Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  “Now isn’t that just the spirit of exploration,” the President said, with the air of a schoolteacher determined to find something positive to say about a rowdy pupil. “You’re a firecracker, Captain. Larger than life!”

  “A credit to the nation,” the Ambassador said. “Ah, sherry!”

  An overall relaxation, as trays of drinks circulated and people began to move towards the buffet. Titus seized a glass of sherry and hung back as the nobs went forward. “Monster,” Dr. Trask whispered, grinning. “So this is how Victor von Frankenstein felt!”

  “You’re a troublemaker, Titus,” Shell agreed. “You’ve got your nerve, jerking the poor Ambassador’s chain like that. I thought I’d bust a gut.”

  Titus refused to be distracted, even by the spread of food. “I like the idea of going to Tau Ceti. Who else is going? You, Lash?”

  Dr. Trask snickered at the idea. “Not with his asthma! And you’re never getting me up in one of those things. Clonal surgeons have plenty of work Earthside, grafting new limbs and boobs and organs onto people. Shell’s the one who’ll sweep those Forties off their feet.”

  Titus blinked. He had not meant to suggest that women could be explorers. “If they have feet,” someone else in the line remarked.

  Shell sipped her sherry and laughed. “Did you see that awful cartoon on the Today page?”

  “Well, prophylactics wouldn’t take up all that much cargo space!”

  The talk veered off into jokes and chatter that went right over Titus’s head. “It sounds like a perfect job for me,” he grumbled, accepting the plate someone handed him. What an odd and casual way to eat — and they called this a banquet? To Titus, banquets meant waiters and service, not shuffling through a line for bangers and mash.

  Dr. Trask plopped a scoop of potatoes onto her plate and said, very kindly, “Titus, the teams have been in training for ten years. It’d be an awful lot of work for you to get up to speed.”

  “Frankly, old man, you were the highest example of the explorer as amateur,” Dr. Lash said. “But this is the age of the professional. It’s no reflection on your own worth.”

  In fact Titus did not believe this. His entire experience, leavened with the example of Buck Rogers in the 25th century, assured him that all he had to do was try. Surely a concerted effort would bring success. He helped himself to an enormous plateful of food, only belatedly noticing that he had cleared off half the sausages. How odd, that meat should make up such a small fraction of the offerings! But he had always been a carnivore, and it would surely be incorrect to shovel part of his portion back onto the platter. Instead he allowed them to seat him at the head table.

  The President had asked Dr. Piotr a question about the economic impact of speedy space travel, and the talkative scientist was off and away. “At FTL,” he said with enthusiasm, “the planets are just suburbs. We can colonize the solar system! No more of this three-years-to-Mars stuff. We’ve already gained so much from this one Fortie contact, I can’t wait to see what else is coming.”

  Every word was English, but Titus found he had no idea what was being said. He leaned nearer to Shell. “Do you understand him?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t.”

  She laughed. “And Piotr prides himself on being a populizer, too! Don’t disappoint him by telling him.”

  “Hamilton’s such a show-off,” Sabrina Trask muttered from beyond Shell. “Just because she taught economics and math at Stanford.”

  Titus wasn’t even sure what economics was. Something to do with money, he hazarded. Born to wealth, all he knew of money was how to spend it. He wondered what precisely Buck Rogers had lived on, and how he had got into the 25th century’s military. “Shell, how much education have you had?”

  “Me? Gosh, let me think — twelve years of school, four years college, medical school, another two for my communications doctorate…If you count the Fortie training, I’ve been in school just about all my life.”

  Dr. Piotr had finished his remarks, and the President applauded, saying, “Doctor, I swear if you ever want to quit the Paticalar business, I have a job for you in politics. You could sell shoes to snakes.”

  The doctor grinned, pinker than ever. “Once, Madam President, you might have tempted me. Now, I know the better part. This is where the fun is going to be.”

