The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Read online

Something large and dark—and fast—passed over the camp, and there was a white flash from the cargo-lifter, and screams.

  In the wake of the dark thing came a sudden sensation of heaviness, as if the flank of Encantada were the deck of a ship riding a rogue wave, leaping up beneath Bianca’s feet. Her knees buckled and she was thrown to the ground, pressed into the grass by twice, three times her normal weight.

  The feeling passed as quickly as the wardens’ dark vehicle. Ismaíl, whose walker had kept its footing, helped Bianca up.

  “What was that?” Bianca demanded, bruises making her wince as she tried to brush the dirt and grass from her skirts.

  “Antigravity ship,” Ismaíl said. “Same principle like starship wave propagation drive.”

  “Antigravity?” Bianca stared after the ship, but it was already gone, over Encantada’s dorsal ridge. “If you coños have antigravity, then why in God’s name have we been sitting here playing with catapults and balloons?”

  “Make very expensive,” said Ismaíl. “Minus two suns exotic mass, same like starship.” The firija waved two of its free eyes. “Why do? Plenty got cheap way to fly.”

  Bianca realized that despite the remarks Valadez had made on the poverty of Sky, she had been thinking of all extrañados and aliens—with their ships and machines, their familiar way with sciences that in Rio Pícaro were barely more than a whisper of forbidden things hidden behind the walls of the rich moros’ palaces—as wealthy, and powerful, and free. Now, feeling like a fool for not having understood sooner, she realized that between the power of the Consilium and people like Valadez there was a gap as wide as, if not wider than, the gap between those rich moros and the most petty Ali Baba in the backstreets of Punta Aguila.

  She glanced toward the airfield. Aerial tugs were lifting off; anemopters were blurring into motion. But as she watched, one of the tugs opened up into a ball of green fire. An anemopter made it as far as the killing ground before being hit by something that made its static fields crawl briefly with purple lightnings and then collapse, as the craft’s material body crashed down in an explosion of earth.

  And all the while the warden’s recorded voice was everywhere and nowhere, repeating its list of instructions and demands.

  “Not anymore, we don’t,” Bianca said to Ismaíl. “We’d better run.”

  The firija raised its gun. “First got kill prisoner.”

  “What?”

  But Ismaíl was already moving, the mechanical legs of the walker surefooted on the broken ground, taking long, swift strides, no longer comical but frighteningly full of purpose.

  Bianca struggled after the firija but quickly fell behind. The surface of the killing ground was rutted and scarred, torn by the earthmoving equipment used to push the offal of the gutted zaratánes over the edge. Bianca supposed grasses had covered it once, but now there was just mud and old blood. Only the certainty that going back would be as bad as going forward kept Bianca moving, slipping and stumbling in reeking muck that was sometimes ankle-deep.

  By the time she got to Dinh’s bungalow, Ismaíl was already gone. The door was ajar.

  Maybe the wardens rescued her, Bianca thought; but she couldn’t make herself believe it.

  She went inside, moving slowly.

  “Edith?”

  No answer; not that Bianca had really expected any.

  She found her in the kitchen, face down, feet toward the door as if she had been shot while trying to run, or hide. From three meters away Bianca could see the neat, black, fist-sized hole in the small of Dinh’s back. She felt no need to get closer.

  Fry’s pocket system was on the floor in the living room, as Bianca had known it would be.

  “You should have waited,” Bianca said to the empty room. “You should have trusted me.”

  She found her valise in Dinh’s bedroom and emptied the contents onto the bed. Dinh did not seem to have touched any of them.

  Bianca’s eyes stung with tears. She glanced again at Fry’s system. He’d left it on purpose, Bianca realized; she’d underestimated him. Perhaps he had been a better person than she herself, all along.

  She looked one more time at the body lying on the kitchen floor.

  “No, you shouldn’t,” she said then. “You shouldn’t have trusted me at all.”

  Then she went back to her own bungalow and took the package out from under the bed.

