The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  And the waiting, she knew, would make the story even better.

  Over the next year, Mother would occasionally smile and nod to the nice man at the library, but they would never get into a real conversation. And then, one Saturday, there was no sign of him. Neither Gus nor Mother ever saw the man again.

  Eleven years later, when she was 20, Gus would finally discover her birth certificate—born in 1989 in St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London—with her mother’s name written in the appropriate spot: Louisa Annebella Calzonni. And, in the space for the father’s name, nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  And decades after that, when she had become one of the richest women in the world, she would hire private detectives, and even ask favours of official investigative agencies, including Interpol, to find out something of her origins.

  One enterprising team would eventually find the grave of a couple named Calzonni, whose daughter Louisa had disappeared in 1987, in a small village on the outskirts of Turin. But in whose company Louisa had disappeared, or whom she had travelled to meet, no one would ever discover.

  Of her earlier ancestors, Gus would learn nothing.

  LONDON, 1844

  Grey fog blankets the boulevard which is Pall Mall, causing the gas-lamps—the lamplighter is still on his rounds, can just be seen far down the street, at his work—to hiss in the damp, heavy air. The buildings are grand, doors fronted by columns in the neo-classical style: white-painted or pale grey, eerie in the fogbound night.

  There is a Peeler on duty, on the other side of the wide avenue, his tall rounded helmet lending him the appearance of a toy wooden soldier. But the long truncheon tucked in his leather belt, and the whistle for summoning help, are real enough.

  The anonymous man, Ada’s messenger, half-hidden in a doorway and overly conscious of the pistol in his tweed coat’s pocket, stands very still.

  Mistress ... This is for my Countess.

  Ada engenders such extreme reactions, in her servants as well as her peers: a total, smitten adoration; or a fearful loathing, as though her dark spiritual curse may be infectious.

  Just wait ...

  And, eventually, there is the clop of hooves: a disreputable-looking horse and cart passing through, heading towards Trafalgar Square. The policeman leaves his post to investigate.

  Now.

  Ada’s messenger, his face muffled against the fog and his hat pulled low, moves quickly but noiselessly across the cobblestones, and into the entrance-way of the Athenaeum Club. Ignoring the shining brass knocker, he taps softly. After a long, tense moment, the big panelled door swings open.

  The footman nods in recognition, and leads the messenger inside. In the messenger’s left hand is an envelope addressed to F. Prandi, Esq.; he holds it up for the footman to see. A discreet cough, then another manservant gestures, and leads the messenger along a marble-tiled corridor, to a quiet gentlemen’s snug at the rear.

  A knock, and the door is opened from within.

  “Ah, my friend.” A rotund man beams. His Italian accent, when he speaks, is scarcely detectable. “Come in. Sit down.”

  There is a reek of old cigarillos in the room, although no one is smoking at present. Books line the walls, and copies of Bentley’s Miscellany litter two small tables. A globe stands in one corner, beside a heavy, dark-green ceiling-to-floor drape.

  “I am reading the most excellent serial”—the round-faced Italian’s smile flashes beneath his dark moustache—“by your wonderful Mr. Dickens. Whom I gather”—lowering his voice—“your esteemed mistress personally knows.”

  The messenger’s expression is stoic. His reply, when he makes it, carries the unmistakable burr of the Scottish Highlands.

  “That I cannot say, sir.”

  “And what can you say?” Irritation prickles Signor Prandi’s voice. “What, pray, is that in your hand?”

  “A letter, sir. Addressed to you.”

  The messenger hands it over quickly, before the Italian can snatch it, or make disparaging comments about his mistress.

  “Hmm ...” Tearing open the seal, Prandi flicks a glance over it. “Not signed, I notice.”

  “She ... Since the matter of the Royal Mail, sir ...”

  The Italian’s private letters have been intercepted in the past: an absolute scandal to the British public who had assumed their personal correspondence was sacrosanct. But then, Signor Prandi is a known spy, and a foreigner.

