David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 9

YEAR’S

BEST

SF9

EDITED BY

DAVID G. HARTWELL

and KATHRYN CRAMER

A DF Books NERDs Release

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Contents

Introduction

Octavia E. Butler

Amnesty

Geoff Ryman

Birth Days

Tony Ballantyne

The Waters of Meribah

Nancy Kress

Ej-Es

Joe Haldeman

Four Short Novels

Charles Stross

Rogue Farm

Angélica Gorodischer

The Violet’s Embryos

Michael Swanwick

Coyote at the End of History

John Varley

In Fading Suns and Dying Moons

Gene Wolfe

Castaway

Gregory Benford

The Hydrogen Wall

Ricard de la Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero

The Day We Went Through the Transition

Cory Doctorow

Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers

Robert Reed

Night of Time

Kage Baker

A Night on the Barbary Coast

Nigel Brown

Annuity Clinic

Allen M. Steele

The Madwoman of Shuttlefield

M. Rickert

Bread and Bombs

Stephen Baxter

The Great Game

Rick Moody

The Albertine Notes

About the Editors

Introduction

Well, 2003 is past—another good year to be reading SF, both in pro and semi-professional publications.

And as 2004 began, the President of the United States proposed a broad new initiative in space travel

and exploration for the near future. Surely this must bode well for space adventures in fiction, and there is

much strength to build on in SF already.

The year 2003 was a very strong one for science fiction novels and stories, and there were many

shorter stories in consideration. So we repeat, for readers new to this series, our usual disclaimer: This

selection of science fiction stories represents the best that was published during the year 2003. It would

take several more volumes this size to have nearly all of the best short stories—though, even then, not all

the best novellas. And we believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not physically

possible to encompass it all in one even very large book, also implies presenting some substantial variety

of excellences, and we left some worthy stories out in order to include others in this limited space.

Our general principle for selection: This book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is

clearly that and not something else. We have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction, and

slipstream, and postmodern literature. We (Kathryn Cramer and David G. Hartwell) edit the Year’s Best

Fantasy in paperback from Eos as a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy

fiction, too. But here, we choose science fiction.

Science fiction in shorter forms was vigorous and perhaps even growing in 2003, though sometimes

not in easily accessible places. Certainly, the electronic fiction websites such as Infinite Matrix, Strange

Horizons, and SciFiction continued to publish much excellent work, though a majority of it was fantasy or

horror. And the professional and semi-professional magazines persisted, though most of them did not

thrive in sales or subscriptions, and were a center of interest for SF readers. But the small press really

expanded this past year, both in book form and in a proliferation of little magazines, in the U.S. and

throughout the world.

Books and magazines of high quality from Canada, Australia, and the UK, often anthologies and

short story collections, drew our attention. We have to say that this year was perhaps the best in a

decade for original anthologies and story collections—even though most of them will not be found in local

bookstores because they are available on the whole only by direct mail or internet order, or from

specialty dealers at SF conventions. Still, the total of good SF stories, and perhaps even the total of all

SF stories, increased noticeably last year.

But—and this is a significant but—the majority of small press publications contained only a minority

of science fiction genre stories, and the bulk of the rest were speculative literature, fantasy, horror,

magical realism, allegories, or uses of SF tropes and images in the context of mainstream or postmodern

fiction. This commonly derived from a “breaking the bounds of genre” attitude on the part of the editors

and publishers of small press short fiction, and many of their writers. Distinguished examples of this trend

are Trampoline, Polyphony, Descant, Open Space, and Album Zutique #1 .

And somewhat to our amusement, this attitude was contradicted by one of the bastions of

mainstream literary fiction, McSweeney’s magazine, which published a genre fiction issue, McSweeney’s

Thrilling Tales, in 2003, edited by Michael Chabon. It was filled mainly with genre stories (SF, horror,

fantasy, western, mystery and detective, men’s adventure) by literary writers, although certain ambitious

genre figures of some acknowledged literary accomplishment, including Harlan Ellison, Michael

Moorcock, and Karen Joy Fowler, were included. Each year we find ourselves pointing with some irony

at the areas of growth in SF as if they were double-edged swords. While many of the ambitious insiders

want to break out, at least some ambitious outsiders are breaking in, and some of them at the top of the

genre.

