The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  In another universe, they went for throttle-up. It flew. It flew right off this world, on to another. They came burning down in an arc of fire clear across Amazonis Planitia and the calderas of Elysium. Ten kilometers above Isidia Planifia the descent stage fired. They came down in fire and steam in the crater shadow of Nili Patera. The hammer and sickle of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was stabbed into the regolith and unfurled in the winds of Syrtis Major.

  Somewhere in that thin plastic case, that possibility existed.

  “Can I see it?”

  Paavo gave a shrug of assent. Antti lifted the plastic shell as if what it held were terribly terribly fragile. It was lighter than he had imagined.

  “All these ...”

  Paavo smiled. Antti turned the screen toward him, angled it to make sense and shape out of the plasma film screen. A brief frown of disappointment: the display was a standard operating system interface. But its pristine touch pads, white as milk teeth, called his fingers to type. Test us if we speak the truth.

  “I feel I should ask it something.”

  “It’s not an oracle. It’s just a computer.”

  “All the same ...”

  “It’s still garbage in, garbage out in every universe.” The coals collapsed, sending up a spear of flame, and the dog started, and they were two men together with the mad cold outside the window. “If it were an oracle, if it could send one question out into all universes and all times, what would you ask?”

  Paavo saw his father smile, then think, then the light from the surge of fire fade from his face. Slowly, deliberately, with winter-stiff fingers, not wanting to get one holy word wrong, Antti began to type.

  The locker rooms are all numbered and work in strict rotation. Fifteen hundred workers off-shifting as the next battalion shift on would clash like Vedic armies in the corridors and changing rooms, so they are channeled into separate sectors. Ashwin always imagines he can feel the drub of feet through the carbon steel skeleton of the tower. Likewise, though he never met his shift predecessor, Ashwin knows the heat and particular perfume of his body (irrefutably a his) from the imprint on the live-leather transfer seat.

  Men here, women there. Shirt on this peg. Shoes on that shelf. Pants here. Always folded, neatly folded. A gentleman looks after his clothes. A nod, a word to the number up and the number down and the number across as he changes into the simple white coverall. Sometimes, in the transfer, the body forgets itself; a soiling, a leaking, at least, a drooling. As ever, the papery thing catches at the crotch. Ready. Fifteen hundred locker doors clatter shut, ranked and filed. People moving; always moving, along streets, down platform, onto trains, into rooms, down plastic clad corridors, moving together, a herd of bodies under the utilitarian strip light.

  He nods to his fellow on-shifters. He does not confuse them with workmates anymore. Once you get in that chair, they can send you anywhere. The thin Sikh man next him could work an entire quartersphere away. His own closest workmate is a black man from Senegal. Ashwin carries, he bolts.

  But the room catches him, every time. He flies heavy-lift rosettes through the staggering canyon lands of Valles Marineris, but a thousand black-chairs, row upon row, all facing in the same direction, is awe-full.

  As ever, the air hums to barely audible mantras to relax the on-workers and set the brain-wave patterns ready for the transfer. The scent is mood blue. Ashwin has come to hate that stink up his nose. He finds his seat, twenty along by thirty-five deep. Still warm. He knows its every creak as he lowers himself onto the skin. A nod to the Sikh, mumbling a prayer to himself. Ashwin lies back, stretches. The sensory array arms unfold over his face like a mantis over her husband.

  A start, something, down at the foot of the room. A noise raised over the mantra-wash; wailing, animal noise. Ashwin props himself up, the machine arms with their eyecups and earplugs and skull taps scurry away. Thrashing: something is spasming its couch. Attendants come running through the rows of transfer couches, screening the sight with their bodies, but the fear has rippled out to every corner of the huge room.

  The technology is safe, they said. Tested, tried, true, safe. You need have no fear. We are paying for your soul, but nothing will go wrong.

  But things go wrong. Things have always gone wrong. The ones who settled under the skull-tap probes and went into seizures. The ones who built up an allergic response to the nanoprocessors. The ones who, like this one, come out in pieces, broken in the head. The ones, they rumor, who never come out at all. Who go somewhere else.

