The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

True, removing Joanne's hotwire jack was tantamount to blinding her. She was right to be frightened of the operation, to shy away from it for as long as she could. But the fact remained, people go blind all the time. They make do. They adapt. They go on living. What had made Joanne so different?

  I'd just put the phone away when Laura and Peter came out the front door and walked toward me. I got out of the car.

  "We're going up the coast a ways." She'd changed her clothes again; a cotton frock, dark blue like the sky. Her feet were bare and her hair weaved freely around her freckled shoulders like a wreath of thick black smoke. "You want to come?"

  They set off up the road past the power station. I followed in my own vehicle. There were no streetlights. They knew the route well. It was hard to keep up with them.

  A fifteen-minute drive brought us to the outskirts of the town. There was a car park here, and among the dunes two wooden buildings. Over the largest a sign in red and yellow neon blinked: AMUSEMENTS. I stopped the car beside theirs and got out. There was no sound but the sea.

  Laura fetched a blanket out of the car and the three of us walked down the slipway to the beach.

  "God, it's freezing," Peter mumbled, doing up his tweed jacket. I tugged up the zipper on my fleece. Laura's only concession to the evening was a scarf thrown lazily around her shoulders. Maybe she liked the cold; maybe she wanted to show herself off. She took the corners of the blanket in her hands and wrapped her arms around our shoulders, shrouding us from the wind. The gesture was intimate, embracing, as though we three were old friends. We walked in silence for a while. The tide was coming in. The sand grew silvery in patches, and purple and turquoise where it refracted the moonlight.

  Peter left us to search for sea shells. We wandered the wave-line a little way, watching him, then Laura turned from the sea, pressing herself against me as she steered me up the beach. I felt her heat, and smelled her. "Are you cold?"

  I was trembling. She gathered the folds of the blanket round us. I put my arm around her waist.

  I don't know how long we stood like that. A few seconds, a minute. She'd silenced me with her touch and I was glad, I closed my eyes, I didn't care she said, "Joanne came here last October, a week after we closed for the winter."

  I came awake.

  "She knew about the hotwire feed. That's why she came out here. She wanted to use it. She said she was an army pilot. She told us she'd deserted, that she needed to wipe out her records."

  "That was why she needed hotwire access? To wipe out a few files?"

  "I believed her. Was that stupid of me?"

  "No." I thought about it. "You could use a hotwire for that. A bit like a mallet cracking a nut, though-"

  "Besides," she finished for me, "she was lying."

  I waited, my hand frozen around her waist. She said nothing. Then, as I began to pull away, she pressed her hand to my hand, keeping it against her hip. "My husband's an artist," she said, as if this were some sort of explanation. "I know."

  "Have you seen his pictures?"

  "No."

  "Then what do you know?" Her question was sharp, but not unkind. I replied, "Hardly anything about Peter. We know much more about you."

  "Then you'll know why I believed her," she said softly, bitterly. I nodded. It looked as though Joanne Rynard had read the same file I had, and made her approach accordingly. What more seductive revenge was there to offer Laura, still embittered by her brother's death, than the chance to help a deserter? "Did Peter believe all this about her records?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "It wasn't what he wanted to hear."

  "So she had a story for him, too?"

  She dropped her hand from my shoulder. I pushed harder: "what did he want to hear?"

  "I don't know."

  "You didn't talk about it?"

  "He's guarded about his work."

  "His work? You mean his painting?"

  There was a resentful edge to Laura's voice now: "Peter told me some of what Joanne told I. He thought what she was doing was romantic. She was hungry for heaven, he said."

  "You mean she wanted to die."

  "Not exactly. To enter the virtual world, she said. To live there. To leave her body behind."

  Her news staggered me. I tried hard to conceal my confusion: "Did you know what that would involve?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Did you know she would die?"

  "Not until the last night."

  "Then what did you do?"

  "Nothing."

  “Why?"

  "They made me promise. Joanne and Peter."

  "Afterward?"

  "I phoned the police."

  Not the ambulance, the police. She knew who to call because she knew what had happened. She'd been party to it.

  I looked for him. He was about a hundred yards ahead of us now. He stopped suddenly and edged forward after a retreating wave. He picked up a white lozenge, larger than his hand. He beckoned us with it. We went up and examined it. He said, "It's a cuttlefish shell!" He went off again and found three more.

  "Is he always like this?" I asked her.

  "Last week he found a duck skeleton by the side of the runway. There were feathers all over the place, but the bones were picked clean."

  "He collects skeletons?"

  "Bones and feathers. For his pictures."

  "What does be paint?" I asked her.

  "Death," she replied. I said nothing. She looked at me hard; she could tell the sort of thoughts I was having. She turned away from me, pulling the blanket from my shoulder. She wrapped it around herself, leaving me cold.

  "When did you guess Joanne Rynard's deserter story was a lie?"

  "The same time she made love to Peter."

  "How did you find out?"

  She wouldn't answer. "He's always failing in love with his models," she said, affecting a false sophistication. "They never last."