The SF magazines struggled to maintain circulation and not allow their subscriber base to erode,

while publishing on the whole good-to-excellent stories. Not enough people paid attention, in our

opinion. More of you should be reading at least one of the SF magazines regularly, if not two or three.

We have remarked in the past that the average paperback anthology of fantasy or SF does not contain

as many good stories as the average issue of Asimov’s or Fantasy & Science Fiction .

Two of the main resources for keeping track of short fiction disappeared for part or all of the year.

The ISFDB (the Internet SF Data Base), the largest database of SF story titles on the internet, lost its

home and was dormant, though it is back now. And Tangent Online, the most comprehensive review

medium for short fiction, fell silent in the second half of the year, although a new editor was announced at

the end of 2003. There were regular reviews elsewhere of individual magazines and anthologies, but less

than half of the information on current short fiction that has been dependably available for the last six or

eight years could be had in 2003. Of course, such information has always depended on volunteer labor,

but it does give one pause to think of the fragility of our efforts, and that devoted and hard-working

volunteers do sometimes just run out of energy and stop, or seek paying work.

We remarked above what a good year it was for anthologies, and some examples are Live without a

Net (edited by Lou Anders), Stars (edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick), and Space, Inc (edited by

Julie Czerneda). Other are mentioned in the various story notes.

And from all this we have chosen some fine stories to entertain you. We try in each volume of this

series to represent the varieties of tones and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and

responsive to the changing realities out of which it emerges, in science and daily life. This is a book about

what’s going on now in SF. The stories that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of

the evolving genre in the year 2003. David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer

Amnesty

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

Octavia E. Butler lives in the Seattle, Washington area. She grew up in California and attended

courses in SF writing taught by Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon, and the Clarion SF

Writing workshop. After years of work, culminating in the early 1980s with two exceptional

novels, Kindred and Wild Seed, her career began to peak. She won the 1984 Hugo Award for the

short story “Speech Sounds.” Her story “Bloodchild,” about human male slaves who incubate

their alien masters’eggs, won the 1985 Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, and both are

collected in Bloodchild and Other Stories (1995). Then, in 1995, she was awarded a McArthur

Grant, a large cash prize often called the “genius grant,” given annually in the arts and sciences,

which brought her worldwide notice. She also entered a new, strong phase of her career with the

novel Parable of the Sower. Her early stories are collected in Bloodchild. She is now certainly one

of the notable figures in the SF field and one of our leading writers.

“Amnesty” was published electronically at SciFiction, the SCIFI.com website, which is now

the highest paying market for SF and fantasy and so had some of the very best short fiction in

2003. It is a return to the powerful themes of her fine novella, “Bloodchild,” a story about finding

the courage and strength to compromise and transcend in the face of an oppressive and horrible

situation.

The stranger-Community, globular, easily twelve feet high and wide glided down into the vast, dimly

lit food production hall of Translator Noah Cannon’s employer. The stranger was incongruously quick

and graceful, keeping to the paths, never once brushing against the raised beds of fragile, edible fungi. It

looked, Noah thought, a little like a great, black, moss-enshrouded bush with such a canopy of

irregularly-shaped leaves, shaggy mosses, and twisted vines that no light showed through it. It had a few

thick, naked branches growing out, away from the main body, breaking the symmetry and making the

Community look in serious need of pruning.

The moment Noah saw it and saw her employer, a somewhat smaller, better-maintained-looking

dense, black bush, back away from her, she knew she would be offered the new job assignment she had

been asking for.

The stranger-Community settled, flattening itself at bottom, allowing its organisms of mobility to

migrate upward and take their rest. The stranger-Community focused its attention on Noah, electricity

flaring and zigzagging, making a visible display within the dark vastness of its body. She knew that the

electrical display was speech, although she could not read what was said. The Communities spoke in this

way between themselves and within themselves, but the light they produced moved far too quickly for her

to even begin to learn the language. The fact that she saw the display, though, meant that the

communications entities of the stranger-Community were addressing her. Communities used their

momentarily inactive organisms to shield communication from anyone outside themselves who was not

being addressed.

