Year's Best SF 10, page 8
And as the incursions of more noisy humans forced species into extinction, the record she had contributed to would be all that remained to mark them. But what of her, then?
Children? Getting a bit late in the game for that, and no man interested in fathering. The world did not need more mouths, either.
A light rain spattered down from the canopy, which was nearer now as she angled along the hill toward their central nexus. As she came down through the last grove her pulse quickened. Back to the world of people. And soon, there would be no other.
To the sad long list—the dodo, passenger pigeon, moa, Tasmanian wolf, dusky sparrow, Florida panther, so many more—new names would be added. The only hope of knowing what those creatures were now lay in the sample cabinets of musty museums. But the inventory she was doing held out hope that in some brighter future, the genomic information in their sample bags would enable the resurrection of species. If biology marched on, perhaps the past was not truly lost.
She made herself put aside her musings. A babble of excited talk came from the clearing ahead.
Their trailers had moved. They were circled like wagons against the oddly silent crowd. Brenda must have done that when she saw their numbers—at least five hundred of them, most in pants and collared shirts, a few even in dark suits. Missionaries?
There was Brenda, gesturing to a tall, swarthy man. She was making pushing motions, get back, but the crowd pressed in around her. Trouble.
Cindy hailed Brenda, a short, muscular no-nonsense woman in jeans who turned with relief. As Cindy approached hand-lettered signs lofted from the crowd.
HEED THE HOLY WORD
REPENT THE SIN
read one in garish lettering, and a banner unfurled between two women:
ARROGANCE WILL BRING THE LAST DAYS
A sullen mutter rose up from them. Eyes glowered above gritted teeth.
Cindy could not imagine what this was about. Usually they faced only the press. Those were well represented today, scenting controversy: three shoulder-held cameras zoomed in on her as she strode into the crowd. In the cloying heat she could smell them, rank and excited.
“Who’s in charge here?” she demanded loudly.
A tall man with russet beard stepped from the line. “I am.”
From long experience she turned and faced him straight-on, chin up. “We’ve had some religious types demonstrate, but this is different, isn’t it? Lots more of you.”
“I come bearing a message you should heed,” he said slowly, soberly. His face was all planes and he had the cast of a man who was uncertain of very little. “I wish to deliver it away from this circus, if you please.”
The please was a pleasant touch. She eyed the rest of them and found the usual types; people with too much past and too little future, washed up upon the shore of faith.
“Why?” she challenged him, hands on hips. The crowd was milling and muttering but she ignored it. Brenda started talking to the rest of them in a reasonable tone, projecting her big voice out over their heads. The TV crews, thank God, followed her, sniffing at a possible confrontation.
“We are here for many different missions, we faithful.”
He waved a hand at the others but his burning eyes told the truth—this was his mission, and the others did not matter. He carried the air of a man bedeviled by something, a past that had carved lines in his long face. His severe black suit seemed wrapped around him more than fitted. He had a look she had seen once in a woman’s forlorn face, a sense of some past moral transgression for which everyone forgives them except themselves. And so they powerfully needed to redeem themselves.
She gave him a big arm-sweeping gesture and smiled, light as a bird in flight. “Come into my spacious office.” Her levity got the fierce, brooding look off his face. Enough social lubrication and she might get him off the site. But today it didn’t seem to work. His eyes bored into her for long moments, his mouth working, and then he nodded twice in quick jerks.
She led him into the trailer where the automatic species-readers were working. It was cooler there, from the air conditioning the computers needed. They labored silently and the clacking of the auto-readers was muffled. She pointed out one to him. The machine took the samples from the day before—insects, mostly—and in a single bright flash took a three-dimensional photo, analyzing its features in an instant. By comparing it with the immense Global Inventory database, and using rules of thumb worked out by the best taxonomists, this single trailer could index and place the samples a billion times faster than clunky humans.
It was the key to making an inventory of so many species, and she rattled on about it for a full minute before she realized that none of it was sinking in. And that her well-learned talents at dealing with opponents—smile, make little jokes, offer information, make them see you as human, too—were getting nowhere.
“All right,” she said, shifting gears to her official voice, “let’s get down to business, Mister…?”
“Abrahams,” he said curtly.
“Ummm. And—”
“You are all in great danger.”
His deep-set eyes glared, the mouth twisted. “Uh, oh?”
“You are a rational scientific type person. You do not heed an older wisdom.”
“Depends on the wisdom, I’d say.”
“Consider this, then—” He stood and recited:
“Genesis, 19. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
“Which means…?”
“Your Global Inventory. You are naming the beasts.”
“And the plants. So?”
He wrung his hands together, squeezing his eyes shut, and then the words exploded from him. “Genesis, 20. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found a help mate for him.”
“This is where Eve comes in?”
He stared off into the distance, as if listening to someone. Then he shook his head and turned to her slowly. “You are of Eve. But no, the scripture means something more. We cannot know what will attend once we have completed the Lord’s task.”
She wanted to say to him, Yes, the naming of the beasts is holy work. Science is holy. Your own book says it! So how about leaving us alone to do our jobs?
But she didn’t. This one was not going to tolerate a lot of argument.
