The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  He walked slowly round the portal. The pale violet emanation in the air around it remained constant, hazing the dull surface from perfect observation. That and a faint hum were the only evidence of the massive quantity of power it consumed. Its eternal stability a mocking enigma.

  Despite all the logic of argument he knew Katherine was wrong. Why build the dish if you had this ability? And why keep it operational?

  That factor must have been important to them. It had been built in the centre of the ship, and built to last. They'd even reconfigured the wreck to ensure it lasted. Fine, they needed reliability, and they were masters of material science. But a one-off piece of emergency equipment lasting 13,000 years? There must be a reason, and the only logical one was that they knew they would need it to remain functional so they could come back one day.

  The SII suit prevented him from smiling as realization dawned. But it did reveal a shiver ripple along his limbs as the cold wonder of the knowledge struck home.

  On the Lady Mac's bridge, Marcus said: "We originally assumed that the xenocs would just go into zero-tall and wait for a rescue ship; because that's what we would do. But their technology allows them to take a much different approach to engineering problems."

  "The wormhole leads into the future," Roman said in astonishment.

  "Almost. It doesn't lead anywhere but back to itself, so the length inside it represents time not space. As long as the portal exists you can travel through it. The xenocs went in just after they built the dish and came out again when their rescue ship arrived. That's why they built the portal to survive so long. It had to carry them through a great deal of time."

  "How does that help you get here?" Katherine asked. "You're trapped over in the xenoc wreckage right now, not in the past."

  "The wormhole exists as long as the portal does. It's an open tube to every second of that entire period of existence, you're not restricted which way you travel through it."

  In the portal chamber Marcus approached one of the curving black buttress legs. The artificial gravity was off directly underneath the doughnut so the xenocs could rise into it. But they had been intent on travelling into the future.

  He started to climb the buttress. The first section was the steepest; he had to clamp his hands behind it, and haul himself up. Not easy in that gravity field. It gradually curved over, flattening out at the top, leaving him standing above the doughnut. He balanced there precariously, very aware of the potentially lethal fall down onto the floor.

  The doughnut didn't look any different from this position, a glowing ring surrounding the grey pressure membrane. Marcus put one foot over the edge of the exotic matter, and jumped.

  He fell clean through the pressure membrane. There was no gravity field in the wormhole, although every movement suddenly became very sluggish. To his waving limbs it felt as if he was immersed in some kind of fluid, though his sensor block reported a perfect vacuum.

  The wormhole wall was insubstantial, difficult to see in the meagre backscatter of light from the pressure membrane. Five narrow lines of yellow light materialized, spaced equidistantly around the wall. They stretched from the rim of the pressure membrane up to a vanishing point some indefinable distance away.

  Nothing else happened. Marcus drifted until he reached the wall, which his hand adhered to as though the entire surface was one giant stikpad. He crawled his way back to the pressure membrane. When he stuck his hand through, there was no resistance. He pushed his head out.

  There was no visible difference to the chamber outside. He datavised his communication block to search for a signal. It told him there was only the band from one of the relay blocks in the stairwells. No time had passed.

  He withdrew back into the wormhole. Surely the xenocs hadn't expected to crawl along the entire length? In any case, the other end would be 13,000 years ago. Marcus retrieved the xenoc activation code from his neural nanonics, and datavised it.

  The lines of light turned blue.

  He quickly datavised the deactivation code, and the lines reverted to yellow. This time when he emerged out into the portal chamber there was no signal at all.

  "That was ten hours ago," Marcus told his crew. "I climbed out and walked back to the ship. I passed you on the way, Karl."

  "Holy shit," Roman muttered. "A time machine."

  "How long was the wormhole active for?" Katherine asked.

  "A couple of seconds, that's all."

  "Ten hours in two seconds." She paused, loading sums into her neural nanonics. "That's a year in 30 minutes. Actually, that's not so fast. Not if they were intending to travel a couple of thousand years into the future."

