The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  How simple/stupid did they think he was?

  “No bottles,” he told them emphatically, and just once. The entities had perfect recall, after all. Let them remember the words and his blatant scorn. “I’m going to live a few years, and then I’ll die one way or another,” he said. “But you’re not fooling me into hope. Because there isn’t any hope. And that’s the same for all of you. Machines don’t run forever, no matter how much you try to fool yourselves.”

  The voyage proved even more grueling than expected. Regardless of painkillers and cushions, the hard acceleration made Amund ache, and each new day was desperate to repeat every day that came before. The ship’s mess could generate any food, but he usually ate the same reliable meals. He knew where he would lie down and what he would think about when he let his mind wander, and for those early months, Amund thought about ex-lovers and the cavern that had seemed so tiny until he came to live here.

  Those left-behind people were obviously thinking about him. Good wishes kept arriving, and there were some elaborate, intimate messages buried among the clichés. Responding to everybody was tedious, and he gave up that chore soon enough. But a few people received his thanks along with observations about a dreary life inside a machine-infested closet, and sure enough, that honesty helped diminish the inflow until a week might pass without noise from home.

  One of the later messages was memorable. A girl who Amund had never met sent him a long video of herself. She resembled Mere, undersized and big-eyed. But she was also a child through and through, and a youngster’s enthusiasm was on display. Grinning, she told him that she had studied the river’s video very closely, the same video shown to everybody in the Highland. She realized that Amund saw only a few moments before he ran downstairs to volunteer. “Everybody knows your story,” she said. But the rest of the video was far, far more impressive. “Don’t you think so?” Of course the living rivers weren’t rivers. They were more like trees, and the bulk of every tree was hidden underground. The dense, supersalted gel didn’t stop at the ocean. The aliens reached across the continental shelves after rising from the depths, and they glowed as they moved, feeding on volcanic seams and microbes and sunlight brought from above. That was the spectacle worth seeing. Not the ordinary business on land, but on the ocean floor. That was what she would see, if she could. And she only hoped that Amund had time and the opportunity to experience that very wonderful paradise for himself.

  Amund had never bothered to watch the full video. Inspired by the enthusiasm, he took the challenge and felt impressed, but not as awed as his new friend sounded. No, she was what impressed him. “You seem like such a bright, excited person,” he told her in his reply. “My advice? Get the fuck out of that cavern. Go out and live anywhere else that will take you.”

  That message went home, and after that, nobody called to him.

  Which was perhaps what Amund wanted all along.

  It was impossible to guess what his companions would talk about on any day, or even inside a single minute. Topics varied widely, crazily, often shifting in mid-sentence. But Amund knew that he wouldn’t understand much, and the subjects’ importance would evade him. Yet that ridiculous noise became a reliable joy in a small, painful life. Two gods shooting the shit, and sometimes, now and again, offering up words that fascinated the human in their midst.

  Those gods weren’t having sex. But Rococo’s lust was aimed at Mere’s blatant indifference, and his frustration was another reliable joy.

  Maybe all that would change when they reached the rivers. An entire world as their playground and out of sight of the doomed man, the gods would take their pleasures by any and all means. Imagining sex with Mere. That was another trusted pleasure. She was a wise god who didn’t want Rococo, and of course she didn’t have desires for a mortal beast like Amund. Mere had lived happily among aliens. She even married a few of them. This female deity seemed capable of any perversion, which meant that she was saving herself for the rivers. Her next husband was a ten thousand kilometer ribbon, and how could anything as small and ordinary as Rococo feel reason to be optimistic? But freed from hope, Amund could spin endless fantasies about the god-machine.

  Not a terrible fate, all in all.

  Then the rivers started to murder each other. An entire world was burning, and that’s when Amund honestly contemplated the cold bottle. Suspend his life, and with him unaware, they would land beside the first streakship. That vessel was safe enough, protected by hyperfiber and aggressive banks of defensive lasers—two features missing from their minimal ship. Frozen, Amund would endure one kind of dreamless nonexistence, and if he woke again, they would be approaching the Great Ship, most of his life left to be lived.

  Except he never mentioned the bottle.

  And the others didn’t offer.

  The following times were interesting and awful. Morning began with breakfast and premonitions of disaster. A comet shard was about to strike their thin, low-mass hull. Amund knew it, and later, he was equally sure that a nuclear weapon would meet them. The sense of doom gave each moment its spark, and every minute crossed felt like victory. And the human was surprisingly fond of this new life, fear churning emotions while his thoughts kept bending in fresh, peculiar ways. He didn’t waste neurons dwelling on bottles or his left-behind life. It was an endless, secret joy to stretch out on the padded mattress, watching gods struggle with events beyond their control, maybe beyond their understanding.

  One hundred million kilometers out, Mere looked at him and then looked away, telling the wall, “Bottle time.”

  Bombs and the need to make hard maneuvers left no choice. Amund had to be frozen and wrapped in protective garb, then loaded with the rest of the essentials inside the crash vault. He was one kind of dead when the ship suffered a string of attacks, and then the vault was on the ground and the hyperfiber door was blown clear. The defrosting took hours, his last breath still inside the soft pink lungs. Alien air was allowed past preset filters, and a wardrobe of smart clothing swaddled him, helping lift his temperature to happy human norms.

