The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I must go indoors. To sanity. And beyond.

  The ring-binder was clamping more and more of me; and my mind was at war. I was scripting my own hallucinations from the impetus of ecofreak ideology, exaggerated absurdly, and from the myth of the Holy Roman Empire … I was dreaming, wide awake.

  And Case stood, watching me.

  “You okay, Jill?”

  I nodded. I shouldn’t tell him the truth. There was no truth any more; there was only potent imagery, subject to interpretation.

  Certain bedrock facts existed: the bombing, the deaths in Amsterdam, my abduction … Event-images: that’s what those were. The interpretation was another matter, dependent upon what one believed—just as art was forever being reinterpreted in the context of a new epoch; and even history too.

  Persuasion—and Confusion too?—had torn me loose from my moorings, so that interpretations cascaded about me simultaneously, synchronously. I had become a battlefield between world-views, which different parts of my mind were animating.

  With dread, I sensed something stirring which perhaps had lain dormant ever since humanity split from Nature—ever since true consciousness of self had dawned as a sport, a freak, a biological accident …

  “You sure, Jill?”

  You. I. Myself. Me.

  The independent thinking entity, named Jill Donaldson.

  I wasn’t thinking quite so independently any longer. An illusion of Self—that productive illusion upon which civilization itself had been founded—was floundering.

  “Quite sure,” said I.

  I, I, I. Ich. Io. Ego.

  And Jilldonaldson hastened past him into the kitchen, where one of the cooks was hollowing out the marrow. The big TV set, tuned to CNN, scooping signals bounced from space, shimmered. The colours bled and reformed. The pixel pixies danced a new jig.

  The countenance of Vertumnus gazed forth from that screen, he of the laughing lips, the ripe rubicund cheeks of peach and apple, the pear-nose, the golden ears of corn that were his brows. Oh the flashing hilarity of his berry-eyes. Oh those laughing lips.

  With several nods of his head he gestured Jill elsewhere.

  Jill adopted a pan-face.

  She walked through the corridors of the house, to the front porch. She stepped out on to the gravel drive.

  Ignition keys were in the red Porsche.

  Jill ought to be safe with Annie in a colony of women. Rudolph Vertumnus was a male, wasn’t he?

  A hop through Cheltenham, then whoosh by motorway to Exeter and on down into Cornwall. She would burn fuel but keep an eye out for police patrols. Be at Polmerrin by dusk …

  * * *

  The Porsche wasn’t even approaching Cheltenham when the car phone burbled, inevitably.

  She had been counting on a call.

  A stolen bright red Porsche would be a little obvious on the motorway. So she had her excuse lined up. She was going to visit her brother—in Oxford, in roughly the opposite direction. She’d be back at Bexford that evening. Brother Bob was a banker. Let Rumby worry that she was going to blab to him to protect her 750K investment, about which she no longer cared a hoot. Let Case and some co-driver hare after her fruitlessly towards Oxford in the Merc.

  The voice wasn’t Case’s. Or Lascelles’. Or even Rumby’s.

  She nearly jerked the Porsche off the road.

  The voice was that of Voss.

  “Can you hear me, Fräulein Donaldson?”

  Hands shaking, legs trembling, she guided the car into a gateway opening on to a huge field of close-cut golden stubble girt by a hawthorn hedge. A Volvo hooted in protest as it swung by. A rabbit fled.

  “How did you find me, Voss—?” she gasped. Horrid perspectives loomed. “They told you! They know you!”

  The caller chuckled.

  “I’m merely the voice of Vertumnus, Fräulein. My image is everywhere these days, so why shouldn’t I be everywhere too? Are you perhaps worried about the collapse of your precious Ego, Fraulein?”

  How persuasive his voice was. “This has all happened before, you know. The God of the Bible ruled the medieval world, but when He went into eclipse Humanity seized His sceptre. Ah, that exalted Renaissance Ego! How puffed up it was! By the time of Rudolph, that same Ego was already collapsing. Its confidence had failed. A new unity was needed—a bio-cosmic social unity. The Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph sought to be the head of society—hence the painting of so many regal heads by the artist you have libelled. Those biological, botanical heads.”

