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

by Gardner Dozois

  "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, Rocket 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 l
eft, 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 increased 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.

  But what a magnificent laugh it was.

  I lowered my forkful of peach. "Why are you still here in this godforsaken place?" Kelly still had plenty of money—Nick's misadventures in orbit had barely depleted his fortunes, even after the staggering fines assessed against his estate for sundry air traffic and orbital protocol violations. She could have checked on the dimple then headed for Tahiti.

  She cocked her head. "I could ask the same question, with more justification. I'm waiting for my husband, making sure you lot don't muck up his chances of returning. Keeping my eye on the dimple. What are you waiting for, Mr. Diedrich? Why do you keep coming back?"

  I couldn't give her a true answer, not one that she would accept.

  The melting of the snow was like a revelation.

  Patches of green appeared in the unremitting white of the landscape just as the first anniversary of Nick Maclnnes's telephone call from the stars approached.

  In celebration of one or the other, Kelly and I hiked out to the lake to inspect the dimple. All winter long, it hadn't frozen over, despite the blankets of snow on all sides, despite the fact that other lakes in the region were solid sheets of ice.

  The dimple still appeared much as it had the first day I had seen it, even with the snow on the north side of the lake—wide, unnatural, a mystery to be solved.

  And the key stood
next to me.

  "In some ways I'm waiting for the same thing as you, you know," I said finally.

  She was silent for a long time. I knew she understood me —during the time we had spent together over the last winter, we had developed that odd pattern of shortcuts and silences that many married couples use to communicate. I just barely remembered it from my own failed marriage.

  She nodded out at the dimple. "You were born in the United States?"

  Non sequitur. We had advanced to those as well. But I still didn't know where she was going with this. "Yes."

  "You've been on the winning team all your life. You don't have a clue what it's like to be Canadian, having the world's biggest brother next door." A hare hopped into our line of vision. I watched it make tracks in the snow left in the sun's shadow.

  "The United States," Kelly continued, not looking at me. "The 'we did it first' country. You build the space shuttle, we build a robot arm. Canada makes another contribution to progress."

  She seemed to expect a serious answer. I didn't give it to her.

  "And now your government keeps sending you here to babysit me. Because the hard men with the bright lights didn't learn anything."

  "No one is forcing me."

  She gave me a look that asked me whom I thought I was kidding, one eyebrow raised and her wide lips somewhere close to a smile. "No, but I know why you're here. You hate it, the whole world hates it, but especially you Yanks. You hate that a Canadian went to the stars first, without you."

  She was partly right.

  But only partly.

  Kelly was a hard nut to crack, laughter or no laughter. It wasn't until we'd been alone together regularly for almost a year before she started calling me by my first name.

  Even though I had been waiting for it for what seemed forever, I almost didn't notice. We were out on the lake in the park's Ranger Cherokee to take some measurements of our own of the surface temperature near the dimple, cross-checking the instruments. My Geiger counter kept acting up —the third one the agency had sent me —but there was nothing wrong with our old-fashioned thermometers.