The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yeah, well. You too.”

  The Colonel passes him a slim manila folder. Without wanting to, Roger slides out the single sheet of paper within.

  “So it was them.”

  “Yeah.” A moment’s silence. “For what it’s worth, we haven’t lost yet. We may yet pull your wife and son out alive. Or be able to go back home.”

  “Your family too, I suppose.” Roger is touched by the Colonel’s consideration, the pious hope that Andrea and Jason will be all right, even through his shell of misery. He realizes his glass is empty. Instead of refilling it he puts it down on the carpet beside his feet. “Why?”

  The Colonel retrieves the sheet of paper from his numb fingers. “Probably someone spotted you in the King David and traced you back to us. The Mukharabat had agents everywhere, and if they were in league with the KGB …” He shrugs. “Things escalated rapidly. Then the president cracked that joke over a hot mike that was supposed to be switched off … Have you been checking in with the desk summaries this week?”

  Roger looks at him blankly. “Should I?”

  “Oh, things are still happening.” The Colonel leans back and stretches his feet out. “From what we can tell of the situation on the other side, not everyone’s dead yet. Ligachev’s screaming blue murder over the hotline, accusing us of genocide: but he’s still talking. Europe is a mess and nobody knows what’s going on in the middle east—even the Blackbirds aren’t making it back out again.”

  “The thing at Takrit.”

  “Yeah. It’s bad news, Roger. We need you back.”

  “Bad news?”

  “The worst.” The Colonel jams his hands between his knees, stares at the floor like a bashful child. “Saddam Hussein al-Takriti spent years trying to get his hands on Elder technology. It looks like he finally succeeded in stabilizing the gate into Sothoth. Whole villages disappeared, Marsh Arabs, wiped out in the swamps of Eastern Iraq. Reports of yellow rain, people’s skin melting right off their bones. The Iranians got itchy and finally went nuclear. Trouble is, they did so two hours before that speech. Some asshole in Plotsk launched half the Uralskoye SS-20 grid—they went to launch-on-warning eight months ago—burning south, praise Jesus. Scratch the middle east, period—everything from the Nile to the Khyber Pass is toast. We’re still waiting for the callback on Moscow, but SAC has put the whole Peacemaker force on airborne alert. So far we’ve lost the eastern seaboard as far south as North Virginia and they’ve lost the Donbass basin and Vladivostok. Things are a mess; nobody can even agree whether we’re fighting the commies or something else. But the box at Chemobyl—Project Koschei—the doors are open, Roger. We orbited a Keyhole-eleven over it and there are tracks, leading west. The Pluto strike didn’t stop it—and nobody knows what the fuck is going on in WarPac country. Or France, or Germany, or Japan, or England.”

  The Colonel makes a grab for Roger’s Wild Turkey, rubs the neck clean and swallows from the bottle. He looks at Roger with a wild expression on his face. “Koschei is loose, Roger. They fucking woke the thing. And now they can’t control it. Can you believe that?”

  “I can believe that.”

  “I want you back behind a desk tomorrow morning, Roger. We need to know what this Thulu creature is capable of. We need to know what to do to stop it. Forget Iraq; Iraq is a smoking hole in the map. But K-Thulu is heading toward the Atlantic coast. What are we going to do if it doesn’t stop?”

  MASADA

  The city of XK-Masada sprouts like a vast mushroom, a mile-wide dome emerging from the top of a cold plateau on a dry planet in orbit round a dying star. The jagged black shapes of F-117s howl across the empty skies outside it at dusk and dawn, patrolling the threatening emptiness that stretches as far as the mind can imagine.

  Shadows move in the streets of the city, hollowed-out human shells in uniform. They rustle around the feet of the towering concrete blocks like the dry leaves of autumn, obsessively focussed on the tasks that lend structure to their remaining days. Above them tower masts of steel, propping up the huge geodesic dome that arches across the sky: blocking out the hostile, alien constellations, protecting frail humanity from the dust storms that periodically scour the bones of the ancient world. The gravity here is a little lighter, the night sky whorled and marbled by diaphanous sheets of gas blasted off the dying star that lights their days. During the long winter nights, a flurry of carbon dioxide snow dusts the surface of the dome: but the air is bone-dry, the city slaking its thirst from subterranean aquifers.

