The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (38 page)

“A straight fifty-fifty split, Emma,” he tells me, as we cross the orbit of the gas giant’s outermost moon. “I can’t do better than that.”

“Fifty per cent of nothing is nothing, Niles.”

“I will find them. They led me here, after all.”

Niles Sarkka claims that he talked to Suresh Shrivastav before he left Libertaria to meet with Everett Hughes and Jason Singleton on First Foot. He says that the prospector told him that he hadn’t stumbled on the code by chance. No, he’d been heading home after searching a couple of world-lets in Terminus’s outer belt when he’d detected a brief, transitory pulse of broad-spectrum radio noise – a squeal like a God’s own fire alarm, he said. It had grabbed his attention and he’d swung around and made landfall on the worldlet and hiked across its arctic surface to the crash site, following a faint but steady pulse. No other code has ever been so marked, and Niles Sarkka is convinced that someone or something led Shrivastav to it. Not the Jackaroo, but one of the Elder Cultures. He also believes, without a shred of evidence, that this Elder Culture wants us to find them. That they want to help us, and tell us all they know about the plans of the Jackaroo, and the true history of the wormhole network.

I’ve told him many times that I think that this story is nothing more than a fabulous fiction, and I tell him that again now, adding, just to needle him, “If there is something out there, how about we take all of it, and send you to jail?”

“You have to tell the farmers about my offer, Emma. You are obligated, as their guest. Also, you should tell your bosses back on First Foot, too. Talk to all parties concerned, why don’t you, and get back to me.”

Well, I don’t want to talk to my boss, of course. I’m in deep trouble with the UN, and haven’t been in communication with Marc Godin or any other UN official since the chase began. But I call Rajo and tell her about my latest conversation with Niles, and his offer, and she says that she must consult with the council. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long.

“We are not varying our agreement,” Rajo says. “We will capture him, and whatever you find out there, we will deal with it then.”

I tell her that I’m relieved that she and the council see Sarkka’s offer for what it is.

“Did you think that we would renege on our deal? Have faith in us, Emma. As we have faith in you.”

I call Sarkka. His ship is close to the edge of the cold, carbon-black limb of the planet now, and we are in the middle of preparations for aerobraking. He doesn’t answer for more than ten minutes, and when he finally picks up, and I start to tell him that he can’t make any kind of deal with the farmers, he says that it doesn’t matter. There’s something in his voice I haven’t heard for a while. An unsettling manic glee.

“It’s too late to make a deal. I’ll take it all. Everything here. You are not my nemesis after all, Emma. You are my witness!”

He signs off and won’t answer when I call back, and then his ship drops out of sight beyond the limb of the gas giant. We won’t see him again until after aerobraking.

I help the crew finish tying everything down, and then we all strap into crash couches and plug into the interface and watch the black-on-black bands of the gas giant swell towards us. And just as the ship hits the fringes of its atmosphere, and begins to shudder and groan as deceleration piles on the gees, and the view is washed with violet light as friction with the atmosphere heats the hull of the ship and wraps it in a caul of ionised plasma, one of the crew posts a snatched shot of a shaped rock orbiting at the edge of the ring system. A cone with a flat face. A wormhole throat.

A moment later, we enter the terminal phase of the aerobraking manoeuvre. Plasma as hot as the surface of the gas giant’s star envelopes us and gravity crushes us. I’m trying to breath with what seems like a full pirate crew squatting on my chest, my heart is pounding like crazy, black rags are fluttering in. The ship quivers and groans and is filled with a tremendous roar as it scratches a flame 10,000 km long across the face of the gas giant. And as the plasma dies back and the pull of deceleration fades there’s an alarming bang: the flight crew has fired up the solid fuel motors, finessing our delta-vee as we climb away from the nightside of the planet and head out towards the edge of the rings.

Later.

We’ve completed our first orbit and failed to find any trace of Sarkka’s ship. There’s only one place he could have gone, and there’s no question about what we have to do, even though we are perilously low on fuel. Now we’re on final approach. We’ve been videoing everything, transmitting it via q-phone directly to Terminus. If we fail, others will follow.

The black mirror of the wormhole’s throat rushes towards us, and then stars bloom all around.

Thousands of stars, bright burning jewels flung in handfuls everywhere we look. Stars of all colours, and threads of luminous gas strung between them.

We’re in the heart of a globular cluster, in orbit around a planet twice the size of Earth and clad in ice from pole to pole. There are so many stars in the sky and they are all so bright and so close together that it takes a few minutes to locate the planet’s sun, an undistinguished red dwarf as dim and humble as any of the fifteen stars gifted us by the Jackaroo, outshone by many of its neighbours. Millions of kilometres beyond the ice-planet’s limb is a cluster of six wormholes, arranged in the points of a hexagon. Sarkka’s ship is moving towards them, riding the blue flame of his solid fuel motor.

All around me, a babble of cross talk erupts as the ship’s crew speculate wildly on where those wormholes might lead, about whether the ice-planet is habitable, whether there are habitable planets or moons or planoformed rocks in this system or elsewhere.

