Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 7

One of the shipcarls behind Descender opened the ventilator, so that the breezes began to slowly scatter his food. Descender paused; he grabbed one or two pieces of fruit and stuck them under his elbow to hang onto them.

It looked absurd. But n.o.body laughed.

It was hard to say whether or not Descender actually was frightened. His face showed no emotion. But he certainly acted like a frightened man.

He said, "I thank you for your hospitality. I wish now to return to my ship."

The chancellor said, "But we are not done with you. That ship of yours; it is a nice one, isn't it? We would be happy to accept its drives and main hulls sections as gifts. Or perhaps we can simply claim it as salvage. There's no one aboard it right now."

Descender curled his legs, and put his hands near his kiri-su-gama. He spoke softly: "She. It's more polite, good sir, to address those crafts who sustain our lives as 'her' and 'she.'"

The winged knight said loudly, "Those who carry arms are required, when honor commands, to use them. Those false lowlife debris and pokeboys who scrounge the weapons off their betters deserve a looter's air-lock. But who says a thief has any care for honor? It is to honor, gentlemen, that I propose a toast! To the honor and to the air that sustains us! Let those who will not drink be deprived of both. But look!

You have no page, you who call yourself a captain! Hoy! Smith! Grease-monkey!

Hand our guest his last draught of wine; your hands are the only ones fit to hand it to him!" And he took from his pouch a plastic bag from the medical stores, filled with liquid waste. The knight threw it to Smith, who caught it with trembling fingers.

This was a mortal insult. If Smith pa.s.sed the bag to him, Descender could neither drink, nor could he refuse the toast, with honor. The carefully planned program of insults that had gone before, Smith guessed, had only been to see how much Descender would stomach. If he had any hidden weapons, tricks, or traps, now he would show them; Captain Ereshkigal would only lose one lesser knight; Ereshkigal could repudiate the rash young knight once he was killed, apologize, blame him; polite words and polite pretense could keep a bit of honor intact during such retreat.That is, if he had some hidden weapon. If not...

Anger made Smith forget all caution. He threw down the heavy charging-brush and the sloshing bag of medical waste, so that he drifted away from the captain and out of her immediate knifereach. "Here's a poor man, innocent as innocence, and you're going to strangle him up and eat his fine ship! He's done no wrong, and answered all your slurs with kind words! Why can't you let him be?! Why can't you let him be?!"

The captain spoke without turning her head: "Engineer, you are insubordinate.

Your air ration is hereby decreased to zero. If you report to the medical house for euthanasia, your going will be pleasant, and note will be made of your obedience in the ship's log. If you continue your insubordination, however, your name will be blotted out. I have no wish to dishonor you; go quietly."

Descender spoke in a strange and distant tone of voice: "Captain, your order is not lawful. At feast times, the code of subordination is relaxed, and free speech allowed, at least among those civilized peoples who recognize the guest law..." He turned and looked at Smith, addressing him directly, "Engineer, what, pray tell, is your name? Tell it to me, and I shall preserve it in my ship's log, my book of life, and it may endure longer than any record of this age."

But Smith's courage deserted him then, and he did not answer. He flapped the napkin he held as a fan, moving back to the bulkhead, where he crouched, looking each way with wide, wild eyes, ready to spring off in any direction.

Yet no one paid much heed to him. The n.o.bles were still concentrating on Descender. There was silence in the chamber.

The gentlemen were each stealing quick glances at their neighbors. Each crouched and ready. But no one was prepared to take the final swoop to make their threats and hints come true. Perhaps there was something hard about killing a man who had not drawn his weapon; perhaps they were each thinking that now, even now, it still was not too late to back away...

Then the young piebald knight with the racing-wings spoke up, kicking the sheaths off his blades, displaying steel. Now it was too late. His voice rang out, high-pitched and over-loud: "What is more hateful in the sight of G.o.d than cowardice? By Gaia, how I hate the thing (I will not call him a man) who takes a blow without a show of spleen! He smiles with his beggar's smile, his shoulders hunched, his eye wet, a tremble in his whining voice. Hatred, gentleman, hatred and disgust is what we ought to feel for those we hurt! Weakness is loathsome! And any man who will not fight deserves to die!

A lowlife heart should not dare to hide inside what seems a captain's chest. I say we cut the false heart out!"

Descender's face was stiff and expressionless. His voice was tense and even. His eyes were filled with dreadful calm: "You are angry because you have no good excuse for anger, have you? It would be easier to do the deed if I had given some offense, wouldn't it? Or if I somehow seemed less human? n.o.ble fellow-CaptainEreshkigal! There is no need for this. What I can spare from my ship, I will freely give. Let us avoid a scene of horror. You conduct yourself as one who honors honorable conduct. Let not this feast end in tragic death!"

