The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007 Page 3

  Bianca looked out at it, wondering again what kept Encantada and Finisterra so close; but then the view was taken away and they were coming down between the trees, into a shady, ivy-filled creekbed somewhere not far from Encantada’s western edge. There was another anemopter already there, and a pair of aerial tugs—and a whitish mass that dwarfed all of these, sheets and ribbons of pale material hanging from the branches and draped over the ivy, folds of it damming the little stream.

  With an audible splash, the anemopter set down, the ramps lowered, and Bianca stepped off into cold ankle-deep water that made her glad of her knee-high boots. Fry followed, gingerly.

  “You!” called Valadez, pointing at Fry from the deck of the other anemopter. “Come here. Miss Nazario—I’d like you to have a look at that balloon.”

  “Balloon?”

  Valadez gestured impatiently downstream. Suddenly Bianca saw the white material for the shredded, deflated gasbag it was; and saw, too, that there was a basket attached to it, lying on its side, partially submerged in the middle of the stream. Ismaíl was standing over it, waving.

  Bianca splashed over to the basket. It actually was a basket, two meters across and a meter and a half high, woven from strips of something like bamboo or rattan. The gasbag—this was obvious, once Bianca saw it up close—had been made from one of the ballonets of a zaratán, a zaratán younger and smaller even than the one Bianca had seen killed; it had been tanned, but inexpertly, and by someone without access to the sort of industrial equipment the poachers used.

  Bianca wondered about the way the gasbag was torn up. The tissues of the zaratánes, she knew, were very strong. A hydrogen explosion?

  “Make want fly got very bad,” Ismaíl commented, as Bianca came around to the open side of the basket.

  “They certainly did,” she said.

  In the basket there were only some wool blankets and some empty leather waterbags, probably used both for drinking water and for ballast. The lines used to control the vent flaps were all tangled together, and tangled, too, with the lines that secured the gasbag to the basket, but Bianca could guess how they had worked. No stove. It seemed to have been a pure hydrogen balloon; and why not, she thought, with all the hydrogen anyone could want free from the nearest zaratán’s vent valves?

  “Where did it come from?” she asked.

  Ismaíl rippled his arms in a way that Bianca guessed was meant to be an imitation of a human shrug. One of his eyes glanced downstream.

  Bianca fingered the material of the basket: tough, woody fiber. Tropical, from a climate warmer than Encantada’s. She followed Ismaíl’s glance. The trees hid the western horizon, but she knew, if she could see beyond them, what would be there.

  Aloud, she said, “Finisterra.”

  She splashed back to the anemopters. Valadez’s hatch was open.

  “I’m telling you,” Fry was saying, “I don’t know her!”

  “Fuck off, Fry,” Valadez said as Bianca stepped into the cabin. “Look at her ID.”

  The her in question was a young woman with short black hair and sallow skin, wearing tan off-world cottons like Fry’s under a colorful homespun serape; and at first Bianca was not sure the woman was alive, because the man next to her on Valadez’s floor, also in homespun, was clearly dead, his eyes half-lidded, his olive skin gone muddy gray.

  The contents of their pockets were spread out on a low table. As Bianca was taking in the scene, Fry bent down and picked up a Consilium-style ID tag.

  “‘Edith Dinh,’” he read. He tossed the tag back and looked at Valadez. “So?”

  “‘Edith Dinh, Consilium Ethnological Service,’” Valadez growled. “Issued Shawwal ’43. You were here with the Ecological Service from Rajab ’42 to Muharram ’46. Look again!”

  Fry turned away.

  “All right!” he said. “Maybe—maybe I met her once or twice.”

  “So,” said Valadez. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Who the hell is she? And what’s she doing here?”

  “She’s …” Fry glanced at the woman and then quickly looked away. “I don’t know. I think she was a population biologist or something. There was a group working with the, you know, the natives—”

  “There aren’t any natives on Sky,” said Valadez. He prodded the dead man with the toe of his boot. “You mean these cabrónes?”

