The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  I told my father to pack up and come with me.

  He ran his fingers through the fur on Blue’s square head. “I used to have a son, but he left.” He sounded certain. “He became the next step for us. For humans.”

  He was looking right at me, even looking in my eyes, and there was truly no recognition there. His look made me cold to the spine, cold to the ends of my fingers, even with the sun driving sweat down my back.

  I kissed his forehead. I found Mona and told her I’d be back in a few weeks and she should have him packed up.

  Her eyes were beautiful and terrible with reproach as she declared, “He doesn’t want to leave.”

  “I can help him.”

  “Can you make him young, like you?”

  Her hair had gone gray at the edges, lost the magnificent black that had glistened in the sun like her goth lipstick all those years ago. God, how could I have been so selfish? I could have given her some of what I had.

  But I liked her better touched by pain and age and staying part of my past. Like the act of saving them didn’t.

  I hadn’t known that until that very moment, when I suddenly hated myself for the wrinkles around her eyes and the way her shoulders bent in a little bit even though she was only fifty-seven like me. “I’ll bring you some, too. I can get some of the best nano-meds available.” Hell, I’d designed some of them, but Mona wouldn’t understand that. “I can get creams that will erase the wrinkles from your hands.”

  She sighed. “Why don’t you just leave us?”

  Because then I would have no single happy place. “Because I need my father. I need to know how he’s doing.”

  “I can tell you from here.”

  My throat felt thick. “I’ll be back in a week.” I turned away before she could see the inexplicable tears in my eyes. By then I flew back and forth, and it was a relief to focus down on the gauges in my head, flying manual until I got close enough to Seattle airspace that the feds grabbed the steering from me and there was nothing to do but look down at the forest and the green resort playgrounds of Cle Elum below me and to try not to think too hard about my dad or about Mona Alvarez and her sons.

  I had moved into a condo on Alki Beach, and I had a view all the way to Canada. For two days after I returned, the J-pod whales cavorted offshore, great elongated yin and yang symbols rising and falling through the waters of Puget Sound.

  The night before I went back for Mona and my father, I watched the boardwalk below me. People walked dogs and Rollerbladed and bicycled and a few of the chemical-sick walked inside of big rolling bubbles like the hamster I’d had when I was a kid. Even nano-medicine and the clever delivery of genetically matched and married designer solutions couldn’t save everyone.

  I wish I could say that I felt sorry for the people in the bubbles, and I suppose in some distant way I did. But nothing bad had ever happened to me. I didn’t get sick. I’d never married or divorced. I had nice dates sometimes, and excellent season tickets for Seattle Arts and Lectures.

  I flew Mona back with my father. We tried to take Blue, but the dog balked at getting in the car, and raced away, lost in the apple trees in no time. Mona looked sick and said, “We should wait.”

  I glanced at my father’s peaceful face. He had never cried when his dogs died or left, and now he had a small smile, and I had the fleeting thought that maybe he was proud of Blue for choosing the farm and the sheep and the brown-skinned boys. “Will your sons care for the dog?”

  “Their children love him.”

  So we arrived back in West Seattle, me and Mona and my father.

  I got busy crafting medicine to fix my father. These things didn’t take long – time moved fast in the vast cloud of data I had security rights for. I crunched my father’s DNA and RNA and proteins and the specifics of his blood in no time, and told the computers what to do while I set all of us out a quiet dinner on the biggest of the decks. Mona commented on the salty scent of Puget Sound and watched the fast little ferries zip back and forth in the water and refused to meet my eyes.

  Dad simply stared at the water.

  “He needs a dog,” she said.

  “I know.” I queried from right there, sending a bot out to look. It reported fairly fast. “I’ll be right back. Can you watch him?”

  She looked startled.

  An hour later I picked Nanny up at Sea-Tac, a middle-aged golden retriever, service-trained, a dog with no job since most every disease except the worst allergies to modernity could be fixed.

