The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I was born in Strome,” she said. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Five miles down the road.”

  “A white settler of the second generation,” said Murdo.

  “You know a lot about me, don’t you?” she said.

  “I do that,” said Murdo. “You have—“

  I knew what he was going to say next. I was glad he was close enough to give him the dig of my elbow.

  “What?” he said.

  “Don’t bug the lassie,” I said.

  “I was just making conversation.”

  “Aye, well make it different.” I kept my eyes on the road. “Sorry about that, Ailiss.”

  She flicked a hand. “No problem.” She turned to Murdo. “You’re right, my parents were from down South. They were just so typical, they collected pine resins for aromatherapy…” She went on about this for a bit.

  But I could see where her hand went while she spoke, maybe without her even thinking about it. It went to her knee, then crept to the top of her boot.

  “I live past Strathcarron,” she said, as I slowed at the turn-off.

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll drop you at the site. You’ll have to walk or hitch from there.”

  “I’ll walk,” she said..

  “Not far to go then?” said Murdo. Still prying.

  “Not far at all,” she said. “Up behind Strathcarron.”

  Now I know for a fact there’s nothing up behind Strathcarron. There’s nothing at Strathcarron, except the old railway station, some empty houses and the ruins of a restaurant. Up the hills behind it there’s waste howling wilderness. It was empty even before the freeze. There’s bugger-all people between here and Kintail. Bugger-all beasts for that matter. You’d be hard-pressed to find enough dead sheep to feed a crow.

  I kept my trap shut about all this and I glared at Murdo to do the same.

  We crossed the Carron bridge and pulled up just before the site road-end, two or three hundred metres from the old station.

  “Thanks,” said Ailiss. She hopped out, hauled her bag after her, waved, shut the door and strode off along the road. The end of the loch was to her right and the site to her left. She didn’t look to either side, or back.

  “Well,” said Euan as he climbed down from the lookout bucket to the running board, “there goes a girl who is not afraid of bandits.”

  Murdo and I both laughed.

  “What?” said Euan. He handed the shotgun in through the cab window. I clipped it to the rack behind the seats.

  “She’s armed,” I said. “At least a knife, and maybe a gun as well. And she lives up in the hills behind Strathcarron.” I waved at the range in front of us.

  “And she has no food in that bag,” said Murdo, “except some sugar and a packet of Rich Abernethy biscuits. It’s all stuff like batteries and disinfectants.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?” demanded Euan.

  I started the engine again and began the turn, over an earth-covered culvert and on to the site. As the security guard waved a scanner at us I glanced up the road for traffic. There was none. The girl was a couple of hundred metres away, walking fast.

  “She’s a bandit,” I said.

  * * * *

  V

  SITE WORK

  We had brought a Caterpillar digger on the back of the truck. Getting it off was hard work. Our thick gloves made the chains awkward to handle, but they were too cold to touch with bare skin. The heavy padlocks and hasps were frozen solid. It took a lot of tapping with a hammer to get them loose. The tailgate ramps were stiff. We had to melt ice off them with a blowtorch before Euan could drive the Cat down to the ground. He had just eased the tracks over the edge of the flatbed and was inching forward, waiting to tip forward onto the slope of the ramps, when I saw a black cloud in the west. Way down the loch. By the time the Cat was on the ground you couldn’t see Lochcarron.

  I looked around. It was weird to be standing in bright sunshine with that black wall of cloud on the way. All over the site—there were about twenty guys working there—people were yelling, hauling tarpaulins over equipment, shutting down machinery, and running for shelter. Only the guards stood their ground. Their armour would take more than a storm to damage.

  “Time to go, boys,” I said.

  Euan jumped out of the Cat and locked the door behind him. Murdo pulled his parka hood up and headed for the nearest depot. I heaved the two boards one by one into the back of the truck and banged the tailgate up, slammed the bolts across.

  I could hear a hissing from the sea a couple of hundred metres away.

  I ran after Euan towards the doorway where Murdo was standing among a crowd of others, staring past us and waving. Beckoning, urging us on. A gust of wind pushed us like a giant hand on our backs. The hiss became a drumming roar. We had just got under the roof when hailstones the size of golf balls started hitting the tarmac. They hit so hard they shattered. I felt a sting of ice on my face, and covered my eyes. Everybody backed farther inside, pressing against machines and tools and coils of pipe.

  For ten minutes it was almost as dark as night. The ground in front of us turned slowly white. The hailstones hammered on the roof. I could see them bouncing off the side window of the depot and wondered why it didn’t break. Then I remembered it was probably made of toughened glass, just like the truck windscreen and the Cat’s cabin windows. This thought reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. With all the noise I could hardly think at all.

  Then the hailstorm passed as suddenly as it had started. The sky was still overcast, and the wind fresh, but the squall had marched off up the glen. We walked out, boots crunching on chunks of ice.

