Year's Best SF 1 Read online

  Year's Best SF

  EDITED BY

  David G. Hartwell

  To Geoffrey and to Kathryn

  I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Mark Kelly, whose Locus columns I found helpful. The magazine reviews in Tangents are also, I feel, a valuable contribution to the ongoing dialog about quality in short fiction in the SF field. And of course to the editors, who accomplish so much more than they are ever paid.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  James Patrick Kelly

  Think Like a Dinosaur

  Patricia A. McKillip

  Wonders of the Invisible World

  Robert Silverberg

  Hot Times in Magma City

  Stephen Baxter

  Gossamer

  Gregory Benford

  A Worm in the Well

  William Browning Spencer

  Downloading Midnight

  Joe Haldeman

  For White Hill

  William Barton

  In Saturn Time

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Coming of Age in Karhide

  Roger Zelazny

  The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker

  Nancy Kress

  Evolution

  Robert Sheckley

  The Day the Aliens Came

  Joan Slonczewski

  Microbe

  Gene Wolfe

  The Ziggurat

  About the Editor

  Books Edited by David G. Hartwell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  SCIENCE FICTION IS

  ALIVE AND WELL

  This is the first volume of an annual year's best science fiction anthology, to be published each spring in a widely available mass market edition. In each volume the best science fiction of that year will be represented. Not fantasy. Not science fantasy. Science fiction: This anthology will contain only stories that a chronic reader would recognize as SF.

  For decades, until recently, there was usually one or more good year's best anthologies available in paperback in the SF field. The last ones vanished with the deaths of distinguished editors Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim. There has been a notable gap. This book fills that need.

  Furthermore, the existence of more than one year's best anthology in the SF genre has been good for the field. Volumes which differ in taste or in aesthetic criteria clarify and encourage knowledgeable discourse in the field and about the field. Therefore this book announces itself in opposition to the other extant anthologies.

  Here is the problem. Other books have so blurred the boundaries between science fiction and everything else that it is possible for an observer to conclude that SF is dead or dying out. This book declares that science fiction is still alive; is fertile and varied in its excellences. Most important, SF has a separate and distinct identity within fairly clear boundaries exemplified by the contents of this book.

  In the magazine stories and original anthologies this past year there was a fair amount of clunky hardish SF and a bunch of stuff, sometimes quite talented, that was published as SF, but was only by courtesy and by association SF. Not, in fact, an unusual year in these regards.

  What was unusual was that it was a strong year for science fiction and in particular SF of novella length. By my casual count there were fifteen or twenty novellas from Analog, Asimov's, Omni Online, and the original anthologies Far Futures and New Legends, that could justifiably have been included in a year's best volume alone. Every once in a while the SF field has a “novella renaissance.” 1995 was one of those years and it looks likely to spill over into 1996. Guess what? You have fallen behind in your reading if you haven't been reading the novellas. I may be off base but I suspect that there were more first-rate SF novellas than first-rate SF novels published in 1995.

  Overall, the best speculative fiction of all descriptions was published in Interzone, which deservedly won the Hugo award this year. But all the magazines had high spots and high standards. It was not a year to skip, for instance, Tomorrow or Science Fiction Age.

  Sadly, it was not a notable year for original anthologies (two extraordinary exceptions are mentioned above, to which Full Spectrum 5 is the third). The general thinking was that the original anthologies made the magazines look good. Book publishers are at fault for letting so much unedited stuff get through under usually dazzling covers. How fortunate we are to have the magazines and the magazine editors: Budrys and Dozois, Schmidt, Rusch, Pringle, Cholfin, Datlow, Edelman, Killheffer and the rest. We had better treasure and support them, and buy and read their magazines, or we won't have them much longer. For the time being they, and the writers, have given us a bright moment.

  David G. Hartwell

  Pleasantville, N. Y.

  January, 1996

  Think Like a Dinosaur

  JAMES PATRICK KELLY

  James Patrick Kelly is the author of many SF stories and novels, including the recent novel Wildlife. One thinks of his novella, “Mr. Boy,” which makes up the first part of that novel, as a high point in SF from the early 1990s. He is one of the more sophisticated of the younger SF writers from the last decade or two (he attended the Clarion SF workshop in the same group as Bruce Sterling), and seems just now in the 1990s to be achieving full command of his impressive talents. He has a clear graceful style and a willingness to do the hard work of making the science in his stories count. Never a prolific writer, Kelly is nevertheless becoming an important one in the SF field. This story, from Asimov's SF, is in the classic hard SF mode and is in fact in dialogue with the touchstone of hard SF reading, Tom Godwin's controversial “The Cold Equations.” I have chosen to place it first to set the tone for this volume. For some readers this will be the best story of the year.

  Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler, trying to balance in Tuulen Station's delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had transformed Kamala. She was leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian's idea of beautification. But what struck me most was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.

  “Welcome back.” The float's whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it down the hallway.

  She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lots of migrators are devastated when they come out of the assembler; it's because there is no transition. A few seconds ago Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit. She was almost home; her life's great adventure was over.

  “Matthew?” she said.

  “Michael.” I couldn't help but be pleased that she remembered me. After all, she had changed my life.

  I've guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study the dinos. Kamala Shastri's is the only quantum scan I've ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed 50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm3. She could play the nagasvaram, a kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute was watermelon and she'd had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-
nine had volunteered to go to the stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal signal. She understood what it meant to balance the equation.

  I first met her on June 22, 2069. She shuttled over from Lunex's L1 port and came through our airlock at promptly 10:15, a small, roundish woman with black hair parted in the middle and drawn tight against her skull. They had darkened her skin against epsilon Leo's UV; it was the deep blue-black of twilight. She was wearing a striped clingy and velcro slippers to help her get around for the short time she'd be navigating our .2 micrograv.

  “Welcome to Tuulen Station.” I smiled and offered my hand. “My name is Michael.” We shook. “I'm supposed to be a sapientologist but I also moonlight as the local guide.”

  “Guide?” She nodded distractedly. “Okay.” She peered past me, as if expecting someone else.

  “Oh, don't worry,” I said, “the dinos are in their cages.”

  Her eyes got wide as she let her hand slip from mine. “You call the Hanen dinos?”

  “Why not?” I laughed. “They call us babies. The weeps, among other things.”

  She shook her head in amazement. People who've never met a dino tended to romanticize them: the wise and noble reptiles who had mastered superluminal physics and introduced Earth to the wonders of galactic civilization. I doubt Kamala had ever seen a dino play poker or gobble down a screaming rabbit. And she had never argued with Linna, who still wasn't convinced that humans were psychologically ready to go to the stars.

  “Have you eaten?” I gestured down the corridor toward the reception rooms.

  “Yes…I mean, no.” She didn't move. “I am not hungry.”

  “Let me guess. You're too nervous to eat. You're too nervous to talk, even. You wish I'd just shut up, pop you into the marble, and beam you out. Let's just get this part the hell over with, eh?”

  “I don't mind the conversation, actually.”

  “There you go. Well, Kamala, it is my solemn duty to advise you that there are no peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Gend. And no chicken vindaloo. What's my name again?”

  “Michael?”

  “See, you're not that nervous. Not one taco, or a single slice of eggplant pizza. This is your last chance to eat like a human.”

  “Okay.” She did not actually smile—she was too busy being brave—but a corner of her mouth twitched. “Actually, I would not mind a cup of tea.”

  “Now, tea they've got.” She let me guide her toward reception room D; her slippers snicked at the velcro carpet. “Of course, they brew it from lawn clippings.”

  “The Gendians don't keep lawns. They live underground.”

  “Refresh my memory.” I kept my hand on her shoulder; beneath the clingy, her muscles were rigid. “Are they the ferrets or the things with the orange bumps?”

  “They look nothing like ferrets.”

  We popped through the door bubble into reception D, a compact rectangular space with a scatter of low, unthreatening furniture. There was a kitchen station at one end, a closet with a vacuum toilet at the other. The ceiling was blue sky; the long wall showed a live view of the Charles River and the Boston skyline, baking in the late June sun. Kamala had just finished her doctorate at MIT.

  I opaqued the door. She perched on the edge of a couch like a wren, ready to flit away.

  While I was making her tea, my fingernail screen flashed. I answered it and a tiny Silloin came up in discreet mode. She didn't look at me; she was too busy watching arrays in the control room. =A problem,= her voice buzzed in my earstone, =most negligible, really. But we will have to void the last two from today's schedule. Save them at Lunex until first shift tomorrow. Can this one be kept for an hour? =

  “Sure,” I said. “Kamala, would you like to meet a Hanen?” I transferred Silloin to a dino-sized window on the wall. “Silloin, this is Kamala Shastri. Silloin is the one who actually runs things. I'm just the doorman.”

