The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  I felt that my guts might burst from my excitement. My fingers trembled on the wheel. “Can I put you up?” I said. “It’s past curfew. You’ll be safer in the morning.”

  “Yes. I’m meeting Steve at ten.”

  And that was all. I pulled into the parking slip and turned off the car. Then I stepped outside into the cool, humid night, and he was there beside me. I listened to him breathe. Almost a hissing sound.

  “Nice house.”

  “It’s my wife’s. She’s a professor at Tulane.”

  Again that harsh intake of breath. He looked up at the gabled roof. For a moment I was afraid he might refuse to come inside. Something in him seemed to resist. But then he followed me onto the porch.

  “You don’t lock your doors?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Hunh. When I was in school, New Orleans was the murder capital of the entire country.”

  “It hasn’t all been bad,” I said.

  Then he was in the living room, standing on the Doshmelti carpet. I excused myself to wash my face and hands in the kitchen bathroom, and when I returned he was looking at the bookcase. “Can I get you something to eat?” I asked. “I’m famished.”

  “Something to drink.” By which he meant alcohol. So I brought out a bottle of white bourbon that we had. I poured him a glass. I really was very hungry. I’d scarcely eaten all day.

  “How can you stand it?” he asked suddenly. He had moved over to a case full of biology and medical texts, a collection Melissa had gathered during her trips.

  He had one of the books open in his hand. With the other, he gestured with his glass around the room. “All this. You’re not a fool. Or are you?”

  He put down the book and then walked over to stand in front of me, inches away, his face inches from my own. “I was at Carville,” he said. “People died there. Aren’t you afraid you’re going to catch something?”

  But I knew I had caught something already. My heart was shuddering. My face was wet.

  I looked up at him, and I thought I could see every pore in his skin. I could see the way his teeth fit into his gums. I could smell his breath and his body when he spoke to me, not just the alcohol but something else. “This state is a sick joke everywhere,” he said. “Those people who attacked the Center, they didn’t have a tenth-grade education between them. How can you blame them?”

  Curtis Garr had black hair in his ears. His lower face was rinsed in gray—he hadn’t shaved. I stood looking up at him, admiring the shapes his thin lips formed around his words. “What does your wife teach?”

  “Biology.”

  At that moment, the phone rang. It was on a table in a little alcove by the door. I didn’t answer it. Garr and I stood inches apart. After three rings the machine picked up.

  “Hi, sweetie,” said Melissa. “I just thought I’d try to catch you before you went to bed. Sorry I missed you. I was just thinking how nice it would be to be in bed with you, sucking that big Monongahela. Just a thought. I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  The machine turned off, and Curtis Garr smiled. “That sounds very cozy.” Then he stepped away from me, back to the bookcase again, and I let out my breath.

  “A third of the population of Louisiana died during the HIV-2 epidemic,” I said. “In just a few years. The feds told them not to worry. The doctors told them it couldn’t happen. The New Baptists were the only ones who didn’t lie to them. What do you expect?”

  “Sin and disease,” he said. “I know the history. Not everybody died of HIV. I knew some biology too—the real kind. And I said something about it. That’s why I was at Carville in the first place. The other thing’s just an excuse.”

  He was staring at the books as he spoke. But he must have been watching me as well, must have seen something in my face as he sipped his whiskey, because he lowered the glass and grinned at me over the rim. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?”

  And then after a moment: “Christ, you are! You hypocrite.”

  But I was standing with my hands held out, my right hand closed around my wrist. “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  He finished his drink and gave a little burp. He put his glass on one of the shelves of the bookcase, and then sat down in the middle of the couch, stretching his thin arms along the top of it on either side. “No, you disgust me,” he said, smiling. “Everything about you disgusts me.”

  * * *

  Often now I’ll start awake in bed, wondering where I am. “Melissa,” I’ll say, still half-asleep, when I get up to go to the bathroom. So Rob tells me on the nights he’s there. I used to sleep as soundly as a child. That night, when Curtis Garr stayed in the house on Exposition Boulevard, was the first I remember lying awake.

  After I had gone upstairs, he sat up late, reading and drinking whiskey on the couch. From time to time I would get up and stand at the top of the stairs, watching the light through the banisters, listening to the rustle of the pages. Near dawn I masturbated, and then, after I’d washed up, I went downstairs and stood next to him as he slept. He had left the light on and had curled up on the couch, still in his suit. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.

  His mouth was open, pushed out of shape by the cushions. I stood next to him, and then I bent down and stretched out my left hand. I almost touched him. My left wrist was a mass of hectic spots. The rash had spread up the inside of my arm.

  In my other hand, I carried a knapsack with some clothes. My passport, and a few small personal items. Almost everything in the house that actually belonged to me, I could fit in that one bag. A picture of Melissa, which is on my bedside still. I had the card to her bank account, and I stood by the couch, wondering if I should leave a note.

