Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  10.

  The thunderstorm on the previous day had left the air cooler. Blackett walked home slowly in the darkness, holding the HP calculator and two books the old man had perforce drawn upon for data, now the internet was expired. He did not recall having carried these particular volumes across the street from the empty library. Perhaps Clare or one of the other infrequent visitors had fetched them.

  The stars hung clean and clear through the heavy branches extending from the gardens of most of the large houses in the neighborhood and across the old sidewalk. In the newer, outlying parts of the city, the nouveaux riches had considered it a mark of potent prosperity to run their well-watered lawns to the very verge of the roadway, never walking anywhere, driving to visit neighbors three doors distant. He wondered how they were managing on Venus. Perhaps the ratio of fit to obese and terminally inactive had improved, under the whip of necessity. Too late for poor Kafele, he thought, and made a mental note to stockpile another batch of pioglitazone, the old man’s diabetes drug, when next he made a foray into a pharmacy.

  He sat for half an hour in the silence of the large kitchen, scratching down data points and recalculating the professor’s estimates. It was apparent that Massri thought the accepted extinction date of the great reptiles, coinciding as it did with the perfect overlap of the greater and lesser lights in the heavens, was no such thing—that it was, in fact, a time-stamp for Creation. The notion chilled Blackett’s blood. Might the world, after all (fashionable speculation!), be no more than a virtual simulation? A calculational contrivance on a colossal scale? But not truly colossal, perhaps no more than a billion lines of code and a prodigiously accurate physics engine. Nothing else so easily explained the wholesale revision of the inner solar system. The idea did not appeal; it stank in Blackett’s nostrils. Thus I refute, he thought again, and tapped a calculator key sharply. But that was a feeble refutation; one might as well, in a lucid dream, deny that any reality existed, forgetting the ground state or brute physical substrate needed to sustain the dream.

  The numbers made no sense. He ran the calculations again. It was true that Ganymede’s new orbit placed the former Jovian moon in just the right place, from time to time, to occult the sun’s disk precisely. That was a disturbing datum. The dinosaur element was far less convincing. According to the authors of these astronomy books, Earth had started out, after the tremendous shock of the X-body impact that birthed the Moon, with an dizzying 5.5 or perhaps eight-hour day. It seemed impossibly swift, but the hugely larger gas giant Jupiter, Ganymede’s former primary, turned completely around in just 10 hours.

  The blazing young Earth spun like a mad top, its almost fatal impact wound subsiding, sucked away into subduction zones created by the impact itself. Venus—the old Venus, at least—lacked tectonic plates; the crust was resurfaced at half billion year intervals, as the boiling magma burst up through the rigid rocks, but not enough to carry down and away the appalling mass of carbon dioxide that had crushed the surface with a hundred times the pressure of Earth’s oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. Now, though, the renovated planet had a breathable atmosphere. Just add air and water, Blackett thought. Presumably the crust crept slowly over the face of the world, sucked down and spat back up over glacial epochs. But the numbers—

  The Moon had been receding from Earth at a sluggish rate of 38 kilometers every million years—one part in 10,000 of its final orbital distance, before its removal to Venus. Kepler’s Third Law, Blackett noted, established the orbital equivalence of time squared with distance cubed. So those 65.5 million years ago, when the great saurians were slain by a falling star, Luna had been only 2500 km closer to the Earth. But to match the sun’s sidereal rotation exactly, the Moon needed to be more than 18,000 km nearer. That was the case no more recently than 485 million years ago.

  Massri’s dinosaur fantasy was off by a factor of at least 7.4.

  Then how had the Egyptian reached his numerological conclusion? And where did all this lead? Nowhere useful that Blackett could see.

  It was all sheer wishful thinking. Kafele Massri was as delusional as Clare, his thought processes utterly unsound. Blackett groaned and put his head on the table. Perhaps, he had to admit, his own reflections were no more reliable.

  11.

  “I’m flying down to the coast for a swim,” Blackett told Clare. “There’s room in the plane.”

  “A long way to go for a dip.”

