The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25 (Mammoth Books) (143 page)

Time seemed to shrink away. He stopped counting hours and minutes and began thinking in steps and grips, which formed movements, which formed phases.

They went around bluffs, over ridges, avoided overhangs, and followed the road up the rock face. As they ascended, the light became more tenuous. They donned collar lanterns and set them glowing.

Many hours later, they came to a small cavern that burrowed off the side of the Hollow. Arlyana helped Moko scramble over the lip and into the safety of the space inside. Once he had caught his breath, he looked out the cavern mouth. There was another hundred metres to the peak of Canterbury Hollow. He groaned. The muscles ached in his shoulders, back, and calves.

Arlyana smiled. “Don’t worry. This is as far as we’re going.”

“But we’re not at the top yet.”

“This is better. Come and see.”

She took his hand and led him into the cavern. The space opened up at the back and they could walk upright without hitting their heads. The light from their collar lanterns filled the small cavern. Hundreds of golden reflections shone back at them. The reflections came from ballot tags that had been hung from the roof. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands.

Moko moved about, brushing the tags with his fingers and setting them swinging. “What is this place?” he asked.

“Where climbers come to die,” Arlyana said. She hammered a bolt into the cavern roof and from it she hung her ballot tag. Moko took his own tag and chain from around his neck and hung it from the same bolt, then looped a knot in the two chains so that the tags dangled face to face.

“Come here,” said Arlyana, and she started to undress.

Arlyana and Moko were two small primates who were members of a long, slow radiation from the horn of Africa. Their lives meant little except to each other and to a small number of people around them, but stepping back, their choices were part of a pattern of self-similarity echoed on many scales of magnitude. The forces that drove them to each other also drove the cycles of expansion and contraction in the civilization of Deep Citizens. It drove the population cycles of foxes and hares and, on a larger scale again, the cycle of ammonites and meteorites. This great engine of colonization and exploitation had pushed humanity outwards but had also destroyed the biosphere of a third of all inhabited worlds.

Programmed death has dogged living creatures ever since deep, deep ancestors discovered the power of swapping genes. With the evolution of abstract intelligence, the tragedy of death became a folly. But without that folly, humans would never have made it across the Red Sea and there never would have lived a pair of bonded primates in the crust of a planet twenty-nine light-years from Earth.

Arlyana cut a small segment off their climbing rope and tied one end around her wrist and the other around Moko’s so they would not be separated.

On the timescales that affect human consciousness they did not have long, but for twenty heartbeats they would be cradled by the forces of nature. Angels of gravity drew them an elegant parabola; angels of electricity allowed skin to touch and to feel the contact; angels of strong force held them intact; and angels of weak force bound them to their mutual asymmetries.

They walked to the lip of the cavern, held each other tight, and toppled into empty space.

—for Albert C

Canterbury Hollow / Lawson

THE VORKUTA EVENT

Here’s another story by Ken MacLeod, whose “Earth Hour” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one, he takes us back to Cold War Russia for a story about a creepy Lovecraftian intrusion into our reality that is not only top secret but something that you legitimately Don’t Want to Know . . . and will regret knowing if you do.

I

Tentacles and Tomes

It was in 19—, that unforgettable year, that I first believed that I had unearthed the secret cause of the guilt and shame that so evidently burdened Dr. David Rigley Walker, Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of G—. The occasion was casual enough. A module of the advanced class in Zoology dealt with the philosophical and historical aspects of the science. I had been assigned to write an essay on the history of our subject, with especial reference to the then not quite discredited notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Most of my fellow students, of a more practical cast of mind than my own, were inclined to regard this as an irrelevant chore. Not I.

With the arrogance of youth, I believed that our subject, Zoology, had the potential to assimilate a much wider field of knowledge than its current practice and exposition was inclined to assume. Is not man an animal? Is not, therefore, all that is human within, in principle, the scope of Zoology? Such, at least, was my reasoning at the time, and my excuse for a wide and – in mature retrospect – less than profitable reading. Certain recent notorious and lucrative popularizations – as well as serious studies of sexual and social behaviour, pioneered by, of all people, entomologists – were in my view a mere glimpse of the empire of thought open to the zoologist. In those days such fields as evolutionary psychology, Darwinian medicine, and ecological economics still struggled in the shattered and noisome eggshell of their intellectually and – more importantly – militarily crushed progenitors. The great reversal of the mid-century’s verdict on this and other matters still slumbered in the womb of the future. These were, I may say, strange times, a moment of turbulent transition when the molecular doctrines were already established, but before they had become the very basis of biology. In the minds of older teachers and in the pages of obsolete textbooks certain questions now incontrovertible seemed novel and untried. The ghost of vitalism still walked the seminar room; plate tectonics was solid ground mainly to geologists; notions of intercontinental land bridges, and even fabled Lemuria, had not been altogether dispelled as worthy of at least serious dismissal. I deplored – nay, detested – all such vagaries.

