The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “For crying out loud, Tamara! Look at you.” Vlad felt some of his anger gathering. It had been a long time coming. He had had a long moment of emerging from the sea, the memories falling away like water. Enough time to go to the clinic and make the arrangements. Not enough time, it had turned out, to execute them before another relapse. It was becoming harder to break the surface. Soon, he knew, he would remain submerged in water for good. “You’re almost entirely a machine.”

  “We’re all machines,” his sister said. “Are you proud because the parts that make you are biological? Soft, fallible, weak? You may as well be proud of learning to clean your bottom or tying your shoelaces, Vlad. You’re a machine, I’m a machine, and R. Brother Patch-It over there is a machine. When you’re gone, you’re gone. There’s no afterlife but the one we build ourselves.”

  “The fabled robot heaven,” Vlad said. He felt tired. “Enough!” he said. “I appreciate what you are trying to do. All of you. Boris.”

  “Yes, dad?”

  “Come here.” It was strange, to see his boy and see this man, this almost stranger, that he had become. Something of Weiwei in him, though. Something of Vlad, too. “I can no longer remember your mother’s name,” he told him.

  “What?”

  “Boris, I spoke to the doctors. Weiwei’s Folly has spread through me. Nodal filaments filling up every available space. Invading my body. I am drowning under the weight of memories. They make no sense any more. I don’t know who I am because I can’t make them behave. Boris…”

  “Dad,” Boris said. Vlad raised his hand and touched the boy’s cheek. It was wet. He stroked it, gently. “I’m old, Boris. I’m old and I’m tired. I want to rest. I want to choose how I go, and I want to go with dignity, and with my mind intact. Is that so wrong?”

  “No, dad. No, it’s not.”

  “Don’t cry, Boris.”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “Good.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m all right. You can let go, now.”

  Vlad released him. Remembered the boy who asked him to walk with him, “Just to the next lamp post, dad.” They’d go in the dark towards that pool of light and, on reaching it, stop. Then the boy would say, “Just to the next lamp post, dad. I can go the rest on my own. Honest.”

  On and on they went, following the trail of lights. On and on they went until they made it safely home.

  * * *

  One’s death should be a memorable occasion and, on this occasion, Vlad felt, everything really did go swimmingly.

  They had departed by mini-bus from Central Station. Vlad sat in the front, enjoying the warmth of the sun, next to the driver. A small delegation sat in the back: Boris, and Miriam, Vlad’s sister Tamara, R. Patch-It, Ibrahim the alte-zachen man and Eliezer, the god artist, both of whom once, long ago, worked with Vlad in the construction site. Relatives came to say their good-byes, and the atmosphere was one almost of a party. Vlad hugged young Yan Chong, who was soon to marry his boyfriend, Youssou, got a kiss on the cheek from his sister’s friend Esther, who he had, once, almost had an affair with but, in the end, didn’t. He remembered it well, and it was strange to see her so old. In his mind she was still the beautiful young woman he once got drunk with at a shebeen, when his wife was away, somewhere, and they had come close to it but, in the end, they couldn’t do it. He remembered walking back home, alone, and the sense of relief he’d felt when he came in through the door. Boris was a boy then. He was asleep and Vlad came and sat by his side and stroked his hair. Then he went and made himself a cup of tea.

  The mini-bus spread out solar panel wings and began to glide almost soundlessly down the old tarmac road. Neighbours, friends, and relatives waved and shouted good-byes. The bus turned left on Mount Zion and suddenly the old neighbourhood disappeared from view. It felt like leaving home, for that is what it was. It felt sad but it also felt like freedom.

  They turned on Salameh and soon came to the interchange and onto the old highway to Jerusalem. The rest of the journey went smoothly, in quiet, the coastal plain giving way gradually to hills. Then they came to the Bab-el-Wad and rose sharply along the mountain road to Jerusalem.

  It felt like a rollercoaster along the mountain road, with sharp inclines giving way to sudden drops. They circled the city without going in and drove along the circle road, between a Palestine on one side and an Israel on the other, though the two were often mixed up in such a way only the invisible digitals could keep them apart.

