The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  That night, as she dreamed among the doomed towers of Nairobi, the elephant came to her again. It stood on the border between worlds and raised its trunk and its alien hands and spoke to her. It told her that only fools feared the change that would make things what they could be, and should be; that change was the special gift of whatever had made the Chaga. She knew in her dream that the elephant was speaking with the voice of Prenderleith, but she could not see him, except as a silent shadow moving in the greater dark beyond humanity’s floodlights: Adam again, hunting in the Africa of his heart.

  DEATH DO US PART

  Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. Silverberg has won five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Up the Line, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, and three novel-length expansions of the famous Isaac Asimov stories “Nightfall,” “The Bicentennial Man,” and “The Ugly Little Boy.” His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and a massive retrospective collection The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume One: Secret Sharers. His most recent books are the novels Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, Mountains of Majipoor, and Starborne. A new novel, Sorcerers of Majipoor, is due out any day now. His stories have appeared previously in every one of our first ten Annual Collections. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

  Here he gives us a quiet but compelling look at a May-December romance of a unique and poignant kind.…

  It was her first, his seventh. She was 32, he was 363: the good old April/September number. They honeymooned in Venice, Nairobi, the Malaysia Pleasure Dome, and one of the posh L-5 resorts, a shimmering glassy sphere with round-the-clock sunlight and waterfalls that tumbled like cascades of diamonds, and then they came home to his lovely sky-house suspended on tremulous guy-wires a thousand meters above the Pacific to begin the everyday part of their life together.

  Her friends couldn’t get over it. “He’s ten times your age!” they would exclaim. “How could you possibly want anybody that old?” Marilisa admitted that marrying Leo was more of a lark for her than anything else. An impulsive thing; a sudden impetuous leap. Marriages weren’t forever, after all—just thirty or forty years and then you moved along. But Leo was sweet and kind and actually quite sexy. And he had wanted her so much. He genuinely did seem to love her. Why should his age be an issue? He didn’t appear to be any older than thirty-five or so. These days you could look as young as you liked. Leo did his Process faithfully and punctually, twice each decade, and it kept him as dashing and vigorous as a boy.

  There were little drawbacks, of course. Once upon a time, long long ago, he had been a friend of Marilisa’s great-grandmother: They might even have been lovers. She wasn’t going to ask. Such things sometimes happened and you simply had to work your way around them. And then also he had an ex-wife on the scene: Number Three, Katrin, 247 years old and not looking a day over 30. She was constantly hovering about. Leo still had warm feelings for her. “A wonderfully dear woman, a good and loyal friend,” he would say. “When you get to know her you’ll be as fond of her as I am.” That one was hard, all right. What was almost as bad, he had children three times Marilisa’s age and more. One of them—the next-to-youngest, Fyodor—had an insufferable and presumptuous way of winking and sniggering at her, that hundred-year-old son of a bitch. “I want you to meet our father’s newest toy,” Fyodor said of her, once, when yet another of Leo’s centenarian sons, previously unsuspected by Marilisa, turned up. “We get to play with her when he’s tired of her.” Someday Marilisa was going to pay him back for that.

  Still and all, she had no serious complaints. Leo was an ideal first husband: wise, warm, loving, attentive, generous. She felt nothing but the greatest tenderness for him. And then too, he was so immeasurably experienced in the ways of the world. If being married to him was a little like being married to Abraham Lincoln or Augustus Caesar, well, so be it: They had been great men, and so was Leo. He was endlessly fascinating. He was like seven husbands rolled into one. She had no regrets, none at all, not really.

  * * *

  In the spring of ’87 they go to Capri for their first anniversary. Their hotel is a reconstructed Roman villa on the southern slope of Monte Tiberio: alabaster walls frescoed in black and red, a brilliantly colored mosaic of sea creatures in the marble bathtub, a broad travertine terrace that looks out over the sea. They stand together in the darkness, staring at the awesome sparkle of the stars. A crescent moon slashes across the night. His arm is around her; her head rests against his breast. Though she is a tall woman, Marilisa is barely heart-high to him.

