The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Words to live by,” Konstantin whispered. There seemed to be nothing more to her voice than a rough whisper. She looked past him, but there was no one in the doorway.

  “So, did you learn anything?” he asked her, sounding just slightly condescending. Perhaps that was a function of his medicine as well. She didn’t hold it against him.

  “Oh, yeah.” She slipped out of the restraints and went over to the wall to her left. The control that let down the chaise was just slightly below eye level for her. She hit it with the side of her hand and it swung out and down in a way that reminded her of the way kids might stick out their tongues. Nyah, nyah, nyah.

  “It was actually very simple,” she said wearily, “but Celestine and DiPietro weren’t thorough enough. The killer hid inside the Murphy style compartment, waited until Iguchi was all wrapped up in what he was doing, and then sliced him.” Nyah, nyah, nyah.

  Taliaferro was nonplussed. “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. It’s Occam’s Razor is what it is. The simplest explanation is the explanation.”

  “Any idea who might have been hiding in there with Occam’s Razor?”

  Her moment of hesitation was so short, she was sure that Taliaferro didn’t notice it, but at the same time, it was very long, incredibly, immeasurably long, of a duration that only Body Sativa could have understood and waited patiently enough for. “Yeah. It was Mank. He was bitter about not being the manager and not too stable. He frequented post-Apocalyptic Noo Yawk Sitty on the generous employee discount enough times that he got a bad case of gameplayers’ psychosis. He was killing in there and it spilled over to killing out here.”

  “You sound awful sure about all that,” Taliaferro said doubtfully.

  “You’d have to go in and see it for yourself. There’s all kinds of—of stuff in there. Including memes for murder. Mank got one. Let’s grab him and see if we can have him all tucked in before Police Blotter does an update. I think there was a stringer following me around in there.”

  Taliaferro grunted, took a hit off his inhaler, and dropped it into his pocket. “Okay. I guess that’s it, then.”

  “Yeah,” Konstantin said. “That’s it.”

  “Okay,” he said again. Pause. “I’ll send someone back here with your clothes.”

  “Thanks.” But she was talking to the air. Taliaferro had run off. Apparently there was only so much an inhaler could do. There was only so much anything could do. Anything, or anyone. Even Occam’s Razor. But then, the murder weapon hadn’t been the same in the other seven murders anyway. No indeed. And Mank looked good for this one, she insisted to herself. He looked too good. The image of him in the Sitty was too identifiable not to be damning. The ego of the man, using his own face. Although that might be a more widespread practice than anyone realized.

  But could anything really be surprising in the land of anything goes, she thought. The fabled promised land of AR, where they had everything there was in realtime—including death—and more besides.

  If anything goes, then let anyone go as well. Mank looks good for it, and if the state can’t prove its case against him, then it can’t. But let him be the one who goes this time. For now. Until—well, when?

  In her mind’s eye, she saw the image of the coin again, the loop of infinity on one side, Ouroboros on the other. Maybe until you were ready to know which came first when you called it in the air.

  FOR WHITE HILL

  Joe Haldeman

  Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, Joe Haldeman took a B.S. degree in physics and astronomy from the University of Maryland, and did postgraduate work in mathematics and computer science. But his plans for a career in science were cut short by the U.S. Army, which sent him to Vietnam in 1968 as a combat engineer. Seriously wounded in action, Haldeman returned home in 1969 and began to write. He sold his first story to Galaxy in 1969, and by 1976 had garnered both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award for his famous novel The Forever War, one of the landmark books of the seventies. He took another Hugo Award in 1977 for his story “Tricentennial,” won the Rhysling Award in 1983 for the best science fiction poem of the year, and won both the Nebula and the Hugo Award in 1991 for the novella version of “The Hemingway Hoax.” His story “Graves” won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards in 1994 and his “None So Blind” won the Hugo Award in 1995. His other books include a mainstream novel, War Year; the SF novels Mindbridge, All My Sins Remembered, There Is No Darkness (written with his brother, SF writer Jack C. Haldeman II), Worlds, Worlds Apart, Worlds Enough and Time, Buying Time, and The Hemingway Hoax; the “techno-thriller” Tool of the Trade; the collections Infinite Dreams and Dealing in Futures; and, as editor, the anthologies Study War No More, Cosmic Laughter, and Nebula Award Stories Seventeen. His most recent books are a new collection, Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds and a major new mainstream novel, 1968. He has had stories in our First, Third, Eighth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Twelfth Annual Collections. Haldeman lives part of the year in Boston, where he teaches writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the rest of the year in Florida, where he and his wife, Gay, make their home.

