David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 8

YEAR’S

BEST

SF 8

EDITED BY

DAVID G. HARTWELL

and KATHRYN CRAMER

Two Futurians:

To Virginia Kidd, who nurtured short fiction as well as novels.

To Damon Knight, who taught that the anthologist’s basic responsibility is not to art or to writers, but to

readers.

A DF Books NERDs Release

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Bruce Sterling

In Paradise

Michael Swanwick

Slow Life

Eleanor Arnason

Knapsack Poems

Geoffrey A. Landis

At Dorado

Robert Reed

Coelacanths

Ken Wharton

Flight Correction

Robert Sheckley

Shoes

Charles Sheffield

The Diamond Drill

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Seasons of the Ansarac

Richard Chwedyk

A Few Kind Words for A. E. Van Vogt

Charles Stross

Halo

Terry Bisson

I Saw the Light

A.M. Dellamonica

A Slow Day at the Gallery

Paul Di Filippo

Ailoura

J.R. Dunn

The Names of All the Spirits

Carol Emshwiller

Grandma

Neal Asher

Snow in the Desert

Greg Egan

Singleton

Robert Onopa

Geropods

Jack Williamson

Afterlife

Gene Wolfe

Shields of Mars

Nancy Kress

Patent Infringement

Michael Moorcock

Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel

About the Editors

Books Edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer

Cover

Copyright

About the Publisher

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank the short fiction reviewers at Locus, LocusMag.com, and Tangent Online

for their insights, and our editor, Michael Shohl, for editorial help and for shepherding this book through

the publication process.

Introduction

We said last time that 2001 was an excellent year for the science fiction short story. The year 2002 was,

if anything, even better. Many stories were challenging, literate, thought-provoking, and entertaining for

the mind in the ways that make SF a unique genre.

The good news in the book publishing area is that nothing particularly bad happened 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 continue,

though you will find Ace, Roc, and DAW all part of the Penguin conglomerate, and Bantam and Del Rey

both part of Random House (now so closely allied that a Del Rey hardcover became a Bantam SF

paperback lead this year). Mass market distributors are still pressing all publishers to reduce the number

of titles and just publish “big books,” but SF and fantasy seem to be resisting further diminution.

The last SF and fantasy magazines that are widely distributed are Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF, and

Realms of Fantasy. All of them published a lot of good fiction this year, we are pleased to report. 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—for

example, Interzone, Tales of the Unanticipated, Spectrum SF, Black Gate—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.

The small presses were a very healthy presence. We have a strong short-fiction field today in part

because the small presses publishing semi-professional magazines, single-author collections, and

anthologies are printing and circulating a majority of the high-quality fiction published in SF and fantasy

and horror. One significant trend noticeable in the small press anthologies this year was toward

genre-bending slipstream stories. The SF Book Club, now part of the mega-corporation (Bookspan) that

resulted from the combination of all of the Literary Guild and Book of the Month Club divisions,

continues to be an innovative and lively publisher, as well as an influential reprinter. 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

editions of those anthologies.

The best original anthologies of the year in our opinion were Leviathan 3, edited by Jeff

VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre; Polyphony, edited by Jay Lake; Conjunctions 39, edited by Peter

Straub—these books mixing SF and fantasy with slipstream fiction; Mars Probes, edited by Peter

Crowther (DAW); Embrace the Mutation, edited by Bill Sheehan; Agog, edited by Cat Sparks; and

The DAW 30th Anniversary SF Anthology, edited by Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert (which

contained in general long episodes from popular novel series rather than independent stories; there was

also a companion volume for fantasy). Of these, the particular excellences of Polyphony, Conjunctions

39, Leviathan, and Embrace the Mutation were mostly in the realm of fantasy, and the especial

pleasures of Mars Probes were in SF. So you will find a couple of stories here from Mars Probes, but

should look to our companion Year’s Best Fantasy 3 for stories from the other books. The rest of the

paperback original anthologies of the year should best be considered as equivalent to single issues of

magazines, and on that basis, 2002 was on the whole not a distinguished year for original anthologies in

paperback.

