The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  But just before it hits him, the thing veers off and disappears into the silent distance. Listening carefully lest it return, Broadtail backs toward the rest of the group and they resume their journey to Longpincer’s house.

  Everyone agrees that this expedition is stranger than anything they remember. Longpincer seems pleased.

  Rob stopped his impeller and let the drones catch up. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. The Ilmatarans wouldn’t be scared off, and there was no way Rob could attack them. Whatever happened to Henri, Rob did not want to be the first human to harm an alien.

  The link with Henri was still open. The video showed him looking quite calm, almost serene.

  “Henri?” he said. “I tried everything I could think of. I can’t get you out. There are too many of them.”

  “It is all right, Robert,” said Henri, sounding surprisingly cheerful. “I do not think they will harm me. Otherwise why go to all the trouble to capture me alive? Listen: I think they have realized I am an intelligent being like themselves. This is our first contact with the Ilmatarans. I will be humanity’s ambassador.”

  “You think so?” For once Rob found himself hoping Henri was right.

  “I am certain of it. Keep the link open. The video will show history being made.”

  Rob sent in one drone to act as a relay as the Ilmatarans carried Henri into a large rambling building near the Maury 3a vent. As he disappeared inside, Henri managed a grin for the camera.

  Longpincer approaches the strange creature, laid out on the floor of his study. The others are all gathered around to help and watch. Broadtail has a fresh reel of cord and is making a record of the proceeding. Longpincer begins. “The hide is thick, but flexible, and is a nearly perfect sound absorber. The loudest of pings barely produce any image at all. There are four limbs. The forward pair appear to be for feeding, while the rear limbs apparently function as both walking legs and what one might call a double tail for swimming. Roundhead, do you know of any such creature recorded elsewhere?”

  “I certainly do not recall reading of such a thing. It seems absolutely unique.”

  “Please note as much, Broadtail. My first incision is along the underside. Cutting the hide releases a great many bubbles. The hide peels away very easily; there is no connective tissue at all. I feel what seems to be another layer underneath. The creature’s interior is remarkably warm.”

  “The poor thing,” says Raggedclaw. “I do hate causing it pain.”

  “As do we all, I’m sure,” says Longpincer. “I am cutting through the underlayer. It is extremely tough and fibrous. I hear more bubbles. The warmth is extraordinary – like pipe-water a cable or so from the vent.”

  “How can it survive such heat?” asks Roundhead.

  “Can you taste any blood, Longpincer?” adds Sharpfrill.

  “No blood that I can taste. Some odd flavors in the water, but I judge that to be from the tissues and space between. I am peeling back the underlayer now. Amazing! Yet another layer beneath it. This one has a very different texture – fleshy rather than fibrous. It is very warm. I can feel a trembling sensation and spasmodic movements.”

  “Does anyone remember hearing sounds like that before?” says Smoothshell. “It sounds like no creature I know of.”

  “I recall that other thing making similar sounds,” says Broadtail.

  “I now cut through this layer. Ah – now we come to viscera. The blood tastes very odd. Come, everyone, and feel how hot this thing is. And feel this! Some kind of rigid structures within the flesh.”

  “It is not moving,” says Roundhead.

  “Now let us examine the head. Someone help me pull off the shell here. Just pull. Good. Thank you, Raggedclaw. What a lot of bubbles! I wonder what this structure is?”

  The trip back was awful. Rob couldn’t keep from replaying Henri’s death in his mind. He got back to the station hours late, exhausted and half out of his mind. As a small mercy Rob didn’t have to tell anyone what had happened – they could watch the video.

  There were consequences, of course. But because the next supply vehicle wasn’t due for another twenty months, it all happened in slow motion. Rob knew he’d be going back to Earth, and guessed that he’d never make another interstellar trip again. He didn’t go out on dives; instead he took over drone maintenance and general tech work from Sergei, and stayed inside the station.

  Nobody blamed him, at least not exactly. At the end of his debriefing, Dr. Sen did look at Rob over his little Gandhi glasses and say, “I think it was rather irresponsible of you both to go off like that. But I am sure you know that already.”

  Sen also deleted the “Death to HK” list from the station’s network, but someone must have saved a copy. The next day it was anonymously relayed to Rob’s computer with a final method added: “Let a group of Ilmatarans catch him and slice him up.”

  Rob didn’t think it was funny at all.

  THE GARDEN

  A Hwarhath Science Fictional Romance

  Eleanor Arnason

  Here’s something you may have never seen before – a fascinating take on what a science fiction story would be like if it was written by an alien rather than by a human . . .

  Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the nineties, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel that won the prestigious James Tipree Jr. Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her most recent novel is Ring of Swords. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo Finalist in 2000. Her stories have appeared in our Seventeenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Annual Collections.

  THERE WAS A BOY who belonged to the Atkwa lineage. Like most of his family, he had steel-gray fur. In the case of his relatives the color was solid. But the boy’s fur was faintly striped and spotted. In dim light this wasn’t visible. In sunlight his pelt looked like one of the old pattern-welded swords that hung in his grandmother’s greathouse and were taken outside rarely, usually to be polished, though sometimes for teaching purposes, when adult male relatives were home. Not that anyone used swords in this period, except actors in plays. But children ought to learn the history of their family.

