The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “But where’re they from?”

  “I believe they postdate us,” she said. “As always, everyone’s treating everyone else like a denizen. Mustn’t talk, can’t say, won’t get involved. Still, they did help me carry you into the gardens after I plugged that strangler.”

  “Ranke knows—knew they were here. I think he was starting to have designs on their travelers.”

  “Well, Ranke’s dead, and they only have the one traveler anyway.” She laughed softly. “But, ah, he is worth having designs on.”

  “You’re incorrigible. How long do we have now?”

  “Hours. The climactic eruption starts at seven fifty-two A.M.”

  “Well,” Medlin said drily, “I sure don’t want to miss seeing the climactic eruption, now do I?”

  Beers happened to overhear that. Arms akimbo, he said, very sternly, “I would advise you not to see it from here.”

  Oblivious to irony, Medlin thought, and said, “What about Morne Rouge?”

  “What about Morne Rouge?”

  “Is it safe? Safe tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow, yes. But you haven’t a chance of reaching it tonight.”

  Something made Medlin ask, “Is it safe later?”

  “Later?” The scientist seemed surprised by the question. “Well, if you mean—it catches holy hell at the end of August.”

  “Deaths?”

  Beers shrugged. “Not as many as here. Probably not more than two thousand in all.” He saw something being done wrong and walked away to see that it was done right.

  Medlin did not know why he should have felt more pain at the thought of two thousand denizens dying at Morne Rouge five months from now than at the thought of thirty thousand killed in St. Pierre tomorrow morning. For all he knew, Father Hayot and his two hundred forlorn parishioners had not lingered any longer at Morne Rouge than at St. Pierre. Until this moment, he didn’t know that he had been rooting for the priest and his flock. At least they had shown better sense than anyone in Little Paris. He found himself wanting to think that they would somehow survive all of the volcano’s tantrums, even as he found himself disbelieving that any denizen, lacking precise knowledge of the future, could possibly escape. The lethal ingenuity of human beings was as nothing compared with that of Pelée. If it failed to kill you with lava or poison gas or a mudslide, it could always send a big wave to drown you, or fer-de-lances, or a tumbling hogshead.

  He looked mournfully at Garrick, who murmured, “Some denizen you met?”

  “Denizens.”

  “Shouldn’t get so attached, Med.”

  “I know. But all of a sudden I’m really tired of being detached.”

  Rain began to patter around them. Medlin looked up and let the warm drops strike his ashy face. It felt good until he touched his cheek. Then it just felt slimy. Garrick stood up grousing about her old bones, and they moved to stand under a tree. Medlin heard the muffled pealing of bells striking the hour and counted the strokes. It was ten o’clock.

  Garrick produced a flat case and a penlight from her bag. She opened the case and trained the penlight on its contents. Medlin saw two dozen slender, gleaming ampoules.

  “There’s enough here,” she said, “to get both of us through a dozen trips if nineteen oh two doesn’t work out.”

  “Eventually, we’ll run out.”

  “Big deal. Eventually, we’ll run out and not be able to travel first-class any more. But we’ll still be able to travel.”

  “It’s rough without drugs.”

  “So’s childbirth, I hear, but women who don’t have drugs still have babies. We’ll just have to be careful not to throw up on anyone important or badtempered when we arrive someplace. Consider the alternative, Med. Even if just the idea of temporal engineering doesn’t scare the ass off you … we’d become cargo vessels, and there’d be someone else’s hand on the tiller all the time. The cargo’d be people like Ranke and people a lot worse than Ranke. That’s your fate, if you go back.”

  That was the last thing Medlin remembered hearing for a while. A deep rumbling from the volcano woke him from a doze. Garrick was still sitting beside him, watching the scientists work. The noise increased, and then came a billowing mass of red smoke. Medlin sat up in alarm. Garrick calmly looked at her watch again, then said, “It’s still just demonstrating. But we need to be leaving soon. If we are going to leave.”

