Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  Late one night, just as she was drifting off, she heard a scratching sound. Something small and rough. Was she imagining it? She took a flashlight and inched her way towards the sound. It was coming from the next dome, but it stopped as she neared it. Of course: she had passed a plexi window; they had seen the light.

  They moved around, like mice, nibbling here and there. Were they using their fingernails? Did they still have fingernails? They could be using the rocks to scrape away at the dome, making the walls here and there thinner and thinner, so that one night they might poke their hands through and pull her out.

  Maybe she couldn’t just sit and wait for rescue; that was too far off. What were they thinking about? What were they planning?

  She was a scientist; she could fight them. She thought about how to kill them, now. She reminded herself that they were aliens, they were after her. Sometimes they stood, one at each plexi, just to frighten her, to say she couldn’t escape them. Well, she could. She could escape them if they were dead.

  She hated having to think this way—and who was responsible for that? Who was forcing her to think of that?

  It would have to be something that got them all together, all at once. That meant an explosion. Yes, blow them up entirely, leave no trace. They were fond of standing together like forks, good.

  There was a set of explosives and a remote fuse, two in fact. She took them to the kitchen table and read the instructions. It was easy. She took off the wrappings and stopped.

  She sat at the table, her hands shaking.

  She began to keep records about their movements. When she rose, she checked all the windows, recording where they were. They were almost always together. Sometimes one or two broke off and went up the rocky inclines. Did they still eliminate, then, and have the need for privacy? Were they mating?

  She heard scraping again. In the daytime. So now she had two reasons to go out: to see if they really were trying to scratch through the walls, and to set up the explosives, just in case. She didn’t have to use them; it was merely a precaution.

  So. Where should she place the explosives? She went back to her log. They liked to appear in her windows, but usually one by one for that. They liked to go as a group to the thick water, but that was too far away, and the water would probably shield them. Occasionally they picked through the rubble of the trash heap and took a scrap of something.

  She decided to take out some small objects, to put them along with the explosives, in the trash heap. She decided on a toothbrush, a cup, a candy bar. The candy bar would make it seem like she was trying to see if they still ate; that would satisfy their curiosity.

  She watched from the plexi. The first day they didn’t go in the water; they merely stood about. The second day only two of them went in. The scratchings continued overnight, like animals pawing at the door to get in. On the third day, she was rewarded.

  They all went in the thick water, sliding through it and then sliding down, until their feet vanished, their hips vanished, their heads vanished. Sibbetts suited up, unbolted the door and walked out. She walked around the domes. Yes, there were scratches; there were areas that had been peeled away. She thought maybe it had proved too hard for them, until she circled around to the back, where her lab was. There was a bigger spot here, a more delicate spot. She tapped her foot against it, and it gave slightly. Her heart pounded. They were distracting her, she thought, with scratching at other places so she wouldn’t concentrate on this spot.

  Her mouth was dry. She looked at the beach and saw that someone’s head was showing through the line of the water. She moved quickly to the trash heap and put out the items, hiding the explosives under a bit of trash. She saw that three of them were kicking their way out of the water, pushing themselves to shore. She waved (sarcastically), and went inside.

  Let them think what they would.

  There was no doubt in her mind that they were about to break in. She went to the lab room, got down on her knees, pressing against the wall until she found the soft spot. It wouldn’t take them long. She placed a plastic sheet over it and taped around it. This would protect her against a breach, temporarily at least.

  If they stopped scratching at the walls, she would leave them alone. She would give them that chance, one last chance. It was not her decision; it was theirs.

  She folded herself into her bed that night, hoping there would be nothing but silence around her. But the scratching started, the little nibblings at the wall; that night, they seemed to be at all the walls from all sides. Had she missed other spots that were just as well worn as the one in the lab?

  She bolted upright. She turned the lights on, crouching and running through the domes, listening. The sounds stopped as she drew near, then they started up somewhere else, as if they were tracking her, aware of her every move.

  She ran around, and wherever she thought a sound had come from, she pounded her fist just above it (she would not push her hand through a weakened spot, no, she wouldn’t be pushed to that kind of error); to the top at first and then over to the right or to the left, she varied it because she didn’t want them to work out how she would act.

  She did it for hours, skittering around, hating them, for the sounds, for their concentration, for their harmony—they were working in concert against her; if one of them weakened, there was another and she only had her wits and her sense and her logic and her hard, hard determination.

  In the afternoon, she blew them up. They finally came to see what she had laid out in the trash heap, picking up the toothbrush, holding up the cup. They came as they usually did, and she pulled the switch and there was a muffled boom! And they were shattered, just like that.

  She didn’t have the nerve to go out and look, not right away. She waited until she stopped shaking, and then she wrote down, again, her reasons: How they didn’t eat, how they drank the water. The way they were breaking in. That they wanted to infect her.

  She added to her notes: they would bring the pollution back to earth.

  She stayed inside for two days. She was used to being inside, but there was something in her heart, in her mind, somewhere, that wanted her to go outside. To see. Just to check. Something.

