The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Leveritt and Holmes spent the day in a tent with the sides drawn up, consolidating survey data and incorporating it into a three-dimensional computer model of the region from the valley to the hills. Over tens of millions of years, the land had been repeatedly submerged, then raised, drained, eroded. “Up and down,” Holmes said, “more times than the proverbial whore’s drawers.” Leveritt, her fierce concentration momentarily broken, shot him an oh-please look. They barely noticed a brief midmorning cloudburst, barely paused for lunch, and might have skipped it but for the noise made by a couple of campmates returning muddy and ravenous from a collecting sortie into the valley. The sun was halfway down the sky when Holmes abruptly switched off his laptop, stretched, and declared that they could continue that evening, but right at that moment he needed some downtime. Leveritt glared at his retreating back until he had disappeared into the next tent; she found herself looking past the tent at the barren plain and the distant hills, and after a minute she resigned herself to thinking about Ed Morris and wondering what had become of him.

  Ed Morris. Ed Morris. Maybe you arrived high and dry and unhurt out there on the plain.…

  Her catalog of the possible fates of Ed Morris had grown extensive. It occurred to her now to record them in a notebook, like Gilzow’s models of geologic time. Then she remembered Lieutenant Hales’s injunction against writing anything that had to do with Ed Morris. She still did not feel safe from Hales.

  Ed Morris. You arrived and—what? You wasted at least a little time and energy being confused and frightened. But after a while, you gathered your wits and took stock of your predicament. And what a predicament. You’ve got no food, no water, no idea of where you are. You know only where you aren’t. You have only the clothes on your back and the laptop in your hand.

  If it’s night, you learn immediately that the stars are no help at all. The constellations you know don’t exist yet. You wander around in the dark, fall into a ravine, break your neck and die instantly.…

  Or break your leg and expire miserably over the course of a couple of days.

  Back to the beginning. You find water, a rivulet, and follow it to a stream and follow that to the river and follow the river to the sea and find the main camp.…

  Or find nothing, if you’ve arrived before there is a camp.

  Or you don’t find water and don’t fall and break any bones. You just wander around until your strength gives out.

  No. You do find water, you reach the river, but you realize your strength will inevitably give out, that you’re lost and doomed to die in the middle of nowhere and no two ways about it, unless you take a chance, eat some of the local flora or fauna, shellfish, millipedes, whatever you can grab, anything you can keep down. You eat it raw, because you don’t have any way to make fire, but you don’t get sick and die. You—what do you do, if you live?

  You live out your life alone, Adam without Eve in paleo-Eden. Robinson Crusoe of the dawn.

  Alone with your laptop.

  Best-case scenario, Ed Morris. You walk into camp just around dinnertime tonight, ragged and emaciated after an epic trek, and tired of subsisting on moss and invertebrates, but alive, whole, and proud of yourself.

  Not-as-good scenario, at least not as good for you, but it’d let everybody give you your due and let me be done with you. We find the cairn you built with the biggest rocks you could move. Inside the cairn, we find your laptop. The seals’re intact, the circuitry isn’t corroded. We can read the message you left for us.…

  Lot of work for a dying man.

  Okay. First, you figure out how to survive. Then you build a cairn. You wander around building cairns all over the place, increasing the chances we’ll find at least one of them.

  Leveritt went quickly to her tent. She hung a canteen from her belt, put a wide-brimmed straw hat on her head, and started walking toward the hills. The wet ground crunched underfoot.

  The levelness of the flatland was an illusion; the ground was all barely perceptible slopes, falling, rising, like the bosom of a calm sea. When she could no longer see the camp, she planted her fists on her hips and stood looking around at the rocky litter and thought, Now what?

  Take stock, she told herself.

  I’ve eaten, I’m not lost, my life isn’t at stake here. None of which Ed Morris could say. I’m not confused and scared, either, and I haven’t been injured. Besides not having eaten for ten, twelve hours before the jump, he didn’t look like he had a lot of body fat to live off. On the plus side, he was a mountain climber and a skydiver, in good shape and not a physical coward.

