The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  By the time she'd chosen two books and approached the counter, I was feeling half defiantly triumphant, half sick with shame. I'd struck a pure note with the network at last- what I felt at the sight of this woman rang true. And if everything I'd done to achieve it was calculated, artificial, bizarre and abhorrent ... I'd had no other way.

  I was smiling as she bought the books, and she smiled back warmly. No wedding or engagement ring-but I'd promised myself that I wouldn't try anything, no matter what. This was just the first step: to notice someone, to make someone stand out from the crowd. I could ask out the tenth, the hundredth woman who bore some passing resemblance to her.

  I said, "Would you like to meet for a coffee sometime?"

  She looked surprised, but not affronted. Indecisive, but at least slightly pleased to have been asked. And I thought I was prepared for this slip of the tongue to lead nowhere, but then something in the ruins of me sent a shaft of pain through my chest as I watched her make up her mind. If a fraction of that had shown on my face, she probably would have rushed me to the nearest vet to be put down. She said, "That would be nice. I'm Julia, by the way."

  "I'm Mark." We shook hands. "When do you finish work?"

  "Tonight? Nine o'clock."

  "Ah." I said, "How about lunch? When do you have lunch?"

  "One." She hesitated. "There's that place just down the road ... next to the hardware store?"

  "That would be great."

  Julia smiled. "Then I'll meet you there. About ten past. OK?"

  I nodded. She turned and walked out. I stared after her, dazed, terrified, elated. I thought: This is simple. Anyone in the world can do it. It's like breathing.

  I started hyperventilating. I was an emotionally retarded teenager, and she'd discover that in five minutes flat. Or, worse, discover the 4,000 grown men in my head offering advice.

  I went into the toilet to throw up.

  Julia told me that she managed a dress shop a few blocks away. "You're new at the bookshop, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "So what were you doing before that?"

  "I was unemployed. For a long time."

  "How long?"

  "Since I was a student."

  She grimaced. "It's criminal, isn't it? Well, I'm doing my bit. I'm job-sharing, half-time only."

  "Really? How are you finding it?"

  "It's wonderful. I mean, I'm lucky, the position's well enough paid that I can get by on half a salary." She laughed. "Most people assume I must be raising a family. As if that's the only possible reason."

  "You just like to have the time?"

  "Yes. Time's important. I hate being rushed."

  We had lunch again two days later, and then twice again the next week. She talked about the shop, a trip she'd made to South America, a sister recovering from breast cancer. I almost mentioned my own long-vanquished tumour, but apart from fears about where that might lead, it would have sounded too much like a plea for sympathy. At home, I sat riveted to the phone-not waiting for a call, but watching news broadcasts, to be sure I'd have something to talk about besides myself. Who's your favourite singer/author/artist/actor? I have no idea.

  Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why?

  Because I'd chosen her. But ... why had I felt compelled to choose anyone?

  Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they'd desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions bad the same ancestry as everyone else's; what more could I ask?

  But how could I pretend that I felt anything real for Julia, when I could shift a few buttons in my head, anytime, and make those feelings vanish?

  Even if what I felt was strong enough to keep me from wanting to touch that dial ... Some days I thought: it must be like this for everyone. People make a decision, half-shaped by chance, to get to know someone; everything starts from there. Some nights I sat awake for hours, wondering if I was turning myself into a pathetic slave, or a dangerous obsessive. Could anything I discovered about Julia drive me away, now that I'd chosen her? Or even trigger the slightest disapproval?

  And if, when, she decided to break things off, how would I take it?

  We went out to dinner, then shared a taxi home. I kissed her goodnight on her doorstep. Back in my flat, I flipped through sex manuals on the net, wondering bow I could ever hope to conceal my complete lack of experience. Everything looked anatomically impossible; I'd need six years of gymnastics training just to achieve the missionary position. I'd refused to masturbate since I'd met her-, to fantasize about her, to imagine her without consent, seemed outrageous, unforgivable. After I gave in, I lay awake until dawn trying to comprehend the trap I'd dug for myself, and trying to understand why I didn't want to be free.

  Julia bent down and kissed me, sweatily. "That was a nice idea." She climbed off me and flopped onto the bed.

  I'd spent the last ten minutes riding the blue control, trying to keep myself from coming without losing my erection. I'd heard of computer games involving exactly the same thing. Now I turned up the indigo for a stronger glow of intimacy-and when I looked into her eyes, I knew that she could see the effect on me. She brushed my cheek with her hand. "You're a sweet man. Did you know that?"

  I said, "I have to tell you something." Sweet? I'm a puppet, I'm a robot, I'm a freak.

  "What?"

  I couldn't speak. She seemed amused, then she kissed me. "I know you’re gay. That's all right; I don't mind."

  "I'm not gay." Any more? "Though I might have been."

  Julia frowned. "Gay, bisexual ... I don't care. Honestly."

