Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 18

"And now," he said, "the burning of the boats."

He raised his arms and gave a signal to his followers on the beach, who at once set to, dragging the canoes one after another onto the fires. The grooms objected ritually and had to be ritually restrained, but there was a lot of laughter. It was clearly all in fun.

Clancy frowned. "Why do you do that?"

"When a man marries, his wandering days should end, isn't that so?"

The king winked.

"That moon-boat of yours, it won't burn quite so easily!"

"What do you mean?"

Clancy looked over to the headland where Sphere was perched on its tripod legs. A fire was burning beneath it.

"No!" he cried out, and then laughed at himself. How could mere fire harm a vessel designed to cope with s.p.a.ce?

The king laughed good-naturedly with him, putting a friendly arm round the shoulders of his son-in-law to be.

"Those rocks are easily shattered under the moon," he observed, "and we have fires in the caves below as well."

When he heard Com translate this, it took Clancy a few seconds before he grasped the implications-and in that short time the first boulder had broken loose and crashed down into the sea.

"No," Clancy shouted, "it's my only way back!"

The king roared with laughter.

"I'm not joking!" cried Clancy, looking around for the rope ladder to get down. "Have the fires put out at once!"

Over on the headland a second boulder crashed down, then a third. And then the sphere itself tipped over, its surfaces glinting in the pink moonlight as it rolled onto its back, its tripod legs sticking up in the air as if it was a stranded sheep. Some more rocks exploded. In agonizing slow-motion, or so it seemed, Sphere went over the edge, cras.h.i.+ng against the cliff-once...twice...-then hitting the sea with a mighty splash and sinking beneath the waves.

With one foot on the rope ladder, Clancy stared. And the king, still laughing, his face wet with tears, reached down, helped him kindly back onto the platform and gave him a warm, fishy hug.

"The boats are burnt! So now you can go to Wayeesha."

Clancy walked over to the rough wooden rail at the edge of the platform, looked out at the bonfires, the glittering sea, the giant moon, and remembered Wayeesha waiting for him in the hall below.

As he had trained himself to do in even the most extreme situations, he examined his thoughts. What he found surprised him. He turned to the king with a smile.

"I'm going to regret this. And I fear that you, my friend, are going to be seriously disappointed. But right now, it's strange, I feel as if I've put down a burden. I don't think I've ever felt so free!"

"A good ending for the book!" Com observed.

"What book, you idiot?" said Clancy. "Are we going to write it on seaweed, or carve it into the stones?"

Then he proffered the yellow egg to the king.

"Here," he said, "it's yours. I don't need it, and I feel you ought to get something from your alliance with the stars. No need to translate that last sentence, Com."

"Is this wise?" asked Com, as the king turned it over reverently in his large hands.

"No," said Clancy. "In another month your battery will run out and you really will just be a plastic egg. Then what will the king think of my gift?"

He went to the rope ladder and began to lower himself, carefully avoiding looking down.

In the Days of the Comet

JOHN M. FORD.

John M. Ford was a Wunderkind who published a bunch of professional short stories in his teensand early twenties, and published his first novel, Web of Angels, just after he turned 21, in 1980.

Now he is a member of the establishment with a recent new kidney transplant (Merry Christmas, 2000!). In between, he has won the World Fantasy Award for a fantasy novel, The Dragon Waiting, and a narrative poem, "Winter Solstice, Camelot Station." He also won a Philip K. d.i.c.k Award for his SF novel Growing Up Weightless (1993), and wrote two cla.s.sic Star Trek novels, The Final Reflection (1984) and How Much for Just the Planet? (1987). Some of his fantasy stories are collected in Casting Fortune (1989) and some SF in From the End of the Twentieth Century (1997). He has published only three stories in the last decade, in part due to ill health but also because he has always been easily distracted by work in other areas such as game design. A fine fantasy short novel, written years ago, The Last Hot Time, came out at the end of 2000.

This story, from Nature, is a complete tale start to finish in a manner that many of the other Nature pieces are not. It is a short short story.

Camfield is dead, and this s.h.i.+p is very quiet now. I have tried to be hopeful in the recent dispatches: we were, Camfield certainly was. Prions are not supposed to kill people any more, but they can, and they have. Which is part of the reason Camfield was out here in the first place.

He was a teller of jokes and he played the guitar very well-these are valuable things when you are doomed to spend years aboard a cantankerous old s.h.i.+p. Several instalments ago, I described the lab accident that infected Camfield, and I have received numerous messages calling the events absurd. This is true. In addition to myself, the organic Petrovna and the Neumann Thucydides saw the incident, and we all laughed until we realized Camfield was hurt. Petrovna, at least, can forget, although I do not think she will.

The prion has been decrypted and entered into the antigenic database, so no one should ever again die of Agent Op-1175s/CFD.

Which is the story, but not its point.

At the cusp of this millennium we discovered that it was not hard to manufacture prions, and not that hard to custom-twist them. It took longer for our twists to be meaningful, but now organic humanity can don an armour of proteins for defence against a hostile Universe. Rather like viruses. Draw your own conclusions.

