Some of the Best From Tor.com, 2013 Edition: A Tor.Com Original

by Various

  She’d take the hillside screaming, and kill who she could, before Grant got her.

  She dropped the rifle in her lap, gunned the engine.

  She never made it.

  The rider who crested the hill on her right flank was one of Grant’s railroaders.

  He’d cast a wide net, she thought. He hadn’t wanted survivors.

  The man must have been nervous going up a rock face so sheer; it took a moment before he looked up and caught his first and last glimpse of a dog of the Western Fleet.

  By the time she reached the bottom of the hill, Grant and his men had vanished.

  Frank was already gone.

  She sat with him for a little while, pushed his hair from his forehead and closed his eyes.

  She didn’t know any songs. (There was so little left).

  So she told him the story he’d loved as a child, of the warrior who sought his stolen wife in the enemy camp, and the old grandmother who advised him and called him from the dead when he was torn to pieces, and when the man had his wife he brought the grandmother home as well, because it’s good not to leave behind those who care for you.

  Her fingers were slick; she’d pulled at the rings until they bled.

  When the worst of her trembling was over, she carried him to the dog, for his last journey home.

  The others were in the yard, shouting plans to find them—Joseph was the fastest draw, Maria was on horseback, and Fa Liang had broken Dog 1 but was changing mounts, and knew how long it took railroad men to regroup.

  Three men were scattered, dead, in the pool of light from the house.

  Good, she thought dimly.

  When Fa Liang saw Faye, his arms dropped as if grief had knocked him in the chest.

  When Maria saw them, she dismounted and went inside, to clear the table for the dead.

  Joseph reached for Frank, but hesitated, so Faye could object if she wanted to.

  She didn’t. Her strength was coming and going. She could barely walk.

  (Joseph could carry him, they had built the water pump in the yard together, they’d been clever and now Frank never would be, never again, her hands were cold.)

  They laid him on the table in the front room. Faye smoothed his hair down his shoulders, wiped blood from his face, laced his hands across his stomach in his old habit.

  He’d wanted so much to fight for home, and win.

  She yanked her hair out of its plaits, dragged her fingers through it, just for something to do with her hands.

  Outside, she heard horses and engines, and people calling. Maria was riding for town to demand the sheriff honor her claim. Joseph was going with her, as armed guard.

  There was a clatter as Fa Liang set the dog on watch.

  When Faye looked into the hanging mirror on the far wall, there were two doubles in the frame; the weeping one reached out, took the cool hand of the other.

  Maria and Joseph came back with grim faces, and spoke to Fa Liang. Then they came into the sitting room.

  “To pay respects,” Maria said.

  Faye wanted to ask what had happened, but her throat was dry.

  Through the window she could see down the flats to the horizon. She’d watched that open line a long time.

  “They’re debating if it’s legal to interfere,” Maria said, as if to Frank, before she left.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Fa Liang told Faye, when it was his turn.

  That was cruel, she thought; he had to know how hard it was to part from a brother.

  There should be something, she thought, when the others had gone. There should be someone here who could prepare Frank for a good journey home.

  But there wasn’t. Grant and his men would be back. There was no time, even if she knew what should be done.

  She couldn’t even dress him the way he should be dressed; he had only the one necklace. The rest of it was any man’s clothes.

  She sat beside him for a long time, wishing she could cut her hair.

  Frank had made her promise never to, after they cut his at the school. She’d given her word. He’d grown his hair out, since—it was as long as hers—but still, she’d never touched it.

  Her hands ached for a pair of shears.

  She thought about the people in River Pass, who wanted the railroad, and worried Frank would raise the dead against them.

  To the north, if she could swing wide of prospectors, she’d be free. Shoshone territory had been eaten whole, but if she left this behind, she could look for land they might not yet have thought to steal.

  All that had kept her here was Frank—his hope of making a safe place, his belief in holding firm.

  It seemed a betrayal to go on alone.

  She sat beside him, thinking about what it meant to stay here, about how much she was willing to fight.

  Then she rose, and took what she needed, and kissed him good-bye.

  What Grant and the Union Pacific see, when they come to lay claim to Elijah Pike’s lands, is a campfire burning high behind a six-legged metal dog, front legs raised with blades out, bearing a single rider.

  They see they’ve raised a ghost, an Indian come back to guard his land.

  Their gun wrists get cold, suddenly; suddenly, their teeth are chattering.

  Grant and one or two others struggle for reason. They think, it can’t be him, it can’t—they look around for any other person who can make a lie of this horror.

  But the dog moves forward, impossibly nimble, and they see the man’s face in the first streaks of dawn, and the breastplate of his necklace, missing strands and spattered with his blood.

  “God save me, it’s Frank Clement,” Grant whispers, and the tremor under the name is the sound that sucks the fight out of them.

  When Frank keeps coming, his jaw set and his dark eyes fixed on them, the monstrous insect moving underneath him with its engine shrieking, with his open mouth shrieking, with the thunder of the fire behind him, they run.

  Less than an hour after Grant and his men had gone, Susannah Pell arrived with Lewis the sheriff and some deputies with guns.

