Year's Best SF 11, page 9
“Mason’s Rats” appeared in Asimov’s. It is short, biting, and to the point, and an interesting counterpoint to the Dozois story in this book. Farmer Mason discovers that his cats are missing and that the rats in his barn have become tool users and are carrying weapons.
The cartridges, with their environmentally friendly titanium shot, thunked into the shotgun with satisfying precision. Mason snapped it shut and with pursed lips viewed his sprawling farmyard. Where to start? Where would the killer stray be hiding? He hooked the shotgun under his arm and headed for the huge enclosed barns where grain handlers could still be heard at work. There would be the place, but he knew he would have to be careful where he fired. Micro-circuitry was robust, but not that robust, as he had discovered after blasting one of Smith’s cybernetic rat traps, mistaking it for a rabbit. It had run home squealing and dropping chips like little black turds. He smiled to himself at the memory, then came suddenly to a stop, his smile fading. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps Smith had reprogrammed one of his traps to hunt cats, for revenge.
Mason’s suspicions had only been aroused when the General had disappeared. The disappearance of the other two cats he had put down to other things. They could have found another home with a more ready food supply. He did not believe in giving them all they would want even though it was tax-deductible. He called it motivation. They were working cats after all. Another possibility that crossed his mind was that they had not been quick enough when the combine harvester had come round, and that he would find their remains when he came to do the baling. But not the General; that raggedy-eared moggy had been around for six years and knew the dangers. He also managed to grow fat on a steady diet of rats. Others might have thought the culprit a fox, but foxes don’t attack cats. Cats, after all, have more natural armament than foxes. No, the greatest killer of cats is other cats. Mason shook his head and continued on to the barns.
The doors to G1 slid back only halfway, then jammed. Mason was not surprised. He had not used them in two years. The lights worked all right, though, and he could easily see into the dusty interior. Before him was a mountain of alpha-wheat. He reached down and grabbed up a handful, gazed with satisfaction at the pea-sized grains, then tossed them to the floor as a handler came whirring past him. He frowned as he watched the bulky device. The handlers were the one inefficiency in the circuit. The grain went from the harvesters to the barns, then, by handlers, from the barns up the ramps to the silos. Mason would have liked one of the new harvesters with its fans that could blow the grain directly up fifty feet of ducting into the silos, but he did not have fifty million Euros to spare. Still with a sour expression, he again gazed up at the pile of wheat grain. It was then that he saw the gray shape crouching on top of it, regarding him with glittery, avid eyes.
Mason raised his shotgun, deciding on the instant that this was the stray. The creature turned to flee, and Mason hesitated as he realized that it was not a cat at all, but a huge rat. He lowered his gun as it scampered down the other side of the pile, a sweat breaking out all over him. No wonder the General had gone missing. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face, then cautiously moved in. No way did he want to come suddenly upon a rat that size.
On the other side of the pile there was no rat. Fifty yards in front of him were the doors to G2. He trotted over to them and hit the opening button. The doors slid aside and a wedge of light was thrown into the darkness. The rat was there. It froze, pinned by light. Mason raised his gun to fire and saw that the rat had something round its middle. It looked almost like a tool belt. The shotgun kicked and the rat shot into the air with a shriek and spattering of blood, then hit the ground convulsing. Mason stepped aside and turned on all the lights. He scanned around as other large shapes fled amongst the grain piles, but he did not shoot at them. Right then he had only one cartridge left in his gun and a couple in his pocket, and did not feel altogether safe. He approached the dead rat.
Somehow the creature had managed to wrap a piece of canvas webbing around itself. At least this is what Mason told himself at first. But as he came to stand over it he realized that this was not a good enough explanation. The rat was wearing a tool belt, and hanging from it were tools fashioned from bone, wood, and old nails.
