The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  He had raised the flag above the slaver with his own hands. Several of the Africans had pointed at it and launched into excited comments when it was only a third of the way up the mast. He could still see some of them pointing and obviously explaining its significance to the newcomers. Some of them had even pointed at him. Most liberated slaves came from the interior. The captives who came from the coast would know about the antislavery patrol. They would understand the significance of the flag and the blue coat.

  “We’re all loaded and ready, sir.”

  Harrington turned away from the deck. The last prisoner had settled into his seat in the boat.

  He nodded at Terry and Terry nodded back. The hands had managed to slip in a few more pawings under the guise of being helpful, but Terry seemed to have the overall situation under control.

  “She’s your ship, Mr. Terry. I’ll send you the final word on your prize crew as soon as I’ve conferred with Mr. Bonfors.”

  “It looks to me like it’s about time we hopped for home,” Giva said.

  “Now? He’s only brought one load of slaves on deck.”

  “You don’t really think he’s going to decorate the deck with more Africans, do you? Look at my screens. I’m getting two usable images of your ancestor returning to his ship. It’s a high feel closure. All we need is a sunset.”

  “There’s five hundred people in that hold. Don’t you think he’s going to give the rest of them a chance to breathe?”

  “He exaggerated his report. Use your head, Emory. Would you go through all the hassle involved in controlling five hundred confused people when you knew they were only four or five days away from Freetown?”

  “You are deliberately avoiding the most important scene in the entire drama. We’ll never know what happened next if we go now.”

  “You’re clinging to a fantasy. We’re done. It’s time to go. Hal—I request relocation to home base.”

  “I have a request for relocation to home base. Please confirm.”

  “I do not confirm. I insist that we—”

  “Request confirmed, Hal. Request confirmed.”

  Time stopped. The universe blinked. A technology founded on the best contemporary scientific theories did something the best contemporary scientific theories said it couldn’t do.

  The rig dropped onto the padded stage in Transit Room One. The bubble had disappeared. Faces were peering at them through the windows that surrounded the room.

  Gina jabbed her finger at the time strip mounted on the wall. They had been gone seven minutes and thirty-eight seconds local time.

  “We were pushing it,” Gina said. “We were pushing it more than either of us realized.”

  The average elapsed local time was three minutes—a fact they had both committed to memory the moment they had heard it during their first orientation lecture. The bump when they hit the stage had seemed harder than the bumps they had experienced during training, too. The engineers always set the return coordinates for a position two meters above the stage—a precaution that placed the surface of the stage just outside the margin of error and assured the passengers they wouldn’t relocate below it. They had come home extra late and extra high. Gina would have some objective support for her decision to return.

  The narrow armored hatch under the time strip swung open. An engineer hopped through it with a medic right behind her.

  “Is everything all right?”

  “I can’t feel anything malfunctioning,” Giva said. “We had a flicker about two hours before we told Hal to shoot us home.”

  Emory ripped off his seat belt. He jumped to his feet and the medic immediately dropped into his soothe-the-patient mode. “You really should sit down, Mr. FitzGordon. You shouldn’t stand up until we’ve checked you out.”

  The soft, controlled tones only added more points to the spurs driving Emory’s rage. Giva was sprawling in her chair, legs stretched in front of her, obviously doing her best to create the picture of the relaxed daredevil who had courageously held off until the last minute. And now the medic was treating him like he was some kind of disoriented patient … .

  He swung toward the medic and the man froze when he saw the hostility on Emory’s face. He was a solid, broad-shouldered type with a face that probably looked pleasant and experienced when he was helping chrononauts disembark. Now he slipped into a stance that looked like a slightly disguised on-guard.

  “You’re back, Mr. FitzGordon. Everything’s okay. We’ll have you checked out and ready for debriefing before you know it.”

  Peter LeGrundy crouched through the hatch. He flashed his standard-issue smile at the two figures on the rig and Emory realized he had to get himself under control.

  “So how did it go?” Peter said. “Did you have a nice trip?”

  Emory forced his muscles to relax. He lowered his head and settled into the chair as if he was recovering from a momentary lapse—the kind of thing any normal human could feel when he had just violated the laws of physics and traveled through three centuries of time. He gave the medic a quick thumbs-up and the medic nodded.

  He had his own record of the event. He had Giva’s comments. Above all, he had Peter LeGrundy. And Peter LeGrundy’s ambitions. He could cover every grant Peter could need for the rest of Peter’s scholarly career if he had to. The battle wasn’t over. Not yet.

  You need the creatives. The creatives need your money.

  I ordered the liberated captives brought to the deck as circumstances allowed. They did not fully comprehend their change in status, and I could not explain it. Our small craft does not contain a translator among its complement. But the sight of so many souls rescued from such a terrible destiny stimulated the deepest feelings of satisfaction in every heart capable of such sentiments.

  Two well-placed candles illuminated the paper on John Harrington’s writing desk without casting distracting shadows. The creak of Sparrow’s structure created a background that offered him a steady flow of information about the state of his command.

  He lowered his pen. He had been struggling with his report for almost two hours.

