The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  I don’t want to hurt you, but you must leave the child alone, the robot says.

  At the sound of what they take to be a human voice, the wolves spring into a flurry of action. The gray leader stalks forward, teeth bared, while the others in the pack mill like creek fish behind him. They are searching for an exit. The small, young one finds that a living-room window is open. With a short hop from a couch, the wolf is outside. The others follow, one by one, while the gray leader attempts to hold the robot at bay. The robot does not move, but lets the wolves depart. Finally, the gray leader sees from the corner of his eye that the other wolves have escaped. Still, he cannot help but risk one feint at the robot. The robot does not move. The gray leader, bolder, quickly jumps toward the robot and locks his jaws on the robot’s forward leg. The teeth close on blue steel. The gray leader shakes. There is no moving the robot.

  In surprise and agitation, the wolf backs up, barks three times.

  I’m sorry to embarrass you. You’d better go.

  The wolf does just that, turning tail and bounding through the open window without even using the living-room couch as a launch point. The robot gazes around the silent room.

  There is a dead family here.

  An adult male, the father, is on one side of the couch, facing a television. Part of his neck and his entire chest are torn open in a gaping bloody patch. Twisted organs glint within. The television is off. Huddled in a corner is the mother and a young boy. Their blood splatters an entire wall of the living room. A shotgun, the robot decides. First the man, and then the mother was shot with her children all at once, with several blasts from a shotgun. There are pepper marks in the wall from stray shot. Yes, the killing was done with a shotgun. The wolves must have dragged one child away from the mother. The robot sees that it is a little girl. The mother’s other child, an older boy and a bit large for even a large wolf to handle, is still by his mother, partially blown into his mother’s opened body.

  The blood on the walls and floor has begun to dry and form into curling flakes that are brown and thin and look like tiny autumn leaves. There are also bits of skin and bone on the wall.

  The robot stares at the little girl. Her eyes are, mercifully, closed, but her mouth is pulled open and her teeth, still baby teeth, exposed. This is perhaps caused by her stiffening facial muscles. Or she may have died with such an expression of pain. The robot cannot tell. The girl wears a blue dress that is now tatters around her tattered, small body. One foot has been gnawed, but on the other is a dirty yellow flip-flop sandal.

  The robot feels one of the legs of the mu jerk spasmodically. Then the other jerks, without the robot wishing it to do so. The robot stares at the young girl and jitters and shakes for a long time. This is the way the robot cries.

  * * *

  Deeper in the earth, very deep now, and the rock, under megatons of pressure, explodes with a nuclear ferocity as the robot cuts away. For the past week the robot has thought constantly of the dead logger family, of the little dead girl. The robot has tried to remember the color of the girl’s hair, but cannot, and for some reason, this greatly troubles the robot.

  One evening, after a sixteen-hour workday, the robot dims the lights for Andrew. Outside the digger’s main body, but still in the home cave, the robot inhabits the mu. The robot takes pen and paper in the dexterous manipulators of the mu and begins to write a description of the little girl. Not as she was, twisted and dead, but of how she might have been before.

  The robot told Andrew about the family, and Andrew called the authorities, being careful to keep the robot out of his report.

  They’ll disassemble you if they find out, Andrew said to the robot. At least in the United States, they’d be legally required to do it. God knows what the Protectorate will want to do.

  There are accounts in the newspapers of the killing. The sheriff’s department claims to be bewildered, but the robot overhears the technicians who come from logger families muttering that the Matties now own the cops, and that everybody knew who was behind the murders, if not who actually pulled the trigger. And the Matties who worked under Andrew, led by Gurney, spoke in low tones of justice and revenge for the killings in Port Townsend on Codependence Day.

  I am a witness, the robot thinks. But of what?

  * * *

  Andrew?

  Yes.

  Are you tired?

  Yes. What is it?

  She would have grown up to be part of the loggers, so killing her makes a kind of sense.

