The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  But what a magnificent laugh it was.

  I lowered my forkful of peach. "Why are you still here in this godforsaken place?" Kelly still had plenty of money—Nick's misadventures in orbit had barely depleted his fortunes, even after the staggering fines assessed against his estate for sundry air traffic and orbital protocol violations. She could have checked on the dimple then headed for Tahiti.

  She cocked her head. "I could ask the same question, with more justification. I'm waiting for my husband, making sure you lot don't muck up his chances of returning. Keeping my eye on the dimple. What are you waiting for, Mr. Diedrich? Why do you keep coming back?"

  I couldn't give her a true answer, not one that she would accept.

  The melting of the snow was like a revelation.

  Patches of green appeared in the unremitting white of the landscape just as the first anniversary of Nick Maclnnes's telephone call from the stars approached.

  In celebration of one or the other, Kelly and I hiked out to the lake to inspect the dimple. All winter long, it hadn't frozen over, despite the blankets of snow on all sides, despite the fact that other lakes in the region were solid sheets of ice.

  The dimple still appeared much as it had the first day I had seen it, even with the snow on the north side of the lake—wide, unnatural, a mystery to be solved.

  And the key stood next to me.

  "In some ways I'm waiting for the same thing as you, you know," I said finally.

  She was silent for a long time. I knew she understood me —during the time we had spent together over the last winter, we had developed that odd pattern of shortcuts and silences that many married couples use to communicate. I just barely remembered it from my own failed marriage.

  She nodded out at the dimple. "You were born in the United States?"

  Non sequitur. We had advanced to those as well. But I still didn't know where she was going with this. "Yes."

  "You've been on the winning team all your life. You don't have a clue what it's like to be Canadian, having the world's biggest brother next door." A hare hopped into our line of vision. I watched it make tracks in the snow left in the sun's shadow.

  "The United States," Kelly continued, not looking at me. "The 'we did it first' country. You build the space shuttle, we build a robot arm. Canada makes another contribution to progress."

  She seemed to expect a serious answer. I didn't give it to her.

  "And now your government keeps sending you here to babysit me. Because the hard men with the bright lights didn't learn anything."

  "No one is forcing me."

  She gave me a look that asked me whom I thought I was kidding, one eyebrow raised and her wide lips somewhere close to a smile. "No, but I know why you're here. You hate it, the whole world hates it, but especially you Yanks. You hate that a Canadian went to the stars first, without you."

  She was partly right.

  But only partly.

  Kelly was a hard nut to crack, laughter or no laughter. It wasn't until we'd been alone together regularly for almost a year before she started calling me by my first name.

  Even though I had been waiting for it for what seemed forever, I almost didn't notice. We were out on the lake in the park's Ranger Cherokee to take some measurements of our own of the surface temperature near the dimple, cross-checking the instruments. My Geiger counter kept acting up —the third one the agency had sent me —but there was nothing wrong with our old-fashioned thermometers.

  I had no interest in taking the boat into the middle. The drop to the flat surface of the dimple was about ten feet and looked vaguely like a ring of waterfalls.

  "I'm keeping at least five boat lengths away," I said. "We'll circle."

  Kelly trailed the thermometer on a length of fishing line. "Fine with me, Bruce."

  I was so busy navigating the rim of the dimple, the fact that she had called me "Bruce" didn't immediately register. When it did, it was like a kick to the gut, and I jerked the tiller toward the edge.

  I corrected immediately, and Kelly looked up. "Temperature holding steady here. What about you?"

  "I'm fine."

  The pines whistled with the mountain wind; even in July, it was chilly up here. As I drove the boat, I watched a hawk work the thermals off toward the granite massif that sheltered the headwaters of the Kicking Horse River. There was something seriously wrong with me if Kelly's use of my first name felt as intimate as a kiss.

  It was about time I called my boss, Marge Williams, and returned to Maryland again for a while.

