The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Then he saw it, three quarters of a second, perhaps, after Marilyn had: an upright figure striding down a fiery beach. Its bipedal locomotion was not a complete guarantee of dominance and intelligence, to be sure; ostriches had never ruled a world and never would, no matter how big a pest they became on Mars. But—yes—those powerful forelimbs were surely GP manipulators and not mere weapons. Now, Marilyn! Now!

  As though she had heard him, a pink arm flicked down. For an instant the shadow man floated, struggling wildly to escape, the gravitation of his shadow world countered by their gravitor; then he flashed toward them. Kyle swiveled to watch the black sphere splash (there could be no other word for it) and, under the prodding of the gravs, recoalesce. They were four.

  In a moment more, their shadow man bobbed to the surface of the dark and still-trembling yolk. To him, Kyle reflected, they were not there; the Egg was not there. To him it must seem that he floated upon a watery sphere suspended in space.

  And possibly that was more real than the computer-enhanced vision he himself inhabited, a mere cartoon created from one of the weakest forces known to physics. He unplugged, and at once the Egg’s hold was white and empty again.

  Marilyn took off her helmet. “All right, Ky, from here on it’s up to you—unless you want something more from the surface?”

  Kyle congratulated her and shook his head.

  “Darling, are you feeling any better?”

  Skip said levelly, “I’m okay now. I think that damned machine must have drugged me.”

  “Ky? That seems pretty unlikely.”

  “We should de-energize or destroy him, if we can’t revise his programming.”

  Marilyn shook her head. “I doubt that we could reprogram him. Ky, what do you think?”

  “A lot of it’s hard-wired, Marilyn, and can’t be altered without new boards. I imagine Skip could revise my software if he put his mind to it, though it might take him quite a while. He’s very good at that sort of thing.”

  Skip said, “And you’re a very dangerous device, Kyle.”

  Shaking his head, Kyle broke out the pencil-thin cable he had used so often in training exercises. One end jacked into the console, the other into a small socket just above his hips. When both connections were made, he was again in the cybernetic cartoon where true matter and shadow matter looked equally real.

  It was still a cartoon with colors by Skip: Marilyn’s skin shone snow-white, her lips were burning scarlet, her hair like burnished brass, and her eyes blue fire; Skip himself had become a black-bearded satyr, with a terra-cotta complexion and cruel crimson lips. Kyle tightened both ferrules firmly, tested his jets, released his safety harness, and launched himself toward the center of the Egg, making Polyaris crow with delight.

  The shadow man drifted into view as they neared the black yolk. He was lying upon what Kyle decided must be his back; on the whole he was oddly anthropomorphic, with recognizable head, neck, and shoulders. Binocular organs of vision seemed to have vanished behind small folds of skin, and Kyle would have called his respiration rapid in a human.

  Marilyn asked, “How does he look, Ky?”

  “Like hell,” Kyle muttered. “I’m afraid he may be in shock. At least, shock’s what I’d say if he were one of you. As it is, I…” He let the sentence trail away.

  There were strange, blunt projections just above the organs that appeared to be the shadow man’s ears. Absently, Kyle tried to palpate them; his hand met nothing, and vanished as it passed into the shadow man’s cranium.

  The shadow man opened his eyes.

  Kyle jerked backward, succeeding only in throwing himself into a slow spin that twisted his cable.

  Marilyn called, “What’s the matter, Ky?”

  “Nothing,” Kyle told her. “I’m jumpy, that’s all.”

  The shadow man’s eyes were closed again. His arms, longer than a human’s and more muscled than a body builder’s, twitched and were still. Kyle began the minute examination required by the plan.

  When it was complete, Skip asked, “How’d it go, Kyle?”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t see his back. The way you’ve got the shadow water keyed, it’s like ink.”

  Marilyn said, “Why don’t you change it, Skip? Make it blue but translucent, the way it’s supposed to be.”

  Skip sounded apologetic. “I’ve been trying to; I’ve been trying to change everything back. I can’t, or anyway not yet. I don’t remember just what I did, but I put some kind of block on it.”

