The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Once we were on our way, a big dark soldier emerged, and sat beside me. We spoke each other’s language, the now-useless chip unneeded. I was more glad of his company than I could say. He put his arm around me. We stank of sweat, both of us, and of the wet greenness of the geography we were leaving. But at World’s Edge, whoever gives a damn about such things? We didn’t make love, have sex. I think it was once called heavy petting, what we did, millions of lifetimes ago, or last year. Plenty of others were doing the same.

  Under us, the heavy bounding drone of the VTO, solid as granite up in that space beyond all else.

  My soldier left me once only during the journey, and returned with a bottle of whisky. “Drink this,” he said, “take a good big drink. Cure all your blues.”

  EXCHANGE RATE

  Hal Clement

  Hal Clement – the writing name of longtime science teacher Harry Clement Stubbs – made his first sale in 1942 to Astounding, and became one of the mainstays of that magazine throughout the ’50s and ’60s, with much of his best short work appearing there. Clement’s most famous novel is Mission of Gravity, which in retrospect still holds up as one of the best SF books of the ’50s, although I am also fond of the underrated Cycle of Fire. Clement’s influence on later writers such as G. David Nordley, Stephen Baxter, Harry Turtledove, Janet Kagan, and others is clear and unmistakable. His other books include the novels Star Light (the sequel to Mission of Gravity), Needle, Close to Critical, Iceworld, Ocean on Top, and The Nitrogen Fix, and the collections Small Changes, Natives of Space, and The Best of Hal Clement. Clement’s most recent books are a new novel, Half Life, and an omnibus reprint of three of his previous novels (Needle, Iceworld, and Close to Critical), bound together as The Essential Hal Clement, Volume 1: Trio for Slide Rule and Typewriter (NESFA Press, PO Box 809, Framingham, MA 01701 – $25 plus $2 postage. Volume 2: Music of Many Spheres is a collection of short fiction, bringing a lot of Clement’s long unavailable work back into print.) He’s also rumoured to be at work on a sequel to Mission of Gravity. In 1999, Clement was given the prestigious Grandmaster Award by the Science Fiction Writers of America, an award previously won by writers such as Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

  Although known as one of the most scrupulously accurate of the “hard science” writers, someone careful to always get the scientific details right, Clement also has a rich and lively imagination, especially when it comes to alien lifeforms, and he has created some of the most memorable alien characters in science fiction. He’s outdone even himself, though, in the suspenseful novella that follows, in which harried human explorers (under pressure in more ways than one!) must try to figure out the lifeways and motivations of some extremely strange and enigmatic alien creatures on one of the strangest planets ever portrayed in science fiction – and do it all before the clock runs out.

  “ERNI! NIC! HOLD IT! Senatsu’s found a break!”

  The speaker was excited, but neither driver bothered to look up. A “break” on Halfbaked meant little to human eyes; it was a spot where radar frequencies, not human vision, could get through the streaming and usually ionized clouds which kept starlight from the surface. Neither cared to look at stars. They were very worried men at the moment and didn’t even look at each other. However, Ben Cloud kept talking, and his next words did manage to get their attention.

  “It’s near Hotlat plus eight and Rotlat plus eighty, close to the track they should be taking back here.”

  The operators of the Quarterback did glance at each other this time. Facial expressions didn’t show through breathing masks. They didn’t need to. For a moment both were silent; then the younger spoke aloud.

  “Has she really spotted anything definite?”

  “She thinks so. She’s checking all the usable spectra now. Stand by; she should be through in a few seconds.”

  Quarterback’s drivers looked wordlessly at each other once more, and Dominic hit the quick-cutout that brought the runabout to a halt. Operating any sort of surface vehicle on Halfbaked demanded full attention.

  “Well?” said Erni. After all, a few seconds had passed.

  “Stand by. She’s still at it.” A longer pause followed, until even the more patient Nic was tempted to break it, but Ben resumed before either listener actually gave in.

