The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  RESET, finally.

  But what (I would wonder) if I had been patient, what if I had watched and waited?

  Time, it turns out, takes an unconscionable time. The waste, the footless waste—it’s no spectator sport; whatever fun there is in sitting idly looking at nothing and tasting your own being for a whole afternoon, there is no fun in replaying it, the waiting is excruciating. How often, in five years, in eight thousand hours of daylight or lamplight, might we have coupled, how much time expended in lovemaking? A hundred hours, two hundred? Odds were not high of my coming on such a scene, darkness swallowed most of them and the others were lost in the interstices of endless hours spent shopping, reading, on planes and in cars, asleep, apart. Hopeless.

  ACCESS. She has turned on a bedside lamp. Alone. She hunts amid the Kleenex and magazines on the bedside table, finds a watch, looks at it dully, turns it right-side-up, looks again and puts it down. Cold. She burrows in the blankets, yawning, staring, then puts out a hand for the phone, but only rests her hand on it, thinking. Thinking at four A.M. She withdraws her hand, shivers a child’s deep sleepy shiver, and shuts off the light. A bad dream. In an instant it’s morning, dawn, the Wasp slept too. She sleeps soundly, unmoving, only the top of her blond head showing out of the quilt: and will no doubt sleep so for hours, watched over more attentively, more fixedly, than any peeping Tom could ever have watched over her.

  RESET.

  ACCESS.

  “I can’t hear as well as I did at first,” I told the Director. “And the definition is getting softer.”

  “Oh sure, yes sure,” the Director said. “That’s really in the literature. We have to explain that very carefully. That this might be a problem.”

  “It isn’t just my monitor?” I asked. “I thought it was probably only the monitor.”

  “No, no, not really, no,” he said. He gave me coffee. We’d gotten to be friendly over the months. I think, as well as being afraid of me, he was glad I came around now and then; at least one of the living came here, one at least was using the services. “There’s a slight degeneration that does occur.”

  “Everything seems to be getting gray.”

  His face had shifted into intense concern, no belittling this problem. “Mm-hm, mm-hm, see, at the molecular level where we’re at, there is degeneration. It’s just in the physics. It randomizes a little over time. So you lose—you don’t lose a minute of what you’ve got—but you lose a little definition. A little color. But it levels off.”

  “It does.”

  “We think it does. Sure it does, we promise it does. We predict that it will.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “Well, well you see we’ve only been in this business a short while. This concept is new. There were things we couldn’t know.” He still looked at me, but seemed at the same time to have forgotten me. Tired. He seemed to have grown colorless himself lately, old, losing definition. “You might start getting some snow,” he said softly.

  ACCESS. RESET. ACCESS.

  A gray plaza of herringbone-laid stones; gray, clicking palms. She turns up the collar of her sweater, narrowing her eyes in a stern wind. Buys magazines at a kiosk: Vogue, Harpers, La Moda. Cold, she says to the kiosk girl. Frio. The young man I was takes her arm; they walk back along the beach, which is deserted and strung with cast seaweed, washed by a dirty sea. Winter in Ibiza. We talk, but the Wasp can’t hear, the sea’s sound confuses it, it seems bored by its duties, and lags behind us.

  RESET.

  ACCESS. The Algonquin, terribly familiar; morning, winter. She turns away from the snowy window, I am in bed, and for a moment watching this I felt suspended between two mirrors, reflected endlessly. I had seen this before; I had lived it once, and remembered it once, and remembered the memory, and here it was again, or could it be nothing but another morning, a similar morning, there were far more than one like this, in this place. But no; she turns from the window, she gets out her vial of pills, picks up the coffee cup by its body: I had seen this moment before, not months before, weeks before, here in this chamber. I had come upon the same scene twice.

  What are the odds of it, I wondered, what are the odds of coming upon the same minutes again, these minutes.

  I stir within the bedclothes.

  I leaned forward to hear, this time, what I would say; it was something like but fun anyway, or something.

  Fun, she says, laughing, harrowed, the degraded sound a ghost’s twittering. Charlie someday I’m going to die of fun.