  “The ground needed it,” said Euan.

  “Yes indeed, it’ll be good for the crops,” said Murdo.

  “Aye, the spring sowing needs it,” I said.

  We went on with this farming talk until it stopped being funny. That didn’t take long.

  I led the way to the yellow dome of the site office. A local lassie looked at us from behind a desk as we trooped in.

  “Site engineer ?” I asked.

  “He’ll be back in a minute,” she said.

  “OK,” I said.

  Her hands were moving on the keyboard but she was watching the news. It scrolled down a screen tacked to the wall beside a calendar. March was a bare girl on a wet rock somewhere hot. April would be a hot girl on a bare rock somewhere wet. On the screen the top news was a Siberian town that had sunk two metres overnight. They’re thawing while we’re freezing. Russian kids in army uniforms helped folk into long trucks with huge fat wheels. The rest of the news was the usual. Truck bomb in Tehran. Ambush in Kabul.

  “The Bodach’s been busy,” said Euan.

  The Bodach—the old man—is what the locals call Osama Bin Laden. Nobody knows if he’s still alive or not. Maybe he’s getting the Reverse treatment but he’s not in a healthy line of work. His gloating videos still come out every now and again. But that doesn’t prove anything. You could say the same about Mick Jagger.

  A man in a suit and wellies hurried in with that look of someone who has just been for a pee. His belt was one notch too tight for his belly and his thinning hair had been flattened by twenty-odd years under hard hats. Red cheeks and sandy eyebrows and sharp blue eyes.

  “Liam Morrison,” he said, shaking hands.

  “We’ve brought the Cat,” I said after we’d introduced ourselves.

  “Good,” he said. He ambled to the desk and pawed at loose paper. “The chart, Kelly?”

  “It’s in here somewhere,” she said. “Got it.”

  Over by the curved wall a printer whizzed. Kelly got up and came back with a metre of paper. Liam looked around for somewhere to spread it, then held it up against the wall.

  “That’s your line for the trench,” he said. “It’s all marked out on the ground. From the river to the railway. Yellow posts and green string, mind. The red one’s for the site sewage line.”

  We p
eered at the drawing and got this clear in our heads.

  “OK,” I said.

  “You better take it,” said Liam. “Don’t get it wet.”

  We all laughed and Liam nodded and we headed out.

  “ ‘Don’t get it wet,’ “ Euan muttered.

  “Taking the piss,” I said. “But he’s polite for a boss.”

  “The gentleman will have his little joke,” said Murdo.

  Lack of water was what had brought us here in the first place. The hailstorm was the usual way water falls from the sky around here. Not much of that, and not much rain, not even much snow. The rain that does fall comes in heavy bursts that run off in flash floods. The snow that does fall, up on the tops, doesn’t melt near soon enough. The Highlands are drying out. So the Hydro stations that kept the Highlands lit up in the old days don’t get enough water to work. Wind power turned out to be a crock as soon as the weather went wild. It’s either so calm the blades don’t turn or so stormy the pylons get blown over.

  So here we were, climbing onto the Cat and getting ready to dig a trench to hold a cable. One end of the cable was coiled up on the bank of the Carron. The rest of it ran out along the riverbed and across the tidal flat and along the bottom of the loch. All the way out to the new nuclear power station on a wee island between the mouth of Loch Carron and the Isle of Skye. The wee island is called Eilean Mor, which means Big Island. The power station was built on it because nobody lives there to object, and also because it’s easy to guard. In the Sound of Skye there’s enough military and naval hardware to scare off the Bodach himself.

  The first part of our job was to dig a trench from the Carron to the back of the old railway station. The railway line was a ready-made route across country to Loch Luichart. At Loch Luichart, about twenty kilometres inland, was one of those dry Hydro power stations I told you about. Somebody had decided that this would be just the place to plug the new power into the grid. It had all the machinery, but it was lying idle.

  The trains don’t run anymore on the Kyle line—too many landslides—so the rails were free to carry heavy equipment. Any day now it would come chugging down from Inverness. Then it would slowly chug back, digging a trench alongside the railway track as it went. Same trick for laying the cable. All we’d have to do was follow behind and shovel the dirt in, and lay prefab concrete covers over any stretches where the cable had to be trailed over bare rock.

  All very straightforward. But first we had to dig this trench through a couple hundred metres of soil that was on the way to freezing solid. Tomorrow’s permafrost. And the day after tomorrow’s swamp, if Alaska and Siberia are anything to go by. But that’s the day after tomorrow’s problem.

  Liam Morrison had done his bit with the theodolite and laser gadget. His two assistants (I could see from the names on the drawing) had done their thing with sticks and string. The line they’d marked out for the trench to follow stretched straight from the Carron’s left bank to just east of the station. Easy.

  Our only instruction was to dig a metre deep all the way along it. By the time Murdo had manoeuvred the Cat to the side of the river we were lined up and ready to go. Point and shoot.

