The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

“Unfortunately, I couldn’t even take a sample to biopsy. Your wife’s vitals took a nosedive and we had to withdraw immediately. She’s fine now – under the circumstances. But we need to do those scans as soon as possible. Her right eye was so damaged by this tumour that we couldn’t save it. If we don’t move quickly enough, it’s going to cause additional damage to her face.”

  Nell took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. She hadn’t thought they would hear her but they had; all three stopped talking and Call-Me-Anne and Marcus scurried over to the side of her bed, saying her name in soft, careful whispers, as if they thought it might break. She kept her eyes closed and her body limp, even when Call-Me-Anne took her hand in both of hers and squeezed it tight. After a while, she heard them go.

  How had they done that, she marveled. How had they done it from so far away?

  Something can be a million light-years away and in your eye at the same time.

  Her mind’s eye showed her a picture of two vines entangled with each other. Columbus’s ships, just coming into view. The sense she had been missing was not yet fully developed, not enough to reconcile the vine and the ships. But judging from what the doctor said, it wouldn’t be long now.

  BLIND CAT DANCE

  Alexander Jablokov

  With only a handful of stories, mostly for Asimov’s, and a few well-received novels, Alexander Jablokov established himself as one of the most highly regarded new writers of the nineties. His first novel, Carve the Sky, was released in 1991, and was followed by other successful novels such as A Deeper Sea, Nimbus, River of Dust, and Deepdrive, as well as a collection of his short fiction, The Breath of Suspension. Jablokov fell silent through the decade of the aughts, but in the last couple of years has been returning to print, releasing Brain Thief in 2010, his first novel in over ten years, and popping up in the magazines again with elegant, coolly pyrotechnic stories such as the one that follows, set in a future society that has developed a novel way of integrating the human and natural worlds, making the animals unable to perceive the human society around them, so that they think they’re in the middle of a forest when actually they’re in the middle of a crowded café. Of course, one immediately has to wonder what it is that the humans themselves are unable to see, although it’s brushing all around them. . . .

  Encounter #1

  Cafe Kulfi

  THE COUGAR STALKS into the cafe, its skin loose, looking relaxed, even a bit bored. Its padded feet are silent on the terrazzo. Conversation at the tables drops for a moment, but then, when the cat doesn’t immediately kill anything, gets noisy again.

  Berenika sits near the back, on a banquette, with her friends from before, Mria and Paolo. Mria is small and nervous, with spiky frosted hair. Paolo is tall, with big ears and Adam’s apple.

  “You don’t mean you, like, just left.” Mria can’t believe it. “Walked out on Mark.”

  “You can’t just walk out of that place, can you?” Paolo says. “That’s miles of desert. You could die. You must have gotten a ride. Who gave you a ride?”

  “Oh, sure,” Mria says. “That’s what we need to know. Her means of transportation.”

  Paolo looks hurt. “I was just saying she could have called me to come get her. I would have done it. Right, Berenika? Far, but I would have done it for you.”

  Berenika is solemn. “Thank you, Paolo.”

  “But who — ”

  “Oh!” Mria turns her head sharply toward Berenika, hoping her hair will exclude Paolo from the conversation. “But what did Mark do? What did he say?”

  “Not much, really,” Berenika says. “By that point, I think he realized there wasn’t anything he could do.”

  “You must know your husband better than that,” Mria says. “There’s always something he can do. Has he called you? Hired people to kidnap you? Planted himself in your yard and let birds nest in his hair?”

  “No.” Berenika clearly doesn’t want to talk about it. “Nothing like that.”

  “We were all going to Easter Island.” Paolo is mournful. “To that new jungle. I was already packed.”

  “Ah,” Mria says. “Procrastination pays off again. I hadn’t even found my suitcase yet.”

  “That’s actually not funny.” Paolo blinks slowly. “I was looking forward to it.”

  “Oh, so was I.” Mria waggles her cup over her shoulder at me without looking, an annoying habit. “So was I. I need a break. Easter Island. Giant heads, buried under vines. And you, Berenika. It was your idea in the first place. You wanted some special tour to see how they brought everything back. More than back. I don’t think the jungle was as dense before people came there.”

