Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 34

"It's not your fault, dear."

"I have papers with me," Maskell said, "if you'd care to sign. The terms are surprisingly generous, considering."

Lytton and Susan were close enough to see the knife.

"You sheep-s.h.a.gging b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Susan said.

Lytton's other gun appeared from under her shawl. She raised her arm and fired.

Allie felt wind as the bullet whistled past. Maskell's jaw came away in a gush of red-black. Susan shot him again, in the eye. He was thumped backward, knife ripped away from Allie's throat, and laid on the gra.s.s, heels kicking.

"I said I didn't like guns," Susan announced. "I never said I couldn't use one."

Lytton took hold of Susan's shoulders and pulled her out of the way of the fusillade unleashed in their direction by Budge and Terry Gilpin.

Allie twisted in Erskine's grasp and rammed a bony knee between his legs.

Erskine yelped, and she clawed his ear-bandages, ripping the wounds open.The Constable staggered away, and was peppered by his comrades' fire. He took one in the lungs and knelt over the Squire, coughing up thick pink foam.

In a flash of gunfire, Allie saw Lytton sitting up, s.h.i.+elding Susan with his body, arm outstretched. He had picked up a pistol. The flashes stopped. Budge lay flat dead, and Gilpin gurgled, incapacitated by several wounds. Lytton was shot again too, in the leg.

He had fired his gun dry, and was reloading, taking rounds from his belt.

Car-lights froze the scene. The blood on the gra.s.s was deepest black. Faces were white as skulls. Lytton still carefully shoved new bullets into chambers. Susan struggled to sit up.

Reeve Draper got out of the panda car and a.s.sessed the situation. He stood over Maskell's body. The Squire's face was gone.

"Looks like you'm had a bad gyppo attack," he said.

Lytton snapped his revolver shut and held it loosely, not aiming. The Reeve turned away from him.

"But it be over now."

Erskine coughed himself quiet.

Allie wasn't sorry any of them were dead. If she was crying, it was for her father, for the chickens, for the vegetable garden.

"I a.s.sume Goodwife Ames no longer has to worry about her cows being destroyed?" Lytton asked.

The Reeve nodded, tightly.

"I thought so."

Draper ordered Gary Chilcot to gather the wounded and get them off Gosmore Farm.

"Take the rubbish too," Susan insisted, meaning the dead.

Chilcot, face painted with purple b.u.t.terflies, was about to protest but Lytton still had the gun.

"Squire Maskell bain't givin' out no more pay packets, Gary," the Reeve reminded him.

Chilcot thought about it and ordered the able-bodied to clear the farm of corpses.

Allie woke up well after dawn. It was a glorious spring day. The blood on the gra.s.s had soaked in and was invisible. But there were windows that needed mending.

She went outside and saw Lytton and Susan by the generator. It was humming into life. Lytton had oil on his hands.

In the daylight, Susan seemed ghost-like.

Allie understood what it must be like. To kill a man. Even a man like SquireMaskell. It was as if Susan had killed a part of herself. Allie would have to be careful with Susan, try to coax her back.

"There," Lytton said. "Humming nicely."

"Thank you, Captain," said Susan.

Lytton's eyes narrowed minutely. Maskell had called him Captain.

"Thank you, Susan."

He touched her cheek.

"Thank you for everything."

Allie ran up and hugged Lytton. He held her too, not ferociously. She broke the embrace. Allie didn't want him to leave. But he would.

The Norton was propped in the driveway, wheeled out beyond the open gate. He walked stiffly away from them and straddled the motorcycle. His leg wound was just a scratch.

Allie and Susan followed him to the gate. Allie felt Susan's arm around her shoulders.

Lytton pulled on his gauntlets and curled his fingers around the handlebars. He didn't wince.

"You're Captain UI Lytton, aren't you?" Susan said.

There was a little hurt in his eyes. His frown-lines crinkled.

"You've heard of me."

