The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Of The Year Part 14

"You can come back in now." There were thumps and thuds.

Instead, Blackett went back to the kitchen and made a new pot of coffee. He carried two mugs into the bedroom.

"Have I frightened you, my boy?"

"Everything frightens me these days, Professor Ma.s.sri. You're about to tell me that you've found a monolith in the back garden, along with the discarded cans and the mangy cats."

The Egyptian laughed, phlegm shaking his chest. "Almost. Almost. The Moon is now on orbit a bit over. A million kilometers from Venus. Also retrograde. Exactly the same distance Ganymede. Used to be from Jupiter."

"Well, okay, hardly a coincidence. And Ganymede is in the Moon's old orbit."

For a moment, Ma.s.sri was silent. His face was drawn. He put down his coffee with a shaking hand.

"No. Ganymede orbits Venus some 434,000 kilometers out. According to the last data I could find before. The net went down for good."

"Farther out than the Moon used to orbit Earth. And?"

"The Sun, from Venus, as you once told me. Looks brighter and larger. In fact, it subtends about 40 minutes of arc. And by the most convenient and. Interesting coincidence. Ganymede now just exactly looks..."

"...the same size as the Sun, from the surface of Venus." Ice ran down Blackett's back. "So it blocks the Sun exactly at total eclipse. That's what you're telling me?"

"Except for the corona, and bursts of solar flares. As the Moon used to do here." Ma.s.sri sent him a glare almost baleful in its intensity. "And you think that's just a matter of chance? Do you think so, Dr. Blackett?"

10..

The thunderstorm on the previous day had left the air cooler. Blackett walked home slowly in the darkness, holding the HP calculator and two books the old man had perforce drawn upon for data, now the internet was expired. He did not recall having carried these particular volumes across the street from the empty library. Perhaps Clare or one of the other infrequent visitors had fetched them.

The stars hung clean and clear through the heavy branches extending from the gardens of most of the large houses in the neighborhood and across the old sidewalk. In the newer, outlying parts of the city, the nouveaux riches had considered it a mark of potent prosperity to run their well-watered lawns to the very verge of the roadway, never walking anywhere, driving to visit neighbors three doors distant. He wondered how they were managing on Venus. Perhaps the ratio of fit to obese and terminally inactive had improved, under the whip of necessity. Too late for poor Kafele, he thought, and made a mental note to stockpile another batch of pioglitazone, the old man's diabetes drug, when next he made a foray into a pharmacy.

He sat for half an hour in the silence of the large kitchen, scratching down data points and recalculating the professor's estimates. It was apparent that Ma.s.sri thought the accepted extinction date of the great reptiles, coinciding as it did with the perfect overlap of the greater and lesser lights in the heavens, was no such thing-that it was, in fact, a time-stamp for Creation. The notion chilled Blackett's blood. Might the world, after all (fas.h.i.+onable speculation!), be no more than a virtual simulation? A calculational contrivance on a colossal scale? But not truly colossal, perhaps no more than a billion lines of code and a prodigiously accurate physics engine. Nothing else so easily explained the wholesale revision of the inner solar system. The idea did not appeal; it stank in Blackett's nostrils. Thus I refute, he thought again, and tapped a calculator key sharply. But that was a feeble refutation; one might as well, in a lucid dream, deny that any reality existed, forgetting the ground state or brute physical substrate needed to sustain the dream.

The numbers made no sense. He ran the calculations again. It was true that Ganymede's new orbit placed the former Jovian moon in just the right place, from time to time, to occult the sun's disk precisely. That was a disturbing datum. The dinosaur element was far less convincing. According to the authors of these astronomy books, Earth had started out, after the tremendous shock of the X-body impact that birthed the Moon, with a dizzying 5.5 or perhaps 8-hour day. It seemed impossibly swift, but the hugely larger gas giant Jupiter, Ganymede's former primary, turned completely around in just 10 hours.

The blazing young Earth spun like a mad top, its almost fatal impact wound subsiding, sucked away into subduction zones created by the impact itself. Venus-the old Venus, at least-lacked tectonic plates; the crust was resurfaced at half-billion-year intervals, as the boiling magma burst up through the rigid rocks, but not enough to carry down and away the appalling ma.s.s of carbon dioxide that had crushed the surface with a hundred times the pressure of Earth's oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Now, though, the renovated planet had a breathable atmosphere. Just add air and water, Blackett thought. Presumably the crust crept slowly over the face of the world, sucked down and spat back up over glacial epochs. But the numbers- The Moon had been receding from Earth at a sluggish rate of 38 kilometers every million years-one part in 10,000 of its final orbital distance, before its removal to Venus. Kepler's Third Law, Blackett noted, established the orbital equivalence of time squared with distance cubed. So those 65.5 million years ago, when the great saurians were slain by a falling star, Luna had been only 2500 km closer to the Earth. But to match the sun's sidereal rotation exactly, the Moon needed to be more than 18,000 km nearer. That was the case no more recently than 485 million years ago.

Ma.s.sri's dinosaur fantasy was off by a factor of at least 7.4.

Then how had the Egyptian reached his numerological conclusion? And where did all this lead? Nowhere useful that Blackett could see.

It was all sheer wishful thinking. Kafele Ma.s.sri was as delusional as Clare, his thought processes utterly unsound. Blackett groaned and put his head on the table. Perhaps, he had to admit, his own reflections were no more reliable.

11..

"I'm flying down to the coast for a swim," Blackett told Clare. "There's room in the plane."

"A long way to go for a dip."

"A change of scenery," he said. "Bring your bathing suit if you like. I never bother, myself."

She gave him a long, cool look. "A nude beach? All right. I'll bring some lunch."

They drove together to the small airfield to one side of the industrial park in a serviceable SUV he found abandoned outside a 7-Eleven. Clare had averted her eyes as he hot-wired the engine. She wore sensible hiking boots, dark gray shorts, a white wife-beater that showed off her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s to advantage. Seated and strapped in, she laid her broad-brimmed straw hat on her knees. Blackett was mildly concerned by the slowly deteriorating condition of the plane. It had not be serviced in many months. He felt confident, though, that it would carry him where he needed to go, and back again.

During the 90-minute flight, he tried to explain the Egyptian's reasoning. The young psychiatrist responded with indifference that became palpable anxiety. Her hands tightened on the seat belt cinched at her waist. Blackett abandoned his efforts.

As they landed at Matagorda Island, she regained her animation. "Oh, look at those lovely biplanes! A shame they're in such deplorable condition. Why would anyone leave them out in the open weather like that?" She insisted on crossing to the sagging Stearmans for a closer look. Were those tears in her eyes?

Laden with towels and a basket of food, drink, paper plates and two gla.s.ses, Blackett summoned her sharply. "Come along, Clare, we'll miss the good waves if we loiter." If she heard bitter irony in his tone, she gave no sign of it. A gust of wind carried away his own boater, and she dashed after it, brought it back, jammed it rakishly on his balding head. "Thank you. I should tie the d.a.m.ned thing on with a leather thong, like the cowboys used to do, and cinch it with a... a..."

"A woggle," she said, unexpectedly.

It made Blackett laugh out loud. "Good G.o.d, woman! Wherever did you get a word like that?"

"My brother was a boy scout," she said.

They crossed the unkempt gra.s.s, made their way with some difficulty down to the sh.o.r.eline. Blue ocean stretched south, almost flat, sparkling in the cloudless light. Blackett set down his burden, stripped his clothing efficiently, strode into the water. The salt stung his nostrils and eyes. He swam strongly out toward Mexico, thinking of the laughable scene in the movie Gattaca. Gattaca. He turned back, and saw Clare's head bobbing, sun-bleached hair plastered against her well-shaped scalp. He turned back, and saw Clare's head bobbing, sun-bleached hair plastered against her well-shaped scalp.

They lay side by side in the sun, odors of sun-block hanging on the unmoving air. After a time, Blackett saw the red setter approaching from the seaward side. The animal sat on its haunches, mouth open and tongue lolling, saying nothing.

