The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  … and the sun: pale and fitful, with a murky, copper color she did not recognize. Even on the clearest summer days, shadows and dark places seemed to dominate the endless snowfields. Nothing she could think of would account for it, though admittedly she knew less than a Soviet officer should about such things as windborne dust particles and the surface effects of eradicating the ozone layer. The Voskoya manual only spoke of “temporary climatological aberrations,” and Avdotya could see now that something was amiss, or that it was a case of the usual official “optimism-laden-with-a-secret-prayer:” the Communist faith.

  “I’ll never know,” she said aloud. Through the thick windshield, the stars glittered impassively.

  She was suddenly aware of a faint glimmer of light directly ahead on the flat horizon, diffuse and alone. A star? she thought. Perhaps the moonlight reflecting on a patch of ice somewhere in the middle distance.

  But there is no moon tonight, she realized.

  As she drew nearer, the image sharpened into several distinct points against the grey, sloping uplands beyond the desert. With a start, she recognized them as artificial lights.

  The highway map she carried showed a small town on the edge of the playa named Wendover. It sounded vaguely familiar, then she remembered that American B-29 crews had trained there to drop atomic bombs on Japan at the end of the Great Patriotic War. Now it was probably one of those desolate little settlements ringing the Nevada border, where oppressed and stupified working people could come and lose hard-won sustenance on gambling, gasoline, awful food, immoral stage acts, and other forms of swindle.

  Even so, someone was still there. It must be so, for the cold and seasonally violent weather had lasted too long for any power source to function without maintenance, whatever the wizardry of American technology. Someone had survived. How, here on the edge of the wasteland, Avdotya did not even consider. Instead, she unhitched a .357 magnum taken from a Cheyenne sporting goods store, and checked its load. But the feeling she had as she watched the bullets in the cylinder spin was not one of hate or fear. Instead, she felt a soft warmth in her stomach, and anticipation.

  The buried highway curved around the shoulder of a low, rocky range rising abruptly from the desert floor, and the town spread out along the edge of a stone-strewn alluvial fan. It was not much to look at: a few motels and gas stations, a surprising number of hotels and casinos, and rows of trailer homes in the snow. On the opposite side of the town, set upon a low knoll, lights illuminated a large casino-hotel complex, and something else.

  Avdotya could not understand what she saw, because the shapes scattered around the knoll were enormous and unfamiliar. She was a kilometer from the casino-hotel, off the interstate and rolling up the main road through town, when she noticed that one object, a long cylinder with stubby projections spaced along serrated spines, had fallen on a wing of the hotel, reducing most of the structure to rubble. A similar cylinder lay on its side in the parking lot, surrounded by the charred hulks of several automobiles. Ice lay congealed and black with dirt around the wreckage, as though it had melted in the heat of some great conflagration, and slowly refroze amidst the debris.

  A third cylinder rested upright on a squat tripod in the midst of the broad street in front of the casino. Though dented and burned, it seemed relatively intact.

  Just then, she thought she understood: R.V.S.N. missiles, perhaps XRS-4s from Mirnyj, malfunctioned while inbound and fell here. Or perhaps they did not malfunction; she knew little of the XRS generation’s performance profiles. Perhaps the spent boosters released their warheads, reentered the atmosphere, and by some fantastic coincidence, three of them came down on a casino on the Nevada-Utah border.

  Ridiculous.

  They were far too large, and no staged booster she knew of looked remotely similar. The chances of three spent boosters impacting on the same place were not high, and had they done so, providing they survived the heat of reentry, their explosive energy would have leveled the town. These objects were brought down under control, but something obviously had gone wrong.

  But what were they? And who had turned on the lights, outside on the garish signs and the driveways, and inside, in the undamaged portions of the casino and hotel?

  “I am in no shape for this,” she muttered.

  There is more to it than a few survivors holed up in a desert town, she thought as she glanced around. Above the truck, a large marquee flickered; a giant neon-lit cowboy hooked a hand in its denims and signaled her with its thumb. A cigarette drooped from the plastic face, and the red lips leered. She detested it.

