Year's Best SF 7 Read online

  YEAR’S

  BEST

  SF 7

  EDITED BY

  DAVID G. HARTWELL

  and KATHRYN CRAMER

  To the friends and family of Jenna Felice (1976–2001)

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Nancy Kress

  Computer Virus

  Terry Bisson

  Charlie’s Angels

  Richard Chwedyk

  The Measure of All Things

  Simon Ings

  Russian Vine

  MichaelSwanwick

  Under’s Game

  Brian W. Aldiss

  A Matter of Mathematics

  Edward M. Lerner

  Creative Destruction

  David Morrell

  Resurrection

  James Morrow

  The Cat’s Pajamas

  Michael Swanwick

  The Dog Said Bow-Wow

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  The Building

  Stephen Baxter

  Gray Earth

  Terry Dowling

  The Lagan Fishers

  Thomas M. Disch

  In Xanadu

  Lisa Goldstein

  The Go-Between

  Gene Wolfe

  Viewpoint

  Gregory Benford

  Anomalies

  Alastair Reynolds

  Glacial

  James Patrick Kelly

  Undone

  About the Editors

  Book Edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  We would like to acknowledge the usefulness of Tangents online, and of Locus online and Locus magazine, and the many reviewers of short fiction with whom we often disagree. And also the help of those fiction websites, including SciFiction and Strange Horizons, who printed and sent us stories to consider.

  Introduction

  The year 2001 was an excellent one for the science fiction short story. The stories were often challenging, thought-provoking, and entertaining in the ways that make SF a unique genre. It was a year of great excitement, great tragedy in the real world, and great change. There is a war going on.

  In 2001, books by the big names were selling better than ever, sliding through the publishing and distribution process perhaps even easier than before. Hardcover editions contributed substantially to the support of every SF publishing line. The trade paperback was well-established as the safety net of a number of publishers and writers. The small presses were again a vigorous presence. We have a strong short fiction field today because the small presses, semi-professional magazines, and anthologies are printing and circulating a majority of the high-quality fiction published in sf and fantasy and horror. 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 of our field 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. What a change that is in the U.S.—though this trend has been emerging for more than a decade.

  We must not forget the SF Book Club, so much a part of the SF field that it is often as invisible, unless we look up, as the skyscrapers we pass on our way to work in the city. 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 edition of those anthologies.

  The best original anthologies of the year in our opinion were Starlight 3, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor) and Red Shift, edited by Al Sarrantonio (Roc). Of those, the particular excellences of Starlight were mostly in the realm of fantasy, and the especial pleasures of Red Shift were in SF. So you will find some stories here from Red Shift, but should look to our companion, Year’s Best Fantasy 2, for some stories from the Nielsen Hayden book.

  I write in December 2001, but the anxious outlines of the publishing future are becoming clear for the SF field 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 are hard-pressed to continue distributing the number of new titles they have been able to in the past. Mass market distributors are pressing all publishers to reduce the number of titles and just publish “big books.” The last SF and Fantasy magazines that are widely distributed (Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, Realms of Fantasy) are being charged more by the same distributors for distribution because they are not as high-circulation as The New Yorker or Playboy (which are also under pressure). So the in-field magazines are hard-pressed but are only a special case of the widespread difficulties facing all magazines.

  In 2001, the air went out of electronic bookselling. Amazon.com fired a lot of people and closed warehouses, intending to claim a profit in early 2002. Barnes & Noble folded its dotcom division back into the bookstore chain, with attendant layoffs. And electronic text failed to live up to the advance publicity (both Random House and Warner closed their etext operations by the end of 2001). Print-on-demand became a very small success. The Wall Street Journal, in a late-year article surveying 2500 titles, quoted the figure of 88 copies as the average sale of a print-on-demand title.

  Of the several high-paying online short fiction markets announced last year that helped to cushion the loss of print media markets for short fiction, one survives. We found some excellent science fiction from editor Ellen Datlow’s Scifiction site, now the highest-paying market in the genre for short fiction. We offer three stories from it, for perhaps the first time in print, in this book.

  It was another good year to be reading the magazines, both pro and semi-professional. It was a strong year for novellas, and there were more than a hundred shorter stories in consideration, from which we made our final selection. 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 2001. It would take two or three more volumes this size to have nearly all of the best—though even then, not all the best novellas. We believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not physically possible to encompass it all in one even 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 z 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 out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2001.

