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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Out with friends,” he said, rolling his eyes in a way that I knew meant a longer conversation on the subject was inevitable.

  We sat and he interrogated me about everything from the sleeping facilities at Canberra—I had my own spacious room, but shared a bathroom with a medic assigned to monitor me—to the more obscure policy considerations about contact with the Needlers, which I couldn’t discuss. Not with the patch I was wearing.

  “What if the Needlers give us something of tremendous value? I don’t know … teleportation technology, cold fusion … Which country reaps those benefits?”

  “Who do you think, Dad?” I said. “Our corporate sponsors in the good ol’ U.S. of A.—and maybe our loyal allies. Whether we decide to share that technology with anyone else though, who’s to say?”

  “Got it,” he said, acknowledging the unspoken fact that it’s “finders keepers” in the game of alien debriefing. And if the Sino-Iranian crew were to beat us to the punch on any of that technology, the shoe would be on the other foot. We’d be flat out of luck.

  An hour later while Dad salted the pot of whitefish stew, the front door rattled open and boots stomped on the welcome mat. I ran from the kitchen to the living room and when I saw Katie, I couldn’t believe it. She’d transformed from a scrawny, pigtailed girl into a teenager with bright, gray eyes—a feature that I guess she inherited from you, Mother. When I went to greet her, she held her hands up as if afraid that I’d hug her. “Mom,” she said in a flat voice, deeper than I remembered. She extended her hand and I shook it. When she removed her ski hat, her long blond hair fell to her shoulders, parted down the middle by a six-inch-wide bald track.

  “Katie!” Dad said. “What did you do to your hair? And today of all days…”

  “So? I got it cut!” She said this in an exasperated manner that didn’t acknowledge the meaning of the distinctive hairdo, a style worn by the militant Isolationists.

  I managed to find my voice. “Hey, the Isos have a sensible position.” Not that I agreed with it.

  “Damn right we do,” Katie said.

  “Language!” Dad said

  I’d heard it all before—as had most of the public, which had been subjected to transportation shutdowns, the firebombing of government offices, and other random protests. Contact with the aliens spelled certain doom for humanity. Interactions between advanced and “primitive” cultures had always resulted in the same outcome: destruction of the latter. A reasonable concern, I supposed, especially when compared to the complaints of the “Xeno-mystics,” who fervently believed the aliens were here to bring us a message about God. Or the Reincarnationists, who thought the Needlers were dead people from human history returning home. Or the Protectors, who actually encouraged armed conflict with the aliens as a serious—no, the only—viable option. Compared to the theories of these crackpots and zealots, Isolationism was an almost scholarly pursuit.

  “I’d be an Iso myself,” I said, “except it’s too late in the game to do anything but prepare for contact. The Needlers are already on the way.”

  “Well, you can stop trying to communicate with them,” Katie said. “Stop provoking them. Maybe they’d leave us alone if we weren’t sending them so many messages.”

  “No, if there’s any hope,” I said, “it lies in understanding them, communicating with them, letting the Needlers know who we are, what’s unique about us, so they can teach us to better ourselves.” Saying it out loud made me believe it even more. The Needlers would extend a hand and help lift humanity up, I was sure of it. Intellectually, I understood that the most likely outcomes were dark and terrifying, but in my heart I didn’t believe the aliens would come all this way to harm us. Not intentionally. Traveling such vast distances to destroy a backwards species seemed like an expensive and pointless proposition. No, I was convinced the Needlers were coming to reveal something, something that would open the universe to us.

  “You really think the Needlers care?” Katie said, rolling her eyes. “Have they responded to any of your messages over the past three years?”

  I couldn’t answer her because of my patch, so I deflected. “Whether or not they’ve responded, it doesn’t mean we give up.”

  “You know what?” Katie said. “If you’ve come all this way just to pick a fight with me, maybe you should just go back to your aliens.”

  “Katie!” Dad said.

  “Hey, I’m not here to fight with you,” I said. I pushed a strand of hair out of her eyes and she swatted my hand away.

