Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  Inside, modern desks and new computers lined one side of a huge white room. At the other end, there was a small lab with racks of glassware and a centrifuge. Color-coded gene charts covered the walls. Yellow lines braided into red, producing orange offspring. Bright pink Post-it notes followed one line and dead-ended with a handwritten note and an arrow drawn in black marker. She could read the print without effort: Autism?

  Mitten-handed mutants. Ghostly spirit children.

  She let herself down from the windowsill and crept through brittle grass to the edge of the wire fence.

  Inside, she could see one end of the compound and the lights of the blockhouse beyond. Dark human shapes were silhouetted against small fires and she realized she’d expected them to be treated as inmates, locked up for the night and under constant guard. Instead she could smell the wood smoke and hear their muffled voices. Women laughing. A baby squalling, then shushed. Hands pattered on a drum.

  She touched the fence with the back of her hand, testing for current.

  Nothing.

  She listened, but there was no alarm that she could hear.

  Someone chanted a verse of a song. A chorus of children sang in answer. For the first time, Maria saw the enormity of what she was about to do.

  The Cure for Everything. Not just Lucknow’s.

  She pulled out the cutters and started working on the fence. The gene chart. Autism. The way his voice had sounded, shrieking Jamarikuma! None of this was right.

  She crawled through the hole in the fence and they saw her right away. The singing and conversation stopped. She got to her feet, brushed off her knees and went near enough to the closest fire to be seen, but not close enough to be threatening. The Cure for Everything gave Maria a quick, urgent nod but he didn’t stand up. Around him, a few heads cocked in recognition of her face, her skin.

  The withered old woman Maria had seen at Xingu hobbled over from one of the other fires, leaning on her walking stick. She frowned at Maria and started speaking in accented Portuguese.

  “We saw you at Xingu. You’re the Jamarikuma. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to help,” said Maria.

  “Help us do what?” said the old woman.

  “You don’t have to stay in this place,” said Maria. “If you do, you and your children and your grandchildren’s children won’t ever be allowed to leave.”

  The old woman—and half a dozen other older members of the tribe—glanced at the Cure. Not in a particularly friendly way.

  “What’s this all about?” said the old woman to the Cure, still in Portuguese. “You’ve got a spirit arguing for you now?”

  He replied in their own language. To Maria he sounded sulky.

  “Do you understand why you’re here? ” said Maria. “These people …” She gestured at the looming buildings. “They want your blood, your…” Genes might mean souls to them. “You have a—a talent to cure diseases,” said Maria. “That’s why they want your blood.”

  Guarded eyes stared back from around the fire.

  The old woman nodded. “What’s so bad about that?”

  “You won’t ever be able to go back home,” said Maria.

  The old woman snorted. “At home they were trying to shoot us.” She spat into the fire. “We’re afraid to go back there.”

  “But here we’re animals.” The Cure pushed himself to his feet. “We’re prisoners!”

  “We’ve had this discussion,” said the old woman sharply and turned to Maria. “We made a decision months ago. We said he didn’t have to stay if he didn’t want to, but he stayed anyway, and now he’s bringing in spirits to make an argument that no one else agrees with. We’re safer right here than we’ve been for years. No one’s shooting at us. So we have to wear their ugly jewelry.” She touched the ruby sampler in her ear. “So we lose a little blood now and then. It’s just a scratch.”

  “But you’re in a cage,” said Maria.

  “I don’t like that part,” said the old woman. “But you have to admit, it’s a big cage, and mostly it keeps the bandits and murderers out.”

  The Cure jabbed a finger at Maria, making his point in harsh staccato tones. Maria only caught the word Xingu.

  The old woman eyed Maria. “What would happen to us at Xingu?”

  “We’d teach you how to be part of the world outside,” said Maria. “We’d show you what you need to know to be farmers, or to live in the city if that’s what you want.”

  “Are there guns in the world outside?”

  It was a patronizing question. Maria felt sweat break out at the small of her back. “You know there are.”