  Cylinders with odd-looking fins and superstructures, she thought. Large. Torus-shaped bulges at one end …

  And then she had the answer: cylinders, large enough to be spacecrafts, perhaps—

  Something leaped onto the side of the cab and hammered on the window by her head.

  She had momentary impressions of a face, fangs, sharp features and staring eyes, and then she slammed on the brakes and pulled the pistol out of her jacket, and drew down on the creature through the glass.

  There was nothing there.

  She looked around, following her eyes with the oversized .357. Nothing.

  She waited.

  Finally she zipped herself into the thermal suit and unracked the M-16 from the ceiling compartment. She cracked open the cab door and stepped out onto the runner.

  The lights burned steadily on the snow-covered lawns and in the broken windows of the casino and hotel. The stars flickered overhead, random points of scintilla struggling against a few tatters of cirrus. The wind gusted, and fell silent.

  She climbed down off the truck, holding the rifle at ready. Barely had her boots sunk into the snow when she noticed footprints, shallow and rounded, angling away from a large depression where something obviously had struck and rolled.

  So she had seen the creature after all, she thought, and took a deep breath.

  Behind her, she heard a quiet footfall in the snow.

  She whirled around just as two of the creatures stepped from behind the back end of the truck, the red taillights glinting in their many-faceted eyes. She did not really think about what happened next; her reflexes and the panic she had held for so long under the surface flew together and achieved a critical state. She fired, squeezed the trigger and sprayed the things as they saw her and stopped in their tracks.

  She worked the trigger, and nothing happened. She looked stupidly at the rifle in her hands. It did not even click.

  Ayich! she thought. My gun is frozen.

  She shrugged suddenly, and dropped it. The creatures stared at her, not moving.

  They were ugly, she decided. They resembled three-meter-tall, rust-colored ducks, with curved fangs set in long, leathery snouts. Their arms were short and thick, and folded over large round bellies hidden in heavy cloaks. Skinny, chitinous legs held them up, and their naked knees were knobby and bent backwards. They were manifestly adapted to colder weather, and wore brightly-colored turbans around their heads. Avdotya did not know whether to laugh or be terrified, or simply amused at the irony, for their circumstances were clear now.

  They’re as lost as I am in this place, she realized. And I was going to shoot them.

  Ayich …

  She tried to smile at them, no small feat at the time, but it had no effect.

  She waved, and both creatures dropped clumsily into the snow and crouched, as if ready to run. After a minute they slowly got to their feet and looked at each other. They gesticulated and pointed, waving their arms and kicking their feet, murmuring in low tones. One finally turned and waved back.

  She waved again, and the second one waved. She smiled and waved both hands. They glanced at each other again, and then waved, one with its left arm, the other with its right.

  Interesting symmetry, she thought. I wonder what we’re saying … hello, probably; don’t hurt me.

  Abruptly she knew she was being watched from behind, and when she turned, she saw at leas
t fifteen or sixteen silhouettes standing in the snow, backlit in a ghostly, bluish aura by the floodlights on the hotel roof.

  I hope they’re not hungry, she thought inanely, suppressing an urge to giggle.

  They only wanted her to come indoors. Pointing and waving they escorted her past the smashed doors and the ice-encrusted lobby, through the casino and its legion of blinking, beeping slot machines and dusty crap tables, to the inner amphitheater and stage. There, they had insulated the walls, built low partitions for privacy, and set up unfamiliar generating and heating systems. There were shops and a rudimentary laboratory, and remembering the great cylindrical spacecraft propped upright in the street, she could guess what they were trying to do. Pieces of salvaged equipment, some of it of human origin, lay all about the stage.

