Year's Best SF 7, page 30
Presumably, each speciation episode was instigated by the isolation of a group of the parent stock. We assumed that the key isolating events were caused by climate changes: rising or falling sea levels, the birth or death of forests, the coming and going of glaciation. It was a plausible picture—before we knew of the Red Moon, of the Gray Earth, of other Moons and Earths.
Assume that the base Australopithecine stock evolved on Earth—my Earth. Imagine that some mechanism scooped up handfuls of undifferentiated Australopithecines, and, perhaps some generations later, deposited them on a variety of subtly different Earths.
It is hard to imagine a more complete isolation. And the environments in which they were placed might have had no resemblance to those from which they were taken. In that case, our Australopithecines would have had to adapt or die.
And later, samples of those new populations were swept up in their turn, and handed on to other Earths, where they were shaped again. Thus the Hams, with their power and conservatism, have been shaped by the brutal conditions of this Gray Earth.
This is my proposal: that hominid speciation has been driven by the transfer of populations between parallel Earths. It is fantastic, but logical. If this is true, then everything about us—everything about me —has been shaped by the meddling of the Old Ones, these engineers of worlds and hominids, for their own unrevealed, unfathomable purpose. Just as my own life story—too complicated to set out here—has become a scrawl across multiple realities.
What remains unclear is why the Old Ones, if they exist, should wish to do this. Perhaps their motives were somehow malicious, or somehow benevolent; perhaps they wished to give the potential of humankind its fullest opportunity of expression.
But their motive is scarcely material.
What power for mortals to hold.
What arrogance to wield it.
Nemoto said she would not go into the ground until she saw another night. But she grew steadily weaker, until she could not raise her body from its pallet of moss, or clean herself, or even raise her hands to her mouth.
Mary cared for her. She would give Nemoto water in sponges of mashed-up leaf, and when Nemoto fouled herself Mary cleaned her with bits of skin, and she bathed her body’s suppurating sores with blood-tree sap.
But Nemoto’s skin continued to flake away, as the slow revenge of the bat disturbed from its hibernation took its gruesome course.
There came a day when the sun rolled along the horizon, its light shimmering through the trees that flourished there. Mary knew that soon would come the first night, the first little night, since the spring. So she carried Nemoto to the mouth of the cave—she was light, like a thing of twigs and dried leaves—and propped her up on a bundle of skins, so that her face was bathed in the sunlight.
But Nemoto screwed up her face. “I do not like the light,” she said, her voice a peevish husk. “I can bear the dark. But not these endless days. I have always longed for tomorrow. For tomorrow I will understand a little more. I have always wanted to understand. Why I am here. Why the world is as it is. Why there is something, rather than nothing.”
“Lon’ for tomorrow,” Mary echoed, seeking to comfort her.
“Yes. But you do not dream of the future, do you? For you there is only today. Here especially, with your Long Day and your Long Night, as if a whole year is made of one tremendous day.”
Overhead, a single bright star appeared.
Nemoto gasped. “The first star since the spring. How marvelous, how beautiful, how fragile.” She settled back on her bundle of skins. “You know, the stars here are the same—I mean the same as those that surround the world where I grew up, the Blue Earth. But the way they swim around the sky is not the same.” She was trying to raise her arm, perhaps to point, but could not. “You have a different pole star here. It is somewhere in Leo, near the sky’s equator. I cannot determine which…your world is tipped over, you see, like Uranus, like a top lying on its side; that is how the Big Whack shaped it here. And so for six months, when your pole points at the sun, you have endless light; and for six months endless dark…. Do you follow me? No, I am sure you do not.” She coughed, and seemed to sink deeper into the skins. “All my life I have sought to understand. I believe I would have pursued the same course whichever of our splintered worlds I had been born into. And yet, and yet—” She arched her back, and Mary laid her huge hands on Nemoto’s forehead, trying to soothe her. “And yet I die alone.”
Mary took her hand. It was delicate, like a child’s. “Not alone,” she said.
