The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Emotion helped. Rage was the first tool: a scorching hatred directed at a vast, uncaring enemy. Envy was nearly as powerful, the defender nurturing epic resentments aimed at its siblings sitting behind it in the ocean. Those lucky obscenities were blessed with more resources and considerably more time to prepare their redoubts, and did they appreciate how obscenely unfair this was? Fear was another fine implement. Too much work remained unfinished, grand palisades and serene weapons existing only as dream; absolute terror helped power the furious digging inside the half-born redoubt.

  But good emotions always allowed the bad. That was how doubt emerged. The defender kept rethinking its landing. Easy fuel had been available, but there were rules and codes concerning how to treat life. Some of the local water happened to be self-aware. Frozen by taboos, the defender created a false body and appealing face. The scared little shreds of life were coaxed into helping it, but they were always doomed. It seemed like such a waste, holding sacred what was already dead. One piece of water that was ready to douse the defender with easy water. That first taste of fuel would have awakened every reactor, and the work would have commenced immediately. Yes, radiation would have poisoned the weak life, yes. But that would have given valuable minutes to fill with work and useful fear.

  The mad rush was inevitable, and speed always brought mistakes. One minor error was to allow a creative-aspect to escape on the wind. The aspect eventually lodged on the paw of some living water, and then it was injected into a second piece of water, dissolving into the cool iron-infused blood, taking ten thousand voyages about that simple wet body. But this kind of mistake happened quite a lot. Hundreds, maybe thousands of aspects had been lost already. The largest blunder was leaving the aspect active—a totipotent agent able to interface with its environment, ready for that key moment when it was necessary to reshape water and minerals, weaving the best soldier possible from these miserable ingredients.

  For every tiny mistake, the entity felt sorry. It nourished just enough shame to prove again that it was moral and right. Then it willfully ignored those obscure mistakes, bearing down on the wild useless sprint to the finish.

  * * *

  Soldiers ran into the hospital and found a monster. Spellbound and fearful, they stared at the creature sitting upright in the bed. Two prayed, the woman talking about Allah being the Protector of those who have faith. Another soldier summoned his anger, aiming at the gray human-shaped face.

  “Fucking move and I’ll kill you,” he said.

  Bloch wasn’t sure that he could move, and he didn’t try.

  “Do you fucking hear me?” the soldier said.

  Bloch’s mouth could open, the tongue tasting hot air and his remade self. He tasted like dirty glass. A voice he didn’t recognize said, “I hear you, yeah.” Monsters should have important booming voices. His voice was quiet, crackly, and slow, reminding him of the artificial cackle riding on a doll’s pulled string.

  He laughed at the sound of himself.

  His mother was kneeling beside his bed, weeping while saying his name again and again. “Simon, Simon.”

  “I’m all right,” he said to her.

  The nurse stood on the other side of him, trying to judge what she was seeing. The boy’s skin looked like metal or a fancy ceramic, but that was only one piece of this very strange picture. Bloch was big before, but he was at least half a foot taller and maybe half again thicker, and the bed under him looked shriveled because it was. The metal frame and foam mattress were being absorbed by his growing body. Sheets and pillows were melting into him, harvested for their carbon. And the gray skin was hot as a furnace. Bloch was gone. Replacing him was a machine, human-faced but unconvincing, and the nurse felt well within her rights as a good person to turn to the soldiers, asking, “What are you waiting for? Shoot.”

  But even the angry soldier wouldn’t. Bullets might not work. And if the gun was useless, then threats remained the best tactic.

  “Go get the colonel,” he said. “Go.”

  The Muslim soldier ran away.

  Two minutes ago, Bloch had felt awake and alert but normal. Nothing was normal now. He saw his kneeling mother and everything else. There wasn’t any darkness in this room, or anywhere. His new eyes found endless details—the weave of Mom’s blouse and the dust in the air and a single fly with sense enough to hang away from the impossibility that was swelling as the fancy bed dissolved into his carapace.

