The Year's Best SF 22 # 2004 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  acknowledgment

  Inappropriate Behavior

  THE MECHANO

  THE MAN

  THE MECHANO

  THE MAN

  THE MECHANO

  DR. RHODES

  THE MECHANO

  THE MAN

  THE MECHANO

  DR. RHODES

  THE MECHANO

  MATAREKA WARADI

  THE MECHANO

  MATAREKA WARADI

  THE MECHANO

  start the clock

  The Third party

  The voluntary state

  shiva in shadows

  1. SHIP

  2. PROBE

  3. SHIP

  4. PROBE

  5. SHIP

  6. PROBE

  7. SHIP

  8. PROBE

  9. SHIP

  10. PROBE

  11. SHIP

  12. PROBE

  13. SHIP

  14. PROBE

  15. SHIP

  16. PROBE

  The people of sand and slag

  The clapping Hands of god

  Tourism

  scout’s Honor

  MONDAY

  TUESDAY

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY

  FRIDAY

  SATURDAY

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  TUESDAY

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY

  FRIDAY

  SATURDAY

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  TUESDAY

  Men Are Trouble

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Mother Aegypt

  synthetic serendipity

  Skin Deep

  Delhi

  The Tribes of Bela

  ITEM (1) Extracts from the Notebook of Kohn, Robert Rogers, Colonel, Security Forces

  ITEM (2) From the Written Report of Anna Li, D.Sc., M.D.

  ITEM (3) From the Notebook of Colonel Kohn

  ITEM (4) From the Written Report of Li, Anna M., M.D.

  ITEM (5) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (6) From Doctor Li’s Report

  ITEM (7) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (8) From Dr. Li’s Report

  ITEM (9) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (10) From Dr. Li’s Report

  ITEM (11) Extract from the Bela Shuttleport Log

  ITEM (12) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (13) From Dr. Li’s Report

  ITEM (14) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (15) Extract from a Letter of Eloise Alcerra to Her Mother

  ITEM (16) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (17) From Dr. Li’s Report

  ITEM (18) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (19) From Dr. Li’s Report

  ITEM (20) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (21) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook (continued by Jamal al-Sba’a)

  ITEM (22) From Doctor Li’s Report

  ITEM (23) From a Letter of Eloise Alcerra to Her Mother

  ITEM (24) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook (Kohn speaking)

  ITEM (25) From the Letter of Eloise Alcerra to Her Mother

  ITEM (26) From Colonel Kohn’s Notebook

  ITEM (27) From Dr. Li’s Report

  ITEM (28) From the Letter of Eloise Alcerra (as dictated to Dr. Li)

  ITEM (29) From the Report of Doctor Li

  ITEM (30) From Colonel Kohn’s Second Notebook

  sitka

  Leviathan wept

  The Defenders

  Mayflower II

  Riding the white Bull

  falling star

  The Dragons of summer gulch

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  The ocean of the Blind

  The garden - A Hwarhath science Fictional Romance

  footvote

  JANNETTE

  COLIN

  JANNETTE

  COLIN

  JANNETTE

  sisyphus and the stranger

  Ten sigmas

  Investments

  summation: 2004

  acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following materials:

  ALSO BY GARDNER DOZOIS

  honorable mentions: 2004

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  acknowledgment

  The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Susan Casper, Ellen Datlow, Gordon Van Gelder, Peter Crowther, Nicolas Gevers, David Pringle, Andy Cox, Marty Halpern, Gary Turner, Lou Anders, Eileen Gunn, Nisi Shawl, Mike Resnick, Cory Doctorow, Vernor Vinge, M. John Harrison, Robert E. Howe, Darrell Schweitzer, Susan Marie Groppi, Karen Meisner, Jed Hartman, Richard Freeburn, Patrick Swenson, Bridget McKenna, Marti McKenna, Jay Lake, Deborah Layne, Edward J. McFadden, Sheila Williams, Brian Bieniowski, Trevor Quachri, Jayme Lynn Blascke, Lou Antonelli, Paul Melko, Mark Rudolph, Tehani Croft, Zara Baxter, Allan Price, Andrew Finch, Stuart Barrow, Robbie Matthews, David Hartwell, Warren Lapin, Roelf Goudriaan, Bob Neilson, David Murphy, John O’Neill, Kelly Link, Gavin Grant, Gordon Lilnzer, Gerard Houarner, Guy Hasson, David Lee Summers, Diane L. Walton, Linn Prentis, Vaughne Lee Hansen, Shawna McCarthy, Rich Horton, Mark R. Kelly, Jonathan Strahan, Mark Watson, Michael Swanwick, and special thanks to my own editor, Marc Resnick.

  Thanks are also due to Charles N. Brown, whose magazine Locus (Locus Publications, P.O. Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661. $52 for a one-year subscription [twelve issues] via second class; credit card orders call 510-339-9198) was used as an invaluable reference source throughout the Summation; Locus Online (www.locusmag.com), edited by Mark R. Kelly, has also become a key reference source. Thanks are also due to John Douglas and Warren Lapine of Science Fiction Chronicle (DNA Publications, Inc., P.O. Box 2988, Radford, VA 24143-2988, $45 for a one-year/twelve-issue subscription via second class), which was also used as a reference source throughout.

