The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (98 page)

Bell knew of several kinds of island lizard that reproduced parthenoge netically. Such species, when found, were always young, isolated, at risk. They were aberrations outside the main thrust of evolution. Most were doomed, in the long run, because sexual reproduction is a much better way to create the next generation. In sexual reproduction, genes mix and match, new phenotypes arise, gene frequencies shift like tides. Sexual reproduction shuffles the genetic deck from one generation to the next.

Parthenoge ne tic species, on the other hand, are locked-in, playing the same card over and over.

But not the insects in the back room.

The insects in the back room seemed to have a whole deck from which to deal, parthenoge ne tic or not. Such insects could adapt quickly, shifting morphotypes in a single generation. And then shift back the next. It was the next logical step – not just evolution, but the evolution of evolution. But how was it possible?

Bell thought of Cole, of what made men like him. That old argument, nature vs. nurture. In another time, in another place, Cole would have fit in. In another time, maybe Cole would have been a different person entirely.

The descendents of Vikings and Mongols today wore suits and ran corporations. Were veterinarians, or plumbers, or holy men. Perhaps tomorrow, or a thousand years from now, they’ll need to be Vikings and Mongols again.

Populations change. Needs change. Optimums change. And it all changes faster than selection can track.

From a biological perspective, it would be easy to produce the same kind of people again and again. Stable people. Good people. Again and again, generation after generation a one to one correlation between gene-set and expression.

But that’s not what you find when you look at humans.

Instead there is a plasticity in human nature. A carefully calibrated susceptibility to trauma.

What looks like a weak point in our species is in fact design.

Because the truth is that certain childhoods are supposed to fuck you up.

It is an adaptive response. Wired into us.

The ones who couldn’t adapt died out. Those gene sets which always produced the same kind of people – stable people, good people – no matter the environment, no matter the violence – those gene sets which always played the same card, again and again –

– died out.

Leaving behind the ones who could metamorphose.

We were not so different from these bugs.

Bell unloaded all this on Seana one day during lunch. They sat across from each other, sipping soft drinks. “The evolution of evolution?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Why would this happen in insects?” she asked.

“Because they’ve been here longest,” he said. But it was more than that. He thought of the ants and their aphids. The enzyme that clipped their wings. He thought of the different ways that insects solved their problems. “Because insects always choose the biological solution.”

Bell avoided Cole for days.

He told himself he was waiting for a good time to see the director, to tell her what had happened in the lemur tunnel. Told himself he wasn’t afraid that Cole would retaliate by telling about drinking together on zoo time, zoo property. Both were lies, but what he had the toughest time with was pure simple fear of Cole.

“Ridiculous,” he told himself “You’re a grown man and a professional.”

On the other hand, Cole obviously was dangerous.

Maybe he could get Cole to leave, to resign his service contract without anyone having to tell the director anything.

This seemed, on reflection, to be the best bet for an outcome where he, Bell, kept his job and got rid of the problem.

The reflection took place at home, on the sofa, in front of the TV, in his underwear.

When Lin crossed the room, he saw himself through her eyes. He looked like a bum.

She was thinking, he knew, what an asshole he was for buying beer.

He didn’t care.

Neither did she, it seemed.

She sat down on the couch beside him.

What was he? When had he turned into a person who said nothing, did nothing? What had he let himself turn into?

*  *  *

The next day, Bell followed Cole down to the supply shed and said, “We’re going to have a talk.”

Cole took a set of eight-foot pruning shears down from the wall rack, and turned to face Bell.

“Yeah,” he said.

Bell fumbled for a beginning, forgetting what he’d rehearsed.

Cole began whistling. He leaned on the pruning shears as if they were a wizard’s staff.

“I have to turn you in,” Bell said.

“For what?”

“Throwing rocks at the animals.”

Cole stared at him. His grip on the shears tightened. “I lose my temper sometimes. I have a temper, I admit.”

“That’s why you can’t be here.”

“Listen, I’ll work on it. I’ll be better.”

Cole shook his head. “I’m just letting you know as a courtesy. I have to report it.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“The other choice is that you leave today and don’t come back.”

“That’s not any choice at all.”

“There are other places you can do your service.”

“I like it here.”

“Here doesn’t like you anymore.”

“You know what I don’t like? I don’t think I like you trying to push me around.”

“Today is your last day here, one way or the other,” Bell said. “You can leave on your own, or you can be ushered out.”

“You really don’t want to do that.”

“You’re right, I don’t,” Bell said.

Cole’s face changed. “I’m warning you.”

Bell raised his walkie-talkie, never taking his eyes off Cole. “Garland,” he spoke into the handset. There was a squelch, then a voice, “Yeah.”