  “I already know this,” she said.

  “He would be the head—and the people, the limbs, the organs. Of one body! In the new world now a-dawning life will be a unity again. The Emperor will be the head—but not a separate, egotistic head. Nor will the limbs and organs be separate individualists.”

  “You’re telling me what I know!” Aye, and what she most feared—namely the loss of Self. Its extinction. And what she most feared might well win; for what is feared is potent.

  “Who are you? What are you?” she cried into the phone—already suspecting that Voss’s voice, the voice of Vertumnus, might well be in her own wayward head, either ring-bound or else planted there by alchemical potion.

  She slammed the hand-set down on to its cradle by the gearshift lever, thumbed the windows fully open, and lit a cigarette to calm herself. Whispers of smoke drifted out towards the shorn field.

  A mat of golden stubble cloaked the broad shoulders of the land. A ghostly pattern emerged across the great network of dry stalks: a coat of arms. The hedge was merely green braiding. Her car was a shiny red bug parked on the shoulder of a giant sprawling being.

  Angrily she pitched her cigarette through the passenger window towards the field, wishing that it might start a fire, though really the straw was far too short to combust.

  She drove on; and when the phone seemed to burble again, she ignored it.

  She smoked. She threw out half-burned cigarettes till the pack was empty, but no smoke ever plumed upwards far behind her.

  * * *

  Half way through Cheltenham, in slow-moving traffic, she passed a great billboard flaunting Rudolph Vertumnus. WE ARE ALL PART OF NATURE, proclaimed the all too familiar text.

  Evidently unseen by other drivers and pedestrians, the fruity Emperor shouldered his way out of the poster. A pumpkin-belly that she had never seen before reared into view. And marrow-legs, from between which aubergine testicles and a carrot cock dangled. Vertumnus towered over the other cars and vans behind her, bestriding the roadway. His carrot swelled enormously.

  Raphanidosis: ancient Greek word. To be fucked by a giant radish. To be radished, ravished.

  Vertumnus was coming.

  A red light changed to green, and she was able to slip onward before the giant could advance to unpeel the roof of the Porsche and lift her out, homunculus-like, from her container.

  Even in the heart of the city, a chthonic entity was coming to life. A liberated, incarnated deity was being born.

  No one else but Jill saw it as yet.

  Yet everyone knew it from ten thousand posters and badges—wearing its varied seasonal faces. Everyone knew Vertumnus by now, deity of change and transformation; for change was in the air, as ripe Autumn matured. The death of Self was on the horizon.

  When she reached the motorway, those triple lanes cutting far ahead through the landscape opened up yawning perspectives of time rather than of space.

  Deep time, in which there’d been no conscious mind present at all, only vegetable and animal existence. Hence, the blankness of the road …

  Soon, a new psychic era might dawn in which the sovereign virtue of the conscious Self faded as humanity re-entered Nature once again—willing the demise of dissective, alienating logics and sciences, altering the mind-set, hypnotizing itself into a communal empathy with the world, whose potent figurehead wasn’t any vague, cloudy Gaea, but rather her son Vertumnus. Every eating of his body—of fruits and nuts and vegetables and fishes—would
be a vividly persuasive communion. His royal representative would reign in Budapest, or in Prague, or Vienna. His figurehead.

  The phone burbled, and this time Jill did answer as she swung along the endless tongue of tarmac, and through time.

  “Jill, don’t hang up.” Rumby. “I know why you’ve skipped out. And you must believe it ain’t my fault.”

  What was he talking about?

  “I’ve been the well-meaning patsy in this business. I’ve been the Gorby.”

  “Who was he?” she asked mischievously. Here was a message from a different era.

  “I’m fairly sure by now that my goddam Star Club was behind the bombing and the ring-binder. Didn’t trust me to be thorough enough. The whole Archy situation was really a lot more serious than even I saw. Those damn posters were really imprinting people on some deep-down level—not just surface propaganda. These are power-images. Fucking servosymbols—”

  “You’re only fairly sure?” she asked.

