The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The brilliant Max Born, who had first used the expression quantum mechanics in a paper written two years before, was leading a meeting of the university’s physicists. They were discussing Max Planck’s latest proposals concerning his own theories of radiation. Planck had developed some basic ideas in the emerging field of quantum physics, yet he had used classical Newtonian mechanics to describe the interactions of light and matter. It was clear that this approach was inadequate, but as yet there was no better system. At the Göttingen conference, Pascual Jordan rose to introduce a compromise solution; but before Born, the department chairman, could reply, Werner Heisenberg fell into a violent fit of sneezing.

  “Are you all right, Werner?” asked Born.

  Heisenberg merely waved a hand. Jordan attempted to continue, but again Heisenberg began sneezing. His eyes were red, and tears crept down his face. He was in obvious distress. He turned to his graduate assistant. “Jehan,” he said, “please make immediate arrangements; I must get away. It’s my damned hay fever. I want to leave at once.”

  One of the others at the meeting objected. “But the colloquium—”

  Heisenberg was already on his feet. “You can tell Planck to go straight to hell and to take De Broglie and his matter waves with him. The same goes for Bohr and his goddamn jumping electrons. I can’t stand any more of this.” Heisenberg took a few shaky steps and left the room. Jehan stayed behind to make a few notations in her journal. Then she followed Heisenberg back to their apartments.

  * * *

  There were no minarets in the Budayeen, but in the city all around the walled quarter there were many mosques. From the tall, ancient towers, strong voices called the faithful to morning devotions. “Come to prayer, come to prayer! Prayer is better than sleep!”

  Leaning against a grimy wall, Jehan heard the chanted cries of the muezzins, but she paid them no mind. She stared at the dead body at her feet, the body of a boy a few years older than she, someone she had seen about the Budayeen but whom she did not know by name. She still held the bloody knife that had killed him.

  In a short while three men pushed their way through a crowd that had formed at the mouth of the alley. The three men looked down solemnly at Jehan. One was a police officer; one was a qadi, who interpreted the ancient Islamic commandments as they applied to modern life; and the third was an imam, a prayer leader who had hurried from a small mosque not far from the east gate of the Budayeen. Within the walls the pickpockets, whores, thieves, and cut-throats could do as they liked to each other. A death in the Budayeen didn’t attract much attention in the rest of the city.

  The police officer was tall and heavily built, with a thick black mustache and sleepy eyes. He was curious only because he had watched over the Budayeen for fifteen years, and he had never investigated a murder by a girl so young.

  The qadi was young, clean-shaven, and quite plainly deferring to the imam. It was not yet clear to those in attendance if this matter should be the responsibility of the civil or the religious authorities.

  The imam was tall, taller even than the police officer, but thin and narrow shouldered; yet it was not asceticism that made him so slight. He was well-known for two things: his common sense concerning the conflicts of everyday affairs and the high degree of earthly pleasures he permitted himself. He, too, was puzzled and curious. He wore a short, grizzled gray beard, and his soft brown eyes were all but hidden within the reticulation of wrinkles that had slowly etched his face. Like the police officer, the imam had once worn a brave black mustache, but the days of fierceness had long since passed for him. Now he appeared decent and kindly. In truth, he was neither; but he found it useful to cultivate that reputation.

  “O my daughter,” he said in his hoarse voice. He was very upset. He much preferred explicating obscure passages of the glorious Qur’an to viewing such tawdry matters as blatant dead bodies in the nearby streets.

  Jehan looked up at him, but she said nothing. She looked back down at the unknown boy she had killed.

  “O my daughter,” said the imam, “tell me, was it thou who hath slain this child?”

  Jehan looked back calmly at the old man. She was concealed beneath her kerchief, veil, and robe; all that was visible of her were her dark eyes and the long thin fingers that held the knife. “Yes, O Wise One,” she said, “I killed him.”

  The police officer glanced at the qadi.

