The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (53 page)

Final approach.

Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerising infinite regress of bullseyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.

Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair – if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters – we will be dead. Before we know it.

Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically-displaced mass.

I turn to the drone’s-eye view relayed from up ahead. It’s a window into history – even now, there’s a timelag of several minutes – but past and present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly-minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, re-enlist them for the next build – but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it’s cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.

A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

At least we’ve spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds.

Angels do not speak to ants.

Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past anymore, I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.

Tactical beeps at us.

“Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: does the angel speak to us after all? A thank-you, perhaps? A cure for heat death?

But –

“It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

Two minutes.

“Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”

“We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

“Still in front of us! Look at the sun!”

“Look at the signal,” I tell him.

Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost – random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky. It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.

“Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.

“We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artifacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh Limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.

So far, though, nothing’s come out.

“Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had – enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a . . .

I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.

“Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some – family squabble.”

“Maybe didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”

Why would you think that?, I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

My son is trying to comfort me.

I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while, I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

But I’m better now.

It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging your goddamned superhighway behind us.

I still have so much to learn.

At least my son is here to teach me.

THE INTEGRITY
OF THE CHAIN

Lavie Tidhar

Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, lived in Israel and South Africa, traveled widely in Africa and Asia, lived in London for a number of years, and currently lives in Southeast Asia. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), was the editor
of Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography
, and the anthologies
A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults
and
The Apex Book of World SF.
He is the author of the linked story collection
HebrewPunk
, the novellas
An Occupation of Angels
and
Cloud Permutations
, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel
The Tel Aviv Dossier. A
prolific short-story writer, his stories have appeared in
Interzone, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Chizine, Postscripts, Fantasy, Nemonymous, Infinity Plus, Aeon, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau
, and elsewhere, and have been translated into seven languages.

Here he gives us a vivid slice of a future world where much has changed – and yet much has stayed the same.

T
HE GIRL THEY
called the General was back on the television: she wore a crisp army uniform decorated with many medals, its colour that of the jungles at dusk, a dark green that seemed to give off a fresh, sharp scent of foliage and fear. She spoke crisply: the words were carefully-measured cups of rice, precise and just. The latest news from the Party conference. Details of the latest five-year plan. Picture: rice paddies up north, workers in the fields in dark-blue overalls. Someone beside the television, a shaggy man Noy identified at last as Sip Pan Joe, said, “Heard the first baby was born yesterday on the Chinese moon colony.”

They called him Sip Pan Joe because he always charged ten thousand kip for a city journey. “Sip pan! Sip pan!” he would say, losing money every time he took a fair. They called him Joe because of some character in a Thai soap. Sip Pan Joe wasn’t all there, but he had a way of getting news.

Noy said, “I want to go to the moon,” and Sip Pan Joe cackled and said, “No tuk-tuks on the moon! No air!”

They called Noy Noy because he was small. Now he said nothing, merely stared at the television. On the screen, the General was speaking again, talking about the latest American war. Noy’s grandfather had died, early century, looking for scrap metal. There was a lot of scrap metal in the highlands of Laos. Most of it had been left there by the Americans during their Secret War, a long time before. The scrap metal was valuable. Unfortunately, it also tended to explode. The UXO clearance team later said it had been a CBU-26 – an anti-personnel cluster fragmentation bomb, a type particularly favoured by the Americans. By then Noy’s grandmother had already been pregnant with Noy’s father though.

“One day I will go to America,” another of the drivers said. He was Hmong, had family in Florida who wired him money every month. “I will open a hotel, or drive a cab. A real one, with guns on the side and an armoured windshield.”

“That’s just in the movies,” Noy couldn’t stop himself from saying. The Hmong man turned on him. “Oh? And how would you know, boy?”

“Leave him alone,” Sip Pan Joe said. “I want to watch the news.”

“He wants to watch the news,” the Hmong said. “Maybe he wants to go to the moon and make babies too.”

There was general laughter and the Hmong, made bold, said, “He can take Noy with him, and good riddance. Ten thousand for a ticket to the moon! Sip Pan! Sip Pan!”

