The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Weeks passed. Then two months. The Colorado summer slipped into early autumn. The days grew shorter but more pleasant. After three hard interviews, I was offered a job at a private school in Denver. I would be teaching sixth graders. They knew my history, but evidently thought that I had changed for the better. It was Friday when I finished the final interview. They said they would call me the next day, on Saturday.

  They were as good as their word. They sounded truly pleased when they offered me the job—perhaps they knew it meant a new start for me, a new life. They were surprised by my answer.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I’ve changed my mind.” I knew now that I could never teach eleven-year-olds again. They would all remind me of Allan, or of Kelly Dahl.

  There was a shocked silence. “Perhaps you would like another day to think about it,” said Mr. Martin, the headmaster. “This is an important decision. You could call us on Monday.”

  I started to say no, began to explain that my mind was made up, but then I heard Wait until Monday. Do not decide today.

  I paused. My own thoughts had echoed like this before since returning from Kelly Dahl. “Mr. Martin,” I said at last, “that might be a good idea. If you don’t mind, I’ll call you Monday morning with my decision.”

  On Sunday morning I picked up the New York Times at Eads tobacco store, had a late breakfast, watched the 11 A.M. Brinkley news show on ABC, finished reading the Times Book Review, and went down to the Jeep about 1:00 in the afternoon. It was a beautiful fall day and the drive up Left Hand Canyon and then up the hard Jeep trail took less than an hour.

  The blue sky was crisscrossed with contrails through the aspen leaves when I stopped the Jeep ten feet from the entrance to the vertical mine shaft.

  “Kiddo,” I said aloud, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel. “You found me once. I found you once. Do you think we can do it together this time?”

  I was talking to myself and it felt silly. I said nothing else. I put the Jeep in first and floored the accelerator. The hood first rose as we bounced over the lip of the pit, I caught a glimpse of yellow aspen leaves, blue sky, white contrails, and then the black circle of the pit filled the windshield.

  I hit the brake with both feet on the pedal. The Jeep slid, bucked, slewed to the left, and came to a stop with the right front tire hanging over the open pit. Shaking slightly, I backed the Jeep up a foot or two, set the brake, got out of the vehicle and leaned against it.

  Not this way. Not this time. I did not know if the thought was mine alone. I hoped not.

  I stepped closer to the edge, stared down into the pit, and then stepped back.

  * * *

  Months have passed. I took the teaching job in Denver. I love it. I love being with the children. I love being alive again. I am once again the sage on the stage, but a quieter sage this time.

  The bad dreams continue to bother me. Not dreams of Kelly Dahl, but Kelly Dahl’s dreams. I wake from nightmares of Carl coming into my small room in the trailer, of trying to speak to my mother as she smokes a cigarette and does not listen. I fly awake from dreams of awakening to Carl’s heavy hand over my mouth, of his foul breath on my face.

  I feel closest to Kelly Dahl at these times. Sitting up on the bed, sweat pouring from me, my heart pounding, I can feel her presence. I like to think that these dreams are an exorcism for her, a long overdue offer of love and help for me.

  It is impossible to explain the feeling that Kelly Dahl and I shared that last night in her world … in our world. Galaxies colliding, I think I said, and I have since looked up the photographic telescope images of that phenomenon: hundreds of billions of stars passing in close proximity as great spiral clusters pinwheel through one another, gravities interacting and changing each spiral forever but no stars actually colliding. This has some of the sense of what I felt that night, but does not explain the aftermath—the knowledge of being changed forever, of being filled with another human’s mind and heart and memories, of solitude ceasing. It is impossible to share the knowledge of being not just two people, but four—ourselves here, and truly ourselves where we meet again on that alternate place of going away.

  It is not mystical. It is not religious. There is no afterlife, only life.

  I cannot explain. But on some days out on the recess grounds, on some warm Colorado winter days when the sunlight is like a solid thing and the high peaks of the Divide gleam to the west as if they were yards away rather than miles, then I close my eyes as the children play, allow myself to hear the wind above the familiar murmur of children at play, and then the echoes of that separate but equal reality are clear enough. Then all this becomes the memory, the echo.

  * * *

  The Flatirons are gone, but a dirt road leads to low cliffs that look out over the Inland Sea. The Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and lodgepole trees are gone; the narrow road winds through tropical forests of sixty-foot and flowering cycads the size of small redwoods. Cedarlike conifers let down lacy branches and one unidentifiable tree holds clusters of seeds that resemble massive shaving brushes. The air is humid and almost dizzyingly thick with the smell of eucalyptus, magnolia, something similar to apple blossoms, sycamore, and a riot of more exotic scents. Insects buzz and something very large crashes through the underbrush deep in the fern forest to my right as the Jeep approaches the coast.

