The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She felt her throat constricting violently. The throbbing numbness in her ankle suddenly slashed at her.

  “You.…” she choked. “… you.…”

  “I am so deeply, so terribly ashamed,” said Daffy.

  “How? Why?”

  “When the ship misfired its load of dust from the ground-up fuel tanks, hundreds of thousands of metric tons were hurled at a velocity exceeding nine-tenths light-speed in a grazing trajectory toward your sun. Three months later the dust blew away much of the outer solar atmosphere, and drastically distorted the spin, magnetic fields, and internal structure. A small amount of dust, very small, disintegrated upon colliding with your planet’s atmosphere … the planet was contraposed to our ships when the dust blew through your system. As a result, your planet was blasted and irradiated. Since the impact had altered the energy output of your sun, the planet’s climate was transformed and the biosphere eliminated. All this we watched, as we made the final approach.”

  “You bastard,” she whispered. “Do you know what we had almost achieved here? Do you realize what you have done?”

  “We have had seventeen suicides since we landed here,” Daffy replied. The duck did not move, did not even breathe. It looked like it had been turned to stone.

  Only the mouth had life. “We know what we have done.”

  Avdotya closed her eyes. “Get out,” she said.

  10

  When she hobbled through the casino lobby a few weeks later, she found the truck carefully parked by the curb. The fuel tanks were filled, the lockers stocked with food and water, and the tread that had been damaged in Cheyenne was repaired. The engine was warm and ready to be turned over.

  She sat in the cab for an hour, silently staring at her lap. Then she started the engine and backed the truck down into the heated parking garage and climbed out.

  Limping back to the lobby entrance, she stopped and unhitched her pistol, and fired several shots into the garish, neon-lit cowboy waving above the street. The glass and plastic face shattered, and the glittering shards rained down into the snow.

  11

  “Where is Dewey Duck?”

  She confronted Daffy, the pistol still in her gloved hand. “The one who set my ankle. Where is Dewey?”

  Daffy looked away.

  “I see,” Avdotya said. “No more of this. Do you understand me?”

  She turned to the rest of the ducks crowded into her small room, the translator still on the battered wooden table.

  “I consider suicide a dishonorable way to express shame and sorrow. You insult many memories here. No more. You will simply have to suffer it through.”

  She put her pistol away. As an afterthought, she added, “I will be here to help you.”

  12

  The days began to grow a little warmer as the ducks labored to fine-tune the lander’s fusion reactor and process enough hydrogen fuel from water-ice. Then one evening a violent sou’easter rolled out of the mountains and across the playa. The wind screamed in the broken windows and walls of the hotel, and by morning a thin layer of carbon dioxide flakes had buried the world.

  The sun returned and the afternoon became quite warm. As Avdotya sat on a rock on the jumbled slopes north of the town, she could see the billowing mists of melting “snow,” red-tinted in the westering light, far out on the desert floor. A bitter tang was in the air, and she was reminded of the sea.

  Below, the ducks held an elaborate observance among the grey mounds where their dead lay. She understood none of it, but something in the slow, ritualized movements and sonorous murmurs took her back to her childhood, and caused her to reminisce about a Christmas evening spent listening in the dark recesses of the orthodox cathedral in Kiev. The priests in their ornate golden habits had moved with the same calm, considered devotion to the martyr crucified high on the damp wall.

  Later, as the other ducks moved from grave to grave sprinkling handfuls of sand from home, she and Daffy stood and wrote to one another on a pad of paper.

  How can I judge you? She wrote. What options do I have but to forgive you? I myself have murdered, and not by accident, either. I am far more concerned about the messages that you transmitted to home after your ships injected into orbit here. The psychosis of guilt you’ve described to me must be dealt with.

  The question is how, Daffy wrote. At best we will return home seven years after the messages arrive. By then, the worst will have happened. Suicides will be epidemic, apathy endemic. Science and art will be in decline, governments will have fallen in anger and despair. We will return to a society threatened by psychological chaos, as each one of my people seeks an individual answer to personal guilt. I doubt if anyone will want to listen to the murderers themselves.

