The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

  “Nearly twenty-five years.”

  Larry looked around him and made those strange noises again. “Delahaye . . .”

  “All dead,” I said. “Delahaye, Warren, Chen, Bright, Morley. The whole team. You and I are the only survivors.”

  Larry looked at his hands; it was impossible to read the expression on what passed for his face, but he made a noise that might, if one were psychotic enough, be mistaken for a laugh. “I don’t seem to have survived very well, Alex.” He looked at me. “You seem to be doing all right, though.”

  I shrugged. “As I said, we still don’t know exactly what happened.”

  Larry emitted that awful laugh again. “My god,” he said, “it’s like something from a Marvel comic. You think maybe I’ve become a superhero, Alex?”

  “That’s an . . . unusual way of looking at it,” I allowed warily.

  Larry sighed. “You’d think I’d get X-ray vision or something. Not . . .” he waved his not-quite-hands at me, “. . . this.”

  “Larry,” I said, “you need help.”

  Larry laughed. “Oh? You think? Jesus, Alex.” He started to pace back and forth. Then he stopped. “Where was I? Before?”

  “Afghanistan. We think you were just trying to find your way back here.”

  Larry shook his head, which was an awful thing to watch. “No. Before that. There was . . . everything was the wrong . . . shape . . .”

  I took a step forward and said, “Larry . . .”

  “And before that . . . I was here, and we were having this conversation . . .”

  “It’s just déjà vu,” I told him. “It’s hardly the worst of your worries.”

  Larry straightened up and his body seemed to gain coherence. “Alex,” he said, “how many times have we done this before?”

  I shook my head. “Too fucking many,” I said, and I plunged my hands into the seething exploding mass of Larry Day’s body and pulled us both back into Hell.

  I still wasn’t sure why I went back after escaping the second time. Maybe I just wanted to know what had happened to me and there was no way to find out on my own. Maybe I was afraid that if I spent too long there I would forget what it was like to be human.

  The general and his three friends were unavailable. I later discovered that they had been in hospital ever since they saw what I turned the table into; one of them never recovered. In their place, I was assigned two more generals – one from the Air Force and one from the Army – and an admiral, and a team of eager young scientists, all looked after by quiet, efficient people from the CIA and the NSA.

  I was questioned, over and over and over again, and the answers I was able to give them wouldn’t have covered the back of a postage stamp. One of the scientists asked me, “What’s it like there? How many dimensions does it have?” and all I could tell him was, “Not enough. Too many. I don’t know.”

  We were unprepared. We knew too little, and that was why he nearly got me that first time. I knew that Point Zero was like a beacon there, a great solid negative tornado, and one of the few useful pieces of advice I was able to contribute was to keep a watch on the SCC for any manifestations. I went back to our old house in Sioux Crossing to wait, because I knew. I knew he was looking for a landmark, a reference point, because that was what I had done. When the manifestations began, I was bustled in great secrecy to the Site, and I saw him appear for the first time. Heard him speak for the first time. Thought, not for the last time, Of course. It had to be Larry.

  He was confused, frightened, angry, but he recovered quickly. I told him what had happened – what we understood, anyway – and he seemed to pull his exploding form together a little. He looked about him and said, This must be what God feels like, and my blood ran cold. And then I felt him try to take me apart and remake me, the way I had remade the table.

  I did the first thing that crossed my mind. I grabbed him and went back there with him, and I let him go and came back here.

  The second time he came back, it was the same thing. A few random manifestations, some baffling but relatively minor destruction. Then he found his way to Point Zero, confused, amnesiac. But he came to the same conclusion. This must be what God feels like. And I had to take him back there.

  And again. And again. And again.

  I walked an unimaginable distance. It took me an impossible length of time. Nothing here meant anything or made any sense, but there were structures, colossal things that were almost too small to see: the remains of Professor Delahaye and the other victims of The Accident. There were also the remains of a specially-trained SEAL team, sent in here by the President—not the present one but her predecessor – when he thought he could create a group of all-American superheroes. I, and pretty much every scientist involved in investigating The Accident, argued against that, but when the President says jump you just ask what altitude he wants, so the SEALs remain. There is no life or death there, only existence, so Professor Delahaye and the others exist in a Schroedinger not-quite-state, trying to make sense of what and where they are. If they ever succeed, I’m going to be busy.

  The scientists call this “Calabi-Yau space”, or, if they’re trying to be particularly mysterious, “The Manifold”. Which it may or may not be, nobody knows. The String Theorists, overwhelmed with joy at having eyewitness evidence of another space, named it, even though I could give them little in the way of confirmatory testimony. Calabi-Yau space exists a tiny fraction of a nanometre away from what I used to think of as “normal” space, but it would take more than the total energy output of the entire universe to force a single photon between them.

