Robert Silverberg - Science Fiction The Best of 2001

Science Fiction

The Best of 2001

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ROBERT SILVERBERG’s many novels includeThe AlienYears ; the most recent volume in the

Majipoor Cycle,LordPrestimion ; the bestselling Lord Valentine trilogy; and the classicsDying Inside

andA Time of Changes .Sailing toByzantium , a collection of some of his award-winning novellas, was

published by ibooks in 2000.Science Fiction101—Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder , an

examina-tion of the novellas that inspired him as a young writer, was published in March 2001, followed

byCronos , a collection of three time-travel pieces published in August 2001. He has been nominated for

the Nebula and Hugo awards more times than any other writer; he is a five-time winner of the Nebula

and a five-time winner of the Hugo.

KAREN HABER is the bestselling co-author (with Link Yaco) ofThe Science of the X-Men , a

scientific examination of the popular superhuman characters published by Marvel Comics. She also

created the bestsellingThe Mutant Season series of novels, of which she co-authored the first volume

with her husband, Robert Silverberg. She is a respected journalist and an accomplished fiction writer.

Her short fic-tion has appeared inThe Magazine of Fantasy and ScienceFiction, Full Spectrum 2,

Science Fiction Age , andIsaacAsimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber

UNDONE

James Patrick Kelly

KNOW HOW, CAN DO

Michael Blumlein

FROM HERE YOU CAN SEE THE SUNQUISTS

Richard Wadholm

KEEPERS OF EARTH

Robin Wayne Bailey

ANOMALIES

Gregory Benford

ONE OF HER PATHS

Ian Watson

THE DOG SAID BOW-WOW

Michael Swanwick

AND NO SUCH THINGS GROW HERE

Nancy Kress

SUN-CLOUD

Stephen Baxter

INTO GREENWOOD

Jim Grimsley

ON K2 WITH KANAKAREDES

Dan Simmons

SCIENCE FICTION

THE BEST OF 2001

AN INTRODUCTION

by Robert Silverberg

and Karen Haber

The first of all the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies appeared in the summer of 1949. It was

edited by Everett F. Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, a pair of scholarly science-fiction readers with long

experience in the field, and it was called, not entirely appropriately (since it drew on material published in

1948), The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949.

Science fiction then was a very small entity indeed—a handful of garish-looking magazines with names

likePlanetStories andThrillingWonderStories , a dozen or so books a year produced by

semi-professional publishing houses run by old-time s-f fans, and the very occasional short story by the

likes of Robert A. Heinlein inTheSaturdayEveningPost or some other well-known slick magazine. So

esoteric a species of reading-matter was it that Bleiler and Dikty found it necessary to provide their

book, which was issued by the relatively minor mainstream publishing house of Frederick Fell, Inc., with

two separate introductory essays explaining the nature and history of science fiction to uninitiated readers.

In those days science fiction was at its best in the short lengths, and the editors of

TheBestScienceFic-tion:1949 had plenty of splendid material to offer. There were two stories by Ray

Bradbury, both later incorporated inTheMartianChronicles , and Wilmar Shiras’s fine superchild story

“In Hiding,” and an excellent early Poul Anderson story, and one by Isaac Asimov, and half a dozen

others, all of which would be received enthusiastically by modern readers. The book did fairly well, by

the modest sales standards of its era, and the Bleiler-Dikty series of annual anthologies continued for

another decade or so.

Toward the end of its era the Bleiler-Dikty collection was joined by a very different sort of Best of the

Year anthology edited by Judith Merril, whose sophisticated literary tastes led her to go far beyond the

s-f magazines, offering stories by such outsiders to the field as Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Finney, Donald

Barthelme, and John Steinbeck cheek-by-jowl with the more familiar offerings of Asimov, Theodore

Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, and Clifford D. Simak. The Merril anthology, inaugurated in 1956, also

lasted about a decade; and by then science fiction had become big business, with new magazines

founded, shows likeStarTrek appearing on network television, dozens and then hundreds of novels

published every year. Since the 1960s no year has gone by without its Best of the Year collection, and

sometimes two or three simultaneously. Such distinguished science-fiction writers as Frederik Pohl, Harry

Harrison, Brian Aldiss, and Lester del Rey took their turns at compiling annual anthologies, along with

veteran book editors like Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.

