The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Okay. So you’ll go?”

  “What if I say no?”

  “We’ll look for some other qualified individual willing to take the assignment.”

  “Someone who doesn’t care about Hank, you mean.”

  It didn’t have to be said that Hank was probably dead. Probably not a chance in ten of even finding his remains. Jack realized that, as he sat here right now, Hank certainly was dead—long, long dead and gone, even his bones turned to dust. Gone forever in the distant past. Could that be undone?

  He opened his big mouth and said, “When do you want me to leave?”

  * * *

  They gave him no guide to lead him back to ground floor. They probably never thought of it. Once the director’s door closed and vanished behind him, he was lost. He couldn’t locate a lift entrance or even the walls of the tower core. It must have been a shift’s quitting time, for people now swarmed around him, hurrying on their way to wherever tower-dwellers went after selling their daily lives to their jobs. Among them were the occasional trans-specied individuals like his former guide.

  He dodged mere images and ran into real people. The real people bumped him along with the flow of the crowd. Bodies jammed against him from all sides. He walked into a wall he couldn’t detect, then another. He could see only part of what was there. In a fleeting moment of insight, he recognized a band of wild horses browsing on prairie grass, a pair of moose stripping leaves from trees, salmon leaping to climb an ethereal cataract in midair. The moment was gone, and what remained were incomprehensible lights, links, and datastreams. None of what he heard was intelligible, just a cacophony of buzzes and clicks and whistles and beeps that he could no more interpret than he could the speech of porpoises. People were constantly running into him and glaring in annoyance, as if it was his fault they failed to detect him. He, the anomaly.

  He tried to work his way out of the busy travel routes, but they shifted around him constantly. He felt the invisible ceiling and walls closing in on him, leaving no personal space or air to breathe. His legs wanted to run, anywhere, until he was out of there. His knees were coming unhinged. His bad knee buckled and he almost went down.

  Jack caught hold of himself and took a slow, deep breath. They’re watching us, Katie. They must be. Somebody watched everything here, the stage for a million reality shows. See the poor enclaver-hick lost in the tower. The thought held him together. He willed himself to take slow, deep breaths. Okay. He’d been lost in the woods a time or three. When that happened, you stayed calm until you could orient yourself. He elbowed a path through the mob and parked himself out of the way in the middle of a diorama that appeared to display the lifecycle of a freshwater mussel. He stayed put, ignored the chaos around him.

  At last he caught a glimpse of a door opening in the air ahead and two people came out of a lift. He headed quickly for the lift doorway, squeezing through before it could close and disappear from view. He had no means to operate the lift, and it moved through a number of higher and lower floors before finally opening to a level where he saw the surface view of outdoors. He exited quickly.

  A line of people in white robes was filing through an entrance. He squeezed past them and at last stood breathing the fresh air of outdoors. He waited to make sure he really was outdoors. Thank God.

  A few of the white-robed people stood talking outside the tower, their bare feet immersed in the damp grass beyond the walkway. It was full dark now and Jack’s truck was nowhere to be seen, so he looked up at the night sky to orient himself.

  Something was wrong with his eyes. The stars had become fat smudges of light, none in any familiar position or constellation. Where were Jupiter and Mars? Venus should be following the sun to the west. And Polaris? Sirius? He stared at one of the stars too long and in a moment it came down to him, growing larger, moving quickly. Blooming in front of him in a burst of blue-white light. Holograms all around him then, moving soundless images just on the verge of being recognizable. A woman’s face? He couldn’t experience the whole effect, but part of it appeared to be an ad for a new skyway vehicle. Finally the display burst into a shower of sparks that died around him. The group of white-robed people cheered and applauded the display. Or were they applauding Jack’s reaction to it? He noticed that they didn’t look at the sky themselves.

  He turned his eyes to the tower wall before he attracted the attention of another faux-star. Forget about compass directions. If he just kept walking one way around the tower, he’d eventually come to his truck. And he did.

