Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  Cowell shut her out as best he could. He brought his chair close enough to touch the shield. Still nothing: no tingle, no humming, no moving. Nothing at all.

  That first time rushed back to him, in sharp sensory detail. The fatigue, the strain, the rustle of corn husks in the unseen wind. Hans Kleinschmidt’s Styrofoam cup of coffee warm in Cowell’s hand. Ann Pettie’s cry It’s landing here! Run! Cowell’s own strange personal feeling of inevitability: Of course. They wouldn’t let me miss this.

  Well, they had. They’d let the whole world miss whatever the hell the object was supposed to be, or do, or represent. Hans was long dead. Ann was institutionalized with Alzheimer’s. “Hello, ship.” And the rest of his life—of many people’s lives—devoted to trying to figure out the Space Super Fizzle.

  That long frustration, Cowell thought, had showed him one thing, anyway. There was no mystery behind the mystery, no unseen Plan, no alien messiah for humanity. There was only this blank object sitting in a field, stared at by a shrill middle-aged woman and a dying man. What you see is what you get. He, James Everett Cowell, had been a fool to ever hope for anything else.

  “Dad, why are you smiling like that? Don’t, please!”

  “It’s nothing, Barbara.”

  “But you looked—”

  “I said, ‘It’s nothing.’”

  Suddenly he was very tired. It was cold out here, under the grey sky. Snow was in the air.

  “Honey, let’s go back now.”

  They did, Barbara walking close by Cowell’s chair. He didn’t look back at the object, silent on the fallow ground.

  Transmission: There is nothing here yet.

  Current probability of occurrence: 67%

  II: 2090

  The girl, dressed in home-dyed blue cotton pants and a wolf pelt bandeau, said suddenly, “Tam—what’s that​?”

  Tam Wilkinson stopped walking, although his goat herd did not. The animals moved slowly forward, pulling at whatever tough grass they could find on the parched ground. Three-legged Himmie hobbled close to the herd leader; blind Jimmie turned his head in the direction of Himmie’s bawl. “What’s what?” the boy said.

  “Over there, to the north… no, there.”

  The boy shaded his eyes against the summer sun, hot under the thin clouds. He and Juli would have to find noon shade for the goats soon. Tarn’s eyes weren’t strong, but by squinting and peering, he caught the glint of sunlight on something dull silvery. “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s go see.”

  Tam looked bleakly at Juli. They had married only a few months ago, in the spring. She was so pretty, hardly any deformity at all. The doctor from St Paul had issued her a fertility certificate at only fourteen. But she was impulsive. Tam, three years older, came from a family unbroken since the Collapse. They hadn’t accomplished that by impulsive behaviour.

  “No, Juli. We have to find shade for the goats.”

  “It could be shade. O, or even a machine with some good metal on it!”

  “This whole area was stripped long ago.”

  “Maybe they missed something.”

  Tam considered. She could be right; since their marriage, he and Juli had brought the goats pretty far beyond their usual range. Not many people had ventured into the Great Northern Waste for pasturage. The whole area had been too hard hit at the Collapse, leaving the soil too contaminated and the standing water even worse. But the summer had been unusually rainy, creating the running water that was so much safer than ponds or lakes, and anyway Tam and Juli had delighted in being alone. Maybe there was a forgotten machine with usable parts still sitting way out here, from before the Collapse. What a great thing to bring home from his honeymoon!

  “Please,” Juli said, nibbling his ear, and Tam gave in. She was so pretty. In Tarn’s entire family, no women were as pretty, nor as nearly whole, as Juli. His sister Nan was loose-brained, Calie had only one arm, Jen was blind, and Suze could not walk. Only Jen was fertile, even though the Wilkinson farm was near neither lake nor city. The farm still sat in the path of the west winds coming from Grand Forks. When there had been a Grand Forks.

  Tam and Juli walked slowly, herding the goats, towards the glinting metal. The sun glared pitilessly by the time they reached the object, but the thing, whatever it was, stood beside a stand of scrawny trees in a little dell. Tam drove the goats into the shade. His practised eye saw that once there had been water here, but no longer. They would have to move on by early afternoon.

