The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “What shall—” Something slammed onto Gunther’s back. He was knocked forward, off his feet. Tumbling, he became aware that fists were striking him, again and again, and then that a lean man was kneeling atop his chest, hysterically shouting, “Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

  Hamilton seized the man’s shoulders and pulled him away. Gunther got to his knees. He looked into the face of madness: eyes round and fearful, expression full of panic. The man was terrified of Gunther.

  With an abrupt wrench, the man broke free. He ran as if pursued by demons. Hamilton stared after him. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure.” Gunther adjusted his tool harness. “Let’s see if we can find the others.”

  They walked toward the lake, staring about at the self-absorbed figures scattered about the grass. Nobody attempted to speak to them. A woman ran by, barefooted. Her arms were filled with flowers. “Hey!” Hamilton called after her. She smiled fleetingly over her shoulder, but did not slow. Gunther knew her vaguely, an executive supervisor for Martin Marietta.

  “Is everybody here crazy?” he asked.

  “Sure looks that way.”

  The woman had reached the shore and was flinging the blossoms into the water with great sweeps of her arm. They littered the surface.

  “Damned waste.” Gunther had come to Bootstrap before the flowers; he knew the effort involved getting permission to plant them and rewriting the city’s ecologies. A man in a blue-striped Krupp suit was running along the verge of the lake.

  The woman, flowers gone, threw herself into the water.

  At first it appeared she’d suddenly decided to take a dip. But from the struggling, floundering way she thrashed deeper into the water it was clear that she could not swim.

  In the time it took Gunther to realize this, Hamilton had leaped forward, running for the lake. Belatedly, he started after her. But the man in the Krupp suit was ahead of them both. He splashed in after the woman. An outstretched hand seized her shoulder and then he fell, pulling her under. She was red-faced and choking when he emerged again, arm across her chest.

  By then Gunther and Beth were wading into the lake, and together they three got the woman to shore. When she was released, the woman calmly turned and walked away, as if nothing had happened.

  “Gone for more flowers,” the Krupp component explained. “This is the third time fair Ophelia there’s tried to drown herself. She’s not the only one. I’ve been hanging around, hauling ’em out when they stumble in.”

  “Do you know where everybody else is? Is there anyone in charge? Somebody giving out orders?”

  “Do you need any help?” Gunther asked.

  The Krupp man shrugged. “I’m fine. No idea where the others are, though. My friends were going on to the second level when I decided I ought to stay here. If you see them, you might tell ’em I’d appreciate hearing back from them. Three guys in Krupp suits.”

  “We’ll do that,” Gunther said.

  Hamilton was already walking away.

  On a step just beneath the top of the stairs sprawled one of Gunther’s fellow G5 components. “Sidney,” he said carefully. “How’s it going?”

  Sidney giggled. “I’m making the effort, if that’s what you mean. I don’t see that the ‘how’ of it makes much difference.”

  “Okay.”

  “A better way of phrasing that might be to ask why I’m not at work.” He stood, and in a very natural manner accompanied Gunther up the steps. “Obviously I can’t be two places at once. You wouldn’t want to perform major surgery in your own absence, would you?” He giggled again. “It’s an oxymoron. Like horses: those classically beautiful Praxitelesian bodies excreting these long surreal turds.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve always admired them for squeezing so much art into a single image.”

  “Sidney,” Hamilton said. “We’re looking for our friends. Three people in blue-striped work suits.”

  “I’ve seen them. I know just where they went.” His eyes were cool and vacant; they didn’t seem to focus on anything in particular.

  “Can you lead us to them?”

  “Even a flower recognizes its own face.” A gracefully winding gravel path led through private garden plots and croquet malls. They followed him down it.

  There were not many people on the second terrace; with the fall of madness, most seemed to have retreated into the caves. Those few who remained either ignored or cringed away from them. Gunther found himself staring obsessively into their faces, trying to analyze the deficiency he felt in each. Fear nested in their eyes, and the appalled awareness that some terrible thing had happened to them coupled with a complete ignorance of its nature.