  She takes her pill. The Wasp follows her to the john, and is shut out.

  Why am I here? I thought, and my heart was beating hard and slow. What am I here for? What?

  RESET.

  ACCESS.

  Silvered icy streets, New York. Fifth Avenue. She is climbing shouting from a cab’s dark interior: just don’t shout at me, she shouts at someone, her mother I never met, a dragon. She is out and hurrying away down the sleety street with her bundles, the Wasp at her shoulder. I could reach out, and touch her shoulder, and make her turn, and follow me out.

  Walking away, lost in the colorless press of traffic and people, impossible to discern, within the softened snowy image.

  * * *

  Something was very wrong.

  Georgie hated winter, she escaped it most of the time we were together, about the first of the year beginning to long for the sun that had gone elsewhere; Austria was all right for a few weeks, the toy villages and sugar snow and bright sleek skiers was not really the winter she feared, though even in firewarmed chalets it was hard to get her naked without gooseflesh and shudders from some draft only she could feel. We were chaste in winter. So Georgie escaped it: Antigua and Bali and two months in Ibiza when the almonds blossomed, it was a continual false flavorless spring all winter long.

  How often could snow have fallen when the Wasp was watching her?

  Not often; countable times, times I could count up myself if I could remember as the Wasp could. Not often: not always.

  “There’s a problem,” I said to the Director.

  “It’s peaked out, has it?” he said. “That definition problem?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “Actually, it’s gotten worse.”

  He was sitting behind his desk, arms spread wide across his chair’s back, and a false pinkish flush to his cheeks like undertaker’s makeup. Drinking.

  “Hasn’t peaked out, huh,” he said.

  “That’s not the problem,” I said. “The problem is the access. It’s not random like you said.”

  “Molecular level,” he said. “It’s in the physics.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s not getting more random. It’s getting less random. It’s getting selective. It’s freezing up.”

  “No no no,” he said dreamily. “Access is random. Life isn’t all summer and fun, you know. Into each life some rain must fall.”

  I sputtered, trying to explain. “But but but…”

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of getting out of access.” He pulled open a drawer in the desk before him; it made an empty sound. He stared within it dully for a moment, and shut it. “The Park’s been good for me, but I’m just not used to this. Used to be you thought you could render a service, you know? Well, hell, you know, you’ve had fun, what do you care.”

  He was mad. For an instant I heard the dead around me; I tasted on my tongue the stale air of underground.

  “I remember,” he said, tilting back in his chair and looking elsewhere, “many years ago, I got into access. Only we didn’t call it that then. What I did was, I worked for a stock-footage house. It was going out of business like they all did, like this place here is going to do, shouldn’t say that but you didn’t hear it. Anyway. It was a big warehouse with steel shelves for miles, filled with film cans, film cans filled with old plastic film, you know? Film of every kind. And movie people, if they wanted old scenes of past time in their movies, would call up and ask for what they wanted, find me this, fin
d me that. And we had everything, every kind of scene, but you know what the hardest thing to find was? Just ordinary scenes of daily life. I mean people just doing things and living their lives. You know what we did have? Speeches. People giving speeches. Like presidents. You could have hours of speeches, but not just people, whatchacallit, oh washing clothes, sitting in a park…”

  “It might just be the reception,” I said. “Somehow.”

  He looked at me for a long moment as though I had just arrived. “Anyway,” he said at last, turning away again, “I was there a while learning the ropes. And producers called and said get me this, get me that. And one producer was making a film, some film of the past, and he wanted old scenes, old, of people long ago, in the summer; having fun; eating ice-cream. Swimming in bathing suits. Riding in convertibles. Fifty years ago. Eighty years ago.”

  He opened his empty drawer again, found a toothpick, and began to use it.

  “So I accessed the earliest stuff. Speeches. More speeches. But I found a scene here and there: people in the street, fur coats, window-shopping, traffic. Old people, I mean they were young then, but people of the past; they have these pinched kind of faces, you get to know them. Sad, a little. On city streets, hurrying, holding their hats. Cities were sort of black then, in film; black cars in the streets, black derby hats. Stone.