  “She says yes! It’s Jellyseal’s pattern.”

  “Anything from the girls?”

  “No, but Jelly’s moving apparently under control and at a reasonable speed.”

  “What’s that? Or can Sen tell?” cut in the elder driver.

  “The tanker’s doing about a hundred and eighty kilos an hour. Must be open country.”

  “How’s she measuring that?”

  “Tell you soon. Sen’s taking all the advantage she can of the break, but it’ll take a while to cross-check with memory. They’ll probably have to move a bit farther, too.”

  “If the speed is real, they’ve probably unloaded.”

  “Probably. Maria reported they’d reached what seemed to be the broadcast site and found something city-ish, though she never really described it. That was nearly twenty hours ago as you both know. That was about five hundred kilos outward of where they seem to be now. They could have emptied, loaded up again, and easily be at Sen’s current fix. You can stop worrying.”

  “And the natives did acknowledge receipt of the shipment, and even said how delighted they were, didn’t they?” asked Dominic. “But no more word was coming from Maria and Jessi. That’s the picture we had from Tricia before we started.

  “She was firm about the acknowledgment, yes. Still is. You know how she waffles when a message seems to involve abstractions, though. They were very repetitious, she says, talking about how they understood why we couldn’t send pure hydrogen and commenting again and again on the wide variety of compounds there were anyway – ”

  “I got all that. Paraffin, whether you’re speaking European or North American Anglic, does have a lot of different hydrogen compounds in it. I’m admitting we know the girls got there, but still wondering why we haven’t heard from them since. We’ll stop worrying – maybe – when they say something.” Erni’s tone suggested strongly that he wanted no advice as he went on, “You say they’re backtracking? Using the same route?”

  “Senatsu hasn’t had a long enough look-see to tell. They’re just about on the path they took earlier, I gather, but remember we didn’t see them get to it. We did map more than half of it outbound, but I’d say – ”

  “We know all that!” snapped Erni. “What I want to know is whether Nic and I should keep on and try to meet them.”

  “I’d say no. It made sense to head for the transmission source when they seemed to be stuck there, but now we know they’re moving and presumably heading back here, it seems smarter to wait for them here at Nest.”

  “But suppose they still don’t report? How long do we wait? And what could keep them from talking to us, anyway?”

  “The same sorts of things that keep us from seeing them as often as we’d like. We’re talking to you all right now, but you’re only a few hundred ks away using multiple channel cross-link. They’re nearly fifty thousand. We can see even you only occasionally – less often than we can see them, since there are more clouds here on the dark side. You know all that as well as anyone. Halfbaked wasn’t built for long-range talking. It has too many kinds of clouds, too many kinds and strengths of charge dancing around in them, too many winds high and low and up and down and sideways and circular, too much pure distance –”

  “And natives who use AM communication but still make some sense. I know all that!” snapped Icewall.

  “Then please talk as though you did.” Ben was getting a little short, too. “Look, I know you’re worried, and I know why, even if I don’t have a shared name yet. It’s too bad the girls won the draw for the first load, but even you didn’t try to change it so Nic could go with Maria or you with Jessi. They went. They really weren’t in any more danger pushing a tanker a
round the landscape than at Nest, except for being farther from help if they needed it, of course. It isn’t as though this idiotic world had any nice stable places where you could put up a building and go to sleep with reasonable hope the ground wouldn’t pull apart under it before you woke up. I know your wives haven’t talked to us since they reported spotting their city, or village, or whatever it turned out to be. That’s a fact. I don’t dispute it, and I can’t account for it except with guesses I can’t support. So go ahead and worry. I can’t stop you, and I wouldn’t if I could. They’re your wives. I still think, though, that you’ll be smarter waiting for them here than going thirty or forty thousand kilos, a lot of it in sunlight, and trying to find them while they’re still moving and we can’t keep good contact, visual or verbal, with either of you.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Erni admitted in a much meeker tone. “Nic? You think we’d better go back, too?”

