The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Lessingham set her on her feet.

  “Tie me up.”

  He was proffering a handful of blood-slicked leather thongs.

  “What?”

  “Tie me to the rock, mount me. It’s what I want.”

  “The evil warriors tied you—?”

  “And you come and rescue me.” He made an impatient gesture. “Whatever. Trust me. It’ll be good for you too.” He tugged at his bloodstained silk breeches, releasing a huge, iron-hard erection. “See, they tore my clothes. When you see that, you go crazy, you can’t resist … and I’m at your mercy. Tie me up!”

  “Sonja” had heard that 80 percent of the submissive partners in sadomasochist sex are male. But it is still the man who dominates his “dominatrix”: who says tie me tighter, beat me harder, you can stop now.… Hey, she thought. Why all the stage directions, suddenly? What happened to my zipless fuck? But what the hell. She wasn’t going to back out now, having come so far.… There was a seamless shift, and Lessingham was bound to the rock. She straddled his cock. He groaned. “Don’t do this to me.” He thrust upward, into her, moaning. “You savage, you utter savage, uuunnnh…” Sonja grasped the man’s wrists and rode him without mercy. He was right, it was as good this way. His eyes were half-closed. In the glimmer of blue under his lashes, a spirit of mockery trembled.… She heard a laugh, and found her hands were no longer gripping Lessingham’s wrists. He had broken free from her bonds, he was laughing at her in triumph. He was wrestling her to the ground.

  “No!” she cried, genuinely outraged. But he was the stronger.

  * * *

  It was night when he was done with her. He rolled away and slept, as far as she could tell, instantly. Her chief thought was that virtual sex didn’t entirely connect. She remembered now, that was something else people told you, as well as the “zipless fuck.” It’s like coming in your sleep, they said. It doesn’t quite make it. Maybe there was nothing virtuality could do to orgasm, to match the heightened richness of the rest of the experience. She wondered if he, too, had felt cheated.

  She lay beside her hero, wondering, where did I go wrong? Why did he have to treat me that way? Beside her, “Lessingham” cuddled a fragment of violet silk, torn from his own breeches. He whimpered in his sleep, nuzzling the soft fabric, “Mama…”

  * * *

  She told Dr. Hamilton that “Lessingham” had raped her.

  “And wasn’t that what you wanted?”

  She lay on the couch in the mirrored office. The doctor sat beside her with his smart notebook on his knee. The couch collected “Sonja” ’s physical responses as if she were an astronaut umbilicaled to ground control; and Dr. Jim read the telltales popping up in his reassuring horn-rims. She remembered the sneaking furtive thing that she had glimpsed in “Lessingham” ’s eyes, the moment before he took over their lust scene. How could she explain the difference? “He wasn’t playing. In the fantasy, anything’s allowed. But he wasn’t playing. He was outside it, laughing at me.”

  “I warned you he would want to stay in control.”

  “But there was no need! I wanted him to be in control. Why did he have to steal what I wanted to give him anyway?”

  “You have to understand, ‘Sonja,’ that to many men it’s women who seem powerful. You women feel dominated and try to achieve ‘equality.’ But the men don’t perceive the situation like that. They’re mortally afraid of you: And anything, just about anything they do to keep the upper hand, seems like justified self-defense.”

  She could have wept with frustration. “I know all that! That’s exactly what I was trying to get away from. I thought we were supposed to leave the damn baggage behind. I wanted something purely physical.… Something innocent.”

  “Sex is not innocent, ‘Sonja.’ I know you believe it is, or ‘should be.’ But it’s time you faced the truth. Any interaction with another person involves some kind of jockeying for power, dickering over control. Sex is no exception. Now that’s basic. You can’t escape from it in direct-cortical fantasy. It’s in our minds that relationships happen, and the mind, of course, is where virtuality happens too.” He sighed, and made an entry in her notes. “I want you to look on this as another step toward coping with the real. You’re not sick, ‘Sonja.’ You’re unhappy. Not even unusually so. Most adults are unhappy, to some degree—”

  “Or else they’re in denial.”

  Her sarcasm fell flat. “Right. A good place to be, at least some of the time. What we’re trying to achieve here—if we’re trying to achieve anything at all—is to raise your pain threshold to somewhere near average. I want you to walk away from therapy with lowered expectations: I guess that would be success.”

  “Great,” she said, desolate. “That’s just great.”

  Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, you guys! You are so weird. It’s always the same story. Can’t live with you, can’t live without you.… You can’t go on this way, you know. Its getting ridiculous. You want some real advice, ‘Sonja’? Go home. Change your attitudes, and start some hard peace talks with that husband of yours.”

