Mammoth Book of Best New SF 19

by Gardner Dozois

  A crew member helped her on board and led her to a cabin. It looked oddly like her hotel room of the night before. Smaller and more cramped, with no balcony, and a circular window, but otherwise —

  “Why are the windows on ships circular?” she asked.

  “A better seal,” the sailor answered. “Windows leak at their corners. Also tradition. Portholes have always been round.”

  Lydia unpacked for the second time in two days, then went up on deck. It was a little before noon. She could hear the engines starting up, a deep thrum rising from below. She walked forward to the knife-prow and leaned over. The water was clear and blue. A sea-ribbon swam just under the surface, undulations moving through its long, flat, rust-brown body.

  Buddha, she felt good!

  A little past noon, the anchor came up, pulled by an automatic winch, with a sailor standing by and watching. Lydia kept out of the way. The engine’s sound changed. The Persistent backed first, then turned and headed out. Lydia recorded the harbor, the town, the island volcano, its plume pulled into a diagonal by the wind.

  A narrow channel, marked with buoys, led past the breakwater. Waves foamed and crested beyond.

  “I am Too Ziri,” a person said, coming up next to Lydia. She was slender, with a golden skin and brown hair — no, these were feathers — ruffled by the wind.

  Clearly, she was the same species as Wazati Tloo, though her clothing was human: yellow waterproof boots, black pants, and a bright blue anorak. “You are Lydia Duluth.”

  Lydia hesitated, then nodded.

  “Don’t worry. Those of us who are progressive have forgiven you for helping Wazati Tloo escape our home planet, and his exploits in drama have shown us anything is possible. I’m here on this world because of Tloo in his first starring role, Star Dump. He made a fine heroic convict, unjustly condemned to life in the dump and fighting for his freedom. Seeing that, I knew I could, and would, escape my culture, and here I am, a scientist on a human research ship.”

  “You saw Star Dump on your home world?” Lydia asked.

  “No. It was banned there, as you ought to know. I was off-planet, studying the theory of inter-species communication at a human institution of higher learning. After I saw Dump, I knew I would not go home. Here is the radio we use for communication with K’r’x.”

  It was an ordinary, old-fashioned headset, held on by tension.

  “K’r’x has a radio connected to his AI, as you do not, I understand. The AI translates his thoughts into humanish and broadcasts the translation to us. We receive the messages on a radio like this one, though ours have ear plugs and a mike. We have modified this one, so your AI can plug directly into it. The mike and ear plugs have been removed, since you are going to be talking mind-to-mind. I have to say, I envy you! But not enough to ask for an AI inside my skull.”

  I am not sure that she could get one. We are selective. Though she does seem to be an avant guardist, and that is what we’re interested in.

  “Where is he?” Lydia asked. The ship was rocking a little now, as it plunged through the foaming water. Was she going to be seasick? At the moment she did not know.

  “There,” said Ziri and pointed.

  He was pacing them: a long, pale body just below the waves, breaking the surface now and then. Lydia saw a sleek, wet back. A fin lifted into view, triangular and very large, almost as long as his body at its base. K’r’x dove.

  Shortly thereafter, he rose again. She caught sight of the tentacles that ringed his mouth. They were not made formidable by suckers, but by spines and hooks. Two, she knew, ended in clusters of small, agile, subsidiary tentacles that could be used as hands.

  His head was bulbous. Two of the five eyes were in front, giving him stereoscopic vision. Two more were on the sides. They were huge, with v-shaped pupils. As well as watching to the left and right, they looked down. In the inky deeps where his people hunted, these were the most effective eyes. One last eye, the smallest, was on the back of his head, where the head sloped toward his torpedo-shaped body. Nothing snuck up on a Diver from behind.

  K’r’x dove again.

  Ziri handed the radio to Lydia. “I’m certain you want to talk with him.”

  “In a moment,” Lydia said.

  K’r’x surfaced again. This time she saw one of the huge side-eyes, its pupil narrowed at the moment. The iris was silver-grey, a good match for the body, pale grey and speckled like a trout.

