The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “My friend’s got a broken arm,” I said. “Shock, too. I’m sure you guys’ll be able to exchange insurance once the paramedics get here. Did you call them?”

  “My buddy’s on it,” he said, pointing back at the truck. There was someone in the passenger seat with a phone clamped to his head, beneath the brim of a cowboy hat.

  “The lens,” Pug said.

  I leaned down and opened the door. “Chill out, I’m on it.” I shrugged at the guy from the truck and went around back. The entire rear end was lifted clean off the road, the rear wheels still spinning lazily. To a first approximation, we were unscathed. The same couldn’t be said for the low-slung hybrid that had rear-ended us, which had been considerably flattened by its harrowing scrape beneath us, to the extent that one of its tires had blown. The driver had climbed out of the car and was leaning unsteadily on it. She gave me a little half wave and a little half smile, which I returned. I popped the hatch and checked that the box was in one piece. It wasn’t even dented. “The lens is fine,” I called. Pug gave no sign of having heard.

  I started to get a little anxious feeling. I jogged around the back of the subcompact and then ran up the driver’s side and yanked open Pug’s door. He was unconscious, and that gray sheen had gone even whiter. His breath was coming in little shallow pants and his head lolled back in the seat. Panic crept up my throat and I swallowed it down. I looked up quickly and shouted at the pickup driver. “You called an ambulance, right?” The guy must’ve heard something in my voice because an instant later he was next to me.

  “Shock,” he said.

  “It’s been years since I did first aid.”

  “Recovery position,” he said. “Loosen his clothes, give him a blanket.”

  “What about his arm?” I pointed.

  He winced. “We’re going to have to be careful,” he said. “Shit,” he added. The traffic beyond the car was at a near standstill. Even the motorcycles were having trouble lane-splitting between the close-crammed cars.

  “The ambulance?”

  He shrugged. “On its way, I guess.” He put his ear close to Pug’s mouth, listened to his breathing, put a couple fingers to his throat and felt around. “I think we’d better lay him out.”

  The lady driving the subcompact had a blanket in her trunk, which we spread out on the weedy ground alongside the median, which glittered with old broken glass. She—young, Latina, wearing workout clothes—held Pug’s arm while the gardener guy and I got him at both ends and stretched him out. The other guy from the pickup truck found some flares in a toolkit under the truck’s seat and set them on the road behind us. We worked with a minimum of talk, and for me, the sounds of the highway and my weird postanxiety haze both faded away into barely discernible background noise. We turned Pug on his side, and I rolled up my jacket to support his arm. He groaned. The gardener guy checked his pulse again, then rolled up his own jacket and used it to prop up Pug’s feet.

  “Good work,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Craziest thing,” the gardener said.

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I fussed awkwardly with Pug’s hair. His ponytail had come loose and it was hanging in his face. It felt wiry and dry, like he spent a lot of time in the sun.

  “Did you see it?”

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Craziest thing. It crashed right in front of us.” He spoke in rapid Russian—maybe it was Bulgarian?—to his friend, who crunched over to us. The guy held something out for me to see. I looked at it, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. It was a tangle of wrecked plastic and metal and a second later, I had it worked out—it was a little UAV, some kind of copter. Four rotors—no, six. A couple of cameras. I’d built a few like it, and I’d even lost control of a few in my day. I could easily see how someone like me, trying out a little drone built from a kit or bought fully assembled, could simply lose track of the battery or just fly too close to a rising updraft from the blacktop and crash. It was technically illegal to fly one except over your own private property, but that was nearly impossible to enforce. They were all over the place.

  “Craziest thing,” I agreed. I could hear the sirens.

  The EMTs liked our work and told us so, and let me ride with them in the ambulance, though that might have been on the assumption that I could help with whatever insurance paperwork needed filling out. They looked disappointed when I told them that I’d only met Pug that day and I didn’t even know his last name and was pretty sure that “Pug” wasn’t his first name. It wasn’t. They got the whole thing off his driver’s license: Scott Zrubek. “Zrubek” was a cool name. If I’d been called “Zrubek,” I’d have used “Zee” as my nickname, or maybe “Zed.”

