The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (84 page)

“Just hold me, then, and let’s sleep.”

But after hours of listening to his soft breathing and thinking that he still sounded a little like wind through aspens, he woke up, and Meghan found he had more life in him than he thought.

Isaac stood next to the cold stove. His clothes no longer dripped. They crackled when he moved. Next to his skin, though, they were soaked, and he could feel them sucking away the little heat that remained. One ceiling board had broken completely while he’d knocked the snow off the roof, and the supplies directly underneath were covered, including the boxes of matches. He scooped snow off the floor in double handfuls until he found them, but the boxes were squashed and the matches ruined. The match heads smeared against the striker when he tried to light them.

Dully, his head feeling sluggish and slow, he knelt on the pile of snow for a minute. Flakes came down through the hole in the room, swirling in a breeze that hadn’t been there before. Without matches, he’d never light the fire. Maybe he could get the snowshoes back on and make his way to the miners’ cabins, but he knew the steep trail, completely hidden in the storm, would be almost impossible to hike, even if his clothes weren’t already wet and he wasn’t exhausted. He couldn’t feel his knees against the snow, and the cold crept up his legs. He thought about just staying still. His chin drifted to his chest. Resting sounded good. In a few minutes, he would get up, but for now, a little sleep was all he needed. The vibration and steady thumping of the generator below annoyed him though, then, frightened, he stood. If he slept, the generator would surely freeze, and so would he. If he didn’t have duties, he could rest, but the others depended on him.

Isaac waved his arms to restore circulation, slapping his hands against his arms, then staggered toward the stairs. With renewed vigor, the wind shook the house. No light came from the depths. His candle had gone out, so he swept his hand against the wood, careful to not fall again on the slick floor, until he hit the Tommie Sticker. Water gurgled against the power wheel behind him. With a yank, he pulled the candle holder from the wood, forced himself to climb the stairs, before sitting by the stove. It took a dozen tries to unscrew the brass cap holding the matches. There were only three. Carefully, he lit one, but before he touched the candle, the breeze blew it out. He nearly wept. With the new hole in the roof, there was no place he could guarantee the next match would stay lit long enough to start the fire.

He opened the stove door, pushed his hands inside, out of the wind, to light the second match. It flicked to life, but the draw up the chimney immediately snuffed it out.

Isaac took a deep breath, closed the stove flue to stop the wind, and mumbled a prayer before lighting the last match. The water in his shoes felt like it was freezing. He couldn’t feel his feet at all. The match caught, held steady. Carefully, he pushed the candle wick into the flame. It flared into life. He jammed the candle between two charcoaled logs in the stove before feeding kindling to the flame. Soon, smoke flowed from the open stove. Isaac coughed, and his eyes teared, as he kicked the stool apart for bigger pieces of wood, the last fuel in the house, but he didn’t open the flue until a healthy flame filled the iron stove. Heat baked off the sides. His gloves steamed on top the stove as he warmed his hands. Piece by piece, he removed his clothes to hang around the stove before wrapping his blanket around his shivering shoulders. Water dripped from his coat and pants. Heat rolled off the stove, tingling his cheeks, sending stabbing sparks through his toes and feet. He grimaced and moved closer.

The wood walls of the house rattled in a torrent of wind, whipping the fire in the little stove into a tiny inferno. At its peak, when surely the house would have to shatter, the wind stopped, and for the first time in a ten days, the house fell silent except for the river’s heart beating through the generator below.

The storm had broken.

In the cabin’s sudden quiet, Isaac reached for his Bible, opened it randomly to read the first verse his eye fell upon. Surely the storm’s cessation was a miracle. Surely a message would be at hand. He wrote the verse on a slip of paper, rolled it into a tube, then sealed it inside the Tommy Sticker. By the time he finished, his face felt warm and his toes stopped aching.

Sean didn’t wake up after the seventh long sleep.

Dr Singh said, “He knew the dangers when he let himself age. The sleep process is hard. I’m sorry.” She consulted her notes. “Dr Arnold was a great man. His work on long sleep cellular degradation and preservation was groundbreaking. If we were still on Earth, he surely would receive a Nobel Prize. We should all make it to Zeta Reticula because of him.” Singh shook her head sympathetically. “I understand you were close.”

Meghan gripped the edge of the examination table. “I saw him yesterday . . . before the last sleep I mean. I just saw him.” She felt every minute of her 722 years.

