The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Before he got to the truck, his phone rang. He fished around in his shirt pocket, found the phone, and squeezed it between thumb and forefinger. An image sprang up above his hand: the face of his wife.

  “Jack,” Carol said, “Emily called this morning. Henry is missing. He went off on some animal-capture job and was supposed to be back home the night before last. She’s frantic.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me about it,” Jack told her. “Did she try the law?”

  Her image nodded. “The sheriff hasn’t been able to find a trace of him here in the enclave. And you won’t believe who I just got a call from, five minutes ago. He said he’s a project director for the government.”

  “The government,” Jack said. “What project?”

  “He didn’t say. He said he’s with the Department of the Interior. They want to hire you for an animal-capture job.”

  “Work for the government? That’ll be the day.”

  “Jack, the guy on the phone said the job involves Henry’s disappearance. He wouldn’t say anything more. He wants to see you this afternoon at their headquarters. But, um, it’s in one of the towers in south Columbus.”

  “So they just snap their fingers, and I’m supposed to come running?” Jack kicked a loose rock across the gravel pull-off. It click-clicked, bounced high, scattered smaller pieces of gravel. A few hours’ drive, if conditions on the old highway weren’t too bad. And then he’d have to go into that tower. He ought to just let the sheriff interview the guy. But the enclave’s sheriff had no jurisdiction there, and the government wasn’t asking to see him. If Jack left right now, he might make it before dark. No, not this time of year. He told Carol he’d go and dropped the phone into his pocket. He returned to his pickup truck and put the otter in the bed, beside the three beaver he had picked up at other jobs that morning.

  Movement caught the corner of his eye. Darker shadows flickered past the dark edge of the woods on the other side of the road. Wolves had picked up his scent or the scent of the beaver. The lead wolf, the alpha female, came out along the edge of the road that marked the border between Jack’s enclave and the wilderness preserve. She saw Jack looking at her and howled a quick warning to her packmates.

  Jack’s family had been on the land when it was a wilderness to the European settlers, when the wilderness was gone, and now that it was mostly wilderness again. Restored bear and cougar populations didn’t cause the rural folks enough grief, so the government had brought in western timber wolves on the grounds that wolves had once inhabited the Ohio wilderness. The wolves’ implants were supposed to keep them in the preserve, but things didn’t always work as intended.

  Kill one and there would be hell to pay, if not from the government then from the wolf worshippers and their lawyers. He could see them now, the fans and sponsors of this particular pack, leaning forward in their tower homes, watching the video feed through the eyes of the wolves. Waiting to see if they would take down this reckless enclaver for their next meal. Eat everything a man ever was, right down to his bones and the soles of his boots.

  Jack took the stunstick out of his pocket, telescoped it to its full length, and let the wolves see it. Their fear of man was mostly gone, but one thing had been engraved deeply enough in the canine culture by generations of stone and steel and lead and electron: beware of men carrying sticks. You couldn’t kill them with a stunstick, but could sure give them one hell of a shock. The wolves kept their distance, milling along the edge of the road, finally disappearing back into the forest after he got into his truck.

  Jack drove down the empty road until he hit old Route 23 North, which paced the Scioto River for much of its length. This stretch of road ran next to a skyway, where the multitudes whizzed by high above ground on electromagnetic fields, lost in their business or conversations or whatever it was the tower-dwellers did with themselves. They couldn’t be taking in the country at that speed. Or notice Jack trundling along on his antiquated surface wheels.

  Lo, once there were superhighways, now razed and reclaimed back to the earth. Just a few of the older roads were left for the enclavers to use and maintain by themselves.

  Dense, overhanging trees gave the semblance of moving through a tunnel. Grass and weeds crowded the edges of the old highway and sprouted from the cracks they had formed in the asphalt. Dead branches and debris littered the empty road and potholes abounded. Twice he had to stop and move tree limbs that had fallen during the last storm. Outside the boundaries of the enclaves, where beaver were protected by law, he frequently had to slow for submerged pavement. In one place the water came up to his floorboards. After an hour, he chanced to glance at the fuel gauge, saw it was almost on empty. At the next enclave, another farming community, he stopped at a crossroads store, bought a gallon of distilled water, and dumped it into the tank. Then he drove on into the gathering dusk.

  * * *

  He could see the lighted tower, looming ever larger through occasional gaps in the trees, well before he arrived. An example of the newest, footprint-reducing architecture, the tower was built like a giant morel: a tall, narrow cap with an irregular, ridged surface overhanging a smaller, round base. No, not a morel; if that tower was a mushroom, it had to be one of the poisonous varieties. From a hub level in the tower cap, the thin lines of skyways spread out in various directions. Like a giant spiderweb.