  “A change of scenery,” he said. “Bring your bathing suit if you like. I never bother, myself.”

  She gave him a long, cool look. “A nude beach? All right. I’ll bring some lunch.”

  They drove together to the small airfield to one side of the industrial park in a serviceable SUV he found abandoned outside a Seven-Eleven. Clare had averted her eyes as he hot-wired the engine. She wore sensible hiking boots, dark gray shorts, a white wife-beater that showed off her small breasts to advantage. Seated and strapped in, she laid her broad-brimmed straw hat on her knees. Blackett was mildly concerned by the slowly deteriorating condition of the plane. It had not been serviced in many months. He felt confident, though, that it would carry him where he needed to go, and back again.

  During the 90-minute flight, he tried to explain the Egyptian’s reasoning. The young psychiatrist responded with indifference that became palpable anxiety. Her hands tightened on the seat belt cinched at her waist. Blackett abandoned his efforts.

  As they landed at Matagorda Island, she regained her animation. “Oh, look at those lovely biplanes! A shame they’re in such deplorable condition. Why would anyone leave them out in the open weather like that?” She insisted on crossing to the sagging Stearmans for a closer look. Were those tears in her eyes?

  Laden with towels and a basket of food, drink, paper plates and two glasses, Blackett summoned her sharply. “Come along, Clare, we’ll miss the good waves if we loiter.” If she heard bitter irony in his tone, she gave no sign of it. A gust of wind carried away his own boater, and she dashed after it, brought it back, jammed it rakishly on his balding head. “Thank you. I should tie the damned thing on with a leather thong, like the cowboys used to do, and cinch it with a . . . a . . .”

  “A woggle,” she said, unexpectedly.

  It made Blackett laugh out loud. “Good god, woman! Wherever did you get a word like that?”

  “My brother was a boy scout,” she said.

  They crossed the unkempt grass, made their way with some difficulty down to the shoreline. Blue ocean stretched south, almost flat, sparkling in the cloudless light. Blackett set down his burden, stripped his clothing efficiently, strode into the water. The salt stung his nostrils and eyes. He swam strongly out toward Mexico, thinking of the laughable scene in the movie Gattaca. He turned back, and saw Clare’s head bobbing, sun-bleached hair plastered against her well-shaped scalp.

  They lay side by side in the sun, odors of sun-block hanging on the unmoving air. After a time, Blackett saw the red setter approaching from the seaward side. The animal sat on its haunches, mouth open and tongue lolling, saying nothing.

  “Hello, Sporky,” Blackett said. “Beach patrol duties?”

  “Howdy, doc. Saw the Cessna coming in. Who’s the babe?”

  “This is Dr. Clare Laing. She’s a psychiatrist, so show some respect.”

  Light glistened on her nearly naked body, reflected from sweat and a scattering of mica clinging to her torso. She turned her head away, affected to be sleeping. No, not sleeping. He realized that her attention was now fixed on a rusty bicycle wheel half buried in the sand. It seemed she might be trying to work out the absolute essence of the relationship between them, with the rim and broken spokes of this piece of sea drift serving as some kind of spinal metaphor.

  Respectful of her privacy, Blackett sat up and began explaining to the dog the bibliophile’s absurd miscalculation. Sporky interrupted his halting exposition.

  “You’re saying the angular width of the sun, then and now, is about 32 arc minutes.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, 0.00925 radians.”

  “And the Moon last matched this some 485 million years ago.”

  “No, no. Well, it was a slightly better match than it is now, but that’s not Massri’s point.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is that the sun’s rotational period and the Moon’s were the same in that epoch. Can’t you see how damnably unlikely that is? He thinks it’s something like . . . I don’t know, God’s thumbprint on the solar system. The true date of Creation, maybe. Then he tried to show that it coincides with the extinction of the dinosaurs, but that’s just wrong, they went extinct—”

  “You do know that there was a major catastrophic extinction event at the Cambrian-Ordovician transition 488 million years ago at?”

  Dumbfounded, Blackett said, “What?”

