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

by Gardner Dozois

  "Look at the way it's steaming," she said, hardly glancing at me as she took a peanut butter and jelly. "Things are getting even warmer down there."

  "Hm." I stared across the water, at the steam rising above the lake. It wasn't that hot, but there was enough temperature differential with the air to build miniature fog banks that rolled down inside the dimple and occasionally crept out. The first snow had not yet fallen, but the days were near freezing now. "You expecting anything?"

  "Entropic progression is speeding up," she said instead of answering my question. "Coming up on the sixth anniversary of Nick's return."

  Perhaps it was an answer.

  By the time the snow started melting again in late March, the dimple was so wide and shallow it spilled onto the shores of Emerald Lake and it was developing a noticeable bulge in the middle. The water was quite warm.

  The research teams had mostly disappeared over the winter. Alone again, Kelly and I had settled into a routine a lot like an old marriage —subdued acrimony, half-secrets, and mutual celibacy—so I was surprised when she came looking for me in my room in the lodge one day7 with that huge smile I hadn't seen in a year.

  I fell in love all over again.

  "Bruce, can you help me with something?"

  I tossed aside the tablet computer with the report I was writing. "Sure."

  She led me down to the tree fort. In front of the trunk stood a big plastic shipping crate with rusted catches. I had never seen it before, although I recognized the chain saw and the plastic gas can next to it. There was fresh dirt clinging to the crate.

  "What's this?"

  "Something I buried a long time ago," Kelly said. "When I first got here."

  Almost six years in the middle of nowhere together, and she starts pulling crates out of the ground? Entropic progression, my ass.

  She was undoing the latches of the crate. "I need to get this up to the observatory. Do you think we can construct some kind of pulley system?"

  "Okay. But what is it?"

  "See for yourself," she said, throwing open the top. As I watched, she drew out a nice Celestron G-8 Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope.

  "What are we waiting for?" It was cold as hell in the tree fort in the middle of the night, and Emerald Lake sounded like it was bubbling in the dark.

  "April 8, 2:30 a.m." Kelly trained the flashlight on her watch. "Which is in about twenty minutes."

  I stared up at the stars. "He told you something in that phone call, didn't he?"

  Her nod was little more than a shifting shadow. "There was more of a mission profile than we admitted."

  I didn't miss the we. "You were part of it all along."

  Kelly turned away from the Celestron, trained on Ophiuchus, low in the southern sky this time of year. "We had contingency plans."

  Mission or no mission, she was finally showing me the core of her, the part she had kept hidden all these years. "So tell me."

  She sighed, one hand trailing down the barrel of the telescope. "Obviously, we couldn't test his drive in advance. Nick was pretty sure he'd get a simultaneous translation to Barnard's Star, but he couldn't predict when he'd come out. One analysis said he'd just show up, the other that he had to wait out a lightspeed lag in a state of reduced entropy. Nothing's for free in nature, right? When he didn't come back right away, I knew he was waiting out the lag."

  Assuming he hadn't just croaked out there in the depths of space in the violent spray of energy with which his homebuilt starship had departed. I shook my head. "How did he make the phone call from Barnard's Star?"

  She laughed, her real laugh. And then I understood —the thing out there in the lake, the dimple, the mascon—that wasn't just a symbol of a man, someone I could compete with. No, that was her dream, the dream she shared with Nick Maclnnes.

  "The same paired-quantum effects that allow the drive to function can be used to open an electromagnetic channel," she lectured me. "We tested that here on earth. Once he got to Barnard's, Nick used a satellite phone with a virtual antenna that could hit the orbital network he'd built years earlier in our telecomm days. It totally blows Einsteinian simultaneity."

  It dawned on me how ridiculous it was that a man went to the stars and called home on a cell phone. "You can say that again."

  "It's how I knew we got the math right." In the dark, a ghost of a smile. "He didn't blow up when he got there. He called, promised to come home." Kelly leaned over, handing me what appeared to be a fat manila envelope. "Here."

