The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Maybe it was impossible. I couldn’t guarantee that it wasn’t. There’s still a lot we don’t know about nonlinear dynamics, scientific chaos. That’s the nature of the beast. We build up a stock of empirical observation, a complex structure of experimentation to go with theories and equations that often appear maddeningly simple before you put them through their iterations. Then, sometimes in very short order, your model can become too complex for even the largest computers to handle reliably in any reasonable amount of time. We can model the fractal programming that allows genes to hold the complex instructions that will result in a human—or an orchid. But we still can’t adequately model the old meteorologist’s example of a butterfly in China causing a hurricane in the Atlantic. Tomorrow’s weather forecast is still wrong occasionally. If our computers could process ten times as much information at ten times the speed our best can now, tomorrow’s weather forecast would still be wrong once in a while.

  I pulled open a crate of meal packets and fixed something to eat. I couldn’t even say what it was now—just a meal, food, fuel. Something to do: it gave me ten minutes of sitting down, enough time to rest my feet. But when I got back up and started pacing again, my feet hurt worse than before. I’m not used to that much walking.

  It was after two o’clock when a series of massive yawns convinced me that it was time to try to get a little sleep. I called Ike, and as soon as he responded coherently, I grabbed a couple of blankets and made myself a bed on top of several packing crates. I used one blanket as a pillow and wrapped myself in the other. Apparently, I fell asleep almost at once.

  * * *

  “Roy.” A hand touched my shoulder. “Doctor Jepp.”

  “I’m awake, Jenny,” I said, surprised that I had even been asleep.

  “About forty-five minutes to sunrise. We’ll have a little light before long.”

  I sat up, stretched, and yawned. I was a long way from alert, but I was awake.

  “Ike’s fixing breakfast packs for us,” Jenny said. That’s one thing about holing up in the warehouse. You can count on food.

  “Any sign of activity outside?” I asked, collecting my thoughts. I felt drugged, still stuporous from sleep.

  “Not a hint,” Jenny said. “It’s been quiet all night.”

  All night? There hadn’t been much of a night for us. I stood and did some more stretching. I’m not used to going from sleep to working-alertness right away. Back home, I would have a couple of hours to gear up for the office. The morning routine at home and the commute to the IWS office gave me plenty of time to make the transition.

  “You checked on our storm lately?” I asked.

  “I’ve been watching. Steady on all points.”

  “Just hope it stays that way for a few more hours. I’d hate to get out there and have to scrub the run. I don’t want to go through more nights like this.”

  “The winds didn’t even weaken during the night,” Jenny said. “They may increase today.”

  I needed a couple of seconds to dredge the last numbers I had seen during the night from my memory. “It shouldn’t strengthen enough to get it out of our range,” I said.

  “Not by noon anyway,” Jenny said.

  I started walking around, swinging my arms and stretching, trying to pump myself up for the day’s work. My back ached. My feet didn’t need long to join the party. I’m really going to feel like hell by the time this is over, I thought with something less than joyful anticipation. My lifestyle has always been rather sedentary. It was catching up with me in a hurry. I should get more exercise. I make that decision periodically. Unfortunately, that’s as far as I usually get.

  Hurrying through breakfast was the best way to make it palatable. Then it was time to get ready for the day’s work.

  “Jenny, as soon as we get the plane moved outside, seal the door again. Stay put until we get back, if possible, until we set off the devices at least.” She nodded. We were going to trigger them from the Imre this time, rather than from the center—another safety precaution. “You’ll be able to monitor everything from here.” I pointed at the computer terminal that showed the storm track holo. Jenny nodded again.

  I got especially jumpy again when we opened the doors, but there was no one out there waiting for us. Ike ran the tractor to pull the plane outside, then uncoupled the tractor and moved it out of the way. Jenny already had the bunker doors shut.

  “Let’s move!” Ike shouted when he sealed the plane’s passenger hatch behind him. I was already in the pilot’s seat.

