The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  There was nothing left of the city to defend, and almost nobody able to defend it. Even those who were willing were starved too weak to hold a weapon.

  All through February, all through March, the shelling continued, despite the lack of return fire from the city. They must have known that the resistance was over. Perhaps, Johann said, they had forgotten that there was a city here at all, they were shelling the city now for no other reason than that it had become a habit. Perhaps they were shelling us as a punishment for having dared to defy them.

  Through April, the shelling continued. There was no food, no heat, no clean water, no medicine to treat the wounded.

  When Johann died, it took me four hours to remove the rubble from his body, pulling stones away as birds failing around me demolished a building standing a block to the east, one two blocks north. I was surprised at how light he was, little more than a feather pillow. There was no place to bury him; the graveyards were all full. I placed him back where he had lain, crossed his hands, and left him buried in the rubble of the basement where we had spent our lives entwined.

  I moved to a new shelter, a tunnel cut out of the solid rock below the Monchsberg, an artificial cavern where a hundred families huddled in the dark, waiting for an end to existence. It had once been a parking garage. The moisture from three hundred lungs condensed on the stone ceiling and dripped down on us.

  At last, at the end of April, the shelling stopped. For a day there was quiet, and then the victorious army came in. There were no alleys to baffle their tanks now. They came dressed in plastic armor, faceless soldiers with railguns and omniblasters thrown casually across their backs; they came flying the awful standard of the Pan-Slavic Army, the two-headed dragon on a field of blue crosses. One of them must have been Dragan Vukadinovid, Dragan the Cleanser, the Scorpion of Bratislava, but in their armor I could not know which one. With them were the diplomats, explaining to all who would listen that peace had been negotiated, the war was over, and our part of it was that we would agree to leave our city and move into camps to be resettled elsewhere.

  Would the victors write the history, I wondered? What would they say, to justify their deeds? Or would they, too, be left behind by history, a minor faction in a minor event forgotten against the drama of a destiny working itself out far away?

  It was a living tide of ragged humans that met them, dragging the crippled and wounded on improvised sledges. I found it hard to believe that there could be so many left. Nobody noticed a dirty twelve-year-old girl, small for her age, slip away. Or if they did notice, where could she go?

  The molecular still was still running. The darkness, the smell of it, hidden beneath a ruined, deserted Salzburg, was a comfort to me. It alone had been steadfast. In the end, the humans who tended it had turned out to be too fragile, but it had run on, alone in the dark, producing explosives that nobody would ever use, filling the caverns and the dungeons beneath a castle that had once been the proud symbol of a proud city. Filling it by the ton, by the thousands of tons, perhaps even tens of thousands of tons.

  I brought with me an alarm clock, and a battery, and I sat for a long time in the dark, remembering the city.

  And in the darkness, I could not bring myself to become the angel of destruction, to call down the cleansing fire I had so dreamed of seeing brought upon my enemies. In order to survive, you must become tough, Johann had once told me; you must become hard. But I could not become hard enough. I could not become like them.

  And so I destroyed the molecular still, and fed the pieces into the Salzach. For all its beauty and power, it was fragile, and when I had done, there was nothing left by which someone could reconstruct it, or even understand what it had been. I left the alarm clock and the battery, and ten thousand tons of explosives, behind me in the catacombs. Perhaps they are there still.

  It was, I am told, the most beautiful, the most civilized, city in the world. The many people who told me that are all dead now, and I remember it only through the eyes of a child, looking up from below and understanding little.

  Nothing of that little girl remains. Like my civilization, I have remade myself anew. I live in a world of peace, a world of mathematics and sky-cities, the opening of the new renaissance. But, like the first renaissance, this one was birthed in fire and war.

  I will never tell this to anybody. To people who were not there, the story is only words, and they could never understand. And to those who were there, we who lived through the long siege of Salzburg and somehow came out alive, there is no need to speak.

  In a very long lifetime, we could never forget.

