The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The hull shivers before his face. Heat haze.

  He looks down. The wreckage of the little Russian lander, and Williams' LFU, has gone. The surface under the tail of this big ship looks unmarked, lacking even the raying of the landing. And the topography of the area is quite different; now he is looking down over some kind of lumpy, sun-drenched mountain range, and a wide, fat rille snakes through the crust.

  "How about that," Williams says dryly, from above him. Her voice signal is degraded; the amplifier on the LFU is no longer available to boost their VHF link.

  "We're on Moon Five," he says.

  "Moon Five?"

  "It seems important to keep count."

  "Yeah. whatever. Bado, this time the geology's changed. Maybe one of the big primordial impacts didn't happen, leaving the whole lunar surface a different shape."

  They reach the hatch. Bado lets the astronaut take his tool carrier, and clambers in on his knees.

  The astronaut closes the hatch and dogs it shut by turning a big heavy wheel. He wears a British Union Flag on his sleeve, and there is a name stitched to his breast: Taine.

  The four of them stand around in the airlock, in their competing pressure suit designs. Air hisses, briefly.

  An inner door opens, and Taine ushers them through with impatient gestures. Bado enters a long corridor, with nozzles set in the ceiling. The four of them stand under the nozzles. Water comes gushing down, and runs over their suits. Williams opens up her gold sun visor and faces Williams. "Showers," she says. "What for?"

  "To wash off radioactive crap, from the exhaust." She begins to brush water over her suit arms and legs.

  Bado has never seen such a volume of water in lunar conditions before. It falls slowly from the nozzles, gathering into big shimmering drops in the air. Grayblack lunar dust swirls toward the plug holes beneath his feet. But the dirt is ingrained into the fabric of his suit legs; they will be stained gray forever.

  When the water dries they are ushered through into a third larger chamber. The walls here are curved, and inset with round, tough-looking portholes; it looks as if this chamber reaches most of the way around the cylindrical craft.

  There are people here, dozens of them, adults and children and old people, dressed in simple cotton coveralls. They sit in rows of crude metal-framed couches, facing outward toward the portholes. They stare fearfully at the newcomers.

  The astronaut, Taine, has opened up his faceplate; it hinges outward like a little door.

  Bado pushes back his hood and reaches up to his fishbowl helmet. He undoes it at the neck, and his ears pop as the higher pressure of the cabin pushes air into his helmet.

  He can smell the sharp, woodsmoke tang of lunar dust. And, overlaid on that, there is a smell of milky vomit: baby sick.

  The Russian, his own helmet removed, makes a sound of disgust. "Eta oozhasna!"

  Williams pulls off her Snoopy flight helmet. She is maybe forty, Bado guesses-around Bado's own age-with a tough, competent face, and closecropped blonde hair.

  Taine shoos the three of them along. "Welcome to Prometheus," he says. "Come. There are some free seats further around here." His accent is flat, sounding vaguely Bostonian. Definitely British, Bado thinks, probably from the south of England. "You're the last, we think. We must get away. The impact is no more than twelve hours hence."

  Bado, lugging his tool carrier, walks beside him. "what impact?"

  "The meteorite, of course." Taine sounds impatient. "That's why we're having to evacuate the colonies. And you alternates. The Massolite got most of them off, of course, but-"

  Williams says, "Massolite?"

  Taine waves a hand. "A mass transporter. Of course it was a rushed job. And it had some flaws. But we knew we couldn't lift everybody home in time, not all those thousands in the big colonies, not before the strike; the Massolite was the best we can do, you see." They come to three empty couches. "These should do, I think. If you'll sit down I'll show you how to fit the seat belts, and instruct you in the safety precautions .. ."

  "But," Williams says, "what has this Massolite got to do with .. ." She dries up, and looks at Bado.

  He asks, "With moving between alternate worlds?"

  Taine answers with irritation. "Why, nothing, of course. That's just a design flaw. We're working on it. Nonlinear quantum mechanical leakage, you see. I do wish you'd sit down; we have to depart.. ."

  Bado shucks off his PLSS backpack, and he tucks his helmet and his carrier under his seat.

  Taine helps them adjust their seat restraints until they fit around their pressure suits. It is more difficult for the Russian; his suit is so stiff it is more like armor. The Russian looks young, no more than thirty. His hair sticks up in the air, damp with sweat, and he looks at them forlornly from his shell of a suit. "Gdye tooalyet?"

  The portholes before them give them a good view of the lunar surface. It is still Moon Five, Bado sees, with its mountains and that sinuous black rille.

  He looks around at their fellow passengers. The adults are unremarkable; some of them have run to fat, but they have incongruously skinny legs and arms. Longterm adaptation to lunar gravity, Bado thinks.

  But there are also some children here, ranging from babies in their mothers' arms up to young teenagers. The children are extraordinary: spindly, attenuated. Children who look facially as young as seven or eight tower over their parents. The passengers clutch at their seat belts, staring back at him. Bado hears a clang of hatches, and a siren wails, echoing from the metal walls. The ship shudders, smoothly, and there is a gentle surge. "Mnye nada idtee k vrachoo," groans the Russian, and he clutches his belly.

  As the years wore on he followed the news, trying to figure out how things might be different back home.

  The Cold War went on, year after year. There were no ICBMS here, but they had squadrons of bombers and nuke submarines and massive standing armies in Europe, And there were no spy satellites; nobody had a damn clue what the Russians-or the Chinese-were up to. A lot of shit came down that Bado figured might have been avoided, with satellite surveillance. It slowly leaked out into the paper press, usually months or years too late. Like the Chinese nuking of Tibet, for instance. And what the Soviets did to Afghanistan.

  The Soviet Union remained a monolith, blank, threatening, impenetrable. Everyone in the U.S. seemed paranoid to Bado, generations of them, with their bomb shelters and their iodine pills. It was like being stuck in the late 1950s.

  And that damn war in Indochina just dragged on, almost forgotten back home, sucking up lives and money like a bloody sponge.

  Around 1986, he felt a sharp tug of wistfulness. Right now, he figured, on the other side of that heat-haze barrier, someone would be taking the first steps on Mars. Maybe it would be his old buddy, Slade, or someone like John Young. Bado might have made it himself Bado missed the live sports on TV.

  In free fall, Taine gives them spare cotton coveralls to wear, which are comfortable but don't quite fit; the name stitched to Bado's is Leduc, and on Williams', Hassell.

  Bado, with relief, peels off the three layers of his pressure suit: the outer micrometeorite garment, the pressure assembly, and the inner cooling garment. The other passengers look on curiously at Bado's cooling garment, with its network of tubes. Bado tucks his discarded suit layers into a big net bag and sticks it behind his couch.

  They are served food: stodgy stew, lukewarm and glued to the plate with gravy, and then some kind of dessert, like bread with currants stuck inside it. Spotted Dick, Taine calls it.

  There is a persistent whine of fans and pumps, a subdued murmur of conversation, and the noise of children crying. Once a five-year-old, all of six feet tall, came bouncing around the curving cabin in a spidery tangle of attenuated arms and legs, pursued by a fat, panting, queasy-looking parent.

  Taine comes floating down to them, smiling. "Captain Richards would like to speak to you. He's intrigued to have you on board. We've picked up quite a few alternate-colonists, but not many alter
nate-pioneers, like you. Would you come forward to the cockpit? Perhaps you'd like to watch the show from there."

  Williams and Bado exchange glances. "What show?"

  "The impact, of course. Come. Your German friend is welcome too, of course," Taine adds dubiously. The cosmonaut has his head stuck inside a sick bag. "I think he's better off where he is," Bado says.

  "You go," Williams says. "I want to try to sleep." Her face looks worn to Bado, her expression brittle, as if she is struggling to keep control. Maybe the shock of the transitions is getting to her at last, he thinks.

  The cockpit is cone-shaped, wadded right in the nose of the craft. Taine leads Bado in through a big oval door. Charts and mathematical tables have been stuck to the walls, alongside pictures and photographs. Some of these show powerful-looking aircraft, of designs unfamiliar to Bado, but others show what must be family members. Pet dogs. Tools and personal articles are secured to the walls with elastic straps.

  Three spacesuits, flaccid and empty, are fixed to the wall with loose ties. They are of the type Taine wore in the airlock: thick and flexible, with inlaid metal hoops, and hinged helmets at the top.

  Three seats are positioned before instrument consoles. Right now the seats face forward, toward the nose of the craft, but Bado can see they are hinged so they will tip up when the craft is landing vertically. Bado spots a big, chunky periscope sticking out from the nose, evidently there to provide a view out during a landing.

  There are big picture windows set in the walls. The windows frame slabs of jet-black, star-sprinkled sky.

  A man is sitting in the central pilot's chair. He is wearing a leather flight jacket, a peaked cap, and-Bado can't believe it-he is smoking a pipe, for God's sake. The guy sticks out a hand. "Mr. Bado. I'm glad to meet you. Jim Richards, RAF."

  "That's Colonel Bado." Bado shakes the hand. "U.S. Air Force. Lately of NASA."

  "NASA?"

  "National Aeronautics and Space Administration." Richards nods. "American. Interesting. Not many of the alternates are American. I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to see more of your ship. Looked a little cramped for the three of you."

  "It wasn't our ship. It was a Russian, a one-man lander."

  "Really," Richards murmurs, not very interested. "Take a seat." He waves Bado at one of the two seats beside him; Taine takes the other, sipping tea through a straw. Richards asks, "Have you ever seen a ship like this before, Colonel Bado?"

  Bado glances around. The main controls are a conventional stick-and-rudder design, adapted for spaceflight; the supplementary controls are big, clunky switches, wheels, and levers. The fascia of the control panel is made of wood. And in one place, where a maintenance panel has been removed, Bado sees the soft glow of vacuum tubes. "No," he says. "Not outside the comic books." Richards and Taine laugh.

  "It must take a hell of a launch system."

  "Oh," says Richards. "We have good old Beta to help us with that."

  "Beta?"

  "This lunar ship is called Alpha," Taine says. "Beta gives us a piggyback out of Earth's gravity. We launch from Woomera, in South Australia. Beta is a hypersonic athodyd-"

  Richards winks at Bado. "These double-domes, eh? He means Beta is an atomic ramiet."

  Bado boggles. "You launch an atomic rocket from the middle of Australia? How do you manage containment of the exhaust?"

  Taine looks puzzled. "What containment?"

  "You must tell me all about your spacecraft," Richards says.

  Bado, haltingly, starts to describe the Apollo system.

  Richards listens politely enough, but after a while Bado can see his eyes drifting to his instruments, and he begins to fiddle with his pipe, knocking out the dottle into a big enclosed ashtray.

  Richards becomes aware of Bado watching him. "Oh, you must forgive me, Colonel Bado. It's just that one encounters so many alternates."

  "You do, huh."

  "The Massolite, you know. That damn quantum-mechanical leakage. Plessey just can't get the thing tuned correctly. Such a pity. Anyhow, don't you worry-, the boffins on the ground will put you to rights, I'm sure."

  Bado is deciding he doesn't like these British. They are smug, patronizing, icy. He can't tell what they are thinking.

  Taine leans forward. "Almost time, Jim."

  "Aha!" Richards gets hold of his joystick. "The main event." He twists the stick, and Bado hears what sounds like the whir of flywheels, deep in the guts of the ship. Stars slide past the windows. "A bit of showmanship, Colonel Bado. I want to line us up to give the passengers the best possible view. And us, of course. After all, this is a grandstand seat, for the most dramatic astronomical event of the century-what?"

  The Moon, fat and gray and more than half-full, slides into the frame of the windows.

  The Moon-Moon Five, Bado assumes it to be-looks like a ball of glass, its surface cracked and complex, as if scarred by buckshot. Tinged pale white, the Moon's center looms out at Bado, given three-dimensional substance by the Earthlight's shading.

  The Moon looks different. He tries to figure out why.

  There, close to the central meridian, are the bright pinpricks of Tycho, to the south, and Copernicus, in the north. He makes out the familiar pattern of the seas of the eastern hemisphere: Serenitatis, Crisium, Tranquillitatis-gray lakes of frozen lava framed by brighter, older lunar uplands.

  He supposes there must be no Apollo 11 LM descent stage, standing on this version of the Sea of Tranquility.

  The Moon is mostly full, but he can see lights in the remaining crescent of darkness. They are the abandoned colonies of Moon Five.

  Something is still wrong, though. The western hemisphere doesn't look right. He takes his anchor from Copernicus. There is Mare Procellarum, to the western limb, and to the north of that nothing but bright highlands.

  "Hey," he says. "Where the hell's Mare Imbrium?"

  Richards looks at him, puzzled, faintly disapproving.

  Bado points. "Up there. In the northwest. A big impact crater-the biggestflooded with lava. Eight hundred miles across."

  Richards frowns, and Taine touches Bado's arm. "All the alternate Moons are different to some degree," he says, placating. "Differences of detail-"

  "Mare Imbrium is not a goddamn detail." Bado feels patronized again. "You're talking about my Moon, damn it." But if the Imbrium impact has never happened, no wonder the surface of Moon Five looks different.

  Richards checks his wristwatch. "Any second now," he says. "If the big brains have got it right-"

  There is a burst of light, in the Moon's northwest quadrant. The surface in the region of the burst seems to shatter, the bright old highland material melting and subsiding into a red-glowing pool, a fiery lake that covers perhaps an eighth of the Moon's face. Bado watches huge waves, concentric, wash out across that crimson, circular wound.

  Even from this distance Bado can see huge debris clouds streaking across the lunar surface, obscuring and burying older features, and laying down bright rays that plaster across the Moon's face. The lights of the night-side colonies wink out, one by one.

  Richards takes his pipe out of his mouth. "Good God almighty," he says.

  "thank heavens we got all our people off."

  "Only just in time, sir," Taine says.

  Bado nods. "Oh, I get it. Here, this was the Imbrium impact. Three billion years late."

  Richards and Taine look at him curiously.

  It turned out that to build a teleport device-a "Star Trek" beaming machine-you needed to know about quantum mechanics. Particularly the Uncertainty Principle.

  According to one interpretation, the Uncertainty Principle was fundamentally caused by there being an infinite number of parallel universes, all lying close to each other-as Bado pictured it-like the pages of a book. The universes blurred together at the instant of an event, and split off afterward.

  The Uncertainty Principle said you could never measure the position and velocity of any particle with absolute precision. But to telep
ort that was exactly what you needed to do: to make a record of an object, transmit it, and re-create the Payload at the other end.

  But there was a way to get around the Uncertainty Principle. At least in theory.

  The quantum properties of particles could become entangled: fundamentally linked in their information content. What those British must have done is take sets of entangled particles, left one-half on their Moon as a transmitter, and planted the other half on the Earth.

  There was a lot of technical stuff about the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen theorem that Bado skipped over; what it boiled down to was that if you used a description of your teleport passenger to jiggle the transmitter particles, you could reconstruct the passenger at the other end, exactly, from the corresponding jiggles in the receiver set.

  But there were problems.

  If there were small nonlinearities in the quantum-mechanical operators-and there couldn't be more than a billion billion billionth part, according to Bado's researchers-those parallel worlds, underlying the Uncertainty Principle, could short-circuit.

  The Moon Five Brits had tried to build a cheap-and-dirty teleport machine. Because of the huge distances involved, that billion-billion-billionth nonlinearity had become significant, and the damn thing had leaked And so they had built a parallel-world gateway, by accident.

  This might be the right explanation, Bado thought. It fit with Captain Richards' vague hints about "nonlinear quantum mechanics."

  This new understanding didn't make any difference to his position, though. He was still stranded here. The teleport devices his researchers had outlined-even if they'd got the theory right from the fragments he'd given them-were decades beyond the capabilities of the mundane world Bado found himself in.

  Re-entry is easy. Bado estimates the peak acceleration is no more than a couple of G, no worse than a mild rollercoaster. Even so, many of the passengers look distressed, and those spindly lunar-born children cry weakly, pinned to their seats like insects.

  After the landing, Alpha's big doors are flung open to reveal a flat, barren desert. Bado and Williams are among the first down the rope ladders, lugging their pressure suits, and Bado's tool carrier, in big net bags.