Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  The boys ate their bread. Campbell and I watched, keeping companionable silence. The boys fidgeted. Campbell and I made them stretch in the grass, crawling and parting the fronds, reminding them to close their eyes and mouths as they moved through it, like swimmers. We sent them one by one up onto a small pile of rocks to look around the plain and see if they spotted the hebras (or anything else). They got bored and hungry and finished their bread heels and drank half the whole day’s water supply. Derk got bit by something nasty and flying and a welt came up on his arm. He didn’t complain, though. Good kid. It warmed and we stripped off our outer layer of coats.

  The first group came in, including Jove. He shook his head at me. “Nothing.”

  The second and third groups found each other and came in together, then the fourth. No one reported seeing anything bigger than a jumping-prickle or a long-tailed rat. We made a long string of humans and sandwiches at the base of the cliff, still downwind from the ropes. We rested on warm rocks. The three boys abandoned me and Jove. I figured they’d be watched well enough between so many of us. Besides, they too had seen cats bring down a baby hebra this spring. Surely they’d be cautious.

  “Did you see anything interesting out there?” I asked Jove.

  “Grass.”

  Well, true enough. His right cheek showed a set of thin lines where he’d seen the grass too closely, and one had been deep enough that it was slightly crusted with blood.

  “You should clean up before that starts itching.” I dug an antiseptic cloth out of my bag, adding a bit of water from my canteen to bring it to life. Some plants here were the antidotes to other plants, and we had a whole team of botanists doing nothing more than cataloging everything we learned. This was one of their gifts. Jove took the cloth, and while he wiped up his cheek and a deeper cut I hadn’t noticed on his forearm, I said, “They know we’re here. They’ve been grazing here every day for two years except winters and today—maybe they’re territorial and this is the territory for this herd. They’ve been watching us watch them, but they don’t like us all the way down here.”

  “What next?” he asked.

  We still had half of this day. “Let’s try again today, send everyone in one group except me and Campbell and the boys. Have you all go together along the road so you get farther away, and then make two teams and go forward. Maybe you can get far enough out for the hebras to be between you and me. Just don’t spook them. Sometimes they sleep during the day, but they’ll have watchers.”

  He handed me back the cloth instead of just putting it in his own pocket.

  I took it.

  “How do you know what they do during the day? You’re always working.”

  “I ask around the fire at night. Almost no one sees them during the day. One theory suggests they go into the woods, another that they sleep when the big predators sleep. I kinda like—”

  A scream cut my sentence off. One of the boys. “Demons!”

  No! They slept during the day. I knew that. Everybody knew that. Dammit—what did I know? I leapt up, dropping the rest of my lunch, and scrambled to a higher rock behind me. Our line—stretched out maybe twenty meters—did the same, people backing up against the cliff.

  “To me,” I called. The demons would try and surround the ends first, to isolate a single person or two and then kill them easily. I tried to recall who was where, couldn’t remember. Lousy leading.

  A demon bayed as if answering me, the same call I’d heard from the cliff, shuddering. It was worse down here, and diffuse, like the wail came from all around, the grass and the plains themselves hunting us.

  I couldn’t tell where the demon was.

  The boys.

  Derk and Niko came running up to me, panting, standing one at each side of me, looking out. They trembled, but neither cried.

  “Where’s Sho?” I demanded, voice high and worried.

  Another bay, and a yip. People gathered around us.

  Derk found his breath. “Up. On the cliff.”

  Indeed, over the chaos of gathering, drawing stunners, screeching for each other, demons yipping and baying, I heard the high slip of Sho’s voice.

  I looked up.

  He stood three meters above me, his feet dug into the cliff, apparently balanced on a ledge too small for me to see from below. He hung onto a tree growing thin and spindly out of dirt caught between rocks, leaning out. Close to falling. Now that I was looking at him, I could see he was screaming details. “Six of them. To the right.”

