The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois Page A

Abby Boudaine did court-mandated dry-outs or simply binged. Eventually, Abby picked up ten-year-old Carlotta from one of these periodic suburban exiles and drove her over the state border into Arizona, jumping bail. “We’ll never be apart again,” her mother told her, in the strained voice that meant she was a little bit high or hoping to be. “Never again!” Blessing or curse? Carlotta wasn’t sure which. “You’ll never leave me, baby. You’re my one and only.”
    Not such an unusual story, the elder Carlotta thinks, though her younger self, she knows, feels uniquely singled out for persecution.
    Well, child, Carlotta thinks, try living as a distributed entity on a Fleet that’s being eaten by invisible monsters, then see what it feels like.
    But she knows the answer to that. It feels much the same.
    “Now you steal from me?” Dan-O’s voice drills through the wall like a rusty auger. Young Carlotta stirs and whimpers. Any moment now, she’ll open her eyes, and then what? Although this is the fixed past, it feels suddenly unpredictable, unfamiliar, dangerous.
    *  *  *
    Erasmus came with me when I went timesliding, and I appreciated that, even before I understood what a sacrifice it was for him.
    Early on, I asked him about the Fleet and how it came to exist. The answer to that question was lost to entropy, he said. He had never known a time without a Fleet – he couldn’t have, because Erasmus was the Fleet, or at least a sovereign fraction of it.
    “As we understand it,” he told me, “the Fleet evolved from networks of self-replicating data-collecting machine intelligences, no doubt originally created by some organic species, for the purpose of exploring interstellar space. Evidence suggests that we’re only a little younger than the universe itself.”
    The Fleet had outlived its creators. “Biological intelligence is unstable over the long term,” Erasmus said, a little smugly. “But out of that original compulsion to acquire and share data, we evolved and refined our own collective purpose.”
    “That’s why you hoover up doomed civilizations? So you can catalogue and study them?”
    “So they won’t be forgotten, Carlotta. That’s the greatest evil in the universe – the entropic decay of organized information. Forgetfulness. We despise it.”
    “Worse than the Invisible Enemy?”
    “The Enemy is evil to the degree to which it abets entropic decay.”
    “Why does it want to do that?”
    “We don’t know. We don’t even understand what the Enemy is, in physical terms. It seems to operate outside of the material universe. If it consists of matter, that matter is non-baryonic and impossible to detect. It pervades parts of the galaxy – though not all parts – like an insubstantial gas. When the Fleet passes through volumes of space heavily infested by the Enemy, our loss-rate soars. And as these infested volumes of space expand, they encompass and destroy life-bearing worlds.”
    “The Enemy’s growing, though. And the Fleet isn’t.”
    I had learned to recognize Erasmus’s distress, not just because he was slowly adopting somewhat more human features. “The Fleet is my home, Carlotta. More than that. It’s my body, my heart.”
    What he didn’t say was that by joining me in the act of surfing time, he would be isolating himself from the realtime network that had birthed and sustained him. In realtime, Erasmus was a fraction of something reassuringly immense. But in slide-time, he’d be as alone as an Erasmus could get.
    And yet, he came with me, when I made my decision. He was my Erasmus as much as he was the Fleet’s, and he came with me. What would you call that, girl? Friendship? At least. I came to call it love.
    The younger Carlotta has stolen those pills (the ones hidden under her smudged copy of People) for a reason. To help her sleep, was what she told herself But she didn’t really have trouble sleeping. No. If she was honest, she’d have to say the pills were