The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  In normal DNA, the repeats were below the level of expression of disease. Standard tests of the zygote assured this. The GROSS paper told how to construct two viruses: the first would plant a time bomb in the egg. At a particular stage of embryonic development the repetition of trinucleotides would explode. The second virus would plant compensating sequences on the Y chromosome.

  Creating the viruses would be a tricky but not impossible problem in plasmid engineering. Their effect, however, would be devastating. In males the Y chromosome would suppress the X-linked diseases, but in females the trinucleotide syndromes would be expressed. When the repeats kicked in, the child would develop any one of a host of debilitating or fatal neurological disorders.

  Of course once the disorder was recognized, other gene engineers would go to work curing it, or at least identifying possessors prenatally. The GROSS virus would not destroy the human race—but it could burden a generation of females with disease and early death.

  Tyler had led Erno to this monstrosity. What was he supposed to do with it?

  Nonetheless, Erno downloaded the file into his notebook. He had just finished when Cluny came into the lab.

  “Hello, Professor Odillesson,” Cluny said to Lemmy. He saw Erno and did a double take. Erno stared back at him.

  “I’m not a professor, Michael,” Lemmy said.

  Cluny pointed at Erno. “You know the constables are looking for him?”

  “They are? Why?”

  Erno got up. “Don’t bother explaining. I’ll go.”

  Cluny moved to stop him. “Wait a minute.”

  Erno put his hand on Cluny’s shoulder to push him aside. Cluny grabbed Erno’s arm.

  “What’s going on?” Lemmy asked.

  Erno tried to free himself from Cluny, but the Earthman’s grip was firm. Cluny pulled him, and pain shot through the shoulder Erno had hurt in yesterday’s spill. Erno hit Cluny in the face.

  Cluny’s head jerked back, but he didn’t let go. His jaw clenched and his expression hardened into animal determination. He wrestled with Erno; they lost their balance, and in slow motion stumbled against a lab bench. Lemmy shouted and two women ran in from the next lab. Before Erno knew it he was pinned against the floor.

  “Dead Man”

  Many of the stories for men were about murder. The old Earth writers seemed fascinated by murder, and wrote about it from a dozen perspectives.

  In one of the stories, a detective whose job it is to throw illegal riders off cargo trains finds a destitute man—a “hobo”—hiding on the train. While being brutally beaten by the detective, the hobo strikes back and unintentionally kills him.

  The punishment for such a killing, even an accidental one, is death. Terrified, knowing that he has to hide his guilt, the hobo hurries back to the city. He pretends he never left the “flophouse” where he spent the previous night. He disposes of his clothes, dirty with coal dust from the train.

  Then he reads a newspaper report. The detective’s body has been found, but the investigators assume that he fell off the train and was killed by accident, and are not seeking anyone. The hobo is completely free from suspicion. His immediate reaction is to go to the nearest police station and confess.

  ELEVEN

  Erno waited in a small white room at the constabulary headquarters. As a child Erno had come here many times with his mother, but now everything seemed different. He was subject to the force of the state. That fucking cow Cluny. The constables had taken his notebook. Was that pro forma, or would they search it until they found the GROSS file?

  He wondered what Alicia had done after he’d left the day before. What had she told her friends?

  The door opened and two women came in. One of them was tall and good-looking. The other was small, with a narrow face and close-cropped blond hair. She looked to be a little younger than his mother. She sat down across from him; the tall woman remained standing.

  “This can be simple, Erno, if you let it,” the small woman said. She had an odd drawl that, combined with her short stature, made Erno wonder if she was from Earth. “Tell us where Tyler Durden is. And about the conspiracy.”

  Erno folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t know where he is. There is no conspiracy.”

  “Do we have to show you images of you and him together during the Oxygen Warehouse riot?”

  “I never saw him before that, or since. We were just hiding in the back room.

  “You had nothing to do with the smartpaint explosion?”

  “No.”

  The tall woman, who still had not spoken, looked worried. The blond interrogator leaned forward, resting her forearms on the table. “Your DNA was found at the access portal where the device was set.”

