The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Here, God and Marx had surrendered in the face of the mountains and mosques of Muhammad.

  The true national frontier, running for miles in either direction, was formed by the Kopet Dagh Mountains. Their monotonous flanks loomed on the far side of the river, extending as far as the eye could see, eroded, practically treeless. An Iranian settlement of mud-coloured huts had grown up on the far banks of the Garakhs. A road led from the settlement into the range. Nothing moved except dust. The Iranian sky to the south was leaden.

  On the northern side of the river, Turkmenistan presented no more enlivening a spectacle. The land, lying almost at sea level, was a salt desert. Habitation had ceased as soon as they had left the capital, apart from a few yurts here and there, by which Akhal-teke horses were tethered. The desolate expanses were punctuated at one point by oil wells. Assaad remarked that the Japanese were prospecting.

  Later, they passed a party of ragged horsemen galloping at full speed beside a railway line. Later still, a few miles from their destination, Burnell watched a group of people walking with some camels and a mule—an archaic frieze soon left behind in the dust. The dust was a problem, whipped up by an increasing wind.

  The road from Ashkhabad, potholes and all, petered out at the river.

  “In the spring, after rain, the wild tulips are blooming here, everywhere,” Dr. Assaad said. “The landscape is colourful.” He stopped the car and sat with his great body leaning forwards, drumming his fingers on the wheel and peering out at the intermittent dust clouds. “I remember it so.”

  Burnell sighed.

  “It’ll be all right,” Assaad said, motioning with his head for Burnell to get out.

  The two men walked towards the bridge. It was unfinished—scarcely begun.

  The Friendship Bridge at the Garakhs resembled a failed animal of some earlier epoch. It stuck its snout a short way over the flood, as if blindly to quiz the Iranian shore. It had been designed much as a child’s bridge is constructed from wooden blocks. One stump of pillar stood on the near bank. A second stump stood in the swirling torrent. Over the stumps had been laid, in giant concrete sections, intimations of road, a kind of archetypal road, no more than 10 yards long, crumbling already.

  This truncated lump of masonry was left with its far end hanging over the water and its near end jutting some feet above the land, dislocated from the road below.

  Burnell walked beneath it, hands in pockets, gazing up at reinforcing rods trailing worm-like from the body of concrete. He was bitterly angry. To a man whose book, Architrave and Archetype, had been accepted as a standard work, this abortive hulk was an insult—certainly nothing worth two hours’ travel over bumpy roads.

  “Let’s get back to town,” he said. “I have important things to do. I must return to Frankfurt.”

  “Yes, yes, instantly,” said Dr. Assaad, conjuring up one of the adverbs of which he seemed fond. “But first we must climb on the bridge. Then you will understand, surely.”

  He led the way. Burnell felt obliged to follow as the big man heaved himself up a ladder set against the near pillar.

  With agility, it was possible to swing up, grasp a girder and pull oneself on to the flat part of the bridge. Clouds of dust met them. Lizards scuttled into hiding. The wound in Burnell’s leg ached in the heat.

  They stood together, the Syrian and the Englishman, high above the ground. Burnell shielded his eyes with a hand. “Look, hadn’t we better get back?”

  The sun had assumed the aspect of a withered orange. It cast a bronze gloom over the land.

  Assaad said, “I know you have things on your mind, Mr. Burnell. We all have them. Once past youth, all men have things on mind. Women likewise, probably.” He walked along to the edge of the concrete structure, to gaze down into the water, letting wind and dust whip against his suit.

  “This bridge is called the Friendship Bridge for obvious reasons. The Turkmeni say for a joke it is called Friendship Bridge because, like friendship, it should never have been started and will never finish … Huh. Not too much humorous for British taste, eh?”

  Burnell said, “I’ve lost my sense of humour. Sorry.”

  “The first stone was laid by the late President of Turkmenistan. He was a devout Muslim, an ayatollah. But the war swept him out of power, happily. He died of some disease soon after. As people do. With the onslaught of war, President Diyanizov ordered work here all to stop. Of course it will never be resumed. We no longer wish to be so friendly with Iran since their last revolution. Some recall an old Goklani saying, ‘Iranian ponies have only three and a half legs.’”

