The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  “Well?” I asked.

  He was distant, hardly hearing my voice. His eyes so pale, the pupils so tiny, he could have been looking in any direction at all, or in none. For a moment, I thought he wanted to answer, and then it didn’t seem important any more. We sat for a long time in the cool lifting breeze, the heat of the distant sun beginning to strip the clouds away. Light fell on Binam, bringing out the rich greens and softer-colored variations along his skin, and he closed his eyes and sat there. “I can’t tell you what a sweet feeling this is.”

  “The sunlight?”

  “Yes. On my chloroplasts.” He licked his lips, though the moisture looked more like sap than saliva. “I can feel it in every nerve.”

  “It must be nice.”

  He nodded. “This is the best time of day for it. Later, it’s too hot; I can’t take so much of the sun, not like the tree.”

  “Is this something you need?”

  He nodded again. “I don’t know the science for it, I can’t tell you why. But I need a certain amount of sunlight to keep my skin growing. The outer part dies off when the new inner tissue ripens, this time of year.”

  I had brought a calorie bar with me, my breakfast, which I pulled out of my coveralls and unwrapped.

  “Breakfast,” Binam said. “That’s the word. This is where I come to have breakfast.”

  “A nice place for it.” The bar, essentially tasteless, went down quite handily.

  “The tree is somewhat repulsed by that,” Binam said. “Chewing and eating. It’s very animal.”

  “I am an animal.”

  He had closed his eyes again, murmured, “Yes, he knows you are.”

  “And you?”

  “Sometimes there’s still too much animal in me,” he answered.

  “Is that your opinion, or the tree’s?”

  “Both.”

  A silence. I let the obvious questions suspend themselves. He was welcome to his opinions, after all. “You don’t talk much, do you?”

  “Talk? Me and the tree?”

  “No. In words, like right now, I mean. You couldn’t remember the word for breakfast.”

  He shrugged. That gesture came quite naturally. “I don’t get much practice.”

  “What about your neighbors?”

  “If we’re close to our hosts, we don’t really need to talk.”

  “You read each other’s minds?”

  He nodded. “I guess that’s the easiest way to think of it.”

  “Is it better than talking?”

  “It’s nothing like talking. There’s no way to compare it.” His smile, for a moment, familiar, the way his eyes were shaped, familiar, my little brother from thirty years ago. “I like talking, as a matter of fact, right now. I forget you have to decide to do it, then you have to decide what to say. You can hide things when you talk. I’ll miss it when you’re gone.” He stirred, reaching down with a foot, and just at that moment a cloud blanked out his moment of sunlight. “But I really want to swim.”

  “Can I come, too?”

  He led me down to the dis and I stripped out of my coveralls. When we were on the ground he led me to a place where steps descended into the water. I followed him, taking off the rest of my clothes by the edge of the canal.

  “It’s clean,” he said, easing into the liquid with hardly a ripple. “You don’t have to worry about what’s in the water.”

  It felt wonderful to slip into the silky liquid, to glide along the surface beside this moon-faced creature. We floated lazily in the early light, a hint of mist along the canal. Near the woody knee of one of Binam’s neighbors, we stopped and headed back again. I swam close to Binam to hear the sound he was making, a low vocalization deep in the throat, like the purr of a cat. “I love to drink,” he said, turning on his back to float.

  “This does feel wonderful.”

  “You can’t imagine how wonderful, if you’re part leaf.”

  I laughed. “You do this every morning?”

  “Yes.” We were ashore now, seating ourselves on the lower step, still mostly immersed. “It’s one of the things I can do that the tree envies. Though he shares it.”

  “Shares?”

  “Through the link.”

  Silence, then. I was looking up at the Dirijh, trying to see the tree as Binam saw it, a living mind, a partner. I had been waiting to ask a certain question, and felt it was a good time. “Why did you change your mind and decide to let me visit you, this time? You always seemed so certain it was a bad idea.”

  He slid up from the water, dripping onto the stones. “I didn’t change my mind.”

  “You still think it’s a bad idea?”

  He looked at me. Nothing recognizable, at that moment, in his face. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I know you’re my sister, but that was a long time ago, longer to me than it seems to you, even. Time isn’t the same for me and you. So I didn’t really want you to come. But now I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Well, thanks. I guess.”

  He shrugged again. The gesture this time appeared less natural. “I can only tell you the truth, Kitra.”

  A chorus of birds, eerie calling high in the trees. Some of it sounded rehearsed, as if it were a piece of music some bird was performing.

  “Are you upset?” Binam asked.

  “No.” I looked my brother square in the face. “I didn’t simply want to come to see you, either, Binam.”

  “Then I expect we’re approaching the same point from different places. There’s an elegant way the trees have of saying that, but I can’t put it in words.”

  “What do you mean, we’re approaching the same point?”

  “You came to talk to the trees about independence,” Binam said. “I’m right, I know I am. Because that’s why they want to talk to you.”

  Just then, in that eerie quiet, pandemonium of a kind. Something fell out of a tree across the canal, followed by a chorus of birds and animals, a sound as if every leaf on every tree were shaking, and Binam leapt to his feet in alarm.

