Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 2

"You cannot make me angry," Judith said, "for you are only animals."

"I am not an animal!" Child-of-Scorn shook her fist at Judith. "I refuse to be treated like one."

"One does not blame an animal for being what it is. But neither does one trust an animal that has proved unreliable. You were given two chances."

"If I'm an animal, then what does that make you? Huh? What the f.u.c.k does that make you, G.o.dd.a.m.nit?" The woman's face was red with rage. Her friend staredblankly up at her from the ground.

"Animals," Judith said through gritted teeth, "should be killed without emotion."

She fired twice.

With her party thus diminished, Judith could not hope to return to Canada afoot.

But there were abundant ruins nearby, and they were a virtual reservoir of chemical poisons from the days when humans ruled the Earth. If she set the ankh to its hottest setting, she could start a blaze that would set off a hundred alarms in Pole Star City.

The wardens would have to come to contain it. She would be imprisoned, of course, but her client would live.

Then Judith heard the thunder of engines.

High in the sky, a great light appeared, so bright it was haloed with black. She held up a hand to lessen the intensity and saw within the dazzle a small dark speck. A shuttle, falling from orbit.

She ran cras.h.i.+ng through the brush as hard and fast as she could. Nightmarish minutes later, she topped a small rise and found the Ninglanders standing there, the offworlder between them. They were watching the shuttle come to a soft landing in the clearing its thrusters had burned in the vegetation.

"You summoned it," she accused the offworlder.

He looked up with tears in his eyes. The detoxifier had left him in a state of pitiless lucidity, with nothing to concentrate on but his own suffering. "I had to, yes." His voice was distant, his attention turned inward, on the neural device that allowed him to communicate with the s.h.i.+p's crew. "The pain-you can't imagine what it's like. How it feels."

A lifetime of lies roared in Judith's ears. Her mother had died for lack of the aid that came at this man's thought.

"I killed two women just now."

"Did you?" He looked away. "I'm sure you had good reasons. I'll have it listed as death by accident." Without his conscious volition, his hands moved, saying, It's a trivial matter, let it be.

A hatch opened in the shuttle's side. Slim figures clambered down, white med-kits on their belts. The offworlder smiled through his tears and stretched out welcoming arms to them.

Judith stepped back and into the shadow of his disregard. She was just another native now.

Two women were dead.

And her reasons for killing them mattered to no one.

She threw her head back and laughed, freely and without reserve. In that instant Judith Seize-the-Day was as fully and completely alive as any of the unworldly folk who walk the airless planets and work in the prosperous and incomprehensiblehabitats of deep s.p.a.ce.

In that instant, had any been looking, she would have seemed not human at all.

Chapter 3 - The Firefly Tree by Jack Williamson.

Jack Williamson is a living legend in science fiction, who has been writing and publis.h.i.+ng SF since the 1920s, seven decades now, and it looks very much like he might make it to the eighth. Of all the writers of his era, he is the last to keep writing SF that is part of the living evolution of the literature today. His cla.s.sic fantasy novel, Darker Than You Think, originally published in Unknown Worlds in the early 1940s is still influential, and his SF cla.s.sics, including The Legion of s.p.a.ce and The Humanoids, still drop in and out of print in paperback in a decade when many newer books by others are gone. This piece appeared in SF Age, which has been required reading for several years now but in 1997 had its best year yet for science fiction, and is the first of several from that magazine in this volume. It is about a boy and an alien and is a moving evocation of wonder in what we might perhaps call the Ray Bradbury tradition.

They had come back to live on the old farm where his grandfather was born. His father loved it, but he felt lonely for his friends in the city. Cattle sometimes grazed through the barren sandhills beyond the barbed wire fences, but there were no neighbors. He found no friends except the firefly tree.

It grew in the old fruit orchard his grandfather had planted below the house. His mouth watered for the ripe apples and peaches and pears he expected, but when he saw the trees they were all dead or dying. They bore no fruit.

With no friends at all, he stayed with his father on the farm when his mother drove away every morning to work at the peanut mill. His father was always busy in the garden he made among the bare trees in the orchard. The old windmill had lost its wheel, but there was an electric pump for water. Cantaloupe and squash vines grew along the edge of the garden, with rows of tomatoes and beans, and then the corn that grew tall enough to hide the money trees.

His mother fretted that they might cause trouble. Once he heard her call them marijuana. His father quickly hushed her. The word was strange to him but he never asked what it meant because he saw his father didn't like it.

He found the firefly tree one day while his father was chopping weeds and moving the pipes that sprayed water on his money trees. It was still tiny then, not as tall as his knee. The leaves were odd: thin arrowheads of glossy black velvet, striped with silver. A single lovely flower had three wide sky-colored petals and a bright yellow star at the center. He sat on the ground by it, breathing its strange sweetness, till his father came by with the hoe."Don't hurt it!" he begged. "Please!"

"That stinking weed?" his father grunted. "Get out of the way."