  Here he takes us thousands of years into a sophisticated, high-tech future for ringside seats at a unique competition among artists who have the kind of nearly unlimited resources to draw upon that would be unimaginable to someone from our day—but who find that, in the end, in spite of wealth and power, they still have to deal with the same old, cold questions as artists of any age.

  I am writing this memoir in the language of England, an ancient land of Earth, whose tales and songs White Hill valued. She was fascinated by human culture in the days before machines—not just thinking machines, but working ones; when things got done by the straining muscles of humans and animals.

  Neither of us was born on Earth. Not many people were, in those days. It was a desert planet then, ravaged in the twelfth year of what they would call the Last War. When we met, that war had been going for over four hundred years, and had moved out of Sol Space altogether, or so we thought.

  Some cultures had other names for the conflict. My parent, who fought the century before I did, always called it the Extermination, and their name for the enemy was “roach,” or at least that’s as close as English allows. We called the enemy an approximation of their own word for themselves, Fwndyri, which was uglier to us. I still have no love for them, but have no reason to make the effort. It would be easier to love a roach. At least we have a common ancestor. And we accompanied one another into space.

  One mixed blessing we got from the war was a loose form of interstellar government, the Council of Worlds. There had been individual treaties before, but an overall organization had always seemed unlikely, since no two inhabited systems are less than three light-years apart, and several of them are over fifty. You can’t defeat Einstein; that makes more than a century between “How are you?” and “Fine.”

  The Council of Worlds was headquartered on Earth, an unlikely and unlovely place, if centrally located. There were fewer than ten thousand people living on the blighted planet then, an odd mix of politicians, religious extremists, and academics, mostly. Almost all of them under glass. Tourists flowed through the domed-over ruins, but not many stayed long. The planet was still very dangerous over all of its unprotected surface, since the Fwndyri had thoroughly seeded it with nanophages. Those were submicroscopic constructs that sought out concentrations of human DNA. Once under the skin, they would reproduce at a geometric rate, deconstructing the body, cell by cell, building new nanophages. A person might complain of a headache and lie down, and a few hours later there would be nothing but a dry skeleton, lying in dust. When the humans were all dead, they mutated and went after DNA in general, and sterilized the world.

  White Hill and I were “bred” for immunity to the nanophages. Our DNA winds backwards, as was the case with many people born or created after that stage of the war. So we could actually go through the elaborate airlocks and step out onto the
blasted surface unprotected.

  I didn’t like her at first. We were competitors, and aliens to one another.

  When I worked through the final airlock cycle, for my first moment on the actual surface of Earth, she was waiting outside, sitting in meditation on a large flat rock that shimmered in the heat. One had to admit she was beautiful in a startling way, clad only in a glistening pattern of blue and green body paint. Everything else around was grey and black, including the hard-packed talcum that had once been a mighty jungle, Brazil. The dome behind me was a mirror of grey and black and cobalt sky.

  “Welcome home,” she said. “You’re Water Man.”

  She inflected it properly, which surprised me. “You’re from Petros?”

  “Of course not.” She spread her arms and looked down at her body. Our women always cover at least one of their breasts, let alone their genitals. “Galan, an island on Seldene. I’ve studied your cultures, a little language.”

