Best Science Fiction of the Year Read online

  He showed me the virtual planetarium at the Clearbrite, and the signals from a probe passing through the Oort Cloud, and even took me down to the tunnels of a mine where a huge tank of cryogenically cooled fluid had been set up in the hope of detecting the dark matter of which it had once been believed most of our universe was made. It was an old thing now, creaking and leaking, and Rob was part of the small team of volunteers who kept it going. We stood close together in the dripping near-dark, clicking hardhats and sharing each other’s breath, and of course I was thinking of other possi-bilities—those fractional moments when things could go one of many ways. Our lips pressing. Our bodies joining. But something, maybe a fear of losing him entirely, held me back.

  “It’s another thing that science has given up on,” he said later when we were sitting at our table in the Eldon. “Just like that ridiculous Copenhagen shoulder-shrug. Without dark matter, and dark energy, the way the galaxies rotate and recede from each other simply doesn’t make mathematical sense. You know what the so-called smart money is on these days? Something called topographical deformity, which means that the basic laws of physics don’t apply in the same way across this entire universe. That it’s pock-marked with flaws.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “Of course I don’t! It’s fundamentally unscientific.”

  “But you get glitches in even the most cleverly conceived virtuals, don’t you? Even in novels, sometimes things don’t always entirely add up.”

  “Yeah. Like who killed the gardener in The Big Sleep, or the season suddenly changing from autumn to spring in that Sherlock Holmes story. But this isn’t like that, Lita. This isn’t . . . ” For once, he was in danger of sounding bitter and contemptuous. But he held himself back.

  “And you’re not going to give up?”

  He smiled. Swirled his beer. “No, Lita. I’m definitely not.”

  5.

  Perhaps inevitably, Rob’s and my taste in books had started to drift apart. He’d discovered an antique genre called Science Fiction, something that the AIs at An Lit were particularly sniffy about. And, even as he tried to lead me with him, I could see their point. Much of the prose was less than luminous, the characterization was sketchy, and, although a great deal of it was supposedly about the future, the predictions were laughably wrong.

  But Rob insisted that that wasn’t the point, that SF was essentially a literature of ideas. That, and a sense of wonder. To him, wonder was particularly important. I could sometimes—maybe as that lonely astronaut passed through the stargate, or with those huge worms in that book about a desert world—see his point. But most of it simply left me cold.

  Rob went off on secondment the following year to something called the Large Millimeter Array on the Atacama Plateau in Chile, and I, for want of anything better, kept the lease on our house in Headingley and got some new people in, and did a masters on gender roles in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Of course, I paid him virtual visits, and we talked of the problems of altitude sickness and the changed assholes our old uni friends were becoming as he put me on a camera on a Jeep and bounced me across the dark-skied desert.

  Another year went—they were already picking up speed—and Rob found the time for a drink before he headed off to some untenured post, part research, part teaching, in Heidelberg that he didn’t seem particularly satisfied with. He was still reading—apparently there hadn’t been much else to do in Chile—but I realized our days of talking about Proust or Henry James had gone.

  He’d settled into, you might almost say retreated to, a sub-genre of SF known as alternate history, where all the stuff he’d been telling me about our world continually branching off into all its possibilities was dramatized on a big scale. Hitler had won World War Two—a great many times, it seemed— and the South was triumphant in the American Civil War. That, and the Spanish Armada had succeeded, and Europe remained under the thrall of medieval Roman Catholicism, and Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet had grazed past President Kennedy’s head. I didn’t take this odd obsession as a particularly good sign as we exchanged chaste hugs and kisses in the street outside the Eldon and went our separate ways.