  I looked right. My head was above the grass, but barely. The stones we’d sat on made a small clearing, the grass close enough to throw shadows at our feet.

  Sho would see them coming for us, but we wouldn’t know until the grass parted in front of our faces.

  The demon cries were still a bit away, but confident. Maybe the demons didn’t care we were all together.

  “One almost there!” Sho cried. “By you, Chaunce.”

  I raised my stunner, hand shaking. I’d fired at a demon once, missed as it came right at me fast as lightning. Louise had been behind me and she hadn’t missed. Now the boys were behind me, small, no stunners.

  The dog burst through the grass, long and sinewy, teeth bared, eyes black and full of hunger.

  I fired.

  Someone else fired.

  The dog fell. Its coat rippled as another shot hit it.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Don’t waste shots!”

  “There!” Sho.

  A second dog burst through in almost the same place, its body landing on the other one. This time we used four shots.

  Derk pushed past me, knife in hand, bent on killing the stunned animals.

  To my right, someone screamed, and in a moment of shock I heard the slick of another stunner and another thump. Who screamed?

  A hebra bugled, high and long. The same sound I’d heard a hundred times when this hunt played out below me and I merely watched.

  “Back!” Sho screamed. The watch hebra. That’s what Sho did for us.

  Sho and a real hebra. What was the hebra doing here?

  I backed.

  Derk ducked, his right hand now covered in demon blood.

  A head rose over mine, above the grass, the neck long and thin, a white beard like my grandfather’s last.

  I backed faster.

  The hebra passed between me and Derk in its lurching fast run, bigger than I expected, an animal the color of spring grass with gold spots on its knobby knees. It breathed deep and rattling but ran strong. A dog followed it, too fast for me to bring up my stunner.

  The woman next to me, Paulette, screamed in joy, clapping.

  “Watch!” Sho still sounded scared. “Stay back!”

  More hebras, the whole herd of them, and dogs, all running together. The dogs had given up on us. They moved away a bit, the hebras now silent except for deep, sharp breathing, the dogs yipping and baying on their heels.

  “Shoot the dogs!” I couldn’t tell who yelled, the command a shiver down my spine.

  Instinct told me. “No! The hebras can do this.”

  I stood as still as I could, the grass waving around me, the sounds of animals racing through it and the call and yips of hunter, hunted, and humans all distinct and all around.

  A high-pitched squeal touched my heart. A hebra. I heard its body fall, a sound like a sack of flour thrown from the roof of a storage barn. Me and Jove and Campbell raced toward the fallen hebra. A dog passed right in front of me, its tail slapping me sideways. I raised my stunner and hit its flank.

  It cried in pain, stopped, stood still, didn’t fall.

  I hit it again.

  It mewled, sounded like a child needing help, like it didn’t understand, and then it fell.

  Ahead of me, the fallen hebra struggled up, blood dripping down its leg from a slash in its thigh. Shaking. Not broken.

  Someone else dropped a dog to my right.

  Two other hebras raced past us, screaming.

  The few dogs lef
t didn’t draw off this time. They circled the beast that had just gotten up. One of its knees bled, too.

  There were four demons left. Few enough they should know better. Maybe the smell of blood drove them crazy.

  Someone I couldn’t see stunned another dog.

  A dog somewhere let out a high, sharp bark and in heartbeats the pack was gone. They might have never been there, the grass closed across the memory of their hungry mouths and long, powerful legs.

  The injured hebra took a step, and then another. Gingerly.

  Two hebras walked through the grass, oblivious to us, and placed themselves on either side of the wounded one. One of the two strongest watch hebras came up to stand between me and the threesome, looking down at me. I stood there, craning my neck up, sweating, my ankle throbbing lightly from a sidestep I’d taken. Its shoulder rose above my eye, its front knee about at my chest. Its fur looked coarser than I’d expected.

  I kept my gun down.

  Even though its sides heaved, it looked at me as if speaking sentences. They had no language we could understand, but they were at least as smart as the herding dogs. And some days I thought the collies were smarter than me. I knew I was in the presence of something good, even on this hellhole of a planet.

