The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “But it does work,” she said. “You’re magnificent.”

  “Thank you. You have been very patient and useful. Will you read your books for us?”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “We can build a library,” Daffy replied. “You can read fiction books into a storage tape for us, please. I have Hemingway, Borges and Kawabata, and others. I believe that the … art … can be enhanced by a human voice, and the materials that you produce can be stored easily for a long voyage.”

  “Of course. It will be an honor, even.”

  The duck watched her carefully. “I also have Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn. I have Pasternak.”

  She laughed. “All are very proper, now.”

  What would a duck associate with “A Dull Story,” or “An Incident at Krechetovka Station”? For that matter, how would it react to “A Way You’ll Never Be”? She wondered if all the tapes and photographs, the image and voice of herself as well, would be lost in a museum somewhere far away … to be inflicted occasionally upon visiting schoolchildren from nearby academies.

  “Ooooooh! She is so ugly!” Avdotya imagined the strange voices clicking and murmuring. “What is she saying now? When can we go home?”

  Daffy was in a talkative mood, and had more to say.

  “We will be leaving soon,” it remarked. “In a week we will hold a complete systems test and if it is successful, we will probably schedule a departure date within the month.”

  “Yes, you ran a check on the fusion torus yesterday, didn’t you? It certainly seemed to work.”

  By aiming the vehicle’s main thruster nozzle away from the casino, the ducks had inadvertently destroyed the small shopping center across the street. For some reason, they appeared very upset by this.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to go back?” Avdotya asked.

  “I think so,” Daffy replied. “You have saved us years of preparation and we are grateful.”

  They sat silently for a few minutes. She stared at the walls, and the duck watched her.

  “I’ve been thinking about what I’m doing here,” she finally said.

  “You are improving your English,” said the duck, and rocked its head.

  She looked at it with surprise and irritation, and then suddenly realized that Daffy was attempting a joke.

  Avdotya smiled. “Yes, that, too.”

  “We assumed that you did not want to be alone,” observed the duck.

  “It is pleasant to be among people again,” she said, continuing to smile.

  “We make poor company, I think.”

  “But you’ve been very good to me, and I like you. I regret that there is only me now … there were beautiful places I could have shown you once. There were good people, too. Most of us were good, despite what we did to ourselves. Do you understand?”

  But the duck had straightened and sat back. “No,” it replied, clearly upset.

  Avdotya shrugged. She wondered what she had said. “I’m not explaining myself well. I wanted to say thank you. For everything you’ve done … is there something wrong?”

  The duck tucked its snout under one arm in agitation. Its body trembled slightly.

  “Have I offended you?” Avdotya insisted in a bewildered tone.

  “No,” said Daffy at last, and raised its head. “Yes … I understand. I will try to say the right words. It is good to be here with you. I wish for better circumstances, too. But to meet you gives me a better perspective and appreciation of human character than if I only had artifacts to examine. I like you for this. It is a difficult situation for you to be in, and I respect you for your behavior in this place. It is very sad that you are alone.”

  “Sad,” she agreed, still puzzled. They both looked at the walls.

  Then Daffy said, “You cannot survive here. The planet’s climate has been radically altered, and will probably remain so until the ablation effects on the sun have subsided years from now.”

  Ablation effects? She shook her head. “What?”

  “We will take you with us, if you want to come. You can go home with us.”

  She was stunned. She saw herself in the museum, along with the photographs, the carefully restored furniture and dead voices. Schoolchildren brushed her clothes and hands, the facets of their eyes catching her reflection as they stared at her.

  “Have we offended you?” they chorused.

  “No!” she screamed.

  “Consider our offer carefully,” Daffy was saying. “Your going will present no technological difficulties, but there will be psychological problems. You will be alone among us, isolated by insurmountable biological and cultural obstacles. We will keep you in a special place, for our home will be both terrible and wonderful to you. You could not cope by yourself. We will try to make you happy, but you will not be happy.”

  The duck suddenly stretched across the table, bringing its large, slightly bitter-smelling head close to her own.

  “We want you to come with us,” it said. “But I like you. I want you to be happy.”

  She said: “I won’t go.”

  Daffy quietly tucked its snout under an arm.

  After a few minutes, Avdotya said, “Will you answer a question?”

  The duck raised its head and stared at her, the face chillingly unfathomable.

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you here? What happened to you?”

  The duck was silent for a long time. Finally it answered.

  “Home received some of your television broadcasts, twenty-two-year-old signals, but we knew you were here. It was exciting. You were the first ones we knew of for certain, and we decided to come and have a look. Four ships were constructed. They were very good ones, better than those we sent to build colonies in our nearest neighboring stellar system.”

  The duck paused, and turned its head away.

  “They did not incorporate the necessary safeguards,” it said, and the voice from the speaker had an odd cadence. “We were just under half a light year out from this system, shifting from cruise mode into deceleration, when an accident occurred.”

  “Half a light year out?” Avdotya interrupted. “Are you saying that you lost ships out in space?”

