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

by Gardner Dozois

  But the scarcity of metal was an endless burden. With a starship’s power and a hundred talented engineers, they would have slashed deep into this old stony world, wrenching free enough treasure to make up the shortfalls. But their ship little more than a stripped and starving hulk, and the mission’s various disasters had decimated what began as a minimal engineer corps. These were inventive, intelligent people, yes. Ad hoc pumps pulled river’s worth of seawater through atomic filters. Plastics and diamond were manufactured in impressive quantities. Their best biologists were little more than gifted hobbiests, but they were still able to manipulate a succession of earth plants, inventing new species that breathed the dense rich atmosphere. But then their main reactor failed for the final time, and a series of technical solutions proved miserably unworkable. After that, emotion ruled over reason. Decent people quarreled and eventually picked sides, and during one awful winter, most of the technological innovations and all of the deep decent thoughts that humans had brought from the stars were pushed aside.

  Mercer survived that winter war, and he didn’t suffer much during the following year’s long rebellion. But an organized, pragmatic soul had to recognize the inevitable. Their tiny colony existed only as a name on a few unread maps. In another year, or perhaps two, the last shreds of organization would collapse. People that he had known for ages — friends and a few lovers — would try to murder him. Or even worse, those trusted faces would coax him into their battles, using smiles and implicit threats.

  The colonists considered Mercer to be organized and passionless, and that’s why he served as the semi-official shopkeeper. One summer night, a distant volcano sent a dense cloud of ash over the sky, covering the brown dwarf’s glowering face. The shopkeeper used that lucky darkness to slip into various locked storerooms, collecting items of value. Then he made two piles of supplies, and he forced himself to leave the larger pile, stuffing the smaller one into a pack that he could carry without too much pain, and if necessary, run with.

  Before dawn, Mercer abandoned the human realm. By then, there were only three working plasma guns. Each faction had congealed around its own murderous gun. What he carried was one of the broken guns, and if confronted, his plan was to bluff. And if that bluff didn’t fool anybody, he had a diamond-barreled kinetic gun in easy reach. That would drop a few bodies, at least temporarily. People were already slow to heal, what with the shortages of calories and key nutrients. But fortunately there was no need to play games or to fight. No one noticed the shopkeeper as he slipped over the town’s rock wall and ran down to the ocean’s edge. One last time, Mercer paused and listened to the night breeze, some tiny piece of him believing that a woman had just called his name. But this was only another one of his ghosts speaking. The voice that he had heard, sweet little Deleen’s, had been silenced last year, executed for undefined crimes against the irritable, ineffectual state.

  The moons were down, the tide out. The summer skin lay against the wet shore, thick and hard as wood, and each stride felt momentous. He walked quickly until the blazing sun rose, and then after a long look at the flat terrain behind him, Mercer continued to walk, ignoring sleep and food for three full days.

  Reaching this isolated chunk of land took years.

  Alone, he had wandered countless places and watched whatever this world would show him, and on rare occasions, he had interacted with the sentient organisms called Nots by no one but his exceptionally rare species.

  In despairing moments, he talked to his ghosts. His memories. Not to the dead colonists, but to people he had known in his previous life. Most of them were probably still alive, scattered across a thousand successful colonial worlds. They were thriving today, he could assume. In their comfortable immortality, those happy souls would eat whatever they wished and sleep without care, and when the mood struck, they could become experts in the narrowest, dreamiest fields. Undoubtedly a few old friends had studied their local sentients, learning curious secrets and sharing their findings with an increasingly human galaxy.

  To his ghosts, Mercer often explained the Nots.

  The biology of this place wasn’t unique, but along many lines, it had pushed what was possible to the rational limit. Life here most certainly evolved on one of the outer moons. Since the White Moon was smallest and cooled first, it was the most likely candidate. But that world was little more than a titanic drop of water with mud and stone trapped at the core. In those depths, peptide nucleic acids were utilized for genetic material — built from the commonest elements, yet tough enough to withstand a wide range of temperatures and pH. Huge, cumbersome proteins were spawned. A patient metabolism must have evolved. Then some forgotten comet splashed into that living water, sending up storms of viable spores. Ten billion years ago, the Nots’ world would have been a hot, sterile realm. The spores fell, and a precious few of them survived, and the subsequent ten billion years of natural selection had taught the invaders to use more of the periodic table, but not much more. In tiny amounts, iron was embraced. And phosphorus. And sulfur. But life is a perniciously conservative business, after all. With an abundance of free oxygen and water, living cells and their makeshift chemistries could afford to be inefficient. Even when the sea was covered with a deep, suffocating layer of living skin, plenty of dissolved oxygen remained in the depths, nourishing the minimal gills. And despite a steeply elliptical orbit, the world’s seasons remained predictable. Carnage and small successes had led to an astonishing array of creatures, and those species continued playing hard at life, utilizing nothing but the same few, utterly functional ingredients.

  Where the Nots thrived, humans struggled.

