The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  The audience smiled as Irving left the podium.

  Of course Mattie deserved the final word, and she used her public moment to beg for full funding of the ongoing Graveyard Project. It was a clumsy display of politics, and only she could get away with it. Irving was the project's administrator, far too exposed to act in such obvious ways. But he was grateful for her waving the hat, and he told her so afterwards. There was a reception back in Gillette, and another one of the endless news conferences, and the two sat close together behind a long table, fielding the same questions again and again.

  Ten months after its discovery, nobody knew for sure how large the burial ground was. But evidence hinted at an enormous field of bodies, most of them deeper than George, buried over a period of many thousands of years. That was why the entire mine had been closed and made into a national monument. Power plants were sitting idle back east, but that's how important the Graveyard was. Every reporter wanted to know why the aliens had used this location. Mattie and Irving confessed that they were just as curious and as frustrated by their ignorance. To date, thirty-eight "georges" had been recovered from within the gigantic coal seam. As a rule, the deeper bodies wore better clothes and carried fancier tools, though nothing worthy of a star-traveler had been uncovered yet. Without giving details, Irving allowed that a final census might be coming, and that's when Mattie mentioned the new seismic scans—an elaborate experiment to make the lignite transparent as water.

  "Don't put too much stock in success," Irving warned the reporters and cameras. "This technology is new and fickle, and we might not get results for months, if ever."

  It seemed odd, a man in his position staunching excitement. But if these scans failed, he might be blamed. And what good would that do? This job was a dream, and Irving intended to remain inside the dream as long as possible. He was successful and couldn't imagine being happier, wielding power over hundreds of lives and a billion-dollar budget: emperor to an empire that had already revolutionized how humanity looked at itself and the universe.

  Irving was exhilarated by the news conference; Mattie was exhausted. He made a point of walking the still-frail woman to her car, even when she claimed she could manage on her own, thank you. "I insist," he told her, and they shook hands and parted, and as he walked back into the reception hall, an associate approached quickly and whispered, "Sir, you have to see this, sir."

  "See what?"

  Then in the next instant, he muttered, "Results?"

  "Yes, sir."

  The laptop was set up in the little kitchen, linked to Base Camp's computers, and the news was astonishing enough that this man who never failed to find the right words was mute, knees bending as he stared at data that made his fondest dreams look like weak fantasies.

  The screen was jammed with white marks and long numbers, each grave given a precise designation tied to estimated size and metal content and other crucial information. The graveyard covered more than a five square kilometers, and the dead were thick, particularly in the deepest layers.

  "How many . . . ?" he muttered.

  "At least thirty thousand, sir."

  Again, Irving's voice failed him.

  The assistant misread his silence, assuming disappointment. "But that's not the final number," she added. "They're so many bodies, particularly near the bottom, sir . . . the final number is sure to be quite a bit larger than this."

  Badger

  Why he loved the girl was a complicated business. There were so many reasons he couldn't count them—moments of bliss and the intense looks that she gave him and little touches in the dark and touches offered but then taken away. Teasing. She was an expert at the tease. She was funny and quick with her tongue, and she was beautiful, of course. Yet she carried her beauty in ways most girls couldn't. Slender and built like a boy, she had the smallest tits he'd every felt up—a fact that he foolishly admitted once. But her face had this wonderful full mouth and a perfect nose and impossibly big eyes full of an earthly blue that watched him whenever he talked and paid even closer attention when he wasn't saying anything. She was observant in ways he never would be, and she was smart about people, and even though she rarely left Wyoming, she seemed to know more about the world than did her much older boyfriend who had already traveled across the globe three or four times.

  Badger had little memory for the places he had been, but Hanna knew that if she kept asking questions, he might remember what the Sahara looked like at midnight and what he saw on a certain street in Phnom Penh and what it felt like to tunnel his way into an Incan burial chamber seven hundred years after it was sealed off from the world.

  "Why Badger?" was her first question, asked moments after they met.

  He sipped his beer and looked around the bar, wondering who this youngster was. "Because that's my name," he said with a shrug.

  "You dig tunnels, right?"

  "Who are you?" he asked.

  "Hanna." She'd already settled on the stool beside his. Without another word, she pulled his glass over and took a sip, grinning as she licked the Budweiser off her upper lip. Reading his mind, she said, "I'm twenty-two."

  "You aren't," he replied.

  She laughed and gave back his remaining beer. "Word is, Badger, you're working at the Graveyard, digging down to the most interesting georges."

  "Which high school do you go to?"

  "I attend the University in Laramie," she replied. Then she put an elbow on the bar and set her delicate chin on edge of her palm, fingers curled up beneath that big, wonderful, smiling mouth. Without a trace of doubt, she told him, "You aren't all that comfortable with women. Are you, Badger?"

  "How do you know my name?"

  "I've seen you. And I've asked about you, I guess." Then she laughed at him, adding, "Or maybe I heard there was this guy named Badger digging holes for Dr. Chong, and you came tromping in here, and I figured, just by looking at you, that you had to be that guy. What would you think of that?"

  He didn't know what the girl was telling him, or if he should care one way or another.

