The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Gennady didn’t reply, but he knew how Egorov felt. Ukraine had some of the same problems—the listless lack of direction, the loss of confidence … It wasn’t getting any better here. He thought of the blasted steppes they were passing through, rendered unlivable by global warming. There had been massive forest fires in Siberia this year, and the Gobi desert was expanding north and west, threatening the Kazaks even as the Caspian sea dwindled down to nothing.

  He thought of SNOPB. “They’re gone,” he said, “but they left their trash behind.” Toxic, decaying: nuclear submarines heeled over in the waters off of Murmansk, nitrates soaking the soil around the launch pads of Baikonur. The ghosts of old Soviets prowled this dark, in the form of radiation in the groundwater, mutations in the forest, and poisons in the dust clouds that were all too common these days. Gennady had spent his whole adult life cleaning up the mess, and before yesterday he’d been able to tell himself that it was working—that all the worst nightmares were from the past. The metastables had changed that, in one stroke rendering all the old fears laughable in comparison.

  “Get some sleep,” he told Egorov. “We’re going to be driving all night.”

  “I don’t sleep much anymore.” But the old man stopped talking, and just stared ahead. He couldn’t be visiting his online People’s Republic through his glasses, because those IP addresses were blocked here. But maybe he saw it all anyway—the brave young men in their trucks, heading to the Semipalatinsk site to witness a nuclear blast; the rail yards where parts for the giant moon rocket, doomed to explode on the pad, were mustering … With his gaze fixed firmly on the past, he seemed the perfect opposite of Ambrose with his American dreams of a new world unburdened by history, whose red dunes marched to a pure and mysterious horizon.

  The first living thing in space had been the Russian dog Laika. She had died in orbit—had never come home. If he glanced out at the star-speckled sky, Gennady could almost see her ghost racing eternally through the heavens, beside the dead dream of planetary conquest, of flags planted in alien soil and shining domes on the hills of Mars.

  * * *

  They arrived at the Tsarina site at 4:30: dawn, at this latitude and time of year. The Semipalatinsk Polygon was bare, flat, blasted scrubland: Mars with tufts of dead weed. The irony was that it hadn’t been the hundreds of nuclear bombs set off here that had killed the land; even a decade after the Polygon was closed, the low rolling hills had been covered with a rich carpet of waving grass. Instead, it was the savage turn of the climate, completely unpredicted by the KGB and the CIA, that had killed the steppe.

  The road into the Polygon was narrow blacktop with no real shoulder, no ditches, and no oncoming traffic—though a set of lights had faded in and out of view in the rearview mirror all through the drive. Gennady would have missed the turnoff to the Tsarina site had his glasses not beeped.

  There had been a low wire fence here at one time, but nobody had kept it up. He drove straight over the fallen gate, which was becoming one with the soil, and up a low rise to the crest of the water-filled crater. There he parked and got out.

  Egorov climbed out too and stretched cautiously. “Beautiful,” he said, gazing into the epic sunrise. “Is it radioactive here?”

  “Oh, a little.… That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  Gennady had looked at the satellite view of the site on the way here; it was clear, standing here in person, that that vertical perspective lied. “The Tsarina was supposed to be an underground test. You usually get some subsidence of the ground in a circle around the test site. And with the big ground shots, you would get a crater, like Lake Chagan,” he nodded to the east. “But this … this is a hole.”

  Egorov spat into it. “It certainly is.” The walls of the Tsarina crater were sheer and went down a good fifty feet to black water. The “crater” wasn’t round, either, but square, and it wasn’t nearly big enough to be the result of a surface explosion. If he hadn’t known it was the artifact of a bomb blast, Gennady would have sworn he was looking at a flooded quarry.

  Gennady gathered his equipment and began combing the grass around the site. After a minute he found some twisted chunks of concrete and metal, and knelt down to inspect them.

  Egorov came up behind him. “What are you looking for?”

