The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  22 K is a Cobb house. Always been a Cobb house. No squatters here. Give it all to the sea.

  But take the pictures first. Put them on your walls. Remember me. Remember me.

  Should have left years ago. Can’t now.

  Wish you’d stayed, Joan. Miss you.

  Ethel

  The houses around her were black hulks, silent like trees. The crescent moon rose, silvering the ocean. Ethel heard the gulls call to one another, smelled the sea as it licked the beach. In the distance, boats moved on the bay, dots of green and red light, thin black lines of wake.

  “God, I love it here,” she said suddenly, full of contentment.

  KATHE KOJA

  Distances

  Here’s an unsettling study of the kind of sacrifices that must sometimes be made if you’re going to bridge the immense distances of time and space … and death.

  This was Kathe Koja’s second sale, and she is already receiving attention as one of the most exciting new writers around. She has subsequently made several more sales to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. She lives in Willowbrook, Illinois.

  DISTANCES

  Kathe Koja

  Michael, naked on the table, hospital reek curling down his throat, the base of his skull rich with the ache it has had every day since the first one, will probably never lose. He remembers that day: parts of him stone-numb, other parts prickling and alive; moving to make sure he still could; exhilaration; and the sense of the jacks. They had said he would not, physically could not, feel the implants. Wrong—needle-slim, they seemed like pylons, silver pillars underskin.

  He is tall, under the straps; his feet are cold. Three months’ postsurgery growth of yellow hair, already curling. Grey eyes’ glance roams the ceiling, bare peripherals.

  He shifts, a little; the attendant gives him a faraway scowl. The old familiar strap-in: immobilize the head, check CNS response, check for fluid leak, check check check. “I am fine,” he growls, chin strap digging into his jawline, “just fucking fine,” but the attendant, rhino-sized, silent, ignores him entirely.

  The ceiling monitor lights, bright and unexpected. Now what?

  A woman, dark hair, wide mouth, cheekbones like a cat’s, white baggy labcoat shoulders. “Hi,” she says. “Doing all right?”

  “Just ducky,” tightmouthed, tin man with rusted jaw. Don’t tell me, he thinks, more tests. “Who’re you? A doctor?”

  She appears to find this pretty funny. “Not hardly. I’m your handler. My name’s Halloran.” Something offscreen causes that wide mouth to turn down, impatient curvature. “I’ll be in in a couple of minutes, we’ve got a meeting—Yeah I heard you!” and the screen blanks.

  Check-up over, Michael rubs the spots where the straps were. “Excuse me,” he says to the attendant. “That woman who was just onscreen—you know her?”

  “Yeah, I know her.” The attendant seems affronted. “She’s a real bitch.”

  That charcoal drawl, bass whisper from babyface: “Oh good. I hate synthetics.”

  * * *

  “So who’s he? General Custer?”

  Halloran beside him, scent of contraband chocolate mints, slipping him handfuls. They are part of a ten-pair group in an egg-shaped conference room, white jacket and bald head droning away in accentless medspeak at the chopped-down podium. The air is ripe with dedication.

  “That’s Bruce, Dr. Bruce, the director. You’re supposed to be listening to this.”

  “I am. Just not continuously.”

  Dreamy genius meets genius-dreamer. Bad kids in the back of the class, jokes and deadpan, catching on faster than anyone anyway. NASA’d done its profile work magnificently this time: the minute of physical meeting told them that, told them also that, if it was engineered (and it was), so what: it’s great. Maybe all the other pairs feel the same. That’s the goal, anyway. NASA believes there must be something better than a working relationship between handler and glasshead, more than a merely professional bond.

  “He always snort like that when he talks?”

  “You should hear him when he’s not talking.”

  Dr. Bruce: “… bidirectional. The sealed fiber interface, or SFI, affords us—”

  “Glass fibers for glass heads.”

  “Beats an extension cord.”

  Her hair is a year longer than his, but looking in the mirror would show Michael the back of her skull: it’s his. Handlers are first-generation glassheads, just technically imperfect enough to warrant a new improved version—but hey, don’t feel bad, you’re still useful. We can put you to work training your successors, the ones who’ll fly where you can never go; train them to do what you want to; brutally practical demonstration of the Those Who Can’t principle. But who better to handle a glasshead but a glasshead?

