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

by Gardner Dozois

  Mike had made a short detour to find that last site after dropping off a party of geologists. It was a beautiful day. The blue dome of the sky unmarked except for the trail of a jet plane crawling silently northeast. Hardly any wind. In the absolute stillness he could hear the tide of blood in his ears, the faint sigh of air in his nostrils. Looking out across the pure white expanse of the Dyer Plateau towards mountain peaks sawtoothing the horizon he could imagine that the view was exactly as it had been before anyone had set foot on the continent. Ice and rock and snow and sky. Except that he remembered something one of the geologists had said as they’d unloaded their gear—that in the permanent dark of winter people heloed up to the plateau for wild skiing under the Antarctic moon and stars, using GPS to navigate from ice lodge to ice lodge. The snow here was fantastic, the geologist had said, a lot more of it than there used to be because the warmer air transported more moisture and caused more precipitation. Part of the expedition’s work was measuring erosion caused by increased rainfall and snowmelt.

  Change everywhere.

  By now, it was long past midsummer. Christmas had come and gone. The weeks of 24-hour sunlight were over. Nights were lengthening inexorably. The first snow had fallen at Square Bay. As the research season ended, Mike and the other helo pilots were kept busy retrieving people from far-flung science camps, and Mike had a brief fling with one of the scientists. Sarah Conway, an English palaeontologist eight years older than him, part of a team which had been working on a rich seam of fossils in a sedimentary layer high in the Eternity Range. They met at one of the social nights in the town’s two-lane bowling alley, where the pins were painted to resemble penguins and an ancient jukebox played K-pop from the last century. Sarah was a good-looking big-boned blonde with the kind of unassailable confidence and ambition, founded on good old-fashioned middle-class privilege, that Mike knew he should resent, but she was smart, funny and vivid, and when he saw how other men looked at her he felt a fierce pride that she had chosen him instead of any of them.

  “She’s a fine woman,” Oscar said, “but you do know she’s only into you for just the one thing.”

  “We’re just having a little fun before she goes back to the World,” Mike said.

  “I have plenty of experience of short-term romances is all I’m saying,” Oscar said. “Have fun, sure, but don’t let her go breaking your heart.”

  Mike knew that Oscar was right, knew that he should keep it cool, fool around but keep a certain distance, but one day he told Sarah about the elf stones, and when she expressed an interest he took her up into the hills to show her the one at Pulpit Peak.

  At first, she seemed to get it, saying that she understood why he hadn’t documented the stones in any way. “It’s about the moment. The connection you make through the stones. The journey you make to find them changes you. And when you actually see them, you’re changed again. It makes you see their context afresh,” she said, her broad smile showing the gap between her front teeth that Mike found terrifically attractive.

  But then he tried to explain his idea that the stones had been sited in places that reminded people of what had been lost, the ice and the snow, the empty quiet of unpopulated Nature that would one day come again, and everything went north.

  “This was all forest ten million years ago,” Sarah said. “And a hundred million years before that, in the Cretaceous, it was even warmer. Covered by rainforest, inhabited by dinosaurs and amphibians and early mammals. Some big non-flying dinosaurs survived here after the asteroid impact wiped them out everywhere else. We found a nest with ankylosaur eggs this season that we think definitely post-dates the extinction event. And last season we found a partial hypsilophodont skull with enlarged eye sockets that confirms the dinosaurs lived here all year around, and had acute night vision that helped them to hunt during the polar night. The point being, choosing one state over another, ice over forest, is completely subjective.”

  “But this time the change isn’t natural. Antarctica should be covered in ice and snow,” Mike said, “and we fucked it up.”

  “I’m just taking the long view. Nothing lasts forever. But that doesn’t mean that when the Anthropocene passes it will be replaced by a replica of the immediate past. As my grandfather used to like saying, you can’t unring a bell. There’ll be something else here. Something different.”

  “It will come back if we help it,” Mike said.

  “Are we talking about Antarctica or your lost island home?”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with the stones,” Mike said, although of course it did. He was angry, but mostly with himself. He shouldn’t have told her about the reclaimers. He shouldn’t have shared his stupid ideas about the stones. He’d said too much, he’d opened his heart, and she was repaying his trust with a lecture.

  “Antarctica could freeze over again, but it won’t ever be what it once was,” Sarah said. “And you can build new islands, but it won’t bring back what you’ve lost. It will be something new. You can’t hate change. It’s like hating life.”

  “I can hate the wrong kind of change, can’t I?” Mike said, but he could see that it was no good. She was a scientist. She had all the answers, and he was just a dumb helo pilot.

  So they broke up on a sour note. A few days later, while Mike was out on a supply run to one of the kelp farms, Sarah caught a plane to New Zealand, leaving him with the feeling that he’d somehow fucked up.

  “You definitely fucked up a perfectly good lay with that obsession of yours,” Oscar said.

  “I’m not obsessed.”

  Oscar laid a finger alongside his broad flat nose, pulling down his lower eyelid and staring straight at Mike. “I’ve been watching you Torres. The time you spend chasing those stones. The time you spend talking about chasing them, or what you found when you ran one down. You think it’s more important than anything else. And anyway, she’s right.”

