The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  Someone had definitely shot it up. Ask was fairly certain that if he’d managed to arrive somewhat earlier, he would have seen wisps of smoke curling up. As it was, sprung access panels and a starred windshield testified to significant brute force—that front screen was space-rated plaz, and should have remained intact even if the cab around it had delaminated.

  Something had hit the vehicle very, very hard.

  After a bit of careful climbing about, Ask identified seven entry points, all from a fairly high angle. He couldn’t help glancing repeatedly up at the sky. Redghost’s faintly mauve heavens, wispy with altocirrus, appeared as benign as ever.

  Orbital kinetics. No other explanation presented itself. That was even weirder than a nuke. And why anyone would bother to target an unoccupied rockhopper off in the wilderness was a question he could not even begin to answer.

  A particularly baroque assassination attempt, perhaps? He’d always avoided politics, both the official kind intertwined with the Polity’s governance, and the unofficial kind among the Howards themselves. That particular stupidity was the shortest path to murder, in Ask’s opinion.

  As a result of the strike on the aircar, the power pack was fractured unto death and being mildly toxic about its fate. Nothing his reinforced metabolism couldn’t handle for a while, but he probably shouldn’t hang around too long. As a result of the neutrino bursts, or more to the point, whatever had created them, every independent battery or power source in his equipment was fried, too.

  Someone had been annoyingly thorough.

  He finally found three slim Class II batteries in a shielded sample container. They lit up the passive test probe Ask had pulled out of one of the tool boxes, but wouldn’t be good for much more than powering a small handlight or some short-range comm.

  The way things were going, carrying any power source around seemed like a bad idea. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do much about the electronics in his skull, except to hope they were sufficiently low power to avoid drawing undue attention.

  As for the batteries, he settled for stashing them with the surviving campsite equipment he’d left back in the caves with the last working sensor suite. He retrieved what little of his gear was not actively wired—mostly protective clothing and his sleeping bag—and went back out to survey his route down out of these mountains. His emergency evac route had been almost due west, to a place he’d never visited called the Shindaiwa Valley. A two-hour rockhopper flight over rough terrain could be weeks of walking.

  Not to mention which, a man had to eat along the way. Even, or perhaps especially, if that man was a Howard.

  MAY 13TH, 2977 [RTS-RA]

  Ask toiled across an apron of scree leading to a round-shoulder ridge. He was switchbacking his way upward. Dust and grit caked his nose and mouth, the sharp smell of rock and the acrid odor of tiny plants crushed beneath his boots.

  Had the formation been interrupted, it would have been a butte, but this wall ran for kilometers in both directions. The broken range of hills rising behind him had dumped him into the long, narrow valley that ran entirely athwart his intended line of progress.

  Over two weeks of walking since he’d left the rockhopper behind. That was a long way on foot. Time didn’t bother Ask. Neither did distance. But the ridiculousness of combining the two on foot seemed sharply ironic. He’d not walked so much since his childhood in Tasmania. Redghost was not the Earth of eight hundred years ago.

  At least he’d been out in the temperate latitudes in this hemisphere’s springtime—the weather for this journey would have been fatally unpleasant at other times and places on this planet.

  He had no direct way to measure the radiation levels, but presumed from the lack of any symptoms on his part that they had held level or dropped over the time since what he now thought of as Day Zero. His Howard-enhanced immune system would handle the longer-term issues of radiation exposure as it had for the past centuries—that was not a significant concern.

  Likewise he had no way to sample the comm spectra, as he’d left all his powered devices behind. But since he had not seen a single contrail or overflight in the past two weeks, he wasn’t optimistic there, either. The night sky, by contrast, had been something of a light show. Either Redghost was experiencing an extended and unforecasted meteor shower or a lot of space junk was de-orbiting.

  The admittedly minimal evidence did not point to any favorable outcome.

