The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Pruitt said unhappily, “It’s not that black and white. I’ve been reeval-uating everything I ever knew about the Hefn, believe me, these past few weeks. And I know – I know – there’s been a real desire – definitely on Humphrey’s part, and some of the other Observers too – to connect with people and help them – help them adjust – just help them.” The apple in her hands was mostly rot; she abandoned the effort to cut out the bad parts and dumped the whole thing in the compost bowl. “But behind all that, yes, it does look like there was always another agenda, even for Humphrey and Godfrey and Alfrey. Because, whatever they think personally, and however earnestly some of them have intervened on our behalf, in the end the Hefn serve the Gafr. We tend to forget that, because we never see the Gafr, but it’s all too true. All the Hefn we’ve had any contact with were loyal to the Gafr when the rebels fomented their mutiny.”

  Denny flung the knife down on the table so hard it skidded to the floor. “So that’s been their purpose right from the start? Reduce-slash-eliminate the human population, the temperate forests and rainforest come back, the ecosystems are restored, the keystone predators return – and the aliens have a choice of breeding grounds. Our breeding grounds. Humans are sterilized so the aliens can have children. This isn’t going to play well in Peoria,” he said.

  “No.” Pruitt got up and dumped the bucket of water, now empty of apples, into the sink. She picked Denny’s paring knife up off the floor and laid it on the counter, then went to build up the fire. “I think Humphrey really believed that the Ban would be lifted if things went well. Maybe the Gafr meant to lift it someday. But the whole deal has always hinged on connections between a few Hefn and a handful of people. Except for those relationships, the Gafr would have washed their hands of us long ago.”

  She stood, a bit stiffly, to lift a Dutch oven off the hearth and hang it on an iron arm affixed to the side of the fireplace. She removed the heavy lid and set it down. “All that’s been kind of falling to pieces of late. The more frantic people get, the more reckless they get. Now that we’ve become so seriously endangered as a species ourselves, people naturally feel they have less and less to lose by defying the Hefn, and the Hefn have less and less reason to defend us to the Gafr. People are ready to explode even without knowing the Hefn and Gafr are breeding. If they find out – ”

  “Are you saying not to tell anybody?”

  Pruitt shot him a startled look. “Were you going to? I thought you were looking for a bolt hole last night, not a reporter.”

  They stared at each other. Denny dropped his gaze. “I don’t know what to do,” he admitted. “I’m in danger of mindwipe because if I go public with this it could start a worldwide riot. But if I don’t tell – I’ve never been able to stand the Hefn. If I don’t expose them, I’ll feel like a collaborator, or a coward, or both.” He got up and carried the heaping bowl of quartered apples to the hearth. “The plain truth is, I am a collaborator, even if I didn’t really know it. All the field biologists are. What have we been doing but helping get Earth’s ecosystem ready to be an alien nursery?” He didn’t state the obvious – that if he was a collaborator she was a thousand times worse – but he didn’t need to.

  Pruitt took the bowl and said, “I need about a cup of water.” When Denny brought the water, she poured it into the Dutch oven, dumped in the apples, and stirred them briefly with a long wooden spoon. Then she clanged on the lid and swung the iron arm so the big pot hung over the fire. “Thanks,” she said. “I owe Humphrey more than I owe to any human being now alive. But his patience with the people he’s been trying to help has been strained to the limit. And, of course, he’s utterly entranced with the thought of having a baby himself, his own baby. They’ve all been waiting for this for a very long time, fearing all that while that they would never breed again, that their kind would go extinct.”

  “So then they know exactly how we feel!”

  Pruitt looked downright haggard. “Denny, I need to know what you’re going to do. I doubt I can protect you if the Hefn find out what you know, even from Humphrey. What we need is a plan that will keep your paths from crossing.”

  “Well,” said Denny, “when I get back from my leave – if I go back – Fish and Wildlife has offered me reassignment. Here, as a matter of fact. Outside the fence, I guess they mean.”

  “Here?” Pruitt sounded astonished.

  “Mm-hm, it was Humphrey’s idea. When I told him I was a Gaian and he was kicking me off my Ground, he apologized and said he’d try to get me reassigned to Hurt Hollow, which I guess he was thinking is every Gaian’s Ground in a sense, as well as being yours, your own personal Ground. So if I don’t go public, I guess that’s what I’ll be doing.”

