The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I can’t think of why we would need any such reasons.”

  “So you have no philosophy of constant expansion? No ideology?”

  “I do not know what those words mean,” Drill said.

  Gram closed her eyes and lowered her head. “I am sorry,” she said.

  “No need. We have no conflicts in our ideas about ourselves, about our lives. We are happy with what we are.”

  “Yes. You couldn’t be unhappy if you tried, could you?”

  “No,” Drill said cheerfully. “I see that you understand.”

  “Yes,” Gram said. “I scent that I do.”

  “In a few million years,” Drill said, “these things will become clear to you.”

  * * *

  The first Shar ship returned from Drill’s home, reporting a transfer of the Memory. The field around Ship filled again with thousands of Shars, crying their happiness to the skies. Other Memories were now taking instructions to all terraforming bases. The locations of two new planets were released. Ships carrying spare Memories leaped into the skies.

  It’s working, Drill told Memory.

  Long, Memory said. Very long.

  But Memory could not lower Drill’s joy. This was what he had lived his life for, and he knew he was good at it. Memories of the future would take this solution as a model for negotiations with other species. Things were working out.

  * * *

  One night the Shars outside Ship altered their behavior. Their singing became once again a moaning, mixed with cries. Drill was disturbed.

  A communication came from the President. “Cup is dead,” she said.

  “I understand,” Drill said. “Who is his replacement?”

  Drill could not read Gram’s expression. “That is not yet known. Cup was a strong person, and did not like other strong people around him. Already the successors are fighting for the leadership, but they may not be able to hold his faction together.” Her ears flickered. “I may be weakened by this.”

  “I regret things tend that way.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So do I.”

  * * *

  The second set of ships returned. More Memories embarked on their journeys. The treaty was holding.

  There was a meeting aboard Ship to formalize the agreement. Cup’s successor was Brook, a tall, elderly Shar whose golden fur was darkened by age. A compromise candidate, President Gram said, his election determined after weeks of fighting for the successorship. He was not respected. Already pieces of Cup’s old faction were breaking away.

  “I wonder, your Excellency,” Brook said, after the formal business was over, “if you could arrange for our people to learn your language. You must have powerful translation modules aboard your ship in order to learn our language so quickly. You were broadcasting your message of peace within a few hours of entering real space.”

  “I have no such equipment aboard Ship,” Drill said. “Our knowledge of your language was acquired from Shar prisoners.”

  “Prisoners?” Shar ears pricked forward. “We were not aware of this,” Brook said.

  “After our base Memories recognized discrepancies,” Drill said, “we sent some Ships out searching for you. We seized one of your ships and took it to my home world. The prisoners were asked about their language and the location of your capital planet. Otherwise it would have taken me months to find your world here, and learn to communicate with you.”

  “May we ask to arrange for the return of the prisoners?”

  “Oh.” Drill said. “That won’t be possible. After we learned what we needed to know, we terminated their lives. They were being kept in an area reserved for a garden. The landscapers wanted to get to work.” Drill bobbed his head reassuringly. “I am pleased to inform you that they proved excellent fertilizer for the gardens. The result was quite lovely.”

  “I think,” said President Gram carefully, “that it would be best that this information not go beyond those of us in this room. I think it would disturb the process.”

  Minister-General Vang’s ears went back. So did others’. But they acceded.

  “I think we should take our leave,” said President Gram.

  “Have a pleasant afternoon,” said Drill.

  * * *

  “It’s important.” It was not yet dawn. Ship had awakened Drill for a call from the President. “One of your ships has attacked another of our planets.”

  Alarm drove the sleep from Drill’s brain. “Please come to the airlock,” he said.

  “The information will reach the population within the hour.”

  “Come quickly,” said Drill.

  The President arrived with a pair of assistants, who stayed inside the airlock. They carried staves. “My people will be upset,” Gram said. “Things may not be entirely safe.”

  “Which planet was it?” Drill asked.

  Gram rubbed her ears. “It was one of those whose location went out on the last peace shuttle.”

  “The new Memory must not have arrived in time.”

  “That is what we will tell the people. That it couldn’t have been prevented. I will try to speed up the process by which the planets receive new Memories. Double the quota.”

  “That is a good idea.”

  “I will have to dismiss Brook. Opposite Minister-General Vang will have to take his job. If I can give Vang more power, he may remain in the coalition and not cause a split.”

  “As you think best.”

  President Gram looked up at Drill, her head rising reluctantly, as if held back by a great weight. “My son,” she said. “He was on the planet when it happened.”

  “You have other offspring,” Drill said.

  Gram looked at him, the pain burning deep in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  * * *

  The fields around Ship filled once again. Cries and howls rent the air, and dirges pulsed against Ship’s uncaring walls. The Shar broadcasts in the next weeks seemed confused to Drill. Coalitions split and fragmented. Vang spoke frequently of readiness. President Gram succeeded in doubling the quota of planets. The decision was a near one.

