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

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  It's true that, in some sense, the idea that a history could differ so many billions of years ago as to completely change the evolution of multicellular life, and yet produce this present—a present in which these women, indisputably human, walk through the streets of this city, like any human city I have known, speaking languages I learned from men—is, to an approximation of many, many decimal places, simply impossible.

  But the impossible often has an integrity that the merely improbable lacks.

  I've come this far; too much is irreversible now.

  * * *

  I stop a slim, dark young woman with Central American cheekbones and professional black and white clothes, and in Arabic I ask her if she can tell me which way is north.

  "That way," she says, pointing. "Up the stairs."

  Ahead the bank rises steeply, and there is a broad stone staircase that leads in flights up the slope next to the bridge.

  I realize I have been hoping she would point up or down the river. Something of this must be showing in my posture, because the woman smiles apologetically, and gives a helpless shrug.

  "Where are you going?" she asks.

  I look up and down the river, and back at the boat, and up the stairs, and back to the woman.

  "I'm not sure," I tell her. "It's my first time in Erethea."

  "There's a visitors' center in Khawlah Road," she offers. "Up the stairs, then left—that's Ste.-Jeanne Street—then right at the first roundabout. It's got signs in five languages; you can't miss it. They can find you a hotel."

  It's as good an idea as any.

  "Thank you," I tell her.

  "Peace."

  * * *

  Up. The stairs are small, built to a shorter stride than mine, and in other times I might have taken them two or three at a time. Now I shuffle under the weight of the bag and the fever—the Fever, I mean; I can't pretend any more that that isn't what it is. The chills come in waves. The air is warm, little less warm than down in the delta, and gravid with the nearness of the river, but I am remembering my second year of university and a walking trip in the foothills of the Pamirs, hunched against a bitter wind, my boots slipping on the first ice of autumn, my steps measured in centimeters and in the mounting fear that the next one will send me sliding into the kilometer-deep abyss beside us; measured in the certainty of death.

  Somehow I survived that. Somehow I survive this, too, and come out at the top of the stairs, shaking with exhaustion and with the latest wave of chills. I come out, and have my first glimpse of the sky.

  "God." The word is involuntary, forced out of me through chattering teeth.

  Beyond the street lights, beyond the ordered stars of the towers it rises, a slender ribbon of moonlight-silver becoming burnished gold where it rises above the shadow of the horizon, tapering almost to invisibility but refusing even in my blurred and shaking vision to disappear. At its apex, at right angles, it meets another ribbon, a ring of gold.

  A space elevator, and an equatorial ring station.

  The ring is an arch that extends from horizon to horizon. There is no possibility that I could have missed seeing it before. I would have seen it from the Tenacious. I would have seen it from Haiming. From any point on Hippolyta it would have been the brightest thing in the sky.

  (Somewhere in the back of my mind, the mental model of the causal anomaly that I have spent ten years constructing suddenly expands wildly, acquiring three, four, five extra dimensions. . .)

  My resolution dissolves. I tear my gaze from the impossible ring and suddenly I am running, back toward the river, away from the sky. Behind me, women's raised voices, startled or angry or concerned.

  The burka constricts my vision to a narrow slit. No peripheral vision. The bridge. I'm on the bridge. I can't find the stairs.

  I turn and look back and the ring is still there.

  Hallucination. Delirium is one of the symptoms of Amazon Fever.

  "Delirium is —" I brush up against someone, and I turn to explain "— one of the symptoms —" Who am I talking to? I can't see anything through this damned veil. I stumble, and look down into the face of a sturdy blonde matron, dressed in red, looking exactly like the Queen of England, when we danced The Once and Future King for her at Glastonbury.

  "I was Lancelot," I tell her, no longer sure whether I am speaking Arabic or Turkish or Russian. "It was magnificent." I spin around, managing just one half-turn of a pirouette à la seconde before losing my balance.

  The Queen takes my arm, frowning with concern. "You need help," she says, earnestly, and I don't need to know what language she's speaking to understand.

