The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She's looking at the passage I've highlighted. But loving kindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn't mean getting rid of anything. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we already are.

  "Well." She sets the book down, careful to leave it open to the same page. "That sounds a bit like Dr. Mehldau." I laugh. "Yeah, it does. Did she tell you I wanted you and Mitch to be at the next session?"

  "We'll be there." She works around the room, picking up T-shirts and underwear. I stand up to get out of the way. Somehow she manages to straighten up as she moves— righting books that had fallen over, setting Boo W. Bear back to his place on the bed, sweeping an empty chip bag into the garbage can—so that as she collects my dirty laundry she's cleaning the entire room, like the Cat in the Hat's cleaner-upper machine.

  "Alice, in the last session I remembered being at Sea World, but there was a girl next to me. Next to Therese."

  "Sea World? Oh, that was the Hammel girl, Marcy. They took you to Ohio with them on their vacation that year."

  "Who did?"

  "The Hammels. You were gone all week. All you wanted for your birthday was spending money for the trip."

  "You weren't there?"

  She picks up the jeans I left at the foot of the bed. "We always meant to go to Sea World, but your father and I never got out there."

  "This is our last session," I say.

  Alice, Mitch, Dr. Mehldau: I have their complete attention.

  The doctor, of course, is the first to recover. "It sounds like you've got something you want to tell us."

  "Oh yeah."

  Alice seems frozen, holding herself in check. Mitch rubs the back of his neck, suddenly intent on the carpet.

  "I'm not going along with this anymore." I make a vague gesture. "Everything: the memory exercises, all this imagining of what Therese felt. I finally figured it out. It doesn't matter to you if I'm Therese or not. You just want me to think I'm her. I'm not going along with the manipulation anymore."

  Mitch shakes his head. "Honey, you took a drug" He glances at me, looks back at his feet. "If you took LSD and saw God, that doesn't mean you really saw God. Nobody's trying to manipulate you, we're trying to undo the manipulation."

  "That's bullshit, Mitch. You all keep acting like I'm schizophrenic, that I don't know what's real or not. Well, part of the problem is that the longer I talk to Dr. Mehldau here, the more fucked up I am." Alice gasps.

  Dr. Mehldau puts out a hand to soothe her, but her eyes are on me. "Terry, what your father's trying to say is that even though you feel like a new person, there's a you that existed before the drug. That exists now."

  "Yeah? You know all those O.D.-ers in your book who say they've 'reclaimed' themselves? Maybe they only feel like their old selves."

  "It's possible'' she says. "But I don't think they're fooling themselves. They've come to accept the parts of themselves they've lost, the family members they've left behind. They're people like you." She regards me with that standard-issue look of concern that doctors pick up with their diplomas. "Do you really want to feel like an orphan the rest of your life?"

  "What?" From out of nowhere, tears well in my eyes. I cough to clear my throat, and the tears keep coming, until I smear them off on my arm. I feel like I've been sucker punched. "Hey, look Alice, just like you," I say.

  "It's normal," Dr. Mehldau says. "When you woke up in the hospital, you felt completely alone. You felt like a brand person, no family, no friends. And you're still just start-down this road. In a lot of ways you're not even two years old."

  "Damn you're good," I say. "I didn't even see that one coming."

  "Please, don't leave. Let's—"

  "Don't worry, I'm not leaving yet." I'm at the door, pulling my backpack from the peg by the door. I dig into the pocket and pull out the brochure. "You know about this?"

  Alice speaks for the first time. "Oh honey, no…"

  Dr. Mehldau takes it from me, frowning. On the front is a nicely posed picture of a smiling teenage boy hugging relieved parents. She looks at Alice and Mitch. "Are you considering this?"

  "It's their big stick, Dr. Mehldau. If you can't come through for them, or I bail out, boom. You know what goes on there?"

