The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  McCauley smiled. “Yes.” Daisy came into the room.

  It had been twenty-two days since he had last seen his wife; Wing was disgusted with himself for knowing the number exactly. After the party he had worked hard at avoiding her. He had tried to stay out of the arid precincts of her Portsmouth while lowering himself into the swamp around its edges. He had reprogrammed the door to the Counting House to admit no one but him and had changed his work schedule, sneaking in just often enough to keep up appearances. He had never replied to the messages she left for him.

  “What is she doing here?” Wing was tempted to walk out.

  “I think it best that you wait alone with him, Daisy,” said McCauley.

  “Best for who?” said Wing.

  “For her, of course. Look into the sun, Daisy.”

  “Yes, Jim.”

  “Phillip.” He bowed and left them together.

  “Look into the sun. Look into the sun.” He opened the flask. “What the hell does that mean anyway?”

  “It’s like a koan—a proverb. It takes a long time to explain.” Daisy looked as though she had put herself together in a hurry: wisps of hair fell haphazardly across her forehead and the collar of her mud-colored jumpsuit was turned up. She settled across the table from him and drummed her fingers on a keyboard, straightened her hair, glanced at him and then quickly away. He realized that she did not want to be there either and he took another drink.

  “Keep your secrets then—who cares? I came to see Ndavu.”

  “He’s not here right now.”

  “All right.” He pushed the chair back. “Goodbye, then.”

  “No, please.” She seemed alarmed. “He’s coming. Soon. He’ll want to see you; he’s been waiting a long time.”

  “It’s good for him.” Wing thought she must have orders to keep him there; that gave him a kind of power over her. If he wanted to he could probably steer this encounter straight into one of the revenge fantasies that had so often been a bitter substitute for sleep. No matter what he said, she would have to listen.

  “Are you often like this?” she said.

  “What the hell do you care?” He drank and held out the flask. “Want some?”

  “You haven’t returned my calls.”

  “That’s right.” He shook the flask at her.

  She did not move. “I know what you’ve been doing.”

  “What is it you’re waiting to hear, Daisy?” Saying her name did it. The anger washed over him like the first wave of an amphetamine storm. “That I’ve spent the last three weeks twisted out of my mind? That I can’t stand to live without you? Well, plug yourself. Even if it were true I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

  She sat like a statue, her face as smooth and as invulnerable as stone, her eyes slightly glazed, as if she were meditating at the same time she pretended to listen to him. His anger surged, and he veered out of control.

  “You’re not worth it, you know that? It gets me right in the gut sometimes, that I ever felt anything for you. You pissed on everything I thought was important in my life and I was dumb enough to be surprised when you did it. Look at you. I’m suffering and you sit there like you’re carved out of bloody ice. And calling it good breeding, no doubt. Fine. Great. But just remember that when you die, you bitch, you’ll be nothing but another stinking puddle on the floor.”

  Then Wing saw the tear. At first he was not even sure that it was hers: her expression had not changed. Maybe a water pipe had leaked through the ceiling and dripped on her. The tear rolled down her cheek and dried near the corner of her mouth. A single tear. She held her head rigidly erect, looking at him. He realized then that she had seen his pain and heard his anger and that her indifference was a brittle mask which he could shatter, if he were cruel enough. Suddenly he was ashamed.

  He leaned forward, put his elbows on the table, his head in his hands. He felt like crying too. “It’s been hard,” he said. He shivered, took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.” He wanted to reach across the table and wipe away the track of her tear with his finger but she was too far away.

  They sat without speaking. He imagined she was thinking serene Messenger thoughts; he contemplated the ruins of their marriage. Ever since the party Wing had hoped, secretly, desperately, that Daisy would in time offer some explanation that he could accept—even if it were not true. He had expected to be reconciled. Now for the first time he realized that she might not want a reconciliation. The silence stretched. The telelink rang; Daisy tapped at the keyboard.

  “He’s in his office,” she said.

