The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Whatever happened to that dolphin?” Stasov asked. “After he guided the priests to Delphi.”

  “Did he die, his task finished?” Theodoros shrugged, looking closely at Stasov. “The story doesn’t say. Dolphins perceive the universe by sensing sounds they generate themselves. This makes them arrogant, as if they define the universe, and their final arrogance is their belief that they can finish what they have to do, find closure, and die, achieving completion. Fortunately humans, dependent on the world outside themselves, are incapable of such a self-satisfied attitude.”

  Stasov turned away. “After four thousand years, they tell me, the Messiah has been born. The orcas are angry that he is not of their number but otherwise don’t seem to find it much of a matter for comment.”

  “Why should they? He is a material Messiah, immanent, not transcendent. A money changer. A Pharisee. Even dolphin theology is crude and stupid.”

  That made Stasov smile. “At last we’ve found your pet peeve, Georgios. Lack of theological rigor.”

  “Don’t laugh, you’re the one who has to deal with it. So you want to push these lazy, incompetent creatures to the Time of the Breath. Why?”

  “I shattered their silence, and now I forever hear their voices. If I bring on the Breath, and they reach their new incarnation, perhaps I can find peace.”

  Theodoros looked sorrowful. “You won’t, Ilya. You never will. Peace is only within. But here we are.” He dropped sail and the boat stilled. No land was visible. A buoy marked the shallows where the Temple lay. “Into the sea with you. Seek the Messiah. I will await your return here.” He smiled sunnily at Stasov, who sat, motionless, staring at the smoothly shining water.

  “You have to face them,” Theodoros said. “You have madly driven this far. How can you stop?”

  “I can’t. I always want to, but I can’t.” Stasov put on his fins and slipped into the water. Dolphins commented to each other somewhere in the distance, but the water around him was empty. He swam towards the voices, recognizing them. Bottom-Thumper at Hokkaido, and these three here. Who else?

  In a few moments he came into sight of the Temple of Poseidon Pankrator. Buried by volcanic ash and millennia of bottom sediment, the Temple had been lost until a sounding survey detected a density anomaly. After negotiation with the Delphine Delegation it had been cleaned and restored. A forest of the distinctive Cretan columns, wider at the top than at the bottom, held up a roof edged with stylized bull’s horns. Everything had been repainted its original bright polychrome, the columns red with green capitals, the bull’s horns gleaming with gold. The Temple was used as a symbolic site for formal human-dolphin negotiations, since it had been from the men of the Cretan Thalassocracy that dolphins had first learned the habits of speech.

  Stasov swam slowly over the old sacred precincts, tracing out the lines of the religious complex of which the Temple of Poseidon Pankrator had once been the center. The rest of the ruins had been cleared of debris and left just as they were. In front of the Temple was a large open area. This had once been the Sacred Pool, where dolphins had swum to pay homage, with the sullen sarcasm that must even then have been part of their personalities, to the humans’ anthropomorphic version of the Sea God.

  Three dolphins swam fitfully around the Temple. The sun probed through the water and gleamed on the ultrasonic cutting blades that made up the front edges of their flippers and dorsal fins. Their sides were armored and their bellies packed with superconducting circuitry. They turned and swam towards him in attack formation. Phobos, Deimos, and Harmonia. A coincidence, that those three had survived. The children of Aphrodite, wife of the cuckolded artificer Hephaestos, and Ares the War God. Fear, Panic, and Harmony, the contradictory emotions of Love and War, with a healthy assist from sullenly impartial technology.

  “Colonel!” Deimos said, and the dolphins stopped, awaiting orders. They would still obey him, he knew. If he commanded them to cut Theodoros’s boat apart, they would do it without a moment’s hesitation, despite the treaty violation it would entail. His authority over them would always exist, for they knew he had the power to change the shape of the world, a power that caused them agony and terror.

