The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (35 page)

“Yeah.”

“The worst thing we could do to them is
Hamlet
, Will,” Varner said. “They haven’t destroyed it yet.”

Walking along the track down to the swamp, Varner considered the path that had brought him here. And driven him a little mad? Perhaps, he thought. Oh yes. But when the wind was westerly, Old Varner thought, he still knew a hawk from a handsaw.

BUTTERFLY BOMB

Dominic Green

British writer Dominic Green’s output has to date been confined almost entirely to the pages of
Interzone
, but he’s appeared there
a lot
, selling them eighteen stories in the course of the last few years.

Green lives in Northampton, England, where he works in information technology and teaches kung fu part time. He has a website at homepage.ntlworld.com/lumpylomax, where the text of several unpublished novels and short stories can be found. In the sharp and clever story that follows, he takes us to a world where nobody and nothing turn out to be even remotely what they seem.

O
LD KRISHNA WAS
walking home from a solid afternoon’s work removing acid tares from the downhill green-garden when he saw the drive flare dropping through the clouds. It was reversed, on braking burn. Whoever’s hull it was, it was also glowing red hot, canted at an extreme angle for maximum drag, maximum deceleration, minimum time in atmosphere. The pilot had a job to do which he imagined might get him shot at by the planetary inhabitants. As Old Krishna was, as far as he was aware, the only planetary inhabitant, this did not bode well.

Still, he couldn’t run. If he ran, he might fall in the high gravity, catch his stick against one of the outcrops of former civilization that filled the hills, break his glasses and have to grind a new pair, even break a leg. And a broken leg, out here, might mean death. He contented himself with hurrying, helping his stroke-damaged left leg along with his good arm and the stick, going on three legs in the Evening.

The house had been selected as a good fortifiable location not easily visible from outside the valley. He had surrounded it quite deliberately with yellowgarden shrubs. The native xanthophyll-reliant vegetation was usually harmless to Earth life, but the shrubs he had chosen were avoided by the native fauna. The house was mostly made of hand-cut stone blocks – he’d cheated by using as many stones levered out of various ruins in the hills as possible, but still doubted he could repeat the feat without industrial construction gear. That sort of work was for the young man he had once been.

This planet’s ruins came in three flavours. First came serene, ancient fractal-patterned structures that merged into the landscape; second came massive, hastily-erected polyhedra that clashed with it. The latter were trademarks of the later Adhaferan empire, the former a matter for future archaeologists. Krishna had had neither the time nor the stomach to research that matter for himself.

The third type of ruin was ramshackle, overgrown, cheerfully constructed of the cheapest possible materials, and clearly identifiable as human. Each ruin had a tidy, identical grave before its front door, and many such ruins surrounded Old Krishna’s house.

There was an ornamental greengarden next to the house, where he’d managed to keep a few terrene flowers alive outside the confines of a glasshouse – edelweiss, crocus, Alaskan lupin, heather, all chosen for the cold and rarefied air. He had kept the heather for the colour, and the bees. At this time of day she might be in the garden stealing bee-honey, pinning up wet clothes, cutting back flowers, or even just sitting reading in the single hammock.

The bushes round the garden disintegrated in a welter of flame. Incinerated pine needles blew in his face like furnace sinter. He smelled cheap, low-tech reaction mass. Petrochemicals! They were still burning hydrocarbons!

The ship was the mass-produced swing-boomerang type he had been dreading, capable of furling itself up into a delta for atmospheric exit, or making itself straight as a die for vertical take-off and landing. It had just vertically landed in his garden. The satellite defence system should, of course, have vaporized the ship before it even entered the atmosphere, but it had been a decade before anyone had happened by to maintain the defences. His masters had not sent so much as a radio message for years. There had probably been a coup in the inworlds.