  I had a job of sorts—thanks to Sun-Mi, my fellow An Lit student from Korea—teaching English to the kids of rich families in Seoul, and for a while it was fun, and the people were incredibly friendly, but then I grew bored and managed to wrangle an interview with one of the media conglomerates that had switched its physical base to Korea in the wake of the California Earthquake. I was hired for considerably less than I was getting paid teaching English and took the crowded commute every morning to a vast half-real, semi-ziggurat high-rise mistily floating above the Mapo District, where I studied high res worlds filled with headache-inducing marvels, and was invited to come up with ideas in equally headache-inducing meetings.

  I, an Alice in these many virtual wonderlands, brought a kind of puzzled innocence to my role. Two, maybe three, decades earlier, the other developers might still have known enough to recognize my plagiarisms, if only from old movies their parents had once talked about, but now what I was saying seemed new, fresh, and quirky. I was a thieving literary magpie, and became the go-to girl for unexpected turns and twists. The real murderer of Roger Ackroyd, and the dog collar in The Great Gatsby. Not to mention what Little Father Time does in Jude the Obscure, and the horror of Sophie’s choice. I pillaged them all, and many others. Even the strange idea that the Victorians had developed steam-powered computers, thanks to my continued conversations with Rob.

  Wherever we actually were, we got into the habit of meeting up at a virtual recreation of the bar of the Eldon that, either as some show-off feat of virtual engineering, or a post-post-modern art project, some student had created. The pub had been mapped in realtime down to the atom and the pixel, and the ghosts of our avatars often got strange looks from real undergrads bunking off from afternoon seminars. We could actually order a drink, and even taste the beer, although of course we couldn’t ingest it. Probably no bad thing, in view of the state of the Eldon’s toilets. But somehow, that five-pints-and-still-clear-headed feeling only added to the slightly illicit pleasure of our meetings. At least, at first.

  It was becoming apparent that, as he switched from city to city, campus to campus, project to project, Rob was in danger of turning into one of those aging, permanent students, clinging to short-term contracts, temporary relationships, and get-me-by loans, and the worst thing was that, with typical unflinching clarity, he knew it.

  “I reckon I was either born too early, or too late, Lita,” he said as he sipped his virtual beer. “Even one of the assessors actually said that to me a year or so ago when I tried to persuade her to back my project.”

  “So you scientists have to pitch ideas as well?”

  He laughed, but that warm, Hebridean sound was turning bitter. “How else does this world work? But maths doesn’t change even if fashions do. The many worlds theory is the only way that the behavior of subatomic particles can be reconciled with everything else we know. Just because something’s hard to prove doesn’t mean it should be ignored.”

  By this time I was busier than ever. Instead of providing ideas other people could profit from, I’d set up my own consultancy, which had thrived and made me a great deal of money. By now, in fact, I had more of the stuff than most people would have known what to do with. But I did. I’d reserved a new apartment in a swish high-res, high-rise development going up overlooking the Han River and was struggling to get the builders to understand that I wanted the main interior space to be turned into something called a library. I showed them old walk-throughs of the Bodleian in Oxford, and the reading room of the British Museum, and the Brotherton in Leeds, and many other lost places of learning. Of course I already had a substantial collection of books in a secure, fireproofed, climate-controlled warehouse, but now I began to acquire more.

  The once-great public collections were either in storage or scattered to the winds. But there were still e
nough people as rich and crazy as I was to ensure that the really rare stuff—first folios, early editions, hand-typed versions of great works—remained expensive and sought-after, and I surprised even myself with the determination and ruthlessness of my pursuits. After all, what else was I going to spend my time and money on?

  There was no grand opening of my library. In fact, I was anxious to get all the builders and conservators, both human and otherwise, out of the way so I could have the place entirely to myself. Then I just stood there. Breathing in the air, with its savor of lost forests and dreams.

