Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Lunch was tortoise sandwiches and sour cherries. The clouds were thickening, and there were distant rumblings of thunder. But if there was rain, it fell somewhere else. Kala sat backwards at the table, smelling the stream and the light peppery stink of the strange trees. Despite a lifetime spent reading books and watching documentaries, she was unprepared for this divine place. It was an endless revelation, the idea that here lived creatures that had ruled this world until the arrival of humans. If the local climate had been warmer and the soil better, this reserve couldn't have survived. She was blessed. In ways new to her, the girl felt happy. Gazing into the shadows, she imagined native rock-lambs and tomb-tombs and the lumbering Harry's-big-days. In her daily life, the only animals were those that came with the Last Father—the roodeer and starlings and such. And their crops and a few hundred species of wild plants came here as seeds and spores that people had intentionally carried along. But these great old mountains wore a different order, a fresh normalcy. The shaggy black forest looked nothing like spruce trees, bearing a lovely useless wood too soft to be used as lumber, and always too wet to burn.

  A narrow form suddenly slipped from one shadow to the next.

  What could that have been?

  Kala rose slowly. Her brother was immersed in a fat adventure novel. Her parents glanced her way, offering smiles before returning to the subject at hand: What, if anything, would they do with the afternoon and evening? With a stalker's pace, Kala moved into the forest—into the cool spicy delicious air—and then she paused again, eyes unblinking, her head cocked to one side while she listened to the deep booming of thunder as it curled around the mountain flanks.

  A dry something touched Kala on the back of the calf.

  She flinched, looking down.

  The housefly launched itself, circling twice before settling on her bare arm. Kala never liked to kill, but this creature didn't belong here. It was one of the creatures humans always brought—by chance, originally, and now cherished because maggots could be useful disposing of trash. With the palm of her right hand, she managed to stun the creature, and then she knelt, using eyes and fingers to find its fallen body, two fingertips crushing the vermin to an anonymous paste.

  Sitting nearby, studying Kala, was a wild cat. She noticed it as she stood again—a big male tabby, well fed and complacent, caught in a large wire trap. Cat-shaped signs were posted across the reserve, warning visitors about feral predators. These animals were ecological nightmares. During its life, a single killing machine could slaughter thousands of the native wisp-mice and other delicate species; and a male cat was the worst, since it could also father dozens of new vermin that would only spread the carnage.

  Kala approached the cat, knelt down and looked into its bright green eyes. Except for the tangled fur, nothing about the animal looked especially wild. When she offered her hand, the cat responded by touching her fingertips with the cool end of its nose. Exotics like this were always killed. No exceptions. But maybe she could catch it and take it home. If she begged hard enough, how could her parents refuse? Kala studied the mechanism of the trap and found a strong stick and slipped it into a gap, and then with a hard shove, she forced the steel door to pop open.

  The cat had always been wild, and it knew what to do. As soon as the door vanished, Kala reached for its neck, but her quarry was quicker. It sprinted back into the dark shadows, leaving behind a young girl to think many thoughts, but mostly feeling guilt mixed with a tenacious, unexpected relief.

  "Find anything?” Father asked on her return.

  "Nothing,” she lied.

  "Next time,” he advised, “take the camera."

  "We haven't seen a tomb-tombs yet,” her mother added. “Before we leave, I'd like to have a close look at them."

  Kala sat beside her brother, and he glanced up from his book, investing a few moments watching her as she silently finished her sandwich.

  * * * *

  Later that day, they visited a tiny museum nestled in a wide black meadow. Like favored students on a field trip, they wandered from exhibit to exhibit, absorbing little bits of knowledge about how these mountains were built and why the glaciers had come and gone again. Display cases were jammed with fossils, and in the basement were artifacts marking these last centuries when humans played their role. But the memorable heart of the day was a stocky, homely woman who worked for the reserve—a strong, raspy-voiced lady wearing a drab brown uniform complete with a wide-brimmed hat and fat pockets and an encyclopedic knowledge on every imaginable subject.

