The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Finisterra - DAVID MOLES

  1. ENCANTADA

  2. THE FLYING ARCHIPELAGO

  3. THE STEEL BIRD

  4. THE KILLING GROUND

  5. THE AERONAUTS

  6. THE CITY OF THE DEAD

  7. THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

  8. THE PROFESSIONALS

  9. FINISTERRA

  Lighting Out - KEN MACLEOD

  An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away - JOHN BARNES

  Saving Tiamaat - GWYNETH JONES

  Of Late I Dreamt of Venus - JAMES VAN PELT

  Verthandi’s Ring - IAN MCDONALD

  Sea Change - UNA MCCORMACK

  The Sky Is Large and the Earth Is Small - CHRIS ROBERSON

  WATER-DRAGON YEAR, TWENTY-EIGHTH YEAR OF THE KANGXI EMPEROR

  Glory - GREG EGAN

  1

  2

  3

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Against the Current - ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Alien Archeology - NEAL ASHER

  The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate - TED CHIANG

  THE TALE OF THE FORTUNATE ROPE-MAKER

  THE TALE OF THE WEAVER WHO STOLE FROM HIMSELF

  THE TALE OF THE WIFE AND HER LOVER

  Beyond the Wall - JUSTIN STANCHFIELD

  Kiosk - BRUCE STERLING

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  Last Contact - STEPHEN BAXTER

  MARCH 15

  JUNE 5

  OCTOBER 14

  The Sledge-Maker’s Daughter - ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  Sanjeev and Robotwallah - IAN MCDONALD

  The Skysailor’s Tale - MICHAEL SWANWICK

  Of Love and Other Monsters - VANDANA SINGH

  Steve Fever - GREG EGAN

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Hellfire at Twilight - KAGE BAKER

  The Immortals of Atlantis - BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Nothing Personal - PAT CADIGAN

  Tideline - ELIZABETH BEAR

  The Accord - KEITH BROOKE

  1. TISH GOLDENHAWK

  2. ER-JIAN-DIE

  3. TISH GOLDENHAWK

  4. ER-JIAN-DIE

  5. TISH GOLDENHAWK

  Laws of Survival - NANCY KRESS

  The Mists of Time - TOM PURDOM

  Craters - KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  The Prophet of Flores - TED KOSMATKA

  Stray - BENJAMIN ROSENBAUM DAVID ACKERT

  Roxie - ROBERT REED

  Dark Heaven - GREGORY BENFORD

  Summation: 2007

  Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following materials:

  ALSO BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  Honorable Mentions: 2007

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper; Ellen Datlow; Gordon Van Gelder; Peter Crowther; Nicolas Gevers; Jonathan Strahan; Mark Pontin; Farah Mendlesohn; Ian Whates; Mike Resnick; Andy Cox; Jeste de Vries; Robert Wexler; Eric T. Reynolds; George Mann; Peter Tennant; Susan Marie Groppi; Karen Meisner; John Joseph Adams; Wendy S. Delmater; Jed Hartman; Rich Horton; Mark R. Kelly; Andrew Wilson; Damien Broderick; Gary Turner; Chris Roberson; Ellen Asher; Andy Wheeler; Lou Anders; Cory Doctorow; Patrick Swenson; Bridget McKenna; Marti McKenna; Jay Lake; William Shaffer; Sheila Williams; Brian Bieniowski; Trevor Quachri; Jayme Lynn Blascke; Alastair Reynolds; Michael Swanwick; Ken MacLeod; Stephen Baxter; Pat Cadigan; Kristine Kathryn Rusch; Nancy Kress; Kage Baker; Greg Egan; John Barnes; Una McCormack; Ted Kosmatka; Eileen Gunn; Paolo Bacigalupi; Elizabeth Bear; Jack Skillingstead; Keith Brooke; Paul McAuley; Robert Reed; Justin Stanchfield; James Van Pelt; Vandana Singh; Kathleen Ann Goonan; Cat Sparks; Andy Robertson; Michael Bishop; Tim Pratt; William Sanders; Lawrence Watt-Evans; Gregory Benford; David Hartwell; Ginjer Buchanan; Susan Allison; Shawna McCarthy; Kelly Link; Gavin Grant; John Klima; John O’Neill; Rodger Turner; Stuart Mayne; John Kenny; Edmund Schubert; Tehani Wessely; Tehani Croft; Karl Johanson; Sally Beasley; Jason Sizemore; Sue Miller; David Lee Summers; Christopher M. Cevasco; Tyree Campbell; Andrew Hook; Vaughne Lee Hansen; Mark Watson; Sarah Lumnah; and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick.

  Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, $60 in the United States for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit card orders [510] 339 9198), was used as an invaluable reference source throughout the Summation. Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), edited by Mark R. Kelly, has also become a key reference source.

  Finisterra

  DAVID MOLES

  New writer David Moles has sold fiction to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Polyphony, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Say, Flytrap, and elsewhere. He coedited with Jay Lake, 2004’s well-received “retro-pulp” anthology All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, as well as coediting with Susan Marie Groppi the original anthology Twenty Epics. He’s had stories in our Twenty-second, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth Annual Collections.

  In the vivid and fast-paced story that follows, he takes us to a world of living, floating islands in the sky, to teach us the uncomfortable lesson that you’re never safe from predation no matter how big you are. Or from your own past, either.

  1. ENCANTADA

  Bianca Nazario stands at the end of the world.

  The firmament above is as blue as the summer skies of her childhood, mirrored in the waters of la caldera; but where the skies she remembers were bounded by mountains, here on Sky there is no real horizon, only a line of white cloud. The white line shades into a diffuse grayish fog that, as Bianca looks down, grows progressively murkier, until the sky directly below is thoroughly dark and opaque.

  She remembers what Dinh told her about the ways Sky could kill her. With a large enough parachute, Bianca imagines, she could fall for hours, drifting through the layered clouds, before finding her end in heat or pressure or the jaws of some monstrous denizen of the deep air.

  If this should go wrong, Bianca cannot imagine a better way to die.

  Bianca works her way out a few hundred meters along the base of one of Encantada’s ventral fins, stopping when the dry red dirt beneath her feet begins to give way to scarred gray flesh. She takes a last look around: at the pall of smoke obscuring the zaratán’s tree-lined dorsal ridge, at the fin she stands on, curving out and down to its delicate-looking tip, kilometers away. Then she knots her scarf around her skirted ankles and shrugs into the paraballoon harness, still warm from the bungalow’s fabricators. As the harness tightens itself around her, she takes a deep breath, filling her lungs. The wind from the burning camp smells of wood smoke and pine resin, enough to overwhelm the taint of blood from the killing ground.

  Blessed Virgin, she prays, be my witness: this is no suicide.

  This is a prayer for a miracle.

  She leans forward.

  She falls.

  2. THE FLYING ARCHIPELAGO

  The boatlike anemopter that Valadez had sent for them had a cruising speed of just less than the speed of sound, which in this part of Sky’s atmosphere meant about nine hundred kilometers per hour. The speed, Bianca thought, might have been calculated to bring home the true size of Sky, the impossible immensity of it. It had taken the better part of their first day’s travel for the anemopter’s p
oint of departure, the ten-kilometer, billion-ton vacuum balloon Transient Meridian, to drop from sight—the dwindling golden droplet disappearing, not over the horizon, but into the haze. From that Bianca estimated that the bowl of clouds visible through the subtle blurring of the anemopter’s static fields covered an area about the size of North America.

  She heard a plastic clattering on the deck behind her and turned to see one of the anemopter’s crew, a globular, brown-furred alien with a collection of arms like furry snakes, each arm tipped with a mouth or a round and curious eye. The firija were low-gravity creatures; the ones Bianca had seen on her passage from Earth had tumbled joyously through the Caliph of Baghdad’s inner-ring spaces like so many radially symmetrical monkeys. The three aboard the anemopter, in Sky’s heavier gravity, had to make do with spindly-legged walking machines. There was a droop in their arms that was both comical and melancholy.

