The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "There you go," said the Supercargo, shivering. "Now you can say you've seen it. Oh, no pictures, please. You don't want to get me into trouble."

  "We wouldn't dream of it."

  Eddie teetered, patting at his wayward hair. The aliens stood like zoo visitors, looking into a naked and featureless cell where something huddled on the floor: a dark, fibrous, purplish lump like a hundred-pound hunk of horsemeat. It was fuzzy in outline, as if not securely fixed in these particular dimensions, and had four blunt extrusions. A convoluted sheet of paler tissue covered some of the main lump, like a skein of fat over a slab of steak.

  "Is it really right next door?" asked Grace, casually.

  "I suppose," said Eddie. "I never thought about it." His eyes went unfocused as he checked the Knob's internal architecture, and he nodded. "Yeah, actually it is. Shit, I never knew that—" He was shivering more strongly.

  "It looks as if its been skinned alive, filleted, and had its arms and legs cut off," breathed Orlando.

  "And that could be its brain," whispered Grace. "It looks kind of like a cerebral cortex, unfolded out of someone's skull."

  "I don't know why you're whispering," said Eddie. He'd started to pace up and down, flexing his long, delicate hands, as if in nervous impatience. "It can't hear you. Hey, you don't know what they're meant to look like. You're anthropomorphizing. It could be a handsome, happy whatsit, for all you know."

  "We don't anthropomorphize," objected Grace. "We're aliens."

  Eddie groaned a little. "Oh, have it your own way, a different word. You're thinking like it's a person. It isn't."

  There's something in every human heart that delights in horrors: Orlando and Grace were not immune. They pored over the creature on the other side of the window, fascinated and seduced. They knew that Eddie was lying for his own comfort. Almost without a doubt, the thing had once been human. Whatever lies the government told, this goose that laid the golden eggs was almost certainly someone who had made a transit, and failed to return intact… But from where had it fallen, into this pit? From where? Where had it been, the lone voyager to that land of plenty?

  "I can't believe they really keep it here," muttered Orlando. "I thought that was just Spacer bullshit."

  "Where else?" inquired Eddie, sarcastically. "In the Pentagon basement? Give me a break. It's incre-credibly weird and unbelievably d-dangerous."

  Now the creature was moving. It had begun to shudder and squirm across the floor of the cell, silently giving every sign of anguish and terror. "That's milking-time behavior," hissed Eddie. "Now you'll see something, watch, this is it—" But he seemed distracted. A flush had gathered around his eyes and nose, he was smiling strangely and breathing hard.

  A section of the cell wall slid aside, revealing a recess set with a pair of waldo rings. Then the government arrived, in the form of two heavy-built robotic hands that reached into the chamber. The alien's movement was now clearly an attempt to reach those hands. As soon as it was close, one of the big chunky mitts got a lock on a stubby tentacle, while the other, grotesquely, delved and disappeared into a cleft that had opened in the dark raw flesh. The creature jerked and writhed in pain, shuddering in that rough grip with an awful, sexual-seeming submission. The buried hand reappeared, full of something that squeezed between the fingers like a thick silvery goo, like liquid mercury. The robot arm retracted out of the cell and returned empty to delve again. Orlando and Grace watched this process happen five times, five greedy fistfuls (with Eddie's breath coming in gasps beside them). Then the robot hands vanished, and the cell wall closed up again.

  "Wow, that was gross," said Orlando. "Thanks a million, Eddie."

  "But it wants to be milked," whispered Eddie, still off on his own track. "It wants that to happen. Like the scorpion. It has to obey its nature."

  "Was that q-bits?" asked Grace, trying to sound unmoved. "Or the helium?"

  "Yeah," said Eddie, blinking and mopping his brow with the filigree scarf. "They get helium, it's half the earth's supply now. An' decoherence resistant particles for building q-bits. It saves pollution, little children get clean water, whoo — "

  He pulled himself together. "Shit, I don't know. The goop goes straight back to Earth, all automated. I only work here. C'mon. Got to take you back."

  The journey out was the same as the journey in, except that Eddie's mood had taken a severe downturn. The aliens were silent too. He parted from them at his office door. "Catch you later," he said, as he slunk into privacy.

