The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (106 page)

“Good,” she lied.

“Feel like walking around?”

“Why?”

“Dr. Chong says it’s all right. I explained how the doctor wants you in bed, but for the next couple weeks you can still move—”

“Will I get to see the new one?”

“You want to?”

“I’m getting dressed now,” she lied, crawling off the couch. “Are you coming to get me, Badge?”

“Pulling into the driveway right now,” he reported happily.

So she got caught. Not only wasn’t she close to ready, Hanna looked awful, and it took more promises and a few growls before Badger decided she was up to this adventure. Babies. Such a bother! Laying eggs would be so much easier. Drop them somewhere safe and walk away, living your own life until the kids were big enough to be fun. That’s how mothering should be.

She mentioned her idea to Badger.

He was driving and laughing. “I wonder where you got that from?”

Georges had laid eggs. The younger females always had a few in some incomplete stage of development. Nobody knew if they put their basketball-sized eggs inside nests or incubators or what. Two years of research, yet the aliens’ life remained mysterious, open to guesswork and wishful thinking. But somewhere in those vanished mountains, up high where the air was deliciously thin, the species had struggled mightily to replace the several friends and family being buried every year in that deep black peat.

Mattie was waiting for them at the surface. She smiled warmly and asked Hanna how she was feeling, and Hanna tried to sound like a woman in robust good health. Everybody dressed in clean gowns and masks, and then they took the long walk below ground, following one of the worm-like tunnels that Badger had cut into the deep seam. Seven other times Hanna had gotten a tour. But this visit was unique because of the age of the corpse being unearthed – one of the first generation georges, it was guessed – and because this was a privilege that not even the most connected members of the media had known.

This body lay at the graveyard’s edge. To help the studies, Badger had carved an enormous room beside the fossil. The room was filled with machinery and lights, coolers full of food and drink, a portable restroom, plus several researchers busy investigating the tiniest features, making ready for the slow cautious removal of the dead alien female.

Compared to the first george, she was a giant. Hanna expected as much, but seeing the body made her breath quicken. A once-powerful creature, larger than most rhinoceroses, she now lay crumpled down by death and suffocation and the weight of the world that had been peeled away above her. She was dead, yet she was entirely whole too. The acidic peat was a perfect preservative for flesh born outside this world, and presumably the aliens understood that salient fact.

“Great,” Hanna gushed. “Wonderful. Thank you.”

“Step closer,” Mattie offered. “Just not past the yellow line.”

A pair of researchers – sexless in their gowns and masks – were perched on a short scaffold, carefully working with the alien’s hands.

“The burial ring?” Hanna asked.

Mattie nodded. “An aluminum alloy. Very sophisticated, very obvious in the scans.”

“How different?”

The older the corpse, the more elaborate the ring. Mattie explained, “This one’s more like a cylinder than a ring, and it’s covered with details we don’t find in any of the later burials.”

The clothing was more elaborate, Hanna noticed, legs covered with trousers held up by elaborate belts, the feet enjoying what looked like elegant boots sewn from an ancient mammal’s leathery hide. A nylon satchel rode the long back, worn by heavy use, every pocket stripped of anything that would have been difficult to replace.

“Will we ever find the prize?” Hanna asked.

“That amazing widget that transforms life on earth?” Mattie shrugged, admitting, “I keep promising that. Every trip to Congress, I say it’s going to happen soon. But I seriously wonder. From what I’ve seen, these creatures never went into the ground carrying anything fancy or difficult to make.”

Those words sank home. Hanna nodded and glanced at Badger’s eyes, asking, “What else did I want to ask, hon? You remember?”

“Religion,” he mentioned.

“Oh, yeah.” Standing on the yellow line, she asked, “So why did they go into the ground, Mattie?”

“I don’t know.”

Hanna glanced at the woman, and then she stared up at the alien’s cupped hands, imagining that important ring of metal. “I know the story I like best.”

“Which one?”

“A starship reached our solar system, but something went wrong. Maybe the ship was supposed to refuel and set out for a different star, and it malfunctioned. Maybe its sister ships were supposed to meet here, but nobody showed.” Hanna liked Mattie and respected her, and she wanted to sound informed on this extraordinary topic. “Mars or the moon would have made better homes. Their plan could have been to terraform another world. I know they would have appreciated the lighter gravity. And we think – because of the evidence, we can surmise – that their bodies didn’t need or want as much free oxygen as we require. So whatever the reason, earth isn’t where they wanted to be.”

“A lot of people think that,” Mattie said.

