The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Tenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  And the blighted, poisoned mud that has been piling up night upon night, year upon year behind James Joyce’s eyes pours out of his skull in a drown-wave that will entomb the whole world. Militaries, Director Ames, fellow Academicians, his own son, stand immobilized and mired in mud as, with a speed no one would think credible in a man of 72 years, he darts past the gun in his son’s hand to squeeze through the airlock door and slam it behind him. Wheels spin, dogs engage.

  Bullets carome outside but James Joyce knows to within a fraction of an inch the tolerances to which this door was manufactured. Of the tolerances of his own body, how long it can survive unprotected in vacuum, what level of radiation it can withstand, he is less certain. He rests the heel of his left hand on the “Airlock Cycle” button. The steel chamber shudders to the power of the bevatron smashing fundamental particles into the wave of tachyons that will sweep him into the past. Visions swim, before his eyes: tachyon ghosts of other times, other possibilities. The gulf of the years yawns before him and he sees that it is deeper than any of his colleagues had ever guessed, not one hundred and one years deep, but deep as all time. At the bottom of the chasm is the earth, still unformed, fresh and molten from the forge, shifting, restless, waiting the hammerblow that will give it solidity and definition. That event, he understands, may be as small as the touch of a single footprint upon it. All time, and all space, are his to mould. The world can be any shape he wishes it to be. Infinite alternative geographies.

  “So be it,” he says. He fills his lungs, clamps lips shut, pinches his nose with his fingers. He closes his eyes. His left hand slams the button and in a blast of decompression James Joyce is hurled into the tachyon flux. And swept away.

  * * *

  It seems clear to me that Herr J.’s dreams are not the projections of seductive alien intelligences, but rather products of the angst of losing Nora B. to younger, fitter, sexually attractive rivals. His doubts over his own fidelity after the affair with Martha Fleischmann, coupled with his peculiarly Irish sense of religious guilt, are transferred onto Nora B.; that recurring dream of his, so ripe with phallic, vaginal and mammary symbolism, is so clearly a sublimation of his fears of failing sexual potency.

  Treatment in such cases of low self-esteem I have found to be straightforward and successful. I was eager for Herr J. to begin therapy immediately but my telephone calls to his apartment went unanswered, my telegrams unacknowledged and when finally I called in person at his apartment on Strehlgasse I was informed by the concièrge that Herr J. had not been home for the past three days.

  Thank God for whatever whim it was, conscious or otherwise, that moved me to return to my office via the lakefront. The crowd, always in evidence, was extraordinarily dense this day. The trams could hardly pass for the press of people; they were packed onto the none-too-safe balconies of the lakefront buildings; the most foolhardy elements had climbed lamp-posts and tramhalts. Around the pleasure-boat jetties, where the crowd was thickest, the general hubbub rose to a clamour. Patrons of the Burkliplatz Café were standing on the table-tops, craning to see. I asked a waiter the cause of the frenzy.

  “Have you not heard, sir? They are leaving us.”

  In that same moment I saw, in a moment of preternatural revelation, the face of Herr J. close by in the crowd at the jetties; his thick, wire-framed spectacles dazzling in the sun. I went to him. Together, we were swept onto a steam side-wheeler already packed to the plimsoll line with babbling passengers.

  “Herr J.!” I cried over the din of excited passengers. “What are you doing here?”

  He did not seem the least surprised to find me at his side. “The Rapture, Doctor. Is come,” he said, strangely distracted. “And the dream. The testing thereof.”

  He passed me a pair of field-glasses. As I focused them upon the shivering curtain of the Enclave, he continued: “See, Doctor? The Companion Bodies, that we liken to airborne trees, or deep-sea medusae; they are absent. Disappeared. Gone ahead to who knows what unimaginable other Zurich to prepare the way.” I did notice that the Travellers seemed to have assumed a definite arrow-head shape, striped and mottled with many colours.

