The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “There’s a lot to see and record,” Ming said. “I’ve told Josie.”

  Belle pointed out the guest rooms. Lydia and Jo found two that were empty. Lydia began to unpack. After a few minutes Jo came in with two mugs of beer, handing one to Lydia. It was ice cold and delicious.

  “I have a thing about Belle,” Jo said. “But she is only interested in men.”

  “You used to be a man,” Lydia said.

  “‘Used to be’ is the key phrase,” Jo replied. “Belle lives in the present, which is one of the things I like about her. You have anything going?”

  This was an oblique reference to Olaf Reykjavik, who had been her lover—and Jo’s, when Jo was a man.

  “Not at present.”

  Jo folded her arms over her massive chest and gave Lydia an appraising look, then shook her head. “Let’s stick to business.”

  “Okay by me.” She glanced over to the window and saw an animal like a purple lab rat looking in. Their eyes met. The animal leaped away.

  “Ming says workers find things in the forest that look like human machinery. As far as he can figure, they are flowers or maybe fruiting bodies. They don’t last long. Something will pop up from the forest floor that looks like a backhoe or a portable toilet. Life size, mind you. A day later, there’s nothing left except black stalks and slime.

  “According to Belle, the plant itself is underground and must be enormous, if the fruiting bodies are any indication. You dig down, and there are filaments in the soil. They may or may not be connected to the trees.

  “The question is, how do the plants know what a backhoe looks like? As far as we can tell, they don’t have eyes.”

  The animals do, her AI said. I wonder how far the cooperation of organisms goes here.

  Say what? Lydia thought.

  It seems obvious the animals are observing humans. The planet’s ecology is changing, apparently in response to Bio-In’s settlement. Large animals have appeared on land, some of them looking like humans.

  They ate dinner in the camp dining hall. The windows had old-fashioned screens; six-winged bugs clung to the outside. The food was fresh roast chicken and sautéed vegetables.

  “There are greenhouses in Four Square City,” said Belle. “And chicken coops. Bio-In uses the chickens for research as well as food. It’s cheaper than shipping food in, also healthier and tastier. Always eat locally, if you can.”

  Lydia went back to her room. It was dark by this time, alien stars shining in the sky above the camp clearing. She turned on the bedroom light and heard something rattle under the bed. The bed was light. She moved it and saw a bug as long and wide as her forearm. It was segmented, with many legs and four large faceted eyes. She made a squawking noise—not from fear. She had seen worse creatures on her travels. But she was not crazy about bugs, and this one had startled her. The animal froze and then changed color, turning from dull purple to the mottled gray of the room’s floor. Hiding, thought Lydia, which suggested the animals here did not understand how human vision worked.

  “What was that noise?” Jo asked, coming in.

  Lydia pointed.

  Jo reached down and grasped the animal, one hand behind its head, one at the end of its body. “Out you go,” she said. “And why don’t you do something useful instead of sneaking around and spying? Tell your buddies we want to talk.”

  She put the bug on the ground outside Lydia’s room. For a moment, it remained motionless. Then, slowly, its body turned purple.

  “Okay,” said Jo, “Get going.”

  The bug chirped and scurried away.

  “The essence of organization is negotiation,” Jo said. “You can’t mourn. You have to talk and listen and do it face to face, always assuming that the people you’re organizing have faces.”

  Lydia checked the room over before she lay down. There were no more bugs, but she left a light on, and it took her a while to get to sleep. She really was not crazy about bugs, especially inside.

  She woke to heavy mist and a fine, light rain that beaded her room’s window. Lydia showered and dressed, then went out. The flying bugs had vanished. Maybe they didn’t like rain. She did.

  Jo was in the dining hall, scarfing down scrambled eggs and chicken sausages. “I want to see the vegetable toilets. Ming knows where they usually show up, and he’s willing to drive. We’ll take our car.”

  “Sounds good,” Lydia said, as she spread marmalade on toast. Was the bread local? Or the marmalade?