  Travel between dimensions appears to be, however, more like judo than karate, more a manipulation of force than a direct application of it. Somehow, Delahaye’s final shot manipulated those forces in just the wrong way, pitching everything within a radius of five metres into a terrible emptiness and leaving behind Point Zero, a pulsing, open wound between the worlds, a point that won’t be imaged. Someone once told me that the odds of The Accident happening at all were billions and billions to one against. Like going into every casino on The Strip in Vegas and playing every slot machine and winning the jackpot on all of them, all in one evening. But here’s the thing about odds and probability. You can talk about them as much as you want, do all the fancy math, but in the end there’s only either/or. That’s all that matters. Either you win all the jackpots on The Strip, or you don’t. Either it will happen, or it won’t. It did, and here I am. And here, somewhere, is Larry Day.

  Existing in Calabi-Yau space, being able to step between dimensions, being able to use the insight this gives you to manipulate the “real” world, really is like being a god. Unfortunately, it’s like being one of the gods H.P. Lovecraft used to write about, immense and unfathomable and entirely without human scruple. So far, the human race is lucky that Larry seems unable to quite get the knack of godhood. None of us can work out why I acclimatized to it so easily, or why it’s still so difficult for Larry, why returning him there screws him up all over again while I can cross back and forth at will, without harm. Larry was one of the biggest brains humanity ever produced, and he can’t get the hang of The Manifold, while I, the world’s most prosaic man, as my ex-wife liked to remind me, took it more or less in my stride. All I can tell them is that every time we meet – and we’ve done this particular little pantomime fifty-two times so far – he seems to recover more quickly. One day he’s going to come out of it bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I won’t be able to take him back there. I’ll have to fight him here, and it’ll be like nothing Stan Lee ever imagined. Either/or. Either the world will survive, or it won’t.

  Larry is not a nice man. He was a great man, before The Accident, and I liked him a lot, until I found out about him and my wife. But he’s not a nice man. Of all the people in the world you’d want to get bitten by the radioactive spider, he’d probably come close to the bottom of the list.

  And the wonderful, extravagant cosmic joke of it is that Larr
y is not even the nightmare scenario. The nightmare scenario is that Delahaye and Chen and Morley and the SEAL team and all the animals who got onto the Site despite the billion-dollar-per-annum containment operation somehow drop into a rest state at once, and find their way here. If that happens, it’ll make the Twilight of the Gods look like a quiet morning in a roadside diner. I plan to be somewhere else on that day. I’m happy enough to present the appearance of humanity for the moment, but I don’t owe these people anything.

  Eventually, I came across a room. Although this wasn’t a room in the sense that anyone here would recognize. It was all distributed planes of stress and knots of mass, open on all sides, too huge to measure. I stepped into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.

  Nobody screamed. Nobody ran away. They were expecting me, of course, and I had learned long ago how to clothe myself before I came here. People hate it when naked men appear out of nowhere in the Situation Room at the White House. Someone brought me coffee. The coffee here was always excellent.

  “Mr. Dolan,” said the President.

  “Madam President,” I said. I sipped my coffee. “He’s recovering more quickly.”

  “We noticed,” said one of the scientists, a man named Sierpinski. “The others?”

  “I saw some of them. They’re still aestivating. I’m not sure I should be checking them out; won’t observing them collapse them into one state or the other?”

  Sierpinski shrugged. We don’t know. Maybe we should make that our company song.

  “You look tired,” said the President.

  “I look how I want to look,” I snapped, and regretted it. She was not an unkind person, and I was tired. And anyway, it was ridiculous. Why would a godlike transdimensional superhero want to look like a tubby balding middle-aged man? If I wanted, I could look like Lady Gaga or Robert Downey, Jr., or an enormous crystal eagle, but what I really want is to be ordinary again, and that, of all things, I cannot do.

  I looked up at the expectant faces, all of them waiting to hear how I had saved the world again.

  “Do you think I could have a sandwich?” I asked.

  WHAT WE FOUND

  Geoff Ryman

  Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone with his brilliant novella “The Unconquered Country”, that he first attracted any serious attention. “The Unconquered Country”, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his short fiction appearing frequently in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and his novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; his later novel Air also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was, Coming of Enkidu, The King’s Last Song, Lust, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of www.ryman.com, and which in its print form won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent works are the anthology When It Changed, the novel The Film-makers of Mars, and the collection Paradise Tales: and Other Stories.

  In the story that follows, he relates the emotionally powerful story of characters caught between generations in a nation itself caught between the modern world and an old world of tribal superstitions.

  CAN’T SLEEP. STILL dark. Waiting for light in the East.

  My rooster crows. Knows it’s my wedding day. I hear the pig rootling around outside. Pig, the traditional gift for the family of my new wife. I can’t sleep because alone in the darkness there is nothing between me and the realization that I do not want to get married. Well, Patrick, you don’t have long to decide.

