“But this one isn’t,” she said. He was moving along the deck now, holding tight to a railing next to the swaying container stack. Looking back, he saw her following doggedly, but still twenty or more feet back.
Lightning day-lit the scene for a moment, and Gennady thought he saw someone where nobody in their right mind should be. “Did you see that?” He waited for her to catch up and helped her along. Both of them were drenched and the water was incredibly cold.
Her glasses were beaded with water. Why didn’t she just take them off? Her mouth moved and he heard “See what?” through his earbuds, but not through the air.
He tried to pitch his voice more conversationally—his yelling was probably unnecessary and annoying. “Somebody on top of one of the stacks.”
“Let me guess: it’s the stack with the plutonium.”
He nodded and they kept going. They were nearly to the stack when the ship listed particularly far and suddenly he saw bright orange flashes overhead. He didn’t hear the bangs because suddenly lightning was dancing around one of the ship’s masts, and the thunder was instantaneous and deafening. But the deck was leaning way over, dark churning water meters to his left and suddenly the top three layers of the container stack gave way and slid into the water.
They went in a single slab, except for a few stragglers that tumbled like matchboxes and took out the railing and a chunk of decking not ten meters from where Gennady and Miranda huddled.
“Go back!” He pushed her in the direction of the superstructure, but she shook her head and held on to the railing. Gennady cursed and turned as the ship rolled upright then continued to list in the opposite direction.
One container was pivoting on the gunwale, tearing the steel like cloth and throwing sparks. As the ship heeled starboard it tilted to port and went over. There were no more and the other stacks seemed stable. Gennady suspected they would normally have weathered a heavier storm than this.
He rounded the stack and stepped onto the catwalk that ran between it and the next. As lightning flickered again he saw that there was somebody there. A crewman?
“Gennady, how nice to see you,” said Fraction. He was wearing a yellow hard hat and a climbing harness over his crew’s overalls. His glasses were as beaded with rain as Miranda’s.
“It’s a bit dangerous out here right now,” Fraction said as he stepped closer. “I don’t really care, but then I’m riding, aren’t I?” As blue light slid over the scene Gennady saw the black backpack slung over Fraction’s shoulder.
“You’re not from Cilenia, are you?” said Gennady. “You work for somebody else.”
“Gennady! He’s with sanotica,” said Miranda. “You can’t trust him.”
“Cilenia wants that plutonium,” said Fraction. “For their new generators, that’s all. It’s perfectly benign, but you know nations like ours aren’t considered legitimate by the attractors. We could never buy the stuff.”
Gennady nodded. “The containers were rigged to go overboard. The storm made handy cover, but I’d bet there was enough explosives up there to put them over even if the weather was calm. It would have been automatic. You didn’t need to be here for it.”
Fraction shifted the pack on his back. “So?”
“You climbed up and opened the container,” said Gennady. “The plutonium’s right here.” He pointed at the backpack. “Ergo, you’re not working for Cilenia.”
Miranda put a hand on his shoulder. She was nodding. “He was after the rest of it himself, all along,” she shouted. “He used us to track it down, so he could take it for sanotica.”
Danail Gavrilov’s face was empty of expression, his eyes covered in blank, rain-dewed lenses. “Why would I wait until now to take it?” Fraction said.
“Because you figured the container was being watched. I’m betting you’ve got some plan to put the plutonium overboard yourself, with a different transponder than the one Cilenia had on their shipping container. . . . Which I’m betting was rigged to float twenty feet below the surface and wait for pickup.”
Fraction threw the bundle of rope he’d been holding, then stepped forward and reached for Gennady.
Gennady sidestepped, then reached out and plucked the glasses from Danail Gavrilov’s face.
The cyranoid staggered to a stop, giving Gennady enough time to reach up and pluck the earbuds from his ears.
Under sudden lightning, Gennady saw Gavrilov’s eyes for the first time. They were small and dark, and darted this way and that in sudden confusion. The cyranoid said something that sounded like a question—in Bulgarian. Then he put his hands to his ears and roared in sudden panic.