  "You're complaining about it?" Roman asked.

  "Maybe it speeds up the further you go through it," Schutz suggested. "Or more likely we need the correct access codes to vary its speed."

  "Whatever," Marcus said. He datavised the flight computer and blew the tether bolts which were holding Lady Mac to the wreckage. "I want flight readiness status, people, please."

  "What about Jorge and the others?" Karl asked.

  "They only come back on board under our terms." Marcus said. "No weapons, and they go straight into zero-tall. We can hand them over to Tranquillity's sergeants as soon as we get home." Purple course vectors were rising into his mind. He fired the manoeuvring thrusters, easing Lady Mac clear of the xenoc shell.

  Jorge saw the sparkle of bright dust as the explosive bolts fired. He scanned his sensor collar round until he found the tethers, narrow grey serpents flexing against the speckled backdrop of drab orange particles. It didn't bother him unduly. Then the small thrusters ringing the starship's equator fired, pouring out translucent amber plumes of gas.

  "Katherine, what do you think you're doing?" he datavised.

  "Following my orders," Marcus replied. "She's helping to prep the ship for a jump. Is that a problem for you?"

  Jorge watched the starship receding, an absurdly stately movement for an artifact that big. His respirator tube seemed to have stopped supplying fresh oxygen, paralysing every muscle. "Calvert. How?" he managed to datavise.

  "I might tell you some time. Right now, there are a lot of conditions you have to agree to before I allow you back on board."

  Pure fury at being so completely outmanoeuvred by Calvert made him reach automatically for his weapon. "You will come back now," he datavised.

  "You're not in any position to dictate terms."

  Lady Macbeth was a good 200 metres away. Jorge lined the stubby barrel up on the rear of the starship. A green targeting grid flipped up over the image, and he zeroed on the nozzle of a fusion drive tube. He datavised the X-ray laser to fire. Pale white vapour spewed out of the nozzle.

  "Depressurization in fusion drive three," Roman shouted.

  "The lower deflector coil casing is breached. He shot us, Marcus, Jesus Christ, he shot us with an X-ray."

  "What the hell kind of weapon has he got back there?" Karl demanded.

  "Whatever it is, he can't have the power capacity for many more shots," Schutz said.

  "Give me fire control for the maser cannons," Roman said. "I'll blast the little shit."

  "Marcus!" Katherine cried. "He just hit a patterning node. Stop him."

  Neuroiconic displays zipped through Marcus's mind. Ship's systems coming on line as they shifted over to full operational status, each with its own schematic. He knew just about every performance parameter by heart. Combat sensor clusters were already sliding out of their recesses. Maser cannons powering up. It would be another seven seconds before they could be aimed and fired.

  There was one system with a faster response time.

  "Hang on," he yelled.

  Designed for combat avoidance manoeuvres, the fusion drive tubes exploded into life two seconds after he triggered their ignition sequence. Twin spears of solar-bright plasma transfixed the xenoc shell, burning through deck after deck. They didn't even strike anywhere near the airlock which Jorge was cloistered in. They didn
't have to. At that range, their infrared emission alone was enough to break down his SII suit's integrity.

  Superenergized ions hammered into the wreck, smashing the internal structure apart, heating the atmosphere to an intolerable pressure. Xenoc machinery detonated in tremendous energy bursts all through the structure, the units expending themselves in spherical clouds of solid light which clashed and merged into a single wavefront of destruction. The giant rock particle lurched wildly from the explosion. Drenched in a cascade of hard radiation and subatomic particles, the unicorn tower at the centre of the dish snapped off at its base to tumble away into the darkness.

  Then the process seemed to reverse. The spume of light blossoming from the cliff curved in on itself, growing in brightness as it was compressed back to its point of origin.

  Lady Mac's crew were straining under the five gee acceleration of the starship's flight. The inertial guidance systems started to flash priority warnings into Marcus's neural nanonics.

