The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  And I should not abandon my friend, whether he was a true friend to me, or not.

  Men’s souls are crooked and unsound things, not good materials out of which to build friendships, families, households, cities, civilizations. But good or no, these things must be built, and we must craft them with the materials at hand, and make as strong and stubborn a redoubt as we can make, lest the horrors of the Night should triumph over us, not in some distant age to come, but now.

  We are surrounded by the Silent Ones. We are fated to die. One of us will perish before we regain the pyramid; Hellenore saw only one pair of footprints leading back. How is it possible that we both shall live?

  But by then the cycling process was too advanced, and his thoughts lost focus. Many hours must pass before I would open the lid, and answer his question.

  As I carried him on my back, out past the golden doors, I lead his blind hand to touch the bas-relief on the left panel of the golden doors.

  Here was the panel carven long ago by Hellenore in a former time, was a small depiction of one small event on what, to her, had been the future, now our present. Here was a man without a breastplate or helm, wearing only gauntlets and greaves, carrying a one-armed man on his back; a blindfold (but I knew now it was a bandage) covered his eyes.

  The image showed a star shining down on them, and the gates of the Last Redoubt opening to receive them. Only one pair of footprints led in.

  THE LONG WAY HOME

  James Van Pelt

  One of the most widely published new writers of short-length works, James Van Pelt’s stories have appeared in Sci Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative, Weird Tales, Talebones, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Pulphouse, Altair, Transversions, Adventures in Sword & Sorcery, On Spec, Future Orbits, and elsewhere. His first book, appropriately enough, was a collection, Strangers and Beggars. He lives with his family in Grand Junction, Colorado, where he teaches English at the high school and college levels.

  Here he offers us a moving look at the way lives entwine through the years from one generation to the next, and how sometimes we have no choice but to take the longest way home.

  MARISA KEPT HER back to the door, holding it closed. “Another few minutes and they will have made the jump. You can go home then.”

  “The war has started,” said Jacqueline, the telemetry control engineer. Her face glowed red with panic. “I don’t matter. The mission is over. They made the jump four hours ago.”

  Marisa swallowed. If Jacqueline grabbed her, there would be little she could do. The woman outweighed her by thirty pounds, and there were no security forces to help. “Jacqueline, we’ve come so far.”

  The bigger woman raised her fist. Marisa tensed, but didn’t move. Her hands trembled behind her. For a moment, Jacqueline’s fist quivered in the air. Beyond her, the last of the Mission Control crew watched. Most of the stations were empty. The remaining engineers’ faces registered no expression. They were too tired to react, but Marisa knew they wanted to leave just as badly.

  Then Jacqueline dropped her hand to her side. Her eyes closed. “I don’t make a difference,” she whispered.

  Marisa released a held breath. “We’re part of mankind’s greatest moment. There’s nothing you can do out there.” She nodded her head toward the door. “We can’t stop what’s happening, but we can be witnesses to this. There’s hope still.”

  Several monitors displayed a United States map and a Florida one inset in the corner. Both showed bright yellow blotches. “Areas of lost communication” the key read underneath. Major cities across the country; most of the southwestern coast and northeastern seaboard, glowed bright yellow. In Florida, yellow sunbursts blotted out Miami and Jacksonville. As she watched, another one appeared on Tampa. She glanced at Mission Control’s ceiling and the half-dozen skylights. At any moment, the ceiling could peel away, awash in nuclear light. She expected it, expected it much earlier, but she’d stayed at her station, recording the four-hour old signals from the Advent as it sped toward the solar system’s edge, already beyond Neptune’s orbit. Would she have any warning? Would there be an instant before the end when she would be aware that it had happened?

  Jacqueline sat heavily at her console, and Marisa returned to her station. The data looked good, but it had looked good from the beginning, six years earlier, when the massive ship ponderously moved out of orbit, all 14,400 passengers hale and hearty. There had been deaths on board, of course. They expected that. Undetected medical conditions. Two homicides. Two suicides, but no major incidents with the ship itself. The hardware performed perfectly, and now, only a few minutes from when the synchronized generators along the ship’s perimeter powered up to send the Advent into juxtaspace, Mission Control really was redundant. Jacqueline was right.

