The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Juanita gives me a pat on the rear, and surprisingly, Eloni gives me a silent hug. Inside her visor, her dark eyes are glistening. I think of how frightened the Kenyan student must be, but she has just contributed in the only way she could think of. "Thanks, team," I say, and squeeze her hand.

  I clip my ascent ratchet on and start climbing. There are no problems and we reach Randi and Ed in half an hour. Randi is calm. "Right arm. Won't go above shoulder. Maybe dislocated. Left arm works, sort of. But hurts too much. Might faint. OK as long as I keep illy hands down."

  "I'll take you down, papoose-style," Ed offers. "Then we'll ride the elevator up.

  Dr. Lotati touches Randi. "OK?"

  "I'll make it, Dad."

  "Good, Wojciech and I will go up then, and set the anchor," Dr. Lotati decides. His voice crackles with leadership and confidence. I smile. Everyone, including him, has forgotten about his age. It won't be obvious on this climb; if anything, I will slow him down.

  We replace Ed's backpack with Randi, tying her to his shoulder harness, and help guide them down. When they are safe below, Dr. Lotati nods to me, and says, "We have to consider everything we put into this surface to be hazardous, no?"

  I nod. We are leaning out from a wall almost half a kilometer above a bridge about half a kilometer above a pool of cryogenic nitrogen trifluoride, talking about how the various things that hold our ropes to said wall may give way at any time.

  "OK. We use four pitons, or bolts, or a combination, on each belay, and arrange the ropes like so." He demonstrates, creating what looks at first glance to be a cat's cradle of ropes between carabiners and pitons. "This equalizes forces among the pitons and minimizes the shock if one lets go."

  It takes me a couple of tries to get it right. He finally pats me on the shoulder, and without further ado says, "Climbing."

  "On belay," I answer, wondering about people who seem to come alive only when staring death in the face. He ascends deliberately, and deceptively fast.

  Actually, I keep up, but exhaust myself in the process. Dr. Lotati is only a centimeter or two taller than his daughter, and hardly much heavier. He is wiry strong; occasional rest stops are the only concession he makes to age-and I need them more than he does. We stop where the second line-bearing rocket buried itself in the fragile clathrate, six meters below the crater floor. The ledge is overhung by about a meter, more where the rocket impact dislodged a large hunk of wall.

  "Can you stand a short fall?" he asks me. "I think we'll need several tries to get around that edge." I've never fallen on a belay line before. I want to impress Emilio; my Mirandas, moon and woman, are at stake. But the idea of trying to scramble almost upside down and free-falling six to ten meters, with only a questionable anchor to stop me if I slip, scares the crap out me. If there were any other way ... "Wojciech?"

  "Yes." Then, perhaps because my mind works best in an emergency, or under a deadline, the idea comes to me. "Dr. Lotati-this is fairly soft stuff. You don't suppose we could just tunnel through it, up to the surface?"

  He looks down at me. "Perhaps! I wouldn't consider desecrating an Earth climb like that, but I think we will be forgiven here. I knew your head would be good for something!" Then he takes an ax from his belt and swings it into the ice overhead. A good sized hunk falls and shatters into tiny chips on my helmet.

  "Ice!" He looks at his handiwork, says, "Si," and swings again, and again, cutting a notch more than a tunnel as it turns out. We are through and up to the crater floor in less than an hour.

  There is a round of cheers when we say, "On top!" Mike and Karen wave from the other side of the crevasse-only a hundred meters away. It has taken us two days to go that hundred meters.

  I help set the next set of anchors a hundred meters back from the edge, in firm regolith. The rest is ropes, ascenders and pulleys. Mike and Karen send the remaining gear, and themselves, across in an ersatz tram, and help us hoist the rest of the party. Juanita is the last one to emerge from the crevasse and we all cheer, intoxicated with our close call and our final victory. By the time everything is up or over, we have been awake for thirty hours. Dr. Lotati decides to set up camp immediately.

  We have four two-person tents in addition to the large one. They can be independent or their entrances can be sealed to connecting ports in the large tent, forming a mini-base looking something like an inflated starfish minus an arm. That way, early risers can let others sleep.

  Randi's left shoulder is bad-a possible separation-and we have at least three days' march ahead of us to our pickup point. We discuss an evacuation, but she won't hear of it. Mike and Ed both have field medical training but Mike has more practice, so he is the closest thing to a doctor we have, and he consults with Earth. It turns out that our optical scattering imager is good enough to build up a picture of the injury; Randi's humerus is not quite in its socket.

  Earth recommends evacuation. Randi says no. Dr. Lotati supports her-we are in an age where injuries can be healed if they can be endured, but the opportunities to do something more significant than entertain oneself and collect one's automation stipend are few and far between.

  Randi, Ed told me several nights ago, is Dr. Lotati's only son. I laughed and asked Ed what that made him. "The gayest man on Mercury," he answered and threw such a convincing leer at me that it took me an unsettling second to get the joke. But the humor disguises a poignant situation-a young woman trying to be, for her father, the son he could never have. How much was from her nature, how much was from her love? Or was there a difference? And what of her mother? Randi's mother was never mentioned by anyone, and the only public biographical info was that Emilio had divorced her when Randi was six and never married again.