  “One ship,” Daffy replied hesitantly. “You know very little about our ships. The vehicles outside are … were … only small planetary landers. There are three interstellar cruisers in a parking orbit around the poles, and two of them are badly damaged. But the third … if we can get the remaining lander operational and rendezvous with the third ship, we can go home.”

  “What happened during the accident?”

  Inexplicably, Daffy bared its fangs and screeched. Avdotya scrambled to her feet.

  “What is it?” she demanded. “What did I say?”

  “I am sorry … I cannot tell you what happened.”

  “Why?”

  “I cannot.”

  “Okay,” she said. “All right, I don’t need to know this. We can talk about something else.”

  “You do not understand. You do not know what happened. I do not know what you think happened. I do not want to tell you.”

  Avdotya wondered if the duck was hysterical.

  “Why? Is it something I’m not permitted to know? Is it … religious? A taboo? No?”

  “Guilt,” Daffy replied, and once again gave her an unfathomable stare. “Shame is what we feel.”

  “You told me that it was an accident.”

  “It was an accident.”

  “They happen. One accepts them, comes to terms with them, learns—”

  “No. No one learns from this accident. No one can come to terms with it. Listen to me, Avdotya Nazarovna!”

  The sound of her name momentarily took her breath away. No duck had ever used it before.

  “Listen, and then you will learn,” said Daffy, leaning across the table. “You do not know about our ships. Our landers are fusion-powered and use hydrogen as a propellant. Our cruisers propel themselves by forcing an interacti
on between hydrogen and antihydrogen, and ejecting the resulting muons and pions along a diverging magnetic field to produce thrust. We carry several tanks of hydrogen, and several more of electrostatically-suspended, supercooled antihydrogen. We tether two opposing engines on a twenty-kilometer cable, and hang the command module, tanks, lander, and shields in between. In the acceleration and cruise mode, the leading engine fires, and the shields provide protection against gamma radiation. We protect ourselves from interstellar dust and micrometeors by diverting their kinetic energy into a ferrous fluid compound and spraying a screen of droplets out ahead of the ship. In the deceleration mode, we shift the shields and command module around and fire the opposing engine against trajectory. We deploy a great number of lightweight layers of thin plastic film to protect the ship against particles, and we grind up the empty fuel tanks into fine dust and shoot it out ahead at ninety percent light speed to clear the way of larger particles.”

  “It sounds remarkable. What happened?”

  The duck flailed an arm. “Going into deceleration one of our ships misfired its load of dust from the ground-up tanks. Our ships normally operate in a formation hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart, but even so, one ship was destroyed and another severely damaged through impacting a scattering of dust molecules moving in an angular trajectory at relativistic speeds. The malfunctioning ship was forced to decelerate without a dust shield, and literally eroded in the process.”

  Daffy paused. “It took us a year to decelerate and attain a parking orbit around this planet. All of our landers were damaged from shuttling back and forth between the cruisers at near relativistic speeds, coping with emergencies and repairs. Only one landed successfully, though not without further damage.”

  The duck gestured outward and around. “When we arrived here, we found all of this.”

  Avdotya shook her head and looked at the floor. “It must have been so difficult to come this far,” she whispered, “through so much hardship, just to find that we’d killed ourselves in a war. You’re right. The word is guilt. Shame.”

  She sincerely felt both emotions, along with a ghost resurrection of hatred for the stupid Americans. The face and rotten hands of Ben Kimball beckoned to others besides herself, she realized.

  But Daffy Duck blinked slowly and cocked its head.

  “War?” it asked. “What war?”

  “What war?… the war. The war that caused all of this … killed my people. The war the Americans—the ones who lived right here—started.”

  She felt hot, all of the sudden. “What do you mean, ‘what war?’”

  “Forgive me,” the duck implored. “I am trying to understand you. Perhaps there is a concept here that I am not familiar with. Are you speaking of a conflict between nation-states?”

  “Yes,” she replied, calming down. Why had the duck upset her?

  “But the Americans did not begin a war here. I have seen no evidence of any war. We scanned the planet—”

  “I was there!” she snapped, her face reddening. “I … fought in it!”

  “I believe you,” Daffy insisted, “but nothing less than a nuclear conflict—”

  And then the duck sat back. “You do not know what has happened here,” it said, the cadence of its voice distorting horribly. “… no war!”

  “No war!” it croaked again, and fled from the room.

  6

  Later that day Avdotya wandered far out onto the vast playa, clad in her thermal suit.

  She thought about the ducks’ reactions to the movies she had shown. After a time, Daffy Duck had managed to convey to her some sense of what was going on. The ducks distinguished imagination from reality in wholly different ways. They understood that what happened on a television screen, or on canvas or the printed pages of a book, was fictional, in that events never occurred in quite that way. But they personalized their imagination, art, even discursive learning as opposed to experience, in exactly the same manner as they internalized and reacted to their own existence. Everything was real to them; they could not divorce themselves from anything around them, not through passive observation, or rationalization, or withdrawal. They were not “scientists” in the Soviet sense, they were quantum physicists, artists, and philosophers.