  “Serial numbers.” He quickly found some old, grayed stenciling on a half-buried tank made of greenish metal. “You’ll understand what I’m doing,” he said as he pinched the arm of his glasses to take a snapshot. “I’m checking our database … Hmpf.”

  “What is it?” Egorov shifted from foot to foot. He was glancing around, as if afraid they might be interrupted.

  “This piece came from the smaller of the installations here. The one the Americans called URDF-3.”

  “URDF?” Egorov blinked at him.

  “Stands for ‘Unidentified Research and Development Facility.’ The stuff they built there scared the Yankees even more than the H-bomb…”

  He stood up, frowning, and slowly turned to look at the entire site. “Something’s been bothering me,” he said as he walked to the very edge of the giant pit.

  “What’s that?” Egorov was hanging back.

  “Ambrose told me he saw a pyramid on Mars. It said CCCP on its side. That was all; so he knew it was Russian, and so did Google and the CIA when they found out about it. And you, too.

  “But that’s all anybody knew. So who made the connection between the pyramid and the Tsarina?”

  Egorov didn’t reply. Gennady turned and found that the old man had drawn himself up very straight, and had leveled a small, nasty-looking pistol at him.

  “You didn’t follow us to Stepnogorsk,” said Gennady. “You were already there.”

  “Take off your glasses,” said Egorov. “Carefully, so I can be sure you’re not snapping another picture.”

  As Gennady reached up to comply he felt the soft soil at the lip of the pit start to crumble. “Ah, can we—” It was too late, he toppled backward, arms flailing.

  He had an instant’s choice: roll down the slope, or jump and hope he’d hit the water. He jumped.

  The cold hit him so hard that at first he thought he’d been shot. Swearing and gasping, he surfaced, but when he spotted Egorov’s silhouette at the crest of the pit, dove again.

  Morning sunlight was just tipping into the water. At first Gennady thought the wall of the pit was casting a dark shadow across the sediment below him. Gradually he realized the truth: there was no bottom to this shaft. At least, none within easy diving distance.

  He swam to the opposite side; he couldn’t stay down here, he’d freeze. Defeated, he flung himself out of the freezing water onto hard clay that was probably radioactive. Rolling over, he looked up.

  Egorov stood on the lip of the pit. Next to him was a young woman with a rifle in her hands.

  Gennady sat up. “Shit.”

  Kyzdygoi slung the rifle over her back, then clambered down the slope to the shore. As she picked her way over to Gennady she said, “How much do you know?”

  “Everything,” he said between coughs. “I know everything. Where’s Ambrose?”

  “He’s safe,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”

  Then she waited, rifle cradled. “You’re here,” he said reluctantly, “which tells me that -3 was funded by the Soviets. Your job was never to clean up the Earth—it was to design life support and agricultural systems for a Mars colony.”

  Her mouth twitched, but she didn’t laugh. “How could we possibly get to Mars? The sky’s a shooting gallery.”

  “… And that would be a problem if you were going up there in a dinky little aluminum can, like cosmonauts always did.” He stood up, joints creaking from the cold. He was starting to shiver deeply and it was hard to speak past his chattering teeth. “B-but if you rode a c-concrete bunker into orbit, you could ignore the shrapnel c-completely. In fact, that would be the only way you could d-do it.”

  “Come now. How could something like that
ever get off the ground?”

  “The same way the Tsarina d-did.” He nodded at the dark surface of the flooded shaft. “The Americans had their P-project Orion. The Soviets had a similar program based at URDF-3. Both had discovered that an object could be just a few meters away from a nuclear explosion, and if it was made of the right materials it wouldn’t be destroyed—it would be shot away like a bullet from a gun. The Americans designed a spaceship that would drop atomic bombs out the back and ride the explosions to orbit. But the Tsarina wasn’t like that … it was just one bomb, and a d-deep shaft, and a pyramid-shaped spaceship to ride that explosion. That design’s something called a Verne gun.”

  “And who else knows this?”

  He hesitated. “N-no one,” he admitted. “I didn’t know until I saw the shaft just now. The p-pyramid was fitted into the mouth of it, right about where we’re s-standing. That’s why this doesn’t look like any other bomb crater on Earth.”

