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

by Gardner Dozois

  Tuesday morning he called in sick. He spent the day in bed, sometimes sleeping. He watched a soap opera; the characters’ ludicrous problems seemed so small and manageable.

  Tuesday night he did not sleep. He brought out a box of letters from his mother, read through them looking for clues. At the bottom of the box he found a picture of himself at age eight, standing between his parents. It had been torn in half, the jagged line cutting between him and his father like a lightning bolt, and crudely taped together. He remembered rescuing the torn photo from his mother’s wastebasket, taping it together, hiding it in a box of old CD-ROMs. Staring at it late at night. Wondering why.

  Wednesday morning he drove to the airport.

  * * * *

  There was a strike at O’Hare and he was rerouted to Atlanta, where he ate a bad hamburger and floated on a tide of angry, frustrated people, thrashing to stay on top. Finally one gate agent found him a seat to LAX. From there he caught a red-eye to San Francisco.

  He arrived at the clinic at 5 A.M. The door was locked, but there was a telephone number for after-hours service. It was answered by a machine. He stomped through menus until he reached a bored human being, who knew nothing, but promised to get a message to Dr. Steig.

  He paced the hall outside the clinic. He had nowhere else to go.

  Fifteen minutes later an astonished Dr. Steig called back. “Your father is already in prep for surgery, but I’ll tell the hospital to let you see him.” He gave Jason the address. “I’m glad you came,” he said before hanging up.

  The taxi took Jason through dark, empty streets, puddles gleaming with reflected streetlight. Raindrops ran down the windows like sweat, like tears. Jason blinked as he stepped into the hard blue-white light of the hospital’s foyer. “I’m here to see Noah Carmelke,” he said. “I’m expected.”

  * * * *

  The nurse gave him a paper mask to tie over his nose and mouth, and goggles for his eyes. “The prep area is sterile,” she said as she helped him step into a paper coverall. Jason felt like he was going to a costume party.

  And then the double doors slid open and he met the guest of honor.

  His father lay on his side, shallow breaths raising and lowering his furry flanks. An oxygen mask was fastened to his face, like a muzzle. His eyes were at half-mast, unfocused. “Jason,” he breathed. “They said you were coming, but I didn’t believe it.” The sound of his voice echoed hollowly behind the clear plastic.

  “Hello, Dad.” His own voice was muffled by the paper mask.

  “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Dad… I had to come. I need to understand you. If I don’t understand you, I’ll never understand myself.” He hugged himself. His face felt swollen; his whole head was ready to implode from sadness and fatigue. “Why, Dad? Why did you leave us? Why didn’t you come to Mom’s funeral? And why are you throwing away your life now?”

  The bald head on the furry neck moved gently, side to side, on the pillow. “Did you ever have a dog, Jason?”

  “You know the answer, Dad. Mom was allergic.”

  “What about after you grew up?”

  “I’ve been alone most of the time since then. I didn’t think I could take proper care of a dog if I had to go to work every day.”

  “But a dog would have loved you.”

  Jason’s eyes burned behind the goggles.

  “I had a dog when I was a kid,” his father continued. “Juno. A German Shepherd. She was a good dog… smart, and strong, and obedient. And every day when I came home from school she came bounding into the yard… so happy to see me. She would jump up and lick my face.” He twisted his head around, forced his eyes open to look into Jason’s. “I left your mother because I couldn’t love her like that. I knew she loved me, but I thought she deserved better than me. And I didn’t come to the funeral because I knew she wouldn’t want me there. Not after I’d hurt her so much.”

  “What about me, Dad?”

  “You’re a man. A man like me. I figured you’d understand.”

  “I don’t understand. I never did.”

  His father sighed heavily, a long doggy sigh. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re turning yourself into a dog so someone will love you?”

  “No. I’m turning myself into a dog so I can love someone. I want to be free of my human mind, free of decisions.”

  “How can you love anyone if you aren’t you any more?”

  “I’ll still be me. But I’ll be able to be me, instead of thinking all the time about being me.”

  “Dad…”

  The nurse came back. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carmelke, but I have to ask you to leave now.”

  “Dad, you can’t just leave me like that!”

  “Jason,” his father said. “There’s a clause in the contract that lets me specify a family member as my primary handler.”

  “I don’t think I could…”

  “Please, Jason. Son. It would mean so much to me. Let me come home with you.”

  Jason turned away. “And see you every day, and know what you used to be?”

  “I’d sleep by your feet while you watch movies. I’d be so happy to see you when you came home. All you have to do is give the word, and I’ll put my voiceprint on the contract right now.”

  Jason’s throat was so tight that he couldn’t speak. But he nodded.

  The operation took eighteen hours. The recovery period lasted weeks. When the bandages came off, Jason’s father’s face was long and furry and had a wet nose. But his head was still very round, and his eyes were still blue.

  Two deep wells of sincere, doggy love.

