The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Carol jumped out of her chair and said, “Come on.” I took off my headset and followed her. We passed through the door and into the tunnel, where settling clouds of dust were refracted in yellow light. I stopped at a locker marked “Emergency” and took out two respirators—false faces in clear plastic with attached stainless steel tubes. If enough helium escaped into the tunnel, it could drive out the oxygen and suffocate anyone without breathing apparatus. “Here,” I said and gave her one.

  The door to the experiments room was askew. Behind us I heard loud voices and the sounds of feet pounding up the stairs to the surface. Turning sideways, I slipped through the door’s opening.

  Blue blue blue blue, the slightest pulse in it, then suddenly as the conjurer’s dove flying from the hat, white, swords or crystals of it jammed together, vibrating as if uncertain, then turning as suddenly to blue.

  The composite detector unit and surrounding equipment had disappeared. Carol Hendrix had become a translucent, glowing figure that left billowing trails of color as she moved. The world was a sheet of light and a chittering of inhuman voices, high-pitched and rising.

  Etched images in gold against white, flickering, the reality tape shrieking through its transports as every possible variation on this one moment unfolded, the infinitesimal multiplied by the infinite.

  Sometime later, hands pulled on me, dragging me backward across rough cement to a world that did not burn like the middle of a star. My heels drummed against the floor, my back was arched, every muscle rigid.

  * * *

  Riding the Invisible Bicycle past Building A, I saw two men bent over the partially disassembled carcass of a groundskeeper robot. Sprays of optic fiber, red lengths of plastic tubing, and bright clusters of aluminum spikes lay in the grass beside it. One man was holding a dull gray, half-meter cube—the container for the expert system that guided the robot and was the apparent source of its problems.

  The state of things at Texlab: big science—grandiose and masculine and self-satisfied—lay in ruins all around, shattered by its contact with an infinitely small point, the singularity.

  On the steps of Building A, camera crews and reporters had gathered. They just milled aimlessly at this point, waiting for the Texlab spokesman—presumably Diehl—who would have to come out and recite a litany of disaster. Then would come the questions: How did this happen? What does it mean?

  As I headed out the perimeter road I was passed by lines of vehicles: vans carrying tech teams, flatbed trucks loaded with massive chunks of bent metal, cars with solemn, dark-suited bureaucrats in their back seats. No shuttle rides today—the tunnel was strictly off-limits.

  Near Station 12 an orange quadrupole assembly lay next to the hole it had made coming out of the ground. Part of its shrouding had torn away to reveal the bright stainless-steel ring that held its thousands of intertwined wires together. At other stations I passed there were stacks of lumber for shoring the tunnel, repair crews in hardhats milling near them.

  Little more than an hour after the medical team had carried me out of the tunnel, I was apparently fully recovered. The rest of my morning had been spent with me the focus of doctors, nurses, and lab techs. I had suffered an episode of grand mal, an epileptic fit, they told me—apparently a reaction to the singularity.

  Today there were fifty-six injured, one dead, two more probably to die. The collider had been destroyed: beam pipes deforming and spraying those high-energy particles all over the place—explosive quench in the lattice, it was called.

  And Carol Hendrix was one of the fifty-six injured. A chunk of concrete had fallen on her. Skull fracture, assorted lacerations … Christ. While they were testing me at the Texlab hospital, she was being flown toward Houston in a medivac helicopter brought in by the Air National Guard. She remained in a coma, but for reasons that escaped me, her doctors were hopeful, so mine had told me.

  The men she had talked to couldn’t listen, simply couldn’t. She was a woman, her approach was unusual, her conclusions weird, and despite all their protestations to the contrary, the men she had spoken to were prisoners of their contexts, their presuppositions. Their scientific objectivity didn’t exist, never had.

  I wondered if they felt as Oppenheimer and company had on the morning of the Trinity explosion: bright light and EM pulse, shock wave throwing those nearby to the ground … then they all had to confront—whatever their jubilation, awe, fear, sorrow—their part in this thing, their complicity.