  They didn't fancy their turned-over cabin, so they made for the saloon.

  It was late afternoon by standard time, and the dank, icy bar was quiet, empty except for the hardcore of alcoholics and gamblers who lurked here from happy hour to happy hour. A couple of the support staff were beating up a recalcitrant food machine. The morbidly obese lady in the powerchair, who wore her hair side-parted in a fall of golden waves, was acting as banker at one of the autotables. (The aliens, who were crazy about Hollywood, knew her as Lakey.) The tall, gangly bloke with the visor—whom they called Blind Pew—looked up to stare, from the band of gleaming darkness where his eyes had been. He said, "Twist," and returned his attention to the game. The aliens got beer tubes and installed themselves at a table near the games consoles—which nobody played, because they required Earth currency credit, and the Deep Spacers didn't have that kind of money.

  "Woooeee," breathed Orlando, finally. "Whaaat?"

  "My God!"

  "Now I understand why they insist it's an alien."

  "The gateway to Eldorado," babbled Grace. "My god, I thought they… why don't they… You'd think they'd be doing something — "

  "You mean, why isn't the International Government investigating the thing? Because they daren't, Grace. They're junkies. They're totally dependent. They daren't do anything that might stop the flow."

  In the close to four hundred years since spaceflight got started, the human race had never got beyond orbital tourism, government science stations and wretched, hand-to-mouth mining operations in the Belt. The discovery of nonlocal travel had made a huge difference; but the catch was that so far only a conscious human being could make a Buonarotti transit. You could take what you could carry, as long as it didn't contain a processor, and that was all. Hence the Lottery, which had been set up out here, as far from Earth as possible in case of unforseen space-time disasters. The government was handing out cheap survey stakes in the galactic arm to anyone prepared to come to the Kuiper Belt. You got the rights to a portfolio of data (there were programs that would advise you how to make up your package) and the chance that your claim would turn up the spectral signature of an Earthtype, good atmosphere, viable planet—the 4-space coordinates of paydirt.

  Then you had to check it out: lie down in a Buonarotti couch in the transit lounge, with your little outfit of grave-goods, and go you knew not where.

  Prospectors went missing for months; prospectors came back dead, or mutilated, or deathly sick. Just often enough some Spacer came back safe, the proud owner of a prime development site: rich enough, even after selling it at a considerable discount, to pay the medical bills and go home to Earth in fabulous style. But once, once, back in the early days, someone or something had materialized in the transit lounge bearing not merely information, but treasure…

  Orlando and Grace had come out on the superfast advanced-fusion Slingshot, which made the journey in nine months these days, if the orbital configuration was right. (The harvest from the thing in the Knob traveled faster; it didn't need life-support and could stand a lot more gs.) They'd known they'd be stuck for a year, whether their numbers came up or not, and then face another six months for the homeward trip. They'd known the Lottery was meant for redundant Deep Spacers — kind of a scattergun pension fund for the human debris of the conventional space age. But they had seen a window of bold, dazzling opportunity and decided it was worth the risk.

  They'd thought it out. They'd taken a government loan-grant, they'd brought thei
r vitamins, and paid the exorbitant supplement for the freight of the bikes. (They'd done the research, they knew that squeeze-suits were just prosthetic, and you had to do real exercise to save your skeleton.) They weren't crazy. They'd had no intention of risking an actual transit themselves. The plan had been that they would get some good coordinates and sell them to a development consortium (you were allowed to do that, and there were plenty, hovering like vultures). The consortium could hire a Deep Spacer for the perilous test-trip, and Orlando and Grace would still be taking home a very nice slice. But they'd been on the Kuiper Belt for nine months, watching the survey screens, and their stake had been coming up stone-empty. Nothing but gas giants, hot rocks, cold rocks. The loss of the bikes had been the last straw. Just a couple of hours ago they'd been looking at crawling home from their great adventure three years older, with rotten bones, and in hideous government debt for life.

  Now they had something to take to market!

