The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 24

by Gardner Dozois

  But there’s still a lot of work to do. Berenika could make a real contribution.

  “But something’s bothering you about it.”

  “Yeah: Paolo,” Mria says. “Stop pointing out that stupid alligator every time it swims by. We see it.”

  Paolo’s mouth droops.

  “No,” Berenika says “It’s the cat.”

  Our cougar rests on a bough above the black water, barely awake.

  “Wrong species of panther?” Paolo flicks through the restaurante environmental information, eager to make good. “The Florida one’s extinct, this one is pretty close, they say. . . .”

  “Not the species. The environment. The place. Cougars live in the slash pine woods. In decent-sized limestone uplands. They need some dry land. Not down in the water here. They don’t fish.”

  “Maybe they eat birds.” Paolo, on a roll, is pleased to spot the anhinga, the restaurante signature bird, as it pops out of the water, a dead fish speared on its beak. He starts to point, thinks better of it, and changes his gesture to a wave at the waiter.

  He’s just going to have to wait. I’m no longer on duty.

  The anhinga climbs out on a cypress knee and spends a moment getting the fish off its beak. It’s dark, with a long white neck. It swallows the fish, then spreads its wings. Unlike most water birds, anhingas have no oils on their feathers. This permits them to dive deeply, but means they have to dry their wings before attempting flight.

  This catches the cougar’s attention. There’s really no way it can get that anhinga, but, still, it’s kind of an interesting intellectual problem, with the tricky approach, the bird’s speed, and all. For a sated cat, thinking about ways to catch unpromising prey is like doing crossword puzzles.

  “You’re right.” Mark frowns. “It shouldn’t be here.”

  Neither should I. My job is done. I should be back to my regular work. There’s some oak stands to redo in Illinois, and ponds for migratory birds. Those things are hard. The birds have to maintain their ability to navigate thousands of miles, yet not realize they are landing amid observation platforms whenever they come down.

  Aside from some species of parrot, birds are never easy to train.

  Berenika has slipped away, probably to the bathroom. I didn’t notice her go.

  In her absence, Mark is checking and sending messages. He’s probably finding out where I am, what I’m up to, figuring out that someone who owed me a favor let me set up here in the Everglades, checking water pH and drainage.

  Mark isn’t the only one with deep resources.

  A couple of heavy drops fall on the raft, and it tilts, just slightly, with added weight.

  “Do you really think no one can see you?” Berenika says, almost in my ear.

  I jerk, but don’t knock anything over, and look up. She stands over me, water sheeting down her body, her hair gleaming black.

  “How much was real?” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.” She moves around the raft, barefoot and silent, and examines the equipment. “Is this what a nature god is? A little man squatting in the underbrush with some display screens?”

  “I’ve never claimed divine status — ”

  She’s in my face. She’s disturbing close up, eyes too big, cheekbones too high, skin too velvet. She’s meant to be observed from a safe distance.

  “How much, Mr. . . . you do have a name, don’t you? Mark must allow you a name.”

  “Tyrell Fredrickson.”

  “Come on.” She glances back at the restaurant. Mria is complaining that there is too much saffron in the flan. There isn’t supposed to be any saffron in the flan. No one has missed Berenika yet. “You’ve been on me, you and your kitty. What did Mark hire you to do?”

  “Just to keep you safe. What appears to be the natural world is more dangerous than you — ”

  She knocks me down and pins me to the raft. The cougar stands up on its bough and looks over at us, exactly as if it can see us both.

  I enjoy feeling her weight on me.

  “It wasn’t all my doing, was it?” she says. “Everything around me. You have the power to control it. Tell me!”

  So I do. It’s not that I think she’s going to kill me, though she’s mad enough to try. It’s because she sees that which she would like least to see. My assignment was to make her feel like . . . Mark said, “like a nature goddess.”

  It had been a dream ever since she was a little girl, to have the natural world perceive and respond to her. She’d always had pets, found wounded birds and animals and nursed them back to health, had the ability to sit still for hours and let things come to her. She was perfect for the career I had.

  Mark’s analysis had shown him that she had left because she felt like she didn’t have equal standing with him. She didn’t have a valid role. So he decided to give her one.

  That’s my job, really. To make things seem like they just happen. Of course, if you left the natural world to “just happen,” most of it would be dead and decaying in a couple of seasons. Too much of it is gone for the rest of it to live on its own.

  “That’s pretty much what I thought,” she says, and sits back on her heels.

  I look at her. I never expected her to go back with Mark, no matter what power she felt. I expected . . . I don’t know what I expected. None of it makes sense. Mark wanted her to come back to him, so he made her feel more powerful, more in control. And now she questions the one illusion that makes her feel best about herself.

  “I’m going away,” I say. “I’m taking a rough job. A weed patch in an old city. No one really likes those mundane restoration jobs. It takes forever, and even when you’re done, it doesn’t look like much.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “In case . . . if you wonder where I am. What I’m doing.”

  She shakes her head, smiles at me. “You really don’t understand anything, do you?”

  “Look – no matter what, you’re good at this. Better, probably, than I am. You can — ”

  “I know what I can do. But what can you do? Are you just going to hide in the leaves and fake it all up for people?”