  The change in geography was startling. Suddenly the mountains ended and they were dropping, and the desert began without warning. It was the strange thing about this country that had become Weiwei’s home, Vlad thought—how quickly and startlingly the landscape changed in so small a place. It was no wonder the Arabs and the Jews had fought over it for so long.

  Dunes appeared, the land became a yellow place and camels rested by the side of the old road. Down, down, down they went, until they passed the sign for the ocean level and kept going, following the road to the lowest place on Earth. Soon they were travelling past the Dead Sea and the blue, calm water reflected the sky like a mirror. Bromine released from the sea filled the air, causing a soothing, calming effect on the human psyche.

  Just beyond the Dead Sea the Arava desert opened up and here, at last, some two hours after setting off from Central Station, they arrived at their destination.

  The Euthanasia Park sat on its own in a green oasis of calm. They drew at the gates and parked in the almost empty car park. Boris helped Vlad down from his seat. Outside it was hot, a dry hotness that soothed and comforted. Water sprinklers made their whoosh-whoosh-whoosh sound as they irrigated the manicured grass.

  “Are you sure, dad?” Boris said.

  Vlad just nodded. He took in a deep breath of air. The smell of water and freshly-cut grass. The smell of childhood.

  Together they looked on the park. There, a swimming pool glinting blue, where one could drown in peace and tranquillity. There, a massive, needle-like tower rising into the sky, for the jumpers, those who wanted to go out with one great rush of air. And there, at last, the thing that they had travelled all this way for. The Urbonas Ride.

  The Euthanasia Coaster.

  Named after its designer, Julijonas Urbonas, it was a thing of marvel and beautiful engineering. It began with an enormous climb, rising to half a kilometer above the ground. Then the drop. A five hundred meter drop straight down that led to a series of three hundred and thirty degree loops one after the other in rapid succession. Vlad felt his heart beating faster just by looking at it. He remembered the first time he had climbed up the space port in his exoskeleton. He had perched up there, on Level Five of the unfinished building, and looked down, and felt as though the whole city, the whole world, were his.

  He could already feel the memories crowding in on him. Demanding that he take them, hold them, examine them, search amongst them for her name, but it was missing. He hugged his son again, and kissed his sister. “You old fool,” she said. He shook hands with the robo-priest. Miriam, next. “Look after him,” Vlad said, gesturing at his son.

  “I will.”

  Then Eliezer, and Ibrahim. Two old men. “One day I’ll go on one of these,” Eliezer said. “What a rush.”

  “Not me,” Ibrahim said. “It’s the sea for me. Only the sea.”

  They kissed on the cheeks, hugged, one last time. Ibrahim brought out a bottle of arak. Eliezer had glasses. “We’ll drink to you,” Eliezer said.

  “You do that.”

  With that he left them. He was left alone. The park waited for him, the machines heeding his steps. He went up to the roller coaster and sat down in the car and put on the safety belt carefully around himself.

  The car began to move. Slowly it climbed, and climbed, and climbed. The desert down below, the park reduced to a tiny square of green. The Dead Sea in the distance, as smooth as a mirror, and he could almost think he could see Lot’s wife, who had
been turned into a pillar of salt.

  The car reached the top and, for a moment, stayed there. It let him savour the moment. Taste the air on his tongue. And suddenly he remembered her name. It was Aliyah.

  The car dropped.

  Vlad felt the gravity crushing him down, taking the air from his lungs. His heart beat the fastest it had ever beat, the blood rushed to his face. The wind howled in his ears, against his face. He dropped and levelled and for a moment air rushed in and he cried out in exultation. The car shot away from the drop and onto the first of the loops, carrying him with it, shot like a bullet at three hundred and fifty-eight kilometers an hour. Vlad was propelled through loop after loop faster than he could think; until at last the enormous gravity, thus generated, claimed him.