  How long would it have taken him to get over the confusion and fright? Give him the benefit of the doubt. A career in accountancy implies a well-ordered mind.

  How much more time would’ve passed before it occurred to him to build a cairn? Then he’d have had to pick a site where a cairn would have a chance of being found, where it wouldn’t get washed away, where there was an ample supply of portable rock. If he was back toward the hills, he’d have found the streambeds full of smooth stones of a particularly useful size. Out here, he’d just have had to make do with what’s at hand.

  How much rock could he have moved before his strength gave out?

  Leveritt picked up a grapefruit-sized chunk of limestone, carried it a dozen feet, and set it down next to a slightly larger chunk. She worked her way around and outward from the two, gathering the bigger stones, carrying them back. After laboring steadily for the better part of two hours, she was soaked with perspiration, her arms, back, and legs ached, and she had erected an indefinite sort of pyramid approximately three feet high. Increasingly, she had expended time and energy locating suitable stones at ever greater distances from the cairn and lugging them over to it. She squatted to survey her handiwork.

  Ed Morris, she told herself, wouldn’t have stopped working at this point, because he didn’t have a camp to return to when he got tired. Still, it’s a respectable start, stable, obviously the work of human hands.

  She rose and walked in the direction of the camp. She paused once to look back and wonder, How long before it tumbles down?

  No one in camp seemed to have noticed her absence. Typical, she thought. She discovered, however, that she could not maintain a sour mood for very long. She and Holmes worked together for an hour after dark, and then she retired to her tent and, soon, to her cot. Despite the mugginess of the evening, she had no trouble falling asleep.

  For the next two days, work thoroughly involved her. On the afternoon of the third day, she returned to the cairn. She started to add to it, decided, No, moved off a hundred yards, and built a second cairn. Thereafter, she spent most of such free daylit time as she had piling up stones. She never returned to any site.

  Now her absences did attract notice, Holmes trailed her past two abandoned cairns to her latest site. She answered his questions with monosyllables or shrugs or ignored the questions altogether, keeping on the move the whole while, finding, prying up, carrying, setting down stones. She refused his offer to help. Finally, he said, quite good-naturedly, “You need a hobby, Bonnie.”

  “This is my hobby, Mike.” She wished aloud that he would go away, and he did.

  That evening, over a dinner that tasted better than dinner usually did, Gilzow asked her what she was doing, and Leveritt replied, “Pursuing mental health.” Later, she was almost unable to keep herself from laughing at one of Holmes’s stupid jokes.

  Two weeks and seven cairns after she had begun, as she lay on the edge of sleep, she realized with a start that she had not thought about Ed Morris all that day.

  Four days later, when she had returned from building her eighth and last cairn, she asked around for a copy of Robinson Crusoe. Nobody had one. Gilzow offered her Emma, by Jane Austen. “Close enough,” Leveritt said.

  A month passed.

  * * *

  The supply boat arrived three days ahead of schedule. Everyone turned out to carry boxes; the first people to reach the boat yelled to th
ose following, “Brinkman’s here!” The big man, who had been downriver for weeks, stood in the bow, waving his shapeless hat. It transpired that the loud, sincere welcome was not entirely for him. He had brought a mixed case of liquor.

  When the supplies had been unloaded and the camp had settled down for a round or two of good stiff drinks, Brinkman sought out Leveritt and asked her to walk with him along the bluff. They had scarcely put the camp out of earshot when he heaved a great sigh, his ebullient humor fell away from him like a cloak, and he suddenly looked tired and pale under his tan and more solemn than she could recall having seen him.

  “I really came all the way up here,” he said, “to tell you this personally. Two days ago, they dug something out of the marsh down by the main camp. It was one of the—part of one of the gurneys they use in the jump station.”

