The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “What for?” I said.

  That was sixty years ago.

  I have written this to tell how it was to live in the house of God before the world ended and began again. To tell it I have tried to write with the mind I had then. But neither then nor now do I fully understand the oracle which my father and all the priests saw and spoke. All of it came to pass. Yet we have no God, and no oracles to guide us.

  None of the strange men lived a long life, but they all lived longer than Omimo. We were on the long road up into the mountains when an angel caught up with us to tell us that Mesiwa had joined Omimo, and the two generals had brought their great army against the house of the strangers, which stood like a tower in the fields near Soze River, with a waste of burned earth around it. The strangers warned Omimo and his army clearly to withdraw, sending lightning out of the house over their heads that set distant trees afire. Omimo would not heed. He could prove he was God only by killing God. He commanded his army to rush at the tall house. He and Mesiwa and a hundred men around him were destroyed by a single bolt of lightning. They were burned to ash. His army fled in terror.

  “They are God! They are God indeed!” Tazu said when he heard the angel tell us that. He spoke joyfully, for he was as unhappy in his doubt as I was. And for a while we could all believe in them, since they could wield the lightning. Many people called them God as long as they lived.

  My belief is that they were not God in any sense of the word I understand, but were otherworldly, supernatural beings, who had great powers, but were weak and ignorant of our world, and soon sickened of it and died.

  There were fourteen of them in all. Some of them lived more than ten years. These learned to speak as we do. One of them came up into the mountains to Chimlu, along with some of the pilgrims who still wanted to worship Tazu and me as God. Tazu and I and this man talked for many days, learning from each other. He told us that their house moved in the air, flying like a dragon-lizard, but its wings were broken. He told us that in the land they came from the sunlight is very weak, and it was our strong sunlight that made them sick. Though they covered their bodies with weavings, still their thin skins let the sunlight in, and they would all die soon. He told us they were sorry they had come. I said, “You had to come. God saw you coming. What use is it to be sorry?”

  He agreed with me that they were not God. He said that God lived in the sky. That seemed to us a useless place for God to live. Tazu said they had indeed been God when they came, since they fulfilled the oracle and changed the world; but now, like us, they were common people.

  Ruaway took a liking to this stranger, maybe because she had been a stranger, and when he was at Chimlu they slept together. She said he was like any man under his weavings and coverings. He told her he could not impregnate her, as his seed would not ripen in our earth. Indeed the strangers left no children.

  This stranger told us his name, Bin-yi-zin. He came back up to Chimlu several times, and was the last of them to die. He left with Ruaway the dark crystals he wore before his eyes, which make things look larger and clearer for her, though to my eyes they make things dim. To me he gave his own record of his life, in a beautiful writing made of lines of little pictures, which I keep in the box with this writing I make.

  When Tazu’s testicles ripened we had to decide what to do, for brothers and sisters among the common people do not marry. We asked the priests and they advised us that our marriage being divine could not be unmade, and that though no longer God we were husband and wife. Since we were in each other’s heart, this pleased us, and often we slept together. Twice I conceived, but the conceptions aborted, one very early and one in the fourth month, and I did not conceive again. This was a grief to us, and yet fortunate, for had we had children, the people might have tried to make them be God.

  It takes a long time to learn to live without God, and some people never do. They would rather have a false God than none at all. All through the years, though seldom now, people would climb up to Chimlu to beg Tazu and me to come back down to the city and be God. And when it became clear that the strangers would not rule the country as God, either under the old rules or with new ones, men began to imitate Omimo, marrying ladies of our lineage and claiming to be a new God. They all found followers and they all made wars, fighting each other. None of them had Omimo’s terrible courage, or the loyalty of a great army to a successful general. They have all come to wretched ends at the hands of angry, disappointed, wretched people.

  For my people and my land have fared no better than I feared and saw over my shoulder on the night the world ended. The great stone roads are not maintained. In places they are already broken. Almoghay bridge was never rebuilt. The granaries and storehouses are empty and falling down. The old and sick must beg from neighbors, and a pregnant girl has only her mother to turn to, and an orphan has no one. There is famine in the west and south. We are the hungry people, now. The angels no longer weave the net of government, and one part of the land knows nothing of the others. They say barbarians have brought back the wilderness across the Fourth River, and ground dragons spawn in the fields of grain. Little generals and painted gods raise armies to waste lives and goods and spoil the sacred earth.

  The evil time will not last forever. No time does. I died as God a long time ago. I have lived as a common woman a long time. Each year I see the sun turn back from the south behind great Kanaghadwa. Though God does not dance on the glittering pavement, yet I see the birthday of the world over the shoulder of my death.

  Savior

  NANCY KRESS

  Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omini and other periodicals. Her books include the novels The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, the novel version of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, and a sequel, Beggars and Choosers. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her most recent book is a new novel, Probability Moon. She has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.” Born in Buffalo, New York, Nancy Kress now lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her husband, SF writer Charles Sheffield.

