The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Brooke shut the greenhouse door. He pointed through a dew-streaked pane at the dock. “See that little man with the black songkak hat?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s from the Ministry of Islamic Banking. He just came from your kampong, looking for you. Big news from the gnomes of Zurich. You’re hot property now, kid.”

  Turner folded his arms defiantly. “I’ve made my decision, Tuan Councilor. I threw it over. Everything. My family, the West … I don’t want that money. I’m turning it down! I’m staying.”

  Brooke ignored him, wiping a patch of glass with his sleeve. “If they get their hooks into your cash flow, you’ll never get out of here.” Brooke glanced at him, alarmed. “You didn’t sign anything, did you?”

  Turner scowled. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”

  Brooke tugged at his hearing aid. “What? These damn batteries … Look, I got spares in my cabin. We’ll check it out, have a talk.” He waved Turner back, opened the greenhouse door slightly, and shouted a series of orders to the crew in their Dayak dialect. “Come on,” he told Turner.

  They left by a second door, and sneaked across a patch of open deck, then down a flight of plywood steps into the center hull.

  Brooke lifted the paisley bedspread of his cabin bunk and hauled out an ancient steamer chest. He pulled a jingling set of keys from his pocket and opened it. Beneath a litter of ruffled shirts, a shaving kit, and cans of hair spray, the trunk was packed to the gills with electronic contraband: coax cables, multiplexers, buffers and converters, shiny plug-in cards still in their heat-sealed baggies, multiplugged surge suppressors wrapped in tentacles of black extension cord. “Christ,” Turner said. He heard a gentle thump as the ship came loose, followed by a rattle of rigging as the crew hoisted sail.

  After a long search, Brooke found batteries in a cloisonné box. He popped them into place.

  Turner said, “Admit it. You’re surprised to see me, aren’t you? Still think you were wrong about me?”

  Brooke looked puzzled. “Surprised? Didn’t you get Seria’s message on the Net?”

  “What? No. I slept on the docks last night.”

  “You missed the message?” Brooke said. He mulled it over. “Why are you here, then?”

  “You said you could help me if I ever had money trouble,” Turner said. “Well, now’s the time. You gotta figure some way to get me out of this bank legacy. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I’ve broken with my family for good. I’m gonna stay here, try to work things out with Seria?”

  Brooke frowned. “I don’t understand. You want to stay with Seria?”

  “Yes, here in Brunei, with her!” Turner sat on the bunk and waved his arms passionately. “Look, I know I told you that Brunei was just a glass bubble, sealed off from the world, and all that. But I’ve changed now! I’ve thought it through, I understand things. Brunei’s important! It’s small, but it’s the ideas that matter, not the scale. I can get along, I’ll fit in—you said so yourself.”

  “What about Seria?”

  “Okay, that’s part of,” Turner admitted. “I know she’ll never leave this place. I can defy my family and it’s no big deal, but she’s Royalty. She wouldn’t leave here, any more than you’d leave all your money behind. So you’re both trapped here. All right. I can accept that.” Turner looked up, his face glowing with determination. “I know things won’t be easy for Seria and me, but it’s up to me to make the sacrifice. Someone has to make the grand gesture. Well, it might as well be me.”

  Brooke was silent for a moment, then thunped him on the shoulder. “This is a new Turner I’m seeing. So you faced down the old smack merchant, huh? You’re quite the hero!”

  Turner felt sheepish. “Come on, Brooke.”

  “And turning down all that nice money, too.”

  Turning brushed his hands together, dismissing the idea. “I’m sick of being manipulated by old geezers.”

  Brooke rubbed his unshaven jaw and grinned. “Kid, you’ve got a lot to learn.” He walked to the door. “But that’s okay, no harm done. Everything still works out. Let’s go up on deck and make sure the coast is clear.”

  Turner followed Brooke to his deck chair by the bamboo railing. The ship sailed rapidly down a channel between mud flats. Already they’d left the waterfront, paralleling a shoreline densely fringed with mangroves. Brooke sat down and opened a binocular case. He scanned the city behind them.

  Turner felt a lightheaded sense of euphoria as the triple bows cut the water. He smiled as they passed the first offshore rig. It looked like a good place to get some fishing done.

