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

by Gardner Dozois

  But if they were dinosaurs, down on that island, we will never know. The plane no longer stops to orbit, for it cannot; the chariots no longer fly down to investigate thunder lizards. And we plough on ever east, ever farther over the ocean, ever deeper into a past even beyond the dinosaurs.

  My social life is a bit of a challenge these days.

  As our food and water run out, our little aerial community is disintegrating into fiefdoms. The Water Barons trade with the Emperors of the Larder, or they will go to war over a tapped pipeline. Occasionally I hear pronouncements from the invisible Captain Fassbender, but I am not certain how far his word holds sway any longer. There have been rumours of a coup by the SS officers. The movie-makers are filming none of this. Their morale was the first to crumble, poor lambs.

  I last saw Wolfgang Ciliax ten days ago. He was subtle and insidious; I had the distinct impression that he wanted me to join a sort of harem. Women are the scarcest commodity of all on this boat. Women, and cigarettes. You can imagine the shrift he got from me.

  I sleep in barricaded rooms. In the guts of the Beast I have stashes of food and water, and cigarettes and booze to use as currency in an emergency. I keep out of the way of the petty wars, which will sort themselves out one way or another.

  Once I had to bale out over Malaya, and I survived in the jungle for a week before reaching an army post. This is similar. It’s also rather like college life. What larks!

  * * * *

  Editor’s note: Many fragmentary entries follow. Some are undated, others contain only mathematical jottings or geometric sketches. The reader is referred to a more complete publication forthcoming in Annals of Psychiatry.

  * * * *

  Day 365. A year, by God! A full year, if I have counted correctly, though the calendar is meaningless given how many times we have spun around this watery earth—or appear to have. And if the poor gutted Beast is still keeping to her nominal speed, then I may have travelled two million miles. Two million. And still no America!

  I believe I am alone now. Alone, save for the valve mind of Hans, and perhaps the odd rat.

  The food ran out long ago, save for my stashes. The warfare between the Führers of Spam and the Tsars of Dried Eggs became increasingly fragmented, until one man fell on the next for the sake of a cigarette stub. Others escaped, however, in chariots that went spinning down to one lost island or another. Klaus was one of them. I hope they survive; why not? Perhaps some future expedition, better equipped than ours, may retrieve their descendants.

  And the Beast is hollowed out, much of her burned, depopulated save for me. I have explored her from one end to the other, seeking scraps of food and water, pitching the odd corpse into the drink. The only place I have not investigated is the sealed hold of the atom engine. Whatever survives in there has failed to break out.

  However, the engine continues to run. The blades of the Merlins turn still. Even the heating works. I should put on record that no matter how badly we frail humans have behaved, the Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering has fulfilled her mission flawlessly.

  This can’t go on forever, though. Therefore I have decided to set my affairs in order to begin with, my geometrical maunderings. I have left a fuller account—that is, complete with equations—in a separate locker. These journal notes are intended for the less mathematical reader; such as my mother (they’re for you, mummy!—I know you’ll want to know what became of me).

  I have had to make a leap of faith, if you will. As we drive on and on, with no sight of an end to our journey, I have been forced to consider the possibility that there will be no end—that, just as it appears, the Pacific is not merely anomalously large, but, somehow, infinite. How can this be?

  Our greatest geometer was Euclid. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you? He reduced all of the geometry you can do on a plane to just five axioms, from which can be derived that menagerie of theorems and corollaries which have been used to bother schoolchildren ever since.

  And even Euclid wasn’t happy with the fifth axiom, which can be expressed like this: parallel lines never meet. That seems so obvious it doesn’t need stating, that if you send off two lines at right angles to a third, like rail tracks, they will never meet. On a perfect, infinite plane they wouldn’t. But on the curved surface of the earth, they would: think of lines of longitude converging on a pole. And if space itself is curved, again, “parallel” lines may meet—or they may diverge, which is just as startling. Allowing Euclid’s axiom to be weakened in this way opens the door to a whole set of what are rather unimaginatively called “non-Euclidian geometries.” I will give you one name: Bernhard Riemann. Einstein plundered his work in developing relativity.

  And in a non-Euclidean geometry, you can have all sorts of odd effects. A circle’s circumference may be more or less than “pi” times its diameter. You can even fit an infinite area into a finite circumference: for, you see, your measuring rods shrink as those parallel lines converge. Again I refer you to one name: Henri Poincaré.

  You can see where I am going with this, I think. It seems that our little globe is a non-Euclidean object. Its geometry is hyperbolic. It has a finite radius—as you can see if you look at its shadow on the moon—but an infinite surface area, as we of the Goering have discovered. The world has a Fold in it, in effect. As I drive into the Fold I grow smaller and ever more diminished, as seen from the outside—but I feel just as Bliss-sized as I always did, and there is plenty of room for me.

  This seems strange—to put it mildly! But why should we imagine that the simple geometry of something like an orange should scale up to something as mighty as a planet?