  "It's this damned veil," I explain, apologetically. "I can't see a thing through it." I pull away from the woman's grip and start gathering the folds of cloth, trying to pull the burka over my head. "Why the hell didn't you stop wearing them when we died?"

  I know that's unfair, the Queen of England wasn't wearing a burka—what was she wearing? A round hat, with flowers. I try to apologize, to tell her how much I like her hat, but the cloth is muffling my voice and I give up. "I give up!" I let the cloth drop, and turn to the Queen to let her know I give up.

  Lights, in the corner of my eye, through the lace. I'm in the street.

  "I'm in the street!" I yell. "These fucking veils!"

  There is a screeching of tires. Someone grabs my arm, and I remember something from elementary school.

  "The rate of pedestrian traffic fatalities in Kabul, in the fourteenth century of the Hegira —" I start to say, and all of a sudden, before I can finish, I am on my back, flat on the ground, the wind knocked out of me. Smell of bruised grass. City lights above me in the night. Women's voices, all around me.

  "Is she hurt?"

  "Someone call an ambulance!"

  The lights rush in on me, expanding to fill all the world.

  * * *

  I can hear them, though I am blind.

  "Temperature forty point five," the hospital's doctor says, sounding as though she's talking into a microphone. "Heart rate one-ten. Blood pressure. . ."

  "Perhaps it's some kind of autoimmune reaction." Another woman's voice, a familiar one. Beautiful Arabic, like a scholar.

  "Maryam?" I croak.

  Her hand on my forehead, strong and cool. "Dr. Orbay called me," she says. "They found her address in your bag. Hush now, Yazmina. I'll take care of you."

  The hospital's doctor is talking over her. ". . .one-fifty over eighty. If you're right. . ." I imagine the doctor shaking her head. "There's not much we can do here except try to get her stable. Maybe they can do something for her off-planet."

  Through my closed eyelids I see the arch again. An accelerator ring, a jumping-off point for starships. Hippolyta's was destroyed at the start of the quarantine. But there it is. Not a place, so much as a gateway.

  To where?

  I think of Lancelot again, halted at the door of the Grail Chapel, granted a glimpse of what he would never touch.

  The nurses strip me, wash me, wrap me again in what are probably soft felt blankets, though they feel like steel wool against my fevered skin. I wait for some reaction to my anatomy—shock? outrage? disgust?—but it never comes.

  A needle pricks my arm.

  I can almost sleep.

  * * *

  I was wrong to define my own history as real, Hippolyta's as unreal—to define mine as Self and Hippolyta's as Other. That is what the inference engines were trying to tell me.

  There is no past that is not in some sense a lie. We see the past through the distortion of memory and imagination. We collaborate in its conscious distortion through history and propaganda. We see the laws of cause and effect violated not only each time a starship bends space-time but also each time we view the incomplete records of the past with our teleological modern eyes, imbuing them with presentiments of the future that is our own present, a thing which itself we never see or understand except as imperfect fragments. We tell ourselves that we sea
rch for truth when what we are concerned with is in fact nothing more than plausibility.

  I called Hippolyta's history virtual, but that is semantics. Whether the causal anomaly created that history, or whether it only connected us to something that always existed, somewhere, somehow—is probably not even a meaningful question.

  The women of Hippolyta have a story they tell about themselves, and it does not include men.

  That I exist is enough to prove the story false.

  That Hippolyta exists is enough to prove the story true.

  I am the flaw in the calculation, the hidden assumption that invalidates the proof.

  That is why I am dying. To balance an equation.

  * * *

  "Hush," Maryam says, in Arabic, as she lays a damp cloth across my forehead. I must have said some of that aloud.

  "Not long, now," I whisper. When the end comes, it will come quickly.

  I wonder what would happen if Liwen were to launch her rockets from here. Would Lieutenant Addison and the Tenacious still be waiting? If not—if the rockets, launched, would find themselves in some other space-time altogether, rotated through some set of higher dimensions—what would that mean? That Hippolyta is as much a Gordian knot from this side as from the other?

