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

by Gardner Dozois

  “You are still skeptical.” Four Warm Currents clenched tight to keep distaste from inking the space between them. Nine Brittle Spines was a council member, and not one to risk offending. “But the ice’s composition is changing, as I reported. The bit shears easier with every turn. We’re approaching the other side.”

  “So it thins, and so it will thicken again.” Nine Brittle Spines wriggled dismissal. “The other side is a deep dream, Four Warm Currents. Your machine is approaching more ice.”

  “The calculations,” Four Warm Currents protested. “The sounding. If you would read the theorems—”

  Nine Brittle Spines hooked an interrupting tentacle through the thicket of movement. “No need for your indignation. I have no quarrel with the Drill. It’s a useful sideshow, after all. It keeps the eyes and mouths of the colony fixated while the council slides its decisions past unhindered.”

  “If you have no quarrel, then why do you come here?” Four Warm Currents couldn’t suck back the words, or the single droplet of ichor that suddenly wobbled into the water between them. It blossomed there into a ghostly black wreath. Four Warm Currents raked a hasty tentacle through to disperse it, but the councillor was already tasting the chemical, slowly, pensively.

  “I have no quarrel, Four Warm Currents, but others do.” Nine Brittle Spines swirled the bitter emission around one tentacle tip, as if it were a pheromone poem or something else to be savored. Four Warm Currents, mortified, could do nothing but turn an apologetic mottled blue, almost too distracted to process what the councillor signed next.

  “While the general opinion is that you have gone mad, and your project is a hilariously inept allocation of time and resources based only on your former contributions, theories do run the full gamut. Some believe the Drill is seeking mineral deposits in the ice. Others believe the Drill will be repurposed as a weapon, to crack through the fortified cities of the vent-dwelling colonies.” Nine Brittle Spines shaped a derisive laugh. “And there is even a small but growing tangent who believe in your theorems. Who believe that you are fast approaching the mythic other side, and that our ocean will seep out of the puncture like the viscera from a torn egg, dooming us all.”

  “The weight of the ocean will hold it where it is,” Four Warm Currents signed, a sequence by now rote to the tentacles. “The law of sink and rise is one you’ve surely studied.”

  “Once again, my opinion is irrelevant to the matter,” Nine Brittle Spines replied. “I am here because this radical tangent is believed to be targeting your project for sabotage. The council wishes to protect its investment.” Tentacles pinwheeled in a slight hesitation then: “You yourself may be in danger as well. The council advises you to keep a low profile. Perhaps change your name taste.”

  “I am not afraid for my life.” Four Warm Currents signed it firmly and honestly. The project was more important than survival. More important than anything.

  “Then fear, perhaps, for your mate’s children.”

  Four Warm Currents flashed hot orange shock, bright enough for the foreman to glance over, concerned. “What?”

  Nine Brittle Spines held up the tentacle tip that had tasted Four Warm Currents’s anger. “Traces of ingested birth mucus. Elevated hormones. You should demonstrate more self-control, Four Warm Currents. You give away all sorts of secrets.”

  The councillor gave a lazy salute, then jetted off into the gloom, joined at a distance by two bodyguards with barbed tentacles. Four Warm Currents watched them vanish down the tunnel, then slowly turned back toward the Drill. The bit churned and churned. Four Warm Currents’s mind churned with it.

  * * *

  When the work cycle closed, the Drill was tugged back down the tunnel and tethered in a hard shell still fresh enough to glisten. A corkscrewing skiff arrived to unload the guard detail, three young bloods with enough hormone-stoked muscle to overlook the still-transparent patches on their skin. They inked their names so loudly Four Warm Currents could taste them before even jetting over.

  “There’s been a threat of sorts,” Four Warm Currents signed, secreting a small dark privacy cloud to shade the conversation from workers filing onto the now-empty skiff. “Against the project. Radicals who may attempt sabotage.”

  “We know,” signed the guard, whose name was a pungent Two Sinking Corpses. “The councillor told us. That’s why we have these.” Two Sinking Corpses hefted a conical weapon Four Warm Currents dimly recognized as a screamer, built to amplify a sonar burst to lethal strength. Nine Brittle Spines had not exaggerated the seriousness of the situation.