  “What tipped you off? Was it something Case said? Or Johnny Lascelles? Something Johnny let slip? I mean, why did you skip?”

  Something Case or Lascelles had let slip…? So Rumby was becoming a tad paranoid about his own staff in case they were serving two masters—Rumby himself, and some other rich gent in that secret Star Club of theirs … A gent whom she had perhaps met in that drawing room in North London; who had caned her at a distance …

  “Come back, Jill, and tell me all you know. I’m serious! I need to know.”

  Oh yes, she could recognize the authentic tones of paranoia …

  “Sorry about taking the Porsche,” she said.

  “Never mind the fucking car. Where are you, Jill?”

  She remembered.

  “I’m going to Oxford to see my brother. He’s a bank manager.”

  She hung up, and ignored repeated calls.

  * * *

  Polmerrin lay in a wooded little valley within a couple of miles of the rocky, wind-whipped North Cornwall coastline. Sheltered by the steep plunge of land and by oakwood, the once-derelict hamlet of cottages now housed studios and craft workshops, accompanied by a dozen satellite caravans. Pottery, jewellery, painting, sculpting, candle-making …

  Kids played. Women worked. A few male companions lent an enlightened hand. Someone was tootling a flute, and a buzzard circled high overhead. A kingfisher flashed to and fro along a stream, one soggy bank of which was edged by alder buckthorn. Some brimstone butterflies still fluttered, reluctant to succumb to worn-out wings and cooling nights. The sunset was brimstone too: sulphur and orange peel. A few arty tourists were departing.

  Immediately Jill realized that she had come to the wrong place entirely. She ought to have fled to some high-tech airport hotel with gleaming glass elevators—an inorganic, air-conditioned, sealed machine resembling a space station in the void.

  She was too tired to reverse her route.

  * * *

  Red-haired Annie embraced Jill, in surprise and joy. She kissed Jill, hugged her.

  Freckled Annie was wearing one of those Indian cotton dresses—in green hues—with tiny mirrors sewn into it; and she’d put some extra flesh upon her once-lithe frame, though not to the extent of positive plumpness. She had also put on slim, scrutinizing glasses. Pewter rings adorned several fingers, with scarab and spider motifs.

  One former barn was now a refectory, to which she led a dazed Jill to drink lemonade.

  “How long has it been, Jilly? Four years? You’ll stay with me, of course. So what’s happening?” She frowned. “I did hear about your book—and that awful bombing. I still listen to the radio all day long while I’m painting—”

  “Jill’s drugged,” said Jill. “Vertumnus is reborn. And the Holy Roman Empire is returning.”

  Annie scrutinized her with concern. “Holy shit.” She considered. “You’d better not tell any of the others. There are kids here. Folks might worry.”

  They whispered, as once they had whispered confidences.

  “Do you know the Portrait of Jacopo Strada?” Jill began. She found she could still speak about herself in the first person, historically.

  Presently there were indeed kids and mothers and a medley of other women, and a few men in the refectory too, sharing an early supper of spiced beans and rice and salad and textured vegetable protein, Madras style, while Vivaldi played from a tape-deck. The beams of the barn were painted black, and murals of fabulous creatures relieved the whiteness of the plaster: a phoenix, a unicorn, a minotaur, each within a mazelike Celtic surround, so that it seemed as if so many heraldic shields were poised around the walls. Tourists would enjoy cream teas in here of an afternoon.

  * * *

  Sulphur and copper had cleared from a sky that was now deeply leaden-blue, fast darkening. Venus and Jupiter both shone. A shooting star streaked across the vault of void; or was that a failed satellite burning up?

  Annie shared a studio with Rosy and Meg, who would be playing chess that evening in the recreation barn beside the refectory. The whole ground floor of the reconditioned cottage was studio. Meg’s work was meticulous neo-medieval miniatures featuring eerie freaks rather than anyone comely. Rosy specialized in acrylic studies of transparent hourglass buildings set within forests, or in crystalline deserts, and crowded with disembodied heads instead of sand.

