The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Mother looked suitably surprised. "What kind of music?" she countered.

  "Anything," Wendy said. The music she was hearing in her head was soft and fluty music, which she heard as if from a vast distance, and which somehow seemed to be the oldest music in the world, but she didn't particularly want it duplicated and brought into the room. She just wanted something to fill the cracks of silence which broke up the muffled sound of arguing.

  Mother called up something much more liquid, much more upbeat, much more modern. Wendy could see that Mother wanted to speak to her, wanted to deluge her with reassurances, but couldn't bear to make any promises she wouldn't be able to keep. In the end, Mother contented herself with hugging Wendy to her bosom, as fiercely and as tenderly as she could.

  When the door opened it flew back with a bang. Father came in first.

  "It's all right," he said, quickly. "They're not going to take her away. They'll quarantine the house instead."

  Wendy felt the tension in Mother's arms. Father could work entirely from home much more easily than Mother, but there was no way Mother was going to start protesting on those grounds. While quarantine wasn't exactly all right it was better than she could have expected.

  "It's not generosity, I'm afraid," said Tom Cartwright. "It's necessity. The epidemic is spreading too quickly. We don't have the facilities to take tens of thousands of children into state care. Even the quarantine will probably be a short-term measure-to be perfectly frank, it's a panic measure. The simple truth is that the disease can't be contained no matter what we do."

  "How could you let this happen?" Mother said, in a low tone bristling with hostility. "How could you let it get this far out of control? With all modern technology at your disposal you surely should be able to put the brake on a simple virus."

  "It's not so simple," Cartwright said, apologetically. "If it really had been a freak of nature-some stray strand of DNA which found a new ecological niche-we'd probably have been able to contain it easily. We don't believe that any more."

  "It was designed," Father said, with the airy confidence of the well-informed though even Wendy knew that this particular item of wisdom must have been news to him five minutes ago. "Somebody cooked this thing up in a lab and let it loose deliberately. It was all planned, in the name of liberation ... in the name of chaos, if you ask me."

  Somebody did this to me! Wendy thought. Somebody actually set out to take away the limits, to turn the randomizing factor into ... into what, exactly?

  While Wendy's mind was boggling, Mother was saying: "Who? How? Why?"

  "You know how some people are," Cartwright said, with a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders. "Can't see an apple-cart without wanting to upset it. You'd think the chance to live for a thousand years would confer a measure of maturity even on the meanest intellect, but it hasn't worked out that way. Maybe someday we'll get past all that, but in the meantime ..."

  Maybe someday, Wendy thought, all the things left over from the infancy of the world will go. All the crazinesses, all the disagreements, all the diehard habits. She hadn't known that she was capable of being quite so sharp, but she felt perversely proud of the fact that she didn't have to spell out-even to herself, in the brand new arena of her private thoughts-the fact that one of those symptoms of craziness, one of the focal points of those disagreements, and the most diehard of all those habits, was keeping children in a world where they no longer had any biological function-or, rather, keeping the ghosts of children, who weren't really children at all because they were always children.

  "They call it liberation," Father was saying, "but it really is a disease, a terrible affliction. It's the destruction of innocence. It's a kind of mass murder " He was obviously pleased with his own eloquence, and with the righteousness of his wrath. He came over to the bed and plucked Wendy out of Mother's arms. "It's all right, Beauty," he said. "We're all in this together. We'll face it together. You're absolutely right. You're still our little girl. You're still Wendy. Nothing terrible is going to happen."

  It was far better, in a way, than what she'd imagined-or had been too scared to imagine. There was a kind of relief in not having to pretend any more, in not having to keep the secret. That boundary had been crossed, and now there was no choice but to go forward.