  * * *

  At the above-ground entrance to BC 4, Texlab Security had placed on wooden sawhorses a yellow plastic ribbon with the words “EXTREME DANGER” repeating along its length. Several gray-uniformed men stood nearby.

  “I’ll keep your bicycle for you, Doctor Sax,” one said as I dragged it down the steps. “No,” I said, “that’s all right. I’ll take it with me.”

  Rusty iron latticework showed where chunks of the tunnel walls had fallen, brushed by an angel’s wing. In the hard yellow light, the Invisible Bicycle looked cheap, a stupid toy. Which it was: just a thing of plastic and conceit.

  I wheeled the bicycle around the plywood barrier in front of the experiments room door and stopped to watch the blue white blue, which continued to some rhythm we did not understand. Robot cameras and recording instruments sat against the near wall.

  Reduced to primitive magic, I hurled the Invisible Bicycle at the thing, a burnt offering: take this, let me have her. It slowed in midair as though moving through heavy liquid and began to deform. It seemed to turn inside out. Now the Topologically Bizarre Bicycle, no longer recognizable by shape or anything else as a human artifact, it was shot for a moment with rainbow colors, then was gone.

  Unmoved, the singularity continued its transformations. Here was the angel, inscrutable as Yahweh answering Moses out of the whirlwind, “I am that I am.” It promised infinite levels of discovery, an order not inexplicable but complex and deep as the night. And it promised that for every fragment of knowledge gained, for every level of understanding surmounted, there would be pain and sorrow. How puffed-up we become, filled with immense pride in our knowledge; and how quickly the universe reminds us of how little we know.

  In the desert it was bright and hot. One of the security guards gave me a ride back to Maingate.

  PROTECTION

  Maureen F. McHugh

  Maureen F. McHugh is another new writer who has made a powerful impression on the SF world of the early ‘90s with a relatively small body of work. Born in Ohio, McHugh spent some years living in Shijiazhuang in the People’s Republic of China, an experience that has been one of the major shaping forces on her fiction to date. Upon returning to the United States, she made her first sale in 1989, and soon became a frequent contributor to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as selling to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, and other markets. 1992 has been a good year for her. In addition to the quietly harrowing story that follows, she also published at least two other stories that might have made the cut for this anthology in another year, as well as one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which received the Tiptree Memorial Award. Coming up is a new novel, tentatively entitled Half the Day is Night. Recently married, she lives, appropriately enough, in Loveland, Ohio.

  In “Protection,” she delivers a haunting and oddly moving look at survival and love inside the concentration camps of a troubled future America …

  When the train gets to the camp I’m scared out of my mind, but I’m trying to act smooth, you know? I was supposed to go to Green River, an all women camp out in Wyoming, but there was some kind of jack-jockey mix-up and I end up going to Protection in Kansas. I’ve never heard of Protection—I’ve heard of Green River, of course. I guess in a way I’m kind of pissed, I was supposed to go to this famous, badass labor camp and instead they send me to this place nobody ever heard of. Like it’s some kind of contest, you know, and people are going to give
a damn what camp I end up in. Still thinking outside, and I’m inside. But I don’t know that yet.

  I think of myself as one ticklish bitch, let me tell you. I think I’m hard-circuited. I’m not doing anything the whole way out from Wichita to Protection except I’ve got a seat on the train by the window and I’m just sitting there. Nobody will climb on me, even though a lot of people are sitting in the aisle and stepping on each other. That’s because I managed to shove a pen down the side seam of one of the three pairs of pants I’m wearing and everybody knows if they come near me I’m like as not to shove it in them, so nobody bothers me.

  But there’s nothing to see outside the train window except all this dead, brown grass. Kansas must be a hell of a place. The train trip is about five hours, because we don’t go very fast, and the whole time there’s nothing outside but dried grass and once in awhile we go over a place that used to be a road before the Corridor dried up, back when it used to rain out west and there were farms. People keep stepping on each other because they’ve got to go to the bathroom, but I figure I can wait pretty long because I know the moment I get up someone is going to have my seat.

