The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It was five years since Gus had logged on to www.java.sun.com and downloaded the basic Java Development Kit (already an outmoded name, but serious coders mostly still called it the JDK, rather than SDK) onto her school’s battered old PC. And taught herself real programming.

  At her table, the talk had moved from sex to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; to Professor Schama’s thesis that women were the driving force behind cultural change in 19th-century England (even before they achieved suffrage); to the post-acid house Latin revival in general and El Phase-Transition’s lead singer, N. Rapt, in particular; and back to sex.

  Gus stared around the packed ice-cream bar, feeling out of place.

  “Excuse me,” she said to no one in particular, and slipped away from her seat.

  She passed the notice board, scanned the yellow sheet announcing a JKD demonstration—some kind of kung fu: nothing at all to do with programming; you had to laugh—and pressed her way through to the exit.

  Outside, on Little Trendy Street, she turned left, tucked her hands into her pockets, and began to walk. (A towny or a tourist would have called the narrow road Little Clarendon Street, unaware of the separate, insiders’ geographical nomenclature known only to students and faculty.) The street, by whichever name, was dark and touched by mist. Gus shivered.

  “—some change, please?”

  A small youth, scarcely bigger than Gus, was sitting on a blanket in a doorway, with a black retriever curled up on his lap.

  “Sure.” Gus had very little money—now, or any time—but perhaps that sharpened her senses in some way. She knew real, desperate poverty when she saw it.

  She handed over some coins.

  “Thanks, miss.”

  “No problem.” She liked the American sound of that: like something from the movies. “Take it easy.”

  She walked on.

  Something ...

  Usually, this close to the city centre, the streets were safe. But there was a rustle as she passed the bushes by Wellington Square, and she stopped. Her skin prickled—

  Then a heavy hand grabbed her sleeve.

  “Hey, chickie. Should we be out after dark?”

  Stink of breath, close to her. Gus choked.

  And another voice, slimy, behind her: “Gimme, now!”

  Help me!

  Fear paralysed Gus’s throat, her mouth wide but silent, like a dying fish. Her mind would not process what was happening as big shapes manhandled her. Gus was utterly helpless.

  I don’t want to ...

  “Hey!” An echoing voice.

  Sound of a dog, barking.

  “Bitch-girl.”

  Impact on her face. Spurt of warm blood in mouth.

  Then they were gone, vanished into the thickening fog, while she sat back, stunned, on cold paving-stones. Beside Gus, the young homeless man squatted, careful not to touch her.

  “Are you all right?”

  His dog growled at the departed muggers once more, then looked at Gus, stopped, swallowed wetly, then licked her face.

  LONDON, 1844

  St. Catherine’s Dock is dark. Two figures hurry across the cobblestones: Aldo Guillermi, muffled against the cold, carrying a cane which he is careful not to tap against the ground, and his sister, Maria. The baby, wrapped in her shawl, is silent.

  “Aldo, we will be late. If it sails, what of our baggage?”

  “Hush. They won’t throw it off.”

  “But ...”

  “It sails, and we sail onboard.”

  But their voices carry, and dark figures step from the shadows behind a pile of netting and crates. There are three of them, big and burly, with short heavy jackets over their tunics, and heavy belaying-pins in their hands.

  “Well, mates.” The first one spits a long stream of something dark onto the dockyard stones. “We’ve found a new friend, looks like.”

  “No.” Guillermi raises his empty left hand, placating. “Sirs, I cannot. We’re about to sail.”

  “ ’At’s what I said, innit?”

  Press-gang? Or worse?

  “I’m sorry.” Guillermi adjusts his grip on the walking-cane. “I don’t understand. Could you repeat that, please?”

  “You deaf, or what? I said—”

  The cane whips down and up, in an instant: downwards, across the leader’s right hand, then uses the rebound to arc backhand across the man’s face. His belaying-pin clatters on the cobblestones.

  “Maria, go ...”

