The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Manchetti, watching the cartoon and taking notes, leans into his own microphone. “That makes sense, Daniel. We’re spying on these other histories, aren’t we, so perhaps you find it easier to link up with doubles in the same trade.”

  “Cute. The metaphysics of quantum identity. Listen, there’s a couple of old codgers coming over from the camp.”

  They are very black, very thin, as fit as trouts, and liberally decorated with incisions. The young men slink off.

  “See the cicatrices? That must be what the kid meant about cutting me.”

  “They’re Aborigines,” Jill notes.

  “I don’t think there’s ever been a European in the country.” Daniel takes a deep, ravished breath. “It’s beautiful—untouched. The air’s wonderful.”

  “So what’s a nice Vietnamese boy like you doing in a place like this?” Manchetti asks. “Be careful, Danny.”

  “Good midday, young northerner,” says one of the elders. “You are speaking to the Dreaming ancestors, I see.”

  “Good … midday, sir. Uh, not exactly. I was talking to my wife.”

  The second elder finds this droll. “Ah, his wife! Is she well, young Ng? Are your babies healthy and whole in your distant homeland?”

  Inside his head, Manchetti says, “Play along with him, Danny.”

  “Yes, sir,” Daniel says to the old man. They are entirely naked, and carry spears sharpened and hardened by fire.

  “This is good news. Ng, let us talk here together for a time. There will be dancing, and a gathering. We have found you a skin.”

  “A skin.” He blinks.

  “Indeed. The elders have discussed the matter and sought the guidance of the Ancestor Makers. We have found your color and skin, young northerner. You are a Wallaby-man.”

  “A Wallaby—Thank you, old father.” He gropes for a suitable formula. “This will make my family very proud.”

  “You Wallaby-men are great travelers,” the black elder tells him, settling on his haunches in the sweet grass. His penis hangs loose, swaying, and from the corner of his eye Danny sees that something horrible has been done to it. He glances again, and then at the other old man. Their genitals look like, like what? Sausages slashed on one side and opened out—Subincision rite, he recalls, with a violent shudder, and looks away, feeling his gorge rise. “Uncle and I like to live here along the river tracks,” the elder is saying, swaying slightly, “but we see that the Lightning Man calls you to run far and far as the mobs of Wallabies ran across the plains.”

  Jill tells him, “Danny, we’re going into phase-three turbulence. We’re going to lose you for a moment. Hang in there, sweetheart.”

  His mind and heart are torn within him. After the suspicion and brutality of the other allo-histories, this world is a joyous affirmation, for all the fright that its ancient rites have speared into his clenching belly. “I don’t know what to say,” he says stumblingly to the old men. “I’m a stranger, and you’re welcoming me into your family. If only I could tell you how beautiful your world seems to me, how sweet, how generous.…”

  * * *

  Even as he speaks, there comes to his ears a rising crackle of flame that is abruptly a roaring of some terrible wind. The black men are gone into ruin and desolation. A machine voice tells him, “Warning! Close your face mask. Ambient aerosol toxins are at lethal levels. I repeat, close your face mask.”

  Jill fades back in. “We’ve got you, Danny. Who’s that? What’s that awful sound?”

  “Just a moment, Jill.” It is hot, and the air stinks. He wonders if he will faint. “How am I supposed to seal this bloody thing?” The device closes under his fingers, and he is breathing richer piped air. “Shit, what is this hellhole?”

  “You are two kilometers southeast of the bunker airlock, Master Ng,” the machine tells him. He realizes it is his suit speaking to him. “Please activate your head-up display and follow the cursor.”

  Where the river was a moment ago is a dry, cracked ditch. All the ground cover is parched and looks burned. He cannot even look at the sky, at its burning white glare. “It’s so hot!” Apparently he is clad in high-tech protective clothing, but still he feels as if his brains are being fried.

  “External temperature is fifty-three degrees celsius, Master Ng,” his suit tells him. “Please return immediately to the bunker. Your life-support system is failing.”

  “Where am I? How could this place suddenly be a desert? My God, is this some sort of Greenhouse nightmare?”