  If the knot is ever untied, it will be untied from this side.

  "Little daughter," Maryam says. "Hush."

  And does that other side exist? Did it ever? How would I prove it?

  I try to remember the name of the prophet in the Qu'ran, the one whose sister the Jews and Christians called Maryam. The name of the woman I met in the Erewhon transit hostel, the maker of kinés. She brought the Bani Israil out of Egypt, but died on the banks of the Jordan. If I was to take a name it should have been that one, and not Yazmina.

  Maryam puts her hand in mine. I try to remember if she knows that I am a man.

  "Hush, little daughter," she says again.

  Son, I try to say, but the word is already slipping away from me.

  * * *

  The Clockwork Atom Bomb

  Dominic Green

  New British writer Dominic Green's output has to date been confined almost entirely to the pages of Interzone, but he's appeared there a lot, selling them eighteen stories in trhe course of the last few years.

  Leftover war munitions are already a problem, with lost land mines from past wars taking a life or a limb somewhere around the world almost every day. And in the future, when the weapons have become more powerful and more strange, that's not going to get any better. In fact, as the scary story that follows demonstrates, it could get quite a bit worse ...

  * * *

  "Over here, mister. This is the place.” The girl tugged Mativi’s sleeve and led him down a street that was mostly poorly-patched shell holes. Delayed Action Munitions – the size of thumbnails and able to turn a man into fragments of the same dimensions – littered the ground hereabouts, designed to lie dormant for generations. Construction companies used robot tractors to fill in bomb damage, and the robots did a poor job. Granted, they were getting better – Robocongo was one of equatorial Africa’s biggest exporters. But usually the whites and the blacks-with-cash sat in control rooms a kilometre away directing robots to build the houses of the poor, and the poor then had to live in those houses not knowing whether, if they put their foot down hard on a tough domestic issue, they might also be putting it down on a DAM bomblet a metre beneath their foundations.

  This street, though, hadn’t even been repaired. It was all sloped concrete, blast rubble and wrecked signs telling outsiders to keep out this goverment building! field clerical stores! important goverment work here you go back!

  “Come on, mister”, said the phaseuse. “You will see, and then you will have no problem paying.”

  “You stand still,” commanded Mativi suddenly. “Stand right there.”

  Nervously, he reached into a pocket and brought out the Noli Timere. It only worked fifty per cent of the time, based on information gathered from scientist-collaborators from all factions in the war, but fifty per cent was better than zip.

  He turned the device on, on low power in case any of the more recent devices that smelled mine detector power-up were present, and swept it left and right. Nothing. He flicked it up to full power and swept again. A small stray air-dropped anti-personnel device at the north-west end of the street, but otherwise nothing.

  “You see that house over there, Emily?” he said, pointing across the road. The girl nodded. “Well, you’re not to go in there. There is an explosive device in there. A big one. It’ll kill you.”

  Emily shook her head firmly. “It isn’t nearly as big as the one that took Claude.”

  Mativi nodded. “But you say the device is still there.”

  “Has been since I was very little. Everyone knows it’s there. The grown-ups know it’s there. They used it when the slim hit, to get rid of the bodies, so we wouldn’t get sick. Sometimes,” she said, “before the bodies were entirely dead.”

  “You can’t get slim from a dead body,” said Mativi.

  “That’s what you say,” said Emily. And he knew she was right. So many generously altered genomes had been flying around Africa in warheads fifteen years ago that someone could have altered HIV and turned it into an airborne, rather than blood-borne, virus – like the rickettsial haemorrhagic fever that had wiped out all of Johannesburg’s blood banks in a single day and made social pariahs of blacks all over Europe and America overnight.

  The sun dropped below the horizon like a guillotine blade, and it was suddenly night, as if someone had flicked a switch in Heaven. Mativi had gotten too used to life off the equator, had been working on the basis that night would steal up slowly as it had in Quebec and Patagonia. But the busy equatorial night had no time for twilight. He hadn’t brought night vision goggles. Had he brought a torch?

