The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  They’d come at a time when Nazdeek lay between its sun and the galactic centre. At dusk one half of the Aloof’s dazzling territory stretched from the eastern horizon to the zenith, with the stars’ slow march westward against a darkening sky only revealing more of their splendour.

  “You think that was to die for?” Jasim joked as they walked back to the house.

  “We could end this now, if you’re feeling unambitious.”

  He squeezed her hand. “If this takes ten thousand years, I’m ready.”

  It was a mild night, they could have slept outdoors, but the spectacle was too distracting. They stayed downstairs, in the physical wing. Leila watched the strange thicket of shadows cast by the furniture sliding across the walls. These neighbours never sleep, she thought. When we come knocking, they’ll ask what took us so long.

  * * * *

  3

  Hundreds of observatories circled Nazdeek, built then abandoned by others who’d come on the same quest. When Leila saw the band of pristine space junk mapped out before her — orbits scrupulously maintained and swept clean by robot sentinels for eons — she felt as if she’d found the graves of their predecessors, stretching out in the field behind the house as far as the eye could see.

  Nazdeek was prepared to offer them the resources to loft another package of instruments into the vacuum if they wished, but many of the abandoned observatories were perfectly functional, and most had been left in a compliant state, willing to take instructions from anyone.

  Leila and Jasim sat in their living room and woke machine after machine from millennia of hibernation. Some, it turned out, had not been sleeping at all, but had been carrying on systematic observations, accumulating data long after their owners had lost interest.

  In the crowded stellar precincts of the bulge, disruptive gravitational effects made planet formation rarer than it was in the disk, and orbits less stable. Nevertheless, planets had been found. A few thousand could be tracked from Nazdeek, and one observatory had been monitoring their atmospheric spectra for the last twelve millennia. In all of those worlds for all of those years, there were no signs of atmospheric composition departing from plausible, purely geochemical models. That meant no wild life, and no crude industries. It didn’t prove that these worlds were uninhabited, but it suggested either that the Aloof went to great lengths to avoid leaving chemical fingerprints, or they lived in an entirely different fashion to any of the civilisations that had formed the Amalgam.

  Of the eleven forms of biochemistry that had been found scattered around the galactic disk, all had given rise eventually to hundreds of species with general intelligence. Of the multitude of civilisations that had emerged from those roots, all contained cultures that had granted themselves the flexibility of living as software, but they also all contained cultures that persisted with corporeal existence. Leila would never have willingly given up either mode, herself, but while it was easy to imagine a subculture doing so, for a whole species it seemed extraordinary. In a sense, the intertwined civilisation of the Amalgam owed its existence to the fact that there was as much cultural variation within every species as there was between one species and another. In that explosion of diversity, overlapping interests were inevitable.

  If the Aloof were the exception, and their material culture had shrunk to nothing but a few discreet processors — each with the energy needs of a gnat, scattered throughout a trillion cubic light years of dust and blazing stars — then finding them would be impossible.

  Of course, that worst-case scenario couldn’t quite be true. The sole reason the Aloof were assumed to exist at all was the fact that some component of their material culture was tossing back every probe that was sent into the bulge. However discreet that machinery was, it certainly couldn’t be sparse: given that it had managed to track, intercept and reverse the trajectories of billions of individual probes that had been sent in along thousands of different routes, relativistic constraints on the information flow implied that the Aloof had some kind of presence at more or less every star at the edge of the bulge.

  Leila and Jasim had Nazdeek brief them on the most recent attempts to enter the bulge, but even after forty thousand years the basic facts hadn’t changed. There was no crisply delineated barrier marking the Aloof’s territory, but at some point within a border region about fifty light years wide, every single probe that was sent in ceased to function. The signals from those carrying in-flight beacons or transmitters went dead without warning. A century or so later, they would appear again at almost the same point, travelling in the opposite direction: back to where they’d come from. Those that were retrieved and examined were found to be unharmed, but their data logs contained nothing from the missing decades.

  Jasim said, “The Aloof could be dead and gone. They built the perfect fence, but now it’s outlasted them. It’s just guarding their ruins.”

  Leila rejected this emphatically. “No civilisation that’s spread to more than one star system has ever vanished completely. Sometimes they’ve changed beyond recognition, but not one has ever died without descendants.”

  “That’s a fact of history, but it’s not a universal law,” Jasim persisted. “If we’re going to argue from the Amalgam all the time, we’ll get nowhere. If the Aloof weren’t exceptional, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “That’s true. But I won’t accept that they’re dead until I see some evidence.”

  “What would count as evidence? Apart from a million years of silence?”

  Leila said, “Silence could mean anything. If they’re really dead, we’ll find something more, something definite.”

