21st Century Science Fiction (66 page)

“And now?”

“And now they are children grown to take on the worst aspects of someone—a clone, to carry the dark elements of the self. Emotions, concepts, feelings are extracted from the original and inserted into a blank host. That little girl is the worst of someone else. Do you have any idea who?”

The kappa hesitated. She knew very well who had done such a thing: I-Nami, the glowing, golden goddess, who had sent her small fractured self to live in the swamp. Then she thought of the woman in the crowd: of the clean canal, the tenement with lights and fresh water. It was enough to make her say, slowly, “No. I do not know.”

“Well. It must be someone very wealthy—perhaps they had it done for a favored child. I’ve heard of such things. The kid gets into drugs or drink, or there’s some genetic damage psychologically, so they have a clone grown to take on that part of the child and send it away. It costs a fortune. It would have been called black magic, once. Now it is black science.”

“But what is happening to her now?”

“My guess is that she came close to the original, whose feelings she hosts, and that it’s put her under strain. I don’t understand quite how these things work—it’s very advanced neuro-psychiatry, and as I say, it’s rare.”

“And the future?”

“I can’t tell you that it’s a happy one. She is all damage, you see. She has no real emotions of her own, little free will, probably not a great deal of intelligence. You are looking at a person who will grow up to be immensely troubled, who may even harbor appetites and desires that will prove destructive to others.”

“And what would happen if the
ikiryoh
died?”

“I’m not sure,” the healer said, “but in the legends, if anything happens to the
ikiryoh,
the stored emotions pass back to the person who once possessed them.”

“Even if the person does not know that the
ikiryoh
is dead?”

“Even then.”

He and the kappa stared at one another.

“I think,” the kappa said at last, “that I had better take her home.”

Next day, toward evening, the kappa once more sat on the steps of the water-temple. The child was sleeping within. It was very quiet, with only the hum of cicadas in the leaves and the ripple of fish or turtle. The kappa tried to grasp the future: the long years of fits and nightmares, the daily anguish. And once the
ikiryoh
reached puberty, what then? The kappa had seen too much of a goddess’ dark desires, back at the temple: desires that seemed to embody a taste for the pain of others. How different had Than Geng been from I-Nami? And yet, I-Nami now was restoring the fortunes of her people: thousands of them . . .

The kappa looked up at a sudden sound. The child was making her way down the steps to the water. For a moment, the kappa thought:
it would be easy, if I must.
The child’s frail limbs, powerless against the thick-muscled arms of the kappa; a few minutes to hold her under the water . . . It would be quick. And better do it now, while the
ikiryoh
was still a child, than face a struggle with an angry, vicious human adult. But what if the
ikiryoh
had a chance after all, could be remade, not through the aid of an arcane science, but simply through the love of the only family she had?

The kappa stared at the child and thought of murder, and of the goddess’s glowing face, and then she sighed.

“Come,” she said. “Sit by me,” and together in stillness they watched the shadowy golden carp, half-seen beneath the surface of the lake.

T
ED
K
OSMATKA
Born and raised in Indiana, Ted Kosmatka has been a farmworker, a zookeeper, a lab tech, and a steel mill laborer, and is now a writer for the online gaming company Valve. His first published story was “The God Engine” in 2005. His debut novel,
The Games,
was listed by
Publishers Weekly
as one of the best novels of the year.

Originally published in 2007, “The Prophet of Flores” is set in a world in which Darwinian evolution has been apparently disproved, and science has shown the Earth to be merely thousands of years old. It is a tricky story, and not necessarily the one you think it’s going to be.

If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?

—V
OLTAIRE

P
aul liked playing God in the attic above his parents’ garage. That’s what his father called it, playing God, the day he found out. That’s what he called it the day he smashed it all down.

Paul built the cages out of discarded two-by-fours he’d found behind the garage and quarter-inch mesh he bought from the local hardware store. When his father was away to speak at a scientific conference on divine cladistics, Paul began constructing his laboratory from plans he’d drawn during the last day of school.

Because he wasn’t old enough to use his father’s power tools, he had to use a handsaw to cut the wood for the cages. He used his mother’s sturdy black scissors to snip the wire mesh. He borrowed hinges from old cabinet doors, and he borrowed nails from the rusty coffee can that hung over his father’s unused workbench.

One evening his mother heard the hammering and came out to the garage. “What are you doing up there?” she asked, speaking in careful English, peering up at the rectangle of light that spilled down from the attic.

Paul stuck his head through the opening, all spiky black hair and sawdust. “I’m just playing around with some tools,” he said. Which was, in some sense, the truth. Because he couldn’t lie to his mother. Not directly.

“Which tools?”

“Just a hammer and some nails.”