“Me too,” said Singh. “If you need them, I can prescribe anti-depressants, but I’d rather not. Drug interaction is difficult to predict.”

Meghan walked the long hall from the infirmary to Sean’s apartment. The plastic sheets covered his bed and the desk, coated by a thin layer of dust. Despite automated cleaning mechanisms, dust still fell on surfaces they couldn’t reach. She pulled the plastic off his desk and let it fall to the floor. He’d left a notebook and her candle holder in the middle. She turned the cover back carefully. The paper that started the trip seven hundred years ago, even though it was acid free and specially milled to last, had become brittle. Any hand-written notes that were expected to be permanent were written on plastic paper, but Sean had enjoyed the feel of real pages better.

He had written “To Meghan” inside the cover; the rest of the pages were blank.

When she sat on the edge of the bed, the plastic crackled. The candle holder rested on her lap. She wondered, did everyone feel so empty, and what could she do about it? Her fingers pressed against the cool metal. Although remembering the aspen shaking in the valley of her wall display escaped her, she felt connected through the hard shape. How often had this candle holder stuck in a mine wall to light a few feet of rock? Who else had held it? Had it ever been more than just a tool to them? Her fingers traveled from the pointed end, past the coil that held the candle, to the burnished brass tube. For the first time, Meghan really examined the antique as a practical object instead of art. Was that a cap on the end of what she had thought was the handle? She twisted it hard. Nothing. Maybe the antique did have something in it, another connection to Earth. Both Teague and Sean had wondered, now she wanted to know.

A few minutes later she asked the machine shop chief, a stout woman whose name Meghan had never known, “Do you have a way to open it?”

The chief turned it over. She said, “It’s brass, I think. From the nineteenth century, you say? I can cut it apart, but it will cause damage.”

“Go ahead.”

The chief handled the cutting tool delicately, sending tiny sparks flurrying as she sliced through the candle holder’s end. A coin-sized piece of metal dropped to the floor. Meghan leaned over her shoulder as the chief used a pair of tweezers to pull the rolled up slip of paper from the cavity.

Meghan shivered. “It’s almost a thousand years old!”

“There’s writing.”

“A message.” Meghan feared the paper would crumble before she could discover what it said.

“What does it mean?” asked the shop chief after they’d carefully unrolled it.

“It’s a Bible verse, I think. I think I know.”

Meghan left the puzzled shop chief behind and headed toward hydroponics, already planning new pipes and grow lights. She would have to leave explanations and instructions for the next shift’s hydroponic officers.

Isaac climbed through the window and up to the surface again, the last of the chair burning in the stove behind him. The air bit just as cruelly, but without the wind behind it, and the clouds clearing, he didn’t feel as cold, although dampness squished in his temporarily warm clothes. If he couldn’t find more wood soon, though, the fire would wink out again, and storm or no storm, he would freeze. Holding a short-handled axe, he girded himself for the long hike up the canyon where he might be able to find firewood.

For a moment, he tried to orient himself Snow transformed the valley, hiding all that had been familiar. The hundreds of tree trunks that marked the land before were deeply covered so the vista before him was smooth, clean and hypnotic. The Crystal River had almost entirely vanished, revealed only by a narrow crack in the snow from where the water’s glassy voice arose.

What surprised him most, though, were the trees that remained. Two weeks earlier, their lowest branches were twenty feet above the ground, the easy to reach ones having been chopped off for wood. Now, though, where the snow drifted, their needles brushed the crystalline surface. He would have no trouble finding fuel. He thought, Why that tree there carries enough dead limbs to keep me warm for a month. It felt like a miracle.

He thought about the Bible verse he’d written on the slip of paper. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but it had filled him with hope: “Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves. For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey.” A bit from Proverbs.

When spring came, he would take the Tommie Sticker with its message and bury it by the pump house. Somewhere, someone might read it, and it would help. He was sure of it.

Meghan kept her eyes closed for a long time after she awoke until, finally, Dr Singh’s familiar voice said, “I know you can hear me. Your vitals don’t lie.”

“I’m eight-hundred and twenty-two years old today.” She hadn’t moved even a finger yet, but she didn’t feel tired like she had the last time. She only felt hopeful.

She waited through Dr Singh’s tests impatiently. “I have to get to work,” Meghan said.