Hanna continued. “They didn’t want to stay here long. And we don’t have any evidence that their starship landed nearby. But they came here. The aliens set down in the nearby mountains, and they managed to find food and built shelter, and survive. But after ten or fifty or maybe two hundred years . . . whatever felt like a long time for that first generation . . . no one had come to rescue them. And that’s why they started digging holes and climbing inside.”

“You believe they were hibernating,” Mattie guessed.

“No,” Hanna admitted. “Or I mean, maybe they slept when they were buried. But they weren’t planning to wake up like normal either. Their brains weren’t like ours, I know. Crystalline and tough, and all the evidence points to a low-oxygen metabolism. What I think happened . . . each of the creatures reached a point in life when they felt past their prime, or particularly sad, or whatever . . . and that’s why a lady like this would climb into the cold peat. She believes, or at least she needs to believe, that in another few hundred years, another ring-shaped starship is going to fall toward our sun, dig her up and bring her back to life.”

Mattie contemplated the argument and nodded. “I’ve heard that story a few times, in one fashion or another.”

“That’s how their tradition started,” Hanna continued. “Every generation of georges buried itself in the peat, and after a few centuries or a few thousand years, nobody would remember why. All they knew that it was important to do, and that by holding a metal ring in your hands, you were making yourself a little easier to find inside your sleeping place.”

Badger sighed, disapproving of the rampant speculation.

“That might well be true,” said Mattie. “Which explains why the rings got simpler as time passed. Nobody remembered what the starship looked like. Or maybe they forgot about the ship entirely, and the ring’s purpose changed. It was a symbol, an offering, something that would allow their god to catch their soul and take them back to Heaven again.”

Just then, the two workers on the scaffold slipped the burial ring out from between the dead fingers. Mattie approached them and took the prize in both of her gloved hands. Hanna and then Badger stared at what everyone in the world would see in another few hours: A model of a great starship that had once crossed the vacant unloving blackness of space, ending up where it shouldn’t have been and its crew and their descendants dying slowly over the next 20,000 years.

Once last time, Hanna thanked Mattie for the tour.

Walking to the surface again, she took her husband’s big hand and held it tightly and said, “We’re lucky people.”

“Why’s that?” Badger asked.

“Because we’re exactly where we belong,” she replied, as if it couldn’t be more obvious.

Then they were in the open again, walking on a ravaged landscape dwarfed by the boundless Wyoming sky, and between one step and the next Hanna felt something change inside her body – a slight sensation that held no pain and would normally mean nothing. But she stopped walking. She stopped, but Badger kept marching forward. With both hands, she tenderly touched herself, and she forgot all about the aliens and their epic, long-extinct problems. Bleeding harder by the moment, she looked up to see her husband far ahead of her now, and to herself, with the smallest of whispers, she muttered, “Oh, no . . . not today . . .”

George

Despite night and the season, the thick air burned with its heat and choking oxygen, and the smallest task brought misery, and even standing was work too, and the strongest of the All stood on the broad planks and dug and he dug with them at the soft wet rot of the ground. Everyone but him said those good proper words saved for occasions such as this – ancient chants about better worlds and difficult journeys that ended with survival and giant caring hands that were approaching even now, soon to reach down from the stars to rescue the worthy dead. Silence was expected of the dead, and that was why he said nothing. Silence was the grand tradition born because another – some woman buried far beneath them – said nothing at her death, and the All were so impressed by her reserve and dignity that a taboo was born on that night. How long ago was that time? It was a topic of some conjecture and no good answers, and he used to care about abstract matters like that but discovered now that he couldn’t care anymore. His life had been full of idle ideas that had wasted his time, and he was sorry for his misspent passion and all else that went wrong for him. Grief took hold, so dangerous and so massive that he had to set his shovel on the plank and say nothing in a new fashion, gaining the attention of his last surviving daughter. She was a small and pretty and very smart example of the All, and she was more perceptive than most, guessing what was wrong and looking at him compassionately when she said with clicks and warbles that she was proud of her father and proud to belong to his honorable lineage and that he should empty his mind of poisonous thoughts, that he should think of the dead under them and how good it would feel to pass into a realm where thousands of enduring souls waited.

But the dead were merely dead. Promised hands had never arrived, not in their lives or in his. That buoyant faith of youth, once his most cherished possession, was a tattered hope, and perhaps the next dawn would erase even that. That was why it was sensible to accept the smothering sleep now, now while the mind believed however weakly in its own salvation. Because no matter how long the odds, every other ending was even more terrible: He could become a sack of skin filled with anonymous bones and odd organs that would never again know life, that would be thrown into the communal garden to serve as compost, that the All might recall for another three generations, or maybe four, before the future erased his entire existence.

