The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  From his trip to Mars, Antti Selkokari brought back a Kazakh rug and a fabric badge with the names of the crew of Novy Mir. He brought them home to the wooden house by the Baltic that had been his father’s and, since his death, was now his, his alone. A party official invited himself for tea to tell Cosmonaut Selkokari Mars was dead, no one was going now or ever, never to mention Mars; forget Mars, but even then their authority was on the wane and Antti had nodded and signed the forms and consents and that night gone out on the pale sand beach to look up at that red dot in the sky. First loves are enduring loves.

  As he spoke, Antti became aware that the other voices telling their tales of their Marses were fading; the figures, though still pressed close as far as he could see into the white, were becoming less distinct. They became whispers, shadows, until all that remained with any clarity was the Indian youth, confessing his hopes and dreams for the world he was building, a world for all the dispossessed; with trains! Trains! Antti smiled. The construction worker smiled back and, like the cat in that English children’s story he never liked, faded too, the white of the smile lingering. Back to his future, his universe, his incomplete solution to Mars. Now Antti was alone with the ragged little woman, the saint, the angel, the artificial intelligence.

  “Will this do?” he asked. “It’s all I have.”

  “This will do very well,” she said, turned, and was gone, too.

  Antti was alone in the featureless white, and, as if held in abeyance, the cold rushed in.

  Time, he knew, had restarted somewhere. And space. Space! The compass. He flipped it open. The needle quested, then settled firmly on north. Antti tapped it. No lie. As if in confirmation, he heard a dog barking, muffled, but closing with every yap. It came bowling out of the white, breath steaming, curling up in itself, wagging its tail furiously in its delight to have found him. It made to jump up, Antti stepped back.

  “Enough of that!” It cringed. “Here! Hutttt! Heel!”

  Too much to expect of such a creature, but it did draw close, looking up at him, and together they followed the way the compass said to home, man and mongrel.

  Before the train has even come to a halt the roof-riders are swinging down over the doors and windows, hitting the platform at a run, some slipping and falling, some hitting into people waiting for the train out. Racing to beat the crowd. Racing to get home. Work. Home. Sleep. Work.

  Every other evening, Ashwin would have been among the first of the first. Tonight, he waits for the roof to empty around him. He looks up at the fragmented station dome. The memories of the time that was not a time in that other place that was not a place are less clear now. In time they will fade. All such encounters with the numinous, the miraculous must. It is written.

  Quantum interference, they said in the medical center. A random superposition of states. Less than a second, no permanent damage done. But in that second, he had flat-lined. Brain-dead. Mind ... elsewhere. Elsewhen. The corporada doctors ran their diagnostics and did their tests and pronounced him fit to work and travel. It would have cost too much money to have pronounced him anything else.

  New passengers are scrambling up as Ashwin climbs down from the train. He passes through the ceaseless, changeless bustle of the station in a state of beatification.

  I’ve seen you all, over there, in the new world. I told them about you, what you needed, what you dreamed. It may be your future, it may be someone else’s future, but I spoke for you. And somebody listened.

  In the square a great crowd has gathered, all attention turned to the street where the holy woman has buried herself alive. The kids have got off their scooters and are peering, questing over the heads, What’s happening, what’s going on? The band is playing like a pack of maniacs and over the general hubbub Ashwin can hear the sadhus proclaiming loudly that a miracle has taken place, a miracle, a sign for corrupt, materialist days. This woman! This holy woman! For five days she has mortified the flesh in the earth, she has practiced the fiercest of asceticisms, she has come forth and she has achieved samadhi.

  From the top of the station steps, Ashwin catches sight of her. She is smaller than he had imagined and, despite five days fasting in the earth, plumper. Her hair is wound in a long greasy pigtail, and a circle of sadhus surrounds her, proclaiming her virtues to the crowd, who thrust out their hands to be touched, to take some of her spirituality. But something stops her. Something turns her head. She looks up. She seeks out Ashwin on the far side of the crowd. Their eyes lock.

  I saw you, there, Ashwin thinks. And you saw me. We know each other. We know what we have done.

  Self-mortification as a quantum state? What are the physics of the soul?

  He nods. The holy woman smiles, then goes back to her adoration. Ashwin skirts the crowd, then the smell stops him. It has been a long, strange day of hard work, he could eat the beard of the sadhu. He might trouble the datarajah for another of his chapatis, he thinks.

  The thing ate like a pig. Worse, for a pig, despite its lack of grace, has some utility. He had put his life on the line out there on the ice (and beyond, something whispers) and it hadn’t even the grace to look up from its food bowl.

  Displacement, Antti thought. It’s the boy you are really annoyed with. He went straight to the dog, not to you. What did you expect? But you cannot be angry with our grandson. So curse his dog, and watch it scatter its food that looks and smells like shit over the kitchen floor.

  Paavo had that look he got when he wanted to lecture his father again for his stupidity. Antti knew that he would say it was a bad example to Yuri, going out on the ice alone, not leaving a note, a message—why, he even has a GPS tracker in the car—trusting your life to some ancient compass. All for Yuri’s benefit, but it would be son to father. Strange, the nuances of parents. Everything mediated through the children.

