Year’s Best SF 15 (35 page)

Alastair Reynolds
(voxish.tripod.com)
lives in Wales. He worked as a space scientist in the Netherlands until 2004, and returned to the UK a couple of years ago. His first novel,
Revelation Space,
was published in 1999. He became an icon of the new British space opera and of hard sf writers emerging in the mid and late 1990s, in the generation after Baxter and McAuley, and originally the most “hard SF” of the new group. He has now published about fifty short stories; two collections of his stories were published in 2006,
Zima Blue
and
Galactic North. House of Suns
(2008) is an expanded version of the Zima Blue collection. His ninth novel,
Terminal World,
a far-future, steampunk-influenced planetary romance, will appear in 2010. He says, “I am currently at work on a big trilogy about an optimistic, spacefaring future spanning the next 11,000 years.

“The Fixation” was published 2009 in
The Solaris Book of New SF 3.
It was first published in a limited-run tribute book for a prominent Finnish fan and disc jockey and Reynolds' friend, Hannu Blomilla. It is an alternate universe physics story, with an unusual twist.

K
atib, the security guard who usually works the graveyard shift, has already clocked on when Rana swipes her badge through the reader. He gives her a long-suffering look as she bustles past in her heavy coat, stooping under a cargo of document boxes and laptops. “Pulling another all-nighter, Rana?” he asks, as he has asked a hundred times before. “I keep telling you to get a different job, girl.”

“I worked hard to get this one,” she tells him, almost slipping on the floor, which has just been polished to a mirrored gleam by a small army of robot cleaners. “Where else would I get to do this and actually get paid for it?”

“What ever they're paying you, it isn't enough for all those bags under your eyes.”

She wishes he wouldn't mention the bags under her eyes—it's not as if she exactly likes them—but she smiles anyway, for Katib is a kindly man without a hurtful thought in his soul. “They'll go,” she says. “We're on the home stretch, anyway. Or did you somehow not notice that there's this big opening ceremony coming up?”

“Oh, I think I heard something about that,” he says,
scratching at his beard. “I just hope they need some old fool to look after this wing when they open the new one.”

“You're indispensable, Katib. They'd get rid of half the exhibits before they put you on the street.”

“That's what I keep telling myself, but…” He gives a burly shrug, and then smiles to let her know it isn't her business to worry about his problems. “Still, it's going to be something, isn't it? I can see it from my balcony, from all the way across the town. I didn't like it much at first, but now that's up there, now that it's all shining and finished, it's starting to grow on me. And it's ours, that's what I keep thinking. That's our museum, nobody else's. Something to be proud of.”

Rana has seen it too. The new wing, all but finished, dwarfs the existing structure. It's a glittering climate-controlled ziggurat, the work of a monkish British architect who happens to be a devout Christian. A controversial choice, to be sure, but no one who has seen that tidal wave of glass and steel rising above the streets of the city has remained unimpressed. As the sun tracks across the sky, computer-controlled shutters open and close to control the flood of light into the ziggurat's plunging atrium—the atrium where the Mechanism will be the primary exhibit—and maintain the building's ideal ambient temperature. From afar, the play of those shutters is an enchanted mosaic: a mesmerizing, never-repeating dance of spangling glints. Rana read in a magazine that the architect had never
touched
a computer until he arrived in Greater Persia, but that he took to the possibilities with the zeal of the converted.

“It's going to be wonderful,” she says, torn between making small talk with the amiable Katib and getting started on her work. “But it won't be much of an opening ceremony if the Mechanism isn't in place, will it?”

“Which is a kind way of saying, you need to be getting to your office.” He's smiling as he speaks, letting her know he takes no offense. “You need some help with those boxes and computers, my fairest?”

“I'll be fine, thanks.”

“You call me if you need anything. I'll be here through to
six.” With that he unfolds a magazine and taps the sharp end of a pencil against the grid of a half-finished puzzle. “And don't work too hard,” he says under his breath, but just loud enough that she will hear.

Rana doesn't pass another human being on her way to the office. The public part of the museum is deserted save for the occasional cleaner or patrolling security robot, but at least the hallways and exhibits are still partially illuminated, and from certain sightlines she can still see people walking in the street outside, coming from the theater or a late restaurant engagement.