  “Would we all be able to stay together, the entire tribe?” asked the old woman.

  “We do the best we can,” said Maria. “Sometimes it isn’t possible to keep everyone together, but we try.”

  The old woman made a wide gesture into the dark. “We didn’t lose one single person on the trip. You’re saying you can’t guarantee that for us at Xingu, though. Is that right?”

  “Right,” said Maria.

  “But we’d be free.”

  Maria didn’t say anything.

  The old woman made a sharp gesture. “It’s time for the Jamarikuma spirit to leave. If that’s what she actually is.” She closed her eyes and began to hum, a spirit-dismissing song, Maria supposed, and she glanced at the Cure, who leaped to his feet.

  “I am leaving. With the Jamarikuma.”

  The old woman nodded, still humming, as though she was glad he’d finally made up his mind.

  The Cure took a step away from the fire. He walked—no, he sauntered around his silent friends, family, maybe even his wife. No one said anything and no one was shedding any tears. He came over to Maria and stood beside her.

  “I will not come back,” he said.

  The old woman hummed a little louder, like she was covering his noise with hers.

  When they got back to the Toyota, Maria unlocked the passenger side and let him in. He shut the door and she walked slowly around the back to give herself time to breathe. Her heart was pounding and her head felt empty and light, like she was dreaming. She leaned against the driver’s side, just close enough to see his dim reflection in the side mirror. He was rubbing his sweaty face, hard, as though he could peel away his skin.

  In that moment, she felt as though she could reach into the night, to just the right place and find an invisible door which would open into the next day. It was the results of a night with him that she wanted, she realized. He was like a prize she’d just won. For the first time, she wondered what his name was.

  She pulled the driver’s side open and got in beside him. She turned the key in the ignition and checked the rearview mirror as the dashboard lit up. All she could see of herself was a ghostly, indistinct shape.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine.” She said and let the truck blunder forward into the insect-laden night.

  Later, when the access road evened out to pavement, he put his hot palm on her thigh. She kept driving, watching how the headlights cut only so far ahead into the darkness. She stopped just before the main road, and without looking at him, reached out to touch his fingers.

  “Are we going to Xingu?” he asked, like a child.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t go back.”

  “Neither can I,” he said, and let her kiss him. Here. And there.

  THE SUSPECT GENOME

  Peter F. Hamilton

  Here’s an absorbing and intricately plotted mystery set in a troubled future England, a story that expertly and effortlessly mixes two genres to produce a hybrid worthy of the best of either: a science fiction mystery full of surprises, where nothing is as it seems to be.

  Prolific new British writer Peter F. Hamilton has sold to Interzone, In Dreams, New Worlds, Fears and elsewhere. He sold his first novel, Mindstar Rising, in 1993, and quickly followed it up with two sequels, A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower, all detailing f
urther adventures of Greg Mendel, who also features in “The Suspect Genome”. Hamilton’s first three books didn’t attract a great deal of attention, on this side of the Atlantic, at least, but that changed dramatically with the publication of his next novel, The Reality Dysfunction, a huge modern Space Opera (it needed to be divided into two volumes for publication in the United States) that is itself only the start of a projected trilogy of staggering size and scope, the Night’s Dawn trilogy. The Reality Dysfunction has been attracting the reviews and the acclaim that his prior novels did not, and has suddenly put Hamilton on the map, perhaps a potential rival for writers such as Dan Simmons, Iain Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Greg Benford, C. J. Cherryh, Stephen R. Donaldson, Colin Greenland and other major players in the expanding subgenre of Modern Baroque Space Opera, an increasingly popular area these days. The subsequent novel in the trilogy, The Neutronmm Alchemist, generated the same kind of excited critical buzz. Hamilton’s most recent books include his first collection, A Second Chance at Eden, the third novel in the Night’s Dawn trilogy, The Naked God, and a novella chapbook, “Watching Trees Grow.