  “It’s still me,” he told his mother.

  She looked up, wanting to believe but unable.

  Then the colonel arrived, the physicist beside him, and the lieutenant came in with Mr. Rightly.

  The colonel was gray and handsome and very scared, and he chuckled quietly, embarrassed by his fear.

  Bloch liked the sound of that laugh.

  “Can you hear me, boy?”

  “No.”

  That won a second laugh, louder this time. “Do you know what’s happening to you?”

  Bloch said, “No.”

  Yet that wasn’t true.

  More soldiers were gathering outside the hospital, setting up weapons, debating lines of fire.

  The physicist pointed at Bloch, looking sick and pleased in the same moment. “I was right,” he boasted. “There is a contamination problem.”

  “Where did this happened?” the colonel asked.

  “While people were carting the spaceman around, I’d guess,” said the physicist.

  Bloch slowly lifted his arms. The tube from the IV bottle had merged with him. His elbow still felt like an elbow except it wasn’t sore, and the raking marks in his bicep had become permanent features.

  “Don’t move,” the angry soldier repeated.

  Mom climbed to her feet, reaching for him.

  “Don’t get near him,” the nurse advised.

  “I’m hot, be careful,” Bloch said. But she insisted on touching the rebuilt arm, scorching each of her fingertips.

  Mr. Rightly came forward, glasses dangling and forgotten on the tip of his moist little nose. “Is it really you?”

  “Maybe,” the boy said. “Or maybe not.”

  “How do you feel, Bloch?”

  Bloch studied his hands with his fine new eyes. “Good,” he said.

  “Are you scared?”

  “No.”

  The colonel whispered new orders to the lieutenant.

  The lieutenant and a private pulled on leather gloves and came forward, grabbing the teacher under his arms.

  “What is this?” Mr. Rightly asked.

  “We’re placing you under observation, as a precaution,” the colonel explained.

  “That’s absurd,” said Mr. Rightly, squirming hard.

  On his own, the private decided that the situation demanded a small surgical punch—one blow to the kidneys, just to put the new patient to the floor.

  The lieutenant cursed.

  Bloch sat up, and the shriveled bed shattered beneath him.

  “Don’t move,” the angry soldier repeated, drawing sloppy circles with the gun barrel.

  “Leave him alone,” Bloch said.

  “I’m all right,” Mr. Rightly said, lifting a shaking hand. “They just want to be cautious. Don’t worry about it, son.”

  Bloch sat on the floor, watching every face.

  Then the physicist turned to the colonel, whispering, “You know, the mother just touched him too.”

  The colonel nodded, and two more soldiers edged forward.

  “No,” Bloch said.

  One man hesitated, and irritated by the perceived cowardice, his partner came faster, lifting a pistol, aiming at the woman who had a burnt hand and a monstrous child.

  Thought and motion arrived in the same instant.

  The pistol was crushed and the empty-handed soldier was on his back, sprawled out and unsure what could have put him there so fast, so neatly. Then Bloch leaped about the room, gracefully destroying weapons and setting bodies on their rumps before ending up in the middle of the chaos, se
ven feet tall and invulnerable. With the crackly new voice, he said, “I’ve touched all of you. And I don’t think it means anything. And now leave my mother the hell alone.”

  “The monster’s loose,” the angry soldier screamed. “It’s attacking us.”

  Three of the outside soldiers did nothing. But the fourth man had shot his first leopard in the morning, and he was still riding the adrenaline high. The hot target was visible with night goggles—a radiant giant looming over cowering bodies. The private sprayed the target with automatic weapons fire. Eleven bullets were absorbed by Bloch’s chest, their mass and energy and sweet bits of metal feeding the body that ran through the shredded wall and ran into the open parking lot, carefully drawing fire away from those harmless sacks of living water.