  “God, these people!”

  Hamilton grunted.

  He felt he was walking through a dream. Sounds were muted by his suit, and colors less intense seen through his helmet visor. It was as if he had been subtly removed from the world, there and not-there simultaneously, an impression that strengthened with each new face that looked straight through him with mad, unseeing indifference.

  Sidney turned a corner, broke into a trot and jogged into a tunnel entrance. Gunther ran after him. At the mouth of the tunnel, he paused to let his helmet adjust to the new light levels. When it cleared he saw Sidney dart down a side passage. He followed.

  At the intersection of passages, he looked and saw no trace of their guide. Sidney had disappeared. “Did you see which way he went?” he asked Hamilton over the radio. There was no answer. “Beth?”

  He started down the corridor, halted, and turned back. These things went deep. He could wander around in them forever. He went back out to the terraces. Hamilton was nowhere to be seen.

  For lack of any better plan, he followed the path. Just beyond an ornamental holly bush he was pulled up short by a vision straight out of William Blake.

  The man had discarded shirt and sandals, and wore only a pair of shorts. He squatted atop a boulder, alert, patient, eating a tomato. A steel pipe slanted across his knees like a staff or scepter, and he had woven a crown of sorts from platinum wire with a fortune’s worth of hyperconductor chips dangling over his forehead. He looked every inch a kingly animal.

  He stared at Gunther, calm and unblinking.

  Gunther shivered. The man seemed less human than anthropoid, crafty in its way, but unthinking. He felt as if he were staring across the eons at Grandfather Ape, crouched on the edge of awareness. An involuntary thrill of superstitious awe seized him. Was this what happened when the higher mental functions were scraped away? Did Archetype lie just beneath the skin, waiting for the opportunity to emerge?

  “I’m looking for my friend,” he said. “A woman in a G5 suit like mine? Have you seen her? She was looking for three—” He stopped. The man was staring at him blankly. “Oh, never mind.”

  He turned away and walked on.

  After a time, he lost all sense of continuity. Existence fragmented into unconnected images: A man bent almost double, leering and squeezing a yellow rubber duckie. A woman leaping up like a jack-in-the-box from behind an air monitor, shrieking and flapping her arms. An old friend sprawled on the ground, crying, with a broken leg. When he tried to help her, she scrabbled away from him in fear. He couldn’t get near her without doing more harm. “Stay here,” he said, “I’ll find help.” Five minutes later he realized that he was lost, with not the slightest notion of how to find his way back to her again. He came to the stairs leading back down to the bottom level. There was no reason to go down them. There was no reason not to. He went down.

  He had just reached the bottom of the stairs when someone in a lavender boutique suit hurried by.

  Gunther chinned on his helmet radio.

  “Hello!” The lavender suit glanced back at him, its visor a plate of obsidian, but did not turn back. “Do you know where everyone’s gone? I’m totally lost. How can I find out what I should be doing?” The lavender suit ducked into a tunnel.

  Faintly, a voic
e answered, “Try the city manager’s office.”

  * * *

  The city manager’s office was a tight little cubby an eighth of a kilometer deep within the tangled maze of administrative and service tunnels. It had never been very important in the scheme of things. The city manager’s prime duties were keeping the air and water replenished and scheduling airlock inspections, functions any computer could handle better than a man had they dared trust them to a machine. The room had probably never been as crowded as it was now. Dozens of people suited for full vacuum spilled out into the hall, anxiously listening to Ekatarina confer with the city’s Crisis Management Program. Gunther pushed in as close as he could; even so, he could barely see her.

  “—the locks, the farms and utilities, and we’ve locked away all the remotes. What comes next?”

  Ekatarina’s peecee hung from her work harness, amplifying the CMP’s silent voice. “Now that elementary control has been established, second priority must go to the industrial sector. The factories must be locked down. The reactors must be put to sleep. There is not sufficient human supervisory presence to keep them running. The factories have mothballing programs available upon request.