  Those worries aside, the worst part of his walk had been the food and water. He’d crammed his daypack with energy bars before leaving the rockhopper, but that was a decidedly finite nutritional reserve. Not even his Howard-enhanced strength and endurance could carry sufficient water for more than a few days while traveling afoot. Those same enhancements roughly doubled his daily calorie requirements over baseline human norms.

  Which meant he’d eaten a lot of runner cactus, spent several hours a day catching skinks and the little sandlion insect-analogs they preyed on, and dug for water over and over, until his hands developed calluses.

  Two hundred kilometers of walking to cross perhaps a hundred and twenty kilometers of straight line vector. On flat ground with a sag wagon following, Ask figured he could have covered this distance in less than four full days.

  The scree shifted beneath him. Ask almost danced over the rolling rocks, wary of a sprained or broken ankle. When injured he healed magnificently well, but he could not afford to be trapped in one place for long. Especially not in one place with so few prospects for food or water as this slope.

  The cliffs towered above him. The rock was rotten, an old basalt dike with interposed ash layers that quickly—in a geological sense—surrendered to the elements so that the material sheered away in massive flakes the size of landing shuttles. That left a wonderfully irregular face for him to climb when he topped the scree slope. It also left an amazingly dangerous selection of finger- and toe-holds.

  On the other side of this ridge was the wide riparian valley of the Shindaiwa River, settled thickly by rural Redghost standards with farmland, sheep ranches and some purely nonfunctional estates. Drainage from rain and snowpack higher up the watershed to the north kept the valley lush even in this drier region in the rain shadow of the Monomoku Mountains further to the west.

  All he had to do was climb this ridge, cross over it, and scramble down the other side. And he’d find … People? Ruins?

  Ask didn’t want to think too hard about that. He couldn’t think about anything else. So he kept climbing.

  * * *

  The river was still there. He tried to convince himself that this was at least a plus.

  The ridgeline gave an excellent view of the Shindaiwa Valley. Though nothing curled with the smoke of destruction, he also had an excellent view of a number of fire scars where structures had burned. There seemed to be a fair amount of dead livestock as well. A lot more animals still wandered in fenced pastures.

  Nothing human moved. No boats on the river. No vehicles on the thin skein of roads. The railroad tracks leading south toward Port Schumann and the shores of the Eniewetok Sea were empty. No smoke from fireplaces or brush burning. No winking lights for navigation, warning or welcome.

  Even from his height and distance, Ask could see what had become of the hand of man in this place.

  He had to look. At a minimum, he had to find food. Most of the structures were standing. The idea of looting the houses of the dead for food distressed him. The idea of starving distressed him more.

  * * *

  He didn’t reach the first farmhouse until evening’s dusk. Ask would have strongly preferred to do his breaking and entering in broad daylight, but another night of hunger out in the open seemed foolish with the building right in front of him. A tall fieldstone foundation was topped by two stories of brightly painted wooden house that would not have looked out of place on one of the wealthier neighboring farms of his youth.

  Ask wasn’t sure if this was a deliberate revival of an ancient fashion of building, or a so
rt of architectural version of parallel evolution.

  Chickens clucked and fussed in the yard with the beady-eyed paranoia of birds. Some had already climbed into the spreading bush that seemed to be their roost, others were hunting for some last bit of whatever the hell it was chickens ate.

  Beyond the house, a forlorn flock of sheep pressed against the fenced boundary of a pasture, bleating at him. He had no idea what they wanted, but they looked pretty scraggly. A number of them were dead, grubby bodies scattered in the grass.

  Water, he realized, seeing the churned up earth around a metal trough. They were dying of thirst.

  Ask walked around the house to see if the trough could be refilled. He found the line poking up out of the soil, and the tap that controlled it. Turning that on did nothing, however.

  Of course it wouldn’t, he realized. No power for the well pump.

  He sighed and unlatched the gate. “River’s over there, guys,” Ask said, his voice a croak. He realized he hadn’t spoken aloud in the two weeks he’d been walking.

  The sheep just stared at him. They made no move for freedom. There wasn’t anything more he could do for the animals. He shrugged and walked back to the house, up the rear steps.