  The emotions he had ignored during the battle had flooded over him as soon as he had closed the door of his cabin. The pistol that had roared in his face had exploded half a dozen times.

  He shook his head and forced out a sentence advising the Admiralty he had placed Mr. Terry in command of the prize. He had already commended Terry’s gunnery and his role in the assault. He had given Bonfors due mention. Dawkins and several other hands had been noted by name. The dead and the wounded had been properly honored.

  It had been a small battle by the standards of the war against Napoleon. A skirmish really. Against an inept adversary. But the bullets had been real. Men had died. He could have died. He had boarded an enemy ship under fire. He had led a headlong assault at an enemy line. He had exchanged shots with the captain of the enemy.

  The emotions he was feeling now would fade. One hard, unshakeable truth would remain. He had faced enemy fire and done his duty.

  He had met the test. He had become the kind of man he had read about when he was a boy.

  Craters

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

  Kristine Kathryn Rusch started out the decade of the ’90s as one of the fastest-rising and most prolific young authors on the scene, took a few years out in mid-decade for a very successful turn as editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and, since stepping down from that position, has returned to her old standards of production here in the 21st century, publishing a slew of novels in four genres, writing fantasy, mystery, and romance novels under various pseudonyms, as well as science fiction. She has published more than twenty novels under her own name, including The White Mists of Power, The Disappeared, Extremes, and Fantasy Life, the four-volume Fey series, the Black Throne series, Alien Influences, and several Star Wars, Star Trek, and other media tie-in books, both solo and written with husband Dean Wesley Smith and with others. Her most recent books (as Rusc
h, anyway) are the SF novels of the popular “Retrieval Artist” series, which include The Disappeared, Extreme, Consequences, Buried Deep, Paloma, Recovery Man, and a collection of “Retrieval Artist” stories, The Retrieval Artist and Other Stories. Her copious short fiction has been collected in Stained Black: Horror Stories, Stories for an Enchanted Afternoon, Little Miracles and Other Tales of Murder, and Millennium Babies. In 1999, she won Readers Award polls from the readerships of both Asimov’s Science Fiction and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, an unprecedented double honor! As an editor, she was honored with the Hugo Award for her work on The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and shared the World Fantasy Award with Dean Wesley Smith for her work as editor of the original hardcover anthology version of Pulphouse. As a writer, she has won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery (for A Dangerous Road, written as Kris Nelscott) and the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice Award (for Utterly Charming, written as Kristine Grayson); as Kristine Kathryn Rusch, she has won the John W. Campbell Award, been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and took home a Hugo Award in 2000 for her story “Millennium Babies,” making her one of the few people in genre history to win Hugos for both editing and writing.

  Let’s hope that the harrowing future that she portrays here doesn’t come to pass—although looking around the modern world, I get the uneasy feeling that it just might.

  What they don’t tell you when you sign up is that the work takes a certain amount of trust. The driver, head covered by a half-assed turban, smiles a little too much, and when he yes-ma’ams you and no ma’ams you, you can be lulled into thinking he actually works for you.

  Then he opens the side door of his rusted jeep and nods at the dirt-covered seat. You don’t even hesitate as you slide in, backpack filled with water bottles and purifying pills, vitamins and six days’ dry rations.

  You sit in that jeep, and you’re grateful, because you never allow yourself to think that he could be one of them, taking you to some roadside bunker, getting paid an advance cut of the ransom they anticipate. Or worse, getting paid to leave you there so that they can all take turns until you’re bleeding and catatonic and don’t care when they put the fifty-year-old pistol to your head.

  You can’t think about the risks, not as you’re getting in that jeep, or letting some so-called civilian lead you down sunlit streets that have seen war for centuries almost nonstop.

  You trust, because if you don’t you can’t do your job.

  You trust, and hope you get away from this place before your luck runs out.

  I still have luck. I know it because today we pull into the camp. This camp’s just like all the others I’ve seen in my twenty-year career. The ass-end of nowhere, damn near unbearable heat. Barbed wire, older than God, fences in everything, and at the front, soldiers with some kind of high-tech rifle, some sort of programmable thing I don’t understand.

  My driver pulls into a long line of oil-burning cars, their engines only partly modified to hydrogen. The air stinks of gasoline, a smell I associate with my childhood, not with now.

  We sit in the heat. Sweat pours down my face. I nurse the bottle of water I brought from the Green Zone—a misnomer we’ve applied to the American base in every “war” since Iraq. The Green Zone doesn’t have a lick of green in it. It just has buildings that are theoretically protected from bombs and suicide attacks.

  Finally, we pull up to the checkpoint. I clutch my bag against my lap, even though the canvas is heavy and hot.

  My driver knows the soldiers. “Reporter lady,” he tells them in English. The English is for my benefit, to prove once again that he is my friend. I haven’t let him know that I know parts (the dirty parts mostly) of two dozen languages. “Very famous. She blog, she do vid, you see her on CNN, no?”

