Blind Cat Dance

Blind Cat Dance

By Alexander Jablokov

(excerpt)

So now I live among weeds: spiky leaved plants, muck-loving carp, fast-growing trees, pigeons. I hunt among the herds of stunted deer that browse the grass between fallen branches of locusts and silver maples. Sometimes, a pack of canids makes its quarrelsome way through the area. A cross between domestic dogs and coyotes, they are unromantic, unphotogenic, and unclean. No Trainer has ever worked to get them to set their carrion-smelling paws on a city street. No passerby has ever been struck at dawn by their wild beauty. When I hear them yelping at night I stuff my head into my pillow.

A crow calls outside, so it really is time to get up. All of the animals can see me, but only that crow seems to care. It has a kind of reptilian affection for me, based on the small prey I scare up on my hunts, and I sometimes find it staring fixedly at me, head sidewise, considering me with an expressionless yellow-rimmed eye. I work at not attributing human emotions to it, but always fell. Maybe I wasn`t meant for my line of work after all.

At least I haven`t given it a name. That`s the most obvious way pretend animals are more ours than they actually are. I figure it respects me, but is puzzled by me. Our lives are pretty similar just now, so we get along. The bird can predict in general what I am going to do next, but not specifically, and that is the basis of a decent relationship.

It looks like a large cat (Alexandre Jablokov, Blind Cat Dance). Image by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

There is no natural world. If the term ever had meaning, it hasn`t for years. Jeremiads about how the natural world will unite and turn against humans are a childish fantasy. Nature has no motivations, no desires, no ultimate goal.

Except what we choose to give it. I finally roll out of my bag, wash my face in the basin I always fill before going to sleep, and go outside. It`s overcast, and cold. My breath puffs. I like feeling the weather against me. Having little defense against it, I have to react to it the same way everything else alive has to. I listen to the air, sniff it to see how scents are carrying today, listen to any sounds it brings. I’m here and visible. I can be evaded, I can be resisted, I can be killed, I pay full attention.

Outside, something on the ground catches my eye. I kneel to get a better look. I reach out my hand, but pull it back before my fingertips can disturb anything.

It’s a partial print: a big heel pad, and two toe marks. No claw indentations, and it looks pretty good-sized. Cat. It looks like a large cat.

I bend over the imprint and push my face almost to the ground, looking and smelling, using every channel of information I can. I smell cat too.

Could be a lynx. I’ve seen some other, ambiguous traces. A lynx would be okay.

I don’t think it’s a lynx. A few days ago I found a piece of scat. Like the print, it was big, bigger than your visual coydog turd. And it had a bit of hair in it, as from self-grooming with a rough tongue. I managed to persuade myself that it was just the right shade of reddish brown.

I stand up, ready for my day. If there really is a cougar out here somewhere, I won’t see it. In an even contest, I don’t have a chance. But I’ll keep looking.

Anyone could find me here, if they wanted. Berenica has to know where I am. She could come here and observe me in my natural habitat. If she wanted.

It’s ridiculous. A fera housecat could make it here in this shrunken weed patch, for as long as it evaded the coydogs, but chances were lower for a lynx, and a cougar was impossible. A cougar needed more than ten square miles of territory to support itself, probably significantly more in this impoverished ecology, and there was nothing like that here, not yet. A single kill and the deer would flee elsewhere. These are not trained to forget, circle around, and return. Again, not yet.

So there’s work to be done. The various patches of woods can be knitted together in the minds of the beasts that are here. That’s what we do. We take the far-flung archipelagos of environment and reassemble them into continents in the minds of the animals. We give them a way to live in the world we have made.

So I live, work, and hope.

(Excerpt, see the full text in The Year’s Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois, first edition July 2011).

Mammoths of the Great Plains

Mammoths of the Great Plains

Eleanor Arnason

“Men never think ahead,” “That’s why they make good warriors.” The council president came back from Korea with a chest full of medals. He has never looked beyond the next hill in his entire life. Well, this hill is the new casino. Let’s wait and see what lies on the other side.”

“I went home and looked at the bank balance and sent out my resume. Del was getting paid well for his mural. But that money wouldn’t last; and our utility bills were high.”

