Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  Irked, she leaped high and flew above the City. Go local, then. Orange County was the PacBasin's best fount of fresh ideas.

  She caught vectors from the county drawing her down. Prickly hints sheeted across her belly, over her forearms. To the east—there—a shimmer of possibility.

  Her ferrets were her own, of course—searcher programs tuned to her style, her way of perceiving quality and content. They were her, in a truncated sense.

  Now they led her down a funnel, into—

  A mall.

  In real-space, no less. Tacky.

  Hopelessly antique, of course. Dilapidated buildings leaning against each other, laid out in boring rectangular grids. Faded plastic and rusty chrome.

  People still went there, of course; somewhere, she was sure, people still used wooden plows.

  This must be in Kansas or the Siberian Free State or somewhere equally Out Of It. Why in the world had her sniffers taken her here?

  She checked real-world location, preparing to lift out.

  East Anaheim? Impossible!

  But no—there was something here. Her sniffer popped up an overlay and the soles of her feet itched with anticipation. Programs zoomed her in on a gray shambles that dominated the end of the cracked blacktop parking lot.

  Was this a museum? No, but—

  Art Attack came the signifier.

  That sign…“An old K-Mart,” she murmured. She barely remembered being in one as a girl. Rigid, old-style aisles of plastic prod. Positively cubic, as the teeners said. A cube, after all, was an infinite number of stacked squares.

  But this K-Mart had been reshaped. Stucco-sculpted into an archly ironic lavender mosque, festooned with bright brand name items.

  It hit her. “Of course!”

  She zoomed up, above the Orange County jumble.

  Here it was—pay dirt. And she was on the ground first.

  She popped her pod and sucked in the dry, flavorful air. Back in Huntington Beach. Her throat was dry, the aftermath of tension.

  And just 16:47, too. Plenty of time for a swim.

  The team that had done the mock-mosque K-Mart were like all artists: sophisticated along one axis, dunder-heads along all economic vectors. They had thought it was a pure lark to fashion ancient relics of paleo-capitalism into bizarre abstract expressionist “statements.” Mere fun effusions, they thought.

  She loved working with people who were, deep in their souls, innocent of markets.

  Within two hours she had locked up the idea and labeled it: “Post-Consumerism Dada from the fabled Age of Appetite.”

  She had marketed it through pre-view around the globe. Thailand and the Siberians (the last true culture virgins) had gobbled up the idea. Every rotting 'burb round the globe had plenty of derelict K-Marts; this gave them a new angle.

  Then she had auctioned the idea in the Mesh. Cut in the artists for their majority interest. Sold shares. Franchised it in the Cutting Concept sub-Mesh. Divided shares twice, declared a dividend.

  All in less time than it took to drive from Garden Grove to San Clemente.

  “How'd you find that?” her Foe asked, climbing out of his pod.

  “My sniffers are good, I told you.”

  He scowled. “And how'd you get there so fast?”

  “You've got to take the larger view,” she said mysteriously.

  He grimaced. “You're up two thousand five creds.”

  “Lucky I didn't really trounce you.”

  “Culture City sure ate it up, too.”

  “Speaking of which, how about starting a steak? I'm starving.”

  He kissed her. This was perhaps the best part of the Foe-Team method. They spurred each other on, but didn't cut each other dead in the marketplace. No matter how appealing that seemed, sometimes.

  Being married helped keep their rivalry on reasonable terms. Theirs was a standard five-year monogamous contract, already nearly half over. How could she not renew, with such a deliciously stimulating opponent?

  Sure, dog-eat-dog markets sometimes worked better, but who wanted to dine on dog?

  “We'll split the chores,” he said.

  “We need a servant.”

  He laughed. “Think we're rich? We just grease the gears of the great machine.”

  “Such a poet you are.”

  “And there are still the dishes to do from last night.”

  “Ugh. I'll race you to the beach first.”

