The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  On July twenty-ninth, after the Austrians had attacked Serbia and the tsar had ordered mobilization, the Ostrov family set off for Berlin. The train was packed with Russians intent on outrunning the German declaration of war. Rosalind sat dry-eyed, handing the countess her smelling salts; Leonid Ivanovitch was cheerful and inspired, eager to return to his betrothed and to his regiment. Everyone on the train—the Russians, the English students, the French maid, the German officers clanking past—insisted that “it would be over by Christmas.”

  Rosalind shut her eyes and fell into a dreamlike recollection of her last interview with Medvekhin. She saw the extraordinary, wise face, the yellow eyes, the billowing “Russian blouse” of yellow silk that covered the muscular, furred upper body. They sat alone; Sister Luise was in the kitchen preparing the vegetable soup on which the patient subsisted; Lucas had not yet come to the evening rendezvous. The wooden shutters were flung wide and the back window open, showing the sunlit mountainside.

  They spoke of the impending war. Medvekhin turned from gazing at the path winding up to the high meadow and made a curious pronouncement: “Where millions die for insufficient reasons perhaps this is in itself a reason not to live.”

  Rosalind was shocked but she managed to hide it. She had become better and better at hiding her thoughts and feelings from the patient. She wondered if it had to do with poor Medvekhin’s failing health.

  “I accept one sufficient reason to die,” she said, “namely that one has grown very old and come to the end of a life span. Is that so with the Akuine?”

  “No,” said Medvekhin. “Once again the parallels are inexact. There is the possibility of mind-conservation and rebirth. Let us talk of something less embarrassing.”

  “I will be returning to Russia with the Ostrov family,” she said.

  “Your last visit, chère Rosaline?”

  A twitch of the fine drooping hair about the mouth.

  “No, not quite,” she smiled and lied with perfect composure. “I will be here tomorrow morning.”

  Soon afterward Lucas arrived and the Sister came in with the patient’s food. Lucas sat down at the harmonium and they entertained Medvekhin with dinner music. Rosalind sang “Auld Lang Syne”; she was aware that none of the listeners felt the powerful associations of the song as she did. Later that evening she walked back to the hospital with Lucas for the last time and they went over their brave plans for letters, for their next meeting, when everything was over. She expressed her hopes for Medvekhin and for Europe, for mankind. Yet she carried in her sewing bag Dr. Lucas Tilmann’s black notebook, which she had stolen from the tangle of books at his bedside, and she made sure never to come within range of their cosmic guest the next day. Her memory, at least, would survive the encounter with Medvekhin.…

  * * *

  When she opened her eyes again the countess was gazing at her with sad concern. The family was well aware that she was being parted from her sweetheart by the approaching conflict, but Rosalind was able to reassure the countess, later on. No, she was not expecting a child. The idea of being pregnant and unwed among the Ostrovs was not as frightful as that of being in the same situation, for instance, in Cheltenham. She began to see it as an alternative life, something that might have happened. Lucas had given her a beautiful ring with an emerald, the gift of a grateful patient, but she wore it on a chain around her neck, under her blouse. It was evening of the first day; Munich, Nuremberg lay behind them; they were approaching Leipzig.

  Cities of Old Europe were left behind: Berlin, Stettin, Danzig, Konigsberg … and at last Minsk, after the railway gauge broadened and the travelers lost a number of days by returning to the Julian calendar.

  “We are traveling back into the past,” said Leonid wearily.

  “Believe me, dear child,” said his mother, “Horse-dawn carriages were much worse.”

  “Perhaps one day,” said Rosalind, “we will fly from place to place.”

  “As angels?” teased Marie-Louise.

  “No of course not!” said Rosalind, laughing. “In flying-machines!”

  “Futuristic thinking,” said Leonid, “is subversive. Kyril, our revolutionary, hopes that none of the empires will survive this war.”

  At last they reached their destination: Rosalind helped the countess up the steps of the palace in Moscow, where they took refuge with Great-Uncle Paul, pleading the fortunes of war.

