The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I crawled along, listening to my ragged breathing reflecting back from infinity, until I found my hands trying to rest on empty air. I scrambled backwards, then aimed my headlamp straight down into a vertical pit ten feet deep. I had to wait until I stopped shaking before I could rig for the descent.

  “I took the next section very slowly; the passage was terribly narrow. After a short distance it turned a sharp corner and ended at a rectangular cross-section of glossy grey ore. There was no sign of an artifact.

  “I remember sitting perfectly still, swallowing sour air. What had I been thinking? Did I really believe that some forgotten manuscript was going to prevent the extinction of my career? Was I that desperate?

  “I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But too much fitted together. The black part was real enough, certainly. There had to be something down there.

  “I began to crawl back towards the surface. Every step sent a jolt of pain through my knees and my arms. After I reached the base of the pit I’d nearly fallen into on the way down, I had to stop to rest.

  “The air circulation in the shaft was especially strong there. The mine seemed to be taking long, slow breaths. Dampness dripped down the stone faces. And I found myself looking into a side passage I hadn’t noticed on the way in.

  “The timbers framing the entrance had collapsed; rubble blocked it almost entirely. I wondered why the supports had fallen—hundreds of others stood firmly in place along a mile or more of mine shaft. I could only imagine that someone had pulled them down to discourage access to the passage.

  “I began rolling rocks to one side. I tied a rope around one of the timbers and yanked until it was out of the way. I wiped sweat out of my eyes and kept at it until I had cleared a hole just the width of my shoulders.

  “I waited for the dust to settle, then I swept my light along the passage. It extended back only a few yards. At the end, still embedded in a slanting vein of ore, was a black, refrigerator-sized mass. It had rounded corners and smooth flanks that were opalescent in the harsh white glare of my lamp.”

  * * *

  “The black radiance reminded me of the part I’d found in my uncle’s trunk, and the object seemed completely intact except for some deep scratches in the top surface.

  “As I inched closer through the rubble, I noticed that the scratches on the top were very regular; closer still I decided that they were markings of some kind, repeated in a hexagonal array. I braced myself against the back wall of the passage and tried to catch my breath. From there I could just touch one of the artifact’s sides. The surface felt as smooth as glass. I moved close enough to brush the dust out of the figures on the top. They seemed to form a diagram, but it was like a puzzle, meaningless, lines in interlocking hexagonal patterns.…

  “I stared until my head hurt. Then I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them again, the meaning leaped right off the surface. The diagram was telling me—in the clearest possible way—how to open the top of the artifact.

  “Eight fasteners were indicated: threaded cylinders that fitted flush and screwed in at a slight angle. Each had six depressions that were slightly smaller than the ends of my fingers.

  “I tore several fingernails before I had the idea of making a wrench out of bolts pounded through a piece of wood. Once I realized that the threads were left-handed, the cylinders turned easily. That astonished me more than anything else. Any mechanism trapped in a vein of Cretaceous ore should have welded solid millions of years ago.

  “I was ready to pry off the top within five minutes. As the lid started to come up, I suddenly realized how much the artifact resembled a sarcophagus. I hesitated before looking inside, half afraid that I’d see the remains of … I don’t know what. A time traveler? A squat alien creature with six tiny fingers?

  “I aimed my lamp inside and took a deep breath. No bones or rotted clothing. Just diagrams and hundreds and hundreds of marvelously precise interlocking parts.

  “I studied the diagrams first. I had the knack of interpreting them quickly by then. Everything had a deeply rooted six-sided symmetry. The figures and their groupings all formed partial or complete hexagons. But it wasn’t so much the patterns that were organized that way, I realized, as the brain of whoever had made them.

  “There was one diagram all the others branched from, a sort of table with diverging columns. In the center was a single hexagon, then a space, then two hexagons, then three. Each group of hexagons was paired with a symbol—a number system.

