The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Not long after the murmur of the stream and the frogs' formidable calls—what Aristophanes would have done with them!—faded in the distance, Audubon heard what he first thought were geese flying by. He'd ridden out onto a grassy stretch a little while before. He looked north to see if he could spot the birds, but had no luck.

  Harris was peering in the same direction, his face puzzled. "Geese—but not quite geese," he said. "Sounds like trumpet music played on a slide trombone."

  "It does!" For a moment, Audubon simply smiled at the comparison. Then, sudden wild surmise in his eye, he stared at his friend. "Edward, you don't suppose — ?"

  "I don't know," Harris said, "but we'd better find out. If they aren't honkers, they could be nondescript geese, which wouldn't be bad, either. Audubon's geese, you could call them."

  "I could," said Audubon, who'd never had less interest in discovering a new species. "I could, yes, but… I'm going to load my gun with buckshot." He started doing just that.

  "Good plan." So did Harris.

  Keep calling. Please keep calling, Audubon thought, again and again, as they rode through the forest toward the sound. The birds—whatever they were —did keep up the noise, now quietly, now rising to an angry peak as if a couple of males were quarreling over a female, as males were likely to do in spring.

  When Audubon thought they'd come close enough, he slid down off his horse, saying, "We'd best go forward on foot now." He carried not only his gun but also charcoal sticks and paper, in case… Harris also dismounted. Audubon believed he would have brained him with the shotgun had he argued.

  After perhaps ten minutes, Harris pointed ahead. "Look. We're coming to an open space." Audubon nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He too saw the bright sunshine that told of a break in the trees. The bird calls were very loud now, very near. "Would you call that honking?" Harris asked. Audubon only shrugged and slid forward.

  He peered out from in back of a cycad at the meadow beyond… at the meadow, and at the honkers grazing on it. Then they blurred: tears of joy ran down his face.

  "Blessed art Thou, O Lord, Who hast preserved me alive to see such things," he whispered, staring and staring.

  Harris stood behind a small spruce a few feet away. "Isn't that something. Isn't that something?" he said, his words more prosaic than his friend's, but his tone hardly less reverent.

  Eight honkers grazed there, pulling up grass with their bills: two males, Audubon judged, and half a dozen smaller females. The birds had a more forward-leaning posture than did the mounted skeletons in the Hanover museum. That meant they weren't so tall. The males probably could stretch their heads up higher than a man, but it wouldn't be easy or comfortable for them.

  And then they both moved toward the same female, and did stretch their necks up and up and up, and honked as loudly as ever they could, and flapped their tiny, useless wings to make themselves seem big and fierce. And, while they squabbled, the female walked away.

  Audubon started sketching. He didn't know how many of the sketches he would work up into paintings and how many would become woodcuts or lithographs. He didn't care, either. He was sketching honkers from life, and if that wasn't heaven it was the next best thing.

  "Which species are they, do you suppose?" Harris asked.

  Once, at least a dozen varieties of honker had roamed Atlantis' plains and uplands. The largest couple of species, the so-called great honkers, birds of the easily accessible eastern lowlands, went extinct first. Audubon had studied the remains in Hanover and elsewhere to be ready for this day. Now it was here, and he still found himself unsure. "I… believe they're what's called the agile honker," he said slowly. "Those are the specimens they most resemble."

  "If you say they're agile honkers, why then, they are," Harris said. "Anyone who thinks otherwise will have to change his mind, because you've got the creatures."

  "I want to be right." But Audubon couldn't deny his friend had a point. "A shame to have to take a specimen, but…"

  "It'll feed us for a while, too." The prospect didn't bother Harris. "They are supposed to be good eating."

  "True enough." When Audubon had all the sketches he wanted of grazing honkers and of bad-tempered males displaying, he stepped out from behind the cy-cad. The birds stared at him in mild surprise. Then they walked away. He was something strange, but they didn't think he was particularly dangerous. Atlantean creatures had no innate fear of man. The lack cost them dearly.

  He walked after them, and they withdrew again. Harris came out, too, which likely didn't help. Audubon held up a hand. "Stay there, Edward. I'll lure them back."

