Best Science Fiction of the Year Read online

  The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Beatrix Potter, the Mr. Men series. Where the Wild Things Are. Frodo’s adventures. Slowly, like some archaeologist discovering the world by deciphering the cartouches of the tombs in Ancient Egypt, I learned how to perceive and interact through this antique medium. It was, well, the thingness of books. The exact way they didn’t leap about or start giving off sounds, smells, and textures. That, and how they didn’t ask you which character you’d like to be, or what level you wanted to go to next, but simply took you by the hand and led you where they wanted you to go.

  Of course, I became a confirmed bibliophile, but I do still wonder how my life would have progressed if my parents had seen odd behavior differently, and taken me to some pediatric specialist. Almost certainly, I wouldn’t be the Lita Ortiz who’s writing these words for whoever might still be able to comprehend them. Nor the one who was lucky enough to meet Rob Holm all those years ago in the teenage fug of those student halls back at Leeds University.

  2.

  So. Rob. First thing to say is the obvious fact that most of us fancied him. It wasn’t just the grey eyes, or the courtly elegance, or that soft Scottish accent, or even the way he somehow appeared mature and accomplished. It was, essentially, a kind of mystery. But he wasn’t remotely standoffish. He went along with the fancy dress pub crawls. He drank. He fucked about. He took the odd tab.

  One of my earliest memories of Rob was finding him at some club, cool as you like amid all the noise, flash, and flesh. And dragging him out onto the pulsing dance floor. One minute we were hovering above the skyscrapers of Beijing and the next a shipwreck storm was billowing about us. Rob, though, was simply there. Taking it all in, laughing, responding, but somehow detached. Then, helping me down and out, past clanging temple bells and through prismatic sandstorms to the entirely non-virtual hell of the toilets. His cool hands holding back my hair as I vomited.

  I never ever actually thanked Rob for this—I was too embarrassed—but the incident somehow made us more aware of each other. That, and maybe we shared a sense of otherness. He, after all, was studying astrophysics, and none of the rest of us even knew what that was, and he had all that strange stuff going on across the walls of his room. Not flashing posters of the latest virtual boy band or porn empress, but slow-turning gas clouds, strange planets, distant stars and galaxies. That, and long runs of mek, whole arching rainbows of the stuff, endlessly twisting and turning. My room, on the other hand, was piled with the precious torn and foxed paperbacks I’d scoured from junksites during my teenage years. Not, of course, that they were actually needed. Even if you were studying something as arcane as narrative fiction, you were still expected to download and virtualize all your resources.

  The Analogue Literature Faculty at Leeds University had once taken up a labyrinthine space in a redbrick terrace at the east edge of the campus. But now it had been invaded by dozens of more modern disciplines. Anything from speculative mek to non-concrete design to holo-pornography had taken bites out of it. I was already aware—how couldn’t I be?—that no significant novel or short story had been written in decades, but I was shocked to discover that only five other students in my year had elected for An Lit as their main subject, and one of those still resided in Seoul and another was a post-centarian on clicking steel legs. Most of the other students who showed up were dipping into the subject in the hope that it might add something useful to their main discipline. Invariably, they were disappointed. It wasn’t just the difficulty of ploughing through page after page of non-interactive text. It was linear fiction’s sheer lack of options, settings, choices. Why the hell, I remember some kid shouting in a seminar, should I accept all the miserable shit that this Hardy guy rains down on his characters? Give me the base program for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and I’ll hack you fifteen better endings.

  I pushed my weak mek to the limit during that first term as I tried to formulate a tri-dee excursus on Tender Is the Night, but the whole piece was reconfigured out of existence once the faculty AIs got hold of it. Meanwhile, Rob Holm was clearly doing far better. I could hear him singing in the showers along from my room, and admired the way he didn’t get involved in all the usual peeves and arguments. The physical sciences had a huge, brand new facility at the west end of campus called the Clearbrite Building. Half church, half-pagoda, and maybe half spaceship in the fizzing, shifting, headachy way of modern architecture, there was no real way of telling how much of it was actually made of brick, concrete, and glass, and how much consisted of virtual artifacts and energy fields. You could get seriously lost just staring at it.

