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

by Gardner Dozois

Helen coalesces. Abstraction congeals towards humanity: ten thousand fragments fall together, an interlocking three-dimensional puzzle whose pieces desaturate from bright primary down to muted tones of flesh and blood. The Colonel imagines a ghost, dressing in formal attire for some special occasion.

  “S—Siri?” She has a face now. The particles of its lower half jostle in time to the name. “Is he—”

  “I don’t know. The signal’s—very faint. Garbled.”

  “He’d be forty-two,” she says after a moment.

  “He is,” the Colonel says, not giving a micron.

  “You sent him out there.”

  It’s true enough; he didn’t speak out, after all. He didn’t object, even added his own voice to the chorus when it became obvious which way the wind was blowing. What weight would his protests have carried anyway? All the others were already on board, in thrall to a networked mob so far beyond caveman mentality that all those experts and officers might as well have been a parliament of mice.

  “We sent all of them, Helen. Because they were all the most qualified.”

  “And have you forgotten why he was most qualified?”

  He wishes he could.

  “You sent him into space chasing ghosts,” she says. “At best. At worst you fed him to monsters.”

  And you, he does not reply, abandoned him for this place before the monsters even showed up.

  “You sent him up against something that was too big for anyone to handle.”

  I will not be drawn into this argument again. “We didn’t know how big it was. We didn’t know anything. We had to find out.”

  “And you’ve done a fine job on that score.” Helen’s fully integrated now, all that simmering resentment resurrected as though it had never been laid to rest at all.

  “Helen, we were surveyed. The whole damn planet.” Surely she remembers. Surely she hasn’t got so wrapped up in her fantasy world that she’s forgotten what happened in the real one. “Should we just have ignored that? You think anyone else would miss their child less, even if Siri wasn’t the best man for the job? It was bigger than him. It was bigger than all of us.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to tell me. For Colonel Moore so loved the fucking world that he gave his only begotten son.”

  His shoulders rise, and fall.

  “If this pans out—”

  “If—”

  He cuts her off: “Siri could be alive, Helen. Can’t you put aside your hatred long enough to take any hope at all from that?”

  She hovers before him like an avenging angel, but her sword arm is stayed for the moment. She’s beautiful—more so than she ever was in the flesh—although the Colonel has a pretty good idea of what her physical corpus must look like, after so many years spent pickling in the catacombs. He tries to squeeze a little vindictive satisfaction from that knowledge, and fails.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she says at last.

  “Nothing’s certain—”

  “But there’s a chance. Yes, of course.” She leans forward. “Do you expect—that is, when will you have a better idea of what it says? The signal?”

  “I don’t know. I’m—pursuing options. I’ll tell you the moment I learn anything.”

  “Thank you,” the angel says, already beginning to dissipate—then recongeals at a sudden thought. “Of course you won’t let me share this, will you?”

  “Helen, you know—”

  “You’ve already security-locked my domain. The wall goes up the moment I try to tell anyone my son could be alive. Doesn’t it?”

  He sighs. “It’s not my call.”

  “It’s an intrusion. That’s what it is. It’s a form of bullying.”

  “Would you rather I just didn’t tell you?” But he knows, as Helen disconnects and Heaven dissolves and the barren walls of his apartment reappear around him, that it’s all just part of the dance. The steps never change: he mans the barricades, she rages against them, energy flows downhill to the same empty equilibrium. It probably doesn’t even matter whether the security locks are in place or not. Who would she tell, after all?

  Down in Heaven, all her friends are imaginary.

  * * *

  “This is Jim Moore.”

  The Colonel stands at the edge of the desert. The Nissan idles at his side like a faithful pet.

  “I will be unavailable for the foreseeable future. I can’t tell you where I’m going.”

  He’s been effectively naked for the past twenty-four hours: no springsoles, no sidearm, no dog tags. No watch: window to the Noosphere, keeper of secrets, hub and booster and event coordinator for all those everyday pieces of smartwear he left behind. He’s even shut down his cortical inlays, thrown away his vision along with his garments. All that’s left is this last-minute voicemail, to be held in abeyance until he is beyond reach.

