The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Gus does a puzzle. He has been doing them in therapy and the therapist (a different one from the first one, who is now on maternity leave) says that there are definite signs that the cells are grafting, filling in. Gus likes puzzles. She buys the ones for children eight to twelve. Cannonball Adderly is on the cd player. The tightness in her eases a bit. Christmas has never been a time for good things to happen, not in her experience. Too much at stake, she always supposed. All those expectations of the best Christmas ever.

  But at this moment she is profoundly grateful.

  “Do you need help?” she calls into the kitchen. Dan has told her she isn’t allowed in on pain of death.

  “No,” Dan calls out.

  The smell of beef drippings is overwhelming. She has been living on microwavable dinners and food picked up at the grocery where they have already cooked stuff to take home and eat and Chinese takeout.

  “Why’d you get rid of the microwave?” Dan asks from the kitchen.

  “It shorted out,” Mila says.

  Gus doesn’t look up from his puzzle. Does he remember that evening at all? That was after his brain was scrubbed out, so it isn’t something he would have lost. But did he ever have it? Does he know what he is living through, moment to moment, or is it like sand?

  “Are you in there?” she whispers.

  At six o’clock, there is more food than three people could ever eat in a month. Dan has sliced the beef and put beautifully finished slices on their plates. (Gus’s is cut up, she notices, and her eyes fill with gratitude.) The beef is cooked beautifully, and sits in a brown sauce with a swirl of horseradish. There is a flower cut out of carrot sitting on bay leaves on her plate and on Dan’s—Gus’s has the flower, but no bay leaf to mistake for food. The salad glistens and the pomegranate berries are like garnets. There is wine in her glass and in Dan’s—Gus’s glass has juice.

  “Oh, my,” she breathes. It’s a dinner for grown-ups in a place that has never seen anything but frozen lasagna and Chinese takeout. “Oh, Dan,” she says. “It’s so beautiful.”

  “It had better be,” Dan says. “It’s what I do for a living.”

  “Gus,” she says. “Come eat Dan’s dinner.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Gus says.

  “Come and sit with me while I eat, then.”

  Sometimes he comes and sometimes he doesn’t. Tonight he comes and she guides him to his seat.

  “It’s Christmas Eve, Dad,” Dan says. “It’s roast beef for Christmas Eve dinner.” She wants to tell him not to try so hard, to just let Gus make his own way, but he has worked so hard. Please, no trouble, she thinks.

  “Roast beef?” Gus says. He takes his fork and takes a bite. “It’s good,” he says. She and Dan smile at each other.

  Mila takes a bite. “Where did you get this meat?” she asks.

  “Reider’s Stop and Shop,” Dan says.

  “No you didn’t,” she says.

  “Sure I did,” Dan says. “You’ve just cooked so many years you don’t remember how it tastes when you’ve just been smelling. I got all my cooking talents from you, Mom.”

  Not true. He is his father over again, with the same deep thoughtfulness, the same meticulousness. It is always a puzzle, cooking. She cooked as a hobby. Dan cooks with the same deep obsessiveness that Gus brought to model rockets!

  “I don’t like that,” Gus says.

  “What?” Dan says.

  “That.” Gus points to the swirl of horseradish. “It’s nasty.”

  “Horseradish?” Dan says. “You always liked horseradish.”

  Gus had made a fetish of horseradish. And wasabi and chilies and ginger. He liked licorice and kimchee and stilton cheese and everything else that tasted strongly.

  “It’s nasty,” Gus says.

  “I’ll get you some without,” Mila says, before Dan fights. Never contradict, she thinks at Dan. It’s not important. “He’s not used to strong tastes anymore,” she says quickly to Dan, hoping Gus won’t pay attention, that she won’t have to explain.

  “I’ll get it,” Dan says. “You sit.”

  Dan brings a plate. “What have you been eating, Dad?” he asks. “Cottage cheese? Mom, shouldn’t he be getting tastes to, I don’t know, stimulate him?”

  Gus frowns.

  “Don’t,” she says. It’s hard enough without Dan making accusations.

  Gus has retreated from all but the bland. He eats like a three-year-old might. Macaroni and cheese. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Tomato soup. Ice cream. And she’s let him because it was easy. She thinks about telling him that Gus has hit her. That they have been getting through the days.

  Maybe inviting Dan was a mistake. Gus needs routine, not disruption.

  “How’s that, Dad?” Dan says.

  “Good,” Gus says. Gus eats the roast beef without horseradish, the potatoes, the chestnut purée. He cleans out the ramekin of crème brûlée with his index finger while Dan sits, smiling and bemused.

