The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  In those days, Roxie lived outside as much as she lived in. But the backyard gate proved inadequate; using her nose, she would easily flip the latch up and out of the way. Tying the latch only bought a few more days of security. Leaping was easy work, and a four-foot chain-link fence was no barrier at all. A series of ropes and lightweight chains were used and discarded. Finally Leslie went to a farm supply store and bought a steel chain strong enough to yank cars out of ditches. Years later, a friend from Alaska visited, and I asked sheepishly if our chain was overkill. No, it was pretty standard for sled dogs, she conceded. Then she told me what I already knew: “These animals love to run.”

  One morning, somebody’s dog was barking, and Leslie asked me to make sure it wasn’t hers. Peering out the dining room window, I found a beautiful red-and-white husky dancing on the patio, happy as can be.

  “It’s not your dog,” I told my girlfriend.

  Even burdened with the heavy chain, Roxie had killed a squirrel, and now she was happily flinging the corpse into the air and catching it again. The game was delicious fun until the limp squirrel fell out of reach, and then the wailing began. I got dressed and found a shovel in the garage, and when I picked up her prize by its tail, the dog leaped happily. Oh, I was saving her day! But with the first spade of earth, she saw my betrayal for what it was, and the wailing grew exponentially.

  Two nights later, Leslie called for help. Again, her dog had killed an animal. She didn’t know what kind; despite being a farmer’s kid, Leslie has an exceptionally weak stomach, and she didn’t want to look too closely. But if I could drop over and take care of the situation …

  It was late, and I was very tired. But I stopped by that next afternoon, when no humans were home. A half-grown opossum was baking in the sun. Using my growing puddle of wisdom, I gave my girlfriend’s dog a quick walk and put her inside before burying the bloated body. Then I let Roxie back out on her chain, and she hurried to the spot where the opossum had been, sniffing and digging, and then flinging herself down on her back to roll on the ripe, wondrous ground.

  After a year of dating, I moved in with both of them, and that next spring, Leslie and I dug a pond below the patio. That’s where we found the opossum’s grave. Rot and time had eaten the flesh from the skull, and I put the prize in a little jar that I set on a shelf in the spare bedroom that had become my office.

  After several days, the new asteroid surfaces again on the Web, this time wearing an official designation. The bolide is found to be exceptionally dark, lending evidence that this could be a short-term comet with most of its volatiles bled away. A tiny albedo means it must be larger than it appears in the images. Two black kilometers across, and maybe more. As promised, the one-in-six-thousand chance of an impact has been discarded. Extra data allow astronomers to plot a lovely elliptical orbit that reaches out past Saturn and then dives inside the Earth’s orbit. Calculations are still in flux, I read online. If the object starts to act like a comet, watery fountains and gaseous vents will slow it down or speed it up, depending on chaotic factors. These are complications that will mean much, or nothing. But for the moment, the odds of an impact with the Earth have shifted by a factor of twenty.

  “One-in-three-hundred,” I read at the ScienceDaily site.

  In other words, it is easier to fill an inside straight in poker. And if the object’s trajectory makes any substantial change, the chance of an impact will probably—probably—drop to one-in-infinity.

  I grew up with black Labradors in the house. They were docile animals, a little foolish but always good-hearted, and each one began his day by asking, “How can I make my owner proud of me?”

  No husky thinks in those subservient, dim-witted terms.

  Leslie grew up on a farm full of dogs and cats, but those pets lived outdoors. Because of that and because she wasn’t home during the day, she’d had limited success housebreaking Roxie. Of course I like to tell myself that once I had moved in, the chaos turned to discipline. But the truth is a more complex, less edifying business: To make certain our dog was drained in the morning, I walked her. Since I worked at home, taking Roxie outside for the midday pee was easily done. And when my girlfriend was tired in the evening, I would throw a thirty-foot lead on the beast and take her up to the park and back again.

  But “Who trained who?” is a valid question.

