The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  Is it chance, rogue coincidence, that the next day Bruce schedules a dual jack, a climatizer as he calls it? Between them, there is much secret hilarity, expressed in a smile here, a less-than-gesture there, and when they do dual, for real and on the record, they swoop and march in flawless tandem, working as one; the simulated tasks are almost ridiculously simple to complete, and perfectly.

  Bruce still loathes them, but is undeniably impressed. “There’s something about them,” he tells a subordinate, who tells someone else, who mentions it sotto voce at dinner break, mostly to piss off Ferrante, who is nobody’s favorite either. Michael and Halloran hear, too, but go on eating, serene, prefab biscuits and freeze-dried stew.

  The tests seem, now, redundant, and Michael is impatient, growing more so. He lusts for the void, can almost taste its unforgiving null. “What is this shit?” he complains one night, face sideways-pressed into pillow, Halloran’s small hands strong on back and buttocks. “The damn thing’ll be there and back before we ever get a chance to ride it.”

  More tests. NASA is stultifyingly thorough.

  More tests. Intense. Ruthann Duvall vomits her morning sausage in simulation; the sausage, of course, is very real. “Don’t you know,” Michael tells her, “that’s not the way to send back your breakfast?”

  More tests.

  “Fuck!” Halloran feels like wrecking something. She contents herself with smokebomb curses. “This is getting to me, you know that, this is really fucking getting to me.”

  Maybe even Bruce, the king of caution, has had enough. The waiting is driving everyone mad, madder than before, the daily speculation, the aura of tension thick as gasoline smoke. Surely they must know, those testers, those considerers of results, surely they must know who is meant to fly, who is the best.

  * * *

  They don’t need a victory party. They are a victory party.

  No one is really, truly, happy for them. Michael is no darling, and this is Halloran’s second sweep; besides, Team Chronic has rubbed too many raw spots to be favorites now. All the others can hope for, in their darkest moments, is project failure, but then of course they feel like shits: nobody really wants Arrowhead to fail, no matter who’s riding it.

  The winners are wild in their joy; the strain has broken, the goal achieved, the certainty blue-ribbon and bright confirmed. They order up beer, the closest they can get to champagne, and one by one, team by team, the others drift by to join in. Ferrante and Duvall do not, of course, attend, instead spending the evening reviewing data, searching for the flaw that cannot be found.

  Everyone gets drunk, yells, laughs loud. Even in losing out there is a certain comfort—at least the waiting is over. And their assignments, while (as Bruce noted) not “glamorous,” are still interesting, worthy of excitement. Everyone talks about what they’re going to do, while silently, unanimously, envying the radiant Michael.

  Somebody takes a picture: Michael, beer in hand, mutilated labcoat and denim cap askew, sneakered feet crossed at the ankles, hair a halo and eyes—they are—like stars; one arm around Halloran, dark, intent, a flush on her cheekbones, hair pushed messily back, wearing a button on her lapel—if you look very closely at the picture you can read the words: “Has The World Gone Mad, Or Am I At Work?”

  * * *

  His work area is almost ludicrously bare. The physical jacking in, 2mm cord running to a superconducting supercomputer—that’s all. The comlink system is housed elsewhere. In contrast to the manual backup equipment, resembling the cockpit of a suborbital fighter in its daunting complexity, he could be in a broom closet.

  He has taken almost obsessive care to furnish his domain. Totems of various meanings and symbolisms are placed with fastidious precision. His bicycle bottle of mineral water, here; the remnants of his original labcoat, draped over his chairback here; his handleless black mug, sticky, most times, with aging grounds, here; pertinent memos and directives that no one must disturb, in this messy heap here; a bumpersticker that reads “Even if I gave a shit, I still wouldn’t care,” pasted at a strict diagonal across the wall before him; and, in the place of honor, the party-picture.

  He loves his work.

  It goes without saying, but he does. He cannot imagine, now, another way to live, as if, meeting by chance the lover he has always dreamed of, he thinks of life without her scent and kiss, her morning joke. Riding Arrowhead is all he ever expected, dreamed it to be, only better, better. He does his work—now, guiding Arrowhead through systems check in deceleration mode, realtime course correction to prepare for the big show—and has his play, the sheer flying, ecstasy of blackness, emptiness at his fingertips, in his mouth, flowing over his pores so hungry for mystery that they soak like new sponges. He eats it, all of it, drunk with delight, absorbing every morsel.

