The Year's Best SF 09 # 1991

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Well, what about me? Do you think it was easy for me? Growing up with a dead sister—everything I did, it was ‘Too bad you can’t be more like Karen’ and ‘Karen wouldn’t have done it that way’ and ‘If only Karen had.…’ How do you think that made me feel, huh? You had it easy—I was the one who had to live up to the standards of a goddamn angel.”

  “Tough breaks, kid. Better than being dead.”

  “Damn it, Karen, I loved you. I love you. Why did you have to go away?”

  “I know that, kid. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry. I love you too, but I have to go. Can you let me go? Can you just be yourself now, and stop trying to be me?”

  “I’ll … I’ll try.”

  “Goodbye, little sister.”

  “Goodbye, Karen.”

  She was alone in the settling shadows on an empty, rugged plain. Ahead of her, the sun was barely kissing the ridgetops. The dust she kicked up was behaving strangely; rather than falling to the ground, it would hover half a meter off the ground. She puzzled over the effect, then saw that all around her, dust was silently rising off the ground. For a moment she thought it was another hallucination, but then realized it was some kind of electrostatic charging effect. She moved forward again through the rising fog of moondust. The sun reddened, and the sky turned a deep purple.

  The darkness came at her like a demon. Behind her only the tips of mountains were illuminated, the bases disappearing into shadow. The ground ahead of her was covered with pools of ink that she had to pick her way around. Her radio locator was turned on, but receiving only static. It could only pick up the locator beacon from the Moonshadow if she got in line of sight of the crash site. She must be nearly there, but none of the landscape looked even slightly familiar. Ahead—was that the ridge she’d climbed to radio Earth? She couldn’t tell. She climbed it, but didn’t see the blue marble. The next one?

  The darkness had spread up to her knees. She kept tripping over rocks invisible in the dark. Her footsteps struck sparks from the rocks, and behind her footprints glowed faintly. Triboluminescent glow, she thought—nobody has ever seen that before. She couldn’t die now, not so close. But the darkness wouldn’t wait. All around her the darkness lay like an unsuspected ocean, rocks sticking up out of the tidepools into the dying sunlight. The undervoltage alarm began to warble as the rising tide of darkness reached her solar array. The crash site had to be around here somewhere, it had to. Maybe the locator beacon was broken? She climbed up a ridge and into the light, looking around desperately for clues. Shouldn’t there have been a rescue mission by now?

  Only the mountaintops were in the light. She aimed for the nearest and tallest mountain she could see and made her way across the darkness to it, stumbling and crawling in the ocean of ink, at last pulling herself into the light like a swimmer gasping for air. She huddled on her rocky island, desperate as the tide of darkness slowly rose about her. Where were they? Where were they?

  * * *

  Back on Earth, work on the rescue mission had moved at a frantic pace. Everything was checked and triple-checked—in space, cutting corners was an invitation for sudden death—but still the rescue mission had been dogged by small problems and minor delays, delays that would have been routine for an ordinary mission, but loomed huge against the tight mission deadline.

  The scheduling was almost impossibly tight—the mission had been set to launch in four months, not four weeks. Technicians scheduled for vacations volunteered to work overtime, while suppliers who normally took weeks to deliver parts delivered overnight. Final integration for the replacement for Moonshadow, originally to be called Explorer but now hastily re-christened Rescuer, was speeded up, and the transfer vehicle launched to the Space Station months ahead of the original schedule, less than two weeks after the Moonshadow crash. Two shuttle-loads of propellant swiftly followed, and the transfer vehicle was mated to its aeroshell and tested. While the rescue crew practiced possible scenarios on the simulator, the lander, with engines inspected and replaced, was hastily modified to accept a third person on ascent, tested, and then launched to rendezvous with Rescuer. Four weeks after the crash the stack was fueled and ready, the crew briefed, and the trajectory calculated. The crew shuttle launched through heavy fog to join their Rescuer in orbit.