  Nevermore

  Ian R. Macleod

  British writer Ian R. Macleod has been one of the hottest new writers of the nineties to date, and, as the decade progresses, his work continues to grow in power and deepen in maturity. Macleod has published a slew of strong stories in the first years of the nineties in Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, among other markets. Several of these stories made the cut for one or another of the various "Best of the Year" anthologies; in 1990, in fact, he appeared in three different Best of the Year anthologies with three different stories, certainly a rare distinction. His stories have appeared in our Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh, and Thirteenth Annual Collections. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997, followed by a major collection of his short work, Voyages by Starlight.

  Macleod lives with his wife and young daughter in the West Midlands of England.

  Here, in a stylish and compelling look at a decadent modern world that ought to be Utopia, he proves once again that Art-like Passion-is in the eye of the beholder.

  Now that he couldn't afford to buy enough reality, Gustav had no option but to paint what he saw in his dreams. With no sketchpad to bring back, no palette or cursor, his head rolling up from the pillow and his mouth and his jaw aching from the booze he'd drunk the evening before-which was the cheapest means he'd yet found of getting to sleep-he was left with just that one chance, and a few trailing wisps of something that might once have been beautiful before he had to face the void of the day.

  It hadn't started like this, but he could see by now that this was how it had probably ended. Representational art had had its heyday, and for a while he'd been feted like the bright new talent he'd once been sure he was. And big lumpy actuality that you could smell and taste and get under your fingernails would probably come back into style again-long after it had ceased to matter to him.

  So that was it. Load upon load of self-pity falling down upon him this morning from the damp-stained ceiling. What had he been dreaming? Something-surely something. Otherwise, being here and being Gustav wouldn't come as this big a jolt. He should've got more used to it than this by now ... Gustav scratched himself, and discovered that he also had an erection, which was another sign hadn't he read once, somewhere?-that you'd been dreaming dreams of the old fashioned kind, unsimulated, unaided. A sign, anyway, of a kind of biological optimism. The hope that there might just be a hope.

  Arthritic, cro-magnon, he wandered out from his bed. Knobbled legs, knobbled veins, knobbled toes. He still missed the habit of fiddling with the controls of his window in the pockmarked far wall, changing the perspectives and the light in the dim hope that he might stumble across something better. The sun and the moon were blazing down over Paris from their respective quadrants, pouring like mercury through the nanosmog. He pressed his hand to the glass, feeling the watery wheeze of the crack that now snaked across it. Five stories up in these scrawny empty tenements, and a long, long way down. He laid his forehead against its coolness as the sour thought that he might try to paint this scene speeded through him. He'd finished at least twenty paintings of foreat Paris; all reality engines and cabled ruins in gray, black, and white. Probably done, old Vincent had loved his cadmiums and chromes! And never sold one single fucking painting in his entire life.

  "What-what I told you was true," Elano
re said, stumbling slightly over these little words, sounding almost un-Elanore-like for a moment; nearly uneasy. "I mean, about Marcel in Venice and Francine across the sky. And, yes, we did talk about a reunion. But you know how these things are. Time's precious, and, at the end of the day it's been so long that these things really do take a lot of nerve. So it didn't come off. It was just a few promises that no one really imagined they'd keep. But I thought-well, I thought that it would be nice to see you anyway. At least one more time."

  "So all of this is just for me. Jesus, Elanore, I knew you were rich, but .."

  "Don't be like that, Gustav. I'm not trying to impress you or depress you or whatever. It was just the way it came out."

  He poured more of the wine, wondering as he did so exactly what trick it was that allowed them to share it.

  "So, you're still painting?"

  "Yep."

  "I haven't seen much of your work about."

  "I do it for private clients," Gustav said. "Mostly."

