Year's Best Scifi 8 Part 16

"With the help of your gla.s.ses.... And not out of any prurient interest, Ed, I a.s.sure you. I just want to help."

"You're already helping too much."

"I hope you won't mind the one little step I took."

"Step? What step?"

My doorbell rang. I glared at my shoes.

"I took the liberty of calling Marsha and asking her over."

"YOU DID WHAT?".

"Ed, Ed, calm down! I know it was taking a liberty. It's not as if I called your former boss, Mr.

Edgarson, at Super-Gloss Publications."

"You wouldn't dare!"

"I would, but I didn't. But you could do a lot worse than go back to work for Edgarson. The salary was very nice."

"Have you read any of Gloss's publications? I don't know what you think you're doing, but you aren't going to do it to me!"

"Ed, Ed, I haven't done anything yet! And if you insist, I won't. Not without your permission!"

There was a knock at the door.

"Ed, I'm only trying to look out for you. What's a machine with empathy circuits and excess computing ability to do?"

"I'll tell you in a moment," I said.

I opened the door. Marsha stood there, beaming.

"Oh, Ed, I'm so glad you called!"

So the son of a b.i.t.c.h had imitated my voice, too! I glanced down at my shoes, at the gash in the cap of the left one. A light went off in my head. Realization! Epiphany!

"Come in, Marsha," I said. "I'm glad to see you. I have something for you."

She entered. I sat down in the only decent chair and stripped off the shoes, ignoring the shoe computer's agonized cry in my head of "Ed! Don't do this to me...."

Standing up again, I handed them to Marsha. "What's this?" she said.

"Shoes for one of your charity cases," I said. "Sorry I don't have a paper bag for you to carry them in."

"But what am I going to do with-"

"Marsha, these are special shoes, computerized shoes. Give them to one of your down-and-outers, get him to put them on. They'll make a new man of him. Pick one of the weak-willed ones you specialize in. It'll give him backbone!"

She looked at the shoes. "This gash in one of them-"

"A minor flaw. I'm pretty sure the former owner did that himself," I told her. "A guy named Carlton Johnson. He couldn't stand the computer's messing around with his head, so he disfigured them and gave them away. Marsha, believe me, these shoes are perfect for the right man. Carlton Johnson wasn't the right man, and I'm not either. But someone you know will bless the ground you walk on for these, believe me."

And with that, I began herding her toward the door.

"When will I hear from you?" she said.

"Don't worry, I'll call," I told her, reveling in the swinish lie that went along with my despicable life.

The Diamond Drill

CHARLES SHEFFIELD.

Charles Sheffield (19352002) , physicist and writer, was born in the UK, but lived in the U.S. after the mid-1960s. In 1998, he married writer Nancy Kress.

Sheffield began publis.h.i.+ng SF in the 1970s, and quickly gained a reputation as a new star of hard SF in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke. He in fact wrote SF of all descriptions but always with a positive view of scientific knowledge as a tool for solving problems. Sheffield was a prolific novelist, averaging more than a book a year. His novel Spheres of Heaven (2001) is a sequel to The Mind Pool (1993). He had two books out in 2002: Dark as Day, a sequel to Cold as Ice (1992), and The Amazing Dr. Darwin. His short fiction is collected in Vectors (1979), Hidden Variables (1981), Erasmus Magister (1982), The McAndrew Chronicles (1983), and Georgia On My Mind, and Other Places (1996). He also wrote Borderlands of Science: How to Think Like a Scientist and Write Science Fiction (1999).

"The Diamond Drill" is from a.n.a.log, and is one of the last pieces from this clever, energetic writer, who died near the end of 2002. The central character is a smart man and proud of it, and uses his wit and knowledge to gain advantage. Charles Sheffield's amused, intelligent narrative voice is here personified in the central character. Not a word is wasted. Sheffield cared about science and science fiction, and we will miss him and his engaging stories.

