The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “What?” I said. Ms. Dellafield was there, the principal, and Mr. Ambrose, the school nurse, and two guidance counselors whose names I could never remember. They all looked really scared. I blinked at them. “I just wanted to take a walk,” I said, but they were in a semicircle around me, pushing at the edges of the bubble, herding me toward the van. “You don’t have to do this,” I told them. “Really. I’m fine. I was just taking a walk.”

  They didn’t listen. They kept herding me toward the van, and then I was inside it, and the door was closing.

  They drove me back to school, and then they herded me into Mr. Ambrose’s office, and then Ms. Dellafield went to call Mom while Mr. Ambrose and the two guidance counselors stood there and watched me, like they were going to tackle me if I tried to move. “Why are you doing this?” I kept asking them. “I was just going for a walk.” It didn’t make any sense. I’d seen other kids walk out of classes: they’d never gotten this kind of attention. “I’ll go back to biology, okay? I’ll dissect my frog. You don’t have to call my mother!”

  And at the same time I thought, thank God Mom’s home today. Thank God she’s not down in Carson, so that Ms. Dellafield doesn’t have to hear them say whatever they say when they answer the phone there, not that there’s any chance that Ms. Dellafield doesn’t know where Mom works, since everybody else knows it. But even all that didn’t bother me as much as usual, because the bubble was still basically holding. Mr. Ambrose and the guidance counselors kept asking me how I was, and I kept telling them I was fine, thank you, and how are all of you today? And they kept looking more and more worried, as if I’d answered them in another language, one where “fine” meant “my eyeballs are about to explode.” So I sat there feeling fine, if a little far away, and thinking, these people are really weird.

  And finally, after about half an hour, I heard voices outside Mr. Ambrose’s office, and then the door opened and Mom came in. She was leaning on David. David had his arm around her, and he was really pale. It was the same way he’d looked after he pulled me away from the rattlesnake.

  I squinted at him and said, “What are you doing here? What happened?”

  “She called me,” David said. He sounded like he was choking. “At work. When they called her. So we could come over here together.”

  I looked at Mom. She was crying, and then I got really scared. “What’s going on?” I said. “Mom, what’s wrong? Are you okay? Did something happen to Letty?” Maybe Mom had called Ms. Dellafield and said something had happened and they had to find me. But that wouldn’t explain the van and the guidance counselors, would it? If something had happened to Letty, wouldn’t Mom have driven over here to tell me herself?

  Everybody just stared at me. Mom stopped crying, and wiped her eyes, and said very quietly, “Michael, the question is, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine! Why does everybody keep asking me that? I was just going for a walk! Why doesn’t anybody believe me?”

  And Mom started crying again and David shook his head and said, “Oh, you stupid—”

  “David.” Ms. Dellafield sounded very tired. “Don’t.”

  I felt like I was going crazy. “Would somebody please tell me what’s going on? I was just—”

  “Michael,” Mom said, “that’s what your father said, too.”

  I blinked. The room had gotten impossibly quiet, as if nobody else was even breathing. Mom said, “He said he was just going for a walk, and then he went out into the yard. Don’t you remember?”

  I looked away from all of them, out the window. I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember anything that had happened that day, before the shot. It didn’t matter: everyone else at school knew the story, and they’d remembered it for me. “I really was just going for a walk,” I said, and then, “I don’t even have a gun.”

  Ms. Dellafield said I should take the rest of the day off, so Mom and David and I drove home together, in David’s jeep. When Ms. Dellafield called Mom at home, Mom had been too upset even to drive, so she’d called David and he’d left work and picked her up and driven her to school. He drove us all home, too. He drove really carefully. Once a squirrel ran into the road and David slowed down until it got out of his way. I’d never seen him drive like that before. And when we were walking into the house, Mom tripped, and David reached out to steady her.

  The last time I’d seen Mom and David leaning on each other, they’d been coming in from the yard. I remembered that part. My ears had still been ringing, but Letty wouldn’t let me go, no matter how hard I fought. She’d been eating lunch with us when it happened. “Let me see,” I kept telling her, trying to break free. “Let me go out there! I want to see what happened!”

  But Letty wouldn’t let go, because the first thing that happened after the shot was that Mom and David ran out into the yard, and David started screaming, and then Mom yelled at Letty, “Keep Michael inside! Don’t let him come out here!”

  And they came back inside, and Mom called the police, and I kept saying, “I want to go see,” and David kept shaking his head and saying, “No you don’t, Michael, you don’t want to see this, you really don’t,” and Letty wouldn’t let go of me. And the cops came and asked everybody questions, and then Letty took me to her house, and by the time I got home, Mom and David had cleaned up the backyard, picked up all the little pieces of bone and brain, so that there was nothing left to see at all.

  Dad was stupid. You can’t beat the house: anybody who’s ever been anywhere near a casino knows that. But he and George and Howard were trying. They’d worked out a system, the newspaper said; George or Howard, never both at once, would go in and play at Dad’s table, and Dad would touch a cheek or scratch an ear, always a different signal, so they’d know when to double their bets. And then when they won, they’d split the take with him. They tried to be smart. They didn’t do it very often, but it was often enough for the pit bosses and the cameras to catch on. And somehow, when Dad came home that day, he knew he’d been caught. He knew the walls were closing in.

  George and Howard went to jail. I guess Dad knew he’d have to go there too. I guess he thought that was just too small a box.

  Nobody said anything for a long time, after we got home from school. Mom started unloading the dishwasher, moving in little jerks like somebody in an old silent movie, and David sat down at the kitchen table, and I went to the fridge and got a drink of juice. And finally David said, “Why the hell did you do that?”

  He didn’t sound angry, or like he was trying to piss me off. He just sounded lost. And I hadn’t been trying to do anything; I’d just been going for a walk, but I’d said that at least a million times by now and it was no good. Nobody believed me, or nobody cared. So instead I said, “Why did you keep letting Bobo out?”

  And Mom, with her back to us, stopped moving; she stood there, holding a plate, looking down at the open dishwasher. And David said, “I don’t know.”

  Mom turned and looked at him, then, and I looked at Mom. David never admitted there was anything he didn’t know. He stared down at the table and said, “You kept saying you wanted to go outside. You kept—you were fighting to go outside. The cat wanted to go out, Michael. He did.” He looked up, straight at me; his chin was trembling. “You didn’t even have to look at it. It wasn’t fair.”

  His voice sounded much younger, then, and I flashed back on that day when he saved me from the rattlesnake, when we were still friends, and all of a sudden my bubble burst and I was back in the world, where it hurt to breathe, where the air against my skin felt like sandpaper. “So you wanted me to get my wish by having to look at Bobo?” I said. “Is that it? Like I wanted any of it to happen, you fuckhead? Like—”

  “Shhhh,” Mom said, and came over and hugged me. “Shhhh. It’s all right now. It’s all right. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. David—”

  “Forget it,” David said. “None of it matters anymore, anyway.”

  “Yes it does,” Mom said. “David, I made you do too much. I—”
>
  “I want to go for a walk now,” I said. I was going to scream if I couldn’t get outside; I was going to scream or break something. “Can we just go for a walk? All of us? You can watch me, okay? I promise not to do anything stupid. Please?”

  Mom and David have gotten along a lot better since then. Letty and I talked about it, once. She said they’d probably been fighting so much because David was mad at Mom for making him help her in the yard when Dad died, and Mom felt guilty about it, and didn’t even know she did, and kept lashing out at him. And none of us were talking about anything, so it festered. Letty said that what I did at school that day was exactly what I needed to do to remind Mom and David how much they could still lose, to make them stop being mad at each other. And I told her I hadn’t been trying to do anything, and anyway I hadn’t even remembered what Dad had said before he went out into the yard. She said it didn’t matter. It was instinct, she said. She said people still have instincts, even when they live in boxes, and that we can’t ever lose them completely, not if we’re still alive at all. Look at Bobo, she told me. You got him from a pet store. He’d never even lived outside, but he still wanted to get out. He still knew he was supposed to be hunting mice.

  In June, when the snow melted from the top of Peavine, I hiked back up to the mine. I’d been back on the mountain before that, of course, but I hadn’t gone up that high: maybe because I thought I wouldn’t be able to see anything yet, maybe because I was afraid I would. But that Saturday I woke up, and it was sunny and warm, and Mom and David were both at work, and I thought, okay. This is the day. I’ll go up there by myself, to see. To say goodbye.

  All those months, the transmitter signal hadn’t moved.

  So I hiked up, past the developments, through rocks and sagebrush, scattering basking lizards. I saw a few rabbits and a couple of hawks, and I heard gunfire, but I didn’t see any people.

  When I got to the mine, I peered inside and couldn’t see anything. I’d brought a flashlight, but it’s dangerous to go inside abandoned mines. Even if it’s safe to breathe the air, even if you don’t get trapped, you don’t know what else might be in there with you. Snakes. Coyotes.

  So I shone the flashlight inside and looked for anything that might have been a cat once. There were dirt and rocks, but I couldn’t even see anything that looked like bones. The handheld said this was the place, though, so I scrabbled around in the dirt a little bit, and played the flashlight over every surface the beam would reach, and finally, maybe two feet inside the mine, I saw something glinting in a crevice in the rock.

  It was the chip: just the chip, a tiny little piece of silver circuitry, sitting there all by itself. Maybe there’d been bones too, for a while, and something had carried them off. Or maybe something had eaten Bobo and left a pile of scat here; with the chip in it, and everything had gone back into the ground except the chip. I don’t know. All I knew was that Bobo was gone, and I still missed him, and there wasn’t even anything that had been him to bring back with me.

  I sat there and looked at the chip for a while, and then I put the handheld next to it. And then I went and sat on a rock outside the mine, in the sun.

  It was pretty. There were wildflowers all over the place, and you could see for miles. And I sat there and thought, I could just leave. I could just walk away, walk in the other direction, clear to Tahoe, walk away from all the boxes. I don’t have a transmitter. Nobody would know where I was. I could walk as long as I wanted.

  But there are boxes everywhere, aren’t there? Even at Tahoe, maybe especially at Tahoe, where all the rich people build their fancy houses. And if I walked away, Mom and David wouldn’t know where I was. They wouldn’t even have a transmitter signal. And I knew what that felt like. I remembered staring at the dark screen, when the satellites were offline. I remembered staring at it, and trying not to cry, and praying. Please, Bobo, come back home. Please come back, Bobo. I love you.

  So I sat there for a while, looking out over the city. And then I ate an energy bar and drank some water, and headed back down the mountain, back home.

  Crux

  ALBERT E. COWDREY

  New author Albert E. Cowdrey quit a government job to try his hand at writing. So far, he’s appeared almost exclusively in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, where he’s published a handful of well-received stories over the last couple of years, most of them supernatural horror. In 2000, he took a sudden unexpected turn away from horror and into science fiction, producing two of the year’s best science fiction novellas, “Mosh,” the sequel to “Crux,” and “Crux” itself, the story you’re about to read, which takes us deep into a future world as dark, complex, richly layered, and fascinating as any ever produced in the genre, for an intricate and hard-edged story of plot and counterplot, intrigue and betrayal, and the dynamics of history, all seasoned with a bit of time travel … .

  One suspects—in fact, one rather hopes—that a novel based on the “Crux” stories is imminent. Cowdrey lives in New Orleans, where many of his expertly crafted supernatural horror stories have been set.

  Dyeva watched the earth revolve beneath her, vanish into banks of icy cirrus, then emerge as a patchwork of blue sea and immobile, shining cumuli.