  He glared at Elanore, daring her to challenge his statement. Of course, if he really was painting and selling, he'd have some credit. And if he had credit, he wouldn't be living in that dreadful tenement she'd tracked him down to. He'd have paid for all the necessary treatments to stop himself becoming the frail old man he so nearly was. I can help, you know, Gustav could hear Elanore saying because he'd heard her say it so many times before. I don't need all this wealth. So let me give you just a little help. Give me that chance ... But what she actually said was even worse.

  "Are you recording yourself, Gus?" Elanore asked. "Do you have a librarian?"

  Now, he thought, now is the time to walk out. Pull this whole thing down and go back into the street-the foreal street. And forget.

  "Did you know," he said instead, "that the word reality once actually meant foreal-not the projections and the simulations, but proper actuality. But then along came virtual reality, and of course, when the next generation of products was developed, the illusion was so much better that you could walk right into it instead of having to put on goggles and a suit. So they had to think of an improved phrase, a super-word for the purposes of marketing. And someone must have said, Why don't we just call it reality?"

  "You don't have to be hurtful, Gus. There's no rule written down that says we can't get on."

  "I thought that that was exactly the problem. It's in my head, and it was probably there in yours before you died. Now it's .. ." He'd have said more. But he was suddenly, stupidly, near to tears.

  "What exactly are you doing these days, Gus?" she asked as he cleared his throat and pretended it was the wine that he'd choked on. "What are you painting at the moment?"

  "I'm working on a series," he was surprised to hear himself saying. "It's a sort of a journey-piece. A sequence of paintings which begin here in Paris and then .. ." He swallowed. ".. . Bright, dark colors .. ." A nerve began to leap beside his eye. Something seemed to touch him, but was too faint to be heard or felt or seen.

  "Sounds good, Gus," Elanore said, leaning toward him across the table. And Elanore smelled of Elanore, the way she always did. Her pale skin was freckled from the sunlight of whatever warm and virtual place she was living. Across her cheeks and her upper lip, threaded gold, lay the down that he'd brushed so many times with the tips of his fingers. "I can tell from that look in your eyes that you're into a really good phase .. ."

  After that, things went better. They shared a second bottle of vin ordinaire. They made a little mountain of the butts of her Disc Bleu in the ashtray. This ghost-she really was like Elanore. Gustav didn't even object to her taking his hand across the table. There was a kind of abandon in all of this-new ideas mixed with old memories. And he understood more clearly now what van Gogh had meant about this cafe being a place where you could ruin yourself, or go mad, or commit a crime.

  The few other diners faded. The virtual waiters, their aprons a single assured gray-white stroke of the palette knife, started to tip the chairs against the tables. The aromas of the Left Bank's ever-unreliable sewers began to override those of cigarettes and people and horse dung and wine. At least, Gustav thought, that was still foreal ... "I suppose quite a lot of the others have died by now," Gustav said. "All that facile gang you seem to so fondly remember."

  "People still change, you know. Just because we've passed on, doesn't mean we can't change."

  By now, he was in a mellow enough mood just to nod at that. And how have you changed, Elanore? he wondered. After so long, what flicker of the electrons made you decide to come to me now?

  "You're obviously doing well."

  "I'm .. ." She nodded, as if the idea surprised her. "I mean, I didn't expect-"

  "-And you look-"

  "-And you, Gus, what I said about you being-"

  "-That project of mine-"

  "-I know, I-"

  They stopped and gazed at each other. Then they both smiled, and the moment seemed to bold, warm and frozen, as if from a scene within a painting. It was almost ... "Well .. ." Elanore broke the illusion first as she began to fumble in the small sequined purse she bad on her lap. Eventually, she produced a handkerchief and blew delicately on her nose. Gustav tried not to grind his teeth-although this was exactly the kind of affectation he detested about ghosts. He guessed, anyway, from the changed look on her face, that she knew what he was thinking. "I suppose that's it, then, isn't it, Gus? We've met-we've spent the evening together without arguing. Almost like old times."

  "Nothing will ever be like old times."