  In the intricate and compelling novella that follows, she gives us the story of an enigmatic visitor from the depths of space, sent here on a mission no one understands, but which gradually generates the realization that it somehow must be understood, before it’s too late … and that the clock may be ticking in more ways than one.

  I: 2007

  The object’s arrival was no surprise; it came down preceded, accompanied, and followed by all the attention in the world.

  The craft—if it was a craft—had been picked up on an October Saturday morning by the Hubble, while it was still beyond the orbit of Mars. A few hours later Houston, Langley, and Arecibo knew its trajectory, and a few hours after that so did every major observatory in the world. The press got the story in time for the Sunday papers. The United States Army evacuated and surrounded twenty square miles around the projected Minnesota landing site, some of which lay over the Canadian border in Ontario.

  “It’s still a shock,” Dr. Ann Pettie said to her colleague Jim Cowell. “I mean, you look and listen for decades, you scan the skies, you read all the arguments for and against other intelligent life out there, you despair over Fermi’s paradox—”

  “I never despaired over Fermi’s paradox,” Cowell answered, pulling his coat closer around his skinny body. It was cold at 3:00 A.M. in a northern Minnesota cornfield, and he hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Maybe longer. The cornfield was as close as he and Ann had been allowed to get. It wasn’t very close, despite a day on the phone pulling every string he could to get on the official Going-In Committee. That’s what they were calling it: “the Going
-In Committee.” Not welcoming, not belligerent, not too alarmed. Not too anything, “until we know what we have here.” The words were the president’s, who was also not on the Going-In Committee, although in his case presumably by choice.

  Ann said, “You never despaired over Fermi’s Paradox? You thought all along that aliens would show up eventually, they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet?”

  “Yes,” Cowell said, and didn’t look at her directly. How to explain? It wasn’t belief so much as desire, nor desire so much as life-long need. Very adolescent, and he wouldn’t have admitted it except he was cold and exhausted and exhilarated and scared, and the best he could hope for, jammed in with other “visiting scientists” two miles away from the landing site, was a possible glimpse of the object as it streaked down over the treeline.

  “Jim, that sounds so … so …”

  “A man has to believe in something,” he said in a gruff voice, quoting a recent bad movie, swaggering a little to point up the joke. It fell flat. Ann went on staring at him in the harsh glare of the floodlights until someone said, “Bitte? Ein Kaffee, Ann?”

  “Hans!” Ann said, and she and Dr. Hans Kleinschmidt rattled merrily away in German. Cowell knew no German. He knew Kleinschmidt only slightly, from those inevitable scientific conferences featuring one important paper, ten badly attended minor ones, and three nights of drinking to bridge over the language difficulties.

  What language would the aliens speak? Would they have learned English from our secondhand radio and TV broadcasts, as pundits had been predicting for the last thirty-six hours and writers for the last seventy years? Well, it was true they had chosen to land on the American-Canadian border, so maybe they would.

  So far, of course, they hadn’t said anything at all. No signal had come from the oval-shaped object hurtling toward Earth.

  “Coffee,” Ann said, thrusting it at Cowell. Kleinschmidt had apparently brought a tray of Styrofoam cups from the emergency station at the edge of the field. Cowell uncapped his and drank it gratefully, not caring that it was lukewarm or that he didn’t take sugar. It was caffeine.

  “Twenty minutes more,” someone said behind him.

  It was a well-behaved crowd, mostly scientists and second-tier politicians. Nobody tried to cross the rope that soldiers had strung between hastily driven stakes a few hours earlier. Cowell guessed that the unruly types, the press and first-rank space fans and maverick businessmen with large campaign contributions, had all been herded together elsewhere, under the watchful eyes of many more soldiers than were assigned to this cornfield. Still more were probably assigned unobtrusively—Cowell hoped it was unobtrusively—to the Going-In Committee, waiting somewhere in a sheltered bunker to greet the aliens. Very sheltered. Nobody knew what kind of drive the craft might have, or not have. For all they knew, it was set to take out both Minnesota and Ontario.

  Cowell didn’t think so.

  Hans Kleinschmidt had moved away. Abruptly Cowell said to Ann, “Didn’t you ever stare at the night sky and just will them to be there? When you were a kid, or even a grad student in astronomy?”

  She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “Well, sure. Then. But I never thought … I just never thought. Since.” She shrugged, but something in her tone made Cowell turn full face and peer into her eyes.

  “Yes, you did.”

  She answered him only indirectly. “Jim … there could be nobody aboard.”

  “Probably there isn’t,” he said, and knew that his voice betrayed him. Not belief so much as desire, not desire so much as need. And he was thirty-four goddamn years old, goddamn it!

  “Look!” someone yelled, and every head swiveled up, desperately searching a clear, star-jeweled sky.

  Cowell couldn’t see anything. Then he could: a faint pinprick of light, marginally moving. As he watched, it moved faster and then it flared, entering the atmosphere. He caught his breath.

