The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Paavo lumbered in with the bags.

  “Bad enough. Down to thirty this side of Tallinn. Repair budget’s probably putting some councillor’s kid through university.”

  “Ah, no budget for anything, these days.” He looked out at the setting indigo before closing the porch door on the winter. The silhouettes of the trees across the bay were still discernible, shadows against the infra-blue; low over them, Jupiter rising, and the early stars. Another thing we couldn’t afford.

  “You can cut the rest, but you have to have infrastructure,” Paavo was saying as he moved the bags into the hall.

  “Spoken like a good new Russian,” the old man said, but Yuri was running ahead of any of them, even the dog.

  “Where are they, can I see them?” he called out, questing in at the open door though he knew what room they were in, where they would always remain, that they were always his to look at and marvel over. Grandfather Antti paused in the study doorway, reluctant to break the shell of unalloyed wonder. Yuri stood in the center of the threadbare Kazakh rug, head thrown back, looking up at the models hanging from the ceiling. Revolving slowly, unconsciously; the photographs and certificates and engineering diagrams and artist’s impressions spinning around him. Relativity.

  The dog scuffled at his heels, horrified that it was missing something. Antti shoved it away with his foot. Dare break the moment and, Yuri notwithstanding, I will poison you. Twice a year, summer and winter, was a meager ration of wonder stuff, and its half-life was so short. Years and peers and sophistication would kill that thing you feel, orbiting beneath the models of the ships that should have taken us to Mars.

  Yuri stopped.

  “That one. That wasn’t here before.”

  “It’s new, that’s why.”

  “I can see that. Show me.”

  Antti pulled over the peeling swivel chair to stand on and unhook the curved delta of aerobody from its fishing line rig.

  “What’s that bit?”

  “That’s the fuel processing module. The idea was that it would go down first, maybe even six months before, and manufacture the fuel for the return trip.”

  “An empty tank mission.”

  “Empty tanks.” The boy had the language. “That’s right.”

  Yuri turned the aerodynamic plastic wedge over in his hands, stopped at a hieroglyph in curvilinear blue.

  “This isn’t Russian,” he pronounced. “I know this sign. That says NASA. But I don’t know this bit.” A line of red, alien letters above the noble blue insignia.

  “It says ‘Astrodyne Systems MOREL 2’.”

  “An American ship.”

  “I have friends in America. I send them mine, they send me theirs. We’re all the same, really.”

  “They didn’t get there either.”

  “No, they left it too late. Do you know what they ask for most? The Americans?” He nodded Yuri to the disk of embroidered fabric, insignificant among the prints and plans of the boosters and orbiters. Vorontsev, Nitin, Rozdevshensky, Selkokari: Novy Mir. And the date, so many decades ago he could not believe the hubris of those who had planned to send men to another world. Another Russia, then. “I’ll never let them have it. A photograph, that’s what they’ll get. At least we made it to the pad.”

  The hatch-dog spinning. The gloved hand reaching in: the thick, black glove. The glove, the hand that should not have been there. The gold-plated audio jacks pulling free from the helmet sockets, dangling on their glossy black wire coils. Commander Rozdevshensky hitting his chest release and surging up from his restraint straps—slowly, so slowly—as the white digits on the countdown timer remained forever frozen between the flip and flop. Better to die that way. Better by far than to be talked to death by pragmatists and right Christians.

  And it still hurt, by God, still brought that involuntary twitch to the corners of the mouth. Thirty-five years since the light of a Kazakhstan morning flooded through the hatch into the capsule, the hatch that should have opened on another light altogether. Scrap now. Plumbing in the Presidential palaces of new Republics. Pig sheds. He had heard that one of the preignition pumps had turned up as a vodka still. New Russia. Dismembered. But in this shrine to a lost space age deep in Baltic winter, ATOM 12 still stood as he remembered her that morning as they drove across the steppe, high and lovely and unbelievably white. Its model in the corner by the curtained window towered over Yuri. Towers over us all, his grandfather thought. We are never out of its shadow, the rocket that would have taken Antti Selkokari, Cosmonaut, to Mars.

