The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (94 page)

Tom Archibold raised his pistol and aimed it at Marilyn, and the avatar stepped in front of him and in its booming baritone said that it wanted the woman alive, and snatched the laptop from him and wheeled around and began to march towards the Range Rovers. The goon pushed Marilyn forward, but a living carpet of hive rats was already rippling across the ground in front of them and when they stopped and turned there were hive rats behind them too, two waves meeting and climbing over each other and merging in a great stream that chased after the avatar as it stepped stiffly along. The goon let go of Marilyn and ran, and hive rats swarmed up him and he batted at them and went down, screaming. Tom raised his pistol and got off a single round that whooped past Marilyn, and then he was down too, covered in a seething press, jerking and crawling, and then he lay still and the hive rats moved on, chasing after the laptop that the avatar carried.

Ana had released a pheromone into the nest that made the hive rats believe that they were being attacked by another nest, and painted the laptop with a scent that mimicked that of a hive rat queen. This had drawn most of the hive rats in nest to the surface, and they had begun their attack when the laptop had started to play the sound file Marilyn had activated: a recording of a hive rat queen distress call. The nest believed that one of its queens had been captured, and was rushing to her defense.

Marilyn stood still as rats scurried past on either side of her, scared that she’d be bitten if she stepped on one. The avatar wrenched open the door of the nearest Range Rover and bent inside, and a muscular stream of hive rats flowed over it. The avatar was strong and its shell was tough. It managed to start the Range Rover and the big vehicle shot forward, packed with furious movement and pursued by the army of hive rats. It ploughed through the plastic chairs and the awning, swerved snakewise past the shack, and drove straight off the edge of the bench terrace and slammed down nose first into the garden below.

The flood of hive rats washed over it and receeded, streaming away, sinking into holes and burrows. Marilyn stepped carefully amongst the hundreds of hive rats that were still moving about the bench terrace, collecting up the injured and dying. Tom Archibold and his goon were messily dead. So was Julie Bell, inside the shack. In the Range Rover, the avatar was half-crushed between the steering wheel and the broken seat. Its suit had been ripped to shreds and its shell had been torn open by the strong teeth and claws of soldier hive rats, and it did not move when Marilyn dared to lean into the Range Rover, searching for and failing to find the laptop – the hive rats must have carried it off to their nest.

The avatar wouldn’t or couldn’t answer her questions, began to leak acrid white smoke from the broken parts of its shell. Marilyn snatched up a briefcase and beat a hasty retreat when the avatar suddenly burst into flame, burning in a fierce flare that set the Range Rover on fire, too, a funeral pyre that sent hot light and dark smoke beating out across the garden as the last of the hive rats scurried home.

When the posse from Joe’s Corner arrived, late and loud and half-drunk, Marilyn was setting up a scaffold tripod over the hole in the top of the mound. She gave Joel Jumonville and the three men he’d brought with him the last of her suppressor, and they reluctantly followed her across the garden and helped her rig up a harness; then she climbed down the rope ladder and helped Ana Datlovskya into the harness and Joel and his men hauled the old woman out by main force. Ana passed out as soon as she reached the top. The men carried her across the garden and drove her off to the clinic in Joe’s Corner, and Marilyn drove Joel to the tomb where she had stashed her prisoner, Frank Parker.

Frank Parker lawyered up and parlayed a deal. Marilyn had to agree to drop most of the charges against him in exchange for a lead that pointed the UN police in Port of Plenty to a room in a hotbed motel near the city’s docks, where Tom Archibold had stashed Zui Lin. The mathematician had been interrogated by the avatar, and confirmed most of Marilyn’s story. The UN provisional authority on first Foot made a formal protest about the avatar’s presence, and in due course received apologies from the Jackaroo, who blamed a rogue element and made bland assurances that it would not happen again.

Ana Datlovskaya was in a coma for two weeks, and nearly died from blood loss and infection. Reporters set up camp outside the clinic; Marilyn arrested two who tried to sneak into her room, and deputised townspeople to set up an around-the-clock watch.

When Ana recovered consciousness, she told Marilyn her last little secret. Marilyn and Joel Jumonville drove out to the arroyo and paced off distances from Ana’s shack and dug down carefully and retrieved the plastic-wrapped box with Ana’s papers and a q-bit hard drive that contained not only a copy of all her work on the hive rats, but also a back-up of the hard drive of the laptop lost somewhere under the hive rat garden.