"h.e.l.lo, Sporky," Blackett said. "Beach patrol duties?"

"Howdy, Doc. Saw the Cessna coming in. Who's the babe?"

"This is Dr. Clare Laing. She's a psychiatrist, so show some respect."

Light glistened on her nearly naked body, reflected from sweat and a scattering of mica clinging to her torso. She turned her head away, affected to be sleeping. No, not sleeping. He realized that her attention was now fixed on a rusty bicycle wheel half-buried in the sand. It seemed she might be trying to work out the absolute essence of the relations.h.i.+p between them, with the rim and broken spokes of this piece of sea drift serving as some kind of spinal metaphor.

Respectful of her privacy, Blackett sat up and began explaining to the dog the bibliophile's absurd miscalculation. Sporky interrupted his halting exposition.

"You're saying the angular width of the sun, then and now, is about 32 arc minutes."

"Yes, 0.00925 radians."

"And the Moon last matched this some 485 million years ago."

"No, no. Well, it was a slightly better match than it is now, but that's not Ma.s.sri's point."

"Which is?"

"Which is that the sun's rotational period and the Moon's were the same same in that epoch. Can't you see how d.a.m.nably unlikely that is? He thinks it's something like... I don't know, G.o.d's thumbprint on the solar system. The true date of Creation, maybe. Then he tried to show that it coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but that's just wrong, they went extinct-" in that epoch. Can't you see how d.a.m.nably unlikely that is? He thinks it's something like... I don't know, G.o.d's thumbprint on the solar system. The true date of Creation, maybe. Then he tried to show that it coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but that's just wrong, they went extinct-"

"You do know that there was a major catastrophic extinction event at the Cambrian-Ordovician transition 488 million years ago?"

Dumbfounded, Blackett said, "What?"

"Given your sloppy math, what do you say the chances are that your Moon-Sun rotation equivalence bracketed the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction? Knocked the living h.e.l.l out of the trilobites, Doc." A surreal quality had entered the conversation. Blackett found it hard to accept that the dog could be a student of ancient geomorphisms. A spinal tremor shook him. So the creature was no ordinary genetically upgraded dog but some manifestation of the ent.i.ty, the force, the ontological dislocation that had torn away the Moon and the world's inhabitants, most of them.

Detesting the note of pleading in his own voice, Blackett uttered a cry of heartfelt pet.i.tion. He saw Clare roll over, waken from her sun-warmed drowse. "How can I get back there?" he cried. "Send me back! Send us both!"

Sporky stood up, shook sand from his fur, spraying Blackett with stinging mica.

"Go on as you began," the animal said, "and let the Lord be all in all to you."

Clouds of uncertainty cleared from Blackett's mind, as the caustic, acid clouds of Venus had been sucked away and transposed to the relocated Moon. He jumped up, bent, seized the psychiatrist's hand, hauled her blinking and protesting to her feet.

"Clare! We must trace out the ceremony of the Great Temple! Here, at the edge of the ocean. I've been wasting my time trying this ritual inland. Venus is now a world of great oceans!"

"d.a.m.n it, Robert, let me go, you're hurting-"

But he was hauling her down to the brackish, brine-stinking sea sh.o.r.e. Their parallel footprints wavered, inscribing a semiotics of deliverance. He began to tread out the Petran temple perimeter, starting at the Propylec.u.m, turned a right angle, marched them to the East Excedra and to the very foot of the ancient Cistern. He was traveling backward into archeopsychic time, deeper into those remote, somber half-worlds he had glimpsed in the recuperative paintings of his mad patients.

"Robert! Robert!"

They entered the water, which lapped sluggishly at their ankles and calves like the articulate tongue of a dog as large as the world. Blackett gaped. At the edge of sea and sand, great three-lobed arthropods shed water from their sh.e.l.ls, moving slowly like enormous wood lice.

"Trilobites!" Blackett cried. He stared about, hand still firmly clamped on Clare Laing's. Great green rolling breakers, in the distance, rushed toward sh.o.r.e, broke, foamed and frothed, lifting the ancient animals and tugging at Blackett's limbs. He tottered forward into the drag of the Venusian ocean, caught himself. He stared over his shoulder at the vast, towering green canopy of trees. Overhead, bracketing the sun, twin crescent moons shone faintly against the purple sky. He looked wildly at his companion and laughed, joyously, then flung his arms about her.

"Clare," he cried, alive on Venus, "Clare, we made it!"

THE FOOL JOBS.

JOE ABERCROMBIE.

Joe Abercrombie attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School and Manchester University, where he studied psychology. He moved into television production before taking up a career as a freelance film editor. His first novel, The Blade Itself, The Blade Itself, was published in 2004, followed by sequels was published in 2004, followed by sequels Before They Are Hanged Before They Are Hanged and and Last Argument of Kings Last Argument of Kings, and stand-alone novel Best Served Cold. Best Served Cold. His most recent book is another stand-alone novel set in the same world, His most recent book is another stand-alone novel set in the same world, The Heroes The Heroes. Joe lives in Bath with his wife, Lou, and his daughters, Grace and Eve. He still occasionally edits concerts and music festivals for TV, but spends most of his time writing edgy yet humorous fantasy novels.

Craw chewed the hard skin around his nails, just like he always did. They hurt, just like they always did. He thought to himself that he really had to stop doing that. Just like he always did.

"Why is it," he muttered under his breath, and with some bitterness, too, "I always get stuck with the fool jobs?"

The village squatted in the fork of the river, a clutch of damp thatch roofs, scratty as an idiot's hair, a man-high fence of rough-cut logs ringing it. Round wattle huts and three long halls dumped in the muck, ends of the curving wooden uprights on the biggest badly carved like dragon's heads, or wolf's heads, or something that was meant to make men scared but only made Craw nostalgic for decent carpentry. Smoke limped up from chimneys in muddy smears. Half-bare trees still shook browning leaves. In the distance the reedy sunlight glimmered on the rotten fens, like a thousand mirrors stretching off to the horizon. But without the romance.

Wonderful stopped scratching at the long scar through her shaved-stubble hair long enough to make a contribution. "Looks to me," she said, "like a confirmed s.h.i.+t-hole."

"We're way out east of the Crinna, no?" Craw worked a speck of skin between teeth and tongue and spat it out, wincing at the pink mark left on his finger, way more painful than it had any right to be. "Nothing but hundreds of miles of s.h.i.+t-hole in every direction. You sure this is the place, Raubin?"

"I'm sure. She was most specifical."

Craw frowned round. He wasn't sure if he'd taken such a p.r.o.nounced dislike to Raubin 'cause he was the one that brought the jobs and the jobs were usually cracked, or if he'd taken such a p.r.o.nounced dislike to Raubin 'cause the man was a weasel-faced a.r.s.ehole. Bit of both, maybe. "The word is 'specific,' half-head."

"Got my meaning, no? Village in a fork in the river, she said, south o' the fens, three halls, biggest one with uprights carved like fox heads."

"Aaaah." Craw snapped his fingers. "They're meant to be foxes."

"Fox Clan, these crowd."

"Are they?"

"So she said."

"And this thing we've got to bring her. What sort of a thing is it, exactly?"

"Well, it's a thing," said Raubin.

"That much we know."

"Sort of, this long, I guess. She didn't say, precisely."

"Unspecifical, was she?" asked Wonderful, grinning with every tooth.

"She said it'd have a kind of a light about it."

"A light? What? Like a magic b.l.o.o.d.y candle?"

All Raubin could do was shrug, which wasn't a sc.r.a.p of use to no one. "I don't know. She said you'd know it when you saw it."

"Oh, nice." Craw hadn't thought his mood could drop much lower. Now he knew better. "That's real nice. So you want me to bet my life, and the lives o' my crew, on knowing it when I see it?" He shoved himself back off the rocks on his belly, out of sight of the village, clambered up and brushed the dirt from his coat, muttering darkly to himself, since it was a new one and he'd been taking some trouble to keep it clean. Should've known that'd be a waste of effort, what with the s.h.i.+tty jobs he always ended up in to his neck. He started back down the slope, shaking his head, striding through the trees towards the others. A good, confident stride. A leader's stride. It was important, Craw reckoned, for a chief to walk like he knew where he was going.

