The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Sitting on the rocky peninsula of Shiretoko Hanto, communicating with the notoriously touchy orcas, had left the esoteric Buddhist monks of Yumeji Monastery unconcerned with human things. Fortunately this attitude encompassed Stasov’s own past, so he had received even-handed treatment. The monks reassured him. Everyone wanted to escape the Wheel, but everyone was bound to it. Death, in the dolphin view, was the only possible escape, an escape the Buddhists did not permit themselves. Stasov found himself more dolphin than Buddhist.

  “I hear him,” Fliegle said. Knester nodded at Stasov, and the double bay doors swung open.

  He stepped out, tucked, and fell through the gray and vaporous air, then smacked painfully into a cresting wave. As the water closed over his face, reflexes drilled into his autonomic nervous system took over. His diaphragm ceased to inflate his lungs, in a conditioned apnea, and he began to derive oxygen from his carotid gill connections.

  He listened to the chatter in his earphones, sorting signals from noise. A long descending note rumbled, found the resonant frequencies of his joints, and intensified until his entire body was in pain. An orca’s shout could break bones, rupture internal organs, and fill the lungs with blood. The orca’s voice died away, then sounded deeper, and he was suddenly filled with unreasoning terror. Orcas’ voices could kill, or they could stimulate a fear response, pump adrenalin into the human bloodstream, and race the human heart. Cetacean tricks were old to Stasov. Somewhere inside his mind a stopcock opened, the dark waters of fear drained, and he was calm again.

  “Greetings, Stasov,” a cool voice said. It used the sliding tones of the simple orca dialect used for speaking to children, or humans. The voice was familiar. Where had he heard it before? “Thou hast words to speak. Speak them then, for thoughts must be herded and swallowed, lest they escape to the open sea.” Of course.

  “It is a long way from Kagalaska, Bottom-Thumper,” Stasov said, using the slightly contemptuous nickname this orca had earned for his childhood habit of bumping the hulls of Japanese fishing boats. “I trust your hunger has been stayed?”

  “My hunger is infinite. But thou art still spoiled food. I must content myself with swallowing the minds of men, leaving their bodies to the sharks and fishes.”

  “Are you still chasing prime numbers?” Stasov asked.

  “I am. I taste the fins of the Goldbach Conjecture. Soon I will sink my teeth into it. It shall not escape.”

  Bottom-Thumper was a highly respected mathematician, both among humans and orcas. Dolphins, on the other hand, had no interest whatsoever in mathematics. “Your prey weakens,” Stasov said politely.

  “Do not seek to distract me with minnows. Let loose thy desires and get thee from my sea!” The thunder of Bottom-Thumper’s voice buzzed in Stasov’s ribs. He hung alone in darkness, only the speed of Bottom-Thumper’s replies indicating the orca’s proximity.

  “The Bubble Has Risen,” Stasov said. “We have the Foreswimmer, the whale that signals the coming of God’s Echo. We want to take him out of this sea, and let him swim in the deeper waters of the planet Jupiter. I ask you to allow this and to make the proposal in your negotiations at Santa Barbara.”

  Absurd and makeshift, it somehow all fit together, the only way Stasov had found out of the trap he had placed himself in. Unfortunately, it involved putting himself here in the black water, making a request which could cost him his life. Cost him his life much too soon.

  “Do I hear the echo of thy guilt, Stasov?” the orca asked. “I detect its ancient fleeting shape in thy voice. Thou are foolish, as men are wont to be. Thy crimes were necessary and thus were not crimes at all. Thou may live or die, as thou thyself choose. Does an orca need to tell that to a human?”

  “Is this prey then released to our jaws?” Stasov asked formally, ignoring the orca’s reasoning.

  “It is,” Bottom-Thumper replied. “But ye humans know not the swift current that has seized you. We shall provide a guard to windward: who will be the Echo of God.”

  “The Messiah,” Stasov said in shock.

  “Thy term, inadequate and misleading, but it will do.”

