The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “But, just as quickly, the heat leaks away, and the air starts to thin. The end, when it comes, is probably rapid—a catastrophic decline—lots of feedback loops working together to destroy the life-bearing conditions.”

  Her face was hard. “And then it’s back to the dustbowl.”

  “Yes. Alexei thought he mapped six such episodes, six summers. The first was about a billion years after the planet formed. The second one-and-a-half billion years ago, and then eight hundred million years ago, two hundred million, one hundred million—”

  “And now.”

  “Yeah. We were lucky, Verity, we humans, to come along just now, to see Mars bloom, for it’s a rare event.”

  “Or unlucky,” she said acidly.

  “I suppose so. In normal times, we couldn’t even have landed the way we did, in a big glider of a MEM. Air too thin. You’d need heat shields, parachutes, rockets…”

  “We maybe wouldn’t have come here at all. And maybe we wouldn’t have had all this extra tension over Mars, over the future in space. Maybe we wouldn’t have gone to war at all. And now…” She looked around at the shabby huddle of our settlement, the yellowing plastic, the broken-down machines, the dying crops, the bundled-up, wheezing children. “We thought we were safe, here on Mars. Or at least that we had a chance. A new world, a new roll of the dice for humanity. But if the atmosphere collapses we won’t be able to live here.”

  “No. In, say, a century, tepees and bonfires won’t cut it. You might as well be living on the moon. If we’d had more time, more resupply from home—”

  “We were lured here by a lie. A transient phenomenon.”

  I reached out and took her hand. “Verity—all these years. When I close my eyes I can still see you sitting in the chair in Mount Wilson, smiling as I showed you Mars … It seems like yesterday. I don’t begrudge you Alexei. You had a good life, I can see that. But now he’s gone, and maybe—”

  She snatched her hand away. “What are you talking about, Puddephat? My children are going to die here, and their children, without meaning, without hope. What do you think we’re going to do, in your head—sit together on a porch, holding hands and smiling as we give out the suicide pills?”

  “Verity…”

  She stalked off.

  And I was left alone with the alpacas, and my graph in the dirt.

  HELL CITY, MARS. 4 JULY 2026.

  Even now I’m not alone, probably. Some other group may be huddled up against another air machine, bleeding power off peeling Soviet solar cells. We could never reach each other. Doubt if my old pressure suit would fit me any more—but it’s a moon suit you need on Mars now.

  Anyhow, that’s it for me. At eighty-three, I’m probably the oldest man left alive on any of the worlds. I’ll raise Old Glory one more time over the sands of Mars, and toast her with the very last drop of my Soviet potato vodka, and bury this tin chest, and wait for the dust storms to bury me …

  I guess I should finish the story.

  We didn’t need suicide pills in the end. When the youngsters figured out that my generation had blown up one world and dumped them into lethal conditions on another, they went crazy. A war of the age cadres, you could call it. Verity died in the chapel, praying to God for succour, telling the young ones they would be damned for their sins; her own grandchildren blew the chapel up. I daresay we could have lasted longer, if we’d eked everything out as carefully as we could. But to what end? So we could live to see the last molecule of oxygen rust out of the air?

  Mars abides. Yes, it’s a consolation that in the far future, in fifty or a hundred million years, when my bones are dust, and Earth has healed over and is a mindless green point in the sky, the great volcanoes will shout again and bring Mars to life once more, though we will be gone. There’s always that, and—whoever you are, whoever reads this—I hope you won’t think too badly of us.

  It was one heck of a ride, though, wasn’t it?

  JONAS PUDDEPHAT.

  The Visitor from Taured

  IAN R. MACLEOD

  Here’s an exquisitely written and subtly characterized story that shows us how a man’s obsession with experimentally proving or disproving the Many Worlds theory of reality comes to dominate his entire life—and which may (or may not) eventually lead him to the proof he seeks.

