The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  That was why his house sat in the exact center of three arrows of dense forest, each thirty kilometers long and spaced one hundred and twenty degrees apart, each surrounded by carefully husbanded open pasture. A “look here” note visible even from orbit. Especially from orbit. Who the hell else would be looking?

  Outside his front gate a mid-sized landing shuttle, about thirty meters nose to tail, sat clicking and ticking away the heat of its descent. The grass around it smoldered. Ask did not recognize the engineering or aesthetics of the machine, which answered some of his speculations in the negative. It certainly did not display Polity markings.

  He stood his ground, waiting for whoever might open that hatch from within. His long walk was done, had been done for over two hundred years.

  Time for the next step.

  The hatch whined open, air puffing as pressure equalized. Someone shifted their weight in the red-lit darkness within.

  Human?

  It didn’t matter.

  He was about to learn what would happen next.

  Aeschylus Sforza was home.

  The Incredible Exploding Man

  DAVE HUTCHINSON

  Here’s the gripping story of a man who saves the world, only to find that he’s reluctantly obliged to save it over and over again.

  Dave Hutchinson is a writer and journalist who was born in Sheffield and now lives in London with his wife and assorted cats. He’s the author of one novel and the novella The Push, which was nominated for the BSFA Award, as well as five collections of short stories. He’s also the editor of the anthology Under the Rose, and the coeditor of Strange Pleasures 2 and Strange Pleasures 3.

  From a distance, the first thing you saw was the cloud.

  It rose five thousand feet or more, a perfect vertical helix turning slowly in the sky above Point Zero. Winds high in the atmosphere smeared its very top into ribbons, but no matter how hard the winds blew at lower levels the main body kept its shape. A year ago, a tornado had tracked northwest across this part of Iowa and not disturbed the cloud at all. It looked eerie and frightening, but it was just an edge effect, harmless water vapour in the atmosphere gathered by what was going on below. The really scary stuff at Point Zero was invisible.

  The young lieutenant sitting across from me looked tired and ill. They burned out quickly here on the Perimeter—the constant stress of keeping things from getting through the fence, the constant terror of what they would have to do if something did. A typical tour out here lasted less than six months, then they were rotated back to their units and replacements were brought in. I sometimes wondered why we were bothering to keep it secret; if we waited long enough the entire US Marine Corps would have spent time here.

  I leaned forward and raised my voice over the sound of the engines and said to the lieutenant, “How old are you, son?”

  The lieutenant just looked blankly at me. Beside him, I saw Former Corporal Fenwick roll his eyes.

  “Just trying to make conversation,” I said, sitting back. The lieutenant didn’t respond. He didn’t know who I was—or rather, he had been told I was a specialist, come to perform routine maintenance on the sensors installed all over the Site. There was no way to tell whether he believed that or not, or if he even cared. He was trying to maintain a veneer of professionalism, but when he thought nobody was looking he kept glancing at the windows. He wanted to look out, to check on his responsibilities on the ground. Was the Site still there? Was there a panic? Had a coyote got through?

  It had been a coyote last time. At least, that was the general consensus of opinion—it was hard to be certain from the remains. The Board of Inquiry had found that the breach was due to gross negligence on the part of the officer in command. The officer in command, a colonel I had met a couple of times and rather liked, had saved Uncle Sam the cost of a court martial by dying, along with seventeen of his men, bringing down the thing the coyote had become. You could tell, just by looking at the Lieutenant, that he had terrible nightmares.

  The Black Hawk made another wide looping turn over Sioux Crossing, waiting for permission to land. Looking out, I thought I could see my old house. The city had been evacuated shortly after the Accident. It had taken weeks to clear the place out; even after dire stories of death and disaster, even with the cloud hanging over the Site, there were people who refused to leave. The fact that the skies by then were full of military helicopters, some of them black, hadn’t helped. The government had handled the whole thing poorly, and there had been a couple of armed standoffs between householders and the military. Then a bunch of asshole militiamen had turned up from the wilds of Montana, vowing to oppose the Zionist World Government or the Bilderberg Group or whoever the hell they believed was running the world. I was glad I’d missed the whole thing.