Once again, to the joy of his daughter and the others, the dead man picked up the long shovel and dug. The front feet threw his weight into the blade, and the blade cut into the cold watery muck, and up came another gout of peat that had to be set carefully behind him. Still the right words were spoken, the right blessings offered, and the right motions made, no one daring complain about the heat or the slow progress or the obvious, sorry fact that the strongest and largest of the All were barely able to manage what their ancestors had done easily.

At least so the old stories claimed.

Then came the moment when the fresh wet rectangular hole was finished and one of them had to climb inside. Odd as it seemed, he forgot his duty here. He found himself looking at the others, even at his exhausted daughter, wondering who was to receive this well-deserved honor. Oh yes, me, he recalled, and then he clicked a loud laugh, and he almost spoke, thinking maybe they would appreciate the grim humor. But no, this was a joke best enjoyed by the doomed, and these souls were nothing but alive. Leaving the moment unspoiled, the ceremony whole and sacred, he set his shovel aside and proved to each that he was stealing nothing precious. Hands empty, pockets opened, he showed them just a few cheap knives that he wanted for sentimental reasons. Then he stepped into the chilly stinking mess of water and rot, and with his feet sinking but his head exposed, he reached up with his long arm, hands opened until that good daughter placed the golden ring into his ready grip.

True to the custom, he said nothing more.

In the east, above the high snow-laced mountains, the winter sun was beginning to rise. Soon the killing heat would return to the lowlands, this brutal ground rendered unlivable. The All worked together to finish what had taken too long, shovels and muddy hands flinging the cold peat at the water and then at him – ceremony balanced on growing desperation – and he carefully said nothing and worked hard to think nothing but good thoughts. But then a favorite son returned to him, killed in a rockslide and lost, and he thought of his best mate whose central heart burst without warning, and because promises cost so little, he swore to both of them that he would carry their memories into this other realm, whatever shape it took.

When he discovered that he could not breathe, he struggled, but his mouth was already beneath the water, his head fixed in place.

With the job nearly finished, most of the All kept working. But others were standing away from the grave – those too weak to help, or too spent or too indifferent – and they decided that the dead could not hear them. With private little voices, they spoke about the coming day and the coming year, gentle but intense words dwelling on relationships forming and relationships lost, and who looked best in their funeral garb, and whose children were the prettiest and wisest, and who would die next, and oh by the way, did anyone think to bring a little snack for the journey home . . . ?

ONE OF OUR
BASTARDS IS MISSING

Paul Cornell

Here’s a fast-paced study of the Great Game played between nations that reads like a Ruritanian romance written by Charles Stross. . . .

British author Paul Cornell is a writer of novels, comics, and television. He’s written
Doctor Who
episodes as well as episodes of
Robin Hood
and
Primeval
for the BBC, and Captain Britain for
Marvel Comics
, in addition to Doctor Who novelizations and many other comic works. His
Doctor Who
episodes have twice been nominated for the Hugo Award, and he shares a Writer’s Guild Award. Of late, he’s taken to writing short science fiction, with sales to
Fast Forward 2
,
Eclipse 2
, and
The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Volume Three.

T
O GET TO
Earth from the edge of the Solar System, depending on the time of year and the position of the planets, you need to pass through at least Poland, Prussia and Turkey, and you’d probably get stamps in your passport from a few of the other great powers. Then as you get closer to the world, you arrive at a point, in the continually shifting carriage space over the countries, where this complexity has to give way or fail. And so you arrive in the blissful lubrication of neutral orbital territory. From there it’s especially clear that no country is whole unto itself. There are yearning gaps between parts of each state, as they stretch across the Solar System. There is no congruent territory. The countries continue in balance with each other like a fine but eccentric mechanism, pent up, all that political energy dealt with through eternal circular motion.

The maps that represent this can be displayed on a screen, but they’re much more suited to mental contemplation. They’re beautiful. They’re made to be beautiful, doing their own small part to see that their beauty never ends.

If you looked down on that world of countries, onto the pink of glorious old Greater Britain, that land of green squares and dark forest and carriage contrails, and then you naturally avoided looking directly at the golden splendor of London, your gaze might fall on the Thames valley. On the country houses and mansions and hunting estates that letter the river banks with the names of the great. On one particular estate: an enormous winged square of a house with its own grouse shooting horizons and mazes and herb gardens and markers that indicate it also sprawls into folded interior expanses.

