The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Cole reached up and touched RVR. “Hair is easy,” RVR whispered in his ear, as if that explained everything. “I copied the design from ancient Africa.”

  “Before my time,” Cole said.

  “No, after.”

  Dinner was served: little pointed breads and horse and a yeasty beer that grew cold in the mouth. While they had coffee, Hilary showed Cole and Lee pictures of their children which floated in the air, in three dimensions. Cole could direct them with his eyes, here and there. Peace was in medicine, which had mostly to do with trauma, since the details of diagnosis and treatment were handled by nanobots in the blood. Plenty lived in Edminidine, near the sea, where she helped administer a sea farm and “dabbled in literature.”

  “A writer?”

  “No, no,” said Hilary. “There is quite enough already written, don’t you think? We have enough to do to read and understand it all, without adding to it.”

  Hilary and Brin showed Cole and Lee their library. The books opened backward, and the print was a strange cross between Cyrillic and Chinese, but it was ink (or something very like it) on paper, or something very like paper.

  The print turned into English when Cole ran his thumb down the page. But he closed the book; he didn’t feel like reading.

  “Hands like books,” Lee said approvingly. “Hands and eyes.” The authors were familiar, some of them: Tasso, Cicero, King, Bruno, Shakespeare, Lafferty, Dryden, Huilvet, Gourg, Yi Lun.

  Cole looked for his favorites – Dick, Himes, Abbey, Sandoz. But they were either forgotten or absent from this particular library.

  Like literature, music was finished, according to Brin, though no one actually used the word “finished.” She played guitar, “but not fancy,” and only for herself. Cole thought she was being modest until she played for him. Back outside, they passed a pipe around the table while they watched the sun set. Cole had hoped for marijuana or some new, unheard-of drug, but it was that jealous old queen, tobacco. It seemed rude to turn it down. It was his first hit in almost eleven years, since an earlier Helen had made him quit, and it warmed him all the way down to his toes.

  The setting sun seemed larger than it should, and Hilary explained that there had been an increase in stellar radiation in the past million and a half years, the first change in over three billion. It had been compensated for by atmospheric adjustments, a joint project between humanity and ARD.

  “Another drink?” asked Brin.

  “That is a quite fine whiskey,” said Lee. “There is one thing that you Europeans got right.” He winked to show that he was teasing Cole, who didn’t really mind. One would have thought that Cole had had enough whiskey earlier in the evening; but since that was ten million years ago, he allowed Hilary to pour him two fingers; okay, three.

  The sun had set and only the snowy tops of the mountains still glowed. Cole saw the glint of a plane, high up, but no vapor trail. These people left no mark on Earth or sky. And what an Earth! What a sky! “What a gift,” he said to RVR. But it was Lee who answered. “Gift?”

  “What you said before, in Paris.” Cole passed Lee the pipe. “That humanity gets to live, amidst all this beauty, for millions of years. It didn’t have to be.”

  “The gift is the ability to change,” said Lee. “Man is a reed, but a thinking reed. To evolve, to make a choice.”

  Choice? Cole wasn’t so sure. It seemed to him that humankind, given a choice, always chose the worst option.

  “It was you who did it,” said Hilary. “You went from surviving the world, to dominating it, to cooperating with it. You went from prey to predator to caretaker, and you did it in less than a hundred generations.”

  “It seemed impossibly slow to me at the time,” Cole said. “Still does.”

  “A hundred generations is nothing,” said Brin. “We are an exceptional species, the only one with such control – for good or ill – over our environment. But we are also part of the environment. We are a species, still, and what we want is in our bones as well as in our minds.”

  “What we want is – ” Cole stopped. They were all looking at him. “This,” he said, with a wave of his hand that was meant to encompass it all: sky, sunset, whiskey, company, tobacco, the darkling plain . . .

  “All this is ours, it will be ours, if we can learn to coexist and not destroy,” said Lee. How can he speak of the future here, in the future? Cole wondered. But according to Lee, humankind’s journey had only just begun. “Then we can, we will, settle down to enjoy the life span of a successful species, which is anywhere from ten to a hundred million years.”