The young knight shouted, "Beg and beg! Must we hear the beggar mewl!? Cut his throat and silence this shrill noise!" He kicked his legs to clash his blades together, a bright crash of metallic noise.

But Captain Ereshkigal held open her fan for silence. "My brother captain asks, with dignity, that we not pretend that this is other than it is. We will not mask our deed under the code of duels. Let it openly be named: Murder, then, murder and piracy!"

There was a slight noise all around the chamber, sighs and hisses from the gentlemen. Some looked angry, or saddened, or surprised; most were stony-faced; but each face, somehow, still was dark with cruelty.

The captain continued: "But you have brought it on yourself, brother captain!

How dare you have a fine hull, fine drives, and air, when we are many, and you are only one?"

"The property is mine, by right."

"And when you die, it shall be ours, by right or wrong."

"You have no need."

"But we want."

"Captain, I beg you-"

"We wish to hear no more of begging!"

"So... ? Is this the rule by which you wish also to be judged? Then no plea for mercy will be heard when your own time comes."

"Judged? How dare you speak defiance to us?"

"You condemn me when I apologize, and then equally when I do not. What if I say, take my ship, but spare my life?"

"We will not even spare an ounce of air!"

"Hah! I will be more generous than you, Ereshkigal. I will spare one life; perhaps that of the scared little Smith there. He has done me no harm, and I think that he begins to suspect what I am. Yes; one person should survive to spread the tale, otherwise the exercise is useless."

"Do you think to frighten us with superst.i.tious hints and lies? Englobe him, my gentlemen! Steward, close the ducts! We must have our drapes sop up the blood-cloud so no drops foul our air system."

Descender spoke softly while the bejeweled, beribboned, and tattooed knights and vavasors, glittering, smiling, fans waving, drew their snaring-hooks and dirks and slowly circled him.

He spoke in a voice of Jovian calm: "Who else but a machine intelligence has solong a life that it can intend to bring law and order to the Void, and yet expect to see the slow results? Civilization, gentlemen, is when all men surrender their natural habits of violence, because they fear the retribution of some power sufficient to terrify and awe them into obedience. To civilize a wilderness is long effort; and when the wilderness is astronomically vast, the terror must be vast as well."

Captain Ereshkigal, her eyes wide with growing panic, made a clumsy gesture with her fan, shrieking, "Kill him! Kill!"

Steel glittered in their hands as the shouting knights and n.o.bles kicked off the walls and dove. With hardly any surprise at all, Smith saw the stranger beginning to shine with supernatural light, and saw him reach up with flaming fingers to pull aside what turned out to be, after all, a mask.

Chapter 7 - The Voice by Gregory Benford.

Gregory Eenford is one of the chief spokesmen of hard SF of the last twenty years, articulate and contentious, and he has produced some of the best fiction of recent decades about scientists working, and about the riveting and astonishing concepts of cosmology and the nature of the universe, for example, Timescape, or Great Sky River. For several years he has also been a science columnist for Fantasy & Science Fiction (he is currently preparing a collection of his columns). His novel foundation's fear, continuing Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was published in 1997. His new novel, Cosm, is out this year in hardcover. He has had a story in each of the two previous Year's Best volumes in this series, each one quite different from the others in tone and approach. This story appeared in SF Age, and in a very different version in the original anthology Future Histories. It starts out in Isaac Asimov territory and wanders somehow into Ray Bradbury country without losing its punch or its science.

"I don't believe it." Qent said sternly.

Klair tugged him down the musty old corridor. "Come on, turn off your Voice.

Mine is-I showed you."

"Stuff on walls, whoever heard of-"

"There's another one further along."

Down the narrow, dimly lit hallway they went, to a recessed portion of the permwall. "See-another sign."

"This? Some old mark. What's a 'sign' anyway?"

"This one says-" she shaped the letters to herself carefully-"Pa.s.sAGE DENIED.".

Qent thumbed on his Voice impatiently. He blinked. "That's... what the Voicesays."

"See?"

"You've been here before and the Voice told you."

"I let you pick the corridor, remember? A fair trial."

"You cheated."

"No! I can read it." Read. The very sound of the word made her pulse thump.

Qent paused a second and she knew he was consulting the Voice again. "And 'read' means to untangle things, I see. This 'sign' tells you Pa.s.sAGE DENIED?