  Somehow, I didn't have much success fleeing Emerald Lake. The next time I came back, I came back for good. The ostensible excuse was Marge's gentle insistence — the government still wanted whatever information Kelly Maclnnes could provide badly enough to make it a permanent assignment. The potential value of what Nick had done, even with its fatal flaws, outweighed any cost of my time and effort.

  But the real reason was Kelly. NSA couldn't force me, given the radiation risk— and they didn't have to.

  I returned in October. To my surprise, she was waiting at the park landing zone as the helicopter came in.

  "What took you so long!" she shouted out over the whirring of the blades as I hopped down from the cabin. "We've had no less than seven dimple-fans succeed in breaching security since you left."

  "Seven! Guess I better get back on the job." Of course I had already been informed about the handful of trespassers who weren't bright enough to be scared off by radioactive fallout—Marge had used them as a further argument to get me to return. For the good of the project, of course. And Kelly's safety. That and a huge bonus I could put aside to finance my medical bills if I ended up with cancer in a decade or two.

  It all seemed worth it with Kelly glad to see me. Perhaps it was just the basic human need for companionship, but I was happy to delude myself into thinking it was more.

  By our third year at Emerald Lake, it began to appear that the world had forgotten us. Over the winter, attempts to breach park security had dwindled to nothing, and even with the arrival of spring and the second anniversary of the appearance of the dimple, there had been less than half a dozen. Of course, I still spoke with headquarters nearly every week. We also had occasional contact with maintenance personnel and an RCMP trooper by the name of Sergeant Perry who actually came by on horseback when the weather was good and sometimes brought us old newspapers. I went back to Maryland regularly for my quarterly mission reviews and radiation assessments, and we were connected with the outside world through the Internet, but for the most part we were alone.

  Me, Kelly, and the dimple.

  She looked at that damn dimple every day as if Nick Maclnnes was going to come walking out of it and embrace her. I just looked at it.

  And so we hadn't become lovers. To me she was a widow, but Kelly thought of herself as a wife.

  An extremely loyal wife.

  We got along well enough, had even become friends of sorts. That is if you disregarded the fact that I dreamed about the scent of her every night.

  It was a warm day in late August when I finally asked the question. "So, why are we still here?"

  Kelly and I sat in front of the lodge on a little pebbled strip of land too modest to call a beach. The dimple punctuated the lake in front of us, and the mountains loomed high in the sky around it. For a change it was warm enough that I didn't have to wear a jacket.

  "Why are you still here?"

  I shrugged. "You're my job." You and Nick, I thought, but I tried to say his name as little as possible. "According to my boss, they don't have anything else for me."

  She placed her left hand on my right forearm, a rare moment of physical contact between us. "Oh, surely there's more for you to do than wait by a lake. You Americans, you always have some mess to go fix. Or make."

  I didn't move a muscle, afraid to dislodge her touch. "I wouldn't have to be here all the time just to oversee the security of the site. Your husband achieved something no one eve
r did before him, and there are a lot of people who want to know what he didn't tell us." What you're not telling us. "Marge sent me here to find out why you're still keeping such a sharp eye on the dimple."

  Kelly smiled, one eyebrow arched. "Marge?"

  "Sure. Not everyone is as afraid of first names as you are."

  She moved her hand away. Me and my big mouth. My arm still tingled where her fingers had been.

  "Actually," she said, "I'm waiting for another message from him."

  I couldn't help laughing. "Another phone call?"

  She grinned. "No, no. Nick promised to set a sign in the heavens." Despite her grin, I had the strange feeling that she was serious.

  After the snows melted the next spring, Kelly started bugging me to go into the center of the dimple with her, a squint of worry around her eyes. The thing had never frozen over, even as the ice crusted around the edges. A heavy snow could cover it for a day or so, before the snow blanket sagged into the warm water beneath. The dimple was there like a great blind eye in the water, staring at the sky, trapping us in its unseeing gaze.

  I studied the curious phenomenon that had become such an everyday part of life. "How do you propose we get back out if we go down in there?"