  “Well, get up here and let’s get through this checklist.” I shouted back. I wasn’t going to take any stupid chances just to make a fast “getaway,” especially without trouble right there on top of us.

  * * *

  We had particularly rough air that morning … or maybe it just seemed that way because my nerves were so jangled. As soon as we were airborne, I radioed Doctor Elkins—woke her up—to tell her that we were on our way and to make sure that everyone was inside when we set the devices off. The center was too far away from the eye of the hurricane for there to be any real danger, but the gesture had to be made. Then I radioed Captain Linearson to alert her to the timing of the explosions. Four 17-megaton fusion devices exploding fairly low in the atmosphere could hardly pose a radiation problem for the ship in orbit, but again, it was a gesture that had to be made. I also wanted to get all of the data the ship could collect on the explosions.

  “I’m aiming directly for the eye,” I told Ike when I finished with the “courtesy” calls. “We’ll circle overhead if we have to. I want to make sure we’re in place on time.”

  “I’ll go back and run another check on the Mantas,” he said. I nodded. Keeping busy was better than sitting idle.

  Ike was still working in the cargo hold when Donna Elkins called. We were just under an hour into the flight.

  “We’ve had trouble here,” she said.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked, my stomach knotting up. I thought about Jenny back in that bunker and glanced over my shoulder at the hatch leading to the plane’s cargo hold.

  “Casey. He committed suicide during the night, apparently not long before dawn.”

  I closed my eyes for an instant and took a deep breath. Relief mixed with sorrow. To be honest, relief was the dominant emotion at the moment. Donna Elkins kept talking.

  “He left two notes, one in English on the computer net, the other on paper, handwritten in kanji characters. I’ve seen Kasigi writing in Japanese. He’s not—he wasn’t—very speedy. This must have taken him hours to write.”

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “There’s no one else here who reads Japanese, so I can’t be sure that the two notes are the same. I’m pretty sure that they aren’t. The Japanese note appears to be materially longer—maybe private messages to his family. The note in English says that he killed himself to protest against the use of any nuclear devices for any reason. The note is quite passionate.”

  I hadn’t even thought of the possibility of something like this. I had been so worried that Kasigi might try to physically stop us from carrying out our final experiment that I hadn’t thought beyond that.

  “I’m sorry, Donna,” I said. “I had no idea that he might do something like this.”

  “Neither did I,” she said—with more than a little bitterness. “And since I’ve known him for more than ten years, I should have.”

  “I’m sorry.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. No, I didn’t even think of calling off the mission. And even if I had thought of it, I wouldn’t have.

  * * *

  The next seventy-five minutes were probably the longest of my life, as trite as that may sound. I told Ike what had happened when he came back from inspecting the sleds. Jenny came on the radio long enough to tell me that she had heard the other call and to say that she felt terrible about it. Well, so did I, but there was nothing any of us could do. Not after the fact.

  “Jenny, once we get
in position, we’ll deploy the sleds as soon as possible. I’m not going to bother waiting for the clock.” It was only a minor flaw in procedure. The noon blast time had been mostly for convenience. And we wouldn’t be early by a lot anyway.

  “Still no deviation in the storm data,” Jenny said. I knew that. We had the same information on the cockpit terminal.

  The squall lines ahead of the main storm were clearly visible from above, the converging arcs like the blades of a child’s pinwheel. Up where Ike and I were, the sky was clear, the sun reflecting off the clouds in a dazzling display. For a change I felt no pleasure, no exaltation at the sight of the familiar beautiful patterns of weather systems in the atmosphere. The majestic brush strokes of nature seemed flat and lifeless, faded copies of copies.

  Ike and I didn’t talk much after I told him about Casey. The flight didn’t require much. Nor did the deployment of the air sleds when we got in position. And we didn’t feel at all up to idle chatter.

