Year's Best SF 2 Read online

  Year's

  Best

  SF 2

  EDITED BY

  David G. Hartwell

  To Judith Merril; Harry Harrison

  and Brian W. Aldiss; Terry Carr;

  Donald A. Wollheim.

  The best, every one different.

  Again 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 magazine editors, who accomplish so much more than they are ever paid.

  Table of contents

  Introduction

  Dave Wolverton

  After a Lean Winter

  Terry Bisson

  In the Upper Room

  John Brunner

  Thinkertoy

  Gregory Benford

  Zoomers

  Sheila Finch

  Out of the Mouths

  James Patrick Kelly

  Breakaway, Backdown

  Yves Meynard

  Tobacco Words

  Joanna Russ

  Invasion

  Brian Stableford

  The House of Mourning

  Damon Knight

  Life Edit

  Robert Reed

  First Tuesday

  David Langford

  The Spear of the Sun

  Gene Wolfe

  Counting Cats in Zanzibar

  Bruce Sterling

  Bicycle Repairman

  Gwyneth Jones

  Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland

  Allen Steele

  Doblin's Lecture

  Kathleen Ann Goonan

  The Bride of Elvis

  Kate Wilhelm

  Forget Luck

  Connie Willis

  Nonstop to Portales

  Stephen Baxter

  Columbiad

  About the Editor

  Books Edited by David G. Hartwell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  First, the usual caveat: this selection of science fiction stories represents that best that was published during the year 1996. In my opinion, I could have filled two more volumes this size and then claimed to have nearly all of the best—though not all the best novellas.

  Second, the general criteria: this book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is clearly that and not something else. I personally have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and slipstream and post-modern literature. But here, I chose science fiction. It is the intention of this year's best series to focus entirely on science fiction, and to provide readers who are looking especially for science fiction an annual home base.

  And now for the year 1996.

  One theme that was particularly evident in this year's fiction was respect for the forefathers of science fiction. Since it was one hundred years after the first publication of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, an original anthology was conceived in honor of the occasion, and the stories in that book filled many magazine pages as well before the book appeared. The gimmick was irresistible to writers: tell a story of the Wellsian Martian invasion in the literary voice and style of a writer contemporary of Wells. Another idea that attracted first-rate writers was to write a story in honor of Jack Williamson, the living Grand Master of SF whose contemporary career began in the 1920 and is still going strong. In addition to these anthologies, there were individual books such as Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships, a sequel to Wells' The Time Machine; and Richard Garfinkle's Celestial Matters, an alternate science alternative history of space adventure among the crystalline spheres of the Ptolemaic universe that looked to the past with respect and wonder.

  Stephen Baxter, David Langford, and others wrote more individual stories about Jules Verne, Wells, G. K. Chesterton, as forefathers. Perhaps it is a signal of a new evolutionary stage in the literature that the field is aware of diverse literary traditions and of the historical figures, styles, and ideas that have made science fiction what it is today.

  There was a relative crash in mass market distribution in 1996 that affected all genres, and that hurt SF, too, leading to some fewer titles in mass market by the end of the year and more titles announced in trade paperback—but not as many in 1997 as in earlier years in mass market size. The major magazines were all in transition, with Analog and Asimov's sold to another publisher, Omni ceasing print publication in favor of online issues—a move followed by A. J. Budry's magazine, Tomorrow, at the end of the year. Gordon Van Gelder took over as the new editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction as of January 1997. SF Age was the only magazine that didn't appear to go through some difficult transition in 1996, achieving a new level of quality that challenged both F&SF and Asimov's. The smaller professional magazines were all hurt by the relative collapse of small press distribution over the last few years that continued in 1996. Absolute Magnitude and Pirate Writings continued to publish, as well as On Spec in Canada and Interzone in England, but in spite of editorial excellence, none of them thrived—just survived. Interzone, as usual, maintained its leading position in speculative fiction, and published several fine science fiction stories in the mix.