  “I’m going out,” she announced to Dad.

  “Katie, your mom’s only here for two days…”

  “Melinda’s throwing me a surprise birthday party tomorrow and I promised I’d help her get ready. I have to practice looking surprised.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Dad said. I hadn’t seen him this angry since the day I’d totaled the car as a teenager without wearing my seatbelt.

  “Grandpa, you heard her,” Katie said. “She doesn’t mind.”

  “Not a chance,” he said

  “Dad … really, it’s okay.” I didn’t want to be the needy mom who came home to dictate her daughter’s schedule.

  Dad sighed so loudly it became a wheeze. He picked up his soup bowl and stomped into the kitchen.

  Katie and I stared at each other for a full minute until she stood and headed upstairs.

  Despite Dad’s scolding, she barely spoke a word that day, and avoided me at every turn until she left to her friend’s party. I saw so much of myself in her that my heart filled to bursting with equal parts love and guilt.

  On Sunday morning a new coat of snow had fallen, dressing the trees in the white robes of meditative monks. Dad stood on the porch and kissed my hands.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to wake her?” he said.

  “No, let her sleep.”

  As the black limo pulled up to the driveway, I glanced up at the second-floor window and spotted Katie peeking from behind the blinds. She darted backwards out of sight.

  I got in, slammed the car door and stared up at the wobbling blinds.

  Over a year later, a week before her High School graduation, Dad called Katie over during one of our vid chats. She stood there sullen and silent until I asked her what she was thinking on that day, what had I done to make her so angry with me. She shook her head in disbelief and said, “Why didn’t you ask me to skip the party?” She paused and ran her hand across her eyes for a second though I didn’t see anything like tears in those steely gray irises. “Why didn’t you care enough to ask me to stay?” And she got up and left.

  * * *

  Three months after I returned to Canberra, Dad informed me during a vid chat of Katie’s new boyfriend. “She’s dating one of those long-haired neo-hippies. A Xeno-mystic. I don’t think she sees anything in him. It’s just her way of crying out for attention. Oh, she’d deny it, but she still wants—more than anything—for you to come back and be part of her life.”

  “Dad, the Needler ship has accelerated…”

  “What was that? You cut out.”

  The Information Wall had bleeped out my comment about the Needlers.

  “Just that … things are getting crazy around here, that’s all. But it won’t be long until I’m home for good, I promise.”

  * * *

  Six months later, the Needler ship entered orbit around Earth. It was during this chaotic time that Dad somehow managed to arrange another vid chat off-schedule—so I knew it had to be something serious.

  “Is Katie okay?” I said.

  That’s when he told me about his leukemia.

  “I can’t take care of Katie anymore,” he said. “She’s hurt and angry and at that awkward age where she won’t listen to what I have to say anymore. She needs her mother.”

  “Oh, Daddy.”

  “I haven’t told her. I don’t think she could handle it. You need to come home.”

 
“I can’t just pick up and leave. I’ll need a few days to wrap things up, but I’ll talk to Archie and make the arrangements.”

  Those plans fell by the wayside the next day when the Needlers released two shuttlecraft into the atmosphere—each thirty stories high and identical in shape to the mothership. The U.S. military mistook the ships for missiles and gave the order to launch the nukes. But the Needlers released an EMP that knocked out our satellites, cutting off all communications and preventing the massive nuclear strike the military had planned as a fallback “if circumstances dictated the necessary defense of God’s beautiful blue world against the soulless alien hordes” blah-blah-blah. You’ve heard the spiel even on Luna 1, I’m sure. Worse, the EMP had caused damage that prevented air travel back to the States for several weeks.

  One of the vessels landed on Mount Everest and the other in a park in Santiago, Chile. Archie arranged to transport the team by sea to a Chilean base established a quarter of a mile away from the cordoned-off Parque Bustamente. The ships sat there for months while we tried everything to communicate with them: prime numbers; music; artwork; photographs; video-stream; Bible passages (we owed some Red State politicians a few favors); chemical formulas; math theorems. Even an old-fashioned knock on the door of their spaceship.

