The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Do the stars really fall?

  No. No, they never fall. Meteors are just … rock. Debris.

  And there is no gravity up there? What is that like?

  I don’t know. I’ve never been into space. I would like to. As you get deeper, there will be less gravity pulling you down. The pressure will be greater and the rock will want to explode inward, so the cutting will be easier.

  Andrew?

  Hmm.

  What will happen when I get to the bottom?

  The bottom of what?

  The mohole.

  Andrew does not answer for a long while.

  The earth is round, he finally says. There isn’t any bottom.

  * * *

  On weekends, the robot does not dig, but wanders the land. With the mobile unit, the robot can range the nearby forest and mountains. The mu scrambles over deadfall that would daunt a man. Sometimes, the robot deliberately gets lost. The robot feels the fade of signal from the main housing back in the living area, where the robot’s noetics physically remain, until there is a flurry of white noise and the fading of awareness and a click and the world snaps back to its grid as the robot’s transmission toggles from line-of-sight microwave to modulated laser satellite relay. Or so Andrew had said when the robot asked about it.

  The robot scrambles up hanging valleys into cerns and cirques with chilled, clear water where only cold things live. Or climbs up skree slopes, using the mu’s sure footing, onto ridges and to highland plateaus above the tree line. At this elevation, snow remains all year and the mu spreads a wide base with its spidery legs and takes small steps when crossing.

  The robot hears the low whistle of marmots, and sees an occasional mountain goat munching, although these goats are neutered, and the last of their clan. They had been brought by humans in the 1800s, until they filled the Olympics with goat mass and threatened to eat the upper tundra to nub. Now helicopters dart them with birth control and they die without progeny. And the robot sees the wolves that have begun to return after their species’ far northern retreat.

  The robot is descending from a high pass near Sawtooth Ridge when a pack of five wolves flow over a rise. They are changing valleys, perhaps to find denser spreads of the small, black deer of the rain forest or even a sickly Roosevelt elk. Their leader is an old, graying dog with spitmatted hair and a torn ear. He looks up at the mu, starts, and the other wolves come up short too. The robot ceases moving. The wolves sniff the air, but there is nothing—nothing living—to smell. But, with its chemical sensors, the robot smells them. They have the stink of mice to them, but tinged with a rangy fetor of meat and blood.

  The other wolves do not appear as bedraggled as the leader. One, smaller, perhaps younger, whines, and the leader yips at this one and it is silent.

  Then a cloud shadow moves up and over the pass, and courses darkly down into the adjacent valley. In that instant, the wolves course with the shadow, running with it down the coloir of the pass and disappearing from sight into the green of fir and hemlock a thousand feet below. The robot follows them in the infrared until their separate heats flux into the valley’s general sink.

  Still the robot stands and remembers that this is not a new sight, that the man, Victor Wu, has seen wolves in the passes before. But the man has never smelled wolves, and smelling them now pleases the part of the robot that is becoming the man, that the man is becoming.

  * * *

  And the robot digs, and is glad to dig. The deep rock begins to take on a new smell. This bedrock has never seen the surface. It is the layered outgush of an ocean floor rift dating from the Triassic. The smell is like the scent of high passes and summits, although the robot cannot say how. And the rock chimes and hums when the robot cuts it; it does not break away uniformly, but there is an order to its dismantle that the robot feels. And so the robot knows when to expect a mass to break away, and can predict when the going will be harder.

  The robot cannot explain this feeling to Andrew. Andrew has guessed that the skills of the man, Victor Wu, are integrating, and that his pattern-recognition ability is enhancing the robot’s own noetics. But the man is not separate. It is as if the man were one of the robot’s threads or a cutter head—but more than that. The man is always behind the robot’s thoughts, within them, never speaking but always expressing. Much more. The robot does not know how to say this to Andrew.

