The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Well, we keep doing what has to be done, despite it all,” he said.

  “I was innocent.” Her gaze slid away from his, and she smiled. Carson saw her connection to him sever. The shift was nearly audible. “I don’t want to see the news tonight. Maybe there will be a nice rerun later. Friends or Cheers would be good. I’ll go to the mall in the morning. The fall fashions should be in.” She settled into her pillow as if to go to sleep.

  Carson set up a vaporizer, hoping that would make her breathing easier, then quietly shut her door before leaving.

  Crowbar in hand, he crossed the dirt expanse that was his front yard, stepped over the dry-leafed hedge between his yard and the neighbors. The deadbolt splintered out of the frame when he leaned on the crowbar, and one kick opened the door. The curtains were closed, darkening the living room. Carson wrinkled his nose at the house’s mustiness. Under that smell lingered something rotten, like mildew and bad vegetables gone slimy and black.

  He flicked on his flashlight. The living room was neat, magazines fanned across a coffee table for easy selection, glass coasters piled on a small stand by a lounge chair and family photos arranged on the wall. Three bedroom doors opened into the main hallway. In one, a crib stood empty beneath a Mickey Mouse mobile. In the second, his light played across an office desk, a fax machine and a laptop computer, its top popped open and keyboard waiting.

  The third door led to the master bedroom. In the bathroom medicine cabinet he found antacids, vitamins and birth control pills, but no antibiotics. When he left the house, he closed the front door as best he could.

  An hour later he’d circled the block, breaking into every house along the way. Two of the houses had already been looted. The door on the first hung from only one hinge. In the second, the furniture was overturned, and a complicated series of cracks emanated from a single bullet hole in the living room window. In some of the houses the bed sheets covered long lumps. He stayed out of the bedrooms. No antibiotics.

  His chest heavy, barely able to lift his feet, he trudged across the last lawn to his house where one window was lit. Whatever the illness was, it felt serious. Not a cold or flu, but down deep malignant, sincere, like nothing he’d ever had before. This was how he felt, and he’d started in good shape, but Tillie hardly ever ate well. She never exercised. Her system would be especially vulnerable. He pictured his house empty. No Tillie gazing over her cards before drawing. No Tillie wandering in the yard, looking for a single geranium to give her hope. “How do you bear it?” she’d asked.

  Tillie was sleeping, her fever down again, but her breathing was just as hoarse. In his own lungs, each inhalation fluttered and buzzed. He imagined a thousand tiny pinwheels whirling away inside him.

  Carson started the New York City Marathon video, then returned to the chair next to Tillie’s bed. He wet a washcloth then pressed it against her forehead. She didn’t move. “What a celebration of life,” said the announcer. “In the shadow of disaster, athletes have gathered to say we can’t be beat in the long run.” A map of the course winding through the five boroughs appeared on the screen. Then a camera angle from a helicopter skimming over the streets showing the human river. At one point a dozen birds flew between the camera and the ground. “Doves,” thought Carson, feeling flush. Even his eyes felt warm, and when he finally rested his head on Tillie’s arm, he couldn’t feel a difference in their temperatures.

  * * *

  He dreamed about bird books spread across a desk in front of him, but he wasn’t in his office. Other desks filled the room, and at each one a person sat, studying books. In the desk beside his, a man with tremendous sideburns that drooped to the sides of his neck picked up a dead bird, spread its wing feathers apart, scrutinizing each connection. He placed the bird back on his desk, then added a few lines to a drawing of it on an easel.

  “Purple finch,” said the man, and Carson knew with dreamlike certainty that it was John Audubon. “A painting is forever, even if the bird is not.” Audubon poked at the feathered pile. “It’s a pity I have to kill them to preserve them.”

  “I’m searching for a bird’s name,” said Carson. Some of the people at the other desks looked up in interest. He described the bird. “I’ve only seen three of them flying with European starlings.”