  Some of this was lost in the wind. Burnell turned his back to the gale and said, speaking formally, “Dr. Assaad, a storm’s brewing. Best to get back to Ashkhabad.”

  Assaad’s large face was already powdered with dust.

  He shook his head sadly, disappointed by Burnell’s lack of perception. Turning his back on the river, he frowned at Burnell. As if preparing to make a speech, he clutched his lapels.

  “This place is what you should remember to carry back to England with you. In its fashion, it is even a victory for the West! Yes, a monument for the magnetic attraction of the West, felt even in this country where not a copy of The Hand of Ethelberta is to be had for money or love.” He gave a sardonic smile, tight-lipped, and stared down at the pattern of wooden planking embedded in fossil imprint in the concrete blocks at his feet. “Many men wished to embrace Islam when Soviet Union collapsed, but the pull of the West was even stronger. Happily, some men wish not to grovel to Mecca five times every day…”

  A battery of winds sprang up. Light gravels were scooped from the river bank and dashed into their faces. The men were blown across the bridge. Assaad dragged Burnell down beside him. They crouched for shelter under the low parapet. The wind roared as it rushed overhead, suddenly making its intentions clear.

  “When it is stopped, we go back to the car,” Assaad said, his face close to Burnell’s. “These storms last no long time. Do not worry.”

  “It was madness to come out here.”

  Assaad laughed. “And maybe we were both mad to leave our own countries, probably … To escape memories or to find them … Che sera, sera, isn’t that what the Italians say? You travel but you have no cosmopolitan spirit, Mr. Burnell. You must appreciate what has befallen here. You should regard Friendship Bridge as a memorial to a crucial moment in history.

  “When Soviet Union collapsed, was a great day for all the world. Also for Turkmeni peoples. They had been long suppressed. The place was bankrupt. Then the frontiers were open, suddenly. Never before open except in the lives of very old people. Freedom—that word we all like to hear!

  “A great procession of ordinary people came from Ashkhabad. My wife was among them. They came along the road we have taken, to this point, to look across at Iran, a free country. Before, all the whole frontier was patrolled and people could be shot who came near here.”

  From his crouched position, resting his elbows on the concrete, Assaad imitated the action of someone firing a rifle.

  “And across the other side of this river, Iranians appeared! They cheered to this side, this side cheered to them. Can you imagine? On that day, were two thousand Turkmeni here, maybe two hundred Irani there. After all, there are same families on both sides of the frontier, divided only by that monster Stalin.

  “That particular day, was icy rain in the air—not this nice warm sand. But some of the Ashkhabad youths, they strip off their clothes and swim across the river at this point. One young boy age thirteen, he drown. Otherwise, is great rejoicing. The people embrace, each to each, warmly. It was an occasion of many tears and kisses, Mr. Burnell, many tears and kisses. My wife stood here. She waved to her older sister across the river.”

  He fell silent, letting the sand scour their ears.

  “One Iranian has a loud-shouter? Yes, loud-hailer. He calls out news. He calls names, telephone numbers, radio wavelengths. Names of lost relations are called acr
oss this river. Many people wept. Weeping because lives are broken. You can imagine. All spoken is—what do you call it?—reconciling words, privately. No words of politics, no words of religion. Only poor people stood here. No great ones.”

  As Assaad paused, Burnell thought, Oh yes, he has ties of love to this land he affects to hate …

  Assaad continued. “The people congregated on both sides of the river till the sun was set. The date was the thirteenth of Azar by the Muslim calendar.

  “The brave boys swam back here again. Some had gifts such as worry beads and sweetmeats. The newspapers in Ashkhabad described that day as a day of seething emotions. There were demands that a bridge should be built, so that Muslim should be united with Muslim. A bridge of friendship.