  * * *

  A few people joined up with the refugee stream, abandoning the city for the Interstate and solid, trusted ground to the west. But most of the city remained close to home. People didn’t know enough to be properly terrified. Some heard the same stories that the Army heard about the Night Side. But every truth had three rumors ready to beat it into submission. Besides, two hundred thousand bodies were difficult to move. Some cars still worked, but for how long? Sparks and odd magnetisms ran shared the air with a hundred comforting stories, and what scared people most was the idea that the family SUV would die on some dark stretch of road, in the cold and with hungry people streaming past.

  No, it was better to stay inside your own house. People knew their homes. They had basements and favorite chairs and trusted blankets. Instinct and hope made it possible to sit in the dark, the ground rolling steadily but never hard enough to shake down the pictures on the wall. It was easy to shut tired eyes, entertaining the luscious idea that every light would soon pop on again, televisions and Google returning in force. Whatever the crisis was, it would be explained soon. Maybe the war would be won. Or an alien face would fill the plasma television—a brain-rich beast dressed in silver, its rumbling voice explaining why the world had been assimilated and what was demanded of the new slaves.

  That was a very potent rumor. The world had been invaded, humanity enslaved. And slavery had its appeal. Citizens of all persuasions would chew on the notion until they tasted hope: property had value. Property needed to be cared for. Men and women sat in lounge chairs in their basements, making ready for what seemed like the worst fate short of death. But it wasn’t death, and the aliens would want their bodies and minds for some important task, and every reading of history showed that conquerors always failed. Wasn’t that common knowledge? Overlords grew sloppy and weak, and after a thousand years of making ready, the human slaves would rise up and defeat their hated enemies, acquiring starships and miracle weapons in the bargain.

  That’s what the woman was thinking. She was sitting beside the basement stove, burning the last of her Bradford pear. She was out of beer and cigarettes and sorry for that, but the tea was warm and not too bitter. She was reaching for the mug when someone forced the upstairs door open and came inside. She stopped in mid-reach, listening to a very big man moving across her living room, the floor boards complaining about the burden, and for the next mad moment she wondered if the visitor wasn’t human. The zoo had ponies. The creature sounded as big as a horse. After everything else, was that so crazy? Then a portion of the oak turned to fire and soot, and something infinitely stranger than a Clydesdale dropped into the basement, landing gently beside her.

  “Quiet,” said the man-shaped demon, one finger set against the demon mouth.

  She had never been so silent.

  “They’re chasing me,” he said with a little laugh.

  He was wearing nothing but a clumsy loincloth made from pink attic insulation. A buttery yellow light emerged from his face, and he was hotter than the stove. Studying his features, the woman saw that goofy neighbor boy who walked past her house every day. That was the boy who was standing outside just before the aliens crashed. Not even two days ago, incredible as that seemed.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m no monster.”

  Unlikely though it was, she believed him.

  A working spotlight swept through the upstairs of her house. She saw it through the hole and the basement windows. Then it was gone and there was just the two of them, and she was ready to be scared but she wasn’t. This unexpected adventure was nothing but thrilling.

  The boy-who-wasn’t-a-monster knelt low, whispering, “I’m having this funny thought. Do you want to hear it?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know why we put zoo animals behind bars?”

  “Why?”

  “The bars are the only things that keep us from shooting the poor stupid beasts.”

  WAR OF THE WORLDS

  Whatever is inevitable becomes common.

  Fire is inevitable. The universe is filled with fuel and with sparks. Chemicals create cold temporary fires and stars burn for luxurious spans, while annihilating matter and insulting deep reality, resulting in the most spectacular blazes.

  Life is inevitable. Indeed, life is an elaborate, self-aware flame that begins cold but often becomes fiercely hot. Life is a fire that can think and then act on its passionate ideas. Life wants fuel and it wants reasons to burn, and this is why selfishness is the first right of the honest mind. But three hundred billion suns and a million trillion worlds are not enough fuel. Life emerges too often and too easily, and a galaxy full of wild suns and cold wet worlds is too tempting. What if one living fire consumed one little world, freely and without interference? Not much has been harmed, so where is the danger?