Gennady lunged, intending to grab Gavrilov’s hand, but instead got a handful of the backpack’s tough material. Gavrilov spun around, skidded on the deck as the backpack came loose—and then went over the rail.
He heard Miranda’s shout echoing his own. They both rushed to the railing but could see nothing but black water topped by white streamers of foam.
“He’s gone,” said Miranda with a sudden, odd calm.
“We’ve got to try!” shouted Gennady. He ran for the nearest phone, which was housed in a waterproof kiosk halfway down the catwalk. He was almost there when Miranda tackled him. They rolled right to the edge of the catwalk and Gennady almost lost the backpack.
“What are you doing?” he roared at her. “He’s a human being, for God’s sake.”
“We’ll never find him,” she said, still in that oddly calm tone of voice. Then she sat back. “Gennady, I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have done that. No, shut up, Jake. It was wrong. We should try to rescue the poor man.”
She cocked her head, then said, “He’s afraid Oversatch will be caught.”
“Your son’s been riding you!” Gennady shook his head. “How long?”
“Just now. He called as we were coming outside.”
“Let me go,” said Gennady. “I’ll tell them we stowed away below decks. I’m a Goddamned Interpol investigator! We’ll be fine.” He staggered to the phone.
It took a few seconds to ring through to the surprised crew, but after talking briefly to them Gennady hung up, shaking his head. “Not sure they believe me enough to come about,” he said. “They’re on their way down to arrest us, though.”
The rain was streaming down his face, but he was glad to be seeing it without the Oversatch interface filtering its reality. “Miranda? Can I talk to Jake for a second?”
“What? Sure.” She was hugging herself and shaking violently from the cold. Gennady realized his own teeth were chattering.
He had little time before reality reached out to hijack all his choices. He hefted the backpack, thinking about Hitchens’ reaction when he told him the story—and wondering how much of Oversatch he could avoid talking about in the deposition.
“Jake,” he said, “what is Cilenia?”
Miranda smiled, but it was Jake who said, “Cilenia’s not an ‘it’ like you’re used to, not a ‘thing’ in the traditional sense. It’s not really a place either. It’s just . . . some people realized that we needed a new language to describe the way the world actually works nowadays. When all identities are fluid, how can you get away with using the old words to describe anything?
“You know how cities and countries and corporations are like stable whirlpools in a flood of changes? They’re attractors—states the network relaxes back into, but at any given moment they might not really be there. Well, what if human beings were like that too? Imagine a driver working for a courier company. He follows his route, he talks to customers and delivers packages, but another driver would do exactly the same thing in his place. While he’s on the job, he’s not him, he’s the company. He only relaxes back into his own identity when he goes home and takes off the uniform.
“It 2.0 gives us a way to point at those temporary identities. It’s a tool that lets us bring the temporarily real into focus, even while the outlines of the things we thought were real—like countries and co
mpanies—are blurred. If there could be an it 2.0 for countries and companies, don’t you suppose there could be one for people, too?”
“Cilenia?” said Gennady. Miranda nodded, but Gennady shook his head. It wasn’t that he couldn’t imagine it; the problem was he could. Jake was saying that people weren’t even people all the time, that they played roles through much of the day representing powers and forces they often weren’t even aware of. A person could be multiple places at once, the way that Gennady was himself and his avatars, his investments and emails and website, and the cyranoids he rode. He’d been moving that way his whole adult life, he realized, his identity becoming smeared out across the world. In the past few weeks the process had accelerated. For someone like Jake, born and raised in a world of shifting identities, it 2.0 and Cilenia must make perfect sense. They might even seem mundane.
Maybe Cilenia was the new “it.” But Gennady was too old and set in his ways to speak that language.
“And sanotica?” he asked. “What’s that?”