  “Then I found a periodic table. The six inert gases formed a hexagon at the center; the elements with partially filled shells swirled outwards. A table of molecules surrounded that. Each item was assigned its own symbol, modified by other symbols that indicated isomers or ionic states.

  “I followed one of the branches of the interior diagram, loosening cylinder screws as I went. I found that an assembly about a foot square and a couple of inches thick swung up and to one side. Below it were more instructions, more assemblies.

  “I was bent over in an impossibly awkward position working by entirely inadequate light. But I couldn’t leave. I kept disassembling and cataloguing, copying, drawing, reassembling.

  “The primary elements were tiny chambers—sometimes just widenings in pinhole channels—each attached to a sort of valve. Hexagonal tubes the thickness of a hair were fused to all the surfaces, constantly branching and joining. I thought at first they were electrical connections, then I decided they were optical. Later, very deep in the clockwork, I found a nest of icosahedral crystals that fit flush against the polished faces of thousands of those hexagonal tubes.

  “I didn’t return to the surface until my backup lamp began to dim. I stood at the mine entrance and stared at the daylight until my retinas burned. I had almost forgotten what it looked like.

  “I was too tired to invent excuses concerning my torn clothes or eccentric hours. Fortunately, my landlady was polite enough not to inquire. She made me scones and orange marmalade while I tried to make up my mind.

  “Who should I tell? The police? The newspapers? I decided that I’d feel more comfortable contacting somebody at a university. But I was still uneasy. If only I had a better idea of what the artifact was for.

  “Eventually, I decided on sleep and another visit.

  “The second descent went quickly—my climbing gear was still in place, and I knew what to expect. But I was more daunted than ever by the artifact’s complexity. I tried to copy down some of the simpler diagrams to study later, but I realized right away that I’d be drawing for days. Then I had the idea of making rubbings, like people do with gravestones. That worked beautifully, even for the smallest figures. I returned with a notebook full of them.”

  Roger reached into his pack and produced a sheaf of papers. He tore one out and handed it to me. Spidery white lines stood out in relief against thick black pencil marks. The markings were incomprehensible. All I could discern was a six-sided symmetry.

  “Can I keep this?” I asked.

  Roger waved as if it were a matter of the least possible importance.

  “The figures were mostly warnings,” he said. “It could all operate as long as water was a liquid—indicated by pictures of water in different states. The proper environment was nitrogen and oxygen with traces of water vapor and some other components. As far as I could remember, Earth’s atmosphere qualified with no trouble.

  “Starting the thing up involved filling several chambers with chemicals—simple organics mostly: amino acids, lipids, monosaccharides, plus some trace metals, water, sodium hydroxide. The power requirements were marvelously simple: just plenty of light.

  “Ultimately, the instructions told me everything except what the artifact did. I spent quite a bit of time thinking about that. My best guess was a piece of survival equipment from an alien colony—a safe food source, say, for use in a strange ecosystem. But then why didn’t I find other artifacts in the vicinity? And why build an auto-kitchen to last for a hundred million y
ears?

  “After four trips I’d examined a dozen assemblies. I expected them to get simpler as I reached deeper into the artifact, with bigger chambers to accommodate steaming slabs of alien rump roast, or whatever. Nothing of the sort. The components became smaller and more intricate. I couldn’t even make out most of them.

  “For a while I tried to follow the pathways, guess at the reactions. Two or three levels deep I had to give up. About all I could do was estimate the number of connections. I came up with 200,000 reaction products, give or take a factor or two. That’s when I knew my auto-kitchen hypothesis wouldn’t hold up. It was much too complicated.

  “The diagrams terminated at the right front corner of the box. The directions there had me remove and inspect a long conical assembly that ran almost to the bottom of the artifact. It ended in a hollow needle and a very fine screen connected to the main body by a dozen tubes.

  “I pointed my lamp into the cavity left by the assembly’s absence. The chamber was spherical, a few inches across, right up against the front. On one side was a smaller cavity with a very familiar shape. I reached into my pack and took out the part that Martin Knowles had passed down to me. Then I slid it back into place for the first time in two hundred years.

