The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Denny really loved his work. Except in abstract terms he cared much more about baby bears than he did about human babies, but he despised the Hefn anyhow. The problem didn’t get simpler. Mostly he just accepted the way things were and focused on his job, but every time he had to show up for one of these meetings the conflict would boil up inside him again.

  The ragged alley of tall cedars ended abruptly and he emerged into the clearing where the cabin sat. Beyond it hulked the chopper, a big metal dragonfly. Neither the Hefn nor the chopper pilot, a human, were anywhere to be seen. Denny trotted up the steps and along the deck and pushed open the cabin door.

  A young woman in her mid-twenties or thereabouts was hunkered down in front of the stove, putting in chunks of firewood; she closed and latched the little door and stood to face him, dusting off her hands. “Hi,” said Denny. “I guess I’m a little late. I was vetting some new cubs and kind of got into a situation. Where’s the Hefn Observer?” As he spoke he stuffed the watch cap in his pocket and hung the backpack on a hook by the door.

  “He went for a walk. He was getting sleepy,” she said. “It’s not Innisfrey this time, it’s Humphrey. I’m Marian Hoffman, by the way.”

  “The pilot, right?” She nodded. “Denny Demaree.” They shook hands. Denny started to unzip his parka, then had a thought. “Uh – maybe I should go try to find him? Did he walk down to the road?”

  “He just went straight past the pond and on down the hill. Bushwhacking. On all fours, the last I saw of him. I guess he doesn’t get out of the city much.”

  Denny considered. If the Hefn hadn’t stuck to either of the farm’s rough wagon roads, he could be anywhere. “Then I guess I’ll wait.” He hung his jacket on another hook and threw himself into one armchair, and Marian took the other. The next instant he sprang out of the chair. “Hang on, did you say Humphrey? The Bureau of Temporal Physics and the Apprentices and all that – the one that does the viddy program? What the hell is he doing here?”

  “Don’t ask me, I just fly the chopper.” She smiled. “Nice little place you’ve got here. Pretty luxurious for a field office.”

  “I – ” Denny stopped and willed himself to calm down. Humphrey. He had a bad feeling about this, but there was nothing to do but wait for the Hefn to show up. He sat down again. “Yeah, it is nice. Some old lady built this cabin and willed it and the whole farm to the local Girl Scout Council for a camp. The actual farm is a hundred acres, and a long time ago it used to be in my family, with a house down by the road. The well’s still there. This place, the cabin, was used as an admin building when the Scouts had it.”

  “Then time went by, and there weren’t any more Brownies coming up through the ranks?”

  He nodded. “The Scouts turned the place over to the state when they disbanded, and the state turned it over to Fish and Wildlife when the Hefn tapped them to monitor wildlife recovery.” He hopped up again, nervously. “I feel like I shouldn’t just be sitting around.”

  “Humphrey’s not like Innisfrey,” Marian said. “He won’t jump all over you for not being here on time. At least I don’t think he will.”

  “Yeah, but why’s he here?” Denny said. He opened the door to the porch and walked outside, scanning the whole long view from left to right. Nothing.

  “‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?’” Marian called to him from inside.

  Denny was surprised, and a little intrigued. The line, which he recognized but hadn’t thought of in decades, was from a kids’ edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Kids’ edition or not, the story had given him nightmares. From deep within itself his memory obliged with the right response: “ ‘Naught but the wind a-blowing, naught but the green grass growing.’ Man, I can’t believe I still remember that! I reckon it must’ve been high summer in Bluebeard’s kingdom, the grass won’t green up here for a good while yet.”

  “But here is Bluebeard himself,” came a deep voice from the deck, and the Hefn Humphrey burst through the other door and swept into the room.

