Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

“We approached Miocene with our news,” Aasleen continued. “I know Washen was disappointed. But I was given the job of finding you again, and if possible, corralling you. Washen helped me profile your nature. Your powers. I decided to lure you in with the promise of another machine like you, and that’s why I turned Bottom-E into a halfway famous abode for a glowing shape-shifting soul. If something went ugly-wrong down here, then at least the damage could be contained.”

“What about the LoYo?” Alone asked.

“They’ve been moved to other quarters. The lights above are hiding sensors, and I designed them myself, and they didn’t help at all. Until that light show, we couldn’t be certain that you were anywhere near this place.”

The needle was quickly growing longer, reaching for the cage’s outermost wall.

“What will you do now?” Alone asked.

“Strip away your engine, first. And then we’ll secure it and you.” Aasleen tried to describe the process, offering several incomprehensible terms to bolster her expertise. But she seemed uneasy when she said, “Then we’ll isolate your neural net and see what it is and how it works.”

“You are talking about my mind,” Alone complained.

“A mind that lives beside a powerful, unexploded bomb,” the captain added.

“The Bakers didn’t design you to survive for this long. My best guess is that you pushed yourself outside the Milky Way, and in that emptiness, nothing went wrong. You drifted. You waited. I suppose you slept, in a fashion. And then you happened upon the Great Ship, before or after we arrived. You could have been here long before us, but of course the Bakers are lost, and you weren’t what I would consider sentient.”

“But I am now,” he said, his voice small and furious.

Aasleen paused.

Without apparent effort, the needle began to pass through the wall of the first impenetrable cage.

“You are going to kill me,” he insisted.

The human was not entirely happy with these events. It showed in her posture, her face. But she was under orders, and she was confident enough in her skills to say, “I don’t think anything bad will happen. A great deal of research and preparation has been done, and we have an excellent team working on you. Afterwards, I think you’ll prefer having all of your memories pulled loose and set inside safer surroundings.”

With a sudden thrust, the needle pierced the other cages, and before it stopped rising, its bright plasmatic tip was touching his center.

Damage was being done.

Quietly but fiercely, he begged Aasleen, “Stop.”

One of the nearby machines began to wail, the tone ominous and quickening. Aasleen looked at the data for a moment, and then too late, she lifted one of her hands, shouting, “Stop it now. We’ve got the alignment wrong—!”

Then the captain and every engineer vanished.

They were projections, Alone realized. The real humans were tucked inside some safe room, protected from the coming onslaught by distance and thick reaches of enduring hyperfiber.

He was injured and dying. But the damage was specific and still quite narrow, and the faltering mind lay exposed like never before. And that was when the Voice that had always been speaking to him and to every soul that stood upon or inside the deep ancient hull could be heard.

“I am the Ship,” the Voice declared.

“Listen!”

In a place that was not one place, but instead was everywhere, Those-Who-Rule received unwelcome news. There was trouble in Creation, and there was sudden talk of grand failures. A portion of the everywhere was in rebellion. How could this be? Who would be so foolish? Those-Who-Rule were outraged by what they saw as pure treachery. Punishment was essential, and the best punishment had to be delivered instantly, before the rebellion could stretch beyond even their powerful reach. A ship was aimed and set loose, burrowing its way through the newborn universe. When it reach edits target, that ship would deliver a sentence worse than any death. Nonexistence was its weapon—oblivion to All—and with that one talent, plus an insatiable hunger for success, the ship dove on and on until it had passed out of sight.

But then the revenge lay in the past. A moment later, upon reflection, Those Who-Rule questioned the wisdom of their initial decision. Total slaughter seemed harsh, no matter how justified. In a brief discussion that wasted time on blaming one another, these agents of power decided to dispatch a second ship—another vessel full of talents and desires and grand, unborn possibilities.

If the second ship caught the first ship—somewhere out into that mayhem of newborn plasmas and raw, impossible energies—disaster would be averted. Life and existence and death and life born again would remain intact. But the universe was growing rapidly, exploding outwards until two adjacent points might discover themselves separated by a billion light-years.

The chase would be very difficult.

And yet, the second ship’s goal could be no more urgent.

Through the fires of Creation, one ship chased the other, and nothing else mattered, and nothing else done by mortals or immortals could compare to the race that would grant the universe permission to live out its day.

Alone listened to the insistent relentless piercing voice. And then he felt his center leaking, threatening to explode. That was when he interrupted, finally asking, “And which ship are you?”

The Voice hesitated.

“But you can’t be the first ship,” Alone realized. “If you were carrying this nonexistence…then you wouldn’t know about the second ship chasing after you, trying to stop your work…”

In a mutter, the Voice said, “Yes.”

“You must be the second ship,” he said. “What other choice is there?”

“But a third choice exists,” the Voice assured.

“No,” said Alone.

Then in terror, he said, “Yes.”

“I am,” the Great Ship said.

“Both,” Alone blurted. “You’re that first ship bringing Nothingness, and you’re the second ship after it has reached its target.”

“Yes.”

“But you can’t stop the mission, can you?”

“I have tried and cannot, and I will try and nothing will change,” the Great Ship declared. Sad, yet not sad.

“You’re both ships, both pilots.”

“We are.”

“Working for opposite ends.”

“Yes.”

“And the humans are happily, foolishly riding you through their galaxy.”

“Doom everywhere, and every moment ending us.”

Alone felt weak, and an instant later, stronger than he had ever felt before. As his energies flickered, he said, “Tell them. Why can’t you explain it to them?”

“Why won’t they hear me?”

“I hear you.”

“Yes.”

“I could tell them for you.”

“If you survived, you would explain. Yes.”

“But.”

“It is too late.”

Alone said nothing.

The Great Ship continued to talk, repeating that same tale of revenge and the chase, of nonexistence and the faint promise of salvation.

But Alone had stopped listening. He heard nothing more. With just the eye of his mind, he was gazing back across tens of thousands of years, remembering every step, and marveling at how small his life appeared when set against the light of far suns and the deep abyss of Time.

Kij Johnson sold her first short story in 1987, and has subsequently appeared regularly in Analog , Asimov’s , Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy . She has won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ Crawford Award. Her short story “The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change” was nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo awards. Her story “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” was nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Hugo awards, and won the World Fantasy Award, while short science fiction story “Spar” won the 2009 Nebula Award. Her novels include World Fantasy Award nominee The Fox Woman and Fudoki . She is currently researching a third novel set in Heian Japan.