  David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

  Pleasantville, NY

  Computer Virus

  NANCY KRESS

  Nancy Kress [www.sff.net/people/nankress] is one of today’s leading SF writers. She is known for her complex medical SF stories, and for her biological and evolutionary extrapolations in such classics as Beggars in Spain (1993), Beggars and Choosers (1994), and Beggars Ride (1996). In recent years, she
has written Maximum Light (1998), Probability Moon (2000), and last year published Probability Sun (2001), the second book in a trilogy of hard SF novels set against the background of a war between humanity and an alien race. In 1998 she married SF writer Charles Sheffield. Her stories are rich in texture and in psychological insight, and have been collected in Trinity and Other Stories (1985), The Aliens of Earth (1993), and Beaker’s Dozen (1998). She has won two Nebulas and a Hugo for them, and been nominated a dozen more times. She teaches regularly at summer writing workshops such as Clarion, and during the year at the Bethesda Writing Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She is the Fiction columnist for Writer’s Digest.

  “Computer Virus” is major Kress, a moving, exciting near future hostage story, fusing with unusual grace and plausibility the notions of a biological virus and a computer virus. It appeared in Asimov’s , a magazine that definitely kept its competitive edge this year. It was one of several fine stories Kress published in 2001.

  “It’s out!” someone said, a tech probably, although later McTaggart could never remember who spoke first. “It’s out!”

  “It can’t be!” someone else cried, and then the whole room was roiling, running, frantic with activity that never left the workstations. Running in place.

  “It’s not supposed to be this way,” Elya blurted. Instantly she regretted it. The hard, flat eyes of her sister-in-law Cassie met hers, and Elya flinched away from that look.

  “And how is it supposed to be, Elya?” Cassie said. “Tell me.”

  “I’m sorry. I only meant that…that no matter how much you loved Vlad, mourning gets…lighter. Not lighter, but less…withdrawn. Cass, you can’t just wall up yourself and the kids in this place! For one thing, it’s not good for them. You’ll make them terrified to face real life.”

  “I hope so,” Cassie said, “for their sake. Now let me show you the rest of the castle.”

  Cassie was being ironic, Elya thought miserably, but “castle” was still the right word. Fortress, keep, bastion…Elya hated it. Vlad would have hated it. And now she’d provoked Cassie to exaggerate every protective, self-sufficient, isolating feature of the multi-million dollar pile that had cost Cass every penny she had, including the future income from the lucrative patents that had gotten Vlad murdered.

  “This is the kitchen,” Cassie said. “House, do we have any milk?”

  “Yes,” said the impersonal voice of the house system. At least Cassie hadn’t named it, or given it one of those annoying visual avatars. The roomscreen remained blank. “There is one carton of soymilk and one of cow milk on the third shelf.”

  “It reads the active tags on the cartons,” Cassie said. “House, how many of Donnie’s allergy pills are left in the master-bath medicine cabinet?”

  “Sixty pills remain,” House said, “and three more refills on the prescription.”

  “Donnie’s allergic to ragweed, and it’s mid-August,” Cassie said.

  “Well, he isn’t going to smell any ragweed inside this mausoleum,” Elya retorted, and immediately winced at her choice of words. But Cassie didn’t react. She walked on through the house, unstoppable, narrating in that hard, flat voice she had developed since Vlad’s death.

  “All the appliances communicate with House through narrow-band wireless radio frequencies. House reaches the Internet the same way. All electricity comes from a generator in the basement, with massive geothermal feeds and storage capacitors. In fact, there are two generators, one for backup. I’m not willing to use battery back-up, for the obvious reason.”

  It wasn’t obvious to Elya. She must have looked bewildered because Cassie added, “Batteries can only back-up for a limited time. Redundant generators are more reliable.”

  “Oh.”

  “The only actual cables coming into the house are the VNM fiber-optic cables I need for computing power. If they cut those, we’ll still be fully functional.”

  If who cuts those? Elya thought, but she already knew the answer. Except that it didn’t make sense. Vlad had been killed by econuts because his work was—had been—so controversial. Cassie and the kids weren’t likely to be a target now that Vlad was dead. Elya didn’t say this. She trailed behind Cassie through the living room, bedrooms, hallways. Every one had a roomscreen for House, even the hallways, and multiple sensors in the ceilings to detect and identify intruders. Elya had had to pocket an emitter at the front door, presumably so House wouldn’t…do what? What did it do if there was an intruder? She was afraid to ask.

  “Come downstairs,” Cassie said, leading the way through an e-locked door (of course) down a long flight of steps. “The computer uses three-dimensional laser microprocessors with optical transistors. It can manage twenty million billion calculations per second.”

  Startled, Elya said, “What on earth do you need that sort of power for?”

