The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  As the coach passed the spot where Orion had been killed, Sam took out the whiskey that Lane had given him and began drinking. He offered some to his fellow passengers, but they each took one swallow and then refused more, saying that it was the vilest stuff they’d ever tasted. Sam agreed, but drank almost half the bottle anyway.

  At the next station stop, he climbed atop the coach with his saddlebags while the horses were being changed. When the coach started moving again, Sam drank more whiskey and stared at the fields of green and gold. Soon, his head warm with sun and alcohol, it occurred to him that the corn and grass shifting in the breeze looked like ocean swells after a storm. He was reminded of a holiday he had spent near New Orleans, looking out at the Gulf of Mexico after piloting a steamboat down the Mississippi. He wondered if he would love anything in Nevada half as much.

  The thought of Nevada reminded him of the letter that Jim Lane had written for him, so he took it out and read it:

  My dear Governor Nye:

  You will recall that your intended Secretary of two years past, Mr. Orion Clemens, was unfortunately killed before he could assume his duties. This letter will introduce his younger brother Samuel, who has provided service to his Nation and is a loyal Republican. I trust you shall do your utmost to secure for him any employment for which he might be suited.

  Yours most sincerely,

  James Lane, Senator

  The Great and Noble State of Kansas

  Sam tore up the letter and let its pieces scatter in the wind. If Nevada held “any employment for which he might be suited,” he would secure it without any assistance from a self-righteous, thieving son of a bitch like Jim Lane.

  Nor would he drink any more of Lane’s abominable whiskey. He leaned over the coach roof’s thin iron rail and emptied the bottle onto the road. Then he opened one of his saddlebags, took out his Colt, and stood. He held the whiskey bottle in his left hand and the pistol in his right.

  The coach conductor glanced back at him. “What are you doing, sir?” he asked.

  Sam spread his arms. “I am saying fare-thee-well to the bloody state of Kansas,” he cried, “and lighting out for the Territory!”

  He looked out over the tall grass. It rippled in waves.

  He missed the river.

  He missed his brothers.

  But killing men for the sake of a world that was gone wouldn’t bring it back. It was time to make a new one.

  “Half-less twain!” he cried.

  Both the conductor and driver stared back at him.

  “Quarter-less twain!” Sam shouted.

  Then he brought his left arm back and whipped it forward, throwing the bottle out over the grass. As it reached the apex of its flight, he brought up his right arm, cocked the Colt with his thumb, and squeezed the trigger.

  The bottle exploded into brilliant shards.

  The coach lurched, and Sam sat down on the roof with a thump.

  “Goddamn it!” the conductor yelled. “You spook these horses again, and I’ll throw you off!”

  Sam held the pistol by its barrel and offered it to the conductor. “Please accept this,” he said, “with my apologies.”

  The conductor took it. “I’ll give it back when you’re sober.”

  “No,” Sam said, “you won’t.”

  Then he threw back his head and roared: “MAAARRRRK TWAIIINN!”

  Two fathoms. Safe water.

  He lay down with his hat over his face and fell asleep, and no dead men came to haunt his dreams.

  For Sam Clemens, the war was over.

  THE BEST AND THE REST OF JAMES JOYCE

  Ian McDonald

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novel Out on Blue Six and a collection of his short fiction, Empire Dreams. His most recent books include a new novel, The Broken Land, and a new collection, Speaking in Tongues, as well as several graphic novels. He is at work on another new novel, tentatively entitled Necroville. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

  In the daring, playful, and lushly inventive story that follows, he gives us a look (or a succession of different looks) at a world-famous writer as you’ve never seen him before—in fact, as no one’s ever seen him before …

