The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  He put his beer down and grabbed her with an intensity that was made ferocious largely by Anthony’s fear that this was entirely the wrong thing, that he was committing an outrage that would compel her shortly to clout him over the head with the coffee pot and drop him in his tracks. Whalesong rang frantic chimes in his head. She gave a strangled cry as he tried to kiss her and thereby confirmed his own worst suspicions about this behavior.

  Philana tried to push him away. He let go of her and stepped back, standing stupidly with his hands at his sides. A raging pain in his chest prevented him from saying a word. Philana surprised him by stepping forward and putting her hands on his shoulders.

  “Easy,” she said. “It’s all right, just take it easy.”

  Anthony kissed her once more, and was somehow able to restrain himself from grabbing her again out of sheer panic and desperation. By and by, as the kiss continued, his anxiety level decreased. I/You, he thought, are rising in warmness, in happy tendrils.

  He and Philana began to take their clothes off. He realized this was the first time he had made love to anyone under two hundred years of age.

  Dweller sounds murmured in Anthony’s mind. He descended into Philana as if she were a midnight ocean, something that on first contact with his flesh shocked him into wakefulness, then relaxed around him, became a taste of brine, a sting in the eyes, a fluid vagueness. Her hair brushed against his skin like seagrass. She surrounded him, buoyed him up. Her cries came up to him as over a great distance, like the faraway moans of a lonely whale in love. He wanted to call out in answer. Eventually he did.

  Grace (1), he thought hopefully. Grace(l).

  Anthony had an attack of giddiness after Philana returned to her flying yacht and her work. His mad father gibbered in his memory, mocked him and offered dire warnings. He washed the dishes and cleaned the rattling bottle cap off the fridge, then he listened to recordings of Dwellers and eventually the panic went away. He had not, it seemed, lost anything.

  He went to the double bed in the forepeak, which was piled high with boxes of food, a spool of cable, a couple spare microphones, and a pair of rusting Danforth anchors. He stowed the food in the hold, put the electronics in the compartment under the mattress, jammed the Danforths farther into the peak on top of the anchor chain where they belonged. He wiped the grime and rust off the mattress and realized he had neither sheets nor a second pillow. He would need to purchase supplies on the next trip to town.

  The peak didn’t smell good. He opened the forehatch and tried to air the place out. Slowly he became aware that the whales were trying to talk to him. Odd scentings, they said, Things that stand in water. Anthony knew what they meant. He went up on the flybridge and scanned the horizon. He saw nothing.

  The taste is distant, he wrote. But we must be careful in our movement. After that he scanned the horizon every half hour.

  He cooked supper during the white dwarf’s odd half-twilight and resisted the urge to drink both the bottles of bourbon that were waiting in their rack. Philana dropped onto the flybridge with a small rucksack. She kissed him hastily, as if to get it over with.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  “I don’t know why.”

  He kissed her again. “I do,” he said. She laid her cheek against his woolen shoulder. Blind with terror, Anthony held on to her, unable to see the future.

  After midnight Anthony stood unclothed on the flybridge as he scanned the horizon one more time. Seeing nothing, he nevertheless reduced speed to three knots and rejoined Philana in the forepeak. She was already asleep with his open sleeping bag thrown over her like a blanket. He raised a corner of the sleeping bag and slipped beneath it. Philana turned away from him and pillowed her cheek on her fist. Whale music echoed from a cold layer beneath. He slept.

  Movement elsewhere in the boat woke him. Anthony found himself alone in the peak, frigid air drifting over him from the forward hatch. He stepped into the cabin and saw Philana’s bare legs ascending the companion to the fly-bridge. He followed. He shivered in the cold wind.

  Philana stood before the controls, looking at them with a peculiar intensity, as though she were trying to figure out which switch to throw. Her hands flexed as if to take the wheel. There was gooseflesh on her shoulders and the wind tore her hair around her face like a fluttering curtain. She looked at him. Her eyes were hard, her voice disdainful.