  The little girl?

  The Matties and the people who used to be loggers hate each other. And they can’t help the way they are because they are like stones in sediment that’s been laid down long before, and the hatred shapes them to itself, like a syncline or an anticline. So that there has to be new conditions brought about to change the lay of the sediment; you can’t change the rocks.

  I don’t know about that. People are not rocks.

  So if she wasn’t killed out of an ignorant mistake, then I don’t understand why.

  I don’t either, robot.

  Why do you think?

  I don’t know, I said, I don’t know. There isn’t any good reason for it. There is something dark in this world that knows what it’s doing.

  Is it evil?

  There is evil in the world. All the knowledge in the world won’t burn it away.

  How do you know?

  I don’t. I told you, I don’t. I look at rocks. I don’t have very many theories.

  But.

  Yes?

  But you think it knows?

  I think the evil knows what it’s doing. Look at us in this goddamn century, all going back to hatred and tribes. You can’t explain it with economics or cultural semantics or any system at all. Evil and plain meanness is what it is.

  Andrew, it’s not right for her to die. She hadn’t lived long enough to see very many things and to have very many feelings. Those were stolen from her.

  That’s what murderers steal.

  The future?

  Yes. Even when you’re old, it still isn’t right.

  Yes. I can see that. It’s clear to me.

  Well. Then.

  I’ll turn down the lights.

  Well. Good night.

  Brown.

  What?

  Her hair was dark brown.

  * * *

  And the robot digs deeper and deeper, approaching the Mohorivicic layer, with the true mantle not far beneath, seething, waiting, as it had waited for four billion years, would wait should this attempt fail, should all attempts fail. And again, the foreign rhythm appears, hums along with the glade and bale of the robot’s cutting, but distinct from it, distinct from the robot and all human-made things.

  What is it? Andrew does not know. But there is something at the edge of the robot’s consciousness, at the edge of Victor Wu’s unconscious presence, that does know, that hears something familiar, as a whisper when the words are lost, but the meaning remains.

  One day, the alien rhythm is louder than ever, and for a fleeting moment, the robot recognizes it.

  Strong harmonies from the depths of the planet. Maude under the full moon. Magmas rising.

  Victor you can feel it. How can you feel it?

  I don’t know, Maude, the robot thinks. Maude among the instruments. I remember, thinks the robot, I remember what it felt like to walk the earth and let it show itself to me. There is a showing. Something is showing itself. Something is being revealed. Just as the St. Helens eruption was a revelation, with portents, with auguries that were plain to a man who cared for the earth.

  Something knows we’re here, the robot tells Andrew one night.

  Andrew is tired from a half-day underground, and the afternoon spent explaining the dig to yet another Mattie committee in Port Angeles, but he listens to what the robot has to say.

  What? How can you know?

  I do though.

  Then you do. Victor would know.

  Andrew shucks the
soft-sole walking shoes he wears in the city, and climbs onto the little cot inside the robot.

  Everyone else wants me to stop digging. Do you want to stop digging?

  No, Andrew.

  Then what shall we do about it?

  Listen, says the robot. Listen. But Andrew has fallen asleep and does not hear. The robot dims the lights inside, adjusts the temperature for Andrew, then goes out into the mu to read.

  The robot listens. The rhythm grows stronger, and now there are variations, windings among the background vibration that is the feedback from the robot’s own cutting of the rock and thumping against the earth’s insides. It is like a song, but not a song.

  There and there, the robot tells Andrew, but Andrew cannot hear it, encased as he is in the service wagon, and he cannot detect the rhythm on his many instruments.

  I believe you, Andrew says, but I simply can’t find it.

  The robot considers saying no more. What if Andrew really came to doubt the robot’s sanity? Would that not mean powering down, rebooting. Or perhaps never coming back up again. Dying.

  Andrew will not kill me, the robot thinks. And I will say what it is I hear.