  As they walked up the street, a wind gathered, as if the landscape sensed his unease.

  “You have to be careful,” said the girl, “tread only where I tread. And you have to bend down.” She nodded at Mativi’s Kinshasa Rolex. “You have to leave your watch outside.”

  Why? So one of your bacheque boyfriends can steal it while I’m in there? To satisfy the girl’s insistence, he slid the watch off his wrist and set it on a brick, but picked it up again when she wasn’t looking and dropped it into his pocket.

  “Where are we going?” he said.

  “In there.” She pointed. Half-buried in the rubble was a concrete lintel, one end of a substantial buried structure, through which the wind was whistling.

  No. Correction. Out of which the wind was whistling.

  She slipped under the lintel, on which was fixed a sign saying warning! extreme personal danger! The room beyond had once had skylights. Now, it had ruined holes in the roof, into which the geostationary UNPEFORCONG security moon poured prisms of reflected sunlight. 35,900 kilometres above Mativi’s head, he and five million other Kinshasans were being watched with five thousand cameras. This had at first seemed an outrageous intrusion on his privacy, until he’d realized that he’d have to commit a thousand murders before any of the cameras was likely to catch him in the act.

  “Don’t step any closer,” said the girl. “It will take you.”

  The entrance had promised an interior like any other minor military strongpoint – only just large enough to contain a couple of hammocks and a machine gun, maybe. But inside, after only a few steps down, the room was huge, the size of a factory floor. They had entered via an engineer’s inspection catwalk close to the roof. He was not sure how far down the floor was.

  The wind in here was deafening. The girl had to shout. “THERE IS MORE THAN ONE IN HERE. THEY LIVE IN THE MACHINES. THE GOVERNMENT MADE THE MACHINES, BUT NOT WITH TECHNICIANS AND ELECTRICIANS. WITH SOrcery.”

  The machines did not look made by sorcery. They were entirely silent, looking like rows of gigantic, rusted steel chess pawns twice the height of a man, with no pipes or wires enter
ing or leaving them, apparently sitting here unused for any purpose. Mativi felt an urgent, entirely rational need to be in another line of employment.

  “HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT THE MACHINES WERE BUILT FOR?” said Mativi, who had.

  The girl nodded. “THE DEMONS ARE IN THE MACHINES,” she said. “THE MACHINES WERE BUILT AS CAGES. THE MILLTARY MEN WHO MADE THIS PLACE WARNED ALL THE MOST IMPORTANT MEN IN OUR DISTRICT OF THIS. THEY WARNED MY FATHER. THEY TOLD HIM NEVER TO BREAK ANY OF THE MACHINES OPEN. BUT OVER TIME, THEY LEAK, AND THE DEMONS CAN GET OUT. THE FIRST TWO MACHINES ARE SAFE, FOR NOW. BUT YOU MUST BE CAREFUL, BECAUSE WE THOUGHT THE THIRD ONE WAS SAFE TOO, AND IT TOOK CLAUDE.”

  “WHAT DID IT DO TO CLAUDE, WHEN IT TOOK HIM?” said Mativi. He could not see any damage to the walls around the third machine beyond, perhaps, a certain swept-clean quality of the dust on the floor around it.

  “IT TOOK HIM,” said the girl. “IT MADE HIM SMALL. IT SUCKED HIM UP.”

  “THE MACHINES,” said Mativi in broken lingala. “THEY ARE COVERED WITH…WITH THINGS.”

  The heads of the chess-pawns, under the light of Mativi’s torch, were surrealistically coiffured with assorted objects – spanners, wire, door furniture, and, worryingly, a single fragmentation grenade. Many, perhaps more than half of the things were ferrous metal. But some looked like aluminium. Some were even bits of wood or plaster.

  Not just magnetism, then.

  He fished the fake Rolex out of his pocket, waved it in the direction of the machines, and felt a strong tug on it as he held it in his hand. But he also felt a strong tug on the sleeve of his shirt, and on his arm itself.