  I wouldn't have to manipulate my responses much longer; the prosthesis was being shaped by all of this, and in a few weeks I'd be able to leave it to its own devices. Then I'd feel, as naturally as anyone, all the things I was now having to choose.

  I said, "When I was 12, I had cancer."

  I told her everything. I watched her face, and saw horror, then growing doubt. "You don't believe me?" She replied haltingly, "You sound so matter-of-fact. Eighteen years? How can you just say, "I lost 18 years'?"

  "How do you want me to say it? I'm not trying to make you pity me. I just want you to understand."

  When I came to the day I met her, my stomach tightened with fear, but I kept on talking. After a few seconds I saw tears in her eyes, and I felt as though I'd been knifed.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you." I didn't know whether to try to hold her, or to leave right then. I kept my eyes fixed on her, but the room swam.

  She smiled. "What are you sorry about? You chose me. I chose you. It could have been different for both of us. But it wasn't." She reached down under the sheet and took my hand. "It wasn't."

  Julia had Saturdays off, but I had to start work at eight. She kissed me goodbye sleepily when I left at six; I walked all the way home, weightless.

  I must have grinned inanely at everyone who came into the shop, but I hardly saw them. I was picturing the future. I hadn't spoken to either of my parents for nine years, they didn't even know about the Durrani treatment. But now it seemed possible to repair anything. I could go to them now and say: This is your son, back from the dead. You did save my life, all those years ago.

  There was a message on the phone from Julia when I arrived home. I resisted viewing it until I'd started things cooking on the stove; there was something perversely pleasurable about forcing myself to wait, imagining her face and her voice in anticipation.

  I hit the PLAY button. Her face wasn't quite as I'd pictured it.

  I kept missing things and stopping to rewind. Isolated phrases stuck in my mind. Too strange. Too sick. No one's fault. My explanation hadn't really sunk
in the night before. But now she'd bad time to think about it, and she wasn't prepared to carry on a relationship with 4,000 dead men.

  I sat on the floor, trying to decide what to feel: the wave of pain crashing over me, or something better, by choice. I knew I could summon up the controls of the prosthesis and make myself happy-happy because I was "free" again, happy because I was better off without her ... happy because Julia was better off without me. Or even just happy because happiness meant nothing, and all I had to do to attain it was flood my brain with Leu-enkephalin.

  I sat there wiping tears and mucus off my face while the vegetables burned, The smell made me think of cauterization, sealing off a wound.

  I let things run their course, I didn't touch the controls-but just knowing that I could have changed everything. And I realized then that, even if I went to Luke De Vries and said: I'm cured now, take the software away, I don't want the power to choose any more ... I'd never be able to forget where everything I felt had come from.

  My father came to the flat yesterday. We didn't talk much, but he hasn't remarried yet, and he made a joke about us going nightclub-hopping together. At least I hope it was a joke.

  Watching him, I thought: he's there inside my head, and my mother too, and ten million ancestors, human, proto-human, remote beyond imagining. What difference did 4,000 more make? Everyone had to carve a life out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance. I'd just had to face the details a little more starkly.

  And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that narrow zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.

  When my father was leaving, he looked out from the balcony across the crowded suburb, down towards the Paramatta river, where a storm drain was discharging a visible plume of oil, street litter and garden runoff into the water. He asked dubiously, "You happy with this area?" I said, "I like it here."

  Moon Six

  Stephen Baxter

  Like many of his colleagues here in the late nineties, Greg Egan comes to mind, as do people like Paul I. McAuley, Michael Swanwick, Iain M. Banks, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Geoff Ryman, and a half-dozen others-Stephen Baxter is busily engaged with revitalizing and reinventing the "hard-science" story for a new generation of readers.

  Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine's most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov's Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere; his stories have appeared in our Eleventh, Twelfth, and Fourteenth Annual Collections. His first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche-a sequel to The Time Machine-The Time Ships, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His most recent books are the alternate history novel Titan, Voyage and the collection Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence.

  Although always prolific, Baxter was especially prolific this year, publishing at least eleven stories in the genre that I'm aware of (plus a couple of nongenre stories), stories that appeared everywhere from obscure British semiprozines to (in early 1998, in collaboration with, of all people, Arthur C. Clarke!) Playboy. As far as I can tell, Baxter published more short work in the genre this year than any other author (rivaled only by Robert Reed and Brian Stableford), and, in spite of this prodigous output, managed to keep the overall quality amazingly high: at least three or four of this year's Baxter stories were good enough to be seriously considered for inclusion in a Best of the Year volume, and might well have made the cut in another year. In the end, though, I decided to go with the tense and ingenious story that follows, one that suggests that the problem with voyaging to Alternate Worlds is that you might have been better off staying where you were in the first place ...

  Bado was alone on the primeval beach of Cape Canaveral, in his white lunarsurface pressure suit, holding his box of Moon rocks and sampling tools in his gloved hand. He lifted up his gold sun visor and looked around. The sand was hard and flat. A little way inland, there was a row of scrub pines, maybe ten feet tall. There were no ICBM launch complexes here.