  “About this bank,” Turner said. “We have to face them some time—what good is this doing us?”

  Brooke smiled without looking up from his binoculars. “Kid, I’ve been planning this day a long time. I’m running it on a wing and a prayer. But, hey, I’m not proud, I can adapt. You’ve been a lot of trouble to me, stomping in where angels fear to tread, in those damn boots of yours. But I’ve finally found a way to fit you in. Turner, I’m going to retrofit your life.”

  “Think so?” Turner said. He stepped closer, looming over Brooke. “What are you looking for, anyway?”

  Brooke sighed. “Choppers. Patrol boats.”

  Turner had a sudden terrifying flash of insight. “You’re leaving Brunei. Defecting!” He stared at Brooke. “You bastard! You kept me on board!” He grabbed the rail, then began tearing at his heavy boots, ready to jump and swim for it.

  “Don’t be stupid!” Brooke said. “You’ll get her in a lot of trouble!” He lowered the binoculars. “Oh Christ, here comes Omar.”

  Turner followed his gaze and spotted a helicopter, rising gnatlike over the distant high-rises. “Where is Seria?”

  “Try the bow.”

  “You mean she’s here? She’s leaving too?” He ran forward across the thudding deck.

  Seria wore bell-bottomed sailor’s jeans and a stained nylon windbreaker. With the help of two of the Dayak crew, she was installing a meshwork satellite dish in an anchored iron plate in the deck. She had cut away her long dyed hair; she looked up at him, and for a moment he saw a stranger. Then her face shifted, fell into a familiar focus. “I thought I’d never see you again, Turner. That’s why I had to do it.”

  Turner smiled at her fondly, too overjoyed for her words to sink in. “Do what, angel?”

  “Tap your phone, of course. I did it because I was jealous, at first. I had to be sure. You know. But then when I knew you were leaving, well, I had to hear your voice one last time. So I heard your talk with your Grandfather. Are you mad at me?”

  “You tapped my phone? You heard all that?” Turner said.

  “Yes, darling. You were wonderful. I never thought you’d do it.”

  “Well,” Turner said, “I never thought you’d pull a stunt like this, either.”

  “Someone had to make a grand gesture,” she said. “It was up to me, wasn’t it? But I explained all that in my message.”

  “So you’re defecting? Leaving your family?” Turner knelt beside her, dazed. As he struggled to fit it all together, his eyes focussed on a cross-threaded nut at the base of the dish. He absently picked up a socket wrench. “Let me give you a hand with that,” he said through reflex.

  Seria sucked on a barked knuckle. “You didn’t get my last message, did you? You came here on your own!”

  “Well, yeah,” Turner said. “I decided to stay. You know. With you.”

  “And now we’re abducting you!” She laughed. “How romantic!”

  “You and Brooke were leaving together?”

  “It’s not just me, Turner. Look.”

  Brooke was walking toward them, and with him Dr. Moratuwa, newly outfitted in saffron-collored baggy shorts and T-shirt. They were the work clothes of a Buddhist technician. “Oh, no,” Turner said. He dropped his wrench with a thud.

  Seria said, “Now you see why I had to leave, don’t you? My family locked him up. I had to break adat and help Br
ooke set him free. It was my obligation, my dharma!”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Turner said. “But it’s gonna take me a while, that’s all. Couldn’t you have warned me?”

  “I tried to! I wrote you on the Net!” She saw he was crestfallen, and squeezed his hand. “I guess the plans broke down. Well, we can improvise.”

  “Good day, Mr. Choi,” said Moratuwa. “It was very brave of you to cast in your lot with us. It was a gallant gesture.”

  “Thanks,” Turner said. He took a deep breath. So they were all leaving. It was a shock, but he could deal with it. He’d just have to start over and think it through from a different angle. At least Seria was coming along.

  He felt a little better now. He was starting to get it under control.

  Moratuwa sighed. “And I wish it could have worked.”

  “You brother’s coming,” Brooke told Seria gloomily. “Remember this was all my fault.”

  They had a good headwind, but the crown prince’s helicopter came on faster, its drone growing to a roar. A Gurkha palace guard crouched on the broad orange float outside the canopy, cradling a light machine gun. His gold-braided dress uniform flapped in the chopper’s downwash.

