The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  They were creatures as malleable as Anttonen’s thoughts. He wondered what form they would take next and where they were running to so swiftly, these misty children of snow and wind. Perhaps they could be taught to attack the Russians. He smiled, savoring the fancy of the snow beasts unleashed upon the enemy. It was a strange, wild thought. Colonel Bengt Anttonen had never been an imaginative man before, but of late his mind had often been taken by such whimsies.

  Anttonen turned his face into the wind again, welcoming the chill, the numbing cold. He wanted it to cool his fury, to cut into the heart of him and freeze the passions that seethed there. He wanted to be numb. The cold had turned even the turbulent sea into still and silent ice; now let it conquer the turbulence within Bengt Anttonen. He opened his mouth, exhaled a long plume of breath that rose from his reddened cheeks like steam, inhaled a draft of frigid air that went down like liquid oxygen.

  But panic came in the wake of that thought. Again, it was happening again. What was liquid oxygen? Cold, he knew somehow; colder than the ice; colder than this wind. Liquid oxygen was bitter and white, and it steamed and flowed. He knew it, knew it as certainly as he knew his own name.

  But how?

  Anttonen turned from the ramparts. He walked with long, swift strides, his hand touching the hilt of his sword as if it could provide some protection against the demons that had invaded his mind. The other officers were right; he was going mad, surely. He had proved it this afternoon at the staff meeting.

  The meeting had gone very badly, as they all had of late. As always, Anttonen had raised his voice against the others, hopelessly, stupidly. He was right, he knew that. Yet he knew also he could not convince them and that each word further undermined his status, further damaged his career.

  Jägerhorn had brought it on once again. Colonel. F. A. Jägerhorn was everything that Anttonen was not: dark and handsome, polished and politic, an aristocrat with an aristocrat’s control. Jägerhorn had important connections, Jägerhorn had influential relatives, Jägerhorn had the confidence of Vice Admiral Carl Olof Cronstedt, commandant of Sveaborg. At the meeting, Jägerhorn had produced a sheaf of reports.

  “The reports are wrong,” Anttonen had insisted. “The Russians do not outnumber us. They have barely forty guns, sir. Sveaborg mounts ten times that number.”

  Cronstedt seemed shocked by Anttonen’s tone, his certainty, his insistence. Jägerhorn simply smiled. “Might I ask how you come by this intelligence, Colonel Anttonen?” he asked.

  That was the question Bengt Anttonen could never answer. “I know,” he said.

  Jägerhorn rattled the papers in his hand. “My own intelligence comes from Lieutenant Klick, who is in Helsinki, and has direct access to reliable reports of enemy plans, movements, and numbers.”

  He looked to Vice Admiral Cronstedt. “I submit, sir, that this information is a good deal more reliable than Colonel Anttonen’s mysterious certainties. According to Klick, the Russians outnumber us already, and General Suchtelen will soon be receiving sufficient reinforcements to enable him to launch a major assault. Furthermore, they have a formidable amount of artillery on hand. Certainly more than the forty pieces that Colonel Anttonen would have us believe is the extent of their armament.”

  Cronstedt was nodding, agreeing. Even then Anttonen could not be silent. “Sir,” he insisted. “Klick’s reports must be discounted. The man cannot be trusted. Either he is in the pay of the enemy or they are deluding him.”

  Cronstedt frowned. “That is a grave charge, Colonel.”

  “He is a fool and a damned Anjala traitor!”

  Jägerhorn bristled at that, and Cronstedt and a number of junior officers looked plainly aghast. “Colonel,” the commandant said, “it is well known that Colonel Jägerhorn has relatives in the Anjala League. Your comments are offensive. Our situation here is perilous enough without my officers fighting among themselves over petty political differences. You will offer an apology at once.”

  Given no choice, Anttonen had tendered an awkward apology. Jägerhorn accepted with a patronizing nod.

  Cronstedt went back to the papers. “Very persuasive,” he said, “and very alarming. It is as I have feared. We have come to a hard place.” Plainly his mind was made up. It was futile to argue further. It was at times like this that Bengt Anttonen most wondered what madness had possessed him. He would go to staff meetings determined to be circumspect and politic, and no sooner would he be seated than a strange arrogance would sieze him. He argued long past the point of wisdom; he denied obvious facts, confirmed in written reports from reliable sources; he spoke out of turn and made enemies on every side.