  By the time they’d X-rayed Pug and put his arm in a sling and an air cast, he was awake and rational again and I meant to ask him why he wasn’t going by Oz, but we never got around to it. As it turned out, I ended up giving him a lift home in a cab, then getting it to take me home, too. It was two in the morning by then, and maybe the lateness of the hour explains how I ended up promising Pug that I’d be his arm and hand on the playa-dust printer and that I’d come with him to Fourth of Juplaya in order to oversee the installation of the device. I also agreed to help him think of a name for it.

  That is how I came to be riding in a big white rental van on the Thursday before July Fourth weekend, departing L.A. at zero-dark-hundred with Pug in the driver’s seat and classic G-funk playing loud enough to make me wince in the passenger seat as we headed for Nevada.

  Pug had a cooler between us, full of energy beverages and electrolyte drink, jerky, and seed bars. We stopped in mono lake and bought bags of oranges from old guys on the side of the road wearing cowboy hats, and later on we stopped at a farm stall and bought fresh grapefruit juice that stung with tartness and was so cold that the little bits of pulp were little frost-bombs that melted on our tongues.

  Behind us, in the van’s cargo area, was everything we needed for a long weekend of hard-core radical self-reliance—water cans to fill in Reno, solar showers, tents, tarps, rebar stakes, booze, bikes, sunscreen, first-aid kits, a shotgun, an air cannon, a flamethrower, various explosives, crates of fireworks, and more booze. All stored and locked away in accordance with the laws of both Nevada and California, as verified through careful reference to a printout sheathed in a plastic paper-saver that got velcroed to the inside of the van’s back door when we were done.

  In the center of all this gear, swaddled in Bubble Wrap and secured in place with multiple tie-downs, was the gadget, which we had given a capital letter to in our e-mails and messages: the Gadget. I’d talked Pug out of some of his aversion to moving parts, because the Gadget was going to end up drowning in its own output if we didn’t. The key was the realization that it didn’t matter where the Gadget went, so long as it went somewhere, which is how we ended up in Strandbeest territory.

  The Strandbeest is an ingenious wind-powered walker that looks like a blind, mechanical millipede. Its creator, a Dutch artist called Theo Jansen, designed it to survive harsh elements and to be randomly propelled by wind.

  Ours had a broad back where the Gadget’s business end perched, and as the yurt panels were completed, they’d slide off to land at its feet, gradually hemming it with rising piles of interlocking, precision-printed pieces. To keep it from going too far afield, I’d tether it to a piece of rebar driven deep into the Playa, giving it a wide circle through which the harsh winds of the black rock desert could blow it.

  Once I was done, Pug had to admit I’d been right. It wasn’t just a better design, it was a cooler one, and the Gadget had taken on the aspect of a centaur, with the printer serving as rising torso and head. We’d even equipped it with a set of purely ornamental goggles and a filter mask, just to make it fit in with its neighbors on the Playa. They were a very accepting lot, but you never knew when antirobot prejudice would show its ugly head, and so anything we could do to anthropomorphize the Gadget would only help our cause
.

  Pug’s busted arm was healed enough to drive to the Nevada line, but by the time we stopped for gas, he was rubbing at his shoulder and wincing, and I took over the driving, and he popped some pain-killers and within moments he was fast asleep. I tried not to envy him. He’d been a bundle of nerves in the run-up to the Fourth, despite several successful trial runs in his backyard and a great demo on the roof of Minus. He kept muttering about how nothing ever worked properly in the desert, predicting dire all-nighters filled with cursing and scrounging for tools and missing the ability to grab tech support online. It was a side of him I hadn’t seen up to that point—he was normally so composed—but it gave me a chance to be the grown-up for a change. It helped once I realized that he was mostly worried about looking like an idiot in front of his once-a-year friends, the edgiest and weirdest people in his set. It also hadn’t escaped my notice that he, like me, was a single guy who spent an awful lot of time wondering what this said about him. In other words: he didn’t want to look like a dork in front of the eligible women who showed up.

  “I’m guessing two more hours to Reno, then we’ll get some last-minute supplies and head out. Unless you want to play the slots and catch a Liza Minnelli impersonator.”