  When they came, Fa Liang and Joseph were gone—they’d taken the cart to fetch the broken dog—and Maria and Faye were sitting on the porch, flanked by loaded rifles.

  The sheriff told Maria they’d found her claim legal, and the railroad in the wrong. Michael Grant had been formally accused of killing Elijah Pike, and the town would be suing Union Pacific for his murder.

  It was the easiest way out, Faye thought, if the town was waking to a conscience. Grant was a good man to blame; he’d just been passing through on land that wasn’t his, and that sort are easy to hate.

  “The mayor’s going to tell the railroad that God-fearing people won’t condone that sort of thing,” Susannah told Maria, in the tone of a sister. “You’re free to stay—of course we’ll stand with you. Poor Elijah.”

  Faye waited until the last of the River folk had passed beyond the horizon.

  Then she said, “I’m going to bury him. Alone.”

  When Joseph moved to argue, Maria put a hand on his arm, and he looked down at her and reconsidered.

  Stay here, Faye thought. Take whatever moments you can. They’ll be far between.

  They’d all be watched more closely, now, as long as they stayed here—the railroad and the town would both be waiting to see if the folk of Western Fleet had been worth their notice.

  The price of a homestead, for their kind.

  Fa Liang brought Dog 2 from the barn to the door, and she saw he’d lashed a shovel to the front of the seat.

  “Call if you need us,” he said, in the tone of a man who knew what it took to bury kin.

  She didn’t call.

  All the while she dug into the earth nearly as tall as she was, and covered him with the soft dark dirt, she didn’t make a sound.

  When it was over, she sat beside the grave and looked out across the wide horizon, where it curved to meet the deep blue sky.

  At dusk, Mari
a brought wildflowers to the grave.

  Then she knelt beside Faye, and said, “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I know how it is, to let someone go who you loved.”

  She hadn’t let him go, Faye thought, her stomach tight; that was half the grief.

  “I wore his clothes,” Faye said. “I wore his name.”

  Maria nodded. “It’s strange, the things that happen. I had a husband I didn’t love. I’ll be his widow the rest of my life.”

  Faye smoothed her hands against her trousers.

  (Some sorrows you carried alone.)

  “Come in soon,” Maria said. “It will be cold tonight.”

  Then she was moving across the rise and down the hill, sure-footed, all the way to the big house she owned, where she had made a garden grow from nothing.

  Dark was rolling in above them.

  Fa Liang was probably still on the porch, mending dogs’ legs by candlelight. Maria would be in the kitchen by now, forcing a meal together, and Joseph would be seeing to the horses for the night before he came inside, to watch Maria and not say a thing.

  There was no moon, no stars—clouds covered them, the sky was grieving. In the dark, she could see Green River, a dim candle flame across the basin.

  Amazing, how far away light could be.

  The train would come to Green River; the train would lace the land tight, a faster road to cross the plains.

  She didn’t want to see it. She would rather take a tipi and a horse and wander into the badlands, or die free in the first bitter winter.

  But Frank was here; just now, she couldn’t leave him.

  A lamp went on in the front room. It swallowed the lights of Green River, flooded the whole place like morning—the half-standing barn, the shadows of dogs in the bunkroom, the path to the cabin that was hers and Frank’s, their footsteps worn into the land.

  Faye rose from the graveside, and started for home.

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Genevieve Valentine

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Richard Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address Tor.com, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  e-ISBN 9781466839244

  First eBook Edition: February 2013

  Contents

  Title Page

  Begin Reading

  In the end, the discovery of evidence of extraterrestrial life, and not just life, but intelligence, got hopelessly mucked up because no one wanted to take responsibility for confirming the findings, and no one could decide who ultimately had the authority—the obligation—to do so. We submitted the paper, but peer review held it up for a year. News leaked—NASA announced one of their press conferences, but the press conference ended up being an announcement about a future announcement, which never actually happened and the reporters made a joke of it. Another case of Antarctic meteorites or cold fusion. We went around with our mouths shut waiting for an official announcement while ulcers devoured our guts.

  So I wrote a press release. I had Marsh at JPL’s comet group and Salvayan at Columbia vet it for me and released it under the auspices of the JPL Near Earth Objects Program. We could at least start talking about it instead of arguing about whether we were ready to start talking about it. I didn’t know what would happen next. I did it in the spirit of scientific outreach, naturally. The release included that now-famous blurry photo that started the whole thing.

  I had an original print of that photo, of UO-1—Unidentified Object One, because it technically wasn’t flying and I was being optimistic that this would be the first of more than one —framed and hanging on the wall over my desk, a stark focal point in my chronically cluttered office. Out of the thousands of asteroids we tracked and photographed, this one caught my eye, because it was symmetrical and had a higher than normal albedo. It flashed, even, like a mirror. Asteroids aren’t symmetrical and aren’t very reflective. But if it wasn’t an asteroid.…

  We turned as many telescopes on it as we could. Tried to get time on Hubble and failed, because it sounded ridiculous—why waste time looking at something inside the orbit of Jupiter? We did get Arecibo on it. We got pictures from multiple sources, studied them for weeks until we couldn’t argue with them any longer. No one wanted to say it because it was crazy, just thinking it would get you sacked, and I got so frustrated with the whole group sitting there in the conference room after hours on a Friday afternoon, staring at each other with wide eyes and dropped jaws and no one saying anything, that I said it: It’s not natural, and it’s not ours.