  And then, full, he goes upstairs and goes to bed in his clothes. After an hour she goes up and takes off his shoes and covers him up. He sleeps, childlike and serene, until almost seven on Christmas morning.

  “I’m getting better,” Gus announces after therapy one day in February.

  “Yes,” Mila says, “you are.” He goes to therapy three times a week now, and does the kind of things they do with children who have sensory integration problems. Lots of touching and moving. Evenings after therapy he goes to bed early, worn out.

  “I remember better,” he says.

  He does, too. He remembers, for instance, that the townhouse is where they live. He doesn’t ask to go home, although he will say that he wishes they still lived in the other house. She thinks there is some small bit of recrimination in this announcement.

  “Do you want to go out to eat?” she asks one evening. They haven’t gone out to eat in, oh, years. She is out of the habit.

  She decides on Applebee’s, where the food is reassuringly bland. These days, Gus might be someone who had a stroke. He no longer looks vacant. There is someone there, although sometimes she feels as if the person there is a stranger.

  After dinner at Applebee’s she takes him to rent a DVD. He wanders among the racks of DVDs and stops in the area of the store where they still have video tapes. “We used to watch these,” he says.

  “We did,” she says. “With Dan.”

  “Dan is my son,” he says. Testing. Although as far as she can tell he’s never forgotten who Dan is.

  “Dan is your son,” she agrees.

  “But he’s grown,” Gus says.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Pick a movie for me,” he says.

  “How about a movie you used to like?” She picks out Forbidden Planet. They had the tape until she moved them to the townhouse. She got rid of all of Gus’s old tapes when they moved because there wasn’t enough room. He had all the Star Wars tapes including the lousy ones. He had all the Star Trek movies, and 2001, Blade Runner, Back to the Future I and III.

  “This is one of your favorites,” she says. “You made a model of the rocket.”

  When Dan was a kid he loved to hear about when he was a baby, and Gus is that way now about what he was like “before.” He turns the DVD over and over in his hands.

  At home he puts it in the player and sits in front of the screen. After a few minutes he frowns. “It’s old,” he says.

  “It’s in black and white,” she says.

  “It’s dumb,” he says. “I didn’t like this.”

  She almost says, It was your favorite. They watched it when they were dating, sitting on the couch together. He had shown her all his science fiction movies. They’d watched Them on television. But she doesn’t, doesn’t start a fight. When he gets angry he retreats back into Alzheimer’s behavior, restless and pacing and then opaque.

  She turns on the TV and runs the channels.

  “Wait,” he says, “go back.”

  She goes back until he tel
ls her to stop. It’s a police show, one of the kind everyone is watching now. It’s shot three camera live and to her it looks like a cross between Cops and the old sitcom Barney Miller. Part of the time it’s sort of funny, like a sitcom, and part of the time it’s full of swearing and idiots with too many tattoos and too few teeth.

  “I don’t like this,” she says.

  “I do,” Gus says. And watches the whole show.

  She lets the home health go.

  Iris quit to go to another agency, Mila doesn’t know why, and then they got William. Luckily by the time they got William it was okay if Gus was alone sometimes because William never got there before eight-thirty and Mila had to leave for work before eight. William was an affable and inept twenty-something, but Gus seemed to like him. Because William was a man instead of a woman?

  Gus says, “Thank you for putting up with me,” and William smiles.

  “I’m so glad you got better, Mr. Schuster,” he says. “I never left before because a patient got better.”

  “You helped a lot,” he says.

  Gus can stay by himself. There’s so much he doesn’t know these days, among the strange things that he does. But he can follow directions. The latest therapist—they have had four in the ten months Gus has been going, and the latest is a patient young man named Chris—the latest therapist says that Gus has the capacity to be pretty much normal. It’s just a matter of re-learning. And he is re-learning as if he was actually much younger than he is, because of those new neurons forming connections.

  There is some concern about those new neurons. Children form more and more connections until they hit puberty, and then the brain seems to sort through the connections and weed out some and reinforce others, to make the brain efficient in other ways. Nobody knows what will happen with Gus. And of course, the cause of the Alzheimer’s still lurks somewhere. Maybe in ten years he’ll start to deteriorate again.

  “I am so grateful to you,” he says to Mila when William is gone. “You have been through so much for me.”

  “It’s okay,” she says. “You’d do the same for me.” Although she doesn’t know what Gus would do. She doesn’t know if she likes this new Gus. This big child.

  “I would do the same for you,” he says.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t stick me in some nursing home?” she says. “Only come visit me once a month?” She tries to make her tone broad, broad enough for anyone to see this comment as a joke.