  “I hope to provide a full debriefing upon my return. I don’t know exactly when that might be.”

  He stands there, weighing costs, weighing risks. The threat of greater gods, the hazards of beatific indifference. The threat posed by aliens from another world; the threat posed by aliens from this one. The delusional arrogance in the thought that some puny caveman, scarcely climbed down from the trees, might be able to use one against the other.

  The cost of a son.

  “I believe that my service record has earned me some leeway. I’m asking you to refrain from investigating my whereabouts during my absence.”

  He’s not trusting them to do that, though. The Nissan is stolen, logs doctored, all traces of truancy erased. His own vehicle tours the Olympic Peninsula on its own recognizance, laying a trail of bread crumbs for any forensic algos that happen by after the fact.

  “I’m—aware of the breach this represents. You know I’d never do such a thing unless I thought it absolutely vital.”

  Maybe you really do feel safe, sleeping with your giants. They haven’t rolled over and crushed you in your sleep; maybe you think that’s some kind of guarantee they never will. I will never be that reckless.

  Again.

  It doesn’t take a hive to grasp the simple, straightforward ease with which he’s been manipulated. It’s caveman strategy: find the Achilles heel, craft the exploit, slide it home. Forge hope from static. Let remorse and the faint hope of redemption do the rest.

  All too easy to dismiss, if not for one thing: the sheer, mind-boggling egotism it would take to believe that a lonely old baseline could possibly matter to a collective of such godlike intellect. The thought that this unremarkable caveman would even merit notice, much less manipulation.

  “I’ve set my apartment to run in autonomous mode for the duration of my absence. I would nonetheless appreciate it if someone could drop by occasionally to check in on my cat.”

  He has to admit, in the face of all his fear and mistrust: compassion, after all, might be the most parsimonious explanation.

  He thumbs SEND, lets the transmitter slip from his fingers. His valediction has travelled a thousand kilometers by the time his boot grinds the little device into the dirt; it will reveal itself to the chain of command in due course. The Colonel leaves behind everything but the clothes on his back, two broad-spectrum antivenom capsules, and enough rations for a one-way hike to the monastery. If Bicameral thought processes are rooted in any kind of religious philosophy, hopefully it will be one of those faiths that preach charity to lost souls, and the forgiveness of trespass.

  No guarantees, of course. There are so many ways to read the sliver of intelligence the hive has granted him. Perhaps he’s merely a pawn in some greater game after all; or a starving insect who once seized a crumb from the Heavens, and now presumes to think it has a relationship with God. Only one thing is certain out of all the scenarios, all the competing hypotheses. One insight, after all these years, that leaves the Colonel so hungry for more he’ll risk everything: His son was lost, but now is found.

  His son is coming home.

  “Go home,” he tells the Nissan, and se
ts out across the desert.

  Entanglement

  VANDANA SINGH

  Vandana Singh was born and raised in India, and currently resides with her family in the United States, where she teaches physics and writes. Her stories have appeared in many different markets and been reprinted in several Best of the Year anthologies. She’s published two children’s books in India, Younguncle Comes to Town and Younguncle in the Himalayas, and a chapbook novella, Of Love and Other Monsters. Her other books include another chapbook novella, Distances, and her first collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories. Her most recent book is an original anthology, coedited with Anil Menon, Breaking the Bow.

  In the intricate novella which follows, she shows us the hidden connections between several people in a near-future world who are struggling—and to at least a small extent, succeeding—to combat the worst ravages of global climate change.

  … FLAPPING ITS WINGS …

  … and flying straight at her. She ducked, averting her eyes. The whole world had come loose: debris flying everywhere; the roar of the wind. Something soft and sharp cannoned into her belly—she looked up to see the monster rising into the clouds, a genie of destruction, yelled—Run! Run! Find lower ground! Lower ground!