  “Pray to the Leviathans you don’t have to use them,” Four Warm Currents signed, then joined the workers embarking on the skiff, tasting familiar names, slinging tentacles over knotted muscles, adding to a multilayered scent joke involving an aging councillor and a frost shark. Spirits were high. The Drill was cutting smoothly. They were approaching the other side, and though for some that only meant the end of contract and full payment, others had also been infected by Four Warm Currents’s fervor.

  “What will we see?” a worker signed. “Souls of the dead? The Leviathans themselves?”

  “Nothing outside the physical laws,” Four Warm Currents replied, but then, sensing the disappointment: “But nothing like we have ever seen before. It will be unimaginable. Wondrous. And they’ll soak our names all through the memory sponges, to remember the brave explorers who first broke the ice.”

  A mass of tentacles waved in approval of the idea. Four Warm Currents settled back as the skiff began to move and a wave of new debates sprang up.

  * * *

  The City of Bone was roughly spherical, a beautiful lattice of ancient skeleton swathed in sponge and cultivated coral, glowing ethereal blue with bioluminescence. It was older than any councillor, a relic of the dim past before the archives: a Leviathan skeleton dredged from the seafloor with buoyant coral, built up and around until it could float unsupported, tethered in place above the jagged rock bed.

  Devotees believed the Leviathans had sacrificed their corporeal forms to leave city husks behind; Four Warm Currents shared the more heretical view that the Leviathans were extinct, and for all their size might have been no more intelligent than the living algae feeders that still hauled their bulk along the seafloor. It was not a theory to divulge in polite discourse. Drilling through the roof of the world was agitator enough on its own.

  As the skiff passed the City of Bone’s carved sentinels, workers began to jet off to their respective housing blocks. Four Warm Currents was one of the last to disembark, having been afforded, as one of the council’s foremost engineers, an artful gray-and-purple spire in the city center. Of course, that was before the Drill. Nine Brittle Spines’s desire for a “sideshow” aside, Four Warm Currents felt the daily loss of council approval like the descending cold of a crevice. Relocation was not out of the realm of possibility.

  For now, though, the house’s main door shuttered open at a touch, and, more importantly, Four Warm Currents’s mates were inside. Six Bubbling Thermals, sleek and swollen with eggs, drizzling ribbons of birth mucus like a halo, but with eyes still bright and darting. Three Jagged Reefs, lean and long, skin stained from a heavy work cycle in the smelting vents, submitting to a massage. Their taste made Four Warm Currents ache, deep and deeper.

  “So our heroic third returns,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, interrupting the massage and prompting a ruffle of protest.

  “Have you ended the world yet?” Three Jagged Reefs added. “Don’t stop, Six. I’m nearly loose enough to slough.”

  “Nearly,” Four Warm Currents signed. “I blacked a councillor. Badly.”

  Both mates guffawed, though Six Bubbling Thermals’s had a nervous shiver to it.

  “From how far?” Three Jagged Reefs demanded. “Could they tell it was yours?”

  “From not even a tentacle away,” Four Warm Currents admitted. “We were in conversation.”

  Three Jagged Reefs laughed again, the reckless, waving laugh t
hat had made Four Warm Currents fall in love, but their other mate did not.

  “Conversation about what?” Six Bubbling Thermals signed.

  Four Warm Currents hesitated, tasting around to make sure a strong emotion hadn’t slipped the gland again, but the water was clear and cold and anxiety-free. “Nine Brittle Spines is a skeptic of the worst kind. Intelligent, but refusing to self-educate.”

  “Did you not explain the density calculation?” Three Jagged Reefs signed plaintively.

  Four Warm Currents moved to reply, then recognized a familiar mocking tilt in Three Jagged Reefs’s tentacles and turned the answer into a crude “floating feces” gesticulation.

  “Tell us the mathematics again,” Three Jagged Reefs teased. “Nothing slicks me better for sex, Four. All those beautiful variables.”

  Six Bubbling Thermals smiled at the back-and-forth, but was still lightly spackled with mauve worry. The birth mucus spiralling out in all directions made for an easy distraction.

