The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Mom, sitting in her chair, reading the current issue of Life, said, “What’re you squinting for, Mark?”

  He shrugged, squinted at her, and said, “I dunno. I guess it makes the numbers easier to read.”

  She stared at him for a minute, giving him that concerned look, then went back to her magazine. Mark went back to scribbling the English essay, hoping he wouldn’t lose too many points for legibility. Arithmetic had been easy, just problems intended as drill for kids who couldn’t seem to memorize the multiplication tables, couldn’t quite get it when it was time for long division. Science was easy too, just not quite so … regular. This electricity business was pretty interesting anyway. English, though … Five hundred words … every one of them made up from scratch, without a clue as to what Mrs. Pennyman wanted. Oh, well. As long as I keep getting As in arithmetic, Dad won’t be too upset about the Cs in English and history.…

  Right now, Dad was sitting in his own chair, bigger than Mom’s, next to the heavy old bookcase, the one they’d gotten when Grandma died last year, head tipped toward the big Philco radio, sound turned down so the others wouldn’t be disturbed, listening to the war news. It was pretty interesting stuff, sometimes. Today the subdued voice talking about some big battle in North Africa. Kasserine Pass. Dad’s face very serious. Troubled glance at me, then. Maybe he thinks the war will still be going on when I’m old enough. Ten years. Would the war still be raging in 1953?

  Anyhow, maybe that was why Dad let him do homework out here on the floor, while Jill and Sandy sat together at the kitchen table. Mark sighed and put the essay in his notebook, threading the holes over the rings then snapping them shut, hoping what he’d done would be sufficient. Just a C, that’s all you need.…

  Mom was looking at him again, smiling a little bit, kind of distant. Mom’s face was always full of sunshine when she smiled, even more so when she laughed. Like when she called Dad “Willy-Boy” and Dad would smile and say, “Harry-me-Lad!” as if breathless with excitement. Like a game between them, like they were kids. They’d giggle and joke with each other then, sitting together on the couch, and sometimes they’d go to bed early, giggling off down the hallway.

  Mark flipped through his homework one last time, making sure he’d really done everything. Omissions were embarrassing to explain in front of the class, even though you were never the only one, even though you could try to pretend it was funny. Close the books. Dad was reaching out toward the radio, twiddling the tuner dial, listening close, intent. I’m glad I’ve got nice parents. Not like Donnie across the street, whose parents would sometimes whip him with a leather strap. You could hear him cry all the way down the block when that happened.…

  The radio was getting old and hard to tune in, Dad promising in another year or two they’d replace it. No, not with one of the new little radios, but with a television set like the one Mike’s dad built from a kit last year. Three times the size of the old Philco, with a round screen the size of a saucer in the upper right-hand corner. Once, Dad had let him stay up late, go over to watch a boxing match on TV with the men gathered in Mr. Carozza’s parlor. He fell asleep after an hour, Dad laughing when he carried him home, beer on his breath, very cheerful, bouncing Mark on his shoulders.…

  I’ll miss the old radio when it’s gone. Tall, peaked, made of ornate wood, scrollwork over cloth-covered speakers in the middle, two tall half-pillars on either side, like the pillars to either side of the stage in the theater downtown, where Mom and Dad went once or twice a year. What was the word Mom told me? Proscenium. Like the radio was a stage, the voices from the speaker actors in a play, tiny figures before him, dressed in richly colored costumes, striding back and forth before his eyes.

  Maybe, someday, TV will be like that, instead of those watery gray mannequins. We’ll get it, though, and then I can watch old Cisco and Pancho.…

  Right now, though, Dad was smiling at him, beckoning, turning up the sound, and there was the announcer’s plummy voice, telling him all about “O. Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old West.…”

  * * *

  Mark sat in his favorite chair, a spindly Danish Modern with blue nylon upholstery, pushing heavy, black-framed glasses back up his nose, staring at the front page of the Post. Two photographs, side by side, of two handsome but alien-looking young men in foreign military uniforms. Andrian G. Nikolaev, said one. Pavel R. Popovich, said the other. Orbited the Earth sixty-four times. Orbited the Earth forty-eight times. Vostok. East.

