The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Created a new psychological fad, brought business to a new generation of ill-trained, cultish therapists …

  “It’ll be all right,” he said. “Matt is a bright boy. Too bright to be seduced by mere fantasy, no matter how real it may seem.…”

  But then they walked over the hill, back toward the house, and there the two of them sat, side by side on the divan, swinging gently, eyes shut, machine between them, inductabs on temple and forehead. Silent. Still. Then the old man’s eyes opened, eerie and bright. “My God, Jerry,” he’d whispered. “You oughta try this.…”

  And Matt, “Get back in, Gramps! Hurry. Mr. Vorhees is ready.…”

  They’d watched a while, then, reluctant, gone back out on the beach.

  Lisa stopped after a while and turned toward him, face pressed into his chest. Not knowing what to say, finally, “I think we’re going to have to…”

  Jerry squeezed her close and said, “Look. We’re only going to be here a few days. Once we leave we’ll talk it over with Matt and see how he feels. He’s our son. We can make sure nothing happens.…” He kissed her on top of the head. “I haven’t seen Grandpa smile like that since Gina died, for God’s sake. I don’t want to take it away just now.”

  She looked up at him, eyes serious, and said, “No. I guess not.”

  “It’ll be OK.” Because nothing lasts forever.

  * * *

  Three years later, Jerry and Lisa stood on Mark’s lawn, shading their eyes from bright sunshine, waiting along with a few billion other people for the crew transport of the Mars 1 expedition to lift off. Not really anything out of the ordinary. There’d been dozens of these over the past thirty-six months as the ship had been built in Earth orbit. This one was, however, the last one. When this crew took off, they’d be gone for a long time. Only three months to Mars and touchdown, hopefully on the north rim of Coprates, but the surface stay was two years long.…

  Lisa kept looking over her shoulder, back up at the porch, where Matt, tall and tan now at eleven, sat with the old man, the two of them tied together through yet another induction unit, the third one they’d bought since that first eerie day. Nothing untoward, of course, a lot of people used them, and Matt seldom touched the deck otherwise. Still …

  The old man looked awful now, sunken-cheeked, eyes seeming to bulge from their sockets, painfully thin with his skin hanging away in long, loose flaps, mottled and dry, like some old-time cancer victim. Still in his right mind, though, bright-eyed and full of life. Maybe that was the worst part, that he could sit there, year after year, and watch himself die. Sometimes the abolition of things like Alzheimer’s seemed like a mixed blessing. Well, Mark seemed happy enough, so long as he and the boy could net up once in a while, through SynchroNet every couple of weeks, live like this two or three times a year.

  “I wish Matt would come off the porch and watch this for real.…”

  Jerry glanced back at them and nodded. “Yeah. Well. I guess I feel that way too, but…” He shrugged. “This morning Grandpa told me he’d arranged a netfeed from NASA, cost him around thirty thousand bucks just for one channel-track. They’re going to watch the launch from a chase plane, then switch over to an old military satellite that’s scheduled to be passing overhead. Ought to be quite a view.…”

  No more, then. Sudden brilliant light, north along the coast, and you could hear people shouting down on the beach, crowds all along A1A, arms lifted, pointing, shading their eyes. The light began its climb then, thunder rolling across the sea, back in over the land, fire in the sky, going upward, tipping away into the east, slowly getting farther away, twenty-six men and women on their way into the future.

  When the light and thunder were over, crew transport just a bright spark far out over the sea, they turned back toward the porch. Lisa took a sudden step back, scream strangling in her throat. Sitting on the couch beside the boy, the old man’s head was thrown back, vacant eyes staring at the sky, mouth open, chest still.

  “Dear God…” Jerry ran forward then, up onto the porch, and knelt before his son, reaching out, shaking him. “Matt. Matt!”

  The boy’s eyes opened and focused on him. “Dad?”

  “Are you all right?”