  “I am sorry, Master Ng, but your enquiry exceeds the parameters of my fuzzy-logic processor. For location, please consult the global-satellite fix on your head-up display.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Just tell me where I am, you stupid machine.”

  “You are just inside the entrance to the Hugh Morgan National Park. I must warn you, Master Ng, your suit cannot extend full warrantied protection against ambient volatiles for longer than five hours.”

  Daniel stands where he is, weeping. “They’ve wrecked it all, Jill! Oh my God, they’ve ruined our poor beautiful fucking planet!”

  * * *

  And it is snatched away, instantly, hell replaced by heaven. Danny gasps, wiping eyes suddenly dry. “Uh. It’s gone. I’m back. Jill, I don’t think I can stand much more of this. It’s killing me, it’s really making me sick. Let me just get over here to the stream and put my feet in the water. Ah. Ah.”

  The trickling water is cool, and sweet, unblemished.

  “I can’t see the black guys. The camp’s gone. Actually, now that I look at it, this place seems … you know … manicured. It’s gorgeous, Jill. Christ, a garbage tip’d be dazzling after that last place, but this is … I dunno, a Merchant Ivory movie, or something. Peter Greenaway. Only it’s not English, it’s real Aussie landscape but somehow … Shit! Don’t do that! Jill?”

  The voice in his head says, “Here, Dan. I’m trying to talk Dr. Manchetti into pulling you out.… We’ve lost your visual feed.”

  “Not you, darling.” He stares at the impossible, and finds that he is actually shaking his head in unconscious denial. “This woman just, just popped up in front of me, and she’s floating about a meter off the ground, and she’s you!”

  Aloft, at her ease, the uniformed woman says, “Male, what are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Danny says faintly. “How are you doing that?”

  She drops lightly to the ground. “This continent is proscribed to Males. Where are your companions?”

  Manchetti’s voice comes on-line. “Daniel, did I understand you? There’s an analog of your wife in this world?”

  “To the life, except she seems to have discovered antigravity. And she doesn’t like men very much.”

  The woman is terse. “No point trying to communicate with your fellow conspirators, Male. I’ve placed a force barrier across this park. Please sit down on the grass and keep your hands away from your body.”

  “Play along with her, Daniel,” Manchetti tells him. “This is what we’ve been waiting for!”

  “Oh, good.”

  “We’re trying to keep you stabilized in this domain, but we won’t be able to hold the superposition for long. Get us an equation, Dan, something along the lines of E = mc2, the superstring equations, anything, a hint, something we can use to bootstrap our own research, some paradigm breakthrough.”

  “Shut up for a moment, Dr. Manchetti. She’s frisking me with a, I dunno, an invisible tendril or something. I think this reality’s a matriarchy. Like that movie The Female Man.”

  “Sit down,” the woman tells him with military crispness. “What’s your name, Male? And stop muttering to your sky gods; I detest that superstitious drivel.”

  “My name’s Daniel Ng. And unless I miss my mark, yours is Gillian. Or Jill.”

  Shocked, the woman says, “Jael. How did you know that?”

  Daniel shrugs. “It just seemed highly probable, under the circumstances.”

  “Goddess!�
�� Instantly, she says, “You’re a quantum doppelgänger.”

  “A double, right?”

  “From an alternative superposition.”

  “Yes. How can you possibly know that?”

  She regards him scornfully. “You’re a Male, alone, and ungelded to judge by your tone of voice.”

  “Ungelded? What’s wrong with all you loonies? Yes, I’m ungelded and don’t you starting getting any ideas.”

  “Hence you’re a doppelgänger. It’s the most economical explanation. When one has eliminated the extremely implausible—”

  “—the impossible must be true?”

  She looks at him with renewed suspicion. “You know things no Male is permitted to study. What are you doing in the Garden of the Rose Hegemon?”

  With punch-drunk levity, Danny says, “Sorry, didn’t mean to trespass. Show me the gate and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Unless you can swim the ocean, there is no way for you to leave Her Garden.”

  “She owns the whole of bloody Australia?”

  “The southern island continent, yes.”