  “You know I’m not going back. Before we fly off somewhere, though—” Medlin looked at her very seriously “—I want to help Madame Boislaville escape from St. Pierre.”

  Garrick pulled dubiously on her chin. “Maybe she’s supposed to die with all her neighbors in the morning. And even if she isn’t—”

  “Maybe she isn’t. She told me you yourself urged her to go visit her relatives in the south.”

  Garrick seemed slightly abashed. “I wasn’t trying to force events. I just thought I’d give them a little nudge. Maybe she isn’t supposed to die in the morning. Maybe the reason she doesn’t is that a crazy white boy rescues her. What do you, as the crazy white boy, propose to do with her once you’ve rescued her?”

  Medlin shrugged. “Wish her a long and happy life in Fort-de-France.”

  “Med, whether she lives or dies, what difference does it really make? She’s still a ghost.”

  “No, you’re wrong. You can’t really believe what you just said. Otherwise, why would you have bothered even to try to nudge events, as you call it? Denizens or not, anomalies or not, we’re— Ranke didn’t think these people were real at all, and they hacked him to pieces.”

  “You know what I mean.” Garrick heaved a great sigh. “Look, did I tell you how I met Clara Prentiss? Missis Prentiss, the American Consul’s wife? It was last Friday morning, just after I’d arrived and just after the volcano’d started to act up. We weren’t exactly formally introduced. I only happened to see her on the street. In a wonderful display of futile and misdirected concern, she tried to rescue a suffocated bird that’d fallen in the road. I took it away from her and threw it away and told her not to waste her sentiment. She looked at me like I’d arrived from a moon of Saturn.”

  “Sometimes,” said Medlin, “you act like it. Between nineteen forty and here, I’ve seen too many people killed by Stukas and volcanoes and crap. I just don’t think I can stand to be around denizens any more and go on telling myself, Well, this is their world, these are their lives, aw gee, that was their deaths. We’re going to be living entirely among them from now on. We’ve got to stop thinking of them as people who’ve been in their graves for hundreds of years.”

  “If you save her, you become responsible for the woman’s life, and her daughter’s, and for all their descendants.”

  “I think if time’s been resilient enough to accommodate us all this while, it ought to be able to accommodate a couple of denizens just this once.”

  “Aiee. You’re cutting it thin with this rescue.”

  “I’ll get out in time.”

  “Christ, as long as you’re determined to go through with this madness—” Garrick dug around in her bag and handed over a revolver “—you better take this. In case we run into the voodoo people again.”

  “We? If you don’t approve, don’t come along.”

  “Well, I can’t have you changing your mind about going AWOL as soon as you’re out of my sight.” Something Ranke had said nagged at Medlin. He set the thing carefully to one side in his mind, to be examined later. Garrick was looking at her watch again. “Besides,” she said, “someone’s got to keep time. We don’t want to be sitting too close to the stage when the show starts.”

  They stood up, and Garrick sought out Beers, who seemed very uncomfortable as she thanked him for his help. He said, without looking at Medlin, “I thought you were going with us. The quimboiseurs aren’t likely to attack a group the size of ours.”

  She shook her head. “I’m too old to go trekking through any jungle at night. Anyway, the streets’re pretty quiet now. Even wizards have to go
home and explain to their wives why they’ve been out so late. My friend and I’ll take the coast road south.”

  “Then good luck to you,” said Beers, “and your friend.”

  Each with gun in hand, Medlin and Garrick slipped past the gates of the botanical gardens. It was five-thirty by the antique watch. Dawn, the eighth of May, Thursday, Ascension Day, looked and felt like the inside of a filthy pressure cooker. Dirty red smoke hung above the crater. Pierrotins were emerging from their homes. Most of them drifted like sleepwalkers in the direction of the cathedral.

  At Madame Boislaville’s, all the shutters had been closed and the cracks stuffed with rags. Medlin pounded on the door and called her name, but got no response. He walked around to the courtyard gate and carefully aimed at the padlock. It took two shots from the revolver, a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber housegun, to shatter the big padlock. He ran into the courtyard and began banging on the shutters at the rear of the house. He identified himself loudly and kept shouting her name. Finally, suddenly, a shutter on one of the upstairs windows opened. She was only a dark shape, outlined by the glow of a candle.