  The boy seemed to shrug, very distant as he looked over at the corpse beside him, staring at it, quite calm. Long moment, somber, then he looked back up at his parents, eyes brightening, full of … something.

  “Sure,” he said. “Everything’s fine.” Another look at the old body. Everything’s fine, he thought, remembering a lovely evening twenty years before, when Gina’d smiled into his eyes and told him just how she felt. And now, everything seems so clean and new.…

  As he slowly picked the inductabs off his head, Matt said, “The view was tremendous. It made him happy again.” His parents helped him to his feet then, and walking away, he glanced over his shoulder at Mark, thinking, You’re not gone so long as someone remembers who you were.

  The old man, lost in a distant dream, could only agree.

  COUNTING CATS IN ZANZIBAR

  Gene Wolfe

  Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics to be one of the best—perhaps the best—SF and fantasy writers working today. His most acclaimed work is the tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, individual volumes of which won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. His other books include the classic novels Peace and The Devil in a Forest, both recently rereleased, as well as Soldier of the Mist, Free Live Free, Soldier of Arete, There Are Doors, Castleview, Pandora by Holly Hollander, and The Urth of the New Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, Gene Wolfe’s Book of Days, The Wolfe Archipelago, the recent World Fantasy Award–winning collection Storeys from the Old Hotel, and Endangered Species. His most recent books are part of a popular new series, including Nightside the Long Sun, The Lake of the Long Sun, Caldé of the Long Sun, and Exodus from the Long Sun. His short stories have appeared previously in our First, Second, and Fifth Annual Collections.

  Here he takes us aboard a ship at sea to visit with a man and a woman enjoying breakfast during a seemingly pleasant and restful sea voyage—but, as you’ll soon see (and as you would immediately expect if you know Wolfe’s work), almost nothing here is what it first seems to be.…

  The first thing she did upon arising was count her money. The sun itself was barely up, the morning cool with the threatening freshness peculiar to the tropics, the freshness, she thought, that says, “Breathe deep of me while you can.”

  Three thousand and eighty-seven UN dollars left. It was all there. She pulled on the hot-pink underpants that had been the only ones she could find to fit her in Kota Kinabalu and hid the money as she had the day before. The same skirt and blouse as yesterday; there would be no chance to do more than rinse, wring out, and hang dry before they made land.

  And precious little then, she thought; but that was wrong. With this much money she would have been able to board with an upper-class family and have her laundry micropored, rest, and enjoy a dozen good meals before she booked passage to Zamboanga.

  Or Darwin. Clipping her shoes, she went out on deck.

  He joined her so promptly that she wondered whether he had been listening, his ears attuned to the rattle and squeak of her cabin door. She said, “Good morning.” And he, “The dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the bay. That’s the only quote I’ve been able to think of. Now you’re safe for the rest of the trip.”

  “But you’re not,” she told him, and nearly added Dr. Johnson’s observation that to be on a ship is to be in prison, with the added danger of drowning.

  He came to stand beside her, leaning as she did against the rickety railing. “Things talk to you, you said that last night. What kind of things?”

  She smiled. “Machines. Animals too. The wind and the rain.”

  “Do they ever give you quotations?” He was big and looked thirty-five or a little past it, wit
h a wide Irish mouth that smiled easily and eyes that never smiled at all.

  “I’d have to think. Not often, but perhaps one has.”

  He was silent for a time, a time during which she watched the dim shadow that was a shark glide under the hull and back out again. No shark’s ever talked to me, she thought, except him. In another minute or two he’ll want to know the time for breakfast.

  “I looked at a map once.” He squinted at the sun, now half over the horizon. “It doesn’t come up out of China when you’re in Mandalay.”

  “Kipling never said it did. He said that happened on the road there. The soldier in his poem might have gone there from India. Or anywhere. Mapmakers colored the British Empire pink two hundred years ago, and two hundred years ago half Earth was pink.”

  He glanced at her. “You’re not British, are you?”

  “No, Dutch.”

