The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (121 page)

I could feel the dinosaur calling to me, even so, through the appalling cold of Titan’s snows and the void of fifty or a hundred million years. And the entwined memory of my son, sacrificed for nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

“Those are the classic guesses – most of them wrong.” The Director flicked his finger; the display went to blank gray. “We still have no idea why the galaxy, indeed the universe as a whole, is quiet. Why the stars are still shining, spilling out their colossal energy resources, when intelligence should be collecting it. Calculations you’re all familiar with prove that a single intelligent species arising anywhere in the galaxy within the last billion years would by now have colonized all its trillion stars and associated bodies, turned the sky black with Matrioshka shells – or perhaps obliterated the stars in vast, wasteful wars.”

I pricked up my ears. A political subtext? Perhaps not; maybe our director was just a tone-deaf drone. I glanced around; several people near me had dropped their eyes, more than one held fists clenched tight. Okay.

“One of the equally classic Great Filters must screen out potential intelligent life and leave the heavens exactly as they’d have to be if there is no life at all out there. No intelligent, starfaring life, anyway.

“So now we’re faced with a new paradox. Fermi remains unanswered – and yet we have this old vehicle made by beings not of our own species, but apparently related. The likelihood of that coincidence being due to chance alone is impossibly small. I see only three remaining possibilities.”

“Barney did it,” someone called, muted but clear across the room. A wave of tittering. I felt my jaw tighten, and a flush creep into my cheeks.

“A previous civilization sprung from dinosaur stock on Cretaceous Earth, or even earlier, yes,” said Dr Namgoog evenly. “The opinion represented here today by our guest, Sensei Park.”

A pattering of polite applause, some even more muted groans.

“We have evidence in the form of preliminary scans by our Naval remote viewer, Colonel Meagle, that the creature . . . the being, forgive me . . . in charge of the craft has just such an origin. Leaving aside the improbability of parallel evolution. If so, this leaves the earlier and larger Fermi question unanswered: where are its kindred now, why haven’t they conquered the whole galaxy? Tipler and others proved decades ago that this could have been achieved at achievable sub-light speeds within a million years. If they have, why don’t we see them?”

Hearing it stated so flatly, I was dizzied, as always, by the prospect. Flotillas of starcraft fleeing into the spiral arms at a tenth of light speed, crammed with dragon seed or our own. Or minute nanoscale pods fired toward a hundred million stars by magnetic catapult, or driven on filmy wings by laser light. Yet these, too, were last year’s dreams, last century’s. We had stepped from Earth to Ganymede to Titan entangled on a light beam, and without waiting to be shoved here by sailboat. The moment entangled luminal portage became a reality for my own species, it opened the yawning cavern: why not for them, as well? What the hell was a starship doing here? Why bother? It was so last week, like finding a steam locomotive under the ice.

Namgoog was enunciating his other solutions to Fermi, but I didn’t care. I was entranced by the mystery of the sleeping creature, sedate under his bedding of live flowers. It was a hunger like my endless appetite for chow. I wanted to step straight through the damned shell of the ship and look the critter in the eye, man to man. Even if it decided to eat me.

That’s what dragons do, isn’t it?

And so to bed. Where I lay in the dark in a lather of fright for fifteen minutes. Fearful and weak. Bleak. Needing a leak. I climbed out and thudded to the sanitary personal. When I got back, after a swab up and down and across with a wet face cloth to dab away the worse of the flopsweat, my door was slightly open. Through it came the never-stopping background clanging and banging of humans and machines keeping the place ticking over. Snapping my fingers, I clicked the room light up to dim. Dr Jendayi Shumba, chubby string looper, stretched at ease on my bed, clad in sensible pajamas with a mission blaze on the collar. Of course, I jumped and squealed.

“What the – Is there some – ”

“Hush up, dear man, and come over here.” She grinned.

“You’re not serious. Are you?”

In evidence, she slithered out of her pjs and raised her eyebrows.

“Absurd. I’d crush you like a bug.”

“Myeong-hui, you don’t weigh any more, here, than my little boy.”

“You have a—?” I swallowed, and crept closer. “I had a son once.”

“Let us be in this moment, Sensei,” she said without reproach.

“I’m disgusting to look upon,” I said frankly. “And I don’t need a pity—”

She had her fingers across my mouth, and then pulled me down through several clunky jumpy evolutions. “There are other ways to convey one’s . . . intimacy,” she said.

“Ulp,” I protested.

“An easy mouth is a great thing on a long journey, is it not, old fellow?” she said, releasing mine and patting my neck.

“Excuse me?”

Jendayi burst out laughing, a slightly husky, wonderfully exciting sound. “A quote from an old British classic about a horse. Nineteenth century, I believe. You might have read it as a child. Black Beauty.”

“You are the black beauty,” I said, noticing a cue when it smacked me between the eyes. I raised my voice and said, “Door close,” and it did.

“You’ve got a way to break into the ship, don’t you?” she said, after a time without time.

I was reeling and reckless. “Yes. Probably.”