  In their quarters is a remote terminal. It goes unused.

  Other handlers work their subjects still, guiding them through maintenance routines, or geosynchronous dances, or linkups close and far; they are needed, to some degree; their tech has uses. Not that the subjects will not leave them behind, to NASA’s prosaic mercies, to other work for handlers whose glassheads have outstripped them. They are on their way out. It was the pre-est of preordained. But not just yet.

  Halloran is useless.

  Her tech cannot fly Arrowhead—that was graphically proved. She cannot interface directly with the audacious bundle streaking across heaven; cannot in fact guide Michael; he is already far beyond her abilities. Despite any projections to the contrary, she has no function. She is required, now, only to keep Michael happy, on an even keel; when he stabilizes, breaks completely to harness, she will no longer be even marginally necessary.

  She has busywork, of course. She “charts.” She “observes.” She “documents.” She is strictly prohibited to use the room remote. It will hurt her. She knows this.

  She is in the room one twilight, finishing the last of her daily “reports.” She is wearing a castoff flightsuit, the irony of which only she can honestly appreciate. Her hair is clubbed back in a greasy bow. She refuses to think about the future. Sometimes, at night, her stomach aches so sourly she wants to scream, knows she will, doesn’t.

  “Hi.” Michael, tray in hand, smile he tries to make natural. Her pain makes him miserable. He goes, every day, where she is technologically forbidden to enter: she stands at the gate while he soars inside. There is never any hint that she begrudges: she would scream like a banshee if ever came the slightest whisper of withdrawal from the project. He is as close as she can get; even the light of the fire is warmth, of a kind.

  “Brought you some slop. Here,” and sets it before her, gentle, seats himself at her side. “Mind if I graze?”

  “Help yourself.”

  He eats, or tries to. She messes the food, rubs it across the plate, pretends. “Music?” she asks, trying to do her part.

  “Sure. How ’bout some Transplant?”

  “Okay.” She turns it on, the loudest of the blast purveyors, nihilism in 4/4 time. “Good run today?”

  “Great. You see the sheets?”

  “Yeah. Outstanding.”

  He cannot answer that. They play at eating for a little while longer, Transplant thrashing in the background; then Michael shoves the tray aside.

  “Jack with me,” he says, pleads, commands.

  This is what she lives for. “Okay,” she says.

  Inner workings, corridors, a vastness she can know, share. O, she tells him. Without words, trying to hide what cannot be hidden, trying to bear the brunt. He sees, knows, breaks into her courage, as he does each time; his way of sharing it, of taking what he can onto his shoulders. Don’t, he says. No, she says.

  Wordless, they undress, fit bodies together, make physical love. He is crying. He often cries, now. She is dry-eyed, wet below. The pleasure suffuses, brings its own panacea, is enough for the moment. They ride those waves, peak after peak, trailing down, whispering sighs into each other’s open mouths.
Her sweat smells sweet to him, like nothing else. He licks her shoulders. He has stopped crying, but only just.

  To stay jacked this way too long, after a day of Arrowhead, will exhaust him, perhaps mar his efficiency. She is the one who broaches a stop.

  No

  Don’t be an asshole yes

  No

  I am

  and she does. He grapples, wide-eyed, for a moment, tears free his own jack. “Don’t do that!” he cries, then sinks back, rubbing rough at his neck.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” she says, and the cry she has withheld so sternly for so long breaks out; she weeps, explosion, and he holds her, helpless. What to do, what to do; nothing. Nothing to do.

  * * *

  The symptoms are subtle.

  Besides the nighttime bellyache, which Halloran has learned to ignore if not subdue, come other things, less palatable. Her jacks pain her, sometimes outrageously. Her joints hurt. She has no appetite. It is so difficult to sleep that she has requested, and received, barbiturates. The fact that they gave her no argument about the drugs makes her wonder. Do they A) just not care if she dopes herself stupid or B) have another reason, i.e., more requests? Is everybody breaking down?

