The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  She hauled her feet up again and gathered herself to stand and sprint down the center stem of this bough, a perilous highway no wider than her palm. When she raised her eyes, though, she found herself looking straight into the four bright, curious blue eyes of a second swamp-tiger.

  “Aw, crud,” Dharthi said. “Didn’t anyone tell you guys you’re supposed to be solitary predators?”

  It looked about the same age and size and fluffiness as the other one. Littermates? Littermates of some Terran species hunted together until they reached maturity. That was probably the answer, and there was another groundbreaking bit of Cytherean biology that would go into a swamp-tiger’s belly with Dharthi’s masticated brains. Maybe she’d have enough time to relay the information to Kraken while they were disemboweling her.

  The swamp-tiger lifted its anterior right forefoot and dabbed experimentally at Dharthi. Dharthi drew back her lips and hissed at it, and it pulled the leg back and contemplated her, but it didn’t put the paw down. The next swipe would be for keeps.

  She could call Kraken now, of course. But that would just be a distraction, not help. Help had the potential to arrive in time.

  The idea of telling Kraken – and everybody – how she had gotten out of a confrontation with two of Venus’s most impressive predators put a new rush of strength in her trembling legs. They were juveniles. They were inexperienced. They lacked confidence in their abilities, and they did not know how to estimate hers.

  Wild predators had no interest in fighting anything to the death. They were out for a meal.

  Dharthi stood up on her refirming knees, screamed in the swamp-tiger’s face, and punched it as hard as she could, right in the nose.

  She almost knocked herself out of the damned tree, and only her windmilling left hand snatching at twigs hauled her upright again and saved her. The swamp-tiger had crouched back, face wrinkled up in distaste or discomfort. The other one was coming up behind her.

  Dharthi turned on the ball of her foot and sprinted for the end of the bough. Ten meters, fifteen, and it trembled and curved down sharply under her weight. There was still a lot of forest giant left above her, but this bough was arching now until it almost touched the one below. It moved in the wind, and with every breath, it creaked and made fragile little crackling noises.

  A few more meters, and it might bend down far enough that she could reach the branch below.

  A few more meters, and it might crack and drop.

  It probably wouldn’t pull free of the tree entirely – fresh Cytherean ‘wood’ was fibrous and full of sap – but it might dump her off pretty handily.

  She took a deep breath – clean air, rain, deep sweetness of flowers, herby scents of crushed leaves – and turned again to face the tigers.

  They were still where she had left them, crouched close to the trunk of the tree, tails lashing as they stared balefully after her out of eight gleaming cerulean eyes. Their fanged heads were sunk low between bladelike shoulders. Their lips curled over teeth as big as fingers.

  “Nice kitties,” Dharthi said ineffectually. “Why don’t you two just scamper on home? I bet mama has a nice bit of grue for supper.”

  The one she had peed on snarled at her. She supposed she couldn’t blame it. She edged a little further away on the branch.

  A rustling below. Now that’s just ridiculous.

  But it wasn’t a third swamp-tiger. She glanced down and glimpsed an anthropoid shape clambering up through the branches fifty meters below, mostly hidden in foliage but moving with a peculiar empty lightness. The shell. Coming for her.

  The urge to speed up the process, to try to climb down to it was almost unbearable, but Dharthi made herself sit tight. One of the tigers – the one she’d punched – rose up on six padded legs and slunk forward. It made a half dozen steps before the branch’s increasing droop and the cracking, creaking sounds made it freeze. It was close enough now that she could make out the pattern of its damp, feathery whiskers. Dharthi braced her bare feet under tributary limbs and tried not to hunker down; swamp-tigers were supposed to go for crouching prey, and standing up and being big was supposed to discourage them. She spread her arms and rode the sway of the wind, the sway of the limb.

  Her adaptshell heaved itself up behind her while the tigers watched. Her arms were already spread wide, her legs braced. The shell just cozied up behind her and squelched over her outstretched limbs, snuggling up and tightening down. It affected her balance, though, and the wobbling of the branch –

  She crouched fast and grabbed at a convenient limb. And that was more than tiger number two could bear.