  Ashwin watches the electric gurney weave its load back between the couches. Nothing to see here, nothing’s happened, everything will be fine, go about your work, you have great work to do today, great work. And Ashwin feels part of him saying, yes, yes to the blandishments of the company medics and he knows that part is the pretransfer drugs suffusing up through the skin of the seat, through his own skin, into his blood. Let go. All is illusion: mind, body ... illusion. Free your mind. Let us park your body. Go. Commute.

  Soft bioplastic fingers unfold over Ashwin. Eyecups press over his sockets: A moment’s panic as the plugs seek out the contours of his inner ears and fill them. The breathing tubes worm down his nostrils, into his lungs. The drip-feed needles and blood scrubbers are busy at his wrists. Last of all, the taps caress his skull as the nanoprocessors swarm through the cranium into his selfhood and wrench it away from him.

  But another Ashwin, one the drugs and tiny skull machines cannot touch, shouts through the drugs and the seethe of nanomachines, the sweat-reek of the workroom, the corporada mantra-blur. What kind of world? What kind of Mars you asked yourself, up on the roof, riding with the poor men like the poor man you are? That kind of Mars, where poor men are taken away quietly on a cart, where there is no fuss, no mess, nothing to spoil the corporada image. You think your people will ever ride on the roof of those great fusion-power expresses? There will never be enough cars on the space-elevator, there will never be enough berths in the transplanetary ships, enough lovely, habitable cities for all the poor of Chandigarh and the Punjab and all of Bharat, let alone the children they squeeze into being every second of every day. Rich men build a rich world. You go to construct a golf course in the sky. A country club for the datarajahs.

  Then that Ashwin is snuffed out, and there is the black of light-speed for a time the mind cannot clock. And after that instant: light, mass, sensation, existence. A world. His world. Ashwin Mehta has arrived on Mars.

  The old man came down the stairs sniffing. No salty tang of mongrel urine in the porch. He threw back the heavy night curtains. The outer windows were leafy with frost. No taint in the hall. In the study the splendid erection of ATOM 12 was undefiled; a natural challenge to a dog. Why did he always forget to close the door when that thing came to call? Nothing and no one to close them on, most of the time. The living room smelled of vodka and gentle sweat, but no taint of piss. The fire had burned down to gray charcoals. New morning now. Antti wrenched open the curtains, admitting watery, destroying light into every part of the room. He waved clear a circle in the frosted mist inside the window. Real mist beyond, moving slowly across the frozen bay. The sun was high and wan, seeming to dash and veer through the upper streamers of the fog. If it were a morning hoar, it would boil off, but the speed with which the trees on Kuresaari Island were fading hinted at an inversion layer forming out at the limit of the pack ice. They could lie out there for days. Weeks, in a stable winter anticyclone. Breath steaming, Antti watched the ice crystals reform and close as cold coils of fog hastened across the ice to swaddle the wooden house.

  In the unsympathetic morning light, the oracle-machine was just a wafer of translucent aquamarine plastic. No more wisdom than a credit card. Wincing at the foolishness of old men and firelight and vodka, Antti slipped open the lid. Still there from the night before. He had forgotten to shut the program down. So clever, and yet too stupid to think of doing it itself.

  WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO MY DREAM OF MARS?
>
  Dining room unsullied. Dining table polished and perfect. Table linen pure and unpolluted. Kitchen. And there it was, one paw in a shallow lagoon of cold, orange piss, proudly wagging its tail.

  “Hiii! Hutt! Hutt! Hutt! Out with you, pissing beast! Go on, out, out, away with you.”

  The thing had a terrible temper, but the wrath of old men is swift and fearless. The vile thing was bundled out the back door before it could open its jaw. It stood there, grubby white on the white, stunned by the suddenness of the cold. Antti bent to the undersink cupboard to fetch cleaner and cloths and disinfectant before young feet in search of cereals came skidding through the amber slick. It was crying now, a kind of sobbing keen that made Antti despise it all the more. Learn Darwin, he thought as he went down on his knees to the crusted piss.

  Only when he heard Yuri’s voice from outside did Antti realize he had not heard the dog’s yip for some minutes now. He ran to the door to scold Yuri about silly boys who went rushing out into the cold not properly dressed. He listened. Yuri’s voice was getting farther away. He was out on the ice.

  “Bloody cur!” Antti cursed. He dashed down the back path as fast as his years and the winter would let him.

