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

by Gardner Dozois

  He found a room in a cheap boardinghouse, and a job washing dishes that paid under the counter, in a taco place. Even though the tacos came filmed with grease, he could digest better here than at Elizabeth’s, and anyway he didn’t eat much. His wages went on sugarcane.

  He became, in turn, an observant child, a tough loner, a pensive loner, a friendly panhandler. Sugarcane made him, variously, mute or extroverted or gloomy or awed or confident. But none of it was as satisfying as it once had been. Even when he was someone else, he was still aware of being Noah. That had not happened before. The door out of himself stayed ajar. Increasing the dose didn’t help.

  Two weeks after he’d left Elizabeth’s, he strolled on his afternoon off down to Battery Park. The late October afternoon was unseasonably warm, lightly overcast, filled with autumn leaves and chrysanthemums and balloon sellers. Tourists strolled the park, sitting on the benches lining the promenade, feeding the pigeons, touring Clinton Castle. Noah stood for a long time leaning on the railing above the harbor, and so witnessed the miracle.

  “It’s happening! Now!” someone shouted.

  What was happening? Noah didn’t know, but evidently someone did because people came running from all directions. Noah would have been jostled and squeezed from his place at the railing if he hadn’t gripped it with both hands. People stood on the benches; teenagers shimmied up the lamp poles. Figures appeared on top of the Castle. A man began frantically selling telescopes and binoculars evidently hoarded for this occasion. Noah bought a pair with money he’d been going to use for sugarcane.

  “Move that damn car!” someone screamed as a Ford honked its way through the crowd, into what was supposed to be a pedestrian area. Shouts, cries, more people rushing from cars to the railings.

  Far out in the harbor, the Deneb Embassy, its energy shield dull under the cloudy sky, began to glow. Through his binoculars Noah saw the many-faceted dome shudder—not just shake but shudder in a rippling wave, as if alive. Was it alive? Did his mother know?

  “Aaaahhhhh,” the crowd went.

  The energy shield began to spread. Either it had thinned or changed composition, because for a long moment—maybe ninety seconds—Noah could almost see through it. A suggestion of floor, walls, machinery … then opaque again. But the “floor” was growing, reaching out to cover more territory, sprouting tentacles of material and energy.

  Someone on the bridge screamed, “They’re taking over!”

  All at once, signs were hauled out, people leaped onto the roofs of cars that should not have been in the park, chanting began. But not much chanting or many people. Most crowded the railings, peering out to sea.

  In ten minutes, the Embassy grew and grew laterally, silently spreading across the calm water like a speeded-up version of an algae bloom. When it hardened again—that’s how it looked to Noah, like molten glass hardening as it cooled—the structure was six times its previous size. The tentacles had become docks, a huge one toward the city and several smaller ones to one side. By now even the chanters had fallen silent, absorbed in the silent, aweing, monstrous feat of unimaginable construction. When it was finished, no one spoke.

  Then an outraged voice demanded, “Did those bastards get a city permit for that?”

  It broke the silence. Chanting, argument, exclaiming, pushing all resumed. A few motorists gunned their engines, futilely, since it was impossible to move vehicles. The first of the motorcycle cops arrived: NYPD, then Special Border Patrol, then chaos.

  Noah slipped deftly through the mess, back toward the streets north of the Battery. He had to be at work in an hour. The Embassy had nothing to do with him.

  MARIANNE

  A spore cloud doesn’t look like anything at all.

  A darker patch in dark space, or the slightest of veils barely dimming starlight shining behind it. Earth’s astronomers could not accurately say how large it was, or how deep. They relied on Deneb measurements, except for the one fact that mattered most, which human satellites in deep space and human ingenuity at a hundred observatories was able to verify: The cloud was coming. The path of its closest edge would intersect Earth’s path through space at the time the Denebs had said: early September.

  Marianne knew that almost immediately following the UN announcement, madness and stupidity raged across the planet. Shelters were dug or sold or built, none of which would be effective. If air could get in, so could spores. In Kentucky, some company began equipping deep caves with air circulation, food for a year, and high-priced sleeping berths: reverting to Paleolithic caveman. She paid no more attention to this entrepreneurial survivalism than to the televised protests, destructive mobs, peaceful marches, or lurid artist depictions of the cloud and its presumed effects. She had a job to do.

