The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (46 page)

“— not believe a word I say. I’ve nothing to show them, after all. Nothing to prove my story.”

“But your life! You have your whole life . . .”

He’d tried to picture it on the flight here. He had imagined himself as a baker, a soldier, a diplomat, a painter. He longed for every one of them, for any of them. All he had to do was start his jet and follow Chirk, and one of them would come to pass.

He started to reach for his jet, but there was nowhere he could escape the responsibility he’d willingly taken on himself. He realized he didn’t want to.

“Only I can do this,” he told her. “Anyway, this is the only thing I ever had that was mine. If I give it up now, I’ll have some life . . . but not
my
life.”

She said nothing, just shook her head. He looked past her at the vast canopy of glittering lights – from the windows in city apartments and town wheel-houses, from the mansions of the rich and the gas-fires of industry: a sphere of people, every single one of them threatened by something that even now might be uncoiling in the cold vacuum outside the world; each and every one of them waiting, though they knew it not, for a helping hand.

Ten words, or a single coin.

“Get out of here, Chirk,” he said. “It’s starting. If you leave right now you might just get away before the full heat hits.”

“But —” She stared at him in bewilderment. “You come too!”

“No. Just go. See?” He pointed at a faint ember-glow that had started in the darkness below their feet. “They’re waking up. This place will be a furnace soon. There’s no treasure here for you, Chirk. It’s all out there.”

“Jessie, I can’t —” Flame-coloured light blossomed below them, and then from one side. “Jessie?” Her eyes were wide with panic.

“Get out! Chirk, it’s too late unless you go
now
! Go! Go!”

The panic took her and she kicked her jet into life. She made a clumsy pass, trying to grab Jessie on the way by, but he evaded her easily.

“Go!” She put her head down, opened the throttle, and shot away.
Too late
, Jessie feared.
Let her not be just one second too late.

Her jet disappeared in the rising light. Jessie kicked his own jet away, returning to cling to the edge of the window. His own sharp-edged shadow appeared against the metal skull inches from his own.

“You have your proof!” He could feel the pulse of energy – heat, and something deeper and more fatal – reaching into him from the awakening suns. “Now open up.

“Open
up
!”

The moth reached out and did something below the window. The crystalline pane slid aside, and Jessie climbed into the narrow, boxlike space. The window slid shut, but did nothing to filter the growing light and heat from outside. There was nowhere further to go, either. He had expected no less.

The precipice moth lowered its head to his.

“I have come to you on behalf of humanity,” said Jessie, “to tell you that the ancient strategy of relying on Candesce for our safety will no longer work . . .”

He told the moth his story, and as he spoke the dawn came up.

EVIL ROBOT MONKEY

Mary Robinette Kowal

Caught between two worlds can be a very uncomfortable place to be.

New writer Mary Robinette Kowal won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2008. Her work has appeared in
Cosmos
,
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
The Solaris Book of Science Fiction 2
,
Strange Horizons
,
Subterranea
n,
Clarkesworld
,
Twenty Epics
,
Apex Digest
,
Apex Online
, and
Talebones
, among other markets. She’s the secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the art director of the magazine
Shimmer
, and in civilian life is a professional puppeteer and voice actor. She lives in New York City. Her website is at maryrobinettekowal.com.

S
LIDING HIS HANDS
over the clay, Sly relished the moisture oozing around his fingers. The clay matted down the hair on the back of his hands making them look almost human. He turned the potter’s wheel with his prehensile feet as he shaped the vase. Pinching the clay between his fingers he lifted the wall of the vase, spinning it higher.

Someone banged on the window of his pen. Sly jumped and then screamed as the vase collapsed under its own weight. He spun and hurled it at the picture window like faeces. The clay spattered against the Plexiglas, sliding down the window.

In the courtyard beyond the glass, a group of school kids leapt back, laughing. One of them swung his arms aping Sly crudely. Sly bared his teeth, knowing these people would take it as a grin, but he meant it as a threat. Swinging down from his stool, he crossed his room in three long strides and pressed his dirty hand against the window. Still grinning, he wrote SSA. Outside, the letters would be reversed.

The student’s teacher flushed as red as a female in heat and called the children away from the window. She looked back once as she led them out of the courtyard, so Sly grabbed himself and showed her what he would do if she came into his pen.

Her naked face turned brighter red and she hurried away. When they were gone, Sly rested his head against the glass. The metal in his skull thunked against the window. It wouldn’t be long now, before a handler came to talk to him.

Damn.

He just wanted to make pottery. He loped back to the wheel and sat down again with his back to the window. Kicking the wheel into movement, Sly dropped a new ball of clay in the centre and tried to lose himself.

In the corner of his vision, the door to his room snickled open. Sly let the wheel spin to a halt, crumpling the latest vase.

Vern poked his head through. He signed, “You okay?”

Sly shook his head emphatically and pointed at the window.

“Sorry.” Vern’s hands danced. “We should have warned you that they were coming.”

“You should have told them that I was not an animal.”

Vern looked down in submission. “I did. They’re kids.”

“And I’m a chimp. I know.” Sly buried his fingers in the clay to silence his thoughts.

“It was Delilah. She thought you wouldn’t mind because the other chimps didn’t.”

Sly scowled and yanked his hands free. “I’m not
like
the other chimps.” He pointed to the implant in his head. “Maybe Delilah should have one of these. Seems like she needs help thinking.”

“I’m sorry.” Vern knelt in front of Sly, closer than anyone else would come when he wasn’t sedated. It would be so easy to reach out and snap his neck. “It was a lousy thing to do.”

Sly pushed the clay around on the wheel. Vern was better than the others. He seemed to understand the hellish limbo where Sly lived – too smart to be with other chimps, but too much of an animal to be with humans. Vern was the one who had brought Sly the potter’s wheel, which, by the Earth and Trees, Sly loved. Sly looked up and raised his eyebrows. “So what did they think of my show?”

Vern covered his mouth, masking his smile. The man had manners. “The teacher was upset about the ‘evil robot monkey’.”

Sly threw his head back and hooted. Served her right.

“But Delilah thinks you should be disciplined.” Vern, still so close that Sly could reach out and break him, stayed very still. “She wants me to take the clay away since you used it for an anger display.”

Sly’s lips drew back in a grimace built of anger and fear. Rage threatened to blind him, but he held on, clutching the wheel. If he lost it with Vern – rational thought danced out of his reach. Panting, he spun the wheel trying to push his anger into the clay.

The wheel spun. Clay slid between his fingers. Soft. Firm and smooth. The smell of earth lived his nostrils. He held the world in his hands. Turning, turning, the walls rose around a kernel of anger, subsuming it.

His heart slowed with the wheel and Sly blinked, becoming aware again as if he were slipping out of sleep. The vase on the wheel still seemed to dance with life. Its walls held the shape of the world within them. He passed a finger across the rim.

Vern’s eyes were moist. “Do you want me to put that in the kiln for you?”

Sly nodded.

“I have to take the clay. You understand that, don’t you?”

Sly nodded again staring at his vase. It was beautiful.

Vern scowled. “The woman makes
me
want to hurl faeces.”

Sly snorted at the image, then sobered. “How long before I get it back?”

Vern picked up the bucket of clay next to the wheel. “I don’t know.” He stopped at the door and looked past Sly to the window. “I’m not cleaning your mess. Do you understand me?”

For a moment, rage crawled on his spine, but Vern did not meet his eyes and kept staring at the window. Sly turned.

The vase he had thrown lay on the floor in a pile of clay.

Clay.

“I understand.” He waited until the door closed, then loped over and scooped the clay up. It was not much, but it was enough for now.

Sly sat down at his wheel and began to turn.

FIVE THRILLERS

Robert Reed

Here’s a fast-paced story, dazzling in its shifts in milieu, that delivers exactly what the title says that it’s going to deliver.

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Asimov’s Science Fiction
, and many other markets. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short fiction, seriously rivalled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And – also like Baxter and Stableford – he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality
while
being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice”, “Brother Perfect”, “Decency”, “Savior”, “The Remoras”, “Chrysalis”, “Whiptail”, “The Utility Man”, “Marrow”, “Birth Day”, “Blind”, “The Toad of Heaven”, “Stride”, “The Shape of Everything”, “Guest of Honor”, “Waging Good”, and “Killing the Morrow”, among at least a half dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the 80s and 90s. Many of his best stories were assembled in his first collection,
The Dragons of Springplace
. Nor is he non-prolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the eighties, including
The Lee Shore
,
The Hormone Jungle
,
Black Milk
,
The Remarkables
,
Down the Bright Way
,
Beyond the Veil of Stars
,
An Exaltation of Larks
,
Beneath the Gated Sky
,
Marrow
, and
Sister Alice
. His most recent books include two chapbook novellas,
Mere
and
Flavors of My Genius
, a collection,
The Cuckoo’s Boys
, and a novel,
The Well of Stars
. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.

THE ILL-FATED MISSION

T
HEIR SITUATION WAS
dire. A chunk of primordial iron had slashed its way through the Demon Dandy, crippling the engines and pushing life support to the brink of failure. Even worse, a shotgun blast of shrapnel had shredded one of the ship’s two life-pods. The mission engineer, a glum little fellow who had spent twenty years mining Earth-grazing asteroids, studied the wreckage with an expert eye. There was no sane reason to hope that repairs could be made in time. But on the principle of keeping his staff busy, he ordered the robots and his new assistant to continue their work on the useless pod. Then after investing a few moments cursing God and Luck, the engineer dragged himself to the remnants of the bridge to meet with the Dandy’s beleaguered captain.