Grandmother shrugged. “Why make a long story longer than it is by nature? The Prairie Lake council voted to set up a foundation. It took another four years, with Marion pushing at every meeting; but it finally happened. By then Del had a job searching at the Minneapolis College of Art, and he’d even had a show in a white museum – not his current work, but the older abstractions. Young Delores was old enough for day care, though she didn’t like it. How your mother yelled the first time I left her!

“The University got the first grant for mammoth research; and I went to work for the research lab. The U had no choice. I came with the money and the mammoth tissue. Did I feel guilt using the tissue and the Prairie Lake band’s clout? Not a bit. It was the 1990s by then, the last great hurrah of capitalism befor the dark days of the early 21st century. The white people were busy grabbing everything they could with both hands. I thought, I could do a little of the same, enough to pay the bills and get myself back into research.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Illustration: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

“Of course the people in the lab resented me, a woman and an Indian, who had gotten her job through luck and casino money. How could I be any good? I won’t bother you with the story of my struggles. This story is about the mammoths, not me. But always remember that power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation… want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…”

At the time I did not recognize the quote. It was Frederick Douglass, of course. Odd to hear my grandmother talk about the ocean on the bone-dry Dakota prairie.

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

Chimbwi

Chimbwi

By JimHawkins (excerpt, from The Year’s Best Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois, first edition July 2011)

The ship from Libya to Dar es Salaam was crowded and filthy. Here, in the hills of Tanzania, they were not badly treated, but the work was hard. The cage went down the shaft at high speed still lurching at it braked at the bottom and the gate opened. There were twin tunnels under construction. Jason climbed with the others from the lift into a low train running up the wide water tunnel, twenty feet across, lit with bright points of LED light. He had a sudden vivid memory of the London underground. Down-slop from here the tunnel descended in a shallow gradient for sixty miles to the Tanzanian coast near the southern town of Mtwara and then a further five miles under the Indian Ocean.

Jason was working in the second, parallel, smaller tunnel, which would carry superconducting cables. This would bring current from the solar fusion plants five thousand feet up in Zambia to massive pumps along the water tunnel that would lift seawater to three thousand feet to a desalination plant in the hills above Lake Malawi. There were sixteen systems like this, each tunnel emerging into the sea, along the Tanzanian coast, and more in Mozambique. Power for water – it was a good barter.

Africa was greening again. The evaporating lakes were filling. Rivers flowed. Irrigation ducts fed the fertile fields. All of this was because a remarkable breakthrough by the Zambians converted the sun’s rays into electricity at a phenomenal 98% efficiency. They weren’t telling anybody how they did it.

Lions kill only when they’re hungry. Leopards enjoy killing (Jim Howkins, Chimbwi). Photo by Megan Jorgesen (Elena)

Jason was working in a gang of six watching them into an airtight liming, preparing for the vacuum that was needed. The other five refugee workers were German, and rarely spoke to him, not because they didn’t speak English, but because they were all suppressed by their wrist-hands. He’d hardly had anything amounting to a conversation with anybody since he embarked on his long and dangerous journey from England. He would have expected a camp of several hundred forced labourers to have a loud, violent culture, but it was more like a Sunday School camp. They didn’t sing; they didn’t shout; they didn’t fight. They’d had an emotional epidural.

A shift with sizzling blue welding arcs in his face was pretty sure to bring on a headache. He’s just finished a join and lowered the torch when he felt a tap on this shoulder. Mbanga, the site manager, gestured for him to follow.

An hour later he was showered, dressed in clean shorts and shirt, and sitting in the comfort of a high speed maglev train, eating maize and curried fish, drinking cold beer, watching out of the window for the occasional glimpse of giraffe or elephants. He was on his way to the wealthiest country in the world. As the silent train rounded a banked curve at three hundred and twenty miles per hour the towering heights of Kilimanjaro came into view to the north. The summit was no longer snowy. The land around outside the train was sandy and dry with widely-spaced baobab trees standing with their enormously wide brown trunks out of proportion to the number of branches above them

Again and Again and Again

Again and Again and Again

Rachel Swirsky (excerpt, read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

She turned out to be a breeder, so she got to find out. Her oldest son, Paolo, joined an experimental product trial to replace his eyes, nose and ears with a sensitive optic strip. Lucia crossed her DNA with an ant’s and grew an exoskeleton that came in handy when she renounced her parents’ conscientious objector status and enlisted in the army. Javier quite college to join a colony of experimental diseasits and was generous enough to include photographs of his most recent maladies every year in his holiday cards.

