The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I moved to the icy shelf at the base of the falls, shuffling to where I normally walked through, where the ice should be thinnest. Three times I swung, twice without force and the third blow hard and useless, the ice as tough as marble and more slippery. My axe slid sideways, twisting me. Then my boots moved, my balance lost, and I hit the icy shelf, slid, and fell again.

  The pond caught me. The ice beneath gave with the impact, a slight but deep cracking sound lasting for an age. But I didn’t fall through. And when I could breathe again, with pain, I stood and hobbled over to the shore, trying very hard not to give in.

  “Is this what you did to the others?” I asked.

  Silence.

  “Is this how you treat lovers, Ula?”

  A howl, almost close, sudden and very shrill.

  A primeval thought came to me. I made myself approach the black jungle, scooping up leaves by the armful and building a substantial pile of them where I had sat with Provo, against the downed log. And I lit them and the log on fire with a second glowglobe, putting it on overload and stepping back and the globe detonating with a wet sizzle, the dried leaves exploding into a smoky red fire.

  The odd sugars loved to burn, the flames hot and quick and delicious. They ignited the log within minutes, giving me a sense of security. The canopy didn’t reach overhead. I made doubly sure that the surrounding ground had no leaves, no way for the fire to spread; then I set to work, armfuls of fresh leaves piled against the cliché, tamped them down with my boots until there was a small hill spilling onto the pond.

  Heat versus ice.

  Equations and estimates kept me focused, unafraid.

  Then I felt ready, using the axe to knock loose a long splinter of burning log. I carried the cold end, shouting, “See? See? I’m not some idiot. I’m not staying in your trap, Ula!” I touched the leaf pile in a dozen places, then retreated, keeping at what felt like a safe distance but feeling waves regardless, dry and solid heat playing over me, almost nourishing me for the moment.

  Those sugars were wonderfully potent. Almost explosive.

  Ula must have planned to burn me alive, I kept thinking. She would have lit the leaf litter when it was deep enough … only I’d beaten her timetable, hadn’t I?

  “I’ll file charges,” I promised the red-lit trees. “You should have done a better job, my dear.”

  A sharp howl began, then abruptly stopped. It was as if a recording had been turned off in its middle.

  Then came a crashing sound, and I turned to see a single chunk of softened ice breaking free of the cliché, crashing into my fire and throwing sparks in every direction. Watching the sparks, I felt worry and a sudden fatigue. What’s wrong? My eyes lifted, maybe out of instinct, and I noticed a single platter-sized leaf still rising, glowing red and obviously different from the other leaves. It was burning slowly, almost patiently. It practically soared overhead. Just like a fire eagle, it rode a thermal … and didn’t it resemble an eagle? A little bit? One species of tree among hundreds, and Ula must have designed it, and she must have seen that it was planted here—

  —such an elaborate, overly complicated plan. Contrived and plainly artificial, I was thinking. Part of me felt superior and critical. Even when I knew the seriousness of everything, watching that leaf vanish into great blackness overhead … out of the thermal now, gliding off in some preplanned direction, no doubt … even then I felt remarkably unafraid, knowing that that leaf would surely reach the canopy somewhere, igniting hundreds of leaves and the sappy young branches … and part of me wanted nothing more than to take my student aside, arm around her shoulders, while I said, “Now listen. This is all very clever, and I’m sure it’s cruel, but this is neither elegant nor artful and show me another way to do it. By tomorrow. That’s your assignment, Ula. Will you do it for me, please?”

  * * *

  The forest caught fire.

  I heard the fire before I saw the ruddy glow of it. It sounded like a grinding wind, strong and coming nearer; then came the crashing of softened ice, blocks and slush dropping onto my fire and choking it out completely.

  I didn’t have time or the concentration to build another fire.

  Towering red flames were streaking through the cavern, first in the canopy and then lower, igniting whole trunks that would explode. I heard them, and I felt the detonations against my face and through my toes. The air itself began to change, tasting warm and sooty, ashes against my teeth and tongue. Transfixed, I stood in the clearing beside the pond, thick and twisting black columns of smoke rising, the ceiling lit red and the smoke pooling against it, forming an inverted lake full of swirling superheated gases.

  Over the rumble and roar of the fire, I heard someone speaking, close and harsh … and after a few moments of hard concentration I realized it was my voice, senseless angry sounds bubbling out of me … and I clamped a hand over my mouth, fingers into a cheek and tears mixed with the stinking ash … I was crying … I had been crying for a very long while.…

  I would die here.

  Always crying, I struggled with prosaic calculations. Calories from combustion; oxygen consumed; the relative toughness of human flesh. But my numbers collapsed, too much stress and too little time remaining. Part of the firestorm was coming back at me now, trunks burning and splitting open as the fiery sap boiled; but I wouldn’t burn to death, I decided. Because what felt like a finger struck me on top of my head, in my hair, and I looked up just as a second gooey drop of water found me. It dripped between the fingers of my clamping hand, and I tasted it—smoke and ash mixed with a sharp, almost chemical aftertaste—

  —melted ice from the faraway roof—

  —unfrozen, ancient seawater.