Mason reached down and hauled up the huge rat by its tail, then glanced around as he heard more movement. Raising his gun he backed out of G2, dragging the rat carcass with him. As he reached the door he detected movement and looked up. Crouched on one of the grain piles was another rat. There came a snapping sound and something cracked against the door beam and clattered to the floor. Mason peered down at the small crossbow bolt, swore, then got out of the barn as fast as he could.
“Now Mr. Mason, there’s no need to upset yourself. Traptech can sort out your little problem.”
Patronizing jerk, thought Mason, staring down at the deep-frozen rat corpse he had dumped on the table. Smith had recommended this man but Mason did not like him. The suit was the first thing that annoyed him. Mason had an aversion to anyone wearing a suit. He reckoned it was a certainty that this bloke had a pair of green rubber boots in the trunk of his company car. He looked up.
“Upset myself? Little problem? I’ve got armed rats in my barns and you call it a little problem?”
“Yes sir. Perhaps I am wrong to call it a little problem, but it is a problem we at Traptech are used to handling.”
Mason could not believe he was having this discussion. The last he had heard about tool-using ability in the animal kingdom had been from a program about apes, who managed to break open nuts with rocks.
“Tell me again where they come from.”
“As I said, man has become the greatest force of evolution. We are forcing intelligence on the animal kingdom. It is—”
Mason raised his hand before the Traptech rep could move into full bullshit mode. “Okay, what have you got for me?”
The suit smiled like a shark and pulled a thick catalog from his briefcase. Mason felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach—one he normally associated with the sight of little brown envelopes with windows in them. The suit opened the catalog on the table next to the thawing rat and showed Mason a picture of something that looked like a security camera.
“This is the TT6, which we introduced only last year. It is a guided pulse laser with dual heat and movement sensors. Four of these in each of your two barns should solve your problem. Smith was most satisfied with them.”
“How much?” asked Mason tiredly, then frowned at the answer. The new harvester retreated even further into the future.
The men from Traptech installed the TT6s in a day. Mason noted that they wore helmets, visors, and overalls with micromesh ring mail stitched in, and that one of them stood guard with a pump-action shotgun. The rats remained hidden, though. From the TT6s, the men ran an armored cable into his house to the farm computer. When all the work was completed the suit arrived to demonstrate the system.
“This is the control package,” said the suit after loading two discs and plugging the cable into the computer’s unused security circuit. “Now you can call up diagnostics on each TT6, find out if there have been any hits, and even get a view through each unit.”
The computer screen flickered on and showed: HIT ON TT6 G1/3.
“Ah, marvelous,” said the suit, and demonstrated how the view could be called up on that unit. The screen flickered again and showed the greenish infrared view of the inside of G1. Lying before one of the grain piles, smoke wisping from the laser punctures in its body, lay Mason’s remaining cat.
“Ah…it would be advisable to keep other animals out of the barns. The sensors are set to pick up on animals within certain size parameters. Obviously they will miss humans but—”
“I will expect some sort of reduction for this,” interrupted Mason, his teeth clenched.
On the first day the diagnostic program reported a malfunction and Mason could get no picture through that particular unit. It never occurred to him to be surprised. With his shotgun hooked under his arm he went to G1. On the floor before the TT6 one of the rats lay in a smoking heap. The TT6 was smoking as well though, two crossbow bolts impaling it. In the night two more were scrapped. In the morning Mason called up the suit.
“Ah,” said the suit, inspecting the crossbow bolt shortly after he arrived, “this sometimes happens. Your best move now would be to get a mobile defense.” He opened up the dread catalog and pointed out something that looked like a foot-long chrome scorpion. “This is the TT15.”
“Those TT6s are still under guarantee.”
“I can give you a very reasonable exchange price with service contract and deferred payment, and though they are expensive, you will only need one TT15.”
