The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

“Thank you, thank you,” gushed the woman.

  For an instant, Pico saw herself reflected on the rock. She looked much older than these people. Tired, she thought. Badly weathered. In the cramped starship, they hadn’t the tools to revitalize aged flesh, nor had there been the need. Most of the voyage had been spent in cold-sleep. Their waking times, added together, barely exceeded forty years of biological activity.

  “Look at this!” the woman shouted, turning and waving her prize at the others. “Isn’t it lovely?”

  “A shiny rock,” teased one voice. “Perfect!”

  Yet the woman refused to be anything but impressed. She clasped her prize to her chest and giggled, merging with the crowd and then vanishing.

  They look like children, Pico told herself.

  At least how she imagined children to appear … unworldly and spoiled, needing care and infinite patience.…

  She read the next name, and a new woman emerged to collect her gift. “My, what a large box!” She tore at the paper, then the box’s lid, then eased her hands into the dunnage of white foam. Pico remembered wrapping this gift—one of the only ones where she was positive of its contents—and she happily watched the smooth, elegant hands pulling free a greasy and knob-faced nut. Then Pico explained:

  “It’s from the Yult tree on Proxima Centauri Two.” The only member of the species on that strange little world. “If you wish, you can break its dormancy with liquid nitrogen. Then plant it in pure quartz sand, never anything else. Sand, and use red sunlight—”

  “I know how to cultivate them,” the woman snapped.

  There was a sudden silence, uneasy and prolonged.

  Finally Pico said, “Well … good …”

  “Everyone knows about Yult nuts,” the woman explained. “They’re practically giving them away at the greeneries now.”

  Someone spoke sharply, warning her to stop and think.

  “I’m sorry,” she responded. “If I sound ungrateful, I mean. I was just thinking, hoping … I don’t know. Never mind.”

  A weak, almost inconsequential apology, and the woman paused to feel the grease between her fingertips.

  The thing was, Pico thought, that she had relied on guesswork in selecting these gifts. She had decided to represent every alien world, and she felt proud of herself on the job accomplished. Yult trees were common on Earth? But how could she know such a thing? And besides, why should it matter? She had brought the nut and everything else because she’d taken risks, and these people were obviously too ignorant and silly to appreciate what they were receiving.

  Rage had replaced her fear.

  Sometimes she heard people talking among themselves, trying to trade gifts. Gem-stones and pieces of alien driftwood were being passed about like orphans. Yet nobody would release the specimens of odd life-forms from living worlds, transparent canisters holding bugs and birds and whatnot inside preserving fluids or hard vacuums. If only she had known what she couldn’t have known, these silly brats.… And she found her-self swallowing, holding her breath, and wanting to scream at all of them.

  Pico was a compilation, yet she wasn’t.

  She hadn’t lived one day as these people had lived their entire lives. She didn’t know about comfort or changelessness, and with an attempt at empathy, she tried to imagine such an incredible existence.

  Tyson used to tell her, “Shallowness is a luxury. Maybe the ultimate luxury.” She hadn’t understood him. Not really. “Only the rich can master true frivolity.” Now those words echoed back at her, making her think of Tyson. That intense and angry man … the opposite of frivolity, the truth told.

  And with that, her mood shifted again. Her skin tingled. She felt nothing for or against her audience. How could they help being what they were? How could anyone help their nature? And with that, she found herself reading another name on another unopened box. A little box, she saw. Probably another one of the unpopular gemstones, born deep inside an alien crust and thrown out by forces unimaginable.…

  There was a silence, an odd stillness, and she repeated the name.

  “Opera? Opera Ting?”

  Was it her imagination, or was there a nervousness running through the audience? Just what was happening—?

  “Excuse me?” said a voice from the back. “Pardon?”

  People began moving aside, making room, and a figure emerged. A male, something about him noticeably different. He moved with a telltale lightness, with a spring to his gait. Smiling, he took the tiny package while saying, “Thank you,” with great feeling. “For my father, thank you. I’m sure he would have enjoyed this moment. I only wish he could have been here, if only.…”

  Father? Wasn’t this Opera Ting?

