The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  The conversation was so thick that Brady couldn’t hear separate voices, separate words. A variety of perfumes overwhelmed him and the coolness seemed to have left the gallery. He let the crowd push him down the hall toward his own exhibit and as he passed, he caught bits and pieces of other signs:

  … IMAGE ARTIST …

  … (2000–2010) …

  … HOLOGRAPHER, AFRICAN BIOLOGICAL …

  … ABC CAMERAMAN, LEBANON …

  … PHOTOJOURNALIST, VIETNAM CONFLICT …

  … (1963) …

  … NEWS REELS FROM THE PACIFIC THEATER …

  … OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER, WORLD WAR I …

  … (1892–…

  … INDIAN WARS …

  And then his own:

  MATHEW B. BRADY EXHIBIT

  OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER:

  UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR

  (1861–1865)

  The room was full. People stood along the walls, gazing at his portraits, discussing and pointing at the fields of honored dead. One woman turned away from the toddler, shot in the back; another from the burning church. People looked inside Brady’s wagon, and more than a few stared at the portraits of him, lined along the doric columns like a series of somber, aging men.

  He caught a few words:

  “Fantastic composition” … “amazing things with black and white” … “almost looks real” … “turns my stomach” … “can’t imagine working with such primitive equipment” …

  Someone touched his shoulder. Brady turned. A woman smiled at him. She wore a long purple gown and her brown hair was wrapped around the top of her head. It took a moment for him to recognize his benefactress.

  “Welcome to the exhibit, Mathew. People are enjoying your work.”

  She smiled at him and moved on. And then it hit him. He finally had an exhibit. He finally had people staring at his work, and seeing what had really happened in all those places during all that time. She had shown him this gallery all his life, whirled him when he thought he was asleep. This was his destiny, just as dying impoverished in his own world was his destiny.

  “You’re the artist?” A slim man in a dark suit stood beside Brady.

  “This is my work,” Brady said.

  A few people crowded around. The scent of soap and perfume nearly overwhelmed him.

  “I think you’re an absolutely amazing talent,” the man said. His voice was thin, with an accent that seemed British but wasn’t. “I can’t believe the kind of work you put into this to create such stark beauty. And with such bulky equipment.”

  “Beauty?” Brady could barely let the word out of his throat. He gazed around the room, saw the flowered woman, the row of corpses on the Gettysburg Battlefield.

  “Eerie,” a woman said. “Rather like late Goya, don’t you think, Lavinia?”

  Another woman nodded. “Stunning, the way you captured the exact right light, the exact moment to illuminate the concept.”

  “Concept?” Brady felt his hands shake. “You’re looking at war here. People died in these portraits. This is history, not art.”

  “I think you’re underestimating your work,” the man said. “It is truly art, and you are a great, great artist. Only an artist would see how to use black and white to such a devastating effect—”

  “I wasn’t creating art,” Brady said. “My assistants and I, we were shot at. I nearly died the day the soldiers burned that church. This isn’t beauty. This is war. It’s truth. I wanted you to see how ugly war really is.”

  “And you did it so well,” the man said. “I truly admire your technique.” And then he walked out of the room. Brady watched him go. The women smiled, shook his hand, told him that it was a pleasure to meet him. He wandered around the room, heard the same types of conversation and stopped when he saw his benefactress.

  “They don’t understand,” he said. “They think this was done for them, for their appreciation. They’re calling this art.”

  “It is art, Mathew,” she said softly. She glanced around the room, as if she wanted to be elsewhere.

  “No,” he said. “It actually happened.”

  “A long time ago.” She patted his hand. “The message about war and destruction will go home in their subconscious. They will remember this.” And then she turned her back on him and pushed her way through the crowd. Brady tried to follow her, but made it only as far as his wagon. He sat on its edge and buried his face in his hands.

  He sat there for a long time, letting the conversation hum around him, wondering at his own folly. And then he heard his name called in a voice that made his heart rise.

