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

by Gardner Dozois

  That was what they thought.

  But I knew the truth. I knew it as I watched Zima stand at the edge of the pool and surrender himself to the blue. He'd told me exactly how it would happen: the slow, methodical shutting down of higher-brain functions. It hardly mattered that it was all irreversible: there wouldn't be enough of him left to regret what he had lost.

  But something would remain: a little kernel of being; enough of a mind to recognise its own existence. Enough of a mind to appreciate its surroundings, and to extract some trickle of pleasure and contentment from the execution of a task, no matter how purposeless. He wouldn't ever need to leave the pool. The solar patches would provide him with all the energy he needed. He would never age, never grow ill. Other machines would take care of his island, protecting the pool and its silent slow swimmer from the ravages of weather and time.

  Centuries would pass.

  Thousands of years, and then millions.

  Beyond that, it was anyone's guess. But the one thing I knew was that Zima would never tire of his task. There was no capacity left in his mind for boredom. He had become pure experience. If he experienced any kind of joy in the swimming of the pool, it was the near-mindless euphoria of a pollinating insect. That was enough for him. It had been enough for him in that pool in California, and it was enough for him now, a thousand years later, in the same pool but on another world, around another sun, in a distant part of the same Galaxy.

  As for me…

  It turned out that I remembered more of our meeting on the island than I had any right to. Make of that what you will, but it seemed I didn't need the mental crutch of my AM quite as much as I'd always imagined. Zima was right: I'd allowed my life to become scripted, laid out like a blueprint. It was always red wine with sunsets, never the white. Aboard the outbound lightbreaker a clinic installed a set of neural memory extensions that should serve me well for the next four or five hundred years. One day I'll need another solution, but I'll cross that particular mnemonic bridge when I get there. My last act, before dismissing the AM, was to transfer its observations into the echoey new spaces of my enlarged memory. The events still don't feel quite like they ever happened to me, but they settle in a little bit better with each act of recall. They change and soften, and the highlights glow a little brighter. I guess they become a little less accurate with each instance of recall, but like Zima said: perhaps that's the point.

  I know now why he spoke to me. It wasn't just my way with a biographical story. It was his desire to help someone move on, before he did the same.

  I did eventually find a way to write his story, and I sold it back to my old newspaper, the Martian Chronicle. It was good to visit the old planet again, especially now that they've moved it into a warmer orbit.

  That was a long time ago. But I'm still not done with Zima, odd as it seems.

  Every couple of decades, I still hop a lightbreaker to Murjek, descend to the streets of that gleaming white avatar of Venice, take a conveyor to the island and join the handful of other dogged witnesses scattered across the stands. Those that come, like me, must still feel that the artist has something else in store… one last surprise. They've read my article now, most of them, so they know what that slowly swimming figure means… but they still don't come in droves. The stands are always a little echoey and sad, even on a good day. But I've never seen them completely empty, which I suppose is some kind of testament. Some people get it. Most people never will.

  But that's art.

  * * *

  Planet of the Amazon Women

  David Moles

  David Moles has lived in six time zones on three continents, and hopes some day to collect the whole set. His fiction and poetry have been published in Polyphony, Say..., Rabid Transit, Flytrap, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and Asimov's, as well as on Strange Horizons.

  * * *

  Planet of the Amazon Women. That's what Musa called it. He makes kinés, he has a keen sense of the ridiculous in art and history. When he found out I was on my way to Hippolyta he said nothing at first, only looked at me, black eyes serious in his dark face; looked at me, I think, until he was sure I was telling the truth. He covered my hand with his. Then, as if we had both said everything that needed to be said, he stood up abruptly.

  "Come on, Sasha," he said. "Let's go dancing."

  Musa. A chance meeting in the men's dormitory of an Erewhon orbital transit hostel. If I had met him when I was twenty he would have been the great love of my life.

  That is probably how I will remember him, if things on Hippolyta go half-right. If I grow old on the Planet of the Amazon Women, and die there.

  * * *

  There is something about the crew of the S.P.S. Tenacious, the picket ship that the Erewhon Republic has stationed in Hippolyta's system to prevent any excursion from the Planet of the Amazon Women, that is both comical and touching. They take themselves very seriously, with their crisp white uniforms and their military ranks and their short haircuts. (Most of them are human, and most of the humans are men—boys, really.) They take their job very seriously, too, with a certain pride that they are the only ones in this part of the Polychronicon interested in the problem: the universe may be dangerous and chaotic and very poorly organized, but the Republic, and the Navy, are up to the task.

  They're not, of course. The universe is so much more disorganized than these comic-opera astronauts could even imagine. That's what makes it so touching.

  "And this is the Operations Center," Lieutenant Addison tells me. "Where we control the sensor platforms and the particle-beam satellites. We've never had to use them, thank God."

  Addison looks at me, and I look at the room full of complicated equipment and focused young men and nod as if I knew what I was looking at. Already I am practicing my imposture, preparing myself for Hippolyta. This is a dance, and I am improvising it.