  Fry nodded. “They had this ‘sustainable development’ program going—farming, forestry. Teaching them how to live on Finisterra without killing it.”

  Valadez looked skeptical. “If the Consilium wanted to stop them from killing Finisterra, why didn’t they just send in the wardens?”

  “Interdepartmental politics. The zaratánes were EcoServ’s responsibility; the n-—I mean, the inhabitants were EthServ’s.” Fry shrugged. “You know the wardens. They’d have taken bribes from anyone who could afford it and shot the rest.”

  “Damn right I know the wardens.” Valadez scowled. “So instead EthServ sent in these do-gooders to teach them to make balloons?”

  Fry shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Miss Nazario? Tell me about that balloon.”

  “It’s a hydrogen balloon, I think. Probably filled from some zaratán’s external vents.” She shrugged. “It looks like the sort of thing I’d expect someone living out here to build, if that’s what you mean.”

  Valadez nodded.

  “But,” Bianca added, “I can’t tell you why it crashed.”

  Valadez snorted. “I don’t need you to tell me that,” he said. “It crashed because we shot it down.” Pitching his voice for the anemopter’s communication system, he called out, “Ismaíl!”

  Bianca tried to keep the shock from showing on her face, and after a moment she had regained her composure. You knew they were criminals when you took their money, she told herself.

  The firija’s eyes came around the edge of the doorway.

  “Yes?”

  “Tell the tug crews to pack that thing up,” said Valadez. “Every piece, every scrap. Pack it up and drop it into clear air.”

  The alien’s walking machine clambered into the cabin. Its legs bent briefly, making a little bob like a curtsey.

  “Yes.” Ismaíl gestured at the bodies of the dead man and the unconscious woman. Several of the firija’s eyes met Valadez’s. “These two what do?” he asked.

  “Them, too,” said Valadez. “Lash them into the basket.”

  The firija made another bob and started to bend down to pick them up.

  Bianca looked down at the two bodies, both of them, the dead man and the unconscious woman, looking small and thin and vulnerable. She glanced at Fry, whose eyes were fixed on the floor, his lips pressed together in a thin line.

  Then she looked over at Valadez, who was methodically sweeping the balloonists’ effects into a pile, as if neither Bianca nor Fry was present.

  “No,” she said.

  Ismaíl stopped and straightened up.

  “What?” said Valadez.

  “No,” Bianca repeated.

  “You want her bringing the wardens down on us?” Valadez demanded.

  “That’s murder, Mr. Valadez,” Bianca said. “I won’t be a party to it.”

  The poacher’s eyes narrowed. He gestured at the dead man.

  “You’re already an accessory,” he said.

  “After the fact,” Bianca replied evenly. She kept her eyes on Valadez.

  The poacher looked at the ceiling. “Fuck your mother,” he muttered. He looked down at the two bodies, and at Ismaíl, and then over at Bianca. He sighed heavily.

  “All right,” he said to the firija. “Take the live one back to the camp. Secure a bungalow, one of the ones out by the edge”—he glanced at Bianca—“and lock her in it. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Ismaíl. “Dead one what do?”

  Valadez looked at Bianca again. “The dead one,” he said, “goes in the basket.”

  Bianca looked at the dead man again, wondering what bravery
or madness had brought him aboard that fragile balloon, and wondering what he would have thought if he had known that the voyage would end this way, with his body tumbling down into the deep air. She supposed he must have known there was a chance of it.

  After a moment, she nodded, once.

  “Right,” said Valadez. “Now get back to work, damn it.”

  6. THE CITY OF THE DEAD

  The anemopter that brought Bianca and Fry over the ridge took them back. Fry was silent, hunched, his elbows on his knees, staring at nothing. What fear or guilt was going through his mind, Bianca couldn’t guess.

  After a little while she stopped watching him. She thought about the Finisterran balloon, so simple, so fragile, making her father’s wood-and-silk craft look as sophisticated as the Lupita Jeréz. She took out her pocket system, sketched a simple globe and basket, then erased them.

  Make want fly very bad, Ismaíl the firija had said. Why?

