The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  In three months at the secret robot base Maddy had had exactly one conversation with boy hero Shinichiro Tanimura. It had gone like this:

  Tanimura (English strongly accented, eyes behind his unkempt black bangs never lifting above Maddy’s none-too-impressive chest): “You lived in Japan.”

  Maddy: (Tokyo. Three years.)

  Tanimura: (Your Japanese is pretty good.)

  Maddy (lying): “I don’t understand.”

  She’d understood fine. She just didn’t want to make friends with Tanimura. Which raised the question of why she’d felt it necessary to show off by speaking Japanese in the first place, when Captain Asano had introduced them, and Abby had asked Maddy exactly that, when Maddy had told her the story.

  “Competitive, much?” Abby had said, and Maddy had given her a withering look; but Abby tended not to notice things like that. And Maddy had to admit—to herself, anyway—that Abby was probably right. But she was getting that geek-boy crush vibe from Tanimura, or thought she was, and she wanted to shut that down right away. She wasn’t here to be Tanimura’s friend, and she certainly wasn’t here to be his girlfriend. As far as Maddy was concerned, she was here to be his replacement.

  Maddy and Abby and Jacob were American. Almost everyone else on the secret robot base was Japanese, apart from a few of the doctors that had followed them from Camp Chilliwack, who were Canadian. They were Japanese because Tanimura was Japanese, and until the Camp Chilliwack graduates had turned up, Tanimura, and Tanimura’s shiny white robot the Pierrot, had been the only thing standing between the enemy coming out of the zones and the human race.

  There had been twenty-seven test candidates at Camp Chilliwack and five of them had graduated. Of the twenty-two who hadn’t, four were dead and seven would need serious medical attention for the rest of their lives. Of the five who had, two had been killed the very first time they were Rapidly Deployed: Hailey Peterson had died trying to save a busload of Taiwanese schoolchildren who shouldn’t have been anywhere near the operational area, and Oscar Jara—who had been a soldier, and at twenty-three the oldest of them by five years, and who Maddy privately thought should have known better—had died going after Hailey. Hailey’s body had been sent back to Ontario and Oscar’s to California, and the Docteur and the Arlequin to wherever dead robots went.

  The Colombine and the Scaramouche and the Pantalon came back in one piece, and Maddy and Abby and Jacob did too, more or less. They got better at what they were supposed to be doing. The zones got bigger, the things coming out of them—crawling out of them, usually, crawling and dying, but not always—got weirder, and Maddy and Abby and Jacob killed the monsters and turned back the machines and they stuck to the mission and none of them died. They stood for press photos, with Captain Asano just out of frame; they got crayon robot drawings from schoolchildren in Nunavut and Poland and Hong Kong. Abby said they were saving lives and giving people hope. Jacob said they were saving a lot of property.

  The showers in the secret robot base were new and Japanese, but as industrial as all the rest of it, with spray nozzles in worrying places, oversized controls suitable for clumsy gloved hands. Maddy made sure the cannula in her hip for the zone drugs was sealed, turned on about half the nozzles, made the water as hot as she could stand it; wetted her hair, scrubbed at her shoulders and upper arms. Coming back, maybe it was the disinfectants, maybe it was going off the zone drugs, something made her itch all over. She was breaking out again. She lathered her hair, rinsed, rubbed in conditioner, leaned her forehead against the smooth ceramic of the cubicle wall. She closed her eyes and saw the enemy.

  Back at Camp Chilliwack, Abby had made a game out of the enemy recognition cards they’d all been given. It was a sort of mahjong or gin rummy, except instead of making sets by number or suit you had to make them by the shared characteristics of the enemy machines. This one, a thing like a walking mushroom that a UN committee or computer had named the AG-7 Grauekappe, Abby classified “bipedal.” As she did this one, the dumpy, vaguely humanoid AM-3 Zwerg. But the Grauekappe, at forty meters plus, was also “gigantic,” and so could make a set not only with the Zwerg but also with the MC-11 Wiatrak, spindly and three-legged. Or so Abby had said as she took the trick.