  Further out, I could see the buildings of the Collider in the distance. From here, all looked peaceful. Apart from the cloud, towering over everything, it was as if nothing had ever happened here.

  The pilot eventually got permission to make final approach and we landed in a park on the edge of Sioux Crossing. The park was ringed by prefabricated buildings stacked four high, offices and barracks and mess halls and control rooms and armouries and garages surrounding a big white “H” sprayed on the ground. The lieutenant jumped down as soon as the door was opened, and the last I saw of him was his back as he strode away from us towards the control centre.

  “Talkative fucker,” Former Corporal Fenwick commented, hopping down from the helicopter beside me.

  I sighed. A figure in fatigues was coming towards us from the control centre. The figure passed the lieutenant, and they snapped salutes at each other without breaking step.

  “Welcoming committee,” said Fenwick. “Nice. I approve.”

  “Shut up, Fenwick,” I muttered.

  The figure was the base commander, Colonel Newton J. Kettering. He marched up to us and saluted. Fenwick returned the salute sloppily, as usual. I didn’t bother.

  “Sir,” Kettering said smartly. “Welcome to Camp Batavia.”

  “Well thank you kindly, Colonel,” Fenwick said. “Looks like you’re running a tight ship here.”

  “Sir. Thank you, sir.” Unlike the lieutenant, Kettering didn’t look tired and ill. He looked alert and bright-eyed. He looked alert and bright-eyed to the point of madness. He was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and he’d done three tours here, and I didn’t want to spend a minute longer in his company than I had to.

  I said to Fenwick, “I’d better supervise the unloading.”

  Fenwick gave me his big shit-eating grin. “I think that sounds like a fine idea, Mr. Dolan.” I wanted to punch him. “Perhaps Colonel Kettering could give me the guided tour while you’re doing that thing.”

  “Sir, I was hoping you could join me in the Officers’ Club,” Kettering said. “We have a luncheon prepared.”

  Fenwick’s grin widened. “Colonel, I would love to.”

  “We need to get onto the Site as soon as possible,” I said to them both, but mainly to Fenwick. Kettering regarded me with a keen look of hostility. Fenwick pouted; he hated to miss a free meal. I said, “Colonel, it shouldn’t take more than half an hour to unload my gear—”

  “Hell,” Fenwick put in amiably. “That’s plenty of time for luncheon. Right, Colonel?”

  “Sir. Yes, sir.” Kettering gave me that hostile look again. I had already ruined his carefully-groomed routine; he wasn’t about to let me ruin lunch too. Neither was Fenwick.

  I looked at them both. “Half an hour,” I said. “No longer.”

  Fenwick and Kettering exchanged a knowing glance. Civilians. Then Fenwick clapped Kettering on the back and said, “Lead the way, Colonel,” and they walked off. A few yards away, Fenwick looked over his shoulder and called, “Would you like us to send a plate out for you, Mr. Dolan?”

  I shook my head. “No thank you, General, I’ll be fine,” I called back. Fenwick flipped me the bird surreptitiously and turned back to Kettering. The two of
them, deep in conversation, walked towards the wall of prefabs.

  I watched them go for a few moments, then went back to the helicopter, where, in the style of bored baggage handlers and cargo men the world over, half a dozen Marines were throwing my metal transport cases out onto the grass.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Careful with those things! They’re delicate scientific instruments!”

  Actually, the cases were full of old telephone directories, for weight, but I had to keep up the charade.

  * * *

  I had been in a foul mood when I arrived for work that morning. I drove the short distance from home to the facility, stopped briefly at the gate to show my ID, then drove to the building housing the small control room Professor Delahaye and his team were using.

  Most of them were already there ahead of me. Delahaye was over to one side of the room, conferring with half a dozen of his colleagues and grad students. Others were busily typing at consoles and peering at monitors. Nowhere, though, could I see the shock of white hair that I was looking for.