  Berenika isn’t paying much attention to the discussion about the ecological restoration of Easter Island, which, with variations, they’ve already had several times. She’s watching the cougar. No one else is, because it doesn’t really seem to be doing anything.

  It’s a maie cougar, Puma concolor, medium-sized for its species at 130 pounds, six feet long. It is utterly still, not even the tip of its long, luxurious tail moving. Its fur is red-brown, paler under its muzzle and on its belly. That color matches that of the local population of deer. There are no deer in the cafe. Its hazel eyes are dilated in the dimness. It can’t see color, but can detect the smallest movement.

  It has sensed the shadow of something. It is on full alert. And well it should be. It’s out of its territorial range, and on the edge of the range of another male. A bigger male.

  It doesn’t really know that yet. Right now, it’s just checking things out.

  I refill Mria’s cup, but she just sighs at the delay, not noticing me.

  “Weren’t you looking forward to it?” Mria’s voice gets penetrating. “Berenika!”

  “What?” Berenika looks at her friends. “Sure. Of course I was.”

  “That would have been a great place for you to learn about . . . restoration methods, whatever it was.” Paolo sighs. “I bought this nice linen jacket. . . .”

  “Return it.” Mria turns to cut him out again. “You’re not seriously still interested in working, like, with animals, Berenika. Are you?”

  “I am.” Berenika smiles, just for a split second, a flash of light. “I’m sure they wouldn’t let me start with animals, but that’s still what I want.”

  “Oh! That’s ridiculous. Just leave them alone, why don’t you? Let them be themselves. Natural, like they’re supposed to be.”

  They all look at the cougar, which is again on the move.

  It doesn’t see anything at the tables it moves past. It believes the cafe to be empty, in fact sees the space as a clearing in a larger forest.

  “Okay,” Mria says. “Maybe that’s not so natural. I didn’t even really notice when these things started wandering around. Where does the thing take a crap? Not in here, I hope.” She picks up her feet so her pumps don’t touch the floor.

  “It’s trained to go in a certain spot, where it gets recycled,” Berenika says. “You might not have noticed it, but there’s a place under the bushes in front of the candle store. And it looked like there was another cougar that usually used it.”

  And then she sniffs.

  “The service here sucks,” Mria says. “But the place seems clean enough.” She keeps her feet up, though, just in case.

  “You checked in the cat toilet?” Paolo says. “And you could tell who’d used it?”

  But now Berenika is up. She stalks around, tall and loose, a bit of a cat herself. The combs in her thick, black hair glint in the dimness. The cougar jerks its head, and she freezes. It looks past her. Somewhere, inside, it is deeply frustrated, knowing it’s missing something but having no way of figuring out what it is.

  She kneels and sniffs a corner by the counter. Mark had led me to expect someone a bit more . . . romantic. Not interested in the yucky details of how we actually get these animals to survive among us. She hitches her skirt up a bit to free up her movements and sniffs again. She’s dressed beautifully, with severa
l layers of translucent fabric of contrasting patterns.

  People in the cafe are now watching her, not the cougar.

  Paolo shreds his napkin in embarrassment, then closes his eyes.

  It wouldn’t be natural for me not to react.

  “Have you lost something, miss?”

  She stands up next to me. “We’re in another cougar’s territory here. Where is it now?”

  I’m startled. Did she actually examine the feces in the waste recycler in the plaza? “I’ve seen one, I guess. Another cat, right? But I don’t know. I could ask . . .”

  “That’s all right.” She heads back to her table, having dismissed me as useless.

  That’s the point. That’s why I’m wearing this stupid padded white jacket, like a fencer, or something. I’m supposed to be taking care of things in the background.

  I still wish she’d have really looked at me.

  “Their urine has been modified to smell kind of like turpentine.” Berenika slides neatly back into her seat. “To us. To each other, it still smells jagged and aggressive.”

  “That’s charming,” Paolo says.

