The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  Then it was gone. Not because the sea-dragon had failed in its bid to achieve coherence, but because the creature had withdrawn into the depths. The yellow-green glow had by now all but dissipated, like some vivid chemical slick breaking up into its constituent elements. The sea, still being stirred around by the tail-end of the storm, appeared normal enough. Moments passed, then what must have been a minute or more. He had not drawn a breath since first seeing the sea-glow, but he started breathing again, daring to hope that the life-form had swum away to some other objective or had perhaps lost coherence in the depths.

  He felt it slam into the rig.

  The entire structure lurched with the impact; he doubted the impact would have been any less violent if a submarine had just collided with it. He remained on his feet, while all around pieces of unsecured metal broke away, dropping to decks or the sea. From somewhere out of sight came a tortured groan, heralding some awful structural failure. A sequence of booming crashes followed, as if boulders were being dropped into the waves. Then the sea-dragon rammed the rig again, and this time the jolt was sufficient to unfoot him. To his right, one of the cranes began to sway in an alarming fashion, the scaffolding of its tower buckling.

  The sea-dragon was holding coherence. From the ferocity of its attacks, Gaunt thought it quite possible that it could take down the whole rig, given time.

  He realised, with a sharp and surprising clarity, that he did not want to die. More than that: he realised that life in this world, with all its hardships and disappointments, was going to be infinitely preferable to death beyond it. He wanted to survive.

  As the sea-dragon came in again, he started down the ladders and stairwells, grateful for having a full set of fingers and hands, terrified on one level and almost drunkenly, deliriously glad on the other. He had not done the thing he had been planning, and now he might die anyway, but there was a chance and if he survived this he would have nothing in the world to be ashamed of.

  He had reached the operations deck, the room where he had planned to administer first-aid and issue his distress call, when the sea-dragon began the second phase of its assault. He could see it plainly, visible through the rig’s open middle as it hauled its way out of the sea, using one of the legs to assist its progress. There was nothing translucent or tentative about it now. And it was indeed a dragon, or rather a chimera of dragon and snake and squid and every scaled, barbed, tentacled, clawed horror ever committed to a bestiary. It was a lustrous slate-green in colour and the waters ran off it in thunderous curtains. Its head, or what he chose to think of as its head, had reached the level of the operations deck. And still the sea-dragon produced more of itself, uncoiling out of the dark waters like some conjuror’s trick. Tentacles whipped out and found purchase, and it snapped and wrenched away parts of the rig’s superstructure as if they were made of biscuit or brittle toffee. It was making a noise while it attacked, an awful, slowly rising and falling foghorn proclamation. It’s a weapon, Gaunt reminded himself. It had been engineered to be terrible.

  The sea-dragon was pythoning its lower anatomy around one of the support legs, crushing and grinding. Scabs of concrete came away, hitting the sea like chunks of melting glacier. The floor under his feet surged and when it stopped surging the angle was all wrong. Gaunt knew then that the rig could not be saved, and that if he wished to live he would have to take his chances in the water. The thought of it was almost enough to make him laugh. Leave the rig, leave the one thing that passed for solid ground, and enter the same seas that now held the dragon?

  Yet it had to be done.

  He issued the distress call, but didn’t wait for a possible response. He gave the rig a few minutes at the most. If they couldn’t find him in the water, it wouldn’t help him to know their plans. Then he looked around for the nearest orange-painted survival cabinet. He had been shown the emergency equipment during his training, never once imagining that he would have cause to use it. The insulated survival clothing, the life-jacket, the egress procedure . . .

  A staircase ran down the interior of one of the legs, emerging just above the water line; it was how they came and went from the rig on the odd occasions when they were using boats rather than helicopters. But even as he remembered how to reach the staircase, he realised that it was inside the same leg that the sea-dragon was wrapped around. That left him with only one other option. There was a ladder that led down to the water, with an extensible lower portion. It wouldn’t get him all the way, but his chances of surviving the drop were a lot better than his chances of surviving the sea-dragon.

  It was worse than he had expected. The fall into the surging waters seemed to last forever, the superstructure of the rig rising slowly above him, the iron-grey sea hovering below until what felt like the very last instant, when it suddenly accelerated, and then he hit the surface with such force that he blacked out. He must have submerged and bobbed to the surface because when he came around he was coughing cold salt-water from his lungs, and it was in his eyes and ears and nostrils as well, colder than water had any right to be, and then a wave was curling over him, and he blacked out again.

  He came around again what must have been minutes later. He was still in the water, cold around the neck but his body snug in the insulation suit. The life-jacket was keeping his head out of the water, except when the waves crashed onto him. A light on his jacket was blinking on and off, impossibly bright and blue.

  To his right, hundreds of metres away, and a little further with each bob of the waters, the rig was going down with the sea-dragon still wrapped around its lower extremities. He heard the foghorn call, saw one of the legs crumble away, and then an immense tidal weariness closed over him.