“Ah. I have you, don’t I, Mary? I have a friend. That is something, isn’t it? That is an achievement….” Nemoto tried to squeeze Mary’s hand; it was the gentlest of touches.
And the sun, as if apologetically, slid beneath the horizon. Crimson light towered into the sky.
There are no books here. There is nothing like writing of any kind. And there is no art: no paintings on animal skins or cave walls, no tattoos, not so much as a dab of crushed rock on a child’s face.
As a result, the Hams’ world is a startlingly drab place, lacking art and story.
To me, a beautiful sunset is a comforting reminder of home, a symbol of renewal, a sign of hope for a better day tomorrow. But to the Hams, I believe, a sunset is just a sunset. But every sunset is like the first they have ever seen.
They are clearly aware of past and future, of change within their lives. They care for each other. They will show concern over another’s wounds, and lavish attention on a sickly infant. They show pain, and fear, a great sense of loss when a loved one dies—and a deep awareness of their own mortality.
But they are quite without religion.
Think what that means. Every morning Mary must wake up, as alert and conscious as I am, and she must face the horror of life full in the face—without escape, without illusion, without consolation.
As for me, I have never abandoned my shining thread of hope that someday I will get out of here—without that I would fear for my sanity. But perhaps that is just my Homo sapiens illusion, my consolation.
Before the sun disappeared again, Mary had placed her friend in the ground, the ground of this Gray Earth.
The memory of Nemoto faded, as memories will.
But sometimes, sparked by the scent of the breeze that blew off the sea—a scent of different places—she would think of Nemoto, who had died far from home, but who had not died alone.
The Lagan Fishers
TERRY DOWLING
Terry Dowling [eidolon.net/homesite.html?section_name= terry_dowling] lives in Australia and is one of the best prose stylists in Australian science fiction and fantasy. His short fiction is widely published in Australia and has appeared in F & SF and Interzone. Although he has never written a novel, his SF stories have been collected in eight volumes in Australia since 1990, most famously in the Tom Rynosseros series, and his influences are most saliently the stories of J. G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, and Jack Vance. Most recently, he was presented with the special Convenor’s Award for Excellence at the 1999 Aurealis Awards for Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling . A critic and reviewer, and an anthologist, Dowling is also a musician and songwriter, with eight years of appearances on Australia’s longest-running television program, ABC’s Mr Squiggle & Friends . And he currently teaches a Communications course at a large Sydney college.
“The Lagan Fishers,” like the Ings story in this collection, first appeared online at the SciFiction website, and is also a story of alien invasion, though of an extremely different sort—here the alien is a mysterious crystalline plant incursion (that echoes Ballard’s The Crystal World ).
In the first week of September, a lagan bloom appeared in the south meadow below Sam Cadrey’s kitchen window, and that was the day it felt real at last.
Something glinting in the morning sunlight caught his eye as he stood making coffee—dislodged hubcap, plastic drum lid, discarded garbage bag, he couldn’t be sure—something close to the road but definitely on his property. When he hurried down to see what it was, there was no mistaking the glossy quatrefoil of tartarine pushing up through the lucerne like an old bore cover made of fused glass. He kicked at the shell of opalescent stuff, beat on it a few times, then stood wondering how much his life would change.
Sam knew his rights. They couldn’t take his farm back, he was sure of that. When that small container of mioflarin— MF—illegally buried in the Pyrenees had leaked in 2029, poisoning so much of Europe, then the rest of the world, he’d become that rare and wondrous thing, a true global hero: one of the twenty-two volunteers sent in to cap it, one of the five who had survived Site Zero and made it out again. Sam had freehold in perpetuity, and the World Court in Geneva had decreed that lagan blooms were land-title pure and simple. Sure, there were local magistrates, local ordinances and local prejudices to reckon with, but the Quarantine was officially over, the last of the embargoes lifted—both made a laughingstock by the sheer extent of the bloom outbreaks and their consistently benign nature. A dis-figured, forty-nine-year-old MF veteran and widower on a UN life pension had recourse to legal aid as well. Looking down at the four-lobed curving hump of the bloom, Sam knew he was king of all that he surveyed and that, in all probability, his kingdom would be an alien domain for the next year or so.