  “You talk like an American.”

  ‘‘I’ve lived in the United States, and in England too; and I can be more English than the British when I want to. I have heerd how many ord’nary veman one vidder’s equal to, in pint ’o comin’ over you. I think it’s five-and-twenty, but I don’t rightly know verther it a’n’t more.”

  This time he grinned. “The real English don’t talk like that.”

  “They did in Dickens’s day, some of them.”

  “I still think you’re American. Can you speak Dutch?”

  “Gewiss, Narr!”

  “Okay, and you could show me a Dutch passport. There are probably a lot of places where you can buy one good enough to pass almost anywhere. I still think you’re American.”

  “That was German,” she muttered, and heard the thrum of the ancient diesel-electric: “Dontrustim-dontrustim-dontrustim.”

  “But you’re not German.”

  “Actually, I am.”

  He grunted. “I never thought you gave me your right name last night. What time’s breakfast?”

  She was looking out across the Sulu Sea. Some unknown island waited just below the horizon, its presence betrayed by the white dot of cloud forming above it. “I never thought you were really so anxious to go that you’d pay me five thousand to arrange this.”

  “There was a strike at the airport. You heard about it. Nobody could land or take off.” Aft, a blackened spoon beat a frying pan with no pretense of rhythm.

  * * *

  Seated in the smelly little salon next to the galley, she said, “To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day.”

  “They won’t have kippers here, will they?” He was trying to clean his fork with his handkerchief. A somewhat soiled man who looked perceptionally challenged set bowls of steaming brown rice in front of them and asked a question. By signs, he tried to indicate that he did not understand.

  She said, “He desires to know whether the big policeman would like some pickled squid. It’s a delicacy.”

  He nodded. “Tell him yes. What language is that?”

  “Melayu Pasar. We call it Bazaar Malay. He probably does not imagine that there is anyone in the entire world who cannot understand Melayu Pasar.” She spoke, and the somewhat soiled man grinned, bobbed his head, and backed away; she spooned up rice, discovering that she was hungry.

  “You’re a widow yourself. Isn’t that right? Only a widow would remember that business about widows coming over people.”

  She swallowed, found the teapot, and poured for both of them. “Aha, a deduction. The battle-ax scenteth the battle afar.”

  “Will you tell me the truth, just once? How old are you?”

  “No. Forty-five.”

  “That’s not so old.”

  “Of course it’s not. That’s why I said it. You’re looking for an excuse to seduce me.” She reached across the table and clasped his hand; it felt like muscle and bone beneath living skin. “You don’t need one. The sea has always been a seducer, a careless, lying fellow.”

  He laughed. “You mean the sea will do my work for me?”

  “Only if you act quickly. I’m wearing pink underdrawers, so I’m aflame with passion.” How many of these polyglot sailors would it take to throw him overboard, and what would they want for it? How much aluminum, how much plastic, how much steel? Four would probably be enough, she decided; and settled on six to be safe. Fifty dollars each should be more than sufficient, and even if there was quite a lot of plastic he would sink like a stone.

  “You’re flirting with trouble,” he told her. The somewhat soiled man came back with a jar of something that looked like bad marmalade and plopped a spoonful onto each bowl of rice. He tasted it, and gave the somewhat soiled man the thumbs-up sign.

  “I didn’t think you’d care for it,” she told him. “You were afraid of kippers.”

  “I’ve had them and I don’t like them. I like calamari. You know, you’d be nice looking if you wore makeup.”

  “You don’t deny you’re a policeman. I’ve been waiting for that, but you’re not going to.”

  “Did he really say that?”

  She nodded. “Polisi-polisi. That’s you.”

  “Okay, I’m a cop.”

  “Last night you wanted me to believe you were desperate to get out of the country before you were arrested.”

  He shook his head. ‘‘Cops never break the law, so that has to be wrong. Pink underwear makes you passionate, huh? What about black?”

  “Sadistic.”