  He didn’t remember the helicopter finding him. He didn’t remember the thud of its rotors or being hauled out of the water on a winch-line. There was just a long period of unconsciousness, and then the noise and vibration of the cabin, the sun coming in through the windows, the sky clear and blue and the sea unruffled. It took a few moments for it all to click in. Some part of his brain had skipped over the events since his arrival and was still working on the assumption that it had all worked out, that he had slept into a better future, a future where the world was new and clean and death just a fading memory.

  “We got your signal,” Clausen said. “Took us a while to find you, even with the transponder on your jacket.”

  It all came back to him. The rigs, the sleepers, the artilects, the sea-dragons. The absolute certainty that this was the only world he would know, followed by the realisation – or, rather, the memory of having already come to that realisation – that this was still better than dying. He thought back to what he had been planning to do before the sea-dragon came, and wanted to crush the memory and bury it where he buried every other shameful thing he had ever done.

  “What about the rig?”

  “Gone,” Clausen said. “Along with all the sleepers inside it. The dragon broke up shortly afterwards. It’s a bad sign that it held coherence for as long as it did. Means they’re getting better.”

  “Our machines will just have to get better as well, won’t they.”

  He thought she might spit the observation back at him, mock him for its easy triteness, when he knew so little of the war and the toll it had taken. But instead she nodded. “That’s all they can do. All we can hope for. And they will, of course. They always do. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.” She looked down at his blanketed form. “Sorry you agreed to stay awake now?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Even with what happened back there?”

  “At least I got to see a dragon up close.”

  “Yes,” Clausen said. “That you did.”

  He thought that was the end of it, the last thing she had to say to him. He couldn’t say for sure that something had changed in their relationship – it would take time for that to be proved – but he did sense some thawing in her attitude, however temporary it might prove. He had not only chosen to
stay, he had not gone through with the accident. Had she been expecting him to try something like that, after what had happened to Steiner? Could she begin to guess how close he had come to actually doing it?

  But Clausen wasn’t finished.

  “I don’t know if it’s true or not,” she said, speaking to Gaunt for the first time as if he was another human being, another caretaker. “But I heard this theory once. The mapping between the Realm and base-reality, it’s not as simple as you’d think. Time and causality get all tangled up on the interface. Events that happen in one order there don’t necessarily correspond to the same order here. And when they push things through, they don’t always come out in what we consider the present. A chain of events in the Realm could have consequences up or down the timeline, as far as we’re concerned.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  She nodded to the window. “All through history, the things they’ve seen out there. They might just have been overspill from the artilect wars. Weapons that came through at the wrong moment, achieving coherence just long enough to be seen by someone, or bring down a ship. All the sailors’ tales, all the way back. All the sea monsters. They might just have been echoes of the war we’re fighting.” Clausen shrugged, as if the matter were of no consequence.

  “You believe that?”

  “I don’t know if it makes the world seem weirder, or a little more sensible.” She shook her head. “I mean, sea monsters . . . who ever thought they might be real?” Then she stood up and made to return to the front of the helicopter. “Just a theory, that’s all. Now get some sleep.”

  Gaunt did as he was told. It wasn’t hard.

  THE TASTE OF NIGHT

  Pat Cadigan

  You can’t see something until you develop the eyes to see it with, as the unsettling tale that follows demonstrates all too well. . . .

  Pat Cadigan was born in Schenectady, New York, and now lives in London with her family. She made her first professional sale in 1980, and has subsequently come to be regarded as one of the best new writers of her generation. Her story “Pretty Boy Crossover” has appeared on several critic’s lists as among the best science fiction stories of the 1980s, and her story “Angel” was a finalist for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award (one of the few stories ever to earn that rather unusual distinction). Her short fiction – which has appeared in most of the major markets, including Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction – has been gathered in the collections Patterns and Dirty Work. Her first novel, Mindplayers, was released in 1987 to excellent critical response, and her second novel, Synners, released in 1991, won the Arthur C. Clarke Award as the year’s best science fiction novel, as did her third novel, Fools, making her the only writer ever to win the Clarke Award twice. Her other books include the novels Dervish Is Digital, Tea from an Empty Cup, and Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine, and, as editor, the anthology The Ultimate Cyberpunk, as well as two making-of movie books and four media tie-in novels. Her most recent book was a novel, Cellular.

  THE TASTE OF night rather than the falling temperature woke her. Nell curled up a little more and continued to doze. It would be a while before the damp chill coming up from the ground could get through the layers of heavy cardboard to penetrate the sleeping bag and blanket cocooning her. She was fully dressed and her spare clothes were in the sleeping bag, too – not much but enough to make good insulation. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, though, she would have to visit a laundromat because phew.

  Phew was one of those things that didn’t change; well, not so far, anyway. She hoped it would stay that way. By contrast, the taste of night was one of her secret great pleasures although she still had no idea what it was supposed to mean. Now and then something almost came to her, almost. But when she reached for it either in her mind or by actually touching something, there was nothing at all.