  It had never felt so good to slide behind the wheel. He started the engine and drove up the exit ramp as fast as he could. If those government people ever wanted to talk to him again, they’d have to come out to the country to see him.

  * * *

  Night had settled over the land as he headed down the highway to home. Beneath the overhanging trees, he drove through a tunnel of darkness that stayed always beyond the reach of his headlights. Why had he given up so easily on saving Katie? The one time in the past that mattered, and he lost it. Yet the director’s words jibed with everything he had read about time-travel restrictions.

  It was late when he turned at the rusted old mailbox post that still stood at the end of the drive leading to the family farm. Nice long driveway to keep the tower tourists at a distance. Yeah, take a tour of an actual working agrarian enclave. Roll along the ancient roads in a wheeled surface vehicle. At regular stops you may experience the sights, sounds, and smells, or perhaps talk to some of the locals. See how they live. See them at work in the fields, the kind of clothes they wear. Yes, those are real cattle and sheep, pigs and chickens, which they still enslave. They have an exemption under the Cultural Preservation Act.

  Eddie was waiting for him outside the barn door. “Dad! I caught a muskrat in the creek!” He held out the furry rodent by its dark, scaly tail.

  “You pull your traps if it ices up any more, you hear?”

  “Okay. Will you help me skin it?”

  “Maybe tomorrow, if I have time.” The boy followed Jack into the barn. “I’m going away on a trip, so I have a lot to do before I leave.” Then he realized it wasn’t true. He would experience four days in the past while only a moment of present time elapsed before they brought him back. With Hank, if possible.

  The barn held the familiar smells of dry hay, cow dung and piss, and green animal pelts. Jack set his gear to the side of the door and hung the beaver and otter from a rafter, high enough to be out of reach of the rats and cats. Hanging from the same rafter, still drying on the boards, were the skins of two coyotes, two other beaver, and three coons. Dry pelts hung on a wall, their skins stiff and crinkly like thick parchment. Tomorrow he’d skin and board out the new beaver and otter, then he’d go pull his trapline. It wouldn’t be right to leave his traps set when he couldn’t be sure he’d ever come back to check them.

  Eddie set the muskrat on a workbench under an overhead light and began stroking the lustrous dark guard hairs on the animal’s back.

  “Did you eat dinner yet?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah. I finished milking the cows, too.”

  “Good. Go get cleaned up, it’s near your bedtime.”

  He went out after the boy and latched the barn doors, then thought to look up. The real stars, galaxies, and planets were back in their places over the open enclave sky. He searched and found the faint smudge of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, Katie’s favorite. Jack himself had always liked M104, and Katie liked that one, too; but he knew he couldn’t find the Sombrero with his naked eye. Maybe he should get the old telescope out of the barn and have a look. No. It wouldn’t be any good without her.

  Carol stood waiting in the kitchen doorway, watching him as he came in. He hung his hat and jacket on wall hooks by the front door. She watched him do that and watched him take off his muddy boots. The warmth of the room brought the scent of evaporating sweat from the neck of his damp wool shirt. He went to the kitchen and she backed up out of the hallway, stil
l looking at him. The lights in the room flickered, dimmed, then came back. Trouble in the enclave’s old power plant again. Funny how events that seemed connected often weren’t.

  He sat down at the table and she turned to the old cabinet microwave oven to remove a plate of food. She must have put it in to warm when she’d heard his truck come up the drive. Meatloaf made of ground beaver meat, corn, and potatoes. The thick, peppery smell of the gravy made his stomach growl. She set the plate in front of him and sat herself down on the chair across the table.

  After a while of watching him eat, she said, “Josh also called today.”

  Jack snorted. “You mean he’s still alive? So what’s up with them?”

  She looked at her hands, gripping the table in front of her. “He actually won a drawing among the tower engineering staff for a two-week cruise of the moon. He and Shari are going next month.”

  “Are they still in that plural-marriage group?”

  “No.” She hesitated a moment, then: “At least they got out of it together.”