  “I take it you’ve never held a referendum,” he mutters sarcastically, “on the Republican agenda.”

  “Enough talk, Male. I must return you to your dream.”

  Daniel sits down and puts his feet back in the water. “Dream’s right. The whole damned world’s nothing but a dream.”

  “Not this world, which is the Harbor of Reality, the Stem of the Rose.” Jael rises again into the air, moves lightly across the water, hovers there. “Your little worlds are dreams of dreams, infinitely improbable. You are foam on the quantum ocean.”

  “‘Foam’ my ass. I’m live and kicking. Come over here and I’ll give you a pinch to prove it.”

  “Most of your doppelgängers must have died in childhood. How else could you find yourself here at the far end of the curve, in the Garden of Reality?”

  That takes Daniel aback. “Are you telling me I died on the fishing trawler when I was five years old?”

  “Poor little Male boy. To perish so young. Death sets us free in the worlds where we survive, you see.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You poor partials ride the wind at the edge of the world.”

  Manchetti’s voice says, “Keep her talking, Daniel. They obviously know about superposed states. Ask her for the equations, damn it.”

  “Do you understand how I got here, Jael?”

  “Of course. You must be coupled to my own doppelgänger. What did you call her? Jeel-ian?”

  “Jill. She’s my wife. Jael, can you tell me the equations for all this? Where I come from, it’s all new. We’re just taking the first steps.”

  She smiles for the first time. “Poor Male. Don’t you understand? What good would it do you?”

  “Because I’m just a dream, right. Quantum froth.”

  “Because you’re about to die.”

  “What?”

  “Surely you know? Look into your body, Male. There’s an infection wasting your immunity systems. Your gastric tract is boiling with ulcers. Even the little machines in your brain are dying.”

  “You can see the HIV-6? But why should this body be sick? And besides, you don’t have any instruments!”

  “Not this form. Your remote source.”

  “You can see my baseline body? Jael, are you a witch?”

  “I’m a gardener,” she tells him, “for my mistress the Rose Hegemon. Naturally I’m equipped with the appropriate tools.”

  “Tell me something! Anything, Jael, just scraps from the table.”

  “Quantum relativity,” Manchetti suggests urgently. “Even Penrose hasn’t cracked that.”

  “Tell me the equations for quantum relativity.”

  “Pointless, Male. You don’t know enough to recognize the science of the Sisters and Mothers. If I told you that I hover in the air by manipulating the null-energy plexus, would that allow you to fly by yourself?”

  “She means zero-point energy! That’s the metric Puthoff’s been blathering about for the last twenty years! We all assumed it was the ravings of a jack Scientologist.”

  “Shut up, Manchetti, I can’t hear myself think. Jael, you’re wrong. Yours isn’t the only universe. Neither is mine. Oranges,” he says with a grin, “are not the only fruit.”

  She shrugs, still airborne. “It doesn’t matter, Male. It’s irrelevant either way, because you can’t stay here. If your kind would dare to give another human a deathly sickness just so little machines could stay in his head longer, what corruption might follow you? I’m sending you home to that poor Male version of peace and contentment.”

  “Dan!” Jill yells into her headset. “What was that? Is she saying these pricks—Hang on, we’re going chaotic. Shit, sweetheart, she’s screwing with the superposition. We’re pulling the plug.”

  “Jill! Jill!” Daniel cries, aswirl in the vortex, dying, lost. “Hold my hand, Jill, don’t let me drown!”

  * * *

  The river burbles, the fire crackles faintly; he is back in Ur-Aboriginal Australia. “Jill!” he cries piteously. “Oh my God, what am I doing here? Manchetti! Anyone!”

  There is no reply. He has been severed from his home reality.

  “So you’re back among us, boy,” one of the old black men says in a friendly fashion. “It is good to walk with the ancestors, but now we must reflect upon the coming ceremony of naming. Have you chosen a name yet?”

  Frantic, Daniel cries, “Where’s Jill? Where’s my wife?”

  The other old man wags a hand. “This is men’s business, Ng. We can’t have women here, you know this. Besides, your wife and children are far away, far away, in the place of the other pale people.”