  Delahaye spotted me and walked over. “What are you doing here, Dolan?” he asked. “Surely you’ve got enough material by now?”

  “I need a conclusion,” I said, still looking around the room. “Just a last bit of colour.”

  “Well, try not to get in the way will you? There’s a good chap.” Delahaye was a small, agitated Londoner who couldn’t see why a journalist had been foisted on him and his experiment.

  “I don’t see Larry,” I said. “Is he coming in today?”

  Delahaye looked around him. “Maybe. Who knows? The experiment’s almost over, he doesn’t need to be here. Is it important?”

  Is it important? No, maybe not to you, Professor. I said, “I just wanted a quick word, that’s all.”

  Delahaye nodded irritably. “All right. But just—”

  “Try not to get in the way. Yes, Professor, I know. I’ll just stand over there in the corner.” As if I was going to reach over and press some important big red button, or fall into a piece of machinery. Nothing I did here was going to make the slightest bit of difference to the enormous energies being generated, nanoseconds at a time, far below our feet in the tunnels of the Collider. And even if I did manage to screw something up, it wouldn’t affect the experiment all that much; all the results were in, Delahaye was just using up his allotted time with a last couple of shots.

  The professor gave me a last admonitory glare and went back to the little group across the room. There was nothing world-shaking going on here; the Collider was brand new—the offices still smelled of fresh paint. Delahaye was just running warm-up tests, calibrating instruments, the high-energy physics equivalent of running-in a new car. I’d been there two months, working on an article about the new facility for Time. I thought the article was shaping up to be interesting and informative. The worst thing about the whole fucking business was that it had brought Larry into my life.

  Andy Chen came over and we shook hands. “Been fun having you around, man,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Right.”

  “Nah, really,” he insisted. “You piss old man Delahaye off mightily. It’s been beautiful to watch.”

  Despite being beyond pissed off myself, I smiled. “You’re welcome. What’s for you now? Back to MIT?”

  He shook his head. “Been offered a job at JPL.”

  “Hey, excellent, man. Congratulations.”

  “Ah, we’ll see. It’s not pure research, but at least it gets me away from that monstrous old fart.” He looked over at Professor Delahaye, who was regaling some students with some tale or other. Andy snorted. “Brits,” he said. “Who knows?” He looked over to where a small commotion had begun around the door. “Well, we can get the party started now.”

  I looked towards the door and saw Larry Day’s leonine features over the heads of the others in the room, and I felt my heart thud in my chest. “Andy,” I said, “I need to have a quick word with Larry.” We shook hands again and I launched myself through the crowd. “Great news about JPL, man. Really.”

  Larry was drunk again. That much was obvious even before I got to him. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a desert camouflage jacket and he was clutching a tattered sheaf of paper in one hand and a shrink-wrapped six pack of Dr Pepper in the other. His hair looked as if he had been dragged back and forth through a hedge a couple of times, and his eyes were hidden by mirrorshades with lenses the size of silver dollars.

  “Larry,” I said as I reached him.

  The mirrored lenses turned towards me. “Hey. Alex. Dude.” There was a powerful aura of Wild Turkey and Cuban cigars around him, and when he grinned at me his teeth were yellow and uneven.

  Rolling Stone had called him “Steven Hawking’s Evil Twin.” One of the most brilliant physicists of his generation, a legend at the age of twenty-four. Of course, by that time he had been thrown out of Harvard for an incident involving a homemade railgun, a frozen chicken, and his supervisor’s vintage TransAm, but that was just part of his mystique, and pretty much every other university on Earth had offered him a place. His doctoral thesis was titled Why All Leptons Look Like Joey Ramone But Smell Like Lady GaGa, and it was generally agreed that it would have been embarrassing if it had won him the Nobel Prize. Bad enough that it was shortlisted. His postdoc research had been a mixture of the mundane and the wildly exotic; he cherry-picked his way through some of the wilder outlands of quantum mechanics and nanotechnology, came up with a brand new theory of stellar evolution, published a paper which not only challenged the Big Bang but made it seem rather dull and simple-minded. Larry Day. Brilliant physicist. Brilliant drunk. Brilliant serial womanizer. He and I had visited all the bars in Sioux Crossing and been thrown out of most of them.