  “Only three?” Audubon looked puzzled. “They flew in flocks that filled the sky for days. Outside of Louisville, the people were all in arms. The banks of the Ohio were crowded with men and boys, incessantly shooting at the birds. Multitudes were destroyed, and for a week or more the population fed on no other flesh, and you saw only three?” Carson nodded.

  “With European starlings?”

  Carson was at a loss. How could he explain to Audubon about birds introduced to America after his death? He said instead, “But what is the bird’s name?”

  “Purple finch, I told you.”

  “No, I mean the bird I described.”

  Audubon picked up his pencil and added another line to the drawing. He mumbled an answer.

  “Excuse me?” said Carson.

  More mumbling. Audubon continued drawing. The bird didn’t look like a finch, purple or otherwise. His lines grew wilder as the bird became more and more fantastic. He sketched flames below it with quick, sure strokes, all the while mumbling, louder and louder.

  Carson strained to understand him. What was the bird? What was it? And he became aware that the mumbling was hot and moist in his ear. With a jerk, he sat up. Tillie’s lips were moving, but her eyes were shut. What time was it? Where was he? For a moment he felt completely dissociated from the world.

  Two aspirins in hand, he tried waking her up, but she refused to open her eyes. Her cheeks were red, and in between incoherent bursts of speech, her breathing was labored, as if she were a deep-sea diver, bubbling from the depths. Her forehead felt hot again. A sudden shivering attack took him, and for a minute it was all he could do to grit his teeth against the shaking. When it passed, he swallowed the aspirins he’d brought for her. Maybe there might be antibiotics in one of the houses a block over.

  He put on a coat against his chills, grabbed the crowbar and flashlight, then crossed the street. In the night air, his head seemed light and large, but walking was a strain. The crowbar weighed a thousand pounds.

  In the second house he found a plastic bottle marked Penicillin in a medicine cabinet. He laughed in relief, then coughed until he sat on the bathroom floor, the flashlight beside him casting long, weird shadows. Only two tablets, 250 mg each. They hardly weighed anything in his hand. What was an adult dosage? Was penicillin the right treatment for pneumonia? What if she didn’t have pneumonia or she did but it was viral instead of bacterial?

  Carson staggered back home. After fifteen minutes, he was able to rouse Tillie enough to take the pills and the aspirin. Exhausted, he collapsed on the chair by her bed. He put his head back and stared at the ceiling. Swirls and broad lines marked the plaster. For a moment he thought they were clouds, and in the clouds he saw a bird, the narrow winged one that he’d seen by the river, the one Audubon said he knew, and suddenly, Carson knew too. He’d always known, and he laughed. No wonder it looked familiar. Of course he couldn’t find it in his bird books.

  Smiling, holding Tillie’s hand, he fell asleep.

  A pounding roused him.

  Thump, thump, thump. Like a heartbeat. His eyelids came apart reluctantly and gradually he focused on the length of bedspread that started at his cheek and reached to the bed’s end. Without moving, without even really knowing where he was, he knew he was sick. Sickness can’t be forgotten. Even in his sleep, he must have been aware of the micro-war within. It surged through him, alienating his organs, his skin. The machine is breaking down, he thought.

  “Someone’s at the door,” said Tillie. She stirred beside him. “It might be the pool man.”

  Carson pushed himself from the bed, his back cracking in protest. His legs felt wooden. How long had he been next to her?

  She was sitting
up, blankets over her legs, an open book facedown under her hands. “You’ve been sleeping, Bob Robert,” she said brightly.

  He put a hand against her forehead, then against his own. “I’m not Bob Robert.” She was cooler, and the wheezing in her chest didn’t sound quite as bad. The empty penicillin bottle sat on the night stand beneath her reading light. Could antibiotics work that fast? Even if they did, one dose wouldn’t cure whatever they had. She’d relapse. He’d get sicker. He needed to find more.

  A pounding from the front of the house again.

