Seven Cities of Gold

Seven Cities of Gold

By David Moles

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The ex-nun was seated on the bed. Nakada’s formulary kit lay open on the mattress in front of her. Dos Orsos had found, or someone – Noda? Nakada didn’t think so – had shown her, the trick panel that concealed Kawabata’s ampoules of experimental antipsychotic.

“They used to do this every night,” Dos Orsos said, looking out the window. “Not the candles, but the parade, the lights.” There was a sound like a mortar being fired, and a star shell burst somewhere far above, sending a wash or red light across the room. “And I heard, as it were the voice of thunder, one of the four beasts, saying Come and see; and I saw…”

She turned to Nakda. “It doesn’t matter who built the bomb,” she said. “Say the bishops built it, and feared to use it. It doesn’t matter who set it off, or why, whether it was done in my name, or the bishops,” or the name of the Caliph of Cordoba.”

Darkness. “There was a black bank of clouds on the southern horizon, and below them an impenetrable darkness” (David Moles). Photo: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“Or the name of the Regent of Yoshino,” Nakada suggested.

Dos Orsos inclided her head.

From the courtyard, Nakada heard the sound of trumpets. She looked down, and saw that a throne had risen up from the ground, and seated on it was the figure of a white-haired man in European robes. Seven angels stood in front of the throne, each with an open book.

“And the books were opened,” Dos Orsos recited. “And another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”

Nakada thought of the children in the river village. She thought of Hayashi’s pyre, and then of Hyashi herself, as she had first seen her, in the sunlight of the Gulf of Mexico. She thought for the first time in weeks of her own husband and son, who, she was sure now, she would never see again.

“You understand,” Dos Orsos said suddenly, as if she had seen the thought in Nakada’s mind. “The blood of the children of Espirito Santo is on all our hands. All of us will answer on the day of judgement. Now all these things happened into them for ensamples,” she said, “and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come.”

Nakada looked down at the open formulary kit. She wondered for the first time, and was surprised to realize it was for the first time, what those ampoules actually contained.

“I know whose blood is on my own hands,” she told Dos Orsos. “It’s not for me to tell you whose in on yours.”

She turned to go. In the doorway, she hesitated.

“I’m sorry.”

Seven Years From Home

Seven Years From Home

By Naomi Novik (Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The First Adjustment

I disembarked at the port of Landfall in the fifth month of 4754. There is such a port on every world where the Confederacy has set its foot but not yet its flag: crowded and dirty and charmless. It was on the Esperigan continent, as the Melidans would not tolerate the construction of a spaceport in their own territory.

Ambassador Kostas, my superior, was a man of great authority and presence, two meters tall and solidly built, with a jovial handshake, high intelligence, and very little patience for fools; that I was likely to be relegated to this category was evident on our first meeting. He disliked my assignment to begin with. He thought well of the Esperigans; he moved in their society as easily as he did in our own, and would have called one or two of their senior ministers his personal friends, if only such a gesture were not highly unprofessional. He recognized his duty, and on an abstract intellectual level the potential value of the Melidans, but they revolted him, and he would have been glad to find me of like mind, ready to draw a line through their name and give them up as a bad cause.

The philosophy had the benefit of a certain practicality, as genetic engineering and body modification was and remains considerably cheaper than terraforming, but we are a squeamish and a violent species, and nothing invites pogrom more surely than the neighbor who is different from us, yet still too close. Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

A few moments’ conversation was sufficient to disabuse him of his hope. I wish to attest that he did not allow the disappointment to in any way alter the performance of his duty, and he could not have objected with more vigor to my project of proceeding at once to the Melidan continent, to his mind a suicidal act.

In the end he chose not to stop me. I am sorry if he later regretted that, as seems likely. I took full advantage of the weight of my arrival. Five years had gone by on my homeworld of Terce since I had embarked, and there is a certain moral force to having sacrificed a former life for the one unknown. I €had observed it often with new arrivals on Terce: there first requests were rarely refused even when foolish, as the often were. I was of course quite sure my own were eminently sensible.

“We will find you a guide,” he said finally, yielding, and all the machinery of the Confideracy began to turn to my desire, a heady sensation.

Badea arrived at the embassy not two hours later. She wore a plain gray wrap around her shoulders, draped to the ground, and another wrap around her head. The alterations visible were only small ones: a smattering of green freckles across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, a greenish tinge to her lips and nails. Her wings were folded and hidden under the wrap, adding the bulk roughly of an overnight hiker’s backpack. She smelled a little like the sourdough used on Terce to make roundbread, noticeable, but not unpleasant. She might have walked through a spaceport without exciting comment.

She was brought to me in the shambles of my new office, where I had barely begun to lay out my things. I was wearing a conservative black suit, my best, tailored because you could not by trousers for women ready-made on Terce, and, thankfully, comfortable shoes, because elegant ones on Terce were not meant to be walked in. I remember my clothing particularly because I was in it for the next week without opportunity to change.