  Of course this is just one mathematical model that fits the observations; it may or may not be definitive. And many questions remain open, such as astronomical effects, and the nature of gravity on an infinite world. I leave these issues as an exercise for the reader.

  One might question what difference this makes to us mere mortals. But surely geography determines our destiny. If the Pacific could have been spanned in the Stone Age, perhaps by a land bridge, the Americas’ first inhabitants might have been Asian, not Africans crossing the Atlantic. And certainly in our own century if the Pacific were small enough for America and Japan to have rubbed against each other, the convulsion of war we have endured for the last decade would not have turned out the way it did.

  Besides all that—what fun to find yourself living on such a peculiar little planet, a World with a Fold! Don’t you think?…

  * * * *

  Date unknown. Sorry, I’ve given up counting. Not long after the last entry, however.

  With my affairs in order I’m jumping ship. Why?

  Point one: I’ve eaten all the food. Not the Spam, obviously.

  Point two: I think I’m running out of world, or at least the sort of world I can live on. It’s a long time since I saw a mastodon, or a dinosaur. I still cross over island groups, but now they are inhabited, if at all, by nothing but purplish slime and what look like mats of algae. Very ancient indeed, no doubt.

  And ahead things change again. The sky looks greenish, and I wonder if I am approaching a place, or a time, where the oxygen runs out. I wake up in the night panting for breath, but of course that could just be bad dreams.

  Anyhow, time to ditch. It’s the end of the line for me, but not necessarily for the Goering. I think I’ve found a way to botch the flight deck equipment: not enough to make her fully manoeuvrable again, but at least enough to turn her around and send her back the way she came, under the command of Hans. I don’t know how long she can keep flying. The Merlins have been souped up with fancy lubricants and bearings for longevity, but of course there are no engineers left to service them. If the Merlins do hold out the Goering might one day come looming over Piccadilly Circus again, I suppose, and what a sight she will be. Of course there will be no way of stopping her I can think of, but I leave that as another exercise for you, dear reader.

  As for me, I intend
to take the Spit. She hasn’t been flown since Day 1, and is as good as new as far as I can tell. I might try for one of those slime-covered rocks in the sea.

  Or I might try for something I’ve glimpsed on the horizon, under the greenish sky. Lights. A city? Not human, surely, but who knows what lies waiting for us on the other side of the Fold in the World?

  What else must I say before I go?

  I hope we won’t be the last to come this way. I hope that the next to do so come, unlike us, in peace.

  Mummy, keep feeding my cats for me, and I’m sorry about the lack of grandchildren. Bea will have to make up the numbers (sorry, sis!).

  Enough, before I start splashing these pages with salt water. This is Bliss Stirling, girl reporter for the BBC, over and out!

  * * * *

  Editor’s note: There the transcript ends. Found lodged in a space between bulkheads, it remains the only written record of the Goering’s journey to have survived on board the hulk. No filmed or tape-recorded material has been salvaged. The journal is published with respect to the memory of Miss Stirling. However, as Miss Stirling was contracted by the BBC and the Royal Geographic Society specifically to cover the Goering’s Pacific expedition, all these materials must be regarded as COPYRIGHT the British Broadcasting Conglomerate MCMLII. Signed PETER CARINHALL, Board of Governors, BBC.

  * * * *

  OKANAGGAN FALLS

  Carolyn Ives Gilman

  Here’s a unique slant on the theme of alien invasion, simultaneously tough and compassionate, one where the conquered try out a very different kind of resistance…

  Carolyn Ives Gilman has sold stories to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, Bending the Landscape, and elsewhere. She is the author of five nonfiction books on frontier and American Indian history, and (so far) one SF novel, Halfway Human. Her work has appeared in our Fifteenth and Nineteenth Annual Collections. She lives in St. Louis, where she works as a museum exhibition developer, and is also at work on a new SF novel.

  * * * *

  The town of Okanoggan Falls lay in the folded hills of southwestern Wisconsin—dairy country, marbled with deciduous groves and pastureland that looked soft as a sable’s fur. It was an old sawmill town, hidden down in the steep river valley, shaded by elderly trees. Downtown was a double row of brick and ironwork storefronts running parallel to the river. Somehow, the town had steered between the Scylla and Charybdis of the franchise and the boutique. If you wanted to buy a hamburger on Main Street, you had to go to Earl’s Cafe, and for scented soap there was just Meyer’s Drugstore. In the park where the Civil War soldier stood, in front of the old Town Hall infested with pigeons, Mr. Woodward still defiantly raised the United States flag, as if the world on cable news were illusion, and the nation were still reality.

  American small towns had changed since the days when Sinclair Lewis savaged them as backwaters of conformist complacency. All of that had moved to the suburbs. The people left in the rural towns had a high kook component. There were more welders-turned-sculptors per capita than elsewhere, more self-employed dollmakers, more wildly painted cars, more people with pronounced opinions, and more tolerance for all the above.

