The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (24 page)

She tilted her head back for one last clear look at the shining black infinity of space. Really, there wasn’t any choice at all. Because even if she’d misunderstood what Vinnie seemed to be trying to tell her, the worst she’d end up was dead, and that was light-years better than what the Mi-Go had on offer.

Black Alice Bradley loved her ship.

She turned to her left and started walking, and the
Lavinia Whateley
’s bioluminescence followed her courteously all the way, vanes swaying out of her path. Black Alice skirted each of Vinnie’s eyes as she came to them, and each of them blinked at her. And then she reached Vinnie’s mouth and that magnificent panoply of teeth.

“Make it quick, Vinnie, okay?” said Black Alice, and walked into her leviathan’s maw.

Picking her way delicately between razor-sharp teeth, Black Alice had plenty of time to consider the ridiculousness of worrying about a hole in her suit. Vinnie’s mouth was more like a crystal cave, once you were inside it; there was no tongue, no palate. Just polished, macerating stones. Which did not close on Black Alice, to her surprise. If anything, she got the feeling the Vinnie was holding her . . . breath. Or what passed for it.

The Boojum was lit inside, as well – or was making herself lit, for Black Alice’s benefit. And as Black Alice clambered inward, the teeth got smaller, and fewer, and the tunnel narrowed. Her throat, Alice thought. I’m inside her.

And the walls closed down, and she was swallowed.

Like a pill, enclosed in the tight sarcophagus of her space suit, she felt rippling pressure as peristalsis pushed her along. And then greater pressure, suffocating, savage. One sharp pain. The pop of her ribs as her lungs crushed.

Screaming inside a space suit was contra-indicated, too. And with collapsed lungs, she couldn’t even do it properly.

alice
.

She floated. In warm darkness. A womb, a bath. She was comfortable. An itchy soreness between her shoulder blades felt like a very mild radiation burn.

alice
.

A voice she thought she should know. She tried to speak; her mouth gnashed, her teeth ground.

alice. talk here
.

She tried again. Not with her mouth, this time.

Talk
. . .
here
?

The buoyant warmth flickered past her. She was . . . drifting. No, swimming. She could feel currents on her skin. Her vision was confused. She blinked and blinked, and things were shattered.

There was nothing to see anyway, but stars.

alice talk here
.

Where am I
?

eat alice
.

Vinnie. Vinnie’s voice, but not in the flatness of the heads-up display anymore. Vinnie’s voice alive with emotion and nuance and the vastness of her self.

You ate me
, she said, and understood abruptly that the numbness she felt was not shock. It was the boundaries of her body erased and redrawn.

!

Agreement. Relief.

I’m . . . in you, Vinnie
?

=/=

Not a “no”. More like, this thing is not the same, does not compare, to this other thing. Black Alice felt the warmth of space so near a generous star slipping by her. She felt the swift currents of its gravity, and the gravity of its satellites, and bent them; and tasted them, and surfed them faster and faster away.

I
am
you
.

!

Ecstatic comprehension, which Black Alice echoed with passionate relief. Not dead. Not dead after all. Just, transformed. Accepted. Embraced by her ship, whom she embraced in return.

Vinnie. Where are we going
?

out
, Vinnie answered. And in her, Black Alice read the whole great naked wonder of space, approaching faster and faster as Vinnie accelerated, reaching for the first great skip that would hurl them into the interstellar darkness of the Big Empty. They were going somewhere.

Out
, Black Alice agreed and told herself not to grieve. Not to go mad. This sure beat swampy Hell out of being a brain in a jar.

And it occurred to her, as Vinnie jumped, the brainless bodies of her crew already digesting inside her, that it wouldn’t be long before the loss of the
Lavinia Whateley
was a tale told to frighten spacers, too.

THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE

Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
Spectrum SF
, and elsewhere. His first novel,
Revelation Space
, was widely hailed as one of the major SF books of the year; it was quickly followed by
Chasm City
,
Redemption Ark
,
Absolution Gap
,
Century Rain
, and
Pushing Ice
, all big sprawling space operas that were big sellers as well, establishing Reynolds as one of the best and most popular new SF writers to enter the field in many years. His other books include a novella collection,
Diamond Dogs
,
Turquoise Days
. His most recent books are a novel,
The Prefect
, and two collections,
Galactic North
and
Zima Blue and Other Stories
. Coming up is a new novel,
House of Sun
, and a chapbook novella from Subterranean Press,
The Six Directions of Space
. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he worked for the European Space Agency in the Netherlands for a number of years, but has recently moved back to his native Wales to become a full-time writer.

Reynolds’s work is known for its grand scope, sweep, and scale (in one story, “Galactic North’, a spaceship sets out in pursuit of another in a stern chase that takes thousands of years of time and hundreds of thousands of light-years to complete; in another, “Thousandth Night”, ultra-rich immortals embark on a plan that will call for the physical rearrangement of all the stars in the galaxy. In the hard-hitting and unsettling story that follows, he shows us a brutal galactic empire embattling itself to defend against attacks by other empires that come not just from elsewhere in the galaxy, but from other universes altogether!

