The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  “Trying is about as far as I’ve got so far. I have all the raw material, but …” But. “I’m not creative. Anyway, I think we have to have both science and art. Everything in the universe partakes in some way of every other thing.”

  “What about philosophy?”

  “Maybe it’s what links science and art.”

  “Even if it’s a lot of wanking?”

  “Even wanking has its place in the scheme of things. What about this boyfriend?”

  “Interesting segue.”

  “Is this a serious thing? Serious like marriage?”

  She shrugged, then shook her head. “I want to do something with my life before I get into that.”

  “What?”

  “I wish I knew. I feel I have so much to live up to. Your side of the family’s all over-achievers. My father’s a hot Hollywood screenwriter. My uncle, the scientist, has done just the most amazing things. My grandparents were big wheels in Texas politics. It’s almost as bad as having movie-star parents. The pressure on me to achieve is awful.”

  “It was probably worse for the Huxleys.”

  “Mom’s always felt outclassed. Her family’d always just muddled along. She felt utterly inadequate the whole time she and Dad were married.”

  “With a little help from him, she made a beautiful daughter.”

  She looked pleased by the compliment but also a little uncomfortable. “Thank you for saying that.”

  “It’s true.”

  “You used to call me Squirrel Monkey.”

  Don came outside looking exasperated. “Ever reach a point in a conversation,” he said, “where, you know, you can’t go on pretending to take people seriously who don’t know what they’re talking about?”

  “Are we talking rhetorically?”

  Don laughed a soft, unhappy sort of laugh. He indicated the unopened bottle of beer. “Is that for me?”

  “Just that one, Daddy.”

  “I need it.” He said to Ivan, “Tell me the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard. I’m trying to put something into perspective here.”

  Ivan thought for a moment. “Well, there was the low point, or maybe it was the high point, of my blessedly short stint as a purveyor of scientific knowledge to college freshman. I had a student tell me in all earnestness that an organism that lives off dead organisms is a sacrilege.”

  Don laughed again, less unhappily than before. “Been on the phone with someone who makes deals and gives off movies as waste. He’s got the hottest idea of his life. He’s doing a full-blown remake of The Three Musketeers in Taiwan.”

  Ivan felt his eyebrows go up. He made them come back down.

  Don nodded. “That was my reaction. I said to him, I gather you’ve taken a few liberties with the novel. And he said, Novel? By Alexandre Dumas, I said. You mean it? he said. Excuse me for a moment, and he gets on his AnswerMan and says, To legal, do we have exclusive rights to alleged novel by Doo-dah-duh. Dumas, I scream, Dumas, you dumbass!” He shook his head as though to clear it of an irritating buzz. “Well. I go on and tell him the novel’s in the public domain, Dumas has been dead for a little while now. He drums his fingers on his desktop. He screws his face into a mask of thoughtfulness. He says, Well, it’s always best to be sure, because if what you say is true, we’ll have to see about getting it pulled out of circulation. I beg his pardon. He says, We don’t want people confusing it with our book based on the movie.”

  Ivan said, “He’s going to novelize a movie based on a novel?”

  “Sure. The novel based on Pride and Prejudice was on the best-seller list?”

  Michelle said, “Hooray for Hollywood,” and Ivan raised his bottle in a toast.

  Don raised his as well. “Here’s to L.A., Los Angeles del Muerte!”

  Then Michelle excused herself and went inside. Ivan said, “Every time I see her, she’s bigger, smarter, prettier, and nicer.”

  “That’s how it works if you only see her once every few years. Move out here, be her doting uncle all the time.”

  “Oh, I would love to. It would be good to see more of you, too. But—” To avoid his brother’s expectant look, Ivan turned toward the canyon. “Call me a crank on the subject, but I’ll never live on an active plate margin.”

  “Christ.”

  “Geologically speaking, these hills have all the structural integrity of head cheese. They piled up here after drifting in across a prehistoric sea from God knows where. One of these times, Don, the earth’s going to hiccup, and all these nice houses and all you nice people in them are going to slide all the way down that canyon.”