  9. FINISTERRA

  A hundred meters, two hundred, five hundred—Bianca falls, the wind whipping at her clothes, and the hanging vegetation that covers Encantada’s flanks is a green-brown blur, going gray as it thins, as the zaratán’s body curves away from her. She blinks away the tears brought on by the rushing wind and tries to focus on the monitor panel of the harness. She took it from an off-the-shelf emergency parachute design; surely, she thinks, it must be set to open automatically at some point? But the wind speed indicator is the only one that makes sense; the others—altitude, attitude, rate of descent—are cycling through nonsense in three languages, baffled by the instruments’ inability to find solid ground anywhere below.

  Then Bianca falls out of Encantada’s shadow into the sun, and before she can consciously form the thought, her hand has grasped the emergency handle of the harness and pulled convulsively; and the glassy fabric of the paraballoon is billowing out above her, rippling like water, and the harness is tugging at her, gently but firmly, smart threads reeling themselves quickly out and then slowly in again on their tiny spinnerets.

  After a moment, she catches her breath. She is no longer falling, but flying.

  She wipes the tears from her eyes. To the west, the slopes of Finisterra are bright and impossibly detailed in the low-angle sunlight, a million trees casting a million tiny shadows through the morning’s rapidly dissipating mist.

  She looks up, out through the nearly invisible curve of the paraballoon, and sees that Encantada is burning. She watches it for a long time.

  The air grows warmer, and more damp, too. With a start, Bianca realizes she is falling below Finisterra’s edge. When she designed the paraballoon, Bianca intended for Dinh to fall as far as she safely could, dropping deep into Sky’s atmosphere before firing up the reverse Maxwell pumps, to heat the air in the balloon and lift her back to Finisterra; but it does not look as if there is any danger of pursuit now, from either the poachers or the wardens. Bianca starts the pumps and the paraballoon slows, then begins to ascend.

  As the prevailing wind carries her inland, over a riot of tropical green, and in the distance Bianca sees the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ciudad Perdida, Bianca glances up again at the burning shape of Encantada. She wonders whether she’ll ever know if Valadez was telling the truth.

  Abruptly the jungle below her opens up, and Bianca is flying over cultivated fields, and people are looking up at her in wonder. Without thinking, she has cut the power to the pumps and opened the parachute valve at the top of the balloon.

  She lands hard, hobbled by the scarf still tied around her ankles, and rolls, the paraballoon harness freeing itself automatically in obedience to its original programming. She pulls the scarf loose and stands up, shaking out her torn, stained skirt. Children are already running toward her across the field.

  Savages, Fry said. Refugees. Bianca wonders if all of them speak Valadez’s odd Spanish. She tries to gather her scraps of Arabic, but is suddenly unable to remember anything beyond Salaam alaikum.

  The children—six, eight, ten of them—falter as they approach, stopping five or ten meters away.

  Salaam alaikum, Bianca rehearses silently. Alaikum as-salaam. She takes a deep breath.

  The boldest of the children, a stick-legged boy of eight or ten, takes a few steps closer. He has curly black hair and sun-browned skin, and the brightly colored shirt and shorts he is wearing were probably made by an autofactory on one of the elevator gondolas or vacuum balloon stations, six or seven owners ago. He looks like her brother Pablo, in the old days, before Jesús left.

  Trying
not to look too threatening, Bianca meets his dark eyes.

  “Hola,” she says.

  “Hola,” the boy answers. “¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Es éste su globo?”

  Bianca straightens her back.

  “Yes, it’s my balloon,” she says. “And you may call me Señora Nazario.”

  “If the balloon’s yours,” the boy asks, undaunted, “will you let me fly in it?” Bianca looks out into the eastern sky, dotted with distant zaratánes. There is a vision in her mind, a vision that she thinks maybe Edith Dinh saw: the skies of Sky more crowded than the skies over Rio Pícaro, Septentrionalis Archipelago alive with the bright shapes of dirigibles and gliders, those nameless zaratánes out there no longer uncharted shoals but comforting and familiar landmarks.

  She turns to look at the rapidly collapsing paraballoon, and wonders how much work it would take to inflate it again. She takes out her pocket system and checks it: the design for the hand-built dirigible is still there, and the family automation too.