  But Gus doesn’t. Teasing distresses him. “No,” he says now, “I promise, Mila. I would look after you the way you looked after me.”

  “I know, honey,” she says. “I was just joking.”

  He frowns.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s look at your homework.”

  He is studying for his G.E.D. It’s a goal he and the therapist came up with. Mila wanted to say that Gus not only had a degree in engineering, he was certified, but of course that was the old Gus.

  He’s studying the Civil War, and Mila checks his homework before he goes to his G.E.D. class.

  “I think I want to go to college,” he says.

  “What do you want to study?” she asks. She almost says, ‘Engineering?’ but the truth is he doesn’t like math. Gus was never very good at arithmetic, but he was great at conceptual math—algebra, calculus, differential equations. But now he doesn’t have enough patience for the drill in fractions and square roots.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I want to be a therapist. I think I want to help people.”

  Help me, she thinks. But then she squashes the thought. He is here, he is getting better. He is not squatting in the hollyhocks. She’s not afraid of him anymore. And if she doesn’t love him like a husband anymore, well, she still loves him.

  “What was that boy’s name?” Gus says, squinting down the street.

  He means the home health.

  For a moment she can’t think and her insides twist in fear. It has started happening recently, when she forgets she feels this sudden overwhelming fear. Is it Alzheimer’s?

  “William,” she says. “His name is William.”

  “He was a nice boy,” Gus says.

  “Yes,” Mila says, her voice and face calm but her heart beating too fast.

  Halo

  CHARLES STROSS

  Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead (in fact, as one of the key Writers To Watch in the Oughts), with a sudden burst in the last few years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “Antibodies,” “A Colder War,” “Bear Trap,” “Dechlorinating the Moderator,” “Toast: A Con Report,” “Lobsters,” “Troubadour,” and “Tourist,” in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Odyssey, Strange Plasma, and New Worlds. Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. He has “published” a novel online, Scratch Monkey, available to be read on his website (www.antipope.org/charlie/), and is currently serializing another novel, The Atrocity Archive, in the magazine Spectrum SF. His most recent books are another new novel, Festival of Fools, and his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures. He had two stories in our Eighteenth Annual Collection, and one in our Nineteenth Annual Collection. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

  Here he takes us back to the wired-up, dazzlingly fast-paced Information Age future of his acclaimed and popular “Manfred Macx” stories (debuted last year in “Lobsters,” a Hugo Finalist), and cranks things up a notch even from his former frenetic concept-dense pace—introducing us to what might be called “Manfred Macx: The Next Generation,” as the daughter of Manfred Macx leaves a frazzled Earth tottering on the edge of a Vingian Singularity to travel to Jupiter space, in company with a cast of characters that even Manfred Macx himself might have found a bit peculiar ...

  The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. “I love you,” it croons in Amber’s ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: “Let me give you a big hug. ...”

  A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. “Locked and loaded,” she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle-stick overhead. Sarcastically: “big hug time! I got asteroid!” Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in: it doesn’t do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing, is still there: it’s her rock, and it loves her, and she’s going to bring it to life.

  The workspace of Amber’s room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn’t belong on a spaceship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy-band bump-and-grind through their glam routines; tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager’s bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create): three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawai dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father’s cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone.

  Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: “I’ve got it!” she shouts. “It’s all mine! I rule!” It’s the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it’s her
first, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar’s cane toads—which should be locked down in the farm, it’s not clear how it got here—and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infant’s video shows.

  “You’re so prompt, Amber,” Pierre whines when she corners him in the canteen.

  “Well, yeah!” She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn’t nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Step-Mom don’t care about that kind of thing. “I’m brilliant, me!” she announces. “Now what about our bet?”

  “Aww.” Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. “But I don’t have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?”

  “Huh?” She’s outraged. “But we had a bet!”

  “Uh, Doctor Bayes said you weren’t going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I’ll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle’s end?”

  “You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee.” Her avatar blazes at him with early teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He’s only thirteen, freckled, hasn’t yet learned that you don’t welsh on a deal. “I’ll let you do it this time,” she announces, “but you’ll have to pay for it. I want interest.”

  He sighs. “What base rate are you—”

  “No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!” She grins malevolently.

  And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: “As long as you don’t make me clean the litter tray again. You aren’t planning on doing that, are you?”

  Welcome to the third decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIP per gram; it’s still pretty dumb, but it’s not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 1028 MIPS of the solar system’s brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation—individually, a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively, they’re ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They’re up to 1033 MIPS and rising, although there’s a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake.