The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (104 page)

“What about the rest of the world?” Foss asked.

“The rich can have the rest of the world. The cold and sunless northern and southern bands. The rich don’t need sunlight. They have money for food. The whole global demographic will change – a new pulsing heart will bring life and culture and prosperity to the tropics. Over time the north and the south will become increasingly irrelevant. The central zone will be everything – a great population of real people, sitting in the sun for three hours a day, using the remaining twenty-one creating greatness for humanity.”

VII

But what can I say? It was a fire, and fire, being a combustion, is always in the process of rendering itself inert. I did consider whether I needed to include, in this account, material about my motivation for betraying my friend. But I think that should be clear from what I have written here.

The Company persuaded me. A message was conveyed that I wanted to meet him again. A meeting was arranged. I flatter myself the there were very few human beings on the planet for whom he would have agreed this.

I had to pretend I had taken up dotsnuff. This involved me actually practising snorting the stuff, though I hated it. But the dotsnuff was a necessary part of the seizure strategy. It identified where I was; and more to the point it was programmed with Nic’s deener-tag (of course the Company had that on file) That would separate us out from all other people in whichever room or space we found ourselves in – let’s say, soldiers, guards, captors, terrorists, whomsoever – and in which the snuff would roil about like smoke. When the capture team came crashing in with furious suddenness their guns would know which people to shoot and which not to shoot.

He was back in the Indian Federation now: somewhere near Delhi.

I was flown direct to Delhi international. And we landed at noon. And I was fizzing with nerves.

From the airpot I took a taxi to an arranged spot, and there met a man who told me to take a taxi to another spot. At that place I was collected by three other men and put into a large car. It was not a pleasant drive. I was bitter with nerves; my mind rendered frangible by terror. It was insanely hot; migraine weather, forty five, fifty, and the car seemed to have no air conditioning. We drove past a succession of orchards, the trunks of the trees blipping past my window like a barcode. Then we turned up a road that stretched straight as a thermometer line, towards the horizon. And up we raced until it ended before a huge gate. Men with rifles stood about. I could see four dogs, tongues like untucked shirttails. And then the gate was opened and we drove inside.

I was shown to a room, and in it I stayed for several hours. My luggage was taken away.

I could not sleep. It was too hot to sleep anyway.

My luggage was brought back, my tube of dotsnuff still inside. I took this and slipped it inside my trouser pocket.

I informed my guards of my need to use the restroom – genuinely, for my bladder was fuller, and bothered me more, than my conscience. I was taken to a restroom with a dozen urinals at one wall and half a dozen sinks at another. A crossword-pattern of gaps marked where humidity had removed some of the tiny blue tiles covering the walls. The shiny floor was not as clean as I might have liked. I emptied my bladder into the white porcelain cowl of a urinal, and washed my hands at the sink. Then, like a character in a cheap film, I peered at myself in the mirror. My eyes saw my eyes. I examined my chin, the jowls shimmery with stubble, the velveteen eyebrows, the rather too large ears. This was the face that Kate saw when she leant in, saying either “a kiss before bedtime,” or “a bed before kisstime,” and touched my lips with her lips. I was horribly conscious of the flippant rapidity of my heart, of blood hurrying with adrenaline.

A guard I had not previously encountered, a tall, thin man with a gold-handled pistol tucked into the front of his trousers, came into the lavatory. “The Redeemer will see you now,” he said.

VIII

Had he come straight out with “why are you here?” or “what do you want?” or anything like that, I might have blurted the truth. I had prepared answers for those questions, of course, but I was, upon seeing him again, miserably nervous. But of course he wasn’t puzzled that I wanted to see him again. He took that as his due. Of course I wanted to see him – who wouldn’t? His face cracked wide with a grin, and he embraced me.

We were in a wide, low-ceilinged room; and we were surrounded by gun-carrying young men and women: some pale as I, some sherry- and acorn-coloured, some black as liquorish. A screen was switched on but the sound was down. Through a barred-window I could see the sepia plain and, waverly with heat in the distance, the edge-line of the orchards.

“Redeemer, is it?” I said, my dry throat making the words creak.

“Can you believe it?” He rolled his eyes upwards, so that he was looking at the ceiling – the direction, had he only known it, of the company troopers, sweeping in low-orbit with a counter-spin to hover, twenty-miles up on the vertical. “I try to fucking discourage it.”

“Sure you do,” I said. Then, clutching the tube in my pocket to stop my fingers trembling, I added in a rapid voice: “I’ve taken up snuff, you know.”

