The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  As they headed into the hills north of Hollywood, she concentrated on her driving and he stole glances at her profile. He decided that the haircut suited her vastly better than the unfortunate coiffures she had been in the habit of inflicting upon herself. Well, he thought, you turned out pretty after all.

  And he thought, I love you still, darling, and I always shall. Whether it’s really you or not.

  Seated at the metal table, screened from the sun by the eucalyptus tree and with his book lying open on his lap, he admired the blue and orange blooms and banana-shaped leaves of the bird of paradise flowers in his brother’s backyard. He could look past them and the fence and right down the canyon on the hazy blur of the city. The morning had begun to heat up, and there was a faint ashy taste to the air. He noticed a small dark smudgy cloud where the farthest line of hills met the sky.

  Michelle emerged from the house carrying two ice-flecked bottles of imported beer on a tray. She set it on the table and sat down across from him and said, “Daddy’s still talking to the thing that would not die.”

  He nodded in the direction of the smudgy cloud. “I hope that’s not what I think it is.”

  She looked. “Fires in the canyons. It’s the season.” She opened one of the beers and handed it to him. “What’re you reading?”

  Unnecessarily, he glanced at the spine. “The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant.”

  She clearly did not know what to say in response.

  “It’s about the lives of the great philosophers,” he went on after a moment, “and their thoughts on being and meaning and stuff.”

  She made a face. “It sounds excruciating.”

  “It is. I think the great philosophers were all wankers, except for Voltaire, who was funny. Nietzsche was probably the wankiest of the lot.”

  “Why’re you reading it if you think it’s so awful?”

  “Let’s just say I’m in full-tilt autodidact mode these days. Nowadays I carry the same three books with me everywhere I go. This one, a book about quantum mechanics, and the latest edition of the People’s Almanac. The almanac’s the only one I really enjoy.”

  “What’s that, quantum mechanics?”

  “Didn’t they teach you anything in school? Advanced physics. Probably just a lot of philosophical wanking set to math. But it interests me. Somewhere between physics and philosophy is the intersection of the real world. Out of our subjective perception of an objective reality of energy and matter comes our interpretation of being and meaning.”

  “Whatever you say, Uncle Ivan.”

  “Are you going to this party tomorrow night?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “I’m going to a concert with my boyfriend. Anyway, I don’t much care for movie people. Oh, some of them are nice, but—I’ve never been comfortable around actors. I can never tell when they aren’t acting. No, that’s not it, it just makes me tired trying to figure out when they’re acting and when they’re not. The directors are mostly pretentious bores, and the producers just make Daddy crazy.” She gazed down the canyon. “The fact is, I don’t much like movies. But my boyfriend”—she gave him a quick, self-conscious glance—“my boyfriend loves ’em. And he loves dinosaurs. He says he judges a movie by whether he thinks it’d be better or worse with dinosaurs in it.”

  “Did he have anything to do with that recent version of Little Women?”

  “No. He’s not in the industry, thank God. I wouldn’t go out with anybody who is. I wonder what genius thought of setting Little Women in prehistoric times. Anyway, you’d be surprised how many movies flunk his dinosaur test.”

  “Probably I wouldn’t.”

  “He and Daddy like sitting around coming up with lunatic premises for movies. What they call high-concept. He cracks Daddy up. Daddy says he could be making movies every bit as bad as anybody else’s if he just applied himself.”

  “Give me an example of high-concept.”

  “‘Hitler! Stalin! And the woman who loved them both!’” They laughed together. Then she suddenly regarded him seriously. “I hope you’re not going to let yourself be overawed by these people.”

  “People don’t awe me.” She looked doubtful, so he added, “They can’t begin to compete with what awes me.”

  “What’s that? What awes you?”

  He leaned sideways in his chair, scooped some dirt out of a flowerbed. “This,” he said, and as he went on talking he spread the dirt on his palm and sorted through it with his index finger. “When we were kids, teenagers, while your daddy sat up in his room figuring out how to write screenplays, I was outdoors collecting bugs and fossils. We neatly divided the world between us. He got the arts, I got the sciences. Even our tastes in reading—white he was reading, oh, Fitzgerald and Nabokov, I’d be reading John McPhee and Darwin’s journal of the voyage of the Beagle. There was a little overlap. We both went through phases when we read mysteries and science fiction like mad. I’d read The Big Sleep or The Time Machine and pass ‘em onto Don, and then we’d discuss ’em. But we were usually interested in different parts of the same books. Don was interested in the characters, the story. Who killed so and so. I loved Raymond Chandler’s, Ross Macdonald’s descriptions of the southern California landscape. I was like a tourist. My feeling was that setting is as vital as plot and characterization. A good detective-story writer had to be a good travelogue writer, or else his characters and action were just hanging in space. Don argued that a good story could be set anywhere, scenery was just there to be glanced at. If the plot was good, it would work anywhere.”

  “Daddy says there are only three or four plots. At least he says that out here there are only three or four.”