  * * *

  The season was late spring but the weather in the Alps was chill and changeable. Rosalind drove up from the station wrapped in a treasured Russian coat that reached to her ankles. She was exhausted from journeying, drained of hope. The familiar trees on the avenue filled her with a painful expectation—Oh Lucas, oh my love—but she could not help noticing that the driveway was neglected. A few patients were on the terrace and she saw at once that they were veterans: “wounded soldiers.”

  In the hall she found a village girl mopping the marble floor. A gruff old orderly did not remember her but he became excited when she asked for Dr. Lucas Tilmann.

  “The English girl!” he cried. “Are you…?”

  Rosalind did not like “making herself known” but felt it necessary.

  “I am Miss Lane, Dr. Tilmann’s verlobte, his betrothed!” she announced.

  Old Fritz was already hurrying her off to the oberin, the matron. He flung open the double doors to the matron’s parlor and cried out: “She has come! Fräulein Lane, his English girl!”

  Dr. Daniel, the intern, came toward her with outstretched hands and the new oberin, rustling from behind her desk, was Sister Luise. Rosalind, trembling, could not hold back any longer: “Oh tell me!” she cried. “What has happened to Lucas Tilmann? Is he here?”

  “Yes, he is here!” soothed Dr. Daniel, smiling.

  “We were to be married! I sent telegrams, letters…”

  “Hush! He will be all right!” said the frau oberin. “Now that you are here.”

  “I have heard nothing for five years—since 1915!”

  They sat her down with a reviving little glass of herbal schnapps and began to explain. Lucas Tilmann was a convalescent, one of the “wounded soldiers,” discharged seven months ago from an orthopedic ward in Munich; he had lost his left leg at the knee when a field lazaretto caught a shell on the Somme.

  That was really not all of it, she could see. Dr. Daniel spoke of trauma, from the battlefield; she first heard from him the English word shell shock. The former director sat alone in a darkened room.…

  “Please! I must go to him at once!”

  Dr. Daniel hurried off to prepare Lucas for a visitor. Rosalind knew that there was still more to tell, concerning the hospital itself; but now that she was alone with the Frau Oberin she blurted out a quite different question and was able to observe the result.

  “Sister Luise, what has become of the patient in the annex; what has become of Medvekhin?”

  The frau oberin gave a puzzled smile. “Well, there is no one up in the chalet now,” she said. “And I don’t recall any Russian patient with that name.…”

  Rosalind felt a warning chill: She knew better than to protest. Sister Luise had been made to forget.

  “Who was the last patient up there?” she asked. “Was it Miss Courtney?”

  “Yes, of course!” said the frau oberin. “Such a remarkable recovery! Poor Dr. Tilmann’s sleep cure!”

  “Surely there were two gypsies, up in the clearing, living in their caravan?”

  “Yes, indeed! Kaspar is still here, working as an orderly, and Marja is in the kitchen. If anyone asks we say they are Hungarians.…”

  Then the frau oberin directed Rosalind up the stairs—the lifts were not working. So she came to the rooms in the east wing that Lucas Tilmann had inherited when his father retired to Switzerland. Dr. Daniel stood at the door of the sitting room motioning her inside with an encouraging smile.

  She looked into the large room, dark now because of the bright day outside. She saw a figure hunched at a sma
ll desk, outlined against the French windows onto the balcony. Rosalind saw her life, her future, her dear love whom she must heal; she rushed into the room and fell on her knees beside Lucas Tilmann.

  “Is it you?” he whispered. “Is it you?”

  “Oh yes!” she said “Oh yes, my dear, my soul…”

  Dr. Daniel closed the door, satisfied, as they embraced. Rosalind asked a question or two and knew that she could not pursue certain subjects. Lucas Tilmann had no memory of Medvekhin; she could not tell if this amnesia was part of an alien command to forget or if it was deepened by his war trauma.

  Lucas counted his long recovery from the moment of her arrival, but Rosalind knew that it was made possible by his insight into his own case. In no time he was managing the clumsy prosthesis well enough to walk up and down the sitting room. Then, mastering the confines of the room he set out, battling his agoraphobia, to explore the suite, to stand on the balcony, to plan a descent to the garden, to the village—in particular, an official visit to the picturesque baroque Rathaus: The burgermeister was in his debt.