She stared up at him, her delicate face a broken Chinese doll—pieces of porcelain reglued subtly out of alignment. “Be careful,” she said, and he understood she was talking both about the tools, and about his father.

The days turned into weeks as Paul worked on the cages. Because the materials were big, he built the cages big—less cutting that way. In reality, the cages were enormous, over-engineered structures, ridiculously outsized for the animals they’d be holding. They weren’t mouse cages so much as mouse cities—huge tabletop-sized enclosures that could have housed German shepherds. He spent most of his paper route money on the project, buying odds and ends that he needed: sheets of plexi, plastic water bottles, and small dowels of wood he used for door latches. While the other children in the neighborhood played basketball or wittedandu, Paul worked.

He bought exercise wheels and built walkways; he hung loops of yarn the mice could climb to various platforms. The mice themselves he bought from a pet store near his paper route. Most were white feeder mice used for snakes, but a couple were of the more colorful, fancy variety. And there were even a few English mice—sleek, long-bodied show mice with big tulip ears and glossy coats. He wanted a diverse population, so he was careful to buy different kinds.

While he worked on their permanent homes, he kept the mice in little aquariums stacked on a table in the middle of the room. On the day he finished the last of the big cages, he released the mice into their new habitats one by one—the first explorers on a new continent. To mark the occasion, he brought his friend John over, whose eyes grew wide when he saw what Paul had made.

“You built all this?” John asked.

“Yeah.”

“It must have taken you a long time.”

“Months.”

“My parents don’t let me have pets.”

“Neither do mine,” Paul answered. “But anyway, these aren’t pets.”

“Then what are they?”

“An experiment.”

“What kind of experiment?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

• • • •

Mr. Finley stood at the projector, marking a red ellipse on the clear plastic sheet. Projected on the wall, it looked like a crooked half-smile between the X and Y axis.

“This represents the number of daughter atoms. And
this
. . .” He drew the mirror image of the first ellipse. “This is the number of parent atoms.” He placed the marker on the projector and considered the rows of students. “Does anyone know what the point of intersection represents?”

Darren in the front row raised his hand. “It’s the element’s half-life.”

“Exactly. In what year was radiometric dating invented?”

“1906.”

“By whom?”

“Rutherford.”

“What method did he use?”

“Uranium lead—”

“No. Wallace, can you tell us?”

“He measured helium as an intermediate decay product of uranium.”

“Good, so then who used the uranium-lead method?”

“That was Boltwood, in 1907.”

“How were these initial results viewed?”

“With skepticism.”

“By whom?”

“By the evolutionists.”

“Good.” Mr. Finley turned to Paul. “In what year did Darwin write
On the Origin of Species
?”

“1859,” Paul said.

“Yes, and in what year did Darwin’s theory finally lose the confidence of the larger scientific community?”

“That was 1932.” Anticipating the next question, Paul continued. “When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating. The new dating method proved the earth wasn’t as old as the evolutionists thought.”

“And in what year was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?”

“1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel prize in 1960 when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the Earth was 5,800 years old.”

• • • •

Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father’s old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul’s father was a doctor, the PhD kind. He was blond and big and successful. He’d met Paul’s mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm. They had worked on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul’s father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.

Paul’s father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; and the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul’s mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.

Paul’s father was a force of nature, a cataclysm as unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. The attic was a good place to hide, and Paul threw himself into his hobby.

Paul studied his mice as though they were Goodall’s chimps. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. He found that within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Paul learned, could kill each other.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations expanded to fill the new worlds he’d created for them. The babies were born pink and blind, but as their fur came in, Paul began documenting colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, and banded, and broken marked. In later generations, colors appeared that he hadn’t purchased, and he knew enough about genetics to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.

Paul was fascinated by the concept of genes, the stable elements through which God provided for the transfer of heritable characteristics from one generation to the next. In school they called it divine transmission.

Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well-mapped and well-understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. But it wasn’t enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He wanted to do real science. And because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas.

Mice, he quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand. The electronic scale, however, proved useful. He weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics, but he wasn’t sure what characteristics to look for.

He was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date, but a mouse—the seventeenth mouse born in January. He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. There was nothing really special about the mouse. It was made different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he’d written there. Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he’d ever weighed.

• • • •

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God’s words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G. That’s not why Paul did it though, to get closer to God. He did it for the simplest reason, because he was curious.

It was early spring before his father asked him what he spent his time doing in the attic.

“Just messing around.”

They were in his father’s car on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there.”

Paul fought back a surge of panic. “I built a fort a while ago.”

“You’re almost twelve now. Aren’t you getting a little old for forts?’

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“I don’t want you spending all your time up there.”

“All right.”

“I don’t want your grades slipping.”

Paul, who hadn’t gotten a B in two years, said “All right.”

They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.