  Denny bolted to the porch doorway just in time to catch the Hefn’s showy entrance. He darted inside while Humphrey shut the other door and turned to greet him properly. “You were expecting my colleague Innisfrey. I am, as you see, not Innisfrey, however. No. Innisfrey is at present otherwise engaged. I offered to take this meeting in his place, as I was already in Kentucky for a reason of my own. Humphrey, BTP. I am pleased to meet you, George Dennis Demaree.”

  Denny stared, more or less dumbfounded. He had of course seen Humphrey on the viddy, doing regular progress reports and updates and announcements. Also scoldings. Humphrey was the highest-profile Observer of the lot, and had had the most to do with humans since the Takeover, but the image on the screen, to which he had paid as little attention as possible, had not prepared Denny for the force of Humphrey’s personality. He looked like Innisfrey, his short, stocky, oddly jointed figure, covered entirely with gray hair (including a long shaggy beard which, though gray like the rest of him, made his improvised witticism particularly apt), with large opaque eyes and forked hands and feet. He also looked, truth to tell, rather moth-eaten. Denny knew why; the anti-hibernation drugs the wakeful Hefn had to take in winter made their hair fall out in clumps. And he had Innisfrey’s faintly gamy wet-dog odor.

  But the quality of his presence wasn’t remotely like cold, supercilious, charmless Innisfrey’s. All in all, the clash between apprehensive expectation and reality was so disorienting that it took Denny almost a minute to pull his wits together enough to apologize for being late.

  “Not at all, not at all. Your tardiness providentially provided me with a chance to stretch my legs. The country hereabouts is delightful; your work here must have given you great pleasure.”

  Denny nodded; then, realizing that he and his visitor were both still standing, blurted, “Uh, would you like to sit down?”

  Humphrey said, “As it appears that we have two chairs and two humans and one Hefn in this room, I propose that you and Marian Hoffman take the chairs.” And thereupon the Hefn Humphrey, household word, movie star, viddy personality, most powerful Observer on Earth, dropped to all fours, ambled over to the woodstove, and flomped onto the rag rug. He looked like a scruffy, off-color Great Pyrenees. “All right, Marian Hoffman? All right, George Dennis Demaree?” He gazed mildly from one to the other with those odd flat eyes, and Denny found himself in danger of being seriously disarmed.

  Marian had stood when Humphrey came in. She and Denny looked at each other, and then both sat down in the chairs they had been sitting in before.

  “Now, to business! I am delighted to be the bearer of happy tidings,” Humphrey said, and the flat eyes somehow conveyed an impression of beaming with pleasure. “Innisfrey has, as you might say, filled me in, and I have examined the radio reports you have filed, and the written reports, all of them, for the entire duration of this study. You have done excellent work here! Thanks to you, and to the studies of coyotes and white-tailed deer carried forward by your fellow wildlife biologists, we have a complete and detailed picture of the top two predators for this recovering habitat, together with their most important large prey species, over the past four years.

  “During this period in this area, the black bear population has experienced a 74 per cent gain in numbers. Eighty-six per cent of the bears are not immigrants but bears native to east central Kentucky. Remarkable! More than that, the bears are, might one say, in the pink? A comical expression to apply to a dark-colored bear! Their reproductive success has been excellent, and they are in prime condition! As the flora here proceed through the various stages of succession, the entire ecosystem burgeons and thrives.

  “Therefore! With no reason whatever for concern that the trend is in danger of reversing itself, we have determined,” Humphrey said from his shaggy-sheepdog position on the floor, giving again that impression of beaming up into Denny’s face, “to terminate this study, and to reassign you, George Dennis Demaree, to a location in particular need
of the skills you have exercised so diligently in this one. Congratulations!” And he bounded up and offered Denny his forked, hairy hand.

  Denny bounded up as well. “But the study’s not finished!” he protested, his voice loud and rude with shock. Instead of shaking Humphrey’s hand, he waved his arms wildly. “It’s nowhere near finished! I designed it to run for ten years, that’s the way my data spreadsheets are configured – I don’t want to drop it now! I can’t! I can’t believe you want to pull me out now!”