  Bianca undid the erasure, bringing her sketch back. She drew the spherical balloon out into a blunt torpedo, round at the nose, tapering to a point behind. Added fins. An arrangement of pulleys and levers, allowing them to be controlled from the basket. A propeller, powered by—she had to think for a little while—by an alcohol-fueled engine, carved from zaratán bones … .

  The anemopter was landing. Bianca sighed and again erased the design.

  The firija guard outside Edith Dinh’s bungalow didn’t seem to speak Arabic or Spanish, or for that matter any human language at all. Bianca wondered if the choice was deliberate, the guard chosen by Valadez as a way of keeping a kind of solitary confinement.

  Or was the guard Valadez’s choice at all? she wondered suddenly. Looking at the meter-long weapon cradled in the alien’s furred arms, she shivered.

  Then she squared her shoulders and approached the bungalow. Wordlessly, she waved the valise she was carrying, as if by it her reasons for being there were made customary and obvious.

  The alien said something in its own fluting language—whether a reply to her, or a request for instructions from some unseen listener, Bianca couldn’t tell. Either those instructions were to let her pass, apparently, or by being seen in Valadez’s company she had acquired some sort of reflected authority; because the firija lifted its weapon and, as the bungalow’s outer door slid open, motioned for her to enter. The inner door was already open.

  “¿Hola?” Bianca called out, tentatively. Immediately she felt like an idiot.

  But the answer came:

  “Aquí.”

  The interior layout of the bungalow was the same as Bianca’s. The voice came from the sitting room. Bianca found Dinh there, still wearing the clothes she’d had on when they found her, sitting with her knees drawn up, staring out the east window into the sky. The east was dark with rain clouds, and far below, Bianca could see flashes of lightning.

  “Salaam aleikum,” said Bianca, taking refuge in the formality of the Arabic.

  “Aleikum as-salaam,” Dinh replied. She glanced briefly at Bianca and looked away; then looked back again. In a Spanish that was somewhere between Valadez’s strange accent and the mechanical fluency of Fry’s language module, she said, “You’re not from Finisterra.”

  “No,” said Bianca, giving up on the Arabic. “I’m from Rio Pícaro—from Earth. My name is Nazario, Bianca Nazario y Arenas.”

  “Edith Dinh.”

  Dinh stood up. There was an awkward moment, where Bianca was not sure whether to bow or curtsey or give Dinh her hand. She settled for proffering the valise.

  “I brought you some things,” she said. “Clothes, toiletries.”

  Dinh looked surprised. “Thanks,” she said, taking the valise and looking inside.

  “Are they feeding you? I could bring you some food.”

  “The kitchen still works,” said Dinh. She held up a white packet. “And these?”

  “Sanitary napkins,” said Bianca.

  “Sanitary … ?” Color rose to Dinh’s face. “Oh. That’s all right. I’ve got implants.” She dropped the packet back in the valise and closed it.

  Bianca looked away, feeling her own cheeks blush in turn. Damned extrañados, she thought. “I’d better—” be going, she started to say.

  “Please—” said Dinh.

  The older woman and the younger stood there for a moment, looking at each other. Bianca suddenly wondered what impulse had brought her here, whether curiosity or Christian charity or simply a moment of loneliness, weakness. Of course she’d had to stop Valadez from killing the girl, but this was clearly a mistake.

  “Sit,” Dinh said. “Let me get you something. Tea? Coffee?”

  “I—all right.” Bianca sat, slowly, perching on the edge of one of the too-soft extrañado couches. “Coffee,” she said.

  The coffee was very dark, sweeter than Bianca liked it, flavored with something like condensed milk. She was glad to have it, regardless, glad to have something to look at and something to occupy her hands.

  “You don’t look like a poacher,” Dinh said.

  “I’m an aeronautical engineer,” Bianca said. “I’m doing some work for them.” She looked down at her coffee, took a sip, and looked up. “What about you? Fry said you’re a biologist of some kind. What were you doing in that balloon?”

  She couldn’t tell whether the mention of Fry’s name had registered, but Dinh’s mouth went thin. She glanced out the west window.