So it was with a certain zeal, I confess, that I embarked on the background reading for my modest composition. I walked into the University library at noon, bounded up the stairs to the science floor, and alternated browsing the stacks and scribbling in my carrel for a good five hours. Unlike some of my colleagues, I had not afflicted myself with the nicotine vice, and was able to proceed uninterrupted save for a call of nature. I delved into Lamarck himself, in verbose Victorian translation; into successive editions of
The Origin of Species;
and into the
Journal of the History of Biology.
I had already encountered Koestler’s
The Case of the Midwife Toad,
that devastating but regretful demolition of the Lamarckian claims of the fellow-traveling biologist, fraud, and suicide Viktor Kammerer – the book, in well-thumbed paperback, was an underground classic among Zoology undergraduates, alongside Lyall Watson’s
Supernature.
I read and wrote with a fury to discredit, for good and all, the long-exploded hypothesis that was the matter of my essay. But when I had completed the notes and outline, and the essay was as good as written, needing only some connecting phrases and a fair copy, a sense that the task was not quite finished nagged.

I leaned back in the plastic seat, and recollected of a sudden the very book I needed to deliver the
coup de grace.
But where had I seen it? I could almost smell it – and it was the sense of smell that brought back the memory of the volume’s location. I stuffed my notes in a duffel bag, placed my stack of borrowings on the Returns trolley, and hurried from the library. Late in the autumn term, late in the day, the University’s central building, facing me on the same hilltop as the tall and modern library, loomed black like a gothic mansion against the sunset sky. Against the same sky, bare trees stood like preparations of nerve-endings on an iodine-stained slide. I crossed the road and walked around the side of the edifice and down the slope to the Zoology Department, a granite and glass monument to the 1930s. Within: paved floors, tiled walls and hardwood balustrades, and the smell that had reminded me, a mingled pervasive waft of salt-water aquaria, of rat and rabbit droppings, of disinfectant and of beeswax polish. A porter smoked in his den, recognized me with a brief incurious glance. I nodded, turned, and ascended the broad stone staircase. On the first landing a portrait of Darwin overhung the door to the top of the lecture hall; beneath the window lay a long glass case containing a dusty plastic model of
Architeuthys,
its two-metre tentacles outstretched to a painted prey. The scale of the model was not specified. At the top of the stairs, opposite the entrance to the library, stood another glass case, with the skeleton of a specimen of
Canis dirus
from Rancho La Brea. As I moved, the shadow and gleams of the dire wolf’s teeth presented a lifelike snarl.

Inside, the departmental library was empty, its long windows catching the sun’s last light. From the great table that occupied most of its space, the smell of beeswax rose like a hum, drowning out the air’s less salubrious notes save that of the books that lined the walls. Here I had skimmed Schrödinger’s neglected text on the nerves; here I had luxuriated in D’Arcy Thomson’s glorious prose, the outpoured, ecstatic precision of
On Growth and Form;
here, more productively, I had bent until my eyes had watered over Mayr and Simpson and Dobzhansky. It was the last, I think, who had first sent me to glance, with a shudder, at the book I now sought.

There it was, black and thick as a Bible; its binding sturdy, its pages yellowing but sound, like a fine vellum.
The Situation in Biological Science: Proceedings of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the U.S.S.R., July 31 – August 7, 1948, Complete Stenographic Report.
This verbatim account is one of the most sinister in the annals of science: it documents the conference at which the peasant charlatan Lysenko, who claimed that the genetic constitutions of organisms could be changed by environmental influences, defeated those of his opponents who still stood up for Mendelian genetics. genetics in the Soviet Union took decades to recover.

I took the volume to the table, sat down, and copied to my notebook Lysenko’s infamous, gloating remark toward the close of the conference: “The Central Committee of the CPSU has examined my report and approved it”; and a selection from the rush of hasty recantations – announcements, mostly, of an overnight repudiation of a lifetime’s study – that followed it and preceded the closing vote of thanks to Stalin. I felt pleased at having found – unfairly perhaps – something with which to sully further the heritage of Lamarck. At the same time I felt an urge to wash my hands. There was something incomprehensible about the book’s very existence: was it naivety or arrogance that made its publishers betray so shameful a demonstration of the political control of science? The charlatan’s empty victory was a thing that deserved to be done in the dark, not celebrated in a
complete stenographic report.

But enough. As I stood to return the book to the shelf I opened it idly at the flyleaf, and noticed a queer thing. The sticker proclaiming it the property of the Department overlaid a handwritten inscription in broad black ink, the edges of which scrawl had escaped the bookplate’s obliteration. I recognised some of the fugitive lettering as Cyrillic script. Curious, I held the book up to the light and tried to read through the page, but the paper was too thick.

The books were for reference only. The rule was strict. I was alone in the library. I put the book in my duffel bag and carried it to my bedsit. There, with an electric kettle on a shaky table, I steamed the bookplate off. Then, cribbing from a battered second-hand copy
of The Penguin Russian Course,
I deciphered the inscription. The Russian original has faded from my mind. The translation remains indelible:

To my dear friend Dr. Dav. R. Walker,

in memory of our common endeavour,

yours,

Ac. T. D. Lysenko.

The feeling that this induced in me may be imagined. I started and trembled as though something monstrous had reached out a clammy tentacle from the darkness of its lair and touched the back of my neck. If the book had been inscribed to any other academic elder I might have been less shocked: many of them flaunted their liberal views, and hinted at an earlier radicalism, on the rare occasions when politics were discussed; but Walker was a true-blue conservative of the deepest dye, as well as a mathematically rigorous Darwinian.