  “Maybe if they didn’t get out of it together he would have come home,” he told her. Katie would have stayed, he felt sure.

  She gave him the smile, the one that always lifted him, no matter what. “Maybe. But it is what it is. There’s still Eddie left to us.” She kept looking at him.

  His contract had a confidentiality clause, but damned if he was going to make Hank’s mistake of honoring a contract by keeping secrets from his own wife. No way was he going to leave her frantically asking everyone she knew, “Have you seen Jack?” if he never came back. What a scatterbrain Hank was.

  He waited until Eddie had gone to bed before he told her. Her first thought was the same as his. “Can you stop at two years ago?” He gave her the answer, the cold, bitter, final answer that had been given to him.

  She wasn’t keen at all about his going off trapping in the Pleistocene, but when he explained about Hank she quit protesting. He could see in her eyes the thought of facing Emily if she talked him out of going.

  “I’ll call Emily after you’ve left,” she said. “I’ll tell her you’ve gone to find Hank.” She looked up, directly into his eyes, and said in a louder voice, “Jack, you make sure you come back. With Henry if you can find him. You hear me?”

  * * *

  Strapped into his seat, he felt an initial sense of movement, then nothing. He saw nothing outside because there were no windows in the spherical capsule. As spacetime changed around him, he wondered if he’d feel the only time that mattered.

  For one instant again, Katie, I’m going to be when you are. Maybe right around here is when I could have stopped you from going out on that ice. And maybe here is when you were a small child walking through leaves, and here is when you were born.

  The passage seemed to take less than half a minute, but he couldn’t tell whether his own sense of time was normal or compressed. How much time does it take to travel through time? The wormhole was supposed to leave him at the same place, but the moment after Hank’s own capsule had returned to the future. He heard nothing until the crack of displaced air from outside the capsule when it popped back into normal space. But something wasn’t right; he still felt no sense of his own weight. There was an explosion of gas inside the capsule as it filled itself with foam. Then the capsule hit something. Hard.

  The foam saved his life, but the impact knocked him unconscious for a moment. When he came to, the sphere was rolling and bouncing down a rough incline of some sort with Jack going along end-over-end inside. His ride stopped a few seconds later when the capsule hit something yielding, bounced back uphill a ways, then rocked itself to a standstill. He swung the hatch open and waited for the foam to evaporate before trying to see where he was. So much for wormhole misalignment. He must have popped into normal space well aboveground. The rest of this time-travel business had damn well better work as advertised.

  He climbed out and for the first time in his life beheld a true wilderness. No skyways split the air, no towers jutted up along the horizon. No roads or fields or other mark of human beings. He stood on the slope of a gradual hill covered with grass, dense patches of brush, and a few scattered groves of trees. His capsule had come to rest against a small patch of alders; their springy branches had halted his tumble downhill. A cool breeze was in his face, sending a few last wisps of foam fluttering from his head and shoulders and vanishing as they swirled downwind.

  The grass on the hillside was below his knees, and the vegetation showed the bright green of youth. Early summer, then, and the sun indicated near midday. The air was cool and the trees were different from those he knew. Gone were the dense hardwood forests, the oak, ash, hickory, walnut, cherry, and beech. The trees he knew had not yet migrated this far north. He saw instead the less familiar white trunks of birch, the green-gray of aspen, the dark-green-and-black of spruce.

  In the valley below ran a good-sized river, light gray-brown in the sunlight. Its current looked to be moving along at a pretty good clip, but not enough to make waves. The other side of the river wound past a bare cutbank that rose into a bluff downstream. Half a mile or so upstream, the river disappeared around the shoulder of the hill on which he stood, and farther upstream he saw a lake spreading into a vast marsh that faded out of sight into the distance. On the slope across the river, a herd of large deer-like animals were stripping leaves from some scrub willows in a meadow. Their legs were long and a few mature males in the herd carried huge racks in velvet and looking like a cross between the antlers of a bull elk and those of a moose.