  This isn’t what she wanted, when she set out from home; but she is still a Nazario, and still an engineer.

  She puts the system away and turns back to the boy.

  “I have a better idea,” she says. “How would you like a balloon of your very own?”

  The boy breaks into a smile.

  Lighting Out

  KEN MACLEOD

  Even in a high-tech posthuman future, taking a flyer on a new venture inevitably involves a certain amount of risk …

  Ken MacLeod graduated with a B.Sc. in zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research in biomechanics at Brunel University, he worked as a computer analyst-programmer in Edinburgh. He’s now a full-time writer, and widely considered to be one of the most exciting new SF writers to emerge in the nineties, his work features an emphasis on politics and economics rare in the New Space Opera, while still maintaining all the wide-screen, high-bit rate, action-packed qualities typical of the form. His first two novels, The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, each won the Prometheus Award. His other books include the novels, The Sky Road, The Cassini Division, Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, Engine City, Newton’s Wake, and Learning the World, plus a novella chapbook, The Human Front. His short fiction was collected in Strange Lizards from Another Galaxy. His most recent book is the novel The Execution Channel. Coming up is a new novel, The Night Sessions. His stories have appeared in our Nineteenth, Twenty-third, and Twenty-fourth Annual Collections. He lives in West Lothian, Scotland, with his wife and children.

  Mother had got into the walls again. Constance Mukgafle kept an eye on her while scrabbling at the back of her desk drawer for the Norton. Her fingers closed around the grip and the trigger. She withdrew the piece slowly, nudging the drawer farther open with the heel of her hand. Then she whipped out the bell-muzzled device and leveled it at the face that had sketched itself in ripples in the paint of her study.

  “Any last words, Mom?” she asked.

  Constance lip-read frantic mouthings.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. She snapped her fingers a couple of times to turn the sound up. “What?”

  “Don’t be so hasty,” her mother said. “I have a business proposition.”

  “Again?” Constance thumbed the antivirus to max.

  “No, really, this time it’s legit—”

  “I’ve heard that one before, too.”

  “You have?” A furrow appeared in the paint above the outlined eyes. “I don’t seem to have the memory.”

  “You wouldn’t,” said Constance. “You’re a cunning sod when you’re all there. Where are you, by the way?”

  “Jupiter orbit, I think,” said her mother. “I’m sorry I can’t be more specific.”

  “Oh, come on,” Constance said, stung. “I wouldn’t try to get at you, even if I could.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” said her mother. “I really don’t know where the rest of me is, but I do know it’s not because I expect you to murder me. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Constance, kicking herself for giving her mother that tiny moral victory. “So what’s the deal?”

  “It’s in the Inner Station,” said her mother. “It’s very simple. The stuff people on the way out take with them is mostly of very little use when they get there. The stuff people on the way in arrive with is usually of very little use here. Each side would be better off with the other side’s stuff. You see the possibilities?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Constance. “And you’re telling me nobody else has? In all this time?”

  “Of course they have,” said her mother. “There’s a whole bazaar out there of swaps and marts and so forth. The point is that nobody’s doing it properly, to get the best value for the goods. Some of the stuff coming down really is worth something here, and all too often it just goes back up the tube again.”

  “Wait a minute.” Constance tried to recall her last economics course. “Maybe it’s not worthwhile for anybody to try.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said her mother. “For most business models, it isn’t. But for a very young person with very low costs, and with instant access—well, light-speed access—to a very old person, someone with centuries of experience, there’s money to be made hand over fist.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “Apart from helping my daughter find her feet?” Her mother looked hurt. “Well, there’s always the chance of something really big coming down the tube. Usable tech, you know? We’d have first dibs on it—and a research and marketing apparatus already in place.”

  Constance thought about it. The old woman was undoubtedly up to something, but going to the Inner Station sounded exciting, the opportunity seemed real, and what did she have to lose?

  “All right,” she said. “Talk to my agent.”

  She fingered a card from her pocket with her free hand and downloaded her mother from the wall.

  “You in?” she asked.

  “Yes,” came a voice from the card.

  The image on the wall gave a convincing rendition of a nod, and closed its eyes.