  Out of the Mouths

  SHEILA FINCH

  Sheila Finch has been writing better-than-average science fiction since the 1970s. Her first novel, Infinity's Web, appeared in 1985, followed by several more in the 1980s and early 1990s, but her work has had little impact on the field. “Shiela Finch is still in the wings,” said The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in 1992, “but gives the impression she is capable of stepping into full view at any time.”

  She had professional training in linguistics, which is evident in her novel, Triad, and since the late 1980s she has been publishing stories of the Guild of Xenolinguists. Two of these appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1996 and this one particularly, “Out of the Mouths,” gives some evidence of the depth of Finch's real power as a storyteller. As is evident in our world today, problems of communication between cultures can be deadly. How much more so, then, between aliens and humans in the future.

  The old man was wading, net in hand, tending his fish ponds, when the visitor arrived. He hadn't heard the approach of an aircar. Tattered curls of autumnal mist caught in the low boughs of oak and alder; patches of night darkness still lingered on the estuary beyond the fish ponds; the rich, dark smell of river mud rose like a favorite perfume to his nose. He transferred the net to his left hand and shaded his eyes with the right, bending forward from the waist. “Heron,” his students had once called him, affectionately mocking his awkward height. The name had stuck.

  “Good morning.” A small, brown, middle-aged woman stood on the opposite bank.

  There was something clipped and suppressed in her speech; he understood from it that she didn't like him. By his leg, a fish jumped, a gleam of dull gold above gray glass. He watched the ripples spreading, aware the woman watched him.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  He sensed the itch of irritation that ran through her words. He studied the woman's face, reading small physical clues that gave the lie to words as he'd taught his students to do. The visitor was unafraid of tough decisions but not blessed with patience. She was annoyed at having to be here. Yet he'd known for a long time that she would come some day.

  “You are Magistra Orla Eiluned,” he said. “Head of the Mother House of the Guild of Xenolinguists.”

  The visitor's mouth twitched. “I remember a time when that was your title, and I was a lowly probationer, fresh from a provincial world no one had ever heard of.”

  “Minska. I'd heard of it.”

  Orla Eiluned glanced at him. When she spoke, the anger was back underneath her words. “Must we confer across this stinking water? I'm susceptible to the damp in this island, even if you aren't.”

  He waded out onto the bank where his visitor stood, laid the net aside, and pulled off his hip boots. He led the way up the path to the small cottage. Inside, she gazed around, and he saw it fresh through her eyes: a book-filled room with sloping roof, a long cot under a window and a cooking alcove at the rear. He thought of the ample apartment that had been his at the Mother House, overlooking the lake beneath snow-crowned Alps. He wondered if she'd brought in pictures and rugs and musical instruments of her own, as he had, though he'd brought mostly books. The memory ached this morning.

  “Ten years it's been, since you were Head.” She turned from a bookshelf, her face in shadow. “Do you miss the Guild, Magister Heron?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “The students, perhaps.” She was silent while he set tea in pottery mugs on a small table before her. At his gesture, she sat, her eyes reading his face as he had read hers a moment ago.
>
  “You had a reputation as a good Head. It's all the more wonder to me—”

  “Keri and T'biak,” he said at once, because there could be no other reason. He remembered a sharply clear, end-of-winter morning, and a baby, pink and smooth as a porcelain doll, lying in his arms; he remembered how she'd smelled of milk and petals and innocence.

  “Indeed,” Orla Eiluned said. “And now the final chapter to this sorry experiment must be written.”

  “It was wartime,” he said. “We took extraordinary measures for what seemed good enough reason at the moment—”

  “The thought of using babies is horrifying, no matter how desperate the times or how noble the purpose!”

  He bowed his head and waited.

  She sighed, and for a moment seemed to set aside the mantle of her office. They sat quietly, as if they were old country wives, mending threadbare patches with their words, preparing to examine the troubled fabric of the past.

  The human child had arrived first.