  Cole had heard Lee’s rap before but he didn’t mind hearing it again. Ten million years. They were ten years old, into a lifespan of a hundred. They had only just begun. It felt like immortality. Or maybe what it felt like was good whiskey, tobacco, the sunset.

  “The explosion started in your time,” said Brin, “with agriculture and cities. Surplus. We ceased the wandering that had taken us all over the world. Your generation, those who lived in the tiny sliver of time between 1500 and 2500, merely saw its end. And began the mopping up. It must have been a scary business.”

  “I think that is true,” said Lee. “Five thousand years, five hundred. There is little difference from here.”

  “The main thing is, you did it,” said Brin, relighting the pipe and passing it to Cole. “There are those who would have been happier if humankind had lived and died in a brief blaze of glory, like Jimi Hendrix.”

  Cole grinned. “You’ve heard of Hendrix?”

  “Of course,” she said. “The Age of Empire. Hill and I studied it, for this assignment, which I assure you is a labor of love. I even know a little English. Don’t translate, RVR. Let me go it alone.”

  She said something unintelligible. Cole and Lee smiled politely. Cole recognized Lee’s smile; it was the inscrutable one, the one he had always shown to him before RVR.

  It was an evening Cole would always keep with him, in dreams if not in memory, for the beauty of the place as well as for the sweet contentment of Hilary and Brin, who were thankful for the opportunity to live closer to unspoiled nature, if only for a while.

  “ARD usually only allows brief forays into what she calls the ‘Open Areas’ (which are closed to us),” said Brin. “We were thrown out of the Garden of Eden ten million years ago. We should be used to it by now. We live in the cities, and only come into the Open Areas as hunters or hikers or herders.”

  “Hunters?” Lee asked. “Still that old thing?”

  “Nature red in tooth and claw,” said Hilary. “It is often said that ARD doesn’t love us, but I don’t agree. The man ARD loves is ancient man, one of her killer species. Man, the bloodletter. ARD loves killing. We learned that during the ARD wars.”

  The ARD wars had started with an anti-RVR cult some two hundred and sixty thousand years before. A group from what had once been India, south of the Great Plateau, becoming convinced through a series of dreams and prophetic utterances that RVR was a malevolent entity, had moved into the wilderness. It was a great pilgrimage, of hundreds of thousands. Colonies were set up in remote locations with the permission of ARD and the cooperation of the rest of humanity, which was living with numbers of about seven billion (6.756) in the major cities and in smaller locations around the world. Over two hundred thousand years passed and the “pilgrims” were forgotten, except by historians (and of course ARD and RVR) until a series of earthquakes and floods sent refugees streaming. The colonies and ARD had come into conflict, and ARD had destroyed them. It was Sodom and Gomorrah all over again. A few humans filtered into the cities, but their language was untranslatable and they were no longer truly human. In fact they had regressed to the hominid stage (which explained, Cole thought, some of our “junk” DNA) and could no longer intermarry with humans. They died off through disease and heartbreak. This was the last speciation of the human race, and it was a repeat, a reversal.

  “And no other sentient life-forms?” Cole knew but he had to ask
again. The stars were beginning to appear, one by one. He couldn’t find any familiar constellations; he had never been very good at picking them out, but now even the Big Dipper was gone. Flung apart by Time.

  “None to speak of,” said Hilary. “Or to speak with. Molds and slimes, mostly. Not good company.”

  “Speaking of company . . .” Cole saw that the ponies were grazing right up next to the house.

  “They like people,” said Brin.

  “Like dogs,” Lee said. It turned out that Hilary and Brin had never seen or touched a dog. They had long been extinct.

  “Tell us about dogs,” said Hilary, and Cole did, as much as he knew, from the days they had first seen man’s fires and crept closer, fascinated and comforted by our talk and our singing. Hilary and Brin listened with what seemed to Cole a polite but diminishing interest. The long partnership, the love affair, had long been over. Humankind had forgotten the dog.

  “That’s a beautiful story,” said RVR.

  The ponies gathered around the deck, compact, silent and shapeless in the darkness, while the people smoked and talked. Man the destroyer is loved by the other animals as much (or more) than man loves them, Cole thought. Even though we kill them and eat them, they love us, and shouldn’t it be so? Life kills us and eats us, yet we worship it in our way. We fall all over it.