  “Prayest thou to Allah?” asked the imam. If this hadn’t been the Budayeen, he wouldn’t have needed to ask.

  “Yes,” said Jehan. And it was true. She had prayed on several occasions in her lifetime, and she might yet pray again sometime.

  “And knowest thou there is a prohibition against taking of human life that Allah hath made sacred?”

  “Yes, O Wise One.”

  “And knowest thou further that Allah hath set a penalty upon those who breaketh this law?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Then, O my daughter, tell us why thou hath brought low this poor boy.”

  Jehan tossed the bloody knife to the stone-paved alley. It rang noisily and then came to rest against one leg of the corpse. “I killed him because he would do me harm in the future,” she said.

  “He threatened you?” asked the qadi.

  “No, O Respected One.”

  “Then—”

  “Then how art thou certain that he would do thee harm?” the imam finished. Jehan shrugged. “I have seen it many times. He would throw me to the ground and defile me. I have seen the visions.”

  A murmur grew from the crowd still cluttering the mouth of the alley behind Jehan and the three men. The imam’s shoulders slumped. The police officer waited patiently. The qadi looked discouraged. “Then he didst not offer thee harm this morning?” said the imam.

  “No.”

  “Indeed, as thou sayest, he hath never offered thee harm?”

  “No. I do not know him. I have never spoken with him.”

  “Yet,” said the qadi, clearly unhappy, “you murdered him because of what you have seen? As in a dream?”

  “As in a dream, O Respected One, but more truly as in a vision.”

  “A dream,” muttered the imam. “The Prophet, mayest blessings be on his name and peace, didst offer no absolution for murder provoked only by dreams.”

  A woman in the crowd cried out, “But she is only twelve years old!”

  The imam turned and pushed his way through the rabble.

  “Sergeant,” said the qadi, “this young girl is now in your custody. The Straight Path makes our duty clear.”

  The police officer nodded and stepped forward. He bound the young girl’s wrists and pushed her forward through the alley. The crowd of fellahin parted to make way for them. The sergeant led Jehan to a small, dank cell until she might have a hearing. A panel of religious elders would judge her according to Shari’a, the contemporary code of laws derived from the ancient and noble Qur’an. Jehan did not suffer in her noxious cell. A lifetime in the Budayeen had made her familiar with deprivation. She waited patiently for whatever outcome Allah intended.

  She did not wait long. She was given another brief hearing, during which the council asked her many of the same questions the imam had asked. She answered them all without hesitation. Her judges were saddened but compelled to render their verdict. They gave her an opportunity to change her statement, but she refused. At last the senior member of the panel stood to face her. “O young one,” he said in the most reluctant of voices, “the Prophet, blessings be on his name and peace, said, ‘Whoso slayeth a believer, his reward is hell forever.’ And elsewhere, ‘Who killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he killed all mankind.’ Therefore, if he whom you slew had purposed corruption upon you, your act would have been justified. Yet you deny this. You rely on your dreams, your visions. Such insubstantial defense cannot persuade this council otherwise than that you are guilty. You must pay the penalty as it is written. It shall be exacted tomor
row morning just before sunrise.”

  Jehan’s expression did not change. She said nothing. Of her many visions, she had witnessed this particular scene before also. Sometimes, as now, she was condemned; sometimes she was freed. That evening she ate a good meal, a better meal than most she had taken before in her life of poverty. She slept the night, and she was ready when the civil and religious officials came for her in the morning. An imam of great repute spoke to her at length, but Jehan did not listen carefully. The remaining acts and motions of her life seemed mechanically ordered, and she did not pay great heed to them. She followed where she was led, she responded dully when pressed for a reply, and she climbed the platform set up in the courtyard of the great Shimaal Mosque.

  “Dost thou feel regret?” asked the imam, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  Jehan was made to kneel with her head on the block. She shrugged. “No,” she said.

