The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year Part 20

"Please," said Alone. "Let me go free."

"I can't."

He changed his shape.

Aasleen's eyes opened. "I know that story about you and Wune. My guess? That you'd take on my appearance like you did hers."

But he hadn't. He had no limbs now, no face. To the eye, he looked like a ball of hyperfiber with giant rockets on one hemisphere, thick armor on the other. Using a hidden mouth, he promised, "I won't do any harm. I shall not hurt anyone and I will never injure the s.h.i.+p."

"You just want to left by yourself," she said.

"Nothing else."

"But why?"

He had no response.

"Which leads us to another area of deep concern," she continued. "A machine built by unknown hands is discovered wandering inside another machine built by unknown hands. But there seems to be two mysteries, there might be only one. Do you understand what I mean?"

He said, "No."

"Two machines, but only one builder."

He didn't react.

She shook her head. "We don't know how old the Great s.h.i.+p is. Not precisely, but we have informed guesses. And no matter how well-engineered you appear to be, I don't think you're several billion years old."

He remained silent.

Aasleen took one step closer. "There's the third terror involving you: a captain's nightmare. Maybe you are the puzzleboys' machine. Or you're somebody else's representative. Either way, if you arrived here on the s.h.i.+p before any human did, and if there's a lost soul inside whatever pa.s.ses for your mind...well, then it's possible that a different species might legally claim possession over the wealth and impossibilities that the Great s.h.i.+p offers. And at that point, no matter how sweet your engineering is, your fate is out my hands..."

Her voice trailed away.

She took a tiny step forward.

"I have no idea," he said. "I don't know what I am. I know nothing."

The tiny machines inside Aasleen were speaking rapidly again.

"I'm watching your mind," she confessed. "But I'm not at all familiar with its neural network. It's a sloppy design, or it's revolutionary. I don't know enough to offer an opinion."

"I wish to leave now," he said.

"In the universe, there are two kinds of unlikely," Aasleen warned. "The Great s.h.i.+p is one type-never attempted or even imagined, but achievable, provided someone has time and the muscle to make it real. And then there's the implausible that you imagine will come true, and one day your worst fears turn real. If the Great s.h.i.+p belongs to someone else, then my species has to surrender our claim. And even though I believe that I am a good and charitable soul, I don't want that to happen. Facing that prospect, I would fight to keep that from happening, in fact."

Alone did nothing, gathering his strength.

"And even if you are safe as rain," she said, "I don't relish the idea of you wandering wherever you like. Not on my s.h.i.+p. Certainly not until we can find the answers to all these puzzles."

Without warning, Alone lost his shape, turning into a hot broth that tried to flow around the grasping arms.

The arms seemed to expect his trick, quickly creating one deep bowl that held him in place.

"I promise," said Aasleen. "You'll be somewhere safe. We will keep you comfortable. And as much as possible, you'll be left alone. Not even Miocene wants to torment you. And that's why a special chamber is being prepared-"

A new talent emerged.

The liquid body suddenly compressed itself, collapsing into a tiny dense and radiant drop hotter than any sun. And as the bowl-shaped limbs struggled to keep hold of this fleck of fire, Alone stole a portion of their ma.s.s, turning it into energy, shaping a ball of white-hot plasma.

And with that, he shrank into an even tinier, hotter bit of existence.

Aasleen turned and ran.

The arms were pierced. Not even the hyperfiber floor could resist his descent. He struck and sank out of sight, and when he was beneath the floor, hyperfiber turned into a bed of pale pink granite, and much as a s.h.i.+p pa.s.sed between the stars, he was slicing quickly through what felt much like nothing.

7.

Creating a narrow hole, Alone fell.

The hole was lined with compressed, distorted magma that flowed and bubbled and soon hardened above him. But despite the minuscule trail, his enemies would follow. He felt certain. Alone had value in their eyes, or he was dangerous, or they simply could not approve of his continued existence. Whatever their reasons, Aasleen and the captains would go to considerable trouble to chase him. But the Great s.h.i.+p was full of holes and tunnels, and it occurred to him that his enemies would simply gather below him, waiting inside the next chamber.

