The Sultan of the Clouds

The Sultan of the Clouds

By Geoffrey A. Landis

The pilot-monk rolled the barque back, and then pointed, forward and slightly to the right. “There. See it?”

I didn`t know what to see. “What?”

“There”.

I saw it know, a tiny point glistening in the distance. “What is it?”

“Hypatia. The jewel of the clouds”.

As we coasted closer, the city grew. It was an odd sight. The city was a dome, or, rather, a dozen glistening domes melted haphazardly together, each one faceted with a million panels of glass. The domes were huge, the smallest nearly a kilometer across, and as the barque glided across the sky, the facets caught the sunlight and sparked with reflected light. Below the domes, a slender pencil of rough black stretched down toward the cloudbase like taffy, delicate as spun glass, terminating in an absurdly tiny bulb of rock that seemed far too small to counterbalance the domes.

A Sultan of the Clouds. Painting by Elena

“Beautiful, you think, yes?” Like the wonderful jellyfishes or your blue planet`s oceans. Can you belief that half a million people live here?”

The pilot brought us around the city in a grand sweep, showing off, not even bothering to talk. Inside the transparent domes, chains of lakes glittered in green ribbons between boulevards and delicate pavilions. At last, he slowed to a stop, and then slowly leaked atmosphere into the vacuum vessel that provided the buoyancy. The barque settled down gradually, wallowing from side to side now that the stability given by its forward momentum was gone. Now it floated slightly lower than the counterweight. The counterweight no longer looked small, but loomed above us, a rock the size of Gibraltar. Tiny fliers affixed tow-ropes to hard-points on the surface of the barque, and slowly we were winched into a hard-dock.

“Welcome to Venus”, said the monk.

The surface of Venus is a place of crushing pressure and hellish temperature. Rise above it though, and the pressure eases, the temperature cools. Fifty kilometres above the surface, at the base of the clouds, the temperature is tropical, and the pressure the same as Earth normal. Twenty kilometres above that, the air is thin and polar cold.

The Things

The Things

By Peter Watts

Those encysted souls. Those tumors. Hiding away in their bony caverns, folded in on themselves. I knew they couldn`t hide forever; this monstrous anatomy had only slowed communion, not stopped it. Every moment I grew a little. I could feel myself twinning around Palmer`s motor wiring, sniffing upstream along a million tiny currents. I could sense my infiltration of that dark thinking mass behind Blair’s eyes.

Imagination, of course. It’s all reflex that far down, unconscious and immune to micromanagement. And yet, a part of me wanted to stop while there was still time. I’m used to incorporating souls, not rooming with them.

This, this compartmentalization was unprecedented. I’ve assimilated a thousand worlds stronger than this, but never one so strange. What would happen when I met the spark in the tumor? Who would assimilate who?

I was being three men by now. The world was growing wary, but it hadn’t noticed yet. Even the tumors in the skins I had taken didn’t know how close I was. For that I could only be grateful – that Creation has rules, that some things don’t change no matter what shape you take. It doesn’t matter whether a soul spreads throughout the skin of festers in grotesque isolation; it still runs on electricity. The memories of man still took time to gel, to pass through whatever gatekeepers filtered noise from signal – and a judicious burst of static, however indiscriminate, still cleared those caches before their contents could be stored permanently. Clear enough, at least, to let these tumors simply forget that something else moved their arms and legs on occasion.

Dreams. Soon, though, the dreams dried up. Image: Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

At first, I only took control when the skins closed their eyes and their searchlights flickered disconcertingly across unreal imagery, patterns that flowed senselessly into one another like hyperactive biomass unable to settle on a single shape. (Dreams, one searchlight told me, and a little later, Nightmares). During those mysterious periods of dormancy when the men lay inert and isolated, it was safe to come out.

Soon, though, the dreams dried up. All eyes stayed open all the time, fixed on shadows and each other. Men once dispersed throughout the camp began to draw together, to give up their solitary pursuits in in favor of company. At first I thought they might be finding common ground in a common fear. I even hoped that finally, they might shake off their mysterious fossilization and take communion.