  From a standing start, still halfway down the branch, the tiger gathered itself, hindquarters twitching. It leaped, and Dharthi had just enough time to try to throw herself flat under its arc. Enough time to try, but not quite enough time to succeed.

  One of the swamp-tiger’s second rank of legs caught her right arm like the swing of a baseball bat. Because she had dodged, it was her arm and not her head. The force of the blow still sent Dharthi sliding over the side of the limb, clutching and failing to clutch, falling in her adaptshell. She heard the swamptiger land where he had been, heard the bough crack, saw it give and swing down after her. The swamp-tiger squalled, scrabbling, its littermate making abrupt noises of retreat as well – and it was falling beside Dharthi, twisting in midair, clutching a nearby branch and there was a heaving unhappy sound from the tree’s structure and then she fell alone, arm numb, head spinning.

  The adaptshell saved her. It, too, twisted in midair, righted itself, reached out and grasped with her good arm. This branch held, but it bent, and she slammed into the next branch down, taking the impact on the same arm the tiger had injured. She didn’t know for a moment if that green sound was a branch breaking or her – and then she did know, because inside the shell she could feel how her right arm hung limp, meaty, flaccid – humerus shattered.

  She was dangling right beside her cocoon, as it happened. She used the folds of cloth to pull herself closer to the trunk, then commanded it to detach and retract. She found one of the proximity alarms and discovered that the damp had gotten into it. It didn’t register her presence, either.

  Venus.

  She was stowing it one-handed in one of the shell’s cargo pockets, warily watching for the return of either tiger, when the voice burst into her head.

  “Dhar!”

  “Don’t worry,” she told Kraken. “Just hurt my arm getting away from a swamp-tiger. Everything’s fine.”

  “Hurt or broke? Wait, swamp-tiger?”

  “It’s gone now. I scared it off.” She wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t about to admit that. “Tell Zamin the juveniles hunt in pairs.”

  “A pair of swamp-tigers?!”

  “I’m fine,” Dharthi said, and clamped down the link.

  She climbed down one-handed, relying on the shell more than she would have liked. She did not see either tiger again.

  At the bottom, on the jungle floor, she limped, but she ran.

  FOUR RUNS AND four sleeps later – the sleeps broken, confused spirals of exhaustion broken by fractured snatches of rest – the brightest patch of pewter in the sky had shifted visibly to the east. Noon had become afternoon, and the long Cytherean day was becoming Dharthi’s enemy. She climbed trees regularly to look for signs of geometrical shapes informing the growth of the forest, and every time she did, she glanced at that brighter smear of cloud sliding down the sky and frowned.

  Dharthi – assisted by her adaptshell – had come some five hundred kilometers westward. Maxwell Montes was lost behind her now, in cloud and mist and haze and behind the shoulder of the world. She was moving fast for someone creeping, climbing, and swinging through the jungle, although she was losing time because she hadn’t turned the adaptshell loose to forage on its own since the swamp-tiger. She needed it to support and knit her arm – the shell fused to itself across the front and made a seamless cast and sling – and for the pain suppressants it fed h
er along with its pre-chewed pap. The bones were going to knit all wrong, of course, and when she got back, they’d have to grow her a new one, but that was pretty minor stuff.

  The shell filtered toxins and allergens out of the biologicals it ingested, reserving some of the carbohydrates, protein, and fat to produce a bland, faintly sweet, nutrient-rich paste that was safe for Dharthi’s consumption. She sucked it from a tube as needed, squashing it between tongue and palate to soften it before swallowing each sticky, dull mouthful.

  Water was never a problem – at least, the problem was having too much of it, not any lack. This was Venus. Water squelched in every footstep across the jungle floor. It splashed on the adaptshell’s head and infiltrated every cargo pocket. The only things that stayed dry were the ones that were treated to be hydrophobic, and the coating was starting to wear off some of those. Dharthi’s cocoon was permanently damp inside. Even her shell, which molded her skin perfectly, felt alternately muggy or clammy depending on how it was comping temperature.