  As the robot digs deeper, the rock grows faulty and unstable. The tunnel behind the robot is at risk of blowing out, and the robot takes time to excavate down fault lines, shore up weaknesses with double or triple diamond glass. If the tunnel did collapse, the robot would have to dig a slow circle trying to find an egress farther back. But the people in the service wagon would die, and this concerns the robot. Andrew would die.

  The robot seldom speaks, but has come to know the voices of the technicians and graduate students in the transport. There is Gurney, the chief tech, who is a Mattie. The robot is surprised to learn that Gurney was in the field when the woman spoke, that Gurney remembers the robot.

  Don’t it give you the willies, a tech asks Gurney.

  It’s a machine, Gurney says. Depends on who’s driving. Right now, I am. Anyway, the good Mother wants us to eat.

  Many of the techs are not Matties, but descendants of the logging families that used to rule the Peninsula and still permeate it. The Matties outnumber them in the cities, but up the dirt roads that spoke into the mountains, in dark, overhung coves and in the gashes of hidden valleys, the families that remain from that boom time eke out makework and garden a soil scraped clean of top humus by the last ice age and thinly mulched with the acid remains of evergreens.

  Nothing grows goddamn much or goddamn right out here, says a tech.

  The Matties and the loggers heatedly discuss politics and appear close to fighting at times, but the robot cannot understand any of this. It thinks of the man who was killed on the stone steps, and the man who killed him. The robot does not understand at all.

  The grad students and the Matties are more comfortable around one another. The robot feels a warmth toward the graduate students that is certainly from the man. Yet their speech patterns are different from the techs, and the robot has difficulty understanding them at times. The meanings of their words shine like the moon behind a cloud, but the robot cannot think to the way around to them. Always they recede, and the robot is impatient. Victor Wu’s instincts are stronger in the robot than is his knowledge. Andrew has said that this is to be expected and that any computer of sufficient size can learn words, but you can learn intuition. Still the robot should know what the students are discussing, and finds the incomprehension irritating.

  But always the rock to return to, and the certainty that rock was what the robot was made for, and what the robot was born and bred for, and, in the end, that is enough.

  * * *

  One day in the following spring, at a critical juncture down in the mohole, Gurney does not show up for work and the digging is halted.

  The referendum passed, one of the grad students says, and there’s fighting in Forks and a Mattie got killed in Port Angeles, it looks like.

  Andrew gives the robot the day off, and to the robot’s delight, the man and the mu go for a long walk along the Quinault. Andrew seems sad, and the robot says nothing for a long while. The robot wants to speak, but doesn’t know what to say to Andrew.

  It’s not the politics, Andrew finally says. The damn Matties got their Protectorate fair and square with the referendum. But you get the feeling they’d take it if they hadn’t.

  Hadn’t what?

  Won the vote. There’s something about Gurney and them, the ones that I’ve met. I care about the same things they claim to. I don’t know. Something else again.

  Andrew, I don’t understand.

  They spend a lot of time worrying about whether everybody else believes the same way they do.

  The river rushes against cliff and turns through a stand of white birch. The robot stops
the mu. The robot is captivated by the play of the light on the water, the silver reflection of the sun, turning the clear water to opaque and viscous lead, then just as suddenly, when a cloud passes, back to happy water once again.

  It doesn’t really change, does it?

  What?

  The water. The way the light’s there, and isn’t, then is.

  Andrew rubs his eyes. He gazes out over the water. You are doing very well with your contractions, he says.

  You were right that I should stop thinking about them and they would flow more easily. Do you think it is Victor Wu’s knowledge surfacing, or my own practice?

  I don’t know. Both.

  Yes, both.

  The trail leads through a marsh, and Andrew struggles to find a dry path. The robot extends the mu’s footpads; each folds out as if it were an umbrella, and the mu seems to hover over the mud, the weight is distributed so well.

  Thank you for the mobile unit, the robot tells Andrew. I really like using it.

  It was necessary for the dig. That’s where most of the first grant money went. Robot, I have to tell you something.

  Andrew stops, balancing on a clump of rotten log.