I doubt if there is a human being alive who said, as a small child, "What I want to be when I grow up is a tax inspector."

That includes the Customs official (Customs are just another form of taxation) who had just pulled me out of line with a discreet, "If you wouldn't mind, sir."

"What's the problem?" I had been headed for the NOTHING TO DECLARE exit.

"Your luggage. You are Dr. Purcell, arriving from Pavonis Six?"

"I am." I read his badge. "What can I do for you, Mr. Warren?"

"Are you aware, sir, that the import to Earth of diamonds, alien artifacts, and life-forms from Pavonis Six is strictly forbidden?"

"I did know that, yes."

"Then what about these, sir?"

We had entered an official chamber off the main entrance corridor. There, open on a table, lay my suitcase. Beside it sat a large leather pouch, also opened to reveal a bright glitter from within. I laughed. "Oh, I see why you are worried." I put my hand into the pouch and pulled out a handful of faceted stones that seemed to catch and refract every ray of light in the room. "These are stage jewelry, Mr. Warren. They look much like diamonds, but they're not. I picked them up very cheaply, practically for nothing. If you like, I can show you the receipt."

"I think, Dr. Purcell, that we would rather obtain our own a.s.surances as to their nature." He stared at me, but my easy confidence must have somewhat persuaded him of my innocence, because his voice was more friendly when he said, "I presume you would not object to our conducting our own tests-nondestructive ones, of course."

"Not at all." I quickly poured the handful of stones that I was holding back into the pouch and held it out. "I hope this won't take too long-I do have appointments."

"It will be very quick, sir, just a few minutes. We now have a fully automated procedure." He said that with a slight air of pride.

"A machine?"

"That is correct. This machine." He walked across to a compact unit maybe half a meter on a side.

"It is designed specifically to establish if a stone is a diamond, or some other material."

He emptied the pouch into a hopper on the top, and the stones vanished into the interior.

"Fascinating." I leaned against the table. "If it's not some sort of trade secret, I wonder if you would mind telling me how it works."

"Not at all." From his tone I could tell that he was delighted to talk about his department's latest toy.

"How much do you know about diamonds, sir?"

"Enough to know you can't buy them for the price I paid for those stones. Oh, and if it will scratch gla.s.s, it's a diamond. Right?"

"Actually, sir, that's wrong. Diamonds are the hardest things found in nature, but many other gemstones, such as rubies and sapphires and topazes, plus many manmade materials, will scratch gla.s.s.

You would be safer to state it the other way around: If it won't scratch gla.s.s, it's not a real diamond."

"So I know even less about diamonds than I thought. This machine tests hardness?"

"It does. It also tests for density. Diamonds have a density of about 3.5 times that of water.

Zircons-a very common 'fake diamond'-are much denser, at 4.6 and 4.7. So are rubies and sapphires at about 4.1. Gla.s.ses are much less dense."

"I suppose the machine tests everything for densities?"

"Indeed it does. But that's not all-colorless topazes have almost exactly the same density as diamonds, so we have to consider still another test: of refractive index."

"How much the stone bends light?"

"Exactly. Diamonds have a very high refractive index, at 2:43, which accounts for its brilliance. 'Fake diamond' candidates run over a wide range of refractive indices, from clear quartz at about 1.5 to zircons at 1.97."

"And I suppose this marvelous machine tests that, too?"

"Indeed it does. Only if a stone pa.s.ses all three tests-hardness, density, and refractive index-can it be a diamond." The machine at his side beeped gently and disgorged a heap of glittering stones into the pan at its bottom. "And yours didn't pa.s.s all the tests. Whatever these are, they're not diamonds. I hope you didn't pay too much for them, sir."

"Oh, I don't think so." I picked up the pan and emptied its contents back into my lead-lined carrying pouch. "Is there anything else, Mr. Warren, or am I free to go?"

"That's all, sir. Welcome to Earth, and I hope that you enjoy your stay here."

"I'm sure I will. And I guess I won't be going near the diamond merchants."

