The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  It’s Paolo. He stands tall and skinny in the doorway’s exact center, as if demonstrating how unnecessarily wide it is.

  “I — ”

  “Oh, you know him.” The short, blond Mria pushes past him, carrying a bag that seems symbolic of “groceries”: leafy celery and a baguette stick out of the top. “The Trainer. Mark’s guy.”

  “Mark’s guy.” Paolo’s eyes are pale blue. I had not noticed how clear and perceptive they were. I hadn’t really been watching him, and he certainly had never looked at me before. “What is he doing here, then?”

  “I don’t know.” Mria is already in the kitchen. “Maybe he’s training gophers. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I’m here to put some things away,” I say. This is even almost true. At least it is now.

  “Hey, us too,” Paolo says. “We can start a club. ‘People who clean up after Mark and Berenika.’ ”

  “Don’t be bitter, Paolo.” Mria is opening and closing cabinets. “Didn’t they say they’d leave a saucepan in . . . oh, there it is. She just asked us for a favor, since we were going to be in the neighborhood.”

  There was no neighborhood. Mark had, impressively, put his house where there really was nothing, an expanse of dry ridges and valleys in the Great Basin. The most visible life in the region was a herd of pronghorns that tended to keep well south, where there was more water. The only plant visible is an occasional sullen creosote bush. Those black sticks suck all the moisture from the dirt around them, leaving a circle so dry that no seed would ever germinate there. Their kingdoms are tiny and parched, but they are supreme within them.

  “You hid your car,” Paolo says.

  “Habit.”

  “So what were you going to do here?”

  “Maybe he’s moving here.” Mria pokes her head in from the kitchen. Behind her, I hear something frying. “You want some lunch, Mr. Animal Trainer? We’re going to have to pack out what we don’t eat.”

  I’d never pegged Mria as a cook. But, then, I hadn’t paid that much attention to her either. I’d been watching Berenika.

  “Sure,” I say. “I didn’t bring anything to contribute.”

  “Didn’t figure that you would.” She vanishes back into the kitchen.

  “Berenika’s going to be a Trainer too,” Paolo says. “She’s going to find out what really makes things tick.”

  “It’s a long, hard road,” I say. “Much less fun than it looks.”

  “She knows all about that,” Paolo says. “You probably explained some of it to her.”

  “I tried.”

  “You’re not going to ask, are you.” Mria hands me linen-wrapped silverware and has me set the table. “Berenika’s gone back to Mark, and both of them are off on some atoll trying to restore fish stocks, train tuna to protect themselves, whatever, and you’re going to pretend you don’t even care.”

  “I don’t have the right to care,” I finally manage.

  “The forks go on the other side,” Mria says briskly. “You don’t need some kind of standing to care.”

  “Oh, Come on.” Paolo slouches above us, unsure of what to do. “He just failed. He wanted to set things up a certain way, train Berenika to move to him, and he didn’t do it.”

  I try to do it slowly, but I think they hear me let my breath out.

  “Don’t you guys need to protect those fish?” Mria says. “Go ahead. I’ll lay everything else out.”

  “The fish,” Paolo says on the way down the stairs to the lower levels. “Did you put them here?”

  “My first project for Mark,” I say. “They’re an almost-vanished subspecies – agriculture had dropped the water table and their caves were going dry. They seem to be breeding pretty well here. I hope the new owner takes care of them.”

  “It’s in the deed. You have to. If you don’t want to, buy somewhere else.”

  Many people think that the way we fool nature now shows our power. But it equally enslaves us to perpetual care.

  Or some of us, anyway.

  In the cool darkness we could hear the water swirling beneath our feet and in the walls. A still pool filled the floor’s center. We stand on its edge, looking down and seeing the passages receding in all directions into the earth.

  The pool has a blue glow now that we’re here. The fish can’t see it, but it lets us see them.

  “Did you . . . make this?” Paolo’s eyes are large in the dimness.

