The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  A large part of.

  There were families running Vang Vieng but he was the Old Man, olfala bigfala bos blong ol man tod blong Kunming, and the Chinese had anyway bought up most of Laos back in the early privatisation days. He would cut deals with some, terminate the others, and slice himself a piece of the Vang Vieng dumpling – that was the plan.

  She had advised him against it. She told him it was too soon to travel. She asked him to wait.

  He wouldn’t.

  She sort of had an inkling as to the why . . .

  She was picking up the kid’s node right next to the driver’s.

  Which was not good at all.

  The driver’s, first: an incomprehensible jumble of emotion, in turns horny, soothing, driven, paused – the driver and the slug as one, their minds pulsating in union – hunger and sex made it go faster. Snatches of Beethoven – for some reason it calmed down the slugs. The driver not aware of the extra passenger – yet.

  The kid wasn’t really a kid . . .

  His node blocked to her – black impenetrable walls, an emptiness not even returning pings. He was alone in his own head – which must have been terrifying.

  She had to get to the front of the train. She had to get on the slug. And Boss Gui was convulsing.

  “Why are you just standing there, girl?”

  She tried to keep her voice even. “I found the assassin. He is planning to kill the slug – destroy the entire train, and you with it.”

  Boss Gui took that calmly. “Clever,” he said, then grimaced. His naked belly glistened, a dark shape moving beneath the membrane of skin. The Toads looked helpless, standing there. She flashed them a grin. “I’ll be right back,” she said. Then she left, hearing Boss Gui’s howl of rage behind her.

  Running down the length of the train – through the dining-car, past toilets already beginning to smell, past farang backpackers and Lao families and Thais returning to Udon from the capital – past babies and backpacks and bemused conductors in too-tight trousers that showed their butts off to advantage – warm wind came in through the open windows and she blocked off the public nodes broadcasting news in Thai and Belt Pidgin. The end of the train was a dead end, a smooth wall with no windows. She kicked it – again and again, augmented muscles expending too much energy, but it began to break, and fading sunlight seeped through.

  How had the kid gotten through? He must have had gecko-hands – climbed out of the window and crawled his way along the side of the train, below the window-line, all the way to the slug . . .

  She reached out – sensed the driver’s confusion as another entity somehow wormed its way into the two-way mahout/slug interface. Stop!

  Confusion from the slug. The signals rushing through, too fast – horny/hungry/faster – faster!

  He was going to crash the train. The driver: Who is this? You can’t –

  She kept kicking. The wall gave way – behind it was the slug’s wide back, the driver sitting cross-legged on the beast, the intruder behind it, a hand on the driver’s shoulder – the hand grew roots that penetrated the woman and the beast both.

  Hostile mahout interface initiated.

  The driver was fighting it, and losing badly. No one hijacked slug trains.

  On her private channel – Boss Gui, screaming. “Get back here!”

  “Get your own fucking midwife!”

  But she could sense his pain, confusion. How many times had he gone through it in the past? she wondered. She had never seen a birth – but then, there wouldn’t be one, not unless –

  The hijacker had kept the driver alive. Had to – the whole thing had to look like an accident, the driver’s body found in the wreckage, unmolested – no doubt he planned to jump before impact.

  Could he?

  She crept behind him. neither hijacker nor driver paid her any attention. And what could she do? Killing the hijacker would kill the interface – he was already in too deep.

  Unless . . .

  From Boss Gui, far away – “Hurry!”

  Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if Darwin’s Choice had stayed behind. It was possible for katoi to give birth, these days . . . could an Other foster a child? Would he want to?

  Or he could have flesh-ridden a host . . . she would have kept the male parts just for that. If he’d asked her.

  But he never did.

  The hijacker must have had an emergency eject. She had to find the trigger for it –

  Wind was rushing at her, too fast. It was hard to maintain balance on the soft spongy flesh of the slug. It was accelerating – too fast.

  She was behind the hijacker now – she reached out, put her hand on the back of his head. A black box . . .

  She punched through with a data-spike while her other hand . . .

  Darkness. The smell of rotting leaves. The smell of bodies in motion, sweat – hunger, a terrible hunger –

  “Who the fuck are you? How did you get in here?”

  Panic was good. She sent through images – her standing behind him, the data-spike in his head – and what else she was doing.

  “You can’t do that . . .”

  She had pushed a second data-spike through his clothes and through the sphincter muscle, into the bowels themselves – detached a highly illegal, replicator probe inside.

  She felt the slug slow down, just a fraction. The hijacker trying to understand –

  She said, “I am being nice.”

  She was.

  He had a choice.

  The probe inside him was already working. It was the equivalent of graffiti artists at work. It replicated a message, over every cell, every blood vessel, every muscle and tendon. It would be impossible to scrub – you’d need to reach a good clinic and by then it’d be too late.

  The message said, I killed the slug train to Nong Khai.

  It was marking him. He wasn’t harmed. She couldn’t risk killing him, killing the interface. But this way, whether he got off the train or not, he was a dead man.

  “I’ll count to five.”

  He let go at three.

  Light, blinding her. The wind rushed past – the driver sat as motionless as ever, but the train had slowed down. The hijacker was gone – she followed him back through the hole in the wall.

