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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Ava here.”

  “I have news.”

  “Archie, can’t it wait until tomorrow? It’s Thanksgiving, for God’s sake.”

  “Ariel BLV23 just did something very unusual.”

  “Define ‘unusual.’” I’d been hearing about the comet for weeks from colleagues at work. The object had emerged from deep in the Oort Cloud and generated immediate attention because of its massive, elongated shape. Unusual for a comet, I’d been told.

  “We’ve detected transmissions,” he said.

  “What do you mean? What kind of transmissions?”

  “A string of ascending and descending prime numbers. Accompanied by … symphonies, I guess you could call them. There’s no doubt, Ava. The signals are intelligent.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Dad entered the room carrying a turkey on a platter. He shot me a look.

  “That isn’t even the half of it,” Archie said. “Its trajectory has shifted. It’s on course to intersect with Earth’s orbit.”

  I managed to find my voice and asked about the object’s speed.

  “At its current rate of deceleration, it’ll reach us in three years.”

  “Jesus.”

  “We need to coordinate our response to the transmission, prepare a press release. And our research with you becomes even more important now.”

  Does it? I thought. I couldn’t see the connection.

  Then it hit me: Archie wanted me to try to read the goddamned aliens. “Okay, I’ll be in first thing in the morning.”

  “There’s already a car on its way to take you to JFK.”

  “Tonight?”

  “We’re all gathering at the Canberra Complex. NASA personnel, plus the ESA team. We need to get a jump on the Iranians and the Chinese.”

  I suppose I could have told Archie we had years to figure this all out, that it was Thanksgiving and I needed to spend it with my family. But I was overwhelmed by the news, and flattered that Archie thought I could make some contribution. In three years the aliens in the needle-shaped ship—aliens!—would arrive and transform our world in ways we couldn’t even imagine. (It took us all of about three seconds, by the way, before we’d nicknamed them “Needlers.”)

  I don’t remember how Dad reacted to the news. Everything after that single phone call blurs now into a jumble of fragmented memories. I remember Katie storming into her bedroom and slamming the door. I remember packing my bag. Saying goodbye. I must have said goodbye, right?

  I just know I never got to try Katie’s gravy.

  * * *

  The most contentiously debated topic was related to the nature of the Needler vessel. Was it an automated probe or a manned spaceship? The European team believed the vessel’s sub-light speeds made it unfeasible for biological beings to survive the interstellar distances—unless, that is, the Needlers had a hell of a long lifespan or advanced stasis technology. NASA scientists fell firmly in the Generation Ship camp; the massive ship, after all, could accommodate Beijing—with room to spare. Generations of space travelers could have lived and died on that vessel during the centuries-long passage between the stars.

  That first year the traditional rivalries between ESA and NASA fell by the wayside. Negotiations resulted in the formation of a coalition of experts tasked with preparing for interaction with the aliens. As the wunderkind of space neuroscience, Archie made the cut. Everyone wondered what the effect of traveling through space—maybe for centuries—would be on alien physiology and psychology. Archie, of course, emphasized the difficulty of measuring those effects when we didn’t have a starting point from which to evaluate the aliens. But the consensus nonetheless was to include an array of experts who might give us the best shot at understanding the Needlers. That’s where Archie thought my skills might come in handy.

  * * *

  The attention deficit disorder that made me prone to temper tantrums in public continued long after you left. Likewise, my aversion to human touch. I can imagine how difficult this must have made things for a young mother like you, dealing with a shrieking child who you couldn’t calm down, who you couldn’t touch without triggering another meltdown. This must have frustrated you to no end.

  I remember spending most of my time with Dad or the nanny while you threw yourself into your work with EncelaCorp. At the time, of course, all I knew was that you were rarely around. An exception to this rule was on the sunny Saturday morning you drove me to Rockaway Beach. Do you remember? I wanted to do nothing but observe the yappy lapdogs being walked by their owners and especially an excited border collie that fetched a red frisbee. Instead, you tried to force me to swim, and when I cried and fought you, you picked me up and rushed away from the shore. I couldn’t make you understand. I wound up throwing myself on the sand while you wrestled with me, shouted at me, until I bit your index finger.

