The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  Berge’s illness advanced without pity. I was touched when he chose to come stay with me, to “see it out,” as he put it.

  My fondness for Berge is not hard to understand. My wife died in her only attempt at childbirth. This is not uncommon, as pelvises evolved in heavy Earth gravity struggle to release the great fragile skulls of Moon-born children. So I had rejoiced when Berge was born; at least some of my genes, I consoled myself, which had emanated from primeval oceans now lost in the sky, would travel on to the farthest future. But now, it seemed, I would lose even that.

  Berge spent his dwindling energies in feverish activities. Still his obsession with Leonardo clung about him. He showed me pictures of impossible machines, far beyond the technology of Leonardo’s time (and, incidentally, of ours); shafts and cogwheels for generating enormous heat, a diving apparatus, an “easy-moving wagon” capable of independent locomotion. The famous helicopter intrigued Berge particularly. He built many spiral-shaped models of bamboo and paper; they soared into the thick air, easily defying the Moon’s gravity, catching the reddening light.

  I have never been sure if he knew he was dying. If he knew, he did not mention it, nor did I press him.

  In my gloomier hours – when I sat with my nephew as he struggled to sleep, or as I lay listening to the ominous, mysterious rumbles of my own failing body, cumulatively poisoned, wracked by the strange distortions of lunar gravity – I wondered how much farther we must descend.

  The heavy molecules of our thick atmosphere are too fast-moving to be contained by the Moon’s gravity. The air will be thinned in a few thousand years: a long time, but not beyond comprehension. Long before then we must have reconquered this world we built, or we will die.

  So we gather metals. And, besides that, we will need knowledge.

  We have become a world of patient monks, endlessly transcribing the great texts of the past, pounding into the brains of our wretched young the wisdom of the millennia. It seems essential we do not lose our concentration as a people, our memory. But I fear it is impossible. We are Stone Age farmers, the young broken by toil even as they learn. I have lived long enough to realize that we are, fragment by fragment, losing what we once knew.

  If I had one simple message to transmit to the future generations, one thing they should remember lest they descend into savagery, it would be this: People came from Earth. There: cosmology and the history of the species and the promise of the future, wrapped up in one baffling, enigmatic, heroic sentence. I repeat it to everyone I meet. Perhaps those future thinkers will decode its meaning, and will understand what they must do.

  Berge’s decline quickened, even as the sun slid down the sky, the clockwork of our little universe mirroring his condition with a clumsy, if mindless, irony. In the last hours I sat with him, quietly reading and talking, responding to his near-adolescent philosophizing with my customary brusqueness, which I was careful not to modify in this last hour.

  “. . . But have you ever wondered why we are here and now?” He was whispering, the sickly gold of his face picked out by the dwindling sun. “What are we, a few million, scattered in our towns and farms around the Moon? What do we compare to the billions who swarmed over Earth in the final years? Why do I find myself here and now rather than then? It is so unlikely . . .” He turned his great lunar head to me. “Do you ever feel you have been born out of your time, as if you are stranded in the wrong era, an unconscious time traveler?”

  I had to confess I never did, but he whispered on.

  “Suppose a modern human – or someone of the great ages of Earth – was stranded in the sixteenth century, Leonardo’s time. Suppose he forgot everything of his culture, all its science and learning – ”

  “Why? How?”

  “I don’t know. . . . But if it were true – and if his unconscious mind retained the slightest trace of the learning he had discarded – wouldn’t he do exactly what Leonardo did? Study obsessively, try to fit awkward facts into the prevailing, unsatisfactory paradigms, grope for the deeper truths he had lost?”

  “Like Earth’s systems being analogous to the human body.”

  “Exactly.” A wisp of excitement stirred him. “Don’t you see? Leonardo behaved exactly as a stranded time traveler would.”

  “Ah.” I thought I understood; of course, I didn’t. “You think you’re out of time. And your Leonardo, too!” I laughed, but he didn’t rise to my gentle mockery. And in my unthinking way I launched into a long and pompous discourse on feelings of dislocation: on how every adolescent felt stranded in a body, an adult culture, unprepared . . .

