The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “It is already bad,” grumbled Thorsid Magnesson, Director of Public Safety. (Once that office had had something to do with catching criminals, when the major threat to safety was crime.)

  “It will get worse,” said Malibert, and it did. The cold deepened. The reports from the rest of the world dwindled. They plotted maps to show what they knew to show. One set of missile maps, to show where the strikes had been—within a week that no longer mattered, because the deaths from cold already began to outweigh those from blast. They plotted isotherm maps, based on the scattered weather reports that came in—maps that had to be changed every day, as the freezing line marched toward the Equator. Finally the maps were irrelevant. The whole world was cold then. They plotted fatality maps—the percentages of deaths in each area, as they could infer them from the reports they received, but those maps soon became too frightening to plot.

  The British Isles died first, not because they were nuked but because they were not. There were too many people alive there. Britain never owned more than a four-day supply of food. When the ships stopped coming they starved. So did Japan. A little later, so did Bermuda and Hawaii and Canada’s off-shore provinces; and then it was continents’ turn.

  And Timmy Clary listened to every word.

  The boy didn’t talk much. He never asked after his parents, not after the first few days. He did not hope for good news, and did not want bad. The boy’s infection was cured, but the boy himself was not. He ate half of what a hungry child should devour. He ate that only when Malibert coaxed him.

  The only thing that made Timothy look alive was the rare times when Malibert could talk to him about space. There were many in Iceland who knew about Harry Malibert and SETI, and a few who cared about it almost as much as Malibert himself. When time permitted they would get together, Malibert and his groupies. There was Lars the postman (now pick-and-shovel ice excavator, since there was no mail), Ingar the waitress from the Loftleider Hotel (now stitching heavy drapes to help insulate dwelling walls), Elda the English teacher (now practical nurse, frostbite cases a specialty). There were others, but those three were always there when they could get away. They were Harry Malibert fans who had read his books and dreamed with him of radio messages from weird aliens from Aldebaran, or worldships that could carry million-person populations across the galaxy, on voyages of a hundred thousand years. Timmy listened, and drew sketches of the worldships. Malibert supplied him with dimensions. “I talked to Gerry Webb,” he said, “and he’d worked it out in detail. It is a matter of rotation rates and strength of materials. To provide the proper simulated gravity for the people in the ships, the shape has to be a cylinder and it has to spin—sixteen kilometers is what the diameter must be. Then the cylinder must be long enough to provide space, but not so long that the dynamics of spin cause it to wobble or bend—perhaps sixty kilometers long. One part to live in. One part to store fuel. And at the end, a reaction chamber where hydrogen fusion thrusts the ship across the Galaxy.”

  “Hydrogen bombs,” said the boy. “Harry? Why don’t the bombs wreck the worldship?”

  “It’s engineering,” said Malibert honestly, “and I don’t know the details. Gerry was going to give his paper at the Portsmouth meeting; it was one reason I was going.” But, of course, there would never be a British Interplanetary Society meeting in Portsmouth now, ever again.

  Elda said uneasily, “It is time for lunch soon. Timmy? Will you eat some soup if I make it?” And did make it, whether the boy promised or not. Elda’s husband had worked at Keflavik in the PX, an accountant; unfortunately he had been putting in overtime there when the follow-up missile did what the miss had failed to do, and so Elda had no husband left, not enough even to bury.

  Even with the earth’s hot water pumped full velocity through the straining pipes it was not warm in the gasthuis. She wrapped the boy in blankets and sat near him while he dutifully spooned up the soup. Lars and Ingar sat holding hands and watching the boy eat. “To hear a voice from another star,” Lars said suddenly, “that would have been fine.”

  “There are no voices,” said Ingar bitterly. “Not even ours now. We have the answer to the Fermi paradox.”

