Year's Best SF 8 Read online

  YEAR’S BEST

  SF 8

  EDITED BY

  DAVID G. HARTWELL

  and KATHRYN CRAMER

  Two Futurians:

  To Virginia Kidd, who nurtured short fiction as well as novels.

  To Damon Knight, who taught that the anthologist’s basic responsibility is not to art or to writers, but to readers.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Bruce Sterling

  In Paradise

  Michael Swanwick

  Slow Life

  Eleanor Arnason

  Knapsack Poems

  Geoffrey A. Landis

  At Dorado

  Robert Reed

  Coelacanths

  Ken Wharton

  Flight Correction

  Robert Sheckley

  Shoes

  Charles Sheffield

  The Diamond Drill

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Seasons of the Ansarac

  Richard Chwedyk

  A Few Kind Words for A. E. Van Vogt

  Charles Stross

  Halo

  Terry Bisson

  I Saw the Light

  A.M. Dellamonica

  A Slow Day at the Gallery

  Paul Di Filippo

  Ailoura

  J.R. Dunn

  The Names of All the Spirits

  Carol Emshwiller

  Grandma

  Neal Asher

  Snow in the Desert

  Greg Egan

  Singleton

  Robert Onopa

  Geropods

  Jack Williamson

  Afterlife

  Gene Wolfe

  Shields of Mars

  Nancy Kress

  Patent Infringement

  Michael Moorcock

  Lost Sorceress of the Silent

  Citadel

  About the Editors

  Books Edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  The editors would like to thank the short fiction reviewers at Locus, LocusMag.com, and Tangent Online for their insights, and our editor, Michael Shohl, for editorial help and for shepherding this book through the publication process.

  Introduction

  We said last time that 2001 was an excellent year for the science fiction short story. The year 2002 was, if anything, even better. Many stories were challenging, literate, thought-provoking, and entertaining for the mind in the ways that make SF a unique genre.

  The good news in the book publishing area is that nothing particularly bad happened in 2002. SF publishing as we have known it is nine mass market publishing lines (Ace, Bantam, Baen, DAW, Del Rey, Eos, Roc, Tor, Warner—ten if you count Pocket Book’s Star Trek line), and those lines continue, though you will find Ace, Roc, and DAW all part of the Penguin conglomerate, and Bantam and Del Rey both part of Random House (now so closely allied that a Del Rey hardcover became a Bantam SF paperback lead this year). Mass market distributors are still pressing all publishers to reduce the number of titles and just publish “big books,” but SF and fantasy seem to be resisting further diminution.

  The last SF and fantasy magazines that are widely distributed are Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and Realms of Fantasy. All of them published a lot of good fiction this year, we are pleased to report. The U.S. is the only English-language country that still has any professional, large-circulation magazines, though Canada, Australia, and the UK have several excellent magazines. The semi-prozines—for example, Interzone, Tales of the Unanticipated, Spectrum SF, Black Gate—mirror the “little magazines” of the mainstream in function, holding to professional editorial standards and publishing the next generation of writers, along with some of the present masters.

  The small presses were a very healthy presence. We have a strong short-fiction field today in part because the small presses publishing semi-professional magazines, single-author collections, and anthologies are printing and circulating a majority of the high-quality fiction published in SF and fantasy and horror. One significant trend noticeable in the small press anthologies this year was toward genre-bending slipstream stories. The SF Book Club, now part of the mega-corporation (Bookspan) that resulted from the combination of all of the Literary Guild and Book of the Month Club divisions, continues to be an innovative and lively publisher, as well as an influential reprinter. Good anthologies and collections are harder than ever to select on the bookstore shelves from among the mediocre ones, but you will find some of the best books each year selected for SFBC editions, often the only hardcover editions of those anthologies.

  The best original anthologies of the year in our opinion were Leviathan 3, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre; Polyphony, edited by Jay Lake; Conjunctions 39, edited by Peter Straub—these books mixing SF and fantasy with slipstream fiction; Mars Probes, edited by Peter Crowther (DAW); Embrace the Mutation, edited by Bill Sheehan; Agog, edited by Cat Sparks; and The DAW 30th Anniversary SF Anthology, edited by Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert (which contained in general long episodes from popular novel series rather than independent stories; there was also a companion volume for fantasy). Of these, the particular excellences of Polyphony, Conjunctions 39, Leviathan, and Embrace the Mutation were mostly in the realm of fantasy, and the especial pleasures of Mars Probes were in SF. So you will find a couple of stories here from Mars Probes, but should look to our companion Year’s Best Fantasy 3 for stories from the other books. The rest of the paperback original anthologies of the year should best be considered as equivalent to single issues of magazines, and on that basis, 2002 was on the whole not a distinguished year for original anthologies in paperback.