  “Mr. Brady?”

  He looked up and saw Julia. Not the Julia who had grown pale and thin in their small apartment, but the Julia he had met so many years ago. She was slender and young, her face glowing with health. No gray marked her ringlets, and her hoops were wide with a fashion decades old. He reached out his hands. “Julia.”

  She took his hands and sat beside him on the wagon, her young-girl face turned in a smile. “They think you’re wonderful, Mr. Brady.”

  “They don’t understand what I’ve done. They think it’s art—” he stopped himself. This wasn’t his Julia. This was the young girl, the one who had danced with him, who had told him about her dream. She had come from a different place and a different time, the only time she had seen the effects of his work.

  He looked at her then, really looked at her, saw the shine in her blue eyes, the blush to her cheeks. She was watching the people look at his portraits, soaking in the discussion. Her gloved hand clutched his, and he could feel her wonderment and joy.

  “I would be so proud if this were my doing, Mr. Brady. Imagine a room like this filled with your vision, your work.”

  He didn’t look at the room. He looked at her. This moment, this was what kept her going all those years. The memory of what she thought was a dream, of what she hoped would become real. And it was real, but not in any way she understood. Perhaps, then, he didn’t understand it either.

  She turned to him, smiled into his face. “I would so like to be a part of this,” she said. She thought it was a dream; otherwise she would have never spoken so boldly. No, wait. She had been bold when she was young.

  “You will be,” Brady said. And until that moment, he never realized how much a part of it she had been, always standing beside him, always believing in him even when he no longer believed in himself. She had made the greater sacrifice—her entire life for his dream, his vision, his work.

  “Julia,” he said, thankful for this last chance to touch her, this last chance to hold her. “I could not do this without you. You made it all possible.”

  She leaned against him and laughed, a fluted sound he hadn’t heard in decades. “But it’s your work that they admire, Mr. Brady. Your work.”

  “They call me an artist.”

  “That’s right.” Her words were crisp, sure. “An artist’s work lives beyond him. This isn’t our world, Mr. Brady. In the other rooms, the pictures move.”

  The pictures move. He had been given a gift, to see his own future. To know that the losses he suffered, the reversals he and Julia had lived through weren’t all for nothing. How many people got even that?

  He tucked her arm in his. He had to be out of this room, out of this exhibit he didn’t really understand. They stood together, her hoop clearing a path for them in the crowd. He stopped and surveyed the four walls—filled with his portraits, portraits of places most of these people had never seen—his memories that they shared and made their own.

  Then he stepped out of the exhibit into a future in which he would never take part, perhaps to gain a perspective he had never had before.

  And all the while, Julia remained beside him.

  —for Dean

  A WALK IN THE SUN

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  A physicist engaged in doing solar cell research, Geoffrey A, Landis is a frequent contributor to Analog, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Maga
zine, and Interzone, and has also sold stories to markets such as Amazing and Pulphouse. His story “Elemental” was on the Final Hugo Ballot a few years back, and his story “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” won him a Nebula Award in 1989. His first collection, Myths, Legends, and True History, has just come out from Pulphouse. He lives in Brook Park, Ohio.

  In “A Walk in the Sun,” he tells the suspenseful story of an astronaut shipwrecked on the Moon who is determined to survive no matter what she has to do—or how far she has to go.

  The pilots have a saying: a good landing is any landing you can walk away from.

  Perhaps Sanjiv might have done better, if he’d been alive. Trish had done the best she could. All things considered, it was a far better landing than she had any right to expect.

  Titanium struts, pencil-slender, had never been designed to take the force of a landing. Paper-thin pressure walls had buckled and shattered, spreading wreckage out into the vacuum and across a square kilometer of lunar surface. An instant before impact she remembered to blow the tanks. There was no explosion, but no landing could have been gentle enough to keep Moonshadow together. In eerie silence, the fragile ship had crumpled and ripped apart like a discarded aluminum can.