Nic looked very somberly at me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go outside if you want to snort that.”

For a moment I thought he was being genuine, and my rapid heartbeat accelerated to popping point. My hands shivered. I was sweating. When he laughed, and beckoned me towards a lowslung settee, I felt the relief as sharply as terror. I sat and tried, by focussing my resolve, to stop the tremble in my calf muscles.

“You know what I hate?” he said, as if resuming a conversation we had been having just moments before. “I hate that phrase body fascism. You take a fat man, or fat woman, and criticise them for being fat. That makes you a body fascist. You know what’s wrong there? It’s the fascism angle. In a fucking world where one third of the population hoards all the fucking food and two third starve – in a world where your beloved Company makes billions selling anti-obesity technology to people too stupid to understand they can have anti-obesity for free by fucking eating less – in that world, where the fat ones steal the food from the thin ones so that the thin ones starve to death. That’s a world where the fascists are the ones who criticize the fatties? Do you see how upside down that is?”

I fumbled the tube and sniffed up some powder. The little nanograins, keyed to my metabolism, thrummed into my system. Like, I suppose, fire being used to extinguish an oilwell blaze, the extra stimulation had a calming effect.

The talcum-fine cloud in that room. I coughed, theatrically, and waved my hand to dissipate the material.

“So you’re free to go?”

“I’m not in charge of it,” he said brightly. “Fuck, it’s good to see you again! I’m not in charge – I’m being carried along by it as much as anybody. It’s a tempest, and it’s blowing the whole of humanity like leaves in autumn.”

“Some of it was Company,” I said. “The ADP to ATP protocols weren’t, legally speaking, yours to give away, you know.”

“The hair stuff was mine,” he said.

“I’m only saying.”

“Sure – but the hair stuff.”

I thought of the troops, falling through the sky directly above us, their boot-soles coming closer and closer to the tops of our heads.

“The photovoltaic stuff, and the nanotube lysine fabrication of the conductive channels along the individual strands of hair – that was you. But that’s of no use without the interface to do the ATP.”

He shrugged. “You think like a lawyer. I mean, you think science like a lawyer. It’s not that at all. You don’t think there’s a moral imperative, when the famine in the southern African republics is killing, how many thousands a week is it?” Then he brightened. “Fuck it’s good to see you though! If I’d let the Company have this they’d have squeezed every last euro of profit out of it, and millions would have died.” But his heart wasn’t really in this old exchange. “Wait til I’ve shown you round,” he said, as excited as a child, and swept his right hand in an arc, lord-of-the-manor-wise.

Somewhere outside the room a siren was sounding. Muffled by distance, a warbling miaow. Nic ignored it, although several of his guards perked their heads up. One went out to see what the pother was.

I felt the agitation building in my viscera. Betrayal is not something I have any natural tolerance for, I think. It is an uncomfortable thing. I fidgeted. The sweat kept running into my eyes.

“All the old rhythms of life change,” Nic said. “Everything is different now.”

I felt the urge to scream. I clenched my teeth. The urge passed.

“Of course Power is scared,” Nic was saying. “Of course Power wants to stop what we’re doing. Wants to stop us liberating people from hunger. Keeping people in fear of starvation has always been the main strategy by which Power has kept people subordinate.”

“I’ll say,” I said, squeakily, “how much I love your sophomore lectures on politics.”

“Hey!” he said, either in mock outrage, or in real outrage. I was too far gone to be able to tell the difference.

“The thing is,” I started to say, and then lots of things happened. The clattering cough of rifle fire started up outside. There was the realization that the highpitched noise my brain had been half-hearing for the last minute was a real sound, not just tinitus – and then almost at once the sudden crescendo or distillation of precisely that noise; a great thumping crash from above, and the appearance, in a welter of plaster and smoke, of an enormous metal beak through the middle of the ceiling. The roof sagged, and the whole room bowed out on its walls. Then the beak snapped open and two, three, four troopers dropped to the floor, spinning round and firing their weapons. All I remember of the next twenty seconds is the explosive stutter-cough and the disco flicker of multiple weapon discharges, and then the stench of gunfire’s aftermath.

A cosmic finger was running smoothly round and round the lip of a cosmic wineglass.