  “You don’t dress like that on Seldene, either.” Not anywhere I’d been on the planet.

  “Only at the beach. It’s so warm here.”

  I had to agree. Before I came out, they’d told me it was the hottest autumn on record. I took off my robe and folded it and left it by the door, with the sealed food box they had given me. I joined her on the rock, which was tilted away from the sun and reasonably cool.

  She had a slight fragrance of lavender, perhaps from the body paint. We touched hands. “My name is White Hill. Zephyr-Meadow-Torrent.”

  “Where are the others?” I asked. Twenty-nine artists had been invited; one from each inhabited world. The people who had met me inside said I was the nineteenth to show up.

  “Most of them traveling. Going from dome to dome for inspiration.”

  “You’ve already been around?”

  “No.” She reached down with her toe and scraped a curved line on the hard-baked ground. “All the story’s here, anywhere. It isn’t really about history or culture.”

  Her open posture would have been shockingly sexual at home, but this was not home. “Did you visit my world when you were studying it?”

  “No, no money, at the time. I did get there a few years ago.” She smiled at me. “It was almost as beautiful as I’d imagined it.” She said three words in Petrosian. You couldn’t say it precisely in English, which doesn’t have a palindromic mood: Dreams feed art and art feeds dreams.

  “When you came to Seldene I was young, too young to study with you. I’ve learned a lot from your sculpture, though.”

  “How young can you be?” To earn this honor, I did not say.

  “In Earth years, about seventy awake. More than a hundred and forty-five in time-squeeze.”

  I struggled with the arithmetic. Petros and Seldene were twenty-two light-years apart; that’s about forty-five years’ squeeze. Earth is, what, a little less than forty light-years from her planet. That leaves enough gone time for someplace about twenty-five light-years from Petros, and back.

  She tapped me on the knee, and I flinched. “Don’t overheat your brain. I made a triangle; went to ThetaKent after your world.”

  “Really? When I was there?”

  “No, I missed you by less than a year. I was disappointed. You were why I went.” She made a palindrome in my language: Predator becomes prey becomes predator? “So here we are. Perhaps I can still learn from you.”

  I didn’t much care for her tone of voice, but I said the obvious: “I’m more likely to learn from you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so.” She smiled in a measured way. “You don’t have much to learn.”

  Or much I could, or would, learn. “Have you been down to the water?”

  “Once.” She slid off the rock and dusted herself, spanking. “It’s interesting. Doesn’t look real.” I picked up the food box and followed her down a sort of path that led us into low ruins. She drank some of my water, apologetic; hers was hot enough to brew tea.

  “First body?” I asked.

  “I’m not tired of it yet.” She gave me a sideways look, amused. “You must be on your fourth or fifth.”

  “I go through a dozen a year.” She laughed. “Actually, it’s still my second. I hung on to the first too long.”

  “I read about that, the accident. That must have been horrible.”

  “Comes with the medium. I should take up the flute.” I had been making a “controlled” fracture in a large boulder and set off the charges prematurely, by dropping the detonator. Part of the huge rock rolled over onto me, crushing my body from the hips down. It was a remote area, and by the time help arrived I had been dead for several minutes, from pain as much as anything else. “It affected all of my work, of course. I can’t even look at some of the things I did the first few years I had this body.”

  “They are hard to look at,” she said. “Not to say they aren’t well done, and beautiful, in their way.”

  “As what is not? In its way.” We came to the first building ruins and stopped. “Not all of this is weathering. Even in four hundred years.” If you studied the rubble you could reconstruct part of the design. Primitive but sturdy, concrete reinforced with composite rods. “Somebody came in here with heavy equipment or explosives. They never actually fought on Earth, I thought.”

  “They say not.” She picked up an irregular brick with a rod through it. “Rage, I suppose. Once people knew that no one was going to live.”