  “Given your sloppy math, what do you say the chances are that your Moon-Sun rotation equivalence bracketed the Cambrian-Ordovician extinction? Knocked the living hell out of the trilobites, doc.”

  A surreal quality had entered the conversation. Blackett found it hard to accept that the dog could be a student of ancient geomorphisms. A spinal tremor shook him. So the creature was no ordinary genetically upgraded dog but some manifestation of the entity, the force, the ontological dislocation that had torn away the Moon and the world’s inhabitants, most of them.

  Detesting the note of pleading in his own voice, Blackett uttered a cry of heartfelt petition. He saw Clare roll over, waken from her sun-warmed drowse. “How can I get back there?” he cried. “Send me back! Send us both!”

  Sporky stood up, shook sand from his fur, spraying Blackett with stinging mica.

  “Go on as you began,” the animal said, “and let the Lord be all in all to you.”

  Clouds of uncertainty cleared from Blackett’s mind, as the caustic, acid clouds of Venus had been sucked away and transposed to the relocated Moon. He jumped up, bent, seized the psychiatrist’s hand, hauled her blinking and protesting to her feet.

  “Clare! We must trace out the ceremony of the Great Temple! Here, at the edge of the ocean. I’ve been wasting my time trying this ritual inland. Venus is now a world of great oceans!”

  “Damn it, Robert, let me go, you’re hurting—”

  But he was hauling her down to the brackish, brine-stinking sea shore. Their parallel footprints wavered, inscribing a semiotics of deliverance. He began to tread out the Petran temple perimeter, starting at the Propylaeum, turned a right angle, marched them to the East Excedra and to the very foot of the ancient Cistern. He was traveling backward into archeopsychic time, deeper into those remote, somber half-worlds he had glimpsed in the recuperative paintings of his mad patients.

  “Robert! Robert!”

  They entered the water, which lapped sluggishly at their ankles and calves like the articulate tongue of a dog as large as the world. Blackett gaped. At the edge of sea and sand, great three-lobed arthropods shed water from their shells, moving slowly like enormous wood lice.

  “Trilobites!” Blackett cried. He stared about, hand still firmly clamped on Clare Laing’s. Great green rolling breakers, in the distance, rushed toward shore, broke, foamed and frothed, lifting the ancient animals and tugging at Blackett’s limbs. He tottered forward into the drag of the Venusian ocean, caught himself. He stared over his shoulder at the vast, towering green canopy of trees. Overhead, bracketing the sun, twin crescent moons shone faintly against the purple sky. He looked wildly at his companion and laughed, joyously, then flung his arms about her.

  “Clare,” he cried, alive on Venus, “Clare, we made it!”

  All the Love in the World

  Cat Sparks

  Catriona Sparks (www.catsparks.net) lives in Wollongong, Australia, with her partner, Robert Hood. She is an Australian speculative fiction writer and graphic designer. From 2002–2008 she and Robert Hood ran Agog! Press, which produced ten anthologies of award-winning, new and mostly Australian speculative fiction. Her stories have drawn attention in the last six years or so. In 2007, Cat’s story “Hollywood Roadkill” was awarded both the Aurealis Award for best short science fiction story and the Golden Aurealis for best Australian speculative fiction story of the year. In 2010, she replaced Damien Broderick as fiction editor of Cosmos, an Australian literary science magazine that also publishes SF, and is poised to reach an audience outside Australia.

  “All the Love in the World” was published in Sprawl, an impressive original anthology edited by Alisa Krasnostein in Australia. In this story, civilization collapses, and a small suburban neighborhood barricades itself for survival, forming an enclave. But things work out a little differently than one might expect for one woman. We like this story because it does something new and positive with the post-apocalypse tale.

  If only Jon hadn’t been the one to find her, rostered on his sentry duty up high above the wire. If only he’d been out the back busting furniture for wood. I could have claimed she was a looter, shot her square between the eyes. Jeannie spoiled everything. Wormed her way into the Crescent, set her sights on kicking me from Jon’s bed. Tricking them all with her innocence and sweetness. Fooling every one of them but me.

  “Why can’t they put her in with Brian and Joyce?”