  “… which by now I’m sure you’re all used to.” Dr. Bruce again. “But these are extremely important tests. We’ll be using the results to determine your final project placement. I know Project Arrowhead is the plum assignment, but the others are valuable, very much so, if not as strictly ‘glamorous.’” He says it that way, quotes and all, into a room that suddenly stinks of raw tension. “Handlers, you’ll be final-prepping the tandem quarters. Also there’s a meeting at 1700. Subjects—”

  “That’s you,” sucking on a mint. Hint of chocolate on those wide lips.

  “Actually I’m more of an object.”

  “—under supervisory care for the balance of the day. Everyone, please remember and observe the security regulations.”

  “No shootouts in the hallways, huh?”

  “No. But don’t worry.” Halloran gives him a sideways look. “We’ll figure out a way to have fun.”

  * * *

  Arrowhead: inhouse they call it “Voyager’s big brother.” Far, far away: Proxima Centauri. The big news came from the van de Kamp lunar telescope, where the results of new proper motion studies confirmed what everyone had, happily, suspected: bedrock evidence of at least three planets. At least. The possibility of others, and the complexity of their facefirst exploration, precluded the use of even the most sophisticated AI probe. Build new ones, right? No. Something better.

  Thus Arrowhead. And glasshead tech gives it eyes and ears, with almost zero lagtime. This last is accomplished by beaucoup-FTL comlink: two big tin cans on a tachyon string. The tech itself was diplomatically extorted from the Japanese, who nearly twelve years before had helped to construct and launch the machine half of Arrowhead, engineered to interface with a human component that did not yet exist, and proved far more difficult to develop.

  At last: the glassheads. Manned exploration without live-body risk and inherent baggage. Data absorbed by the lucky subject through thinnest fibers, jacked from receiving port into said subject’s brain. The void as seen by human eyes.

  Who wanted a humdrum assignment like sneaking spysat, or making tanks squaredance, when you could ride Arrowhead and be Cortez?

  * * *

  “Hey. State of the art barracks.” Michael takes a slow self-conscious seat on the aggressively new, orthopedically sound bed. “Kinda makes you glad this isn’t the bad old days, when NASA got the shitty end of every stick.”

  “Oh yeah, they thought of everything but good taste.” Halloran’s voice is exquisitely tired. She settles on the other side of the bed, one foot up, one dangling, and talks—inevitably—of Arrowhead. As she speaks her face shifts and changes play across the mobile muscles, taut stalks of bone. She could be a woman talking of her lover, explaining to a stranger. One hand rubs the back of her neck, erratic rhythm.

  “It was so nuts,” that first group. “Everybody just out for blood. Especially me and Ferrante.” Paranoia, envy, round-the-clock jockeying, rumors of sabotage and doctored scores. “Everybody in high-gear bastard twenty-four hours a day. It was all I could think of. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my heart’s going a mile a minute, thinking, Did Bruce see my scores today, really see them? I mean does he know I’m the only one who can do this?
” Her hands stray from neck to hair, weave and twist among the dark locks. Her want shines like a lamp.

  “You got it, didn’t you.” It’s no question, and she knows it.

  “Yeah, I got it. That’s how they found out the tech wasn’t up to spec.” Her voice is absolutely level. “Fucked up, you know, in a simulator. When they told me I’d never be able to go, in any capacity—and I thought of them all, believe me—when they told me, I wanted to just cut out the jacks and die.” She says this without self-pity, without the faintest taint of melodrama, as if it is the only natural thing to want under the circumstances. “Then they told me about Plan B. Which is you.”

  “And so you stayed.”

  “And so I stayed.”

  Quiet. The sonorous hum of air, recirculating. Low nimbus of greenish light around Michael’s head, his glance down, almost shy, trying to see those days, knowing her pain too well to imagine it. Halloran’s hand grabs at her neck; he knows it aches.

  “You better not fuck me up, Michael.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I know.”

  Silence. Where another would retreat, he pushes forward. “Know what I was doing, when they called me? When they told me I made the cut?”