  She opens the pages, looking at pictures of the cabins, the obstacle course, the big lodge where kids just like me engage in "intense group sessions with trained counselors" where they can "recover their true identities." She shakes her head. "Their approach is different than mine…"

  "I don't know, doc. Their approach sounds an awful lot like 'reclaiming.' I got to hand it to you, you had me going for awhile. Those visualization exercises? I was getting so good that I could even visualize stuff that never happened. I bet you could visualize me right into Therese's head."

  I turn to Alice and Mitch. "You've got a decision to make. Dr. Mehldau's program is a bust. So are you sending me off to brainwashing camp or not?"

  Mitch has his arm around his wife. Alice, amazingly, is dry-eyed. Her eyes are wide, and she's staring at me like a stranger.

  It rains the entire trip back from Baltimore, and it's still raining when we pull up to the house. Alice and I run to the porch step, illuminated by the glare of headlights. Mitch waits until Alice unlocks the door and we move inside, and then pulls away.

  "Does he do that a lot?" I ask.

  "He likes to drive when he's upset."

  "Oh." Alice goes through the house, turning on lights. I follow her into the kitchen.

  "Don't worry, he'll be all right." She opens the refrigerator door and crouches down. "He just doesn't know what to do with you."

  "He wants to put me in the camp, then."

  "Oh, not that. He just never had a daughter who talked back to him before." She carries a Tupperware cake holder to the table. "I made carrot cake. Can you get down the plates?"

  She's such a small woman. Face to face, she comes up only to my chin. The hair on the top of her head is thin, made thinner by the rain, and her scalp is pink.

  "I'm not Therese. I never will be Therese."

  "Oh, I know," she says, half sighing. And she does know it; I can see it in her face. "It's just that you look so much like her."

  I laugh. "I can dye my hair. Maybe get a nose job."

  "It wouldn't work, I'd still recognize you." She pops the lid and sets it aside. The cake is a wheel with icing that looks half an inch thick. Miniature candy carrots line the edge.

  "Wow, you made that before we left? Why?"

  Alice shrugs, and cuts into it. She turns the knife on its side and uses the blade to lever a huge triangular wedge onto my plate. "I thought we might need it, one way or another."

  She places the plate in front of me, and touches me lightly on the arm. "I know you want to move out. I know you may never want to come back."

  "It's not that I—"

  "'We're not going to stop you. But wherever you go, you'll be my daughter, whether you like it or not. You don't get to decide who loves you."

  "Alice…"

  "Shhh. Eat your cake."

  * * *

  The Canadian Who Came Almost all the Way Back from the Stars

  Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold

  Highly prolific new writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last couple of years, including Asimov's SCI FICTION, Interzone, Strange Horizons, The Third Alternative, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, and many other markets. He's produced enough short fiction to have already released four collections, even though his career is only a few years old: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, and Dogs in the Moonlight. He's the coedi-tor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, and has also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, and TEL: Stories. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. His most recent book is his first novel, R
ocket Science.

  New writer Ruth Nestvold is a graduate of Clarion West whose stories have appeared in Asimov's, SCI FICTION, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Futurismic, Fantastic Companions, and elsewhere. A former professor of English, she now runs a small software localization business in Stuttgart, Germany.

  Here they join forces to give us a surprising story that's about exactly what it says that it's about.

  * * *

  Kelly Maclnnes was pretty, prettier than I had expected. She had that sort of husky blond beauty I associated with the upper Midwest. Or in her case, the Canadian prairie.

  Together we stared out across Emerald Lake, one of those small mountain lakes jeweling western North America, framed by a vista of Douglas firs, longleaf pines, and granite peaks clawing their way into the echoing summer sky. Midway out on the lake, the water gathered into a visible depression, as if a huge weight had settled on it. The dimple was about forty feet in diameter and ten feet deep, perfectly flat at the bottom, with steeply angled sides like a giant inverted bottle cap. It had appeared five days after Nick Maclnnes had mysteriously called home three months ago — years after he was presumed dead.