  The boy’s pelt was due to a recessive gene, emerging after generations, since the Atkwa had not gone to a spotted family for semen in more than two hundred years. This was not due to prejudice. Unlike humans, the hwarhath find differences in color more interesting than disturbing. Their prejudices lie in other directions.*

  It was circumstance and accident that kept the Atkwa solid grey. They lived in a part of the world where this was the dominant coloration; and – being a small and not especially powerful family – they did not look to distant places when arranging breeding contracts.

  As a toddler, the boy was forward and active, but not to an extraordinary degree. At the age of eight or so, he lengthened into a coltish child, full of energy, but also prone to sudden moods of thoughtfulness. These worried his mother, who consulted with her mother, the family matriarch, a gaunt woman, her fur frosted by age, her big hands twisted by joint disease.

  “Well,” the matriarch said after listening. “Some men are thoughtful. They have to be, if they’re going to survive in space, with no women around to do their thinking.”

  “But so young?” the mother asked. “He spends hours watching fish in a stream or bugs in a patch of weeds.”

  “Maybe he’ll become a scientist.” The matriarch gave her daughter a stern look. “He’s your only boy. He’s been strange and lovely looking from birth. This has led you to pay too much attention and to worry without reason. Straighten up! Be solid! The boy will probably turn out well. If he doesn’t, he’ll be a problem for our male relatives to handle.”


  At ten, the boy discovered gardening – by accident, while following a tli that had come out of the nearby woods to steal vegetables. The sun was barely up. Dew gleamed on the vegetation around his grandmother’s house. The air he drew into his mouth was cool and fragrant.

  The tli, a large specimen with strongly marked stripes, trundled over his grandmother’s lawn, its fat furry belly gathering dew like a rag wiping moisture off something bright. A metal blade maybe, the boy thought. A dark trail appeared behind the animal, and it was this the boy followed at a safe distance. Not that a tli is ever dangerous, unless cornered, but he didn’t want to frighten it.

  The animal skirted the house, entering the garden in back. There the tli began to pillage, a messy process with much (it seemed to the boy) unnecessary destruction. He ought to chase it away. But he was hit – suddenly and with great force – by the beauty of the scene in front of him. The perception was like a blade going into his chest. Don’t think of this as a figure of speech, exaggerated and difficult to believe. There are emotions so intense that they cause pain, either a dull ache or a sudden sharp twinge. Under the influence of such an emotion, one’s heart may seem to stop. One may feel wounded and changed, as one changed by a serious injury.

  This happened to the boy when he didn’t, as yet, understand much of what he felt. If he’d been older, he might have realized that most emotions go away, if one ignores them. Instead, he was pierced through by beauty. For the rest of his life he remembered how the garden looked: a large rectangular plot, edged with ornamental plants, their leaves – red, purple, yellow, and blue – like the banners of a guard in a military ceremony.

  Inside this gaudy border were the vegetables, arranged in rows. Some grew on poles or trellises. Others were bushes. Still others rose directly from the soil as shoots, fronds, clusters of leaves. The variety seemed endless. While the garden’s border was brightly colored, most of these plants were shades of green or blue. Yet they seemed – if anything – more lovely and succulent, beaded with dew and shining in the low slanting rays of the sun.

  So it was, on a cool summer morning, the air barely stirring, that Atkwa Akuin fell in love – not with another boy, as might have been expected, if not this year, then soon, but with his grandmother’s garden.

  He spent the rest of that summer in the plot, helping the two senior female cousins who did most of the house’s gardening. In the fall, he turned soil, covered beds with hay, trimmed what needed trimming and planted chopped-up bits of root. Black and twisted, they looked dead to him. But they’d send up shoots in the spring, his cousins promised.

  Akuin’s mother watched doubtfully. The boy was settling down to a single activity. That had to be better than his former dreaminess. But she would have been happier if he’d taken up a more boyish hobby: riding tsina, fishing in the nearby river, practicing archery, playing at war.

  “Give him more time,” said Akuin’s grandmother. “Boys are difficult, as I know.”

  She’d raised three. One had died young in an accident. Another had died in space, killed in the war that had recently begun. The enemy – humans, though their name was not yet known – had come out of nowhere in well-armed ships. Almost everything about them remained hidden in darkness as complete as the darkness from which they’d emerged. But no one could doubt their intentions. The first meeting with them had ended in violence. So had every encounter since.

  The matriarch’s third son was still alive and had reached the rank of advancer one-in-front. This should have given her satisfaction, but the two of them had never gotten along. Akuin’s uncle rarely came home for a visit. The matriarch lavished her attention on her one daughter, her nieces, and their children.

  Now she said, folding her twisted hands, “Maybe Akuin will become a gardener in a space station. Such people are useful. An army needs more than one kind of soldier.”

  When he was fifteen, Akuin went to boarding school, as do all boys of that age. In these places they learn to live without women and among males who belong to other lineages. This becomes important later. A boy who can’t detach himself from family and country is of little use in space.

