The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Mr. Hargrove didn’t care for her friends?”

  “Something like that,” said Theodore Bonwait. “Well, there were more demands on her time, too. It was a rather strong attachment at first. We saw them occasionally, at parties and openings, that sort of thing.”

  “What was she like then, can you tell me? What was your impression?”

  They thought about it. Talented, they agreed, a little vague about practical matters (“which was why it seemed so lucky for her to marry Potter,” said Alice Orr, “but it didn’t work out”), very charming sometimes, but a sharp-tongued critic. Selby took notes. He got them to tell him where they had all lived, where they had met, in what years. Three of them admitted that they had some of Petryk’s letters, and promised to send him copies.

  * * *

  After another day or so, Truro called him and asked him to come to the office. Selby felt that something was in the wind.

  “Mr. Selby,” Truro said, “you know visitors like yourself are so rare that we feel we have to take as much advantage of them as we can. This is a young world, we haven’t paid as much attention as we might to literary and artistic matters. I wonder if you have ever thought of staying with us?”

  Selby’s heart gave a jolt. “Do you mean permanently?” he said. “I didn’t think there was any chance—”

  “Well, I’ve been talking to Potter Hargrove, and he thinks something might be arranged. This is all in confidence, of course, and I don’t want you to make up your mind hurriedly. Think it over.”

  “I really don’t know what to say. I’m surprised—I mean, I was sure I had offended Mr. Hargrove.”

  “Oh, no, he was favorably impressed. He likes your spice.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Don’t you have that expression? Your, how shall I say it, ability to stand up for yourself. He’s the older generation, you know—son of a pioneer. They respect someone who speaks his mind.”

  Selby, out on the street, felt an incredulous joy. Of all the billions on Earth, how many would ever be offered such a prize?

  Later, with Helga Sonnstein, he visited an elementary school. “Did you ever have a cold?” a serious eight-year-old girl asked him.

  “Yes, many times.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Well, your nose runs, you cough and sneeze a lot, and your head feels stuffy. Sometimes you have a little fever, and your bones ache.”

  “That’s awful,” she said, and her small face expressed something between commiseration and disbelief.

  Well, it was awful, and a cold was the least of it—“no worse than a bad cold,” people used to say about syphilis. Thank God she had not asked about that.

  He felt healthy himself, and in fact he was healthy—even before the Paradisan treatments, he had always considered himself healthy. But his medical history, he knew, would have looked like a catalog of horrors to these people—influenza, mumps, cerebrospinal meningitis once, various rashes, dysentery several times (something you had to expect if you traveled). You took it for granted—all those swellings and oozings—it was part of the game. What would it be like to go back to that now?

  * * *

  Miss Sonnstein took him to the university, introduced him to several people, and left him there for the afternoon. Selby talked to the head of the English department, a vaguely hearty man named Quincy; nothing was said to suggest that he might be offered a job if he decided to remain, but Selby’s instinct told him that he was being inspected with that end in view.

  Afterward he visited the natural history museum and talked to a professor named Morrison who was a specialist in native life-forms.

  The plants and animals of Paradise were unlike anything on Earth. The “trees” were scaly, bulbous-bottomed things, some with lacy fronds waving sixty feet overhead, others with cup-shaped leaves that tilted individually to follow the sun. There were no large predators, Morrison assured him; it would be perfectly safe to go into the boonies, providing he did not run out of food. There were slender, active animals with bucket-shaped noses climbing in the forests or burrowing in the ground, and there were things that were not exactly insects; one species had a fixed wing like a maple seedpod—it spiraled down from the treetops, eating other airborne creatures on the way, and then climbed up again.

  Of the dominant species, the aborigines, Morrison’s department had only bones, not even reconstructions. They had been upright, about five feet tall, large-skulled, possibly mammalian. The eyeholes of their skulls were canted. The bones of their feet were peculiar, bent like the footbones of horses or cattle. “I wonder what they looked like,” Selby said.

  Morrison smiled. He was a little man with a brushy black mustache. “Not very attractive, I’m afraid. We do have their stone carvings, and some wall pictures and inscriptions.” He showed Selby an album of photographs. The carvings, of what looked like weathered granite, showed angular creatures with blunt muzzles. The paintings were the same, but the expression of the eyes was startlingly human. Around some of the paintings were columns of written characters that looked like clusters of tiny hoofprints.

  “You can’t translate these?”

  “Not without a Rosetta stone. That’s the pity of it—if only we’d got here just a little earlier.”

  “How long ago did they die off?”

  “Probably not more than a few centuries. We find their skeletons buried in the trunks of trees. Very well preserved. About what happened there are various theories. The likeliest thing is plague, but some people think there was a climatic change.”

  Then Selby saw the genetics laboratory. They were working on some alterations in the immune system, they said, which they hoped in thirty years would make it possible to abandon the allergy treatments that all children now got from the cradle up. “Here’s something else that’s quite interesting,” said the head of the department, a blonde woman named Reynolds. She showed him white rabbits in a row of cages. Sunlight came through the open door; beyond was a loading dock, where a man with a Y-lift was hoisting up a bale of feed.

