Year's Best SF 1

by David G. Hartwell

  There was a note floating in the air over the bed saying she had gone to a party in the common room. I found her in a gossamer wheelchair, teaching a hand dance to Denli om Cord, while a harpist and flautist from two different worlds tried to settle on a mutual key.

  She was in good spirits. Denli remembered an engagement and I wheeled White Hill out onto a balcony that overlooked a lake full of sleeping birds, some perhaps real.

  It was hot outside, always hot. There was a mist of perspiration on her face, partly from the light exercise of the dance, I supposed. In the light from below, the mist gave her face a sculpted appearance, unsparing sharpness, and there was no sign left of the surgery.

  “I'll be out of the chair tomorrow,” she said, “at least ten minutes at a time.” She laughed, “Stop that!”

  “Stop what?”

  “Looking at me like that.”

  I was still staring at her face. “It's just…I suppose it's such a relief.”

  “I know.” She rubbed my hand. “They showed me pictures, of before. You looked at that for so many days?”

  “I saw you.”

  She pressed my hand to her face. The new skin was taut but soft, like a baby's. “Take me downstairs?”

  10

  It's hard to describe, especially in light of later developments, disintegrations, but that night of fragile love-making marked a permanent change in the way we linked, or at least the way I was linked to her: I've been married twice, long and short, and have been in some kind of love a hundred times. But no woman has ever owned me before.

  This is something we do to ourselves. I've had enough women who tried to possess me, but always was able to back or circle away, in literal preservation of self. I always felt that life was too long for one woman.

  Certainly part of it is that life is not so long anymore. A larger part of it was the run through the screaming storm, her life streaming out of her, and my stewardship, or at least companionship, afterward, during her slow transformation back into health and physical beauty. The core of her had never changed, though, the stubborn serenity that I came to realize, that warm night, had finally infected me as well.

  The bed was a firm narrow slab, cooler than the dark air heavy with the scent of Earth flowers. I helped her onto the bed (which instantly conformed to her) but from then on it was she who cared for me, saying that was all she wanted, all she really had strength for. When I tried to reverse that, she reminded me of a holiday palindrome that has sexual overtones in both our languages: Giving is taking is giving.

  11

  We spent a couple of weeks as close as two people can be. I was her lover and also her nurse, as she slowly strengthened. When she was able to spend most of her day in normal pursuits, free of the wheelchair or “intelligent” bed (with which we had made a threesome, at times uneasy), she urged me to go back outside and finish up. She was ready to concentrate on her own project, too. Impatient to do art again, a good sign.

  I would not have left so soon if I had known what her project involved. But that might not have changed anything.

  As soon as I stepped outside, I knew it was going to take longer than planned. I had known from the inside monitors how cold it was going to be, and how many ceemetras of ice had accumulated, but I didn't really know how bad it was until I was standing there, looking at my piles of materials locked in opaque glaze. A good thing I'd left the robots inside the shelter, and a good thing I had left a few hand tools outside. The door was buried under two metras of snow and ice. I sculpted myself a passageway, an application of artistic skills I'd never foreseen.

  I debated calling White Hill and telling her that I would be longer than expected. We had agreed not to interrupt each other, though, and it was likely she'd started working as soon as I left.

  The robots were like a bad comedy team, but I could only be amused by them for an hour or so at a time. It was so cold that the water vapor from my breath froze into an icy sheath on my beard and mustache. Breathing was painful; deep breathing probably dangerous.

  So most of the time, I monitored them from inside the shelter. I had the place to myself; everyone else long since gone into the dome. When I wasn't working I drank too much, something I had not done regularly in centuries.

  It was obvious that I wasn't going to make a working model. Delicate balance was impossible in the shifting gale. But the robots and I had our hands full, and other grasping appendages engaged, just dismantling the various pieces and moving them through the lock. It was unexciting but painstaking work. We did all the laser cuts inside the shelter, allowing the rock to come up to room temperature so it didn't spall or shatter. The air-conditioning wasn't quite equal to the challenge, and neither were the cleaning robots, so after a while it was like living in a foundry: everywhere a kind of greasy slickness of rock dust, the air dry and metallic.

  So it was with no regret that I followed the last slice into the airlock myself, even looking forward to the scourging if White Hill was on the other side.

  She wasn't. A number of other people were missing, too. She left this note behind:

  I knew from the day we were called back here what my new piece would have to be, and I knew I had to keep it from you, to spare you sadness. And to save you the frustration of trying to talk me out of it.

  As you may know by now, scientists have determined that the Fwndyri indeed have sped up the Sun's evolution somehow. It will continue to warm, until in thirty or forty years there will be an explosion called the “helium flash.” The Sun will become a red giant, and the Earth will be incinerated.

  There are no starships left, but there is one avenue of escape. A kind of escape.

  Parked in high orbit there is a huge interplanetary transport that was used in the terraforming of Mars. It's a couple of centuries older than you, but like yourself it has been excellently preserved. We are going to ride it out to a distance sufficient to survive the Sun's catastrophe, and there remain until the situation improves, or does not.

