David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 3

Year's Best Scifi 3

Edited by David G. Hartwell

Table of CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Petting Zoo by Gene Wolfe

Chapter 2 - The Wisdom of Old Earth by Michael Swanwick

Chapter 3 - The Firefly Tree by Jack Williamson

Chapter 4 - Views of a Cardboard City by William Gibson

Chapter 5 - The Nostalginauts by S.N. Dyer

Chapter 6 - Guest Law by John C. Wright

Chapter 7 - The Voice by Gregory BenfordChapter 8 - Yeyuka by

Greg Egan

Chapter 9 - An Office Romance By Terry Bisson

Chapter 10 - Itsy Bitsy Spider by James Patrick Kelly

Chapter 11 Beauty in the Night by Robert Silverberg

Chapter 12 - Mr. Pale by Ray Bradbury

Chapter 13 - The Pipes of Pan by Brian Stableford

Chapter 14 - Always True to Thee, in My Fashion by Nacky Kress

Chapter 15 - Canary Land By Tom Purdom

Chapter 16 - Universal Emulators by Tom Cool

Chapter 17 - Fair Verona by R. Garcia Y Robertson

Chapter 18 - Great Western by Kim Newman

Chapter 19 - Turnover By Geoffery A. Landis

Chapter 20- The Mendelian Lamp Case by Paul Levinson

Chapter 21 - Kiss Me by Katherine MacLean

Chapter 22 - London Bone by Michael Moorcock

Copyright Information

Scan and Proof History and Notes

To Everett Bleiler and T. E. Dikty, who invented Year’s Best

volumes in SF; and

To Judith Merril, who died in 1997 and who showed what really

could be accomplished in a Year’s Best with a strong and coherent

aesthetic; and

To Peter Henry Cramer Hartwell, who was born October 17,

1997, just because. Acknowledgments

The existence of Locus and Tangents makes doing an annual

anthology easier and I thank them both for their devotion to

considering the short fiction published each year in the SF field. I am

grateful to the publishers of the SF magazines for continuing the

uphill battle to stay in business and publish fiction in 1997.

Introduction

Contents Next

First, my annual clarification: this selection of science fiction stories represents the

best that was published during the year 1997. In my opinion I could perhaps 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 postmodern 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 1997.

All the trends mentioned in last year’s introduction continued in 1997: the

magazines continued to lose circulation but still publish the lion’s share of the best

stories in the SF field; original anthologies remained mediocre, with honorable

exceptions that gathered stories often better than all but the best magazine stories. I’ll

discuss some of them below. And the best stories were most often short, novelettes

or shorts according to Hugo or Nebula Award rules (just plain short stories

according to the standards of non-genre literature). 1997 was not a great year for

novellas.

SF Age emerged as a leader among the magazines for high quality science fiction,

though Asimov’s and Fantasy & Science Fiction and Interzone continued strong. It

was a particularly good year for Asimov’s, and there were a number of talented new

writers in Interzone. There were some consolidations in the publishing industry,

some cutbacks in paperbacks, but they were offset by an extraordinary increase in

the number of trade paperback titles. 1997 was the year of the trade paperback in

SF, with Del Rey alone issuing fifty or more titles of its extensive fantasy and SF

backlist in trade paperback.

I have several hot tips for readers. You may well have missed three of the best

(maybe three of the four year’s best—the only other leading contender is Linaweaver

& Kramer’s Free Space, which was reviewed widely and attracted many Nebula

story nominations) original science fiction anthologies of the year: Decalog 5, New

Worlds, and Future Histories. All of these books appeared unexpectedly and

without advance warning and I only saw them at first by accident. They helped make

it a particularly good year for anthologies in general.

Decalog 5 is the fifth in a series and is suddenly distinguished (after four previous

volumes that were not— the first two were filled with unmemorable Dr. Who

stories!). This one, however, has originals by Stephen Baxter, Dominic Green, Ian

Watson, and others, all set in the far future. A good book in any year. Editor David

Garnett’s latest New Worlds appeared as a trade paperback original from White

Wolf with no fanfare and is in my opinion the best original anthology of the year,

including new stories by William Gibson, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Kim

Newman, Ian Watson, and many others—some SF, some speculative fiction, as you

would expect. If there is such a thing as good old fashioned New Worlds at its best,

this it it. Editor Stephen McClelland’s Future Histories is a trade paper-back

published in the UK (only?) by Horizon House and Nokia, full of original stories by

such writers as Nancy Kress, Gregory Benford, Pat Cadigan, Stephen Baxter, Pat

Murphy, Brian Stableford (and interviews with Sterling, Bear, Gibson, Stephenson,

Vernor Vinge, Alexander Besher, and others). The theme is “Twenty Tomorrows for

Communications”—a corporate anthology, by golly, but done extremely well.