  The trend toward novellas I mentioned last year ceased abruptly, with many fewer fitting into the magazines after page cutbacks and fewer individual issues this year (now most monthly magazines publish eleven times a year, including one big double issue). On the other hand, it was a particularly good year for the science fiction short story, with excellent work appearing every month. And I wish to point out that with the exception of anthologies such as the two mentioned above, Ellen Datlow's hybrid reprint/original, fantasy/SF Off Limits, and Patrick Nielsen Hayden's fine Starlight I (the beginning of a new series of original anthologies of new short SF and fantasy), and the long-awaited, extraordinary Tesseracts Q—SF from the French-Canadian for the first time in English—it was another year in which the magazine editors outperformed the anthologists.

  The world stayed turned upside-down in that the average issue of the major magazines was better than the average contents of the original anthologies. Perhaps one beneficial effect of the distribution cut-backs will be fewer original anthologies and a resurgence of quality control (by which I mean editing) in them. The history of science fiction is filled with landmark anthologies, whose story notes and introductions tell the real history and evolution of the literature. We need more good ones.

  But now for the stories.…

  David G. Hartwell

  Pleasantville, N.Y.

  January, 1997

  After a Lean Winter

  DAVE WOLVERTON

  Dave Wolverton won a Writers of the Future prize at the start of his career and has gone on not only to write many novels and stories of science fiction adventure, but to head the Writers of the Future contest and edit their anthologies himself for the past few years. He is one of the most talented writers of entertaining adventure among younger SF writers, the new generation that appeared at the end of the 1980s. This story is particularly interesting in that it is written as if by Jack London. It was composed for inclusion in War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, edited by Kevin Anderson, though it first appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction. The idea was that writers would write reports of the Martian invasion from parts of the world other than Wells' England (an exception is made for Mr. Henry James) as if witnessed by other famous historical personages, such as Pablo Picasso or Albert Einstein. But the writers often took on another challenge: “After a Lean Winter” is a Jack London story in the style London would have written it. Other interesting pieces in the book in this vein include Robert Silverberg's Henr
y James, George Alec Effinger's Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Gregory Benford and David Brin's Jules Verne. Wolverton delivers a virtuoso performance here, an SF writer writing as another SF writer (those of you who have missed London's SF may be in for a treat), in the world of a third writer.

  Pierre swept into Hidden Lodge on Titchen Creek late on a moonless night. His two sled dogs huffed and bunched their shoulders, then dug their back legs in with angry growls, hating the trail, as they crossed that last stubborn rise. The runners of his sled rang over the crusted snow with the sound of a sword being drawn from its scabbard, and the leather harnesses creaked.

  The air that night had a feral bite to it. The sun had been down for days, sometimes hovering near the horizon, and the deadly winter chill was on. It would be a month before we'd see the sun again. For weeks we had felt that cold air gnawing us, chewing away at our vitality, like a wolf pup worrying a shard of caribou bone long after the marrow is depleted.

  In the distance, billowing thunderclouds raced toward us under the glimmering stars, promising some insulating warmth. A storm was chasing Pierre's trail. By agreement, no one came to the lodge until just before a storm, and none stayed long after the storm began.

  Pierre's two poor huskies caught the scent of camp and yipped softly. Pierre called “Gee,” and the sled heeled over on a single runner. Carefully, he twisted the gee-poles, laid the sled on its side next to a dozen others. I noted a heavy bundle lashed to the sled, perhaps a moose haunch, and I licked my lips involuntarily. I'd pay well for some meat.

  From out under the trees, the other pack dogs sniffed and approached, too tired to growl or threaten. One of Pierre's huskies yapped again, and Pierre leapt forward with a dog-whip, threatening the lean beast until it fell silent. We did not tolerate noise from dogs anymore. Many a man would have pulled a knife and gutted that dog where it stood, but Pierre—a very crafty and once-prosperous trapper—was down to only two dogs.