“Imagine Oversatch,” said Jake, “but with no moral constraints on it. Imagine that instead of looking for spontaneous remappings in the healthy network of human relationships, you had an ‘it 3.0’ that looked for disasters—points and moments when rules break down and there’s chaos and anarchy. Imagine an army of cyranoids stepping in at moments like that, to take advantage of misery and human pain. It would be very efficient, wouldn’t it? As efficient, maybe, as Oversatch.
“That,” said Jake as shouting crewmen came running along the gunwales, “is sanotica. An efficient parasite that feeds on catastrophe. And millions of people work for it without knowing.”
Gennady held up the backpack. “It would have taken this and . . . made a bomb?”
“Maybe. And how do you know, Mister Malianov, that you don’t work for sanotica yourself? How can I be sure that plutonium won’t be used for some terrible cause? It should go to Cilenia.”
Gennady hesitated. He heard Miranda Veen asking him to do this; and after everything he’d seen, he knew now that in his world power and control could be shifted invisibly and totally moment by moment by entities like Oversatch and Cilenia. Maybe Fraction really had hired Hitchens’ people, and Gennady himself. And maybe they could do it again, and he wouldn’t even know it.
“Drop the backpack in the bilges,” said Jake. “We can send someone from Oversatch to collect it. Mother, you can bring it to Cilenia when you come.”
The rain was lessening, and he could see that her cheeks were wet now with tears. “I’ll come, Jake. When we get let go, I’ll come to you.”
Then, as Jake, she said, “Now, Gennady! They’re almost here!”
Gennady held onto the backpack. “I’ll keep it,” he said.
Gennady took the glasses out of his pocket and dropped them over the railing. In doing so he left the city he had only just discovered, but had lately lived in and begun to love. That city—world-spanning, built of light and ideals—was tricked into existing moment-by-moment by the millions who believed in it and simply acted as though it were there. He wished he could be one of them.
Gennady could hear Jake’s frustration in Miranda’s voice, as she said, “But how can you know that backpack’s not going to end up in sanotica?”
“There are more powers on Earth,” Gennady shouted over the storm, “than just Cilenia and sanotica. What’s in this backpack is one of those powers. But another power is me. Maybe my identity’s not fixed either and maybe I’m just one man, but at the end of the day I’m bound to follow what’s in here, whereever it goes. I can’t go with you to Cilenia, or even stay in Oversatch, much as I’d like to. I will go where this plutonium goes, and try to keep it from harming anyone.
“Because some things,” he said as the crewmen arrived and surrounded them, “are real in every world.”
The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned
Brenda Cooper
Brenda Cooper (www.brenda-cooper.com) lives in Kirkland, Washington. By day, she is the City of Kirkland’s CIO, and at night and in early morning hours, she’s a futurist and writer. “I’m interested in how new technologies might change us and our world, particularly for the better,” she says on her website. Her fiction has appeared in Nature, Analog, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and in anthologies. She has collaborated with Larry Niven on six short stories and on the novel Building Harlequin’s Moon (2005). Her own first novel, The Silver Ship and the Sea, was published in 2007, and its sequels are Reading the Wind (2008) and Wings of Creation (2009). Her novel Mayan December is out in 2011. Cooper had a strong year for short fiction in 2010 and had several stories in contention for this book.
“The Hebras and the Demons and the Damned” was published in Analog, which had a particularly good year in 2010, perhaps benefiting from the relative pressure of fantasy stories in other magazines—both F&SF and Asimov’s publish a lot of fantasy these days. The story is an adventure set on the colonized planet Fremont, the setting for her first novel.
I’m going to ramble a bit. Let me; I’m no roamer speaking over a communal fire. I’m not sure I know which parts of the story you want. But this is part of how Fremont was saved and kind of an alien contact story too.
My name is Chaunce, and I am one of the few left on Fremont who remembers the home we left behind. Deerfly. Stupid name for a planet, if you ask me. But we didn’t leave Deerfly over its wreck of a name. Rather, it was too smart for us, everybody there becoming stronger, faster beings, almost becoming computers or robots with flesh, leaving us true humans behind, some of them wearing no more than a thin skin of flesh to fool the eye.