Several online short fiction markets (Infinite Matrix, SciFiction, and Strange Horizons) helped to

cushion the loss in recent years of print media markets for short fiction. We found some excellent science

fiction, particularly from editor Ellen Datlow’s SciFiction site, now the highest-paying market in the genre

for short fiction, although both the others were of quite high quality in general. We offer stories from them

in this book for perhaps the first time in print.

In 2002 it was good to be reading the magazines, as well, both professional and semi-pro. It was a

very strong year for novellas, and there were more than a hundred shorter stories in consideration. 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 2002. It would take two or three more volumes of

this size to include nearly all of the best short stories—though even then, not all of the best novellas. And

we believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not physically possible to encompass it

all in even one 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 Year’s Best

Fantasy 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 2002.

David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

Pleasantville, NY

In Paradise

BRUCE STERLING

Bruce Sterling <www.well.com/conf/mirrorshades> lives in Austin, Texas. The novel Schismatrix

(1985) and the related stories that made him famous were re-released in 1996 as Schismatrix Plus.

He collaborated with William Gibson on The Difference Engine (1990), became a media figure who

appeared on the cover of Wired, became a journalist who wrote the exposé The Hacker

Crackdown (1992), and returned his attention to science fiction in 1995, with a new explosion of

stories and novels, including Heavy Weather (1994), Holy Fire (1996), and Distraction (1998). His

most recent novel, Zeitgeist (2000), is fantasy. His interest in the political and cultural implications

of future change has informed his work, and in his recent nonfiction book, Tomorrow Now:

Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2002), he re-imagines the future after the turn of the 21st century.

“In Paradise” was published in F&SF, a magazine that published a large number of especially

good stories this year. It is a madly jolly, near-future love story, in which the machete of satire is

wielded against the advent and spread of intrusion into the private lives of citizens in the name of

homeland security. Certain moral and ethical problems are oversimplified so that love conquers

all. It is first in this book because we found it so representative of the year 2002 and so much fun.

The machines broke down so much that it was comical, but the security people never laughed about

that.

Felix could endure the delay, for plumbers billed by the hour. He opened his tool kit, extracted a

plastic flask and had a solid nip of Scotch.

The Moslem girl was chattering into her phone. Her dad and another bearded weirdo had passed

through the big metal frame just as the scanner broke down. So these two somber, suited old men were

getting the full third degree with the hand wands, while daughter was stuck. Daughter wore a long baggy

coat and thick black headscarf and a surprisingly sexy pair of sandals. Between her and her minders

stretched the no man’s land of official insecurity. She waved across the gap.

The security geeks found something metallic in the black wool jacket of the Wicked Uncle. Of

course it was harmless, but they had to run their full ritual, lest they die of boredom at their posts. As the

Scotch settled in, Felix felt time stretch like taffy. Little Miss Mujihadeen discovered that her phone was

dying. She banged at it with the flat of her hand.

The line of hopeful shoppers, grimly waiting to stimulate the economy, shifted in their disgruntlement.

It was a bad, bleak scene. It crushed Felix’s heart within him. He longed to leap to his feet and harangue

the lot of them. Wake up, he wanted to scream at them, cheer up, act more human. He felt the urge

keenly, but it scared people when he cut loose like that. They really hated it. And so did he. He knew he

couldn’t look them in the eye. It would only make a lot of trouble.

The Mideastern men shouted at the girl. She waved her dead phone at them, as if another

breakdown was going to help their mood. Then Felix noticed that she shared his own make of cell

phone. She had a rather ahead-of-the-curve Finnish model that he’d spent a lot of money on. So Felix

rose and sidled over.

“Help you out with that phone, ma’am?”

She gave him the paralyzed look of a coed stuck with a dripping tap. “No English?” he concluded.

“Habla español, senorita?” No such luck.

He offered her his own phone. No, she didn’t care to use it. Surprised and even a little hurt by this

rejection, Felix took his first good look at her, and realized with a lurch that she was pretty. What eyes!

