The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Roger’s mother took a hesitant step after him, but Roger took her arm. “Don’t bother, Mom—I’m pretty sure the quickest way to catch up with him is to just keep going straight ahead.”

  Debbie was patting the fabric of her sequined gown. “I hope I get to keep this,” she said.

  * * *

  The traffic lights were in perfect step now. Roger considered leading the two women around the circle and straight out Bailey, eastward, but he was fatalistically sure that Bailey Boulevard, as they proceeded along it, would within half a block or so become Main Street, and they’d be facing the circle again. Neither his mother nor Debbie objected when he turned right at Main, toward the Splendide.

  The entrance was more brightly illuminated than ever, but it was a harsh glare like that cast by arc lights, and the cars pulling up and driving away moved in sudden hops, like spiders, or like cars in a film from which a lot of the frames have been cut. The music was a weary, prolonged moaning of brass and strings. Jack Singer, once again in his suit, slouched up from the far side of the hotel and joined them on the steps.

  Roger thought of making some cutting remark—something like, “Not so easy to ditch me this time, huh, Pop?”—but both his parents looked so unhappy, and he himself was so frightened, that he didn’t have the heart for it.

  “Oh, God,” wailed his mother, “will we ever get back home?”

  Roger was facing the hotel, but he turned around when he heard splashing behind him. It was the fountain—the traffic circle was now right in front of the hotel, and the pavement below the steps wasn’t the Main Street sidewalk any longer, was now just a concrete walkway between the grass of the circle and the steps of the hotel. Dark buildings, as nondescript as painted stage props, crowded up around the other sides of the circle, and Roger could see only one traffic light. It was flashing slower, and its yellow color had a faint orange tint.

  “Do come in,” called Evelyn from the open lobby doors. “It’s just time to sit down for dinner.” Her face was paler, and she seemed to be trembling.

  Roger glanced at his mother. “Maybe,” he said. Then he turned toward the circle and concentrated; it was harder than making a snifter of scotch appear, but in a moment he had projected, blotting out the dim traffic circle, a downtown street he remembered seeing on the way to the Crystal Lake amusement park in New Jersey. It was one of the things Evelyn had never permitted him to dream about.

  He was surprised at how clearly he was able to project it—until he saw that the sky behind the shabby New Jersey office buildings was overcast and gray instead of the brilliant blue he remembered, and he realized that someone else, perhaps unintentionally, perhaps even against their will, was helping to fill out the picture, using their own recollections of it.

  Behind him Evelyn gasped—and the one visible traffic signal began to flash a little faster, and to lose some of the orange tint.

  Okay, Roger thought tensely, the cord isn’t quite cut yet. What else was there? Oh yeah …

  He made the New Jersey street disappear and instantly replaced it with a prairie, across which a horse and rider galloped. At first the rider was a cavalry soldier, as in the movie scene Roger remembered, but again someone else’s projection changed the scene—the rider was smaller now, and not dressed in blue … it was hard to see clearly, and again Roger got the impression that this altering of what he was projecting was unintentional … and when the rider fell off the horse it was hard to tell which foot had caught in the stirrup …

  The pavement below him had widened, and now he could see another traffic light. The two were still in step, but were at least flashing in their normal pace and color.

  He replaced the vision of the galloping horse and the suffering figure behind it with a rendition of the hospital room in which he’s awakened after the removal of his tonsils … and this time the picture was altered instantly and totally, though the lingering-in-the-back-of-his-throat smell of ether grew stronger. He saw a windowless room with newspapers spread neatly all over the floor, and there was a sort of table, with …

  The night shuddered, and suddenly he could see down Main Street—and, way down south, he saw one yellow light blinking out of synch. “This way out,” he said, stepping to the sidewalk and walking south. “Walk through the visions—I’m building us a bridge.”

  Again the downtown New Jersey street appeared, and without his volition a young couple—hardly more than teenagers—entered the picture. They both looked determined and scared as they walked along the sidewalk looking at the address numbers on the buildings.