  "What is it?"

  "Schematics, mission profile, the data about the cost-effective drive none of you believed in. Just in case things don't work out."

  Things don't work out? What things? Her very slow entropic progression, presumably. I squeezed the envelope, checking the thickness of the paper, then slipped it inside my shirt. "Why me? Why now? I'm the enemy."

  She put her face back against the eyepiece of the telescope. "Yeah, you are the enemy. You and all your government kind. But I also know you're an honorable guy. I've been hanging out here all these years to keep someone like you from messing things up. But you turned out okay, Bruce."

  I swallowed. That was more than she had ever given me before.

  She went on. "You're also a survivor. If it turns out we're wrong about something important, you'll get the data to the Canadian people for us."

  I had questions, dozens, hundreds of questions about the documents in the envelope, but the warm, rotten reek from the lake bothered me too much to ask them. The Canadian Rockies in April are not supposed to smell like a Louisiana summer. After years of just sitting around, it was all coming together, too fast.

  "Ophiuchus. You're looking for Barnard's Star. It's about six light years, right?"

  "Five point nine seven," she said without moving her head. She had her telescope where she wanted it and was staring intently. "Five years and three hundred and fifty-five days. Plus a few hours."

  Emerald Lake was definitely bubbling now, like a pot on to boil. "Which is now, right?"

  "Five minutes, give or take a slight margin of error."

  "And you expect…"

  Her smile gleamed at me briefly in the darkness before she turned her face back to the eyepiece. "A sign set in the heavens."

  I suddenly remembered the bomb-pumped lasers. Below us, Emerald Lake was in full boil. Literally. The reeking steam was the mud bottom being cooked.

  "Christ," I whispered. "You're watching for the laser light. He set off the Russian nukes, then hit his drive and came home."

  "Got it. You Americans aren't all dumb after all. He'll be home a few seconds after we see the laser light."

  I finally understood the slowly growing heat rise in the lake —it was energy leakage from whatever that mascon really was, some very exotic bloc of matter, a giant quark, something. Nick had been back for the last six years, wrapped in an indeterminate envelope of arrested entropy, sitting out reality in his lightspeed lag. Traveling through space and time, waiting for the equations to balance out and spit him out.

  Kelly's husband was down in the bottom of the lake—literally waiting for his time to come.

  The lake bottom. "He came out in hard vacuum, somewhere near Barnard's Star, right?"

  "Yeah… cometary orbit…" She wasn't really listening.

  "Why not come back to vacuum here?"

  "Reentry," she said absently. "Added an entire layer of complexity and design requirements. Throw weight for the launch, all kinds of issues. We figured on translating straight home."

  Right smack in the middle of a much, much higher density of matter than the single hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter he would have encountered out in deep space. The burst of his arrival at Barnard's would have been nothing but a light show. Back here, though… I was no physicist, but even I could imagine the energy gradient coming together when his wave front finally collapsed out there in the lake.

  "Kelly," I said, my voice as calm as I could make it. "Nick's ship is exploding. It's be
en exploding for six years, very, very, very slowly—that's what the dimple has been. In three minutes, it's going to explode in real time."

  "He didn't bring the nukes back." Kelly's voice was dreamy. "The ship was set to ditch them before reengaging the drive. Just in case he couldn't set them off."

  "Nukes or no nukes, something is blowing up. We have to go, now." I reviewed the escape routes, paths to higher ground versus how far we could get in my Ford Explorer parked up by the lodge. "I said no nukes," Kelly replied absently, still peering through the Celestron.

  "To hell with the nukes. He's carrying too much potential energy out there, without a hard vacuum to bleed it off into!"

  Agonized, I could hear the smile in her voice. "The math worked. He got there, he'll get back. I have to be here to meet him."

  She had a scientist's faith in the numbers, damn her—and a lover's faith in the future. "For Christ's sake, no matter what the numbers tell you, Nick's ship is blowing up. Emerald Lake will be coming down around our heads." Was there such a thing as a quantum explosion?