  Bits of continents poked through the gaps as the airpacket swung out on a hyperbolic curve. She had a glimpse of North America, with the Appalachian Islands trailing into the Atlantic and the Inland Sea glimmering under the hot March sun. Then the sixty-one passengers were shrouded in the lower cloud layer and reading lights winked briefly on before they emerged again to flit like the shadow of a storm over the broad Pacific.

  A light meal was served, and during dessert the glint of Fujiyama Island on the right with its attendant green islets announced that they were nearing the Worldcity. They flashed into the dark red sun and the vast forest of China leaped out of the glittering wavelets of the Yellow Sea. Fifty-five hundred clicks was now too fast and one, two, three times the airpacket quivered as the retros slowed it to a sedate thousand.

  They were speeding over the green savannahs of the Gobi, famous for its herds of wild animals. Of course they were too high and moving too fast to see the herds, but a mashina in the forward wall of the cabin darkened, glittered briefly with pinpoints of light, and filled with solid-seeming images of wapiti, elephants, haknim, sfosura—animals native and imported from other worlds—shambling over pool-dotted green plains where the immortal Khan once ruled.

  Dyeva’s pale, high-cheekboned face concentrated and her unblinking dark eyes glinted with reflected images. Nine-tenths of the Earth—humanity’s first home—was now a world of beasts. The ultimate achievement of the man called Minister Destruction. Was it for this that twelve billion people had died?

  In the sunset glow of Ulanor the Worldcity, Stef sprawled on his balcony wearing a spotty robe and listening to the cries of vendors and the creak of wheels in Golden Horde Street. He loved to loll here smoking kif in the last light during all seasons except the brief, nasty Siberian winter.

  A commotion in the street made him swing his bony legs off the battered lounge chair. He tucked the mouthpiece of his pipe into a loop of hose from the censer and shuffled in broken-strap sandals to the railing.

  Down below, vendors’ carts had pulled against the walls and a long line of prisoners (blue pajamas, short hair, wrists and necks imprisoned in black plastic kangs) shuffled past like a column of ants. Guards in wide-brimmed duroplast helmets strode along the line at intervals, swinging short whips against the legs of laggards to hurry them on. The prisoners groaned and somebody started to sing a prison song in Alspeke, the only language that all humans knew: Smerta, smerta mi kallá/Ya nur trubna haf syegdá …

  Death, death, call me, I have nothing but trouble always. Picking up the rhythm, even the laggards began moving so quickly that the guards no longer had an excuse to strike.

  A good song, thought Stef, lying down again, because it goes in two opposite directions, endurance and despair. Those are the pole
s of life, right? Of his life, anyway. Except for kif, which was close to being his religion, filling him during these evening hours with a distant cool melancholy, with what the Old Believers called Holy Indifference—meaning that what happened happened and you didn’t try to fuck with God. And, of course, there was Dzhun. She meant a little more than lust, a good deal less than love. He whispered her name, which meant summertime in Alspeke, with its original English intonation and meaning: June.

  Then frowned. He was, as usual, out of cash. Kif cost money. Then how was he supposed to afford Dzhun? He brooded, puffing slowly, letting the aromatic smoke leak from his nose and mouth. He needed a case. He needed a job. He needed money to fall on him out of the sky.

  Even blase passengers who had seen Ulanor many times, perhaps even had grown up there, joined the newcomers in staring through the ports at the capital of the human race.

  More than a million people! Dyeva thought. Who could believe a city so vast? Of course, compared to the world-cities of the twenty-first century, Ulanor was hardly a suburb. But this could at least give her a glimmering of the wonders that had been lost—a revelation of the once (and future?) world before the Time of Troubles had changed everything.

  The shuttle was drifting along now, joining the traffic at the fifth level on the outermost ring, swinging around so that the city with its spoked avenues and glittering squares seemed to be turning. The copilot (a black box, of course) began speaking in a firm atonal voice, pointing out such wonders as Genghis Khan Allee, Yellow Emperor Place where the various sector controllers had their palaces, and Government of the Universe Place, where the President’s Palace faced the Senate of the Worlds.