  “Go away!” she cried out to him. “Go to your own kind!”

  Garrick appeared beside him and raised her empty hand in greeting. “Madame Boislaville!” she said out gaily. “How delightful to see you again!”

  “We must leave this town now,” Medlin said. “We have come to give you safe passage to Fort-de-France.”

  “The wizards—”

  They held up their revolvers for her to see, and Garrick declared that any wizard who showed his face would be shot. Madame made no reply. The shutter remained open for a few more seconds, then closed with a rattle. Medlin looked up at it unhappily, convinced that she had made up her mind to die in her home. The same thought must have occurred simultaneously to Garrick, for she began, with a shrug in her tone, “If she’s determined not to be rescued—”

  Down from the mountain came the sound of a great detonation. It was followed in short order by a second and then a third. Garrick nervously fingered her watch. Finally, she said, “We really do have to—”

  Madame Boislaville’s rear door opened, and she appeared looking hot, tired, dirty, and unfriendly. She was clutching her beads in one hand and made the other into a fist. Medlin had thought the heat in the courtyard was suffocating, but the mass of air that oozed out past her to envelope him was as dense and heavy as lead.

  “Madame,” he said, “I implore you to leave with us at once.”

  “I…”

  Garrick went to the woman’s side. “Madame Boislaville,” she said, “this young man is determined to save you from the mountain. Please go get your daughter while he hitches your cart.”

  “The horse is dead…”

  “Then we must walk,” Garrick said, “and we must start immediately.

  The two women turned and moved into the building. Medlin stationed himself in the doorway. He overheard a brief argument about belongings; Garrick insisted that there was no time to gather them. She returned leading Madame, who was wrapped in a shawl and leading Elizabeth by one hand, carrying only a rosary in the other. Medlin brought up the rear. Garrick urged them to hurry as they entered the street, and they moved at a fast walk through the gloom. As they passed over the rim of the amphitheater, they paused to look back. The volcano’s incandescent eye peered through a great sifting veil of airborne debris. The pall dispersed as a warm, sulphurous wind blew down the mountainside. The sun shone down on St. Pierre, revealing a roadstead full of anchored ships and, high on Pelée’s side, a great glowing patch. They hurried on, and only Medlin looked back again. Each time, the town seemed to have sunk a little farther into the earth until at last it vanished altogether. Little Paris, Little Sodom, goodbye, he thought.

  As the soldier had told Governor Mouttet, there were no guards to turn back refugees now. But there were not many refugees. A few riders and carriages passed the four, hurrying along the road without acknowledging their presence.

  A little more than an hour later, tired, footsore, and thirsty, they arrived at a small fishing village that lay half under the jungle and half on the upper reaches of a glistening black beach. The beach itself lay between two steep-sided promontories.

  Medlin asked, in English, “How long till the volcano blows?”

  “Not long,” said Garrick.

  “Are we far enough away?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure, Med.”

  On the beach, villagers—women, children, and old men—were pulling in a long net. Offshore, younger men in small boats slapped their oars against the water.

  “That is to frighten the fish,” Madame said, “and keep them from escaping the net.”

  The girl Elizabeth voiced a complaint. It was the first sound Medlin could remember hearing her make. It was like the squeak of a young cat.

  Madame stroked her hair and murmured to her in creole, then turned to them.

  “We can rest here,” she said, “and probably get something to eat and drink.”

  “Good,” said Garrick. “My mouth feels like a lava bed.”

  They walked down into the village. An ancient woman told them that soon there would be fresh fish to eat, for the catch was much better this morning than it had been for the past several days. She explained that there was no good water for coffee and no rum, only some sugar-cane juice. She poured the juice into wooden cups for them. It tasted grassy. The four refugees sipped and watched from a discreet distance as the villagers hauled in their net.

  “They’ll send someone else,” Medlin said after a while.