  Stasov ran his maimed left hand down Deimos’s side, feeling the scars and machinery. In the war’s second year Deimos and a dozen of his fellows had preceded a run of Soviet attack submarines from Murmansk through the perilous sea gap between Greenland and Iceland, where the enemy had placed his most sensitive submarine detection technology. Packed with equipment which made them appear to all sensors as Alfa class submarines, the dolphins had drawn ASW forces away from the real Soviet attack. Five of the nine submarines had gotten through, to provide a useful diversion of enemy forces from the main theater of war in the North Pacific. Deimos alone of his comrades had survived, and been decorated with an Order of Lenin.

  “I am not a Colonel,” Stasov said. He was tired of saying it.

  “What are you then?” Harmonia said. Her artificial left eye glittered at him, its delicate Japanese optics covered with seaweed and algae. “An orca that walks?”

  “An orca with hands,” Phobos agreed. “A good definition of a human.” He was the largest of the three and had gotten through the war miraculously unscathed. “We know what you want. You want God. That’s why you’re still alive.”

  “Why the hell do you care?” Harmonia made a thrumming noise indicative of disgust. “Why should we?” Her eye kept twisting and focusing at nothing. She had lost the left side of her skull during the landings at Kagalaska. Her job had been cutting free mines with her ultrasonic fin blades while suppressing their magnetic detection circuitry. At Kagalaska the dolphins had encountered a new model. Stasov had never figured out how Harmonia had managed to survive. “Why have you dragged us here to do this? I’m bored.”

  “He wants to hurt us more,” Deimos said. “This way he can drive all of us. He will use the Remora like a narwhal’s tusk. He will pierce us. Isn’t that true, Colonel?”

  “It’s true,” Stasov said. “But it doesn’t matter. It had no effect on the validity of my request.”

  “Stop knocking a dead body around with your snout,” the massive Phobos said. “Save logical games for the orcas, who like them. They bore us.”

  The three dolphins’ voices sank through the water like lumps of lead. Each phrase seemed a deliberate effort, but that did not silence them.

  “I’m not playing games,” Stasov said. “I am serious.”

  “But why do you care?” cried Harmonia.

  “I do. I always have.”

  Phobos swam up and knocked Stasov aside as if he were a vagrant piece of seaweed. Three chevrons, now dark and tarnished, marked his dorsal fin, one for each of the American submarines whose destruction had been attributable to his skillful use of his sonic and magnetic detectors. He had also helped sink the American Aegis cruiser Wainwright, saving the landings on Kagalaska.

  Even now, his side bruised, Stasov felt that same surge of gratitude that had overcome him when he watched the cruiser sink into the North Pacific. “Answer her question,” Phobos said. “Why do you care?”

  Harmonia did not allow Stasov to answer. “We certainly don’t. God talk is stupid.”

  “God will rise when She wants to,” Deimos said. “We can’t push Her flippers with our snouts.”

  They circled Stasov like mechanical, murderous sharks.

  “Tell us why this matters to you,” Phobos roared.

  Would they slice him apart with their ultrasonic blades, these decorated veterans of that heroic, futile war, and stain the clear water with his blood? He felt like a man returned to the grave of his comrades, only to have their bony hands reach out from death to pull him beneath the surface. He would welcome their cold touch, because he knew they had the right.

  “It matters because it has to happen,” Stasov said. “It is necessary.”

  The dolphins hooted contempt. “You always do what is necessary, Colonel,” Deimos said. “You tortur
ed us until you ripped the voice from our throats—because it was necessary. You took away our bodies and turned us into mechanical sharks—because it was necessary. You killed us in your incomprehensible human war—because it was necessary. Now you come to tear us from the womb of our sea and throw us into the cold deeps of space because it is necessary?”

  “Eating is necessary,” Harmonia said. “Fucking is necessary. Breathing is necessary. Death is necessary. You’re as stupid as a sea turtle that fucks in the sea and then climbs out into the air to lay its eggs where the land dwellers can steal them. I’m sure the turtle thinks it’s necessary.”

  “You’re like a shark maddened by the smell of blood,” Phobos said, suddenly quiet, “who eats and eats and can’t stop until its belly bursts. Won’t you ever have your fill of us, Ilya Stasov?”

  Crying under water seemed so maddeningly futile. He reached his arms out to them, a meaningless gesture. But what could he give them? An apology? A confession?

