The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  “Another thing,” said Mr. Rightly. “Why would an alien, a creature powerful enough and smart enough to cross between stars, need water? Our astronauts didn’t fly to the moon naked and hope for air.”

  “Maybe she missed her target,” Bloch suggested.

  “And there’s something else,” Mr. Rightly said. “How can anything survive the gee forces from this kind of impact? You heard the sonic booms. She, or it … whatever it is … the entity came down fast and hit, and nothing alive should be alive after that kind of crash.”

  Bloch wanted to offer an opinion, but they arrived at the penguin exhibit before he could find one. Men and the screaming woman climbed out of the trailing cars, and like an old pro, the pickup’s driver spun around and backed up to the edge of the pond. Half a dozen people waved him in. In one voice, everybody shouted, “Stop.” Night was falling. The penguin pool was deep and smooth and very clear. Mr. Rightly started to say something about being cautious, about waiting, and someone asked, “Why?” and he responded with noise about water quality and its temperature. But other people had already climbed into the truck bed, grabbing at the four limbs and head and the base of that sad, drooping tail. With barely any noise, the alien went into the water. It weighed very little, and everyone expected it to float, but it sank like an arrow aimed at the Earth. Bloch stood at the edge of the pool, watching while a dark gray shape lay limp at the bottom of the azure bowl.

  The screaming woman came up beside him. “Oh god, our girl’s drowning,” she said. “We need to jump in and help get her up to the air again.”

  A couple men considered being helpful, but then they touched the cold November water and suffered second thoughts.

  Another man asked Mr. Rightly, “Did we screw up? Is she drowning?”

  The teacher pushed his glasses against his face.

  “I think we did screw up,” Mr. Rightly said.

  The body had stopped being gray. And a moment later that cute seal face and those eyes were smoothed away. Then the alien was larger, growing like a happy sponge, and out from its center came a blue glow, dim at first, but quickly filling the concrete basin and the air above—a blue light shining into the scared faces, and Bloch’s face too.

  Leaning farther out, Bloch felt the heat rising up from water that was already most of the way to boiling.

  The woman ran away and then shouted, “Run.”

  The driver jumped into his truck and drove off.

  Only two people were left at the water’s edge. Mr. Rightly tugged on Bloch’s arm. “Son,” he said. “We need to get somewhere safe.”

  “Where’s that?” Bloch asked.

  His teacher offered a grim little laugh, saying, “Maybe Mars. How about that?”

  THE LEOPARD

  Any long stasis means damage. Time introduces creeps and tiny flaws into systems shriveled down near the margins of what nature permits. But the partial fueling allowed repairs to begin. Systems woke and took stock of the situation. Possibilities were free to emerge, each offering itself to the greatest good, yet the situation was dire. The universe permitted quite a lot of magic, but even magic had strict limits and the enemy was vast and endowed with enough luck to have already won a thousand advantages before the battle had begun.

  Horrific circumstances demanded aggressive measures; this was the fundamental lesson of the moment.

  The sanctity of an entire world at stake, and from this moment on, nothing would be pretty.

  * * *

  “Did you feel that?”

  Bloch was stretched out on the big couch. He remembered closing his eyes, listening to the AM static on his old boom box. But the radio was silent and his mother spoke, and opening his eyes, he believed that only a minute or two had passed. “What? Feel what?”

  “The ground,” she said. Mom was standing in the dark, fighting for the best words. “It was like an earthquake … but not really … never mind…”

  A second shiver passed beneath their house. There was no hard shock, no threat to bring buildings down. It was a buoyant motion, as if the world was an enormous water bed and someone very large was squirming under distant covers.

  She said, “Simon.”

  Nobody else called him Simon. Even Dad used the nickname invented by a teasing brother. At least that’s what Bloch had been told; he didn’t remember his father at all.

  “How do you feel, Simon?”

  Bloch sat up. It was cold in the house and silent in that way that comes only when the power was out.

  She touched his forehead.

