The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  All the familiar Joycean techniques have been Brassoed to a fare-thee-well: the medium rare, al dente, yet together punch of his instrumentalizations; the verbal and lyrical bravura, like a rather well arranged firework display just for you, the concrete-hard, almost architectural righteousness, the mining of new gems from the overworked lodes of sarif and ethnic genres. If there is a sense of progression, it lies in a search for spiritual understanding, a theological touchstone to transmute this tarnished age to, if not gold, at least lamé. The popular press, in its brief moments of relevance between Dal Riada spruce forest and the nail on the outdoor toilet door, have nudged and winked at James Joyce’s interest in the mystical religions of the North Afrikan safidis, and if this quest for a Holy Grail reaches a climax in “Ulysses, Telemachus, Eumaeus,” the whole thing is mercifully saved from toppling into terminal pomposity by the impudent, shamelessly danceable “Stogged.”

  The final track, “The Inner Organs of Animals,” leaves one hungry for more, with a tang of faintly scented urine on the tongue, and eagerly anticipating the next cylinder. Clubland and dubland will bop till they drop and then discuss post-modernism and the punk ethos over pools of seventy-percent-proof vomit on the toilet floor. Few cylinders warrant the epithet “seminal”; James Joyce stands unique among popular musicians as one who (to date) has produced nothing but masterpieces, and looks set fair to continue to do so. And you can dance to it. There’s presence, and progress, in this cylinder; and that rates five stars by me.

  * * *

  Senior Academician James Joyce is uncomfortable at the formal dinner that night at the Captain’s table. His white frock coat and high-collar shirt are drab and contemptible among the militaries’ synthetic golds and carmines and purples. Even the sombre black and silver of the Directorate outshines him. He is acutely conscious that his thick pebble glasses mark him genetically inferior to the eugenically engineered military and political castes. He does not enjoy the enforced informalities of shipboard life, he does not enjoy being pushed into an intimacy with these superior castes. Son Giorgio seems at ease, weaving across strands of conversation from military to political to scientific; father James finds himself longing for the company of his peers at the tachyon facility. Over ersatz coffee, the threads of conversation draw inevitably toward the War, and how it might be won.

  Air Lord Blennerhasset stoutly advocates the strategy of mass bombardment of the Tsarist Holdfasts by air-dreadnoughts armed with atomic cannon.

  “Crack them open like an egg!” he says. Death-light shines in his eyes, or perhaps the grainy illumination of the bulkhead bulbs. “The enemy annihilated, the war won, in less than a week!”

  Marshall Valery-Petain, clinging with his French Territorial Army to the handful of coastal holdfasts and revetments that are all that remains of his homeland, is dismissive of the new atomic artillery. He thinks it is over-vaunted. The ultimate weapon has always been, will always be, the man on the ground, the Bloody Infantry.

  Giorgio Joyce, respectfully, disagrees with both. “Atomic artillery, massed waves of infantry, both are like a blunt cudgel compared to the sure, swift, untraceable scalpel of Chronokinesis. The ability to change an enemy’s history without him ever knowing that you have done so, that is the ultimate weapon.”

  “Sub Academician Joyce of course, speaks as our first potential Chrononaut,” Director Ames says, a pinch-faced, bulbous-headed man with luminous violet eyes, dressed in the uniform of the elite Steel Guard.

  A subaltern serves ersatz whisky. James Joyce excuses himself from the table and beckons for his son to follow him outside onto the airdeck. William and Mary travels wrapped in thick cloud as a precaution against detection. Father and son walk the steel balcony that runs around the perimeter of the dreadnought; to their left, the curving boron fibre hull, to their right, a dimensionless gray limbo. They pause over an engine housing, whisper under the threshing of the impellors.

  “That was reckless,” James Joyce says to his son. “To mention the infinite mutability of history in company such as this.”

  “Militaries? If it doesn’t involve attrition rates of over five hundred a minute, I might as well not be speaking.”

  “Ames is no Military. He may not be an Academician, but Directors, even if they are Steel Guard, have some capacity for speculative thought. If he begins to suspect that it is not just our enemy’s history that is mutable and untraceable, but our own also…”

  Speed unchanged, heading unchanged, altitude unchanged, concealed in its cloud-layer of mystery, William and Mary bores on over the slate-cold sea.