  The night bakes black around me. 3:30 A.M. In three hours, the church at the top of the road will start with the singing. Two hours after that, everyone in both families will come crowding into my yard. The rooster crows again, all his wives in the small space behind the house. It is still piled with broken bottles from when my father lined the top of that wall with glass shards.

  That was one of his good times, when he wore trousers and a hat and gave orders. I mixed the concrete, and passed it up in buckets to my eldest brother Matthew. He sat on the wall like riding a horse, slopping on concrete and pushing in the glass. Raphael was reading in the shade of the porch. “I’m not wasting my time doing all that,” he said. “How is broken glass going to stop a criminal who wants to get in?” He always made me laugh, I don’t know why. Nobody else was smiling.

  When we were young my father would keep us sitting on the hot, hairy sofa in the dark, no lights, no TV because he was driven mad by the sound of the generator. Eyes wide, he would quiver like a wire, listening for it to start up again. My mother tried to speak and he said, “Sssh. Sssh! There it goes again.”

  “Jacob, the machine cannot turn itself on.”

  “Sssh! Sssh!” He would not let us move. I was about seven, and terrified. If the generator was wicked enough to scare my big strong father, what would it do to little me? I keep asking my mother what does the generator do?

  “Nothing, your father is just being very careful.”

  “Terhemba is a coward,” my brother Matthew said, using my Tiv name. My mother shushed him, but Matthew’s merry eyes glimmered at me: I will make you miserable later. Raphael prised himself loose from my mother’s grip and stomped across the sitting-room floor.

  People think Makurdi is a backwater, but now we have all you need for a civilized life. Beautiful banks with security doors, retina ID and air conditioning; new roads, solar panels on all the streetlights, and our phones are stuffed full of ebooks. On one of the river islands they built the new hospital; and my university has a medical school, all pink and state-funded with laboratories that are as good as most. Good enough for controlled experiments with mice.

  My research assistant Jide is Yoruba and his people believe that the grandson first born after his grandfather’s death will continue that man’s life. Jide says that we have found how that is true. This is a problem for Christian Nigerians, for it means that evil continues.

  What we found in mice is this. If you deprive a mouse of a mother’s love, if you make him stressed through infancy, his brain becomes methylated. The high levels of methyl deactivate a gene that produces a neurotrophin important for memory and emotional balance in both mice and humans. Schizophrenics have abnormally low levels of it.

  It is a miracle of God that with each new generation, our genes are knocked clean. There is a new beginning. Science thought this meant that the effects of one life could not be inherited by another.

  What we found is that high levels of methyl affect the sperm cells. Methylation is passed on with them, and thus the deactivation. A grandfather’s stress is passed on through the male line, yea unto the third generation.

  Jide says that what we have found is how the life of the father is continued by his sons. And that is why I don’t want to wed.

  My father would wander all night. His three older sons slept in one room. Our door would click open and he would stand and glare at me, me particularly, with a boggled and distracted eye as if I had done something outrageous. He would be naked; his towering height and broad shoulders humbled me, made me feel puny and endangered. I have an odd-shaped head with an indented V going down my forehead. People said it was the forceps tugging me out: I was a difficult birth. That was supposed to be why I was slow to speak, slow to l
earn. My father believed them.

  My mother would try to shush him back into their bedroom. Sometimes he would be tame and allow himself to be guided; he might chuckle as if it were a game and hug her. Or he might blow up, shouting and flinging his hands about, calling her woman, witch or demon. Once she whispered, “It’s you who have the demon; the demon has taken hold of you, Jacob.”

  Sometimes he shuffled past our door and out into the government street, sleep walking to his and our shame.

  In those days, it was the wife’s job to keep family business safe within the house. Our mother locked all the internal doors even by day to keep him inside, away from visitors from the church or relatives who dropped in on their way to Abuja. If he was being crazy in the sitting room, she would shove us back into our bedroom or whisk us with the broom out into the yard. She would give him whisky if he asked for it, to get him to sleep. Our mother could never speak of these things to anybody, even her own mother, let alone to us.

  We could hear him making noises at night, groaning as if in pain, or slapping someone. The baby slept in my parents’ room and he would start to wail. I would stare into the darkness: was Baba hurting my new brother? In the morning his own face would be puffed out. It was Raphael who dared to say something. The very first time I heard that diva voice was when he asked her, sharp and demanding, “Why does that man hit himself?”

  My mother got angry and pushed Raphael’s face; slap would be the wrong word; she was horrified that the problem she lived with was clear to a five-year-old. “You do not call your father ‘that man’! Who are you to ask questions? I can see it’s time we put you to work like children used to be when I was young. You don’t know what good luck you had to be born into this household!”

  Raphael looked back at her, lips pursed. “That does not answer my question.”