How?"

"See those?-they're letters. I know each one-there are twenty-six, it takes a lot of work-and together they shape words."

"Nonsense," Qent said primly. "Your mouth shapes words."

"I have another way. My way."

He shook his head and she had to take him on to another sign and repeat the performance. He grimaced when the Voice told him that indeed, the markings meant ALDENTEN.

SECTOR. "A trick. Your Voice is on. You just rigged your touchpad-"

"Here, take my insert!" She thrust it into his hand and made him walk to the next emblem. "MANUFAC DIST, that way."

"I know an arrow when I see it," he said sarcastically. But the rest of it-what's DIST mean?"

She had hoped he wouldn't ask that. "Maybe it means a place."

"Like a neighborhood?"

"Could be-in fact, yes, 'district.' If there wasn't room to write it all out, they'd shorten a word."

"And who were 'they'? Some magicians?"

"The ancients, I guess."

He was working his way around to being convinced, she could see. "They left wall marks? What for, when the Voice-"

"Maybe they came before the Voice."

"But what possible use-"

"I learned all this from those old papers I uncovered in the Historical Section.

They were called 'Bills of Lading' but there were enough words-"

"How do you know you can 'read' something? I mean, without checking with the Voice?"

"I know. The letters group together, you see-MANUFAC is just 'man' and thisupturned letter is the sound 'you,' and-"

"You're going too fast." He grimaced, obviously not liking this at all. He was a biology specialist and tolerated her interest in antiquity, but finally he said, "Okay, show me again. Not that I really believe this, but..."

They spent the next few days in the oldest precinct of the Historical Sector, searching out corridors that the Imperium had not gotten around to Voicing. Klair read him signs and he started picking up the method. Progress was slow; reading was hard. Letters, words, then working up to grasping how sentences and then paragraphs had their logic and rhythms, their clues about how to extract meaning.

Still, it wasn't as though he were some Deedee, after all. After a while she recalled from her Educational Specialty training that Deedees were actually officially called the Developmentally Delayed. So if someone had once taken just the first letters of both words, that was how they had gotten their name.

Everything went well between them and they got to like having their Voices off while they strolled through the antiquated hallways, making sense of the signs.

The Voice was always available if they needed it. Linkchips embedded near both ears could pick up the pervasive waves of CompCentral. They only had basic link, no frills but constant access. Like everybody, they had used the Voice more as time went on; it was so easy. *

But reading gave them a touch of the past and some silence. It was a relief, really.

They had kept their Voices nearly always on. It was easy to get used to the Voice's silky advertis.e.m.e.nts that floated just within hearing. You could pay the subscriber service for the Voice and have no ads, but none of their friends did: it was far too expensive. And anyway, the ads told you a lot about people. There was a really interesting one for sperm and egg donors to the gay/les bank, a Meritocracy program to help preserve the Gay gene. It had zoomer sonics and life histories and everything. You could amp it and hear a whole half-hour show if you wanted. For free, too. But most weren't anywhere near that good, so they were glad to be rid of them.

Reading, though, grew on them. There were advantages to reading old signs that the Voice didn't bother to translate. They showed off to a few friends but n.o.body believed they could really read the curious markings. It had to be some trick, for sure. Klair and Qent just smiled knowingly and dropped the subject.

Not that it was all good. At an old intersection Qent honored the GO signal by reading it, rather than listening to his Voice. The signal was off synch and he nearly got flattened by a roller car.

They debated whether to tell anyone in authority. After all, maybe n.o.body knew this.

"Ummm, no," Qent said. "Look at it this way-carrion eaters rule the world, in their way. Because n.o.body cares. n.o.body wants what they like."

"So we'd be fools to make other people like reading?""Demand rises, supplies fall. Suppose everybody wanted those old books you found?"

She had to admit it was a sobering possibility. The carrion-eater a.n.a.logy came out of his biology training, and he couldn't resist adding, "It's a smart strategy. When times are tough on everybody, the buzzards just get more to eat."

The thought was so disgusting she decided to forget about the whole question.

They came to like strolling the byways of the Megapolis, ferreting out the antiquated secrets of the signs. Lovers often find their own rituals, and this was a particularly delectable one.

Outside one vaultway there were clearly marked instructions on how to spin a dial and get in. They had to work on it for quite a while but finally they made it work.

The door swung open on primitive hinges and they walked into a musty set of rooms. Exploring them proved boring; just stacks of locked compartments, all without signs. Until a guard came in with a drawn zapper.

"How'd you kids get in here?"