The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (133 page)

“You’re not . . . the same.”

Neither are you
. What he
said
was, “I know. I couldn’t be. Serejen couldn’t have lived here. Torben can. Torben is the only one who can.”
But for how long, before he splits into his component personalities?

“Do you remember the way you . . . he . . . used to see numbers?”

“Of course I do. And before that, I remember how Ptey used to see numbers. He could look up into the night sky and tell you without counting, just by
knowing
, how many stars there were. He could see numbers. Serejen could make them do things. For me, Torben; the numbers haven’t gone away, I just see them differently. I see them as clearly, as absolutely, but when I see the topospace transformations, I see them as words, as images and stories, as analogies. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“I think, no matter how long I try, how long any of us try, we will never understand how your multiple personalities work. To us, you seem a race of partial people, each a genius, a savant, in some strange obsessive way.”

Are you deliberately trying to punish me?
Torben thought at the flicker-wing angel hovering before the ice-filled windows.

True, he was making colossal intuitive leaps in his twisted, abstruse discipline of space-time geometry. Not so abstruse: the Anpreen space drives, that Taynish physicists said broke the laws of physics, reached into the elevenspace substrate of the universe to locally stretch or compress the expansion of space-time – foreshortening ahead of the vehicle, inflating it behind. Thus the lack of any measurable acceleration, it was the entire continuum within and around the shatter-ship that had moved. Snowflakes and loxodromic curves had danced in Torben’s imagination: he had it, he had it. The secret of the Anpreen: relativistic interstellar travel, was now open to the peoples of Tay.

The
other
secret of the Anpreen, that was.

For all his epiphanies above the spherical ocean, Torben knew that seminars had changed. The student had become the teacher, the master the pupil.
What is you want from us?
Torben asked himself.
Truly want, truly need?

“Don’t know, don’t care. All I know is, if I can find a commercial way to bubble quantum black holes out of elevenspace and tap the evaporation radiation, I’ll have more money than God,” said Yetger, a squat, physically uncoordinated Oprann islander who relished his countrymen’s reputation for boorishness, though Torben found him an affable conversationalist and a refined thinker. “You coming to the Falls on Tennay?”

So they set off across the sky, a little flotilla of physicists with wine and sweet biscuits to dip in it. Those older and less sure of their bodies used little airscooter units. Torben flew. He enjoyed the exercise. The challenge of a totally alien language of movement intrigued him, the fish-tail flex of the flipper-suit. He liked what it was doing to his ass muscles.

The Soujourners’ house’s western windows gave distant views of the Falls, but the sense of awe began twenty kilometres out when the thunder and shriek became audible over the constant rumble of sky traffic. The picnic party always flew high, close to the ceiling among the tower roots, so that long vistas would not spoil their pleasure. A dense forest of inverted trees, monster things grown kilometres tall in the nanogee, had been planted around the Falls, green and mist-watered by the spray. The scientists settled onto one of the many platforms sculpted from the boulevard-wide branches. Torben gratefully peeled off his fin-tights, kicked his legs free, and spun to face the Falls.

What you saw, what awed you, depended on how you looked at it. Feet down to the world sea, head up to the roof, it was a true fall, a cylinder of falling water two hundred metres across and forty kilometres long. Feet up, head down, it was even more terrifying, a titanic geyser. The water was pumped through from the receiving station at near supersonic speeds, where it met the ocean-bead the joined waters boiled and leaped kilometres high, broke into high looping curls and crests and globes, like the fantastical flarings of solar prominences. The roar was terrific. But for the noise-abatement properties of the nanoengineered leaves, it would have meant instant deafiness. Torben could feel the tree branch, as massive as any buttress wall of Jann fortress-university, shudder beneath him.

Wine was opened and poured. The biscuits, atavistically hand-baked by Hannaj, one of whose Aspects was a master pastry chef, were dipped into it and savoured. Sweet, the light sharpness of the wine and the salt mist of another world’s stolen ocean tanged Torben’s tongue.

There were rules to Tennays by the Falls. No work. No theory. No relationships. Five researchers made up a big enough group for family jealousy, small enough for cliquishness. Proper topics of conversation looked homeward; partnerships ended, children born, family successes and sicknesses, gossip, politics, and sports results.