  Don shrugged. “Mobility is what California’s all about. Everything here is from someplace else. The water comes from Colorado. These flowers,” and he extended his arm and delicately touched a leaf on one of the bird-of-paradise flowers as though he were stroking a cat under its jaw, “are South African. The jacaranda you see all over town are from Brazil, the eucalyptus trees are from Australia. The people and the architecture are from everywhere you can think of.” He took a long pull on his bottle, draining it. “That’s the reason California’s such a weird goddamn place. Because nothing really belongs here.”

  “I think it’s fascinating. I wouldn’t live here for anything—not even for you and Michelle, I’m sorry. But it is certainly fascinating.”

  “Oh, absolutely, I agree, it is. In a big, ugly, tasteless, intellectually numbing kind of way.”

  “What do you do for intellectual stimulation?”

  “I read your monographs.”

  “Really?”

  “No, but I have copies of all of them.”

  Later, stretched across the bed with his eyes closed and the cool fresh sheet pulled up to his sternum, Ivan thought, Clever, talented Don. It had never occurred to him before that his brother considered his work at all.…

  He did not think he had fallen asleep, yet he awoke with a start. He was hot and parched. He slipped into a robe and eased into the hallway. In the kitchen, he filled a glass with cold filtered water from the jug in the refrigerator and sat down with his back to the bar to look out through the glass doors, at the lights of the city. There was a glowing patch of sky, seemingly as distant as the half moon, where the dark smudgy cloud had been that afternoon.

  When he returned to his room, he sat on the edge of the bed and took his well-thumbed People’s Almanac from the nightstand. He opened it at random and read a page, then set it aside and picked up the laptop. “Where were we?”

  The screen lightened. “That’s a good question,” Cutsinger was saying. He chuckled into the microphones. “I know, because my colleagues and I have asked it of each other thousands of times since the anomaly was discovered. Every time, the answer’s been the same. Simply traveling through time into the past is impossible. Simply to do so violates the laws of physics, especially our old favorite, the second law of thermodynamics. Simply to enter the past is to alter the past, which is a literal and actual contradiction of logic. Yet the fact is, we have discovered this space-time anomaly which connects our immediate present with what from all evidence is the Earth as it existed during mid-Paleozoic times. The only way the laws of physics and logic can accommodate this awkward fact is if we quietly deep-six the adjective ‘simply’ and run things out to their extremely complicated conclusion. We must posit a universe that stops and starts, stops and starts, countless billions of times per microsecond, as it jumps from state to state. As it does so, it continually divides, copies itself. Each copy is in a different state—that is, they’re inexact copies. A separate reality exists for every possible outcome of every possible quantum interaction. Inasmuch as the number of copies produced since the Big Bang must be practically infinite, the range of difference among the realities must be practically infinite as well. These realities exist in parallel with one another. Whatever we insert into the anomaly—probes, test animals, human beings—are not simply going to travel directly backward into our own past. Instead, they’re going to travel som
ehow to another universe, to another Earth which resembles our Earth as it was in the Paleozoic. Yes? Question?”

  From offscreen came a question, inaudible to Ivan, but on the screen Cutsinger nodded and answered, “Well, it’s probably pointless to say whether this sort of travel occurs in any direction—backward, sideward, or diagonally.”

  From offscreen, someone else asked, “If there are all these multiple Earths, when you’re ready to come back through this hole you’re talking about, how can you be sure you’ll find your way back to the right Earth?”

  “To the very best of our knowledge, this hole as you call it has only two ends. One here and now, one there and then. Next question?”

  You glib son of a bitch, Ivan thought.

