The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “I think he likes the Batinites.”

  “They are easy folk to like.”

  “There are more such folk than you might think.”

  “I think you are bald. Beneath the hijab, I mean. Bald, and maybe with ears like conch shells.”

  “Oh, you are a past master of flattery! You and I may never team again. You will go through a gate and I will go through another, and maybe one of us will not come back.”

  “I am no Shi’a. I do not practice muta’a.”

  Iman’s face set into unreadable lines. “Is that what you think? A marriage with an expiration date? Then perhaps you do not know me, after all.” She went to the flap of his pavilion and paused a moment slightly bent over before passing without. “It’s black,” she said, turning a bit to cast the words back. “Black and very long, and my mother compared it to silk. As for the ears, that price is higher than you’ve paid so far.”

  With that, she was gone. Hassan thought they had quarreled. I have seniority, he told himself. She will join Soong and Mizir and me when we next go out. He could arrange that. There were people in the House of Gates who owed him favors.

  The next day, Hassan sent Bashir back to Earth for supplies and because he was so young, sent Mizir to accompany him and Khalid to drive the other-bus. They took discs full of information and cases of specimens for the scholars to study “Check calibration on clock,” Soong reminded them as they buttoned down. “Time run differently in Other ’Brane.”

  “Thank you, O grandfather,” said Khalid, who had driven many such runs before, “I did not know that.”

  “Insolence,” Soong complained to Hassan afterward. “Reminder never hurt.”

  “Makes me nervous having only the one buggy left,” Yance said. “Y’know what I mean? We can’t get all of us and all our gear into one, if’n we have to bug out in a hurry.”

  “Bug out?” Soong thought the word related to “buggy.”

  “Y’never know,” Yance said, feigning wisdom by saying nothing, so that Soong was no more enlightened.

  That evening, Klaus came to Hassan with a puzzle. “These are for today the surveillance flights over ‘Six-foot City’.”

  “Don’t call the natives ‘six-foots.’ What’s on the videos?”

  “I hope that you will tell me.”

  Klaus was usually more forthcoming. He had the German’s attitude toward facts. He ate them raw, without seasoning, and served them up the same way. There was something brutal about this, for facts could be hard and possess sharp edges, making them hard to swallow. Better to soften them a little first by chewing them over.

  Klaus’ video had been shot at night and had the peculiar, greenish luminescence of night vision. The time stamp in the lower right named the local equivalent of three in the morning. The drone had been conducting a biosurvey over the tidal flats north of the city – Mizir had spotted some peculiar burrowing creatures there on an earlier flyover – and during the return flight, motion in the city below had activated the drone’s sensors.

  “It is most peculiar,” Klaus said. “Most peculiar.”

  How peculiar, Hassan did not know. Perhaps it was customary for large groups of the Batinites to wake from their sleep and come outdoors in the small hours of the morning, although they had never done so before. Yet, here they were in their multitudes: on balconies, on rooftops, at their windowsills, in small knots gathered before the doorways of their buildings. All turned skyward with a patient stillness that Hassan could only call expectation. The drone had lingered in circles, its small Intelligence sensing an anomaly of some sort in the sudden mass behavior. And then, first one worldling, then another pointed skyward and they began to behave in an agitated manner, turning and touching and waving their tentacled upper arms.

  “Have they seen the drone?” Hassan asked. It was hard to imagine, stealthed as it was and at night in the bargain. “Perhaps they sense the engine’s heat signature?” Mizir had floated the hypothesis that some of the gelatin pits on the headball were sensitive to infrared.

  “No,” said Klaus, “observe the direction in which they stare. It is to the east, and not directly above.”

  “How do you know which way they stare, when they have no faces?” In truth, it was difficult to judge in the unearthly light of night-vision. Everything was just a little soft at the edges, and features did not stand out.

  “Look how they hold their bodies. I assume that their vision is in the direction in which they walk. It makes reason, not so?”

  “Reason,” said Hassan. “I wonder what reason brought them all out in the middle of the night?”