  “Dost thou feel anger, O my daughter?”

  “No.”

  “Then mayest Allah in His mercy grant thee peace.” The imam stepped away. Jehan had no view of the headsman, but she heard the collective sigh of the onlookers as the great ax lifted high in the first faint rays of dawn, and then the blade fell.

  * * *

  Jehan shuddered in the alley. Watching her death always made her exceptionally uneasy. The hour wasn’t much later; the fifth and final call to prayer had sounded not long before, and now it was night. The celebration continued around her more intensely than before. That her intended deed might end on the headsman’s block did not deter her. She grasped the knife tightly, wishing that time would pass more swiftly, and she thought of other things.

  By the end of May 1925 they were settled in a hotel on the tiny island of Helgoland some fifty miles from the German coast. Jehan relaxed in a comfortably furnished room. The landlady made her husband put Heisenberg’s and Jehan’s luggage in the best and most expensive room. Heisenberg had every hope of ridding himself of his allergic afflictions. He also intended to make some sense of the opaque melding of theories and countertheories put forward by his colleagues back in Göttingen. Meanwhicle the landlady gave Jehan a grim and glowering look at their every meeting but said nothing. The Herr Doktor himself was too preoccupied to care for anything as trivial as propriety, morals, the reputation of this Helgoland retreat, or Jehan’s peace of mind. If anyone raised eyebrows over the arrangement, Heisenberg certainly was blithely unaware; he walked around as if he were insensible to everything but the pollen count and the occasional sheer cliffs over which he sometimes came close to tumbling.

  Jehan was mindful of the old woman’s disapproval. Jehan, however, had lived a full, harsh life in her twenty-six years, and a raised eyebrow rated very low on her list of things to be concerned about. She had seen too many people abandoned to starvation, too many people dispossessed and reduced to beggary, too many outsiders slain in the name of Allah, too many maimed or beheaded through the convoluted workings of Islamic justice. All these years Jehan had kept her father’s bloodied dagger, packed now beneath her shetland wool sweaters and still as deadly as ever.

  Heisenberg’s health improved on the island, and there was a beautiful view of the sea from their room. His mood brightened quickly. One morning, while walking along the shoreline with him, Jehan read a passage from the glorious Qur’an. “This sura is called ‘The Earthquake,’” she said. “‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. When Earth is shaken with her final earthquake, and Earth yields up her burdens and man saith: What aileth her? That day she will relate her chronicles, because thy Lord inspireth her. That day mankind will issue forth in separate groups to be shown their deeds. And whoso doeth good an atom’s weight will see it then. And whoso doeth ill an atom’s weight will see it then.’”

  And Jehan wept, knowing that however much good she might do, it could never outweigh the wrongs she had already performed. But Heisenberg only stared out over the gray, tumbling waves of the ocean. He did not listen closely to the sacred verses, yet a few of Jehan’s words struck him. “‘And whoso doeth good an atom’s weight will see it then,’” he said, emphasizing the single word. There was a small, hesitant smile quivering at the corners of his mouth. Jehan put her arm around him to comfort him because he seemed chilled, and she led him back to the hotel. The weather had turned colder, and the air was misty with sea spray; together they listened to the cries of the herring gulls as the birds dived for fish or hovered screeching over the strip of beach. Jehan thought of what she’d read, of the end of the world. Heisenberg thought only of its beginning, and its still closely guarded secrets.

  They liked their daily peaceful walk about the island. Now, more than ever before, Jehan carried with her a copy of the Qur’an, and she often read short verses to him. So different from the biblical literature he’d heard all his life, Heisenberg let the Islamic scriptures pass without comment. Yet it seemed to him that certain specific images offered their meanings to him alone.

