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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Despite my reputation for romanticism,” said Asa, “I’m not so sure the Harvard of yesteryear is better than today. That university and others like it once also nurtured the generals and presidents who would eventually deny that mankind could change the climate and lead a people hungry for demagoguery into war against the poorer states in Asia and Africa.”

  Quietly, we continued to drift around the Yard, watching tourists climb in and out of the empty, barnacle-encrusted windows like hermit crabs darting through the sockets of a many-eyed skull. Some were mostly nude, trailing diaphanous fabrics from their bodies in a manner reminiscent of Classical American Early Republic dresses and suits; others wore wetsuits inspired by American Imperial styles, covered by faux body armor plates and gas mask helmets; still others went with refugee-chic, dragging fake survival breathing kits with artfully applied rust stains.

  What were they looking for? Did they find it?

  Nostalgia is a wound that we refuse time to heal, Asa once wrote.

  * * *

  After a few hours, satiated with their excursions, the tourists headed for the surface like shoals of fish fleeing some unseen predator, and in a way, they were.

  The forecast was for a massive storm. The Sea of Massachusetts was rarely tranquil.

  As the sea around us emptied of visitors and the massive cloud-island that was the cruise ship departed, Asa grew noticeably calmer. She assured me that we were safe, and brought the submersible craft to the lee of Memorial Church Reef. Here, below the turbulent surface, we would ride out the storm.

  The sun set; the sea darkened; a million lights came to life around us. The coral reef at night was hardly a place of slumber. This was when the luminescent creatures of the night—the jellies, the shrimp, the glow-worms and lantern-fish—came out of hiding to enjoy their time in this underwater metropolis that never slept.

  While the wind and the waves raged above us, we hardly felt a thing as we drifted in the abyss that was the sea, innumerable living stars around us.

  * * *

  We do not look.

  We do not see.

  We travel millions of miles to seek out fresh vistas without even once having glimpsed inside our skulls, a landscape surely as alien and as wondrous as anything the universe has to offer. There is more than enough to occupy our curiosity and restless need for novelty if we but turn our gaze to the ten square meters around us: the unique longitudinal patterns in each tile beneath our feet, the chemical symphony animating each bacterium on our skin, the mysteries of how we can contemplate ourselves contemplating ourselves.

  The stars above are as distant—and as close—as the glowing coral-worms outside my portholes. We only have to look to see Beauty steeped in every atom.

  Only in solitude it is possible to live as self-contained as a star.

  I am content to have this. To have now.

  * * *

  In the distance, against Widener’s cliff-like bulk, there was an explosion of light, a nova bursting in the void.

  The stars around it streaked away, leaving inky darkness behind, but the nova itself, an indistinct cloud of light, continued to twist and churn.

  I woke Asa and pointed. Without speaking, she guided the habitat toward it. As we approached, the light resolved itself into a struggling figure. An octopus? No, a person.

  “That must be a tourist stranded behind,” said Asa. “If they go up to the surface now, they’ll die in the storm.”

  Asa switched on the bright lights in front of the habitat to get the tourist’s attention. The light revealed a disoriented young woman in a wetsuit studded with luminescent patches, shielding her eyes against the sudden glow of the habitat’s harsh lights. Her artificial gill slits opened and closed rapidly, showing her confusion and terror.

  “She can’t tell which way is up,” Asa muttered.

  Asa waved at her through the porthole, gesturing for her to follow the habitat. There was no airlock in the tiny refuge, and we had to go up to the surface to get her in. The young woman nodded.

  Up on the surface, the rain was torrential and the waves so choppy that it was impossible to remain standing. Asa and I clung to the narrow ridge around the entrance dome on our bellies and dragged the young woman onto the craft, which dipped even lower under the added weight. With a great deal of effort and shouting, we managed to get her inside, seal the dome, and dive back underwater.