  Incredibly, yes. The handlers are beginning—in the startlingly crude NASAspeak—to corrode. The glassheads are still okay, doing swimmingly, making hay with their billion-dollar tech. The handlers are slowly going to shit, each in his or her own destructive orbit but with some symptoms universal. Entropy, Halloran thinks, laughing in a cold hysteric way. Built-in byebye.

  But it is not built in. She accesses Bruce’s files, breaking their so-called security with contemptuous angry ease, finds that this situation is as shocking to the brass as it is to the handlers. The ex-glassheads. Broken glassheads.

  No one is discussing it, not that she knows of. In the cafeteria, at the now-infrequent meetings, she searches them, looks minute and increasingly desperate, hunting their dissolution: does Ryerson look thinner? Wickerman’s face seems blotchy. Ferrante has big bags under his eyes. She knows they are watching her, too, seeing her corrosion, drawing conclusions that must inevitably coincide. While in the meantime hell freezes over, waiting for Bruce to bring it up.

  She says nothing to Michael about any of it. When they jack, the relief of not having to think about it sweeps her mind clean; she is there, in that moment, in a way she is never anywhere else, at any time, anymore.

  Bruce comes to see her one morning. She logs off, faces him, feels the numb patches around lips and wrist begin to throb.

  “We don’t understand it,” he begins.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “There are various treatments being contemplated.” He looks genuinely distressed. For the first time it begins to dawn: this is more than breakdown. This is death. Or maybe. Probably. Otherwise why the careful face, the eyes that won’t, will not, meet hers. Her voice rises, high vowels, hating the fear of it but unable to quell.

  “We’re thinking of relocating you,” Bruce says. “All the handlers.”

  “Where?”

  “South Carolina,” he says. “The treatments—” Pause. “We don’t want the subjects … we don’t want to dismay them.”

  Dismay? “What am I supposed to tell him?” She is shouting. No, she is screaming. “What am I supposed to tell him? That I’m going on VACATION?!” Really sceaming now. Get hold of yourself, girl, part of her says, while the other keeps making noise.

  “For God’s sake, Halloran!” Bruce is shaking her. That in itself quiets her down; it’s so damned theatrical. For God’s Sake Halloran! oh ha ha ha, HA HA HA stop it!

  “We have no concrete plans, yet,” he says, when she is calm enough to listen. “In fact if you have any ideas—about how to inform the subjects—” He looks at her, hopeful.

  Get out, Bruce. I can’t think about dying with that face of yours in the room. “I’ll be sure and send you a memo.” It is dismissal; the tone comes easy. In the face of death, getting reprimanded seems, somehow, unimportant. Ha HA: you better stop it or you’re going to flip right out.

  No more bogus “reports.” She sits, stares at her hands, thinking of Michael flying in the dark, thinking of that other dark, the real dark, the biggest dark of all. Oh God, not me. Please not me.

  * * *

  “Something’s wrong.”

  Michael, holding her close, his breath in her damp hair.

  “Something’s bad wrong, Halloran, and you better tell me what it is.”

  Silence.

  “Halloran—”

  “I don’t … I don’t want to—” dismay “—worry you. It’s a metabolic disturbance,” and how easily, how gracefully, the lies roll off her tongue. She could give lessons. Teach a course. A short course. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar,” and she laughs.

  “You,” he says, measured, considering, “are a fucking liar.” He is plugged in, oh yes, he’s going to get to the bottom of this and none of her bullshit about metabolic disturbances, and he pins her down, jacks her in. One way or another he’s going to find out what the hell’s going on around here.

  He finds out.

  * * *

  “South Carolina, what the hell do you mean South Carolina!”

  “That’s where they want to send us. Some kind of treatment center, a clinic.” Voice rough and exhausted from hours of crying, of fighting to comfort. “Bruce seems to think—well, you know, you saw.” She is so immensely tired, and somehow, selfishly, relieved: they share this, too. “Don’t ask me, I—”

  “Why can’t they do whatever they have to do right here?” There is that in him that refuses to think of it in any way other than a temporary malfunction. She will be treated, she will be cured. “Why do they have to send you away?”