She glanced at her employer and saw that its attention was focused away from her. It had no

noticeable eyes, but its entities of vision served it very well whether she could see them or not. It had

drawn itself together, made itself look more like a spiny stone than a bush. Communities did this when

they wished to offer others privacy or simply disassociate themselves from the business being transacted.

Her employer had warned her that the job that would be offered to her would be unpleasant not only

because of the usual hostility of the human beings she would face, but because the subcontractor for

whom she would be working would be difficult. The subcontractor had had little contact with human

beings. Its vocabulary in the painfully created common language that enabled humans and the

Communities to speak to one another was, at best, rudimentary, as was its understanding of human

abilities and limitations. Translation: by accident or by intent, the subcontractor would probably hurt her.

Her employer had told her that she did not have to take this job, that it would support her if she chose

not to work for this subcontractor. It did not altogether approve of her decision to try for the job

anyway. Now its deliberate inattention had more to do with disassociation than with courtesy or privacy.

“You’re on your own,” its posture said, and she smiled. She could never have worked for it if it had not

been able to stand aside and let her make her own decisions. Yet it did not go about its business and

leave her alone with the stranger. It waited.

And here was the subcontractor signaling her with lightning.

Obediently, she went to it, stood close to it so that the tips of what looked like moss-covered outer

twigs and branches touched her bare skin. She wore only shorts and a halter top. The Communities

would have preferred her to be naked, and for the long years of her captivity, she had had no choice.

She had been naked. Now she was no longer a captive, and she insisted on wearing at least the basics.

Her employer had come to accept this and now refused to lend her to subcon-tractors who would refuse

her the right to wear clothing.

This subcontractor enfolded her immediately, drawing her upward and in among its many selves, first

hauling her up with its various organisms of manipulation, then grasping her securely with what appeared

to be moss. The Communities were not plants, but it was easiest to think of them in those terms since

most of the time, most of them looked so plantlike.

Enfolded within the Community, she couldn’t see at all. She closed her eyes to avoid the distraction

of trying to see or imagining that she saw. She felt herself surrounded by what felt like long, dry fibers,

fronds, rounded fruits of various sizes, and other things that produced less identifiable sensations. She

was at once touched, stroked, massaged, compressed in the strangely comfortable, peaceful way that

she had come to look forward to whenever she was employed. She was turned and handled as though

she weighed nothing. In fact, after a few moments, she felt weightless. She had lost all sense of direction,

yet she felt totally secure, clasped by entities that had nothing resembling human limbs. Why this was

pleasurable, she never understood, but for twelve years of captivity, it had been her only dependable

comfort. It had happened often enough to enable her to endure everything else that was done to her.

Fortunately, the Communities also found it comforting—even more than she did.

After a while, she felt the particular rhythm of quick warning pressures across her back. The

Communities liked the broad expanse of skin that the human back offered.

She made a beckoning motion with her right hand to let the Community know that she was paying

attention.

There are six recruits, it signaled with pressures against her back. You will teach them.

I will, she signed, using her hands and arms only. The Communities liked her signs to be small,

confined gestures when she was enfolded and large, sweeping hand, arm, and whole-body efforts when

she was outside and not being touched. She had wondered at first if this was because they couldn’t see

very well. Now she knew that they could see far better than she could—could see over great distances

with specialized entities of vision, could see most bacteria and some viruses, and see colors from

ultraviolet through infrared.

In fact the reason that they preferred large gestures when she was out of contact and unlikely to hit or

kick anyone was because they liked to watch her move. It was that simple, that odd. In fact, the

Communities had developed a real liking for human dance performances and for some human sports

events—especially individual performances in gymnastics and ice skating.

The recruits are disturbed, the subcontractor said. They may be dangerous to one another. Calm

them.

I will try, Noah said. I will answer their questions and reassure them that they have nothing to fear.

Privately, she suspected that hate might be a more prevalent emotion than fear, but if the subcontractor

didn’t know that, she wouldn’t tell it.