  When the goats were settled, the lovers walked hand-in-hand towards the object. “O,” Juli said, “it’s an egg! A metal egg!” Suddenly she clutched Tarn’s arm. “Is it… do you think it’s a polluter?”

  Tam felt growing excitement. “No—I know what this is! Gran told me, before she died!”

  “It’s not a polluter?”

  “No, it… well, actually, nobody knows exactly what it’s made of. But it’s safe, dear love. It’s a miracle.”

  “A what?” Juli said.

  “A miracle.” He tried not to sound superior; Juli was sensitive about her lack of education. Tam was teaching her to read and write. “A gift directly from God. A long time ago—a few hundred years, I think, anyway before the Collapse—this egg fell out of the sky. No one could figure out why. Then one day a beautiful princess touched it, and she got pregnant and bore twin sons.”

  “Really?” Juli breathed. She ran a few steps forward, then considerately slowed for Tarn’s halting walk. “What happened then?”

  Tam shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. The Collapse happened.”

  “So this egg, it just sat here since then? Come on, sweet one, I want to see it up close. It just sat here? When women try so hard, us, to get pregnant?”

  The boy didn’t like the sceptical tone in her voice. He was the one with the educated family. “You don’t understand, Juli. This thing didn’t make everybody pregnant, just that one princess. It was a special miracle from God.”

  “I thought you told me that before the Collapse, nobody needed no miracles to get pregnant, because there wasn’t no pollutants in the water and air and ground?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So then when this princess got herself pregnant, why was it such a miracle?”

  “Because she was a virgin, loose-brain!” After a minute he added, “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m going to look at the egg,” Juli said stiffly, and this time she ran ahead without waiting.

  When Tam caught up, Juli was sitting cross-legged in prayer in front of the egg. It was smaller than he had expected, no bigger than a goat shed, a slightly irregular oval of dull silver. Around it the ground shimmered with heat. Minnesota hadn’t always been so hot, Gran had told Tam in her papery old-lady voice, and he suddenly wondered what this place had looked like when the egg fell out of the sky.

  Could it be a polluter? It didn’t look like it manufactured anything, and certainly Tam couldn’t see any plastic parts to it. Nothing that could flake off in bits too tiny to see and get into the air and water and wind and living bodies. Still, if they were so very small, these dangerous pieces of plastic “endocrine mimickers”, Gran had taught Tam to call them, though he had no idea what the words meant. Doctors in St Paul knew, probably. Although what good was knowing, if you couldn’t fix the problem and make all babies as whole as Juli?

  She sat saying her prayer beads so fervently that Tam was annoyed with her all over again. Really, she just wasn’t steady. Playful, then angry, then prayerful she’d better be more reliable than that when the babies started to come. But then Juli raised her eyes to him, lake-blue, and appealed to his greater knowledge, and he softened again.

  “Tam… do you think it’s all right to pray to it? Since it did come from God?”

  “I’m sure it’s all right, honey. What are you praying for?”

  “Twin sons, like the princess got.” Juli scrambled to her feet. “Can I touch it?”

  Tam felt sudden fear. “No! No—better not. I will, instea
d.” When those twin sons came, he wanted them to be of his seed, not the egg’s.

  Cautiously the boy put out one hand, which stopped nearly a foot away from the silvery shell. Tam pushed harder. He couldn’t get any closer to the egg. “It’s got an invisible wall around it!”

  “Really? Then can I touch it? It’s not really touching the egg!”

  “No! The wall is all the princess must have touched, too.”

  “Maybe the wall, it wasn’t there a long time ago. Maybe it grew, like crops.”

  Tam frowned, torn between pride and irritation at her quick thought. “Don’t touch it, Juli. After all, for all we know, you might already be pregnant.”

  She obeyed, stepping back and studying the object. Suddenly her pretty face lit up. “Tam! Maybe it’s a miracle for us, too! For the whole family!”

  “The whole—”

  “For Nan and Calie and Suze! And your cousins, too! O, if they come here and touch the egg—or the egg wall—maybe they can get pregnant like the princess did, straight from God!”