  The pleasure boat had joined the great fleet of craft major and minor that had assembled to witness the Rapture. Virtually anything that would float had been pressed into service: punts, motor launches, horribly overloaded sailing dinghies, clusters of pedalloes roped together, sections of pontoon. The paddle steamer’s steam horns warned the lumbering, over-burdened small craft away from our bows. The density of the lake traffic grew as we approached the lowest point of the globular Enclave. Herr J. was almost beside himself, leaning perilously over the rails. Every eye, every lens, was directed on the sky. There at the centre was a curious, almost reverent hush.

  “Now we shall see, Herr Doctor,” he whispered. While every eye was fixed on the sky, in a trice he had stripped himself of his outer garments and climbed onto the rail as if to dive into the water.

  “No, no, don’t you understand, man?” I implored. “It is impossible, quite impossible. The dream, your dream of the Glass Hotel, is not to do with the Travellers but of your own fear of losing Nora to the attractions of a younger, more virile man. It is the dream of the fear of your own inadequacy, Herr J.”

  “Such convenient answers, Dr Jung,” Herr J. said. “But perhaps in this dream the hidden meaning is that there is no hidden meaning. This time everything is exactly what it seems to be.”

  With those words he dived into the cold waters of Lake Zurich. Murmurs of surprise came from the spectators around me, in an instant changed into a sigh of amazement. I looked back to the sky, and saw the ending. The interior of the bubble of gravitylessness ran with rainbow-coloured light, like the sheen of oil on water. Strong beyond his years, Herr J. cut on through the waters. Some others, seeing and comprehending, tried to follow him, threw themselves from the upper decks. The Enclave began to spin. Like clay on a potter’s wheel it elongated into a funnel of light within which the Travellers moved, its lower end reaching closer, closer to the surface of the lake, whipping up the water to spray and foam. I shouted a warning to Herr J. but I was one voice among a multitude. The waves and spume broke over him, the whirling wall of light engulfed him. A dark tear appeared in the radiance, a rent of infinite darkness. Through the rent I glimpsed the Travellers’ destination. As if looking down from a great height, the outline of the Black Sea and the suspended pendulum of the Crimean peninsula. The Travellers launched themselves into the tear and were consumed. In the same instant the Enclave burst with a tremendous thunderclap of air.

  Clouds sailed serene and uninterrupted over Lake Zurich.

  Of Herr J. there was no sign whatsoever. And no sign was ever found, though the Lake was several times dragged at Frau Nora B’s insistence by the city police.

  The optimist in me likes to believe that he was indeed taken when the Travellers transited between universes, dragged along in the metaphysical slipstream, that even now, as I write these casenotes, he is finding a foothold in whatever version of our world it is we glimpsed through the tear in reality. But what I cannot reconcile is why he did it. What was it that made him trust his dreams and embark on such a mad scheme? All I can offer is that I, like Herr J., am a man in his late middle years, and men of our age have always needed some notion of heaven.

  * * *

  (From an interview in WorldWeek Magazine: 26th July 1930, conducted with James Joyce at his home in the hills above Tangier by Gwynnedd Suarez.)

  We’re sitting here on a patio by the pool-side, it’s 86°, your valet has just served us mint tea, below us are the Straits of Hercules; an idyllic setting: it’s six years since your last cylinder “Finnegan’s Wake”; do you now consider yourself to be in retirement?

  I would say rather a man taking time over his life. Certainly not retired. God forfend. I may well cut more cylinders. Certainly I’ve at least three more works in varying degrees of potentiality in me. But it’s a question of timing.

 
Do you feel you want to distance yourself from the general bafflement that greeted “Finnegan’s Wake”?

  No. Not at all. I had complete faith in Finnegan’s Wake as it was released. So did the producers and the record company. I still have. They still have.

  But it was a radical departure from your previous recordings.

  Every recording I have ever made has been a conscious attempt to be a radical departure from its predecessors. To limit yourself to one mode, one style, one way of doing it so that people can say, aha, yes, this is Jimmy Joyce, this is what we like, let’s have the same again only more so; it’s death to music, and worse, death to the soul. Whoever put music in the hand of the market researchers and public relations people deserves a particular kind of personal hell. I want to push hard at the limits of what can and can’t be done within as tightly defined a genre as popular music. I want to explore the … the potential for mutability, for other ways of doing it, within the genre constraints.