The TT15 arrived the next day. Just taking it out of its box gave Mason the creeps. After turning off the TT6s he took it into the barns, and turned it on. Immediately it scuttled into the shadows. Mason found himself fearing it more than he feared the rats, and he quickly went outside. Its homing beacon he placed by the compost heap. After half an hour the TT15 came out with a dead rat in it mandibles and dumped it by the beacon. Next to the tractor on which he was working Mason shuddered and turned back to his task. Later, as he sat on one of the tractor’s tires and rolled himself a cigarette, he saw three rats run out of G1 with the chrome scorpion in pursuit.
He found himself hoping the rats would escape but, before they reached the polythene-wrapped straw bales, it had the slowest of them, caught it, crunched it, then like some horrible gun dog took it to the compost heap. However unpleasant the thing might look, Mason decided, it was damned efficient.
The men from Traptech came the following day to take down the TT6s. When they had finished, their foreman came to see Mason.
“Says here you had eight TT6s, mate.”
“That’s right. The rats scrapped four of them though.”
“We know about that. We’ve got those four. Just that one of the good one’s gone missin’. I’ll have to report it, mate.”
For the rest of the day, while he baled straw in the fields, Mason wondered confusedly where the missing TT6 could have gone. By evening he had figured it out and in a strange way was quite glad. As soon as he got back to the farmyard he fetched his shotgun and went with it into the barns.
It had been one hell of a fight in G1. The rats had swivel-mounted the TT6, using a couple of old bearings and a universal joint, on one of the grain handlers, and powered it from the handler’s battery. Mason was impressed, but realized the rats had not taken into account the reflective surface of the TT15. They had obviously fired the laser many times, enough to have drained the handler’s battery, but the TT15, though damaged, had not been immobilized. A battle with crossbow bolts and hand weapons had then ensued. The floor was littered with dead and dismembered rats, weapons, and silvery pieces of the TT15. Finally the rats had managed to shut the doors into G2 on it, trapping it, and there it remained, its motor whining periodically.
Mason walked over to the doors, opened them, then hit the lights for G2. The TT15 scuttled on into the barn, immediately zeroing in on movement at the farther edge of the floor. Mason gazed across and saw a group of rats. Many of them were injured. Many of them were applying dressings and tying on splints. They all looked up at him, glittery eyed. He raised his shotgun and saw what could only be described as a look of fatalism come onto their ratty faces. He fired both barrels of the shotgun and blew the TT15 to scrap.
As he turned and left the barn shortly after, on his way to cancel the check he had sent to Traptech, Mason felt extremely pleased with himself—in fact, the happiest he had felt in days. The kind of rats he really hated wore suits and cost a damned sight more than a few handfuls of alpha-wheat.
A Modest Proposal for the Perfection of Nature
VONDA N. McINTYRE
Vonda N. McIntyre (www.vondanmcintyre.com) lives in Seattle, Washington. The biography at her website by Eileen Gunn is a delightful tissue of moonshine. She attended the original Clarion workshop in Pennsylvania at the start of the 1970s, and thereafter founded the original Seattle Clarion. She became famous for her innovative short fiction and for her novel Dreamsnake (1977), and then for her bestselling Star Trek novels in the 1980s, for her Starfarers novels in the early 1990s, and for her Nebula Award-winning The Moon and the Sun (1997). Sometime in the early 1980s she stopped writing short fiction, so a year such as 2005, in which two McIntyre stories were published, is rare.
“A Modest Proposal” was published in Nature. The author says that the full title includes “for the Perfection of Nature.” It has the same finely controlled, moderate, reasonable, deadpan tone as its literary model by Jonathan Swift. So it is possible that someone could take it seriously as a good idea. But remember Swift’s proposal to slaughter and eat the poor, and don’t.
The crop grows like endless golden silk. Wave after wave rushes across plains, between mountains, through valleys, in a tsunami of light.
Its harvest is perfection. It fills the nutritional needs of every human being. It adapts to our tongues, creating the taste, texture and satisfaction of comfort food or dessert, crisp vegetables or icy lemonade, sea cucumber or big game. It’s the pinnacle of the genetic engineer’s art.