“You better come to the supply shed.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Now, Garland.”

Cole shoved Bell into the wall. Shoved him hard, so his teeth clacked.

And the rage was there again in the cutting torch eyes. Rage like nothing else mattered. Scarred hands curled into Bell’s shirt.

“This is your last chance,” Cole said.

Bell only smiled, feeling something shift inside him. He found suddenly that he was through being scared. “Fuck you,” he said.

Bell ducked the first blow, but the second caught him upside the head, splitting his brow open. Bell spun away, throwing an elbow that missed, and then they were both off balance, taking wild swings, and Cole grabbed at him, and they were falling. They hit the ground and rolled, wrestling for on the filthy floor. Cole came up on top, sitting on Bell’s legs. “I fucking warned you,” he hissed, and then he rained down punches until Garland tackled him.

After that, it was two on one, and Bell didn’t feel the least bit guilty about that.

The zoo super interviewed Bell for her report. They sat in her office. Behind her, against the wall, her fish swam their little circles. The superintendent leaned forward and laced her hands together on her desk.

She didn’t dig very deep. Seemed to think Cole’s behavior was its own explanation. “I think you need stitches,” she said.

Bell nodded. He touched his brow. His first zoo scar.

“He’ll be barred from the zoo, of course,” she said. “And I’ll insist that his community service hours be revoked.”

“What’s going to happen to him now?”

“Charges probably.”

“I don’t want to press charges.”

“Animal cruelty. The lemurs. He’s going back to jail.” She paused, then added, “When they find him.”

Bell looked at the fish, swimming in the aquarium. “He said he’s never going back.”

That evening, as he was closing up, Bell found Cole’s parting gift. Found it revealed, at first, in the presence of a door ajar.

The back room of the castle.

After the fight, Cole had climbed to his feet, wiped the blood from his face – and then walked off. Heading toward the gates. Even two on one, the fight had been about even, and when Cole had finally stepped back, wiped the blood from his face, and walked away, Bell and Gavin let him go. A draw. They’d assumed Cole left zoo property. But he hadn’t left.

He’d circled back around to the castle.

And he’d poured lye into each and every terrarium.

Several grubs were on the cement floor, ground into pulp with a boot.

Others were desiccated husks. Only a few still moved, writhing in the white powder. Bell stepped further into the room, surveying the carnage. He should have known. He should have known this was coming.

Bell’s inner alarm started bothering him on his way home that night.

Once a zookeeper developed an inner alarm, it worked everywhere.

In this case, it was less an alarm than a sense of something out of place. It got stronger as he closed in on the trailer park. At first he thought the alarm had something to do with Cole, but when he got home, he understood. The universe had an interesting sense of timing.

Lin was gone.

Not like gone to the store. Gone, left. Leaving him.

She left a note about it. The note explained. Blamed him.

Distantly, he heard himself curse.

All Bell could think, at first, was that she didn’t seem to have taken anything. Like there was nothing about their life worth bothering with. She had written the whole thing off, it seemed. Him. Their life. A total loss.

He made some growling noises.

She might be back. She might change her mind.

The stereo, after all, was really hers. She’d had it before they moved in together, and they’d never been able to afford a new one.

Somberly, he unplugged the stereo. In something like a trance, he planted it in the sink and turned on the water. Like a zombie, he let the water run and started searching the trailer for enough change to buy beer.

The next month passed in a haze.

Word filtered down, as word always did, and it turned out Cole had skipped town. The cops were still looking.

Not many of the grubs had survived Cole’s attack. The ones that did were scarred. Cole had been very thorough, even pouring lye in the terrarium on the floor. In all, only a handful of the grubs finished their cocoons. A few from the control cage. A few from the terrarium marked “heat.” But they were twisted things, these cocoons. Damaged things. His experiment was ruined. His hope was that he’d be able to get at least a few reproducing adults, start over. If the cocoons hatched at all.

And word had filtered down, too, that it would be bad for Cole when he was caught, because the list of charges had grown, and the warrant had sprouted teeth. Cole was facing time, real time, for what had happened. Bell knew Cole would need someone to blame.

He would blame Bell, and he would blame the zoo.

Several weeks later, Bell pulled into the parking lot and found there were fire trucks already in the lot. Hoses ran upward along the hill. Black smoke curled into the sky. Bell ran. He knew what he’d see before he saw it. The castle was engulfed in flame. The firefighters fought the blaze, but Bell knew it was too late. He imagined the animals inside baking. He imagined the sizzle and pop of burst skin, the soundless cries of dying snakes and lizards and frogs and bugs. He imagined his insects burning alive.

