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

by Gardner Dozois

  “How much time do we have?” Paula bit off her words as if they tasted bad.

  “We realize you will need time to achieve acceptance, so we are prepared to give you two months.”

  The room practically exploded with protests and arguments.

  At last the captain held up the blunt appendage that served him as a hand. “Very well,” he said. “I am authorized to give you an extension. You may have three months.”

  Later, they learned that every captain up and down the valley had given the same extension. It had obviously been planned in advance.

  The room smoldered with outrage as the captain turned to leave, his job done. But before he could exit, Susan Abernathy stepped into the doorway, along with the smell of brewing coffee from the hall outside.

  “Captain Groton,” she said, “would you like to join us for coffee? It’s a tradition after meetings.”

  “Thank you, madam,” he said, “but I must return to base.”

  “Susan,” she introduced herself, and, contrary to all etiquette, held out her hand.

  The Wattesoon recoiled visibly. But in the next second he seemed to seize control of himself and, by sheer force of will, extended his arm. Susan clasped it warmly, looking down into his pebbly eyes. “Since we are going to be neighbors, at least for the next few months, we might as well be civil,” she said.

  “That is very foresighted of you, madam,” he answered.

  “Call me Susan,” she said. “Well, since you can’t stay tonight, can I invite you to dinner tomorrow?”

  The captain hesitated, and everyone expected another evasion, but at last he said, “That would be very acceptable. Susan.”

  “Great. I’ll call you with the details.” As the captain left, followed closely by his ensign, she turned to the council. “Can I bring you some coffee?”

  * * * *

  “Ish. What did it feel like?” said her son Nick.

  Susan had become something of a celebrity in the eleven-year-old set for having touched an alien.

  “Dry,” she said, staring at the laptop on the dining room table. “A little lumpy. Kind of like a lizard.”

  In the next room, Tom was on the phone. “Warren, you’re talking crazy,” he said. “We still might be able to get some concessions. We’re working on it. But if you start shooting at them, we’re doomed. I don’t want to hear any more about toad hunts, okay?”

  “Have you washed your hand?” Nick wanted to know.

  Susan let go of the mouse to reach out and wipe her hand on Nick’s arm. “Eew, gross!” he said. “Now I’ve got toad germs.”

  “Don’t call them that,” she said sharply. “It’s not polite. You’re going to have to be very polite tonight.”

  “I don’t have to touch him, do I?”

  “No, I’m sure touching a grody little boy is the last thing he wants.”

  In the next room, Tom had dialed a different number. “Listen, Walt, I think I’m going to need a patrol car in front of my house tonight. If this toad gets shot coming up my walk, my house is going to be a smoking crater tomorrow.”

  “Is that true?” Nick asked, wide-eyed.

  “No,” Susan lied. “He’s exaggerating.”

  “Can I go to Jake’s tonight?”

  “No, I need you here,” Susan said, hiding the pang of anxiety it gave her.

  “What are we having for dinner?”

  “I’m trying to find out what they eat, if you’d just leave me alone.”

  “I’m not eating bugs.”

  “Neither am I,” Susan said. “Now go away.”

  Tom came in and sank into a chair with a sigh. “The whole town is up in arms,” he said. “Literally. Paula wanted to picket our house tonight. I told her to trust you, that you’ve got a plan. Of course, I don’t know what it is.”

  “I think my plan is to feed him pizza,” Susan said.

  “Pizza?”

  “Why not? I can’t find that they have any dietary restrictions, and everyone loves pizza.”

  Tom laid his head back and stared glumly at the ceiling. “Sure. Why not? If it kills him, you’ll be a hero. For about half an hour; then you’ll be a martyr.”

  “Pizza never killed anyone,” Susan said, and got up to start straightening up the house.

  The Abernathys lived in a big old 1918 three-story with a wraparound porch and a witch’s-hat tower, set in a big yard. The living room had sliding wood doors, stained-glass fanlights, and a wood-framed fireplace. It could have been fancy, but instead it had a frayed, lived-in look—heaps of books, puppy-chewed Oriental carpet, an upright piano piled with model airplanes. The comfy, well-dented furniture showed the marks of constant comings and goings, school projects, and meetings. There was rarely a night when the Abernathys didn’t have guests, but dinner was never formal. Formality was alien to Susan’s nature.

  She had been an RN, but had quit, fed up with the bureaucracy rather than the patients. She had the sturdy physique of a German farm girl, and the competent independence to go with it. Light brown hair, cropped just above her shoulders, framed her round, cheerful face. Only rarely was she seen in anything more fancy than a jean skirt and a shirt with rolled-up sleeves. When they had elected Tom, everyone had known they weren’t getting a mayor’s wife who would challenge anybody’s fashion sense.