  “S'okay,” I said from my watch post, putting him at ease. “No Martians about.” Indeed, the frozen tundra before me was barren for miles. In the distance was a meandering line of wizened spruce, black in the starlight, and a few scraggly willows poked through the snow along the banks of a winding frozen river just below the lodge. The distant mountains were dark red with lush new growth of Martian foliage. But mostly the land was snow-covered tundra. No Martian ships floated cloud-like over the snowfields. Pierre glanced up toward me, unable to make out my form.

  “Jacques? Jacques Lowndunn? Dat you?” he called, his voice muffled by the wolverine-fur trim of his parka. “What news, my fren'? Eh?”

  “No one's had sight of the bloody-minded Martians in two weeks,” I said. “They cleared out of Juneau.”

  There had been a brutal raid on the town of Dawson some weeks before, and the Martians had captured the whole town, harvesting the unlucky inhabitants for their blood. We'd thought then that the Martians were working their way north, that they'd blaze a path to Titchen Creek. We could hardly go much farther north this time of year. Even if we could drag along enough food to feed ourselves, the Martians would just follow our trail in the snow. So we dug in, holed up for the winter.

  “Ah 'ave seen de Marshawns. Certayne!” Pierre said in his nasal voice, hunching his shoulders. He left the dogs in their harness but fed them each a handful of smoked salmon. I was eager to hear his news, but he made me wait. He grabbed his rifle from its scabbard, for no one would walk about unarmed, then forged up toward the lodge, plodding toward me through the crusted snow, floundering deeper and deeper into the drifts with every step, until he climbed up on the porch. There was no friendly light behind me to guide his steps. Such a light would have shown us up to the Martians.

  “Where did you spot them?” I asked.

  “Anchorawge,” he grunted, stamping his feet and brushing snow out of his parka before entering the warmer lodge. “De citee ees gone, Jacques—dead. De Martians keel everybawdy, by gar!” He spat in the snow. “De Martians es dere!”

  Only once had I ever had the misfortune of observing a Martian. It was when Bessie and I were on the steamer up from San Francisco. We'd sailed to Puget Sound, and in Seattle we almost put to port. But the Martians had landed, and we saw one of their warriors wearing a metal body that gleamed sullenly like polished brass. It stood watch, its curved protective armor stretching above its head like the chitinous shell of a crab, its lank, tripod metal legs letting it stand gracefully a hundred feet in the air. At first, one would have thought it an inanimate tower, but it twisted ever so insignificantly as we moved closer, regarding us as a jumping spider will a gnat, just before it pounces. We notified the captain, and he kept sailing north, leaving the Martian to hunt on its lonely stretch of beach, gleaming in the afternoon sun.

  Bessie and I had thought then that we would be safe back in the Yukon. I cannot imagine any other place than the land near the Circle that is quite so relentlessly inhospitable to life, yet I am intimate with the petty moods of this land, which I have always viewed as something of a mean-spirited accountant which requires every beast upon it to pay his exact dues each year, or die. I had not thought the Martians would be able to survive here, so Bessie and I took our few possessions and struck out from the haven of San Francisco for the bitter wastes north of Juneau. We were so naive.

  If the Martians were in Anchorage, then Pierre's tidings were mixed. It was good that they were hundreds of miles away, bad that they were still alive at all. In warmer climes, it was said, they died quickly from bacterial infections. But that was not true here by the Circle. The Martians were thriving in our frozen wastes. Their crops grew at a tremendous rate on any patch of frozen windswept ground—in spite of the fact that there was damned little light. Apparently, Mars is a world that is colder and darker than ours, and what is for us an intolerable frozen hell is to them a balmy paradise.

  Pierre finished stamping off his shoes and lifted the latch to the door. Nearly everyone had already made it to our conclave. Simmons, Coldwell and Porter hadn't shown, and it was growing so late that I didn't anticipate that they would make it this time. They were busy with other affairs, or the Martians had harvested them.