  Silloin looked through the window with her near eye, then swung around and peered at Kamala with her other. She was short for a dino, just over a meter tall, but she had an enormous head that teetered on her neck like a watermelon balancing on a grapefruit. She must have just oiled herself because her silver scales shone. =Kamala, you will accept my happiest intentions for you? =She raised her left hand, spreading the skinny digits to expose dark crescents of vestigial webbing.

  “Of course, I.…”

  =And you will permit us to render you this translation?=

  She straightened. “Yes.”

  =Have you questions?=

  I'm sure she had several hundred, but at this point was probably too scared to ask. While she hesitated, I broke in. “Which came first, the lizard or the egg?”

  Silloin ignored me. =It will be excellent for you to begin when?=

  “She's just having a little tea,” I said, handing her the cup. “I'll bring her along when she's done. Say an hour?”

  Kamala squirmed on the couch. “No, really, it will not take me.…”

  Silloin showed us her teeth, several of which were as long as piano keys. =That would be most appropriate, Michael.= She closed; a gull flew through the space where her window had been.

  “Why did you do that?” Kamala's voice was sharp.

  “Because it says here that you have to wait your turn. You're not the only migrator we're sending this morning.” This was a lie, of course; we had had to cut the schedule because Jodi Latchaw, the other sapientologist assigned to Tuulen, was at the University of Hipparchus presenting our paper on the Hanen concept of identity. “Don't worry, I'll make the time fly.”

  For a moment, we looked at each other. I could have laid down an hour's worth of patter; I'd done that often enough. Or I could have drawn her out on why she was going: no doubt she had a blind grandma or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home those artificial eyes, not to mention potential spin-offs which could well end tuberculosis, famine, and premature ejaculation, blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left her alone in the room to read the wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.

  “Tell me a secret,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A secret, you know, something no one else knows.”

  She stared as if I'd just fallen off Mars.

  “Look, in a little while you're going someplace that's what…three hundred and ten light years away? You're scheduled to stay for three years. By the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous, and elsewhere; we'll probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise not to tell.”

  She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. “This is another test, right? After everything they have put me through, they still have not decided whether to send me.”

  “Oh no, in a couple of hours you'll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some dark Gendian burrow. This is just me, talking.”

  “You are crazy.”

  “Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It's from the Greek: logos meaning word, mania meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I'll go first. If my secret isn't juicy enough, you don't have tell me anything.”

  Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that whatever she was worrying about at the moment, it wasn't being swallowed by the big blue marble.

  “I was brought up Catholic,” I said, settling onto a chair in front of her. “I'm not anymore, but that's not the secret. My parents sent me to Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run by a couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught physics, which I got a ‘D’ in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught theology and had all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.

  “One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama
Moogoo went out in their Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home, Mama Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got broadsided by an ambulance. Like I said, she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should've lifted her license back in the '50s. She was killed instantly. Father Tom died in the hospital.

  “Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I did a little, but I never really liked either of them and I resented the way their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more annoyed than sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so uncharitable. Maybe you'd have to grow up Catholic to understand that. Anyway, the day after it happened they called an assembly in the gym and we were all there squirming on the bleachers and the cardinal himself telepresented a sermon. He kept trying to comfort us, like it had been our parents that had died. When I made a joke about it to the kid next to me, I got caught and spent the last week of my senior year with an in-school suspension.”

  Kamala had finished her tea. She slid the empty cup into one of the holders built into the table.

  “Want some more?” I said.

  She stirred restlessly. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “It's part of the secret.” I leaned forward in my chair. “See, my family lived down the street from Holy Spirit Cemetery and in order to get to the carryvan line on McKinley Ave., I had to cut through. Now this happened a couple of days after I got in trouble at the assembly. It was around midnight and I was coming home from a graduation party where I had taken a couple of pokes of insight, so I was feeling sly as a philosopher-king. As I walked through the cemetery, I stumbled across two dirt mounds right next to each other. At first I thought they were flower beds, then I saw the wooden crosses. Fresh graves: here lies Father Tom and Mama Moogoo. There wasn't much to the crosses: they were basically just stakes with crosspieces, painted white and hammered into the ground. The names were hand printed on them. The way I figure it, they were there to mark the graves until the stones got delivered. I didn't need any insight to recognize a once in a lifetime opportunity. If I switched them, what were the chances anyone was going to notice? It was no problem sliding them out of their holes. I smoothed the dirt with my hands and then ran like hell.”