The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I’m being as polite as I can. I didn’t invite you.”

  “Come on, Marilisa. Let’s get going.”

  “Going? Where? What for?”

  “We can have plenty of fun together and you damned well know it. Aren’t you tired of being such a loyal little wife? Politely sliding through the motions of your preposterous little marriage with your incredibly ancient husband?”

  His eyes are shining strangely. His face is flushed.

  She says softly, “You’re crazy, aren’t you?”

  “Oh, no, not crazy at all. Not as nice as my father, maybe, but perfectly sane. I see you rusting away here like one of the artifacts in his collection and I want to give you a little excitement in your life before it’s too late. A touch of the wild side, do you know what I mean, Marilisa? Places and things he can’t show you, that he can’t even imagine. He’s old. He doesn’t know anything about the world we live in today. Jesus, why do I have to spell it out for you? Just drop everything and come away with me. You won’t regret it.” He leans forward, smiling into her face, utterly sure of himself, plainly confident now that his blunt unceasing campaign of bald invitation will at last be crowned with success.

  His audacity astounds her. But she is mystified too.

  “Before it’s too late, you said. Too late for what?”

  “You know.”

  “Do I?”

  Fyodor seems exasperated by what he takes to be her willful obtuseness. His mouth opens and closes like a shutting trap; a muscle quivers in his cheek; something seems to be cracking within him, some carefully guarded bastion of self-control. He stares at her in a new way—angrily? Contemptuously?—and says, “Before it’s too late for anybody to want you. Before you get old and saggy and shriveled. Before you get so withered and ancient-looking that nobody would touch you.”

  Surely he is out of his mind. Surely. “Nobody has to get that way anymore, Fyodor.”

  “Not if they undergo Process, no. But you—you, Marilisa—” He smiles sadly, shakes his head, turns his hands palms upward in a gesture of hopeless regret.

  She peers at him, bewildered. “What can you possibly be talking about?”

  For the first time in her memory Fyodor’s cool cocky aplomb vanishes. He blinks and gapes. “So you still haven’t found out. He actually did keep you in the dark all this time. You’re a null, Marilisa! A short-timer! Process won’t work for you! The one-in-ten-thousand shot, that’s you, the inherent somatic unreceptivity. Christ, what a bastard he is, to hide it from you like this! You’ve got eighty, maybe ninety years and that’s it. Getting older and older, wrinkled and bent and ugly, and then you’ll die, the way everybody in the world used to. So you don’t have forever and a day to get your fun, like the rest of us. You have to grab it right now, fast, while you’re still young. He made us all swear never to say a word to you, that he was going to be the one to tell you the truth in his own good time, but why should I give a damn about that? We aren’t children. You have a right to know what you really are. Fuck him, is what I say. Fuck him!” Fyodor’s face is crimson now. His eyes are rigid and eerily bright with a weird fervor. “You think I’m making this up? Why would I make up something like this?”

  It is like being in an earthquake. The floor seems to heave. She has never been so close to the presence of pure evil before. With the tightest control she can manage she says, “You’d make it up because you’re a lying miserable bastard, Fyodor, full of hatred and anger and pus. And if you think—But I don’t need to listen to you anymore. Just get out of here!”

  “It’s true. Everybody knows it, the whole family! Ask Katrin! She’s the one I heard it from first. Christ, ask Leo! Ask Leo!”

  “Out,” she says, flicking her hand at him as though he is vermin. “Now. Get the hell out. Out.”

  * * *

  She promises herself that she will say nothing to Leo about the monstrous fantastic tale that has come pouring out of his horrid son, or even about his clumsy idiotic attempt at seduction—it’s all too shameful, too disgusting, too repulsive, and she wants to spare him the knowledge of Fyodor’s various perfidies—but of course it all comes blurting from her within an hour after Leo is back from Barcelona. Fyodor is intolerable, she says. Fyodor’s behavior has been too bizarre and outrageous to conceal. Fyodor has come here unasked and spewed a torrent of cruel fantastic nonsense in a grotesque attempt at bludgeoning her into bed.

  Leo says gravely, “What kind of nonsense?” and she tells him in a quick unpunctuated burst and watches his smooth taut face collapse into weary jowls, watches him seem to age a thousand years in the course of half a minute. He stands there looking at her, aghast; and then she understands that it has to be true, every terrible word of what Fyodor has said. She is one of those, the miserable statistical few of whom everybody has heard, but only at second or thirdhand. The treatments will not work on her. She will grow old and then she will die. They have tested her and they know the truth, but the whole bunch of them have conspired to keep it from her, the doctors at the clinic, Leo’s sons and daughters and wives, her own family, everyone. All of it Leo’s doing. Using his influence all over the place, his enormous accrued power, to shelter her in her ignorance.

  “You knew from the start?” she asks, finally. “All along?”

  “Almost. I knew very early. The clinic called me and told me, not long after we got engaged.”

  “My God. Why did you marry me, then?”

  “Because I loved you.”

  “Because you loved me.”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “I wish I knew what that meant,” she says. “If you loved me, how could you hide a thing like this from me? How could you let me build my life around a lie?”