He could hear their voices now. He couldn’t understand them; they were not using translators. A human ear could only hear impossibly complex birdsong, filling the spectrum of sound from the deep sub-basso-profundo of a mating grouse to the falsetto trill of a bat. The creatures were not singing, however, and did not in any way resemble birds. Old Krishna doubted their speech could be understood by the house translators. Certainly, though, they would speak Proprietor. He had to hurry. They would see reason.

He could hear pre-burn sparklers already, touching off fuel leakages to prevent explosion. He wondered if she could have been killed by their landing jets, and felt a small, irrational surge of joy as he heard her voice. They would not understand the voice. It was not talking to them, after all. It was shouting to him.
“KRISHNA – IT’S ALL RIGHT. I AM GOING WITH THESE GENTLEMEN. YOU SHOULD STAY AWAY.”

He gripped his fists tight around the stick until the skin squealed. She was trying to warn him off! She was worried
they
would hurt
him!
He heard his own voice shouting “TIIITAAALIII!”

He heard the magnetohydrodynamic whine of an airlock door closing. It was too late. They had done their business, now they were going. He cursed himself for having set up the comms antenna for her. It allowed her to talk to passing trade ships and hear news from other suns, but it also lit up their location like a neon sign to ships whose purpose was not trade at all.

There was still time, even now. There were always courses of action.

The house was relatively undamaged, though draped with burning fragments of garden. Outside the house was a rough stone cube that Old Krishna, after the manner of his beliefs, had determined was his god. He made his obeisance to it as he entered the house, and bowed to it again as he left with a dusty maximum-survivability container, the lock on which he had to break open with a hammer. Having opened the container, he extracted from it a long tubular device terminating in a spike at one end. He thrust the spike into the ground, uncovered the activator and pulled out the pin. Immediately, the heavy capital end of the device flared into life, no doubt powered by some obscene radiation or other. It would probably be best not to remain close to it.

High above him, deep beneath him, a powerful and no doubt carcinogenic radio signal was being broadcast on all bands millions of miles out into space, saying only one thing.
Come and get me.
Old Krishna had hoped he would never have to use it.

Stamping down the small fires all around the house, he settled down on his god with a book to wait. The book was an exciting fiction allegedly written many thousands of years ago, which he had purchased from a trader. The principal characters included the architect of the entire universe and his only begotten son.

He had reached chapter ten of the book, in which a wicked king stole away a poor man’s one small ewe-lamb, when the second swing boomerang appeared in the sky. He put down his book, took up the few possessions he imagined he would be allowed, and walked down the hill to meet the ship.

The superintendent of the slave ship looked Old Krishna up and down sourly.

“We’ve expended nearly 300 million joules of energy detouring down this gravity well. We were expecting a colonial settlement at the very least. You say you’re the only person on planet?”

Old Krishna nodded. “Yes, your honour. You will find me worth the calories. There was originally another planetary inhabitant; my granddaughter, who was taken by Minorite slavers not unlike yourselves. I intend to follow her into slavery and locate her.”

The superintendent, unusually for a slaver, was human. He bore the facial tattoos of a freedman; he had probably once stood on just such a barren hillside as this, waiting while his own father had sold him into service. Possibly it was the old man’s concern for his grandchild, so different from his own experience, that softened the superintendent’s heart.

“We’re not a shuttle service, grandfather,” said the superintendent gently. “You’ll go where you’re sold.”

Old Krishna smiled and bowed. “Which will be the Being Exchange on Sphaera. All slaving vessels on this branch are in its catchment area.”

“Pardon my impudence, grandfather, but you look on the verge of death. What could you possibly have to offer an owner?”

“I am a skilled AI mediator and seventh generation language programmer.”

The superintendent’s eyebrows raised. “I was under the impression no human being was capable of understanding instructions below generation eight.”

“Human beings once understood generation one, on simple machines only, of course. We designed and built artificial intelligences of our own before we were ever contacted by the Proprietors.”

