Year's Best SF 2

by David G. Hartwell

  “There seems to be something white coming down from the sky,” said the commentator, his voice choked with fear.

  Darlene jumped up and stared at the television. “Of course,” she said. “Of course.”

  They'd finally got the drive working again. Took them long enough. Only about sixty years. Naturally they'd take the King first—they had to hook Him in. They'd taken no chances with Him. Why tell the Brides? Those Techs always treated Brides like dirt and were so smug about their jobs and always saying nothing could go on without them. They must have just planned to wake the Brides up when everything was ready, to keep them from getting underfoot. She thought of her kiddies, suddenly, her beautiful, fast-growing full-lined kiddies. They must be here, along with her mother. There were no men, of course, in that heaving, thronging crowd.

  “I have to get back to Memphis, Roy,” she said.

  “No,” he whispered, and she felt his pain. He jumped up and his arms went around her, held her tight. “I won't let you go. So what if He's back? They don't need you there. I do. Oh God, honey, sweetheart, I do.”

  Her eyes filled with tears when she heard the passion in his voice, which matched hers in strength and depth.

  Then Elvis, live, she knew it, launched into a song she'd never heard before. It must be patched through from the ship. The call. What they'd always been waiting for.

  It was like she was hearing two things when she listened, the human words, and beneath them, ancient, powerful directions.

  The spark of the unknown past surged through her. Mana, pure white as if distilled from starlight. Long, incredibly long life; planets beyond her ken, a homeland she couldn't even imagine, but which pulled at every cell.

  Roy never looked frightened, no, not for an instant, as he reached back to turn off the TV, almost like he knew it all and what was going to happen.

  “I won't let you go,” he said. He held her even more closely, and she knew it was true. She drew back a little and just looked at him, with Elvis' lovely voice in her ears, and he started to gasp. He let go of her. His hands went to his throat, and he fell to the floor, writhing and choking.

  Darlene reached down and picked up the keys he'd dropped, then stepped over him.

  Elvis stopped singing as she walked out the door. She walked across the gravel lot, climbed into the truck, and heard Zinnea scream.

  “Sorry, honey,” she said, as she turned the ignition key and slammed the truck into reverse, even though she knew he couldn't hear her. But he'd be breathing again now. She'd only meant to make him let go of her. As she sped down the driveway, toward Him, mana, her kiddies, the ship, everything, she whispered, blinking back tears, “It never would have worked. It never would have worked anyway, Roy, sweetie. Never.”

  Forget Luck

  KATE WILHELM

  Kate Wilhelm has been recognized as a first-rate writer of SF since the late 1950s, but came fully into prominence in the 1970s with a string of stories and novels that won many Nebula Awards and were nominated for many more. Her Hugo-winning novel, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, was also published then. Since the mid-1980s, she has written a number of successful novels in the mystery genre, but has continued to write striking new SF short fiction. Wilhelm is married to Damon Knight. Together they influenced the instruction of new SF writers through the Clarion Writers Workshop, which they helped found, for thirty years—after being significant forces in the famous Milford Writers Workshop (for experienced professional writers) for more than ten years before Clarion. Evolution is one of the bedrock ideas upon which the whole of SF literature is founded in the 20th century, and “Forget Luck” is this year's best addition to that central tradition.

  Tony Manetti had not been assigned to cover the colloquium at Michigan State, but the day before it was to start, his editor had a family crisis. Tony would have to go. A suite was already reserved in the magazine's name at the Holiday Inn; a rental car would be waiting at the Lansing airport.

  Tony had called Georgina twice, leaving the message that meant she was to return the call when her husband was not around, but she had not called back. Already on her way from Berkeley, he decided. Of course, she thought Harry would be covering the conference, and accordingly had not been in touch with Tony. Five nights, he kept thinking, five nights, and days, of course.