  “Tomorrow at sunrise,” he says, “we’ll see the Blue Grotto. And then in the afternoon we’ll hike down below here to the Cave of the Mater Magna. I always get a shiver when I’m there. Thinking about the ancient islanders who worshiped their goddess under that cliff, somewhere back in the Pleistocene. Their rites and rituals, the offerings they made to her.”

  “Is that when you first came here?” she asks, keeping it light and sly. “Somewhere back in the Pleistocene?”

  “A little later than that, really. The Renaissance, I think it was. Leonardo and I traveled down together from Florence—”

  “You and Leonardo, you were just like that.”

  “Like that, yes. But not like that, if you take my meaning.”

  “And Cosimo de’ Medici. Another one from the good old days. Cosimo gave such great parties, right?”

  “That was Lorenzo,” he says. “Lorenzo the Magnificent, Cosimo’s grandson. Much more fun than the old man. You would have adored him.”

  “I almost think you’re serious when you talk like that.”

  “I’m always serious. Even when I’m not.” His arm tightens around her. He leans forward and down, and buries a kiss in her thick dark hair. “I love you,” he whispers.

  “I love you,” she says. “You’re the best first husband a girl could want.”

  “You’re the finest last wife a man could ever desire.”

  The words skewer her. Last wife? Is he expecting to die in the next ten or twenty or thirty years? He is old—ancient—but nobody has any idea yet where the limits of Process lie. Five hundred years? A thousand? Who can say? No one able to afford the treatments has died a natural death yet, in the four hundred years since Process was invented. Why, then, does he speak so knowingly of her as his last wife? He may live long enough to have seven, ten, fifty wives after her.

  Marilisa is silent a long while.

  Then she asks him, quietly, uncertainly, “I don’t understand why you said that.”

  “Said what?”

  “The thing about my being your last wife.”

  He hesitates just a moment. “But why would I ever want another, now that I have you?”

  “Am I so utterly perfect?”

  “I love you.”

  “You loved Tedesca and Thane and Iavilda too,” she says. “And Miaule and Katrin.” She is counting on her fingers in the darkness. One wife missing from the list. “And—Syantha. See, I know all their names. You must have loved them but the marriages ended anyway. They have to end. No matter how much you love a person, you can’t keep a marriage going forever.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just do. Everybody knows it.”

  “I would like this marriage never to end,” he tells her. “I’d like it to go on and on and on. To continue to the end of time. Is that all right? Is such a sentiment permissible, do you think?”

  “What a romantic you are, Leo!”

  “What else can I be but romantic, tonight? This place; the spring night; the moon, the s
tars, the sea; the fragrance of the flowers in the air. Our anniversary. I love you. Nothing will ever end for us. Nothing.”

  “Can that really be so?” she asks.

  “Of course. Forever and ever, as it is this moment.”

  * * *

  She thinks from time to time of the men she will marry after she and Leo have gone their separate ways. For she knows that she will. Perhaps she’ll stay with Leo for ten years, perhaps for fifty; but ultimately, despite all his assurances to the contrary, one or the other of them will want to move on. No one stays married forever. Fifteen, twenty years, that’s the usual. Sixty or seventy, tops.

  She’ll marry a great athlete next, she decides. And then a philosopher; and then a political leader; and then stay single for a few decades, just to clear her palate, so to speak, an intermezzo in her life, and when she wearies of that she’ll find someone entirely different, a simple rugged man who likes to hunt, to work in the fields with his hands, and then a yachtsman with whom she’ll sail the world, and then maybe when she’s about three hundred she’ll marry a boy, an innocent of eighteen or nineteen who hasn’t even had his first Prep yet, and then—then—

  A childish game. It always brings her to tears, eventually. The unknown husbands that wait for her in the misty future are vague chilly phantoms, fantasies, frightening, inimical. They are like swords that will inevitably fall between her and Leo, and she hates them for that.

