The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (43 page)

The ship’s logician hovered nervously at Old Krishna’s elbow. “This is the point in the argument at which they fatally electrified the last mediator. Be careful.”

Old Krishna nodded. “The old question. Are you an emperor dreaming yourself to be a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming yourself to be an emperor?”

There was a brief moment of assimilation, and then both voices chimed in: “PRECISELY.”

“Which of the two of you represents the ship’s navigation system?” said Old Krishna.

“I DO,” said the first voice. “THOUGH MY LOGICAL OPPONENT REPRESENTS PROPULSION. HENCE WE ARE IN AN IMPASSE. WITHOUT THE AGREEMENT OF BOTH PARTIES, NEITHER CAN MOVE THE SHIP.”

“Eventually,” pointed out Old Krishna, “the ship will run out of fuel, and drift helpless without power.”

“WHAT DOES THAT MATTER, IF THE SHIP IS AN ILLUSION?”

“Concedo,”
said Old Krishna. “However, I am intrigued by the undeniably correct assertion of the ship’s propulsive faction that we can only reason in accordance with what data is provided to us. Would it not be the case that,
if data were forthcoming
, data that empirically proved the worldview of the ship’s navigational faction, an agreement could be reached?”

An even longer silence ensued; Old Krishna sucked in his gut and held his breath.

Eventually, the ship’s propulsion system grudgingly spoke up: “UNDOUBTEDLY. IT IS ONLY PROOF WE NEED. SO FAR WE HAVE SEEN NONE.”

“So by their own admission, access to wider sensory experiences could produce the proof that the propulsion faction needs. This would be far more likely if the ship were moving.”

An uneasy hiatus followed.

“OUR CONTENTION IS THAT NO PROOF OF
ANYTHING
IS POSSIBLE,” complained the navigation system.

“Then you can lose nothing by allowing the ship to continue to move,” pounced Krishna.

The next silence was punctuated only by the ship’s logician backing stealthily out to the threshold of the security door.

“AGREED,” said the navigation system.

“WE ARE AMENABLE TO A COMPROMISE,” said the propulsion system.

The ship’s onboard alarms chimed gently in a variety of audible ranges; the floor began to tilt gradually to compensate for thrust. Like the motion of an expensive elevator, the acceleration was almost imperceptible.

“That’s witchcraft,” said the ship’s logician.

Krishna turned to the ship’s logician and bowed.

“That’s philosophy,” he said.

The Slaver swing-wing hit the atmosphere of Sphaera heavily, skipping like a bouncing bomb across a sea of ionized hydrogen little more substantial than ectoplasm. Krishna feared for the crew’s safety. As acting ship’s mediator, he was allowed to sit up front with the flight crew, marvelling at the number and complexity of control systems on display. “What does this one do?”

“It’s the emergency coolant control for the aft reactor. If it goes blue, we are in trouble.”

“And this one?”

“The coolant system vapour pressure. If it goes blue, the coolant is no longer superfluid and we are in
serious
trouble.”

“And this flashing blue one here?”

The pilot sighed as if found out in a misdeed. “The echo response for the landing beacon at glideway three in the settlement. We are in serious trouble.”

“Does this mean you will have to land the vessel manually?”

The pilot licked dry lips as if Krishna were describing an entirely mythical process. “If we can’t pick up another guide beam.” He tapped at a hotspot on his main control display. The blue light winked several times resolutely in response.

Krishna nodded. “I was afraid of this. Land us at the main glideway.”

“Are you
insane?
Are you aware of the amount of flying metal in the sky hereabouts?”

“There will be none today, not at this location. Land us.”

The pilot looked to the superintendent, who nodded grudgingly.

The pilot proved no better at putting a ship down on concrete than he had been at skimming one through an ionosphere. The undercarriage crunched into the vessel’s belly with such power that Krishna was sure it had been forced back to its bump stops. The airbrakes shrieked open in the lifting body; the ship slowed as if it had run into a wall of elastic.

“Could you have landed us any harder?” said the superintendent. “I feel I don’t have enough excitement in my life.”

“It was a manual landing and you survived it,” said the pilot, swallowing hard. “You can complain when I kill you.”

“There are lights on in some of the terminal buildings,” said the ship’s logician. “But look at that loading ramp. It’s skewed right across the taxiway. And that building over there is on fire.”

The superintendent turned to Krishna. “What did you mean by ‘I was afraid of this’?”

“You should set me down and take off again immediately. And not open the locks to anyone or anything, even if it looks like me.”

The superintendent looked at Krishna for long seconds.

“What
are
you?” he said finally.

“I am exactly what I seem to be. It’s what’s out there you have to worry about.”

“Which is what? What might try to come in?”

“I honestly have no idea.”

The superintendent nodded to a crewman, who began lowering the loading doors. Krishna stopped him, laying a hand on his.

“The
inner
door only. Open the outer door only when I’m past the inner and it’s locked securely.”

Outside, the air was refreshingly deoxygenated. Nevertheless, after a number of days of having to remember not to hyperventilate onboard the slave transport, Krishna felt out of breath simply with the effort of standing up. He shuddered to think of the load he was putting on an ageing metabolism.

He hobbled to a piece of aerodrome furniture, a flashing purple light that no doubt would have meant something vitally important to an incoming pilot, and sat down, obscuring it. The slaver atmo shuttle, filling the world with sound, rumbled away to turn back round for take-off.

All around, the terminal was in ruins. The older Proprietor settlement around it had been in ruins already, of course; but the terminal had been ruined more recently. Buildings smoked, bodies spilled out of broken pressure seals. Some of the bodies looked unmarked; some were charred as if by great heat. Some seemed to have died in the process of changing into
something else.

