The Years Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2009 Read online

  A hostess walked us down dark carpet, past rows of potted bamboo, and seated us at a table near the back. The waitress brought us our drinks. Voicheck took his glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The lenses were prescription, I noticed. Over the last decade, surgery had become so cheap and easy in the States that only anachronists and foreigners wore glasses anymore. Voicheck took a long swig of his Goose Island and got right to the point. “We need to discuss price.”

  Veronica shook her head. “First, we need to know how it is made.”

  “That information is what you’ll be paying for.” His accent was thick, but he spoke slowly enough to be understood. He opened his hand and showed us a small, gray flash drive, the kind you’d pay thirty dollars for at Best Buy. His fingers curled back into a fist. “This is data you’ll understand.”

  “And you?” Veronica asked.

  He smiled. “I understand enough to know what it is worth.”

  “Where is it from?”

  “Donets’k, originally. After that, Chisinau laboratory, until about two years ago. Now the work is owned by a publicly traded company which shall, for the time being, remain nameless. The work is top secret. Only a few people at the company even know about the breakthrough. I have all the files saved. Now we discuss price.”

  Veronica was silent. She knew better than to make the first offer.

  Voicheck let the silence draw out. “One hundred thirteen thousand,” he said.

  “That’s a pretty exact number,” Veronica said.

  “Because that’s exactly twice what I’ll entertain as a first counter offer.”

  Veronica blinked. “So you’ll take half that?”

  “You offer fifty-six thousand five hundred? My answer is no, I am sorry. But here is where I rub my chin; and because I’m feeling generous, I tell you we can split the difference. We are negotiating, no? Then one of us does the math, and it comes out to eighty-five thousand. Is that number round enough for you?”

  “I liked the fifty-six thousand better.”

  “Eighty-five minimum.”

  “That is too much.”

  “What, I should let you steal from me? You talked me down from one hundred thirteen already. I can go no further.”

  “There’s no way we—”

  Voicheck held up his hand. “Eighty-five in three days.”

  “I don’t know if we can get it in three days.”

  “If no, then I disappear. It is simple.”

  Veronica glanced at me.

  I spoke for the first time. “How do we even know what we’d be paying for? You expect us to pay eighty-five grand for what’s on some flash drive.”

  Voicheck looked at me and frowned. “No, of course not.” He opened his other fist. “For this, too.” He dropped something on the table. Something that looked like a small red wire.

  “People have died for this.” He gestured toward the red wire. “You may pick it up.”

  I looked closely. It wasn’t one wire; it was two. Two rubber-coated wires, like what you’d find behind a residential light switch. He noticed our confusion.

  “The coating is for protection and to make it visible,” he said.

  “Why does it need protection?”

  “Not it. You. The coating protects you.”

  Veronica stood and looked at me. “Let’s go. He’s been wasting our time.”

  “No, wait,” he said. “Look.” He picked up one of the wires. He lifted it delicately by one end—and the other wire lifted, too, rising from the table’s surface like some magician’s trick.

  I saw then that I’d been wrong; it was not two wires after all, but one.

  “The coating was stripped from ten centimeters in the middle,” Voicheck said. “So you could see what was underneath.”

  But in the dim light, there was nothing to see. I bent close. Nothing at all. In the spot where the coating had been removed, the thread inside was so fine that it was invisible.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “An allotrope of carbon, Fullerene structural family. You take it,” he said. “Do tests to confirm. But remember, is just a neat toy without this.” He held out the flash drive. “This explains how the carbon nanotubes are manufactured. How they can be woven into sheets, what lab is developing the technique, and more.”

  I stared at him. “The longest carbon nanotubes anybody has been able to make are just over a centimeter.”

  “Until now,” he said. “Now they can be miles. In three days you come back. You give me the eighty-five thousand, I give you the data and information about where the graphene rope is being developed.”

  Veronica picked up the wire. “All right,” she said. “Three days.”

  My father was a steelworker, as was his father before him.

  My great-grandfather, though, had been here before the mills. He’d been a builder. He was here when the Lake Michigan shoreline was unbroken sand from Illinois to St. Joseph. He built Bailey Cemetery around the turn of the century—a great stone mausoleum in which some of the area’s earliest settlers were buried. Tourists visit the place now. It’s on some list of historic places, and once a summer, I take my sister’s daughters to see it, careful to pick up the brochure.

  There is a street in Porter named after him, my great-grandfather. Not because he was important, but because he was the only person who lived there. It was the road to his house, so they gave it his name. Now bi-levels crowd the street. He was here before the cities, before the kingdoms of rust and fire. Before the mills came and ate the beaches.

  I try to imagine what this part of Indiana would have been like then. Woods, and wetlands, and rolling dunes. It must have been beautiful.

  Sometimes I walk out to the pier at night and watch the ore boats swing through the darkness. From the water, the mill looks like any city. Any huge, sprawling city. You can see the glow of a thousand lights; you hear the trains and the rumble of heavy machines. Then the blast furnace taps a heat, a false-dawn glow of red and orange—flames making dragon’s fire on the rolling Lake Michigan waves. Lighting up the darkness like hell itself.

