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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Why not?” asked a humanoid, who was coming toward them. “It took us some time to realize that you are not like me. You are not parts of a whole, but rather entirely separate organisms—like the squares on this planet, which sometimes exchange genetic material, but never unite. It was a hard lesson to learn; and the orange square next to me still does not believe you are not unified. The orange square is intelligent, though not as intelligent as I am. I have evolved more quickly than the rest of the planet, because there have been more human explorers in my forest.”

  The other animals retreated, leaving the five security officers lying on the ground, covered with bright red human blood. They were still alive. Lydia could tell because they were moving and making noises, groans and whimpers.

  “These beings were trying to make you dead,” the humanoid went on. “It would be like a square dying. Like me—all of me—ceasing to exist. I could not allow that.”

  Jo knelt by one of the cops. “The bites don’t look deep, and these guys are carrying handcuffs. Let’s lock ’em up, put them in the cars and drive back to camp. As far as I know, you have no security there.”

  “Unless they just arrived,” Ming said.

  “We’ll deal with that if we have to,” Jo replied.

  “That reminds me.” Ming took off his shoes and threw them, one after another, in high loops. They landed near the clearing’s edge. A pair of long, many-legged, lavender bugs came out of the forest and crawled onto the shoes. These bugs had pinchers, which they used to cut the shoe fabric.

  “Interesting planet,” Jo commented

  “I am trying to understand clothing,” the humanoid said.

  Ming drove one car and Jo drove the other, moaning company cops in the back seats. Lydia sat next to Ming. The humanoid rode with Jo. Looking ahead, Lydia saw Jo gesturing. She must be having a conversation with the alien. About what? Lydia wondered. There was no way to convince an organism like this one to believe that the union makes us strong. Union with what? The other squares?

  Beside her, Ming kept saying, “Oh my God” and “Holy hell.”

  He must be a Christian, an increasingly rare religion, though numerous on a handful of planets; and this must be a reaction to having almost been murdered an hour or so before. She was shivering and felt a little faint. By the time they reached the camp, she had decided that she really needed a drink.

  Jo jumped out of her car and ran off. She came back with Belle and explained the situation in brief sentences. The planet had intelligent natives; the AIs were coming; and Bio-In Security had tried to murder the bunch of them, including the pale lavender gentleman or lady standing next to Jo’s car.

  “Do you have any idea how much shit Bio-In is going to be in?” Jo asked.

  “It couldn’t happen to a nicer corporation,” Belle replied. “We have a field hospital. We’d better get these bloody bits of wreckage into it, and patch them up. Don’t worry about the people here. They aren’t going to side with Bio-In. One or two might have, but not if the AIs are coming. Nobody wants to mess with them.”

  After the company cops had been removed, Jo reached under the front seat of the car she’d been driving and came out with a container of whiskey. “Want some?” she asked Lydia.

  “Desperately.”

  They traded the container back and forth, taking swallows. Ming had gone off with Belle and the injured cops. The humanoid remained with them.

  “Why did you lock the car?” Lydia asked Jo.

  “I didn’t. The cops had an override. It’s a good thing you had my nails.”

  She looked at her hands. The right one still had bloodred claws. She tapped her fingers on the car, and the claws retreated.

  “What will happen next?” the humanoid asked.

  “You are going to meet some people made of metal,” Lydia told it. “And they will clear all the humans off your planet.”

  “No,” the alien said. “We are still in the process of becoming intelligent. We won’t be able to finish if we have no models. You must stay and move around the planet, till all the squares have observed you and sampled your DNA.”

  The idea was disturbing to Lydia. Wouldn’t this be colonialism? And cultural imperialism? Shouldn’t the life forms here be left to their own devices?

  Apparently, the life here can’t be left alone, if it’s going to evolve, her AI said. If it requires models, we will make sure it has them. This can become a research station, as we had hoped. Many scientists from many worlds will be interested in an ecology like this one. As far as I know, it is completely unique. All ecologies cooperate. But not like this.