  The chopper circled the boat once. “We’ve had it,” Brooke said. “Well, at least it’s not a patrol boat with those damned Exocet missiles. It’s family business with the princess on board. They’ll hush it all up. You can always depend on adat.” He patted Moratuwa’s shoulder. “Looks like you get a cellmate after all, old man.”

  Seria ignored them. She was looking up anxiously. “Poor Omar,” she said. She cupped her hands to her mouth. “Brother, be careful!” she shouted.

  The Prince’s copilot handed the guard a loudspeaker. The guard raised it and began to shout a challenge.

  The tone of the chopper’s engines suddenly changed. Plumes of brown smoke billowed from the chromed exhausts. The prince veered away suddenly, fighting the controls. The guard, caught off balance, tumbled headlong into the ocean. The Dayak crew, who had been waiting for the order to reef sails, began laughing wildly.

  “What in hell?” Brooke said.

  The chopper pancaked down heavily into the bay, rocking in the ship’s wake. Spurting caramel-colored smoke, its engines died with a hideous grinding. The ship sailed on. They watched silently as the drenched guard swam up and clung to the chopper’s float.

  Brooke raised his eyes to heaven. “Lord Buddha, forgive my doubts.…”

  “Sugar,” Seria said sadly. “I put a bag of sugar in brother’s fuel tank. I ruined his beautiful helicopter. Poor Omar, he really loves that machine.”

  Brooke stared at her, then burst into cackling laughter. Regally, Seria ignored him. She stared at the dwindling shore, her eyes bright. “Goodbye, Brunei. You cannot hold us now.”

  “Where are we going?” Turner asked.

  “To the West,” said Moratuwa. “The Ocean Arks will spread for many years. I must set the example by carrying the word to the greatest global center of unsustainable industry.”

  Brooke grinned. “He means America, man.”

  “We shall start in Hawaii. It is also tropical and our expertise will find ready application there.”

  “Wait a minute,” Turner said. “I turned my back on all that! Look, I turned down a fortune so I could stay in the East.”

  Seria took his arm, smiling radiantly. “You’re such a dreamer, darling. What a wonderful gesture. I love you, Turner.”

  “Look,” said Brooke, “I left behind my building, my title of nobility, and all my old mates. I’m older than you, so my romantic gestures come first.”

  “But,” Turner said, “it was all decided. I was going to help you in Brunei. I had ideas, plans. Now none of it makes any sense.”

  Moratuwa smiled. “The world is not built from your blueprints, young man.”

  “Whose, then?” Turner demanded. “Yours?”

  “Nobody’s, really,” Brooke said. “We all just have to do our best with whatever comes up. Bricolage, remember?” Brooke spread his hands. “But it’s a geezer’s world, kid. We got your number, and we got you outnumbered. Fast cars and future shock and that hot Western trip … that’s another century. We like slow days in the sun. We like a place to belong and gentle things around us.” He smiled. “Okay, you’re a little wired now, but you’ll calm down by the time we reach Hawaii. There’s a lot of retrofit work there. You’ll be one of us!” He gestured at the satellite dish. “We’ll set this up and call your banks first thing.”

  “It’s a good world for us, Turner,” Seria said urgently. “Not quite East, no quite West—like us two. It was made for us, it’s what we’re best at.” She embraced him.

  “You escaped,” Turner said. No one ever said much about what happened after Sleeping Beauty woke.

  “Yes, I broke free,” she said, hugging him tighter. “And I’m taking you with me.”

  Turner stared over her shoulder at Brunei, sinking into hot green mangroves and warm mud. Slowly, he could feel the truth of it, sliding over him like some kind of ambiguous quicksand. He was going to fit right in. He could see his future laid out before him, clean and predestined, like fifty years of happy machine language.

  “Maybe I wanted this,” he said at last. “But it sure as hell wasn’t what I planned.”

  Brooke laughed. “Look, you’re bound for Hawaii with a princess and eight million dollars. Somehow, you’ll just have to make do.”