  <>

  * * * *

  DEAD MEN WALKING

  Paul J. McAuley

  Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has since established himself at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and the revamped and retooled widescreen space opera that has sometimes been called the new space opera, as well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes fantasy and horror. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel; Confluence—a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprising the novels Child of the River, Ancients of Days, and Shrine of Stars; Life on Mars; The Secret of Life; Whole Wide World; and White Devils. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines, and he is the coeditor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent book is a novel, Players. Coming up are two new novels, Cowboy Angels and The Quiet War. His stories have appeared in our Fifth, Ninth, Thirteenth, and Fifteenth through Twentieth Annual Collections.

  Here he takes us to a prison in the far reaches of the solar system, to show us how some consequences of a devastating war can persist for years after the war is ostensibly over—with deadly results.

  * * * *

  I GUESS THIS IS THE END. I’m in no condition to attempt the climb down, and in any case I’m running out of air. The nearest emergency shelter is only five klicks away, but it might as well be on the far side of this little moon. I’m not expecting any kind of last-minute rescue, either. No one knows I’m here, my phone and the distress beacon are out, my emergency flares went with my utility belt, and I don’t think that the drones patrol this high. At least my legs have stopped hurting, although I can feel the throb of what’s left of my right hand through the painkiller’s haze, like the beat of distant war drums…

  * * * *

  If you’re the person who found my body, I doubt that you’ll have time to listen to my last and only testament. You
’ll be too busy calling for help, securing the area, and making sure that you or any of your companions don’t trample precious clues underfoot. I imagine instead that you’re an investigator or civil servant sitting in an office buried deep inside some great bureaucratic hive, listening to this out of duty before consigning it to the memory hole. You’ll know that my body was found near the top of the eastern rimwall of the great gash of Elliot Graben on Ariel, Uranus’s fourth-largest moon, but I don’t suppose you’ve ever visited the place, so I should give you an idea of what I can see.

  I’m sitting with my pressure suit’s backpack firmly wedged against a huge block of dirty, rock-hard ice. A little way beyond my broken legs, a cliff drops straight down for about a kilometer to the bottom of the graben’s enormous trough. Its floor was resurfaced a couple of billion years ago by a flood of water-ice lava, a level plain patched with enormous fields of semi-vacuum organisms. Orange and red, deep blacks, foxy umbers, bright yellows… they stretch away from me in every direction for as far as I can see, like the biggest quilt in the universe. This moon is so small and the graben is so wide that its western rim is below the horizon. Strings of suspensor lamps float high above the fields like a fleet of burning airships. There’s enough atmospheric pressure, twenty millibars of nitrogen and methane, to haze the view and give an indication of distance, of just how big this strange garden really is. It’s the prison farm, of course, and every square centimeter of it was constructed by the sweat of men and women convicted by the failure of their ideals, but none of that matters to me now. I’m beyond all that up here, higher than the suspensor lamps, tucked under the eaves of the vast roof of transparent halflife polymer that tents the graben. If I twist my head I can glimpse one of the giant struts that anchor the roof. Beyond it, the big, blue-green globe of Uranus floats in the black sky. The gas giant’s south pole, capped with a brownish haze of photochemical smog, is aimed at the brilliant point of the sun, which hangs just above the western horizon.

  Sunset’s three hours off. I won’t live long enough to see it. My legs are comfortably numb, but the throbbing in my hand is becoming more urgent, there’s a dull ache in my chest, and every breath is an effort. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to tell you my story…

  * * * *

  All right. I’ve just taken another shot of painkiller. I had to override the suit to do it, it’s a lethal dose…

  Christos, it still hurts. It hurts to laugh…

  * * * *

  My name is Roy Bruce. It isn’t my real name. I have never had a real name. I suppose I had a number when I was decanted, but I don’t know what it was. My instructors called me Dave—but they called all of us Dave, a private joke they never bothered to explain. Later, just before the war began, I took the life of the man in whose image I had been made. I took his life, his name, his identity. And after the war was over, after I evaded recall and went on the run, I had several different names, one after the other. But Roy, Roy Bruce, that’s the name I’ve had longest. That’s the name you’ll find on the roster of guards. That’s the name you can bury me under.

  My name is Roy Bruce, and I lived in Herschel City, Ariel, for eight and a half years. Lived. Already with the past tense…

  My name is Roy Bruce. I’m a prison guard. The prison, TPA Facility 898, is a cluster of chambers—we call them blocks—buried in the eastern rim of Elliot Graben. Herschel City is twenty klicks beyond, a giant cylindrical shaft sunk into Ariel’s icy surface, its walls covered in a vertical, shaggy green forest that grows from numerous ledges and crevices. Public buildings and little parks jut out of the forest wall like bracket fungi; homes are built in and amongst the trees. Ariel’s just over a thousand kilometers in diameter and mostly ice; its gravity barely exists. The citizens of Herschel City are arboreal acrobats, swinging, climbing, sliding, flying up and down and roundabout on cableways and trapezes, nets and ropewalks. It’s a good place to live.