  * * *

  Inside the house was a mess. If he’d come on it in broad daylight, even from the outside he’d have noticed the cracked and shattered windows. Inside, the floors were dirty with splinters and wisps of insulation.

  The lack of people was disturbing. So was the lack of blood, in a weird way.

  They’d just walked outside, leaving the doors standing open, and vanished. Then orbital kinetics had plowed through the roof to disable the house’s power plant, core comm system and—oddly—the oven. He figured it had to have happened in that order, because if anyone had been inside the house when the strikes hit, there would be signs of panic—toppled furniture, maybe blood from the splinters and other collateral damage.

  With that happy thought in mind, Ask walked around the house in the deepening dark, checking every commset, music player, power tool and any other gadget he could find to switch on. The small electronics were fried, too, just like the equipment in his rockhopper.

  It was as if the old fairy tale of the Christian Rapture had come true, here on Redghost. Followed by the explosive revenge of the exploited electron? He hadn’t so much as looked at a Bible in over seven hundred years, but Ask was pretty sure that there hadn’t been any mention of a rapture of the batteries.

  “Render unto Volta those things which are Volta’s,” he said into the darkness, then began giggling.

  His discipline finally broke. Ask retreated to the kitchen to hunt for food and drink.

  JUNE 21ST, 2977 [RTS-RA]

  It took him five weeks to explore every house in this part of the Shindaiwa Valley. On the way, Ask opened all the pasture gates he could find, shooing out the cattle and sheep and horses. The llamas, pigs and goats were smart enough to leave on their own, where they hadn’t already jumped or broken the gates, or—in the case of the goats—picked the latches.

  Most of them would starve even outside the fences, but at least they could find water and better pasture. Some would survive. So far as he knew, Redghost had no apex predators in the native ecology. Humans certainly hadn’t imported any.

  Give the dogs a few generations of living wild and that would change, though.

  It was the damned dogs that broke his heart. The household pets were the worst. So many of them had starved, or eaten one another. And the survivors expected more of him than the farm animals had. When he slipped open a door or tore a screen, they rushed up to him. Barking, whining, mewling. He was a Person, he was Food, he could let the good boys Out. And the dogs knew they had been Bad. Crapping in corners, sleeping on the furniture, whining outside bedroom doors forever shut and silent.

  In truth, that became the reason he’d entered every house or building he could find. To let out the cats and dogs and dwarf pigs. Finding a bicycle meant he could gain distance on those dogs that wanted to follow him. The cats didn’t care, the pigs were too smart to try. He let the occasional birds out, too, and when he could, dumped the fish tanks into whatever nearby watercourse presented itself.

  The more he walked, the fewer of them were left alive inside. But he had to try.

  Thirty-nine days in the Shindaiwa Valley, and he’d visited almost four hundred houses, dormitories, granaries, slaughterhouses, tanneries, cold storage warehouses, machine workshops, emergency services centers, feed stores, schools. Even three railroad stations, a small hospital and a tiny airport terminal.

  Not a single human being. Not so much as a finger bone. He’d even dug up both an old grave and a recent one to see if the bodies had been left behind. They had. Ask couldn’t remember enough about Christianity to figure out if that was evidence for or against the Rapture. He did rebury them, and said what he could remember of the Lord’s Prayer over the fresh-turned earth.

  “Ten thousand sheep, a thousand cats and dogs, and me,” he told a patient oak tree. It was wind-bent and twisted, standing in an ornamental square in front of the Lower Shindaiwa Valley Todd Christensen Memorial Railroad Depot Number 2. A sign proclaimed this to be the first Terran tree in the valley, planted by one of the pioneer farmers two centuries earlier. “You’re a survivor. Like me.”

  But of what?

  One small blessing of the railroad station was a modest selection of cheap tourist maps printed on plastene flimsy. Some people just didn’t want to mess with dataflow devices all the time. On a relatively thinly-settled planet like Redghost the electrosphere was largely incomplete anyway.

  Had been. It was nonexistent now, which was the utmost form of incompletion.