  “You are right,” he said. “I need to do it so that at last I can rest. I can try to forget what I have done to you.”

  “Rest,” Deimos said. “A human word.” Dolphins slept with only one hemisphere of their brains at a time so that they could always keep swimming. They could never stop, because they had to breathe. “Why should we grant it to you? The Treaty does not require it.”

  “And if the Treaty does not require it,” Phobos added, “we will not do it. Name us the proper articles or leave.”

  “Brothers,” Harmonia said, suddenly quiet. “Stasov wishes to die. He cannot until he is finished.”

  “Yes,” Stasov said. “Give me your Messiah. And let me die.”

  UGLEGORSK, JUNE 2031

  It was the scene of his nightmares. The tanks were now empty, the floor dry, the electronics long since packed up and discarded, but the high vault of the laboratory still contained all of the pain and terror that Stasov could imagine. From the platform where he stood the pattern of tanks on the floor looked like an ice cube tray in an abandoned refrigerator. The vault’s concrete was cracked and aging, the color of long-buried bone.

  Stasov held tightly to the thin metal railing though there was no danger of falling. Even empty the building whispered. The Japanese had long ago given up on the idea of turning the Uglegorsk station into an atrocity museum. It was too far from anywhere, and the torment there had not involved blood or physical torture but pain too subtle for a human to see. They concluded that the museum would have been utterly unvisited. So it had lain empty, until Stasov’s irregular request for a last look at it.

  The Japanese had been extraordinarily polite and cooperative, and had left Stasov to wander on his own through the ruins. Perhaps, Stasov thought, it was because they knew he could punish himself more effectively than they had ever been able to.

  Suddenly something thunked on the metal stairs. Stasov shivered. Was the place really haunted? The thunk became regular, and Stasov heard the heavy breathing of someone pulling himself up the stairs.

  A large figure loomed out of the darkness. “Ilya,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Antosha!” Stasov embraced the massive Anatoly Ogurtsov and kissed him. He hadn’t seen the General since the middle of the war. Veterans of Uglegorsk never spoke to each other, even if they lived in the same town. The slightest word would have shattered the icy barriers they had set up around that time. Stasov suspected he knew why the other was there. Ogurtsov would ask a question, eventually. Stasov only hoped that he would be able to answer it.

  Ogurtsov stepped back. His right foot was a prosthetic. When he noticed Stasov’s attention, he slapped it with his cane. “Not an orca, unfortunately,” he rumbled. “Nothing appropriate like that. A single bullet through the knee at Unimak. An ordinary soldier’s wound.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a vodka bottle. He pulled the stopper out with his teeth and offered it to Stasov. “To old times.”

  “To old times,” Stasov responded, and took a swallow. He almost choked.

  Ogurtsov chuckled. “Now don’t insult me, Ilya. I make that stuff myself. An old man’s hobby. Flavored with buffalo grass.”

  “It’s excellent,” Stasov managed to choke, tears in his eyes.

  “Have you lost your taste for vodka?” Ogurtsov laughed. “I remember,” he gestured with his cane at the tanks below, “how we sat, you, me, and that Greek philosopher, Theodoros, and unriddled the ways of the dolphins. The drunker we got, the more sense we made of their myths and their gods. And we figured it out.”

  “And we did it. We tortured them until they spoke.”

  Ogurtsov regarded him warily. “How were we to know? How should we have realized the incredibly strong response of the cetacean brain to the sense of sound? The aural illusions we generated for them tormented them, drove them mad. It’s as if those optical illusions you find in children’s books drove humans to extremes of agony.”

  “We didn’t know,” Stasov whispered. “For months, years, we tortured them with illusions of moving seabeds, of impossible echoes. Their absolute faith in their senses broke them like dry sticks in our hands.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Ogurtsov said. He put his arm around Stasov’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They climbed down the stairs and walked among the crumbling tanks. “Remember the first time one of them spoke?” Stasov said.

  “Ilya, please—”

  “Do you remember?”

  Ogurtsov shook himself. “Of course I remember.” He paused by a tank and looked in at its cracked and stained bottom. “There were four of us. You, me, Sadnikova, and Mikulin. Mikulin died last year, did you know? He tripped and fell down in the snow. He was drunk. He froze to death.

