Year's Best SF 11, page 25
“If we were,” he said, “would this be a problem?”
“Aye. I have no objection to your bronze man and his lions going home. Though the morality of their staying or returning is more properly a matter for the local rabbis to establish. Unfortunately, there would be curiosity as to their provenance and from whence they had come. This land would be the talk of the world. But I would keep our friends as obscure as possible for as long as may be. And you?”
Surplus sighed. “It is hard to put this into words. It would be a violation of our professional ethics not to return for the bronzes. And yet…”
“And yet,” Darger said, “I find myself reluctant to reintroduce this timeless land to the modern world. These are gentle folk, their destruction of St. Vasilios notwithstanding, and I fear for them all. History has never been kind to gentle folk.”
“I agree with you entirely. Which is why I have decided to stay and to protect them.”
“Thank you. I have grown strangely fond of them all.”
“I as well,” Surplus said.
Dionysus leaned forward. “That is good to hear. It softens the hurt of what I must say to you. Which is: Do not return. I know what sort of men you are. A week from now, or a month, or a year, you will think again of the value of the bronzes. They are in and of themselves worth a fortune. Returned to England, the prestige they would confer upon their finders is beyond price. Perhaps you have been guilty of criminal activities; for this discovery, much would be forgiven. Such thoughts will occur to you. Think, also this: That these folk are protected not by me alone, but by the madness I can bring upon them. I want you to leave this land and never come back.”
“What—never return to Arcadia?” Surplus said.
“You do not know what you ask, sir!” Darger cried.
“Let this be an Arcadia of the heart to you. All places abandoned and returned to must necessarily disappoint. Distance will keep its memory evergreen in your hearts.” Now Dionysus reached out and embraced them both, drawing them to his bosom. In a murmurous voice, he said, “You need a new desire. Let me tell you of a place I glimpsed en route to Greece, back when I was merely human. It has many names, Istanbul and Constantinople not the least among them, but currently it is called Byzantium.”
Then for a time he spoke of that most cosmopolitan of cities, of its mosques and minarets and holographic pleasure-gardens, of its temples and palaces and baths, where all the many races of the world met and shared their lore. He spoke of regal women as alluring as dreams, and of philosophers so subtle in their equivocations that no three could agree what day of the week it was. He spoke too of treasures: gold chalices, chess sets carved of porphyry and jade, silver-stemmed cups of narwhalivory delicately carved with unicorns and maidens, swords whose hilts were flecked with gems and whose blades no force could shatter, tuns of wine whose intoxicating effects had been hand-crafted by the finest storytellers in the East, vast libraries whose every book was the last surviving copy of its text. There was always music in the air of Byzantium, and the delicate foods of a hundred cultures, and of a summer’s night, lovers gathered on the star-gazing platforms to practice the amatory arts in the velvety perfumed darkness. For the Festival of the Red and White Roses, streams and rivers were re-routed to run through the city streets, and a province’s worth of flowers were plucked and their petals cast into the flowing waters. For the Festival of the Honey of Eden…
Some time later, Darger shook himself from his reverie, and discovered that Surplus was staring blindly into the distance, while their little pony stamped his feet and shook his harness, anxious to be off. He gripped his friend’s shoulder. “Ho! Sleepy-head! You’ve wandered off into the Empyrean, when you’re needed here on Earth.”
Surplus shook himself. “I dreamed…what did I dream? It’s lost now, and yet it seemed vitally important at the time, as if it were something I should remember, and even cherish.” He yawned greatly. “Well, no matter! Our stay in the countryside has been pleasant, but unproductive. The Evangelos bronzes remain lost, and our purses are perilously close to empty. Where shall we go now, to replenish them?”
“East,” Darger said decisively. “East, to the Bosporus. I have heard—somewhere—great things of that city called…called…”
“Byzantium!” Surplus said. “I too have heard wondrous tales—somehow—of its wealth and beauty. Two such men as ourselves should do marvelous well there.”