  “Gad, I envy you young people,” the Ambassador said. “Tell us more about the time business — what’s this new time window trick the newsies are chattering about?”

  Obligingly, Dr. Piotr said, “Well, it’s disruptive and difficult to pull a real object or person through time. A perfect candidate like the captain here is rare. It would be as much fun, and cheaper, to just pull light — images. I wouldn’t mind a photograph of a velociraptor, would you? We could make a fortune on the posters and screensavers alone.”

  This is beyond me, Titus admitted silently. He bowed his head to the inevitable. Buck Rogers was a cheat, the invention of some fantasizing duffer who’d never actually had to work with less than seventy percent of the knowledge necessary. Titus would live the reality, and he could acknowledge now that much of it would be forever beyond his comprehension. To swallow down the entire 21st century was too big a mouthful. His only hope was to select an area to worry at and, please God, to master.

  But which area? If he wasn’t going to explore, then what? “Lash, what am I going to live on? They must have proved my will and settled the estate. I don’t suppose my heirs’ descendants, my great-grandnephews and so on, will want to part with the money even if there’s a bean left after all this time. Will you people support me until I die?”

  “A stipend’s in the works,” Dr. Lash said. “PTICA is responsible for your existence, Titus — you won’t starve.”

  “But I bet anything you like, you’re not going to want to live out your life as a couch potato,” Shell added. “I can’t wait to see what the newsies will say, about your reconquering the American Colonies!”

  Dr. Lash shuddered. “I could wish, Titus, that you’d be more careful about what you say!”

  Titus ate steadily, thinking hard. His life had been handed back to him on a platter. But the President, of all people, had put her finger on the key question: what could he do with it? He knew how to fight, and he knew how to die. He had a sense there was very little call for such skills in the 21st century. As useful as knowing how to blow a duck call, he thought sardonically. Perhaps he could assist that young black at the museum.

  He had it now: enough information so that he could distinguish what was truly vital. Clear as day, Titus saw that if he didn’t carve a niche for himself, he would indeed become a couch potato — he was repelled without even knowing what that was. There was a higher fence to clear than just learning to exist here. The crucial battle lay not in the past, nor the present, but the future. From infancy, playing with popguns and wooden horses, he had always known what he would be: a soldier. Now in this strange new world this destiny was gone, and he was adrift. He could do anything he set his will to. But first he had to find a new destiny to replace the one he’d left behind in 1912. Else he’d become a pet, a parasite, leeching off the moderns for the rest of his useless life, trotted out for display every now and then to bark for the visiting brass.

  It reminded him of his first sight of the Himalayas, in India. Some dashed impressive mountains, but then the morning haze lifted for a moment, and the eye took in the colossal heights beyond, snow-capped peaks rearing up to pierce the sky. What he had thought was the real battle had again been nothing but the first skirmish. How much easier a sharp crisis would be! Walking to one’s end in a blizzard, perhaps. “May be some time,” indeed! This slow stubborn uphill slog would last till his dying day — in the spirit of locking the barn door too late, he swore that when he drew that final breath it should not be expended on feeble ironies that would come back to haunt him.

  Wars came to an end in a year or two. Even manhauling to the Pole and back had to be accomplished in
six or seven months during the austral summer. But this was never going to end. It would call for more pluck and resolution and bottom than anything else he’d ever set hand to, because it would never be over. For a moment the prospect was unspeakably daunting, and he slumped over his empty plate. But with an effort he straightened. Stiff upper lip and all that. He had conclusively demonstrated, after all, that he could do anything he set his mind to. “I’ve survived far worse,” he said aloud.

  Dr. Lash glanced up. “What’s that you say, Titus?”

  No time like the present to begin. Titus gazed thoughtfully at the other man’s little machine, lying beside his plate. “Lash…what time is it?”

  * * *

  Marcher

  CHRIS BECKETT

  British writer Chris Beckett is a frequent contributor to Interzone. A former social worker, he’s now a university lecturer living in Cambridge, England. His story “La Macchina” was in our Ninth Annual Collection.

