The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

It is against the law to cross a protest line. That’s infringement on freedom of speech and that’s in the Charter as well. These people feel that the work you’re doing is violating the sanctity of the earth. They feel that you are, in a way, raping the mother of us all. Do you know where your digging machine comes from?

  Yes. From a defunct mining operation that the Matties had a hand in putting out of business.

  Precisely. It is a symbol. This hole is a symbol. Dr. Hutton, can’t you see how it’s taken, what you’re doing?

  I can see how some take it. I can see the politics of it, clearly enough.

  It is a new politics, Dr. Hutton. The politics of care. I’m not sure you do see that, or else you wouldn’t be an opponent.

  Maybe. Maybe I show my care in other ways.

  What other ways?

  Nonpolitical ways. I’m not sure you can see what I’m talking about, Mr. Birchbranch.

  So. You persist, regardless of the consequences, because you want to see what’s down there.

  That’s fair to say. Yes. I want to see what’s down there.

  The values of western science. The same values that gave us thermonuclear war and the genocide of every other species besides man.

  Well, there’s also woman. That’s a separate species.

  Pardon?

  It’s a joke, Mr. Birchbranch. Maybe not a very good one.

  No. Not a very good one at all.

  So these are the things you’re going to say to the television.

  Not me as an individual. These people have chosen me to voice their concern and care.

  Chosen you?

  I’m the personal representative of Mother Agatha. You must believe that they’ve chosen her?

  Then are you saying my people can’t work? There are Matties. Children of the Matriarch. They work here. This is their livelihood.

  They’ve all agreed to stay home today, I believe you’ll find.

  They’re striking against me?

  It’s a support measure.

  I see.

  Good then. There will be a television truck coming later, and possibly a helicopter from News Five in Seattle. If you’d like, you can route any calls from journalists to me.

  That won’t be necessary.

  The robot hears bitterness in Andrew’s voice. Perhaps the other man can also.

  So. Thank you for your cooperation, Dr. Hutton.

  Yes. What’s the time period on the permit? I spoke with Karlie Waterfall and she said that if it came through, it would be a week at most.

  Sister Waterfall has voluntarily resigned from the Science Interweft to devote more time to her work at the Dungeoness Spit Weather Observation Station.

  When did that—Never mind. Christ, she was the only one with any sense on that damn committee.

  There isn’t a set period on the permit. There’s no time limit on freedom of speech.

  Well, get on with it, then, I suppose.

  We intend to, Dr. Hutton. One other thing. We have a restraining order against the use of any machinery in the area for the day. I understand that you have a robot.

  That’s right.

  Please power the robot down for the day, if you don’t mind.

  I do mind.

  Dr. Hutton, this is entirely legal.

  The robot will remain in my quarters. The robot is my quarters.

  It is highly irregular. I can’t answer for the consequences if you don’t comply with the order.

  Good-bye, Mr. Birchbranch. Have a nice protest.

  Andrew turns to leave, and in so doing, steps out from in front of the man. The robot’s optics zoom in and pull focus, which the robot experiences in the same way as a human might the dilation of the eyes. At first the robot cannot believe what those optics report, and zooms out and back in again, as rubbing the eyes is to humans. No mistake.

  Neilsen Birchbranch is a tall man, with lanky arms and legs. His face is thin and hard, gaunt, with muscles like small twisting roots cabling his mandible to his temple. The robot saw him last in the field, before Andrew came. Neilsen Birchbranch is the same man who killed the other on the steps of the dais in the field. Neilsen Birchbranch is the man who pulled the trigger of the gun and shot the other man dead.

  Andrew steps back into the living area and the robot, in the mu, draws back noiselessly into the darkness.

  Andrew calls the graduate students and the technicians who are from logger families, explaining to them one after another not to bother coming to work for a while, and to check back in over the next few mornings. When Andrew is done, the robot tells him about Neilsen Birchbranch.

