Year's Best SF 17 Read online

  Nothing much was happening at the launch site in the middle of the park—the machine was still in its crate—so they were filling in with talking heads and shots of its arrival a couple of days earlier: the wide-load truck, the police outriders, the military escort vehicles, the faces and flags lining Rue de Vaugirard; the white gloves, the flashing lights, the gleaming rifle-barrels. Some comic relief as the convoy negotiated corners and the park gate. Then the crane, straining to lift the broad flat crate and lower it to the grass. The guard of honour around the hidden machine, and the real guard among the trees, armed and wired.

  I thumbed over to the phone conversation.

  “—got to be a fake,” Jack was saying, in his usual confident bray. “You wait.”

  “We are waiting,” said Nicole.

  Laughter crackled across the phones.

  “Why d’you think it’s a fake?” Bob asked, a note of anxiety in his voice.

  “Anti-gravity, come on!” said Jack. “Where’s the theory?”

  A babble of interruptions, shouted names of marginal physicists and outright cranks, was drowned out by a collective intake of breath, like a gust of wind in the still air. I left the phone channel open and flipped to the news. Four technicians in white coats had marched out onto the grass, towards the crate. They slid the top off—it looked like an aluminium roll-up door, which they duly rolled up—and, staggering slightly, lugged it like a log to lay it down a few metres away. Then they took up positions at the crate’s corners. With a flourish, each reached for an edge, pressed some switch, and stepped well back.

  The sides of the crate fell away, to reveal a silvery lens about fifteen metres across and just over three metres high in the centre.

  A huge roar went up.

  “My God,” Milton said. “A goddam flying saucer.”

  He didn’t sound impressed.

  “If this is a stunt,” said Catherine, “they’re sure doing it very publicly.”

  “You know what this reminds me of?” said Nicole. “That scene in Jefferson in Paris, you know, the Nick Nolte thing? Where he’s watching a Montgolfier ascent?”

  “Too right,” said Jack. “It’s a fucking balloon! Just like at Roswell!”

  The SF writers all laughed. I smiled to myself. They’d see.

  Another roar erupted as the pilot walked out, helmet in the crook of his arm. He smiled around, gave a wave. The news channels were beside themselves—the test pilot was Jean-Luc Jabril, an air force veteran in his thirties, something of a mascot for the Republic because of his origins: a son of Moroccans from the banlieues who’d made good, proving his French patriotism to the hilt in the fiery skies of North Africa. Everyone around me was looking at their phones, rapt. A few metres away in the crush, a girl in a hijab had tears on her cheeks.

  Ceremoniously, Jabril put on his helmet, slid the visor down, took another wave for the cameras, and ducked under the machine’s perimeter. A hatch in the underside swung open, forming a short ramp. He disappeared inside, and the hatch closed. White vapour puffed from vents on the rim.

  And then, without fanfare, on the stroke of noon, the machine lifted into the air. It moved in a straight vertical, without a wobble or a yaw. The news channels’ microphones caught and amplified a faint humming sound that rose to a whine as the disc ascended. I could see it directly now, rising above the wall and the tops of the trees. I stopped watching on the screen and raised my phone to record. Everyone around me did the same.

  Up and up the machine rose, faster and faster, into the clear blue sky. A thousand feet, two thousand—I wasn’t thinking in metres at this point. At three thousand feet the machine was a shining dot. I wished I’d thought to bring binoculars.

  The flash was so bright that I felt sorry for those who had.

  There was a sound as if half a million people had simultaneously been punched in the gut. A moment later, a sound like thunder. Then screams.

  I was still blinking at purple after-images when I spotted a black dot drop from the fading flare. A parachute snapped open, perilously low. It floated downward for a few seconds and passed out of view. I’d tracked it with my camera, open-mouthed. I turned the phone over and looked at the news screen, just in time to catch a figure landing and rolling, then standing as the parachute collapsed beside him. Mobbed, Jabril had time to take his helmet off and deliver a shaky smile before the technicians and medics bundled him away.