  “Oh, no,” he said, watching something moving on the ground; he looked sickened, as if he were nauseous; then he said to me, “Stay here, please,” and slipped into the water and swam across.

  From other trees in the vicinity, other syms were descending, altogether invisible before, then suddenly in sight, maybe a dozen.

  What had fallen from the tree was another sym, and when it stood (I could not tell what sex it had been) I was horrified; the poor creature looked flayed, as if it had been beaten, or worse, partly eaten, and the syms were picking something off it with their fingers, the injured sym shaking, a green fluid oozing down its face, chest, legs; not a sound coming out of it, or them. The healthy syms surrounded the sick one and picked what I guess were insects out of its ravaged skin, the injured one standing and shaking, some of the others helping to support it, and when they were done, they checked the injured one again head to foot and then laid it on the ground, cleaned the soles of the feet. One of the syms, not Binam, brought a large piece of vine and began to squeeze milky fluid out of it, which Binam took onto his palms and rubbed gently over the injured one.

  This took a while. I watched. At first without any self-consciousness, then, noticing that some of the syms were looking my way, I began to feel as if I were intruding and drew back from the bank of the canal. When it was clear that Binam would be busy for a while, I climbed to the dis and made myself tea, using the micro-cup in my kit.

  When the wait stretched beyond a full marking, I took out a portable reader and scanned some of the downloads I’d brought, items from the various nexus publications I tried to keep up with. A lot of technology is forbidden in Greenwood; for instance, I couldn’t do a portable VR intract or immerse myself in one of the total-music wave stations; none of the technologies we use to feed data directly into our own neural circuitry functions in Greenwood, so I was reading for the first time in years, scanning printed words with my eyes.

  The whole t
ime, I was aware of commotion, activity on the ground across the canal. A pair of trusses arrived at a certain point, bearing more syms from farther off, I guess. Everyone sat around in a circle beneath the tree involved, and the injured sym sat with them. I suppose this was some kind of meeting. I was aware of it, trying not to spy.

  When the circle dissolved and the trusses disappeared, Binam returned to his tree. He climbed to the dis, shoulders slumped, visibly distracted, shaken, though his eyes were so very difficult to read. I was sitting on one of the upraised pieces of wood on the dis, looking out over the clearing. He sat with me for a while, put his hand in mine, the same shy gesture as when he was eight, the texture of his skin tough and resinous, cool. “I’m sorry that took so long,” he said.

  “What happened?”

  He shook his head.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t want to.” He looked up at the canopy, the bright slivers of sky beyond the leaves. Breathless, and due to the physiological alterations, he appeared to be breathing with only the top half of his chest. “I need to climb higher for a while. When I come down, we’ll talk again. Do you mind?”

  “No. Whatever you need to do.”

  He nodded. He truly was shaken, I could see it now. He climbed into the leaves, disappearing.

  SIX

  When I was eleven and Binam was eight, Serith and Kael took us on a picnic to wild country near Starns, the border village where the River Moses emerges from the forest. We got up early and rode the boat into Greenwood to the first Dirijhi city up the river, a treat for us, my birthday coming up, and Binam old enough to join the local scout troop, wearing his new scout hat with his first pin on it, I forget for what. I was too old for scouts now, in my opinion, but watching him in the boat with that hat, his bright face, brown hair tangled over his jug ears, I envied him a little, and wished I had not gotten to be so old. He was talking to the guide, his usual shyness gone, leaning forward to look through the plexiglass bubble at the forest around us. “Do they talk to you?” he was asking.

  “No, son. What’s your name?”

  “Binam.”

  “No, Binam, the trees don’t talk to me. They each have a special person who belongs to them, and that’s who they talk to.”

  “Why don’t they talk to anybody else?”

  “We can’t hear them,” Kael threw in from her seat, nervous at Binam’s need for attention. “Leave the pilot alone, dear.”

  The pilot turned and smiled at us. The boat was not nearly full that morning; we were awake early for the excursion. She was Erejhen, the pilot, a redhead, one of those genetic types that still recurs in their population but only rarely in the rest of us; the Erejhen can’t breed with anyone else. “He’s no bother. He likes the trees, that’s all.”

  “I like them very much,” Binam amended.

  “Come and sit down,” Serith said, his voice mild, the kind of voice that tells you you really needn’t listen.

  “I want to stand here.”

  “Well, then you can help me keep an eye on the river.” The Erejhen woman looked him over. “Watch out for floating logs and branches and whatnot.”

  Binam nodded emphatically and folded his arms. “But I mostly need to watch the trees.”

  “Go ahead, that’s a good thing to do, too.”

  “I think the trees would talk to me,” he said, very seriously.

  “They used to talk to me,” the pilot answered, “not these trees here but the ones on my home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “A long way from here.”

  “Another planet?”

  She nodded. Binam’s eyes got big. For a long time he had thought that every planet was somehow part of Ajhevan, he hadn’t even understood the idea of Aramen, of the world we lived on; when it finally dawned on him that there were a lot of other places besides this one, he’d been very disturbed and quiet for a while. “Don’t ask which one,” the pilot said, “I won’t tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I won’t.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Efen,” she answered, and I remembered it, because it was the first time I heard an Erejhen woman given any name other than Kirstin.