  “We need to collect again,” Four Warm Currents signed, gesturing to the trembling ribbons. “Or you’ll bury us in our sleep.”

  “And then I’ll finally have the house all to my own,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, cloying. But the mauve worry dissolved into flushed healthy pink as they all began coiling the mucus and storing it in coral tubing. Four Warm Currents stroked the egg sacs gently as they worked, imagining each one hatching into an altered world.

  * * *

  After they finished with the birth mucus and pricked themselves with a recreational skimmer venom, Three Jagged Reefs made them sample a truly terrible pheromone poem composed at the smelting vents between geysers. The recitation was quickly cancelled in favor of hallucination-laced sex in which they all slid over and around Six Bubbling Thermals’s swollen mantle, probing and pulping, and afterward the three of them drifted in the artificial current, slowly revolving as they discussed anything and everything:

  Colony annexation, the validity of aesthetic tentacle removal, the new eatery that served everything dead and frozen with frescoes carved into the flesh, So-and-So’s scent change, the best birthing tanks, the after-ache they’d had the last time they used skimmer venom. Anything and everything except for the Drill.

  Much later, when the other two had slipped into a sleeping harness, Four Warm Currents jetted upward to the top of their gray-and-purple spire, coiling there to look out over the City of Bone. Revelers jetted back and forth in the distance, visible by blots of blue-green excitement and arousal. Some were workers from the Drill, Four Warm Currents knew, celebrating the end of a successful work cycle.

  Four Warm Currents’s namesake parent had been a laborer of the same sort. A laborer who came home to cramped quarters and hungry children, but was never too exhausted to spin them a story, tentacles whirling and flourishing like a true bard. Four Warm Currents had been a logical child, always finding gaps in the tall tales of Leviathans and heroes and oceans beyond their own. But still, the stories had sunk in deep. Enough so that Four Warm Currents might be able to sign them to the children growing in Six Bubbling Thermals’s egg sacs.

  There was no need for Nine Brittle Spines or the council to know it was those stories that had ignited Four Warm Currents’s curiosity for the roof of the world in the first place. Soon there would be new stories to tell. In seven, maybe eight more work cycles, they would break through.

  After such a long percolation, the idea was dizzying. Four Warm Currents didn’t know what awaited on the other side. There were theories, of course. Many theories. Four Warm Currents had studied gas bubbles and knew that whatever substance lay beyond the ice was not water as they knew it, not nearly so heavy. It could very well be deadly. Four Warm Currents would take precautions, but—

  The brush of a tentacle tip, a familiar taste. Six Bubbling Thermals had ballooned up to join the stillness. Four Warm Currents extended a welcoming clasp, and the rasp of skin on skin was a comforting one. Calming.

  “Someone almost started a riot in the plaza today,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed.

  The calm was gone. “Over what? Over the project?”

  “Yes.” Six Bubbling Thermals stared out across the city with a long clicking burst, then turned to face Four Warm Currents. “They had artificial panic. In storage globes. Broke them wide open right as the market peaked. It was…” Tentacles wove in and out, searching for a descriptor. “Chaos.”

  “Are you all right?” Four Warm Currents signed hard. “You should have told me. You’re birthing.”

  Six Bubbling Thermals waved a quick-dying laugh. “I’m still bigger than you are. And I told Three Jagged Reefs. We agreed it would be best not to add to your stress. But I’ve never kept secrets well, have I?”

  Another stare, longer this time. Four Warm Currents joined in, scraping sound across the architecture of the city, mapping curves and crevices, spars and spires.

  “Before they were dragged off, they dropped one last globe,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “It was your name, fresh, mixed with a decay scent. They said you’re a monster, and if nobody stops you, you’ll end the world.”

  Four Warm Currents shivered, clenched hard against the noxious fear threatening to tendril into the water. “Fresh?”

  “Yes.”

  Who had it been? Four Warm Currents thought of the many workers and observers jetting up and down the tunnel, bringing status reports, complaints, updates. Any one of them could have come close enough to coax their chief engineer’s name taste into a concealed globe. With a start, Four Warm Currents realized Six Bubbling Thermals was not gazing pensively over the city, but keeping watch.