  British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, publishing a slew of strong stories in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and elsewhere and his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity as we move through the first decades of the new century. Much of his work has been gathered in four collections, Voyages By Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, Past Magic, and Journeys. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his novella The Summer Isles, and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette The Chop Girl. In 2003, he published his first fantasy novel, and his most critically acclaimed book, The Light Ages, followed by a sequel, The House of Storms in 2005, and then by Song of Time, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 2008. A novel version of The Summer Isles also appeared in 2005. His most recent books are a new novel, Wake Up and Dream, and a big retrospective collection, Snodgrass and Other Illusions: The Best Short Stories of Ian R. MacLeod. MacLeod lives with his family in the West Midlands of England.

  There was always something otherworldly about Rob Holm. Not that he wasn’t charming and clever and good-looking. Driven, as well. Even during that first week when we’d arrived at university and waved goodbye to our parents and our childhoods, and were busy doing all the usual fresher things, which still involved getting dangerously drunk and pretending not to be homesick and otherwise behaving like the prim, arrogant, cocky and immature young assholes we undoubtedly were, Rob was chatting with research fellows and quietly getting to know the best virtuals to hang out in.

  Even back then, us young undergrads were an endangered breed. Many universities had gone bankrupt, become commercial research utilities, or transformed themselves into the academic theme-parks of those so-called “Third Age Academies.” But still, here we all were at the traditional redbrick campus of Leeds University, which still offered a broad-ish range of courses to those with families rich enough to support them, or at least tolerant enough not to warn them against such folly. My own choice of degree, just to show how incredibly supportive my parents were, being Analogue Literature.

  As a subject, it already belonged with Alchemy and Marxism in the dustbin of history, but books—and I really do mean those peculiar, old, paper, physical objects—had always been my thing. Even when I was far too young to understand what they were, and by rights should have been attracted by the bright, interactive, virtual gewgaws buzzing all around me, I’d managed to burrow into the bottom of an old box, down past the stickle bricks and My Little Ponies, to these broad, cardboardy things that fell open and had these flat, two-dee shapes and images that didn’t move or respond in any normal way when I waved my podgy fingers in their direction. All you could do was simply look at them. That, and chew their corners, and maybe scribble over their pages with some of the dried-up crayons which were also to be found amid those predigital layers.

  My parents had always been loving and tolerant of their daughter. They even encouraged little Lita’s interest in these ancient artefacts. I remember my mother’s finger moving slow and patient across the creased and yellowed pages as she traced the pictures and her lips breathed the magical words that somehow arose from those flat lines. She wouldn’t have assimilated data this way herself in years, if ever, so in a sense we were both learning.

  The Hungry Caterpillar. The Mister Men series. Where The Wild Things Are. Frodo’s adventures. Slowly, like some archaeologist discovering the world by deciphering the cartouches of the tombs in Ancient Egypt, I learned how to perceive and interact through
this antique medium. It was, well, the thingness of books. The exact way they didn’t leap about or start giving off sounds, smells and textures. That, and how they didn’t ask you which character you’d like to be, or what level you wanted to go to next, but simply took you by the hand and lead you where they wanted you to go.

  Of course, I became a confirmed bibliophile, but I do still wonder how my life would have progressed if my parents had seen odd behaviour differently, and taken me to some paediatric specialist. Almost certainly, I wouldn’t be the Lita Ortiz who’s writing these words for whoever might still be able to comprehend them. Nor the one who was lucky enough to meet Rob Holm all those years ago in the teenage fug of those student halls back at Leeds University.

  2.

  So. Rob. First thing to say is the obvious fact that most of us fancied him. It wasn’t just the grey eyes, or the courtly elegance, or that soft Scottish accent, or even the way he somehow appeared mature and accomplished. It was, essentially, a kind of mystery. But he wasn’t remotely stand-offish. He went along with the fancy dress pub crawls. He drank. He fucked about. He took the odd tab.