  We came in on the eye of the hurricane at 50,000 feet and descended toward the top of the hourglass-shaped eye in a gentle banking turn that left us pointed back toward the center. After a final check of the storm’s vital statistics, Ike launched the four air sleds and went to work guiding them into position while I maneuvered the plane up away from the eye and ran the throttles full open to put as much airspace as possible between the eye and us before we triggered the fusion devices.

  I would have liked to put a couple of AUs between us. In a pinch, I would have settled for a hundred miles. I hoped to get at least twice that.

  “Let me know if any of the sleds start to lose stability,” I reminded Ike for about the tenth time in five minutes.

  “We’re holding good,” Ike said, not taking his eyes off the display. “The sleds have enough fuel for another twenty-one minutes.”

  I nosed the plane forward a little to pick up a few extra miles of airspeed. “We don’t want to cut it too close,” I said.

  “The fuel calibration tested perfectly,” Ike reminded me.

  “Still. Keep a close watch and let me know when the first sled shows five minutes’ fuel left.” I started doing rough calculations in my head. Our airspeed was just over 550 miles per hour. The storm was moving at 12 mph, but not directly in our direction. That meant that we were pulling away from the eye at a rate of about 9 miles a minute. If we could hang on until the first sled got down to 3 minutes’ fuel, we would have our 200 mile margin—and just a little more.

  I started running through the satellite weather data we had, looking for better winds. And then I smiled for the first time that morning. By dropping another 8,000 feet I could pick up an extra 10 knots of tail wind. I nosed the plane down a little more sharply. That helped too. I was ready to start thinking about inches of margin. I did have a rough idea how much power we were going to unleash, and I was thoroughly intimidated.

  At least worrying about the sleds and their cargo kept me from dwelling on Kasigi’s suicide.

  We were 203 miles from the nearest edge of the storm’s eye when Ike told me that we had reached five minutes worth of fuel in the first sled.

  “Detonate now?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “Are all four sleds still stable?”

  “Perfectly,” he assured me. “They’re keeping station like they were tied together.”

  “We’ll hold off as long as possible,” I said. “Just keep a close watch on them. Jenny, you listening?”

  “I’m listening,” she said. “Crank up the filters on your windows.”

  “Right. Thanks for the reminder,” I said. I hit the manual control and the sky darkened noticeably. We were far enough away that the fireball wouldn’t even be visible—if the historical data was correct. We shouldn’t be able to see anything of the explosion. But again, we were taking absolutely no chances. “All the way to the stops,” I reported.

  “Four minutes on fuel,” Ike said softly.

  I glanced at my navigation screen. We were 213 miles from the nearest bomb. Even the most bizarre set of circumstances we could imagine wouldn’t produce anything that might remotely endanger the Imre at that distance—shock wave or radiation. That didn’t stop my nerves from jumping. It had been a hundred years since a fusion device had been detonated.

  “As long as everything holds stable, hit the button at two minutes.” I said. “If anything even starts to look as if it might be ready to go wacky, warn me and hit the button at once.”

  Two minutes. I must have aged ten years in the last seconds of waiting. Ike detonated the explosives. We saw nothing, felt nothing. Only the reports from the satellites told us that all four devices had exploded. We waited for a short eternity, staring at the constantly updated model of the storm in our holotank.

  Things happened.

  The eyewall pulsed out and down. The water-laden clouds boiled away, vaporized. The force of the explosions kicked against the 170 mph winds around the eye of the hurricane, pushing some forward, throwing a wall in front of others, disrupting the patterns through the middle altitudes of the storm. The heat and downward pressure of the explosion increased atmospheric pressure below.

  Our computer model couldn’t show everything that was happening, couldn’t keep up with the pace. Conditions in and around the eye changed too quickly for the satellite monitors to keep pace.

  The hurricane rebounded inward.

  And the system ripped itself apart.

  * * *

  It didn’t happen instantly. After all, the hurricane was more than 600 miles in diameter. But there was enough action along the eyewall in the first two minutes to tell us that we were doing something. We had tipped a strong, well-organized hurricane into chaotic instability. After five minutes, the disruption was still increasing. Ten minutes after detonation, there was no doubt in my mind. The hurricane wasn’t dead, but it was dying.