To fool these hunters, Alone let his body balloon outwards, one final burst of blazing heat leaking out before his descent was finished.

Fifteen kilometers beneath Aasleen, the machine built a new chamber. It was a tiny realm, the spherical wall glowing red as the residual heat bled away, and he lay silent in the middle for long minutes before sprouting delicate fingers, pus.h.i.+ng their tips into the cooling magma. Falling from above were vibrations-bright hard jarrings marking the closing and sealing of every hatch and orifice and superfluous valve. Then something ma.s.sive and quite slow pa.s.sed directly beneath him. But the subtle noises were never regular, never simple, creating distortions and echoes as the waves broke around empty s.p.a.ces deep within the cold rock. Swim in one downward angle, and a large chamber would be waiting. Another easy line promised a more distant but far more extensive cavern. But what caught Alone's interest was a line that might be an illusion, a flaw in the rock, perhaps, or it might be a tunnel leading nowhere. But that target was close. Alone pulled his body into a new shape. Looking like the worms common to a hundred billion worlds, he began slithering and shoving his way forward.

He missed his goal by eighty meters.

But instinct or a wordless voice urged him to pause and think again. What was wrong? An urge told him what to do, and he obeyed, following a new line until he was not only certain that he was lost but that the Great s.h.i.+p was solid to its core, and his fate was to wander this cramped darkness until Time's end.

Suddenly the rock beneath him turned to cultured diamond.

With the worm's white-hot head, he pushed through the gemstone. The Great s.h.i.+p was laced with countless tiny tunnels, and this was among the most obscure, barely mapped examples. He glowed brightly for a long moment, new eyes probing in both directions before one was chosen. Then inside a s.p.a.ce too small for a human child to stand, he began to run-sprouting limbs as necessary, pus.h.i.+ng off the floor and the sides and that low slick diamond ceiling. With every junction and tributary hole, he picked for no reason. Eventually he was hundreds of kilometers from his beginning point, random choice his guide until the moment when he realized that he was beginning to wander back toward his starting point. Then Alone decided to pause, listening to the diamond and the rock beyond. The next turn led to a dead end, and he backed out of that hole and hunkered down, and with a soft private voice asked, "What now?"

"Down," the familiar voice coaxed.

Nothing else was offered. No other instruction was needed. He burned a fresh hole into the diamond floor, and after plunging three kilometers, his fierce little body exploded out into a volume of frigid air that stretched farther than the light of his body could reach.

Alarmed, he made himself black as s.p.a.ce.

He fell, and a floor of water and carbon dioxide ice slapped him when he struck bottom.

The cavern was five kilometers in diameter, bubble-shaped and filled with ancient ice and a whisper of oxygen gas. Except for the dimpled footprints of one robot surveyor, there was no trace of visitors. No human had ever stepped inside this place. But as a precaution, Alone erased his tracks, and where his warmth had distorted the ice, he made delicate repairs.

A walker's existence gave way to the sessile life. He moved only to investigate his new home. Every sealed hatch leading out into the s.h.i.+p was studied, and he prepared three secret exits that wouldn't appear on the captains' maps. Sameness made for simple memories. The next seventeen thousand years were crossed without interruption. Life was routine, and life was silent and unremarkable, and the old sense of fear subsided into a slight paranoia that left each sliver of Time sweet for being pleasantly, unashamedly boring.

Doing nothing was natural.

For long delicious spans, the ent.i.ty sat motionless, allowing his heat to gradually melt the ice. Then he would cool himself and his surroundings would freeze again, and he would pretend to be the old ice. With determination and a wealth of patience, he imagined billions of years pa.s.sing while nothing happened, nothing in this tiny realm experiencing any significant change. Sometimes he sprouted a single enormous eye, and from another part of his frigid body he emitted a thin rain of photons that struck the black basalt ceiling and the icy hills around him, and with that eye designed for this single function, he would slowly and thoroughly study what never changed, and with his mind he would try to imagine the s.h.i.+p that he could not see.

"Speak to me," he might beg.

Then he would wait, wis.h.i.+ng for a reply, tolerant enough to withstand a year and sometimes two years of inviting silence.