  It had seemed funny at the time, and probably served the purpose the cards had been meant for, inasmuch as it helped the test candidates of Camp Chilliwack memorize the different shapes and sizes. But even back then Maddy had seen that what the otaku-obsessive cataloguing mostly did, the profusion of numbers and abbreviations and code names that might have come out of Jacob’s anime collection, was mask UNPROCON’s ignorance regarding the zones and regarding the enemy, an ignorance that was deep and practically total.

  Now behind Maddy’s closed eyes, the alien shapes moved gray and blue between white stuccoed houses, were chased across the Colombine’s screens by cursors and reticles. She remembered looking down into a railroad cut overhung with green under a gray sky, and a parked string of heavy freight cars, angular black metal forms folding and tearing like foil as the zwergs and hryuks slammed through them, tumbling along the cut away from Maddy’s fire. Remembered the shadow of the grauekappe above her, and then the shocking brightness of its weapon, the way it cleaved in an instant through rock and vine and concrete, shearing away a buildingsized chunk of city so that for a moment Maddy saw pipes and wires and foundations and bedrock, before a water main exploded into a linear cloud of steam and Maddy was throwing the Colombine forward into the cover it gave, down onto the tracks, the cockpit at the Colombine’s heart spinning like a hamster ball to keep Maddy upright as they rolled, and then they were down on the tracks and Maddy’s finger was on the trigger, cutting down the smaller machines with the Colombine’s rifle, sticking to the mission, finishing the job. Saving the world.

  She’d turned back to the grauekappe then, four times the height of the Colombine, not an opponent but a rude adult about to stomp flat child-Maddy’s robot sandcastle; and she’d aimed the Colombine’s rifle at the glowing blue eyes beneath the enemy machine’s spreading mushroom-cap, watching the white light of the beam weapon building in its shocked round O of a mouth, and Maddy had been surprised to realize that even though she might be about to die she was happy.

  And then the Pierrot had been there, in the way, Tanimura getting up in the thing’s face, spoiling its shot and Maddy’s too, and the grauekappe had leapt backwards, strangely graceful, three times its own height from a standing start, over a tall building in a single bound and gone.

  Maddy opened her eyes. She rinsed the conditioner from her hair and turned off all the taps. As she squeezed the water from her hair she heard the locker-room door open and close.

  She came out to find Captain Asano at the sink, washing her hands.

  “Maddy-san!” In the mirror Asano saw the toothbrush Maddy was holding, and said, “Sorry. I’ll only be a moment.”

  “It’s all right,” Maddy said. “I’ll wait.”

  Asano finished what she was doing but made no move to turn around. Her English was much better than Tanimura’s. It was Asano that relayed the orders, Asano’s voice Maddy and Abby and Jacob heard in their helmets when they were on an operation; it was Asano who had drafted the letters to Hailey Peterson’s parents and Oscar Jara’s wife, though they’d gone out over the signature of some UNPROCON undersecretary. Abby had helped her with those.

  When the Camp Chilliwack graduates had first arrived at the secret robot base Asano had already been there; and when she’d introduced herself to them, Maddy had thought she was in her mid-twenties, but now she thought that had been makeup. Thirty? Thirty-five? Older? The pale UN blue wasn’t a flattering color. Now Maddy realized she didn’t really know what Asano’s job was, either. Radio operator? Translator? Babysitter? Object of vaguely Oedipal desire for Tanimura, picked out by UN psychologists after watching even more giant robot shows than Jacob?

  That thought was cruel, and immediately Maddy was ashamed of it. Asano looked tired. There was
nothing particularly wrong with the figure under the baggy fatigues; nothing particularly sexy about it either. It wasn’t as though Asano was parading around the base in a sports bra and and Daisy Dukes.

  Still. Maddy would bet any amount of money that the body under the blue cloth was what Tanimura thought about when he was trying to get to sleep at night. Or had been, till Maddy and Abby showed up. Even if the UN hadn’t planned it that way.