  One of the creatures picked up an object and showed it to her, murmuring and turning it over and over in large, horny hands. It was a partially disassembled color television receiver with a Japanese brand name. She smiled and nodded, reminded that she had almost bought one, once. This time, everyone seemed to appreciate the smile; they waved at her as she stood there next to a gaming table strewn with odd beakers filled with colored liquids, shivering and wondering what she would do now. On the wall above, a grimy banner undulated in the air currents. Welcome to the Stateline, it read, Coming October 24th … the rest, ripped and frayed, was gone forever.

  4

  She lived with the ducks—for that was how her mind insisted on visualizing them—in the casino in Wendover for seven months, as summer gave way to winter, and a thin carbon dioxide sleet fell frequently. She was constantly cold, and at first, very frustrated. No one could talk to her, although by the middle of the third month the anthropologist whom she had taken to calling Daffy Duck, learned to read and write in English fairly well. It would not take the time to learn Russian, and although she bitterly resented the slight, she recognized the logic. Every day Daffy and the biologist, Lysenko Duck, would come to her room in a converted storage area off the stage, and sit at a wooden table under a strong light, murmuring to one another as Daffy painstakingly wrote out questions in longhand with a ballpoint pen. She would answer with short essays in dubious English typed on a battered word processor, or simply shrug her shoulders and wait for the next question.

  The ducks were very good to her. They brought her canned food and hotel furniture for her room, and little gifts: an electric razor, a child’s kite, a baby bassinet and a large portrait photograph of the former kitchen staff of the complex. Daffy brought her a set of plastic figures that could be manipulated to change from vaguely human form into aircraft or imaginary spaceships, and asked whether the religious significance of these icons were similar all over the planet. The ducks had found the toys in a box in the nursery of the church down the street. They were excited about the discovery, and nothing she could say could quite convince them of their mistake.

  They let her wander around the hotel and the grounds as much as she wanted. If she tried to approach the cylindrical spacecraft in the street, however, a phalanx of ducks always came running, and shooed her away with low, sing-song noises and gentle sweeping motions. They made no attempt to interfere with her in any other way, and she was sure they would let her go when she wanted, but it was plain they desired her to stay. She liked that.

  They asked her how she had survived, and she told them part of the story, but they never asked how everyone else had died. She appreciated the courtesy, thinking that the ducks must be endowed with a sense of tact, and repaid the favor by never mentioning the wrecked ships outside, or the sloppily-healed wounds some of them bore. Nor did she say anything about the morning on which she witnessed a suicide attempt by one of the ducks in the casino lobby, although she was deeply troubled by what it might mean, and why the others had reacted so quickly and seemingly without surprise.

  One evening she met Daffy Duck and the engineer she called Korolyov Duck on the lawn in front of the casino. She asked them where they were going, writing with a pencil on Daffy’s pad of paper. After murmuring to each other, they motioned for her to follow. She did her best to keep up as they crossed the town and climbed the barren slopes above. On a broad, gravel-strewn shelf below a sheer rock wall they came across many stone mounds set in parallel rows, perhaps a hundred or more. Here the survivors of the disaster, twenty-two in all, had buried their comrades. The first few weeks must have been very difficult, she reflected, as she sat on a boulder and watched while Daffy and Korolyov D. walked from grave to grave, sprinkling a reddish, crystalline substance on each mound.

  Custom, Daffy wrote when she asked. They had been here for several years, and two or three evenings a week a few of the survivors came up to lay grains of sand from home on the graves. The anthropologist’s attempt to explain why faltered badly, or else she could not grasp the translation from “duck” to English to Russian. Perhaps it had something to do with various ritualistic responsibilities of the living to dead, but she was disturbed by the reference to “those who had sacrificed themselves willingly for the mistakes of others,” and when she tried to question the anthropologist, it had turned away.

  She slept better at night. Occasionally she suffered dreams, and woke up with sweat rasping down her face and back. But there were mornings when she was almost glad to roll out of bed, if only to help the ducks carry equipment or clean the amphitheater, or chip away ice from the entrances. The ducks encouraged her, and Daffy always had a list of things to do.

