The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  They did not really need me, I found, for it was rare that they hatched out alone. Usually, there were half a dozen alive at any one time, and they could obey their inner drives in fondling one another, achieving their fulfilment easily, comfortably, and by their own standards naturally.

  When the time eventually came for me to leave Rowland’s house, to convey his legacy to the greater world so that his methods and techniques might be employed for the betterment of mankind, I was sorry to leave these ephemerae, because I had grown fond of them, in my fashion. It was in their chamber that I buried Rowland Usher, for it was there that I found the grave of his beloved Magdalen, and I knew that brother and sister would have wished to rest side by side. I left him lightly coffined, as I knew that he would have left her, so that in time his decaying flesh might be absorbed, with hers, by the scavenging cells of the house, to become a part of its extending body, dissipated within it, united in substance if not in spirit.

  When I finally did come out of the house again, and found myself in the full glare of the tropic sun, I had to wrinkle my nose against the stench of the swamp, for I had become used to breathing clean and sterile air. The sky seemed very blue, its light wild and abandoned, and my eyes ached for the gentle roseate light of bioluminescence.

  As the motor-boat sped away toward the main stream of the Orinoco I looked back at the astonishing edifice, and saw that in this light its ebon walls gleamed and sparkled like jet, and that its softened shape resembled a Daliesque hand reaching up as though to touch the sun with molten fingers.

  It was not ugly at all, but perfectly lovely.

  The first House of Usher—that shameful allegory of the disturbed psyche—was burst asunder and swallowed by dark waters. In stark contrast, Rowland’s house still stands, soaring proudly above the tattered canopy of the twisted trees. It is still growing, and though it stands today in a noisome swamp there will come a time, I know, when it has purified the lakes and the islands, absorbing their stagnancy into its own vitality.

  I was afraid, for a time, that the mysterious canker which was implicit in Rowland Usher’s being might in some curious fashion be replicated in his house—perhaps by infection as the house absorbed his mortal remains. I am glad to say, though, that in the ten years since I quit that house it has shown no outward sign of any malady, and I become more confident with every year that passes that it will truly stand the test of time.

  In one of the notes which he appended to his data discs Rowland contrasts his own house with Poe’s imaginary one, damning the fictitious original as a typical product of the nineteenth century imagination and its myriad demonic afflictions. His own house, he claims, belongs not just to the twenty-second century but to the third millennium, and hazards the speculation that its life might not even be confined by a thousand years, but might go on forever, into that far-off Golden Age when the entire ecosphere of this planet (and who knows how many more) will be subject to the dominion of the mind of man.

  We can only hope that his faith will be justified.

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

  Glacier

  Here’s a thoughtful and intensely rendered study of a boy’s difficult coming-of-age in a future Boston caught in a deadly grip of ice …

  Kim Stanley Robinson sold his first story in 1976, and quickly established himself as one of the most respected and critically acclaimed writers of his generation. He is a frequent contributor to such markets as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Universe, and Omni. His brilliant story “Black Air” was both a Nebula and Hugo finalist in 1984, and went on to win the World Fantasy Award that year. “Black Air” was in our First Annual Collection. His excellent novel The Wild Shore was published in 1984 as the first title in the resurrected Ace Special line, and was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the year. Other Robinson books include the novels Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness, and the critical book The Novels of Philip K. Dick. His most recent books are The Planet on the Table, a collection, and a new novel, The Gold Coast. His story “The Lucky Strike” was in our Second Annual Collection, “Green Mars” was in our Third Annual Collection, “Down and Out in the Year 2000” was in our Fourth Annual Collection, and his “Mother Goddess to the World” was in our Fifth Annual Collection. Robinson and his wife Lisa, are back in the United States again after several years in Switzerland.

  GLACIER

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  “This is Stella,” Mrs. Goldberg said. She opened the cardboard box and a gray cat leaped out and streaked under the corner table.

  “That’s where we’ll put her blanket,” Alex’s mother said.