“So you really are a poltergeist.” She stroked my contemptible belly, as if it were a friendly animal sharing the bed with us. “Tony nearly poked his damn eye out.” Her laugh was throaty, dirty, a tonic.

“Don’t blame me,” I said, and found a glass of water, drained it. “It’s like being able to wiggle your ears.”

In the near-dark, she wiggled hers, and more.

But before she left, Jendayi said, “Bring me back a sample. A skin scraping, anything with DNA. Just for me, honey, okay?” Oh, so that’s why you’re here? Had to be some reason. Exploitative bitch. But that’s life, right?

Looking like a well-laid but annoyed and put-upon squat polar bear in my bodyglove, some hellish number of minus degrees on the far side of its skin, I stood gazing down from the edge of the excavation. The spacecraft was unaltered, every bloom precisely where it had been several days before, where it been, perhaps, several tens of millions of years before. Unless it was salted here recently as a snare for gullible humans. In which case, it might be younger than I. Not so likely, though.

“Ready when you are, Sensei,” said the political officer, doing Mr Kim’s bidding, and damn the scientists’ caution.

I raised one thumb and let myself drift. Cause and effect unbraided, started their long, looping dance of etiological distortion, swirling, curdling. I was the still center of the spinning world. Certainties creaked, cracked. A favorite poem entered my heart, by Ji-Hoon Cho, “Flower petals on the sleeves”:

Had this saurian person below me, trapped now in timelessness, known wine? Crushed release and perhaps moments of joy from some archaic fruit not yet grape? I thought, with a wrenching mournfulness:

“Hey!”

And there went the flowers, drawn up and tossed away from the hull of the starship. They were scattering in the methane wind, lifted and flung by the bitter gusts, floral loveliness snap-frozen, blown upward and falling down in drifts into the alien snow.

“The stationary shield is discontinued,” said a clipped voice in my ears.

I stepped forward, ready to enter the ancient, imprisoned place. To meet my dinosaur, who had either died or even now lived, freed from timeless suspension. A hand caught my encased arm.

“Not yet, Sam. We have a team prepped. Thanks, you’ve done good here today.” I turned, hardly able to see through my tears, and it was not that bastard Tony Caetani groveling his apologies, the universe could not be so chirpy as that. I hadn’t met this one before, although he’d picked up my dining room nickname and used it with a certain familiar breeziness; some beefy functionary of some armed service division, grinning at me in his bluff farmboy way. I nodded, and watched the team of marines go down, and remembered my dear boy and the way he had gone forward fearlessly into darkness and then into the fire falling from the sky. It did not matter one whit that I thought his cause wrong-headed. I remembered a poem in that book I’d found in the ruined library, a poem by an Englishman named Kipling that had torn my heart as I sat before Song-Dam’s closed coffin. There was no comfort in this tide, the poem warned me, nor in any tide, save this:

Without shame, I sobbed, but then drew myself up and turned back to Huygens agora. Perhaps, I told myself, ten or sixty million years ago, another father had laid his son on these cruel snows and bade him farewell. I murmured to that reptilian father, offering what poor borrowed comfort I might to us both, across all that void of space and time: “Then hold your head up all the more, This tide, And every tide; Because he was the son you bore, And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!”

I looked straight up above me, at the photodiode display before my eyes in the viewmask, swallowing hard, to follow the streaming tide of blossoms on the wind, and there was Saturn, old Father Time, hanging in the orange smoke of the sky, an arrow through his heart. I gave him a respectful nod, and raised one gloved thumb in salute.

I

I
T SEEMS TO
me foolish to take a story about betrayal and call it – as my sponsors wish me to –
The Hairstyle That Changed The World.
All this hairdressing business, this hair-work. I don’t want to get excited about that. To see it as those massed strands of electricity shooting up from the bald pate of the vandegraaff machine. And whilst we’re on the subject of haircuts: I was raised by my mother alone, and we were poor enough that, from an early stage, she was the person who cut my hair. For the sake of simplicity, as much as economy, this cut would be uniform and close. To keep me quiet as the buzzer grazed, she used to show me the story about the mermaid whose being-in-the-world was confused between fishtail and feet. I’m sure she showed me lots of old books, but it was that one that sticks in my head: the singing crab, more scarab than crustacean; the wicked villainess able to change not only her appearance but, improbably, her size – I used to puzzle how she was able to generate all her extra mass as she metamorphosed, at the end, into a colossal octopus. Mostly I remember the beautiful young mermaid; she had the tempestuous name Ariel. The story hinged on the notion that her tail might vanish and reform as legs, and I used to worry disproportionately about those new feet. Would they, I wondered, smell of fish? Were the toenails actually fish-scales? Were the twenty-six bones of each foot (all of which I could name) formed of cartilage, after the manner of fish bones? Or human bone? The truth is, my mind is the sort that is most comfortable finding contiguities between different states, and most uncomfortable with inconsistencies. Hence my eventual choice of career, I suppose. And I don’t doubt that my fascination with the mermaid story had to do with a nascent erotic yearning for Ariel herself – a very prettily drawn figure, I recall.