David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 2

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Year's Best SF

edited by

David G. Hartwell

All New Fantastic Stories!

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Table of Contents

Dedication

About the Editor

Introduction

(1) James Patrik Kelly

Think Like a Dinosaur

(2) Patricia A McKillip

Wonders of the Invisible World

(3) Robert Silverberg

Hot Times in Magma City

(4) Stephen Baxter

Gossamer

(5) Gregory Benford

A Worm in the Well

(6) William Browning Spencer

Downloading Midnight

(7) Joe Haldeman

For White Hill

(8) William Barton

In Saturn Time

(9) Ursula K. Le Guin

Coming of Age in Karhide

(10) Roger Zelazny

The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker

(11) Nancy Kress

Evolution

(12) Robert Sheckley

The Day the Aliens Came

(13) Joan Slonczewski

Microbe

(14) Gene Wolfe

The Ziggurat

Story Copyrights

Scan Infomation

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Dedication

To Geoffrey and to Kathryn

I would like to acknowledge the contribution of Mark Kelly, whose Locus columns I found helpful. The

magazine reviews in Tangents are also, I feel, a valuable contribution to the ongoing dialog about quality

in short fiction in the SF field. And of course to the editors, who accomplish so much more than they are

ever paid.

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David G. Hartwell

David G. Hartwell is a Ph.D. in Comparative Medieval Literature who has been nominated for the

Hugo Award fifteen times. He has won the World Fantasy Award for best anthology. He has taught at

Harvard University and New York University, among others, and has edited a dozen anthologies or

more. He is the author of Age of Wonders, and is presently a senior editor at Tor Books.

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Introduction

Science Fiction is Alive and Well

This is the first volume of an annual year's best science fiction anthology, to be published each spring in a

widely available mass market edition. In each volume the best science fiction of that year will be

represented. Not fantasy. Not science fantasy. Science fiction: This anthology will contain only stories

that a chronic reader would recognize as SF.

For decades, until recently, there was usually one or more good year's best anthologies available in

paperback in the SF field. The last ones vanished with the deaths of distinguished editors Terry Carr and

Donald A. Wollheim. There has been a notable gap. This book fills that need.

Furthermore, the existence of more than one year's best anthology in the SF genre has been good for the

field. Volumes which differ in taste or in aesthetic criteria clarify and encourage knowledgeable discourse

in the field and about the field. Therefore this book announces itself in opposition to the other extant

anthologies.

Here is the problem. Other books have so blurred the boundaries between science fiction and everything

else that it is possible for an observer to conclude that SF is dead or dying out. This book declares that

science fiction is still alive; is fertile and varied in its excellences. Most important, SF has a separate and

distinct identity within fairly clear boundaries exemplified by the contents of this book.

In the magazine stories and original anthologies this past year there was a fair amount of clunky hardish

SF and a bunch of stuff, sometimes quite talented, that was published as SF, but was only by courtesy

and by association SF. Not, in fact, an unusual year in these regards.

What was unusual was that it was a strong year for science fiction and in particular SF of novella length.

By my casual count there were fifteen or twenty novellas from Analog, Asimov's, Omni Online, and the

original anthologies Far Futures and New Legends, that could justifiably have been included in a year's

best volume alone. Every once in a while the SF field has a "novella renaissance." 1995 was one of those

years and it looks likely to spill over into 1996. Guess what? You have fallen behind in your reading if

you haven't been reading the novellas. I may be off base but I suspect that there were more first-rate SF

novellas than first-rate SF novels published in 1995.

Overall, the best speculative fiction of all descriptions was published in Interzone, which deservedly won

the Hugo award this year. But all the magazines had high spots and high standards. It was not a year to

skip, for instance, Tomorrow or Science Fiction Age.

