Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 10

Theresa felt a gnawy guilt as well as an effervescent thrill.

Marlboro shook his head, his mouth starting to open, another question ready to be ignored- Then came the roaring of alarms and a fusillade of spinning red lights. Over the public address system, a booming voice said, "There is nothing to worry about. Please, please, everyone needs to leave the dome now! Now! In an orderly fas.h.i.+on, please follow the ushers now!"

Within fifteen minutes, the dome was evacuated.

Coaching staffs and most of the players were taken to the helipad and lifted back to the mainland, following the media's hasty retreat.

Twenty minutes after the emergency began, the 1-1-2041s came out of their hiding places. The sidelines were under sea water, but the field itself was high enough to remain mostly dry. Security people and maintenance crews could be heard in the distance. Only emergency lights burned, but they were enough. Looking at the others, Theresa realized they were waiting for her to say something.

"This is for us," she told them. "And however it turns out, we don't tell. n.o.body ever hears the final score. Agreed?"

Alan said, "Good," and glared at the others, his fists bleeding from beating all those bilge pumps to death.

Man O War cried out, "Let's do it then!"

In the gloom, the teams lined up for a two-point play. State had ten bodies, and including the whippet still groggy from being unconscious, Tech had its full twelve.

Fair enough.

Theresa leaned low, and in a whisper, called the only appropriate play.

"Go out for a pa.s.s," she told her receivers and her running back. "I'll think of something."

She settled behind the minotaur playing center, and she nestled her hands into that warm damp groin, and after a long gaze at the empty stands, she said, "Hey."

She said, "When you're ready. Give it here."

Secrets of the Alien Reliquary

MICHAEL BISHOP.

Michael Bishop is from Oklahoma but has been settled in Pine Mountain Georgia for more than three decades. He has been a leading SF writer since the 1970s, his most prolific decade, and flowered in the 1980s with novels and short story collections. He has always been engaged withunderstanding the alien, with a sociological and anthropological perspective. No Enemy But Time and Ancient of Days are perhaps his most famous novels. His most recent novel, one of his best, is Brittle Innings (1994), in which Frankenstein's monster survives into the 1940s and becomes a minor league baseball player in the rural South. He has published only a few short stories since.

But since the start of his career he has also written and published poetry. I have not previously included a poem in the year's best volumes (and may not again), but I was particularly taken with this narrative poem on an SF topic that appeared in Bishop's poetry collection Time Pieces in 1999, and was reprinted in Asimov's.

At first, of course, we grossly failed to recognize it, a.s.suming the displays in their camouflaged temple relics of their espionage, dandruff from our anxious ids, the gleanings of a xenophilic curator with eclectic tastes, or no taste to speak of, an otherworldly magpie of the inconsequentia and splendor of our species, a devourer of it all. Later we came to understand that we had stumbled, not into a conventional museum, but a kind of backdoor bawdyhouse repository of fetis.h.i.+stic, and thus shameful, alien delights not one arising from their own ferrogramineous biology but rather from a low-percentile, albeit planetwide, deviant preoccupation, generally discreetly suppressed, with anything and everything human. Stunned doesn't begin to describe our mind set pa.s.sing among the temple's dioramas and interactive icons, which ranged from the size of fingernails-indeed, one was a fingernail-to that of an immense holographic projection of a membrane-enveloped gall bladder, conspicuously diseased, which revolved aloft like a lopsided glitter ball in a clandestine discotheque.

Who would have imagined that a silhouette of Abe ViG.o.da, a pair of gutta-percha galoshes, the scent of halitosis disseminated via an atomizer, a pictorial chiropractic text,a large petri dish of toenail fungus, a video of a Tourette Syndrome sufferer, or a quaint electronic coupon for a box of hemorrhoid suppositories would have so reliably tweaked the private orgiastic impulses of some of these creatures that they would showcase their favorite libidinous stimuli in a concealed exhibition hall within an energy field only a klick from our first landing site? Among sentients, it appears, a p.o.r.nographic yen is an infallible index: a potential pacifying bond that we should perhaps explore.