In modern times the definitive Year’s Best Anthology has been the series of encyclopedic collections

edited by Gardner Dozois since 1984. Its eighteen mammoth volumes so far provide a definitive account

of the genre in the past two decades. More recently a second annual compilation has arrived, edited by

an equally keen observer of the science-fiction scene, David A. Hartwell; and that there is so little

overlap between the Hartwell and Dozois anthologies is a tribute not only to the ability of experts to

disagree but also to the wealth of fine shorter material being produced today in the science-fiction world.

If there is room in the field for two sets of opinions about the year’s outstanding work, perhaps there is

room for a third. And so, herewith, the newest of the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies, in which a

long-time writer/editor and his writer/editor wife have gathered a group of the science-fiction stories of

2001 that gave them the greatest reading pleasure.

—Robert Silverberg

Karen Haber

UNDONE

JAMES PATRICK KELLY

panicattack

THE SHIP SCREAMED. ITS screens showed Mada that she was surrounded in threespace. A swarm

of Utopian asteroids was closing on her, brain clans and mining DIs living in hollowed-out chunks of

carbonaceous chondrite, any one of which could have mustered enough votes to abolish Mada in all ten

dimensions.

“I’m going to die,” the ship cried, “I’m going to die, I’m going to. . .”

“I’m not.” Mada waved the speaker off impatiently and scanned down-when. She saw that the Utopians

had planted an identity mine five minutes into the past that would boil her memory to vapor if she tried to

go back in time to undo this trap. Upwhen, then. The future was clear, at least as far as she could see,

which wasn’t much beyond next week. Of course, that was the direction they wanted her to skip. They’d

be happiest making her their great-great-great-grandchildren’s problem.

The Utopians fired another spread of panic bolts. The ship tried to absorb them, but its buffers were

already overflowing. Mada felt her throat tighten. Suddenly she couldn’t remember how to spellluck ,

and she believed that she could feel her sanity oozing out of her ears.

“So let’s skip upwhen,” she said.

“You s-sure?” said the ship. “I don’t know if. . .how far?

“Far enough so that all of these drones will be fossils.”

“I can’t just. . .I need a number, Mada.”

A needle of fear pricked Mada hard enough to make her reflexes kick. “Skip!” Her panic did not allow

for the luxury of numbers. “Skip now!” Her voice was tight as a fist. “Do it!”

Time shivered as the ship surged into the empty di-mensions. In three-space, Mada went all wavy. Eons

passed in a nanosecond, then she washed back into the strong dimensions and solidified.

She merged briefly with the ship to assess damage. “What have you done?” The gain in entropy was an

ache in her bones.

“I-I’m sorry, you said to skip so. . .” The ship was still jittery.

Even though she wanted to kick its sensorium in, she bit down hard on her anger. They had both made

enough mistakes that day. “That’s all right,” she said, “we can always go back. We just have to figure out

when we are. Run the star charts.”

two-tenthsofaspin

The ship took almost three minutes to get its charts to agree with its navigation screens—a bad sign.

Reconciling the data showed that it had skipped forward in time about two-tenths of a galactic spin.

Almost twenty million years had passed on Mada’s home world of True-born, time enough for its crust

to fold and buckle into new mountain ranges, for the Green Sea to bloom, for the glaciers to march and

melt. More than enough time for everything and everyone Mada had ever loved—or hated—to die, turn

to dust and blow away.

Whiskers trembling, she checked downwhen. What she saw made her lose her perch and float aimlessly

away from the command mod’s screens. There had to be something wrong with the ship’s air. It settled

like dead, wet leaves in her lungs. She ordered the ship to check the mix.

The ship’s deck flowed into an enormous plastic hand, warm as blood. It cupped Mada gently in its palm

and raised her up so that she could see its screens straight on.

“Nominal, Mada. Everything is as it should be.”