  “Such as?”

  “If we see it, we’ll know.”

  They began the project in earnest, reviewing data from the ancient observatories, stopping only to gather food, eat and sleep. They had resisted making detailed plans back on Najib, reasoning that any approach they mapped out in advance was likely to be rendered obsolete once they learned about the latest investigations. Now that they’d arrived and found the state of play utterly unchanged, Leila wished that they’d come armed with some clear options for dealing with the one situation they could have prepared for before they’d left.

  In fact, though they might have felt like out-of-touch amateurs back on Najib, now that the Aloof had become their entire raison d’être it was far harder to relax and indulge in the kind of speculation that might actually bear fruit, given that every systematic approach had failed. Having come twenty thousand light years for this, they couldn’t spend their time day-dreaming, turning the problem over in the backs of their minds while they surrendered to the rhythms of Nazdeek’s rural idyll. So they studied everything that had been tried before, searching methodically for a new approach, hoping to see the old ideas with fresh eyes, hoping that — by chance if for no other reason — they might lack some crucial blind spot that had afflicted all of their predecessors.

  After seven months without results or inspiration, it was Jasim who finally dragged them out of the rut. “We’re getting nowhere,” he said. “It’s time to accept that, put all this aside, and go visit the neighbours.”

  Leila stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Go visit them? How? What makes you think that they’re suddenly going to let us in?”

  He said, “The neighbours. Remember? Over the hill. The ones who might actually want to talk to us.”

  * * * *

  4

  Their neighbours had published a précis stating that they welcomed social contact in principle, but might take a while to respond. Jasim sent them an invitation, asking if they’d like to join them in their house, and waited.

  After just three days, a reply came back. The neighbours did not want to put them to the trouble of altering their own house physically, and preferred not to become acorporeal at present. Given the less stringent requirements of Leila and Jasim’s own species when embodied, might they wish to come instead to the neighbours’ house?

  Leila said, “Why not?
” They set a date and time.

  The neighbours’ précis included all the biological and sociological details needed to prepare for the encounter. Their biochemistry was carbon-based and oxygen-breathing, but employed a different replicator to Leila and Jasim’s DNA. Their ancestral phenotype resembled a large furred snake, and when embodied they generally lived in nests of a hundred or so. The minds of the individuals were perfectly autonomous, but solitude was an alien and unsettling concept for them.

  Leila and Jasim set out late in the morning, in order to arrive early in the afternoon. There were some low, heavy clouds in the sky, but it was not completely overcast, and Leila noticed that when the sun passed behind the clouds, she could discern some of the brightest stars from the edge of the bulge.

  Jasim admonished her sternly, “Stop looking. This is our day off.”

  The Snakes’ building was a large squat cylinder resembling a water tank, which turned out to be packed with something mossy and pungent. When they arrived at the entrance, three of their hosts were waiting to greet them, coiled on the ground near the mouth of a large tunnel emerging from the moss. Their bodies were almost as wide as their guests’, and some eight or ten metres long. Their heads bore two front-facing eyes, but their other sense organs were not prominent. Leila could make out their mouths, and knew from the briefing how many rows of teeth lay behind them, but the wide pink gashes stayed closed, almost lost in the grey fur.

  The Snakes communicated with a low-frequency thumping, and their system of nomenclature was complex, so Leila just mentally tagged the three of them with randomly chosen, slightly exotic names — Tim, John and Sarah — and tweaked her translator so she’d recognise intuitively who was who, who was addressing her, and the significance of their gestures.

  “Welcome to our home,” said Tim enthusiastically.

  “Thank you for inviting us,” Jasim replied.

  “We’ve had no visitors for quite some time,” explained Sarah. “So we really are delighted to meet you.”

  “How long has it been?” Leila asked.

  “Twenty years,” said Sarah.

  “But we came here for the quiet life,” John added. “So we expected it would be a while.”

  Leila pondered the idea of a clan of a hundred ever finding a quiet life, but then, perhaps unwelcome intrusions from outsiders were of a different nature to family dramas.

  “Will you come into the nest?” Tim asked. “If you don’t wish to enter we won’t take offence, but everyone would like to see you, and some of us aren’t comfortable coming out into the open.”

  Leila glanced at Jasim. He said privately, “We can push our vision to IR. And tweak ourselves to tolerate the smell.”

  Leila agreed.

  “Okay,” Jasim told Tim.

  Tim slithered into the tunnel and vanished in a quick, elegant motion, then John motioned with his head for the guests to follow. Leila went first, propelling herself up the gentle slope with her knees and elbows. The plant the Snakes’ cultivated for the nest formed a cool, dry, resilient surface. She could see Tim ten metres or so ahead, like a giant glow-worm shining with body heat, slowing down now to let her catch up. She glanced back at Jasim, who looked even weirder than the Snakes now, his face and arms blotched with strange bands of radiance from the exertion.