  “I know you won’t consider halting the project,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “But you need to be careful. Promise me that much.”

  Four Warm Currents remembered the councillor’s warning and stroked Six Bubbling Thermals’s egg sacs with a trembling tentacle. “I’ll be careful. And when we break through, this will all go away. They’ll see there’s no danger.”

  “And when will that be?” The mauve worry was creeping back across Six Bubbling Thermals’s skin.

  “Soon,” Four Warm Currents signed. “Seven work cycles.”

  They enmeshed their tentacles and curled against each other, bobbing there in silence as the City of Bone’s ghostly blue guide lights began to blink out one by one.

  * * *

  The first attack came three cycles later, after shift. A pair of free-swimmers, with their skins pumped pitch-black and a sonar cloak in tow, managed to bore halfway through the Drill’s protective shell before the guards spotted them and chased them off. The news came by a messenger whom Three Jagged Reefs, unhappily awoken, nearly eviscerated. Bare moments later, Four Warm Currents stroked goodbyes to both mates and took the skiff to the project site, tentacles heavy from sleep but hearts thrumming electric.

  Nine Brittle Spines somehow contrived to arrive first.

  “Four Warm Currents, it is a pleasure to see you so well rested.” The councillor’s tentacles moved as smoothly and blandly as ever, but Four Warm Currents could see the faintest of trembling at their tips. Mortal after all.

  “I came as quickly as I was able,” Four Warm Currents signed, not rising to the barb. “Were either of the perpetrators identified?”

  “No.” Nine Brittle Spines gave the word a twist of annoyance. “Assumedly they were two of yours. They knew the thinnest point of the shell and left behind a project-tagged auger.” One tentacle produced the spiral tool and set it drifting between them. It was a miniature cousin to the behemoth Drill, used to sample ice consistency.

  Four Warm Currents inspected the implement. “I’ll speak with inventory, but I imagine it was taken without their knowledge.”

  “Do that,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “In the meanwhile, security will be increased. We’ll have guards at all times from now on. Body searches for workers.”

  Four Warm Currents waved a vague agreement, staring up at the burnished armor shell, the hole sco
red in its underbelly. The workers would not be happy, but they were so close now, too close to let anything derail the project. Four Warm Currents would agree to anything, so long as the Drill was safe.

  * * *

  Tension became a sharp, sooty tang overlaying every conversation, so much so that Four Warm Currents was given council approval for a globe of artificially mixed happiness to waft around the tunnel entrance. It ended being mostly sucked up by the guards, who were happy enough already to swagger around with screamers and combat hooks bristling in their tentacles, interrogating any particularly worry-spackled worker who happened to look their way.

  Four Warm Currents complained to the councillor, but was soundly ignored, told only that the guards had been instructed to treat the project site and its crew with the utmost respect. Enthusiasm was now a thing of the past. Workers spoke rarely and with short tempers, and every time the Drill slowed or an error was found in its calibration, the possibility of sabotage hung in the tunnel like a decay scent. Four Warm Currents found a slip in the most recent density calculation that promised to put things back a full work cycle, but still the Drill churned.

  At home, they began receiving death threats. Six Bubbling Thermals found the first, a tiny automaton that waved its stiff tentacles in a prerecorded message: “We won’t need a drill to puncture your eyes and every one of your eggs.” Three Jagged Reefs shredded it to pieces. Four Warm Currents gave the pieces to the council’s investigator.

  Then, two cycles before breakthrough, black globes of artificial malice were slicked to their spire with adhesive and timed to burst while they slept. Only one went off, but it was enough to necessitate a pore-cleanse for Six Bubbling Thermals and a dedicated surveillance detail for the house.

  Three Jagged Reefs fumed and fumed. “After the Drill breaks through, you’ll let me borrow it, won’t you?” The demand was jittery with skimmer venom, and made only once Six Bubbling Thermals, finally returned from the cleansing tanks, was out of sight range. “I’m going to find the shit-eater who blacked Six and stick them on the bit gland first.”