We both laughed. I placed the pouch containing dozens of pure diamonds back in my case, nodded to him, and headed for the exit. The Customs staff were of course free to question me about other matters, but human psychology being what it is, there was no chance of that. Their infallible machine had a.s.sured them that despite the anonymous tip (provided, of course by me) Dr. Purcell was not a diamond smuggler, so it was remotely unlikely that he would be smuggling anything else.

The trouble with machines, of course, is that they do what they are built to do. They lack the humantalent for suspicion or the power to notice that, although a stone failed to pa.s.s all their tests and could therefore not be a diamond, there was still something highly odd about the results of these particular tests.

My diamonds had satisfied the hardness test and the refractive index test, but they had all failed the density test. Their density, rather than being 3.5, would have measured 4.1. All diamonds are pure crystallized carbon, and these were no exception. But nothing like these diamonds had ever been found-or made-by humans. Ordinary diamonds consist of the commonest form of carbon, carbon-12.

These were pure carbon-14, a more ma.s.sive and slightly unstable isotope with a half-life of 5,700 years.

If the Customs' Department machine had possessed a suitable test, it would have discovered that the stones were radioactive enough to glow feebly in the dark.

I was telling the exact truth when I said that I would not be visiting the diamond merchants. My target is the big industrialists. The chance to experiment with and explore an alien artifact is worth thousands of times as much to them as any gemstone in existence.

The Seasons of the Ansarac

URSULA K. LE GUIN.

Ursula K. Le Guin lives in Portland, Oregon. She has been such an important force in fantasy and science fiction for the last decade, after decades of major work, that it is conceivable that literary historians will look back on the years before and after the turn of the 21st century as Le Guin's mature period. She has also written poetry, mainstream fiction, a children's book, and literary essays, 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. Le Guin's work is widely read outside the SF field, and she is taken seriously as a contemporary writer. In 2000, she published The Telling, her first SF novel in more than ten years. Her short story collection, The Birthday of the World, came out in 2002, and is the best SF collection of the year, in a year when a dozen or more excellent SF collections appeared. Her 2001 novel, The Other Wind, is one of the finest fantasy novels in years, and her fantasy collection, Tales from Earthsea , was the best fantasy collection of 2001. That's what she's done lately.

"Seasons of the Ansarac" was first published online by Infinite Matrix, and reprinted inF&SF. It is a subtle, clever anthropological portrait of a species of aliens that behaves rather like osprey.

To the Ospreys of McKenzie Bridge, whose lifestyle inspired this story -Ursula K. Le Guin I talked for a long time once with an old Ansar. I met him at his Interplanary Hostel, which is on a large island far out in the Great Western Ocean, well away from the migratory routes of the Ansarac. It is the only place visitors from other planes are allowed, these days.

Kergemmeg lived there as a native host and guide, to give visitors a little whiff of local color, for otherwise the place is like a tropical island on any of a hundred planes-sunny, breezy, lazy, beautiful, with feathery trees and golden sands and great, blue-green, white-maned waves breaking on the reef out past the lagoon. Most visitors came to sail, fish, beachcomb, and drink fermented u, and had no interest otherwise in the plane or in the sole native of it they met. They looked at him, at first, and took photos, of course, for he was a striking figure: about seven feet tall, thin, strong, angular, a little stooped by age, with a narrow head, large, round, black-and-gold eyes, and a beak. There is an all-or-nothing quality about a beak that keeps the beaked face from being as expressive as those on which the nose and mouth are separated, but Kergemmeg's eyes and eyebrows revealed his feelings very clearly. Old he might be, but he was a pa.s.sionate man. He was a little bored and lonely among the uninterested tourists, and when he found me a willing listener (surely not the first or last, but currently the only one) he took pleasure in telling me about his people, as we sat with a tall gla.s.s of iced u in the long, soft evenings, in a purple darkness all aglow with the light of the stars, the s.h.i.+ning of the sea-waves full of luminous creatures, and the pulsing glimmer of clouds of fireflies up in the fronds of the feather-trees.