  A long time ago we declared war on another tribe, Daffy wrote, by sending them a book scrawled by a blind neurotic, describing how they ought to conduct their fertility rites. We won the war by dispatching the images of the empty southern deserts under terrible seige by sandstorms, set to music written by a composer for a lover who lay dying. The other tribe sued for peace immediately.

  Do you often fight wars among yourselves? Avdotya had written.

  Not for an age, the duck replied. There came a day when a young philosopher wrote an epistle to all of the tribes, describing how he had ground pieces of glass into lenses and set them in a long, moveable tube, and thus had turned the machine onto the silky lights in the night sky. The philosopher described what was to be seen there and what was to be deduced from it, and millions of the machines were built, and millions of us concurred. It was decided that we really were a small people after all, and yet, it was we who were looking at the infinite stars, and not they at us. We were alive, and we came to understand the significance of that fact. We took hope, and determined to make ourselves as big a people as we could. In such a universe, war ceases to be the most direct and efficient method.

  In human terms the ducks are schizophrenics, Avdotya told herself as she trudged through the snow. They are unable to behaviorally distinguish fantasy from reality. The trait made them both more and less adaptable than humans. More, because they were capable of assimilating novel new situations and incorporating radical solutions into society without upheaval; witness the fact that the invention of the telescope eradicated war. Less, because their reaction to imagination could push them into extremes of behavior that were detrimental to their well-being. More and less. The concept seemed uncomfortably paradoxical from a human point of view.

  How to solve the riddle of the ducks? I haven’t an idea, she thought. Kindness and suicide, brilliance and irrationality, the sense of something hidden … they sympathize, and yet they fear me. Why? How does someone like me, who carefully creates artificial reference points and a system of perceptual boundaries between the real and the unreal, communicate with creatures who have no similar concepts? How can I be sure of what I say? How can they?

  Why did the duck run out of the room?

  I assume myself when I speak, Avdotya thought. And perhaps the duck assumes itself. When the worlds we so carefully construct in our imagination totter on reality, we run, screech, or stand up and strike out!

  Her thoughts strayed to the image of Ben Kimball, fury contorting his gentle face, the jaw muscles rippling under the expanse of snow-white beard, as he cocked his gun and held it to her nose.

  Bastard, she had shouted, nonetheless. Betraying dog …

  She suddenly stopped. Directly ahead sprawled a large lump of dark material, half-buried in the snow. Off to one side was an unraveled green turban.

  Lysenko Duck lay motionless in the middle of the empty playa. Blood seeped from an opened artery in its neck, and one hand clutched a sharpened screwdriver.

  “Nyet!” Avdotya cried, as she frantically dug the body out. The duck was barely alive. It made a feeble motion with the other hand, patting her on the back and stroking her heaving shoulder.

  It shook its head.

  She could not carry it. It was too large and bulky. She stuffed torn fabric from the turban into the wound and succeeded in hoisting the duck’s arms up over her shoulders. Dragging its legs in the snow, she staggered away, toward the distant lights below the darkening evening sky.

  But the casino was still only a faint glimmer on the horizon when she realized that her thermal suit was icing up. The batteries were nearly flat. It made little difference when she tried to pull harder. The duck’s wet, rasping breath could no longer be heard in the silenc
e.

  An hour passed, and she was stumbling and falling over herself. Still she dragged and pushed the body. The joints of her suit had frozen, and she was forced into a stiff-legged limp that only emphasized the numbness in her feet and calves. Finally she slipped and collapsed onto a hard pan of ice. As the duck sagged across her, her leg twisted with an odd crunching sound.

  “Nikolai! Oh…” she croaked, as the boy danced across the ice at the edge of her vision.

  “Ben Kimbaaaaaalll!” she bawled. But the mummified skeleton with the great white beard took aim and fired the gun anyway. The boy dropped.

  7

  Avdotya Nazarovna stood in the wing operations bunker at the edge of the missile field, and jotted notes on a pad. The command link to “D” complex had been severed six minutes earlier, rendering the missiles’ lock-in and guidance systems inoperative. The caretaker crews were just beginning to climb out of the underground silos, and except for the maintenance displays, the boards were dark.

  “Another twenty-two megatons,” she told herself. “Ust-Kamenogorsk is saved.”

  It was a Soviet intelligence estimate; the Americans were not verifying anything. They would not have to for five weeks, when the warheads themselves were scheduled to be dismantled.

  Behind her, Spiridon Terentevich Khorobrov cleared his throat.

  “Colonel Kimball?” he said in English, his heavy voice overlayed with a flawless British accent. “Colonel Kimball, I am grateful that today’s exercise has displayed none of the … technical difficulties … that seem to have plagued American disarmament in the last two months. Your own crew apparently has regained its competence, and I congratulate you for inspiring this miraculous recovery.”

  Ben Kimball swiveled around in his chair, and grinned. “Fuck you, comrade,” he said.

  But Khorobrov did not even flinch. “May I assume that tomorrow’s program of dismantling the link to “K” complex will be equally successful?”

  “No sir, you may not,” Kimball replied, the grin maintained. “As you know, our interpretation of the schedule calls for the airbases at Offutt and Hill field to stand down on their stockpiles. Tomorrow we get to relax; it’s the Cold War all over again here.”