  When he saw the government’s sign at the compound’s surface entrance, his foot went to the brake pedal and his hands twitched, wanting to turn the wheel back toward home. But he followed the entrance ramp into the compound. He drove through parklands where elk and camels grazed, over a creek, and the length of a small lake where swans swam in pairs, to arrive at a small paved area before a tower entrance. It held no other vehicles but looked as good as anyplace to park the truck, so he did. The outside of the tower base presented a rough, ridged surface with no windows or seams. He pulled his wool cap down over his forehead and raised his hands to push open a door. He stumbled slightly when his hands met no resistance and he felt a puff of air as he passed through the non-existent door into the building. The lobby’s outer wall appeared to be made entirely of one-way glass that allowed a view of the compound outside. Or maybe he was only looking at video screens. It probably made no difference to the tower-dwellers.

  The floor was covered with some mutated form of living grass that lay in a short, dense mat like a golf green. He gouged its surface with his boot-toe and watched it begin repairing itself. Imagine that crap growing over your foot, eh, Katie? From a wall of the tower’s core a waterfall trickled down and formed a stream that meandered across the floor to his left. A few of the dark-robed tower-dwellers strolled and loitered, communing with their view of the outdoors. Others scurried in or out of the elevators. They paid him no mind.

  Jack had walked through the lobby, halfway around the tower’s core, when a voice growled his name from behind him. He turned and saw what looked like a cross between an orangutan and a human woman. She wore no clothing and was covered with straw-blonde hair, long but thin and with no underfur. Her face was bare ahead of her ears and heavily made-up. Her arms hung nearly to her knees and her breasts halfway to her waist; the breasts swung across her torso as she moved.

  “Mr. Morgan, the director’s office is this way.” She smiled open-mouthed, displaying ivory canines. She seemed amused by his reaction.

  “How do you know who I am?”

  “We were expecting you. You’re not connected, so you’re the anomaly here.”

  She turned and knuckle-walked to the nearest lift, wiggling her hips as she went. He moved to follow and almost fell on his face as a weight dragged on his right leg, the one with the bad knee. Some kind of cleaner robot had wheeled itself across the floor and was licking the half-dried mud off his boot. He kicked the robot free and caught up with the ape-woman at a lift. They ascended to the hub floor, the one with the transit stations, where the skyways spread out like the spokes of a wheel. Caught in the spiderweb.
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  One step out of the lift and he was mobbed by interactive holograms. Human and cartoon faces mouthing soundlessly, waving ad banners or petitions or virtual collection slots for various causes. The only one he had time to read solicited funds for saving species of geothermal bacteria endangered by leaks in the freshwater pipeline running down through the coastal waters from Alaska to California. He had no means to filter them out, but when he failed to show an identity response, the holos vanished.

  Following his guide closely, Jack was dumbfounded by a place without boundaries or familiar reference points. Gleaming glass and metal, lights and colors, senseless flickering images. The lobby appeared to extend forever in all directions, including behind him where the lift doors had vanished. People moved around him, some ethereal as ghosts.

  He was led to a door that appeared to stand by itself in the borderless expanse. The door had lettering that spelled out some guy’s name, project director of some division of bureaucrats, none of which Jack gave a crap about. His guide stepped aside and showed a last flash of canines and took two more steps to the side and vanished. The door opened, so he went in to a private office where a man wearing an early twenty-first-century-style business suit sat behind a desk.

  “Good evening, Mr. Morgan.” The man in the suit spread his hands to indicate the room. “We created this old-style office just so you might feel comfortable.” He stood up, went around the desk, and held out his hand.

  Yes, there were now walls Jack could see and touch, windows on one of them, and two visitor chairs in front of a desk that looked to be made out of walnut but was of course not real wood, if it had real substance at all. Jack ignored the man’s extended hand and touched one of the chairs. It felt solid enough, so he dropped slowly into the seat. He took a deep, slow breath and fixed his eyes on this condescending bureaucrat who would have liked nothing better than to take away Jack’s livestock and tools and traps, put a communication device in his head, and make him live far above ground in a meaningless anthill existence. No doubt to the dismay of some other bureaucrat whose job it was to manage the government’s relations with the cultural enclaves.

  The project director returned to his seat. The windows behind him showed a fine view of a forest-covered hill lit by a midday sun. Phony video image. “Let’s get to business, okay?” the director said. “We’d like to issue a contract for your animal-capture services.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m just here to find out where Henry Andersen is.”

  “You’ll have to hear about our job for that. Your friend’s location is confidential until then.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “We want you to catch a beaver.”

  Jack nodded toward the fake window, an impulse he couldn’t control. “If you people ever set foot on the ground, you’d see there’s beaver all over the country.”

  “Not this kind of beaver. Do you want to find out about your friend?”

  Jack shrugged, then nodded. “So you want a beaver caught. Just one?”

  “You won’t be able to bring it back alive.” The bureaucrat touched his finger to his tongue and used it to trace a circle on the top of his desk. “We just need tissue samples. We expect you’ll probably have to euthanize the animal first.”

  Jack decided it was his turn to wear a smile. “Euthanize.”

  “This is for a project that justifies the death of one beaver.”

  Jack kept looking at the man, waiting him out. He succeeded.