That couldn’t be right. She could breathe ship-nominal atmosphere. “Check it again,” she said.

“Mada, I’m sorry,” said the ship.

The identity mine had skipped with them and was still dogging her, five infuriating minutes into the past.

There was no getting around it, no way to undo their leap into the future. She was trapped two-tenths of

a spin upwhen. The knowledge was like a sucking hole in her chest, much worse than any wound the

Utopian psychological war machine could have inflicted on her.

“What do we do now?” asked the ship.

Mada wondered what she should say to it. Scan for hostiles? Open a pleasure sim? Cook a nice, hot

stew? Or-ders twisted in her mind, bit their tails and swallowed themselves.

She considered—briefly—telling it to open all the air locks to the vacuum. Would it obey this order? She

thought it probably would, although she would as soon chew her own tongue off as utter such cowardly

words. Had not she and her sibling batch voted to carry the revolution into all ten dimensions? Pledged

themselves to fight for the Three Universal Rights, no matter what the cost the Utopian brain clans

extracted from them in blood and anguish?

But that had been two-tenths of a spin ago.

beanthoughts

“Where are you going?” said the ship.

Mada floated through the door bubble of the command mod. She wrapped her toes around the perch

outside to steady herself.

“Mada, wait! I need a mission, a course, some line of inquiry.”

She launched down the companionway.

“I’m a Dependent Intelligence, Mada.” Its speaker buzzed with self-righteousness. “I have the right to

proper and timely guidance.”

The ship flowed a veil across her trajectory; as she approached, it went taut. That was DI thinking: the

ship was sure that it could just bounce her back into its world. Mada flicked her claws and slashed at it,

shredding holes half a meter long.

“And I have the right to be an individual,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

She caught another perch and pivoted off it toward the greenhouse blister. She grabbed the perch by the

door bubble and paused to flow new alveoli into her lungs to make up for the oxygen-depleted,

carbon-dioxide-enriched air mix in the greenhouse. The bubble shivered as she popped through it and

she breathed deeply. The smells of life helped ground her whenever operation of the ship overwhelmed

her. It was always so needy and there was only one of her.

It would have been different if they had been designed to go out in teams. She would have had her sibling

Thiras at her side; together they might have been strong enough to withstand the Utopian’s panic. . .no!

Mada shook him out of her head. Thiras was gone; they were all gone. There was no sense in looking for

com-fort, downwhen or up. All she had was the moment, the tick of the relentless present, filled now

with the moist, bittersweet breath of the dirt, the sticky savor of running sap, the bloom of perfume on the

flowers. As she drifted through the greenhouse, leaves brushed her skin like ca-resses. She settled at the

potting bench, opened a bin and picked out a single bean seed.

Mada cupped it between her two hands and blew on it, letting her body’s warmth coax the seed out of

dor-mancy. She tried to merge her mind with its blissful unconsciousness. Cotyledons stirred and began

to ab-sorb nutrients from the endosperm. A bean cared noth-ing about proclaiming the Three Universal

Rights: the right of all independent sentients to remain individual, the right to manipulate their physical

structures and the right to access the timelines. Mada slowed her meta-bolism to the steady and

deliberate rhythm of the bean—what Utopian could do that? They held that individu-ality bred chaos,

that function alone must determine form and that undoing the past was sacrilege. Being Utopians, they

could hardly destroy Trueborn and its handful of colonies. Instead they had tried to put the Rights under

quarantine.

Mada stimulated the sweat glands in the palms of her hands. The moisture wicking across her skin called

to the embryonic root in the bean seed. The tip pushed against the sead coat. Mada’s sibling batch on

Trueborn had pushed hard against the Utopian blockade, to bring the Rights to the rest of the galaxy.

Only a handful had made it to open space. The brain clans had hunted them down and brought most of

them back in disgrace to Trueborn. But not Mada. No, not wily Mada, Mada the fearless, Mada whose

heart now beat but once a minute.

The bean embryo swelled and its root cracked the seed coat. It curled into her hand, branching and

re-branching like the timelines. The roots tickled her.