Rushing through the hallways, she barely acknowledged other crew members’ greetings. They, too, had work to do. So much of the trip waited before them. So much more space had to be traversed before they could come to a rest.

The first hydroponics lab looked much like she had left it, although she noted the tanks that held the plants steady would need rebuilding on her shift. She passed under one of the spokes, the cathedral-like height earning not a glance. Did her experiment work, she thought. Did the other hydroponics officers follow her direction? She couldn’t see far in front of her. The ceiling’s downward bulge cut off her view until she was almost there, and then, she saw.

At the end of the row, where normally the plants stopped, her jury-rigged piping led to the new plant tanks. A thick trunk rose from the tank, and as she entered the space below the next spoke, her gaze traveled up the tree’s long stretch. Guy wires attached to the vertical space’s sides held the tree steady. At the top, new grow fixtures hung suspended from other wires, bathing the aspen in light.

Meghan held her breath. An aspen, under the right conditions, can grow to eighty feet. This one was easily that tall. She walked around the tree. New piping and tanks connected to her original work. Three other trees grew from them. The closest tank came from her co-worker twenty-five years down the line, and the tree from that tank nearly matched her own. A smaller tree, only fifty years old, grew from the next tank, and the last tank held the smallest tree, still over thirty feet to its top. The history attached to it showed it had been built twenty-five years ago. Each officer had added a tree to the grove.

Meghan sat on the floor so she could look up with less strain. Each tree’s branches touched the next. The room smelled of aspen, a light leafy odor that reminded her of mountains and streams, and an old generator house perched on the edge of a short cliff.

After she’d sat for a while, she realized that air currents in the ship flowed up the spoke. What she heard, finally, was not the ubiquitous mechanical hiss from the ventilation vents. What she heard was the gentle rustle of leaves touching leaves, a sound that she thought she’d long left behind and would never hear again.

ACT ONE

Nancy Kress

Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-1970s and has since become a frequent contributor to
Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, Sci Fiction
, and elsewhere. Her books include the novel version of her Hugo- and Nebula-winning story,
Beggars in Spain
, and a sequel,
Beggars and Choosers
, as well as
The Prince Of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, Nothing Human, The Floweres of Aulit Prison, Crossfire, Crucible, Dogs
, and the Space Opera trilogy
Probability Moon, Probability Sun
, and
Probability Space.
Her short work has been collected in
Trinity And Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, Beaker’s Dozen
, and
Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories.
Her most recent book is the novel
Steal Across the Sky.
In addition to the awards for
Beggars in Spain
, she has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out Of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison,” and won another Hugo this year for “The Erdmann Nexus.”

Here she shows us that you can have too much of a good thing – even compassion.

To understand whose movie it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.

– Joan Didion

I
EASED DOWN THE
warehouse’s basement steps behind the masked boy, one hand on the stair rail, wishing I’d worn gloves. Was this level of grime really necessary? It wasn’t; we’d already passed through some very sophisticated electronic surveillance, as well as some very unsophisticated personal surveillance that stopped just short of a body-cavity search, although an unsmiling man did feel around inside my mouth. Soap cost less than surveillance, so probably the grime was intentional. The Group was making a statement. That’s what we’d been told to call them: “The Group.” Mysterious, undefined, pretentious.

The stairs were lit only by an old-fashioned forty-watt bulb somewhere I couldn’t see. Behind me, Jane’s breath quickened. I’d insisted on going down first, right behind our juvenile guide, from a sense of – what? “Masculine protection” from me would be laughable. And usually I like to keep Jane where I can see her. It works out better that way.

“Barry?” she breathed. The bottom of the steps was so shrouded in gloom that I had to feel my way with one extended foot.

“Two more steps, Janie.”

“Thank you.”

Then we were down and she took a deep breath, standing closer to me than she usually does. Her breasts were level with my face. Jane is only five-six, but that’s seventeen inches taller than I am. The boy said, “A little way more.” Across the cellar a door opened, spilling out light. “There.”

It had been a laundry area once, perhaps part of an apartment for some long-dead maintenance man. Cracked wash tubs, three of them, sagged in one corner. No windows, but the floor had been covered with a clean, thin rug and the three waiting people looked clean, too. I scanned them quickly. A tall, hooded man holding an assault rifle, his eyes the expression of bodyguards everywhere: alert but nonanalytic. An unmasked woman in jeans and baggy sweater, staring at Jane with unconcealed resentment. Potential trouble there. And the leader, who came forward with his hand extended, smiling. “Welcome, Miss Snow. We’re honored.”