  “Ed Morris,” Leveritt said bleakly. She had not said the name aloud since her conversation with Michael Diehl. Now, as though invoked by her speaking it, a humid wind swept up the valley, bearing a faint fetid breath of the estuary.

  Brinkman said, “A Navy security officer named Hales told me about it.”

  “More surprises. I’d’ve thought he’d be swearing everyone to secrecy.”

  “It was too late for that. Everybody in camp knew it by the time he heard about it. Everybody.”

  “What about Ed Morris himself?”

  “They’re digging around. They haven’t found anything else yet, and God knows if they will. The gurney’s all twisted up like a pretzel, and one end’s melted. God knows what that implies—besides the obvious, terrific heat. The thing was buried in a mud bank. Impacted. A botanist tripped over an exposed part.”

  “How long had it been there?”

  Brinkman shook his head. “They’re still working on that, but even the most conservative guess puts it before the manned phase of the expedition. As to how it got there—there has to be an inquest. You have to be there for it.”

  Leveritt groaned. “I don’t have anything to tell.”

  “So Hales said. But people higher up’re calling the shots. Everything’s got to be official, and you’ve got to be part of it.”

  “I cannot get away from this thing!” Leveritt sat down on a knob of rock and angrily kicked at the ground. “Not from Hales and the Navy, and, most of all, not from Ed Morris. I thought I’d done it, finally worked it out by myself, but—”

  “I’m sorry, Bonnie. You have to go back with me in the morning. I can find work for you to do until this thing’s over.”

  “Making coffee?” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “I want to be here, Rob.”

  “I’ve never known you not to be willing to do what you had to do so you could do what you want to do. While you’re there—the San Diego bunch has talked about holding a memorial service. I kind of gather none of them knew Morris all that well, or liked him, or something. But he is the expedition’s first casualty. Since you were almost the last person to see him, perhaps you could—”

  Leveritt shook her head emphatically. “No.”

  “Bonnie, the man is dead.”

  “I couldn’t eulogize him if my life depended on it. What I know about him wouldn’t fill half a dozen sentences. He talked too fast and dressed like Jungle Jim. He said he liked mountain climbing and skydiving. And I’m very sorry about what happened to him, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  “Who said it was your fault?” Brinkman knelt beside her and picked at his cuticle. “There has to be one meaningful thing you could say about him.”

  Leveritt sighed. She looked down at the supply boat and imagined herself on it again, sitting, as before, under the white canopy with Brinkman, drinking coffee from a thermos bottle, and glimpsing the pier and the cluster of tents and Quonset huts through the fog. She saw it all as though it were a movie being shown in reverse. She would have to go back and back and back, until she reached a point before Ed Morris had taken over her life, and start anew. This time, she told herself, I will make things happen the way they’re supposed to happen. I will be the hero of my own story.

  She said, “When he found out how nervous I was, he gave me a pep talk. And just before I went through the hole, he gave me a wink of encouragement.”

  “Well, then, if nothing else, you owe him for that wink.” Brinkman could not have spoken more softly and been heard.

  Leveritt closed her eyes and thought of the scene in the jump station, the purposeful technicians, Ed Morris’s face framed by the bars of the railing. She looked helplessly at Brinkman, who said, “What?”

  The humid wind moved up the valley again, and again she smelled the estuary’s attenuated fetor of death and of life coming out of death. She exhaled harshly and said, “Nothing.” She had meant to say that she could not recall the color of Ed Morris’s eyes. “Never mind. I’ll think of something.” The wind passed across the rocky plain, toward the ancient crumbled hills and beyond.

