The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (129 page)

T
O GET TO
Earth from the edge of the Solar System, depending on the time of year and the position of the planets, you need to pass through at least Poland, Prussia and Turkey, and you’d probably get stamps in your passport from a few of the other great powers. Then as you get closer to the world, you arrive at a point, in the continually shifting carriage space over the countries, where this complexity has to give way or fail. And so you arrive in the blissful lubrication of neutral orbital territory. From there it’s especially clear that no country is whole unto itself. There are yearning gaps between parts of each state, as they stretch across the Solar System. There is no congruent territory. The countries continue in balance with each other like a fine but eccentric mechanism, pent up, all that political energy dealt with through eternal circular motion.

The maps that represent this can be displayed on a screen, but they’re much more suited to mental contemplation. They’re beautiful. They’re made to be beautiful, doing their own small part to see that their beauty never ends.

If you looked down on that world of countries, onto the pink of glorious old Greater Britain, that land of green squares and dark forest and carriage contrails, and then you naturally avoided looking directly at the golden splendor of London, your gaze might fall on the Thames valley. On the country houses and mansions and hunting estates that letter the river banks with the names of the great. On one particular estate: an enormous winged square of a house with its own grouse shooting horizons and mazes and herb gardens and markers that indicate it also sprawls into folded interior expanses.

Today that estate, seen from such a height, would be adorned with informational banners that could be seen from orbit, and tall pleasure cruisers could be observed, docked beside military boats on the river, and carriages of all kinds would be cluttering the gravel of its circular drives and swarming in the sky overhead. A detachment of Horse guards could be spotted, stood at ready at the perimeter.

Today, you’d need much more than a passport to get inside that maze of information and privilege.

Because today was a royal wedding.

That vision from the point of view of someone looking down upon him was what was at the back of Hamilton’s mind.

But now he was watching the princess.

Her chestnut hair had been knotted high on her head, baring her neck, a fashion which Hamilton appreciated for its defiance of the French, and at an official function too, though that gesture wouldn’t have been Liz’s alone, but would have been calculated in the warrens of Whitehall. She wore white, which had made a smile come to Hamilton’s lips when he’d first seen it in the Cathedral this morning. In this gigantic function room with its high arched ceiling, in which massed dignitaries and ambassadors and dress uniforms orbited from table to table, she was the sun about which everything turned. Even the King, in the far distance, at a table on a rise with old men from the rest of Europe, was no competition for his daughter this afternoon.

This was the reception, where Elizabeth, escorted by members of the Corps of Heralds, would carelessly and entirely precisely move from group to group, giving exactly the right amount of charm to every one of the great powers, briefed to keep the balance going as everyone like she and Hamilton did, every day.

Everyone like the two of them. That was a useless thought and he cuffed it aside.

Her gaze had settled on Hamilton’s table precisely once. A little smile and then away again. As not approved by Whitehall. He’d tried to stop watching her after that. But his carefully random table, with diplomatic corps functionaries to his left and right, had left him cold. Hamilton had grown tired of pretending to be charming.

“It’s a marriage of convenience,” said a voice beside him.

It was Lord Carney. He was wearing open cuffs that bloomed from his silk sleeves, a big collar and no tie. His long hair was unfastened. He had retained his rings.

Hamilton considered his reply for a moment, then opted for silence. He met Carney’s gaze with a suggestion in his heart that surely His Lordship might find some other table to perch at, perhaps one where he had friends?

“What do you reckon?”

Hamilton stood, with the intention of walking away. But Carney stood too and stopped him just as they’d got out of earshot of the table. The man smelled like a Turkish sweetshop. He affected a mode of speech beneath his standing. “This is what I do. I probe, I provoke, I poke. And when I’m in the room, it’s all too obvious when people are looking at someone else.”

The broad grin stayed on his face.

Hamilton found a deserted table and sat down again, furious at himself.

Carney settled beside him, and gestured away from Princess Elizabeth, towards her new husband, with his neat beard and his row of medals on the breast of his Svenska Adelsfanan uniform. He was talking with the Papal ambassador, doubtless discussing getting Liz to Rome as soon as possible, for a great show to be made of this match between the Protestant and the Papist. If Prince Bertil was also pretending to be charming, Hamilton admitted that he was making a better job of it.

“Yeah, jammy fucker, my thoughts exactly. Still, I’m on a promise with a couple of members of his staff, so it’s swings and roundabouts.” Carney clicked his tongue and wagged his finger as a Swedish serving maid ran past, and she curtsied a quick smile at him. “I do understand, you know. All our relationships are informed by the balance. And the horror of it is that we all can conceive of a world where this isn’t so.”

Hamilton pursed his lips and chose his next words carefully. “Is that why you are how you are, your Lordship?”

“ ’Course it is. Maids, lady companions, youngest sisters, it’s a catalogue of incompleteness. I’m allowed to love only in ways which don’t disrupt the balance. For me to commit myself, or, heaven forbid, to marry, would require such deep thought at the highest levels that by the time the Heralds had worked it through, well, I’d have tired of the lady. Story of us all, eh? Nowhere for the pressure to go. If only I could see an alternative.”

Hamilton had decided that, having shown the corner of his cards, the man had taken care to move back to the fringes of treason once more. It was part of his role as an agent provocateur. And Hamilton knew it. But that didn’t mean he had to take this. “Do you have any further point, your Lordship?”

“Oh, I’m just getting – ”

The room gasped.

Hamilton was up out of his seat and had taken a step towards Elizabeth, his gun hand had grabbed into the air to his right where his .66mm Webley Corsair sat in a knot of space and had swung it ready to fire –

At nothing.