  My first year went by, and I fought hard against crawling home, and had a few unromantic flings, and made vegetable bolognaise my signature dish, and somehow managed to get version 4.04 of my second term excursus on Howard’s End accepted. Rob and I didn’t become close, but I liked his singing and the cinnamon scent he left hanging behind in the steam of the showers, and it was good to know that someone else was making a better hash of this whole undergraduate business than I was.

  “Hey, Lita?”

  We were deep into the summer term and exams were looming. Half the undergrads were back at home, and the other half were jacked up on learning streams, or busy having breakdowns.

  I leaned in on Rob’s doorway. “Yeah?”

  “Fancy sharing a house next year?”

  “Next year?” Almost effortlessly casual, I pretended to consider this. “I really hadn’t thought. It all depends—”

  “Not a problem.” He shrugged. “I’m sure I’ll find someone else.”

  “No, no. That’s fine. I mean, yeah, I’m in. I’m interested.”

  “Great. I’ll show you what I’ve got from the letting agencies.” He smiled a warm smile, then returned to whatever wondrous creations were spinning above his desk.

  3.

  We settled on a narrow house with bad drains just off the Otley Road in Headingley, and I’m not sure whether I was relieved or disappointed when I discovered that his plan was that we share the place with some others. I roped in a couple of girls, Rob found a couple of guys, and we all got on pretty well. I had a proper boyfriend by then, a self-regarding jock called Torsten, and every now and then a different woman would emerge from Rob’s room. Nothing serious ever seemed to come of this, but they were equally gorgeous, clever, and out of my league.

  A bunch of us used to head out to the moors for midnight bonfires during that second winter. I remember the smoke and the sparks spinning into the deep black as we sang and drank and arsed around. Once, and with the help of a few tabs and cans, I asked Rob to name some constellations for me, and he put an arm around my waist and led me further into the dark.

  Over there, Lita, up to the left and far away from the light of this city, is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, which is always a good place to start when you’re stargazing. And there, see close as twins at the central bend of the Plough’s handle, are Mizar and Alcor. They’re not a true binary, but if we had decent binoculars, we could see that Mizar really does have a close companion. And there, that way, up and left—his breath on my face, his hands on my arms— maybe you can just see there’s this fuzzy speck at the Bear’s shoulder? Now, that’s an entire, separate galaxy from our own filled with billions of stars, and its light has taken about twelve million years to reach the two of us here, tonight. Then Andromeda and Cassiopeia and Canus Major and Minor… . Distant, storybook names for distant worlds. I even wondered aloud about the possibility of other lives, existences, hardly expecting Rob to agree with me. But he did. And then he said something that struck me as strange.

  “Not just out there, either, Lita. There are other worlds all around us. It’s just that we can’t see them.”

  “You’re talking in some metaphorical sense, right?”

  “Not at all. It’s part of what I’m trying to understand in my studies.”

  “To be honest, I’ve got no real idea what astrophysics even means. Maybe you could tell me.”

>   “I’d love to. And you know, Lita, I’m a complete dunce when it comes to, what do you call it—two-dee fiction, flat narrative? So I want you to tell me about that as well. Deal?”

  We wandered back toward the fire, and I didn’t expect anything else to come of our promise until Rob called to me when I was wandering past his room one wet, grey afternoon a week or so later. It was deadline day, my hair was a greasy mess, I was heading for the shower, and had an excursus on John Updike to finish.

  “You did say you wanted to know more about what I study?”

  “I was just . . . ” I scratched my head. “Curious. All I do know is that astrophysics is about more than simply looking up at the night sky and giving names to things. That isn’t even astronomy, is it?”

  “You’re not just being polite?” His soft, granite-grey eyes remained fixed on me.

  “No. I’m not—absolutely.”