  Beside the Damned River

  D. J. COCKBURN

  All that really happens in “Beside the Damned River” by new writer D. J. Cockburn, this year’s winner of the James White Award, is that an old man helps repair a truck that has broken down on a muddy backcountry road in Thailand. What makes it science fiction are the changes that have occurred to the old man’s homeland over the course of his lifetime, and what makes the story surprisingly powerful are the changes to the old man’s life brought about by those changes, and how he feels about it all.

  In between a long stretch of rejections, D. J. Cockburn’s fiction has been published in various venues, including Buzzy, Interzone, Stupefying Stories, and, most recently, in the Qualia Nous anthology. He’s supported his writing habit through medical research on various parts of the African continent. Earlier phases of his life have included teaching unfortunate children and experimenting on unfortunate fish. His website is at http://cockburndj.wordpress.com.

  Narong heard children running to the road before he heard the pickup truck. He sighed. When he’d been a child, there had been nothing unusual about cars in Ubon Ratchathani province. All the same, he was happy enough to set down the empty water barrow and stretch his back as the plume of dust approached.

  As the truck and its trailer got closer, he savoured the healthy roar from the engine. As rare as the unscraped white paint under the film of dust. He couldn’t remember when he last saw a truck that didn’t carry its age as he did, in wrinkled bodywork and incessant wheezing before starting up. He winced as a pothole thumped the tyres and rattled the suspension. The healthy sound wouldn’t last long if the driver kept hitting them like that.

  Perhaps Narong was still a child at heart because he squinted, trying to make out the manufacturer’s badge. The truck thumped another pothole. The engine screamed in mechanical agony, faded to a whine and fell silent. The truck coasted past him and stopped fifty metres away. He wondered what was under the tarpaulins covering the truck’s bed and its trailer.

  A farang woman got out on the passenger side. Her ginger hair was just long enough to shimmer as she moved. She wore a sleeveless shirt and knee-length shorts, revealing skin so white it defied the sun pounding this water-forsaken corner of Thailand.

  Narong’s interest stirred. Today would have more to mark it than dust and water barrows.

  The line of children by the roadside collapsed into a gaggle as they ran toward her, like a shoal of catfish outside a river temple when someone threw food into the water. Narong decided he was definitely still a child when he found himself following them as fast as his arthritic knees would carry him.

  The woman backed toward the truck, looking as though she expected the children to steal the clothes she stood in. Her bare shoulder touched the hot metal of the cab. She jerked forward with a yelp.

  “Stand back, younger brothers and sisters.” Narong caught his breath. He may have been a child at heart, but the pounding in his ears reminded him he didn’t have the heart of a child. “It is not good to get so close to our visitors that they cannot move without treading on you.”

  The children backed away without taking their eyes off the woman. One of them fell into the dry ditch beside the road but there was no laughter as he scrambled out. Even the funniest mishap was less interesting than an exotic stranger. Farang were such a rare sight that today’s children didn’t even know the jokes that kept Narong and his childhood friends entertained for hours.

  The woman looked at her driver, a young man with his hair cut short at the back with a longer fringe. He’d probably never driven more than a hundred kilometres from Bangkok. The driver spread his hands, looking helpless. He reminded Narong of the junior official the government sent a couple of years ago, who gave a speech about how the government hadn’t forgotten the north east of its country and went back to Bangkok before it got dark. Even the government had shown more sense than to let such a boy drive himself.

  The driver stepped out of the cab and looked at Narong. His stare carried all the respect Narong expected a man wearing foreign-made shoes to show an old man wearing sandals made from an old tyre.

  Narong had met too many well-dressed boys from Bangkok to expect him to say anything worth listening to. He walked toward the farang woman. He wanted to hear her voice.

  She watched him coming without looking at him directly, showing her wariness.

  Narong pressed his hands together and bowed. “Sawadee kob.”

  She shuffled her feet and returned his wai with the clumsiness of someone unused to the action.

  “Sawadee kob,” she mumbled. No one had told her women said “kha” instead of “kob.”

  “My name is Narong,” he said. “Guess your gearbox dropped.”

  Relief washed over her face at being addressed in English.