  The holy woman has been in the tomb five days now and the crowds are gathering again. Most are there to witness a miracle, a triumph of faith and will. They are easy to spot: many wear the sadhu’s unbraided hair and go flagrantly naked, skin daubed with holy ash. Spirit clad. Some practice asceticism; burning cones of incense on their skin, driving hooks through folds of flesh, tongue, eyelids. One man walks around for the admiration of the crowd, his right arm held aloft by a devotee declaring that the sadhu had held his arm fifteen years thus in asceticism. Fifteen years! The arm is withered as a stick in a drought. It will never bend again. The joints are fused, locked. The holy man’s eyes glare spiritual challenge at the crowds thronging the station approach. See what I do: who in this corrupt century dares attempt such practice to sever soul from flesh?

  This corrupt century has surer and swifter ways to samadhi, Ashwin thinks, smiling to himself, as he joins the queue for holy breakfast. He has done this every morning since the sacred woman’s coffin was sealed, lowered into the dusty grave, and buried. Behind him, a band tootles. Off-shift jitneys and money-kids on bio-motor scooters dart around the musicians. The sky is already that flat, dusty steel blue of the most ferociously hot days; the sun a savage copper atom. Ashwin thanks whatever gods mind buried women for the air-conditioning of the cyber-mahals of Chandigarh. The line shuffles forward, toward the shade of the tent where Ashwin can make out the bobbing, nodding head of the benefactor; a datarajah: grown sleek on the global market’s hunger for cheap IT labor. His expiation: a pile of chapattis and a pot of daal.

  Ashwin reaches the folding deal table where the alms are bestowed. The old man bows to him in blessing, an assistant hands him a chapati. Ashwin cannot but notice the barrier gloves. He looks a moment at the bowed head of the rich man, the saffron mark on the forehead, the simple white robes. Are you the one whose machines split my mind from my body and send it across the solar system? A nudge moves him on.

  “How long?” Ashwin asks the man at the end of the row of tables, whose job seems to be to keep the beneficiaries moving. He nods to the richly patterned cloth draped over the pile.

  “Looking like today,” the minder says.

  By the time Ashwin reaches the station, he has finished the holy breakfast. With each step up, the sound from within increases until it seems as solid as the four-hundred-year-old Raj-brick walls. Hand-scrawled signs apologize again for the delay in final construction of the nano-carbon diamond train shed. Labor shortages. More money to be made, out there. The spars of the half-completed dome reach over the crumbling station like a hunting hawk’s claws, stooping. Beneath them, legions of shift workers clash on the platforms, merge, flow through each, separate, neither the victor. Clocking on, clocking off. Families camped on the platforms make meals, wipe children, tend elders. Water sellers clack bronze water cups, newsplug hawkers hold up five fingers full of the days’ headlines; wallahs lift baskets of guavas and mangoes; battered tin trays of samosas and nimki; paper-wrapped pokes of channa. Buy eat buy eat. Ashwin half-hears an announcement, half-glimpses a platform change on a hovering roll-screen, then is almost carried off his feet as a thousand people move as one. Out there, a sleek little electric commuter train slides stealthily into its platform. He makes it as the doors close, dodges the Sikh packer who would seize him by collar and seat of pants and wedge him between that oily man with the big mustache and that girl in the suddenly self-consciously short skirt. Ashwin swings into the
gap between carriages: hands reach down, pull him up the ladder as the fast little train begins to accelerate.

  The inside monthly ticket has gone up again.

  Roof-riders shuffle aside for Ashwin as the train pulls out of the cracked dome of Kharar station. He grips tight as the carriage lurches over points. If you slide down between the carriages, there is no hope. But it is cheap, and the air is fresher than the hot spew pushed around by the carriage ventilators. From his high seat, it seems to Ashwin that even in one night the slum chawls have divided and grown denser again, like bacteria doubling, in a sample dish. They seem to shoulder closer to the line. Chawl life as a series of snapshots. Flash: a dirty little urchin girl, wide-eyed at the wonderful train, one hand in her mouth, the other held up in salutation. Hello hello hello ... Flash: three men in dhotis drag the corpse of a pickup on frayed nylon ropes, like an ox hauled to the slaughter. Flash: two barefoot women push a water-barrow, leaning hard into the shafts to shift the heavy leaking plastic barrel. Flash: a leathery old man angles a solar umbrella into the best light to power his sewing machine. Flash: A skeletal yellow cow stares dully at the level crossing, unfazed by the train hurtling past its nose. Don’t test your sacred status this morning. Panjab Rapid Transit respects you not.