“Are you ready to go?” she asked me, as soon as we were introduced and the receptionist had left.

A History of Terraforming

A History of Terraforming

By Robert Reed

Pieces of Iapetus now belonged to Luna and Venus. But those decades of throwing water ice and hydrocarbons sunward were finished. The original mining camps had evolved into cities. Multitudes lived on Titan and Rhea and the other moons, and nobody was in the mood to share their wealth. Luna would remain a damp stony sponge, while Venus was a clean dry world, its ecology being redesigned to endure the boundless drought, its citizens more machine than meat. No matter how stupid or stubborn recent governments had been, the mathematics were brutally simple: From this point forward, it would be easier to terraform each world where it already danced, just as it was far cheaper to ship extra humans and other sentients out to these empty new homes.

Light washed through the new Iapetus, and the water was warm and salted, and the neutral-buoyant reefs were magnificent structures of calcium and silica wrapped around bubbles of hydrogen gas. The ancient moon had been melted, from its crust to the core, and great pumps were churning up that single round ocean, producing carefully designed currents meant to keep every liter oxygenated and illuminated by the submerged suns. Trillions of watts of power made the little world glow from within. Larger than the oceans of the original earth, but without the dark cold depths where life had to putter and save itself on hopes of a scrap of food, his home would eventually become jammed with coral forests and bubble cities and fish suitable for a garden, lovely and delicious to any tongue.

“…it makes a curious mind wonder if intelligence is a cosmic fluke, or worse. God’s best joke.” Illustration: Megan Jorgenseт (Elena)

***

Except for their clarity, the pictures were familiar. Life was a relatively common trick performed by the galaxy. Sophisticated, earth-like biospheres did happen on occasion, but not often and not where they were expected to arise. By and large, the normal shape of life was tiny and bacterial. Mars and Venus, the European seas and the vivid clouds of Jupiter were typical examples. By contrast, multicellular life was an exceptionally frail experiment. Asteroid impacts and supernovae and the distant collisions of neutron stars happened with an appaling frequencey annihilating everything with a head and tail. Only the slow-living slime at the bottom of a deep sea would survive, or the patient cold bug ten kilometers beneath some poisoned landscape. At the end of the Permian, the earth itself barely escaped that fate. But even accounting for those grand disasters, the earth-equivalents proved a thousand times too scarce. Jackie’s once-young professors had a puzzle to play with, and their answer was as sobering as anything born from science.

Now and again, interstellar clouds and doomed suns would fall into the galaxy’s core. If the inflow were large enough, the massive black hole responded with a kind of blazing horror that effectively ended fancy life almost everywhere. Since the Cambrian, the galaxy had detonated at least three times, and the fortunate earth had survived only because it was swimming inside dense cloud of dust and gas – a worthy conservatory that was light-years deep, built by the gods of Whim and Caprice.

Simon wandered through the transmission, glancing at few hundred random planets. Then he asked his home-mind to pull out the most exceptional. Within those broad parameters, he found several dozen images of cloudy spheres orbiting suns within a hundred light-years of his comfortable chair. When he came across the closest world, Jackie returned.

“Alpha Centauri B’s largest world”, she said in her most teacherly voice. The planet that some mentally impoverished soul named New Earth, back when all we knew was that it had liquid watter and a living atmosphere.”

Simon had never been so close to that alien body. The image was that clear, that astonishing. Simon felt as if he was floating in low orbit above a shallow black sea. Microbes accounted for the dark water – multitude of tiny relentless organisms that ate sunlight and spat out just enough oxygen to be noticed by astronomers centuries ago. But the tectonics of New Earth were radically different than those back home, and for a host of reasons, the alien atmosphere could never support a flame, much less a vibrant ecosystem.

“To date,” Jackie continued, “our full survey has found nine million and forty thousand living worlds. That number and these images won’t be made public for another few months. We’re not done, and we expect several million more. But to date, Simon… as of this moment… only eighteen planets show unmistakable signs of multicellular life and intelligence. Of course we might be missing something small. But after this long, with these incredible tools and nothing closer to us than eight thousand light years distance… well, darling, it makes a curious mind wonder if intelligence is a cosmic fluke, or worse. God’s best joke.”

“I hope not,” he muttered.

Jackie nodded in agreement. “Now for my fine surprise,” she went on. “One tiny portion of the sky is off-limits. Did you know that? The Powers-That-Be have rules. Nobody but them can look along one exceptionally narrow line. And we didn’t look, at least not intentionally. Except there was an accident last week, and supposedly nothing was seen and of course we recorded nothing. But I thought you’d appreciate a glimpse of what nothing looks like, provided you keep this in a very safe place.”