“It’s a new empire!” someone says.

My q-phone rings.

“Do you see?” Niles Sarkka says. “Dare you follow?”

“You haven’t found what you are looking for.”

“I’ve found something better.”

One of the crew tells me that we are critically low on fuel. We have barely enough to return to the wormhole from which we emerged. And if we don’t return, the resupply ship will never find us. We’ll be stranded here.

I ask Niles Sarkka to come back with us, but he laughs and cuts the connection. And then, as he closes on the wormhole throat, he sends a brief video message. It’s startling to see him after all this time. He was once a handsome and powerfully built man, but after six months alone in close quarters and minimal rations he looks like a shipwrecked outcast, long grey hair tied back, an untrimmed beard over hollow cheeks, sores around his mouth, his eyes sunken in bruised sockets. But his gaze is vital, and his smile is that of someone cresting the tape at the end of a long and arduous marathon.

“I name this star, the gateway to untold wonders, Sarkka’s Star. I came here for all mankind, and I go on, in the name of mankind. One day I will return with the full and final answer to Fermi’s paradox. Do not judge me until then.”

And then he’s gone. We swing past and fall towards the wormhole that will take us back to the G0 star, and the crew is still babbling about new worlds and stars to be explored, and I think: suppose he’s right?

Suppose he is the hero after all, and I’m the villain?

O
LD VARNER SHED
tears on the rotting boards of the stage. A thousand miles I rode, he thought, this late in the season, and even here the books are ashes long since blown away with fallen leaves. He did not cry because he had strayed too far north, too late, and now winter would surely catch him before he could get south again, and he would be lucky indeed to survive the journey. He did not cry for Sue and the child she might or might not have borne him. Old Varner shed tears for the voices that had once echoed in the theater he stood in, for the pages of books that had once held the words those voices spoke. I will die without seeing it, he thought, and spoke without meaning to.

“Look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me,” he said. “You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck at the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ . . .” He trailed off and stood silently weeping. After a moment he recovered enough to finish.

“Yet you cannot make it speak.”

The empty ruins of the Mendelssohn Theater, on what had once been the campus of the University of Michigan, did not answer, and Varner did not know the rest.

“It’s every actor’s dream to play the Dane,” Varner’s father said.

“Who’s the Dane?” Varner asked. He was eleven, and still playing mostly women’s roles. Ophelia, one of the witches in Macbeth, Rosalind. His father said he had promise. “In three years, my boy, you’ll be playing men,” he said, and young Varner burned for the passage of time. The only time he was permitted onstage as a man was as Puck, but Midsummer was a tricky choice in some parts of the country. The more God-fearing the area, the more likely it was that playing elves and fairies could get you burned.

“Hamlet,” his father said. “The greatest role ever written for the stage, in the greatest play ever written. One of these days you’ll play it.” Varner studied in the whispery pages of a Riverside Shakespeare as the caravan rattled and creaked its way down Old 55 from Chicago toward St. Louis. When they stopped for the night at a rest area, pitching tents behind a sign that said
PET EXERCISE AREA
, his father stopped him. “There’s only twenty-six hours in the day, my boy,” he said. “Three hundred and thirty-seven days in the year. You can’t read them all away.” They looked up at the stars and ate beef jerky and flat bread. A garland of moonlets trailed the crescent smile of Luna. Some of them were large enough to be named – Varner’s father called most of them after the names of the mechanicals in Midsummer – while others came and went too quickly to merit a name. It had only been fifty years since the Fall.

Varner heard the whisper of falling leaves in his voice, the faint rasp of the grave. It is too much to dream in these times, he thought wearily. When I wake, I cry to dream again. He mounted his horse Touchstone and rode down State Street to William, collapsed storefronts on either side with trees grown through their fallen roofs. At William he left the weedy street and entered a grove of trees that must have once been a quadrangle. Varner’s father had taught him that word, when he was a boy and he listened to the older generations tell stories of life before the Fall, and the Long Winter that followed. It was a forbidden word, reeking as it did of the pursuit of knowledge. Missionaries of the Book had been known to kill a man for speaking it.

Buildings of brick and sandstone, stately even in their decay, stood all around Varner. One of them would be a library, and perhaps this library would be the one they had missed. He tied Touchstone to a rusted railing at the foot of a stair, and walked slowly into a marble-floored atrium. Right away he knew that he had chosen correctly; through a doorway he could see the battered husks of computers, and beyond them toppled bookshelves blackened with old fire. Failure again. Too much could happen in a hundred years. “Is there nowhere you have not reached?” Varner asked softly of men absent, or long dead. “Must the rest be silence?”

Knowing what he would find, he went through the stacks from floor to floor, wandered into unlocked rooms and broke locks where he found them. And – even though the Missionaries of the Book had been here, and left ashes and ruin behind – he sometimes found books crumbling in these locked rooms: technical manuals, management texts, business books. But no novels, no poems or plays. No Hamlet.