  “I don’t want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”

  Dr. Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor act. “Listen. I’ll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: A hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. He grinned. “I’ve been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man.…”

  He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”

  She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn’t matter.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  * * *

  Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”

  She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he’d lost a customer, that was why he’d been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she’d lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semimedical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy talk was! He’d never have dared to play the sex-change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn’t likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn’t trouble her.

  So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr. Hamilton’s judgment. He had the telltales: He would know. She recognized with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities; unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations.… But that’s crazy, she thought. I don’t hate men, and I don’t believe “Lessingham” hates women. There’s nothing psychotic about what we’re doing. We’re making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that’s all. Okay, it’s convenience food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along that is cheaper, easier, and more fun than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.

  The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain.…

  (with apologies to E. R.
Eddison)

  THE LADY VANISHES

  Charles Sheffield

  One of the best contemporary “hard science” writers, British-born Charles Sheffield is a theoretical physicist who has worked on the American space program, and is currently chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. Sheffield is also the only person who has ever served as president of both the American Astronautical Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. He won the Hugo Award in 1994 for his story, “Georgia on My Mind.” His books include the bestselling non-fiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother’s Keeper, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader’s World, Proteus Unbound, Summertide, Divergence, Transcendence, Cold As Ice, Brother To Dragons, The Mind Pool, Godspeed, and The Ganymede Club and the collections Erasmus Magister, The McAndrew Chronicles, and Dancing With Myself. His most recent books include a novel written in collaboration with Jerry Pournelle, Higher Education, a new collection, Georgia on My Mind and Other Places, and another two novels, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and The Billion Dollar Boy. His stories have appeared in our Seventh, Eighth, and Eleventh Annual Collections. He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

  In the gripping scientific thriller that follows, he shows us that there are some women you just can’t keep your eyes on—no matter how hard you try.

  What is wrong with this picture?

  Colonel Walker Bryant is standing at the door of the Department of Ultimate Storage. He is smiling; and he is carrying a book under one arm.

  Answer: Everything is wrong with this picture. Colonel Bryant is the man who assigned (make that consigned) me to the Department of Ultimate Storage, for reasons that he found good and sufficient. But he never visited the place. That is not unreasonable, since the department is six stories underground in the Defense Intelligence facility at Bolling Air Force Base, on a walk-down sub-basement level which according to the elevators does not exist. It forms a home for rats, spiders, and me.

  Also, Walker Bryant never smiles unless something is wrong; and Walker Bryant never, in my experience, reads anything but security files and the sports pages of the newspaper. Colonel Bryant carrying a book is like Mother Theresa sporting an AK-47.

  “Good morning, Jerry,” he said. He walked forward, helped himself to an extra-strength peppermint from the jar that I keep on my desk, put the book next to it, and sat down. “I just drove over from the Pentagon. It’s a beautiful spring day outside.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  It was supposed to be sarcasm, but he has a hide like a rhino. He just chuckled and said, “Now, Jerry, you know the move to this department was nothing personal. I did it for your own good, down here you can roam as widely as you like. Anyway, they just told me something that I thought might interest you.”

  When you have worked for someone for long enough, you learn to read the message behind the words. I thought might interest you means I don’t have any idea what is going on, but maybe you do.

  I leaned forward and picked up the book. It was The Invisible Man, by H. G. Wells. I turned it over and looked at the back.

  “Are you reading this?” I wouldn’t call Walker Bryant “Sir” to save my life, and oddly enough he doesn’t seem to mind.

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  “I mean, actually reading it—yourself.”

  “Well, I’ve looked through it. It doesn’t seem to be about anything much. But I’m going to read it in detail, as soon as I get the time.”

  I noted that it was a library book, taken out three days before. If it was relevant to this meeting, Colonel Bryant had heard something that “might interest you” at least that long ago.

  “General Attwater mentioned the book to me,” he went on. He looked with disapproval at the sign I had placed on my wall. It was a quotation from Swinburne, and it read, “And all dead years draw thither, and all disastrous things.” I felt it was rather appropriate for the Department of Ultimate Storage. That, or “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

  “He’s a bit of an egghead, like you,” Bryant went on. “I figured you might have read The Invisible Man. You read all the time.”

  The last sentence meant, You read too much, Jerry Macedo, and that’s why your head is full of nonsense, like that stupid sign on your wall.

  “I’ve read it,” I said. But the meeting was taking a very odd turn. General Jonas Attwater was Air Force, and head of three of the biggest “black” programs, secret developments with their own huge budgets that the American public never saw.