  A cold, clear day at the end of winter. Heron stood on the porch of the secluded, centuries-old stone house that Essa had refurbished for them, the child awkwardly draped across his stiff arms. She was three weeks old, an orphan, with a tiny pouty mouth and a fuzz of almost silver hair.

  “You act as if this is the first infant you've held!” Essa glanced at him from under a purple wool scarf, a spot of color in a white landscape.

  “It is.” The Guild discouraged parenthood for lingsters, and he, a dutiful son in the Mother House for the last five decades, had never needed to question its wisdom. But the thought made him ask, “What happened to her parents?”

  “Casualties of the war,” Essa answered shortly.

  “Poor child. Does she have a name?”

  “Keri.”

  Uncontrolled emotion was dangerous for a lingster at work; all his training guarded against being swept away in the storm of strong feelings. Never let emotion color the interface, the first rule of the Guild. He could see how that applied here too; becoming sentimental about the baby would lead to inappropriate actions that could jeopardize the project. He gave the infant back to Essa. Yet his arms retained the imprint of her tiny body long after she'd been carried into the house, an odd effect that he noted as dispassionately as he marked the snow softening underfoot as the thaw began.

  Essa had found the house in a pine forest on the slopes of a mountain, not so far north that the weather would be a problem, but far enough away from the Mother House for privacy. Heron had considered going off-world, but that would create additional difficulties because of the uncertainties of civilian travel due to the war, and he'd bowed to Essa's choice. The house, which had belonged for many generations to a prosperous family, boasted several living rooms, and also bedrooms with wood-burning fireplaces, a feature that had appealed to him in these times of austerity. A large stone-flagged kitchen opened out to a greenhouse and vegetable garden behind the house; that would help keep their costs to a minimum. The fewer times he asked the Guild for money, the fewer awkward questions would be asked. He wanted to avoid the awkward questions.

  Essa had filled the house with rocking chairs and antique rugs and handmade quilts, and also with dogs and cats; the children were not to be deprived of the comforts of a normal childhood as she saw it. He didn't argue, though he wondered how animals might contaminate the experiment. He recognized that he needed Essa's warmth as counterweight to his necessarily colder vision.

  Three months ago, an ambassador he'd only vaguely known—but whose sister was once Heron's student—had approached him with a proposition, and excitement and apprehension had warred in his blood ever since. The ambassador had reminded him how often he'd mused with his students about such an experiment; war, the ambassador said, often allowed great leaps of scientific knowledge to happen. Why not in Heron's field too?

  There was no denying the great need for such an advance. In the centuries since humans had begun to spread out to the worlds of the Orion Arm, they'd never encountered an enemy like the Venatixi. The ambassador told a disturbing tale of a race whose history, customs, and intentions toward humans were all unknown, inscrutable; only the trail of destruction and blood they left behind spoke of their fierce enmity. “If we could crack their language,” the diplomat said, pacing the floor in Heron's study at the Mother House, “we could decipher their intentions and frustrate them! The Guild is our only hope.”

  But the Guild lacked the nerve to do what had to be done; forcing the issue ran the risk of tearing it apart, perhaps fatally. He would never knowingly do anything to damage the Guild. For the first time in his long career, Heron knew he had to act outside the Guild.

  Odysseus must have felt like this, he thought now, on the porch of the stone house: lured by the twin sirens of duty and intellectual adventure. He would never have agreed to do it for money. It was good that Essa would be the children's ombudsman if they should ever need protection; he understood that some people found him too austere. Questions there might be, in the future, but he didn't want it said he'd been cruel.

  A few hours later, the Venatixi infant arrived with a face like a forest god, half fawn, half fox. He'd never seen a Venatixi before, and he was stunned by the child's beauty. He remembered Essa's comment when he'd first asked her to join him: “They kill like demons, but they look like angels.”