"Speak," he would prompt again.

Silence.

Then he might offer a soft lie. "I can hear you anyway," he would claim. "Just past my hearing, you are. Just out of my reach, out of my view."

But if the strange voice was genuine, then its maker was proving itself more stubborn even than him.

Seventeen millennia and thirty-seven years pa.s.sed, and then with a thunderous thud, a hatch on one wall burst inward. Unsealed for the first time, the open door let in a screaming wind and a brigade of machines-enormous swift and fearless a.s.semblages of muscle and narrow talents that knew their purpose and had only so much time to work.

Alone was terrified, and he was enthralled. Imagining that he could escape at will, he retreated to the chamber's center. But then the other hatches exploded inwards, including a big opening at the apex of the ceiling. Machines began to burrow into the ice and string lights, and then they carved the black walls and built a second, lower ceiling. And all the while, they were leaking enough raw heat that the ancient glacier began to melt, transformed into fizzy water and gas.

Alone huddled inside the rotting shards of the ice.

Each of his emergency exists were either blocked or too close to active machines. The chamber floor was quality hyperfiber, difficult to pierce without creating a spectacle. Alone pretended to belong to the floor. For the next awful week, he did nothing but remain still. Then the ice had melted and the first wave of machinery vanished, replaced by different devices that worked rapidly in smaller ways, but with the same tenacious purpose.

Mimicking one common machine, he drifted to the new lake's surface.

A sh.o.r.eline was being constructed from cultured wood and young purple corals and farm-raised sh.e.l.lfish, everything laid across a bed of gla.s.sy stone filled with artificial fossils-ancestors to the chamber's new residents. Humans stood beside the aliens, the species speaking through interpretive AIs. The aliens wore broad purple sh.e.l.ls, and they were happiest when their gills lay in the newly conditioned water. The humans wore uniforms of various styles, different colors. One uniform had the bright reflective quality of a mirror, and the woman inside it was saying, "Beautiful, yes." Then she knelt down and sucked up a mouthful of the salted, acidic water. Spitting with vigor, she said, "And a good taste too, is it?"

The aliens swirled their many feet and the fibrous gills, stirring up their lake. Then their chittering answers were turned into the words, "We are skeptical."

"To your specifications," said the woman. "I pledge."

The aliens spoke of rare elements that needed to be increased or abolished. Proportions were critical. Perfection was the only satisfactory solution.

"It shall be done," the captain promised.

The aliens claimed to be satisfied. Confident of success, they slithered into the deeper water, plainly enjoying their new abode.

The captain looked across the lake, spying one machine that was plainly doing nothing.

With a commanding tone, she said, "This is Washen. We've got a balky conditioner sitting in the middle. Do you see it?"

Quietly, Alone eased beneath the surface, changing his shape, merging with the gla.s.sy sediment. His disguise was good enough to escape the notice of watching humans and machines. As he waited, he gathered enough power to make a sudden explosive escape. But then the artificial day faded, a bright busy night taking hold, complete with the illusion of scattered stars and a pale red moon; and it was an easy trick to a.s.sume the form of one sh.e.l.led alien, mimicking its motions and chattering tongue, casually slipping out through the public entrance into a side tunnel that led to a mult.i.tude of new places, all empty.

8.

Twenty centuries of steady exploration, and still the cavern had no end. Its wandering pa.s.sageways were dry and often cramped, unlit and deeply chilled. The granite and hyperfiber were quite sterile. Humans and aliens didn't wish to live in places like this. Machine species set up a few homes, but their communities were tiny and easily avoided. Once more, the habit of walking returned to his life. To help track his own motions as well as the pa.s.sage of time, Alone would count his strides until he reached some lovely prime number, and then he would mark the nearest stone with slashes and dots that only he could interpret-apparently random marks that would warn him in another thousand years that not only had he had pa.s.sed this way before, but he had been moving from this tunnel into that chamber, and if at all possible, he should avoid repeating that old route.

