The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Some light rain misted down out of the overcast sky. Avery parked the bus and went out to check whether they were alone. She had seen no one but a single dog-walker near the entrance, and no vehicle had followed them in. The gates would close in half an hour, and the bus would have to be out. Henry and his friends were probably waiting outside the gate for them to appear again. She returned into the bus and knocked on Lionel’s door. He opened it right away. Inside, the large picnic cooler they had bought was standing open, ready.

  “Help me lift him in,” Lionel said.

  Avery maneuvered past the cooler to the tank. “Is it okay for me to touch him?”

  “Hold you hand close to him for a few seconds.”

  Avery did as instructed. A translucent tentacle extruded from the cauliflower folds of the alien’s body. It touched her palm, recoiled, then extended again. Gently, hesitantly, it explored her hand, tickling slightly as it probed her palm and curled around her pinkie. She held perfectly still.

  “What is he thinking?” she whispered.

  “He’s learning your chemical identity,” Lionel said.

  “How can he learn without being aware? Can he even remember?”

  “Of course he can remember. Your immune system learns and remembers just about every pathogen it ever met, and it’s not aware. Can you remember them all?”

  She shook her head, stymied.

  At last, apparently satisfied, the tendril retracted into the alien’s body.

  “All right,” Lionel said, “now you can touch him.”

  The alien was surprisingly heavy. Together, they lifted him onto the bed of dirt and wood chips Lionel had spread in the bottom of the cooler. Lionel fitted the lid on loosely, and each of them took a handle to carry their load out into the open air. Avery led the way around a mausoleum shaped like a Greek temple to an unmowed spot hidden from the path. Sycamore leaves and bark littered the ground, damp from the rain.

  “Is this okay?” she asked.

  For answer, Lionel set down his end of the cooler and straightened, breathing in the forest smell. “This is okay.”

  “I have to move the bus. Stay behind this building in case anyone comes by. I’ll be back.”

  The gatekeeper waved as she pulled the bus out onto the street. By the time she had parked it on a nearby residential street and returned, the gate was closed. She walked around the cemetery perimeter to an unfrequented side, then scrambled up the wall and over the spiked fence.

  Inside, the traffic noise of the city fell away. The trees arched overhead in churchlike silence. Not a squirrel stirred. Avery sat down on a tombstone to wait. Beyond the hill, Lionel was holding vigil at the side of his dying companion, and she wanted to give him privacy. The stillness felt good, but unfamiliar. Her life was made of motion. She had been driving for twenty years—driving away, driving beyond, always a new destination. Never back.

  The daylight would soon be gone. She needed to do the other thing she had come here for. Raising the hood of her raincoat, she headed downhill, the grass caressing her sneakers wetly. It was years since she had visited the grave of her daughter Gabrielle, whose short life and death was like a chasm dividing her life into before and after. They had called it crib death then—an unexplained, random, purposeless death. “Nothing you could have done,” the doctor had said, thinking that was more comforting than knowing that the universe just didn’t give a damn.

  Gabrielle’s grave lay in a grove of cedar trees—the plot a gift from a sympathetic patron at the café where Avery had worked. At first she had thought of turning it down because the little grave would be overshadowed by more ostentatious death; but the suburban cemeteries had looked so industrial, monuments stamped out by machine. She had come to love the age and seclusion of this spot. At first, she had visited over and over.

  As she approached in the fading light, she saw that something was lying on the headstone. When she came close she saw that some stranger had placed on the grave a little terra cotta angel with one wing broken. Avery stood staring at the bedraggled figurine, now soaked with rain, a gift to her daughter from someone she didn’t even know. Then, a sudden, unexpected wave of grief doubled her over. It had been twenty years since she had touched her daughter, but the memory was still vivid and tactile. She remembered the smell, the softness of her skin, the utter trust in her eyes. She felt again the aching hole of her absence.

  Avery sank to her knees in the wet grass, sobbing for the child she hadn’t been able to protect, for the sympathy of the nameless stranger, even for the helpless, mutilated angel who would never fly.

  There was a sound behind her, and she looked up. Lionel stood there watching her, rain running down his face—no, it was tears. He wiped his eyes, then looked at his hands. “I don’t know why I feel like this,” he said.

  Poor, muddled man. She got up and hugged him for knowing exactly how she felt. They stood there for a moment, two people trapped in their own brains, and the only crack in the wall was empathy.

  “Is he gone?” she asked softly.

  He shook his head. “Not yet. I left him alone in case it was me … interfering. Then I saw you and followed.”

  “This is my daughter’s grave,” Avery said. “I didn’t know I still miss her so much.”

  She took his hand and started back up the hill. They said nothing, but didn’t let go of each other till they got to the marble mausoleum where they had left Mr. Burbage.

  The alien was still there, resting on the ground next to the cooler. Lionel knelt beside him and held out a hand. A bouquet of tentacles reached out and grasped it, then withdrew. Lionel came over to where Avery stood watching. “I’m going to stay with him. You don’t have to.”

  “I’d like to,” she said, “if it’s okay with you.”

  He ducked his head furtively.