  Thirty days after the unexpected signal from the moon had revealed a survivor of the Moonshadow expedition, Rescuer left orbit for the moon.

  * * *

  From the top of the mountain ridge west of the crash site, Commander Stanley passed his searchlight over the wreckage one more time and shook his head in awe. “An amazing job of piloting,” he said. “Looks like she used the TEI motor for braking, and then set it down on the RCS verniers.”

  “Incredible,” Tanya Nakora murmured. “Too bad it couldn’t save her.”

  The record of Patricia Mulligan’s travels was written in the soil around the wreck. After the rescue team had searched the wreckage, they found the single line of footsteps that led due west, crossed the ridge, and disappeared over the horizon. Stanley put down the binoculars. There was no sign of returning footprints. “Looks like she wanted to see the moon before her air ran out,” he said. Inside his helmet he shook his head slowly. “Wonder how far she got?”

  “Could she be alive somehow?” asked Nakora. “She was a pretty ingenious kid.”

  “Not ingenious enough to breathe vacuum. Don’t fool yourself—this rescue mission was a political toy from the start. We never had a chance of finding anybody up here still alive.”

  “Still, we had to try, didn’t we?”

  Stanley shook his head and tapped his helmet. “Hold on a sec, my damn radio’s acting up. I’m picking up some kind of feedback—almost sounds like a voice.”

  “I hear it too, Commander. But it doesn’t make any sense.”

  The voice was faint in the radio. “Don’t turn off the lights. Please, please, don’t turn off your light.…”

  Stanley turned to Nakora. “Do you…?”

  “I hear it, Commander … but I don’t believe it.”

  Stanley picked up the searchlight and began sweeping the horizon. “Hello? Rescuer calling Astronaut Patricia Mulligan. Where the hell are you?”

  * * *

  The spacesuit had once been pristine white. It was now dirty grey with moondust, only the ragged and bent solar array on the back carefully polished free of debris. The figure in it was nearly as ragged.

  After a meal and a wash, she was coherent and ready to explain.

  “It was the mountaintop. I climbed the mountaintop to stay in the sunlight, and I just barely got high enough to hear your radios.”

  Nakora nodded. “That much we figured out. But the rest—the last month—you really walked all the way around the moon? Eleven thousand kilometers?”

  Trish nodded. “It was all I could think of. I figured, about the distance from New York to LA and back—people have walked that and lived. It came to a walking speed of just under ten miles an hour. Farside was the hard part—turned out to be much rougher than nearside. But strange and weirdly beautiful, in places. You wouldn’t believe the things I saw.”

  She shook her head, and laughed quietly. “I don’t believe some of the things I saw. The immensity of it—we’ve barely scratched the surface. I’ll be coming back, Commander. I promise you.”

  “I’m sure you will,” said Commander Stanley. “I’m sure you will.”

  * * *

  As the ship lifted off the moon, Trish looked out for a last view of the surface. For a moment she thought she saw a lonely figure standing on the surface, waving her goodbye. She didn’t wave back.

  She looked again, and there was nothing out there but magnificent desolation.

  FRAGMENTS OF AN ANALYSIS OF A CASE OF HYSTERIA

  Ian McDonald

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some f
requency in Interzone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for Desolation Road. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six and King of Morning, Queen of Day, and a collection of his short fiction, Empire Dreams. Coming up is a new novel, The Broken Land (the British edition will be called Hearts, Hands, & Voices), and a new collection, as well as several graphic novels. His story “Rainmaker Cometh” was in our Eighth Annual Collection. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

  In the vivid and eloquent story that follows, he takes us back to the days before World War II, and deep into the uneasy dreams of a young girl on a collision course with a strange and frightening destiny.

  THE NIGHT SLEEPER

  Hurrying, hurrying, faster, faster; hurrying, hurrying, faster, faster, through the forests of the night; the night train, cleaving through the forests of the night, through the trees, the endless trees, cleaving them with the beam of its headlight that casts its white pool upon the endlessly unreeling iron line, cleaving the forest with the tireless stroke of its pistons, cleaving the night with its plume of spark-laden smoke streamed back across the great sleek length of the engine and the shout of its hundred wheels, cleaving through the night that lies across the heart of the continent; the night train, hurrying, hurrying, faster, faster.