  That night, Captain Groton arrived precisely on time, in a car with tinted windows, driven by someone who stayed invisible, waiting. Tom met the guest on the doorstep, looking up and down the street a little nervously. When they came into the living room, Susan emerged from the kitchen with a bouquet of wine glasses in one hand and a bottle in the other.

  “Wine, Captain?” she said.

  He hesitated. “If that is customary. I regret I am not familiar with your dietary rituals. I only know they are complex.”

  “It’s fermented fruit juice, mildly intoxicating,” she said, pouring a little bit in his glass. “People drink it to relax.”

  He took the glass gingerly. Susan saw that he had stumpy nubbin fingers. As a nurse, she had had to train herself to feel compassion even for the least appealing patients, and now she was forced to call on that skill to disregard his appearance.

  “Cheers,” she said, lifting her glass.

  There was a snap as the stem on Captain Groton’s glass broke in two. The wine slopped onto his hand as he tried to catch the pieces. “Pardon me,” he mumbled. “Your vessel is brittle.”

  “Never mind the glass,” Susan said, taking it and handing the pieces to Tom. “Did you cut yourself?”

  “No, of course—” he stopped in mid denial, staring at his hand. A thin line of blood bisected the palm.

  “Here, I’ll take care of that,” she said. Taking him by the arm, she led him to the bathroom. It was not until she had dabbed the blood off with a tissue that she realized he was not recoiling at her touch as he had before. Inwardly, she smiled at small victories. But when she brought out a bottle of spray disinfectant, he did recoil, demanding suspiciously, “What is it?”

  “Disinfectant,” she said. “To prevent infection. It’s alcohol-based.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought it might be water.”

  She spritzed his hand lightly, then applied a bandage. He was looking curiously around. “What is this place?”

  “It’s a bathroom,” she said. “We use it to—well, clean ourselves, and groom, and so forth. This is the toilet.” She raised the lid, and he drew back, obviously repulsed. She had to laugh. “It’s really very clean. I swear.”

  “It has water in it,” he said with disgust.

  “But the water’s not dirty, not now.”

  “Water is always dirty,” he said. “It teems with bacteria. It transmits a thousand diseases, yet you humans touch it without any caution. You allow your children to play in it. You drink it, even. I suppose you have gotten used to it, living on this world where it soils everything. It even falls from the sky. It is impossible to get away from it. You have no choice bu
t to soak in it.”

  Struck by the startling image of water as filth, Susan said, “Occupying our world must be very unpleasant for you. What is your planet like?”

  “It is very dry,” he said. “Miles and miles of hot, clean sand, like your Sahara. But your population does not live in the habitable spots, so we cannot either.”

  “You must drink water sometimes. Your metabolisms are not that different from ours, or you would not be able to eat our food.”

  “The trace amounts in foods are enough for us. We do not excrete it like you do.”

  “So that’s why you don’t have bathrooms,” she said.

  He paused, clearly puzzled. Then it dawned on him what she had left out of her explanation. “You use this room for excretory functions?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s supposed to be private.”

  “But you excrete fluids in public all the time,” he said. “From your noses, your mouths, your skin. How can you keep it private?”

  For a moment the vision of humans as oozing bags of bacteria left her unable to answer. Then she said, “That’s why we come here, to clean it all off.”

  He looked around. “But there is no facility for cleaning.”

  “Sure there is.” She turned on the shower. “See?”

  He reacted with horror, so she quickly shut it off. She explained, “You see, we think of water as clean. We bathe in it. How do you bathe?”

  “Sand,” he said. “Tubs of dry, heated sand. It is heavenly.”

  “It must be.” She could picture it: soft, white sand. Like what lay under the Okanoggan limestone. She looked at him in dawning realization. “Is that why you want—?”

  “I cannot say anything about that,” he said. “Please do not ask me.”

  Which was all the answer she needed.

  When they came back out, Tom and the boys were in the kitchen, so that was where they went.

  “Sorry, we got caught up in a really interesting conversation,” Susan said breezily, with an I’ll-tell-you-later look at Tom. “Captain Groton, these are our sons, Ben and Nick.” The boys stood up and nodded awkwardly, obviously coached not to shake hands.

  “They are both yours?” the Wattesoon asked.

  “Yes,” Tom said. “Do you have any kids, captain?”

  “Yes. A daughter.”

  “How old is she?” Susan said, pouring some more wine for him in a mug.

  Captain Groton paused so long she wondered if she had said something offensive, but finally he shook his head. “I cannot figure it out. The time dilation makes it too difficult. It would mean little to you anyway; our years are so different.”

  “So she’s back home on your planet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your wife, too?”

  “She is dead.”