  Roger kept leading his group southward, and when the New Jersey picture faded he saw that the out-of-step signal was closer. Debbie was walking carefully right beside him. Thank God, he thought, that she hasn’t chosen this occasion to be difficult—but where are my parents?

  He couldn’t turn to look behind him, for the next projection was appearing, cleaving a path out of Evelyn’s imploding fake world. Obviously Evelyn’s aversion to these memories was strong, for her own projection simply recoiled from these the way a live oyster contracts away from lemon juice squeezed onto it.

  The cowboy movie memory was now altered out of recognition, though it was the most effective yet at re-randomizing the traffic lights; now it was a girl instead of a cavalry soldier, and somehow she still had both feet in the stirrups, and though there was blood she didn’t seem to be being dragged over any prairie … in fact she was lying on a table in a windowless room with newspapers all over the floor, and the ether reek was everywhere like the smell of rotten pears, and her young boyfriend was pacing the sidewalk out in front of the shabby office and at last the overcast sky had begun dropping rain so that he needn’t struggle to hold back his tears any longer …

  “Woulda been a girl, I think,” came the multiply-remembered voice of a man …

  Shock and sudden comprehension slowed Roger’s steps, and involuntarily he turned and looked back at Evelyn as bitterness and loss closed his throat and brought tears to his eyes. The man knew his business, he thought. “Goodbye, Evelyn,” he whispered.

  Goodbye, Roger, spoke a voice—a receding voice—in his head.

  The projected scene ahead was even clearer now, but beyond it lay the real pre-dawn Santa Margarita streets. “Come on,” said Roger, stepping forward again. “We’re almost out of it.”

  Debbie was right beside him, but he didn’t hear his parents, so he paused and turned.

  They were stopped several yards back, staring at the pavement.

  “Come on,” Roger said harshly. “It’s the way out.”

  “We can’t go through it,” his father said.

  “Again,” added his mother faintly.

  “We weren’t married yet, then, in ’48…” his father began; but Roger had taken Debbie’s hand and resumed their forward progress.

  They moved slowly through the windowless room, every full stride covering a few inches of newspaper-strewn floor, and then there was the fluttering thump of something landing in a plastic-lined waste basket and they were out in the streets and the air was cold and Roger didn’t have socks on and the traffic signals, ready for all the early-morning commuters, were switching through their long-green, short-yellow, long-red cycles, and the one-eyed old hobo standing in the street nodded curtly at them and then motioned them to step aside, for an ancient woman was puffing along the sidewalk behind them, pushing a shopping cart full of green scraps of cloth, and behind her trotted a lean little old fellow whom Roger remembered having seen many times walking the streets of Santa Margarita, lingering by empty lots when the workmen had gone home and the concrete outlines of long-gone houses could still be seen among the mud and litter and tractor tracks. There was no one else on the street. The sky was already pale blue, though the sun wasn’t up yet.

  Debbie glanced down at herself and pursed her lips angrily to see that her fine gown had disappeared again. “Are you through with your games?” she snapped. “Can we go home now?”


  “You go ahead,” Roger told her. “I want to walk some.”

  “No, come back with me.”

  He shook his head and walked away, slapping his pants pockets for change and trying to remember where he’d seen the all-night Mexican diner with the sign about the menudo breakfast.

  “When you do come back,” Debbie called furiously, “I won’t be there! And don’t bother going to my parents’ house, ’cause I won’t be there either!”

  Good for you, he thought.

  And as the first rays of the sun touched the tall palms around the traffic circle a scrap of something, unnoticed by anyone, sank to the bottom of the fountain pool, at peace at last.

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  The Prisoner of Chillon

  Born in Mineola, New York, James Patrick Kelly now lives in Durham, New Hampshire. Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; his stories have also appeared in Universe, Galaxy, Amazing, Analog, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. His first solo novel Planet of Whispers came out in 1984; his most recent book is a novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, Freedom Beach. He is currently at work on a new novel, tentatively entitled Look into the Sun. His story “Friend,” also in collaboration with Kessel, was in our First Annual Collection; his story “Solstice” was in our Third Annual Collection. He lives with his family in Durham, New Hampshire.