  Alex got down on hands and knees to look. Stella was a skinny old cat; her fur was an odd mix of silver, black, and pinkish tan. Yellow eyes. Part tortoiseshell, Mom had said. The color of the fur over her eyes made it appear her brow was permanently furrowed. Her ears were laid flat.

  “Remember she’s kind of scared of boys,” Mrs. Goldberg said.

  “I know.” Alex sat back on his heels. Stella hissed. “I was just looking.” He knew the cat’s whole story. She had been a stray that began visiting the Goldbergs’ balcony to eat their dog’s food, then—as far as anyone could tell—to hang out with the dog. Remus, a stiff-legged ancient thing, seemed happy to have the company, and after a while the two animals were inseparable. The cat had learned how to behave by watching Remus, and so it would go for a walk, come when you called it, shake hands and so on. Then Remus died, and now the Goldbergs had to move. Mom had offered to take Stella in, and though Father sighed heavily when she told him about it, he hadn’t refused.

  Mrs. Goldberg sat on the worn carpet beside Alex, and leaned forward so she could see under the table. Her face was puffy. “It’s okay, Stell-bell,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  The cat stared at Mrs. Goldberg with an expression that said You’ve got to be kidding. Alex grinned to see such skepticism.

  Mrs. Goldberg reached under the table; the cat squeaked in protest as it was pulled out, then lay in Mrs. Goldberg’s lap quivering like a rabbit. The two women talked about other things. Then Mrs. Goldberg put Stella in Alex’s mother’s lap. There were scars on its ears and head. It breathed fast. Finally it calmed under Mom’s hands. “Maybe we should feed her something,” Mom said. She knew how distressed animals could get in this situation: they themselves had left behind their dog Pongo, when they moved from Toronto to Boston. Alex and she had been the ones to take Pongo to the Wallaces; the dog had howled as they left, and walking away Mom had cried. Now she told Alex to get some chicken out of the fridge and put it in a bowl for Stella. He put the bowl on the couch next to the cat, who sniffed at it disdainfully and refused to look at it. Only after much calming would it nibble at the meat, nose drawn high over one sharp eyetooth. Mom talked to Mrs. Goldberg, who watched Stella eat. When the cat was done it hopped off Mom’s lap and walked up and down the couch. But it wouldn’t let Alex near; it crouched as he approached, and with a desperate look dashed back under the table. “Oh Stella!” Mrs. Goldberg laughed. “It’ll take her a while to get used to you,” she said to Alex, and sniffed. Alex shrugged.

  * * *

  Outside the wind ripped at the treetops sticking above the buildings. Alex walked up Chester Street to Brighton Avenue and turned left, hurrying to counteract the cold. Soon he reached the river and could walk the path on top of the embankment. Down in its trough the river’s edges were crusted with ice, but midstream was still free, the silty gray water riffled by white. He passed the construction site for the dam and came to the moraine, a long mound of dirt, rocks, lumber, and junk. He climbed it with big steps, and stood looking at the glacier.

  The glacier was immense, like a range of white hills rolling in from the west and north. The Charles poured from the bottom of it and roiled through a cut in the terminal moraine; the glacier’s snout loomed so large that the river looked small, like a gutter after a storm. Bright white iceberg chu
nks had toppled off the face of the snout, leaving fresh blue scars and clogging the river below.

  Alex walked the edge of the moraine until he was above the glacier’s side. To his left was the razed zone, torn streets and fresh dirt and cellars open to the sky; beyond it Allston and Brighton, still bustling with city life. Under him, the sharp-edged mound of dirt and debris. To his right, the wilderness of ice and rock. Looking straight ahead it was hard to believe that the two halves of the view came from the same world. Neat. He descended the moraine’s steep loose inside slope carefully, following a path of his own.

  The meeting of glacier and moraine was a curious juncture. In some places the moraine had been undercut and had spilled across the ice in wide fans; you couldn’t be sure if the dirt was solid or if it concealed crevasses. In other places melting had created a gap, so that a thick cake of ice stood over empty air, and dripped into gray pools below. Once Alex had seen a car in one of these low wet caves, stripped of its paint and squashed flat.