  The room smelled of old coffee and sweat. Many of the controllers had been at their stations for twenty hours or more. As time grew short, they split their attention between their stations and the ubiquitous news displays. A scrolling text readout under the graphics listed unbelievable numbers: estimated dead, radiation readings, cities lost.

  Marisa toggled her display. She wanted readouts on the juxtaengines. Mankind was going to the stars at last, even if there might be no Earth left to return to, if they could duplicate the ship to bring them back. “It’s easy, having no family,” she said under her breath, which wasn’t quite true. Her grown son lived in Oceanside, a long commute from southern L.A., but they only talked on the phone at Christmas now. She had to check his photograph to remind herself of what he looked like. A station over, an engineer had his head down on his keyboard, sobbing.

  Dr. Smalley was the only controller who appeared occupied. He flicked through screen after screen of medical data. The heartbeats of the entire crew drew tiny lines across his display. He looked at Marisa. “We won’t know what happens when the shift happens. What will their bodies go through? What a pity they can’t signal through the jump.”

  “If they make the jump at all,” moaned Jacqueline.

  “We’ll know in three minutes,” said Marisa. “Regardless of what happens here, we will have saved ourselves.”

  Dimly, through Mission Control’s thick walls, sirens wailed up and down. The building vibrated, sending a coffee cup off a table’s edge and to the floor.

  “Maybe if we’d spent the money here, where it could do some good, we’d never have come to this,” said Jacqueline. “We bankrupted the planet for this mission.”

  Dr. Smalley studied the heartbeats from the ship. “They’re excited. Everyone’s pulse is high. Look, I can see everything that’s happening in their bodies.” He waved a hand at his display. “Their individual transmitters give me more information than if I had them hooked up in a hospital. I wish I was with them.”

  “Everyone wishes they were with them,” said Marisa.

  Jacqueline said, “Don’t you have a word for it, Doctor, when the patient’s condition is fatal, so you decide to try something unproven to save her? That’s what we’re doing here, aren’t we? Humanity is dying, so we try this theoretical treatment.”

  The countdown clock on the wall showed less than two minutes. The floor shook again, much more sharply this time.

  “Please, a few more seconds,” Marisa said to no one.

  So much history happening around her: the first colonial expedition to another star system, and the long-feared global nuclear conflict. The victor had to be the explorers. The names passed through her head: Goddard, Von Braun, Armstrong, and the rest of them. It was a way to shut out the death-dealers knocking at the door.

  “It’s an experiment,” said Jacqueline, edging on hysteria. “We’ve never sent a ship even a tenth this big. We’ve never tied multiple juxtaengines together. What if their fields interact? Instead of sending the ship in one piece, it could tear it apart.”

  “It was too expensive to try out,” Marisa snapped. “It was all or nothing.”

  “You’ve been
listening to the defeatists,” said Dr. Smalley. “The theory is perfect. The math is perfect. In an instant, they will be hundreds of light-years from our problems.”

  Marisa clutched the edge of her monitor. The countdown timer clicked to under a minute. I’m a representative of mankind, she thought. For everyone who has ever wanted to go to the stars, I stand for them. She wished she could see the night sky.

  Dr. Smalley hunched toward his computer as if he were trying to climb right through. Jacqueline stared at the television screens with their yellow-specked maps. The images wavered, then turned to grey fuzz. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth.

  “Ten seconds,” said Marisa. “All systems in the green.”

  The countdown ticker marched down. Marisa remembered a childhood filled with stories of space, the movies and books set in the universe’s grand theater, not the tiny stage lit by a single sun. If only she could have gone too, she could have missed the messy ending mankind had made for itself. The first bombs had exploded yesterday morning. Over breakfast, she’d thought it was a hoax. No way people could be so stupid. But the reports continued to come in, and it wasn’t a joke, not in the least.