  * * *

  Ndavu’s grin reminded Wing of the grin that Leonardo had given his John the Baptist: mysterious, ironic, fey. “We do not, as you say, keep the message to ourselves.” Ndavu’s wheelchair was docked at an enormous desk; the scale of the Messenger’s office made Wing feel like a midget. “On the contrary we have opened missions around the world in the last year where we assist all who seek enlightenment. Surely you see that it would be irresponsible for us to disseminate transcendently important information without providing the guidance necessary to its understanding.” Ndavu kept nodding as if trying to entice Wing to nod back and accept his evasions.

  Wing had the feeling that Ndavu would prefer that he settle back on the couch and think about how lucky he was to be the first human ever invited to tour a Messenger starship. He wondered if the initiates would be jealous when they found out that an unbeliever was going to take that prize. “Then keep your goddamned secret—why can’t you just give us plans for the reincarnation computer and loan us the keys to a starship?”

  “Technology is the crux of the message, Phillip.”

  Daisy sat beside Wing in luminous silence, listening to the conversation as if it were the fulfillment of a long-cherished dream. “Is she going to be reincarnated?” Her serenity was beginning to irk him, or maybe it was just that he was beginning to sober up to a blinding headache. “Is that the reward for joining?”

  “The message is its own reward,” she murmured.

  “Don’t you want to be reincarnated?”

  “The essence does not want. It acknowledges karma.”

  “The essence?” Wing could feel a vein throbbing just above his right eyebrow.

  “That which can be reincarnated,” she said.

  “There are no easy answers, Phillip,” said Ndavu.

  “Great.” He shook his head in disgust. “Does anyone have an aspirin?”

  Daisy went to check. “Everything is interconnected,” the Messenger continued. “For instance I could tell you that it is the duty of intelligence to resist entropy. How could you hope to understand me? You would have to ask: What is intelligence? What is entropy? How may it be resisted? Why is it a duty? These are questions which it took the commonwealth of Messengers centuries to answer.”

  Daisy returned with McCauley. “What we will ask of you,” continued Ndavu, “does not require that you accept our beliefs. Should you wish to seek enlightenment, then I will be pleased to guide you, Phillip. However you should know that it is not at all clear whether it is possible to grasp the message in the human lifespan. We have only just begun to study your species and have yet to measure its potential.”

  McCauley stood behind the couch, waiting inconspicuously for Ndavu to finish dodging the question. He rested a hand on Wing’s shoulder, as if he were an old pal trying to break into a friendly conversation. “Excuse me, Phillip,” said McCauley. Just then Wing remembered something he had forgotten to do. Something that had nagged at him for weeks. He was sober enough now to stay angry and the son of a bitch kept calling him by his first name.

  “I’m very sorry, Phillip,” said McCauley with a polite smile, “but we don’t have much use for drugs here. However, if you’re really in need we could send someone out…”

  Wing shot off the couch, turned and hit his wife’s lover right in the smile. Astonished, McCauley took the punch. The sculptor staggered backward, fists clenched, and Daisy gave
a strangled little scream. Ndavu was grotesquely expressionless. It was as if his face were a mask that had slipped, revealing … nothing. Wing had never seen the Messenger look quite so alien.

  “That’s okay.” He sat down, rubbing his knuckles. “I feel much better now.”

  McCauley touched his bloody lip and then turned and walked quickly from the office. Daisy was staring at Ndavu’s abandoned face. Wing settled back on the couch and—for the first time in weeks—started to laugh.

  * * *

  The Messengers had done a thorough job; Wing’s cabin on the starship was a copy of the interior of his go-tube—with a few differences. The gravity was .6 earth normal. The floor was not tongue-and-grooved oak but some kind of transparent crystal; beneath him reeled the elephant-skin wrinkles of the Zagros mountains. And Daisy slept next door.