  Then, days later, another message. “One of our commanders,” said President Gram, “was based on the vicinity of the attacked planet. He is one of Vang’s creatures. On his own initiative he ordered our military forces to engage. Your terraforming Ship was attacked.”

  “Was it destroyed?” Drill asked. His tone was urgent. There is still hope, he reminded himself.

  “Don’t be anxious for your fellow humans,” Gram said. “The Ship was damaged, but escaped.”

  “The loss of a few hundred billion unconscious organisms is no cause for anxiety,” Drill said. “An escaped terraforming Ship is. The Ship will alert our military forces. It will be a real war.”

  President Gram licked her lips. “What does that mean?”

  “You know of our Shrikes and so on. Our military people are worse. They are fully conscious and highly specialized in different modes of warfare. They are destructive, carnivorous, capable of taking enormous damage without impairing function. Their minds concentrate only on tactics, on destruction. Normally they are kept on planetoids away from the rest of humanity. Even other humans find their proximity too … disturbing.” Drill put all the urgency in his speech that he could. “Honorable President, you must give me the locations of the remaining planets. If I can get Memories to each of them with news of the peace, we may yet save them.”

  “I will try. But the coalition…” She turned away from the transmitter. “Vang will claim a victory.”

  “It is the worst possible catastrophe,” Drill said.

  Gram’s tone was grave. “I believe you,” she said.

  * * *

  Drill listened to the broadcasts with growing anxiety. The Shars who spoke on the broadcasts were making angry comments about the execution of prisoners, about flower gardens and values Drill didn’t understand. Someone had let the secret loose. President Gram went from group to group outsid
e Ship, talking of the necessity of her plan. The Shars’ responses were muted. Drill sensed they were waiting. It was announced that Vang had left the coalition. A chorus of triumphant yips rose from scattered members of the crowd. Others only moaned.

  Vang, now simply General Vang, arrived at the field. His followers danced intoxicated circles around him as he spoke, howling their responses to his words. “Triumph! United will!” they cried. “The humans can be beaten! Treachery avenged! Dictate the peace from a position of strength! We smell the location of their planets!”

  The Shars’ weird cackling laughter followed him from point to point. The laughing and crying went on well into the night. In the morning the announcement came that the coalition had fallen. Vang was now President-General.

  In his sleeping chamber, surrounded by his video walls, Drill began to weep.

  * * *

  “I have been asked to bear Vang’s message to you,” Gram said. She seemed smaller than before, standing unsteadily even on her tripod legs. “It is his … humor.”

  “What is the message?” Drill said. His whole body seemed in pain. Even Lowbrain was silent, wrapped in misery.

  “I had hoped,” Gram said, “that he was using this simply as an issue on which to gain power. That once he had the Presidency, he would continue the diplomatic effort. It appears he really means what he’s been saying. Perhaps he’s no longer in control of his own people.”

  “It is war,” Drill said.

  “Yes.”

  You have failed, said Memory. Drill winced in pain.

  “You will lose,” he said.

  “Vang says we are cleverer than you are.”

  “That may be the case. But cleverness cannot compete with experience. Humans have fought hundreds of these little wars, and never failed to wipe out the enemy. Our Memories of these conflicts are intact. Your people can’t fight millions of years of specialized evolution.”

  “Vang’s message doesn’t end there. You have till nightfall to remove your Ship from the planet. Six days to get out of real space.”

  “I am to be allowed to live?” Drill was surprised.

  “Yes. It is our … our custom.”

  Drill scratched himself. “I regret our efforts did not succeed.”

  “No more than I.” She was silent for a while. “Is there any way we can stop this?”

  “If Vang attacks any human planets after the Memories of the peace arrangement have arrived,” Drill said, “the military will be unleashed to wipe you out. There is no stopping them after that point.”

  “How long,” she asked, “do you think we have?”

  “A few years. Ten at the most.”

  “Our species will be dead.”

  “Yes. Our military are very good at their jobs.”

  “You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is … instinct. Or reflex.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Drill.

  Gram’s body trembled. “That is the tragedy of it,” she said.

  * * *

  An hour later Ship rose from the field. Shars laughed their defiance from below, dancing in crazed abandon.

  I have failed, Drill told Memory.

  You knew the odds were long, Memory said. You knew that in negotiations with species this backward there have only been a handful of successes, and hundreds of failures.

  Yes, Drill acknowledged. It’s a shame, though. To have spent all these months away from home.

  Eat! Eat! said Lowbrain.

  * * *

  Far away, in their forty-mile-long Ships, the human soldiers were already on their way.

  PAUL J. MCAULEY

  The Temporary King

  The following story of the unexpected effects of a high-tech culture on a Future Shocked rural village begins, in its own words, “as all the old stories began”—but it ends very differently indeed.

  Born in Oxford, England, Paul J. McAuley is one of a number of British writers beginning to make names for themselves in the SF world of the late ’80s. He is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold stories to Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and to other markets. His first novel, 400 Billion Stars, is forthcoming from Del Rey Books. McAuley works as a cell biologist at Oxford University, and lives near Oxford with his family.