  In their blood and bones, the colonists held the talent to endure huge abuse and repair even the most catastrophic wound. But magic was never free, and their particular magic demanded huge stores of chemical energy as well as most of the periodic table — dozens of elements far, far rarer than the ancient rust running through their arteries.

  Tiny, sophisticated organs hid inside Mercer’s ageless body, and he had never fully understood what any of them accomplished.

  But they were vital, and they were shamelessly greedy. Those intricate machines relied on oddities like selenium and bismuth, terbium and silver, and in this diluted realm, sweat and pee and every lost drop of blood carried away what was essential and often irreplaceable.

  Before the Nots’ world, Mercer felt no particular interest in the workings of his heart and lungs. But after abandoning the colony, he had no choice: If he didn’t replace his losses, atom by atom, and if he didn’t build up reserves to carry him across the lean centuries, then his body would literally fall to pieces.

  Success was never easy, much less inevitable. But the life that he had fashioned on this island, by himself and for the benefit of no one else, was an accomplishment worthy of celebration. Without hesitation, he would set his life story against the best in human history. There were days when his success felt boundless, and he couldn’t help but smile with a smug, defiant pride. And there were summer nights, like this good night, when he was certain that he would never have to abandon this familiar ground or the fanhearts, or the Nots for whom he felt every emotion, including a deep, aching love.

  He reached the barricade as the Gold Moon fell from sight.

  Every Not had a simple but important calendar woven into its peculiar mind. To survive, Mercer had decided to plant himself inside his neighbors’ consciousness, which included dividing their year into a string of memorable dates. Ages ago, the first night of every summer brought death. Masked and alone, the human monster would suddenly march out of the hills to terrorize the farmers and fishermen, slaughtering all those who dared fight him. Nots might be slow learners, but their most vivid memories were often transcribed into their genetics and carried into their offspring. He wrote on their souls, using terror and hatred as well as a god’s endless patience. And by defeating his neighbors, he eventually taught those tiny creatures to accept and then embrace what was inevitab
le.

  The Nots tried and tried and tried to kill the alien in their midst.

  For centuries, they would send out their champions and their slaves, and they hired mercenaries who came here on the winter boats. The best of those professional killers had experience fighting similar monsters. The colony was lost, but their offspring were spreading across every landmass. Mercer was just the oldest of a dangerous breed. But he was a large strong opponent, and experienced, and he was fighting on ground that he knew better than anyone, and most important, he was far too shrewd to fool.

  In the end, Mercer had the power to murder the last of the local Nots — a tiny population huddling inside a stone fort built in desperation, set far out on one of the island’s distant fingers. He arrived there on the first night of a long-ago summer, but without warning or explanations, he showed mercy. In ways that even the simplest Not could understand, the human monster betrayed a charity of spirit. He spent half of that night marching circles about the fort. Then he suddenly slid his long diamond sword back into its scabbard and set to work, wrenching free one of the fort’s smaller stones. A well-fed human, trained and rested, was stronger than six Nots. He carried that rock to the tip of the finger. The tide was high. He looked at the open water and then glanced back at the cowering faces, and when every eye was fixed on him, he threw the rock into the brackish sea.

  Then he returned to the fort and claimed a second stone and threw it on top of the first.

  In all, he tossed only a dozen rocks into the bay. At dawn, he strode back into his hills, back to bed in his small underground home again. And the Nots, misunderstanding his message, dismantled the fort and tossed every last block into the bay, creating a tiny second island.

  That marked a momentous truce that held for a full year. Then the first summer night came again, and he returned and again threw rocks into the open water.

  Gradually, very gradually, his intentions became clear.

  Several generations of Nots grew old and died away, but the monster’s arrival remained a linchpin to their year. Afterwards, when they began adding rocks to the growing cofferdam, he rewarded them with gifts of wild meat and planks sliced from one of the giant magna-wood trees. As he slowly learned their ancient, inherited language, and they learned about his mind, understandings were reached. Principles became law. A bright young Not paid close attention to this ritual with the rocks, and after making an intellectual leap, she managed to explain her inspiration to others. Ignorant of the science, they nonetheless finished the cofferdam before the water grew warm. With a hill’s worth of packed mud, they sealed the bay off from the sea, even at high tides. And as the sun grew huge in the pale green sky, the bay evaporated, leaving behind nothing but thin white grime that their monster demanded for no conceivable reason.

  But when two pirate boats came that following winter, Mercer generously slaughtered every last one of those invaders.

  By then, no one but him could remember when dropping the ceremonial rock was not a tradition. Just once, Not youngsters got the foolish idea that they could kill the god while he was naked, unarmed and unaware. They took the trouble to ambush Mercer as he slipped through the barricade. But even with a couple arrows buried in his guts, he proved far more dangerous than any of those tiny fools. The rock that would have been thrown on the dam crushed skulls instead. He ripped off heads with his bare hands, and he stomped on squirming bodies, and cursing in their little language, he told everyone in earshot just how pissed he was, promising a hard long miserable summer in exchange for this undeserved treachery.

  That was three thousand summers ago, and since then, nothing like it had happened again.

