The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

In November, when she finished with the sheep and went into town, she asked around and found a guy who knew about star-gazing and telescopes. He loaned her some books and sent her to a certain pawnshop, and she gave most of a year’s wages for a 14 x 75 telescope with a reflective lens. On clear, moonless nights, she met the astronomy guy out at the Little League baseball field, and she sat on a fold-up canvas stool with her eye against the telescope’s finder while he told her what she was seeing: Jupiter’s moons, the Pelican Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy. The telescope had a tripod mount, and he showed her how to make a little jerry-built device so she could mount her old 7 x 32 binoculars on the tripod too. She used the binoculars for their wider view of star clusters and small constellations. She was indifferent to most discomforts, could sit quietly in one position for hours at a time, teeth rattling with the cold, staring into the immense vault of the sky until she became numb and stiff, barely able to stand and walk back home. Astronomy, she discovered, was a work of patience, but the sheep had taught her patience, or it was already in her nature before she ever took up with them.

Coelacanths - ROBERT REED

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986, and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as selling many stories to Science Fiction Age, Universe, New Destinies, Tomorrow, Synergy, Starlight, and elsewhere. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And-also like Baxter and Stableford-he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Decency,” “Savior,” “The Remoras,” “Chrysalis,” “Whiptail,” “The Utility Man,” “Marrow,” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “The Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count as among some of the best short work produced by anyone in the ’80s and ’90s. Nor is he non-prolific as a novelist, having turned out eight novels since the end of the ’80s, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, and Beneath the Gated Sky. His reputation can only grow as the years go by, and I suspect that he will become one of the Big Names of the first decade of the new century that lies ahead. His stories have appeared in our Ninth through Seventeenth, and our Nineteenth Annual Collections. Some of the best of his short work was collected in The Dragons of Springplace. His most recent book is Marrow, a novel-length version of his 1 997 novella of the same name. Reed lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Here’s as strange and distant a far-future as you’re ever likely to see, even in today’s science fiction, a world that has become so alien to the few remaining humans who scuttle like cockroaches through its interstices that they have given up all hope of understanding it, and concentrate all their energies and ingenuity just on the daily battle to survive…

THE SPEAKER

He stalks the wide stage, a brilliant beam of hot blue light fixed squarely upon him. “We are great! We are glorious!” the man calls out. His voice is pleasantly, effortlessly loud. With a face handsome to the brink of lovely and a collage of smooth, passionate mannerisms, he performs for an audience that sits in the surrounding darkness. Flinging long arms overhead, hands reaching for the distant light, his booming voice proclaims, “We have never been as numerous as we are today. We have never been this happy. And we have never known the prosperity that is ours at this golden moment. This golden now!” Athletic legs carry him across the stage, bare feet slapping against planks of waxed maple. “Our species is thriving,” he can declare with a seamless ease. “By every conceivable measure, we are a magnificent, irresistible tide sweeping across the universe!”

Transfixed by the blue beam, his naked body is shamelessly young, rippling with hard muscles over hard bone. A long fat penis dangles and dances, accenting every sweeping gesture, every bold word. The living image of a small but potent god, he surely is a creature worthy of admiration, a soul deserving every esteem and emulation. With a laugh, he promises the darkness, “We have never been so powerful, we humans.” Yet in the next breath, with a faintly apologetic smile, he must add, “Yet still, as surely as tomorrow comes, our glories today will seem small and quaint in the future, and what looks golden now will turn to the yellow dust upon which our magnificent children will tread!”

PROCYON