The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  The Colombine is a weapon.

  The Colombine is Earth’s last hope, or nearly.

  The Colombine is a job.

  The Colombine is Maddy’s other self.

  The Colombine is broken.

  If Maddy’s anywhere near the war she can’t hear it. She tries putting her ear to the ground like some kind of hunting elf in one of Abby’s fantasy novels but feels stupid immediately, and stops. Now, her face turned back to the sky, she closes her eyes and hears the wind down in the valley, and somewhere a trickle of water. It would be so easy to fall asleep here. Maddy tries to remember the last time she fell asleep in the grass, and can’t.

  She’s not going to sleep here. If she does, something will come along and step on her, or the drugs in her system will run out, or the zone will find some other way to kill her. Maddy gets up.

  She follows the sound of the water up out of the cleft and across the slope, scrambles over some rocks, comes down into a space like a shallow bowl, where meltwater from the ridge has formed an oval pool about fifty yards long, ringed with gravel and gray mud.

  There is a girl there.

  She is squatting at the edge of the pool, all knees and elbows, trailing the fingers of one hand in the water. Maddy knows instantly that it’s a girl, though she can’t then say, and won’t later be able to say, how she knows; and Maddy knows instantly that it/she is not human. She is dressed from head to foot in something dark blue and mirror-glossy, so that Maddy can see the clouds above and the rippling water below reflected in it. It rises to cover her head as well, and drops to cover the hand that’s not in the water, so that only the skin of her hand and of her too-round face is uncovered; and that skin too is blue, or bluish, or maybe a pale gray made blue by the blue around it.

  The alien sees Maddy and instantly she straightens up, a quick, birdlike motion, and the glossy blue runs swiftly down her bare fingers and across her face, leaving only the eyes, not the inky black of a cartoon alien’s but large and round and bright like the eyes of a lemur. Standing, she’s even more obviously inhuman, her torso too long, her hips and shoulders too narrow, her waist nonexistent. But there’s something beautiful about her all the same, beautiful and strange, the more so as she seems to relax, and the armor or whatever it is withdraws again from her face and hands. It’s hard to read that strange face, but Maddy thinks she looks expectant, or maybe a little puzzled.

  Maddy comes down to the water, sliding a little on the loose, rocky ground, and the alien stays where she is; then when Maddy stops about ten feet away she comes closer, one pale blue-gray hand extended, long fingers splayed. Maddy tugs off her right glove and raises her own hand to match the alien’s. There’s the tiniest crackle of static electricity as their fingers meet. Maddy laughs.

  And then the alien’s head clicks round to train those wide eyes on something over Maddy’s left shoulder, and she grabs Maddy’s hand in a cool, strong grip as if by reflex; and then as Maddy turns to see Tanimura, frozen at the top of the slope, the alien drops Maddy’s hand as quickly as she took it. Her attention flickers from Tanimura to Maddy and back, her strange face agitated and unhappy. And then she jumps away, that blue armor flowing over her, mounding into strange forms that disguise the thinness of her body, opening out around her head like an umbrella or the brim of an enormous round hat, so that Maddy can no longer see the bright eyes.

  Then she’s getting bigger, somehow, as she retreats, heavier, wider, taller, impossibly tall, tall as the icy ridge, so that Maddy has to tilt her head back to take the blue shape in. And as Tanimura scrambles past her down the gravel slope and out into the water, hands outstretched, crying, the alien jumps back, seeming to hang for a moment between the snow and the sky, and Maddy recognizes the shape now, from the railroad cut and from Abby’s card game, and the broad cap tilts back and Maddy recognizes the eyes and the mouth that she’d been so sure meant death; and then the alien is gone.

  Tanimura is still moving, still wading out into the pool; it’s almost up to his waist. Maddy wonders if she’s going to have to drag him back. And then he stops, suddenly, and turns around, and sloshes his way back to the shore. He squats down, and puts his head in his hands. After a little while he looks up.

  he says.