  Ashwin thinks of his own tenaciously held few rooms, the roof garden where his mother tends a small urban farm, the balcony; his father’s pride, the mark of a man, a place where he may entertain his friends, read the paper of a morning, watch the satellite sports of an evening. But a proper house; no slum, no cardboard shanty, no. So proud they are. He thinks of the world he will build that day, the homes and towns they will design beneath the glass sky. Cities. Hundreds of cities; cities built for people, with districts where everyone knows your name and open spaces where you can meet and talk and markets where you can buy goods from two worlds and then a cup of coffee in a bar where you may watch sports. Cities big enough to be thrilling, small enough to be intimate. And chawls? Ashwin looks at the sprawling degradation with a new eye. Yes, chawls! Of course chawls! Where there are people, there will always be the cities we build for ourselves, out of our deepest needs, not given by those who tell us how we should live. Human cities. He imagines the people of Old Kharar and Basi and Kurali flocking from their hovels, along the sewage-seeping lanes to the roads, to the rail, south, ever south, to the girdle of space elevators ringing the world’s waist. He sees them flowing up those spun-diamond towers, sailing across space in colossal arks, whole families together. He imagines them coming down the hundred thousand pier-towers, spreading out under his glass roof across the virgin grasslands, taking the things they find and building from them their homes.

  A sudden slam of sound and air and movement jars him out of his dreams. Ashwin slides on his tender perch, grabs, finds human bodies. Hands seize him, steady him. The 07:00 Jullundur express hurtles past on the main line, a blurred streak of steel and windows and speed. Ashwin laughs. And trains. Of course trains. The only practical transport. No plane can operate in the cold, primeval atmosphere beyond the roof, and none but a fool or a sparrow would fly inside a glass house. Trains, then. Already, he has heard, engineers are designing fusion-powered juggernauts the size of city blocks riding tracks wide as a house. Grand journeys they shall go on; not gritty little commuter runs, but voyages across whole continents. Those who ride up on the roofs of these titans will see entire landscapes unfolding before their eyes, new vistas, geographies; new worlds that have never felt the foot of man.

  When the fast train slams past, Ashwin always looks forward for the first glints from the towers of Chandigarh through the smog haze. Ghost cities in the mist. The Cybermahals of the Indian Tiger. Curving scimitars of construction crystal, minarets of spun titanium and glass, curtain walls of solar tiling, battlements half a kilometer above the chawl sprawl of the Panjab. Ashwin seeks particularly the golden glint of the huge solar disk that fronts the Ambedkar tower, the vanity of corporada architecture but also the device that will spin his mind, his perceptions, his abilities, across the solar system to that new world. Ashwin thinks again of the holy woman by the station, buried in dirt. Can you promise them anything like this? Or is it all internal, all for the next world? There is the next world, hanging up there. All you have to do is look. A promise, a lure. A world of your own. Your Mars. For how many years had the disciple lifted his own arm, uncomplainingly, unnoticed, to bear aloft his master’s?

  Then cutting walls seal off the vision as the overburdened little commuter train dives into the approach tunnel to Chandigarh station.

  The others were asleep now, and the house was quiet and dark. A time for men. A time for father and son. They sat by the fire in the drawing room. Burning wood gave the only light. Paavo had brought a bottle of good vodka: Polish, none of that Russian dung. The dog lay at his feet, but it did not lie easily. Every creak, every click of the geriatric heating, every pop of the fire roused it: enemy/interest/attention. Lie at peace like a proper dog, Antti thought. Proper dogs trust their masters.

  The long, bad winter drive had drained Paavo; it did not take much vodka, Polish or not, to bring him to the point where he could speak the truth. He lifted his glass, turned it to catch the light from the fire, send its rays into his eyes, his soul of souls.