Marilyn and Joel drank from ice-cold bottles of beer from the cooler they’d brought along, standing side by side at the edge of the bench terrace and looking out at the simmering garden down in the arroyo. It was noon, hot and peaceful. Every blade of century plant stood above its shrunken shadow. Hive rat sentries stood guard on flat stones in front of their pop holes.

“I can almost see why she wants to come back,” Joel said.

Ana had told Marilyn that she still had a lot of work to do. “I had only just begun a proper conversation with the ship-mind before I was so rudely interrupted. Now I will have to have to start over again. Things may go more quickly if Zui Lin sticks to his promise and comes out here to help me, but it will be a long time before we know whether or not the Jackaroo avatar told you anything like the truth.”

Marilyn warned the old woman that people were already talking about her work with the hive rats and the ship-mind, showed her a fat fan of newspapers that had made it their headline story. “You’re famous, Ana. You’re going to have to become used to that.”

“I will be beleaguered by fools looking for the secret of the universe,” the old woman said. She looked frail and shrunken against the clean linen of the clinic bed, but her gaze was still as fierce as a desert owl’s.

“The Jackaroo thought that the ship-mind knew something important,” Marilyn said. “Something that might help us understand what happened to the other tenant races. What might happen to us.”

“As if we can learn from the fate of other species, when we have learnt so little from our own history,” Ana said. “Whatever the ship-mind knows, and I do not yet know it knows anything important, we must make our own future.”

Marilyn thought about that now, when Joel Jumonville asked her what she was going to do next.

“Why I ask, you’re going to be rich,” Joel said. “And the last constable, he ran out when he struck it rich with that room-temperature superconductor.”

The briefcase Marilyn had pulled out of the avatar’s Range Rover had contained a little gizmo that not only tracked and disrupted q-phones, but could also eavesdrop on them – a violation of quantum mechanics that was like catnip to physicists. Marilyn had a patent lawyer, a cousin of the town’s assayer, working full time in Port of Plenty to establish her rights to a share of profits from any new technology derived from reverse engineering the gizmo. Marilyn planned to give half of anything she earned to Ana; so far all she had was a bunch of unpaid legal bills.

She took a slug of beer and studied the shimmering hive rat garden, the sentries standing upright and alert beneath the great sails of the century plants. “Oh, I think I’ll stick around for a little while,” she said. “Someone has to make sure that Ana will be able to get on with her work without being disturbed by tourists and charlatans. And besides, my contract has six months to run.”

“And after that?”

“Hell, Joel, who knows what the future holds?”

THE VOYAGE OUT

Gwyneth Jones

One of the most acclaimed British writers of her generation, Gwyneth Jones was a co-winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues in science fiction, in her 1991 novel
White Queen
, and has also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, for her novel
Bold as Love
. She also received two World Fantasy Awards – for her story “The Grass Princess” and for her collection
Seven Tales and a Fable
. Her other books include the novels
North Wind
,
Flowerdust
,
Escape Plans
,
Divine Endurance
,
Phoenix Café
,
Castles Made of Sand
,
Stone Free
,
Midnight Lamp
,
Kairos
,
Life
,
Water in the Air
,
The Influence of Ironwood
,
The Exchange
,
Dear Hill
,
Escape Plans
,
The Hidden Ones
, and
Rainbow Bridge
, as well as more than sixteen young adult novels published under the name Ann Halam. Her too infrequent short fiction has appeared in
Interzone
,
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
Off Limits
, and other magazines and anthologies, and has been collected in
Identifying the Object: A Collection of Short Stories and Seven Tales and a Fable
. She is also the author of the critical study
Deconstructing the Starships: Science Fiction and Reality
. Her most recent book is a new SF novel,
Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant
. She has a website at homepage.ntl-world.com/gwynethann/. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat.

Here she tells the story of a woman who is forced to leave behind everything she knows, and is thrust, quite literally, into the unknown.

I

“D
O YOU WANT
to dream?”

“No.”

The woman in uniform behind the desk looked at her screen and then looked at me, expressionless. I didn’t know if she was real and far away; or fake and here.

“Straight to orientation then.”

II

I walked. The Kuiper Belt Station – commonly known as the Panhandle – could afford the energy fake gravity requires. It wasn’t going anywhere; it was spinning on the moving spot of a minimum-collision orbit, close to six billion kilometres from the sun: a prison isle without a native population. From here I would be transported to my final exile from the United States of Earth, as an algorithm, a string of 0s and 1s. It’s illegal to create a code-version of a human being anywhere in the USE, including near-space habitats and planetary colonies. Protected against identity theft, the whole shipload of us, more than a hundred condemned criminals, had been brought to the edge: where we must now be coded individually before we could leave. The number-crunching would take a while, even with the most staggering computation power.