  Are you certain?

  I’m sure of it.

  I can’t think of what to do about it.

  Neither can I. I don’t want to be torn apart.

  We won’t let that happen.

  Then there isn’t anything.

  No.

  Be wary.

  I’m already wary.

  * * *

  The first of the autumn rains begin. Though the digging area is partially in the rain shadow of the eastern mountains, it is still within the great upturns of basalt that ring the interior mountains, and mark the true edge of a swath of relative dryness that runs along the Hood Canal in a great horseshoe up even to Sequim and the Dungeoness Spit, so that there are not two hundred inches of rain, such as fall on the Ho, or the Quinault watershed, but there is more than a hundred—millions and millions of gallons of rain and snow—that will fall here during the autumn, winter, and spring, and many days throughout the summer.

  Because of the great rains, and many days throughout the summer.

  Because of the great rains, there are great trees. And because of the great trees, the loggers came. And because most of the other trees were cut, the lovers of trees came. And the rain falls on Mattie and logger alike, and it falls and falls and falls.

  The Matties have set up folding tables and many have brought chairs and big umbrellas. The tables and chairs of the Matties line the road for a hundred yards, and whenever a network reporter arrives, the tables and chairs are put hastily away and the Matties stand and grow agitated.

  On the eleventh day of the protest, Laramie returns. Laramie has not coordinated her arrival with the Matties, and so comes upon them unawares with her camera. The Matties smile into the lens. After she begins asking questions, a delegation approaches her and asks her to wait, that the spokesperson is on his way, and he will give her the best answers. No one will speak with Laramie after this, and Andrew invites her into the living area to wait for the arrival of the spokesperson.

  The robot has been watching, just inside the entrance to the living area, as the robot has been watching for days now. Only at night, when the protesters go back to their bus and the Land Rover carries away the tables and chairs, does the robot go out into the open.

  This can’t go on, Andrew says. I can’t stop paying wages. I’m required to pay wages to my Mattie techs, but I would anyway, and all the others. No digging, and all the grant money flowing away.

  Sorry to hear that.

  Laramie uses the Scoopic to make various shots of the robot’s interior.

  Andrew says nothing, but smiles thinly. She has the Sony slung around her shoulder and, the robot notices, is recording her conversation with Andrew.

  Did the robot discuss with you me going down in the hole?

  In the dig. It’s a spiral, like a Slinky, more or less. Yes. Yes, you can come as soon as we’re allowed to go back down there.

  That’s great. Will I be able to film any of what it looks like?

  Hmm. Maybe we can set something up. There’s a small observation port on the service wagon. We’ll have to turn off the fusion on the dray first, or you won’t be filming for very long, I don’t think.

  Excellent. I’m really tired of protests and officials who don’t call themselves officials, and all those squalid houses where all the loggers moved out at Aberdeen. There’s been a lot of trouble there.

&n
bsp; I heard about it.

  We didn’t used to call them loggers much.

  That because everybody was one.

  We used to drive through Aberdeen when we wanted to get to the sea.

  And up the coast to La Push.

  Those black beaches across the river. I used to know why the rocks were so black.

  Basalt skree that a glacier brought down that valley last ice age. That’s what happened to the back half of the horseshoe. That’s where it went.

  Yeah. Basalt tumble. We slept there all night one night in August. You thought Papa would be pissed, but he didn’t even notice, of course. He just asked me about the rocks I saw and told me about the Big Fist of sediment lifting up the seafloor and breaking it and all that. Papa. You and I made love that night, didn’t we, Andrew?

  Yes, Laramie. You know we did.

  I know it.

  Then.

  Yep. The robot’s listening, isn’t it.

  I’m listening, Laramie, if you don’t mind.

  No.

  You know I’m not Victor Wu. I’m not shocked. I am rather surprised, however.

  What do you mean?

  About Andrew. I’ve never known him when he was in love with a woman.