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “Are you nauseous?”

  “No.”

  “Radiation sickness,” she said. “It won’t happen right away.”

  “I’m fine, Mom. What time is it?”

  “Not quite six,” she said. Then she checked her watch to make sure. “And we are going to the doctor this morning, if not the hospital.”

  “Yeah, except nothing happened,” he said, just like he did twenty times last night. “We backed away when the glow started. Then the police came, and some guy from Homeland, and Mr. Rightly found me that old sweatshirt—”

  “I was so scared,” she interrupted, talking to the wall. “I got home and you weren’t here. You should have been home already. And the phones weren’t working, and then everything went dark.”

  “I had to walk home from the zoo,” he said again. “Mr. Rightly couldn’t give me a ride if he wanted, because he was parked over by the crash site.”

  “The crash site,” she repeated.

  He knew not to talk.

  “You shouldn’t have been there at all,” she said. “Something drops from the sky, and you run straight for it.”

  The luckiest moment in his life, he knew.

  “Simon,” she said. “Why do you take such chances?”

  The woman was a widow and her other son was a soldier stationed in a distant, hostile country, and even the most normal day gave her reasons to be nervous. But now aliens were raining down on their heads, and there was no word happening in the larger world. Touching the cool forehead once again, she said, “I’m not like you, Simon.”

  “I know that, Mom.”

  “I don’t like adventure,” she said. “I’m just waiting for the lights to come on.”

  But neither of them really expected that to happen. So he changed the subject, telling her, “I’m hungry.”

  “Of course you are.” Thankful for a normal task, she hurried into the kitchen. “How about cereal before our milk goes bad?”

  Bloch stood and pulled on yesterday’s pants and the hooded Cornell sweatshirt borrowed from the zoo’s lost-and-found. “Yeah, cereal sounds good,” he said.

  “What kind?” she asked from inside the darkened refrigerator.

  “Surprise me,” he said. Then after slipping on his shoes, he crept out the back door.

  * * *

  Mr. Rightly looked as if he hadn’t moved in twelve hours. He was standing in the classroom where Bloch left him, and he hadn’t slept. Glasses that needed a good scrubbing obscured red worried eyes. A voice worked over by sandpaper said, “That was fast.”

  “What was fast?” Bloch asked.

  “They just sent a car for you. I told them you were probably at home.”

  “Except I walked here on my own,” the boy said.

  “Oh.” Mr. Rightly broke into a long weak laugh. “Anyway, they’re gathering up witnesses, seeing what everybody remembers.”

  It was still night outside. The classroom was lit by battery-powered lamps. “They” were the Homeland people in suits and professors in khaki, with a handful of soldiers occupying a back corner. The classroom was the operation’s headquarters. Noticing Bloch’s arrival, several people came forward, offering hands and names. The boy pretended to listen. Then a short Indian fellow pulled him aside, asking, “Did you yourself speak to the entity?”

  “I heard it talk.”

  “And did it touch you?”

 
; Bloch nearly said, “Yes.” But then he thought again, asking, “Who are you?”

  “I told you. I am head of the physics department at the university, here at the request of Homeland Security.”

  “Was it fusion?”

  “Pardon?”

  “The creature, the machine,” Bloch said. “It turned bright blue and the pond was boiling. So we assumed some kind of reactor was supplying the power.”

  The head professor dismissed him with a wave. “Fusion is not as easy as that, young man. Reactors do not work that way.”

  “But it asked for water, which is mostly hydrogen,” Bloch said. “Hydrogen is what makes the sun burn.”

  “Ah,” the little man said. “You and your high school teacher are experts in thermonuclear technologies, are you?”

  “Who is? You?”

  The man flung up both hands, wiping the air between them. “I was invited here to help. I am attempting to learn what happened last night and what it is occurring now. What do you imagine? That some cadre of specialists sits in a warehousewaiting for aliens to come here and be studied? You think my colleagues and I have spent two minutes in our lives preparing for this kind of event?”

