Science Fiction: The Best of 2001 Read online

  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

  Introduction copyright © 2001, 2002 by Agberg, Ltd.

  “Undone” copyright © 2001 James Patrick Kelly; “Know How, Can Do” copyright © 2001 Michael Blumlein; “From Here You Can See the Sunquists” copyright © 2001 Richard Wadholm; “Keepers of Faith” copyright © 2001 Robin Wayne Bailey; “Anomalies” copyright © 2001 Abbenford Associates; “One of Her Paths” copyright © 2001 Ian Watson; “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” copyright © 2001 Michael Swanwick; “And No Such Things Grow Here” copyright © 2001 Stephen Baxter; “Into Greenwood” copyright © 2001 by Jim Grimsley; “On K2 with Kanakaredes” copyright © 2001 Dan Simmons.

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  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  and KAREN HABER

  Science Fiction The Best of 2001

  ROBERT SILVERBERG’s many novels include The Alien Years; the most recent volume in the Majipoor Cycle, Lord Prestimion; the bestselling Lord Valentine trilogy; and the classics Dying Inside and A Time of Changes. Sailing to Byzantium, a collection of some of his award-winning novellas, was published by ibooks in 2000. Science Fiction 101—Robert Silverberg’s Worlds of Wonder, an examination of the novellas that inspired him as a young writer, was published in March 2001, followed by Cronos, 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) of The Science of the X-Men, a scientific examination of the popular superhuman characters published by Marvel Comics. She also created the bestselling The 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 fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Full Spectrum 2, Science Fiction Age, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

  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 like Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories, 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 in The Saturday Evening Post 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 The Best Science Fiction: 1949 had plenty of splendid material to offer. There were two stories by Ray Bradbury, both later incorporated in The Martian Chronicles, 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 like Star Trek 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

  panic attack

  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 grea
t-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 spell luck, 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 dimensions. 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-tenths of a spin

  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? Orders 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.

  bean thoughts

  “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 comfort, 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 caresses. 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 dormancy. She tried to merge her mind with its blissful unconsciousness. Cotyledons stirred and began to absorb nutrients from the endosperm. A bean cared nothing 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 metabolism to the steady and deliberate rhythm of the bean—what Utopian could do that? They held that individuality 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, the light. It was only the light—violet-blue and orange-red—that mattered, the incredible shower of photons that excited her chlorophyll, passing electrons down carrier molecules to form adenosine diphosphate and nicotinamide adenine dinucleo. . . .

  “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.”

&nb
sp; 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 asteroids 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 command 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 deciduous hardwood. There were indeed new mountains—knife edges slicing through evergreen sheets—that had upthrust some eighty kilometers off the Fire Coast, leaving 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 continents, 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.