  “No room. They’ve got grandchildren in there.”

  And God knows what else. Brian used to be a bus driver, kept his yard so spick and span and a little dog too old to do much yapping. Next door to him was once a childcare centre. Now it was filled with Princes Highway refugees and all the tinned stuff we’d been able to scrounge.

  Jon’s and my place had four rooms. I put Jeannie out back where the telly used to be. Watched her waving cheerily at Darren and Julie, the nice couple over the side fence. She treated me with deference. Obeyed my rules. Respected my possessions, but we both knew it was only borrowed time. I observed her step-by-step ingratiation into our tight community, checking out one man after another, calculating which of them had what. Darren was handsome and closer to her age, but two little daughters bound him tight to Julie. All roads of logic and opportunity led to Jon, no matter how you did the maths. And besides, he was already smitten.

  Jeannie volunteered for extra farming. Said she loved nature and watching things grow. Every spare patch of Crescent soil was put to vegetable production, Al Messina’s roses the one exception. They’d been his pride and joy before. No-one had the heart to pull them out. He grew his share of carrots where his front lawn used to be. Cabbages down the side passage. Avocadoes along the fence.

  We were safe enough. Safe as anyone could be. Our Crescent home was blocked at either end, the creek behind our houses widened, banks fortified with razor wire and sacks of dirty sand. Across the road, a concrete sound barrier protected us from the highway, serving its duty as a battlement wall.

  We had enough cans to get by for now. The future would be anybody’s guess. Chris Cloakey’s swimming pool was permanently half filled with scuzzy water. It rained a lot but we boiled it anyway. Used stormwater drain runoff for washing. It wouldn’t take much to poison the lot of us.

  Jon had been mine for ten whole months. I thought it was a blessing. That something as wonderful as love could bloom at the end of the world. He’d never have looked at me before the war. He stopped looking at me the day that bitch showed up, all big brown eyes and begging for something to eat.

  He played guitar. Beatles and Pixies mixed with songs he wrote himself. We still ran stuff on batteries, clinging to the comfort of that electronic glow. Pointless, noisy shooting games. The real shooting had mostly passed us by.

  Weekly meetings were all about our chickens and whether or not to dig up the bitumen road. We voted yes. More soil was needed for potatoes. There was talk of expanding the barricade up into St John’s Road. That one got a yes vote too. The streets behind us had lain abandoned for months.

  The couple on the corner’s yard was still chocked with Christmas decorations. Giant reindeer and snowmen dioramas, shit that never made any sense in baking Austr
alian Decembers. I said they ought to pull them down. That vote went against me. I said we didn’t need reminding. They seemed to think it important not to forget.

  I lost Jon incrementally in stages of politeness. Humour was the first to go—our private little jokes. She ended up with everything: the sex, the love, the laughter. The laughter cut the most because it proved he didn’t care. Jon became so formal in my presence. Straight up with necessary exchanges, like ones he had with neighbours either side. Conversations reduced to business transactions. If I give you this, perhaps you’ll give me that. When I lost Jon I got nothing in exchange. Sympathy from others, not enough to make a stand.

  He wrote songs for her. Cooked her special treats. Stole from my hidden stash of chocolate even though I never touched his private stuff. I overheard them whispering in the darkness.

  “Jeannie, you brought the light back to my life.”

  Give me a break, you heartless bastard. Before she got here, you and me were fine. But you’ve forgotten all of that, just like you always traded up. I bought that he felt guilty he’d survived. Most folks ’round here did. I didn’t.

  So I endured their hush-hush tones, their giggles and their love. It was the love that killed me—if it had been just sex, I might have borne that well enough. But Jon truly loved her. He’d always been a princess chaser even in the days before. And Jeannie was a princess, albeit a barefoot one in ragged jeans.

  People don’t ask questions when they want something to be true. I never pondered the coincidences that drew Jon to my side. He never questioned his right to upgrade. Jeannie read the lot of us like books. Sized us up and took the things she wanted. I spared so little thought to all the lives we’d left behind us. All her thoughts were focused on the future.