  The evening walk came after the human dinner. When I put down the fork, the dog would begin to whine and leap, sometimes poking me in the gut with her paw. Disciplining her was endless work, and often futile. She was too quick to grab, too graceful to corral. One night, watching some favorite TV show, I got a little too clever and lured her upstairs. Then after a few words about what a spoiled bitch she was, I shut the door between us, and after a few seconds of loud thumping, the house went quiet. At the first commercial break, I peeked through the door to find my dog sitting in the kitchen, waiting patiently. “Good girl,” I said, and as a reward, I let her come downstairs. She sat at my feet, as patient as I had ever seen her act, sometimes glancing my way with an expression full of meanings that I couldn’t quite read.

  When I went upstairs again, I discovered what she had done. In my office, on the throw rug, she had emptied her bladder. Here was a message, and the lesson was learned; and after that, our walks were a priority, and I tried to avoid treating her like inconvenient luggage.

  The dead comet surfaces in newspaper articles and on television. Its soulless official designation has been replaced by “Shelby,” which happens to be the off-the-cuff name given to it by its discoverers. The odds of an impact are fluctuating between one in three hundred and one in one thousand, depending on the expert being quoted. But even the most alarming voice sounds calm, particularly when he or she repeats the undeniable truth: The bolide is a long ways out and still traveling toward the sun. Any day now, Shelby will start to vent, and its orbit will shift some significant distance.

  Meanwhile, what has been an unnaturally mild winter ends with a single heavy snow. Fifteen wet inches fall in less than a day. Cars wear white pillars. The warm earth melts the first several inches, but what remains is impressive. With my four-year-old daughter’s help, I build a snowman in the front yard—my first snowman in forty years. And Roxie appreciates the snow, though she can’t leap into those places that aren’t plowed or shoveled. For several days, our walks are limited to the plowed streets, and it takes persistence and some coaxing before she finds a place worthy of her poop.

  I still run with her on the cool days. For several years, we haven’t gone farther than a mile. There is one course she accepts without complaint, knowing the turnaround point to the inch. One blustery afternoon, when the last snow has melted, I take her into a stand of old pines growing beside the park’s nine-hole golf course, and then I lure her past that point, tricking her into running a course that is slightly longer than normal.

  Together, we maintain a comfortable nine-minute gait. And at the one-mile mark, almost exactly, she begins to limp. She looks pained and pitiful, right up to the moment when we start to walk home, and then her limp vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

  A few days later, she wakes me at four-thirty in the morning. Our walk is uneventful, but I can’t relax when I come home. Online, I jump to the New Scientist site, reading that somebody has uncovered photographic plates taken several decades ago. These old images show Shelby moping along near its perigee—a forgotten speck moving just outside Venus’s orbit. Astronomers now have fresh data to plug into their equations, refining their predictions. And more important, they don’t see any evidence of a coma or tail. During its last fiery summer, this old comet didn’t spill any significant volatiles.

  Worse still, between then and now our bolide has been moving along an exceptionally predictable line.

  Overnight, the odds of an impact with the Earth have shifted, jumping from a comforting one in three hundred, at their very worst, to a one-miserable-chance-in-thirteen.

  I used to be a semi-fast r
unner, and except in summer, Roxie was good for a six- or eight-mile adventure. And in late fall and winter, when temperatures dipped to a bearable chill, we would run twelve miles at a shot, or farther. She adored the snow. I think she knew every course by heart, even when drifts obscured the trails. We ran with human friends, and she always worked harder around new people, trying to impress them. But the real fun was to get out and smell the smells, and she relished her chances to pee against fresh trees and important fences.

  Roxie often lifted one hind leg like a boy dog would; but better than that, she occasionally did the canine equivalent of a handstand, throwing her piss high to fool strange dogs into thinking, “What a big bad bitch was here!”