  Dominic Wildbear Yucca – Maria might no longer be alive but he was still entitled to their jointly chosen name because of their children – nodded silently, and without further words looked carefully around through the windows ringing the cockpit. One looked before moving anywhere on Halfbaked. Neither window nor roof port was made of glass. There were too many fluorine compounds in Halfbaked’s atmosphere for silicate materials to be trusted. Silicon tetrafluoride is a gas even at most Terrestrial temperatures. Satisfied that no serious landscape change had sneaked by his notice during the talk, he repowered the driving system – stopping was nearly always safer than starting, and the control system reflected that fact – and sent the runabout into a fairly tight turn. The path was wide enough to need little steering care at the moment, though bushes, rocks which had rolled from the modest hills, cracks in the surface, and patches of vegetation which might or might not be on fire could be encountered any time.

  The spaceward side of Halfbaked was well covered with what looked to human beings like plant life, though its actual ecological role was still being argued. No animals had yet been seen, unless some of the large and small objects resembling fragments of burned paper which seemed to be borne on the fierce winds were actually flying instead. There was evidence on some of the plants that things were eating them, but the pool for the first confirmed animal sighting was still unclaimed after five Terrestrial months. Two schools of thought were developing among the biologists: the katabolic part of the ecology was being handled by microbes, or was being taken care of by fire.

  Drivers could devote very little of their attention to specimen search while their machines were in motion. The Quarterback trembled slightly as it moved, partly from ground irregularities, occasionally from temblors, and mostly from winds of constantly varying violence and direction. At their present height above the reference ellipsoid – Halfbaked had no seas to provide an altitude zero – the pressure averaged about seventeen atmospheres, wavering irregularly and on a time scale of minutes by about two each way. With its molecular weight averaging well over a hundred, wind was both difficult and unsafe to ignore.

  Dominic nursed the vehicle up to nearly two hundred kilometres per hour. There were few obstacles now in sight, and the red and green deeplights flashing alternately from their masts on each side of the runabout provided shadow patterns easily interpreted as range information. It was better than computer-backed radar in the continuous howl of microwave and longer static emitted by the local plants. The lights also allowed human-reflexive response time; glancing back and forth between the outside and a screen, no matter how precise and detailed the latter’s readings might be, would have put a much lower limit on permissible driving speed much of the time.

  Erni kept his hands away from the controls, but watched their surroundings as carefully as his partner. Both could see in all directions even here on night side, since a bank of floods supplemented the deep-lights and there was nearly continuous and fairly bright lightning among the clouds overhead. Halfbaked, less than eight million kilometres from the centre of its G3-to-4 sun, had plenty of energy to expend on luminous, biological, and even comprehensible local phenomena.

  The driver did cast an occasional glance at his younger companion. He would never have admitted that Erni could be more worried about Jessi than he himself was about Maria, but the Icewalls had been married less than three years as against the Yuccas’ fourteen, and might possibly be less philosophical about the unpredictability of life.

  Apparently greater worry was not hurting Erni’s driving judgment, though. His “Watch it!” from the right-side station was essentially simultaneous with Nic’s cutting out drive again. Quarterback came to a quick halt, but not a smooth one.

  Active faults don’t move smoothly; even on Earth they cause quakes, often violent ones. Under more than seven Earth gravities, the quakes tend to be much more frequent and no less violent. Both drivers floated quietly at their stations and watched. There was nothing else to do until what they saw made detailed sense.

  The fault could be seen half a kilometre ahead, though rain was starting to fall, but there were no hills close enough to offer a threat of slides or rockfalls. If there had been, it was likely that not even trained driver reflexes could have coped with all the probabilities, and more worry would have been in order.

  The ground movement was largely horizontal, they could see and feel. The fault started from some indeterminate point to their left, slanted across in front, and extended out of sight ahead and to their right. It did have a small vertical component; the far side had lifted nearly half a metre since they had passed the level site less than an hour before. Rather casually, Erni reported their stopping and the reason for it to Nest; Ben acknowledged with equal aplomb.