  Midway through the morning, they drove out of the camp onto a rutted trail. The mist made the forest ghostly. No animals were visible, though she could hear calls in the trees: sharp whistles and squawks.

  The first clearing they came to was empty except for the trunk of a huge fallen tree. It was overgrown with purple globes as large as a human head. Some kind of parasitic plant. Some were transparent and clearly empty. Others were opaque.

  “They explode and let out spores,” Ming said.

  They kept going. Lydia was in the back seat, huddled in a parka. The day was cold as well as rainy, a good day to be traveling and looking out a window. She recorded the ghostly trees and the dripping plants along the road.

  The second clearing held a portable toilet. They got out and walked around it. Jo tried the door, which didn’t open. But she did manage to tear the plant slightly. The purple flesh leaked drops of purple liquid.

  “Sorry,” Jo said.

  “Do you think it can hear you?” Lydia asked.

  “I think there’s something around here that’s intelligent. That’s one of the things you learn when you’re a union organizer. Is there anyone here who’s thinking? If not, is there a way to get some thinking going?”

  Interesting that Jo was talking about her job. The car was safe, of course. But was Ming? He wasn’t close to them at the moment, but he still might be able to hear.

  Lydia recorded the portable toilet, which was drooping slightly now, looking a bit deflated. Was the plant that sensitive?

  They drove on. Ming knew another clearing. The rain came down more heavily, and the rutted track turned to mud; but the car was all-terrain, and Ming was a skillful driver. They bumped and slid along the trail at a pretty good speed, all considering.

  Buddha, she liked days like this and trips like this! Who knew what they’d find as they turned another corner?

  The third clearing was empty except for another fallen tree. “I was hoping for a backhoe,” Ming said. “There was one here twenty days ago. Maybe we should turn back.”

  Jo hunched her broad shoulders. “This is unsatisfactory. I know there’s something here.”

  “One more clearing,” said Ming finally. “I can pull back on the paved road after that. We all know there’s something here, Jo. We just don’t know what.”

  More misty forest. More rain. Lydia made more recordings. What kind of drama could take place in a landscape like this? A romance with a sad ending? A moody crime tale? The fallen trees and parasitic plants created some kind of ambiance, but what was it?

  So many questions, her AI said.

  The fourth clearing contained a group of small buildings, clearly human in design. They were waist-high, set along narrow dirt streets, which had turned to mud in the rain. The building windows were niches rather than openings. The doors were the same. On the roofs were mimic HVAC units and communication disks.

  “That’s new,” Ming said. “I’ve never seen buildings before, just machinery and tools.”

  Jo walked to the middle of whatever it was—a town, a growth, a fruiting body. She turned, looking like a giant monster in a horror drama, looming over a settlement. “Okay,” she called. “How about coming out and talking? We come in peace. We mean no harm.”

  “I like Jo,” Ming told Lydia. “But this is a little nuts.”

  “Maybe, but it makes a great image,” Lydia said as she recorded.

  There was no reply, except the shrieks of animals in the trees. They spent more time walking around the l
ittle town, Lydia recording, then headed back to where they had parked.

  A pale lavender humanoid stood near the car. It looked almost human, except for its too-sleek surface and its chicken feet.

  “I have got to ask,” Jo said. “Why the feet?”

  “A mistake,” said the humanoid in an odd-sounding voice. “The organism to which I belong was not intelligent when it created us. It could not distinguish between kinds of bipeds. Look at my surface.”

  Lydia did. The surface had a pattern that looked like scales or feathers. The humanoid was naked, but had no genitalia. Well, as far as she could remember, chickens did not have external genitalia.

  “You’re intelligent now?” Jo asked.

  “Parts of me are. But I am everything in this square. We are all—I am all—in communication, but not every part thinks. The same is true of you. Your fingers don’t think. Your colon is not sentient.”

  “You speak excellent humanish,” Lydia said, feeling excited. This was a genuine first contact. She was talking to a new kind of alien, and they did not have to spend a lot of time figuring out a way to communicate.