  “Did you really talk to trees before?”

  “Oh yes. I swear. There’s nothing like it.”

  Serith and Kael hadn’t the money for a walking tour so we rode another boat back to Starns; Efen was heading all the way up to the northernmost stop before she came back. We changed boats on one of the floating landings and Binam waved at her as she sailed away.

  At the end of our picnic, we noticed that Binam was missing. He had been straying farther and farther from the spread of food Serith had brought, he being the cook in our family, Kael not very good at it. We were within sight of Greenwood, and figured that Binam had been unable to resist exploring, so Kael and I went after him while Serith packed up the food and picnic gear. Into Greenwood ourselves, along the riverbank, without a guide, shouting for Binam, who never answered. Nervous, because we were not supposed to go into the forest on foot, everyone knew it, and even though we were only on the riverbank, we were afraid. We looked for a while, then went back. Kael and Serith stood at the putter stop not knowing what to do, looking at one another oddly. I remember how frightened I was to see my parents so confused. Serith reported Binam missing to the human clerk at the park station, who grew concerned when Kael added that she thought Binam had probably strayed into Greenwood.

  We stayed in a hotel in Starns overnight, when we were supposed to be traveling back to the farm. In the morning, there was still no word at first, until a putter arrived at the hotel with Binam in it, along with a human escort; one of the local syms had found him sitting in a Dirijh near the river. He had climbed nearly to the top. The Dirijh had sent word to the nearest sym to come and get him.

  A long and tiring adventure. We stayed one more night in Starns; I think Serith was too nervous to travel. In bed beside Binam, I asked him what it was like to spend the night in the tree. Did it speak to him?

  “Yes,” he said, though we both knew he was lying, and exploded into giggles the next instant.

  I have a cube taken at that picnic. Serith sits with his back to the camera, attempting to look up at the multifocus, moving restlessly instead and mostly looking at the ground; Kael is eating, pickled egg after pickled egg, along with strips of raw sea urchin, and cups of seaweed made into a puree; I am entranced in some music broadcast by whatever group I was in love with at the time, sitting with my shirt off in the sun; Binam stands behind us, looking into the forest, restlessly turning to the camera, and at the end of the cube segment he walks away altogether, so I picture that as the moment when the tree first called him, when he first felt the urge to answer.

  After that, whenever he came out of a simulation with advertisements or when he saw some printed poster for the sym recruiters around Asukarns Village, he would tell Serith or Kael or both that he wanted to be a sym, he wanted to be sold to a tree. Given the size of the bounty, it was not long before our parents began to listen.

  SEVEN

  Binam rejoined me near sunset, but was distracted, not altogether present. Twice he climbed to the ground and crossed the canal, I suppose to check on his neighbor. We talked only a little. I showed him some cubes from my last visit to Serith and Kael.

  “They’re talking about getting out of their contract, you know. Do you ever hear from them?”

  “Once in a while,” Binam answered. “Serith writes. Kael sends a birthday card.”

  “She’s very fat now. None of her doctors can figure out why. Fat blockers don’t work on her. And you remember how she eats.”

  “You should re-engineer her.”

  “She’s too superstitious for that.”

  “They’re getting out of the contract? They won’t be married any more?”

  I nodded. “In about a year, they say. When some of their investments come to term. They’re already talki
ng to lawyers. It’s very friendly; I think they’re just tired of each other.”

  “Serith’s young.”

  “He’s only eighty. Kael’s over a hundred.”

  “She sent me an invitation to her century party.”

  “I was on Paska,” I said. “I haven’t seen them since I got back.”

  He was looking off into space. As we talked, he seemed to come into focus better. “Why did you go?”

  “To learn about the independence movement there. We’re trying to study each other, all the groups who’re trying to do the same thing we are, to share information.”

  Through the following exchange, at times it seemed to me that he was listening to someone else, someone speaking slowly, so that at first I simply guessed the tree was paying close attention.

  “Do the Hormling know about your group?”

  “Yes. Of course. It’s perfectly legal to express the opinions that we do.”

  “So you do this work out in the open?”

  “Most of it.”

  He absorbed this for a while. I was priming the micro-cup for tea.

  “Why do you want independence? What is freedom to you?”

  I laughed. “I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t like having my mind read by the Prin.”

  That might have been the wrong thing to say at the time. I studied Binam, who made no move or change of expression. “You mean, you don’t like their control.”

  “Not just the Prin, the Hormling. Their economy. Their Conveyance, that nobody can compete with. Their billions and billions of emigrants through that damned gate.”

  “But it seems to us that the Prin and the Hormling make everything possible that happens in your world.” Binam was nodding his head, maybe unconsciously; the movement appeared to have no meaning. “Some of these thoughts come from the link root. Some of the trees have been waiting to talk to you about your ideas.”

  So this was some kind of a meeting, and this being in front of me was more than Binam, at the moment. I acknowledged what he said, but answered his first statement. “The only thing the Prin and the Hormling make possible is each other. The Prin prop up the Hormling, who proceed to turn everything into a product and every place into a market.”