  “No, I want to get out there and get set up.”

  “Good.” Suddenly he gorilla-beat his chest with his good fist and let out a rebel yell. “Man, I just can’t wait.”

  I smiled. This was the voluble Pug I knew.

  He pointed a finger at me. “Oh, I see you smiling. You think you know what’s going to happen. You think you’re going to go drink some beers, eat some pills, blow stuff up, and maybe get lucky. What you don’t know is how life-changing this can all be. You get out of your head, literally. It’s like—” he waved his hands, smacked the dashboard a couple times, cracked and swigged an energy beverage.

  “Okay, this is the thing. We spend all our time doing, you know, stuff. Maintenance. Ninety-eight percent of the day, all you’re doing is thinking about what you’re going to be doing to go on doing what you’re doing. Worrying about whether you’ve got enough socked away to see you through your old age without ending up eating cat food. Worrying about whether you’re getting enough fiber or eating too many carbs. It’s being alive, but it’s hardly living.

  “You ever been in a bad quake? No? Here’s the weird secret of a big quake: it’s actually pretty great, afterward. I mean, assuming you’re not caught in the rubble, of course. After a big one, there’s this moment, a kind of silence. Like you were living with this huge old refrigerator compressor humming so loud in the back of your mind that you’ve never been able to think properly, not once since about the time you turned, you know, eleven or twelve, maybe younger. Never been present and in the moment. And then that humming refrigerator just stops and there’s a ringing, amazing, all-powerful silence and for the first time you can hear yourself think. There’s that moment, after the earth stops shaking, when you realize that there’s you and there’s everyone else and the point of it all is for all of you to figure out how to get along together as best as you can.

  “They say that after a big one, people start looting, raping, eating each other, whatever. But you know what I saw the last time it hit, back in 2019? People figuring it out. Firing up their barbecues and cooking dinner for the neighborhood with everything in the freezer, before it spoils anyway. Kids being looked after by everyone, everyone going around and saying, ‘What can I do for you? Do you have a bed? Water? Food? You okay? Need someone to talk to? Need a ride?’ In the movies, they always show everyone running around looting as soon as the lights go out, but I can’t say as I’ve ever seen that. I mean, that’s not what I’d do, would you?”

  I shook my head.

  “’Course not. No one we know would. Because we’re on the same side. The human race’s side. But when the fridge is humming away, you can lose track of that, start to feel like its zero sum, a race to see who can squirrel away the most nuts before the winter comes. When a big shaker hits, though, you remember that you aren’t the kind of squirrel who could live in your tree with all your nuts while all the other squirrels starved and froze out there.

  “The Playa is like a disaster without the disaster—it’s a chance to switch off the fridge and hear the silence. A chance to see that people are, you know, basically awesome. Mostly. It’s the one place where you actually confront reality, instead of all the noise and illusion.”

  “So you’re basically saying that it’s like Buddhism with recreational drugs and explosions?”

  “Basically.”

  We rode awhile longer. The signs for Reno were coming more often now, and the traffic was getting thicker, requiring more attention.

  “If only,” he said. “If only there was some way to feel that way all the time.”

  “You couldn’t,” I said, without thinking. “Regression to the mean. The extraordinary always ends up feeling ordinary. Do it for long enough and it’d just be noise.”

  “You may be right. But I hope you’re not. Somewhere out there, there’s a thing so amazing that you can devote your life to it and never forget how special it is.”

  We crawled the last thirty miles, driving through Indian country, over cattle gratings and washed-out gullies. “The local cops are fine, they’re practically burners themselves. Everyone around here grew up with burning man, and it’s been the only real source of income since the gypsum mine closed. But the feds and the cops from over the state line, they’re bad news. Lot of jack Mormons over in Pershing County, don’t like this at all. And since the whole route to the Playa, apart from the last quarter mile, is in Washoe County, and since no one is supposed to buy or sell anything once you get to the Playa, all the money stays in Washoe County, and Pershing gets none of it. All they get are freaks who offend them to their very souls. So basically, you want to drive slow and keep your nose clean around here, because you never know who’s waiting behind a bush to hand you a giant ticket and search your car down to the floor mats.”