  Her imperfect poise, her sudden coldness, irritated me. "What never last?" I demanded: "His affairs? Or his models?"

  The hurt and fury in Laura's look confirmed my guess about her wrists; the neat white hesitation marks.

  Peter spared her the need to reply further, returning with his pockets full of shells. We walked back to the car park on either side of her, sharing the blanket with her as before. She had her arm around me again, but she didn't touch me: her fist was balled round the blanket, and her arm was stiff as though a piece of driftwood were balanced on my shoulder. Peter went ahead to unlock their car. Laura and I stood watching him together, our arms around each other, but wooden and foolish as though we were playing some parlour game that required us to freeze in midaction.

  Only when Peter turned and beckoned her, only when she knew he was looking, was certain of it, did Laura come alive again, turning to me, smiling, her coldness gone. The breeze changed direction and blew her hair toward me. Tresses like liquid smoke brushed my face.

  "Goodnight," she said, and brushed her cheek to mine to make it look as if we'd kissed.

  I spent the next morning in my hotel room, talking down an IBCN fiber to Harris, my section head. I told him, "She wasn't involved."

  "You're sure?"

  "As I can be."

  "But she knew."

  "At first she figured Joanne Rynard was trying to sabotage a personnel archive. When it turned out different she lost interest."

  "She didn't blow any whistles."

  "By then she was implicated. And I think her husband stopped her."

  "He knew?"

  "He helped Rynard die."

  "Morley said she had help."

  "It was him."

  "You know why?"

  "He collects suicides."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I don't know. But I have some ideas."

  Afterward I phoned Morley and told him what Laura had told me. He said, "Bullshit."

  "Listen-"

  "I've no time for this now."

  I waited an hour and
picked up on the first ring. "Two minutes tops." Morley had plugged so many counterintelligence boxes into his phone, his voice sounded like those machines you get in trains and elevators that string words together into artificial sentences. "You have all I know," I told him. "Then there's not much I can tell you."

  "Go on."

  "The project's called White Light. Two years ago they ran on a budget of two million. Strictly test-tube stuff; a little amniotics, a few animal tests. They were researching near-death neurology. They found that as death approaches and anoxia sets in there's massive presynaptic activity in the CNS: the dying axons release huge amounts of chemically encoded data into the cerebro-spinal fluid."

  "I am reaching for the aspirin as we speak-"

  "Look: you're dying. Your personality is liquefying, broiling around your cooling skull, hunting for some way out."

  "What then?"

  "Last year White Light pulled a budget of sixty million, held human trials, released no data."

  "The year our friend left."

  "This year, White Light officially ceased to exist."

  "Any guesses?" I asked him. "Stop clutching my hand."

  I concentrated. Searching for heaven, she'd said ... Heaven Jesus!" I shouted. "They've found a way out?"

  But the line had gone dead.

  I found him kneeling in front of the tank, stony-faced, a little pale maybe, but calm, the nightmare passing: the nightmare we all fear, of one day getting precisely what we want.

  I'd half-expected to find him here, but I acted surprised.

  "You want help with something?" he asked, looking up at me: his way of telling me to get lost. And not content with that: "They took everything away."

  "Not everything," I replied lightly, stepping into the booth. I knelt down beside him and looked through the side of Joanne Rynard's sense-deprivation tank. I pretended to lose myself in the play of shadows and reflections. "You helped her build this?"

  "For some reason," he admitted, lugubriously.

  I chose to misunderstand him. "Oh, it's a sense-deprivation tank," I explained. "Without it you can't enter the virtual world. Your senses hold you back. You're trapped inside your body." I studied his reflection. There was no emotion there. I wondered what he must be feeling. "Do you know what she did here? What all this was for?"

  "She said she was a pilot. She had a plug in her neck. They used to plug her into fighter planes."

  "And then?" I prompted him. "what then?" And when he didn't answer: "Last night Laura said to me Joanne had found a way to heaven. Do you know what she meant by that?"

  "Laura never paid much attention to what Joanne said."

  "Did you?"

  "Enough to know what she wanted."

  "Which was?"

  He shrugged. "A way out of her body. She was dying."

  "And slashing her wrists saved her life?"

  "You know what I'm talking about," he complained, tired of playing mouse to my cat. "Seconds in the virtual world seem like years, they say."

  I hadn't known that. I made a mental note to try it out on Morley, assuming he dared speak to me again. But even so, I thought, what then? what had Joanne traded mortality for? Everlasting corn prices and teletext? An afterlife of telecommunications? "So much for ecstasy," I grunted, but even as I disparaged the idea, I knew it was the answer.

  Joanne Rynard bad tried to become immortal. And, for all I knew, she may have succeeded.

  I searched Peter's reflection-he'd yet to spot me staring at him in the glass for some sign of feeling. But no one was home.

  According to Laura, Peter had fallen in love with Joanne. But if he'd loved her, how could he have helped her die like that? Because he believed in her dream? "Why did you help her?"

  "I had to. She was dying."

  I waited for more.