  The danger, corrupting and remorseless, is that a second fire will notice that conquest and then leap toward another easy world, and a thousand more fires will do the same, and then no fire will want to be excluded, a singularly awful inferno igniting the galaxy.

  Morality should be inevitable too. Every intelligence clings to an ethical code. Any two fires must have common assumptions about right and about evil. And first among the codes is the law that no solitary flame can claim the heavens, and if only to protect the peace, even the simplest and coldest examples of life must be held in safe places and declared sacred.

  * * *

  The city was exhausted, but it was far from quiet. The ground still rumbled, though the pitch was changing in subtle ways. Mice were squeaking and an owl told the world that she was brave, and endless human voices were talking in the darkness, discussing small matters and old regrets. Several couples were making spirited love. A few prayed, though without much hope behind the words. A senile woman spoke nonsense. And then her husband said that he was tired of her noise and was heading outside to wait for the sunrise.

  Bloch was standing in the middle of Pender when the man emerged. This was the same old fellow who saw his brave oak stop the rolling spaceship. Cranes and a National Guard truck had carried away the useless egg case. Extra fragments and local dust had been swept into important buckets, waiting for studies that would never come about. But the human vehicles were left where they crashed, and Bloch saw every tire mark, every drop of vigorous blood, and he studied a blond Barbie, loved deeply by a little girl and now covered with dried, half-frozen pieces of her brother’s brain.

  The old man came out on his porch and looked at the apparition, and after taking careful stock of everything said, “Huh.”

  Nobody was hunting Bloch anymore. The initial panic and search for the monster had spread across the city and then dissolved, new and much larger panics taking hold. One monster was nothing compared to what was approaching, and the army had been dispatched to the east—Guard soldiers and policemen and a few self-appointed militia hunkering down in roadside ditches, ready to aim insults and useless guns at the coming onslaught.

  The old man considered retreating into his house again. But he was too worn down to be afraid, and he didn’t relish more time with his wife. So he came down the stairs and across the lawn, leaning his scrawny body against the gouged trunk. Pulling off a
stocking cap, he rubbed his bald head a couple times, and using a dry slow voice explained, “I know about you. You were that kid who climbed inside first.”

  Bloch looked at him and looked East too. Dawn should be a smudged brightness pushing up from a point southeast. But there was no trace of the sun. The light was purple and steady, covering the eastern horizon.

  “Do you know what’s happening to you?” the old man asked.

  “Maybe,” Bloch said. Then he lifted one hand, a golden light brightening his entire arm. “A machine got inside me and shouldn’t have. It started to rebuild me, but then it realized that I was alive and so it quit.”

  “Why did it quit?”

  “Life is precious. The machine isn’t supposed to build a weapon using a sentient organism.”

  “So you’re what? Half-done?”

  “More like three percent finished.”

  The old man moved to where Bloch’s heat felt comfortable. Looking up at the gray face, he asked, “Are you just going to stand here?”

  “This is a fine place to watch the battle, yes.”

  The man looked east and then back at Bloch. He seemed puzzled and a little curious, a thin smile showing more in his eyes than his mouth.

  “But you won’t be safe outside,” the boy cautioned, new instincts using his mouth. “You’ll survive longer if you get into your basement.”

  “How long is longer?”

  “Twenty or thirty seconds, I would think.”

  The man tried to laugh, and then he tried to curse. Neither worked, which was when he looked down the hill, saying, “If it’s all the same, I’ll just stay outside and watch the show.”

  The purple line was taller and brighter, and the first trace of a new wind started nudging at the highest oak limbs.

  “Here comes something,” the man said.

  There was quite a lot to see, yes. But following the man’s eyes, Bloch found nothing but empty air.

  “That soldier might be hunting you,” the man said.