  Aboard His Britannic Majesty’s air-dreadnought William and Mary as it leaves the Command Holdfast buried beneath the cratered mudscape once known as London in the one-hundred-and-first year of the war are 112 ratings, 66 officers, and six highly important, highly secret passengers: Air Lord Blennerhasset, Admiralty Lord Van Loos, Marshall Valery-Petain, Director Ames, Sub-Academician Giorgio Joyce and his father, senior Academician James Joyce. Reinforced concrete bombproof doors open as William and Mary rises cautiously, every sense tuned, toward the perpetual rainclouds that discharge their poisoned drizzle over the mudfields of Staines. Despite two atomic cannon, a complement of ten turret-mounted 18-inch guns and a veritable arsenal of lighter artillery and rocket racks, the artillerymen standing by their weapons and the glider-marines ready at the launch tubes are nervous. They have heard stories of dirigibles, dreadnoughts even, surprised and destroyed attaining altitude by marauding Tsarist airships lying grounded, half buried in the mud. For the lynchpin of His Majesty’s airfleet to lift unescorted, unprotected, into potentially hostile airspace …

  They have long suspected that the High Command locked up in their War Room half a mile under Command Holdfast have gone insane: now they have proof. But His Majesty’s Air Lords need not justify to the crew of William and Mary their decision that a lone dirigible might escape the attention a dreadnought with full escort would warrant. Their destination, the very fact that they are carrying passengers, have been kept secret from them. But seeing the cindered cities of the midlands slipping away far beneath their armoured glass observation bull’s-eyes, they know that their course is northward. A combined services mission, perhaps, supporting the beleaguered 19th Army bogged down in melting permafrost north of Bergen, or a search-and-destroy mission on Tsarist submarine traffic across the Barents Sea. Maybe William and Mary has been sent to rendezvous with the remnant of the Royal Dutch Airfleet stationed at Scapa Flo Holdfast and destroy the Tsarist North Polar Fleet. In his armoured cubicle the Captain opens the envelope sealed with the wax sigil of His Majesty’s Directorate and after reading and burning the flimsy within, calls a heading, altitude and velocity down the gosport to the flightbridge that will, in 18 hours’ time, bring William and Mary and its secret passengers north to Iceland, to the Keflavik Chronokinetics Research Facility.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1933 I was asked by a doctor of my acquaintance if I might examine a patient of his, a gentleman from Ireland of late middle age who had come to him complaining of persistent and severe insomnia. My doctor friend prescribed sleeping tablets but the patient, who I shall hereafter refer to as Herr J., complained that the prescription was ineffective and that the true source of the insomnia lay in a powerful and disturbing dream that recurred nightly, whereupon my colleague referred him to my practice. I was advised that the man, a writer of international repute, would not make the most co-operative of patients.

  My first interview with the patient was at an outside table at a café on the Burkliplatz. The tetchiness against which my colleague had warned me made itself immediately evident in his response to my introduction of myself: “Ah yes, the Swiss Tweedledee, not to be confused with the Austrian Tweedledum.” It was clear to me that the caustic witticism with which he leav
ened his subsequent conversation concealed a deep-seated discontent.

  He was a tall, thin man, of protrusions and angularities. Behind the thick glasses he wore—he was a sufferer from persistent iritis—his eyes were an extraordinarily penetrating ice-blue. His hands moved constantly, making idle play with the table utensils. He was quite refreshingly frank about the details of his life, though more, I felt, from a mischievous delight in outrage: his first sexual experience had been at the age of fourteen with a prostitute on the banks of a canal. This had precipitated his lapse from the Catholic faith—an almost inevitable fall, I have heard, for the intelligentsia of his country. At the age of 22 he had left Ireland with his lover, Frau Nora B., and lived the following years as an artistic exile in Paris, Trieste and Zurich, during which time he produced his most notable work. He confessed to having been unfaithful to Nora B. only once; a short, tempestuous affair with one Martha Fleischmann of this city.

