Robert Silverberg - Science Fiction The Best of 2002

ROBERT SILVERBERG and KAREN HABER

SCIENCE FICTION

THE BEST OF 2002

ROBERT SILVERBERG’s many novels includeThe Alien Years ; the most recent volume in the

Majipoor Cycle,The King of Dreams ; the bestselling Lord Valentine trilogy; and the classicsDying Inside

andA Time of Changes .Sailing to Byzantium , a collection of some of his award-winning novellas, was

published by ibooks in 2000.Science Fiction 101—Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder , an

examination of the novellas that inspired him as a young writer, was published in March 2001, followed

byCronos , a collection of three time-travel pieces published in August 2001. He has been nominated for

the Nebula and Hugo awards more times than any other writer; he is a five-time winner of the Nebula

and a four-time winner of the Hugo.

KAREN HABER is the acclaimed editor of the Hugo Award-nominatedMeditations on Middle Earth ,

and the forthcomingExplorations of The Matrix . She also created the bestsellingThe Mutant Season

series of novels, of which she co-authored the first volume with her husband, Robert Silverberg. She is a

respected journalist and an accomplished fiction writer. Her short fiction has appeared inThe Magazine of

Fantasy and Science Fiction ,Full Spectrum 2 , andWomen of Darkness .

Fantasy and Science Fiction

published by ibooks, inc.:

Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

Fantasy: The Best of 2001

Robert Silverberg & Karen Haber, Editors

The Ultimate Cyberpunk

Pat Cadigan, Editor

The Ultimate Halloween

Marvin Kaye, Editor

Science Fiction: The Best of 2002

An ibooks, Inc. ebook

ibooks, Inc.

24 West 25thSt.

New York, NY 10010

The ibooks World Wide Web Site Address is:http://www.ibooksinc.com

ISBN: 1-59176-598-6

Contents

Introduction

Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber

Tourist

Charles Stross

The Long Chase

Geoffrey A. Landis

Coelacanths

Robert Reed

Liking What You See: A Documentary

Ted Chiang

The Black Abacus

Yoon Ha Lee

The Discharge

Christopher Priest

Aboard theBeatitude

Brian W. Aldiss

Droplet

Benjamin Rosenbaum

The War of the Worldviews

James Morrow

Breathmoss

Ian R. MacLeod

Angles

Orson Scott Card

Introduction

This is the second in an annual series of anthologies intended to bring together in one convenient volume

the best science-fiction stories of the year. It is one of three such anthologies now being published, and,

like the other two, it reflects the tastes and prejudices of editors who have had decades of experience in

reading and writing science fiction. That these three anthologies have such widely differing contents is a

tribute not only to the ability of experts to disagree but also to the wealth of fine shorter material being

produced today in the science-fiction world.

Such annual anthologies are a long-standing tradition in science fiction. The first of all the Year’s Best

Science Fiction anthologies appeared in the summer of 1949. It was edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T.E.

Dikty, a pair of scholarly science-fiction readers with long experience in the field, and it was called, not

entirely appropriately (since it drew entirely on material published in 1948),The Best Science Fiction

Stories: 1949.

Science fiction then was a very small entity indeed—a handful of garish-looking magazines with names

likePlanet Stories andThrilling Wonder Stories , a dozen or so books a year produced by

semi-professional publishing houses run by old-time s-f fans, and the very occasional short story by the

likes of Robert A. Heinlein inThe Saturday Evening Post or some other well-known slick magazine. So

esoteric a species of reading-matter was it that Bleiler and Dikty found it necessary to provide their

book, which was issued by the relatively minor mainstream publishing house of Frederick Fell, Inc., with

two separate introductory essays explaining the nature and history of science fiction to uninitiated readers.