  They will not welcome you, Avdotya replied, but they’ll listen to you. When you tell them about all that has happened here, and about me, and what I have said, they’ll listen. No species develops successfully without the desire to survive. Count on that. It is a fundamental point of communication between cultures. Most of your people will want to survive and prosper. You will give them that option by using me.

  And you will not come back with us? We need you now.

  No, you don’t. It is better that I stay here and make the ultimate sacrifice. They’ll remember me forever if I do that. Besides, I’ll be an invalid in your society, eternally dependent. Not an impressive martyr, you know. Not a cultural icon for the ages.

  Then let me stay with you, the duck wrote. Show me Russia. We will go and find your child together. I am responsible. I wish to pay my debt.

  My friend, Avdotya answered, no living creature knows me better. No one can interpret my life and the meaning of my words with more feeling and accuracy than you. And no one I know of better understands the problems of translation and comprehension between my people and yours. We are going to create a myth, you and I, a social frame of reference that will save your people. It requires you to go and me to stay.

  Both the duck and the human stared at each other. The rich light of the evening sun caught the reflective facets of the duck’s eyes and illuminated Avdotya’s visored face in a red-gold glow.

  Strange, wrote Daffy, to think that we plan a strategy now, to meet a crisis that will not occur for eighteen years.

  13

  “Tomorrow morning, you’ll be going home,” Avdotya said to the ducks who had gathered around on the floor by her feet. “I won’t be going with you.”

  “In the last few weeks I’ve tried to give you some insight into myself and my people,” she continued. “I’ve told you about my life, and each of you have described a little of your own. I don’t know what sort of understanding we have created. I suspect we sympathize with each other. I don’t think we comprehend each other. And yet … I feel very close to all of you.”

  She looked around. “You know what you will be going home to. By the time you return, the messages you sent four years ago will likely have caused a general collapse of social values, behavioral patterns, and institutions. You yourselves will probably be outcasts, shunned and despised. You are literally escaping exile here to fly into the face of violence and chaos, and perhaps even death.”

  Avdotya paused. The intensity of their attentiveness awed her.

  “When you finally come home, I want you to remember a few things. Remember that you were here, a witness to everything that occurred. Remember that you were among those who met a human being, and that you learned from this creature what had been lost, and the price that can be exacted for innocent mistakes. Above all, remember that you will be most able to explain what has happened and what must be done about it. There will be many among your people who will want to know … seek them out, and discuss it with them.

  “It has fallen to me to absolve you of the loss of my own people, and I do so willingly and with great relief. I forgive you. No one need feel guilty, nor be ashamed for their part in what has happened here. No one need pay with their own life, nor give up their initiative
out of a sense of debt. The debt is excused. I forgive you.

  “But even as I forgive you, so shall I always be with you. You must remember what you have done here, and shape your own destiny by what the experience has taught you. I caution you to take constructive lessons. You have a responsibility to my people to become wise and benevolent seekers, to achieve the things we once aspired to. You cannot reject such an obligation. But what happens to you from this point on is your own responsibility, and you will have to suffer the consequences yourself.

  “Life is rare and very precious. In all the vastness of space that you have only begun to search out, you have discovered but one other oasis. You will find another, someday. When you do, do not avoid the inhabitants. Remember how much we wanted to meet you, or someone like you. But when you attempt to contend with the circumstances, whatever they may be, remember—life is very precious, and will not be repeated in the same way ever again. Save it. All decisions should devolve from such a memory.”

  Avdotya stood up.

  “The things you have gathered from this planet, you should take them home. The tapes and books … all of it. Take my words, and your memories of me, as well. You are emissaries of another culture to your own, and you are the last, best hope for both.”

  She stepped away. “Long day for all of us tomorrow,” she said. “Goodnight.”