  In the fast-paced, inventive, and pyrotechnic story that follows, he demonstrates that there are many other kinds of prisons than those constructed of concrete and steel.…

  THE PRISONER OF CHILLON

  James Patrick Kelly

  We initiated deorbital burn over the Marshall Islands and dropped back into the ionosphere, locked by the wing’s navigator into one of the Eurospace reentry corridors. As we coasted across Central America we were an easy target for the attack satellites. The plan was to fool the tracking nets into thinking we were a corporate shuttle. Django had somehow acquired the recognition codes; his computer, kludged to the navigator, made the wing think it was the property of Erno Raumfahrttechnik GMBH, the West German aerospace conglomerate.

  It was all a matter of timing, really. It would not be too much longer before the people on IBM’s Orbital 7 untangled the spaghetti Django had made of their memory systems and realized that he had downloaded WISE-GUY and stolen a cargo wing. Then they would have to decide whether to zap us immediately or have the mindkillers waiting when we landed. Django’s plan was to lose the wing before they could decide. Our problem was that very little of the plan had worked so far.

  He had gotten us on and off the orbital research station all right, and had managed to pry WISEGUY from the jaws of the corporate beast. For that alone his reputation would live forever among operators, even if he was not around to enjoy the fame. But he had lost his partner—Yellowbaby, the pilot—and he still did not know exactly what it was he had stolen. He seemed pretty calm for a punk who had just plugged the world’s biggest corporation. He slouched in the commander’s seat across from me watching the readouts on the autopilot console. He was whistling and tapping a finger against his headset as if he were listening to one of his old jazz disks. He was a dark, ugly man with an Adam’s apple that looked like a nose and a nose that looked like an elbow. He had either been juved or he was in his mid-thirties. I trusted him not at all and liked him less.

  Me, I felt as though I had swallowed a hardboiled egg. I was just along for the story, the juice. According to the courts, all I was allowed to do was aim my microcam glasses at Django and ask questions. If I helped him in any way, I would become an accessory and lose press immunity. But press immunity wouldn’t do me much good if someone decided to zap the wing. The First Amendment was a great shield and all but it didn’t protect against re-entry friction. I wanted to return to earth with a ship around me; sensors showed the outer skin was currently 1400 degrees Celsius.

  “Much longer?” A dumb question since I already knew the answer. But better than listening to the atmosphere scream as the wing bucked through turbulence. I could feel myself losing it; I wanted to scream back.

  “Twenty minutes. However it plays.” Django lifted his headset. “Either you’ll be a legend or air pollution.” He stretched his arms over his head and arched his back away from the seat. I could smell his sweat. “Hey, lighten up, Eyes. You’re a big girl now. Shouldn’t you be taking notes or something?”

  “The camera sees all.” I tapped the left temple of the microcam and then forced a grin that hurt my face. “Besides, it’s not bloody likely I’ll forget this ride.” I wasn’t about to let Django play with me. He was too hypered on fast-forwards to be scared. My father had been the same way; he ate them like popcorn when he was working. And called me his big girl.

  It had been poor Yellowbaby who had introduced me to Django. I had covered the Babe when he pulled the Peniplex job. He was a real all-nighter—handsome as plastic can make a man, and an artiste in bed. Handsome, past tense. The last time I had seen him he was floating near the ceiling of a decompressed cargo bay, an eighty kilo hunk of flash-frozen boytoy. I missed him already.

  “I copy, Basel Control.” Yellowbaby’s calm voice crackled across the forward flight deck. “We’re doing Mach 9.9 at 57,000 meters. Looking good for touch at 14:22.”

  We had come out of reentry blackout. The approach program that Yellowbaby had written, complete with voice interaction module, was in contact now with Basel/Mulhouse, our purported destination. As long as everything went according to plan, the program would get us where we wanted to go. If anything went wrong … well, the Babe was supposed to improvise if anything went wrong.

