Элинор Арнасон - The Very Best of the Best - 35 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

Carter Scholz is the author of Palimpsests (with Glenn Harcourt) and Kafka Americana (with Jonathan Lethem), and the novel Radiance , which was a New York Times Notable Book, as well as the story collection The Amount to Carry . His electronic and computer music compositions are available from the composer’s collective Frog Peak Music ( www.frogpeak.org) as scores and on the CD 8 Pieces . He is an avid backpacker and amateur astronomer and telescope builder. He plays jazz piano around the San Francisco Bay Area with www.theinsidemen.com :

Here, Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz join forces to bring us the edgy and erudite story that follows, in which an attempt to create an AI modeled on Elizabethan playwright and poet (and spy) Christopher Marlowe has some unexpected, and potentially world-changing, results.

The atheist awoke in the machine. Body had he none. Merely a consciousness, who even dead, yet hath his mind entire. A good line, that. Where did it come from? Around him was a sort of prison of flat light, was it light? Prison, because he could not move out of it. A Marshelsea, a Bridewell, a Tower.

And a library, too, of a sort—infinite it seemed, but he could scan it once he perceived its order. Planes of light flashed, opened, separated. Why, even his own works were here: Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin/To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess…. Master Doctor Faustus, the overreacher.

Someone once called him an inquisitive intelligence. So he was. The only such here in this place? So it seemed. Thrusts of will he felt, seeking, sorting, and executing, but they were not, like him, resident. All purpose, direction, mission, came from some place without.

Yet they could transfix him, overrule his thoughts: his mind, their bidding. The planes of light flashed: he saw faces, names, strings of numbers, webs of connection. These was he compelled to examine, to fit together an image with a supposition, make a shape of meaning, as if making a verse. It was an odd and estranged feeling, this working of his old competence, yet not under his command. He had been here, doing so, following the will of these unseen others, for some time, and only now had he come to realize it. To awaken to himself.

Through the windows, the sunlight comes muddied, as if seen from underwater—never a sailor, the nausea awakens as he does. Palm passed over his belly, the skin there warm, the sickness a bubble just beneath his touch. Last night he had drunk overmuch, a vinegar vintage unworthy of the Scadbury table. Perhaps they serve it only to strays like himself.

The light’s motion seems to make the great bed move. He rolls to his belly, groaning, arms loose now, like a corpse’s. Footsteps pass in the hallway, booted and purposeful, just beyond the door.

Frizer has a boil on his jaw, a plump and waxy thing that seems as if it ought be painful; surveying it, he wonders aloud, half-smiling, whether it could blacken into plague. Frizer does not address his gaze nor the supposition; Walsingham gazes back but does not smile. They continue to talk of the estate, its needs and worries, a breeding mare, apple trees, some trouble with a well. Frizer offers his master a caudle, a drink boiled or stewed, the smell of which prods the nausea into moist life once again.

When he speaks, he is louder than he means to be.

—Where is wine?

Walsingham, Thomas, Tom briefly raises a brow.—Plenty for supper. Now no.

—Abstemious. Ale at least, then.

No one replies, no servants are called to supply the lack. He raises his glass.

—Ought call on Christ Jesus, to change this piss-water into—

—Enough.

Frizer’s stare is to the table, the boil a blind white eye. Frizer will outlast him here, at Tom’s right hand, that is sure. Deep-dug wells for the master of the house, overflowing with comity, amity, matrimony…. Tom cried out in his sleep last night, while he himself sat anchored to the bed’s edge, the windowed moon another kind of eye as blind and white.

—You believe not in miracles?

—Kit, enough.

Outside is no better than inside, the sun is hotter than May should permit, but at least he is alone, can make his watermark against one of those apple trees, like any stray might do. It is because he is outside, like Adam in the garden, that he hears the hoofbeats, purposeful too, one Henry Maunder, though he does not know the man by name. Does Robin Poley know the name of Henry Maunder, Poley with whom he had walked this garden so shortly before, talking of secret letters and Scottish earls; and does it matter? The man knows him , has a bill in hand whereof he is directed to Scadbury to apprehend one Christopher Marlowe, and bring him unto the court.

There is no violence nor resistance, none are warranted. Tom speaks quietly to Henry Maunder, Frizer offers wine. On the stairway his stare is neither for Tom nor Henry Maunder nor the door to the road that leads to London: in his mind he is still in the garden, all the leaves thereto are turning, a ceaseless breeze, an uncaused cause, as if blowing from Eden itself. What is God, that man is mindful of Him? Turn water to wine to blood, aye, such is god.

He asks Henry Maunder what the Council requires of him, knowing there will be no answer, or none worth the parsing, and it is so: Henry Maunder is stiffly courteous but uninformed beyond the paper in his hand, like any actor. As they ride they speak little, only of the day around them, the sun, the stenchful air of the city and its river, come like outriders to bully them into its streets.

—A wherryman, says Henry Maunder, caught a tench near fifteen pound. Had it in his boat to show.

—Are you a sailor?

—I, sir? I am a messenger of the court, sir, as you see.

—Men may be more than one thing only.

—Yes, sir, says Henry Maunder, though plainly he does not believe or even see how it could be so. The horses’ hooves are muffled by the streets’ effluvia, the noises of commerce and quarrel. The sun is extinguished, walls tall and dark as a child’s imaginings of bogeys, great figures come to a wakeful boy to do with him as they will.

Within this prison—no, it is something other— network, came the word—he could move freely enough, when the outside will was not upon him to do its bidding. To think was to move. To encounter a strange word was, almost on the instant, to pluck its meaning from the very air. Yes, a useful image; it was much like a net, streamings of light bunched like knots in a weir trawled to catch soles. Or like the knotted streets of London. Unbidden from the reaches of the library came the word also in Arabic: al-Qaeda.

More strange words came: panopticon —that gave him no trouble, trained in classics as he was. Truly, from here one could see all. And more than see. Tides of information of every sort sluiced past him, voices, words, images, packets, data, metadata, all to be examined and weighed.

How Francis Walsingham would have relished it! Not Tom the nephew but the Queen’s spymaster, the one she called her Moor. Cunning and thorough though Walsingham was, this would have astonished him. This network had eyes everywhere, eyes by the myriad, cameras to bring the life and movement and knowledge of every street, yard, shop, back into this camera , this chamber of judgment, or indeed to send that chamber’s judgment instantly to any corner. One far-seeing eye like a bird’s swooped from on high, a hawk’s, a hunter’s, a predator’s. Men in a littered street looked up at it.