  * * *

  (Sleeve notes from the cylinder “The Best and the Rest of James Joyce: Collected Recordings: 1902–1922”)

  Imagine. I know it’s hard. I know it’s a thing to which you are not accustomed, you who have parted with your pelve and pence for this cylinder that claims to be the Best and the Rest of a man called James Joyce. I know you are impatient to hear just what James Joyce thinks constitutes his Best and Rest (Old Light Through Old Windows). But try. For one moment, try and imagine the Rest.

  Imagine a world where our United Kingdoms and Emirates are not a maternal clutch of three islands off the coasts of Africa and Spain—imagine Home Islands that lie, say, off the North coast of France, imagine a Dal Riada, say, consigned to the cold waters beneath Greenland’s southern tip.

  Got it now? Try it again. Imagine a world where the cylinder that rests impatiently in your sonogram will never be heard, will never have been, a world where James Joyce is not a musician, where there are no wirelesses, no live bands, no televisions, for the thermionic valve, the transistor, the cathode-ray tube, the microprocessor, have not been invented.

  Imagine the world turned upside down, where north is south, and south north, where the twin spires of Africa and South America reach toward the polestar.

  Imagine the world turned inside out, an earth that is a bubble of air and light and life in an infinity of dark, lifeless rock, where the moon and stars are a perforated veil of darkness about a sun that is a blazing atom a few hundred miles above our heads.

  You have it now. Fun, isn’t it?

  Imagine a world, imagine worlds, where men, or what pass for men, may step from world to world, possibility to possibility, with the ease that you cross the room to throw the play switch of your sonogram.

  Enough? Too much for your imagination? Time now at last to surrender the cylinder to the needle and settle back in the privacy of your headphones. To lay down the Best, to say that better will never be found, is to deny the Rest. But who is to say that the Rest might not be better. You have imagined just a hair’s-breadth of the Rest; the possible worlds that are held within the contemplation of God by the exercise of His free will. For the exercise of choice, be that choice human or divine, creates worlds of undoing that might have been had we, or He, chosen otherwise: infinite choices, infinite worlds brought into existence by our lowly, daily acts of ablution, defecation, copulation, mastication. Consider the responsibility. With each step you take to cross the room to fit this cylinder into your sonogram a world may be created, humdrum worlds each a footstep different from ours.

  This is the teaching of the Al Afr sect. Let not a footfall go unconsidered.

  Got that?

  Screw philosophy, let’s dance!

  * * *

  James Joyce has a recurring dream. He is alone, quite alone, dressed in a heavy rubber gas and radiation suit, flapping in webbed shoes across the mudscape that extends from Edinburgh to the Caucasus. He stumbles without aim or purpose through tangles of corroded wire hung with rags of rotted fabric, through hulks of guns and tanks and tracked war machines, through the cavernous interiors of land dreadnoughts, once tall and proud as battleships, stogged to the waist in mud; stumbling, through the faintly luminous fog that gathers in the shell craters, ever faster in an effort to keep up with his ludicrous, flapping feet, stop himself from falling, falling, into the mud, until at last his flapping feet catch
on a snarl of wire or a chunk of rusted concrete, and he falls. He puts out his hands to save himself, but they plunge up to the elbow into the mire. His gloved fingers feel an embroidered cap badge, a piece of domestic thermoplastic, a porcelain doll’s head, a water flask, a military honour, a silver picture frame, a scrap of cloth. Then in the dream his hands are suddenly bare, and the mud between his fingers has a fibrous, grainy texture. He knows then that the gritty graininess is the powdered brick and stone and steel of the great cities of Europe, the stringy fibrousness the rotted bones and blood of 300 million men, gently mixed into mud by the rain that falls upon the battlefield.

  He dreams that he hears the voices of those 300 million, and more: the hundreds of millions who once lived in those drowned cities, the men and the women and the children, calling out to him from their dissolution beneath the mud.

