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

by Gardner Dozois

  For eight days, Ankyl was dying inside a pool built especially for him. A dozen great doctors were focused only on his wellbeing. That was Glory’s doing. An entire hospital was obeying her commands, and when her father made his reasonable points about spending a fortune on a creature that would never recover, she was the force that kept resources focused on her hero.

  For the first seven mornings, Glory came to visit the patient.

  Each time, she looked different.

  The parasitic flowers were gone, and one day her flesh was turned brown and ordinary, and the wounds from the battle and the ripped-out roots were a little at a time. She had no hair yet, but on the last day a little stubble was warily emerging from her scalp, and she had a good pretty smile when she looked into Ankyl’s hawk face, telling him and herself, “I won’t ever forget you.”

  But the bodyguard was still holding to life on the eighth day, and the woman didn’t arrive at the usual time or any time after that. He lay inside the hot nourishing bath, on his back, letting the liquids do the breathing for him. Then he slept and it was afternoon suddenly, and Ankyl felt something go wrong with his heart, and he died once and then a second time, brought back through the marvelous hands of surgeons who were ignoring far more important patients.

  There wouldn’t be a ninth day of near-death. Ankyl sensed it and accepted it, and he was astonished by how long he had lingered.

  This was not a warrior’s death.

  Eventually it grew late in the day, and he was alive again, asking no one in particular about Glory’s whereabouts.

  A crafted nurse was present. Nobody else. She was part gibbon and all comfort—a breasty beast ready to feed any patient with mammary glands that could on a whim produce any of a million medicines.

  No medicine would help anymore, and the tits were tucked out of sight.

  “Oh, Glory is coming tomorrow,” the nurse said cheerfully. “The girl has a big date today. Everybody is hopeful.”

  For no good reason, Ankyl thought about the purple man—the silly brother that he was supposed to protect during the wedding.

  But hearing the name “Lugon” just made the nurse laugh.

  “Oh, no. Not that boy, no,” said this pathologically cheerful creature. “It’s the bastard’s bastard son. It’s Warren. He invited the girl to join him for dinner. ‘Peace talks,’ he calls them. But everybody knows. It’s really just a first date.”

  That was when everything became obvious.

  “Give me someone to talk to,” Ankyl said.

  “I’m talking,” the nurse pointed.

  He named useful names, beginning with his superiors and ending with that purple man who fought like a tiger and hid like a tiger too.

  “I’ll see who I can find,” the nurse promised.

  She left.

  And Ankyl died two minutes later, for the last time.

  THE WALK OF A GOD

  Twenty months later, Lugon was a guest at the Ames headquarters—not an uncommon honor for someone who earned considerable fame because of several lucky shots and that now famous threat:

  “Pick up those damned bombs, Devon. Or I’ll goddamn shoot you myself.”

  Devon preferred to ignore the man who had embarrassed him in front of billions. Glory was responsible for making Lugon an honored guest, and though he rarely saw the appreciative woman, she had left standing orders allowing him unlimited access to every facility as well as the privilege of one drink every hour, but never any more. The indoor lake was a favorite diversion, though he didn’t like the swimming as much as the sitting, and he had several favorite tables where he nursed his drinks and the time while thinking about very little. And twenty months later, he found himself present on the day when Glory and her new fiancé arrived unannounced.

  Lugon considered slipping away unseen.

  But a new glass of rum had arrived, and he stayed, discovering that he was just as invisible this way.

  The cyborg had changed dramatically over the last few months. Machine parts had been peeled away, replaced with his cultivated flesh as well as Ames’ new-generation tissues. But he was still sixty percent mechanical beast, and because of that he sank to the lake bottom. Happy as any six-year-old, Warren began to run laps, and the children above him tried to swim against the current, and then he accelerated, the entire body of water becoming a sloshing whirlpool.

  To afford herself a clear view and to be seen better by others, Glory climbed the lifeguard’s stand, filling a chair meant for an entirely different kind of creature.