  Inappropriate Behavior

  PAT MURPHY

  As the story that follows demonstrates, that old movie line “What we have here is a failure to communicate” is likely to be just as true in the future, in spite of all our high-tech communications equipment—in fact, maybe even because of it.

  Pat Murphy lives in San Francisco, where she works for a science museum, the Exploratorium, and edits the Exploratorium Quarterly. Her elegant and incisive stories have appeared throughout the eighties and the nineties (and on into the Oughts) in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Elsewhere, Amazing, Universe, Shadows, Lethal Kisses, Event Horizon, Full Spectrum, and other places. Her story “Rachel in Love,” one of the best-known stories of the eighties, won her the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and the Asimov’s Readers Award in 1988; her novel The Falling Woman won her a second Nebula Award in the same year. Her novella “Bones” later won her a World Fantasy Award, and her collection Points of Departure won her a Philip K. Dick Award. Her stories have appeared in our First, Fifth, Eighth, and Ninth Annual Collections. Her other books include The Shadow Hunter; The City, Not Long After ; Nadya: The Wolf Chronicles; and There and Back Again: by Max Merriwell. Her most recent book is a new novel, Wild Angel, by Mary Maxwell. She writes a science column, with Paul Doherty, for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  THE MECHANO

  There was a man asleep on the sand.

  He shou
ld not be here. It was my island. I had just returned to my mechano and it was time for me to go to work. He should not be here.

  I studied the man through the eyes of my mechano. They were good eyes. They worked very well beneath the water, at depths down to fifteen hundred meters. I had adjusted them for maximum acuity at distances ranging from two inches to five feet. Beyond that, the world was a blur of tropical sunshine and brilliant color. I liked it that way.

  There had been a big storm the night before. One of the coconut palms had blown down, and the beach was littered with driftwood, coconuts, and palm fronds.

  The man didn’t look good. He had a bloody scrape on his cheek, other scrapes on his arms and legs, a smear of blood in his short brown hair. His right leg was marked with bruises colored deep purple and green. He wore an orange life vest, a t-shirt, a pair of shorts, and canvas boat shoes.

  He stirred in his sleep, sighing softly. Startled, I sent the mechano scuttling backward. I stopped a few feet away from him.

  My mechano had a speaker. I tested it and it made a staticky sound. I wondered what I should say to this man.

  The man moved, lifting a hand to rub his eyes. Slowly, he rolled over.

  “Bonjour,” I said through the mechano’s speakers. Maybe he had come from one of the islands of French Polynesia.

  THE MAN

  A sound awakened him—a sort of mechanical squawking.

  Evan Collins could feel the tropical sun beating down on his face, the warm beach sand beneath his hands. His head ached and his mouth was dry. His right leg throbbed with a dull, persistent pain.

  Evan raised a hand to rub his eyes and winced when he brushed against a sand-encrusted scrape on his cheek. When he rolled over onto his back, the throbbing in his leg became a sudden, stabbing pain.

  Wiping away the tears that blurred his vision, he lifted his head and blinked down at his leg. His calf was marked with bloody coral scrapes. Beneath the scrapes were vivid bruises: dark purple telling of injuries beneath the surface of the skin. When he tried to move his leg again, he gasped as the stabbing pain returned.

  He heard the sound again: a mechanical rasping like a radio tuned to static. He turned in the direction of the sound, head aching, eyes dazzled by the sun. A gigantic cockroach was examining him with multifaceted eyes.

  The creature was at least three feet long, with nasty looking mandibles. Its carapace glittered in the sunlight as it stood motionless, staring in his direction.

  Again, the mechanical squawk, coming from the cockroach. This time, the sound was followed by a scratchy voice. “Bonjour,” the cockroach said.

  He had taken two years of French in high school, but he could remember none of it. This must be a dream, he thought, closing his eyes against the glare.

  “Do you speak English?” the scratchy voice asked.

  He opened his eyes. The roach was still there. “Yes,” he rasped through a dry throat.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” the scratchy voice said. “What are you doing here?”

  He looked past the monster, struggling to make sense of his situation. The beach sand was the pure white of pulverized coral. On one side of the beach was a tangle of mangroves. On the inland side, palm trees rose from scrubby undergrowth. The water of the lagoon was pure tropical blue—paler where the coral reef was near the water’s surface; darker where the water was deep. Some hundred yards offshore, he could see the mast of a boat sticking up out of the water. His boat.

  He remembered: he had been heading west toward the Cook Islands when the storm came up. He ran before the wind toward an island that was an unnamed speck on the nautical chart. He had made it over the reef into the lagoon before the surge smashed the boat against a coral head, cracking the hull, swamping the boat, sending him flying overboard to smash into the reef. He didn’t remember breaking his leg and struggling through the surf to the beach.

  “Thirsty,” he rasped through dry lips. “Very thirsty. Please help me.”

  He closed his eyes against the dazzling sunlight and heard the sound of metal sliding against metal as the roach walked away. He wondered if the monster was leaving him to die.