  It was big. It was very big…

  "You know," said Orlando, "When we found the bikes gone, I was going to suggest we offer to fuck Eddie's brains out. I mean, he likes us. Maybe he would have twisted the Lottery AFs arm, switched us to a better stake — "

  They looked at each other and laughed, eyes bright, slightly hysterical.

  The arrival of the tourists hadn't caused a stir. When Jack Solo and Draco Ko-jima made an entrance, looking mean, the inevitable molls in tow, all the barflies came to attention. The aliens felt the tremor and saw the reason. These were the Panhandle big boys, uncontested top bullies. But Jack and Draco were arch-rivals. They hated each other; what were they doing together? Orlando and Grace hunched down in their seats, lowered their eyes, and wondered who was in trouble. Murderous violence was not at all uncommon, but they didn't have to worry. It was gang warfare, and you were okay as long as you stayed out of the line of fire.

  To their horror, Draco and Jack headed straight for the games consoles curve. With one accord, they hauled out the suction chairs facing the aliens and sat down. Jack's scrawny girlfriend, Anni-mah, adopted her habitual bizarre pose, crouched at her boyfriend's feet. Draco's chunky babe, her bosoms projected ahead of her by awesome pecs and fantastic lats, stood at his shoulder, her oversized blue eyes blank, her little mouth pursed in its customary sugar-smile.

  When they'd first encountered the molls, Orlando and Grace had thought they were real people, with strange habits and poor taste in body mods. Of course they were bots, insubstantial software projections. Strictly speaking, they were contraband, because you weren't supposed to use fx generators —or any kind of personal digital devices—on board the Panhandle. But nobody was going to make an issue of it with these two —certainly not Eddie Supercargo.

  Jack Solo was a gray-haired, wiry little man, a veteran pilot of the spaceways, who must have fought the damage stubbornly and hard. He showed no signs of Deep Space mutilation, no prosthetic walking frame or deep-vein thrombosis amputations, and he still had normal vision. But then you looked into his eyes, and you knew he hadn't got off lightly. He habitually wore a data glove that had seen better days, and a tube-festooned, battered drysuit—pilot undress, that he sported as a badge of rank. Draco Fujima was something very different—a fleshy, soft-faced young man, with a squeeze-suit under his streamlined, expensive, rad-proof jumper. You could tell at once he hadn't been in space for long. Like Grace and Orlando he was just passing through. He was a time-expired UN remote-control peacekeeper, out of the military at sixteen; who had taken the free Lottery option as part of his severance pay.

  This was one tourist the Spacers treated with extreme respect. Though crazy Jack might knife you over a menu choice, he probably counted his kills in single figures. Draco's lethal record was official and seriously off the scale.

  No one messes with a playpen soldier.

  The big boys stared, with radiant contempt. The aliens attempted to radiate the cynical, relaxed confidence that might get them through this alive.

  "You went to see Eddie today," said Jack.

  "How d'you know that?" demanded Orlando.

  Draco leaned forward. "We have our ways. We don't like you, so we always know where you are. Why did you go to see Eddie?"

  "Our bicycles," explained Grace, grinning. "They've been stolen. Do you wise guys happen to know anything about that heist?"

  Orlando kicked her under the table: there's such a thing as being too relaxed.

  Jack jumped halfway across the table, like a wild-eyed Jack-in-a-Box. "Listen, cunts," he snapped, the dataglove twitching. "Fuck the bicycles, we don't like the relationship. You two and Eddie, we see it and we don't like it. You're going to tell us what the fuck's going on."

  "He likes us," said Grace. "Can we help that?"

  "It's called empathy," explained Orlando, getting braver. "It might seem like psychic powers, but it's natural to us. You just don't have the wiring."

  Jack grabbed Orlando by the throat and flicked the wrist of his other, gloved hand so that a knife appeared there, a sleek slender blade, gleaming against Orlando's pale throat. Anni-mah whined, "Oh please don't hurt him." Jack kept his eyes fixed on Orlando and his grip on the jumper while he reached down to smack his bot around her virtual chops with the gloved hand that held the knife.

  He made the smack look real, with practiced ease.

  "Oh yes, oh, hit me big boy," whimpered Anni-mah. "Oh, harder, please—"

  Draco's babe just stood there; she was the strong, silent type.