  “I worked it out. There were objections. There’s no geology anywhere near here that could remotely have water-filled caverns like this, but Mark offered to finance it, and it really was the best option. You can’t have everything perfect.”

  Blind fish have eyes. Or, rather, they develop eyes normally, up to a point. The genes that guide the development of the eyes is still there, still active. An eyecup develops, a lens. Then, another gene, busily beefing up the front of the head, increasing the sense of smell, the barbels, the whole chemical/physical sense structure that the fish needs to survive in the absolute darkness of limestone caverns a thousand feet underground, finally gets its bulldozers and concrete mixers into the area – and builds right over the eye. It sinks under that new flesh, and vanishes.

  I wave my hand over the water. This was once Berenika’s great pleasure, Mark had told me. The one thing about the house that had entranced her. I want to see what she saw.

  And they come. The fish swim out of their underground grottos and out into the dim blue glow of that room. Their skin is pure white, patterned with blue, like tattoos. Their drooping barbels let them sense what is around them. They swirl up, never touching each other, sensing the pressure of the others, searching for their microscopic food.

  I hold my finger over the water, but don’t touch it. It’s best for them if they never know anyone else is here. It’s too late, anyway. Even if they knew I was here, that I had determined their destinies, they wouldn’t care.

  “Come on,” I say to Paolo.

  The controls make everything automatic, but it still seems that we need to be there to supervise. I carefully check the sandy floor for any obstructions and find. . . .

  Paolo stands next to me and looks down.

  “Was that your cat?” he says.

  “Not at all,” I say. “Just a companion. We worked together for a while. And then — ”

  “And now it works for Mark too?”

  The footprint is clear. I’m tempted to say too clear, as if it was rolled there for police identification. But over here, it looks like the cougar slept. A cave might seem a good place of concealment for it.

  No way of telling how long ago it had been here.

  “Will they . . . will they be okay under there?” Paolo says.

  “The system is sealed and recirculating,” I tell him. “Left for long enough, sure. This cave won’t survive the fall of civilization or anything. But long before they have any trouble, someone will be here to clean it up, keep them fed and alive.”

  The cover looks like heavy stone, though I know it’s just a foamed metal alloy with a thin cover of fused rock dust. It slides across the pool, across the cougar footprint, across the vague traces we ourselves have left down there, and the blue glow vanishes. The house’s life is concealed until someone returns to reveal it again.

  The cougar never knew I was there, so it can’t miss me, but it must be able to detect a difference in its life now that I have left it.

  “Come on up.” Mria calls from upstairs. “Lunch is ready.”

  “What are you going to do now?” Paolo says.

  “I have another project.”

  “Mark must have paid you a bundle. It must be something pretty wild.”

  “Not so wild,” I say. “Just something that needs to get done.”

  Potential encounter

  Urban Study Area #7

  Sometimes a chunk of decorative plaster crashes down from the coffered ceiling high overhead. This usually happens a couple of days after a heavy rain. The water percolates throug
h the various remaining layers of the railway station roof. You’d think there wouldn’t be an acanthus swag or gilded rosette left up there, but the builders had not stinted on unseen decoration.

  Sometimes it happens for no reason at all, like this morning. I jerk awake, hearing just the echoes of a distant crash.

  Usually I get up and search, trying to figure out which piece it was that had just been added to the rubble on the waiting room floor. I don’t know what the point of that is, but I do feel good when I see fresh edges, as if I’m finally getting a grip on how things work around here.

  I don’t feel like doing that today. I just wiggle myself deeper into my bag and watch the pale light of morning grow in the high windows. The pigeons that have left a crust over the glass shift complain on their perches high above.

  I’ve been here a few months now, and still find it ridiculous. Had absolutely everyone left this city and headed for better places? It had once been huge. I can walk the old streets for days, clamber carefully across rusting bridges, jump across the pits of collapsed sewers. None of it was set up to interact with nature. It comes from a purely human world, now obsolete.

  Most of it collapsed and was swept into sinuous ridges, twenty or thirty feet high. Forests slowly spread across them. There’s a small modern city up the river a bit, but it has its own environment and I never take any animals there.