  Hence the preoccupation with free will and alternate worlds on the jacket for the “Best and Rest.” I gather you weren’t happy about that cylinder’s release.

  I wasn’t. I’m still not. To a certain extent, I am not totally happy with any of my recordings because they limit the music to one thing and one thing only, and not a set of potential things at different times thematically linked together.

  Those notes were written at a time when you were becoming involved with the Al Afr sect: between the “Best and the Rest” and “Finnegan’s Wake” was a period of several years when you studied under the Sidi Hussein, and the influence of Al Afr belief was evident in that cylinder. Yet here you are in your comfortable, might I even call it luxurious?, home contemplating new recordings: are the Al Afr years a period of your life you consider conclusively behind you?

  By no means. Faith is not something you can step out of like a pair of shoes. I have no regrets about the years I spent with Sidi Hussein at the University of Fez. So, I wasn’t touring, I didn’t cut a cylinder until Wake, but I don’t consider the time was unproductive. No time spent in the company of remarkable men is ever wasted. With the Al Afr I experienced things that have reshaped my life.

  Could you expand on that?

  There is a sense in which religious experience, any transcendant experience, is essentially uncommunicable. But I’ll try. One of the tenets of Al Afr belief is that, as a consequence of his free will, God creates, has created, will create alternate worlds, alternate universes, alternate humanities parallel to yet separated from our own. In the Al Afr whirling trance, I experienced a … crossing, no, nothing so precise as that, a leakage, across the God-barrier between those other worlds. It’s hard to explain properly. There are creatures there, in between the universes. I can’t explain them, they are incomprehensible to us, yet they are as human as you or I. But they have felt the touch of our presence and responded. They are coming to us, searching across thousands upon thousands of possible universes to find us and join us. The reason I left the order was to try to explain that experience; that attempt was Finnegan’s Wake, and, to use your own quote, it was, at best, misunderstood.

  But you still sympathize with Al Afr belief?

  As I said, you don’t step out of faith. At the moment, I am trying to establish retreat and study centres in the Home Islands for, well, anyone really, who needs time and space to re-evaluate their lives and places in this world. Prepare themselves for the coming of these travellers. Because they most assuredly are on their way. These are the days of miracle and wonder, but we are human and can only bear so much miracle and wonder at once.

  And plans for the musical future?

  Well, as I intimated, I have ideas for a new collection; I’m going to take a few months off and travel through Sub-Saharan Afrika and learn the musical language of the people there. There’s a tremendous, vital, musical heritage down there almost totally unexplored which deserves world attention. After that, my plans are less formalized. Maybe go back to pure, plain sarif, just a backing group and a musik club. It has a certain righteous appeal.

  So you still stand by the motto you used on the sleeve notes for “Best and Rest”?

  Screw philosophy, let’s dance? Well, I’m 48, and that’s an entire geological age in popular music, but I think it’s a pretty good motto, yes, I do, yes.

  NAMING THE FLOWERS

  Kate Wilhelm

  Kate Wilhelm began publishing in 1956, and by now is widely regarded as one of the best of today’s writers—outside the genre as well as in it. Her work has never been limited to the strick boundaries of the field, and she has published mysteries, mainstream thrillers, and comic novels as well as science fiction. Wilhelm won a Nebula Award in 1968 for her short story “The Planners,” won a Hugo in 1976 for her well-known novel Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, added another Nebula to her collection in 1987 with a win for her story “The Girl Who Fell Into the Sky,” and won yet another Nebula the following year for her story “Forever Yours, Anna,” which was in our Fifth Annual Collection. Her story “And the Angels Sing” was in our Ninth Annual Collection. Her many books include the novels Margaret and I, Fault Lines, The Clewiston Test, Juniper Time, Welcome, Chaos, Oh, Susannah!, Huysman’s Pets, Cambio Bay, Death Qualified, and the Constance Leidl–Charlie Meiklejohn mystery novels The Hamlet Trap, Smart House, Seven Kinds of Death, Sweet, Sweet Poison, and as well as the story collections The Downstairs Room, Somerset Dreams, The Infinity Box, Listen, Listen, Children of the Wind, and And the Angels Sing. Her most recent book is a new mystery novel, Justice for Some. Wilhelm and her husband, writer Damon Knight, ran the Milford Writer’s Conference for many years, and both are still deeply involved in the operation of the Clarion workshop for new writers. She lives with her family in Eugene, Oregon, and is currently at work on The Best Defense, a sequel to Death Qualified.