  "Her implants were inflamed. Topical treatments weren't working. She'd been shooting immune suppressants."

  "While she was here?"

  "And before. She arrived with ARC."

  I looked around me at the shreds of plastic around the windows and the door, all that remained of her sterile tent. "The hotwire was her only way out," he said. "I had to do it."

  "Why not ring a doctor, have her socket removed?"

  He shook his head. "It was too late for that. She was dying." I remembered Morley had said much the same.

  Whichever way I looked at it, Peter had done the right thing. He'd given her the only chance she'd had.

  And I hated him for it. Hated him for his judgement, for his cold kindness, and most of all his fingers at her wrists, tying, untying. I felt sick. "So what was it like?" I asked him. Swallowing my phlegm. "What?"

  "To kill someone as a favour. To kill and be thanked for the trouble. To get away with it."

  I rose to my feet as I spoke. He followed me up, facing me with perfect equanimity. He said, "I rather expected you to come out with something like that eventually."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning we all have our excuses. If you want to pet my wife, go ahead. You don't have to think me a monster to do it. Though if it makes you feel better-" I hit him in the mouth.

  "Oh for God's sake," he mumbled, and kneeled down, dripping blood onto the Formica.

  When I stepped out of the hangar it was evening. Laura was cleaning paint brushes in a can of turpentine. "Busy?"

  "Window frames needed doing. Peter around?"

  I shrugged. "I'm leaving tonight." I don't know what I expected from that but whatever it was, I didn't get it. "The cleaners will be here tomorrow to remove the rest of the evidence."

  "I thought that was your job."

  "I do containment."

  "Are we contained?"

  "That's up to you."

  "It is?"

  "If you can live with it or not."

  "With what?"

  "Your husband helping her bleed to death." She said nothing to that.

  "Where were you when it happened?"

  "In bed."

  "Asleep?"

  "Sure. I guessed what they were up to. I'd washed my hands of them." She made it sound like they'd been having a crafty fuck in the back of the 4X4.

  "I'm sorry." It seemed like a good thing to say at the time.

  "I should thank you," she said, as she dried her paint brushes carefully on a disposable cloth.

  "For what?"

  "For not being the police, I suppose. A court case would have wrecked my husband."

  "To be honest, I don't give a shit about your husband."

  At least she was looking at me now.

  I said, "Let me drive you some place."

  I had forgotten all about Harris, and Morley, and the army ghosts, and the roomful of papers we had on her: the rallies, the riots, her jail terms, her dead brother, and all the little hatreds she'd collected on the way.

  I'd forgotten that I was the enemy.

  She put her brushes down. "Where did you have in mind?"

  My heart leapt.

  "Anywhere," I said. My throat was full of her, her smell, honey and lavender. "Anywhere away from here!"

  "No," she said.

  I thought of her husband, of his shells and bones and feathers, and of the dark scum at the bottom of the isolation tank. My head began to pound. I thought of Joanne Rynard's wrists, the meticulously knotted bandages. My head felt as though it was going to burst. I thought of the beach, and the blanket, and Laura's hand pressing mine to her hip, and her hair like smoke on my face. I stepped forward and gathered her up in my arms and I mashed my mouth against hers. Her lips were red and slack and cold. I squeezed the air out of her. Her arms hung limply by her sides. I closed my eyes. The air stank of turpentine.

  I let her go.

  She walked inside the house and shut the door.

  I stood there awhile, watching the paint dry, glancing around at the hangar, and the house, and the cracked runways, and the power station. Their private kingdom: sea and sky, untroubled by the world and rarely visited
on any terms but theirs. Peter forever indulging his own perverse tastes. Laura, whose resentfulness controlled her every move.

  I knew then it was hopeless; that I stood no more chance against them than Joanne had done. Joanne Rynard who, dying to fulfill her dreams, had served to fulfill theirs. They were monstrous. They were magnificent. I got into the car and drove away.

  After Kerry

  Ian McDonald

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus "Best First Novel" Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, and the acclaimed Evolution's Shore, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His most recent books include the novels Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, and, most recently, Kirinya. His short stories have previously appeared in our Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Fourteenth Annual Collections. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland and now lives and works in Belfast. He has a Web site at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~unicorn/mcdonald/.

  In the haunting story that follows, he takes us on a melancholy voyage of discovery through a troubled future Ireland, a place where you can't be certain of anything, even who you are-or who you were.

  November is the dying season in our family. The light fades out of us, we grow pale and cold and fall like leaves. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins accidentally killed; all the dead of November. Now, my mother.

  It’s a good month for burying, November. The low between-light of autumn-going-winter shows the bones and struts of things; the land, the things growing from it, the people standing on it. Ireland is a country that looks best by winter light, stripped bare of leaves and greenery, spare and strong and good. We buried Ma beneath an intense blue sky, the golden light casting long shadows on the grave grass from the marble Jesuses and alabaster angels and our overcoated figures around the hole. Family, the few living relatives, Father Horan. No friends. My mother had never had a friend she had not alienated in the end.