  Setting down his shotgun, he lay on his back in the sweet-smelling grass, raised his hips, and pumped his legs in the air, first one, then the other, again and again, faster and faster. He'd made pronghorn antelope on the Terranovan prairie curious enough to approach with that trick. What worked with the wary antelope should work for agile honkers as well. "Are they coming?" he asked.

  "They sure are." Harris chuckled. "You look like a damn fool—you know that?"

  "So what?" Audubon went on pumping. Yes, he could hear the honkers drawing near, hear their calls and then hear their big, four-toed feet tramping through the grass.

  When he stood up again, he found the bigger male only a few feet away. The honker squalled at him; it didn't care for anything on two legs that was taller than it. "Going to shoot that one?" Harris asked.

  "Yes. Be ready if my charge doesn't bring it down," Audubon said. Point-blank buckshot should do the job. Sometimes, though, wild creatures were amazingly tenacious of life.

  Audubon raised the shotgun. No, the agile honker had no idea what it was. This hardly seemed sporting, but his art and science both required it. He pulled the trigger. The gun kicked against his shoulder. The male let out a last surprised honk and toppled. The rest of the birds ran off—faster than a man, probably as fast as a horse, gabbling as they went.

  Harris came up beside Audubon. "He's down. He won't get up again, either."

  "No." Audubon wasn't proud of what he'd done. "And the other male can have all the females now."

  "He ought to thank you, eh?" Harris leered and poked Audubon in the ribs.

  "He'd best enjoy them while he can." Audubon stayed somber. "Sooner or later—probably sooner—someone else will come along and shoot him, too, and his lady friends with him."

  By then, the rest of the honkers had gone perhaps a hundred yards. When no more unexpected thunder boomed, they settled down and started grazing again. A few minutes later, a hawk soared by overhead—not a red-crested eagle, but an ordinary hawk far too small to harm them: Still, its shadow panicked them more thoroughly than the shotgun blast had. They sprinted for the cover of the trees, honking louder than they did when Audubon fired.

  "Would you please bring my wires, Edward?" the artist asked. "No posing board with a bird this size, but I can truss him up into lifelike postures."

  "I'll be back directly," Harris said. He took longer than he promised, but only because instead of carrying things himself he led up the pack horses. That gave Audubon not only the wires but also his watercolors and the strong spirits for preserving bits of the agile honker. If he and Harris did what he'd told the customs man they wouldn't do and drank some of the spirits instead of using them all as preservatives… Well, how else could they celebrate?

  Audubon soon got to work. "This may be the last painting I ever do," he said. "If it is, I want to give my best."

  "Don't be foolish. You're good for another twenty years, easy," Harris said.

  "I hope you're right." Audubon left it there. No matter what he hoped, he didn't believe it, however much he wished he did. He went on, "And this may be the last view of these honkers science ever gets. I owe it to them to give my best, too."

  He wired the dead male's neck and wings into the pose it took when challenging its rival. He had the sketches he'd made from life to help him do that. His heart pounded as he and Harris manhandled the honk
er. Ten years earlier, or even five, it wouldn't have seemed so hard. No, he didn't think he had twenty more left, or anything close to that.

  Live for the moment then, he told himself. It's all there is. His eye still saw; his hand still obeyed. If the rest of him was wearing out like a steamboat that had gone up and down the Big Muddy too many times… then it was. When people remembered him, it would be for what his eye saw and his hand did. The rest? The rest mattered only to him.

  And when people remembered agile honkers from now on, that too would be for what his eye saw and what his hand did. Even more than he had with the red-crested eagle, he felt responsibility's weight heavy on his shoulders.

  The other honkers came out from the trees and began grazing again. Some of them drew close to where he worked. Their calls when they saw him by the male's body seemed to his ear curious and plaintive. They knew their fellow was dead, but they couldn't understand why Audubon stood near the corpse. Unlike a hawk's shadow, he was no danger they recognized.

  The Sun was setting when he looked up from his work. "I think it may do," he said. "The background will wait for later."

  Harris examined the honker on the paper, the honker vibrant with the life Audubon had stolen from its model. He set a hand on the painter's shoulder. "Congratulations. This one will last forever."

