The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  We went to the terminal, and Carol ran the Monte Carlos as Dickie Boy sat almost squirming with impatience to have a look at what she was doing. When she got out of the chair, he almost leapt into it and said, “You two go somewhere else, okay? The other room’s all right; just leave me alone.”

  “I need to do some work at the office,” I told Carol. “What about you?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I should check my mail at the lab, see who’s angry that I’m gone. You got another terminal with a modem?”

  “In the bedroom,” I said. “I’ll see you two later.”

  * * *

  At HBET I found a line of people waiting for me to talk about or approve their experimental arrangements, and so I spent the afternoon there, amid the chaos of getting the SSC ready for its first full-energy runs, scheduled for just a month away.

  Carol and Dickie Boy were seated next to one another when I returned, with another variation on her Monte Carlos on the screen in front of them. “What’s up?” I said, and Dickie Boy said, “This is fantastic.” Carol was smiling.

  “Think we can take it to Thursday Group?” I asked.

  “Tough audience,” Dickie Boy said.

  “Is it the one that counts?” Carol asked.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “If we can convince them, they’ll go up against Diehl or anyone else.”

  “Let’s do it, then,” she said.

  “Can you do a presentation?” I asked. “Good talk, good pictures?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve been getting ready to do it.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll call Allenson and ask if I can take over the agenda. I don’t think anyone’s got anything hot working.”

  * * *

  Bad haircuts, cheap clothes, and an attitude—that’s the way I once heard a gathering of theoretical physicists described. They—we—consider ourselves aristocrats of the mind, working in the deepest and most challenging science there is. Getting there first with good ideas, that’s the only thing that counts—under all circumstances, that was the unspoken credo.

  The whole group showed up that night. The living room of Allenson’s house was shabby and comfortable, with couches, chairs, and large pillows enough to hold the sixteen of us: thirteen regulars and me, Carol, and Dickie Boy. Eight Caucasians and five Orientals, three Chinese and two Japanese. Most were in their late thirties, though a few were in their middle forties. No one under thirty, no one over fifty. These were the theoretical heavyweights at the lab, men in their short-lived prime as it exists in high-energy physics. A few were drinking coffee; most just sat waiting, talking.

  I gave her the simplest possible introduction. I said, “This is Carol Hendrix, who is here from Los Alamos, where she is Simulations Group Leader. She has some very interesting simulations she would like to present to us.”

  Carol Hendrix knew her audience. She had gone into sexless mode as much as possible. Her face was pale and scrubbed, no makeup, and she wore baggy tan trousers and a plaid wool shirt—in short, the closest approximation she could get to what the men in front of her were wearing. From her first words, she spoke calmly and authoritatively, for they’d listen to nothing else from her, and she allowed none of the passion I’d heard to animate her presentation.

  She gave it all to them, dealt it out on a screen in the front of the room. The slides came up showing pretty pictures from The Thing, equation sets from QUARKER, annotations in her own hand: each idea led straightforwardly to the one after, theory and practice brought together with casual elegance.

  Leaving the last slide’s “END SIMULATION” on the screen, she summarized: “We know little about the physical attributes of a singularity; in fact, its essential nature is lawless.” She stopped, smiled. “Though we would anticipate its interactions with the nonsingular world of spacetime to be governed by the usual conservation laws, this may not be the case. In short, the consequences of creating a singularity are not well understood, and I would suggest that further analysis is required before any experiments are undertaken that could bring such a peculiar region of spacetime into close proximity with instruments so delicate as those in an experimental area.” She paused and looked at all of them, said, “I will be glad to hear your questions and comments.”

  This is where it would happen, I thought. Guests to Thursday Group often got taken on the roughest intellectual ride of their lives, as this group of brilliant and aggressive men probed everything they had said for truth, originality, and relevance—or the converse. I went very tense, waiting for the onslaught to begin.

  “Dickie Boy,” Bunford said. If this group had an alpha male, Bunford was it. He was a big man—around six three and more than two hundred pounds—with a strong jaw, a lined face, and sunburned skin. He had elaborated the so-called “Standard Model” in new and interesting ways. The “semi-unbound quark state” was his particular interest—and the smart money had it that he and his group could pick up a Nobel if the SSC found the interactions he was predicting. “Did you validate her simulations?” Bunford asked. Rather an oblique approach, I thought, probably in preparation for going for the throat, theoretically speaking. Carol Hendrix turned to see how Dickie Boy would answer.

  “Sure,” Dickie Boy said. “Very sweet, very convincing. Take for instance the series of transforms…”

  “Fine,” Bunford said. And to Carol Hendrix: “Thank you. If Dickie Boy validates your Monte Carlos, I’m sure they’re well done.” He paused. “The physics is interesting, too … though quite speculative, of course.”

  And he stopped there, apparently having finished.