  14

  Before the sun rose, she pulled the truck out of the garage and drove slowly around the huge lander in the street, up to the top of the knoll beyond. She walked back through the stirring frosts of the early morning; her boots crunched loudly in the snow. The sun suddenly leaped above the eastern horizon, momentarily turning the great playa into a roiling lake of oranges and electric blue.

  The ducks waited at the base of the lander. For a long time they were still, and then one by one they filed past and clumsily shook her hand. To each, she recalled something personal, some memory they shared. At last she stood alone in the snow with the anthropologist. Daffy scribbled something on its pad and held it out.

  Спасбо и на том. Мόжешь успокόиться.

  “Just a minute,” she said, and grabbing the pad, wrote: You’ve never told me your real name. What is your name?

  It would not mean anything to you, the duck replied.

  Please. It is important.

  Daffy chimed and blew softly. It sounded pleasant, and somehow lifted her spirits.

  They stood there for a minute, and then the duck extended its hand and she took it and held it in her own.

  Above the town, from the interstate highway, she watched the ship lift off on a pale blue pillar of flame. Blocks of asphalt and masonry flew through the shimmering air, and the ruined casino rang with the roar. The ship dwindled to a blue dot in the luminous salmon sky, and then disappeared.

  That night the sky was very clear, and the stars shone in such multitudes as she had never seen before. At midnight she rolled to a stop just west of Elko. She lay in her bunk when the darkness outside was burnished with a deep red glow, and she scrambled over into the passenger seat and stared out through the windshield. In the sky a fierce, pinkish point arced quickly toward the meridian, brightening and blurring as its color changed to white, and then to blue, and finally to a searing violet. She watched for an hour as the violet streak slowed, reddened around the edges, and faded away. She knew they were gone then, and she was alone.

  She felt calm as she crawled back into her bunk. She was very tired, and as she slept she dreamed of the vast oceans of ice, terrible and beautiful as the light of myriad stars reflected off their sculptured surfaces.

  15

  One hundred and fourteen years passed, and on the planet, the season remained the same. Then, on a day like all the rest, the ducks returned in a great fleet of ships, hundreds in number. The night sky was filled with gracefully arcing points of light, and immense landers constantly thundered down onto the flats south of Wendover. Thousands of ducks disembarked. A city was built, and equipment was designed and manufactured from available materials. Exploration commenced.

  Nine weeks after the arrival a small skimmer was cruising far to the north, several hundred meters above the western sea. The pilot noticed a dark spot down amidst the jumbled ice, something made of metal and plastic that tripped the monitors, and circled lazily to investigate. Below, a large, treaded vehicle lay overturned on a steep incline.

  Strange, thought the duck, to find that sort of machine so far out on the ice. A human being must have come out here after the sea froze, months or years after the Accident. Who could it have been?

  The sudden hiss of its breath was loud enough that the traffic controller monitoring transmissions in Wendover broke in to ask what was wrong.

  Within an hour a huge transport arrived, and set down on the ice just beyond the grounded skimmer. Daffy Duck (it knew its name on this world) stepped down from a ramp and strode through the shallow snow toward the truck. It motioned to the skimmer pilot, who squatted quietly nearby, and the duck reluctantly got to its feet and loped after the anthropologist.

  “It is hers,” the pilot murmured in subdued tones. “It is. I do not want to go up there again.”

  The anthropologist gave a short, chopped gesture to the pilot and clambered up onto the truck. It pried open the ice-encrusted door, and peered at the rigid figure slumped over the steering wheel inside. It knelt on its knobby knees, resting a gloved hand on the back of the figure’s head.

  Above, the wan sun guttered in a deep bronze sky, like a candle in a sudden wind.