  "Which is more than I will. Which is more than the birds will." Audubon looked down at the dead honker, agile no more. "Now for the anatomical specimens, and now for the dark meat. Poor thing, it will be all flyblown by this time tomorrow."

  "But your painting will keep it alive," Harris said.

  "My painting will keep its memory alive. It's not the same." Audubon thought again about how his heart had beat too hard, beat too fast. It was quieter now, but another twenty years? Not likely. "No, it's not the same." He sighed. "But it's all we have. A great pity, but it is." He drew his skinning knife. "And now for the rest of the job…"

  * * *

  Deus Ex Homine

  Hannu Rajaniemi

  From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006) and Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (2006)

  Hannu Rajaniemi (http://tomorrowelephant.net/) is a Finn living in Edinburgh, Scotland, and is now working on his PhD thesis in string theory. His bio says "Hannu was born in Ylivieska, Finland, in 1978 and survived the polar bears, the freezing cold and the Nokia recruiting agents long enough to graduate from the University of Oulu. After brief stints in Cambridge University and working as a research scientist for the Finnish Defense Forces, he moved to Edinburgh." And he "only recently switched to Queen's English as his primary medium of expression. His favorite method of writing involves starting at a blank A4 page until drops of blood form on his forehead."

  "Deus Ex Homine " was published in Nova Scotia. An AI plague turns humans into deadly, near-omnipotent gods. Being a god is like having a disease, and it turns out that this can be sexually transmitted: fullblown godhood can appear in the child even if the parent has been cured. Jukka is an ex-god, his infection now burned away and part of his mind with it—human again, but not quite whole, a survivor of the war against the gods.

  * * *

  As gods go, I wasn't one of the holier-than-thou, dying-for-your-sins variety. I was a full-blown transhuman deity with a liquid metal body, an external brain, clouds of self-replicating utility fog to do my bidding and a recursively self-improving AI slaved to my volition. I could do anything I wanted. I wasn't Jesus, I was Superman: an evil Bizarro Superman.

  I was damn lucky. I survived.

  The quiet in Pittenweem is deeper than it should be, even for a small Fife village by the sea. The plague is bad here in the north, beyond Hadrian's Firewall, and houses hide behind utility fog haloes.

  "Not like Prezzagard, is it?" Craig says, as we drive down the main street.

  Apprehension, whispers the symbiote in my head. Worry. I don't blame Craig. I'm his stepdaughter's boyfriend, come calling during her first weekend leave. There's going to be trouble.

  "Not really," I tell him, anxiety bubbling in my belly.

  "Beggars canna be choosers, as my granny used to say," Craig replies. "Here we are."

  Sue opens the door and hugs me. As always, I see Aileen in her, in the short-cropped blonde hair and freckled face.

  "Hey, Jukka," she says. "It's good to see you."

  "You too," I say, surprising both myself and the symbiote with my sincerity.

  "Aileen called," Sue says. "She should be here in a few minutes."

  Behind her shoulder, I notice Malcolm looking at me. I wink at him and he giggles.

  Sue sighs. "Malcolm has been driving me crazy," she says. "He believes he can fly an angel now. It's great how you think you can do anything when you're six."

  "Aileen is still like that," I say.

  "I know."

  "She's coming!" shouts Malcolm suddenly. We run out to the back garden and watch her descend.

  The angel is big, even bigger than I expect from the lifecasts. Its skin is transparent, flowing glass; its wings pitch-black. Its face and torso are rough-hewn, like an unfinished sculpture.

  And inside its chest, trapped like an insect in amber, but smiling, is Aileen.

  They come down slowly. The downdraft from the micron-sized fans in the angel's wings tears petals from Sue's chrysanthemums. It settles down onto the grass lightly. The glass flesh flows aside, and Aileen steps out.

  It's the first time I've seen her since she left. The quicksuit is a halo around her: it makes her look like a knight. There is a sharper cast to her features now and she has a tan as well. Fancasts on the Q-net claim that the Deicide Corps soldiers get a DNA reworking besides the cool toys. But she is still my Aileen: dirty blonde hair, sharp cheekbones and green eyes that always seem to carry a challenge; my Aileen, the light of the sun.