  “I could show you something here.” He waved at the stars on his walls, the stuff spinning on his desk. “But maybe we could go out. To be honest, Lita, I could do with a break, and there’s an experiment I could show you up at the Clearbrite that might help explain what I mean about other worlds . . . but I understand if you’re busy. I could get my avatar to talk to your avatar and—”

  “No, no. You’re right, Rob. I could do with a break as well. Let’s go out. Seize the day. Or at least, what’s left of it. Just give me . . . ” I waved a finger toward the bathroom, “… five minutes.”

  Then we were outside in the sideways-blowing drizzle, and it was freezing cold, and I was still wet from my hurried shower, as Rob slipped a companionable arm around mine as we climbed the hill toward the Otley Road tram stop.

  Kids and commuters got on and off as we jolted toward the strung lights of the city, their lips moving and their hands stirring to things only they could feel and see. The Clearbrite looked more than ever like some recently arrived spaceship as it glowed out through the gloom, but inside the place was just like any other campus building, with clamoring posters offering to restructure your loan, find you temporary work, or get you laid and hammered. Constant reminders, too, that Clearbrite was the only smartjuice to communicate in realtime to your fingerjewel, toejamb, or wristbracelet. This souk-like aspect of modern unis not being something that Sebastian Flyte, or even Harry Potter in those disappointing sequels, ever had to contend with.

  We got a fair few hellos, a couple of tenured types stopped to talk to Rob in a corridor, and I saw how people paused to listen to what he was saying. More than ever, I had him down as someone who was bound to succeed. Still, I was expecting to be shown moon rocks, lightning bolts, or at least some clever virtual planetarium. But instead he took me into what looked like the kind of laboratory I’d been forced to waste many hours in at school, even if the equipment did seem a little fancier.

  “This is the physics part of the astro,” Rob explained, perhaps sensing my disappointment. “But you did ask about other worlds, right, and this is pretty much the only way I can show them to you.”

  I won’t go too far into the details, because I’d probably get them wrong, but what Rob proceeded to demonstrate was a version of what I now know to be the famous, or infamous, Double Slit Experiment. There was a long black tube on a workbench. At one end of it was a laser, and at the other was a display screen attached to a device called a photo multiplier—a kind of sensor. In the middle he placed a barrier with two narrow slits. It wasn’t a great surprise even to me that the pulses of light caused a pretty dark-light pattern of stripes to appear on the display at the far end. These, Rob said, were ripples of the interference pattern caused by the waves of light passing through the two slits, much as you’d get if you were pouring water. But light, Lita, is made up of individual packets of energy called photons. So what would happen if, instead of sending tens of thousands of them down the tube at once, we turned the laser down so far that it only emitted one photon at a time? Then, surely, each individual photon could only go through one or the other of the slits, there would be no ripples, and two simple stripes would emerge at the far end. But, hey, as he slowed the beep of the signal counter until it was registering single digits, the dark-light bars, like a shimmering neon forest, remained. As if, although each photon was a single particle, it somehow became a blur of all its possibilities as it passed through both slits at once. Which, as far as anyone knew, was pretty much what happened.

  “I’m sorry,” Rob said afterward when we were chatting over a second or third pint of beer in the fug of an old student bar called the Eldon that lay down the road from the university, “I should have shown you something less boring.”

  “It wasn’t boring. The implications are pretty strange, aren’t they?”

  “More than strange. It goes against almost everything else we know about physics and the world around us—us sitting here in this pub, for instance. Things exist, right? They’re either here or not. They don’t flicker in and out of existence like ghosts. This whole particles blurring into waves business was one of the things that bugged me most when I was a kid finding out about science. It was partly why I chose to study astrophysics—I thought there’d be answers I’d understand when someone finally explained them to me. But there aren’t.” He sipped his beer. “All you get is something called the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is basically a shoulder shrug that says, hey, this stuff happen at the sub-atomic level, but it doesn’t really have to bother us or make sense in the world we know about and live in. That, and then there’s something else called the many worlds theory . . . ” He trailed off. Stifled a burp. Seemed almost embarrassed.

