Year's Best Scifi 7 Part 16

A week, this lasts: a week of curfews, false sightings, beatings of the rush beds. At last, exhausted, Connie consults with the military authorities in Ipswich, and abandons the hunt.

At night, with the light on, he reads.

"Rudin spoke intelligently, pa.s.sionately, and effectively; he exhibited much knowledge, a great deal of reading. No one had expected to find him a remarkable man... He was so indifferently dressed, so little had been heard of him. To all of them it seemed incomprehensible and strange how someone so intelligent could pop up suddenly in the provinces."

With eyes black-brown and bored, she says: "I've heard this part before."

Yes, and if he asked her, she could probably recite it to him. (He does not ask her.) "He spoke masterfully, and entertainingly, but not entirely lucidly...yet this very vagueness lent particular charm to his speech."

Connie wonders, dizzily, if Ivan Turgenev's observation, sharp enough in its day, means anything at all now.

"A listener might not understand precisely what was being talked about; but he would catch his breath, curtains would open wide before his eyes, something resplendent would burn dazzlingly ahead of him."

Rebecca does not know what vagueness is. She could not be vague if she tried. Her stories shine and flash like knives. He glances at her eyes. They will not close. They will not close. His bludgeon hand is numb, he is so tired. But still he reads.

"... But most astounded of all were Basistov and Natalya. Basistov could scarcely draw breath; he sat all the while open-mouthed and pop-eyed-and listened, listened, as he had never listened to anyone in his whole life, and Natalya's face was covered in a crimson flush and her gaze, directly fixed at Rudin, both darkened and glittered in turn..."

"Tomorrow," he says to her, when at last he can read no more, "let us go for a walk. Where would you like to go?"

"To the banks of the Alde and the Ore," she says, "where Hadmuhaddera's nephew lost his shoe, and the last man in Orford once fished."

Deprived of records, she remembers everything as a story. Because everything is a story, she remembers everything.

Tonight, in the dark, as he sprawls, formless and helpless beside her, she tells him a story of a beach she has heard tell of, a beach she doesn't know, called Chesil.

"Chesil Beach is a high shingle bank, cut free of the coast by small, brackish waters," she says.

"Like here," he says.

"Like here," she agrees, "but the waters aren't rivers, and the bank that parts them from the sea is much bigger, and made all of stones."

She tells him: "You could spend your whole day among the dunes and never see the sea. Yet you hear its constant stirring, endlessly, and soon in your mind comes the image of this bank, this barrow-mound, put before you like a dike, to keep the sea from roaring in upon you. The land behind you is melted and steep, andbefore you the pebbles grind, a vast mill, and you wonder how high the sea water is now. You wonder how high the tide comes, relative to the land. You wonder how long it will take, for the sea to eat through the bank..."

In the morning, as you are eating breakfast, she comes down the stairs. She is wearing a red dress. It is a dress you recognize. It belongs to the girl you so recently left. It belongs to your mistress in Paris.

Even her hair is arranged in the way that your mistress's hair was arranged.

You say nothing. How can you? You can hardly breathe.

"Let's go for our walk, then," she says.

So you go for your walk, down the track, past the gate, into lane after lane, and all around stand the apple trees, line upon line. The gravel slides wetly under your feet as you walk, and the leaves of the apple trees whisper and rattle. She scents the air, and you wonder what she finds there to smell, what symptom of weather or season or time of day. She tosses her hair in the breeze. Her hair is crunched and pinned and high, and the fold of it that you so treasured is gone, the fold of gold-brown that once hid her eye.

Your orchards fan east to the banks of the Alde and the Ore. The rivers run wide and muddy and dark, and seabirds pick over them, combing for the blind, simple foods of the seash.o.r.e.

The rivers, slow, rich and mud-laden, evacuate themselves into each other through a maze of ditches and channels, some natural, and some cut by hand through the furze. On the far banks, where the land is too narrow for tillage, an old fenland persists, all jetties and rotten boardwalks and old broken-down walls, and everything is choked by high, concealing reeds.