  Twenty minutes later, dry, gills removed, securely wrapped in a warm blanket with a hot mug of tea, Saram - looked back gratefully at us.

  “I got lost inside,” she said. “The empty stacks went on and on, and they looked the same in every direction. At first, I followed a candy-cane fish through the floors, thinking that it was going to lead me outside, but it must have been going around in circles.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” asked Asa.

  She was a student at Harvard Station, Saram explained—the institution of higher learning suspended in the upper atmosphere of Venus that had licensed the old name of the university lying in ruins under us. She had come to see this school of legend for herself, harboring romantic notions of trying to search through the stacks of the dead library in the hopes of finding a forgotten tome.

  Asa looked outside the porthole at the looming presence of the empty library. “I doubt there’s anything left there now after all these years.”

  “Maybe,” Saram said. “But history doesn’t die. The water will recede from here one day. I may live to see when Nature is finally restored to her rightful course.”

  Sarah was probably a little too optimistic. United Planets’ ion-drive ships had just succeeded in pushing six asteroids into near-Earth orbits earlier in the year, and the construction of the space mirrors had not even begun. Even the most optimistic engineering projections suggest that it will be decades, if not centuries, before the mirrors will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching Earth to begin the process of climate cooling and restoring the planet to its ancient state, a temperate Eden with polar ice caps and glaciers on top of mountain peaks. Mars might be fully terraformed before then.

  “Is Doggerland any more natural than the Sea of Massachusetts?” Asa asked.

  Saram’s steady gaze did not waver. “An ice age is hardly comparable to what was made by the hands of mankind.”

  “Who are we to warm a planet for a dream and to cool it for nostalgia?”

  “Mysticism is no balm for the suffering of the refugees enduring the consequences of our ancestors’ errors.”

  “It is further error that I’m trying to prevent!” shouted Asa. She forced herself to calm down. “If the water recedes, everything around you will be gone.” She looked outside the porthole, where the reef’s night-time denizens had returned to their luminescent activities. “As will the vibrant communities in Singapore, in Havana, in Inner Mongolia. We call them refugee shantytowns and disturbed habitats, but these places are also homes.”

  “I am from Singapore,” said Saram. “I spent my life trying to get away from it and only succeeded by winning one of the coveted migration visas to Birmingham. Do not presume to speak for us or to tell me what it is we should want.”

  “But you have left,” said Asa. “You no longer live there.”

  I thought of the lovely corals outside, colored by poison. I thought of the refugees around the world underground and afloat—still called that after centuries and generations. I thought of a cooling Earth, of the Developed World racing to reclaim their ancestral lands, of the wars to come and the slaughter hinted at when the deck of power is shuffled and redealt. Who should decide? Who pay the price?

  As the three of us sat inside the submerged habitat, refugees enveloped by darting trails of light like meteors streaking across the empyrean, none of us could think of anything more to say.

  * * *

  I once regretted that I do not know the face I was born with.

  We remake our faces as easily as our ancestors once sculpted
clay, changing the features and contours of our shells, this microcosm of the soul, to match the moods and fashions of the macrocosm of society. Still unsatisfied with the limits of the flesh, we supplement the results with jewelry that deflect light and project shadows, smoothing over substance with ethereal holograms.

  The Naturalists, in their eternal struggle against modernity, proclaim hypocrisy and demand us to stop, telling us that our lives are inauthentic, and we listen, enraptured, as they flash grainy images of our ancestors before us, their imperfections and fixed appearances a series of mute accusations. And we nod and vow to do better, to foreswear artifice, until we go back to our jobs, shake off the spell, and decide upon the new face to wear for the next customer.

  But what would the Naturalists have us do? The faces that we were born with were already constructed—when we were only fertilized eggs, a million cellular scalpels had snipped and edited our genes to eliminate diseases, to filter out risky mutations, to build up intelligence and longevity, and before that, millions of years of conquest, of migration, of global cooling and warming, of choices made by our ancestors motivated by beauty or violence or avarice had already shaped us. Our faces at birth were as crafted as the masks worn by the ancient players in Dionysian Athens or Ashikaga’s Kyoto, but also as natural as the glacier-sculpted Alps or sea-inundated Massachusetts.

