The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Shut up about my wife.” I smiled; I had decided this conversation would remain friendly. In any case, I had come to talk about something else. “It was your idea to leverage Esteban and myself out of our own corporation.”

  “We may have collateralized a few of your assets. I would hardly call what we did ‘leveraging.’”

  “I’ve always been curious why somebody like you would take an interest in a tiny corporation like Coria Bright Matter. Alberto Zuniga told you about our lyghnium shares. Didn’t he.”

  I had found something amusing for him. “It was your friend Contreras that he told us about. A good morghium designer is hard to come by. The lyghnium has turned out to be a bonus.”

  For a moment, he seemed uncertain how much he wanted to go on. Oh, but here was a man in love with his cause. He had no enemies. Only prospects.

  “We have this wayward franchisee,” he said after a while. “This man, del Cayo. He purchased a lot of very expensive ideology. Refused every decent overture of repayment. When we pressed the matter, he generated the money to pay us by pumping up lyghnium production at all his ergosphere mines throughout the French Violet—so much lyghnium, he caused a collapse in the market.”

  “So, you turn our Bright Matter ships into missiles. And you shut down his lyghnium operations. Permanently.”

  “He’s put a quarter-billion people out of work. He’s used our ideology to sanction a civil war against his brother. Killing ...” He waved his hand at some unconscionable number. He had that faith shared among Anglos that anything can be forgiven. God’s own attorneys, those people; anything can be mitigated in the light of something worse.

  “You must be nervous right now.”

  “It’s a big night for us,” he admitted, breathless as an ingénue.

  “I mean, you must be nervous putting all that lyghnium back on the market.” That is how you paid or your pterachnium isn’t it?”

  He peeked up at me through his eyebrows, impish in his guilt. “We fudged a little. What we sold were options on lyghnium futures—the same contracts we acquired from Coria Bright Matter when we bought you out. Lyghnium 485.” He shook his head in amazement. “I’d still like to know where you got that stuff. It must be decayed half to lead by now, which is a singular shame.”

  “You’re going to substitute 482 from one of your mines.”

  He put up his hands, what can I do? The problem would come when Dryden’s creditors called in those 485 options; there would be trouble even if they accepted Dryden’s isotope for our own. Putting 900 pennyweight of lyghnium on the market would devalue the price another couple of kilotramos at least. I could see that chewed at his conscience in ways that killing another Bright Matter ship did not.

  But I had good news for Dryden’s conscience.

  “You are in a unique position to fulfill your lyghnium 485 contracts,” I said. “You own the parent isotope.”

  He started to explain to me about binding energies versus repulsive electrical charge, and the limitations of naturally formed nuclei. He stopped. He gave me a cautious, sideways look. A little smile. “What did you say?”

  “Lyghnium 485 decays down from pterachnium. You borrowed the money to buy your pterachnium using its own isotope futures as collateral.”

  He thought about that. His eyes grew narrow, and then very wide.

  “It’s called a market loop,” I said. “The way Martisela set up ours was very deliberate, with an exit strategy close to hand. And we were careful about who we brought in downstream. You bought into her market loop without ever realizing. You used it to borrow from some of the biggest brokers on the Exchange.”

  He turned on his heel to look back up the path. He might have been looking for a way out. He might have been looking to see if anyone else found me as amusing as he did.

  “So what then? We compounded your larceny with a few innocent mistakes. What are you going to do?” He laughed. “Call Los Zapatos?”

  “Better. I called all the people holding paper on your lyghnium.” In the dusk beneath the bridge, Dryden’s face took on the pallid glow of a drowned isotope. I could have read my watch by the reflection. “Not to worry,” I said. “I have assumed your debt. No need to thank me.”

  His first move was for something in his waistband.

  “In the event of my passing, my assets go to Señora Contreras.”

  Dryden had spent the evening with the delightfully ruthless widow. His eyes widened at the mention of her name. His hand fell back to his side.