  “Third, the farms cannot tolerate neglect. Fifteen minutes without oxygen, and all the tilapia will die. The calimari are even more delicate. Three experienced agricultural components must be assigned immediately. Double that number, if you only have inexperienced components. Advisory software is available. What are your resources?”

  “Let me get back to you on that. What else?”

  “What about the people?” a man asked belligerently. “What the hell are you worrying about factories for, when our people are in the state they’re in?”

  Izmailova looked up sharply. “You’re one of Chang’s research components, aren’t you? Why are you here? Isn’t there enough for you to do?” She looked about, as if abruptly awakened from sleep. “All of you! What are you waiting for?”

  “You can’t put us off that easily! Who made you the little brass-plated general? We don’t have to take orders from you.”

  The bystanders shuffled uncomfortably, not leaving, waiting to take their cue from each other. Their suits were as good as identical in this crush, their helmets blank and expressionless. They looked like so many ambulatory eggs.

  The crowd’s mood balanced on the instant, ready to fall into acceptance or anger with a featherweight’s push. Gunther raised an arm. “General!” he said loudly. “Private Weil here! I’m awaiting my orders. Tell me what to do.”

  Laughter rippled through the room, and the tension eased. Ekatarina said, “Take whoever’s nearest you, and start clearing the afflicted out of the administrative areas. Guide them out toward the open, where they won’t be so likely to hurt themselves. Whenever you get a room or corridor emptied, lock it up tight. Got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tapped the suit nearest him, and its helmet dipped in a curt nod. But when they turned to leave, their way was blocked by the crush of bodies.

  “You!” Ekatarina jabbed a finger. “Go to the farmlocks and foam them shut; I don’t want any chance of getting them contaminated. Anyone with experience running factories—that’s most of us, I think—should find a remote and get to work shutting the things down. The CMP will help direct you. If you have nothing else to do, buddy up and work at clearing out the corridors. I’ll call a general meeting when we’ve put together a more comprehensive plan of action.” She paused. “What have I left out?”

  Surprisingly, the CMP answered her: “There are twenty-three children in the city, two of them seven-year-old prelegals and the rest five years of age or younger, offspring of registered-permanent lunar components. Standing directives are that children be given special care and protection. The third-level chapel can be converted to a care center. Word should be spread that as they are found, the children are to be brought there. Assign one reliable individual to oversee them.”

  “My God, yes.” She turned to the belligerent man from the Center, and snapped, “Do it.”

  He hesitated, then saluted ironically and turned to go.

  That broke the logjam. The crowd began to disperse. Gunther and his coworker—it turned out to be Liza Nagenda, another ground-rat like himself—set to work.

  * * *

  In after years Gunther was to remember this period as a time when his life entered a dark tunnel. For long, nightmarish hours he and Liza shuffled from office to storage room, struggling to move the afflicted out of the corporate areas and into the light.

  The afflicted did not cooperate.

  The first few rooms they entered were empty. In the fourth, a distraught-looking woman was furiously going through drawers and files and flinging their contents away. Trash covered the floor. “It’s in here somewhere,” she said frantically.

  “What’s in there, darling?” Gunther said soothingly. He had to speak loudly so he could be heard through his helmet. “What are you looking for?”

  She tilted her head up with a smile of impish delight. Using both hands, she smoothed back her hair, elbows high, pushing it straight over her skull, then tucking in stray strands behind her ears. “It doesn’t matter, because I’m sure to find it now. Two scarabs appear, and between them the blazing disk of the sun, that’s a good omen, not to mention being an analogy for sex. I’ve had sex, all the sex anyone could want, buggered behind the outhouse by the lizard king when I was nine. What did I care? I had wings then and thought that I could fly.”