  “Something in the sky. Ask Soong. Such a mystery will please him.”

  Hassan made a note to talk to Soong, but as he turned away, something in the panning video caught his eye, and that something was this:

  When all men fall prostrate in prayer, the one who kneels upright stands out like bas-relief. When all men run, the one remaining still is noted. And when all men look off to the east, the one with face upturned seemed to be staring directly at Hassan himself.

  Which was to say, directly at the drone. “This one,” said Hassan, striking the freeze-frame. “What do you make of him?”

  “So . . . I had not noticed him before.” Klaus peered more closely at the screen. “A heretic, perhaps.” But his chuckle stuck in his throat. “I meant no offense.”

  Hassan, much puzzled, took none. Only later would Mizir remind him that to a European, Mecca lies proverbially east.

  “Planet,” Soong announced with grave satisfaction after evening had fallen. “Most systems, many planets. This rising significant to sixlegs.”

  “Don’t call them sixlegs. Why would it have special significance?”

  Soong made a gesture signifying patient ignorance. “Perhaps beginning of festival. Ramadan. Fasching. Carnival.”

  “Ramadan is not a festival.”

  “So hard, keep Western notions straight,” Soong answered. Hassan was never certain when Soong was being droll. “Is brightest object now in sky,” the geophysicist continued, “save inner moon. Maybe next planet starward. Blue tint, so maybe water there. Maybe second living world in system!”

  The next day, the worldlings went about their city bearing arms.

  There had been little sign of a military hitherto, but now Havenites drilled and marched on the parkland south of the city. They ran. They jumped. They practiced ramming shot down the long barrels of their weapons. They marched in rank and file and executed intricate ballets to the rhythmic clapping of their lower arms. Formations evolved from marching column to line of battle and back again. The floral arrangements that had checkerboarded the park were soon trampled and their colors stamped into a universal sepia. It bothered Hassan when behaviors suddenly changed. It meant that the team had missed something basic. “Why?” he asked, watching through the binoculars, expecting no answer.

  But he received one of sorts that evening: When the Blue Planet rose, some of the worldlings fired their weapons in its direction and raised a staccato tattoo that rose and fell and rippled across the city like the chop on a bothered sea.

  “Fools,” muttered Soong, but Hassan recognized defiance when he saw it.

  “Of planet?” the Chinese scoffed. “Of omen?”

  Iman was saddened by the guns. “I had hoped them beyond such matters.”

  “What people,” Hassan said, “have ever been beyond such matters?”

  Klaus grunted. “It will be like Bismarck’s wars, I think. No radio, but they must have telegraphy. No airplanes, but a balloon would not surprise me.”

  Iman turned on him. “How can you talk of war with such detachment?”

  But Klaus only shrugged. “What other way is there?” he asked. “All we can do is watch.” Ladawan and Yance and the others said nothing.

  The day after that, the second other-bus returned with fresh supplies and equipment. Mizir off-loaded a wealth of reagents, a sounding laser, and a scanning electron micr
oscope. “It’s only a field model,” he said of the microscope, “but at last I can see!” Soong regarded the aerosondes and high-altitude balloons and judged them passable. “View from height, maybe informative,” he conceded, then he turned to Mizir and grinned, “So I, too, look at very small things.” A team of mechanics had come back with Bashir and Khalid and they set about assembling the ultralight under Yance’s impatient eyes.

  “They wanted to know if you’ll let the other teams through yet,” Bashir told Hassan.

  “No.”

  “But . . . I told them – ”

  “It was not for you to tell them anything!” Hassan shouted, which caused heads to turn and Bashir to flinch. Hassan immediately regretted the outburst, but remained stern. “Something has developed in the city,” he said brusquely, and explained about the rising of the Blue Planet, al-Azraq, and the sudden martial activity.

  “The new star marks their season for jihad,” Bashir guessed.

  “Who ever had such seasons?” Hassan scolded him. “It is the struggle with our own heart that is the true jihad.”

