The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  “Is it snoring?” Mria says. “Tell me raccoons don’t snore.”

  Encounter #3

  Greenslope

  The forested slope is really the roof of an indoor gym and mail. Just above the restaurant, the hill crests, and, out of sight, descends in a succession of apartments. At the slope’s base is an open park, its snow trampled by mule deer looking for browse. A small herd of deer stands in a tight group there now, yanking a last bit of grass root out with their teeth.

  The big houses on the valley’s other side, beyond the concealed highway, are ugly enough that I wish I had the suppressed perceptions of a wild animal.

  I also wish I couldn’t see the Wild West duster they make me wear here. It’s embroidered with lassos and horses.

  The spruces and firs overhead hold huge clumps of snow in their needles. A chickadee hangs upside down from a cone and yanks determinedly at a seed. Various other squeaky-voiced small birds jump around the branches, distinguishable as kinglets, nuthatches, and others to those who care to tell them apart. Each has a different diet, and thus different ways of perceiving the world. No one appreciates how hard it is to manage a mixed group like that. Certainly not Paolo, who hasn’t stopped talking since he and Berenika sat down.

  But Berenika is looking at the birds. She always looks carefully at animals, as if she actually sees them as meaning something in themselves. She raises a hand, and crooks a finger to summon a waiter. Me.

  A kinglet flutters down and perches on it. It’s unexpected, and her green-brown eyes widen. The kinglet, a tiny greenish bird with an orange crown, walks back and forth on her finger. It actually thinks her finger is a twig, and is looking for signs of hibernating insects beneath the bark. Before anything unfortunate happens, it shoots off again.

  Berenika watches after it. She has a gift of meaningful stillness. Snow glitters in her dark hair. She is a nature goddess only temporarily among the worlds of men.

  The sun is shining but the air is bony and cold. Most animals are in hiding, and those that appear are lean, their intentions focused down to survival. Winter rakes through with sharp teeth, giving the survivors a bigger space to grown in the summer. The pain of survival is most obvious at this season, and the restaurant does a good business when it’s cold.

  Giant bluish cubes of ice, fifty feet on a side, thrust out of the trees. Snow clings to flaws in their surfaces. It always seems that you should be able to look all the way through them, but vision disappears into the deep blue interior. These grab the winter’s cold and send it back through heat exchangers in the summer to cool the buildings below, as they melt and cascade down the rocks, disappearing by the time fall brushes the leaves from the trees.

  A puff of breeze, and light snow races across the tables. Berenika and Paolo wear folded clothes like elaborate tents, with velvet over their hair. Warm air puffs from their sleeves when they lean forward, melting the snow into droplets. Paolo has his set so high he’s sweating. He’s picked this place to please Berenika. He prefers things to be a little more comfortable.

  “So, Berenika,” he says. “How have you been doing?”

  Right now, Berenika is doing what she is supposed to be doing. She is looking for the cougar. Her brief hesitation before answering the question creases Paolo’s wide face. He’s laid some kind of plan, but is having trouble putting it into operation.

  “Oh, Paolo! Sorry. I’m doing good. I can’t believe I waited so long to do what I wanted to. It’s hard work. But I wouldn’t want to do anything else.”

  “But you haven’t heard from. . . .”

  “No. Nothing from Mark. I kind of wish everyone — ”

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Mria was wondering, and you know how she is. She’d be all over me if I didn’t ask. I’m glad you could find the time to come out here with me. I thought maybe you would like it.”

  “I do, Paolo, I do. I’ve always heard of it.”

  “It seemed like your kind of place.”

  Both of them are uncomfortable. Neither expected to ever be in this situation.

  “I’ve been doing well too,” Paolo says.

  “Really? What have you been up to?”

  “You know, the usual. But well, you know.” Paolo starts again. “Do you have any, like, wider plans? For your life outside of nature?”

  “Not really. I’ve been pretty focused.”

  Paolo sighs. A gust at the same moment makes it seem that his inability to move her has shaken the snow from the trees.

  “Does he still live in the desert?” Paolo asks.

  Berenika has sensed movement in the trees along the meadow’s edge. “What?”

  “Does Mark still live in that desert place? I liked those parties he had out there.”

  Berenika manages to tear her attention from the signs of the cougar’s presence. She leans forward and puts her hand over Paolo’s. Both are gloved, so it’s not as intimate as it might be.

  “Give him a call if you want, Paolo. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. He always said. . . .” She’s moved too fast, and now has to come up with something Mark always said. “He said you were good company. And he liked it when you mixed the drinks.”

  “Yeah, well. I always liked him too. I mean, I understand why it had to end and all, but. . . .”

  Unlike the elk, the mule deer don’t get a reprieve. One is momentarily distracted, trying to yank a particularly sweet grass tuft. There’s a puff of snow as the cougar leaps, and then the lead buck is down. It kicks its legs once, but the cougar’s teeth sink in and crush its windpipe. That may be unnecessary. It looks like its head’s impact with the frozen ground has been enough to take it out.

  The cougar breathes hard for a few moments, then lowers its head and starts to feed.