I recognized him immediately. He was a type rampant in political life, which used to be my life. Big, handsome, too pleased with himself and his position to accurately evaluate either. He was the only one not wearing jeans, dressed in slacks and a sports coat over a black turtleneck. If he had been a pol instead of a geno-terrorist, he’d have maybe gotten as far as city council executive, and then would have run for mayor, lost, and never understood why. So this was a low-level part of The Group’s operation, which was probably good. It might lessen the danger of this insane expedition.

“Thank you,” Jane said in that famous voice, low and husky and as thrilling off screen as on. “This is my manager, Barry Tenler.”

I was more than her manager but the truth was too complicated to explain. The guy didn’t even glance at me and I demoted him from city council executive to ward captain. You always pay attention to the advisors. That’s usually where the brains are, if not the charisma.

Ms Resentful, on the other hand, switched her scrutiny from Jane to me. I recognized the nature of that scrutiny. I’ve felt it all my life.

Jane said to the handsome leader, “What should I call you?”

“Call me Ishmael.”

Oh, give me a break. Did that make Jane the white whale? He was showing off his intellectual moves, with no idea they were both banal and silly. But Jane gave him her heart-melting smile and even I, who knew better, would have sworn it was genuine. She might not have made a movie in ten years, but she still had it.

“Let’s sit down,” Ishmael said.

Three kitchen chairs stood at the far end of the room. Ishmael took one, the bodyguard and the boy standing behind him. Ms Resentful took another. Jane sank cross-legged to the rug in a graceful puddle of filmy green skirt.

That was done for my benefit. My legs and spine hurt if I have to stand for more than a few minutes, and she knows how I hate sitting even lower than I already am. Ishmael, shocked and discerning nothing, said, “Miss Snow!”

“I think better when I’m grounded,” she said, again with her irresistible smile. Along with her voice, that smile launched her career thirty-five years ago. Warm, passionate, but with an underlying wistfulness that bypassed the cerebrum and went straight to the primitive hind-brain. Unearned – she was born with those assets – but not unexploited. Jane was a lot shrewder than her fragile blond looks suggested. The passion, however, was real. When she wanted something, she wanted it with every sinew, every nerve cell, every drop of her acquisitive blood.

Now her graceful Sitting-Bull act left Ishmael looking awkward on his chair. But he didn’t do the right thing, which would have been to join her on the rug. He stayed on his chair and I demoted him even further, from ward captain to go-fer. I clambered up onto the third chair. Ishmael gazed down at Jane and swelled like a pouter pigeon at having her, literally, at his feet. Ms Resentful scowled. Uneasiness washed through me.

The Group knew who Jane Snow was. Why would they put this meeting in the hands of an inept narcissist? I could think of several reasons: to indicate contempt for her world. To preserve the anonymity of those who actually counted in this most covert of organizations. To pay off a favor that somebody owed to Ishmael, or to Ishmael’s keeper. To provide a photogenic foil to Jane, since of course we were being recorded. Any or all of these reasons would be fine with me. But my uneasiness didn’t abate.

Jane said, “Let’s begin then, Ishmael, if it’s all right with you.”

“It’s fine with me,” he said. His back was to the harsh light, which fell full on both Jane and Ms Resentful. The latter had bad skin, small eyes, lanky hair, although her lips were lovely, full and red, and her neck above the Windbreaker had the taut firmness of youth.

The light was harder on Jane. It showed up the crow’s feet, the tired inelasticity of her skin under her flawless make-up. She was, after all, fifty-four, and she’d never gone under the knife. Also, she’d never been really beautiful, not as Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones had once been beautiful. Jane’s features were too irregular, her legs and butt too heavy. But none of that mattered next to the smile, the voice, the green eyes fresh as new grass, and the powerful sexual glow she gave off so effortlessly. It’s as if Jane Snow somehow received two sets of female genes at conception, a critic wrote once, doubling everything we think of as “feminine.” That makes her either a goddess or a freak.

“I’m preparing for a role in a new movie,” she said to Ishmael, although of course he already knew that. She just wanted to use her voice on him. “It’s going to be about your . . . your organization. And about the future of the little girls. I’ve talked to some of them and—”

“Which ones?” Ms Resentful demanded.