  After the robot probes had gone and apparently come back through the space-time anomaly, the next step was obvious to everyone: human beings must follow. It was decided that two people should go through together. At the outset, in the moment it had taken the phrase “time travel to the prehistoric world” to register in his mind, Ivan had made up his mind—yes, absolutely, I want to go! “Presented with the opportunity to traverse time and explore a prehistoric planet,” he had written to Don, “who wouldn’t?” In the weeks and months that followed, however, through all the discussion and planning sessions, he had never quite believed that he had a real chance to go. Partly it was a matter of funding: x amount of money in the kitty simply equaled y number of people who would get to go on any Paleozoic junket. Partly it was a matter of prestige: given, practically speaking, an entire new planet to explore—everything about it, everything about the cosmos it occupied, for that matter, being four hundred million years younger, any scientist could make a case for his or her particular field of inquiry. Ivan did not, of course, despise his work in the least or see any need to apologize for it; moreover, he did not take personally—too personally, anyway—one or another of the likelier candidates’ feigned confusion over pedology, the study of the nature and development of children, and pedology, soil science. The first few times, he affected amusement at the joke fellow soil scientists told on themselves, which in its simplest form was that the insertion of a single soil scientist into Silurian time would result in that remote geological period’s having more scientist than soil. It was the sort of extremely specialized joke specialists told. Like any specialized joke, its charm vanished the instant that an explanation became necessary. Real soil would have only just started, geologically speaking, to collect amid the Silurian barrens; pedogenesis would be spotty and sporadic; rock could weather away to fine particles, but only the decay of organic matter could make sterile grit into nurturing dirt, and while organisms abounded in the Silurian seas, they would have only just started, again, geologically speaking, to live and die—and decompose—on land.

  “Oh. I see. Ha, ha.”

  The joke had escaped, from the soil scientists at some point and begot tortuous variations in which twenty-first-century pedology overwhelmed and annihilated the reality of primordial soil: why (went one version), the weight of the terminology alone—soil air, soil complexes, associations and series, soil horizons, moisture budgets, aggregates and peds, mor and mull and all the rest of it—would be too much for such thin, poor, fragile stuff as one might expect to find sprinkled about in mid-Paleozoic times.

  He had tried to look and sound amused, and to be a good sport overall, whenever he heard the joke in any of its mutated forms. After all, it was never intended really maliciously; it merely partook of a largely unconscious acceptance of a hierarchy of scientists. Physics and astronomy were glamour fields. Geology and paleontology were comparatively rough-hewn but nonetheless logical choices; moreover, they were perennially popular with the public, a crucial concern when public money was involved. Pedology was none of the above. He liked to think that he did not have it in himself to be envious, and so, with unfailing good humor, he agreed that there certainly would be a lot of geology at hand in the Paleozoic, mountains, valleys, strata, and the like. And, as for paleozoology, the Paleozoic would be nothing if not a big aquarium stocked with weird wiggly things and maybe a few big showy monsters.

  And as for the crazy night skies, my oh my!

  And even Kemal Barrowclough, paleobotanist, could get up and describe some harsh interior landscape enlivened only by the gray-green of lichens, “the first true land plants, because, unlike the psilophytes and lycopods we find clinging to the low moist places, close to water, always looking over their shoulders, so to speak, to make sure they haven’t strayed too far, lichens, by God, have taken the big step,” and there would scarcely be a dry eye among the listeners, except for Kemal’s sister, Gulnar, herself a paleobotanist. Gulnar specialized in psilophytes.

  Throughout the discussions, Ivan had felt that, in effect, DeRamus had but to point to his rocks and say, “Old!” or Gabbert to his sky and say, “Big!” and nothing, nothing, he could have said about microbiotic volume in the histic epipedon, or humic acid precipitation, or the varieties of Paleozoic mesofauna he expected to sift through a tullgren funnel, would have meant a damn thing. Rather than enter his saprotrophs in unequal and hopeless competition against thrust faults, sea scorpions, or prehistoric constellations, he would wait until all around the table had settled back, glowering but spent, then softly clear his throat and calmly explain all over again that the origin and evolution of soil ranked among the major events in the history of life on Earth, that soil was linked inextricably to that major event of mid-Paleozoic time, life’s emergence onto land.