  “Which is what you believe in?”

  “Believe isn’t the right word. Things either are or they aren’t in science. But, yeah, I do. And the maths supports it. Simply put, Lita, it says that all the possible states and positions that every particle could exist in are real—that they’re endlessly spinning off into other universes.”

  “You mean, as if every choice you could make in a virtual was instantly mapped out in its entirety?”

  “Exactly. But this is real. The worlds are all around us—right here.”

  The drink and the conversation moved on, and now it was my turn to apologize to Rob, and his to say no, I wasn’t boring him. Because books, novels, stories, they were my other worlds, the thing I believed in even if no one else cared about them. That single, magical word, Fog, which Dickens uses as he begins to conjure London. And Frederic Henry walking away from the hospital in the rain. And Rose of Sharon offering the starving man her breast after the Joads’ long journey across dustbowl America, and Candide eating fruit, and Bertie Wooster bumbling back across Mayfair . . .

  Rob listened and seemed genuinely interested, even though he confessed he’d never read a single non-interactive story or novel. But, unlike most people, he said this as if he realized he was actually missing out on something. So we agreed I’d lend him some of my old paperbacks, and this, and what he’d shown me at the Clearbrite, signaled a new phase in our relationship.

  4.

  It seems to me now that some of the best hours of my life were spent not in reading books, but in sitting with Rob Holm in my cramped room in that house we shared back in Leeds, and talking about them.

  What to read and admire, but also—and this was just as important— what not to. The Catcher in the Rye being overrated, and James Joyce a literary show-off, and Moby Dick really wasn’t about much more than whales. Alarmingly, Rob was often ahead of me. He discovered a copy of Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges in a garage sale, which he gave to me as a gift and then kept borrowing back. But he was Rob Holm. He could solve the riddles of the cosmos and meanwhile explore literature as nothing but a hobby, and also help me out with my mek so that I was finally able to produce the kind of arguments, links, and algorithms for my piece on Madame Bovary that the AIs at An Eng actually wanted.

  Meanwhile, I also found out about the kind of life Rob had come from. Both his parents were engineers,
and he’d spent his early years in Aberdeen, but they’d moved to the Isle of Harris after his mother was diagnosed with a brain-damaging prion infection, probably caused by her liking for fresh salmon. Most of the fish were then factory-farmed in crowded pens in the Scottish lochs, where the creatures were dosed with antibiotics and fed on pellets of processed meat, often recycled from the remains of their own breed. Just as with cattle and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease a century earlier, this process had resulted in a small but significant species leap of cross-infection. Rob’s parents wanted to make the best of the years Alice Holm had left, and set up an ethical marine farm—although they preferred to call it a ranch—harvesting scallops on the Isle of Harris.

  Rob’s father was still there at Creagach, and the business, which not only produced some of the best scallops in the Hebrides but also benefited other marine life along the costal shelf, was still going. Rob portrayed his childhood there as a happy time, with his mother still doing well, despite the warnings of the scans, and regaling him with bedtime tales of Celtic myths, that were probably his only experience before meeting me of linear fictional narrative.

  There were the kelpies, who lived in lochs and were like fine horses, and then there were the Blue Men of the Minch who dwelt between Harris and the mainland and sung up storms and summoned the waves with their voices. Then, one night when Rob was eleven, his mother waited until he and his father were asleep, walked out across the shore and into the sea, and swam, and kept on swimming. No one could last long out there, the sea being so cold, and the strong currents, or perhaps the Blue Men of the Minch, bore her body back to a stretch of shore around the headland from Creagach, where she was found next morning.

  Rob told his story without any obvious angst. But it certainly helped explain the sense of difference and distance he seemed to carry with him. That, and why he didn’t fit. Not here in Leeds, amid the fun, mess, and heartbreak of student life, nor even, as I slowly came to realize, in the subject he was studying.