The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

There is some concern about those new neurons. Children form more and more connections until they hit puberty, and then the brain seems to sort through the connections and weed out some and reinforce others, to make the brain efficient in other ways. Nobody knows what will happen with Gus. And of course, the cause of the Alzheimer’s still lurks somewhere. Maybe in ten years he’ll start to deteriorate again.

“I am so grateful to you,” he says to Mila when William is gone. “You have been through so much for me.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “You’d do the same for me.” Although she doesn’t know what Gus would do. She doesn’t know if she likes this new Gus. This big child.

“I would do the same for you,” he says.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t stick me in some nursing home?” she says. “Only come visit me once a month?” She tries to make her tone broad, broad enough for anyone to see this comment as a joke.

But Gus doesn’t. Teasing distresses him. “No,” he says now, “I promise, Mila. I would look after you the way you looked after me.”

“I know, honey,” she says. “I was just joking.”

He frowns.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s look at your homework.”

He is studying for his G.E.D. It’s a goal he and the therapist came up with. Mila wanted to say that Gus not only had a degree in engineering, he was certified, but of course that was the old Gus.

He’s studying the Civil War, and Mila checks his homework before he goes to his G.E.D. class.

“I think I want to go to college,” he says.

“What do you want to study?” she asks. She almost says, ‘Engineering?’ but the truth is he doesn’t like math. Gus was never very good at arithmetic, but he was great at conceptual math-algebra, calculus, differential equations. But now he doesn’t have enough patience for the drill in fractions and square roots.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I want to be a therapist. I think I want to help people.”

Help me, she thinks. But then she squashes the thought. He is here, he is getting better. He is not squatting in the hollyhocks. She’s not afraid of him anymore. And if she doesn’t love him like a husband anymore, well, she still loves him.

“What was that boy’s name?” Gus says, squinting down the street.

He means the home health.

For a moment she can’t think and her insides twist in fear. It has started happening recently, when she forgets she feels this sudden overwhelming fear. Is it Alzheimer’s?

“William,” she says. “His name is William.”

“He was a nice boy,” Gus says.

“Yes,” Mila says, her voice and face calm but her heart beating too fast.

Halo - CHARLES STROSS

Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it’s only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead (in fact, as one of the key Writers To Watch in the Oughts), with a sudden burst in the last few years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as “Antibodies,” “A Colder War,” “Bear Trap,” “Dechlorinating the Moderator,” “Toast: A Con Report,” “Lobsters,” “Troubadour,” and “Tourist,” in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Odyssey, Strange Plasma, and New Worlds. Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. He has “published” a novel online, Scratch Monkey, available to be read on his website (www.antipope.org/charlie/), and is currently serializing another novel, The Atrocity Archive, in the magazine Spectrum SF. His most recent books are another new novel, Festival of Fools, and his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures. He had two stories in our Eighteenth Annual Collection, and one in our Nineteenth Annual Collection. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Here he takes us back to the wired-up, dazzlingly fast-paced Information Age future of his acclaimed and popular “Manfred Macx” stories (debuted last year in “Lobsters,” a Hugo Finalist), and cranks things up a notch even from his former frenetic concept-dense pace-introducing us to what might be called “Manfred Macx: The Next Generation,” as the daughter of Manfred Macx leaves a frazzled Earth tottering on the edge of a Vingian Singularity to travel to Jupiter space, in company with a cast of characters that even Manfred Macx himself might have found a bit peculiar…

The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. “I love you,” it croons in Amber’s ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: “Let me give you a big hug…”