  THE TEMPORARY KING

  Paul J. McAuley

  I’ll begin as all the old stories began, and tell you that once upon a time there was a great forest in the shadow of a mountain, and in a clearing of the forest stood a house built all of logs, and roofed with living grass. It was the home of the Lemue family, and the head of the family was my father; I was his youngest child and only daughter. That was how things were before Gillain Florey arrived.

  I remember him even after all this time as well as if he had just now left the room. For I was the first of our family to see him, and I was the cause of his downfall. It was spring then, all those years ago. In the mud and new reeds beside the creek, frogs were calling hoarsely each to each; there was a scantling of green along the limbs of the dogwood and alder trees, and the flowers of the magnolias were just about blown; and every still pool was mantled with a golden scum of pine pollen, wrinkling in the wind like the blankets of uncertain sleepers. It isn’t the same here, under the dome, where you notice the spring only by changes in the quality of the light if you notice it at all. When I was a child, the lengthening days and the warmer weather were only a part of it. It was like a great reawakening, a stirring; and I felt the same stirring, too.

  I was seventeen then, yes, the same age as you. That’s why I’m telling you this now. Seventeen, and I felt as if I had done everything that could be done in the forest. I felt trapped, closed in, by the worn familiarity of home, by the prospect of marriage. Oh, I suppose I loved Elise Shappard, but it had all been arranged by his father and mine. I loved Elise, but not in the way you’ll love, freely, of your own choice. I felt that there had to be more, but I didn’t know what. My family and the house and a small part of the forest were all I knew.

  So that spring day, when my mother asked that someone go collect ivy sap—it makes a good red dye, and we boiled some of our wool in it—I went gladly, carrying a pot and a small knife up through the fern clumps that were just beginning to show new buds beneath the pines. And that was where I found the man.

  He was stretched full out on a bank of ivy amongst the roots of a leaning pine, boots crossed one on the other, his trousers of some shiny, dark stuff, the flaps of his leather vest open on his smooth, naked chest. His face was as white as a woman’s, and his hair long and tangled, like black snakes around his head. I remember how I hardly dared breathe as I looked at him, as if he were a vision conjured by the finest, most delicate of spells. And then his eyes opened. I dropped my pot and my knife, and I ran.

  I made a fair commotion when I reached the house, scattering hens and geese as I ran yelling through the compound. People looked out of doors and windows to see what was happening, and I’d hardly had time to begin to gasp out what I’d seen—a man, a stranger, up in the forest—when someone cried out a warning and we all turned.

  In the distance, someone emerged from the shadows beneath the trees and strolled down from the grass slope toward the house as if it were his own and he were returning to it. He briefly disappeared when he reached the ha-ha; then he had scrambled up the other side and started to cross the bare fields.

  One of my uncles called, “Don’t worry, Clary, we’ll see him off!” and someone else swung onto a horse and, brandishing a staff, galloped toward the stranger. Behind him the others whooped and yelled encouragement. He swept past, and the stranger ducked the staff, raising his hand as the rider—it was my b
rother Rayne—checked his mount and turned. And then the horse stumbled, plowing into the ground in a tangle of legs and reins, Rayne tumbling over its head. Someone screamed, and someone else fired a shot that sprayed dirt a meter from the stranger’s boots. Tall, white-faced, he turned to us and once more raised his hand.

  The air turned white, white as the sun. It felt as if your eyeballs had all of a sudden turned inward and there was nothing in your head but cold, white fire. It was all so sudden that I didn’t even feel frightened, was simply puzzled that I was lying on the ground with someone’s boots in front of my face.

  It was the stranger.

  I picked myself up; all around, everyone else was picking himself up, too. The men shuffled uncertainly, all of their oafish bluster deflated by the magic. A dog barked a challenge and someone hushed it. We were all looking at the stranger, who was looking at me.

  I felt a kind of laughter bubbling inside, a singing in my head, and I brushed at my dress and stepped up to him. I still don’t know why I did it; perhaps I felt responsible.

  He smiled and held out my knife, hilt-first. “You dropped this, Seyoura. I’m afraid your little pot was broken, though.” The pupils of his eyes were capped with silver; there was something funny about his knuckles.

  I became frightened, snatched the knife, and backed off into my mother’s embrace. But the spell was broken. My father, pulling on his beard, cautiously approached the smiling stranger, then stuck out his hand, which the stranger looked at, then shook. The other men, all my uncles and brothers, began to crowd around, grinning, asking him how he had knocked us all down, how he could knock Rayne’s horse over without touching it (leading the horse, which seemed none the worse, Rayne came limping up, ruefully shaking his head but grinning like the rest). My mother had once said that the games of men always required that someone be hurt, so that they would seem more important than they were; and now that it was all over with no more than a sprained ankle to show for it, they were babbling in relief. The stranger was the calm center of it all, smiling and shaking hands, telling them that his name was Gillain Florey, please call him Gil, that he came from another world.