Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  She knew that in her own way she had adapted, and not just by taking her medication regularly. She had adapted her mind and her soul, and knew that in doing that she had adapted her body chemistry, too, in subtle ways that no genetic engineer or ultra-smart expert system could ever have predicted. She knew that she was unique, and that what Alan had felt for her really did qualify as love, and was not to be dismissed as any mere addiction. If it had been mere addiction, there wouldn't have been any problem at all; he would simply have switched to another girl who'd been infected with the same virus vectors but had proved to be immune—so far—to the emergent mutations.

  The punter wasn't a bad sort, all things considered. Unusual tastes weren't necessarily associated with perverted manners. He paid Anna in cash and he dropped her right outside the door of Lambeth North tube station. It was, he said, pretty much on his way home—which meant that he could conceivably have been Isabel's next-door neighbor. Anna didn't ask for further details, and he wouldn't have told her the truth if she had. There was an etiquette in these matters which had to be observed.

  By the time Anna got back to the cemetery the grave had been filled in. The gravedigger had arranged the wreaths in a pretty pattern on the freshly turned earth, which was carefully mounded so that it wouldn't sink into a hollow as it settled beneath the spring rains. Anna studied the floral design very carefully before deciding exactly how to modify it to incorporate her own wreath.

  She was a little surprised to note that her earlier impression had been mistaken; there were several wreaths made up of genetically engineered exotics. She quickly realized, however, that this was not a calculated expression of xenophilia so much as an ostentatious gesture of conspicuous consumption. Those of Alan's friends and relatives who were slightly better-off than the rest had simply taken the opportunity to prove the point.

  When she had rearranged the wreaths she stood back, looking down at her handiwork.

  “I didn't want any of this to happen,” she said. “In Paris, it might almost pass for romantic—man becomes infatuated with whore, recklessly smashes himself up in his car when she becomes infected with some almost-unprecedented kind of venereal disease—but in Pinner it's just absurd. You were a perfect fool, and I didn't even love you…but my mind got blown to hell and back by the side effects of my own mutated psychotropics, so maybe I would have if I could have. Who knows?”

  I didn't want it to happen either, he said, struggling to get the words through the cloying blanket of her medication, which was deeply prejudiced against any and all hallucinations. It really was an accident. I'd got over the worst of the withdrawal symptoms. I'd have been okay. Maybe I'd even have been okay with Kitty, once I'd got it all out of my system. Maybe I could have begun to be what everybody wanted and expected me to be.

  “Conformist bastard,” she said. “You make it sound like it was all pretense. Is that what you think? Just a phase you were going through, was it? Just a mad fling with a maddening whore who went completely mad?”

  It was the real thing, he insisted, dutifully.

  “It was a lot realer than the so-called real thing,” she told him. “Those expert systems are a hell of a lot cleverer than Old Mother Nature. Four billion years of natural selection produced spanish fly and rhino horn; forty years of computerized protein design produced me and a thousand alternatives you just have to dilute to taste. You couldn't expect Mother Nature to take that kind of assault lying down, of course, even if she always has been the hoariest whore of them all. Heaven only knows what a psychochemical wilderness the world will be when all the tailored pheromones and augmentary psychotropics have run the gamut of mutational variation. You and I were just caught in the evolutionary cross fire. Kitty and Isabel too, I guess. No man is an island, and all that crap.”

  I don't think much of that as a eulogy, he said. You could try to be a little more earnest, a little more sorrowful.

  He was right, but she didn't dare. She was afraid of earnestness, and doubly afraid of sorrow. There was no way in the world she was going to try to put it the way Ecclesiastes had—in much wisdom is much grief, and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow and all that kind of stuff. After all, she had to stay sane enough to get safely back to the hospital or they wouldn't let her out again for a long time.

  “Good-bye, Alan,” she said, quietly. “I don't think I'll be able to drop in again for quite a while. You know how things are, even though you never once came to see me in the hospital.”

  I know, he said. You don't have any secrets from me. We're soul mates, you and I, now and forever. It was a nicer way of putting it than saying he was addicted to her booby-trapped flesh, but it came to the same thing in the end.

  She went away then: back to the tube station, across zones three, two, and one, and out again on the far side of the river. She wanted to be alone, although she knew that she never would be and never could be.

  The receptionist demanded to know why Isabel hadn't brought her back in the car, so Anna said that she'd asked to be dropped at the end of the street. “I wanted to walk a little way,” she explained. “It's such a nice evening.”

  “No it isn't,” the receptionist pointed out. “It's cloudy and cold, and too windy by half.”

  “You don't notice things like that when you're in my condition,” Anna told her, loftily. “I'm drugged up to the eyeballs on mutated euphorics manufactured by my own cells. If it weren't for the medication, I'd be right up there on cloud nine, out of my mind on sheer bliss.” It was a lie, of course; the real effects were much nastier.