  She was wearing clothes, which was the day’s fashion, but not so many clothes that her new golden flesh was obscured, or the bright beads of sweat that rolled back and forth across a skin that was alive only in the broadest sense.

  Glory was making little steps, slowly embracing cyborg technologies.

  Her father was angry about quite a lot, of course. Even someone as far removed as Lugon heard stories about battles between Devon and his daughter, threats issued and temporary surrenders offered. But her gold flesh remained—an infusion of nanobots and reaction chambers that ate every stray photon that tried to pass through their timeless beauty.

  Light and heat and radio waves were all food, yes. But the flesh also acted as giant lidless eyes, the entire spectrum visible always, and of course the woman noticed Lugon’s slow, half-drunken approach.

  His plan was charmingly simple. He intended to tell her “thank you” for the usual and the obvious. But a feeling took hold somewhere in those final steps … a sensation not unlike the bold madness that made him a great soldier, if only for a moment.

  Glory turned to him, wrapping his name in a smile. Then with her original eyes, she continued watching her fiancé and the increasingly rapid water. She wasn’t as happy as she was on her wedding day. Nobody ever would be that happy again, not in the history of the world. But she looked regal and competent. She was a lifeguard studying a wild boy’s shenanigans, ready to leap into the lake whenever the fun went sour.

  That was the moment when Lugon blurted what he thought.

  What he knew.

  Maybe he had always known the truth. It occurred to him then, listening to his own quick sensible voice, that he had always been thinking about these matters. Sitting at that table and the other tables, sipping drinks, was when he had been going over the problems with the accepted history. And now this would be the second moment in his life when he would rise up as a hero.

  He said it all, in a few sharp sentences.

  And Glory thought enough of the words to turn and look only at him, at least with those old-fashioned eyes.

  Lugon repeated the heart of his message.

  “The attack was theatre. We were fooled, all of us, and he got everything in the end. Including you.”

  Glory did not look pleased. But in that less-than-happy expression was far more than the young man bargained for, and he couldn’t process what he saw, and he certainly didn’t anticipate what she would say next.

  “You know,” she said. “I’m not an idiot.”

  He hadn’t intended to say she was.

  “I know quite a lot more than you can imagine,” she said.

  “But if your fiance—” Lugon began.

  Glory interrupted him with the one word, “Think.”

  Think about what? He didn’t understand.

  She asked, “If the world had gone on as as it was, what would have happened? What was as inevitable as the next breath?”

  “I don’t know,” Lugon said.

  “I do,” she said.

  He pointed at the swirling, angry lake. “He’s a monster.”

  And for the last time, she looked away from him, telling the water, “Being a god is far harder than it appears. Which of course is why there are so few of us.”

  The Long Haul, from the Annals of Transportation, The Pacific Monthly, May 2009

  KEN LIU

  Here’s another story by Ken Liu, whose “The Regular” appears elsewhere in th
is anthology. This one is a loving, nostalgic look at a world that might have come to pass, but never did.

  Twenty-five years ago, on this day, the Hindenburg crossed the Atlantic for the first time. Today, it will cross it for the last time. Six hundred times it has accomplished this feat, and in so doing it has covered the same distance as more than eight roundtrips to the Moon. Its perfect safety record is a testament to the ingenuity of the German people.

  There is always some sorrow in seeing a thing of beauty age, decline, and finally fade, no matter how gracefully it is done. But so long as men still sail the open skies, none shall forget the glory of the Hindenburg.

  —John F. Kennedy, March 31, 1962, Berlin.

  It was easy to see the zeppelins moored half a mile away from the terminal. They were a motley collection of about forty Peterbilts, Aereons, Macks, Zeppelins (both the real thing and the ones from Goodyear-Zeppelin), and Dongfengs, arranged around and with their noses tied to ten mooring masts, like crouching cats having tête-à-tête tea parties.

  I went through customs at Lanzhou’s Yantan Airport, and found Barry Icke’s long-hauler, a gleaming silver Dongfeng Feimaotui—the model usually known in America, among the less-than-politically-correct society of zeppeliners, as the “Flying Chinaman”—at the farthest mooring mast. As soon as I saw it, I understood why he called it the American Dragon.