  "I know Mattie pretty well," she reported. "Your boss has come to school to talk . . . I don't know, maybe ten times. She's a neat, neat lady, I think."

  He nodded agreeably.

  "How long has she been in charge?"

  "Three months," he answered. "Dr. Case got pushed up to Washington—"

  "I bet she drives you nuts," she interrupted.

  "Why's that?"

  "A feeling." Hanna shrugged and suddenly changed topics. "Does it ever make you crazy, thinking what you're working on?"

  "Why would it?"

  "The Graveyard!" she shouted. Down came her hand, and she sat up straight on the stool, looking around the quiet bar as if to hunt down a witness to this foolishness. "One hundred thousand dead aliens in the ground, and you're part of the team that's working their way to the bottom of the dead. Isn't that an astonishing thing? Don't you wake up every morning and think, 'God, how incredibly lucky can one burrowing weasel be?'"

  "My build," he allowed.

  She fell silent, watching him.

  "I got the name as a kid," he reported. "My given name is Stuart, but I got the nickname because I've got short legs and a little bit of strength, I guess."

  "You guess?"

  "I'm strong," he said.

  "I can tell."

  "Yeah?"

  "I like strong," she confessed, leaning in close.

  Or maybe it wasn't that complicated, why he loved Hanna. She seemed to truly love him, and how could he not return the emotion? Beautiful and smart and sharp, and he was powerless to ignore her overtures. He gave her the rest of his beer and answered her questions as far as he could, admitting that the scope and importance of the Graveyard was beyond him. He was a professional digger. Using equipment designed by others, he was adept at carving his way through complicated strata, avoiding other graves and other treasures on his way to realms that hadn't seen sun since a few million years after the dinosaurs died a
way.

  Later, Hanna asked, "What do you think of them?"

  They were sitting in his truck in the open countryside, at night. So far they hadn't even kissed, but it felt as if they'd been sitting there for years. It was that natural, that inevitable.

  "Think about who?" he said.

  She gave him a look.

  He understood. But the honest answer was another shrug and the embarrassing admission, "I don't think much. I don't know much at all. I've seen hundreds of them, but the aliens still look nothing but strange to me. What they were like when they were alive . . . I don't have any idea . . . "

  "You don't call them 'georges,'" she pointed out.

  "That's a silly name," he growled, "and it doesn't suit them."

  She accepted the logic.

  This was the moment when Badger caught himself wondering when he would ask the girl to marry him. Not if, but when.

  "Everybody else has a story," Hanna told him. "I haven't met the person who doesn't think these creatures were part of some lost colony or prisoners in an alien work camp, or maybe they were wanderers living in orbit but burying themselves in the peat so we'd find them millions of years later. Just to prove to us that they'd been here."

  "I don't know the answer," he said.

  "And do you know why?" she asked. "Because you understand what's important." Then she lifted her face to his, and they kissed for a long while, and it was all that he could do, big, strong, unimaginative Badger, not to ask that girl to marry him right then.

  Hanna

  He called to ask, "How you doing, hon?"

  "Good," she lied.

  "Feel like walking around?"

  "Why?"

  "Dr. Chong says it's all right. I explained how the doctor wants you in bed, but for the next couple weeks you can still move—"

  "I get to see the new one?"

  "You want to?"

  "I'm getting dressed now," she lied, crawling off the couch. "Are you coming to get me, Badge?"

  "Pulling into the driveway right now," he reported happily.

  So she got caught. Not only wasn't she close to ready, Hanna looked awful, and it took more promises and a few growls before Badger decided she was up to this adventure. Babies. Such a bother! Laying eggs would be so much easier. Drop them somewhere safe and walk away, living your own life until the kids were big enough to be fun. That's how mothering should be.

  She mentioned her idea to Badger.

  He was driving and laughing. "I wonder where you got that from?"

  Georges had laid eggs. The younger females always had a few in some incomplete stage of development. Nobody knew if they put their basketball-sized eggs inside nests or incubators or what. Two years of research, yet the aliens' life remained mysterious, open to guesswork and wishful thinking. But somewhere in those vanished mountains, up high where the air was deliciously thin, the species had struggled mightily to replace the several friends and family being buried every year in that deep black peat.

  Mattie was waiting for them at the surface. She smiled warmly and asked Hanna how she was feeling, and Hanna tried to sound like a woman in robust good health. Everybody dressed in clean gowns and masks, and then they took the long walk below ground, following one of the worm-like tunnels that Badger had cut into the deep seam. Seven other times Hanna had gotten a tour. But this visit was unique because of the age of the corpse being unearthed—one of the first generation georges, it was guessed—and because this was a privilege that not even the most connected members of the media had known.

  This body lay at the graveyard's edge. To help the studies, Badger had carved an enormous room beside the fossil. The room was filled with machinery and lights, coolers full of food and drink, a portable restroom, plus several researchers busy investigating the tiniest features, making ready for the slow cautious removal of the dead alien female.

  Compared to the first george, she was a giant. Hanna expected as much, but seeing the body made her breath quicken. A once-powerful creature, larger than most rhinoceroses, she now lay crumpled down by death and suffocation and the weight of the world that had been peeled away above her. She was dead, yet she was entirely whole too. The acidic peat was a perfect preservative for flesh born outside this world, and presumably the aliens understood that salient fact.