She turns away from you where you settle, shapeless in the gra.s.s. She bends, and the red dress rides up her calves, and you begin to ask her where the dress comes from, and what has she done to her hair?

But all that comes out is: "I-I-I-".

She takes off her shoes.

"What are you going to do?"

"Paddle." She lifts the edges of her dress and unrolls her stockings, peeling them down her brown smooth legs.

The tide is out, the mud is thick and brown like chocolate.

"There are terrible quicksands," you tell her, knowing that she knows.

Absently, she traces her toe through the yielding mud.

"If I don't come back," she says, "you'll know I'm swimming."

"No," you tell her, agitated. "Don't do that! It's dangerous. Don't do that."

You stand and watch her as she walks slowly upstream, in the shallow edge of the water. Swishing her feet. When she is gone, you wander to the water's edge, and you study the thing she has drawn in the mud.

Qit eah t

A line from a book comes to you: a book by Marshall McLuhan: Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

When the rifle shot comes out from the reeds in the far bank, and hits you full in the chest, you do not fall. The suddenness of it seems to freeze the world, to undo the physical constraints that hold you and your kind and her kind and all kinds to worlds that are never quite alien, never quite home.

You do not even stagger.

You stand, watching old abandoned windmills, listening to the rushes, their susurration clear against the rustling of the leaves of the apple trees. You watch the distant figure with the rifle leap from cover behind an old ruined wall and disappear between the reeds. You choke, and fall backward. As you lie there, she comes running.

She has taken off the red dress. She has let down her hair.

You follow the line of it, and find that it has returned to itself, a fold of gold-brown over one eye.

Terrified, you follow the fold of her hair to her neck, to her breast. Blood bubbles in your throat as you try to speak.

She puts her arms about you, holding you upright for a few seconds longer. "Try not to move," she says. She is crying in the soft, calm manner of her people.

When your eyes close, she begins to sing. "I hate you," she sings. "I hate you. Oh, how I hate you!"

Singing, or weeping. You cannot tell the difference.

You come from too far away.

Under's Game

MICHAEL SWANWICK.

Michael Swanwick's [www.michaelswanwick.com] novels include the Nebula Award winner Stations of the Tide (1991), The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993), and Jack Faust (1997), and his new novel Bones of the Earth (2002). But in between the novels, he still writes short stories. His short fiction in recent years has been fantasy as often as science fiction, but his stories dominated the short fiction Hugo Award nominations in 1998. And a few more appeared in 1999. Swanwick then announced that he had better get back to novel writing, so we are experiencing another comparative dry spell before the next wave of Swanwick stories, except that he has discovered a facility for very short stories, now appearing widely. His short fiction has been collected princ.i.p.ally in Gravity's Angels (1991), A Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000), and Tales of Old Earth (2000). A collection of short-shorts, Cigar-Box Faust and Other Miniatures, appeared in 2001 from Tachyon Books. Other than that, we do not know what to expect, except excellence.

"Under's Game" is a witty parody of a cla.s.sic Orson Scott Card SF story. It was published by SciFiction, and is one of a series of fantasy and SF short short stories and vignettes, each based on an element from the Periodic Table.

12.

MG.

MAGNESIUM.

24.312.

The s.p.a.ceships burned brightly in the vacuum between stars. They were a hundred miles long at a minimum. The tiny ships of the s.p.a.ce Force darted in and out among the flaming wrecks, dodging the Invader fleet's death rays when they could and dying when they couldn't. Courage was on the side of the s.p.a.ce Force. Numbers were on the side of the Invaders.

"It doesn't make any sense," Under said petulantly. "How can they burn in outer s.p.a.ce? There's no air there. It's stupid."