  Asano’s eyes met Maddy’s in the mirror, and Maddy had the uncomfortable feeling that Asano knew what she was thinking. She flushed. She wondered if the UN knew she was a dyke, if that was in a file somewhere and Asano had read it.

  “You lived in Japan,” Asano said.

  Maddy thought better of busting out her schoolroom Japanese this time, and just nodded.

  “How did you like it?” asked Asano.

  Maddy shrugged. “It was all right,” she said. It had been, apart from the first few months. And the last few.

  Asano said, “I was there at Aoyama Gakuin, when you took the preliminary tests.”

  Maddy remembered the tests. There had been a lecture hall, and about three hundred Japanese teenagers in it, faces lit by laptop screens; the twenty or so expatriate kids there to take the English version had been corralled by the UN organizers, herded into a smaller lab with older desktop computers, tested on math and physics and logic, then on coordination and reflexes and spatial relationships, then on stranger things. Maddy remembered an even smaller room, part of the music school maybe, with a grand piano under a dust cover, where a middle-aged black man with a British accent had sat her in a sort of reclining pod like a first-class airline seat, covered her eyes with opaque red goggles, played low-frequency static at her through headphones for half an hour, and afterwards brought out a flat, Victorian-looking box of wood and glass and asked her to pick individual butterflies out from a dusty collection. There had been some Japanese in UN uniforms watching while she did that; maybe one of them had been Asano.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

  “It’s all right,” said Asano.

  As far as Maddy knew, she was the only one, Japanese or expat, out of the three hundred-odd who’d taken the test that day to make it through to advanced testing. She wondered if Asano had remembered her.

  Asano turned around at last. “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

  Maddy shrugged again. “I guess,” she said.

  “Why are you here?” Asano asked.

  Maddy stared at her for a long moment. They’d asked her the question, in various forms, three or four times in the course of the testing, and she’d given the kind of bullshit answers somebody in one of her dad’s movies would have given: blah blah make a difference, blah blah save the planet. After a while they’d believed her, maybe, or maybe by then they’d just put enough money and time into her that they’d stopped caring why she was there so long as she did what she was told. And she could say the same thing now and it might even be true, but it would still sound like bullshit.

  She just didn’t want to get into it, the tangle of frustration and ambition and loneliness and credulity and outrage that had brought her here, that had made the Colombine seem like a better idea than graduating high school and going off to college or joining the Army or just hitchhiking to Rhode Island and getting a job as a waitress, and she didn’t want to get into it with Asano, and she particularly didn’t want to get into it with Asano when she was standing in a bathroom on an oil rig in the Arctic Ocean wearing nothing but a towel and dripping cold water on her shower shoes.

  Instead she asked, “Is it true that in Shenzen, last year, Tanimura ran away, and you had to drag him back?”

  “Where did you hear that?” Asano asked.

  Maddy didn’t answer.

  Asano sighed.

  “Tanimura-kun. . . . It hasn’t been easy for him,” she said. “Be good to Tanimura. He could use a friend.”

  “I’m not here to be anybody’s friend, Captain Asano,” said Maddy.

  Thinking: No, you’re here to be Tanimura’s fucking backup band.

  Asano said something to herself in Japanese that Maddy didn’t catch a word of, and shook her head.

  “What?” said Maddy.

  “It isn’t fair,” said Asano, “what they’re doing to you.”

  “We’re saving the world,” Maddy said. “No one told us it was going to be easy.”

  Asano put a hand on Maddy’s damp shoulder.

  “Maddy-san,” she said. “The lady robot pilots in those anime Jacob likes to watch—they die. A lot. That doesn’t have to be you.” She let the hand drop. she said.

  And she left.

  Maddy went to the sink, turned on the water, took out her toothbrush. She knew that one. Be careful. As if she’d be here at all, if she was.

  Maddy’s parents had sent her to a therapist for a little while, when they were still living together, before the divorce was final. The therapist, a grayhaired, soft-spoken Chinese-American, had taught Maddy a breathing and meditation exercise that was supposed to reduce anxiety. He’d told Maddy to imagine a room, a quiet room somewhere deep in her mind, with a door she could close, leaving on the other side of it everything she was afraid of or angry at or that she just couldn’t control—not to wish those things away or imagine them gone, but just to put them aside for a little while, put herself beyond their reach.