  The drive back to Indiana was quiet. The rain had stopped. We drove with the windows half-open, letting the wind flutter in, both of us lost in thought.

  The strand—that’s what we’d call it later—was tucked safely into her purse.

  “Do you think it’s for real?” she asked.

  “We’ll know tomorrow.”

  “You can do the testing at your lab?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do you think he is who he says he is?”

  “No, he’s not even trying.”

  “He called it a graphene rope, which isn’t quite right.”

  “So?” I said.

  “Clusters of the tubes do naturally align into ropes held together by Van der Waals forces. It’s the kind of slip only somebody familiar with the theory would make.”

  “So he’s more familiar with it than he lets on?”

  “Maybe, but there’s no way to know,” she said.

  The next day I waited until the other researchers had gone home, and then I took the strand out of my briefcase and laid it on the lab bench. I locked the door to the materials testing lab and energized the tensile machine. The fluorescent lights flickered. It was a small thing, the strand. It seemed insignificant as it rested there on the bench. A scrap of insulated wiring from an electrician’s tool box. Yet it was a pivot point around which the world would change, if it was what it was supposed to be. If it was what it was supposed to be, the world had changed already. We were just finding out about it.

  The testing took most of the night. When I finished, I walked back to my office and opened a bottle I kept in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. I sat and sipped.

  It’s warm in my office. My office is a small cubby in the back room of the lab, a thrown-together thing made by wall dividers and shelves. It’s an office because my desk and computer sit there. Otherwise it might be confused
with a closet or small storage room. File cabinets line one side. There are no windows. To my left, a hundred sticky notes feather the wall. The other wall is metal, white, magnetic. A dozen refrigerator magnets hold calendars, pictures, papers. There is a copy of the lab’s phone directory, a copy of the lab’s quality policy, and a sheet of paper on which the geometry of crystal systems is described. The R&D directory of services is there, too, held to the wall by a metal clip. All the phone numbers I might need. A picture of my sister, blonde, unsmiling, caught in the act of speaking to me over a paper plate of fried chicken, the photo taken at a summer party three years ago. There is an Oxford Instruments periodic table. There’s also a picture of a sailboat. Blue waves. And a picture of the Uspar-Nagoi global headquarters, based out of London.

  Veronica finally showed up a few minutes past midnight. I was watching the butterfly as she walked through the door.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t break it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I couldn’t get a tensile strength because I couldn’t get it to fail. Without failure, there’s no result.”

  “What about the other tests?”

  “It took more than 32,000 pounds per square inch without shearing. It endured 800 degrees Fahrenheit without a measurable loss of strength or conductivity. Transmission electron microscopy allowed for direct visualization. I took these pictures.” I handed her the stack of printed sheets. She went through them one by one.

  Veronica blinked. She sat. “What does this mean?”

  “It means that I think they’ve done it,” I said. “Under impossibly high pressures, nanotubes can link, or so the theory holds. Carbon bonding is described by quantum chemistry orbital hybridization, and they’ve traded some sp2 bonds for the sp3 bonds of diamond.”

  She looked almost sad. She kissed me. The kiss was sad. “What are its uses?”

  “Everything. Literally, almost everything. A great many things steel can do, these carbon nanotubes will do better. It’s super-light and superstrong, perfect for aircraft. This material moves the fabled space elevator into the realm of possibility.”

  “There’d still be a lot of R&D necessary—

  “Yes, of course, it will be years down the road, but eventually the sky’s the limit. There’s no telling what this material will do, if it’s manufactured right. It could be used for everything from suspension bridges to spacecraft. It could help take us to the stars. We’re at the edge of a revolution.”

  I looked down at the strand. After a long time, I finally said what had been bothering me for the last sixteen hours. “But why did Voicheck come to you?” I said. “Of all places, why bring this to a steel company?”

  She looked at me. “If you invent an engine that runs on water, why offer it to an oil company?” She picked up the strand. “Only one reason to do that, John. Because the oil company is certain to buy it.”

  She looked at the red wire in her hand. “If only to shut it down.”

  That night we drank. I stood at the window on the second story of her townhome and looked out at her quiet neighborhood, watching the expensive cars roll by on Ridge Road. The Ridge Road that neatly bisects Lake County. Land on the south, higher; the land to the north, low, easing toward urban sprawl, and the marshes, and Lake Michigan. That long, low ridge of land represented the glacial maxim—the exact line where the glacier stopped during the last ice-age, pushing all that dirt and stone in front of it like a plow, before it melted and receded and became the Great Lakes—and thousands of years later, road builders would stand on that ridge and think to themselves how easy it would be to follow the natural curve of the land; and so they built what they came to build and called it the only name that would fit: Ridge Road. The exact line, in the region, where one thing became another.

  I wrapped the naked strand around my finger and drew it tight, watching the bright red blood well up from where it contacted my skin—because in addition to being strong and thin, the strand had the property of being sharp. For the tests, I’d stripped away most of the rubber coating, leaving only a few inches of insulation at the ends. The rest was exposed strand. Invisible.