  Where the Flatirons should be, tidal flats and lagoons reflect the sky. Everything is more textured and detailed than I remember from earlier visits. The sea stretches out to the east, its wave action strong and constant. The road leads to a causeway and the causeway leads across the tidal pools to Mont-Saint-Michel, the city-cathedral and its high walls gleaming in late-afternoon light.

  Once I pause on the causeway and reach back for my binoculars, scanning the city walls and parapets.

  The Ford Bronco is parked outside the gate. Kelly Dahl is on the rampart of the highest wall, near the cathedral entrance high on the stone island. She is wearing a red sweatshirt and I notice that her hair has grown out a bit. The sunlight must be glinting on my field glasses, for as I watch she smiles slightly and raises one hand to wave at me even though I am still a quarter of a mile away. I set the glasses back in their case and drive on. To my right, in one of the deep pools far out beyond the quicksand flats, a long-necked plesiosaur, perhaps of the alasmosaurian variety, lifts a flat head studded with its fish-catching basket of teeth, peers nearsightedly across the flats at the sound of my Jeep’s engine, and then submerges again in the murky water. I stop a moment to watch the ripples but the head does not reappear. Behind me, where the Flatirons and Boulder once were—will someday be—something roars a challenge in the forest of cycads and ferns.

  Focusing on the dot of red high on the miracle that is Mont-Saint-Michel, imagining that I can see her waving now—somehow seeing her clearly even without the field glasses—I get the Jeep in gear and drive on.

  THINK LIKE A DINOSAUR

  James Patrick Kelly

  Like his friend and frequent collaborator John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and went on to become one of the most respected and prominent new writers of the eighties. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially the recent Wildlife, he has perhaps had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business; indeed, Kelly stories such as “Solstice,” “The Prisoner of Chillon,” “Glass Cloud,” “Mr. Boy,” “Pogrom,” and “Home Front” must certainly be numbered among the most inventive and memorable short works of the decade. Kelly’s first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984. It was followed by Freedom Beach, a novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look into the Sun. His most recent book is the above-mentioned Wildlife, and he is currently at work on another novel. A collaboration between Kelly and Kessel appeared in our Second Annual Collection; and solo Kelly stories have appeared in our Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, E
ighth, and Ninth Annual Collections. Born in Mineola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

  Here he takes us to an alien-operated space station in close Earth orbit that might prove to be the gate to the wide universe beyond for humanity, if we can only learn to see things in the proper cosmic perspective—and if we are willing to pay the price that such a perspective entails.

  Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station’s delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian’s idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.

  “Welcome back.” The float’s whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it down the hallway.

  She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lots of migrators are devastated when they come out of the assembler; it’s because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life’s great adventure was over.

  “Matthew?” she said.

  “Michael.” I couldn’t help but be pleased that she remembered me. After all, she had changed my life.

  * * *

  I’ve guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri’s is the only quantum scan I’ve ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm3. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelon and she’d had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal signal. She understood what it meant to balance the equation.

  I first met her on June 22, 2069. She shuttled over from Lunex’s L1 port and came through our airlock at promptly 10:15, a small, roundish woman with black hair parted in the middle and drawn tight against her skull. They had darkened her skin against epsilon Leo’s UV; it was the deep blue-black of twilight. She was wearing a striped clingy and velcro slippers to help her get around for the short time she’d be navigating our .2 micrograv.

  “Welcome to Tuulen Station.” I smiled and offered my hand. “My name is Michael.” We shook. “I’m supposed to be a sapientologist but I also moonlight as the local guide.”

  “Guide?” She nodded distractedly. “Okay.” She peered past me, as if expecting someone else.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” I said, “the dinos are in their cages.”

  Her eyes got wide as she let her hand slip from mine. “You call the Hanen dinos?”

  “Why not?” I laughed. “They call us babies. The weeps, among other things.”

  She shook her head in amazement. People who’ve never met a dino tended to romanticize them: the wise and noble reptiles who had mastered superluminal physics and introduced Earth to the wonders of galactic civilization. I doubt Kamala had ever seen a dino play poker or gobble down a screaming rabbit. And she had never argued with Linna, who still wasn’t convinced that humans were psychologically ready to go to the stars.

  “Have you eaten?” I gestured down the corridor toward the reception rooms.

  “Yes … I mean, no.” She didn’t move. “I am not hungry.”