  The thought of having the same husband for all the vast expanse of time that is the rest of her life is a little disturbing—it gives her a sense of walls closing in, and closing and closing and closing—but the thought of leaving Leo is even worse. Or of his leaving her. Maybe she isn’t truly in love with him, at any rate not as she imagines love at its deepest to be, but she is happy with him. She wants to stay with him. She can’t really envision parting from him and moving on to someone else.

  But of course she knows that she will. Everybody does, in the fullness of time.

  Everybody.

  * * *

  Leo is a sandpainter. Sandpainting is his fifteenth or twentieth career. He has been an architect, an archaeologist, a space-habitats developer, a professional gambler, an astronomer, and a number of other disparate and dazzling things. He reinvents himself every decade or two. That’s as necessary to him as Process itself. Making money is never an issue, since he lives on the compounding interest of investments set aside centuries ago. But the fresh challenge—ah, yes, always the fresh challenge!

  Marilisa hasn’t entered on any career path yet. It’s much too soon. She is, after all, still in her first life, too young for Process, merely in the Prep stage yet. Just a child, really. She has dabbled in ceramics, written some poetry, composed a little music. Lately she has begun to think about studying economics or perhaps Spanish literature. No doubt her actual choice of a path to follow will be very far from any of these. But there’s time to decide. Oh, is there ever time!

  Just after the turn of the year she and Leo go to Antibes to attend the unveiling of Leo’s newest work, commissioned by Lucien Nicolas, a French industrialist. Leo and Lucien Nicolas were schoolmates, eons ago. At the airport they embrace warmly, almost endlessly, like brothers long separated. They even look a little alike, two full-faced square-jawed dark-haired men with wide-flanged noses and strong, prominent lips.

  “My wife Marilisa,” Leo says finally.

  “How marvelous,” says Lucien Nicolas. “How superb.” He kisses the tips of his fingers to her.

  Nicolas lives in a lofty villa overlooking the Mediterranean, surrounded by a lush garden in which the red spikes of aloes and the yellow blooms of acacias stand out dazzlingly against a palisade of towering palms. The weather, this January day, is mild and pleasant, with a light drizzle falling. The industrialist has invited a splendid international roster of guests to attend the unveiling of the painting; diplomats and jurists, poets and playwrights, dancers and opera singers, physicists and astronauts and mentalists and sculptors and seers. Leo introduces Marilisa to them all. In the antechamber to the agate dining hall she listens, bemused, to the swirl of conversations in half a dozen languages. The talk ranges across continents, decades, generations. It seems to her that she hears from a distance the names of several of Leo’s former wives invoked—Syantha, Tedesca, Katrin?—but possibly she is mistaken.

  Dinner is an overindulgent feast of delicacies. Squat animated servitors bring the food on glistening covered trays of some exotic metal that shimmers diffractively. After every third course a cool ray of blue light descends from a ceiling aperture and a secondary red radiance rises from the floor: They meet in the vicinity of the great slab of black diamond that is the table, and a faint whiff of burning carbon trickles into the air, and then the diners are hungry all over again, ready for the next delight.

  The meal is a symphony of flavors and textures. The balance is perfect between sweet and tart, warm and cool, spicy and bland. A pink meat is followed by a white one, and then by fruit, then cheese, and meat again, a different kind, and finer cheeses. A dozen wines or more are served. An occasional course is still alive, moving slowly about its plate; Marilisa takes her cue from Leo, conquers any squeamishness, traps and consumes her little wriggling victims with pleasure. Now and then the underlying dish is meant to be eaten along with its contents, as she discovers by lagging just a moment behind the other guests and imitating their behavior.

  After dinner comes the unveiling of the painting, in the atrium below the dining hall. The guests gather along the balcony of the dining hall and the atrium roof is retracted.