  “What?” Her hands leave her neck, clasp, unclasp, settle like skittish birds. “What were you doing?”

  “Singing,” promptly, grinning, delighted with the memory. “It was late, they were trying to find me all day and I didn’t know it. I was sure I hadn’t made it and I was sad, and pissed, so I went down to the bar and started drinking, and by midnight I was up onstage. And at twenty after one—I’ll never forget it—this guy comes up to me and says, Hey Michael, some guy from NASA’s on the phone, he wants to talk to you. And I knew it! And you know what else?” He leans forward, not noticing then that she loves this story almost as much as he does, not surprised that a comparative stranger can share this glee so fully. “I’d been drinkin’ all night, right, and I should’ve been drunk, but I wasn’t. Not till he called.” He laughs, still floored, having the joy of it all over again. “I was so drunk when I talked to him, I thought Boy you must sound like a real ripe asshole, boy, but I was so happy I didn’t give a shit.” He laughs again. “I hung up and went back onstage and sang like a son of a bitch till four thirty in the morning, and then I got some eggs and grits and got on the plane for Atlanta.”

  She puts up an eyebrow. “What’s the name of the band?”

  “Chronic Six. Chronics one through five busted up.” It is the perfect question, and nobody’s surprised, or surprised that they’re not.

  * * *

  Early days: the pairs, teams as Bruce calls them, solidify. Very little talk between them, and all of it polite. Scrupulous. The glassheads-turned-handlers are avid to better last time’s run: they sniff the way old packmates will, hunt weaknesses and soft spots, watch around the clock. The ones they want most are Halloran and her smartass protegé; the Two-Headed Monster; the self-proclaimed Team Chronic.

  Too-loud music from their quarters, morning ritual of killer coffee drunk only from twin black handleless mugs, labcoats sleeve-slashed and mutilated, “Team Chronic” in black laundry marker across the back, chocolate mints and slogans and mystic aggression, attitude with a capital A. Her snap and his drawl, her detail-stare and his big-picture sprawl, their way of finishing each other’s sentences, of knowing as if by eyeless instinct what the other will do. Above all, their way of winning. And winning.

  “Everybody hates us,” Halloran at meal break, murmuring behind a crust of lunch. “They hated me, too, before.”

  Michael shrugs with vast satisfaction. “All the world hates a winner.”

  “And,” smiling now, coffee steam fragrant around bright eyes, “they can’t even scream teacher’s pet, because Bruce hates us too.”

  “Bruce doesn’t hate us. He loathes us.”

  They’re laughing this over when: “Halloran.” White hand on her shoulder, faint smell of mustard: Ferrante. Old foe, pudgy in immaculate whites, handsome heavy face bare with anger. Behind him, standing like a duelist’s second, Ruthann Duvall, his glasshead, her expression aping his. The whole cafeteria is watching.

  “I want to talk to you, Halloran.”

  “Feel free. I’ve had all my shots.”

  “Shots is right,” Ferrante says. He is obviously on the verge of some kind of fury-fit. “You’re enhanced,” meaning chemically enhanced, meaning illegally doctored; no Inquisitor could have denounced her with more élan. Everyone leans forward, spectators around the cockfight pit. “I’d think that even you would recognize that you’re disrupting the integrity of the whole project, but that’s never mattered to you, has it? Or,” sparing, then, a look for Michael, who sits finger-linked and mild, looking up at Ferrante with what appears to be innocent interest, “your foul-mouthed shadow.”

  Halloran, cocked head, voice sweet with insult: “Oh, I know the species of bug that’s up your ass—you’re stuck in second best and you can’t figure out why. Well, let me make it crystal for you, slim: you suck.”

  “What if I go to Dr. Bruce and ask for a chem scan?”

  “What if I jack you into the sanitation system, you big piece of shit?”

  His fat white hand clops on her shoulder, shoving her so she slews into Michael and both nearly topple. Immediately she is on her feet, on the attack, pursuing, slapping, driving him towards the cafeteria door. Michael, beside her, grabs the avenging arms: “Let him go, the son of a bitch,” and indeed Ferrante takes almost indecent advantage of the moment, leaves, with Ruthann Duvall—contemptuously shaking her still-nearly-bald head—following, muttering, in her mentor’s wake.