  “Have you ever heard of Castoroides ohioensis?” the director finally asked.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  The bureaucrat looked confused, then his eyes went empty, his mouth hung slightly open—the vacant, moronic look of someone consulting his web access. A common enough expression for those who let nanobots build artificial things in the middle of their cerebral cortex. Why would you open the last place of privacy to the whole world?

  “Ah, okay,” the director said. “Meaning you haven’t heard of it. You people use such interesting expressions.”

  “We get by.” Jack lifted one muddy boot and crossed his legs. “Without an implant telling us what to say. And think.”

  “Okay. But to get to the point, Castoroides ohioensis was a giant species of beaver that lived during the Pleistocene epoch. It’s been extinct for at least ten thousand years. Our project requires sending an animal-capture expert to the late Pleistocene to catch an ohioensis and bring back tissue samples.”

  “You want to send me back in time to catch a giant beaver?”

  The bureaucrat nodded.

  “What for?” Jack saw the bureaucrat’s face begin to go blank again, so he translated for the man. “Why do you want tissue from one of these big beavers?”

  The project director’s finger traced circles on his desk again. He appeared to study the view through the video screens. Jack himself kept fighting the unconscious assumption that the view was real. “Our project involves cataloging the genomes of extinct Pleistocene mammals. For some species we have no bones, only fossils, and there’s a limit to the information that can be obtained from fossils.”

  Jack thought of the only time in the past he cared about. “I’ll go if I can make a side stop at one year, eleven months, two days ago.”

  The director started to shake his head, then his curiosity got the better of him. “Why then?”

  “Because that’s when my daughter fell through the ice and drowned.”

  “And you hope to change things and save her life.” The director finished the shake of his head. “No one is allowed to go to a past time and place where there were people. You might change the past, the timeline of human history. In fact, you admit that you’d try to change the timeline.”

  “I just want to save my daughter. One little ten-year-old girl.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Then forget it.” Jack stood up. “Screw you guys.”

  A slight frown crossed the director’s face for a moment, then faded to an expression of serene disregard. Jack suppressed the urge to lean over the desk and backhand the man and shout at him. But there was no use trying to provoke someone with a mood regulator inside his head. The effort would only backfire.

  “Before you leave, let’s talk about your friend, Henry Andersen,” the bureaucrat was saying. “He seems to have disappeared back there in the Pleistocene. His time capsule returned without him. And we hope you’ll say yes to us now in order to go look for him.”

  “Are you saying you talked Hank into going back to the Pleistocene to catch one of these giant beaver?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid you weren’t our first choice, sorry.”

  “All by himself? You assholes sent him there all by himself?”

  “The energy cost of time travel depends on the mass involved, and Mr. Andersen said he could do it by himself. We’ll send you in a two-seat capsule, in case you do find him.”

  “Why would he agree to do that?”

  The director shrugged. “Money. Even your people have some need for it, I understand. He also seemed perversely excited at the prospect of being able to catch an extinct giant beaver.”

  Jack sat very still. That sounded like Hank all right. The damn fool. Jack played with the collar of his wool shirt, which was still damp from the morning’s rain.

  “So, okay,” the director continued. “Andersen agreed that four days’ subjective time should be sufficient, so that’s what the schedule allows. We don’t want you staying any longer than necessary.”

  “Four days? If I have to get around on foot, it might take longer than that just to locate these giant beaver. Let alone find Hank, which would be my first priority.”

  “You’ll be sent to known ohioensis habitat, where fossils of relevant age have been found. The same site we sent him to.” He dipped his finger again and traced a circle on his desk. “Your contract pays a substantial bonus if you’re successful.”

  “What if I run into prehistoric humans? Won’t that
risk changing the timeline?”

  “We’re sending you to a time before humans arrived on the continent.”

  “Aren’t you worried I might do something to change the evolution of the beaver?”

  “No. Modern beaver, Castor canadensis, were alive then, too. The giant beaver was a different genus that was driven to extinction by the arrival of humans in North America.” The director leaned forward, noticed his necktie spooling up on the table, and wiped his fingers on it. “Useful apparel item. Why aren’t you wearing one?”

  Before Jack could decide whether to answer, the director’s face took on that blank, stupid look again. Obviously getting instructions from someone else. Just a flunky, then.

  “Okay, I’m required to disclose certain project risks. You cannot control the time capsule. The wormhole is directed from our facility. Though rare, there’s the possibility of a wormhole misalignment. And North America was populated with dangerous megafauna—”

  “Whoa. What does ‘wormhole misalignment’ mean?”

  “Your capsule may not go precisely to when or where it’s supposed to. Just a slight chance. But we could still find your capsule and retrieve you.”

  “Great. So what about the dangerous megafauna?”

  “The division head insists that you be advised to take a firearm along for protection.”

  “I don’t have a firearm that could stop a charging mammoth,” Jack said slowly. “Why wouldn’t you give me a plasma weapon?”

  The director shook his head and smiled. “We don’t hand over a modern weapon to an unconnected individual. Who knows what you might use it for? Sorry, you’ll have to make do with your traditional cultural weapons.”

  “At least we still have our culture.”