The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (33 page)

There were six lifeboats, accessed through six armoured doorways, each of which was surmounted with a panel engraved both with operating instructions and stern warnings concerning the penalties for improper use. Qilian was floating at the far end, next to the open doorway of the sixth boat. I had to look at him for a long, bewildered moment before I quite realized what I was seeing. I wondered if it was a trick of my eyes, occasioned by the gloomy lighting. But I had made no mistake. Next to Qilian, floating in states of deceptive repose, were the bodies of Jura and Batbayar. A little further away, as if he had been surprised and killed on his own, was Uugan. They had all been stabbed and gashed: knife wounds to the chest and throat, in all three instances. Blood was still oozing out of them.

In his good hand, Qilian held a bloody knife, wet and slick to the hilt.

“I am sorry,” he said, as if all that situation needed was a reasonable explanation. “But only one of these six boats is functional.”

I stared in numb disbelief. “How can only one be working?”

“The other five are obstructed; they can’t leave because there is damage to their launch hatches. This is the only one with a clear shaft all the way to space.” Qilian wiped the flat of the blade against his forearm. “Of course, I wish you the best of luck in proving me wrong. But I am afraid I will not be around to witness your efforts.”

“You fucking . . .” I began, before trailing off. I knew if I called him a coward he would simply laugh at me, and I had no intention of giving him even the tiniest of moral victories. “Just go,” I said.

He drew himself into the lifeboat. I expected some last word from him, some mocking reproach or grandiloquent burst of self-justifying rhetoric. But there was nothing. The door clunked shut with a gasp of compressed air. There was a moment of silence and stillness and then the boat launched itself away from the ship on a rapid stutter of electromagnetic pulses.

I felt the entire hull budge sideways in recoil. He was gone. For several seconds, all I could do was breathe; I could think of nothing useful or constructive to say to Muhunnad, nothing beyond stating the obvious hopelessness of our predicament.

But instead, Muhunnad said quietly: “We are not going to die.”

At first, I did not quite understand his words. “I’m sorry?”

He spoke with greater emphasis this time. “We are going to live, but only if you listen to me very, very carefully. You must return me to the couch with all haste.”

I shook my head. “It’s no good, Muhunnad. It’s all over.”

“No, it is not. The
River Volga
is not dead. I only made it seem this way.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“There isn’t time to explain here. Get me back to the bridge, get me connected back to the harness, then I will tell you. But make haste! We really do not have very much time. The enemy are much nearer than you think.”

“The enemy?”

“There is no
Mandate of Heaven
. Either she scuttled back to the portal, or she was destroyed during the same attack that damaged us.”

“But you said . . .”

“I lied. Now help me move!”

Not for the first time that day, I did precisely as I was told.

Having already plotted a route around the obstructions, it did not take anywhere near as long to return to the bridge as it had taken to reach the lifeboats. Once there, I buckled him into the couch – he was beginning to retain some limb control, but not enough to help me with the task – and set about reconnecting the harness systems, trusting myself not to make a mistake. My fingers fumbled on the ends of my hands, as if they were a thousand
li
away.

“Start talking to me, Muhunnad,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on. Why did you lie about the Mandate?”

“Because I knew the effect that lie would have on Qilian. I wished to give him a reason to leave the ship. I had seen the kind of man he was. I knew that he would save himself, even if it meant the rest of dying.”

“I still don’t understand. What good has it done us? The damage to the ship . . .” I completed the final connection. Muhunnad stiffened as the harness took hold of his nervous system, but did not appear to be in any obvious discomfort. “Are you all right?” I asked warily.

“This will take a moment. I had to put the ship into a deep shutdown, to convince Qilian. I must bring her back system by system, so as not to risk an overload.”

The evidence of his work was already apparent. The bridge lights returned to normal illumination, while those readouts and displays that had remained active were joined by others that had fallen into darkness. I held my breath, expecting the whole ensemble to shut back down again at any moment. But I should have known better than to doubt Muhunnad’s ability. The systems remained stable, even as they cycled through start-up and crash recovery routines. The air circulators resumed their dull but reassuring chug.