  This planet was once alive—near the equator there is still a scummy sea of algae that feeds oxygen into the atmosphere, and a range of volcanoes near the north pole indicates plate tectonics in motion—but it is visibly dying. There is a lot of history here, but no future.

  Sometimes, in the early hours when he cannot sleep, Roger walks outside the city, along the edge of the dry plateau. Machines labor on behind him, keeping the city tenuously intact: he pays them little attention. There is talk of mounting an expedition to Earth one of these years, to salvage whatever is left before the searing winds of time erases it forever. Roger doesn’t like to think about that. He tries to avoid thinking about Earth as much as possible, except when he cannot sleep. Then he walks along the clifftop, prodding at memories of Andrea and Jason and his parents and sister and relatives and friends, each as painful as the socket of a missing tooth. He has a mouthful of emptiness, bitter and aching, out here on the edge of the plateau.

  Sometimes Roger thinks he’s the last human being alive. He works in an office, feverishly trying to sort out what went wrong; and bodies move around him, talking, eating in the canteen, sometimes talking to him and waiting, as if they expect dialogue. There are bodies here, men and some women chatting, civilian and some military—but no people. One of the bodies, an army surgeon, told him he’s suffering from a common stress disorder, called survivor’s guilt. This may be so, Roger admits, but it doesn’t change anything. Soulless days follow sleepless nights into oblivion.

  A narrow path runs along the side of the plateau, just downhill from the foundations of the city power plant, where huge apertures belch air warmed by the nuclear reactor’s heat-exchangers. Roger follows the path, gravel and sandy rock crunching under his worn shoes, dust trickling over the side of the cliff like sand into the undug graves of his family. Foreign stars twinkle overhead, forming unrecognizable patterns that tell him he’s far from home. The trail drops away from the top of the plateau, until the city is an unseen shadow looming above and behind his shoulder. To his right is a vertiginous panorama, the huge rift valley with its ancient city of the dead outstretched before him. Beyond it rise alien mountains, their peaks as high and airless as the dead volcanoes of Mars.

  About half a mile away from the dome, the trail circles an outcrop of rock and takes a downhill switchback. Roger stops at the bend and looks out across the desert at his feet. He sits down, leans against the rough cliff-face and stretches his legs across the path, so that his feet dangle over nothingness. Far below him, the dead valley is furrowed with rectangular depressions; once, millions of years ago, they might have been fields, but nothing of that survives. They’re just dead, like everyone else on this world. Like Roger.

  In his shirt pocket, a crumpled, precious pack of cigarettes. He pulls a white cylinder out with shaking fingers, sniffs at it, then flicks his lighter under it. Scarcity has forced him to cut back: he coughs at the first lungful of stale smoke, a harsh, racking croak. The irony of being saved from lung cancer by a world war is not lost on him.

  He blows smoke out, a tenuous trail streaming across the cliff. “Why me?” he asks quietly.

  The emptiness takes its time answering. When it does, it speaks with the Colonel’s voice. “You know why.”

  “I didn’t want to do it,” he hears himself saying. “I didn’t want to leave them behind.”

  The void laughs at him. There are miles of empty air beneath his dangling feet. “You had no choice.”

  “Yes I d
id! I didn’t have to come here.” He pauses. “I didn’t have to do anything,” he says quietly, and inhales another lungful of death. “It was all automatic. Maybe it was inevitable.”

  “—Evitable,” echoes the distant horizon. Something dark and angular skims across the stars, like an echo of extinct pterosaurs. Turbofans whirring in its belly, the F117 hunts on: patrolling to keep the ancient evil at bay, unaware that the battle is already lost. “Your family could still be alive, you know.”

  He looks up. “They could?” Andrea? Jason? “Alive?”

  The void laughs again, unfriendly: “There is life eternal within the eater of souls. Nobody is ever forgotten or allowed to rest in peace. They populate the simulation spaces of its mind, exploring all the possible alternative endings to their lives. There is a fate worse than death, you know.”