  Eyes toward their readouts, the control engineers monitored Advent’s last signals. Already at near solar-escape velocity, the Advent would leap out of the solar system, riding the unlikely physics of juxta-space.

  “Three . . . two . . . one,” someone said. Marisa’s screen flipped to the NO SIGNAL message. Analysis indicated the ship had gone. A ragged and weak cheer came from the few engineers in the room.

  “She’s made the jump,” Marisa said. She envisioned the Advent obscured in a burst of light as the strange energies from the juxtaengines parted space, allowing the giant ship its trans-light speed journey. For a moment, the space program existed all on its own, separate from the news broadcasts and progress reports, far from the “Areas of lost communication.”

  “No,” said Dr. Smalley. “There should be no telemetry now. They’re gone.” He touched his fingers to his monitor. Marisa moved to where she could see what he saw. The heartbeats on his screen still registered. Brain waves still recorded their spiky paths. He flicked from one screenful of medical transmissions to the next.

  “How is that possible?” said Marisa. Jacqueline stood beside her. Other engineers left their stations to crowd behind Smalley’s chair.

  “They’re getting weaker,” said Jacqueline.

  “No, no, no,” said Smalley. His fingers tapped a quick command on his keyboard. A similar display with names and readouts appeared on the screen, but this one showed no activity in the medical area.

  “What is that?” asked Marisa. How could there be transmissions? The Advent was beyond communication now. They’d never know if she reached her destination. Light speed and relativity created a barrier as imposing as death itself.

  “It’s their respiration,” said Smalley, his voice computer-calm. “They’re not breathing.” He switched back to the heartbeats. Many of the readouts now showed nothing. A few blinked their pulses slowly, and then those stopped too. Smalley tapped through screen after screen. Every pulse was now zero. Every brain scan showed a flat line.

  Marisa’s hands rested on the back of Smalley’s chair. She could feel him shaking through her fingers. “Check their body temperatures,” she said.

  He raised his head as if to look back at her. Then he shrugged in understanding. The new display showed core temperatures. As they watched, the numbers clicked down.

  “Is it an anomaly?” asked someone. “Are we getting their signals from juxtaspace?”

  “The ship blew up,” said Jacqueline.

  Marisa said, “No. We would have received telemetry for that.” She held Smalley’s chair now so that she wouldn’t collapse. “It’s their real signals from our space.” Her face felt cold and her feet numb. A part of her knew that she was within an instant of collapsing. “The Advent left, but it didn’t take them.”

  Jacqueline said, “Worst-case scenario. It was a possibility that the multiple engines wouldn’t work the same way as single ones. We dumped everyone into space.” Her voice cracked.

  “They’re dead,” said Marisa as the room slowly swooped to her right. I’m falling, she thought. What would a telescope see if it could see that far? After the flash of light? Would it see 14,400 bodies tumbling? What other parts of the ship didn’t go?

  Her head hit the floor, but it didn’t hurt. Nothing hurt, and she was curiously aware of meaningless details: how the tiled floor beneath her felt gritty, how ridiculous the engineers looked staring down at her. Then, oddly, how their faces began to darken. What a curious phenomena, she thought. The fraction of a second before she knew no more, she realized that their faces hadn’t darkened. It was the skylights above them. They’d gone brilliantly bright. Surface-of-the-sun bright.

  We’re not going to the stars, she thought, as the heat of a thousand stars blasted through the ceiling. She would have cried if she had had the time.

  Who has died like this? So sudden, the walls shimmered. Then they were gone. The air burst away, much of the ships innard’s remained, but twisted and ruptured. Torn into parts. The stars swirl around us, and all the eyes see. We all see what we all see, but there isn’t a “we” to talk about, just a group consciousness. The 14,400 brains frozen in moments, the neurons firing micro-charges across the supercool gaps creating a mega-organism, still connected. And we continue outward, held together loosely by our tiny gravities, sometimes touching, drifting apart, but never too far. Pluto passed in hardly a thought, and then we were beyond, into the Oort Cloud, but who would know it? The sun glimmered brightly behind us, a brighter spot among the other spots, but mostly it was black and oh so cold. Time progressed even if we couldn’t measure it. Was it days already, or years, or centuries? Out we traveled. Out and out.