  The soldiers lean in. They have young faces covered in sand and mud and threeday-old beards. The same faces I’ve been seeing for years—skin an indeterminate color, thanks to the sun and the dirt, eyes black or brown or covered with shades, expressions flat—the youth visible only in the body shape, the lack of wrinkles and sun-lines, the leftover curiosity undimmed by too much death over too much time.

  I lean forward so they can see my face. They don’t recognize me. CNN pays me, just like The New York Times News Service, just like the Voice of the European Union. But none of them broadcast or replicate my image.

  The woman everyone thinks of as me is a hired face, whose features get digitized over mine before anything goes out public. Too many murdered journalists. Too many famous targets.

  The military brass, they know to scan my wrist, send the code into the Reporter Registry, and get the retinal download that they can double-check against my eye. But foot soldiers, here on crap duty, they don’t know for nothing.

  So they eyeball me, expecting a pretty face—all the studio hires are skinny and gorgeous—and instead, getting my shoe-leather skin, my dishwater blond going on steel gray hair, and my seen-too-much eyes. They take in the sweat and the khakis and the pinkie jacks that look like plastic fingernails.

  I wait.

  They don’t even confer. The guy in charge waves the jeep forward, figuring, I guess, that I clean up startlingly well. Before I can say anything, the jeep roars through the barbed wire into a wide flat street filled with people.

  Most cultures call them refugees, but I think of them as the dregs—unwanted and unlucky, thrown from country to country, or locked away in undesirable land, waiting for a bit of charity, a change of political fortune, waiting for an understanding that will never, ever come.

  The smell hits you first: raw sewage combined with vomit and dysentery. Then the bugs, bugs like you’ve never seen, moving in swarms, sensing fresh meat.

  After your first time with those swarms, you slather illegal bug spray on your arms, not caring that developed countries banned DDT as a poison/nerve toxin long ago. Anything to keep those creatures off you, anything to keep yourself alive.

  You get out of your jeep, and immediately, the children who aren’t dying surround you. They don’t want sweets—what a quaint old idea that is—they want to know what kind of tech you have, what’s buried in your skin, what you carry under your eyes, what you record from that hollow under your chin. You give them short answers, wrong answers, answers you’ll regret in the quiet of your hotel room days later, after you know you’ve made it out to report once more. You remember them, wonder how they’ll do, hope that they won’t become the ones you see farther into the camp, sprawled outside thin government-issue tents, those bug swarms covering their faces, their stomachs distended, their limbs pieces of scrap so thin that they don’t even look like useful sticks.

  Then you set the memories—the knowledge—aside. You’re good at setting things aside. That’s a skill you acquire in this job, if you didn’t already have it when you came in. The I’ll-think-about-it-later skill, a promise to the self that is never fulfilled.

  Because if you do think about it later, you get overwhelmed. You figure out pretty damn quickly that if you do think about all the things you’ve seen—all the broken bodies, all the dying children—you’ll break, and if you break you won’t be able to work, and if you can’t work, you can no longer be.

  After a while, work is all that’s left to you. Between the misplaced trust and the sights no human should have to bear, you stand, reporting, because you believe someone will care, someone stronger will Do Something.

  Even though, deep down, you know, there is no one stronger, and nothing ever gets done.

  5:15 UPLOAD: SUICIDE SQUADRON PART I BY MARTHA TRUMANTE

  General Amanda Pedersen tells the story as if it happened two days ago instead of twenty years ago. She’s sitting in one of the many cafeterias in the Louvre, this one just beneath the glass pyramid where the tourists enter. She’s an American soldier on leave, spending a week with her student boyfriend at the Sorbonne. He has classes. She’s seeing the sights.

  She’s just resting her feet, propping them up—Am
erican-style—on the plastic chair across from her. From her vantage, she can’t see the first round of security in the pyramid itself, but she can see the second set of metal detectors, the ones installed after the simultaneous attacks of ’19 that leveled half the Prado in Madrid and the Tate in London.

  She likes watching security systems—that’s what got her to enlist in the first place, guaranteeing a sense of security in an insecure world—and she likes watching people go through them.

  The little boy and his mother are alone on the escalator coming down. They reach the security desk, the woman opening her palm to reveal the number embedded under the skin, her son—maybe four, maybe five—bouncing with excitement beside her.

  A guard approaches him, says something, and the boy extends his arms—European, clearly, used to high levels of security. The guard runs his wand up the boy’s legs, over his crotch, in front of his chest—

  And the world collapses.

  That’s how she describes it. The world collapses. The air smells of blood and smoke and falling plaster. Her skin is covered in dust and goo and she has to pull some kind of stone off her legs. Miraculously, they’re not broken, but as the day progresses, part of her wishes they were, so she wouldn’t be carrying dead through the ruins of the Roman area, up the back stairs, and into the thin Paris sunlight.

  She can’t go to the rebuilt pyramid, even now, nor to the Tuileries Garden, or even look at the Seine without thinking of that little boy, the smile on his face as he bounces, anticipating a day in the museum, a day with his mother, a day without cares, like five-year-olds are supposed to have.

  Were supposed to have.