In those days science fiction was at its best in the short lengths, and the editors ofThe Best Science

Fiction: 1949 had plenty of splendid material to offer. There were two stories by Ray Bradbury, both

later incorporated inThe Martian Chronicles , and Wilmar Shiras’s fine superchild story “In Hiding,” and

an excellent early Poul Anderson story, and one by Isaac Asimov, and half a dozen others, all of which

would be received enthusiastically by modern readers. The book did fairly well, by the modest sales

standards of its era, and the Bleiler-Dikty series of annual anthologies continued for another decade or

so.

Toward the end of its era the Bleiler-Dikty collection was joined by a very different sort of Best of the

Year anthology edited by Judith Merril, whose sophisticated literary tastes led her to go far beyond the

s-f magazines, offering stories by such outsiders to the field as Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Finney, Donald

Barthelme, and John Steinbeck cheek-by-jowl with the more familiar offerings of Asimov, Theodore

Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and Clifford D. Simak. The Merril anthology, inaugurated in 1956, also

lasted about a decade; and by then science fiction had become big business, with new magazines

founded, shows likeStar Trek appearing on network television, dozens and then hundreds of novels

published every year. Since the 1960s no year has gone by without its Best of the Year collection, and

sometimes two or three simultaneously. Such distinguished science-fiction writers as Frederik Pohl, Harry

Harrison, Brian Aldiss, and Lester del Rey took their turns at compiling annual anthologies, along with

veteran book editors like Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.

In modern times the definitive Year’s Best Anthology has been the series of encyclopedic collections

edited by Gardner Dozois since 1984. Its eighteen mammoth volumes so far provide a definitive account

of the genre in the past two decades. More recently a second annual compilation has arrived, edited by

an equally keen observer of the science-fiction scene, David A. Hartwell. And if there is room in the field

for two sets of opinions about the year’s outstanding work, perhaps there is room for a third. And so,

herewith, yet another Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology, in which a long-time writer/editor and his

writer/editor wife have gathered a group of the science-fiction stories of 2002 that gave them the greatest

reading pleasure.

—Robert Silverberg

—Karen Haber

Tourist

by Charles Stross

Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels: his right hand, outstretched for

balance, clutches a mark’s stolen memories. His victim is just sitting up on the hard stones of the

pavement, wondering what’s happened; maybe he looks after the fleeing youth, but the tourist crowds

block the view and in any case he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run amnesia is what the

polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it’s just more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus

motorised combat boots.

The victim of the mugging sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples.What happened? he

wonders. The universe is a brightly coloured blur of fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises.

His glasses are rebooting continuously: they panic every eight hundred milliseconds, whenever they realise

that they’re alone on his personal area network without the comforting support of a memory hub to tell

them where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are bickering moronically,

disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth.

A tall blonde clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble-wrap leans over him curiously: “you

alright?” she asks.

“I—” he shakes his head, which hurts. “Who am I?” His medical monitor is alarmed because his blood

pressure has fallen: his pulse is racing, and a host of other biometrics suggest that he’s going into shock.

“I think you need an ambulance,” the woman announces. She mutters at her lapel: “phone, call an

ambulance.” She waves a finger vaguely at the victim then wanders off, chainsaw clutched under one

arm, as if embarrassed at the idea of involving herself: typical southern eacutemigreacute behaviour in the

Athens of the North. The man shakes his head again, eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades

skid around him in a elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the north.

Who am I?wonders the man on the pavement. “I’m Manfred,” he says with a sense of stunned wonder.

He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that looms above the crowds on this busy street

corner. Someone has plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider: languid fluffy

pink tentacles wave at him in an attack ofkawai . “I’m Manfred—Manfred. My memory. What’s

happened to my memory?” Elderly Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing

tour bus. He suddenly burns with a sense of horrified urgency.I was going somewhere , he recalls.What

was I doing? It was amazingly important, he thinks, but he can’t remember what exactly it was. He was

going to see someone about—it’s on the tip of his tongue—

Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos.

Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather than born; there are ten

microprocessors for every human being, and the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population

growth in the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below replacement level: in the wired

nations, more forward-looking politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI base.

Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second recession of the century. The Malaysian

government has announced the goal of placing an Imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody else cares

enough to try.