  “Don’t worry.” Reading the note more carefully, he adds: “Do you know anything of this favour she wishes me to grant?”

  A pause, then: “No, sir. I do not.”

  But that hesitation told its own story. There is a flash of gold, as Prandi hands over two sovereigns. The messenger gulps, then secretes the coins in his waistcoat’s watch-pocket.

  “I only ... The bairn’ll need a wet-nurse, sir, if it is to survive.”

  “A child? Ah, I see. Very good, my friend.”

  “Sir.”

  The messenger gives a stiff nod, then leaves the small snug, closing the door behind him.

  After a decent interval, to make sure the messenger has left the club, Fortunato Prandi sits back in his overstuffed armchair, and uses the silver point of his cane to ruffle the green drape at the small room’s rear.

  “You can come out now, Aldo.”

  “Thank you.” The drape is pulled aside, and a lean-faced man steps into the room. “This message ... It’s from the countess?”

  “The very one.” Prandi taps his teeth with the envelope’s edge. “And I wonder what kind of trouble she’s in now.”

  But they both heard the messenger’s comment: there’s a newborn child involved. The Countess of Lovelace has been touched by too many scandals in the past; one more would be disastrous.

  “The countess knows”—Aldo Guillermi’s face is tightly drawn: his long hair and wide shoulders bespeak an athlete’s grace, but his body is fairly vibrating with tension—“of my sister’s misfortune.”

  How else would anyone associate an Italian spy with a wet-nurse? For Guillermi’s sister Maria, so young and beautiful, has but recently lost her firstborn to a raging fever no English doctor could identify, no apothecary could cure.

  “We spoke,” says Prandi, still in English, “in general terms, no more. The countess knows of your sister’s plight, but not her identity.”

  “That is good.”

  For a moment, as the two men face each other, it is not certain where the power in this room really resides. Then Prandi’s glance slides away. Though he is nominally senior in the republican movement, his forte is solo, diplomatic espionage: moving among the drawing-rooms of the rich and the good, gleaning gossip, recruiting admirers. It is Aldo Guillermi who is the soldier, used to bearing the responsibility of command.

  “Mazzini,” he says, “has mixed feelings about the current furore.”

  Guillermi pronounces the last word in the Italian way.

  “The republican cause”—Prandi shakes his head—“can only benefit.”

  Both Mazzini, the true figurehead, and Prandi are in exile: the public face of agitation. Prandi’s work as a spy has been both hindered and helped by his now-public identity. Mazzini proved, to most intelligent readers’ satisfaction, that the British Government caused their personal letters—his and Prandi’s—to be opened, by the supposedly untouchable Royal Mail.

  Hence this handwritten note from Ada, which reads:

  Dear Prandi. I have a more important service to ask of you, which only you can perform ... and goes on to arrange a rendezvous, without specifying the new favour’s nature. Ada identifies herself anonymously, thus: I am the person you went with to hear Jenny Lind sing. I expect you at 6—

  “Your mother,” adds Prandi, as Guillermi finishes reading the unsigned note, “has raised more funds for the cause.”

  “It will be good to see her again.”

  Guillermi’s mother is French, and France has been home to many for whom Italy is too hot a pla
ce to be in these troubled days. More than anything, Guillermi wants to remove his sister from this cold benighted country.

  “Since Maria lost the child”—his gaze turns bleak—“I have feared for her sanity. And since her husband Higgs seems lost at sea ...”

  “She had best set sail for southern France, where your mother can take care of her.”

  “Yes.” Guillermi’s hand goes to his hip as though to rest upon a sword-hilt which is not there. “That would be best.”

  “And the Countess, it seems, needs a newborn child to disappear.”

  Guillermi looks at Prandi. The overweight spy looks unduly pleased with himself.

  “How can you be so certain? There might be another explanation.”

  “Ah, my friend. It is not the first time”—with a flashing grin—“I have caused a member of her family to vanish.”