  “It’s a lot of work to get it just right,” Berenika says. “Real skill.” If only she knew. “But we’re definitely on an established territory. I bet that other cougar is out past all those little stands in the plaza. There must be good hunting for small game in the shrubs.”

  She’s absolutely right. That other cougar, larger and stronger than this one, isn’t part of the story yet, but there is the potential for drama. Fights over territory and access to sex always sell.

  “If you like stuff like that, Mark could have set you up better than anyone,” Mria says. “I think he has connections with the guys who run this stuff. You could have your own, I don’t know, ecosystem, whatever.”

  “It’s a messy hobby,” Paolo says. “Not like you, Berenika. I didn’t even think Mark should have gotten those blind fish in your basement. What a lot of work! Is that what got you interested?”

  “I didn’t want Mark to set me up with anything.”

  Her friends can tell they’ve annoyed Berenika. That’s something they don’t want to do.

  Mria shifts in her seat. “Let me get this. My turn, really.”

  “Good point,” Paolo says.

  The cougar slides behind the counter, being a bit perverse now, as they will be. It angles its body up and puts its forepaws up on the counter, knocking some demitasses to the floor. Its claws are a good inch and a half long. It yawns in flehmen, seeking scent information, and, incidentally, shows its canines, white against its black gumline.

  Well, it gets what information it can, but cannot overcome the blockages that allow it to survive in the environment it now lives in. It has no idea it’s in a place that serves good Turkish coffee, black as night, sweet as love, hot as hell, a place that makes you wear a ridiculous jacket to serve it. It can’t smell anything human. It can’t see us or hear us. As far as it is concerned, we no longer exist.

  It reaches its head forward . . . and pushes its nose against the hot side of the espresso machine.

  It makes a tiny yelp, like a kitten, then jumps back, crouches down and hisses.

  Everyone in the cafe laughs. Despite the fact that they are invisible to it, that there is no possible threat, they are still afraid of it, and welcome such evidence of its impotence.

  Berenika, I notice, doesn’t laugh.

  Encounter #2

  No Faux Pho

  A red-tailed hawk soars overhead in an updraft from the parking lot. It’s been up there a while without success. The deer mice in the high grass between the parking places haven’t been active.

  The noodle shop is stuck to the side of the old mall like a piece of gum. The tables are on balconies hanging down, with steep stairs that make it easy to spill pho on a customer. Not that anyone worries about the comfort of the waitstaff.

  Mria and Berenika have chosen the lowest table, just above where a small herd of elk browse beneath oaks and maples with leaves just touched with russet and purple by approaching fall. An elk cow lowers her head, grabs a bit of grass, looks around. She can’t see us, or the mail, or the cars that make their way over hardened paths through the lot’s ridges and swales to find spots outside the wildlife zones. She also can’t see the cougar, who sits, seemingly not paying attention to her, in some underbrush a few feet away.

  That’s two completely different ways of not seeing. I’m sure there are others.

  “You know,” Mria says. “I was just remembering how you and Mark got together.”

  “It was fated,” Berenika says. “The stars were aligned and it all happened exactly as was ordained.”

  “What?”

  Berenika laughs. “Oh, come on, Mria. We met at that party. Chance. You had just left. I was helping Margaret clean up.”

  “Duty pays off again.”

  “He always said he was ‘putting in an appearance’,” Berenika says. “I thought that was pompous, then learned how much of that he actually does.”

  “He put in an appearance on Easter Island,” Mria says. “Don’t tell Paolo. He’ll never get over it. Poor Paolo. He kind of got to thinking that he was the one Mark really liked. That they had some kind of relationship.”

  “Mark does like Paolo. He said so.”

  “Oh! Mark. Like you can believe what he says.”

  “You look good,” Berenika says. “Is that a new thing with your hair?”

  “Just growing it out a little.” Mria pats her blond curls with a satisfied air. “I’ve got somebody good. I’ll give you her name.”

  “Sure. Maybe.”

  Berenika’s black hair is thicker and shorter than it was a few months ago, and the clips in it look almost permanent. And she wears an outdoor jacket with a couple of bird shit stains on it that never quite came out.

