Year's Best SF 11, page 18
“And very proud and very unhappy that their only daughter volunteered for this mission.”
Carter said that his family were just ordinary folks, part of a cooperative that ran a vacuum organism farm on the water-and methane-ice plains of San Joaquin. He’d piloted one of the cooperative’s tugs and had volunteered for service in the Keidian defense force as soon as the war against the Fanatics began, but he didn’t want to talk about the two inconclusive skirmishes in which he’d been involved before being assigned to the mission. Instead, he told the scientist about his childhood and the tented crevasse that was his family home, and the herds of engineered rats he’d helped raise.
“I loved those rats. I should have been smart enough to stay home, raise rats and make babies, but instead I thought that the bit of talent I have for math and spatial awareness was my big ticket out.”
“Shit,” the scientist said. “The singleship just passed through your debris field.”
She opened a window and showed Carter the radar plot.
He felt a funny floating feeling that had nothing to do with free fall. He said, “Well, we tried.”
“I’m sure it won’t catch up with us before we reach the star.”
“If we make that burn now—”
“We’ll miss the chance to collect the photon data. We’re going to die whatever we do, sailor. Let’s make it worthwhile.”
“Right.”
“Why did you like them? The rats.”
“Because they’re survivors. Because they’ve managed to make a living from humans ever since we invented agriculture and cities. Back on Earth, they were a vermin species, small and tough and smart and fast-breeding, eating the same food that people ate, even sharing some of the same diseases and parasites. We took them with us into space because those same qualities made them ideal lab animals. Did you know that they were one of the first mammal species to have their genome sequenced? That’s why there are so many gengineered varieties. We mostly bred them for meat and fur and biologicals, but we also raised a few strains that we sold as pets. When I was a little kid, I had a ruffled piebald rat that I loved as much as any of my sisters and brothers. Charlie. Charlie the rat. He lived for more than a thousand days, an awfully venerable age for a rat, and when he died I wouldn’t allow him to be recycled. My father helped me make a coffin from offcuts of black oak, and I buried him in a glade in my favorite citrous forest…”
The scientist said, “It sounds like a nice spot to be buried.”
Carter said, “It’s a good place. There are orchards, lots of little fields. People grow flowers just for the hell of it. We have eighteen species of mammals roaming about. All chipped of course, but they give you a feeling of what nature must have been like. I couldn’t wait to get out, and now I can’t wait to get back. How dumb is that?”
The scientist said, “I’d like to see it. Maybe you could take me on a picnic, show me the sights. My family used to get together for a picnic every couple of hundred days. We’d rent part of one of the parklands, play games, cook way too much food, smoke and drink…”
“My father, he’s a pretty good cook. And my mother leads a pretty good choral group. We should all get together.”
“Absolutely.”
They smiled at each other. It was a solemn moment. Carter thought he should say something suitable, but what? He’d never been one for speeches, and he realized now that although the scientist knew his name—it was stitched to his suit—he didn’t know hers.
The scientist said, “The clock’s ticking.”
Carter said, “Yes, ma’am. I’ll get this junk fixed up, and then I’ll be right back.”
He welded the photon detectors to the blunt nose of the pod and cabled them up. He prepped the antenna array. After the pod grazed the base of the flare, its computer would compress the raw data and send it in an encrypted squawk aimed at Keid, repeating it as long as possible, repeating it until the Fanatic singleship caught up. It was less than ten thousand kilometers behind them now. Ahead, the red dwarf filled half the sky, the jet a slender white thread rooted in patch of orange and yellow fusion fire, foreshortening and rising above them to infinity as they drove toward it. Carter said that its base looked like a patch of fungal disease on an apple, and the scientist told him that the analogy wasn’t farfetched; before the science platform had been destroyed, one of the research groups had discovered that there were strange nuclear reactions taking place there, forming tons of carbon per second. She showed him a picture one of the pod’s cameras had captured: a rare glimpse of the Transcendent. It was hard to see against the burning background of the star’s surface because it was a perfectly reflective sphere.