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t—he was whispering quietly to Hong, one of his group members. And no one else was saying a word. Finally, Allenson stood from the pillow where he’d been sitting cross-legged and said, “Shall we make it an early evening tonight? I don’t know about you guys, but I could use some sleep.” He turned to Carol Hendrix and said, “I’d like to thank our guest for speaking to us this evening.” Murmured voices said much the same thing. “At a later time, perhaps we can discuss the implications of this work, but this week we are all very busy getting the SSC up to spec.”

  Carol Hendrix stood white-faced and silent as all the men got up, nodded goodbye to her, and left, some alone, others in small groups of their colleagues.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. We were walking along one of the suburb-like loops that led from Allenson’s house to mine. For the present, many of us lived in Texlab-owned housing as a matter of convenience. “They didn’t even want to argue with you.”

  “I’m an idiot,” she said. “I forgot some of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned. In particular, I forgot that I’m a woman, and anything I say gets filtered through that.”

  “Do you really think that?”

  “Sax, don’t be so fucking naive. Why do you think they were polite? Because I was a visitor?” Her voice was filled with scorn; she knew as well as I did what treatment visitors got.

  “Your conclusions are radical. You can’t expect them to assent right off.”

  “I’ll grant you that, and it would have been hard to convince them of anything substantive, but I could have begun tonight. They dismissed me, they dismissed what I was saying. Bastards. Smug male bastards—it’s no wonder they can’t hear anything; they’re so filled with their own importance.”

  We stood in front of my house. She said, “I think I’ll walk around for a while, if that’s all right. I don’t want to talk right now.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Go anywhere you want. In fact, I think I’ll go for a bicycle ride. I’ll see you later.”

  So moonlight flashed through the bicycle frame as I rode the berm road above the SSC, and finally I realized I had no answers to what perplexed me, and I turned around and headed back toward home.

  I rode through streets of darkened homes and came to my driveway, where a light burned on a pole, walked the Invisible Bicycle up to the door, and went in to absolute
silence. On a low table in the living room, I found a note:

  Dear Sax,

  I have gone back to Los Alamos.

  Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. I just need to think about what happened here.

  Thank you for all you’ve done.

  Carol

  Over the next weeks, as the full-energy trials came closer, I thought often about Carol Hendrix, her singularity, and the treatment she’d gotten.

  I went back to Thursday Group the next week but found I had little to say to any of them—the whole bunch seemed to be strutting apes, obsessed with their own importance and show. If they were interested in the truth, and particularly in new, interesting truths, then why hadn’t they treated Carol Hendrix with the seriousness her ideas deserved? Her ideas were strange, but important ideas always were. She was a woman, but so what? How could that matter?

  All of a sudden, I felt a fool. Their conversation excluded everyone who was not a member of the group, and their masculinity, while entirely free of conscious malice, effectively recognized only its own kind. A young, small woman simply did not exist for them as a physicist to be taken seriously.

  I left early that evening and decided I would not go back.

  But what I had seen at Thursday Group was everywhere at the lab. Secretaries were women, scientists and administrators were men—white men by and large, with a sprinkling of Orientals. Carol Hendrix was right: I was incredibly naive. But I understood why. As a high-energy physicist, I had been devoted to what I thought of as an unbiased search for the truth, a search that creates intense tunnel vision, because of how difficult it is, it demands absolutely everything you can bring to it, and often that isn’t quite enough. Now I had awakened, and what I saw appalled and confused me.

  I got one note from Carol Hendrix, apologizing for leaving so abruptly and saying that she would write again when she had gotten her thoughts straightened out. Then, five days before the first full-energy, high-beta runs, she called me at the office. “Sax,” she said. “I’d like to come watch the runs. Would you mind?”

  * * *

  Carol leaned over me, slid her body down mine, pulled the gown over her head. She was astride me, hands at her side as she moved in rhythmic arcs. “The stars,” she said. Through the window I could see points of light strobing, red-and-blue shifting through the spectrum. “Something is poking through behind them,” she said. “It wants in.” A sheet of blue light poured through the window, burned through us, X-raying flesh and bone. In it we were translucent, the intricate network of our nerves burning in silver fire. We were fusing together, so close to an orgasm that would annihilate us.

  I woke, got up, and drank some water for my burning throat, fell back on the bed. I hung suspended between waking and sleeping as a flood of images passed across my eyes. Bright, blurred shapes vanished before I could see them clearly.

  She was coming in the next day, the day before the first big runs.

  * * *

  She wore khaki shorts and a dark blue T-shirt. We were sitting in my back yard again, under a moonless sky—a thousand stars above us and meteors cutting brief, silent arcs at the horizon. She sniffed at the glass of cold Chardonnay she was holding, drank, and leaned back in the reclining chair.

  “I owe you an apology,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You did everything you could to help, and I walked out on you.”

  “You were troubled.”

  “I was, but I shouldn’t have treated you like one of them.”

  “That’s okay. Apology accepted.”

  “Tomorrow morning, what do you think will happen?”

  “Truthfully, I don’t know. If we get good beam, we’ll have the right conditions for your simulation.”