  She woke up. The boat rocked gently; instrument panels in the small cabin painted thin blue and red lines. Outside, the pale Arctic dawn suffused the sky with orange light. Everything was normal.

  “Except I hadn’t been asleep, not really,” she said aloud. Her morning coffee had grown cold. “What kind of dream was that?”

  She rubbed the orange bracelet. One of the screens flickered. There was a fragmented image for a microsecond before the screen went blank: a gray sky, a spinning cloud, things falling. She sat up.

  Her genie appeared in a corner of the screen.

  “Irene, I just connected you to five people around the world,” it said cheerfully. “Carefully selected, an experiment. We don’t want you to get too lonely.”

  “Frigg,” she said, “I wish you wouldn’t do things like that.”

  There were two messages from Tom. She thought of him in the boat three hundred kilometers away, docked to the experimental iceberg, and hoped he and Mahmoud were getting along. Good, he had only routine stuff to report. She scrolled through messages from the Arctic Science Initiative, the Million Eyes project, and three of her colleagues working off the northern coast of Finland. Nothing from Lucie.

  She let out a long, slow breath. Time to get up, make fresh coffee. Through the tiny window of the boat’s kitchenette, the smooth expanse of ocean glittered in the morning light. The brolly floated above it like a conscientious ghost, not two hundred meters away. Its parachute-like top was bright in the low sun, its electronic eyes slowly swiveling as the intelligent unit in the box below drank in information from the world around it. Its community of intelligences roved the water below, making observations and sending them back to the unit, so that it could adjust its behavior accordingly. She felt a tiny thrill of pride. The brolly was her conception, a crazy biogeochemist’s dream, brought to reality by engineers. The first prototype had been made by Tom himself, in his first year of graduate school. Thinking of his red thatch of hair framing a boyish face, she caught herself smiling. He was such a kid! The first time he’d seen a seal colony, he’d almost fallen off the boat in his enthusiasm. You’d think the kid had never even been to a zoo. He was so Californian, it was adorable. Her own upbringing in the frozen reaches of northern Canada meant she was a lot more cold-tolerant than him—he was always overdressed by her standards, buried under layers of thermal insulation and a parka on top of everything. Some of her colleagues had expressed doubts about taking an engineering graduate student to the Arctic, but she’d overruled them. The age of specialization was over; you had to mix disciplinary knowledge and skills if you wanted to deal intelligently with climate change, and who was better qualified to monitor the brollies deployed in the region? Plus Mahmoud would make a great babysitter for him. He was a sweet kid, Tom.

  She pulled on her parka and went out on deck to have her coffee the way she liked it, scalding hot. Staring across the water, she thought of home. Baffin Island was not quite directly across the North Pole from her station in the East Siberian Sea, but this was the closest she had come to home in the last fifteen years. She shook her head. Home? What was she thinking? Home was a sunny apartment in a suburb of San Francisco, a few BART stops from the university, where she had spent ten years raising Lucie, now twenty-four, a screenwriter in Hollywood. It had been over a year since she and Lucie had had a real conversation. Her daughter’s chatty e-mails and phone calls had given way to a near silence, a mysterious reserve. In her present solitude that other life, those years of closeness, seemed to have been no more than a dream.

  Over the water the brolly moved. There was a disturbance not far from the brolly—an agitation in the water, then a tail. A whale maybe five meters in length swimming close to the surface popped its head out of the water—a beluga! Well, she probably wasn’t far from their migration route. Irene imagined the scene from the whale’s perspective: the brolly like an enormous, airborne jellyfish, the boat, the human-craft, and a familiar sight.