  Erno squirmed. He imagined a sequence of unstable nucleotide triplets multiplying in the woman’s cells. “He asked me to help him. I had no idea what it was.”

  “No idea. So it could have been a bomb big enough to blow a hole in the dome. Yet you told no one about it.”

  “I knew he wasn’t going to kill anyone. I could tell.”

  The interrogator leaned back. “I hope you will excuse the rest of us if we question your judgment.”

  “Believe me, I would never do anything to hurt a cousin. Ask my mother.”

  The tall woman finally spoke. “We have. She does say that. But you have to help us out, Erno. I’m sure you can understand how upset all this has made the polity.”

  “Forget it, Kim,” the other said. “Erno here’s not going to betray his lover.”

  “Tyler’s not my lover,” Erno said.

  The blond interrogator smirked. “Right.”

  The tall one said, “There’s nothing wrong with you being lovers, Erno.”

  “Then why did this one bring it up?”

  “No special reason,” said the blond. “I’m just saying you wouldn’t betray him.”

  “Well, we’re not lovers.”

  “Too bad,” the blond muttered.

  “You need to help us, Erno,” the tall one said. “Otherwise, even if we let you go, you’re going to be at risk of violence from other cousins.”

  “Only if you tell everyone about me.”

  “So we should just let you go, and not inconvenience you by telling others the truth about you,” said the blond.

  “What truth? You don’t know me.”

  She came out of her chair, leaning forward on her clenched fists. Her face was flushed. “Don’t know you? I know all about you.”

  “Mona, calm down,” the other woman said.

  “Calm down? Earth history is full of this! Men sublimate their sexual attraction in claims of brotherhood—with the accompanying military fetishism, penis comparing, suicidal conquer-or-die movements. Durden is heading for one of those classic orgasmic armageddons: Masada, Hitler in the bunker, David Koresh, September 11, the California massacre.”

  The tall one grabbed her shoulder and tried to pull her back. “Mona.”

  Mona threw off the restraining hand, and pushed her face up close to Erno’s. “If we let this little shit go, I guarantee you he’ll be involved in some transcendent destructive act—suicidally brave, suicidally cowardly—aimed at all of us. The signs are all over him.” Spittle flew in Erno’s face.

  “You’re crazy,” Erno said. “If I wanted to fuck him, I would just fuck him.”

  The tall one tried again. “Come away, officer.”

  Mona grabbed Erno by the neck. “Where is he!”

  Come away, now!” The tall cop yanked the small woman away, and she fell back. She glared at Erno. The other, tugging her by the arm, pulled her out of the room.

  Erno tried to catch his breath. He wiped his sleeve across his sweating face. He sat there alone for a long time, touching the raw skin where she had gripped his neck. Then the door opened and his mother came in.

  “Mom!”

  She carried some things in her hands, put them on the table. It was the contents of his pockets, including his notebook. “Get
up.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just shut up and come with me. We’re letting you go.”

  Erno stumbled from the chair. “That officer is crazy.”

  “Never mind her. I’m not sure she isn’t right. It’s up to you to prove she isn’t.”

  She hustled him out of the office and into the hall. In seconds Erno found himself, dizzy, in the plaza outside the headquarters. “You are not out of trouble. Go home, and stay there,” his mother said, and hurried back inside.

  Passersby in North Six watched him as he straightened his clothes. He went to sit on the bench beneath the acacia trees at the lava tube’s center. He caught his breath.

  Erno wondered if the cop would follow through with her threat to tell about his helping with the explosion. He felt newly vulnerable. But it was not just vulnerability he felt. He had never seen a woman lose it as clearly as the interrogator had. He had gotten to her in a way he had never gotten to a matron in his life. She was actually scared of him!

  Now what? He put his hand in his pocket, and felt the notebook.

  He pulled it out. He switched it on. The GROSS file was still there, and so was the address he’d written earlier.

