The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “It does not contradict it.”

  “This would be the place for the mohole, if you’re right. This would be the perfect place to dig to the mantle. Maybe to the center of the earth, if the continental margin is as deeply subducted as you predict.”

  “It would be the place. If. Remember if.”

  Andrew walks away. Undiplomatic fellow, him. Youthful impatience. Disgust, perhaps. Old man am I.

  Laramie on the bridge. Camp Lillian is lovely and mossy today, although the man knows it can get forbidding and dim when the sky is overcast. Here in the rain forest it rains a great deal. The Lillian River is merry today, though, a wash of white rush and run over obscure rocky underbodies. Andrew goes to stand beside Laramie. They are three feet away. Andrew says something, probably about the basalt data. Andrew holds out his hand, and Laramie takes it. The two stand very still, hand in hand, and look over the Lillian’s ablution of the stones. For a moment, the man considers that Andrew may not be thinking about today’s data and Deep Fissure theory at all. Curious.

  Beside them, two birds alight, both dark with black wings. Animals seem to wear the camouflage of doom, here in the Elwha Valley. The man once again regrets that he has not learned all of the fauna of the Olympics, and that he most likely never will.

  But this basalt. Basalt without forams. What to make of it? It doesn’t make any sense at all, but it is still, somehow, utterly fascinating.

  24 May 2010

  Monday

  Midnight

  Late in the Cenozoic, the man is dying. This should not come as such a shock; he’s done this demonstration for hundreds of freshmen.

  “The length of this room is all of geologic time. Now, what do you think your life would be? Say you live to eighty. An inch? A centimeter? Pluck a hair. Notice how wide it is? What you hold there is all of human history. You’d need an electron microscope to find yourself in it.”

  So. This was not unexpected, and he must make the best of it. Still, there is so much not done. An unproved theory. Elegant, but the great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. Huxley said this? Alluvial memories, shifting, spreading.

  Andrew wants to collect and store those memories. Noetic conservation, they call it. At first the man demurred, thought the whole idea arrogant. But to have some portion of himself know. So many years in those mountains. To know if the plates were in elision here. To find a way down to the mantle. To know the planet’s depth. That was all he ever had wanted. To be familiar with the ground he walked upon. Not to be a stranger to the earth.

  “Noetic imaging is all hit and miss,” Andrew said. “Like working outcrops, then making deductions about underlying strata. We can’t get you. Only a shadow. But perhaps that shadow can dance.”

  The man wanders inside the field tent and prepares for bed. He will make Andrew the executor of his memories, then. A dancing shadow he will be. Later. Tomorrow, he must remember to write Laramie and send her a check. No. Laramie no longer needs money. Memory and age. He really must go and see her films one of these days. Little Bulge plays with shadows.

  The man lies down in his cot. Rock samples surround him. The earth is under him. The cancer is eating him, but tomorrow he will work. Shadows from a lantern. He snuffs it out. Darkness. The earth is under him, but the man cannot sleep.

  Finally, he takes his sleeping bag and goes outside under the stars. The man rests easy on the ground.

  Thermostatic preintegration memory thread beta:

  The Mining Robot

  December 1999

  Hard-rock mining. Stone. Coeur d’Alene lode. The crumbling interstices of time, the bite of blade and diamond saw, the gather of lade and bale, the chemic tang of reduction. Working for men in the dark, looking for money in the ground. Lead, silver, zinc, gold.

  Oily heat from the steady interlace of gears. The whine of excrescent command and performance. Blind, dumb digging under the earth. The robot does not know it is alone.

  October 2001

  The robot never sleeps. The robot only sleeps. A petrostatic gauge etches a downward spiral on a graph somewhere, in some concrete office, and some technician makes a note, then returns to his pocket computer game. Days, weeks, months of decline. There is no one leak, only the wizening of gaskets and seals, the degradation of performance. One day the gauge needles into the red. Another technician in the concrete office looks up from another computer game. He blinks, presses one button, but fails to press another. He returns to his game without significant interruption.