  They are almost upon him, but Guillermi sidesteps, leading them away from his sister.

  “Get ’im.”

  A fencing-lunge, and he stabs the cane’s point into a second attacker’s throat, followed with a savate side-kick into the lower ribs. The man doubles up, but his mate has already seized Guillermi’s arms from behind, the grip unbreakable.

  Strike like lightning ...

  Guillermi snaps his head backwards, feels the crunch of broken nose against the back of his skull. Stamps downwards, arcs his elbow back—impact—and spins away.

  ... and roar like thunder.

  Charlemont’s never-forgotten words, as he drove his students to fight, scream now in Guillermi’s brain.

  “Yaaah!”

  His warrior-yell startles all three attackers. A circular fouetté, a whipping kick into a thigh muscle, and the first is down, leg paralysed. Guillermi spins to one side—half-heard: “I’ve got ’im”—then his heel takes another in the throat, quicker than thought, in a beautiful revers. Then an arcing series of la canne strikes drops the leader.

  All three men are down.

  A civilized man would stop now, but a soldier knows better. If his attackers have other weapons, this is the moment when they will use them. So Guillermi—as has been drilled into him—does not stop, but whirls and stamps onto ribs, onto heads, whips the cane downwards again and again, until the threat is gone.

  He began training in le savate with spoiled young gentlemen, in a somewhat effete salon, during his Sorbonne days. But he moved on to study with the huge powerful champion Charlemont, who regularly lifted small cannon barrels overhead, and whose instruction was practical and deadly. In later years, Guillermi practised in the sun-drenched south, in the dockyard style of rough Marseilles, where sporting rules have never applied.

  One of his attackers is curled up on his side, hands around his damaged knees, mewling, with a long wicked knife beside him. Guillermi kicks the blade across damp cobbles, out of reach. Another man lies still, softly snoring as though asleep. The third ...

  Moves!

  Guillermi leaps back, startled by a flash of light—blade—and then a crack of sound. And the man slumps once more upon the cold dockyard cobblestones.

  “Maria! Are you all right?”

  Like a marionette with severed strings, the corpse lies with twisted neck, a pool of dark liquid expanding beneath its lifeless head.

  “Yes, my brother.” Blue steel glints in her hand, beneath the baby’s form. “Let’s go.”

  Her voice is very calm, as she slips the dark, six-inch Derringer pistol out of sight. It is a muzzle-loaded 1807 Derringer Phila, blued steel inset in polished wood: a percussion cap pocket gun which requires a steady hand and careful aiming. Guillermi is impressed.

  Some good will come of this.

  It is a strange thought for a protective brother to have. Yet Maria’s hysteria is suddenly gone, along with the dark depression of recent days: replaced by a quiet determination. And somehow her renewed spirit has kept the baby—the newborn boy she must protect—from crying.

  “Yes. Three days,” he tells her, “and we’ll see Maman once more.”

  OXFORD, 2006

  There was a lecture to commemorate some obscure academic event—the anniversary of someone else’s lecture—and it began with a boring recitation of the history of computing. The lecturer’s accent was transatlantic, and his name was Ives, but Gus knew nothing of his work.

  “And, before Turing’s life was tragically cut short in
1954, hounded by society to his death, though he almost certainly did more than any other single man to ensure Allied victory in World War II ...”

  Gus’s skin prickled.

  Turing was here, in this place, she realized. He was real.

  Buried in Ives’s tone, she thought, was a resentment towards the society which had caused the mathematician’s suicide. Perhaps not everyone in the room detected it—most of her colleagues were waiting in good-natured boredom for the meat of the lecture to follow—but on some level several of them did.

  Ives was a visiting research fellow, and Gus followed his talk with interest: a brave attempt to bridge the conflicting software paradigms of formal specification languages and evolutionary algorithms. Most of the people sitting near Gus were Z experts, used to formulating system definitions with rigorous symbolic logic: they frowned at the anti-reductionist notion of creating code which had evolved, not been designed.