  UO-1 was approximately 250 meters long, with a fan shape at one end, blurred at the other, as if covered with projections too fine to show up at that resolution. The rest was perfectly straight, a thin stalk holding together blossom and roots, the lines rigid and artificial. The fan shape might be a ram scoop—Angie came up with that idea, and the conjecture stuck, no matter how much I reminded people that we couldn’t decide anything about what it was or what it meant. Not until we knew more.

  We—the scientific community, astronomers, philosophers, writers, all of humanity—had spent a lot of time thinking about what would happen if we found definitive proof that intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe. All the scenarios involved these other intelligences talking to us. Reaching out to us. Sending a message we would have to decipher—would be eager to decipher. Hell, we sure wouldn’t be able to talk to them, not stuck on our own collection of rocks like we were. Whether people thought we’d be overrun with sadistic tripods or be invited to join a greater benevolent galactic society, that was always the assumption—we’d know they were there because they’d talk to us.

  When that didn’t happen, it was like no one knew what to do next. No one had thought about what would happen if we just found a … a thing … that happened to be drifting a few million miles out from the moon. It didn’t talk. Not so much as a blinking light. The radiation we detected from it was reflected—whatever propulsion had driven it through space had long since stopped, and inertia carried it now. No one knew how to respond to it. The news that was supposed to change the course of human history … didn’t.

  We wouldn’t know any more about it until we looked at it up close, until we brought it here, brought it home. And that was where it all fell apart.

  * * *

  I presented the initial findings at the International Astronomical Union annual meeting. My department gathered the data, but we couldn’t do anything about implementation—no one group could implement anything. But of course, the first argument was about whom the thing belonged to. I nearly resigned.

  Everyone wanted a piece of it, including various governments and the United Nations, and we had to humor that debate because nothing could get done without funding. The greatest discovery in all of human history and funding held it hostage. Several corporations, including the producers of a popular energy drink, threatened to mount their own expeditions in order to establish naming and publicity rights, until the U.S. Departments of Energy, Transportation, and Defense issued joint restrictions on privately-funded extra-orbital spaceflight, which caused its own massive furor.

  Meanwhile, we and the various other groups working on the project tracked UO-1 as it appeared to establish an elliptical solar orbit that would take it out to the orbit of Saturn and back on a twenty-year cycle. We waited. We developed plans, which were presented and rejected. We took better and better pictures, which revealed enough detail to see struts holding up what did indeed appear to be the surface of a ram scoop. It did not, everyone slowly began to agree, appear to be inhabited. The data on it never fluctuated. No signals emanated from it. It was metal, it was solid, it was inert. We published papers and appeared on cable documentaries. We gritted our teeth while websites went up claiming that the thing was a weapon, and a survivalist movement developed in response. Since it was indistinguishable from all the existing survivalist movements, no one really noticed.

  And we waited.


  * * *

  The thing is, you discover the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and you still have to go home, wash up, get a good night’s sleep, and come up with something to eat for breakfast in the morning. Life goes on, life keeps going on, and it’s not that people forget or stop being interested. It’s that they realize they still have to change the oil in the car and take the dog for a walk. You feel like the whole world ought to be different, but it only shifts. Your worldview expands to take in this new information.

  I go to work every day and look at that picture, my picture, this satellite or spacecraft, this message in a bottle. Some days I’m furious that I can’t get my hands on it. Some days I weep at the wonder of it. Most days I look at it, sigh, and write another round of emails and make phone calls to find out what’s going to happen to it. To make something happen.

  “How goes the war?” Marsh leans into my office like he does every afternoon, mostly to try to cheer me up. He’s been here as long as I have; our work overlaps, and we’ve become friends. I go to his kids’ birthday parties. The brown skin around his eyes crinkles with his smile. I’m not able to work up a smile to match.

  “The Chinese say they’re sending a probe with a robotic arm and a booster to grab it and pull it back to Earth. They say whoever gets there first has right of salvage. It’s a terrible idea. Even if they did manage to get it back without breaking it, they’d never let anyone else look at it.”

  “Oh, I think they would—under their terms.” He doesn’t get too worked up about it because nobody’s managed to do anything yet, why would they now? He would say I take all of this too personally, and he’d be right.

  “The IAU is sending a delegation to try to talk the Chinese government into joining the coalition. They might have a chance of it if they actually had a plan of their own. Look, if you want me to talk your ear off, come in and sit, have some coffee. Otherwise, leave now. That’s your warning.”

  “I’ll take the coffee,” he says, claiming the chair I pulled away from the wall for him before turning to my little desktop coffee maker. His expression softens, his sympathy becoming genuine rather than habitual. “You backing any particular plan yet?”