  Late in September I told the crew at Phoenix Publishing Company that I had had it, I was taking off, I might never be heard from again and for them not to send the cops out looking for me. Gracie Blanchard, my secretary, laughed and said, “Oh. Win. Go on.” Then she asked how many cameras I was taking, and Phil Delacourt, the general manager, said he had been practicing my signature until he could forge it on anything that came in. But if I was heading north, he added, he could whip out a list of people I probably should see about this and that. I told him what to do with his list.

  We had finished a big catalogue job, and the Christmas catalogues were long gone; the pharmaceuticals were on schedule, even ahead of schedule, and I was tired. And bored. When I started Phoenix seven years ago, it was exciting, but over the past few years it had turned into deadlines, messed up print runs, back orders of paper that never arrived, photographs that were out of focus.… The usual fuckups, people told me, the same people who told me seven years ago that I couldn’t publish out of Atlanta; all the talent was in New York.

  I had no real plans, no itinerary; I simply knew I wanted to be in New England when the foliage was at its best. I would call in now and then, I said to Gracie; keep the fires banked. I took off in my twelve-year-old Thunderbird with a suitcase, hiking gear, half a dozen books, and four cameras. I didn’t tell Gracie about the cameras; I didn’t want to see her dimply, knowing smile. Gracie’s cute and twenty-five years old. It had alarmed me the day I realized that she seemed terribly young. I was thirty-eight.

  I drove along the blue ridges of the Appalachians, and spent a couple of days hiking, but it was too early. The trees would be better on my return trip. I cut over to the coast and paid a call on Atlantic City. I hadn’t been there for years and I didn’t want to linger this time, I was just curious about how much it had changed, but I made the mistake of arriving on Sunday and when I was ready to leave, so were a million others. I checked into a hotel instead, and then walked along the beach where it seemed that more than a million kids were playing, enjoying Indian summer. One of them, a little girl, began to walk at my side. I looked at her uneasily, and then looked around for a mot
her, father, someone.

  “Can I have an ice cream?” the child asked. We had drawn near a vendor.

  “Where’s your mommy?” I asked the kid, as I fished out a dollar. She shrugged and gestured toward the casinos. I bought her an ice cream stick, and she walked with me for a few more yards, and then smiled and darted away. I walked faster. A man just doesn’t buy ice cream for strange little girls, I was thinking, not if he wants to stay out of trouble. Then I noticed one of the bridges and thought how fine it would look in the early morning sunlight.

  The next morning I returned with my old Leica and sat on a wall waiting for the light. The same little girl appeared and held up her hands for me to hoist her up to the wall.

  “Honey,” I said, after she was settled, “didn’t your mom tell you not to talk to strangers?” She giggled. It was a cool morning, too cool for her lightweight sweater which was too big and too loose on her, and she was too big not to know better than to pick up men and be this trusting with them. I scanned the beach looking for a distraught mother, and saw only a couple of kids playing, a few people strolling, a jogger. I stood up. “I’ve got to go now,” I said. She held out her arms for me to help her down; I lifted her and set her on the sand. I should take her to the police, I was thinking, turn her in, a lost child. Then, to my relief, a group of women appeared, heading our way, and she began to run toward them. The idea of the bridge in sunlight was dead; the light had come and gone again. I left, and that afternoon I was wandering around Gettysburg.

  In the car, meandering northward, I played Bach fugues and Sibelius and did not turn on the radio; in the motels I read Fuente or García Márquez or Don DeLillo, or a biography of Mann, and did not turn on the television.

  On Wednesday night, near Middletown, New York, when I got back to the motel after dinner, a man was waiting for me, lounging against a black Ford. He straightened as I approached.