  One of my earliest memories of Rob was finding him at some club, cool as you like amid all the noise, flash and flesh. And dragging him out onto the pulsing dance floor. One minute we were hovering above the skyscrapers of Beijing and the next a shipwreck storm was billowing about us. Rob, though, was simply there. Taking it all in, laughing, responding, but somehow detached. Then, helping me down and out, past clanging temple bells and through prismatic sandstorms to the entirely non-virtual hell of the toilets. His cool hands holding back my hair as I vomited.

  I never ever actually thanked Rob for this—I was too embarrassed—but the incident somehow made us more aware of each other. That, and maybe we shared a sense of otherness. He, after all, was studying astrophysics, and none of the rest of us even knew what that was, and had all that strange stuff going on across the walls of his room. Not flashing posters of the latest virtual boy band or porn empress, but slow-turning gas clouds, strange planets, distant stars and galaxies. That, and long runs of mek, whole arching rainbows of the stuff, endlessly twisting and turning. My room, on the other hand, was piled with the precious torn and foxed paperbacks I’d scoured from junksites during my teenage years. Not, of course, that they were actually needed. Even if you were studying something as arcane as narrative fiction, you were still expected to download and virtualise all your resources.

  The Analogue Literature Faculty at Leeds University had once taken up a labyrinthine space in a redbrick terrace at the east edge of the campus. But now it had been invaded by dozens of more modern disciplines. Anything from speculative mek to non-concrete design to holo-pornography had taken bites out of it. I was already aware—how couldn’t I be?—that no significant novel or short story had been written in decades, but I was shocked to discover that only five other students in my year had elected for An Lit as their main subject, and one of those still resided in Seoul, and another was a post-centarian on clicking steel legs. Most of the other students who showed up were dipping into the subject in the hope that it might add something useful to their main discipline. Invariably, they were disappointed. It wasn’t just the difficulty of ploughing through page after page of non-interactive text. It was linear fiction’s sheer lack of options, settings, choices. Why the hell, I remember some kid shouting in a seminar, should I accept all the miserable shit that this Hardy guy rains down on his characters? Give me the base program for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and I’ll hack you fifteen better endings.

  I pushed my weak mek to limit during that first term as I tried to formulate a tri-dee excursus on Tender Is the Night, but the whole piece was reconfigured out of existence once the faculty ais got hold of it. Meanwhile, Rob Holm was clearly doing far better. I could hear him singing in the showers from my room, and admired the way he didn’t get involved in all the usual peeves and arguments. The physical sciences had a huge, brand-new faculty at the west end of campus called the Clearbrite Building. Half church, half pagoda and maybe half spaceship in the fizzing, shifting, headachy way of modern architecture, there was no real way of telling how much of it was actually made of brick, concrete and glass, and how much consisted of virtual artefacts and energy fields. You could get seriously lost just staring at it.

  My first year went by, and I fought hard against crawling home, and had a few unromantic flings, and made vegetable bolognaise my signature dish, and somehow managed to get version 4.04 of my second term excursus on Howard’s End accepted. Rob and I didn’t become close, but I liked his singing, and the cinnamon scent he left hanging behind in the steam of the showers, and it was good to know that someone else was making a better hash of this whole undergraduate business than I was.

  “Hey, Lita?”

  We were deep into the summer term and exams were looming. Half the undergrads were back at home, and the other half were jacked up on learning streams, or busy having breakdowns.

  I leaned in on Rob’s doorway. “Yeah?”

  “Fancy sharing a house next year?”

  “Next year?” Almost effortlessly casual, I pretended to consider this. “I really hadn’t thought. It all depends—”

  “Not a problem.” He shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll find someone else.”

  “No, no. That’s fine. I mean, yeah, I’m in. I’m interested.”

  “Great. I’ll show you what I’ve got from the letting agencies.” He smiled a warm smile, then returned to whatever wondrous creations were spinning above his desk.

  3.