Something made him reach to catch the hoe.

"Okay." His father grinned and let it stay. "If you care that much."

He called it his tree, and watched it grow. When it wilted in a week with no rain, he found a bucket and carried water from the well. It grew taller than he was, with a dozen of the great blue flowers and then a hundred. The odor of them filled the garden.

Since there was no school, his mother tried to teach him at home. She found a red-backed reader for him, and a workbook with pages for him to fill out while she was away at work. He seldom got the lessons done.

"He's always mooning over that d.a.m.n weed," hie father muttered when she scolded him. "High as a kite on the stink of it."

The odor was strange and strong, but no stink at all. Not to him. He loved it and loved the tree. He carried more water and used the hoe to till the soil around it. Often he stood just looking at the huge blue blooms, wondering what the fruit would be.

One night he dreamed that the tree was swarming with fireflies. They were so real that he got out of bed and slipped out into the dark. The stars blazed brighter here than they had ever been in the city. They lit his way to the orchard, and he heard the fireflies before he came to the tree.

Their buzz rose and fell like the sound of the surf the time they went to visit his aunt who lived by the sea. Twinkling brighter than the stars, they filled the branches.

One of them came to meet him. It hovered in front of his face and lit on the tip of his trembling finger, smiling at him with eyes as blue and bright as the flowers.

He had never seen a firefly close up. It was as big as a b.u.mblebee. It had tiny hands that gripped his fingernail, and one blue eye squinted a little to study his face.

The light came from a round topknot on its head. It flickered like something electric, from red to green, yellow to blue, maybe red again. The flashes were sometimes slower than his breath, sometimes so fast they blurred. He thought the flicker was meant to tell him something, but he had no way to understand.

Barefoot and finally s.h.i.+vering with cold, he stood there till the flickering stopped.

The firefly shook its crystal wings and flew away. The stars were fading into the dawn, and the tree was dark and silent when he looked. He was back in bed before he heard his mother rattling dishes in the kitchen, making breakfast.

The next night he dreamed that he was back under the tree, with the firefly perched again on his ringer. Its tiny face seemed almost human in the dream, and he understood its winking voice. It told him how the tree had grown from a sharp-pointed acorn that came from the stars and planted itself when it struck the ground.

It told him about the firefly planet, far off in the sky. The fireflies belonged to agreat republic spread across the stars. Thousands of different peoples lived in peace on thousands of different worlds. The acorn s.h.i.+p had come to invite the people of Earth to join their republic. They were ready to teach the Earth-people how to talk across s.p.a.ce and travel to visit the stars. The dream seemed so wonderful that he tried to tell about it at breakfast.

"What did I tell you?" His father turned red and shouted at his mother. "His brain's been addled by the stink of that poison weed. I ought to cut it down and burn it."

"Don't!" He was frightened and screaming. "I love it. I'll die if you kill it."

"I'm afraid he would." His mother made a sad little frown. "Leave the plant where it is, and I'll take him to Dr. Wong."

"Okay." His father finally nodded, and frowned at him sternly. "If you'll promise to do your ch.o.r.es and stay out of the garden."

Trying to keep the promise, he washed the dishes after his mother was gone to work. He made the beds and swept the floors. He tried to do his lessons, though the stories in the reader seemed stupid to him now.

He did stay out of the garden, but the fireflies came again in his dreams. They carried him to see the s.h.i.+ning forests on their own wonderful world. They took him to visit the planets of other peoples, people who lived under their seas, people who lived high in their skies, people as small as ants, people larger than the elephants he had seen in a circus parade and queerer than the octopus in the side show. He saw s.h.i.+ps that could fly faster than light from star to star, and huge machines he never understood, and cities more magical than fairyland.

He said no more about the dreams till the day his mother came home from work to take him to Dr. Wong. The nurse put a thermometer under his tongue and squeezed his arm with a rubber gadget and left him to wait with his mother for Dr.

Wong. Dr. Wong was a friendly man who listened to his chest and looked at the nurse's chart and asked him about the fireflies.

"They're wonderful!" He thought the doctor would believe him. "You must come at night to see them, sir. They love us. They came to show us the way to the stars."

"Listen to him!" His mother had never been out at night to see the fireflies s.h.i.+ning.

"That ugly weed has driven him out of his head!"

"An interesting case." The doctor smiled and patted his shoulder in a friendly way and turned to speak to his mother. "One for the books. The boy should see a psychiatrist."

His mother had no money for that.

"I'll just take him home," she said, "and hope he gets better."

A police car was parked in front of the house when they got there. His father sat in the back, behind a metal grill. His head was bent. He wouldn't look up, not even when his mother called through a half-open window.The police had more cars parked around the garden. They had chopped down all the money trees and thrown them into a pile. The firefly tree lay on top. Its fragrance was lost in a reek of kerosene. The policemen made everybody move upwind and set the fire with a hissing blowtorch.

It spread slowly at first, then blazed so high they had to move farther away.