  White clouds drifted in the dark mirror of the polished solar panels covering the upper half of the zeppelin like a turtle’s shell. Large, waving American flags trailing red and blue flames and white stars were airbrushed onto each side of the elongated silver teardrop hull, which gradually tapered towards the back, ending in a cruciform tail striped in red, white, and blue. A pair of predatory, reptilian eyes were painted above the nose cone and a grinning mouth full of sharp teeth under it. A petite Chinese woman was suspended by ropes below the nose cone, painting over the blood-red tongue in the mouth with a brush.

  Icke stood on the tarmac near the control cab, a small, round, glass-windowed bump protruding from the belly of the giant teardrop. Tall and broad-shouldered, his square face featured a tall, Roman nose and steady, brown eyes that stared out from under the visor of a Red Sox cap. He watched me approach, flicked his cigarette away, and nodded at me.

  Icke had been one of the few to respond to my Internet forum ad asking if any of the long-haulers would be willing to take a writer for the Pacific Monthly on a haul. “I’ve read some of your articles,” he had said. “You didn’t sound too stupid.” And then he invited me to come to Lanzhou.

  * * *

  After we strapped ourselves in, Icke weighed off the zeppelin—pumping compressed helium into the gasbags until the zeppelin’s positive lift, minus the weight of the ship, the gas, us, and the cargo, was just about equal to zero. Now essentially “weightless,” the long-hauler and all its cargo could have been lifted off the ground by a child.

  When the control tower gave the signal, Icke pulled a lever that retracted the nose cone hook from the mooring mast and flipped a toggle to drop about a thousand pounds of water ballast into the ground tank below the ship. And just like that, we began to rise, steadily and in complete silence, as though we were riding up a skyscraper in a glass-walled elevator. Icke left the engines off. Unlike an airplane that needs the engines to generate forward thrust to be converted into lift, a zeppelin literally floats up, and engines didn’t need to be turned on until we reached cruising height.

  “This is the American Dragon, heading out to Sin City. See you next time, and watch out for those bears,” Icke said into the radio. A few of the other zeppelins, like giant caterpillars on the ground below us, blinked their tail lights in acknowledgment.

  Icke’s Feimaotui is 302 feet long, with a maximum diameter of 84 feet, giving it capacity for 1.12 million cubic feet of helium and a gross lift of 36 tons, of which about 27 are available for cargo (this is comparable to the maximum usable cargo load for semis on the Interstates).

  Its hull is formed from a rigid frame of rings and longitudinal girders made out of duratainium covered with composite skin. Inside, seventeen helium gasbags are secured to a central beam that runs from the nose to the tail of the ship, about a third of the way up from the bottom of the hull. At the bottom of the hull, immediately below the central beam and the gasbags, is an empty space that runs the length of the ship.

  Most of this space is taken up by the cargo hold, the primary attraction of long-haulers for shippers. The immense space, many times the size of a plane’s cargo bay, was perfect for irregularly shaped and bulky goods, like the wind generator turbine blades we were carrying.

  Near the front of the ship, the cargo hold is partitioned from the crew quarters, which consists of a suite of apartment-like rooms opening off of a central corridor. The corridor ends by emerging from the hull into the control cab, the only place on the ship with windows to the outside. The Feimaotui is only a little bit longer and taller than a Boeing 747 (counting the tail), but far more voluminous and lighter.

  The whole crew consisted of Icke and his wife, Yeling, the woman who was re-painting the grinning mouth on the zeppelin when I showed up. Husband-wife teams like theirs are popular on the transpacific long haul. Each of them would take six-hour shifts to fly the ship while the other slept. Yeling was in the back, sleeping through the takeoff. Like the ship itself, much of their marriage was made up of silence and empty space.

  “Yeling and I are no more than thirty feet apart from each other just about every minute, but we only get to sleep in the same bed about once every seven days. You end up learning to have conversations in five-minute chunks separated by six-hour blocks of silence.