They were whirlpools. The line of her lips was like the tapered edge of a rose leaf.

“It’s your battery,” he told her. Though she had not a word of English, she obviously got it about

phone batteries. After some gestured persuasion, she was willing to trade her dead battery for his. There

was a fine and delicate little moment when his fingertips extracted her power supply, and he inserted his

own unit into that golden-lined copper cavity. Her display leaped to life with an eager flash of numerals.

Felix pressed a button or two, smiled winningly, and handed her phone back.

She dialed in a hurry, and bearded Evil Dad lifted his phone to answer, and life became much easier

on the nerves. Then, with a groaning buzz, the scanner came back on. Dad and Uncle waved a command

at her, like lifers turned to trusty prison guards, and she scampered through the metal gate and never

looked back.

She had taken his battery. Well, no problem. He would treasure the one she had given him.

Felix gallantly let the little crowd through before he himself cleared security. The geeks always went

nuts about his plumbing tools, but then again, they had to. He found the assignment: a chi-chi place that

sold fake antiques and potpourri. The manager’s office had a clogged drain. As he worked, Felix

recharged the phone. Then he socked them for a sum that made them wince.

On his leisurely way out—whoa, there was Miss Cell phone, that looker, that little goddess,

browsing in a jewelry store over Korean gold chains and tiaras. Dad and Uncle were there, with a couple

of off-duty cops.

Felix retired to a bench beside the fountain, in the potted plastic plants. He had another bracing shot

of Scotch, then put his feet up on his toolbox and punched her number.

He saw her straighten at the ring, and open her purse, and place the phone to the kerchiefed side of

her head. She didn’t know where he was, or who he was. That was why the words came pouring out of

him.

“My God you’re pretty,” he said. “You are wasting your time with that jewelry. Because your eyes

are like two black diamonds.”

She jumped a little, poked at the phone’s buttons with disbelief, and put it back to her head.

Felix choked back the urge to laugh and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “A string of pearls

around your throat would look like peanuts,” he told the phone. “I am totally smitten with you. What are

you like under that big baggy coat? Do I dare to wonder? I would give a million dollars just to see your

knees!”

“Why are you telling me that?” said the phone.

“Because I’m looking at you right now. And after one look at you, believe me, I was a lost soul.”

Felix felt a chill. “Hey, wait a minute—you don’t speak English, do you?”

“No, I don’t speak English—but my telephone does.”

“It does?”

“It’s a very new telephone. It’s from Finland,” the telephone said. “I need it because I’m stuck in a

foreign country. Do you really have a million dollars for my knees?”

“That was a figure of speech,” said Felix, though his bank account was, in point of fact, looking

considerably healthier since his girlfriend Lola had dumped him. “Never mind the million dollars,” he said.

“I’m dying of love out here. I’d sell my blood just to buy you petunias.”

“You must be a famous poet,” the phone said dreamily, “for you speak such wonderful Farsi.”

Felix had no idea what Farsi was—but he was way beyond such fretting now. The rusty gates of his

soul were shuddering on their hinges. “I’m drunk,” he realized. “I am drunk on your smile.”

“In my family, the women never smile.”

Felix had no idea what to say to that, so there was a hissing silence.

“Are you a spy? How did you get my phone number?”

“I’m not a spy. I got your phone number from your phone.”

“Then I know you. You must be that tall foreign man who gave me your battery. Where are you?”

“Look outside the store. See me on the bench?” She turned where she stood, and he waved his

fingertips. “That’s right, it’s me,” he declared to her. “I can’t believe I’m really going through with this.

You just stand there, okay? I’m going to run in there and buy you a wedding ring.”

“Don’t do that.” She glanced cautiously at Dad and Uncle, then stepped closer to the bulletproof

glass. “Yes, I do see you. I remember you.”

She was looking straight at him. Their eyes met. They were connecting. A hot torrent ran up his

spine. “You are looking straight at me.”

“You’re very handsome.”

