The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I think you really damaged it.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “The question ought to be why you haven’t done it already. Why you haven’t gone in there and crashed the hell out of their programs.”

  “You think I could do something like that?”

  She studied me. “I think maybe you could, yes.”

  “Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. But I’m not a crusader, you know. I like my life the way it is. I move around; I do as I please. It’s a quiet life. I don’t start revolutions. When I need to gimmick things, I gimmick them just enough and no more. And the Entities don’t even know I exist. If I stick my finger in their eye, they’ll cut my finger off. So I haven’t done it.”

  “But now you might,” she said.

  I began to get uncomfortable. “I don’t follow you,” I said, though I was beginning to think that I did.

  “You don’t like risk. You don’t like being conspicuous. But if we take your freedom away, if we tie you down in L.A. and put you to work, what the hell would you have to lose? You’d go right in there. You’d gimmick things but good.” She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said. “You really would. I see it now, that you have the capability and that you could be put in a position where you’d be willing to use it. And then you’d screw everything up for all of us, wouldn’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You’d fix the Entities, sure. You’d do such a job on their computer that they’d have to scrap it and start all over again. Isn’t that so?”

  She was on to me, all right.

  “But I’m not going to give you the chance. I’m not crazy. There isn’t going to be any revolution and I’m not going to be its heroine and you aren’t the type to be a hero. I understand you now. It isn’t safe to fool around with you. Because if anybody did, you’d take your little revenge, and you wouldn’t care what you brought down on everybody else’s head. You could ruin their computer, but then they’d come down on us and they’d make things twice as hard for us as they already are, and you wouldn’t care. We’d all suffer, but you wouldn’t care. No. My life isn’t so terrible that I need you to turn it upside down for me. You’ve already done it to me once. I don’t need it again.”

  She looked at me steadily, and all the anger seemed to be gone from her and there was only contempt left.

  After a little while, she said, “Can you go in there again and gimmick things so that there’s no record of your arrest today?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I could do that.”

  “Do it, then. And then get going. Get the hell out of here, fast.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “You think I’m not?”

  I shook my head. I understood. And I knew that I had won and I had lost at the same time.

  She made an impatient gesture, a shoofly gesture.

  I nodded. I felt very, very small.

  “I just want to say, all that stuff about how much I regretted the thing I did to you back then—it was true. Every word of it.”

  “It probably was,” she said. “Look, do your gimmicking and edit yourself out, and then I want you to start moving. Out of the building. Out of the city. OK? Do it real fast.”

  I hunted around for something else to say and couldn’t find it. Quit while you’re ahead, I thought. She gave me her wrist and I did the interface with her. As my implant access touched hers, she shuddered a little. It wasn’t much of a shudder, but I noticed it. I felt it, all right. I think I’m going to feel it every time I stiff anyone, ever again. Any time I even think of stiffing anyone.

  I went in and found the John Doe arrest entry and got rid of it, and then I searched out her civil-service file and promoted her up two grades and doubled her pay. Not much of an atonement. But what the hell, there wasn’t much I could do. Then I cleaned up my traces behind me and exited the program.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s done.”

  “Fine,” she said and rang for her cops.

  They apologized for the case of mistaken identity and let me out of the building and turned me loose on Figueroa Street. It was late afternoon, and the street was getting dark and the air was cool. Even in Los Angeles, winter is winter, of a sort. I went to a street access and summoned the Toshiba from wherever it had parked itself, and it came driving up five or ten minutes later, and I told it to take me north. The going was slow, rush-hour stuff, but that was OK. I went to the wall at the Sylmar gate, 50 miles or so out of town. The gatekeeper asked me my name. “Richard Roe,” I said. “Beta Pi Upsilon, ten-four-three-two-four-X. Destination San Francisco.”

  It rains a lot in San Francisco in the winter. Still, it’s a pretty town. I would have preferred Los Angeles at that time of year, but what the hell. Nobody gets all his first choices all the time. The gate opened and the Toshiba went through. Easy as Beta Pi.