  “You know why.”

  “How the fuck can I work anyway!” He is the one screaming, now. “How do they expect me to do anything!”

  The bond, the tie that binds, cuts deeper than NASA intended, or wants. For all the teams it is the same: the glassheads, even those whose handlers have, like Halloran, become token presences, want their handlers. They need them. Bruce and his people are in the unhappy position of trying to separate high-strung children from their very favorite stuffed animals now that the stuffing is coming out. And trying to disguise the disintegration at the same time. It is the quintessential no-win situation. Uncountable dollars down the drain with one batch, the other batch sniffing stress and getting antsy and maybe not able to work at all.

  And for the closest of them, Team Chronic, it is even worse. How do Siamese twins, happy Siamese twins, feel when the scalpel bites?

  * * *

  “Just a little more.”

  “Stop it.” She is surly in her pain. “You’re not my mother. Stop trying to make me eat.”

  “You have to eat, asshole!” He is all at once furious, weeks’ worth of worry geysering now. “How do you ever expect to get better if you don’t eat?”

  “I’m not going to get better!”

  “Yes you are. Don’t even say that. You are going to get better.” He says each word with the unshakable conviction of terror. “And you’d be getting better faster if you’d just cooperate a little.”

  “Stop it! Stop making it my fault!” She stands up, shaking; an observer, seeing her last a year ago, would be shocked silent at her deterioration. She is translucent with her illness; not ugly or wasted, but simply less and less there. “They did this to me!” She scratches at her neck, wild, as if trying to dig out the jacks. “They made me sick! It’s not my fault, Michael, none of it is my fault!”

  He starts to cry. “I know I know,” hands over his face, “I know I know I know,” monotonously, and she sweeps the tray from the table, slapping food on floor, spattering walls, kicking the plastic plate into flight. Then, on her knees beside him, exhausted from the strain of anger, her arms around him, rocking him gently back and forth as he grips her forearms, and sobs as if his heart will break, as if his body will
splinter with the force. “I know,” she says, softly, into his ear. “I know just how you feel. Don’t cry. Please, don’t cry.”

  * * *

  “There goes the bastard,” says a subordinate to Bruce, as Michael slips past them down the corridor. “One minute he’s tearing your head off because you touched his coffee cup, the next minute he won’t even answer you or acknowledge you’re alive.”

  “He’s under enormous stress, Lou.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Lou bites a knuckle, considering. “You don’t think he’ll—do anything, do you? To himself?”

  “No.” Bruce looks unsure.

  “How about Arrowhead?”

  “No.” Very sure. “He’s totally committed to the project, that I know. His performance is still perfect,” which is simple truth. Michael’s work is excellent, his findings impeccable; essential. It is his refuge; he clings to it as fiercely and stubbornly as he clings to Halloran.

  Bruce, and Lou, and all the Lous, are meeting today, to decide the next step in the separation process. The tandem quarters will be vacated; each handler—how empty the title sounds now!—will be put on a ward; the glassheads will be housed in new quarters, with no memories in their walls or under their beds. This move will just be done, no discussion, no chance of input or hysterics or tantrums. Better for everyone, they tell each other solemnly. For them, too, but they don’t say it. This daily tragedy is wearing everybody down.

  The move is a success, with one exception.

  “No,” Michael says, with the simplicity of imminent violence. “Nope,” hand on the door, very calm. “No, she’s not moving anywhere, I don’t care who decided, I don’t care about anything. She’s staying right here and you can go tell Bruce to fuck himself.” And the door closes. Bruce is consulted. He says, Let them be for today and we’ll think of something else tomorrow.

  What they think of is ways to mollify the other teams. Halloran is not moved. Arrowhead is, at bedrock, the project, essential. Everything else is a tangent. If consistent, outstanding results are obtained—as they are—then ways can be found, any ways, to keep them coming; the glasshead project in toto is not such a crushing success, what with the first batch proving unsuitable and then unusable, that they can afford to tamper with that which produces its only reason for existing, its reason, to be crude, for any budget at all. Without Arrowhead they can all fold up their tents tomorrow. And the data in itself is so compelling that it is unthinkable that the project not continue.