  Kyle shrugged again. “Keep trying, Skip, please.”

  “Yes, please try, darling. Now buckle up, everybody. Time to rendezvous.”

  Kyle disconnected his cable and pulled his harness around him. After a moment’s indecision, he plugged into the console as well.

  If he had been unable to see it, it would have been easy to believe that Egg’s acceleration had no effect on the fifty-meter sphere of dark matter at its center; yet that too was mass, and the gravs whimpered like children at the strain of changing its speed and direction, their high wail audible—to Kyle at least—above the roaring of the jets. The black sphere stretched into a sooty tear. Acceleration was agony for Polyaris as well; Kyle cupped her fragile body in his free hand to ease her misery as much as he could.

  Somewhere so far above the Egg that the gravity well of the shadow planet had almost ceased to make any difference and words like above held little meaning, the Shadow Show was unfolding to receive them, preparing itself to embed the newly fertilized Egg in an inner wall. For a moment Kyle’s thoughts soared, drunk on the beauty of the image.

  Abruptly the big jets fell silent. The Egg had achieved escape velocity.

  Marilyn returned control of Egg to the assistant director. “That’s it, folks, until we start guiding in. Unbuckle if you want.”

  Kyle tossed Polyaris toward the yolk and watched her make a happy circuit of the Egg’s interior.

  Skip said, “Marilyn, I seem to have a little problem here.”

  “What is it?”

  Kyle took off his harness and retracted it. He unplugged, and the yolk and its shadow man were gone. Only the chortling Polyaris remained.

  “I can’t get this Goddamned thing off,” Skip complained. “The buckle’s jammed or something.”

  Marilyn took off her own acceleration harness and sailed across to look at it. Kyle joined them.

  “Here, let me try it,” Marilyn said. Her slender fingers, less nimble but more deft than Skip’s, pressed the release and jiggled the locking tab; it would not pull free.

  Kyle murmured, “I’m afraid you can’t release Skip, Marilyn. Neither can I.”

  She turned to look at him.

  “You accepted restraint for Skip, Marilyn. I want to say that in my opinion you were correct to do so.”

  She began, “You mean—”

  “The Director isn’t satisfied yet that Skip has recovered, that’s all. Real recoveries aren’t usually so quick or so…” Kyle paused, searching his dictionary file for the best word. “Convenient. This may be no more than a lucid interval. That happens, quite often. It may be no more than a stratagem.”

  Skip cursed and tore at the straps.

  “Do you mean you can lock us…?”

  “No,” Kyle said. “I can’t. But the Director can, if in his judgment it is indicated.”

  He waited for Marilyn to speak, but she did not.

  “You see, Marilyn, Skip, we tried very hard to prepare for every foreseeable eventuality, and mental illness was certainly one of those. About ten percent of the human population suffers from it at some point in their lives, and so with both of you on board and under a great deal of stress, that sort of problem was certainly something we had to be ready for.”

  Marilyn looked pale and drained. Kyle added, as gently as he could, “I hope this hasn’t been too much of a shock to you.”

  Skip had opened the cutting blade of his utility knife and was hacking futilely at his straps. Kyle took it from him, closed
it, and dropped it into one of his own storage areas.

  Marilyn pushed off. He watched her as she flew gracefully across the hold, caught the pilot’s-chair grab bar, and buckled herself into the seat; her eyes were shining with tears. As if sensing her distress, Polyaris perched on the bar and rubbed her ear with the side of her feathered head.

  Skip muttered, “Go look at your demon, Kyle. Go anyplace but here.”

  Kyle asked, “Do you still think it’s a demon, Skip?”

  “You’ve seen it a lot closer up than I have. What do you think?”

  “I don’t believe in demons, Skip.”

  Skip looked calm now, but his fingers picked mechanically at his straps. “What do you believe in, Kyle? Do you believe in God? Do you worship Man?”

  “I believe in life. Life is my God, Skip, if you want to put it like that.”

  “Any life? What about a mosquito?”

  “Yes, any life. The mosquito won’t bite me.” Kyle smiled his metal smile.

  “Mosquitoes spread disease.”