  One - The Dodgy Deal

  It was only quarter past nine on that particular Monday morning, but the September sun was already hot enough to soften the tarmac of Oakham’s roads. The broad deep-tread tires of Richard Townsend’s Mercedes were unaffected by the mildly adhesive quality of the surface, producing a sly purring sound as they crossed the spongy black surface.

  Radio Rutland played as he drove. The station was still excited by the news about Byrne Tyler—the celebrity’s death was the biggest thing to happen in the area all month. A newscaster was interviewing some detective about the lack of an arrest. The body had been found on Friday, and the police still had nothing.

  Richard turned onto the High Street, and the road surface improved noticeably. The heart of the town was thriving again. Local shops were competing with the national brand-name stores that were muscling in on the central real estate, multiplying in the wake of the economic good times that had come to the town. Richard always regretted not having any interests in the new consumerism rush, but he’d been just too late to leap on that gravy train. Real money had been very short in the immediate aftermath of the PSP years, which was when the retail sector began its revival.

  He drove into the Pillings Industrial Precinct, an area of small factories and warehouses at the outskirts of the town. Trim allotments down the right hand side of the road were planted with thick banana trees, their clumps of green fruit waving gently in the muggy breeze. The sturdy trunks came to a halt beside a sagging weed-webbed fence that sketched out a jumble of derelict land. All that remained of the factory that once stood there was a litter of shattered bricks and broken concrete footings half glimpsed among the tangle of nettles and rampant vines. A new sign had been pounded into the iron-hard ocher clay, proclaiming it to be Zone 7, and Ready For Renewal, a Rutland Council/Townsend Properties partnership.

  Zone 7 was an embarrassment. It was the first site anyone saw when they entered the Pillings Precinct: a ramshackle remnant of the bad old days. The irony being Pillings was actually becoming quite a success story. Most of the original units, twentieth-century factories and builders’ merchants, had been refurbished to house viable new businesses, while the contemporary zones, expanding out into the verdant cacao plantations that encircled the town, were sprouting the uniform blank sugar-cube structures of twenty-first-century construction. Seamless weather-resistant composite walls studded with mushroom-like air-conditioning vents, and jet-black solar-cell roofs. Whatever industry was conducted inside, it was securely masked by the standardized multipurpose façades. Even Richard wasn’t sure what some of the companies did.

  He parked the Merc outside his own offices, a small brick building recently renovated. Colm, his assistant, was already inside, going through the datapackages that had accumulated overnight on his desktop terminal.

  “The architect for Zone 31 wants you to visit,” he said as Richard walked in. “There’s some problem with the floor reinforcements. And a Mr. Alan O’Hagen would like to see you. He suggested 10:30 this morning.”

  Richard paused. “Do I know him?”

  Colm consulted his terminal. “We don’t have any file on record. He said he may be interested in a zone.”

  “Ah.” Richard smiled. “Fine, 10:30.”

  It was a typical morning spent juggling data. Builders, suppliers, clients, accountants, local planning officials; they all expected him to clear up the mess they were making of their own jobs. He’d spent a lot of his own money over the last four years, schmoozing and paying off the county and town councillors to get his partnership with the precinct project, and it had paid off. Townsend Properties was currently involved in developing eight of the zones, with architects working on plans for another three. Having the massive Event Horizon corporation open a memox processing facility on Zone 12 a year ago had been a real triumph for the town; other smaller corporations had immediately begun to nose around, eager for subcontracts. Quite how the council development officers managed to pull off that coup always baffled Richard. He’d never known a supposedly professional team quite as incompetent as the people who worked at Rutland Council. Every job he undertook was besieged by official delays and endless obstructionist revisions.

  The man who walked in at 10:30 prompt wasn’t quite what Richard had expected. He was in his late fifties, nothing like any of those eager young business types who normally came sniffing around the precinct. Alan O’Hagen wore a gray business suit with a pale purple tie. He had a sense of authority which made Richard automatically straighten up in his chair and reach to adjust his own tie. Even the man’s handshake was carefully controlled, an impression of strength held in reserve.

  “What can I do for you?” Richard asked as his visitor settled into the leather chair before the desk.