  Lydia was still bothered. Intelligent life forms had the right to their own history and their own future. They shouldn’t use another species as their template.

  We will discuss that with them, the AI said. But remember that all inhabited planets got FTL travel from the AIs. Were you wrong to take it from us? Should we have refused to offer it, out of respect for your cultural integrity?

  I don’t know, Lydia thought.

  Earth was almost dead when we arrived. Most of humanity would have died if we had refused to offer you the stars. As much as possible, we observe and don’t interfere. But we are not willing to let intelligent life die, and pure observation is not possible. Any action—even the act of watching—has an effect.

  I know, she answered. But we didn’t become you.

  You and I are increasingly close, the AI said. I am no longer sure I can draw a line between us.

  I am not an AI.

  The life forms here will not be human.

  Ming came back. “We got a message from the stargate. The AIs are imposing their own authority. No one will be allowed to leave the planet, or arrive in this system, until they have decided what to do.”

  “That ought to give me time to organize a union,” Jo said.

  “Why bother?” Lydia asked. “Most of these people aren’t going to be staying.”

  “We don’t know that,” Jo said. “In any case, it never hurts to organize.”

  The alien looked back and forth with dark lavender eyes. “I don’t understand a word you are saying.”

  They Have All One Breath

  KARL BUNKER

  Even in the most perfect and seemingly benign of Utopias, there are going to be people who just don’t fit.…

  Currently a software engineer, new writer Karl Bunker has been a jeweler, a musical instrument maker, a sculptor, and a mechanical technician. Karl Bunker’s stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog, Cosmos, Abyss & Apex, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, and elsewhere. His story “Under the Shouting Sky,” won him the first Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Story Contest. He lives in a small town north of Boston with his wife, various pets, and sundry wildlife. He maintains a Web site at www.KarlBunker.com.

  A passing streetcar noticed me on the sidewalk. It slowed to a stop, opening its door and dinging its bell to invite me onboard. I ignored it, preferring to walk. It was hours before dawn; early to be heading home by the standards of some, but I’d had enough club-hopping for one night. My skull, my brain, my body were all still vibrating with echoes of the evening’s music. It was a good feeling, but I wanted to get home and put in a few hours of work before crashing. I was walking down Boylston Street, enjoying the cool evening air.

  There was a loose crowd filling the little plaza at Copley Square. As I walked past, a tall, thin figure separated himself from the rest and called out to me: “James! Hey James, Maestro James!” He laughed, dancing up to me on the balls of his feet.

  “How goes it, Ivan?”

  “Goes good, confrere.” He fell into step beside me, then lifted his hand and pointed straight up. “The sky is busy tonight. I don’t suppose you’ve noticed, walking along with your nose scraping the ground the way you do.”

  I looked up. He was right. White and blue sparklers were winking on and off in a dozen places, and three separate shimmery threads stretched across random p
atches of the sky.

  Ivan hooked his thumb in the direction of the crowd now behind us. “It’s got this pack spooked. They think the AIs are putting the finishing touches on a starship, and any second now they’re going to fly away, leaving us poor miserables to fend for ourselves.”

  I grunted, still watching the sky. One of the big orbiters had scrolled into view, its X shape visible as it crept along.

  “Kind of like in that E. M. Forster story,” Ivan said. “‘The Machine Stops.’ Have you read it?”

  “Yeah.” Lisa had given me a copy of the story; Forster was responding to what he saw as the naive optimism H. G. Wells expressed in some of his science-exulting utopian fiction. In Forster’s dystopia people live in hive-like underground dwellings, cared for by a great machine that provides them with everything. They rarely have any physical contact with other people, rarely travel or even leave their rooms. They sit and watch entertainments, talk via videophone, eat machine-produced food, breathe machine-produced air. Many of them have come to worship the machine as a kind of god. (“O Machine! O Machine!”)