  Like most of the Midwest, Okanoggan Falls had been relatively unaffected by the conquest and occupation. Few there had even seen one of the invading Wattesoons, except on television. At first, there had been some stirrings of grassroots defiance, born of wounded national pride; but when the Wattesoons had actually lowered taxes and reduced regulation, the volume of complaint had gone down. People still didn’t love the occupiers, but as long as the Wattesoons minded their own business and left the populace alone, they were tolerated.

  All of that changed one Saturday morning when Margie Silengo, who lived in a mobile home on Highway 14, came racing into town with her shockless Chevy bouncing like a rocking horse, telling everyone she met that a Wattesoon army convoy had gone rolling past her house and turned into the old mill grounds north of town as if they meant to stay. Almost simultaneously, the mayor’s home phone rang, and Tom Abernathy found himself standing barefoot in his kitchen, for the first time in his life talking to a Wattesoon captain, who in precise, formal English informed him that Okanoggan Falls was slated for demolition.

  Tom’s wife Susan, who hadn’t quite gotten the hang of this “occupation” thing, stopped making peanut butter sandwiches for the boys to say, “They can’t say that! Who do they think they are?”

  Tom was a lanky, easygoing fellow, all knobby joints and bony jaw. Mayor wasn’t his full-time job; he ran one of the more successful businesses in town, a wholesale construction-goods supplier. He had become mayor the way most otherwise sensible people end up in charge: out of self-defense. Fed up having to deal with the calcified fossil who had run the town since the 1980s, Tom had stood for office on the same impulse he occasionally swore—and woke to find himself elected in a landslide, 374 to 123.

  Now he rubbed the back of his head, as he did whenever perplexed, and said, “I think the Wattesoons can do pretty much anything they want.”

  “Then we’ve got to make them stop wanting to mess with us,” Susan said.

  That, in a nutshell, was what made Tom and Susan’s marriage work. In seventeen years, whenever he had said something couldn’t be done, she had taken it as a challenge to do it.

  But he had never expected her to take on alien invaders.

  * * * *

  Town council meetings weren’t formal, and usually a few people straggled in late. This day, everyone was assembled at Town Hall by five p.m., when the Wattesoon officer had said he would address them. By now they knew it was not just Okanoggan Falls; all four towns along a fifty-mile stretch of Highway 14 had their own occupying forces camped outside town, and their own captains addressing them at precisely five o’clock. Like most Wattesoon military actions, it had been flawlessly coordinated.

  The captain arrived with little fanfare. Two sand-colored army transports sped down Main Street and pulled up in front of Town Hall. The two occupants of one got out, while three soldiers in the other stood guard to keep the curious at arms’ length. Their weapons remained in their slings. They seemed to be trying to keep the mood low-key.

  The two who entered Town Hall looked exactly like Wattesoons on television—squat lumps of rubbly khaki-colored skin, like blobs of clay mixed with gravel. They wore the usual beige army uniforms that hermetically encased them, like shrink wrap, from neck to heel, but neither officer had on the face mask or gloves the invaders usually employed to deal with humans. An aroma like baking rocks entered the room with them—not unpleasant, just not a smell ordinarily associated with living creatures.

  In studied, formal English the larger Wattesoon introduced himself as Captain Groton, and his companion as Ensign Agush. No one offered to shake hands, knowing the famous Wattesoon horror at touching slimy human flesh.

  The council sat silent behind the row of desks they used for hearings, while the captain stood facing them where people normally gave testimony, but there was no question about where the power lay. The townspeople had expected gruff, peremptory orders, and so Captain Groton’s reasonable tone came as a pleasant surprise; but there was nothing reassuring about his message.

  The Wattesoons wished to strip-mine a fifty-mile swath of the hilly, wooded Okanoggan Valley. “Our operations will render the land uninhabitable,” Captain Groton said. “The army is here to assist in your removal. We will need you to coordinate the arrangements so this move can be achieved expeditiously and peacefully.” There was the ever-so-slight hint of a threat in that last word.

  When he finished there was a short silence, as the council absorbed the imminent destruction of everything they had lived for and loved. The image of Okanoggan Valley transformed into a mine pit hovered before every eye: no maple trees, no lilacs, no dogs, no streetlights. Rob Massey, the scrappy newspaper editor, was first to find his voice. “What do you want to mine?” he said sh
arply. “There are no minerals here.”

  “Silica,” the captain answered promptly. “There is a particularly pure bed of it underneath your limestone.”

  He meant the white, friable sandstone—useless for building, occasionally used for glass. What they wanted it for was incomprehensible, like so much about them. “Will we be compensated for our property?” Paula Sanders asked, as if any compensation would suffice.

  “No,” the captain answered neutrally. “The land is ours.”

  Which was infuriating, but unarguable.

  “But it’s our home!” Tom blurted out. “We’ve lived here, some of us four, five generations. We’ve built this community. It’s our life. You can’t just walk in and level it.”

  The raw anguish in his voice made even Captain Groton, lump of rubble that he was, pause. “But we can,” he answered without malice. “It is not within your power to stop it. All you can do is reconcile yourselves to the inevitable.”