  “I spoke with Ellie last night,” I said quietly.

  He smiled down at me. “Hey,” he said. “Outstanding.”

  I gritted my teeth. “She told me.”

  In the background, I could hear Delahaye saying something above the holiday atmosphere in the room, but I wasn’t paying attention. All I could concentrate on was Larry’s mouth, his lying lips as he said, “Ah. Okay.”

  “Is that all you can say?” I hissed. “‘Ah. Okay’?”

  He shrugged expansively and some of the papers in his hand escaped and fell to the floor. “What can I say, man? ‘I’m sorry’?”

  Delahaye seemed to be counting in a loud voice, but it was as if I heard him from a great echoing distance. I lunged at Larry, grabbed him by the front of the camouflage jacket, and drove him two steps back against the wall.

  “… Three … two…” said Delahaye.

  “You fucking bastard!” I screamed into Larry’s face.

  “… One!” said Delahaye, and the world filled with a sudden flash of something that was not blinding white light.

  * * *

  I had the Humvee loaded by the time Fenwick and the colonel returned from their lunch. In the end I’d told the Marines to go away, and I’d done it myself. Down the years I’ve noticed that Marines tend towards a certain disdain for people who are not themselves Marines. I was a civilian specialist. To most of them that was a euphemism for CIA, which was a direct invitation to dick around and try to get a rise out of me, but I wasn’t going to play that game.

  “How was your lunch, General?” I asked when Fenwick and Kettering arrived.

  Fenwick looked at Kettering. “I think I can report that this camp is not lacking in creature comforts, Mr. Dolan,” he said, and Kettering smiled in relief.

  I looked at my watch. “We really should be making a start, General,” I said. “I’d like to be out of here before nightfall.”

  Fenwick snorted. “You and me both.” He turned to Kettering. “Newt,” he said, “if you’re ever down at Bragg, I’ll throw a party for you at the BOQ that’ll make your head spin.”

  Kettering grinned. “Sir. Yes, sir.” They shook hands and Kettering stood to attention while Fenwick and I got into the Hummer. I took the
wheel.

  I said, “I do hope you didn’t breach any security protocols in there, Corporal.”

  Fenwick grinned and tapped the stars on his fatigues. “General.”

  I put the Hummer in gear. “Oh, fuck off, Fenwick,” I said. “You’re no more a general than I am.” And I drove the Humvee out of the gates of the camp and onto the road to the Site.

  * * *

  There was a place that was not a place. It was too small and too large all at once, and it was either dark or it was lit by something that wasn’t light but came in from the edge of vision like a hypnagogic nightmare. There was an “up” and a “down.” Or maybe it was a “down” and an “up.” I screamed and I screamed and the noises I made were not sounds. I was … I was …

  It took me a long time to get my bearings. Or maybe I never did, maybe it was all an accident. I walked. Travelled, anyway. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing, couldn’t be sure that I was seeing it. I wanted to curl up and die, and I did in fact try that a couple of times, but it was impossible. I couldn’t even curl up, in the sense that I understood it. I held my hands up and looked at them. They were … they were …

  At some point, maybe instantly, maybe it took a hundred million years, I came upon a … structure. Too small and too large to see, all at once. It looked like … there’s no way I can describe what it looked like, but I touched it and I reached down and I curled around it and the next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking up at a starry sky and someone nearby was screaming, “Don’t move, you fucker! You stay right where you are!”

  I turned my head, astonished that I still remembered how. A soldier was standing a few feet from me, illuminated by moonlight, pointing an automatic weapon at me.

  “Who are you?” I asked, and almost choked myself because I was still trying to speak as I might have when I was there. I coughed and retched, and at some point I realised I was naked and freezing cold. I said again, “Who are you?”