  “I’ll show you.” They approached another door, reinforced steel from the look of it. “Open,” Cassie said, and it swung inward. Elya stared at a windowless, fully equipped genetics lab.

  “Oh, no, Cassie…you’re not going to work here, too!”

  “Yes, I am. I resigned from MedGene last week. I’m a consultant now.”

  Elya gazed helplessly at the lab, which seemed to be a mixture of shining new equipment plus Vlad’s old stuff from his auxiliary home lab. Vlad’s refrigerator and storage cabinet, his centrifuge, were all these things really used in common between Vlad’s work in ecoremediation and Cassie’s in medical genetics? Must be. The old refrigerator had a new dent in its side, probably the result of a badly programmed ’bot belonging to the moving company. Elya recognized a new gene synthesizer, gleaming expensively, along with other machines that she, not a scientist, couldn’t identify. Through a half-open door, she saw a small bathroom. It all must have cost enormously. Cassie had better work hard as a consultant.

  And now she could do so without ever leaving this self-imposed prison. Design her medical micros, send the data encrypted over the Net to the client. If it weren’t for Jane and Donnie…Elya grasped at this. There were Janey and Donnie, and Janey would need to be picked up at school very shortly now. At least the kids would get Cassie out of this place periodically.

  Cassie was still defining her imprisonment, in that brittle voice. “There’s a Faraday cage around the entire house, ofcourse, embedded in the walls. No EMP can take us out. The walls are reinforced foamcast concrete, the windows virtually unbreakable polymers. We have enough food stored for a year. The water supply is from a well under the house, part of the geothermal system. It’s cool, sweet water. Want a glass?”

  “No,” Elya said. “Cassie…you act as if you expect fullscale warfare. Vlad was killed by an individual nutcase.”

  “And there are a lot of nutcases out there,” Cassie said crisply. “I lost Vlad. I’m not going to lose Janey and Donnie…hey! There you are, pumpkin!”

  “I came downstairs!” Donnie said importantly, and flung himself into his mother’s arms. “Annie said!”

  Cassie smiled over her son’s head at his young nanny, Anne Millius. The smile changed her whole face, Elya thought, dissolved her brittle shell, made her once more the Cassie that Vlad had loved. A whole year. Cassie completely unreconciled, wanting only what was gone forever. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Or was it that she, Elya, wasn’t capable of the kind of love Cassie had for Vlad? Elya had been married twice, and divorced twice, and had gotten over both men. Was that better or worse than Cassie’s stubborn, unchippable grief?

  She sighed, and Cassie said to Donnie, “Here’s Aunt Elya. Give her a big kiss!”

  The three-year-old detached himself from his mother and rushed to Elya. God, he looked like Vlad. Curly light brown hair, huge dark eyes. Snot ran from his nose and smeared on Elya’s cheek.

  “Sorry,” Cassie said, grinning.

  “Allergies?”

  “Yes. Although…does he feel warm to you?”

  “I can’t tell,” said Elya, who had no children. She released
Donnie. Maybe he did feel a bit hot in her arms, and his face was flushed a bit. But his full-lipped smile—Vlad again—and shining eyes didn’t look sick.

  “God, look at the time, I’ve got to go get Janey,” Cassie said. “Want to come along, Elya?”

  “Sure.” She was glad to leave the lab, leave the basement, leave the “castle.” Beyond the confines of the Faraday-embedded concrete walls, she took deep breaths of fresh air. Although of course the air inside had been just as fresh. In fact, the air inside was recycled in the most sanitary, technologically advanced way to avoid bringing in pathogens or gases deliberately released from outside. It was much safer than any fresh air outside. Cassie had told her so.

  No one understood, not even Elya.

  Her sister-in-law thought Cassie didn’t hear herself, didn’t see herself in the mirror every morning, didn’t know what she’d become. Elya was wrong. Cassie heard the brittleness in her voice, saw the stoniness in her face for everyone but the kids and sometimes, God help her, even for them. Felt herself recoiling from everyone because they weren’t Vlad, because Vlad was dead and they were not. What Elya didn’t understand was that Cassie couldn’t help it.

  Elya didn’t know about the dimness that had come over the world, the sense of everything being enveloped in a gray fog: people and trees and furniture and lab beakers. Elya didn’t know, hadn’t experienced, the frightening anger that still seized Cassie with undiminished force, even a year later, so that she thought if she didn’t smash something, kill something as Vlad had been killed, she’d go insane. Insaner. Worse, Elya didn’t know about the longing for Vlad that would rise, unbidden and unexpected, throughout Cassie’s entire body, leaving her unable to catch her breath.