  Her job was to lead tourists along the lazy trail that circled her museum grounds. Her practiced voice described this world as well as each of its known neighbors. From the First Father to the Last, seventeen examples of the Creation had been settled, while another fifty worlds had been visited but found unsuitable. The Old Earth and its sisters belonged to one endless family, each world sharing the same essential face: There was always a Eurasia and Africa, an Australia and two Americas. The North Pole was water, while islands or a single continent lay on the South Pole. Except for the fickle effects of erosion, landmasses were constant. Two billion years of separation wasn't enough to make any earth forget which family it belong to.

  But where stone and tectonics were predictable, other qualities were not. Minuscule factors could shift climates or the composition of an atmosphere. Some earths were wet and warm. Kala's earth, for instance. Most had similar atmospheres, but none were identical to any other. A few earths were openly inhospitable to humanity. Oxygen cycles and methane cycles were famously temperamental. Sometimes life generated enough greenhouse gas to scorch the land, lifting the oceans into a cloud-born biosphere. Other earths had been permanently sterilized by impacting comets or passing supernovae. Yet those traps were easy to spot with a working ripper; little bites of air warned the Fathers about the most deadly places. What the woman lecturer discussed, and in astonishing depth, were worlds that only seemed inviting. Everyone knew examples from history. After a hard year or two, or in the case of Mattie's House, a full ten years of misery, the reining Father had realized there was no hope, and gathering up his pioneers, he used the ripper's remaining power to leap to another, more favorable world.

  "We have a wonderful home,” the woman declared, leaning against one of the native trees. “A long Ice Age has just released this land, giving us a favorable climate. And the northern soils have been bulldozed to the warm south, making the black ground we always name Iowa and Ohio and Ukraine."

  Her praise of their world earned grateful nods from tourists.

  "And we're blessed in having so much experience,” she continued. “Our ancestors learned long ago what to bring and how to adapt. Our culture is designed to grow quickly, and by every measure. Ten centuries is not a long time—not to a world or even to a young species like ours—but that's all the time we needed here to make a home for five billion of us."

  Smiles rode the nodding faces.

  "But we're most blessed in this way,” she said. Then she paused, letting her wise old eyes take their measure of her audience. “We are awfully lucky because this world is extremely weak. For reasons known and reasons only guessed at, natural selection took its sweet time here. These native life forms are roughly equivalent to the First Earth during its long ago Permian. The smartest tomb-tomb isn't smart at all. And as any good Father knows, intelligence is the first quality to measure when you arrive at a new home."

  Kala noticed the adults’ approval. Here was the central point; the woman was speaking to the young men in her audience, giving them advice should they ever want to become a Father.

  One hand lifted, begging to be seen.

  "Yes, sir,” said the lecturer. “A question?"

  "I could ask a question, I suppose.” The hand belonged to an elderly gentleman with the pale brown eyes of the First Father as well as his own thick mane of white hair. “Mostly, I was going to offer my observations. This morning, I was hiking the trail to Passion Lake—"

>   "A long walk,” the woman interjected, perhaps trying to compliment his endurance.

  "I was bitten by mosquitoes,” he announced. “Nothing new about that, I suppose. And I saw rilly birds nesting in one of your false-spruces.” The rillies were native to the Second Father's world. “And I'm quite sure I saw mice—our mice—in the undergrowth. Which looked an awful lot like oleo-weed when it's gone wild."

  Oleo-weed was from the First Father's world, and it had been a human companion for the last twenty thousand years.

  The lecturer adjusted her big-brimmed hat as she nodded, acting unperturbed. “We have a few exotics on the reserve,” she agreed. “Despite our rules and restrictions—"

  "Is this right?” the white-haired man interrupted.

  "Pardon me?"

