Less quietly, she says, “Show yourself.”
A wide parabolic floor appears, gleaming and black and agonizingly close. But just before she slams into the floor, a wrenching force peels it away. A brilliant violet light rises to meet her, turning into a thick sweet syrup. What may or may not be a hand curls around her body, and squeezes. Procyon fights every urge to struggle. She wrestles with her body, wrestles with her will, forcing both to lie still while the hand tightens its grip and grows comfortable. Then using a voice that betrays nothing tentative or small, she tells what holds her, “I made you, you know.”
She says, “You can do what you want to me.”
Then with a natural, deep joy, she cries out, “But you’re an ungrateful glory ... and you’ll always belong to me ... !”
ESCHER
The prison-ball has been reengineered, slathered with camouflage and armor and the best immune-suppressors on the market, and its navigation system has been adapted from add-ons stolen from the finest trashcans. Now it is a battle-phage riding on the sharp incisor as far as it dares, then leaping free. A thousand similar phages leap and lose their way, or they are killed. Only Escher’s phage reaches the target, impacting on what passes for flesh and launching its cargo with a microscopic railgun, punching her and a thousand sisters and daughters through immeasurable distances of senseless, twisted nothing.
How many survive the attack?
She can’t guess how many. Can’t even care. What matters is to make herself survive inside this strange new world. An enormous world, yes. Escher feels a vastness that reaches out across ten or twelve or maybe a thousand dimensions. How do I know where to go? she asks herself. And instantly, an assortment of possible routes appear in her consciousness, drawn in the simplest imaginable fashion, waiting and eager to help her find her way around.
This is a last gift from Him, she realizes. Unless there are more gifts waiting, of course.
She thanks nobody.
On the equivalent of tiptoes, Escher creeps her way into a tiny conduit that moves something stranger than any blood across five dimensions. She becomes passive, aiming for invisibility. She drifts and spins, watching her surroundings turn from a senseless glow into a landscape that occasionally seems a little bit reasonable. A little bit real. Slowly, she learns how to see in this new world. Eventually she spies a little peak that may or may not be ordinary matter. The peak is pink and flexible and sticks out into the great artery, and flinging her last tendril, Escher grabs hold and pulls in snug, knowing that the chances are lousy that she will ever find anything nourishing here, much less delicious.
But her reserves have been filled again, she notes. If she is careful—and when hasn’t she been—her energies will keep her alive for centuries.
She thinks of the World, and thanks nobody.
“Watch and learn,” she whispers to herself.
That was the first human thought. She remembers that odd fact suddenly. People were just a bunch of grubbing apes moving blindly through their tiny lives until one said to a companion, “Watch and learn.”
An inherited memory, or another gift from Him?
Silently, she thanks Luck, and she thanks Him, and once again, she thanks Luck.
“Patience and planning,” she tells herself.
Which is another wise thought of the conscious, enduring ape.
THE LAST SON
The locked gates and various doorways know him—recognize him at a glance—but they have to taste him anyway. They have to test him. Three people were expected, and he can’t explain in words what has happened. He just says, “The others will be coming later,” and leaves that lie hanging in the air. Then as he passes through the final doorway, he says, “Let no one through. Not without my permission first.”
“This is your mother’s house,” says the door’s AI.
“Not anymore,” he remarks.
The machine grows quiet, and sad.
During any other age, his home would be a mansion. There are endless rooms, rooms beyond counting, and each is enormous and richly furnished and lovely and jammed full of games and art and distractions and flourishes that even the least aesthetic soul would find lovely. He sees none of that now. Alone, he walks to what has always been his room, and he sits on a leather recliner, and the house brings him a soothing drink and an intoxicating drink and an assortment of treats that sit on the platter, untouched.
For a long while, the boy stares off at the distant ceiling, replaying everything with his near-perfect memory. Everything. Then he forgets everything, stupidly calling out, “Mother,” with a voice that sounds ridiculously young. Then again, he calls, “Mother.” And he starts to rise from his chair, starts to ask the great empty house, “Where is she?”
And he remembers.
As if his legs have been sawed off, he collapses. His chair twists itself to catch him, and an army of AIs brings their talents to bear. They are loyal, limited machines. They are empathetic, and on occasion, even sweet. They want to help him in any fashion, just name the way ... but their appeals and their smart suggestions are just so much noise. The boy acts deaf, and he obviously can’t see anything with his fists jabbed into his eyes like that, slouched forward in his favorite chair, begging an invisible someone for forgiveness. ...
THE SPEAKER
He squats and uses the tip of a forefinger to dab at the puddle of semen, and he rubs the finger against his thumb, saying, “Think of cells. Individual, self-reliant cells. For most of Earth’s great history, they ruled. First as bacteria, and then as composites built from cooperative bacteria. They were everywhere and ruled everything, and then the wild cells learned how to dance together, in one enormous body, and the living world was transformed for the next seven hundred million years.”