  “Maybe so,” said Yance, who had overheard, “but when folks are in a mood for a ruckus, any reason’ll do.” He studied the ultralight thoughtfully. “I just hope they don’t have anti-aircraft guns.”

  Iman learned to recognize Batinites.

  “They only look alike,” she said, “because they are so strange, and the common strangeness overwhelms the individual differences.”

  “Yes,” said Soong. “Like Arab curlicues. All letters look same.”

  “The Batinites do not have faces, exactly,” Iman reminded them, “but the features on their headball are not random. There are always the same number of pits and ferns and they always appear in the same approximate locations . . .”

  “No surprise there,” said Mizir. “How many humans are born with three eyes, or with noses where their ears should be?”

  “. . . But the sizes of these features and the distances between them vary just as they do among humans. How else do we recognize one another, but by the length of the nose, the distance between the eyes, the width of the mouth . . .”

  “Some mouths,” Yance whispered to Bashir, “being wider than others.”

  “. . . I have identified seventy-three eigenface dimensions for the Batinite headball. The diameters of the pits; reflectivity of the gelatin in them; the lengths of the fronds and the number and size of their ‘leaves’; the hue of the skin-plates . . .”

  “You don’t have to name them all,” Hassan said.

  “. . . And so on. All too strange to register in our own perception, but the Intelligence can measure an image and identify specific individuals.”

  “Are there systematic differences between the two races?” Mizir asked. “I think you will find the cobaltics have more and broader ‘leaves’ than the ceruleans.”

  “Why so they have! On the dorsal fronds.”

  Mizir nodded in slow satisfaction. “I believe those function as heat radiators, though I cannot be certain until I explore their anatomies. If the cobaltics are a tropical folk, they may need to spill their heat more rapidly. None of the mountain species here in our valley have those particular fronds – or any related feature. At this altitude, spilling excess heat is not a great problem.”

  “More evidence,” Bashir suggested, “that the Havenites have come from somewhere else.”

  The Intelligence had been teasing threads of meaning from the great ball of yarn that was the Batinites’ spoken tongues. The task was complicated by the presence of two such tongues, which the Intelligence declared to be unrelated at the fifth degree, and by the inferred presence of scores of specialized jargons and argots. “The folk at the docks,” Klaus pointed out, “must have their own language. And the thieves that we sometimes hear whisper in the night.”

  “They don’t whisper,” Iman told him. “They hum and pop and click.”

  “Those pits on the headball,” Mizir mused, “are drums. Wonderfully adapted. They no more evolved for speaking than did human lips and tongue. They were recruited; and yet they serve.”

  “If they cannot speak from both sides of the mouth,” Klaus observed, “they may sometimes say two things at once.”

  “The advantage of having more than one orifice adapted to making sounds.”

  Klaus made a further comment and laughed; but because he made it in German no one else got the joke, although it concerned making sounds from more than one orifice.

  They input the murmuring of the crowd from the night when al-Azraq first appeared and the Intelligence responded with . . . murmuring, and the occasional cry of [the Blue Planet! It rises/appears!] and [expression of possible dismay and/or fear]. It was not a translation, but it was progress toward a translation.

  There may have been another language, a third one, which made no use of sounds, for at times they observed two Batinites together, silent but in evident communication.

  “It’s the fern-like structures,” said Mizir. “They are scent receptors. At close range, they communicate by odors.”

  “Inefficient,” scoffed Klaus.

  “Inefficiency is a sign of natural selection,” Mizir assured him. “And some messages may be very simple. Run! Come!”

  “It’s not the scents,” said Iman. “Or not the scents alone. Observe how they touch, how they stroke one another’s fronds. They communicate by touching one another.” She challenged the others with an upthrust chin and no one dared gainsay her, for she herself often communicated by touch. “What else is a handshake, a clap on the shoulder,” she insisted, “or a kiss?”