  Pico managed to nod, then she asked, “Where is he? I mean, is he busy somewhere?”

  “Oh, no. He died, I’m afraid.” The man moved differently because he was different. He was young—even younger than I, Pico realized—and he shook his head, smiling in a serene way. Was he a clone? A biological child? What? “But on his behalf,” said the man, “I wish to thank you. Whatever this gift is, I will treasure it. I promise you. I know you must have gone through Hell to find it and bring it to me, and thank you so very much, Pico. Thank you, thank you. Thank you!”

  Death.

  An appropriate intruder in the evening’s festivities, thought Pico. Some accident, some kind of tragedy … something had killed one of her sixty-three parents, and that thought pleased her. There was a pang of guilt woven into her pleasure, but not very much. It was comforting to know that even these people weren’t perfectly insulated from death; it was a force that would grasp everyone, given time. Like it had taken Midge, she thought. And Uoo, she thought. And Tyson.

  Seventeen compilated people had embarked on Kyber, representing almost a thousand near-immortals. Only nine had returned, including Pico. Eight friends were lost.… Lost was a better word than death, she decided.… And usually it happened in places worse than any Hell conceived by human beings.

  After Opera—his name, she learned, was the same as his father’s—the giving of the gifts settled into a routine. Maybe it was because of the young man’s attitude. People seemed more polite, more self-contained. Someone had the presence to ask for another story. Anything she wished to tell. And Pico found herself thinking of a watery planet circling a distant red-dwarf sun, her voice saying, “Coldtear,” and watching faces nod in unison. They recognized the name, and it was too late. It wasn’t the story she would have preferred to tell, yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Coldtear was on her mind.

  Just tell parts, she warned herself.

  What you can stand!

  The world was Terran-class and covered with a single ocean frozen on its surface and heated from below. By tides, in part. And by Coldtear’s own nuclear decay. It had been Tyson’s idea to build a submersible and dive to the ocean’s remote floor. He used spare parts in Kyber’s machine shop—the largest room on board—then he’d taken his machine to the surface, setting it on the red-stained ice and using lasers and robots to bore a wide hole and keep it clear.

  Pico described the submersible, in brief, then mentioned that Tyson had asked her to accompany him. She didn’t add that they’d been lovers now and again, nor that sometimes they had feuded. She’d keep those parts of the story to herself for as long as possible.

  The submersible’s interior was cramped and ascetic, and she tried to impress her audience with the pressures that would build on the hyperfiber hull. Many times the pressure found in Earth’s oceans, she warned; and Tyson’s goal was to set down on the floor, then don a lifesuit protected with a human-shaped force field, actually stepping outside and taking a brief walk.

  “Because we need to leave behind footprints,” he had argued. “Isn’t that why we’ve come here? We can’t just leave prints up on the ice. It moves and melts, wiping itself clean every thousand years or so.”

  “But isn’t that the same below?” Pico had responded. “New muds rain down—s
lowly, granted—and quakes cause slides and avalanches.”

  “So we pick right. We find someplace where our marks will be quietly covered. Enshrouded. Made everlasting.”

  She had blinked, surprised that Tyson cared about such things.

  “I’ve studied the currents,” he explained, “and the terrain—”

  “Are you serious?” Yet you couldn’t feel certain about Tyson. He was a creature full of surprises. “All this trouble, and for what—?”

  “Trust me, Pico. Trust me!”

  Tyson had had an enormous laugh. His parents, sponsors, whatever—an entirely different group of people—had purposefully made him larger than the norm. They had selected genes for physical size, perhaps wanting Tyson to dominate the Kyber’s crew in at least that one fashion. If his own noise was to be believed, that was the only tinkering done to him. Otherwise, he was a pure compilation of his parents’ traits, fiery and passionate to a fault. It was a little unclear to Pico what group of people could be so uniformly aggressive; yet Tyson had had his place in their tight-woven crew, and he had had his charms in addition to his size and the biting intelligence.