  That’s when you stormed off and left me alone, crying. In hindsight, I’m sure you didn’t go very far. You probably retreated behind the beach chair vendors to compose yourself. You wouldn’t have left a bawling, five-year-old by herself on a beach, right? Ten minutes later, after I’d finally calmed down, you returned and yanked me up off the sand. It’s a memory I can’t let go, even after all these years. You were angry—I understood that even then. But you’d come back for me.

  * * *

  Communications with anyone outside of Canberra were restricted—and monitored. NASA/ESA couldn’t chance any information being leaked to their rivals in Tehran and Shanghai. Archie arranged to grant me access to the Net every three months so I could chat with Dad and Katie. At first, Katie participated despite the time difference.

  “Mom, just come home,” she said. She’d put her hair into pigtails, which made her look nine instead of thirteen and twirled one of the braids around her finger.

  “I can’t, Katie. Not yet. I’m involved with critical research here,” I said. “When the aliens arrive, they’re going to help us and teach us to grow as a species. They’re going to change our lives forever.”

  “I don’t want our lives to change. I just want you to come home.”

  “As soon as I can, I will. I promise.”

  The last few calls, she’d been at sleepovers with friends, according to Dad, though I suspected otherwise.

  The project demanded my complete attention. I spent my time in meetings where the team responsible for greeting protocols butted heads with military personnel who’d put together their own special “welcome” strategy. The team’s plan was to respond to the transmission with prime numbers and our own music, to let the aliens know we understood their messages. The military reps tried to put the kibosh on those plans. Best to maintain the element of surprise, they argued, whatever the hell that meant. In the end we’d persuaded them of the wisdom of sending the message by highlighting the potential risks of inaction. What if the Iranians established communications with the Needlers first?

  The modulated message we transmitted used the same radio frequency as the Needler music. It consisted of a mix of classic and contemporary pieces, agreed upon after weeks of debate, to match the frenetic energy of the alien symphonies. We wanted to impress the Needlers—with Bach and Mozart, the Beatles and Chen Ts’ong, the Hard Knox and Nisa Ndogo. We wanted to show them humanity welcomed them and aspired to follow in their footsteps as grand cosmic explorers—something like that. That was the idea, anyway.

  After transmission of the message, we shifted all of our attention to preparing for in-person contact.

  * * *

  Let me ask you something. Did you know Dad hired a private investigator to find out if you were dead? That’s how we learned you’d relocated from EncelaCorp’s Nairobi office to the Luna 1 colony, that you’d remarried and had two children. Girls. Bright, oh-so-normal girls, I imagine.

  Unlike me. How humiliating it must have been for you to have to walk around with your dumb, defective daughter. That’s why you fled after the initial misdiagnosis on my sixth birthday, isn’t it? That’s w
hy you left it to Dad to deal with my behavioral therapy, to help me with my poor communication skills and clumsiness.

  If you’d stayed you could have seen the dramatic progress I made over the next year, the improvement that caused the doctors to question their initial diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder. You could have listened to the specialists who methodically ruled out various disorders on the autism spectrum (though they found me by no means neurotypical), before diagnosing me as acutely empathetic. Unlike most empathetic people, who understand and relate to the mental states of others based on subtle clues, expressions, body language, my abilities proved to be far more atypical.

  For as long as I can remember, I found I was especially attuned to the feelings of animals. I could feel the discomfort of saddled horses whenever Dad took me to the dude ranch at the Catskills every summer. I could sense our pet beagle’s discomfort with the dark dampness of the backyard doghouse.