Mada manipulated the chemistry of her sweat by forcing her sweat ducts to reabsorb most of the sodium

and chlorine. She parted her hands slightly and raised them up to the grow lights. The cotyledons

emerged and chloroplasts oriented themselves to the light. Mada was thinking only bean thoughts as her

cupped hands filled with roots and the first true leaves unfolded. More leaves budded from the nodes of

her stem, her petioles arched and twisted to the light,thelight . It was only the light—violet-blue and

orange-red—that mattered, the incredi-ble shower of photons that excited her chlorophyll, passing

electrons down carrier molecules to form aden-osine diphosphate and nicotinamide adenine dinu-cleo. . .

.

“Mada,” said the ship. “The order to leave you alone is now superseded by primary programming.”

“What?” The word caught in her throat like a bone.

“You entered the greenhouse forty days ago.”

Without quite realizing what she was doing, Mada clenched her hands, crushing the young plant.

“I am directed to keep you from harm, Mada,” said the ship. “It’s time to eat.”

She glanced down at the dead thing in her hands. “Yes, all right.” She dropped it onto the potting bench.

“I’ve got something to clean up first but I’ll be there in a minute.” She wiped the corner of her eye.

“Meanwhile, calculate a course for home.”

Not until the ship scanned the quarantine zone at the edge of the Trueborn system did Mada begin to

worry. In her time the zone had swarmed with the battle aster-oids of the brain clans. Now the Utopians

were gone. Of course, that was to be expected after all this time. But as the ship re-entered the home

system, dumping excess velocity into the empty dimensions, Mada felt a chill that had nothing to do with

the temperature in the com-mand mod.

Trueborn orbited a spectral type G3V star, which had been known to the discovers as HR3538. Scans

showed that the Green Sea had become a climax forest of de-ciduous hardwood. There were indeed

new mountains—knife edges slicing through evergreen sheets—that had upthrust some eighty kilometers

off the Fire Coast, leav-ing Port Henoch landlocked. A rain forest choked the plain where the city of

Blair’s Landing had once sprawled.

The ship scanned life in abundance. The seas teemed and flocks of Trueborn’s flyers darkened the skies

like storm clouds: kippies and bluewings and warblers and migrating stilts. Animals had retaken all three

conti-nents, lowland and upland, marsh and tundra. Mada could see the dust kicked up by the herds of

herbivorous aram from low orbit. The forest echoed with the clatter of shindies and the shriek of

blowhards. Big hunters like kar and divil padded across the plains. There were new species as well,

mostly invertebrates but also a number of lizards and something like a great, mossy rat that built mounds

five meters tall.

None of the introduced species had survived: dogs or turkeys or llamas. The ship could find no cities,

towns, buildings—not even ruins. There were neither tubeways nor roads, only the occasional animal

track. The ship looked across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and saw nothing but the natural

background.

There was nobody home on Trueborn. And as far as they could tell, there never had been.

“Speculate,” said Mada.

“I can’t,” said the ship. “There isn’t enough data.”

“There’s your data.” Mada could hear the anger in her voice. “Trueborn, as it would have been had we

never even existed.”

“Two-tenths of a spin is a long time, Mada.”

She shook her head. “They ripped out the founda-tions, even picked up the dumps. There’s nothing,

nothing of us left.” Mada was gripping the command perch so hard that the knuckles of her toes were

white. “Hypothesis,” she said, “the Utopians got tired of our troublemaking and wiped us out.

Speculate.”

“Possible, but that’s contrary to their core beliefs.” Most DIs had terrible imaginations. They couldn’t tell

jokes, but then they couldn’t commit crimes, either.

“Hypothesis: they deported the entire population, scattered us to prison colonies. Speculate.”

“Possible, but a logistical nightmare. The Utopians prize the elegant solution.”

She swiped the image of her home planet off the screen, as if to erase its unnerving impossibility.

“Hy-pothesis: there are no Utopians anymore because the revolution succeeded. Speculate.”

“Possible, but then where did everyone go? And why did they return the planet to its pristine state?”