  "Right,” he repeated. “Correct. Responsible. What we are doing here ... is it worth the damage done to a helpless planet...?"

  More than anything, the audience was either puzzled by his attitude or completely indifferent. Half of the tourists turned away, pretending to take a burning interest in random rocks or the soft peculiar bark of the trees.

  The lecturer pulled the mountain air across her teeth. “There are estimates,” she began. “I'm sure everybody here has seen the figures. The First Father was the first pioneer, but he surely wasn't the only one to lead people away from the Old Earth. Yet even if you count only that one man and his wives, and if you make a conservative estimate of how many Fathers sprang up from that first world ... and then you assume that half of those Fathers built homes filled with young people and their own wandering hearts ... that means that by now, millions of colony worlds have been generated by that first example. And each of those millions might have founded another million or so worlds—"

  "An exponential explosion,” the man interjected.

  "Inside an endless Creation, as we understand these things.” She spoke with a grim delight. “No limit to the worlds, no end to the variety. And why shouldn't humanity claim as much of that infinity as he can?"

  "Then I suppose all of this has to be moral,” the white-haired man added, the smile pleasant but his manner sarcastic. “I guess my point is, madam ... you and those like you are eventually going to discover yourselves without employment. Because there will be a day, and soon, when this lovely ground is going to look like every other part of our world, thick with the same weeds and clinging creatures we know best, and the exactly the same as the twenty trillion other human places."

  "Yes,” said the woman, her satisfaction obvious. “That is the future, yes."

  The lecturer wasn't looking at Kala, but every word felt as if it had been aimed her way. For the first time in her life, she saw an inevitable future. She loved this alien forest, but it couldn't last. An endless doom lay over the landscape, and she wanted to weep. Even her brother noticed her pain, smiling warily while he asked, “What the hell is wrong with you?"

  She couldn't say. She didn't know how to define her mind's madness. Yet afterwards, making the journey back to the parking lot, she thought again of that wildcat; and with a fury honest and pure, she wished that she had left the creature inside that trap. Or better, that she had used that long stick of hers and beaten it to death.

  4

  The most devoted wives left behind written accounts of their adventures on the new world—the seven essential books in the First Father's Testament. Quite a few churches also included the two Sarah diaries, while the more progressive faiths, such as the one Kala's family belonged to, made room for the Six Angry Wives. Adding to the confusion were the dozens if not hundreds of texts and fragmentary accounts left behind by lesser-known voices, as well as those infamous documents generally regarded to be fictions at best, and at worst, pure heresies.

  When Kala was twelve, an older girl handed her a small, cat-eared booklet. “I didn't give this to you,” the girl warned. “Read it and then give it to somebody else, or burn it. Promise me?"

  "I promise."

  Past Fathers had strictly forbidden this testament, but someone always managed to smuggle at least one copy to the next world. The First Mother's Tale was said to be a third-person account of Claire, the fifty-year-old widow whose job it had been to watch over the sorority house and its precious girls. Claire was a judicious, pragmatic woman—qualities missing in her own mother, Kala realized sadly. On humanity's most important day, the housemother woke to shouts and wild weeping. She threw on a bathrobe and stepped into slippers before leaving her private ground-floor apartment. Urgent arms grabbed her up and dragged her down a darkened hallway. A dozen terrified voices were rambling on about some horrible disaster. The power was out, Claire noticed. Yet she couldn't find any trace of cataclysms. The house walls were intact. There was no obvious fire or flood. Whatever the disturbance, it had been so minor that even the framed photographs of Delta sisters were still neatly perched on their usual nails.

  Then Claire stepped out the front door, and hesitated. Two long trucks were parked in the otherwise empty street. But where was the campus? Past the trucks, exactly where the Fine Arts building should be, a rugged berm had been made of gray dirt and gray stone and shattered tree trunks. Beyond the berm was a forest of strange willowy trees. Nameless odors and a dense gray mist were drifting out of the forest on a gentle wind. And illuminated by the moon and endless stars was a flock of leathery creatures, perched together on the nearest limbs, hundreds of simple black eyes staring at the newcomers.