  The belugas were interested in the brolly. Irene wondered what they made of it. One worry the researchers had was that brollies and their roving family units would be attacked and eaten by marine creatures. The brolly could collapse itself into a compact unit and sink to the seabed or use solar power to rise a couple of meters above the ocean surface. At the moment it seemed only to be observing the whales as they cavorted around it. Probably someone, somewhere, was looking at the ocean through the brolly’s electronic eyes and commenting on the Internet about a whale pod sighting. Million Eyes on the Arctic was the largest citizen science project in the world. Between the brollies, various observation stations, and satellite images, more than two million people could obtain and track information about sea ice melt, methane leaks, marine animal sightings, and ocean hot spots.

  It occurred to Irene that these whales might know the seashore of her childhood, that they might even have come from the north Canadian archipelago. A sudden memory came to her: going out into the ocean north of Baffin Island with her grandfather in his boat. He was teaching her to use traditional tools to fish in an icy inlet. She must have been very small. She recalled the rose-colored Arctic dawn, her grandfather’s weathered face. When they were on their way back with their catch, a pod of belugas had surfaced close enough to rock their boat. They clustered around the boat, popping their heads out of the water, looking at the humans with curious, intelligent eyes. One large female came close to the boat. “Qilalugaq,” her grandfather said gently, as though in greeting. The child Irene—no, she had been Enuusiq then—Enuusiq was entranced. The Inuit, her grandfather told her, wouldn’t exist without the belugas, the caribou, and the seals. He had made sure she knew how to hunt seals and caribou before she was thirteen. Memories surfaced: the swish of the dog sled on the ice in the morning, the waiting at the breathing holes for the seals, the swift kill. The two of them saying words of apology over the carcass, their breath forming clouds in the frigid air.

  Her grandfather died during her freshman year of high school. He was the one who had given her her Inuk name, Enuusiq, after his long-dead older brother, so that he would live again in her name. The name held her soul, her atiq. “Enuusiq,” she whispered now, trying it on. How many years since anyone had called her that? She remembered the gathering of the community each time the hunters brought in a big catch, the taste of raw meat with a dash of soy. How long had it been since those days? A visit home fifteen years ago when her father died (her mother had died when she was in college)—after that just a few telephone conversations and Internet chats with her cousin Maggie in Iqaluit.

  The belugas moved out of sight. Her coffee was cold again. She was annoyed with herself. She had volunteered to come here partly because she wanted to get away—she lo
ved solitude—but in the midst of it, old memories surfaced; long-dead voices spoke.

  The rest of the morning she worked with a fierce concentration, sending data over to her collaborators on the Russian research ship Kolmogorov, holding a conference call with three other scientists, politely declining two conference invitations for keynote speaker. But in the afternoon her restlessness returned. She decided she would dive down to the shallow ocean bed and capture a clip for a video segment she had promised to the Million Eyes project. It was against protocol to go down alone without anyone on the boat to monitor her—but it was only twenty-two meters, and she hadn’t got this far by keeping to protocol.

  Some time later she stood on the deck in her dry suit, pulled the cap snugly over her head, checked the suit’s computer, wiggled her shoulders so the oxygen tank rested more comfortably on her back, and dove in.

  This was why she was here. This falling through the water was like falling in love, only better. In the cloudy blue depths she dove through marine snow, glimpsing here and there the translucent fans of sea butterflies, a small swarm of krill, the occasional tiny jellyfish. A sea gooseberry with a glasslike two-lobed soft body winged past her face. Some of these creatures were so delicate a touch might kill them—no fisherman’s net could catch them undamaged. You had to be here, in their world, to know they existed. Yet there was trouble in this marine paradise. Deeper and deeper she went, her drysuit’s wrist display clocking time, temperature, pressure, oxygen. The sea was shallow enough at twenty-two meters that she could spend some time at the bottom without worrying about decompression on the way up. It was darker here on the seaweed-encrusted ocean floor; she turned on her lamp and the camera. Swimming along the sea-floor toward the array of instruments, she startled a mottled white crab. It was sitting on top of one of the instrument panels, exploring the device with its claws. Curiosity … well, that was something she could relate to. The crab retreated as she swam above it, then returned to its scrutiny. Well, if her work entertained the local wildlife, that was something.