The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I've notified the concierge and arranged for shipping, said Nicholas. And I've booked a first class car for you and Nancy to the Cozumel clinic.

  So Bug had finally converted, and at just the wrong time. In case you haven't been paying attention, Nick, she tongued, Nancy's not coming.

  Nonsense, chuckled Nicholas. Knowing you, you're bound to have some trick up your sleeve.

  This clearly was not Bug. Well, you're wrong. I'm plumb out of ideas. Only a miracle could save her.

  A miracle, of course. Brilliant! You've done it again, Zoe! One faux miracle coming right up.

  There was a popping sound. The votive cups were replenished with large, fat candles that ignited one-by-one of their own accord. Nancy glanced at them and glowered suspiciously at Zoranna.

  You don't really expect her to fall for this, Zoranna tongued.

  Why not? She thinks you're locked out of the houseputer, remember? Besides, Nancy believes in miracles.

  Thunder suddenly drummed in the distance. Roses perfumed the air. And Saint Camillus de Lellis floated out of his picture frame, gaining size, hue, and dimension, until he stood a full, fleshy man on a roiling cloud in the middle of the room.

  It was a good show, but Nancy wasn't even watching. She watched Zoranna instead, letting her know she knew it was all a trick.

  I told you, Zoranna tongued.

  The saint looked at Zoranna, and his face flickered. For a moment, it was her mother's face. Her mother appeared young, barely twenty, the age she was when she bore her. Taken off guard, Zoranna startled when her mother smiled adoringly at her, as she must have smiled thousands of times at her first baby. Zoranna shook her head and looked away. She felt ambushed and not too Pleased about it.

  When Nancy saw this, however, she turned to examine the saint. There was no telling what or who she saw, but she gasped and struggled out of her recliner to kneel at his feet. She was bathed in a holy aura, and the room dimmed around her. After long moments of silent communion, the saint pointed to his forehead. Nancy, horror-struck, turned to stare at Zoranna, and the apparition ascended, shrank, and faded into the ceiling. The candles extinguished themselves, one by one, and vanished from the cups.

  Nancy rose and gently tugged Zoranna to the recliner, where she made her lie down. "Don't move," she whispered. "Here's a pillow." She carefully raised Zoranna's head and slid a pillow under it. "Why didn't you tell me you were sick, Zoe?" She felt Zoranna's forehead with her palm. "And I thought you went through this before."

  Zoranna took her sister's hand and pressed it to her cheek. Her hand was warm. Indeed, Nancy's whole complexion was flush with color, as though the experience had released some reserve of vitality. "I know. I guess I haven't been paying attention," Zoranna said. "Please take me to the clinic now."

  "Of course," said Nancy, standing and retrieving her walker. "I'll just pack a few things." Nancy hurried to the bedroom, but the walker impeded her progress, so she flung it away. It went clattering into the kitchen.

  Zoranna closed her eyes and draped her arms over her head. "I must say, Bug ... Nick, I'm impressed. Why didn't I think of that?"

  "Why indeed," Nicholas said in his marvelous voice. "It's just the sort of sneaky manipulation you so excel at."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Zoranna opened her eyes and looked at a handsome, miniature man projected in the air next to her head. He wore a stylish leisure jacket and lounged beneath an exquisitely gnarled oak treelette. He was strikingly familiar, as though assembled from favorite features of men she'd found attractive.

  "It means you were ambivalent over whether you really wanted Nancy to survive," the little man said, crossing his little legs.

  "That's insulting," she said, "and untrue. She's my sister. I love her."

  "Which is why you visit her once every decade or so."

  "You have a lot of nerve," she said and remembered the canceled field test. "So this is what Ted meant when he said you'd turn nasty."

  "I guess," Nicholas said, his tiny face a picture of bemused sympathy. "I can't help the way I am. They programmed me to know and serve you. I just served you by saving your sister in the manner you, yourself, taught me. Once she's rejuvenated, I'll find a hospicer society to employ her. That ought to give you a grace period before she repeats this little stunt."

  "Grace period?"