  At Denny’s outburst the Hefn’s beamish-boy look faded away; his demeanor became more closed and quiet, and when he spoke his voice had lost much of its hearty charm. “I regret that you do not wish to end your work here. I regret to learn that in your view it is incomplete. Our view, however, is different. We consider you to have been entirely successful. Thanks to you, we know that this area is well on its way to climax. Also thanks to you, we know that biodiversity increases every year. This is all we need to know. Whether you choose to accept reassignment is, of course, a decision you must make for yourself, but there are a great many other recovering habitat areas in Kentucky about which we know too little, and where your skills would be of great service.”

  Denny, so angry he was almost sputtering, managed to let him finish. “It doesn’t work like that!” he blurted the instant Humphrey stopped talking. “Wildlife biology is important for its own sake! Understanding how the bears adapt as this farmland reverts to climax forest doesn’t end because some practical purpose has been served! You – you Hefn never told me you’d turn up one day and tell me to pack up my stuff and leave! I did everything you told me to, nobody ever complained that the work wasn’t done well – you’re throwing me out for doing a good job!”

  Marian moved uneasily in her chair, and Denny suddenly remembered, like a bucket of cold water, who he was talking to. The Hefn, as he knew perfectly well, could do whatever they damn pleased. They had absolute power over the people of Earth, and most Hefn felt no sympathy for humanity, given the mess humanity had made of its own planet, and how hard the aliens had had to work to get them to clean it up. This Hefn, Humphrey, was probably the one with the most sympathy for the plight of the Earth’s people, many of whom were suffering a good deal from the cleanup process. If he said the study was over, it was probably over.

  Denny was wild. What a fool he’d been, to fall into the comfy habit of assuming he’d been assigned to this field study for the sake of science, and that as long as he minded his P’s and Q’s he would be allowed to continue. He’d been assigned here because it pleased the Hefn to study the bears of east central Kentucky for a while. Now they were done doing that, evidently, and he could take a new assignment or go and do something else entirely, they didn’t much care which. What they would not let him do was the one thing he wanted to do: keep on living in this cabin, watching Rocket and Rodeo develop under the tutelage of Rosetta, recording their weight, examining their scats under a microscope, radio-collaring them in due course, observing as they found mates and began the next generation.

  Then he had another thought. “What about Jason and Angie, are you pulling them out too?”

  “The studies of Jason Gotschalk and Angela Rivera are integral with your own. The coyotes are thriving. The white-tailed deer are thriving. The elk are thriving. Everything is thriving! We would not allow any element of this area study to continue unless all were to continue, nor would we terminate one without terminating all.” Humphrey sounded so benevolent as he said this, you would think he was doing them all a favor by yanking them out of the field.

  Denny had one more card to play, so he played it, not expecting to gain much by it but needing to try. “I’m a Gaian,” he said. “This is my Ground. A hundred years ago my family owned this farm, and I’d like to stay here, even if the study isn’t to be funded anymore.” Stay and do a little unofficial-work with Rosetta and her family and the half-dozen other breeding sows he’d been following, until the equipment wore out. Or, if they took that all away to a different site, just record observations, do odd jobs in town to buy food, hunker down here for as long as he could.

  Humphrey immediately became less alien-seeming, but no less definite. “Then I am truly sorry,” he said, sounding as if he meant it. “But alas, no one may stay. Our Lords the Gafr have decreed that wherever habitat studies have been terminated, the human presence shall be excluded until recovery is complete.”

  The Gafr were the boss aliens that nobody had ever seen. They directed things from their ship parked on the Moon, and what they said was final.

  “When?” Denny asked, finally defeated.

  “We will help you gather your personal things together,” said Humphrey kindly.

  He meant they were going to fly him out now. “What about the horse and the mule?”