A reprieve, then. A stay of execution

In my narrow cabin, or cell, I lay down on the bunk. Walls, floor, fittings: everything was made of the same, grey-green, dingy ceramic fibre. The ‘mattress’ felt like metal to the touch, but it yielded to the shape and weight of my body. The raised rim made me think of autopsies, crushed viscera. A panel by my head held the room controls: just like a hotel. I could check the status of my vacuum toilet, my dry shower, my air, my pressure, my own emissions, detailed in bright white.

Questions bubbled behind my lips, never to be answered. I was disoriented by weeks of being handled only by automation (sometimes with a human face); never allowed any contact with my fellow prisoners. When did I last speak to a human being? That must have been the orientation on earth, my baggage allowance session. You’re given a “weight limit” – actually a code limit – and advised when you’ve “duplicated”.
Gray’s Anatomy
, for old sake’s sake. A really good set of knives, a really good pair of boots, a field first-aid kit, vegetable and flower seeds. The Beethoven piano sonatas, played by Alfred Brendel; Mozart piano sonatas, likewise. The prison officer told me I couldn’t have the first aid. He advised me I must
choose
the data storage device for my minimalist choice of entertainments, and
specify
the lifetime power source. He made me handle the knives, the boots, the miniaturized hardware, even the seeds. What a palaver.

But the locker underneath the bunk was empty.

Do you want to dream?

The transit would happen, effectively, in no time at all. I had no idea how long the coding would take. An hour, a week, a month? I thought of the others, dreaming in fantasy boltholes. Some gorging their appetites, delicate or gross. Some exacting hideous revenge on the forces that brought them here: fathers, mothers, lovers; authority figures, SOCIETY. Some even trying to expiate their crimes in virtual torment; you get all sorts in the prison population. None of that for me. If you want to die have the courage to kill yourself, before you reach a finale like this one. If you don’t, then live to the last breath. Face the firing squad without a blindfold.

Scenes from my last trial went through my head. Me, bloody but unbowed of course, still trying to make speeches, thoroughly alienating the courtroom witnesses. My ex-husband making unconscious gestures in a small blank room, as he finally abandoned this faulty domestic appliance to her fate. He was horrified by that Death Row interview: I was not. I had given up on Dirk long ago. Did he
ever
believe in me? Or was he just humouring my unbalanced despair, as he says now – in the years when we were lovers and best friends? Did he really twist his hands around like that, and raise them high, palm outwards, as if he faced a terrorist with a gun?

I thought of the girl who had caught my eye, glimpsed as we sometimes glimpsed each other; waiting to be processed into the Panhandle system. Springy cinnamon braids, sticking out on either side of her head, that made her look like a little girl. Her eyes lobotomized. Who had brushed her hair for her? Why would they waste money sending a lobotomy subject out here? Because it’s a numbers game they’re playing. The weaklings, casualties of the transit, may ensure in some occult way the survival of a few, who may live long enough to form the foundation stones of a colony, on an earth-like planet of a distant star. Our fate: to be pole-axed and buried in the mud where the bridge of dreams will be built.

I wondered when “orientation” would begin. The cold of deep space penetrated my thin quilt. The steady shift of the clock numerals was oddly comforting, like a heartbeat. I watched them until at some point I fell asleep.

III

The Kuiper Belt Station had been planned as the hub of an international deep space city. Later, after that project had been abandoned and before the Buonarotti Device became practicable for mass exits like this one, it’d been an R&R resort for asteroid miners. They’d dock their little rocket ships and party, escaping from utter solitude to get crazy drunk and murder each other, according to the legends. I thought of those old no-hopers as I followed the guidance lights to my first orientation session; but there was no sign of them, no scars, no graffiti on the drab walls of endless curving corridors. There was only the pervasive hum of the Buonarotti torus, like the engines of a vast majestic passenger liner forging through the abyss. The sound – gentle on the edge of hearing – made me shudder. It was warming up, of course.

In a large bare saloon, prisoners in tan overalls were shuffling past a booth where a figure in medical-looking uniform questioned them and let them by. A circle of chairs, smoothly fixed to the floor or maybe extruded from it, completed the impression of a dayroom in a mental hospital. I joined the line. I didn’t speak to anyone and nobody spoke to me, but the girl with the cinnamon braids was there. I noticed her. My turn came. The woman behind the desk, whom I immediately christened Big Nurse, checked off my name and asked me to take the armband that lay on the counter. “It’s good to know we have a doctor on the team,” she said.