  The black lake of churning smoke was its deepest straight above me, and those first drops became multitudes, fat and forceful. Like rain, then harder. They hammered me to the ground, my head dropping and my hands held above it, shielding very little, and squinting eyes able to see the oncoming fire begin to slow, to drown.

  I thought of the falls melting with this onslaught, but I couldn’t stand, much less move. The mud under me seemed to suck, holding me in place. I was squarely beneath an enormous waterfall—no cliché—and I would have laughed, given the breath.

  Funny, fun Ula.

  Perhaps the largest waterfall in the Realm, I was thinking. For this moment, at least. And my mind’s eye lent me a safe vantage point, flames and water struggling for the world. And destroying it too. And somewhere I realized that by now I had to be dead, that breathing had to be impossible, that I only believed I was breathing because death had to be a continuation of life, a set of habits maintained. What a lovely, even charming wonder. I felt quite calm, quite happy. Hearing the roar of water, aware of the soil and trees and rock itself being obliterated … my bones and pulverized meat mixed into the stew … and how sweet that I could retain my limbs, my face and mouth and heart, as a ghost. I thought. Touching myself in the noisy blackness, I found even my soaked jersey intact … no, not total blackness; there was a dim glow from above … and I began to sit upright, thinking like a ghost, wondering about my powers and wishing that my soul could lift now, lift and fly away.

  But instead, with unghostly force, my head struck a solid surface.

  Thunk.

  I staggered, groaned, and reached out with both hands, discovering a blister of transparent hyperglass above me. Enclosing me. Larger than a coffin, but not by much … it must have been deployed at the last possible instant, air pumped in from below, seals designed to withstand this abuse … a safety mechanism not shown on any schematic, obviously … and I was alive, slippery wet and numb but undeniably organic.…

  … and unalone as well.

  Rising from the mud beside me, visible in that thin cool light, was a naked form—artist; torturer; Nature Herself—who calmly and with great dignity wiped the mud from her eyes and grinning mouth. And she bent, the mouth to my ear, asking me over the great roar, “So what have you learned today, student?
”

  I couldn’t speak, could barely think.

  Opening my jersey, she kissed my bare chest. “The eight-legged howler was just noise. Just my little illusion.”

  Yet in my head it was real, even now.

  “I would never intentionally hurt,” she promised. “Not you, not anyone.”

  I wanted to believe her.

  “I always watched over you, Hann. I never blinked.”

  Thank you.

  “I’m not cruel.” A pause. “It’s just—”

  Yes?

  “—I wanted to show you—”

  What?

  “—what? What have I shown you, darling?”

  Squinting, I gazed up through the thick blister, the black water churning more slowly, cooling and calming itself. My mind became lucid, answers forming and my mouth opening and her anticipating the moment, her hand tasting of earth as it closed my mouth again.

  * * *

  We lay quietly together, as if in a common grave.

  For two days we waited, the water refreezing around us and neither of us speaking, the creaking of new ice fading into a perfect silence. A contemplative, enlightening silence. I built worlds in my head—great and beautiful and true, full of the frailties and powers of life—then came the gnawing and pounding of robots. Half-burned trees were jerked free and tossed aside. The ice itself was peeled away from the blister. I saw motions, then stars. Then a familiar stocky figure. Provo Lei peered in at us, the round face furious and elated in equal measures; and as he began to cut us free, in those last moments of solitude, I turned to Ula and finally spoke.

  “You never wanted to terraform worlds,” I blurted.

  “Worlds are tiny,” she said with contempt. Her liquid smile was lit by the cutting laser, and a green eye winked as she said, “Tell me, Hann. What do I care about?”

  Something larger than worlds, I knew—

  —and I understood, in an instant—

  —but as I touched my head, ready to tell, Provo burst through the hyper-glass and stole my chance. Suddenly Ula had changed, becoming the pouting little girl, her lower lip stuck out and a plaintive voice crying, “Oh, Father. I’m such a clumsy goof, Father. I’m sorry, so sorry. Will you ever forgive me? Please, please?”

  LUMINOUS

  Greg Egan

  Perhaps the hottest and fastest-rising new writer to debut in SF in the nineties, Australian Greg Egan is poised on the verge of being recognized as one of the genre’s Big Names. In the last few years, Egan has become a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has made sales as well to Pulp-house, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and elsewhere. Several of his stories have appeared in various best-of-the-year series, including this one; in fact, he placed two stories in both our Eighth and Ninth Annual Collections—the first author ever to do that back-to-back in consecutive volumes. He has also had stories in our Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Annual Collections as well. He was on the Hugo Final Ballot in 1995 for his story “Cocoon,” which won the Ditmar Award and the Asimov’s Readers Award. His first novel, Quarantine, appeared in 1992, to wide critical acclaim, and was followed by a second novel in 1994, Permutation City, which won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His most recent book is a collection of his short fiction, Axiomatic. Upcoming are two new novels, Distress and Diaspora.

