The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

“You are the one who proved that theorem,” said Oleg roughly, “and I never found experimental evidence to the contrary.”

  “So that’s how it is,” I muttered. Something hit me all at once, a year’s worth of fatigue, perhaps, and maybe now I made decisions one after another, each taking me to a different branch, each branch beginning with: “So that’s how it is” parroted over and over.

  “Well, that is all,” said Oleg and stood up abruptly. He reached to shake my hand; its fingers were, for some strange reason, dusted with chalk. “Enough already with the histrionics! You lived by hope alone for a year, looking for me, and I lost hope a year ago and had the time I needed to come to terms with it. I can do nothing for you, Dima. Not-a-thing.”

  I stood up.

  “Leaving?” Oleg asked, his voice flat, without giving me his hand. “You looked for me for such a long time. We could have coffee, dinner, you could tell me about the university. Did Kulikov defend his dissertation?”

  “You’ve been on their web site,” I shrugged.

  “No, not since—”

  “You,” I said, from the doorway, “you splice realities to make lives better.”

  “Of course,” he nodded.

  “And those you turn away?”

  “So that’s the question.” He came closer and with a long-familiar gesture put both his hands on my shoulders. His palms were unpleasantly heavy, and I sagged like Atlas under the weight of the sky.

  “You think I turn away those whose fate I cannot channel in a better direction,” he said, looking straight into my eyes. He did not even blink, and I tried not to blink as well. “You are mistaken, Dima. I have rules. Well, not quite rules; I want nothing to do with unpleasant people, or with people whose happiness depends on the suffering of others. I choose, yes. Do you think I have no right?”

  “Oh, come on,” I muttered. “It’s just that—”

  “You thought of what I could have done for you?”

  “No,” I chuckled. “You would not do this, and it’s not what I would want.”

  “You do want,” he said roughly. “Don’t lie, your eyes betray you. You want to be happy, everyone does. You want her specter to stop haunting you. You want to forget—”

  “No!”

  “Fine: to remember, just about enough to light a candle, that is sufficient. And live a happy life. You came to have your life spliced with a branch where you are happy and prosperous—”

  “No,” I said, but blinked and lowered my eyes. I wanted that. So what? This he could do, I knew. I also knew he would not lift a finger to help me.

  “Yes,” he sighed and pressed even harder (or did I imagine it?) on my shoulders. “You know, Dima, when you came in, and we recognized each other, the first thing I did was run through a list of splices, in my head, that I could have made. For you. Even if you had not asked me, I decided to do it. Because to live without Ira … I know how it was for me, but I cannot do anything for myself, because of your damned theorem. But I could help you, yes, or else what purpose do I have?”

  He took his hands from my shoulders at last, and I stood straight, feeling suddenly light. Was it the lifting of that weight that made me feel relieved, or thinking, for a moment: Oleg can, Oleg will?

  “There isn’t a single line in all of the multiverse,” he said, “where all is well for you. Not one. What can I do with that?”

  “Nonsense!” I exclaimed and stepped back from him. “You know that’s nonsense, why do you even … we discussed this problem since—”

  “Yes, we discussed,” he interrupted.

  “The multiverse is infinite!” I exclaimed. “There is an infinite number of branches of reality, and all without exception can be embodied as our reality, any version of any event, phenomenon, process, and that means—”

  “That means,” said Oleg regretfully, “that you were right, not I. You proved there’s only a finite number of branches because the wave function for each event has a limited number of solutions.”

  “Yes, but since then—”

  “But I,” Oleg raised his voice, “I maintained that there is an infinity of branches, and in the multiverse’s infinity there must exist all possibilities of human fate—happy and unhappy. I was sure! But now I know I was wrong. The branching of destinies is limited, Dima. Forgive me. I wanted. Very much. At least in Ira’s memory. It’s no use. There is a huge number of versions of your life, but none where you are happy.”

  “Well, then,” I said, feeling an emptiness in my soul which I now knew could never be filled, “we’ve resolved an old scientific debate. For once you have admitted that I’m right.”