“So Genesis is, what, wrong?” It usually helped if you took their point of view at first, and could politely differ with the following portions of the argument. But something told her this was not going to work with the intense, scowling man, still rubbing and massaging his hands as he stared at her. For the first time she wondered about her own safety here, alone with him, with only the buzzing machines as witness.
“Not wrong, no. It becomes a tale of origins. Later scholars ignored the flat fact that the naming of the beasts was God’s first commandment. All that comes after is irrelevant to the deeper truth.”
“Which is…”
“That mankind—including the Eves—never finished the first work they were given. God-given!”
“You mean our inventory will do that, at last.”
“Yes.” His hands hung at his side, their wringing finished.
“Then we are doing holy work, yes?”
“Of a kind, yes. Complying, as is our duty, with the First Commandment.”
“I thought Moses did those.”
It was meant to be a small joke, but he gravely shook his head. “Genesis comes before Moses.”
“I think I knew that.”
“But hear this.” He stiffened and the hands came together again and he recited: “Genesis, 21: And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept.”
“Before he got his job done, the naming of the beasts?”
He gazed at her with an expression suddenly mournful. “I do not believe we can know what that passage means.”
“A sleep? I know I’ll be needing one after this project is done.”
“I think you must not complete your inventory. Not until we have a further sign of what the Lord intends to do, after we have done his holy work at last—but so late. Millennia late!”
“And maybe too late,” she said sourly. Where was this going?
He nodded, as if he shared her sadness at all that had been lost. “Since we were in the Garden, we have destroyed much.”
“Without naming them at all.” She felt a strange sympathy with this sad man.
“Think of all that we have lost. God may be displeased.”
“This is a scientific study—”
“I gave you a world of wonders. You give me a measly list.”
She was about to say calmly, carefully, that the Global Inventory estimated that at best they would miss twenty percent of the species that had been alive at the turn of the millennium—but then realized that he was not about numbers.
“Surely,” he said, “the Lord will consider the completion of your project to be of importance. Perhaps He”—she could hear the capital letter—“has been waiting all this time for us to be done.”
Thy will be done, she remembered from the Apostle’s Creed, learned in girlhood. She had not thought of it for at least three decades. The words took her back….
But rough sounds intruded. Angry shouts came from outside.
A thump. Something crashing over.
Brenda burst into the room, eyes wide.
The ceremony to mark completion of the Global Inventory was held near the same blue gum grove where Weiss had given her the final permission papers. The day was sharp and clear and at least five hundred people milled around the broad field in front of the platform.
The U.N. dignitaries had all the attention, of course, and she was so far down the pecking order she found herself sitting next to Weiss himself, at the back, true, but at least on the platform. A small seat in history, she consoled herself.
From the podium came the usual.
“Glad you got it all done in time,” he whispered. “Heard there was a dustup.”
She nodded. “A religious gang. Their leader got me off to talk, and the rest of them started going for our equipment. When somebody came to tell me, we barely managed to restrain the leader.”
“Really? You weren’t—”
“No. He went for the taxonomy systems, not for us.”
“There’s always nutters about.”
“Especially these days. The last days, some religious ones say.”
She sat back and enjoyed the view. From here the artificial mountains loomed like great gray clouds. A distant squall was mounting up their ramparts. The cloud’s blue belly ripened as it rose. She turned and could see to the east the last slopes of the true mountains, where they petered out and the flat dry lands had begun.
There the gray carbon slopes began. Below each range the land lay fallow, but the fields were greener down slope of the artificial peaks. The works of man were doing better than the tired, eroded flanks that had been thrust up young by the waltz of continents.
“So this ceremony is premature?” Weiss was asking her. She thought she had seen some movement in the distance.
“What? Oh, not exactly. We got everything running right again. Just lost a little time, is all. I promised the execs that we would have the processing done by today all right.”
“That’s the end of the whole job, then?”
“Oh no, we have to understand it next. After all, it’s just a list of all the species on Earth, with a proper tag attached, a working name.”
“That’s a lot.”
“All we’ve done is name the…the beasts.”
Suddenly she saw in her mind’s eyes the hot-eyed man, Abrahams. He had feared that God would be displeased. Maybe not with the time it took to name the beasts—they were bumbling, slow-witted humans, after all—but with the missing numbers, the endless bugs and rodents and worms and on down to microbes, all the small squirming creatures who nonetheless made up His fine sacrament, His province. A bounty all gone now because of human numbers, creatures lost before they had been counted, while the humans squandered their eons and fought their wars and ignored the generous world around them—
She caught herself. “The inventory, yes…. Now we haveto—”
But something had drawn her eye.
Far to the east, where the world was still wholly natural, the peaks had changed. Lightning crackled and a dark funnel descended from so far up in the firmament she could not see its beginning. Wind whipped by her ears. A dank, musty odor came and the crowd murmured in fear, like a chorus. Voices lifted toward peaks that were subsiding, lapsing. Great spokes of stone broke through the leafy slopes. The ground shook like a beast rousing from a long slumber. Fear tasted like copper in her mouth.
