The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  He sat next to her without saying anything. Now that she was beside him, the speech he’d practiced sounded phony and ridiculous. The villagers rested when the music ended, talking quietly to themselves. On the makeshift stage, the band tuned their instruments. The two guitarists compared notes, while the trumpet player discreetly blew the spit out of his horn.

  “This is nice,” said Jonathan. He winced. Even that sounded stupid.

  “Yes.” Her hands were together in her lap. “How were the roads?”

  The band started another tune, and soon the crowd wove through the familiar patterns.

  “Fine, I guess.” Jonathan decided that the best move would be to leave the room. It was one thing to think grand thoughts while pulling his cart down the seashore roads, but it was quite another to confront her in the flesh. “I did good business in Oceanside.”

  “It must be interesting, seeing all those places.”

  Jonathan swelled. “Oh, yes. I’ve been even further north than that, you know. I even went to San Clemente once. A few of the buildings still stand. I wanted to press on to Los Angeles, but you know how cautious the old folks are.”

  She looked sideways at him.

  He cleared his throat. “Just along the beach. Nothing inland, of course. It’s ice from the Santa Ana mountains almost to the sea, but they say the snow field is retreating. It’s getting warmer, they say.”

  Felitia sighed. “The dust went up; the dust will go down. I don’t know if I believe it. They can call it ‘nuclear winter,’ but it’s more like nuclear eternity to me.” She watched the dancers, her face lost and vulnerable. “Encinitas seems so small.”

  Jonathan gripped the table’s edge. What he wanted to ask was on the tip of his tongue. Everything else sounded trivial, but the timing wasn’t right. He couldn’t just blurt it out. A thought came to him, and, with relief, he said, “I brought you a present.” He slung his backpack off his shoulders and set it between them. Felitia peered inside when he opened it.

  “Books!” She clapped her hands.

  He dug through the volumes. “There’s one I thought you might like especially.” At the bottom, he found it. “We need to go outside so I can give it to you.” He tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Nothing he’d ever done before felt so bold.

  She held his hand as they walked away from the dancers. Her fingers nestled softly in his.

  Felitia put on a coat and picked up a storm lamp before they went out the back door. The flame flickered before settling into a steady glow.

  “What is it?”

  Wind pushed against his face, tasting of salt. It could snow tonight, he thought. First snow of the season. He pulled the book out of his jacket and handed it to her. “Here’s as far as you can get from Encinitas.”

  She opened the book, a paperback edition of Peterson’s Field Guide to the Stars and Planets. By the storm lamp, he could see a color print of the Cone Nebula, a red, clouded background with white blobs poking through.

  “Oh, Jonathan. It’s beautiful.”

  Their foreheads touched as they bent over the book.

  She turned her face toward his. “My father told me about stars. He said he saw them when he was a boy, before the bad times.”

  Jonathan glanced up. “My dad said we were going to the stars. His mom helped launch the Advent.” The uniform black of the night sky greeted him, as indistinguishable as a cave interior. “He said the sky used to be blue, and the sun was as sharp-edged as a gold coin.”

  He looked down. Felitia’s face was only an inch from his own. Without thinking about it, he leaned in just enough to kiss her. She didn’t move away, and his question was answered before he asked it.

  Later, holding her against him, he said, “They say when the dust clears, we’ll see the stars again.”

  And on a calm night, four years later, after Ray, Jr., had gone to sleep, Jonathan and Felitia stood outside their house in Oceanside.

  “Can you see?” said Felitia. “Do you think that’s what I think it is?” She pointed to a spot in the sky.

  One hand on her shoulder, Jonathan pulled her tight. “I think it is.”

  A bright spot glimmered for a second. Another joined it.

  They stayed outside until they both grew so cold they couldn’t stand it anymore.

