The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  Jehan was in her early forties now, her black hair cut short, her eyes framed by clumsy spectacles, her beauty stolen by care, poor diet, and sleeplessness. She wore a white lab coat and carried a clipboard, as much a part of her as her title, Fräulein Professor Doktor Ashûfi. This was not Göttingen any longer; it was Berlin, and a war was being lost. She was still with Heisenberg. He had protected her until her own scientific credentials became protection of themselves. At that point, the Nazi officials were compelled to make her an “honorary” Aryan, as they had the Jewish physicists and mathematicians whose cooperation they needed. It had been only Jehan’s long-standing loyalty to Heisenberg himself that kept her in Germany at all. The war was of little concern to her; these were not her people, but neither were the British, the French, the Russians, or the Americans. Her only interest was in her work, in the refinement of physics, in the unending anticipation of discovery.

  She was glad, therefore, when the German atomic bomb project was removed from the control of the German army and given to the Reich Research Council. One of the first things to be done was the calling of a research conferencc at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin. The conference would be conducted under the tightest security; no preliminary list of topics would be released in advance, so that no foreign agents might see such terms as fission cross sections and isotope enrichment, leading to speculation on the long-term goals of these physicists.

  At the same time, the Reich Research Council decided to hold a second conference for the benefit of the government’s highest officials on the same day. The idea was that the scientists speaking at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s meeting could present short, elementary summaries of their work in plain language so that the political and military leaders could be briefed on the progress that was being made toward a nuclear weapon. Then, following the laymen’s presentation, the physicists could gather and discuss the same matters in their more technical jargon.

  Heisenberg thought it was a good idea. It was 1942, and material, political support, and funding were getting more difficult to find. The army wanted to put all available research resources into the rocketry program; they argued that the nuclear experiments were not showing sufficient success. Heisenberg was a theoretical physicist, not an engineer; he could not find a way to tell the council that the development of the uranium bomb must necessarily be slow and methodical. Each new step forward in theory had to be tested carefully, and each experiment was expensive in both time and money. The Reich, however, cared only for positive results.

  One evening Jehan was alone in an administrative office of the Reich Research Council, typing her proposal for an important test of their isotope-separation technique. She saw on the desk two stacks of papers. One stack listed the simple synopses the physicists had prepared for the Reich ministers who had little or no background in science. She took those papers and hid them in her briefcase. The second stack was the secret agenda for the physicists’ own meeting: “Nuclear Physics as a Weapon,” by Professor Dr. Schumann; “The Fission of the Uranium Atom,” by Professor Dr. Hahn; “The Theoretical Basis for the Production of Energy from the Fission of Uranium,” by Heisenberg; and so on. Each person attending the technical seminar would be given a program after he entered the lecture hall, and he would be required to sign for it. Jehan thought for a long while in the quiet office. She remembered her wretched childhood. She recalled her arrival in Europe and the people she had come to know, the life she had come to lead here. She thought about how Germany had changed while she hid in her castle of scientific abstractions, uninvolved with the outside world. At last she thought about what this new Germany might do with the uranium bomb. She knew exactly what she must do.

  It took her only a few moments to take the highly technical agendas and drop them into the already-addressed envelopes to be sent to the Third Reich’s leaders. She had guaranteed that the brief introductory discussion would be attended by no one. Jehan could easily imagine the response the unintelligible scientific papers would get from the political and military leaders—curt, polite regrets that they would not be in Berlin on that day, or that their busy schedules prevented them from attending. It was all so easy. The Reich’s rulers did not hear the talks, and they did not learn how close Germany was to developing an atomic bomb. Never again was there any hope that such a weapon could be built in time to save the Reich—all because the wrong invitations had been slipped into a few envelopes.

  * * *

  Jehan awoke from a dream and saw that the night had grown very old. It would not be long before the sun began to flood the sky with light. Soon she would have a resolution to her anxiety. She would learn if the boy would come to the alley or stay away. She would learn if he would rape her or if she would find the courage to defend herself. She would learn if she would be judged guilty or innocent of murder. She would be granted a glimpse of the outcome to all things that concerned her.

  Nevertheless, she was so tired, hungry, and uncomfortable that she was tempted to give up her vigil. The urge to go home was strong. Yet she had always believed that her visions were gifts granted by Allah, and it might offend Him to ignore the clear warnings. For Allah’s sake, as well as her own, she reluctantly chose to wait out the rest of the dying night. She had seen so many visions since last evening—more than on any other day of her life—some new, some familiar from years past. It was, in a small, human way, almost comparable to the Night of Power that was bestowed upon the Prophet, may Allah’s blessings be on him and peace. Then Jehan felt guilty and blasphemous for comparing herself to the Messenger that way.

