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

by Gardner Dozois

  Three Jagged Reefs had been pulled from smelting after an incidence of “hazardously elevated emotions,” in which a copper-worker trilling about the impending end of the world had their tentacle held over a geyser until it turned to pulp. Staying in the house full cycle, under the watchful eyes and mouths of council surveillance, was not an easy transition. Not even stocked with high-quality venom.

  “It’ll all be over soon,” Four Warm Currents signed, mind half-filled, as was now the norm, with figures from the latest density calculation. One final cycle.

  “Tell it to Six,” Three Jagged Reefs signed back, short and clipped, and turned away.

  Four Warm Currents swam into the next room, to where their mate was adrift in the sleeping harness. The egg sacs were bulging now, slick with the constant emission of birth mucus, bearing no trace of black ichor stains. The cleansing tanks had reported no permanent damage. Four Warm Currents sent a gentle prod of sonar and elicited a twitch.

  “I’m awake,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, languid. “I’d sleep better with you two around me.”

  “They’ll catch the lunatics who planted that globe,” Four Warm Currents signed back.

  Six Bubbling Thermals signed nothing for a long moment, then waved a sad laugh. “I don’t think it’s lunatics. Not anymore. A lot of people are saying the same thing, you know.”

  “Saying what?”

  “You spend all of your time at the Drill, even when you’re here with us.” The accusation was soft, but it stung. “You haven’t been paying attention. The transit currents are full of devotees calling you a blasphemer. Saying you think yourself a Leviathan. Unbounded. The whole city is frightened.”

  “Then it’s a city of idiots,” Four Warm Currents signed abruptly.

  “I’m frightened. I have no shame admitting it. I’m frightened for our children. For them to have two parents only. One parent only. None. For them to never even hatch. Who knows?” Six Bubbling Thermals raised a shaky smile. “Maybe the idiot is the one who isn’t frightened.”

  “But I’m going to give them an altered world, a new world.…” Four Warm Currents’s words blurred as Six Bubbling Thermals stilled two waving tentacles.

  “I don’t give a floating shit about a new world if it’s one where you take a hook in the back,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed back, slow and clear. “Don’t go to the Drill tomorrow. They’ll send for you when it breaks the ice.”

  At first, Four Warm Currents didn’t even comprehend the words. After spending a third of a lifespan planning, building, lobbying, watching, the idea of not being there to witness the final churn, the final crack and squeal of ice giving away, was dizzying. Nauseating.

  “If you go, I think you’ll be dead before you come home,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “You’re worth more to us alive for one more cycle than as a name taste wafting through the archives for all eternity.”

  “I’ve watched it from the very start.” Four Warm Currents tried not to tremble. “Every turn. Every single turn.”

  “And without you it moves no faster, no slower,” Six Bubbling Thermals replied. “Isn’t that what you say?”

  “I have to be there.”

  “You don’t.” Six Bubbling Thermals gave a weary shudder. “Is it a new world for our children, or only for you?”

  Four Warm Currents’s tentacles went slack, adrift. The two of them stared at each other in the gloom, until, suddenly, something stirred in the egg sacs. The motion repeated, a faint but mesmerizing ripple. Six Bubbling Thermals gave a slight wriggle of pain.

  Four Warm Currents climbed into the harness, turning acid blue in an apology that could not have been properly signed. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay, I’ll stay.”

  They folded against each other and spoke of other things, of the strange currents that had brought them together, the future looming in the birthing tanks. Then they slept, deeply, even when Three Jagged Reefs wobbled in to join them much later, nearly unhooking the harness with chemical-clumsy tentacles.

  Four Warm Currents dreamt of ending the world, the Drill shearing through its final stretch of pale ice, and from the gaping wound in the roof of the world, a Leviathan lowering its head, eyes glittering, to swallow the engine and its workers and their blasphemous chief engineer whole, pulling its bulk back into the world it once abandoned, sliding through blackness toward the City of Bone, ready to reclaim its scattered body, to devour all light, to unmake everything that had ever been made.

  * * *

  Four Warm Currents awoke to stinging sonar and the silhouette of a familiar councillor drifting before the sleeping harness, flanked by two long-limbed guards.