  In still other places, however, the ice sloped down and overlaid the moraine’s gravel in a perfect ramp, as if fitted by carpenters. Alex walked the trough between dirt and ice until he reached one of these areas, then took a big step onto the curved white surface. He felt the usual quiver of excitement: he was on the glacier.

  It was steep on the rounded side slope, but the ice was embedded with thousands of chunks of gravel. Each pebble, heated by the sun, had sunk into a little pocket of its own, and was then frozen into position in the night; this process had been repeated until most chunks were about three-quarters buried. Thus the glacier had a peculiarly pocked, rocky surface, which gripped the torn soles of Alex’s shoes. A non-slip surface. No slope on the glacier was too steep for him. Crunch, crunch, crunch: tiny arabesques of ice collapsed under his feet with every step. He could change the glacier, he was part of its action. Part of it.

  Where the side slope leveled out the first big crevasses appeared. These deep blue fissures were dangerous, and Alex stepped between two of them and up a narrow ramp very carefully. He picked up a fist-sized rock, tossed it in the bigger crack. Clunk clunk … splash. He shivered and walked on, ritual satisfied. He knew from these throws that at the bottom of the glacier there were pockets of air, pools of water, streams running down to form the Charles … a deadly subglacial world. No one who fell into it would ever escape. It made the surface ice glow with a magical danger, an internal light.

  Up on the glacier proper he could walk more easily. Crunch crunch crunch, over an undulating broken debris-covered plain. Ice for miles on miles. Looking back toward the city he saw the Hancock and Prudential towers to the right, the lower MIT towers to the left, poking up at low scudding clouds. The wind was strong here and he pulled his jacket hood’s drawstring tighter. Muffled hoot of wind, a million tricklings. There were little creeks running in channels cut into the ice: it was almost like an ordinary landscape, streams running in ravines over a broad rocky meadow. And yet everything was different. The streams ran into crevasses or potholes and instantly disappeared, for instance. It was wonderfully strange to look down such a rounded hole: the ice was very blue and you could see the air bubbles in it, air from some year long ago.

  Broken seracs exposed fresh ice to the sun. Scores of big erratic boulders dotted the glacier, some the size of houses. He made his way from one to the next, using them as cover. There were gangs of boys from Cambridge who occasionally came up here, and they were dangerous. It was important to see them before he was seen.

  A mile or more onto the glacier, ice had flowed around one big boulder, leaving a curving wall some ten feet high—another example of the glacier’s whimsy, one of hundreds of strange surface formations. Alex had wedged some stray boards into the gap between rock and ice, making a seat that was tucked out of the west wind. Flat rocks made a fine floor, and in the corner he had even made a little fireplace. Every fire he lit sank the hearth of flat stones a bit deeper into the otherwise impervious ice.

  This time he didn’t have enough kindling, though, so he sat on his bench, hands deep in pockets, and looked back at the city. He could see for miles. Wind whistled over the boulder. Scattered shafts of sunlight broke against ice. Mostly shadowed, the jumbled expanse was faintly pink. This was because of an algae that lived on nothing but ice and dust. Pink; the blue of the seracs; gray ice; patches of white, marking snow or sunlight. In the distance dark clouds scraped the top of the blue Hancock building, making it look like a distant serac. Alex leaned back against his plank wall, whistling one of the songs of the Pirate King.

  * * *

  Everyone agreed the cat was crazy. Her veneer of civilization was thin, and at any loud noise—the phone’s ring, the door slamming—she would jump as if shot, then stop in mid-flight as she recalled that this particular noise entailed no danger; then lick down her fur, pretending she had never jumped in the first place. A flayed sensibility.

  She was also very wary about proximity to people; this despite the fact that she had learned to love being petted. So she would often get in moods where she would approach one of them and give an exploratory, half-purring mew; then, if you responded to the invitation and crouched to pet her, she would sidle just out of arm’s reach, repeating the invitation but retreating with each shift you made, until she either let you get within petting distance—just—or decided it wasn’t worth the risk, and scampered away. Father laughed at this intense ambivalence. “Stella, you’re too stupid to live, aren’t you,” he said in a teasing voice.

  “Charles,” Mom said.