  Following instructions from the doctors on Earth, Mike resets the shoulder. It takes him two tries. Randi shuts her eyes and gasps-that is all. Then it is in. Painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and reconstructive stimulants we have, she will be sore, but as good as new in a few months. Climbing is out, but she can walk the rest of the way.

  Ed and Randi retire together, her arm immobilized to her body with tape.

  Juanita decides to sleep with Emilio. Mike and Karen are a given.

  Eloni is looking at me with dark pools of eyes and what could be a hopeful smile on her face. I look at the shy graduate student who had given me a hug to send me up a treacherous wall that had just come within the width of an idea of killing two people. I shrug and reach a hand out to her and she comes and sits by me with the widest grin on her face I have ever seen.

  "You wish I were Randi, don't you?" Eloni asks me.

  "That's not your fault."

  Her smile fades. "I almost got us all killed by being too slow. That was my fault."

  There are times when sympathy can do things just cannot. I have my arms around her in a second. "No one blames you. You're part of us, now. Time to enjoy it."

  She kind of melts into me and gently pushes me down onto my back on my sleepsack. She has a low, incredibly sexy voice. "That is about as much as I can enjoy. I hope I do not disappoint you."

  Tired as I am, I'm relieved; and confused. "Eloni, I write about the male and female thing, more from reading than experience, I'm afraid. I may sigh, but disappointment would be putting things a bit strong. But I'm curious. Do you believe in abstinence, and if so, can you tell me why?"

  No contraception, I speculate? In this day, I find that hard to believe-but she is studying at Jovis Tholis on Mars, I remind myself, in the middle of the New Reformation.

  A certain hardness comes over her face. "You want to know? I spoke literal truth. Abstinence has nothing to do with it. I was mutilated so I cannot enjoy what most women can enjoy. So I hike across glaciers and climb mountains instead," she smiles wryly. "That is how I get high. Try to understand. I am not Kenyan by birth. Kenya is a civilized nation."

  I have it then. Female circumcision. Back on Earth, the villages all have nice premanufactured houses, with bathrooms, electricity, diagnostic comm ports, a
nd regular food deliveries. But here and there, otherwise gentle people protect primitive cultures from "western interference," and so we still permit this to be done to children.

  "How old were you?"

  "Ten. They were very thorough. But in a few years, doctors will be able to fix it, I think. Regenerate the tissue that was taken from me. That's a spin-off from the interstellar project. They needed to solve tissue regeneration to do cold sleep reliably. For now, I must enjoy giving and being enjoyed while I fantasize what it might really be like."

  What can one say? I take her hand and she squeezes it.

  "Oh, yes." Her voice is low and throaty. "They mutilated me, they tried to keep me barefoot and stupid to carry on their primitive culture. They even tried to keep me from school. But they could not shut off my mind. And here I am, yes, here I am where they thought I could never go doing what they thought to keep from me forever. So I am a space person now, part of another tribe."

  Eloni and I are both, I realize, refugees from cultures that do not want who we are. Hers a primitive one, mine too sophisticated to see itself. I only want to hold her, smother her hurt, and bring a smile to her face. I try to kiss her.

  She holds me off. "Someday I have to go back there and try to change what the people do to each other there. I cannot be a space person forever. Do you understand?" She buries her face in my shoulder. "For now. Just for now."

  I understand. This is for now-and whatever our feelings for each other now, our destinies lie in different directions. I nod and she is in my arms. Our lips touch again and the future vanishes. "What do you do want me to do?" I ask.

  In answer, she releases the seal of my tight suit.

  We remove each other's remaining clothes and slip into ray sleep sack. She wriggles against me and we do kiss, and our hands do stroke and caress, and begin to defy the cold dead gray cruelty outside our bubble with yet another act of life.

  But there really isn't very much room and we are both very tired. So, in each other's arms, we fall asleep, content with a mostly symbolic defiance.

  The remaining walk toward the center of Chao Meng Fu is two by two, the time filled mostly with conversations that share what we are and what we know, but sometimes with those comfortable silences in which your mind digests what you have learned, playing this way and that with it. There are more crevasses to cross, but we do so expeditiously.

  During one of these crossings, I say, "On belay, Dr. Lotati."

  "Climbing. Wojciech, call me Emilio, it's quicker."

  A small thing, but it suggests to me a future more interesting than correcting undergraduate papers.

  Juanita suggests we share a piece of music for our final approach to the central depot. It is by a twentieth-century composer named Alan Hovhaness, a symphony called "City of Light." She says it is his symphony number twenty-two.

  "Twenty-two?" I ask. "Did I hear you right? I know Haydn wrote over a hundred, but that was when they were short and highly formatted. Beethoven wrote only nine. Tehaikovsky, six. I thought they'd pretty much stopped doing symphonies by the twenty-first century."

  Juanita laughed. "We geologists call Hovhaness our patron composer because he actually wrote a symphony about a volcano-and that was number fifty. By the mid-twenty-first century, they were calling him "the American Haydn.' Now let's just listen."