  Later, she had an idea. There was a flatbed trailer in a gas station lot down the street. She proposed that they hook the trailer to her truck and make a run to Salt Lake City to look for useful items. The ducks considered it for a few days, but by that time they appeared to trust her too, and so they agreed. Once they found out what diesel fuel was, they happily set about distilling and reprocessing the muck in every gas tank and station in town. She and Daffy and Korolyov D., and sometimes Lysenko D. or Huey and Dewey and Lewey, drove to Salt Lake several times, and even to Reno on one occasion, and to the American air base at Mountain Home, Idaho. They brought back miscellaneous things: computer components, laser arrays, plastics, many types of valves and fittings, books, tapes, art objects, anything that looked interesting.

  She returned with videotapes and showed American movies on a salvaged VCR. The ducks were enchanted by Shane, and asked her to show it two or three times a week. She was baffled by their behavior toward this typical cowboy opera. As they watched Alan Ladd gun down the henchmen of the protobourgeoise rancher, they did incomprehensible things. Some rocked back and forth on the benches in unison, some made clicking noises with their beaks and raised and lowered their arms, while others sat still with their eyes shut. But when the little boy ran shouting after the hero Ladd at the end of the film, everyone stood up and screeched. A few of the ducks did a passable phonetic imitation.

  “Zannee! Quimbak … Zannee! Mumndad nid oo!” they cried.

  She showed Apocalypse Now, and their reaction bordered upon the bizarre. She found it an impressive documentation of a criminal holocaust, but the ducks appeared to argue about it for three days, during which time several became violently, but temporarily ill. Often they resorted to role-playing to make some important point. Once she walked into the casino to find Lysenko D. the biologist wading carefully through a pile of “corpses,” gesticulating to a group of unclothed ducks, brandishing pool cues on the balcony above. That evening they insisted upon seeing the movie twice. No one made a sound.

  The following day she had a long and frustrating argument with Daffy and Lysenko D. by note paper. For some obscure reason they wanted to bury the tape in the ground and post a guard over it. Their explanations made little sense to her. Their reaction to the movie appeared to be predicated upon the way in which the ducks distinguished imagination from reality, but she could not begin to understand their point of view. For their part, Daffy and Lysenko D. grew upset over her inability to comprehend them. Finally, they allowed her to
simply throw the tape away.

  She realized now how great the gulf was between herself and the ducks. There were superficial similarities, enough to communicate on a fairly complex level. It was quite possible that there were parallel personality and intellectual traits that ran deep. But the biological “wiring” was different, and the cultural matrix very strange to her. She might never understand their motivations, and they might always mistake hers. She was not unappreciative of their benevolent qualities, but she began to suspect that coexistence would become difficult as time went by. Paradoxically, as she grew familiar with the ways of the ducks, Avdotya isolated herself from them.

  5

  One morning Daffy Duck banged into Avdotya’s room lugging an assortment of equipment, including an ordinary stereo speaker and what looked like an amplifier and several cannibalized and resurrected computer components. The duck waved and set about plugging everything together, and she watched with interest, wondering what it was all about.

  After a few minutes Daffy threw two switches, typed in a sequence of commands, and then glanced up. It shoved a microphone over to the center of the table and murmured in low, modulated tones.

  “Hello. This project is successful. I feel happy,” the speaker said in English.

  She sat stunned. She exclaimed something in her native language, but the speaker burped and let out a high-pitched buzz.

  “In English, please,” said Daffy. “I am sorry.”

  “It is you speaking,” she said, and smiled.

  “Yes,” replied Daffy. “I have been successful with this project.”

  It paused.

  “But you do not speak to me naturally. This project needs refinement. It needs more memory. It especially needs more processing power and elective definition to decide proper nuance and syntax.”

  The duck rocked its head back and forth. “Again, I am sorry. I am not a linguist … that one is dead.” It motioned at the equipment on the table. “And I work with unfamiliar designs.”