  The mouth was another difference from squid. It was a circle of triangular plates, which muscles forced together. The plates were edged with teeth, and there were more teeth in the Diver’s throat. Much of its native food was armored. The plate teeth sheared through armor, while the throat teeth crushed it; then the Diver’s tongue — long, delicate, and sensitive — extracted the inner animal from its broken shell.

  Your interest in this creature is disturbing, her AI said.

  I’m a romantic, Lydia thought. This is a romantic being.

  “Do you need help?” Ziri asked. She took the headset and pressed it. A transparent, glassy wire came out the middle. “The socket for your computer is at the top of your skull, I understand. Just push the wire in and snug the set to your head. You will be in communication.”

  Lydia did as instructed. The ship vanished, and she seemed to be in a maze of glass, light shining through it, refracting and reflecting. An AI operating system: she recognized it from past encounters. Programs — transparent, colorless, as flexible as fish — moved through the crystal maze. None of this was real, of course. Rather, it was a metaphor, a way of understanding something that was outside human experience, beyond human comprehension. In spite of what she saw and felt, Lydia was still on the ship’s deck, staring at the ocean.

  Something approached her. Huge, dark, and apparently solid, it was nothing like anything she’d ever seen in an AI. It pushed through the walls of crystal, the angular rays of light, as if both were insubstantial, as they in fact were.

  For a moment, as the great dark body loomed over her, Lydia panicked. She reached to remove the radio set. The thing engulfed her.

  Aha! I have seized you! You are eaten! You are mine!

  K’r’x?

  Yes. Are you armored? Is there anything I need to crush? Or can I merely tongue?

  Try tonguing first, Lydia thought.

  The crystal maze vanished. Lydia was back on the ship, which she had never left, still leaning on the railing. K’r’x surfaced again, a tentacle rising well into air. It ended in a group of formidable-looking spines.

  “He’s waving,” said Ziri and waved back.

  Lydia could feel him inside her head, an unfamiliar something that moved among her thoughts. At times — it was the damnedest sensation — it seemed as if a thought had been hooked or grabbed. A passing idea — my, the water is clear — Buddha, this situation is scary — would suddenly jerk, twist, and be gone.

  Could you be less intrusive? Lydia asked.

  I am a predator, K’r’x replied. But I will try.

  The sense of strangeness diminished.

  I thought you were going to mediate this, Lydia said to the AI.

  He has a surprisingly strong mind, and his AI seems to be willing to let him have his way. There is always the danger of contamination, when one co-exists so closely with an intelligent life form.

  You are lovely, said K’r’x. Like a grove of seaweed or a school of fish. What ideas you have! So quick and flexible! So deeply rooted and delicately branching! I mated many times before I left my home planet, but I never felt anything like this. I wonder what kinds of minds the women of my species have? What would it be like, if we could touch each other so deeply?

  The females of his species were larger than the males; Lydia saw one, as K’r’x remembered. A gigantic, pale torpedo swimming through sunlit water, her eyes golden, her skin tawny. To K’r’x she was lovely. Their courtship began as a chase, the quicker male darting around his huge and graceful hoped-for mate, touching her lightly, then spe
eding away, as she struck out — not angry with the male, but flirting.

  At last, the female slowed; the chase became a dance with twisting tentacles and undulating fins. As the dance continued, the female’s skin grew flushed, and Lydia thought she could feel heat in her own body. Was she feeling K’r’x memory of his own flushed skin? The dancers met. Their tentacles wound together. Dangerous mouths open, they intertwined their tongues. A deep hum like the sound of engines seemed to fill Lydia’s ears and throat: K’r’x and his mate singing. It was, she had to admit, wonderfully — and embarrassingly — erotic.

  K’r’x stroked the female, then reached back with one of his handed tentacles to where his sperm was being extruded as a gelatinous blob. Taking hold of the blob gently, he brought it to his mate’s semen-receiving duct and inserted it, while continuing to stroke and sing.

  “Are you all right?” asked Ziri.

  Lydia glanced around, suddenly remembering where she was. “Why?”