  Annie used to paint swirling, luminous abstracts. Now she specialized in large acrylic canvasses of bloom within bloom within bloom, vortexes that sucked the gaze down into a central focus from which an eye always gazed out: a cat’s, a bird’s, a person’s. Her pictures were like strange, exploded, organic cameras.

  Jill looked; Jill admired. The paintings looked at her. Obviously there was a thematic empathy between the three women who used this studio.

  “The conscious mind is going into eclipse,” Jill remarked, and Annie smiled hesitantly.

  “That’s a great title. I might use it.”

  A polished wooden stairway led up to a landing with three bedrooms.

  Annie’s wide bed was of brass, with a floral duvet. Marguerites, daisies, buttercups.

  * * *

  In the morning when Jill awoke, the flowers had migrated from the duvet.

  Annie’s face, her neck, her shoulders were petals and stalks. Her skin was of white and pink blossoms. Her ear was a tulip, her nose was the bud of a lily, and her hair a fountain of red nasturtiums.

  Jill reached to peel off some of the petals, but the flowers were flesh, and Annie awoke with a squeak of protest. Her open eyes were black nightshades with white blossom pupils.

  And Jilldonaldson, whose name was dissolving, was the first to see such a transformation as would soon possess many men and women who regarded one another in a suitable light as part of Nature.

  Jilldona stepped from the brass bed, towards the window, and pulled the curtains aside.

  The valley was thick with mist. Yet a red light strobed the blur of vision. Spinning, this flashed from the roof of a police car parked beside the Porsche. Shapeless wraiths danced in its dipped headlight beams. One officer was scanning the vague, evasive cottages. A second walked around the Porsche, peered into it, then opened the passenger door.

  “Hey,” said Annie, “why did you tweak me?”

  Annie’s flesh was much as the night before, except that Jill continued to see a faint veil of flowers, an imprint of petals.

  “Jill just wanted a cigarette,” said Jill.

  “I quit a couple of years ago,” Annie reminded her. “Tobacco costs too much. Anyway, you didn’t smoke last night.”

  “Jill forgot to. Fuzz are down there. Fuzz make Jill want a fag.”

  “That braggartly car—we ought to have driven it miles away! Miles and miles.” Yet Annie didn’t sound totally convinced that sheltering this visitor might be the best idea.

  Jilldona pulled on her paisley sweater and jeans, and descended. Annie’s paintings eyed her brightly as she passed by, recording her within their petal-ringed pupils.

&
nbsp; She walked over to the police, one of whom asked:

  “You wouldn’t be a Miss Jill Donaldson, by any chance?” The burr of his Cornish accent …

  “Names melt,” she told her questioner. “The mind submerges in a unity of being. Have the Habsburgs sent you?” she asked. “Or was it the Star Club?”

  One officer removed the ignition key from the Porsche and locked the car.

  The other steered her by the arm into the back of the strobing vehicle. She could see no flowers on these policemen. However, a pair of wax strawberries dangled discretely from the driving mirror like blood-bright testicles.

  For Hannah Shapero

  A LONG NIGHT’S VIGIL AT THE TEMPLE

  Robert Silverberg

  Here’s one man’s moving crisis of faith and conscience, played out against the lush and richly evocative background of a society so far in the future that our familiar everyday world, everything we see around us, all our history and culture, everything we are, is a fading distant memory, blurred almost to nothing by time, all but forgotten. Even in this unimaginably distant future age, though, some things don’t change—like the eternal question, What Is Truth?…

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Tom O’Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, and At Winter’s End. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, and Beyond the Safe Zone. His most recent books are two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy, the solo novels The Face of the Waters and Kingdoms of the Wall, and a massive retrospective collection, The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. For many years he edited the prestigious anthology series New Dimensions, and has recently, along with his wife, Karen Haber, taken over the editing of the Universe anthology series. His stories have appeared in all nine previous editions of The Year’s Best Science Fiction, a record unmatched by anyone else. He lives in Oakland, California.