The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

They waited silently until a vehicle slid to the curb, and its gull-door rose up. Gus slid inside first, announcing their destination loudly to the cab’s AI, knowing that her vestigial accent could cause recognition problems.

Ives crossed his arms, as the door descended and the street began to slide past.

“People always draw family trees,” Gus said suddenly, as though she herself had not told him to drop the topic of past lives, “upside down. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

“Quй?” Ives spread his hands. “ No comprendo. Sorry.”

“Branching out downwards, with increasing time. But the further back you go, the more ancestors you have.”

“Right. Ten generations back-”

“You have 1,024 ancestors.”

“Assuming no incest. Yee-hah. You know you’re a redneck when-” Ives stopped, looked at her, then patted her hand. “Gus, dear. It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anybody’s. Life just turns out like that.”

“I know.”

But Gus’s sudden wealth had come too late to keep her mother alive. Genetic defect in the heart, the consultant had told her. The neuro-degeneration weakened her, and we still don’t know the cause of that.

Silent tears, unbidden, tracked down Gus’s cheeks.

A holo landscape half-filled the room, hanging above the desktop and extending outwards, so that Ives appeared to be standing in the middle of a mountain range.

“I’ve modified here, and here.” Gus pointed at additional free-floating holovolumes in which equations scrolled. “But it’s little different from the standard mosaic.”

The landscape represented a simplified three-dimensional spacetime-two spatial, one time-as an overall brane, formed of interwoven sub-branes. Gus pointed at the “zoom” icon. The image expanded until gaps were visible: the holes between linked Planck-length tessellae which form the vacuum itself.

“I reworked the topology”-Gus smiled-“using not-knots. Remember them?”

“Ah, yes.”

The image flipped into a kind of mirror-converse. What had seemed a landscape was now a moirйe pattern draped across something else: an underlying jagged sub-landscape which supported reality.

“Then I got more interested in the continuum’s context than in spacetime itself. Modelling the not-knot-”

Ives nodded. “The power of metaphor. Well done, dear.”

Faraday used the notion of fields purely as a metaphor, explaining electromagnetic action at a distance. Yet modern researchers thought of fields as the underlying reality, while everything else-particles, twistors, branes, tessellae-was illusion. Physicists gained the concept “with their mother’s milk,” as Einstein said.

But Gus’s work changed the metaphor. In her model, the eleven dimensions of realspace were the illusory projection, draped across the underlying fractal context which shapes both this and other universes. She had a name for the context: mu-space.

“The ultimate continuum,” she said.

“If you’re right, there’s a Nobel prize in-”

“And I’ve already sent a signal through it.”

ASHLEY COMBE, 1852

Hot flames crackle in the fireplace. A vision of eternal Hell awaiting her? Pain insinuates its claws between the deadening layers of laudanum intoxication: it is the crab, this disease which is killing her.

“My father-” Ada’s voice is a whimper. “I want to be buried-with him.”

“Hush, my dear.” A hand pats hers. “That will be taken care of.”

For a moment, she does not know who this is: William, perhaps Andrew Crosse, or Faraday… Last week, she believes, her old friend Dickens read to her. To her. Daughter of the great poet, but a strange, maddened fool in her own right.

I’ve done so much wrong.

Has Charles Babbage been to see his failing Queen of Engines, his dying Enchantress of Numbers? But it is John Crosse, her former lover, who is with her now. For a time, her old friends were barred from visiting; now it is too late for foolishness.

It hurts-

Her body is soaked. William and her sons-her three acknowledged sons-have been pouring cold water upon her bared, so-thin midriff to ease the pain. But for now, only Crosse is here with her.

“I received a letter,” he whispers. “About… Jean-Pierre. Our son thrives. He thrives, my love.”

My son?

“He has a constant playmate,” Crosse adds. “Daughter of the man who took him abroad. Giuliani? Something like that. Someday, says Medora, they’ll be-”

The whimpering begins again.

My son!

Ada fights the pain, but neither guile nor ferocity will beat this last, implacable foe. Finally, though it takes two more pain-racked days, metastasized cervical can cer shuts down her internal organs one by one, her ragged breath rattles, and she lies still.

In the fireplace, lowering flames sputter. Grey ash spills upon the floor.

It was perhaps a mesmeric demonstration, at a soirйe held on her 26th birthday, which opened the Pandora’s box of Ada’s mind, released the dark spirit which could never be contained again. She blamed that experiment-undertaken for sensation’s sake-and her own impetuous nature for all that followed. Equations burned, pure thoughts soared, but her inner drives would always deny her peace.