  “Sometimes Yeling and I have an argument, and she’ll have six hours to think of a come-back for something I said six hours earlier. That helps since her English isn’t perfect, and she can use the time to look up words she needs. I’ll wake up and she’ll talk at me for five minutes and go to bed, and I’ll have to spend the next six hours thinking about what she said. We’ve had arguments that went on for days and days this way.”

  Icke laughed. “In our marriage, sometimes you have to go to bed angry.”

  The control car was shaped like an airplane’s cockpit, except that the windows slanted outward and down, so that you had an unobstructed view of the land and air below you.

  Icke had covered his seat with a custom pattern: a topographical map of Alaska. In front of Icke’s chair was a dashboard full of instruments and analog and mechanical controls. A small, gleaming gold statuette of a laughing, rotund bodhisattva was glued to the top of the dashboard. Next to it was the plush figure of Wally, the Green Monster of Fenway Park.

  A plastic crate wedged into place between the two seats was filled with CDs: a mix of mandopop, country, classical, and some audio books. I flipped through them: Annie Dillard, Thoreau, Cormac McCarthy, The Idiot’s Guide to Grammar and Composition.

  Once we reached the cruising altitude of 1,000 feet—freight zeppelins generally are restricted to a zone above pleasure airships, whose passengers prefer the view lower down, and far below the cruising height of airplanes—Icke started the electrical engines. A low hum, more felt than heard, told us that the four propellers mounted in indentations near the tail of the ship had begun to turn and push the ship forward.

  “It never gets much louder than this,” Icke said.

  We drifted over the busy streets of Lanzhou. More than a thousand miles west of Beijing, this medium-sized industrial city was once the most polluted city in all of China due to its blocked air flow and petroleum processing plants. But it is now the center of China’s wind turbine boom.

  The air below us was filled with small and cheap airships that hauled passengers and freight on intra-city routes. They were a colorful bunch, a ragtag mix of blimps and small zeppelins, their hulls showing signs of make-shift repairs and shanzhai patches. (A blimp, unlike a zeppelin, has no rigid frame. Like a birthday balloon, its shape is maintained entirely by the press
ure of the gas inside.) The ships were plastered all over with lurid advertisements for goods and services that sounded, with their strange English translations, frightening and tempting in equal measure. Icke told me that some of the ships we saw had bamboo frames.

  Icke had flown as a union zeppeliner crewman for ten years on domestic routes before buying his own ship. The union pay was fine, but he didn’t like working for someone else. He had wanted to buy a Goodyear-Zeppelin, designed and made 100 percent in America. But he disliked bankers even more than Chinese airship companies, and decided that he would rather own a Dongfeng outright.

  “Nothing good ever came from debt,” he said. “I could have told you what was going to happen with all those mortgages last year.”

  After a while, he added, “My ship is mostly built in America, anyway. The Chinese can’t make the duratainium for the girders and rings in the frame. They have to import it. I ship sheets of the alloy from Bethlehem, PA, to factories in China all the time.”

  The Feimaotui was a quirky ship, Icke explained. It was designed to be easy to maintain and repair rather than over-engineered to be durable the way American ships usually were. An American ship that malfunctioned had to be taken to the dealer for the sophisticated computers and proprietary diagnostic codes, but just about every component of the Feimaotui could be switched out and repaired in the field by a skilled mechanic. An American ship could practically fly itself most of the time, as the design philosophy was to automate as much as possible and minimize the chances of human error. The Feimaotui required a lot more out of the pilot, but it was also much more responsive and satisfying to fly.

  “A man changes over time to be like his ship. I’d just fall asleep in a ship where the computer did everything.” He gazed at the levers, sticks, wheels, toggles, pedals and sliders around him, reassuringly heavy, analog, and solid. “Typing on a keyboard is no way to fly a ship.”

  He wanted to own a fleet of these ships eventually. The goal was to graduate from owner-operator to just owner, when he and Yeling could start a family.