It’s the last and only living member of the plant kingdom on Earth.
Solar cells cover slopes too steep and peaks too high for the monoculture. The solar arrays flow in long, wide swaths of glass, gleaming with a subtle iridescence, collecting sunlight. Our civilization never runs short of power.
The flood of grain drowns marsh and desert, forest and plain, bird and beast and insect. Land must serve to produce the crop; creatures only nibble and trample and damage it, diverting resources from the service of human beings. Even the immortality of rats and cockroaches has failed.
The grain stops at the ocean’s beach. No rivers muddy the sea’s surface or break the shoreline. The grain and the cities require fresh water, and divert it before it wastes itself in the sea.
The tides wash up and back, smoothing the clean silver sand, leaving it bare of tangled seaweed, of foraging seabirds or burrowing clams, of the brown organic froth that dirtied it in earlier times. Now and then the waves erase a line of human footprints, but these are very rare.
The air is clear of any bite of iodine, any hint of pollution or decay.
The sea undulates, blue and green, clear as new glass. Sunlight shimmers on its surface and dapples the bare sea floor. Underwater turbines cast shadows on the sand. The tides power the turbines, tapping the force of gravity.
Far from shore, where its colonies will not interrupt the vista of clear water, a single species of cyanobacterium photosynthesizes near the surface, pumping oxygen into the crystalline air, controlling the level of carbon dioxide. Its design copes easily with the increasing saltiness of the sea.
Except for the cyanobacteria, the ocean’s cacophony of microscopic organisms has followed redwoods, mammoths and Hallucigenia into extinction. The krill are gone. Krill would be of as little use to people as sharks and seabirds, fish or jellyfish, seashells or whales. They are all gone, too.
The water deepens beyond the reach of light. The continental shelf ends in a precipice, dropping off into darkness.
On the sea floor, the glass-lace shells of diatoms lie clean and dead, slowly settling. In a moment of geologic time, they will form white limestone.
In the deepest trenches, black smokers gush scalding chemical soup. Machines sense the vents of heat, swim to them, and settle over them to trap the energy from the center of Earth. Nothing remains for the sustenance and evolution of primordial life in these extraordinary environments.
The strange creatures that lived there, and died, were never any use to human beings.
All the resources of sea and land serve our needs.
Cities of alabaster and adamantine grace the crests of mountains and span the flow of rivers. The cities’ people live rich, full lives, long and healthy, free of disease. We are well fed. We have interesting, challenging occupations and plenty of time for leisure, family and virtual reality. We can experience any adventure, from wilderness to exotic ritual, without the expense, trouble or danger of travel. We can experience any adventure that ever happened, any adventure anyone can imagine. The virtual experience matches reality or invention in every way: sight, sound, smell, touch and movement.
Our civilization pulses with vitality. We have unlimited opportunity: of thought, of achievement, of freedom, and of the pursuit of happiness.
Whatever we require, human ingenuity can invent and provide. And if, in some unlikely but imaginable future, we should wish to recreate any organism, the means to do so exist. DNA sequences, RNA sequences, are easy to write down and archive; there is no need to store messy biological material, either tough and persistent DNA or fragile and degradable RNA. We are magnanimous; we have preserved the blueprints for everything, even parasites and pathogens.
No one has bothered to recreate an organism in a very long time. We have considered the question long and hard, and we have made our decision. No creation of nature has an inherent right to exist, independent of our need.
We have perfected nature, for we are its masters.
Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch
RUDY RUCKER
Rudy Rucker (www.rudyrucker.com) lives in Los Gatos, California. He has published fifteen novels to date, several science non-fiction books, and some software. His collected stories, Gnarl!, was published in 2000. Rucker is one of the original cyberpunks of the Movement, and later the inventor of transrealism, a literary mode, not a movement. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback original novel in the U.S. twice, for Software and for Wetware. He’s now a retired math and computer science professor and is writing up a storm. His 2006 novel is Mathematicians in Love.