  “Wake your mates,” Nine Brittle Spines signed, with a taut urgency Four Warm Currents had never seen before. “All three of you have to leave.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Four Warm Currents rolled, body heavy with sleep, and stroked each mate awake in turn. Three Jagged Reefs refused to rise until Six Bubbling Thermals furiously shook the harness, a flash of the old pre-birthing strength.

  “Someone come to murder us?” Three Jagged Reefs asked calmly, once toppled free.

  “You wouldn’t feel a thing with all that venom in you,” Four Warm Currents replied, less calmly.

  “I barely pricked.”

  “As said the Drill to the roof of the world,” Six Bubbling Thermals interjected.

  Nine Brittle Spines flashed authoritative indigo, cutting the conversation short. “We have a skiff outside. Your discussions can wait.”

  The three of them followed the councillor out of the house, trailing long, sticky strands of Six Bubbling Thermals’s replenished birth mucus. Once they exited the shutter and were no longer filtered, a faint acrid flavor seeped to them through the water. The City of Bone tasted bitter with fear. Anger.

  And that wasn’t all.

  In the distance, Four Warm Currents could see free-swimmers moving as a mob, jetting back and forth through the city spires, carrying homegrown phosphorescent lamps and scent bombs. Several descended on a council-funded sculpture, smearing the stone with webbed black-and-red rage. Most continued on, heading directly for the city center. For their housing block, Four Warm Currents realized with a sick jolt.

  “The radical tangent has grown,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “Considerably.”

  “So many?” Four Warm Currents was stunned.

  “Only thing people love more than a festival is a doomsday,” Three Jagged Reefs signed bitterly.

  “Indeed. Your decriers have found support in many places, I’m afraid.” Nine Brittle Spines bent a grimace as they swam toward the waiting skiff, a closed and armored craft marked with an official sigil. “Including the council.”

  Four Warm Currents stopped dead in the water. “But the Drill is still under guard.”

  “The Drill is currently being converged upon by a mob twice this size,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “Even without sympathizers in the security ranks, it would be futile to try to protect it. The council’s official position, as of this moment, is that your project has been terminated to save costs.”

  Four Warm Currents realized, dimly, that both mates were holding tentacles back to prevent an incidence of hazardously elevated emotions. Searing orange desperation had spewed into the water around them. Nine Brittle Spines made no remarks about self-control, only flashed, for the briefest instant, a pale blue regret.

  “But we’re nearly through,” Four Warm Currents signed, trembling all over. Three Jagged Reefs and Six Bubbling Thermals now slowly slid off, eager for the safety of the skiff. Drifting away when they were needed most.

  “Perhaps you are,” Nine Brittle Spines admitted. “Perhaps your theorems are sound. But stability is, at the present moment, more important than discovery.”

  “If we go to the Drill—” Four Warm Currents shuddered to a pause. “If we go to the Drill, if we go now, we can stop them. I can explain to them. I can convince them.”
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  “You know better than that, Four Warm Currents. In fact—”

  Whatever Nine Brittle Spines planned to say next was guillotined as Six Bubbling Thermals surged from behind, wrapping the councillor in full grip. In the same instant, Three Jagged Reefs yanked the skiff’s shutter open. Four Warm Currents stared at the writhing councillor, then at each mate in turn.

  “Get on with it, Four,” Three Jagged Reefs signed. “Go and try.”

  Six Bubbling Thermals was unable to sign, tentacles taut as a vice around Nine Brittle Spines, but the misty red cloud billowing into the water was the fiercest and most pungent love Four Warm Currents could remember tasting.

  “Oh, wait.” Three Jagged Reefs glanced between them. “Six wanted to know if you have any necessary names.”

  “None,” Four Warm Currents signed shakily. “So long as there are Thermals and Reefs.”

  “Well, of course.” Three Jagged Reefs waved a haughty laugh that speared Four Warm Currents’s hearts all over again. The councillor had finally stopped struggling in Six Bubbling Thermals’s embrace and now watched the proceedings with an air of resignation. Four Warm Currents flashed a respectful pale blue, then turned and swam for the skiff.