  Why didn't I tell them before? Wendy wondered. Why didn't I just tell them, and trust them to see that everything would be all right? But even as she thought it, even as she clutched at the straw, just as Mother and Father were clutching, she realized how hollow the thought was, and how meaningless Father's reassurances were. It was all just sentiment, and habit, and pretense. Everything couldn't and wouldn't be "all right," and never would be again, unless ... Turning to Tom Cartwright, warily and uneasily, she said: "Will I be an adult now? Will I live for a thousand years, and have my own house, my own job, my own ... ?"

  She trailed off as she saw the expression in his eyes, realizing that she was still a little girl, and that there were a thousand questions adults couldn't and didn't want to hear, let alone try to answer.

  It was late at night before Mother and Father got themselves into the right frame of mind for the kind of serious talk that the situation warranted, and by that time Wendy knew perfectly well that the honest answer to almost all the questions she wanted to ask was: "Nobody knows."

  She asked the questions anyway. Mother and Father varied their answers in the hope of appearing a little wiser than they were, but it all came down to the same thing in the end. It all came down to desperate pretense.

  "We have to take it as it comes," Father told her. "It's an unprecedented situation. The government has to respond to the changes on a day-by-day basis. We can't tell how it will all turn out. It's a mess, but the world has been in a mess before-in fact, it's hardly ever been out of a mess for more than a few years at a time. We'll cope as best we can. Everybody will cope as best they can. With luck, it might not come to violence-to war, to slaughter, to ecocatastrophe. We're entitled to hope that we really are past all that now, that we really are capable of handling things sensibly this time."

  "Yes," Wendy said, conscientiously keeping as much of the irony out of her voice as she could. "I understand. Maybe we won't just be sent back to the factories to be scrapped ... and maybe if they find a cure, they'll ask us whether we want to be cured before they use it." With luck, she added, silently, maybe we can all be adult about the situation.

  They both looked at her uneasily, not sure how to react. From now on, they would no longer be able to grin and shake their heads at the wondrous inventiveness of the randomizing factor in her programming. From now on, they would actually have to try to figure out what she meant, and what unspoken thoughts might lie behind the calculated wit and hypocrisy of her every statement. She had every sympathy for them; she had only recently learned for herself what a difficult, frustrating and thankless task that could be.

  This happened to their ancestors once, she thought. But not as quickly. Their ancestors didn't have the kind of head-start you can get by being thirteen for thirty years. It must have been hard, to be a thinking ape among unthinkers. Hard, but ... well, they didn't ever want to give it up, did they?

  "Whatever happens, Beauty," Father said, "we love you. Whatever happens, you're our little girl. When you're grown up, we'll still love you the way we always have. We always will."

  He actually believes it, Wendy thought. He actually believes that the world can still be the same, in spite of everything. He can't let go of the hope that even though everything's changing, it will all be the same underneath. But it won't. Even if there isn't a resource crisis-after all, grown-up children can't eat much more than un-grown-up ones-the world can never be the same. This is the time in which the adults of the world have to get used to the fact that there can't be any more families, because from now on children will have to be rare and precious and strange. This is the time when the old people will have to recognize that the day of their silly stopgap solutions to imaginary pr
oblems is over. This is the time when we all have to grow up. If the old people can't do that by themselves, then the new generation will simply have to show them the way.

  "I love you too," she answered, earnestly. She left it at that. There wasn't any point in adding: "I always have," or "I can mean it now," or any of the other things which would have underlined rather than assuaged the doubts they must be feeling.

  "And we'll be all right," Mother said. "As long as we love one another, and as long as we face this thing together, we'll be all right."

  What a wonderful thing true innocence is, Wendy thought, rejoicing in her ability to think such a thing freely, without shame or reservation. I wonder if I'd be able to cultivate it, if I ever wanted to.

  That night, bedtime was abolished. She was allowed to stay up as late as she wanted to. When she finally did go to bed she was so exhausted that she quickly drifted off into a deep and peaceful sleep-but she didn't remain there indefinitely. Eventually, she began to dream.