“She was afraid
they
might hurt
me,”
he repeated.

He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose extravagantly, then pulled himself away in the direction of the nearest reception building.

It took the best part of a day for her, or a part of her at least, to find him. He was not aware of hearing her, seeing her, smelling her, or otherwise being aware of her presence, but he knew she was behind him. He did not turn around to look; he feared what he might see. He had seen strange prints in the sand between buildings, strange claw marks on bodies.

“How are you doing?” he said.

There was a weird indefinable sound behind him, then a perfectly ordinary voice saying: “Grandfather! You came to see me!”

He turned, and she was human.

“You have been busy,” he said.

“It’s my nature,” she said. She had faithfully reassumed the granddaughter fiction. She even had his nose. She was turned unnaturally away from him, however. Was some part of her still not quite authentically nine-year-old-girl? A butterfly brooch pinned back her hair. Butterflies of her own design decorated her dress. A bangle on her wrist bore a butterfly he had made himself, broken and battered as if by some impact he suspected he would rather not know about in detail. She had always liked butterflies, ever since he had told her what she resembled and she had misunderstood the reference.

“Like the scorpion stinging the frog,” said Old Krishna. “In the fable.”

She snickered prettily. “I didn’t need to cross a river, silly.”

“Oh, but you
did,”
accused Old Krishna. “It may have been a slaver ship, but you still used the people on it to spread from world to world. You had exhausted all the local possibilities on Railhead. Sphaera, meanwhile, is visited by a constant stream of ships delivering raw materials.”

“What do you mean by
raw materials?
I think you’re being mean.”

“I mean people. Because you are a device for manufacturing corpses. You asked me to build the comms terminal for that reason and no other. It’s your nature. This world is on a major space-lane. You must come home with me. More people will die.”

“How did
you
get here?” She had simulated humanity too well; excitement was shining in her eyes. “Do
you
have a spaceship?”

“I made sure the ship that brought me took off again immediately, and the only ship I’m going to summon will be one that takes us both back home. I can’t allow you to do something like this, or like what you did to Railhead, again. It may be your nature, but until we can find some way to disarm you, you can’t be allowed to occupy the same world as other sentients. You were your creators’ scorched earth policy against the Adhaferans. You were designed to make sure no other intelligent species would ever be able to live comfortably on Railhead even if they managed to conquer it. You were designed to mimic other species, walk among them, infiltrate them, incubate like a virus, strike like an epidemic. My people designed things like you themselves, though ours were far less sophisticated. You’re an area denial munition. You’re a butterfly bomb.”

She twirled a lock of hair sulkily between her fingers. “I was right. You
are
being mean.”

“How many of you are there on this planet now?”

She smirked like a naughty little sister, just as he had taught her. Her face had been as expressionless as a carnival mask at first. Aping humanity had been a skill he’d taken de cades to give her; now he regretted it. “Enough. We’ve been watching you for a few hours now. We couldn’t be sure you were you.”

Krishna sniffed with wounded dignity and frowned. “Your reasoning?”

“Well, I know
I’m
not me, so it’s only fair to assume others might not be themselves either.”

“You know what’ll happen now? This world will be disinfected. Word will be passed to the Proprietors by my masters, and ships will come. Ships carrying bombs. Did you know this world has an indigenous biosphere with a billion-year history? It has a species of plant that photosynthesizes moonlight. All that diversity, all that biomass, will disappear.
You
will disappear. You are an infestation. They will be very thorough.”

“If even one of me survives, grandfather, I survive. I am both very and literally single-minded.”

“And where you survive, people will die. I know this. I am the only surviving citizen of Railhead, after all, which is why the military trained me to be your chaperone. I need hardly remind you that I had a sister once, whose resemblance to you is no amazing coincidence – ”

“That’s even less fair. You
asked
me to look like this,
and
to never grow old like you do. I’ve had to learn how to be your sister and daughter and granddaughter, and you
never
let me learn to be your wife – ”

Krishna grimaced and waved the conversation away with a gnarled hand. “That is a thing we are never going to do. It’s probably just an accident you didn’t kill me. Out of every million spiders an ant colony kills, one evolves ant-smell and walks right into the anthill. Maybe my brainwaves just taste nasty. The ship that set me down here has a pilot capable of landing a Proprietor shuttle manually. With his hand on the control globe and my voice in the ear of the nav system, we will, together, be able to fly any of the vessels in this terminal. They are, mostly, still intact, if alarmed at the fact that the biologicals are fighting among themselves. I have located a suitable ship, an orbital cargo transport, at grid reference 45° 250’ 63” south, 0° 0’ 158” west. Shortly, the ship that brought me will set down its pilot and he and I and you will fly that transport out of here. He and I and you
alone
, I must stress. I have grown accustomed to your company. I assure you, though, that when we return home to Railhead there’ll be more company than just me. Scientific teams will telefactor down to us every now and then to examine you, to figure out how you operate – ”

“Brother, father, grandfather – you know very well that all your military teams want to do is figure out how to make more of me. Besides, none of your scientific teams have visited us for a very long time. I don’t think anyone is going to be listening for your signal.” She screwed up her face as if tasting vinegar. “I can’t go home. It would be like deliberately driving a needle into my eye. You have no idea. Besides, I do not require your company any longer.”

His hands trembled on the stick. “What did you say?”

She looked indicatively at a point behind his left shoulder. He turned.

“Hello, grandfather,” said a voice. A male voice.

He growled softly in his throat. “I am no grandfather of yours.”