If one could find the right message, a prion would make a wonderful interstellar, even intergalactic, postal card: immune to temperature, pressure, radiation and time. The ideal pony for the express would be a comet, packed with messenger proteins, flung into a hyperbolic orbit, to seed any worlds at the far end with its cargo.

One could write one's name in the evolving life of a planet. At exactly the right moment, one might even begin the process, dropping a bouillon cube into the primordial soup.

a.s.suming that no one at the other end is quite as evolved, and quite as dependent on delicate higher neural functions, as we are.

So here we are, myself, 29 (down from 30) organic crew, and eight Neumanner, combing the comets of the Oort for prions. We have found a lot of prions, and there are a lot of comets left. You've got mail, as we said when I was organic.

Maybe. Or maybe one of the 48 published theories of spontaneous prion formation in comets is correct. It is the Neumanner who are most insistent on deliberate seeding. Perhaps it comforts them to think that, just as we built them, somebody built us. How human of them-but, as their namesake said, adequately describe any activity, and a machine can perform it.

In Camfield's last hours he was afire with fever, his whole body trembling, but there was a clarity in his speech that was at once heartbreaking and terrifying. Fischer, Chiang, and the Neumann Hypatia were tending him. Abruptly he calmed, fixed Chiang (and me, unavoidably) with a direct stare, and said, "I see the Martians now! They are flat, and they roll!" He s.h.i.+vered then, and I heard his heart stop.

The exclamation points are not added for drama. He was excited by what he saw, transported by whatever the alien messenger in his brain was revealing to him. Camfield was born on the Moon, notMars, so we cannot explain away the vision as Heimsucht.

We cannot, of course, positively explain it at all. But we must examine the possibility that, eons ago, Op-1175s/CFD fell on Mars and began life there, which was later carried to Earth by a planetary blunt trauma.

Thucydides carefully wrapped and sealed Camfield's remains for storage until we return to the Moon, eight years from now. When he was done, Sid paused for two full minutes (exactly-we are like that), just looking at the bundle.

This kind of behaviour is by no means strange in a Neumann (one can adequately describe a thoughtful pause) but I asked Sid what he was thinking. He waited fourteen seconds longer-which was purely theatrical of him-and said, "I will miss Camfield. He was always interesting to be with, even when nothing was said. And has he not left us with a fine and difficult question?"

Camfield gave many gifts to his s.h.i.+pmates and his s.h.i.+p. The question-and it is fine-he gave to all of us.

The Birthday of the World

URSULA K. LE GUIN.

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the finest living SF and fantasy writers. She also writes poetry, mainstream fiction, children's books, literary essays, and has published a good book on how to write narrative fiction and nonfiction, and co-edited the Norton Book of Science Fiction, an influential anthology. She is one of the leading feminists in SF, and in recent years a supporter of the James Tiptree Jr. Awards, named in honor of Le Guin's peer and friend Alice Bradley Sheldon's SF pseudonym. Le Guin's work is widely read outside the SF field and she is taken seriously as a contemporary writer. A daughter of famous anthropologists, she grew up in an academic environment and is erudite and cultured. She can be outraged, or silly, when appropriate. In recent years she has published a number of distinguished short stories, and in 2000 she not only continued to do that, but published her first SF novel in more than ten years, The Telling.

"The Birthday of the World," from Fantasy & Science Fiction and one of three stories she published in the magazines last year, is a powerful story that starts out just like a fantasy. But this is actually a science fiction story set on another world, and the point of view is not what it initially seems. This ironic tale is in the the main body of Le Guin's work, anthropological SF, a branch of the field carried on for decades mainly by her and Michael Bishop. It may be read as an historical and/or political allegory. It gives ample evidence that Le Guin is still at the peak of her powers as a writer.

Tazu was having a tantrum, because he was three. After the birthday of the world, tomorrow, he would be four and would not have tantrums.

He had left off screaming and kicking and was turning blue from holding his breath. He lay on the ground stiff as a corpse, but when Haghag stepped over him as if he wasn't there, he tried to bite her foot.

"This is an animal or a baby," Haghag said, "not a person." She glanced may-I-speak-to-you and I glanced yes. "Which does G.o.d's daughter think it is," she asked, "an animal or a baby?"

"An animal. Babies suck, animals bite," I said. All the servants of G.o.d laughed and t.i.ttered, except the new barbarian, Ruaway, who never smiled. Haghag said, "G.o.d's daughter must be right. Maybe somebody ought to put the animal outside. An animal shouldn't be in the holy house."

"I'm not an aminal!" Tazu screamed, getting up, his fists clenched and his eyes as red as rubies. "I'm G.o.d's son!""Maybe," Haghag said, looking him over. "This doesn't look so much like an animal now. Do you think this might be G.o.d's son?" she asked the holy women and men, and they all nodded their bodies, except the wild one, who stared and said nothing.