  You have to tell me something, Andrew?

  Yes. Someone is coming. She phoned yesterday. All this brouhaha over the Protectorate Referendum is attracting attention all around the world. She’s going to shoot a documentary. She’s coming in a week. She’s bringing a crew and she’ll be staying in Port Townsend at first. I just thought you might. Want.

  Laramie. Laramie is coming.

  That’s right, robot. Laramie is coming home for a while. She doesn’t know how long.

  For the first time ever, the robot feels the man, the man Victor Wu, as a movement, a distinct movement of joy inside him. Little Bulge. Coming home. The robot tries to remember Laramie’s face, but cannot. Just a blur of darkness and bright flush. Always rushing and doing. And the camera. The robot can remember Laramie’s camera far better than her face.

  Andrew begins to walk again. I didn’t tell her about you, robot. I didn’t tell her about her father being part of you.

  Laramie does not know?

  No. She knows about the noetics, of course, but not how I’ve used them. I didn’t strictly need her permission to do it.

  Do you think she will hate me?

  No. Of course not. I don’t know. I don’t know her anymore.

  Should we tell her about me? At this thought the robot feels fearful and sad. But what matters is what is best for Little Bulge.

  Of course we should. It’s only right. Damn it, robot, I don’t know how I feel about this. I don’t know how much you knew about it or how much you realized, the Victor Wu part of you, I mean. Laramie and I—we didn’t part on the best of terms.

  I don’t remember. I remember the bridge at the Lillian once. You didn’t like her?

  Of course I liked her. I love her. That was the problem. She was impetuous. She’s opportunistic, damn it. Look at her pouncing on this thing. She called me a stick in the mud. I guess she was right. She called me a sour cynic who was fifty years old the day he turned twenty-five. We haven’t spoken in some time.

  I don’t understand.

  Robot. Victor. You never had a clue, I don’t think.

  I am not Victor.

  I know that. I know that. Still, I always thought he suspected. It was so obvious, and he was so brilliant in other ways.

  Andrew and the robot arrive back at the river. The robot thinks about it and realizes that they’d been traversing an oxbow swamp, made from spring overflows at the melting of the snow. At the river, they pick up a trail, once solid and well-traveled, now overgrown and ill-kept for two seasons. The Forest Service has been officially withdrawn at the Matties’ request, Andrew tells the robot. Booth, who is the president of the United States, responded to political pressure from the Mother Agatha and the Matties.

  The goddamn world is going back to tribes. The country’s going to hell. And taking my funding with it. And now there’s a skeleton crew for the Park Service, even, over at the Ho. I had a lot of friends who got fired or reassigned to the Statue of Liberty or some shit. Something else too. I think some of them haven’t left.

  What do you mean haven’t left?

  Haven’t left.

  * * *

  The trail diverges from the river, winds over a rise, then back down to the water again. A side trail leads to a peninsula and a wooden trail shelter, enclosed on three sides. Andrew takes a lunch from his daypack and eats a sandwich, while the robot looks for quartzite along the riverbank. The robot has become an expert in spotting a crystal’s sparkle and extracting it from the mud or silt of skree with which it has been chipped away and washed downstream from pressurized veins in the heart of the mountains. This day, the robot finds three crystals, one as cylindrical and as long as a fingernail. The robot brings them to Andrew, back at the trail shelter.

  Nice. Trace of something here. Blue? Manganese maybe, I don’t know. I like the ones with impurities better.

  I do too.

  Andrew puts the crystals in an empty film canister and stows them in his daypack.

  I was here at the turn of the century, he says. It was June and there was a terrible storm. All night long I heard crashing and booming like the world was coming to an end. Next morning, the whole forest looked like a war zone.

  The robot does not know what a war zone looks like, but says nothing.

  And all that morning, trees kept falling. If I hadn’t camped out here on the end of the peninsula, one of those trees would have fallen on me, smashed me flat. Killed by old growth. God, that’d probably thrill a Mattie to death just thinking about it.