Thumb and finger wipe themselves dry against a hairy thigh, and he rises again, grinning in that relentless and smug, yet somehow charming fashion. “Everything was changed, and nothing had changed,” he says. Then he says, “Scaling,” with an important tone, as if that single word should erase all confusion. “The bacteria and green algae and the carnivorous amoebae weren’t swept away by any revolution. Honestly, I doubt if their numbers fell appreciably or for long.” And again, he says, “Scaling,” and sighs with a rich appreciation. “Life evolves. Adapts. Spreads and grows, constantly utilizing new energies and novel genetics. But wherever something large can live, a thousand small things can thrive just as well, or better. Wherever something enormous survives, a trillion bacteria hang on for the ride.”
For a moment, the speaker hesitates.
A slippery half-instant passes where an audience might believe that he has finally lost his concentration, that he is about to stumble over his own tongue. But then he licks at the air, tasting something delicious. And three times, he clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
Then he says what he has planned to say from the beginning.
“I never know whom I’m speaking to,” he admits. “I’ve never actually seen my audience. But I know you’re great and good. I know that however you appear, and however you make your living, you deserve to hear this:
“Humans have always lived in terror. Rainstorms and the eclipsing moon and earthquakes and the ominous guts of some disemboweled goat—all have preyed upon our fears and defeated our fragile optimisms. But what we fear today—what shapes and reshapes the universe around us—is a child of our own imaginations.
“A whirlwind that owes its very existence to glorious, endless us!”
ABLE
The boy stops walking once or twice, letting the fat leopard keep pace. Then he pushes his way through a last wall of emerald ferns, stepping out into the bright damp air above the rounded pool. A splashing takes him by surprise. He looks down at his secret pool, and he squints, watching what seems to be a woman pulling her way through the clear water with thick, strong arms. She is naked. Astonishingly, wonderfully naked. A stubby hand grabs an overhanging limb, and she stands on the rocky sh
ore, moving as if exhausted, picking her way up the slippery slope until she finds an open patch of halfway flattened earth where she can collapse, rolling onto her back, her smooth flesh glistening and her hard breasts shining up at Able, making him sick with joy.
Then she starts to cry, quietly, with a deep sadness.
Lust vanishes, replaced by simple embarrassment. Able flinches and starts to step back, and that’s when he first looks at her face.
He recognizes its features.
Intrigued, the boy picks his way down to the shoreline, practically standing beside the crying woman.
She looks at him, and she sniffs.
“I saw two of them,” he reports. “And I saw you, too. You were inside that cylinder, weren’t you?”
She watches him, saying nothing.
“I saw something pull you out of that trap. And then I couldn’t see you. It must have put you here, I guess. Out of its way.” Able nods, and smiles. He can’t help but stare at her breasts, but at least he keeps his eyes halfway closed, pretending to look out over the water instead. “It took pity on you, I guess.”
A good-sized fish breaks on the water.
The woman seems to watch the creature as it swims past, big blue scales catching the light, heavy fins lazily shoving their way through the warm water. The fish eyes are huge and black, and they are stupid eyes. The mind behind them sees nothing but vague shapes and sudden motions. Able knows from experience: If he stands quite still, the creature will come close enough to touch.
“They’re called coelacanths,” he explains.
Maybe the woman reacts to his voice. Some sound other than crying now leaks from her.
So Able continues, explaining, “They were rare, once. I’ve studied them quite a bit. They’re old and primitive, and they were almost extinct when we found them. But when they got loose, got free, and took apart the Earth ... and took everything and everyone with them up into the sky ...”
The woman gazes up at the towering horsetails.
Able stares at her legs and what lies between them.
“Anyway,” he mutters, “there’s more coelacanths now than ever. They live in a million oceans, and they’ve never been more successful, really.” He hesitates, and then adds, “Kind of like us, I think. Like people. You know?”
The woman turns, staring at him with gray-white eyes. And with a quiet hard voice, she says, “No.”
She says, “That’s an idiot’s opinion.”
And then with a grace that belies her strong frame, she dives back into the water, kicking hard and chasing that ancient and stupid fish all the way back to the bottom.
Presence
MAUREEN F. MCHUGH
Maureen F. McHugh made her first sale in 1989, and has since made a powerful impression on the SF world with a relatively small body of work, becoming one of today’s most respected writers. In 1992, she published one of the year’s most widely acclaimed and talked-about first novels, China Mountain Zhang, which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, the Lambda Literary Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award, and which was named a New York Times Notable Book as well as being a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her other books, including the novels Half the Day is Night and Mission Child, have been greeted with similar enthusiasm. Her most recent book is a major new novel, Nekropolis. Her powerful short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Starlight, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin, Killing Me Softly, and other markets, and is about to be assembled in a collection called The Lincoln Train. She has had stories in our Tenth through Fourteenth, and our Nineteenth Annual Collections. She lives in Twinsburg, Ohio, with her husband, her son, and a golden retriever named Smith.
In the eloquent and moving story that follows, she shows us that perhaps it is sometimes better not to know what you have lost ...
Lila sits at her desk in Ohio and picks up the handle of the new disposable razor in ... Shen Zhen, China? Juarez, Mexico? She can’t remember where they’re assembling the parts. She pans left and right and decides it must be Shen Zhen, because when she looks around there’s no one else in camera range. There’s a twelve-hour time-zone difference. It’s eleven at night in China, so the only other activity is another production engineer doing telepresence work—waldos sorting through a bin of hinge joints two tables over in a pool of light. Factories are dim and dirty places, but cameras need light, so telepresence stations are islands in the darkness.