  JOHN CROWLEY

  Snow

  Throughout the centuries, people have spent a great deal of money on the quest for forgetfulness. But, as the bittersweet story that follows suggests, someday it might prove even more expensive to remember …

  John Crowley is perhaps best known for his fat and fanciful novel Little, Big, which won the prestigious World Fantasy Award. His other novels include Beasts, The Deep, and Engine Summer. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Elsewhere, Interfaces, Shadows, and Whispers. Originally from the Midwest, he now makes his home in Conway, Massachusetts.

  SNOW

  John Crowley

  I don’t think Georgie would ever have got one for herself: she was at once unsentimental and a little in awe of death. No, it was her first husband—an immensely rich and (from Georgie’s description) a strangely weepy guy, who had got it for her. Or for himself, actually, of course. He was to be the beneficiary. Only he died himself shortly after it was installed. If installed is the right word. After he died, Georgie got rid of most of what she’d inherited from him, liquidated it. It was cash that she had liked best about that marriage anyway; but the Wasp couldn’t really be got rid of. Georgie ignored it.

  In fact the thing really was about the size of a wasp of the largest kind, and it had the same lazy and mindless flight. And of course it really was a bug, not of the insect kind but of the surveillance kind. And so its name fit all around: one of those bits of accidental poetry the world generates without thinking. O Death where is thy sting.

  Georgie ignored it, but it was hard to avoid; you had to be a little careful around it, it followed Georgie at a variable distance, depending on her motions and the number of other people around her, the level of light and the tone of her voice, and there was always the danger you might shut it in a door or knock it down with a tennis racket. It cost a fortune (if you count in the access and the perpetual-care contract, all prepaid) and though it wasn’t really fragile, it made you nervous.

  It wasn’t recording all the time. There had to be a certain amount of light, though not much. Darkness shut it off. And then sometimes it would get lost. Once when we hadn’t seen it hovering around for a time, I opened a closet door and it flew out, unchanged, and went off looking for her, humming softly. It must have been shut in there for days.

  Eventually it ran out, or down. A lot could go wrong, I suppose, with circuits that small, controlling that many functions. It ended up spending a lot of time bumping gently against the bedroom ceiling, over and over, like a winter fly. T
hen one day the maid swept it out from under the bureau, a husk. By that time it had transmitted at least eight thousand hours (eight thousand was the minimum guarantee) of Georgie: of her days and hours, her comings in and her goings out, her speech and motion, her living self: all on file, taking up next to no room, at The Park.

  And then when the time came, you could go there, to The Park, say on a Sunday afternoon; and in quiet landscaped surroundings (as The Park described it) you would find her personal resting chamber; and there, in privacy, through the miracle of modern information storage and retrieval systems, you could access her: her alive, her as she was in every way, never changing or growing any older: fresher (as The Park’s brochure said) than in memory—ever green.

  * * *

  I married Georgie for her money, the same reason she married her first, the one who took out The Park’s contract for her. She married me, I think, for my looks; she always had a taste for looks in men. I wanted to write. I made a calculation that more women than men make, and decided that to be supported and paid for by a rich wife would give me freedom to do so, to “develop.” The calculation worked out no better for me than it does for most women who make it. I carried a typewriter and a case of miscellaneous paper from Ibiza to Gstaad to Bali to London, and typed on beaches, and learned to ski. Georgie like me in ski clothes.

  Now that those looks are all but gone, I can look back on myself as a young hunk, and see that I was in a way a rarity, a type that you run into often among women, far less often among men, the beauty unaware of his beauty, aware that he affects women profoundly and more or less instantly but doesn’t know why; thinks he is being listened to and understood, that his soul is being seen, when all that’s being seen is long-lashed eyes and a strong square tanned wrist turning in a lovely gesture, stubbing out a cigarette. Confusing. By the time I figured out why I had for so long been indulged and cared for and listened to, why I was interesting, I wasn’t as interesting as I had been. At about the same time I realized I wasn’t a writer at all. Georgie’s investment stopped looking as good to her, and my calculation had ceased to add up; only by that time I had come, pretty unexpectedly, to love Georgie a lot, and she just as unexpectedly had come to love and need me too, as much as she needed anybody. We never really parted, even though when she died I hadn’t seen her for years. Phone calls, at dawn or four A.M. because she never, for all her travel, really grasped that the world turns and cocktail hour travels around with it.