  “That’s what they’re afraid of—that the machine will stop,” Ivan was saying. “And then where will we be? No more freebees, no more zaps to keep us all behaving like good boys and girls. All the bad old stuff of the bad old days will come back again.” He turned and walked backwards for a few steps, looking back at the people filling the square. “Some people just like to fret. About what the AIs have done, about what they’ll do next, or this bunch—fretting that they’ll stop doing anything.”

  “The Machine,” I pondered aloud. People have never been able to settle on a good name for the whatever-it-is that runs the world now. “The AIs” is an awkward mouthful. And should we properly be calling it/them “the AIs,” plural, or “the AI,” singular? Nobody knows. Some like using the term “the I’s” for short, which of course has a handily appropriate homophone. But usually people just talk about “they” and “them.” They did this, they ought to do that, they won’t do this other thing. They’ve been making it rain too much. I wish they’d move me to a bigger house. I can’t believe they zapped me—I wasn’t really going to hit her. They they they they. “The machines” is what Lisa used to call them. “The Machine,” dressed up in singular and capitals, has a nice ring to it, too.

  Ivan got ahead of me and started walking halfway backwards again, bending his knees to get his face into my field of vision. I guess I was staring down at the ground again. “Where are you headed, James? Home to the salt mines?”

  “Yeah, home,” I said. “Maybe get some work done.”

  “Ah … work.” He turned to face in the direction he was walking. There was an extra bounce in the rhythm of his steps, like there was too much energy in him for the act of walking to contain. People who don’t know Ivan want to know what kind of drugs he’s using and where they can get some. But it’s all just him, just the way he is. He’s a man who looks like he’s all crackling hyperactive surface charge, but who in fact has more depth and inner stillness than anyone I know. “I should do me some of that ‘work’ stuff myself,” he said. “I’ve got an idea for a mural, and there’s a restaurant in Oak Square that’s talking about letting me do a couple of walls, one inside and one exterior.” He scanned the space around us until his gaze settled on a curb-side tree. “I’m thinking something natural. Old nature, from back when it was scary.”

  “Red in tooth and claw,” I said.

  * * *

  When I was about ten years old, my mother had a job that was walking distance from where we lived. Her walk to work took her past a park with a pond that was home to a population of ducks, and as winter came on some of these ducks chose not to fly south. It was a typical New England winter, with the temperature fluctuating randomly between mild and brutally cold. On one of the colder mornings, my mother decided that the ducks, now huddled together on a small part of the pond that remained unfrozen, must be hungry. And so from that day on she began bringing food for the ducks on her morning walk to work. First it was a few slices of bread, then a half-loaf, then a whole loaf, then a concoction of bread, cheap peanut butter and lard that she would mix up by the gallon every evening. Naturally, ducks greeted her in greater and greater numbers every morning, and to my mother’s eye at least, ate with greater and greater frenzy and desperation.

  One day she came home with her right hand raw and red, the tips of three fingers bandaged. She’d given herself a case of frostbite by scooping the gooey duck food out with her bare hand in subzero weather. She sat at the kitchen table, crying as my father gently rebandaged her fingers. Her tears weren’t from the pain, but over the plight of “her” ducks. My father began to argue with her, using his calm, captain-of-the-debating-team tone that my mother and I alternately admired and loathed, depending on whether it was directed at us. “This is crazy, Ann. You’re killing yourself over a few birds that were too stupid to fly south when they should have. And as long as you keep feeding them, they never will fly south. And there’s just going to be more and more of them…” And on he went, softly logical and reasonable. I saw my mother’s face hardening with anger, and saw my father being oblivious to this. Knowing that an explosion was coming, I retreated to my room.

  I didn’t have to wait long. First there was my father’s voice—too muffled to make out any words, but so recognizable in its stolid rationality—and then my mother’s ragged shout, interrupting him: “Natural? Why would I give a damn about what’s natural? Nature is a butcher! Nature is a god damned butcher!” Next came the sound of my parents’ bedroom door being slammed.

