The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

The silver biographer-globe drops closer, and she frowns. Then she realizes she is lying down, though she cannot recall changing position.

Blackness, circling all around.

And the stars, so bright.

“… ma’am?”

Sounds, fading.

We made it, Mum.

And, for a moment, she sees it: the fractal Pattern, the mu-space reality which holds up our illusory cosmos-

Thank you.

Somewhere, a major blood vessel erupts. A crack, then relief.

Stars…

A smile spreads across Gus’s lined face.

… fading…

Her personal universe dwindles.

… to darkness.

Is gone.

The Hotel at Harlan’s Landing - KAGE BAKER

One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late ’90s, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s, and has since become one of that magazines most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-travelling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a High Fantasy milieu as any we’ve ever seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her first novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1 997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. Her second novel, Sky Coyote, was published in 1999, followed by a third and a fourth, Mendoza in Hollywood and The Graveyard Game, both published in 2001. Her most recent book is her first collection, Black Projects, White Knights, where the story that follows was originally published. In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.

Here she shows us that sometimes no matter how isolated and remote a location you find in which to hide yourself away, it isn’t nearly isolated enough…

There was just the five of us in the bar that night.

The lumber mills were all shut down for good and there hadn’t been a ship come up to the wharf in years. No more big schooners down there in the cove, with their white sails flying in at eye level to the bluff top like clouds. Dirty little steamers stayed well out on the horizon and never came in, going busily to San Francisco or Portland. Nothing to come in for, at Harlan’s Landing.

All this stuff the weekenders find so cute now, the gingerbread cottages and the big emporium with its grand false front and the old hotel here-you wouldn’t have thought they were much then, when they were gray wood beaten into leaning by the winter storms, paint from the boom days all peeled off. No Heritage Society to save us, no tourists with cash to spend. Nobody had cash to spend. It was 1934.

I couldn’t keep the hotel open, but after the Volstead Act was repealed I opened the bar downstairs and things brightened up considerably. Our own had some place to go, had sort of a social life now, see? We come that close to being a ghost town that everybody needed to know there was still a place with the yellow lights shining out through the windows, fighting to stay alive.

And it wasn’t like there was anyplace else to go anyhow, not with the logging road washed out in winter, which was the only other way to get here from the city back then. I felt I sort of owed the rest of them.

Especially I owed Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. I had that awful year in 1929 when Mama got the cancer and I lost Bill, that was my husband, he was one of the crew on the San Juan, see. They were real kind to me then. Stayed by me when I wanted to just die. Aunty Irina baked bread, and Uncle Jacques fixed the typewriter and told me what I ought to write to the damn insurance people when they weren’t going to pay. People who’ll help you clean your house for a funeral twice in one year are good friends, believe you me.

Then, if Uncle Jacques hadn’t kept the Sheep Canyon trail cleared we’d have had nothing to eat but venison, because there’d have been no way I could have got the buckboard through to Notley for provisions most of the time. It must have been hard work, even for him, just one man with an axe busting up those redwood snags; because of course Lanark was no use. But Uncle Jacques looked after all of us, he and Aunty Irina. They said it was a good thing to have a human community.