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  Glass Cloud

  One of the hottest new writers in science fiction, James Patrick Kelly was born in Mineola, New York, and now lives with his family in Durham, New Hampshire. Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; his stories have also appeared in Universe, Galaxy, Amazing, Analog, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. His first solo novel, Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. His most recent book is a novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, Freedom Beach. He is currently at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled Look into the Sun. His story “Friend,” also in collaboration with Kessel, was in our First Annual Collection; his story “Solstice” was in our Third Annual Collection; and his story “The Prisoner of Chillon” was in our Fourth Annual Collection.

  Here, in an intense and compelling story set in his native New Hampshire, he shows us that sometimes even a man at the very top of his profession can receive an offer he can’t refuse.

  GLASS CLOUD

  James Patrick Kelly

  Phillip Wing was surprised when he found out what his wife had been doing with her Wednesday afternoons. “You’ve joined what?”

  “A friend invited me to sit in on a study group at the mission.” Daisy refilled her glass from a decanter. “I’ve been twice, that’s all. I haven’t joined anything.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Sitting in, Phil—it’s not like I intend to convert. I’m just browsing.” She sipped her wine and waited for Wing to settle back. “They haven’t said a word about immortality yet. Mostly they talk about history.”

  “History? History? The Messengers haven’t been here long enough to learn anything about history.”

  “Seven years. First contact was seven years ago.” She sighed and suddenly she was lecturing. “Cultural evolution follows predictable patterns. There are interesting correlations between humanity and some of the other species that the Messengers have contacted.”

  Wing shook his head. “I don’t get it. We’ve been together what? Since ’51? For years all that mattered was the inn. They nuke Geneva, so what? Revolution in Mexico, who cares?”

  “I care about you,” she said.

  That stopped him for a moment. Absently, he filled his glass from the decanter and took a gulp before he realized that it was the synthetic Riesling that she was trying out as a house wine. He swallowed it with difficulty. “Who’s the friend?”

  “What?”

  “The friend who asked you to the mission. Who is he?” Wing was just guessing that it was a man. It was a good guess.

  “A regular.” Daisy glanced away from him and nodded at the glow sculpture on the wall. “You know Jim McCauley.”

  All he knew was that McCauley was a local artist who had made a name for himself in fancy light bulbs. Wing watched the play of pastel light across her face, trying to see her as this regular might see her. Daisy was not beautiful, although she could be pretty when she paid attention to detail. She did not bother to comb her hair every time the wind caugh
t it nor did she much care about the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Hers was an intelligent, hard-edged, New Hampshire Yankee face. She looked like someone who would know about things that mattered. Wing had good reasons for loving her; he slid across the couch and nuzzled under her ear.

  “Don’t tickle.” She laughed. “You’re invited, you know.” She pulled back, but not too far. “The new Messenger, Ndavu, is interested in art. He’s mentioned the Glass Cloud several times. You really ought to go. You might learn something.” Having made her pitch, she kissed him.

  * * *

  Phillip Wing had no time to study history; he was too busy worrying about the Second Wonder of the World. Solon Petropolus, erratic scion of the Greek transportation conglomerate, had endowed the Seven Wonders Foundation with an immense fortune. The foundation was Petropolus’s megalomaniacal gift to the ages. It commissioned constructions—some called them art—on a monumental scale. It was the vulgar purpose of the Wonders to attract crowds. They were to be places where a French secretaire or a Peruvian campesino or even an Algerian mullah might come to contemplate the enduring spirit of Solon Petropolus, the man who embalmed himself in money.

