The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  Bloch watched the greenish-gold cat eyes. The animal was anxious. Not scared, no, but definitely on edge and ready to be scared, and that struck him as funny.

  The woman heard him chuckling. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She took a deep breath. “What do we do?”

  “Nothing,” was a useful word. Bloch said it again, with authority. He considered placing his hands on her shoulders, knowing she would let him. She might even like being touched. But first he explained, “If we do nothing, he’ll go away.”

  “Or jump us,” she said.

  That didn’t seem likely. She wasn’t attacked when she was alone, and there were two of them now. Bloch felt lucky. Being excited wasn’t the same as being scared, and he enjoyed standing with this woman, listening to the running water and her quick breaths. Colored fish were rising slowly in the cool morning, begging out of habit to be fed, and the leopard stared down from his high place, nothing moving but the tip of his long luxurious tail.

  Voices interrupted the perfection. People were approaching, and the woman gave a start, and the leopard lifted his head as she backed against a boy nearly ten years younger than her. Halfway turning her head, she asked the electric air, “Who is it?”

  Soldiers, professors, and the Homeland people—everybody was walking up behind them. If they were heading for the penguin pond, they were a little lost. Or maybe they had some other errand. Either way, a dozen important people came around the bend to find the graduate student and boy standing motionless. Then a soldier spotted the cat, and with a loud voice asked, “How do you think they keep that tiger there? I don’t see bars.”

  Some people stopped, others kept coming.

  The head physicist was in the lead. “Dear God, it’s loose,” he called out.

  Suddenly everybody understood the situation. Every person had a unique reaction, terror and flight and shock and startled amusement percolating out of them in various configurations. The colonel and his soldiers mostly tried to hold their ground, and the government people were great sprinters, while the man who had ordered the woman out on the errand laughed loudest and came closer, if not close.

  Then the physicist turned and tried to run, his feet catching each other. He fell hard, and something in that clumsiness intrigued the leopard, causing it to slide forwards, making ready to leap.

  Bloch had no plan. He would have been happy to stand there all morning with this terrified woman. But then a couple other people stumbled and dropped to their knees, and somebody wanted people to goddamn move so he could shoot. The mayhem triggered instincts in an animal that had killed nothing during its long comfortable life. Aiming for the far bank of the pond, the leopard leapt, and Bloch watched the trajectory while his own reflexes engaged. He jumped to his right, blocking the cat’s path. Smooth and graceful, it landed on the concrete bank, pulling into a tuck, and with both hands Bloch grabbed its neck. The leopard spun and slashed. Claws sliced into one of the big triceps, shredding the sweatshirt. Then Bloch angry lifted the animal, surprised by how small it felt, but despite little exercise and its advanced years, the animal nearly pulled free.

  Bloch shouted, “No!”

  The claws slashed again.

  Bloch dove into the pond—three hundred pounds of primate pressing the cat into the carp and cold water. The leopard got pushed to the bottom with the boy on top, a steady loud angry-happy voice telling it, “Stop stopstopstopstop.”

  The water exploded. Wet fur and panicked muscle leaped over the little fake hill, vanishing. Then Bloch climbed out the water, relieved and thrilled, and he peeled off his sweatshirt, studying the long cuts raking his left arm.

  Eyes closed in terror, the young woman hadn’t seen the leopard escape. Now she stared at the panicked fish, imagining the monster dead on the bottom. And she looked at Bloch, ready to say something, wanting very much to thank the boy who had swept into her nightmare to save her life. But then she felt the wet jeans, and touching herself, she said, “I can’t believe this.” She looked at the piss on her hand, and she sniffed it once, and then she was crying, saying, “Don’t look at me. Oh, Jesus, don’t look.”

  * * *

  He slept.

  The medicine made him groggy, or maybe Bloch was so short of sleep that he could drift off at the first opportunity. Whatever the reason, he was warm and comfortable in the army bed, having a fine long dream where he wrestled leopards and a dragon and then a huge man with tusks for teeth and filthy, shit-stained hands that shook him again and again. Then a small throat was cleared and he was awake again.

  A familiar brown face was watching him. “Hello.”

  “Hi.”

  The physicist looked at the floor and said, “Thank you,” and then he looked at the boy’s eyes. “Who knows what would have happened. If you hadn’t been there, I mean.”

  Bloch was the only patient in a field hospital inflated on the zoo’s parking lot. One arm was dressed with fancy military coagulants, and a bottle was dripping antibiotics into Bloch’s good arm. His voice was a little slow and rough. “What happened to it?”

  Bloch was asking about the leopard, but the physicist didn’t seem to hear him. He stared at the floor, something disgusting about the soft vinyl. “Your mother and teacher are waiting in the next room,” he said.

  The floor started to roll and pitch. The giant from Bloch’s dream rattled the world, and then it grew bored and the motion quit.

  Then the physicist answered a question Bloch hadn’t asked. “I think that a machine has fallen across half the world. This could be an invasion, an investigation, an experiment. I don’t know. The entire planet is blacked out. Most of our satellites are disabled, and we can barely communicate with people down the road, much less on the other side of the world. The alien or aliens are here to torture us, unless they are incapable of noticing us. I keep listening for that god-voice. But there isn’t any voice. No threats or demands, or even any trace of an apology.”