  “It’s what I do. I’m a Trainer.”

  “So am I, now. You think Mark wanted to give me the illusion of power over nature to get me to Come back to him. But it’s not an illusion, is it? I’m not some kind of nature goddess. That’s just dumb. But I do have power over nature. And I love it all. Every bit of it. Do you love it, Tyrell?”

  “I do.” The answer comes before I think about it.

  This time she really looks at me. I’m pale, a little soft, but I think I have some shape to me. A good jaw, and people say my eyes are thoughtful.

  Well, my mother said it. She was otherwise pretty honest. She never told me I was strikingly handsome or anything.

  “You might still make something of yourself, Tyrell. Then we’ll see.” Her dive into the water is totally silent.

  Berenika. I write these reports for Mark, but he never reads them. Maybe someday you will.

  How I Became a Trainer

  Tyrell Fredrickson

  You don’t really want the whole story, but perhaps this part will help you make sense of it.

  Before I became a Trainer, I worked on a farm, at Sty #14, on the thirtieth floor. Sometimes, when my work was done, I’d go out to the plant areas to watch the sun set. The circulating breeze kept condensation off the glass and made the leaves whisper behind me. From that height I didn’t really see people, just buildings copper to the horizon. After a few minutes, something would start beeping. I wasn’t really supposed to be in that area. My job was the pork.

  I’d go back to the dark. The glow strip across the vat room’s arched ceiling was about as bright as a full moon. After all, the pork tubes – pigs, if you insist – couldn’t see.

  The sterilizing lights came on once a day. Then it was my job to put on goggles and turn the tubes in their vats of liquid, mak
ing sure the UV hit all their surfaces. The fluid was full of antibiotics and all that, but there were fungi, there were molds . . . anywhere there was that much cell shedding and organic material something would find a way to live.

  The main problem was the skin. The bones were vestigial, floating free from each other like an exploded skeletal diagram, but the things still had skin. They floated in the blue-green support fluid, but they were so huge that there were always folds, or points of pressure against the tank sides, where infection could collect. My job was detecting these areas and taking care of them.

  It might seem that you should just get rid of the skin and just have meat, but that would cause more problems than it solved. Skin is a sophisticated interface, keeping in the things that should be in, and keeping almost all of the universe out. Creating some new interface would have been more trouble than it was worth. It might not have seemed that way, but they’d changed only those things that needed changing. For example, collagen had been added, to make the skin easier to remove, when that time came.

  The back of pork still looked like a pig. The spine had separated like the boosters of a rocket heading for space, but I could still see a trace of the original shoat, with its bristly hair. If I left them in some other orientation, they would slowly turn to have their backs up.

  No one ever visited me there. The meat side of the farm just wasn’t that popular. There was an occasional maintenance team, in to adjust the recirculators that turned pork waste into usable fertilizer for the plants on the south side. Otherwise, I was alone with my pigs.

  Once a month was slaughtering time.

  I’d pull each tube out of the liquid in a support harness. The sterilizing fluid would cascade off its sides. I’d dry the skin, first with a roller and then with an infrared light, and then I would open it up. There was supposed to be a seam, kind of a biological zipper, along where the edge of the belly had once been, but it often got jammed up with squamous cells and other undifferentiated growth.

  So I would have to cut it open. I had a vibratory cutter that I would run along the pig’s side. Then, being extremely careful, I would roll up the hide. As I mentioned, there was additional collagen that added some tension, so that the skin curled up to expose the meat.

  Most of each pig was smooth flesh, suitable for processed food. Without connective tissue or grain, this was easy to work with. I’d run the cutter along the pig’s length, and then cut off slabs. There was always a little blood seepage, but not much. The cutter was smart, and the blood supply was spaced rationally. Large vessels would be avoided, and tucked in, to dangle like electrical conduit. I’d hit them with vascularization hormones later, stimulate arborization, and link them up with the new flesh that bubbled up around them.

  Then I would supervise the movement of the chops to the cooler, in the blank north side of the building. They’d rumble down one of the conveyors and disappear to the next step in the process of making food. The area was forgotten, with hexagonal ice crystals growing on the housings of seldom-used support pumps, and fluid spills that eventually turned into sheets of brown-red ice. My least favorite part of the job was defrosting and cleaning that.

  Things did go wrong. Cancers could spread through the flesh when cell reproduction was disrupted. This could happen surprisingly fast. Sometimes an entire tube would have to be terminated and discarded. I had no idea where that flesh went.

  Once I heard a rattle as the cutter went by. When I looked at the resulting slab, I found a pig’s lower jaw, complete with teeth, all perfectly formed. They looked tiny against that huge bulk, even though they would have been able to support the feeding of a creature that weighed several hundred pounds. I cleaned them off and kept them. There is nothing more diagnostic of a mammal than the elaborate pattern on the surface of the teeth. Someone with more experience than I could have identified what breed of Sus domestica had led to this gargantuan meat factory.

  I got into my routine. I don’t think I was even fully conscious, following out my rounds in the semidarkness, with only the backs of pigs for company.