  Nursing his mug of coffee—shot through with the last of the night’s good Polish vodka—Antti excused himself from the kitchen table.

  “If that thing has to pee, take it out on a bit of string,” he admonished Yuri.

  He hesitated at the door to his study. All that Mars, shut inside. Hallucination? People did go crazy in whiteout. Wintermad. And he knew he had been closer to hypothermia out there than he liked to think. But it had seemed so real, so true. He had told those people things he had not even told his own son, certainly not the woman who had been his wife. Things he had only alluded to with his truest family; the brethren of rocketeers and Areologists and Mars dreamers.

  He opened the door, peeked in. There, in the corner, a glimpse of another world: a ragbag place that held the dreams of everyone who had ever looked up into the autumn sky and wondered at that little red fast traveler. Ten thousand cities under a glass roof. SkyWheels and moon rings and terraforming machines and reality shaping angels and airship legions and trains the size of ocean liners. And more, so much more; more wonders. As many wonders and incongruities as only a real world can hold. And people. Of course, people. People make it a world. Their stories, their words, their never-ceasing definition of its reality. Without them, it is just a planet. Dead.

  He looked again and it was just badges and models and toy spaceships hanging from the ceiling on fishing line. He closed the door. He would take his coffee in the living room. He could poke some life into the embers of the other night; there was wood, he might coax up a blaze. He settled in his chair, watched curls of red creep across the charcoals, almost alive. The quantum computer still stood open on the table. Antti turned it to him. His wish, his prophecy, burned on the screen. WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO MY DREAM OF MARS? He closed the blue plastic lid and settled down to have his coffee.

  Stories for Men

  JOHN KESSEL

  Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives with his family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American literature and creative writing at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975. His first solo novel, Good News From Outer Space, was released in 1988 to wid
e critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly imaginative, finely crafted short stories, many of which were assembled in his collection Meeting in infinity. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his superlative novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, and an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop (which he also helps to run), called Intersections, coedited by Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His most recent books are a major new novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and a new collection, The Pure Product. His stories have appeared in our First, Second (in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly), Fourth, Sixth, Eighth, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Annual Collections.

  In the complex and thought-provoking novella that follows, he takes us to the Moon to visit a Lunar colony that’s supposed to be a Utopia, a perfect, harmonious society worked out in intricate detail by social engineers—but one where the social engineers have forgotten that one person’s Utopia is often someone else’s Dystopia ...

  ONE

  Erno couldn’t get to the club until an hour after it opened, so of course the place was crowded and he got stuck in the back behind three queens whose loud, aimless conversation made him edgy. He was never less than edgy anyway, Erno—a seventeen-year-old biotech apprentice known for the clumsy, earnest intensity with which he propositioned almost every girl he met.

  It was more people than Erno had ever seen in the Oxygen Warehouse. Even though Tyler Durden had not yet taken the stage, every table was filled, and people stood three deep at the bar. Rosamund, the owner, bustled back and forth providing drinks, her face glistening with sweat. The crush of people only irritated Erno. He had been one of the first to catch on to Durden, and the room full of others, some of whom had probably come on his own recommendation, struck him as usurpers.

  Erno forced his way to the bar and bought a tincture. Tyrus and Sid, friends of his, nodded at him from across the room. Erno sipped the cool, licorice flavored drink and eavesdropped, and gradually his thoughts took on an architectural, intricate intellectuality.

  A friend of his mother sat with a couple of sons who anticipated for her what she was going to see. “He’s not just a comedian, he’s a philosopher,” said the skinny one. His foot, crossed over his knee, bounced in rhythm to the jazz playing in the background. Erno recognized him from a party he’d attended a few months back.

  “We have philosophers,” the matron said. “We even have comedians.”

  “Not like Tyler Durden,” said the other boy.

  “Tyler Durden—who gave him that name?”

  “I think it’s historical,” the first boy said.

  “Not any history I ever heard,” the woman said. “Who’s his mother?”

  Erno noticed that there were more women in the room than there had been at any performance he had seen. Already the matrons were homing in. You could not escape their sisterly curiosity, their motherly tyranny. He realized that his shoulders were cramped; he rolled his head to try to loosen the spring-tight muscles.

  The Oxygen Warehouse was located in what had been a shop in the commercial district of the northwest lava tube. It was a free enterprise zone, and no one had objected to the addition of a tinctures bar, though some eyebrows had been raised when it was discovered that one of the tinctures sold was alcohol. The stage was merely a raised platform in one corner. Around the room were small tables with chairs. The bar spanned one end, and the other featured a false window that showed a nighttime cityscape of Old New York.

  Rosamund Demisdaughter, who’d started the club, at first booked local jazz musicians. Her idea was to present as close to a retro Earth atmosphere as could be managed on the far side of the moon, where few of the inhabitants had ever even seen the Earth. Her clientele consisted of a few immigrants and a larger group of rebellious young cousins who were looking for an avant garde. Erno knew his mother would not approve his going to the Warehouse, so he was there immediately.