  Oh, Pico,” he cried out. “What’s this about, coming here? If it’s not about leaving traces of our passage … then what?”

  “It’s about going home again,” she had answered.

  “Then why do we leave the Kyber? Why not just orbit Coldtear and send down our robots to explore?”

  “Because …”

  “Indeed! Because!” The giant head nodded, and he put a big hand on her shoulder. “I knew you’d see my point. I just needed to give you time, my friend.”

  She agreed to the deep dive, but not without misgivings.

  And during their descent, listening to the ominous creaks and groans of the hull while lying flat on their backs, the misgivings began to reassert themselves.

  It was Tyson’s fault, and maybe his aim.

  No, she thought. It was most definitely his aim.

  At first, she guessed it was some game, him asking, “Do you ever wonder how it will feel? We come home and are welcomed, and then our dear parents disassemble our brains and implant them—”

  “Quiet,” she interrupted. “We agreed. Everyone agreed. We aren’t going to talk about it, all right?”

  A pause, then he said, “Except, I know. How it feels, I mean.”

  She heard him, then she listened to him take a deep breath from the close damp air; and finally she had strength enough to ask, “How can you know?”

  When Tyson didn’t answer, she rolled onto her side and saw the outline of his face. A handsome face, she thought. Strong and incapable of any doubts. This was the only taboo subject among the compilations—“How will it feel?”—and it was left to each of them to decide what they believed. Was it a fate or a reward? To be subdivided and implanted into the minds of dozens and dozens of near-immortals.…

  It wasn’t a difficult trick, medically speaking.

  After all, each of their minds had been designed for this one specific goal. Memories and talent; passion and training. All of the qualities would be saved—diluted, but, in the same instant, gaining their own near-immortality. Death of a sort, but a kind of everlasting life, too.

  That was the creed by which Pico had been born and raised.

  The return home brings a great reward, and peace.

  Pico’s first memory was of her birth, spilling slippery-wet from the womb and coughing hard, a pair of doctoring robots bent over her, whispering to her, “Welcome, child. Welcome. You’ve been born from them to be joined with them when it is time.… We promise you …!”

  Comforting noise, and mostly Pico had believed it.

  But Tyson had to say, “I know how it feels, Pico,” and she could make out his grin, his amusement patronizing. Endless.

  “How?” she muttered. “How do you know—?”

  “Because some of my parents … well, let’s just say that I’m not their first time. Understand me?”

  “They made another compilation?”

  “One of the very first, yes. Which was incorporated into them before I was begun, and which was incorporated into me because there was a spare piece. A leftover chunk of the mind—”

  “You’re making this up, Tyson!”

  Except, he wasn’t, she sensed. Knew. Several times, on several early worlds, Tyson had seemed too knowledgeable about too much. Nobody could have prepared himself that well, she realized. She and the others had assumed that Tyson was intuitive in some useful way. Part of him was from another compilation? From someone like them? A fragment of the man had walked twice beside the gray dust sea of Pliicker, and it had twice climbed the giant ant mounds on Proxima Centauri 2. It was a revelation, unnerving and hard to accept; and just the memory of that instant made her tremble secretly, facing her audience, her tired blood turning to ice.

  Pico told none of this to her audience.

  Instead, they heard about the long descent and the glow of rare life-forms outside—a thin plankton consuming chemical energies as they found them—and, too, the growing creaks of the spherical hull.

  They didn’t hear how she asked, “So how does it feel? You’ve got a piece of compilation inside you … all right! Are you going to tell me what it’s like?”

  They didn’t hear about her partner’s long, deep laugh.

  Nor could they imagine him saying, “Pico, my dear. You’re such a passive, foolish creature. That’s why I love you. So docile, so damned innocent—”

  “Does it live inside you, Tyson?”

  “It depends on what you consider life.”

  “Can you feel its presence? I mean, does it have a personality? An existence? Or have you swallowed it all up?”