I had qualified as a surgeon but it was years since I’d practised, other than as a volunteer “barefoot” GP in Community Clinics for the underclass. I looked at the armband that said “captain” and wondered how it had got there, untouched by human hand. Waldoes, robot servitors . . . It was disorienting to be reminded of the clunky, mechanical devices around here; the ones I was not allowed to see.

“Where are you in the real world?” I asked, trying to reclaim my dignity. I knew they had ways of dealing with the time-lapse, they could fake almost natural dialogue. “Where is the Panhandle run from these days? Xichang? Or Houston? I’d just like to know what kind of treatment to expect, bad or worse.”

“No,” said Big Nurse, answering a different question. “I am a bot.” She looked me in the eye, with the distant kindness of a stranger to human concerns. “I am in the information system, nowhere else. There is no treatment, no punishment here, Ruth Norman. That’s over.”

I glanced covertly at my companions, the ones already hovering around the day-room chairs. I’d been in prison before; I’d been in reform camp before. I knew what could happen to a middle-class woman, in jail for the unimpressive “crime” of protesting the loss of our civil liberties. The animal habit of self-preservation won out. I slipped the band over the sleeve of my overalls. Immediately a tablet appeared, in the same place on the counter. It was solid when I picked it up.

I quickly discovered that, of the fourteen people in the circle (there were eighteen names listed on my tablet, the missing four never turned up), less than half had opted to stay awake. I tried to convince the dream-deprived that I had not been responsible for the mix-up. I asked them all to answer to their names. They complied, surprisingly willing to accept my authority – for the moment.

“
Hil . . . de
. . . ” said the girl with the cinnamon braids, struggling with a tongue too thick for her mouth: a sigh and a guttural
duh
, like the voice of a child’s teddy bear, picked up and shaken after long neglect. The braids had not been renewed, fuzzy strands were escaping. Veterans of prison-life glanced at each other uneasily. Nobody commented. There was another woman who didn’t speak at all, so lacking in response you wondered how she’d found her way to the dayroom.

We were nine women, four men and one female-identifying male transsexual (to give the Sista her prison-system designation). The details on my tablet were meagre: names, ages, ethnic/national grouping, not much else. Mrs Miqal Rohan was Iranian and wore strict hejabi dress, but spoke perfect, icy English. “Bimbam” was European English, rail thin, and haunted by some addiction that made her chew frantically at the inside of her cheek. The other native Englishwoman, a Caribbean ethnic calling herself Servalan (Angela Morrison, forty-three), looked as if she’d been institutionalized all her life. I had no information about their crimes. But as I entered nicknames, and read the qualifications or professions, I saw a pattern emerging, and I didn’t like it. Such useful people! How did you all come to this pass? By what strange accidents did you all earn mandatory death sentences or life-without-parole? Will the serial killers, the drug cartel gangsters, and the re-offending child rapists please identify yourselves?

I kept quiet, and waited to hear what anyone else would say.

The youngest of the men (Koffi, Nigerian; self-declared “business entrepreneur”) asked, diffidently, “Does anyone know how long this lasts?”

“There’s no way of knowing,” said Carpazian, who was apparently Russian, despite the name; a slim and sallow thirty-something, still elegant in the overalls. “The Panhandle is a prison system. It can drug us and deceive us without limit.”

The man who’d given his handle as Drummer raised heavy eyes and spoke, sonorous as a prophet, from out of a full black beard. “We will be ordered to the transit chamber as we were ordered to this room; or drugged and carried by robots in our sleep. We will lie down in the Buonarotti capsules, and a code-self, the complex pattern of each human body and soul, will be split into two like a cell dividing. The copies will be sent flying around the torus, at half-light speed. You will collide with yourself and cease utterly to exist at these co-ordinates of space-time. The body and soul in the capsule will be
annihilated
, and know GOD no longer.’

“But then we wake up on another planet?” pleaded Servalan, unexpectedly shy and sweet from that coarsened mask.

“Perhaps.”

The prophet resumed staring at the floor.

“Isn’t it against your religion to be here, Mr Drummer?”

He made no answer. The speaker was “Gee”, a high-flier, corporate, who must have got caught up in something
very
sour. A young and good-looking woman with an impervious air of success, even now. I marked her down as a possible troublemaker, and tried to start a conversation about survival skills. That quickly raised another itchy topic. Is there
really
no starship? Not even a lifepod? Are we
really, truly
meant to pop into existence on the surface of an unknown planet, just as we stand?