  “Then I can tell you for a fact that Humphrey thinks the world of your work on the bears of Anderson County,” said Pruitt, clearly impressed herself. “You have no idea what a compliment that offer is, coming from him. As a matter of fact, the upper part of the fence is about to come down. He wants bears to be able to get into Hurt Hollow. He wants his own son to be nurtured right here, right in the hottest Hot Spot of them all, and that sure isn’t the best way I can think of to keep your paths from crossing.”

  A sharp bark came from outside; Pruitt walked over and opened the back door to let the dog in, along with a draft of cold air. “Wait a second,” said Denny, throwing himself back onto the bench. “Hold everything. If the Hefn and Gafr are going to start having kids right and left, and placing them in bears’ dens all over the map every winter, how long can the whole thing stay a secret? One baby Hefn, okay. But dozens? Hundreds? There’s no way.” Feste trotted around the room sniffing at things, then sat down in front of Denny, looking expectant. He rubbed the dog’s ears absently and scratched under his chin.

  Pruitt sat down on the bench across from him. “They’ll post all the territories with signs threatening mindwipe – ”

  “People are getting more reckless, you said it yourself. Some other biologist is going to refuse to be kicked out, same as I did. There’s no way they can keep the lid on. What if a bunch of Hefn toddlers come out in spring and start wandering around with the mother bears?” He leaned toward Pam. “What if somebody steals one out of a den? Or kills one? You know it could happen.”

  “If the Hefn weren’t keeping close tabs on them all – ”

  “But they’re not! Nobody’s at my farm. Nobody was protecting the baby in Rosetta’s den. You’d think they’d have the whole ship watching over it.”

  Pruitt rubbed her forehead, back and forth, as if trying to massage a headache away. “I guess keeping hands off, leaving it up to nature, might be a necessary part of Hefn child development.” She looked at Denny, tense on his bench as a sprinter waiting for the gun. “Humphrey did say this had to happen in the wild, that zoos wouldn’t work. If they could have kept a supply of captive apex predators on their ship, I don’t suppose they’d have stuck around Earth.”

  “And I wouldn’t be cowering here in dread of having my memory wiped.”

  “And the planet would still be going to hell in a handbasket.”

  “But it would still be ours.”

  Pruitt’s eyebrows went up. “For how much longer?”

  Denny struck the table again. “You know what I think? I think we’ve been in a lose-lose situation all along here. I think if we’d been left to ourselves we’d either have poisoned and depleted the Earth beyond saving, or blown her up. Either way, extinction. And I think the Hefn have basically saved Earth’s ecosystem, but for themselves, and they’re going to force humanity into extinction anyway.” He laughed, a harsh sound in the cozy little house. “At least this way Gaia herself survives. She’ll do fine without us. As Gaians I guess we ought to be glad about that.”

  “Hard for a Hefn-hating Gaian wildlife biologist to know which end is up sometimes, yes?” And while Denny was still wondering how to take this spiteful-sounding crack, she added, “But right now, this morning, this minute, I’m thinking that you may h
ave just hit the nail on the head.” She shoved back her bench and stood up. “This retreat is over. I need to talk to Humphrey. And you need to get out of the Hollow. Humphrey knows this place like the back of his hand. If you don’t want to go back to Fish and Wildlife you could hole up in my house in Salt Lake for a while – ”

  “I think I’ll go back to Louisville,” Denny said. “For now. I know some hidey-holes back there.” And when Pruitt looked dubious, “Everything’s happening too fast! A few weeks ago I was a field biologist, then I was a subversive, now all of a sudden I’m a fucking fugitive! Every time I think I’ve figured out what to do there’s a news flash and I have to start figuring all over again. It’s too crazy-making. I just want to go someplace quiet and think.” Denny got up, took his filthy parka down from the hook where she had hung it, and put it on. He grabbed the straps of his duffel, and he was ready.