  Rage had bled away, leaving incredulity. The little man looked like a boy when he said, “People are coming to us, people from this side of the demarcation line. Witnesses. Just an hour ago, I interviewed a refugee from Ohio. He claims that he was standing on a hilltop, watching the solar sail’s descent. What he saw looked like smoke, a thin quick slippery smoke that fell out of the evening sky, settling on the opposite hillside. Then the world before him changed. The ground shook like pudding and trees were moving—not waving, mind you, but picking up and running—and there were voices, huge horrible voices coming out of the darkness. Then a warm wind hit him in the face and the trees and ground began flowing across the valley before him and he got into his car and fled west until he ran out of gas. He stole a second car that he drove until it stopped working. Then he got a third and pushed until he fell asleep and went off the road, and a state trooper found him and brought him here.”

  The physicist paused, breathing hard.

  He said, “The device.” He said, “That object that you witnessed. It might be part of the same invasion, unless it is something else. Nobody knows. But a number of small objects have fallen on what was the day side of the Earth. The military watched their arrival before the radars failed. So I feel certain about that detail. These little ships came from every portion of the sky. Most crashed into the Pacific. But the Pender event is very important, you see, because it happened on the land, in an urban setting. This makes us important. We have a real opportunity here. Only we don’t have time to pick apart this conundrum. The quakes are more intense now, more frequent. Ground temperatures are rising, particularly deep below us. One hypothesis—this is my best guess—is that the entity you helped carry to the water has merged with the water table. Fusion or some other power source is allowing it to grow. But I have no idea if it has a different agenda from what the giant alien is doing. I know nothing. And even if I had every answer, I don’t think I could do anything. To me, it feels as if huge forces are playing out however they wish, and we have n
o say in the matter.”

  The man stopped talking so that he could breathe, but no amount of oxygen made him relax. Bloch sat quietly, thinking about what he just heard and how interesting it was. Then a nurse entered, a woman about his mother’s age, and she said, “Sir. She really wants to see her son now.”

  “Not quite yet.”

  The nurse retreated.

  “Anyway,” the physicist said. “I came here to thank you. You saved our lives. And I wanted to apologize too. I saw what you did with that animal, how you grabbed and shook it. You seemed so careless, so brave. And that’s one of the reasons why I ordered the doctors to examine you.”

  “What did you do?” Bloch asked.

  “This little hospital is surprisingly well-stocked,” the physicist said. “And I was guessing that you were under of some kind of alien influence.”

  Bloch grinned. “You thought I was infected.”

  The little man nodded and grimaced. “The doctors have kept you under all day, measuring and probing. And your teacher brought your mother, and someone finally thought to interview the woman. She explained you. She says that you were born this way, and you don’t experience the world like the rest of us.”

  Bloch nodded and said nothing.

  “For what it is worth, your amygdala seems abnormal.”

  “I like being me,” Bloch said happily.

  The physicist gave the floor another long study. Then the ground began to shake once again, and he stood as still as he could, trying to gather himself for the rest of this long awful day.

  “But what happened to the leopard?” Bloch asked.

  The man blinked. “The soldiers shot it, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was running loose,” the physicist said. “People were at risk, and it had to be killed.”

  “That’s sad,” the boy said.

  “Do you think so?”

  “It’s the last of its kind,” Bloch said.

  The physicist’s back stiffened as he stared at this very odd child, and with a haughty voice, he explained, “But of course the entire world seems to be coming to an end. And I shouldn’t have to point out to you, but this makes each of us the very last of his kind.”

  THE PENDER MONSTER

  Bloch was supposed to be sleeping. Two women sat in the adjoining room, using voices that tried to be private but failed. Fast friends, his mother and his nurse talked about careers and worrisome children and lost men. The nurse’s husband had abandoned her for a bottle and she wanted him to get well but not in her presence, thank you. Bloch’s father died twelve years ago, killed by melanoma, and the widow still missed him but not nearly as much as during those awful first days when she had two young sons and headaches and heartaches, and God, didn’t she sound like every country song?

  It was the middle of a very dark night, and the warm ground was shaking more than it stood still. The women used weak, sorry laughs, and the nurse said, “That’s funny,” and then both fell into worried silence.

  Bloch didn’t feel like moving. Comfortable and alert, he sat with hard pillows piled high behind him, hands on his lap and eyes half-closed. The fabric hospital walls let in every sound. He listened to his mother sigh, and then the nurse took a breath and let it out, and then the nurse asked his mother about her thoughts.

  “My boys,” Mom said. Glad for the topic, she told about when her oldest was ten and happy only when he was causing trouble. But nobody stays ten forever. The Army taught Matt to control his impulses, which was one good thing. “Every situation has its good,” she said, almost believing it. The nurse made agreeable sounds and asked if Matt always wanted to be a soldier, and Mom admitted that he had. Then the nurse admitted that most military men were once that way. They liked playing army as boys, so much so they couldn’t stop when they grew up.

  “Does that ever happen?” Mom asked. “Do they actually grow up?”