“Exactly a kilometer across,” the scientist said, “orbiting the equator every eight minutes. It’s thought they enclose themselves in bubbles of space where the fundamental constants have been altered to enhance their cognitive processes. This one’s a keeper. I’ll send it back—”
A glowing line of gas like a burning snake thousands of kilometers long whipped past. The pod shuddered, probably from stray magnetic flux.
Carter said, “I should climb inside before I start to cook.”
The scientist said, “I have to fire up the motor pretty soon.” Then she said, “Wait.”
Carter waited, hung at the edge of the hatch.
The scientist said, “You switched on the antenna array.”
“Just long enough to check it out.”
“Something got in. I think a virus. I’m trying to firewall, but it’s spreading through the system. It already has the motor and nav systems—”
“I also have control of the corn system,” another voice said. It was light and lilting. It was as sinuous as a snake. It was right inside Carter’s head. “Carter Cho. I see you, and I know you can hear me.”
The scientist said, “I can’t fire the motor, but I think you can do something about that, sailor.”
So she’d known about the cutout all along. Carter started to haul himself toward the stern.
The voice said, “Carter Cho. I will have complete control of your ship shortly. Give yourself to us.”
Carter could see the singleship now, a flat triangle at the tip of a lance of white flame. It was only seconds away. He flipped up the panel, plugged in a patch cord. Sparse lines of data scrolled up in a window. He couldn’t access the scientist’s flight plan, had no nav except line-of-sight and seat-of-the pants. He had to aim blind for the base of the flare and hope he hit that narrow window by luck, came in at just the right angle, at just the right place where parallel lines of magnetic force ran in just the right direction…
“Carter Cho. I have taken control. Kill the woman and give yourself to us, and I promise that you will live with us in glory.”
…Or he could risk a throw of the dice. Carter ran a tether from his p-suit utility belt to a nearby bolt and braced himself against a rung. With his helmet visor almost blacked out, he could just about look at the surface of the star rushing toward him, could see the intricate tangles of orderly streams that fed plasma into the brilliant patch of fusion fire at the base of the jet.
“Kill her, or I will strip your living brain neuron by neuron.”
“Drop dead,” Carter said, and switched off his com. The jet seemed to rise up to infinity, a gigantic sword that cut space in two. The scientist had said that if the pod grazed the edge of the jet, spiraling magnetic fields would fling it into the sky at a random vector. And the star took up half the sky…
Fuck it, Carter thought. He’d been lucky so far. It was time to roll the dice one more time, hope his luck still held. He fired attitude controls and aimed the blunt nose of the pod. A menu window popped up in front of his face. He selected burn and full thrust.
Sudden weight tore at his two-handed grip on the rung as the motor flared. It was pushing a shade under a gee of acceleration; most humans who had ever lived had spent their entire lives in that kind of pull, but Carter’s fingers were cramping inside the heavy gloves, and it felt as if the utility belt were trying to amputate him at the waist. The vast dividing line of the jet rushed toward him. Heat beat through his p-suit. If its cooling system failed for a second, he’d cook like a joint of meat in his father’s stone oven. Or the Fanatic could burn him out of the sky with its X-ray laser, or magnetic flux could rip the pod apart…
Carter didn’t care. He was riding his ship rodeo-style toward a flare of fusion light a thousand kilometers wide. He whooped with defiant glee—
—and then, just like that, the pod was somewhere else.
After a minute, Carter remembered to switch on his com. The scientist said, “What the fuck did you just do?”
It took them a while to find out.
Carter had aimed the pod at the edge of the jet, hoping that it would be flung away at a random tangent across the surface of the red dwarf, hoping that it would survive long enough to transmit all of the data collected by the scientist’s experiment. But now the red dwarf was a rusty nailhead dwindling into the starscape behind them, the bright point of the white dwarf several seconds of arc beyond it. In the blink of an eye, the pod had gained escape velocity and had been translated across tens of millions of kilometers of space.