  We feel space. Neutrinos pass through like sparklers in the group body. Gravity heats our skin. We hear space, not through the frozen cells of our useless ears, but through the sensitive membrane of our group awareness. The stars chime like tiny bells. It has a taste, the vacuum does, dusty and metallic, and it doesn’t grow old. We go farther and farther and slower and slower, until we stop, not in equilibrium; the sun won. Gradually, we start back. Apogee past. The Oort Cloud. The birthplace of comets. How many years have we gone away?

  “Relying on the old knowledge is a mistake.” Professor Matsui faced the crowd of academics in the old New Berkeley lecture hall. The new New Berkeley hall wouldn’t be done until next year. After 120 years of use, this one would be torn down. He would miss the old place. “We overemphasize recreating the world we know from the records, but we aren’t doing our own work. Where is our originality? Where is our cultural stamp on our scientific progress?” He was glad for the new public address system. His voice wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been when he was young.

  Matsui watched Dr. Chesnutt, the Reclaimed Technologies chair. He appeared bored, his notebook unopened on his study desk. Languidly he raised his hand. “Point,” he said. “Would you have us throw away our ancestors’ best work? When we allocate money, should we assign more on your ‘original research’ that may yield nothing, or should we spend wisely, investigating what we know will work because it worked before? When we equal the achievements of the past, then it will make sense to invest in your programs. Until then, you divert valuable time and valuable funds.”

  Pausing for a moment to scan the crowd, Matsui took a deep breath. Were the others with him or against him? The literature department was evenly split between the archivists and the creative writers. Biology, Sociology, and Agriscience would lean toward him, as would Astronomy, but the engineers, mathematicians, and physicists would cast their vote solidly with Chesnutt, and, as the former head of the School of Medicine, he had probably coerced everyone in the department to vote his way. “Obviously we must continue the good work of learning from the past, but if we throw all our effort, and funds, into that, we risk creating the same mistakes that destroyed their world. You pursue their wisdom without worrying about their folly. Will you follow them down the road that led to nuclear annihilation?”

  Chesnutt chuckled. “You can raise the ‘nuclear annihilation’ demon all you like. As you know, there is no agreement among historians about what caused the great die-off. The nuclear exchange may have been the last symptom of a much deeper problem. We will only avoid their fate if we learn from their triumphs.”

  Heads nodded in the audience.

  Matsui finished his speech, but he could tell that Chesnutt had called in all his favors. It didn’t matter what value his arguments had, the Research Chair would not gain funding this year. He’d be lucky to hold his committee assignments.

  After the meeting, Matsui left the lecture hall in a hurry. He didn’t want to deal with the false condolences. The bloodsuckers, he thought. They’ll be looking for strategies to make my loss an advantage for their departments in some way or another.

  A breeze off the bay cut through his thin coat, sending a translucent veil of clouds across the night sky, and tossing the lights dangling from their poles.

  “Wait, Professor,” called a voice.

  He grimaced, then slowed his pace. Puffing, Leif Henderson, an assistant lecturer in Astronomy, joined him.

  “Good speech, sir.”

  “I’m afraid it was wasted.”

  “I don’t think so. We’ve got a couple of Chesnutt supporters in the department, but I can tell you the grad students aren’t interested in making their names in
the field by rediscovering all of Jupiter’s moons. The younger ones want to do something new.”

  Matsui pushed his hands deep into his pockets. Maybe he was getting too old for the back-stabbing politics of the university. “Chesnutt has a point. Old Time learning casts a huge shadow. We may never be able to get out from under it, and it doesn’t help that whenever original research makes a discovery, the intellectual archeologists dig up some reference to show it’s been done before. There’s no impetus for innovation.”

  Henderson matched Matsui’s steps. “But the Old Timers didn’t know everything. They didn’t conquer death. They didn’t master themselves.” The young man looked into the night sky. “They didn’t reach the stars. We should have been receiving the Advent’s signals for the last fifty years if they made it, or even more likely, they would have come back. They have had 400 years to recreate their engines.”

  “I like to think they arrived, and we just haven’t built sensitive enough receivers, or maybe 350 light years is too far for the signal. What they have to wonder is why we haven’t contacted them, why we didn’t follow them. The world has gone silent.”