  “It’s hard to imagine.” The records are chaotic. Evidently the first people died two or three days after the nanophages were introduced, and no one on Earth was alive a week later. “Not hard to understand, though. The need to break something.” I remembered the inchoate anger I felt as I squirmed there helpless, dying from sculpture, of all things. Anger at the rock, the fates. Not at my own inattention and clumsiness.

  “They had a poem about that,” she said. “‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’”

  “Somebody actually wrote something during the nanoplague?”

  “Oh, no. A thousand years before. Twelve hundred.” She squatted suddenly and brushed at a fragment that had two letters on it. “I wonder if this was some sort of official building. Or a shrine or church.” She pointed along the curved row of shattered bricks that spilled into the street. “That looks like it was some kind of decoration, a gable over the entrance.” She tiptoed through the rubble toward the far end of the arc, studying what was written on the face-up pieces. The posture, standing on the balls of her feet, made her slim body even more attractive, as she must have known. My own body began to respond in a way inappropriate for a man more than three times her age. Foolish, even though that particular part is not so old. I willed it down before she could see.

  “It’s a language I don’t know,” she said. “Not Portuguese; looks like Latin. A Christian church, probably, Catholic.”

  “They used water in their religion,” I remembered. “Is that why it’s close to the sea?”

  “They were everywhere; sea, mountains, orbit. They got to Petros?”

  “We still have some. I’ve never met one, but they have a church in New Haven.”

  “As who doesn’t?” She pointed up a road. “Come on. The beach is just over the rise here.”

  I could smell it before I saw it. It wasn’t an ocean smell; it was dry, slightly choking.

  We turned a corner and I stood staring. “It’s a deep blue farther out,” she said, “and so clear you can see hundreds of metras down.” Here the water was thick and brown, the surf foaming heavily like a giant’s chocolate drink, mud piled in baked windrows along the beach. “This used to be soil?”

  She nodded. “There’s a huge river that cuts this continent in half, the Amazon. When the plants died, there was nothing to hold the soil in place.” She tugged me forward. “Do you swim? Come on.”

  “Swim in that? It’s filthy.”

  “No, it’s perfectly sterile. Besides, I have to pee.” Well, I couldn’t argue with that. I left the box on a high fragment of fa
llen wall and followed her. When we got to the beach, she broke into a run. I walked slowly and watched her gracile body, instead, and waded into the slippery heavy surf. When it was deep enough to swim, I plowed my way out to where she was bobbing. The water was too hot to be pleasant, and breathing was somewhat difficult. Carbon dioxide, I supposed, with a tang of halogen.

  We floated together for a while, comparing this soup to bodies of water on our planets and ThetaKent. It was tiring, more from the water’s heat and bad air than exertion, so we swam back in.

  * * *

  We dried in the blistering sun for a few minutes and then took the food box and moved to the shade of a beachside ruin. Two walls had fallen in together, to make a sort of concrete tent.

  We could have been a couple of precivilization aboriginals, painted with dirt, our hair baked into stringy mats. She looked odd but still had a kind of formal beauty, the dusty mud residue turning her into a primitive sculpture, impossibly accurate and mobile. Dark rivulets of sweat drew painterly accent lines along her face and body. If only she were a model, rather than an artist. Hold that pose while I go back for my brushes.

  We shared the small bottles of cold wine and water and ate bread and cheese and fruit. I put a piece on the ground for the nanophages. We watched it in silence for some minutes, while nothing happened. “It probably takes hours or days,” she finally said.

  “I suppose we should hope so,” I said. “Let us digest the food before the creatures get to it.”

  “Oh, that’s not a problem. They just attack the bonds between amino acids that make up proteins. For you and me, they’re nothing more than an aid to digestion.”

  How reassuring. “But a source of some discomfort when we go back in, I was told.”

  She grimaced. “The purging. I did it once, and decided my next outing would be a long one. The treatment’s the same for a day or a year.”