  The adaptshell also filtered some of the fatigue toxins out of Dharthi’s system. But not enough. Sleep was sleep, and she wasn’t getting enough of it.

  The landscape was becoming dreamy and strange. The forest never thinned, never gave way to another landscape – except the occasional swath of swampland – but now, occasionally, twisted fumaroles rose up through it, smoking towers of orange and ochre that sent wisps of steam drifting between scalded yellowed leaves. Dharthi saw one of the geysers erupt; she noticed that over it, and where the spray would tend to blow, there was a hole in the canopy. But vines grew right up the knobby accreted limestone on the windward side.

  Five runs and five... five attempts at a sleep later, Dharthi began to accept that she desperately, desperately wanted to go home.

  She wouldn’t, of course.

  Her arm hurt less. That was a positive thing. Other than that, she was exhausted and damp and cold and some kind of thick liver-colored leech kept trying to attach itself to the adaptshell’s legs. A species new to science, probably, and Dharthi didn’t give a damn.

  Kraken tried to contact her every few hours.

  She didn’t answer, because she knew if she did, she would ask Kraken to come and get her. And then she’d never be able to look another living Cytherean in the face again.

  It wasn’t like Venus had a big population.

  Dharthi was going to prove herself or die trying.

  The satlink from Zamin, though, she took at once. They chatted about swamp-tigers – Zamin, predictably, was fascinated, and told Dharthi she’d write it up and give full credit to Dharthi as observer. “Tell Hazards, too,” Dharthi said, as an afterthought.

  “Oh, yeah,” Zamin replied. “I guess it is at that. Dhar... are you okay out there?”

  “Arm hurts,” Dharthi admitted. “The drugs are working, though. I could use some sleep in a bed. A dry bed.”

  “Yeah,” Zamin said. “I bet you could. You know Kraken’s beside herself, don’t you?”

  “She’ll know if I die,” Dharthi said.

  “She’s a good friend,” Zamin said. A good trick, making it about her, rather than Kraken or Dharthi or Kraken and Dharthi. “I worry about her. You know she’s been unbelievably kind to me, generous through some real roughness. She’s –”

  “She’s generous,” Dharthi said. “She’s a genius and a charismatic. I know it better than most. Look, I should pay attention to where my feet are, before I break the other arm. Then you will have to extract me. And won’t I feel like an idiot then?”

  “Dhar –”

  She broke the sat. She felt funny about it for hours afterward, but at least when she crawled into her cocoon that rest period, adaptshell and all, she was so exhausted she slept.

  SHE WOKE UP sixteen hours and twelve minutes later, disoriented and sore in every joint. After ninety seconds she recollected herself enough to figure out where she was – in her shell, in her cocoon, fifty meters up in the Ishtarean canopy, struggling out of an exhaustion and painkiller haze – and when she was, with a quick check of the time.

  She stowed and packed by rote, slithered down a strangler vine, stood in contemplation on the forest floor. Night was coming – the long night – and while she still had ample time to get back to base camp without calling for a pickup, every day now cut into her margin of safety.

  She ran.

  Rested, she almost had the resources to deal with it when Kraken spoke in her mind, so she gritted her teeth and said, “Yes, dear?”

  “Hi,” Kraken said. There was a pause, in which Dharthi sensed a roil of suppressed emotion. Thump. Thump. As long as her feet kept running, nothing could catch her. That sharpness in her chest was just tight breath from running, she was sure. “Zamin says she’s worried about you.”

  Dharthi snorted. She had slept too much, but now that the kinks were starting to shake out of her body, she realized that the rest had done her good. “You know what Zamin wanted to talk to me about? You. How wonderful you are. How caring. How made of charm.” Dharthi sighed. “How often do people take you aside to gush about how wonderful I am?”

  “You might,” Kraken said, “be surprised.”

  “It’s hard being the partner of somebody so perfect. When did you ever struggle for anything? You have led a charmed life, Kraken, from birth to now.”