  “No, sir,” he said. “I beg of you, disregard Klick’s intelligence. Sveaborg is vital to the spring counteroffensive. We have nothing to fear if we can hold out until the ice melts. Once the sea lanes are open, Sweden will send help.”

  Vice Admiral Cronstedt’s face was drawn and weary, an old man’s face. “How many times must we go over this? I grow tired of your argumentative attitude, and I am quite aware of Sveaborg’s importance to the spring offensive. The facts are plain. Our defenses are flawed, and the ice makes our walls accessible from all sides. Sweden’s armies are being routed—”

  “We know that only from the newspapers the Russians allow us, sir,” Anttonen blurted out. “French and Russian papers. Such news is unreliable.”

  Cronstedt’s patience was exhausted. “Quiet!” he said, slapping the table with an open palm. “I have had enough of your intransigence, Colonel Anttonen. I respect your patriotic fervor, but not your judgment. In the future, when I require your opinion, I shall ask for it. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Anttonen had said.

  Jägerhorn smiled. “If I may proceed?”

  The rebuke had been as smarting as the cold winter wind. It was no wonder Anttonen had felt driven to the cold solitude of the battlements afterward.

  By the time he returned to his quarters, Bengt Anttonen’s mood was bleak and confused. Darkness was falling, he knew. Over the frozen sea, over Sveaborg, over Sweden and Finland. And over America, he thought. Yet the afterthought left him sick and dizzy. He sat heavily on his cot, cradling his head in his hands. America, America, what madness was that, what possible difference could the struggle between Sweden and Russia make to that infant nation so far away?

  Rising, he lit a lamp, as if light would drive the troubling thoughts away, and splashed some stale water on his face from the basin atop the modest dresser. Behind the basin was the mirror he used for shaving, slightly warped and dulled by corrosion but serviceable. As he dried his big, bony hands, he found himself staring at his own face, the features at once so familiar and so oddly, frighteningly strange. He had unruly, graying hair; dark-gray eyes; a narrow, straight nose; slightly sunken cheeks; a square chin. He was too thin, almost gaunt. It was a stubborn, common, plain face. The face he had worn all his life. Long ago, Bengt Anttonen had grown resigned to the way he looked. Until recently, he scarcely gave his appearance any thought. Yet now he stared at himself, unblinking, and felt a disturbing fascination welling up inside him, a sense of satisfaction, a pleasure in the cast of his image that was alien and troubling. Such vanity was sick, unmanly, another sign of madness. Anttonen wrenched his gaze from the mirror. He lay himself down with a will.

  For long moments he could not sleep. Fancies and visions danced against his closed eyelids, sights as fantastic as the phantom animals fashioned by the wind: flags he did not recognize, walls of polished metal, great storms of fire, men and women as hideous as demons asleep in beds of burning liquid. And then, suddenly, the thoughts were gone, peeled off like a layer of burned skin. Bengt Anttonen sighed uneasily and turned in his sleep.…

  * * *

  … before the awareness is always the pain, and the pain comes first, the only reality in a still, quiet, empty world beyond sensation. For a second, an hour I do not know where I am, and I am afraid. And then the knowledge comes to me; returning, I am returnin
g, in the return is always pain. I do not want to return, but I must, must. I want the sweet, clean purity of ice and snow, the bracing touch of the winter wind, the healthy lines of Bengt’s face. But it fades, fades though I scream and clutch for it, crying, wailing. It fades, fades, and then is gone.

  I sense motion, a stirring all around me as the immersion fluid ebbs away. My face is exposed first. I suck in air through my wide nostrils, spit the tubes out of my bleeding mouth. When the fluid falls below my ears, I hear a gurgling, a greedy sucking sound. The vampire machines feed on the juices of my womb, the black blood of my second life. The cold touch of air on my skin pains me. I try not to scream, manage to hold the noise down to a whimper.