  "We're going back," he datavised. Five gees made talking too difficult. "Jesus, five gees and it's still pulling us in." The external sensor suite showed him the contracting fireball, its luminosity surging towards violet. Large sections of the cliff were flaking free and plummeting into the conflagration. Fissures like black lightning bolts split open right across the rock.

  He ordered the flight computer to power up the nodes and retract the last sensor clusters.

  "Marcus, we can't lump," Katherine datavised, her face pummelled into frantic creases by the acceleration. "It's a gravitonic emission. Don't."

  "Have some faith in the old girl." He initiated the jump.

  An event horizon eclipsed the Lady Macbeth's fuselage.

  Behind her, the wormhole at the heart of the newborn micro-star gradually collapsed, pulling in its gravitational field as it went. Soon there was nothing left but an expanding cloud of dark snowdust embers.

  They were three jumps away from Tranquillity when Katherine ventured into Marcus's cabin. Lady Mac was accelerating at a tenth of a gee towards her next jump coordinate, holding him lightly in one of the large blackfoam sculpture chairs. It was the first time she'd ever really noticed his age.

  "I came to say sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have doubted."

  He waved limply. "Lady Mac was built for combat, her nodes are powerful enough to jump us out of some gravity fields. Not that I had a lot of choice. Still, we only reduced three nodes to slag, plus the one dear old Jorge damaged."

  "She's a hell of ship, and you're the perfect captain for her. I'll keep flying with you, Marcus."

  "Thanks. But I'm not sure what I'm going to do after we dock. Replacing three nodes will cost a fortune. I'll be in debt to the banks again."

  She pointed at the row of transparent bubbles which all held identical antique electronic circuit boards. "You can always sell some more Apollo command module guidance computers."

  "I think that scam's just about run its course. Don't worry, when we get back to Tranquillity I know a captain who'll buy them from me. At least that way I'll be able to settle the flight pay I owe all of you."

  "For Heaven's sake, Marcus, the whole astronautics industry is in debt to the banks. I swear I never could understand the economics behind starflight."

  He closed his eyes, a wry smile quirking his lips. "We very nearly solved human economics for good, didn't we?"

  "Yeah. Very nearly."

  "The wormhole would have let me change the past. Their technology was going to change the future. We could have rebuilt our entire history."

  "I don't think that's a very good idea. What about the grandfather paradox for a start? How come you didn't warn us about Jorge as soon as you emerged from the wormhole?"

  "Scared, I guess. I don't know nearly enough about quantum temporal displacement theory to start risking paradoxes. I'm not even sure I'm the Marcus Calvert that brought this particular Lady Macbeth to the xenoc wreck. Suppose you really can't travel between times, only parallel realities? That would mean I didn't escape into the past, I just shifted sideways."

  "You look and sound pretty familiar to me."

  "So do you. But is my crew still stuck back at their version of the wreck waiting for me to deal with Jorge?"

  "Stop it," she said softly. "You're Marcus Calvert, and you're back where you belong, flying Lady Mac."

  "Yeah, sure."

  "The xenocs wouldn't have built the wormhole unless they were sure it would help them get home, their true home. They were smart people."

  "And no mistake."

  "I wonder where they did come from?"

  "We'll never know, now." Marcus lifted his head, some of the old humour emerging through his melancholia. "But I hope they got back safe."

  Itsy Bitsy Spider

  James Patrick Kelly

  James Patrick Kelly made his first sale in 1975, and since has gone on to become one of the most respected and popular writers to enter the field in the last twenty years. Although Kelly has had some success with novels, especially the recent Wildlife, he has had more impact to date as a writer of short fiction, with stories such as "Solstice," "The Prisoner of Chillon," "Glass Cloud," "Mr. Boy," "Pogrom," and "Home Front," and is often ranked among the best short story writers in the business. His acclaimed story "Think Like a Dinosaur" won him a Hugo Award in 1996. Kelly's first solo novel, the mostly ignored Planet of Whispers, came out in 1984.