  Jonathan shifted the backpack’s weight on his shoulders as he tramped down the slope toward Encinitas, then rubbed his hands together against the cold. He’d left his cart filled with trade goods in Leucadia, and it felt good not to be pulling its weight behind him. The sun had set in garish red an hour earlier, and all that guided his footsteps was the well-worn path and the waves’ steady pounding on the shore to his right. No moon yet, although its diffuse light wouldn’t help much anyway. When he’d crested the last hill, though, he’d seen the tiny lights of Encinitas’ windows, and knew he was close.

  He whistled a tune to himself, keeping rhythm with his steps. The harvest was in, and it looked like it would be a good one this year for Encinitas. They’d wired two more greenhouses with grow-lights in the spring, and managed to scare up enough seed for a full planting. For the first time, they might even have an excess. If he could broker a deal with the folks in Oceanside, who lost part of their crop to leaf blight, it could be a profitable winter.

  A snatch of music came through the ocean sound. Jonathan smiled. Ray Hansen’s daughter, Felitia, would be there. Last year she’d danced with him twice, and he imagined her hand lingered as they passed from partner to partner . . . but she’d been too young to court then. Not this year, though. It was going to be a good night. Even the icy-cold ocean breeze smelled clean. Not so dead. Not like when he was a boy and everyone called it the “stinking sea.”

  He slowed down. The gate across the path should be coming soon. It stopped the flock of goats from wandering off during the summer. In the winter, of course, they were kept in the barns so that they wouldn’t freeze. Yes, Encinitas was a rich community, to be able to grow enough to feed livestock. Felitia would be a good match for him. She was strong and lively, and her father would certainly welcome him warmly if he was a part of the family. Goat’s milk with every meal! He licked his lips, thinking of the cheese that was a part of the harvest celebration.

  But what if she didn’t want him?

  He slowed even more. What wasn’t to want about him? He was twenty, and a businessman, but it wasn’t like he was around all the time to charm her, and a yea
r was a long time. Maybe she didn’t want to travel from village to village, carrying trade goods. And she was a bookish girl. People talked about her, Jonathan knew. That was part of her charm. He buried his hands under his armpits. Did it seem unusually cold suddenly, or was it fear that made him shiver?

  The gate rattled in the breeze, which saved him bumping into it. Fingers stiff, he unlatched it. Clearly now, the music lilted from over the hill. He hurried, full of hope and dread.

  “Jonathan, you are welcome,” said Ray Hansen at the door. Hansen looked older than the last time Jonathan had seen him, but he’d always seemed old. He might be forty, which was really getting up in years, Jonathan thought. Beyond, the long tables filled with seedling plants had been pushed to the wall. Everyone in the village seemed to be there. The Yamishitas and Coogans. The Taylors and Van Guys. The Washingtons and Laffertys. Over a hundred people filled the room. Jonathan smiled. “I’ve come to see your daughter, sir.”

  The old man smiled wanly. “You’ll need to talk to her about that.”

  Jonathan wondered if Hansen was sick. He seemed much thinner than Jonathan remembered him. Probably the blood disease, he thought. Lots of folks got the blood disease.

  The band struck up a reel, and couples formed into squares for the next dance. The caller took his place on the stage. Felitia, in a plain, cotton dress, sat on the edge of a table at the far end of the long room, swinging her feet slowly beneath her. Jonathan edged along the dance floor. The music drove the dancers to faster and faster twirls, hands changing hands, heads tossing. He apologized when a woman bumped him, but she was gone so fast he doubted she’d heard.

  Felitia watched him as he made the last few yards, her blue eyes steady, her blonde hair tied primly back. Was she glad to see him? Surely she knew why he was there. He had left her notes every time he passed through Encinitas, and her replies that he retrieved the next trip were chatty enough, but noncommital. She could have been writing to her brother for all the passion he’d found in them.