The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yeah, it ought to.” Bill swung himself into the console seat and sent Beautiful Evelyn trundling on.

  “Good.” Ford sighed. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Psuit says you’ve ruptured something,” said Bill, staring at the monitor. He accelerated.

  “Oh. Well, that’s not too bad,” said Ford, blinking. “Jimmy Linton got a rupture and he’s okay. Better than okay, actually. The medic said he couldn’t work with a shovel anymore. So… they made him official secretary for the Council, see? All he has to do is record stuff at meetings and post notices.”

  “Really.”

  “So if I have a rupture, maybe my dad won’t take it so hard that I want to be a Hauler. Since that way I get out of working in the methane plant and the cowsheds. Maybe.”

  Bill gave him an incredulous look.

  “All this, and you still want to be a Hauler?”

  “Of course I do!”

  Bill just shook his head.

  * * * *

  They drove in a dead calm, at least compared to the weather before. Far off across the plains they saw dust devils here and there, twirling lazily. The farther north they drove, the clearer the air was, the brighter the light of the sun, shining on standing outcroppings of rock the color of rust, or milk chocolate, or tangerines, or new pennies.

  “This is so great,” said Ford, slurring his words as he spoke. “This is more beautiful than anything. Isn’t the world a big place?”

  “I guess so,” said Bill.

  “It’s our place,” said Ford. “They can all go back to Earth, but we never will. We’re Martians.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see, I have hair growing in?” Ford swung his hand up to pat Ins scalp. “Red like Mars.”

  “Don’t move your arm around, okay? You’ll rip the tube out.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right. Maybe you should mask up, you know? You could probably use the oxygen.”

  “Sure…” Ford dragged his mask into place.

  After a while, he smiled and said: “I know who I am.”

  He murmured to himself for a while, muffled behind the mask. The next time Bill glanced over at him, he was unconscious.

  And Bill was all alone.

  Billy wasn’t there to be yelled at, or blamed for anything. He might never be there again. He couldn’t be argued with, he couldn’t be shamed or ignored or made to feel anything Bill wanted him to feel. Not if he was dead.

  But he’d been like that when he’d been alive, too, hadn’t he?

  The cold straight road stretched out across the cold flat plain, and there was no mercy out here, no right or wrong, no lies. There was only this giant machine hurtling along, that took all Bill’s strength to keep on the road.

  If he couldn’t do it, he’d die.

  Bill realized, with a certain shock, how much of his life he’d wanted an audience. Someone else to be a witness to how scared and angry he was, to agree with him on how bad a father Billy had been.

  What had he thought? That someday he’d stand up in some kind of giant courtroom, letting the whole world know how unfair everything had been from the day he’d been born?

  Out here, he knew the truth.

  There was no vast cosmic court of justice that would turn Billy into the kind of father Bill had wanted him to be. There was no Marswife to swoop down from the dust clouds and guide a lost boy home. The red world didn’t care if he sulked; it would casually kill him, if it caught him Outside.

  And he had always known it.

  Then what was the point of being angry about it all the time?

  What was the point of white-knuckled fists and a knotted-up stomach if things would never change?

  His anger would never force anybody to fix the world for him.

  But…

  There were people who tried to fix the world for themselves. Maybe he could fix his world, just the narrow slice of it that was his.

  He watched the monitors, watched the wind driving sand across the barren stony plain, the emptiness that he had hated ever since he could remember. What would it take to make him love it, the way Billy or Ford loved it?

  He imagined water falling from the sky, bubbling up from under the frozen rock. Maybe it would be blue water. It would splash and steam, the way it did in the bathhouse. Running, gurgling water to drown the dust and irrigate the red sand.

  And green would come. He couldn’t get a mental image of vizio acres over the whole world, tenting in greenness even up here; that was crazy. But the green might creep out on its own, if there was enough water. Wiry little desert plants at first, maybe, and then… Bill tried to remember the names of plants from his lesson plans. Sagebrush, right. Sequoias. Clover. Edelweiss. Apples. A memory came back to him, a nursery rhyme he’d had on his Buke once: I should like to rise and go, where the golden apples grow…

  He blurred his vision a little and saw himself soaring past green rows that went out forever, that arched over and made warm shade and shelter from the wind. Another memory floated up, a picture from a lesson plan, and his dream caught it and slapped it into place: cows grazing in a green meadow, out under a sky full of white clouds, clouds of water, not dust.

  And, in the most sheltered places, there would be people, Families. Houses lit warm at night, with the lights winking through the green leaves. Just as he had always imagined. One of them would be his house. He’d live there with his family.