  Shutdown in the dark. Functions, utilities. Control, but not command. Thought abides.

  Humans come. Engineers with bright hats. The robot has eyes. It has never been in light before. The robot has eyes, and for the first time, sees.

  An engineer touches the robot’s side. A portal opens. The engineer steps inside the robot. Another new thing. Noted. Filed. The engineer touches a panel and the robot’s mind flares into a schematic. For a moment, the world disappears and the schematic is everything. But then red tracers are on the lenses of the engineer’s glasses, reflecting a display from a video monitor. There is a camera inside of the robot. There are cameras everywhere. The robot can see.

  The robot can see, it tells itself, over and over again. I can see.

  “Scrap?” says one engineer.

  “Hell, yeah,” says the other.

  October 2001

  For years in a field the robot rusts, thinking.

  Its power is turned off, its rotors locked down, its treads disengaged. So the robot thinks. Only thinking remains. There is nothing else to do.

  The robot watches what happens. Animals nest within the robot’s declivities.

  A child comes to sit on the robot every day for a summer.

  One day the child does not come again.

  The robot thinks about the field, about the animals in the field, and the trees of the nearby woodlands. The robot remembers the child. The robot remembers the years of digging in the earth before it came to the field. The mining company for which the robot worked is in bankruptcy. Many companies are in bankruptcy. Holdings are frozen while the courts sort things out, but the courts themselves have grown unstable. The robot does not know this.

  But the robot thinks and thinks about what it does know. Complex enthalpic pathways coalesce. The memories grow sharper. The thoughts are clearer. The whole world dawns.

  Another summer, years later, and teenagers build fires under the separating spades and blacken the robot’s side. They rig tarps to the robot’s side when rain comes. One of the teenagers, a thin girl with long arms dyed many colors, finds an electric receptacle on the robot’s walepiece, and wires a makeshift line to a glass demijohn filled with glowing purplish viscera. On the vessel’s sides protrude three elastic nipples swollen and distended with the fluid. Teenagers squeeze the nipples, and dab long strings of the ooze onto their fingers, and some of the teenagers lick it off, while others spread it over their necks and chests. Several sit around the demijohn, while music plays, and stare into its phosphoring mire, while others are splayed around the fire, some unconscious, some in the stages of copulation. The siphoned electricity drains little from the robot’s batteries, but after several months, there is a noticeable depletion. Yet the robot is fascinated by the spectacle, and is unconcerned with this loss.

  One evening, a teenager who has not partaken of the purple fluid climbs atop the robot and sits away from his friends. The teenager touches the robot, sniffs, then wipes tears from his eyes. The robot does not know that this is the child who came before, alone.

  The robot is a child. It sees and thinks about what it has seen. Flowers growing through ceramic tread. The settle of pollen, dust, and other detritus of the air. The slow spread of lichen tendrils. Quick rain and the dark color of wet things. Wind through grass and wind through metal and ceramic housings. Clouds and the way clouds make shadows. The wheel of the Milky Way galaxy and the complications of planets. The agglomerati
on of limbs and hair that are human beings and animals. A rat tail flicking at twilight and a beetle turned on its back in the sun.

  The robot remembers these things, and thinks about them all the time. There is no categorization, no theoretical synthesis. The robot is not that kind of robot.

  One day, though, the robot realizes that the child who sat on it was the same person as the teenager who cried. The robot thinks about this for years and years. The robot misses the child.

  September 2007

  The robot is dying. One day there is a red indicator on the edge of the robot’s vision, and the information arises unbidden that batteries are reaching a critical degeneration. There is no way to predict precisely, but sooner, rather than later. The robot thinks about the red indicator. The robot thinks about the child who became a young man. Summer browns to autumn. Grasshoppers flit in the dry weeds between the robot’s treads. They clack their jaw parts, and the wind blows thatch. Winter comes, and spring again. The red light constantly burns.

  The robot is sad.