  Several online short fiction markets (Infinite Matrix, SciFiction, and Strange Horizons) helped to cushion the loss in recent years of print media markets for short fiction. We found some excellent science fiction, particularly from editor Ellen Datlow’s SciFiction site, now the highest-paying market in the genre for short fiction, although both the others were of quite high quality in general. We offer stories from them in this book for perhaps the first time in print.

  In 2002 it was good to be reading the magazines, as well, both professional and semi-pro. It was a very strong year for novellas, and there were more than a hundred shorter stories in consideration. So we repeat, for readers new to this series, the usual disclaimer: This selection of science fiction stories represents the best that was published during the year 2002. It would take two or three more volumes of this size to include nearly all of the best short stories—though even then, not all of the best novellas. And we believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not physically possible to encompass it all in even one very large book, also implies presenting some substantial variety of excellences, and we left some worthy stories out in order to include others in this limited space.

  Our general principle for selection: This book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is clearly that and not something else. We have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream, and postmodern literature. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best Fantasy in paperback from Eos as a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy fiction, too. But here, we chose science fiction.

  We try to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. This is a book about what’s going on now in SF. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point o

  * * *

  evolving genre

  * * *

  . David G.
Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

  Pleasantville, NY

  In Paradise

  BRUCE STERLING

  Bruce Sterling lives in Austin, Texas. The novel Schismatrix (1985) and the related stories that made him famous were re-released in 1996 as Schismatrix Plus. He collaborated with William Gibson on The Difference Engine (1990), became a media figure who appeared on the cover of Wired, became a journalist who wrote the exposé The Hacker Crackdown (1992), and returned his attention to science fiction in 1995, with a new explosion of stories and novels, including Heavy Weather (1994), Holy Fire (1996), and Distraction (1998). His most recent novel, Zeitgeist (2000), is fantasy. His interest in the political and cultural implications of future change has informed his work, and in his recent nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002), he re-imagines the future after the turn of the 21st century.

  “In Paradise” was published in F&SF, a magazine that published a large number of especially good stories this year. It is a madly jolly, near-future love story, in which the machete of satire is wielded against the advent and spread of intrusion into the private lives of citizens in the name of homeland security. Certain moral and ethical problems are oversimplified so that love conquers all. It is first in this book because we found it so representative of the year 2002 and so much fun.

  The machines broke down so much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about that.

  Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a plastic flask and had a solid nip of Scotch.

  The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone. Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed through the big metal frame just as the scanner broke down. So these two somber, suited old men were getting the full third degree with the hand wands, while daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy coat and thick black headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her minders stretched the no man’s land of official insecurity. She waved across the gap.

  The security geeks found something metallic in the black wool jacket of the Wicked Uncle. Of course it was harmless, but they had to run their full ritual, lest they die of boredom at their posts. As the Scotch settled in, Felix felt time stretch like taffy. Little Miss Mujihadeen discovered that her phone was dying. She banged at it with the flat of her hand.

  The line of hopeful shoppers, grimly waiting to stimulate the economy, shifted in their disgruntlement. It was a bad, bleak scene. It crushed Felix’s heart within him. He longed to leap to his feet and harangue the lot of them. Wake up, he wanted to scream at them, cheer up, act more human. He felt the urge keenly, but it scared people when he cut loose like that. They really hated it. And so did he. He knew he couldn’t look them in the eye. It would only make a lot of trouble.

  The Mideastern men shouted at the girl. She waved her dead phone at them, as if another breakdown was going to help their mood. Then Felix noticed that she shared his own make of cell phone. She had a rather ahead-of-the-curve Finnish model that he’d spent a lot of money on. So Felix rose and sidled over.

  “Help you out with that phone, ma’am?”

  She gave him the paralyzed look of a coed stuck with a dripping tap. “No English?” he concluded. “Habla español, senorita?” No such luck.

  He offered her his own phone. No, she didn’t care to use it. Surprised and even a little hurt by this rejection, Felix took his first good look at her, and realized with a lurch that she was pretty. What eyes! They were whirlpools. The line of her lips was like the tapered edge of a rose leaf.

  “It’s your battery,” he told her. Though she had not a word of English, she obviously got it about phone batteries. After some gestured persuasion, she was willing to trade her dead battery for his. There was a fine and delicate little moment when his fingertips extracted her power supply, and he inserted his own unit into that golden-lined copper cavity. Her display leaped to life with an eager flash of numerals. Felix pressed a button or two, smiled winningly, and handed her phone back.

  She dialed in a hurry, and bearded Evil Dad lifted his phone to answer, and life became much easier on the nerves. Then, with a groaning buzz, the scanner came back on. Dad and Uncle waved a command at her, like lifers turned to trusty prison guards, and she scampered through the metal gate and never looked back.