  When he checked in at the motel, Georgina had not yet registered. He paid scant attention to the academic papers the desk clerk handed him; the speakers would all make certain Academic Currents received a copy of their papers. He checked the schedule. That evening, Saturday, there would be opening ceremonies, then people would drift away to eat and drink. On Sunday there would be a brunch, several luncheons, teas, more eating and drinking, and on Monday the attendees would start lecturing one another. He planned to miss it all. He could read the papers any time, and if anything interesting happened, someone would tell him all about it. He planned to be in upper Michigan with the gorgeous Georgina.

  She had not checked in yet when he came back down, after leaving his gear in his suite. He went to the bar, crowded with academics, ordered a gin and tonic, and looked for a place to sit where he could keep an eye on the lobby.

  Someone said, “Ah, Peter, good to see you again.” A heavyset bald man was beckoning to him.

  “Dr. Bressler,” Tony said. “How are you.” He looked past him toward the front desk where people were checking in in a continuous flow.

  “Very well, Peter. Here, take a seat.”

  “It's Tony. Tony Manetti.” Bressler had been his teacher for a term at Columbia; Tony had seen him twice, once in the hall and once in class, and every time they met at a conference, Bressler called him Peter.

  “Yes, of course. You're the FBI fellow.”

  “No sir. I work for Academic Currents, the magazine.” A new group had replaced the old; she was not among them.

  “Of course. Of course. Peter, you're just the sort of fellow I've been looking for, someone with your training.”

  Bressler was in his sixties, a contender for the Nobel any year now for his past work in genetics, and he was more than a little crazy, Tony had decided six years ago in his class. A redhead appeared. He strained to see. Wrong redhead.

  “…a bit of a problem getting blood…”

  He thought of her legs, a dancer's long legs.

  “…can't seem to get even a drop. One can't very well simply ask for it, you see.”

  He had been to the upper peninsula once in late summer; it had been misty and cool, romantic, with a lot of shadowy forest.

  “…have to think they're onto me. I simply can't account for it in any other way. Four accidents in the last two years, and some of my finest graduate students…”

  Admit it, he would say, your marriage is a sham. I can move out to the west coast, he would say. I don't have to stay in Chicago; I can work out of anywhere.

  “…really substantiates my theory, you see, but it also poses a severe problem.”

  Tony had hardly touched his gin and tonic; it was simply something to do while he waited. He tasted it and put it down again. Bressler was gazing off into space, frowning.

  And then she appeared, clinging to the arm of Melvin Witcome, smiling up at him the same way she sometimes had smiled up at Tony. Melvin Witcome was some kind of special course coordinator for the Big Ten, a man of power and influence; not yet forty, independently wealthy, handsome, suave, Phi Beta Kappa, with a doctorate in charm or something, he was everything Tony was not. He watched Witcome sign the registration, watched him and Georgina take their computer keys, watched them point out their bags to a bellboy, then board the elevator together. He was not aware that he had stood up until he heard Bressler's voice.

  “I don't mean to imply there's any immediate danger. Sit down, Peter.”

  He sat down and gulped some of his drink. It was a mistake; they simply happened to arrive at the same time; they were old friends; she had not expected Tony to be there. He finished his drink. She had not expe
cted him to be there.

  “You're not going to the beastly opening ceremony, are you?” Bressler placed his hand on Tony's arm. “Let's go have some dinner instead. I want to pick your brain. You're a godsend, Peter. I was desperate for guidance, and you appeared. A godsend.”

  He had talked to the class about angels, Tony remembered then. Something about angels. Tony had tuned out. He had tuned out most of that year, in fact.

  Bressler's voice had grown a bit shrill. “No one knows how humiliating it is to be considered a weirdo. A weirdo,” he repeated with bitter satisfaction. “Simply because you have come upon a truth that others are not yet willing to accept or even to see.”

  “Angels,” Tony said.

  “Excellent, Peter! Ten years or more and you remember. But, of course, they prefer to see angels. Come on, let's go have some dinner.”

  Tony stood up. It had been six years ago; he didn't bother to make the correction. When they emerged from the dim bar, a mirage of pine forest danced in the street before him. A taxi drove through the dripping trees, and Bressler waved it over.