  “You cut yourself,” Veronica said. She parted her soft lips and drew my finger into her mouth.

  The first time I’d told her I loved her, it was an accident. In bed, half asleep, I’d said it. Good night, I love you. A thing that was out of my mouth before I even realized it—a habit from an old relationship come rising up out of me, the way every old relationship lives just under the skin of every new one. All the promises. All the possibilities. Right there under the skin. I’d felt her stiffen beside me, and an hour later, she nudged me awake. She was sitting up, arms folded across her breasts, as defensive as I’d ever seen her. I realized she hadn’t slept at all. “I heard what you said.” There was anger in her voice, and whole stratus of pain.

  But I denied it. “You’re hearing things.”

  Though of course it was true. What I’d said. Even if saying it was an accident. It had been true for a while.

  The night after I tested the strand, I lay in bed and watched her breathe. Blankets kicked to the floor.

  Light from the window glinted off her necklace, a thin herringbone—some shiny new steel, Uspar-Nagoi emblem across her beautiful dark skin. I caressed the herringbone plate with my finger, such an odd interlinking of metal.

  “They gave this to you?”

  She fingered the necklace. “They gave one to all of us,” she said. “Management perk. Supposed to be worth a mint.”

  “The logo ruins it,” I said. “Like a tag.”

  “Everything is tagged, one way or another,” she said. “I met him once.”

  “Who?”

  “The name on the necklace.”

  “Nagoi? You met him?”

  “At a facility in Frankfurt. He came through with his group. Shook my hand. He was taller than I thought, but his handshake was this flaccid, aqueous thing, straight-fingered, like a flipper. It was obvious he loathed the Western tradition. I was prepared to like him, prepared to be impressed, or to find him merely ordinary.”

  She was silent for so long I thought she might have fallen asleep. When she finally spoke, her voice had changed. “I’ve never been one of those people who judged a person by their handshake,” she said. “But still . . . I can’t remember a handshake that gave me the creeps like that. They paid sixty-six billion for the Uspar acquisition. Can you imagine that much money? That many employees? That much power? When his daughter went through her divorce, the company stock dropped by two percent. His daughter’s divorce did that. Can you believe that? Do you know how much two percent is?”

  “A lot.”

  “They have billions invested in infrastructure alone. More in hard assets and research facilities, not to mention the mills themselves. Those assets are quantifiable and linked to actuarial tables that translate into real dollars. Real dollars which can be used to leverage more takeovers, and the monster keeps growing. If Nagoi’s daughter’s divorce dipped the share price by two percent, what do you think would happen if a new carbon-product competitor came to market?”

  I ran a finger along her necklace. “You think they’ll try to stop it?”

  “Nagoi’s money is in steel. If a legitimate alternative reached market, each mill he owned, each asset all across the world, would suddenly be worth less. Billions of dollars would blink out of existence.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “We get the data. I write my report. I give my presentation. The board suddenly gets interested in buying a certain company in Europe. If that company won’t sell, Uspar-Nagoi buys all the stock and owns them anyway. Then shuts them down.”

  “Suppression won’t work. The Luddites never win in the long run.”

  She smiled. “The three richest men in the world have as much money as the poorest forty-eight nations,” she said. “Combined.”

  I watched her face.

 
She continued. “The yearly gross product of the world is something like fifty-four trillion dollars, and yet there are millions of people who are still trying to live on two dollars a day. You trust business to do the right thing?”

  “No, but I trust the market. A better product will always find its way to the consumer. Even Uspar-Nagoi can’t stop that.”

  “You only say that because you don’t understand how it really works. That might have been true a long time ago. The Uspar-Nagoi board does hostile takeovers for a living, and they’re not going to release a technology that will devalue their core assets.”

  Veronica was silent.

  “Why did you get into steel?” I asked. “What brought you here?”

  “Money,” she said. “Just money.”

  “Then why haven’t you told your bosses about Voicheck?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you going to tell them?”

  “No, I don’t think I am.”

  There was a long pause.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Buy it,” she said. “Buy Voicheck’s data.”

  “And then what? After you’ve bought it.”

  “After I’ve bought it, I’m going to post it on the Internet.”

  The drive to meet Voicheck seemed to take forever. The traffic was stop and go until we reached Halsted, and it took us nearly an hour to reach downtown Chicago.

  We parked in the same twenty-dollar lot and Veronica squeezed my hand again as we walked toward the restaurant.

  But this time, Voicheck wasn’t standing outside looking like a bouncer. He wasn’t looking like anything, because he wasn’t there. We waited a few minutes and went inside. We asked for the same table. We didn’t speak. We had no reason to speak.

  After a few minutes, a man in a suit came and sat. He was a gray man in a gray suit. He wore black leather gloves. He was in his fifties, but he was in his fifties the way certain breeds of athletes enter their fifties—broad, and solid, and blocky-shouldered. He had a lantern jaw and thin, sandy hair receding from a wide forehead. The waitress came and asked if he needed anything to drink.