  Maddy knows that word. Dumbass. Or something like. But she doesn’t think he means her. Maybe he means himself. Maybe he means it’s a dumb-ass situation. Or a dumb-ass world. She can’t say she disagrees.

  The Colombine’s cockpit stutters to life as soon as the Pierrot comes near. Together Maddy and Tanimura make their way down off the mountainside, find a road leading out of the zone, and follow it till they find a stretch of autobahn long and straight enough for the transport to land. Maddy speaks briefly to Asano over the radio; she doesn’t say anything to Tanimura. She hasn’t figured out what she wants to say.

  Aboard the transport, the Colombine secure in its cradle, Maddy powers the cockpit down again and sits in darkness. The amphetamines they gave her at the start of the mission are wearing off; she can feel it.

  She closes her eyes. She wishes she had a home, so that she could feel homesick for it. In the dark, she sees the alien girl.

  Back at the secret robot base she finds Tanimura in his cabin. It’s not the hikikomori rathole she’s been expecting. Apart from a few books, a Sony laptop, and a scattered deck of the recognition cards there’s no real sign anybody lives there. Tanimura is sitting on the bunk, playing some game on his phone, or maybe texting somebody. He stops when Maddy comes in.

  “I figured it out,” she says. “On the way back. She thought I was you, right? You met her, before. That’s why you ran away. But I bet they can’t tell us apart, and she thought I was you.”

  Tanimura doesn’t say anything.

  “It’s all a lie,” Maddy presses on. “Everything they’ve told us about the zones, about the enemy. Isn’t it? Maybe they’re not lying to us on purpose, but it’s all bullshit. They don’t know anything. You and me, we know more than they do.”

  Tanimura just looks at her. Maddy can’t tell if he understands her or not.

  “Look,” she says. “I want to help, okay? Who is she? What’s her name?”

  “Name?” Tanimura says.

  Maddy says. She goes to the desk, finds the card, holds it up. “Hers.”

  Tanimura looks at the card, then up at Maddy.

  “Grauekappe,” he says levelly. “AG-7.”

  Maddy stares at him.

  “Okay,” she says, dropping the card to the floor. “Fuck you, too.”

  She can’t get into the hangar. She wants to climb into the Colombine’s cockpit and put six inches of red metal between herself and the world, but they aren’t going to let her do that. She goes to the simulator room instead, and climbs up into one of the big white boxes and closes it and sits there unseeing as the computers run it through its routine, never touching the controls, so that she dies again and again; and then she wipes her eyes and opens the box and gets down.

  KATABASIS

  Robert Reed

  Here’s a story by Robert Reed, whose “Eater-of-Bone” appears elsewhere in this anthology.

  In the harrowing novella that follows, another of his “Great Ship” stories—a long-running series about a Jupiter-sized spaceship that endlessly travels the Galaxy with millions of passengers from many different races, including humans on board—bored rich immortals compete to complete a months-long trek across difficult terrain for no particular reason except to gain prestige in the eyes of their peers . . . but find that the stakes in this contest may be higher than they thought, and that their existence may come to depend on their alien guide, Katabasis.

  1

  The custom was to bring nothing but your body, no matter how weak or timid that body might be. Robotic help was forbidden, as were exoskeletons and other cybernetic aids. Every nexus had to be shut down; the universe and its distractions were too much of a burden to carry across the wilderness. Brutal work and miserable climate
s were guaranteed, and the financial costs were as crushing as any physical hardship. Food was purchased locally, every crumb wearing outrageous import fees, while simple tents and minimal bedding cost as much as luxury apartments. But most expensive were the indispensable porters: Every hiker had to hire one strong back from among a hodgepodge of superterran species, relying on that expert help to carry rations and essential equipment as well as the client’s fragile body when he proved too weary or too dead to walk any farther.