  “Yuri!”

  The boy was farther even than he had feared, calling into the white fog that came weaving thicker every moment through the trees across the inlet.

  “Yuri!”

  Come back, oh, come back now, don’t let this be the moment when you decide that everything old men say is stupid and you can safely disregard them.

  “Yuri!”

  The boy stopped, on the edge of melting into the white and white.

  “Come back, come on back. It’s not safe; you can’t see a foot in front of you in this fog, and the ice can still be rotten.”

  “But my dog ...”

  “Come back to the house.” He saw the boy look back to the dimensionless white of the closing fog and knew what he must offer to buy his safety. “I’ll go look for him. You go on back. It’ll be all right.”

  Hunting through the drawer of the study desk, Antti looked at his private space fleet and shivered. Venture into the unknown. The alien on your doorstep. He found his mission training compass. It saw me through Kamchatka, it won’t let me down within sight of my own back door. Outside, the cold was paralyzing. Antti took a bearing on the house and went down to the edge of the ice. Pebbles grated beneath his booted feet. And he was there. The door opening, everyone waiting for that first crack of light, that pale slit widening into a wedge, a rectangle of illumination, beyond which lay a new world. Cranking down the ladder, everyone getting into proper order in the lock as narrow as a birth canal; bulking in their excursion suits, rehearsing their lines. Rozdevshensky first, then him, last Nitin. The top of Rozdevshensky’s helmet vanishing over the platform. Rozdevshensky down, a breath—more a sigh—on the helmet intercoms. Then him, lumbering out backward, clumsy as a spring-woken bear. Looking at the strangely lit metal, until the crunch of stones under his booted feet. You’re down. Now, you can turn and look. How it would have been. Should have been.

  Antti Selkokari stepped out onto the frozen world.

  Within twenty paces, the house was a ghost. Another ten, and it was gone. Antti was embedded in white from the surface of his skin to infinity. He looked around, suddenly cold and fearful in the knowledge that he had let his need to be admired by his grandson push him into folly. Pale fronds of trees swam momentarily through the nothing. He checked the compass. It pointed true. It pointed home. He struck out into the mist.

  “Hiii! Hey! Here, boy!” he called. “Come on, where are you, you stupid mutt?”

  No sign, no sound. He half-hoped that it was drowned already. It would wash up with the thaw, recognizable only by its blue plastic webbing collar. Thing-that-was-a-dog. Let it go. Your kitchen is warm, there is coffee, and you are no Mars explorer. Anything lost in this is dead.

  But Yuri, he told himself. How can I tell him this and retain any honor?

  Another reading on the compass, another tentative shuffle forward into the featureless white. Every footfall a test. Will it bear me. Is it rotten to its blue heart?

  On Mars, there are craters silted so full of dust they cannot be seen on the surface. They wait, drowning traps of red, like buried ant-lions.

  Lost in remembrance, Antti realized with a shock of cold that he had been walking without thought. He flipped open the compass. The needle was spinning, swinging wildly from point to point, hunting for home and unable to find it.

  Antti Selkokari tapped the compass.

  Still the needle swung.

  He closed the compass, opened it again, hit it with the heel of his hand, held it upside down, shook it, shook it like he would a dog that had pissed on his dining table, pressed it up to his ear as if it might tell him the reason for its betrayal. Still, it lied. It would not tell the way home. Antti was lost. The ice held no footprints, no track back.

  “Hello!” Antti shouted. “Hello! Can you hear me!”

  The ice fog took his words, smeared them, returned them as whispering echoes. Echoes. Nothing in this dimensionlessness should echo.

  “Hello!”

  Hello hello hello hellooo hellllooooo said the echoes, in voices not his, that did not die away, but whispered on, into a mumble of conversations half heard, from another room, another universe.

  Hello?

  Against sense, Antti spun toward the voice so clear behind him.

  Is anyone there? Who is that?

  The voice was at once out there in the white and inside his head, speaking in his own Estonian and another language he did not recognize.

  “Who is this?” Antti asked, and heard his own voice speak in two places, two languages, two worlds. He frowned, a thickening of the fog, a curdling of the white, a solidity, a shape. A shadow, moving toward him across the ice plain. The white swirled, and a man walked out of it.