  Roger looks at his cigarette disbelievingly: throws it far out into the night sky above the plain. He watches it fall until its ember is no longer visible. Then he gets up. For a long moment he stands poised on the edge of the cliff nerving himself, and thinking. Then he takes a step back, turns, and slowly makes his way back up the trail toward the redoubt on the plateau. If his analysis of the situation is wrong, at least he is still alive. And if he is right, dying would be no escape.

  He wonders why hell is so cold at this time of year.

  The Real World

  STEVEN UTLEY

  Steven Utley’s fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Universe, Galaxy, Amazing, Vertex, Stellar, Shayol, and elsewhere. He was one of the best-known new writers of the seventies both for his solo work and for some strong work in collaboration with fellow Texan Howard Waldrop, but fell silent at the end of the decade and wasn’t seen in print again for more than ten years. In the last decade he’s made a strong comeback, though, becoming a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, as well as selling again to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, and elsewhere. Utley is the coeditor, with George W. Proctor, of the anthology Lone Star Universe, the first—and probably the only—anthology of SF stories by Texans. His first collection, Ghost Seas, was published in 1997, and he is presently at work on a novel/collection based on his Silurian stories, such as the one that follows. His most recent books are collections of his poetry, This Impatient Ape and Career Moves of the Gods. He lives in Smyrna, Tennessee.

  Here, part of a long sequence of stories that Utley has been writing throughout the nineties, detailing the adventures and misadventures of time-traveling scientists exploring the distant Silurian Age, millions of years before the dinosaurs roamed the Earth, he offers us a parable of what’s important and what’s not—and wonders how you can be sure that you can tell the difference when you can’t even be sure of the very ground under your feet.

  Everything felt like a dream. The flight attendants seemed to whisper past in the aisle. The other passengers were but shadows and echoes. Through the window, he could see the wing floating above an infinite expanse of cloudtop as flat and featureless as the peneplained landscapes of the Paleozoic. I’m just tired, he thought, without conviction.

  Ivan forced his attention back to the laptop. He had called up an did documentary in which he himself appeared. “Resume,” he said, very softly, and the image on the screen unfroze, and a familiar, strange voice said, “Plant life may actually have invaded the land during the Ordovician Period.” Is that really me? he thought. My face, my eyes, I look so unlived-in. “We know about two dozen genera of land plant in the Silurian,” and the screen first showed a tangle of creeping green tendrils at his younger self’s feet, “such as these, which are called psilophytes,” then a glistening algal mat. “The big flat things you see all over the mudflats are Nematophycus. The point is—”

  His earphone buzzed softly. “Pause,” he murmured to the laptop, and the image on the screen froze once more. He said, “Hello?” and heard his brother say, “How’s the flight?”

  “Don. I hope you’re not calling to rescind my invitation.”

  “Michelle’ll pick you up at the airport as planned. I’m just calling to warn you and apologize in advance. I just got an invitation I can’t refuse to a social event tomorrow evening.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  “Sure there is. This is a soiree of Hollywood swine.”

  “I can use the time to rest up for Monday.”

  “Well, actually, I’d sort of like to take you along. In case I need somebody intelligent to talk to. Unless, of course, you think you’d be uncomfortable.”

  Ivan examined the prospect for a moment, then said, “On Tuesday I’m going to read a paper on Paleozoic soils at the Page Museum. Young snotnoses keen to establish their reputations on the ruins of mine will be there. In light of that, I can’t imagine how people who undoubtedly don’t know mor from mull could possibly make me uncomfortable.”

  “Good. To the extent possible, I’ll camouflage you in my clothing.”

  “What’s the occasion for the party?”

  “The occasion’s the occasion.”

  “Let me rephrase the question. Who’s hosting the party?”

  “Somebody in the business who’s throwing himself a birthday party. None of his friends will throw one for him, because he doesn’t have any friends. If I hadn’t come within an ace of an Oscar last month—which by the way is the limit of his long-term memory—it’d never have occurred to him to invite a writer. If I was a self-respecting writer and not a Hollywood whore, I’d duck it. But, hey, it’ll be entertaining from a sociological point of view.”

  “As long as I get to ogle some starlets.”

  “Starlets’d eat you alive.”

  “That would be nice, too. Look, please don’t think you have to entertain me the whole time I’m out there.”

  “Oh, this place’ll afford you endless opportunities to entertain yourself.”

  “I look forward to it.”