He looked around, searching for Cole, wondering if he’d stayed long enough to watch it burn.

When the fire was out, Bell walked through the ruins. The devastation was complete. Dead frogs and snakes and lizards. In the back room, he found the terrariums blackened and cracked. The insects inside charred and unrecognizable.

Except for one. The terrarium on the floor.

The terrarium with the heat sticker, now curled and blackened.

The cocoon was charred, split wide by the heat.

There was no grub inside.

*  *  *

They found Cole’s body later that day in the weeds behind the parking lot. Bell watched them load the body into the ambulance. Dark and swollen. It had been a bad death.

There were burns, minor, across his hands, like he’d come too close to his creation.

Burns and something else.

Something like stings.

Eyes swollen shut, anaphylactic shock.

Not everything burned in the fire.

Not all that burns is consumed. Cole had said that once.

Bell stood there for a long time, listening. Listening for a buzz like an electric light, but there was no sound. Only the sound of wind in the trees.

It was long gone, whatever it was. He just wished he could have seen what the grub had turned into. Next year it would be different.

Next year it would be a fruit eater, or a wasp, or a beetle. It would be what it needed to be.

It would be what the world made it.

Approaching home, Bell felt his inner alarm stir again.

The cable had been turned off.

Those cocksuckers didn’t know who they were dealing with. Bell had gotten drunk two nights in a row now, and he was feeling mean, feeling predatory.

He stalked outside, nine trailers down to the cable box, opened it up with a hex wrench, and hooked his cable back up.

Went home and surfed channels for anything resembling porn.

After two hours of this, his thumb hurt and the battery on the remote died.

He heard the screen door open.

Lin?

In the moment before the inner door opened, it occurred to him that her stereo was still soaking in the kitchen sink. He had a momentary, fearful impulse; his leg jerked. Then the beer kicked back in. He slouched back. He sneered like a sleepy lion.

A shape in a doorway.

Seana.

His sneer disappeared.

She stepped inside and said nothing. Looked at him a moment, as if reading him. Slouched down beside him with a sack of takeout chicken.

His hand, heavy and lazy, rested on her leg.

She tugged his hand higher.

They didn’t talk. Even the TV flashed in silence.

Outside the thin walls, the world licked itself and made hunting noises.

THIS WIND BLOWING,
AND THIS TIDE

Damien Broderick

Here’s a fascinating study of the border country between science and the paranormal, where remote-viewing psychics take us a little further afield than usual – all the way out to the frozen wastes of Titan.

Australian writer, editor, futurist, and critic Damien Broderick, a Senior Fellow in the School of Cultural Commincations at the University of Melbourne, made his first sale in 1964 to John Carnell’s anthology
New Writings in SF 1.
In the decades that followed, he has kept up a steady stream of fiction, nonfiction, futurist speculations, and critical work, which has won him multiple Ditmar and Aurealis awards. He sold his first novel,
Sorcerer’s World
, in 1970; it was later reissued in a rewritten version in the United States as
The Black Grail.
Broderick’s other books include the novels
The Dreaming Dragons, The Judas Mandala, Transmitters, Striped Holes
, and
The White Abacus
, as well as books written with Rory Barnes and Barbara Lamar. His many short stories have been collected in
A Man Returns, The Dark Between the Stars, Uncle Bones: Four Science Fiction Novellas
, and the upcoming
The Quilla Engine: Science Fiction Stories.
He also wrote the visionary futurist classic
The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed by Rapidly Advancing Technology
, a critical study of science fiction,
Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction
, edited the nonfiction anthology
Year Million: Science at the Far End of Knowledge
, as well as editing the SF anthology
Earth Is But a Star: Excursions Through Science Fiction to the Far Future
, and three anthologies of Australian science fiction,
The Zeitgeist Machine, Strange Attractors
, and
Matilda at the Speed of Light.
Broderick also serves as the fiction editor for the Australian science magazine
Cosmos
, which publishes a science fiction story per issue.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

– “My Boy Jack,” Rudyard Kipling (1915)

T
HE STARSHIP WAS
old, impossibly old, and covered in flowers. Despite a brisk methane breeze, not a petal nor a stamen of the bright blooms moved. Under an impervious shield, they remained motionless, uncorrupted, altogether untouchable.

“They’re alive,” reported the Navy remote viewer. When I was a kid, the idea that the armed services might employ a trained, technologically enhanced psychic would have got you a derisive smack in the ear from your elders and betters, even though the American CIA ran a remote viewing program called Star Gate back in the last century, before they ostentatiously closed it down and took it to black ops. This viewer was blind to light, but saw better than the rest of us, by other means, on a good day. Like me, sort of, in my own itchy way.