Meanwhile, turnabout being fair play, several of us begin to find the jut of a Denebolan femoral spur, the lemonish fragrance of a ruptured ovipositor, or even a coded swarm of their gill-dwelling symbiotic vermin almost as arousing as venereal human contact or state-of-the-art handheld weapons of irresistible concupiscent destruction. What this bodes for future interspecies relations, I am loathe to speculate. Their reliquary, though, rewards a look-see.

Kinds of Strangers

SARAH ZETTEL.

Sarah Zettel has published four SF novels to date, Reclamation, Fool's War (a New York Times Notable Book for 1996), Playing G.o.d, and The Quiet Invasion. Her short fiction has appeared in a.n.a.log, as did this story. She sold her first story in 1986 to a small press magazine called "Beyond...Fantasy and Science Fiction." "About six years and a billion and three rejection slips later," she says, "Stan Schmidt at a.n.a.log bought my story 'Driven by Moonlight,' and truly launched my professional career."

"Kinds of Strangers" is a problem-solving story in the a.n.a.log tradition, with a satisfyingly spectacular action climax, but it also deals with human issues often left out of SF stories. Why shouldn't a s.p.a.ce crew marooned without hope of rescue experience depression?

Margot Rusch pulled open the hatch that led to the Forty-Niner's sick bay. "Paul?" she asked around the tightness building in her throat. She pulled herself into the sterile, white module. She focused slowly on the center of the bay, not wanting to believe what she saw.

Paul's body, wide-eyed, pale-skinned, limp and lifeless floated in mid-air. A syringe hovered near hishand, pointing its needle toward the corpse as if making an accusation.

"Oh, Christ." Margot fumbled for a handhold.

The ventilation fans whirred to life. Their faint draft pushed against the corpse, sending it toward the far wall of the module. Margot caught the acrid scent of death's final indignities. Hard-won control shredded inside her, but there was nowhere to turn, no one to blame. There was only herself, the corpse and the flat, blank screen of the artificial intelligence interface.

"d.a.m.n it, Reggie, why didn't you do something!" she demanded, fully aware it was irrational to holler at the AI, but unable to help it.

"I did not know what to do," said Reggie softly from its terminal. "There are no case scenarios for this."

"No, there aren't," agreed Margot, wearily. "No, there sure as h.e.l.l aren't."

The crew of the Forty-Niner had known for three months they were going to die. The seven of them were NASA's pride, returning from the first crewed expedition to the asteroid belt. They had opened a new frontier for humanity, on schedule and under budget. Two and a half years of their four-year mission were a raving success, and now they were headed home.

There had been a few problems, a few red lights. Grit from the asteroid belt had wormed its way into the works on the comm antenna and the radio telescope. No problem. Ed MacEvoy and Jean Kramer replaced the damaged parts in no time. This was a NASA project. They had backups and to spare. Even if the reaction control module, which was traditional methane/oxygen rockets used for course corrections, somehow failed completely, all that would mean was cutting the project a little short. The long-distance flight was handled by the magnetic sail; a gigantic loop of high-temperature superconducting ceramic cable with a continuous stream of charged particles running through it. No matter what else happened, that would get them home.

"Margot?" Jean's voice came down the connector tube. "You OK?"

Margot tightened her grip on the handle and looked at the corpse as it turned lazily in the center of the bay. No, I am not OK.

The mag sail, however, had found a new way to fail. A combination of radiation and thermal insulation degradation raised the temperature too high and robbed hundreds of kilometers of ceramic cable of its superconductivity.

Once the mag sail had gone, the s.h.i.+p kept moving. Of course it kept moving. But it moved in a slow elliptical orbit going nowhere near its scheduled rendezvous with Earth. They could burn every atom of propellant they carried for the RCM and for the explorer boats, and they'd still be too far away for any of the Mars shuttles to reach by a factor of five. Frantic comm bursts to Houston brought no solutions. The Forty-Niner was stranded.