  Lucas no longer owned any part of St. Verena’s hospital. His family’s long association with the Russians was regarded as disloyal to the kaiser while the two empires were at war. He had been more or less forced to sell his shares to the town council of Mariensee. The shares of his Russian partners (who could now be described as White Russians) had simply been confiscated.

  The burgermeister’s plans to develop St. Verena’s as a luftkurort, a health resort featuring mountain air, were delayed by lack of funds and personnel. The presence of Lucas Tilmann was an embarrassment to the town council and the staff of St. Verena’s. He was a reminder of past glories, and at the same time a physician who could not heal himself. The burgermeister, in these circumstances, was able to arrange for a civil marriage, with an English bride, pending a joumey to some other country.

  The two lovers planned their future with a blend of realism and romance that Rosalind thought of as “postwar.” After the ceremony in the town hall they would drive into Switzerland in the sturdy old Daimler and take their way down into Italy, to Venice, where they would take ship for England. Lucas had money in a Swiss bank account; she had her nest egg in the Bank of England plus a few pieces of jewelry that the countess had pressed upon her in lieu of salary.

  The Ostrov family had lost a large part of their fortunes but they were not completely ruined. After the large estates had gone, there remained the small places—the hunting grounds, the horse farm—which could be sold sometime, before they came into the power of the state.

  And as for their lives they owed these to Kyril Mihailovitch Azlov, who was in the forefront of the revolution. When the palace in Moscow was requisitioned he made sure that the family retained comfortable living quarters. Rosalind spoke to him with keen interest about the great meteorite of 1908, believed to have fallen in the region of the Stony Tunguska River.

  Kyril Mihailovitch had not only rejected his title and made over all his personal fortune to the cause, he had changed his name. He called himself Erlik, the name he had used to sign his folktales; this name, he told Rosalind, was a Siberian name for the Firegod. When the great meteorite fell down, simple folk said it was the Firegod Erlik, who came to Earth in the guise of a bear.

  Comrade Erlik was a Party member of the second wave, due to be purged about 1936, not long after Dr. Jacob Daniel, the director of St. Verena’s Sanitarium, lost his civil rights and went into exile.

  Two days before her marriage, before she left St. Verena’s forever, Rosalind visited the chalet. The weather was cool but clear with scarves of mist on the upper slopes of the mountains. She set off up the path to the clearing, which was overgrown: The benches were wet, covered with leaves. The horse and the caravan had gone and the icon of St. George had been taken from the wayside shrine. Yet as she climbed the righthand path toward the chalet she remembered, she had preserved the memory of that joy, that well-being that had streamed out to her.

  The chalet itself was clean and well-kept; Rosalind went from room to room flinging open the shutters and the windows. She began to weep. Tears slid down her cheeks for the lovers who had shared the narrow bed, for millions dead, for Leonid Ostrov, dead near Vilna. The large back bedroom was quiet and still, with no hint of its former occupant; when she stood at the open window she saw that the path to the higher meadow had been picked out with white stones.

  Rosalind dried her eyes. She went out of the back door and began to climb up through the pines and the larches, coming into new leaf. When she passed the spring, bubbling in its ancient stone basin, she wrung out a handkerchief in the icy water and wiped her face. She came out into brighter sunshine and turned left, pacing slowly through the long grass at the edge of the round meadow.

  She found the grave just within the shade of the trees; a network of green had spread over the black earth; some larger stones at the head of the grave formed the letter M. Nearby there was a block of wood, cut from a tree trunk, as if someone else came to sit in this place, as she did now, contemplating the grave.

  It seemed to Rosalind that nothing had taken place; the story would never be told; no researchers would ever find their way into the subarctic wastes—and that Medvekhin had willed it this way. This impossibly lonely death was an essential act, the contribution of the Akuine race of star-travelers to the history of the world.

  Presently she heard a voice and saw the gypsy, Kaspar, striding up the path. He was just as he had been, a muscular, jolly man with a piercing glance; she stood up and they shook hands. His smile was melancholy.