  "Great," Hanna gushed. "Wonderful. Thank you."

  "Step closer," Mattie offered. "Just not past the yellow line."

  A pair of researchers—sexless in their gowns and masks—were perched on a short scaffold, carefully working with the alien's hands.

  "The burial ring?" Hanna asked.

  Mattie nodded. "An aluminum alloy. Very sophisticated, very obvious in the scans."

  "How different?"

  The older the corpse, the more elaborate the ring. Mattie explained, "This one's more like a cylinder than a ring, and it's covered with details we don't find in any of the later burials."

  The clothing was more elaborate, Hanna noticed, legs covered with trousers held up by elaborate belts, the feet enjoying what looked like elegant boots sewn from an ancient mammal's leathery hide. A nylon satchel rode the long back, worn by heavy use, every pocket stripped of anything that would have been difficult to replace.

  "Will we ever find the prize?" Hanna asked.

  "That amazing widget that transforms life on earth?" Mattie shrugged, admitting, "I keep promising that. Every trip to Congress, I say it's going to happen soon. But I seriously wonder. From what I've seen, these creatures never went into the ground carrying anything fancy or difficult to make."

  Those words sank home. Hanna nodded and glanced at Badger's eyes, asking, "What else did I want to ask, hon? You remember?"

  "Religion," he mentioned.

  "Oh, yeah." Standing on the yellow line, she asked, "So why did they go into the ground, Mattie?"

  "I don't know."

  Hanna glanced at the woman, and then she stared up at the alien's cupped hands, imagining that important ring of metal. "I know the story I like best."

  "Which one?"

  "A starship reached our solar system, but something went wrong. Maybe the ship was supposed to refuel and set out for a different star, and it malfunctioned. Maybe its sister ships were supposed to meet here, but nobody showed." Hanna liked Mattie and respected her, and she wanted to sound informed on this extraordinary topic. "Mars or the moon would have made better homes. Their plan could have been to terraform another world. I know they would have appreciated the lighter gravity. And we think—because of the evidence, we can surmise—that their bodies didn't need or want as much free oxygen as we require. So whatever the reason, earth isn't where they wanted to be."

  "A lot of people think that," Mattie said.

  Hanna continued. "They didn't want to stay here long. And we don't have any evidence that their starship landed nearby. But they came here. The aliens set down in the nearby mountains, and they managed to find food and build shelter, and survive. But after ten or fifty or maybe two hundred years . . . whatever felt like a long time for that first generation . . . no one had come to rescue them. And that's why they started digging holes and climbing inside."

  "You believe they were hibernating," Mattie guessed.

  "No," Hanna admitted. "Or I mean, maybe they slept when they were buried. But they weren't planning to wake up like normal either. Their brains weren't like ours, I know. Crystalline and tough, and all the evidence points to a low-oxygen metabolism. What I think happened . . . each of the creatures reached a point in life when they felt past their prime, or particularly sad, or whatever . . . and that's why a lady like this would climb into the cold peat. She believes, or at least she needs to believe, that in another few hundred years, another ring-shaped starship is going to fall toward our sun, dig her up and bring her back to life."

  Mattie contemplated the argument and nodded. "I've heard that story a few times, in one fashion or another."

  "That's how their tradition started," Hanna continued. "Every g
eneration of georges buried itself in the peat, and after a few centuries or a few thousand years, nobody would remember why. All they knew was that it was important to do, and that by holding a metal ring in your hands, you were making yourself a little easier to find inside your sleeping place."

  Badger sighed, disapproving of the rampant speculation.

  "That might well be true," said Mattie. "Which explains why the rings got simpler as time passed. Nobody remembered what the starship looked like. Or maybe they forgot about the ship entirely, and the ring's purpose changed. It was a symbol, an offering, something that would allow their god to catch their soul and take them back to Heaven again."

  Just then, the two workers on the scaffold slipped the burial ring out from between the dead fingers. Mattie approached them and took the prize in both of her gloved hands. Hanna and then Badger stared at what everyone in the world would see in another few hours: a model of a great starship that had once crossed the vacant unloving blackness of space, ending up where it shouldn't have been and its crew and their descendants dying slowly over the next twenty thousand years.

  One last time, Hanna thanked Mattie for the tour.

  Walking to the surface again, she took her husband's big hand and held it tightly and said, "We're lucky people."

  "Why's that?" Badger asked.

  "Because we're exactly where we belong," she replied, as if it couldn't be more obvious.

  Then they were in the open again, walking on a ravaged landscape dwarfed by the boundless Wyoming sky, and between one step and the next Hanna felt something change inside her body—a slight sensation that held no pain and would normally mean nothing. But she stopped walking. She stopped, but Badger kept marching forward. With both hands, she tenderly touched herself, and she forgot all about the aliens and their epic, long-extinct problems. Bleeding harder by the moment, she looked up to see her husband far ahead of her now, and to herself, with the smallest of whispers, she muttered, "Oh, no . . . not today . . . "