  He was lying on his bunk, still reading his book. He wasn’t listening to music anymore. Their eyes met. She grinned. He turned his gaze. She had given him a choice and she’d abide by it – but if the Toads happened to find out, she didn’t rate his chances . . .

  Well, the next stop was in an hour. She’d give him an extra half hour after that – a running start.

  She went back to the boss.

  “It’s coming!” Boss Gui said. She knelt beside him. His belly-sack was moving, writhing, the thing inside trying to get out. She helped – a fingernail slicing through the membrane, gently. A sour smell – she reached in where it was sticky, gooey, warm – found two small arms, a belly – pulled.

  “You sorted out the problem?”

  “Keep breathing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes, of course I did! Now push!”

  Boss Gui pushed, breathing heavily. “I’m getting too old for this . . .” he said.

  Then he heaved, one final time, and the small body detached itself from him and came into her hands. She held it, staring at the tiny body, the bald head, the small penis, the five-fingered hands – a tiny Boss Gui, not yet fat but just as wrinkled.

  It was hooked up with a cord to its progenitor. With the same flick of a nail, she cut it cleanly.

  The baby cried. She rocked it, said, “There, there.”

  “Drink,” Boss Gui said – weakly. One of the Toads came forward. Boss Gui fastened lips on the man/toad’s flesh and sucked – a vampire feasting. He had Toad genes – so did the baby, who burped and suddenly ballooned in her hands before shrinking again.

  “A true Gui!” the Old Man said.

  She stared at the little creature in her hands . . .
“Which makes how many, now?” she said.

  The boss shrugged, pushing the Toad away, buttoning up his own shirt. “Five, six? Not many.”

  “You would install him at Vang Vieng?”

  “An assurance of my goodwill – and an assurance of Gui control there, too, naturally. Yes. An heir is only useful when he is put to use.”

  She thought of Darwin’s Choice. “Evolution is everything,” he would have told her. “We evolve constantly, with every cycle. Whereas you . . .”

  She stared at the baby clone. It burped happily and closed its little eyes. Gui’s way was not unpopular with the more powerful families . . . but sooner or later someone would come to challenge succession and then it wouldn’t matter how many Guis there were.

  Suddenly she missed DC, badly.

  She rocked the baby to sleep, hugging it close to her chest. The train’s thoughts came filtering through in the distance – comfort, and warmth, food and safety – the slow rhythmic motion was soothing. After a while, when the baby was asleep, she handed him to the Old Man, no words exchanged, and went to the dining car in search of a cup of tea.

  MY FATHER’S SINGULARITY

  Brenda Cooper

  Sometimes progress, like future shock, can be in the eye of the beholder. . . .

  Brenda Cooper is a technology professional, a futurist, and a public speaker, in addition to being a writer. She’s a frequent contributor to Analog, and has also sold to Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Nature, Strange Horizons, and to many anthology markets. Her first novel was Building Harlequin’s Moon, in collaboration with Larry Niven. Her other novels include The Silver Ship and the Sea, Reading the Wind, and Wings of Creation. Coming up is a new novel, Mayan December. She lives in Kirkland, Washington.

  IN MY FIRST memory of my father, we are sitting on the porch, shaded from the burning sun’s assault on our struggling orchards. My father is leaning back in his favorite wooden rocker, sipping a cold beer with a half-naked lady on the label, and saying, “Paul, you’re going to see the most amazing things. You will live forever.” He licks his lips, the way our dogs react to treats, his breath coming faster. “You will do things I can’t even imagine.” He pauses, and we watch a flock of geese cross the sky. When he speaks again, he sounds wistful. “You won’t ever have to die.”

  The next four of five memories are variations on that conversation, punctuated with the heat and sweat of work, and the smell of seasons passing across the land.

  I never emerged from this particular conversation with him feeling like I knew what he meant. It was clear he thought it would happen to me and not to him, and that he had mixed feelings about that, happy for me and sad for himself. But he was always certain.

  Sometimes he told me that I’d wake up one morning and all the world around me would be different. Other nights, he said, “Maybe there’ll be a door, a shining door, and you’ll go through it and you’ll be better than human.” He always talked about it the most right before we went into Seattle, which happened about twice a year, when the pass was open and the weather wasn’t threatening our crops.

  The whole idea came to him out of books so old they were bound paper with no moving parts, and from a brightly-colored magazine that eventually disintegrated from being handled. My father’s hands were big and rough and his calluses wore the words off the paper.

  Two beings always sat at his feet. Me, growing up, and a dog, growing old. He adopted them at mid-life or they came to him, a string of one dog at a time, always connected so that a new one showed within a week of the old one’s death. He and his dogs were a mutual admiration society. They liked me fine, but they never adored me. They encouraged me to run my fingers through their stiff fur or their soft fur, or their wet, matted fur if they’d been out in the orchard sprinklers, but they were in doggie heaven when he touched them. They became completely still and their eyes softened and filled with warmth.

  I’m not talking about the working dogs. We always had a pair of border collies for the sheep, but they belonged to the sheep and the sheep belonged to them and we were just the fence and the feeders for that little ecosystem.