  “Fuck you too, tennis ball head!” Halloran yells, then notices a strange sound coming from Michael: the grunt of suppressed laughter. It’s too much, it blows out of him, hands on thighs and bent over with hilarity, and somebody else joins and somebody else too and finally the whole room is laughing. Even Halloran, who is first to stop.

  “Let’s go,” she says.

  Michael rubs helplessly at his eyes. “Tennis ball head!” He can’t stop laughing.

  * * *

  Third week. Long, long day. In their quarters, blast music on, Michael bare-chested on the floor, Halloran rubbing her neck, the muscles thick and painful. Michael watches her, the sore motions.

  “Do your jacks ever hurt?”

  “No!”

  “Mine do. All the time.”

  “No they don’t! They’re not supposed to!”

  He raises his brows at her vehemence, waits.

  “All right,” she says at last, “you’re right. They hurt. But I thought it was because I’m—you know. Defective.” Fiercely: “You’re not defective. It must just be phantom pain.”

  “A phantom pain in the ass.” He sits up, pushes her hands away, begins to massage her hunched shoulders. “Listen, Halloran.” His hands are very strong. “There isn’t anything wrong with me. Got that? Nothing. So relax.” He squeezes, harder and harder, forcing the muscles to give.

  “So,” squeezing, “when do we jack?”

  “We’ve been jacking all damn day.”

  “I mean together.”

  “I don’t know.” Pleasure in her voice, the pain lessening. “That’s up to Bruce, he does all the scheduling.”

  “The hell with Bruce. Let’s do it now.”

  “What?” Even she, rebel, has not considered this. “We can’t,” already wondering why not, really—if they can jack into the computer—“It’s never been done, that I know of, not so early.”

  “Now we really have to.” He’s already on his feet, making for his labcoat, taking from the inner breast pocket a two-meter length of fiber, cased in protective cord, swings it gently jackend like a pendulum at Halloran, a magic tool, you are getting verrrrry sleeeepy. “Come on,” he says. “Just for fun.”

  There is no resisting. “All right,” she says. “Just wait a minute.” There’s a little timer on her wall desk; she sets
it for ten minutes. “When this times out, so do we. Agreed?”

  “Sure thing.” He’s already plugged in, conjurer’s hands, quicker than her eye. He reaches up to guide her down. “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  They’ve jacked in simulation, to prepare; it is, now, the difference between seeing the ocean and swimming, seeing food and eating. They are swamped with it, carried, tumbled, at the moment of mutual entry eyes flash wide, twinned, seeing, knowing, hot with it, incredible

  Michael it’s strong stronger than I thought it would

  know I know great look at this

  and faster than belief thoughts and images burst between them, claiming them, devouring them as they devour, all of each shown to the other without edit or exception, all of it running the link, the living line, a knowing vaster than any other, unthinkably complex, here, now, us, look look see this, without any words; they dance the long corridors of memory, and pain, and sorrow, see old fears, old joys, dead dreams, new happinesses bright as silver streamers, nuance of being direct and pure, sledgehammer in the blood, going on forever, profound communion and

  finally it is Halloran who pulls back, draws them out, whose caution wakes enough to warn that time is over. They unplug simultaneously, mutual shudder of disunity, a chill of spirit strong enough to pain. They sit back, stunned; the real world is too flat after such a dimensionless feast.

  Words are less than useless. In silence is comfort, the knowing—knowing—that one lives who knows you beyond intimacy; two souls, strung hard, adrift on the peculiar fear of the proud, the fear of being forced to go naked in terrible weakness and distress, and finding here the fear is toothless, that knowing and being utterly known could be, is, not exposure but safety, the doctrine of ultimate trust made perfect by glasshead tech.

  They move into each other’s arms, still not speaking.

  Tears are running down Michael’s face; his eyes are closed.

  Halloran’s hands are ice-cold on his wrists.

  “We’ve been jacked all night,” she says, “it’s almost morning.”

  She can feel his body shaking, gently, the slow regular hitching of his chest. She has never loved anyone so much in all her life.