  He stood shakily, his chest aching on each breath.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m all right. A bit of reading will do me good.” She opened the book. It was one from his office. Sometime during the night she must have gotten out of bed.

  Carson braced himself against the hallway wall as he walked to the front door, hunched over the illness. His head throbbed and the sunlight through the front window was too bright.

  “Carson, are you in there?” a voice yelled. “Birnam wood has come to Elsinore,” it shouted.

  Through the pain and fever, Carson squinted. He opened the door. “Isn’t it Dunsinane that Birnam comes to?”

  The warehouse manager balanced a box on his hip. “I saw the damnedest thing on the way here.” He started. “Jeeze, man! You look terrible.”

  Carson nodded, trying to put the scene together. The manager’s truck was parked next to his own in the driveway. The sun lingered high in the sky.

  How long had he been sleeping? Carson forced the words out in little gasps. “What are you doing?”

  Grabbing Carson’s arm, the manager helped him into the living room onto the couch. “I found the antibiotics I told you about,” he said. “It wasn’t in the pharmacy. The place burned to the ground.” The manager ripped open the box lid. Inside were rows of small, white boxes. Inside the first box were hundreds of pills. He plucked two out. “But in the delivery area behind the store, there was a UPS truck chock full of medicine.”

  Carson blinked, and the manager offered him a glass of water for the pills. When did he get up to fetch the water?

  “Your chest is heavy, right, and you’re feverish and tired?”

  “Yes,” croaked Carson.

  “I can hear your lungs from here. Pneumonia, for sure, I’ll bet. If we’re lucky, this’ll knock it right out.”

  Carson swallowed the pills. Sitting, he felt better. It took the pressure off his breathing. Tillie had looked healthier. Maybe the penicillin helped her, and if it helped her, it could help him.

  The manager walked around the room, stopping at the photoelectric panel’s gauges. “You have a sweet set up here. Did you do the wiring yourself?”

  Carson nodded. He croaked, “Why aren’t you at the warehouse?” The light in the room flickered. Ponderously, Carson turned his head. Through the picture window, it seemed for a moment as if shadows raced over the houses, but when he checked again, the sun shone steadily.

  Without looking at him, the manager said, “Time to move on. That warehouse paralyzed me. I’ve been waiting, I think. Olivier’s Hamlet said last night, ‘If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come it will be now.’ ”

  “What was he talking about?” asked Carson.

  “Fear of death. Grief,” said the manager. “The readiness is all, he said. Ah, who is this?”

  Tillie stood at the entrance to the hallway. She’d changed into jeans and a work shirt. Her face was still feverish and she swayed a little. “Oh, good, the pool man,” she said. Without pausing for a reply, she waved a handful of packets at them. “I’m tired of waiting for flowers, Carson. I’m going to plant something.”

  Confused, he said, “It’s nearly winter,” but she’d already disappeared. He rubbed his brow, and his hand came away wet with sweat. “Did she call me Carson?”

  Shadows hurried across the street again, and this time the manager looked too.

  “What is that?” asked Carson.

  “I was going to ask you.” The manager stepped out the door and glanced up. “I saw them on the way over. They’re funny birds.”

  Carson heaved himself out of the couch. His head swam so violently that he nearly fell, but he caught himself and made it to the door. He held the manager’s arm to stay steady.

  Overhead, the flock streamed across the sky, barely above the rooftops. Making no sound. Hundreds of them. Narrow wings. Red breasts.

  “What are they?” asked the manager.

  Carson straightened. Even sickness couldn’t knock him down for this. The birds zoomed like feathered jets. Where had they been all these years? Had there just been a few hidden in the remotest forests, avoiding human eyes? Had they teetered on the edge of extinction for a century without actually disappearing despite all evidence to the contrary? Was it conceivable to return to their glory?

  Carson said, “They’re passenger pigeons.”

  The manager said, “What’s a passenger pigeon?”