  The women laughed again, this time with heart. Mom kept it up longest and then confessed that she was worried about Bloch but it was Matt that she was thinking of, imagining that big alien ship crashing down on top of him. She gave out one sorry breath after another, and then with a flat, careful voice, she wondered what life was like on the Night Side.

  That’s what the other half of the world had been named. The Night Side was mysterious, wrong and lost. For the last few hours, refugees had been coming through town, trading stories for gasoline and working cars. And the stories didn’t change. Bloch knew this because a group of soldiers were standing outside the hospital, gossiping. Every sound came through the fabric walls. Half a dozen men and one woman were talking about impossible things: the land squirming as if it was alive; alien trees black as coal sprouting until they were a mile high, and then the trees would spit out thick clouds that glowed purple and rode the hot winds into the Day Side, raining something that wasn’t water, turning more swathes of the countryside into gelatin and black trees.

  What was happening here was different. Everybody agreed about that. The ground shivered, but it was only ground. And people functioned well enough to talk with strained but otherwise normal voices. Concentrating, Bloch could make out every voice inside the hospital and every spoken word for a hundred yards in any direction, and that talent didn’t feel even a little bit peculiar to him.

  He heard boots walking. An officer approached the gossiping soldiers, and after the ritual greetings, one man dared ask, “Do we even stand a chance here, lieutenant?”

  “A damned good chance,” the lieutenant said loudly. “Our scientists are sitting in a classroom, building us weapons. Yeah, we’re going to tear those aliens some new assholes, just as soon as they find enough glue guns and batteries to make us our death rays.”

  Everybody laughed.

  One soldier said, “I’m waiting for earth viruses to hit.”

  “A computer bug,” somebody said.

  “Or AIDs,” said a third.

  The laughter ran a time and then faded.

  Then the first soldier asked, “So this critter under us, sir … what is it, sir?”

  There was a pause. Then the lieutenant said, “You want my opinion?”

  “Please, sir.”

  “Like that zoo teacher says. The monster came from a different part of the sky, and it doesn’t act the same. When you don’t have enough firepower to kick the shit out of its enemy, you dig in. And that’s what I think it is doing.”

  “This is some big galactic war, you mean?”

  “You wanted my opinion. And that’s my opinion for now.”

  One soldier chuckled and said, “Wild.”

  Nobody else laughed.

  Then the woman soldier spoke. “So what’s that make us?”

  “Picture some field in Flanders,” said the officer. “It’s 1916, and the Germans and British are digging trenches and firing big guns. What are their shovels and shells churning up? Ant nests, of course. Which happens to be us. We’re the ants in Flanders.”

  The soldiers quit talking.

  Maybe Mom and the nurse were listening to the conversation. Or maybe they were just being quiet for a while. Either way, Mom broke the silence by saying, “I always worried about ordinary hazards. For Matt, I mean. Bombs and bullets, and scars on the brain. Who worries about an invasion from outer space?”

  Bloch pictured her sitting in the near-darkness, one hand under her heavy chin while the red eyes watched whatever was rolling inside her head.

  “It’s hard,” said the nurse.

  Mom made an agreeable sound.

  Then with an important tone, the nurse said, “At least you can be sure that Matt’s in a good place now.”

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “If he’s gone, I mean.”

  “I know what you meant,” Mom said.

  The nurse started to explain herself.

  Mom cut her off, saying, “Except I don’t believe in any of that.”

  “You don’t believe in what?”

&nb
sp; “The afterlife. Heaven and such.”

  The nurse had to breathe before saying, “But in times like this, darling? When everything is so awful, how can you not believe in the hereafter?”

  “Well, let me tell you something,” Mom said. Then she leaned forward her chair, her voice moving. “Long ago, when my husband was dying for no good reason, I realized that if a fancy god was in charge, then he was doing a pretty miserable job of running his corner of the universe.”

  The new friendship was finished. The two women sat uncomfortably close to each other for a few moments. Then one of them stood and walked over the rumbling floor, putting their head through the door to check on their patient. Bloch remained motionless, pretending to be asleep. The woman saw him sitting in the bed, lit only by battery-powered night-lights. Then to make sure that she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, she came all the way into the room, and with a high wild voice she began to scream.

  * * *

  The defender had landed far from open water, exhausted and exposed. Fuel was essential and hydrogen was the easy/best solution, but most of the local hydrogen was trapped in the subsurface water or chemically locked into the rock. Every atom had to be wrenched loose, wasting time and focus. Time and focus built a redoubt, but the vagaries of motion and fuel had dropped the defender too close to the great enemy, and there was nothing to be done about that, and there was nothing to work with but the drought and the sediments and genius and more genius.

  Emotion helped. Rage was the first tool: a scorching hatred directed at a vast, uncaring enemy. Envy was nearly as powerful, the defender nurturing epic resentments aimed at its siblings sitting behind it in the ocean. Those lucky obscenities were blessed with more resources and considerably more time to prepare their redoubts, and did they appreciate how obscenely unfair this was? Fear was another fine implement. Too much work remained unfinished, grand palisades and serene weapons existing only as dream; absolute terror helped power the furious digging inside the half-born redoubt.