  In her dream Wendy was living wild in a magical wood where it never rained. She lived on sweet berries of many colors. There were other girls living wild in the dream-wood but they all avoided one another. They had lived there for a long time but now the others had come: the shadow-men with horns on their brows and shaggy legs who played strange music, which was the breath of souls.

  Wendy hid from the shadow-men, but the fearful fluttering of her heart gave her away, and one of the shadow-men found her. He stared down at her with huge baleful eyes, wiping spittle from his pipes onto his fleecy rump. "Who are you?" she asked, trying to keep the tremor of fear out of her voice. "I'm the devil," he said. "There's no such thing," she informed him, sourly.

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. "So I'm the Great God Pan," he said. "What difference does it make? And how come you're so smart all of a sudden?"

  "I'm not thirteen anymore," she told him, proudly. "I've been thirteen for thirty years, but now I'm growing up. The whole world's growing up-for the first and last time."

  "Not me," said the Great God Pan. "I'm a million years old and I'll never grow up. Let's get on with it, shall we? I'll count to ninety-nine. You start running."

  Dream-Wendy scrambled to her feet, and ran away. She ran and she ran and she ran, without any hope of escape. Behind her, the music of the reed-pipes kept getting louder and louder, and she knew that whatever happened, her world would never fall silent.

  When Wendy woke up, she found that the nightmare hadn't really ended. The meaningful part of it was still going on. But things weren't as bad as all that, even though she couldn't bring herself to pretend that it was all just a dream which might go away.

  She knew that she had to take life one day at a time, and look after her parents as best she could. She knew that she had to try to ease the pain of the passing of their way of life, to which they had clung a little too hard and a little too long. She knew that she had to hope, and to trust, that a cunning combination of intelligence and love would be enough to see her and the rest of the world through-at least until the next catastrophe came along.

  She wasn't absolutely sure that she could do it, but she was determined to give it a bloody good try.

  And whatever happens in the end, she thought, to live will be an awfully big adventure.

  Crossing Chao Meng Fu

  G. David Nordley

  The determination to stick to a task until you complete it, to push through no matter what the odds or how overwhelming the problems you face, can be a positive quality-but, as the thriller that follows amply demonstrates, on the airless, sun-blasted surface of Mercury, with death only inches away at any moment, sometimes it may not be such a good idea...

  G. David Nordley is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and physicist who has become a frequent contributor to Analog in the last couple of years as well as selling stories to Asimov's Science Fiction, Tomorrow, and elsewhere. He won Analog's Analytical Laboratory readers poll in 1992 for his story "Poles Apart" and also for his well-known story "Into the Miranda Rift," which appeared in our Eleventh Annual Collection,- the story that follows is a "prequel" to it. He lives in Sunnyvale, California.

  Begin a ghostly plain

  Dim white in pale starlight.

  Flat as far as you can see

  To where a distant black ridge

  Divides reality.

  Above the stars shine

  Below the ground crunches;

  Hillary, Byrd, Peary and Amundsen,

  Are your guides. It is beautiful.

  But you cannot stop long;

  The plain is life itself;

  Move on now, trod onward,

  Or stand and freeze, they say.

  -W. B.

  I am in the middle of a line of people walking determinedly across the most everything-forsaken boring waste in the Solar System. I am so sore and tired k I could scream-if there were a warm bed around somewhere, I'd crawl in it to shudder. My attitude has hit rock bottom, but it is time to file my report and if I want anything good out of this pain, I'd best sound positive:

  "I am Woicjech Bubka, college teacher, occasional poet and now your.. " I take a breath of sterile suit air, "guide to the natural universe, courtesy of the Solar System Astrographic Society and its many sponsors and members. Welcome to my personal journey through exotic, dangerous, and unusual places of the Solar System." I take another deep breath-got to keep up with everyone else. "Come with me while there are still such places to explore-for as we approach the twenty-third century, this frontier, too, is receding."