It wasn’t hard to elope. Young women had been eloping since the dawn of time. Elopement with

eager phone support was a snap. He followed her to the hotel, a posh place that swarmed with limos and

videocams. He brought her a bag with a big hat, sunglasses, and a cheap Mexican wedding dress. He

sneaked into the women’s restroom—they never put videocams there, due to the complaints—and he

left the bag in a stall. She went in, came out in new clothes with her hair loose, and walked straight out of

the hotel and into his car.

They couldn’t speak together without their phones, but that turned out to be surprisingly

advantageous, as further discussion was not on their minds. Unlike Lola, who was always complaining

that he should open up and relate—“You’re a plumber,” she would tell him, “how deep and mysterious is

a plumber supposed to be?”—the new woman in his life had needs that were very straightforward. She

liked to walk in parks without a police escort. She liked to thoughtfully peruse the goods in Mideastern

ethnic groceries. And she liked to make love to him. She was nineteen years old, and the willing sacrifice

of her chastity had really burned the bridges for his little refugee. Once she got fully briefed about what

went inside where, she was in the mood to tame the demon. She had big, jagged, sobbing, alarming,

romantic, brink-of-the-grave things going on, with long, swoony kisses, and heel-drumming, and

clutching-and-clawing.

When they were too weak, and too raw, and too tingling to make love anymore, then she would

cook, very badly. She was on her phone constantly, talking to her people. These confidantes of hers

were obviously women, because she asked them for Persian cooking tips. She would sink with

triumphant delight into cheery chatter as the Basmati rice burned.

He longed to take her out to eat; to show her to everyone, to the whole world; really, besides the

sex, no act could have made him happier—but she was undocumented, and sooner or later some

security geek was sure to check on that. People did things like that to people nowadays. To contemplate

such things threw a thorny darkness over their whole affair, so, mostly, he didn’t think. He took time off

work, and he spent every moment that he could in her radiant presence, and she did what a pretty girl

could do to lift a man’s darkened spirits, which was plenty. More than he had ever had from anyone.

After ten days of golden, unsullied bliss, ten days of bread and jug wine, ten days when the

nightingales sang in chorus and the reddest of roses bloomed outside the boudoir, there came a knock on

his door, and it was three cops.

“Hello, Mr. Hernandez,” said the smallest of the trio. “I would be Agent Portillo from Homeland

Security, and these would be two of my distinguished associates. Might we come in?”

“Would there be a problem?” said Felix.

“Yes there would!” said Portillo. “There might be rather less of a problem if my associates here could

search your apartment.” Portillo offered up a handheld screen. “A young woman named Batool Kadivar?

Would we be recognizing Miss Batool Kadivar?”

“I can’t even pronounce that,” Felix said. “But I guess you’d better come in,” for Agent Portillo’s

associates were already well on their way. Men of their ilk were not prepared to take no for an answer.

They shoved past him and headed at once for the bedroom.

“Who are those guys? They’re not American.”

“They’re Iranian allies. The Iranians were totally nuts for a while, and then they were sort of okay,

and then they became our new friends, and then the enemies of our friends became our friends…. Do

you ever watch TV news, Mr. Hernandez? Secular uprisings, people seizing embassies? Ground war in

the holy city of Qom, that kind of thing?”

“It’s hard to miss,” Felix admitted.

“There are a billion Moslems. If they want to turn the whole planet into Israel, we don’t get a choice

about that. You know something? I used to be an accountant!” Portillo sighed theatrically. “ ‘Homeland

Security.’ Why’d they have to stick me with that chicken outfit? Hombre, we’re twenty years old, and

we don’t even have our own budget yet. Did you see those gorillas I’ve got on my hands? You think

these guys ever listen to sense? Geneva Convention? U.S. Constitution? Come on.”

“They’re not gonna find any terrorists in here.”

Portillo sighed again. “Look, Mr. Hernandez. You’re a young man with a clean record, so I want to

do you a favor.” He adjusted his handheld and it showed a new screen. “These are cell phone records.