  "No. We modeled everything. We knew if he got there, he'd get back, and —Hey! Barnard's Star is getting brighter! I can see Nick's lasers!"

  "Kelly, come on!" I broke my cardinal rule for dealing with her and tried to force the issue. Grabbing her arm, I pulled her away from the telescope, but she whirled on me. Her fist connected with my jaw.

  "I'm not leaving, Bruce. You're afraid, you run."

  And to my shame, I did. The instinct for survival won out, and I found myself scrambling down the ladder and running up the incline away from the lake and the disaster I was almost sure was about to occur. I decided against taking the extra time to find the Ford and get it started and just kept running uphill, for all the seconds left to me, leaving the woman I loved behind with her telescope and her dimple and her long-lost husband.

  And then the lake exploded.

  I groaned myself awake in a puddle of mud, wondering how long I had been lying there. What had once been Emerald Lake was awash with light, and I heard the chattering of a helicopter in the distance.

  I had gotten far enough away. I was alive.

  And Kelly almost certainly was not.

  About a quarter mile away, I saw the remains of the lodge, splintered timbers rising above a sea of mud, a nightmare landscape of shadows and destruction glowing in a spotlight from above. With all that radioactive lake bottom blown everywhere, this place was a real hot zone now.

  I pushed myself up, every joint screaming in protest. Coughing water out of my sinuses, or maybe blood, I turned to head back in the direction of the shore.

  A pale glow in front of me turned out to be Marge, finding her way through the debris with a red-filtered flashlight. She was wearing street clothes —a knee-length skirt, for the love of God, out here. "Glad to see you survived, Bruce."

  And right behind her was Ray Vittori, the project manager from the Canadian Space Agency—who had told us about the radioactivity coming from the dimple in the first place.

  And Vittori was in shirtsleeves, despite all the blown mud. God damn was I an idiot. So much for the radionuclides. No wonder my Geiger counters never worked right—they'd had to rig them up back at the agency. Hell, even J could think of three or four ways to fake a dosimeter.

  "Nice to see you again, Agent Diedrich," Vittori said. "Although the circumstances could certainly be better."

  I just stared at him.

  He held out his hand, but it wasn't for a shake. It was palm up, expecting something. "I'll take those documents now."

  "What-?"

  Marge smiled, teeth gleaming pink in the flashlit darkness as she lit a cigarette. "Microphones, Bruce. You should know better."

  Yeah, I did know better. Passive surveillance was cheap. They could have wired the entire Canadian Rockies for sound during the time I'd been hanging around here.

  I looked from Marge to Vittori. Kelly had said I should give the documents to the Canadian people, but I didn't think this was what she had in mind.

  "There never was any radioactive fallout." My voice sounded as dead as I felt.

  Vittori shook his head. "No."

  "But why?"

  He shrugged, finally lowering his expectant hand. "We already had all the data we were going to get from the dimple, Diedrich. All that was left was the woman."

  The woman.

  Kelly Maclnnes, a laughing woman who had lived and died for a dream and a long-lost husband.

  "Oh, God," I said, remembering someone else who was dead.

  "Sergeant Perry—?"

  Marge's expression hardened, and she took another drag on her cigarette. "Died in a hunting accident, Bruce. Headed the wrong way, you might say."

  Hunting accident. Perry had been ready to say too much. I turned to her with the same question I'd asked Vittori: "Why?"

  "There are plenty of people on both sides of the border who will do a lot for a working star drive."

  For Nick Maclnnes's plans, which we had all rejected twelve years ago. The Canadian who had made it almost all the way home from the stars.

  With a sigh, I sat down on a shattered log, cruddy and mossy from the lake. Wedged behind it, I noticed a plastic gas container, the top still on.

  "Can I bum a cigarette from you, Marge?"

  "You quit years ago." Her voice was impatient.

  "I need one now." I hugged myself, cold and wet in the dark April night. The envelope crinkled under my shirt, the one accurate record of Maclnnes's cost-effective method of superluminal travel.

