Asimov's SF, February 2010 (26 page)

Yes, I am still wrestling with my decision. Wisely, the Admiral is not pressing me. I have the feeling that he will go to Mars with or without me, perhaps with some poor soul such as Watt to take my place. But the Hobbes-Fulton systems [
another correction, from Fulton-Hobbes!—A.C.
] need running, and nobody else could do it; without me the mission will fail—and Collingwood will go anyway! Can I let him die for nothing?—and Miss Herschel, come to that. And can I allow a world to come to pass in which such as Anne must live under the ice boot of the Phoebeans?—if people survive at all. These are the issues. And yet, and yet—I want to live! As I gaze on Anne (and, to her gentle credit, she lets me) I wrestle with the rights and wrongs of it, the pros and cons.

And it is because I look on her, and on the windows behind her, that I happen to be the first to see the assassin. He must have crawled along the track outside the office, under the window ledge and out of sight. Now he raises himself up—and I recognize him, for it is of course Gourdon, who has followed me all the way here from the deck of the
Indomitable
that night in the Channel—and he aims his musket.

I stand, and cover my face with my sleeve, and hurl myself at the wall.

Falling amid splintering glass and broken frames, I collide with the Frenchman, grabbing his arms, and the two of us tumble back into the pit. We land hard, for it must be six or seven feet deep, and I hear Phoebean crabs slither out of the way, and his musket goes off with a crack. I hear voices raised in alarm above me, and somebody screams.

My universe, from spanning Inter-planetary Space, is suddenly reduced to the smallest of dimensions—me, and the Frenchman under me. I pin his arms back. I smell the wine on his breath, and see pox scars on his nose, and—that odd, repulsive detail!—smears of burgoo porridge and bread crumbs on the filthy ponytail. “You don't give up,” I say to him in French.

"Never, you sack of shit,” he says to me. “I was flogged for failing to catch you at Stockton! My mission was abandoned as we closed with Wellesley's forces. But I am not here for France. I am here for myself, American.” He is bigger than me, and stronger, and more determined, and now he begins to force his arms down, and I find myself being lifted, unable to hold him. He will kill me and others in the next seconds, unless I act.

I let go one arm. He pushes back more easily now, mouth open, laughing. But I have a free hand, and I scrabble in the straw, and my fingers close on a smooth lump of ice—an egg, a Phoebean egg. I take this egg and ram it into his mouth. It is big, but it jams in there, and now I push my hand under his jaw to keep it closed, I push and push. He claws my wrist and gurgles, and his eyes bulge as he chokes.

But it is not the suffocating that kills him. It is the detonation as the egg bursts, prompted by his body's warmth, shattering into pieces that would later reassemble into a crab. The glass-hard shards burst from his cheeks and skewer his tongue, and lance up through his throat into his brain.

He twitches and falls back, and blood and ice spews from his mouth. I let him go and pull back, kneeling over him, drenched in his gore. Now they are here, Collingwood and Denham and the rest. Collingwood pulls me off the man and to my feet, while Denham takes his musket and checks he is dead.

And here is Anne, dear Anne at my side, clutching me despite the blood that will soak her London dress. “Oh, Ben! I thought you had sacrificed yourself. You saved us—my father—you saved us all!"

"As you have saved me,” I say to her, and my voice is raw. Her beloved face swims before me. “Make me a promise,” I say. “That when I bring your father safe home from Mars—you will marry me."

And she answers me with a kiss, into which I fall like a comet.

Epilogue

To this account I might add the personal details that my father packed a bag of acorns, so that Mars might grow oak trees with which to build English warships in the future. And that his final words before he sealed the hull of the
Paine
, which I heard myself, were these: “Now, gentlemen, let us do something today which the world will talk of hereafter.” And so it will.