  “Let’s blow out of here.” Django heaved himself out of the seat and swung down the ladder to the equipment bay. I followed. We pulled EV suits from the lockers and struggled into them. I could feel the deck tilting as the wing began a series of long lazy “S” curves to slow our descent.

  Django unfastened his suit’s weighty backpack and quickly shucked the rest of the excess baggage: comm and life support systems, various umbilicals. He was whistling again.

  “Would you shut the hell up?” I tossed the still camera from my suit onto the pile.

  “You don’t like Fats Waller?” There was a chemical edge to his giggle. “‘I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling,’ great tune.” And then he began to sing; his voice sounded like gears being stripped.

  Yellowbaby’s program was reassuring Basel even as we banked gracefully toward the Jura Mountains. “No problem, Basel Control,” the dead man’s voice drawled. “Malf on the main guidance computer. I’ve got backup. My Lover D is nominal. You just keep the tourists off the runway and I’ll see you in ten minutes.”

  I shut down the microcam—no sense wasting batteries and disk space shooting the inside of an EV suit—and picked up the pressure helmet.

  “Think I’m falling for you, Eyes.” Django blew me a kiss. “Don’t forget to duck.” He made a quacking sound and flapped his arms like wings. I put the helmet on and closed the seals. It was a relief not to have to listen to him rave; we had disabled the comm units to keep the mindkillers from tracking us. He handed me one of the slim airfoil packs we had smuggled onto and off of Orbital 7. I stuck my arms through the harness and fastened the front straps. I could still hear Yellowbaby’s muffled voice talking to the Swiss controllers. “Negative, Basel control, I don’t need escort. Initiating terminal guidance procedures.”

  At that moment I felt the nose dip sharply. The wing was diving straight for the summit of Mont Tendre, elevation 1679 meters. I crouched behind Django in the airlock, tucked my head to my chest, and tongued the armor toggle in the helmet. The thermofiber EV suit stiffened and suddenly I was a shock-resistant statue, unable to move. I began to count backwards from one thousand; it was better than listening to my heart jackhammer. Nine hundred and ninety-nine, nine hundred and ninety-eight, nine hundred and …


  I remembered the way Yellowbaby had smiled as he unbuttoned my shirt, that night before we had shuttled up to 7. He was sitting on a bunk in his underwear. I had still not decided to cover the raid; he was still trying to convince me. But words weren’t his strong point. When I turned my back to him, he slipped the shirt from my shoulders, slid it down my arms. I stood there for a moment, facing away from the bunk. Then he grabbed me by the waist and pulled me onto his lap. I could feel the curly hair on his chest brushing against my spine. Sitting there half-naked, my face glowing hot as any heat shield, I knew I was in deep trouble. He had nibbled at my ear and then conned me with that slow Texas drawl. “Hell, baby, only reason ain’t no one never tried to jump out of a shuttle is that no one who really needed to jump ever had a chute.” I had always been a fool for men who told me not to worry.

  Although we were huddled in the airlock, my head was down so I did not see the hatch blow. But even with the suit in armor mode, I felt like the clapper inside a cathedral bell. The wing shuddered and, with an explosive last breath, spat us into the dazzling Alpine afternoon.

  The truth is that I don’t remember much about the jump after that. I know I unfroze the suit so I could guide the airfoil, which had opened automatically. I was too intent on keeping Django in sight and on getting down as fast as I could without impaling myself on a tree or smashing into a cliff. So I missed being the only live and in-person witness to one of the more spectacular crashes of the twenty-first century.

  We were trying to drop into the Col du Marchairuz, a pass about seven kilometers away from Mont Tendre, before the search hovers came swarming. I saw Django disappear into a stand of dead sycamores and thought he had probably killed himself. I had no time to worry because the ground was rushing up at me like a nightmare. I spotted the road and steered for it but got caught in a gust which swept me across about five meters above the pavement. I touched on the opposite side; the airfoil was pulling me toward a huge boulder. I toggled to armor mode just as I hit. Once again the bell rang, knocking the breath from me and announcing that I had arrived. If I hadn’t been wearing a helmet I would have kissed that chunk of limestone.