  Leo says, after a moment, “I wanted you to have the good years, untainted by what would come later. There was time for you to discover the truth later. But for now—while you were still young—the clothes, the jewelry, the traveling, all the joy of being beautiful and young—why ruin it for you? Why darken it with the knowledge of what would be coming?”

  “So you made everybody go along with the lie? The people at the clinic. Even my own family, for God’s sake!”

  “Yes.”

  “And all the Prep treatments I’ve been taking—just a stupid pointless charade, right? Accomplishing nothing. Leading nowhere.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  She begins to tremble. She understands the true depths of his compassion now, and she is appalled. He has married her out of charity. No man her own age would have wanted her, because the developing signs of bodily deterioration in the years just ahead would surely horrify him; but Leo is beyond all that, he is willing to overlook her unfortunate little somatic defect and give her a few decades of happiness before she has to die. And then he will proceed with the rest of his life, the hundreds or thousands of years yet to come, serene in the knowledge of having allowed the tragically doomed Marilisa the happy illusion of having been a member of the ageless elite for a little while. It is stunning. It is horrifying. There is no way that she can bear it.

  “Marilisa—”

  He reaches for her, but she turns away. Runs. Flees.

  * * *

  It was three years before he found her. She was living in London then, a little flat in Bayswater Road, and in just those three years her face had changed so much, the little erosions of the transition between youth and middle age, that it was impossible for him entirely to conceal his instant reaction. He, of course, had not changed in the slightest way. He stood in the doorway, practically filling it, trying to plaster some sort of facade over his all-too-visible dismay, trying to show her the familiar Leo smile, trying to make the old Leo-like warmth glow in his eyes. Then after a moment he extended his arms toward her. She stayed where she was.

  “You shouldn’t have tracked me down,” she says.

  “I love you,” he tells her. “Come home with me.”

  “It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be f
air to you. My getting old, and you always so young.”

  “To hell with that. I want you back, Marilisa. I love you and I always will.”

  “You love me?” she says. “Even though—?”

  “Even though. For better, for worse.”

  She knows the rest of the passage—for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health—and where it goes from there. But there is nothing more she can say. She wants to smile gently and thank him for all his kindness and close the door, but instead she stands there and stands there and stands there, neither inviting him in nor shutting him out, with a roaring sound in her ears as all the million years of mortal history rise up around her like mountains.

  THE SPADE OF REASON

  Jim Cowan

  They say that genius is in the details. As the quirky and brilliant story that follows demonstrates, maybe God is in the numbers.…

  New writer Jim Cowan has published several stories in Century magazine, as well as in the on-line electronic magazine InterText, one of which has been chosen for a best-of-the-Net anthology, eScene. He lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

  When I first came here, the nurses spelled my name wrong. They wrote C-A-X-T-O-N on a slip of pink paper and slid it into the spine of a shiny new aluminum chart-holder. That was four years ago. The aluminum is battered and scratched now, and my chart is very thick.

  This will be the last of our many nighttime talks. As usual, I’m lounging in my pajamas in this comfortable old chair by these open French windows, where I can see the moonlight on the lawns. The curtains wave gently in the scented breeze and you come in from the warm night, unbuckle your toolbelt, sit there on the corner couch, and choose an orange from my bowl of fruit.

  Sometimes we’d talk like this for hours. Sometimes you’d get called away to fix a leaking faucet or replace a fuse. You’d buckle your belt carefully and go into the night, walking slowly to one of the other buildings. No one who’s in a hurry can fix stuff right, you said. I remember what you told me: Look for the simplest causes, nothing esoteric, and fix it right the first time, or the nurses will just call you back.

  I’ve learned a lot from you, Pete. More than you might ever guess.

  * * *

  Remember how we met, on my first night here, how you made me laugh? The other patients were asleep and the nurses were eating at the nurses’ station. I was sitting in the rec room. The TV was on but the station had gone off the air. I was staring at the gray snow on the screen and listening to the white hiss from the speaker.

  “Hi,” you said. “I’m Pete.”

  I already knew that because your name was embroidered in red on the chest of your blue coverall. What I didn’t know was that you were the third-shift mechanic and that we would become friends.

  You jerked your thumb in the direction of the nurses’ station and asked me if I knew the difference between a night nurse and an elephant.

  “No.”

  “About seven pounds.”

  And I smiled.

  Okay. It wasn’t a great joke, but at that time in my life I thought I’d never smile again. I’d just been fired from the supercollider, right after I got the message from God.…

  Well, I’ll get to that part later. I promised I’d tell you the whole story before I left here. When the sun rises an hour from now you’ll know everything that happened. About an hour after that, at exactly 7 A.M., I will become a free man, released by the same court that sent me here.

  How many men can say they have been certified as sane?

  My suitcase is already packed.

  * * *

  I have not always had this lovely corner room with its long French windows. This is my reward for seniority and good behavior. I’ll miss it. For the past few months I’ve enjoyed sitting here and reading, and when I grew tired of reading I could look up at my van Gogh print. You can see the pale patch on the wall above my bed where the print was taped. On my last-day pass I bought a mailing tube at the post office so I could take the print with me when I leave.