  These dogs were his children just like me, although he never suggested they would see the singularity. I would go beyond and they would stay and he and the dogs accepted that arrangement even if I didn’t.

  I murmured confused assent when my father said words about how I’d become whatever comes after humans.

  Only once did I find enough courage to tell him what was in my heart. I’d been about ten, and I remember how cold my hands felt clutching a glass of iced lemonade while heat-sweat poured down the back of my neck. When he told me I would be different, I said, “No, Dad. I want to be like you when I grow up.” He was the kindness in my life, the smile that met me every morning and made me eggs with the yolks barely soft and toast that melted butter without burning.

  He shook his head, and patted his dog, and said, “You are luckier than that.”

  His desire for me to be different than him was the deepest rejection possible, and I bled for the wounds.

  After the fifth year in seven that climate-freak storms wrecked the apples – this time with bone-crushing ice that set the border collies crazed with worry – I knew I’d have to leave if I was ever going to support my father. Not by crossing the great divide of humanity to become the seed of some other species, but to get schooled away from the slow life of farming sheep and Jonagolds. The farm could go on without me. We had the help of two immigrant families that each owned an acre of land that was once ours.

  Letting my father lose the farm wasn’t a choice I could even imagine. I’d go over to Seattle and go to school. After, I’d get a job and send money home, the way the Mexicans did when I was little and before the government gave them part of our land to punish us. Not that we were punished. We liked the Ramirezes and the Alvarezes. They, too, needed me to save the farm.

  But that’s not this story. Except that Mona Alvarez drove me to Leavenworth to catch the silver Amtrak train, her black hair flying away from her lipstick-black lips, and her black painted fingernails clutching the treacherous steering wheel of our old diesel truck. She was so beautiful I decided right then that I would miss her almost as much as I would miss my father and the bending apple trees and the working dogs and the sheep. Maybe I would miss Mona even more.

  Mona, however, might not miss me. She waved once after she dropped me off, and then she and the old truck were gone and I waited amid the electric cars and the old tourists with camera hats and data jewelry and the faint marks of implants in the soft skin between their thumbs and their index fingers. They looked like they saw everything and nothing all at once. If they came to our farm the coyotes and the re-patriated wolves would run them down fast.

  On the other end of the train ride, I found the University of Washington, now sprawled all across Seattle, a series of classes and meet ups and virtual lessons that spidered out from the real brick buildings. An old part of the campus still squatted by the Montlake Cut, watching over water and movement that looked like water spiders but was truly lines of people with oars on nanofab boats as thin as paper.

  Our periodic family trips to Seattle hadn’t really prepared me for being a student. The first few years felt like running perpetually uphill, my brain just not going as fast as everyone else’s.

  I went home every year. Mona married one of the Ramirez boys and had two babies by the time three years had passed, and her beauty changed to a quiet softness with no time to paint her lips or her nails. Still, she was prettier than the sticks for girls that chewed calorie-eating gum and did their homework while they ran to Gasworks Park and back on the Burke-Gilman Trail, muttering answers to flashcards painted on their retinas with light.

  I didn’t date those girls; I wouldn’t have known how to interrupt the speed of their lives and ask them out. I dated storms of data and new implants and the rush of ideas until by my senior year I was actually keeping up.

  When I graduated
, I got a job in genetics that paid well enough for me to live in an artist’s loft in a green built row above Lake Union. I often climbed onto the garden roof and sat on an empty bench and watched the Space Needle change decorations every season and the little wooden boats sailing on the still lake below me. But mostly I watched over my experiments, playing with new medical implants to teach children creativity and to teach people docked for old age in the University hospital how to talk again, how to remember.

  I did send money home. Mona’s husband died in a flash-flood one fall. Her face took on a sadness that choked in my throat, and I started paying her to take care of my father.

  He still sat on the patio and talked about the singularity, and I managed not to tell him how quaint the old idea sounded. I recognized myself, would always recognize myself. In spite of the slow speed of the farm, a big piece of me was always happiest at home, even though I couldn’t be there more than a day or so at a time. I can’t explain that – how the best place in the world spit me out after a day or so.

  Maybe I believed too much happiness would kill me, or change me. Or maybe I just couldn’t move slow enough to breathe in the apple air anymore. Whatever the reason, the city swept me back fast, folding me in its dancing ads and shimmering opportunities and art.

  Dad didn’t really need me anyway. He had the Mexicans and he still always had a dog, looking lovingly up at him. Max, then OwlFace, then Blue. His fingers had turned to claws and he had cataracts scraped from his eyes twice, but he still worked with the harvest, still carried a bushel basket and still found fruit buried deep in the trees.

  I told myself he was happy.

  Then one year, he startled when I walked up on the porch and his eyes filled with fear.

  I hadn’t changed. I mean, not much. I had a new implant, I had a bigger cloud, researchers under me, so much money that what I sent my father – what he needed for the whole orchard – was the same as a night out at a concert and dinner at Canlis. But I was still me, and Blue – the current dog – accepted me, and Mona’s oldest son called me “Uncle Paul” on his way out to tend the sheep.