  Eighteen months ago he had embarked upon a new, major, work, to be entitled Finnegans Wake, a “stream of consciousness” exploration of a single night’s dream. After three months he had abandoned work on account of failing concentration which he blamed on insomnia caused by a recurring and vivid dream. Two months to the day after the first dream, the Travellers arrived and threw our affairs into disarray. He found himself no longer capable of working on Finnegans Wake and was convinced that the Travellers were the source of his dreams. Indeed, his attention was continually being diverted from our table across the Burkliplatz to the large number of spectators who thronged the promenade with telescopes and field glasses, and from these spectators upward, to the focus of their observation, the hazy curtain of air, half hidden by thin cloud, beyond which the incomprehensible forms of the Travellers may occasionally be glimpsed.

  “Dreams of falling, Dr Jung? Well, we all know what they mean,” he said. “Dreams of flying? Doubtless, there is some handy psychological rebus for these too.”

  “I don’t deal in psychological panaceas, Herr J.,” I said. “You tell me rather what you think these dreams signify.”

  “A belief and a fear, Herr Doctor. I believe that the Travellers will soon leave. I fear that I want more than anything to go with them.”

  * * *

  Righteous Rhythm Rocks the Musik Halls

  A traditional sound from the Eastern Emirates of the United Kingdoms is the new popular music craze of the basement clubs in the Capital. Sarif, a fusion of traditional Moorish music with Western Kingdoms electric instruments has emerged from the kasbahs of the cities of the Southern Counties to become the essential listening of the new youth underground, a new musical wave determined to sweep all before it.

  Lyle Santesteban goes every week to the musik clubs in the depressed area of Vincastra where sarif is drawing packed houses to dance all night to the rhythms of Afrika and Islam. Escapism through music, or something deeper? “Sarif speaks to us,” says Lyle Santesteban. “Sarif has something to say. That stuff on the wireless, the electric crooners, the neoballadeers, they got nothing to say; it’s all just love and romance and let’s get married tootsie-wootsie. What’s that got to do with life in the United Kingdoms, what’s that got to say about Vincastra in 1902? Sarif is music of the street. Sarif speaks with the voice of the street. Sarif has something to say about being young, about being old, about being poor, about being rich, in a job, out of a job, family problems, arranged marriages, polygamy, sex, morality, God; sarif speaks to us.”

  Sarif’s musical revolution is essentially a righteous one. The clubs and cafés that specialize in the new music serve nothing stronger than coffee. Says Haran Gomez, manager of the El Morocco Cafe: “Islam and sarif cannot be separated. And that means no alcohol, and certainly, no drugs. We catch anyone in the toilet toking a kif, he’s not just bounced, we call the cops as well. What sarif is about is having a good time, hearing great music, dancing, meeting people, without getting blind drunk, smashed out of your skull, or into a fight. But it’s not a wank. Sarif’s got steel at its core, it’s strong, like Islam. The spirit of sarif is the spirit of Islam.”

  James Joyce would agree. He is one of the most promising of sarif’s rising stars; coupling social consciousness with intense verbal imagery and ingenuity. This seminal figure is in many ways an anomaly in an anomalous genre, originating not from the Hispano-Moorish section of the population which spawned sarif as a distinct form, but from the purebreed Western Celts.

  “It’s a positive advantage,” the twenty-year-old boy from Hibernia East says. “I’m bringing together two separate strands of our culture, the Moorish and the Celtic; bringing a little North African soul and spiritual fibre into the Celtic, a little Celtic playfulness and imagination into the North African. The two cultures really have much more in common than you think, it’s exciting experimenting with new ways of fusing Celtic melodies with Islamic rhythms, breaking down the structured lyrical system of ethnic protosarif into improvisational stream-of-consciousness passages. But there’s nothing over-cerebral about it,” Joyce adds. “It’s dance music pure and simple, first and last.”

  Certainly, the Celtic-Islamic fusion makes James “Ched” (the Moroccan Arabic name for traditional folk singers) Joyce’s sets at the El Morocco where he holds down a regular Saturday night spot stand out among an already outstanding bill that includes Ched Alayah and Ched Christo Dos Santos. His inventive, improvised vocals, the purity of his singing voice and the multi-layered complexity of his backing group leave the listener both beguiled and stimulated.