  On sunny days I would walk outside and wander across the lawns or along the gravel paths under the trees. I always liked to look back at the pale tan-brick buildings, so massive in their institutional certainty. I found them reassuring. But I must leave this place. The court has said so and I am ready to go.

  We are on the ground floor here but there are no bars on my windows. Any night, I could have opened the window and walked away across what we call the Eastern Lawn, through the limpid moonlight, until I came to that dark line of trees a mile away that marks the road.

  Beyond the road are flat fields of Texas cotton, and far away across the fields is the horizon, that imaginary line where the Earth ends and Heaven begins.

  Imaginary. Does that mean that there is no line because Heaven and Earth never, never meet? That’s what Aquinas said.

  Or does imaginary mean that there is no line, no division, between Heaven and Earth?

  That was my project, exploring the line between Heaven and Earth. And that’s how I got into trouble. Philosophical speculation can be dangerous, and lead to madness. Perhaps a man’s time is better spent fixing a faucet than trying to read the mind of God.

  Anyway, there are no bars on my windows. Each day I prove I’m sane by staying.

  * * *

  I’ll miss this room. I liked sitting here by the window and reading in the afternoon. When I tired of my book I would look across the lawns and watch the crazies walking in the sun instead of staying in the shade. You must have noticed that crazy people always walk real slow? You probably think they shuffle along because they have nowhere to go, so why hurry, but the truth is they spend so much energy on being mad they have none left for the rest of their bodies. Not so for the manics, of course, but they’re all locked up, not out walking on the grass.

  I’ve become very interested in mental things like this recently, how the mind works and so on. I’ve been reading a lot about the physical basis of thought, about neurobiology.

  Think about that orange in your hand, Pete. You see an orange sphere, you feel its waxy dimpled surface. Now imagine the soft ripping sound if you were to tear off its peel, imagine the juice spraying out, imagine taking a bite, imagine the tangy scent, the sweet tartness on your tongue. Is your mouth filling with saliva, Pete? That’s because your brain is projecting an image, a mental model, of these sensations inside your head, and the image is so real you can’t help salivating.

  That image of an orange is a working model of the world, a model that lets you analyze a situation, plan ahead, test alternative strategies, act, survive. Models like that make up what we are.

  But some minds create weird models and those minds may be mad. I don’t know about that. But I do know that one kind of madness is not knowing that the model is all we will ever know.

  * * *

  All right, if I’m going to tell it I’d better just tell it.

  My project began when I was only three years old. I was watching Sesame Street, learning the letters and the numbers like all kids do. Remember? Each show was sponsored by three letters and a number? No? Guess you’re just a little too old for that.

  Anyway, my favorite letter was X and my favorite number was six. I already had an X in my name and I wanted to have a six. Suddenly I knew, I just knew, that my name was spelled C-A-X-6-T-O-N. The six would be silent, of course, like the silent E that I discovered was hidden at the end of some words.

  Three years later, on my first day at school, I told the teacher I could spell my name, and write it too.

  “Show me,” she said.

  I wrote it down. C-A-X-6-T-O-N. “The six is silent,” I said. Actually I lisped badly, so I must have said, “The thixth ith thilent, Mith Thmith.”

  “Well done, but there is no six.” She made me write it without the six.

  A few minutes later I looked up from my work and she was staring at me, curiously, as if I were a specimen.

  * * *

  At that time my mother and
father were fighting a lot. I told my father about the silent six. Once, when they were in the kitchen, making up after a fight, he told my mother, “Our kid’s cute, but weird, like me. He told me he had a six in his name, between the X and the T. Strange. I’ve sometimes thought there should be a six there myself.” He laughed, but my mother didn’t stop crying.

  One day my father left.

  My mother started going to church and taking me with her. When the pastor prayed we were supposed to keep our eyes shut. Sometimes I peeked. The pastor had his eyes open and was looking up into the rafters. That meant that God was up there but I was always too afraid to look up and see Him. Maybe God would bring my father back. But He didn’t. Dad didn’t even come to see me. Ever.

  However, God did speak to me sometimes. He told me that right after the X in my name there really was a six.

  * * *

  My grandpa, my mother’s father that is, bought me a Monopoly game for my tenth birthday. But my mother quickly got tired of playing it with me and I had no one else. I remember one rainy afternoon making up my own game. I made up a list of the numbers from two to twelve, arranged in a random order. Then I rolled the two dice. I told myself that if I could roll the dice eleven times to get the numbers I had written down, in the same order as I had written them, then my father would come home. On and off, in idle moments, I played this game for years.

  In high school I discovered that the chance of getting eleven numbers in the right order was 2,853,670,611 to one. Those were the odds of my father coming home.

  * * *

  I met Evelyn in junior high, in the waiting room of the school psychologist. Later we discovered we shared the same diagnosis: borderline schizophrenia. She was like me in another way: She was thin and freckled.

  Evelyn’s father taught math at the community college. She and I knew we were both pretty clever. We were right. In high school we both got a perfect score on the SATs. The math part, of course.

  I let my hair grow long while I was in junior high and it’s been like that ever since. I grew my mustache when I went to college. Fu Manchus are probably still not in fashion, but I like it.