  The piloting module had torn open and broken loose from the main part of the ship. The fragment settled against a crater wall. When it stopped moving, Trish unbuckled the straps that held her in the pilot’s seat and fell slowly to the ceiling. She oriented herself to the unaccustomed gravity, found an undamaged EVA pack and plugged it into her suit, then crawled out into the sunlight through the jagged hole where the living module had been attached.

  She stood on the grey lunar surface and stared. Her shadow reached out ahead of her, a pool of inky black in the shape of a fantastically stretched man. The landscape was rugged and utterly barren, painted in stark shades of grey and black. “Magnificent desolation,” she whispered. Behind her, the sun hovered just over the mountains, glinting off shards of titanium and steel scattered across the cratered plain.

  Patricia Jay Mulligan looked out across the desolate moonscape and tried not to weep.

  * * *

  First things first. She took the radio out from the shattered crew compartment and tried it. Nothing. That was no surprise; Earth was over the horizon, and there were no other ships in cislunar space.

  After a little searching she found Sanjiv and Theresa. In the low gravity they were absurdly easy to carry. There was no use in burying them. She sat them in a niche between two boulders, facing the sun, facing west, toward where the Earth was hidden behind a range of black mountains. She tried to think of the right words to say, and failed. Perhaps as well; she wouldn’t know the proper service for Sanjiv anyway. “Goodbye, Sanjiv. Goodbye, Theresa. I wish—I wish things would have been different. I’m sorry.” Her voice was barely more than a whisper. “Go with God.”

  She tried not to think of how soon she was likely to be joining them.

  She forced herself to think. What would her sister have done? Survive. Karen would survive. First: inventory your assets. She was alive, miraculously unhurt. Her vacuum suit was in serviceable condition. Life-support was powered by the suit’s solar arrays; she had air and water for as long as the sun continued to shine. Scavenging the wreckage yielded plenty of unbroken food packs; she wasn’t about to starve.

  Second: call for help. In this case, the nearest help was a quarter of a million miles over the horizon. She would need a high-gain antenna and a mountain peak with a view of Earth.

  * * *

  In its computer, Moonshadow had carried the best maps of the moon ever made. Gone. There had been other maps on the ship; they were scattered with the wreckage. She’d managed to find a detailed map of Mare Nubium—useless—and a small global map meant to be used as an index. It would have to do. As near as she could tell, the impact site was just over the eastern edge of Mare Smythii—“Smith’s Sea.” The mountains in the distance should mark the edge of the sea, and, with luck, have a view of Earth.

  She checked her suit. At a command, the solar arrays spread out to their full extent like oversized dragonfly wings and glinted in prismatic colors as they rotated to face the sun. She verified that the suit’s systems were charging properly, and set off.

  Close up, the mountain was less steep than it had looked from the crash site. In the low gravity, climbing was hardly more difficult than walking, although the two-meter dish made her balance awkward. Reaching the ridgetop, Trish was rewarded with the sight of a tiny sliver of blue on the horizon. The mountains on the far side of the valley were still in darkness. She hoisted the radio higher up on her shoulder and started across the next valley.

  From the next mountain peak the Earth edged over the horizon, a blue and white marble half-hidden by black mountains. She unfolded the tripod for the antenna and carefully sighted along the feed. “Hello? This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Emergency. Repeat, this is an emergency. Does anybody hear me?”

  She took her thumb off the transmit button and waited for a response, but heard nothing but the soft whisper of static from the sun.

  “This is Astronaut Mulligan from Moonshadow. Does anybody hear me?” She paused again. “Moonshadow, calling anybody. Moonshadow, calling anybody. This is an emergency.”

  “—shadow, this is Geneva control. We read you faint but clear. Hang on, up there.” She released her breath in a sudden gasp. She hadn’t even realized she’d been holding it.

