The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  The Company persuaded me. A message was conveyed that I wanted to meet him again. A meeting was arranged. I flatter myself that there were very few human beings on the planet for whom he would have agreed this.

  I had to pretend I had taken up dotsnuff. This involved me in actually practising snorting the stuff, though I hated it. But the dotsnuff was a necessary part of the seizure strategy. It identified where I was; and more to the point it was programmed with Nic’s deener-tag (of course the Company had that on file). That would separate us out from all other people in whichever room or space we found ourselves in—let’s say, soldiers, guards, captors, terrorists, whomsoever—and in which the snuff would roil about like smoke. When the capture team came crashing in with furious suddenness their guns would know which people to shoot and which not to shoot.

  He was back in the Indian Federation now: somewhere near Delhi.

  I was flown direct to Delhi international. And we landed at noon. And I was fizzing with nerves.

  From the airpot I took a taxi to an arranged spot, and there met a man who told me to take a taxi to another spot. At that place I was collected by three other men and put into a large car. It was not a pleasant drive. I was bitter with nerves; my mind rendered frangible by terror. It was insanely hot; migraine weather, forty-five, fifty, and the car seemed to have no air conditioning. We drove past a succession of orchards, the trunks of the trees blipping past my window like a barcode. Then we turned up a road that stretched straight as a thermometer line, towards the horizon. And up we raced until it ended before a huge gate. Men with rifles stood about. I could see four dogs, tongues like untucked shirttails. And then the gate was opened, and we drove inside.

  I was shown to a room, and in it I stayed for several hours. My luggage was taken away.

  I could not sleep. It was too hot to sleep anyway.

  My luggage was brought back, my tube of dotsnuff still inside. I took this and slipped it inside my trouser pocket.

  I informed my guards of my need to use the restroom—genuinely, for my bladder was fuller, and bothered me more, than my conscience. I was taken to a restroom with a dozen urinals at one wall and half a dozen sinks at another. A crossword-pattern of gaps marked where humidity had removed some of the tiny blue tiles covering the walls. The shiny floor was not as clean as I might have liked. I emptied my bladder into the white porcelain cowl of a urinal and washed my hands at the sink. Then, like a character in a cheap film, I peered at myself in the mirror. My eyes saw my eyes. I examined my chin, the jowls shimmery with stubble, the velveteen eyebrows, the rather too large ears. This was the face that Kate saw when she leant in, saying either “a kiss before bedtime,” or “a bed before kisstime,” and touched my lips with her lips. I was horribly conscious of the flippant rapidity of my heart, of blood hurrying with adrenaline.

  A guard I had not previously encountered, a tall, thin man with a gold-handled pistol tucked into the front of his trousers, came into the lavatory. “The Redeemer will see you now,” he said.

  VIII

  Had he come straight out with “why are you here?” or “what do you want?” or anything like that, I might have blurted the truth. I had prepared answers for those questions, of course, but I was, upon seeing him again, miserably nervous. But of course he wasn’t puzzled that I wanted to see him again. He took that as his due. Of course I wanted to see him—who wouldn’t? His face cracked wide with a grin, and he embraced me.

  We were in a wide, low-ceilinged room; and we were surrounded by gun-carrying young men and women: some pale as I, some sherry- and acorn-coloured, some black as liquorish. A screen was switched on but the sound was down. Through a barred-window I could see the sepia plain and, waverly with heat in the distance, the edge-line of the orchards.

  “Redeemer, is it?” I said, my dry throat making the words creak.

  “Can you believe it?” He rolled his eyes upwards, so that he was looking at the ceiling—the direction, had he only known it, of the company troopers, sweeping in low-orbit with a counter-spin to hover, twenty-miles up on the vertical. “I try to fucking discourage it.”

  “Sure you do,” I said. Then, clutching the tube in my pocket to stop my fingers trembling, I added in a rapid voice: “I’ve taken up snuff, you know.”

  Nic looked very somberly at me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go outside if you want to snort that.”

  For a moment I thought he was being genuine, and my rapid heartbeat accelerated to popping point. My hands shivered. I was sweating. When he laughed, and beckoned me towards a low-slung settee, I felt the relief as sharply as terror. I sat and tried, by focussing my resolve, to stop the tremble in my calf muscles.

  “You know what I hate?” he said, as if resuming a conversation we had been having just moments before. “I hate that phrase body fascism. You take a fat man, or fat woman, and criticise them for being fat. That makes you a body fascist. You know what’s wrong there? It’s the fascism angle. In a fucking world where one third of the population hoards all the fucking food and two third starve—in a world where your beloved Company makes billions selling antiobesity technology to people too stupid to understand they can have antiobesity for free by fucking eating less—in that world, where the fat ones steal the food from the thin ones so that the thin ones starve to death. That’s a world where the fascists are the ones who criticize the fatties? Do you see how upside-down that is?”

  I fumbled the tube and sniffed up some powder. The little nanograins, keyed to my metabolism, thrummed into my system. Like, I suppose, fire being used to extinguish an oilwell blaze, the extra stimulation had a calming effect.

  The talcum-fine cloud in that room. I coughed, theatrically, and waved my hand to dissipate the material.