  The adult Venatixi male who accompanied the child resembled a vision of human perfection carved by a master sculptor. Taller than Heron, he seemed much younger in spite of his pure white hair. His skin was golden, and his dark eyes seemed to look into the deeps of space from which he had come. If Heron expected to read hostility or defiance in the alien's expression—understandable emotions for an enemy, brought here under who knew what coercion—he was disappointed. The beautiful face was blank. Or else, he thought, the play of Venatixi emotions across the face was too subtle for even a trained lingster to read. He sensed a distance in the alien, vaster than the circumstances of war demanded, or their incompatible languages.

  He disliked the man on sight. This unusually strong reaction distressed him; he amended it with logic: What kind of creature delivers its young up to the enemy? How could the Venatixi be sure he didn't plan to torture the child, or even dissect it? And what was the alien's connection with the shadowy ambassador who had set the project in motion and then disappeared?

  Heron never found vague unease to be a useful state of mind in which to work; he turned his thoughts back to the project in hand.

  The alien attendant made it known the baby was to be called T'biak. Odd, how pointing and naming were used so often among the races of the Arm. But names were all he could be sure of at this point. Ah, but the project would rectify all that in time, he thought, and was flushed with eagerness to begin.

  The Venatixi possessed the same organs that in humans facilitated speech. No struggling with olfactory cues, or intricate light pulses, or any of the half dozen or so other variations in the way communication was handled around the Arm. Yet he'd observed that the closer an alien's physiology to human, the more subtle the problem of unlocking the language. The temptation was strong to believe too quickly in surface similarities. Humans were lonely creatures, driven on an endless search across the galaxy for soulmates.

  Over the years he'd developed a sixth sense for invisible problems, quirks of language that didn't easily slip from one tongue to another, hidden minefields that blew understanding sky high when least expected. The best lingsters sometimes met languages that contained obstacles all their skills couldn't overcome. Venatician appeared to be such a one. He'd studied it as best he could while he was still in the Mother House; lingsters who encountered it around the Arm sent back samples. The language was slippery; as soon as he thought he'd identified words and assigned denotation to them, they slid away, meaning changing under his fingertips even as he worked.

  Inglis had retained many homonyms, despite centuries of attempts to standardize and regularize it, but he found Ve
natician held a more baffling mystery. It would've been daunting if it had occurred between friendly races; with a ferocious enemy like the Venatixi it was monstrous. The war that had resulted—from what? territorial imperatives? xenophobia? misunderstanding? nobody knew—had gone on too long, destroyed too many lives, and now threatened the survival of Earth itself. Time for visionary measures in the search for solutions.

  “Did you stop to wonder how the ambassador got hold of an alien child? And so quickly at that!”

  Essa had come back to stand beside him on the porch where he'd been gazing at the surrounding forest. She chewed at her under lip, a habit he knew she would've suppressed when she was younger for what it gave away of her inner turmoil.

  “Kidnapped him, I suppose.”

  “You joke, Heron, but I have misgivings.”

  “Only partly, I'm afraid. Ugly things happen in war. Perhaps he's a hostage of some kind—”

  “Where do you get such a terrible idea?”

  “History,” he said. “Many tribes in Earth's own past made an exchange of high-ranking children to be brought up in the enemy's camp. A good way to ensure peace between them!”

  Essa shuddered.

  “But I don't want to know the truth,” he said. “It's a chance to explore a most promising theory, and I'm not about to lose it through needless bureaucracy.” His blood began to pound; he felt flushed, giddy with the excitement of setting out in unknown territory, the Marco Polo of language. But he understood she might have misgivings. “Of course, it's natural that you'd feel some uncertainty—”

  “More than that. I'm wondering whether we ought to do this at all.”

  “Keep in mind the great good we're doing for our world.”

  “How many scientists have said this down the centuries, I wonder, as they raced to damnation?”

  He smiled tolerantly at her. Nothing could shake his confidence today. “Essa, you exaggerate the dangers here!”

  “Do I?” she said quietly. Beyond where she stood with her back to the forest, the setting sun turned the mountain tops bloodred. “I don't know. But I think perhaps I should've turned you down when you asked me to help. I should've stayed where I was—grounded and safe in the Mother House's library until I retired!”