His assistant was a young fellow named Joseph Carroway.

Handsome as a digital hero, with green eyes and an abundance of curly blond hair, Joe was in his early twenties, born to wealthy parents who had endowed their only child with the earliest crop of synthetic human genes. He was a tall tidy fellow, and he was a gifted athlete as graceful as any dancer, on the Earth or in freefall. According to a dozen respected scales, Joe was also quite intelligent. With an impressed shake of the head, the company psychiatrist had confided that his bountiful talents made him suitable for many kinds of work. But by the same token, that supercharged brain carried certain inherent risks.

Dipping his head in the most charming fashion, he said, “Risks?”

“And I think you know what I’m talking about,” she remarked, showing a wary, somewhat flirtatious smile.

“But I don’t know,” Joe lied.

“And I believe you do,” she countered. “Without exception, Mr Carroway, you have been telling me exactly what I want to hear. And you’re very believable, I should add. If I hadn’t run the T-scan during our interview, I might have come away believing that you are the most kind, most decent gentleman in the world.”

“But I am decent,” he argued.

Joe sounded, and looked, exceptionally earnest.

The psychiatrist laughed. A woman in her early fifties, she was an over-qualified professional doing routine tasks for a corporation larger and more powerful than most nations. The solar system was being opened to humanity – humanity in all of its forms, old and new. Her only task was to find qualified bodies to do exceptionally dangerous work. The vagaries of this young man’s psyche were factors in her assessment. But they weren’t the final word. After a moment’s reflection, she said, “God, the thing is, you’re beautiful.”

Joe smiled and said, “Thank you.”

Then with a natural smoothness, he added, “And you are an exceptionally lovely woman.”

She laughed, loudly and with a trace of despair, as if aware that she would never again hear such kind words from a young man.

Then Joe leaned forward, and wearing the perfect smile – a strong winning grin – he told the psychiatrist, “I am a very good person.”

“No,” she said. “No, Joe, you are not.”

Then she sat back in her chair, and with a finger twirling her mousy-brown hair, she confessed, “But dear God, my boy, I really would just love to have you for dinner.”

Five months later, the Demon Dandy was crippled.

As soon as the engineer left for the bridge, Joe kicked away from the battered escape pod. Both robots quietly reminded him of their orders. Dereliction of duty would leave a black mark on the mission report. But their assignment had no purpose except to keep them busy and Joe distracted. And since arguing with machines served no role, he said nothing, focusing on the only rational course available to him.

The corn-line to the bridge was locked, but that was a puzzle easily solved. For the next few minutes, Joe concentrated on a very miserable conversation between the ship’s top officers. The best launch window was only a little more than three hours from now. The surviving pod had finite fuel and oxygen. Kilograms and the time demanded by any return voyage were the main problems. Thirty precious seconds were wasted when the captain announced that she would remain behind, forcing the engineer to point out that she was a small person, which meant they would need to find another thirty kilos of mass, at the very least.

Of course both officers could play the hero role, sacrificing themselves to save their crew. But neither mentioned what was painfully obvious. Instead, what mattered was the naming and discarding a string of increasingly unworkable fixes.

Their conversation stopped when Joe drifted into the bridge.

“I’ve got two options for you,” he announced. “And when it comes down to it, you’ll take my second solution.”

The captain glanced at her engineer, as if to ask, “Should we listen to this kid?”

In despair, the engineer said, “Tell us, Joe. Quick.”

“The fairest answer? We chop off everybody’s arms and legs.” He smiled and dipped his head as he spoke, pretending to be squeamish. “We’ll use the big field laser, since that should cauterize the wounds. Then our robots dope everybody up and shove us onboard the pod. With the robots remaining behind, of course.”

Neither officer had considered saving their machines.

“We chop off our own arms?” the engineer whined. “And our legs too?”

“Prosthetics do wonders,” Joe pointed out. “Or the company can grow us new limbs. They won’t match the originals, but they’ll be workable enough.”

The officers traded nervous looks.

“What else do you have?” the captain asked.

“One crewmember remains behind.”

“We’ve considered that,” the engineer warned. “But there’s no decent way to decide who stays and who goes.”

“Two of us have enough mass,” Joe pointed out. “If either one stays, everybody else escapes.”

Joe was the largest crewman.

“So you’re volunteering?” asked the captain, hope brightening her tiny brown face.