Fremont was too smart for us, too. In the time I’m telling you about, we’d been here seventeen years. Instead of doing what a self-respecting colony does and grows, we kept losing people to tooth and claw and cliff.
Real humans had grown up on colony planets like this, but Deerfly had gone tame generations ago.
We needed help. Needed to find some accord with this place before it killed us. It gnawed at me that I’d done little for the colony except backbreaking work and staying alive. I’d left the leading to others, and Fremont needed more from me than that. Since I managed horse farms back on Deerfly, I looked to the animals.
Now, there are a lot of animals on Fremont, but most wouldn’t work for what I needed.
The cats had decided we were dinner the day we landed, and they were too big to be undecided in any way I could think of. A foot-long scar on my right calf throbbed in the cold of winter—a reminder.
We had a few domestic dogs we’d brought shipboard and more we were planning to birth and raise up. We weren’t going to lack for best friends, for herding beasts to keep goats in bunches, or four-footed pranksters to steal the chickens. But dogs are smaller than humans, and smaller than most beings of tooth and claw here. I was glad of them, but on Fremont they needed protecting just like we did. They’d give us warning, but they’d die trying to save us from paw cats or yellow snakes. And given how we mostly loved them, humans sometimes died saving their dogs.
Fremont has its own four-footed and single-tailed beasts with a canine look. They run in packs, and people call them demon dogs. But they should never, ever be confused for real dogs. These demons have no soul, and they exist to eat. Worse, I’ve seen them hunt, and I’m sure they are communicating with each other more than any of our native animals from Deerfly, or the ones our fathers brought from Earth. Demons don’t speak, but they work like a team with radios. They make humans mildly sick to eat too. So they’re not even good for food.
I had high hopes for the djuri: four-footed prey that run in packs, fleeing for their lives from the demon dogs. It turned out the djuri were too shy to help. Hard to find, always running and hiding and bleating. Not too bright, either, and not big enough to really help us. Humans can look down on them, or maybe look a big one straight in the eye. Well, all right. A few are even bigger than that. The bucks. But still, they’re not hefty creatures. Keep in mi
nd that we can look a paw cat in the eye, too, and they outweigh us and have claws long as fingers and hard as knives. The truly good thing about djuri is they are incredibly good to eat.
That’s pretty much the rundown on the bigger animals we’d seen here so far, except the hebras. They were our last hope for an answer. I took a while to realize this, even though I sat at the edge of the cliff by the promise of our town, looking down over the grass plains every day for two summers. The grass there is scary big, bigger than a man’s head by the end of summer. When it dries, it’s sharp like a million razors trying to flay the skin from anything as soft as a human. I still have scars on my fingers from it, and on my shoulders.
As tall as the grass is, the hebras’ heads rise above it. They’ve got legs that come to a man’s head. Instead of straight backs like horses, their backs slope up to shoulders, and their necks measure the tiniest bit longer than their backs. Their coats are solid, striped, or covered with great spots like the shadow pattern of leaves on the forest floor. Their colors are all variations of gold and green, brown and black, and sometimes the barest bit of red like a red-haired woman being touched by the sun.
Make no mistake. Hebras are prey animals. Paw cats hunt them all summer, and demons get the weak and the slow and the young. But they are so much more. Remember how I told you about the demon dogs? Perhaps being prey on a planet full of thorns made them smarter than any of the horses I ever rode or trained or showed or loved.
One day, far below me, the demon dogs hunted hebras. I’d given up digging out the smelter’s foundation for the day, my muscles screaming sore and my back feeling on fire. I stood at the edge of the cliff looking down, letting the cooling breeze of near-dusk tease sweat from my skin. The sun shone bright enough to wash everything dull and soft, with that little extra bit of gold that the late part of the day brings. The air smelled of seeds and harvest and of the fall that would soon touch us.
Year’s Best SF 16 Page 28