There was the usual, sad to say, glut of mediocre original anthologies, many with

one or two good stories, but most a bit below the acceptable level for the

professional magazines. The same level maintained for the semiprofessional

magazines in 1997, though the good story balance there was a higher percentage than

in the anthologies.

On the whole, it was another year in which there were in the end more than fifty,

perhaps a hundred, really good SF stories published, certainly enough to fill several

Year’s Best volumes, providing me with a rich diversity of selection for this one.

Comments on thematic trends in the literature I have saved for the notes to the

stories, that follow immediately. Let’s get to them now.

—David G. Hartwell

Chapter 1 - Petting Zoo by Gene Wolfe

Contents - Prev / Next

Gene Wolfe’s body of work over the years is a challenge and a delight to serious

readers of science fiction. This year, as in the past, there were several fine Wolfe

stories to choose from for this volume, but this one, published in a paperback

original anthology of lightweight pieces on the theme, Return of the Dinosaurs,

seemed to me just the thing to lead off a Year’s Best volume, in a year when

dinosaurs on film and TV are in vogue. There has been a fair amount of

disagreement in recent years as to what makes a good SF story and in what way

such characteristics as plot and action, character or idea ought or ought not to be

central to the enterprise of science fiction storytelling. In my opinion, each good

story implicitly makes its own statement and influences the argument it its own favor.

And so the literature evolves. This is a cracking good story with subtle, and some

quite clear, implications. But never mind that for now; read this slick, fast piece for

fun and surprises and then stop and think afterward: what might it mean if the

dinosaurs came back as Barney?

***

Roderick looked up at the sky. It was indeed blue, but almost cloudless. The air

was hot and smelled of dust.

“Here, children…” The teaching cyborg was pointedly not addressing him.

“—Tyranosaurus Rex. Rex was created by an inadequately socialized boy who

employed six Build-a-Critterkits…”

Sixteen.

“—which he duped on his father’s Copystuff. With that quantity of GroQik…”

It had taken a day over two weeks, two truckloads of pigs that he had charged to

Mother’s account, and various other things that had become vague. For. the last

week, he had let Rex go out at night to see what he could find, and people

would—people were bound to—notice the missing cattle soon. Had probably

noticed them already.

Rex had looked out through the barn window while he was mooring his airbike

and said, “I’m tired of hiding all day.”

And he himself had said…

“Let’s go for a ride.” One of the little girls had raised her hand.

From the other side of the token barrier that confined him, Rex himself spoke for

the first time, saying, “You will, kid. She’s not quite through yet.” His voice was a

sort of growling tenor now, clearly forced upward as high as he could make it so as

to seem less threatening. Roderick pushed on his suit’s A-C and shivered a little.

It had been cool, that day. Cool, with a little breeze he had fought the whole way

over, keeping his airbike below the treetops and following groundtrucks when he

could, pulled along by their wake.

Cold in the barn, then—cold and dusty—dust motes dancing in the sunbeams

that stabbed between its old, bent, and battered aluminum panels.

Rex had crouched as he had before, but he was bigger now, bigger than ever, and

his smooth reptilian skin had felt like glass, like ice under which oiled muscles stirred

like snakes. He had fallen, and Rex had picked him up in the arms that looked so tiny

on Rex but were bigger and stronger than a big man’s arms, saying, “That’s what

these are for,” and set him on Rex’s shoulders with his legs—his legs—trying to

wrap around Rex’s thick, throbbing neck…

He had opened the big doors from inside, gone out almost crawling, and stood

up.

It had not been the height. He had been higher on his air-bike almost every day. It

had not been his swift, swaying progress above the treetops—treetops arrayed in

red, gold, and green so that it seemed that he followed Rex’s floating head over a

lawn deep in fallen leaves.

It had been—

He shrugged the thought away. There were no adequate words. Power? You

bought it at a drugstore, a shiny little disk that would run your house-bot for three or

four more years, or your drill forever. Mastery? It was what people had held over

dogs while private ownership had still been legal.

Dogs had four fangs in front, and that was it, fangs so small they did not even

look dangerous. Rex had a mouthful, every one as long as Roderick’s arm, in a

mouth that could have chewed up an aircar.

No, it had not been the height. He had ridden over woods—this wood among

them—often. Had ridden higher than this, yet heard the rustling of the leaves below

him, the sound of a brook, an invisible brook of air. It had been the noise.