  “I don’t think—”

  “If we came back before winter, in easy stages, and knowing ahead of time where the water was, they could all get pregnant! You could talk them into it, dear heart! You’re the only one they listen to, even your parents. The only one who can make plans and carry out them plans. You know you are.”

  She looked at him with adoration. Tam felt something inside him glow and expand. And O, she really was quick, even if she couldn’t read or write. His parents were old, at least forty, and they’d never been as quick as Tam. That was why Gran had taught him so much directly, all sorts of things she’d learned from her grandmother, who could remember the Collapse.

  He said, with slow weightiness, “If the workers in the family stayed to raise crops, we could bring the goats and the infertile women… in easy stages, I think, before fall. Provided we map ahead of time where the safe water is.”

  “O, I know you can!”

  Tam frowned thoughtfully, and reached out again to touch the silent, unreachable egg.

  Just before the small expedition left the Wilkinson farm, Dr Sutter showed up on his dirtbike.

  Why did he have to come now? Tam didn’t like Dr Sutter, who always acted so superior. He biked around the farms and villages, supposedly “helping people“—O, he did help some people, maybe, but not Tarn’s family, who were in their village. Not really helped. O, he’d brought drugs for Gran’s aching bones, and for Suze’s fever, from the hospital in St Paul. But he hadn’t been able to stop Tarn’s sisters—or anybody else—from being born the way they were, and not all his “medical training” could make Suze or Nan or Calie fertile. And Dr Sutter lorded it over Tam, who otherwise was the smartest person in the family.

  “I’m afraid,” Suze said. She rode the family mule; the others walked. Suze and Calie; Nan, led by Tarn’s cousin Jack; Uncle Seddie and Uncle Ned, both armed; Tam and Juli. Juli stood talking, sparkly eyed, to Sutter. To Tarn’s disappointment, no baby had been started on the honeymoon.

  He said, “Nothing to be afraid of, Suze. Juli! Time to go!”

  She danced over to him. “Dave’s coming, too! He says he got a few weeks’ vacation and would like to see the egg. He knows about it, Tam!”

  Of course he did. Tam set his lips together and didn’t answer.

  “He says it’s from people on another world, not from God, and—”

  “My gran said it was from God,” Tam said sharply. At his tone, Juli stopped walking.

  “Tam—”

  “I’ll speak to Sutter myself. Telling you these city lies. Now go walk by Suze. She’s afraid.”

  Juli, eyes no longer sparkling, obeyed. Tam told himself he was going to go over and have this out with Sutter, just as soon as he got everything going properly. Of course the egg was from God! Gran had said so, and anyway, if it wasn’t, what was the point of this whole expedition, taking workers away from the farm, even if it was the mid-summer quiet between planting and harvest.

  But somehow, with one task and another, Tam didn’t find time to confront Sutter until night, when they were camped by the first lake.

  Calie and Suze slept, and the others sat around a comfortable fire, full of corn mush and fresh rabbit. Somewhere in the darkness, a wolf howled.

  “Lots more of those than when I was young,” said Uncle Seddie, who was almost seventy. “Funny thing, too—when you trap ’em, they’re hardly ever deformed. Not like rabbits or frogs. Frogs, they’re the worst.”

  Sutter said, “Wolves didn’t move back down to Minnesota until after the Collapse. Up in Canada, they weren’t as exposed to endocrine-mimicking pollutants. And frogs have always been the worst; water animals are especially sensitive to environmental factors.”

  Some of the words were the same ones Gran had used, but that didn’t make Tam like them any better. He didn’t know what they meant, and he wasn’t about to ask Sutter.

  Juli did, though. “Those endo… endo… what are they, doctor?”

  He smiled at her, his straight white teeth gleaming in the firelight. “Environmental pollutants that bind to receptor sites all over the body, disrupting its normal function. They especially affect fetuses. Just before the Collapse, they reached some sort of unanticipated critical mass, and suddenly there were worldwide fertility problems, neurological impairments, cerebral. Sorry, Juli, you got me started on my medical diatribe. I mean, pretty lady, that too few babies were born, and too many of those who were born couldn’t think or move right, and we had the Collapse.”