  “Well, anyway, your dad and I have art and science all sewed up between us. Science to help us find out what the world is. Art to—I don’t know, art’s not my thing, but I think—”

  “Daddy says you’re trying to write a book.”

  “Trying is about as far as I’ve got so far. I have all the raw material, but …” But. “I’m not creative. Anyway, I think we have to have both science and art. Everything in the universe partakes in some way of every other thing.”

  “What about philosophy?”

  “Maybe it’s what links science and art.”

  “Even if it’s a lot of wanking?”

  “Even wanking has its place in the scheme of things. What about this boyfriend?”

  “Interesting segue.”

  “Is this a serious thing? Serious like marriage?”

  She shrugged, then shook her head. “I want to do something with my life before I get into that.”

  “What?”

  “I wish I knew. I feel I have so much to live up to. Your side of the family’s all overachievers. My father’s a hot Hollywood screenwriter. My uncle, the scientist, has done just the most amazing things. My grandparents were big wheels in Texas politics. It’s almost as bad as having movie-star parents. The pressure on me to achieve is awful.”

  “It was probably worse for the Huxleys.”

  “Mom’s always felt outclassed. Her family’d always just muddled along. She felt utterly inadequate the whole time she and Dad were married.”

  “With a little help from him, she made a beautiful daughter.”

  She looked pleased by the compliment but also a little uncomfortable. “Thank you for saying that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You used to call me Squirrel Monkey.”

  Don came outside looking exasperated. “Ever reach a point in a conversation,” he said, “where, you know, you can’t go on pretending to take people seriously who don’t know what they’re talking about?”

  “Are we talking rhetorically?”

  Don laughed a soft, unhappy sort of laugh. He indicated the unopened bottle of beer. “Is that for me?”

  “Just that one, Daddy.”

  “I need it.” He said to Ivan, “Tell me the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. I’m trying to put something into perspective here.”r />
  Ivan thought for a moment. “Well, there was the low point, or maybe it was the high point, of my blessedly short stint as a purveyor of scientific knowledge to college freshman. I had a student tell me in all earnestness that an organism that lives off dead organisms is a sacrilege.”

  Don laughed again, less unhappily than before. “Been on the phone with someone who makes deals and gives off movies as waste. He’s got the hottest idea of his life. He’s doing a full-blown remake of The Three Musketeers in Taiwan.”

  Ivan felt his eyebrows go up. He made them come back down.

  Don nodded. “That was my reaction. I said to him, I gather you’ve taken a few liberties with the novel. And he said, Novel? By Alexandre Dumas, I said. You mean it? he said. Excuse me for a moment, and he gets on his AnswerMan and says, To legal, do we have exclusive rights to alleged novel by Doo-dah-duh. Dumas, I scream, Dumas, you dumbass!” He shook his head as though to clear it of an irritating buzz. “Well. I go on and tell him the novel’s in the public domain, Dumas has been dead for a little while now. He drums his fingers on his desktop. He screws his face into a mask of thoughtfulness. He says, Well, it’s always best to be sure, because if what you say is true, we’ll have to see about getting it pulled out of circulation. I beg his pardon. He says, We don’t want people confusing it with our book based on the movie.”

  Ivan said, “He’s going to novelize a movie based on a novel?”

  “Sure. The novel based on Pride and Prejudice was on the best-seller list?”

  Michelle said, “Hooray for Hollywood,” and Ivan raised his bottle in a toast.

  Don raised his as well. “Here’s to L.A., Los Angeles del Muerte!”

  Then Michelle excused herself and went inside. Ivan said, “Every time I see her, she’s bigger, smarter, prettier, and nicer.”

  “That’s how it works if you only see her once every few years. Move out here, be her doting uncle all the time.”

  “Oh, I would love to. It would be good to see more of you, too. But—” To avoid his brother’s expectant look, Ivan turned toward the canyon. “Call me a crank on the subject, but I’ll never live on an active plate margin.”

  “Christ.”

  “Geologically speaking, these hills have all the structural integrity of head cheese. They piled up here after drifting in across a prehistoric sea from God knows where. One of these times, Don, the earth’s going to hiccup, and all these nice houses and all you nice people in them are going to slide all the way down that canyon.”

  Don shrugged. “Mobility is what California’s all about. Everything here is from someplace else. The water comes from Colorado. These flowers,” and he extended his arm and delicately touched a leaf on one of the bird-of-paradise flowers as though he were stroking a cat under its jaw, “are South African. The jacaranda you see all over town are from Brazil, the eucalyptus trees are from Australia. The people and the architecture are from everywhere you can think of.” He took a long pull on his bottle, draining it. “That’s the reason California’s such a weird goddamn place. Because nothing really belongs here.”

  “I think it’s fascinating. I wouldn’t live here for anything—not even for you and Michelle, I’m sorry. But it is certainly fascinating.”

  “Oh, absolutely, I agree, it is. In a big, ugly, tasteless, intellectually numbing kind of way.”

  “What do you do for intellectual stimulation?”

