The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (128 page)

Compared to the first george, she was a giant. Hanna expected as much, but seeing the body made her breath quicken. A once-powerful creature, larger than most rhinoceroses, she now lay crumpled down by death and suffocation and the weight of the world that had been peeled away above her. She was dead, yet she was entirely whole too. The acidic peat was a perfect preservative for flesh born outside this world, and presumably the aliens understood that salient fact.

“Great,” Hanna gushed. “Wonderful. Thank you.”

“Step closer,” Mattie offered. “Just not past the yellow line.”

A pair of researchers – sexless in their gowns and masks – were perched on a short scaffold, carefully working with the alien’s hands.

“The burial ring?” Hanna asked.

Mattie nodded. “An aluminum alloy. Very sophisticated, very obvious in the scans.”

“How different?”

The older the corpse, the more elaborate the ring. Mattie explained, “This one’s more like a cylinder than a ring, and it’s covered with details we don’t find in any of the later burials.”

The clothing was more elaborate, Hanna noticed, legs covered with trousers held up by elaborate belts, the feet enjoying what looked like elegant boots sewn from an ancient mammal’s leathery hide. A nylon satchel rode the long back, worn by heavy use, every pocket stripped of anything that would have been difficult to replace.

“Will we ever find the prize?” Hanna asked.

“That amazing widget that transforms life on earth?” Mattie shrugged, admitting, “I keep promising that. Every trip to Congress, I say it’s going to happen soon. But I seriously wonder. From what I’ve seen, these creatures never went into the ground carrying anything fancy or difficult to make.”

Those words sank home. Hanna nodded and glanced at Badger’s eyes, asking, “What else did I want to ask, hon? You remember?”

“Religion,” he mentioned.

“Oh, yeah.” Standing on the yellow line, she asked, “So why did they go into the ground, Mattie?”

“I don’t know.”

Hanna glanced at the woman, and then she stared up at the alien’s cupped hands, imagining that important ring of metal. “I know the story I like best.”

“Which one?”

“A starship reached our solar system, but something went wrong. Maybe the ship was supposed to refuel and set out for a different star, and it malfunctioned. Maybe its sister ships were supposed to meet here, but nobody showed.” Hanna liked Mattie and respected her, and she wanted to sound informed on this extraordinary topic. “Mars or the moon would have made better homes. Their plan could have been to terraform another world. I know they would have appreciated the lighter gravity. And we think – because of the evidence, we can surmise – that their bodies didn’t need or want as much free oxygen as we require. So whatever the reason, earth isn’t where they wanted to be.”

“A lot of people think that,” Mattie said.

Hanna continued. “They didn’t want to stay here long. And we don’t have any evidence that their starship landed nearby. But they came here. The aliens set down in the nearby mountains, and they managed to find food and built shelter, and survive. But after ten or fifty or maybe two hundred years . . . whatever felt like a long time for that first generation . . . no one had come to rescue them. And that’s why they started digging holes and climbing inside.”

“You believe they were hibernating,” Mattie guessed.

“No,” Hanna admitted. “Or I mean, maybe they slept when they were buried. But they weren’t planning to wake up like normal either. Their brains weren’t like ours, I know. Crystalline and tough, and all the evidence points to a low-oxygen metabolism. What I think happened . . . each of the creatures reached a point in life when they felt past their prime, or particularly sad, or whatever . . . and that’s why a lady like this would climb into the cold peat. She believes, or at least she needs to believe, that in another few hundred years, another ring-shaped starship is going to fall toward our sun, dig her up and bring her back to life.”

Mattie contemplated the argument and nodded. “I’ve heard that story a few times, in one fashion or another.”

“That’s how their tradition started,” Hanna continued. “Every generation of georges buried itself in the peat, and after a few centuries or a few thousand years, nobody would remember why. All they knew that it was important to do, and that by holding a metal ring in your hands, you were making yourself a little easier to find inside your sleeping place.”

Badger sighed, disapproving of the rampant speculation.

“That might well be true,” said Mattie. “Which explains why the rings got simpler as time passed. Nobody remembered what the starship looked like. Or maybe they forgot about the ship entirely, and the ring’s purpose changed. It was a symbol, an offering, something that would allow their god to catch their soul and take them back to Heaven again.”

Just then, the two workers on the scaffold slipped the burial ring out from between the dead fingers. Mattie approached them and took the prize in both of her gloved hands. Hanna and then Badger stared at what everyone in the world would see in another few hours: A model of a great starship that had once crossed the vacant unloving blackness of space, ending up where it shouldn’t have been and its crew and their descendants dying slowly over the next 20,000 years.

Once last time, Hanna thanked Mattie for the tour.

Walking to the surface again, she took her husband’s big hand and held it tightly and said, “We’re lucky people.”

“Why’s that?” Badger asked.

“Because we’re exactly where we belong,” she replied, as if it couldn’t be more obvious.