"The hulls are made of pure magnesium. The Invaders breathe oxygen. One direct hit, and the two combine. What's so hard to believe about that?" his instructor asked the young military genius. "Let's test your skill. Take the controls. Show me how good you are."

Under picked up the pad, shifted forces along seven vectors at once, launched plasma torpedoes, and suddenly a full quarter of the Invader fleet was in flames. Then he threw the controller aside. "It's a dumb game. Aren't there any Cheez Doodles left?" He dug a hand under the sofa cushions, searching.

"Please," the instructor begged, tears in his eyes. He was a general, and the one who had convinced the Government of Earth to put all its defenses under the control of one prep.u.b.escent boy. The Invaders were better strategists than any adult human, and better tacticians as well. It only made sense to handover all the s.p.a.ce Force to one boy and then (so he wouldn't freeze up under the responsibility) keep the reality of the situation from him. "You can have ice cream if you win. With sprinkles!"

Under's eyes gleamed. He s.n.a.t.c.hed up the game pad, and launched a series of commands. The s.p.a.ce Force twisted, turned ... and fled into hypers.p.a.ce.

The Invader fleet followed.

"We're doomed!" the general wailed. All the vector lines on the display converged upon one small blue-and-white planet. "You're leading the Invaders straight toward Earth."

"That's what they think too." Under bit his lip and twisted on the couch. His thumbs were a blur. "But watch this. Our ships burn every ounce of fuel they've got and-there's no way the enemy can predict this-their vectors take them right through the Sun's corona. Their hulls are plasteel-they can take the heat. That gives them a slingshot gravity a.s.sist of ten gees. Just within performance tolerance of the crews."

"But now they can't maneuver!"

"They don't have to. Watch. The last of our ships is leaving the sun's chromosphere, and the first of theirs is entering."

There was a glint of light as the first Invader ship vaporized.

"See? Magnesium hulls, just like you said. Up in flames, and bye-bye Invaders!" He tossed the controls to the general. "Here, catch!"

The general stood mesmerized as the Invader menace evanesced, one instant a threat to human existence and the next instant only a memory.

"This is a great moment for humanity," he said, tears in his eyes. His thumb moved, inputting orders for the s.p.a.ce Force. Then he frowned. "They're not responding. They're still headed for Earth!"

"Yeah, pretty neat, huh? I figured they're out of fuel, anyway, so they might as well go out with a bang.

So I aimed them straight at Home Base."

"But this is terrible! At those speeds, they'll hit us with all the force of so many nuclear bombs!"

"h.e.l.l," Under said. "It's only a game."

A Matter of Mathematics

BRIAN W. ALDISS.

Brian W. Aldiss [www.brianwaldiss.com] was given the Grand Master award of the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2000. The influence of his works in SF is deep and widespread. He burst into prominence in the late 1950s, and has never ceased to push the boundaries since. Over five decades, he has published more than 300 stories, collected in twenty-five books, from s.p.a.ce, Time, and Nathaniel (1957) to Supertoys Last All Summer Long (2001), from which this story is taken, and a number of fine novels, including the cla.s.sics Hothouse, Frankenstein Unbound, and the h.e.l.liconia Trilogy. Aldiss has published his autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye (1998), and three new novels are just out or announced for 2002.

The year 2001 was another big year for Aldiss, when the Stanley Kubrick film based on his book, Supertoys Last All Summer Long, was released as AI. The film was a controversial critical success and popular failure, but is certainly a major landmark in SF cinema.

"A Matter of Mathematics" is a lunatic far-future s.p.a.ce story about self-absorbed obsessives finding the truths of the universe by dwelling on their obsessions. It suggests that inner s.p.a.ce is as strange and as interesting as outer s.p.a.ce.

It was a funny thing about Joyce Bagreist. She lived on yogurt and jam sandwiches. She never washed her hair. She was not popular at her university. Yet Bagreist's Short Cut changed the universe.

Simply, shockingly, inevitably, irretrievably.