That was not right either, but it was closer than the others. It had been the

snapping of the limbs and the crashing of the trees falling, or at least that had been a

lot of it—the sound of their progress, the shattering, splintering wood. In part, at

least, it had been the noise.

“He did a great deal of damage,” the teaching cyborg was saying, as her female

attendant nodded confirmation. “Much worse, he terrified literally hundreds of

persons…”

Sitting on Rex’s shoulders, he had been able to talk almost directly into Rex’s

ear. “Roar.”

And Rex had roared to shake the earth.

“Keep on roaring.”

And Rex had.

The red and white cattle Rex ate sometimes, so short-legged they could scarcely

move, had run away slowly only because they were too fat to run any faster, and one

had gotten stepped on. People had run too, and Rex had kicked over a little pre-fab

shed for the fun of it, and a tractor-bot. He’d waded hip-deep through the swamp

without even slowing down and had forded the river.. There were fewer building

restrictions on the north side of the river, and the people there had really run.

Had run except for one old man with a bushy mustache, who had only stood and

stared pop-eyed, too old to run, Roderick thought, or maybe too scared. He had

looked down at the old man and waved; and their eyes had met, and suddenly—just

as if the top of the old man’s head had popped up so he could look around inside

it—he had known what the old man was thinking.

Not guessed, known.

And the old man had been thinking that when he had been Roderick’s age he had

wanted to do exactly what Roderick was doing now. He had never been able to, and

had never thought anybody would be. But somebody was. That kid up there in the

polka-dot shirt was. So he, the old man, had been wrong about the whole world all

his life. It was much more wonderful, this old world, than he, the old man, had ever

supposed. So maybe there was hope after all. Some kind of a hope anyhow, in a

world where things like this could go on, on a Monday right here in Libertyberg.

Before the old man could draw his breath to cheer, he had been gone, and there

had been woods and cornfields. (Roderick’s suit A-C shuddered and quit.) And

after lots of corn, some kind of a big factory. Rex had stepped on its fence which

sputtered and shot sparks without doing anything much, and then the aircar had

started diving at them.

It had been red and fast, and Roderick remembered it as clearly as if he had seen

it yesterday. It would dive, trying to hit Rex’s head, and then the override would

say, My gosh, that’s a great big dinosaur! You’re trying to crash us into a great

big dinosaur, you jerk! The override would pull the air-car up and miss, and then it

would give it back to the driver, and he would try the same thing all over.

Roderick had followed it with his eyes, especially after Rex started snapping at it,

and the sky had been a wonderful cool blue with little white surgical-ball clouds

strolling around in it. He had never seen a better sky—and he never would, because

skies did not get any better than that one. After a while he had spotted the channel

copter flying around up there and taking his picture to run on everybody’s

threedee-vid, and had made faces at it.

Another child, a scrubbed little girl with long, straight privileged-looking yellow

hair had her hand up. “Did he kill a whole lot of people?”

The teaching cyborg interrupted her own lecture. “Certainly not, since there were

no people in North America during the Upper Cretaceous. Human evolution did not

begin—”

“This one.” The scrubbed little girl pointed to Rex. “Did he?”

Rex shook his head.

“That was not the point at issue,” the teaching cyborg explained. “Disruption is

disrupting, and he and his maker disrupted. He disrupted, I should say, and his

maker still more, since Rex would not have been in existence to disrupt had he not

been made in violation of societal standards. No one of sensitivity would have done

what he did. Someone of sensitivity would have realized at once that their

construction of a large dinosaur, however muted in coloration—”

Rex interrupted her. “I’m purple. It’s just that it’s gotten sort of dull lookin‘ now

that I’m older. Looky here.” He bent and slapped at his water trough with his

disproportionately small hands. Dust ran from his hide in dark streaks, leaving it a

faded mulberry.

“You are not purple,” the teaching cyborg admonished Rex, “and you should not

say you are. I would describe that shade as a mauve.” She spoke to her female

attendant. “Do you think that they would mind very much if I were to start over? I’ve

lost my place, I fear.”

“You mustn’t interrupt her,” the female attendant cautioned the little girl.

“Early-Tertiary-in-the-Upper-Eocene-was-the-Moeritherium-the-size-of^a-tuber-but-

more-like-a-hippopotamus.”

“Yum,” Rex mumbled. “Yum-yum!”

A small boy waved his hand wildly. “What do you feed him?”

“Tofu, mostly. It’s good for him.” The teaching cyborg looked at Rex as she

spoke, clearly displeased at his thriving upon tofu. “He eats an airtruckload of it

every day. Also a great deal of soy protein and bean curd.”

