The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Read online

  She stood at the lake’s edge for centuries.

  “She’s awake.”

  Soft light fell all around, like snow. Time passed. Darkness. Light again. I’m under the snow, she thought. Darkness.

  “She’s awake.”

  Her arms were moved. Light was provided. A question was asked. A tube was pulled from her throat. She was hurt. All very passive. Darkness.

  “She’s awake.”

  Elizabeth forced her eyes open. An older man sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand. Beside him stood a medical technician in a lab coat. The man holding her hand had a haggard face. Worry lines across his forehead. A little baggy in the jowls. It wasn’t until she blinked her vision clear that she could see his eyes.

  “Henry?”

  He mouthed a silent, “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  He patted the top of her hand. “Six hundred years.”

  She tried to sit up. Before she was halfway, though, her calves cramped.

  “Probably easier to lay still right now,” Henry said. “The doctors here have some wonderful treatments. Since you’ve made it this far, you should be up soon.”

  Breathing softly, Elizabeth considered what he said for a moment. “There was a doubt?”

  “Big one for a long time.”

  The ache in her legs dwindled to a dim reminder, no worse than the one she felt in her neck and back and chest. She squeezed his hand. “Henry, I’m glad you’re here.”

  “You can take care of her now,” he said to the lab-coated man.

  For the next two days, doctors came and went. They wheeled her from one examining room to the next. Most of the time she couldn’t tell what they were doing. Strange instruments. Peculiar instructions. Doctors nodding to one another over results that didn’t make sense to her. Even their conversation confused her, speaking with a dialect too thick for her to decipher. Although she did have one moment of relief when one asked her to stick out her tongue and say, “Ahh.” The tongue depressor even appeared to be made from wood.

  They weren’t subservient, however. Brisk, efficient, and friendly, but not servile. When she saw Henry again, she asked him about it. He met her in a sitting room where other patients sat reading or visiting quietly. The medical techs insisted she stay in a wheelchair, although she walked quite well in a physical therapy session earlier in the day.

  “All that I’ve learned from our strange journey, Elizabeth, is that time changes everything. You’re not a religion anymore. Actually, now you’re kind of a curiosity. I expect someone from the history guild will want to talk with you. Marvelous opportunity, you know, to actually chat face-to-face with the Elizabeth Audrey.”

  Something in the way he said it caught her ear. “What about my holdings? What about the corporations?”

  Henry covered her hand with his own. “Gone, I’m afraid. Long, long gone now.”

  The tears came unbidden. She thought of herself as a strong person. Finally, she shook the tremors off and dried her face. “We need to get to work then to get it back. How close are we to finishing the project?”

  Henry smiled. She’d always liked his eyes, but now the years in his expression set them off beautifully. “I’ll let you judge for yourself.”

  When he stood, a medical tech who had been waiting a few seats away, rushed over to help.

  “That’s okay. I’ll take her,” Henry said.

  “Thank you, sir,” said the tech. “I’ll be close if you need me.”

  Elizabeth looked from the tech to Henry and back again. She recognized a power order when she saw one. “How old are you, Henry? How long have you been awake this time?”

  He turned her chair toward the exit and began rolling her toward the door. “Twenty-two years. I’m sixty-two now.”

  The door opened into a wide space. A ceiling a hundred feet above enclosed the multiple levels and balconies she saw on the other side. Pedestrians walked purposefully to and fro.

  “What is this, a mall?”

  “More like a business park, but you’ve got the right idea.”

  A pair of women dressed in dark, functional, leather long-coats walked past them. One laughed at something the other said. Pale clean circles surrounded their eyes in faces that were uniformly filthy.

  “Prospectors do a lot of trading here,” said Henry, as way of explanation.

  He wheeled her to a garage a level lower and helped her into a car. This one didn’t appear nearly as heavy as the truck she’d ridden in with him what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “It’s time for you to see Venus in its glory,” said Henry.