  “The branching is finite,” he said. “Aren’t you happy to be right?”

  Did he intentionally torment me?

  “Farewell,” I said and closed the door quietly behind me. Three of the prophet’s secretaries sat at their computers, not even lifting their eyes to me.

  “The office hours are over for today,” a ceiling speaker screeched, and dozens of people crowded into the waiting room sighed as one with disappointment.

  It was windy outside and a drizzle soaked my hair, the rented car was parked two blocks away, and by the time I sat behind the wheel my shirt was plastered to my body, and thoughts had deserted me entirely, all thoughts but one: who needs a life like this?

  I drove slowly in the right lane without knowing where I was, in what part of the city, until I saw a “Dead End” sign. I turned toward the curb and killed the engine.

  We had debated once, with Oleg. Not just us; it was a popular question, fifteen years ago, in theoretic Everettics: is there a limited number of events in the world of continuous branchings? I said, yes, it is limited, and my arguments … God, I had no idea I could win the debate and lose my own life!

  Rain. It will always be raining, now.

  The phone rang, its ringtone a Hungarian dance by Brahms. I fumbled in my bag and brought the phone to my ear.

  “Dima!”

  I did not recognize the voice at first: it was Mikhail Natanovich, the doctor who treated, but could not save, Irina. “Dima, I’ve been calling you all day!”

  “My phone was off,” I said.

  “No matter! I wanted to tell you: today’s test results are much better than before. Much better! This new drug, it’s really … Dima, I think it will all turn out for the best, now. Do you hear me, Dima?”

  Will turn out for the best. New drug. Ira.

  “How is she?” I asked, squeezing the phone as if I wanted to break it.

  “Slept well all night.”

  “Ira?”

  “Irina Yakovlevna had breakfast this morning, for the first time…”

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you for calling. I will be at the hospital no later than nine this evening, as soon as I can get there.”

  I dropped the phone on the seat next to me.

  Oleg succeeded? How? He said himself—not quite an hour ago—that there’s a limited number of splices, that if she died, then …

  Was he mistaken? Or did he accomplish that which he himself considered impossible? Or found an infinity of branches and among them, one in which everything, simply everything, works out?

  I lifted the receiver and dialed his number. It was my duty to thank him, at least.

  “I need to speak with Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said when one of his secretaries answered.

  “Unfortunately—”

  “This is Mantsev, his old friend and colleague, I was just with him and want to—”

  “Unfortunately,” repeated a voice as gray as the rain beyond my window, “it’s impossible. Oleg Nikolaevich passed away immediately after you left.”

  How could that happen? He had appeared healthy and acted perfectly well when …

  “I do not understand,” I muttered. “How is this—”

  “The police are here now,” the secretary said. “I think they might want to speak with you, you were his last visitor of the day. Ten minutes after you left…”

&
nbsp; “Out with it!”

  “Oleg Nikolaevich threw himself out the window. And we are—”

  “On the sixth floor,” I finished for him.

  This is how it ends, I thought. He pushed the white curtain out of the way and stepped through.

  Rain ended. I drove to the airport as fast as I could go. At nine I had to be at the hospital. With Irina. My Irina.

  I was right after all: there is a limit to the number of splices. Oleg proved it, conclusively this time. He said he could do nothing with his fate. Of course. Except for one thing: he could interrupt it. Only then could my fate where Ira died be spliced with the branch where she survived.

  You can extend one branch by cutting off another. The law of conservation. Oleg knew.

  Why did he do this? He had every reason to hate me. What would I have done in his place, knowing there was only one possibility? What am I? A theoretician. Oleg worked in practical, experimental everettics, he did what I could only guess at. Or calculate.

  I sped up, no longer watching the speedometer.

  I knew that Irina and I—that all will be well.

  How can I live, knowing that?

  Slipping

  LAUREN BEUKES

  A miraculous second chance at life may be worth taking no matter how great the cost. Or maybe not.