  “Jesus,” I said. Nobody heard me. I could hardly hear myself above the yells and screams and cries of relief.

  It was towards the middle of that afternoon before we all met up, at a bistro in the Marais, not far from my own flat. I’d dropped by and picked up my wife, who was by now well awake and as shaken as everyone else who’d watched the ascent. We strolled around a few corners and joined the now somewhat larger group outside a bistro off Beaumarchais. They were outside because Jack had evidently insisted on smoking one of his Cuban cigars (a gesture somewhat redundant in the Year Three, but he’d acquired the taste in the old days). I bought our drinks and joined the huddle, introducing my wife to Bob and to two writers who hadn’t met her before. She smiled politely and retreated to a table with Milton and Ali, over glasses of dry white and a saucer of black olives.

  “But why,” Bob was saying, “would they have their big show-off demonstration flight blow up like that? In front of everyone? If it was a fake, a balloon for fuck’s sake, they’d have done much better just bringing it back down after a shorter flight.”

  “A double bluff,” Jack said. He jabbed with his cigar. “Exactly so that everyone would think the way you’re thinking.”

  The discussion went around and around, not getting anywhere.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” Nicole pointed out. “With all those cameras and phones pointed at it, and no doubt all kinds of instruments—hell, there’ll be a spectrograph analysis—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Jack. He dropped the butt of his cigar and crushed it out on the pavement, then reached into his jacket and pulled out his phone. He thumbed the screen.

  “Knew I had the app,” he said.

  He poked about for a moment, then triumphantly held up his phone screen for all to see. I peered at a colour-coded histogram.

  “What?” I said.

  “Analysis of the light from my pics,” he said. “Hydrogen and magnesium, mostly. No wonder the flash was so fucking bright!”

  The sky had clouded over, the sun had set, rain began to spit. We headed indoors. After another round, of drinks and argument, we headed out. Across the boulevard and deeper into the Marais, wandering westward. It turned into one of those evenings. Standing outside a serving hatch in the drizzle, we dined on Breton pancakes out of waxed paper, reeled across the street, occupied a bar. Got into arguments, left, got turned away from a gay club that Milton and Ali had fancied they’d get us into, found another bistro. Bob bought more rounds than he drank. He worked his way around our tables, talking to each of the writers, and eventually squeezed in beside me and my wife.

  “Done it!” he said. “Got everyone signed up.”

  “Good for you,” I said.

  “You’re forgetting someone,” my wife pointed out.

  Bob mimed a double take. “Shit. Pardon, madame. Yes, of course.” He looked me in the eye. “You up for a story?”

  “I’m not American,” I said.

  “Hey, man, that’s got nothing to do with it. You’re one of the gang, even if you are a Brit.”

  “I appreciate the offer, Bob,” I said. “But I think it would kind of … dilute the focus, know what I mean? And I don’t have any problem getting published, even in English.”

  “Don’t be so stupid,” my wife said. “The Ozzies and Kiwis? They don’t pay well, and it’s not much of a market.”

  I smiled at her, then at Bob. “She guards my interests fiercely,” I said. “Never lets me pass up a cent. But the fact is, I have a job that pays all right.”

  “Yeah, maintaining university admin
legacy code in the Sorbonne basement,” said Bob.

  How had he known that? Maybe someone had mentioned it.

  I shrugged. “It suits me fine. And like I said, it pays.”

  “Come on, you haven’t sold a story in the US for years. And readers would like something from you, you know. It wouldn’t narrow the anthology, it would broaden it out, having your name on the cover.”

  “Having your name as editor would do as much,” I said.

  “The offer’s open,” Bob said. He leaned forward and murmured: “For you—fifty cents a word.”

  I laughed. “What’s a cent, these days?”

  “I’m talking euros,” Bob said. “Half a euro a word.”