  “I don’t think I’ll tell.” Then the laugh enlarged, and the man lifted his legs and kicked at the hyperfiber with his powerful muscles. She could hear, and feel, the solid impacts of his boot-heels. She knew that Tyson’s strength was nothing compared to the ocean’s mass bearing down on them, their hull scarcely feeling the blows … yet some irrational part of her was terrified. She had to reach out, grasping one of his trouser legs and tugging hard, telling him:

  “Don’t! Stop that! Will you please … quit!?”

  The tension shifted direction in an instant.

  Tyson said, “I was lying,” and then added, “about knowing. About having a compilation inside me.” And he gave her a huge hug, laughing in a different way now. He nearly crushed her ribs and lungs. Then he spoke into one of her ears, offering more, whispering with the old charm, and she accepting his offer. They did it as well as possible, considering their circumstances and the endless groaning of their tiny vessel; and she remembered all of it while her voice, detached but thorough, described how they had landed on top of something rare. There was a distinct crunch of stone. They had made their touchdown on the slope of a recent volcano—an island on an endless plain of mud—and afterward they dressed in their lifesuits, triple-checked their force fields, then flooded the compartment and crawled into the frigid pressurized water.

  It was an eerie, almost indescribable experience to walk on that ocean floor. When language failed Pico, she tried to use silence and oblique gestures to capture the sense of endless time and the cold and darkness. Even when Tyson ignited the submersible’s outer lights, making the nearby terrain bright as late afternoon, there was the palpable taste of endless dark just beyond. She told of feeling the pressure despite the force field shrouding her; she told of climbing after Tyson, scrambling up a rough slope of youngish rock to a summit where they discovered a hot-water spring that pumped heated mineral-rich water up at them.

  That might have been the garden spot of Coldtear. Surrounding the spring was a thick, almost gelatinous mass of gray-green bacteria, pulsating and fat by its own standards. She paused, seeing the scene all over again. Then she assured her parents, “It had a beauty. I mean it. An elegant, minimalist beauty.”

  Nobody spoke.

  Then som
eone muttered, “I can hardly wait to remember it,” and gave a weak laugh.

  The audience became uncomfortable, tense and too quiet. People shot accusing looks at the offender, and Pico worked not to notice any of it. A bitterness was building in her guts, and she sat up straighter, rubbing at both hips.

  Then a woman coughed for attention, waited, and then asked, “What happened next?”

  Pico searched for her face.

  “There was an accident, wasn’t there? On Coldtear …?”

  I won’t tell them, thought Pico. Not now. Not this way.

  She said, “No, not then. Later.” And maybe some of them knew better. Judging by the expressions, a few must have remembered the records. Tyson died on the first dive. It was recorded as being an equipment failure—Pico’s lie—and she’d hold on to the lie as long as possible. It was a promise she’d made to herself and kept all these years.

  Shutting her eyes, she saw Tyson’s face smiling at her. Even through the thick faceplate and the shimmering glow of the force field, she could make out the mischievous expression, eyes glinting, the large mouth saying, “Go on back, Pico. In and up and a safe trip to you, pretty lady.”

  She had been too stunned to respond, gawking at him.

  “Remember? I’ve still got to leave my footprints somewhere—”

  “What are you planning?” she interrupted.

  He laughed and asked, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m going to make my mark on this world. It’s dull and nearly dead, and I don’t think anyone is ever going to return here. Certainly not to here. Which means I’ll be pretty well left alone—”

  “Your force field will drain your batteries,” she argued stupidly. Of course he knew that salient fact. “If you stay here—!”

  “I know, Pico. I know.”

  “But why—?”

  “I lied before. About lying.” The big face gave a disappointed look, then the old smile reemerged. “Poor, docile Pico. I knew you wouldn’t take this well. You’d take it too much to heart … which I suppose is why I asked you along in the first place.…” And he turned away, starting to walk through the bacterial mat with threads and chunks kicked loose, sailing into the warm current and obscuring him. It was a strange gray snow moving against gravity. Her last image of Tyson was of a hulking figure amid the living goo; and to this day, she had wondered if she could have wrestled him back to the submersible—an impossibility, of course—and how far could he have walked before his force field failed.