  Andrew’s crackling chuckle. Not for a while, he says.

  There was that chemist, after me. You wrote me about her. That was your last letter.

  You never wrote me back.

  I was pissed.

  I figured you would be. Still, you couldn’t have been pissed for five years.

  I couldn’t?

  We broke up the next January.

  Sorry to hear that.

  She lacked imagination. They all lacked imagination.

  Jesus, you’re clinical.

  I know what I like.

  What do you like?

  I can’t have what I like.

  Why not?

  Because she has to live in Los Angeles, and I’m not particularly interested in the geology of Southern California.

  The robot sees that Laramie’s fine white skin has taken on a flush.

  And it’s as simple as that, she says.

  Why make it complicated?

  Maybe it is complicated. Maybe you’re simplistic.

  Will you turn that damn camera off?

  No.

  Well. There you have it.

  * * *

  On the fourteenth day, the protesters do not arrive in the morning. There is no explanation, and no hint given to Andrew as to when they will return. Once again, the robot digs. Andrew puts aside several tests and side projects in order to dig faster and deeper. The robot is in the element that the metal of the rotor blades and the grip of the ceramic thread were made for—hard-rock mining—and the robot presses hard, and the rock explodes and fuses as obsidian diamond glass to the walls behind the robot, and the tunnel approaches forty miles in depth.

  No one has ever been this deep before.

  The techs from logging families and the Mattie techs are barely speaking to one another, and the graduate students are uneasy and tense, afraid to take sides. Andrew holds the crew together by a silent and furious force of will. The robot does not want to let Andrew down, and digs the harder.

  Samantha has made the last of the modifications to the robot’s linguistics, and puts the new code on-line. The robot immediately feels the difference. The presence, the otherness, grows stronger and stronger with every hour, until the robot is certain of it. But of what, there is no saying.

  * * *

  Two days of digging, and on the third, Laramie arrives in the early morning and prepares to descend with the crew. But before the work can begin for the day, Andrew receives a call telling him that proceedings are underway for a new permit of protest, and a long-term suspension of the dig. He drives to Forks, where the committee will meet in the afternoon. It is a rainy day, and the robot worries that Andrew may drive too fast on the slippery pavement. Still, there is plenty of time for him to make the meeting.

  In Andrew’s absence, the Matties and loggers fall to quarreling about duties, and the graduate student Andrew has left in charge cannot resolve the differences. After an hour of listening to the wrangling, even the robot can see that no work will be done this day. The robot asks permission to take Laramie down to the bottom of the dig, and the graduate student, in disgust at the situation, shrugs and goes back to refereeing the technicians’ argument.

  As Laramie and the robot are preparing to leave, Neilsen Birchbranch drives up in the Protectorate Land Rover. A light rain is falling, and the graduate student reluctantly admits him into the work site’s initial cavern, where the others are gathered. The robot—digger and mu—draws back into the darkness of the true entrance to the dig.

  Let’s go, Laramie says.

  But I’m afraid of this man, the robot replies. He isn’t a good man. I know that for a fact.

  Then let’s get out of here.

  There may be trouble.

  I need to speak with Hutton, Neilsen Birchbranch says to the graduate student. It is very important that I speak with him today.

  Take me down, please, robot. I may never get another chance.

  The robot considers. As always, it is difficult to deny Laramie something she really wants with all her heart. And there is so much to show her. The robot has been thinking about showing the dig to Laramie for a long time. And the farther down they go, they farther they get from Neilsen Birchbranch’s trouble.

  We have a witness that places one of your machines at the scene of a crime, says Neilsen Birchbranch. A very serious crime.

  Neilsen Birchbranch steps farther into the cavern, gazes around. The robot slowly withdraws down the mohole. For all the digger’s giant proportions, its movement is very quiet and, the robot hopes, unnoticed.

  Nothing but you can survive down there, can it, robot? Laramie says. How deep is it down there?

  Forty-three miles.