  “You are groaning.”

  “I’m fine,” Lydia said, then added in a thought to K’r’x, This has to stop. I can’t be having this kind of response in public.

  Are you not enjoying the memory? Do you have a problem with sex?

  Let me attempt to mediate, the AI said.

  The sense of the Diver’s presence decreased, as if something — distance or a pane of glass — had been put between him and Lydia. She pulled the headset down, so it hung around her neck, then exhaled. “Buddha! What an experience!”

  “What happened?” Ziri asked.

  “First he ate me, then we had sex. Oy gevalt!”

  “Are you sure you understood? There was not a problem with communication?”

  “I think not,” said Lydia. She rubbed her neck under the headset’s band. In spite of the cold wind, she was sweating, and she noticed suddenly that the headset’s ends had joined together, making a collar. She tugged. The collar wouldn’t open.

  “Press here,” said Ziri and demonstrated. The headset unlocked. “This function makes it difficult to lose the radio. They’re expensive, and in bad weather anything that isn’t fastened will go overboard.”

  A remarkable creature, her AI said. If you put the headset back on, I will attempt to communicate with his AI.

  Not now, Lydia thought. In the water next to the Persistent, K’r’x surfaced again, this time waving a tentacle armed with hooks. “How did anyone figure out his species was intelligent?”

  “Their kindergartens,” Ziri answered.

  “What?”

  “It’s an ancient human word, meaning a garden for children. The Diver children are small when born, no longer than my hand. They can swim and feed, but they are not intelligent. As you might imagine, they are vulnerable. Their parents build an artificial reef by arranging rocks in a circle on a ‘nursery bottom,’ a broad expanse of sand. Then the parents place sessile animals on the reef, along with plants that attract specific kinds of fish — small ones, which the Diver young can hunt in safety. Seaweed is planted in the center of the reef, and the Diver mothers attach their eggs to the seaweed. When the eggs hatch, the young find themselves in a garden. Their parents surround the garden, floating above and around it, making sure that nothing dangerous is able to enter.”

  How sweet, Lydia thought.

  “When human explorers came to the Diver home planet, they took one look at the gardens and knew — or at least suspected — they were the work of thinking beings.”

  “Why is he on this world?” she asked Ziri. “Why does he have an AI?” The headset had reclosed. She didn’t want to unlock it, feeling reluctant to put it on.

  “He wanted to travel,” Ziri said. “When one is fifteen meters long and aquatic, a journey to the stars is not easy. The AIs agreed to help him, if he would agree to an observer. Since they control FTL, it was easy for them to bring him first to the school where I studied, then here.”

  “What does he eat?” Lydia asked, remembering that the life on this world did not nourish humans. The sea-ribbons she’d seen drying were not eaten, but ground up and used to enrich the soil of greenhouses.

  “His bio-chemistry is oddly similar to that of humans.”

  “You don’t feed him vegetables from the greenhouses?”

  “The human colonists are trying to introduce fish in protected fjords. We modified his enzymes, and now he is able to eat those fish. Though what he wants, K’r’x has told us, is armored fish, large and crunchy, able to swim fast enough to give him a good hunt.”

  Lydia went to her cabin, lay on the bed, took a deep breath, unlocked the headset, and plugged it in.

  For a moment, she was in the crystal maze. Then she was in the ocean, blue water rushing past her and through the two tubes that went the length of her body, bringing oxygen to her gills, taking waste away. Her — his — dangerous mouth was open, the delicate tongue tasting for food. There was only the flavor of sea ribbons and mats, foreign and unpleasant.

  You are back, K’r’x said. Have I eaten you again? I feel as if you’re inside me.

  Why did you want to travel? Lydia asked.

  We do not travel among the stars. We know only what other species tell us. I wanted to taste alien waters, rise into alien sunlight, dive into the blackness of alien deeps, eat creatures that never swam in my planet’s ocean, and mate in ways new to my species.

  His tentacles were rolled up around his head, she noticed. His broad fins beat strongly. Muscle contractions forced water through and out his breathing-and-excreting tubes, driving him forward. What a remarkable creature!