  “Goodbye, Mom,” said Constance, and squeezed the trigger.

  She stood there for a while, staring at the now smooth paint after the brute force of the electromagnetic pulse, and the more subtle ferocity of the antivirus routines transmitted immediately after it, had done their work. As always on these occasions, she wondered what she had really done. Of course she hadn’t killed her mother. Her mother, allegedly in Jupiter orbit, was very much alive. Even the partial copy of her mother’s brain patterns that had infiltrated the intelligent paint was itself, no doubt this very second, sitting down for a coffee and a chat with the artificial intelligence agent in the virtual spaces of Constance’s business card. At least, a copy of it was. But the copy that had been in the walls was gone—she hoped. And it had been an intelligent, self-aware being, a person as real as herself. The copy had expected nothing but a brief existence, but if it had been transferred to some other hardware—a robot or a blank brain in a cloned body—it could have had a long one. It could have wandered off and lived a full and interesting life.

  On the other hand, if all copies and partials were left in existence, and helped to independence, the whole Solar System would soon be overrun with them. Such things had happened, now and again over the centuries. Habitats, planets, sometimes entire systems transformed themselves into high-density information economies, which accelerated away from the rest of civilization as more and more of the minds within them were minds thinking a million times faster than a human brain. So far, they’d always exhausted themselves within five years or so. It was known as a fast burn. Preventing this was generally considered a good idea, and that meant deleting copies. Constance knew that the ethics of the situation had all been worked out by philosophers much wiser than she was—and agreed, indeed, by copies of philosophers, just to be sure—but it still troubled her sometimes.

  She dismissed the pointless worry, put the Norton back in the desk
and walked out the door. She needed fresh air. Her apartment opened near the middle of the balcony, which stretched hundreds of metres to left and right. Constance stepped two paces to the rail, stood between plant boxes, and leaned over. Below her, other balconies sloped away in stepped tiers. In the downward distance, their planters and window boxes merged in her view, like the side of green hill, and themselves merged with the rougher and shallower incline of vine terraces. Olive groves, interspersed with hundred-metre cypresses, spread from the foot of the slope across the circular plain beneath her. Surrounded by its halo of habitats, a three-quarters-full Earth hung white and glaring in the dark blue of the sky seen through the air and the crater roof. Somewhere under that planet’s unbroken cloud cover, huddled in fusion-warmed caves and domes on the ice, small groups of people worked and studied—the brave scientists of the Reterraforming Project. Constance had sometimes daydreamed of joining them, but she had a more exciting destination now.

  Weight began to pull as the shuttle decelerated. Constance settled back in her couch and slipped her wraparounds down from her brow to cover her eyes. The default view, for her as for all passengers, was of the view ahead, over the rear of the ship. A hundred kilometres in diameter, the Inner Station was so vast that even the shuttle’s exhaust gases barely distorted the view. The station itself was dwarfed by the surrounding structures: the great spinning webs of the microwave receptors, collecting energy beamed from the solar power stations in Mercury orbit; and the five Short Tubes, each millions of kilometres long and visible as hairline fractures across the sky. To and from their inner ends needle-shaped craft darted, ferrying incoming or outgoing passengers for the Long Tubes out in the Oort Cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto—so far, indeed, that this initial or final hop was, for the passengers, subjectively longer than the near-light-speed journey between the stars.

  As the ship’s attitude jets fired the view swung, providing Constance with a glimpse of the green-gold haze of habitats that ringed the Sun. The main jet cut in again, giving a surge of acceleration as the shuttle matched velocities with the rim of the Inner Station. With a final clunk and shudder the ship docked. Constance felt for a moment that it was still under acceleration—as indeed it was: the acceleration of constant rotation, which she experienced as a downward centrifugal force of one Earth gravity. She stood up, holding the seat until she was sure of her balance, and tried not to let her feet drag as she trudged down the aisle to the exit door. In the weeks of travel from the Moon she’d kept the induction coils and elastic resistance of her clothing at a maximum, to build up her bone and muscle mass, but she still felt heavy. It looked as if the other passengers felt the same.