I blinked, and blinked, and looked about me. The dust in the air looked like steam. That open metal beak, rammed through the ceiling, had the disconcerting appearance of a weird avant-art metal chandelier. There were half a dozen troopers; standing in various orientations and positions but with all their guns held like dalek-eyes. There were a number of sprawling bodies on the floor. I didn’t want to count them, or look too closely at them. And, beside me, on the settee, was an astonished-looking Neocles.

I moved my mouth to say something to him, and then either I said something that my ears did not register, or else I didn’t say anything.

He didn’t look at me. He jerked forward, and then jerked up. Standing. From a pouch in his pocketstrides he pulled out a small square-shaped object which, fumbling a little, he fitted into his right hand. The troopers may have been shouting at him, or they may have been standing there perfectly silently, I couldn’t tell you. Granular white clouds of plaster were sifting down. Nic leveled his pistol, holding his arm straight out. There was a conjuror’s trick with multiple bright red streamers and ribbons being pulled instantly and magically out of his chest, and then he hurtled backwards, over the top of the settee, to land on his spine on the floor. It took a moment for me to understand what had happened.

He may have been thinking, either in the moment or else as something long pre-planned, about martyrdom. Perhaps the Redeemer is not able to communicate his message in any other way. It’s also possible that, having gone through life protected by the tightfitting prophylactic of his unassailable ego that he may have genuinely believed that he could single-handedly shoot down half a dozen troopers, and emerge the hero of the day. I honestly do not know.

IX

I was forced to leave my home, and live in a series of hideouts. Of course a Judas is as valuable and holy figure as any other in the sacred drama. But religious people (Kate kneeling beside the bed at nighttime, praying to meekling Jesus gent and mild) can be faulted, I think, for failing imaginatively to enter into the mindset of their Judases. Nobody loved Nic as deeply as I. Or knew him so well. But he was rich, and not one motion of his liberal conscience or his egotistical desire to do good in the world changed that fact, or changed his inability to enter, actually, into the life of the poor. The poor don’t want the rich to save them. Even the rioters in the Indian Federation, even the starving Australians, even they – if only they knew it – don’t want to be carried by a god-like rich man into a new realm. What they want is much simpler. They want not to be poor. It’s simultaneously very straightforward and very complicated. Nic’s hair was, in fact, only a way of making manifest the essence of class relations. In his utopia the poor would actually become – would literally become – the vegetation of the earth. The rich would reinforce their position as the zoology to the poor’s botany. Nothing could be more damaging, because it would bed-in the belief that it is natural and inevitable that the rich graze upon the poor, and that the poor are there to be grazed upon. Without even realizing it Nic was laboring to make the disenfranchised a global irrelevance; to make them grass for the rich to graze upon. I loved him, but he was doing evil. I had no choice.

X

Last night, as we lay in bed together in my new, Company-sourced secure flat in I-can’t-say-where (though I’m the one paying the rent) Kate said to me: “I am cut in half like the moon; but like the moon I grow whole again.” I was astonished by this. This really isn’t the sort of thing she says. “What was that, sweet?” I asked her. “What did you say, my love?” But she was asleep, her red lips were pursed, and her breath slipping out and slipping in.

BEFORE MY
LAST BREATH

Robert Reed

Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction
, and many other markets. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And – also like Baxter and Stableford – he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Decency,” “Savior,” “The Remoras,” “Chrysalis,” “Whiptail,” “The Utility Man,” “Marrow,” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “The Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count among some of the best short works produced by anyone in the 1980s and 90s; many of his best stories have been assembled in the collections
The Dragons of Springplace
and
The Cuckoo’s Boys.
Nor is he non-prolific as a novelist, having turned out eleven novels since the end of the 1980s, including
The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, Sister Alice
, and
The Well of Stars
, as well as two chapbook novellas,
Mere
and
Flavors of My Genius.
His most recent book is a new novel,
Eater-of Bone.
Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Here he unravels a fascinating archaeological mystery with roots that stretch back for millions of years. . . .

Thomas

T
HE AFTERNOON WAS
clear and exceptionally cold. An off-duty company geologist was driving across the floor of the mine when a flash of reflected light caught his gaze. He didn’t particularly want to go home, and thirty-one years in the coal industry hadn’t quite killed the curious boy inside him. Backing up, he saw the flash repeated, and it seemed peculiar enough that he pulled on his stocking cap and mittens and climbed slowly up over the lignite coal, taking a close, careful look at something that made no sense whatsoever.

His fingers were numb and nose frostbitten when he reached the field office. But he didn’t tremble until he began to the maps, showing his superiors what patch of ground shouldn’t be touched until more qualified experts could come in and kick around.