  “Under the old ayatollah president, the construction of the bridge was begun. Then it was discovered that the Iranians did not build a road to the bridge on their side, cunningly. Instead, they waged another war with Iraq, their other neighbour. And both sides began to worry about illegal border crossings. Remember, Turkmenistan was then being attacked by the Afghanistan guerrillas.

  “The rest I have already told. This bridge makes me very happy—naturally, because it’s not complete. The bridges should be built not to the south, to Islam, but to the West, to Hungary and Germany and France and England—where change is not a criminal act.”

  As he rambled on, Assaad’s voice was at times dominated by the wind, which now seemed to consist as much of sand as air. Burnell found his thoughts wandering.

  In his work, he was accustomed to monuments that endured, beautiful structures whose very endurance inspired reverence. Although he had no religious faith, he venerated the buildings it was his duty to catalogue.

  Because there was melancholy as well as honour in the task, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had long been his favourite reading. Able to recite whole passages of the old unbeliever by heart, particularly when slightly drunk, Burnell recalled now, crouching against the concrete, Gibbon’s reflections on transience. “The art of man is able to construct,” Gibbon had said, “monuments far more permanent than the narrow span of his own existence: yet these monuments, like himself, are perishable and frail; and in the boundless annals of time his life and his labours must equally be measured as a fleeting moment.”

  And if that labour should be to stock, without fuss, an airing cupboard with fresh sweet clothes … It was important, surely, to remember that monument to past love. Even if not his …

  He saw his own life as no more than a wormcast in a vast tract of history. And his family? His grandfather had lived through the dissolution, peaceful on the whole, as on the whole the disintegrating institution had been, of the British Empire. His father had lived through the collapse of the Communist empire. He was himself passing his life in the years following those momentous events, during the expansionist phase of the EC superstate.

  The Turkmeni were seeking some kind of political stability which so far eluded them. No models of stable modern government in their past existed from which they might gain strength; there were only memories of horrendous oppression, massive abuses of morality (and agriculture) and, more distantly, the legend of that Golden Horde which had once thrown a shadow of terror over all Christendom. In fact, the Friendship Bridge represented an attempt of hope, a hand stretched towards an imagined outer world.

  He sensed something of the complexity of emotions Dr. Assaad felt. His wife’s sister must remain on the other side of the torrent. That was part of a historical necessity. Burnell’s anger against the Syrian faded. Despite the discomfort of the sandstorm, he was glad to be here, where no Englishman, as far as he knew, had ventured. Perhaps Assaad was wrong and he did have a cosmopolitan spirit …

  And how had he come here? Certainly, he had managed to obtain no introduction to President Diyanizov from the authorities in Frankfurt or London. Fearful of the paid assassin, Diyanizov saw no visitors. Had he ever really hoped that he might retrieve that vital missing period of his memory? Or had he found it, without realizing as much?

  Burnell had drifted because he was, essentially, a drifter. Despite the best of educations, he had refused to join the family’s merchant bank. He had dedicated himself to … Well, dedication was hardly a word he cared to apply to himself.

  His father was now confined to a motorized chair. An old embittered man who trundled slowly about his estate. Soon he would inevitably pass away. The estate would be broken up. And the avenue of lime trees planted by his grandfather … Already Burnell could feel immense regret latent in him, awaiting the release of his father’s death.

  His father had liked, had loved, Stephanie. Of course Burnell had no more chance of getting her back than there was of standing and demanding, successfully, that the sandstorm cease.

  But there was that vital scene to be retrieved, to be reinstated in memory. He needed better evidence than a cupboard full of shirts he failed to recognize. Oh, Stephanie, how did our relationship go so badly wrong? You were the most precious thing in my life. Had there been someone more precious to you than I? If only I knew, if only I could remember …

  But would things then be different? Could he rectify a past fault? Could that broken bridge ever be reconstructed to cross the chilly river of separation?

  Tears filled his eyes, to be instantly dried by the heat.