  “They will be transferred to another field station. Yours, if you decide to accept reassignment. And I will gladly put you in touch with the Gaian Steward in Louisville, who should be able to assist you in finding another suitable Ground. Very possibly a way might be devised to match your new assignment with such a place.”

  And kick me out again when you decided I’d done enough there, Denny thought. No thanks.

  “As a Gaian, you could perhaps be assigned to the terrain around Hurt Hollow? Would that interest you? Bears have been sighted nearby. Pam Pruitt is in residence there at present, but some arrangement could surely be worked out.”

  Denny glanced up at this, but his mind was in turmoil. “I . . . don’t know. I need to think.” He gazed around the cabin, the place he had gradually let himself come to think of as home for the foreseeable future, now on the far side of an absolute divide; it was like looking through a Time Window into the past. “Most of this stuff stays with the cabin. The dishes and bedding and all that. The short-wave set.”

  “We will help you gather up what does not, yes, Marian Hoffman?”

  “I’d rather do it myself. I won’t be long. You could damp down the stove if you want something to do.”

  There really wasn’t much to pack: some dirty laundry, a razor, the daypack with the bear equipment, a few books and computer disks, the PocketPad, the laptop, his field glasses, his other pair of boots. Denny threw it all on the bed and went down in the basement, mind reeling from the sudden shift of direction, to get his duffel bag.

  Under the stairs, piled in the doorless tornado shelter, were the abandoned remnants of the old farm’s incarnation as Camp Sheltowee: rolled-up sleeping bags, tents, deflated air mattresses, mess kits, canteens . . . Denny’s disoriented brain suddenly focused. He touched nothing, only stood still for a moment before heading back up with the empty duffel. But his mind was made up.

  The chopper dropped him at the regional headquarters of Fish and Wildlife in Frankfort and whirled off to collect his two still-unsuspecting colleagues. Tess Perry, Denny’s boss, threw up her arms in protest at his accusing glare. “We had absolutely no clue they were going to pull this! The first I knew about it, here was Humphrey instead of Innisfrey, saying I should alert Louisville to get ready to reassign three field researchers, they were closing down East Central. This office is being closed down! I tried to warn you and the other two but you’d all gone out.”

  “I was checking on Rosetta’s cubs,” he said bitterly. “So what happens now?”

  “Reassignment, like he said.” And at the look on Denny’s face, “I know, I know, believe me, but you need to think about it anyway before you burn any bridges. When they get back here with Angie and Jason they’re taking y’all to Louisville.” She pronounced it “Luh:uv’le.” “They’re giving me a week to close up the office, then guess where I’m being transferred to. Paducah! Think I want to go to Paducah?”

  “Your parents live here in Frankfort, don’t they?”

  “My whole goddam family lives in Frankfort! But I’m going to Paducah, because right now I haven’t got a better idea, and till I come up with one I’m keeping on the right side of the Hefn.”
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br />   Denny groaned. “God, I hate the fuckers.”

  “Not any more than I do,” said Tess glumly, “but if you want to keep on doing wildlife biology, stay on their good side, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Denny said nothing to any of them about his plan, not Tess, not his rumpled and furious fellow deportees. In Louisville he went through the motions of being debriefed and counseled about reassignment, took a couple of days to “think it over,” discussing options with Angie and Jason and the teams from the eastern part of the state, who had also been praised to the skies and yanked out of the field.

  In the end, after a lot of grumbling, the others all agreed to be posted elsewhere, at least for the time being. Humphrey must indeed have put in a word, because when they interviewed Denny they offered him Hurt Hollow, the Gaian shrine thirty miles upriver. He thanked them politely but said he’d like to apply for an unpaid leave, take some time to consider all his options, including that one, which he hinted was an attractive possibility. Unlike the others, the territory he’d been relieved from was his Ground; that made it harder to know what to do. He mentioned visiting his brother in Pittsburgh; you could get to Pittsburgh by steamboat, right up the Ohio River from Louisville.