  We do not know who we are. But we dare not stop striving to find out.

  Checkerboard Planet

  ELEANOR ARNASON

  Eleanor Arnason published her first novel, The Sword Smith, in 1978, and followed it with novels such as Daughter of the Bear King and To the Resurrection Station. In 1991, she published her best-known novel, one of the strongest novels of the ’90s, the critically acclaimed A Woman of the Iron People, a complex and substantial novel which won the prestigious James Tipree Jr. Memorial Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing, Orbit, Xanadu, and elsewhere. Her other books are Ring of Swords and Tomb of the Fathers, and a chapbook, Mammoths of the Great Plains, which includes the eponymous novella, plus an interview with her and a long essay. Her most recent book is a collection, Big Mama Stories. Her story “Stellar Harvest” was a Hugo Finalist in 2000. Her most recent book is a collection, Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies. Coming up is a major SF retrospective collection, Hwarhath Stories: Transgressive Tales by Aliens. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

  Here she takes us to mysterious planet that is an enigma even from orbit, one whose mysteries deepen the closer you get—and a few of which may be deadly to try to unravel.

  The system was a type G yellow dwarf with six planets. Four of the planets were gas giants, the innermost so close to its primary that it skimmed the stellar atmosphere. Dark red in color, it had neither moons nor rings. It sped around its sun, inflated by heat to an impressive size and boiling with bloodred storms.

  The other giants—banded in pale, icy, elegant shades of blue and green—orbited the star at a much greater distance. All had rings and moons. The rings were broad and splendid, the moons numerous and varied. Lydia Duluth saw nothing to write home about. The universe was full of worlds like these.

  The system’s last two planets orbited in the wide space between the inner giant and its pale, outer companions. Both were small and stony. One, almost airless, had a yellow surface pocked with craters. The other was white and blue.

  “Atmosphere and water,” said Lydia’s companion. The two of them stood in an observation room in the system’s stargate station, looking at virtual windows that showed the star and its planets. One window was turned off. Lydia could see herself and Mantis reflected in its dark surface: a human woman beside a tall, angular AI that stood on four thin, metal legs. Mantis’s two long arms were folded against its chest; its triangular head was studded with sensors, most of them retracted.

  “The planet is almost exactly one A.U. from its star,” Mantis said. “It has the right amount of oxygen and water, the right temperature, everything necessary to make an Earth-normal world.”

  “There are plenty of those,” Lydia pointed out.

  “Not like this one.” The AI unfolded an arm and tapped the window showing the blue and white planet. The planet’s clouds vanished, and Lydia could see the surface. It looked to be half water. Two continents were visible, one in the northern hemisphere, a rough diamond that touched the pole, and the other in the southern hemisphere, sprawling like a serpent below the equator. The south pole was open water, sky-blue and spotted with white islands. Both the continents were covered by checkerboard patterns.

  “What?” asked Lydia.

  “Vegetation,” said Mantis.

  The squares must be huge to be visible at this distance. They alternated colors. One set of squares had warm hues: red, orange, yellow, several shades of tan. The alternating set was cool: blue-grey, blue-green, a muted purple, a silvery lavender. In every case, the color was uniform within its square.

  More squares floated in the ocean. They were smaller than the ones on land. Many were singletons, floating alone. But a number had formed partial checkerboards. Mouth open, Lydia regarded a group in the southern ocean: a long line of alternating orange and blue squares. “This cannot be natural,” she said finally.