The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest DisneyCorp in the media rights to their latest L5

colony plan, unaware that there’s already a colony out there and it isn’t human: first-generation uploads,

Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid

mining project established by the Franklin Trust. (The lobsters had needed sanctuary, away from a planet

overflowing with future-shocked primates. In return for Franklin beaming a copy of their state vector out

over the deep space tracking network, they agreed to run his cometary Von Neumann factory.)

Two years ago JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on comet Kruschev-7 picked up an

apparently artificial signal from outside the solar system; most people don’t know, and of those who do,

even fewer care. After all, if NASA can’t even put a man on the moon…

Portrait of a wasted youth:

Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his father; he was unplanned, and Pa

managed to kill himself in a building site accident before the Child Support could garnish his income for

the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two bedroom association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call

centre when he was young, but business dried up: humans aren’t needed on the end of a phone any

more. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and

go like tourists in the Festival season—but humans aren’t in demand for shelf stacking either, these days.

His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was regularly excluded and effectively ran wild

from the age of twelve. By thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting: by fourteen he’d broken

his collar-bone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees,

who completed the destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an illicit tawse.

Today he’s a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public surveillance cameras, with distinctions in

steganographic alibi construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime—if you’re going to mug

someone, do so where there are so many by-standers that they can’t pin the blame on you. But the Polis

expert systems are catching up with him: if he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they’ll have a

positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury of his peers that he’s guilty as fuck—and then

he’ll go down to Saughton for four years.

But Jack doesn’t understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or the significance of a chi-squared

test, and the future still looks bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the tourist

gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment, when they begin whispering into his ears in

stereo and showing him pictures of the tourist’s vision, it looks even brighter.

“Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal,” whisper the glasses. “Get a runner, liberate the potential.” Weird

graphs in lurid colours are filling up his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged marketroid.

“Who the fuck are ye?” asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and icons.

“I am you, you are we, got a deal to close,” murmur the glasses. “Dow Jones down fifteen points,

Federated Confidence up three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of skirt hem

lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of multidrug antibiotic resistance in gram negative

bacilli: accept?”

“Ah can tak it,” Jack mumbles, and a torrent of images crashes down on his eyeballs and jackhammers

its way in through his ears like the superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he’s stolen:

the glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed with enough hardware to run the

entire internet, circa the turn of the millennium. They’ve got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed

engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew of high-level agents that collectively

form a large chunk of the society of mind that is their owner’s personality. Their owner is an agalmic

entrepreneur, a posthuman genius locii of the net who catalyses value wherever he goes, leaving money

trees growing in his footprints. This man doesn’t believe in zero-sum games, in a loser for every winner.

And Jack has stolen his memories. There are microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the

ear-pieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the belt pack, before being distributed for

remote storage. At four months per terabyte, memory storage is cheap: what makes this bunch so

unusual is that their owner—Manfred—has cross-indexed them with his agents.

In a very real sense, the glassesare Manfred, regardless of the identity of the soft machine with its

eyeballs behind the lenses. And it is a very puzzled Manfred picks himself up and, with a curious vacancy

in his head—except for a hesitant request for information about accessories for Russian army

boots—dusts himself off, and heads for his meeting on the other side of town.

“Something, he is not there, something iswrong ,” says the woman. She raises her mirrorshades and rubs

her left eye, visibly worried. With crew-cut hair, and wearing a black trouser suit with narrow lapels, she

looks like a G-man from a 1960’s conspiracy movie.

Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. “Manfred are prone to fits of do his

own thing with telling nobody in advance,” he points out. “Do you have concrete reason to suspect

something is wrong?” Despite his words he looks slightly worried. Manfred is a core team member;

losing him at this point could be more than embarrassing. Besides, he’s a friend—for posthuman values of

friendship.