  “Sometimes,” Kyle admitted. “Then they must be destroyed, the lower life sacrificed to the higher. Skip, your Marilyn is especially sacred to me now. Do you understand that?”

  “Marilyn’s doomed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because of the demon, of course. I tried to tell her that she had doomed herself, but it was actually you that doomed her. You were the one who wanted him. You had to have him, you and the Director; and if it hadn’t been for you, we could have gone home with a hold full of dark matter and some excuse.”

  “But you aren’t doomed, Skip? Only Marilyn?”

  “I’m dead and damned, Kyle. My doom has caught up with me. I’ve hit bottom. You know that expression?”

  Kyle nodded.

  “People talk about hitting bottom and bouncing back up. If you can bounce, that isn’t the bottom. When somebody gets where I am, there’s no bouncing back, not ever.”

  “If you’re really dead, Skip, how can the straps hold you? I wouldn’t think that an acceleration harness could hold a lost soul, or even a ghost.”

  “They’re not holding me,” Skip told him. “It was just that at the last moment I didn’t have guts enough to let Marilyn see I was really gone. I’d loved her. I don’t anymore—you can’t love anything or anyone except yourself where I am. But—”

  “Can you get out of your seat, Skip? Is that what you’re saying, that you can get out without unfastening the buckle?”

  Skip nodded slowly, his dark eyes (inscrutable eyes, Kyle thought) never leaving Kyle’s face. “And I can see your demon, Kyle. I know you can’t see him because you’re not hooked up. But I can.”

  “You can see him now, Skip?”

  “Not now—he’s on the far side of the black ball. But I’ll be able to see him when he floats around to this side again.”

  Kyle returned to his seat and connected the cable as he had before. The black yolk sprang into being again; the shadow man was facing him—in fact glaring at him with burning yellow eyes. He asked the Director to release Skip.

  Together they drifted toward the center of the Egg. Kyle made sure their trajectory carried them to the side of the yolk away from the shadow man; and when the shadow man was no longer in view, he held Skip’s arm and stopped them both with a tug at the cable. “Now that I know you can see him, too, Skip, I’d like you to point him out to me.”

  Skip glanced toward the watery miniature planet over which they hovered like flies—or perhaps merely toward the center of the hold. “Is this a joke? I’ve told you, I can see him.” A joyous blue and yellow comet, Polyaris erupted from the midnight surface, braking on flapping wings to examine them sidelong.

  “That’s why I need your input, Skip,” Kyle said carefully. “I’m not certain the feed I’m getting is accurate. If you can apprehend shadow matter directly, I can use your information to check the simulation. Can you still see the demon? Indicate his position, please.”

  Skip hesitated. “He’s not here, Kyle. He must be on the other side. Shall we go around and have a look?”

  “The water’s still swirling quite a bit. It should bring him to us before long.”

  Skip shrugged. “Okay, Kyle, you’re the boss. I guess you always were.”

  “The Director’s our captain, Skip. That’s why we call him what we do. Can you see the demon yet?” A hand and part of one arm had floated into view around the curve of the yolk.

  “No. Not yet. Do you have a soul, Kyle?”

  Kyle nodded. “It’s called my original monitor. I’ve seen a printout, though of course I didn’t read it all; it was very long.”

  “Then when you’re destroyed it may be sent here. Here comes your demon, by the way.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “I suppose it may be put into one of these horrors. They seem more machine than human, at least to me.”

  “No,” Kyle told him. “They’re truly alive. They’re shadow life, Skip, and since this one is the only example we have, just now it must be the most precious life in the universe to you, to Marilyn, and to me. Do you think he sees us?”

  “He sees me,” Skip said grimly.

  “When I put my fingers into his brain, he opened his eyes.” Kyle mused. “It was as though he felt them there.”

  “Maybe he did.”

  Kyle nodded. “Yes, possibly he did. The brain is such a sensitive mechanism that perhaps a gravitational disturbance as weak as that results in stimulation, if it is uneven. Put your hand into his head, please. I want to watch. You say he’s a demon—pretend you’re going to gouge out his eyes.”

