Edge of Infinity Read online

  EDGE OF INFINITY

  Edited by

  Jonathan Strahan

  Also Edited by Jonathan Strahan

  Best Short Novels

  (2004 through 2007)

  Fantasy:

  The Very Best of 2005

  Science Fiction:

  The Very Best of 2005

  The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year:

  Volumes 1 - 6

  Eclipse: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (Volumes 1-4)

  The Starry Rift:

  Tales of New Tomorrows

  Life on Mars:

  Tales of New Frontiers

  Under My Hat:

  Tales from the Cauldron

  Godlike Machines

  Engineering Infinity

  Edge of Infinity

  Reap the Whirlwind

  (forthcoming)

  With Lou Anders

  Swords and Dark Magic: The New Sword and Sorcery

  With Charles N. Brown

  The Locus Awards: Thirty Years of the Best in Fantasy and Science Fiction

  With Jeremy G. Byrne

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 1

  The Year’s Best Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume 2

  Eidolon 1

  With Jack Dann

  Legends of Australian Fantasy

  With Terry Dowling

  The Jack Vance Treasury

  The Jack Vance Reader

  Wild Thyme, Green Magic

  Hard Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance

  With Gardner Dozois

  The New Space Opera

  The New Space Opera 2

  With Karen Haber

  Science Fiction: Best of 2003

  Science Fiction: Best of 2004

  Fantasy: Best of 2004

  With Marianne S. Jablon

  Wings of Fire

  EDGE OF

  INFINITY

  EDITED BY JONATHAN STRAHAN

  Including stories by

  PAT CADIGAN

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  JAMES S. A. COREY

  SANDRA MCDONALD AND STEPHEN D. COVEY

  JOHN BARNES

  PAUL MCAULEY

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  GWYNETH JONES

  HANNU RAJANIEMI

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  ALASTAIR REYNOLDS

  AN OWOMOYELA

  BRUCE STERLING

  First published 2012 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (epub): 978-1-84997-460-8

  ISBN (mobi): 978-1-84997-461-5

  Cover by Adam Tredowski

  Introduction and story notes and arrangement copyright © 2012 Jonathan Strahan.

  “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” copyright © 2012 Pat Cadigan.

  “The Deeps of the Sky” copyright © 2012 Elizabeth Bear.

  “Drive” copyright © 2012 Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.

  “The Road to NPS” copyright © 2012 Sandra McDonald and Stephen D. Covey.

  “Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh” copyright © 2012 John Barnes.

  “Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden” copyright © 2012 Paul McAuley.

  “Safety Tests” copyright © 2012 Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

  “Bricks, Sticks, Straw” copyright © 2012 Gwyneth Jones.

  “Tyche and the Ants” copyright © 2012 Hannu Rajaniemi.

  “Obelisk” copyright © 2012 Stephen Baxter.

  “Vainglory” copyright © 2012 Alastair Reynolds.

  “Water Rights” copyright © 2012 An Owomoyela.

  “The Peak of Eternal Light” copyright © 2012 Bruce Sterling.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  For my friend and colleague, Gardner Dozois, some pure quill SF!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I have loved working on this book and would like to thank my Solaris editor Jonathan Oliver, Ben Smith, and the whole team at Rebellion for all of their kindness, help, and consideration over the past year. Also for the absolutely kick-arse cover by Adam Tredowski, which totally nails the book. I would also like to thank all of the book’s contributors for letting me publish their wonderful stories: Daniel Abraham, John Barnes, Stephen Baxter, Elizabeth Bear, Pat Cadigan, Stephen D. Covey, Ty Franck, Gwyneth Jones, Paul McAuley, Sandra McDonald, An Owomayela, Hannu Rajaniemi, Alastair Reynolds, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Bruce Sterling. An extra thanks to Peter Hamilton and Peter Watts, who would have been part of the book if situations had allowed. As always, I’d like to thank my agent, the ever wonderful Howard Morhaim and his brilliant new assistant Alice Speilburg.

  And, finally, an extra special thanks to my wife Marianne, who helped with this book, and to my two daughters, Jessica and Sophie, for their love and support.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction, Jonathan Strahan

  The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi, Pat Cadigan

  The Deeps of the Sky, Elizabeth Bear

  Drive, James S. A. Corey

  The Road to NPS, Sandra McDonald and Stephen D. Covey

  Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh, John Barnes

  Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden, Paul McAuley

  Safety Tests, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Bricks, Sticks, Straw, Gwyneth Jones

  Tyche and the Ants, Hannu Rajaniemi

  Obelisk, Stephen Baxter

  Vainglory, Alastair Reynolds

  Water Rights, An Owomoyela

  The Peak of Eternal Light, Bruce Sterling

  Also From Solaris

  INTRODUCTION

  WELCOME TO THE Fourth Generation of science fiction.

  A year or so ago I was working on Engineering Infinity, a collection of stories intended to interrogate what hard science fiction means in the second decade of the 21st century. In the introduction to that book I made passing reference to the ‘Fourth Generation of Science Fiction,’ where I suggested that science fiction, having been born, had passed through adolescence, into adulthood, and then moved into a post-scarcity period of incredible richness and diversity.