  Enough gawking at the landscape. Jack took his trapping and camping gear from the compartment under the seat in the capsule. He had his trapping gear in an old maple-strip pack that had belonged to his great-grandfather. His camping equipment, extra clothes, and food were in a duffel bag. He had brought an old pump-action .35 Whelen rifle, the most powerful firearm he owned, used at home for collecting venison and the occasional bear or boar. He fixed it to a gun-holder bracket on the side of the pack; he could release the rifle quickly by reaching back with his left hand. He worked his shoulders through the straps of the pack, grabbed the duffel, and started downhill. If these giant beaver were any sort of real beaver, they’d be near water. That’s how Hank would have figured, too.

  The ground was rough and uneven, a raw, wild land that had never felt the comb of plow and disk. Climb a grassy tussock one step, drop into a grass-hidden hole the next. While picking his way downhill, he scanned the ground for sign. He found a faint line of grass leaning in the direction of his travel, which might mark Hank’s passage. Hard to tell after several days.

  He was passing upwind of a grove of aspen when he startled some huge animal. Maybe it was his unfamiliar smell or the clink of steel in his pack. All he could see at first was a moving patch of long-haired, light-brown coat. Brush was snapping and treetops shaking as it made its ponderous way down toward the river. It broke into a clearing on the riverbank and turned to look back toward him. Bear-like body suspended over long, thick legs ending in hindclaws he could see even at this distance. Heavy gorilla-like forearms with big, wicked-looking claws, and a head shaped like a hamster’s right down to the oversized, droopy cheeks. It used its heavy tail as a counterweight as it rose up on its hind legs to sniff the air. Twice a man’s height, easy.

  The giant sloth was still downwind, and he could tell when it caught his scent again because it let out a low snort and shook its ludicrous hamster head. If the scientists were right, the animals here should not yet have any fear of the hominids that were migrating out of Africa. The sloth didn’t like the smell of this African hominid, anyway. It turned back toward the river and, with an unhurried, waddling gait, plunged into the water, wading and swimming to the far bank. It shook itself like a dog as it emerged, then climbed straight up the cutbank.

  Jack opened the duffel, took out his .44 magnum revolver in its holster, and strapped it to his right hip. A lot of good it would do against an animal that si
ze, but he felt better letting his hand brush against the gun handle as he walked.

  He found the sloth’s tracks crossing a patch of mud on a game trail that ran along the river. Water was still trickling into the huge tracks from a puddle in the middle of the mudhole. The sloth appeared to have been walking pigeon-toed, with its ankles rotated inward, weight resting on the outside edges of its feet and huge claws lying almost sideways on the ground. Jack studied the patch of mud. Smaller, soft-footed animals and several large, cloven-hoofed animals had also left their tracks.

  And there, on the far side of the puddle, was a smeared track that could only have been made by the boot of a man who’d hopped the puddle and skidded a bit on landing. Headed upstream, toward the lake. Jack went the same way, now and then finding part of a boot track that hadn’t been obscured by other traffic.

  He found signs of old friends, familiar furbearers: muskrat pathways through the reeds, mink tracks on a sandbar, otter scat on a big rock. The river was cold and slightly discolored with fine, gray silt that coated rocks at the edge of the shallows. Twice he flushed flocks of ducks that went beating into the wind, turning to head upstream. Ducks weren’t the brightest of birds; they liked to fly off in the direction you were traveling, so you just wound up flushing them again and again.

  As he waded across a little feeder creek to continue up the game trail, he saw a beaver-chewed stick caught on a rock. He picked it up. Toothmarks of a size that belonged to the beaver of his own time, probably from a colony somewhere up the little creek. But he found no sign of any giant beaver.

  Then all at once, he did. As he rounded the bend, at a narrow part of the river where the banks rose up higher and steeper, he found the cause of the lake and marsh he had seen before: a dam five or six times his own height and stretching all the way across the valley. It was made of logs and limbs and whole trees, cemented together with a mixture of mud and rocks. Water rushed over the top in a dozen places and strained through a few gaps in the structure’s face.