  Leo’s paintings are huge rectangular constructions made of fine sparkling sand of many colors, laid out within a high border of molten copper. The surfaces of each work are two-dimensional, but the cloudy hint of a third dimension is always visible, and even that is only the tip of an underlying multidimensional manifold that vanishes at mysterious angles into the fabric of the piece. Down in those churning sandy depths lie wells of color with their roots embedded in the hidden mechanisms that control the piece. These wells constantly contribute streams of minute glittering particles to the patterns at the surface, in accordance with the changing signals from below. There is unending alteration; none of Leo’s pieces is ever the same two hours running.

  A ripple of astonishment breaks forth as the painting is revealed, and then a rising burst of applause. The pattern is one of interlaced spirals in gentle pastels, curvilinear traceries in pink and blue and pale green, with thin black circles surrounding them and frail white lines radiating outward in groups of three to the vivid turquoise borders of the sand. Leo’s friends swarm around him to congratulate him. They even congratulate Marilisa. “He is a master—an absolute master!” She basks in his triumph.

  Later in the evening she returns to the balcony to see if she can detect the first changes in the pattern. The changes, usually, are minute and subtle ones, requiring a discriminating eye, but even in her short while with Leo she has learned to discern the tiniest of alterations.

  This time, though, no expertise is required. In little more than an hour the lovely surface has been significantly transformed. A thick, jagged black line has abruptly sprung into being, descending like a dark scar from upper right to lower left. Marilisa has never seen such a thing happen before. It is like a wound in the painting: a mutilation. It draws a little involuntary cry of shock from her.

  Others gather. “What does it mean?” they ask. “What is he saying?”

  From someone in African tribal dress, someone who nevertheless is plainly not African, comes an interpretation: “We see the foretelling of schism, the evocation of a transformation of the era. The dark line moves in brutal strokes through the center of our stability point. There, do you see, the pink lines and the blue? And then it drops down into the unknown dominion beyond the painting’s eastern border, the realm of the mythic, the grand apocalyptic.”

  Leo is summoned. He is calm. But Leo is always calm. He shrugs away the urg
ent questions: The painting, he says, is its own meaning, not subject to literal analysis. It is what it is, nothing more. A stochastic formula governs the changes in his works. All is random. The jagged black line is simply a jagged black line.

  Music comes from another room. New servitors appear, creatures with three metal legs and one telescoping arm, offering brandies and liqueurs. The guests murmur and laugh. “A master,” they tell Marilisa once again. “An absolute master!”

  * * *

  She likes to ask him about the faraway past—the quaint and remote twenty-third century, the brusque and dynamic twenty-fourth. He is like some great heroic statue rising up out of the mists of time, embodying in himself firsthand knowledge of eras that are mere legends to her.

  “Tell me how people dressed, back then,” she begs him. “What sorts of things they said, the games they played, where they liked to go on their holidays. And the buildings, the architecture: How did things look? Make me feel what it was like: the sounds, the smells, the whole flavor of the long-ago times.”

  He laughs. “It gets pretty jumbled, you know. The longer you live, the more muddled-up your mind becomes.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that at all! I think you remember every bit of it. Tell me about your father and mother.”

  “My father and my mother—” He pronounces the words musingly, as though they are newly minted concepts for him. “My father—he was tall, even taller than I am—a mathematician, he was, or maybe a composer, something abstruse like that—”

  “And his eyes? What kind of eyes did he have?”

  “His eyes—I don’t know, his eyes were unusual, but I can’t tell you how—an odd color, or very penetrating, maybe—there was something about his eyes.…” His voice trails off.

  “And your mother?”

  “My mother. Yes.” He is staring into the past and it seems as if he sees nothing but haze and smoke there. “My mother. I just don’t know what to tell you. She’s dead, you realize. A long time, now. Hundreds of years. They both died before Process. It was all such a long time ago, Marilisa.”