Calm them. The subcontractor repeated. And she knew then that it meant, literally, “Change them

from disturbed people to calm, willing workers.” The Communities could change one another just by

exchanging a few of their individual entities—as long as both exchanging communities were willing. Too

many of them assumed that human beings should be able to do something like this too, and that if they

wouldn’t, they were just being stubborn.

Noah repeated, I will answer their questions and reassure them that they have nothing to fear. That’s

all I can do.

Will they be calm?

She drew a deep breath, knowing that she was about to be hurt—twisted or torn, broken or

stunned. Many Communities punished refusal to obey orders—as they saw it—less harshly than they

punished what they saw as lying. In fact, the punishments were left over from the years when human

beings were captives of uncertain ability, intellect, and perception. People were not supposed to be

punished any longer, but of course they were. Now, Noah thought it was best to get whatever

punishment there might be out of the way at once. She could not escape. She signed stolidly, Some of

them may believe what I tell them and be calm. Others will need time and experience to calm them.

She was, at once, held more tightly, almost painfully—“held hard” as the Communities called it, held

so that she could not move even her arms, could not harm any members of the Community by thrashing

about in pain. Just before she might have been injured by the squeezing alone, it stopped.

She was hit with a sudden electrical shock that convulsed her. It drove the breath out of her in a

hoarse scream. It made her see flashes of light even with her eyes tightly closed. It stimulated her muscles

into abrupt, agonizing contortions.

Calm them, the Community insisted once again.

She could not answer at first. It took her a moment to get her now sore and shaking body under

control and to understand what was being said to her. It took her a moment more to be able to flex her

hands and arms, now free again, and finally to shape an answer—the only possible answer in spite of

what it might cost.

I will answer their questions and reassure them that they have nothing to fear.

She was held hard for several seconds more, and knew that she might be given another shock. After

a while, though, there were several flashes of light that she saw out of the corner of her eye, but that did

not seem to have anything to do with her. Then without any more communication, Noah was passed into

the care of her employer, and the subcontractor was gone.

She saw nothing as she was passed from darkness to darkness. There was nothing to hear but the

usual rustle of Communities moving about. There was no change of scent, or if there was, her nose was

not sensitive enough to detect it. Yet somehow, she had learned to know her employer’s touch. She

relaxed in relief.

Are you injured? her employer signed.

No, she answered. Just aching joints and other sore places. Did I get the job?

Of course you did. You must tell me if that subcontractor tries to coerce you again. It knows better.

I’ve told it that if it injures you, I will never allow you to work for it again.

Thank you.

There was a moment of stillness. Then the employer stroked her, calming her and pleasing itselves.

You insist on taking these jobs, but you can’t use them to make the changes you want to make. You

know that. You cannot change your people or mine.

I can, a little, she signed. Community by Community, human by human. I would work faster if I

could.

And so you let subcontractors abuse you. You try to help your own people to see new possibilities

and understand changes that have already happened but most of them won’t listen and they hate you.

I want to make them think. I want to tell them what human governments won’t tell them. I want to

vote for peace between your people and mine by telling the truth. I don’t know whether my efforts will

do any good, in the long run, but I have to try.

Let yourself heal. Rest enfolded until the subcontractor returns for you.

Noah sighed, content, within another moment of stillness. Thank you for helping me, even though you

don’t believe.

I would like to believe. But you can’t succeed. Right now groups of your people are looking for

ways to destroy us.

Noah winced. I know. Can you stop them without killing them?

Her employer shifted her. Stroked her. Probably not, it signed. Not again.

“Translator,” Michelle Ota began as the applicants trailed into the meeting room, “do these…these

things…actually understand that we’re intelligent?”

She followed Noah into the meeting room, waited to see where Noah would sit, and sat next to her.

Noah noticed that Michelle Ota was one of only two of the six applicants who was willing to sit near her

even for this informal question-and-answer session. Noah had information that they needed. She was

doing a job some of them might wind up doing someday, and yet that job—translator and personnel

officer for the Communities—and the fact that she could do it was their reason for distrusting her. The

second person who wanted to sit near her was Sorrel Trent. She was interested in alien

spirituality—whatever that might be.

The four remaining job candidates chose to leave empty seats between themselves and Noah.