  A fiercely hot hand touched his forehead. A mother’s gesture, and Amund recoiled.

  Mere said his name.

  “Who?” he asked.

  The vast eyes blinked, startled.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  But he couldn’t fool the tiny god. She laughed, warming him with her gentle pleasure. Then with a minimum of sentences and a few hopeful nods of her head, she explained what had to be done if they were going to survive.

  “Wait,” Amund interrupted.

  She stopped talking.

  “The old deal is shit, isn’t it?”

  “And there’s no good reason to slaughter you,” she teased.

  Rococo was standing close but not standing with them. The man obviously wanted to add his genius to the conversation, but he managed to keep his machine tongue quiet.

  “If we go home,” Amund said to Mere.

  “If,” she agreed.

  “I want to ride inside the bottle.”

  “With the rest of your days ahead,” Rococo interjected.

  The man was unlikable. But Amund nodded as if those were the wisest words ever spoken, and then he did what he had never done before. One of his cold hands reached out, touching smooth hot skin and the very sharp cheekbones of a face that couldn’t be more amazing.

  “That’s not why,” he told Mere.

  “No?” she asked.

  “No,” he confessed. “I just want the chance to stop thinking about you.”

  9.

  “I’m looking forward to sleeping with you.”

  Those words were buried inside the noise about protecting them. But having said them, Amund didn’t repeat himself, not even in the most tangential, cursory fashion. That first night, after their kit provided dinner, the three of them sat on the open deck. Nobody spoke. The only noise was the groaning and creaking of the giant beneath them. Amund never mentioned sleeping arrangements. Mere watche
d the tired face and the man’s bent posture, noticing how the left hand rubbed the right elbow. That joint was giving him trouble. Arthritis, perhaps. The backpack was heavy, yet he had carried it down to the river. The kit could synthesize any substance, and that’s why she opened the pack and verbally walked it through a menu of archaic compounds. Pink tabs of salicylic acid and sugar were delivered, and Mere studied the mortal once again. A creature of water and passion, and so far removed from simple.

  The medicine remained inside her tiny hand.

  Standing, Mere said nothing. From the corner of an eye, she saw Rococo watching her slow walk. Maybe Amund watched her, too. She didn’t look back at the man. She was done trying to decipher him.

  The sun was nearly set when she entered the cabin that Amund had already chosen. His boots were waiting inside the door, self-cleaned and new heels generated for the next hike. The room was dark and felt small and smelled a little like blood agar. She left the door open. A woven bed was waiting in the back corner, the mattress pulpy and soft and just a little damp, and it would be awful sleeping. Mere wondered if she could ask their protector to speak to the river, give the creature a little helpful instruction about making people comfortable.

  Entering the cabin, Amund was greeted by soft laughter.

  To the blackness, he said, “Hello.”

  “Here,” she answered.

  He closed the door, and that was all he did for the time being. Standing opposite her, Amund was breathing loudly enough to be heard over the creaking river. The lack of windows did nothing to isolate them. Every motion beneath them was felt, the twitches and shivers and the rising sensation as they were carried aloft, accelerating downstream. Mere shivered out of fatigue and fear, and then she laughed once again, louder this time.

  “What’s funny?” Amund asked.

  He still stood beside the closed door. Two thin lines of starlight managed to slip past. Mere’s eyes had totally adapted, but mortals had lousy night vision. And Amund wasn’t young anymore.

  “You and the river,” she said. “The two of you were having a conversation on the hillside.”

  Her companion shifted his weight from one leg to the other.

  “While we were being useless, you and it were achieving important diplomatic overtures.”

  “She.”

  “Okay. She.”

  Amund took one blind step forward.

  “I have something for you,” Mere said.

  The river shuddered and creaked, but the larger sound was a deep breath being taken and then held.

  “Medicine,” she said. “For your elbow.”

  “Is that what you did in the kit?”

  “Yes.”

  Amund didn’t speak.

  “What did you think I was doing?”

  “Making poison,” he said. “Or some kind of madness pill. You know. So you can enslave my will and all.”

  Interesting, paranoid ideas.

  “I wish I’d thought of that,” she said.

  Amund broke out laughing, but not for long and not hard. Then he crossed the room until his feet blindly hit hers.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “For what part of this?”

  The man sat beside Mere, but a good deal of the bed was between them. “She and I talked, sure. She told me what she thinks about you. And Rococo. She was ready to kill both of you, just as soon as she thought of the best way.”

  “But you stopped her.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “You saved us.”

  He sighed. “Apparently so.”

  “Hold out your hand,” Mere said.

  Amund reached for the voice, and she grabbed his hand with her empty hand. His skin was cool and damp, rather like the bed was cool and damp. But she suspected that Amund would make a far more comfortable mattress.

  Mere held three of his fingers inside her five.

  He pulled back until he felt pressure, and then he relaxed.