Thirty, forty calls a day, to and from your number. Then look at this screen, this is the good part. Check

out her call records. That would be her aunt in Yerevan, and her little sister in Teheran, and five or six of

her teenage girlfriends, still living back in purdah…. Who do you think is gonna pay that phone bill? Did

that ever cross your mind?”

Felix said nothing.

“I can understand this, Mr. Hernandez. You lucked out. You’re a young, red-blooded guy and that is

a very pretty girl. But she’s a minor, and an illegal alien. Her father’s family has got political connections

like nobody’s business, and I would mean nobody, and I would also mean business.”

“Not my business,” Felix said.

“You’re being a sap, Mr. Hernandez. You may not be interested in war, but war is plenty interested

in you.” There were loud crashing, sacking and looting noises coming from his bedroom.

“You are sunk, hermano. There is video at the Lebanese grocery store. There is video hidden in the

traffic lights. You’re a free American citizen, sir. You’re free to go anywhere you want, and we’re free to

watch all the backup tapes. That would be the big story I’m relating here. Would we be catching on

yet?”

“That’s some kind of story,” Felix said.

“You don’t know the half of it. You don’t know the tenth.”

The two goons reappeared. There was a brief exchange of notes. They had to use their computers.

“My friends here are disappointed,” said Agent Portillo, “because there is no girl in your residence,

even though there is an extensive selection of makeup and perfume. They want me to arrest you for

abduction, and obstruction of justice, and probably ten or twelve other things. But I would be asking

myself: why? Why should this young taxpayer with a steady job want to have his life ruined? What I’m

thinking is: there must be another story. A better story. The flighty girl ran off, and she spent the last two

weeks in a convent. It was just an impulse thing for her. She got frightened and upset by America, and

then she came back to her people. Everything diplomatic.”

“That’s diplomacy?”

“Diplomacy is the art of avoiding extensive unpleasantness for all the parties concerned. The united

coalition, as it were.”

“They’ll chop her hands off and beat her like a dog!”

“Well, that would depend, Mr. Hernandez. That would depend entirely on whether the girl herself

tells that story. Somebody would have to get her up to speed on all that. A trusted friend. You see?”

After the departure of the three security men, Felix thought through his situation. He realized there

was nothing whatsoever in it for him but shame, humiliation, impotence, and a crushing and lasting

unhappiness. He then fetched up the reposado tequila from beneath his sink.

Some time later he felt the dulled stinging of a series of slaps to his head. When she saw that she had

his attention, she poured the tequila onto the floor, accenting this gesture with an eye-opening Persian

harangue. Felix staggered to the bathroom, threw up, and returned to find a fresh cup of coffee. She had

raised the volume and was still going strong.

He’d never had her pick a lovers’ quarrel with him, though he’d always known it was in her

somewhere. It was magnificent. It was washing over him in a musical torrent of absolute nonsense. It was

operatic, and he found it quite beautiful. Like sitting through a rainstorm without getting wet: trees

straining, leaves flying, dark, windy, torrential. Majestic.

Her idea of coffee was basically wet grounds, so it brought him around in short order. “You’re right,

I’m wrong, and I’m sorry,” he admitted tangentially, knowing she didn’t understand a word, “so come on

and help me,” and he opened the sink cabinet, where he had hidden all his bottles when he’d noticed the

earlier disapproving glances. He then decanted them down the drain: vodka, Southern Comfort, the gin,

the party jug of tequila, even the last two inches of his favorite single-malt. Moslems didn’t drink, and

really, how wrong could any billion people be? He gulped a couple of aspirin and picked up the phone.

“The police were here. They know about us. I got upset. I drank too much.”

“Did they beat you?”

“Uh, no. They’re not big fans of beating over here, they’ve got better methods. They’ll be back. We

are in big trouble.”

She folded her arms. “Then we’ll run away.”

“You know, we have a proverb for that in America. ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’ ”

“Darling, I love your poetry, but when the police come to the house, it’s serious.”