  “So you’re free to go?”

  “I’m not in charge of it,” he said brightly. “Fuck, it’s good to see you again! I’m not in charge—I’m being carried along by it as much as anybody. It’s a tempest, and it’s blowing the whole of humanity like leaves in autumn.”

  “Some of it was Company,” I said. “The ADP to ATP protocols weren’t, legally speaking, yours to give away, you know.”

  “The hair stuff was mine,” he said.

  “I’m only saying.”

  “Sure—but the hair stuff.”

  I thought of the troops, falling through the sky directly above us, their boot-soles coming closer and closer to the tops of our heads.

  “The photovoltaic stuff, and the nanotube lysine fabrication of the conductive channels along the individual strands of hair—that was you. But that’s of no use without the interface to do the ATP.”

  He shrugged. “You think like a lawyer. I mean, you think science like a lawyer. It’s not that at all. You don’t think there’s a moral imperative, when the famine in the southern African republics is killing, how many thousands a week is it?” Then he brightened. “Fuck it’s good to see you though! If I’d let the Company have this they’d have squeezed every last euro of profit out of it, and millions would have died.” But his heart wasn’t really in this old exchange. “Wait til I’ve shown you round,” he said, as excited as a child, and swept his right hand in an arc, lord-of-the-manor-wise.

  Somewhere outside the room a siren was sounding. Muffled by distance, a warbling miaow. Nic ignored it, although several of his guards perked their heads up. One went out to see what the pother was.

  I felt the agitation building in my viscera. Betrayal is not something I have any natural tolerance for, I think. It is an uncomfortable thing. I fidgeted. The sweat kept running into my eyes.

  “All the old rhythms of life change,” Nic said. “Everything is different now.”

  I felt the urge to scream. I clenched my teeth. The urge passed.

  “Of course Power is scared,” Nic was saying. “Of course Power wants to stop what we’re doing. Wants to stop us liberating people from hunger. Keeping people in fear of starvation has always been the main strategy by which Power has kept people subo
rdinate.”

  “I’ll say,” I said, squeakily, “how much I love your sophomore lectures on politics.”

  “Hey!” he said, either in mock outrage, or in real outrage. I was too far gone to be able to tell the difference.

  “The thing is,” I started to say, and then lots of things happened. The clattering cough of rifle fire started up outside. There was the realization that the highpitched noise my brain had been half-hearing for the last minute was a real sound, not just tinitus—and then almost at once the sudden crescendo or distillation of precisely that noise; a great thumping crash from above, and the appearance, in a welter of plaster and smoke, of an enormous metal beak through the middle of the ceiling. The roof sagged, and the whole room bowed out on its walls. Then the beak snapped open and two, three, four troopers dropped to the floor, spinning round and firing their weapons. All I remember of the next twenty seconds is the explosive stutter-cough and the disco flicker of multiple weapon discharges, and then the stench of gunfire’s aftermath.

  A cosmic finger was running smoothly round and round the lip of a cosmic wineglass.

  I blinked, and blinked, and looked about me. The dust in the air looked like steam. That open metal beak, rammed through the ceiling, had the disconcerting appearance of a weird avant-art metal chandelier. There were half a dozen troopers; standing in various orientations and positions but with all their guns held like dalek-eyes. There were a number of sprawling bodies on the floor. I didn’t want to count them or look too closely at them. And, beside me, on the settee, was an astonished-looking Neocles.

  I moved my mouth to say something to him, and then either I said something that my ears did not register, or else I didn’t say anything.

  He didn’t look at me. He jerked forward, and then jerked up. Standing. From a pouch in his pocketstrides he pulled out a small Γ-shaped object which, fumbling a little, he fitted into his right hand. The troopers may have been shouting at him, or they may have been standing there perfectly silently, I couldn’t tell you. Granular white clouds of plaster were sifting down. Nic leveled his pistol, holding his arm straight out. There was a conjuror’s trick with multiple bright red streamers and ribbons being pulled instantly and magically out of his chest, and then he hurtled backwards, over the top of the settee, to land on his spine on the floor. It took a moment for me to understand what had happened.

  He may have been thinking, either in the moment or else as something long pre-planned, about martyrdom. Perhaps the Redeemer is not able to communicate his message in any other way. It’s also possible that, having gone through life protected by the tight-fitting prophylactic of his unassailable ego that he may have genuinely believed that he could single-handedly shoot down half a dozen troopers, and emerge the hero of the day. I honestly do not know.

  IX

  I was forced to leave my home and live in a series of hideouts. Of course a Judas is as valuable and holy figure as any other in the sacred drama. But religious people (Kate kneeling beside the bed at nighttime, praying to meekling Jesus gent and mild) can be faulted, I think, for failing imaginatively to enter into the mind-set of their Judases. Nobody loved Nic as deeply as I. Or knew him so well. But he was rich, and not one motion of his liberal conscience or his egotistical desire to do good in the world changed that fact, or changed his inability to enter, actually, into the life of the poor. The poor don’t want the rich to save them. Even the rioters in the Indian Federation, even the starving Australians, even they—if only they knew it—don’t want to be carried by a godlike rich man into a new realm. What they want is much simpler. They want not to be poor. It’s simultaneously very straightforward and very complicated. Nic’s hair was, in fact, only a way of making manifest the essence of class relations. In his utopia the poor would actually become—would literally become—the vegetation of the earth. The rich would reinforce their position as the zoology to the poor’s botany. Nothing could be more damaging, because it would bed-in the belief that it is natural and inevitable that the rich graze upon the poor, and that the poor are there to be grazed upon. Without even realizing it Nic was laboring to make the disenfranchised a global irrelevance; to make them grass for the rich to graze upon. I loved him, but he was doing evil. I had no choice.

