt lost, but I knew that his story was coming. Once I'd coaxed it out of him, I could put it into better order later.

“So, tell me: what did she do to you?”

“She dumped me,” he said. He was telling me the truth,
but with a lost, forlorn, bewildered air, like he couldn't believe it himself. “She dumped me and she married the President of France.” Massimo glanced up, his eyelashes wet with grief. “I don't blame her. I know why she did that. I'm a very handy guy for a woman like her, but Mother of God, I'm not the President of France!”

“No, no, you're not the President of France,” I agreed. The President of France was a hyperactive Hungarian Jewish guy who liked to sing karaoke songs. President Nicolas Sarkozy was an exceedingly unlikely character, but he was odd in a very different way from Massimo Montaldo.