“What’d you find?” they asked.

“An unknown species,” seemed like an honest, worthy answer.

Sixty million years ago, plant material had gathered inside a basin sandwiched between young mountain ranges. Then the peat was covered over with eroded debris and slowly cooked into the low-sulfur treasure that today fed power plants across half of the country. Fossils were common in Powder River country. The coal often looked like rotted leaves and sticks. But there was no way to systematically investigate what the gigantic machines wrested from the ground. Tons of profit came up with every scoop, and only one person in the room wanted the discovery preserved, no matter how unique it might be.

The geologist listened to the group’s decision. Then he lifted the stakes, showing the photographs that he had taken with his cell phone camera. “This resembles nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he added. Then mostly to himself, he muttered, “It’s like nothing else in the world.”

“I’ve seen these before,” one supervisor barked. “It’s nothing, Tom.”

Normally an agreeable sort, the geologist nodded calmly, but then his voice showed bite when he asked, “Why can’t we damn well be sure? Just to be safe?”

“No,” another boss growled. “Now forget about it.”

Thirty-one years of loyal service to the company brought one undeniable lesson: This argument would never be won here. So he retreated, driving into Gillette and his tiny house. His wife was sitting in the front of the television, half-asleep. He poured the last of her whiskey down the sink, and she stood and cursed him for some vague reason and swung hard at his face, and he caught her and wrestled her to bed, saying all of the usual words until she finally closed her eyes. Then he collected several dozen important names and agencies, sending out a trim but explicit e-mail that included his phone numbers and the best of his inadequate pictures. Thomas showered quickly, and he waited. Nobody called. Then he dressed and ate dinner before carrying two shotguns, unloaded, and a tall thermos of coffee out the truck, and after a few minutes of consideration, he drove back to the mine, parking as close to the fossil as possible.

Tom’s plan, such as it was, involved shooing away the excavators as long as possible, first with words, and if necessary, empty threats. But these were temporary measures, and worse, he discovered that his phone didn’t work down here in the pit’s deepest corner. That’s why he stepped out into the cold again. Navigating by the stars and carrying a small hammer, he intended to break off a few pieces of the fossil – as a precaution, in case this treasure was dug up and rolled east, doomed to be incinerated with the rest of the anonymous coal.

Mattie

Few took notice of the peculiar e-mail. Three colleagues called its author, two leaving messages on his voice mail. CNN’s science reporter ordered her intern to contact the corporation’s main office for reaction. The PR person on duty knew nothing about the incident, sharply questioned its validity, and after restating his employer’s sterling environmental record, hung up. In frustration, the intern contacted a random astronomer living in Colorado. The astronomer knew nothing about the matter. She glanced at the forwarded e-mail, in particular the downloaded images, and then said, “Interesting,” to the uninterested voice. It wasn’t until later, staring at the twisted body with its odd limbs and very peculiar skull that her heart began to race. She called the geologist’s phones. Nobody answered. Leaving warning of her imminent arrival, she dressed for the Arctic and grabbed the department’s sat-phone, buying two tall coffees when she gassed up on her way out of Boulder.

Better than most, Mattie understood the temporary nature of life. This woman who had never before been stopped by the police earned three speeding tickets on the journey north. Approaching the mine, she slipped in behind an empty dump truck, driving almost beneath the rear axle, and because the only security guard happened to be relieving himself, she managed to slip undetected out onto the gouged, unearthly landscape.

GPS coordinates took her to a pickup truck parked beside a blackish-brown cliff. The engine was running, a stranger sleeping behind the wheel. Beside him on the seat was what looked like huge, misshapen hands cradling a large golden ring. Two shotguns were perched against the far door. For a brief moment, she hesitated. But Mattie shoved her natural caution aside. With a tap on the glass, she woke the stranger, and startled, he stared out at what must have looked like a ghost – this young woman with almost no hair and a gaunt, wasted face.

He nervously rolled down the window.

“Are you Thomas Greene? I’m Mattie Chong.”

Stupid with fatigue, Tom asked, “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see your alien,” she reported.

He accepted that. What bothered him more was the stranger’s appearance. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking . . . what’s wrong with you?”

“Cancer,” Mattie reported amiably, throwing her flashlight’s beam against the deep seam of lignite. “And if I’m alive in four months, I’ll beat all of my doctors’ predictions.”