  * * *

  They were hauling the Drill out of its carapace with hooks and bare tentacles, clouding the water with rage, excitement, amber-streaked triumph. Four Warm Currents abandoned the skiff for the final stretch, sucking back hard, jetting harder. The mob milled around the engine in a frenzy, too caught up to notice one late arrival.

  Four Warm Currents screamed, dragging sonar across the crowd, but in the mess of motion and chemicals nobody felt the hard clicks. They’d brought a coring charge, one of the spiky half-spheres designed for blasting through solid rock bed to the nickel veins beneath. Four Warm Currents had shut down a foreman’s lobby for such explosives during a particularly slow stretch of drilling. Too volatile, too much blowback in a confined space. But now it was here, and it was going to shred the Drill to pieces.

  Four Warm Currents jetted higher, above the chaos, nearly to the mouth of the tunnel. No eyes followed. Everyone was intent on the Drill and on the coring charge being shuffled toward it, tentacle by tentacle.

  Four Warm Currents sucked back, angled, and dove. The free-swimmers towing the coring charge didn’t see the interloper until it was too late, until Four Warm Currents slid two tentacles deep into the detonation triggers and clung hard.

  “Get away from me! Get away or I’ll trigger right here!”

  The crowd turned to a fresco of frozen tentacles, momentarily speechless. Then:

  “Blasphemer,” signed the closest free-swimmer. “Blasphemer.”

  The word caught and rippled across the mob, becoming a synchronized wave of short, chopping motions.

  “The Drill is not going to end the world,” Four Warm Currents signed desperately, puffing up over the crowd, hauling the coring charge along. “It’s going to break us into a brand-new one. One we’ll visit at our choosing. The deep ocean will stay deep ocean. The Leviathans will stay skeletons. Our cities will stay safe.”

  Something struck like a spar of bone, sending Four Warm Currents reeling. The conical head of a screamer poked out from the crowd, held by a young guard whose skin was no longer inked with the council’s sigil. The name came dimly to memory: Two Sinking Corpses. An unfamiliar taste was clouding into the water. It took a moment for Four Warm Currents to realize it was blood, blue and hot and saline.

  “Listen to me!”

  The plea was answered by another blast of deadly sound, this one misaimed, clipping a tentacle. Four Warm Currents nearly lost his grip on the coring charge. The mob roiled below, waving curses, mottled black and orange with fury. There would be no listening.

  “Stay away from me or I’ll trigger it,” Four Warm Currents warned once more, then jetted hard for the mouth of the tunnel. The renewed threat of detonation bought a few still seconds. Then the mob realized where the coring charge was headed, and the sleekest and fastest of them tore away in pursuit.

  Four Warm Currents hurled up the dark tunnel, sucking back water in searing cold gulps and flushing faster and harder with each. Familiar grooves in the ice jumped out with a smatter of sonar, etchings warning against unauthorized entry. Four Warm Currents blew past with tentacles straight back, trailing the coring charge directly behind, gambling nobody would risk hitting it with a screamer.

  A familiar bend loomed in the dark, one of the myriad small adjustments to course, and beyond it, the service lights, bundles of bioluminescent algae set along the walls, began blooming to life, painting the tunnel an eerie blue-green, casting a long-limbed shadow on the wall. Four Warm Currents chanced a look down and saw three free-swimmers, young and strong and gaining.

  “Drop it!” one took the opportunity to sign. “Drop it and you’ll live!”

  Four Warm Currents used a tentacle to sign back one of Three Jagged Reefs’s favorite gestures, reflecting that it was a bad idea when the young-blood’s skin flashed with rage and all three of them put on speed. The head start was waning, the coring charge was heavy, the screamer wound was dribbling blood.

  But Four Warm Currents knew the anatomy of the tunnel better than anyone, better than even the foreman. The three pursuers lost valuable time picking their way through a thicket of free-floating equipment knocked from the wall, then more again deliberating where the tunnel branched, stubby memento of a calculation error.

  Four Warm Currents’s hearts were wailing for rest as the final stretch appeared. The coring charge felt like lead. A boiling shadow swooped past, and Four Warm Currents realized they’d fired another screamer, one risk now outweighing the other. The roof of the world, stretched thin like a membrane, marred with the Drill’s final twist, loomed above.