  “I don’t really—”

  “Listen to me,” the head professor insisted.

  But then the ground rose. It was the same sensation that struck half a dozen times during Bloch’s walk back to the zoo, only this event felt larger and there wasn’t any matching sense of dropping afterwards. The room remained elevated, and everyone was silent. Then an old professor turned to a young woman, asking, “Did Kevin ever get that accelerograph?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, see if you can find either one. We need to get that machine working and calibrated.”

  The girl was pretty and very serious, very tense. Probably a graduate student, Bloch decided. She hurried past, glancing at the big boy and the college sweatshirt that was too small. Then she was gone and he was alone in the room with a couple dozen tired adults who kept talking quietly and urgently among themselves.

  The head physicist was lecturing the bald man from Homeland. The bald man was flanked by two younger men who kept flipping through pages on matching clipboards, reading in the dim light. An Army officer was delivering orders to a couple soldiers. Bloch couldn’t be sure of ranks or units. He had a bunch of questions to ask Matt. For a thousand reasons, he wished he could call his brother. But there were no phones; even the Army was working with old-fashioned tools. The officer wrote on a piece of paper and tore it off the pad, handing it to one scared grunt, sending him and those important words off to “The Site.”

  Mr. Rightly had moved out of the way. He looked useless and exhausted and sorry, but at least he had a stool to perch on.

  “What do we know?” Bloch asked him.

  Something was funny in those words.

  Laughing along with his teacher, Bloch asked, “Do you still think our spaceship is different from the big probe?”

  As if sharing a secret, Mr. Rightly leaned close. “It came from a different part of the sky, and it was alone. And its effects, big as they are, don’t compare with what’s happening on the other side of the world.”

  The professors were huddled up, talking and pointing at the ground.

  “What is happening on the other side?”

  Mr. Rightly asked him to lean over, and then he whispered. “The colonel was talking to the Homeland person. I heard him say that the hardened military channels didn’t quit working right away. Twenty minutes after the big impact, from Europe, from Asia, came reports of bright lights and large motions, from the ground and the water. And then the wind started to blow hard, and all those voices fell silent.”

  Bloch felt sad for his brother, but he couldn’t help but say, “Wow.”

  “There is a working assumption,” Mr. Rightly said. “The Earth’s night side has been lost, but the invasion hasn’t begun here. Homeland and the military are trying not to lose this side too.”

  Thinking about the alien and the dead kids, Bloch said, “You were right, sir. We shouldn’t have trusted it.”

  Mr. Rightly shrugged and said nothing.

  Some kind of meeting had been called in the back of the room. There was a lot of passion and no direction. Then the Homeland man whispered to an assistant who wrote hard on the clipboard, and the colonel found new orders and sent his last soldier off on another errand.

  “What’s the alien doing now?” Bloch asked.

  “Who knows,” Mr. Rightly said.

  “Is the radiation keeping us away?”

  “No, it’s not…” The glasses needed another shove. “Our friend vanished. After you and I left, it apparently punched through the bottom of the pond. I haven’t been to the Site myself. But the concrete is shattered and there’s a slick new hole reaching down who-knows-how-far. That’s the problem. And that’s why they’re so worried about these little quakes, or whatever they are. What is our green-eyed mystery doing below us?”

  Bloch looked at the other faces and then at the important floor. Then a neat, odd thought struck him: the monster was never just the creature itself. It was also the way that the creature lurked about, refusing to be seen. It was the unknown wrapped heavy and thick around it, and there was the vivid electric fear that made the air glow. Real life was normal and silly. Nothing happening today was normal or silly.

  He started to laugh, enjoying the moment, the possibilities.

  Half of the room stared at him, everybody wondering what was wrong with that towering child.

  “They’re bringing in equipment, trying to dangle a cable down into the hole,” Mr. Rightly said.

  “What, with a camera at the end?”