  Finally she suited up, quite slowly, took the laser guns, and let herself out. She turned around carefully, surveying the area before moving to the blast site. The hole the explosion had made was deeper than she’d thought it would be. There was a glittering along the walls. Metallic ash? She surveyed it warily, some ten yards away. Most of the debris would be plastics, with some metal. There shouldn’t be much dust. She moved closer, squinting through the window of her helmet. She was afraid there would be blood, but she couldn’t see any blood.

  She spun around. For a moment she’d felt that someone was watching her. But there was no one. Of course there was no one.

  She was close now, standing at the edge of the blackest part, just looking slowly around, along the ground, checking the bits and pieces of things. She glanced quickly, not knowing what there was she could be afraid of.

  A movement. She scanned along the outside wall of the dome. Something, yes, something small. A piece that had stuck to the wall was now, slowly, falling down.

  And another. Yes, very small. That’s why it was so hard to see, there were drops of things moving down the wall. Her heart lurched but she thought she had to verify it, she would imagine things if she didn’t.

  She walked up to the wall and bent over slightly, peering at it.

  A piece of flesh down at the bottom of the wall, on the ground. How had it survived? She stared at it. Something else slid down the wall. So small, like a drop, and while she watched it fell at the edge of the skin and joined it.

  She straightened up suddenly. That glittering—the wall seemed to have a sheen; it wavered a little. She told herself to stop thinking, to stop anticipating. She forced her body to still itself, she made herself stare, unblinking, at the steady, slow accretion of the sheen, so that the thin wet slick of it gather
ed, getting thicker, until it pooled to a heavy drop. There were drops here and there, small ones that gathered weight from another small one nearby; others that never moved and seemed to be waiting.

  Some of them shivered, impatiently. They hovered against the wall until the weight shifted them down to a drop below them, or slightly to the side.

  As she watched, she could see the largest one fall down minutely, shifting to the left, heading for the skin on the ground. Then it joined it. Of course it was still small, it was skin, yes, but just a bit of skin.

  Sibbetts leaned over it. She bent closer. Another drop found it and it moved, just a little. The tip of a finger. She waited again, without moving, until the silvery, sheeny stuff—thick water, she knew it—formed another drop, and reached it. She could see where the top sliver of the fingernail was just starting to be visible. It was being built in front of her.

  Sibbetts sucked in the air inside her helmet. Was there no relief from this kind of horror? They would assemble themselves every day, bit by bit, until she would wake one morning and find a balloon-face pressed against the plexi, or all four of them, touching at the shoulder, just standing together and pointing at her. It was unbearable—the thought that they would be there again, knowing what she’d done—she could feel her eyes rolling back in her head. She could hear herself whimper.

  And the scratchings would begin again. Her shoulders tightened. She would be inside, listening to them claw their way to her, grinning, nodding, blending, aiming themselves at her. She could see, indeed, that they had turned into a joint organism; organism, yes, not people, and she should dispel any lingering trace of regret or guilt.

  She went back to her lab for comfort. She stood and looked around, at the shelves of specimens—mostly the thick water. There were plastic jars and glass jars. They were all sizes, and there was a whole container of more jars in the clean room.

  She thought her way through it, and then she assembled her materials the next day—jars, lids, pipettes, scoops, tweezers—and put on her suit. She carried the things carefully to the ruined dome. The wall still glistened faintly, but on the ground there were small staggered movements as globules combined. She took her first plastic cup and ticked her eyes along the ground, evaluating. That finger she had seen the day before was now assembled to the tip of the cuticle. But there was a piece of the top of the head complete with hair, far to the right. Next to that a bone with a scrap of sinew. A piece of beige skin inched towards it. She began to index, in her head, any recognizable thing. An elbow, a rib, a foot nearly complete and flexing hopefully. She bent over, watching. The things moved; they had purpose. “Probably dying to get together again,” she thought, and smiled. She could stop that.

  She opened jars and took the larger parts, and the moveable parts—she would have none of them wandering away, gathering behind a rock or in the sea, repairing.

  Every other day she went out, gathering with her jars and vats, picking out the hearts, the tongues, the scar on Jenks’ thigh, two tattoos (was that Squirrel or Darcy?).

  The hearts and lungs and guts could wait; they were going nowhere. Feet and hands had to come first, but the heads—no, they would be gathered in pieces. It was too disturbing, even for her analytic bent, her Euclidean eye. It was enough that she would reassemble them in her mind, put the puzzle together, intellectually. Let it remain intellectual—let her surmise that the jar on the top shelf belonged with the jar on the bottom shelf, cheek-by-jowl, brow to chin. They were like lovers who were no good for each other and should be kept apart.

  Or, at least, no good for her.

  She gathered them, plucking them and sorting them. Would they only truly recognize their own or would they pollinate—making a Brute-Darcy, a Squirrel-Jenks, a Squirrel-Darcy? They had ballooned into each other; they might have the desire to form one interconnected being: eight legs, eight arms, four hearts, one mind.

  One brain bloomed and she bottled it, not waiting for the brainpan to find its home. Four brains, each on a shelf. They might have achieved telepathy; she would see.