  “I’ll try to remember. No black and no white.”

  “The time will come when you’ll long for white.” Listening to the thrum of the old engine, the knock of the propeller shaft in its loose bearing, she ate more rice. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but this brown stuff is really made from the penises of water buffaloes. They slice them lengthwise and stick them into the vaginas of cow water buffaloes, obtained when the cows are slaughtered. Then they wrap the whole mess in banana leaves and bury it in a pig pen.”

  He chewed appreciatively. “They must sweat a lot, those water buffaloes. There’s a sort of salty tang.”

  When she said nothing, he added, “They’re probably big fat beasts. Like me. Still, I bet they enjoy it.”

  She looked up at him. “You’re not joking? Obviously, you can eat.

  Can you do that too?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

  “You came here to get me.…”

  He nodded. “Sure. From Buffalo, New York.”

  “I will assume that was intended as wit. From America. From the United States. Federal, state, or local?”

  “None of the above.”

  “You gave me that money so that we’d sail together, very likely the only passengers on this ship. Which doesn’t make any sense at all. You could have had me arrested there and flown back.”

  Before he could speak she added, “Don’t tell me about the airport strike. I don’t believe in your airport strike, and if it was real you arranged it.”

  “Arrest you for what?” He sipped his tea, made a face, and looked around for sugar. “Are you a criminal? What law did you break?”

  “None!”

  He signaled to the somewhat soiled man, and she said, “Silakan gula.”

  “That’s sugar? Silakan?”

  “Silakan is please. I stole nothing. I left the country with one bag and some money my husband and I had saved, less than twenty thousand dollars.”

  “And you’ve been running ever since.”

  “For the wanderer, time doesn’t exist.” The porthole was closed. She got up and opened it, peering out at the slow swell of what was almost a flat calm.

  “This is something you should say, not me,” he told her back. “But I’ll say it anyhow. You stole God’s fingertip.”

  “Don’t you call me a thief!”

  “But you didn’t break the law. He’s outside everybody’s jurisdiction.”

  The somewhat soiled man brought them a thick glass sugar canister; the “big policeman” nodded thanks and spooned sugar into his tea, s
tirred it hard, and sipped. “I can only taste sweet, sour, salty, and bitter,” he told her conversationally. “That’s all you can taste too.”

  Beyond the porthole, a wheeling gull pleaded, “Garbage? Just one little can of garbage?” She shook her head.

  “You must be God-damned tired of running.”

  She shook her head again, not looking. “I love it. I could do it forever, and I intended to.”

  The silence lasted so long that she almost turned to see whether he had gone. At last he said, “I’ve got a list of the names we know. Seven. I don’t think that’s all of them, nobody does, but we’ve got those seven. When you’re Dutch, you’re Tilly de Groot.”

  “I really am Dutch,” she said. “I was born in the Hague. I have dual citizenship. I’m the Flying Dutchwoman.”

  He cleared his throat, a surprisingly human sound. “Only not Tilly de Groot.”

  “No, not Tilly de Groot. She was a friend of my mother’s.”

  “Your rice is getting cold,” he told her.

  “And I’m German, at least in the way Americans talk about being German. Three of my grandparents had German names.”

  She sensed his nod. “Before you got married, your name was—”

  She whirled. “Something I’ve forgotten!”

  “Okay.”

  She returned to their table, ignoring the sailors’ stares. “The farther she traveled into unknown places, the more precisely she could find within herself a map showing only the cities of the interior.”

  He nodded again, this time as though he did not understand. “We’d like you to come home. We feel like we’re tormenting you, the whole company does, and we don’t want to. I shouldn’t have given you so much money, because that was when I think you knew. But we wanted you to have enough to get back home on.”

  “With my tail between my legs. Looking into every face for new evidence of my defeat.”

  “What your husband found? Other people…” He went silent and slackjawed with realization.

  She drove her spoon into her rice. “Yes. The first hint came from me. I thought I could control my expression better.”