  “Are we lovers?” she asked. “Is that what’s going on here?” His skin prickled at her tone.

  Her stiff-spined stance challenged him. He was afraid to touch her.

  “The condition is that of rut,” he said, and tried to laugh.

  Her posture, one leg cocked out front, reminded him of a haughty water bird. She looked at the controls again, then looked aft, lifting up on her toes to gaze at the horizon. Her nostrils flared, tasted the wind. Clouds scudded across the sky. She looked at him again. The white dwarf gleamed off her pebble eyes.

  “Very well,” she said, as if this was news. “Acceptable.” She took his hand and led him below. Anthony’s hackles rose. On her way to the forepeak Philana saw one of the bottles of bourbon in its rack and reached for it. She raised the bottle to her lips and drank from the neck. Whiskey coursed down her throat. She lowered the bottle and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She looked at him as if he were something worthy of dissection.

  “Let’s make love,” she said.

  Anthony was afraid not to. He went with her to the forepeak. Her skin was cold. Lying next to him on the mattress she touched his chest as if she were unused to the feel of male bodies. “What’s your name?” she asked. He told her. “Acceptable,” she said again, and with a sudden taut grin raked his chest with her nails. He knocked her hands away. She laughed and came after him with the bottle. He parried the blow in time and they wrestled for possession, bourbon splashing everywhere. Anthony was surprised at her strength. She fastened teeth in his arm. He hit her in the face with a closed fist. She gave the bottle up and laughed in a cold metallic way and put her arms around him. Anthony threw the bottle through the door into the cabin. It thudded somewhere but didn’t break. Philana drew him on top of her, her laugh brittle, her legs opening around him.

  Her dead eyes were like stones.

  In the morning Anthony found the bottle lying in the main cabin. Red clawmarks covered his body, and the reek of liquor caught at the back of his throat. The scend of the ocean had distributed the bourbon puddle evenly over the teak deck. There was still about a third of the whiskey left in the bottle. Anthony rescued it and swabbed the deck. His mind was full of cotton wool, cushioning any bruises. He was working hard at not feeling anything at all.

  He put on clothes and began to work. After a while Philana unsteadily groped her way from the forepeak, the sleeping bag draped around her shoulders. There was a stunned look on her face and a livid bruise on one cheek. Anthony could feel his body tautening, ready to repel assault.

  “Was I odd last night?” she asked.

  He looked at her. Her face crumbled. “Oh no.” She passed a hand over her eyes and turned away, leaning on the side of the hatchway. “You shouldn’t let me drink,” she said.

  “You hadn’t made that fact clear.”

  “I don’t remember any of it,” she said. “I’m sick.” She pressed her stomach with her hands and bent over. Anthony narrowly watched her pale buttocks as she groped her way to the head. The door shut behind her.

  Anthony decided to make coffee. As the scent of the coffee began to fill the boat, he heard the sounds of her weeping. The long keening sounds, desperate throat-tearing noises, sounded like a pinioned whale writhing helplessly on the gaff.

  A vast flock of birds wheeled on the cold horizon, marking a colony of drift creatures. Anthony informed the whales of the creatures’ presence, but the humpbacks already knew and were staying well clear. The drift colony was what they had been smelling for hours.

  While Anthony talked with the whales
, Philana left the head and drew on her clothes. Her movements were tentative. She approached him with a cup of coffee in her hand. Her eyes and nostrils were rimmed with red.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Sometimes that happens.”

  He looked at his computer console. “Jesus, Philana.”

  “It’s something wrong with me. I can’t control it.” She raised a hand to her bruised cheek. The hand came away wet.

  “There’s medication for that sort of thing,” Anthony said. He remembered she had a mad father, or thought she did.

  “Not for this. It’s something different.”

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “I need your help.”

  Anthony recalled his father’s body twisting on the end of its rope, fingertips trailing in the dust. Words came reluctantly to his throat.

  “I’ll give what help I can.” The words were hollow: any real resolution had long since gone. He had no clear notion to whom he was giving this message, the Philana of the previous night or this Philana or his father or himself.