  So much for good old Project Mercury, whose long-term goal, sometime, someday, was to keep a man in space for a whole twenty-four hours. Four days. That’s enough time to reach the Moon and land. Kennedy’s going to look like a fool. I wonder how Glenn and Carpenter feel now. Ticker-tape parades, for God’s sake.…

  Hell. When our people touch down in 1970 these guys will have been there for five years. You are now entering the Lunovskaya Soviet Socialist Republic. Passports, please?

  Dad was right. Remember watching the Berlin news with him in ’49? Our grandchildren will be dead and gone before this is over, he said. We should’ve gone in and cleaned them out right after we finished with Hitler and Tojo. Right now, it sure looked like the Communists’ centrally managed economies had something over good old free enterprise, all right.…

  And whatever it was, it had made Khrushchev awfully damned bold. Stood up to them in Berlin, whipped them back in Korea; now this business with Castro and Russians down in the Caribbean, setting up shop ninety miles from Florida.

  Suddenly, Mark felt very cold. A young father wanted to look forward, to plan for his children’s adulthood, help them get a good start. He put the paper aside and looked at the two of them on the floor, Billy getting to be a big boy now, starting first grade in a couple of weeks, Freddy old enough to sit up beside him, out of diapers and talking quite nicely, much to Bill’s aggravation.…

  You can smile about that at least … Dad. Funny to think of myself that way. Mom seems to like being called Grandma even though she’s still so young-looking. Well. Fifty-three is young. They’ll be young as long as they live. Memory of them from last Easter, Harriet sitting in Willy’s lap, messing up his thinning hair, kissing him in front of the kids. I don’t know why it upset Marian like that. Never bothered me when I was a kid. Just glad my parents seemed to like each other.…

  Poor Marian. Pregnant again, just so she can try for a daughter. Unhappy about two boys, have to make sure that never gets back to Fred. Me, though, born because Dad wanted a son … OK. It’s easy to understand. Marian was uncomfortable though, in her seventh month, feeling fat and horrible, wondering why she’d wanted to do such a thing to herself once again.…

  The two little boys were engrossed in watching the TV, unaware of the nasty adult world unraveling all around them. Rapt, wrapped up in the opening sequences of the last show before bedtime, listening to Fifties-style advertising singers tell them all about the “Modern Stone Age Fam-uh-Lee.…” Pretty funny stuff, actually. Not like Rocky and Bullwinkle, making me put aside this grad-school homework long enough to watch with them, but … funny. That business about using animals in place of mechanical technology was a pretty good grade of science fiction when you thought about it. Maybe something engineers will really do someday.…

  Engineers. Right. Engineers build hydrogen bombs, if they’re lucky. Engineers blow up the world. And me with my little B.S. degree. What do I build? Right. I build blueprints. I help flesh out the work of better men. For now. Twenty-eight? Still a boy. The pile of books on the coffee table was tall, and they’d been expensive. Tough, going for your master’s at night after working all day. Tough on Marian and the kids too. For them, though, make more money, give them a future. If …

  That’s the word, all right. If. He glanced over at the bookcase. Been two years since I read it. Can’t forget it though. Words red, white, and blue on a black spine, J. B. Lippincott’s edition of Alas, Babylon. I wonder how I managed to lose the dust jacket? Very inspirational,
trying to make a dead world carry on with human life … But it won’t be like that. I know. Anybody who’s interested can know. Right here in the public library there’s a copy of The Prompt and Delayed Effects of Thermonuclear Weapons.…

  And the kids were sitting on the floor, watching Fred Flintstone sink his teeth into his new role as “The Frog-Mouth,” blah-blah-blah, making them giggle at comedy too sophisticated for two little boys, one just barely out of diapers. Just reacting to the laugh track, that’s all.

  Anyway, it looks nice on a color TV, glad we spent the money, almost enough for a new car.…

  * * *

  Standing in the hot June sun, Mark took off his white hard hat and wiped his brow on one tan sleeve, leaving a big dark splotch of moisture on the cloth. All right. Time for short sleeves. Tomorrow. It was a very nice day, not enough breeze really, but clear and cloudless, sky a lucid, vaulting blue, the world bright green all around, falling away in waves of distant vegetation toward the horizon, blue mountains barely visible in the west.