  There were first editions of great novels by Nabokov, Dos Passos, Stendhal, Calvino, and Wells, and an early translation of Cervantes, and a fine collection of Swift’s works. Even, in a small nod to Rob, a long shelf of pulp magazines with titles like Amazing Stories and Weird Tales, although their lurid covers of busty maidens being engulfed by intergalactic centipedes were generally faded and torn. Not that I cared about the pristine state of my whispering pages. Author’s signatures, yes—the sense of knowing Hemingway’s hands had once briefly grasped this edition—but the rest didn’t matter. At least, apart from the thrill of beating others in my quest. Books, after all, were old by definition. Squashed moths and bus tickets stuffed between the pages. Coffee-cup circles on the dust jackets. Exclamations in the margin. I treasured the evidence of their long lives.

  After an hour or two of shameless gloating and browsing, I decided to call Rob. My avatar had been as busy as me with the finishing touches to my library, and now it struggled to find him. What it did eventually unearth was a short report stating that Callum Holm, a fish-farmer on the Isle of Harris, had been drowned in a boating accident a week earlier.

  Of course, Rob would be there now. Should I contact him? Should I leave him to mourn undisturbed? What kind of friend was I, anyway, not to have even picked up on this news until now? I turned around the vast, domed space I’d created in confusion and distress.

  “Hey.”

  I span back. The Rob Holm who stood before me looked tired but composed. He’d grown a beard, and there were a few flecks of silver now in it and his hair. I could taste the sea air around him. Hear the cry of gulls.

  “Rob!” I’d have hugged him, if the energy field permissions I’d set up in this library had allowed. “I’m so, so sorry. I should have found out, I should have—”

  “You shouldn’t have done anything, Lita. Why do you think I kept this quiet? I wanted to be alone up here in Harris to sort things out. But . . . ” He looked up, around. “What a fabulous place you’ve created!”

  As I showed him around my shelves and acquisitions, and his ghost fingers briefly passed through the pages of my first edition Gatsby, and the adverts for X-Ray specs in an edition of Science Wonder Stories, he told me how his father had gone out in his launch to deal with some broken tethers on one of the kelp beds and been caught by a sudden squall. His body, of course, had been washed up, borne to the same stretch of shore where Rob’s mother had been found.

  “It wasn’t intentional,” Rob said. “I’m absolutely sure of that. Dad was still in his prime, and proud of what he was doing, and there was no way he was ever going to give up. He just misjudged a coming storm. I’m the same, of course. You know that, Lita, better than anyone.”

  “So what happens next? With a business, there must be a lot to tie up.”

  “I’m not tying up anything.”

  “You’re going to stay there?” I tried to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

  “Why not? To be honest, my so-called scientific career has been running on empty for years. What I’d like to prove is never going to get backing. I’m not like you. I mean . . . ” He gestured at the tiered shelves. “You can make anything you want become real.”

  6.

  Rob wasn’t the sort to put on an act. If he said he was happy ditching research and filling his father’s role as a marine farmer on some remote island, that was because he was. I never quite did find the time to physically visit him in Harris—it was, after all, on the other side of the globe—and he, with the daily commitments of the family business, didn’t get to Seoul. But I came to appreciate my glimpses of the island’s strange beauty. That, and the regular arrival of chilled, vacuum-packed boxes of fresh scallops. But was this really enough for Rob Holm? Somehow, despite his evident pride in what he was doing, and the funny stories he told of the island’s other inhabitants, and even the occasional mention of some woman he’d met at a ceilidh, I didn’t think it was. After all, Creagach was his mother and father’s vision, not his.

  Although he remained coy about the details, I knew he still longed to bring his many worlds experiment to life. That, and that it would be complicated, controversial, and costly. I’d have been more than happy to offer financial help, but I knew he’d refuse. So what else could I do? My media company had grown. I had mentors, advisors, and consultants, both human and AI, and Rob would have been a genuinely useful addition to the team, but he had too many issues with the lack of rigor and logic in this world to put up with all the glitches, fudges, and contradictions of virtual ones. Then I had a better idea.