But no. They’d just stopped trusting anything they couldn’t see.

They were merely turning against each other.

My extremities are beginning to numb, my thoughts slow as the distal reaches of my soul succumb to the chill. The weight of the flamethrower pulls at its harness, forever tugs me just a little off-balance. I have not been Childs for very long; almost half his tissue remains unassimilated. I have an hour, may be two, before I have to start melting my grave into the ice. By that time I need to have converted enough cells to keep the whole skin from crystallizing. I focus on antifreeze production.

It’s almost peaceful out there. There’s been so much to take in, so little time to process it. Hiding in these skins takes such concentration, and under all those watchful eyes I was lucky if communion lasted long enough to exchange memories: compounding my soul would have been out of the question. Now, though, there is nothing to do but prepare for oblivion. Nothing to occupy my thoughts, but all these lessons left unlearned.

MacReady’s test sample, by example. His thing detector, to expose imposters posing as men. It does not work nearly as well as the world thinks; but the fact that it works at all violates the most basic rules of biology. It’s the center of the puzzle. It’s the answer to all the mysteries. I might have already figured it out if I had been just a little larger. I might already know the world, if the world wasn’t trying so ahrd to kill me.

MacReady’s test.

Either it is impossible or I have been wrong about everything.

Return to Titan

Return to Titan

By Stephen Baxter (excerpt)

The days are very long on Titan, and by the time we got back to the gondola nothing seemed to have changed about the landscape or the sky, not a diffuse shadow had shifted. We found Poole and Dzik happily fixing big balloon wheels to axis slung beneath the crumpled hull.

When they were done, we all climbed back aboard. Poole had reset some of the interior lamps so they glowed green, yellow, and blue; it was a relief to be immersed once more in bright Earth light.

We set off in our gondola-truck for the next part of our expedition. We were making, I was told, for an impact crater believed to hold liquid water, which itself was not far from a cryovolcano, another feature of interest for the expedition. This site was only perhaps a hundred kilometres from where we had come down.

Miriam transferred her samples to cold stores, and ran some of them through a small onboard science package. She jabbered about what she had discovered. Poole encouraged here more than Dzik did, but even that wasn’t much.

Dzik and Poole were more interested in that moment with Playing with the gondola. Like overgrown boys they sat at an improvised driver’s console and fussed over gear ratios and the performance of the big tyres. Poole even insisted on driving the bus himself, though Titan was so flat and dull for the most part he could easily have left the chore to the onboard systems. That proved to me the fallacy of not bringing along specialist biologists on a jaunt like this. It was only Miriam who seemed to have a genuine passion for the life systems we were supposed to be here to study: Dzik and Poole were too easily distracted by the technology, which was, after all, only a means to an end.

Return to Titan. Peinture by Elena

They had however rearranged the interior to make it feel a little less cramped. The couches had been separated and set up around the cabin, so you could sit upright with a bit of elbow room. The cabin was pressurised, so we could remove room for one at a time to shuck off his or her exosuit. Poole ordered us to do so; we had already been inside the suits for a few hours, and the suits, and ourselves, needed some maintenance. Poole had set up a curtained-off area where we could let our discarded suits perform their self-maintenance functions while we had showers – of water recycles from our urine and sweat, which was deemed a lot safer than melt from the ice moon. Pool himself used the shower first, and then Miriam. She was hasty, eager to get back to her work, and kept talking even while she cleaned up.

After Miriam was out of the shower I took my turn. It was a miserable drizzle and lukewarm at that, but it was a relief to let my skin drink in the water. I was quick, though; with the unknown dangers of Titan only centimetres away beyond the gondola’s fragile metal walls, I didn’t want to spend long outside the security of the suit.

After me, Bill Dzik followed, and it was an unlovely stink his suit released. I was spitefully glad that for all this bluster his reaction to the terrors of our landing must have been just as ignoble as mine.

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.