  “We did it! We did it!” Ike was shouting almost right into my ear. Jenny was yelling the same thing over the radio. Maybe I did a little shouting myself.

  But the shouting didn’t last long. Against the darkened glass of the windshield in front of me, I could almost see Kasigi’s face, begging me not to do it. “You cannot let this horror be reborn.”

  And now it was a squalling infant.

  * * *

  We left two days later. There was no trace remaining of the storm we had killed. But the ghost of a man remained, a man who had died to protest what we had done. Kasigi Jo had already been buried, on Trident, at his own request. I was carrying his suicide notes, his manifestoes, back to Earth. I would make his notes public, regardless of the fallout there. I owed him that much. Others could decide whether or not we should use our new weapon against the ravages of nature. I had little doubt what the final decision would be.

  “I assume that the work will continue,” I told Donna Elkins at our last meeting. “We know that the theory is workable now. It needs to be refined. If nothing else, we need to find the minimum force needed.”

  “Does that mean you’ll be coming back?”

  I shook my head first, then shrugged. “I don’t know. I think that the work has to continue, but I’m having trouble working up any enthusiasm for doing it myself.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said. Then she sighed. “You’re right, the work will go on. But I’ve lost my enthusiasm too. When the next load of bombs comes out, I go home. Quit. I don’t want any part of it.” She turned away from me. “I love this place and I’ll miss it more than anything, but I can’t fight for it here. I’ve got to go back to Earth to do that.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you there,” I said. And then I left. Quickly.

  POGROM

  James Patrick Kelly

  Like his friend and frequent collaborator John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and went on to become one of the most respected and prominent new writers of the eighties. Although his most recent solo novel, Look into the Sun, was well received, Kelly has had more impact to date as a writer
of short fiction than as a novelist, and, indeed, Kelly stories such as “Solstice,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Glass Cloud,” “Mr. Boy,” and “Home Front” must be ranked among the most inventive and memorable short works of the decade. Kelly’s first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a novel written in collaboration with John Kessel. His story “Friend,” also in collaboration with Kessel, was in our First Annual Collection; his “Solstice” was in our Third Annual Collection; his “The Prisoner of Chillon” was in our Fourth Annual Collection; his “Glass Cloud” was in our Fifth Annual Collection; his “Home Front” was in our Sixth Annual Collection; and his “Mr. Boy” was in our Eighth Annual Collection. Born in Mineola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he’s reported to be at work on a third solo novel, Wildlife.

  Here he takes us to a frighteningly plausible near-future society for a new and disturbing take on the age-old war between the young and the old.

  Matt was napping when Ruth looked in on him. He had sprawled across the bedspread with his clothes on, shoes off. His right sock was worn to gauze at the heel. The pillow had crimped his gray hair at an odd angle. She had never seen him so peaceful before, but then she had never seen him asleep. She had the eye zoom for a close-up. His mouth was slack and sleep had softened the wrinkles on his brow. Ruth had always thought him handsome but forbidding, like the cliffs up in Crawford Notch. Now that he was dead to the world, she could almost imagine him smiling. She wondered if there were anything she could say to make him smile. He worried too much, that man. He blamed himself for things he had not done.

  She increased the volume of her wall. His breathing was scratchy but regular. They had promised to watch out for one another; there were not many of them left in Durham. Matt had given Ruth a password for his homebrain when they had released him from the hospital. He seemed fine for now. She turned out the lights he had left on, but there was nothing else she could see to do for him. She did not, however, close the electronic window which opened from her apartment on Church Hill onto his house across town. It had been years since she had heard the sounds of a man sleeping. If she shut her eyes, it was almost as if he were next to her. His gentle snoring made a much more soothing background than the gurgle of the mountain cascade she usually kept on the wall. She was not really intruding, she told herself. He had asked her to check up on him.