  Garrick shook her head. “They don’t have anyone else. No one like us. No one.”

  “They could get lucky and find another real traveler.”

  “Maybe not. Listen, Beers and his group have got to be from our future. I saw ’em using equipment no volcanologist ever saw in our time, let alone in nineteen oh two. Believe me, I’ve learned a lot about volcanology lately. Now, I imagine there’s about as much wrong with the world in Beers’ time as there is in the Awful Oughts, but seeing these scientists and historians going about their work here—unchaperoned, unfettered, undisturbed by anyone except us—sure suggests to me that temporal engineering didn’t even get out of the starting gate. Why? Because it requires a traveler to carry meddling passengers. Why wasn’t there a traveler? Because we two travelers went AWOL, and no one else qualified for the j—”

  There was a sudden sound like a cannonade, and the feeble sun disappeared completely. The sound did not fade but grew louder by the moment. It came to the village like a rolling barrage of artillery fire. The villagers screamed inaudibly and scattered across the beach. To the north, the glowing cloud climbed into the sky, filled it, displaced it. The cloud was red and edged with black, then black suffused with red, and as it expanded it resembled God’s or the Devil’s great opening hand. Fire and lightning flashed through it. One sickly purple flash showed Medlin stranded fish thrashing on the sand near his feet. The next showed him Madame Boislaville, in tears, plainly terrified, with Elizabeth at her side, clutching her waist, looking at the cloud with wide cat eyes and open mouth. He reached out and took Madame’s hand and felt her strong dark fingers grasp his needfully. Holding hands was no guarantee of anything, but sometimes it was good for a little reassurance.

  GRAVITY’S ANGEL

  Tom Maddox

  Here’s an informed and thoughtful look at the megabuck world of Big Science—and a reminder that even with the very biggest of projects, you can’t afford to overlook even the smallest of possibilities …

  Born in Beckley, West Virginia, Tom Maddox is currently on sabbatical from his position at Evergreen State University in Washington. Although he has sold only a handful of stories to date, primarily to Omni and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, he scored a major success last year with the publication of his well-received first novel, Halo—and I suspect we’ll be seeing
a lot more from him as the decade progresses. Maddox currently lives in Oakland, California, and contributes a monthly column of “Reports from the Electronic Frontier” to Locus.

  The Invisible Bicycle burned beneath me in the moonlight, its transparent wheels refracting the hard white light into rainbow colors that played across the blacktop. Beneath the road’s surface the accelerator tunnel ran, where the SSC—the Superconducting Synchroton Collider—traced a circle 160 kilometers in circumference underneath the Texas plains.

  Depending on how you feel about big science and the Texas economy, the SSC was either a superb new tool for researching the subatomic world, or high-energy physics’ most outrageous boondoggle. Either way, it was a mammoth raceway where subatomic particles were pushed to nearly the speed of light, then crashed together as violently as we could contrive—smash-ups whose violence was measured in trillions of electron volts.

  Those big numbers get all the press, but it’s only when particles interact that experiments bear fruit. The bunches of protons want to pass through each other like ghosts, so we—the High Beta Experiment Team, my work group—had all sorts of tricks for getting more interactions. Our first full-energy shots were coming up, and when the beams collided in Experimental Area 1, we would be rewarded for years of design and experiment.

  So I had thought. Now I rode a great circle above the SSC, haunted by questions about infinity, singularity—improbable manifestations even among the wonderland of quantum physics, where nothing was—quite—real. And more than that, I was needled and unsettled by questions about the way we—not my group but all of us, the high-energy physics community—did our business. I’d always taken for granted that we were after the truth, whatever its form, whatever our feelings about it. Now even that simple assumption had collapsed, and I was left with unresolvable doubts about it all—the nature of the real, the objectivity of physics—riddles posed by an unexpected visitor.

  Two nights earlier I had returned from a ride to find a woman standing in front of my house. “Hello,” I said, as I walked the Invisible Bicycle up the driveway toward her. “Can I help you?”