  X

  Last night, as we lay in bed together in my new, Company-sourced secure flat in I-can’t-say-where (though I’m the one paying the rent) Kate said to me: “I am cut in half like the moon; but like the moon I grow whole again.” I was astonished by this. This really isn’t the sort of thing she says. “What was that, sweet?” I asked her. “What did you say, my love?” But she was asleep, her red lips were pursed, and her breath slipping out and slipping in.

  The Things

  PETER WATTS

  Self-described as “a reformed marine biologist,” Peter Watts has quickly established himself as one of the most respected hard science writers of the twenty-first century. His short work has appeared in The New Space Opera 2, Tor.com, Tesseracts, The Solaris Book of Science Fiction, Upgraded, On Spec, Divine Realms, Prairie Fire, and elsewhere. He is the author of the well-received Rifters sequence, including the novels Starfish, Maelstrom, Behemoth: B-Max, and Behemoth: Seppuku. His other novels include Blindsight, Echopraxia, The Colonel, and Firefall. His most recent novel is The Freeze-Frame Revolution. His short work has been collected in Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes, and his novelette The Island won the Hugo Award in 2010. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

  John W. Campbell’s classic novella Who Goes There? relates the story of a group of humans in an isolated winter encampment in Antarctica who must struggle for survival against a strange creature from the stars. The story has twice been filmed, as The Thing from Another World and The Thing, but if you want to know what the story looks like from the perspective of the alien “monster” itself, you must read the suspenseful story that follows.

  I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

  I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

  I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

  The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

  I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

  The world has found me out. It has discovered my burrow beneath the tool shed, the half-finished lifeboat cannibalized from the viscera of dead helicopters. The world is busy destroying my means of escape. Then it will come back for me.

  There is only one option left. I disintegrate. Being Blair, I go to share the plan with Copper and to feed on the rotting biomass once called Clarke; so many changes in so short a time have dangerously depleted my reserves. Being Childs, I have already consumed what was left of Fuchs and am replenished for the next phase. I sling the flamethrower onto my back and head outside, into the long Antarctic night.

  I will go into the storm, and never come back.

  * * *

  I WAS SO much more, before the crash. I was an explorer, an ambassador, a missionary. I spread across the cosmos, met countless worlds, took communion: the fit reshaped the unfit and the whole universe bootstrapped upwards in joyful, infinitesimal increments. I was a soldier, at war with entropy itself. I was the very hand by which Creation perfects itself.

  So much wisdom I had. So much experience. Now I cannot remember all the things I knew. I can only remember that I once knew them.

  I remember the crash, though. It killed most of this offshoot outright, but a little crawled from the wreckage: a few trillion cells, a soul too weak to keep them in check. Mutinous biomass sloughed off despite my mo
st desperate attempts to hold myself together: panic-stricken little clots of meat, instinctively growing whatever limbs they could remember and fleeing across the burning ice. By the time I’d regained control of what was left the fires had died and the cold was closing back in. I barely managed to grow enough antifreeze to keep my cells from bursting before the ice took me.

  I remember my reawakening, too: dull stirrings of sensation in real time, the first embers of cognition, the slow blooming warmth of awareness as my cells thawed, as body and soul embraced after their long sleep. I remember the biped offshoots that surrounded me, the strange chittering sounds they made, the odd uniformity of their body plans. How ill-adapted they looked! How inefficient their morphology! Even disabled, I could see so many things to fix. So I reached out. I took communion. I tasted the flesh of the world—

  —and the world attacked me. It attacked me.

  I left that place in ruins. It was on the other side of the mountains—the Norwegian camp, it is called here—and I could never have crossed that distance in a biped skin. Fortunately there was another shape to choose from, smaller than the biped but better adapted to the local climate. I hid within it while the rest of me fought off the attack. I fled into the night on four legs, and let the rising flames cover my escape.

  I did not stop running until I arrived here. I walked among these new offshoots wearing the skin of a quadruped; and because they had not seen me take any other shape, they did not attack.

  And when I assimilated them in turn—when my biomass changed and flowed into shapes unfamiliar to local eyes—I took that communion in solitude, having learned that the world does not like what it doesn’t know.

  * * *

  I AM ALONE in the storm. I am a bottom-dweller on the floor of some murky alien sea. The snow blows past in horizontal streaks; caught against gullies or outcroppings, it spins into blinding little whirlwinds. But I am not nearly far enough, not yet. Looking back I still see the camp crouching brightly in the gloom, a squat angular jumble of light and shadow, a bubble of warmth in the howling abyss.