  But that jaw should have made me more attentive. Something had gone wrong with the gene expression in that tube. All the developmental genes were still there, after all, just suppressed. It was only after the cutters hesitated a bit on that same pig that I finally hauled it up out of the fluid to investigate more thoroughly.

  It had grown a leg, complete with trotter. It looked ridiculous, down there all by itself, supporting nothing, contacting nothing, but it had the full complement of bones and muscles.

  I poked it and it jerked away.

  So it had some basic innervation as well. I was going to have to do something about this.

  Sometimes a consumer gets a hankering for a real differentiated piece of meat, something with connective tissue, muscle strands, bone: a ham, a rib, a chop. These tubes had not been designed to produce those. Even in those that had been, what looked like ancestral cuts of meat were sculpted creations, not actual muscles attached to limbs.

  The hoof looked tiny and precise. Something about it appealed to me. I decided to keep it for a while. I had the idea that I was liberating some essential nature hidden in the huge tube of meat. I reprogrammed the slab cutters to avoid it. That dropped my overall productivity a bit, but still well within the quotas I had for this sty.

  Sentimentality has no place in farming. I really should have known that.

  Next harvest, that leg threw the slab cutter off so much it pulled back, forcing me to slice meat manually. I wasn’t used to the auxiliary blade, and the flesh shuddered so much when I lowered myself to it that I almost sliced through a finger.

  Maintaining a sentimental piece of real pig quickly proved to be tiresome. And a health and safety inspection would show poor practice. My real career was elsewhere, but losing points here could really set me back.

  At the next skin maintenance time, I rotated that tube so that the leg stuck out toward me. I pulled myself up to it. The leg’s joint was right at the skin surface. That was good. There would be no telltale stump left afterward, and the cutters would be able to do their job. I got right up to the thing, pushing my head against its side, and slid the auxiliary blade into the leg.

  It kicked me. I lost my grip and almost fell into the tank myself. I did drop the saw, and lost it somewhere in those translucent depths. The leg flailed several more times, then was still. But it was pulled back against the tube’s bulk, as if ready to attack again.

  A shudder went through the entire thing, sending waves splashing back and forth against the tank sides. Blood seeped from the cut and dripped down.

  Muscle and bone were one thing, but the thing had nerves, and had recruited a blood supply.

  What had given the command to kick me? The nerves led somewhere.

  Maybe I was mad at it, but I had given up on careful surgery. I had to get this thing fixed and back on the production line. I recovered my blade from the tank bottom and slashed deeply, checking for any variations in the meat’s otherwise smooth structure.

  I found and removed a couple of ribs and a big fold of tissue that I later figured out was a bladder, one that had never managed to grow in on itself to hold fluid. A bit of ureter led off from it, but it had never regrown a kidney, so the tube just ended.

  Beneath that, along the spine, I found a lump. This was the creature’s real secret.

  It had never grown a dura mater, much less cranial bones, and most of the brain had never grown either, but here was a bit of the pig’s brain, barely protected by a flexible arachnoid and pia mater, material like stiff rubber.

  The original pig had a fair amount of cortex. It was an intelligent animal.

  This tube of meat was not an intelligent animal. But even then I knew enough of the structure of the mammalian nervous system to have some idea of what had regrown. It was a bit of the motor cortex: what had allowed the thing to kick me. And much of the sensory cortex: what had allowed it to feel me probing it.

>   There was no comfort I could give. Nothing I could do to help. It couldn’t see, it couldn’t hear, it couldn’t taste. But it could feel pain.

  It was just a mistake. Just a malfunction in gene expression, the generation of nerve cells with no consumption value. I thought about how long it had been shuddering under the slices of the cutter. The innervation had gone much farther than I would have thought possible. It sensed everything that was going on, everything that happened to it.

  It was silent in that huge room. I sat there, kind of stroking the part of the skin that was left. I had no idea if it could feel that too.

  A damage report was called for, so that others could be on the lookout for a similar malfunction.

  But I didn’t tell anyone. I excised the brain, the nerves, the other organs.

  Then I sautéed those no-longer-functional pain centers in butter. The ultimate discourtesy to a food animal is to kill it but not to eat it.

  I think I overcooked them. They were a bit crumbly. But I choked them down.

  Okay, this isn’t why I became a Trainer. But it’s why I’ve never quit. We’ve picked something up, and now there’s no way for us to ever put it down again. Now that you bear some of the weight, Berenika, maybe you understand.

  Non-encounter

  Mark and Berenika’s Desert Residence

  I go through every room of the house, as if someone will be hiding in one of them.

  But there’s nowhere to hide. The furniture is gone, and the rooms, floored with native stone, seem to have been vacuumed by forensics teams and retain not a trace of their previous occupants.

  The high living room windows show the distant dry ridge, tilting like a sinking ship.

  I hear a thunk from the underground garage, then voices. A man and a woman.

  I was sure Berenika would leave him again. It just didn’t make sense that she would stay. But instead she was taking advantage of his power. I thought they were far away, restoring some part of the dead ocean, not here to find me scuttling across their floor like a hermit crab that had misplaced its shell, pale and shrivel-assed.

  “Who are you?”