He stood at the edge of the huge, flower-bedecked vessel, gloved, open palms held outward, his hands vibrating ever so slightly, like insect antennae hunting a pheromone. “It’s amazing. Those blossoms are still alive, after . . . what . . . millions of years? I can’t find my way in yet, but I can detect that much even through the stationary shield.”

“Is that the same as a, you know, stasis field?” I asked the marine master sergeant standing guard beside us. I turned to face her, and bobbed sickeningly. Two days ago I had been on Ganymede, and on Earth’s Moon before that. Now I walked on another world entirely, around yet another world entirely. It wasn’t right for a man as ample as I to weigh so little, especially with Titan’s bruised-peach air pushing down on me half again as heavily as Earth’s. It went against nature. Even with the bodyglove wrapping me, and an air tank on my back, I only weighed about 18 kilos – say 40 lbs. A tenth of what the scales would show back home.

“ ‘Stasis’ my ass! That’s sci-fi nonsense,” she barked. “Media technobabble. Like your own—” She bit the rest of her sentence off, perhaps fortunately. “This here is hard science.”

“So sorry.”

“And please don’t speak again without an invitation to do so, Sensei Park. We don’t want to put Mr Meagle off his stroke.”

Opening his startlingly blue, blind eyes, the Navy viewer laughed. The sound echoed oddly in his bodyglove and through our sound loop. All sounds did, out on the orange-snowy surface of Titan. “Let him natter on, Marion. I’m entangled now. You’d have to cut my head off and pith my spine to unhook me from this baby.”

I wondered idly how either of them would respond if I told them I was the reason, or at the proximate occasion, that they were here. They’d regard me as a madman, probably. My role in developing the portage functor was under cover about as deep as any since the creation of the US Office of Strategic Services in 1945, long before the CIA got tight with clairvoyants. Perhaps these people already did consider me deluded. Yeah, it was true that I’d told them where to look for the starship, but it wasn’t as I had the credentials of a remote viewer, so undoubtedly it was just an accident. Right.

I felt the pressure of the thing, its causal gravitas, as I gazed down at the starship. If that’s what it was, under its stationary shield and floral tribute.

This thing on Titan had been tugging at me, at my absurd and uncomfortable and highly classified gift, since I was four or five years old, running in the streets of Seoul, playing with a Red Devils soccer ball and picking up English and math. A suitable metaphor for the way a child might register the substrate of a mad universe, and twist its tail. My own son, little Song-Dam, plagued me with questions when he, too, was a kid, no older than I’d been when the starship buried under tons of frozen methane and ethane had plucked for the first time at my stringy loops.

“If light’s a wave, Daddy, can I surf on it?” Brilliant, lovely child! “No, darling son,” I said. “Well, not exactly. It’s more like a Mexican football wave, it’s more like an explosion of excitement that blows up.” I pulled a big-eyed face and flung my arms in the air and dropped them down. “Boom!” Song laughed, but then his mouth drooped. “If it’s a wave, Dad, why do some people say it’s made of packets?” “Well,” said I, “you know that a football wave is made of lots and lots of team supporters, jumping up and sitting down again.” He wasn’t satisfied, and neither was I, but the kid was only five years old.

Later, I thought of that wave, sort of not there at all at one end, then plumping up in the middle, falling to nothing again as it moved on. Follow it around the bleachers and you’ve got a waveform particle moving fast. Kind of But for a real photon, you needn’t follow it, it’s already there, its onboard time is crushed and compressed from the moment of launch to the final absorption, just one instantaneous blip in a flattened, timeless universe. Why, you could jump to the Moon, or Ganymede, or even Titan, all in a flash. Just entangle yourself with it, if you knew how (as I showed them how, much later), like Mr Meagle remote viewing his impenetrable stationary starship.

Physics – you’re soaking in it!

“I can likely get more now sitting in my relaxation cell back at Huygens,” Meagle said. He looked very calm, as if he’d just stepped out of an immersion tank, but there was a faint quivering around his blind eyes. I watched his face in my viewmask, as if neither of us wore gloves over our heads. The man was exhausted. “So tell me, Mr Park,” he said, as we turned and made our way to the big-wheeled jitney, “what were your own impressions, sir?” Scrupulous about not front-loading me with hints of his own; I liked that.

“Anyone, or any thing, who loves flowers that much,” I said judiciously, “can’t be all bad.”