  The fire had burned down to coals. Pruitt banked these with a little flat tool and gave the apples another stir. She stuck some papers, and some cheese and walnuts and a few other food items, into a small pack of her own, and put on her jacket. All through these preparations Denny could feel how she was bursting to argue with him, persuade him to keep the secret to himself, but all she said was, “Let’s go, then. We row across to Indiana and catch the packet to Louisville.” Opening the back door, she let Denny step out first into the damp, chilly, gray day, then followed the dog out and pulled the door to with a little bang. “I suppose we’ll have to keep the house locked when the fence comes down.” The thought made her grimace. “I’m going to the outhouse. You?” And when he shook his head, “Back in a minute then. Feste, sit. Stay.”

  Pruitt took three paces down the path – and directly ahead of her the view of leafless trees and steep hillside and Orrin Hubbell’s studio began to spin. Denny shouted “Hey! Hey!” and dropped his bag. As they watched, the spinning air began to clarify from the center outward.

  “Stay right where you are,” said Pruitt. “It’s a Time Window, opening from the future.”

  “What’s going to happen?” Denny asked, tensed to run.

  “To us? Nothing. Don’t worry, whoever it is, all they can do is look through and talk.” The bitterness had vanished from her voice; she sounded flustered but excited.

  Denny was scared, but he was excited too. Ordinarily people didn’t get to be on either side of a Time Window while it was actually working. All they ever saw were viddy recordings made through Time Windows, of historical events, edited by Temporal Physics technicians. This was raw footage, and he was in it – which might have been cause for panic, given his present situation, except – “How far in the future does a transceiver have to be to open a Window?”

  “Theoretically, not far at all. In practice, it’s impossible to set the coordinates if you’re not pretty far down the road. Like trying to read something printed on the bridge of your nose.”

  Denny started to reply, but she waved her arm down to shut him up. The lens had clarified almost to the rim. At the center Denny saw a Hefn standing behind a strange metal contraption on legs, which he was obviously operating. Surrounding Hefn and transceiver, a disk of April – pink smears of blooming redbuds, fervent birdsong – had superimposed itself on the dead of winter.

  The rim stopped spinning; the window was clear across its whole circumference. Stepping back from the machine, the Hefn came around where they could see him plainly.

  Denny would have sworn he couldn’t tell one Hefn from another, but he understood at once that this was neither Humphrey nor Innisfrey. This Hefn was sleeker somehow, slimmer, less motley-looking. His hyped-up brain would have arrived at the obvious in another moment, but the sleek Hefn did it for him. “Hi, Pam. Hi, Denny. Hey there, Feste, you look just like your great-great-grandnephews! Sorry to barge in on you like this. I’m Terrifrey, by the way. Humphrey’s son.”

  Pruitt said quickly, “Where’s Humphrey?”

  “Hibernating. He was up most of the winter. He’s fine, don’t worry. We had to make the decision to contact you without consulting him, but he – preapproved it, so to speak.”

  “‘We’?”

  Terrifrey looked to the side, beyond the edge of the lens, and another Hefn came and stood next to him. “We,” he said. “I’m Dennifrey. Named after you, Denny. Nice to see you.”

  Like a Time Window, Denny’s mind whirled and cleared. “You’re Rosetta’s baby Hefn!” The Hefn nodded and beamed – or seemed to, since no Hefn could really do either. Instantly Denny said, “What happened to Rocket?”

  “He lived a long, happy life and fathered lots of little Rockettes. And Rodeo and I were close as long as she lived. I went to see her all the time. She had lots of babies too.”

  “How do I know if you’re telling me the truth, or telling me what I want to hear!” Denny protested.

  “Oh, it’s the truth, all right,” said a third voice, and a wiry old man, nearly bald, with a bushy gray beard, strolled into the spring landscape and stood beside the two Hefn, a sight so unexpected, and so shocking, that Denny almost blurted out “Paw!” But his grandfather had been dead for years. He realized, with a dizzying lurch, that it was himself he was seeing.

  The old man grinned at him, then beckoned in his turn, and the strangest figure of all entered the frame of the lens: a brown-haired girl of what, ten? eleven? Denny realized he couldn’t remember what children had looked like at various ages, not that he’d ever paid that much attention. The girl was wearing a long blue dress and brown high-button shoes. “Hi, Grampa,” she said, and giggled. The old man put his arm around her, but she had spoken through the lens, to Denny. “I’m Marny. I’m your granddaughter.”