  I was eager to hear Pierre's full account, so I followed him into the lodge.

  In more congenial days, we would have had the iron stove crackling merrily to warm the place. But we couldn't risk such a comforting blaze now. Only a meager lamp consigned to the floor furnished any light for the room. Around the lodge, bundled in bulky furs in their unceasing struggle to get warm, were two dozen stolid men and women of the north. Though the unending torments of the past months had left them bent and bleak, there was a cordial atmosphere now that we had all gathered. A special batch of hootch warmed on a tripod above the lamp. Everyone rousted a bit when Pierre came through the door, edging away enough to make room for him near the lamp.

  “What news?” One-Eyed Kate called before Pierre could even kneel by the lamp and pull off his mittens with his teeth. He put his hands down to toast by the glass of the lamp.

  Pierre didn't speak. It must have been eighty below outside, and his jaw was leather-stiff from the cold. His lips were tinged with blue, and ice crystals lodged in his brows, eyelashes, and beard.

  Still, we all hung on expectantly for a word of news. Then I saw his mood. He didn't like most of the people in this room, though he had a warm spot in his heart for me. Pierre had Indian blood on his mother's side, and he saw this as a chance to count coup on the others. He'd make them pay for every word he uttered. He grunted, nodded toward the kettle of hootch on the tripod.

  One-Eyed Kate herself dipped in a battered tin mug, handed it to him. Still he didn't utter a word. He'd been nursing a grudge for the past two months. Pierre Jelenc was a trapper of almost legendary repute here in the north, a tough and cunning man. Some folks down at the Hudson Bay Company said he'd devoted a huge portion of his grub stake to new traps last spring. The north had had two soft winters in a row, so the trapping promised to
be exceptional—the best in forty years.

  Then the Martians had come, making it impossible for a man to run his trap lines. So while the miners toiled in their shafts through the dark winter, getting wealthier by the minute, Pierre had a lost a year's grub stake, and now all of his traps were scattered in their line, hundreds of miles across the territory. Even Pierre, with his keen mind, wouldn't be able to find most of those traps next spring.

  Two months ago, Pierre had made one desperate attempt to recoup his losses here at Hidden Lodge. In a drunken frenzy, he started fighting his sled dogs in the big pit out behind the lodge. But his dogs hadn't been eating well, so he couldn't milk any fight out of them. Five of his huskies got slaughtered in the pit that night. Afterward, Pierre had left in a black rage, and hadn't attended a conclave since.

  Pierre downed the mug of hootch. It was a devil's concoction of brandy, whiskey, and hot peppers. He handed the cup back to One-Eyed Kate for a refill.

  Evidently, Doctor Weatherby had been reading from an article in a newspaper—a paper nearly three months old out of southern Alberta.

  “I say, right then,” Doctor Weatherby said in a chipper tone. Apparently he thought that Pierre had no news, and I was of a mind to let Pierre speak when he desired. I listened intently, for it was the Doctor I had come to see, hoping he would be able to help my Bessie. “As I reported, Doctor Silvena in Edmonton thinks that there may be more than the cold at work here to help keep the Martians alive. He notes that the ‘thin and rarefied air here in the north is more beneficial to the lungs than air in the south, which is clogged with myriad pollens and unhealthy germs. Moreover,’ he states, ‘there seems to be some quality to the light here in the far north that causes it to destroy detrimental germs. We in the north are marvelously free of many plagues found in warmer lands—leprosy, elephantiasis, and such. Even typhoid and diphtheria are seldom seen here, and the terrible fevers which rampage warmer climes are almost unknown among our native Inuit.’ He goes on to say that, ‘Contrary to speculation that the Martians here will expire in the summer when germs are given to reproduce more fervently, it may be that the Martian will hold forth on our northern frontier indefinitely. Indeed, they may gradually acclimatize themselves to our air, and, like the Indians who have grown resistant to our European measles and chicken pox, in time they may once again venture into more temperate zones.’”