  Gus was fascinated.

  Afterwards, she found herself among a small group of faculty and students drinking tea in the hallway outside the lecture theatre. When someone suggested relocating to a common room, Ives put down his half-drunk tea, looking relieved, then made the counter-proposal of coffee in Starbucks.

  “My treat,” he said, which swayed the balance.

  “Authors and academics,” he would tell Gus at a later date, “are easily swayed by the promise of free drink or food.”

  “Pavlovian conditioning,” she would reply. “And the desire to meet like minds: let’s be fair.”

  The coffee house was teeming with energy. While the rest of the group went upstairs to stake out a claim on seats, Gus volunteered to help Ives carry the collection of cappuccinos, frappuccinos, tea—that last for old Crichton, of course—and lattes, which someone had pointed out was a bag of bevvies.

  “I was hoping,” said Ives, leaning on the delivery counter, “to have a conversation free of maths humour, for a change.”

  A “bag” was technically correct: a mathematical set where duplication was allowed but sequencing was irrelevant—both Jim and Maureen had ordered venti lattes, and it didn’t matter which of the two drinks either person took.

  “No chance of that round here.” Gus was surprised at her own boldness. “If you want normality, head north.”

  “Or just outwards, yeah. Town and gown. I love this old place.” Ives had chosen to wear a bright red tie, and he was now running his finger inside his shirt collar, and looking uncomfortable. “Less formal than I expected. I was doing some consultancy at a place in London, and everyone was wearing business suits.”

  “You might as well take the tie off,” said Gus. “Visiting the empire’s last bastion must have misled you.”

  “Right. Here, it’s just like home. I’m the only guy in this city who’s wearing one.” He tugged it, pulling the knot too tight, in his effort to undo it. “Damn. You know, I had to consciously work out the theory behind this, but I only modelled the putting-it-on operation.”

  So much for an evening without maths humour.

  “Let me.” Surprised again at her own actions, she reached up—aware of his close warmth—and undid the knot.

  “Thanks. You realize there are more than 80 ways to tie one of these things?”

  “Really?” Gus frowned in concentration, social niceties forgotten. It had become a technical problem, and that was interesting.

  “A handy way to model knot topology,” Ives said, stuffing the discarded tie in his jacket pocket, “is to consider the knot’s context, the space around it.”

  “Oh, yes. Model the not-knots. I’ve heard of that ...”

  When the drinks arrived, they carried everything upstairs, and found their colleagues gathered on wooden chairs and armchairs around a small table, discussing the constraints placed by Goedel’s Theorem on some branch of research which Gus had never heard of.

  Do I really belong here?

  It was a question she asked herself often. But then some maths or physics or computation problem—they were all the same to her—would crop up, and she would be lost in the joy of solving it.

  I should get home, now.

  “—your opinion?” Ives was asking her.

  “Sorry. I was thinking of something else.” Gus put down the empty cup she realized she was holding. “I ought to be going.”

  Ives looked at her for a moment. Just then, they were in an isolated bubble of silence while animated conversation sparkled all around them.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  How did you know? She was so used to hiding the details of her life.

  “My mother ... She’s not well.” Gus blinked. She had not told anyone. “They’ve examined her at the Radcliffe Infirmary, and they don’t know what’s wrong. Or they’re not telling us.”

  “Oh.” Ives put down his own drink. “Where’s home?”

  Gus told him.

  “You’ve got a car?”

  “No. We—” Gus shook her head. “We can’t afford one. And I can’t drive.”

  “Ah, right.” Ives stood up and turned to the rest of the group. “I’ll be back shortly. Just going to run Gus home, is that all right?”

  She had not realized he even knew her name.

  “I’m parked in St. Giles,” he added. “Major achievement.”

  He left with Gus, whether it was all right with the others or not.