  Mona looked awed almost to fear when I showed up with the dog, but she smiled and uncovered the dinner I’d left waiting.

  Nanny and Dad were immediately enchanted with each other, her love for him the same as every other dog’s in his life, cemented the minute she smelled him. I didn’t understand, but if it had been any other way, I would have believed him lost.

  The drugs I designed for him didn’t work. It happens that way sometimes. Not often. But some minds can’t accept the changes we can make. In the very old, it can kill them. Dad was too strong to die, although Mona looked at me one day, after they had been with me long enough that the wrinkles around her eyes had lost depth but not so long that they had left her face entirely. “You changed him. He’s worse.”

  I might have. How would I know?

  But I do know I lost my anchor in the world. Nothing in my life had been my singularity. I hadn’t crossed into a new humanity like he prophesied over and over. I hadn’t left him behind.

  Instead, he left me behind. He recognized Nanny every day, and she him. But he never again called me Paul, or told me how I would step beyond him.

  THE STARSHIP MECHANIC

  Jay Lake and Ken Scholes

  Highly prolific writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last few years, including Asimov’s, Interzone, Jim Baen’s Universe, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction that he already has released four collections, even though his career is only a few years old: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, and Dogs in the Moonlight. His novels include Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, and Escapement, He’s the coeditor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, now in six volumes, and has also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories with David Moles, TEL: Stories, and, most recently, Other Earths with Nick Gevers, and Spicy Slipstream Stories with Nick Mamatas. The most recent examples of his own work are three new novels, Green, The Madness of Flowers, and Pinion; three chapbook novellas, “Death of a Starship,” “The Baby Killers,” and “The Specific Gravity of Grief”; and a new collection, The Sky That Wraps. Coming up is another new novel, Sunspin. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Ken Scholes is another prolific writer whose short works have appeared in a diverse mix of markets such as Subterranean, Tor.com, Talebones, Clarkesworld, Weird Tales, and Realms of Fantasy. His books include the novels Lamentation and Canticle of the Psalms of Isaak sequence, Last Flight of the Goddess, A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon, and the collection Long Walks, Last Flights: And Other Strange Journeys. His most recent books are Antiphon, a novel in the Isaak series, and a new collection, Diving Mimes, Weeping Czars and Other Unusual Suspects. Upcoming are two more Isaak novels, Requiem and Hymn.

  Here they join forces for a wry story that shows us that a workman is only as good as his tools – and that some of those tools are specialized for some very weird tasks, indeed.

  THE FLOOR OF Borderlands Books had been polished to mirror brightness. A nice trick with old knotty pine, but Penauch would have been a weapons-grade obsessive-compulsive if he’d been human. I’d thought about setting him to detailing my car, but he’s just as likely to polish it down to aluminum and steel after deciding the paint was an impurity.

  When he discovered that the human race r
ecorded our ideas in books, he’d been impossible to keep away from the store. Penauch didn’t actually read them, not as such, and he was most reluctant to touch the volumes. He seemed to view books as vehicles, launch capsules to propel ideas from the dreaming mind of the human race into our collective forebrain.

  Despite the fact that Penauch was singular, unitary, a solitary alien in the human world, he apparently didn’t conceive of us as anything but a collective entity. The xenoanthropologists at Berkeley were carving Ph.D.s out of that particular clay as fast as their grad students could transcribe Penauch’s conversations with me.

  He’d arrived the same as David Bowie in that old movie. No, not Brother from Another Planet; The Man Who Fell to Earth. Tumbled out of the autumn sky over the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco like a maple seed, spinning with his arms stretched wide and his mouth open in a teakettle shriek audible from the Ghost Fleet in Suisun Bay all the way down to the grubby streets of San Jose.