  White on gold. A line, a crack. Peer into it: a sliver of eye, a line of cheek, the corner of a lip. A face under the gold. Pull out: the crack is a hairbreadth in a curve of gold: another step’s remove, and the golden arc is the laminated visor of a pressure-suit helmet. Reflected in the visor, a landscape curved like an image in a state fair hall of mirrors. Where visor seals to helmet, the golden landscape curves away to nothing. There are hills mirrored here on either side; they slide off into nothingness, the mere suggestion of altitude. Optical lies: in truth, they are vast rim-walls, kilometers high. This same distortion gives undue prominence to the objects at the center of the field of vision. Immediate foreground: an insectlike vehicle, spiky with antennae, huge balloon wheels at the end of each of the six sprung legs. Behind it, a squat brick structure, incongruously like a Hopi pueblo, down to the satellite dish on the flat roof. Its location only adds to the likeness: a wide, dry plain of wind-eroded stones. Beyond, and dwarfing the little adobe home, a hovering saucer, keeping its station a handful of meters above the ground with twitches of its nacelle-mounted fans. The distortion of the reflection thrusts the logo on the aircraft’s nose into focus: ROTECH. It has colleagues, they hold tight formation across the valley floor as far as the visor reflections allow seeing. And beyond the flotilla of airships, and dwarfing them as they dwarf the house, the house the vehicle, the vehicle the man, the man the scratch etched by some accident in his helmet visor, the pillar. It is surely stupendous. It is buttressed like the roots of a rain-forest tree: tiny flakes of dirt cling to them. There are other pueblos, hanging from the lower slopes, insignificant as grains of salt. An airship drifts across the sheer face of the tower. It is tiny and bright as a five pice coin. Follow the huge structure up until it curves away off the edge of the visor. Look beyond: like the airships, this pillar is one of a mass. The floor of this vast canyon is forested with thousands of pillars, three kilometers high.

  Pull out again, in a long, astronomical-scale zoom. The pressure-suited figure is just one of many, human and machine. The machines outnumber the humans in
number and variety. The valley floor is a hive of machine species. There are high-stepping nanofacturing robots, pausing to stab proboscises into the surface and release swarms of nanoassemblers. There are surveying machines, exchanging heliographs of laser light. There are great orange worm machines, burrowing deep in the regolith, chewing dead red rock into pumice. There are planters and fermentories—great, slow, sessile things—gulping in carbon dioxide atmosphere by the ton and reacting it with water and wan sunlight into organic matter. Living stuff. The stuff of worlds. There are the fleets of heavy-lift LTAs—the man in the suit is marshaling them on some precision maneuver—and smaller, nimbler sky-craft, zipping between the big slow dirigibles on their priority missions. There are track layers and road builders and brick makers and patient little spider machines that mortar them into the neat adobes for the humans. There are machines that build machines and machines that service machines and machines that program machines and machines that repair machines and everywhere is the green circle logo and sigil of ROTECH. Remote Orbital Terraform and Environmental Control Headquarters. Swarming machine life calls green out of the red; tentative, fragile plantations of gene-tweak grasses and mosses. Beneath human perceptions, the cleverest, the most important machines, the nanoassemblers, fuse red sand into silicon pillar. On the scale of planets, other hives of machines extend primeval run-water channels into canals to carry water from the thawing north pole to the terraformed lands of Grand Valley. A flash of light: eighty kilometers up in low, fast orbit, a vana, a spinning mirror of silver polymer, frail as a hope, rolls its focus on to its true target; the northern polar cap. The scale of the work in this four-thousand kilometer rift valley only becomes apparent at this kind of altitude. To the northwest the forest of towers rise above our ascending point of view. Their tops open out into branches, those branches into twigs, bare, waiting. To the east the towers are still growing, one kilometer, two kilometers. Farther east still, trillions of assemblers swarming in the subsoil are pushing the great root-buttresses out of chaotic mesa-lands of Eos and Capri. The wave of construction passes down the chasm like a slow, silicon spring. Another glitter of light, not from an orbital mirror this time, but sun catching the edge of the world roof, five kilometers above the wind-shaved hills of Coprates. Above it now, climbing fast. The world roof flows from the east like a river of glass that falls into red emptiness.