"Most people have. Most people don't know how you could do what you did in the War."

"Sometimes you have a choice. Sometimes you don't."

Susan left Allie and slipped around the gate. She kissed Lytton. Not the way Lytton had kissed Janet Speke, like a slap, but slowly, awkwardly.

Allie was half-embarra.s.sed, half-heartbroken.

"Thank you, Captain Lytton,"_ Susan said. "There will always be a breakfast for you at Gosmore Farm."

"I never did give you the ten s.h.i.+llings," he smiled.

Allie was crying again and didn't know why. Susan let her fingers trail through Lytton's hair and across his shoulder. She stood back.

He pulled down his goggles, then kicked the Norton into life and drove off.

Allie scrambled through the gate and ran after him. She kept up with him, lungs protesting, until the village oak, then sank, exhausted, by the curb. Lytton turned on his saddle and waved, then was gone from her sight, headed out across the moors.

She stayed, curled up under the oak, until she could no longer hear his engine.

Chapter 19 - Turnover By Geoffery A. Landis

Geoff Landis is characteristically a hard SF writer, widely published in the magazines and often seen on award nomination ballots, and that's where this story is coming from. It appeared in Interzone, where a significant amount of the best humorous SF is published these days. One of the traditional hallmarks of satire is the world turned upside down, a clever way to expose the absurdity of conventional behavior, and in this case some clunky and old fas.h.i.+oned SF storytelling. The third word in the story is a suspicious intrusion from conventional fantasy and by the end of the first sentence we know we are in the world of deadpan. This story goes to show that a heavy hand sometimes delivers the strongest blow.

The scientist's guild had a requirement that each accredited scientist must have a beautiful a.s.sistant to ask questions. Doctor Piffelheimer's beautiful a.s.sistant was a young man named Percival Kensington. She looked him over. The cool-suit he was wearing, a necessary accoutrement against the Venusian temperature, had the advantage of being a skintight, form-fitting garment, padding and revealing every curve of his perfectly shaped body, down to and including the almost indecent bulge between his thighs.

The surface of Venus was almost hot enough for the rocks to glow. It was a good thing that the perfect thermal insulator had been invented, or it would have been completely impossible to send a team to Venus .to answer important scientific questions.

Except for her a.s.sistant Percy, the surface of Venus held very little to see. One spot on the barren rock looked very much like another. Dr. Piffelheimer picked one at random and pointed. "This looks like a good spot."

Percy obediently lugged the equipment over to the spot. Fortunately the ultradrill floated on a carpet of electrostatic repulsion, and lugging the five-ton ma.s.s of the drill to the indicated spot required little more than guiding it with a finger in the right direction. "Explain to me what we're trying to find out from this core," he said, and c.o.c.ked his head in a charming tilt to listen. They must have trained him perfectly in scientists' a.s.sistant school; this was exactly the type of obvious question that a beautiful a.s.sistant was supposed to ask.

Piffelheimer motioned him to start the ultradrill while she expounded. The ultradrill would bore downward at a rate of 200 meters a minute. It made a racket like a herd of mating elephants while doing so, but fortunately the helmets of the coolsuits were perfect acoustic insulators as well as perfect thermal insulation, so she knew that her voice over the intercom was flawlessly clear.

"The surface of Venus is very anomalous," Piffelheimer expounded carefully.

"This was first really understood back in the last years of the twentieth century,when the primitive s.p.a.ce probes discovered that the crater distribution was uniform across the surface."

"What's anomalous about that?" Percy asked, completely on cue.

"Crater count indicates the age of the surface," Piffelheimer said. "Since meteor bombardment occurs randomly at every point on the surface, a uniform crater distribution means that the surface of Venus is all precisely the same age. But, as every geologist knows, a geological surface is periodically resurfaced, by tectonic forces, by vulcanism, and the like. Vulcanism is necessary to get the heat out of the interior of the planet. So a planet cannot possibly have a surface of uniform age."