  Though it must be hours since your father bid you good-night from the upper berth, hours more since the sleeping car attendant did that clever folding trick with the seat and unrolled the bundles of fresh laundered bedding, you are not asleep. You cannot sleep. Out there, beyond the window are the trees of the night forest. You cannot see them, but you know they are there, shouldered close together, shouldered close to the track, branches curving down to brush the sides of the sleeping car, like the long arms of old, stoop-shouldered men.

  And though you cannot see them either, you are also aware of the hundreds of other lives lying still in their berths in the ochre glow of their railway company nightlights, rocked and rolled to sleep by the rolling gait of the night sleeper across the border; hundreds of other lives lying still, one above the other in their tiny, ochre lit compartments, carried onward through the forest of the night to their final destinations. From the adjacent compartment come the sounds again; the small sounds, the intimate sounds, a woman’s whisper, a man speaking softly, the creak of leather upholstery, stifled laughter, the repeated knock knock knock knock knock of something hard against the wooden partition. As you lie in your bottom berth your head next to the knock knock knock knock knock from the next compartment, it is as if you are suddenly aware of everything all at once, the lovers across the partition, the sleeping passengers in their berths, the blast of sound and steam and speed of the night train’s momentary passage, cleaving through the forest of the night, cleaving through the endless, stoop-shouldered trees.

  You must have slept. You had thought that sleep would elude you, but the rhythm of the wheels must have lulled you to sleep, for it is the change of that tireless rhythm that has woken you. The train is slowing. You turn in your berth to look out of the window but all there is to be seen is your reflection looking back at you. The train has slowed to a crawl, grinding along the track with a slowness that is dreadful to you because you fear that should the train stop it will never, never start again.

  Up the line, far away, a bell clangs. Barely audible over the grind of the wheels are voices, voices outside the window, shouting in a language you do not understand.

  Your father is awake now. He descends the wooden ladder, switches on the lights and sits across the table from you, peering out of the window to see why the train is stopping. By the light from the window you see the faces. There are men standing by the side of the track, men with stupid, slow, brutal faces. As you grind past them, they pause in their labour to stare up into your faces with slow, brutal incomprehension. The stupid brutality of their faces blinds you to what it is they are doing. They are carrying bodies, slung between them by the hands and the feet, and laying them out by the side of the track. The naked bodies of men and women and children, carried and laid out side by side on the gravel between the track and the edge of the trees. And now you see, far away up the line, a red glow, as if from a great conflagration; something burning fiercely, endlessly, out there in the forest of the night. You ask your father what it all means.

  “Some terrible calamity,” he says, as if in a dream. ‘An accident, up the line; a train has crashed and set the forest burning.”

  The night train grinds on, past the bodies of the men and the women and the children, laid side by side while the men carry and set, carry and set, muttering in their dull, brutal language, and the iron bell clangs.

  You know that you have not slept, though it is as if you have, and woken up at a different place, a different time. Now the train is entering a rural railway station. A bumptious station master with a black moustache and an excess of gold braid is waving the night train in to a stand by the platform. The picket fence is decked with bunting and the little wooden station house is gaily hung with Japanese paper lanterns that swing and rattle in the wind from the night forest. The train creaks to a halt and you hear the music. Outside the waiting room a string quartet is playing the last movement from Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, rather poorly, you think. The station master comes striding along the platform in his black kneeboots blowing his whistle and shouting,

  “All change, all change.”

  “Come, Anna,” your Father says, grabbing his violin case from the rack and before you have time to think you are out on the platform, you and your father and the hundreds and hundreds of others aboard the night train, standing there in your nightdresses and pyjamas and dressing gowns in the cold night air.

  Up the line, the locomotive hisses steam. The carriages creak and shift.