“I shall dispense with artificial gravity until we are safely underway, if that is satisfactory with you.”

“Whatever it takes,” I said.

His eyes, still wide open, quivered in their sockets. “I am sweeping local space,” he reported. “There was some real damage to the sensors, but nowhere as bad as I made out. I can see Qilian’s lifeboat. He made an excellent departure.” Then he swallowed. “I can also see the enemy. Three of their ships will shortly be within attack range. I must risk restarting the engines without a proper initialization test.”

“Again, whatever it takes.”

“Perhaps you would like to brace yourself. There may be a degree of undamped acceleration.”

Muhunnad had been right to warn me, and even then it came harder and sooner than I had been expecting. Although I had managed to secure myself to a handhold, I was nearly wrenched away with the abruptness of our departure. I felt acceleration rising smoothly, until it was suppressed by the dampeners. My arm was sore from the jolt, as if it had been almost pulled from its socket.

“That is all I can do for us now,” Muhunnad said. “Running is our only effective strategy, unfortunately. Our weapons would prove totally ineffective against the enemy, even if we could get close enough to fire before they turned their own guns on us. But running will suffice. At least we have the mass of one less lifeboat to consider.”

“I still don’t quite get what happened. How did you know there’d still be one lifeboat that was still working? From what I saw, we came very close to losing all of them.”

“We did,” he said, with something like pride in his voice. “But not quite, you see. That was my doing, Ariunaa. Before the instant of the attack, I adjusted the angle of orientation of our hull. I made sure that the energy beam took out five of the six lifeboat launch hatches, and no more. Think of a knife fighter, twisting to allow part of his body to be cut rather than another.”

I stared at him in amazement, forgetting the pain in my arm from the sudden onset of acceleration. I recalled what Qilian had said, his puzzlement about the ship twisting at the onset of the attack. “You mean you had all this planned, before they even attacked us?”

“I evaluated strategies for disposing of our mutual friend, while retaining the ship. This seemed the one most likely to succeed.”

“I am . . . impressed.”

“Thank you,” he said. “Of course, it would have been easier if I had remained in the harness, so that we could move immediately once the pod had departed. But I think Qilian would have grown suspicious if I had not shown every intention of wanting to escape with him.”

“You’re right. It was the only way to convince him.”

“And now there is only one more matter that needs to be brought to your attention. It is still possible to speak to him. It can be arranged with trivial ease: despite what I said earlier, I am perfectly capable of locking on a tight-beam.”

“He’ll have no idea what’s happened, will he? He’ll still think he’s got away with it. He’s expecting to be rescued by the
Mandate of Heaven
at any moment.”

“Eventually, the nature of his predicament will become apparent. But by then, he is likely to have come to the attention of the Smiling Ones.”

I thought of the few things Muhunnad had told us about our adversaries. “What will they do to him? Shoot him out of the sky?”

“Not if they sense a chance to take him captive with minimal losses on their own side. I would suggest that an unpowered lifeboat would present exactly such an opportunity.”

“And then?”

“He will die. But not immediately. Like the Shining Caliphate, and the Mongol Expansion, the Smiling Ones have an insatiable appetite for information. They will have found others of his kind before, just as they have found others of mine. But I am sure Qilian will still provide them with much amusement.”

“And then?” I repeated.

“An appetite of another kind will come into play. The Smiling Ones are cold-blooded creatures. Reptiles. They consider the likes of us – the warm, the mammalian – to be a kind of affront. As well they might, I suppose. All those millions of years ago, we ate their eggs.”

I absorbed what he said, thinking of Qilian falling to his destiny, unaware for now of the grave mistake he had made. Part of me was inclined to show clemency: not by rescuing him, which would place
us
dangerously close to the enemy, but by firing on him, so that he might be spared an encounter with the Smiling Ones.

But it was not a large part.

“Time to portal, Muhunnad?”

“Six minutes, on our present heading. Do you wish to review my intentions?”

