Year's Best SF 17

“What do you want me to say?” Bob demanded. “I saw the same as the rest of you. I was just inside the park, I saw it on my phone and when the thing cleared the treetops I saw it with my own eyes. The machine, or what we’d been told was a machine, rose up—”

“Not that,” I said. “Start from when you got to the park.”

Bob frowned. “The Place was crowded. I couldn’t see what was happening around the crate. There were people in the way, trees …” He shrugged. “What’s to say?”

“Describe the trees. Think back to looking up at them.”

Bob sipped the dregs of the green drink in front of him, shaking his head.

“Bare branches, clear blue sky.”

“Were the branches moving?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, were they?”

“Of course not!” he said. “There wasn’t a breath of wind.”

“Bingo!” I said. “There was a clear blue sky. There wasn’t a breath of wind.”

“I don’t get it.”

Nor did anyone else, by the looks I was getting.

“The machine moved straight up,” I said. “And we’re all fairly sure it was some fake, right? An arrangement of balsa and mylar, hydrogen and magnesium.”

I took out my Zippo, and flicked the lid and the wheel. “That’s all it would have taken. Whoof!”

“Yeah,” said Jack, looking interested. “So?”

“The ascent was announced a month and a half ago,” I said. “New Year’s Eve. Announced to the day, to the hour, the minute! Noon, Saturday fifteenth Feb.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Imagine what today’s little demonstration would have been like,” I said, “if there had been … a breath of wind. Or low cloud. The fake would have been blatant.” I held out my hand, fingers spread, and waggled it as I gestured drifting. “Like that.”

Jack guffawed, and Bob joined in. Everyone else just frowned.

“You’re saying the French have weather control?”

“No,” I said. “I’m saying they have weather prediction. That’s what they demonstrated today, not anti-gravity—and that’s what is going to scare the shit out of the Americans and the Brits. Probably has already.”

“It’s impossible to predict the weather forty days in advance,” said Catherine. “Chaos theory, butterfly effect, all that, you know?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “A lot of mathematics research going on at the Sorbonne, you know.” I turned to Bob. “Take that back to your revolution.”

He stared at me for a long moment.

“Fuck you,” he said. “And the horse you rode in on.”

He stood up and stormed out.

None of us heard from him again. Editions Jules Verne, the publishing company, never heard from him either. They honoured the contracts, but nothing came of the anthology.

The ascent at the Jardin de Luxembourg is still the best science fiction of the Year Three.

Dolly

ELIZABETH BEAR

Elizabeth Bear (www.elizabethbear.com) lives in Hartford, Connecticut. Prolific as well as talented, she has published fourteen SF and fantasy novels since 2005, more than forty stories since 2003, and a collection, The Chains That You Refuse. She has won in that short time two Hugo Awards, the John W. Cambell Award for Best New Writer (2005), a Theodore Sturgeon Award, and several others, including an honorable mention for the Philip K. Dick Award.

“Dolly” appeared in Asimov’s, and is situated in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s robot and detective stories. This tale is emblematic of one of this year’s dominant themes: humaniod technology that is not given fully human social status; how people feel entitled to behave toward humaniod technology; and how that technology returns the favor. In this story, a human detective who at least partly comprehends this dynamic attempts a partial solution.

On Sunday when Dolly awakened, she had olive skin and black-brown hair that fell in waves to her hips. On Tuesday when Dolly awakened, she was a redhead, and fair. But on Thursday—on Thursday her eyes were blue, her hair was as black as a crow’s wing, and her hands were red with blood.