  On Tuesday she, Evan, and two lab assistants were taken to the submarine bay at UN Special Mission Headquarters. In the sub, Max and Gina huddled in front of the porthole, or maybe it was a porthole-like viewscreen, watching underwater fish. Maybe fish were what calmed them. Although they probably didn’t need calming: Marianne, who had worked with both before, had chosen them as much for their even temperaments as for their competence. Government authorities had vetted Max and Gina for, presumably, both crime-free backgrounds and pro-alien attitudes. Max, only twenty-nine, was the computer whiz. Gina, in her mid-thirties and the despair of her Italian mother because Gina hadn’t yet married, made the fewest errors Marianne had ever seen in sample preparation, amplification, and sequencing.

  Evan said to Marianne, “Children all sorted out?”

  “Never. Elizabeth won’t leave New York, of course.” (“Leave? Don’t you realize I have a job to do, protecting citizens from your aliens?” Somehow they had become Marianne’s aliens.) “Ryan took Connie to her parents’ place in Vermont and he went back to his purple loosestrife in Canada.”

  “And Noah?” Evan said gently. He knew all about Noah; why, Marianne wondered yet again, did she confide in this twenty-eight-year-old gay man as if he were her age, and not Noah’s? Never mind; she needed Evan.

  She shook her head. Noah had again disappeared.

  “He’ll be fine, then, Marianne. He always is.”

  “I know.”

  “Look, we’re docking.”

  They disembarked from the sub to the underside of the Embassy. Whatever the structure’s new docks topside were for, it wasn’t the transfer of medical personnel. Evan said admiringly, “Shipping above us hasn’t even been disrupted. Dead easy.”

  “Oh, those considerate aliens,” Marianne murmured, too low for the sub captain, still in full-dress uniform, to hear. Her and Evan’s usual semi-sarcastic banter helped to steady her: the real toad in the hallucinatory garden.

  The chamber beyond the airlock had not changed, although this time they were met by a different alien. Female, she wore the same faint shimmer of energy-shield protection over her plain tunic and pants. Tall, coppery-skinned, with those preternaturally huge dark eyes, she looked about thirty, but how could you tell? Did the Denebs have plastic surgery? Why not? They had everything else.

  Except a cure for spore disease.

  The Deneb introduced herself (“Scientist Jones”), went through the so-glad-you’re-here speech coming disconcertingly from the ceiling. She conducted them to the lab, then left immediately. Plastic surgery or no, Marianne was grateful for alien technology when she saw her lab. Nothing in it was unfamiliar, but all of it was state-of-the-art. Did they create it as they had created the Embassy, or order it wholesale? Must be the latter—the state-of-the-art gene sequencer still bore the label ILLUMINA. The equipment must have been ordered, shipped, paid for (with what?) either over the previous months of negotiation, or as the world’s fastest rush shipping.

  Beside it sat a rack of vials with blood samples, all neatly labeled.

  Max immediately went to the computer and turned it on. “No Internet,” he said, disappointed. “Just a LAN, and … wow, this is heavily shielded.”

  “You realize,” Marian
ne said, “that this is a minor part of the science going on aboard the Embassy. All we do is process mitochondrial DNA to identify L7 haplogroup members. We’re a backwater on the larger map.”

  “Hey, we’re here,” Max said. He grinned at her. “Too bad, though, about no World of Warcraft. This thing has no games at all. What do I do in my spare time?”

  “Work,” Marianne said, just as the door opened and two people entered. Marianne recognized one of them, although she had never met him before. Unsmiling, dark-suited, he was Security. The woman was harder to place. Middle-aged, wearing jeans and a sweater, her hair held back by a too-girlish headband. But her smile was warm, and it reached her eyes. She held out her hand.

  “Dr. Jenner? I’m Lisa Gutierrez, the genetics counselor. I’ll be your liaison with the volunteers. We probably won’t be seeing each other again, but I wanted to say hello. And you’re Dr. Blanford?”