  She got down on her knees and faced toward Mecca and addressed a prayer to Allah, reciting one of the later suras from the glorious Qur’an, the one called “The Morning Hours,” which seemed particularly relevant to her situation. “‘In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. By the morning hours, and by the night when it is stillest, thy Lord hath not forsaken thee nor doth He hate thee, and verily the latter portion will be better for thee than the former, and verily thy Lord will give unto thee so that thou wilt be content. Did He not find thee an orphan and protect thee? Did He not find thee wandering and direct thee? Did He not find thee destitute and enrich thee? Therefore the orphan oppress not, therefore the beggar drive not away, therefore of the bounty of thy Lord be thy discourse.’” When she finished praying, she stood up and leaned against the wall. She wondered if that sura prophesied that soon she’d be an orphan. She hoped that Allah understood that she never intended anything awful to happen to her parents. Jehan was willing to suffer whatever consequences Allah willed, but it didn’t seem fair for her mother and father to have to share them with her. She shivered in the damp, cold air and gazed up to see if there was yet any brightening of the sky. She pretended that already the stars were beginning to disappear.

  * * *

  The square was jammed and choked with people. Soon Hilbert could see why—a platform had been erected in the center, and on it stood a man with what could only be an executioner’s ax. Hilbert felt his stomach sicken. His Arab guide had thrust aside everyone in their way until Hilbert stood at the very foot of the platform. He saw uniformed police and a bearded old man leading out a young girl. The crowd parted to allow them by. The girl was stunningly lovely. Hilbert looked into her huge, dark eyes—“like the eyes of a gazelle,” he remembered from reading Omar Khayyám—and glimpsed her slender form undisguised by her modest garments. As she mounted the steps, she looked down directly at him again. Hilbert felt his heart lurch; he felt a tremendous shudder. Then she looked away.

  The Arab guide screamed in Hilbert’s ear. It meant nothing to the mathematician. He watched in horror as Jehan knelt, as the headsman raised his weapon of office. Hilbert shouted. His guide tightened his grip on the outsider’s arm, but Hilbert lashed out in fury and threw the man into a group of veiled women. In the confusion, Hilbert ran up the steps of the scaffold. The imam and the police officers looked at him
angrily. The crowd began to shout fiercely at this interruption, this desecration by a European kaffir, an unbeliever. Hilbert ran to the police. “You must stop this!” he cried in German. They did not understand him and tried to heave him off the platform. “Stop!” he screamed in English.

  One of the police officers answered him. “It cannot be stopped,” he said gruffly. “The girl committed murder. She was found guilty, and she cannot pay the blood price to the victim’s family. She must die instead.”

  “Blood price!” cried Hilbert. “That’s barbarous! You would kill a young girl just because she is poor? Blood price! I’ll pay your goddamn blood price! How much is it?”

  The policeman conferred with the others and then went to the imam for guidance. Finally the English-speaking officer returned. “Four hundred kiam.”

  Hilbert took out his wallet with shaking hands. He counted out the money and handed it with obvious disgust to the policeman. The imam cried a declaration in his weak voice. The words were passed quickly through the crowd, and the onlookers grew more enraged at this spoiling of their morning’s entertainment. “Take her and go quickly,” said the police officer. “We cannot protect you, and the crowd is becoming furious.”

  Hilbert nodded. He grasped Jehan’s thin wrist and pulled her along after him. She questioned him in Arabic, but he could not reply. As he struggled through the menacing crowd, they were struck again and again by stones. Hilbert wondered what he had done, if he and the girl would get out of the mosque’s courtyard alive. His fondness for young women—it was an open joke in Göttingen—had that been all that had motivated him? Had he unconsciously decided to rescue the girl and take her back to Germany? Or was it something more laudable? He would never know. He shocked himself: While he tried to shield himself and the girl from the vicious blows of the crowd, he thought only of how he might explain the girl to his wife, Käthe, and Clärchen, his mistress.

  * * *

  In 1957 Jehan Fatima Ashûfi was fifty-eight years old and living in Princeton, New Jersey. By coincidence, Albert Einstein had come here to live out the end of his life, and before he died in 1955 they had many pleasant afternoons at his house. In the beginning, Jehan wanted to discuss quantum physics with Einstein; she even told him Heisenberg’s answer to Einstein’s objection to God playing dice with the universe. Einstein was not very amused, and from then on their conversation concerned only nostalgic memories of the better days in Germany, before the advent of the National Socialists.

  This afternoon, however, Jehan was sitting in a Princeton lecture hall, listening to a young man read a remarkable paper, his Ph.D. thesis. His name was Hugh Everett, and what he was saying was that there was an explanation for all the paradoxes of the quantum world, a simple but bizarre way of looking at them. His new idea included the Copenhagen interpretation and explained away all the objections that might be raised by less open-minded physicists. He stated first of all that quantum mechanics provided predictions that were invariably correct when measured against experimental data. Quantum physics had to be consistent and valid, there was no longer any doubt. The trouble was that quantum theory was beginning to lead to unappetizing alternatives.

  Schrödinger’s cat paradox—in which the cat in the box was merely a quantum wave function, not alive and not dead, until an observer looked to see which state the cat was in—was eliminated. Everett showed that the cat was no mere ghostly wave function. Everett said that wave functions do not “collapse,” choosing one alternative or the other. He said that the process of observation chose one reality, but the other reality existed in its own right, just as “real” as our world. Particles do not choose at random which path to take—they take every path, in a separate, newly branched world for each option. Of course, at the particle level, this meant a huge number of branchings occurring at every moment.