  “If the way you're talking is any guide,” the receptionist said, wryly, “you're almost back to normal. We'll soon have to throw you back into the wide and wicked world.”

  “It's not as wide or as wicked as all that,” Anna said, with due kindness and consideration, “and certainly not as worldly. One day, though, all the fallen angels will learn how to fly again, and how to soar to undiscovered heights—and then we'll begin to find out what the true bounds of experience are.”

  “I take it back,” the receptionist said. “I hope you haven't been plaguing your poor sister's ears with that kind of talk—she won't want to take you out again if you have.”

  “No,” said Anna, “I don't suppose she will. But then, she's not really my sister, and never was. I'm one of a kind.” And for once, there was no inner or outer voice to say Don't flatter yourself, or Better be grateful for what you've got, or We're all sisters under the skin, or any of the other shallow and rough-hewn saws whose cutting edges she had always tried so very hard to resist.

  Life Edit

  DAMON KNIGHT

  Damon Knight is one of the living grand masters of science fiction, without whom the field and the literature would be unknowably different. He is among the first of the great in-field literary critics (In Search of Wonder). He founded the National Fantasy Fan Federation. He founded the Science Fiction Writers of America and the Nebula Award. He was a founder of the Milford Writing Workshop in the 1950s and a founder of the Clarion Workshops in the 1960s. He is one of the great editors and anthologists of SF (the twenty volumes of Orbit). And most of all, he is one of the great writers. His classic short fiction is a model of clear style and sophisticated treatment of ideas for others (even James Michener lists Knight's stories as an influence). He has kept growing as a writer for six decades, he is very active online, and in 1996 he published what may be his finest novel, Humpty Dumpty. He is also notable for his ability to write short short stories, an art nearly lost among younger writers. This is the shortest story in this book, but it packs no less a punch than the longest.

  Maureen Appleforth opened the door, saw that the little conference room was empty, walked in, and let the door close behind her. She pulled out a chair and sat down. One day away from her twenty-ninth birthday, Maureen Appleforth had reddish brown hair with a natural wave, and she was neither too plump nor too thin, but just right.

  After a moment the door opened and a
young man came in with a machine under his arm. He had sleek brown hair and looked like the kind of man who smoked a pipe. He saw Maureen and looked surprised. “Ms. Appleforth? I was just going to set up the life editor. I'm Brian Orr.”

  He offered his free hand and she took it for a moment with her cool fingers. “I'm a little early,” she said.

  “That's all right. Better early than never.” He laughed briefly and set the machine down on the table. Then he uncoiled a thick cable and plugged it into an outlet. “Would you sit over here please, Ms. Appleforth? We won't start until you're ready, but I just want to do some calibrations first.” He pulled two leads out of the machine and showed her the cuffs at the ends of them. “Ok to put these on you?”

  She said, “Will it hurt?”

  “No, not a bit. Take off your watch, please.” He wrapped the cuffs around her wrists; the cuffs were soft but a little tight. He tapped keys on the pad in front of him and looked at the screen. “You're a bit nervous,” he said. “Is this a voluntary decision on your part?”

  “Not entirely. They told me I couldn't go any higher in the company unless…”

  “But you don't want to do it?”

  “No.”

  “But you want to stay in the company. Go higher.”

  “Yes.”

  “So it's a dilemma, isn't it?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “That's the kind of thing I tell people.”

  “You're in conflict resolution upstairs? Or counseling?”

  “Conflict.”

  “And you're good at it. Or they wouldn't care if you went higher or not.” His voice was pleasant, and she was feeling a little more relaxed.

  “So let's just talk,” he said. “Is there anything I can tell you?”

  She looked at him. He was projecting honest concern and impartiality. She said, “Why did you take the treatment? If you did, and if you remember.”

  “Oh, I remember, all right. It was something I said to a girlfriend of mine, years ago. I don't remember what it was, but it used to bother me about once a week. I'd sit and think, ‘Jesus, I wish I hadn't said that to her.’”

  “And now you don't remember.”

  “No, because it never happened.”

  “But you can remember remembering?”

  “That's the way it works.”

  “What if I don't have anything like that? Anything that bothers me when I remember it?”

  “You may be surprised. Everybody has something. All the way from horrible crimes to egg on your face.”

  “I don't I've had a very tranquil life.”

  “Happy childhood?”

  “Oh, yes. My father—my biological father—”

  “Yes?”

  “He left us when I was a year old, but he looked me up when I was grown, and we have dinner every now and then. He's very nice, a very gentle man. He's very fond of me, in fact. So even that—it's just—”

  He waited.

  “Why do I have these headaches?” she said.