  Maddy had imagined not a room but a beach, the ocean to her right and to her left a field of grass-topped dunes, herself seated comfortably on a rock. The door was there, in front of her, standing free on the pale sand, its white paint and the brass of its knob shining in the sun, and the world was still there on the other side, the noise of it just barely audible beneath the sound of the surf and of the wind in the grass.

  Now Maddy was there, and the noise behind the door was louder, much louder; something was rattling the knob, trying to juggle the old-fashioned key from the lock. Sooner or later something was going to break through.

  Maddy, watching the door from her perch on the rock, discovered she was fine with that. Sooner or later something was going to break through; all right, it would break through. And when it did, Maddy was going to kick the shit out of it.

  The drop goes wrong. Maddy knows it’s going wrong as soon as the Colombine tumbles out of the back of the transport, curled fetal in its packed ball of parachutes and airbags, the cockpit whirling like a fairground ride to keep Maddy upright. Maddy and the Colombine fall out of the sky into the European zone, and every screen in the cockpit shows nonsense, then goes solid blue; the motors steadying the hamster ball seize up for a stomach-twisting moment, then let go, leaving Maddy turning slowly head-down as the Colombine continues to fall. She has time to decide that whatever’s happened to the screens has done for the parachutes and the airbags as well, and that she’s going to die; and that while she doesn’t especially want to die, there’s nothing she can do about it; and that she ought to have some last words, except there isn’t anything she particularly wants to say to anybody; and that that’s kind of sad.

  And then the parachutes open. The Colombine lands, hard. Maddy feels its knees take most of the impact, feels it throw out one arm as it comes down in a crouch, but the screens stay blue and the controls, when Maddy works them, do nothing. The Colombine’s alive, but the cockpit is dead.

  Maddy levers the cockpit open with the emergency bar and climbs down, leaving the Colombine kneeling in the shadow of a house-sized boulder. The ground is cracked black rock, sloping up behind the Colombine to a snow-covered ridge, its top only a few hundred feet away. As she comes out into the sun Maddy finds grass and tiny white flowers, and a steep slope down into a narrow valley with another ridge across it, not as high as this one, its slopes lined with dark evergreens, pine or fir or something; Maddy’s never been good with trees. The sun is redder than it should be—that’s a zone thing—but it’s warm, and Maddy sits down and takes off her helmet, and after a little while she li
es down in the grass, looking up at the sky, cold blue with white clouds.

  She’s somewhere in the Alps, or what used to be the Alps, German or maybe Austrian. She can’t say more specifically than that. She figures she’s at least ten miles inside the zone, maybe more. They say the zones are bigger on the inside than on the outside, that it takes longer to walk out of a zone than it took to walk in. Maddy doesn’t know how they know that, how many people have walked into a zone and then back out, but she supposes it must have happened a few times. They say the laws of physics are different in the zones, that that’s why people who stay in the zones without the drugs get sick, why the living things that come out of the zones die so easily and the machines are so hard to kill. It doesn’t, to Maddy’s mind, adequately explain why those machines can only be stopped by teenagers with giant robots, but it’s a fact that tanks and planes didn’t do so well, so maybe it’s true; and whatever’s going on in the zones it’s fucked up Maddy’s GPS along with everything else.

  She can feel the Colombine there where she left it, out of site on the other side of the boulder; she’s found she knows where it is, always, without thinking, the way she knows where her left hand is. She’s never told the UN doctors about this, never talked about it even with Abby and Jacob, though she assumes they feel the same connection to the Scaramouche and the Pantalon. Maddy’s part of the Colombine now and it’s part of her: a mute external body, androgynous at best despite the name, sort of butch even, the long-limbed strength and slightly inhuman proportions of an El Greco saint in thirty feet of blood-red machinery, but part of her.