  A Dream

  Erno was ten when his youngest sister Celeste was born. After the birth, his mother fell into a severe depression. She snapped at Erno, fought with Aunt Sophie, and complained about one of the husbands until he moved out. Erno’s way of coping was to disappear; his cousin Aphra coped by misbehaving.

  One day Erno came back from school to find a fire in the middle of the kitchen floor, a flurry of safetybots stifling it with foam, his mother screaming, and Aphra—who had apparently started the fire—shouting back at her. Skidding on the foam, Erno stepped between the two of them, put his hands on Aphra’s chest, and made her go to her room.

  The whole time, his mother never stopped shouting. Erno was angrier at her than at Aphra. She was supposed to be the responsible one. When he returned from quieting Aphra, his mother ran off to her room and slammed the door. Erno cleaned the kitchen and waited for Aunt Sophie to come home.

  The night of the fire he had a dream. He was alone in the kitchen, and then a man was there. The man drew him aside. Erno was unable to make out his face. “I am your father,” the man said. “Let me show you something.” He made Erno sit down and called up an image on the table. It was Erno’s mother as a little girl. She sat, cross-legged, hunched over some blocks, her face screwed up in troubled introspection. “That’s her second phase of work expression,” Erno’s father said.

  With a shock, Erno recognized the expression on the little girl’s face as one he had seen his mother make as she concentrated.

  “She hates this photo,” Erno’s father said, as if to persuade Erno not to judge her: she still contained that innocence, that desire to struggle against a problem she could not solve. But Erno was mad. As he resisted, the father pressed on, and began to lose it too. He ended up screaming at Erno, “You can’t take it? I’ll make you see! I’ll make you see!”

  Erno put his hands over his ears. The faceless man’s voice was twisted with rage. Eventually he stopped shouting. “There you go, there you go,” he said quietly, stroking Erno’s hair, “you’re just the same.”

  TWELVE

  On his way to the East Five tube, Erno considered the officer’s rant. Maybe Tyler did want to sleep with him. So what? The officer was some kind of homophobe and ought to be relieved. Raving about violence while locking him up in a room. And then trying to choke him. Yes, he had the GROSS file in his pocket, yes he had hit Alicia—but he was no terrorist. The accusation was just a way for the cop to ignore men’s legitimate grievances.

  But they must not have checked the file, or understood it if they did. If they knew about GROSS, he would never have been freed.

  Early in the colony’s life, the East Five lava tube had been its major agricultural center. The yeast vats now produced only animal fodder, but the hydroponics rack farms still functioned, mostly for luxury items. The rote work of tending the racks fell to cousins who did not express ambition to do anything more challenging. They lived in the tube warrens on the colony’s Minimum Living Standard.

  A stylized painting of a centaur graced the entrance of the East Five men’s warren. Since the artist had not likely ever studied a real horse, the stance of the creature looked deeply suspect to Erno. At the lobby interface Erno called up the AI attendant. The AI came on-screen as a dark brown woman wearing a glittery green shirt.

  “I’m looking for Micah Avasson,” Erno asked it.

  “Who is calling?”

  “Erno Pamelasson.”

  “He’s on shift right now.”

  “Can I speak with him?”

  “Knock yourself out.” The avatar pointed off-screen toward a dimly lit passageway across the room. She appeared on the wall near the doorway, and called out to Erno, “Over here. Follow this corridor, third exit left to the Ag tube.”

  Outside of the lobby, the corridors and rooms here had the brutal utilitarian quality that marked the early colony, when survival had been the first concern and the idea of humane design had been to put a mirror at the end of a room to try to convince the eye that you weren’t living in a cramped burrow some meters below the surface of a dead world. An environmental social worker would shudder.

  The third exit on the left was covered with a clear permeable barrier. From the time he was a boy Erno had disliked passing through these permeable barriers; he hated the feel of the electrostatics brushing his face. He took a mask from the dispenser, fitted it over his nose and mouth, closed his eyes and passed through into the Ag tube. Above, layers of gray mastic sealed the tube roof; below, a concrete floor supported long rows of racks under light transmitted fiberoptically from the heliostats. A number of workers wearing coveralls and oxygen masks moved up and down the rows tending the racks. The high CO2 air was laden with humidity, and even through the mask smelled of phosphates.