  Do you know where we’re going? she asked.

  In search of one of those untasty mat animals. I do this to be obliging, but I think the humans on the ship are fools. The mats can’t be eaten or fucked or talked to. Why bother? He dove, taking her down into blue shadows. Sea-ribbons wriggled around them. K’r’x snapped one up, then spat it out. The pieces wriggled away.

  Now she heard a second voice, her AI: His observer says the Divers’ language is so different from humanish that it can’t be translated. The AI sends experiences in code to the computer that is inside every ordinary headset, and this computer — a human machine, not one of us — turns the code into words. But your headset does not have a human computer. I am supposed to serve the same purpose. I have failed. I am giving you experiences, not words.

  K’r’x dove deeper. They were skimming over a forest of sessile ribbons. Mouth open, he and Lydia tasted a multitude of strange excretions.

  This is not excrement, K’r’x said. But communication.

  You said it was impossible to talk with the life here, Lydia thought.

  This is not language, but the messages that life forms without intelligence send. Everything in this ocean is related; everything communicates; but they say nothing to which we can respond.

  Lydia took off the headset and dozed for a while, having bad dreams. Finally, she woke fully, rose, showered, put on new clothes, and went back on deck.

  The giant’s crescent hung in the sky. A spark glowed beside it, almost certainly a moon. Around the pair were high, thin clouds, the kind named mayor’s tails. Why would a mayor — a human official, still existing on some planets — have a tail? Lydia went to the prow and let wind blow past her, while she recorded sky and ocean.

  Bright yellow disks floated in the water, just below the surface. Their size varied between a meter and a tenth of a meter; their grooves were radial, so they looked like finely cut pies. More local life.

  A man appeared next to Lydia: tall, broad and black, with black hair that hung in ringlets to his shoulders and a wide, curly beard streaked with grey. His face was one of those odd throwbacks to a previous stage of human history. It belonged in ancient Persia: the eyes large and fringed with long lashes, the nose curved, the lips full. Lydia could imagine him in Persepolis, dressed in a robe, bringing prisoners and gifts to the king of kings. Instead, he was on the Persistent, wearing navy waterproof pants and a bright red anorak.<
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  “I am Dr. Johannesburg,” he said, holding out a hand. “The senior scientist on board.”

  They shook, and he gestured toward the yellow disks. “If you turned one of those over, you’d discover that the central side is pitted with holes. The holes are lined with cilia. Microorganisms are driven in and dissolved with enzymes. The animal — the local name for them is ‘coaster’ — absorbs whatever is useful. The remainder is driven out.”

  “Why do they have many mouths, instead of one?”

  He shrugged. “The life here relies on repetition; since this world is full of life, we can conclude that the strategy works.”

  “These aren’t the mats you want to study,” Lydia said.

  “Heavens, no! Though they’re interesting in their own right. The problem with all large animals is how to increase surface area. On Earth, and on many Earth-normal planets, the strategy has been to create inner surfaces: lungs, guts, and so on. We and our relatives are tubes. Nutrients go in one end. Waste comes out the other.” He paused.

  “The animals of this planet use another strategy. Rather than becoming tubes, they have become quilted sheets. The result is structural simplicity. But there is nothing simple about their chemistry. Even the ribbons produce a remarkable array of organic chemicals. Mind you, all life — true life, able to maintain itself and reproduce — is chemically complex. Do you have any idea of the number of enzymes a bacterium must use in order to repair its DNA?”

  “No,” said Lydia, afraid that the doctor was going to tell her.

  Instead, he leaned on the railing and looked down at the disks. A school of rust-brown ribbons had joined them, fluttering between and under. At most, the ribbons were two hundred centimeters long, but easy to see in the wonderfully transparent water. “The chemistry of these animals seems unusually complex to me; possibly because I don’t understand it. We haven’t had the time to study any world as thoroughly as we have studied Earth. As a result, much of our work is still taxonomy. We are merely listing the kinds of life we find and making guesses about how they are related. I intend to do more.”