  Lauren Beukes is a novelist, comics writer, script writer, and occasional journalist. Her time-traveling serial killer novel, The Shining Girls, won the August Derleth Award for best horror awarded by the British Fantasy Society, best mystery novel in the Strand Critics Choice Award, and the prestigious literary award, the University of Johannesburg Prize. She’s also the author of Broken Monsters, about broken dreams and broken people in Detroit, Zoo City, a black magic noir set in Johannesburg that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Moxyland, about a corporate apartheid state. She’s written kids’ animated TV shows for Disney, made a documentary on the biggest female-impersonation beauty pageant in Cape Town, and worked as a journalist for ten years, where she learned everything she knows about storytelling.

  1. HIGH LIFE

  The heat presses against the cab trying to find a way in past the sealed windows and the rattling air conditioner. Narrow apartment blocks swoop past on either side of the dual carriageway, occasionally broken up by a warehouse megastore. It could be Cape Town, Pearl thinks. It could be anywhere. Twenty three hours travel so far. She has never been on a plane before.

  “So what’s the best part about Karachi?” Tomislav says, trying to break the oppressive silence in the back—the three of them dazed by the journey, the girl, her promoter and the surgeon, who has not looked up from his phone since they got in the car because he is trying to get a meeting.

  The driver thinks about it, tugging at the little hairs of his moustache. “One thing is that this is a really good road. Sharah e Faisal. There’s hardly ever a traffic jam and if it rains, the road never drowns.”

  “Excellent,” Tomislav leans back, defeated. He gives Pearl an encouraging smile, but she is not encouraged. She watched the World Cup and the Olympics on TV, she knows how it is supposed to be. She stares out the window, refusing to blink in case the tears come.

  The road narrows into the city and the traffic thickens, hooting trucks and bakkies and rickshaws covered in reflecting stickers like disco balls, twinkling in the sun. They pass through the old city, with its big crumbling buildings from long ago, and into the warren of Saddar’s slums with concrete lean-tos muscling in on each other. Kachi abaadi, the driver tells them, and Pearl sounds it out under her breath. At least the shacks are not tin and that’s one difference.

  Tomislav points out the loops of graffiti in another alphabet and taps her plastic knee. “Gang signs. Just like the Cape Flats.”

  “Oh they’re gangsters all right,” the driver says. “Same people run the country.”

  “You have gangsters in your government?” Pearl is shocked.

  The cab driver clucks and meets her eyes in the rearview mirror. “You one of the racers?”

  “What clued you in?” Dr. Arturo says, without looking up. It’s the first thing he’s said all day. His thumbs tap over the screen of his phone, blunt instruments. Pearl rubs her legs self-consciously, where the tendons are visible under the joint of her knee, running into the neurocircuitry. It’s a showcase, Dr. Arturo told her when she asked him why it couldn’t look like skin. Somedays she thinks it’s beautiful. Mostly, she hates seeing the inside-out of herself.

  “Why do you think you’re in Pakistan?” the driver laughs, “You think anyone else would let this happen in their country?” He rubs his thumb and fingers together and flings it to the wind.

  2. PACKED WITH GOODNESS

  Pre-race. A huge + Games banner hangs above the entrance of the Karachi Parsi Institute or KPI. It’s an old colonial building that has been extended to accommodate them, the track built over the old cricket ground and into the slums. The school has been turned into the athlete’s village, classrooms converted to individual medical cells to cater to their unique needs. Pearl’s for example, has hermetic bio-units and sterile surfaces. The window has been fused shut to prevent the polluted air leaking in.

  In the room next door, they’ve installed extra generators for Charlotte Grange after she plugged in her exo-suit and tripped the power on the whole building. Pearl can hear her grunting through the walls. She doesn’t know what Siska Rachman has.