  “I thought twice about bringing Yuri with us this time.”

  A brief knurl of cold in Antti’s chest. Cold of winter, cold of space. Cold of an old man alone in a wooden house by the sea.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Paavo shifted uncomfortably in his chair. The bloody dog started.

  “He has exams.”

  “I thought he was doing well at school.”

  “He is. He is. Just ...”

  “Not at the right subjects.”

  “His science grades have been dropping.”

  Antti eyed the bottle, thought the Polish vodka made what he had to say next slip out so much more easily.

  “So, why should he not come to see me for New Year? I’m a scientist. Scientist first class. I’ve got the medal, from Comrade Kosygin himself. I could help him with his grades.” He waved down any interruption Paavo might make. “I know, I know. It’s the wrong kind of science. Space travel. Stars, galaxies, planets. Missions to Mars. Old science. Wrong science. Not the kind you can make money from. Not technology. Not computers.” The dog was edgy now, sensing an arousal beyond its primeval levels of reaction and response. Its velvet mongrel ears lifted. “All that time and research and effort and money to send men to Mars, and how many people get to go? Four men. All that money and time and effort. And the stars? Impossible! The universe is too big for us. Let’s explore inner space instead. Cyberspace. Everyone can go there. All you need is a computer. And look at the wonders you find there! All those wonderful things you can buy, if you have the money. All those beautiful women who want you to look at them having sex with donkeys or drinking each other’s piss. If you have the money. All the famous people; you can find out about their lives and their clothes and what they eat and how they make love, but you can never ever be like them. Reach the stars? Impossible.”

  He snatched up the bottle. Surprised, the dog gave a little grizzle. And you, the old man thought at it.

  “Are you finished?” Paavo asked.

  “No, not nearly; I’ve hardly even begun.”

  “Well, when you’re done, give me a shot of that and I’ll show you something.”

  Antti handed the bottle through the firelight. Paavo poured, and the two men drank in silence, one too proud to admit his hurt, the other to apologize. When you were Yuri’s age, on such a night as this we went out through those French windows into the gardens and named the winter constellations together, Antti thought. I saw you look up. I saw their light in your eyes. I have always respected your work, even if I haven’t always comprehended it, and if I am scornful, if I am critical and bitter, it is because, like my ATOM project, there, too, a great promise has been betrayed. Buy things. Look at things
. The constellations in this cyberspace have no shine, no wonder. They are shaped like Coke logos and Nike swooshes. There is no sparkle in them to catch in your eye. They don’t call you outward from home.

  Now Paavo was taking a flat case from his bag beside his chair. He set it on his lap, unfolded it. Blue screen light illuminated his face.

  “This is the thing you wanted to show me?” Antti asked. “Another laptop.”

  “No,” Paavo said carefully. “Not another laptop. You were saying about the universe being too big for us? No, it’s not. I’ve got it right in here.” He tapped the translucent blue polycarbonate casing. “I’ve got them all in here. Infinite universes, in one small box.”

  “You got it to work, then.”

  The son nodded.

  “If Einstein couldn’t get his head around quantum theory, I don’t imagine that I ever will,” Antti said, realizing as the words left him how mealy they sounded. “This quantum computing: calculations being made simultaneously in thousands of parallel universes, each as real as this room, as us, that dog. ...”

  Other rooms, like reflections of reflections. Mirror in mirror. Other worlds. One where the crew of Novy Mir were not pulled from the capsule at T-minus-seven because the booster, the ATOM mission, the entire Mars project had been so rotten with corruption and creaming-off that safety standards had been squandered.

  The moment you went for throttle-up, the fuel lines would have ruptured, Launch Controller Barsamian had said as the army transporter sped away from the launch site, the summer dust pluming up behind it. The call came through from Kirilenko. The whole thing is rotten. Rotten to the heart. It always was. A quick, cheap fix.

  He had glanced back through the window at the great white tower on the scorched steppe and thought, Was there a chance it could have flown, or had it been quick and cheap and botched from the start? All a feint in the game with the Americans?

  In another world, the word did not come from Kirilenko in time. They went for throttle-up. It blew.