  "In a few years, all but the most successful preclone humans will have died out," Nicholas said. "Hospices will soon be as redundant as elementary schools. Your sister has a knack for choosing obsolete careers."

  That made sense.

  "I suppose we could bring Victor back," said Nicholas. "He's a survivor, and he loves her."

  "No, he doesn't," said Zoranna. "He was only using her."

  "Hello! Wake up," said Nicholas. "He's a rat, but he loves her, and you know it. You, however, acted out of pure jealousy. You couldn't stand seeing them together while you're all alone. You don't even have friends, Zoe, not close ones, not for many years now."

  "That's absurd!"

  The little man rose to his feet and brushed virtual dirt from his slacks. "No offense, Zoe, but don't even try to lie to me. I know you better than your last seven husbands combined. Bug contacted them, by the way. They were forthcoming with details."

  Zoranna sat up. "You did what?"

  "That Bug was a hell of a researcher," said Nicholas. "It queried your former friends, employers, lovers, even your enemies."

  Zoranna unsnapped the belt flap to expose the valet controls. "What are you doing?" said Nicholas. She had to remove the belt in order to read the labels. "You can turn me off," said Nicholas, "but think about it-I know you."

  She pushed the switch and the holo vanished. She unscrewed the storage grommet, peeled off the button-sized memory wafer, and held it between thumb and forefinger. "If you know me so well.. ." she seethed, squeezing it. She was faint with anger. She could hardly breathe. She bent the wafer nearly to its breaking point.

  Here she was, sitting among her sister's sour-smelling pillows, forty stories underground, indignantly murdering a machine. It occurred to her that perhaps General Genius was on to something after all, and that she should be buying more shares of their stock instead of throttling their prototype. She placed the wafer in her palm and gently smoothed it out. It looked so harmless, yet her hand still trembled. When was the last time anyone had made her tremble? She carefully replaced the wafer in the grommet and screwed it into the belt.

  It'd be a miracle if it still worked.

  Balinese Dancer

  Gwyneth Jones

  Here's a subtle but compelling look at a family on holiday who find them selves struggling to survive in a turbulent future Europe where just about everything, even the most basic of social conventions, is melting and changing and dissolving like an ice sculpture left out in the rain ...

  British writer Gwyneth Jones was a co-winner of the famed Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for work exploring genre issues in SF with her 1991 novel White Queen; she's also been nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award an unprecedented four times. Her other books include the novels Divine Endurance, Escape Plans, North Wind, and Flowerdust, and a World Fantasy Award-winning collection of fairy stories, Seven Tales and a Fable. Her most recent book is a new novel, Phoenix Cafe. Her too infrequent short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Off Limits, and other magazines and anthologies, including our Fourteenth Annual Collection. She lives in Brighton, England, with her husband, her son, and a Burmese cat. She has a Web site at gopher.well.sf.ca.us:7011/publications/authors/gwyn/.

  There comes a day when the road, the road that has served you so willingly and well, unfolding an endless absorbing game across the landscape, throwing up donjons on secret hills, meadows and forests, river beaches, sun-barred avenues that steadily rise and fall like the heartbeat of the summer, suddenly loses its charm. The baked verges sicken, the flowers have turned to straw, the air stinks of diesel fumes. The ribbon of grey flying ahead o
f you up hills and down dales is no longer magically empty, like a road in paradise. It is snarled with traffic: and even when you escape the traffic, everything seems spoiled and dead.

  The cassette machine was playing one of Spence's classic compilations. The machine was itself an aged relic, its repertoire growing smaller as the tapes decayed, sagged and snapped and could not be replaced. They'd been singing along to this one merrily, from Avignon to Haut Vienne. Now Anna endured in silence while Spence stared dead ahead, beating time on the steering wheel and defiantly muttering scraps of lyric under his breath. They hadn't spoken to each other for hours. Jake lay in the back seat sweating, his bare and dirty feet thrust into a collapsed tower of camping gear. He was watching The Witches on his headband, his soft little face disfigured by the glossy bar across his eyes; his lips moving as be repeated under his breath the Roald Dahl dialogue they all knew by heart. Anna watched him in her mirror. Eyeless, her child looked as if he were dead. Or like an inadequately protected witness, a disguised criminal giving evidence.