  “What do you mean, she’s right?”

  “She’s right about bringing back the past. You can’t. You drop a glass, it breaks on the floor. No way the pieces are going to leap up and fit themselves back again.”

  “You could glue them back together,” Mike said, trying to turn it into a joke.

  “You can’t beat time, dude,” Oscar said. “It only runs in one direction, and there’s only one way out of world.”

  “I didn’t realise that you are a nihilist.”

  “I’m a realist. Instead of than trying to go against the current, I go with the flow. Don’t fuck it up with ideas about rewinding clocks, Torres. Don’t hang your hopes on some dream,” Oscar said, half-singing that last sentence, having fun. “Don’t, in a nutshell, be so fucking serious about what you can’t get back.”

  Mike wondered unhappily if Sarah was right. If Oscar was right. If he’d become obsessed about bringing back what had been lost. Yearning for something he’d never known, something he could never have. Obsessing, yeah, over his romantic ideas about the stones. Because who knew what they really meant? What they meant to the person who had chosen and named them, and carved them with runes?

  But he was too stubborn to give all that up so easily. Rootless and unsettled, he hitched a helo ride north to the Danco Coast, landing at the end of a fjord pinched between steep ridges and hiking up a shallow winding river towards the site of a stone, one of the last on his list. If he got back into his groove, he told himself, maybe everything would be okay. Maybe everything would become clear, and he’d think of the things he should have said to Sarah and the things that he needed to say to Oscar, to himself.

  And as he picked his way between boulders alongside the river, cold clean air blowing through him and clear water chattering over and around rocks and dropping in little waterfalls, with the steep sides of the U-shaped valley rising on either side to bare ridges stark against the empty blue sky and snow-capped mountains standing ahead, he did feel lifted out of himself, the slough of his merely human problems.

  There was change here, like
everywhere else—the river fed by melting ice, with kerbs of pillow moss along its stony banks, stretches of sedges and cotton grass, some kind of bird, a kite or hawk, rising in lazy circles on a thermal above a scree slope starred with yellow flowers, amazing to see a land-based predator in a place where a century ago every animal species had depended on the ocean for food—but the land was empty and its silence profound, and he was part of it, absorbed in it, in the rhythm of walking, with a goal ahead of him and everything else dwindling into insignificance.

  The river grew shallower and slower, breaking up into still pools and streams trickling between shoals and banks of pebbles, and there was the elf stone, an oval ice-smoothed boulder three metres high bedded in black gravel, with runes carved around its waist. The Navel of Our Kingdom Under the Ice.

  Once upon a time, not so long ago, a glacier had flowed through the valley, debouching onto the ice shelf that had filled the fjord. But warm sea currents had undercut and broken up the ice, and the glacier had retreated to the 300-metre contour. The elf stone was one of many erratics deposited by its retreat, and the face of the glacier was a kilometre beyond: a pitted cliff of dirty ice that loomed over a tumble of ice blocks and pools of chalky meltwater.

  After pitching his tent on a shoulder of sandy gravel, Mike lay awake a long time, listening to the whisper of water over stone and the distant retorts and groans of the glacier. When he woke, the air had turned to freezing milk. An ice fog had descended, whiting everything out. The sun was a diffuse glow low in the east; there was a rime of ice on tufts of moss and grass; every sound was muffled.

  Mike brewed coffee on his efficient little Tesla stove, ate two granola bars and a cup of porridge with honey and a chopped banana stirred into it, and broke camp and started the hike back along the river, taking it slowly in the thick chill fog. He wasn’t especially worried. Either the fog would lift and the helo would return and pick him up, or it wouldn’t, and he’d be stuck here for a day or two until a bigger helo with Instant Flight Rules equipment could be diverted. No big deal. He had enough supplies to wait it out, told himself that it was a kind of adventure, even though he could call for help on his phone at any time, and GPS meant that he couldn’t really get lost. Actually, he didn’t even need GPS. All he had to do was follow the river.

  He had been hiking for a couple of hours when he heard movement behind and above him. A soft heavy tread, a sudden sough of breath. He stood still, listening intently. The tread grew closer, shadows loomed out of the fog, bigger than any man, and Mike felt a spike of unreasoning fear. Then the wind shifted, the fog swirled aside, and he saw the first of them.

  The high forehead and small brown eyes, the tear-drop ears with their elongated hair-rimmed lobes. The questing trunk. The shaggy pelt blended from shades of auburn and chocolate. Sturdy legs footing carefully on loose stones.

  One by one, the SUV-sized mammoths trod past, five, seven, ten of them. At the end of the procession came a female with her young calf trotting beside her, trunk curled like a question mark, dissolving like the rest into the mist, leaving behind a musky scent and dinnerplate-sized footprints slowly filling with water in the gravel along the edge of the river.

  And now another figure materialised out of the thinning fog, and a man’s voice said, “Are you lost, friend?”

  “I know exactly where I am,” Mike said, resenting the implication that he was somehow trespassing. “What about you?”