Did she really know them all by name? I looked at her more closely. Intelligence in those small, stony eyes. She could be from The Group’s headquarter cell – wherever it was – and sent to ensure that Ishmael didn’t screw up this meeting. Or not. But if she were really intelligent, would she be so enamored of someone like Ishmael?

Stupid question. Three of Jane’s four husbands had been gorgeous losers.

Jane said, “Well, so far I’ve only talked to Rima Ridley-Jones. But Friday I have the whole afternoon with the Barrington twins.”

Ishmael, unwilling to have the conversation migrate from him, said, “Beautiful children, those twins. And very intelligent.” As if the entire world didn’t already know that. Unlike most of The Group’s handiwork, the Barrington twins had been posed by their publicity-hound parents on every magazine cover in the world. But Jane smiled at Ishmael as if he’d just explicated Spinoza.

“Yes, they are beautiful. Please, Ishmael, tell me about your organization. Anything that might help me prepare for my role in Future Perfect.”

He leaned forward, hands on his knees, handsome face intent. Dramatically, insistently, he intoned, “There is one thing you must understand about The Group, Jane. A very critical thing. You will never stop us.”

Portentous silence.

The worst thing was, he might be right. The FBI, CIA, IRS, HPA, and several other alphabets had lopped off a few heads, but still the hydra grew. It had so many supporters: liberal lawmakers and politicians, who wanted the Anti-Genetic Modification Act revoked and the Human Protection Agency dismantled. The rich parents who wanted their embryos enhanced. The off-shore banks that coveted The Group’s dollars and the Caribbean or Mexican or who-knows-what islands that benefited from sheltering their mobile labs.

“We are idealists,” Ishmael droned on, “and we are the future. Through our efforts, mankind will change for the better. Wars will end, cruelty will disappear. When people can—”

“Let me interrupt you for just a moment, Ishmael.” Jane widened her eyes and over-used his name. Her dewy look up at him from the floor could have reversed desertification. She was pulling out all the stops. “I need so much to understand, Ishmael. If you genemod these little girls, one by one, you end up changing such a small percentage of the human race that . . . How many children have been engineered with Arlen’s Syndrome?”

“We prefer the term ‘Arlen’s Advantage.’ ”

“Yes, of course. How many children?”

I held my breath. The Group had never given out that information.

Jane put an entreating hand on Ishmael’s knee.

He said loftily, hungrily, “That information is classified,” and I saw that he didn’t know the answer.

Ms Resentful said, “To date, 3214.”

Was she lying? My instincts – and I have very good instincts, although to say that in this context is clearly a joke – said no. Resentful knew the number. So she was higher up than Ishmael. And since she sure as hell wasn’t responding to Jane’s allure, that meant The Group now wanted the numbers made public.

“Yes, that’s right,” Ishmael said hastily, “3,214 children.”

Jane said, “But that’s not a high percentage out of six billion people on Earth, is it? It – ”

“Five billionth of 1 per cent,” I said. A silly, self-indulgent display, but what the hell. My legs ached.

She always could ad-lib. “Yes, thank you, Barry. But my question was for Ishmael. If only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses Arlen’s Advantage, even if the genemod turns out to be inheritable—”

“It is,” Ishmael said, which was nonsense. The oldest Arlen’s kids were only twelve.

“Wonderful!” Jane persisted. “But as I say, if only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses the Advantage, how can The Group hope to alter the entire human future?”

Ishmael covered her hand with his. He smiled down at her, and his eyes actually twinkled. “Jane, Jane, Jane. Have you ever dropped a pebble into a pond?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened, my dear?”

“A ripple.”

“Which spread and spread until the entire pond was affected!” Ishmael spread his arms wide. The ass couldn’t even put together a decent analogy. Humanity was an ocean, not a pond, and water ripples were always transitory. But Jane, actress that she was, beamed at him and moved the conversation to something he could handle.

“I see. Tell me, Ishmael, how you personally became involved in The Group.”

He was thrilled to talk about himself As he did, Jane skillfully extracted information about The Group’s make-up, its organization, its communications methods. Resentful let her do it. I watched the young woman, who was watching Ishmael but not in a monitoring sort of way. He couldn’t give away really critical information; he didn’t have any. Still, he talked too much. He was the kind of man who responded to an audience, who could easily become so expansive that he turned indiscreet. Sooner or later, I suspected, he would say something to somebody that he shouldn’t, and The Group would dump him.