  It looks easy. Without a knowledge of what is going on, it all looks easy. The deer weighs as much as the cougar, and carries a multipointed rack that can stab a lung or a gut. Even a small injury can be fatal, if it impairs the ability to hunt. The cougar has to average over a dozen pounds of meat a day to survive a winter. Any interruption in the flow of calories and protein is death. The cougar has been watching for the past two hours, patiently waiting for the exact moment that carried the highest odds.

  A waiter has to stand just attentively, but gets relatively less for the effort. And he has to wear a stupid outfit.

  The cougar raises its head. Something about the open space of the meadow is bothering it. The mule deer think they have moved off to another high valley, as they do when a predator appears, but there is actually no room for that here. They will circle the dining area and reemerge exactly where they were before. Pika move in their long runs under the snow-covered grass, and, a hundred yards away, a porcupine grunts along a freshly fallen log, tearing bark away to get at the still-fresh living layer beneath. Everything else is silent.

  What else does the cougar sense?

  It sinks teeth into the carcass, and, with a couple of powerful bounds, hauls it straight up the cliff.

  It drops it near the table, right next to Berenika, then resumes its meal. Steam rises from the entrails of the dead elk.

  Unlike the others, Berenika does not watch it. Instead, she scans everyone else in the restaurant, a gaze she usually devotes only to the animals. No one is feeding with quite the gusto of the cougar. Berenika has snow in her eyelashes. Sometimes the cougar has that same look. It is a solitary, as private as possible, used to sliding past perception without affecting it. Knowing it is in full view all the time would leave it with the feline equivalent of despair. It could not live that way.

  “Is he here?” Paolo hunches forward miserably.

  “Who?” Berenika says.

  “Mark! He’s got to be here. Somewhere.”

  She looks almost frightened. “Why do you say that?”

  “Because he can’t just let you go. I can’t stand it that he let you go.”

  The cougar curves
around a couple of times, then lays down on the mule deer carcass and goes to sleep. There’s plenty of meat left on it, and its own body heat is the only way it’s going to keep it from freezing solid overnight. The deer’s head gazes blankly at us, its bloody tongue hanging out of its mouth.

  Encounter #4

  Plaza Econtoro

  The plaza outside the Cafe Kulfi is a piece of marsh most of the way to becoming a meadow, with a thick patch of oaks at the edge. The squirrels and birds in the branches sense deeper forest behind them, not a brick wall. There’s still some open water, so there are muskrats, never the most popular animal to watch, but an important part of the system. They serve as food for the mink pair that nest under the cheese shop.

  It’s a nice spring day, and quite a few people are out.

  My hot dog cart’s umbrella conceals a rainforest canopy microenvironment. Bromeliads and orchids dangle from its ribs. Mist drifts down over the relish tray.

  Berenika walks slowly through the plaza. She’s graceful, every part of her long body involved, and her feet seem to barely touch the ground. She’s cut her thick hair even shorter and now wears it unclipped. Her jacket ends at her waist. Her trousers are made of some flowy material.

  She’s hunting for something. She doesn’t peer around, but it’s clear from the way she looks off into some invisible distance that she’s letting all of her senses open all the way, so that even the slightest hint will make itself known. I thought she was waiting for Paolo or Mria before going up into the Cafe Kulfi, where I worked on her world for the first time, but neither have shown and it’s starting to look like she’s on her own today.

  Despite my mini rainforest, she doesn’t pay any attention to my stand. She’s been in training for months, so surely she recognizes the virtuoso technique involved. It’s a clear signal, directly to her. She’s not usually so obtuse.

  The riot of rainforest life under my umbrella is hard to put together and even harder to maintain, right above a great selection of bratwurst and all-beef hotdogs. You could spend an hour looking at moths get nectar from orchids, ants crawling up stems, counting the tree frogs. I’m doing good business, good enough that I can’t pay as much attention to her as I want. It’s a point of pride that I get the orders right.

  Even though it’s right in their face, everyone misses the three-toed sloth at first. It hangs amid the leaves, its fur green with algae, its yellow claws hooked around an umbrella rib, and chews on the same leaf it’s been working on for the past half an hour.

  Berenika kneels and peers into the animal waste recycler just past a set of stairs. But it’s clean. She can’t tell how recently the cougar who owns this territory has been here.

  She turns, and for a moment, I think she’s going to walk over and get a hot dog. I do have to wear this ridiculous purple and orange jacket that clashes with the orchids. I’ve sweated through the pits. Still, I want her to.

  Finally, our cougar slinks into the plaza. It glances toward the Cafe Kulfi. It still remembers the unexpected nose burn and won’t go up there unless it has a good reason.

  It has other things to worry about. It is well into the other male’s range, and this time is completely aware of it. Its ears flick back and forth. A cougar has thirty separate muscles in its ear and it’s using every one to swivel them, trying to extract all the information the environment has to offer.

  Each step forward is a serious consideration. Since it’s here, it believes that it is here to challenge the other cougar. Like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it believes it acts because of decisions it has made. And, like anything above a certain level of consciousness, it is wrong.