The voice found him more often now, but it was quieter and even harder to comprehend. Sometimes a whisper emerged from some slight hole or side pas-sage-like a neighbor calling to a neighbor from some enormous distance. But more often the voice was directly behind him, and it didn't so much speak as offer up emotions, raw and unwelcome. The sadness that it gladly shared was deep and very old, but that black mood was preferable to the sharp, sick fear that sometimes took hold of Alone. One dose of panic was enough to make his next hundred days unbearable. Something was horribly wrong, the voice insisted. Alone couldn't define the terror, much less the reasons, but he didn't have any choice but believe what he felt. He had his solitude; there was no cause to be scared. No captains or engineers chased after him. Occasionally he slipped into some deep corner of the cavern, and for several months he would hide away, waiting for whatever might pa.s.s by. But nothing showed itself, and whatever the voice was, it was wrong. Mistaken. Alone was perfectly safe inside this private, perfect catacomb, and he welcomed no opinion that said otherwise.

One day, walking an unexplored pa.s.sageway, he happened upon a vertical shaft. Normally he might have avoided the place. A human had been here first, leaving behind tastes of skin and bacteria and human oils. Leaking a faint glow, Alone spied the machine abandoned by this anonymous explorer: a winch perched on the edge of the deep shaft, anch.o.r.ed by determined spikes. The sapphire rope was broken. The drum was almost empty, but the winch continued to turn-an achingly slow motion that for some reason fascinated the first soul to stand here in a very long while.

After several days of study, Alone touched the drum, and that slight friction was enough to kill what power remained inside the superconductive battery. How long had it been here, spinning without purpose? And what was inside the hole, waiting at the other end of the broken blue thread?

Alone snapped two handles from the winch and uncoiled the remaining sapphire rope, tying one handle to one end. Then he dropped the handle into the dark shaft. Two hundred meters, and there was no bottom. Then he tied the rope's other end to the winch and climbed down. The shaft turned to hyperfiber, slick and vertical, and then its sides pulled away. When Alone couldn't reach easily from one side to the other, he let go, falling and making his body brighter as he fell, watching the dangling handle fly past. Then feeling no one but himself, he lit the entire chamber with his golden fire.

A human shape lay upon the flat floor.

Alone turned black and cold again, and he dropped hard and repaired his body and then carefully crept close to the motionless figure.

For three days, nothing changed.

Then he brightened, just slightly, straddling the figure. The human male hadn't moved in decades, perhaps longer. There was enough thread on the winch to put him down here, but it must have broken unexpectedly. The hyperfiber floor showed blood where the man struck the first time, hard enough to shatter his tough bones and shred his muscles. But humans can recover from most injuries. This stranger would have healed and soon stood up again, and probably by a variety of means, he had worked to save himself.

Most of the s.h.i.+p's pa.s.sengers carried machines allowing them to speak with distant friends. Why didn't this man beg for help? Perhaps that machinery failed, or this hole was too deep and isolated, or maybe he simply came to this empty place without the usual implements.

Reasons were easy, answers unknowable.

Whatever happened, the man had lived inside this hole for some months and perhaps several years. He had brought food and water, but not enough of either to last long. The cold that Alone found pleasant would have stolen away the body's precious heat, and the man starved while his flesh lost its moisture, reaching a point where it could invent no way to function. Yet the man never died. With his last strength, he stripped himself of his clothes and made a simple bed, his pack serving as his pillow, and then he lay on his back with his eyes aimed at the unreachable opening, his face turning leathery and cold and blind.

The eyes remained open but dry as stone. They might not have changed for centuries, and n.o.body had ever found this man, and perhaps no one had noticed his absence.

Alone considered the implications of each option.

Eventually and with considerable caution, he opened the pack and thoroughly inventoried its contents. What was plainly useful he studied in detail, particularly the sophisticated map of this cavern system. Then he carefully returned each item to where it belonged, and laid the pack beneath the unaware head. That frozen, wasted body weighed almost nothing. A good hard shake might turn the dried muscle to dust. Yet he was careful not to disturb anything more than absolutely necessary, and without a sound, he retreated. The lower length of sapphire lay nearby, coiled into a neat pile. He tied one end to the second handle, and despite the distance and darkness, he managed a perfect toss on his first attempt, the two handles colliding and then wrapping together, and he climbed past the rough knot, pulling it loose and letting the lower rope fall away before he continued his climb out from the hole.