  So, at the end, over the course of two weeks, she spooned them up, in segments or in parts, and jarred them. At first she kept them dry, then she thought—mercifully thought, scientifically thought; or heroically thought: they want the water.

  She went down to the sea, and carved out a piece in her bucket, and brought it back, weighted with virtue. And she cut off pieces into each jar, tightening the lids—no hokum from them, delighting in the water—and sealed them tight.

  In six months, in five months, in four months, in three—soon, soon, there would be a beep on her screen, the first text from home.

  “How are you?” it would ask, and she would sit down, a smile on her face, her hands slightly shaking. The eyes behind her, blinking, the hearts beating, the lungs insisting on their own thick-water breathing—all of them watching, and she would type:

  We are well.

  The War Artist

  TONY BALLANTYNE

  Tony Ballantye (tonyballantyne.com) is a British writer living in Oldham, England, with his wife and children, whose works tend to focus on the subject of Artificial Intelligence and robotics. In college he studied mathematics and later became a teacher, first teaching math and, later, Internet technology. He began publishing SF short stories in 1998, mostly in Interzone, and has since published three idea-rich novels: Recursion (2004), Capacity (2005), and Divergence (2007), which comprise the Recursion trilogy. Twisted Metal (2009) and Blood and Iron (2010) are two novels in his Robot Wars. If there is such a thing as post-cyberpunk hard SF, that’s what he writes.

  “The War Artist” was published in the original anthology Further Conflicts, edited by Ian Whates. War artists depict war, often creating their images en plein aire, though the scenes are military rather than scenic. There have been both official and unofficial war artists. In both World Wars I and II, the British Ministry of Information appointed or just drafted artists and deployed them to the battlefield to paint and sketch. Ballantyne uses that quirk of history to speculate on a future in which, if this goes on …

  My name is Brian Garlick and I carry an easel into battle.

  Well, in reality I carry a sketch book and several cameras, but I like to give people a picture of me they can understand.

  The sergeant doesn’t understand me, though. He’s been staring since we boarded the flier in Marseilles. Amongst the nervous conversation of the troops, their high-pitched laughter like spumes of spray on a restless sea, he is a half-submerged rock. He’s focussing on me with dark eyes and staring, staring, staring. As the voices fade to leave no sound but the whistle of the wind and the creak of the pink high-visibility straps binding the equipment bundles, he’s still staring, and I know he’s going to undermine me. I’ve seen that look before, though less often than you might expect. Most soldiers are interested in what I do, but there are always those who seem to take my presence as an insult to their profession. Here it comes …

  “I don’t get it,” he says. “Why do we need a war artist?”

  The other soldiers are watching. Eyes wide, their breath fast and shallow, but they’ve just found something to distract them from the coming fight. Well, I have my audience; it’s time to make my pitch to try and get them on my side for the duration of the coming action.

  “That’s a good question,” I reply. I smile, and I start to paint a picture. A picture of the experienced old hand, the unruffled professional.

  “Someone once said a good artist paints what can’t be painted. Well, that’s what a war artist is supposed to do.”

  “You paint what can’t be painted,” says the Sergeant. It’s to his credit he doesn’t make the obvious joke. For the moment he’s intrigued, and I take advantage of the fact.

  “They said Breughel could paint the thunder,” I say. “You can paint lightning, sure, but can you make the viewer hear the thunder? Can you make them feel that rumble, deep in their stomach? That’s the job of a war artist, to pa
int what can’t be painted. You can photograph the battle, you can show the blood and the explosions, but does that picture tell the full story? I try to capture the excitement, the fear, the terror.” I look around the rows of pinched faces, eyes shiny. “I try to show the heroism.”

  I’ve composed my picture now, I surreptitiously snap it. That veneer of pride that overlays the hollow fear filling the flier as it travels through the skies.

  The sergeant sneers, the mood evaporates.

  “What do you know about all that?”

  I see the bitter smiles of the other soldiers. So I paint another picture. I lean forward and speak in a low voice.

  “I’ve been doing this for six years. I was in Tangiers after the first Denial of Service attack. I was in Barcelona when the entire Spanish banking system was wiped out; I was in Geneva when the Swiss government network locked. I know what we’re flying into, I know what it’s like to visit a State targeted by hackers.”

  There are some approving nods at this. Or is it just the swaying of the craft as we jump an air pocket? Either way, the sergeant isn’t going to be convinced.

  “Maybe you’ve seen some action,” he concedes. “Maybe you’ve been shot at. That doesn’t make you one of us. You take off the fatigues and you’re just another civilian. You won’t get jostled in the street back home, or refused service in shops. You won’t have people calling you a butcher, when all you’ve tried to do is defend their country.”

  This gets the troops right back on his side. I see the memory of the taunts and the insults written on their faces. Too many people were against us getting involved in the Eurasian war, numbers that have only grown since the fighting started. There’s a cold look in the troops’ eyes. But I can calm them, I know what to say.

  “That’s why the government sent me here. A war artist communicates the emotions their patron chooses. That’s why war artists are nearly always to be found acting in an official capacity. I’m here to tell your side of the story, to counteract those images you see on the web.”