"Margot?" Jean again, calling down the connector.

"I'll be right up." Margot hoped Jean wouldn't hear how strangled her voice was.

Margot looked at the empty syringe suspended in midair. Drunk all and left no friendly drop to help me after. She swallowed hard. Stop it, Margot. Do not even start going there.

"Is there another request?" asked Reggie.

Margot bit her lip. "No. No more requests."

Margot pushed herself into the connector and dragged the hatch shut. She had the vague notion she should have done something for the body-closed its eyes or wrapped a sheet around it, or something, but she couldn't make herself turn around.

Margot's eyes burned. She'd flown four other missions with Paul. She'd sat up all night with him drinking espresso and swapping stories while the bigwigs debated the final crew roster for the Forty-Niner. They'd spent long hours on the flight out arguing politics and playing old jazz recordings.

She'd thought she knew him, thought he would hang on with the rest of them.

Then again, she'd thought the same of Ed and Tracy.

Tracy Costa, their chief mineralogist, had been the first to go. They hadn't known a thing about it, until Nick had caught a glimpse of the frozen corpse outside one of the port windows. Then, Ed had suffocated himself, even after he'd sworn to Jean he'd never leave her alone in this mess. Now, Paul.Margot pulled herself from handhold to handhold up the tubular connector, past its cabinets and access panels. One small, triangular window looked out onto the vacuum, the infinitely patient darkness that waited for the rest of them to give up.

Stop it, Margot. She tore her gaze away from the window and concentrated on pulling herself forward.

The Forty-Niner's command module was a combination of s.h.i.+p's bridge, comm center and central observatory. Right now, it held all of the remaining crew members. Their mission commander, Nicholas Deale, sandy-haired, dusky-skinned and dark-eyed, sat at one of Reggie's compact terminals, brooding over what he saw on the flat screen. Tom Merritt, who had gone from a florid, pink man to a paper-white ghost during the last couple of weeks, tapped at the controls for the radio telescope. He was an astronomer and the mission communications specialist. He was the one who made sure they all got their messages from home. The last living crew member was Jean. A few wisps of hair had come loose from her tight brown braid and they floated around her head, making her look even more worried and vulnerable. She stood at another terminal, typing in a perfunctory and distracted cadence.

Margot paused in the threshold, trying to marshal her thoughts and nerves. Nick glanced up at her.

Margot opened her mouth, but her throat clamped tight around her words. Tom and Jean both turned to look at her. The remaining blood drained out of Tom's face.

"Paul?" he whispered.

Margot coughed. "Looks like he overdosed himself."

Jean turned her head away, but not before Margot saw the struggle against tears fill her face. Both Nick's hands clenched into fists. Tom just looked at Nick with tired eyes and said, "Well, now what?"

Nick sighed. "OK, OK." He ran both hands through his hair. "I'll go take care of...the body. Tom, can you put a burst through to mission control? They'll want to notify his family quietly. I'll come up with the letter..."

This was pure Nick. Give everybody something to do, but oversee it all. When they'd reeled in the sail, he hadn't slept for two days helping Ed and Jean go over the cable an inch at a time, trying to find out if any sections were salvageable from which they could jury-rig a kind of stormsail. When that had proven hopeless, he'd still kept everybody as busy as possible. He milked every drop of encouraging news he could out of mission control. Plans were in the works. The whole world was praying for them.

Comm bursts came in regularly from friends and family. A rescue attempt would be made. A way home would be found. All they had to do was hang on.

"In the meantime..." Nick went on.

"In the meantime we wait for the radiation to eat our insides out," said Tom bitterly. "It's hopeless, Nick. We are all dead."

Nick s.h.i.+fted uneasily, crunching Velcro underfoot. "I'm still breathing and I don't plan to stop anytime soon."

A spasm of pure anger crossed Tom's features. "And what are you going to breathe when the scrubbers give out? Huh? What are you going to do when the water's gone? How about when the tumors start up?"