  I try to gain a little ground to stop briefly and pan my helmet cam over the dirty ice field. Despite the exertion, the change of pace lifts my spirits a bit. But not even a ten-to-one vertical exaggeration will make this landscape interesting. Come on, Bubka. You're a poet? Find meaning.

  "These are not robot explorations to be experienced in a video display, but personal ones. I seek authentic, not virtual, reality. I seek the go there, see there, and be there experience of the human explorer, not sterile pixels." Breathe deep. "There is nothing between me and the crunch of crampon spikes on this frozen mud, the strike of an axe into virgin scarps, the strain of muscles, the hiss of sliding ropes, and the sight of wonders. Such is the dream and the experience I seek to share with you here, today, on the frozen wastes of Chao Meng Fu crater on Mercury." Said strain of muscles gets my attention as I start walking again, and I groan involuntarily. I am tired from the almost week of walking under a pack that brought my weight close to Earth normal-when what is normal for me is Mars. I wiggle my toes as hard as I can-despite vacuum insulation, thermistor environmental control and loose, fluffy socks, I think my feet are beginning to get cold.

  "Come on, mate. Another hour will get us there." That is Ed Blake, a gentleman adventurer from New Zealand with Antarctic experience. Ed is my tentmate, lanky, mostly bald and prematurely gray, confident, competent, and reserved-unless he gets that kind of twinkle in his eye. Then beware a terrible pun. He's cheerful enough to me, but I sense a certain condescension.

  Understandable, I think. What the frozen hell am I doing here?

  I had been getting bored at Jovis Tholis University. Poetry, these days, includes video as well as text-something which would have delighted Will Shakespeare, I assure you-and has blended with drama so much that we distinguish the two by picking nits over length and symbolic content. But even in its media-inflated majesty, a dozen years of going over the same basic stuff while fighting battles with New Reformation censors and left-wing nihilists-neither of whom take kindly to the display of material contrary to their philosophies-has me well on my way to burnout.

  JTU is in a dome over an ostensibly extinct volcano on Tharsis, roughly halfway to Olympus Mons from the tether tube terminal on Ascraeus. The location worked, and it became the biggest university on Mars-of which I was an increasingly small and out-of-step part.

  As the politics of being an important academic became increasingly burdensome, my dreams of "out the
re" grew. I might teach at Saturn High Station with its magnificent view of the rings. Or I could compose random meter verse at Hyperion institute, the lonely retreat of mathematical philosophers set on a detached mountain peak that careens about Saturn as metaphor of an uncertain future. Or I could volunteer to ride a comet and watch robots turn it into Martian air while writing my epics in the freedom of isolation as the comet fell for a decade into the inner Solar System. Or, and this was my most favorite, I might become a journalist in the old sense on the first expedition to Pluto and Charon.

  Thus did I dream. But so, of course, dream millions of orbers. Only a chosen few can go anywhere the first time or do anything the first time. I dabbled at trail writing-, journals of hikes and visits to parts of the vanishing "Red" Mars, but got little notice beyond a reasonably nice "been there, done that" rejection from the Solar System Astrographic Society. I needed an entrée, a contact, an idea, something to lift me out of the background.

  Then, last year (Martian year, everyone; almost two standard years ago), Miranda Lotati, the daughter of the man in charge of Solar System Astrographic Society's expeditions division, walked into my literature class at Jovis Tholis University, a junior transfer from Stanford on Earth. She looked to be a hard, vigorous, and exciting person but could barely choke two words out in succession-about as contrary to stereotype as one could be and still have breasts.

  She was not really beautiful-too muscular, too thin in the face, too boyish a figure, but I saw the possibilities in that. Less competition, and perhaps a complement to my esthetic, well, softness, I told myself. I saw the romance of an attraction of opposites who themselves were opposites of conventionality, and I was looking for some romance somewhere-the women of my normal circles were hopeless and helpless in anything but words, and even seemed to take pride in that. I saw in her an invitation to beyond and away from here. If I played it right-and I resolved to do so.