  Instead, I went into the kitchen, and from the kitchen phone, I dialed a number we all knew in Louisiana, in those days. Together with the numbers for the fire department and the ordinary police, it was typed on a piece of paper that was thumbtacked to the wall. The phone rang a long time. But then finally someone answered it, and there was nothing in his tone of voice to suggest he’d been asleep.

  Within a few minutes, I was on my way. I walked up to St. Charles Avenue just as it got light, toward the streetcar line. The air was full of birds, their voices competing with the soft noise of the cars as they passed a block away, bound toward Melissa’s house or somewhere else, I couldn’t really tell.

  RECORDING ANGEL

  Ian McDonald

  Here’s a look at a vivid and terrifying future where something enigmatic and implacable is eating Africa, and the people in the way are just going to have to come to terms with it—however they can.

  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 frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Worlds, 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 his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six and The Broken Land, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His most recent books include the well-received new novels Evolution’s Shore and Terminal Café, and another new novel just published in England, Sacrifice of Fools. His short stories have previously appeared in our Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Annual Collections. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

  For the last ten miles she drove past refugees from the xenoforming. Some were in their own vehicles. Many rode town buses that had been commandeered to take the people south, or the grubby white trucks of the UNHCR. Most walked, pushing the things they had saved from the advancing Chaga on handcarts or barrows, or laden on the
heads and backs of women and children. That has always been the way of it, the woman thought as she drove past the unbroken file of people. The world ends, the women and children must carry it, and the United Nations sends its soldiers to make sure they do not drop it. And the news corporations send their journalists to make sure that the world sees without being unduly disturbed. After all, they are only Africans. A continent is being devoured by some thing from the stars, and I am sent to write the obituary of a hotel.

  “I don’t do gossip,” she had told T. P. Costello, SkyNet’s Nairobi station chief when he told her of the international celebrities who were coming to the death-party of the famous Treehouse Hotel. “I didn’t come to this country to cream myself over who’s wearing which designer dress or who’s having an affair with or getting from whom.”

  “I know, I know,” T. P. Costello had said. “You came to Kenya to be a player in Earth’s first contact with the alien. Everyone did. That’s why I’m sending you. Who cares what Brad Pitt thinks about the Gas Cloud theory versus the Little Gray Men theory? Angles are what I want. You can get angles, Gaby. What can you get?”

  “Angles, T. P.,” she had replied, wearily, to her editor’s now-familiar litany.

  “That’s correct. And you’ll be up there with it, right on terminum. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  That’s correct, T. P., she thought. Three months in Kenya and all she had seen of the Chaga had been a distant line of color, like surf on a far reef, under the clouded shadow of Kilimanjaro, advancing imperceptibly but inexorably across the Amboseli plain. The spectator’s view. Up there, on the highlands around Kirinyaga where the latest biological package had come down, she would be within touching distance of it. The player’s view.

  * * *

  There was a checkpoint up at Nanyuki. The South African soldiers in blue UN helmets at first did not know how to treat her, thinking that with her green eyes and long mahogany hair she might be another movie star or television celebrity. When her papers identified her as Gaby McAslan, on-line multimedia journalist with SkyNet East Africa, they stopped being respectful. A woman they could flirt with, a journalist they could touch for bribes. Gaby endured their flirtations and gave their commanding officer three of the dwindling stock of duty-free Swatches she had bought expressly for the purpose of petty corruption. In return she was given a map of the approved route to the hotel. If she stayed on it she would be safe. The bush patrols had orders to shoot suspected looters or loiterers.

  Beyond the checkpoint there were no more refugees. The only vehicles were carrying celebrities to the party at the end of the world, and the news corporations following them. The Kikuyu shambas on either side of the road had been long abandoned. Wild Africa was reclaiming them. For a while, then something else would reclaim them from wild Africa. Reverse terraforming, she thought. Instead of making an alien world into Earth, Earth is made into an alien world. In her open-top SkyNet 4x4, Gaby could sense the Chaga behind the screen of heavy high-country timber, and edgy presence of the alien, and electric tingle of anticipation. She had never been this close before.

  When the first biological package came down on the summit of Kilimanjaro, she had known, in SkyNet Multimedia News’s UK office among the towers of London’s Docklands, that this fallen star had her name written on it. The stuff that had come out of it, that looked a little like rain forest and a little like drained coral reef but mostly like nothing anyone had ever seen before, that disassembled terrestrial vegetation into its component molecules and incorporated them into its own matrix at an unstoppable fifty meters every day, confirmed her holy business. The others that came down in the Bismarck Archipelago, the Ruwenzori, in Ecuador and Papua New Guinea and the Maldives, these were only memos from the star gods. It’s here, it’s waiting for you. Hurry up now.

  Now, the Nyandarua package, drawing its trail of plasma over Lake Victoria and the Rift Valley, would bring her at last face-to-face with life from the stars.

  * * *

  She came across a conga-line of massive tracked transporters, each the size of a large house, wedged into the narrow red-dirt road. Prefabricated accommodation cabins were piled up on top of the transporters. Branches bent and snapped as the behemoths ground past at walking pace. Gaby had heard that UNECTA, the United Nations agency that coordinated research into the Chagas, had dismantled its Ol Tukai base, one of four positioned around Kilimanjaro, all moving backward in synchrony with the advance of the southern Chaga, and sent it north. UNECTA’s pockets were not deep enough, it seemed, to buy a new mobile base, especially now that the multinationals had cut their contributions in the absence of any exploitable technologies coming out of the Chaga.