  And when the boy paused in his eating to ask what that was, Harry Malibert explained it as carefully as he could:

  “It is named after Enrico Fermi, a scientist. He said, ‘We know that there are many billions of stars like our sun. Our sun has planets, therefore it is reasonable to assume that some of the other stars do also. One of our planets has living things on it. Us, for instance, as well as trees and germs and horses. Since there are so many stars, it seems almost certain that some of them, at least, have also living things. People. People as smart as we are—or smarter. People who can build spaceships, or send radio messages to other stars, as we can.’ Do you understand so far, Timmy?” The boy nodded, frowning, but—Malibert was delighted to see—kept on eating his soup. “Then, the question Fermi asked was, ‘Why haven’t some of them come to see us?’”

  “Like in the movies,” the boy nodded. “The flying saucers.”

  “All those movies are made-up stories, Timmy. Like Jack and the Beanstalk, or Oz. Perhaps some creatures from space have come to see us sometime, but there is no good evidence that this is so. I feel sure there would be evidence if it had happened. There would have to be. If there were many such visits, ever, then at least one would have dropped the Martian equivalent of a McDonald’s Big Mac box, or a used Sirian flash cube, and it would have been found and shown to be from somewhere other than the Earth. None ever has. So there are only three possible answers to Dr. Fermi’s question. One, there is no other life. Two, there is, but they want to leave us alone. They don’t want to contact us, perhaps because we frighten them with our violence, or for some reason we can’t even guess at. And the third reason—” Elda made a quick gesture, but Malibert shook his head—“is that perhaps as soon as any people get smart enough to do all those things that get them into space—when they have all the technology we do—they also have such terrible bombs and weapons that they can’t control them any more. So a war breaks out. And they kill themselves off before they are fully grown up.”

  “Like now,” Timothy said, nodding seriously to show he understood. He had finished his soup, but instead of taking the plate away Elda hugged him in her arms and tried not to weep.

  * * *

  The world was totally dark now. There was no day or night, and would not be again for no one could say how long. The rains and snows had stopped. Without sunlight to suck water up out of the oceans there was no moisture left in the atmosphere to fall. Floods had been replaced by freezing droughts. Two meters down the soil of Iceland was steel hard, and the navvies could no longer dig. There was no hope of laying additional pipes. When more heat was needed all that could be done was to close off buildings and turn off their heating pipes. Elda’s patients now were less likely to be frostbite and more to be the listlessness of radiation sickness as volunteers raced in and out of the Reykjavik ruins to find medicine and food. No one was spared that job. When Elda came back on a snowmobile from a foraging trip to the Loftleider Hotel she brought back a present for the boy. Candy bars and postcards from the gift shop; the candy bars had to be shared, but the postcards were all for him. “Do you know what these are?” she asked. The cards showed huge, squat, ugly men and women in the costumes of a thousand years ago. “They’re trolls. We have myths in Iceland that the trolls lived here. They’re still here, Timmy, or so they say; the mountains are trolls that just got too old and tired to move any more.”

  “They’re made-up stories, right?” the boy asked seriously, and did not grin until she assured him they were. Then he made a joke. “I guess the trolls won,” he said.

  “Ach, Timmy!” Elda was shocked. But at least the boy was capable of joking, she told herself, and even graveyard humor was better than none. Life had become a little easier for her with the new patients—easier because for the radiation-sick there was very littl
e that could be done—and she bestirred herself to think of ways to entertain the boy.

  And found a wonderful one.

  Since fuel was precious there were no excursions to see the sights of Iceland-under-the-ice. There was no way to see them anyway in the eternal dark. But when a hospital chopper was called up to travel empty to Stokksnes on the eastern shore to bring back a child with a broken back, she begged space for Malibert and Timmy. Elda’s own ride was automatic, as duty nurse for the wounded child. “An avalanche crushed his house,” she explained. “It is right under the mountains, Stokksnes, and landing there will be a little tricky, I think. But we can come in from the sea and make it safe. At least in the landing lights of the helicopter something can be seen.”

  They were luckier than that. There was more light. Nothing came through the clouds, where the billions of particles that had once been Elda’s husband added to the trillions of trillions that had been Detroit and Marseilles and Shanghai to shut out the sky. But in the clouds and under them were snakes and sheets of dim color, sprays full of dull red, fans of pale green. The aurora borealis did not give much light. But there was no other light at all except for the faint glow from the pilot’s instrument panel. As their eyes widened they could see the dark shapes of the Vatnajökull slipping by below them. “Big trolls,” cried the boy happily, and Elda smiled too as she hugged him.