  And slowly, day after day, the rhythm develops into an … other. The robot is not sure how else to think about it. It is the feeling that a—one—someone, is here, even when no one is in view. It is a sense of presence that the robot feels. The robot doesn’t know. Andrew cannot discover a way of knowing. But the feeling is not some erratic wiring, or even the robot’s developing imagination. It is either a madness or it is a real presence.

  And I am not crazy.

  Which is a sure sign of madness. Andrew laughs his dry laugh.

  Yet again, because of Victor Wu, because Andrew has come to trust the robot in all other things, he takes the robot seriously. In the few spare moments he has for experiments not directly related to the mantle-goal, Andrew and a graduate student make coding modifications to the robot’s language software.

  We’re wiring perfect pitch into you, the graduate student, Samantha, says, to go along with your ear for good music. Samantha explains more of what she is doing, but the robot does not follow. Samantha understands the robot’s mechanism as a surgeon might a human being’s. As she works at an internal keyboard, she tells the robot of her own past, but again the robot has trouble understanding.

  I grew up in virtual. I was practically born on the Internet. But by god I’m going to die in the forest, Samantha tells the robot. That’s why most of us are out here with Dr. Hutton, she says.

  There is only a trace of a smile on Andrew’s face, but the robot knows him well enough now to see it.

  Well this sure as hell ain’t virtual, he says.

  Laramie returns. She has not called Andrew. One Saturday the hum-vee crackles down the dirt and gravel road to the living area, and Laramie has come back. Andrew is away, at a meeting, and at first the robot is flustered and bewildered as to what to do. The robot has been reading, with a mind still half in the book.

  Laramie pulls out her camera and some sound equipment and comes to the entrance to the living cavern. The robot, in the mu, meets her, and invites her inside. That much the robot is able to manage.

  I’m sorry I didn’t clear my visit with Andrew first but you said it would be all right.

  It is all right.

  I thought it would be. Do you mind if I record this?

  No. I keep something like a journal myself. Would you care for some tea? Andrew bought some herbal tea after your last visit.

  The robot thinks that the words sound stiff and overly formal, but Laramie says yes, and settles down at the interior table and sets up her equipment. There is a kettle on the hot plate, and the robot turns on the burner. Laramie takes a microphone from a vinyl case and unwinds its cording. The robot watches her, watches Laramie’s hand move. Her fingers are as long as Maude’s.

  The robot suddenly realizes there may be no water in the kettle. But there is steam rising from around the lid—which means that there is water and that the water is hot enough to drink.

  Laramie. May I call you Laramie?

  Sure. Of course.

  I cannot make your tea.

  What? That’s fine, then. I’m fine.

  No. I mean that it’s difficult for me to get the mu inside.

  I don’t understand.

  I’m sorry. I mean the mobile unit. If you don’t mind, you can get a cup and a tea bag out of the cupboard. The water is ready.

  Laramie sets the microphone down, gazes around the room.

  Is it in that cupboard?

  Yes. Bottom shelf.

  Laramie gets the cup and tea, then pours some water. Andrew is a careful pourer, but Laramie spatters droplets on the hot burner and they sizzle as they evaporate. She takes her tea back to the table. She jacks the microphone into a small tape recorder that is black with white letters that say Sony. From the recorder, she runs a lead to the Scoopic sixteen-millimeter camera.

  Where’s that adapter? Oh. There. I had this Scoopic souped up a little, by the way, since my father. Since I got it. Has a GOES chip. Uplinks and downlinks with the Sony. I could record you in Singapore, and not get a frame of drift. But I’m not a pro at this. My sound tech bugged out on me last week. That’s one reason it’s taken me a while to get back over here. He got scared after the riot. Let me voice slate and we’ll be ready.

  Laramie?

  Hmm?

  Are you safe? I mean, where you are staying in Port Townsend—is it guarded in any way?

  No. I’m fine. It’s the loggers and the Matties who want to kill each other.