  James “Ched” Joyce has recently moved from Soukh Recordings, a small independent company specializing in sarif and other ethnic musics, to Marconigram, the Kingdoms’ largest; his first album for them, Three Quarks, is due for release early next month.

  * * *

  The city’s greatest expert on the enigma of the Travellers is Dr Peter Pretorious, to whom I made recourse in the case of Herr J. for a layman’s summary of the phenomenon.

  In the absence of any sustained coherent communication between mankind and the Travellers, Dr Pretorious’s theories were highly suppositional. The general consensus seems to be that our visitors are travellers not of the distances between the stars, as had first been thought, but of the distances between universes; the infinite array of potential other earths that modern physics suggests are created by the indeterminacy of quantum theory. The hypothesis is that the Travellers originate from a parallel earth that diverged from ours at the very dawn of the solar system; one in which matter was not gathered into discrete planets, but remained in an annular nebula around the sun and of which the Travellers, and the incomprehensible companion bodies with which they share their Enclaves, are the dominant life: the humanity of this alternative earth. Their colossal size and mutable shapes are products of evolution within the gravity-free conditions of the gasring; the size of such an organism being governed ultimately by the speed of transmission along the nervous system. Hence the forty-kilometre diameter spheres of gravitylessness they have created in those places they have chosen to arrive upon our earth: Brisbane, Sao Paulo, Vancouver, Freetown in Sierra Leone, Luzon in the Philippines, and here in, or rather above, Zurich. Such enormous creatures, Dr Pretorious informed me, could not hope to survive the effects of gravity. As for a means by which they might negate gravity, or even the method by which they travel with such apparent ease between alternate worlds, both he and the scientific world at large are at a loss to supply.

  I mentioned to him Herr J.’s belief that the Travellers might soon depart. Dr Pretorious replied that recent observations through telescopes, and from aircraft flying as close as they safely dared to the immense pressure barriers that defined the Enclaves, indicated that the Travellers and their companion bodies were indeed undergoing physical changes into new forms that might signal an imminent change of activity.

  Returning to my offices from the University, I called at the residence Herr J. shared with Frau Nora B. to leave a card with the concierge and a request that he
call me at his earliest convenience to make an appointment.

  * * *

  Eoin UiNiall reviews the new James Joyce album, “Agenbites of Inwit” (New Musical Express: March 29th 1911 edition)

  Consider this man’s quandary. In the wireless-defined universe orbit ten million frequency-modulation ghosts who have come to know and possibly love Joyce through his waxings on Marconigram. Yet in the dark streets shine the souls of the luminous few who have danced to glory with him up through the sarif clubs, soul survivors of the Saturday nights (as was your gentle reviewer, in what seems like a previous incarnation) when James Joyce held down a spot at El Morocco and the Virgin’s Kitchen. Quandary quantified: these are two mutually exclusive camps. That they are not yet at war is due to the ministrations of their titular deity: Joyce himself. Though James Joyce on cylinder is a pale shade of James Joyce behind the footlights with five hundred watts of power on each shoulder—the extemporized, improvisational spirit of Joyce’s work is a bird that pines and dies when caged—still a watered-down James Joyce is better than no James Joyce at all.

  So, as an exercise in squaring circles, how does Agenbites of Inwit fare?

  Never let it be said that the man does not believe in value for money. Ten tracks are here, not one under six minutes in length. Roundabouts and swings; what you gain in danceability, you lose in singalong: there is no lyric sheet. Lyrics are superfluous; the titles (“Gas from a Burner,” “The Dead,” “Clashing Rocks”) are themes for improvisation. Join the celebration of mutability: if you feel that on another day, in another place, if the band had one more or one less to drink, this would have been an altogether other album; that is Joyce’s intention. Songs in the key of possibility: what you are listening to is just one of a spectrum of possible alternative Agenbites. If this is a deliberate strategy by Joyce to unite both the dance-floor hero and the wax junkie under the banner of boogiedom, it is successful; this will be filling the floors well into the next decade.