  The subject’s fallsacs when fully deployed serve as a tympanum, producing a rhythmic vibration at a frequency perceived by the human ear as a high-pitched shriek. Xenophysiological modeling has thus far failed to generate testable hypotheses concerning the volume of the sound produced. Some observers have speculated that the subject deployed technological assistance during atmospheric entry, though no evidence of this was found at the landing site, and subject has never indicated this was the case.

  – Jude A. Feldman quoting Jen West Scholes; A Reader’s Guide to

  Earth’s Only Living Spaceman; Borderlands Books, 2014

  It was easier, keeping Penauch in the bookstore. The owners didn’t mind. They’d had hairless cats around the place for years – a breed called sphinxes. The odd animals served as a neighborhood tourist attraction and business draw. A seven-foot alien with a face like a plate of spaghetti and a cluster of writhing arms wasn’t all that different. Not in a science fiction bookstore, at least.

  Thing is, when Penauch was out in the world, he had a tendency to fix things.

  This fixing often turned out to be not so good.

  No technology was involved. Penauch’s body was demonstrably able to modify the chitinous excrescences of his appendages at will. If he needed a cutting edge, he ate a bit of whatever steel was handy and swiftly metabolized it. If he needed electrical conductors, he sought out copper plumbing. If he needed logic probes, he consumed sand or diamonds or glass.

  It was all the same to Penauch.

  As best any of us could figure out, Penauch was a sort of tool. A Swiss Army knife that some spacefaring race had dropped or thrown away, abandoned until he came to rest on Earth’s alien shore.

  And Penauch only spoke to me.

  The question of Penauch’s mental competence has bearing in both law and ethics. Pratt and Shaw (2013) have effectively argued that the alien fails the Turing test, both at a gross observational level and within the context of finer measurements of conversational intent and cooperation. Cashier (2014) claims an indirectly derived Stanford-Binet score in the 99th percentile, but seemingly contradicts herself by asserting that Penauch’s sentience is at best an open question. Is he (or it) a machine, a person, or something else entirely?

  – S.G. Browne, “A Literature Review of the Question of Alien Mentation”; Journal of Exogenic Studies, Volume II, Number 4, August, 2015

  The first time he fixed something was right after he’d landed. Penauch impacted with that piercing shriek at 2:53 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, July 16, 2011, at the intersection of Cole and Parnassus. Every window within six blocks shattered. Almost a hundred pedestrians and shoppers in the immediate area were treated for lacerations from broken glass, over two dozen more for damage to hearing and sinuses.

  I got to him first, stumbling out of Cole Hardware with a headache like a cartoon anvil had been dropped on me. Inside, we figured a bomb had gone off. The rising noise and the vibrating windows. All the vases in the homeware section had exploded. Luckily I’d been with the fasteners. The nails sang, but they didn’t leap off the shelves and try to make hamburger of me.

  Outside, there was this guy lying in a crater in the middle of the intersection, like Wile E. Coyote after he’d run out of Acme patented jet fuel. I hurried over, touched his shoulder, and realized what a goddamned mess he was. Then half a dozen eyes opened, and something like a giant rigatoni farted before saying, “Penauch.”

  Weird thing was, I could hear the spelling.

  Though I didn’t know it in that moment, my old life was over, my new one begun.

  Penauch then looked at my shattered wristwatch, grabbed a handful of BMW windshield glass, sucked it down, and moments later fixed my timepiece.

  For some value of “fixed.”

  It still tells time, somewhere with a base seventeen counting system and twenty-eight point one five seven hour day. It shows me the phases of Phobos and Deimos, evidence that he’d been on (or near) Mars. Took a while to figure that one out. And the thing warbles whenever someone gets near me carrying more than about eight ounces of petroleum products. Including grocery bags, for example, and most plastics.

  I could probably get millions for it on eBay. Penauch’s first artifact, and one of less than a dozen in private hands.

  The government owns him now, inasmuch as anyone owns Penauch. They can’t keep him anywhere. He “fixes” his way out of any place he gets locked into. He comes back to San Francisco, finds me, and we go to the bookstore. Where Penauch polishes the floors and chases the hairless cats and draws pilgrims from all over the world to pray in Valencia Street. The city gave up on traffic control a long time ago. It’s a pedestrian mall now when he’s around.