  She sits on the end of her bed, paging through the official programme while Tomislav paces the room end-to-end, hunched over his phone, his hand resting on his nose. “Ajda! Come on!” her promoter says into the phone, in that Slavic way, which makes the first part of the sentence top-heavy. Like Tomislav himself, still carrying his weight lifter bulk all squeezed up into his chest and neck. He doesn’t compete anymore, but the steroids keep him in shape. The neon lights and the white sheen off the walls makes his eyes look bluer, his skin paler. “Peach” she was taught in school, as if “peach” and “brown” were magically less divisive than “black” and “white” and words could fix everything. But Tomislav’s skin is not the warm orange of a summer fruit, it’s like the milky tea she drinks at home.

  Tomislav has thick black hair up his arms. She asked him about it when they first met at the Beloved One’s house on the hill. Fourteen and too young and too angry about everything that happened to mind her elders, even though her mother gasped at her rudeness and smacked her head.

  Tomislav laughed. Testosterone, kitten. He tapped the slight fuzz over her lip. You’ve got it too, that’s what makes you so strong.

  He’s made her laser all her unsightly hair since. Sports is image. Even this one.

  He sees her looking and speaks louder. “You want to get a meeting, Arturo, we gotta have something to show.” He jabs at the phone dramatically to end the call. “That guy! What does he think I’m doing all day? You all right, kitten?” He comes over to take her by the shoulders, give them a little rub. “You feeling good?”

  “Fine.” More than fine, with the crowds’ voices a low vibration through the concrete and the starting line tugging at her insides, just through that door, across the quad, down the ramp. She has seen people climbing up onto the roofs around the track with picnic blankets.

  “That’s my girl.” He snatches the programme out of her hands. “Why are you even looking at this? You know every move these girls have.”

  He means Siska Rachman. That’s all anyone wants to talk about. Pearl is sick of it, all the interviews for channels she’s never heard of. No-one told her how much of this would be talking about racing.

  “Ready when you are,” Dr. Arturo says into her head, through the audio implant in her cochlear. Back online as if he’s never been gone, checking the diagnostics. “Watch your adrenaline, Pearl. You need to be calm for the install.” He used to narrate the chemical processes, the shifting balances of hormones, the nano enhancing oxygen uptake, the shift of robotic joints, the dopamine blast, but it felt too much
like being in school; words being crammed into her head and all worthless anyway. You don’t have to name something to understand it. She knows how it feels when she hits her stride and the world opens up beneath her feet.

  “He’s ready,” she repeats to Tomislav.

  “All right, let’s get this show pumping.”

  Pearl obediently hitches up her vest with the Russian energy drink logo—one of Tomislav’s sponsors, although that’s only spare change. She has met the men who have paid for her to be here, in the glass house on the hill, wearing gaudy golf shirts and shoes and shiny watches. She never saw the men swing a club and she doesn’t know their names, but they all wanted to shake her hand and take a photograph with her.

  She feels along the rigid seam that runs in a J-hook down the side of her stomach, parallel with her hysterectomy scar, and tears open the velcroskin.

  “Let me,” Tomislav says, kneeling between her legs. She holds her flesh open while he reaches one hand up inside her abdomen. It doesn’t hurt, not anymore. The velcro releases a local anaesthetic when it opens, but she can feel an uncomfortable tugging inside, like cramps.

  Tomislav twists off the valves on either side and gently unplugs her stomach and eases it out of her. He sets it in a sterile biobox and connects it to a blood flow. By the time he turns back, she is already spooling up the accordion twist of artificial intestine, like a party magician pulling ribbons from his palm. It smells of the lab-mod bacteria and the faintest whiff of faeces. She hands it to Tomislav and he wrinkles his nose.

  “Just goes to show,” he says, folding up the slosh of crinkled plastic tubing and packing it away. “You can take the meat out of the human, but they’re still full of shit!”

  Pearl smiles dutifully, even though he has been making the same joke for the last three weeks—ever since they installed the new system.

  “Nearly there,” he holds up the hotbed factory and she nods and looks away because it makes her queasy to watch. It’s a sleek bioplug, slim as a communion wafer and packed with goodness, Dr. Arturo says, like fortified breakfast cereals. Hormones and nanotech instead of vitamins and iron.