“No,” I said, after a moment. “I trust you to do the best possible job. You think we’ll make it into the Infrastructure, without falling to pieces?”

“If Allah is willing. But you understand that our chances of returning to home are now very slim, Yellow Dog? Despite my subterfuge, this ship is damaged. It will not survive many more transitions.”

“Then we’ll just have to make the best of wherever we end up,” I said.

“It will not feel like home to either of us,” he replied, his tone gently warning, as if I needed reminding of that.

“But if there are people out there . . . I mean, instead of egg-laying monsters, or sweet-looking devils with tails, then it’ll be better than nothing, won’t it? People are people. If the Infrastructure is truly breaking down, allowing all these timelines to bleed into one another, than we are all going to have to get along with each other sooner or later. No matter what we all did to each other in our various histories. We’re all going to have to put the past behind us.”

“It will not be easy,” he acknowledged. “But if two people as unalike as you and I can become friends, then perhaps there is hope. Perhaps we could even become an example to others. We shall have to see, shan’t we?”

“We shall have to see,” I echoed.

I held Muhunnad’s hand as we raced towards the portal, and whatever Heaven had in store for us on the other side.

N-WORDS

Ted Kosmatka

As the autumnal story that follows demonstrates, some forms of prejudice go very far back indeed.

New writer Ted Kosmatka has been a zookeeper, a chem tech, and a steelworker, and is now a self-described lab rat who gets to play with electron microscopes all day. He made his first sale, to
Asimov’s
, in 2005, and has since made several subsequent sales there, as well as to
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Seeds of Change
,
Ideomancer
,
City Slab
,
Kindred Voices
,
Cemetery Dance
, and elsewhere. His story “The Prophet of Flores” was picked up by several Best of the Year series last year, including this one, and he’s placed several stories with several such series this year as well. He lives in Portage, Indiana, and has a website at tedkosmatka.com.

T
HEY CAME FROM
test tubes. They came pale as ghosts with eyes as blue-white as glacier ice. They came first out of Korea.

I try to picture David’s face in my head, but I can’t. They’ve told me this is temporary – a kind of shock that happens sometimes when you’ve seen a person die that way. Although I try to picture David’s face, it’s only his pale eyes I can see.

My sister squeezes my hand in the back of the limo. “It’s almost over,” she says.

Up the road, against the long, wrought iron railing, the protestors huddle against the cold wind. They grow excited as our procession approaches. They are many, standing in the snow on both sides of the cemetery gates, men and women wearing hats and gloves and looks of righteous indignation, carrying signs I refuse to read.

My sister squeezes my hand again. Before today I had not seen her in almost four years. But today she helped me pick out my black dress. She helped me with my stockings and my shoes. She helped me dress my son, who is not yet three, and who doesn’t like ties – and who is now sleeping on the seat across from us without any understanding of what he’s lost.

“Are you going to be okay?” My sister asks. She is watching the protestors.

“No,” I say. “I don’t think I am.”

The limo slows as it turns onto cemetery property, and the mob rushes in, shouting obscenities. Protestors push against the sides of the vehicle.

“You aren’t wanted here!” someone shouts, and then an old man’s face is against the glass, his eyes wild. “God’s will be done!” he shrieks. “For the wages of sin is death.”

The limo rocks under the press of the crowd, and the driver accelerates until we are past them, moving up the slope toward the other cars.

“What’s wrong with them?” my sister whispers. “What kind of people would do that on a day like today?”

You’d be surprised
, I think.
Maybe your neighbours
.
Maybe mine
. But I look out the window and say nothing. I’ve gotten used to saying nothing.

She’d shown up at my house this morning a little after 6:00. I’d opened the door, and she stood there in the cold, and neither of us spoke, neither of us sure what to say after so long.

“I heard about it on the news,” she said finally. “I came on the next plane. I’m so sorry, Mandy.”

There are things I wanted to say then – things that rose up inside of me like a bubble ready to burst, and I opened my mouth to scream at her, but what came out belonged to a different person: it came out a pathetic sob, and she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me, my sister again after all these years.