“Of course the Communities know we’re intelligent,” Noah said.

“I mean I know you work for them,” Michelle Ota glanced at her, hesitated then went on. “I want to

work for them too. Because at least they’re hiring. Almost nobody else is. But what do they think of

us?”

“They’ll be offering some of you contracts soon,” Noah said. “They wouldn’t waste time doing that

if they’d mistaken you for cattle.” She relaxed back into her chair, watching some of the six other people

in the room get water, fruit or nuts from the sideboards. The food was good and clean and free to them

whether or not they were hired. It was also, she knew, the first food most of them had had that day.

Food was expensive and in these depressed times, most people were lucky to eat once a day. It pleased

her to see them enjoying it. She was the one who had insisted there be food in the meeting rooms for the

question and answer sessions.

She herself was enjoying the rare comfort of wearing shoes, long black cotton pants, and a colorful

flowing tunic. And there was furniture designed for the human body—an upholstered armchair with a high

back and a table she could eat from or rest her arms on. She had no such furniture in her quarters within

the Mojave Bubble. She suspected that she could have at least the furniture now, if she asked her

employer for it, but she had not asked, would not ask. Human things were for human places.

“But what does a contract mean to things that come from another star system?” Michelle Ota

demanded.

Rune Johnsen spoke up. “Yes, it’s interesting how quickly these beings have taken up local,

terrestrial ways when it suits them. Translator, do you truly believe they will consider themselves bound

by anything they sign? Although without hands, God knows how they manage to sign anything.”

“They will consider both themselves and you bound by it if both they and you sign it,” Noah said.

“And, yes, they can make highly individual marks that serve as signatures. They spent a great deal of their

time and wealth in this country with translators, lawyers, and politicians, working things out so that each

Community was counted as a legal ‘person,’ whose individual mark would be accepted. And for twenty

years since then, they’ve honored their contracts.”

Rune Johnsen shook his blond head. “In all, they’ve been on earth longer than I’ve been alive, and

yet it feels wrong that they’re here. It feels wrong that they exist. I don’t even hate them, and still it feels

wrong. I suppose that’s because we’ve been displaced again from the center of the universe. We human

beings, I mean. Down through history, in myth and even in science, we’ve kept putting ourselves in the

center, and then being evicted.”

Noah smiled, surprised and pleased. “I noticed the same thing. Now we find ourselves in a kind of

sibling rivalry with the Communities. There is other intelligent life. The universe has other children. We

knew it, but until they arrived here, we could pretend otherwise.”

“That’s crap!” another woman said. Thera Collier, her name was, a big, angry red-haired young

woman. “The weeds came here uninvited, stole our land, and kidnapped our people.” She had been

eating an apple. She slammed it down hard on the table, crushing what was left of it, spattering juice.

“That’s what we need to remember. That’s what we need to do something about.”

“Do what?” Another woman asked. “We’re here to get jobs, not fight.”

Noah searched her memory for the new speaker’s name and found it. Piedad Ruiz—a small, brown

woman who spoke English clearly, but with a strong Spanish accent. She looked with her bruised face

and arms as though she had taken a fairly serious beating recently, but when Noah had asked her about it

before the group came into the meeting room, she held her head up and said she was fine and it was

nothing. Probably someone had not wanted her to apply for work at the bubble. Considering the rumors

that were sometimes spread about the Communities and why they hired human beings, that was not

surprising.

“What have the aliens told you about their coming here, Translator,” Rune Johnsen asked. He was,

Noah remembered from her reading of the short biography that had been given to her with his job

application, the son of a small businessman whose clothing store had not survived the depression brought

about by the arrival of the Communities. He wanted to look after his parents and he wanted to get

married. Ironically, the answer to both those problems seemed to be to go to work for the Communities

for a while. “You’re old enough to remember the things they did when they arrived,” he said. “What did

they tell you about why they abducted people, killed people….”

“They abducted me,” Noah admitted.

That silenced the room for several seconds. Each of the six potential recruits stared at her, perhaps

wondering or pitying, judging or worrying, perhaps even recoiling in horror, suspicion, or disgust. She

had received all these reactions from recruits and from others who knew her history. People had never

been able to be neutral about abductees. Noah tended to use her history as a way to start questions,

accusations, and perhaps thought.