  Porters were biological, woven from bone and muscle and extravagant colors of blood. Evolved for massive worlds, most of them thundered about on four and six and even eight stout legs. But there were a few bipeds in the ranks, and one of those was a spectacular humanoid who called herself Katabasis.

  “Yet you seem small,” said the human male. “How can you charge what you charge, looking this way?”

  Katabasis was three times his mass and much, much stronger. But the question was fair. With an expression that humans might mistake for a smile, she said, “The client pays the penalty for being brought out on his back. When you give up, we earn a powerful bonus.”

  The human lifted a hand, two fingers tapping the top of his head. He had pale brown skin and thick hair the color of glacial ice, white infused with blue. The fingers tapped and the hand dropped and with genuine pride he said, “I studied the rules. I understand that rule.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “But these other creatures are giants,” he said. “That Wogfound would have no trouble carrying you. And the One-after-another looks easily stronger.”

  “All true,” she agreed. “But by the same logic, they feel no special obligation to look after their clients. Extra money has its charms, and if you shatter, they win. But I am relatively weak—as you wisely noted, thank you—and that’s why I avoid carrying others, even for a few steps. Ask the other porters here; you will learn. Katabasis is notorious for keeping her clients healthy, which not only adds to the value of the trek, but it saves you the ignominy of being brought into City West as a cripple or a carcass.”

  The modern brain was nearly impossible to kill, and no client had ever permanently died during these marches through jungle and desert. Yet immortality had its costs, including exceptional memories that played upon weaknesses like pride and dignity. Small humiliations were slow to heal. Giant failures could eat at the soul for thousands of years. Most humans would take her warning to heart. Yet this man was peculiarly different. Staring at the powerful, self-assured alien, he smiled for the first time. “Oh, no,” he said. “You cannot scare me.”

  Katabasis had centuries of experience with the species and its countenances, but she had never observed anything so peculiar as that broad, blatant grin and that bald declaration. She watched the ugly tongue curling inside that joyful mouth. The human made no attempt to hide his feelings. He was staring, obviously intrigued by the porter: The shape of her tall triangular face and the muscled contours of the rugged, ageless body, and how the bright golden-brown plumage jutted out of her work clothes. An interspecies fantasy was playing inside his crazy head. This happened on rare occasions, but never on the first day. And never like this.

  Without shame, the man adjusted his erection. “My name is Varid, and I want to hire you.”

  “No.”

  Varid didn’t seem to hear her. He continued to gaze at her with a simpleton’s lust. Then the face flattened, emptiness suddenly welling up in the eyes, and using a tone that was almost but not quite puzzled, he asked, “Why not?”

  “You won’t endure the journey,” Katabasis said.

  Varid tried to laugh but the sound came out broken, as if he was an alien attempting to make human sounds. Then the other arm lifted, bending to make a big bulge of muscle. “I’m exceptionally fit. I’ve trained for years, preparing for this day. Designer steroids and implanted genes, and I have special bacteria in my gut and my blood, doing nothing but keeping this body in perfect condition.”

  “It isn’t the body that concerns me,” she said.

  Varid shut his eyes and opened them again. “What are you saying?”

  “Your mind is the problem.”

  He responded with silence.

  “I don’t know you,” Katabasis continued, “but my impression is that you have a fragile will and a foolish nature.”

  The human face remained empty, unaffected.

  “Hire the One-after-another,” she said, one broad hand picking him off the ground and then setting him aside. “She’s more patient than most porters, and she won’t speak too rudely about you once you give up.”

  In the remote past, in some distant parcel of the newborn universe, someone harvested the core of a Jovian world. Godly hands filled the sphere with caverns and oceans, and then they swaddled their creation inside a hull of hyperfiber. Towering rockets rose thousands of kilometers above the stern, and the new starship was fueled and launched. Yet nobody ever came onboard. The machine’s purpose and ultimate destination were forgotten. Billions of years later, humans found the derelict wandering the cold outside the Milky Way, and after considering a thousand poetic names, that lucky species dubbed their prize “the Great Ship” and began a long voyage around the entire galaxy, offering passage to any species or individual that could afford the price of a ticket.