  Erno approached a man bent over a drawer of seedlings he had pulled out of a rack. The man held a meter from which wires dangled to a tube immersed in the hydroponics fluid. “Excuse me,” Erno said. “I’m looking for Micah Avasson.”

  The man lifted his head, inspected Erno, then without speaking turned. “Micah!” He called down the row.

  A tall man a little farther down the aisle looked up and peered at them. He had a full head of dark hair, a birdlike way of holding his shoulders. After a moment he said, “I’m Micah Avasson.”

  Erno walked down toward him. Erno was nonplused—the man had pushed up his mask from his mouth and was smoking a cigarette, using real fire. No, not a cigarette—a joint.

  “You can smoke in here? What about the fire regulations?”

  “We in the depths are not held to as high a standard as you.” Micah said this absolutely deadpan, as if there were not a hint of a joke. “Not enough O2 to make a decent fire anyway. It takes practice just to get a good buzz off this thing in here without passing out.”

  Joint dangling from his lower lip, the man turned back to the rack. He wore yellow rubber gloves, and was pinching the buds off the tray of squat green leafy plants. Erno recognized them as a modified broadleaf sensamilla.

  “You’re using the colony facilities to grow pot.”

  “This is my personal crop. We each get a personal rack. Sparks initiative.” Micah kept pinching buds. “Want to try some?”

  Erno gathered himself. “My name is Erno Pamelasson. I came to see you because—”

  “You’re my son.” Micah said, not looking at him.

  Erno stared, at a loss for words. Up close the lines at the corners of the man’s eyes were distinct, and there was a bit of sag to his chin. But the shape of Micah’s face reminded Erno of his own reflection in the mirror.

  “What did you want to see me about?” Micah pushed the rack drawer closed and looked at Erno. When Erno stood there dumb, he wheeled the stainless steel cart beside him down to th
e next rack. He took a plastic bin from the cart, crouched, pulled open the bottom drawer of the rack and began harvesting cherry tomatoes.

  Finally, words came to Erno. “Why haven’t I ever seen you before?”

  “Lots of boys never meet their fathers.”

  “I’m not talking about other fathers. Why aren’t you and my mother together?”

  “You assume we were together. How do you know that we didn’t meet in the sauna some night, one time only?”

  “Is that how it was?”

  Micah lifted a partially yellow tomato on his fingertips, then left it on the vine to ripen. He smiled. “No. Your mother and I were in love. We lived together for twenty-two months. And two days.”

  “So why did you split?”

  “That I don’t remember so well. We must have had our reasons. Everybody has reasons.”

  Erno touched his shoulder. “Don’t give me that.”

  Micah stood, overbalancing a little. Erno caught his arm to steady him. “Thanks,” Micah said. “The knees aren’t what they used to be.” He took a long drag on the joint, exhaled at the roof far overhead. “All right, then. The reason we broke up is that your mother is a cast-iron bitch. And I am a cast-iron bastard. The details of our breakup all derive from those simple facts, and I don’t recall them. I do recall that we had good fun making you, though. I remember that well.”

  “I bet.”

  “You were a good baby, as babies go. Didn’t cry too much. You had a sunny disposition.” He took a final toke on the joint, and then dropped the butt into the bin of tomatoes. “Doesn’t seem to have lasted.”

  “Were you there when I was born?”

  “So we’re going to have this conversation.” Micah exhaled the last cloud of smoke, slipped his mask down, and finally fixed his watery brown eyes on Erno. “I was there. I was there until you were maybe six or seven months. Then I left.”

  “Did she make you leave?”

  “Not really.” His voice was muffled now. “She was taken with me at first because of the glamor—I was an acrobat, the Cirque Jacinthe? But her sister was in the marriage, and her friends. She had her mentor, her support group. I was just the father. It was okay while it was fun, and maybe I thought it was something more when we first got together, but after a while it wasn’t fun anymore.”