  “I can see it. Sadnikova stood over there, her hands on the signal generator. I stood here, you next to me. Mikulin on the other side. It was our final, most sophisticated sonic pattern. The eruption of Strogyle and the sinking of the sea bottom. We’d spent months on it. We played it for that one we called Kestrel, because he swam so fast. I don’t know what—”

  “He died in the Battle of La Perouse Strait.”

  “So he got his wish at last.” Ogurtsov grabbed onto the edge of the tank. “We played the illusion. And he cried out—”

  “‘Let—me—die’,” Stasov said through clenched teeth. “That’s what he finally screamed. ‘Let me die!’” He shivered. “That’s how we began to talk.”

  “We never listened to what they said, you know. We made them talk, but we never listened. We’ve never understood why they want to die.”

  They walked through the rest of the building silently. At the back door they stopped. The sky had its usual high overcast. The Sterlet, the boat from the Vladivostok Oceanographic Institute, floated just off shore, its gaily fluttering red flag the only spot of color against the sea and sky. It was the vessel that would take Stasov to Vladivostok, finally back in Russian hands. From there he would go to Tyuratam, and from the spaceport there to Jupiter.

  “They fought a war against us, didn’t they?” Ogurtsov said. “And most of the human race never really believed it. The slimy aquatic bastards.”

  “Yes,” Stasov answered. “They did. They sank ferry boats, pleasure craft, fishing boats. Whenever they knew they wouldn’t get caught, whenever events would be confused. Terrorism, plain and simple.”

  Ogurtsov shook his head. “We trained them well. Phobos probably sank more than his share. He was a mean one.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  They went down to the water and strolled along the rocky shore, letting the waves lap against their feet. Ogurtsov maneuvered easily over the rocks, occasionally kicking a loose one with his prosthetic foot. He looked at Stasov. “I’ve talked to people in Leningrad. You’ve gotten everything. Everything we hid. Why do you want it?”

  Stasov did not return his glance. The question had finally come. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ilya!” Ogurtsov
took his shoulder, his hand massive. Stasov stopped. “You’ve cleaned out the black files, the ones the War Crimes Commission was always after. Circuit diagrams, sonic structures, echo formats. All the ways we generated those sonic images, and the effects that they had. The recordings of dolphins in pain. All of our results.” He shook Stasov’s shoulder. “I thought most of it had been destroyed.”

  “No,” Stasov said. “We never throw anything away. You know that, Antosha.”

  “No one knows that stuff exists. The Japanese suspected, the yellow bastards, but they couldn’t get their hands on it. They tried hard enough to open you up.”

  “They tried. I learned more from them than they did from me.”

  “Why do you want that stuff? After what we’ve been through? We never wanted to have anything to do with it ever again.”

  “I don’t want it,” Stasov said. “I’ve never wanted it. But I need it.”

  Ogurtsov stopped, as immovable as a mountain, holding Stasov in his grip. “Ilya, I feel guilty. We all do, each in our own way, some, I grant you, more than others. But we try to forgive ourselves, because we didn’t know what we were doing. What gives you the right to think that your guilt is more important than anyone else’s?”

  “I know what I have to do, Antosha. That’s all. I’m not trying to compete with you.”

  Ogurtsov dropped his hand, letting him go. “Do it then,” he said, his voice tired. “Do it and be damned.”

  JUPITER ORBIT, JANUARY 2033

  Weissmuller pumped his way towards Jupiter Forward. His entire body ached with fatigue. He’d never swum so far before, and he couldn’t stop to take a rest. That was all right. The universe was really not such a big place after all. Surgically implanted physiological indicators buzzed into his bones, frantically warning him that Jupiter’s magnetic field was about to give him a radiation overdose. The medical personnel at Jupiter Forward had warned him strictly. He belched in contempt. What was the problem? Humans were always afraid of all sorts of things they couldn’t see or hear. The problem of ionizing radiation was too bizarre and subtle to interest Weissmuller. It could be taken care of. Humans liked solving things like that. That was what humans were for.