  “My company.” Alan O’Hagen held up a silver palmtop cybofax. Its key blinked with a tiny pink light as it squirted a data package into the desktop terminal. Richard scanned the information quickly.

  “Firedrake Marketing? I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it.”

  O’Hagen smiled. “No reason you should. It’s a small virtual company I own. I trade on-circuit, specializing in albums and multimedia drama games. I have some German software houses signed up, and a couple of African jazz bands who aren’t well distributed in Europe. Naturally, I’d like to rectify that.”

  “Uh huh.” Richard made an immediate guess about what kind of German software—the end of the PSP hadn’t seen a total reversal of censorship in England. “So how does the Pillings Precinct fit in with all this?”

  “I want Firedrake to become more than a virtual company. At the moment it consists of a circuit site with a few trial samples you can access, and an order form. I subcontract distribution and delivery to a mail-order company in Peterborough. After their fees, I’m not left with much in the way of profit. What I want to do is build up a distribution arm myself.”

  “I see.” Richard made sure he wasn’t grinning. It would appear predatory at this point. “And you’d like to build that distribution company here.”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “A very advantageous one for you. Event Horizon’s memox plant would be next door, so there’d be no shortage of crystals, and we do have an excellent rail service to both Peterborough and Leicester. Not to mention a generous start-up tax allowance.”

  “Every industrial precinct does, these days,” O’Hagen said. “Corby is offering a flat-rate construction loan for anyone starting on either of their new precincts.”

  Richard blanked his irritation at the mention of Corby. He’d lost three clients to their precinct developers in the last six weeks. “You’ll find us a competitive match for any other precinct, I assure you.”

  “What about construction times?”

  “That depends on the size of the operation you’re looking for, of course.”

  “Nothing extrava
gant to start with, but I will require a zone with considerable potential for expansion if things take off.”

  “As I’m sure they will.” Richard walked over to the precinct map pinned on the wall. “I have several zones I can offer you.”

  It took another two hours of cajoling before O’Hagen left. Richard had squirted just about every brochure and data package he’d got into the businessman’s cybofax. He’d hate to play the man at poker; no hint of how keen he was had leaked from that impassive face. But the good news was that O’Hagen had invited Richard for dinner that night, suggesting the Lord Nelson restaurant in the Market Square.

  After lunch, Richard drove to the courthouse in the town’s old castle hall. Jodie Dobson, his solicitor, was waiting for him in the car park. In her mid-thirties, a junior partner in one of the local firms, she was more than capable when it came to corporate legal matters.

  “We’ve got plenty of time,” she said, gesturing to the ancient doors. “The land-registry clerk’s only just finished his lunch.”

  “Fine.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of a company called Firedrake?”

  “Should I have?”

  “Not really.” He waved his cybofax. “I was checking their site this lunchtime. They sell a response formulator for interactives. Once you’ve plugged into a drama, it’ll take your character wherever you want to go inside the arena. The plotlines will reconfigure to incorporate your movements and speech into the story. They’re claiming a much better reaction time than other software.”

  “Sounds fairly standard to me.”

  “Yes, but it’s not just for flatscreens, it can handle a total VR immersion. It’s fully compatible with all the major multimedia formats; you can supplement it to whatever drama you buy.”

  “Why the interest?”

  He shrugged and gestured her through the doorway. “I think it could be quite successful.”

  The old stone hall had a vaulted ceiling, and whitewashed plaster walls hung with hundreds of horseshoes. Prior to the Warming the hall had been little more than a historical tourist attraction, used only occasionally for a magistrate’s court. Then in the aftermath of the seas flooding the Lincolnshire fens, the vast influx of refugees had more than doubled Rutland’s population. The hall’s legal activities had expanded to become full-time. Modern partitioning had been used to break up the rear of the hall into small office cubicles. Jodie and Richard maneuvered along a narrow corridor between the transparent sound-proofed walls. The Land Registry & Claims cubicle was barely large enough to hold the two of them as well as the clerk.