  See what you missed, Mother? Oh, I know your supposed reasons for leaving us behind. Or at least the reasons you gave Dad. Excuse #1: Dad had had a one-night fling while you were pulling some crazy hours at work. You couldn’t forgive his infidelity. Excuse #2: You felt unfulfilled professionally. You couldn’t pass up the adventure of a lifetime, assisting with the engineering plans for the lunar colonies. Excuse #3 (the real reason): Me. You couldn’t cope with my condition.

  Dad coped. I coped. I even found a way to use my gift to make a living, a good one. I designed lunar feedlots, factory farms, and slaughterhouses, making them more humane. And when I wearied of helping animals to die comfortably, I concentrated on helping them live comfortably. I assisted engineers with space transportation and holding systems to move animals in zero-g from Earth to Luna 1 and 2 without stressing them. I designed special holding pens for the Long Island Zoo, worked side by side with animal handlers, volunteered at kennels. After the cutbacks at the zoo, I lucked out when Archie read the piece published about my unusual skills with animals, and called for my assistance.

  Before the Needlers arrived, Archie had me reading livestock that had spent months in space. With the detection of the alien vessel, however, the focus of my work changed. Archie cared less about the animals I could read than he did about me, about learning the extent of my abilities. To read the Needlers, he needed me to hone my skills and stretch them to their limit. That’s when he proposed enhancements.

  Over the next few weeks I allowed medics to extract a swath of cells from my amygdala for analysis. I even let them inject nanites into my insular cortex along with chemicals designed to increase the production of neurotransmitters.

  But as far as I could tell, all it did was make me crave pineapple and anchovies.

  * * *

  Following the medical procedure, over the next twenty-four months at the Canberra Complex I practiced reading mice, tapeworms, finches, armadillos, peacocks, kangaroos, dolphins, great apes, parrots, piglets, lizards and a dozen different types of cats and dogs. My sensitivities became more pronounced. I’d spent the entire previous month just with honeybees, assessing different emotions as varying pheromones were introduced to the hive. I often couldn’t put into words the particular emotion I sensed. Invertebrates, for example, don’t feel sexual attraction the way a human does. It’s more like a compulsion, an overriding magnetic pull, more akin to getting swept downstream toward a waterfall.

  From lizards I sensed what I can only describe as a wave of color, a dull gray. Only Komodo dragons, which were more active, could break through this gray—and only when they hunted; in those cases I identified feelings of excitement and hunger much like my own. The lizards’ other emotions simply didn’t translate.

  On one occasion, I sat across from Bhargava, the biologist and anthropologist, and Fitzpatrick, the hybrid neurologist/psychologist/asshole while they conducted one of their many tests on me. Fitz didn’t pretend to hide his contempt for me—he viewed the whole exercise as a waste of time. I had to respect his honesty. Bhargava, on the other hand, seemed to have a genuine fondness for me. I couldn’t say why. When it came to interpreting human reactions and emotions, I was no different from any other person. Maybe if neurotypical humans were more honest with their emotions, I might have stood some chance of reading them accurately. But half the time their true emotions lay buried beneath the layers of lies they’d told themselves. Between all the conflicting feelings and self-repression, reading an animal’s emotions was a cakewalk by comparison. Looking back, I’m not sure how Archie expected me to read aliens when I couldn’t even read my own self-deluded species.

  “What’s on the schedule today?” I said. “Please, no more insects.” Since insects were one of the most successful forms of animal life on Earth, Archie argued, the Needlers were more apt to skitter on six legs and wave their antennae at us than go for a jog and sit down for a latte.

  We all worried that if the Needlers were insectoid, I might not be able to read them. With ants, I’d detected what I can only describe as a numb, neutral humming. Honeybees, on the other hand, projected certain rudimentary emotions: fear, contentment, shock.

  “We’ve got a surprise for today,” Fitz said.

  Whatever dumb animal they’d brought—I could sense it wasn’t a monkey or a dolphin or other advanced form of life—sat hidden inside an opaque container so I couldn’t see it.

  Fitz took a piece of paper and lit it on fire. He dropped it into the container.