  The sidewalk split in two in front of them. Astronomy and the physical science buildings were to the right. Administration was to the left. They paused at the junction.

  Matsui looked down the familiar path. He’d walked that sidewalk his entire adult life, first as a student, then a graduate assistant, and finally as a professor. From his first day in the classroom, he had valued creative thought. That is what the academy is about, he had argued. The Old Timers accomplished noble feats, but they are gone. We should make our own mistakes.

  “The world is changing, Henderson. The population will be over one billion in a decade. We survived an extinction event four hundred years ago, so we missed being the last epoch’s dinosaurs. We fought our way out of the second Dark Ages. As a species, we must be fated for greatness, but we’re so damned stupid about achieving it.” He kicked at the ground bitterly.

  Henderson stood quietly for a minute. In the distance, the surf pounded against the rocks. “It’s a pendulum, Professor. This year, Chesnutt won. He won’t always. If we’re going to push knowledge forward, we will escape our past. We’ll have to.”

  Matsui said, “Not in my lifetime, son. It’s so frustrating. Humanity has desires. It must. But what they are and how it will go about getting them will remain a mystery to me. There’s a big picture that I can’t see. Oh, if only there was a longer perspective, it would all make sense.”

  Henderson didn’t reply.

  “I’m sorry,” said Matsui. “I’m an old man who babbles a bit when it gets late at night. I wax philosophic. It used to take a couple of pints of beer, but now cool night air and a bad budget meeting will do it. You’ll have to forgive me.”

  Henderson shuffled his feet. “There’s a move in the department to name a comet after you.”

  Suddenly, Matsui’s eyes filled with tears. He was glad the night hid them. “That would be nice, Henderson.”

  Matsui left Henderson behind, but when the older man reached faculty housing, he didn’t stop. He kept going until he came to the bluff that overlooked the sea. Condensation dampened the rail protecting the edge of the low bluff, and it felt cold beneath his hands. Moonlight painted the surf’s spray a glowing white. He thought about moonlight on water, about starlight on water. Each wave pounding against the cliff shook the rail, and, for a moment, he felt connected to it all, to the larger story that was mankind on the planet and the planet in the galaxy. It seemed as if he was feeling the universal pulse.

  Much later, he returned to his cottage and his books. He was right. Chesnutt replaced him on the committees, but Matsui wasn’t unhappy. He remembered his hands on the rail, the moon like a distant searchlight, and the grander story that he was a part of.

  Thoughts come slower, it seems, or events have sped ahead, and we want to sleep. Maybe we have spread out, our individual pieces, a long stream of bodies and ship parts, and odds and ends: books, blankets, tools, chairs, freeze dried foods, scraps of paper, the vast collection of miscellany that humanity thought to bring to a distant star. Or maybe the approaching sun has warmed us. The super-cool state that kept consciousness and connection possible is breaking down. But we know we are accelerating, diving deep into the system that gave us birth. It’s been a long trip, out and back, the 14,400. Our individual dreams forgotten, but the group one survived: to travel, to find our way out of the cave, to check over the next hilltop. We feel an emotion as the last thoughts fail: something akin to happiness. We’re going home.

  Captain Fremaria sat on a blanket with her husband on the hill overlooking the launch facility. The lights illuminating the ship had been turned off, but she knew crews were working within the enclosed scaffolding, fueling the engines, running through the last checklists, making sure it would be ready for the dawn liftoff.

  “It’s just like another test flight, darling,” she said to her husband. “I’ve flown much less reliable crafts.” Her heart took a sudden leap as she thought about the mission. She could hear the rockets igniting in her head. Could she do it? The idea of climbing atop the thousands of pounds of propellant had never sounded so foolhardy as it did now. When she was training, the flight remained a theory, an abstraction, but with the ship so close and the schedule coming to its close, she felt like a condemned woman.

  “Don’t remind me,” he said. “I just want to know that you’ll be safe. I need a sign.”