Today that estate, seen from such a height, would be adorned with informational banners that could be seen from orbit, and tall pleasure cruisers could be observed, docked beside military boats on the river, and carriages of all kinds would be cluttering the gravel of its circular drives and swarming in the sky overhead. A detachment of Horse guards could be spotted, stood at ready at the perimeter.

Today, you’d need much more than a passport to get inside that maze of information and privilege.

Because today was a royal wedding.

That vision from the point of view of someone looking down upon him was what was at the back of Hamilton’s mind.

But now he was watching the princess.

Her chestnut hair had been knotted high on her head, baring her neck, a fashion which Hamilton appreciated for its defiance of the French, and at an official function too, though that gesture wouldn’t have been Liz’s alone, but would have been calculated in the warrens of Whitehall. She wore white, which had made a smile come to Hamilton’s lips when he’d first seen it in the Cathedral this morning. In this gigantic function room with its high arched ceiling, in which massed dignitaries and ambassadors and dress uniforms orbited from table to table, she was the sun about which everything turned. Even the King, in the far distance, at a table on a rise with old men from the rest of Europe, was no competition for his daughter this afternoon.

This was the reception, where Elizabeth, escorted by members of the Corps of Heralds, would carelessly and entirely precisely move from group to group, giving exactly the right amount of charm to every one of the great powers, briefed to keep the balance going as everyone like she and Hamilton did, every day.

Everyone like the two of them. That was a useless thought and he cuffed it aside.

Her gaze had settled on Hamilton’s table precisely once. A little smile and then away again. As not approved by Whitehall. He’d tried to stop watching her after that. But his carefully random table, with diplomatic corps functionaries to his left and right, had left him cold. Hamilton had grown tired of pretending to be charming.

“It’s a marriage of convenience,” said a voice beside him.

It was Lord Carney. He was wearing open cuffs that bloomed from his silk sleeves, a big collar and no tie. His long hair was unfastened. He had retained his rings.

Hamilton considered his reply for a moment, then opted for silence. He met Carney’s gaze with a suggestion in his heart that surely His Lordship might find some other table to perch at, perhaps one where he had friends?

“What do you reckon?”

Hamilton stood, with the intention of walking away. But Carney stood too and stopped him just as they’d got out of earshot of the table. The man smelled like a Turkish sweetshop. He affected a mode of speech beneath his standing. “This is what I do. I probe, I provoke, I poke. And when I’m in the room, it’s all too obvious when people are looking at someone else.”

The broad grin stayed on his face.

Hamilton found a deserted table and sat down again, furious at himself.

Carney settled beside him, and gestured away from Princess Elizabeth, towards her new husband, with his neat beard and his row of medals on the breast of his Svenska Adelsfanan uniform. He was talking with the Papal ambassador, doubtless discussing getting Liz to Rome as soon as possible, for a great show to be made of this match between the Protestant and the Papist. If Prince Bertil was also pretending to be charming, Hamilton admitted that he was making a better job of it.

“Yeah, jammy fucker, my thoughts exactly. Still, I’m on a promise with a couple of members of his staff, so it’s swings and roundabouts.” Carney clicked his tongue and wagged his finger as a Swedish serving maid ran past, and she curtsied a quick smile at him. “I do understand, you know. All our relationships are informed by the balance. And the horror of it is that we all can conceive of a world where this isn’t so.”

Hamilton pursed his lips and chose his next words carefully. “Is that why you are how you are, your Lordship?”

“ ’Course it is. Maids, lady companions, youngest sisters, it’s a catalogue of incompleteness. I’m allowed to love only in ways which don’t disrupt the balance. For me to commit myself, or, heaven forbid, to marry, would require such deep thought at the highest levels that by the time the Heralds had worked it through, well, I’d have tired of the lady. Story of us all, eh? Nowhere for the pressure to go. If only I could see an alternative.”

Hamilton had decided that, having shown the corner of his cards, the man had taken care to move back to the fringes of treason once more. It was part of his role as an agent provocateur. And Hamilton knew it. But that didn’t mean he had to take this. “Do you have any further point, your Lordship?”

“Oh, I’m just getting – ”

The room gasped.

Hamilton was up out of his seat and had taken a step towards Elizabeth, his gun hand had grabbed into the air to his right where his .66mm Webley Corsair sat in a knot of space and had swung it ready to fire –

At nothing.

There stood the Princess, looking about herself in shock. Dress uniforms, bearded men all around her.

Left right up down.

Hamilton couldn’t see anything for her to be shocked at.