From time immemorial, he said, the Ansarac had followed a Way. Madan, he called it. The way of my people, the way things are done, the way things are, the way to go, the way that is hidden in the word always: like ours, his word held all those meanings. "Then we strayed from our Way," he said.

"For a little while. Now again we do as we have always done."

People are always telling you that "we have always done thus," and then you find that their "always"

means a generation or two, or a century or two, at most a millennium or two. Cultural ways and habits are blips, compared to the ways and habits of the body, of the race. There really is very little that human beings on our plane have "always" done, except find food and drink, sleep, sing, talk, procreate, nurture the children, and probably band together to some extent. Indeed it can be seen as our human essence, how few behavioral imperatives we follow. How flexible we are in finding new things to do, new ways to go. How ingeniously, inventively, desperately we seek the right way, the true way, the Way we believe we lost long ago among the thickets of novelty and opportunity and choice...

The Ansarac had a somewhat different choice to make than we did, perhaps a more limited one. But it has its interest.

Their world is farther from a larger sun than ours, so, though its spin and tilt are much the same as Earth's, its year lasts about twenty-four of our years. And the seasons are correspondingly large and leisurely, each of them six of our years long.

On every plane and in every climate that has a spring, spring is the breeding time, when new life is born; and for creatures whose life is only a few seasons or a few years, early spring is mating time, too, when new life begins. So it is for the Ansarac, whose life span is, in their terms, three years.

They inhabit two continents, one on the equator and a little north of it, one that stretches up toward the north pole; the two are joined, as the Americas are, by a narrower mountainous bridge of land, though it is all on a smaller scale. The rest of the world is ocean, with a few archipelagoes and scattered large islands, none with any human population except the one used by the Interplanary Agency.

The year begins, Kergemmeg said, when, in the cities of the plains and deserts of the South, the Year Priests give the word and great crowds gather to see the sun pause at the peak of a Tower or stab through a Target with an arrow of light at dawn: the moment of solstice. Now increasing heat will parch the southern gra.s.slands and prairies of wild grain, and in the long dry season the rivers will run low and the wells of the city will go dry. Spring follows the sun northward, melting snow from those far hills, brightening valleys with green... And the Ansarac will follow the sun.

"Well, I'm off," old friend says to old friend in the city street. "See you around!" And the young people, the almost-one-year-olds-to us they'd be people of twenty-one or twenty-two-drift away from their households and groups of pals, their colleges and sports clubs, and seek out, among the labyrinthine apartment-complexes and communal dwellings and hostelries of the city, one or the other of the parents from whom they parted, back in the summer. Sauntering casually in, they remark, "Hullo, Dad," or "Hullo, Mother. Seems like everybody's going back north." And the parent, careful not to insult by offering guidance over the long route they came half the young one's life ago, says, "Yes, I've been thinking about it myself. It certainly would be nice to have you with us. Your sister's in the other room, packing."

And so by ones, twos, and threes, the people abandon the city. The exodus is a long process, without any order to it. Some people leave quite soon after the solstice, and others say about them, "What a hurry they're in," or "Shennenne just has to get there first so she can grab the old homesite." But some people linger in the city till it is almost empty, and still can't make up their mind to leave the hot and silent streets, the sad, shadeless, deserted squares, that were so full of crowds and music all through the long halfyear. But first and last they all set out on the roads that lead north. And once they go, they go with speed. Most carry with them only what they can carry in a backpack or load on a ruba (from Kergemmeg's description, rubac are something like small, feathered donkeys). Some of the traders who have become wealthy during the Desert Season start out with whole trains of rubac loaded with goods and treasures.

Though most people travel alone or in a small family group, on the more popular roads they follow pretty close after one another. Larger groups form temporarily in places where the going is hard and the older and weaker people need help gathering and carrying food.

There are no children on the road north.