  “Come forward,” this one told Bianca in fractured Arabic, its voice like an ensemble of reed pipes. She thought it was the one that called itself Ismaíl. “Make see archipelago.”

  She followed it forward to the anemopter’s rounded prow. The naturalist, Erasmus Fry, was already there, resting his elbows on the rail, looking down.

  “Pictures don’t do them justice, do they?” he said.

  Bianca went to the rail and followed the naturalist’s gaze. She did her best to maintain a certain stiff formality around Fry; from their first meeting aboard Transient Meridian she’d had the idea that it might not be good to let him get too familiar. But when she saw what Fry was looking at, the mask slipped for a moment; she couldn’t help a sharp, quick intake of breath.

  Fry chuckled. “To stand on the back of one,” he said, “to stand in a valley and look up at the hills and know that the ground under your feet is supported by the bones of a living creature—there’s nothing else like it.” He shook his head.

  At this altitude they were above all but the highest-flying of the thousands of beasts that made up Septentrionalis Archipelago. Bianca’s eyes tried to make the herd (or flock, or school) of zaratánes into other things: a chain of islands, yes, if she concentrated on the colors, the greens and browns of forests and plains, the grays and whites of the snowy highlands; a fleet of ships, perhaps, if she instead focused on the individual shapes, the keel ridges, the long, translucent fins, ribbed like Chinese sails.

  The zaratánes of the archipelago were more different from one another than the members of a flock of birds or a pod of whales, but still there was a symmetry, a regularity of form, the basic anatomical plan—equal parts fish and mountain—repeated throughout, in fractal detail from the great old shape of Zaratán Finisterra, a hundred kilometers along the dorsal ridge, down to the merely hill-sized bodies of the nameless younger beasts. When she took in the archipelago as a whole, it was impossible for Bianca not to see the zaratánes as living things.

  “Nothing else like it,” Fry repeated.

  Bianca turned reluctantly from the view to look at Fry. The naturalist spoke Spanish with a flawless Miami accent, courtesy, he’d said, of a Consilium language module. Bianca was finding it hard to judge the ages of extrañados, particularly the men, but in Fry’s case she thought he might be ten years older than Bianca’s own forty, and unwilling to admit it—or ten years younger, and in the habit of treating himself very badly. On her journey here she’d met cyborgs and foreigners and artificial intelligences and several sorts of alien—some familiar, at least from media coverage of the hajj, and some strange—but the extrañados bothered her the most. It was hard to come to terms with the idea of humans born off Earth, humans who had never been to Earth or even seen it; humans who often had no interest in it.

  “Why did you leave here, Mr. Fry?” she asked.

  Fry laughed. “Because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life out here.” With a hand, he swept the horizon. “Stuck on some godforsaken floating island for years on end, with no one but researchers and feral refugees to talk to, nowhere to go for fun but some slum of a balloon station, nothing but a thousand kilometers of air between you and Hell?” He laughed again. “You’d leave, too, Nazario, believe me.”

  “Maybe I would,” Bianca said. “But you’re back.”

  “I’m here for the money,” Fry said. “Just like you.”

  Bianca smiled and said nothing.

  “You know,” Fry said after a little while, “they have to kill the zaratánes to take them out of here.” He looked at Bianca and smiled, in a way that was probably meant to be ghoulish. “There’s no atmosphere ship big enough to lift a zaratán in one piece—even a small one. The poachers deflate them—gut them—flatten them out and roll them up. And even then, they throw out almost everything but the skin and bones.”

  “Strange,” Bianca mused. Her mask was back in place. “There was a packet of material on the zaratánes with my contract; I watched most of it on the voyage. According to the packet, the Consilium considers the zaratánes a protected species.”

  Fry looked uneasy. Now it was Bianca’s turn to chuckle.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Fry,” she said. “I may not know exactly what it is Mr. Valadez is paying me to do, but I’ve never had any illusion that it was legal.”

  Behind her, the firija made a fluting noise that might have been laughter.