The limo slows near the top of the hill, and the procession tightens. Headstones crowd the roadway. I see the tent up ahead, green; its canvass sides billowing in and out with the wind, like a giant’s breathing. Two-dozen grey folding chairs crouch in straight rows beneath it.

The limo stops.

“Should we wake the boy?” my sister asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want me to carry him?”

“Can you?”

She looks at the child. “He’s only three?”

“No,” I say. “Not yet.”

“He’s big for his age. I mean, isn’t he? I’m not around kids much.”

“The doctors say he’s big.”

My sister leans forward and touches his milky white cheek. “He’s beautiful,” she says. I try not to hear the surprise in her voice. People are never aware of that tone when they use it, revealing what their expectations had been. But I’m past being offended by what people reveal unconsciously. Now it’s only intent that offends. “He really is beautiful,” she says again.

“He’s his father’s son,” I say.

Ahead of us, mourners climb from their cars. The priest is walking toward the grave.

“It’s time,” my sister says. She opens the door and we step out into the cold.

They came first out of Korea. But that’s wrong, of course. History has an order to its telling. It would be more accurate to say it started in Britain. After all, it was Harding who published first; it was Harding who shook the world with his announcement. And it was Harding who the religious groups burned in effigy on their church lawns.

Only later did the Koreans reveal they’d accomplished the same goal two years before, and the proof was already out of diapers. And it was only later, much later, that the world would recognize the scope of what they’d done.

When the Yeong Bae fell to the People’s Party, the Korean labs were emptied, and there were suddenly
thousands
of them – little blond and red-haired orphans, pale as ghosts, starving on the Korean streets as society crumbled around them. The ensuing wars and regime changes destroyed much of the supporting scientific data – but the children themselves, the ones who survived, were incontrovertible. There was no mistaking what they were.

It was never fully revealed why the Yeong Bae had developed the project in the first place. Perhaps they’d been after a better soldier. Or perhaps they’d done it for the oldest reason: because they could.

What is known for certain is that in 2001 disgraced stem cell biologist Hwang Woo-Suk cloned the world’s first dog, an afighan. In 2006, he revealed that he’d tried and failed to clone a mammoth on three separate occasions. Western labs had talked about it, but the Koreans had actually tried. This would prove to be the pattern.

In 2011 the Koreans finally succeeded, and a mammoth was born from an elephant surrogate. Other labs followed. Other species. The Pallid Beach Mouse. The Pyrenean Ibex. And older things. Much older.

The best scientists in the US had to leave the country to do their work. US laws against stem cell research didn’t stop scientific advancement from occurring; it only stopped it from occurring in the United States. Instead Britain, China and India won patents for the procedures. Many cancers were cured. Most forms of blindness, MS and Parkinson’s. Rich Americans had to go overseas for procedures that had become commonplace in other parts of the industrialized world. When Congress eventually legalized the medical procedures, but not the lines of research which lead to them, the hypocrisy was too much, and even the most loyal American cyto-researchers left the country.

Harding was among this final wave, leaving the United States to set up a lab in the UK. In 2013, he was the first to bring back the Thylacine. In the winter of 2015, someone brought him a partial skull from a museum exhibit. The skull was doliocephalic – long, low, large. The bone was heavy, the cranial vault enormous – part of a skullcap that had been found in 1857 in a quarry in the Neander valley.

Snow crunches under our feet as my sister and I move outside the limo. The wind is freezing, and my legs grow numb in my thin slacks. It is fitting

he is being buried on a day like today; David was never bothered by the cold.

My sister gestures toward the limo’s open door. “Are you sure you want to bring the boy? I could stay with him in the car.”

“He should be here,” I say. “He should see it.”

“He won’t understand.”

“No, but later he might remember he was here,” I say. “Maybe that will matter.”

“He’s too young to remember.”

“He remembers everything.” I lean into the shadows and wake the boy. His eyes open like blue lights. “Come, Sean, it’s time to wake up.”

He rubs a pudgy fist into his eyes and says nothing. He is a quiet boy, my son. Out in the cold, I pull a hat down over his ears. He’s still half asleep as we climb the hill. The boy walks between my sister and me, holding our hands.