  They decided that the frond-stroking amounted to kissing. Some was done perfunctorily. “Like a peck on the cheek,” Yance said. Some was done with great show. Some, indeed with lingering stillness. Whatever it meant, the Havenites did it a lot. “They are an affectionate people,” Bashir said. Iman said nothing, but tousled the young man’s hair.

  Bashir had tele-piloting duty the night when a drone followed a soldier out into the park. This soldier wore an ill-fitting uniform of pale yellow on his high cerulean form, one unmarked by any of the signifiers of rank or status that the Intelligence had deduced. It rode a sixleg horse past neglected fields and up the gravel road that led to the once-manicured hilltop. It rode unarmed.

  When it reached the level ground where the Haven folk had sported at games beore taking up more deadly rehearsals, the soldier dismounted and spoke soft drumbeats, as of a distant and muffled darbuka.

  Other drumbeats answered and a second Batinite, a tall slim cobaltic, emerged from the grove of six-cedar and poplar. The two approached and stood together for a while, intertwining their tentacled upper arms. Then the second spoke in two voices. One voice said [Show/demonstrate/make apparent – (to) me/this-one – you/present-one agency – immediate time] and the other said [Fear/dread/flight-or-fight – I/this-one agency – now-and-from-now]. At least so the Intelligence thought it said. Yet what manner of ears must they have, Bashir marveled, to parse a duet!

  The soldier answered in like harmony, [Appears/shows – it/that-one agency – not-yet] and [this-one (pl?) – defiance resolution/resignation (?) – now-and-from-now.]

  The cobaltic had brought a basket and opened it to reveal covered dishes of the puree of grains and legumes that the Batinites favored on their picnic outings and which the Earthlings called batin-hummus. [Eat/take in – this item/thing – you/present-one agency – immediate time] and [Cook/prepare – I/this-one agency – past-time.]

  The soldier had brought food as well: a thick, yellow-green liquid in pear-shaped bottles from which he pried the caps with a small instrument. The two removed their upper garments – a complex procedure in that four arms must withdraw from four sleeves – and exposed thereby the mouths in their torsos.

  “I wonder if humans can eat those foods of theirs,” Iman said. She had come up behind Bashir and had been watching over his shoulder. “A new, exotic flavor to excite the jades . . .” Eve
r since al NahTHa, the appetite for such things had grown and grown. The Rebirth, the Rediscovery. Art. Literature. Song. Science. Everything old was new again, and the new was gulped down whole.

  “I’ve distilled a fluid from the oil-grass,” Mizir told them. He sat at the high table drinking coffee with Ladawan and Klaus. “But whether I have obtained a drink or a fuel I cannot say. Yance will not let me put it in the ultralight’s gas tank; but he will not drink it for me, either.” The others laughed and Klaus indicated Mizir’s small, exquisite mug, whose contents had been brewed in the Turkish fashion. “My friend, how would you know the difference?”

  “Coffee,” said Mizir with mock dignity, “is more than hot water in which a few beans have passed an idle moment.” He took his cup and left the table to stand with Iman and Bashir. “Hassan?” he asked her through lips poised to sip. Iman shook her head and Mizir said, “He is always cautious when encountering a new world.” He turned his attention to the screen just as the soldier ran its tentacles across the fronds of the taller one’s headball and then . . . inserted those tentacles into its own mouth. “What is this?” Mizir said, setting his cup on its saucer and bending closer.

  “A new behavior,” Iman said delighted and pulled her datapad from her belt pouch. “Bashir, what is the file number on the bird’s download? I want to view this later.” She entered the identifier the boy gave her and with her stylus scratched quick curlicues across the touch-screen. “Into the oral cavity . . .” she mused.

  “What does it mean?” Bashir asked, and no one could tell him.

  Usually the Batinites fed themselves by gripping spoons or tines with an upper hand, most often with the left. Sometimes, though rarely, they held food directly using one of their middle hands, typically the right. (“Complementary handedness,” Mizir had called it.) Yet the two Batinites on this double-mooned evening abandoned their spoons to their awkward middle hands, while their delicate and tentacled uppers entwined each other’s like restless snakes.