Sadly, it was not a notable year for original anthologies (two extraordinary exceptions are mentioned

above, to which Full Spectrum 5 is the third). The general thinking was that the original anthologies

made the magazines look good. Book publishers are at fault for letting so much unedited stuff get through

under usually dazzling covers. How fortunate we are to have the magazines and the magazine editors:

Budrys and Dozois, Schmidt, Rusch, Pringle, Cholfin, Datlow, Edelman, Killheffer and the rest. We had

better treasure and support them, and buy and read their magazines, or we won't have them much longer.

For the time being they, and the writers, have given us a bright moment.

David G. Hartwell

Pleasantville, N.Y.

January, 1996

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James Patrick Kelly

James Patrick Kelly is the author of many SF stories and novels, including the recent novel Wildlife.

One thinks of his novella, "Mr. Boy," which makes up the first part of that novel, as a high point in SF

from the early 1990s. He is one of the more sophisticated of the younger SF writers from the last decade

or two (he attended the Clarion SF workshop in the same group as Bruce Sterling), and seems just now

in the 1990s to be achieving full command of his impressive talents. He has a clear graceful style and a

willingness to do the hard work of making the science in his stories count. Never a prolific writer, Kelly is

nevertheless becoming an important one in the SF field. This story, from Asimov's SF, is in the classic

hard SF mode and is in fact in dialogue with the touchstone of hard SF reading, Tom Godwin's

controversial "The Cold Equations." I have chosen to place it first to set the tone for this volume. For

some readers this will be the best story of the year.

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Think Like a Dinosaur

by James Patrick Kelly

Kamala Shastri came back to this world as she had left it—naked. She tottered out of the assembler,

trying to balance in Tuulen Station's delicate gravity. I caught her and bundled her into a robe with one

motion, then eased her onto the float. Three years on another planet had tranformed Kamala. She was

leaner, more muscular. Her fingernails were now a couple of centimeters long and there were four parallel

scars incised on her left cheek, perhaps some Gendian's idea of beautification. But what struck me most

was the darting strangeness in her eyes. This place, so familiar to me, seemed almost to shock her. It was

as if she doubted the walls and was skeptical of air. She had learned to think like an alien.

Welcome back." The float's whisper rose to a whoosh as I walked it down the hallway.

She swallowed hard and I thought she might cry. Three years ago, she would have. Lots of migrators are

devastated when they come out of the assembler; it's because there is no transition. A few seconds ago

Kamala was on Gend, fourth planet of the star we call epsilon Leo, and now she was here in lunar orbit.

She was almost home; her life's great adventure was over.

"Matthew?" she said.

"Michael." I couldn't help but be pleased that she remembered me. After all, she had changed my life.

I've guided maybe three hundred migrations—comings and goings—since I first came to Tuulen to study

the dinos. Kamala Shastri's is the only quantum scan I've ever pirated. I doubt that the dinos care; I

suspect this is a trespass they occasionally allow themselves. I know more about her—at least, as she

was three years ago—than I know about myself. When the dinos sent her to Gend, she massed

50,391.72 grams and her red cell count was 4.81 million per mm3. She could play the nagasvaram, a

kind of bamboo flute. Her father came from Thana, near Bombay, and her favorite flavor of chewyfrute

was watermelon and she'd had five lovers and when she was eleven she had wanted to be a gymnast but

instead she had become a biomaterials engineer who at age twenty-nine had volunteered to go to the

stars to learn how to grow artificial eyes. It took her two years to go through migrator training; she knew

she could have backed out at any time, right up until the moment Silloin translated her into a superluminal

signal. She understood what it meant to balance the equation.

I first met her on June 22, 2069. She shuttled over from Lunex's L1 port and came through our airlock at

promptly 10:15, a small, roundish woman with black hair parted in the middle and drawn tight against her

skull. They had darkened her skin against epsilon Leo's UV; it was the deep blue-black of twilight. She

was wearing a striped clingy and velcro slippers to help her get around for the short time she'd be

navigating our .2 micrograv.