  My intention, in coining the term, was simply to highlight the depth and variety of science fiction today, both in terms of who reads and writes it, and in the breadth and complexity of what the field now encompasses in terms of style, topic, theme, setting and so on. Things are good, and the laboratory is bubbling! However, once Engineering Infinity had gone to press and the time had well and truly arrived to move on to other projects, it occurred to me that the “Fourth Generation” was a good descriptor for something else happening in science fiction.

  Science fiction publishing is a somewhat morbid sub-culture. It is rather obsessed with the death of SF and SF publishing. It is so obsessed with its own death that it feels honour bound to report that it is dying, will die, or in fact has already died rather a long time ago with monotonous regularity. I’ve not checked, but I’m fairly confident that my good friend and colleague, Gardner Dozois, has reported this fact in th
e introduction to almost every one of his nearly three dozen ‘best of the year’ anthologies published between 1977 and the present day. This isn’t because Gardner is a particularly depressive fellow, or that he relishes the aforesaid death of our field. It’s because science fiction, I realised, is being killed by science.

  Not just today, but always. How? Well, every day scientists go to work developing new hypotheses, publishing new papers, and uncovering new facts. The bedrock of information upon which science fiction writers work is constantly shifting and changing, as it should. This is a fine and wonderful thing, and I doubt a single science fiction writer on the planet would complain about it. However, this constant barrage of fact can be the enemy of romance, and science fiction needs romance to survive.

  Take Mars as an example. Percival Lowell, fascinated with drawings by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, fell in love with and helped to popularise the canals of Mars. That view of the world, scientifically reasonable for its time, formed the basis of Edgar Rice Burrough’s novel A Princess of Mars, which imagined the sweeping dead sea bottoms of Helium, populated by thoats and tharks and the setting for the sword-fighting, gravity-defying adventures of John Carter. By 1964 that image was dead, swept away by the tide of facts collected by the space probe Mariner, and by the late 1970s Mariners, Vikings and Voyagers had turned images of Helium forever to dust, and left us with images that looked nothing like nothing more than a stretch of washed-out desert that really wanted to kill you.

  Not that science fiction hasn’t risen to the challenge set by science. It did and it continues to do so. A rash of novels in the 1980s, most prominently from Kim Stanley Robinson, with his austere, magisterial Mars trilogy, took on the challenge of making Mars a human place – a dangerous one, but a place where romance and adventure could flourish and where we could see a way back to the future. Others took up the cudgel, Greg Bear in Moving Mars, Terry Bisson in Voyage to a Red Planet, and many more.

  How does all of this connect to the Fourth Generation? Well, bear with me. It’s been said that with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984, co-incidentally published around the same time the Mars revolution was happening, moved science fiction from an outwards-focussed technological SF to an inwards-focussed look at cyberspace; innerspace, even. Cyberpunk came from the street, but its talk of uploading into cyberspace was also a turning away from the physical world and from science fiction’s journey to the stars, something that would have been unimaginable just a few decades earlier. As the years passed, and as more fact accumulated, travelling to the stars began to seem harder and less likely, and even leaving our planet seemed so fanciful that SF briefly spawned a Mundane movement to challenge it.

  And it’s not hard to see why. The flush of optimism surrounding space travel that followed Sputnik, Laika, Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11, Voyager, Skylab, the space shuttle program and the International Space Station had pretty much run out by the time of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. That moment, for some of us, seemed to mark the endpoint of a certain romance with the future, the idea that we actually would travel into space and finally leave our home world in some meaningful way. Increasingly the stories being told were of a humanity restricted to Earth, where all of its offworld exploration was restricted to robots and probes, or to uploaded intelligences in tiny craft. A practical, scientific future.

  And yet science fiction is about the romance of science and the romance of fiction, about our love affair with tomorrow. During the Fourth Generation of fecundity (see, I came back to it), another kind of story began to appear, one that saw a place for us in our own Solar System, if not out in the stars (yet). This story was to some extent an engineering story. It told of massive engines and small craft, of tiny colonies and bubbles of life spreading out to the moon, to Mars, through the asteroid belt, past massive Jupiter, and on to the distant colder places far from our star. It was a story that appeared as the background to any number of short stories published over the past half-dozen years, and then flourishing in major novels like James S.A Corey’s Leviathan Wakes and Kim Stanley Robinson’s stunning2312. It was a story filled with romance, adventure, and with a love of science and our solar system. It is the story of the Fourth Age of Science Fiction.

  And that brings us back to this book. Edge of Infinity is a companion to Engineering Infinity, as the title foreshadows. It’s a Fourth Generation book. It takes stories set firmly in an industrialised, colonised Solar System during a time when starflight is yet to emerge, and imagines life in the hottest places close to our star, and in the coldest, most distant corners of our home. For all that some individual stories may be darker or lighter in tone, it’s a love letter to our home, to our future and to science fiction. It won’t be the last.