“Yes. It’s very serious, it’s serious as cancer. You’ve got no ID. You have no passport. You can’t

get on any plane to get away. Even the trains and lousy bus stations have facial recognition. My car is

useless too. They’d read my license plate a hundred times before we hit city limits. I can’t rent another

car without leaving credit records. The cops have got my number.”

“We’ll steal a fast car and go very fast.”

“You can’t outrun them! That is not possible! They’ve all got phones like we do, so they’re always

ahead of us, waiting.”

“I’m a rebel! I’ll never surrender!” She lifted her chin. “Let’s get married.”

“I’d love to, but we can’t. We have no license. We have no blood test.”

“Then we’ll marry in some place where they have all the blood they want. Beirut, that would be

good.” She placed her free hand against her chest. “We were married in my heart, the first time we ever

made love.”

This artless confession blew through him like a summer breeze. “They do have rings for cash at a

pawnbroker’s…But I’m a Catholic. There must be somebody who does this sort of thing…Maybe some

heretic mullah. Maybe a Santeria guy?”

“If we’re husband and wife, what can they do to us? We haven’t done anything wrong! I’ll get a

Green Card. I’ll beg them! I’ll beg for mercy. I’ll beg political asylum.”

Agent Portillo conspicuously cleared his throat. “Mr. Hernandez, please! This would not be the

conversation you two need to be having.”

“I forgot to mention the worst part,” Felix said. “They know about our phones.”

“Miss Kadivar, can you also understand me?”

“Who are you? I hate you. Get off this line and let me talk to him.”

“Salaam alekom to you, too,” Portillo concluded. “It’s a sad commentary on federal procurement

when a mullah’s daughter has a fancy translator, and I can’t even talk live with my own fellow agents. By

the way, those two gentlemen from the new regime in Teheran are staking out your apartment. How they

failed to recognize your girlfriend on her way in, that I’ll never know. But if you two listen to me, I think I

can walk you out of this very dangerous situation.”

“I don’t want to leave my beloved,” she said.

“Over my dead body,” Felix declared. “Come and get me. Bring a gun.”

“Okay, Miss Kadivar, you would seem to be the more rational of the two parties, so let me talk

sense to you. You have no future with this man. What kind of wicked man seduces a decent girl with

phone pranks? He’s an aayash, he’s a playboy. America has a fifty percent divorce rate. He would

never ask your father honorably for your hand. What would your mother say?”

“Who is this awful man?” she said, shaken. “He knows everything!”

“He’s a snake!” Felix said. “He’s the devil!”

“You still don’t get it, compadre. I’m not the Great Satan. Really, I’m not! I am the good guy. I’m

your guardian angel, dude. I am trying really hard to give you back a normal life.”

“Okay cop, you had your say, now listen to me. I love her body and soul, and even if you kill me

dead for that, the flames in my heart will set my coffin on fire.”

She burst into tears. “Oh God, my God, that’s the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said to me.”

“You kids are sick, okay?” Portillo snapped. “This would be mental illness that I’m eavesdropping

on here! You two don’t even speak each other’s language. You had every fair warning! Just

remember, when it happens, you made me do it. Now try this one on for size, Romeo and Juliet.” The

phones went dead.

Felix placed his dead phone on the tabletop. “Okay. Situation report. We’ve got no phones, no

passports, no ID and two different intelligence agencies are after us. We can’t fly, we can’t drive, we

can’t take a train or a bus. My credit cards are useless now, my bank cards will just track me down, and

I guess I’ve lost my job now. I can’t even walk out my own front door…. And wow, you don’t

understand a single word I’m saying. I can tell from that look in your eye. You are completely thrilled.”

She put her finger to her lips. Then she took him by the hand.

Apparently, she had a new plan. It involved walking. She wanted to walk to Los Angeles. She knew

the words “Los Angeles,” and maybe there was somebody there that she knew. This trek would involve

crossing half the American continent on foot, but Felix was at peace with that ambition. He really thought

he could do it. A lot of people had done it just for the sake of gold nuggets, back in 1849. Women had

walked to California just to meet a guy with gold nuggets.