“Noah Cannon,” Rune Johnsen said, proving that he had at least been listening when she introduced

herself. “I thought that name sounded familiar. You were part of the second wave of abductions. I

remember seeing your name on the lists of abductees. I noticed it because you were listed as female. I

had never run across a woman named Noah before.”

“So they kidnapped you, and now you work for them?” This was James Hunter Adio, a tall, lean,

angry-looking young black man. Noah was black herself and yet James Adio had apparently decided the

moment they met that he didn’t like her. Now he looked not only angry, but disgusted.

“I was eleven when I was taken,” Noah said. She looked at Rune Johnsen. “You’re right. I was part

of the second wave.”

“So what, then, they experimented on you?” James Adio asked.

Noah met his gaze. “They did, yes. The people of the first wave suffered the most. The Communities

didn’t know anything about us. They killed some of us with experiments and dietary deficiency diseases

and they poisoned others. By the time they snatched me, they at least knew enough not to kill me by

accident.”

“And what? You forgive them for what they did do?”

“Are you angry with me, Mr. Adio, or are you angry in my behalf?”

“I’m angry because I have to be here!” he said. He stood up and paced around the table—all the

way around twice before he would sit down again. “I’m angry that these things, these weeds can invade

us, wreck our economies, send the whole world into a depression just by showing up. They do whatever

they want to us, and instead of killing them, all I can do is ask them for a job!” And he needed the job

badly. Noah had read the information collected about him when he first applied to work for the

Communities. At twenty, James Adio was the oldest of seven children, and the only one who had

reached adulthood so far. He needed a job to help his younger brothers and sisters survive. Yet Noah

suspected that he would hate the aliens almost as much if they hired him as if they turned him down.

“How can you work for them?” Piedad Ruiz whispered to Noah. “They hurt you. Don’t you hate

them? I think I’d hate them if it were me.”

“They wanted to understand us and communicate with us,” Noah said. “They wanted to know how

we got along with one another and they needed to know how much we could bear of what was normal

for them.”

“Is that what they told you?” Thera Collier demanded. With one hand, she swept her smashed apple

off the table onto the floor, and then glared at Noah as though wishing she could sweep her away too.

Watching her, Noah realized that Thera Collier was a very frightened woman. Well, they were all

frightened, but Thera’s fear made her lash out at people.

“The Communities did tell me that,” Noah admitted, “but not until some of them and some of us, the

surviving captives, had managed to put together a code—the beginnings of a language—that got

communication started. Back when they captured me, they couldn’t tell me anything.”

Thera snorted. “Right. They can figure out how to cross light years of space, but they can’t figure out

how to talk to us without torturing us first!”

Noah allowed herself a moment of irritation. “You weren’t there, Ms. Collier. It happened before

you were born. And it happened to me, not to you.” And it hadn’t happened to anyone in Thera Collier’s

family either. Noah had checked. None of these people were relatives of abductees. It was important to

know that since relatives sometimes tried to take revenge on translators when they realized they weren’t

going to be able to hurt the Communities.

“It happened to a lot of people,” Thera Collier said. “And it shouldn’t have happened to anyone.”

Noah shrugged.

“Don’t you hate them for what they did to you?” Piedad whispered. Whispering seemed to be her

normal way of speaking.

“I don’t,” Noah said. “I did once, especially when they were beginning to understand us a little, and

yet went right on putting us through hell. They were like human scientists experimenting with lab

animals—not cruel, but very thorough.”

“Animals again,” Michelle Ota said. “You said they—”

“Then,” Noah told her. “Not now.”

“Why do you defend them?” Thera demanded. “They invaded our world. They tortured our people.

They do whatever they please, and we aren’t even sure what they look like.”

Rune Johnsen spoke up, to Noah’s relief. “What do they look like, Translator? You’ve seen them

close up.”

Noah almost smiled. What did the Communities look like. That was usually the first question asked in

a group like this. People tended to assume, no matter what they had seen or heard from media sources,

that each Community was actually an individual being shaped like a big bush or tree or, more likely, that

the being was wearing shrubbery as clothing or as a disguise.