At the top, Dr Michaels is there to greet us, along with other faculty from Stanford. They offer their condolences, and I work hard not to break down. Dr Michaels looks like he hasn’t slept. David was his best friend. I introduce my sister and hands are shaken.

“You never mentioned you had a sister,” he says.

I only nod. Dr Michaels looks down at the boy and tugs the child’s hat.

“Do you want me to pick you up?” he asks.

“Yeah.” Sean’s voice is small and scratchy from sleep. It is not an odd voice for a boy his age. It is a normal voice. Dr Michaels lifts him, and the child’s blue eyes close again.

We stand in silence in the cold. Mourners gather around the grave.

“I still can’t believe it,” Dr Michaels says. He’s swaying slightly, unconsciously rocking the boy. It is something only a man who has been a father would do, though his own children are grown.

“It’s like I’m another kind of person now,” I say. “Only, nobody’s told me how to be her yet.”

My sister grabs my hand, and this time I do break down. The tears burn in the cold.

The priest clears his throat; he’s about to begin. In the distance the sounds of protestors grow louder, the rise and fall of their chants not unpleasant – though from this distance, thankfully, I cannot make out the hateful words.

When the world first learned of the Korean children, it sprang into action. Humanitarian groups swooped into the war-torn area, monies exchanged hands, and many of the children were adopted out to other countries. They went to prosperous households in America, and Britain, and different countries all over the globe – a new worldwide Diaspora. They were broad, thick-limbed children; usually slightly shorter than average, though there were startling exceptions to this.

They looked like members of the same family, and some of them, assuredly, were more closely related than that. There were more children, after all, than there were fossil specimens from which they’d derived. Duplicates were inevitable.

From what limited data remained of the Koreans’ work, there had been more than sixty different DNA sources. Some even had names: the Old Man La Chappelle aux Saints, Shanidar IV and Vindija. There was the handsome and symmetrical La Ferrassie specimen. And even Amud I.
Huge
Amud I, who had stood 1.8 meters tall and had a cranial capacity of 1740ccs – the largest Neanderthal ever found.

The techniques perfected on dogs and mammoths had worked easily, too, within the genus Homo. Extraction, then PCR to amplify. After that came IVF with paid surrogates. The success rate was high, the only complication frequent caesarean births. And that was one of the things popular culture had to absorb, that Neanderthal heads were larger.

Tests were done. The children were studied and tracked and evaluated. All lacked normal dominant expression at the MC1R locus – all were pale-skinned, freckled, with red or blonde hair. All were blue-eyed. All were Rh negative.

I was six years old when I first saw a picture. It was the cover of
Time
– what is now a famous cover. I’d heard about these children but had never seen one – these children who were almost my age, from a place called Korea; these children who were sometimes called ghosts.

The magazine showed a pale, red-haired Neanderthal boy standing with his adoptive parents, staring thoughtfully up at an outdated anthropology display at a museum. The wax Neanderthal man in the display carried a club. He had a nose from the tropics, dark hair, olive-brown skin and dark brown eyes. Before Harding’s child, the museum display designers had supposed they knew what primitive looked like, and they had supposed it was decidedly swarthy.

Never mind that Neanderthals had spent ten times longer in light-starved Europe than a typical Swede’s ancestors.

The boy looked up at the display with a confused expression.

When my father walked into the kitchen and saw the
Time
cover, he shook his head in disgust. “It’s an abomination,” he said.

I studied the boy’s jutting face. I’d never seen anyone with face like that. “Who is he?”

“A dead-end. Those kids are going to be a drain for the rest of their lives. It’s not fair to them, really.”

That was the first of many pronouncements I’d hear about the children.

Years passed and the children grew like weeds – and as with all populations, the first generation exposed to a western diet grew several inches taller than their ancestors. While they excelled at sports, their adopted families were told they could be slow learners and might be prone to aggression. The families were even told, in the beginning, that the children could be antisocial and might never fully grasp the nuances of complex language.