  Jehan saw at last that he was feeling well. Heisenberg took up again full-time the tangled knot that was the current state of quantum physics. It was both his vocation and his means of relaxation. He told Jehan the best scientific minds in the world were frantically working to cobble together a slipshod mathematical model, one that might account for all the observed data. Whatever approach they tried, the data would not fit together. He, however, would find the key; he was that confident. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d do it, but, of course, he hadn’t yet really applied himself thoroughly to the question.

  Jehan was not amused. She read to him: “‘Hast thou not seen those who pretend that they believe in that which is revealed unto thee and that which was revealed before thee, how they would go for judgment in their disputes to false deities when they have been ordered to abjure them? Satan would lead them far astray.’”

  Heisenberg laughed heartily. “Your Allah isn’t just talking about Göttingen there,” he said. “He’s got Bohr in mind, too, and Einstein in Berlin.”

  Jehan frowned at his impiety. It was the irreverence and ignorant ridicule of the kaffir, the unbeliever. She wondered if the old religion that had never truly had any claim on her was yet still part of her. She wondered how she’d feel after all these years, walking the narrow, crowded, clangorous ways of the Budayeen again. “You mustn’t speak that way,” she said at last.

  “Hmm?” said Heisenberg. He had already forgotten what he’d said to her.

  “Look out there,” said Jehan. “What do you see?”

  “The ocean,” said Heisenberg. “Waves.”

  “Allah created those waves. What do you know about that?”

  “I could determine their frequency. I could measure their amplitude.”

  “Measure!” cried Jehan. Her own long years of scientific study were suddenly overshadowed by an imagined insult to her heritage. “Look here,” she demanded. “A handful of sand. Allah created this sand. What do you know about it?”

  Heisenberg couldn’t see what Jehan was trying to tell him. “With the proper instruments,” he said, a little afraid of offending her, “in the proper setting, I could take a single grain of sand and tell you—” His words broke off suddenly. He got to his feet slowly, like an old man. He looked first at the sea, then down at the shore, then back out at the water. “Waves,” he murmured, “particles, it makes no difference. All that counts is what we can actually measure. We can’t measure Bohr’s orbits, because they don’t really exist! So the spectral lines we see are caused by transitions between two states. Pairs of states, yes; but that will mean a new form of mathematical expression just to describe them, referencing tables listing every possible—”

  “Werner.” Jehan knew that he was now lost to her.

  “Just the computations alone will take days, if not weeks.”

  “Werner, listen to me. This island is so small, you can throw a stone from one end to the other. I’m not going to sit on this freezing beach or up on your bleak and dreary cliff whi
le you make your brilliant breakthrough, whatever it is. I’m saying good-bye.”

  “What? Jehan?” Heisenberg blinked and returned to the tangible world.

  She couldn’t face him any longer. She was pouring one handful of sand through the fingers of her other hand.

  It came suddenly to her mind then: If you had no water to perform the necessary ablution before prayer in the direction of Mecca, you were permitted to wash with clean sand instead. She began to weep. She couldn’t hear what Heisenberg was saying to her—if indeed he was.

  * * *

  It was a couple of hours later in the alley now, and it was getting even colder. Jehan wrapped herself in her robe and paced back and forth.

  She’d had visions of this particular night for four years, glimpses of the possible ways that it might conclude. Sometimes the young man saw her in the alley shortly after dawn, sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes she killed him, sometimes she didn’t. And, of course, there was the open question of whether her actions would lead to her freedom or to her execution.

  When she’d had the first vision, she hadn’t known what was happening or what she was seeing. She knew only the fear and the pain and the terror. The boy threw her roughly to the ground, ripped her clothing, and raped her. Then the vision passed. Jehan told no one about it; her family would have thought her insane. About three months later, the vision returned; only this time it was different in subtle ways. She was in the alley as before, but this time she smiled and gestured to the boy, inviting him. He smiled in return and followed her deeper into the alley. When he put his hand on her shoulder, she drew her father’s dagger and plunged it into the boy’s belly. That was as much as the vision showed her then. It terrified her even more than the rape scene had.