  IAN WATSON

  The Emir’s Clock

  St. Paul received enlightenment on the road to Damascus in the form of a visitation by a blinding white light. In today’s high-tech society, however, we shouldn’t be surprised to find that a similar epiphany would take a somewhat different form, one more suited to modern times …

  One of the most brilliant innovators to enter SF in many years, Ian Watson’s work is typified by its vivid and highly original conceptualization. He sold his first story in 1969, and first attracted widespread critical attention in 1973 with his first novel The Embedding. His novel The Jonah Kit won the British Science Fiction Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award in 1976 and 1977, respectively. Watson’s other books include Alien Embassy, Miracle Visitors, The Martian Inca, Under Heaven’s Bridge (co-authored with Michael Bishop), Chekhov’s Journey, Deathhunter, The Gardens of Delight, The Book of the River, The Book of the Stars, and The Book of Being, as well as the collections The Very Slow Time Machine, Sunstroke, and Slow Birds. He is editor of the anthologies Pictures at an Exhibition, Changes (co-edited with Michael Bishop), and Afterlives (co-edited with Pamela Sargent). His most recent books are the novel Queenmagic, Kingmagic and the collection Evil Water. His well-known story “Slow Birds” was in our First Annual Collection. Watson lives with his wife and daughter in a small village in Northhamptonshire, in England.

  THE EMIR’S CLOCK

  Ian Watson

  “I must show you something, Linda!” Bunny was excited. (Flashing eyes and coaly hair, for he on honey-dew hath fed, et cetera.) He’d come round to my digs at nine in the morning and he’d never done that before. True, his excitement was still gift-wrapped in mystery and bridled by irony.

  “Come on!” he urged. “We’ll need to take a little spin in the country.”

  “Hey—”

  “I’ll buy you lunch afterwards.”

  “I’ve a lecture at eleven.”

  “Never mind that. Ten minutes alone with a book equals one hour with a lecturer. You know it’s true. A lecturer only reads you a draft of his next book, which is a digest of a dozen books that already exist.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Oh Linda! No one seduces a woman in the morning. Not successfully! The impatience of morning subverts the charm.”

  “Most of your friends don’t even know what morning is, never mind feeling impatient about it.”

  “But I know
. To ride out on a desert morning when the world is fresh and cool!”

  How can I possibly describe Bunny without tumbling into clichés? His almost impertinent good looks. And that ivory smile of his … No, that’s wrong. Ivory turns yellow. His smile was snow. There’s no snow in the desert, is there? There was nothing frigid about his smile, though at least it did melt … hearts.

  And his eyes? To call them black oil wells, liquid, warm, and dark? What a trite comparison, considering the source of his family’s wealth, and the emirate’s wealth!

  And his neat curly black beard … the beard of the prophet? Bunny was certainly determined like some young Moses to lead all his people into the promised land of technology and the future. He was also a descendant of Mohammed—who had many descendants, to be sure! What’s more, Bunny was to experience what any proper prophet needs to experience: a revelation, a message from the beyond.

  Of course, I succumbed.

  “Okay, lead me to your camel. Just give me five minutes, will you?” I was still frantically tidying my hair.

  “Strictly horse power, Linda—with Ibrahim at the wheel as chaperone.”

  I’d known Bunny for a full year. Prince Jafar ibn Khalid (plus three or four other names) seemed to relish the twee nickname foisted on him by Oxford’s smart set. Heir to the rich emirate of Al-Haziya, Bunny was deeply anglophile. His favourite light reading: Agatha Christie.

  No, wait.

  What was he, deeply? He was an Arab. And a Moslem, though he made no great show of the latter. Plainly he was pro-British, with a taste for British ways. What was he in Al-Haziya? I’d no idea—since I never accepted his many invitations. He was a surface with many depths like some arabesque of faience on a mosque. Only one of those depths was the British Bunny. Other depths existed. He was like some Arabian carpet which gives the impression of a trapdoor leading down into other, complex patterns.

  No wonder he enjoyed Agatha Christie! Bunny could seem clear as the desert air at times. At other times he preferred to wear a cloak of mystery as if believing that a future ruler needs to be enigmatic, capable of surprising not only his enemies but his friends. For who knows when friends may become enemies? No wonder he liked his innocuous nickname, gift of the assorted Hooray Henrys, upper class sons and daughters, and European blue-bloods who made up the smart set.