  It’s an addition to my life list, thought Carson. Audubon said they’d darkened the skies for days. Carson remembered the New York City Marathon. The people kept running and running and running. They filled the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

  “I guess sometimes things can come back,” said Carson.

  The impossible birds wheeled to the east.

  The Potter of Bones

  ELEANOR ARNASON

  Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To The Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel that won the prestigious James Tipree, Jr. Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel is Ring of Swords. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo Finalist in 2000. Her stories have appeared in our Seventeenth and Nineteenth Annual Collections.

  Here she takes us to a strange planet sunk in its own version of a medieval past for a fascinating study of the birth of the Scientific Method ... and also for an intricate, moving, and quietly lyrical portrait of a rebellious and sharp-minded woman born into a time she’s out of synch with and a world that refuses to see what she sees all around her.

  The northeast coast of the Great Southern Continent is hilly and full of inlets. These make good harbors, their waters deep and protected from the wind by steep slopes and grey stone cliffs. Dark forests top the hills. Pebble beaches edge the harbors. There are many little towns.

  The climate would be tropical, except for a polar current that runs along the coast, bringing fish and rain. The local families prosper through fishing and the rich, semi-tropical forests that grow inland. Blackwood grows there, and iridescent greywood, as well as lovely ornamentals: night-blooming starflower, day-blooming skyflower and the matriarch of trees, crown-of-fire. The first two species are cut for lumber. The last three are gathered as saplings, ported and shipped to distant ports, where affluent families buy them for their courtyards.

  Nowadays, of course, it’s possible to raise the saplings in glass houses anywhere on the planet. But most folk still prefer trees gathered in their native forests. A plant grows better, if it’s been pollinated naturally by the fabulous flying bugs of the south, watered by the misty coastal rains and dug up by a forester who’s the heir to generations of diggers and potters. The most successful brands have names like “Coastal Rain” and emblems suggesting their authenticity: a forester holding a trowel, a night bug with broad furry wings floating over blossoms.

  This story is about a girl born in one of these coastal towns. Her mother was a well-regarded fisherwoman, her father a sailor who’d washed up after a bad storm. Normally, a man such as this—a stranger, far from his kin—would not have been asked to impregnate any woman. But the man was clever,
mannerly, and had the most wonderful fur: not grey, as was usual in that part of the world, but tawny red-gold. His eyes were pale clear yellow; his ears, large and set well out from his head, gave him an entrancing appearance of alertness and intelligence. Hard to pass up looks like these! The matrons of Tulwar coveted them for their children and grandchildren.

  He—a long hard journey ahead of him, with no certainty that he’d ever reach home—agreed to their proposal. A man should be obedient to the senior women in his family. If they aren’t available, he should obey the matrons and matriarchs nearby. In his own country, where his looks were ordinary, he had never expected to breed. It might happen, if he’d managed some notable achievement; knowing himself, he didn’t plan on it. Did he want children? Some men do. Or did he want to leave something behind him on this foreign shore, evidence that he’d existed, before venturing back on the ocean? We can’t know. He mated with our heroine’s mother. Before the child was born, he took a coastal trader north, leaving nothing behind except a bone necklace and Tulwar Haik.

  Usually, when red and grey interbreed, the result is a child with dun fur. Maybe Haik’s father wasn’t the first red sailor to wash up on the Tulwar coast. It’s possible that her mother had a gene for redness, which finally expressed itself, after generations of hiding. In any case, the child was red with large ears and bright green eyes. What a beauty! Her kin nicknamed her Crown-of-Fire.

  When she was five, her mother died. It happened this way: the ocean current that ran along the coast shifted east, taking the Tulwar fish far out in the ocean. The Tulwar followed; and somewhere, days beyond sight of land, a storm drowned their fleet. Mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins disappeared. Nothing came home except a few pieces of wood: broken spars and oars. The people left in Tulwar Town were either young or old.