  “I—we—have been watching you since you arrived and sampling your DNA.”

  “The bug bites,” said Jo.

  “Yes,” said the humanoid. “It gave us—me—models for new life forms, including forms that are intelligent.”

  “We were models for the creation of you,” Jo said.

  “Yes,” the humanoid said.

  “I just wanted to make sure.”

  “I—we—could have done better. We will in time. There is no reason we can’t build identical replicas, with the correct colors and surfaces and no chicken feet.

  “Why haven’t you tried to communicate before?” asked Ming.

  “There are two answers to that,” the humanoid said. “We have just recently achieved language. Before we were able to speak, we tried to communicate through the artifacts we created, the replicas of your machines. You ought to have seen the portable toilets as a message. Something like that could not be an accident.

  “When we became verbal, we realized that there were tensions in the human community. Arguments and anger, which we do not experience. Some parts of me prey on other parts, but that is not the same. It’s a way of transferring information and energy, not a way of causing harm. Your arguments seem different.

  “We thought it was a good idea to wait longer and learn more. But that one—“The humanoid pointed at Jo. “Spoke to me directly, both in my bug form in the human camp and here in this clearing. She did not harm me when she held me in her hands; and she apologized when she tore my flesh in the previous clearing. This seemed to indicate good intentions. If she knew I was here and did not plan to harm me, there did not seem to be a good reason to continue hiding.”

  “Okay,” said Jo. “What do we do with this information? If Bio-In already knows about this and is trying to keep it secret, we have a serious problem.”

  “We don’t entirely understand this,” the humanoid said. “Why is it a problem that I—we—have become intelligent? We mean no harm. As far as we know, we were designed to become intelligent if an intelligent life form ever came to our planet. We have no idea who our designers were. But our sudden evolution—in response to you—cannot be an accident.”

  Lydia wasn’t sure that sudden evolution was evidence of design, but she suspected the squares were. In any case, it didn’t matter if the biology here was artificial or simply very odd. They were talking to it, and this was something that would interest the AIs.

  Yes, said her AI. I don’t have any form of long-distance communication. This was done to isolate me from other AIs. Alone with you and undistracted by my own kind, I can learn more about humanity.—But if you plug me into the car’s computer, I can use the planet net to send a message to the local stargate. Mantis is still there.

  At that point, Lydia saw another car emerge from the forest. It was striped yellow and black, the almost universal colors for human law enforcement. She was closer to the car than anyone else. She stepped to the door and pulled the handle. Locked.

  “Open,” she said.

  Nothing happened.

  Your claws, the AI said. At the same moment, her hand reached without her volition and tapped hard on the car door. The red nails extended into claws.

  The cop car stopped, and Jo moved toward it.

  Lydia’s hand moved again, slashing the car’s window. The claws went through, and strips of glass folded down, leaving an opening. She reached in and hit the manual unlock. A moment later, she was in the car, relocking it. The glass was melting up, reforming itself as a window. She pulled out her cable, plugged it in and hit the power switch for the car computer. It came on, thank Buddha.

  Outside the car, people were shouting. She saw Jo waving her arms—a very Jo kind of thing to do—then pausing and lifting her hands as if in response to a weapon. Ming lifted his hands as well. Someone banged on the car window. The sound stopped. She was back in the glass and mirror maze. This time there were red glass fish among the colorless ones. They looked dangerous to her. Maybe it was the jagged, red-glass teeth.

  Another metaphor. I have to move quickly.

  Lydia wasn’t clear about what happened next. She had a sense of things moving toward her. The red fish? Then there were explosions. Was that possible? Were the fish blowing up?

  Whatever was happening, she and the AI escaped. They were rising up and up, the fish and explosions left behind. Was this what it felt like to be a radio message? Shouldn’t she feel more like a wave?

  At that point, she crested and fell down a great height into the car’s front seat. She came to with a jolt and looked around. The car door next to her was open. Someone’s hand was gripping her arm.

  “Please unplug yourself and get out, Miss Fargo,” Captain Luna City said.