  Jonathan Strahan

  Perth, Western Australia

  THE GIRL-THING WHO WENT OUT FOR SUSHI

  Pat Cadigan

  NINE DECS INTO her second hitch, Fry hit a berg in the Main ring and broke her leg. And she didn’t just splinter the bone – compound fracture! Yow! What a mess! Fortunately, we’d finished servicing most of the eyes, a job that I thought was more busy-work than work-work. But those were the last decs before Okeke-Hightower hit and everybody had comet fever.

  There hadn’t been an observable impact on the Big J for almost three hundred (Dirt) years – Shoemaker-Somethingorother – and no one was close enough to get a good look back then. Now every news channel, research institute, and moneybags everywhere in the Solar System was paying Jovian Operations for a ringside view. Every JovOp crew was on the case, putting cameras on cameras and back-up cameras on the back-up cameras – visible, infrared, X-ray, and everything else. Fry was pretty excited about it herself, talking about how great it was she would get to see it live. Girl-thing should have been watching where she wasn’t supposed to be going.

  I was coated and I knew Fry’s suit would hold, but featherless bipeds are prone to vertigo when they’re injured. So I blew a bubble big enough for both of us, cocooned her leg, pumped her full of drugs, and called an ambulance. The jellie with the rest of the crew was already on the other side of the Big J. I let them know we’d scrubbed and someone would have to finish the last few eyes in the radian for us. Girl-thing was one hell of a stiff two-stepper, staying just as calm as if we were unwinding end-of-shift. The only thing she seemed to have a little trouble with was the O. Fry picked up consensus orientation faster than any other two-stepper I’d ever worked with, but she’d never done it on drugs. I tried to keep her distracted by telling her all the gossip I knew, and when I ran out, I made shit up.

  Then all of a sudden, she said, “Well, Arkae, that’s it for me.”

  Her voice was so damned final, I thought she was quitting. And I deflated because I had taken quite a liking to our girl-thing. I said, “Aw, honey, we’ll all miss you out here.”

  But she laughed. “No, no, no, I’m not leaving. I’m going out for sushi.”

  I gave her a pat on the shoulder, thinking it was the junk in her system talking. Fry was no ordinary girl-thing – she was great out here, but she’d always been special. Back in the Dirt, she’d been a brain-box, top-level scholar and a beauty queen. That’s right – a featherless biped genius beauty queen. Believe it or leave it, as Sheerluck says.

  Fry’d been with us for three and half decs when she let on about being a beauty queen. The whole crew was unwinding end-of-shift – her, me, Dubonnet, Sheerluck, Aunt Chovie, Splat, Bait, Glynis, and Fred – and we all about lost the O.

  “Wow,” said Dubonnet. “Did you ask for whirled peas, too?” I didn’t understand the question, but it sounded like a snipe. I triple-smacked him and suggested he respect someone else’s culture.

  But Fry said, “No, I don’t blame any a youse asking. That stuff really is so silly. Why people still bother with such things, I sure don’t know. We’re supposed to be so advanced and enlightened, and it still matters how a woman looks in a bathing suit. Excuse me, a bi
ped woman,” she added, laughing a little. “And no, the subject of whirled peas never came up.”

  “If that’s how you really felt,” Aunt Chovie said, big, serious eyes and all eight arms in curlicues, “why’d you go along with it?”

  “It was the only way I could get out here,” Fry said.

  “Not really?” said Splat, a second before I woulda blurted out the same thing.

  “Yes, really. I got heavy metal for personal appearances and product endorsements, plus a full scholarship, my choice of school.” Fry smiled and I thought it was the way she musta smiled when she was crowned Queen of the Featherless Biped Lady Geniuses or whatever it was. It wasn’t insincere, but a two-stepper’s face is just another muscle group; I could tell it was something she’d learned to do. “I saved as much as I could so I’d have enough for extra training after I graduated. Geology degree.”

  “Dirt geology though,” said Sheerluck. It used to be Sherlock, but Sheerluck’ll be the first to admit she’s got more luck than sense.

  “That’s why I saved for extra training,” Fry said. “I had to do the best I could with the tools available. You know how that is. All-a-youse know.”

  We did.

  FRY HAD WORKED with some other JovOp crews before us, all of them mixed – two-steppers and sushi. I guess they all liked her and vice versa but she clicked right into place with us, which is pretty unusual for a biped and an all-octo crew. I liked her right away, and that’s saying something because it usually takes me a while to resonate even with sushi. I’m okay with featherless bipeds, I really am. Plenty of sushi – more than will admit to it – have a problem with the species just on general principle, but I’ve always been able to get along with them. Still, they aren’t my fave flave to crew with out here. Training them is harder, and not because they’re stupid. Two-steppers just aren’t made for this. Not like sushi. But they keep on coming and most of them tough it out for at least one square dec. It’s as beautiful out here as it is dangerous. I see a few outdoors almost every day, clumsy starfish in suits.