“Oh. Here.” Yetger sent a message flake spinning lazily through the air. The Soujourners’ house exfoliated notes and messages from home onto slips of whisper-thin paper that peeled from the walls like eczema. The mechanism was poetic but inaccurate; intimate messages unfurled from unintended walls to turn and waft in the strange updrafts that ran through the nest’s convoluted tunnels. It was the worst of forms to read another’s message-scurf.

Torben unfolded the rustle of paper. He read it once, blinked, read it again. Then he folded it precisely in eight and folded it away in his top pocket.

“Bad news?” For a broad beast of a man, Yetger was acute to emotional subtleties. Torben swallowed.

“Nothing strange or startling.”

Then he saw where Belej stared. Her gaze drew his, drew that of everyone in the picnic party. The Falls were failing. Moment by moment, they dwindled, from a deluge to a river, from a river to a stream to a jet, a hiding shrieking thread of water. On all the platforms on all the trees, Anpreen were rising into the air, hovering in swarms, as before their eyes the Falls sputtered and ceased. Drops of water, fat as storms, formed around the lip of the suddenly exposed nozzle to break and drift, quivering, down to the spherical sea. The silence was profound. Then the trees seemed to shower blossoms as the Anpreen took to the air in hosts and choirs, flocking and storming.

Numbers and images flashed in Torben’s imagination. The fuelling could not be complete, was weeks from being complete. The ocean would fill the entire interior hollow, the stalactite cities transforming into strange reef communities. Fear gripped him and he felt Fejannen struggle to free himself from the binding into Torben.
I need you here, friend
, Torben said to himself, and saw the others had made the same calculations.

They flew back, a ragged fotilla strung across kilometres of airspace, battling through the ghostly aerial legions of Anpreen. The Soujourners’ house was filled with fluttering, gusting message slips shed from the walls. Torben snatched one from the air and against all etiquette read it.

Sajhay are you all right what’s happening? Come home, we are all worried about you. Love Mihenj.

The sudden voice of Suguntung, the Anpreen liaison, filled every cell of the nest, an order – polite, but an order – to come to the main viewing lounge, where an important announcement would be made. Torben had long suspected that Suguntung never left the Soujourners’ house, merely deliquesced from hominiform into airborne motes, a phase transition.

Beyond the balcony nets, the sky seethed, an apocalypse of insect humanity and storm clouds black as squid ink rolling up around the edge of the world ocean.

“I have grave news,” Suguntung said. He was a grey, sober creature, light and lithe and androgynous, without any salting of wit or humour. “At 12:18 Taynish Enclave time, we detected gravity waves passing through the system. These are consistent with a large numbers of bodies decelerating from relativistic flight.”

Consternation. Voices shouting. Questions questions questions. Suguntung held up a hand and there was quiet.

“On answer to your questions, somewhere in the region of thirty-eight thousand objects. We estimate them at a range of seventy astronomical units beyond the edge of the Kuiper belt, decelerating to ten per cent light-speed for system transition.”

“Ninety-three hours until they reach us,” Torben said. The numbers, the coloured numbers, so beautiful, so distant.

“Yes,” said Suguntung.

“Who are they?” Belej asked.

“I know,” Torben said. “Your enemy.”

“We believe so,” Suguntung answered. “There are characteristic signatures in the gravity waves and the spectral analysis.”

Uproar. By a trick of the motes, Suguntung could raise his voice to a roar that could shout down a crowd of angry physicists.

“The Anpreen Commonweal is making immediate preparations for departure. As a matter of priority, evacuation for all guests and visitors has been arranged and will commence immediately. A transfer ship is already waiting. We are evacuating the system not only for our own protection, but to safeguard you as well. We believe that the Enemy has no quarrel with you.”

“
Believe?
” Yetger spat. “Forgive me if I’m less than completely reassured by that!”

“But you haven’t got enough water,” Torben said absently, mazed by the numbers and pictures swimming around in his head, as the message leaves of concern and hope and come-home-soon fluttered around. “How many habitats are fully fuelled? Five hundred, five hundred and fifty? You haven’t got enough, even this one is at eighty per cent capacity. What’s going to happen to them?”