  I have a one-room treehouse. It’s not very big and plainly furnished, but you can sit on the porch of a morning, watch squirrel monkeys chase each other through the pines…

  I’m a member of Sweat Lodge #23. I breed singing crickets, have won several competitions with them. Mostly they’re hacked to sing fragments of Mozart, nothing fancy, but my line has good sustain and excellent timbre and pitch. I hope old Willy Gup keeps it going…

  I like to hike too, and climb freestyle. I once soloed the Broken Book route in Prospero Chasma on Miranda, twenty kilometers up a vertical face, in fifteen hours. Nowhere near the record, but pretty good for someone with a terminal illness. I’ve already had various bouts of cancer, but retroviruses dealt with those easily enough. What’s killing me—what just lost the race to kill me—is a general systematic failure something like lupus. I couldn’t get any treatment for it, of course, because the doctors would find out who I really am. What I really was.

  I suppose that I had a year or so left. Maybe two if I was really lucky.

  It wasn’t much of a life, but it was all my own.

  * * * *

  Uranus has some twenty-odd moons, mostly captured chunks of sooty ice a few dozen kilometers in diameter. Before the Quiet War, no more than a couple of hundred people lived out here. Rugged pioneer families, hermits, a few scientists, and some kind of Hindu sect that planted huge tracts of Umbriel’s sooty surface with slow-growing lichenous vacuum organisms. After the war, the Three Powers Alliance took over the science station on Ariel, one of the larger moons, renamed it Herschel City, and built its maximum security facility in the big graben close by. The various leaders and linchpins of the revolution, who had already spent two years being interrogated at Tycho, on Earth’s Moon, were moved here to serve the rest of their life sentences of reeducation and moral realignment. At first, the place was run by the Navy, but civilian contractors were brought in after Elliot Graben was tented and the vacuum organism farms were planted. Most were ex-Service people who had settled in the Outer System after the war. I was one of them.

  I had learned how to create fake identities with convincing histories during my training; my latest incarnation easily passed the security check. For eight and a half years, Roy Bruce, guard third class, cricket breeder, amateur freestyle climber, lived a quiet, anonymous life out on the fringe of the Solar System. And then two guards stumbled across the body of Goether Lyle, who had been the leader of the Senate of Athens, Tethys, when, along with a dozen other city states in the Outer System, it had declared independence from Earth.

  I’d known Goether slightly: an intense, serious man who’d been writing some kind of philosophical thesis in his spare time. His body was found in the middle of the main highway between the facility and the farms, spreadeagled and naked, spikes hammered through hands and feet. His genitals had been cut off and stuffed in his mouth; his tongue had been pulled through the slit in his throat. He was also frozen solid—the temperature out on the floor of the graben is around minus one hundred and fifty degrees Centigrade, balmy compared to the surface of Ariel, but still a lot colder than the inside of any domestic freezer, so cold that the carbon dioxide given off by certain strains of vacuum organisms precipitates out of the atmosphere like hoar frost. It took six hours to thaw out his body for the autopsy, which determined that the mutilations were postmortem. He’d died of strangulation, and then all the other stuff had been done to him.

  I was more than thirty klicks away when Goether Lyle’s body was discovered, supervising a work party of ten prisoners, what we call a stick, that was harvesting a field of vacuum organisms. It’s important to keep the prisoners occupied, and stoop labor out in the fields or in the processing plants leaves them too tired to plan any serious mischief. Also, export of the high-grade biochemicals that the vacuum organisms cook from methane in the thin atmosphere helps to defray the enormous cost of running the facility. So I didn’t hear about the murder until I’d driven my stick back to its block at the end of the shift, and I didn’t learn all the gruesome details until later that evenin
g, at the sweat lodge.

  In the vestigial gravity of worldlets like Ariel, where you can drown in a shower and water tends to slosh about uncontrollably, sweat lodges, saunas, or Turkish-style hamams are ideal ways to keep clean. You bake in steam heat, sweat the dirt out of your pores, scrape it off your skin, and exchange gossip with your neighbors and friends. Even in a little company town like Herschel City, there are lodges catering for just about every sexual orientation and religious belief. My lodge, #23, is for unattached, agnostic heterosexual males. That evening, as usual, I was sitting with a dozen or so naked men of various ages and body types in eucalyptus-scented steam around its stone hearth. We scraped at our skin with abrasive mitts or plastered green depilatory mud on ourselves, squirted the baking stones of the hearth with water to make more steam, and talked about the murder of Goether Lyle. Mustafa Sesler, who worked in the hospital, gave us all the grisly details. There was speculation about whether it was caused by a personal beef or a turf war between gangs. Someone made the inevitable joke about it being the most thorough suicide in the history of the prison. Someone else, my friend Willy Gup, asked me if I had any idea about it.