  We would never capture such beasts in a rope corral. But they had allied themselves with us in that moment, voted with their thundering feet and high bugle calls. We would come to some kind of accommodation, some way to trade them safety for safety.

  These are the things that went through my head as I watched the beast watch me.

  The boys came up beside me and still the hebra watched, the plains silent now except for the ever-present buzz of insects. It took a long time before the hebras moved off, stately, visible above the waving dry grass for a long time.

  Penumbra

  Gregory Benford

  Gregory Benford (www.gregorybenford.com) lives in Irvine, California. He has lately become a CEO of several biotech companies devoted to extending longevity using genetic methods. The first product came on the market in early 2011. He retains his appointment at UC Irvine as a professor emeritus of physics. He is the author of more than twenty novels, including Jupiter Project, Artifact, Against Infinity, Eater, and the famous SF classic, Timescape (1980). His most recent novel is The Sunborn (2005). A two-time winner of the Nebula Award, Benford has also won the John W. Campbell Award, the Australian Ditmar Award, the 1995 Lord Foundation Award for achievement in the sciences, and the 1990 United Nations Medal in Literature. Many of his (typically hard) SF stories are collected in In Alien Flesh, Matters End, and Worlds Vast and Various. Benford is one of the standard-bearers of hard SF.

  “Penumbra,” a hard SF story reminiscent of Larry Niven’s “Inconstant Moon,” was published in Nature, now the highest-paying market for short SF, and a breeding ground, in it’s Futures section, for surprising and often amusing ideas in short form.

  The cloud of flies lifted off our table and pursued the corpse coming by on a wooden plank. Mary turned to look at the shrivelled woman being carried on the wood, followed by a little crowd of mourners who fruitlessly batted away the flies. “Was she—?”

  “Outside? Guess so. Looks like her hair caught fire,” I said.

  “We were so lucky, taking a nap.”

  I hoisted my piña colada. “A day later and we’d have been in California.” The ice was cool but not at all reassuring. “And maybe dead.”

  “You’re . . . sure?” Mary’s eyes jittered. “I know you’re an astrophysicist, but really? Is everybody we know . . . ?”

  “The flash, I saw it from the window. In the distance—bright blue at first, then so brilliant I couldn’t see.”

  “But not right here.”

  “Right, that’s what doesn’t make sense. We got glare, small fires, but not that—” I pointed to the greasy pall building on the offshore horizon, beyond the warm waves. “That’s been building for hours.”

  She blinked. “But there’s no land west of here.”

  “Those dirty brown clouds must’ve blown in. Big fires farther away.”

  Mary’s eyes danced. Her hands clenched and relaxed, clenched and relaxed.

  “But . . . how widespread can this be?”

  “Didn’t burn us here much, so it’s not worldwide. Not a supernova, or we’d see it in the sky.” I pointed up. The mottled blue high above was thickening with smoke.

  “Then what?”

  “I’d say must’ve been a gamma-ray burster. Why we didn’t get it full on, I don’t know.”

  “A . . . burster?”

  I peered at the sky, looking for some clue. I was more a theorist, not an observer. “We think it’s a narrow beam of intense radiation, coming out when a rotating, high-mass star collapses to form a black hole.”

  The gamma-ray satellites had seen hundreds at safe cosmological distances, but none in our Galaxy. Maybe this was the first. I went through a quick description of what happened when gamma-rays hit the top of our atmosphere. Particle cascades, ultraviolet flares, blaring hard light, ozone depletion, mesons lacing down.

  “How did we survive it, then?”

  “Dunno.” The flies came buzzing back. I waved them off our steaming chicken mole. “Eat,” I said. “Then we go to the market and buy whatever we can.”

  But there was no market. Crowds had picked the stalls clean.