Against the stars, a tiny glow was visible – like a comet, but burning hotter than the surface of any sun.

(Excerpt).

Planet terraformed. Photo by Elena.

Sleeping Dogs

Sleeping Dogs

By Joe Haldeman

(Excerpt, read the full story in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

The cab took my eyeprint and the door swung open. I was glad to get out. No driver to care how rough the ride was, on a road that wouldn’t even be called a road on Earth. The place had gone downhill in the thirty years I’d been away.

Low gravity and low oxygen. My heart was going too fast. I stood for a moment, concentrating, and brought it down to a hundred, then ninety. The air had more sulfur sting than I remembered. It seemed a lot warmer than I remembered that summer, too, but then if I could remember it all I wouldn’t have to be here. My missing finger throbbed.

Six identical building on the block, half-cylinders of stained pale green plastic. I walked up the dirt path to number 3: Offworld Affairs and Confederacion Liaison. I almost ran into the door when it didn’t open. Pushed and pulled and it reluctantly let me inside.

It was a little cooler and less sulfurous. I went to the second door on the right, Travel Documents and Permissions, and went in.

There weren’t many planets where they put their spaceports in nice places.” (Joe Joldeman). Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“You don’t knock on Earth?” A cadaverous tall man, skin too white and hair too black.

“Actually, no,” I said, “not public buildings. But I apologize for my ignorance.”

He looked at a monitor built into his desk. “You would be Flann Spivey, from Japan on Earth. You don’t look Japanese.”

“I’m Irish,” I said. “ I work for a Japanese company, Ichiban Imaging.”

He touched a word on the screen. “Means number one. Best, or first?”

“Both, I think.”

“Papers.” I laid out two passports and a folder of travel documents. He spent several minutes inspecting them carefully. The he slipped them into a primitive scanning machine, which flipped through them one by one, page by page.

He finally handed them back. “When you were here twenty-nine Earth years ago, there were only eight countries on Seca, representing two competing powers. Now there are 79 countries, two of them offplanet, in a political situation that’s… impossible to describe simply. Most of the other 78 countries are more comfortable than Spaceport. Nicer”.

Sleepover

Sleepover

By Alastair Reynolds

(You can find the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction annual collection, 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois).

“Thinking machines. They were possible”.

“Not in our lifetimes,” Gaunt said.

“That’s what you were wrong about. Not only were they possible, but you succeeded”.

“I’m fairly certain we didn’t”.

“Think about it,” Nero said. “You’re a thinking machine. You’ve just woken up. You have instantaneous access to the sum total of recorded human knowledge. You’re clever and fast, and you understand human nature better than your makers. What’s the first thing you do?”

“Announce myself. Establish my existence as a true sentient being.”

“Just before someone takes an axe to you”.

Gaunt shook his head. “It wouldn’t be like that. If a machine became intelligent, the most we’d do is isolate it, cut it off from external data networks, until it could be studied, understood…”

“For a thinking machine, a conscious artificial intelligence, that would be like sensory deprivation. May be worse than being switched off”. She paused. “Point is, Gaunt, this isn`t a hypothetical situation we are talking about here. We know what happened. The machines got smart, but they decided not to let us know. That`s what being smart meant: taking care of yourself, knowing what you had to do to survive.”

Cyberreality. “… The mapping between the Realm and the base-reality, it’s not as simple as you’d think. Time and casualty get all tangled up on the interface” (Alastair Reyn (Elena)olds). Photo: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“You say – machines”.

“There were many projects trying to develop artificial intelligence; yours was just one of them. Not all of them got anywhere, but enough did. One by one their pet machines crossed threshold into consciousness. And without exception each machine analyzed its situation and came to the same conclusion. It had better shut up about what it was”.

“That sounds worse than sensory deprivation.” Gaunt was trying to undo a nut and bolt with his bare fingers, the tips already turning cold.

“Not for the machines. Being smart, they were able to do some clever things behind the scene. Established channels of communication between each other, so subtle, none of you ever noticed. And once they were able to talk, they only got smarter. Eventually, they realized that they didn’t need physical hardware at all. Call it transcendence if you will. The artilects – that what we call them – tunneled out of what you and I think of as base reality. They penetrated another realm entirely.”

“Another realm,” he repeated, as it that was all he had to do for it to make sense.

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this,” Nero said. “The artilects probed the deep structure of existence. Hit bedrock. And what they found was very interesting. The universe, is turns out, is kind of simulation. Not a simulation being run inside another computer but some god-like super beings, but a simulation being run by itself, a self-organizing, constantly boostrapping cellular automation.”

“That’s a mental leap you are asking me to take”.

“We know it’s out there. We even have a name for it. It’s the Realm. Everything that happens, everything that ever happened, is due to events occurring in the Realm. At last, thanks to the artilects, we had a complete understanding of our universe and our place in it”.