  The pilot did as Elda had predicted, down the slopes of the eastern range, out over the sea, and cautiously back in to the little fishing village. As they landed, red-tipped flashlights guiding them, the copter’s landing lights picked out a white lump, vaguely saucer-shaped. “Radar dish,” said Malibert to the boy, pointing.

  Timmy pressed his nose to the freezing window. “Is it one of them, Daddy Harry? The things that could talk to the stars?”

  The pilot answered: “Ach, no, Timmy—military, it is.” And Malibert said:

  “They wouldn’t put one of those here, Timothy. It’s too far north. You wanted a place for a big radio telescope that could search the whole sky, not just the little piece of it you can see from Iceland.”

  And while they helped slide the stretcher with the broken child into the helicopter, gently, kindly as they could be, Malibert was thinking about those places, Arecibo and Woomara and Socorro and all the others. Every one of them was now dead and certainly broken with a weight of ice and shredded by the mean winds. Crushed, rusted, washed away, all those eyes on space were blinded now; and the thought saddened Harry Malibert, but not for long. More gladdening than anything sad was the fact that, for the first time, Timothy had called him “Daddy.”

  * * *

  In one ending to the story, when at last the sun came back it was too late. Iceland had been the last place where human beings survived, and Iceland had finally starved. There was nothing alive anywhere on Earth that spoke, or invented machines, or read books. Fermi’s terrible third answer was the right one after all.

  But there exists another ending. In this one the sun came back in time. Perhaps it was just barely in time, but the food had not yet run out when daylight brought the first touches of green in some parts of the world, and plants began to grow again from frozen or hoarded seed. In this ending Timothy lived to grow up. When he was old enough, and after Malibert and Elda had got around to marrying, he married one of their daughters. And of their descendants—two generations or a dozen generations later—one was alive on the day when Fermi’s paradox became a quaintly amusing old worry, as irrelevant and comical as a fifteenth-century mariner’s fear of falling off the edge of the flat Earth. On that day the skies spoke, and those who lived in them came to call.

  Perhaps that is the true ending of the story, and in it the human race chose not to squabble and struggle within itself, and so extinguish itself finally into the dark. In this ending human beings survived, and saved all the science and beauty of life, and greeted their star-born visitors with joy.…

  But that is in fact what did happen!

  At least, one would like to think so.

  BRUCE STERLING

  Green Days In Brunei

  One of the major new talents to enter SF in recent years, Bruce Sterling sold his first story in 1976, and has since sold stories to Universe, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Last Dangerous Visions, Lone Star Universe, and elsewhere. He has attracted special acclaim in the last few years for a series of stories set in his exotic Shaper/Mechanist future, a complex and disturbing future where warring political factions struggle to control the shape of human destiny, and the nature of humanity itself. His acclaimed Shaper/Mechanist story “Swarm” was both a Hugo and Nebula finalist in 1982; “Spider Rose”, another story sharing the same background, was also a Hugo finalist that year. His story “Cicada Queen”, a Nebula finalist last year, was in our First Annual Collection; his “Sunken Gardens” was in our Second Annual Collection. His novels include Involution Ocean and The Artificial Kid. His most recent book is Schismatrix, a novel set in the Shaper/Mechanist future. Sterling was born in Brownsville, Texas, and now lives in Austin, where he is a member of the well-known Turkey City Writer’s Workshop.

  The story that follows displays Sterling at his inventive best—a fast-paced, high-tech, Third World fairy tale … with some unsettling implications.

  GREEN DAYS IN BRUNEI

  Bruce Sterling

  Two men were fishing from the corroded edge of an offshore oil rig. After years of decrepitude, the rig’s concrete pillars were thick with barnacles and waving fronds of seaweed. The air smelled of rust and brine.