  A half hour later he parked the car on what might have been the same hill he’d taken her to before, but now the burgundy sun rested low on the opposite horizon, and where before the landscape was marked by wind, rock and water, plants grew everywhere. Thick-stemmed vines clung to the rocks beside the road. Low bushes dotted the slope to the water’s edge. Here and there, short pine-looking trees poked from the soil, their trunks all leaning the same way and their branches pointing away from the lake. And there was color everywhere. Not only were there the grey and black rocks she remembered, but also tans and browns and yellows. Across the face of the hill to their left, a copper sheen caught the sun, and on the hill to their right, the mossy clumps growing between the rough stones were a vibrant blue.

  But no heather covered the hills. Where she imagined a world with waterfalls, there were only sharp-edged stones. Where she hoped for soft yellow light on fields of flowers, there was a red sun, bloat as a toad on the horizon. She saw a rough land.

  A figure dressed in a leather long-coat, goggles covering his eyes, walked past their car, saw Henry, and tipped his leather hat as he continued on toward the lake where a small complex of buildings serviced two long docks and a dozen moored boats.

  Elizabeth tried to contain her disappointment. “This is not even close to what I worked so hard for. I wanted a world that was what Earth should have been, what it could have been if we hadn’t ruined it. Venus could have been paradise!” The outburst left her short of breath. In the car’s confines, her breathing sounded loud and harsh. “I had a brother …”

  “You were an only child.” Henry sounded quizzical.

  “No, I …” Panic rose in Elizabeth’s throat. She did have a brother, didn’t she? It took a second for her to sort it out for herself. A thousand years of dreaming could feel more convincing than a few decades of reality.

  “We have to get out of here. Take me back.”

  “Wait,” said Henry. He reclined his seat a little before folding his hands across his chest. He watched the sun setting on the lake’s other side. Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, her heart thudding hard.

  The sun slipped deeper into the hills behind the lake. Elizabeth relaxed. Could she get the money back again? She knew no one. The game was surely different now. A wind scurried across the water, rocked the boats, and then rushed up the road to toss sand against the car. Shadows lengthened. She felt so tired, so truly, truly old.

  “You know, I talked to the doctors before I went to sleep the last time. It took considerable persuasion on my part, but I discovered you’d told them to work on me again. For a while, I thought the best action would be to go to your bed and kick out the plug. It was tempting.”

  Henry didn’t move while he spoke. His hands stayed still as he watched the setting sun.

  Elizabeth floundered for a moment, unsure of how to reply. When they’d started this project a month ago (No, a thousand years ago, she thought), he would have never spoken to her like this, and she would have had no trouble telling him what she thought, but this wasn’t the same Henry, not by any measure. “I’m sorry, Henry. I didn’t think you would mind, really. They were changes for your own good.”

  “I loved you once, but you have a mean sense of perfection, Liza.”

  The sun’s last glimmer dropped out of sight. “Watch now,” he said. The horizon glowed like a campfire coal, then, a
s sudden as a sunset can be sudden, low clouds that had been invisible until now picked up red edges, their middles pulsating cherry gold, and the air from the horizon line all the way to nearly directly overhead turned a deep purple with scarlet streaks, changing shades even as she realized they were there.

  A half hour later, still in silence, they watched. Stars appeared in the moonless sky. A boat left the quay, trailing a bioluminescent streak behind it.

  Elizabeth found she was crying again. “My, god, it’s beautiful, Henry, but it’s not what I was trying to make. It’s not better than Earth.”

  “It’s Venus,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be better.”

  By now, night had completely fallen. There were no boardroom meetings to attend. No calls to make. No projects to shepherd to success. Elizabeth felt very small sitting in the car with Henry. Her muscles ached. She suspected she would never be physically as capable as she once was. A thousand years of long sleep had taken their toll.

  “What about you, Henry. You said you loved me once. Will you stay with me?”

  She couldn’t tell in the dark if he turned to look at her or not.

  “You couldn’t shape me into what you wanted either.”

  He started the car, which turned on the dashboard controls, but made no noise. The light revealed his hands on the wheel.

  “My days of shaping are done, Henry.”