"Welcome to Tuulen Station." I smiled and offered my hand. "My name is Michael." We shook. "I'm

supposed to be a sapientologist but I also moonlight as the local guide."

"Guide?" She nodded distractedly. "Okay." She peered past me, as if expecting someone else.

"Oh, don't worry," I said, "the dinos are in their cages."

Her eyes got wide as she let her hand slip from mine. "You call the Hanen dinos?"

"Why not?" I laughed. "They call us babies. The weeps, among other things."

She shook her head in amazement. People who've never met a dino tended to romanticize them: the wise

and noble reptiles who had mastered superluminal physics and introduced Earth to the wonders of

galactic civilization. I doubt Kamala had ever seen a dino play poker or gobble down a screaming rabbit.

And she had never argued with Linna, who still wasn't convinced that humans were psychologically ready

to go to the stars.

"Have you eaten?" I gestured down the corridor toward the reception rooms.

"Yes... I mean, no." She didn't move. "I am not hungry."

"Let me guess. You're too nervous to eat. You're too nervous to talk, even. You wish I'd just shut up,

pop you into the marble, and beam you out. Let's just get this part the hell over with, eh?"

"I don't mind the conversation, actually."

"There you go. Well, Kamala, it is my solemn duty to advise you that there are no peanut butter and jelly

sandwiches on Gend. And no chicken vindaloo. What's my name again?"

"Michael?"

"See, you're not that nervous. Not one taco, or a single slice of eggplant pizza. This is your last chance to

eat like a human."

"Okay." She did not actually smile—she was too busy being brave—but a corner of her mouth twitched.

"Actually, I would not mind a cup of tea."

"Now, tea they've got." She let me guide her toward reception room D; her slippers snicked at the velcro

carpet. "Of course, they brew it from lawn clippings."

"The Gendians don't keep lawns. They live underground."

"Refresh my memory." I kept my hand on her shoulder; beneath the clingy, her muscles were rigid. "Are

they the ferrets or the things with the orange bumps?"

"They look nothing like ferrets."

We popped through the door bubble into reception D, a compact rectangular space with a scatter of

low, unthreatening furniture. There was a kitchen station at one end, a closet with a vacuum toilet at the

other. The ceiling was blue sky; the long will showed a live view of the Charles River and the Boston

skyline, baking in the late June sun. Kamala had just finished her doctorate at MIT.

I opaqued the door. She perched on the edge of a couch like a wren, ready to flit away.

While I was making her tea, my fingernail screen flashed. I answered it and a tiny Silloin came up in

discreet mode. She didn't look at me; she was too busy watching arrays in the control room. =A

problem,= her voice buzzed in my earstone, =most negligible, really. But we will have to void the last two

from today's schedule. Save them at Lunex until first shift tomorrow. Can this one be kept for an hour?=

"Sure," I said. "Kamala, would you like to meet a Hanen?" I transferred Silloin to a dino-sized window

on the wall. "Silloin, this is Kamala Shastri. Silloin is the one who actually runs things. I'm just the

doorman."

Silloin looked through the window with her near eye, then swung around and peered at Kamaia with her

other. She was short for a dino, just over a meter tall but she had an enormous head that teetered on her

neck like a watermelon balancing on a grapefruit. She must have just oiled herself because her silver

scales shone. =Kamala, you will accept my happiest intentions for you?= She raised her left hand,

spreading the skinny digits to expose dark crescents of vestigial webbing.

"Of course, I...."

=And you will permit us to render you this translation=

She straightened. "Yes."

=Have you questions?=

I'm sure she had several hundred, but at this point was probably too scared to ask. While she hesitated, I

broke in. "Which came first, the lizard or the egg?"

Silloin ignored me. =It will be excellent for you to begin when?=

"She's just having a little tea," I said, handing her the cup. "I'll bring her along when she's done. Say an

hour?"

Kamala squirmed on the couch. "No, really, it will not take me...."