She snorted in disgust. “What if,” she tapped a finger to her forehead, “maybe wedon’t exist. What if

we’ve skipped to another time line? One in which the discovery of Trueborn never happened? Maybe

there has been no Utopian Empire in this timeline, no Great Expansion, no Space Age, maybe no human

civilization at all.”

“One does not just skip to another timeline at random.” The ship sounded huffy at the suggestion. “I’ve

monitored all our dimensional reinsertions quite carefully, and I can assure you that all these events

occurred in the timeline we currently occupy.”

“You’re saying there’s no chance?”

“If you want to write a story, why bother asking my opinion?”

Mada’s laugh was brittle. “All right then. We need more data.” For the first time since she had been

stranded upwhen, she felt a tickle stir the dead weight she was carrying inside her. “Let’s start with the

nearest Utopian system.”

chasingshadows

The HR683 system was abandoned and all signs of hu-man habitation had been obliterated. Mada could

not be certain that everything had been restored to its pre-Expansion state because the ship’s database

on Utopian resources was spotty. HR4523 was similarly deserted. HR509, also known as Tau Ceti, was

only 11.9 light years from earth and had been the first outpost of the Great Expansion.

Its planetary system was also devoid of intelligent life and human artifacts—with one striking exception.

Nuevo LA was spread along the shores of the Sterling Sea like a half-eaten picnic lunch. Something had

bitten the roofs off its buildings and chewed its walls. Metal skeletons rotted on its docks, transports

were melting into brown and gold stains. Once-proud boulevards crumbled in the orange light; the only

traffic was wind-blown litter chasing shadows.

Mada was happy to survey the ruin from low orbit. A closer inspection would have spooked her. “Was it

war?”

“There may have been a war,” said the ship, “but that’s not what caused this. I think it’s deliberate

deconstruction.” In extreme magnification, the screen showed a concrete wall pockmarked with tiny

holes, from which dust puffed intermittently. “The composition of that dust is limestone, sand, and

aluminum silicate. The buildings are crawling with nanobots and they’re eating the concrete.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“At a guess, a hundred years, but that could be off by an order of magnitude.”

“Who did this?” said Mada. “Why? Speculate.”

“If this is the outcome of a war, then it would seem that the victors wanted to obliterate all traces of the

vanquished. But it doesn’t seem to have been fought over resources. I suppose we could imagine some

deep ideological antagonism between the two sides that led to this, but such an extreme of cultural

psychopathology seems unlikely.”

“I hope you’re right.” She shivered. “So they did it themselves, then? Maybe they were done with this

place and wanted to leave it as they found it?”

“Possible,” said the ship.

Mada decided that she was done with Nuevo LA, too. She would have been perversely comforted to

have found her enemies in power somewhere. It would have given her an easy way to calculate her duty.

However, Mada was quite certain that what this mystery meant was that twenty thousand millennia had

conquered both the revolutionand the Utopians and that she and her sibling batch had been designed in

vain.

Still, she had nothing better to do with eternity than to try to find out what had become of her species.

anever-endingvacation

The Atlantic Ocean was now larger than the Pacific. The Mediterranean Sea had been squeezed out of

existence by the collision of Africa, Europe and Asia. North Amer-ica floated free of South America and

was nudging Siberia. Australia was drifting toward the equator.

The population of earth was about what it had been in the fifteenth century CE, according to the ship.

Half a billion people lived on the home world and, as far as Mada could see, none of them had anything

important to do. The means of production and distribution, of energy-generation and waste disposal were

in the control of Dependent Intelligences like the ship. Despite repeated scans, the ship could detect no

sign that any independent sentience was overseeing the system.

There were but a handful of cities, none larger than a quarter of a million inhabitants. All were scrubbed

clean and kept scrupulously ordered by the DIs; they reminded Mada of databases populated with

people instead of information. The majority of the population spent their bucolic lives in pretty hamlets

and quaint towns overlooking lakes or oceans or mountains.

Humanity had booked a never-ending vacation.

“The brain clans could be controlling the DIs,” said Mada. “That would make sense.”