  Isn’t that a sour and cynical thing to say, Andrew?

  He smiles. The robot is glad that it has found a way to make Andrew smile.

  * * *

  Gurney does not show up for work the next day, and Andrew gives his crew the week off. The men who are from logging families demand that they be paid, that Codependence Day, the first anniversary of the Protectorate’s founding, means nothing to them. The robot listens to the discussion and hears many terms that are incomprehensible, abstract. There are times the robot wishes that Victor Wu were directly accessible. Victor could at least explain what humans argued about, if not the reasons that they argued in the first place.

  The robot spends the day traveling in the mu, searching for crystals and collecting mushrooms up a stream that flows into the Quinault, near where it passes beneath Low Divide. Andrew is gone for the day, arranging supplies and making sure the dig’s legal work is in order, whatever that may mean, under new Protectorate regulations. When he returns in the evening, he has received no assurances and is unhappy. The robot waits for him to have a cup of tea and to take off his shoes, then speaks.

  Andrew?

  Yes. What?

  Are you all right?

  Huh? Oh, I’m fine. It’s just today. What is it, robot?

  I thought of something today, when I was looking at a map so that I could take the mu to where I wanted to go.

  What did you think of? Andrew speaks in a monotone voice and does not seem very interested. He sips his tea.

  I realized that I can read.

  Of course you can. Glotworks has a reading module as part of the software.

  No. I mean, could I read?

  I don’t follow you.

  A book.

  Could you read a book?

  Andrew is sitting up now. He stares at the internal monitor that is also one of the robot’s eyes.

  Yes. One of yours, perhaps. Which would you recommend?

  The books are kept nearby, in a hermetic box in the room the robot occupies during off-hours.

  Well. Let me. Hmm. Most of them are geology texts.

  Should I read a geology text?

  Well, sure. Why not?

  Can I get one now, with the mu?

  Of course. Go ahead. Try the Owsley. It’s about the most ex
citing of the lot. It’s about the Alvarez event and the search for the big cauldera. It’s a synthesis of other works, but brilliant, brilliant. Pretty much confirms the meteor theory, and gives a good argument for a Yucatan crash site. Made a big sensation in 04.

  The robot switches its awareness to the mu and picks out the book. It reads the first paragraph, then comes back inside the housing, back to the place where Andrew lives.

  Andrew?

  Yes.

  What are dinosaurs?

  * * *

  Summer days lengthen, and Andrew often goes to town—to Port Angeles or Port Townsend, and once making the trek around the peninsula to Forks—all to sort out legal details for the mohole dig. From each of these trips, he returns with a book for the robot. The first book is a Webster’s Dictionary, on bubble-card. Andrew plugs the card into a slot and the robot begins to read the dictionary. The robot finishes with a page of A, then scrolls through the remainder of the book. Here are all the words. Here are all the words in the language. All the robot has to do is look them up and remember them. The robot spends a happy day doing that.

  The next day, Andrew returns with the poems of Robert Frost. The robot pages through the book using the mu, accessing the dictionary card to find words that it does not know. The first word the robot looks up is “poem.”

  * * *

  After a week, Gurney returns to work, and the robot digs once again. The days pass, and the mohole twists deeper, like a coiled spring being driven into the earth. It only deviates from a curving downward path when the robot encounters fault lines or softnesses whose weakness the robot’s cutters can exploit. But, in general, the hole descends in a loose spiral.

  Andrew is anxious, and pushes everyone harder than before. Yet, Andrew himself works the hardest of all, poring over data, planning routing, driving to meetings in Forks and Port Angeles. He is often not in bed before one or two in the morning.

  The robot fills the time with reading. There are so many books—more than the robot ever imagined. And then the robot discovers Andrew’s record collection, all on two bubble-cards carelessly thrown in with all the technical manuals and geology texts. For the first time since the summer when the teenagers came and plugged into the robot and had their parties, the robot listens to music.