  Here he launches an intrepid attack on the most abstract realms of Higher Mathematics with a computer made entirely of light—with potentially disastrous results for the entire universe when those abstract realms start to strike back …

  I woke, disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was lying on the narrow, lumpy single bed in Room 22 of the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was depressingly familiar. But there was something wrong with the way I was lying; every muscle in my neck and shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural causes, however badly they’d slept.

  And I could smell blood.

  I opened my eyes. A woman I’d never seen before was kneeling over me, slicing into my left triceps with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed to the head and foot of the bed.

  Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I could start stupidly thrashing about, instinctively trying to break free. Maybe an even more ancient response—catatonia in the face of danger—took on the adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when I’d been expecting something like this for weeks.

  I spoke softly, in English. “What you’re in the process of hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and the cargo gets fried.”

  My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black hair. Not Chinese: Indonesian, maybe. If she was surprised that I’d woken prematurely, she didn’t show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes I’d acquired in Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good thing the local anaesthetic was beyond their reach.

  Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, “Look on the table next to the bed.”

  I twisted my head around. She’d set up a loop of plastic tubing full of blood—mine, presumably—circulated and aerated by a small pump. The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the intersection controlled by a valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to the inside of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt that she could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute without missing a beat.

  I cleared my throat and swallowed. “Not good enough. The trap knows my blood pressure profile exactly. A generic heartbeat won’t fool it.”

  “You’re bluffing.” But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The hand-held MRI scanner she’d used to find the trap would have revealed its basic configuration, but few fine details of the engineering—and nothing at all about the software.

  “I’m telling you the truth.” I looked her squarely in the eye, which wasn’t easy given our awkward geometry. “It’s new, it’s Swedish. You anchor it in a vein forty-eight hours in advance, put yourself through a range of typical activities so it can memorize the rhythms … then you inject the cargo into the trap. Simple, foolproof, effective.” Blood trickled down across my chest onto the sheet. I was suddenly very glad that I hadn’t buried the thing deeper, after all.

  “So how do you retrieve the cargo, yourself?”

  “That would be telling.”

  “Then tell me now, and save yourself some trouble.” She rotated the scalpel between thumb and forefinger impatiently. My skin did a cold burn all over, nerve ends jangling, capillaries closing down as blood dived for cover.

  I said, “Trouble gives me hypertension.”

  She smiled down at me thinly, conceding the stalemate—then peeled off one stained surgical glove, took out her notepad, and made a call to a medical equipment supplier. She listed some devices which would get around the problem—a blood pressure probe, a more sophisticated pump, a suitable computerized interface—arguing heatedly in fluent Mandarin to extract a promise of a speedy delivery. Then she put down the notepad and placed her ungloved hand on my shoulder.

  “You can relax now. We won’t have long to wait.”

  I squirmed, as if angrily shrugging off her hand—and succeeded in getting some blood on her skin. She didn’t say a word, but she must have realized at once how careless she’d been; she climbed off the bed and headed for the washbasin, and I heard the water running.

  Then she started retching.

  I called out cheerfully, “Let me know when you’re ready for the antidote.”

  I heard her approach, and I turned to face her. She was ashen, her face contorted with nausea, eyes and nose streaming mucus and tears.

  “Tell me where it is!”

  “Uncuff me, and I’ll get it for you.”

  “No! No deals!”

  “Fine. Then you’d better start looking, yourself.”
>
  She picked up the scalpel and brandished it in my face. “Screw the cargo. I’ll do it!” She was shivering like a feverish child, uselessly trying to stem the flood from her nostrils with the back of her hand.

  I said coldly, “If you cut me again, you’ll lose more than the cargo.”

  She turned away and vomited; it was thin and gray, blood-streaked. The toxin was persuading cells in her stomach lining to commit suicide en masse.

  “Uncuff me. It’ll kill you. It doesn’t take long.”

  She wiped her mouth, steeled herself, made as if to speak—then started puking again. I knew, first-hand, exactly how bad she was feeling. Keeping it down was like trying to swallow a mixture of shit and sulphuric acid. Bringing it up was like evisceration.

  I said, “In thirty seconds, you’ll be too weak to help yourself—even if I told you where to look. So if I’m not free…”

  She produced a gun and a set of keys, uncuffed me, then stood by the foot of the bed, shaking badly but keeping me targeted. I dressed quickly, ignoring her threats, bandaging my arm with a miraculously clean spare sock before putting on a T-shirt and a jacket. She sagged to her knees, still aiming the gun more or less in my direction—but her eyes were swollen half-shut, and brimming with yellow fluid. I thought about trying to disarm her, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.

  I packed my remaining clothes, then glanced around the room as if I might have left something behind. But everything that really mattered was in my veins; Alison had taught me that that was the only way to travel.

  I turned to the burglar. “There is no antidote. But the toxin won’t kill you. You’ll just wish it would, for the next twelve hours. Goodbye.”

  As I headed for the door, hairs rose suddenly on the back of my neck. It occurred to me that she might not take me at my word—and might fire a parting shot, believing she had nothing to lose.

  Turning the handle, without looking back, I said, “But if you come after me—next time, I’ll kill you.”