  “Far away in the northern waters, young Ng, where the fish are many and the air is rich with their stink. You’ve told us this many times. Have you forgotten? Sometimes, you know, I find myself forgetting things these days. I went looking for my favorite spear the other day—”

  “Oh be quiet, you silly old man,” his friend tells him snidely. “We don’t want to hear about your spear. It’s long enough since you had a chance to use your spear anyway, isn’t it, eh, eh?”

  “Oh my God.” Danny reels from the dying embers, clutching his head. “Jael thinks this is where I belong. She thinks I should be among men, in the place where there are no women.”

  “The women are safe enough, young Wallaby. They’re collecting yams in the next valley; don’t worry about them, they’ll be quick to welcome you back to the campfires, you with your new name and decorations. Now come, let’s sing together, let’s make ready for the great deed.”

  In the distance, Daniel sees young men and old gathering at a great fire. They are daubing themselves strikingly with ocher and white clay. A didgeridoo starts droning, and voices begin to mutter in ancient song.

  “Leave me alone!” Daniel shakes off their gentle hands. “I’m dying back there, don’t you understand? No, of course you don’t. Dying in the real world. Jill. Jill, talk to me. She can’t hear me.”

  “Calm down, boy. Death’s not so terrible. Listen to the story of the Dreaming, time of the Making of the World.” The old man starts to sing:

  Hanging a long way off, above Milingimbi Creek …

  Slowly the Moon Bone is growing, hanging there far away,

  The bone is shining, the horns of the Moon bend down.”

  The second elder takes up the dirge.

  “First the sickle Moon on the old Moon’s shadow; slowly he grows

  “And shining he hangs there at the place of the Evening Star…”

  The first replies:

  “Then far away he goes sinking down, to lose his bone in the sea;

  “Diving toward the water, he sinks down out of sight.”

  The second sings:

  “The old Moon dies to grow new again, to rise up out of the sea.”

  Their fading fire crackles in silence.

  At length, tears drying on
his cheeks, Daniel Ng says, “I suppose. It’s as if I died there inside the scanner. Maybe all this is just some long drawn-out deathbed VR fantasy. Valhalla among the black warriors. Oh God, oh God. Good-bye, Jill. I love you, darling. I love you forever,” he whispers, “in every world there is.”

  * * *

  In the quantum lab, Daniel’s body is collapsed upon itself. Instruments utter their shrill flatline.

  “We’ve lost him,” Tom Manchetti admits. “Full arrest.”

  Jill leaves her console, clad absurdly in plastic and metal. She stumbles to the table of machines, clutches her husband’s thin hand. “Danny! Oh God, Danny! You bastards! You murdered him! Didn’t you?”

  Dr. Manchetti touches her on the shoulder, and she throws off his hand. “I’m sorry, honey. He was a very brave man.”

  “Shut up, you son of a bitch. You infected him! I can’t believe it! You deliberately infected him … to protect your damned nano machines!”

  Binh is shocked. “That’s grotesque, Jill. He was dying, we knew that. This was a wonderful, brave way to die.”

  Furious, Jill screams, “I could have caught it from him! And you didn’t care! My God, you incredible pricks. You inject Daniel with HIV-6, and let him rot … and just leave me to take my chances! Don’t think you can shut me up about this, you shits! Get out of my way, Binh. You’re fucking history, the lot of you!”

  Manchetti is urbanely menacing. “You’re overwrought, Jill. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you. We’ll see you through this.”

  Someone turns off the flatline indicator.

  Jill Ng crashes through the airlocked doors, screaming in loss and rage: “Bastards! Bastards!”

  * * *

  Beside the campfire, insects flutter and creak. One of the elders stares at a crystalline, unpolluted sky. “It’s a beautiful night.”

  His ancient friend smiles in the darkness and licks his toothless mouth. “I always enjoy a good hot-and-sour fish soup. Well, you’ll be staying with us awhile, won’t you … Daniel Wallaby?”

  “Yes, Uncle. Until spring. Then I have to start back up north to find my wife and children.” His incisions are smarting.

  “It’s good to see your wife. Not too often, of course. Not too often, eh, old man.”