I need not recount the events of the mission of the
Tom Paine
here. Suffice to say that in the months that followed a world at war watched through the eyes of the astronomers—including William Herschel, who was remarkably ever-present once his sister had consigned herself to the dark—as that brave spark followed step by step the course my father had designed, and yet kept secret from me. Glinting in Space, its cannon sparking, the
Paine
arrowed at Mars—and, in a remarkable feat of navigation by Miss Herschel, plunged through the thin Martian air and rammed that crawling nest of Phoebeans. The anti-ice explosion was bright enough to be seen by the naked eye on this world, a man-made star in the sky.

It was no scouting mission. There had never been an intention to loop around Mars and return to the earth—as I, had I been a grain more technical, should have deduced. Rather, it was a bold Nelsonian gesture that ended the life of cautious Cuddy Collingwood.

And nor need I summarize the events of the war on earth, as they unfolded after that strange Christmas. Geordie's Wall in England, and Manhattan in the Americas, did indeed prove the limits of Napoleon's ambition in the Atlantic realm. Napoleon is not done; at time of writing he has raised a new “Grande Armee” and has marched east, to confront the continental powers. Perhaps it will be the land that will defeat him, or the people—or the Phoebeans, for the Russians have approached the English over importing ice beasts from Canada to be loosed in their own Arctic wastes. Defeated he will be, I am sure—but his like will surely rise again in the future, as will the Phoebeans, despite my father's brave enforcement of the ice line. The worlds turn, and bring problems for generations to come, that are the same and yet different.

But this account is not of Napoleon or any Phoebean, but of Ben Hobbes. He must have scribbled the last pages in the dark, during that feverish, sleepless Christmas night after the French assassin was killed. Only now, with hindsight, can I understand the warmth that came into my father's clear eyes when we announced our engagement
to the company! But that dear moment was the end of our story, not the beginning.

So I sit in our home in Morpeth, with Bounce at my feet who looks up at every footstep, pining for his master after all these long years. I wonder how it would have turned out if somehow Ben could have returned to
e
arth, and to my arms. If, i
f !
Such speculations are futile, for this is the only world we have, and it is up to us to make the best of it we can—as Ben Hobbes did, and my own Papa, and it is a consolation to me that they were together at the end, for I loved them both.

—A.C.

Copyright © 2010 Stephen Baxter

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MARCH ISSUE

Our March issue features three new novelettes by genre talents both recent and established. The first, William Preston's subtle and affecting “Helping Them Take the Old Man Down,” may strike some fans of the grand pulp era as oddly familiar. Whether or not you're already conversant in the ways of super-science and mystical vigilantes, you will find much food for thought in this tale of a larger-than-life hero unwillingly brought back down to earth by one of his former associates. I won't ruin the surprise of the story's origins, but we feel this will be considered one of the best SF tales this year. Next you'll find a powerful story by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, this time set within
two
historical periods, as an intrepid band of time travelers from the future venture back to Merry Olde England on an historial mission using risky technology that could strand them back in time—and, of course, certain members of the team cannot not be trusted anywhere near “The Tower.” Alexander Jablokov returns with a tale of gene-modded animals drastically changed to live in a world where the way of nature is most assuredly secondary to the instant gratification of its humans in “Blind Cat Dance."

ALSO IN MARCH

Everyone remembers that being a teen wasn't easy no matter where you lived—even if some adults seem pleased to live their lives like adolescents. In Benjamin Crowell's latest, “Centaurs,” we find teens in a harsh environment expected to behave like adults; will they still have time to act their own age amid all the hardships? New talent Derek Zumsteg's latest for us features an unlikely member of the human race acting as diplomat to alien tourists; his title describes it better than I can: “Ticket Inspector Gliden Becomes the First Martyr of the Glorious Human Uprising"; and Will Ludwigsen, making a fine
Asimov's
debut, considers “The Speed of Dreams” from the viewpoint of a rather precocious eighth grader.

OUR EXCITING FEATURES

Robert Silverberg's Reflections column offers invaluable insight into the art of writing in “Showing and Telling"; James Patrick Kelly considers the true cost of “The Price of Free” in “On the Net"; Paul Di Filippo brings us “On Books"; plus an array of poetry you're sure to enjoy. Look for our March issue on sale at your newsstand on January 26, 2010. Or you can subscribe to
Asimov's
—in classy and elegant paper format or those new-fangled downloadable varieties, by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available on Amazon.com's Kindle!