  This is where I enter the picture. For our survival to be meaningful in this thousand-year war, we have to resort to coldsleep. And for a large number of people to survive centuries of coldsleep, they need my jaturnary skills. Alone, in the ice, they would go slowly mad. Connected through the matrix of my mind, they will have a sense of community, and may come out of it intact.

  I will be gone, of course. I will be by the time you read this. Not dead, but immersed in service. I could not be revived if this were only a hundred people for a hundred days. This will be a thousand, perhaps for a thousand years.

  No one else on Earth can do jaturnary, and there is neither time nor equipment for me to transfer my ability to anyone. Even if there were,

  I'm not sure I would trust anyone else's skill. So I am gone.

  My only loss is losing you. Do I have to elaborate on that?

  You can come if you want. In order to use the transport, I had to agree that the survivors be chosen in accordance with the Earth's strict class system—starting with dear Norita, and from that pinnacle, on down—but they were willing to make exceptions for all of the visiting artists. You have until mid-Deciembre to decide; the ship leaves Januar first.

  If I know you at all, I know you would rather stay behind and die. Perhaps the prospect of living “in” me could move you past your fear of coldsleep; your aversion to jaturnary. If not, not.

  I love you more than life. But this is more than that. Are we what we are?

  W.H.

  The last sentence is a palindrome in her language, not mine, that I believe has some significance beyond the obvious.

  12

  I did think about it for some time. Weighing a quick death, or even a slow one, against spending centuries locked frozen in a tiny room with Norita and her ilk. Chattering on at the speed of synapse, and me unable to not listen.

  I have always valued quiet, and the eternity of it that I face is no more dreadful than the eternity of quiet that preceded my birth.


  If White Hill were to be at the other end of those centuries of torture, I know I could tolerate the excruciation. But she was dead now, at least in the sense that I would never see her again.

  Another woman might have tried to give me a false hope, the possibility that in some remote future the process of jaturnary would be advanced to the point where her personality could be recovered. But she knew how unlikely that would be even if teams of scientists could be found to work on it, and years could be found for them to work in. It would be like unscrambling an egg.

  Maybe I would even do it, though, if there were just some chance that, when I was released from that din of garrulous bondage, there would be something like a real world, a world where I could function as an artist. But I don't think there will even be a world where I can function as a man.

  There probably won't be any humanity at all, soon enough. What they did to the Sun they could do to all of our stars, one assumes. They win the war, the Extermination, as my parent called it. Wrong side exterminated.

  Of course the Fwndyri might not find White Hill and her charges. Even if they do find them, they might leave them preserved as an object of study.

  The prospect of living on eternally under those circumstances, even if there were some growth to compensate for the immobility and the company, holds no appeal.

  13

  What I did in the time remaining before mid-Deciembre was write this account. Then I had it translated by a xenolinguist into a form that she said could be decoded by any creature sufficiently similar to humanity to make any sense of the story. Even the Fwndyri, perhaps. They're human enough to want to wipe out a competing species.

  I'm looking at the preliminary sheets now, English down the left side and a jumble of dots, squares, and triangles down the right. Both sides would have looked equally strange to me a few years ago.

  White Hill's story will be conjoined to a standard book that starts out with basic mathematical principles, in dots and squares and triangles, and moves from that into physics, chemistry, biology. Can you go from biology to the human heart? I have to hope so. If this is read by alien eyes, long after the last human breath is stilled, I hope it's not utter gibberish.

  14

  So I will take this final sheet down to the translator and then deliver the whole thing to the woman who is going to transfer it to permanent sheets of platinum, which will be put in a prominent place aboard the transport. They could last a million years, or ten million, or more. After the Sun is a cinder, and the ship is a frozen block enclosing a thousand bits of frozen flesh, she will live on in this small way.

  So now my work is done. I'm going outside, to the quiet.

  In Saturn Time

  WILLIAM BARTON

  William Barton has been, mostly without fanfare, developing into a considerable writer in the SF field over the past decade. He has published several novels and a number of short stories, but has drawn relatively little attention. This story is an original from Amazing: the Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan, who also produced one, perhaps the last, issue of the oldest surviving SF magazine title in 1995. “In Saturn Time” is an alternate history story about science and space travel, set in part in the future, a harder trick than it might seem. It uses the old “looking backward” technique to good effect and yields a memorable science fiction story.

  On the Ides of October, 1974, LM pilot Nick jensen rode across the Lunar regolith under a featureless black sky not far from the north pole of the Moon. Almighty strange here, he thought, nothing like what we saw at the other six landing sites. Maybe a little bit like Taurus-Littrow, but…

  Long, long shadows cast across the surface, black lanes running off to infinity behind crater walls, every rock the origin of a dark finger that pointed away from the Sun, the Sun itself a glare right on the southern horizon. Post a big sign: Penumbra Starts Here. Scary when you looked around the sky, too. The Earth was nowhere in sight, had disappeared below the horizon as they'd descended the long hill away from the lander's touchdown site.

  Orbiter pilot Ben Santori's voice crackled in his earphones, lightly fuzzed by static. “Inertial nav puts you at seven klicks.”