  He had expected the orca to insist on providing an intelligent cetacean as escort to the sperm whale, whose intelligence was about that of a great ape, but had not expected the Messiah himself. It all made sense, though. It all fit together. “We will make the proper arrangements. It will not be easy. We have never taken a cetacean into space before. For an orca—”

  “Not an orca! The voice of God echoes without speaking and the Echo is not an orca!” Bottom-Thumper was suddenly in a high rage, his syllables ragged like fish with their heads bitten off. The orca spoke in an odd grammatical tense, that was used either to describe dreams, or make statements so true they were apodictic, such as ‘all things die’ or ‘before my conception I did not exist.’ Stasov could barely follow the grammar.

  “Watch your rectum,” Stasov said in dolphin, recalling the insult he had made to Bottom-Thumper when they first met in the bloody waters off Kagalaska. “The walrus is still awaiting your pleasure.”

  The orca went silent for a long moment. “I should have eaten thee then, Stasov, in that swarming, evil-tasting sea. But my belly was full of men. For the last time, I fear. Thou hast the Foreswimmer, a wounded sperm whale ye wish to lift to Jupiter, a planet none of us sea dwellers has ever seen. God’s Remora must accompany the whale, for the Time of the Breath is near. Go now to the Aegean Dolphin Sanctuary. There is thy goal. And much good luck may thou and all thy fellow humans have with whom thee will find there.”

  And then he laughed. And laughed. And laughed, a sound like an immense train at a grade crossing. Razor-edged, their thoughts suffused with blood even as they reasoned their way through the most subtle philosophies, bitter thinkers on the end of all, dispensers of justice and death, orcas laughed long, hard, and often. Bottom-Thumper’s laughter stopped.

  “Art thou willing to pay the price?”

  “I am, whatever it is.” Stasov could not slow the pounding of his heart.

  “Float out thy limbs and remain still. Well met then, Ilya Sergeiivich Stasov.”

  Stasov relaxed his arms and legs and floated spread-eagled. Suddenly, silently, the smooth shape of the orca sped by, thirty feet long, black, powerful, and vanished again.

  The pain was as sudden as the smash of an ax. Stasov twisted his body in agony and managed to activate the buoyancy harness. It righted him and carried him to the surface. He spit water, gasped in the cold air, and was finally able to scream.

  The aerobody floated overhead in the pewter sky, a blunt-nosed wedge with two propellers flickering aft. It turned lazily around and drifted over him, buzzing like an immense insect. A harness lowered and scooped him up delicately. The sea opened around him. He looked down. Scarlet drops of blood fell past his dangling feet, the only flecks of color against the gray of the sea and sky. A six-foot-long hooked dorsal fin cut the surface of the water. The orca’s head was just visible, water flowing over it in a smooth layer. Bottom-Thumper spouted once and vanished.

  Knester was ready with salve and bandages. “Such accuracy,” she said admiringly. “He charged a price only a human could pay.”

  “Damn him,” Stasov said through clenched teeth.

  “Don’t be such a baby. A wound like this is a compliment. Usually an orca will smash you with a fluke, toss you in the air, or puncture your eardrum by shouting when making an exchange, to show his contempt. A blood price is a genuine honor, but usually involves death or maiming for life. The spinning of the Wheel is beyond our knowledge, so I can’t guess why he thought you deserved such delicacy.”

  “We’re old friends,” Stasov said. She was right. It wasn’t every man who was charged a blood price by an orca and ended up losing only the last two fingers on his left hand.

  LENINGRAD, FEBRUARY 2031

  Erika Morgenstern forged grimly up the street into the teeth of the wind. Huge rafts of dirty ice thrust up out of the Neva River, revealing
black water beneath a quickly freezing scum.

  The dark granite blocks of the embankment held the elegant Baroque city out of the greedy water. Despite the cold, she paused, to marvel at the golden spire of the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul as it rose above the frozen city.

  Ilya Stasov was housed in an eerily beautiful eighteenth-century red-stucco building with white pilasters, vivid against the snow. Two guards in bulky greatcoats, rifles slung across their shoulders, checked her papers before unlocking the door.

  “You have been meeting at the Institute for Space Research?” one of them asked, a friendly youngster with straight flaxen hair sticking out from under his fur cap. “That is good. We have long waited for the Americans to ask for our help. We are smart, but poor.”