  So they settled down to keep a strange death watch. Avery shared some chemical hand-warmers she had brought from the bus. When those ran out and night deepened, she managed to find some dry wood at the bottom of a groundskeeper’s brush pile to start a campfire. She sat poking the fire with a stick, feeling drained of tears, worn down as an old tire.

  “Does he know he’s dying?” she asked.

  Lionel nodded. “I know, and so he knows.” A little bitterly, he added, “That’s what consciousness does for you.”

  “So normally he wouldn’t know?”

  He shook his head. “Or care. It’s just part of their life cycle. There’s no death if there’s no self to be aware of it.”

  “No life either,” Avery said.

  Lionel just sat breaking twigs and tossing them on the fire. “I keep wondering if it was worth it. If consciousness is good enough to die for.”

  She tried to imagine being free of her self—of the regrets of the past and fear of the future. If this were a Star Trek episode, she thought, this would be when Captain Kirk would deliver a speech in defense of being human, despite all the drawbacks. She didn’t feel that way.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Consciousness kind of sucks.”

  The sky was beginning to glow with dawn when at last they saw a change in the alien. The brainlike mass started to shrink and a liquid pool spread out from under it, as if it were dissolving. There was no sound. At the end, its body deflated like a falling souffle, leaving nothing but a slight crust on the leaves and a damp patch on the ground.

  They sat for a long time in silence. It was light when Lionel got up and brushed off his pants, his face set and grim. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

  Avery felt reluctant to leave. “His cells are in the soil?” she said.

  “Yes, they’ll live underground for a while, spreading and multiplying. They’ll go through some blooming and sporing cycles. If any dogs or children come along at that stage, the spores will establish a colony in their brains. It’s how they invade.”

  His voice was perfectly indifferent. Avery stared at him. “You might have mentioned that.”

  He shrugged.


  An inspiration struck her. She seized up a stick and started digging in the damp patch of ground, scooping up soil in her hands and putting it into the cooler.

  “What are you doing?” Lionel said. “You can’t stop him, it’s too late.”

  “I’m not trying to,” Avery said. “I want some cells to transplant. I’m going to grow an alien of my own.”

  “That’s the stupidest—”

  A moment later he was on his knees beside her, digging and scooping up dirt. They got enough to half-fill the cooler, then covered it with leaves to keep it damp.

  “Wait here,” she told him. “I’ll bring the bus to pick you up. The gates open in an hour. Don’t let anyone see you.”

  When she got back to the street where she had left the bus, Henry was waiting in a parked car. He got out and opened the passenger door for her, but she didn’t get inside. “I’ve got to get back,” she said, inclining her head toward the bus. “They’re waiting for me.”

  “Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “I just needed a break. I had to get away.”

  “In a cemetery? All night?”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Is there something I should know?”

  “We’re heading back home today.”

  He waited, but she said no more. There was no use telling him; he couldn’t do anything about it. The invasion was already underway.

  He let her return to the bus, and she drove it to a gas station to fuel up while waiting for the cemetery to open. At the stroke of 8:30 she pulled the bus through the gate, waving at the puzzled gatekeeper.

  Between them, she and Lionel carried the cooler into the bus, leaving behind only the remains of a campfire and a slightly disturbed spot of soil. Then she headed straight for the freeway.

  They stopped for a fast-food breakfast in southern Illinois. Avery kept driving as she ate her egg muffin and coffee. Soon Lionel came to sit shotgun beside her, carrying a plastic container full of soil.

  “Is that mine?” she asked.

  “No, this one’s mine. You can have the rest.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It won’t be him,” Lionel said, looking at the soil cradled on his lap.

  “No. But it’ll be yours. Yours to raise and teach.”

  As hers would be.

  “I thought you would have some kind of tribal loyalty to prevent them invading,” Lionel said.

  Avery thought about it a moment, then said, “We’re not defenseless, you know. We’ve got something they want. The gift of self, of mortality. God, I feel like the snake in the garden. But my alien will love me for it.” She could see the cooler in the rearview mirror, sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Already she felt fond of the person it would become. Gestating inside. “It gives a new meaning to alien abduction, doesn’t it?” she said.

  He didn’t get the joke. “You aren’t afraid to become … something like me?”

  She looked over at him. “No one can be like you, Lionel.”

  Even after all this time together, he still didn’t know how to react when she said things like that.

  Patience Lake

  MATTHEW CLAXTON

  Here’s a compelling story in which an injured and down-on-his-luck cyborg must make a dangerous and potentially fatal stand to defend the farm family that tried to help him.…

  Matthew Claxton is a reporter from the west coast of Canada. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, SciFiction, Mothership Zeta, and elsewhere.

  His right knee gave out thirty klicks outside of Saskatoon. He pitched forward onto the gravel shoulder of the Five, plastic pads on his hands sending flashes of PAIN-PAIN-PAIN while red SEEK REPAIR messages flared in the corners of his visual field. He’d been half-asleep, walking on auto, letting GPS and inertial guidance take him the last few dozen klicks, after the farm kids who’d let him ride in their pickup had turned north.