  3. THE STEEL BIRD

  When Bianca was a girl, the mosque of Punta Aguila was the most prominent feature in the view from her fourth-floor window, a sixteenth-century structure of tensegrity cables and soaring catenary curves, its spreading white wings vaguely—but only vaguely—recalling the bird that gave the city its name. The automation that controlled the tension of the cables and adjusted the mosque’s wings to match the shifting winds was hidden within the cables themselves, and was very old. Once, after the hurricane in the time of Bianca’s grandfather, it had needed adjusting, and the old men of the ayuntamiento had been forced to send for extrañado technicians, at an expense so great that the jizyah of Bianca’s time was still paying for it.

  But Bianca rarely thought of that. Instead she would spend long hours surreptitiously sketching those white wings, calculating the weight of the structure and the tension of the cables, wondering what it would take to make the steel bird fly.

  Bianca’s father could probably have told her, but she never dared to ask. Raúl Nazario de Arenas was an aeronautical engineer, like the seven generations before him, and flight was the Nazarios’ fortune; fully a third of the aircraft that plied the skies over the Rio Pícaro were types designed by Raúl or his father or his wife’s father, on contract to the great moro trading and manufacturing families that were Punta Aguila’s truly wealthy.

  Because he worked for other men, and because he was a Christian, Raúl Nazario would never be as wealthy as the men who employed him, but his profession was an ancient and honorable one, providing his family with a more than comfortable living. If Raúl Nazario de Arenas thought of the mosque at all, it was only to mutter about the jizyah from time to time—but never loudly, because the Nazarios, like the other Christians of Punta Aguila, however valued, however ancient their roots, knew that they lived there only on sufferance.

  But Bianca would sketch the aircraft, too, the swift gliders and lumbering flying boats and stately dirigibles, and these drawings she did not have to hide; in fact for many years her father would encourage her, explaining this and that aspect of their construction, gently correcting errors of proportion and balance in Bianca’s drawings; would let her listen in while he taught the family profession to her brothers, Jesús the older, Pablo the younger.

  This lasted until shortly before Bianca’s quinceañera, when Jesús changed his name to Walíd and married a moro’s daughter, and Bianca’s mother delivered a lecture concerning the difference between what was proper for a child and what was proper for a young Christian woman with hopes of one day making a good marriage.

  It was only a handful of years later that Bianca’s father died, leaving a teenaged Pablo a
t the helm of his engineering business; and only Bianca’s invisible assistance and the pity of a few old clients had kept contracts and money coming into the Nazario household.

  By the time Pablo was old enough to think he could run the business himself, old enough to marry the daughter of a musical instrument-maker from Tierra Ceniza, their mother was dead, Bianca was thirty, and even if her dowry had been half her father’s business, there was not a Christian man in Rio Pícaro who wanted it, or her.

  And then one day Pablo told her about the extrañado contract that had been brought to the ayuntamiento, a contract that the ayuntamiento and the Guild had together forbidden the Christian engineers of Punta Aguila to bid on—a contract for a Spanish-speaking aeronautical engineer to travel a very long way from Rio Pícaro and be paid a very large sum of money indeed.

  Three months later Bianca was in Quito, boarding an elevator car. In her valise was a bootleg copy of her father’s engineering system, and a contract with the factor of a starship called the Caliph of Baghdad, for passage to Sky.

  4. THE KILLING GROUND

  The anemopter’s destination was a zaratán called Encantada, smaller than the giant Finisterra but still nearly forty kilometers from nose to tail, and eight thousand meters from gray-white keel to forested crest. From a distance of a hundred kilometers, Encantada was like a forested mountain rising from a desert plain, the clear air under its keel as dreamlike as a mirage. On her pocket system, Bianca called up pictures from Sky’s network of the alpine ecology that covered the hills and valleys of Encantada’s flanks: hardy grasses and small warm-blooded creatures and tall evergreens with spreading branches, reminding her of the pines and redwoods in the mountains west of Rio Pícaro.

  For the last century or so Encantada had been keeping company with Zaratán Finisterra, holding its position above the larger beast’s eastern flank. No one, apparently, knew the reason. Fry being the expert, Bianca had expected him to at least have a theory. He didn’t even seem interested in the question.