  The wine was perfect. No surprise, thought Cole. After ten million years, would there be a place in the world for bad wine? Ditto the clothes, which fit perfectly. Cole wondered how he and Lee looked to Hilary and Brin, particularly Lee in his hideous L.L.Bean safari jacket (which Cole had gotten used to). There was of course no way to know. If there was one thing this couple of the far future had, in addition to their love for each other, it was manners. Not that there was any coldness about them – no, only a perfection of warmth and gravitas and style, with just enough bite, like a perfect whiskey.

  Crime, sorrow, even catastrophe were still part of the human condition, Cole and Lee were assured. Not war, though; war was crime sanctioned, even sanctified, which was unimaginable. Cole looked up at the stars and they looked even colder, even more distant than usual, now that he knew that they were empty. They had looked to him, to us, to Early Man, so much like a great city in the distance. We had wanted so much to go there, to be welcomed in. And now he knew that what we had thought, had hoped, was a beacon, was in fact just dumb fires, sparks, not even ruins. This tiny house of Earth was all there was. We were more alone than any of us had ever imagined possible.

  So melancholy came with the gift. Even the dog, man’s companion, had slipped under the dark waters of Time.

  “Nothing at all,” Cole said, looking up. “No one. It is hard to believe that in all that immensity . . .”

  “It’s getting late,” said Brin. “Shall we go for a ride?”

  The ponies liked to be ridden; it gave them an excuse to strut about. They were bone-shaking little trotters, with one liquid-smooth canter, like the Icelandic ponies Cole and his second Helen had ridden on their honeymoon, when a black face in Iceland was rare. The Icelanders had thought Cole must be a jazz musician. They had asked him about Miles Davis, and he had pretended to have known him, in his old age. It was even partly true: he had met him once, as a child, with his uncle Will, who had sold dreams in the form of drugs to the rich and famous.

  Were those clouds on the Moon? They were. Brin explained that they were the result of a long-ago comet, deflected to the moon for its ice, gradually sublimating into mist that wrapped the poles like a sheer scarf. I know all about that, Lee said. He told of seeing the white streaks on the mountains, and Brin and Hilary wanted to hear about Zoe, almost ten million years ago. Zoe and Cole and Lee were all contemporaries, to them.

  Brin and Hilary slowed their ponies to a walk, so that they could hold hands. Cole and Lee would soon be gone, and they would return to Edminidine, the long littoral city along the China coast. They were ready to resume their life among their friends and their children. But they would miss the ponies, the stars, the sea of grass.

  So would Cole. He was riding bareback across the grass-smelling plain, like an Indian. The stars bore down like a burning blanket. Even though he was not familiar with the constellations, he knew they were all changed, changed utterly, irretrievably. The hundred thousand years behind his long-ago birth, the short trail from Africa to America was nothing compared with the ten million since, which had carried the galaxy and the solar system into new immensities. He looked up, into the hole that is the heavens, and understood for the first time, in his very bones, the awesome enormity of the journey on which humankind had embarked when we first looked up from our small horizons and saw the stars.

  What if, Cole wondered, we had known then what he knew now – that it was all empty? That we were like a child, alone in a great empty house? Forgotten . . . worse than forgotten. Worse than abandoned. Alone forever from the beginning unto the end, from dust to dust, all, all alone. Would we have, could we have, still survived?

  “Cole. Duty calls.”

  Beep beep. Lee showed Cole his PalmPC. The cursor was blinking; it was time to go.

  Hilary and Brin led the way. They rode side by side with their arms around each other, an awkward but lovely sight. The house was a beacon, a far-off ship across the sea of grass, a nearest star.

  “What would happen,” Cole wondered out loud, as they rode back slowly across the plain, toward the frail ship of House, “What would happen, if we didn’t hit RETURN. If we stayed here.”

  “ARD would not allow it,” Lee said.

  “I don’t mean here here. I mean here, on this late afternoon Earth, with these good people.”

  “And forget what we were sent to do?”