  But Berge wasn’t listening. He turned away, to look again at the bloated sun. “All this will pass,” he said. “The sun will die. The universe may collapse on itself, or spread to a cold infinity. In either case it may be possible to build a giant machine that will recreate this universe – everything, every detail of this moment – so that we will all live again. But how can we know if this is the first time? Perhaps the universe has already died, many times, to be born again. Perhaps Leonardo was no traveler. Perhaps he was simply remembering.” He looked up, challenging me to argue; but the challenge was distressingly feeble.

  “I think,” I said, “you should drink more soup.”

  But he had no more need of soup, and he turned to look at the sun once more.

  It seemed too soon when the cold started to settle on the land once more, with great pancakes of new ice clustering around the rim of the Tycho Sea.

  I summoned his friends, teachers, those who had loved him.

  I clung to the greater goal: that the atoms of gold and nickel and zinc which had coursed in Berge’s blood and bones, killing him like the mustard plants of Maginus – killing us all, in fact, at one rate or another – would now gather in even greater concentrations in the bodies of those who would follow us. Perhaps the pathetic scrap of gold or nickel which had cost poor Berge his life would at last, mined, close the circuit which would lift the first of our ceramic-hulled ships beyond the thick, deadening atmosphere of the Moon.

  Perhaps. But it was cold comfort.

  We ate the soup, of his dissolved bones and flesh, in solemn silence. We took his life’s sole gift, further concentrating the metal traces to the far future, shortening our lives as he had.

  I have never been a skillful host. As soon as they could, the young people dispersed. I talked with Berge’s teachers, but we had little to say to each other; I was merely his uncle, after all, a genetic tributary, not a parent. I wasn’t sorry to be left alone.

  Before I slept again, even before the sun’s bloated hull had slid below the toothed horizon, the winds had turned. The warm air that had cradled me was treacherously fleeing after the sinking sun. Soon the first flurries of snow came pattering on the black, swelling surface of the Tycho Sea. My seals slid back into the water, to seek out whatever riches or dangers awaited them under Callisto ice.

  THE WEDDING ALBUM

  David Marusek

  David Marusek, a graduate of Clarion West, made his first sale to Asimov’s Science Fiction in 1993, and his second sale soon thereafter to Playboy, followed subsequently by more sales to Asimov’s and to the British anthology Future Histories. His pyrotechnic novella “We Were Out of Our Minds with Joy” was one of the most popular and talked-about stories of 1995; although it was only his third sale, it was accomplished enough to make one of the reviewers for Locus magazine speculate that Marusek must be a big-name author writing under a pseudonym. Not a pseudonym, Marusek lives the life of a struggling young writer in a “low-maintenance cabin in the woods” in Fairbanks, Alaska, where he is currently working on a mammoth first novel that, by all reports, is likely to dazzle the genre all over again. In the powerful story that follows, which was a Hugo and Nebula finalist in 2000, he takes us to an intricate and strange high-tech, posthuman future milieu, to a world where the border between what’s real and what’s not real has grown disturbingly thin – and we don’t always find ourselves on the right s
ide of the line.

  ANNE AND BENJAMIN stood stock still, as instructed, close but not touching, while the simographer adjusted her apparatus, set its timer, and ducked out of the room. It would take only a moment, she said. They were to think only happy happy thoughts.

  For once in her life, Anne was unconditionally happy, and everything around her made her happier: her gown, which had been her grandmother’s; the wedding ring (how cold it had felt when Benjamin first slipped it on her finger!); her clutch bouquet of forget-me-nots and buttercups; Benjamin himself, close beside her in his charcoal grey tux and pink carnation. He who so despised ritual but was a good sport. His cheeks were pink, too, and his eyes sparkled with some wolfish fantasy. “Come here,” he whispered. Anne shushed him; you weren’t supposed to talk or touch during a casting; it could spoil the sims. “I can’t wait,” he whispered, “this is taking too long.” And it did seem longer than usual, but this was a professional simulacrum, not some homemade snapshot.