  Bianca followed her glance and saw the guard, slumped in its walker, watching the two women with one eye each. She wondered again whether Valadez was really running things, and then whether the firija’s ignorance of human language was real or feigned—and whether, even if it was real, someone less ignorant might be watching and listening, unseen.

  Then she shook her head and looked back at Dinh, waiting.

  “Finisterra’s falling,” Dinh said eventually. “Dying, maybe. It’s too big; it’s losing lift. It’s fallen more than fifty meters in the last year alone.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Bianca said. “The lift-to-weight ratio of an aerostat depends on the ratio of volume to surface area. A larger zaratán should be more efficient, not less. And even if it does lose lift, it should only fall until it reaches a new equilibrium.”

  “It’s not a machine,” Dinh said. “It’s a living creature.”

  Bianca shrugged. “Maybe it’s old age, then,” she said. “Everything has to die sometime.”

  “Not like this,” Dinh said. She set down her coffee and turned to face Bianca fully. “Look. We don’t know who built Sky, or how long ago, but it’s obviously artificial. A gas giant with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere? That doesn’t happen. And the Earthlike biology—the zaratánes are DNA-based, did you know that? The whole place is astronomically unlikely; if the Phenomenological Service had its way, they’d just quarantine the entire system, and damn Sky and everybody on it.

  “The archipelago ecology is as artificial as everything else. Whoever designed it must have been very good; posthuman, probably, maybe even postsingularity. It’s a robust equilibrium, full of feedback mechanisms, ways to correct itself. But we, us ordinary humans and human-equivalents, we’ve”—she made a helpless gesture—“fucked it up. You know why Encantada’s stayed here so long? Breeding, that’s why … or maybe ‘pollination’ would be a better way to put it … .”

  She looked over at Bianca.

  “The death of an old zaratán like Finisterra should be balanced by the birth of dozens, hundreds. But you, those bastards you work for, you’ve killed them all.”

  Bianca let the implication of complicity slide. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s hear your plan.”

  “What?”

  “Your plan,” Bianca repeated. “For Finisterra. How are you going to save it?”

  Dinh stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. She stood up and went to the east window. Beyond the sheet of rain that now poured down the window, the sky was deep mauve shading to indigo, relieved
only by the lightning that sparked in the deep and played across the fins of the distant zaratánes of the archipelago’s outer reaches. Dinh put her palm flat against the diamond pane.

  “I can’t save Finisterra,” she said quietly. “I just want to stop you hijos de puta from doing this again.”

  Now Bianca was stung. “Hija de puta, yourself,” she said. “You’re killing them, too. Killing them and making balloons out of them, how is that better?”

  Dinh turned back. “One zaratán the size of the one they’re slaughtering out there right now would keep the Finisterrans in balloons for a hundred years,” she said. “The only way to save the archipelago is to make the zaratánes more valuable alive than dead—and the only value a live zaratán has, on Sky, is as living space.”

  “You’re trying to get the Finisterrans to colonize the other zaratánes?” Bianca asked. “But why should they? What’s in it for them?”

  “I told you,” Dinh said. “Finisterra’s dying.” She looked out the window, down into the depths of the storm, both hands pressed against the glass. “Do you know how falling into Sky kills you, Bianca? First, there’s the pressure. On the slopes of Finisterra, where the people live, it’s a little more than a thousand millibars. Five kilometers down, under Finisterra’s keel, it’s double that. At two thousand millibars you can still breathe the air. At three thousand, nitrogen narcosis sets in—‘rapture of the deep,’ they used to call it. At four thousand, the partial pressure of oxygen alone is enough to make your lungs bleed.”

  She stepped away from the window and looked at Bianca.

  “But you’ll never live to suffer that,” she said. “Because of the heat. Every thousand meters the average temperature rises six or seven degrees. Here it’s about fifteen. Under Finisterra’s keel it’s closer to fifty. Twenty kilometers down, the air is hot enough to boil water.”

  Bianca met her gaze steadily. “I can think of worse ways to die,” she said.