  Piedmont Plateau a pretty nice part of Virginia. A lot of work remaining to be done hereabouts. He looked down at the blueprint, weighted to the rough wooden table by chunks of concrete and cinder block. Finishing it off. The bridge’s skeleton was done and now they were putting in the roadway, the expander joints, making sure the sewer-and water-pipe transit fittings were lined up OK. Be done in three more months, then move on.

  Not so very far. And not for very long. The Interstate system that had kept him employed for more than a decade was almost done. Almost done and then, nothing. Should be work for people maintaining that expensive infrastructure, maybe they’d planned it that way in the beginning, but something dreadful seemed to be going wrong somewhere. Somewhere way up the line from here.…

  I talked to Dad about it, tried to get his spin on it. All he could do was rave about the Trilateral Commission, about Kissinger and Rockefeller and all the rest. Jesus. Well, he’s getting old now, almost retirement age. I guess we should expect something like this.…

  Don’t believe it. Old? Nonsense. Mark shook his head slowly, looking down the shallow hill at rumbling machinery, spitting little clouds of greasy diesel smoke, at gangs of toiling workers, bare-backed, sunburned men sweating in the heat. Old? Hell. In just a few more weeks, I’ll be forty years old.

  I’m getting too old for this, that’s for sure. So tired today.…

  Like to be in an office somewhere, be an indoor engineer, making up work for the younger folks to do. But this pays better. Made sixty-eight thousand before taxes last year. Billy in college, Freddy about to start, Alice in the ninth grade …

  Be easier if the taxes were a little lower. Which is why you voted for Nixon in ’72. Shows how much you know.…

  Be easier if Marian would get a job too. If Marian could get a job. College degree, sure, but she’s been sitting home with the kids since 1956. And maybe she doesn’t like the idea anyway, what with all that nice, unpaid volunteer work. Hell …

  Starting to turn away, get back to the business at hand, but jet noise, louder than usual, echoing around the hills, made him look up. Too bright. He fished the expensive prescription sunglasses out of his pocket and put them on, looked up again. Bright white arrowhead moving across the northern sky, leaving a tiny sliver of black smoke behind, too low to make a contrail. What … British Airways Concorde making its way to Dulles, thundering across the Northern Virginia suburbs.

  And our SST, just blueprints in the trash. Good old Boeing. Good old politics. As usual. Build the interstates and then let them rot, bridges and all, this fine new thing we’re building now will be falling down in 1995.…

  And Skylab orbiting overhead the end of the space program. Spend billions to get to the Moon, get there, by God, then throw it all away. Hell, five years ago they said they’d have the shuttle flying in six or seven years. Now they say they’ll have it flying in only five or six years. I guess that’s something … Progress.

  Momentary memory of watching Apollo 17 lift off on TV, watching it light up the waterway brilliant yellow and white, the sky turning blue around the edges of the square picture. Sudden realization that this was the last one, that he really should have taken the time to go down and see one take off for real.…

  Too late now, buddy boy.

  The last echo faded, Mark looked back down at the blueprints on the table, at his scribbled notes in one margin. All right, this is why they pay you so much. Fixes. On the spot. He sat down on an upturned wire-spool and slid his fat Rockwell calculator out of its holster, set it on the tabletop, and clicked the “on” switch. The display lit up, bright green, easier to read in daylight than standard red LEDs.

  Sturdy little toy, this, many orders of magnitude more useful than the old K&E deci-trig log-log slide rule sitting home on his dresser. Expensive too. Could have lived with less. So why did you buy it, then? Mark grinned at the little machine. That damned commercial, of course, so clever. Little radio play about the Rockwell advertising department, sleazy guys arguing about how they could make their pitch unique. How does our product differ from all the others? But … but … then the tacky little jingle about “… big, green numbers and little rubber feet!”

  Hell, I still remember the whole thing! “Oh, you can’t go wrong with Rockwell.…”

  * * *

  April the 12th was the twentieth anniversary of Yury Gagarin’s orbital flight. With bright morning sunshine flooding in through the sliding glass doors, Mark turned on the nineteen-inch Panasonic portable, still turned to CBS, because they always had the best coverage, despite Uncle Walter’s unfortunate decision to retire, camera view out across mosquito inlet toward the launch pad. Brilliant, clear blue sky. After so many delays, today would be the day for sure, a pleasant enough coincidence.