  “Let’s go,” she said, gesturing with the rifle. “You’re turning blue.”

  “Y-you’re not going t-to sh-shoot me?”

  “There’s no need,” she said gently. “In a few days, the whole world will know what we’ve done.”

  * * *

  Gennady finished taping aluminum foil to the trailer’s window. Taking a pushpin from the corkboard by the door, he carefully pricked a single tiny hole in the foil.

  It was night, and crickets were chirping outside. Gennady wasn’t tied up—in fact, he was perfectly free to leave—but on his way out the door Egorov had said, “I wouldn’t go outside in the next hour or so. After that … well, wait for the dust to settle.”

  They’d driven him about fifty kilometers to the south and into an empty part of the Polygon. When Gennady had asked why this place, Egorov had laughed. “The Soviets set off their bombs here because this was the last empty place on Earth. It’s still the last empty place, and that’s why we’re here.”

  There was nothing here but the withered steppe, a hundred or so trucks, vans and buses, and the cranes, tanks and pole-sheds of a temporary construction site.—And, towering over the sheds, a gray concrete pyramid.

  “A Verne gun fires its cargo into orbit in a single shot,” Egorov had told Gennady. “It generates thousands of gravities worth of acceleration—enough to turn you into a smear on the floor. That’s why the Soviets couldn’t send any people; they hadn’t figured out how to set off a controlled sequence of little bombs. The Americans never perfected that either. They didn’t have the computational power to do the simulations.

  “So they sent everything but the people. Two hundred eighty thousand tonnes in one shot, to Mars.”

  Bulldozers and cranes, fuel tanks, powdered cement, bags of seeds and food, space suits, even a complete, dismantled nuclear reactor: the Tsarina had included everything potential colonists might need on a new world. Its builders knew it had gone up, knew it had gotten to Mars; but they didn’t know where it had landed, or whether it had landed intact.

  A day after his visit to the Tsarina site, Gennady had sat outside this trailer with Egorov, Kyzdygoi, and a few other officials of the new Soviet. They’d drunk a few beers and talked about the plan. “When our data-mining turned up the Tsarina’s manifest, it was like a light from heaven,” Egorov had said, his hands opening eloquently in the firelight. “Suddenly we saw what was possible, how to revive our people—all the world’s people—around a new hope, after all hope had gone. Something that would combine Apollo and Trinity into one event, and suddenly both would take on the meaning they always needed to have.”

  Egorov had started a crash program to build an Orion rocket. They couldn’t get fissionable materials—Gennady and his people had locked those up tightly and for all time. But the metastables promised a different approach.

  “We hoped the Tsarina was on Mars and intact, but we didn’t know for sure, until Ambrose leaked his pictures.”

  The new Tsarina would use a series of small, clean fusion blasts to lift off and, at the far end, to land again. Thanks to Ambrose, they knew where the Tsarina was. It didn’t matter that the Americans did too; nobody else had a plan to get there.

  “And by the time they get their acts together, we’ll have built a city,” said Kyzdygoi. She was wide-eyed with the power of the idea. “Because we’re not going there two at a time, like Noah in his Ark. We’re all going.” And she swung her arm to indicate the hundreds of campfires burning all around them, where thousands of men, women, and children, hand-picked from among the citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Online, waited to amaze the world.

  * * *

  Gennady hunkered down in a little fort he’d built out of seat cushions, and waited.

  It was like a camera flash, and a second later there was a second, then a third, and then the whole trailer bounced into the air and everything Gennady hadn’t tied down went tumbling. The windows shattered and he landed on cushions and found himself staring across suddenly open air at the immolation of the building site.

  The flickering flashes continued, coming from above now. The pyramid was gone, and the cranes and heavy machinery lay tumbled like a child’s toys, all burning.

  Flash. Flash.

  It was really happening.