  Beside him, Nan, born loose-brained, crooned softly to herself.

  Juli said innocently, “But I thought the Collapse, it came from wars and money and bombs and things like that.”

  “Yes,” Sutter said, “but those things happened because of the population and neurological problems.”

  “O, I’m just glad I didn’t live then!” Ned said, shuddering. “It must have been terrible, especially in the cities.”

  Juli said, “But, doctor, aren’t you from a city?”

  Sutter looked into the flames. The wolf howled again. “Some cities fared much better than others. We lost most of the East Coast, you know, to various terrorist wars, and —”

  “Everybody knows that,” Tam said witheringly.

  Sutter was undeterred, “--and California to rioting and looting. But St Paul came through, eventually. And a basic core of knowledge and skills persisted, even if only in the urban areas. Science, medicine, engineering. We don’t have the skilled population, or even a neurologically functional population, but we haven’t really gone pre-industrial. There are even pockets of research, especially in biology. We’ll beat this, some day.”

  “I know we will!” Juli said, her eyes shining. She was always so optimistic. Like a child, not a grown woman.

  Tam said, “And meanwhile, the civilized types like you graciously go around to the poor country villages that feed you and bless them with your important skills.”

  Sutter looked at him across the fire. “That’s right, Tam.” Uncle Seddie said, “Enough arguing. Go to bed, everybody.” Seddie was the ranking elder; there was no choice but to obey. Tam pulled Juli up with him, and in their bedroll he copulated with her so hard that she had to tell him to be more gentle, he was hurting her.

  They reached the egg, by the direct route Tam had mapped out, in less than a week. Another family already camped beside it.

  The two approached each other warily, guns and precious ammunition prominently displayed. But the other family, the Janeways, turned out to be a lot like the Wilkinsons, a goat-and-farm clan whose herdsmen had discovered the egg and brought others back to see the God-given miracle.

  Tam, standing behind Seddie and Ned, said, “There’s some that don’t think it is from God.”

  The ranking Janeway, a tough old woman lean as Gran had been, said sharply, “Where else could it come from, way out here? No city tech left this here.”

  “That’s what we say,�
� Seddie answered. He lowered his rifle. “You people willing to trade provisions? We got maple syrup, corn mush, some good pepper.”

  “Pepper?” The old woman’s eyes brightened. “You got pepper?”

  “We trade with a family that trades in St Paul,” Ned said proudly. “Twice a year, spring and fall.”

  “We got sugar and an extra radio.”

  Tam’s chin jerked up. A radio! But that was worth more than any amount of provisions. Nobody would casually trade a radio.

  “Our family runs to boys, nearly all boys,” the old woman said, by way of explanation. She looked past Tam, at Juli and Calie and Suze and Nan, hanging back with the mule and backpacks. “They’re having trouble finding fertile wives. If any of your girls… and if the young people liked each other… “

  “Juli, the blond, she’s married to Tam here,” Seddie said. “And the other girls, they aren’t fertile… yet.”

  “’Yet?’ What do you mean, ‘yet’?”

  Seddie pointed with his rifle at the egg. “Don’t you know what that is?”

  “A gift from God,” the woman said.

  “Yes. But don’t you know about the princess and her twins? Tell her, Tam.”

  Tam told the story, feeling himself thrill to it as he did so. The woman listened intently, then squinted again at the girls. Seddie said quickly, “Nan is loose-brained, I have to tell you. And Suze is riding because her foot is crippled, although she’s got the sweetest, meekest nature you could ever find. But Calie there, even though she’s got a withered arm, is quick and smart and can do almost anything. And after she touches the egg… but, ma’am, Wilkinsons don’t force marriages on our women. Never. Calie’d have to like one of your sons, and want to go with you.”

  “O, we can see what happens,” the woman said, and winked, and for a second Tam saw what she must have been once, long ago, on a sweet summer night like this one when she was young.

  He said suddenly, “The girls have to touch the egg at dawn.”