Year's Best SF 17

“Your people and ours are at war. A secret war. We’re all soldiers in that great battle and don’t even know it.”

“Bea,” Cara said, “I just wanted to make sure you were all right. I really have to get back to Juan Carlos.”

“What, you’re leaving before we can bow down to you and wash your feet?” Ambus said.

Cara stepped into her shoes and walked back through the archway to the hearth, which reactivated her bodyfield.

“Cara, I’m sorry,” Beatrix said. “Don’t leave!”

“Look, I can’t … I can’t deal with all this. I can’t believe you’re with him.” The sight of the tether repulsed her.

“Cara!” Beatrix shouted from behind her. But Cara marched ahead through the gusting snow without looking back.

ENCRYPTED Med. Journal Entry No. 226 by Dr Juan Carlos Barbarón: Tether contraction can commence as early as six months (Terran) after adsorption and accelerate, bringing the passive and dominant mates ever closer together. This triggers the growth of nerve fibers on the dominant Wergen’s dermal scales in anticipation of the final stages of corpus meiosis, i.e. encorporation.Cara floated through the thick liquid hydrocarbons with her eyes closed. It felt like she had left the present behind, like she had traveled back to when was ten years old, hunting perpuffers for the very first time. She broke the surface of the waters and threw her head back.

Beatrix sat on the shore, hugging her knees and watching her. She had said that it might still be possible to swim despite her tethered status, but that she preferred not to because Ambus didn’t much enjoy the lake. He sat about twenty-five feet to her left, clutching their bunched-up tether and examining a bot. They could move almost fifty feet apart given their cord’s length and elasticity. But Ambus couldn’t be far away enough as far as Cara was concerned.

In all the years that she’d known Beatrix, her friend had never seemed more alien than she did at that moment with the flesh-colored cord dangling from her head, snaking across the shore toward Ambus. Poor Bea. How much time did she have left?

Cara descended again, peering through the natural muck of the methane. Something caught her attention. A circular shape pulsed by her feet. She reached down, pushed her hand through the ring and the creature instinctively contracted on her wrist.

Cara rose up out of the viscous methane and raised her fist in the air, flashing her find to Beatrix. A phosphorescent-purple perpuffer.

Beatrix clapped her hands and shouted, “Well done, Cara! Well done!”

How many times did they dive together for perpuffers, searching for the elusive purple one, the top prize? Cara couldn’t imagine ever doing this without her best friend at her side.

She swam back to shore.

Ambus moved as far away as his tether would allow, sitting on the other side of a dune with his back to them.

“Cara, it’s lovely,” Beatrix said, fingering the perpuffer.

Cara sighed happily. “After all of these years, I was beginning to think the purple ones were just a myth.”

“Are you going to dive for more?”

“No, I have to go meet Juan Carlos for lunch.”

“Don’t go.” Disappointment washed across Beatrix’s face. “Cara, don’t take this the wrong way, but … I don’t like what you’ve told me about him.”

Cara raised an eyebrow. It was unlike Beatrix to make a negative statement about a human being—let alone to express her disagreement so openly. Normally, if her opinion differed from Cara’s she would hesitate or turn her head away when responding. When something moved her, she would tilt her head to the left and nod. Cara had learned to read her subtle mannerisms.

“You don’t know Juan Carlos,” Cara said.

“Why doesn’t he ever join us?”

“He’s busy.” Cara could never bring herself to tell Beatrix the truth. Despite Juan Carlos’s many fine qualities—his drop-dead looks, his sharp wit and analytical mind, his love for her—he had a low threshold for socializing with Wergens. He made it a point to minimize the time he spent in their presence. “They’re lapdogs, Cara,” he had said to her that morning, trying to persuade her not to visit Beatrix. “Doesn’t it offend you? That such intelligent beings can be so fatuous, so sycophantic … They’re like lovesick schoolchildren.”

Undeniable, really. But he had never met Beatrix, and their friendship transcended that species drive. Cara had to believe that. And certainly she had no biochemical reason for the fondness she felt for Beatrix. “If it’s so offensive,” she had answered, “maybe we shouldn’t be accepting their technology, hmm?” She made a face and kissed him on the cheek. “I know you don’t want me to go, but I really need to visit Bea at the lake.” Juan Carlos’s objections had dissuaded her from seeing Beatrix over the past few weeks. “I don’t like the way I left things with her the last time we met. I’ll see you at lunch, okay?”