  Kelly gazed at me speculatively. "How good a swimmer are you, Bruce?"

  I shook my head. "No, no way."

  She gave me her wide smile. I could almost believe I had imagined the worry— but only almost. "If we had a long enough rope with us, you could belay the boat back for sure. You're strong. I bet you're a good swimmer."

  "I was all-New England in prep school," I admitted. "But I'm still not going to do it."

  "Why not?"

  Oh, Christ, Kelly. "One, I don't want to drown in those damned waterfalls. Two, I don't want to put my body near that thermal gradient without a boat between me and it. The overflight data suggested ice layers down there, at the reverse end of the heat rise. That's why we have cameras and instrument packages."

  "Sometimes there's nothing like a first-hand look."

  "No."

  "You're already exposing yourself to constant radiation," she pointed out, flirting and pleading at the same time. I hadn't thought her capable of either. "Why worry about a simple mascon?"

  This time I said it out loud. "Christ, Kelly."

  She let loose a lovely peal of laughter and took my elbow. "Besides, it's not like you have anything else to do this summer."

  When Kelly realized I wasn't going to get into that water for her anytime soon, she decided we needed to build a "dimple observatory." We spent several days hauling lumber from the park's maintenance shed to a beautiful old rock maple right up by the water with just the right spread of branches. Kelly's big laugh echoed between the trees and the mountains more often than I had ever heard it as we messed with ropes and nails, building our tree fort.

  I had thought I was lost in love before, but I hadn't known how charming, how fun she could be.

  Our Mountie showed up while we were up there hammering away. He regarded us-seriously for a moment from his big bay mare, like a critical parent.

  Kelly took the nail out of her mouth and called down to him. "Come on, Sergeant Perry. Don't you want to work on a tree fort again?"

  He cracked a smile and gave us a few hours of his time. I finally thanked him for his help when I noticed him watching his dosimeter more carefully than he was watching the hammer in his hand.

  One night Kelly and I were grilling hot dogs over a campfire next to our "observatory" when she gave me that look again. "Bruce, won't you at least take me out to the surface of the dimple? I want to see it for myself."

  "Christ, Kelly." I pulled my dog out of the fire and tried to brush off some of the burned spots. What the hell. I'd already signed up for cancer for her sake, had been throwing away red-lined dosimeters for a while. "Sure."

  She tackled me with a squeal that made it all worthwhile.

  I hoped.

  "How deep can you dive?"

  I looked up from the gear I was stowing in the Ranger Cherokee. I hadn't done any diving in years. "Now wait a minute — "

  "If you're going into the water anyway, you could also see if you could get down to the mascon."

  I straightened, shaking my head. "The anomaly is in thirty meters of water. I don't think I can hold my breath more than ninety seconds. That's not enough."

  "So we tie a fifteen meter rope to your ankle, drop you over with something heavy to take you down fast, and you push a pole down the rest of the way."

  I laughed. "And do what? Tap?"

  She smiled her real smile. "You come back up, tell me what you saw, what it felt like. What's down there."

  "You were planning on asking me this all along, weren't you?"

  Her smile took on a guilty cast. "Well, yes."

  I sighed. How much did it matter now? There wasn't much I could do to compete with her rich, dead genius husband. At least I could do this for her.

  I wired the butt of an ancient oak post to the end of a twenty-foot aspen pole, then made a wrist loop at the other end of the pole out of an old bootlace. I would jump headfirst out of the bass boat clutching an old wheel rim to weigh me down and follow the pole toward the bottom. First I smeared my body with a mixture of Vaseline and mud—we didn't have enough of the petroleum jelly around the lodge to use it straight up, but I was worried about the cold.

  "We're nuts," I said. Kelly drove the boat straight for the dimple. Our long line trailed behind us toward the nearest shore, some two hundred feet distant, ready for my belaying act.

  Kelly looked happier than she had since I first met her. "Nick's down there."

  "I'm not knocking on any doors." I already had mud in some very uncomfortable places.

  Her smile was like the sunrise. "Just see what you see."