  “That’s what I thought. I’ve gone over it and over it, worked it through time and again, had a work group tear my analysis apart. It all adds up to the same thing: my simulations are realistic, plausible … and unverifiable without experimental evidence. All of that’s fine. What worries me is this: if I’m right, your people are going into what could be a dangerous situation, and no one has a clue about it; no one wants to hear about it, at least not from me.”

  “You’ve done everything you can.”

  “Maybe.”

  “No, I mean it. Listen.” And I poured it all out to her, what I’d seen in recent weeks, how incredibly closed and self-confident our world was, unbelievably blind about its own nature, which within the community was seen as inevitable. I’m not sure how long I talked or how I sounded—I just know that the frustration and anger and amazement I had lived with for the past weeks came tumbling out in one long screed.

  “Oh, Sax,” she said, finally. “You poor innocent.” And she laughed, then laughed again, harder, and carried on laughing as I sat there embarrassed. Finally she stopped and said, “Sometimes I get so wrapped up in all of this, I forget how things really are. Thanks for reminding me. To hell with them all. I’ve tried, you’ve tried. If the SSC’s turned into the world’s most expensive junk pile, it won’t be our responsibility.”

  We talked a bit more until we had finished the bottle of wine, then she said, “When do we have to be there?”

  “Seven A.M. We should leave here around six-thirty, so I guess it’s time to go to bed.”

  * * *

  She found me standing at the sliding glass door in my bedroom, looking out onto the night. I turned and saw her in the doorway, backlit by the light from the hall behind her. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” she said. She came across the room to me, stood in front of me, and put her hands on my bare shoulders. She said, “Want to make love, pen pal?”

  She leaned against me, and I could feel her body under the thin jersey. “Yes,” I said. “I do.”

  Through the night we moved to the rhythms of arousal and fulfillment: making love, lying together in silence, sleeping, waking again. All the frustration, anger, anxiety, excitement we had both felt the past weeks funneled into those moments, sublimed into active, driven lust.

  Shortly after five I was awakened by a sweep of amber light through the window and the sound of wind. I found the groundskeeper robot outside. It had settled onto one patch of ground; its aerating spikes flashed out of the bottom of the machine, their blind repetition chewing turf into fine much.

  I said, “You ought to go back to the barn or wherever they keep you and just kind of relax. Keep this shit up and they’ll scrap you.” It stopped and sat there emitting a low-pitched hum punctuated with occasional high harmonic bursts. “That’s sensible,” I said. “Think it over.” It decided: it crawled over to a row of stunted ornamental shrubs and began to slice them into very small pieces.

  I went back inside, called the thing’s keepers, and tried to go back to sleep. Instead I lay awake, thinking of what might happen that morning, until Carol turned over to me and whispered, “One more time?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “One more time.”

  * * *

  Around six-thirty we walked out of the house and ten minutes later were at Maingate shuttle station, where we went down into the tunnel with five members of a tech team. They wore orange overalls and helmets and had respirators dangling over their shoulders, protection against any accident where helium would boil from the superconducting magnets and drive the air out of the tunnel.

  Harry Ling, the BC 4 supervisor, was directing people at the shuttle stop. “How’s it going, Harry?” I said.

  “Ask me later,” he said.

  At Experimental Area 1, teams were making final adjustments to their instruments and hoping no last-minute gremlins had crept in. The room was fifty meters square, dominated by the boxcar-sized composite detector. Inside it, the storage rings came together; at their intersection the protons and antiprotons would meet and transform. Two men were levering a bulky, oblong camera—SONY in red letters on its side—into position at an external port. People picked their way through snarls of cable.
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br />   Fifty meters up the tunnel was the control room. It was on two levels: ground floor, where technicians sat in rows at their consoles, and the experiments command above, where the Responsible Person sat with his assistants and controlled the experiments.

  I introduced Carol Hendrix to Paulsen, my assistant, who was crouched over his screen like a big blonde bear over a honeycomb. “Hello,” he said, then went on muttering into his headset—I often wondered how anyone understood him.

  I said to her, “Let’s find you a headset, and you can plug in to my console and watch what develops.”

  The next hour was taken up with the usual preparations for a run: collecting protons and antiprotons in their injector synchrotons, tuning the beams. The “experiments underway” clock had started when the first particles were fed out of the injector synchrotron and into the main rings. Now the particles would be circling in the rings at a velocity near the speed of light, their numbers building until there were enough for a sufficiently violent collision.

  “I have initiated the command sequence,” Diehl said on the headphones.

  About a minute later a voice said, “We’re getting pictures,” and there was a round of sporadic clapping from the people on the ground floor. On one of the screens in front of us, QUARKER was providing near real-time views of the collisions, which appeared as elaborate snarls of red and green, the tracks color-coded to distinguish incoming from outgoing particles. “Beautiful,” the man in front of us said.

  On the screen next to this one, data flickered in green type. I saw that everything was, as they say, “nominal.” Then all lights in the control room went out, every screen blank, every com line and computer dead. Under amber emergency lights, everyone sat stunned.

  And the world flexed, the wave from the singularity passing, shape of spacetime changing. Puffs of gray dust jumped off the walls, and there were the sounds of distant explosions.