  Another blast of sonar, this one closer. Four Warm Currents throttled out a cloak of black ink, hoping to obscure the next shot, too exhausted to try to dodge. Too exhausted to do anything now but churn warm water, drag slowly, too slowly, toward the top.

  The screamer’s next burst was half-deflected by the coring charge, but still managed to make every single tentacle spasm. Four Warm Currents felt the cargo slipping and tried desperately to regain purchase on its slick metal. So close, now, so close to the end of the world. Roof of the world. Either. Thoughts blurred and collided in Four Warm Currents’s bruised brain. More blood was pumping out, bright blue, foul-tasting. Four Warm Currents tried to hold on to the exact taste of Six Bubbling Thermals’s love.

  One tentacle stopped working. Four Warm Currents compensated with the others, shifting weight as another lance of sound missed narrowly to the side. The ice was almost within reach now, cold, scarred, layered with frost. With one final, tendon-snapping surge, Four Warm Currents heaved the coring charge upward, slapping the detonation trigger as it went. The spiked device crunched into the ice and clung. Four Warm Currents tasted something new mixing into the blood, reaching amber tendrils through the leaking blue. Triumph.

  “Get out,” Four Warm Currents signed, clumsily, slowly. “It’s too late now.”

  The pursuers stared for a moment, adrift, then turned and shot back down the tunnel, howling a sonar warning to the others coming behind. Four Warm Currents’s tentacles were going numb. Every body part ached or seared or felt like it was splitting apart. There would be no high-speed exit down the tunnel. Maybe no exit at all.

  As the coring charge signed out its detonation sequence with mechanical tendrils, Four Warm Currents swam, slowly, to the side wall. A deep crevice ran along the length. Maybe deep enough. Four Warm Currents squeezed, twisted, contorted, tucking inside the shelter bit by bit. It was an excruciating fit. Even a child would have preferred a wider fissure. Four Warm Currents’s eyes squeezed shut and saw Six Bubbling Thermals smiling, saw the egg sacs glossy and bright.

  The coring charge went off like a volcano erupting. Such devices were designed, in theory, to deliver all but a small fraction of the explosive yield forwar
d. The tiny fraction of blowback was still enough to shatter cracks through the tunnel walls and send a sonic boom rippling down its depth, an expanding globe of boiling water that scalded Four Warm Currents’s exposed skin. The tentacle that hadn’t managed to fit inside was turned to mush in an instant, spewing denatured flesh and blood in a hot cloud. All of Four Warm Currents’s senses sang with the explosion, tasting the fierce chemicals, feeling the heat, seeing with sonar the flayed ice crumbling all around.

  Then, at last, it was over. Four Warm Currents slithered out of the crack, sloughing skin on its edges, and drifted slowly upward. It was a maelstrom of shredded ice and swirling gases, bubbles twisting in furious wreaths. Four Warm Currents floated up through the vortex, numb to the stinging debris and swathes of scalding water. The roof of the world was gone, leaving a jagged dark hole in the ice, a void that had been a dream and a nightmare for cycles and cycles. Four Warm Currents rose to it, entranced.

  One trembling tentacle reached upward and across the rubicon. The sensation was indescribable. Four Warm Currents pulled the tentacle back, stared with bleary eyes, and found it still intact. The other side was scorching cold, a thousand tingling pinpricks, a gauze of gas like nothing below. Nothing Four Warm Currents had ever dreamed or imagined.

  The chief engineer bobbed and bled, then finally gathered the strength for one last push, breaking the surface of the water completely. The feel of gas on skin was gasping, shivering. Four Warm Currents craned slowly backward, turning to face the void, and looked up. Another ocean, far deeper and vaster than theirs, but not empty. Not dark. Not at all. Maybe it was a beautiful hallucination, brought about by the creeping failure of sense organs. Maybe it wasn’t.

  Four Warm Currents watched the new world with eyes and mouth, secreting final messages down into the water, love for Six Bubbling Thermals, for Three Jagged Reefs, for the children who would sign softly but laugh wildly, and then, as numbing darkness began to seep across blurring eyes, under peeling skin, a sole suggestion for a necessary name.