  “Yes,” Evan said.

  Marianne frowned. “Why do we need a genetic counselor? I was told our job is to simply process blood samples to identify members of the L7 haplogroup.”

  “It is,” Lisa said, “and then I take it from there.”

  “Take what from there?”

  Lisa studied her. “You know, of course, that the Denebs would like to identify those surviving human members of their own haplogroup. They consider them family. The concept of family is pivotal to them.”

  Marianne said, “You’re not a genetic counselor. You’re a xenopsychologist.”

  “That, too.”

  “And what happens after the long-lost family members are identified?”

  “I tell them that they are long-lost family members.” Her smile never wavered.

  “And then?”

  “And then they get to meet Ambassador Smith.”

  “And then?”

  “No more ‘then.’ The Ambassador just wants to meet his six-thousand-times-removed cousins. Exchange family gossip, invent some in-jokes, confer about impossible Uncle Harry.”

  So she had a sense of humor. Maybe it was a qualification for billing oneself a ‘xenopsychologist,’ a profession that, until a few months ago, had not existed.

  “Nice to meet you both,” Lisa said, widened her smile another fraction of an inch, and left.

  Evan murmured, “My, people come and go so quickly here.”

  But Marianne was suddenly not in the mood, not even for quoted humor from such an appropriate source as The Wizard of Oz. She sent a level gaze at Evan, Max, Gina.

  “Okay, team. Let’s get to work.”

  II: S MINUS 9.5 MONTHS

  MARIANNE

  There were four other scientific teams aboard the Embassy, none of which were interested in Marianne’s backwater. The other teams consisted of scientists from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control, the United States Army Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford, the Beijing Genomics Institute, Kyushu University, and the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, perhaps the top immunology center in the world. Some of the most famous names in the scientific and medical worlds were here, including a dozen Nobel winners. Marianne had no knowledge of, but could easily imagine, the political and scientific competition to get aboard the Embassy. The Americans had an edge because the ship sat in New York Harbor and that, too, must have engendered political threats and counterthreats, bargaining and compromise.

  The most elite group, and by far the largest, worked on the spores: germinating, sequencing, investigating this virus that could create a worldwide human die-off. They worked in negative-pressure, biosafety-level-four chambers. Previously the United States had had only two BSL4 facilities, at the CDC in Atlanta and at USAMRIID in Maryland. Now there was a third, dazzling in its newness and in the completeness of its equipment. The Spore Team had the impossible task of creating some sort of vaccine or other method of neutralizing, worldwide, a pathogen not native to Earth, within ten months.

  The Biology Team investigated alien tissues and genes. The Denebs gave freely of whatever was asked: blood, epithelial cells, sperm, biopsy samples. “Might even give us a kidney, if we asked nicely enough,” Evan said. “We know they have two.”

  Marianne said, “You ask, then.”

  “Not me. Too frightful to think what they might ask in exchange.”

  “So far, they’ve asked nothing.”

  Almost immediately the Biology Team verified the Denebs as human. Then began the long process of finding and charting the genetic and evolutionary differences between the aliens and Terrans. The first, announced after just a few weeks, was that all of the seventeen aliens in the Embassy carried the same percentage as Terrans of Neanderthal genes: from one to four percent.

  “They’re us,” Evan said.

  “Did you doubt it?” Marianne asked.

  “No. But more interesting, I think, are the preliminary findings that the Denebs show so much less genetic diversity than we do. That wanker Wilcox must be weeping in his ale.”

  Patrick Wells Wilcox was the current champion of the Toba Catastrophe Theory, which went in and out of scientific fashion. Seventy thousand years ago the Toba supervolcano in Indonesia had erupted. This had triggered such major environmental change, according to theory proponents, that a “bottleneck event” had occurred, reducing the human population to perhaps 10,000 individuals. The result had been a great reduction in human genetic diversity. Backing for the idea came from geology as well as coalescence evidence of some genes, including mitochondrial, Y-chromosome, and nuclear. Unfortunately, there was also evidence that the bottleneck event had never occurred. If the Denebs, removed from Earth well before the supervolcano, showed less diversity than Terrans, then Terran diversity couldn’t have been reduced all that much.