  A second hawk sits on a bough of an oak, just as unsuccessful as the one circling above the parking lot, but not working as hard.

  “Really, Berenika. Are you still doing the animal thing?”

  Berenika smiles. “I should have done it years ago. Even at a low level, I love it. I have to start at the bottom, of course. Physiology classes, ecology, working support in a clinic. It’s physically hard. I never expected how hard. I fall dead asleep in my bed every night.”

  “That desert house of Mark’s had the best beds,” Mria says. “I never dreamed there.”

  “Try cleaning up after a sick moose all day. You won’t dream then.”

  “No thanks. I prefer a really expensive mattress.”

  “Maybe you should have married Mark,” Berenika says.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t stay to help do the dishes. That’ll show me. But he never wanted anyone but you. Why is that?”

  “I’m the wrong person to explain. I have no idea.” Berenika watches the cougar. It stalks forward, belly to the ground, astonishingly fluid for something that must have bones in it somewhere.

  Mria follows Berenika’s gaze, but I can tell she doesn’t see the cougar either.

  “This banh mhi is too dry,” Mria says. “Now, that’s not really a complaint, but you really like that moistness, if you know what I’m saying . . .”

  I replace her banh mhi.

  “How is your food, Berenika?” Mria says.

  Berenika hasn’t eaten anything. “Fine, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Kind of, meh, right? I don’t like the way this one soaks the bread, kind of makes it fall apart. . . .”

  She’s not watching as the cougar charges, but Berenika is.

  Three or four bounds, and it is on the elk.

  But something gives the cow warning: a rustle in the leaves, a finch that switches branches a few seconds before the cat makes its decision, something, but it is already moving when the cougar tries to drop it.

  Claws scratch its flank, but it is bounding off across the parking lot, dodging between the cars it sees as trees, and is gone. Cougars aim, not at the weak or the sick, but at t
he inattentive. When they’ve judged attention wrong, they can find themselves struggling with something fully as strong as they are.

  There is no way the cougar can pursue the fleeing elk. Like all cats, its speed is available only in short bursts. Its heart is small for its body mass. Just that effort alone has sucked up all its stored oxygen. It stands on the spot where the elk had been, breathing deeply, replenishing its stores. At moments like this, it is completely vulnerable.

  “What happened?” Mria cranes around.

  “Nothing,” Berenika says. “Nothing happened.”

  “He can’t have let you go so easily,” Mria says. “That’s just not the Mark I know.”

  “Maybe the Mark you know isn’t the Mark I know. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “All right.” Mria manages a smile. “So you’re liking what you’re doing?”

  “More than anything I’ve ever done. I feel . . . I don’t know. It’s like I was always meant to be out there. Not away from people, exactly. But closer to the foundation of things.”

  I hate it when people talked like that. We’re never more human than when we’re manipulating the natural world.

  I don’t know why she’s annoying me so much all of a sudden. She’s just doing her best, studying, taking her tests like the teacher’s pet I’m sure she’s always been. I was a problem student. It’s only luck, and Mark’s help, that lets me do what I’m so good at.

  Mark wants her to feel herself submerged in the totality of nature. But I’m the one creating that totality, setting up each stage on her progress.

  There’s no way she’ll ever know I’m back here.

  A raccoon emerges on the restaurant balcony. How it got here is my secret.

  Of all the wild creatures, it is perhaps the raccoon that misses human beings most. The others didn’t even notice when humans figured out how to edit themselves out of animal perceptions and return the world to the wild.

  Going back to work has been hard on the raccoons. Their mood seems permanently bad.

  This one has had it, at least for today. It clambers up onto the table, scattering silverware, and, with grim determination, closes its eyes and goes to sleep. As far as it is concerned, this is a place of concealment, invisible to anyone, and, in fact, nothing out in those woods has a chance of seeing it. A buzzard sweeps close overhead, its eyes questing, but sees nothing but dead leaves and a recovered cougar, now loping off, ready for another go at an elk.