  Flash. Flash. Flash …

  Gradually, Gennady began to be able to hear again. He came to realize that monstrous thunder was rolling across the steppe, like a god’s drumbeat in time with the flashes. It faded, as the flashes faded, until there was nothing but the ringing in his ears, and the orange flicker of flame from the launch site.

  He staggered out to find perfect devastation. Once, this must have been a common sight on the steppe; but his Geiger counter barely registered any radiation at all.

  —And in that, of course, lay a terrible irony. Egorov and his people had indeed divided history in two, but not in the way they’d imagined.

  Gennady ran for the command trailer. He only had a few minutes before the air forces of half a dozen nations descended on this place. The trailer had survived the initial blast, so he scrounged until he found a jerry can full of gasoline, and then he climbed in.

  There they were: Egorov’s servers. The EMP from the little nukes might have wiped its drives, but Gennady couldn’t take the chance. He poured gasoline all over the computers, made a trail back to the door, then as the whole trailer went up behind him, ran to the leaning-but-intact metal shed where the metastables had been processed, and he did the same to it.

  That afternoon, as he and Egorov had watched the orderly queue of people waiting to enter the New Tsarina, Gennady had made his final plea. “Your research into metastables,” Gennady went on. “I need it. All of it, and the equipment and the backups; anything that might be used to reconstruct what you did.”

  “What happens to the Earth is no longer our concern,” Egorov said with a frown. “Humanity made a mess here. It’s not up to us to clean it up.”

  “But to destroy it all, you only need to be indifferent! And I’m asking, please, however much the world may have disappointed you, don’t leave it like this.” As he spoke, Gennady scanned the line of people for Ambrose, but couldn’t see him. Nobody had said where the young American was.

  Egorov had sighed in annoyance, then nodded sharply. “I’ll have all the formulae and the equipment gathered together. It’s all I have time for, now. You can do what you want with it.”

  Gennady watched the flames twist into the sky. He was exhausted, and the sky was full of contrails and gathering lights. He hadn’t destroyed enough of the evidence; surely, someone would figure out what Egorov’s people had done. And then … Shoulders slumped under the burden of that knowledge, he stalked into the darkness at the camp’s perimeter.’

  His rented Tata sat where they’d left it when they first arrived here. After Kyzdygoi had confiscated his glasses at the Tsarina site, she’d put them in the Tata’s glove compartment. They were still there.

  Before Gennady put them on, he took a last un
aided look at the burning campsite. Egorov and his people had escaped, but they’d left Gennady behind to clean up their mess. The metastables would be back. This new nightmare would get out of the bottle eventually, and when it did, the traditional specter of nuclear terrorism would look like a Halloween ghost in comparison. Could even the conquest of another world make up for that?

  As the choppers settled in whipping spirals of dust, Gennady rolled up the Tata’s window and put on his glasses. The New Tsarina’s EMP pulses hadn’t killed them—they booted up right away. And, seconds after they did, a little flag told him there was an e-mail waiting for him.

  It was from Ambrose, and it read:

  Gennady: Sorry I didn’t have time to say goodbye.

  I just wanted to say I was wrong. Anything’s possible, even for me.

  P.S. My room’s going to have a fantastic view.

  Gennady stared bitterly at the words. Anything’s possible …

  “For you, maybe,” he said as soldiers piled out of the choppers.

  “Not me.”

  The Dala Horse

  MICHAEL SWANWICK

  Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and in the thirty-one years that have followed he has established himself as one of SF’s most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov’s Readers’ Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story “Radio Waves.” He’s won the Hugo Award five times between 1999 and 2006 for his stories “The Very Pulse of the Machine,” “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur,” “The Dog Said Bow-Wow,” “Slow Life,” and “Legions in Time.” His other books include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragon’s Daughter, Jack Faust, Bones of the Earth, and The Dragons of Babel. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity’s Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time, Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, Michael Swanwick’s Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna, and The Periodic Table of Science Fiction. His most recent books are a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Michael Swanwick, and a new novel, Dancing with Bears. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Marianne Porter. He has a Web site at www.michaelswanwick.com and maintains a blog at floggingbabel.blogspot.com.