  What I saw was what Nick Maclnnes had seen in her. What I wondered was what she had seen in him: the record suggested he had been a monomaniacal nutcase who happened to have gotten it right.

  The Ranger Cherokee slid down into the dimple, and my stomach did a sharp flop —the world's shortest log-flume ride. Kelly cut the trolling motor, and the boat circled loosely in the base of the dimple, a forty-foot wide bowl. The ten-foot walls of water around us were incredibly disconcerting, a violation of every sense and sensibility. It didn't help that our trailing line strained upward, vanishing into those angled waterfalls.

  We tipped the stripped aspen pole overboard. The oak block pulled it straight down until it was stopped by the bootlace loop I'd slipped over a cleat, rocking our little boat. I stared down at the rippling black water beneath which lay the mascon.

  "Don't think too hard," said Kelly. "You won't do it."

  I checked the knot of the lifeline on my ankle. I was only doing it for her, and she was doing it for her husband—she was right, I'd better not think too hard. "Count to thirty, then start pulling up, as fast as you can." I slipped my hand through the loop on the gunwale cleat, pulled the pole free with the tether around my wrist, and fell in headfirst, clutching the wheel rim to my chest.

  The water wasn't any colder than I expected, but it pushed up my nose in a way that seemed stronger, sharper than reasonable. Venting a little air from my lips, I released the wheel rim; I was getting enough downward pull from the weighted aspen pole.

  My ears throbbed with mild pain. The breathing panic started, but I ignored it, letting the pole drag me down past the visible light.

  The water got cooler as I sank. I wondered how deep I was, wondered if Kelly had tossed my line over, sending me off to meet her husband. My ankle jerked up short, and I almost lost my grip on the pole, but the bootlace loop around my wrist held.

  I bobbed head down for a moment, the pole pulling me down, the rope holding me back. I worked my hands to get a firmer grip on the pole. With my eyes open, there was a vague greenish quality to the darkness. The water pressure on my body was like a giant fist slowly closing.

  That was when I realiz
ed my fingers were cold, way too cold. I brought my free hand up in front of my face, but there wasn't enough light to see it. I touched my fingers to my lips —ice scum. I knew what the reports had said, but still… water froze from the top, not the bottom.

  Then the pole jumped in my hands. The downward pull was gone, the pole floating slowly upward. What had happened to the weight? My chest tightened with anoxia and fear. The water felt much colder. Where the hell was Kelly? I tried to turn my body, but with the pole in the way, I started to get trapped in the rope.

  My ankle jerked.

  Kelly.

  Thank God.

  I held the pole while she tugged the rope from somewhere inside the blue sky far above. I followed my heart toward the bright air.

  Kelly wrapped me in two blankets when I rolled into the boat, and I shivered in their scratchy depths. I didn't have the strength to swim to shore yet.

  She examined the aspen pole. "Looks like it snapped off."

  I shook my head. Now that I wasn't panicking, it was easier to figure out what might have happened to the pole. "No applied pressure —I would have felt that."

  Kelly pointed the broken end toward me. The end looked more like it had been blown off. Would my hand have done the same, under the pressure of the rapidly expanding ice?

  Kelly came to the same conclusion at about the same time. "Cold," she said, her voice strangely satisfied. "The aspen shattered from the cold."

  "What's so great about cold?" The cold could have killed me. I was feeling groggy from the dive, chilled in the half-hearted sun of the Canadian Rockies.

  Her smile flashed. "Very slow entropic progression, that's what's so great about cold."

  Very slow entropic progression. I'd never heard her talk like that before.

  The following winter, we were enjoying a comfortable afternoon in front of the lodge fireplace when we heard shots. We looked at each other in shock for a moment before we jumped up, pulled on our Gore-Tex snowpants and parkas, and headed out for the snowmobile.

  Less than a mile from the lodge, we found Sergeant Perry's body in the snow, his skis sticking up at an odd angle, his blood spattering the pristine white of the landscape.