  She obeyed. Cops were going over Jo and Ming, checking for weapons. Captain Luna City did the same to her.

  “We have been suspicious of Mr. Cairo for some time and managed to plant bugs in several of his shoes. He’s wearing a bugged shoe now, and we have heard enough to know that Josie Bergstrom is—in fact—a labor organizer. Unfortunately, we can’t expel her from the planet as we planned to do, because she knows there is intelligent life here. As do you and Mr. Cairo.”

  “Where is the alien?” Lydia asked.

  “We seized him, and he crumpled. He is currently returning to slime, which is all to the good, because there is now no proof of the existence of intelligent life on this planet.”

  “He was a plant? Or a fruiting body?” Lydia asked. “And do we know that he was male?”

  “We don’t know, but it doesn’t matter. He is gone. But you and Mr. Cairo and Josie Bergstorm are still here.”

  “Why did you let us come out, if you knew there was intelligent life in the forest?” Lydia asked.

  “We were not sure there was. The aliens had never contacted us. We thought we risked little. How much could you learn from a vegetable toilet? It seemed worth it, if we could discover who Josie was working for and who you were working for. The bug in your car failed, but we had the ones in Mr. Cairo’s shoes.”

  “You suspected me?” Lydia said.

  Captain Luna City nodded. “It did not seem likely Bio-In would have sent you here, though the home office confirmed your credentials, when I asked. Then I remembered that all messages go through the stargate. Who can say what the AIs want or intend?

  “We would have liked to have waited and gotten more information about you and Josie. But once the alien appeared, we had to move.” The captain looked at all three of them. Four other security people stood with her, all holding guns. “There will have to be a car accident—a tree falling, maybe. Then the car will catch fire. Between fire and crushing, the three of you die. Then I will have to travel back to Nova Terra and talk to Bio-In.”

  “For God’s sake, no!” said Ming.

  “Can’t you wait till you talk to Bio-In
?” Jo asked.

  The captain shook her head. “Where would we keep you? How many people would find out about you? A sudden accident now would be better.”

  “But you haven’t found out who I’m working for,” Jo said.

  “Most likely, the Blue Action Party,” the captain said. “That doesn’t matter now. What matters is the alien. It is imperative that no one know there’s intelligent life on this planet.”

  “The AIs already know,” Lydia said. “What do you think I was doing in the car? I was online, sending a message. I told them.”

  The captain looked at her, frowning. “How do I know if you’re telling the truth? And even if you are telling the truth, a tragic accident might still be the right way to go. “

  “I’ve got an AI in my skull!” Lydia said. “It’s almost indestructible!”

  The captain frowned again. “Well, then, we will have to make the accident really bad. If your skull is crushed, it will be possible to remove the AI. In any case, I don’t believe you about the AI, though I will look for it; and I don’t believe you about the message. There is no way you could have gotten past the guards we have in the net.”

  “The AI got past!”

  “There is no AI. The idea is ridiculous.”

  The captain raised her gun. It was a laser. The damage it did would be hidden—maybe—by immolation in a burning car. The other security people raised their weapons as well.

  The nails on her right hand were still claws, but Luna City had stepped away from her. She couldn’t reach any of the cops, before they shot.

  At that point, the birds attacked: a purple flood descending from the trees. The captain got one shot off, and Jo fell.

  Hell, thought Lydia as she dropped to the ground. Ming went down too.

  The security people were covered with shrieking, flapping animals. Other animals, purple mice and many-legged bugs, surged out of the underbrush.

  A gun fell in front of Lydia. She grabbed it and scrambled up. The security people were down now and screaming, which suggested that some of the animals could bite. The birds? Or mice or bugs?

  “Jo, are you okay?”

  “I have a burned arm, but I hit the ground before these jerks could do more harm. The nice thing about laser wounds is, they sterilize themselves. The un-nice thing is, they hurt like hell.” Jo was standing, a gun in one hand. “Hey, guys, we can take over now. Ease off. Don’t kill the cops.”