  Satisfied, Addison turns to indicate the next point of interest, and I turn back to watching Addison. He's skinny and cute and can't be more than twenty-five. He doesn't know what to say to a civilian who's volunteered for a suicide mission, but he's trying.

  * * *

  A century ago on Hippolyta, something called Amazon Fever killed thirteen hundred million men and boys. Hundreds of millions of women and girls died as well, slain indirectly, by the chaos that came in the Fever's wake.

  No one knows now who started the Fever, or what they were trying to do: whether it was intentional—an attempt at an attack, or a revolution—or accidental—an industrial mishap, or a probability experiment gone awry, or even an archaeological discovery. But when it came it came suddenly, sweeping across Hippolyta in less than a year, in its progress less like a disease than like a curse. It defied drugs and vaccines and quarantines, brushing past exploration-grade immune enhancements as if they were so many scented medieval nosegays. It seemed to be transmitted not only by the afflicted but by their possessions, not only by their possessions but by objects associated with them only distantly, or symbolically.

  There were even isolated cases, reported but never confirmed, of the Fever appearing light-years away, in people who had never been to Hippolyta. Sometimes a connection to Hippolyta could be proved—years in the past, long before the first appearance of the Fever. Other times there was no apparent connection at all.

  A diversion that most undergraduate mathematicians encounter is the idea—an easy one to demonstrate, logically—that given a single contradiction, one can prove the truth or falsehood of any proposition. The fall of the causality barrier has given us all the contradictions any mathematician could wish for. This is the one fundamental truth—and falsehood—of the universe.

  Even if most of us, like the level-headed crew of the Tenacious, deny it—pretending we still live in a universe where one thing happens after another.

  What I suspect, though it is not something anyone can ever prove, is that in those apparently unconnected cases, the connection lay not in the past, but in the future. In a pot
ential future, foreclosed now by the Fever itself.

  It's not strictly accurate to say that Amazon Fever killed all the men. To say that is to use an old-fashioned shorthand, a too-simple understanding of sex and gender. The proximate cause of death in cases of Amazon Fever was sudden, pervasive tissue rejection—the result of the molecules making up the body acquiring a new virtual history, at the Planck scale and unevenly. It wasn't just men and boys that Amazon Fever killed. What it killed was anyone or anything whose immune system was unable to recognize cells that no longer came—that, all of a sudden, had never come—from an evolutionary line based on sexual reproduction.

  The Fever killed male cats, dogs, insects, birds, fish, gingkoes, date palms, malarial gametocytes. Wherever it struck, it destroyed the entire basis of sexual difference. Most observers—who by this point were doing their observing by remote, from twenty light-minutes away—expected animal life on Hippolyta, humanity included, to go extinct in a generation.

  But it didn't.

  * * *

  On the real-time maps the Tenacious uses there is a blank place, in the northeast of Aella Continent—Hippolyta's second largest, and the place of oldest settlement. This I can read: the swirl of weather and the slow-moving lights of tracked targets giving way to static survey data, a century old and more.

  "How close to here"—on a projected globe, my fingers brush the center of the discontinuity—"can you set me down?"

  Lieutenant Addison looks embarrassed.

  "Not very, I'm afraid," he says. "Our equipment doesn't function well that deep into the causal anomaly." He gestures at the globe. "You can see we don't have any current data for that area. No probes, since simultaneity channels don't operate across the probability boundary; and even passive sensors aren't reliable."

  I nod, a little disappointed; but it's no more than I expected, or I wouldn't have brought the mules.

  Addison scrutinizes the globe for a moment and selects a point on the southern coast, a few hundred kilometers from the center of the anomaly. In the Ezheler lands.

  "What about here, near the coast road?" he asks. "You can make your way by native transport from there."

  "That will certainly test my disguise."

  Addison looks uncomfortable. He turns back to the globe.

  "Well, I—"

  "No," I interrupt. "The coast road is fine."

  I will have to dance a little faster, that's all.

  In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the Hegira, before my ancestors came to Islam, they flirted briefly with Hegel. Perhaps in hoping, by resolving the contradictions of Hippolyta, to resolve the contradictions at the heart of the universe, I have fallen into that old heresy: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. If so, so be it. As a natural philosopher, I am expected to face up to the universe's hard truths. As a Russian, I am expected to be a fatalist and a romantic. As a Moslem, I am expected to place my faith in the All-Merciful.

  To deny the contradictions—as Musa understood, and as I would never be able to explain to Lieutenant Addison—is not an option that is open to me.

  * * *

  In the little cabin I have stolen from some junior officer, I strip off my borrowed Republic coverall. There is no mirror, but a projector shows me a reversed image, shadowy, as if my double stood in a darkened corridor. I meet my double's eyes.

  "Goodbye, Sasha," we tell each other.

  Goodbye to Sasha Rusalev of Odessa, ballet cavalier and natural philosopher.