  We settled on a narrow house with bad drains just off the Otley Road in Headingley, and I’m not sure whether I was relieved or disappointed when I discovered that his plan was that we share the place with some others. I roped in a couple of girls, Rob found a couple of guys, and we all got on pretty well. I had a proper boyfriend by then, a self-regarding jock called Torsten, and every now and then a different woman would emerge from Rob’s room. Nothing serious ever seemed to come of this, but they were equally gorgeous, clever and out of my league.

  A bunch of us used to head out to the moors for midnight bonfires during that second winter. I remember the smoke and the sparks spinning into the deep black as we sang and drank and arsed around. Once, and with the help of a few tabs and cans, I asked Rob to name some constellations for me, and he put an arm around my waist and led me further into the dark.

  Over there, Lita, up to the left and far away from the light of this city, is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, which is always a good place to start when you’re stargazing. And there, see close as twins at the central bend of the Plough’s handle, are Mizar and Alcor. They’re not a true binary, but if we had decent binoculars, we could see that Mizar really does have a close companion. And there, that way, up and left—his breath on my face, his hands on my arms—maybe you can just see there’s this fuzzy speck at the Bear’s shoulder? Now, that’s an entire separate galaxy from our own filled with billions of stars, and its light has taken about twelve million years to reach the two of us here, tonight. Then Andromeda and Cassopia and Canus Major and Minor … Distant, storybook names for distant worlds. I even wondered aloud about the possibility of other lives, existences, hardly expecting Rob to agree with me. But he did. And then he said something which struck me as strange.

  “Not just out there, either, Lita. There are other worlds all around us. It’s just that we can’t see them.”

  “You’re talking in some metaphorical sense, right?”

  “Not at all. It’s part of what I’m trying to understand in my studies.”

  “To be honest, I’ve got no real idea what astrophysics even means. Maybe you could tell me.”

  “I’d love to. And you know, Lita, I’m a complete dunce when it comes to, what do you call it—two-dee fiction, flat narrative? So I want you to tell me about that as well. Deal?”

  We wandered back toward the fire, and I didn’t expect anything else to come of our promise unti
l Rob called to me when I was wandering past his room one wet, grey afternoon a week or so later. It was deadline day, my hair was a greasy mess, I was heading for the shower, and had an excursus on John Updike to finish.

  “You did say you wanted to know more about what I study?”

  “I was just…” I scratched my head. “Curious. All I do know is that astrophysics is about more than simply looking up at the night sky and giving names to things. That isn’t even astronomy, is it?”

  “You’re not just being polite?” His soft, granite-grey eyes remained fixed on me.

  “No. I’m not—absolutely.”

  “I could show you something here.” He waved at the stars on his walls, the stuff spinning on his desk. “But maybe we could go out. To be honest, Lita, I could do with a break, and there’s an experiment I could show you up at the Clearbrite that might help explain what I mean about other worlds … But I understand if you’re busy. I could get my avatar to talk to your avatar and—”

  “No, no. You’re right, Rob. I could do with a break as well. Let’s go out. Seize the day. Or at least, what’s left of it. Just give me…” I waved a finger toward the bathroom. “… five minutes.”

  Then we were outside in the sideways-blowing drizzle, and it was freezing cold, and I was still wet from my hurried shower, as Rob slipped a companionable arm around mine as we climbed the hill toward the Otley Road tram stop.

  Kids and commuters got on and off as we jolted toward the strung lights of the city, their lips moving and their hands stirring to things only they could feel and see. The Clearbrite looked more like some recently arrived spaceship as it glowed out through the gloom, but inside the place was just like any other campus building, with clamouring posters offering to restructure your loan, find you temporary work, or get you laid and hammered. Constant reminders, too, that Clearbrite was the only smartjuice to communicate in realtime to your fingerjewel, toejamb or wristbracelet. This souk-like aspect of modern unis not being something that Sebastian Flyte, or even Harry Potter in those disappointing sequels, ever had to contend with.