"But you just said it does."

"That's right. This is the scientific mystery, and we're about to find the answer to it."

"Oh. How are we going to do that?"

"By drilling and inserting heat-flow probes," she said. "The mystery is, how does the planet Venus release heat from the interior, if it doesn't resurface the planet through vulcanism?"

"Aren't there any theories?"

"Well, there is one." Piffelheimer made a face. "One wacko from the twentieth century, a scientist named Turcotte, proposed periodic, catastrophic resurfacing.

Every 500 million years or so, the entire surface of Venus resurfaces all at once. The whole surface of the planet becomes one single magma ocean, and all the heat of the interior is released at once. Then, of course, it cools down, and since the whole thing was molten at the same time, every part of the surface is the same age."

"Well, that makes sense." Percy looked down at the drill controls. "One kilometer, and drilling steady. So, why don't we like that theory?"

"Because it's a catastrophic theory."

Percy looked blank. Charming, but blank.

"Catastrophism is anathema to geologists," Piffelheimer explained. "It smacks of religion-the hand of G.o.d wiping the planet clean. Noah's flood and such. Real geologists are uniformitarians. It's our job to show that the processes of geology are gradual and continuous."

"But if this Turbot theory-"

"Turcotte."

"Turcotte theory was right-"

"But it's not."

"But if it was right, what causes this resurfacing?"

Piffelheimer shrugged. The heat builds up. Eventually something triggers it."

"Two kilometers deep, running steady," Percy said. "How often does itresurface?"

"I told you. It doesn't." She was getting a little annoyed with the conversation, although she couldn't really blame Percy. After all, his job was to ask innocent questions. Time to change the subject. She looked around. Nothing but gray, blasted rock under them, uniform gray clouds above them. Between the gray and the gray was the clear air of the surface. "Have you looked at the horizon?" she asked.

"Notice the way it seems to curve up around us, as if we were at the bottom of a shallow bowl."

"Yes, due to the refraction effect from the density gradient of the thick atmosphere," Percy said. "If the air were clear enough, we would be able to see ourselves on the other side of the planet. We can't of course, due to Rayleigh scattering. You didn't answer my question. How often, according to Turcotte, does this resurfacing event on Venus occur?"

"Every 500 million years, give or take," Piffelheimer said, annoyed. She really shouldn't have answered the question at all, since Percy was going way beyond his job description in pressing it in the first place, but she was so used to expounding automatically that it didn't occur to her to not answer until after she already had.

"And how long ago was the last time it happened?"

"Five hundred million years," she said.

"Then there must be a lot of interior heat waiting to get out," Percy said. "What, exactly, triggers the catastrophic release?"

Piffelheimer shrugged, annoyed. "Anything. An asteroid impact, I suppose might trigger it."

"Or maybe a drill?"

There was no need for Piffelheimer to answer him. The rock surface had suddenly split open at the site of the drilling, separating into three lines that radiated away from the drill point and streaked for the horizon. Each of the creva.s.ses split into a network of sidecracks, which instantly fragmented still further. No doubt there was an ominous thunder accompanying the whole process as well, but of course the insulation m.u.f.fled that. An orange glow from below lit up the clouds, and the cracks widened until the magma, welling up from below, washed over them.

Later, as they bobbed in the magma in their coolsuits, Piffelheimer had a perfect opportunity to expound on the value of perfect thermal insulation, but she decided to stay silent. Kensington probably knew it all anyway, d.a.m.n him.

"If you think I'm gonna set my nice clean s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p down in that," came the voice in her headset, "you got another thing coming."

She looked up. The expedition transport s.h.i.+p was hovering over them. As she watched, a rope (woven of refractory fibers, no doubt, since it didn't melt in the heat) fell toward them and ploiked down in the lava next to her. The correct procedure, Piffelheimer knew, is for scientist to carry beauti-ful a.s.sistant to safety.