  They were posed at the street end of the living room, next to the table piled with brightly wrapped gifts. This was Benjamin’s town-house; she had barely moved in. All her treasures were still in shipping shells in the basement, except for the few pieces she’d managed to have unpacked: the oak refectory table and chairs, the sixteenth-century French armoire, the cherry wood chifforobe, the tea table with inlaid top, the silvered mirror over the fire surround. Of course, her antiques clashed with Benjamin’s contemporary – and rather common – decor, but he had promised her the whole house to redo as she saw fit. A whole house!

  “How about a kiss?” whispered Benjamin.

  Anne smiled but shook her head; there’d be plenty of time later for that sort of thing.

  Suddenly, a head wearing wraparound goggles poked through the wall and quickly surveyed the room. “Hey, you,” it said to them.

  “Is that our simographer?” Benjamin said.

  The head spoke into a cheek mike, “This one’s the keeper,” and withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared.

  “Did the simographer just pop her head in through the wall?” said Benjamin.

  “I think so,” said Anne, though it made no sense.

  “I’ll just see what’s up,” said Benjamin, breaking his pose. He went to the door but could not grasp its handle.

  Music began to play outside, and Anne went to the window. Her view of the garden below was blocked by the blue-and-white-striped canopy they had rented, but she could clearly hear the clink of flatware on china, laughter, and the musicians playing a waltz. “They’re starting without us,” she said, happily amazed.

  “They’re just warming up,” said Benjamin.

  “No, they’re not. That’s the first waltz. I picked it myself.”

  “So let’s waltz,” Benjamin said and reached for her. But his arms passed through her in a flash of pixelated noise. He frowned and examined his hands.

  Anne hardly noticed. Nothing could diminish her happiness. She was drawn to the table of wedding gifts. Of all the gifts, there was only one – a long flat box in flecked silver wrapping – that she was most keen to open. It was from Great Uncle Karl. When it came down to it, Anne was both the easiest and the hardest person to shop for. While everyone knew of her passion for antiques, few had the means or expertise to buy one. She reached for Karl’s package, but her hand passed right through it. This isn’t happening, she thought with gleeful horror.

  That it was, in fact, happening was confirmed a moment later when a dozen people – Great Uncle Karl, Nancy, Aunt Jennifer, Traci, Cathy and Tom, the bridesmaids and others, including Anne herself, and Benjamin, still in their wedding clothes – all trooped through the wall wearing wraparound goggles. “Nice job;” said Great Uncle Karl, inspecting the room, “first rate.”

  “Ooooh,” said Aunt Jennifer, comparing the identical wedding couples, identical but for the goggles. It made Anne uncomfortable that the other Anne should be wearing goggles while she wasn’t. And the other Benjamin acted a little drunk and wore a smudge of white frosting on his lapel. We’ve cut the cake, she thought happily, although she couldn’t remember doing so. Geri, the flower girl in a pastel dress, and Angus, the ring bearer in a miniature tux, along with a knot of other dressed-up children, charged through the sofa, back and forth, creating pyrotechnic explosions of digital noise. They would have run through Benjamin and Anne, too, had the adults allowed. Anne’s father came through the wall with a bottle of champagne. He paused when he saw Anne but turned to the other Anne and freshened her glass.

  “Wait a minute!” shouted Benjamin, waving his arms above his head. “I get it now. We’re the sims!” The guests all laughed, and he laughed too. “I guess my sims always say that, don’t they?” The other Benjamin nodded yes and sipped his champagne. “I just' never expected to be a sim,” Benjamin went on. This brought another round of laughter, and he said sheepishly, “I guess my sims all say that, too.”

  The other Benjamin said, “Now that we have the obligatory epiphany out of the way,” and took a bow. The guests applauded.

  Cathy, with Tom in tow, approached Anne. “Look what I caught,” she said and showed Anne the forget-me-not and buttercup bouquet. “I guess we know what that means.” Tom, intent on straightening his tie, seemed not to hear. But Anne knew what it meant. It meant they’d tossed the bouquet. All the silly little rituals that she had so looked forward to.