  Nick said, “Rog. Coming up on Black Hills terminator.” Somewhere up in that flat black sky, Apollo 21's orbiting CSM Nightwing would be a silvery fleck. And somewhere behind them, back up the twin tracks the rover was leaving in the dust, in the direction of Peary's north rim mountain structure, Lunar Module Flamebird was a barely visible golden freckle on the gray landscape. Seven kilometers. A long walk back if this thing breaks down.

  Goddamned lucky to be here. Eight long years in training since acceptance into the 1966 astronaut candidate pool. Watching men from the earlier intakes get their second and third flights, Alan Shepard on the Moon, Walter Cronkite jolly on TV…As Nixon canceled the Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory, then the advanced Apollo Lunar program, then what little remained of Apollo Applications other than Skylab…

  Nick glanced over at mission commander Stan Freeman in the rover's left-hand seat, craning his neck a little to see around the EVA helmet's visor rim. These outer hard-hat helmets with their gold visor structure were a nuisance. We should just go with the red cloth cover they rigged for the orbital EVAs. “Time.”

  “On time, on target.” Freeman's voice came over the earphones clear and crisp, marked by his familiar Chicago accent. Freeman's luck was even greater, contaminating everything he touched. First black man in space. First black man on the Moon. Mission commander. Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Darling of the press, interviewed by all and sundry only hours before liftoff.

  Lucky for us. Young black moderate Jesse Jackson giving a speech in which he praised NASA, saying King would've been proud, telling them all how much King had liked Star Trek, giving the mission SCLC's blessing and, by extension, its approval of the whole revived space program.

  They pulled up on the edge of shadow, near a low, hummocky ridge, the solar wind- and ejecta-eroded wall of a very old highland-type crater, unclipped their restraints and got out of the rover. Nick staggered slightly, bouncing inside his suit.

  “Watch it.”

  “I'm all right. A little disoriented from the ride.” Wouldn't matter if I fell down anyway. Just get the suit dirty. And, though stiff and clumsy and uncomfortable as hell, these Apollo EVA suits are nothing if not sturdy.

  “All set?”

  “Lead on, MacDuff.” The newsmen interpreting for the home viewing audience would like that. Hardy, bluff, brave, uncomplicated men, our representatives in the Great Void. Nick smiled to himself. Then why do we keep having post-mission nervous breakdowns? It was getting to be a NASA in-joke. Go to the Moon. Then the nuthouse.

  They walked into night.

  “Dark here.”

  Nick said, “Yeah. Let's hold here for cooldown.” Stepping into shadow, they'd just taken a 100K+ temperature drop, and another few steps might double that. Orbital sensing said the minimum temperature down inside the crater's permanent shadow was no more than 100K, theory said it might be as low as 40K. The suits were sturdy, but not invulnerable.

  Lovely luminous night, night that…Nick flipped up the gold visor. “Jesus!”

  “What…” Freeman flipped up his own visor and looked. “Oh…” Soft whisper of delight. Above them, the sky was flooded by the gentle radiance of a hundred million suns, distant, steady needles of light, white, pale blue, tawny red-orange here and there, the Milky Way like a river of golden dust.

  Lucky to be here. All because Morris Udall and a determined band of party conservatives took the Democratic nomination away from the McGovernites' Children's Crusade, all because Nixon got a little paranoid and pulled that Watergate crap, crap that lost him the election.

  President Udall standing up there on Inauguration Day, decreeing that U.S. military forces would turn their equipment over to the ARVN in situ and evacuate Vietnam forthwith, “…because, right or wrong, it's time we were done with this sorry business…”


  President Udall sitting in the Oval Office signing an executive order that canceled Nixon's space transportation system, reinstating Apollo and AAP, “…because we spent forty billion dollars acquiring this technology. Let's get the benefit of it before we go out and buy another one.”

  And, three weeks after that, astronaut trainee Nick Jensen had been assigned to the Apollo 21 prime crew. Apollo 17 to the Moon, numbers 18 through 20 up to Skylab 1, then back to the Moon again. Ten more flights to the Moon were decreed, and another Skylab, and anywhere between three and seven freestanding AAP missions. After that? Who cares? This will keep us busy through 1981.…

  They walked on into the deeper darkness, picking over rocks, skirting small, shallow craters, taking samples, talking to Santori in orbit, back through the LM link to Mission Control.

  “Okay, let's get the lights on.” This was the other limiting factor. It was still seventy Kelvins here, not enough to redline the suits, not even close, but the power necessary to run this new lighting system would drain the backpack batteries in less than forty-five minutes. Ten minutes in here was what the profile called for.

  Flame on. The crater bottom lit up around them, rock and dirt and dust and nothing else. Disappointing. “Over there.” Nick pointed at what looked like a low ridge of black talus near the steeper southern wall of the depression.

  He kneeled by it and prodded with his rock hammer. “Sintered solid, I guess, whatever it is.”

  “Crack off a sample and let's get out of here. This place is a bust.” The commentators would be talking about that one, all right.…

  Nick hit the rock a sharp blow with the hammer's pointed end, breaking a chunk loose. Flash of bright white. “Uh.” He picked up the sample and turned it over. Opaque white rock, colored like chalk but hard like granite, no crystalline structure, covered by a thin black rind.