  Jehan knew this almost-metaphysical idea would find a chilly reception from most physicists, but she had special reasons to accept it eagerly. It explained her visions. She glimpsed the particular branch that would be “real” for her and also those that would be “real” for other versions of her, her own duplicates living on the countless parallel worlds. Now, as she listened to Everett, she smiled. She saw another young man in the audience, wearing a T-shirt that said, WIGNER: DO YOU THINK YOUR FRIEND COULD FEED MY CAT? HEISENBERG WASN’T SURE. THANKS, SCHRÖDINGER. She found that very amusing.

  When Everett finished reading, Jehan felt good. It wasn’t peace she felt; it was more like the release one feels after an argument that had been brewing for a long while. Jehan thought back over the turns and sidetracks she had taken since that dawn in the alley in the Budayeen. She smiled again, sadly, took a deep breath, and let it out. How many things she had done, how many things had happened to her! They had been long, strange lives. The only question that still remained was, How many uncountable futures did she still have to devise, to fabricate from the immaterial resources of this moment? As she sat there—in some worlds—Jehan knew the futures went on without her willing them to, needing nothing of her permission. She was not cautious of when tomorrow came but which tomorrow came.

  Jehan saw them all, but she still understood nothing. She thought, The Chinese say that a journey of a thousand li begins with a single step. How shortsighted that is! A thousand journeys of a thousand li begin with each step. Or with each step not taken. She sat in her chair until everyone else had left the lecture hall. Then she got up slowly, her back and her knees giving her pain, and she took a step. She pictured myriad mirror-Jehans taking that step along with her, and a myriad that didn’t. And in all the worlds across time, it was another step into the future.

  * * *

  At last there was no doubt about it: It was dawn. Jehan fingered her father’s dagger and felt a thrill of excitement. Strange words flickered in her mind. “The Heisenty uncertainberg principle,” she murmured, already hurrying toward the mouth of the alley. She felt no fear.

  HOWARD WALDROP

  Do Ya, Do Ya, Wanna Dance?

  Howard Waldrop is widely considered to be one of the best short-story writers in the business, and his famous story “The Ugly Chickens” won both the Nebula and the World Fantasy Awards in 1981. His work has been gathered in two collections: Howard Who? and All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories by Howard Waldrop, and more collections are in the works. Waldrop is also the author of the novel Them Bones, and, in collaboration with Jake Saunders, The Texas-Israeli War: 1999. Another solo novel is coming up. He lives in Austin, Texas.

  Here he gives us a hilarious, high-energy look back at the ’60s, a look as funny, poignant, and quirky as one would expect from Waldrop, who has been called “the resident Weird Mind of his generation.”

  DO YA, DO YA, WANNA DANCE?

  Howard Waldrop

  The light was so bad in the bar that everyone there looked like they had been painted by Thomas Hart Benton, or carved from dirty bars of soap with rusty spoons.

  “Frank! Frank!” the patrons yelled, like for Norm on Cheers before they canceled it.

  “No need to stand,” I said. I went to the table where Barb, Bob, and Penny sat. Carole the waitress brought over a Ballantine Ale in a can, no glass.

  “How y’all?” I asked my three friends. I seemed not to have interrupted a conversation.

  “I feel like six pounds of monkey shit,” said Bob, who had once been tall and thin and was now tall and fat.

  “My mother’s at it again,” said Penny. Her nails looked like they had been done by Mungo of Hollywood, her eyes were like pissholes in a snowbank.

  “Jim went back to Angela,” said Barb.

  I stared down at the table with them for five or six minutes. The music over the speakers was “Wonderful World, Beautiful People” by Johnny Nash. We usually came to this bar because it had a good jukebox that livelied us up.

  “So,” said Barb, looking up at me, “I hear you’re going to be a tour guide for the reunion.”

  * * *
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br />   There are terrible disasters in history, and there are always great catastrophes just waiting to happen.

  But the greatest one of all, the thing time’s been holding its breath for, the capo de tutti capi of impending disasters, was going to happen this coming weekend.

  Like the Titanic steaming for its chunk of polar ice, like the Hindenberg looking for its Lakehurst, like the guy at Chernobyl wondering what that switch would do, it was inevitable, inexorable, a psychic juggernaut.

  The Class of ‘69 was having its twentieth high school reunion.

  And what they were coming back to was no longer even a high school—it had been phased out in a magnet school program in ’74. The building had been taken over by the community college.

  The most radical graduating class in the history of American secondary education, had, like all the ideals it once held, no real place to go.

  Things were to start Saturday morning with a tour of the old building, then a picnic in the afternoon in the city park where everyone used to get stoned and lie around all weekend, then a dance that night in what used to be the fanciest downtown hotel a few blocks from the state capitol.

  That was the reunion Barb was talking about.

  * * *

  “I found the concept of the high school no longer being there so existential that I offered to help out,” I said. “Olin Sweetwater called me a couple of months ago—”

  “Olin Sweetwater? Olin Sweetwater!” said Penny. “Geez! I haven’t heard that name in the whole damn twenty years.” She held onto the table with both hands. “I think I’m having a drug flashback!”