  I slowed down even more. We stopped for Indian tacos—fried flat-bread smothered in ground beef and fried veggies—that sat in my stomach in an undigestable, salty lump. Pug grew progressively more manic as we approached the turnoff for black rock desert and was practically drumming on the dashboard by the time we hit the dusty, rutted side road. He played with the stereo, put on some loud electronic dance music that made me feel old and out of it, and fished around under the seat for a dust mask and a pair of goggles.

  I’d seen lots of photos of burning man, the tents and shade structures and RVs and “mutant vehicles” stretching off in all directions, and even though I knew the Fourth was a much smaller event, I’d still been picturing that in my mind’s eye. But instead, what we saw was a seemingly endless and empty desert, edges shrouded in blowing dust clouds with the hints of mountains peeking through, and no sign at all of human habitation.

  “Now where?” I said.

  He got out his phone and fired up a GPS app, clicked on one of his waypoints, waiting a moment, and pointed into the heart of the dust. “That way.”

  We rumbled into the dust cloud and were soon in a near-total white-out. I slowed the car to walking pace, and then slower than walking pace. “Pug, we should just stop for a while,” I said. “There’s no roads. Cars could come from any direction.”

  “All the more reason to get to the campsite,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks out here for anyone else arriving.”

  “That’s not really logic,” I said. “If we’re moving and they’re moving, we’ve got a much better chance of getting into a fender bender than if we’re staying still.”

  The air in the van tasted dusty and alkali. I put it in park and put on the mask, noticed my eyes were starting to sting, added goggles—big, bug-eyed Soviet-era MIG goggles.

  “Drive,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

  I was starting to catch some of his enthusiasm. I put it back into drive and rode the brakes as we inched
through the dust. He peered at his GPS, calling out, “left,” then “straight,” then “right” and back again. A few times I was sure I saw a car bumper or a human looming out of the dust before us and slammed on the brakes, only to discover that it had been a trick of the light and my brain’s overactive, nerve-racked pattern-matching systems.

  When I finally did run something over, I was stretched out so tight that I actually let out a scream. In my defense, the thing we hit was a tent peg made out of rebar—the next five days gave the chance to become endlessly acquainted with rebar tent pegs, which didn’t scar the Playa and were cheap and rugged—pushing it through the front driver’s-side tire, which exploded with a noise like a gunshot. I turned off the engine and tried to control my breathing.

  Pug gave me a moment, then said, “We’re here!”

  “Sorry about the tire.”

  “Pfft. We’re going to wreck stuff that’s a lot harder to fix than a flat tire. You think we can get to the spare without unpacking?”

  “No way.”

  “Then we’ll have to unpack. Come on, buddy.”

  The instant he opened the door, a haze of white dust followed him, motes sparkling in the air. I shrugged and opened my door and stepped out into the dust.

  There were people in the dust, but they were ciphers—masked, goggled, indistinct. I had a job to do—clearing out the van’s cargo and getting it moved to our site, which was weirdly precise—a set of four corners defined as GPS coordinates that ran to the tenth of a second—and at the same time, such a farcically huge tract of land that it really amounted to “Oh, anywhere over there’s fine.”

  The shadowy figures came out of the dust and formed a bucket brigade, into which I vanished. I love a good bucket brigade, but they’re surprisingly hard to find. A good bucket brigade is where you accept your load, rotate 180 degrees and walk until you reach the next person, load that person, do another volte-face, and walk until someone loads you. A good bucket brigade isn’t just passing things from person to person. It’s a dynamic system in which autonomous units bunch and debunch as is optimal given the load and the speed and energy levels of each participant. A good bucket brigade is a thing of beauty, something whose smooth coordination arises from a bunch of disjointed parts who don’t need to know anything about the system’s whole state in order to help optimize it. In a good bucket brigade, the mere act of walking at the speed you feel comfortable with and carrying no more than you can safely lift and working at your own pace produces a perfectly balanced system in which the people faster than you can work faster, and the people slower than you can work slower. It is the opposite of an assembly line, where one person’s slowness is the whole line’s problem. A good bucket brigade allows everyone to contribute at their own pace, and the more contributors you get, the better it works.