The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight Read Online Free PDF Page B

offering some shade as the sun got up. Then she dragged the three horses together and roped them into a string – quite a ticklish operation since Jeg's big stallion was a mean bastard and seemed determined to kick her brains out.
    When she'd got it done she frowned off towards those dust trails. They were headed for the town alright, and fast. With a better look she reckoned on about nine or ten, which was two or three better than twelve but still an almighty inconvenience.
    Bank agents after the stolen money. Bounty hunters looking to collect her price. Other outlaws got wind of a score. A score that was currently in the bottom of a well, as it went. Could be anyone. Shy had an uncanny knack for making enemies. She found she'd looked over at Dodd, face down in the dust with his bare feet limp behind him. The only thing she had worse luck with was friends.
    How had it come to this?
    She shook her head, spat through the little gap between her front teeth and hauled herself up into the saddle of Dodd's horse. She faced it away from those impending dust clouds, toward which quarter of the compass she knew not.
    Shy gave the horse her heels.

ZERO FOR CONDUCT
    Greg Egan
    Greg Egan ( www.gregegan.net ) published his first story in 1983, and followed it with twelve novels, six short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction – mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes – that established him as one of the most important writers working in the field. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His latest book is the novel The Arrows of Time , which concludes the "Orthogonal" trilogy.
    1
    L atifa started the web page loading, then went to make tea. The proxy she used convinced her internet provider that every page she accessed belonged to a compendium of pious aphorisms from uncontroversial octogenarians in Qom, while to the sites themselves she appeared to be a peripatetic American, logging on from Pittsburgh one day and Kansas City the next. Between the sanctions against her true host country and that host's paranoia over the most innocent interactions with the West, these precautions were essential. But they slowed down her already sluggish connection so effectively that she might as well have been rehearsing for a flight to Mars.
    The sound of boiling water offered a brief respite from the televised football match blaring down from the apartment above. "Two nil in favour of the Black Pearls, with fifteen minutes left to play! It's looking like victory for the home team here in Samen Stadium!" When the tea had brewed, she served it in a small glass for her grandfather to sip through a piece of hard sugar clenched between his teeth. Latifa sat with him for a while, but he was listening to the shortwave radio, straining to hear Kabul through the hum of interference and the breathless commentary coming through the ceiling, and he barely noticed when she left.
    Back in her room after fifteen minutes, she found the scratched screen of the laptop glistening with a dozen shiny ball-and-stick models of organic molecules. Reading the colour coding of the atoms was second nature to her by now: white for hydrogen, black for carbon, cherry red for oxygen, azure for nitrogen. Here and there a yellow sulfur atom or a green chlorine stood out, like a chickpea in a barrel of candy.
    All the molecules that the ChemFactor page had assigned to her were nameless – unless you counted the formal structural descriptions full of cis-1,3-dimethyl-this and 2,5-di-tert-butyl-that – and Latifa had no idea which, if any of them, had actually been synthesised in a lab somewhere. Perhaps a few of them were impossible beasts, chimeras cranked out by the software's mindless permutations, destined to be completely unstable in reality. If she made an effort, she could probably weed some of them