  “There is a bright side,” I said. “I’ve got a buyer. A mining engineer five light years down the Hercules Vent, looking to illuminate veins of tungsten ions through the Nautilus Nebula. We’ll need precision-speed transportation to get the lyghnium to him before it decays. But I’ve got a pilot who does her best work just below light speed. She will milk those time dilation effects for all they’re worth.”

  “You’re giving us five years to get out of the lyghnium business.”

  “Under the circumstances, I’d say I was being generous.”

  Dryden had this caustic laugh of amazement. “You’re talking about some of the poorest economies in the Scatterhead Nebula. Speculators will short them into currency devaluations. Governments will collapse.”

  “What you get for bothering my wife.”

  He put up his hands in this placating gesture I’ve never seen anyone make but other Anglos. “We made a decision.” He put up his hands again. “A painful decision—to put the lives of the many before the lives of the few. I know this is hard for you to understand—”

  I checked my watch. “You have four years, four hundred and ninety-nine days, forty-nine hours, forty-nine minutes.”

  “I’ve seen your portfolio. You’re heavily invested in these currencies. You will go down with them.”

  “Forty-eight minutes.”

  “Señora Contreras may lose interest in market speculation. Then where will you be? You’re just half-an-hour across the bay from Jimmy-Jim Town.”

  I could see the conversation turning petulant. Besides, Martisela’s ship would be leaving soon. But I wanted to leave him with a memento of his time among the Spaniards.

  Dryden hefted Esteban’s perbladium sample, smiling his rigid smile. “So what is this stuff exactly?” Proud to the last.

  “Spanish version of a crystal ball. Gaze into it awhile. You might just see your future.”

  A deep-water ferry was passing along the canal toward the bay. I had to sprint to catch it. I’d like to say I never looked back, but really, it was a freighted moment.

  I have this lasting image of Dryden. He is leaning over the rail, chucking Esteban’s perbladium in its leaded sleeve and staring toward the gathering dawn as if surprised by the light.

  I have seen him since. He seems to have taken the blame for the collapse of the Scatterhead Nebula economies. Maybe he should have killed me when he had the chance. He’s a front man for the National Socialists these days. Or some tiered-market business operated by the Communists. Whatever, I lose track.

  I have acquired this cachet. Paradoxical, I know—I am the cause of eight billion tragedies. But infamy is a commodity like any other. It requires less promotion than heroism, though it helps that I went broke along with the eight billion residents of the Scatterhead—and for love no less. Heartbreak is only slightly less compelling than villainy.

  As for the money? I could tell you I don’t miss the money. You might laugh. I will tell you that there are compensations.

  I savor the memory of Martisela on the dock at Malecón de Viejas. The boarding bell is ringing, and we’re arguing. Heatedly. And this old grandfather slides in close to hear tales of drunkenness and cruelty. I remember the look on his face as he realized we were fighting over the destruction of worlds.

  I remember Martisela’s face against my palm.

  I remember her kiss.

  She has arrived in Bougainville. She speaks of this faded rose of a city. Talc-white streets and
arsenic-tinged chocolate and the reptile opera. Her note is a bit tentative. She’s reaching across five years. That last good-bye on the docks at Malecón de Viejas, she did tell me not to wait for her.

  I suppose I’m nervous as well. She remembers a clever young man untroubled by conscience, who lived behind the kiosks on Borregos Bridge and toyed with worlds.

  What will she think of the man he became? The canal-boat pilot with friends and bills in about equal proportion?

  I may leave for Bougainville and be gone forever. I may be back in a week. But right now, I am breathless with anticipation. Do you know how long it’s been since I was breathless?

  Agent Provocateur

  ALEXANDER IRVINE

  New writer Alexander Irvine made his first sale in 2000, to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and has since made several more sales to that magazine, as well as sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His well-received first novel, A Scattering of Jades, was released in 2002, and was followed by his first collection, Rossetti Song. He lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

  In the sly and tricky story that follows, he shows us how sometimes everything can turn on the simplest things: the flip of a coin, say, or whether a ball is dropped or caught. And when we say everything—we mean everything.