  “We know who lies here…,” she said, “but what did you tell the others?”

  “The woods are full of graves, miss,” he said. “If the grave is marked then Christians will not disturb it.”

  He made the sign of the cross with two fingers like an old believer. She had to ask the questions—yes, the master had passed on in 1915; both Dr. Tilmann and Sister Luise had assisted at this burial on the meadow.

  “They have been made to forget.…”

  Kaspar laughed aloud.

  “Oh we’ve seen it happen many times, Marja and I. He could make any human forget his own mother, just like that, in a breath!”

  He snapped his fingers. Rosalind hardly questioned the fact that Kaspar and Marja still remembered. She believed it was another odd class thing. Medvekhin knew his true servants: At the last he protected his story, in what was almost a reflex action, from his doctor and his nurse.

  “And would this loss of memory last—forever?” she asked.

  “I asked that question myself,” replied Kaspar, frowning. “And our dear master said that memories might return.”

  This was all the reassurance that she received and it had to be enough. She bade farewell to Medvekhin and to the human being who had been pressed into alien service. She walked down the mountainside through the trees, passing through light and shadow. She thought of England, projected her thoughts into that future time, that future moment in the English woodland when she would bring out the black notebook and present it to her husband.

  SCHRÖDINGER’S DOG

  Damien Broderick

  Australian writer, editor, and critic Damien Broderick made his first sale in 1964 to John Carnell’s anthology New Writings in SF 1, and although not prolific by genre standards, has kept up a steady stream of publications in the thirty-three years that have followed. He sold his first novel, Sorcerer’s World, in 1970; it was later reissued in a rewritten version in the United States as The Black Grail. Broderick’s other books include the novels The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, Striped Holes, and, with Rory Barnes, Valencies, and two collections, A Man Returned and The Dark Between the Stars. He has edited three anthologies of Australian science fiction, The Zeitgeist Machine, Strange Attractors, and Matilda at the Speed of Light, and written a nonfiction critical study of science fiction, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction. His most recent book i
s a major new novel, The White Abacus, and another one, Zones, will be out soon in Australia.

  In the ingenious story that follows, he boldly takes us deep into unexplored territory where no one has gone before, and shows us that although there may be No Place Like Home, sometimes you’ve got to settle for what you can find.…

  The old woman is ninety-nine parts dead, but sardonic with it. A green hospital gown hangs on her wasted flesh like a shroud. Two men look down upon her from the observation bay, one of them rather less than relaxed, as she is cranked into the quantum splitter.

  “Elizabeth,” Dr. Tom Manchetti croons into his mike. “Beth, can you hear me?”

  “Hmph.” She stirs, vomits a thin dribble, which a technician wipes from her chin.

  “Wake up, Beth.” In the bay’s dimmed illumination, lit from below by red and green indicator tabs, Manchetti’s long-jawed face is slightly macabre. “I’m sorry, honey, there’s going to be some pain.”

  “Okay, Thomas,” she whispers. “No need to shout. Oh. God.”

  “I know, honey, it hurts. We’re turning down the nerve-block chips for a moment.” In a beguiling murmur, he tells her, “You have a visitor, Beth.”

  “Oh? Can’t we just get this bloody over and done with? I’m so sick of this.” She dry-retches.

  “Soon, Beth. Can you open your eyes, honey?”

  Elizabeth Croft blinks against the lights, looks up into the bay, squints against a flare of light on the sloping window. “Well, well, the Lord High Pooh-Bah, and me on my deathbed. I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced, Sir Bryce.” She spasms. “Oh, bugger.”

  Neurochip’s new CEO leans to the microphone. “Good morning, Dr. Croft. How are you feeling today?”

  “They’ve turned my pain-block nanos off, Sir Bryce. I feel like shit.”

  “Call me Bry, Elizabeth. May I call you Beth?”

  The dying woman smirks. “Just call me a doctor.”

  Sir Bryce Powell turns his head, speaks quietly. “Dr. Manchetti, surely she’ll need to be fully alert—”