  “If I say, ‘No,’ to sex,” she said.

  He said, “Well.”

  He said nothing.

  “Open your mouth,” she said.

  His face was in profile, and in that very poor light Mere saw the mouth obey her command, his entire body alert and blind and very hopeful.

  She dropped two pills onto the tongue.

  “Sweet,” he said.

  “You’re right, it’s poison,” she said. “And it takes only forty years to work.”

  Then Amund was laughing and not quietly. He laughed until he sobbed, and Mere wasn’t certain when she began to chuckle at some of this or all of this.

  Sitting like that, they stayed awake half the night, gradually moving closer on the unappealing mattress, and Mere kept hold of those three fingers while both of them pulled reasons to laugh out of nothing at all.

  10.

  Amund was making love to one god when a second god called to him. He didn’t dress or bother to let his erection die. A happy fleck of naked water, he hurried off to speak with the river. This would be a pivotal conversation. He had that sense from the beginning, and the human felt a little omniscient when his premonition came true. Among her many promises, the river claimed that they would reach the coast tomorrow, around midday, and the waiting streakship wasn’t far beyond the horizon. Great news was heaped on top of great news. Amund practiced what he would say first and next and last. Returning to the nonboat, the human was wishing that smiles could be infinite. How enormous would his face and mouth have to be to capture this transcendent joy? Then he noticed the two gods standing behind the railing. They watched him, and Amund let his finite face drop for a moment, watching his bare feet crossing the blue flesh. Then he looked up again. Mere and Rococo were standing close to one another, perhaps a little closer than before. Amund was still in an exceptionally good mood, and Mere was smiling too. But at Rococo, and not just politely smiling.

  Humans, genuine mortal humans, were less than brilliant. But even ordinary middle-aged men had the innate genius to find the meaning in faces.

  Amund looked at those faces. Tenderness and acceptance and a new chain of possibilities were on display, and he saw the future. Those two machines were going to sleep together. Suddenly the highest, frothiest portions of Amund’s joy were being shaved away. That was what the revelation did to him. Amund was jubilant and then he wasn’t. He was the pinnacle of history for untold billions, and then without losing that gift, he became another lover for a woman who might have a thousand husbands before her life and soul were obliterated on some alien world.

  Amund didn’t know what to do next. He felt as if he was watching himself finish the walk, one hand grabbing the railing and his body climbing onboard with as much grace as possible, each piece of him acting of its own accord. He was responsible for nothing, including what he said to the others. “A pleasant day,” his voice allowed. But not Amund. Amund was a ghost trapped behind the flesh and behind the words, as surprised as anyone when he entered the toilet room and closed the door, one hand and then the other slowly rubbing the face that still couldn’t put an end to the endless smile.

  Three minutes, and he stepped back into the sun.

  Rococo was standing at the bow. The nonboat was moving again, sliding down a long slope fast enough that the machine had to tilt a little bit forward, leaning against the wind. But Mere had disappeared. Amund looked in her cabin first, but she wasn’t there. What if she was waiting inside Rococo’s cabin? That’s what Amund saw, in his mind. She was lying on Rococo’s bed, waiting for a god, which was exactly what she deserved. Amund waited for jealousy to take hold. He was hoping for ugly emotions, something to give the next moments even more importance. But even when he was convinced that Mere had abandoned him, he couldn’t find any useful anger or need for vengeance.

  To himself, he muttered, “What makes a god?”

  Power, vast and deadly but also capable of great accomplishments.

  Amund pushed open the door of his cabin. Mere had returned to b
ed, and she was naked again. What had been her clothes had formed blankets across the damp, fleshy mattress. She smiled at Amund and sat up a little more, starting to speak and then thinking better of it. What did she notice in his face? Probably more than he would ever tease out of her face.

  “Four gods,” he said.

  She blinked. “What’s that?”

  “Sorry. Nothing.” Amund offered the apology. But he meant it. Four gods were present, but it just so happened that one of the deities had only a few hours remaining, and then he would be nothing but a mortal man again.

  The nonboat twisted slightly, and sunlight fell through the open and over the naked woman. So scrawny, so odd. She was a stick with tiny breasts and the wrong eyes, and Amund wondered why he had ever cared so much about sex with that creature. Then in the next instant, he wanted to throw himself on top of her and take her until he was exhausted. Which was what he should do, he told himself. Because this could well be the last time for this sort of fun.

  “Come outside,” he heard himself saying.

  Mere tilted her head, those eyes gaining a slightly different perspective.

  Then he added, “I have news,” and still naked, he walked to the bow, claiming a patch of the deck where he was close to Rococo.

  How much did he hate this man?

  Not nearly enough, he decided.

  But that didn’t mean there weren’t good reasons for what was going to happen. That’s why Amund didn’t wait for Mere to dress and join them. He looked at a face that never changed, and feeling a smile building, he told the face and the machine behind it, “There’s a new agreement. In place of that old, lost treaty of yours. That’s what I’ve been doing these last days.”

  The surprise seemed genuine, suspicions tagging along behind.

  “A new agreement,” the diplomat repeated.