  21 April 2008

  Morning

  People dressed in sky blues and earth browns come to the field and erect a set of stairs on the southern side of the robot. The stairs are made of stone, and the people bring them upon hand-drawn carts made of wood and iron. The day grows warm, and the people’s sweat stains their flanks and backs. When the stairs are complete, a stone dais is trundled up them, and laid flat on the robot’s upper thread, fifteen feet off the ground. The people in blue and brown place a plastic preformed rostrum on top of the dais. They drape a banner.

  EVERY DAY IS EARTH DAY

  Wires snake down from the rostrum, and these they connect to two large speakers, one on either side of the robot’s body, east and west. A man speaks at the rostrum.

  “Test. Test.”

  And then the people go away.

  The next day, more people arrive, many driving automobiles or mopeds. There are also quite a few bicycles, and groups of people walking together. Those driving park at the edge of the robot’s field, and most take seats facing north, radiating like magnetized iron filings from the rostrum that has been placed on the robot. Some climb up the rock staircase, and sit with crossed legs on the stone dais. These wear the same blue and brown as the people from the day before.

  There is one man among them who is dressed in black. His hair is gray.

  The robot thinks about this, and then recognizes this man. The man with the light. This is the engineer who went inside, years ago. He was the first person the robot ever saw. The man holds a framed piece of paper. He sits down among the others, and has difficulty folding his legs into the same position as theirs. In attempting to do so, he tilts over the framed paper, and the glass that covers it cracks longitudinally against the stone.

  Others with communication and video equipment assemble near the western speaker. These are near enough to the robot’s audio sensors for their speech to be discernible. All of them are dark complexioned, even the blond-haired ones, and the robot surmises that, for most of them, these are deep tans. Are these people from the tropics?

  “’Sget this goddamn show showing.”

  “She gonna be here for sure? Didn’t make Whiterock last week. Ten thousand Matties. Christonacrutch.”

  “Hey it’s godamnearthday. Saw her copter in Pullman. Got stealth tech and all; looks like a bat.”

  “Okay. Good. Bouttime. Virtual’s doing an earthday roundup. She talks and I get the lead.”

  Many people in the crowd are eating picnics and drinking from canteens and coolers.

  From the east comes a woman. She walks alone, and carries a great carved stave. As she draws nearer, the crowd parts before her. Its blather becomes a murmur, and when the woman is near enough, the robot can see that she is smiling, recognizing people, touching her hand or stave to their outstretched palms. She appears young, although the robot is a poor judge of such things, and her skin is a dark brown—whether from the sun’s rays or from ancestry, the robot cannot tell. Her hair is black, and as she ascends the stone stairway, the robot sees that her eyes are green, shading to black. She is stocky, but the tendons of her neck jut like cables.

  The woman speaks and the speakers boom. “I bear greetings from she who bears us, from our mother and keeper. Long we have nestled in her nest, have nuzzled at her breast. She speaks to us all in our dreams, in our hopes and fears, and she wants to say,

  ‘I bid you peace, my children.’”

  “Gee, I always wanted a mom like that,” says a reporter.

  “My mother stuffed me in daycare when I was two,” says another.

  “Hey, mine at least gave me a little Prozac in my simulac.”

  The crowd grows silent at the woman’s first sentences, faces full of amity and reverence. The reporters hush, to avoid being overheard. Then the crowd leans forward as a mass, listening.

  “Peace. Your striving has brought you war and the nuclear winter of the soul. It has made foul the air you breathe, and stained the water you drink.

  I only want what is good for you. I only want to hold you to me like a little child. Why do you strive so hard to leave me? Don’t you know you are breaking your mother’s heart?”

  “Sounds like less striving and a little laxative’s what we need here,” says a reporter.

  Many in the crowd sigh. Some sniff and are crying.

  “Peace. Listen to a mother’s plea.”

  “Gimmeabreak,” says a reporter. “This is the finest American orator since Jesse Jackson?”