  The problem has always been, none of us have any idea what Penauch is. What he does. What he’s for. I’m the only one he talks to, and most of what he says is Alice in Wonderland dialog, except when it isn’t. Two new semiconductor companies have been started through analysis of his babble, and an entire novel chemical feedstock process for converting biomass into plastics.

  Then one day, down on the mirrored floor of Borderlands Books, Penauch looked at me and said quite clearly, “They’re coming back.”

  I was afraid we were about to get our answers.

  It was raining men in the Castro, literally, and every single one of them was named Todd. Every single one of them wore Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts and Birkenstocks. Every single one of them landed on their backs, flopped like trout for a full minute and leaped to their feet shouting one word: “Penauch!”

  – San Francisco Chronicle, November 11th, 2015; Gail Carriger reporting

  “I must leave,” Penauch said, his voice heavy as he stroked a hairless cat on the freshly polished floor of the bookstore.

  On a small TV in the back office of the store, an excited reporter in Milk Plaza spoke rapidly about the strange visitors who’d fallen from the sky. Hundreds of men named Todd, now scattered out into the city with one word on their tongues. As it played in the background, I watched Penauch and could feel the sadness coming off of him in waves. “Where will you go?”

  Penauch stood. “I don’t know. Anywhere but here. Will you help me?”

  The bell on the door jingled and a man entered the store. “Penauch,” he said.

  I looked up at the visitor. His Hawaiian shirt was an orange that hurt my eyes, decorated in something that looked like cascading pineapples. He smiled and scowled at the same time.

  Penauch moved quickly and suddenly the room smelled of ozone and cabbage.

  The man, named Todd I assumed, was gone.

  I looked at my alien, took in the slow wriggle of his pale and determined face. “What did you do?”

  Penauch’s clustered silver eyes leaked mercury tears. “I . . . un-fixed him.”

  We ran out the back. We climbed into my car over on Guerrero. We drove north and away.

  Xenolinguists have expended considerable effort on the so-called “Todd Phenomenon.” Everyone on 11/11/15 knew the visitors fro
m outer space were named Todd, yet no one could say how or why. This is the best documented case of what can be argued as telepathy in the modern scientific record, yet it is equally worthless by virtue of being impossible to either replicate or falsify.

  – Christopher Barzak, blog entry, January 14th, 2016

  Turning east and then north, we stayed ahead of them for most of a week. We made it as far as Edmonton before the man-rain caught up to us.

  While Penauch slept, I grabbed snacks of news from the radio. These so-called Todds spread out in their search, my friend’s name the only word upon their lips. They made no effort to resist the authorities. Three were shot by members of the Washington State Patrol. Two were killed by Navy SEALS in the small town of St. Maries, Idaho. They stole cars. They drove fast. They followed after us.

  And then they found us in Edmonton.

  We were at an A&W drive-through window when the first Todd caught up to the car. He t-boned us into the side of the restaurant with his Mercedes, pushing Penuach against me. The Todd was careful not to get within reach.

  “Penauch,” he shouted from outside the window. My friend whimpered. Our car groaned and ground as his hands moved over the dashboard, trying to fix it.

  Two other cars hemmed us in, behind and before. Todds in Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts stepped out, unfazed by the cold. One climbed onto the hood of my Corvair. “Your services are still required.”

  Penauch whimpered again. I noticed that the Todd’s breath did not show in the sub-zero air.

  The air shimmered as a bending light enfolded us.

  “Af-afterwards, it, uh, it did’t m-matter so much. I m-mean, uh, you know? He smiled at me. Well, n-not an, uh, a smile. Not with that face. Like, a virtual smile? Th-then he was g-gone. Blown out like a candle. You know? Flame on, flame off.