  “Well it wasn’t what they wanted. I found summer for them, color summer, but new. They wanted old. I kept looking back. I kept looking. I did. The farther back I went, the more I saw these pinched faces, black cars, black streets of stone. Snow. There isn’t any summer there.”

  With slow gravity he rose, and found a brown bottle and two coffee cups. He poured sloppily. “So it’s not your reception,” he said. “Film takes longer, I guess, but it’s in the physics. All in the physics. A word to the wise is sufficient.”

  The liquor was harsh, a cold distillate of past sunlight. I wanted to go, get out, not look back. I would not stay watching until there was only snow.

  “So I’m getting out of access,” the Director said. “Let the dead bury the dead, right? Let the dead bury the dead.”

  * * *

  I didn’t go back; I never went back, though the highways opened again and The Park isn’t far from the town I’ve settled in. Settled: the right word. It restores your balance, in the end, even in a funny way your cheerfulness, when you come to know, without regrets, that the best thing that’s going to happen in your life has already happened. And I still have some summer left to me.

  I think there are two different kinds of memory, and only one kind gets worse as I get older: the kind where by an effort of will you can reconstruct your first car or your serial number or the name and figure of your high-school physics teacher: a Mr. Holm, in a gray suit, a bearded guy, skinny, about thirty. The other kind doesn’t worsen, if anything it grows more intense: the sleepwalking kind, the kind you stumble into as into rooms with secret doors, and suddenly find yourself sitting not on your front porch but in a classroom, you can’t at first think where or when, and a bearded smiling man is turning in his hand a glass paperweight inside which a little cottage stands in a swirl of snow.

  There is no access to Georgie: except that now and then, unpredictably, when I’m sitting on the porch or pushing a grocery cart or standing at the sink, a memory of that kind will visit me, vivid and startling, like a hypnotist’s snap of fingers, or like that funny experience you sometimes have, on the point of sleep, of hearing your name called softly and distinctly by someone who is not there.

  ORSON SCOTT CARD

  The Fringe

  The tale that follows takes us to the Fringe, to the edge of what is left of human civilization, for a story of dedication, duty, compassion … and the hardest of hard choices.

  Orson Scott Card began publishing in 1977, and by 1978 had won the John W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer of the year. As of this writing, his novel Ender’s Game was the frontrunner for the 1985 Nebula Award. Card’s other novels include Hot Sleep, A Planet Called Treason, Songmaster, and Hart’s Hope. His short fiction has appeared in Omni, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, New Dimensions, The Berkley Showcase, and elsewhere. He has served several times on the Nebula Award Jury, and edits SFWA’s Nebula Award Report. His most recent book is Speaker For the Dead, a novel. Card lives in Greensboro, North Carolina.

  THE FRINGE

  Orson Scott Card

  LaVon’s book report was drivel, of course. Carpenter knew it would be from the moment he called on the boy. After Carpenter’s warning last week, he knew LaVon would have a book report—LaVon’s father would never let the boy be suspended. But LaVon was too stubborn, too cocky, too much the leader of the other sixth-graders’ constant rebellion against authority to let Carpenter have a complete victory.

  “I really, truly loved Little Men,” said LaVon. “It just gave me goose bumps.”

  The class laughed. Excellent comic timing, Carpenter said silently. But the only place that comedy was useful here in the New Soil country is with the gypsy pageant wagons. That’s what you’re preparing yourself for, LaVon, a career as a wandering parasite who lives by sucking laughter out of weary farmers.

  “Everybody nice in this book has a name that starts with D. Demi is a sweet little boy who never does anything wrong. Daisy is so good that she could have seven children and still be a virgin.”