  "No.. ." Her eyes glinted, and be thought for a moment that she was going to become angry-goaded at last into something like the Elanore of old. But she just smiled. "Nothing ever will be like old times. That's the problem, isn't it? Nothing ever was, or ever will be .. ."

  Elanore clipped her purse shut again. Elanore stood up. Gustav saw her hesitate as she considered bending down to kiss him farewell, then decide that he would just regard that as another affront, another slap in the face.

  Elanore turned and walked away from Gustav, fading into the chiaroseuro swirls of lamplight and gray.

  Elanore, as if Gustav needed reminding, had been alive when he'd first met her. In fact, he'd never known anyone who was more so. Of course, the age difference between them was always huge-she'd already been past a hundred by then, and he was barely forty-but they'd agreed on that first day that they met, and on many days after, that there was a corner in time around which the old eventually turned to rejoin the young.

  In another age, and although she always laughingly denied it, Gustav always suspected that Elanore would have bad her sagging breasts implanted with silicone, the wrinkles stretched back from her face, her heart replaced by a throbbing steel simulacrum. But she was lucky enough to exist at a time when effective anti-aging treatments were finally available. As a post-centenarian, wise and rich and moderately, pleasantly, famous, Elanore was probably more fresh and beautiful than she'd been at any other era in her life. Gustav had met her at a party beside a Russian lake-guests wandering amid dunes of snow. Foreal had been a fashionable option then; although for Gustav, the grounds of this pillared ice-crystalled palace that Catherine the Great's Scottish favorite Charles Cameron had built seemed far too gorgeous to be entirely true. But it was true foreal, actual, concrete, genuine, unvirtual-and such knowledge was what had driven him then. That, and the huge impossibility of ever really managing to convey any of it as a painter. That, and the absolute certainty that he would try.

  Elanore had wandered up to him from the forest dusk dressed in seal furs. The shock of her beauty had been like all the rubbish he'd heard other artists talk about and thus so detested. And he'd been a stammering wreck, but somehow that hadn't mattered. There had been-and here again the words became stupid, meaningless-a dazed physicality between them from that first moment that was so intense it was spiritual.

  Elanore told Gustav that she'd seen and admired the series of triptychs he'd just finished working on. They were p
ainted directly onto slabs of wood, and depicted totemistic figures in dense blocks of color. The critics had generally dammed them with faint praise-had talked of Cubism and Mondrian-and were somehow unable to recognize Gustav's obvious and grateful debt to Gauguin's Tahitian paintings. But Elanore had seen and understood those bright muddy colors. And, yes, she'd dabbled a little in painting herself-just enough to know that truly creative acts were probably beyond her ... Elanore wore her red hair short in those days. And there were freckles, then as always, scattered across the bridge of her nose. She showed the tips of her teeth when she smiled, and he was conscious of her lips and her tongue. He could smell, faint within the clouds of breath that entwined them, her womanly scent.

  A small black cat threaded its way between them as they talked, then, barely breaking the crust of the snow, leaped up onto a bough of the nearest pine and crouched there, watching them with emerald eyes.

  "That's Metzengerstein," Elanore said, her own even greener eyes flickering across Gustav's face, but never ceasing to regard him. "He's my librarian."

  When they made love later on in the agate pavilion's frozen glow, and as the smoke of their breath and their sweat clouded the winter twilight, all the disparate elements of Gustav's world finally seemed to join. He carved Elanore's breasts with his fingers and tongue, and painted her with her juices, and plunged into her sweet depths, and came, finally, finally, and quite deliciously, as her fingers slid around and he in turn was parted and entered by her.

  Swimming back up from that, soaked with Elanore, exhausted, but his cock amazingly still half-stiff and rising, Gustav became conscious of the black cat that all this time had been threading its way between them. Its tail now curled against his thigh, corrugating his scrotum. Its claws gently kneaded his belly.

  Elanore had laughed and picked Metzengerstein up, purring herself as she laid the creature between her breasts.