  CHANGES

  William Barton

  Here’s a wise and contemplative story that reaffirms some ancient wisdom: The more things change, the more they stay the same.…

  William Barton was born in Boston in 1950 and currently resides in Garner, North Carolina, with his wife, Kathleen. For most of his life, he has been an engineering technician, specializing in military and industrial technology. He was at one time employed by the Department of Defense, working on the nation’s nuclear submarine fleet, and is currently a freelance writer and computer consultant. His stories have appeared in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing, Interzone, Tomorrow, Full Spectrum, and other markets. His books include the novels Hunting on Kunderer, A Plague of All Cowards, Dark Sky Legion, and When Heaven Fell, and, in collaboration with Michael Capobianco, Iris and Fellow Traveler. His 1996 novel, The Transmigration of Souls, was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and a new novel, Acts of Conscience, has just been published.

  When the cramp finally let go, Harriet Severn fell back on her pillows, hating the way her skin felt, sticky sweat refusing to evaporate in the summer humidity. The sheets were damp, soaked right through, making her regret the decision to give birth at home instead of going to the hospital like a sensible modern woman. They’d never get the stains out of the mattress, probably have to buy a new one.

  And so hot. But they didn’t have air-conditioning in the town’s little hospital either. The only place they had air-conditioning was in the movie theater. Harriet giggled. Maybe I should’ve gone there.…

  Dr. Noffzinger, sitting between her legs at the foot of the bed, smiled up at her. “Won’t be long now, Harriet. This is going to be easy.” He reached up and patted her belly, then looked back down at her “business end.” Smiled again. No problem at all.…

  Should have gone to the hospital, though. Cleaner. Safer. And Wilson wouldn’t be visibly lurking outside the door like some massive ghost. Poor Willy. He always felt so bad for her when it was happening. Third time now, trying for a boy because the first two were girls. Always felt so bad. But in a couple of months, when the damage was healed, he’d be more interested in “getting things back to normal.”

  Another cramp, making her bunch up, squint and grunt. God. Like turning inside out. One place pulling in, its neighbor popping out, hurting worse than stomach flu, and going on and on … Then done, falling back, panting hard. Right, no problem at all. Should have gone to the hospital, you little idiot.…

  But you didn’t want to leave Grandpa all alone and Willy wouldn’t hear of you going off to have the baby alone, as if he’d be any help. Poor Grandpa, lying in his room, listening to all this. Or maybe not listening. Seventy-eight years old and the pneumonia almost finished with him. “Old Man’s Friend.” Supposed to be an easy death, but Grandpa was making it hard, just not ready to go. Not quite yet. I’d’ve felt bad going off to the hospital, coming home in a week to find him gone.…

  He’ll see this one. Maybe he’ll smile.

  Maybe …

&
nbsp; Uhhhh …

  The baby’s head felt like a padded boulder between her legs, suddenly right there, the doctor leaning forward, touching it with his clean hands, gently cooing, to her, to it? Pulling, “Come on now. There, there…” Harriet put her head back and squeaked, the cramp suddenly powerful and strange, her skin feeling as if it were being burnt by a thousand little cigarette coals.…

  Christ, get it over with … Now!

  And the rest of the little body slithered out like the proverbial greased pig, right into old Noffzinger’s arms.

  Owwww …

  Afterechoes, pain and more pain, but already dying down.

  Noffzinger, always the traditionalist, swung the nasty, bloody thing by its heels, one light slap, and SQUAAALLL! Alive. Cradling it then, grinning, calling out, “You can relax now, Willy. It’s a boy!”

  Then he put it on her bare belly and Harriet reached down to cuddle the slick little body, smiling wider than she ever expected she could. Maybe in a little while, when the doctor was through fiddling around down there, she could get up and show the new baby to Grandpa. A boy. It would light up his fading eyes, just one last time.

  * * *

  Mark Severn, just past his ninth birthday, lay on the floor, doing his homework on the near-pileless maroon carpet. The rug could be a distraction sometimes, with all its patterns and border colors, bits of blue and burnt orange peeking out from behind the red … not behind it exactly, since the rug was essentially a two-dimensional surface, but … God. Distracted. Got to get this stuff done. “The Cisco Kid” coming on in … squint up at the big Nelsonic clock sitting on the old upright piano … ten minutes.…