  “You know why nothing ever changes here, don’t you?” he asked me as our avatars sat together in the Eldon late one afternoon. “Not the smell from the toilets or the unfestive Christmas decorations or that dusty Pernod optic behind the bar. This isn’t a feed from the real pub any longer. The old Eldon was demolished years ago. All we’ve been sitting in ever since is just a clever formation of what the place would be like if it still existed. Bar staff, students, us, and all.”

  “That’s . . . ” Although nothing changed, the whole place seemed to shimmer. “How things are these days. The real and the unreal get so blurry you can’t tell which is which. But you know,” I added, as if the thought had just occurred to me, “there’s a project that’s been going the rounds of the studios here in Seoul. It’s a series about the wonders of science, one of those proper, realtime factual things, but we keep stumbling over finding the right presenter. Someone fresh, but with the background and the personality to carry the whole thing along.”

  “You don’t mean me?”

  “Why not? It’d only be part time. Might even help you promote what you’re doing at Creagach.” “A scientific popularizer?”

  “Yes. Like Carl Sagan, for example, or maybe Stephen Jay Gould.”

  I had him, and the series—which, of course, had been years in development purgatory—came about. I’d thought of it as little more than a way of getting Rob some decent money, but, from the first live-streamed episode, it was a success. After all, he was still charming and persuasive, and his salt-and-pepper beard gave him gravitas—and made him, if anything, even better looking. He used the Giant’s Causeway to demonstrate the physics of fractures. He made this weird kind of pendulum to show why we could never predict the weather for more than a few days ahead. He swam with the whales off Tierra del Fuego. The only thing he didn’t seem to want to explain was the odd way that photons behaved when you shot them down a double-slotted tube. That, and the inconsistencies between how galaxies revolved and Newton’s and Einstein’s laws.

  In the matter of a very few years, Rob Holm was rich. And of course, and although he never actively courted it, he grew famous. He stood on podiums and looked fetchingly puzzled. He shook a dubious hand with gurning politicians. He even turned down offers to appear at music festivals, and had to take regular legal steps to protect the pirating of his virtual identity. He even finally visited me in Seoul and experienced the wonders of my library at first hand.

  At last, Rob had out-achieved me. Then, just when I and most of the rest of the world had him pigeon-holed as that handsome, softly accented guy who did those popular science things, his avatar returned the contract for his upcoming series unsigned. I might have forgotten that getting rich was supposed to be the means to an end. But he, of course, hadn’t.

  “So,” I said as we sat together for what turned out to be th
e last time in our shared illusion of the Eldon. “You succeed with this project. You get a positive result and prove the many worlds theory is true. What happens after that?”

  “I publish, of course. The data’ll be public, peer-reviewed, and—”

  “Since when has being right ever been enough?”

  “That’s . . . ” He brushed a speck of virtual beer foam from his grey beard, “… how science works.”

  “And no one ever had to sell themselves to gain attention? Even Galileo had to do that stunt with the cannonballs.”

  “As I explained in my last series, that story of the Tower of Pisa was an invention of his early biographers.”

  “Come on, Rob. You know what I mean.”

  He looked uncomfortable. But, of course, he already had the fame. All he had to do was stop all this Greta Garbo shit and milk it.

  So, effectively I became PR agent for Rob’s long-planned experiment. There was, after all, a lot for the educated layman, let alone the general public, or us so-called media professionals, to absorb. What was needed was a handle, a simple selling point. And, after a little research, I found one.

  A man in a business suit had arrived at Tokyo airport in the summer of 1954. He was Caucasian but spoke reasonable Japanese, and everything about him seemed normal apart from his passport. It looked genuine but was from somewhere called Taured, which the officials couldn’t find in any of their directories. The visitor was as baffled as they were. When a map was produced, he pointed to Andorra, a tiny but ancient republic between France and Spain, which he insisted was Taured. The humane and sensible course was to find him somewhere to sleep while further enquiries were made. Guards were posted outside the door of a secure hotel room high in a tower block, but the mysterious man had vanished without trace in the morning, and the Visitor from Taured was never seen again.