  OXFORD, 2001

  Gus was twelve in the December when she took home that end-of-term report card: the last report before everything changed.

  A withdrawn child, the summary read, who needs to interact more with other children. It was the kind of report which Louisa had come to expect.

  But there were one or two puzzled hints from other teachers, including Mr. Brownspell who taught physics: Produces occasional flashes of surprising intuition, when she succeeds in engaging with the class at all.

  When the English teacher, Mrs. Holwell, set an essay assignment on Inevitability in Daniel Deronda, a novel the class had just read—by chance, the same Eliot book which Gus had borrowed, and her mother had tried to finish, several years before—Gus’s reply was a long and flowing indictment of genetic determinism: eloquent and reasoned enough for suspicions of plagiarism to spring up in every adult who read it.

  Worse, the essay contained equations and conceptual diagrams—of interconnected springs—forming a mathematical model of the interdependence of genes, and their developmental motion through a phase-space of genetic possibilities. It replicated some of Kaufman’s work (which she could not have seen) from the Santa Fe Institute—which is the nearest, she said in the essay, we get to predetermined lives, and it’s not close at all—and demonstrated the existence of broad constraints on the otherwise random, unimpeded arms-race of co-evolving replicators.

  “I got the idea,” she told Mrs. Holwell, “from the Faraday lectures. On the telly.”

  The English teacher, who had never heard of Richard Dawkins, was unimpressed. But she was sufficiently annoyed to show Gus’s exercise book, during a break in the staff room, to Mr. Brownspell. And he was astute enough to be amazed by what he read.

  “You watched Dawkins,” he said to Gus later. “When you were how old?”

  “I was young.” The twelve-year-old, with a solemn expression, shook her head. “But I remembered it.”

  “Mm. I don’t think—”

  “He’s real, you know. I saw him in town last week.”

  “Quite.” Brownspell was bemused. “He works here, doesn’t he? In the university.”

  It was the first time Gus realized that Oxford could be a special place.

  Perhaps the fuss would have died down, kept Gus’s life more normal, if this had not been an inspection week. But Alex Duggan was the inspector, and he was a young man who was overly sensitive to the annoyance he was causing to already overworked teachers. Across the country, politically motivated or well-intentioned curriculum changes (depending on who you talked to) meant that teachers were putting in long unpaid hours to prepare internal reports as well as lesson material; the feeling was of rampant bureaucracy gone mad.

  And Duggan, who had not so long ago been an idealistic neophyte teacher himself, welcomed any excuse to get involved with an issue which did not revolve around paperwork or failed administration. A problem child, or one of exceptional promise—in this case of suspected plagiarism, it could be either—would form a welcome break from a routine he was beginning to hate.

  He interviewed Gus in the art room, keeping her back “for a small chat” after the others had left for morning break.

  Afterwards, with a strange delight in his eyes, he showed his—or rather Gus’s—trophies in the staff-room: geometric models formed of plasticine and bright plastic cocktail sticks.

  “A hypercube.” Brownspell recognized one of the forms. “But what’s this one?”

  “She’s read about tesseracts. Then extended the notion, all by herself”—Duggan blinked—“to hypertetrahedra and hyperpentahedra.”

  “Well.” Brownspell slowly smiled. “What are we going to do with her?”

  “Hmm? Indeed.” Duggan’s answering smile grew wide. “Did you know Dawkins is giving a public lecture tomorrow night? In the Zoology Institute.”

  “Perhaps”—Brownspell glanced over at Jenny Mensch, who taught French—“a couple of us could take her there.”

  “What about Gus’s parents? What do you know about them?”

  “A single mother. Works two, maybe three cleaning jobs.”

  “Ah.” Duggan thought about the child’s indictment of genetic determinism. “How very interesting.”

  E. O. Wilson showed powerful forces, the twelve-year-old Gus had written, moving every species. But we are human beings and our lives are more interesting than ants.

  “Gus’s mother is devoted to her. You can tell just by the way she looks at her.”

  “That’s very good.”