“It had to be the Transcendent,” the scientist said.
Carter had repressurized the pod and the cooling system was working at a flat roar, but it was still as hot as a sauna. He had taken off his helmet and shaken out his sweat-soaked dreadlocks, but because the scientist’s burns made her sensitive to heat, her coffin was still sealed. He hung in front of it, looking at her through the little window. He said, “I took the only chance we had left, and my luck held.”
“No magnetic field could have flung us so far, or so fast. It had to be something to do with the Transcendent. Perhaps it canceled our interia. For a few seconds we became as mass-less as a photon, we achieved light speed…”
“My luck held,” Carter said. “I hit those magnetic fields just right.”
“Check the deep radar, sailor. There’s no sign of the Fanatic’s singleship. It was right on our tail. If magnetic fields had anything to do with it, it would have been flung in the same direction as us.”
Carter checked the deep radar. There was no sign of the singleship. He remembered the glimpse of the silver sphere sailing serenely around the star, and said, “I thought the Transcendents wanted to leave us alone. That’s why they quit the Solar System. That’s why they only reengineer uninhabited systems…”
“You kept rats when you were a kid. If one got out, you’d put her back. If two started to fight, you’d do something about it. How did your rats feel when you reached into their cage to separate them?”
Carter grinned. “If we’re rats, what are the Fanatics?”
“Rats with delusions of grandeur. Crazy rats who think they’re carrying out God’s will, when really they’re no better than the rest of us. I wonder what that Fanatic must be thinking. Just for a moment, he was touched by the hand of his God…”
“What is it?”
“I’ve finished processing the data stream from my experiment. When we encountered the edge of the flare, there was a massive, sudden increase in photon flux.”
“Because of this symmetry breaking thing of yours. Have you sent the data?”
“Of course, we have to figure the details.”
“Send the data,” Carter said, “and I’ll button up the ship and put us to sleep.”
“Perhaps there are some clues in the decay products…”
“You’ve completed your mission, ma’am. Let someone else worry about the details.”
“Jesswyn Fiver,” the scientist said. She was smiling at him through her little window. For a moment he saw how pretty she’d been. “You never did ask my name. It’s Jesswyn Fiver. Now you can introduce me to your parents when we go on that picnic.”
I Love Liver: A Romance
LARISSA LAI
Larissa Lai (www.ucalgary.ca/~lalai/bio.htm) lives in Calgary, Alberta, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. She was born in La Jolla, California, grew up in Newfoundland, and lived and worked in Vancouver for many years as a writer, organizer, and editor. Her first novel, When Fox Is a Thousand, was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Her second novel, Salt Fish Girl, was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, the James Tiptree Award, and the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Award. She has never been published by a genre publisher or in any genre publication.
“I Love Liver: A Romance” was published in Nature. It’s a really perverse, absurdly improbable romance between a replacement liver and her designer, who is very depressed and perhaps quite nuts. There is something in the air about weird romance in 2005. Compare this to the Rucker story, for instance.
It has taken me almost four weeks of late nights and taxed my mochaccino machine to the limits. But Mira is ready. She began as a prototype for FreshCleanse’s Liver Replacement line, but her capacity for toxin decomposition was weaker than that of the liver McDowell Hill came up with in the cubicle next to mine. (What’s with people who have last names for first names? It’s so tacky.) For whatever reason, the Boss Man liked Mackie’s design better, and so Mira fell to the waste heap of Great Inventions That Die on the Drawing Board.
To be honest, I felt quite despondent about it. It wasn’t just a blow to the ego, I’m used to those. It was more that…well, there was something about Mira, a kind of beauty, extraordinary really. Something poignant about her lines, something tender and sad about her soft, brown-gray texture. The fact that she would never go into production threw me into a bit of a funk.