Silently, the great old mountains were melting, as if shrugging off a burden they had carried far too long.
Burning Day
GLENN GRANT
Glenn Grant [www.istop.com/~ggrant/index.html] lives in Montreal, and uses memes to infect minds: He is the author of the widely reprinted and circulated “Memetic Lexicon” (www.istop.com/~ggrant/memetics/memelex.html), his most successful piece of writing to date. In the late 1980s, he published the small press magazine Edge Detector, for which he was nominated for a ReaderCon Small Press award. With David Hartwell, he co-edited Northern Star (1995) and Northern Suns (1999), both reprint anthologies of the best Canadian science fiction. His writing has appeared in Interzone, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and SF Eye. He also works as an illustrator and graphic designer.
“Burning Day” appeared in Claude Lalumière’s striking anthology of original Canadian speculative fiction, Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic, published in Canada in late 2003 and in the U.S. in 2004, and which we highly recommend. This story proves that cyberpunk still has some spark. It’s a police procedural about androids and AI and human prejudices, a fast-paced adventure with thoughtful undertones and plot surprises. All in all, great SF fun.
“Something’s missing here…” I rotate the crime scene in my mind’s-eye, pan across the remaining walls of the room, tracking over concrete dust, ceiling debris, toppled rows of wooden benches, part of a small synthetic arm…“Something’s missing from this model.”
Overlays flicker up, then fade, data collected by a swarm of flybots at the scene: shrapnel fragments and impact sites; splatter patterns of brain coolant and myonic gel; concentrations of chemical taggants, indicating Detanit.
“For one thing, why don’t we have any idents?”
“It’s only been forty minutes since the attack,” says Danny from the squad car’s other seat. “CSU’s still sweeping the place. Do try to be patient, my paranoid android.” Daniel Aramaki is human, and my work partner, and gets away with too much.
Ah, there we go—tiny red flags and neat little labels, finally popping up all over the virtual display in my head—annotating many thousands of pieces of the victims, large and small, positively identified and otherwise.
That’s better. “We have four confirmed dead, all cogents. And—oh, shit, no…”
“What?”
“Three of them were kids. Report says a bomb attack on the Usutu Truth Memorial Nanofabrication Facility.”
Mind’s-eye closed, optics open: we’re wailing through the intersection of Dundas and Replicraft Drive, running strobes and siren. Rain streaks the windshield, polishes the streets into shiny dark mirrors. The car is a Persina sedan, in standard-issue Homicide gray.
“Synthephobe terrorists again,” says Dan. “Humanist Front, probably, or the Organic Brigades.”
“Fifty dollars says the Humanistas claim it first.”
“You’re a sick guppy, Mohad.” Danny removes his latest designer smartshades, pockets them. He has a new pair every week; he’s constantly losing the things. I once suggested that he could simply buy prosthetic eyes with the same features and then some. He seemed to consider the idea an affront to his biological heritage.
I blink back into the model. From the shrapnel impacts, the program calculates a probable detonation point: mid-air, three meters from the floor, at the center of the room. Not a body-bomb, then. A grenade? Lobbed in from the door? Seems wrong somehow…
So I expand the model, scale it down to see what buildings are nearby. Project the most likely trajectories, out through the windows and back to origin. The resulting probability-cone is centered on the top three stories of an elderly Modernist apartment block. A free hostel. The CSU team are already checking it out, apparently, datacapture flowing into the model as I watch.
I kill the display. “It would appear that someone fired a small missile into the building from a rooftop nearby.”
Dan raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t argue. “Which roof?”
“The free hostel. I believe I know its manager, by reputation at least—Severe Commy Skeptic.”
Dan rolls his eyes. I know what he thinks of the names cogents choose for themselves. I’ve also known activists who sneer at mine: Gene Engine Mohad. The first and last are slave names, they say. Anthrocentric, they say. Fuck ’em, I say. It’s my choice.
West of Eidolonics Avenue, we howl out of Little Arabia and under the eaves of Cogentville. At once the rain is gone, and Dundas is an echoing halogen tunnel through overgrown masses of architecture. Buildings in Cogtown evolve constantly, with complete disregard for city regs and permits. They sprout overhead pedways, cantilevered wings, swooping bridges. Entire streets are spanned, lost under layers of nano-assembled confusion. Walls are always being knocked through, ramps built apparently at random between adjacent structures, entire city blocks domed over with great geodesic umbrellas. Every surface is covered in spectacular art. Not advertising, but luminescent paintings, tilework, bas-relief, animated graphics, palimpsests of cryptic polyglot graffiti…
“And this used to be such a nice neighborhood,” Daniel mutters. He’s joking; twenty-five years ago this was all abandoned office towers stuffed full of flood refugees and squatters. Not a lot of human pedestrians around here now; mostly cogents and lesser bots, walking, rolling, spider-crawling. The majority are anthropine (like me), but only a few are biomimetic, with all the pseudo-organic details. It’s unpopular now, politically uncool, to mimic humans too closely. Pinocchio Syndrome, they call it. Many of today’s cogents wear their mechine nature proudly: neosomatics with weird new body plans and lustrous metallic skins.