  We all look real wonderful. They let us keep our clothes, which kind of surprised me, I thought they’d make us wear gray coveralls or something, but all they did was shave the back of our heads and put these implants in. I don’t know what they’re for. Maybe they can always tell where we are—hell, maybe they can tell what we’re thinking. Anybody who’d had their metabolism stabilized was destabilized, too. I guess nobody worries about being overweight in a labor camp. The back of my head itches, and I’ve been wearing these clothes for two weeks. I’m wearing like three of everything, it looks really stupid and it’s hot. I worried about that, you know, you want to look smooth, but when they told us that we could only keep what we had on I thought it might take me awhile to get out. I mean, I’ll probably bust out before winter, you know? But just in case. And since I don’t know what the hell I’ll be doing when I get out, I think I better have extra clothes. It’s not like the officials don’t know I intend to be out, they probably assume everybody wants to get out, and when I do they’re not going to let me just buy an Amtrak ticket home, I could spend a lot of time getting back to Cleveland. I may have to walk part of the way, and that could take a hell of a long time, so I could be really glad I kept this stuff.

  So we get to Protection. It’s nothing, not even fence, just this concrete platform as long as the train and a dirt road and dead grass. The train stops and we sit. I figure it’s got to be Protection, what else would be out here? Where else would a convict train go?

  After we sit for awhile, maybe twenty minutes in the train with the blowers off, sweating, and far off I see this plume of brown smoke. Except it’s not smoke, it’s dust, and it’s coming off the road. Buses, bunches of them. A whole long elephant trail of dark green buses, humping up and down these kind of rolling hills. Until now I never knew what they meant by rolling hills, but they’re like ripples, all covered with dust-colored dead grass. They stop on the road, the first one is almost nose up against the platform. It’s a gas bus, with a big methane gas bag on top, half inflated, kind of sagging in a cage. I never saw one before, we don’t have them in Cleveland. Guards in army colored coveralls get off the buses, lots of heavy arsenal swinging around. Deal guns, which isn’t what I expected, I thought they’d have projectile weapons, but what do I know? Maybe disruptive guns are less messy, that’s why city cops use them. But out here in a labor camp, who cares if they bloody up the landscape?

  They fiddle around for a moment, crack the door on our car and three of them charge in screaming at us not to move and swinging those deal guns. Hey, I’m not going anywhere, not until I find out what’s going on. “You’re going to go out on the platform, in two lines! You assholes understand me?” this woman is screaming at us. “I been working out here in this goddamn place for five years, maybe if I kill enough of you they’ll think I can’t be trusted and transfer me somewhere, so I’m looking for an excuse! Now move!”

  So we start streaming off our train car, all up and down the platform the other train cars are doing the same. When I get to the door, a guard signals I should get in the left line so I do. There doesn’t seem to be any difference between the left and right line. So there we all are, all lined up, and it’s hot and I gotta go to the bathroom.

  They make us stand there in the sun while they prowl up and down the platform. Yeah, I’m getting scared. I know what’s going on, I know what I’d do in a situation like this. If I had a bunch of scum to take care of, first thing I’d do is show them what a badass I was. So we stand and I wonder what they’re going to do to us.

  Finally the woman who was head screamer stops in front of our two lines. I think of her as “Helga.” “You,” she points that deal gun at a guy in the right line. Tall, skinny-looking guy, the kind who didn’t get a seat. He doesn’t have any expression on his face at all, almost like he expected this. “GET UP HERE!” she screams. He shambles forward. He’s got his ankles shackled, they only do that for psychos and politics; they wouldn’t pull a psycho out of the line unless they were going to roast him, besides, he just doesn’t act psycho, so I figure he’s politics. They probably don’t mind roasting a politics, either.

  “TURN AROUND,” she screams. He does what he’s told so he’s standing with his back to us. “You shitheads like his haircut? Well, let me tell you, the perimeter of the camp is wired.” All up and down the platform every car is getting the same thing screamed at them. I look back at the guy, his hair is kind of long so it covers part of the shaved place. “I’m going to show you what happens if you cross the perimeter.”