It took me a few days to realize that this wasn’t something I would just get over, as I have with countless other designs. By the fourth day, even after two mochaccinos and a double dose of Beverly, my despondency seemed worse. I phoned in sick and went back to bed. My doctor had expressly told me how careful I had to be with Beverly. “This generation of antidepressants is more precise but also much more potent than what you’re probably used to,” she told me, “so you have to watch your dosage very carefully.” Whatever. It was too late now anyway. I closed my eyes. Halfway between sleep and waking, I thought I saw Mira slip in beside me, larger than life, pillowy soft and a little slippery, in a smooth, sleek sort of way. I reached out to caress an elegant fluke. It was almost comforting.
A ringing phone woke me at four in the afternoon. It was McDowell Hill. “You better get down here right away,” he said. “The boss doesn’t care how sick you are. That weird liver you designed—it’s jumped protocols and has infected the mainframe. We’re losing thousands of hours of R&D with every minute that passes. You better get your pathetic, depressed butt down here ASAP.” For a minute I thought: “Who cares, you smarmy creep. I hope Mira burns the whole operation down.” But then I’d be out of a job. I got my pathetic, depressed butt down to the office.
The place was in chaos. The Tech Support boys were mousing as fast as their caffeine-pumped little hands could move, jibing and sniping at one another the whole time. I found McDowell and the Boss Man at my cubicle, riffling furiously through my password-protected files with brazen impunity. Who needs this job? I thought. “I don’t understand how a liver design can go viral like that,” the Boss Man was saying.
“Over-rationalization,” said Mackie. “The protocols are too close. And that was one weird little liver Anna designed. That’s what you get for hiring these foreigners. You know, I’m not sure she’s entirely stable.”
“Anna was born here,” the Boss Man said.
“Damn right,” I said, by way of letting them know I’d been there behind them listening. Mackie turned, and shot me the evil eye.
“Can you fix this, Anna?” asked the Boss Man.
I pushed Mackie out of the way and slid into my seat. “That’s the thing about organics,” I said. “They aren’t static. They do things. They mutate.”
“We need better firewalls,” Mackie said.
I didn’t fix anything. It was more like, I appealed to Mira. I coaxed her gently with a few smatterings of code. I showed her the initial lines of a heart I was working on. Mira returned to her original storage location. She spat back most of the information she’d devoured on her rampage. It wasn’t all in the correct order, and some of it had been corrupted, but it was pretty much all there. It would keep Tech Support busy for a week or two. I went back home to my depression, wondering if Mira was depressed too.
When I got back to my apartment, my computer was on. Mira was floating back and forth across the screen like a pretty brown-gray fish in an aquarium. I don’t know how she got from FreshCleanse to here, but I suppose such things are relatively easy these days. I opened her up and began the modifications. I made her a little larger. I cribbed some slug programming off a biologist’s website to give her underside motility. To give her eyes seemed too strange somehow. Antennae looked better. I altered her coloration just slightly to give her an attractive iridescent sheen. It’s taken me a few weeks, but now she is finally ready to print. What’s wrong with the print function? Never mind, I’ll just try it again. There we go. Hello, Mira! She tumbles gracefully from the printer and slithers across my office floor.
Oops. Must have pressed “print” twice. Hello, Mira Two!…Oh no, something is wrong. Another flap of liver emerges from the printer. She’s cute. I can manage three. Here comes another. Am I in some kind of trouble?
I’ll let it go to 12 before I call Tech Support.
The Edge of Nowhere
JAMES PATRICK KELLY
James Patrick Kelly [www.jimkelly.net] lives in Nottingham, New Hampshire. He is well known as an award winner for his science fiction stories, but in fact he has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows, and writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. His collections include Strange but Not a Stranger and Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories, and his novels include Wildlife (1994) and Look into the Sun (1989). His novella, Burn, was published as a small press book in 2005.