  Wing stared like a blind man at the swirling turquoise shallows that rimmed the Persian Gulf; Ndavu’s arduous briefing had turned his sense of wonder to stone. He now knew everything about a planet called Aseneshesh that a human being could absorb in forty-eight hours without going mad. When he closed his eyes he could see the aliens Ndavu called the Chani. Tall and spindly, they looked more like pipe cleaner men than creatures of flesh and bone. Starving apes with squashed faces and pink teeth. He found them profoundly disturbing—as much for their similarities to homo sapiens as for their differences. Wing could imagine that they had once been human but had been cruelly transformed over eons of evolutionary torture.

  He knew a little of their history. When glaciers threatened to crush their civilization, most had chosen exile and had left the planet in an evacuation organized by the Messengers. Something had happened to those that remained behind, something that the Messengers still did not understand. Even as they slid into barbarism, these Chani began to evolve at an accelerated rate. Something was pushing them toward a biological immortality totally unlike the hardware-based reincarnations of the Messengers. Their cities buried and their machines beyond repair, they had huddled around smoky fires and discovered within themselves the means to intervene in the aging process—by sheer force of mind they could tilt the delicate balance between anabolism and catabolism. They called it shriving. With their sins forgotten and their cells renewed, the Chani could lead many lives in one body, retaining only a few memories from one life to the next. What baffled the materialist Messengers was that shriving was the central rite of a religion based on sun worship. Believe in Chan, the survivors had urged the astonished commonwealth upon their rediscovery centuries after the evacuation: look into the sun and live again.

  Although they embraced some of the concepts of the Chani religion, the Messengers could hardly accept shriving as a divine gift from a class G1 main sequence star. Despite intensive and continuing research, they were unable to master the biology of rejuvenation. The only benefits they were able to derive from the Chani’s evolutionary breakthrough were delta globulins derived from blood plasma, which acted to slow or even halt the aging process in many of the commonwealth’s species. The Messengers could not synthesize the intricate Chani globulins, which left the self-proclaimed goddess and ruler of the Chani in control of the sole source of the most valuable commodity in the commonwealth. That deity was the thearch Teaqua, the oldest living being in the commonwealth. Teaqua, who had sent Ndavu to earth to fetch her an architect. Teaqua, who was dying.

  “She wants a tomb, Phillip, and she claims Chan told her a human must build it.” Ndavu had given up his wheelchair in the starship’s low gravity. As he spoke he had walked gingerly about Wing’s cabin, like a barefoot man watching out for broken glass. “You will design it and oversee its construction.”

  “But if she’s immortal…”

  “No, even the Chan die. Eventually they choose death over shriving. We believe there must be physical limits related to the storage capacity of their brains. They say that the weight of all their lives becomes too heavy to carry. Think of it, Phillip: a tomb for a goddess. Has any architect had an opportunity to compare? This commission is more important than anything that Seven Wonders—or anyone on earth—could offer you. It has historic implications. You could be the one to lead your entire world into the commonwealth.”

  “So why me? There must be thousands who would jump at this.”

  “On the contrary, there are but a handful.” The Messenger seemed troubled by Wing’s question. “I will be blunt with you, Phillip; one cannot avoid the relativistic effects of the mass exchanger. You will be taking a one-way trip into the future. What you will experience as a trip of a few weeks duration will take centuries downtime, here on this planet. There is no way we can predict what changes will occur. You must understand that the earth to which you return may seem as alien as Aseneshesh.” He paused just long enough to scare Wing. “You will, however, return a hero. While you are gone, your name will be remembered and revered; we will see to it that you become a legend. Your work will influence generations of artists; school children will study your life. You could also be rich, if you wanted.”

  “And you’re telling me no one else could do this? No one?”

  “There is a certain personality profile. Our candidate must be able to survive two stressful cultural transitions with his faculties intact. Your personal history indicates that you have the necessary resilience. Talent is yet another qualification.”

  Wing snickered. “But not as important as being a loner with nothing to lose.”