Especially when he didn't.

Raubin hurried after him, whiny voice picking at his back. "She didn't precisely say. About the thing, you know. I mean, she don't, always. She just looks at you, with those eyes..."He gave a shudder. "And says, get me this thing, and where from. And what with the paint, and that voice o' hers, and that sweat o' b.l.o.o.d.y fear you get when she looks at you..." Another shudder, hard enough to rattle his rotten teeth. "I ain't asking no questions, I can tell you that. I'm just looking to run out fast so I don't p.i.s.s myself on the spot. Run out fast, and get whatever thing she's after..."

"Well that's real sweet for you," said Craw, "except insofar as actually getting this thing."

"As far as getting the thing goes," mused Wonderful, splashes of light and shadow swimming across her bony face as she looked up into the branches, "the lack of detail presents serious difficulties. All manner of things in a village that size. Which one, though? Which thing, is the question." Seemed she was in a thoughtful mood. "One might say the voice, and the paint, and the aura of fear are, in the present case... self-defeating."

"Oh no," said Craw. "Self-defeating would be if she was the one who'd end up way out past the Crinna with her throat cut, on account of some blurry details on the minor point of the actual job we're b.l.o.o.d.y here to do." And he gave Raubin a hard glare as he strode out of the trees and into the clearing.

Scorry was sitting sharpening his knives, eight blades neatly laid out on the patchy gra.s.s in front of his crossed legs, from a little p.r.i.c.ker no longer'n Craw's thumb to a hefty carver just this side of a short-sword. The ninth he had in his hands, whetstone working at steel, squick, scrick, squick, scrick, marking the rhythm to his soft, high singing. He had a wonder of a singing voice, did Scorry Tiptoe. No doubt he would've been a bard in a happier age, but there was a steadier living in sneaking up and knifing folk these days. A sad fact, Craw reckoned, but those were the times. marking the rhythm to his soft, high singing. He had a wonder of a singing voice, did Scorry Tiptoe. No doubt he would've been a bard in a happier age, but there was a steadier living in sneaking up and knifing folk these days. A sad fact, Craw reckoned, but those were the times.

Brack-i-Dayn was sat beside Scorry, lips curled back, nibbling at a stripped rabbit bone like a sheep nibbling at gra.s.s. A huge, very dangerous sheep. The little thing looked like a toothpick in his great tattooed blue lump of a fist. Jolly Yon frowned down at him as if he was a great heap of s.h.i.+t, which Brack might've been upset by, if it hadn't been Yon's confirmed habit to look at everything and everyone that way. He properly looked like the least jolly man in all the North at that moment. It was how he'd come by the name, after all.

Whirrun of Bligh was kneeling on his own on the other side of the clearing, in front of his great long sword, leaned up against a tree for the purpose. He had his hands clasped in front of his chin, hood drawn down over his head and with just the sharp end of his nose showing. Praying, by the look of him. Craw had always been a bit worried by men who prayed to G.o.ds, let alone swords. But those were the times, he guessed. In b.l.o.o.d.y days, swords were worth more than G.o.ds. They certainly had 'em outnumbered. Besides, Whirrun was a valley man, from way out north and west, across the mountains near the White Sea, where it snowed in summer and no one with the slightest sense would ever choose to live. Who knew how he thought?

"Told you it was a real p.i.s.s-stain of a village, didn't I?" Never was in the midst of stringing his bow. He had that grin he tended to have, like he'd made a joke on everyone else and no one but him had got it. Craw would've liked to know what it was, he could've done with a laugh. The joke was on all of 'em, far as he could see.

"Reckon you had the right of it," said Wonderful as she strutted past into the clearing. "p.i.s.s. Stain."

"Well, we didn't come to settle down," said Craw, "we came to get a thing."