  "Look," said Grace, coolly, "when you've finished giving yourself the handjob… you've got it all wrong. We made friends with Eddie by accident, it doesn't mean anything. We're just aliens abroad."

  "Shut up, cunt," said Jack. "You are not fucking aliens, that's just a story, and I'm talking to your boyfriend."

  Draco laughed. Jack slowly released Orlando, glaring all the time.

  "Listen, fuckface," said Orlando, straightening his jumper with dignity. "We are aliens in relation to you, you pathetic old-fashioned machismo merchant, because you haven't a cat in hell's chance of understanding where we're coming from. Now do you get it? And by the way, I'm the cunt, thank you very much."

  Anyone in the bar who feared the sight of blood had sneaked out. The hardcore remained, riveted. It was strange, and not totally unpleasant, to be the object of so much attention. They felt as if getting senselessly bullied by Jack and Draco was some kind of initiation ceremony, Maybe now, at last, the tourists would be accepted.

  Jack sat back. The knife had a handle bound in fine-grained blond leather, and the aliens knew the story about where this "leather" had come from. He toyed with his weapon, smiling secretly, then brought the point down so that it sank, under gentle pressure, deep into the ceramic tabletop. The aliens thought not so much of their vulnerable flesh as of the thin shell of the Pan, made of the same stuff as the table, and the cold, greedy, airless dark that would rush in —

  "You're not Spacers," said Jack, calm and affable. "You don't belong here."

  Draco tired of taking the back seat. "In the center of the Knob," he announced, "there is a cell, guarded by fanatical killer AIs. What's in that cell is a cold brutal indictment of the inhumanities perpetrated around the globe by those who claim to be our leaders. We should be listening, we should be feeding on that pain, we should be turning the degraded, ripped and slathered flesh into kills, into respect, the respect that's due to the stand-up guys, good men who have protected humanity. We know, we know that we deserve better than this and YOU know where we can get it-"

  "Don't listen to him," Jack broke in. "He knows fuck. The thing in that cell came from NGC 1999, a star-nursery in the constellation of Orion. Everyone knows that, but I'm the only one who knows it came for me. Orion has been sacred to all the world's ancient religions, for tens of thousands of years. Nobody knew why, until the space telescopes found out that the new stars in that Bok Globule are just one hundred thousand years old. Now do you get it, fuckface, those stars are the same age as homo sa
piens. The thing in that cell is human consciousness, twisted back on itself through the improbability dimension. We keep it in chains, for our torment, but I know. I know, you see. Out there, fifteen hundred light years away, is the source of all thought, all science, and from thence, from that magic explosion of cosmic jizin, my God has come to find me, has come for me."

  The knife went in and out of the tabletop. Anni-mah whimpered, "Don't hit me" or maybe, "Please hit me," but Jack's eyes were calm. The aliens realized, slightly awed, that the old space pilot was perfectly in control. This was his normal state of mind.

  "Fifteen is five times three. It's written in the Great Pyramid."

  "I h-heard about that," Grace nodded, eagerly. "It's the nebula that looks like a thingy, and the ancient Egyptians believed it was, uh, that Orion was Osiris — "

  "The Eygptians knew something, girlie. They knew the cosmos was created out of God's own, lonely lovejuice. But I'm the anointed, I'm the chosen one."

  "It's made of anti-information," broke in Draco, deciding to up the ante. "Does that satisfy you? Does that scare you enough? Why d'you think they keep it here, with scum like these deadbeats, where I don't belong? Why d'you think they lured me out here? They say I'm morally ambivalent, fucking shrinks, they'll say anything, you should try what I do next. They want me to feel bad, never get the good stuff, There's a conspiracy behind the conspiracy—"

  "So you'll tell us," said Jack. "You'll tell us anything you find out."

  "From that limp-wrist, fudge-packing, desk-flying government pansy—" Orlando, Grace noticed, was nudging her in the ribs. She nodded fractionally, and they slid their chairs. The climax had safely passed; they could escape. "Of course, of course we will. Er, we have to go now—" Anni-mah cringed and shivered. Draco's babe went on standing there.