Then they were in the open again, walking on a ravaged landscape dwarfed by the boundless Wyoming sky, and between one step and the next Hanna felt something change inside her body – a slight sensation that held no pain and would normally mean nothing. But she stopped walking. She stopped, but Badger kept marching forward. With both hands, she tenderly touched herself, and she forgot all about the aliens and their epic, long-extinct problems. Bleeding harder by the moment, she looked up to see her husband far ahead of her now, and to herself, with the smallest of whispers, she muttered, “Oh, no . . . not today . . .”

George

Despite night and the season, the thick air burned with its heat and choking oxygen, and the smallest task brought misery, and even standing was work too, and the strongest of the All stood on the broad planks and dug and he dug with them at the soft wet rot of the ground. Everyone but him said those good proper words saved for occasions such as this – ancient chants about better worlds and difficult journeys that ended with survival and giant caring hands that were approaching even now, soon to reach down from the stars to rescue the worthy dead. Silence was expected of the dead, and that was why he said nothing. Silence was the grand tradition born because another – some woman buried far beneath them – said nothing at her death, and the All were so impressed by her reserve and dignity that a taboo was born on that night. How long ago was that time? It was a topic of some conjecture and no good answers, and he used to care about abstract matters like that but discovered now that he couldn’t care anymore. His life had been full of idle ideas that had wasted his time, and he was sorry for his misspent passion and all else that went wrong for him. Grief took hold, so dangerous and so massive that he had to set his shovel on the plank and say nothing in a new fashion, gaining the attention of his last surviving daughter. She was a small and pretty and very smart example of the All, and she was more perceptive than most, guessing what was wrong and looking at him compassionately when she said with clicks and warbles that she was proud of her father and proud to belong to his honorable lineage and that he should empty his mind of poisonous thoughts, that he should think of the dead under them and how good it would feel to pass into a realm where thousands of enduring souls waited.

But the dead were merely dead. Promised hands had never arrived, not in their lives or in his. That buoyant faith of youth, once his most cherished possession, was a tattered hope, and perhaps the next dawn would erase even that. That was why it was sensible to accept the smothering sleep now, now while the mind believed however weakly in its own salvation. Because no matter how long the odds, every other ending was even more terrible: He could become a sack of skin filled with anonymous bones and odd organs that would never again know life, that would be thrown into the communal garden to serve as compost, that the All might recall for another three generations, or maybe four, before the future erased his entire existence.

Once again, to the joy of his daughter and the others, the dead man picked up the long shovel and dug. The front feet threw his weight into the blade, and the blade cut into the cold watery muck, and up came another gout of peat that had to be set carefully behind him. Still the right words were spoken, the right blessings offered, and the right motions made, no one daring complain about the heat or the slow progress or the obvious, sorry fact that the strongest and largest of the All were barely able to manage what their ancestors had done easily.

At least so the old stories claimed.

Then came the moment when the fresh wet rectangular hole was finished and one of them had to climb inside. Odd as it seemed, he forgot his duty here. He found himself looking at the others, even at his exhausted daughter, wondering who was to receive this well-deserved honor. Oh yes, me, he recalled, and then he clicked a loud laugh, and he almost spoke, thinking maybe they would appreciate the grim humor. But no, this was a joke best enjoyed by the doomed, and these souls were nothing but alive. Leaving the moment unspoiled, the ceremony whole and sacred, he set his shovel aside and proved to each that he was stealing nothing precious. Hands empty, pockets opened, he showed them just a few cheap knives that he wanted for sentimental reasons. Then he stepped into the chilly stinking mess of water and rot, and with his feet sinking but his head exposed, he reached up with his long arm, hands opened until that good daughter placed the golden ring into his ready grip.

True to the custom, he said nothing more.

In the east, above the high snow-laced mountains, the winter sun was beginning to rise. Soon the killing heat would return to the lowlands, this brutal ground rendered unlivable. The All worked together to finish what had taken too long, shovels and muddy hands flinging the cold peat at the water and then at him – ceremony balanced on growing desperation – and he carefully said nothing and worked hard to think nothing but good thoughts. But then a favorite son returned to him, killed in a rockslide and lost, and he thought of his best mate whose central heart burst without warning, and because promises cost so little, he swore to both of them that he would carry their memories into this other realm, whatever shape it took.

When he discovered that he could not breathe, he struggled, but his mouth was already beneath the water, his head fixed in place.

With the job nearly finished, most of the All kept working. But others were standing away from the grave – those too weak to help, or too spent or too indifferent – and they decided that the dead could not hear them. With private little voices, they spoke about the coming day and the coming year, gentle but intense words dwelling on relationships forming and relationships lost, and who looked best in their funeral garb, and whose children were the prettiest and wisest, and who would die next, and oh by the way, did anyone think to bring a little snack for the journey home . . . ?