  He drove them the long way home, over hills and around the lake. They didn’t speak. Neither knew what to say to the other yet.

  Verthandi’s Ring

  IAN MCDONALD

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and elsewhere. In 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, a chapbook novella Tendeleo’s Story, Ares Express, and Cyberabad, as well as two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking In Tongues. His novel, River of Gods, was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2005, a novella drawn from it, “The Little Goddess,” was a finalist for the Hugo and the Nebula, and a novelette set in the same milieu, “The Djinn’s Wife,” won him his first Hugo Award this year. His most recent book is another new novel that’s receiving critical raves, Brasyl, and coming up is a new collection, Cyberabad Days. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. He has a Web site at www.lysator.liu.se/^unicorn/mcdonald/.

  In the brilliant story that follows, one with enough dazzling idea-content crammed densely into it to fuel many other author’s 800-page novel, he shows us that total war between competing interstellar races will be slow and bloody and vast, and, well—total. With no room left in the galaxy—or even the universe—for the losing side.

  After thirteen subjective minutes and five-hundred-and-twenty-eight years, the Clade battleship Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity returned to the dying solar system. The Oort cloud web pulled the crew off; skating around the gravity-wells of hot, fat, gas giants and the swelling primary, the battleship skipped out of the system at 30 percent light-speed into the deep dark. Small, fast, cheap, the battleships were disposable: a football of construction nanoprocessors and a pload crew of three embedded in the heart of a comet, a comet it would slowly consume over its half millennium of flight. So cheap and nasty was this ship that it was only given a name because the crew got bored five (subjective) minutes into the slow-time simulation of Sofreendi desert monasticism that was their preferred combat interface.

  The Oort cloud web caught the crew, shied them to the construction yards skeined through the long, cold loops of the cometary halo, which flicked them in a stutter of light-speed to the Fat Gas Giant relay point, where the eight hundred habitats of the new Clade daughter-fleet formed a pearl belly-chain around the planet; then to the Cladal Heart-world herself, basking in the coronal energies of the senile, grasping, swollen sun, and finally into fresh new selves.

  “Hi, guys, we’re back,” said the crew of Ever-Fragrant Perfume as they stepped from the bronze gates of the Soulhouse, down the marble staircase into the thronged Maidan of All Luminous Passion. Irony was still a tradable commodity on this innermost tier of the hundred concentric spheres of the Heart-world, even if not one woman or man or machine or beastli turned its head. Battleship crews knew better than to expect laurels and accolades when they resouled after a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years on the frontline. Word of Ever-Fragrant Perfume’s victory had arrived almost three centuries before. A signal victory; a triumph that would be studied and taught across the military colleges and academies of the Art of Defense for millennia to come. A classic Rose of Jericho strategy.

  Early warning seeds sown like thistledown across half a light-millennium had felt the stroke of the Enemy across their attenuated slow senses and woke. Communication masers hastily assembled from the regoliths of cold moons beamed analyses back to the Heart-world, deep in its centuries-long task of biosphere-salvation: eighty thousand habitats on the move. The Clade battle fleet launched instantly. After two hundred and twenty years, there was not a nanosecond to lose. Thirty-five ships were lost: systems malfunctions, breakdowns in the drives that kept them accelerating eternally, decades-long subtle errors of navigation that left them veering light-years wide of the target gravity-well, loss of deceleration mass. Sudden, total, catastrophic failure. Five hundred years later, Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity alone arrived behind the third moon of the vagrant gas giant, which wandered between stars, a gravitational exile, and began to construct the rain of antimatter warheads and set them into orbit around the wanderer. A quick plan, but a brilliant one. A Rose of Jericho plan. As Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity accelerated away from the bright new nebula, its hindward sensors observed eighty thousand Enemy worlds plough into the bow wave of accelerated gas at 40 percent light-speed and evaporate. Twenty trillion sentients died. War in space-time is slow and vast and bloody. When the species fight, there is no mercy.