  “See you soon.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Resume,” he murmured to the laptop. “The point is.”

  “The point is,” his younger self said, “they can’t have sprung up overnight, even in the geologic sense. The Silurian seas are receding as the land rises, and the plant invasion’s not a coincidence. But there were also opportunities during the Ordovician for plants to come ashore in a big way. Only they didn’t. Maybe there was lethal ozone at ground level for a long time after the atmosphere became oxygen-rich. If so, a lot of oxygen had to accumulate before the ozone layer rose to the higher levels safe enough for advanced life-forms. Our—”

  “Stop,” he said, and thought, What a lot of crap. Then he sighed deeply and told the laptop, “Cue the first Cutsinger press conference.”

  After a moment, Cutsinger’s image appeared on the screen. He was standing at a podium, behind a brace of microphones. He said, “I am at pains to describe this phenomenon without resorting to the specialized jargon of my own field, which is physics. Metaphor, however, may be inadequate. I’ll try to answer your questions afterward.”

  This is afterward, Ivan thought bitterly, and, yes, I have a question.

  “The phenomenon,” Cutsinger’s image went on, “is, for want of a better term, a space-time anomaly—a hole, if you will, or a tunnel, or however you wish to think of it. It appears, and I use the word advisedly, appears to connect our present-day Earth with the Earth as it existed during the remote prehistoric past. We’ve inserted a number of robot probes, some with laboratory animals, into the anomaly and retrieved them intact, though some of the animals did not survive. Judging both from the biological samples obtained and from the period of rotation of this prehistoric Earth, what we’re talking about is the Siluro-Devonian boundary in mid-Paleozoic time, roughly four hundred million years ago. Biological specimens collected include a genus of primitive plant called Cooksonia and an extinct arthropod called a—please forgive my pronunciation if I get this wrong—a trigonobartid. Both organisms are well-known to p
aleontologists, and DNA testing conclusively proves their affinities with all other known terrestrial life-forms. Thus, for all practical purposes, this is our own world as it existed during the Paleozoic Era. However, it cannot literally be our own world. We cannot travel directly backward into our own past.”

  Ivan looked up, startled, as a flight attendant leaned in and said something.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “We’ll be landing soon. You’ll have to put that away now.”

  “Of course.”

  She smiled and withdrew. He looked at the laptop. “The anomaly,” Cutsinger was saying, “must therefore connect us with another Earth.”

  “Quit.”

  Michelle met him as he came off the ramp. For a second, he did not recognize her and could only stare at her when she called his name. He could not immediately connect this young woman with his memories of her as a long-limbed thirteen-year-old girl with braces on her teeth; then, he had never been quite able to decide whether she was going to grow up pretty or goofy-looking. It had been a matter of real concern to him: he had first seen her cradled tenderly in her mother’s arms, eyes squeezed shut and oblivious of her beatific expression; baby Michelle was not asleep, though, but had seemed to be concentrating fiercely on the mother’s warmth, heartbeat, and wordless murmured endearments. Tiny hands had clasped and unclasped rhythmically, kneading air, keeping time, and when Ivan had gently touched one perfect pink palm and her soft digits closed on, but could not encircle, his calloused fingertip, the contrast smote him in the heart. He had no children of his own, and had never wanted any, but he knew immediately that he loved this child. He had murmured it to her, and to Don and Linda he said, “You folks do good work.”

  The discontinuous nature of these remembered Michelles, lying unconformably upon one another, heightened his sense of dislocation as he now beheld her. She was fresh out of high school, fair-skinned, unmade-up, with unplucked eyebrows and close-cropped brown hair. It cannot be her, he told himself. But then the corners of her mouth drew back, the firm, almost prim line of her lips fractured in a smile, and she delivered herself of pleasant, ringing laughter that had a most unexpected and wonderful effect on him: his head suddenly seemed inclined to float off his shoulders, and he found himself thinking that a man might want to bask for years in the radiance of that smile, the music of that laughter. Now he was convinced, and he let himself yield to the feeling of buoyant happiness. As a child she had had the comically intent expression of a squirrel monkey, but her father and her uncle had always been able to make her laugh, and when she had the effect was always marvelous. She closed with him and hugged him tightly, and his heart seemed to expand until it filled his chest.