  Philana hugged him, kissed his cheek. She was excited.

  “Shall we go see the drifters?” she asked. “We can take my boat.”

  Anthony envisioned himself and Philana tumbling through space. He had jumped off a precipice, just now. The two children of mad fathers were spinning in the updraft, waiting for the impact.

  He said yes. He ordered his boat to circle while she summoned her yacht. She held his hand while they waited for the flying yacht to drift toward them. Philana kept laughing, touching him, stropping her cheek on his shoulder like a cat. They jumped from the flybridge to her yacht and rose smoothly into the sky. Bright sun warmed Anthony’s shoulders. He took off his sweater and felt warning pain from the marks of her nails.

  The drifters were colony creatures that looked like miniature mountains twenty feet or so high, complete with a white snowcap of guano. They were highly organized but unintelligent, their underwater parts sifting the ocean for nutrients or reaching out to capture prey – the longest of their gossamer stinging tentacles was up to two miles in length, and though they couldn’t kill or capture a humpback, they were hard for the whale to detect and could cause a lot of stinging wounds before the whale noticed them and made its escape. Perhaps they were unintelligent, distant relatives of the Deep Dwellers, whose tenuous character they resembled. Many different species of sea birds lived in permanent colonies atop the floating islands, thousands of them, and the drifters processed their guano and other waste. Above the water, the drifters’ bodies were shaped like a convex lens set on edge, an aerodynamic shape, and they could clumsily tack into the wind if they needed to. For the most part, however, they drifted on the currents, a giant circular circumnavigation of the ocean that could take centuries.

  Screaming sea birds rose in clouds as Philana’s yacht moved silently toward their homes. Philana cocked her head back, laughed into the open sky, and flew closer. Birds hurtled around them in an overwhelming roar of wings. Whistlelike cries issued from peg-toothed beaks. Anthony watched in awe at the profusion of colors, the chromatic brilliance of the evolved featherlike scales.

  The flying boat passed slowly through the drifter colony. Birds roared and whistled, some of them landing on the boat in apparent hopes of taking up lodging: Feathers drifted down; birdshit spattered the windscreen. Philana ran below for a camera and used up several data cubes taking pictures. A trickle of optimism began to ease into Anthony at the sight of Philana in the bright morning sun, a broad smile gracing her face as she worked the camera and took picture after picture. He put an arm around Philana’s waist and kissed her ear. She smiled and took his hand in her own. In the bright daylight the personality she’d acquired the previous night seemed to gather unto itself the tenebrous, unreal quality of a nightmare. The current Philana seemed far more tangible.

  Philana returned to the controls; the yacht banked and increased speed. Birds issued startled cries as they got out of the way. Wind tugged at Philana’s hair. Anthony decided not to let Philana near his liquor again.

  After breakfast, Anthony found both whales had set their transponders. He had to detour around the drifters – their insubstantial, featherlike tentacles could foul his state-of-the-art silent props – but when he neared the whales and slowed, he could hear the deep murmurings of Dwellers rising from beneath the cold current. There were half a dozen of them engaged in conversation, and Anthony worked the day and far into the night, transcribing, making hesitant attempts at translation. The Dweller speech was more opaque than usual, depending on a context that was unstated and elusive. Comprehension eluded Anthony; but he had the feeling that the key was within his reach.

  Philana waited for the Dwellers to end their converse before she brought her yacht near him. She had heated some prepared dinners and carried them to the flybridge in an insulated pouch. Her grin was broad. She put her pouch down and embraced him. Abstracted Dweller subsonics rolled away from Anthony’s mind. He was surprised at how glad he was to see her.

  With dinner they drank coffee. Philana chattered bravely throughout the meal. While Anthony cleaned the dishes, she embraced him from behind. A memory of the other Philana flickered in his mind, disdainful, contemptuous, cold. Her father was crazy, he remembered again.

  He buried the memory deliberately and turned to her. He kissed her and thought, I/We deny the Other. The Other, he decided, would cease to exist by a common act of will.