  She sighed. “I wouldn’t mind one myself.” She did not have to climb aboard the ship. No one could force her to. In fact, she wouldn’t really be committed until ignition.

  “It’s too much history.” He moved closer to her so that his hand rested on hers. “Mankind returns to space after all these centuries. Everyone wants to know about the impact of this moment. Will we go to the moon next? Will we go to Mars? What will we find there of the old colonies?” He snorted derisively. “I just want to know that you will come back.”

  Fremaria nodded her head, but he wasn’t looking at her. In three hours, she would report to launch central, where they would begin preparing her for insertion into the craft that would carry her into orbit. The mission called for ten circuits around the earth, then a powerless drop back into the atmosphere, where she would fly the stubby-winged ship to a touchdown at Matsui Airbase.

  “I won’t be that far away. If you could take the train straight up, you’d be there in a couple of hours.”

  Her husband chuckled, but it sounded forced.

  For the first time in weeks, the wind was calm. Fremaria had watched the weather reports anxiously, but it looked as if the launch should take place in perfect conditions. Not a cloud marred the flawless night sky. The horizon line cut a ragged edge out of the inverted bowl of pristine stars.

  “I’ve never seen it so clear,” said her husband.

  A green light streaked across the sky.

  “Make a wish,” said Fremaria.

  “You know what it is.” He squeezed her hand.

  Another meteor flamed above them, brighter than the first.

  “That’s rare,” said Fremaria. “So close together.”

  Before he could reply, a third and fourth appeared, traveling parallel courses.

  “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  She arched her back to see the sky better. “There isn’t supposed to be a meteor shower now. The Leonids aren’t for another month.”

  A spectacular meteor crossed half the sky before disappearing.

  Fremaria leaned into her husband’s shoulder for support. For almost two hours, the display continued, often times with multiple meteors visible at once, some so bright that they cast shadows. Then, the intensity dropped, until the sky was quiet again.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?” her husband asked. “Have you even ever heard of anything like that?”

  “No.” She thought about the mysteries of space. “It’s a sign.”

/>   He laughed. “I guess it might be.”

  Fremaria glanced at her watch. “It’s time for me to go.” She brushed her pants after she stood. Her husband held her hand again, but her thoughts now were in the ship. She ran through the takeoff procedure. No mission went without a hitch. They would be depending on her to make corrections, to shake down the craft. A good flight: that was all she wanted, and then a next one and a next one. They began the walk down to the launch facility.

  She thought about the centuries. The Advent was supposed to go to the stars. Had it made it? No one knew, but they were going again. Her flight would open the door again.

  “Are you scared?” her husband asked.

  Fremaria paused on the trail. The ship waited for her. She could see that they had cranked part of the scaffolding away from it. Soon it would stand alone, unencumbered. She would sit in the pilot’s chair listening to the countdown, prepared to take over from the automated controls if needed. What an experience the rocket’s thrust would be! What a joy to feel the weightlessness that awaited her! To break free. To take the first step to the long voyage out.

  “I’m ready to go.”

  A single meteor flickered into existence above them. It glowed brilliantly in its last moment. They watched its path until it vanished.

  “They don’t last too long, do they?” he said.

  Fremaria glanced at the ship, then back at the sky. “No, but they travel a long way first.”

  THE EYES OF AMERICA

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  A physicist who works for NASA, and who has recently been working on the Martian Lander program, Geoffrey A. Landis is a frequent contributor to Analog and to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has also sold stories to markets such as Interzone, Amazing, and Pulphouse. Landis is not a prolific writer, by the high-production standards of the genre, but he is popular. His story “A Walk in the Sun” won him a Nebula and a Hugo Award in 1992, his “Ripples in the Dirac Sea” won him a Nebula Award in 1990, he also won a Hugo for his story “Falling Onto Mars,” and his “Elemental” was on the Final Hugo Ballot a few years back. His first book was the collection, Myths, Legends, and True History, and in 2002, he published his first novel, Mars Crossing. He lives with his wife, writer Mary Turzillo, in Brook Park, Ohio.