The office translator is good, but it can’t provide real-time lip-synch morphing between French and

Italian: Annette has to make an effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all wrong,

like a badly-dubbed video. And the desk switches from black ash to rosewood abruptly, halfway across

its expanse, and the air currents are all wrong. “His answerphone, it is very good: like Manfred, it does

not lie convincingly.”

“But it doesn’t pass the Turing test. Yet.”

“Non.” A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry lines. “Where can he be? You are

relying on him and I—”

The minister prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop; the woodgrain slips, sliding into a strangely

different conformation, generating random dot stereoisograms—messages for his eyes only. “You will

find him in Scotland,” he says after a moment. “That was on his Outlook. I find it harder to trace his exact

whereabouts—the privacy safeguards—but if you, as next of kin by common law, travel in person…”

“I go.”

The woman in black stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk. “Au revoir!”

“Ciao.”

As she vacates her office the minister flickers off behind her, leaving the far wall the dull grey of a cold

display panel. Outside, she’s cut off from the shared groupspace that she, and Gianni, and the rest of the

team, have established. Gianni is in Rome; she’s in Paris, Markus is in Dusseldorf, and Eva’s in

Wrocklaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway across an elderly continent: but as

long as they don’t try to shake hands they’re free to shout across the office at each other. Their

confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of anonymized communication: Gianni can

swing the best facilities, and it’s a good thing too. He’s making his break out of regional politics and into

European national affairs: their job—his election team—is to get him a seat on the Confederacy

Comission, as Representative for Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of post-humanitarian

action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes their casual working conversation

profoundly interesting to certain people: the walls have ears, and not all the brains attached to them are

human. Annette is more worried than she’s letting on to Gianni. It’s unlike Manfred to be out of contact

for long: even odder for his receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest thing to a

home he’s had for the past couple of years. But something smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying

it would be an overnight trip, and now he’s not answering.Could it be his ex-wife? she wonders: but no,

there’s been no word from the obsessive bitch for months, other than the sarcastic cards she despatches

every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of the daughter Manfred has never met.The music

mafia? A letter bomb from the Copyright Enforcement Front? But no, his medical monitor would have

been screaming its head off if anything like that had happened. She’s organised things so that he’s safe

from the intellectual property thieves, lent him the guiding hand he needs. She gets a a warm sense of

accomplishment whenever she considers how complementary their abilities are: how much of a mess he

was in before he met her for the second time, eyes meeting across a microsat launcher in an abandoned

supermarket outside London. But that’s exactly why she’s worried now. The watchdog hasn’t barked…

Annette takes a taxi to Charles de Gaulle, uses her parliamentary carte to bump an executive class seat

on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh’s airport. The plane is climbing out over la Manche before it

hits her: what if the Franklin Collective isn’t as harmless as he thinks?

The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic bucket seats and subtractive volume

renderings by pre-teens stuck to the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It’s deeply silent, the available

bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors—there are children crying, periodic sirens wailing as

ambulances draw up, and people chattering all around him, but to Manfred it’s like being at the bottom of

a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except there’s no euphoria with this drug. Corridor-corner

vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained and rusted voluntary service booth; video

cameras watch the blue bivvy bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone in his

own head, Manfred is frightened and confused.

“I can’t check you in ’less you sign the confidentiality agreement,” says the triage nurse, pushing an

antique clipboard at Manfred’s face. Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce

the incidence of scandals: “sign the nondisclosure clause here and here, or the house officer won’t see

you.”

Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse’s nose, which is red and slightly inflamed from a nosocomial

infection. His phones are bickering again, and he can’t remember why; they don’t normally behave like

this, something must be missing, but thinking about it is hard. “Why am I here?” he asks for the third time.

“Sign it.” A pen is thrust into his hand. He focusses on the page, jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes

kick in.

“This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the second part is enjoined from disclosing

information relating to the operations management triage procedures and processes of the said

healthgiving institution, that’s you, to any third party—that’s the public media—on pain of forfeiture of

health benefits pursuant to section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can’t sign this! You could

reposess my left kidney if I post on the net about how long I’ve been in hospital!”