“Then we are agreed.” Darger shook the harness, and the pony set out at a trot. They both whooped and laughed, and if there was a small hurt in their hearts they did not know what it was or what they should do about it, and so it was ignored.
Surplus waved his tricorn hat in the air. “Byzantium awaits!”
Lakes of Light
STEPHEN BAXTER
Stephen Baxter (tribute site: www.themanifold.co.uk) lives in Morpeth, England. He is now one of the big names in SF, with more than twenty SF novels published to date, and a large body of short fiction. “I always thought of myself as writing hard SF, on a big scale maybe, but ideas driven, not romantic, so not space opera,” he says. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia summarizes his early career thus: “He began publishing SF with “The Xeelee Flower” for Interzone in 1987, which with most of his other short work fits into his Xeelee Sequence, an ambitious attempt at creating a Future History; novels included in the sequence are Raft (1989), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993), and Rind (1994). The sequence…follows humanity into interstellar space, where it encounters a complex of alien races; the long epic ends (being typical in this of UK SF) darkly, many aeons hence.” Since the mid 1990s he has produced five or ten short stories a year in fantasy, SF, and horror venues, occasionally one in the Xeelee Sequence, and did in 2005 again.
“Lakes of Light” was published in Constellations. It is a Xeelee story of alien supertechnology, somewhere between a Hal Clement and a Larry Niven setting. As the story progresses, new wonders are seen and new layers of insight are reached. This is the essence of hard SF.
The Navy ferry stood by. From the ship’s position, several stellar diameters away, the star was a black disc, like a hole cut out of the sky.
The Navy ship receded. Pala was to descend to the star alone in a flitter—alone save for her Virtual tutor, Dano.
The flitter, light and invisible as a bubble, swept inward, silent save for the subtle ticking of its instruments. The star had about the mass of Earth’s sun, and though it was dark, Pala imagined she could feel that immense mass tugging at her.
Her heart hammered. This really was a star, but it was somehow cloaked, made perfectly black save for pale, pixel-small specks, flaws in the dark mask, that were lakes of light. She’d seen the Navy scouts’ reports, even studied the Virtuals, but until this moment she hadn’t been able to believe in the extraordinary reality.
But she had a job to do, and had no time to be overawed. The Navy scouts said there were humans down there—humans living with, or somehow on, the star itself. Relics of an ancient colonizing push, they now had to be reabsorbed into the greater mass of a mankind at war. But the Galaxy was wide, and Pala, just twenty-five years old, was the only Missionary who could be spared for this adventure.
Dano was a brooding presence beside her, peering out with metallic Eyes. His chest did not rise and fall, no breath whispered from his mouth. He was projected from an implant in her own head, so that she could never be free of him, and she had become resentful of him. But Pala had grown up on Earth, under a sky so drenched with artificial light you could barely see the stars, and right now she was grateful for the company even of a Commissary’s avatar.
And meanwhile, that hole in the sky swelled until its edges passed out of her field of view.
The flitter dipped and swiveled and swept along the line of the star’s equator. Now she was flying low over a darkened plain, with a starry night sky above her. The star was so vast, its diameter more than a hundred times Earth’s, that she could see no hint of curvature in its laser-straight horizon.
“Astonishing,” she said. “It’s like a geometrical exercise.”
Dano murmured, “And yet, to the best of our knowledge, the photosphere of a star roils not a thousand kilometers beneath us, and if not for this—sphere, whatever it is—we would be destroyed in an instant, a snowflake in the mouth of a furnace. What’s your first conclusion, Missionary?”
Pala hesitated before answering. It was so recently that she had completed her assessments in the Academies on Earth, so recently that the real Dano had, grudgingly, welcomed her to the great and ancient enterprise that was the Commission for Historical Truth, that she felt little confidence in her own abilities. And yet the Commission must have faith in her, or else they wouldn’t have committed her to this mission.
“It is artificial,” she said. “The sphere. It must be.”
“Yes. Surely no natural process could wrap up a star so neatly. And if it is artificial, who do you imagine might be responsible?”
“The Xeelee,” she said immediately. Involuntarily, she glanced up at the crowded stars, bright and vivid here, five thousand light years from Earth. In the hidden heart of the Galaxy mankind’s ultimate foe lurked; and surely it was only the Xeelee who could wield such power as this.
There was a change in the darkness ahead. She saw it first as a faint splash of light near the horizon, but as the flitter flew on that splash opened out into a rough disc that glowed pale blue-green. Though a speck against the face of the masked star, it was sizable in itself—perhaps as much as a hundred kilometers across.
The flitter came to rest over the center of the feature. It was like a shard of Earth, stranded in the night: she looked down at the deep blue of open water, the mistiness of air, the pale green of cultivated land and forest, even a grayish bubbling that must be a town. All of this was contained under a dome, shallow and flat and all but transparent. Outside the dome what looked like roads, ribbons of silver, stretched away into the dark. And at the very center of this strange scrap of landscape was a shining sheet of light.
“People,” Dano said. “Huddling around that flaw in the sphere, that lake of light.” He pointed. “I think there’s some kind of port at the edge of the dome. You’d better take the flitter down by hand.”
Pala touched the small control panel in front of her, and the flitter began its final descent.
They cycled through a kind of airlock and emerged into fresh air, bright light.
It wasn’t quite daylight. The light was diffuse, like a misty day on Earth, and it came not from a sun but from mirrors on spindly poles. The atmosphere was too shallow for the “sky” to be blue, and through the dome’s distortion Pala saw smeared-out star fields. But the sky contained clouds, pale, streaky clouds.
A dirt road led away from the airlock. Pala glimpsed clusters of low buildings, the green of forest clumps and cultivated fields. She could even smell wood smoke.
Dano sniffed. “Lethe. Agriculture. Typical Second Expansion.”
This pastoral scene wasn’t a landscape Pala was familiar with. Earth was dominated by sprawling Conurbations, and fields in which nanotechnologies efficiently delivered food for the world’s billions. Still, she felt oddly at home here. But she wasn’t at home.
“It takes a genuine effort of will,” she said, “to remember where we are.”
The scouts had determined that the stellar sphere was rotating as a solid, and that this equatorial site was moving at only a little less than orbital speed. This arrangement was why they experienced such an equable gravity; if not for the compensating effects of centrifugal force, they would have been crushed by nearly thirty times Earth standard. She could feel none of this, but nevertheless, standing here, gazing at grass and trees and clouds, she really was soaring through space, actually circling a star in less than a standard day.
“Here comes the welcoming party,” Dano said dryly.
Two people walked steadily up the road, a man and a woman. They were both rather squat, stocky, dark. They wore simple shifts and knee-length trousers, practical clothes, clean but heavily repaired. The man might have been sixty. His hair was white, his face a moon of wrinkles. The woman was younger, perhaps not much older than Pala. She wore her black hair long and tied into a queue that nestled over her spine, quite unlike the short and severe style of the Commission. Her shift had a sunburst pattern stitched into it, a welling up of light from below.
The man spoke. “My name is Sool. This is Bicansa. We have been delegated to welcome you.” Sool’s words, in his own archaic tongue, were seamlessly translated in Pala’s ears. But underneath the tinny murmuring in her ear she could hear Sool’s own gravelly voice. “I represent this community, which we call Home…”
“Inevitably,” Dano murmured.
“Bicansa comes from a community to the north of here.” Pala supposed he meant another inhabited light lake. She wondered how far away that was; she had seen nothing from the flitter.
The woman Bicansa simply watched the newcomers. Her expression seemed closed, almost sullen. She could not have been called beautiful, Pala thought; her face was too round, her chin too weak for that. But there was a strength in her dark eyes that intrigued Pala.
Pala made her own formal introductions. “Thank you for inviting us to your community.” Not that the Navy scouts had left the locals any choice. “We are emissaries of the Commission for Historical Truth, acting on behalf of the Coalition of Interim Governance, which in turn directs and secures the Third Expansion of mankind…”
The man Sool listened to this with a pale smile, oddly weary. Bicansa glared.