  The Needlers showed no interest.

  * * *

  Dad occasionally sent messages updating me on his treatments, but he never asked me about coming home again. He sent me a link to live-feed video of Katie’s High School graduation. It tickled me to think that Katie would see my holo-image occupying a seat in the first row. I was sitting alone in my bedroom watching the ceremony when a fist pounded on my door.

  “Ava!”

  It was Fitzpatrick.

  “What is it? I’m watching—”

  “The ship doors have opened! They’re disembarking.”

  “Holy shit!”

  I raced down the hallway and out the front door and leapt into a Humvee with Fitz and Bhargava. We sped toward the park and in the three minutes that it took us to get there, a narrow aperture had appeared on the side of the vessel.

  We flashed our credentials, pushed past the guards and made our way onto the field.

  Two stick-shaped creatures stood on the grass. It took a few seconds for my eyes to make sense of the images. The aliens had no heads or eyes, no mouths; they looked like tall silver spikes with colorful indentations that resembled hieroglyphics circling their midsections. Dozens of delicate, spindly “arms” and “legs” of varying lengths spidered out of their torsos as they moved.

  That’s when one of the officers guarding the cordoned-off park jumped a barricade on the other side of the field and stood in the Needlers’ path.

  “What the hell?” I yelled.

  The officer removed his helmet, revealing a bald track down the center of his head.

  The other officers on the perimeter raised their guns. “Someone stop him!” a voice from the sidelines screamed.

  “No!” I shouted. “The Needlers are in the line of fire.”

  “We don’t need you!” the Isolationist said. “You don’t belong here!”

  He drew a revolver from his holster and pulled the trigger. The weapon made a clicking noise, but failed to discharge. All around us, the same impotent clicking came from scores of guns targeting the Iso.

  The Needlers edged forward: slow motion, fast forward, slow motion, fast forward. Using three thread-like “arms” with sharp pincers at the end, one of them lifted a quartz rock off the grass and cradled it against its metallic midsection. The Iso continued shouting, moving in the direction of the Needlers. I charged across the field and threw myself at his legs from behind, tackling him before he could touch them. As we lay entangled on the ground, he tried to kick free of my grasp. I looked up to see how the Needlers would react. With one of them still clutching the quartz rock, they skirted around us, apparently oblivious to our presence—slow motion, fast forward—and entered an opening on the side of the ship, which closed behind them.

  Within seconds, the shuttlecraft lifted off, turning into a speck in the sky. The vessel on Mt. Everest, we would later learn, took off at the exact same time.

  * * *

  I’m still trying to understand Dad’s last request. He asked me to do the decent thing. Is that what this message to you is about? Decency? I can’t help but think that he clung to the fantasy of some melodramatic mother-daughter reunion. He always said you’d come back. But I’ve lived my whole goddamned life without you. I sure as hell don’t need you around now.

  Archie asked if I would stay in Chile to assist with forensic analyses conducted at the landing site. I told him I had my father’s funeral to attend, that I was flying home the next day—for good this time—more than five years after Archie’s Thanksgiving phone call. I hoped that Katie would find a way to let go of her anger. Dad had mentioned that she spent most of her time either VR clubbing with friends or with her nose buried in her astrobiology text. She still wouldn’t take my calls.

  The debate still rages as to why the Needlers went away. Maybe it was our clumsy attempt to answer their initial transmission or our attempted nuclear strike or that dumb Iso shooting at them. Many people are convinced it’s something we did wrong.

  There are those who think the Needlers will return, that these were scoutships and a fleet of alien vessels is on its way. But I’m going to confess something to you. Something I haven’t even told Archie.

  When the Needlers took their little stroll in the park, I focused and used my empathic skills. I was confident that I would read a great benevolence, a desire to nurture us, to help humanity maximize its potential. I told the others that I’d drawn a total blank, that I sensed no emotion in them I could correlate to a human feeling. But that was a lie. Perhaps the biggest lie I ever told in my life.