  “Cameras don’t seem to be working. Electronics come and go. So no, they’ll send down a volunteer.”

  “I’d go,” Bloch said.

  “And I know you mean that,” Mr. Rightly said.

  “Tell them I would.”

  “First of all: I won’t. And second, my word here is useless. With this crew, I have zero credibility.”

  The physicist and colonel were having an important conversation, fingers poking imaginary objects in the air.

  “I’m hungry,” Bloch said.

  “There’s MREs somewhere,” said Mr. Rightly.

  “I guess I’ll go look for them,” the boy lied. Then he walked out into a hallway that proved wonderfully empty.

  * * *

  Every zoo exists somewhere between the perfect and the cheap. Every cage wants to be impregnable and eternal, but invisibility counts for something too. The prisoner’s little piece of the sky had always been steel mesh reaching down to a concrete wall sculpted to resemble stone, and people would walk past all day, every day, and people would stand behind armored glass, reading about Amur leopards when they weren’t looking at him.

  Sometimes he paced the concrete ground, but not this morning. Everything felt different and wrong this morning. He was lying beside a dead decorative tree, marshaling his energies. Then the monster came along. It was huge and loud and very clumsy, and he kept perfectly still as the monster made a sloppy turn on the path, its long trailing arm tearing through the steel portion of the sky. Then the monster stopped and a man climbed off and looked at the damage, and then he ran to the glass, staring into the gloomy cage. But he never saw any leopards. He breathed with relief and climbed back on the monster and rode it away, and the leopard rose and looked at the hole ripped in the sky. Then with a lovely unconscious motion, he was somewhere he had never been, and the world was transformed.

  * * *

  Cranes and generators were rumbling beside the penguin pond. Temporary lights had been nailed to trees, and inside those brilliant cones were moving bodies and purposeful chaos, grown men shouting for this to be done and not that, and goddamn this and that, and who the hell was in charge? Bloch was going to walk past the pond’s backside. His plan, such as it was, was to act as if he belonged here. If somebody stoppe
d him, he would claim that he was heading for the vending machines at the maintenance shed—a good story since it happened to be true. Or maybe he would invent some errand given to him by the little physicist. There were a lot of lies waiting inside the confusion, and he was looking forward to telling stories to soldiers holding guns. “Don’t you believe me?” he would ask them, smiling all the while. “Well maybe you should shoot me. Go on, I dare you.”

  The daydream ended when he saw the graduate student. He recognized her tight jeans and the blond hair worn in a ponytail. She was standing on the path ahead of him, hands at her side, eyes fixed on the little hill behind the koi pond. Bloch decided to chat with her. He was going to ask her about the machine that she was looking for, what was it called? He wanted to tell her about carrying the alien, since that might impress her. There was enough daylight now that he could see her big eyes and the rivets in her jeans, and then he noticed how some of the denim was darker than it should be, soaked through by urine.

  The girl heard Bloch and flinched, but she didn’t blink, staring at the same unmoving piece of landscape just above the little waterfall.

  Bloch stopped behind her, seeing nothing until the leopard emerged from the last clots of darkness.

  Quietly, honestly, he whispered, “Neat.”

  She flinched again, sucking down a long breath and holding it. She wanted to look at him and couldn’t. She forced herself not to run, but her arms started to lift, as if ready to sprout wings.

  The leopard was at least as interested in the girl as Bloch was. Among the rarest of cats, most of the world’s Amur leopards lived in zoos. Breeding programs and Russian promises meant that they might be reintroduced into the Far East, but this particular male wasn’t part of any grand effort. He was inbred and had some testicular problem, and his keepers considered him ill-tempered and possibly stupid. Bloch knew all this but his heart barely sped up. Standing behind the young woman, he whispered, “How long have you been here?”

  “Do you see it?” she muttered.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Quiet,” she insisted.

  He said nothing.

  But she couldn’t follow her own advice. A tiny step backward put her closer to him. “Two minutes, maybe,” she said. “But it seems like hours.”