  It’s July in Detroit, a Thursday afternoon in 1940. I am twelve years old. From my seat in the left-field upper deck at Briggs Stadium, I can look over my shoulder and see the General Motors Building towering over Woodward Avenue. Cars stream up and down Michigan Avenue, Fords and Chevrolets and Buicks and the occasional Nash, many driven by the same hands that built them. I look at my hands and imagine that they will become autoworker’s hands, large-knuckled and scarred, grime worked so deep into the wrinkles that even Lava soap will never get it out.

  My father’s shadow falls across me. He sits on my right and balances three mustard-slathered hot dogs on his lap. I look at his hands and try to count the dozens of pale round pinhole scars that mark his wrists and forearms. My father works for the Ford Motor Company as a welder. He is thirty-one years old and seems to me to contain all the knowledge in the world.

  I take a hot dog and devour it in three bites, then reach for another. “Christ, kid,” my father says around a mouthful. “You and Babe Ruth. Tell you what, why don’t we flip for this one and I’ll go get another at the seventh-inning stretch?”

  On the field, Schoolboy Rowe is warming up before the fourth and the Boston Red Sox are milling around the steps of their dugout. Rowe is throwing well and the Bosox are in a bit of a slump; still, three innings could take forty minutes. I am twelve years old. I could starve to death in forty minutes.

  “Deal,” I say.

  Dad flips a quarter.

  Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that the act of observing an object displaces that object, so that its true position and direction cannot both be determined at once. Or so we were taught in high school.

  The Baseball Encyclopedia states that Moe Berg hit six home runs in a major-league career spanning parts of thirteen seasons with four teams. It was said of him that he could speak twelve languages, but couldn’t hit in any of them; Berg was the most scholarly of baseball players, and he made joking notes about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle while he watched the man himself lecture in Switzerland during World War II, all the while deciding whether or not to kill him. I think Moe Berg would understand the subtle shifts my memories of him undergo every time I dredge them up from my seventy years’ worth of neurochemical silt.

  I was Moe Berg’s biggest fan in 1940, even though he’d sort of officially retired at the end of the ’39 season. Like him, I loved baseball, and like him, I loved to read—a combination unusual among twelve-year-olds as it is in major-league clubhouses. I even went so far as to adopt some of his eccentricities. When I found out that he wouldn’t read a newspaper that someone else had touched, I demanded that I be the first in our house to get the Free Press off the porch. Nobody else could touch the sports section until I’d gotten a look at the box scores. Only virgin agate type for this devotee of the national pastime.

  Berg stayed on with the Red Sox as a warm-up catcher and a kind of team guru, but never played a game after 1939, and by the time the war heated up, he was Agent Berg of the OSS. His photographs of Tokyo, taken on a goodwill tour of American baseball players just before the war, guided Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers, and his good sense saved Werner Heisenberg’s life.

  At least, that’s what the history books say. I remember things a little differently.

  I remember, for example, Moe Berg’s seventh home run.

  I call tails. The quarter glitters through its arc over my dad’s hand, looking like any number of slow-motion coin flips I’ve seen in fifty years of movies since then. Dad catches it in his right hand, slaps it onto the back of his left. “You sure?”

  I nod. He takes away his hand. It’s tails.

  “Here you go,” Dad says. The last hot dog is gone before Rowe has taken his eighth warm-up.

  And then, would you believe it, Moe Berg steps to the plate. The Tigers public-address announcer sounds like he can’t believe it either; his voice hesitates, and is momentarily lost in the echoes of his last word. “Sox, sox, ox, ox, ox.” The crowd stirs, and people look up from their scorecards to see if it could actually be Moe Berg taking a last practice cut and scuffing dirt away from the back of the batter’s box. Baseball fans are always alert to the possibility of history being made.

