The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

One of his attackers is curled up on his side, hands around his damaged knees, mewling, with a long wicked knife beside him. Guillermi kicks the blade across damp cobbles, out of reach. Another man lies still, softly snoring as though asleep. The third…

Moves!

Guillermi leaps back, startled by a flash of light- blade- and then a crack of sound. And the man slumps once more upon the cold dockyard cobblestones.

“Maria! Are you all right?”

Like a marionette with severed strings, the corpse lies with twisted neck, a pool of dark liquid expanding beneath its lifeless head.

“Yes, my brother.” Blue steel glints in her hand, beneath the baby’s form. “Let’s go.”

Her voice is very calm, as she slips the dark, six-inch Derringer pistol out of sight. It is a muzzle-loaded 1807 Derringer Phila, blued steel inset in polished wood: a percussion cap pocket gun which requires a steady hand and careful aiming. Guillermi is impressed.

Some good will come of this.

It is a strange thought for a protective brother to have. Yet Maria’s hysteria is suddenly gone, along with the dark depression of recent days: replaced by a quiet determination. And somehow her renewed spirit has kept the baby-the newborn boy she must protect-from crying.

“Yes. Three days,” he tells her, “and we’ll see Maman once more.”

OXFORD, 2006

There was a lecture to commemorate some obscure academic event-the anniversary of someone else’s lecture-and it began with a boring recitation of the history of computing. The lecturer’s accent was transatlantic, and his name was Ives, but Gus knew nothing of his work.

“And, before Turing’s life was tragically cut short in 1954, hounded by society to his death, though he almost certainly did more than any other single man to ensure Allied victory in World War II…”

Gus’s skin prickled.

Turing was here, in this place, she realized. He was real.

Buried in Ives’s tone, she thought, was a resentment towards the society which had caused the mathematician’s suicide. Perhaps not everyone in the room detected it-most of her colleagues were waiting in good-natured boredom for the meat of the lecture to follow-but on some level several of them did.

Ives was a visiting research fellow, and Gus followed his talk with interest: a brave attempt to bridge the conflicting software paradigms of formal specification languages and evolutionary algorithms. Most of the people sitting near Gus were Z experts, used to formulating system definitions with rigorous symbolic logic: they frowned at the anti-reductionist notion of creating code which had evolved, not been designed.

Gus was fascinated.

Afterwards, she found herself among a small group of faculty and students drinking tea in the hallway outside the lecture theatre. When someone suggested relocating to a common room, Ives put down his half-drunk tea, looking relieved, then made the counter-proposal of coffee in Starbucks.

“My treat,” he said, which swayed the balance.

“Authors and academics,” he would tell Gus at a later date, “are easily swayed by the promise of free drink or food.”

“Pavlovian conditioning,” she would reply. “And the desire to meet like minds: let’s be fair.”

The coffee house was teeming with energy. While the rest of the group went upstairs to stake out a claim on seats, Gus volunteered to help Ives carry the collection of cappuccinos, frappuccinos, tea-that last for old Crichton, of course-and lattes, which someone had pointed out was a bag of bevvies.

“I was hoping,” said Ives, leaning on the delivery counter, “to have a conversation free of maths humour, for a change.”

A “bag” was technically correct: a mathematical set where duplication was allowed but sequencing was irrelevant-both Jim and Maureen had ordered venti lattes, and it didn’t matter which of the two drinks either person took.

“No chance of that round here.” Gus was surprised at her own boldness. “If you want normality, head north.”

“Or just outwards, yeah. Town and gown. I love this old place.” Ives had chosen to wear a bright red tie, and he was now running his finger inside his shirt collar, and looking uncomfortable. “Less formal than I expected. I was doing some consultancy at a place in London, and everyone was wearing business suits.”

“You might as well take the tie off,” said Gus. “Visiting the empire’s last bastion must have misled you.”

“Right. Here, it’s just like home. I’m the only guy in this city who’s wearing one.” He tugged it, pulling the knot too tight, in his effort to undo it. “Damn. You know, I had to consciously work out the theory behind this, but I only modelled the putting-it-on operation.”

So much for an evening without maths humour.

“Let me.” Surprised again at her own actions, she reached up-aware of his close warmth-and undid the knot.

“Thanks. You realize there are more than 80 ways to tie one of these things?”

“Really?” Gus frowned in concentration, social niceties forgotten. It had become a technical problem, and that was interesting.