  I can only stare. She winks at me and goes to embrace her mother, brother and Craig. Then she comes to me and I can feel the quicksuit humming. She brushes my cheek with her lips.

  "Jukka," she says. "What on earth are you doing here?"

  "Blecch. Stop kissing," says Malcolm.

  Aileen scoops him up. "We're not kissing," she says. "We're saying hello." She smiles. "I hear you want to meet my angel."

  Malcolm's face lights up. But Sue grabs Aileen's hand firmly. "Food first," she says. "Play later."

  Aileen laughs. "Now I know I'm home," she says.

  Aileen eats with relish. She has changed her armor for jeans and a T-shirt, and looks a lot more like the girl I remember. She catches me staring at her and squeezes my hand under the table.

  "Don't worry," she says. "I'm real."

  I say nothing and pull my hand away.

  Craig and Sue exchange looks, and the symbiote prompts me to say something.

  "So I guess you guys are still determined to stay on this side of the Wall?" I oblige.

  Sue nods. "I'm not going anywhere. My father built this house, and runaway gods or not, we're staying here. Besides, that computer thing seems to be doing a good job protecting us."

  "The Fish," I say.

  She laughs. "I've never gotten used to that. I know that it was these young lads who built it, but why did they have to call it Fish?"

  I shrug.

  "It's a geek joke, a recursive acronym. Fish Is Super Human. Lots of capital letters. It's not that funny, really."

  "Whatever. Well, Fish willing, we'll stay as long as we can."

  "That's good." And stupid, I think to myself.

  "It's a Scottish thing, you could say. Stubbornness," says Craig.

  "Finnish, too," I add. "I don't think my parents are planning to go anywhere soon."

  "See, I always knew we had something in common," he says, although the symbiote tells me that his smile is not genuine.

  "Hey," says Aileen. "Last time I checked, Jukka is not your daughter. And I just got back from a war."

  "So, how was the war?" asks Craig.

  Challenge,
says the symbiote. I feel uneasy.

  Aileen smiles sadly.

  "Messy," she says.

  "I had a mate in Iraq, back in the noughties," Craig says. "That was messy. Blood and guts. These days, it's just machines and nerds. And the machines can't even kill you. What kind of war is that?"

  "I'm"not supposed to talk about it," says Aileen.

  "Craig," says Sue. "Not now."

  "I'm just asking," says Craig. "I had friends in Inverness and somebody with the plague turned it into a giant game of Tetris. Aileen's been in the war, she knows what it's like. We've been worried. I just want to know."

  "If she doesn't want to talk about it, she doesn't talk about it," Sue says. "She's home now. Leave her alone."

  I look at Craig. The symbiote tells me that this is a mistake. I tell it to shut up.

  "She has a point," I say. "It's a bad war. Worse than we know. And you're right, the godplague agents can't kill. But the gods can. Recursively self-optimising AIs don't kill people. Killer cyborgs kill people."

  Craig frowns.

  "So," he says, "how come you're not out there if you think it's so bad?"

  Malcolm's gaze flickers between his sister and his stepfather. Confusion. Tears.

  I put my fork down. The food has suddenly lost its taste. "I had the plague," I say slowly. "I'm disqualified. I was one of the nerds."

  Aileen is standing up now and her eyes are those of a Fury.

  "How dare you!" she shouts at Craig. "You have no idea what you're talking about. No idea. You don't get it from the casts. The Fish doesn't want to show you. It's bad, really bad. You want to tell me how bad? I'll tell you."

  "Aileen—" I begin, but she silences me with a gesture.

  "Yes, Inverness was like a giant Tetris game. Nerds and machines did it. And so we killed them. And do you know what else we saw? Babies. Babies bonded with the godplague. Babies are cruel. Babies know what they want: food, sleep, for all pain to go away. And that's what the godplague gives them. I saw a woman who'd gone mad, she said she'd lost her baby and couldn't find it, even though we could see that she was pregnant. My angel looked at her and said that she had a wormhole in her belly, that the baby was in a little universe of its own. And there was this look in her eyes, this look—"