  In the dying echoes of the culture-fleet, the three assassins of Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity caught a vector. The fleet had not been aimed on a genocidal assault on the Clade Heart-worlds clustered around the worlds of Seydatryah, slowly becoming postbiological as the sun choked and bloated on its own gas. A vector, and a whisper: Verthandi’s Ring.

  But now they were back, huzzah! Harvest Moon and Scented Coolabar and Rose of Jericho, greatest tactician of her flesh-generation. Except that when they turned around on the steps of the Soulhouse to bicker among themselves (as they had bickered the entire time-slowed twenty-six minutes of the transtellar flight, and the time-accelerated two hundred years of the mission at the black wanderer) about where to go and do and be and funk first.

  “Where’s Rose? Where’s the Rose?” said Harvest Moon, whose rank approximated most closely to the historical role of captain.

  Only two resouls stood on the marble steps overlooking the Maidan of All Luminous Pleasure.

  “Shit,” said Scented Coolabar, whose station corresponded to that of engineer. A soul-search returned no trace of their crewmate on this level. In this innermost level, the heart of the heart, a sphere of quantum nanoprocessors ten kilometers in diameter, such a search was far-reaching—the equivalent of every virtual mouse hole and house-shrine—and instantaneous. And blank. The two remaining crew members of Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity understood too well what that meant. “We’re going to have to do the meat thing.”

  Newly incarnated, Harvest Moon and Scented Coolabar stood upon the Heaven Plain of Hoy. Clouds black as regret bruised the up-curved horizon. Lightning fretted along the edge of the world.
Harvest Moon shivered at a fresh sensation; stringent but not unpleasant—not in that brief frisson, though her new meat told her that in excess it might become not just painful, but dangerous.

  “What was that?” she commented, observing the small pimples rising on her space-black skin. She wore a close-to-species-modal body: female in this incarnation; elegant, hairless, attenuated, the flesh of a minimalist esthete.

  “I think it was the wind,” said Scented Coolabar who, as ever, played against her captain’s type and so wore the fresh flesh of a Dukkhim, one of the distinctive humanesque subspecies that had risen after a mass-extinction event on the world of Kethrem, near-lost in the strata of Clade history. She was small and broad, all ovals and slits, and possessed of a great mane of elaborately decorated hair that grew to the small of the back and down to the elbows. The crew of the Ever-Fragrant Perfume of Divinity was incarnate mere minutes, and already Harvest Moon wanted to play, play, play with her engineer’s wonderful mane. “Maybe you should have put some clothes on.” Now thunder spilled down the titled bowl of the world to shake the small stone stupa of the incarnaculum. “I suppose we had better get started.” The Dukkhim had ever been a dour, pragmatic subspecies.

  Harvest Moon and Scented Coolabar spent the night in a live-skin yurt blistered from the earth of Hoy. The thunder cracked, the yurt flapped and boomed in the wind, and the plain of Hoy lowed with storm-spooked grazebeastlis, but none so loud nor so persistent as Harvest Moon’s moans and groans that her long black limbs were aching, burning; her body was dying, dying.

  “Some muscular pain is to be expected in the first hours of incarnation,” chided the yurt gently. “As muscle tone develops these pains generally pass within a few days.”

  “Days!” wailed Harvest Moon. “Pload me back up right now.”

  “I can secrete general analgesia,” said the tent. So until the lights came up all across the world on the skyroof ten kilometers overhead, Harvest Moon suckled sweetly on pain-numb milk from the yurt’s fleshy teat, and, in the morning, she and Scented Coolabar set out in great, low-gravity bounds across the Heaven Plain of Hoy in search of Rose of Jericho. This innermost of the Heart-world meat-levels had long been the preserve of ascetics and pilgrim souls; the ever up-curving plain symbolic, perhaps, of the soul’s quest for its innate spiritual manifestation, or maybe because of its proximity to the virtual realms, above the skyroof, where the ploads constructed universe within universe, each bigger than the one that contained it. Yet this small grassy sphere was big enough to contain tens of thousands of pelerines and stylites, coenobites and saddhus, adrift in the ocean of grass.