  At which point Nick's widow had promptly dropped everything and come here to Yoho National Park in darkest British Columbia. "It looks unnatural." It was a dumb thing to say, but I didn't have much to offer. I was an intruder after all, a U.S. agent come to investigate phone call and dimple —and Mrs. Maclnnes.

  "It is unnatural," she replied. "A couple of weeks after it appeared, every fish in the lake had beached or moved downstream."

  I could imagine the rot. Such a stench seemed impossible in this mountain paradise. The air had the sharp tang of snow on pines, the flinty odor of wet rock, the absolute purity of the Canadian Rockies.

  But there was a lot that was impossible going on here. I had seen the satellite tracking reports —NORAD, NASA, ESA, even some Chinese data. The dimple had appeared, fish had died—something had happened—but there was no evidence of re-entry, no evidence of any precipitating event whatsoever. Only the hole in the lake in front of me.

  And a phone call that couldn't have happened, from a dead man lost in interstellar space.

  "You say your husband told you to come here." They'd all asked her the questions before: the RCMP, the Special Branch, the FBI, several U.N. High Commissions. Kelly Maclnnes had met her husband in college, where they both studied astrophysics, but her name had never been on any of his papers or patents. They asked her the questions anyway.

  And now it was my turn, on behalf of the NSA. We still didn't know what had happened out there in that lake, but we wanted to make sure no one else knew either. The first step had been to clear out the park—except for Kelly Maclnnes. My job wasn't as much to drag information out of her as it was to make sure it didn't get to anyone else first if she was moved to start talking.

  She stared out at the hole in the water, the unfilled grave of her absent husband. "He's not dead."

  I nodded. "I've read the transcripts—it's clear to me you believe that." Or at least you claim you do. "But, Mrs. Maclnnes, there is no evidence your husband survived his rather spectacular departure from earth six years ago."

  She hugged her plaid flannel jacket closer, her gaze drifting up to the sky. Despite the sun, the air was crisp. "The trip was supposed to take less than a week. Then six years after he left, he called and told me to meet him here. Just after 2:30 a.m. on April seventeenth, the center of the lake collapsed into that hole. That's what I know, Mr. Diedrich."

  I followed her stare toward the summer sky. Somewhere behind that perfect blue shell was an explanation for what happened to Nicholas Maclnnes.

  Too bad the sky wasn't talking today.

  Barnard's Star is slightly less than six light-years from Sol. A red dwarf, it is interesting only for its convenient position in the interstellar neighborhood and the fact that it is moving noticeably faster than any of our other stellar neighbors. Until Nick Maclnnes decided to go there six years ago.

  Four years prior to his launch, he'd published a paper in the Canadian Journal of Aerospace Engineering and Technology Applications, "Proposal for a Cost-Effective Method of Superluminal Travel." CJAETA was about one step above vanity publishing, and the article was soon well on its way to the dustbin of history.

  Recently, I had seen to it that all copies of Volume XXXVI, Issue 9, had been destroyed, along with computer files, Web sites, mirror sites, tape backups, printer plates, CD-ROMs, library microfiche archives, and everything else we could think of. Because one fine spring day, Nick Maclnnes, sometime mobile communications billionaire, made a space shot from a privately built and previously unknown launch site on the prairie east of Calgary, found his way into orbit on top of surplus Russian missile hardware, and did something that crashed a significant portion of the world's electronic infrastructure. At which point, he disappeared in a rainbow-colored flash visible across an entire hemisphere of the planet.

  It soon became known that he was carrying four surplus Russian M-2 nuclear warheads. "For the bomb-pumped lasers/' the Ph.Ds assisting Maclnnes said, as if the rest of the world were worrying excessively over trivialities.

  When I returned to Emerald Lake three months later to check on Kelly Maclnnes and security at the park, the Canadian Air Force and NASA were back. The CAF had flown a Lockheed Orion P-3C AIP over the lake back in late April and through most of May.