  Gunther edged a little closer. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

  “You know, Tolstoy said there was a green stick in the woods behind his house that once found would cause all men to love one another. I believe in that green stick as a basic principle of physical existence. The universe exists in a matrix of four dimensions which we can perceive and seven which we cannot, which is why we experience peace and brotherhood as a seven-dimensional green stick phenomenon.”

  “You’ve got to listen to me.”

  “Why? You gonna tell me Hitler is dead? I don’t believe in that kind of crap.”

  “Oh hell,” Nagenda said. “You can’t reason with a flick. Just grab her arms and we’ll chuck her out.”

  It wasn’t that easy, though. The woman was afraid of them. Whenever they approached her, she slipped fearfully away. If they moved slowly, they could not corner her, and when they both rushed her, she leapt up over a desk and then down into the kneehole. Nagenda grabbed her legs and pulled. The woman wailed, and clutched at the knees of Nagenda’s suit. “Get offa me,” Liza snarled. “Gunther, get this crazy woman off my damn legs.”

  “Don’t kill me!” the woman screamed. “I’ve always voted twice—you know I did. I told them you were a gangster, but I was wrong. Don’t take the oxygen out of my lungs!”

  They got the woman out of the office, then lost her again when Gunther turned to lock the door. She went fluttering down the corridor with Nagenda in hot pursuit. Then she dove into another office, and they had to start all over again.

  It took over an hour to drive the woman from the corridors and release her into the park. The next three went quickly enough by contrast. The one after that was difficult again, and the fifth turned out to be the first woman they had encountered, wandered back to look for her office. When they’d brought her to the open again, Liza Nagenda said, “That’s four flicks down and three thousand eight hundred fifty-eight to go.”

  “Look—” Gunther began. And then Krishna’s voice sounded over his trance chip, stiffly and with exaggerated clarity. “Everyone is to go to the central lake immediately for an organizational meeting. Repeat: Go to the lake immediately. Go to the lake now.” He was obviously speaking over a jury-rigged transmitter. The sound was bad and his voice boomed and popped on the chip.

  “All right, okay, I got that,” Liza said. “You can shut up now.”

  “Please go to the lake immediately. Everyone is to go directly to the central—”

  “Shee
sh.”

  By the time they got out to the parklands again, the open areas were thick with people. Not just the suited figures of the survivors, either. All the afflicted were emerging from the caves and corridors of Bootstrap. They walked blindly, uncertainly, toward the lake, as if newly called from the grave. The ground level was filling with people.

  “Sonofabitch,” Gunther said wonderingly.

  “Gunther?” Nagenda asked. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s the trance chips! Sonofabitch, all we had to do was speak to them over the chips. They’ll do whatever the voice in their heads tells them to do.”

  The land about the lake was so crowded that Gunther had trouble spotting any other suits. Then he saw a suited figure standing on the edge of the second level waving broadly. He waved back and headed for the stairs.

  By the time he got to level two, a solid group of the unafflicted had gathered. More and more came up, drawn by the concentration of suits. Finally Ekatarina spoke over the open channel of her suit radio.

  “There’s no reason to wait for us all to gather. I think everyone is close enough to hear me. Sit down, take a little rest, you’ve all earned it.” People eased down on the grass. Some sprawled on their backs or stomachs, fully suited. Most just sat.

  “By a fortunate accident, we’ve discovered a means of controlling our afflicted friends.” There was light applause. “But there are still many problems before us, and they won’t all be solved so easily. We’ve all seen the obvious. Now I must tell you of worse. If the war on Earth goes full thermonuclear, we will be completely and totally cut off, possibly for decades.”

  A murmur passed through the crowd.

  “What does this mean? Beyond the immediate inconveniences—no luxuries, no more silk shirts, no new seed stock, no new videos, no way home for those of us who hadn’t already decided to stay—we will be losing much that we require for survival. All our microfacturing capability comes from the Swiss Orbitals. Our water reserves are sufficient for a year, but we lose minute quantities of water vapor to rust and corrosion and to the vacuum every time somebody goes in or out an airlock, and those quantities are necessary for our existence.