“I’d like to eat the hippos,” Rex told the small boy. “We go right past them every

time I take you kids for ride, and wow! Do they ever look yummy!”

“He’s only joking,” the teaching cyborg told the children. She caught her female

attendant’s left arm and held it up to see her watch. “I have a great deal more to tell

you, children, but I’ll have to do it while we’re taking our ride, or we’ll fall behind

schedule.”

She and her female attendant opened the gate to Rex’s compound and went in,

preceded, accompanied, and followed by small girls and boys. While most of the

children gathered around him, stroking his rough thick hide with tentative fingers, the

teaching cyborg and her female attendant wrestled a stepladder and a very large

howdah of white pentastyrene Wickedwicker from behind Rex’s sleeping shed. For

five minutes or more they struggled to hook the howdah over his shoulders and

fasten the Velcro cinch, obstructed by the well-intended assistance of four little

boys.

Roderick joined them, lifted the howdah into place, and released and refastened

the cinch—getting it tight enough that che howdah could not slip to one side.

“Thank you,” the female attendant said. “Haven’t I seen you here before?”

Roderick shook his head. “It’s the first time I’ve ever come.”

“Well, a lot of men do. I mean it’s always just one man all by himself, but there’s

almost always one.”

“He used to lie down so that we could put it on him,” the teaching cyborg said

severely, “and lie down again so that the children didn’t have to use the ladder. Now

he just sits.”

“I’m too fat,” Rex muttered. “It’s all that good tofu I get.”

One by one, the children climbed the ladder. The teaching cyborg’s female

attendant was standing beside it to catch each if he or she fell, cautioning each to

grasp the railings, and urging each to belt himself or herself in once he or she had

chosen a seat. The teaching cyborg and her female attendant boarded last of all. The

teaching cyborg resumed her lecture, and Rex stood up with a groan and began yet

again the slow walk around the zoo that he took a dozen times a day.

It had been a fall day, Roderick reminded himself, a fall day bright and clear, a

more beautiful day than days ever were now. A stiff, bright wind had been blowing

right through all the sunshine. He had worn jeans, a Peoria White Sox cap, and a

polka-dot shirt. He had kept his airbike low where the wind wasn’t quite so strong,

had climbed on Rex’s shoulders, and watched as Rex had taken down the bar that

held the big doors shut…

“Now,” the teaching cyborg said, “are there any additional questions?” Roderick

looked up just in time to see the corner of the white Wickedwicker howdah vanish

behind Rex’s sleeping shed.

“Yes.” He raised his hand. “What became of the boy?”

“The government assumed responsibility for his nurturing and upbringing,” the

teaching cyborg explained. “He received sensitivity training and reeducation in

societal values and has become a responsible citizen.”

When the teaching cyborg, her female attendant, and all the children had gone,

Rex said, “You know, I always wondered what happened to you.”

Roderick mopped his perspiring forehead. “You knew who I was all the time,

huh?”

“Sure.”

There was a silence. Far away, as if from another time or another world, children

spoke in excited voices and a lion roared. “Nothing happened to me,” Roderick

said; it was clearly necessary to say something. “I grew up, that’s all.”

“Those reeducation machines, they really burn it into you. That’s what I heard.”

“No, I grew up. That’s all.”

“I see. Can I ask why you keep lookin‘ at me like that?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Thinkin’what?”

“Nothing.” With iron fists, stone shoulders, and steel-shod feet, words broke

down the doors of his heart and forced their way into his mouth. “Your kind used to

rule the Earth.”

“Yeah.” Rex nodded. He turned away, leaving for Roderick his serpentine tail and

wide, ridged back—both the color of a grape skin that has been chewed up and spit

out into the dust. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “You, too.”

Chapter 2 - The Wisdom of Old Earth by Michael

Swanwick

Contents - Prev / Next

Michael Swanwick had a big year in 1997, what with the publication of his new

novel, Jack Faust, that had weekly advertisements in The New Yorker for a while,

and the appearance of his second short story collection, A Geography of Unknown

Lands, in trade paperback from Tigereyes Press, a small press in Pennsylvania.

Tachyon Press also published a small volume of his essays on SF and fantasy. A

significant portion of his fiction in recent years has been fantasy but here he returns

to science fiction and at the top of his form. He calls this his Jack London story. It

continues the trend noted last year of SF writers today looking back to early writers,

particularly one such as London who also wrote good SF, and stealing their thunder.