  Above, the top of my tank is coated by a thin, ebony film that has clung to the polished metal. I can see my reflection. I’m a stirring sight, nostril hairs aquiver on my noseless face, my right cheek bulging with a swollen, greenish tumor. Such a handsome devil. I smile, showing a triple row of rotten teeth, fresh new incisors pushing up among them like sharpened stakes in a field of yellow toadstools. I wait for release. The tank is too damned small, a coffin. I am buried alive, and the fear is a palpable weight upon me. They do not like me. What if they just leave me in here to suffocate and die? “Out!” I whisper, but no one hears.

  Finally the lid lifts, and the orderlies are there. Rafael and Slim. Big, strapping fellows, blurred white colossi with flags sewn above the pockets of their uniforms. I cannot focus on their faces. My eyes are not so good at the best of times and especially bad just after a return. I know the dark one is Rafe, though, and it is he who reaches down and unhooks the IV tubes and the telemetry while Slim gives me my injection. Ahhh. The hurt fades. I force my hands to grasp the tank’s sides. The metal feels strange; the motion is clumsy, deliberate; my body, slow to respond. “What took you so long?” I ask.

  “Emergency,” says Slim. “Rollins.” He is a testy, laconic sort, and he doesn’t like me. To learn more, I would have to ask question after question. I don’t have the strength. I concentrate instead on pulling myself to a sitting position. The room is awash with a bright blue-white fluorescent light. My eyes water after so long in darkness. Maybe the orderlies think I’m crying with joy to be back. They’re big but not too bright. The air has an astringent, sanitized smell and the hard coolness of air conditioning. Rafe lifts me up from the coffin, the fifth silvery casket in a row of six, each hooked up to the computer banks that loom around us. The other coffins are all empty now. I am the last vampire to rise this night, I think. Then I remember. Four of them are gone, have been gone for a long time. There is only Rollins and myself, and something has happened to Rollins.

  They set me in a chair, and Slim rolls me past the empty caskets and up the ramps to debriefing. “Rollins?” I ask him.

  “We lost him.”

  I didn’t like Rollins. He was even uglier than me, a wizened little homunculus with a swollen, oversize cranium and a distorted torso without arms or legs. He had real big eyes, lidless, so he could never close them. Even asleep, he looked like he was staring at you. And he had no sense of humor. No goddamned sense of humor at all. When you’re a geek, you got to have a sense of humor. But whatever his faults, Rollins was the only one left, besides me. Gone now. I feel no grief, only a numbness.

  The debriefing room is cluttered but somehow impersonal. They wait for me on the other side of the table. The orderlies roll me up opposite them and depart. The table is a long Formica barrier between me and my superiors, maybe a cordon sanitaire. They can’t let me get too close; after all, I might be contagious. They are normals. I am … what am I? When they conscripted me, I was classified as an HM3. Human Mutation, third category. Or a hum-three, in the vernacular. The hum-ones are the nonviables: stillborns and infant deaths and living veggies. We got millions of ’em. The hum-twos are viable but useless, all the guys with extra toes and webbed hands and funny eyes. Got thousands of them. But us hum-threes are a fucking elite, so they tell us. That’s when they draft us. Down here, inside the Graham Project bunker, we get new names. Old Charlie Graham himself used to call us his “timeriders” before he croaked, but that’s too romantic for Major Salazar. Salazar prefers the official government term: G.C., for Graham Chrononaut. The orderlies and grunts turned G. C. into geek, of course, and we turned it right back on ’em, me and Nan and Creeper, when they were still with us. They had a terrific sense of humor, now. The killer geeks, we called ourselves. Six little killer geeks ridding the timestream, biting the heads off vast chickens of probability. Heigh-ho.

  And then there was one.

  Salazar is pushing papers around on the table. He looks sick. Under his dark complexion I can see an unhealthy greenish tinge, and the blood vessels in his nose have burst beneath the skin. None of us are in good shape down here, but Salazar looks worse than most. He’s been gaining weight, and it looks bad on him. His uniforms are all too tight now, and there won’t be any fresh ones. They’ve closed down all the commissaries and the mills, and in a few years we’ll all be wearing rags. I’ve told Salazar he ought to diet, but no one will listen to a geek, except when the subject is chickens. “Well?” Salazar says to me, his voice snapping. A hell of a way to start a debriefing. Three years ago, when it began, he was full of starch and vinegar, very correct and military, but even the Maje has no time left for decorum now.