Silloin showed us her teeth, several of which were as long as piano keys. =That would be most

appropriate, Michael.= She closed; a gull flew through the space where her window had been.

"Why did you do that?" Kamala's voice was sharp.

"Because it says here that you have to wait your turn. You're not the only migrator we're sending this

morning." This was a lie, of course; we had had to cut the schedule because Jodi Latchaw, the other

sapientologist assigned to Tuulen, was at the University of Hipparchus presenting our paper on the Hanen

concept of identity. "Don't worry, I'll make the time fly."

For a moment, we looked at each other. I could have laid down an hour's worth of patter, I'd done that

often enough. Or I could have drawn her out on why she was going: no doubt she had a blind grandma

or second cousin just waiting for her to bring home artificial eyes, not to mention potential spin-offs which

could well end tuberculosis, famine, and premature ejaculation, blah, blah, blah. Or I could have just left

her alone in the room to read the wall. The trick was guessing how spooked she really was.

"Tell me a secret," I said.

"What?"

"A secret, you know, something no one else knows."

She stared as if I'd just fallen off Mars.

"Look, in a little while you're going someplace that's what... three hundred and ten light years away?

You're scheduled to stay for three years. By the time you come back, I could easily be rich, famous, and

elsewhere; we'll probably never see each other again. So what have you got to lose? I promise not to

tell."

She leaned back on the couch, and settled the cup in her lap. "This is another test, right? After everything

they have put me through, they still have not dated whether to send me."

"Oh no, in a couple of hours you'll be cracking nuts with ferrets in some dark Gendian burrow. This is

just me, talking."

"You are crazy."

"Actually, I believe the technical term is logomaniac. It's from the Greek: logos meaning sword, mania

meaning two bits short of a byte. I just love to chat is all. Tell you what, I'll go first. If my secret isn't juicy

enough, you don't have tell me anything."

Her eyes were slits as she sipped her tea. I was fairly sure that whatever she was worrying about at the

moment, it wasn't being swallowed by the big blue marble.

"I was brought up Catholic," I said, settling onto a chair in front of her. "I'm not anymore, but that's not

the secret. My parents sent me to Mary, Mother of God High School; we called it Moogoo. It was run

by a couple of old priests, Father Thomas and his wife, Mother Jennifer. Father Tom taught physics,

which I got a 'D' in, mostly because he talked like he had walnuts in his mouth. Mother Jennifer taught

theology and had all the warmth of a marble pew; her nickname was Mama Moogoo.

"One night, just two weeks before my graduation, Father Tom and Mama Moogoo went out in their

Chevy Minimus for ice cream. On the way home, Mama Moogoo pushed a yellow light and got

broadsided by an ambulance. Like I said, she was old, a hundred and twenty something; they should've

lifted her license back in the '50s. She was killed instantly. Father Tom died in the hospital.

"Of course, we were all supposed to feel sorry for them and I guess I did a little, but I never really liked

either of them and I resented the way their deaths had screwed things up for my class. So I was more

annoyed than sorry, but then I also had this edge of guilt for being so uncharitable. Maybe you'd have to

grow up Catholic to understand that. Anyway, the day after it happened they called an assembly in the

gym and we were all there squirming on the bleachers and the cardinal himself telepresented a sermon.

He kept trying to comfort us, like it had been our parents that had died. When I made a joke about it to

the kid next to me, I got caught and spent the last week of my senior year with an in-school suspension."

Kamala had finished her tea. She slid the empty cup into one of the holders built into the table.

"Want some more?" I said.

She stirred restlessly. "Why are you telling me this?"