  "Got one!" barked Spence.

  They were looking for a campsite.

  It was late afternoon, the grey and brassy August sky had begun to fade. Spence had been following minor roads at random since that incident, in the middle of the day, on the crowded route nationale, when Anna had been driving. They had escaped death, but the debriefing had been inadequate-corticosterone levels rising; the terrible underlying ever-present stress of being on the road had come up fighting, shredding through their myths and legends of vagabond ease. Spence, in his wife's silence, swung the wheel around: circled the war memorial, cruised through a pretty village, passed the ancient church and the Norman keep, took the left turn by the piscine.

  "Swimming!" piped up Jake, always easily pleased. He had emerged from TV heaven and was clutching the back of the driver's seat. But the site was full of gens de voyage, a polite French term for the armies of homeless persons with huge battered mobile homes, swarms of equally battered and despairing kids, and packs of savage dogs, who were becoming such a feature of rural holidays in La Belle France. They usually kept to their own interstices of the road-world: the cindered truck-stop lay-bys and the desolate service areas where they hung their washing between eviscerated domestic hardware and burned-out auto wrecks. But if a bunch of them decided to infest a tourist campsite, it seemed that nothing could be done. Spence completed a circuit and stopped the car by the entrance, just upwind of a bonfire of old tires.

  "Well, it seems a popular neighborhood. Shall we move in?"

  Some hours ago, Anna had vowed that she was sick to death of this pointless, endless driving. She had threatened to get out of the car and simply walk away if they didn't stop at the next possible site. No matter what. She kept silent.

  "They shouldn't be here," complained Jake. "They're not on holiday, are they?"

  "No, kid, I guess they're not."

  Spence waited, maliciously.

  "Do whatever you want," she muttered. Anna when angry turned extra-English, clipped and tart. In half-conscious, half-helpless retaliation, Spence reverted to the mid-west. He heard himself turning into that ersatz urban cowboy, someone Anna hated. "Gee, I don't know, babe. Frankly, right now I don't care if I live or die."

  The bruised kids, and their older brothers, were gathering. Spence waited.

  "Drive on," she snapped, glowering in defeat. So they drove on, to a drab little settlement about twenty klicks farther along, where they found a municipal campsite laid out under the caves of a wood. It had no swimming pool, but there was a playground with a trapeze. Jake, who believed that all his parents' sorrows on this extended holiday were occasioned by the lack of ponies, mini-golf, or a bar in some otherwise ideal setting, pointed this out with exaggerated joy. The huge rhino-jeep and trailer combo that they'd been following for the last few miles had arrived just ahead of them. Otherwise there was no one about. Anna and Spence set up the yurt, each signaling by courteously functional remarks that if acceptable terms could be agreed, peace might be restored. Each of them tried to get Jake to go away and play. But the child believed that his reluctance to help with the chores was another great cause of sorrow, so, of course, he stayed. Formal negotiations, which would inevitably have broken up in rancor, were therefore unable to commence. Peace returned in silence, led home by solitude; by the lingering heat and dusty haze of evening and the intermittent song of a blackbird.

  While they were setting up, a cat appeared. It squeezed its way through the branches of the beech hedge at the back of their pitch, announcing itself before it could be seen in a loud, querulous oriental voice. It was a long-haired cat with a round face, small ears, blue eyes, and the coloring of a seal-point Siamese, except that its four dark brown feet seemed to have been dipped in cream. Spence thought he knew cats. He pronounced it a Balinese, a long-haired Siamese variant well known in the States.

  "No," said Anna. "It's a Birman, a Burmese Temple Cat. Look, see the white tips to its paws. They're supposed to be descended from a breed of cats that were used as oracles in Burma, ages ago. Maybe it belongs to the people with the big trailer."

  The cat was insistently friendly, but distracted. Alternately it made up to them, purring and gabbing on in its raucous Siamese voice, then broke off to sit in the middle of their pitch, fluffy dark tail curled around its white toes, staring from side to side as if looking for someone.