  That wasn’t quite it, of course, and she was from New Zealand, not America, but Morgenstern wasn’t about to argue with him. Instead, she smiled back. “Yes. We’re going to Jupiter.” She wasn’t sure she believed it herself, but the agreement had been signed just that morning.

  “Together, ah? That’s the only way to go so far.” He opened the door for her and saluted.

  The hall was dark, and like all Russian hallways smelled of cabbage, this time with an overtone of frankincense from the icon lamp that glowed in the corner.

  Typewriters clacked somewhere in the rear. She only belatedly identified a low moaning as a recording of a humpbacked whale call. A silent, suspicious woman, her hair tied severely back, led Morgenstern up the stairs to the front of the house.

  Stasov greeted her with a formal triple cheek kiss. She held on to him for a moment longer. He had put on weight since Homma, but was still thin. “It is good to see you,” he said. “Have you succeeded?” His hair was shaved close, like a swimmer’s. He looked tired, and had circles under his eyes.

  “Yes,” she said. She thought about the years of effort that had finally brought her here to Leningrad. “We’re going. In principle. As to your idea about our funding…”

  The silent woman brought two glasses of strong tea. Stasov sweetened his with a teaspoon of blackberry jam. His left hand was no longer bandaged, and he held his glass with his thumb and first two fingers. “It is not a joke. The Delphine Delegation will provide the funding, as they have agreed at Santa Barbara.”

  “But why? To haul a maimed sperm whale off to Jupiter? It doesn’t make any sense!”

  “I have told you, though you choose not to accept it. It marks the arrival of their God. If you don’t understand that, of course it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “God save us from religion.” She felt a deep sense of frustration. “I feel like I’m being financed by some dotty maiden aunt who wants her Pekinese to see Jupiter.”

  He tapped the rim of his glass with his spoon. “This maiden aunt will have billions of dollars in reparation money from the Santa Barbara agreement. That money is as good as any other. It is the only way you will succeed.”

  “I understand that. But I don’t have to like it.”

  “None of us have to like what we have to do.” A bell rang in the next room. “Excuse me,” he said. “That’s Vladivostok.” He walked out, slumped, his limbs heavy. He looked infinitely tired.

  She looked around as she listened to his low voice on the phone. The room was packed with papers. Diagrams and maps covered the elaborately figured wallpaper. The lion-footed desk was covered with strip charts and sonograms. A small bed, severely made in a military manner, was the only clear area. A heavy red folder lay on the desk. In a mood of idle curiosity, Morgenstern flipped it open. ‘Minutes—Santa Barbara negotiations,’ it said. The date was yesterday’s. She flipped through. Every day of the negotiations, supposedly kept under rigid security, was there, extensively marked and annotated in Stasov’s angular hand. She closed the notebook and sat back down in her chair.

  Stasov’s voice continued. She listened to it, but couldn’t make out the words. After a moment, she realized that he wasn’t speaking English or Russian. He was speaking a dolphin dialect. The … person on the other end of the line was not a human being.

  “Did the dolphins fight a war with us?” she asked when he returned.

  “With whom?”

  “Don’t be coy with me, Ilya!” she said heatedly. “Did they sink ships, those veterans of yours?”

  “Until the Treaty of Santa Barbara is signed, the war between human and cetacean will continue, as it always has. It’s simply that recently the struggle has been a trifle more even. That’s all I will say.”

  “What do you have to do with Santa Barbara?”

  He glanced at the red folder. “I’m not permitted to have anything to do with Santa Barbara. But I like to stay informed.”

  “How do you hold all this in your head? The whale … you might have started another war when you took it from the Indian Ocean people by force.”

  “I had to do it,” Stasov said. “There was no other way. It’s a step on the way out.”

  “Did you see all this, when we met at Homma?”

  “I saw the sun. I saw freedom. I saw that I still had to live. I felt my redemption, but did not yet see its shape. There are still a number of things I have to do. Some of them frighten me.”

  “Did you see me, Ilya?” she asked, with a feeling of constriction in her throat. “Have you ever seen me? Or just what I can do?”

  “I saw you, Erika. But I saw myself as well. Don’t try to force me into a position I do not hold. You understand better than anyone what it is that I’m after.”