  It seemed to work. At night his dreams filled with Dwellers crying in joy, his father warning darkly, the touch of Philana’s flesh, breath, hands. He awoke hungry to get to work.

  The next two days a furious blaze of concentration burned in Anthony’s mind. Things fell into place. He found a word that, in its context, could mean nothing but light, as opposed to fluorescence – he was excited to find out the Dwellers knew about the sun. He also found new words for darkness, for emotions that seemed to have no human equivalents, but which he seemed nevertheless to comprehend. One afternoon a squall dumped a gallon of cold water down his collar and he looked up in surprise: he hadn’t been aware of its slow approach. He moved his computer deck to the cabin and kept working. When not at the controls he moved dazedly over the boat, drinking coffee, eating what was at hand without tasting it. Philana was amused and tolerant; she buried herself in her own work.

  On preparing breakfast the morning of the third day, Anthony realized he was running out of food. He was farther from the archipelago than he’d planned on going, and he had about two days’ supply left; he’d have to return at flank speed, buy provisions, and then run out again. A sudden hot fury gripped him. He clenched his fists. He could have provisioned for two or three months – why hadn’t he done it when he had the chance?

  Philana tolerantly sipped her coffee. “Tonight I’ll fly you into Cabo Santa Pola. We can buy a ton of provisions, have dinner at Villa Mary, and be back by midnight.”

  Anthony’s anger floundered uselessly, looking for a target, then gave up. “Fine,” he said.

  She looked at him. “Are you ever going to talk to them? You must have built your speakers to handle it.”

  Now the anger had finally found a home. “Not yet,” he said.

  In late afternoon, Anthony set out his drogue and a homing transponder, then boarded Philana’s yacht. He watched while she hauled up her aquasled and programmed the navigation computer. The world dimmed as the falkner field increased in strength. The transition to full speed was almost instantaneous. Waves blurred silently past, providing the only sensation of motion – the field cut out both wind and inertia. The green-walled volcanic islands of the Las Madres archipelago rolled over the horizon in minutes. Traffic over Cabo Santa Pola complicated the approach somewhat; it was all of six minutes before Philana could set the machine down in her slip.

  A bright, hot sun brightened the white-and-turquoise waterfront. From a cold Kirst current to the tropics in less than half an hour.

  Anthony felt
vaguely resentful at this blinding efficiency. He could have easily equipped his own boat with flight capability, but he hadn’t cared about speed when he’d set out, only the opportunity to be alone on the ocean with his whales and the Dwellers. Now the very tempo of his existence had changed. He was moving at unaccustomed velocity, and the destination was still unclear.

  After giving him her spare key, Philana went to do laundry – when one lived on small boats, laundry was done whenever the opportunity arose. Anthony bought supplies. He filled the yacht’s forecabin with crates of food, then changed clothes and walked to the Villa Mary.

  Anthony got a table for two and ordered a drink. The first drink went quickly and he ordered a second. Philana didn’t appear. Anthony didn’t like the way the waiter was looking at him. He heard his father’s mocking laugh as he munched the last bread stick. He waited for three hours before he paid and left.

  There was no sign of Philana at the laundry or on the yacht. He left a note on the computer expressing what he considered a contained disappointment, then headed into town. A brilliant sign that featured aquatic motifs called him to a cool, dark bar filled with bright green aquaria. Native fish gaped at him blindly while he drank something tall and cool. He decided he didn’t like the way the fish looked at him and left.

  He found Philana in his third bar of the evening. She was with two men, one of whom Anthony knew slightly as a charter boat skipper whom he didn’t much like. He had his hand on her knee; the other man’s arm was around her. Empty drinks and forsaken hors d’oeuvres lay on a table in front of them.

  Anthony realized, as he approached, that his own arrival could only make things worse. Her eyes turned to him as he approached; her neck arched in a peculiar, balletic way that he had seen only once before. He recognized the quick, carnivorous smile, and a wash of fear turned his skin cold. The stranger whispered into her ear.