  “These are Lyman Whites, a standard strain,” said Miss Reynolds. “Do you notice anything unusual about them?”

  “They look very healthy,” said Selby.

  “Nothing else?”

  “No.”

  She smiled. “These rabbits were bred from genetic material spliced with bits of DNA from native organisms. The object was to see if we could enable them to digest native proteins. That has been only partly successful, but something completely unexpected happened. We seem to have interrupted a series of cues that turns on the aging process. The rabbits do not age past maturity. This pair, and those in the next cage, are twenty-one years old.”

  “Immortal rabbits?”

  “No, we can’t say that. All we can say is that they have lived twenty-one years. That is three times their normal span. Let’s see what happens in another fifty or a hundred years.”

  As they left the room, Selby asked, “Are you thinking of applying this discovery to human beings?”

  “It has been discussed. We don’t know enough yet. We have tried to replicate the effect in rhesus monkeys, but so far without success.”

  “If you should find that this procedure is possible in human beings, do you think it would be wise?”

  She stopped and faced him. “Yes, why not? If you are miserable and ill, I can understand why you would not want to live a long time. But if you are happy and productive, why not? Why should people have to grow old and die?”

  She seemed to want his approval. Selby said, “But, if nobody ever died, you’d have to stop having children. The world wouldn’t be big enough.”

  She smiled again. “This is a very big world, Mr. Selby.”

  Selby had seen in Claire Reynolds’s eyes a certain guarded interest; he had seen it before in Paradisan women, including Helga Sonnstein. He did not know how to account for it. He was shorter than the average Paradisan male, not as robust; he had had to be purged of a
dozen or two loathsome diseases before he could set foot on Paradise. Perhaps that was it: perhaps he was interesting to women because he was unlike all the other men they knew.

  He called the next day and asked Miss Reynolds to dinner. Her face in the tube looked surprised, then pleased. “Yes, that would be very nice,” she said.

  An hour later he had a call from Karen McMorrow; she was free now to welcome him to the Cottage, and would be glad to see him that afternoon. Selby recognized the workings of that law of the universe that tends to bring about a desired result at the least convenient time; he called the laboratory, left a message of regret, and boarded the intercity tube for the town where Eleanor Petryk had lived and died.

  The tube, a transparent cylinder suspended from pylons, ran up and over the rolling hills. The crystal windows were open; sweet flower scents drifted in, and behind them darker smells, unfamiliar and disturbing. Selby felt a thrill of excitement when he realized that he was looking at the countryside with new eyes, not as a tourist but as someone who might make this strange land his home.

  They passed mile after mile of growing crops—corn, soybeans, then acres of beans, squash, peas; then fallow fields and grazing land in which the traceries of buried ruins could be seen.

  After a while the cultivated fields began to thin out, and Selby saw the boonies for the first time. The tall fronded plants looked like anachronisms from the Carboniferous. The forests stopped at the borders of the fields as if they had been cut with a knife.

  Provo was now a town of about a hundred thousand; when Eleanor Petryk had first lived there, it had been only a crossroads at the edge of the boonies. Selby got off the tube in late afternoon. A woman in blue stepped forward. “Mr. Selby.”

  “Yes,”

  “I’m Karen McMorrow. Was your trip pleasant?”

  “Very pleasant.”

  She was a little older than she had looked on the holotube, in her late fifties, perhaps. “Come with me, please.” No monorails here; she had a little impulse-powered runabout. They swung off the main street onto a blacktop road that ran between rows of tall maples.

  “You were Miss Petryk’s companion during her later years?”

  “Secretary. Amanuensis.” She smiled briefly.

  “Did she have many friends in Provo?”

  “No. None. She was a very private person. Here we are.” She stopped the runabout; they were in a narrow lane with hollyhocks on either side.

  The house was a low white-painted wooden building half-hidden by evergreens. Miss McMorrow opened the door and ushered him in. There was a cool, stale odor, the smell of a house unlived in.

  The sitting room was dominated by a massive coffee table apparently carved from the cross section of a tree. In the middle of it, in a hollow space, was a stone bowl, and in the bowl, three carved bones.

  “Is this native wood?” Selby asked, stooping to run his hand over the polished grain.

  “Yes. Redwood, we call it, but it is nothing like the Earth tree. It is not really a tree at all. This was the first piece she carved; there are others in the workroom, through there.”

  The workroom, a shed attached to the house, was cluttered with wood carvings, some taller than Selby, others small enough to be held in the palm of the hand. The larger ones were curiously tormented shapes, half human and half tree. The smaller ones were animals and children.

  “We knew nothing about this,” Selby said. “Only that she had gone silent. She never explained?”

  “It was her choice.”

  They went into Petryk’s study. Books were in glass-fronted cases, and there were shelves of books and record cubes. A vase with sprays of cherry blossoms was on a windowsill.

  “This is where she wrote?”

  “Yes. Always in longhand, here, at the table. She wrote in pencil, on yellow paper. She said poems could not be made on machines.”

  “And all her papers are here?”

  “Yes, in these cabinets. Thirty years of work. You will want to look through them?”

  “Yes. I’m very grateful.”