  Wing had spent five years at Yale grinding out a practitioner’s degree but when he graduated he was certain that he had made a mistake. He was offered several jobs but not one that he wanted. He had studied architecture with the impossibly naïve hope that someday, someone would let him design a building as large as his ambitions. He wanted to build landmarks, not program factories to fabricate this year’s model of go-tubes for the masses too poor to afford real housing. Instead of working he decided to spend the summer after graduation hiking the Appalachian Trail. Alone.

  As he climbed Webster Cliff in Crawford Notch, he played a poetry game against his fatigue. A zephyr massages the arthritic tree. It was only a few kilometers to the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Mispah Spring Hut where he would spend the night. Plodding promiscuously into a tangerine heaven. Wing made it a game because he did not really believe in poetry. Stone teeth bite solipsistic toes. A low cloud was sweeping through the Notch just as the late afternoon sun dipped out of the overcast into a jagged band of blue sky on the horizon. Something strange happened to the light then and for an instant the cloud was transformed. A cloud of glass.

  “A glass cloud,” he muttered. There was no one to hear him. He stopped, watching the cloud but not seeing it, experiencing instead an overpowering inner vision. A glass cloud. The image swelled like a bubble. He could see himself floating with it and for the first time he understood what people meant when they talked about inspiration. He kept thinking of the glass cloud all the way to the hut, all that night. He was still thinking of it weeks later when he reached the summit of Kahtadin, the northern terminus of the trail, and thought of it on the hover to Connecticut. He did some research and made sketches, taking a strange satisfaction from the enormous uselessness of it. That fall Seven Wonders announced the opening of the North American design competition. Phillip Wing, an unregistered, unemployed, uncertain architect of twenty-seven had committed the single inspiration of his life to disk and entered the competition because he had nothing better to do.

  Now as he looked down out of the hover at Crawford Notch, Wing could not help but envy that young man stalking through the forest, seething with ambition and, at the same time, desperately afraid he was second-rate. At age twenty-seven Wing could not imagine the trouble a thirty-five-year old could get into. Schedules and meetings, compromises and contracts. That eager young man had not realized what it would mean to capture the glittering prize at the start of a career, so that everything that came after seemed lackluster. That fierce young man had never been truly in love or watched in horror as time abraded true love.

  A roadbuster was eating the section of NH Route 302 that passed through the Notch. Its blades flayed the ice-slicked asphalt into chunks. Then a wide-bladed caterpillar scooped the bituminous rubble up and into trucks bound for the recycling plant in Concord. Once the old highway had been stripped down to its foundation course of gravel, crews would come to lay the Glass Cloud’s underground track. After thaw a paver the size of a brachiosaurus would regurgitate asphalt to cover the track. Route 302 through Crawford Notch was the last phase of the ninety-seven kilometer track which followed existing roads through the heart of the White Mountain National Forest.

  “Won’t be long now,” said the hover pilot. “They’re talking a power-up test in ten weeks. Three months tops.”

  Wing said nothing. Ten weeks. Unless another preservationist judge could be convinced to meddle or Seven Wonders decided it had spent enough and sued him for the overruns. The project was two years late already and had long since gobbled up a generous contingency budget. Wing knew he had made mistakes, although he admitted them only to himself. Sometimes he worried that he had wasted his chance. He motioned to the pilot who banked the hover and headed south toward North Conway.

  The hover was the property of Gemini Fabricators, the lead company in the consortium that had won the contract to build the Cloud and its track. Wing knew that the pilot had instructions to keep him in the air as long as possible. Every minute he spent inspecting track was one minute less he would have to go over the checklist for the newly completed docking platform with Laporte and Alz. Laporte, the project manager, made no secret of his dismay at having to waste valuable time with Wing. Laporte had made it clear that he believed Wing was largely to blame for the project’s misfortunes.

  The hover settled onto its landing struts like an old man easing into a hot bath. Wing waited for the dirty snow and swirls of litter to subside. The job site was strewn with coffee cups, squashed beer bulbs, and enough vitabulk wrap to cover Mount Washington.