On the screen the General disappeared and was replaced with Martial music, stirring revolutionary lyrics sung by the Army Choir on a background of tanks rolling and jets taking off. The television flickered in the darkness of the drivers’ hut. No one made a reply to the Hmong. Everyone knew they fought on the American side during that long-ago war, and they were still a nuisance, not proper citizens like the lowland Lao. Noy stared at the screen. He was secretly saving up the money from his trips. Two thousand here, five thousand there. He once took a falang man in the tuk-tuk, and the man had told him he had been to space. He’d bought some dope off Noy, and that was when he told him. He made images appear in the air with a flick of his wrist and showed them to Noy: Earth blue and white and green, seen from above; people floating in strange configurations inside a vast hall, almost all of them falangs. But Noy knew space didn’t belong to the falangs. After all, the Chinese went there, and the Malays, and the Indians. It didn’t seem that impossible for a Lao boy to go, too, one day.

He gulped down his tea and decided to go on the job. He wasn’t earning any money sitting there. As he stepped from out the makeshift structure the night felt cool, and a half-full moon was shining, wrapped in yellow bandages, in the sky. He stared at the moon for a long moment. It seemed terribly far, and close, at the same time. He searched for moving lights up there, in the deep blackness, but saw none, and sighed and lowered his head.

He found his tuk-tuk, squatting comfortably besides its fellows, like a cow at pasture exchanging pleasantries to do with the flavour of grass. The herd of tuk-tuks lay, stabled together, in the great tuk-tuk yard beside the new Talat Sao, the Morning Market, which was no longer so new, and had besides never been a morning, but an all-day, market, despite its name. He patted his own tuk-tuk, sat up in the driver’s seat, straddling the engine. He loved the feel of the wind against him as he drove, loved the feel of the road against his tires, knowing every bump and broken surface without needing light – knowing when to slow and when to speed and when to take his time, where the police might be waiting with the hope of ticketing a careless driver for some cash, knew where you could stop for a late-night condensed-milk pancake from a roving stall, what perfect hideaways to stop at along the Mekong for a moment, with a cigarette. Before, in his grandfather’s time and in his father’s time, even, the tuk-tuks ran on gasoline. Now, the ancient, assembled-together with nails and wood and pipes and spit vehicles slumbered under the giant solar grid of the Talat Sao, feeding their silent engines – which no longer gave out the distinct tuk-tuk-tuk sound that had given them their name – with electricity. Now, Noy pressed the gas pedal down (because tradition, in the construction of tuk-tuks as in anything else, had to be maintained) and a bar of electric light sprang up on the board before him, suggesting his battery was full. He eased the vehicle out of the row of its near-identical companions, hit the accelerator with a woosh, and hit the road.

For two and a half hours he cruised through the dark streets of Vientiane. He picked up a family returning late from their market stall, all of them reeking of bananas, and drove them to Don Pamai. He got lucky on the way back and picked up a falang wanting to go into town. The man had a golden prosthetic for a thumb, and spoke little, and there was something wrong with his voice, though his Lao was perfect. Noy had heard of the golden things before, and they made him uncomfortable. They were called Others, and were something like a spirit, that shared the body with the man and could speak through him, and do terrible things (though he wasn’t quite sure what sort of terrible things those were). He took his passenger (his passengers?) to Nampou, the fountain surrounded by soft-lighted falang restaurants, Italian and French and the venerable old misnomer that was the Scandinavian Bakery, and hung around for a while on the corner with the other drivers. Then, a falang couple, both a little unsteady on their feet, wanted to go to the National Circus. He took them there, grabbed a stick of barbequed meat from a stall in the night market, drove around some more but there luck deserted him, the late night played against him, and he could find no one in need of transportation. He looked up, glared at the moon (which had turned a soft, pale white, like a lightly fried egg) as if daring it to intervene.

There was another purpose for the little amounts of money he put aside when he could. He knew an old man who had studied in China and Russia and had been in good standing with the Party but had recently become old and eccentric enough to be put away into modest retirement in the capital. The old man had a large house on the outskirts of town, and he lived there alone, and in the large backyard he was building a . . .