  I am Yazmina Tanzikbayeva now, Ezheler muleteer and coca trader.

  Hippolyta was already an old world when the Fever came, old with the kind of impossible age that is common out here, the kind that vigorous and serious young civilizations like the Republic worry about and that most of the rest of us ignore. When Hippolyta was terraformed and settled (if it was terraformed and settled—there are causality violations in Hippolyta's early history, too), a kaleidoscope of nations made it their home: cultures from every part of the Islamic 'umma and outside it as well, landing here and there, merging, fragmenting, trading, stealing, fighting little wars, making peace—millennia of history compressed into a few generations.

  The Ezheler are nomadic herders who live in the southern mountains and high plains of Aella Continent. Chronically low fertility—a factor of distance from the center of Hippolyta's causal anomaly—keeps them nomadic, just as it keeps their richer neighbors, such as the Chinese speakers in Tieshan, from expanding into their territory. The Ezheler are Muslims, and speak a Turkic language influenced by Russian and Farsi.

  I grew up in Odessa; Russian and Turkish were my native languages. A set of Consilium neural implants and a few months of study have me speaking the language of the Ezheler as well as any off-worlder ever will without living among them.

  But the thing that really drew me to the Ezheler, when I was planning this, was their clothes.

  I dress in cotton and leather and linen and silk. I have practiced this; it comes back to me now, like the steps of a dance. Cotton underwear, first, unbleached; red cotton trousers, much coarser; soft calf-high boots; white cotton blouse embroidered with red; and finally, the burka, the violet-dyed linen veil/robe that covers everything from hair to eyes to ankles.

  Most of the Muslims of Aella follow the customs of hijab, to a degree: they wear the khimar in public, and some wear the abaya. But the Ezheler are among the few who wear the full burka, and only among the Ezheler is it never removed, even among family.

  I straighten the burka, trying to find the position that lets me see the most through the lace-bordered veil. My muscles are alive with false memories, a combination of generic feminine movements and simulated Ezheler kinesthetics created from Consilium ethnologists' AV recordings.

  There are technologies, readily available, with which I could have rebuilt myself completely, from the chromosomes upward—making part of my disguise impenetrable, no longer deception but the truth. (Undoubtedly there are women on Hippolyta today whose ancestors, in the first days of the Fever, did just that.) I could preserve not only my disguise, but my life.

  But in doing so, I would prove nothing. If it were enough to test my hypotheses with equations and proofs, I could have done it from the safety of my rooms in Petersburg. I must test them with myself.

  Besides, as my old ballet master used to say, for a swan there is no art in being a swan.

  It helps that my audience will not expect me to be anything else.

  * * *

  Four hours later Lieutenant Addison is belting me into the capsule that will take me to Hippolyta. The capsule is made for inserting Marine commandos behind enemy lines, or something similarly exciting and dangerous. It seems to me that for landing on Hippolyta, the capsule is overkill—especially since it will have to be abandoned, and perhaps destroyed. But Addison is feeling guilty that he can't take me exactly where I want to go, and his people have seemed to enjoy themselves so much—programming the capsule's camouflage, plotting a course to minimize the chance that someone will see me entering the atmosphere—that I haven't the heart to object.

  There is supposed to be room in the capsule for a half-dozen armored Marines and their equipment, but except for the medical equipment, my gear isn't built to Republic specifications. After it has all been packed in around me, Addison, to shake my hand, has to lean awkwardly over a plastic-wrapped bale that might hold rice or dried apricots or coca leaves.

  He looks around the cramped capsule one more time, the trade goods, the medical pods, the two mules in their cocoons, the half-felt presence of the quantum inference engines. Then he looks down at me.

  "Well," he says, with a helpless shrug, "good luck, then."

  Then he leans back, and the hatch closes, and the capsule swings out on its track, and at last they let me go.

  * * *

  The capsule is three days and fifty kilometers behind me, camouflaged and buried at the bottom of a dry creekbed, when I pick up the road to the coast. The coast road is older, harder than t
he narrow dirt track I have been following out of the dry hills: concrete laid down before the coming of the Fever and cracked now into broken slabs by a century of summers and winters. The grass of the shoulder is brown, tramped down into a footpath, and I guide the mules along that softer way, to spare their hooves and ankles. I can see the tracks of others before me, in the dirt.

  A simultaneity channel links the medical pods, buried with the capsule, to telemetry implants laced through my body, and tells me that so far I am healthy, sore muscles and saddle galls aside. This is Republic technology, simple and reliable, and the pods will probably survive me, whatever happens. The inference engines, more delicate and abstract, I carry with me. They were made in Damascus, and their existence is largely mathematical; it is not likely they will be noticed by anyone who does not know to look for them. For now they are quiet, their transformation of local phase space still undisturbed. I am a kink in the braid of improbability that makes Hippolyta what it is, a bubble of reality suspended in the medium of the unreal.