She lifts the dark blue plastic part in front of the CMM and waits for it to measure the cavity. She figures they’re running about twenty percent out of spec, but they are so far behind on the razor product launch they can’t afford to have the vendor resupply, so tomorrow, underpaid Chinese employees in Shen Zhen raw materials will have to hand-inspect the parts, discard the bad ones and send the rest to packaging.
Her phone rings.
She disengages the waldos and the visor. The display is her home number and she winces.
“Hello?” says her husband, Gus. “Hello, who is this?”
“It’s Mila,” she says. “It’s Mila, honey.”
“Mila?” he says. “That’s what the Speed Dial said. Where are you?”
“I’m at work,” she says.
“At P&G?” he says.
“No, honey, now I work for Gillette. You worked for Gillette, too.”
“I did not,” he says, suspicious. Gus has Alzheimer’s. He is fifty-seven.
“Where’s Cathy?” Mila asks.
“Cathy?” his voice lowers. “Is that her name? I was calling because she was here. What is she doing in our house?”
“She’s there to help you,” Mila says helplessly. Cathy is the new home health. She’s been watching Gus during the day for almost three weeks now, but Gus still calls to ask who she is.
“She’s black,” Gus says. “Not that it matters. Is she from the neighborhood? Is she Dan’s friend?” Dan is their son. He’s twenty-five and living in Boulder.
“Are you hungry?” Mila asks. “Cathy can make you a sandwich. Do you want a sandwich?”
“I don’t need help,” Gus says, “Where’s my car? Is it in the shop?”
“Yes,” Mila says, seizing on the excuse.
“No it’s not,” he says. “You’re lying to me. There’s a woman here, some strange woman, and she’s taken my car.”
“No, baby,” Mila says. “You want me to come home for lunch?” It’s eleven, she could take an early lunch. Not that she really wants to go home if Gus is agitated.
Gus hangs up the phone.
Motherfucker. She grabs her purse.
Cathy is standing at the door, holding her elbows. Cathy is twenty-five and Gus is her first assignment from the home healthcare agency. Mila likes her, likes even her beautifully elaborate long, polished fingernails. “Mrs. Schuster? Mr. Schuster is gone. I was going to follow his minder but he took my locater. I’m sorry, it was in my purse and I never thought he’d take it out—”
“Oh, Jesus,” Mila says. She runs upstairs and gets her minder from her bedside table. She flicks it on and it says that Gus is within 300 meters. The indicator arrow says he’s headed away from Glenwood, where all the traffic is, and down toward the dead end or even the pond.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Schuster,” Cathy says.
“He’s not far,” Mila says. “It’s not your fault. He’s cunning.”
They go down the front steps. Cathy is so young. So unhappy right now, still nervously hugging her elbows as if her ribs hurt. Her fingernails are pink with long sprays like rays from a sunrise on each nail. She trails along behind Mila, scuffing in her cute flats. She’s an easy girl, usually unflustered. Mila had so hoped that Gus would like her.
Gus is around the corner toward the dead end. He’s in the side yard of someone’s house Mila doesn’t know—thank God that nobody is ever home in the daytime except kids. He’s squatting in a flower garden and he has his pants down, she can see his hairy th
ighs. She hopes he isn’t shitting on his pants. Behind him, pale pink hollyhocks rise in spikes.
“Gus!” she calls.
He waves at her to go away.
“Gus,” she says. Cathy is still trailing her. “Gus, what are you doing?”
“Can’t a man go to the bathroom in peace?” he says, and he sounds so much like himself that if she weren’t used to all the craziness she might have burst into tears.
She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t care. That’s when she decides it all has to stop. Because she just doesn’t care.
“It is sometimes possible to cure Alzheimer’s, it’s just not possible to cure the person who has Alzheimer’s,” the treatment info explains. “We can fix the brain and replace the damaged neurons with new brain but we can’t replace the memories that are gone.” It’s the way Alzheimer’s has been all along, Mila thinks, a creeping insidious disease that takes away the person you knew and leaves this angry, disoriented stranger. The video goes on to explain how the treatment—which is nearly completely effective in only about thirty percent of cases, but which arrests the progress of the disease in ninety percent of the cases and provides some functional improvement in almost all cases—cannot fix the parts of the brain that have been destroyed.
Mila is a quality engineer. This is a place she is accustomed to, a place of percentages and estimations, of statements of certainty about large groups, and only guesses about particular individuals. She can translate it, “We can promise you everything, we just can’t promise it will happen to Gus.”
Gus is gone anyway, except in odd moments of habit.
When Gus was diagnosed they had talked about whether or not they should try this treatment. They had sat at the kitchen table, a couple of engineers, and looked at this carefully. Gus had said no. “In five years,” he’d said, “there’s a good chance the Alzheimer’s will come back. So then we’ll have spent all this money on a treatment that didn’t do any good and where will you be then?”
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection Page 33