  Social critics often complain about our rootless, overly mobile society, where nothing is permanent, jobs and relationships are fleeting and transitory, and few people stay in the same place for too long — but as the chilling story that follows suggests, they ain’t seen nothing yet!

  So…um…What do you do for a living?” the young woman asked. (Well, it is difficult to think of original questions to ask people at parties.)

  The young man braced himself. “I am an immigration officer.”

  “Oh, I…”

  He laughed a little bitterly. “Be honest. Not what you expect to meet at a party of leftish 20- and 30-somethings!”

  “No, I suppose…”

  “You thought a teacher perhaps, or maybe a software engineer, not someone who chucks out illegal immigrants and shoves weeping asylum seekers back onto planes.”

  The man checked himself. (His name incidentally was Huw.)

  “Sorry,” he said. “That must have sounded a bit aggressive. The truth is I like to see myself as a leftish 20-something, and I sometimes feel like some kind of pariah among my peers.”

  “I can imagine. In fact…”

  She was going to say that she sympathized, that her own job also often attracted negative comment. But she decided to ask another question instead. He was an interesting young man: well dressed in a nicely understated way, quite poised, attractively reserved.

  “So, why did you become an immigration officer? Did the pariah status appeal in some way? Or…”

  “It seemed to me that it was too easy to disparage jobs of that kind. Mickey over there for example…” (Huw pointed to a university lecturer with tousled hair), “or Susan there. They are always having a go at me about the iniquities of forcing people to go home when they want to stay here. ‘No one leaves their own country except for a very good reason,’ Mickey always says. But what I always ask him is this: is he saying that there should be no immigration controls at all? Is he saying people should come into this country entirely as they please, even if that meant taking in a million people a year? He will never answer my question. He waffles about how a million wouldn’t come and so on, but he never answers my question.”

  “I can imagine,” said the young woman, who knew Mickey slightly.

  “A country does need a boundary of some sort,” Huw went on. “An entity of any kind needs a boundary. And if a country has a boundary, it inevitably means that some people who want to come in will be turned away, by force if persuasion doesn’t work. It seems to me that people like Mickey don’t really offer any kind of alternative. So really what their position amounts to is: let someone else do the dirty work, so I can keep my hands clean.”

  He smiled. “Right. Now I’ll shut up.”

  “No, please don’t. I’m interested. And you haven’t answered my question. Why did you become an immigration officer?”

  “For the reasons I’ve just explained! Because keeping boundaries is necessary and somebody has to do it. People like Mickey and Sue say the service is full of racists and reactionaries. Well, unless liberal-minded people are prepared to join, it would be, wouldn’t it?”

  The young woman laughed. “Yes, but that still doesn’t explain why you joined. The world needs liberal-minded doctors too, no doubt, and teachers and…police officers…all sorts of things. So why this in particular? Why this for you?”

  “I…um…”

  Huw was genuinely bewildered. He could dimly perceive that this was indeed a different kind of question but it wasn’t one he’d ever asked himself. It was like a glimpse through a door into what might be another room, or might more disturbingly be another entire world. He found himself noticing the young woman, not in a sexual way particularly, as far as he could tell, but just noticing her. She had made a connection.

  “I don’t really know,” said Huw. “Why do you think?”

  She laughed and for some reason blushed, which made him blush too.

  “Well I don’t know you!” she exclaimed. “How could I say?”

  “I just thought you sounded as if you might have a theory.”

  She looked away, a movement that he found graceful and sweet (so now he was aware of sex). Then she shrugged and turned back to him.

  “Well, I don’t know you. But since you ask, my guess would be that there must be a reason within yourself that you are preoccupied with defending boundaries. Perhaps there is something inside that disturbs you and that you are trying to keep in, or something outside that frightens you. Perhaps you are afraid that if you get too close to anyone they will invade you and gobble you up.”