The superintendent scratched his forty-year service tattoo thoughtfully. “In that case, you might be of help to us. Our own mediator had arranged a system of non-overlapping magisteria between the nihilist and empiricist factions in our ship’s flight systems, but we were infected with a solipsistic virus several days ago. The accord has now broken down into open sulking. We have been becalmed insystem for two days while our vessel argues with itself. Our astrogator is muttering crazy talk about learning to use a slide rule.”

Old Krishna bowed. “I have extensive experience of the empiricist mindset, and some acquaintance with the nihilist. I believe I can resolve your difficulties.”

The superintendent bowed back, largely for the look of the thing. “Then I believe we can certainly place a quality item like yourself And we are, in fact, bound for Sphaera.” He gestured back into the ship with his ergonomic keypad. “Take a bunk in the aft dormitory. The autochef there does most of the terrestrial amino acids.”

The aft dormitory was cramped, the bunks clearly built for Svastikas, a radially symmetrical race previously conquered by the Proprietors. Unfortunately the Proprietors had taken to breeding them selectively; this in turn had led to a very small gene pool, and left the Svastikas vulnerable to a disease which had exterminated all but a few zoo specimens. Now human beings were left to curl up uncomfortably in spaces originally designed for creatures resembling man-sized echinoderms.

The dormitory was currently occupied by sunken-eyed, sorrowful colonists from a world Old Krishna had never heard of – a world very similar to Krishna’s, one of the string of Adhafera-formed worlds abandoned by the Adhaferan Empire. Growing terrestrial crops in a xanthophyll-reliant ecosystem had proven more difficult than the colonists had imagined, and they had not thought to make provision for an emergency journey home. Slavers’ representatives handed out Come-And-Get-Me beacons for free on colony dispersal worlds; they were cheap enough, and brought in entire homesteads at a time without any need for violence. Old Krishna found himself occupying the top bunk to a troubled adolescent who kept glancing apprehensively at the single Featherfoot guard who nominally prevented exit from the dormitory.

“He’s not quite as scary as he looks,” said Old Krishna. “Those pinnate fringes on his legs are actually gills. The reason why you feel so light-headed in here is because the oxygen content has to be kept high to allow him to breathe. You could kill him with an aerosol deodorant.”

As he spoke, he did not divert his attention from the small cube of stone tacked by a gobbet of never-drying glue to the top of his bunk, before which he sat with his hands clasped, rocking back and forth, saying poojas.

“Why are you praying to a rock?”

“It is a fragment of my god,” said Old Krishna. “My actual god is similar, though somewhat larger. I keep this fragment so that I may carry it with me easily on long journeys.”

The boy did not understand. “Your god is a
rock?”

“And your god is?”

“An intangible being who lives atop Mount Kenya on Earth, within the Earth’s sun, and in other hidden places.”

Krishna scoffed.
“I
can
see
my god.”

“But who decided your god was a rock?”

“I did.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I live in a place where there are a large number of rocks. It was the most convenient god material to hand.”

There was a long uneasy silence.

“Father says the Proprietors used to have a culture that depended too much on machines,” said the boy at length. “He says their machines failed and they’ve had to improvise. Bring in people and make them work their fields, dig in their mines, compute their orbital trajectories. Work them to death.” He shuddered. “He says the calculus sweatshops are the worst.”

“Their machines didn’t
entirely
fail,” said Krishna. “They developed an advanced community of artificial intelligences that developed two diametrically opposed views of the cosmos. Until these two views are reconciled, their society’s automated systems are on hold.”

“And when will that happen?” said the boy.

Krishna grinned. “Hopefully never. They were about to launch an invasion fleet against the Solar System when the Schism hit. That was in 1908 ad. The very first sign of system failure, actually, was when two of their scoutships collided over Tunguska in Siberia. They have since found out two things – firstly, that humans provide the perfect slaves, as we’ve only just moved away from manually-controlled systems ourselves, and secondly, that there are plenty of humans willing to sell other humans into Proprietor slavery.”