  But for the glowing mask, he was naked: A fearless image striding onto the Nots’ rich ground. At a random point, Mercer bent low, picking up a worthy stone. Then he began to run again, powerful ageless legs carrying him down a rocky lane that was created more by his feet than any of theirs. It was night still, farmhouses and apartment buildings dark with the hour. But he knew that most of his neighbors were awake and watching, hiding out of respect more than fear, but their inherited fear never quite removed. Before dawn, he would run out on the same fingertip of land and throw the rock on top of the well-repaired dam, and if there was time, he would examine the various flumes and subsidiary dams that helped increase the production of salts and other precipitates: The summer’s treasure destined to fill a few dozen jars that he kept inside a locked room hidden in his forbidden home.

  Summer had arrived, and at a perfect moment like this, there was no reason to suppose that the next billion summers didn’t belong to him as well — a balanced and endless life that would outlast human civilization and perhaps his species too.

  Eventually this cluster of old suns would abandon the Milky Way. Hotter, richer stars would blow up and die away. But here he would remain, running down a tame road not too different from this road, while above, in the increasingly darkening sky, the last relics of the universe steered inexorably toward the Cold Death.

  8

  The world was bathed in sunlight. Not one winter cloud remained, and for the first days of this exceptionally early summer, the surrounding sea was brilliant and clear, cold to the eye and to the touch. But when the surface water warmed just enough, countless spores and seeds were shaken awake. One calm afternoon saw the transparent water fill with blue-black ink, and the following night brought the calming glow often called summer-milk. Furious biochemical reactions created that wistful silver-white light. She already knew this, but Mercer was full of obscure details and a willingness to share everything he knew. Thrilled with the sound of his voice, he happily explained how nothing mattered to that watery vegetation except to be near the surface once the summer bloom was finished. For heatweave and kather, and in particular, the giant ocean bladderweeds, the goal was to be planted on the very top, sooty-black leaves to the sky. For cooperative fickles and tuts and old-henry-balls, success was to supply the foundation for this buoyant, closely packed jungle, their deep roots pulling up the water desperately needed by the sun-broiled canopy.

  The origins of this elaborate system mattered. Mercer claimed as much, and she offered agreeable noises whenever he glanced her way. But when he spoke about evolutionary pressures and microchemistries and the wondrous vagaries of chance, her mind wandered. Her life — what little there had been of it — had depended on hard, determined effort. The vagaries that mattered were her next meal and a stolen knife or two, and with luck, some hidden shelter where she could sleep for ten thousand uninterrupted breaths. She never needed to know how this rigid black summer skin spread across the world’s water, or where it grew best, or precisely how an array of simple, catalyst-impoverished organisms managed to build such a marvel out of light and air and drink.

  Mercer still used her joke name. “Dream,” he called her. And she let him, since the past didn’t matter except when its lessons allowed her to reach the future. And by future, she meant only her next few days, or in her most expansive moments, the rest of this unexpected summer.

  From a dozen vantage points, she gazed out at the fresh skin of the ocean, judging its thickness and its rigidity, and most important, how far from this long rocky patch of land it had managed to reach.

  There was open water to the north, she observed.

  “A deep cold current runs out there,” Mercer reported. “A polar current. By mid-summer, you won’t see water. But the skin never gets thick, and the mix of species changes constantly.”

  South was a more interesting direction.

  “How close is the mainland?” she asked.

  He offered one of his ludicrous figures, using a measurement system that still made no sense to her.

  She glanced at him, frowning.

  And he laughed, and winked, and then only with his face, he revealed the first traces of concern. “As I told you, Dream. The continent is a very long distance from us.”

  “But will this skin reach all that way?”

 
“Maybe,” he allowed. “But there’s an undersea canyon between us and the rest of the world. And several big rivers keep the currents pushing. In your average summer, the skin finishes late, and it’s never stable or strong.”

  “But you keep saying: This is a hot early summer.”

  And when he didn’t reply, she asked, “Does the sea-skin ever come early enough and grow hard enough to let everything that wants to walk, walk?”

  She was wondering if she could leave the island.

  But Mercer didn’t understand her thinking, or he chose to ignore it. “Since I’ve been living here,” he quietly reported, “this island has been joined to the continent five times. Five different summers.”

  So many thousands of years had passed, yet he knew the precise number. She had no doubt that Mercer could tell stories about each of those long summers. But the topic was too speculative to hold her interest, which was why she said nothing else, staring out across the flat black face of the sea.

  She wasn’t stupid. Mercer said as much a little too often, as if trying to convince himself. He liked to explain how her brain was nearly the same as the one he carried inside his hard old skull. Between their ears sat a bioceramic wonder — the culmination of design and evolution. Even if the flesh was peeled from her bones, and the bones themselves were burnt and crushed, her brain would endure. Impacts and chemical explosions meant nothing. The hottest fires were ignored. Nuclear temperatures were required to consume what held her soul. Mercer mentioned that there used to be murderous weapons called plasma guns, but the last of them were disabled ages ago. Nothing in this solar system could manage that kind of blaze, unless it was the sun itself.