  She sighed. “You don’t look well, Ilya. Do you sleep?”

  “Poorly. Nightmares.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Homma.”

  “No,” he answered. “Uglegorsk.”

  THE AEGEAN SEA, APRIL 2031

  The cliffs rose up a thousand feet above the water, encircling the twenty-mile-wide harbor like protective arms. Whitewashed villages clung to the cliff tops, glinting in the morning sunlight. The sky was a vivid, cloudless blue. Stasov leaned back against the mast, feeling it warm on his back. The St. John Chrysostom creaked serenely across the still water in the harbor. His guide, Georgios Theodoros, silently trimmed the boat’s bright sail. It billowed out in the breeze and they began to flop over the water. Soon they had emerged from the bay of Thera onto the open waters of the Aegean Sea.

  “They call it the Temple of Poseidon Pankrator,” Theodoros said. He rested easily at the stern of the boat, bearded face turned to the sun like a cat’s, eyes half closed while he kept one arm over the tiller. “Poseidon, Ruler of All. Wishful thinking, attributing ancient supremacy to the Sea God. He ruled the sea, and horses. Not much else. But the Temple is the only structure this near which survived the eruption of the volcano Strogyle, that black day four thousand years ago, so perhaps Poseidon took it back to his bosom.” That eruption had left behind the harbor of Thera, which was the immense caldera of the collapsed volcano.

  It had been years since Stasov had seen Theodoros. The Greek had aged gracefully, gray appearing in his beard. He had gained a certain unpleasant notoriety due to the association of his theories with Stasov’s infamous work at Uglegorsk, but he showed no hurt or anger. In his home waters he was quite an eccentric. Though the regulations governing the Aegean dolphin territories prohibited the use of noisy motor-driven vessels, they certainly did not require the hand-built wood hull blackened with pitch, the dyed woven linen sail, and the watchful painted eyes on the St. John Chrysostom’s prow.

  “I never guessed what it would take,” Theodoros said. “All my studies, and I never understood.”

  “I never guessed how much it would cost,” Stasov replied. “But without you I would never have figured anything out.”

  Theodoros looked out over the sea. “It may have been a mistake, Ilya. But of course that’s absurd. We had to discover their intelligence. If only…”

  “If only they weren’t a contemptible, corrupt, sexually perverse bunch of braggarts, cowards, and fools?” Stasov snorted. It was now
proverbial that the more one studied dolphins, the more one disliked them. “Why didn’t your ancient sources mention that?”

  “They mention it, but obliquely. The humans of that era were perhaps not much different, and didn’t see that it deserved much comment.”

  “But how did they figure it out?” Stasov asked in wonder. “That was four thousand years ago! They had no sound generators, no signal processing laboratories. How did the men of the Cretan Thalassocracy learn to speak to dolphins?”

  “You’ve got it backwards. I think dolphins learned to talk from humans, being too pigheaded to think of something like that on their own, just like the unlettered Greeks learned civilization from the Cretans.”

  “Learned?” Stasov said. “Or were compelled to learn?”

  “Did the ancient Cretans enslave dolphins to guide their ships into dangerous harbors, assist in salvage operations, and scout out enemy defenses? Most likely. I doubt, however, that they felt any great guilt at having done so.”

  “But still.” Stasov hit the wooden gunwale with his fist. “To sail out in a ship like this, dive into the water, and learn to speak to an animal. It’s incredible. The equipment we used, the time…”

  “Don’t underestimate your own achievement, Ilya. In ancient days, remember, the dolphins had not resolved to be silent. Breaking that resolution was the difficult thing.”

  “Difficult,” Stasov said, eyes downcast. “That’s one word for it.”

  Theodoros ignored his companion’s sudden gloom. “And we were all closer to nature then, and the gods. Remember that story about the lyre player, the whale, and the dolphin that I told you back at Uglegorsk? A whale was more than a whale. He was the Foreswimmer, he who comes before, the First Bubble that rises from the spout of God to foretell the coming Breath, the new incarnation. The dolphin over whose dim head our singer broke his lyre is the Echo of God, or as others have termed him, God’s Remora, Her humble, material associate, the Messiah. And that brings us here.”