“So don’t sign, then.” The nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari, and walks away: “enjoy your wait!”

Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its megapixel display. “Somethingwrong here.” The

keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs opcodes. This gets him into an X.25 PAD, and he has a vague,

disturbing memory that hints about where he can go from here—mostly into the long-since

decommissioned bowels of NHSNet—but the memories spring a page fault and die, somewhere

between fingertips and the moment when understanding dawns. It’s a frustrating feeling: his brain is like

an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning over and over without catching fire.

The kebab vendor next to Manfred’s seating rail chucks a stock cube on his grill; it begins to smoke,

aromatic and blue and herbal—cannabinoids to induce tranquility and appetite. Manfred sniffs twice, then

staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the toilet, his head spinning. He’s mumbling at his wrist

watch: “hello, Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme tree, I’m confused. Oh shit.

Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry? I can’t find my glasses…”

A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women dressed in anachronistic garb:

men in dark suits, women in long dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face

masks. There’s a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from them, and Manfred

instinctively turns to follow them. They leave the A&E unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies

escorted by three gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first century shuffling

dizzily after.They’re all young , Manfred realises vaguely.Where’s my cat? Aineko might be able to make

sense of this, if Aineko was interested.

“I rather fancy we should retire to the club house,” says one young beau: “oh yes! please!” his short

blonde companion chirps, clapping her hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic

gloves to reveal wired lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. “This trip has obviously been

unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no easy way of locating of him without breach of medical

confidence or a hefty gratuity.”

“The poor things,” murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the leprosarium. “Such a humiliating way

to die.”

“Their own fault: if they hadn’t participated in antibiotic abuse they wouldn’t be in the isolation ward,”

harrumphs a twenty-something with mutton-chops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps

his walking stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a flock of cyclists and a rickshaw

before they cross the road onto the Meadows. “Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune

systems.”

Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the fractal dimensionality of leaves: then

he lurches after them, nearly getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus.Club . His feet

hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of vegetative evolution:Something about

those people . He feels a weird yearning, a tropism for information. It’s almost all that’s left of him—his

voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches up her long skirts to keep them out of the

mud: he sees a flash of iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over old-fashioned combat

boots. Not Victorian, then: something else.I came here to see —the name is on the tip of his tongue.

Almost. He feels that it has something to do with these people.

The squad crosses the Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a Georgian cheesecake

frontage with wide steps and a polished brass doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops

pauses on the threshold and turns to face Manfred. “You’ve followed us this far,” he says. “Do you want

to come in? You might find what you’re looking for.”

Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever he’s forgotten.

Annette sits cross-legged on the hotel room floor and interrogates Manfred’s cat.

“When did you last see him?”

Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike

and thick, pleasingly patterned except for a manufacturer’s URL emblazoned on its flanks: but the mouth

produces no saliva, the throat opens on no stomach or lungs. “Go away,” it says: “I’m busy.”

“When did you last see Manfred?” she repeats intently. “I don’t have time for this. The Polis don’t know.

The medical services don’t know. He’s off-net and not responding. So what canyou tell me?”

“Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular basis,” the cat says pompously: “you

knew that when you bought me this body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of

meat?” The tongue rasps out then pauses while microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out

earlier in the day.

Annette sighs. Manfred’s had this robot cat for six years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its

neural wiring, too: this is its third body, and it’s getting more realistically uncooperative with every

hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it’s going to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet

out of spite. “Command override,” she says. “Dump event log to my cartesian theatre, minus eight hours

to present.”