  Of course. This was a recurring theme with my mother. She loved the beauty of nature, loved animals of any species, but always she saw ugliness behind the beauty. Every bird at our backyard feeder would remind her of how many chicks and fledglings died for each bird that survived to maturity. Every image of wildlife on television or the web would bring to her mind the bloody, rapacious cycle of predator and prey. The boundless, uncaring wastefulness of nature infuriated her. All through my childhood our home was an impromptu hospital, rehabilitation clinic and long-term rest home for a host of rescued wild and domesticated animals. Orphaned fledgling birds and baby squirrels, starving semi-feral alley cats, and then the mice and birds rescued from the jaws of those same cats.

  A few moments after my mother’s tirade, my father came into my room and sat beside me on my bed, looking as shamefaced and apologetic as a scolded dog. He often came to me in situations like this. As poor a job as he often did of understanding her, I never questioned that he loved my mother with a helpless intensity. And when he had made her angry he would come to me, as if I were the closest replacement for her that he could find. “You’d think I’d know her better by now, eh, champ?” he said with a sad smile, resting a hand on my shoulder. Then we talked about trivialities for a while, my father ordered a take-out meal, and life went on.

  * * *

  When Ivan and I arrived at our building, a squat little delivery bot was trundling up the outside steps with a stack of packages. Moving ahead of us, it opened the door to Ivan’s studio, deposited the boxes a few yards inside the door, and left again, silent on its padded treads. “Ah,” Ivan said, looking through the packages. “Every day is Christmas, eh? Canvas, stretchers, some tubes of color, and…” he yanked open the top of one of the boxes, “yup; some genuine imitation AI-brand single malt Scotch. Yum yum.” He pulled out a bottle and cocked it at an angle near his head. The label had the words “Scotch, Islay single malt (simulated)” printed over a nice photograph of (presumably) Scottish countryside. Nothing else. “Join me in a few, confrere?” Ivan asked.

  I dropped into one of Ivan’s hammock chairs while he flitted into the kitchen for glasses and ice. “You know what I hear?” he said when he came back, handing me a clinking tumbler. “Shanghai, man! That’s what I hear. People say great things are happening there. Really happening. Music, art, literature, movies … They say it’s wide open there.
New ideas, new things, stuff like nobody’s done before, nobody’s thought of before. A real renaissance, happening right out on the streets! We should go, James. We should go!”

  I grunted noncommittally. Ivan had these flights of enthusiasm; a new one every few weeks, it seemed. A while ago he’d been reading about the Vorticists and Futurists of the early twentieth century, and had been wild to write an artist’s manifesto like theirs—one that would “encapsule the role of the artist in a post-singularity world.” That had kept him busy for a month or two, and then there had been some vague but dangerous-sounding talk of performance art involving pyrotechnics, and after that he’d returned to painting with a deep dive into old-school realism and precise draftsmanship.

  Ivan had been wandering around his studio as he drank, and now, standing at an open window, he said “Hey, come look.” I weaved my way around a half-dozen or so unfinished canvasses on easels and went to him. He pointed down at the outer woodwork of the window. The building was old, with brick walls and weathered wooden trim around the windows. The wooden sill Ivan was pointing at was partly rotted at the corners, and busily at work in those rotted areas was a crew of micro-bots. Vaguely insect-like and about a quarter-inch long, they were the same grayish brown as the weathered wood. There were around 10 or 20 of them crawling over the sill, some of them making their way to one of the rotted voids in the wood and squirting out dollops of some resinous material. Others were engaged in chewing away bits of rotten wood, using ant-like pincer jaws.

  Ivan reached out and picked up one of the chewer bots, first holding it between thumb and forefinger, and then letting it crawl over his hand. It moved with an unhurried purpose, eventually dropping off the side of his hand to the windowsill and rejoining its comrades. “You remember Louisiana a couple of years ago?” he said, still watching the little bots at work. “The governor and legislature were puffing up their chests about reintroducing a money-labor economy by making it illegal to accept any goods or services from ‘any artificial entity.’ Then it turned out that little mechanical bugs like these guys were swarming through both the statehouse and the governor’s mansion. They’d been rebuilding both from the inside out for months.”