  “My granddaughter!”

  Pruitt broke in. “The Baby Ban’s been lifted, then?”

  The figures in the lens all hesitated and the girl looked sideways up at Terrifrey, who said carefully, “What you see, I’m afraid, is all you get. We can’t answer any questions of that kind.”

  “That’s the one answer I need,” she said. “I’ve got to know.”

  “Well, it’s just what we can’t tell you,” said Old Denny. “Not in so many words, because this – the four of us – is all I remember seeing in the Window. This is all that was shown to us. We had to take it from there as best as we could.”

  Pruitt drew in a shaky breath. Denny said to the girl, “Are you really my granddaughter?”

  Marny nodded vigorously. “You look really young. And you’ve got more hair, and it’s dark. And no beard. This is weird.” She giggled again.

  “It’s marvelous to see you both, but I’m sorry, we’ll have to break contact now.” Humphrey’s self-declared son stepped back behind the transceiver. “Remember that Time is One. It’ll be okay.” And the disk of air spun inward while the others all waved, the alien and old man and the child, and in a few more seconds the wintry hillside had been restored to itself.

  For a long moment Pruitt and Denny stood staring at the empty air. Then “Whuf,” said Pruitt quietly. “I guess we’re not going anywhere just yet. Except I’m still going to the outhouse. Back in a second.” She pulled the door open. “Feste, in you go.”

  Denny picked up his bag and went in too. The house was filled with the heavenly aroma of cooking apples. In a daze he unzipped his coat and sat down. “My granddaughter!” he proclaimed to the black poodle, who turned around twice and slumped to the floor at his feet. And when Pruitt let herself in, “I’m gonna have a granddaughter!”

  “Before you start knitting booties, Grampa,” said Pruitt dryly, pulling off her pack and coat, “let’s think a bit about what they didn’t say.”

  Denny nodded. “That the Ban had been lifted. But there was Marny, Exhibit A!”

  “They didn’t say she hadn’t been cloned. They didn’t say she wasn’t a child actor derived from one of the people who missed the Broadcast. They didn’t say things had been worked out between us and the Gafr. They didn’t, when you get right down to it, say a hell of a lot.”<
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  Denny thought, but had the presence of mind not to say, that another thing they hadn’t explained was Pruitt’s own absence from the tableau. (There could be lots of reasons for that, but the likeliest one was that she had died.) Instead he said, “But don’t just dismiss what they did say: that she’s my granddaughter. Do you think Humphrey’s son would lie to you?”

  “Who knows? Humphrey wouldn’t, but Humphrey wasn’t there.” Pruitt’s excitement had turned to letdown, but Denny felt himself refusing to allow that to affect him. “What year would you think it was in the Window?”

  “You looked, what, about seventy? How old are you now?”

  “Twenty-nine.”

  “Well then. Forty years, give or take. So 2078, 2080? Baby Ban plus or minus sixty-five. If the Ban hasn’t been lifted, the youngest human generation is in its sixties and our fate has been decided.”

  “And if it has, things have worked out some way, and people are having babies again.” His mind was still suffused with the image of the little girl in the long blue dress – far more preoccupied with that, in fact, than with the sight of himself as an old duffer, with its implied guarantee of a long life unblemished by mindwipe. A granddaughter! Necessitating a son or daughter in between!

  An hour ago Denny would have said he had no interest whatever in children, that his fury at the Hefn for imposing the Ban was principled and impersonal. Now the very idea that this vision of the future might be true thrilled him so much, it was hard – no, impossible, right now! – to care about anything else. That humanity had a future, that he himself had a personal stake in it! The possibility this latest news flash – more of a bombshell, really – seemed to promise had changed his world again; he could feel himself being converted from cynicism to hopefulness, all the way through. “What did he mean about time is one?”

  “It’s a saying they have: ‘Time is One, and Fixed.’ It means that whatever happens is the only thing that can happen. If two Hefn and you and a little girl appear in a Time Window, then events will necessarily lead to a moment when a Time Window opens and those four beings speak to you and me on February 5, 2038.”