  James Joyce has never thought of himself as the material from which traitors are made. Born in the 29th year of the war to a prosperous mercantile family in the city that now lies in fused ruins above East Hibernia Holdfast; by education and temperament his inclination lay toward the arts; to literature. In moments of lassitude in his Academician’s domicile under Keflavik Holdfast, he imagines himself writing about that city of his birth in such detail that, should the war ever end, it could be reconstructed out of its ruins from his book. By the 41st year of the war the British Empire had already embarked on its transmutation into leaner, fitter, more ruthless Britannia, and James Joyce understood instinctively that there was no place within the new order for navigators of the stream of consciousness. It was an easy decision to become an Academician, a temporal physics specialist. The only other choice available to those born outside the privileged castes was to become another digit of Great Britannia drowning in the mudfields of Saxony. Perhaps that is why he became a traitor, because reshaping history is the only way he knows to rebuild that city in his imagination. It is the only way he knows to apologize to those calling voices beneath the mud.

  * * *

  “This, Dr. Jung, is the dream that afflicts me night after night. Always the same, never varying in the slightest detail, projected with utter clarity and vividness.

  “I am a passenger aboard an Alpine railway train, like those that take tourists up the Rigi, or Pilatus. I am in the last carriage of all, which is a glass observation car; glass walls, glass roof. The observation car is quite full; there are passengers from all parts of Europe and the Near East. Most of the women are smoking Turkish cigars. Nora is there too, sipping a frothy white cocktail of a sticky, glabrous consistency through a straw.

  “I notice that the mountains through which our train is travelling are peculiarly rounded; strangely smooth and curvaceous for Alpine peaks, and each is surmounted by an erection of some form or another; a small stone cairn, a cross, a gazebo, a revolving restaurant.

  “The train arrives at its destination: a tunnel inside a mountain. Everyone but I seems to know where we have arrived. Porters in extremely tight uniforms seize my bags, whirl me along, this way, Herr J … if you please, Herr J … no time to lose, Herr J … Everywhere, porters and passengers, rushing. I cannot see Nora. I ask one of the porters where Frau Nora is—strangely, as I ask that question, I know that we have arrived at the hotel.

  “The hotel is built on the top of a mountain and all its outside walls are made of glass. Indeed, much of the hotel interior; the ballroom, the dining tables, the grand staircase, the health hydro, are also made of the same clear, smooth glass. The room I have been given overlooks a lake. Paintbox blue, the lake, encircled by the smooth, succulent domes of the mountains. There are pleasure boats and pedalloes abroad on the lake; I ask my porter if they are available for hire. A look of concern crosses his face; no, he says, they should not be out on the lake because of the dolphins. I look through the glass wall and see squadrons of dolphins diving through the blue lake water. The jolly-boats and pleasure-craft make for shore with all haste but a few are too slow, too far from the jetty and are capsized by the leaping dolphins. Their leaps grow higher and bolder, the dolphins are hurling themselves clear from the water twenty, thirty, forty feet. As I watch I realize that all along I have not been in my room at all but in the residents’ saloon where the other guests have gathered. A woman with an oversized shoe for a hat cries, ‘Look, oh look at the dolphins,’ and we all look and see that the dolphins have, in one immense leap, broken free from the water and are soaring into the air. They circle the glass hotel, turning and flashing like silver in the sun, and we notice that they are changing form, elongating, extending into shapes like zeppelins with flukes, fins and beady eyes.

  “A voice cries out; we can do it too, look; and a woman with a red-tipped Turkish cheroot climbs onto the back of a glass sofa and steps off. She’s flying, up round the ceiling, around the chandeliers. The other people in the bar see her and want to join in, one after another they climb up onto the furniture and step off and fly with her around the room. I go with them, it is very easy, all one has to do it climb up on the furniture and step off. But it is taking that one step … Nora is the only one still on the ground. She’s dressed in a skin-smooth dress of silver fishscales. The windows of the Glass Hotel all burst open and then we go flying out of them, up into the air, with the zeppelin-dolphins, and a great light engulfs us all and I wake up.”