“They’re not like anything that any of us have ever known,” she told them. “I’ve heard them

compared to sea urchins—completely wrong. I’ve also heard they were like swarms of bees or

wasps—also wrong, but closer. I think of them as what I usually call them—Communities. Each

Community contains several hundred individuals—an intelligent multitude. But that’s wrong too, really.

The individuals can’t really survive independently, but they can leave one community and move

temporarily or permanently to another. They are products of a completely different evolution. When I

look at them, I see what you’ve all seen: outer branches and then darkness. Flashes of light and

movement within. Do you want to hear more?”

They nodded, sat forward attentively except for James Adio who leaned back with an expression of

contempt on his dark, smooth young face.

“The substance of the things that look like branches and the things that look like leaves and mosses

and vines is alive and made up of individuals. It only looks like a plant of some sort. The various entities

that we can reach from the outside feel dry, and usually smooth. One normal-sized Community might fill

half of this room, but only weigh about six to eight hundred pounds. They aren’t solid, of course, and

within them, there are entities that I’ve never seen. Being enveloped by a community is like being held in a

sort of…comfortable strait jacket, if you can imagine such a thing. You can’t move much. You can’t

move at all unless the Community permits it. You can’t see anything. There’s no smell. Somehow,

though, after the first time, it isn’t frightening. It’s peaceful and pleasant. I don’t know why it should be,

but it is.”

“Hypnosis,” James Adio said at once. “Or drugs!”

“Definitely not,” Noah said. At least this was something she could be sure of. “That was one of the

hardest parts of being a captive of the Communities. Until they got to know us, they didn’t have anything

like hypnosis or mood-altering drugs. They didn’t even have the concept.”

Rune Johnsen turned to frown at her. “What concept?”

“Altered consciousness. They don’t even go unconscious unless they’re sick or injured, and a whole

Community never goes unconscious even though several of its entities might. As a result, Communities

can’t really be said to sleep—al-though at long last, they’ve accepted the reality that we have to sleep.

Inadvertently, we’ve introduced them to something brand new.”

“Will they let us bring medicine in?” Michelle Ota asked suddenly. “I have allergies and I really need

my medicine.”

“They will allow certain medicines. If you’re offered a contract, you’ll have to write in the drugs

you’ll need. They will either allow you to have the drugs or you won’t be hired. If what you need is

allowed, you’ll be permitted to order it from outside. The Communities will check to see that it is what

it’s supposed to be, but other than that, they won’t bother you about it. Medicine’s just about all you’ll

have to spend money on while you’re inside. Room and board are part of the agreement, of course, and

you won’t be allowed to leave your employers until your contract is up.”

“What if we get sick or have an accident?” Piedad demanded. “What if we need some medicine that

isn’t in the contract.”

“Medical emergencies are covered by the contract,” Noah said.

Thera slapped her palms down against the table and said loudly, “Screw all that!” She got the

attention she wanted. Everyone turned to look at her. “I want to know more about you, and the weeds,

Translator. In particular, I want to know why you’re still here, working for things that probably put you

through hell. Part of that no drug thing was no anesthetic when they hurt you, right?”

Noah sat still for a moment, remembering, yet not wanting to remember. “Yes,” she said at last,

“except that most of the time, the people actually hurting me were other human beings. The aliens used to

lock groups of two or more of us up together for days or weeks to see what would happen. This was

usually not too bad. Sometimes, though, it went wrong. Some of us went out of our minds. Hell, all of us

went out of our minds at one time or another. But some of us were more likely than others to be violent.

Then there were those of us who would have been thugs even without the Communities’ help. They were

quick enough to take advantage of any chance to exercise a little power, get a little pleasure by making

another person suffer. And some of us just stopped caring, stopped fighting, sometimes even stopped

eating. The pregnancies and several of the killings came from those cell-mate experiments. We called

them that.

“It was almost easier when the aliens just made us solve puzzles to get food or when they put things

in our food that made us sick or when they enfolded us and introduced some nearly lethal substance into

our bodies. The first captives got most of that, poor people. And some of them had developed a phobic

David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 9

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