Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

The tires on the roadway make a regular, soothing hum broken occasionally by the ucka-ucka of a seam in the asphalt. A light rain ticks against the windshield. Carol and Devin breathe and sigh and move in their seats. I lick my nose once, yawn loudly. A biological dog stress response. If only the humans on my team read my signals as closely as I read theirs.

I don’t think about Dacy often, but today I wonder what advice she would give to me. She didn’t know much about SAR, but she was good at teaching me about people.

Devin slows the truck, and our tires crunch gravel. I sit up and look out from my crate and see tall fencing running outside the windows. I hear the engine of a truck like Devin’s that is behind us slow and also turn onto the gravel, and several smaller cars that must be the police escort vehicles. The second truck must mean that there are additional SAR team members in our caravan, but I did not see them before we left. We grind along a narrow driveway. Sitting up in my backseat crate, I can see a small gatehouse and the pair of silent police cruisers blocking the road.

The truck’s engine falls silent. In the void I hear a faint buzzing overhead. I place it immediately. A drone, likely a police drone that tracked our progress here along with the escort. The sound of it is like an itch inside my head, where I can’t reach it. It is like the feeling before a sneeze.

Good one. I add that to my Is Like list.

The other truck pulls ahead of us. From inside it I hear Anders’ voice.

Anders. That is highly unusual. As team leader, Anders stays at base, remotely managing his deployed teams, resources, requests, and instructions from first responders, and other vital details. Yet he followed us out to this deployment.

The gate rattles open, and a cruiser starts up to make room for us to pass. The buzz of the overhead drone grows louder, and when I look I can see it black against the low clouds, like an insect scurrying across a ceiling.

We drive for a few more minutes with little to spy out the windows except more wet, stubbly fields and the occasional outbuilding. We pass another roadblock, but its cruisers are already pulled aside. I see smokestacks and low, featureless buildings.

A hum is building in the earth. It makes the hair on my spine stand up. By the time we pull up to the buildings and their looming smokestacks, the vibrations are in my bones and my stomach, and I feel cold all over from my hair prickling.

When our convoy stops, I am the only one left behind in the car. Through my crate’s ventholes I watch Carol and Anders and Devin whipped by the wind as they follow a pair of dark-clad workers into a building.

My job right now is to rest, gathering mental and physical energy for the work that will come. But the unnerving vibration and the thoughts that have plagued me since yesterday prevent my resting.

Carol doesn’t like the DAT. She doesn’t like me . She prefers the old way of dog-handler teamwork, the dog giving imperfect feedback through body language and the handler interpreting signals as best they could. She likes the inefficiency because, to her, it felt like connection .

The DAT connects my mind directly to her, but that’s not the kind of connection she means.

I have no Is Like for the kind of connection she means.

Why would she prefer inefficient work and unclear communication when EI is, objectively, better? I don’t understand. But I do want to continue to work. Being good at my job is as important to me as connection is to Carol.

How can both purposes be served?

Footsteps approach the truck, but it’s Anders who opens the door. A woman is with him, wearing dark clothing composed in the same practical, tidy way that the SAR team members dress. Anders unlatches my crate, leashes me without hurry. He knows better than to pat me. Everyone in our SAR unit should know I don’t enjoy it, but Anders has the self-control to restrain himself where even Devin does not. I hop down from the truck at his invitation.

We’re in a gravel lot in the middle of a rain-beaten prairie. Enormous steam vents rise from the earth, trickling metallic-scented exhaust. A breeze snatches past my nose carrying broken-stem, crushed-herb, fresh-dirt smells whipped about with a whiff of ozone. After such a tense hour in the stuffy truck, a face full of bright air is exhilarating.

Another man in dark clothing watches us from outside the door my team disappeared into. He scans the area through thick, military-issue e-glasses.

“This is Sera,” Anders says to the woman. “Sera, this is Angela Weil. She’s in charge of the search and wanted to meet you.”

I understand his speech without DAT help—regular dog brains can hear the shapes of language, even if they don’t understand it like I do—but I can’t respond. Only Carol has the integrated neural pathway for my DAT. I sit for a polite hello in lieu of more complicated language.

“She says hi,” Anders interprets.

Angela reaches a hand toward my head. She smells overpoweringly of personal cleaning products, stringent chemical odors that Modanet says mimic appealing plant smells to the feeble human nose. I try not to flinch away from her touch.

“You’re confident her SAR training won’t interfere with the search objectives?”

Anders shakes his head. “ESAC stock starts with the same specs your dogs do. They’re just brought up differently.”

Angela grabs and gently kneads my ear. I hold my sit carefully, but cast Anders a baleful look. He catches my eye and looks away.

“It will take a certain… commitment. To follow through.”

Anders chuckles. “You’ve got the right dog for the job, then.” He crouches down in front of me. Thankfully, Angela backs off, taking her hands with her. “This is a tough one, Sera.” I’ve always liked the way Anders talks to me. He reaches into his front shirt pocket and brings out a memory stick, which he extends to the DAT interface patch worked into my harness. My brain receives a password-protected dossier tagged Access Restricted .

“Difficult parameters, novel search elements, and an unfamiliar environment,” he says. “Subterranean.”

I open my mouth to pant. Anders is giving me a briefing, all on my own. Often all the information I receive from Carol before a search is a scent profile and a police report. I wonder what is in the Access Restricted dossier.

“In addition, you will be required to apprehend the target, not just locate it. Carol will be given limited information. There are things in this file that are very restricted, that you’ll have access to and she won’t. She will know your target, but she won’t have all of the details that you need in order to do your work. You will be required to keep some information private from her. Do you understand?”

He holds out both hands. Right hand for yes, left hand for no. A game the team played with me often when I was new and my intelligence was amusing to them.

I touch my nose to his right palm.

“Okay. Angela will give you the password to open the dossier. Destroy it once you have the information. Don’t store it as data, store it as biological memory. Do you understand?”

Fascinated, I digest this information for half a moment, then I touch my nose to his palm again.

“Good. Angela?”

The woman bends over and touches a password to my harness DAT interface. The password winks into my thoughts.

I open the dossier.

A drone drops low overhead. Its insectile buzzing thrums the pit of my stomach. I blink rapidly at the information I have, as though it were before my physical eyes and blinking might bring clarity.

I look at Anders. He is watching me with anxiety. “Do you have questions, Sera?”