  * * *

  Corvettes and gunboats marked with the shield and trident of Britannia escort William and Mary to its landing cradle in the Keflavik Holdfast hangar bay. As the concrete blast-doors close over the quarter-mile long shell of the dreadnought, its special passengers are whisked by tubetrain to the Chronokinesis Facility 20 miles distant. The car rattles and sparks along its tunnel. Senior Academician James Joyce explains the theoretical basis of chronokinesis and tachyon physics but his explanations of faster-than-light particles that move backward through time are quite incomprehensible to the militaries. Director Ames alone displays a semblance of intelligent understanding.

  “The physics itself was quite straightforward; the problem lay in generating a stream of tachyons at the correct initial velocity so that they would come to rest-velocity and deposit our chrononaut at the correct date,” James Joyce is saying as the rail-car arrives at the Chronokinesis Facility Station. Waiting on the dingily lit tiled platform are his fellow Academicians, fellow conspirators. Academician Retief, the historian, leads the party along dripping tiled tunnels into the bowels of the Facility. The corridors throb to a pulse of power.

  “Merely the atomic pile that powers the bevatron,” Academician Fisk, the Particle Physicist, reassures the mistrustful militaries. “To rotate our chrononaut back to 1917 requires a tachyon flux with a velocity in excess of 30,000 C.”

  “What is the significance of 1917?” asks Air Lord Blennerhasset.

  “The year in question was a time of unparalleled success for the then Grand Alliance and of uncharacteristic weakness in the Tsarist Empire,” Academician Retief says, his voice barely audible over the rising swell of power. “Indeed, our sources reveal that the Empire was close to collapse. A revolutionary group, the Bolshevists, subscribers to the political philosophies of Marx and Engels, sought to overthrow the Imperial family and establish a proletarian state. Large sections of manufacturing and the armed forces had been infiltrated, indeed, the army was on the verge of widescale mutiny. That they did not succeed is due entirely to the assassination by an Imperial agent of their charismatic leader, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Leaderless, the Bolshevists were rapidly purged and eliminated by the Imperial security police.”

  At the entrance to the antechamber of the Chronokinesis Unit, Giorgio Joyce leaves the party. His father bids him farewell, clasps his son’s hands within his own. He would shed tears, but Britannia does not believe in tears. For once he is gone, he is gone forever. The technology that might bring him back will never have been created. All that can be seen of the chronokinesis chamber from the anteroom is an open airlock door. The militaries seem disappointed. Doubtles
s they had expected yawning chasms filled with manmade lightning, stupendous devices crackling with power, searing beams of energy. Only Ames seems to appreciate the significance of what lies beyond the airlock door.

  “Your belief is that if you can prevent the assassination of this Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Tsarist Empire would crumble under Bolshevist assault, and be forced to sue for peace,” he says, nodding slowly, slyly, like one chess master in appreciation of another’s skills. “In effect, the war would have been won 37 years ago.”

  The militaries in their ludicrous uniforms are dumbfounded. “Except that is not the truth,” says an unexpected voice from the door into the antechamber. Giorgio Joyce has entered the room. He is dressed in a red pressure suit but has left off the helmet. “Is it, Academician Retief? No, the plan is to send a man much further into the past than 37 years. Is that not so, Academician? In fact, to send him one hundred and one years into the past, to the Crimean Incident that was the root of the War. In fact, his intention, the intention of all the Academicians gathered here, is to end the War before it ever began, to re-shape history so that there is neither victor nor vanquished, indeed, that neither the Tsarist Empire nor Britannia came into existence.” From inside the pressure suit Giorgio Joyce draws a heavy revolver.

  “Why so horrified, Father? Are you not proud that your son is a loyal and dutiful citizen of Britannia, ever vigilant to root out disloyalty and treachery wherever it may be found? Including the treasonable behaviour of certain members of the Keflavik Chronokinesis faculty. And you invited me, pleaded with me, begged me to be your chrononaut!” His wire-framed spectacles glitter with reflected fluorescents.

  “The Chronokinesis Project is cancelled as a threat to the security of Britannia!” screams Director Ames. A thin rope of creamy drool has leaked from the corner of his mouth. “The facility will be dismantled and its staff disbanded. All Academicians here present are under arrest. Air Lord Blennerhasset, you are ordered by the Directorate to proceed forthwith on plans for the wholesale atomic bombardment of the Tsarist Holdfasts!”