  There was no Kennedy Space Center, in fact: no space program, evidently, save for him. He was stranded on this empty, desolate beach. As the light leaked out of the sky, an unfamiliar Moon was brightening. Bado glared at it. "Moon Six," he said. "Oh, shit."

  He took off his helmet and gloves. He picked up his box of tools and began to walk inland. His blue overshoes, still stained dark gray from lunar dust, left crisp Moonwalk footprints in the damp sand of the beach.

  Bado drops down the last three feet of the ladder and lands on the foil-covered footpad. A little gray dust splashes up around his feet.

  Slade is waiting with his camera. "OK, turn around and give me a big smile. Atta boy. You look great. Welcome to the Moon." Bado can't see Slade's face, behind his reflective golden sun visor.

  Bado holds onto the ladder with his right hand and places his left boot on the Moon. Then he steps off with his right foot, and lets go of the LM. And there he is, standing on the Moon.

  The suit around him is a warm, comforting bubble. He hears the hum of pumps and fans in the PLSS-his backpack, the Portable Life Support Systemand feels the soft breeze of oxygen across his face.

  He takes a halting step forward. The dust seems to crunch beneath his feet, like a covering of snow: There is a firm footing beneath a soft, resilient layer a few inches thick. His footprints are miraculously sharp, as if he's placed his ridged overshoes in fine, damp sand. He takes a photograph of one particularly well-defined print; it will persist here for millions of years, he realizes, like the fossilized footprint of a dinosaur, to be eroded away only by the slow rain of micrometeorites, that echo of the titanic bombardments of the deep past.

  He looks around.

  The LM is standing in a broad, shallow crater. Low hills shoulder above the close horizon. There are craters everywhere, ranging from several yards to a thumbnail width, the low sunlight deepening their shadows.

  They call the landing site Taylor Crater, after that district of El Lago-close to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston-where he and Fay have made their home. This pond of frozen lava is a relatively smooth, flat surface in a valley once flooded by molten rock. Their main objective for the flight is another crater a few hundred yards to the west that they've named after Slade's home district of Wildwood. Surveyor 7, an unmanned robot probe, set down in Wildwood a few years before; the astronauts are here to sample it.

  This landing site is close to Tycho, the fresh, bright crater in the Moon's southern highlands. As a kid Bado had sharp vision. He was able to see Tycho with his naked eyes, a bright pinprick on that ash-white surface, with rays that spread right across the face of the full Moon.

  Now he is here.

  Bado turns and bounces back toward the LM.

  After a few miles he got to a small town.

  He hid his lunar pressure suit in a ditch, and, dressed in his tube-covered cooling garment, snuck into someone's backyard. He stole a pair of jeans and a shirt he found hanging on the line there.

  He hated having to steal; he didn't plan on having to do it again.

  He found a small bar. He walked straight in and asked for a job. He knew he couldn't afford to hesitate, to hang around figuring what kind of world he'd finished up in. He had no money at all, but right now he was clean-shaven and presentable. A few days of sleeping rough would leave him too dirty and stinking to be employable.

  He got a job washing glasses and cleaning out the john. That first night he slept on a park bench, but bought himself breakfast and cleaned himself up in a gas station john. />
  After a week, he had a little money saved. He loaded his lunar gear into an old trunk, and hitched to Daytona Beach, a few miles up the coast.

  They climb easily out of Taylor.

  Their first Moonwalk is a misshapen circle that will take them around several craters. The craters are like drill holes, the geologists say, excavations into lunar history.

  The first stop is the north rim of a 100-yard-wide crater they call Huckleberry Finn. It is about 300 yards west of the LM.

  Bado puts down the tool carrier. This is a handheld tray, with an assortment of gear: rock hammers, sample bags, core tubes. He leans over, and digs into the lunar surface with a shovel. Wlen he scrapes away the gray upper soil he finds a lighter gray, just under the surface.

  "Hey, Slade. Come look at this."

  Slade comes floating over. "How about that. I think we found some ray material." Ray material here will be debris from the impact that formed Tycho.

  Lunar geology has been shaped by the meteorite impacts that pounded its surface in prehistory. A main purpose of sending this mission so far south is to keep them away from the massive impact that created the Mare Imbrium, in the northern hemisphere. Ray material unpolluted by Imbrium debris will let them date the more recent Tycho impact.

  And here they have it, right at the start of their first Moonwalk.

  Slade flips up his gold visor so Bado can see his face, and grins at him. "How about that. We is looking at a full-up mission here, boy."

  They finish up quickly, and set off at a run to the next stop. Slade looks like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white, bouncing over the beachlike surface of the Moon. He is whistling.

  They are approaching the walls of Wildwood Crater. Bado is going slightly uphill, and he can feel it. The carrier, loaded up with rocks, is getting harder to carry too. He has to hold it up to his chest, to keep the rocks from bouncing out when he runs, and so he is constantly fighting the stiffness of his pressure suit.