  The First Father was sitting halfway down the front steps, a deer rifle cradled in his lap, a box of ammunition between his feet, hands trembling while the pale brown eyes stared out at the first ruddy traces of the daylight.

  Women were still emerging from every door, every fire escape. Alone and in little groups, they would wander to the edge their old world, the bravest ones climbing the berm to catch a glimpse of the strange landscape before retreating again, gathering together on the damp lawn while staring at the only man in their world.

  Claire pulled her robe tight and walked past the First Father.

  No life could have prepared her for that day, yet she found the resolve to smile in a believable fashion, offering encouraging words and calculated hugs. She told her girls that everything would be fine. She promised they'd be home again in time for classes. Then she turned her attentions to the third truck. It was parked beside the house, its accordion door raised and its loading ramp dropped to the grass. Claire climbed the ramp and stared at the strange, battered machinery inside. The young woman who had heard the ripper in operation—the only witness to their leap across invisible dimensions—was telling her story to her sisters, again and again. Claire listened. Then she gathered the handful of physics majors and asked if the ripper was authentic. It was. Could it really do these awful things? Absolutely. Claire inhaled deeply and hugged herself, then asked if there was any possible way, with everything they knew and the tools at hand, that this awful-looking damage could be fixed?

  No, it couldn't be. And even if there was some way to patch it up, nobody here would ever see home again.

  "Why not?” Claire asked, refusing to give in. “Maybe not with this ripper-machine, no. But why not build a new one with the good parts here and new components that we make ourselves...?"

  One young woman was an honor student—a senior ready to graduate with a double major in physics and mathematics. Her name, as it happened, was Kala—a coincidence that made one girl's heart quicken as she read along. That ancient Kala provided the smartest, most discouraging voice. There wouldn't be any cobbling together of parts, she maintained. Many times, she had seen the ripper used, and she had even helped operate it on occasion. As much as anyone here, she understood its powers and limitations. Navigating through the multiverse was just this side of impossible. To Claire and a few of her sisters, the First Kala explained how the Creation was infinite, and how every cubic nanometer of their world contained trillions of potential destinations.

  "Alien worlds?” asked Claire.
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  "Alternate earths,” Kala preferred. “More than two billion years ago, the world around us split away from our earth."

  "Why?"

  "Quantum rules,” said Kala, explaining nothing. “Every world is constantly dividing into a multitude of new possibilities. There's some neat and subtle harmonics at play, and I don't understand much of it. But that's why the rippers can find earths like this. Two billion years and about half a nanometer divide our home from this place."

  That was a lot for a housemother to swallow, but Claire did her best.

  Kala continued spelling out their doom. “Even if we could repair the machine—do it right now, with a screwdriver and two minutes of work—our earth is lost. Finding it would be like finding a single piece of dust inside a world made of dust. It's that difficult. That impossible. We're trapped here, and Owen knows it. And that's part of his plan, I bet."

  "Owen?” the First Mother asked. “Is that his name?"

  Kala nodded, glancing back at the armed man.

  "So you know Owen, do you?"

  Kala rolled her eyes as women do when they feel uncomfortable in a certain man's presence. “He's a graduate student in physics,” she explained. “I don't know him that well. He's got a trust fund, supposedly, and he's been stuck on his master thesis for years.” Then with the next breath, she confessed, “We went out once. Last year. Once, or maybe twice. Then I broke it off."

  Here was a staggering revelation for the living Kala: The woman who brought her name to the new world had a romantic relationship with the First Father. And then she had rejected him. Perhaps Owen still loved the girl, Kala reasoned. He loved her and wanted to possess her. And what if this enormous deed—the basis for countless lives and loves—came from one bitter lover's revenge?