The beautiful part of this scheme was that, after creeping out the window, they really had vanished.

The feds might be all over the airports, over everything that mattered, but they didn’t care about what

didn’t matter. Nobody was looking out for dangerous interstate pedestrians.

To pass the time as they walked, she taught him elementary Farsi. The day’s first lesson was body

parts, because that was all they had handy for pointing. That suited Felix just fine. If anything, this

expanded their passionate communion. He was perfectly willing to starve for that, fight for that and die

for that. Every form of intercourse between man and woman was fraught with illusion, and the bigger, the

better. Every hour that passed was an hour they had not been parted.

They had to sleep rough. Their clothes became filthy. Then, on the tenth day, they got arrested.

She was, of course, an illegal alien, and he had the good sense to talk only Spanish, so of course, he

became one as well. The Immigration cops piled them into the bus for the border, but they got two seats

together and were able to kiss and hold hands. The other deported wretches even smiled at them.

He realized now that he was sacrificing everything for her: his identity, his citizenship, flag, church,

habits, money…Everything, and good riddance. He bit thoughtfully into his wax-papered cheese

sandwich. This was the federal bounty distributed to every refugee on the bus, along with an apple, a

small carton of homogenized milk, and some carrot chips.

When the protein hit his famished stomach Felix realized that he had gone delirious with joy. He was

growing by this experience. It had broken every stifling limit within him. His dusty, savage, squalid world

was widening drastically.

Giving alms, for instance—before his abject poverty, he’d never understood that alms were holy.

Alms were indeed very holy. From now on—as soon as he found a place to sleep, some place that was

so wrecked, so torn, so bleeding, that it never asked uncomfortable questions about a plumber—as soon

as he became a plumber again, then he’d be giving some alms.

She ate her food, licked her fingers, then fell asleep against him, in the moving bus. He brushed the

free hair from her dirty face. She was twenty days older now. “This is a pearl,” he said aloud. “This is a

pearl by far too rare to be contained within the shell of time and space.”

Why had those lines come to him, in such a rush? Had he read them somewhere? Or were those

lines his own?

Slow Life

MICHAEL SWANWICK

Michael Swanwick <www.michaelswanwick.com> is a major player in today’s grand game of

science fiction. His first novel, In the Drift (1984), an alternate-history novel in which the Three

Mile Island reactor exploded, was one of Terry Carr’s Ace Specials in the same series as William

Gibson’s Neuromancer and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore. Since then he has published

his fine novels at a rate of one every three or four years: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Stations of the

Tide (1991), The Iron Dragon’s Daughter (1993—what he called “hard fantasy”) the sharply satiric

Jack Faust (1997), and his new novel, Bones of the Earth (2002), expanded from his Hugo

Award–winning story “Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.” His short fiction is collected in Gravity’s

Angels (1991), Geography of Unknown Lands (1997), Moon Dogs (2000), Tales of Old Earth (2000),

and Puck Aleshire’s Abecedary (2000). Swanwick is also the author of two influential critical

essays, one on SF, “User’s Guide to the Postmoderns”(1985), and one on fantasy, “In The

Tradition….” (1994).

“Slow Life,” in the mode of Hal Clement and Arthur C. Clarke, is from Analog, and is one of

Swanwick’s occasional forays into hard SF. Swanwick links satire of our over-connected

technological present, of online chat and instantaneous entertainment news, with the grand

wonders of the cosmos, adventures on the grand scale, and good old-fashioned SF wonder, in an

entertaining clash of SF cultures.

“It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was

our turn to make history now.” —The Memoirs of Lizzie O’Brien

The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal

speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Diano-acetylene condensed on the seed nucleus,

molecule by molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.

Now the journey could begin.

It took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers,

where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense on it. But when it did, growth

was rapid.

Down it drifted.

At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow.

Occasionally it collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally it was too large to be held

effortlessly aloft by the gentle stratospheric winds.

It fell.

Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost

two meters per second.

David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 8

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