Tom, don't do this, thought Margot, but the words died in her throat, inadequate against the sudden red rage she saw in him. He was afraid of illness, of weakness. Well, weren't they all?

Paul's chief duty was keeping them all from getting cancer. One of the main hazards of lengthy s.p.a.ce flight had always been long-term exposure to hard radiation. The mag sail, when it was functional, had created a s.h.i.+eld from charged particles, which slowed the process down. Medical advancements had arisen to cover the damage that could be done by fast neutrons and gamma rays. Paul Luck maintained cultures of regenerative stem cells taken from each member of the crew. Every week, he measured pre-cancer indicators in key areas of the body. If the indicators were too high, he tracked down the "hot spots" and administered doses of the healthy cultured cells to remind bone, organ and skin how they were supposed to act and voila! Healthy, cancer-free individual.

The Luck system was now, however, permanently down and the only backup for that was the AI's medical expert system and the remaining crew's emergency training. Right now, that didn't seem likeanything close to enough.

"We have time," Nick said evenly. "We do not have to give up. Come on, Tom. What would Carol say if she heard this?" Nick, Margot remembered, had been at Tom's wedding. They were friends, or at least, they had been friends.

"She'd say whatever the NASA shrinks told her to," snapped Tom. "And in the meantime," he drawled the word, "I get to watch her aging ten years for every day we're hanging up here. How much longer do I have to do this to her? How much longer are you going to make your family suffer?"

For the first time, Nick's composure cracked. His face tightened into a mask of pent-up rage and frustration, but his voice stayed level. "My family is going to know I died trying."

Tom looked smug. "At least you admit we're going to die."

"No..." began Jean.

"Help," said a strange, soft voice.

The crew all turned. The voice came from the AI terminal. It was Reggie.

"Incoming signal. No origination. Can't filter. Incoherent system flaw. Error three-six-five..."

A grind and clank reverberated through the hull. Reggie's voice cut off.

"Systems check!" barked Nick.

Margot kicked off the wall and flew to navigation control, her station. "I got garbage," said Tom from beside her. "Machine language, error babble. Reggie's gone nuts."

Margot shoved her velcro-bottomed boots into place and typed madly at her keyboard, bringing up the diagnostics. "All good here," she reported. She turned her head and looked out the main window, searching for the stars and the slightly steadier dots that were the planets. "Confirmed. Positioning systems up and running."

"Engineering looks OK," said Jean. "I'll go check the generators and report back." Nick gave her a sharp nod. She pulled herself free of her station and launched herself down the connector.

"You getting anything coherent?" Nick pushed himself over to hover behind Tom's shoulder.

"Nothing." From her station, Margot could just make out the streams of random symbols flas.h.i.+ng past on Tom's terminal.

"Reggie, what's happening?" she whispered.

"I don't know," said the voice from her terminal. Margot jerked. "Unable to access exterior communications system. Multiple errors on internal nodes. Code corruption. Error, three-four..." the computer voice cut out again in a pulse of static, then another, then silence, followed by another quick static burst.

"Margot, can you see the comm antenna?" asked Tom, his hands still flas.h.i.+ng across the keyboard.

Margot pressed her cheek against the cool window, craned her neck and squinted, trying to see along the Forty-Niner's hull. "Barely, yeah."

"Can you make out its orientation?"

Margot squinted again. "Looks about ten degrees off-axis."

"It's moved," said Tom between static bursts. "That was the noise."

"All OK down in the power plant," Jean pulled herself back through the hatch and attached herself to her station. "Well, at least there's nothing new wrong..." She let the sentence trail off. "What is that?"

Margot and the others automatically paused to listen. Margot heard nothing but the steady hum of the s.h.i.+p and the bursts of static from Reggie. Quick pulses, one, one, two, one, two, one, one, one, two.

"A pattern?" said Nick.

"Mechanical failure," said Tom. "Has to be. Reggie just crashed."

One, one, two, one.

"You ever hear about anything cras.h.i.+ng like this?" asked Margot.