  He felt his own identity fading into the abrasive world about him. Never was it more clear to him why, and how fatally, he clung to the memorials of the past. And the time would come, not today, perhaps not tomorrow, when he would join the dead, and the broken estates, when he would succumb to the same processes of mutability which had transformed the bridge from design to ruin. Yes, the time would come.

  Well, it was no great matter …

  The sand was gathering about the two figures, who crouched as if imploring Allah for his mercy. It lay thickly drifted under the parapet.

  Roy Burnell yielded up his thoughts to let the sand take over. He heard it howling through Turkmenistan, through the universe, covering everything, the living and the dead.

  INTO THE MIRANDA RIFT

  G. David Nordley

  Here’s a suspenseful science fiction adventure of exploration in the grand manner and on a grand scale, full of strange dangers and even stranger wonders, and demonstrating that if you can’t get around a problem, and you can’t get over it, and you can’t get under it, sometimes the only choice you have is to go right on ahead through it.…

  New writer G. David Nordley is a retired Air Force officer and physicist who has become a frequent contributor to Analog in the last couple of years, winning that magazine’s Analytical Laboratory readers poll last year for his story “Poles Apart.” He has also sold stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Tomorrow, Mindsparks, F&SF, and elsewhere. He lives in Sunnyvale, California.

  I

  This starts after we had already walked, crawled, and clawed our way fifty-three zig-zagging kilometers into the Great Miranda Rift, and had already penetrated seventeen kilometers below the mean surface. It starts because the mother of all Mirandaquakes just shut the door behind us and the chances of this being rescued are somewhat better than mine; I need to do more than just take notes for a future article. It starts because I have faith in human stubbornness, even in a hopeless endeavor; and I think the rescuers will come, eventually. I am Wojciech Bubka and this is my journal.

  Miranda, satellite of Uranus, is a cosmic metaphor about those things in creation that come together without really fitting, like the second try at marriage, ethnic integration laws, or a poet trying to be a science reporter. It was blasted apart by something a billion years ago and the parts drifted back together, more or less. There are gaps. Rifts. Empty places for things to work their way in that are not supposed to be there; things that don’t belong to something of whole cloth.

  Like so many great discoveries, the existence of the rifts was obvious after the fact, but our geologist, Nikhil Ray, had to
endure a decade of derision, several rejected papers, a divorce from a wife unwilling to share academic ridicule, and public humiliation in the pop science media—before the geology establishment finally conceded that what the seismological network on Miranda’s surface had found had, indeed, confirmed his work.

  Nikhil had simply observed that although Miranda appears to be made of the same stuff as everything else in the Uranian system, the other moons are just under twice as dense as water while Miranda is only one and a third times as dense. More ice and less rock below was one possibility. The other possibility, which Nikhil had patiently pointed out, was that there could be less of everything; a scattering of voids or bubbles beneath.

  So, with the goat-to-hero logic we all love, when seismological results clearly showed that Miranda was laced with substantial amounts of nothing, Nikhil became a minor Solar System celebrity, with a permanent chair at Coriolis, and a beautiful, high-strung, young renaissance woman as a trophy wife.

  But, by that time, I fear there were substantial empty places in Nikhil, too.

  Like Miranda, this wasn’t clear from his urbane and vital surface when we met. He was tall for a Bengali, a lack of sun had left his skin with only a tint of bronze, and he had a sharp face that hinted at an Arab or a Briton in his ancestry; likely both. He moved with a sort of quick, decisive energy that nicely balanced the tolerant good-fellow manners of an academic aristocrat in the imperial tradition. If he now distrusted people in general, if he kept them all at a pleasantly formal distance, if he harbored a secret contempt for his species, well, this had not been apparent to Catherine Ray, M.D., who had married him after his academic rehabilitation.

  I think she later found the emptiness within him and part of her had recoiled, while the other, controlling, part found no objective reason to leave a relationship that let her flit around the top levels of Solar System academia. Perhaps that explained why she chose to go on a fortnight of exploration with someone she seemed to detest; oh, the stories she would tell. Perhaps that explained her cynicism. Perhaps not.