  My wife heard that, and yelped. I must admit I sat up sharply myself.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “A few grand a story?”

  “Not for every story,” said Bob, ostentatiously glancing around to make sure no one had overheard. Not much chance of that—the bar was loud, and the conversation of the SF writers made it louder yet. “From you, I’ll take ten-kay words. Five grand.”

  For the first time in weeks, I had a craving for a cigarette.

  “I’ll have to go outside and think about it,” I said.

  I bummed a Gitane off Nicole, grinned at my wife’s frown, and headed out. The rain had stopped. The street was dark, half the street-lamps out. My Zippo flared—I keep it topped up, for just these contingencies. After a minute, Bob joined me. He took a fresh pack from his pocket, peeled cellophane, and lit up.

  “You too?” I said, surprised.

  He shrugged. “Only when I’m travelling. Breaks the ice in some places.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. I glared at him. “Fucking Yank.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t mess with my friends.”

  “What?”

  “I know what you’re up to,” I said. “Checking them out, seeing who’s all mouth and who’s serious enough to be interested in one of your little schemes.”

  “Have you got me wrong,” said Bob. “I’m not interested in them. I’m interested in you.”

  He spread his hands, flashed me a conspiratorial grin.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “Come on, you hate the bastards as much as I do.”

  “That’s the trouble,” I said. “You don’t.”

  “What do you mean by that?” He sounded genuinely indignant, almost hurt. I knew that meant nothing. It was a tone I’d practiced often enough.

  “You don’t hate the revolution,” I said. I waved a trail of smoke. “Civil war, terror, censorship, shortages, dictatorship—yeah, I’m sure you hate all that. But it’s still the beginning of socialism. It’s still the revolution, isn’t it?”

  “Not my revolution!”

  “You were never a wanker,” I said. “Don’t mistake me for one, either.”

  He tossed his cigarette into the running gutter, and continued the arm movement in a wave.

  “So why … all this?”

  “We have perfected this machine,” I said.

  He gave me a long look.

  “Ah,” he said. “I see. Like that, is it?”

  “Like that,” I said.

  I held the door open for him as we went back in. The telly over the bar was showing yet another clip of the disastrous flight. Bob laughed as the door swung shut behind us.

  “You didn’t perfect that machine!”

  We picked our way through the patrons to the gang, who by now had shoved two tables together and were all in the same huddle of heads.

  “Describe what happened,” I said, as we re-joined them. “At the Jardin.”

  “Well,” Bob began, looking puzzled, “we all saw what was claimed to be an anti-gravity flying machine rise in the air and blow up. And some of us think—”

  “No,” I said. I banged the table. “Listen up, all of you. Bob is going to tell us what he saw.”

  “What do you want me to say?” Bob demanded. “I saw the same as the rest of you. I was just inside the park, I saw it on my phone and when the thing cleared the treetops I saw it with my own eyes. The machine, or what we’d been told was a machine, rose up—”

  “Not that,” I said. “Start from when you got to the park.”

  Bob frowned. “The Place was crowded. I couldn’t see what was happening around the crate. There were people in the way, trees …” He shrugged. “What’s to say?”

  “Describe the trees. Think back to looking up at them.”

  Bob sipped the dregs of the green drink in front of him, shaking his head.

  “Bare branches, clear blue sky.”

  “Were the branches moving?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Well, were they?”

  “Of course not!” he said. “There wasn’t a breath of wind.”

  “Bingo!” I said. “There was a clear blue sky. There wasn’t a breath of wind.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Nor did anyone else, by the looks I was getting.

  “The machine moved straight up,” I said. “And we’re all fairly sure it was some fake, right? An arrangement of balsa and mylar, hydrogen and magnesium.”

  I took out my Zippo, and flicked the lid and the wheel. “That’s all it would have taken. Whoof!”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, looking interested. “So?”