  “Angela Ri…” She bit off what Narong assumed was her surname. “Angela.”

  She held out her hand, then remembered she had already done the local equivalent and withdrew it. “How do you know it’s the gearbox?”

  Narong felt a moment of disappointment. Her voice sounded as if she never used it to laugh.

  “Sure sounded like it,” he said.

  “The gearbox. That’s bad?”

  The question was addressed to the driver, who looked as though she had set him a problem in differential calculus.

  “Got a toolbox?” asked Narong.

  Angela looked at the driver.

  “Must be jack and wrench somewhere,” he said.

  “He said a toolbox, Gehng. It’s a bust gearbox, not a flat tyre.”

  As she rounded on Gehng, Narong saw pearls of sweat gathered across her shoulders. How much water she must drink in this climate? He winced at the volume he estimated.

  “In this make, it’s usually under a panel behind the cab,” said Narong.

  Angela looked at Gehng, who showed no sign of knowing if there was a panel, let alone a toolbox. Narong reached for the knot tying the tarpaulin to the cleats along the side of the truck. Gehng seized his wrist.

  “It is not good to look underneath.” The hard edge in Gehng’s Thai contrasted with his deferential English.

  “Oh for God’s sake, Gehng, let him look.” Angela may not have understood Thai, but Gehng’s body language was unambiguous. “He seems to have some idea of what he’s doing.”

  “I call headquarters in Bangkok.” Gehng pulled a phone from the pouch on his belt. “They send…”

  His voice faded.

  “Where there’s no water, nobody repairs the roads.” Narong returned to the knot. “Where the roads are bad, there are no maintenance trucks. Where there are no maintenance trucks, there is no signal.”

  The rope was so new it was slippery. Whoever tied it knew nothing about knots and had tried to compensate by tying several of them. Narong’s fingers weren’t as nimble as they once were.

  “Narong. I know your name.” Gehng returned to Thai. “So if you ever speak of what is in the truck, it will not be good for you and your village.”

  Narong tugged the last knot apart. He stepped back and looked at Gehng. He was more irked by Gehng’s omission of the respectful “pee,” the right of an older man, than by his empty threats. If wh
atever was under the tarpaulin was that important, Gehng wouldn’t admit he’d allowed Narong to see it. If Gehng reported to anyone who cared who said what in Ubon Ratchathani, he’d leave Narong out of the report.

  He looked at Angela with the secret surname, letting Gehng know it was obvious who was in charge here.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  Narong allowed himself a trace of a smirk when he looked back at Gehng. A look that said if he was trying to impress Angela into giving him a bonus, he wasn’t doing very well so he could stop acting the phoo yai big man. Gehng’s eyes replied that he read the message and hated Narong for it, but realised his mouth would serve him best by staying shut.

  Narong glanced at Angela, whose expression hadn’t changed. She had seen nothing that passed between him and Gehng.

  Narong couldn’t resist a flourish when he threw back the tarpaulin, revealing the load to the children. The rock on the truck’s bed was matt grey. Its surface was bubbled as though it had been almost melted and then solidified. He touched one of the bubbles. It was as hard as stone. Some sort of polymer, he guessed. He looked up to the holes bored into the top of the rock and understood Gehng’s unease.

  Angela gave him a smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes. She obviously hoped an old man pushing a water barrow wouldn’t know what he was looking at.

  “Pity we can’t see it without the heat shield,” he said. “The children would appreciate the sparkle of enriched platinum ore. From an M-type asteroid.”

  Angela said nothing. Even though asteroid mining had produced enough metal to drop prices, he was looking at no less than five million dollars.

  “So that’s a crane in the trailer, and the parachute that was bolted to it?” he asked.

  Angela’s nod was minute. If she was trying to hide her thoughts, she wasn’t very good at it. She was wondering how an old peasant understood so much and wished he didn’t. She wouldn’t know Ubon Ratchathani had been a wealthy province twenty years ago. If the world had retreated from Ubon Ratchathani with the water, Ubon Ratchathani had not forgotten the world.