  “We have to live here for a while,” I said as we walked back to our hotel. After I’d finished my observing run at the Las Campanas Observatory, Mary had joined me for diving in the Galapagos. Guayaquil was a sightseeing stopover before heading home. We’d seen the cathedral yesterday, echoing and nearly deserted then, but now a huge crowd surrounded it, listening to a priest blaring out his message with a hand-held mike.

  Mary struggled with her high-school Spanish. “He says this shows God’s favour on them,” she reported. “Preservation for them and their families, and liberation from the . . . North Americans. And, uh, Europeans.”

  “How’s he know that?” I looked up at the sky again, learning nothing—but saw an antenna on the church roof.

  I pointed. Mary was an electronics tech type and she said immediately: “They have a satellite link. Non-commercial. Private.”

  It took an hour to talk our way through, first with the priest and then a bishop, no less. But their connection was live and took me to the academic satellite links. The downlook cameras showed blazes everywhere north and south of us. Europe, west Africa—a hemisphere burning. Except in a spot several thousand kilometres wide, an ellipse right at the equator. Where we were.

  No link worked to the gamma-ray working group, where a burster signature would show up. But I didn’t need one now.

  Then the satellite link failed. I didn’t try to pursue it. I got up with Mary and walked out into the rosy sunset and acrid air.

  Some mestizos by the church, dressed in the sombre black of mourning, turned and looked at us, eyes narrowing. Mary noticed and said: “I wonder if they blame us, somehow.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “We run their Universe, don’t we?”

  “So they may think, how can something like this possibly be natural? Gringos are the traditional candidates.”

  “Hasn’t happened before, so maybe somebody’s to blame.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. We strolled away, deliberately casual, but as we approached the hotel, everyone on the cobblestone streets seemed to be looking at us.

  “Go up and pack,” I said, and went to the travel agent. I was amazed that he was still at his desk. Our tickets to Los Angeles were obviously not going to work, so I tried to rebook to an Asian airport. Any Asian airport. But his connection was dead. The blazing cone of light had come in late morning. That meant it got most of Europe and the Americas, except for that blessed oval where we had been following local custom and taking siesta in the hushed, indoor cool of a thick-walled hotel. Asia had been in darkness.

  We stumbled out into the
night air and then I saw it. The crescent moon hung there to our west. “Got it,” I said.

  She saw it too. “You mean . . . ? The gamma-ray burster was just behind our view of the Moon.”

  “That’s why the trees weren’t burning here. That woman’s hair was like tinder—it caught fire, maybe drove her into some accident. We were in the Moon’s penumbra, the twilight zone that caught just some of the burst. Anybody on this side of the planet not shielded by the Moon is dead. Or soon will be.”

  “So now it goes to Asia,” Mary said slowly. “The future.”

  Somehow I smiled. “At least we have one.”

  The Good Hand

  Robert Reed

  Robert Reed (www.robertreedwriter.com) lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. He is perhaps the Poul Anderson—whom James Blish once called “The continuing explosion, the most prolific writer of high quality in the field”—of his generation. He is certainly the most prolific SF writer of high-quality short fiction writing today. He has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. He is perhaps most famous for his Marrow universe, and the novels and stories that take place in that huge, ancient spacefaring environment. A new Marrow book, Eater of Bone, collecting four novellas, is out this year. His story collections, The Dragons of Springplace (1999) and The Cukoo’s Boys (2005) skim only some of the cream from his body of work. He is overdue for another substantial collection. He had another excellent year in 2010 and could easily have had three or four stories in this volume.

  This story was published in Asimov’s. It takes place in an alternate universe in which the U.S. managed to keep a monopoly on nuclear weapons after WWII, and enforce a Pax Americana on the world. The U.S. believes that American global dominance is a price everyone should accept for world peace. Now an American businessman in France finds himself threatened by people who do not agree. This is a piece of post-9/11 SF that challenges many political views of the past, and some of the present. Is the U.S. willing to use nuclear weapons? Should it be? What kind of world would it be then?