  “Oh my God, it’s swerving off course!” somebody shouted from his left, where unofficial jerry-rigged tracking equipment had been assembled in a ramshackle group effort. “Impossible!” someone else shouted, although the only reason for this was that the object hadn’t swerved off a steady course before now. So what? Cowell felt a strange mood grip him, and stranger words flowed through his mind: Of course. They wouldn’t let me miss this.

  “A tenth of a degree northwest … no, wait … .”

  Cowell’s mood intensified. With one part of his mind, he recognized that the mood was born of fatigue and strain, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sense of inevitability grew on him, and he wasn’t surprised when Ann cried, “It’s landing here! Run!” Cowell didn’t move as the others scattered. He watched calmly, holding his half-filled Styrofoam cup of too-sweet coffee, face tilted to the sky.

  The object slowed, silvery in the starlight. It continued to slow until it was moving at perhaps three miles per hour, no more, at a roughly forty-five degree angle. The landing was smooth and even. There was no hovering, no jet blasts, no scorched ground. Only a faint whump as the object touched the earth, and a rustle of corn husks in the unseen wind.

  It seemed completely natural to walk over to the spacecraft. Cowell was the first one to reach it.

  Made of some smooth, dull-silver metal, he noted calmly, and unblackened by re-entry. An irregular oval, although his mind couldn’t pin down in precisely what the irregularity lay. Not humming or moving, or, in fact, doing anything at all.

  He put out his hand to touch it, and the hand stopped nearly a foot away.

  “Jim!” Ann called, and somebody else—must be Kleinschmidt—said, “Herr Dr. Cowell!” Cowell moved his hand along whatever he was touching. An invisible wall, or maybe some sort of hard field, encased the craft.

  “Hello, ship,” he said softly, and afterward wasn’t ever sure if he’d said it aloud.

  “Don’t touch it! Wait!” Ann called, and her hand snatched away his.

  It didn’t matter. He turned to her, not really seeing her, and said something that, like his greeting to the ship, he wasn’t ever sure about afterward. “I was raised Orthodox, you know. Waiting for the Messiah,” and then the rest were on them, with helicopters pulsing overhead and soldiers ordering everyone back, back I said! And Cowell was pushed into the crowd with no choice except to set himself to wait for the visitors to come out.

  “Are you absolutely positive?” the president, who was given to superlatives, asked his military scientists. He had assembled them, along with the joint chiefs of staff, the cabinet, the Canadian lieutenant-governor, and a sprinkling of advisors, in the cabinet room of the White House. The same group had been meeting daily for a week, ever since the object had landed. Washington was warmer than Minnesota; outside, dahlias and chrysanthemums still bloomed on the manicured lawn. “No signal of any type issued from the craft, at any time after you picked it up on the Hubble?”

  The scientists looked uncomfortable. It was the kind of question only nonscientists asked. Before his political career, the president had been a financier.

  “Sir, we can’t say for certain that we know all types of signals that could or do exist. Or that we had comprehensive, fixed-position monitoring of the craft at all times. As you—”

  “All right, all right. Since it landed, then, and you got your equipment trained on it. No radio signals emanating from it, at any wavelength whatsoever?”

  “No, sir. That’s definite.”

  “No light signals, even in infrared or ultraviolet?”

  “No, Mr. President.”

  “No gamma lengths, or other radioactivity?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No quantum effects?” the president said, surprising everyone. He was not noted for his wide reading.

  “Do you mean things like quantum entanglement to transport information?” the head of Livermore National Laboratory said cautiously. “Of course, we don’t know enough about that area of physics to predict for certain what may be discovered eventually, or what a rac
e of beings more advanced than ours might have discovered already.”

  “So there might be quantum signals going out from the craft constantly, for all you know.”

  The Livermore director spread his hands in helpless appeal. “Sir, we can only monitor signals we already understand.”

  The president addressed his chief military advisor, General Dayton. “This shield covering the craft—you don’t understand that, either? What kind of field it is, why nothing at all gets through except light?”

  “Everything except electromagnetic radiation in the visible-light wavelengths is simply reflected back at us,” Dayton said.

  “So you can’t use sonar, X-rays, anything that could image the inside?”

  This time Dayton didn’t answer. The president already knew all this. The whole world knew it. The best scientific and military minds from several nations had been at work on the object all week.

  “So what is your recommendation to me?” the president said.

  “Sir, our only recommendation is that we continue full monitoring of the craft, with full preparation to meet any change in its behavior.”

  “In other words, ‘Wait and see.’ I could have decided that for myself, without all you high-priced talent!” the president said in disgust, and several people in the room reflected with satisfaction that this particular president had only a year and three months left in office. There was no way he would be re-elected. The economy had taken too sharp a downturn.

  Unless, of course, a miracle happened to save him.

  “Well, go back to your labs, then,” the president said, and even though he knew it was a mistake, the director of Livermore gave in to impulse.

  “Science can’t always be a savior, Mr. President.”

  “Then what good is it?” the president said, with a puzzled simplicity that took the director’s breath away. “Just keep a close eye on that craft. And try to come up with some actual scientific data, for a blessed change.”