Things got worse, too. By the time Paolo had kids, limb regeneration was the fashion. Teens competed to shock each other with extreme mutilations. Paolo’s youngest, Gyptia, won a duel with her high school rival by cutting off her own legs, arms, breasts, and sensory organs.

When he saw what she had done, Paolo stifled his urge to scream. “Pie,” he said, carefully, “isn’t this going a bit far?”

Gyptia waited until she regrew her eyes, and then she rolled them.

By the time Gyptia reached adulthood, lifespans had passed the half-millennia mark. Her generation delayed family life. Why go through all the fuss of raising babies now when they could stay fancy-free for another few decades?

Eagle flying. “She rejected a mix of eagle and bat genes to improve her hearing and eyesight, and she kept her skin its natural multiracial brown instead of transfusing to a fashionable scarlet” (Rachel Swirsky). Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

At three hundred at fifty, Gyptia’s biological clock proclaimed itself noisily. She backed out of the lease on her stratoflat and joined a child-friendly cooperative in historical Wyoming that produced wind energy. Current and former residents raved about its diversity.

The co-op even included a few nuclear families bonded by ancient religious rituals.

Gyptia’s daughter, Xyr, grew up surrounded by fields of sage brush dotted with windmills. She and her friends scrambled up the sandstone bluffs and pretended to live in stratoflats like the ones their parents had left behind.

Every option was open to Xyr: a vast range of territory for her to explore, monthly trips to see the technological and artistic wonders of the modern world, educational and entertainment databases linked in by speed pulse. Her neighbors included: polyamorists, monogamists, asexuals, traditionalists, futurists, historics, misanthropists, genetic hybrids, biomechanical biblends, purists, anarchists, exortates, xenophiles, menthrads, ovites, alvores and ilps.

Amaryllis

Amaryllis

By Carrie Vaughn

Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology Collection 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois

The next trip on Amaryllis went well. We made quota in less time than I expected, which gave us half a day’s vacation. We anchored off a deserted bit of shore and went swimming, lay on deck and took in the sun, ate the last of the oranges and dried mackerel that J.J. had sent along with us. It was a good day.

But we had to head back some time and face the scales. I weighed our haul three times with Amaryliss’ scale, got a different number each time, but all within ten pounds of each other, and more importantly twenty pounds under quota. Not that it would matter. We rowed into the slip at the scale house, and Anders was scalemaster on duty again. I almost hauled up our sails and turned us around, never to return. I couldn’t face him, not after the perfect trip. Nina was right – it wasn’t fair that this one man could ruin us with false surpluses and black marks.

Silently, we secured Amaryllis to the dock and began handing up our cargo. I managed to keep from even looking at Anders, which probably made me look guilty in his eyes. But we’d already established I could be queen of perfection and he would consider me guilty.

 “I clenched the banner in my fist; no one would be able to pry it out” (Carrie Vaughn). Illustration by © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

Ander’s frown was smug, his gaze judgmental. I could already hear him tell me I was fifty pounds over quota. Another haul like that, he’d say, we’ll have to see about yanking your fishing rights. I’d have to punch him. I almost told Garrett to hold me back if I looked like I was going to punch him. But he was already keeping himself between the two of us, as if he thought I might really do it.

If the old scalemaster managed to break up Amaryllis, I’d murder him. And wouldn’t that be a worse crime than any I might represent?

Anders drew out the moment, looking us all up and down before finally announcing, “Sixty over this time. And you think you’re good at this.”

My hands tightened into fists. I imagined myself lunging at him. At this point, what could I lose?

“We’d like an audit,” Nina said, slipping past Sun, Garrett, and me to stand before the stationmaster, frowning, hands on her lips.

“Excuse me?” Anders said.

“An audit. I think your scale is wrong, and we’d like an audit. Right?” She looked at me.

It was probably better than punching him. “Yes,” I said, after a flabbergasterd moment. “Yes, we dould like an audit.”

That set off two hours of chaos in the scale house. Anders protested, hollered at us, threatened us. I sent Sun to the committee house to summon official oversight – he wouldn’t try to play nice, and they couldn’t brush him off. June and Abe, two senior committee members, arrived, austere in gray and annoyed.

“What’s the complaint?” June said.