  After a few minutes, they came to a large chamber. The air was humid, but after the confines of the tunnel it felt cool and fresh. Tim led them towards the centre, where about a dozen other Snakes were already waiting to greet them. They circled the guests excitedly, thumping out a delighted welcome. Leila felt a surge of adrenaline; she knew that she and Jasim were in no danger, but the sheer size and energy of the creatures was overwhelming.

  “Can you tell us why you’ve come to Nazdeek?” asked Sarah.

  “Of course.” For a second or two Leila tried to maintain eye contact with her, but like all the other Snakes she kept moving restlessly, a gesture that Leila’s translator imbued with a sense of warmth and enthusiasm. As for lack of eye contact, the Snakes’ own translators would understand perfectly that some aspects of ordinary, polite human behaviour became impractical under the circumstances, and would not mislabel her actions. “We’re here to learn about the Aloof,” she said.

  “The Aloof?” At first Sarah just seemed perplexed, then Leila’s translator hinted at a touch of irony. “But they offer us nothing.”

  Leila was tongue-tied for a moment. The implication was subtle but unmistakable. Citizens of the Amalgam had a protocol for dealing with each other’s curiosity: they published a précis, which spelled out clearly any information that they wished people in general to know about them, and also specified what, if any, further inquiries would be welcome. However, a citizen was perfectly entitled to publish no précis at all and have that decision respected. When no information was published, and no invitation offered, you simply had no choice but to mind your own business.

  “They offer us nothing as far as we can tell,” she said, “but that might be a misunderstanding, a failure to communicate.”

  “They send back all the probes,” Tim replied. “Do you really think we’ve misunderstood what that means?”

  Jasim said, “It means that they don’t want us physically intruding on their territory, putting our machines right next to their homes, but I’m not convinced that it proves that they have no desire to communicate whatsoever.”

  “We should leave them in peace,” Tim insisted. “They’ve seen the probes, so they know we’re here. If they want to make contact, they’ll do it in their own time.”

  “Leave them in peace,” echoed another Snake. A chorus of affirmation followed from others in the chamber.

  Leila stood her ground. “We have no idea how many different species and cultures might be living in the bulge. One of them sends back the probes, but for all we know there could be a thousand others who don’t yet even know that the Amalgam has tried to make contact.”

  This suggestion set off a series of arguments, some between guests and hosts, some between the Snakes themselves. All the while, the Snakes kept circling excitedly, while new ones entered the chamber to witness the novel sight of these strangers.

  When the clamour about the Aloof had quietened down enough for her to change the subject, Leila asked Sarah, “Why have you come to Nazdeek yourself?”

  “It’s out of the way, off the main routes. We can think things over here, undisturbed.”

  “But you could have the same amount of privacy anywhere. It’s all a matter of what you put in your précis.”

  Sarah’s response was imbued with a tinge of amusement. “For us, it would be unimaginably rude to cut off all contact explicitly, by decree. Especially with others from our own ancestral species. To live a quiet life, we had to reduce the likelihood of encountering anyone who would seek us out. We had to make the effort of rendering ourselves physically remote, in order to reap the benefits.”

  “Yet you’ve made Jasim and myself very welcome.”

  “Of course. But that will be enough for the next twenty years.”

  So much for resurrecting their social life. “What exactly is it that you’re pondering in this state of solitude?”

  “The nature of reality. The uses of existence. The reasons to live, and the reasons not to.”

  Leila felt the skin on her forearms tingle. She’d almost forgotten that she’d made an appointment with death, however uncertain the timing.

  She explained how she and Jasim had made their decision to embark on a grand project before dying.

  “That’s an interesting approach,” Sarah said. “I’ll have to give it some thought.” She paused, then added, “Though I’m not sure that you’ve solved the problem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will it really be easier now to choose the right moment to give up your life? Haven’t you merely replaced one delicate judgement with an even more difficult one: deciding when you’ve exhausted the possibilities for contacting the
Aloof?”

  “You make it sound as if we have no chance of succeeding.” Leila was not afraid of the prospect of failure, but the suggestion that it was inevitable was something else entirely.

  Sarah said, “We’ve been here on Nazdeek for fifteen thousand years. We don’t pay much attention to the world outside the nest, but even from this cloistered state we’ve seen many people break their backs against this rock.”

  “So when will you accept that your own project is finished?” Leila countered. “If you still don’t have what you’re looking for after fifteen thousand years, when will you admit defeat?”