W
E HAD BEEN
riding for two hours when I tugged sharply on the reins to bring my pony to a halt. Tenger, my escort, rode on for a few paces before glancing back irritatedly. He muttered something in annoyance – a phrase that contained the words “stupid” and “dyke” – before steering his horse back alongside mine.

“Another sight-seeing stop?” he asked, as the two mismatched animals chewed their bits, flared their nostrils, and flicked their heads up in mutual impatience.

I said nothing, damned if I was going to give him the pleasure of an excuse. I only wanted to take in the view: the deeply-shadowed valley below, the rising hills beyond (curving ever upwards, like a tidal wave formed from rock and soil and grass), and the little patch of light down in the darkness, the square formation of the still-moving caravan.

“If you really want to make that appointment . . .” Tenger continued.

“Shut up.”

Tenger sniffed, dug into a leather flap on his belt, and popped something into his mouth.

“On your own head be it, Yellow Dog. It certainly won’t be my neck on the line, keeping the old man waiting.”

I held both reins in one hand so that I could cup the other against my ear. I turned the side of my head in the direction of the caravan and closed my eyes. After a few moments, I convinced myself that I could hear it. It was a sound almost on the edge of audibility, but which would become thunderous, calamitous, world-destroying, as they drew nearer. The sound of thousands of riders, hundreds of wheeled tents, dozens of monstrous siege engines. A sound very much like the end of the world itself, it must have seemed, when the caravan approached.

“We can go now,” I told Tenger.

He dug his spurs in, almost drawing blood, his horse pounding away so quickly that it kicked dirt into my eyes. Goyo snorted and gave chase. We raced down into the valley, sending skylarks and snipe barrelling into the air.

“Just going by the rules, Yellow Dog,” the guard said, apologising for making me show him my passport. We were standing on the wheeled platform of the imperial
ger
. The guard wore a kneelength blue sash-tied coat, long black hair cascading from the dome of his helmet. “We’re on high alert as it is. Three plausible threats in the last week.”

“Usual nut-jobs?” I said, casting a wary glance at Tenger, who was attending to Goyo with a bad-tempered expression. I had beaten him to the caravan and he did not like that.

“Two Islamist sects, one bunch of Nestorians,” the guard answered. “Not that I’m saying that the old man has anything to fear from you, of course, but we have to follow protocol.”

“I understand fully.”

“Frankly, we were beginning to wonder if you were ever coming back.” He looked at me solicitously. “Some of us were beginning to wonder if you’d been disavowed.”

I smiled. “Disavowed? I don’t think so.”

“Just saying, we’re all assuming you’ve got something suitably juicy, after all this time.”

I reached up to tie back my hair. “Juicy’s not exactly the word I’d use. But it’s definitely something
he
has to hear about.”

The guard touched a finger to the pearl on his collar.

“Better go inside, in that case.”

I did as I was invited.

My audience with the khan was neither as private nor as lengthy as I might have wished, but, in all other respects, it was a success. One of his wives was there, as well as Minister Chiledu, the national security adviser, and the khan was notoriously busy during this ceremonial restaging of the war caravan. I thought, not for the first time, of how old he looked: much older than the young man who had been elected to this office seven years earlier, brimming with plans and promises. Now he was greying and tired, worn down by disappointing polls and the pressures of managing an empire that was beginning to fray at the edges. The caravan was supposed to be an antidote to all that. In this, the nine hundred and ninety ninth year since the death of the Founder (we would celebrate this birthday, but no one knows when it happened), a special effort had been made to create the largest caravan in decades, with almost every local system commander in attendance.

As I stepped off the
ger
to collect Goyo and begin my mission, I felt something perilously close to elation. The data I had presented to the khan – the troubling signs I had detected concerning the functioning and security of the Infrastructure – had been taken seriously. The khan could have waved aside my concerns as an issue for his successor, but – to his credit, I think – he had not. I had been given licence and funds to gather more information, even if that meant voyaging to the Kuchlug Special Administrative Volume and operating under the nose of Qilian, one of the men who had been making life difficult for the khan these last few years.

And yet my mood of elation was short lived.

I had no sooner set my feet on the ground than I spied Tenger. He was bullying Goyo, jerking hard on his bridle, kicking a boot against his hocks. He was so preoccupied with his business that he did not see me approaching from behind his back. I took hold of a good, thick clump of his hair and snapped his head back as far it would go. He released the bridle, staggering back under the pressure I was applying.

I whispered in his ear. “No one hurts my horse, you ignorant piece of shit.”

Then I spun him around, the hair tearing out in my fist, and kneed him hard in the groin, so that he coughed out a groan of pain and nausea and bent double, like a man about to vomit.

Some say that it is Heaven’s Mandate that we should have the stars, just as it was the will of Heaven that our armies should bring the squabbling lands of Greater Mongolia under one system of governance, a polity so civilised that a woman could ride naked from the western shores of Europe to the eastern edge of China without once being molested. I say that it is simply the case that we – call us Mongols, call us humans, it scarcely matters now – have always made the best of what we are given.