  She saw the discomfort in Huw’s face.

  “Sorry,” she said, “that came out rather…”

  “Not at all. I did ask. A bit deep for me, I’m afraid, though.”

  “I’ve upset you,” she said, “and I really didn’t mean to.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said.

  But he changed the subject abruptly, jaggedly, uttering some banalities about turning 30 (this was Susan’s 30th) and how (help!) the next big leap after that would be 40. There was no connection between them now. The conversation petered out. She said she was going to try some of that delicious-looking food, and it was nice to meet him. He hurried for another glass of wine.

  “Damn,” he thought. “Why did I let that shake me? Why did I let her see it shook me?”

  Later he thought, “I’m so self-absorbed. I didn’t ask her name or what she did or anything.”

  He went to look for her, but it seemed she had eaten her food and left.

  Back at his flat after the party, Huw needed somehow to collect himself before he could rest. As he sometimes did at times like this, he took a notebook out of a drawer and tried to write something down. He tried to define himself in some way.

  “Marcher,” he wrote at the top of the page.

  Sometimes old words help. “Marcher” had more of a ring to it than “immigration officer.”

  “Let us put on armour, (he wrote)

  Let us wear breastplates of polished bronze

  And cover our faces with ferocious masks.

  Let us be pure. Let us accept the cold.

  Let us foreswear the search for love.

  Let us ride in the bare places where the ground is clinker

  And the towers are steel…”

  And so on. He was rather pleased with it. (But then it was late at night and he had taken a fair quantity of wine). Feeling he had somehow redeemed himself, he undressed, went to bed and was soon asleep.

  The phone rang at seven o’clock in the morning. It was Huw’s boss, Roger, to tell him a new case had surfaced in a Special Category estate to the south of town. Everyone else in the Section was tied up with other cases. Could he go straight there and make a start on the investigation?

  At half past eight, slightly the worse for last night’s wine, Huw was waiting in his car to go through the estate checkpoint. There were two vehicles ahead of him. In front of the checkpoint was a large sign:

  DEPARTMENT FOR SPECI
AL CATEGORY ADMINISTRATION

  — WORCESTER DISTRICT —

  WELCOME TO PERRY MEADOWS

  THIS IS A Special CATEGORY ESTATE WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE Welfare ADMINISTRATION ACT YOU MAY BE REQUIRED TO PRODUCE IDENTIFICATION

  DESCA

  LET’S TACKLE THIS TOGETHER!

  The other cars passed through and Huw handed up his ID to the DeSCA Constabulary officer. This was the border between the wider world and the world of the welfare claimants, the “dreggies” as they were known.

  The officer swiped Huw’s card in front of a reader.

  “Immigration Service, eh?” he observed with a knowing grin. “Nothing to do with these rumours about appearances and disappearances by any chance?”

  Huw reluctantly returned the smile. He disliked this sort of game. “Sorry, mate. No comment.”

  “Of course,” said the officer, “quite correct. Welcome to Perry Meadows.”

  Huw had visited a fair few such places. Not that his agency had anything to do with the administration of Special Category estates, but the kinds of cases that he dealt with often cropped up in them (as well as in prisons, mental hospitals and private boarding schools).

  Some estates were old concrete jungles, former “council estates” from the 1960s and ’70s of the last century. But Perry Meadows was an estate of the new kind. It had trees and shrubs and artificial hills to screen off homes from the sight and sound of traffic. It had well-equipped playgrounds and shining community centres. It had attractive houses in at least ten quite different designs, with playful features like round windows and the occasional clock-tower or weather-vane, all brightly painted in cheerful nursery colours.

  “These are not ‘sink estates,’” the Secretary of State for Special Category Administration had recently declared, “and they are not ‘dreg’ estates. They are decent dwelling places for human beings: fellow-citizens in our society who find themselves for whatever reason, outside of the economy and who require the special, focused, concentrated help that my department can offer, to find their way back inside it…”