  “Let me guess. You’re too nervous to eat. You’re too nervous to talk, even. You wish I’d just shut up, pop you into the marble, and beam you out. Let’s just get this part the hell over with, eh?”

  “I don’t mind the conversation, actually.”

  “There you go. Well, Kamala, it is my solemn duty to advise you that there are no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Gend. And no chicken vindaloo. What’s my name again?”

  “Michael?”

  “See, you’re not that nervous. Not one taco, or a single slice of eggplant pizza. This is your last chance to eat like a human.”

  “Okay.” She did not actually smile—she was too busy being brave—but a corner of her mouth twitched. “Actually, I would not mind a cup of tea.”

  “Now, tea they’ve got.” She let me guide her toward reception room D; her slippers snicked at the velcro carpet. “Of course, they brew it from lawn clippings.”

  “The Gendians don’t keep lawns. They live underground.”

  “Refresh my memory.” I kept my hand on her shoulder; beneath the clingy, her muscles were rigid. “Are they the ferrets or the things with the orange bumps?”

  “They look nothing like ferrets.”

  We popped through the door bubble into reception D, a compact rectangular space with a scatter of low, unthreatening furniture. There was a kitchen station at one end, a closet with a vacuum toilet at the other. The ceiling was blue sky; the long wall showed a live view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline, baking in the late June sun. Kamala had just finished her doctorate at MIT.

  I opaqued the door. She perched on the edge of a couch like a wren, ready to flit away.

  While I was making her tea, my fingernail screen flashed. I answered it and a tiny Silloin came up in discreet mode. She didn’t look at me; she was too busy watching arrays in the control room. = A problem, = her voice buzzed in my earstone, = most negligible, really. But we will have to void the last two from today’s schedule. Save them at Lunex until first shift tomorrow. Can this one be kept for an hour? =

  “Sure,” I said. “Kamala, would you like to meet a Hanen?” I transferred Silloin to a dino-sized window on the wall. “Silloin, this is Kamala Shastri. Silloin is the one who actually runs things. I’m just the doorman.”

  Silloin looked through the window with her near eye, then swung around and peered at Kamala with her other. She was short for a dino, just over a meter tall, but she had an enormous head that teetered on her neck like a watermelon balancing on a grapefruit. She must have just oiled herself because her silver scales shone. = Kamala, you will accept my happiest intentions for you? = She raised her left hand, spreading the skinny digits to expose dark crescents of vestigial webbing.

  “Of course, I.…”

  = And you will permit us to render you this translation? =

  She straightened. “Yes.”

  = Have you questions? =

  I’m sure she had several hundred, but at this point was probably too scared to ask. While she hesitated, I broke in. “Which came first, the lizard or the egg?”

  Silloin ignored me. = It will be excellent for you to begin when? =

  “She’s just having a little tea,” I said, handing her the cup. “I’ll bring her along when she’s done. Say an hour?”

  Kamala squirmed on the couch. “No, really, it will not take me.…”

  Silloin showed us her teeth, several of which were as long as piano keys. = That would be most appropriate, Michael. = She closed; a gull flew through the space where her window had been.

  “Why did you do that?” Kamala’s voice was sharp.

  “Because it says here that you have to wait your turn. You’re not the only migrator we’re sending this morning.” This was a lie, of course; we had had to cut the schedule because Jodi Latchaw,
the other sapientologist assigned to Tuulen, was at the University of Hipparchus presenting our paper on the Hanen concept of identity. “Don’t worry, I’ll make the time fly.”

  For a moment, we looked at each other. I could have laid down an hour’s worth of patter; I’d done that often enough. Or I could have drawn her out on why she was going: no doubt she had a blind grandma or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes, not to mention potential spin-offs which could well end tuberculosis, famine, and premature ejaculation, blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left her alone in the room to read the wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.

  “Tell me a secret,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A secret, you know, something no one else knows.”

  She stared as if I’d just fallen off Mars.

  “Look, in a little while you’re going some place that’s what … three hundred and ten light-years away? You’re scheduled to stay for three years. By the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous and elsewhere; we’ll probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise not to tell.”

  She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. “This is another test, right? After everything they have put me through, they still have not decided whether to send me.”

  “Oh no, in a couple of hours you’ll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking.”

  “You are crazy.”

  “Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It’s from the Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I’ll go first. If my secret isn’t juicy enough, you don’t have tell me anything.”

  Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn’t being swallowed by the big blue marble.

  “I was brought up Catholic,” I said, settling onto a chair in front of her. “I’m not anymore, but that’s not the secret. My parents sent me to Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught physics, which I got a ‘D’ in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.