  As soon as it appears, Berenika is aware of it. She doesn’t turn toward it, but I can see the way her back stretches out, fine shoulder blades against the fabric of her jacket. She stands very still: irrelevant, since the cougar can’t see her. It’s almost a courtesy. Her hands float without weight.

  I didn’t understand her before, and now I’m kind of sorry about that raccoon. She’s not just fooling around. She’s as serious about life as I am. She could be the rare Trainer that could be seen, and still do her job.

  The cougar whose territory we’re in comes out of the Cafe Kulfi and stands at the top of the stairs. It is significantly larger and stronger than our cougar, full-sized at 170 pounds, eight feet long. Everyone in the plaza falls silent and watches as it swishes its tail impatiently. Since this is its territory, it is the local favorite. They wait to see what it will do to the interloper.

  Somewhere around here, Mark appears and Comes back into her life. That’s the story. And the cougar, no longer needed, goes. Sure, there’s always a chance it will defeat its larger and stronger opponent. Nothing is certain.

  But the smart money’s on the muscle.

  The territory owner crouches down to charge. It is ready. Our cougar is going to find out that it is no longer the center of attention.

  Berenika strolls toward the cafe, not giving any sign that she sees the other cougar. I should be watching the cougars, but, instead, I watch her. She looks like she’s just window-shopping, but I know she’s not seeing anything in the vitrines. Her consciousness is focused forward.

  She steps right into the other cougar’s path. It is ready to leap . . . and suddenly its opponent has vanished. All it can really sense is the absence that is Berenika, because it can’t detect a human being. A shadow has dropped over its world, and it is confounded.

  Suddenly coming to itself, realizing the perilous situation it is in, our cougar turns and bounds out of the plaza.

  There is a stir among everyone else in the plaza. They resume whatever they were doing. But they feel vaguely cheated, unfulfilled. A crucial plot point was muffed.

  That’s because they’re paying attention to the wrong story.

  “Excuse me.”

  Berenika came up silently, as I watched the cougar vanish. She catches me off guard.

  Our eyes meet through the mist that comes from my umbrella. As a gesture, the sloth even turns its head, jaws still working on its leaf, to look at her.

  She realizes the complexity of what I have achieved here. And, seeing that, she’s scoped out who is responsible for the events around her. She has an instinctive feel for the behavior of living creatures. Seeing the effects, she’s tracked down the cause: me.

  “I’d like two hot dogs, please.”

  Two? She really doesn’t need to get one for me. It’s my stand, after all. “Um, sure. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “One with mustard and relish.”

  “Okay.”

  “And one with lots of hot peppers, sauerkraut, and epizote, if you have any.”

  It’s not something I’d usually know about an employer, but Mark had me make him his favorite dog when we were setting this scene up, the day before. Peppers, sauerkraut, and –

  “No epizote.” I still have some, but he’s not getting it. “Out today.”

  “Well.” She sighs. “We can’t always get what we want, can we?”

  “No,” I say. “I guess not.”

  I watch her, graceful and slim, as she crosses the plaza and heads right for the copse of trees where Mark stands, seemingly invisible from the world, waiting to emerge into the midst of a battle to the death between cougars for a single territory.

  Last Encounter

  Anhinga

  The water just beyond the table is still and black. The cypress trees in the hammock stretch above, forming a thick canopy, screening the bright sun. The air is hot, heavy, motionless. Spanish moss, vines, flowers dangle down, dripping water. The only detectable motion is that of an occasional insect flying slowly, almost walking on the thick air. Tiny beams with motion detectors pick them out and highlight their lacy wings against the dimness, subtly enough that the patrons take it for granted that they can see things here, despite having evolved on the sunny, dry veldt.

  There’s no reason why nature shouldn’t always look her best.<
br />
  Paolo, Mria, Berenika, and Mark have fallen silent as they wait for their food. Mark is never chatty, and Paolo and Mria have been trying to fill in the spaces, showing, by their eagerness to entertain, their gratitude that things are back the way they should be, but they’ve run out of things to talk about.

  Mark paid their way out here. That’s their notion of the way things should be.

  Berenika hasn’t been talking much. Is she already regretting her decision to get back with him?

  “Look, there’s one.” Paolo points as an alligator slides by, careful not to thrust his finger over the railing.

  No one else looks.

  “What’s wrong?” Mark finally says. “I knew this was a mistake. Too wet, right? We should get back to the house. The desert. That’s best.”

  “No,” Berenika says. “That’s not it. This is extremely impressive. I might like to work here, actually.”

  Our wetland, lush with water coming from the north, is sandwiched between an office building, all pink stucco and plate glass, and a housing development. Carefully generated mist makes the office building look like a mistake of vision, and the houses hide behind a vine-covered wall. Water is pumped into this patch of jungle, runs through, and then gets recovered on the other side of the restaurant.

  Water once sheeted down from the lakes to the north, covered the sawgrass prairies less than an inch deep, all the way down to the south. Development and overuse of water had threatened these environments.

  Not much of the sawgrass prairie was left, but the wetland is something people want to see. Water flows have been reestablished, exactly to the necessary degree. Nothing that lives here, in the deep waters or any of the other environments around, senses that it all came via subtle paths completely different than the original ones.