  “I do not accept that characterization.” Ndavu settled uneasily onto the loveseat; he did not quite fit. “The fact is, Phillip, that we have already been refused twice. Should you too turn us down, we will proceed to the next on the list. You should know, however, that our time is running out and that you are the last of our prime candidates. The others have neither your ability nor your courage.”

  Courage. The word made Wing uncomfortable; he did not think of himself as a brave man. “What I still don’t understand,” he said, “is why you need a human in the first place. Build it yourself, if it’s so damned important.”

  “We would prefer that. However Teaqua insists that only a human can do what she says Chan wants.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Of course it is absurd.” Ndavu made no effort to conceal his scorn. “We are talking about fifty million intelligent beings who believe that the local star cares for them. We are talking about a creature of flesh and blood who believes she has become a god. You cannot apply the rules of logic to religious superstition.”

  “But how did they find out about humans in the first place?”

  “That I can explain,” Ndavu said, “only if you will promise to keep my response a secret.”

  Wing hesitated; he was not sure if he wanted to know Messenger secrets. “How do you know I’ll keep my promise?”

  “We will have to learn to trust one another, Phillip.” Ndavu unvelcroed the front of his jumpsuit; his chest was pale and smooth. “It is a problem of cultural differences.” Wing backed away as the Messenger pushed a finger into the base of his neck. “Teaqua asked if we knew of any beings like the Chani, and we told her. Homo sapiens and the Chani share a unique genetic heritage,” said Ndavu as his sternum unknit. “There are no other beings like you in the commonwealth.” Wing pressed himself flat against the far wall of the cabin; the handle on the door of the microwave dug into him. “Genes are the ultimate source of culture.”

  Wing heard a low squishing sound, like a wet sponge being squeezed, as something uncoiled within the exposed body cavity. “I-I understand,” he gasped. “Enough!”

  The Messenger nodded and resealed himself. He stood, shuffled across the cabin and held out his hand. Wing shook it gingerly.

  “You have qualities, Phillip,” said Ndavu. “You are ambitious and impatient with the waste of your talents. The first time I saw you, I knew you were the one we needed.”

  Wing felt like throwing up.

  “Will you at least think it over?”

  Now he was
alone with an intoxicating view of the earth, trying to sort fact from feeling, wrestling with his doubts. It was true: he had been increasingly uneasy in his work. Even the Glass Cloud was not all he had hoped it would be. A tomb for a goddess. It was too much, too fantastic. Thinking about it made Wing himself feel unreal. Here he sat with the earth at his feet, gazing down at the wellspring of civilization like some ancient, brooding god. A legend. He thought that if he were home he could see his way more clearly. Except that he had no home anymore, or at least he could never go home to Piscataqua House. The thought was depressing; was there really nothing to hold him? He wondered whether Ndavu had brought him to the starship to feed his sense of unreality, to cut him off from the reassurance of the mundane. He would have never been able to take this talk of gods and legends seriously had he been sitting at his desk at the Counting House with the rubber plant gathering dust near the window and his diploma from Yale hanging next to John the Baptist. Wing could see the Baptist smiling like a messenger as he pointed up at heaven—to the stars? A one-way trip. So Ndavu thought he was brave enough to go. But was he brave enough to stay? To turn down such a project and to live with that decision for the rest of his life? Wing was afraid that he was going to accept because there was nothing else for him to do. He would be an exile, he would be the alien. Wing had never even been in space before. Maybe that was why Ndavu had brought him here to make the offer. So that the emptiness of space could speak to the coldness growing within him.

  Wing stood and walked quickly out of the cabin as if to escape his own dark thoughts. He took a moment to orient himself and then swung across the gravity well to the next landing. There was an elaborate access panel with printreader and voice analyzer and a numeric keypad and vidscanner; he knocked.

  Daisy opened the door. Her room exhaled softly and she brushed the hair from her face. She was wearing the same mud-colored jumpsuit; he could not help but think of all the beautiful clothes hanging in her closet at Piscataqua House.