  The little one-bedroom apartment was nice enough, though way too cramped, but with Marian holding onto the house and Alice still in college, it was the best he could do. OK. I don’t really need a living room, it’s not like I entertain a lot. Bedroom lined with books, breakfast nook in the little kitchen, and use the living room as a den and office. Chair, TV, desk, light table … Might as well get something done.…

  But he sat rooted in the chair, staring at the TV. Too damned tired to work just yet. Feel so old … Right. And when did forty-six start being old? The guy piloting that thing is just about your age. Reading glasses in space, for God’s sake.…

  Just feeling sorry for yourself, old man. Married twenty-seven years and the judge puts your poor old butt in the street, because women have to be “taken care of.” So what? Stop whining and get on with the rest of your life. There was a sharp pang in his chest then, one of those pretend “heart attacks” that used to send him scurrying to the hospital.

  Just anxiety, I can give you something for it if you’d like.…

  No thanks, Doc.

  Thought you were going to have a real heart attack when Dad died, sudden like that, Mom on the phone, bawling her grief in your ear, crying steadily at the funeral, talking about how badly she wanted to die now and go with him. No way to comfort her, not with all those memories of Mom sitting in Dad’s lap, smiling at him, happy with him, memory repeated over and over again, Mom and Dad just getting a little older in each and every snapshot. Then Mom standing by his fresh-dug grave, silent, not smiling anymore.

  Christ, Mom. You had a good trip. Not a damned thing to complain about. At least Dad got to see his great-grandson before he went. Billy the proud poppa, beaming down at brand new Jerry Severn. Hilarious to slap a name like that on some squalling, wrinkled red thing.

  Not long after that, Marian broke the news.

  And here I sit, in an apartment all my own.…

  Another glance at the bright TV picture. Well, going pretty good this morning. Fifty-nine minutes on the countdown clock, so I might as well get something done while I wait.

  The box on the desk was waiting too, right beside the brand-new thirteen-inch color monitor. Went the
extra mile there. Could’ve bought a color TV and gotten away with it. Too fuzzy though, hard on my eyes since I had to start wearing these damn bifocals.…

  Open the box and look down at the thing. Putty-colored, with high-profile keys and the familiar Commodore logo, familiar because they had a couple of PETs at the office. He set it on the desktop and started hooking up wires, plugging things in. Even bought a disk drive instead of a tape deck. Do it right, if it’s going to mean anything at all. The Commodore 64 looked good set up, not as “professional” as the old PETs, but pretty nice. Not metallic like the TI-99/4a he’d looked at, but a whole lot nicer than Billy’s big, boxy Apple II. Probably a good choice. Math not as good as the TI, but more RAM for less money, a lot greater likelihood it’ll still be supported after Texas Instruments goes belly-up.…

  He hit the “on” switches in sequence and waited. Screen alight. Operating system, available RAM space, and READY. Cursor blinking beside the word. “Ready.” Jesus. You had to laugh at the thought of all those people taken in by colorful TV ads, bar-chart histograms rising like magic on the screen, rushing out to buy a real computer. Be the first person in your neighborhood to own a computer? Well, buy one of our computers and maybe you can own the neighborhood. Imagine them now, sitting dumbfounded, wondering, “Ready for what?”

  Movement on the TV.…

  The nine-minute built-in hold was over and the clock was counting down again, electric feeling in the air, as if this was it. Well, maybe. Anything can happen now. Last time, just a couple of days ago, they’d aborted at T-39 seconds, newspeople standing in long, silent rows, cameras ready.…

  But today is the twentieth anniversary of Vostok 1.…

  Then it went down and down and down, Mark dragging the old hassock Marian let him have up in front of the TV, leaning in close so he could watch it without glasses. Make it real. As if the naked TV screen, were, somehow, something real.…

  Down past twelve, plumes of steam coming out of the turbine vents, splash of sparks, yellow fire turning blue then clear. Main engine start … camera pulling back to show the cloud of smoke, then the solids lit, much heavier smoke with fire boiling crazily in its depths …