  “At the moment, I’m following the mammoths.” The figure resolved into a slight man in his sixties, dressed in a red parka with a fur-trimmed hood, windproof trousers, boots. He had some kind of British accent, a neat salt-and-pepper beard, skin darkened by sun exposure but still pale at the roots of his widow’s peak.

  “You’re in charge of them?” Mike said, wondering if the man was an ecopoet, wondering if there were others like him nearby.

  “Oh, hardly,” the man said, and introduced himself: Will Colgate. “May we walk on? My friends are getting away.”

  As they walked alongside the river, Will Colgate explained that he was studying the mammoths’ behaviour, what they ate, where they went, and so on. “They need to eat a lot, so they cover a lot of territory. Yesterday they were ten kilometres south of here. Tomorrow they’ll be ten kilometres north. Or more.”

  “So you’re a scientist,” Mike said. He hadn’t been scared, not exactly, but he felt a little knot in his chest relax.

  “Oh, no. No, I’m just an amateur. A naturalist, in the old tradition. Back in O’Higgins I’m a plumber,” Will Colgate said. Adding: “I think I know why you’re here.”

  “You do?”

  “Only one reason why people would come here. To such an out-of-the-way place. You’re a stoner.”

  “I’m interested in them,” Mike admitted. “Why they are where they are. What they mean.”

  “Figured that out yet?”

  Will Colgate had a sharp edge to his grandfatherly air.

  “I think maybe they’re memorials,” Mike said. “Markers commemorating what was, and what will come again.”

  “Interesting. I once met someone, you know, who claimed she’d made them. She was a member of one of the seed-bombing crews. They take balls of clay and nutrients and seeds, so-called green bullets, and scatter them as they walk. Most of the seeds never germinate, of course, and most of the ones that do soon die. But enough thrive … Some of those willows might be theirs,” Will Colgate said, pointing to a ghostly little island of shrubs standing knee-high in the river’s flow.

  “This woman you met—she really made the stones?”

  “That’s what she said. But she isn’t the only one to lay claim to them, so who knows?”

  Mike said shyly, “I think he or she may have been a helo pilot.”

  Will Colgate seemed to like the idea. “Of course, an awful lot of people use helicopters here. They’re like taxis. When I was a geologist, back in the day, working for Rio Tinto, I was flown everywhere to check out likely lodes. Gave that up and went native, and here I still am. Place can get under your skin, can’t it?”

  “Yeah, it can.”

  They walked on for a while in companionable silence. Mike could hear, faintly, the tread of the mammoths up ahead. More a vibration coming up through the soles of his boots than actual sound.

  Will Colgate said, “If you were going to mark up one of those stones with runes, all you’d need is an automatic cutter. Neat little thing, fits into a rucksack. Programme it, tack to it in place, it would do the job in twenty minutes. Chap I know in O’Higgins uses one to carve gravestones.”

  “You’d also need to know which places to choose, which stones,” Mike said. “How each relates to the other.”

  “Mmm. But perhaps it started as a joke that slowly became serious. That gained its meaning in the making. The land will do that to you.”

  The river broadened, running over a pavement of rock deeply scored by the ice. Mike smelt the sea on the fog, heard a splashing of water and a distant hoarse bugling that raised hairs on the back of his neck. And then he and Will Colgate arrived at the place where the river tumbled down a stony shore, and saw, dimly through thick curtains of mist, that the mammoths had waded waist-deep into the sea. Several were squirting water over themselves; others grazing on kelp, tugging long slippery strands from a jut of black rocks, munching them like spaghetti.

  “The place of the meeting of ice and water,” Will Colgate said. “As it once was. By the time I got here, the river was already running, although back then the ice was about where that elf stone is now.”

  “Are you really a plumber?”

  “Fully certified. Although I’ve done all kinds of work in my time.”

  “Including making gravestones?”

  “People are mostly cremated now. When they aren’t shipped back to the world. Laser engraved brass markers, or modded resin with soulcatcher chips that talk to your phone. It isn’t the same,” Will Colgate said, and stepped towards the edge of the sea and tu
rned back and called out gleefully. “Isn’t that a lovely sight?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  The mammoths were intruders, creatures from another time and place, but the sight of them at play lifted Mike’s heart. While the old man videoed them, walking up and down at the water’s edge to get better angles, Mike called the helo crew. They were grounded. Everyone along the coast without IFR was grounded, waiting for the fog to lift. Mike told them it didn’t matter. He squatted on coarse black sand rucked by the tread of heavy feet, strangely happy. After a while, Will came back and rummaged in his backpack and set a pan of water on a little hotplate.

  “Time for a cuppa, I think.”

  They drank green tea. Will said that there was a theory that the mammoths bathed in the sea to get rid of parasites. “Another claims that seaweed gives them essential minerals and nutrients they can’t find on land. But perhaps they come here to have fun. I mean, that’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?”

  “Are there other people like you?”

  Will gave the question serious consideration, said, “Despite the warming, you know, it is still very difficult to live off the land. Not impossible with the right technology, but you can’t really go the full primitive. You know, as in stories about feral ecopoets. Stone-tipped spears and such. I suppose it might be possible in a hundred or so years, when it will be warmer and greener, but why would anyone want to do such a foolish thing?”