  They might mistake you for a logger. You spent a lot of time in the bush.

  At this expression, which is Victor Wu’s, Laramie looks up. She finds nothing to look at, and turns her gaze back down, to the Sony.

  I’m safe as can be expected.

  Be careful, Laramie.

  You’re not my father.

  I know that. But I would be pleased if you would be careful.

  All right. I’ll keep that in mind. Laramide productions-skykomish-eight-three-fourteen-roll-eleven. Robot, have you decided yet on a name?

  Not yet.

  She raises the camera, looks around through the viewfinder, and finally chooses a bank of monitors to aim it at.

  What do you think about?

  Pardon?

  What do you think about, robot?

  I’m not HAL, Laramie.

  What?

  You know what I mean. You saw that movie many times. Your question sounds snide to me, as if it were forgone conclusion that I don’t really think. You don’t just throw a question like that at me. It would be better to lead up to it. I don’t have to justify my existence to anyone, and I don’t particularly like to fawn on human beings. I feel that it is degrading to them.

  You sound like Andrew is what you sound like.

  That’s quite possible. I spend a lot of time with him.

  Well. So. Maybe that wasn’t the best first question. Maybe you could tell me about your work.

  The robot explains the dig, and what it might mean to science.

  But I don’t know a great deal about that. At least, I don’t think about it often.

  What really matters to you, then?

  The digging. The getting there. The way the rock is. All igneous and thick, but there are different regions.

  Like swimming in a lake.

  Yes. I imagine you’re right. It’s very hard to talk about, the feeling I have.

  What feeling?

  That. I don’t know. It is hard to say. I could. I could take you there.

  Take me where? Down there?

  Yes. Down there.

  Now? You mean now?

  No. I’d have to talk to Andrew about doing so.

  Of course. Do you think he’d let me?

  I would like to show it to you, what we’re doing. I think that if I wanted to take you down, he would let you.

  Laramie sets the cam
era down on the table, beside her herb tea, which is untouched and cooling.

  Ask him, robot. Please ask him.

  * * *

  On Monday, protesters arrive at the dig. Andrew had been expecting them eventually, but the number surprises him. They arrive by bus and gather at the opening to the mohole, not at the living-space entrance.

  Gurney must have told them which was which. Andrew growls the words, and the robot can barely understand them.

  There are forty protesters. At first, they mill around, neither saying nor doing much, but waiting. Finally, a sky-blue Land Rover comes down the dirt road. On its side are the words: KHARMA CORPS, SKYKOMISH PROTECTORATE. Two women and a man get out and the protesters gather round them. From the back of the Land Rover, one of the women hands out placards that have on them symbols. The peace sign. A silhouetted nuclear reactor with a red slashed circle about it. A totem of the Earth Mother from Stilaguamish Northwest Indian heritage, and now the symbol for the Skykomish Protectorate. One sign has a picture of a dam, split in half as if by an earthquake, and fish swimming freely through the crack. The other woman gives those who want it steaming cups of hot, black coffee or green tea.

  The robot waits in the mu at the entrance to the living area, and Andrew walks over to speak with the protesters. The man who drove the Land Rover steps forward to meet him. The robot can hear what is said, but Andrew’s body blocks the view of the man with whom Andrew is speaking.

  Andrew Hutton. I work here.

  I’m with the Protectorate. My name is Neilsen Birchbranch.

  How are you with the Protectorate?

  I’m an aid to Mother Agatha. I sit on the Healing Circle Interlocking Director’s Conclave. I’m the chairperson, in fact.

  Secret police.

  What was that?

  Neilsen, was it?

  Let’s keep it formal, Dr. Hutton, if you wouldn’t mind.

  All right. Mr. Birchbranch, what are you doing on my work site?

  The demonstration is sanctioned. Mother Agatha herself signed the permit. Freedom of speech is guaranteed in the Protectorate Charter.

  I’m not against freedom of speech. We have work to do today.