More centuries pa.s.sed; little if anything changed. But there were a few episodes-intuitive moments when the bright gray fear took hold, when some nagging instinct claimed that he was being sloppy, that he was being pursued. Three times, Alone found marks resembling his own but obviously drawn by another hand. And there was one worrisome incident when he slipped aside and waited only thirteen days before a solitary figure followed him down the long tunnel. The biped was towering and ma.s.sive, covered with bright scales and angry spikes, and the low ceiling forced him to walk bent over inside the pa.s.sageway, both hands carrying an elaborate machine that resembled a second head.

Mechanical eyes and a long probing nostril studied the rock where Alone had stepped, teasing out subtle cues. With a hunter's intensity, the creature slowly moved to a place where the second head noticed that the trail had vanished, and the machine whispered a warning, and the harum-scarum turned in time to see an amorphous shape sprout long limbs, and without sound, silently race away.

After that, Alone adapted his legs and gait, changing his stride, hopefully becoming less predictable. But he refused to abandon the cavern. His home was far too large to be searched easily or in secret, and he had nearly walked every pa.s.sageway, every room-a hard-acquired knowledge that he would have to surrender if he journeyed anywhere else.

Most encounters came through chance, fleeting and harmless. As the millennia pa.s.sed, human numbers had swollen, but other species plainly outnumbered the s.h.i.+p's lawful owners. Aliens wore every imaginable body, and there were always new species waiting to surprise. One glimpse in the dark or some long study at a safe distance didn't make an expert, but Alone had adequate experience to gain several rugged little epiphanies: Life must be relentless, and it had to be astonis.h.i.+ngly imaginative. Every living world seemed unique, and those oceans of living flesh were able to thrive on every sort of unlikely food and bitter breath. The beasts that came slipping through his home drank water, salty or clear, acidic or alkaline, or their drinks were chilled and laced with ammonia, or they wore insulated suits and downed pitchers of frigid methane, or they sucked on peroxides, on odd oils, while quite a few drank nothing whatsoever. Yet despite that staggering range of form and function, every creature was curious, peering into some black hole, sometimes slipping fingers and antennae into places never touched before-if not hunting for invisible, legendary ent.i.ties, then at least seeking the simple, precious novelty of Being First.

On occasion, Alone watched visitors coupling. One eager pair of humans fell onto a mat of glowing aerogel, naked and busy, and standing just a few meters away, immersed in darkness, Alone observed as they bent themselves into a series of increasingly difficult poses, grunting occasionally, then finally shouting with wild voices that echoed off the distant ceiling. Then their violence was finished, and the woman said to the man, "Is that all there is?" and her lover called her a harsh affectionate name, and she laughed, and he laughed, and after drinking the brown alcohol from a treasured bottle, the performance began again.

More centuries and thousands of kilometers were slowly, carefully traversed. And then came one peculiar second where he heard what sounded like a mult.i.tude pa.s.sing through the cavern's largest entrance. The presence of many was felt; he smelled their collective breath. They might whisper respectfully and try to move like ghosts, but there were too many feet and mouths, too many reasons to praise the solitude and beg their neighbors to be silent. Alarmed, he approached the newcomers and then followed them, and from a sober distance he watched as they a.s.sembled at the center of the cavern's largest chamber. A quick count found twenty thousand bodies and a staggering variety of species, and after an invisible signal was given, they began to talk in one shared voice. He heard rhythmic chanting, the sloppily performed songs. Normally he would have fled any spectacle, but the strangers were singing about the Great s.h.i.+p, begging for its blessings and its wisdom. And hope upon hope, the s.h.i.+p's voice.

Using every trick, Alone approached unseen.

The celebration was joyous, and it was senseless. But he felt the urgency and earnest pa.s.sion. At least a hundred alien species were represented. But the lighting was minimal, and hovering at the edges, it was impossible to observe the full crowd, much less comprehend more than a fraction of what was being said.

"We thank the s.h.i.+p," he heard.