Joe said, “No,” with a flat, unaffected voice. “I’m sorry. Did I say anything about volunteers?”

Suddenly the only sound was the thin wind caused by a spaceship suffering a thousand tiny leaks.

One person among the crew was almost as big as Joe.

The engineer whispered, “Danielle.”

Both officers winced. Their colleague was an excellent worker and a dear friend, and Danielle also happened to be attractive and popular. Try as they might, they couldn’t wrap their heads around the idea that they would leave her behind, and without her blessing, at that.

Joe had anticipated their response. “But if you had a choice between her and me, you’d happily abandon me. Is that right?”

They didn’t answer. But Joe was new to the crew, and when their eyes dropped, they were clearly saying, “Yes.”

He took no offence.

With a shrug and a sigh, Joe gave his audience time enough to feel ashamed. Then he looked at the captain, asking, “What about Barnes? He’s only ten, maybe eleven kilos lighter than me.”

That name caused a brief exchange of glances.

“What are you planning?” asked the engineer.

Joe didn’t respond.

“No,” the captain told him.

“No?” asked Joe. “‘No’ to what?”

Neither would confess what they were imagining.

Then Joe put on a horrified expression. “Oh, God,” he said. “Do you really believe I would consider
that
?”

The engineer defended himself with soft mutters.

Joe’s horror dissolved into a piercing stare.

“There are codes to this sort of thing,” the captain reminded everybody, including herself. “Commit violence against a fellow crewmember, I don’t care who it is . . . and you won’t come home with us, Mr Carroway. Is that clear enough for you to understand?”

Joe let her fume. Then with a sly smile, he said, “I’m sorry. I thought we wanted the best way to save as many lives as possible.”

Again, the officers glanced at each another.

The young man laughed in a charming but very chilly fashion – a moment that always made empathic souls uneasy. “Let’s return to my first plan,” he said. “Order everybody into the machine shop, and we’ll start carving off body parts.”

The captain said, “No,” and then looked for a good reason.

The engineer just shrugged, laughing nervously.

“We don’t know if that would work,” the captain decided. “People could be killed by the trauma.”

“And what if we had to fly the pod manually?” the engineer asked. “Without hands, we’re just cargo.”

An awful option had been excluded, and they could relax slightly.

“Okay,” said Joe. “This is what I’m going to do: I’ll go talk to Barnes. Give me a few minutes. And if I don’t get what we want, then I will stay behind.”

“You?” the captain said hopefully.

Joe offered a firm, trustworthy, “Sure.”

But when he tallied up everyone’s mass, the engineer found trouble. “Even with Barnes gone, we’re still five kilos past our limit. And I’d like to give us a bigger margin of error, if I can.”

“So,” said Joe. “The rest of us give blood.”

The captain stared at this odd young man, studying that dense blond hair and those bright green eyes.

“Blood,” Joe repeated. “As much as we can physically manage. And we can also enjoy a big chemically-induced shit before leaving this wreck.”

The engineer began massaging the numbers.

Joe matter-of-factly dangled his leg between the officers. “And if we’re pressed, I guess I could surrender one of these boys. But my guess is that it won’t come to that.”

And in the end, it did not.

Three weeks later, Joe Carroway was sitting in the psychiatrist’s office, calmly discussing the tragedy.

“I’ve read everyone’s report,” she admitted.

He nodded, and he smiled.

Unlike their last meeting, the woman was striving to maintain a strict professional distance. She couldn’t have foreseen what would happen to the Dandy Demon or how this employee would respond. But there was the possibility that blame would eventually settle on her, and to save her own flesh, she was determined to learn exactly what Joe and the officers had decided on the bridge.

“Does your face hurt?” she inquired.

“A little bit.”

“How many times did he strike you?”

“Ten,” Joe guessed. “Maybe more.”

She winced. “The weapon?”

“A rough piece of iron,” he said. “Barnes had a souvenir from the first asteroid he helped work.”

Infrared sensors and the hidden T-scanner were observing the subject closely. Examining the telemetry, she asked, “Why did you pick Mr Barnes?”

“That’s in my report.”

“Remind me, Joe. What were your reasons?”

“He was big enough to matter.”

“And what did the others think about the man?”

“You mean the crew?” Joe shrugged. “He was one of us. Maybe he was quiet and kept to himself —”

“Bullshit.”

When he wanted, Joe could produce a shy, boyish grin.

“He was different from the rest of you,” the psychiatrist pointed out. “And I’m not talking about his personality.”

“You’re not,” Joe agreed.

She produced images of the dead man. The oldest photograph showed a skinny, homely male in his middle twenties, while the most recent example presented a face that was turning fat – a normal consequence that came with the most intrusive, all-encompassing genetic surgery.