  And she was exceptionally competitive. When we saw another dog up ahead, or human runners, or even a slow cyclist, it was critically important to put on a sprint and pass your opponent. And not only pass them, but look back at them too, laughing happily, flashing the canine equivalent of a “Beat your ass” grin.

  People who know me—family and friends, and even passing acquaintances—start to ask, “What do you think the real odds are?”

  Of an impact, they mean.

  Sad to say, being a science-fiction writer doesn’t give a person special knowledge. It should, but it doesn’t. All I can offer is the standard figure. One-in-thirteen. The most likely scenario is that Shelby will cross the Earth’s orbit at a distance far closer to us than we are to the moon. If there is a collision, it will happen in a little less than two years: on March 11, at approximately 3:45 AM local time. And because of the orbital dynamics, if the object does strikes, it will plunge down somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

  But like the talking heads on television, I remind my audience that these numbers are certain to change.

  In mid-April, I am a guest at a little SF convention held at one of our state colleges. Going in, I imagine an event where people talk openly about murderous asteroids and comets. But I keep forgetting that most fans today read nothing but fantasy and media tie-in books. They don’t want to invest much breath in what is a very depressing subject. And the rest of us—including me, I discover—have convinced ourselves that in the end, nothing will come of this.

  I enjoy the convention. Best of all, I relish the change in routine: I don’t have a dog to listen for in the wee hours. I can sleep all the way to a lazy seven-thirty, if I want. Though I can’t manage that trick, since my body isn’t geared for so much leisure.

  On Monday morning, I retrieve my dog from the kennel. As always, Roxie gives me a quick hello before heading for the car. Her poop has been fine, I learn, and she’s eaten every pill and every bite of food that I brought for her.

  The week turns summery warm. On Thursday morning, at one o’clock, I jump awake when Roxie begins to lick herself. She isn’t licking her privates, but instead she is obsessively wetting down her paws and legs, working hard until she has to stop to pant. Then she climbs to her feet and gets a drink from the toilet, then returns to the bedroom to lick her legs some more.

  I could push her into the hall and shut the door, but that would only make her whine. So I lie awake for two or three hours, thinking about work. I play with unfinished stories. I dance with a novel that still hasn’t sold. And when I don’t have anything else to consider, I think about Shelby. If this is the murderer of human civilization, doesn’t the bastard deserve a better name?

  By four in the morning, I am exhausted and anxious.

  Shutting the windows, I turn on the air conditioning. The cool air doesn’t seem to help my dog, but at least the noise covers up the sounds of licking. And by four-thirty, I manage to drift into sleep, fifteen minutes of dreamy slumber enjoyed before Roxie comes to the foot of the bed and starts to whine.

  One winter, my dog took an extraordinary interest in one portion of a local bike path. The path dove under a bridge. That bridge had three tunnels: The pedestrian tunnel was narrow and dark. Beside it was a wider tunnel where a peaceful stream flowed through. And on the far side was a second, equally wide tunnel meant for the overflow during high water. I usually gave Roxie a chance to drink, but suddenly she got it into her head that we needed to investigate the far tunnel. She would stand in the freezing creek, looking back at me with a questioning insistence. This was important; this mattered. We really need to cross over here, she was telling me. But there was no way to convince me to wade through shin-deep water, only to reach an empty tunnel floored with packed clay and trash.

  More than most humans, my dog is woven into her world. Drop a cardboard box anywhere near the bike path, and she will leap and woof until she is convinced that the new object isn’t dangerous. The same can be true for a kid’s bike left in a front yard, or a snowman that wasn’t there yesterday.

  One evening, years ago, Leslie and I were walking the dog together. One of our neighbors had been enjoying too much partying that night, and his wife had refused to let him inside. So he lay down on the front walk and fell asleep. At a glance, Roxie knew this was unusual. Somebody needed to be alerted. She began to bark and whine, and then dance, very much troubled by the fact we were dragging her away from what was clearly somebody in distress.

  She often notices details that the observant writer beside her has completely missed.