  For me, Berg’s appearance is better than a ticket to the World Series. I take off my Tiger cap and look at his autograph, scrawled across the underside of the bill last August. I’d had to fight my way through the crowd around Ted Williams to get near the dugout, and Berg was just sitting on the corner of the dugout steps, rolling a quarter across the backs of his fingers and watching the crowd for pretty girls. When I’d leaned over the railing to hand him my cap, he’d cracked a smile at the Old English D. “You know what an agent provocateur is, kid?”

  “No sir,” I said, “but I’ll go home and look it up after the game.”

  His smile broadened just a bit, and he scribbled his name on my cap and tossed it back to me.

  Now he stands in, and Rowe fires a dipping fastball at the knees. Berg watches it go by, shakes his head, waits on the next pitch.

  And smokes it out to left-center.

  I’m on my feet cheering even before it occurs to me that the ball might have home-run distance. The ball reaches the peak of its arc, and the two Tiger outfielders slow to a jog, watching it head for the fence. Head for me. I remember thinking that: it’s heading right for me. I reach up, watching the ball curve a bit as it sails down out of the sky and worrying that it’ll go over my head. I don’t have my glove, but otherwise for the longest second of my life it’s just like the field behind Estabrook school, watching the ball and hearing my dad’s voice in my head. Keep your eye on it, look it in. Two hands.

  The sound of the ball hitting my palms is almost exactly like the sound of my dad smacking the quarter onto the back of his hand. Someone bumps into me and I fall between the rows of seats. On the way down I bang my head, hard, on a seat or someone’s knee, and fold up like Max Schmeling. But I’m not completely out, I’m still cradling the ball like one of the eggs the high-school girls have to carry around for their home-ec projects. My dad hauls me to my feet, and the knot of fans around me disperses as quickly as it converged. A few people slap me on the back and say, “Nice catch.”

  “Look at you, Avery my boy,” Dad says. “You eat all my hot dogs and catch a home run.”

  “A Moe Berg home run,” I say, looking at the ball. An oblong smudge covers part of the Spalding logo. Moe Berg’s bat was there, I think. It’s almost as good as shaking hands with him. I look up and he’s rounding third, two of him, accepting a laughing double handshake from the twinned third-base coach.

  It’s like a dream. Berg starts to get blurry, and
there is a roaring in my ears, and my father says something else but I’m too busy falling down to hear him.

  And then it is a dream, or anyway it’s different. Avery isn’t in the ballpark any more, and his father isn’t around; in fact, nobody is. He’s alone in a room that seems to have walls, a ceiling, and a floor, but when he looks at them he can’t quite tell whether or not they’re there.

  No, he’s not alone. There’s a man in the room. Like the walls, his face is indistinct, but Avery can tell he’s wearing a tuxedo like the one in his parents’ wedding picture.

  “What just happened didn’t really happen,” the man says.

  Avery is twelve years old. “Sure it did,” he says. “I was there.”

  “Where was there?”

  “Briggs Stadium, at the ball game. I caught this ball,” Avery says, holding it up to him so the man will have to believe him. He has the ball, therefore there was a home run.

  Only the ball is a quarter, like the one Avery’s dad flipped for the hot dog. A 1936 quarter, with three short parallel gouges across the eagle’s right wing.

  “Where’s my ball?” Avery looks around the room.

  “There is no ball. What you have is what you caught.”

  “Come on,” Avery says scornfully. “Ted Williams couldn’t hit a quarter out of the park. Hank Greenberg couldn’t. Jimmie Foxx couldn’t. You expect me to believe Moe Berg did?”

  “What do you have in your hand?”

  “A quarter.”

  “Then that must be what you caught.”

  “No way. You stole it, didn’t you? You stole my ball.”

  “Avery. Listen to me. There’s a reason it’s a quarter.”