  He pulled his pack of fireless cigarettes from the inside pocket of his black twentieth-century suit, shook out a fag, inhaled it into life and imagined himself living back on Earth a hundred years ago. Exhaling a plume of cool, rancid smoke, he caught a glimpse of his razor haircut in the mirror behind the bar, then adjusted the knot of his narrow tie.

  After some minutes the door beside the bar opened and Tyler Durden came out. He leaned over and exchanged a few words with Rosamund. Some of the men whistled and cheered. Rosamund flipped a brandy snifter high into the air, where it caught the ceiling lights as it spun in the low G, then slowly fell back to her hand. Having attracted the attention of the audience, she hopped over the bar and onto the small stage.

  “Don’t you people have anything better to do?” she shouted.

  A chorus of rude remarks.

  “Welcome to The Oxygen Warehouse,” she said. “I want to say, before I bring him out, that I take no responsibility for the opinions expressed by Tyler Durden. He’s not my boy.”

  Durden stepped onto the stage. The audience was quiet, a little nervous. He ran his hand over his shaved head, gave a boyish grin. He was a big man, in his thirties, wearing the blue coveralls of an environmental technician. Around his waist he wore a belt with tools hanging from it, as if he’d just come off shift.

  “ ‘Make love, not war!’ ” Durden said. “Remember that one? You got that from your mother, in the school? I never liked that one. ‘Make love, not war,’ they’ll tell you. I hate that. I want to make love and war. I don’t want my dick just to be a dick. I want it to stand for something!”

  A heckler from the audience shouted, “Can’t it stand on its own?”

  Durden grinned. “Let’s ask it.” He addressed his crotch. “Hey, son!” He called down. “Don’t you like screwing?”

  Durden looked up at the ceiling, his face went simple, and he became his dick talking back to him. “Hiya dad!” he squeaked. “Sure, I like screwing!”

  Durden winked at a couple of guys in makeup and lace in the front row, then looked down again: “Boys or girls?”

  His dick: “What day of the week is it?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Doesn’t matter, then. Thursday’s guest mammal day.”

  “Outstanding, son.”

  “I’m a Good Partner.”

  The queers laughed. Erno did, too.

  “You want I should show you?”

  “Not now, son,” Tyler told his dick. “You keep quiet for a minute, and let me explain to the people, okay?”

  “Sure. I’m here whenever you need me.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Durden addressed the audience again. “Remember what Mama says, folks: Keep your son close, let your semen go.” He recited the slogan with exaggerated rhythm, wagging his finger at them, sober as a scolding grandmother. The audience loved it. Some of them chanted along with the catchphrase.

  Durden was warming up. “But is screwing all there is to a dick? I say no!

  “A dick is a sign of power. It’s a tower of strength. It’s the tree of life. It’s a weapon. It’s an incisive tool of logic. It’s the seeker of truth.

  “Mama says that being male is nothing more than a performance. You know what I say to that? Perform this, baby!” He grabbed his imaginary cock with both of his hands, made a stupid face.

  Cheers.

  “But of course, they can’t perform this! I don’t care how you plank the genes, Mama don’t have the machinery. Not only that, she don’t have the programming. But mama wants to program us with her half-baked scheme of what women want a man to be. This whole place is about fucking up our hardware with their software.”

  He was laughing himself, now. Beads of sweat stood out on his scalp in the bright light.

  “Mama says, ‘Don’t confuse your p
enis with a phallus.’ ” He assumed a female sway of his hips, lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes: just like that, he was an archetypal matron, his voice transmuted into a fruity contralto. “ ‘Yes, you boys do have those nice little dicks, but we’re living in a post-phallic society. A penis is merely a biological appendage.’”

  Now he was her son, responding. “ ‘Like a foot, Mom?’”

  Mama: “ ‘Yes, son. Exactly like a foot.’”

  Quick as a spark, back to his own voice: “How many of you in the audience here have named your foot?”

  Laughter, a show of hands.

  “Okay, so much for the foot theory of the penis.

  “But Mama says the penis is designed solely for the propagation of the species. Sex gives pleasure in order to encourage procreation. A phallus, on the other hand—whichever hand you like—I prefer the left—”

  More laughter.

  “—a phallus is an idea, a cultural creation of the dead patriarchy, a symbolic sheath applied over the penis to give it meanings that have nothing to do with biology. ...”

  Durden seized his invisible dick again. “Apply my symbolic sheath, baby ... oohhh, yes, I like it. ...”

  Erno had heard Tyler talk about his symbolic sheath before. Though there were variations, he watched the audience instead. Did they get it? Most of the men seemed to be engaged and laughing. A drunk in the first row leaned forward, hands on his knees, howling at Tyler’s every word. Queers leaned their heads together and smirked. Faces gleamed in the close air. But a lot of the men’s laughter was nervous, and some did not laugh at all.