Someone whistled; Noy saw the flash of a hand in the darkness, waving him down, and hit the brakes. He couldn’t see the figure’s face; as it approached he saw it was robed somewhat in the manner of a monk, yet the cloth was not saffron but a deep black, the colour of a moonless night in the mountains. The head was cowled.

There was something strangely familiar about the figure, as if it had awakened a dormant memory – ah. He remembered now. A story Sip Pan Joe was telling, only the week before – something about an order of strange monks up in Udom Xhai, falang men and women dressed all in black, who shared a mind together . . .

He had thought it was only one of Sip Pan’s stories. Now the dark figure regarded him from the shadows in what might have been amusement, might have been impatience. Noy said, in English, “Where you go?”

There were, he noticed, thin, silvery wires – almost translucent, but suddenly seen as the figure moved and the wires caught the moonlight – trailing from inside the cowl and across the robes. And now that he looked harder it seemed to him that, from time to time, images – random flashes, too quick to notice details – moved and crawled across the robes, down the chest and arms and over to the back. “Where you go?” he said again, less certain now.

The figure said, “Wat Sokpaluang.”

Noy, uncertain still: “At this hour? I think the temple is—”

“Wat Sokpaluang.”

“Hundred thousand kip,” Noy said. To his surprise, the figure merely nodded. It climbed on the back, into the open passenger box, and waited. Noy shrugged and pressed on the gas.

It was a strange journey for Noy. Though the figure never moved, it seemed to still, somehow, reach across to him, as if its loose wires were somehow trailing through the air to reach him; above his head the moon shone white and clear, exposing one side of its face for scrutiny. The roads were dark and quiet, the shops along Khou Vieng shut, the embers in all the barbecue pits dead and cold. Somehow, he could see the moon more clearly now than ever before, as if the silent, cowled figure in the back of the tuk-tuk was acting as a sort of magnifying glass on his mind: he watched planes rise from the ground and take to the air, watched booster rockets flare, watched the world growing smaller behind him until he was floating between air and empty space, in a thin membrane that surrounded the world below him, while ahead of him giant structures loomed, in crazy loops, donut shapes, and squares, and stranger vessels moored beside them, their square noses aimed at a giant moon . . .

Then he had turned the corner, Khou Vieng into Sokpaluang, and the temple rose ahead, and he stopped the tuk-tuk, and the robed figure climbed out.

The figure paid him. Noy stared at it, said at last, “What
are
you?”

The monk-like figure pulled back, as if surprised. Then the same soft, perfectly-modulated voice said, “I am nothing.”

“You are a monk?”

The figure seemed to shrug, as if the question made little sense. “I am,” it said, and Noy had the feeling, strangely, of more than one voice speaking, of an
I
composed of many smaller fragments of self, “nothing. I am the nothingness between the stars. The moon is only a rock, Noy. Happiness can no more be mined on the moon than it can in Vientiane. Also, your chain is loose.” Then it turned and passed softly under the arches that led to the temple.

“How did you know my name?” Noy mumbled, but there was no reply. “And what do you mean, my chain?” he started the engine again and rode off. It was getting too late for passengers, and the drivers at Nampou, still waiting for the night club traffic, wouldn’t welcome yet another hopeful to compete for the meagre traffic. He decided to go visit the old man. It seemed a good night for it.

At a late-night stall, still open, the sleepy proprietor blinking behind a half-empty glass, he bought a small bottle of rice whiskey to bring along. He cruised down the silent roads, passing the Mekong on his left, then on his right, past a giant Pepsi sign that promised, in a mixture of Lao and English, to revolutionize one’s life with a single sip, past bags of rubbish left outside on the pavements, away from the city centre, past rice paddies eerily lit by the moon, past the croaking of a frog choir (that seemed to resemble, though he would never dare say it aloud, that of the one last heard on the television), and finally down a narrow muddy path to the house of Dr Somboong.

There was still light in one of the windows. Dr Somboong was a reluctant sleeper. As Noy approached the house he heard an unhealthy rattle from underneath the tuk-tuk, the sound of something tearing and falling with a thud on the ground, and he braked, causing the tuk-tuk, before he hastily turned it off, to begin issuing alarms in a commanding and incomprehensible Japanese.