  It was followed by Freedom Beach, a novel written in collaboration with John Kessel, and then by another solo novel, Look into the Sun. His most recent book is a collection, Think Like a Dinosaur, and he is currently at work on another novel. A collaboration between Kelly and Kessel appeared in our Second Annual Collection; and solo Kelly stories have appeared in our Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. Born in Minneola, New York, Kelly now lives with his family in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He has a Web site at http://www.nh.ultranet.com/~jimkelly.

  Here he takes us to an ostensibly tranquil future society where nothing is quite what it seems-and some of the games they play, even children's games, can get very rough indeed ...

  When I found out that my father was still alive after all these years and living at Strawberry Fields, I thought he'd gotten just what he deserved. Retroburbs are where the old, scared people go to hide. I'd always pictured the people in them as deranged losers. Visiting some fantasy world like the Disneys or Carlucci's Carthage is one thing, moving to one is another. Sure, 2038 is messy, but it's a hell of a lot better than nineteen-sixty-whatever.

  Now that I'd arrived at 144 Bluejay Way, I realized that the place was worse than I had imagined. Strawberry Fields was pretending to be some long-lost suburb of the late twentieth century, except that it had the sterile monotony of cheap VR. It was clean, all right, and neat, but it was everywhere the same. And the scale was wrong. The lots were squeezed together and all the houses had shrunk-like the dreams of their owners. They were about the size of a one-car garage, modular units tarted up at the factory to look like ranches, with old double-hung storm windows and hardened siding of harvest gold, barn red, forest green. Of course, there were no real garages; faux Mustangs and VW buses cruised the quiet streets. Their carbrains were listening for a summons from Barbara Chesley next door at 142, or the Goitzes across the street, who might be headed to Penny Lanes to bowl a few frames, or the hospital to die.

  There was a beach chair with blue nylon webbing on the front stoop of 144 Bluejay Way. A brick walk led to it, dividing two patches of carpet moss, green as a dream. There were names and addresses printed in huge lightstick letters on all the doors in the neighborhood; no doubt many Strawberry Fielders were easily confused. The owner of this one was Peter Fancy. He had been born Peter Fanelli, but had legally taken his stage name not long after his first success as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part I. I was a Fancy too; the name was one of the few things of my father's I had kept.

  I stopped at the door and let it look me over. "You're Jen," it s
aid.

  "Yes." I waited in vain for it to open or to say something else. "I'd like to see Mr. Fancy, please." The old man's house had worse manners than he did. "He knows I'm coming," I said. "I sent him several messages." Which he had never answered, but I didn't mention that.

  "Just a minute," said the door. "She'll be right with you."

  She? The idea that he might be with another woman now hadn't occurred to me. I'd lost track of my father a long time ago-on purpose. The last time we'd actually visited overnight was when I was twenty. Mom gave me a ticket to Port Gemini, where he was doing the Shakespeare in Space program. The orbital was great, but staying with him was like being under water. I think I must have held my breath for the entire week. After that, there were a few, sporadic calls, a couple of awkward dinners-all at his instigation. Then twenty-three years of nothing.

  I never hated him, exactly. When he left, I just decided to show solidarity with Mom and be done with him. If acting was more important than his family, then to hell with Peter Fancy. Mom was horrified when I told her how I felt. She cried and claimed the divorce was as much her fault as his. It was too much for me to handle-, I was only eleven years old when they separated. I needed to be on someone's side and so I had chosen her. She never did stop trying to talk me into finding him again, even though after a while it only made me mad at her. For the past few years, she'd been warning me that I'd developed a warped view of men.

  But she was a smart woman, my mom. Sure, she'd had troubles, but she'd founded three companies, was a millionaire by twenty-five. I missed her.

  A lock clicked and the door opened. Standing in the dim interior was a little girl in a gold-and-white checked dress. Her dark, curly hair was tied in a ribbon. She was wearing white ankle socks and black Mary Jane shoes that were so shiny they had to be plastic. There was a Band-Aid on her left knee.