  Sight. Hearing. Smell. Taste. Touch. ________.

  Memory sprang up in her mind with the feel of pale blue stretched long and tight between her hands.

  The blind discover that their other senses, particularly hearing, intensify to compensate for the lack. The deaf can be sharp-eyed but also extra sensitive to vibration, which is what sound is to the rest of us.

  However, those who lose their sense of smell find they have lost their sense of taste as well because the two are so close. To lose feeling is usually a symptom of a greater problem. A small number of people feel no pain but this puts them at risk for serious injury and life-threatening illnesses.

  That doctor had been such a patient woman. Better yet, she had had no deep well of stored-up suspicion like every other doctor Marcus had taken her to. Nell had been able to examine what the doctor was telling her, touching it all over, feeling the texture. Even with Marcus’s impatience splashing her like an incoming tide, she had been able to ask a question.

  A sixth sense? Like telepathy or clairvoyance?

  The doctor’s question had been as honest as her own and Nell did her best to make herself clear.

  If there were some kind of extra sense, even a person who had it would have a hard time explaining it. Like you or me trying to explain sight to someone born blind.

  Nell had agreed and asked the doctor to consider how the other five senses might try to compensate for the lack.

  That was where the memory ended, leaving an aftertaste similar to night, only colder and with a bit of sour.

  Nell sighed, feeling comfortable and irrationally safe. Feeling safe was irrational if you slept rough. Go around feeling safe and you wouldn’t last too long. It was just that the indented area she had found at the back of this building – cinema? auditorium? – turned out to be as cozy as it had looked. It seemed to have no purpose except as a place where someone could sleep unnoticed for a night or two. More than two would have been pushing it, but that meant nothing to some rough sleepers. They’d camp in a place like this till they wore off all the hidden. Then they’d get seen and kicked out. Next thing you knew, the spot would be fenced off or filled in so no one could ever use it again. One less place to go when there was nowhere to stay.

  Nell hated loss, hated the taste: dried-out bitter crossed with salty that could hang on for days, weeks, even longer. Worse, it could come back without warning and for no reason except that, perhaps like rough sleepers, it had nowhere else to go. There were other things that tasted just as bad to her but nothing worse, and nothing that lingered for anywhere nearly as long, not even the moldy-metal tang of disappointment.

  After a bit, she realized the pools of colour she’d been watching behind her closed eyes weren’t the remnants of a slow-to-fade dream but real voices of real humans, not too far away, made out of the same stuff she was; either they hadn’t noticed her or they didn’t care.

  Nell uncurled slowly – never make any sudden moves was another good rule for rough sleepers – and opened her eyes. An intense blue-white light blinded her with the sound of a cool voice in her right ear:

  Blue-white stars don’t last long enough for any planets orbiting them to develop intelligent life. Maybe not any life, even the most rudimentary. Unless there is a civilization advanced enough to seed those worlds with organisms modified to evolve at a faster rate. That might beg the question of why an advanced civilization would do that. But the motives of a civilization that advanced would/could/might seem illogical if not incomprehensible to any not equally developed.

  Blue-white memory stretched farther this time: a serious-faced young woman in a coffee shop, watching a film clip on a notebook screen. Nell had sneaked a look at it on her way to wash up in the women’s restroom. It took her a little while to realize that she had had a glimpse of something to do with what had been happening to her, or more precisely, why it was happening, what it was supposed to mean. On the heels of that realization had come a new one, probably the most important: they were communicating with her.

  Understanding always came to her at oblique
angles. The concept of that missing sixth sense, for instance – when she finally became aware of it, she realized that it had been lurking somewhere in the back of her mind for a very, very long time, years and years, a passing notion or a ragged fragment of a mostly forgotten dream. It had developed so slowly that she might have lived her whole life without noticing it, instead burying it under more mundane concerns and worries and fears.

  Somehow it had snagged her attention – a mental pop-up window. Marcus had said everyone had an occasional stray thought about something odd. Unless she was going to write a weird story or draw a weird picture, there was no point in obsessing about it.

  Was it the next doctor who had suggested she do exactly that – write a weird story or draw a weird picture, or both? Even if she had really wanted to, she couldn’t. She knew for certain by then that she was short a sense, just as if she were blind or deaf.

  Marcus had said he didn’t understand why that meant she had to leave home and sleep on the street. She didn’t either, at the time. But even if she had understood enough to tell him that the motives of a civilization that advanced would/could/might seem illogical if not incomprehensible to any not equally developed, all it would have meant to him was that she was, indeed, crazy as a bedbug, unquote.

  The social worker he had sent after her hadn’t tried to talk her into a hospital or a shelter right away but the intent was deafening. Every time she found Nell it drowned everything else out. Nell finally had to make her say it just to get some peace. For a few days after that, everything was extra scrambled. She was too disoriented to understand anything. All she knew was that they were bombarding her with their communication and her senses were working overtime, trying to make up for her inadequacy.