In the private corridors, it's a different story. The halls are dark and the windows too high to reveal anything more than moonlit sky. The robots don't come here very often and most of the offices and meeting rooms are locked and silent. At the end of one corridor stands the glowing sentinel of a coffee dispenser. Normally Rana takes a cup to her room, but tonight she doesn't have a free hand; it's enough of a job just to shoulder her way through doors without dropping something.

Her room is in the basement: a cool, windowless crypt that is half laboratory and half office. Her colleagues think she's mad for working at night, but Rana has her reasons. By day she has to share her facilities with other members of the staff, and what with all the talk and interruptions she tends to get much less work done. If that's not enough of a distraction, there is a public corridor that winds its way past the glass-fronted rooms, allowing the museum's visitors to watch cataloging and restoration work as it actually happens. The public make an effort to look more interested than they really are. Hardly surprising, because the work going on inside the offices could not look less interesting or less glamorous. Rana has been spending the last three weeks working with microscopically precise tools on the restoration of a single bronze gearwheel. What the visitors would imagine to be a morning's work has consumed more of her life than some relationships. She already knows every scratch and chip of that gearwheel like an old friend or ancient, bitter adversary.

There's another reason why she works at night. Her mind functions better in the small hours. She has made more deductive leaps at three in the morning than she has ever done at three in the afternoon, and she wishes it were not so.

She takes off her coat and hangs it by the door. She opens the two laptops, sets them near each other, and powers them up. She keeps the office lights low, with only enough illumination to focus on the immediate area around her bench. The gearwheel is centermost, supported on an adjustable cradle like a miniature music stand. On either side, kept in upright stands, are various chrome-plated tools and magnifying devices, some of which trail segmented power cables to a wall junction. There is a swing-down visor with zoom optics. There are lasers and ultrasound cleaning baths. There are duplicates of the gearwheel and its brethren, etched in brass for testing purposes. There are plastic models of parts of the Mechanism, so that she can take them apart and explain its workings to visitors. There are other gearwheels which have already been removed from the device for restoration, sealed in plastic boxes and racked according to coded labels. Some are visibly cleaner than the one she is working on, but some are still corroded and grubby, with damaged teeth and scabrous surface deterioration.

And there is the Mechanism itself, placed on the bench on the far side of the gearwheel she is working on. It is the size of a shoebox, with a wooden casing, the lid hinged back. When it arrived the box was full of machinery, a tight-packed clockwork of arbors and crown wheels, revolving balls, slotted pins and delicate, hand-engraved inscriptions. None of it did anything, though. Turn the input crank and there'd just be a metallic crunch as stiff, worn gears locked into immobility. No one in the museum remembers the last time the machine was in proper working order. Fifty years ago, she's heard someone say—but not all of the gearing was in place even then. Parts were removed a hundred years ago and never put back. Or were lost or altered two hundred years ago. Since then the Mechanism has become something of an embarrassment: a fabled contraption that doesn't do what everyone expects it to.

Hence the decision by the museum authorities: restore the Mechanism to full and authentic functionality in time for the reopening of the new wing. As the foremost native expert on the device, the work has naturally fallen to Rana. The authorities tried to foist a team on her, but the hapless doctoral students soon realized their leader preferred to work alone, unencumbered by the give and take of collaboration.

Share the glory? Not likely.

With the wall calendar reminding her how few weeks remain to the opening, Rana occasionally wonders if she has taken on too much. But she is making progress, and the most difficult parts of the restoration are now behind her.

Rana picks up one of her tools and begins to scrape away the tiniest burr of corrosion on one of the gear's teeth. Soon she is lost in the methodical repetitiveness of the task, her mind freewheeling back through history, thinking of all the hands that have touched this metal. She imagines all the people this little clockwork box has influenced, all the lives it has altered, the fortunes it has made and the empires it has crushed. The Romans owned the Mechanism for 400 years—one of their ships must have carried it from Greece, perhaps from the island of Rhodes—but the Romans were too lazy and incurious to do anything with the box other than marvel at its computational abilities. The idea that the same clockwork that accurately predicted the movements of the sun, moon, and the planets across an entire Metonic cycle—235 lunar months—might also be made to do
other things
simply never occurred to them.