  The truth is, when I peered into the Needlers’ alien minds I did feel something, something familiar. I sensed an utter, cavernous indifference.

  So here’s what I think—and it’s the way most people feel these days. The Needlers left because they finally figured out we weren’t worth their time. And they won’t be coming back. But that’s okay. We’ve been doing just fine without them. No, we won’t be seeing the Needlers again. And who the hell needs them?

  A Tower for the Coming World

  MAGGIE CLARK

  Maggie Clark lives and works as both student and educator in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Her short stories have appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and GigaNotoSaurus.

  In the moving story that follows, she shows us that reaching for the sky doesn’t mean that you should lose touch with the ground.

  When a liquid-oxygen tank explodes at the summit of his space elevator, Stanley Osik is in Poland burying his father. His hands prove poor workers in the coarse-loamy soil on his grandmother’s acreage outside the city of Lublin, but even as he reaches its iron-clotted depths, Stanley does not regret refusing a neighbor’s offer of a shovel. Stanley and his father, Henryk, shared this much: a belief in getting their hands dirty, even if to others the effort seemed excessive. Stanley simply draws the line at getting the rest dirty, too—and so went a thousand ancient arguments between father and son. Now Stanley cedes to his father the final word. Commits him to the same world that Henryk spent half a lifetime destroying, mine after mine after mine. Remembers, and forgives, the mocking finger pointed at any rare-earth metals he used to build from the ground to the sky. Let Henryk have the dregs of the Earth now, Stanley thinks. The Earth offers Stanley so little anymore.

  Stanley’s earpiece is up at his grandmother’s cottage, so he misses news of the disaster in the brushfire heat of its first moments: The Russian shuttle exploding on his elevator’s barge-like plateau. The nanotube tether shattering, with cascade-failures all down the line. The civilian death count rising, and with it the number of countries drawn into the aftermath. The rumors of terrorist sabotage flooding the net and sending his stocks into
a tailspin. All this through an earpiece with a 92-percent-accurate translator, the latter of which delights his ninety-seven-year-old grandmother, Rozalia, so much that Stanley doesn’t give a second thought to leaving it behind. His work at SKOK Enterprises is endless, so he reasons that his work can also wait—at least until he’s made his peace with his father’s last remains.

  Stanley’s senior staff is prepared, too, to act swiftly in his absence. While the horror-struck world watches videos of the destruction on repeat, and while Stanley pauses in the two p.m. sun to wick sweat from his brow, one of his assistants, Maurice, is already drafting press releases suitable for all major social media. Across the open-concept office, Evanesca and Irene have the deceased employees’ files open: Evanesca to assess how the company could add to each compensation package; Irene to flag anything a formal investigation might take for signs of an inside job. Meanwhile, security teams from every SKOK property and subsidiary lot are checking in with all-clears, and factory workers have been sent home to prevent further accidents while processing the news. Analysts from the Johannesburg office are pinging private lines to guarantee recovery models before the market’s next opening bell. R&D is dusting off material-acquisition contracts to begin sourcing rebuilds and repairs.

  Still, some in the public sphere will not be appeased until they hear from Stanley himself. The media networks in particular are itching to see his face, hear his voice, and debate the extent and implications of his grief when he discusses a disaster sure to set back deep-space colonization, extrasolar travel, and his business, of course, for years. And he will let them. He will play that part in his own, well-oiled machine in due time.

  For now, though, Stanley holds his father’s biodegradable urn over the misshapen, handworn hole of leached loam and rust, and speaks words that feel dead to him, but which to his father always meant life—true life—itself. And when the urn is well and truly buried, with its spare-leafed sapling of pendunculate oak protruding from an eco-mixture set to counteract the high pH- and sodium-levels in his father’s remains, Stanley stands and looks to the sky. So clear in this part of the world. So full of the promise of rising, and rising, and never coming down. So bereft of graphene particulate, falling like ash from his 12-mile-high masterpiece over Marine Station Six, half an ocean away.