“I don’t give a fuck what happens to them!” Hannaj had always been the meekest and least assertive of men, brilliant but forever hamstrung by self-doubt. Now, threatened, naked in space, pieced through and through by the gravity waves of an unknowable power, his anger burned. “I want to know what’s going to happen to us.”

“We are transferring the intelligences to the interstellar-capable habitats.” Suguntung spoke to Torben alone.

“Transferring; you mean copying,” Torben said. “And the originals that are left, what happens to them?”

Suguntung made no answer.

Yetger found Torben floating in the exact centre of the viewing lounge, moving his tail just enough to maintain him against the microgee.

“Where’s your stuff?”

“In my cell.”

“The shatter-ship’s leaving in an hour.”

“I know.”

“Well, maybe you should, you know . . .”

“I’m not going.”

“You’re
what
?”

“I’m not going, I’m staying here.”

“Are you insane?”

“I’ve talked to Suguntung and Seriantep. It’s fine. There are a couple of others on the other habitats.”

“You have to come home, we’ll need you when they come . . .”

“Ninety hours and twenty-five minutes to save the world? I don’t think so.”

“It’s home, man.”

“It’s not. Not since
this
.” Torben flicked the folded note of his secret pocket, offered it to Yetger between clenched fingers.

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

“You’re dead. We’re all dead, you know that.”

“Oh, I know. In the few minutes it takes me to reach wherever the Anpreen migration goes next, you wil have aged and died many times over. I know that, but it’s not home. Not now.”

Yetger ducked his head in sorrow that did not want to be seen, then in a passion hugged Torben hugely to him, kissed him hard.

“Goodbye. Maybe in the next one.”

“No, I don’t think so. One is all we get. And that’s a good enough reason to go out there where none of our people have ever been before, I think.”

“Maybe it is.” Yetger laughed, the kind of laughter that is on the edge of tears. Then he spun and kicked off up through the ceiling door, his duffel of small possessions trailing from his ankle.

For an hour now, he had contemplated the sea and thought that he might just be getting the way of it, the fractal patterns of the ripples, the rhythms and the microstorms that blew up in squalls and waves that sent globes of water quivering into the air that, just as quickly, were subsumed back into the greater sea. He understood it as music, deeply harmonised. He wished one of his Aspects had a skill for an instrument. Only choirs, vast ensembles, could capture the music of the water bead.

“It’s ready now.”

All the while Torben had calculated the music of the sea, Seriantep had worked on the smart-paper substrate of the Soujourners’ house. Now the poll was complete, a well in the floor of the lounge.
When I leave, will it revert?
Torben thought, the small, trivial wit that fights fear.
Will it go back to whatever it was before, or was it always only just Suguntung?
The slightest of gestures and Seriantep’s wisp-dress fell from her. The floor ate it greedily. Naked and wingless now in this incarnation, she stepped backward into the water, never for an instant taking her eyes from Torben.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she said. “You won’t be hurt.”

She lay back into the receiving water. Her hair floated out around her, coiled and tangled as she came apart. There was nothing ghastly about it, no decay into meat and gut and vile bone, no grinning skeleton fizzing apart in the water like sodium. A brightness, a turning to motes of light. The hair was the last to go. The pool seethed with motes. Torben stepped out of his clothes.

I’m moving on. It’s for the best. Maybe not for you. For me. You see, I didn’t think I’d mind, but I did. You gave it all up so easily, just like that, off into space. There is someone else. It’s Cjatay. I heard what he was saying, and as time went by, as I didn’t hear from you, it made sense. I know I’m reacting. I think I owe you that, at least. We’re all right together. With him, you get everything, I find I can live with that. I think I like it. I’m sorry, Torben, but this is what I want.

The note sifted down through the air like a falling autumn leaf to join the hundreds of others that lay on the floor. Torben’s feet kicked up as he stepped down into the water. He gasped at the electrical tingle, then laughed, and, with a great gasp, emptied his lungs and threw himself under the surface. The motes swarmed and began to take him apart. As the
Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode
broke orbit around Tejaphay, the abandoned space elevator coiling like a severed artery, the bottom of the Soujourners’ house opened, and, like a tear, the mingled waters fell to the sea below.