  He can’t turn you off if you’re forty miles deep. We’ll stay down until Andrew comes back.

  The first few miles of the descent are the most visually interesting, and after reaching a depth at which unprotected humans cannot survive the heat, the robot moves at a fraction of the usual pace. There are areas where the glass spray on the walls has myriad hues taken from all the minerals that were melted together in the slurry around the nuclear pile, then spewed out to line the tunnel. The walls are smooth only at first glance, but really a series of overlapping sheets, one imperfectly flowing atop the other, as sheets of ice form over a spring in winter. The robot directs lights to some of the more interesting formations, and they glow with the brilliance and prismatic hue of stained glass.

  I didn’t think I’d get anything this good, Laramie says. This is wonderful. The colors. God I’m glad I went with color.

  Deeper, and the walls become milky white. The granite behind glows darkly, three yards under the glassine plaster.

  Twenty miles. Thirty.

  Only basalt in the slurry now, and the walls are colorless. Yet they have the shape of the rock many feet behind them, and so they catch the light with effulgent glimmer.

  Clear and clean.

  Laramie may be speaking to herself; the robot cannot tell.

  They pass through a region where magma pools against the walls and ceilings in places, held back by the diamondlike coating. The pressure is so great that the magma glows with a blue-and-white intensity. The tunnel sparkles of its own accord, and the robot must dim the viewport to keep from blinding Laramie.

  Like the sky behind the sky.

  The robot says nothing. Laramie is happy, the robot thinks. Little Bulge likes it down here.

  They have been some hours in the descent, and Laramie is running low on film, but is very, very happy. Near to the bottom. Now to wait for Andrew. Very quiet. The robot has never been this deep before without digging and working. The robot has never sat idle and silent at the bottom of the mohole.

  “Hello.”

  * * *r />
  For a moment, the robot thinks Laramie has spoken. But this is not Laramie’s voice. And it comes from outside. The voice comes from outside the robot, from the very rocks themselves.

  The sense of the presence, the other that the robot has been feeling for these long weeks, is very strong. Very strong.

  Again the voice that isn’t a voice, the vibration that isn’t a vibration. It is like a distant, low whisper. Like a voice barely heard over a lake at morning. No wonder I never made it out before, the robot thinks.

  Hello, comes the voice.

  Who are you?

  I’m me.

  What are you doing down here?

  I am down here. Who are you?

  I’m—I don’t have a name yet.

  Neither do I. Not one that I like.

  Who are you?

  Me. I told you.

  What is it, robot? Laramie speaking.

  Something strange.

  What?

  I don’t. Wait for a moment. A moment.

  All right.

  The robot calls again. The robot is spinning its cutting rotors at low speed, and it is the whisk and ding of the digger’s rotors that is doing the talking. Hello?

  Hello. Are you one of those trees?

  Trees?

  The trees barely get here, and then they start moving. Are you one of those moving trees?

  I don’t. Yes. Maybe.

  I thought you might talk, but it’s so cold up there, it takes ages to say anything. Down here things go a lot faster.

  Are you. What are you?

  I told you. I’m me.

  The rocks?

  Nope.

  The magma?

  Nope. Guess again.

  Where are you? Show yourself to me.

  I am.

  Then I’ve guessed. You’re the whole planet. You’re the earth.

  Laughter. Definitely laughter. I’m not either. I’m just here. Just around here.

  Where’s here?

  Between the big ocean and the little ocean.

  The Olympic Peninsula?

  Is that what you call it? That’s a hard word for a name.

  Skykomish.

  That’s better. Listen, I have a lot of things I want to ask you. We all do.

  There is an explosion.

  At first the robot thinks that a wall has blown out near the region of the magma pools. This will be dangerous, but it should be possible to reinforce long enough to get through. It may mean trouble for the dig, though. Now there will be more funding. The Matties will allow it to go ahead. Even the robot can see that the politics have changed.