Feeling sick at his stomach, he saw the branches of the tree twist and beat against the flames. He heard a long sharp scream. A cat caught in the fire, the policemen said, but he knew it wasn't a cat. Fireflies swarmed out of the thras.h.i.+ng branches and exploded like tiny bombs when the flames caught them.

His father was crying when the police took him away, along with a bundle of the money trees for evidence. His mother moved them back to the city. In school again, he tried to tell his new teachers about the fireflies and how they had come to invite the Earth into their great confederation of stars. The teachers said he had a great imagination and sent him to the school psychologist.

The psychologist called his mother to come for a conference. They wanted him to forget the fireflies and do his lessons and look up his old friends again, but he wanted no friends except the fireflies. He grieved for them and grieved for his father and grieved for all that might have been.

Chapter 4 - Views of a Cardboard City by William.

Gibson William Gibson aspired early in his career to being like J. G. Ballard, and achieving a position of literary respect for his precise and lucid and modernist (or postmodernist) works- perhaps not a huge popular success, but hugely respected and admired by a knowledgeable few. Instead he achieved immense popular success far outside the SF field. This story, from the most ambitious anthology of the year, New Worlds, shows Gibson staking a claim to High Modernist territory, in striking opposition to ordinary science fiction. Here he is the cold, precise, clinically-detached, observing eye, descended from Wallace Steven's great poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," viewing through the lens of Ballard and William S. Burroughs his own place and time, the noir future city. It also somehow reminds me of Richard Brautigan's poetry collection (at least the t.i.tle), All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, and of Anna Kavan's Ice. This is not the direction in which his novels, such as the recent Idoru, now point, but it is a reminder of the range and talent and origins of this impressive writer.

ONE.

DEN-ENLow angle, deep perspective, establis.h.i.+ng Tokyo subway station interior.

Shot with available light, long exposure; a spectral pedestrian moves away from us, into background. Two others visible as blurs of motion.

Overhead fluorescents behind narrow rectangular fixtures. Ceiling tiled with meter-square segments (acoustic baffles?). Round fixtures are ventilators, smoke-detectors, speakers? Ma.s.sive square columns recede. Side of a stairwell or escalator. Mosaic tile floor in simple large-scale pattern: circular white areas in square tiles, black infill of round tiles. The floor is spotless: no litter at all. Not a cigarette b.u.t.t, not a gum-wrapper.

A long train of cardboard cartons, sides painted with murals, recedes into the perspective of columns and scrubbed tile: first impression is of a children's art project, something ch.o.r.eographed by an aggressively creative preschool teacher. But not all of the corrugated cartons have been painted; many, particularly those farthest away, are bare brown paper. The one nearest the camera, unaltered, bright yellow, bears the Microsoft logo.

The murals appear to have been executed in poster paints, and are difficult to interpret here.

There are two crisp-looking paper shopping-bags on the tile floor: one near the murals, the other almost in the path of the ghost pedestrian. These strike a note of anomaly, of possible threat: London Transport warnings, Sarin cultists... Why are they there? What do they contain?

The one nearest the murals bears the logo "DEN-EN." Deeper in the image are other cartons. Relative scale makes it easier to see that these are composites, st.i.tched together from smaller boxes. Closer study makes the method of fastening clear: two sheets are punctured twice with narrow horizontal slits, flat poly-twine a.n.a.log (white or pink) is threaded through both sheets, a knot is tied, the ends trimmed neatly. In fact, all of the structures appear to have been a.s.sembled this way.

Deepest of all, stairs. Pa.s.sengers descending.

TWO.

BLUE OCTOPUS.

Shallow perspective, eye-level, as though we were meant to view an anamorphic painting.

This structure appears to have been braced with a pale blue, enameled, possibly spring-loaded tube with a white, non-slip plastic foot. It might be the rod for a shower-curtain, but here it is employed vertically. Flattened cartons are neatly lashed to this with poly-tie.

The murals. Very faintly, on the end of the structure, nearest the camera, against a black background, the head of the Buddha floats above something amorphous and unreadable. Above the Buddha are fastened what appear to be two packaging-units for Pooh Bear dolls. These may serve a storage function. The mural on the face ofthe structure is dark, intricate, and executed (acrylic paints?) with considerable technique. Body parts, a sense of claustrophobic, potentially erotic proximity. A female nude, head lost where the cardboard ends, clutches a blue octopus whose tentacles drape across the forehead of a male who seems to squat doglike at her feet.

Another nude lies on her back, knees upraised, her s.e.x shadowed in perspective.

The head of a man with staring eyes and pinp.r.i.c.k pupils hovers above her ankles; he appears to be smoking but has no cigarette.

A third nude emerges, closest to the camera: a woman whose features suggest either China or the Mexico of Diego Rivera.

A section of the station's floor, the round black tiles, is partially covered with a sc.r.a.p of grayish-blue synthetic pile carpeting.

Pinned eyes.