  He looked down at his keypad. “Been to a doctor?”

  “Many doctors. All the tests.”

  “Well, then that's another good reason, isn't it? Really, I don't see how you can lose. Either you'll find something to change, like everybody else, or you won't. And if you don't, that's even better, don't you think?”

  She hesitated. “When you edit your life—”

  “Yes?”

  “Doesn't that make everything different? Not just for you, for other people?”

  “I'm not sure I follow.”

  “Suppose, for instance, you had a lover, a woman, and it was a bad relationship. Now you go back and edit her out of your life, right?”

  “Yes.” He looked uncomfortable.

  “So, after you do that, just suppose she finds somebody else and they have a child. That child wouldn't have existed before. Or suppose you kill somebody, and you wish you hadn't. So you edit that, make it come out differently. So now the dead person is alive, but is she real, or just—some kind of ghost?”

  “As far as I'm concerned, she's real. You know, what they tell us in training is, you're not creating anything. You're just moving from one time line to another. Where you didn't say anything dumb to your girlfriend, didn't get drunk and fall down the stairs, whatever. So, in this new time line, naturally you meet people that weren't in the old one. They're just as real as you are. Whatever that means.”

  After a moment, looking at the machine, he remarked, “Your pulse rate has been holding pretty steady. This isn't an emotional thing with you, is it?”

  “No. And I'm going to do it. Yes. I am. What do I do?”

  “Just relax and remember. Start with things that happened today, then further back, further back. You'll know when you hit something you need to change, even if it's buried back there.”

  The machine began to hum and the room darkened gradually, as if transparent dark petals were closing around her. She closed her eyes, and it was like falling into a well of shadows. Bright images swam up and receded, but there was nothing to edit or change; it was all moonlight and shadows, right back to her first birthday. The day when her drunken father picked her up by the ankles. And swung her. Against the cold dark.

  And there was nothing to edit there, either. Somebody else, her father probably, had already edited that moment, or she wouldn't be here, wandering like a cool ghost through the life that was so important to other people.

  Orr was bending over her. “Ms. Appleforth?” She opened her eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “I have an awful headache,” she said.

  “That happens sometimes.” He sat down again.

  She took the cuffs off, rose and opened the door. “Aside from that, I'm fine,” she said over her shoulder. “You're fine too, aren't you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that's just fine. Isn't it?”

  Orr looked up at her anxiously. “Ms. Appleforth, are you sure you're all right?”

  “Oh, yes. Or if not—” As the door closed, her voice drifted back, “—does it matter?”

  First Tuesday

  ROBERT REED

  Robert Reed, like Dave Wolverton, was the winner of a Writers of the Future prize early in his career and went on to write several SF novels in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the last few years he has become a fertile and productive writer of short fantasy and SF, appearing widely and frequently. His fiction is usually focused on character, often on ordinary people in extraordinary environments or with extraordinary problems. He published a number of stories in 1996, principally in SF Age, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov's, making selection for this volume a difficult choice. This story, and a couple of others, reminded me of the voice of Ray Bradbury in his fiction of the late 1940s and early 1950s—the Bradbury of The Martian Chronicles. As a story of American elections, it also reminds me of Michael Shaara's classic, “Election Day: 2066.” “First Tuesday” is another story of virtual reality, one of the richest new repositories for SF writers in 1996. But there was no other VR story like it. There is a kind of deep humane optimism here that represents the best in SF.

  After a lot of pestering, Mom told Stefan, “Fine, you can pick the view.” Only it wasn't an easy job, and Stefan enjoyed it even more than he'd hoped. Standing on the foam-rock patio, he spoke to the house computer, asking for the Grand Canyon, then Hawaii's coast, then Denali. He saw each from many vantage points, never satisfied and never sure why not. Then he tried Mount Rushmore, which was better. Except Yancy saw the six stone heads, and he stuck his head out long enough to say, “Change it. Now.” No debate; no place for compromise. Stefan settled on the Grand Canyon, on a popular view from the North Rim, telling himself that it was lovely and appropriate, and he hoped their guest would approve, and how soon would he be here…? In another couple seconds, Stefan realized. Jesus, now…!

  A figure appeared on the little lawn. He was tall, wearing a fancy suit, that famous face smiling straight at Stefan. And the boy jumped
into the house, shouting with glee:

  “The President's here!”

  His stepfather muttered something.

  Mom whined, “Oh, but I'm not ready.”

  Stefan was ready. He ran across the patio, leaping where it ended. His habit was to roll down the worn grassy slope. But he was wearing good clothes, and this evening was full of civic responsibilities. Landing with both feet solidly under him, he tried very hard to look like the most perfect citizen possible.

  The President appeared solid. Not real, but nearly so.