  “Did I?” Kraken said. “I’ve been lucky, I don’t deny. But I’ve worked hard. And lived through things. You think I’m perfect because that’s how you see me, in between bouts of hating everything I do.”

  “It’s how everyone sees you. If status in the afterlife is determined by praises sung, yours is assured.”

  “I wish you could hear how they talk about you. People hold you in awe, love.”

  Thump. Thump. The rhythm of her feet soothed her, when nothing else could. She was even getting resigned to the ceaseless damp, which collected between her toes, between her buttocks, behind her ears. “They love you. They tolerated me. No one ever saw what you saw in me.”

  “I did,” Kraken replied. “And quit acting as if I were somehow perfect. You’ve been quick enough to remind me on occasion of how I’m not. This thing, this need to prove yourself... it’s a sophipathology, Dhar. I love you. But this is not a healthy pattern of thought. Ambition is great, but you go beyond ambition. Nothing you do is ever good enough. You deny your own accomplishments, and inflate those of everyone around you. You grew up in Aphrodite, and there are only thirty thousand people on the whole damned planet. You can’t be surprised that, brilliant as you are, some of us are just as smart and capable as you are.”

  Thump. Thump –

  She was watching ahead even as she was arguing, though her attention wasn’t on it. That automatic caution was all that kept her from running off the edge of the world.

  Before her – below her – a great cliff dropped away. The trees in the valley soared up. But this was not a tangled jungle: it was a climax forest, a species of tree taller and more densely canopied than any Dharthi had seen. The light below those trees was thick and crepuscular, and though she could hear the rain drumming on their leaves, very little of it dripped through.

  Between them, until the foliage cut off her line of sight, Dharthi could see the familiar, crescent-shaped roofs of aboriginal Cytherean structures, some of them half-consumed in the accretions from the forest of smoking stone towers that rose among the trees.

  She stood on the cliff edge overlooking the thing she had come half a world by airship and a thousand kilometers on foot to find, and pebbles crumbled from beneath the toes of her adaptshell, and she raised a hand to her face as if Kraken were really speaking into a device in her ear canal instead of into the patterns of electricity in her brain. The cavernous ruin stretched farther than her eyes could see – even dark-adapted, once the shell made the transition for her. Even in this strange, open forest filled with colorful, flitting flying things. “Love?”

  “Yes?” Kraken said, then went silent and waited
.

  “I’ll call you back,” Dharthi said. “I just discovered the Lost City of Ishtar.”

  DHARTHI WALKED AMONG the ruins. It was not all she’d hoped.

  Well, it was more than she had hoped. She rappelled down, and as soon as her shell sank ankle-deep in the leaf litter she was overcome by a hush of awe. She turned from the wet, lichen-heavy cliff, scuffed with the temporary marks of her feet, and craned back to stare up at the forest of geysers and fumaroles and trees that stretched west and south as far as she could see. The cliff behind her was basalt – another root of the volcano whose shield was lost in mists and trees. This... this was the clearest air she had ever seen.

  The trees were planted in rows, as perfectly arranged as pillars in some enormous Faerie hall. The King of the Giants lived here, and Dharthi was Jack, except she had climbed down the beanstalk for a change.

  The trunks were as big around as ten men with linked hands, tall enough that their foliage vanished in the clouds overhead. Trees on Earth, Dharthi knew, were limited in height by capillary action: how high could they lift water to their thirst leaves?

  Perhaps these Cytherean giants drank from the clouds as well as the earth. “Oh,” Dharthi said, and the spaces between the trees both hushed and elevated her voice, so it sounded clear and thin. “Wait until Zamin sees these.”

  Dharthi suddenly realized that if they were a new species, she would get to name them.

  They were so immense, and dominated the light so completely, that very little grew under them. Some native fernmorphs, some mosses. Lichens shaggy on their enormous trunks and roots. Where one had fallen, a miniature Cytherean rain forest had sprung up in the admitted light, and here there was drumming, dripping rain, rain falling like strings of glass beads. It was a muddy little puddle of the real world in this otherwise alien quiet.