  Nothing’s ever that simple.

  * * * *

  VI

  WARNING LABELS

  The Cat was so new you could still see yellow and black paint that had never had dust on it. It was a new model and all. It had a big chain winch. It had a drill attached to the digger scoop. Beside the drill was the nozzle of a heat blaster, hose-piped to the engine, for thawing frozen ground.

  So why was I down in the trench with a pick and spade and crowbars? Why were we only fifty metres along, towards the end of the second day after we’d arrived?

  I was asking these questions not very politely.

  “It’s the Ice Age, man,” Euan explained, leaning on a shovel, holding a chain, smoking a tab, and offering advice from above. “The glaciers left a lot of boulders when they went.”

  “At this rate,” I said, wedging the end of a crowbar behind one of said boulders, “they’ll be here when the glaciers come back.”

  “Not long to wait then,” said Murdo, from behind the levers in the cab.

  “Pass me the flexies,” I said.

  Euan flung the chain rattling down. On the end of it was a bunch of cables made from some fancy carbon tech. These were the flexies. If you stretched any two of them out, wrapped them around something then brought the ends together they could writhe like snakes into a knot. This was a fix for exactly the problem we had right now: buried boulders. (As well as for tree stumps and stuck cars and stuff like that.)

  The trouble was, you had to have enough clear space around your obstacle to wrap them in. I heaved on the crowbar. The boulder rocked a few centimetres. Soil that had been hard even for the drill to break into suddenly crumbled and slid into the gap. It filled it completely. I heaved again. I knew this could be done. We’d done it about twenty times already. People had been growing oats and potatoes and turnips on this plain for hundreds of years. You’d think they’d have got rid of all the boulders. Turns out they only got rid of them as deep as the plough digs, which is not a metre, not even half a metre.

  “Why don’t you just take the trench around the boulders?” Liam had asked. He moved his hand like a fish.

  “You know what we find when we do that?”

  “Other boulders?”

  “Got it.”

  “Oh well. Carry on, gentlemen.”

  So we carried on. My second heave on the crowbar shifted the boulder again. I could see black space behind it.

  “Give us a hand,” I said.

  Euan spat his tab and jumped down into the trench and wrapped a pair of flexies around the boulder. The ends knotted themselves. At the same time tiny grippers came out the cable and stuck to the rock like ivy. I let the crowbar sag back. We stood and looked at it for a minute.

  “It’ll no hold,” I said. “It’s too near the top.”

  Euan stretched five more flexies across the exposed surface, then tugged on the chain.

  “It’ll stick like an octopus to a face mask,” he proclaimed.

  “Well, I’m not sticking around,” I said.

  We clambered out of the trench, backed well clear, and gave Murdo the thumbs-up. The winch whined. The chain straightened. The tension built. The chain and flexies lashed through the air like a cat-o’-nine-tails and clanged against the cab.

  “So much for that,” said Euan. “Try again?”

  I looked around. The sun was behind the Atlantic. To the east the pink sky was making the cut-out face of a giant of the mountain. The one the locals call Wellington’s Nose.

  “Call it a day,” I said.

  We washed up, and had some grub in the canteen. Then we cadged a lift for the hotel bar from an Iraqi refugee student on work placement who was keen to make friends. Thank God for Muslims. Well, onside Muslims anyway, if you see what I mean. They don’t complain about having to drive back from the pub. I stood the first round and bought a tall orange juice for young Farhad and a half and a half each for myself and the lads. The whisky bottles all had labels showing the diseased liver of the month. The beer mats showed a range of car crash injuries. The bar had been built like a conservatory. Its big windows had long since been sprayed over with insulation foam. Too mean or too poor even for double glazing. The light was yellow. There was a score or so of people here, usual mix of local soaks and less sozzled incomers. Couple of other teams from the site. Most of the crew preferred to drink in the barracks. No smoke detectors hot-linked to the local cop shop, for one thing. Better atmosphere in every way, you could say. People had stopped staring at us after the first night. I stared at them on my way back to the table with the tray.

  “Looking for somebody?” Euan asked.

  “He’s pining for his bandit,” said Murdo.

  This was true but I denied it. I had found Ailiss on my mind the past couple of days. I had been keeping an eye out for h
er, but I hadn’t seen her on the road or in the village.

  “I meant to ask,” said Euan. “Why did you call her a bandit?”

  Farhad looked worried. “You have bandits here?”

  “Just a few rebels in the hills,” said Murdo.

  “Don’t wind up the kid,” I told him, then turned to Farhad. “They’re no like your Kurds or anything. They’re just small groups of young folks mostly who live up in the mountains. They call themselves new age settlers. Some of them do a bit of stealing. One or two of them sometimes even hold up a supply lorry on a lonely road. That’s why they get called bandits.”

  “But why do they do it?” asked Farhad.