  So now I live among weeds: spiky leaved plants, muck-loving carp, fast-growing trees, pigeons. I hunt among the herds of stunted deer that browse the grass between fallen branches of locusts and silver maples. Sometimes a pack of canids makes its quarrelsome way through the area. A cross between domestic dogs and coyotes, they are unromantic, unphotogenic, and unclean. No Trainer has ever worked to get them to set their carrion-smelling paws on a city street. No passerby has ever been struck at dawn by their wild beauty. When I hear them yelping at night I stuff my head into my pillow.

  A crow calls outside, so it really is time to get up. All of the animals can see me, but only that crow seems to care. It has a kind of reptilian affection for me, based on the small prey I scare up on my hunts, and I sometimes find it staring fixedly at me, head sidewise, considering me with an expressionless yellow-rimmed eye. I work at not attributing human emotions to it, but always fail. Maybe I wasn’t meant for my line of work after all.

  At least I haven’t given it a name. That’s the most obvious way we pretend animals are more ours than they actually are. I figure it respects me, but is puzzled by me. Our lives are pretty similar just now, so we get along. The bird can predict in general what I am going to do next, but not specifically, and that is the basis of a decent relationship.

  There is no natural world. If the term ever had meaning, it hasn’t for years. Jeremiads about how the natural world will unite and turn against humans are a childish fantasy. Nature has no motivations, no desires, no ultimate goal.

  Except what we choose to give it. I finally roll out of my bag, wash my face in the basin I always fill before going to sleep, and go outside. It’s overcast, and cold. My breath puffs. I like feeling the weather against me. Having little defense against it, I have to react to it the same way everything else alive has to. I listen to the air, sniff it to see how scents are carrying today, listen to any sounds it brings. I’m here and visible. I can be evaded, I can be resisted, I can be killed. I pay full attention.

  Outside, something on the ground catches my eye. I kneel to get a better look. I reach out my hand, but pull it back before my fingertips can disturb anything.

  It’s a partial print: a big heel pad, and two toe marks. No claw indentations, and it looks pretty good-sized. Cat. It looks like a large cat.

  I bend over the imprint and push my face almost to the ground, looking and smelling, using every channel of information I can. I smell cat too.

  Could be a lynx. I’ve seen some other, ambiguous traces. A lynx would be okay.

  I don’t think it’s a lynx. A few days ago I found a piece of scat. Like the print, it was big, bigger than your usual coydog turd. And it had a bit of hair in it, as from self-grooming with a rough tongue. I managed to persuade myself that it was just the right shade of reddish brown.

  I stand up, ready for my day. If there really is a cougar out here somewhere, I won’t see it. In an even contest, I don’t have a chance. But I’ll keep looking.

  Anyone could find me here, if they wanted. Berenika has to know where I am. She could come here and observe me in my natural habitat. If she wanted.

  It’s ridiculous. A feral house cat could make it here in this shrunken weed patch, for as long as it evaded the coydogs, but chances were lower for a lynx, and a cougar was impossible. A cougar needed more than ten square miles of territory to support itself, probably significantly more in this impoverished ecology, and there was nothing like that here, not yet. A single kill and the deer would flee elsewhere. These are not trained to forget, circle around, and return. Again, not yet.

  So there’s work to be done. The various patches of woods can be knitted together in the minds of the beasts that are here. That’s what we do. We take the far-flung archipelagos of environment and reassemble them into continents in the minds of the animals. We give them a way to live in the world we have made.

  So I live, work, and hope.

  I imagine Berenika, somewhere in an abandoned room in the city, in a brick row house standing alone amid the trees, like a single book on an empty shelf. Since I’m imagining it, I imagine detail. She’s in an old bedroom where someone changed wallpaper every year. The warmth and moisture she’s brought into the room have loosened its glue, and the soft paper peels off in layers, showing different colors. When she awakes before dawn, it’s to the whisper of falling florals and beribboned hunting horns.