There stood the Princess, looking about herself in shock. Dress uniforms, bearded men all around her.

Left right up down.

Hamilton couldn’t see anything for her to be shocked at.

And nothing near her, nothing around her.

She was already stepping back, her hands in the air, gesturing at a gap –

What had been there? Everyone was looking there. What?

He looked to the others like him. Almost all of them were in the same sort of posture he was, balked at picking a target.

The Papal envoy stepped forward and cried out. “A man was standing there! And he has vanished!”

Havoc. Everybody was shouting. A weapon, a weapon! But there was no weapon that Hamilton knew of that could have done that, made a man, whoever it had been, blink out of existence. Groups of bodyguards in dress uniforms or diplomatic black tie leapt up encircling their charges. Ladies started screaming. A nightmare of the balance collapsing all around them. That hysteria when everyone was in the same place and things didn’t go exactly as all these vast powers expected.

A Bavarian princeling bellowed he needed no such protection and made to rush to the Princess’ side—

Hamilton stepped into his way and accidentally shouldered him to the floor as he put himself right up beside Elizabeth and her husband. “We’re walking to that door,” he said. “Now.”

Bertil and Elizabeth nodded and marched with fixed smiles on their faces, Bertil turning and holding back with a gesture the Swedish forces that were moving in from all directions. Hamilton’s fellows fell in all around them, and swept the party across the hall, through that door, and down a servants’ corridor as Life Guards came bundling in to the room behind them, causing more noise and more reactions and damn it, Hamilton hoped he wouldn’t suddenly hear the discharge of some hidden—

He did not. The door was closed and barred behind them. Another good chap doing the right thing.

Hamilton sometimes distantly wished for an organisation to guard those who needed it. But for that the world would have to be different in ways beyond even Carney’s artificial speculations. He and his brother officers would have their independence cropped if that was so. And he lived through his independence. It was the root of the duty that meant he would place himself in harm’s way for Elizabeth’s husband. He had no more thoughts on the subject.

“I know very little,” said Elizabeth as she walked, her voice careful as always, except when it hadn’t been. “I think the man was with one of the groups of foreign dignitaries – ”

“He looked Prussian,” said Bertil, “we were talking to Prussians.”

“He just vanished into thin air right in front of me.”

“Into a fold?” said Bertil.

“It can’t have been,” she said. “The room will have been mapped and mapped.”

She looked to Hamilton for confirmation. He nodded.

They got to the library, Hamilton marched in and secured it. They put the happy couple at the centre of it, locked it up, and called everything in to the embroidery.

The embroidery chaps were busy, swiftly prioritising, but no, nothing was happening in the great chamber they’d left, the panic had swelled and then subsided into shouts, exhibitionist faintings (because who these days wore a corset that didn’t have hidden depths), glasses crashing, yelled demands. No one else had vanished. No Spanish infantrymen had materialised out of thin air.

Bertil walked to the shelves, folded his hands behind his back, and began bravely and ostentatiously browsing. Elizabeth sat down and fanned herself and smiled for all Hamilton’s fellows, and finally, quickly for Hamilton himself.

They waited.

The embroidery told them they had a visitor coming.

A wall of books slid aside, and in walked a figure that made all of them turn and salute. The Queen Mother, still in mourning black, her train racing to catch up with her.

She came straight to Hamilton and the others all turned to listen, and from now on thanks to this obvious favour, they would regard Hamilton as the ranking officer. He was glad of it. “We will continue,” she said. “We will not regard this as an embarrassment and therefore it will not be. The Ball Room was prepared for the dance, we are moving there early, Elizabeth, Bertil, off you go, you two gentlemen in front of them, the rest of you behind. You will be laughing as you enter the Ball Room as if this were the most enormous joke, a silly and typically English eccentric misunderstanding.”

Elizabeth nodded, took Bertil by the arm.

The Queen Mother intercepted Hamilton as he moved to join them. “No. Major Hamilton, you will go and talk to technical, you will find another explanation for what happened.”

“Another explanation, your Royal Highness?”

“Indeed,” she said. “It must not be what they are saying it is.”

“Here we are, sir,” Lieutenant Matthew Parkes was with the Technical Corps of Hamilton’s own regiment, the 4
^th
Dragoons. He and his men were, incongruously, in the dark of the buttery that had been set aside for their equipment, also in their dress uniforms. From here they were in charge of the sensor net that blanketed the house and grounds down to Newtonian units of space, reaching out for miles in every direction. Parkes’ people had been the first to arrive here, days ago, and would be the last to leave. He was pointing at a screen, on which was frozen the intelligent image of a burly man in black tie, Princess Elizabeth almost entirely obscured behind him. “Know who he is?”

Hamilton had placed the guest list in his mental index and had checked it as each group had entered the hall. He was relieved to recognise the man. He was as down to earth as it was possible to be. “He was in the Prussian party, not announced, one of six diplomat placings on their list. Built like his muscles have been grown for security and that’s how he moved round the room. Didn’t let anyone chat to him. He nods when his embroidery talks to him. Which’d mean he’s new at this, only . . .” Only the man had a look about him that Hamilton recognized. “No. He’s just very confident. Ostentatious, even. So you’re sure he didn’t walk into some sort of fold?”

“Here’s the contour map.” Parkes flipped up an overlay on the image that showed the tortured underpinnings of spacetime in the room. There were little sinks and bundles all over the place, where various Britons had weapons stowed, and various foreigners would have had them stowed had they wished to create a diplomatic incident. The corner where Elizabeth had been standing showed only the force of gravity under her dear feet. “We do take care you know, sir.”

“I’m sure you do, Matty. Let’s see it, then.”