Jonathan Strahan - The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy of the Year Volume 5 An anthology of stories

Doing nothing was natural.

For long delicious spans, the entity sat motionless, allowing his heat to gradually melt the ice. Then he would cool himself and his surroundings would freeze again, and he would pretend to be the old ice. With determination and a wealth of patience, he imagined billions of years passing while nothing happened, nothing in this tiny realm experiencing any significant change. Sometimes he sprouted a single enormous eye, and from another part of his frigid body he emitted a thin rain of photons that struck the black basalt ceiling and the icy hills around him, and with that eye designed for this single function, he would slowly and thoroughly study what never changed, and with his mind he would try to imagine the Ship that he could not see.

“Speak to me,” he might beg.

Then he would wait, wishing for a reply, tolerant enough to withstand a year and sometimes two years of inviting silence.

“Speak,” he would prompt again.

Silence.

Then he might offer a soft lie. “I can hear you anyway,” he would claim. “Just past my hearing, you are. Just out of my reach, out of my view.”

But if the strange voice was genuine, then its maker was proving itself more stubborn even than him.

Seventeen millennia and thirty-seven years passed, and then with a thunderous thud, a hatch on one wall burst inward. Unsealed for the first time, the open door let in a screaming wind and a brigade of machines—enormous swift and fearless assemblages of muscle and narrow talents that knew their purpose and had only so much time to work.

Alone was terrified, and he was enthralled. Imagining that he could escape at will, he retreated to the chamber’s center. But then the other hatches exploded inwards, including a big opening at the apex of the ceiling. Machines began to burrow into the ice and string lights, and then they carved the black walls and built a second, lower ceiling. And all the while, they were leaking enough raw heat that the ancient glacier began to melt, transformed into fizzy water and gas.

Alone huddled inside the rotting shards of the ice.

Each of his emergency exists were either blocked or too close to active machines. The chamber floor was quality hyperfiber, difficult to pierce without creating a spectacle. Alone pretended to belong to the floor. For the next awful week, he did nothing but remain still. Then the ice had melted and the first wave of machinery vanished, replaced by different devices that worked rapidly in smaller ways, but with the same tenacious purpose.

Mimicking one common machine, he drifted to the new lake’s surface.

A shoreline was being constructed from cultured wood and young purple corals and farm-raised shellfish, everything laid across a bed of glassy stone filled with artificial fossils—ancestors to the chamber’s new residents. Humans stood beside the aliens, the species speaking through interpretive AIs. The aliens wore broad purple shells, and they were happiest when their gills lay in the newly conditioned water. The humans wore uniforms of various styles, different colors. One uniform had the bright reflective quality of a mirror, and the woman inside it was saying, “Beautiful, yes.” Then she knelt down and sucked up a mouthful of the salted, acidic water. Spitting with vigor, she said, “And a good taste too, is it?”

The aliens swirled their many feet and the fibrous gills, stirring up their lake. Then their chittering answers were turned into the words, “We are skeptical.”

“To your specifications,” said the woman. “I pledge.”

The aliens spoke of rare elements that needed to be increased or abolished. Proportions were critical. Perfection was the only satisfactory solution.

“It shall be done,” the captain promised.

The aliens claimed to be satisfied. Confident of success, they slithered into the deeper water, plainly enjoying their new abode.

The captain looked across the lake, spying one machine that was plainly doing nothing.

With a commanding tone, she said, “This is Washen. We’ve got a balky conditioner sitting in the middle. Do you see it?”

Quietly, Alone eased beneath the surface, changing his shape, merging with the glassy sediment. His disguise was good enough to escape the notice of watching humans and machines. As he waited, he gathered enough power to make a sudden explosive escape. But then the artificial day faded, a bright busy night taking hold, complete with the illusion of scattered stars and a pale red moon; and it was an easy trick to assume the form of one shelled alien, mimicking its motions and chattering tongue, casually slipping out through the public entrance into a side tunnel that led to a multitude of new places, all empty.

Twenty centuries of steady exploration, and still the cavern had no end. Its wandering passageways were dry and often cramped, unlit and deeply chilled. The granite and hyperfiber were quite sterile. Humans and aliens didn’t wish to live in places like this. Machine species set up a few homes, but their communities were tiny and easily avoided. Once more, the habit of walking returned to his life. To help track his own motions as well as the passage of time, Alone would count his strides until he reached some lovely prime number, and then he would mark the nearest stone with slashes and dots that only he could interpret—apparently random marks that would warn him in another thousand years that not only had he had passed this way before, but he had been moving from this tunnel into that chamber, and if at all possible, he should avoid repeating that old route.

The voice found him more often now, but it was quieter and even harder to comprehend. Sometimes a whisper emerged from some slight hole or side pas-sage—like a neighbor calling to a neighbor from some enormous distance. But more often the voice was directly behind him, and it didn’t so much speak as offer up emotions, raw and unwelcome. The sadness that it gladly shared was deep and very old, but that black mood was preferable to the sharp, sick fear that sometimes took hold of Alone. One dose of panic was enough to make his next hundred days unbearable. Something was horribly wrong, the voice insisted. Alone couldn’t define the terror, much less the reasons, but he didn’t have any choice but believe what he felt. He had his solitude; there was no cause to be scared. No captains or engineers chased after him. Occasionally he slipped into some deep corner of the cavern, and for several months he would hide away, waiting for whatever might pass by. But nothing showed itself, and whatever the voice was, it was wrong. Mistaken. Alone was perfectly safe inside this private, perfect catacomb, and he welcomed no opinion that said otherwise.

One day, walking an unexplored passageway, he happened upon a vertical shaft. Normally he might have avoided the place. A human had been here first, leaving behind tastes of skin and bacteria and human oils. Leaking a faint glow, Alone spied the machine abandoned by this anonymous explorer: a winch perched on the edge of the deep shaft, anchored by determined spikes. The sapphire rope was broken. The drum was almost empty, but the winch continued to turn—an achingly slow motion that for some reason fascinated the first soul to stand here in a very long while.

After several days of study, Alone touched the drum, and that slight friction was enough to kill what power remained inside the superconductive battery. How long had it been here, spinning without purpose? And what was inside the hole, waiting at the other end of the broken blue thread?

Alone snapped two handles from the winch and uncoiled the remaining sapphire rope, tying one handle to one end. Then he dropped the handle into the dark shaft. Two hundred meters, and there was no bottom. Then he tied the rope’s other end to the winch and climbed down. The shaft turned to hyperfiber, slick and vertical, and then its sides pulled away. When Alone couldn’t reach easily from one side to the other, he let go, falling and making his body brighter as he fell, watching the dangling handle fly past. Then feeling no one but himself, he lit the entire chamber with his golden fire.