  “I remember sitting quietly on a broken timber after that, wondering what kind of man my seven-times-great-grandfather was. Of course it might have been someone else who first dismantled the artifact. But I doubted it. Who else would have dared touch the thing? The blackness, the depth below the earth—it must have seemed the devil’s handiwork to the miners who found it.

  “For a moment I could feel Martin Knowles in the shaft beside me, looking over my shoulder at the diagrams, shivering in his frock coat and buckle shoes. He was an educated man. He could read the instructions as well as I. But he was born a century too early to make sense out of the chemistry.

  “Can you imagine his frustration? I could see him pulling down the timbers himself—he had his family’s violent temper. Something was trying to speak to him across an unimaginable gulf of time and space, but he couldn’t quite understand, couldn’t quite answer.

  “I wonder if he guessed at the artifact’s purpose. I knew for certain by then. It was a machine for manufacturing aliens. All those thousands of reactions just sufficed to synthesize a fertilized ovum and implant it in that spherical black womb.”

  Roger closed his eyes. He looked very tired.

  “I couldn’t tell anyone. Can you see that? If I did, the British government would almost certainly seal off the mine as a matter of national security.

  “I couldn’t risk it. I needed to publish. I needed that very badly.

  “I heard somewhere that the chemicals in a man are only worth thirty dollars or so. I can vouch for the fact that alien chemistry is a lot more expensive. Between the reagents and the laser I needed as a light source, the project started to push the limits of my credit cards.

  “My biggest problem was the generator—it weighed nearly a hundred pounds. I ended up disassembling it and hauling it down in sections. But everything else was simple enough. I was ready to go in a few days. Starting the mechanism up was just a matter of moving a few cylinder screws. The operation was automatic after that—and completely silent. I had a hard time believing that anything was happening at all.

  “The indicated gestation period, or whatever, was five weeks—it seemed like five years. Mornings I hauled gasoline for the generator into the mine: my hands smelled perpetually of the stuff. Otherwise I walked around the village, read, ate. There were two pubs in town that dated back to the days of my ancestors. I stayed well clear of both.

  “I spent the last night in the mine, sitting with my arms around my shins, facing the box. My landlady had baked some extra scones for me, and I swallowed one mechanically every hour or so. At some point I must have fallen asleep.

  “I woke to the sensation of something nuzzling my foot. It felt slick and warm, not quite wet. My eyes snapped open. A stray bit of light reflected off a shape about a foot long and six inches high, a smooth, continuous curve.

  “I jumped up and scrambled backwards into a corner. I heard a snuffling noise and smelled a faint, sweet odor overlaying the usual mildew.

  “The smooth shape waddled towards me. It was more or less ellipsoidal, no feet. Its skin was jet black, and slightly corrugated. The only distinctive feature was an inquisitive, tapering protrusion in front.

  “I edged around to the artifact. A door had slid open near the bottom, exposing the spherical chamber I had seen earlier from above. The chamber was empty except for a pool of moisture at the bottom.

  “I looked at the creature again. It was feeling aimlessly at the ground with its snout-like protrusion. Helpless. And hungry. It just radiated hunger.

  “I didn’t know what to do. All I had were the scones. I dug one out of my pack and rolled it towards the creature. The snout found it after a while. The creature snuffled again—the noise seemed to be caused by the contraction of its body when it moved. Eventually it climbed on top of the scone. After a few minutes and considerable snuffling it got off again. There was a damp spot where the scone had been.

  “My knowledge of zoology is practically nil, but I was quite sure that nothing native to Earth ate that way.

  “I sat down on a rock and stared at the thing. After a while I scooped it up and dropped it into my backpack.

  “I got to think of the creature as a him, despite the absence of any distinguishing sexual features—any features at all, really, except for the snout. Sort of a minimalist’s animal. I named him Martin, after Martin Knowles.