  * * *

  After five minutes the rotation of the Earth had taken the ground antenna out of range. In that time—after they had gotten over their surprise that there was a survivor of the Moonshadow—she learned the parameters of the problem. Her landing had been close to the sunset terminator; the very edge of the illuminated side of the moon. The moon’s rotation is slow, but inexorable. Sunset would arrive in three days. There was no shelter on the moon, no place to wait out the fourteen day long lunar night. Her solar cells needed sunlight to keep her air fresh. Her search of the wreckage had yielded no unruptured storage tanks, no batteries, no means to lay up a store of oxygen.

  And there was no way they could launch a rescue mission before nightfall.

  Too many “no”s.

  She sat silent, gazing across the jagged plain toward the slender blue crescent, thinking.

  After a few minutes the antenna at Goldstone rotated into range, and the radio crackled to life. “Moonshadow, do you read me? Hello, Moonshadow, do you read me?”

  “Moonshadow here.”

  She released the transmit button and waited in long silence for her words to be carried to Earth.

  “Roger, Moonshadow. We confirm the earliest window for a rescue mission is thirty days from now. Can you hold on that long?”

  She made her decision and pressed the transmit button. “Astronaut Mulligan for Moonshadow. I’ll be here waiting for you. One way or another.”

  She waited, but there was no answer. The receiving antenna at Goldstone couldn’t have rotated out of range so quickly. She checked the radio. When she took the cover off, she could see that the printed circuit board on the power supply had been slightly cracked from the crash, but she couldn’t see any broken leads or components clearly out of place. She banged on it with her fist—Karen’s first rule of electronics, if it doesn’t work, hit it—and reaimed the antenna, but it didn’t help. Clearly something in it had broken.

  What would Karen have done? Not just sit here and die, that was certain. Get a move on, kiddo. When sunset catches you, you’ll die.

  They had heard her reply. She had to believe they heard her reply and would be coming for her. All she had to do was survive.

  The dish antenna would be too awkward to carry with her. She could afford nothing but the bare necessities. At sunset her air would be gone. She put down the radio and began to walk.

  * * *

  Mission Commander Stanley stared at the x-rays of his engine. It was four in the morning. There would be no more sleep for h
im that night; he was scheduled to fly to Washington at six to testify to Congress.

  “Your decision, Commander,” the engine technician said. “We can’t find any flaws in the x-rays we took of the flight engines, but it could be hidden. The nominal flight profile doesn’t take the engines to a hundred twenty, so the blades should hold even if there is a flaw.”

  “How long a delay if we yank the engines for inspection?”

  “Assuming they’re okay, we lose a day. If not, two, maybe three.”

  Commander Stanley drummed his fingers in irritation. He hated to be forced into hasty decisions. “Normal procedure would be?”

  “Normally we’d want to reinspect.”

  “Do it.”

  He sighed. Another delay. Somewhere up there, somebody was counting on him to get there on time. If she was still alive. If the cut-off radio signal didn’t signify catastrophic failure of other systems.

  If she could find a way to survive without air.

  * * *

  On Earth it would have been a marathon pace. On the moon it was an easy lope. After ten miles the trek fell into an easy rhythm: half a walk, half like jogging, and half bounding like a slow-motion kangaroo. Her worst enemy was boredom.

  Her comrades at the academy—in part envious of the top scores that had made her the first of their class picked for a mission—had ribbed her mercilessly about flying a mission that would come within a few kilometers of the moon without landing. Now she had a chance to see more of the moon up close than anybody in history. She wondered what her classmates were thinking now. She would have a tale to tell—if only she could survive to tell it.

  The warble of the low voltage warning broke her out of her reverie. She checked her running display as she started down the maintenance checklist. Elapsed EVA time, eight point three hours. System functions, nominal, except that the solar array current was way below norm. In a few moments she found the trouble: a thin layer of dust on her solar array. Not a serious problem; it could be brushed off. If she couldn’t find a pace that would avoid kicking dust on the arrays, then she would have to break every few hours to housekeep. She rechecked the array and continued on.