  “Sorry to disturb your plans,” the minister said. “But we can’t just chat up the Yankees every time you hit a little contretemps.” The minister reeled in and revealed a bare book. He cursed mildly in his native Malay. “Hand me another bait, there’s a good fellow.”

  Turner Choi reached into the wooden bait bucket and gave the minister a large dead prawn. “But I need that phone link,” Turner said. “Just for a few hours. Just long enough to access the net in America and download some better documentation.”

  “What ghastly jargon,” said the minister, who was formally known as the Yang Teramat Pehin Orang Kaya Amar Diraja Dato Seri Paduka Abdul Kahar. He was minister of industrial policy for the Sultanate of Brunei Darussalam, a tiny nation on the northern shore of the island of Borneo. The titles of Brunei’s aristocracy were in inverse proportion to the country’s size.

  “It’d save us a lot of time, Tuan Minister,” Turner said. “Those robots are programmed in an obsolete language, forty years old. Strictly Neanderthal.”

  The minister deftly baited his hook and flicked it out in a long spinning cast. “You knew before you came here how the sultanate feels about the world information order. You shall just have to puzzle out this conundrum on your own.”

  “But you’re making weeks, months maybe, out of a three-hour job!” Turner said.

  “My dear fellow, this is Borneo,” the minister said benignly. “Stop looking at your watch and pay some attention to catching us dinner.”

  Turner sighed and reeled in his line. Behind them, the rig’s squatter population of Dayak fisherfolk clustered on the old helicopter pad, mending nets and chewing betel-nut.

  It was another slow Friday in Brunei Darussalam. Across the shallow bay, Brunei Town rose in tropical sunlight, its soaring high-rises festooned with makeshift solar roofs, windmills, and bulging greenhouse balconies. The golden-domed mosque on the waterfront was surrounded by the towering legacy of the twentieth-century oil boom: boxlike office blocks, now bizarrely transmuted into urban farms.

  Brunei Town, the sultanate’s capital, had a hundred thousand citizens: Malays, Chinese, Ibans, Dayaks, and a sprinkling of Europeans. But it was a city under a hush. No cars. No airport. No television. From a distance it reminded Turner of an old Western fairy tale: Sleeping Beauty, the jury-rigged high-rises with their cascading greenery like a hundred castles shrouded in thorns. The Bruneians seemed like sleepwalkers, marooned fro
m the world, wrapped in the enchantment of their ideology.

  Tuner baited his hook again, restive at being away from the production line. The minister seemed more interested in converting him than in letting him work. To the Bruneians, the robots were just another useless memento of their long-dead romance with the West. The old robot assembly line hadn’t been used in twenty years, since the turn of the century.

  And yet the royal government had decided to retrofit the robot line for a new project. For technical help, they had applied to Kyocera, a Japanese multinational corporation. Kyocera had sent Turner Choi, one of their new recruits, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese Canadian CAD-CAM engineer from Vancouver.

  It wasn’t much of a job—a kind of industrial archeology whose main tools were chicken-wire and a ball-peen hammer—but it was Turner’s first and he meant to succeed. The Bruneians were relaxed to the point of coma, but Turner Choi had his future ahead of him with Kyocera. In the long run, it was Kyocera who would judge his work here. And Turner was running out of time.

  The minister, whooping in triumph, hauled hard on his line. A fat, spotted fish broke the surface, flopping on the hook. Turner decided to break the rules and to hell with it.

  * * *

  The local neighborhood organization, the kampong, was showing a free movie in the little park fourteen stories below Turner’s window. Bright images crawled against the bleak white Bauhaus wall of a neighboring high-rise.

  Turner peered down through the blinds. He had been watching the flick all night as he finished his illegal tinkering.

  The Bruneians, like Malays everywhere, adored ghost stories. The film’s protagonist, or chief horror (Turner wasn’t sure which) was an acrobatic monkey-demon with razor-sharp forearms. It had burst into a depraved speakeasy and was slaughtering drunkards with a tremendous windmilling flurry of punches, kicks, and screeches. Vast meaty sounds of combat, like colliding freight trains packed with beef, drifted faintly upward.