  “Unless it gets a good deal higher, we won’t have any trouble in getting past,” Icewall concluded.

  “If it’s still shaking, maybe you ought to get by before it rises any more,” was the answering suggestion. Erni glanced at his partner, nodding thoughtfully.

  “You have a point. All right. We’ll send out bugs to see if it’s any lower within a kilo or two, and climb at the best place. We’ll call you when we start. If you don’t hear from us in two or three minutes after that, someone come out and collect the evidence.”

  “If we can spare anyone.” That point also was well taken, though too obvious to all concerned to be worthy of answer. Energy was essentially limitless thanks to ubiquitous miniature fusion units, and self-reproducing pseudolife equipment was almost equally so as long as there was no shortage of raw material; but personnel on a world like Halfbaked was another matter entirely.

  The servobugs guided them to a spot a few hundred metres to the right. The men called them back, powered up again and sent the runabout slowly toward the infant cliff, stopping again some two metres away. Both operators watched carefully for a minute or so. A slip of a millimetre or two every few seconds was accompanied by more shock waves. One could only guess whether an especially large jolt was waiting to be triggered by the car’s weight, but the regularity of the motions themselves was encouraging. Nic retracted the dozen wheels on which they had been travelling and let the body settle onto its caterpillar treads; then, for reasons he didn’t bother to state, he motioned Erni to take over. The latter obeyed in equal silence. Even more slowly than before, Quarterback eased forward until the treads touched the tiny escarpment and the front of the vehicle began to lift.

  The frequent small shocks became much easier to feel but no more worrisome. The men could see the front of the vehicle lifting but not feel it; up and down, even under heavy gravity, were not obvious except by sight to people floating in water – and sight needed a better reference horizon than this world with its vast size and short atmospheric scale height could provide.

  Tension mounted as the mass centre of the vehicle approached the edge. Both men clenched their fists and held their breaths as it passed and the machine rocked forward.

  In theory, the runabout wouldn’t buckle even if its entire fourteen-hundred-ton mass �
� some ten thousand tons weight, here – were supported only at the centre. Nesters, however, tended to have an engineering bias toward regarding such theory mainly as a guide for planning experiments. This sort of experiment had been done before but not, as far as either driver knew, with acceleration from seismic waves helping out the gravity.

  The body did hold. The impact as it finished rocking forward and the front touched down was gentle, somewhat cushioned by a patch of half-metre-wide, viciously spined growths resembling barrel cacti. Dark red, almost black, fluid which spattered from these crusted over almost at once as the air touched it, but slightly to the men’s surprise they did not ignite.

  A moment later Quarterback was resuming speed with Erni still driving. Nic reported their new status to Nest, added encouraging details about the stresses just survived, and asked for an update on the tanker.

  “Still moving, still apparently on the way back,” replied Ben. “Average speed about a hundred sixty.”

  “Did they really slow down, or is that just a better measure?” Nic barely beat his friend to the question.

  “The latter, Senatsu thinks. But they’re coming, almost certainly backtracking on their original path. They’re not heading straight towards Nest, but nearly Hotsouth towards the dark side. We’re wondering now whether the original guess about travel being better out of the sunlight was right, or if they have some other reason. There’s still no direct word from the girls.”

  The flotation water was clear enough to show part of Erni’s frown above his breathing mask, but he said nothing. The clusters of spiky barrels were becoming more numerous, and even though he knew contact would not harm the Quarterback he disliked casual destruction.

  The drive settled down to routine. Quarterback didn’t have far to go by Halfbaked standards. They had barely started their trip to the “city” reported by Jellyseal’s drivers, which was nearly fifty thousand kilometres from Nest along a geodesic and much farther by realistic standards. The topography seldom allowed a completely free choice of path, and it had seemed wise to make most of the journey out of sunlight as long as there was no obvious reason for haste. Keeping the cargo below its boiling point would be much easier, for one thing.