  I don’t actually believe she’s there. She’s got more important things to pay attention to.

  Mark is the kind of guy who thinks that making his wife stronger is the way to keep her. That makes him hard to compete with. But I’ve worked with him, and know he can be tiresome. A jerk, really. And, pathetic huddled voyeur or not, I know what I’m doing. That can be attractive. There is some room for hope.

  Meanwhile, I have work to do.

  THE SHIPMAKER

  Aliette de Bodard

  New writer Aliette de Bodard is a software engineer who was born in the United States, but grew up in France, where she still lives. Only a few years into her career, her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Asimov’s, Realms of Fantasy, Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future, Coyote Wild, Electric Velocipede, The Immersion Book of SF, Fictitious Force, Shimmer, and elsewhere. Servant of the Underworld, her first novel, appeared in 2010.

  The engrossing story that follows takes us to the far future of an alternate world in which China discovered the New World before Columbus and annexed it as a colony, and introduces us to a scientist who is responsible for engineering the literal birth of a sentient starship . . . with her own life dependent on a successful outcome.

  SHIPS WERE LIVING, breathing beings. Dac Kien had known this, even before she’d reached the engineering habitat – even before she’d seen the great mass in orbit outside, being slowly assembled by the bots.

  Her ancestors had once carved jade, in the bygone days of the Le dynasty on Old Earth: not hacking the green blocks into the shape they wanted, but rather whittling down the stone until its true nature was revealed. And as with jade, so with ships. The sections outside couldn’t be forced together. They had to flow into a seamless whole – to be, in the end, inhabited by a Mind who was as much a part of the ship as every rivet and every seal.

  The Easterners or the Mexica didn’t understand. They spoke of recycling, of design efficiency: they saw only the parts taken from previous ships, and assumed it was done to save money and time. They didn’t understand why Dac Kien’s work as Grand Master of Design Harmony was the most important on the habitat: the ship, once made, would be one entity, and not a pat
chwork of ten thousand others. To Dac Kien – and to the one who would come after her, the Mind-bearer – fell the honour of helping the ship into being, of transforming metal and cables and solar cells into an entity that would sail the void between the stars.

  The door slid open. Dac Kien barely looked up. The light tread of the feet told her this was one of the lead designers, either Miahua or Feng. Neither would have disturbed her without cause. With a sigh, she disconnected from the system with a flick of her hands, and waited for the design’s overlay on her vision to disappear.

  “Your Excellency.” Miahua’s voice was quiet: the Xuyan held herself upright, her skin as pale as yellowed wax. “The shuttle has come back. There’s someone on board you should see.”

  Dac Kien had expected many things: a classmate from the examinations on a courtesy visit; an Imperial Censor from Dongjing, calling her to some other posting, even further away from the capital; or perhaps even someone from her family, mother or sister or uncle’s wife, here to remind her of the unsuitability of her life choices.

  She hadn’t expected a stranger: a woman with brown skin, almost dark enough to be Viet herself – her lips thin and white, her eyes as round as the moon.

  A Mexica. A foreigner – Dac Kien stopped the thought before it could go far. For the woman wore no cotton, no feathers, but the silk robes of a Xuyan housewife, and the five wedding gifts (all pure gold, from necklace to bracelets) shone like stars on the darkness of her skin.

  Dac Kien’s gaze travelled down to the curve of the woman’s belly: a protruding bulge so voluminous that it threw her whole silhouette out of balance. “I greet you, younger sister. I am Dac Kien, Grand Master of Design Harmony for this habitat.” She used the formal tone, suitable for addressing a stranger.

  “Elder sister.” The Mexica’s eyes were bloodshot, set deep within the heavy face. “I am — ” She grimaced, one hand going to her belly as if to tear it out. “Zoquitl,” she whispered at last, the accents of her voice slipping back to the harsh patterns of her native tongue. “My name is Zoquitl.” Her eyes started to roll upwards; she went on, taking on the cadences of something learnt by rote. “I am the womb and the resting place, the quickener and the Mind-bearer.”