Huygens had provided me with a customized broad-beamed sanitary personal; I have authoritative hams, and a wide stance. It degloved me with slick efficiency. I relieved myself with a gratified sigh. While bodygloves have the capacity to handle such impositions of the mortal order, the experience is undignified and leaves a residual aroma trapped inside with one’s nostrils, so I tend to hold on. We had been outside for hours without a pit stop. The sanitary squirted and dabbed, removed sweat from my perspiring hide with its dry tongue, dusted powder across the expanse, set me free. I dressed in my usual unflattering robe, and made my way directly to the commissary bubble. I was starving.

Banally, the wall and ceiling display showed a faux of thrice-magnified Saturn, four hand-widths across, tilted optimally to show off the gorgeous ring system. I’d just seen the reality outside, with nothing between me and the ringed planet itself but a protective film and a million or so kilometers of naked space above the bright Xanadu regional surface where we’d stood. Since we were almost at the equator, Saturn’s belt had been a thin glitter in the photomultipliers in our bodyglove masks (and would be invisible to the naked eye), directly overhead, right and left of the primary’s waist, not truly impressive. Of course, even with the high frequency step-downs of the photomultipliers, the atmosphere looks hazy anyway.

This magisterial feed on the wall was probably coming, today, from one of the polar sats keeping an eye on the big feller. It seemed to me a bit tacky, a lame pretence, but then again, Titan is tidally locked, so it must get a tad wearying for the regular staff, seeing exactly the same thing in the sky forever, whatever installation dome you’re at, Huygens, or Herschel at the north pole. Except that nothing is ever the same; all is nuance, the slow fortnightly progression of light and shade, the phases of the Sun’s illumination of the big ball of gas . . . Well, these were scientists and military, most of them, what could one expect?

I loaded my tray with rather edible Boeuf Bourguignon from the dedicated cuisine printer, took it to a table where a handful of my new colleagues were chowing and jawing away, sat down at the spare place, set to after a genial glance around. At least with the queasy low gravity I wasn’t worried that this spindly conventional chair would give way abruptly beneath me, tipping my considerable butt ungraciously to the floor. It had been known to happen back on Earth. Nobody laughed derisively if it did, at least there was that. Not any more, they didn’t.

“Why, Sensei,” said the Japanese biologist, Natasha Hsai, with the slightest edge in her tone, “won’t you join us for dinner?” I do not give her title, nor do I mean any disrespect; all these eggheads had at least a couple of doctorates apiece, it went without saying.

“Why, Natasha, thank you, I believe I will.” I started in on my second pearl onion. “Good fare, they don’t stint you – nor should they, you are doing sterling work out here.”

Several of the boffins shared glances, perhaps amused. They fancy themselves a cut above.

The handsome dark-haired fellow at the head of the table cleared his throat. “So, have you been outside yet to pay your respects to the Enigma, Mr Park?”

From the dossiers I’d memorized before leaving Jupiter space, I recognized him, beneath his heavy straggled beard, as the head of molecular engineering, Antonio Caetani. “Just got back from the tour, Dr Caetani. Fascinating. Right up my street.”

“That’s Tony,” he said gracelessly. More glances flickered about the table. He chose to go right for it. Had to give him points for that. “Unless I’m mistaken, your street is paved with donations from the ID Institute.”

I had encountered this kind of feral attitude previously, of course, especially from hard-headed scientists of conventional stamp. I could even share a kind of empathy for his rancor. It was as if, from his highly-credentialed point of view, a government-sponsored raving crackpot were to be imposed on his team. As if a SETI astronomer in the Fermi Taskforce had been obliged to include an rectally-probed UFO abductee, or a global proteome program forced to sign up a fundamentalist creationist. I shrugged.

“Oh, give the guy a break, Tony,” said the Ira ni an artifact expert, Mansour Khosrojerdi. “Let him eat his meal.” His beard was darker and thicker even than Caetani’s. Granted, the temperature was nearly minus 200 degrees Celsius on the other side of the bubble, but this was self-mythologizing on a preposterous scale. Did they imagine they were rehearsing the doomed expeditions of the Arctic explorers? “We can postpone the ideological catfights until after the cheese and Amontillado.”

“No need to spare my delicate sensibilities,” I said with a hearty laugh, and reached for the carafe of red wine, luminous as a garnet under spurious golden Saturn light. The woman to my right, the string loop specialist Jendayi Shumba, got there first with her competent, chunky hand, dark as night.

“Allow me, Sensei Park.”

“You are gracious, thanks. But let’s all be friends, no need for formality, call me Myeong-hui.” I grinned with big teeth at her dismay, then laughed out loud. “No, that’s an impossible mouthful, it’s all right, just call me Sam, love. Everyone does.”