  One calm, cool afternoon, Roxie and I were running on a bike path when she suddenly, inexplicably went mad, running circles around me while staring up at the sky, her blue eyes huge and terrified.

  I looked up, and ugly me, I laughed.

  Floating directly above our heads was an enormous white spiral. It looked ominous, yes. To Roxie, this apparition must have been ready to drop on us, which was why we broke into a hard sprint. Off in the distance, a little biplane was spitting out random letters; a skywriter was practicing his trade. I was breathless and laughing, my strides pulled long by the panicked tugs. But the wind happened to be out of the north, and since we were racing south, the spiral hovered above us for another half mile before the trail mercifully bent westward, allowing us to escape. (Though I noticed that she never stopped watching the busy plane, having wisely decided that it must be to blame for this travesty of Nature.)

  Roxie often knew what I didn’t know. But when she tried to coax me into the mysterious tunnel, I ignored her. “You’re not the only stubborn creature in the family,” I warned. Then the weather grew warm, and a couple local kids went exploring. In the tunnel was the body of a teenager, a young man who had been buried in a shallow grave. Police were summoned, and for a week the underpass was cordoned off. Piles of excavated earth were left in the streambed, and when we could run through again, Roxie would stop and shamelessly sniff at the dirt, burying her nose in the ripest parts, every breath telling her stories about what was still, judging by her interest, vividly real.

  As it happened, the dead boy had vanished months ago from a group home for troubled youth. His two best friends in the world were arrested. It came out that there had been a fight over cigarettes. One boy confessed to being present at the murder, but he swore the other fellow had bashed in their buddy’s skull. With no other witnesses and only sketchy forensics, the state had to give a free pass in exchange for a testimony. But then at trial, the boy recanted his story. In the end, a brutal crime was committed and nobody went to prison. And I occasionally have to ask myself, “What would have happened if I’d listened to my dog? If we’d crossed that stream, and if I let her unearth the grave, would the police, given a fresher trail, have been able to make their case?”

  By week’s end, one spent comet has pushed everything else out of the news. Most of a dozen runners gather at the YMCA early Saturday morning, and Shelby is our first topic. I explain what I know about its delicate motion through the sky. I report that the venerable Hubble has spotted what looks like a tiny eruption of gas—probably carbon monoxide—from its equator. Will this make any difference? Maybe, I admit, and maybe not for the best. On the Torino scale, our enemy presently wears an ominous 7. 10 means doom, and the
group wrings some comfort in the gulf between 7 and 10. But the Torino scale is misleading. Only rocks and tiny asteroids can earn 8s or 9s. And the fatal 10 won’t kick in until a massive object—Shelby, for instance—has a 99 percent chance of impacting on the Earth’s face.

  For the last few days, the published odds of the horrific are hovering around one in eleven.

  “We’re going to have to blow it up,” one runner announces. “Stuff a thousand nukes on a missile, and hit the bastard hard.”

  “But that’s not going to help,” I mention.

  “Why not?”

  I don’t respond.

  But the other runners are listening, and our lone female—a little ex-gymnast—comes up beside me, asking, “Why won’t bombs work?”

  Small bolides aren’t brittle rocks ready to shatter to dust under a single hammer blow; they are usually soft, stubborn rubble piles filled with considerable empty space. “It’ll be like kicking a snowdrift,” I mention. Besides, we don’t have a fleet of rockets strong enough to fling hydrogen bombs across the solar system. Even with a crash program, no workable bomb could be launched for months. And without years of lead time, we won’t be able to carefully map Shelby’s surface before putting down at the best possible location. What we’ll have to do is attack it straight on, one or several tiny bullets battering one gigantic cannonball. Sure, the rubble pile might break into pieces. But that might turn a near-collision into a shotgun blast, hill-sized chunks raining down on everybody. And even if we are very lucky—if Shelby holds together and we trigger the perfect outgassing—that won’t happen until late next year. “Which won’t leave us any time, if we make a mistake then,” I remind them.