  Marianne said, “Wilcox shouldn’t weep too soon.”

  “Actually, he never weeps at all. Gray sort of wanker. Holes up in his lab at Cambridge and glowers at the world through medieval arrow slits.”

  “Dumps boiling oil on dissenting paleontologists,” Marianne suggested.

  “Actually, Wilcox may not even be human. Possibly an advance scout for the Denebs. Nobody at Cambridge has noticed it so far.”

  “Or so we think.” Marianne smiled. She and Evan never censored their bantering, which helped lower the hushed, pervasive anxiety they shared with everyone else on the Embassy. It was an anxious ship.

  The third scientific team aboard was much smaller. Physicists, they worked with “Scientist Jones” on the astronomy of the coming collision with the spore cloud.

  The fourth team she never saw at all. Nonetheless, she suspected they were there, monitoring the others, shadowy underground non-scientists unknown even to the huge contingent of visible security.

  Marianne looked at the routine work on her lab bench: polymerase chain reaction to amplify DNA samples, sequencing, analyzing data, writing reports on the genetic inheritance of each human volunteer who showed up at the Deneb “collection site” in Manhattan. A lot of people showed up. So far, only two of them belonged to Ambassador Smith’s haplogroup. “Evan, we’re not really needed, you and I. Gina and Max can handle anything our expensive brains are being asked to do.”

  Evan said, “Right, then. So let’s have a go at exploring. Until we’re stopped, anyway.”

  She stared at him. “Okay. Yes. Let’s explore.”

  NOAH

  Noah emerged from the men’s room at the restaurant. During the mid-afternoon lull they had no customers except for a pair of men slumped over one table in the back. “Look at this!” the waitress said to him. She and the cook were both huddled over her phone, strange enough since they hated each other. But Cindy’s eyes were wide from something other than her usual drugs, and Noah took a look at the screen of the sophisticated phone, mysteriously acquired and gifted by Cindy’s current boyfriend before he’d been dragged off to Riker’s for assault with intent.

  VOLUNTEERS WANTED TO DONATE BLOOD

  PA
YMENT: $100

  HUMAN NURSES TO COLLECT SMALL BLOOD SAMPLES

  DENEB EMBASSY PIER, NEW YORK HARBOR

  “Demonios del Diablo,” Miguel muttered. “Vampiros!” He crossed himself.

  Noah said dryly, “I don’t think they’re going to drink the blood, Miguel.” The dryness was false. His heart had begun to thud. People like his mother got to see the Embassy up close, not people like Noah. Did the ad mean that the Denebs were going to take human blood samples on the large dock he had just seen form out of nothing?

  Cindy had lost interest. “No fucking customers except those two sorry asses in the corner, and they never tip. I shoulda stood in bed.”

  “Miguel,” Noah said, “can I have the afternoon off?”

  * * *

  Noah stood patiently in line at the blood-collection site. If any of the would-be volunteers had hoped to see aliens, they had been disappointed. Noah was not disappointed; after all, the ad on Cindy’s phone had said HUMAN NURSES TO COLLECT SMALL BLOOD SAMPLES.

  He was, however, disappointed that the collection site was not on the large dock jutting out from the Embassy under its glittering energy shield. Instead, he waited to enter what had once been a warehouse at the land end of a pier on the Manhattan waterfront. The line, huddled against the November drizzle, snaked in loops and ox-bows for several blocks, and he was fascinated by the sheer diversity of people. A woman in a fur-lined Burberry raincoat and high, polished boots. A bum in jeans with an indecent tear on the ass. Several giggling teenage girls under flowered umbrellas. An old man in a winter parka. A nerdy-looking boy with an iPad protected by flexible plastic. Two tired-looking middle-aged women. One of those said to the other, “I could pay all that back rent if I get this alien money, and—”

  Noah tapped her arm. “Excuse me, ma’am—what ‘alien money’?” The $100 fee for blood donation didn’t seem enough to pay all that back rent.