  A few minutes later, he heard the sound of the roach returning. He opened his eyes. The cockroach stood beside him, holding a coconut in its mandibles. As he watched, the roach squeezed, and the point of each mandible pierced the outer husk, neatly puncturing the nut in two places.

  Still gripping the coconut, the cockroach took a step toward him, opened its mandibles, and dropped the nut beside him. A thin trickle of coconut milk wet the sand.

  “You can drink,” said the cockroach.

  He picked up the coconut, pressed his lips to the hole in the shaggy husk, and tipped it back. The coconut milk was warm and sweet and wet. He drank greedily.

  By the time he had finished the milk, the roach was back with another coconut. It pierced the shell before dropping the nut.

  The roach brought him two more coconuts, piercing each one neatly and dropping it beside Evan. It stood and watched him drink.

  “I think my leg is broken,” Evan murmured.

  The roach said nothing.

  He closed his eyes against the glare of the sun. Many years before, as an undergraduate, he had taken a psychology course on the psychosocial aspects of emergencies and disasters. A guest speaker, a member of a search-and-rescue team, had talked about how people had managed to stay alive in terrible situations—and had described the mental attitude that helped those people survive. The search-and-rescue expert had said that survivors just kept on trying, doing whatever they could. “Step by step,” he had said. “That’s the approach to take. Don’t try to find the answer to everything at once. Remember, life by the yard is hard, but by the inch, it’s a cinch.”

  Evan thought about what he could do right away to help increase his chances of survival. “I need to get out of the sun,” he muttered. “I need food, water, medical supplies.”

  There were so many things he needed to do. He had to find something that he could use to splint his leg. He had to figure out a way to signal for help. He needed to find water. So many things he had to do.

  He fell asleep.

  THE MECHANO

  It was restful under the ocean. The light that filtered down from above was dim and blue. The world around me was all shades of blue—dark and light. I liked it on the ocean floor.

  I had left the man asleep on the sand. But first, I was helpful. I always try hard to be helpful.

  He had said he had to get out of the sun. So I had gathered palm fronds from the beach and stuck them in the sand where they would shade him. He had said he needed food and water and medical supplies. So I went to his sailboat and found some cans of food and a can opener and bottles of water and a first-aid kit. I carried all that stuff up from the sunken boat and left it on the beach beside him.

  Then I headed for deep water. I had work to do.

  I lifted my legs high as I walked, moving slowly to avoid stirring up the loose silt that covered the ocean bottom. My temperature sensors tested the currents—warm where they welled up from volcanic cracks below. My chemical sensors tested the water; it tasted of sulfides, a familiar musty flavor.

  I picked my way through the silt to reach my favorite spot. There was no silt here: a rocky portion of the ocean bottom had pushed up. There was a great tall chimney, where a hydrothermal vent brought up hot water from deep in the earth. Over the centuries, the hot water had deposited sulfides of copper, zinc, lead, gold, silver, and other metals, forming the chimney.

  The mining company had mined for gold not far from here. They had followed a rich vein of ore until it gave out. Then they gave up. I had sniffed around their tailings, but then I had found a spot near the chimney that was much more promising. I had spent my last few visits to this spot gnawing on the chimney and breaking loose big chunks of rock. Now I could do what I liked best—sort through those rocks. I tasted each one with my chemical sensors to find the rocks that were r
ichest in gold and silver. Those I stacked up in a neat pile.

  It was wonderful work. I liked to sort things. I was very good at it. At home, I liked to sort all my books by color: putting the red ones on one shelf, the blue ones on another, the black ones on another.

  I worked until the light began growing dimmer, a sign that the sun was sinking low in the sky. I choose the best of the rocks and picked it up in the mechano’s mandibles. Then I headed back to the island.

  I made my way up a long slope to reach the shallow waters where the coral reef grew. There, the bottom was sandy and I could walk quickly without stirring up silt. Schools of brightly colored fish swam above me. The fish darted here and there, fleeing from me. They moved too quickly, I thought. I liked it better in the deep blue waters. I passed the man’s sailboat, wedged between two coral heads.

  I came out of the water on the side of the beach near the mangroves. As I emerged from the water, the crabs hurried back into their holes in the sand.

  I placed the rock beside one of the burrows. On my first day on the island, I had noticed that the crabs all seemed to want the burrow that one crab had dug beside a rock. So I started bringing rocks for the other crabs.

  There were now rocks beside thirty-two crab burrows. I had been on the island for thirty-two days and I had brought the crabs one rock each day. I was very helpful. I thought it was appropriate to bring rocks for the crabs.

  If the man hadn’t been on the island, I would have stayed and watched until the crabs came out again. I liked to watch the crabs. But I wanted to find out what the man was doing, so I didn’t wait for the crabs.

  I headed up the beach to where I had left the man. He was no longer in his spot on the sand. I could see a track in the sand where he dragged his leg.

  I followed the track and trudged through the sand. The man was asleep in the shade of a palm tree. He was using his life jacket as a pillow. He had wrapped the water bottles and the cans of food and the first-aid kit in his t-shirt and dragged them along with him.

  He moved in his sleep, shifting restlessly. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me with wide, wild eyes.