"I am, I am G.o.d's son!" Tazu shouted. "Not a baby! Arzi is the baby!" Then he burst into tears and ran to me, and I hugged him and began crying because he was crying. We cried till Haghag took us both on her lap and said it was time to stop crying, because G.o.d Herself was coming. So we stopped, and the bodyservants wiped the tears and snot from our faces and combed our hair, and Lady Clouds brought our gold hats, which we put on to see G.o.d Herself.

She came with her mother, who used to be G.o.d Herself a long time ago, and the new baby, Arzi, on a big pillow carried by the idiot. The idiot was a son of G.o.d too. There were seven of us: Omimo, who was fourteen and had gone to live with the army, then the idiot, who was twelve, and had a big round head and small eyes and liked to play with Tazu and the baby, then Goiz, and another Goiz, who were called that because they had died and were in the ash-house where they ate spirit food, then me and Tazu, who would get married and be G.o.d, and then Babam Arzi, Lord Seven. I was important because I was the only daughter of G.o.d. If Tazu died I could marry Arzi, but if I died everything would be bad and difficult, Haghag said. They would have to act as if Lady Clouds' daughter Lady Sweetness was G.o.d's daughter and marry her to Tazu, but the world would know the difference. So my mother greeted me first, and Tazu second. We knelt and clasped our hands and touched our foreheads to our thumbs. Then we stood up, and G.o.d asked me what I had learned that day.

I told her what words I had learned to read and write.

"Very good," G.o.d said. "And what have you to ask, daughter?"

"I have nothing to ask, I thank you, Lady Mother," I said. Then I remembered I did have a question, but it was too late.

"And you, Tazu? What have you learned this day?"

"I tried to bite Haghag."

"Did you learn that was a good thing to do, or a bad thing?"

"Bad," Tazu said, but he smiled, and so did G.o.d, and Haghag laughed.

"And what have you to ask, son?"

"Can I have a new bath maid because Kig washes my head too hard?"

"If you have a new bath maid where will Kig go?"

"Away."

"This is her house. What if you asked Kig to wash your head more gently?"

Tazu looked unhappy, but G.o.d said, "Ask her, son." Tazu mumbled something to Kig, who dropped on her knees and thumbed her forehead. But she grinned the whole time. Her fearlessness made me envious. I whispered to Haghag, "If I forgot a question to ask can I ask if I can ask it?"

"Maybe," said Haghag, and thumbed her forehead to G.o.d for permission to speak, and when G.o.d nodded, Haghag said, "The daughter of G.o.d asks if she may ask a question."

"Better to do a thing at the time for doing it," G.o.d said, "but you may ask, daughter."

I rushed into the question, forgetting to thank her. "I wanted to know why I can't marry Tazu and Omimo both, because they're both my brothers."

Everybody looked at G.o.d, and seeing her smile a little, they all laughed, some of them loudly. My ears burned and my heart thumped.

"Do you want to marry all your brothers, child?"

"No, only Tazu and Omimo."

"Is Tazu not enough?"

Again they all laughed, especially the men. I saw Ruaway staring at us as if she thought we were all crazy.

"Yes, Lady Mother, but Omimo is older and bigger."

Now the laughter was even louder, but I had stopped caring, since G.o.d was not displeased. She looked at me thoughtfully and said, "Understand, my daughter. Our eldest son will be a soldier. That's his road. He'll serve G.o.d, fighting barbarians and rebels. The day he was born, a tidal wave destroyed thetowns of the outer coast. So his name is Babam Omimo, Lord Drowning. Disaster serves G.o.d, but is not G.o.d."

I knew that was the end of the answer, and thumbed my forehead. I kept thinking about it after G.o.d left. It explained many things. All the same, even if he had been born with a bad omen, Omimo was handsome, and nearly a man, and Tazu was a baby that had tantrums. I was glad it would be a long time till we were married.

I remember that birthday because of the question I asked. I remember another birthday because of Ruaway. It must have been a year or two later. I ran into the water room to p.i.s.s and saw her hunched up next to the water tank, almost hidden.

"What are you doing there?" I said, loud and hard, because I was startled. Ruaway shrank and said nothing. I saw her clothes were torn and there was blood dried in her hair.

"You tore your clothes," I said.

When she didn't answer, I lost patience and shouted, "Answer me! Why don't you talk?"

"Have mercy," Ruaway whispered so low I had to guess what she said.

"You talk all wrong when you do talk. What's wrong with you? Are they animals where you come from? You talk like an animal, brr-grr, grr-gra! Are you an idiot?"

When Ruaway said nothing, I pushed her with my foot. She looked up then and I saw not fear but killing in her eyes. That made me like her better. I hated people who were afraid of me. "Talk!" I said.

"n.o.body can hurt you. G.o.d the Father put his p.e.n.i.s in you when he was conquering your country, so you're a holy woman. Lady Clouds told me. So what are you hiding for?"

Ruaway showed her teeth and said, "Can hurt me." She showed me places on her head where there was dried blood and fresh blood. Her arms were darkened with bruises.