  “You think I’m crazy!” Skip shouted. “Well, I’m telling you, you’re crazy!”

  Startled, Marilyn twisted in her pilot’s chair to look at them.

  “I’ve explained to you that he sees me,” Skip said a little more calmly. “I’m not getting within his reach!”

  “Touch his nose for me, Skip. Like this.” Kyle lengthened one arm until his fingers seemed to brush the dark water several meters from the drifting shadow man’s hideous face. “Look here, Skip. I’m not afraid.”

  Skip screamed.

  * * *

  “Have I time?” Kyle asked. He was holding the grab bar of Marilyn’s control chair. In the forward port, the Shadow Show was distinctly visible.

  “We’ve a few minutes yet,” Marilyn told him. “And I want to know. I have to, Ky. He’s the father of my child. Can you cure him?”

  “I think so, Marilyn, though your correcting the simulator hues has probably helped Skip more than anything I’ve done thus far.”

  Kyle glanced appreciatively in the direction of the yolk. It was a translucent blue, as it should have been all along, and the shadow man who floated there looked more like a good-natured caricature of a human being than a demon. His skin was a dusty pinkish brown, his eyes the cheerful bright-yellow of daffodils. It seemed to Kyle that they flickered for a moment, as though to follow Polyaris in her flight across the hold. Perhaps a living entity of shadow matter could apprehend true matter after all—that would require a thorough investigation as soon as they were safely moored in the Shadow Show.

  “And he can’t really see shadow matter, Ky?”

  Kyle shook his head. “No more than you or I can, Marilyn. He thought he could, you understand, at least on some level. On another he knew he couldn’t and was faking it quite cleverly.” Kyle paused, then added, “Freud did psychology a considerable disservice when he convinced people that the human mind thinks on only three levels. There are really a great many more than that, and there’s no question but that the exact number varies between individuals.”

  “But for a while you really believed he might be able to, from what you’ve told me.”

  “At least I was willing to entertain the thought, Marilyn. Occasionally you can help people like Skip just by allowing them to test their delusional systems. What I found was that he had been taking cues from me—mostly from the dir
ection of my eyes, no doubt. It would be wrong for you to think of that as lying. He honestly believed that when you human beings died, your souls came here, to this shadow planet of a shadow system, in a shadow galaxy. And that he himself was dead.”

  Marilyn shook her head in dismay. “But that’s insane, Ky. Just crazy.”

  She has never looked this lovely, Kyle thought. Aloud he said, “Mental illness is often a way of escaping responsibility, Marilyn. You may wish to consider that. Death is another, and you may wish to consider that also.”

  For a second Marilyn hesitated, biting her lip. “You love me, don’t you, Ky?”

  “Yes, I do, Marilyn. Very much.”

  “And so does Skip, Ky.” She gave him a small, sad smile. “I suppose I’m the luckiest woman alive, or the unluckiest. The men I like most both love me, but one’s having a breakdown.… I shouldn’t have started this, should I?”

  “While the other is largely inorganic,” Kyle finished for her. “But it’s really not such a terrible thing to be loved by someone like me, Marilyn. We—”

  Polyaris shrieked and shrieked again—not her shrill cry of pleasure or even her outraged squawk of pain, but the uncanny, piercing screech that signaled a prowling ocelot: Danger! Fire! Flood! INVASION and CATASTROPHE!

  She was fluttering about the shadow man, and the shadow man was no longer a dusty pinkish brown. As Kyle stared, he faded to gray, then to white. His mouth opened. He crumpled, slowly and convulsively, into a fetal ball.

  Horrified, Kyle turned to Marilyn. But Marilyn was self-absorbed, her hands clasping her belly. “It moved, Ky! It just moved. I felt life!”

  MICHAEL MCDOWELL

  Halley’s Passing

  Here’s a closely observed (and very scary) study of a very methodical man of a very unusual sort.

  Michael McDowell is the author of more than thirty books, including Cold Moon over Babylon, The Amulet, and the six-volume serial novel Blackwater. McDowell has also worked extensively in television, and recently co-scripted his first feature film, Beetlejuice.