Take the nexus in Gansu system, for instance. It was a medium-sized moon that had been hollowed out nearly all the way to its middle, leaving a shell barely a hundred
li
thick, with a small round kernel buttressed to the shell by ninety-nine golden spokes. Local traffic entered and departed the nexus via apertures at the northern and southern poles. Not that there was much local traffic to speak of: Gansu, with its miserly red sun – only just large enough to sustain fusion – and handful of desolate, volatile-poor, and radiation-lashed rocky worlds, was neither a financial nor military hub, nor a place that figured prominently in tourist itineraries. As was often the case, it was something of a puzzle why the wormlike
khorkoi
had built the nexus in such a miserable location to begin with.

Unpromising material, but in the five hundred years since we first reopened a portal into the Infrastructure, we had made a glittering bauble out of it. Five major trunk routes converged on Gansu, including a high-capacity branch of the Kherlen Corridor, the busiest path in the entire network. In addition, the moon offered portals to a dozen secondary routes, four of which had been rated stable enough to allow passage by juggernaut-class ships. Most of those secondary routes led to stellar population centres of some economic importance, including the Kiriltuk, Tatatunga, and Chilagun administrative volumes, each of which encompassed more than fifty settled systems and around a thousand habitable worlds. Even the routes which led to nowhere of particular importance were well-travelled by prospectors and adventurers, hoping to find
khorkoi
relics, or, that fever dream of all chancers, an unmapped nexus.

We did not know the function of the ninety-nine spokes, or of the core they buttressed. No matter; the core made a useful foundation, a place upon which to build. From the vantage point of the rising shuttle, it was a scribble of luminous neon, packed tight as a migraine. I could not distinguish the lights of individual buildings, only the larger glowing demarkations of the precincts between city-sized districts. Pressurised horseways a whole
li
wide were thin, snaking scratches. The human presence had even begun to climb up the golden spokes, pushing tendrils of light out to the moon’s inner surface. Commercial slogans spelled themselves out in letters ten li high.
On Founder’s Day, drink only Temujin Brand Airag. Sorkan-Shira rental ponies have low mileage, excellent stamina, and good temperament. Treat your favorite wife: buy her only Zarnuk Silks. During hunting season, safeguard your assets with New Far Samarkand Mutual Insurance. Think you’re a real man? Then you should be drinking Death Worm Airag: the one with a sting at both ends!

I had spent only one night in Gansu, arranging a eunuch and waiting for the smaller ship that would carry us the rest of the way to Kuchlug. Now Goyo, the eunuch, and I were being conveyed to the
Burkhan Khaldun
, a vessel that was even smaller than the
Black Heart Mountain
that had brought me to Gansu. The
BK
was only one
li
from end to end, less than a quarter of that across the bow. The hull was a multicoloured quilt of patch repairs, with many scratches, craters, and scorches yet to be attended to. The lateral stabilization vanes had the slightly buckled look of something that had been badly bent and then hammered back into shape, while the yaw-dampeners appeared to have originated from a completely different ship, fixed on with silvery fillets of recent welding work. A whole line of windows had been plated over.

As old as the
BK
might have been, it had taken more than just age and neglect to bring her to that state. The Parvan Tract was a notoriously rough passage, quickly taking its toll on even a new ship. If the Kherlen Corridor was a wide, stately river which could almost be navigated blindfold, then the Tract was a series of narrow rapids whose treacherous properties varied from trip to trip, requiring not just expert input from the crew, but passengers with the constitution to tolerate a heavy crossing.

Once I had checked into my rooms and satisfied myself that Goyo was being taken care of, I made my way back to the passenger area. I bought a glass of Temujin
airag
and made my way to the forward viewing platform, with its wide sweep of curved window – scratched and scuffed in places, worryingly starred in others – and leaned hard against the protective railing. The last shuttle had already detached, and the
BK
was accelerating towards the portal, its great human-made doors irising open at the last possible moment, so that the interior of Gansu was protected from the Parvan Tract’s unpredictable energy surges. Even though the Infrastructure shaft stretched impossibly far into the distance, my mind kept insisting that we were about to punch through the thin skin of the moon.

The ship surged forward, the sluggish artificial gravity generators struggling to maintain the local vertical. We passed through the door, into the superluminal machinery of the Infrastructure. The tunnel walls were many
li
away, but they felt closer – as they raced by at increasing speed, velocity traced by the luminous squiggly patterns that had been inscribed on the wall for inscrutable reasons by the
khorkoi
builders, I had the impression that the shaft was constricting, tightening down on our fragile little ship. Yet nothing seemed to disconcert or even arouse the interest of my fellow passengers. In ones and twos, they drifted away from the gallery, leaving me alone with my eunuch, observing from a discreet distance. I drank the
airag
very slowly, looking down the racing shaft, wondering if it would be my fortune to see a phantom with my own eyes. Phantoms, after all, were what had brought me here.