  “Teas, coffees and hot savouries in the waiting room,” announces the beaming station master. “In the waiting room if you please, sirs and madams.”

  Murmuring gladly to each other, the passengers file into the waiting room but with every step you take toward those open wooden doors you feel a dreadful reluctance grow and grow until you know that you must not cannot will not go in.

  “No Father, do not make me!” you cry but your Father says, “Anna, Anna, please, it is only for a little while, until the next train comes,” but you will not cannot must not go, for you have seen, through the latticed windows of the rural railway station, what is waiting in the waiting room. In the waiting room is a baker in a white apron standing before the open door of an oven. He sees you watching him through the window, and smiles at you, and draws his paddle out of the oven to show you what he has been baking there.

  It is a loaf of fresh golden bread in the shape of a baby.

  THE DOOR AND THE WINDOW

  The case of Fraulein Anna B. first came to my attention in the late winter of 1912 at one of the Wednesday meetings of my International Psycho-Analytical Association through Dr. Geistler, one of the newer members of the Wednesday Circle, who mentioned casually over coffee and cigars a patient he was treating for asthmatic attacks that had failed to yield to conventional medical treatment. These attacks seemed related to the young woman’s dread of enclosed spaces, and after the meeting, he asked if I might attempt an analysis of the psychoneurosis, an undertaking to which I agreed, arranging the first treatment for the following Tuesday morning, at ten a.m.

  I have learned from experience that psychoneuroses often belie themselves by too great an absence from the facial features of the patient: Fraulein Anna B. was one such, to the perceptions a pretty, charming, self-confident young lady of seventeen years, the daughter of a concert violinist with the Imperial Opera who, I learned to my surprise, was acquainted with me through the B’Nai B’rith, the Vienna Jewish Club. She was an only child, her mother h
ad died in Anna’s infancy in an influenza epidemic and she had been brought up solely by the father. I gained the distinct impression that her vivacity, her energy, were more than could be accounted for purely by youthful exuberance.

  She commented on the stuffiness and gloominess of my consulting room, and despite the winter chill, refused to settle until both door and window were opened to the elements. I had taken but a few puffs of a cigar when she became most agitated, claiming that she could not breathe, the smoke was suffocating her. Despite the fact that most of the smoke from my cigar went straight out of the open window into Berggasse, I nevertheless acceded to her request that I refrain from smoking in her presence. Such was her hysterical sensitivity that, on subsequent interviews, the slightest lingering trace of cigar smoke from a previous session was enough to induce an asthmatic attack.

  In interview she was exceedingly talkative and greatly given to the encyclopedic elaboration of even the most trivial anecdote. She could not recall a specific moment when she became aware that she dreaded enclosed spaces, but had to a certain degree felt uncomfortable in small rooms with closed doors and heavy furnishings for as long as she could remember. She had not been consciously aware of a deterioration in her condition until the event that had precipitated first her referral to Dr. Geistler, and ultimately to me.

  In the early autumn her father’s orchestra had taken a performance of The Magic Flute’ on tour through Salzburg to Munich, Zurich, Milan and Venice. Seeing an opportunity to expand his daughter’s education through travel, her father had arranged for her to accompany him. Fraulein Anna B. admitted to feelings of foreboding all the day of the departure which, as the orchestra assembled at the West Bahnhof, became an anxiety, and, with the party boarding the train, an hysterical attack. The hour had been late, the station dark and filled with the steam and smoke of the engines. The rest of the musicians were already installed in their sleeping compartments, from the door her father was calling her to board, the train was about to leave. These details she knew only from having been told after the event; her attention was transfixed by the brass table-lamp in the window of the sleeping compartment she and her father were to share. Seeing that lamp, she had felt such fear and dread as she had never known before, she could not enter that compartment, she could not board that train. The noise and the bustle of the station overwhelmed her, the smoke and the fumes of the engine suffocated her; overcome, she fought for breath but her lungs were paralysed, unable to draw breath.