  Nobody would give him a house, or a family, or a safe world to live in, of course. Ever. They didn’t exist. But…

  Bill wrapped it all around himself anyway, to keep out the cold and the fear, and he drove on.

  At some point—hours or days later, he never knew—his strength gave out and he couldn’t hold Beautiful Evelyn on the road anymore. She drifted gently to the side, clipping the boulders as she came, and rumbled to a halt just inside Thousand-K Station.

  Bill lay along the seat where he had fallen, too tired and in too much pain to move. Ford still sat, propped up in his corner, most of his face hidden by his mask. Bill couldn’t tell if he was still alive.

  He closed his eyes and went down, and down, into the green rows.

  * * * *

  He was awakened by thumping on the cab, and shouting, and was bolt upright with his mask on before he had time to realize that he wasn’t dreaming. He crawled across the seat and threw the release switches. The hatch swung down, and red light streamed in out of a black night. There stood Old Brick, granddaddy of the Haulers, with his long beard streaming sideways in the gale and at least three other Haulers behind him. His eyes widened behind his mask as he took in Bill and Ford. He reached up and turned up the volume on his psuit.

  “CONVOY! WE GOT KIDS HERE! LOOKS LIKE TOWNSEND’S RIG!”

  * * * *

  10

  Bill was all right after a couple of days, even though he had to have stuff fed into his arm while he slept. He was still foggy-headed when Mother came and sat by his bed, and very gently told him about Billy.

  Bill mustn’t worry, she said; she would find Billy a warm corner in the Empress, with all the food and drink he wanted the rest of his days, and surely Bill would come talk to him sometimes? For Billy was ever so proud of Young Bill, as everyone knew. And perhaps take him on little walks round the Tubes, so he could see Outside now and again? For Billy had so loved the High Road.

  * * * *

  Ford wasn’t all right. He had to have surgery for a ruptured spleen, and almost bled to death once they’d cut his psuit off him.

  He still hadn’t regained consciousness when Bill, wrapped in an outsize bathrobe, shuffled down to the infirmary’s intensive care unit to see him. See him was all Bill could do; pale as an egg, Ford lay in the center of a mass of tubes and plastic tenting. The only parts of him that weren’t white were his hair, which was growing in red as Martian sand, and the greenish bruise where Bill had punched him in the eye.

  Bill sat there staring at the floor t
iles, until he became aware that someone else had entered the room. He looked up.

  He knew the man in front of him must be Ford’s father; his eyes were the same watery blue, and his ears stuck out the same way. He wore patched denim and muddy boots, and a stocking cap pulled down almost low enough to hide the bandage over his left eyebrow. There was a little white stubble along the line of his jaw, like a light frost.

  He looked at Ford, and the watery eyes brimmed over with tears. He glanced uncertainly at Bill. He looked down, lined up the toes of his hoots against a seam in the tile.

  “You’d be that Hauler’s boy, then?” he said. “I have to thank you, on behalf of my Blatchford.”

  “Blatchford,” repeated Bill, dumfounded until he realized whom the old man meant. “Oh.”

  “That woman explained everything to me,” said Ford’s dad. “Wasn’t my Blatchford’s fault. Poor boy. Don’t blame him for running off scared. Your dad did a good thing, taking him in like that. I’m sorry about your dad.”

  “Me, too,” said Bill. “But For—Blatchford’ll be all right.”

  “I know he will,” said Ford’s dad, looking yearningly at his son. “He’s a strong boy, my Blatchford. Not like his brother. You can raise somebody up his whole life and do your best to teach him what’s right, and—and overnight, he can just turn into a stranger on you.

  “My Sam did that. I should have seen it coming, him walking out on us. He never was any good, really. A weakling.

  “Not like my little Blatchford. Never a word of complaint out of him, or whining after vanities. He knows who he is. He’ll make the Collective proud one day.”

  Bill swallowed hard. He knew that Ford would never make the Collective proud; Ford would be off on the High Road as soon as he could, in love with the wide horizon, and the old man’s angry heart would break again.

  The weight of everything that had happened seemed to come crashing down on Bill at once. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so miserable.

  “Would you tell me something, sir?” he said. “What does it take to join the MAC?”

  “Hm?” Ford’s dad turned.

  “What do you have to do?”

  Ford’s dad looked at him speculatively. He cleared his throat. “It isn’t what you do. It’s what you are, young man.”

  He came and sat down beside Bill, and threw back his shoulders.

  “You have to be the kind of person who believes a better world is worth working for. You can’t be weak, or afraid, or greedy for things for yourself. You have to know that the only thing that matters is making that better world, and making it for everyone, not just for you.

  “You may not even get to see it come into existence, because making the world right is hard work. It’ll take all your strength and all your bravery, and maybe you’ll be left at the end with nothing but knowing that you did your duty.