  I expected to feel the panic of a skittering rat or chipmunk, but as I settled in and focused, I didn’t sense much initially. Whatever animal it was, it didn’t panic, at least not in any traditional way.

  “An unawareness, almost,” I said. “Like an echo of a feeling that’s bigger, slower, struggling to catch up.”

  After a few minutes, the reverberations intensified into a sharp, far-off sting that pierced my chest, then nothingness. “It’s dead,” I said. My hands trembled.

  Fitz and Bhargava studied the results of my neural patterns in the scanner.

  I stood up and staggered toward the door.

  “Ava, what’s wrong?” Bhargava said.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again.” My voice wavered.

  I stumbled back to the table and lifted the divider. Inside the smoke-filled container lay the husk of a burnt shrub.

  * * *

  The Canberra Complex had a makeshift bar in the lobby where project members gathered to shoot the shit over watered-down drinks.

  “We need to grasp the Needlers’ intentions,” Archie said, sucking on an Amstel.

  “I suspect we’ll figure that out the minute the Needlers fire their first weapon.”

  “You don’t believe that.” Archie smiled.

  He was right. In my heart of hearts I had no doubt the Needlers were coming to nurture us, to protect us and lift our species to the next unimaginable phase of development, whatever that might be.

  Archie had a soft spot for me—I thought it might even be romantic in nature. So imagine my surprise when I heard the rumor he was already involved—with Fitzpatrick, no less. The furtive glances, the hand on the shoulder, quickly removed. In hindsight I guess it was pretty obvious. Archie should’ve known better than to be sleeping with one of his subordinates, especially a jerk like Fitz, but with the world’s future in doubt I figured I’d cut the guy some slack.

  “It’s Katie’s birthday next week,” I said. “I need to see her.”

  “I appreciate the sacrifices you’ve made, Ava, really I do. But if we were to make an exception for you, we’d have to lift the Information Wall for everyone else on the team. Did you know that Hernandez’s brother is getting married? That Atul’s son broke his leg skiing?”

  I sipped my drink. Hearing about the travails of family members drove home the point that while we stayed holed up on this base, obsessing over the arrival of the Needlers, the world still went along its merry way.

  “Archie, they’re all employees and officers,” I said. “I’m a civilian, a consultan
t. A consultant who’s only here because you asked.”

  “Ava…”

  “Just a weekend, Arch.”

  Silence.

  I pulled my hair back, displaying the scar in my upper right temple where the medics had drilled into my skull.

  Archie sighed and ran his hand over his mouth. “I’ll see what I can do. I may be able to get clearance to open up a vid chat ahead of schedule.”

  “No, I’m leaving the base,” I said. “Two days. Give me two days with my daughter. I won’t say a word to her about the project. You can put a patch on me. Listen to every word I say.”

  After a long silence Archie said, “The surgical enhancements have made a real difference. The tests show that your sensitivity is off the charts.” He hesitated. “What does it feel like? To be able to peer inside another creature. To know what they’re feeling…”

  “It’s more than just knowing what they feel. It’s feeling what they feel. Entering completely into another being’s world—and translating that experience into language. That’s the tricky part. Sometimes I can’t describe the feeling in words.”

  He paused. “You can have your two days, but that’s it. Keep it to yourself. You’ll be patched. And the Information Wall has to be maintained. Understood?”

  * * *

  Snow froze on the ground, not the white puffy variety but a gray, dirty inch-thick coating that made it difficult to take a step without risking a bad fall. It had been three years since I’d left, and when I strode to the entrance—Dad had painted it a sky-blue that made it unrecognizable—the front door flew open.

  “Ava,” Dad said. He went to give me a hug and then caught himself when I flinched. Physical contact still made me uncomfortable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He took my hands in his, squeezed them.

  I set down my bag and shook the snow out of my jacket and mittens while Dad retreated into the kitchen. As I expected, he emerged a minute later with a mug of hot cider.

  “Sit, sit, sit,” he said, pointing to the couch. “You can put your things away later.”

  “Where’s Katie?”