  UNECTA staff on the tops of the mobile towers waved as she drove carefully past in the red muddy verges. They can probably see the snows of Kirinyaga from that height, she thought. Between the white mountains. We run from the south, we run from the north but the expanding circles of vegetation are closing on us and we cannot escape. Why do we run? We will all have to face it in the end, when it takes everything we know and changes it beyond recognition. We have always imagined that because it comes down in the tropics it is confined here. Why should climate stop it? Nothing else has. Maybe it will only stop when it closes around the poles. Xenoforming complete.

  The hotel was one of those buildings that are like animals in zoos, that by their stillness and coloration can hide from you even when you are right in front of them, and you only know they are there because of the sign on the cage. Two Kenyan soldiers far too young for the size of their weapons met her from the car park full of tour buses and news-company 4x4s. They escorted her along a dirt path between skinny, gray-trunked trees. She could still not see the hotel. She commented on the small wooden shelters that stood every few meters along the path.

  “In case of charging animals,” the slightly older soldier said. “But this is better.” He stroked his weapon as if it were a breast. “Thirty heavy-caliber rounds per second. That will stop more than any wooden shelter.”

  “Since the Chaga has come there are many more animals around,” the younger soldier said. He had taken the laces out of his boots, in the comfortable, country way.

  “Running away,” Gaby said. “Like any sane thing should.”

  “No,” the young, laceless soldier said. “Running into.”

  * * *

  There was a black-painted metal fire escape at the end of the track. As Gaby squinted at the incongruity, the hotel resolved out of the greenery before her. Many of the slim, silver tree trunks were wooden piles, the mass of leaves and creepers concealed the superstructure bulking over her.

  The steward met her at the top of the stairs, checked her name against the guest list, and showed her her room, a tiny wooden cabin with a view of leaves. Gaby thought it must be like this on one of the UNECTA mobile bases; minimal, monastic. She did something to her face and went up to the party on the roof. It had been running for three days. It would only end when the hotel did. The party at the edge of the end of the world. In one glance she saw thirty newsworthy faces and peeked into her bag to check the charge level on her disc recorder. She talked to it as she moved between the faces to the bar. The Out of Africa look was the thing among the newsworthy this year: riding breeches, leather, with the necessary twist of twenty-first-century knowing with the addition of animal-skin prints.

  Gaby ordered a piña colada from the Kenyan barman and wondered as he shook it what incentive the management had offered him—all the staff—to stay. Family relocation to other hotels, on the Coast, down in Zanzibar, she reckoned. And where do they go when they run out of hotels to relocate to? Interesting, but not the angle, she decided as the barman poured out the thick, semeny proof of his ability.

  “Bugger all here, T. P.,” she said to the little black machine in her shirt pocket. Then cocktail-party dynamics parted the people in front of her and there it was, one hundred feet away beyond the gray wooden railing, at the edge of the artific
ial water hole they dredged with bulldozers in the off-season. One hundred feet. Fifteen seconds walk. Eighteen hours crawl. If you kept very still and concentrated you would be able to see it moving, as you could see the slow sweep of the minute hand of your watch. This was the Chaga not on the geographical scale, devouring whole landscapes, but on the molecular.

  * * *

  Gaby walked through the gap in the bright and the beautiful. She walked past Brad Pitt. She walked past Antonio Banderas, with his new supermodel girlfriend. She walked past Julia Roberts so close she could see the wrinkles and sags that the editing computers digitally smoothed. They were only celebrities. They could not change the world, or suffer to have their world changed, even by alien intervention. Gaby rested her hands on the rail and looked over the Chaga.

  “It’s like being on the sundeck of a great, archaic, ocean-liner, cruising close to the shore of an alien archipelago,” she told the recorder. The contrast between the place she was and the place out there was as great as between land and sea, the border between the two as shifting and inexact. There was no line where earth became un-earth; rather a gradual infection of the highland forest with the colored hexagons of alien ground cover that pushed up fingers and feelers and strange blooms between the tree trunks into the disturbing pseudocoral forms of the low Chaga. With distance the alien reef grew denser and the trees fewer; only the tallest and strongest withstood the attack of the molecular processors, lifted high like the masts of beached ships. A kilometer beyond the tide line a wall of red pillars rose a sheer three hundred meters from the rumbled land reefs before opening into a canopy of interlinked hexagonal leaf plates.

  “The Great Wall,” Gaby said, describing the scene before her to the disc. The Chaga beyond offered only glimpses of itself as it rose toward cloud-shrouded Kirinyaga: a gleam of the open white palm of a distant hand-tree, the sway of moss-covered balloons, the glitter of light from crystals. What kind of small craft might put forth from such a shore to meet this ship of vanities? she wondered.