  Marge held a lit cigarette out to me. I took it. "Thanks."

  "Now smoke it and let's get going. There are some very important people waiting for you in Washington."

  She turned to Vittori, whispering something I couldn't hear. Cigarette clenched between my lips, I twisted around and unscrewed the cap, pouring the liquid on the ground.

  It didn't smell right—muddy lake water. The container must have cracked from the force of the blast. I threw my cigarette into it. The butt fizzled and went out.

  "You ready?" Marge asked.

  I nodded. Pulling the envelope out of my shirt, I handed it over to the Canadian.

  Some Canadian. I couldn't fool myself into thinking that it was what Kelly had wanted.

  As we walked toward the helicopter, I realized I could no longer remember the sound of her laugh.

  * * *

  Triceratops Summer

  Michael Swanwick

  Michael Swanwick made his debut in 1980, and, in the twenty-five years that have followed, has established himself as one of SF's most prolific and consistently excellent writers at short lengths, as well as one of the premier novelists of his generation. He has won the Theodore Sturgeon Award and the Asimov's Readers Award poll. In 1991, his novel Stations of the Tide won him a Nebula Award as well, and in 1995 he won the World Fantasy Award for his story "Radio Waves." He's won the Hugo Award four times between 1999 and 2003, for his stories "The Very Pulse of the Machine," "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," "The Dog Said Bow-Wow," and "Slow Life." His other books include the novels In the Drift, Vacuum Flowers, The Iron Dragons Daughter (which was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a rare distinction!), Jack Faust, and, most recently, Bones of the Earth, as well as a novella-length book, Griffins Egg. His short fiction has been assembled in Gravity's Angels, A Geography of Unknown Lands, Slow Dancing Through Time (a collection of his collaborative short work with other writers); Moon Dogs, Puck Aleshire's Abecedary, Tales of Old Earth, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, and Michael Swanwick's Field Guide to the Mesozoic Megafauna. He's also published a collection of critical articles, The Postmodern Archipelago, and a book-length interview, Being Gardner Dozois. His most recent book is a new collection, The Periodic Table of SF, and he is at work on a new novel. He's had stories in our Second, Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Thirteenth through Twenty-first Annual Collections. Swanwick lives in Philadelphia with his
wife, Marianne Porter. He has a Web site at www.michaelswanwick.com.

  Here's a poignant and lyrical reaffirmation of the idea that sometimes it matters more how you spend your time than how much time you have to spend…

  * * *

  The dinosaurs looked all wobbly in the summer heat shimmering up from the pavement. There were about thirty of them, a small herd of what appeared to be Triceratops. They were crossing the road —don't ask me why—so I downshifted and brought the truck to a halt, and waited.

  Waited and watched.

  They were interesting creatures, and surprisingly graceful for all their bulk. They picked their way delicately across the road, looking neither to the right nor the left. I was pretty sure I'd correctly identified them by now—they had those three horns on their faces. I used to be a kid. I'd owned the plastic models.

  My next-door neighbor, Gretta, who was sitting in the cab next to me with her eyes closed, said, "Why aren't we moving?"

  "Dinosaurs in the road," I said.

  She opened her eyes.

  "Son of a bitch," she said.

  Then, before I could stop her, she leaned over and honked the horn, three times. Loud.

  As one, every Triceratops in the herd froze in its tracks, and swung its head around to face the truck.

  I practically fell over laughing.

  "What's so goddamn funny?" Gretta wanted to know. But I could only point and shake my head helplessly, tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks.

  It was the frills. They were beyond garish. They were as bright as any circus poster, with red whorls and yellow slashes and electric orange diamonds—too many shapes and colors to catalog, and each one different. They looked like Chinese kites! Like butterflies with six-foot wingspans! Like Las Vegas on acid! And then, under those carnival-bright displays, the most stupid faces imaginable, blinking and gaping like brain-damaged cows. Oh, they were funny, all right, but if you couldn't see that at a glance, you never were going to.