  “You think we ought to have a word with her?”

  “Yes ... Yes, I think we should.”

  LONDON, 1844

  Ada, Countess of Lovelace, stares at the orange crackling fire, at the sheet of paper burning, becoming ash which leaps upwards, falls back. Outside the window, darkness has settled on fog-bound St James’ Square.

  “Madam?” A discreet cough. “Are you indisposed?”

  “Not according to the good Doctor Locock,” she answers.

  “I will let our guests know,” says William, “that you will be along shortly.”

  “Please do, sir.”

  Her husband William, Lord King, 1st Earl of Lovelace, nods politely.

  What have I done?

  She sees her husband’s real concern, and wishes that she could have been true to him, not given to the dark, wild, reckless passions she has inherited from her genius father. During her entire childhood, her stern unforgiving mother, Annabella, kept Ada forcibly away from the tempestuous Byronic verses: drove her relentlessly down this other path, of cold logic and objective mathematics.

  Except that equations burn inside Ada, as insanely bright as any visions the Deity (or Lucifer) heaped upon her mad, bad father, whose bones now lie safely interred in the family vault.

  O, my son. What have I done?

  But there is no room in society for the child she has delivered. The other three—legitimate, everyone assumes—are well loved. She cannot allow herself to believe that their father was any other than her husband, the well-meaning William. His house gives her freedom from her repressive mother: the liberty she has always longed for.

  Last month she gave birth, without her husband’s knowledge.

  It is an illness which causes her wild weight fluctuations, and that malady has allowed her to hide the pregnancy. Inspired by a penny dreadful, a cheaply sensational novel in which a woman had not realized she was en ceinte until the baby put in his appearance, Ada has kept the secret.

  Also, it is because of her insane cycles, of extreme weight gain followed by catastrophic loss, that William has chosen not to be intimate with her, his wife, for over a year. By the will of Providence, they have spent much of that time living in separate houses.

  Now, one way or another, the child must disappear.

  Ada has a wild scheme in her head for financing the child’s life. A gambling syndicate, using the power of her logic and Mr. Babbage’s Difference Engine, seeded with money from William. She has always been able to persuade him: by her forcefulness, by his genuine love for her. And she will need William’s written permissio
n to gamble in society, since a woman owns little of her own and it is the husband, always, who owns debts incurred by his family, as surely as he holds title to the capital he has inherited, to the monies earned from his own hard labours.

  “You’ll join us shortly, madam?”

  “Oh, yes, dearest William.” She sips from her claret. “That I will.”

  Her doctor no longer prescribes laudanum. Ada’s current medication is a strict regime of hot baths and small doses of claret, taken constantly throughout the day. It appears to be efficacious.

  In the flames which curl and lick inside the fireplace, this is the vision she sees: two scurrying figures in the nightbound dockyards, with a small well-wrapped bundle in their arms. Sometimes the baby cries, sometimes it is silent; either way, misery surrounds it as surely as the cold damp fog settles on the city she is growing to hate.

  OXFORD, 2004

  Bright lights, white walls, and the gabble of cheerful, energetic voices.

  Gus picked at her tub of Ben & Jerry’s “One Sweet Whirled,” intent more on the bright babble of ice-cream-bar conversation surrounding her than the dessert itself. The other students were so much older—18, even 20—that she had reverted to her quiet ways. Around the various colleges, three or four other undergraduates were very young; one of them, like Gus, was only 14.

  The others had been featured in their local newspapers or even the national press; their parents seemed to be teachers or chairmen of small but successful software outfits. Perhaps parental pressure drove them to achieve. For Gus, at home, this was not a factor; she knew only that her mother loved her.

  Here, on wall-boards, a cacophony of brightly coloured notices announced plays, books for sale, a demonstration against world debt (which, on closer examination, had already taken place), used PCs for sale. A small yellow sheet caught her eye: JDK, she thought it read, before realizing her mistake—in fact it was a demonstration of something called JKD. Hardly interesting.