  Ask shuffled the map flimsies. His knowledge of local planetography was poor—it simply hadn’t been important. He’d been dropped by shuttle at Atarashii Ōsaka, the main spaceport and entrepôt for Redghost. He was vaguely aware of three or four other sites with support for surface-to-orbit transfer. And his assignment in the Fayerweather Mountains, for which he’d based out of Port Schumann after an atmospheric flight from Atarashii Ōsaka.

  That was it. All he’d known about the Shindaiwa Valley was that this was his first line of emergency evacuation. All he’d known about Redghost was the semiconducting tunnels, and a notion of a bucolic paradise home to perhaps twenty million souls.

  His next stop, he figured, would be Port Schumann. It was a city, at least by Redghost standards. Anyone else surviving on this part of the planet would have headed there.

  In a bleak frame of mind, Ask figured that twenty million people would have about five million residences and perhaps half a million commercial structures. He’d managed an average ten buildings per day here in the Shindaiwa Valley. Denser in the cities, of course. Still, figure six hundred thousand days to check every structure on Redghost, plus the travel time between places. Fifty years? A hundred, if the buildings in Atarashii Ōsaka and the few other relatively large cities were too big to check so quickly?

  Where the hell did twenty million people go? A planet full of corpses, he could understand. A planet empty of people …

  JANUARY 4TH, 2978 [RTS-RA]

  The crashed airplane in the hills east of Port Schumann had caught his attention as he’d cycled along the rough service road paralleling a rail line. It was a fixed-wing craft with propeller engines—something fairly simply designed to be locally serviceable without parts imported from off-planet. The fuselage looked intact, so he’d gone to check it out.

  Weapons hadn’t seemed to be much of an issue, and most of what he’d found in that department had been useless anyway due to embedded electronics, but he was always curious what he might find.

  This craft had seated six. Small, white with pale green stripes and the seal of the Redghost Ministry of Social Adjustment on the side. Planetary judiciary, in local terms. It was missing one door, he noted as he approached.

  He looked inside to see someone in the rear seat.
/>
  “Shit!” Ask screamed, jumping back.

  He’d been too long without company. He was starting to regret not bringing a few of the dogs from the Shindaiwa Valley with him.

  Feeling foolish, Ask unclipped the aluminum pump from his bike and held it loosely like a club. Some of the Howards were killers, dangerous as any human being who’d ever lived, but he’d never bothered with that training or those enhancements. He was strong enough to swing something like this pump right through a wall at need. At least until the wall or the pump shattered.

  That had been enough.

  Until now.

  He approached the airplane again. Having already screamed, there didn’t seem much point in secrecy now. Still, he didn’t want to just march into the wreck.

  The person was still there.

  No, he corrected himself against the obvious. The body. Who the hell would stay seated in crashed airplane? For one thing, it was pretty cold out here at night.

  A man, he thought. Handcuffed to his seat. Ask climbed into the cabin and crept close. It was hard to tell, with the flesh mummifying in the cold, but it looked like the prisoner had struggled hard against his cuffs.

  Ask stepped up to the pilot and co-pilot’s seats. Smashed instruments and windows, torn seat cushions. No blood.

  They’d been gone from the plane, or at least out of their seats, before the orbital kinetics had struck the aircraft. In flight.

  And the missing door? Had the pilot and guards just stepped out in mid-air? Ask imagined the prisoner, straining to follow whatever trumpet had called his captors away. Then shrieking in fear as the cockpit exploded in sizzling splinters, the engines shredded and died under the orbital strikes, and the plane had glided in to its final landing.

  He hoped the poor bastard had died in the landing, but suspected he might have starved chained to the seat.

  This also meant that people who had been unable to move from a position would not have been taken up by whatever had snatched everyone from Redghost’s surface. Prisoners? The few jails he’d visited had stood empty and open-doored. The guards had taken their captives with them. Hospital ICUs? That explained the several medical beds he’d found dragged into gardens and on outdoor walkways.