  She had taken his battery. Well, no problem. He would treasure the one she had given him.

  Felix gallantly let the little crowd through before he himself cleared security. The geeks always went nuts about his plumbing tools, but then again, they had to. He found the assignment: a chi-chi place that sold fake antiques and potpourri. The manager’s office had a clogged drain. As he worked, Felix recharged the phone. Then he socked them for a sum that made them wince.

  On his leisurely way out—whoa, there was Miss Cell phone, that looker, that little goddess, browsing in a jewelry store over Korean gold chains and tiaras. Dad and Uncle were there, with a couple of off-duty cops.

  Felix retired to a bench beside the fountain, in the potted plastic plants. He had another bracing shot of Scotch, then put his feet up on his toolbox and punched her number.

  He saw her straighten at the ring, and open her purse, and place the phone to the kerchiefed side of her head. She didn’t know where he was, or who he was. That was why the words came pouring out of him.

  “My God you’re pretty,” he said. “You are wasting your time with that jewelry. Because your eyes are like two black diamonds.”

  She jumped a little, poked at the phone’s buttons with disbelief, and put it back to her head.

  Felix choked back the urge to laugh and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “A string of pearls around your throat would look like peanuts,” he told the phone. “I am totally smitten with you. What are you like under that big baggy coat? Do I dare to wonder? I would give a million dollars just to see your knees!”

  “Why are you telling me that?” said the phone.

  “Because I’m looking at you right now. And after one look at you, believe me, I was a lost soul.” Felix felt a chill. “Hey, wait a minute—you don’t speak English, do you?”

  “No, I don’t speak English—but my telephone does.”

  “It does?”

  “It’s a very new telephone. It’s from Finland,” the telephone said. “I need it because I’m stuck in a foreign country. Do you really have a million dollars for my knees?”

  “That was a figure of speech,” said Felix, though his bank account was, in point of fact, looking considerably healthier since his girlfriend Lola had dumped him. “Never mind the million dollars,” he said. “I’m dying of love out here. I’d sell my blood just to buy you petunias.”

  “You must be a famous poet,” the phone said dreamily, “for you speak such wonderful Farsi.”

  Felix had no idea what Farsi was—but he was way beyond such fretting now. The rusty gates of his soul were shuddering on their hinges. “I’m drunk,” he realized. “I am drunk on your smile.”

  “In my family, the women never smile.”

  Felix had no idea what to say to that, so there was a hissing silence.

  “Are you a spy? How did you get my phone number?”

  “I’m not a spy. I got your phone number from your phone.”

  “Then I know you. You must be that tall foreign man who gave me your battery. Where are you?”

  “Look outside the store. See me on the bench?” She turned where she stood, and he waved his fingertips. “That’s right, it’s me,” he declared to her. “I can’t believe I’m really going through with this. You just stand there, okay? I’m going to run in there and buy you a wedding ring.”

  “Don’t do that.” She glanced cautiously at Dad and Uncle, then stepped closer to the bulletproof glass. “Yes, I do see you. I remember you.”

  She was looking straight at him. Their eyes met. They were connecting. A hot torrent ran up his spine. “You
are looking straight at me.”

  “You’re very handsome.”

  It wasn’t hard to elope. Young women had been eloping since the dawn of time. Elopement with eager phone support was a snap. He followed her to the hotel, a posh place that swarmed with limos and videocams. He brought her a bag with a big hat, sunglasses, and a cheap Mexican wedding dress. He sneaked into the women’s restroom—they never put videocams there, due to the complaints—and he left the bag in a stall. She went in, came out in new clothes with her hair loose, and walked straight out of the hotel and into his car.

  They couldn’t speak together without their phones, but that turned out to be surprisingly advantageous, as further discussion was not on their minds. Unlike Lola, who was always complaining that he should open up and relate—“You’re a plumber,” she would tell him, “how deep and mysterious is a plumber supposed to be?”—the new woman in his life had needs that were very straightforward. She liked to walk in parks without a police escort. She liked to thoughtfully peruse the goods in Mideastern ethnic groceries. And she liked to make love to him. She was nineteen years old, and the willing sacrifice of her chastity had really burned the bridges for his little refugee. Once she got fully briefed about what went inside where, she was in the mood to tame the demon. She had big, jagged, sobbing, alarming, romantic, brink-of-the-grave things going on, with long, swoony kisses, and heel-drumming, and clutching-and-clawing.

  When they were too weak, and too raw, and too tingling to make love anymore, then she would cook, very badly. She was on her phone constantly, talking to her people. These confidantes of hers were obviously women, because she asked them for Persian cooking tips. She would sink with triumphant delight into cheery chatter as the Basmati rice burned.