The Persians were different. The Persians saw a universe of possibility in those spinning wheels and meshing teeth. Those early clocks and calculating boxes—the clever devices that sent armies and navies and engineers across the globe, and made Greater Persia what it is today—bear scant resemblance to the laptops on Rana's desk. But the lineage is unbroken.

There must be ghosts, she thinks: caught in the slipstream of this box, dragged by the Mechanism as it ploughed its way through the centuries. Lives changed and lives extin
guished, lives that never happened at all, and yet all of them still in spectral attendance, a silent audience crowding in on this quiet basement room, waiting for Rana's next move.

Some of them want her to destroy the machine forever.

Some of them want to see it shine again.

Rana doesn't dream much, but when she does she dreams of glittering brass gears meshing tight against each other, whirring furiously, a dance of metal and geometry that moves the heavens.

 

Safa dreams of numbers, not gears: she is a mathematician. Her breakthrough paper, the one that has brought her to the museum, was entitled “Entropy Exchange and the Many Worlds Hypothesis.”

As a foreign national, admitted into the country because of her expertise in an exceedingly esoteric field, Safa has more rights than a refugee. But she must still submit to the indignity of wearing a monitoring collar, a heavy plastic cuff around her neck which not only records her movements, not only sees and hears everything she sees and hears, but which can stun or euthanize her if a government agent deems that she is acting contrary to the national interests. She must also be accompanied by a cyborg watchdog at all times: a sleek black prowling thing with the emblem of the national security agency across its bulletproof chest. At least the watchdog has the sense to lurk at the back of the room when she is about to address the gathered administrators and sponsors, at this deathly hour.

“I'm sorry we had to drag you out here so late,” the museum director tells the assembled audience. “Safa knows more than me, but I'm reliably informed that the equipment works best when the city's shutting down for the night—when there isn't so much traffic, and the underground trains aren't running. We can schedule routine jobs during the day, but something like this—something this delicate—requires the maximum degree of noise-suppression. Isn't that right, Safa?”

“Spot on sir. And if everyone could try and hold their breath for the next six hours, that would help as well.” She
grins reassuringly—it's almost as if some of them think she was serious. “Now I know some of you were probably hoping to see the Mechanism itself, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you—positioning it inside the equipment is a very slow and tricky procedure, and if we started now we'd all still be here next week. But I can show you something nearly as good.”

Safa produces a small white pottery jug that she has brought along for the occasion. “Now, you may think this is just some ordinary old jug I found at the back of a staff cupboard…and you'd be right. It's probably no more than ten or fifteen years old. The Mechanism, as I am sure I don't have to remind anyone here, is incomparably older: we know the ship went down around the first half of the First Century
BC
. But I can still illustrate my point. There are a near-infinite number of copies of this object, and they are
all the same jug
. In one history, I caught a cold and couldn't make it today, and someone else is standing up and talking to you, holding the same jug. In another, someone took the jug out of that cupboard years ago and it's living in a kitchen halfway across the city. In another it was bought by someone else and never ended up in the museum. In another it was broken before it ever left the factory.”

She smiles quickly. “You see the point I'm making. What may be less clear is that all these copies of the same jug are in ghostly dialogue with each other, linked together by a kind of quantum entanglement—though it's not really quantum and it's not exactly entanglement.” Another fierce, nervous smile. “Don't worry: no mathematics tonight! The point is, no matter what happens to this jug, no matter how it's handled or what it comes into contact with, it never quite loses contact with its counterparts. The signal gets fainter, but it never goes away. Even if I do this.”

Abruptly, she lets go of the jug. It drops to the floor and shatters into a dozen sharp white pieces.

“The jug's broken,” Safa says, pulling a sad face. “But in a sense it still exists. The other copies of it are still doing fine—and each and every one of them felt an echo of this
one as it shattered. It's still out there, ringing back and forth like a dying chime.” Then she pauses and kneels down, gathering a handful of the broken pieces into her palms. “Imagine if I could somehow take these pieces and get them to resonate with the intact copies of the jug. Imagine further still that I could somehow steal a little bit of orderedness from each of those copies, and give back some of the disorderedness of this one in return—a kind of swap.”