The cat shudders and looks round at her. “Human bitch!” it hisses. Then it freezes in place as the air fills

with a bright and silent tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely high bandwidth

spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would see the cat’s eyes, and a ring on her left hand,

glow blue-white at each other. After a few seconds Annette nods to herself and wiggles her fingers in the

air, navigating a time sequence only she can see. Aineko hisses jealousy at her then stands and stalks

away, tail held high.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Annette hums to herself. She intertwines her fingers, pressing obscure

pressure-points on knuckle and wrist, then sighs and rubs her eyes. “He left here under his own power,

looking normal,” she calls to the cat. “Who did he say he was going to see?” The cat sits in a beam of

sunlight falling in through the high glass window, pointedly showing her its back. “Merde. If you’re not

going to help him—”

“Try the Grass Market,” sulks the cat. “He was going to see the Franklin Collective. Much good they’ll

do him…”

A man wearing second-hand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly expensive pair of glasses bounces

up a flight of damp stone steps beneath a keystone that announces the building to be a Salvation Army

hostel. He bangs on the door, his voice almost drowned out by the pair of Cold War Reenactment

Society MiGs that are buzzing the castle up the road: “open up, ye cunts! Ye’ve got a deal comin’!”

A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair of beady black-eyed video cameras

peer out at him. “Who are you and what do you want?” the speaker crackles.

“I’m Macx,” he says: “you’ve heard from my systems: I’m here to offer you a deal you can’t refuse.” At

least that’s what his glasses tell him to say: what comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more likeah’m

Macx: ye’ve heard frae ma system, Ah’m here tae gie yez a deal ye cannae refuse . The glasses haven’t

had long enough to work on his accent. Meanwhile, he’s so full of himself that he snaps his fingers and

does a little dance of impatience on the top step.

“Aye well, hold on a minute.” The person on the other side of the speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass

Morningside accent that manages to sound more English than the King while remaining vernacular Scots.

The door opens and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall, slightly cadaverous man wearing a tweed

suit that has seen better days and a clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board. His face is almost

concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. “Who did you say you were?”

“I’m Macx! Manfred Macx! Ah’m here wi an opportunity ye wouldnae believe. Ah’ve got the answer

tae yer church’s financial situation. Ah’m gonnae make yez all rich!” The glasses prompt, and Macx

speaks.

The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx from head to foot. Bursts of blue

combustion products spurt from Macx’s heels as he bounces up and down enthusiastically. “Are you

sure ye’ve got the right address?” he asks worriedly.

“Aye, Ah am that.”

The resident backs into the hostel: “well then, come in, sit yourself down and tell me all about it.”

Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of pie charts and growth curves,

documents spawning in the bizarre phase-space of his corporate management software. “Ah’ve got a

deal ye widnae believe,” he begins, gliding past noticeboards upon which Church circulars are staked out

to die like exotic butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of lap-tops left over from a

jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that does double-duty as Mrs Muirhouse’s back-garden

bird-bath. “Ye’ve been here five years an’ yer posted accounts show ye arnae making much

dosh—barely keeping the rent up. But ye’re a shareholder in Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most o’

the church funds’re in the form of a trust left tae it by wan of ye’re congregants when they upped an’

went tae join the omega point, right?”

“Er.” The minister looks at him oddly. “I cannae comment on the Church eschatological investment trust.

Why d’ye think that?”

They fetch up, somehow, in the minister’s office. A huge, framed rendering hangs over the back of his

threadbare office chair: the collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the Dyson

Spheres of the eschaton falling towards the big crunch. Saint Tipler beams down from above with

avuncular approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his head. Posters proclaim the new Gospel:

COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE FOREVER WITHIN MY

LIGHT-CONE. “Can I get you anything? Cup of tea? Battery charge point?” asks the vicar.

“Crystal meth?” asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the vicar shakes his head apologetically. “Aw,

dinnae worry, Ah wis only joshing.” He leans forward: “I know all about your plutonium futures

speculation,” he hisses. A finger taps his stolen spectacles in an ominous gesture: “these dinnae just

record, theythink . An Ah ken where the money’s gone.”

“What have you got?” the minister asks coldly, any indication of good humour flown. “I’m going to have

to edit down these memories, you bastard. Bits of me that aren’t going to merge with the godhead at the

end of time.”

Robert Silverberg - Science Fiction The Best of 2002

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