  In addition, the boys complete their education in the ordinary hwarhath arts and sciences, the ones learned by both females and males; and they begin their education in the specifically male art and science of war.

  Akuin’s school was on the east coast of his continent, in an area of sandy dunes and scrub forest: poor land for gardening. Nonetheless, the school had a garden. Botany is a science, and horticulture is an art.

  It was on the landward side of the school complex, sheltered by buildings from the prevailing wind. Akuin found it the day after he arrived. To the west was a row of dunes, with the afternoon sun standing just above them. Long shadows stretched toward the garden. The gardener – a man with a metal leg – moved slowly between the rows of plants, bending, examining, picking off bugs, which he pressed between the fingers of his good hand. His other arm hung at his side, clearly damaged and not recently. It had shrunk till little remained except black fur over bone.

  Akuin thought he was unnoticed. But the gardener turned suddenly, straightened, and glared at him with yellow eyes. Akuin waited motionless and silent. He might be a little odd, but there was nothing wrong with his manners.

  “You’re new,” said the man finally. “Where from?”

  Akuin told him.

  “Inland. Why aren’t you on the beach? Or exploring the school? We have a fine museum, full of things which former students have sent back.”

  “I like gardens,” Akuin said.

  The man glared at him a second time, then beckoned, using his good hand. The boy came forward into the garden.

  The man’s name, it turned out, was Tol Chaib. He’d gone to this school years before, gone into space, then come back to teach. He said nothing more about himself in that first encounter. Instead he talked about the difficulty of growing healthy plants in sand. Partly, he said, he worked to change the soil. The school provided him with compost and manure. More than that was needed. “If there’s anything certain about boys and tsina, it’s that they will produce plenty of fertilizer.”

  Some of the excess went into lawns and ornamental borders. The rest was sold to local farmers.

  Mostly, he found plants that fit the local soil and weather. “Nothing else works. This is why it’s so difficult to grow our plants on other planets. The light is different, so is the invisible radiation. The soil has the wrong minerals, or minerals in the wrong proportions. A plant always grows best on its home planet, unless – as sometimes happens – it proliferates unnaturally in a strange place.”

  Akuin had been feeling lonely and afraid. How could he survive five years in school? At the end of his school years stood a fate even worse. Few hwarhath men remain on the home planet. From twenty to eighty, their lives are spent in space, exploring and preparing to meet the enemies who will inevitably appear. The universe is a dangerous place, and the hwarhath are a careful species. So the men go into space, looking for trouble, while their female relatives stay home, raising children, and practicing the arts of peace.

  Sixty years in metal corridors, with only brief visits home. Hah! The prospect was terrible.

  Now, listening to Tol Chaib, he felt a little comfort. Maybe he’d be able to survive school. He could certainly learn much from the crippled man.

  The school had a curriculum, of course. There were classes, labs, field trips, military exercises. Most of what Akuin did was required. But when he could decide for himself, he went to Tol Chaib’s garden or to the greenhouses where Chaib kept flowers growing all winter.

  That was a comfort on days when snow lay over the campus and a knife-wind blew off the ocean. The glass walls were covered by condensed moisture, making the world outside invisible. Inside was damp warm air, the smell of dirt and growing things, flowers that blossomed as brightly as a campfire, the gardener’s dry harsh voice.

  At first he told Akuin about the
plants around them, then about the gardening he’d done in space. Gardens up there – Tol Chaib waved at the ceiling – are necessary for five reasons. Men are healthier if they eat fresh fruit and vegetables. The plants help keep air breathable by removing carbon dioxide and providing oxygen. “This can be done by inorganic chemical reactions or by microbes, but a garden is more pleasant and produces air with a better aroma.”

  In addition, Tol Chaib said, every station and ship is supposed to be self-sufficient. “Ships become lost. A station might be cut off, if the war goes badly. If this happens, the men on board will need ways to provide themselves with air, food, and medicine.”

  “You’ve given me three reasons for gardens in space,” Akuin said. “Health, clean air, and self-sufficiency. What are the other two?”

  “Joy,” the gardener said. “Which is not usually produced by vats of microbes or inorganic chemical reactions, and hope that we will finally come home.”

  Toward the end of winter Akuin learned how Tol Chaib had been injured.

  He’d been the foremost gardener in a small station designed for research rather than war. A supply ship arrived, and the pilot made a mistake while docking – several mistakes, since he panicked when he realized the coupling of ship and station was going badly. The station’s outer skin had been punctured. There was sudden loss of pressure, and – Tol Chaib grinned. “The air lock system in my section of the station was new and had improvements, which did not work as planned.”

  When the rescue workers reached the garden, they found most of the plants gone, sucked into space. The garden’s equipment was mostly in pieces. Tol Chaib lay under a heap of debris, next to a lock that had finally closed.

  “They think – I don’t remember – that I was pulled from one end of the garden to the other, through several rooms. Most likely I hit things on the way. I certainly hit the airlock after it closed; and the debris hit me.