Dano murmured, “Shake their hands. Just as well it isn’t an assessment exercise, Missionary!”
Pala cursed herself for forgetting such an elementary part of contact protocol. She stepped forward, smiling, her right hand outstretched.
Sool actually recoiled. The custom of shaking hands was rare throughout the worlds of the Second Expansion; evidently it hadn’t been prevalent on Earth when that great wave of colonization had begun. But Sool quickly recovered. His grip was firm, his hands so huge they enclosed hers. Sool grinned. “A farmer’s hands,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”
Bicansa offered her own hand readily enough. But Pala’s hand passed through the woman’s, making it break up into a cloud of blocky pixels.
It was this simple test that mandated the handshake protocol. Even so, Pala was startled. “You’re a Virtual.”
“As is your companion,” said Bicansa levelly. “I’m close by—actually just outside the dome. But don’t worry. I’m a projection, not an avatar. You have my full attention.”
Pala felt unaccountably disappointed that Bicansa wasn’t really here.
Sool indicated a small car, waiting some distance away, and he offered them the hospitality of his home. They walked to the car.
Dano murmured to Pala, “I wonder why this Bicansa hasn’t shown up in person. I think we need to watch that one.” He turned to her, his cold Eyes glinting. “Ah, but you already are—aren’t you, Missionary?”
Pala felt herself blush.
Sool’s village was small, just a couple of dozen buildings huddled around a small scrap of grass-covered common land. There were shops and manufactories, including a carpentry and pottery works, and an inn. At the center of the common was a lake, its edges regular—a reservoir, Pala thought. The people’s water must be recycled, filtered by hidden machinery, like their air. By the shore of the lake, children played and lovers walked.
This was a farming community. In the fields beyond the village, crops grew toward the reflected glare of spindly mirror towers, waving in breezes wafted by immense pumps mounted at the dome’s periphery. And animals grazed, descendants of cattle and sheep brought by the first colonists. Pala, who had never seen an animal larger than a rat, stared, astonished.
The buildings were all made of wood, neat but low, conical. Sool told the visitors the buildings were modeled after the tents the first colonists here had used for shelter. “A kind of memorial to the First,” he said. But Sool’s home, with big windows cut into the sloping roof, was surprisingly roomy and well lit. He had them sit on cushions of what turned out to be stuffed animal hide, to Pala’s horror.
Everything seemed to be organic, made of wood or baked clay or animal skin. All the raw material of the human settlement had come from cometary impacts, packets of dirty ice from this star’s outer system that had splashed onto the sphere since its formation. But there were traces of art. On one wall hung a kind of schematic portrait, a few lines to depict a human face, lit from below by a warm yellow light. And these people could generate Virtuals, Pala reminded herself; they weren’t as low tech as they seemed.
Sool confirmed that. “When the First found this masked star, they created the machinery that still sustains us—the dome, the mirror towers, the hidden machines that filter our air and water. We must maintain the machines, and we go out to bring in more water ice or frozen air.” He eyed his visitors. “You must not think we are fallen. We are surely as technologically capable as our ancestors. But every day we acknowledge our debt to the wisdom and heroic engineering of the First.” As he said this, he touched his palms together and nodded his head reverently, and Bicansa did the same.
Pala and Dano exchanged a glance. Ancestor worship?
A slim, pretty teenage girl brought them drinks of pulped fruit. The girl was Sool’s daughter; it turned out his wife had died some years previously. The drinks were served in pottery cups, elegantly shaped and painted deep blue, with more inverted-sunburst designs. Pala wondered what dye they used to create such a rich blue.
Dano watched the daughter as she politely set a cup before himself and Bicansa; these colonists knew Virtual etiquette. Dano said, “You obviously live in nuclear families.”
“And you don’t?” Bicansa asked curiously.
“Nuclear families are a classic feature of Second Expansion cultures. You are typical.” Pala smiled brightly, trying to be reassuring, but Bicansa’s face was cold.
