The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

support of King Frederik,’ whom they allege—”

“They declare,” corrected Hamilton.

Pollux laughed. “Oh, let’s get the manners right, and never mind the horrors they describe! All right. They declare that the mad old bastard has been the victim of some sort of coup, and intend to return him to his throne. A coup very much in the eye of the beholder, I should think. A lie more than a declaration, I’d call it. I wonder if Frederik will survive it?”

Hamilton gave no reply. He was pleased to hear it. But it only underlined how important the contents of Lustre’s head were.

Pollux continued his explanations with a gesture around him. “We’re in a mansion, a perfectly normal one, in lunar orbit.” He gestured upwards. “That’s an intelligent projection from another of our properties, one considerably beyond the political boundaries of the solar system. We’ve named that object ‘Nemesis.’ Because we discovered it. It’s the sun’s twin, much less bright.” He shared a smile with Castor. “No metaphor intended.” He looked back to Hamilton. “Travelling at the speed of light, it’d take around a year to get there.”

“You speak of a property there—” Hamilton wondered if they’d sent some automatic carriage out to the place and were calling it by a lofty name.

“We’ve got several properties there,” said Castor, stepping forward to join his brother. “But I think Pollux was referring to the star itself.”

Hamilton knew they were goading him. So he gave them nothing.

“Do you remember the story of Newton and the worm, Major?” asked Pollux, as if they were all sharing the big joke together. But the man wasn’t attempting courtesy, his tone of voice scathing, as if addressing a wayward child. “It’s part of the balance nursery curriculum in Britain, right? You know, old Isaac’s in his garden, an apple falls on his head, he picks it up and sees this tiny worm crawling across its surface, and so he starts thinking about the very small. Unaligned historians have sunk almost every detail of that old tale, by the way, but never mind that. Isaac realised that space needs an observer, God, to make reality keep happening when there’s none of us around. You know, he’s the guy in the forest when the tree falls, and because of him it makes a noise. He’s part of the fabric of creation, part of and the motive behind the ‘decreed and holy’ balance. And the stars and the galaxies and the tremendous distances between them are like they are just because that’s how he set up the stage, and that’s all there is to it. The balance in our solar system is the diamond at the centre of an ornate setting, the further universe. But it is just a setting. Or at least that’s the attitude that great powers academia has always encouraged. It keeps everything fixed. Held down.”

“But you know, we’re not much for academia, we like to get our hands dirty,” said Castor, who sounded a little more affable. “The two of us have our feet planted in the muddy battlefields of mother Earth, where we’ve made our money, but we’ve always looked at the stars. Part of our fortune has gone towards the very expensive hobby of first class astronomy. We have telescopes better than any the great powers can boast, placed at various locations around the solar system. We also make engines. A carriage that slides down a fold, altering gravity under itself at every moment, is capable, in the void, of only a certain acceleration. The record keeps inching up, but it’s a matter of gaining a few miles an hour because of some technical adjustment. And once you’ve reached any great acceleration inside the solar system, you’re going to need to start decelerating in a few days, because you’ll need to slow down at your destination. It wouldn’t be out of the question to send an automatic carriage out into the wilds beyond the comet cloud, but somehow nobody’s gotten around to doing it.”

“That always puzzled us.”

“Until we heard whispers about the great secret. Because people talk to us, we sell weapons and buy information. It became clear that for a nation to send such a carriage, to even prepare a vehicle that greatly exceeded records, would be to have every other nation suspect they’d found something out there, and become suddenly aggressive toward them, in a desperate attempt to keep the balance.”

Hamilton kept his silence.

“When we stumbled on Nemesis in a photographic survey, we realised that we had found something we had always sought, along with so many other disenfranchised inhabitants of Earth—”

“Land,” said Hamilton.

They laughed and applauded like this was a party game. “Exactly,” said Castor.

“We tossed a coin,” said Pollux, “I was the one who went. With a small staff. I took a carriage with a fold full of supplies, and set it accelerating, using an engine of our own, one limited by physical rather than political principles. I struck out for a new world. I opened up a new frontier. For us, this time. For all the people shut out when the great powers closed down the world—” He noticed that his brother was frowning at him, and visibly reined himself in. “The carriage accelerated until after a year or so we were approaching the speed of light. We discovered, to our shock, that as we did so, the demands on the fold became extraordinary. It seems, incredibly, that there is a speed limit on the universe!”

Hamilton tried to keep his expression even, but knew he was failing. He didn’t know how much of this he could believe.

“By my own internal clock, the round trip took four years—”

“But I remained here as fifteen years passed,” said Castor. “Because when you approach the speed of light, time slows down. Just for you. Yeah, I know how mad it sounds! It’s like God starts looking at you differently!”

“And you should see the beauty of it, Major, the rainbows and the darkness and the feeling that one is… finally close to the centre of understanding.”

Hamilton licked his dry lips. “Why does all this happen?”

“We don’t know, exactly,” admitted Castor. “We’ve approached this as engineers, not theorists. ‘God does not flay space,’ that’s what Newton is supposed to have said. He theorised that God provides a frame of reference for all things, relative to Him. But these spooky changes in mass and time depending on speed… that seems to say there’s a bit more going on than Newton’s miniscule gravitation and miniscule causality!”

Hamilton nodded in the direction of Lustre. “I gather she wasn’t on that first trip?”

“No,” said Pollux. “That’s what I’m coming to. When the carriage started decelerating towards Nemesis, we began to see signs of what we initially took to be a solar system surrounding the star. Only as we got closer did we realise that what we had taken to be small worlds were actually carriages. Ones the size of which human beings have not dreamt. The carriages of foreigners.”

Hamilton’s mouth set in a line. That these had been the first representatives of humanity! And the foreigners were so close! If any of this could be true. He didn’t let his gaze move upwards as if to see them. He could almost feel the balance juddering. It was as if something dear to him was sliding swiftly away, into the void, and only destruction could follow. “So,” he said, “you drew alongside and shook hands.”

“No,” laughed Pollux. “Unfortunately. We could see immediately that there were enormous symbols on the carriages, all the same design, though we couldn’t make anything of them. They were kind of… like red birds, but deformed, unfocussed. You needed to see two to realise they were a symbol at all. We approached with all hulloos and flags, and suddenly our embroidery was flooded with what might have been voices, but sounded like low booming sounds. We yelled back and forth, uselessly, for about an hour. We were preparing a diagram to throw into the void in a canister, stick figures handing each other things—”

“I’ll bet,” said Hamilton.

“—when they switched on lights that just illuminated their insignia. Off, then again. Over and over. It was like they were demanding for us to show ours.”

Hamilton pointed at the monstrosity over the fireplace. “Didn’t you have that handy?”

“That’s a later invention,” said Castor, “in response to this very problem.”

“When we didn’t have any insignia of our own to display,” said Pollux, “they started firing at us. Or we assume it was firing. I decided to get out of it, and we resumed acceleration, rounded the star, and headed home.”

Hamilton couldn’t conceal a smile.

“Before the next expedition,” continued Castor, “we built the biggest carriage we could and had the coats of arms painted all over it. But we needed one more thing: something to barter with.” He gestured towards Lustre. “The contents of her head, the locations of the missing mass, the weight of all those living minds, a trading map of the heavens. Depending on where the foreigners came from, we might have information they didn’t. Or at least we