  Early in the voyage, a high-gravity species sold asteroids and rare technologies to the humans and with their earnings bought passage for a distant solar system. Once onboard, they built a vast centripetal wheel. The wheel was deep inside the Ship, helping minimize the natural, distracting tug of real gravity. Forty kilometers wide and nearly five hundred kilometers in diameter, their home spun a circle every eight minutes, pressing them snugly against the wheel’s rim.

  Eventually the aliens reached their destination, and they sold their home to a speculator with dreams but few resources.

  That began a sequence of bankruptcies and auction sales. Each grand plan ended with fresh disappointment. Investors changed and new tenants worked the ground with false optimism, and then everything would fall apart again. In that piecemeal fashion, the habitat’s climate was modified and rectified in places while other regions were left to shatter, creating an ecological stew populated by survivors from a thousand massive worlds. Today the lone sea was shallow and hypersaline, bordered by City East and City West, while at the opposite end of the wheel stood a chain of mashed-down mountains. An artificial sun rode the hub, throwing a patchwork of colors and intensities of light into a maze of valleys, and after thousands of years, for no reason but luck, a splendidly fierce and decidedly unique biosphere had matured.

  The current owners occupied City West, and so long as their investment produced capital and public curiosity, they were happy.

  Every porter lived in City East. An abrasive, brawling community, it was as diverse as the countryside if not so beautiful. With powerful arms, Katabasis had hollowed out a boulder of quake-coral, making a cavity where she could sleep easily. She liked the City, and she loved to walk its shoreline every day, but she also had debts upon debts, which was why she worked constantly and why the wilderness was as much of a home as any place.

  Prospective clients gathered every morning at the official trailheads. Among today’s crop were several species that she preferred to humans. But Varid wasn’t only peculiar, he proved especially stubborn. She tried to whisk him aside, but he insisted that she should be his porter, making noise about proving his worth and giving away wild bonuses for her trust.

  At that point, she interrupted. “No, I won’t take you, no.” Her voice was sharp, and everything about the scene was in poor form. But at last the man seemed to understand. One last time, his face emptied. Varid finally walked away, slowly approaching the One-after-another. The small success lasted until two other humans approached—a mated couple, unexceptional to the eye—and Katabasis wondered why her day was cursed.

  Then the male human did something rare. Not only had he read Katabasis’ public po
sting, he also had some understanding of her species. Raising one hand to make introductions, he looked skyward and called to her by name.

  She lifted the backs of her hands, which was how one smiled politely to a stranger.

  The human was named Perri. A handsome monkey, athletically built and younger in the face than fashionable, he raised his second hand and introduced his wife. Quee Lee took one step and another and then rested. She was a dark elegant creature built from curving tissues and pleasant odors. But there were telltale signs of intense training and medical trickery at work in the muscle beneath those curves, and the creature’s new strength was lashed to reinforced bones that could weather the relentless weight. Making humans ready for this gravity was as much art as engineering. Too much bulk, no matter how powerful, eventually dragged the body to its doom. In most circumstances it was smart to begin small and build the flesh where needed, on the trail and fed by the precious rations. That’s why it was a good sign, these humans being smaller than most, and perhaps they understood at least one vital lesson.

  QueeLee raised her arm. “It is an honor to cross paths with you.”

  “You have made this trek before,” Katabasis guessed.

  “I managed the half-kilometer from the custom office, yes,” she said, her mouth filled with bright teeth.

  “But I made the full circuit once,” Perri said. “Three hundred years ago, and my wife has been training since I returned home.”

  “I’m trying to make my life exciting,” said Quee Lee.

  “I am a boring husband,” he said.

  The two laughed loudly, excluding the world with their pleasure.

  Katabasis studied how they moved, how they stood, and with experience and unsentimental eyes, she sought the warning signs of failure.