  Spence, Jake, and Anna went for a walk. They inspected the sanitaires, and saw the middle-aged couple from the trailer heading toward the little town, probably in search of somewhere to eat. They studied the interactive guide to their locality that had been installed beside the toilet block. As usual, the parents stood at gaze while the child poked and touched, finding everything that was clickable and obediently reading all the text. There was a utility room with a washer-drier, sinks, and a card-in-the-slot multimedia screen, so you could watch a movie or video-phone maman while your socks were going round. Everything was new, bare, and cheap. Everything was waiting for the inexorable tide of tourism to arrive even here, even on this empty shore.

  "Since everywhere interesting is either horribly crowded or destroyed already"' said Anna, "obviously hordes of people will be driven to visit totally uninteresting places instead. One can see the logic."

  "The gens de voyage will move in first," decided Spence.

  Beyond the lower terrace of pitches, they found a small lake, the still surface of the water glazed peach-color by the sunset. Green wrought-iron benches stood beside a gravel path. Purple and yellow loosestrife grew in the long grass at the water's edge; dragonflies hovered. The hayfields beyond had been cut down to sonorous insect-laden turf; and in the distance a little round windmill stood up against the red glistening orb of the sun.

  "Well, hey: this isn't so bad," Spence felt the shredded fabric coming together. They would be happy again.

  "Lost in France," murmured Anna, smiling at last. "That's all we ask."

  "What's that silver stuff in the water?" wondered Jake.

  "It's just a reflection."

  When they came closer they saw that the water margin was bobbing with dead fish.

  Jake made cheerful retching noises. "What a stink!"

  They retreated to the wood, where they discovered before long a deep dell among the trees that had been turned into the town dump. Part of it was smoldering. A little stream ran out from under the garbage, prattling merrily as it tripped down to pollute the lake. The dim but pervasive stink of rot, smoke, and farm chemicals pursued them until the woodland path emerged at a crossroads on the edge of town.

  "Typical Gailic economy," grumbled Spence, trying to see some humor in the situation. "Put the dump by the campsite. Why not? Those tourists are only passing through." Anna said nothing. But her smile had vanished.

  The town was a miniature ribbon development, apparently without a center. There was no sign of life; the two bars and the single restaurant were firmly shuttered. So they turned back, keeping to th
e road this time. Spence put together a meal of pate and bread and wine; fatigue salad from lunch in a plastic box. Anna took Jake to play on the trapeze. Unable to decide who had won the short straw on this occasion, Spence moved about the beech-hedge pitch, fixing things the way he liked them and making friends with the exotic cat, which was still hanging around. He named it the Balinese Dancer, from an old Chuck Prophet song that was going around in his head, about a guy who had a Balinese dancer tattooed across his chest. He couldn't remember what the point of the song was, probably something about having an amenable girlfriend who'd dance for you any time. But it gave him an excuse to restore his own name for the cat. Anna's inexhaustible fund of general knowledge annoyed him. Why couldn't she be ignorant, or even pretend to be ignorant, just once in a while? The cat was thin as a rail under the deceptive thickness of its coat, and though it obviously strove to keep up appearances, its fur was full of hidden burrs and tangles. He looked across the empty pitches to the playground and saw his wife hanging upside down on the trapeze, showing her white knickers: a lovely sight in the quiet evening. If only she could take things more easily, he thought. A few dead fish, what the hell. It doesn't have to ruin your life. The middle-aged couple from the trailer were standing by their beefy hunk of four-wheel drive, heads together, talking hard. They looked as if they were saying things that they wouldn't want anyone to overhear. Probably having a stinking fight, thought Spence with satisfaction. He meditated going over to improve their campingtrip hell by asking them why they didn't take better care of their cat. But refrained.

  The Balinese Dancer was still withhim when Anna and Jake came back. It had reverted to its sentry duty, sitting alert and upright in the middle of the pitch.

  "He's a lost cat," said Jake. "Can we keep him?"

  "I thought we decided he belonged to those guys over there," Spence pointed out.

  "No he doesn't."

  "It doesn't," Anna confirmed. "Jake asked them. They have no cat."