  “I’m so sorry. It must have been hard for you to leave your daughter behind.”

  “It was necessary. I was posted here. I followed my duty.”

  It had occurred to Susan that perhaps cow-excretion pie was not the thing to offer her guest, so she began rummaging in the cupboard, and soon assembled a buffet of dry foods: roast soybeans, crackers, apple chips, pine nuts, and a sweet potato for moisture. As Tom tried valiantly to engage the captain in a conversation about fishing, she started assembling the pizza for her family. The dog was barking at the back door, so she asked Ben to feed him. Nick started playing with his Gameboy. There was a pleasantly normal confusion all around.

  “What sorts of food do you eat at home?” Susan asked her guest when she had a chance.

  Groton shrugged. “We are less preoccupied with food than you are. Anything will do. We are omnivores.”

  Ben muttered, “Better watch out for our dogs.”

  “Ben!” Susan rebuked him.

  Captain Groton turned marbly eyes on him. “We have no interest in your food animals.”

  The whole family stared in horror. “Our dogs aren’t food!” Ben blurted.

  “Then why do you keep them?” the captain asked reasonably.

  Tom said, “For companionship.”

  Ben said, “For fun.”

  Susan said, “Because they remind us that we’re human. Without other species around, we’d forget.”

  “Ah. I see,” the Wattesoon said. “We feel the same.”

  In the awkward silence that followed, the humans all wondered who were the Wattesoons’ pets.

  They were saved by the timer. The pizza came out of the oven, and soon all was cheerful confusion again.

  The internet had told Susan that Wattesoons were frugal eaters, but Captain Groton seemed ravenous. He ate some of everything she put on the table, including two slices of pizza.

  * * * *

  To spare their guest the troubling sight of counters, tabletop, and utensils being smeared with water, Susan asked him out to see the back yard so the others could clean up. The screen door banged shut behind them and the dog came trotting up, eager to smell the stranger, till Susan shooed him into the kitchen. She then led the Wattesoon out into the humid, crickety twilight.

  It was a Midwestern evening. The yard backed up onto the river bluff, a weathered limestone cliff overgrown with sumac and grapevine. Susan strolled out past the scattered detritus of Frisbees and lawn darts toward the quiet of the lower yard, where nature had started to encroach. There was an old swing hung from a gnarled oak tree, and she sat down in it, making the ropes creak. In the shady quiet, she swung idly to and fro, thinking of other evenings.

  She had never realized how desperately she loved this place until she was forced to think of losing it. Looking toward the dark bushes by the cliff, she saw the silent flare of fireflies. “Are you able to find this beautiful?” she said, not trying to hide the longing in her voice.

  After a few moments of silence, she looked over to find the captain gazing into the dark, lost in thought. “I am sorry,” he said, recollecting himself. “What did you ask?”

  Instead of answering, she said, “I think we each get imprinted on a certain kind of landscape when we’re young. We can enjoy other spots, but only one seems like we’re made from it, down to our bones. This is mine.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you understand how it is for us, then? We talk a lot about our investments and our livelihoods, but that’s just to hide the pain. We love this place. We’re bonded to it.”

  He didn’t answer at once, so she stopped the swing to look at him.

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Do you?” she said hopefully.

  “It changes nothing. I am sorry.”

  Disappointed, she stared at his lumpy face. Now that she was a little more accustomed to him, he did not seem quite so rubbly and squat. He gave an impatient gesture. “Why are your people so fond of being discontent? You relish resisting, protesting, always pushing against the inevitable. It is an immature response, and makes your lives much harder.”

  “But, Captain, there are some things that ought to be protested.”

  “What things?”

  “Folly. Malice. Injustice.”

  He cut her off in a pained tone. “These things are part of the nature of the world. There is nothing we can do to prevent them.”

  “You would not even try?” she said.

  “Life is not just. Fairness is a fool’s concept. To fight brings only disillusion.”

  “Well, we are different. We humans can put up with a thousand evils so long as we think they are fair. We are striving all the time to bring about justice, in ourselves and our society. Yours too, if you would just let us.”

  “So your truculence is all an effort to improve us?” the Wattesoon said.

  Surprised, Susan laughed. “Why, Captain Groton, no one told me your people had a sense of irony.”

  He seemed taken aback by her reaction, as if he regretted having provoked it.

  “I was not laughing at you,” she explained hastily. “At least, not in any way you would not wish.”

  “Yo
u cannot know what I would wish,” he said stiffly.

  She said, “Oh, I don’t know about that.” For the time being, here out of all official contexts, he seemed just as difficult and contradictory as any human male. Speculatively, she said, “Your answer just now, about justice. You sounded bitter, as if you spoke from some experience. What was it?”