  “Let me show you first where you will eat and sleep, then you can begin. I will come out once a day to see how you are getting on.”

  * * *

  In the cabinets were thousands of pages of manuscript—treasures, including ten drafts of the famous poem Walking the River. Selby went through them methodically one by one, making copious notes. He worked until he could not see the pages, and fell into bed exhausted every night.

  On the third day, Miss McMorrow took him on a trip into the boonies. Dark scents were all around them. The dirt road, such as it was, ended after half a mile; then they walked. “Eleanor often came out here, camping,” she said. “Sometimes for a week or more. She liked the solitude.” In the gloom of the tall shapes that were not trees, the ground was covered with not-grass and not-ferns. The silence was deep. Faint trails ran off in both directions. “Are these animal runs?” Selby asked.

  “No. She made them. They are growing back now. There are no large animals on Paradise.”

  “I haven’t even seen any small ones.”

  Through the undergrowth he glimpsed a mound of stone on a hill. “What is that?”

  “Aborigine ruins. They are all through the boonies.”

  She followed him as he climbed up to it. The cut stones formed a complex hundreds of yards across. Selby stooped to peer through a doorway. The aborigines had been a small people.

  At one corner of the ruins was a toppled stone figure, thirty feet long. The weeds had grown over it, but he could see that the face had been broken away, as if by blows of a hammer.

  “What they could have taught us,” Selby said.

  “What could they have taught us?”

  “What it is to be human, perhaps.”

  “I think we have to decide that for ourselves.”

  Six weeks went by. Selby was conscious that he now knew more about Eleanor Petryk than anyone on Earth, and also that he did not understand her at all. In the evenings he sometimes went into the workroom and looked at the tormented carved figures. Obviously she had turned to them because she had to do something, and because she could no longer write. But why the silence?

  Toward the end, at the back of the last cabinet, Selby found a curious poem.

  XC

  Tremble at the coming of the light.

  Hear the rings rustle on the trees.

  Every creature runs away in fright;

  Years will pass before the end of night;

  Woe to them who drift upon the seas.

  Erebus above hears not their pleas;

  Repentance he has none upon his height—

  Earth will always take what she can seize.

  Knights of the sky, throw down your shining spears.

  In luxury enjoy your stolen prize.

  Let those who will respond to what I write,

  Lest all of us forget to count the years.

  Empty are the voices, and the eyes

  Dead in the coming of that night.

  Selby looked at it in puzzlement. It was a sonnet, of sorts, a form that had lapsed into obscurity centuries ago, and one that, to his knowledge, Petryk had never used before in her life. What was more curious was that it was an awkward poem, almost a jingle. Petryk could not possibly have been guilty of it, and yet here it was in her handwriting.

  With a sudden thrill of understanding, he looked at the initial letters of the lines. The poem was an acrostic, another forgotten form. It concealed a message, and that was why the poem was awkward—deliberately so, perhaps.

  He read the poem again. Its meaning was incredible but clear. They had bombed the planet—probably the other continent, the one that was said to be covered with desert. No doubt it was, now. Blast and radiation would have done for any aborigines there, and a brief nuclear winter would have taken care of the rest. And the title, “XC”—Roman numerals, another forgotten art. Ninety years.

  In his anguish, there was one curious phr
ase that he still did not understand—“Hear the rings rustle,” where the expected word was “leaves.” Why rings?

  Suddenly he thought he knew. He went into the other room and looked at the coffee table. In the hollow, the stone bowl with its carved bones. Around it, the rings. There was a scar where the tree had been cut into, hollowed out; but it had been a big tree even then. He counted the rings outside the scar: the first one was narrow, almost invisible, but it was there. Altogether there were ninety.

  The natives had buried their dead in chambers cut from the wood of living trees. Petryk must have found this one on one of her expeditions. And she had left the evidence here, where anyone could see it.

  That night Selby thought of Eleanor Petryk, lying sleepless in this house. What could one do with such knowledge? Her answer had been silence, ten years of silence, until she died. But she had left the message behind her, because she could not bear the silence. He cursed her for her frailty; had she never guessed what a burden she had laid on the man who was to read her message, the man who by sheer perverse bad fortune was himself?

  In the morning he called Miss McMorrow and told her he was ready to leave. She said good-bye to him at the tube, and he rode back to the city, looking out with bitter hatred at the scars the aborigines had left in the valleys.

  He made the rounds to say good-bye to the people he had met. At the genetics laboratory, a pleasant young man told him that Miss Reynolds was not in. “She may have left for the weekend, but I’m not sure. If you’ll wait here a few minutes, I’ll see if I can find out.”

  It was a fine day, and the back door was open. Outside stood an impulse-powered pickup, empty.

  Selby looked at the rabbits in their cages. He was thinking of something he had run across in one of Eleanor Petryk’s old books, a work on mathematics. “Fibonacci numbers were invented by the thirteenth-century Italian mathematician to furnish a model of population growth in rabbits. His assumptions were: 1) it takes rabbits one month from birth to reach maturity; 2) one month after reaching maturity, and every month thereafter, each pair of rabbits will produce another pair of rabbits; and 3) rabbits never die.”