It certainly is tough and violent, but like the Wolfe story, has some implications that

stimulate thought a good while after the first reading. It appeared in Asimov’s and is

only the first of several in this book from that magazine, which seemed to me to

publish a slightly higher percentage of SF, as opposed to fantasy of various sorts,

this past year.

***

Judith Seize-the-Day was, quite simply, the best of her kind.

Many another had aspired to the clarity of posthuman thought, and several might

claim some rude mastery of its essentials, but she alone came to understand it as

completely as any offworlder.

Such understanding did not come easily. The human mind is slow to generalize

and even slower to integrate. It lacks the quicksilver apprehension of the posthuman.

The simplest truth must be repeated often to imprint even the most primitive

understanding of what comes naturally and without effort to the space-faring children

of humanity. Judith had grown up in Pole Star City, where the shuttles slant down

through the zone of permanent depletion in order to avoid further damage to the

fragile ozone layer, and thus from childhood had associated extensively with the

highly evolved. It was only natural that as a woman she would elect to turn her back

on her own brutish kind and strive to bootstrap herself into a higher order.

Yet even then she was like an ape trying to pass as a philosopher. For all her

laborious ponderings, she did not yet comprehend the core wisdom of

posthumanity, which was that thought and action must be as one. Being a human,

however, when she did comprehend, she understood it more deeply and thoroughly

than the posthumans themselves. As a Canadian, she could tap into the ancient and

chthonic wisdoms of her race. Where her thought went, the civilized mind could not

follow.

It would be expecting too much of such a woman that she would entirely hide her

contempt for her own kind. She cursed the two trollish Ninglanders who were

sweating and chopping a way through the lush tangles of kudzu, and drove them

onward with the lash of her tongue.

“Unevolved bastard pigs!” she spat. “Inbred degenerates! If you ever want to get

home to molest your dogs and baby sisters again, you’ll put your backs into it!”

The larger of the creatures looked back at her with an angry gleam in his eye, and

his knuckles whitened on the hilt of his machete. She only grinned humorlessly, and

patted the holster of her ankh. Such weapons were rarely allowed humans. Her

possession of it was a mark of the great respect in which she was held.

The brute returned to his labor.

It was deepest winter, and the jungle tracts of what had once been the

mid-Atlantic coastlands were traversable. Traversable, that is, if one had a good

guide. Judith was among the best. She had brought her party alive to the Flying Hills

of southern Pennsylvania, and not many could have done that. Her client had come

in search of the fabled bell of liberty, which many another party had sought in vain.

She did not believe he would find it either. But that did not concern her.

All that concerned her was their survival.

So she cursed and drove the savage Ninglanders before her, until all at once they

broke through the vines and brush out of shadow and into a clearing.

All three stood unmoving for an instant, staring out over the clumps and hillocks

of grass that covered the foundations of what had once been factories, perhaps, or

workers’ housing, gasoline distribution stations, grist mills, shopping malls… Even

the skyline was uneven. Mystery beckoned from every ambiguous lump.

It was almost noon. They had been walking since sundown.

Judith slipped on her goggles and scanned the gray skies for navigation satellites.

She found three radar beacons within range. A utility accepted their input and

calculated her position: less than a hundred miles from Philadelphia. They’d made

more distance than she’d expected. The empathic function mapped for her the

locations of her party: three, including herself, then one, then two, then one, strung

over a mile and a half of trail. That was wrong.

Very wrong indeed.

“Pop the tents,” she ordered, letting the goggles fall around her neck. “Stay out of

the food.”

The Ninglanders dropped their packs. One lifted a refrigeration stick over his

head like a spear and slammed it into the ground. A wash of cool air swept over

them all. His lips curled with pleasure, revealing broken yellow teeth.

She knew that if she lingered, she would not be able to face the oppressive jungle

heat again. So, turning, Judith strode back the way she’d come. Rats scattered at her

approach, disappearing into hot green shadow.

The first of her party she encountered was Harry Work-to-Death. His face was

pale and he shivered uncontrollably. But he kept walking, because to stop was to

die. They passed each other without a word. Judith doubted he would live out the

trip. He had picked up something after their disastrous spill in the Hudson. There

were opiates enough in what survived of the medical kit to put him out of his misery,

but she did not make him the offer.

She could not bring herself to.

Half a mile later came Leeza Child-of-Scorn and Maria Triumph-of-the-Will,

chattering and laughing together. They stopped when they saw her. Judith raised her

ankh in the air, and shook it so that they could feel its aura scrape ever so lightly

against their nervous systems.

“Where is the offworlder?” The women shrank from her anger. “You abandoned

David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 3

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