"It's part of the secret." I leaned forward in my chair. "See, my family lived down the street from Holy

Spirit Cemetery and in order to get to the carryvan line on McKinley Ave., I had to cut through. Now

this happened a couple of days after I got in trouble at the assembly. It was around midnight and I was

coming home from a graduation party where I had taken a couple of pokes of insight, so I was feeling sly

as a philosopher-king. As I walked through the cemetery, I stumbled across two dirt mounds right next

to each other. At first I thought they were flower beds, then I saw the wooden crosses. Fresh graves:

here lies Father Tom and Mama Moogoo. There wasn't much to the crosses: they were basically just

stakes with crosspieces, painted white and hammered into the ground. The names were hand printed on

them. The way I figure it, they were there to mark the graves until the stones got delivered. I didn't need

any insight to recognize a once in a lifetime opportunity. If I switched them, what were the chances

anyone was going to notice? It was no problem sliding them out of their holes. I smoothed the dirt with

my hands and then ran like hell."

Until that moment, she'd seemed bemused by my story and slightly condescending toward me. Now

there was a glint of alarm is her eyes. "That was a terrible thing to do," she said.

"Absolutely," I said, "although the dinos think that the whole idea of planting bodies in graveyards and

marking them with carved rocks is weepy. They say there is no identity in dead meat, so why get, so

sentimental about it? Linna keeps asking how come we don't put markers over our shit. But that's not the

secret. See, it'd been a warmish night in the middle of June, only as I ran, the air turned cold. Freezing, I

could set my breath. And my shoes got heavier and heavier, like they had turned to stone. As I got closer

to the back gate, it felt like I was fighting a strong wind, except my clothes weren't flapping. I slowed to a

walk. I know I could have pushed through, but my heart was thumping and then I heard this whispery

seashell noise and I panicked. So the secret is I'm a coward. I switched the crosses back and I never

went near that cemetery again. As a matter of fact," I nodded at the walls of reception room D on Tuulen

Station, "when I grew up, I got about as far away from it as I could."

She stared as I settled back in my chair. "True story," I said and raised my right hand. She seemed so

astonished that I started laughing. A smile bloomed on her dark face and suddenly she was giggling too.

It was a soft, liquid sound, like a brook bubbling over smooth stones; it made me laugh even harder. Her

lips were full and her teeth were very white.

"Your turn," I said, finally.

"Oh, no, I could not." She waved me off. "I don't have anything so good...." She paused, then frowned.

"You have told that before?"

"Once," I said. "To the Hanen, during the psych screening for this job. Only I didn't tell them the last part.

I know how dinos think, so I ended it when I switched the crosses. The rest is baby stuff." I waggled a

finger at her. "Don't forget, you promised to keep my secret."

"Did I?"

"Tell me about when you were young. Where did you grow up?"

"Toronto." She glanced at me, appraisingly. "There was something, but not funny. Sad."

I nodded encouragement and changed the wall to Toronto's skyline dominated by the CN Tower,

Toronto-Dominion Centre, Commerce Court, and the King's Needle.

She twisted to take in the view and spoke over her shoulder. "When I was ten we moved to an

apartment, right downtown on Bloor Street so my mother could be close to work." She pointed at the

wall and turned back to face me. "She is an accountant, my father wrote wallpaper for Imagineering. It

was a huge building; it seemed as if we were always getting into the elevator with ten neighbors we never

knew we had. I was coming home from school one day when an old woman stopped me in the lobby.

'Little girl,' she said, 'how would you like to earn ten dollars?' My parents had warned me not to talk to

strangers but she obviously was a resident. Besides, she had an ancient pair of exolegs strapped on, so I

knew I could outrun her if I needed to. She asked me to go to the store for her, handed me a grocery list

and a cash card, and said I should bring everything up to her apartment, 10W. I should have been more

suspicious because all the downtown groceries deliver but, as I soon found out, all she really wanted was

someone to talk to her. And she was willing to pay for it, usually five or ten dollars, depending on how

long I stayed. Soon I was stopping by almost every day after school. I think my parents would have

made me stop if they had known; they were very strict. They would not have liked me taking her money.

But neither of them got home until after six, so it was my secret to keep."

"Who was she?" I said. "What did you talk about?"

