Science Fiction remains a vital way of not only looking at possible futures, but of looking at the present through the lens of the imagined future. I don’t think truly new ideas are as common as they once were, but fresh treatments of old ideas, even explicit hommages to old stories, can be just as exciting. Our present is ever changing—and the best SF changes with us, as demonstrated in many stories here. This book showcases the very best of 2005’s stories.
TRICERATOPS SUMMER, by Michael Swanwick
The dinosaurs looked all wobbly in the summer heat shimmering up from the pavement. There were about thirty of them, a small herd of what appeared to be Triceratops. They were crossing the road—don’t ask me why—so I downshifted and brought the truck to a halt, and waited.
Waited and watched.
They were interesting creatures, and surprisingly graceful for all their bulk. They picked their way delicately across the road, looking neither to the right nor the left. I was pretty sure I’d correctly identified them by now—they had those three horns on their faces. I used to be a kid. I’d owned the plastic models.
My next-door neighbor, Gretta, who was sitting in the cab next to me with her eyes closed, said, “Why aren’t we moving?”
“Dinosaurs in the road,” I said.
She opened her eyes.
“Son of a bitch,” she said.
Then, before I could stop her, she leaned over and honked the horn, three times. Loud.
As one, every Triceratops in the herd froze in its tracks, and swung its head around to face the truck.
I practically fell over laughing.
“What’s so goddamn funny?” Gretta wanted to know. But I could only point and shake my head helplessly, tears of laughter rolling down my cheeks.
It was the frills. They were beyond garish. They were as bright as any circus poster, with red whorls and yellow slashes and electric orange diamonds—too many shapes and colors to catalog, and each one different. They looked like Chinese kites! Like butterflies with six-foot winspans! Like Las Vegas on acid! And then, under those carnival-bright displays, the most stupid faces imaginable, blinking and gaping like brain-damaged cows. Oh, they were funny, all right, but if you couldn’t see that at a glance, you never were going to.
Gretta was getting fairly steamed. She climbed down out of the cab and slammed the door behind her. At the sound, a couple of the Triceratops pissed themselves with excitement, and the lot shied away a step or two. Then they began huddling a little closer, to see what would happen next.
Gretta hastily climbed back into the cab. “What are those bastards up to now?” she demanded irritably. She seemed to blame me for their behavior. Not that she could say so, considering she was in my truck and her BMW was still in the garage in South Burlington.
“They’re curious,” I said. “Just stand still. Don’t move or make any noise, and after a bit they’ll lose interest and wander off.”
“How do you know? You ever see anything like them before?”
“No,” I admitted. “But I worked on a dairy farm when I was a young fella, thirty-forty years ago, and the behavior seems similar.”
In fact, the Triceratops were already getting bored and starting to wander off again when a battered old Hyundai pulled wildly up beside us, and a skinny young man with the worst-combed hair I’d seen in a long time jumped out. They decided to stay and watch.
The young man came running over to us, arms waving. I leaned out the window. “What’s the problem, son?”
He was pretty bad upset. “There’s been an accident—an incident, I mean. At the Institute.” He was talking about the Institute for Advanced Physics, which was not all that far from here. It was government-funded and affiliated in some way I’d never been able to get straight with the University of Vermont. “The verge stabilizers failed and the meson-field inverted and vectorized. The congruence factors went to infinity and…” He seized control of himself. “You’re not supposed to see any of this.”
“These things are yours, then?” I said. “So you’d know. They’re Triceratops, right?”
“Triceratops horridus,” he said distractedly. I felt unreasonably pleased with myself. “For the most part. There might be a couple other species of Triceratops mixed in there as well. They’re like ducks in that regard. They’re not fussy about what company they keep.”
Gretta shot out her wrist and glanced meaningfully at her watch. Like everything else she owned, it was expensive. She worked for a firm in Essex Junction that did systems analysis for companies that were considering downsizing. Her job was to find out exactly what everybody did and then tell the CEO who could be safely cut. “I’m losing money,” she grumbled.
I ignored her.
“Listen,” the kid said. “You’ve got to keep quiet about this. We can’t afford to have it get out. It has to be kept a secret.”
“A secret?” On the far side of the herd, three cars had drawn up and stopped. Their passengers were standing in the road, gawking. A Ford Taurus pulled up behind us, and its driver rolled down his window for a better look. “You’re planning to keep a herd of dinosaurs secret? There must be dozens of these things.”
“Hundreds,” he said despairingly. “They were migrating. The herd broke up after it came through. This is only a fragment of it.”
“Then I don’t see how you’re going to keep this a secret. I mean, just look at them. They’re practically the size of tanks. People are bound to notice.”
“My God, my God.”
Somebody on the other side had a camera out and was taking pictures. I didn’t point this out to the young man.
Gretta had been getting more and more impatient as the conversation proceeded. Now she climbed down out of the truck and said, “I can’t afford to waste any more time here. I’ve got work to do.”
“Well, so do I, Gretta.”
She snorted derisively. “Ripping out toilets, and nailing up sheet rock! Already, I’ve lost more money than you earn in a week.”
She stuck out her hand at the young man. “Give me your car keys.”
Dazed, the kid obeyed. Gretta climbed down, got in the Hyundai, and wheeled it around. “I’ll have somebody return this to the Institute later today.”
Then she was gone, off to find another route around the herd.
She should have waited, because a minute later the beasts decided to leave, and in no time at all were nowhere to be seen. They’d be easy enough to find, though. They pretty much trampled everything flat in their wake.
The kid shook himself, as if coming out of a trance. “Hey,” he said. “She took my car.”
“Climb into the cab,” I said. “There’s a bar a ways up the road. I think you need a drink.”
* * * *
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