“Doubtful,” said the ship. “Independent sentients create a signature disturbance in the sixth dimension.”

“Could there be some secret dictator among the humans, a hidden oligarchy?”

“I see no evidence that anyone is in charge. Do you?”

She shook her head. “Did they choose to live in a museum,” she said, “or were they condemned to it?

It’s obvious there’s no First Right here; these people have only theillusion of individuality. And no

Second Right either. Those bodies are as plain as uniforms—they’re still slaves to their biology.”

“There’s no disease,” said the ship. “They seem to be functionally immortal.”

“That’s not saying very much, is it?” Mada sniffed. “Maybe this is some scheme to start human civilization

over again. Or maybe they’re like seeds, stored here until someone comes along to plant them.” She

waved all the screens off. “I want to go down for a closer look. What do I need to pass?”

“Clothes, for one thing.” The ship displayed a selection of current styles on its screen. They were

extravagantly varied, from ballooning pastel tents to skin-tight sheaths of luminescent metal, to feathered

camouflage to jump-suits made of what looked like dried mud. “Fashion design is one of their principal

pasttimes,” said the ship. “In addition, you’ll probably want genitalia and the usual secondary sexual

characteristics.”

It took her the better part of a day to flow ovaries, fallopian tubes, a uterus, cervix, and vulva and to

re-arrange her vagina. All these unnecessary organs made her feel bloated. She saw breasts as a waste

of tissue; she made hers as small as the ship thought acceptable. She argued with it about the several

substantial patches of hair it claimed she needed. Clearly, grooming them would require constant

attention. She didn’t mind tam-ing her claws into fingernails but she hated giving up her whiskers. Without

them, the air was practically invisible. At first her new vulva tickled when she walked, but she got used to

it.

The ship entered earth’s atmosphere at night and landed in what had once been Saskatchewan, Canada.

It dumped most of its mass into the empty dimensions and flowed itself into baggy black pants, a

moss-colored boat neck top and a pair of brown, gripall loafers. It was able to conceal its complete

sensorium in a canvas belt.

It was 9:14 in the morning on June 23, 19,834,004 CE when Mada strolled into the village of

Harmonious Struggle.

thedevil’sapple

Harmonious Struggle consisted of five clothing shops, six restaurants, three jewelers, eight art galleries, a

musical instrument maker, a crafts workshop, a weaver, a potter, a woodworking shop, two candle

stores, four theaters with capacities ranging from twenty to three hundred and an enormous sporting

goods store attached to a miniature domed stadium. There looked to be apart-ments over most of these

establishments; many had views of nearby Rabbit Lake.

Three of the restaurants—Hassam’s Palace of Plenty, The Devil’s Apple, and Laurel’s—were practically

jostling each other for position on Sonnet Street, which ran down to the lake. Lounging just outside of

each were waiters eyeing handheld screens. They sprang up as one when Mada happened around the

corner.

“Good day, Madame. Have you eaten?”

“Well met, fair stranger. Come break bread with us.”

“All natural foods, friend! Lightly cooked, humbly served.”

Mada veered into the middle of the street to study the situation as the waiters called to her. ~

SoIcanchoosewhicheverIwant?~ She subvocalized to the ship.,

~Inanattention-basedeconomy,~ subbed the ship in reply, ~alltheyexpectfromyouisanaudience. ~

Just beyond Hassam’s, the skinny waiter from The Devil’s Apple had a wry, crooked smile. Black hair

fell to the padded shoulders of his shirt. He was wearing boots to the knee and loose rust-colored shorts,

but it was the little red cape that decided her.

As she walked past her, the waitress from Hassam’s was practically shouting. “Madame,please , their

batter is dull!” She waved her handheld at Mada. “Read thereviews . Who puts shrimp inmuffins ?”

The waiter at the Devil’s Apple was named Owen. He showed her to one of three tables in the tiny

restaurant. At his suggestion, Mada ordered the poached peaches with white cheese mousse, an

asparagus breakfast torte, baked orange walnut French toast and coddled eggs. Owen served the

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