  They had flaming cheese, and retsina with lamb kebabs, and ouzo with honey-doused walnut cakes. Bressler talked without letup throughout. Tony listened sporadically, brooding about the gorgeous Georgina.

  “Of course, we all knew you were very special,” Bressler said, then sipped his Greek coffee. “Your job is proof enough. I know people who would kill for your job. Rumor was you saved Bush's life or something, wounded in the line of duty, permanently disabled and quite justly rewarded, all that.”

  What really had happened was that when he was twenty-two, with a bachelor of science degree, he had applied to the FBI, along with his best friend, Doug Hastings, and to their surprise, they both had been accepted. A year later, his first real assignment had taken him and a senior agent out to do a routine background security check. A nothing assignment, until a fourteen-year-old boy with no hair had used him for target practice. Tony would have been quite seriously wounded, even shot dead, if he had not bent over at precisely the right moment to free his pants leg from the top of his sock. As it was he had been shot in the upper arm. Then, two weeks after being declared fit to resume a life of fighting evil, he had been shot again. The second time had been from the rear, and the only people behind him that day had been two other special agents and their supervisor, a unit chief.

  He rather liked the version Bressler was voicing, and, as he had been enjoined never to reveal the truth of the matter, he remained silent, impassive, inscrutable. And, he was afraid, ridiculous. The second time he had been approaching a Buick in a crouch, and when he realized it was empty, he had stood up and started to turn to say the coast was clear. The bullet had gone through his arm instead of his head. The other arm this time.

  “Must be like being a priest, once a priest always a priest. One doesn't forget training like that. Once FBI, always FBI; isn't that right?”

  Tony finished his ouzo. The last time he had seen his former best friend Doug Hastings, Doug had said, “Keep away from me, jinx. Orders. Okay? No hard feelings?”

  “Well, no one expects you to talk about it,” Bressler said. He waved his tiny cup for more Greek coffee. “But you have had the training. Put your mind to it, Peter. How can I get blood samples from those people?”

  Cautiously Tony said, “I need time to think about it.”

  “Of course, of course. When we go back to the hotel I'll hand you the reports, my notes, everything. It was providence that sent you to me, Peter. I had a feeling. Are you ready?”

  What he would do, Tony had decided, was gather up the papers already in hand, check out in the morning, and beat it.

  Back in his suite, he gazed morosely at the stack of papers; the desk clerk had handed him another pile, and Bressler had added his own bulging package. His head was aching with a dull distant surf-like monotony; he had had more to drink that evening than he generally consumed in a year, and he was not at all ready for sleep. When he found himself wondering if Georgina and Witcome were in a suite like his, with a couch like his, the same coffee table, the same king-sized bed, he began to shuffle papers. Not Bressler's, he put them aside and looked over a few others. But bits and pieces of what Bressler had said floated back to his mind, not in any rational coherent way, in phrases. He suspected that Bressler had talked in disconnected phrases.

  Then, because it was his job to condense ten, fifteen, twenty pages of academic papers to a paragraph that would make sense to a reader, even if only temporarily, he found he was doing the same thing to this evening with Bressler.

  Genes were the secret masters of the universe. Tony blinked, but he was certain Bressler had said that. Right. Genes ruled the body they inhabited, communicated with it; they ordered black hair, or red. And silky skin, and eyes like the deepest ocean…He shook himself. Genes were immortal, unless the carriers died without progeny. They decided issues like intelligence, allergies, homosexuality…

  He closed his eyes, trying to remember where the angels came in. Sixty-eight percent of those polled believed in angels; forty-five percent believed in their own personal guardian angel. That was it. For guardian angel read genes.