Within fourteen minutes, orbiting spysats had logged it. Within forty, Mayor Catherine was in her living room with their local Alien Influences Officer, Ross Jimmins, to log the official registration, and a dozen lagan fishers were at the end of his drive waiting to bid for trawling rights. Protection agents and insurance reps were at his door too, offering assistance against the usual: everything from highly organized looters to salting by disgruntled neighbors. But Sam was a UN vet. Within the hour, there were two AIO lagan custodians at his front gate wearing blue armbands, and the usually strident hucksters pacing up and down the gravel drive had become unusually courteous.
“How soon before the hedges form?” Sam asked Mayor Catherine, sounding both cautious and eager, still not sure about the whole thing. Catherine was the closest thing to a rocket scientist Tilby had, a handsome, middle-aged woman with steel-gray hair, looking the perfect, latter-day nasa-chik in her navy-blue jumpsuit. The NASA look. The imprimatur of discipline and professional responsibility. Who would have thought?
“It’s still three to four days,” she said, taking the AIO notepad from Jimmins and adding her verification code. “Latest count, fourteen percent of blooms don’t hold. Remember that, Sam. They sink back.”
“That’s not many though,” Ross Jimmins said, reassuring him, wishing Sam well with every puff on his lagan-dross day-pipe. The pipe was carved from lagan horn, a length of hollowed lattice from a “living” hedge. As well as the wonderful fragrance the slow-combusting dross gave off, somewhere between gardenia and the finest aromatic tobaccos of the previous four centuries, there was a welter of other positive side effects, and the molecularly atrophying horn itself scattered its own immune-enhancing dusting of euphorines on the warm morning air.
“It is like some intelligence is behind it,” Sam said, looking out through the big view window, and knew how inane it sounded coming from him, the Tilby Tiger, the great skeptic.
Catherine gave a wry smile. “It’s good to have you back in the world. We lost you there for a while.”
“At least Jeanie didn’t see me like this.” Sam had resolved he wouldn’t say it, but there it was.
The Mayor looked off at the fields and hills, out to where a tiny orange bus was bringing more science students from the local high school to do a real-time, hands-on site study of early bloom effect. “Jeanie didn’t and it’s not what I meant, Sam.” She changed her tone. “So, what are you going to do about it? Lease it out?”
Sam was grateful. “You think I should? Let them wall it off, rig up processing gantries? Put storage modules down there?” Stop me seeing it, he didn’t add.
“Best way. Nothing is lost but spindrift through the flumes. You get the hedges; they get the lagan. There’s no poaching and none of the hassles.”
“You representing anybody?” Sam asked. He’d always been a wary and even harsh critic where the lagan was concerned. It had always been someone else’s experience, the reality of others, thus easy to comment on. This had changed him—what was the quaint old fin-de-siècle saying?—had made it “up close and personal.”
“I had a dozen phone calls before I left the office, but no. Hope you believe it, Sam.”
“Ross?”
“Eight calls. Nope.”
Sam needed to believe them. They were his friends. They’d been with him when Jeanie died. He needed to brave it out. “Cat, I want to see it. I’ve gone revisionist pro tem, okay? If it’s alien invasion, let’s have it. I want hedges to form. I want them stretching along the road all the way to town. People should be able to poach stuff. Break bits off.”
Cat answered right on cue. This was an area of major personal concern. “A lot of wildcat lagan owners agree with you. I’ve always said it. Keep the cartels out.”
“I’ve got control, right?”
She gave a little frown. “Your property, Sam.”
“What about outside options?”
“Some control. It’s an official thing. What’s on your mind?”
“I want it all hands-on. No remotes. None of those little science doovers. No aerostats.”