  Wing popped the hatch and was greeted by a knife-edged wind; there was no welcoming committee. He crossed the frozen landing zone toward the field offices, a group of linked commercial go-tubes that looked like a chain of plastic sausages some careless giant had dropped. The Seven Wonders tube was empty and the telelink was ringing. Wing would have answered it except that was exactly the kind of thing that made Laporte mad. Instead he went next door to Gemini looking for Fred Alz. Wing suspected that some of the project’s problems arose from the collusion between Laporte and Alz, Gemini’s field super. A woman he did not recognize sat at a CAD screen eating a vitabulk doughnut and staring dully at details of the ferroplastic structural grid.

  “Where is everybody?” said Wing.

  “They went to town to see him off.”

  “Him?”

  “I think it’s a him. A Messenger: No-doubt or some such.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  “Maybe he was looking for converts. With immortality we might actually have a chance of finishing.” She took a bite of doughnut and looked at him for the first time. “Who the hell are you anyway?”

  “The architect.”

  “Yeah?” She did not seem impressed. “Where’s your hard hat?”

  Wing knew what they all said about him: that he was an arrogant son-of-a-bitch with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Great Pyramid. He spent some time living up to his reputation. The engineer did not stay for the entire tirade; she stalked out, leaving Wing to stew over the waste of an afternoon. Shortly afterward, Alz and Laporte breezed in, laughing. Probably at him.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting, Phil,” Laporte held up both hands in mock surrender, “but there’s good news.”

  “It’s two-thirty-eight! This plugging project is twenty-one months late and you’re giving tours to goddamned aliens.”

  “Phil.” Alz put a hand on his shoulder. “Phil, listen to me for a minute, will you?” Wing wanted to knock it away. “Mentor Ndavu has made a generous offer on behalf of the commonwealth of Messengers.” Alz spoke quickly, as if he thought Wing might explode if he stopped. “He’s talking major funding, a special grant that could carry us right through to completion. He says the Messengers want to recognize outstanding achievem
ent in the arts, hard cash and lots of it—you ought to be proud is what you ought to be. We get it and chances are we can float the Cloud out of here by Memorial Day. Ten weeks, Phil.”

  Wing looked from Alz to Laporte. There was something going on, something peculiar and scary. People did not just hand out open-ended grants to rescue troubled projects for no reason—especially not the Messengers, who had never shown more than a polite interest in any of the works of humanity. Three years of autotherapy had taught Wing that he had a tendency to make conspiracy out of coincidence. But this was real. First Daisy, now the Cloud; the aliens were getting close. “Could we do it without them?”

  Alz laughed.

  “They’re not monsters, Phil,” said Laporte.

  * * *

  A tear dribbled down Wing’s cheek. His eyes always watered when he sniffed too much Focus. The two-meter CAD screen that filled one wall of his studio displayed the south elevation of the proposed headquarters for SEE-Coast, the local telelink utility. There was something wrong with the row of window dormers set into the new hip roof. He blinked and the computer replaced the sketch with a menu. A doubleblink changed the cursor on the screen from draw to erase mode. His eyes darted; the windows disappeared.

  He had known that the SEE-Coast project was going to be more trouble than it was worth. Jack Congemi was trying to cram too much building onto too small a site, a sliver of river front wedged between an eighteenth-century chandlery and a nineteenth-century hotel. If he could have gotten a variance to build higher than five stories, there would have been no problem. But SEE-Coast was buying into Portsmouth’s exclusive historic district, where the zoning regulations were carved in granite.

  It was a decent commission and the cost-plus fee contract meant he would make good money, but like everything he had done since the Cloud, Wing was bored with it. The building was pure kitsch: a tech bunker hiding behind a Georgian facade. It was like all the rest of his recent projects: clients buying a safe name brand and to hell with the vision. Of course they expected him to deliver stick-built at a price competitive with Korean robot factories. Never mind that half the local trades were incompetent and the other half were booked.