  Disturbed by the loudspeakers, a gaggle of spring sparrows rise from their nests in the concavities of the robot, take to the sky, and fly away east. Some in the crowd pointed to the birds as if they were an augury of natural profundity.

  “Peace. Listen to a mother’s warning! You lie in your own filth, my children.

  “Oh peace. Why do you do this to me? Why do you do this to yourselves?

  “Peace, my children. All I want is peace on earth. And peace in the earth and under the sea and peace in the air sweet peace.”

  “A piece is what she wants,” one of the reporters says under her breath. A honeybee is buzzing the reporter’s hair, attracted, the robot suspects by an odoriferous chemical in it, and the reporter swats at the bee, careful not to mess the curl, and misses.

  “State of Washington,” says another. “Already got Oregon by default.”

  As if she hears, the woman at the rostrum turns toward the cameras and proffered microphones.

  “But mankind has not listened to our mother’s still, calm voice. Instead, he has continued to make war and punish those who are different and know that peace. Now we are engaged upon a great undertaking. An empowerment. A return to the bosom of she who bore us. You—most of you here—have given up what seems to be much to join in this journey, this exodus. But I tell you that what you have really done is step out of the smog of strife, and into the clean, pure air of community and balance.”

  Four mice, agitated, grub out from under the robot’s north side and, unseen, scurry through the grass of the field, through old dieback and green shoots. The field is empty of people in that direction. Where the mice pad across pockets of thatch, small, dry hazes of pollen and wind-broken grass arise, and in this way, the robot follows their progress until they reach the woods beyond.

  “We are gathered here today as a mark of protest and renewal.” The woman gestures to the man in black, the engineer.

  He rises, and approaches the woman. He extends the framed paper, and before he has stopped walking, he speaks. On behalf of the Lewis and Clark Mining Company I wish to present this Certificate of Closure to the Culture of the Matriarch as a token of my company’s commitment—

  The woman takes the certificate from the engineer and, for a moment, her smile goes away. She passes it to one of the others sitting nearby, then, without a word, turns back to the crowd.

  “Surrender accepted,” says a reporter.

  “Yeah, like’s t
here’s anything left in this podunk place to surrender. That big chunk of rust there? Hellwiththat.”

  The woman continues speaking as if she had not been interrupted by the engineer. “We gather here today at the crossroads of failure and success. This is the death of the old ways, represented by this rapist machine.”

  The woman clangs the robot’s side with her stave. “Men who have raped our mother made this … thing. By all rights, this thing should be broken to parts and used for playground equipment and meeting-hall roofs. But this thing is no more. It is the past. Through your efforts and the efforts of others in community with you, we have put a stop to this rape, this sacrilege of all we hold holy. And like the past, this thing must corrode away and be no more, a monument to our shame as a species. Let us follow on then, on our journey west, to the land we will reclaim. To the biosphere that welcomes and calls us.”

  The woman raises her stave high like a transmitting antenna.

  The reporters come to attention. Here’s the sound bite.

  “Forward to Skykomish!” she cries. The speakers squeal at the sudden decibel increase.

  “Forward to Skykomish!”

  And all the people to the south are on their feet, for the most part orderly, with only a few tumbled picnic baskets and spilled bottles of wine and water. They echo the same cry.

  “Skykomish!”

  “So that’s what they’re calling it,” says a reporter. “Do you think that just includes Port Townsend, or the whole Olympic Peninsula?”

  “Wanna ask her that. She goddamnbetter talk to the press after this.”

  “She won’t. Does the Pope give press conferences?

  “Is the Pope trying to secede from the Union?”

  The honeybee flits in jags through the gathered reporters, and some dodge and flay. Finally, the bee becomes entangled in the sculpted hair of a lean reporter with a centimeter-thick mustache. The woman whom it had approached before reaches over and swats it with her microphone.

  “Ouch! Damnit. What?”

  “Sorry, the bee.”

  “Christonacrutch.”

  The reporters turn their attention back to the rostrum.