  He pushed himself up, flexed the left knee, his elbows. None of the plastic casings around his limbs seemed to have cracked. He’d caught himself, woken up before face-planting. He imagined scratching his eyes on the gravel, leaving permanent gouges in the plastic lenses, and shuddered.

  He stood, balancing his weight on his left leg and swinging the right, gingerly. The knee made a grinding noise, and he felt metal scrape metal, right up through the bone-and-metal socket of his hip. The joint didn’t want to swing too far backward, just a couple of degrees. Forward was fine, but it was loose, something in there stripped and gone. He locked the knee and put some weight on it. It held.

  That was something, he thought.

  GPS said he was close. There’d be a shelter in the city, or at least a recyc bin full of cardboard, an abandoned car, maybe a squat where he could spend the night. If he could get there. He looked back over his shoulder down the road. It was after four, prairie sky blue and clear. He had hours of daylight left. His cooling fan hummed, setting his shirt front to fluttering.

  He took a step, flinging his right leg out from his hip, jamming the heel of his battered boot into the gravel, taking a hopping step. Another. Another.

  Slow, but he could do it. Get to town. Maybe even find someone who would fix his knee, for what amounted to no money. His disability check would come through in a couple of weeks. He just had to keep moving. One step at a time.

  He stuck his thumb out every time he heard the rush of a truck, but nothing passed him with a human inside.

  * * *

  “Excuse me? Do you think I could fill up my water bottle?” He held up the scratched plastic two-liter. The woman, fiddling with a tablet, barely looked up. Squatting next to her was a six-wheeled machine, a cubist mosquito in steel and carbon fiber body panels. Its proboscis was a shiny steel auger, aimed at a spot on the ground near some rolled chain-link and a couple of wooden posts. The thing’s hinged arms were folded up at its sides. It had once been painted red.

  The grey-haired woman and the machine had a similar look, he thought: not young, used hard, sturdy.

  “You can’t get into town that way,” she said.

  He let his arm drop. “What?”

  She glanced up, and he saw that momentary look flicker across her face. Most people got that way. Hard to talk to a man with a smooth plastic head, no nose, speaker grill for a mouth, round eyes that never blinked.

  “There’s a roadblock at Patience Lake. About a five-minute drive down that way. Security’s checking everybody.”

  “RCMP?” he said, hopeful.

  “Nope. Private. Contracted out, twice over.”

  His shoulders slumped. Petty private meant either a shakedown, or being turned around, maybe a night in some rural cell for vagrancy.

  “If I’m turning around, I could really use the water, ma’am.” He tried to put a tone of honest pleading into the flat, synthetic speech that came from his vocal chip.

  She smirked.

  “Well, since you said ma’am.”

  She let him use the faucet outside the house, eyeing him the whole time, staying about two-arms-length away from him while he filled and capped the bottle. The house was maybe fifty or sixty years old, wooden and white with blue trim, a henge of black solar panels squatting on its south-facing roof. In the farmyard stood a grey-sided barn, a Quonset hut, and a clutch of simple greenhouses, half-hoops of PVC pipe covered with plastic sheeting, their insides moisture-beaded. Three or four acres were enclosed in fences, and beyond that were vast fields of plants, something he didn’t recognize. It had started as corn, maybe, before the biotechs had had their way with it. A couple of small blimps drifted in the distance, crop-watching drones holding themselves in place with fat ducted fans.

  He tried not to look around too much, tried not to look like the kind of guy who’d come back later with a couple of friends, a truck, and a deer rifle. If he could have smiled reassuringly, he would have.

  She walked him back to the road.

  “Is there any way to get into Saskatoon wit
hout going through a roadblock?” he asked when he was standing on the gravel shoulder again.

  She waved off to the north, over the low rolling hills covered with golden canola. “Any way you go in that direction, you’ll probably run into them. They’ve probably already seen you. They watch the crop monitor feeds when they’re bored.” She jerked a thumb upwards, indicating one of the fat little blimps.

  “South?”

  “East and then south. Way south. Head in on the Sixteen, and up through Rosewood.”

  He called up the map, sighed at the length of the dotted line it marked between his position and the city’s center.

  He was about to ask for a ride—ask for a ride and get a polite but very firm refusal, he guessed—when the cloud of dust appeared off to the west.

  The woman squinted into the lowering sun. He let his eyes whir into distance vision, polarize out the glare and dust. A big black-and-white, lights and sirens bulging from its roof like tumors.

  The woman glanced at him, eyes flickering down to his knee. She’d seen the way he kick-hopped across the yard.

  “You know anything about farm machinery?” she asked him suddenly.

  “No,” he said. “But I can drive anything.” He tapped the side of his plastic skull. “Fully wired for remote ops.”

  “Sandra Kowalchuk.”

  “Casey Kim.”

  “Well, Casey, you think you can get this thing moving?” She waved a callused hand at the machine.

  “Sure,” he said. “Uh, what does it do?”

  * * *

  By the time the security car had closed half the distance to the farm, Casey had learned what a post-hole digger was. By the time it pulled into the driveway, going too fast, obviously on manual, he had managed to get the machine to make a few juddering movements. The wheels were easy enough. Sandra pointed out where she wanted the hole, and he jiggered it back and forth, positioning that big auger.