  “It’s the best example of approach avoidance behavior I’ve ever seen,” Father said. Intrigued by the challenge, he would sit on the floor, back against the couch and legs stretched ahead of him, and put Stella on his thighs. She would either endure his stroking until it ended, when she could jump away without impediment—or relax, and purr. She had a rasping loud purr, it reminded Alex of a chainsaw heard across the glacier. “Bug brain,” Father would say to her. “Button head.”

  After a few weeks, as August turned to September and the leaves began to wither and fall, Stella started to lap sit voluntarily—but always in Mom’s lap. “She likes the warmth,” Mom said.

  “It’s cold on the floor,” Father agreed, and played with the cat’s scarred ears. “But why do you always sit on Helen’s lap, huhn, Stell? I’m the one who started you on that.” Eventually the cat would step onto his lap as well, and stretch out as if it was something she had always done. Father laughed at her.

  Stella never rested on Alex’s lap voluntarily, but would sometimes stay if he put her there and stroked her slowly for a long time. On the other hand she was just as likely to look back at him, go cross-eyed with horror and leap desperately away, leaving claw marks in his thighs. “She’s so weird,” he complained to Mom after one of these abrupt departures.

  “It’s true,” Mom said with her low laugh. “But you have to remember that Stella was probably an abused kitty.”

  “How can you abuse a stray?”

  “I’m sure there are ways. And maybe she was abused at home, and ran away.”

  “Who would do that?”

  “Some people would.”

  Alex recalled the gangs on the glacier, and knew it was true. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be at their mercy, all the time. After that he thought he understood her permanent frown of deep concentration and distrust, as she sat staring at him. “It’s just me, Stell-bells.”

  Thus when the cat followed him up onto the roof, and seemed to enjoy hanging out there with him, he was pleased. Their apartment was on the top floor, and they could take the pantry stairs and use the roof as a porch. It was a flat expanse of graveled tarpaper, a terrible imitation of the glacier’s non-slip surface, but it was nice on dry days to go up there and look around, toss pebbles onto other roofs, see if the glacier was visible, and so on. Once Stella pounced at a piece of string trailing from his pants, and next time he brought up a length of Father’s yarn.
He was astonished and delighted when Stella responded by attacking the windblown yarn enthusiastically, biting it, clawing it, wrestling it from her back when Alex twirled it around her, and generally behaving in a very kittenish way. Perhaps she had never played as a kitten, Alex thought, so that it was all coming out now that she felt safe. But the play always ended abruptly; she would come to herself in mid-bite or bat, straighten up, and look around with a forbidding expression, as if to say What is this yarn doing draped over me?—then lick her fur and pretend the preceding minutes hadn’t happened. It made Alex laugh.

  * * *

  Although the glacier had overrun many towns to the west and north, Watertown and Newton most recently, there was surprisingly little evidence of that in the moraines, or in the ice. It was almost all natural: rock and dirt and wood. Perhaps the wood had come from houses, perhaps some of the gravel had once been concrete, but you couldn’t tell that now. Just dirt and rock and splinters, with an occasional chunk of plastic or metal thrown in. Apparently the overrun towns had been plowed under on the spot, or moved. Mostly it looked like the glacier had just left the White Mountains.

  Father and Gary Jung had once talked about the latest plan from MIT. The enormous dam they were building downstream, between Allston and Cambridge, was to hold the glacier back. They were going to heat the concrete of the inner surface of the dam, and melt the ice as it advanced. It would become a kind of frozen reservoir. The melt water would pour through a set of turbines before becoming the Charles, and the electricity generated by these turbines would help to heat the dam. Very neat.

  The ice of the glacier, when you got right down to look at it, was clear for an inch or less, cracked and bubble-filled; then it turned a milky white. You could see the transition. Where the ice had been sheared vertically, however—on the side of a serac, or down in a crevasse—the clear part extended in many inches. You could see air bubbles deep inside, as if it were badly made glass. And this ice was distinctly blue. Alex didn’t understand why there should be that difference, between the white ice laying flat and the blue ice cut vertically. But there it was.