  In the car, as they were travelling, he told her about Seattle: “You’d love it. Friendly city, great campus.” He’d delivered various anecdotes about consultancy work for a software giant, during the course of the lecture and later. “Starbucks in the same building. When I was in the Games Division, the company took us to the movies, whenever a sci-fi or a fantasy came out.”

  “Cool,” said Gus. And then: “You worked for the Games Division?”

  “Yeah, for a while. I devised scenarios for Tokugawa. Devious politics and ninja fighting. What a hoot.”

  “Really.”

  “Hmm.” Gus flicked a glance at her, then returned his attention to the road. “You don’t like the game?”

  “It’s great, actually.” With a shrug. “The martial arts were a bit exaggerated, but that’s par for the course, isn’t it?”

  “You know about martial arts?”

  Gus’s voice was quietly confident: “I train in jeet kune do.”

  Big hand, grabbing in the darkness ...

  No one would ever mug her again.

  In the course of a very long life, Gus would have only one occasion to use her art on the street—or rather, on a lonely El station platform in Chicago, late at night on the Green Line south of the Loop, where a big thug attempted to beat an old man senseless with his own walking-stick, while his laughing buddies looked on—but the difference it made that night was mortal.

  She used a reverse-snake escrima disarm to send the stick flying to one side, before clawing the attacker’s eyes and breaking both his knees. The man’s six buddies, through alcohol-clouded senses, noticed that she was small and female, and did not process the ease with which she had taken the big man out.

  The rest happened very fast.

  In seconds she was spinning and circling, throwing kicks and elbow-strikes, firing everything she had been taught in a continuous blur of adrenalized motion. The last man was even bigger than the first, drawing a knife from his belt but too late, as Gus used the running side-kick which Bruce Lee had developed to blast her attacker right off the edge of the platform and onto the tracks, where he narrowly escaped fatal electrocution.

  Beyond that one incident, the daily discipline of physical JKD training, and her later experimentation with neurolinguistic programming, were the keys—she always thought—to her longevity and success.

  As for her mathematical intuition ... she would never be certain whether such discipline helped or hindered in that regard. But when applied to emotional control and financial management, it would certainly make her rich.

  Very rich indeed.


  That night in Oxford, though, as Ives was leaving her house—having stayed to chat with Gus and her mother, and being polite enough to pretend he enjoyed the dark strong tea which Mother made—Gus reached up to kiss him on the cheek, but he moved back subtly and she subsided.

  “I am single,” he told her. “But, you know ... Most guys, at my age, are either married or gay.”

  It took a while for that to sink in.

  “Oh.”

  Ives smiled. “Just so long as you know.”

  He shook her hand then, while her cheeks flared red. Over the decades, it was only the first of many shared incidents they would have cause to chuckle over.

  And that was the first night she dreamed of knots.

  PROVENCE, 1848

  Medora stands at the window, looking out at the unseasonal rain falling upon the courtyard, thinking of England, which she will never see again.

  “It’s a time of revolution,” one of the other two women says. “According to Aldo, this is the year the world will change.”

  Medora, painfully thin but strong now, turns slowly around. The woman who spoke, Alicia, is heavily pregnant. Seated by the pale stone fireplace, she rests one limp hand on the hemispherical bulge of her stomach.

  I should no longer regard you, Medora thinks, as my servant.

  She looks up at Aldo’s sister, Maria, and they share wan smiles. They grew fond of Alicia, when she came up from the village to help out, right from the very first days. Doing more work than she was supposed to. Chatting with Aldo about politics and history. Medora and Maria saw, long before Alicia and Aldo realized it themselves, that the young couple had fallen deeply in love.

  All three of us are sisters now.

  There is the family you are born into—in Medora’s case, a dark calamitous beginning: the Byrons are truly cursed—and the family which, if you are a survivor, you get to choose. It has taken Medora a long time to realize this, but she knows it is true.

  “He’ll come back safely,” she tells Alicia. “Don’t worry.”

  Alicia nods, but Maria turns away. Since Aldo rode off to fight, she has been subject to moods of deep introspection.