  He was pushing the limits now. A lot of people didn’t like mention of sexual matters in the school, and if some pinheaded child decided to report this, the story could be twisted into something that could be used against Carpenter. Out here near the fringe, people were desperate for entertainment. A crusade to drive out a teacher for corrupting the morals of youth would be more fun than a traveling show, because everybody could feel righteous and safe when he was gone. Carpenter had seen it before, not that he was afraid of it, the way most teachers were. He had a career no matter what. The university would take him back, eagerly; they thought he was crazy to go out and teach in the low schools. I’m safe, absolutely safe, he thought. They can’t wreck my career. And I’m not going to get prissy about a perfectly good word like virgin.

  “Dan looks like a big bad boy, but he has a heart of gold, even though he does say real bad words like devil sometimes.” LaVon paused, waiting for Carpenter to react. So Carpenter did not react.

  “The saddest thing is poor Nat, the street fiddler’s boy. He tries hard to fit in, but he can never amount to anything in the book, because his name doesn’t start with D.”

  The end. LaVon put the single paper on Carpenter’s desk, then went back to his seat. He walked with the careful elegance of a spider, each long leg moving as if it were unconnected to the rest of his body, so that even walking did not disturb the perfect calm. The boy rides on his body the way I ride in my wheelchair, thought Carpenter. Smooth, unmoved by his own motion. But he is graceful and beautiful, fifteen years old and already a master at winning the devotion of the weakhearted children around him. He is the enemy, the torturer, the strong and beautiful man who must confirm his beauty by preying on the weak. I am not as weak as you think.

  LaVon’s book report was arrogant, far too short, and flagrantly rebellious. That much was deliberate, calculated to annoy Carpenter. Therefore Carpenter would not show the slightest trace of annoyance. The book report had also been clever, ironic, and funny. The boy, for all his mask of languor and stupidity, had brains. He was better than this farming town; he could do something that mattered in the world besides driving a tractor in endless contour patterns around the fields. But the way he always had the Fisher girl hanging on him, he’d no doubt have a baby and a wife and stay here forever. Become a big shot like his father, maybe, but never leave a mark in the world to show he’d been there. Tragic, stupid waste.

  But don’t show the anger. The children will misunderstand, they’ll think I’m angry because of LaVon’s rebelliousness, and it will only make this boy more of a h
ero in their eyes. Children choose their heroes with unerring stupidity. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old, all they know of life is cold and bookless classrooms interrupted now and then by a year or two of wrestling with this stony earth, always hating whatever adult it is who keeps them at their work, always adoring whatever fool gives them the illusion of being free. You children have no practice in surviving among the ruins of your own mistakes. We adults who knew the world before it fell, we feel the weight of the rubble on our backs.

  They were waiting for Carpenter’s answer. He reached out to the computer keyboard attached to his wheelchair. His hands struck like paws at the oversized keys. His fingers were too stupid for him to use them individually. They clenched when he tried to work them, tightened into a fist, a little hammer with which to strike, to break, to attack; he could not use them to grasp or even hold. Half the verbs of the world are impossible to me, he thought as he often thought. I learn them the way the blind learn words of seeing—by rote, with no hope of ever knowing truly what they mean.

  The speech synthesizer droned out the words he keyed. “Brilliant essay, Mr. Jensen. The irony was powerful, the savagery was refreshing. Unfortunately, it also revealed the poverty of your soul. Alcott’s title was ironic, for she wanted to show that despite their small size, the boys in her book were great-hearted. You, however, despite your large size, are very small of heart indeed.”

  LaVon looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes. Hatred? Yes, it was there. Do hate me, child. Loathe me enough to show me that you can do anything I ask you to do. Then I’ll own you, then I can get something decent out of you, and finally give you back to yourself as a human being who is worthy to be alive.

  Carpenter pushed outward on both levers, and his wheelchair backed up. The day was nearly over, and tonight he knew some thing would change, painfully, in the life of the town of Reefrock. And because in a way the arrests would be his fault, and because the imprisonment of a father would cause upheaval in some of these children’s families, he felt it his duty to prepare them as best he could to understand why it had to happen, why, in the larger view, it was good. It was too much to expect that they would actually understand, today; but they might remember, might forgive him someday for what they would soon find out he had done to them.