"Her name was Margaret Ase. She was ninety-seven years old and I think she had been some kind of

counselor. Her husband and her daughter had both died and she was alone. I didn't find out much about

her; she made me do most of the talking. She asked me about my friends and what I was learning in

school and my family. Things like that...."

Her voice trailed off as my fingernail started to flash. I answered it.

=Michael, I am pleased to call you to here.= Silloin buzzed in my ear. She was almost twenty minutes

ahead of schedule.

"See, I told you we'd make the time fly." I stood; Kamala's eyes got very wide. "I'm ready if you are."

I offered her my hand. She took it and let me help her up. She wavered for a moment and I sensed just

how fragile her resolve was. I put my hand around her waist and steered her into the corridor. In the

micrograv of Tuulen Station, she already felt as insubstantial as a memory. "So tell me, what happened

that was so sad?"

At first I thought she hadn't heard. She shuffled along, said nothing.

"Hey, don't keep me in suspense here, Kamala," I said. "You have to finish the story."

"No," she said. "I don't thin I do."

I didn't take this personally. My only real interest in the conversation had been to distract her. If she

refused to be distracted, that was her choice. Some migrators kept talking right up to the moment they

slid into the big blue marble, but lots of them went quiet just before. They turned inward. Maybe in her

mind she was already on Gend, blinking in the hard white light.

We arrived at the scan center, the largest space on Tuulen Station. Immediately in front of us was the

marble, containment for the quantum nondemolition sensor array—QNSA for the acronymically inclined.

It was the milky blue of glacial ice and big as two elephants. The upper hemisphere was raised and the

scanning table protruded like a shiny gray tongue. Kamala approached the marble and touched her

reflection, which writhed across its polished surface. To the right was a padded bench, the fogger, and a

toilet. I looked left, through the control room window. Silloin stood watching us, her impossible head

cocked to one side. =She is docile?= she buzzed in my earstone.

I held up crossed fingers.

=Welcome, Kamala Shastri.= Silloin's voice came over the speakers with a soothing hush. =You are

ready to open your translation?=

Kamala bowed to the window. "This is where I take my clothes off?"

=If you would be so convenient.=

She brushed past me to the bench. Apparently I had ceased to exist; this was between her and the dino

now. She undressed quickly, folding her clingy into a neat bundle, tucking her slippers beneath the bench.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see tiny feet, heavy thighs, and the beautiful, dark smooth skin of her

back. She stepped into the fogger and closed the door.

"Ready," she called.

From the control room, Silloin closed circuits which filled the fogger with a dense cloud of nanolenses.

The nano stuck to Kamala and deployed, coating the surface of her body. As she breathed them, they

passed from her lungs into her bloodstream. She only coughed twice; she had been well trained. When

the eight minutes were up, Silloin cleared the air in the fogger and she emerged. Still ignoring me, she

again faced the control room.

=Now you must arrange yourself on the scanning table,= said Silloin, =and enable Michael to fix you.=

She crossed to the marble without hesitation, climbed the gantry beside it, eased onto the table and laid

back.

I followed her up. "Sure you won't tell me the rest of the secret?"

She stared at the ceiling, unblinking.

"Okay then." I took the canister and a sparker out of my hip pouch. "This is going to happen just like

you've practiced it." I used the canister to respray the bottoms of her feet with nano. I watched her belly

rise and fall, rise and fall. She was deep into her breathing exercise. "Remember, no skipping rope or

whistling while you're in the scanner."

She did not answer. "Deep breath now," I said and touched a sparker to her big toe. There was a brief

crackle as the nano on her skin wove in a net and stiffened, locking her in place. "Bark at the ferrets for

me." I picked up my equipment, climbed down the gantry, and wheeled it back to the wall.

With a low whine, the big blue marble retracted its tongue. I watched the upper hemisphere close,

swallowing Kamala Shastri, then joined Silloin in the control room.

David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 2

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