  “No, although it’s done entirely with organisms. Each square is a separate bio-system, which does not intrude on its neighbors in any way that can be seen from here. Each square carefully maintains straight edges. The methods used vary. Some squares rely on organisms which are sensitive to the planet’s magnetic field. Other squares rely on heliotropic plants. Since the planet has no axial tilt, the sun’s position does not change during the course of a year. The locating system is combined with genetic coding which tells the border organisms to precede due north for ‘x’ distance, then make a 90-degree turn to the left or right.

  “One of our slower-than-light explorers found the planet. Like all such explorers, it contained a stargate large enough to transmit objects as well as information. Once it sent its initial report, we responded by sending additional research equipment. The STL explorers are often less than state of the art, since they have been traveling for centuries or millennia, with only the most necessary upgrades.

  “We examined everything, trying to determine who did this and why.”

  “Have you succeeded?” Lydia asked.

  “No. It can’t be our long-vanished creators, the Master Builders. Their passion was the making of machines. If they had done this, we would have found nano-machinery pruning the edges of the squares. We haven’t.

  “After years of study, we gave up and opened the planet. We had discovered no evidence that anything intelligent still lived here. Nothing needed our protection; and we hoped that settlers might discover the planet’s secrets, as we had not.

  “You humans are the most numerous and adventurous of the intelligent life forms we have found thus far. It should come as no surprise when I tell you a human government claimed this planet, and one of your human corporations, Bio-Innovation bought an option to explore.”

  “I wouldn’t call Bio-In my corporation,” Lydia said.

  “No, of course not,” Mantis said. “You work for Stellar Harvest.”

  The famous interstellar holoplay company. Her job was to find exotic locations for Stellar Harvest’s action dramas; and this planet was certainly exotic. The patterns covering the continents, muted and varied, reminded her of sweaters she had owned. The ocean squares—they must be rafts of vegetation—looked less perfect, as if knit by an apprentice. Several had ragged edges, and none was exactly aligned north, south, east and west. Clearly the makers had not found a way to control ocean currents or to compensate for them.

  “Why don’t I know about this place?” Lydia asked.

  “Bio-Innovation has kept quiet. They’re afraid that some human agency will declare the planet unique and off-limits.”

  “What government claimed the planet?”

 
“Nova Terra,” said Mantis.

  That explained a lot. Nova Terra was notoriously friendly to business. Under normal circumstances, no one in their government was going to interfere with the activities of a major corporation. But a planet like this one was not a normal circumstance; and Nova Terra’s populace had been restless lately, stirred up by a series of environmental scandals and a charismatic new political leader, Winona Saskatoon of the Blue Action Party. Lydia could imagine what Winona would make of a world like this one in the hands of Bio-In.

  “Why am I here?” she asked.

  “We are incapable of emotion,” Mantis said. “All our decisions are based on logic and reason. However, if we could feel irritation, we would find Bio-In’s behavior irritating. They are looting the planet’s genetic wealth, instead of undertaking a systematic study of a very interesting ecology; and they are looting in secret, instead of bringing in a multitude of scholars and scientists to study and argue. Many hands make light work, as you humans say; and many minds make thinking easier.” Mantis paused. Its head was aimed at the planet’s image, several sensors extended. “We do not like to intervene. Our self-appointed task is to study intelligent life, not change it.”

  “You’re intervening by bringing me here,” said Lydia. “Aren’t you?”

  “We are drawing your attention to the planet. Nothing more. We suspect the people who did this may be the same beings who transformed the planet Lifeline. You told us a planet such as Lifeline, so obviously artificial, might be a signal. We’d like your opinion of this world. Is it another signal? If so, what is it saying? What kind of response does it want? And we thought Stellar Harvest might be interested in the planet.”

  “You want to break Bio-In’s hold on the planet,” said Lydia.

  Mantis was silent for a moment. “We think it would be better for you to go down to the planet in disguise. We have created a new identity for you. You are L. D. Fargo, a sound-and-light technician employed by Bio-In. You have come to record images for the home office. The identity will hold up, if the people here check.”