  It had been by dint of this stolid persistence that he had, in the minds of enough of his peers, ultimately established himself as precisely the sort of knowledgeable, dedicated, persevering person who should be a member of the Paleozoic expedition—and had also established, by extension, all soil scientists everywhere, in every geologic age, as estimable fellows. When finally, Stoll had announced who would go. Ivan stunned to speechlessness, could only gape as each of his colleagues shook his hand; almost a minute passed before he found his voice. “Wonders never cease,” he had said.

  Almost the next thing he remembered was looking over the back of the man who had knelt before him to check the seals on his boots. Cutsinger had stood leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed and watched the technicians work. He smiled ruefully at Ivan and said, “Tell me how you really feel.”

  “Like the first astronaut to spacewalk must’ve, just before he went out and did it.”

  “That guy had an umbilical cord,” said Dilks, who sat nearby, surrounded by his own satellite system of technicians. He did not go onto say the obvious: We don’t.

  “Just don’t lose sight of the anomaly once you’re through,” Cutsinger said.

  “Right now,” Ivan said, “getting back through the anomaly doesn’t concern me quite as much as going through the first time and finding myself sinking straight to the bottom of the sea.”

  “We sent a probe in to bird-dog for you. The hole’s stabilized over solid ground. You’ll arrive high and dry.” Cutsinger nodded at Dilks. “Both of you, together.”

  Ivan flexed his gloved fingers and said, “It’s just the suit,” and thought, It isn’t only just the suit, but part of it is the suit. The suit was bulky and heavy and had to be hermetic. He and Dilks had to carry their own air supplies and everything else they might conceivably need, lest they contaminate the pristine Paleozoic environment and induce a paradox. The physicists, Ivan and Dilks privately agreed, were covering their own asses.

  Cutsinger asked Dilks, “Anything you’re especially concerned about?”

  Dilks grinned. “Not liking the scenery. Not seeing a single prehistoric monster.”

  Cutsinger smiled thinly. “Careful what you wish for.”

  “Time to seal up,” said one of the technicians. Another raised a clear bubble helmet and carefully set it down over Ivan’s head. The helmet sealed when twisted to the right.

  “All set?” said the chief technician’s voice in the helm
etphone.

  “All set,” said Ivan.

  Technicians stood by to lend steadying hands as the two suited men got to their feet and lumbered into an adjoining room for decontamination. They stood upon a metal platform. Their equipment had already been decontaminated and stowed.

  Ivan gripped the railing that enclosed the platform; he did not trust his legs to hold him up. This is it, he told himself, and then, This is what? He found that he still could not entirely believe what he was about to do.

  The wall opposite the door pivoted away. The metal platform began to move on rails toward a ripple in the air.

  Everything turned to white light and pain.

  They considered their reflections in the full-length mirror. Don and Ivan were two solidly built, deep-chested, middle-aged men, unmistakably products of the same parents. Michelle stood framed in the doorway. Her expression was dubious. “Daddy,” she said, “they’ll never accept him as one of their own. No offense, Uncle Ivan, but you don’t have Hollywood hair and teeth. They’ll be horrified by what you’ve done to your skin. Daddy’s tanned and fit because he works out. You’re brown and hard and leathery because you work.”

  Don said to Ivan, “Maybe they’ll mistake you for a retired stuntman.”

  “Why retired?”

  “What other kind is there anymore?”

  “I feel strange in these clothes, but I have to admit that they feel good and look good. They look better that I do.”

  “This is up-to-the-moment thread.”

  “I look like a rough draft of you.”

  “Whatever you do,” Michelle said, “don’t say you’re a scientist. ‘Scientist’ cuts no ice here.”

  Don flashed a grin along his shoulder at his brother and said, “Absolutely do not say you’re a pedologist. They won’t have any idea what a pedologist is, unless they think it’s the same thing as a pedophile.”

  “Someone asks what you are,” Michelle said, “they mean, What’s your astrological sign?”

  “I don’t know my astrological sign.”