The President

It was rare not to be the most important man in the room. And today brought one of those exceptional occasions: a trailer crowded with scientists and Secret Service agents, mining representatives and select reporters, plus the three-person congressional delegation from Wyoming. But the hero of the moment was Dr Greene, and everybody wanted to stand beside the renowned geologist. Of course Dr Chong should have shared this limelight, but she was flown to Utah this morning, her illness taking its expected, presumably fatal turn. The president was merely another visitor, and as the lesser celebrity, it was his duty to shake hands and ask about the poor woman’s health. Every researcher had to be congratulated on the historic, world-shattering work. And he insisted on smiles all around. Bullied joviality was the president’s great skill, and he was at his best when he was feeling less than happy.

Today was especially miserable. The bitter wind and low leaden skies only underscored a mood that had crumbled at dawn. That’s when word arrived that his former Chief of Staff – a slippery political worm on his noblest day – planned to give the Special Investigator everything, including the damned briefcase filled with cash and ten hours of exceptionally embarrassing recordings. The president’s administration was wounded, and by tomorrow it might well be dead. Cautious voices wanted the Wyoming visit canceled, but that would have required an artful excuse, and what would have changed? Nothing. Besides, he understood that if enough people were fascinated with these old bones and odd artifacts, the coming nastiness might not be as awful as it promised to be.

Dr Irving Case was the project administrator, and he had been on duty for less than a week. But with a bureaucrat’s instincts for what counted, he used a large empty smile and a big voice. “Mr President, sir. Would you like to go see the discovery now, sir?”

“If it’s no problem. Let’s have a peek at old George.”

Back into the winter miseries they went. A tent-like shelter had been erected around the burial site, to block the wind and blowing coal dust. As they strolled across the barren scene, a dozen experts spoke in a competitive chorus, agreeing that the fossil was unique and remarkable, and of course immeasurably precious. The first priority was to disturb nothing, every clue precious and no one certain what constituted a clue. The president kept hearing how little was known, yet in the next moment, a dozen different hypotheses were offered to explain the creature’s origins and how it might have looked in life and why it was where it was and why this wasn’t where it had lived.

“It didn’t live here?” the president interrupted. Aiming for humor, he said, “This splendid desolation . . . this is exactly where every movie alien roams.”

Laughter blossomed – the bright fleeting giddiness that attaches itself to men of power. Then they reached the shelter, and reverent silence took hold. Dr Case mentioned rules. Politely but firmly, he reminded everybody to wear the proper masks and gloves, and nothing could be touched, and then he warned the press to stand back so that all might enjoy the best possible view.

Photographs and video had already shown the mysterious fossil to the world. The enormous stratum of coal in which he, or she, was entombed was long ago dubbed Big George, hence the fossil’s popular name. Lights had been strung near the tent ceiling. The coal slag was cleared away, the flat floor littered with scientific instruments and brightly colored cables. What rose before the president was both immediately recognizable and immeasurably strange: sixty million years ago, alien hands had dug a hole deep into the watery peat, and then “George” was lowered in or climbed in, feet first. Shovels had been used in the excavation. Two archeologists pointed at nearly invisible details, describing with confidence how the metal blades must have looked and what kinds of limbs employed them, and even while they were talking, a third voice reminded everyone that conjectures were fine, but nothing was proved and might never be.

George was a big fellow, and even to the uninformed eye, he looked like something from another world. The weight of the rock had compressed him, but not as badly as the president expected. Two bent legs helped carry the long horizontal body, and two more legs were presumably buried out of sight. A fifth limb rose from behind what looked like the angular and watchful face of a praying mantis, and the arm was jointed and complicated and partially destroyed. Dr Greene had removed the matching hands and now famous gold ring. The corpse was majestic, wasn’t it? But in the next moment, in the president’s eyes, George looked preposterous. Pieces stolen from unrelated creatures had been thrown together, a wily hoaxer having his laugh at all this foolish, misplaced fascination.

Turning to world’s most famous geologist, the president asked, “How were we so lucky, this poor fellow exposed this way?”

“The coal’s weak around the edges of the grave,” Dr Greene explained. His celebrity was wearing on him, puffy eyes half-closed, a dazed, deep fatigue visible in his features and slope-shouldered posture. “If the blade had cut anywhere else, I wouldn’t have noticed anything.”

“It was the ring you saw?”

“Yes, sir.”

The president nodded. “I haven’t seen that artifact yet,” he mentioned.

Dr Case stepped forward. “The hands and ring have been sent to the Sandia, sir. For analysis and closer study.”