  Now, in October, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency had stuck some added instrumentation on it. They gave up on towed sonar after losing two rigs in the trees along the shoreline. Recon satellites had performed various kinds of imaging and discovered a significant gravitational anomaly at the bottom of Emerald Lake. Or maybe they hadn't. The dimple in the lake surface was caused by the stress of the anomaly. Or maybe not.

  There wasn't a ferrous body in the lake, but a significant mass concentration rested on the bottom, absorbing radar and creating weird thermal gradients. Wild theories were thrown around concerning polymerization of water, stress on molecular bonds, microscopic black holes, time singularities, and so on. There was some hard data about a heat rise in the center of the dimple, a heat rise that declined in temperature during the first three weeks of observation before leveling out about nine degrees centigrade above historical ambient surface temperature.

  Curiously, remote sensing indicated ice at the bottom of the lake in the area of the dimple. Cameras and instrument packages sent down didn't add much to the picture—the mascon was big, it was inert, and it distorted the lake's temperature profile.

  But then the search for additional meaningful data was complicated by the one incontrovertible thing discovered besides the heat rise: radioactive contamination. Everyone working at the lake was being exposed to radionuclides equivalent to three hundred rem a year, sixty times the permitted exposure level for workers in the United States. Well into cancer-causing territory, especially leukemia, but not enough to give you an immediate case of the pink pukes or make your hair fall out.

  When I heard, I sought out the CSA project manager in charge of the current phase of the investigation, Ray Vittori. I was no physicist, but I'd been a technology spook for years. This stank. "How in holy hell could you not have noticed this before?"

  Vittori shook his head. "It wasn't here before, Diedrich. Simple."

  I crossed my arms. Behind me, I thought I could feel Kelly Maclnnes smile, but I didn't bother to turn around to see if I was right. She mistrusted government institutions, including her own, but she loathed the United States government.

  As it was, we couldn't justify trucking the required diving equipment, mini-subs, and underwater instrumentation high into the Canadian Rockies to find out more about the dimple. So much data had already been collected that it would take years to analyze it in the first place. And the anomaly didn't seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. The radiation levels just complicated whatever case I might have made for inc
reased allocation of intelligence assets.

  The Orion went back to hunting subs in the maritime provinces. The think tanks went back to thinking somewhere else. Some cameras and sensors remained, wired in around the lakeshore, shooting telemetry back to my agency in Maryland. Other than that, only the satellites still provided us with information, along with the occasional research team willing to sign their souls away in indemnity clauses. A bare-bones contingent continued to secure the perimeters of the park, all volunteer agents at exorbitant pay for assurances that they wouldn't seek damages if they ever showed signs of sickness that could be attributed to radiation.

  By the time the first snow fell, I was left alone to observe the astonishing natural beauty of Yoho National Park and the equally attractive Mrs. Kelly Maclnnes. Just me, after all the attention and the hardware went away, with a dosimeter, a sixteen-foot bass boat, and lots of time.

  We ate corned beef hash and canned peaches in the echoing stillness of the lodge's dining hall. The worst of winter was past, but it was damned cold anyway, and we wore down jackets everywhere —and extra layers when we dared to go outside.

  "At least he picked a national park," I said, looking around the empty lodge. My visits to Emerald Lake had been getting longer and longer over the winter. The agency kept me largely free, since it was hard to get anyone else to come up here with the threat of contamination. Not to mention the godawful remoteness.

  And then there was Kelly. Nick knew what he was about, choosing this woman with the loyalty of a lioness. Though at times I rather imagined it was she who had done the choosing.

  She smiled. "Quiet place, facilities nearby, eh, Mr. Diedrich?"

  "I was thinking more in terms of access control. Difficult to secure and patrol private land."

  Her big laugh rang out louder than was natural in the empty spaces of the lodge. "Do you see anyone trying to violate your vaunted security in this godforsaken place?"

  I grimaced. A psychiatrist would probably have a field day with me —NSA spook falls for married woman who laughs at him.