COMING SOON

new stories by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Stephen Baxter, Pamela Sargent, Robert Reed, Tom Purdom, Allen M. Steele, Anna Tambour, Chris Beckett, Steven Popkes, Molly Gloss, Sara Genge, Peter Friend, Barry B. Longyear, and many others!

Copyright © 2010 Brian Bieniowski

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THE LAST THEOREM

by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl

Del Rey, $15.00 (tp)

ISBN: 978-0-345-4023-2

Two of the field's pioneers join forces for a near-future story built around Ranjit Subramanian, a Sri Lankan mathematical genius.

Math isn't the usual stuff of an SF story, although there's no inherent reason it shouldn't be. Certainly Fermat's last theorem, from which the novel takes its title and the initial impulse that drives the plot, is in its broad essence comprehensible to anyone who's taken the first few steps in geometry. (It states that while there are pairs of perfect squares that can be added together to create a third perfect square, the same is not true for any higher powers; Fermat, a seventeenth century French mathematician, claimed to have a proof of this, but never published it.) A proof of the theorem was published in the mid-1990s, but it was long and complex, and could only be checked by a computer. In short, it lacks the elegance and simplicity mathematicians crave. It is almost certainly not the proof Fermat claimed to have had—if he ever had one at all.

In the novel, drafted by Clarke and completed by Pohl before Clarke's death, Ranjit, the sixteen-year-old son of a Hindu monk, comes across Fermat's claim and becomes obsessed with proving it. After a series of adolescent adventures goes wrong, he is imprisoned. There, given time to concentrate on the problem, he succeeds—and upon being freed, immediately publishes it. Almost against his will, he becomes a hot property, invited to speak to learned societies, to give TV interviews and to accept honorary degrees.

He has also become of interest to high-level political players, including a former school friend whose father is a UN official. And while their interest makes his life much more comfortable for a while, it also raises moral issues that bother him a great deal. The lessons his father taught —even though Ranjit is for all practical purposes irreligious—stick with him.

Meanwhile, far from Earth, an intelligent race known as the super-Galactics is planning the extermination of human beings, whom they see as a long-range threat to the order of the universe. They send their operatives—a coalition of less powerful races—to do the job. But while they are in transit, the UN finally develops Pax Per Fidem—a brutally simple means to neutralize threats to peace on our own planet. The larger plot of the novel revolves around the tension between the approaching coalition and the pro-gress of the human effort toward solving its own problems, against which broad background the life of Ranjit and his family plays out.

While much of the overall shape of the book is clearly Clarke's doing, Pohl's hand is evident all through it. In fact, the book has several of the favorite themes of both authors. Clarke's love of Sri Lanka, and his advocacy of space elevators as a means to overcome the high cost of putting people and materials into orbit is here, as is Pohl's expert exploration of hard-nosed political maneuvering; and both authors’ fascination with alien races far advanced beyond human achievement. Those conversant with both men's work will spot other familiar bits, as well—often in the form of little in-jokes for those long-time readers.

The plot is no barnburner. Most readers likely to pick this book up won't be expecting one, in any case; slam-bang action was never Clarke's stock in trade, and Pohl's work, while edgier, has always had a cerebral turn as well. There are enough twists here to keep the reader guessing, and while the conclusion of the main plot can be seen coming a ways off, it's satisfactory nevertheless.

Clarke's death in 2008 means that this is likely to be one of the last books he took an active part in. Pohl is still with us, and seems likely to keep on writing his four pages a day as long as he can lift a pencil. But this will be their only collaboration, as Pohl makes clear in an afterword. Anyone who has enjoyed their work in the past should give this one a read.

THE EDGE OF REASON

By Melinda Snodgrass

Tor, $24.95 (hc)

ISBN: 978-0-7653-1516-8

Subtitled “A Novel of the War Between Science and Superstition,” this latest by Snodgrass sets a weird cosmic battle of supernatural forces against a realistically drawn urban landscape.