  Everyone knew someone or about someone who had had a miraculous escape from certain death or terrible injury. The sole survivor of an airplane crash; the infant who didn't freeze when abandoned in zero temperature; a highway accident that should have been fatal…

  “Forget angels, forget a sixth sense, an intuitive avoidance of danger. Think alleles, the right combination of alleles. Genes are the secret masters and a particular combination of alleles, a particular gene, or more than one possibly, comes into being occasionally to rule all the others, for what purpose we can only guess. These very special genes can cause other genes to do their bidding, cause a change in metabolism that keeps a freezing infant from dying, regulate heart and lung functions to allow a drowned boy to be revived, alter every tissue in the human body and permit it to walk away from an impact that should have killed it outright…”

  Tony yawned. There had been more, three hours' worth more, but he had condensed, combined, edited, and had made it coherent. He wished he had some aspirin. What he had done was compact a yard of garbage into a small neat package, but it was still the same garbage. He took a shower and went to bed, and felt lost in an acre of hard, cold, polyester loneliness.

  He was up and dressed by seven-thirty, determined to be gone before West Coast people, Berkeley people, before Georgina was awake. He ordered breakfast, and while waiting for it he stuffed papers into his briefcase, leaving Bressler's stack to be turned in at the front desk, to be put in the man's message box, or thrown away, or whatever. When those were the only reading material remaining, he glanced at them.

  The subject reports were on top. Everett Simes, at eleven, had been found in a snowdrift, body temperature sixty-three. He had survived with no ill effects. At nineteen he had fallen off a two-hundred-foot cliff and had walked away from the accident, no ill effects. Vera Tanger had survived an explosion in a restaurant that had killed everyone else there; she had survived having her stalled car totaled by a train. Carl Waley, two miraculous survivals. Beverly Wang, two. Stanley R. Griggs, two.

  He replaced the papers in the folder when there was a knock on his door. His breakfast had arrived, and looming over the cart was Dr. Bressler, nearly pushing it himself in his eagerness to gain entrance.

  “Peter, I'm so glad you're up and about already. Did you read my material?”

  Tony motioned to the waiter to unload the cart by the window, signed the charge, and waved him away without speaking.

  “Do you have another cup lurking under there?” Bressler asked. The waiter produced another cup and saucer. “And you might bring another pot of coffee,” Bressler said. He settled down at the window table and began to lift lids off dishes.

  They shared the breakfast; Bressler ate only the finger food since he had no silverware. Sausage was finger food. He talked consta
ntly.

  “The subjects I'm after all had at least two escapes,” he said. “Often three or even four. But two is sufficient. I excluded those with only one reported escape. One could be considered coincidence, but two, three, four? Forget coincidence. No one knows how many possible subjects are out there; not all accidents get reported, of course. I settled for five who live close enough to New York to make it possible, I thought, to extract a sample from them. Hair follicles, saliva, blood, skin scrapings. You know, you're a scientist. But four times in the past two years the graduate students I sent out had accidents of their own. One lost the hair brush he had stolen when he was mugged. Another was chased away by a ferocious dog; he fell and broke his leg trying to elude the beast. One never could get near the subject; she was as wary as a Mata Hari.” He smiled at his little rhyme. “My students are showing some reluctance concerning further attempts.”

  Tony emptied the coffee pot into his cup.

  Bressler looked at it in disappointment. “Have you come up with an idea?” he asked then.

  “Ask outright for a sample,” Tony said. “Offer to pay five bucks a spit. Align yourself with a doctor, a clinic or something like that, and offer free checkups. Find their dentists and pay him to collect a sample. Hire a mugger and have him do a scraping before he snatches the loot. Hire a flock of guys in white coats to swarm over an apartment building, or an office, or wherever the hell the subject is, and say you're checking for an outbreak of plague. Hire some prostitutes, male and female, to seduce them one and all.” There was a tap on the door; he went to open it. “There must be a thousand ways you can get what you're after.” He admitted the waiter with another pot of coffee.

  When they were alone again, Bressler was beaming. “See, that's what I meant. A man with certain training. I tried some of those ideas, of course, but some are quite ingenious. I couldn't do anything that even suggested harm, naturally. Heaven alone knows what the repercussions would be if the genes thought they were under attack. It's bad enough that they know they have been discovered.” He poured coffee for them both.