  She puts her hand in his back and shoves him off the platform and he falls off, hands out, flat into the dust around the concrete. “WALK!” she screams at him. I’m leaving out a lot of what she called us, just because it was pretty much the same thing over and over. Anyway, he struggles to his feet and looks up at her.

  “Why should I walk if you’re going to kill me anyway?” he says in this normal, reasonable way. You can tell he’s scared, but his voice is just as nice and adult.

  I like people who give the world lip.

  “WALK!” she screams at him and shoves her deal gun in his face, so he kind of stumbles back, then suddenly his whole body goes stiff. Like a board. All the muscles in his neck stand out and his hands make claws and he falls over like a frigging tree, straight. Then he goes all loose.

  I look up and down the platform, except for one guy who they’re having to push, all up and down are these people lying in the brown grass. Two guards hop down and I catch my breath expecting them to keel over, too, but they just pick up the guy by his arms and legs and sling him on the bus.

  “Cross it often enough and you’ll fry your frigging brains to scrambled eggs,” the woman says with satisfaction. “That is, if any of you assholes have brains.”

  We don’t get on the bus until Helga has told us the rules, which takes forever. When we get on our bus nobody wants to sit next to Political but he’s sitting near the front so I do. Buses make me sick, the closer I am to the front the better off I am. He’s still out, head against the window, and I have to move him to sit down. He has nice clothes, real ragged but good stuff, Chinese or something. He’s wearing a sweater and pants and under the dust they’re both this kind of maroon color, with little flecks of gray in them. They’ve taken the shackles off and thrown them back on the train. He’s got real long fingers. Something about him I like, maybe it’s the way he turned around and talked to Helga. I could understand if he got mad or freaked, but he was just real reasonable.

  Everybody is looking at me because I sat down next to Political, everybody knows he’s already marked for trouble. I figure if I don’t care it marks me as a real hard-circuit and then nobody will bother me.

  Besides, something about him really attracts me, so I figure he’s mine.

  * * *

  He doesn’t rea
lly come to in the time it takes us to get to the camp, so I have to sling his arm over my shoulders and half-carry him out of the bus. I’m not that big a girl. He’s skinny, but 180, maybe 190 centimeters and weighs more than I do. He’s not completely out, and I keep talking to him. His eyes are barely open. “Come on,” I say, “steps, get your feet under you, you son of a bitch or they’ll take it out on my kidneys.” I just keep pressing on him, get him down the steps and into the barracks. The barracks are new, concrete block and the beds are just like metal bookshelves. I sling him into a bottom bunk and take a middle one. I watch everybody else mill around before settling in.

  Scared, man I’m scared. I sure as hell didn’t want a mixed camp, in a woman’s camp it’s not like I’ll be out-massed by over half the inmates. On the bus it was about two guys to every woman. Men are bigger, the only hope I have is to get a reputation as crazy, or else to come up with something everybody needs. Worrying about Politics gives me something to do other than worry about myself. The only time I leave is to go to the bucket. I never pissed in a metal bucket before, it’s an experience, not to mention that it’s loud. They turn the lights out before I get back to my bunk, which is also exciting.

  I don’t sleep that night. I want to be in a real bed. I want to brush my teeth. I know that’s a bad way to think, ‘cause when I did two years of juvenile reform, I learned, you don’t think about what you miss—and it isn’t really as good as you remember it anyway. Hell, most of the time I sleep on someone’s couch, or floor. But it’s different.

  It’s still dark when the lights come back on. Helga told us we have half an hour in the morning, then roll call, then breakfast. I don’t know what the hell the half an hour is for, most everybody spends it sleeping. I hop down out of my bunk—Goddamn Marx and Lenin, every bone in my body aches from sleeping on a metal bookshelf—and check Politics. Most of the night he was just sprawled the way he landed, one leg half off, but now he’s curled up like he’s cold. He moved, I figure that’s a good sign.