  “You mean Dear Abbey. I wonder now if we should be doing it at all, even if we find it and return with it.”

  “I think that is not for us to decide, Cole, you and I,” Lee answered, kicking his pony and trotting ahead.

  Cole looked up at the still-, always-, ever-to-remain-unfamiliar stars, and shivered, and kicked his little pony too.

  1+

  There they were, the army of mice. Soon Cole knew, without opening his eyes, that they were back in the Student Union. He could hear the thumping from upstairs, and there was a smell of cinder blocks and Coca-Cola.

  The door opened and Parker’s big head stuck through. “Dr. Lee! – Mr. Cole? I thought I heard something. What are you doing here this time of night? I mean, are you . . . ?”

  “It’s okay,” Lee said, opening his eyes and letting go of Cole’s hand.

  “I have to lock up at ten,” said Parker, sounding annoyed. He looked meaningfully toward the analog clock on the wall. It was 9:46.

  “No problem,” said Lee.

  The door closed with a loud click.

  “Why is he always surprised to see us?” Cole asked.

  “Time loop, till ten.” RVR had been left behind, or rather ahead, ten million years in the future, and Lee was speaking English again. Pidgin English.

  “I hope this isn’t some kind of Groundhog Day,” Cole said.

  “Ground what?”

  “Nothing. I thought you said we weren’t done. So why are we back here?”

  “Beats me,” Lee said, pulling a cell phone from his safari jacket and punching in a number.

  “Wait! Who are you calling?”

  “You know. Beeper.”

  “Wait, Lee!” Cole said, reaching for the phone. “What about Los Viejos? What about Dear Abbey? You and I need to talk first.”

  “All come around,” Lee said, handing Cole the phone.

  Cole heard it ring once, then click.

  “Damn!” he said. “So what now, Lee? We wait for Pell and Flo, or whatever her name is, so they can decide what we saw and what we think? But who am I talking to? There’s no talking to you!”

  Cole punched in his own number; might as well check his messages. While it rang, he watched the clock make one jump, to 9:48. Time moved so slowly here, in
the present. That tiny isle. He was beginning to feel like an islander: slightly homesick away, hugely restless at home.

  “You have reached . . .” Cole couldn’t believe the sound of his own voice on the machine. Was he really that dark, that gloomy? “Leave a message if you insist.”

  Cole punched in a code. The machine’s computer-generated voice was so much more pleasant, more human than his own. “You have ONE message.”

  A last piece of nastiness from Helen? Cole was just punching in the retrieval code when he heard a beep beep beep.

  Lee’s PalmPC was blinking.

  “I thought we were done! I thought it was over.”

  “More slice,” Lee said, smiling inscrutably. “Old Ones? Los Viejos? Let’s ride.”

  Cole folded the phone. He didn’t have to be asked twice. He was more at home off the island than on. Besides, in the future he and Lee could talk. He put one hand on Lee’s and the other up beside his own ear, for reassurance, but of course, RVR wasn’t there. Not yet –

  “One more slice,” Lee said again, and there they were, the mice. And the centuries, streaming down, covering the two of them over like drifting sand . . .

  +225,000,000

  It was dark.

  It was cold.

  Something was wrong with the air. Cole smelled smoke and ash and ozone mixed with fear; an ugly smell. He knew it well. It was the smell of downtown New York City after the World Trade Center attack. He had helped a friend (not a Helen) sneak in and loot her own apartment, how many years – how many centuries – ago?

  The glider was squeaking to a stop. They were on a terrace overlooking a dark valley, all in shadow. Cole could see a few lights moving far below. The sun, huge and dark red, hung over a range of hills on the other side. It was setting, or so Cole thought. It looked squashed and impossibly near; but surely that was illusion, a trick of the air. Behind them was a stone building. A light came on, spilling through a long window.

  Someone opened a door. “Contact!”

  Three people came outside, all dressed in the same gray and blue uniform with hoods, like homeboy sweatshirts. Their apparent leader, a woman, carried a coil of glowing rope that looked like soft neon. “They’re out here!” she barked in a harsh, unfamiliar tongue. Cole could see the fold in the air beside her ear that told him RVR was back, and back at work.