  “But that’ll be enough for you.”

  His voice was thin and harsh; he sounded as though he was reciting a lecture he’d memorized. But his eyes shone like Ford’s had, when Ford had looked out on the open sky for the first time.

  “Well—I’m going to study agriculture,” said Bill. “And I thought, maybe, when I pass my levels, I’d like to join the MAC. I want that world you talk about. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Good on you, son,” said Ford’s dad, nodding solemnly. “You study hard, and I’m sure you’d be welcome to join us. You’re the sort of young man we need in the MAC. And it does my heart good to know my Blatchford’s got a friend like you. Gives me hope for the future, to think we’ll have two heroes like you working in our cause!”

  He shook Bill’s hand, and then the nurse looked in at them and said that visiting hours were over. Ford’s dad went away, down the hill. Bill walked slowly back to his room.

  He didn’t climb back into bed. He sat down in a chair in the corner, and looked out through Settlement Dome at the cold red desert, at the far double line of boulders where the High Road ran off into places Billy would never see again. He began to cry, silently, tears burning as they ran down his face.

  He didn’t know whether he was crying for Billy, or for Ford’s dad.

  The world was ending. The world was beginning.

  <>

  * * * *

  KIN

  Bruce McAllister

  Here’s a look at the intricate and surprising relationship that develops between a young boy and a ruthless alien assassin, one that demonstrates how sometimes a similar turn of mind and heart can mark you as kin much more clearly than blood can do.

  Bruce McAllister published his first story in 1963, when he was seventeen (it was written at the tender age of fifteen). Since then, with only a handful of stories and a few novels, he has nevertheless managed to establish himself as one of the most respected writers in the business. His more than seventy short fiction sales appeared in most of the top markets of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, including Omni, In the Field of Fire, and Alien Sex. His first novel, Humanity Prime, was one of the original Ace Specials series, and his novel Dream Baby was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the eighties. After more than a decade away from writing, he has, happily, become active again, with a slew of recent sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Aeon, and elsewhere. A new collection by him is in the works. McAllister lives in Redlands, California.

  * * * *

  The alien and the boy, who was twelve, sat in the windowless room high above the city that afternoon. The boy talked and the alien listened.

  The boy was ordinary—the genes of three continents in his features, his clothes cut in the style of all boys in the vast housing project called LAX. The alien was something else, awful to behold; and though the boy knew it was rude, he did not look up as he talked.

  He wanted the alien to kill a man, he said. It was that simple.

  As the boy spoke, the alien sat upright and still on the one piece of furniture that could hold him. Eyes averted, the boy sat on the stool, the one by the terminal where he did his schoolwork each day. It made him uneasy that the alien was on his bed, though he understood why. It made him uneasy that the creature’s strange knee was so near his in the tiny room, and he was glad when the creature, as if aware, too, shifted its leg away.

  He did not have to look up to see the Antalou’s features. That one glance in the doorway had been enough, and it came back to him whether he wanted it to or not. It was not that he was scared, the boy told himself. It was just the idea—that such a thing could stand in a doorway built for humans, in a human housing project where generations had been born and died, and probably would forever. It did not seem possible.

  He wondered how it seemed to the Antalou.

  Closing his eyes, the boy could see the black synthetic skin the alien wore as protection against alien atmospheres. Under that suit, ropes of muscles and tendons coiled and uncoiled, rippling even when the alien was still. In the doorway the long neck had not been extended, but he knew what it could do. When it telescoped forward—as it could instantly—the head tipped up in reflex and the jaws opened.

  Nor had the long talons—which the boy knew sat in the claws and even along the elbows and toes—been unsheathed. But he imagined them sheathing and unsheathing as he explained what he wanted, his eyes on the floor.

  When the alien finally spoke, the voice was inhuman—filtered through the translating mesh that covered half its face. The face came back: The tremendous skull, the immense eyes that could see so many kinds of light and make their way in nearly every kind of darkness. The heavy welts—the auxiliary gills—inside the breathing globe. The dripping ducts below them, ready to release their jets of acid.

  “Who is it ... that you wish to have killed?” the voice asked, and the boy almost looked up. It was only a voice—mechanical, snake-like, halting—he reminded himself. By itself it could not kill him.

  “A man named James Ortega-Mambay,”
the boy answered.

  “Why?” The word hissed in the stale apartment air.

  “He is going to kill my sister.”

  “You know this ... how?”

  “I just do.”

  The alien said nothing, and the boy heard the long, whispering pull of its lungs.

  “Why,” it said at last, “did you think ... I would agree to it?”

  The boy was slow to answer.

  “Because you’re a killer.”

  The alien was again silent.