  “The ascent was announced a month and a half ago,” I said. “New Year’s Eve. Announced to the day, to the hour, the minute! Noon, Saturday fifteenth Feb.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Imagine what today’s little demonstration would have been like,” I said, “if there had been … a breath of wind. Or low cloud. The fake would have been blatant.” I held out my hand, fingers spread, and waggled it as I gestured drifting. “Like that.”

  Jack guffawed, and Bob joined in. Everyone else just frowned.

  “You’re saying the French have weather control?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m saying they have weather prediction. That’s what they demonstrated today, not anti-gravity—and that’s what is going to scare the shit out of the Americans and the Brits. Probably has already.”

  “It’s impossible to predict the weather forty days in advance,” said Catherine. “Chaos theory, butterfly effect, all that, you know?”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “A lot of mathematics research going on at the Sorbonne, you know.” I turned to Bob. “Take that back to your revolution.”

  He stared at me for a long moment.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “And the horse you rode in on.”

  He stood up and stormed out.

  None of us heard from him again. Editions Jules Verne, the publishing company, never heard from him either. They honoured the contracts, but nothing came of the anthology.

  The ascent at the Jardin de Luxembourg is still the best science fiction of the Year Three.

  Dolly

  ELIZABETH BEAR

  Elizabeth Bear (www.elizabethbear.com) lives in Hartford, Connecticut. Prolific as well as talented, she has published fourteen SF and fantasy novels since 2005, more than forty stories since 2003, and a collection, The Chains That You Refuse. She has won in that short time two Hugo Awards, the John W. Cambell Award for Best New Writer (2005), a Theodore Sturgeon Award, and several others, including an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award.

  “Dolly” appeared in Asimov’s, and is situated in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s robot and detective stories. This tale is emblematic of one of this year’s dominant themes: humaniod technology that is not given fully human social status; how people feel entitled to behave toward humaniod technology; and how that technology returns the favor. In this story, a human detective who at least partly comprehends this dynamic attempts a partial solution.

  On Sunday when Dolly awakened, she had olive skin and black-brown hair that fell in waves to her hips. On Tuesday when Dolly awakened, she was a redhead, and fair. But on Thur
sday—on Thursday her eyes were blue, her hair was as black as a crow’s wing, and her hands were red with blood.

  In her black French maid’s outfit, she was the only thing in the expensively appointed drawing room that was not winter-white or antiqued gold. It was the sort of room you hired somebody else to clean. It was as immaculate as it was white.

  Immaculate and white, that is, except for the dead body of billionaire industrialist Clive Steele—and try to say that without sounding like a comic book—which lay at Dolly’s feet, his viscera blossoming from him like macabre petals.

  That was how she looked when Rosamund Kirkbride found her, standing in a red stain in a white room like a thorn in a rose.

  Dolly had locked in position where her program ran out. As Roz dropped to one knee outside the border of the blood-saturated carpet, Dolly did not move.

  The room smelled like meat and bowels. Flies clustered thickly on the windows, but none had yet managed to get inside. No matter how hermetically sealed the house, it was only a matter of time. Like love, the flies found a way.

  Grunting with effort, Roz planted both green-gloved hands on winter-white wool-and-silk fibers and leaned over, getting her head between the dead guy and the doll. Blood spattered Dolly’s silk stockings and her kitten-heeled boots: both the spray-can dots of impact projection and the soaking arcs of a breached artery.

  More than one, given that Steele’s heart lay, trailing connective tissue, beside his left hip. The crusted blood on Dolly’s hands had twisted in ribbons down the underside of her forearms to her elbows and from there dripped into the puddle on the floor.

  The android was not wearing undergarments.

  “You staring up that girl’s skirt, Detective?”

  Roz was a big, plain woman, and out of shape in her forties. It took her a minute to heave herself back to her feet, careful not to touch the victim or the murder weapon yet. She’d tied her straight light brown hair back before entering the scene, the ends tucked up in a net. The severity of the style made her square jaw into a lantern. Her eyes were almost as blue as the doll’s.