  As we approach the brilliant peaks of the Chao Meng Fu central crown-great massive round Sun-gilded domes that speak of power and eternity-I am incapable of understanding why I once thought of this expedition as a stunt. I feel like a piece of steel, bent, hammered, bent and hammered again in the fire with greater strength and balance than I have ever known before.

  It is a feeling I want to have again, if I must pursue it to the ends of the Solar System. Perhaps I am not in a class with Ed Blake and perhaps any fantasies I had of a match with Randi must remain fantasies, but I have found in my own backyard a delicate and precious union with Eloni and a friend and colleague in Juanita. And I think I have succeeded in my main objective-I have, I think, the friendship and respect of the people who could bring me out to the frontier which calls my spirit.

  As I walk I feel the voices of a more broad-shouldered century calling me; Stanley, Peary, Scott, Teddy Roosevelt, and among poets, of course, Kipling. As I trudge, I amuse myself with a doggerel. Perhaps those prudent people who never risk the pit, Also never know the joy Of coming out of it.

  Not prize material, perhaps, but sums my experience, and in my present state of deranged ecstasy, I am no critic!

  And if my words fail you-as they fail many others of highly educated tastes then listen to the finale of Hovhaness' symphony. For if you cannot understand after hearing that, you have left the human race. What I learned, in the crossing of Chao Meng Fu, was that such things still can be, in any age, for anyone who will do them.

  Yeyuka

  Greg Egan

  Here's another intense and powerful story by Greg Egan, whose "Reasons to Be Cheerful" appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one, he asks the question: No matter how well-intentioned you are, just how much are you really willing to sacrifice in order to help those who really need it?

  Are you sure?

  On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an hour, then lay on the sand and stared at the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there were half a dozen booths set up among the sun-bathers, dispensing the latest fashion: solar tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror you could choose a design and customize it or create one from scratch with software assistance. Computer controlled jets sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your skin, then an hour of UV exposure brought out the colours.

  As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow butterflies perched between shoulder blades, torsos wrapped in green-and-violet dragons, whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching these images materialize around me, I couldn't help thinking of them as banners of victory. Throughout my childhood, there'd been nothing more terrifying than the threat of melanoma, and by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than neck-to-knee lycra. Twenty years later, these elaborate decorations were designed to encourage, to boast of, irradiation. To proclaim, not that the sun itself had been tamed, but that our bodies had. To declare that cancer had been defeated.

  I touched the ring on my left index finger and felt a reassuring pulse. Blood flowed constantly around the hollow core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The ring's inner surface was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded, funnel-shaped structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms wide. Every sizeable molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these traps was seized, shrink-wrapped and held long enough to determine its shape and chemical identity before it was released.

  So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew what belonged and what didn't. Under its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a microscopic tumour far downstream, could never escape detection for long-and once a diagnosis was made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were programmable catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer control. The ring could manufacture a wide range of drugs from raw materials circulating in the blood, just by choosing the right sequence of shapes for these catalyst strapping the necessary ingredients together in nooks and crannies moulded to fit like plaster casts around their combined outlines.

  With medication delivered within minutes or seconds, infections were wiped out before they could take hold, tiny clusters of cancer cells destroyed before they could grow or spread. Linked by satellite to a vast array of medical databases, and as much additional computing power as it required, the ring gave me a kind of electronic immune system, fast enough and smart enough to overcome any adversary.

  Not everyone on the beach that morning would have had their own personal Healthguard, but a we
ekly session on a shared family unit or even a monthly check-up at the local GP would have been enough to reduce their risk of cancer dramatically. And though melanoma was the least of my worries (fair-skinned, I was covered in sunscreen as usual; fatal or not, getting burnt was painful) with the ring standing guard against ten thousand other possibilities, I'd come to think of it as a vital part of my body. The day I'd installed it my life expectancy had risen by fifteen years. And no doubt my bank's risk-assessment software had assumed a similar extension to my working life, since I'd be paying off the loan I'd needed to buy the thing well into my sixties.

  I tugged gently at the plain metal band, until I felt a sharp warning from the needle-thin tubes that ran deep into the flesh. This model wasn't designed to be slipped on and off in an instant like the shared units, but it would only take a five-minute surgical procedure under local anaesthetic to remove it. In Uganda, a single Healthguard machine served 40 million people-or rather, the lucky few who could get access to it. Flying in wearing my own personal version seemed almost as crass as arriving with a giant solar tattoo. Where I was headed, cancer had very definitely not been defeated.

  Nor had malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, schistosomiasis. I could have the ring immunize me against all of these and more, before removing it. But the malaria parasite was notoriously variable, so constant surveillance would provide far more reliable protection. I'd be no use to anyone lying in a hospital bed for half my stay. Besides, the average villager or shanty-town dweller probably wouldn't even recognize the thing, let alone resent it. I was being hypersensitive.

  I gathered up my things and headed for the cycle rack. Looking back across the sand, I felt the kind of stab of regret that came upon waking from a dream of impossible good fortune and serenity, and for a moment I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and rejoin it.

  Lisa saw me off at the airport.