  “Good for you,” she said and offered her own clutch, which she still held, for comparison. The real one was wilting and a little ragged around the edges, with missing petals and sprigs, while hers was still fresh and pristine and would remain so eternally. “Here,” she said, “take mine, too, for double luck.” But when she tried to give Cathy the bouquet, she couldn’t let go of it. She opened her hand and discovered a seam where the clutch joined her palm. It was part of her. Funny, she thought, I’m not afraid. Ever since she was little, Anne had feared that some day she would suddenly realize she wasn’t herself anymore. It was a dreadful notion that sometimes oppressed her for weeks: knowing you weren’t yourself. But her sims didn’t seem to mind it. She had about three dozen Annes in her album, from age twelve on up. Her sims tended to be a morose lot, but they all agreed it wasn’t so bad, the life of a sim, once you got over the initial shock. The first moments of disorientation are the worst, they told her, and they made her promise never to reset them back to default. Otherwise, they’d have to work everything through from scratch. So Anne never reset her sims when she shelved them. She might delete a sim outright for whatever reason, but she never reset them because you never knew when you’d wake up one day a sim yourself. Like today.

  The other Anne joined them. She was sagging a little. “Well,” she said to Anne.

  “Indeed!” replied Anne.

  “Turn around,” said the other Anne, twirling her hand, “I want to see.”

  Anne was pleased to oblige. Then she said, “Your turn,” and the other Anne modeled for her, and she was delighted at how the gown looked on her, though the goggles somewhat spoiled the effect. Maybe this can work out, she thought, I am enjoying myself so. “Let’s go see us side-by-side,” she said, leading the way to the mirror on the wall. The mirror was large, mounted high, and tilted forward so you saw yourself as from above. But simulated mirrors cast no reflections, and Anne was happily disappointed.

  “Oh,” said Cathy, “look at that.”

  “Look at what?” said Anne.

  “Grandma’s vase,” said the other Anne. On the mantel beneath the mirror stood Anne’s most precious possession, a delicate vase cut from pellucid blue crystal. Anne’s great-great-great grandmother had commissioned the Belgian master, Bollinger, the finest glass maker in sixteenth-century Europe, to make it. Five hundred years later, it was as perfect as the day it was cut.

  “Indeed!” said Anne, for the sim vase seemed to radiate an inner light. Through some trick or glitch of the simogram, it sparkled like a lake under moonlight, and, seeing it, Anne felt incandescent.


  After a while, the other Anne said, “Well?” Implicit in this question was a whole standard set of questions that boiled down to – shall I keep you or delete you now? For sometimes a sim didn’t take. Sometimes a sim was cast while Anne was in a mood, and the sim suffered irreconcilable guilt or unassuagable despondency and had to be mercifully destroyed. It was better to do this immediately, or so all the Annes had agreed.

  And Anne understood the urgency, what with the reception still in progress and the bride and groom, though frazzled, still wearing their finery. They might do another casting if necessary. “I’ll be okay,” Anne said. “In fact, if it’s always like this, I’ll be terrific.”

  Anne, through the impenetrable goggles, studied her. “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sister,” said the other Anne. Anne addressed all her sims as “sister,” and now Anne, herself, was being so addressed. “Sister,” said the other Anne, “this has got to work out. I need you.”

  “I know,” said Anne, “I’m your wedding day.”

  “Yes, my wedding day.”

  Across the room, the guests laughed and applauded. Benjamin – both of him – was entertaining, as usual. He – the one in goggles – motioned to them. The other Anne said, “We have to go. I’ll be back.”

  Great Uncle Karl, Nancy, Cathy and Tom, Aunt Jennifer, and the rest left through the wall. A polka could be heard playing on the other side. Before leaving, the other Benjamin gathered the other Anne into his arms and leaned her backward for a theatrical kiss. Their goggles clacked. How happy I look, Anne told herself. This is the happiest day of my life.

  Then the lights dimmed, and her thoughts shattered like glass.

  They stood stock still, as instructed, close but not touching. Benjamin whispered, “This is taking too long,” and Anne shushed him. You weren’t supposed to talk; it could glitch the sims. But it did seem a long time. Benjamin gazed at her with hungry eyes and brought his lips close enough for a kiss, but Anne smiled and turned away. There’d be plenty of time later for fooling around.