And nothing near her, nothing around her.

She was already stepping back, her hands in the air, gesturing at a gap –

What had been there? Everyone was looking there. What?

He looked to the others like him. Almost all of them were in the same sort of posture he was, balked at picking a target.

The Papal envoy stepped forward and cried out. “A man was standing there! And he has vanished!”

Havoc. Everybody was shouting. A weapon, a weapon! But there was no weapon that Hamilton knew of that could have done that, made a man, whoever it had been, blink out of existence. Groups of bodyguards in dress uniforms or diplomatic black tie leapt up encircling their charges. Ladies started screaming. A nightmare of the balance collapsing all around them. That hysteria when everyone was in the same place and things didn’t go exactly as all these vast powers expected.

A Bavarian princeling bellowed he needed no such protection and made to rush to the Princess’ side—

Hamilton stepped into his way and accidentally shouldered him to the floor as he put himself right up beside Elizabeth and her husband. “We’re walking to that door,” he said. “Now.”

Bertil and Elizabeth nodded and marched with fixed smiles on their faces, Bertil turning and holding back with a gesture the Swedish forces that were moving in from all directions. Hamilton’s fellows fell in all around them, and swept the party across the hall, through that door, and down a servants’ corridor as Life Guards came bundling in to the room behind them, causing more noise and more reactions and damn it, Hamilton hoped he wouldn’t suddenly hear the discharge of some hidden—

He did not. The door was closed and barred behind them. Another good chap doing the right thing.

Hamilton sometimes distantly wished for an organisation to guard those who needed it. But for that the world would have to be different in ways beyond even Carney’s artificial speculations. He and his brother officers would have their independence cropped if that was so. And he lived through his independence. It was the root of the duty that meant he would place himself in harm’s way for Elizabeth’s husband. He had no more thoughts on the subject.

“I know very little,” said Elizabeth as she walked, her voice careful as always, except when it hadn’t been. “I think the man was with one of the groups of foreign dignitaries – ”

“He looked Prussian,” said Bertil, “we were talking to Prussians.”

“He just vanished into thin air right in front of me.”

“Into a fold?” said Bertil.

“It can’t have been,” she said. “The room will have been mapped and mapped.”

She looked to Hamilton for confirmation. He nodded.

They got to the library, Hamilton marched in and secured it. They put the happy couple at the centre of it, locked it up, and called everything in to the embroidery.

The embroidery chaps were busy, swiftly prioritising, but no, nothing was happening in the great chamber they’d left, the panic had swelled and then subsided into shouts, exhibitionist faintings (because who these days wore a corset that didn’t have hidden depths), glasses crashing, yelled demands. No one else had vanished. No Spanish infantrymen had materialised out of thin air.

Bertil walked to the shelves, folded his hands behind his back, and began bravely and ostentatiously browsing. Elizabeth sat down and fanned herself and smiled for all Hamilton’s fellows, and finally, quickly for Hamilton himself.

They waited.

The embroidery told them they had a visitor coming.

A wall of books slid aside, and in walked a figure that made all of them turn and salute. The Queen Mother, still in mourning black, her train racing to catch up with her.

She came straight to Hamilton and the others all turned to listen, and from now on thanks to this obvious favour, they would regard Hamilton as the ranking officer. He was glad of it. “We will continue,” she said. “We will not regard this as an embarrassment and therefore it will not be. The Ball Room was prepared for the dance, we are moving there early, Elizabeth, Bertil, off you go, you two gentlemen in front of them, the rest of you behind. You will be laughing as you enter the Ball Room as if this were the most enormous joke, a silly and typically English eccentric misunderstanding.”

Elizabeth nodded, took Bertil by the arm.

The Queen Mother intercepted Hamilton as he moved to join them. “No. Major Hamilton, you will go and talk to technical, you will find another explanation for what happened.”

“Another explanation, your Royal Highness?”

“Indeed,” she said. “It must not be what they are saying it is.”

“Here we are, sir,” Lieutenant Matthew Parkes was with the Technical Corps of Hamilton’s own regiment, the 4
^th
Dragoons. He and his men were, incongruously, in the dark of the buttery that had been set aside for their equipment, also in their dress uniforms. From here they were in charge of the sensor net that blanketed the house and grounds down to Newtonian units of space, reaching out for miles in every direction. Parkes’ people had been the first to arrive here, days ago, and would be the last to leave. He was pointing at a screen, on which was frozen the intelligent image of a burly man in black tie, Princess Elizabeth almost entirely obscured behind him. “Know who he is?”