“That’s tricky, Sam,” she said. “It’s standard nowadays. Every general access unit means a thousand global onlines and probably a thousand research facilities. A fortune from sponsors to you. Even if you could close ’em out, you’d just get thousands more people coming in. You don’t want that.”
“Then only for part of the day. Only in the afternoon. Say, 1300 till sundown. None at night. Can we do that?”
“We can try,” Jimmins said and keyed in the request, waited less than a minute, nodded. “You’ve got it for now, flagged for renegotiation later. Bless your MF, Sam. You’ll get rogues slipping in, but we’ll put up a burn field. Fry ’em in the sky.”
Cat nodded, confirming how easy it was going to be. “They’ll stop when they lose a few. So, what will you do?”
Talking the talk was easy, Sam found. “I’ll fish it myself. See what comes up.”
“Great idea. Can we help?”
It all happened quickly once the Mayor and Jimmins left. The waiting fishers at the gate drove off the moment they learned Sam was going to wildcat it himself, all but one, the craggy-looking, gray-haired older man perched on the bonnet of his truck. When Sam went down to quiz him on why he stayed, he saw that it was Howard Dombey, the proprietor of the Lifeways produce market on the far side of Tilby. He was a part-time lagan fisher, and people said he did some lagan brokering as well.
“It’s Howard Dombey, isn’t it?” Sam said.
“Right on, Mr. Cadrey. Like to help if you’re a mind.” His idioms were straight from Life Studies Online, all very PC, optimally relaxing, maximally community building.
Sam found himself matching them. “Doing it myself. And it’s Sam.”
“Like to help just the same, Sam. Don’t figure profit margins too well anymore. Just like working with it. Seeing it come to.”
“Why?”
Howard Dombey shrugged, going with the role beautifully. “Just do. Watching the spin. Seeing it all flicky-flashy with lagan, pretty as the day. Give me five percent and I’ll do the scut work. Give me ten and I’ll fence the bounty you clear as well. Save you the grief.”
“There’ll be slow days, Howard.”
“Counting on it. At my age, they’re the ones I like.”
They made quite a team—a vet skeptic with a face ruined by MF, a town mayor looking like a shuttle-butt spaceways groupie from the nineties, a pipe-smoking AIO officer, and a small-time entrepreneur who did the culture-speak of mid- twentieth rural USA.
They started early each morning and left off around 1300, with Howard often as not staying on at the sorting trays till sunset when the last of the afternoon’s tek and spec groups had gone—whichever AIO officials were rostered for that day’s site check.
It was funny how much of an unspoken routine it all was. By the time Sam had disengaged the perimeter sensors and AIO alarms around 0700, the four of them were there, ready to set off in pairs, carefully locating the newbies and keying spot and spec codes into notepads for their own constantly updating operations program and the AIO global master.
It was on a spell during one of these start-up checks, after Sam had pointed to a perfect cloudform lagan building on one of the hedges, that Howard told him about the name.
“You know what lagan originally was?”
Sam just stared; it seemed such an odd question. “I thought it was named after the river in that old Irish song. You know, My Lagan Love. They’re always playing it.”
“Most people think that. No. It’s from the language of shipwreck. Flotsam, jetsam and lagan. Flotsam is wreckage that floats when a ship goes down. Jetsam is what’s thrown overboard to lighten her. Jetsam when it’s jettisoned, see. If it floats, it’s flotsam. If it sinks, it’s lagan. A lot of valuable stuff was marked with buoys so they could retrieve it later. There were salvage wars over it. Deliberate wrecking, especially on the coast of Cornwall and around the Scillies. Lights set during storms to lure ships onto rocks. Lamps tied to the horns of cows—‘horn beacons’ they called ’em. Whole families involved. Whole communities.”
“So why that name now? Lagan?”
“Some scientist came up with it. These are floats from somewhere else, aren’t they? Buoys poking through. Lines leading down to stuff.”
“I’ve never heard this.”
Howard looked at him as if to say: You’ve been out of it for quite a while.