  “What happened to Rollins?” I ask.

  Doctor Veronica Jacobi is seated next to Salazar. She used to be chief headshrinker down here, but since Graham Crackers went and expired she’s been heading up the whole scientific side of the show. “Death trauma,” she says, professionally. “Most likely, his host was killed in action.”

  I nod. Old story. Sometimes the chickens bite back. “He accomplish anything?”

  “Not that we’ve noticed,” Salazar says.

  The answer I expected. Rollins had gotten rapport with some ignorant grunt of a foot soldier in the army of Charles XII. I had this droll mental picture of him marching the guy up to his loon of a teenage king and trying to tell the boy to stay away from Poltava. Charles probably hanged him on the spot—though, come to think of it, it had to be something quicker, or else Rollins would have had time to disengage.

  “Your report,” prompts Salazar.

  “Right, Maje,” I say lazily. He hates to be called Maje, though not so much as he hated Sally, which was what Creeper used to call him. Us killer geeks are an insolent lot. “It’s no good. Cronstedt will meet with General Suchtelen and negotiate for surrender. Nothing Bengt says sways him one damned bit. I been pushing too hard. Bengt thinks he’s going crazy. I’m afraid he may crack.”

  “All timeriders take that risk,” Jacobi says. “The longer you stay in rapport, the stronger your influence grows on the host and the more likely it becomes that your presence will be felt. Few hosts can deal with that perception.” Ronnie has a nice voice, and she’s always polite to me. Well scrubbed and tall and calm and even friendly, and above all ineffably polite. I wonder if she’d be as polite if she knew that she’d figured prominently in my masturbation fantasies ever since we’d been down here. They only put five women into the Cracker Box, with thirty-two men and six geeks, and she’s by far the most pleasant to contemplate.

  Creeper liked to contemplate her, too. He even bugged her bedroom, to watch her in action. She never knew. Creeper had a talent for that stuff, and he’d rig up these tiny little audiovideo units in his workbench and plant them everywhere. He said that if he couldn’t live life at least he was going to watch it. One night he invited me into his room, when Ronnie was entertaining big, redhaired Captain Halliburton, the head of base security, and her fella in those early days. I watched, yeah; got to confess that I watched. But afterward I got angry. Told Creeper he had no right to spy on Ronnie or on any of them. “They make us spy on our hosts,” he said, “right inside their fucking heads, you geek. Turnabout is fair play.” I told him it was different, but I got so mad I couldn’t explain why. It was the o
nly fight Creeper and me ever had. In the long run, it didn’t mean much. He went on watching, without me. They never caught the little sneak, but it didn’t matter. One day he went timeriding and didn’t come back. Big, strong Captain Halliburton died, too, caught too many rads on those security sweeps, I guess. As far as I know, Creeper’s hookup is still in place; from time to time I’ve thought about going in and taking a peek, to see if Ronnie has herself a new lover. But I haven’t. I really don’t want to know. Leave me with my fantasies and my wet dreams; they’re a lot better, anyway.

  Salazar’s fat fingers drum upon the table. “Give us a full report on your activities.”

  I sigh and give them what they want, everything in boring detail. When I’m done, I say, “Jägerhorn is the key to the problem. He’s got the Cronstedt’s ear. Anttonen don’t.”

  Salazar is frowning. “If only you could establish rapport with Jägerhorn,” he grumbles. What a futile whiner. He knows that’s impossible.

  “You takes what you gets,” I tell him. “If you’re going to wish impossible wishes, why stop at Jägerhorn? Why not Cronstedt? Hell, why not the goddamned czar?”

  “He’s right, Major,” Veronica says. “We ought to be grateful we’ve got Anttonen. At least he’s a colonel. That’s better than we did in any of the other target periods.”

  Salazar is still unhappy. He’s a military historian by trade. He thought this would be easy when they transferred him out from West Point or what was left of it. “Anttonen is peripheral. We must reach the key figures. Your chrononauts are giving me footnotes, bystanders, the wrong men in the wrong place at the wrong times. It is impossible.”