  “I read your monographs.”

  “Really?”

  “No, but I have copies of all of them.”

  Later, stretched across the bed with his eyes closed and the cool fresh sheet pulled up to his sternum, Ivan thought, Clever, talented Don. It had never occurred to him before that his brother considered his work at all … .

  He did not think he had fallen asleep, yet he awoke with a start. He was hot and parched. He slipped into a robe and eased into the hallway. In the kitchen, he filled a glass with cold filtered water from the jug in the refrigerator and sat down with his back to the bar to look out through the glass doors, at the lights of the city. There was a glowing patch of sky, seemingly as distant as the half moon, where the dark smudgy cloud had been that afternoon.

  When he returned to his room, he sat on the edge of the bed and took his well-thumbed People’s Almanac from the nightstand. He opened it at random and read a page, then set it aside and picked up the laptop. “Where were we?”

  The screen lightened. “That’s a good question,” Cutsinger was saying. He chuckled into the microphones. “I know, because my colleagues and I have asked it of each other thousands of times since the anomaly was discovered. Every time, the answer’s been the same. Simply traveling through time into the past is impossible. Simply to do so violates the laws of physics, especially our old favorite, the second law of thermodynamics. Simply to enter the past is to alter the past, which is a literal and actual contradiction of logic. Yet the fact is, we have discovered this space-time anomaly which connects our immediate present with what from all evidence is the Earth as it existed during mid-Paleozoic times. The only way the laws of physics and logic can accommodate this awkward fact is if we quietly deep-six the adjective ‘simply’ and run things out to their extremely complicated conclusion. We must posit a universe that stops and starts, stops and starts, countless billions of times per microsecond, as it jumps from state to state. As it does so, it continually divides, copies itself. Each copy is in a different state—that is, they’re inexact copies. A separate reality exists for every possible outcome of every possible quantum interaction. Inasmuch as the number of copies produced since the Big Bang must be practically infinite, the range of difference among the realities must be practically infinite as well. These realities exist in parallel with one another. Whatever we insert into the anomaly—probes, test animals, human beings—are not simply going to travel directly backward into our own past. Instead, they’re going to travel somehow to another universe, to another Earth which resembles our Earth as it was in the Paleozoic. Yes? Question?”

  From offscreen came a question, inaudible to Ivan, but on the screen Cutsinger nodded and answered, “Well, it’s probably pointless to say whether this sort of travel occurs in any direction—backward, sideward, or diagonally.”

  From offscreen, someone else asked, “If there are all these multiple Earths, when you’re ready to come back through this hole you’re talking about, how can you be sure you’ll find your way back to the right Earth?”

  “To the very best of our knowledge, this hole as you call it has only two ends. One here and now, one there and then. Next question?”

  You glib son of a bitch, Ivan thought.

  After the robot probes had gone and apparently come back through the space-time anomaly, the next step was obvious to everyone: human beings must follow. It was decided that two people should go through together. At the outset, in the moment it had taken the phrase “time travel to the prehistoric world” to register in his mind, Ivan had made up his mind—yes, absolutely, I want to go! “Presented with the opportunity to traverse time and explore a prehistoric planet,” he had written to Don, “who wouldn’t?” In the weeks and months that followed, however, through all the discussion and planning sessions, he had never quite believed that he had a real chance to go. Partly it was a matter of funding: x amount of money in the kitty simply equaled y number of people who would get to go on any Paleozoic junket. Partly it was a matter of prestige: given, practically speaking, an entire new planet to explore—everything about it, everything about the cosmos it occupied, for that matter, being four hundred million years younger, any scientist could make a case for his or her particular field of inquiry. Ivan did not, of course, despise his work in the least or see any need to apologize for it; moreover, he did not take personally—too personally, anyway—one or another of the likelier candidates’ feigned confusion over pedology, the study of the nature and development of children, and pedology, soil science. The first few times, he affected amusement at the joke
fellow soil scientists told on themselves, which in its simplest form was that the insertion of a single soil scientist into Silurian time would result in that remote geological period’s having more scientist than soil. It was the sort of extremely specialized joke specialists told. Like any specialized joke, its charm vanished the instant that an explanation became necessary. Real soil would have only just started, geologically speaking, to collect amid the Silurian barrens; pedogenesis would be spotty and sporadic; rock could weather away to fine particles, but only the decay of organic matter could make sterile grit into nurturing dirt, and while organisms abounded in the Silurian seas, they would have only just started, again, geologically speaking, to live and die—and decompose—on land.

  “Oh. I see. Ha, ha.”

  The joke had escaped from the soil scientists at some point and begot tortuous variations in which twenty-first-century pedology overwhelmed and annihilated the reality of primordial soil: why (went one version), the weight of the terminology alone—soil air, soil complexes, associations and series, soil horizons, moisture budgets, aggregates and peds, mor and mull and all the rest of it—would be too much for such thin, poor, fragile stuff as one might expect to find sprinkled about in mid-Paleozoic times.