  “He needed lots of water, I discovered—he absorbed it through his skin. And he was quite sensitive to light. Otherwise he was easy enough to take care of. He ate everything, even the kippers I pocketed at breakfast so as not to hurt my landlady’s feelings. He liked being scratched just behind his snout.

  “I watched Martin all that first day and night. He sensed my presence somehow, and he tried to follow wherever I went. He could move surprisingly quickly when he wanted to.

  “I finally fell asleep late during the second day. I dreamt in bright colors and woke to find Martin patiently unraveling the hooked rug with his snout. I dissuaded him gently, then spent the rest of the morning wondering what to do with him.

  “The situation had clearly changed. A hulking black artifact of unknown function was one thing, but Martin … well, who could possibly see him as a threat to national security? He fit more naturally into the soft toy category. I wondered idly if I could claim the residual rights.

  “But I still wanted to contact someone at a university first. I flipped through the journals I’d brought until I happened on a reference to Richard Burns, a Cambridge physical chemist I remembered from a conference. He seemed like the political sort; he probably knew his way around the infrastructure. I called his office and made an appointment for the following week.

  “The clock had started ticking. In a few days, I told myself, the world would become a very different place. And NSF would no doubt treat my next proposal with new-found respect.…

  “I moved around my room in a sort of delirium. Then I’d look at Martin and come right back to my senses. The truth was that I didn’t know any more than on the day Uncle Claude’s trunk arrived at my apartment. What was Martin, anyway? Could my cosmic kitchen hypothesis have been right all along? Martin might be an alien cow-equivalent, a protein source. He seemed smarter than a cow, but that didn’t prove anything. The aliens who ate him were probably smarter than us, too.

  “The problem was that his species couldn’t possibly have built the artifact. The dolphin’s fate: no hands. Of course, he might be an early stage in some complex alien life cycle, or telekinetic, or something.

  “None of that really mattered, of course. Martin’s existence was the most important fact. We could study his metabolism, cell structure, molecular biology. I told myself that, but I didn’t believe it. I wanted to make contac
t.

  “The next day was a quiet one; inclement weather kept us indoors. I taught Martin how to play baseball. I tossed a wadded-up piece of paper towards him, and he batted it back with his snout. Silly, but we played for a couple of hours.

  “In the afternoon I sat in the shabby armchair in my room and watched the rain. The irony of my situation impressed me mightily. I would soon be the most famous person on Earth—after so long being one of its most obscure. I wondered about my clothes. Did I own anything suitable for meeting presidents in? No doubt some picture of me in my torn jeans and flannel shirt would show up in elementary school texts for the rest of eternity. I thought about book contracts, TV appearances, interviews. What would I talk about? All I knew was chemistry.

  “At some point I fell asleep in the chair, and I had the most extraordinary dream.

  “I didn’t have the fuzzy, unworldly sensation I usually associate with dreams. Everything was clear and hard and definite, as if I’d simply woken up in a different place. The time was dawn or twilight, and I was surrounded by a sort of ingeniously organized junkyard that stretched out of sight in every direction. And it all seemed to be moving.

  “A sliver of red sun poked above the horizon, drowning the brilliant night sky and throwing long, leaping shadows. As my eyes adjusted, I could tell that I was standing on an gigantic brass gear that kept trying to slide out from beneath my feet. It moved irregularly, in jumps, with a ghastly screeching. The air smelled of burning oil.

  “I started moving carefully—almost shuffling—towards a high, distant point that looked stationary. I hopped from the gear to a pinion that was impaled on a shaft the diameter of a tree trunk. Its end was sunk in an elegantly faceted jewel.

  “The pinion swung me around to the edge of a shelf. I grabbed it and pulled myself up. The shelf was toothed along its other edge. A hundred yards away in the dim red light I could see a huge, fitfully spinning worm gear that meshed with the rack I was clinging to. The sun remained fixed on the horizon.