  “Then you know that the book’s about a man who takes a drug to make him invisible,” Bryant said. “Three of General Attwater’s staff scientists were in the meeting this morning, and they swear that such a thing is scientifically impossible. I wondered what you think.”

  “I agree with them.”

  He looked crushed, and I continued, “Think about it for a minute and you’ll see why it can’t work, even without getting deep into the physics. The drug is supposed to change human tissue so that it has the same refractive index as air. So your body wouldn’t absorb light, or scatter it. Light would simply pass through you, without being reflected or refracted or affected in any way. But if your eyes didn’t absorb light, you would be blind, because seeing involves the interaction of light with your retinas. And what about the food that you eat, while it’s being digested? It would be visible in your alimentary canal, slowly changing as it went from your esophagus to your stomach and into your intestines. I’m sorry, Colonel, but the whole idea is just a piece of fiction.”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” He didn’t seem totally upset by my words. “It’s impossible, I hear you.”

  He stood up. “Let’s go to my office for a while. I want to show you something—unless you’re all that busy.”

  It depended on the definition of “busy.” I had been browsing the online physics preprints, as I did every morning of the week. Something very strange was going on with Bose-Einstein Condensates and macroscopic quantum systems, but it was evolving too rapidly for me to follow easily. There were new papers every day. In another week or two there ought to be a survey article that would make the development a lot clearer. Since I had no hope of doing original work in that field, the reading delay would cost me nothing. I followed Bryant in silence, up, up, up, all the way to the top floor. I want to show you something sounded to me an awful lot like Gotcha!, but I couldn’t see how.

  His staff assistants didn’t react to my arrival. Colonel Bryant never came down to see me, but he summoned me up to see him often enough. It’s a terrible thought, but I actually think the colonel likes me. Worse yet, I like him. I think there is a deep core of sadness in the man.

  We entered his office, and he closed the door and gestured me to a chair. At that point we could just as well have been in the sub-basement levels. So many highly classified meetings were held in this room that any thought of windows was a complete no-no.

  “Lois Doberman,” he said. “What can you tell me about her?”

  What could I tell, and what I was willing to tell, were two different things. Bryant knew that I had been Dr. Lois Doberman’s boss when she first joined the Agency and we were both in the Office of Research and Development. Since then she had gone up through the structure like a rocket, while I had, somewhat more slowly, descended.

  “You know what they say about Lois?” I was stalling a little, while I decided what I wanted to say. “If you ever make a crack suggesting that she’s a dog, she’ll bite your head off.”

  Not a trace of a smile from Bryant. Fair enough, because it didn’t deserve one.

  “Academic record,” I went on. “Doctorate from UCLA, then two post-doc years with Berkner at Carnegie-Mellon. She had twenty-eight patents when she joined the Agency. Lord knows how many she has now. Properties of materials and optics are her specialty. I don’t know what she’s working on at the moment, but she’s the smartest woman I ever met.”

 
I considered the final statement, and amended it. “She’s the smartest person I ever met.”

  “Some might say you are not an unbiased source. Staff Records show that you dated her for a while.”

  “That was nearly a year ago.”

  “There’s also a strong rumor that you two were sleeping together, though that is not verified.”

  I said nothing, and he went on, “It was outside working hours, and you both had the same clearances, so no one’s worried about that. The thing is, General Attwater’s staff thought you might know more than anyone else about her personal motives. That could be important.”

  “I don’t see how. Her life and mine don’t overlap any more.”

  “Nor does anyone else’s. That’s the trouble.” And, when I stared at him because this was a message that I definitely could not read, “Lois Doberman has disappeared. One week ago. Sit tight, Jerry.”

  I had started to stand up.

  * * *

  She didn’t just disappear from home, or something like that.” He was over at the viewgraph projector and video station used for presentations. “On Tuesday, June 25th, she went to work in the usual way. She was on a project that needed a special environment, and the only suitable place locally is out in Reston. Absolute top security, twenty-four-hour human security staff plus continuous machine surveillance. Only one entrance, except for emergency fire exits that show no sign of being disturbed. Anyone who goes into that building has to sign in and sign out, no matter how they are badged. Arrivals and departures are all recorded on tape.

  “Sitting on the table in front of you is a photocopy of the sign in/sign out sheet for June 25th. Don’t bother to look at it now”—I was reaching out—“take my word for it. Dr. Doberman signed in at 8:22 a.m., and she never signed out. Not only that, I have here the full set of tapes for arrivals and departures. The video-recorder is motion-activated. If you want to study the record, you can do it later. Here’s the bottom line: there’s a fine, clear sequence showing her arrival. There’s nothing of her leaving.”