Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  “Hey, Benny,” I said in a low voice. “What about the goldfish vine?”

  Benny turned around and stared at it. Polly moved back into her cubicle so she wouldn’t block the view, but after a minute Benny put his hands in his pockets and walked off. Well, poor Polly, I thought.

  But just before five, I turned around and Benny wasn’t behind me. I found him at the Nemanthus gregarius. Jeez Benny, I thought, we need to know the name of the game here. Declare extract of Nemanthus gregarius the fountain of youth or tell Polly she has a nice plant but nothing special. I steered him out of the building and back to the Marriott.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen”, day 4.

  Dinner.

  I ordered Benny’s burger and a steak for me. We sat there eating, the only sound between us a muffled “Dancing Queen”. After last night, I was not attempting conversation.

  I’d taken time before dinner to look up Nemanthus gregarius on the Net. It is not endangered. It grows like weeds in cubicles. It can’t cure a thing.

  I didn’t know what Benny was doing.

  He sucked up the last of his glass of Coke and put the glass down a little hard on the table. I looked up at him.

  “I want to find a new plant and name it for Agnetha,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My goal in life,” he said. “If you tell anyone, I’ll see that you’re fired.”

  “You’re looking for a new plant species in office buildings?”

  “I’d actually like to find one for each of the four members of Abba, but Agnetha’s first.”

  And I’d thought finding one completely new species was too much to ask.

  “When Abba sang, the world was so lush,” Benny said. “You can hear it in their music. It resonates with what’s left of the natural world. It helps me save it.”

  It was my turn to be quiet. All I could think was, it works for Benny. He’s had plenty of success, after all, and who hasn’t heard of crazier things than the music of dead pop stars leading some guy to new plant species?

  When I wrote up my daily reports that night, I left out Benny’s goals. Some things the higher-ups don’t need to know.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen”, day 5.

  UP&L offices.

  We spent the day looking at more sorry specimens of Cordyline terminalis, Columnea gloriosa, and Codiaeum variegatum than I care to remember. By the end of the day, Benny started handing out the occasional watering tip, so I knew even he was giving up.

  “Netnantkus gregarius?” I asked in the elevator on the way down.

  Suddenly he punched 6. He walked straight to Polly’s cubicle and stuck out his hand. “I owe you an apology,” he said.

  Polly just sat there. She was facing her own little Waterloo, and she did it bravely.

  “I thought your Nemanthus gregarius might be a subspecies not before described, but it isn’t. It’s the common variety. A nice specimen, though.”

  We left quickly. At least he didn’t give her any watering tips.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 47: “Dancing Queen”, day 5.

  Wandering the streets.

  The thing about Benny is, if it doesn’t work out and we’ve studied every plant on thirty floors of an office tower without finding even a Calathea lancifolia, he can’t stand it. He wanders up and down the streets, poking into every little shop. He never buys anything—he isn’t shopping. I think he’s hoping to spot some rare plant in the odd tobacconist or magazine shop and to do it fast. I have a hard time keeping up with him then, and heaven forbid I should decide to buy something on sale for a Mother’s Day gift.

  We rushed through two used bookstores, an oriental rug store, four art galleries, three fast food joints. “Benny,” I said. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  “It’s here,” he said.

  “What’s where?”

  “There’s something here, and we just haven’t found it.”

  The Dancing Queen was resonating, I supposed. Shops were closing all around us.

  “You check the Indian jewellery store while I check Mr Q’s Big and Tall,” he told me. “We meet outside in five.”

  I did like I was told. I smiled at the Navajo woman in traditional dress, but she did not smile back. She wanted to lock up. I made a quick sweep of the store and noted the various species of endangered cacti and left. Benny was not on the sidewalk. I went into Mr Q’s after him.

  He was standing perfectly still in front of a rack of shirts on sale, hands in his pockets.

  “These are too big for you,” I said.

  “Window display, southeast corner.”

  Well, I walked over there. It was a lovely little display of Rhipsalis salicornioid.es, Pbalaenopsis lueddemanniana, and Streptocarpus saxorum. Nothing unusual.

  Then I looked closer at the Streptocarpus saxorum. The flowers weren’t the typical powder blue or lilac. They were a light yellow.

  The proprietor walked up to me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we’re closing. Could you bring your final purchases to the register?”

  “I’m just admiring your cape primrose,” I said. “Where do they come from?”

  “My mother grows them,” he said. “She gave me these plants when I opened the store.”

  “Did she travel in Africa or Madagascar?”

  “Her brother was in the foreign service. She used to follow him around to his postings. I don’t remember where she went—I’d have to ask her.”

  “Do you mind if I touch one of the plants?” I asked.

  He said sure. The leaves were the typical hairy, grey-green ovals; the flowers floated above the leaves on wire-thin stems. It was definitely Streptocarpus, but I’d never seen anything like it described.

  “I think you should call your mother,” I said, and I explained who Benny and I were.

  The store closed, but Mr Proprietor and his staff waited with us for the mother to arrive. The whole time Benny just stood by the sale rack, eyes closed, hands in his pockets. “You’ve done it again,” I whispered to him.

  He didn’t answer me. Just as I turned to walk back over to the cape primrose, he opened his eyes. “Streptocarpus agnethum,” he whispered.

  And he smiled.

  Abba, Fältskog Listing 32: “I Have a Dream”, day 2.

  Agnetha’s grave.

  The thing about Benny is, he’s generous. He took me to Sweden with him, and we planted Streptocarpus agnethum, or “dancing queen”, around Agnetha’s gravestone. Turns out the flower wasn’t a cure for anything, but it was a new species and Benny got to name it.

  “Agnetha would have loved these flowers,” I told Benny.

  He just kept planting. We had a nice sound system on the ground beside us, playing her music—well, just one of her songs. It talks about believing in angels. I don’t know if I believe in angels, but I can see the good in Benny’s work. Nobody’s bringing back the world we’ve lost, but little pieces of it have survived here and there. Benny was saving some of those pieces.

  “These flowers are so pretty,” I told him.

  Of course he didn’t say anything.

  He didn’t need to.

  THE GREAT GOODBYE

  Robert Charles Wilson

  Here’s a sly and ingenious little glimpse of what the new millennium ahead may have in store for humanity, one of a weekly series of such speculations about the future commissioned by the science magazine Nature…

  Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, to Analog, but little more was heard from him until the late eighties, when he began to publish a string of ingenious and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top ranks of the writers who came to prominence in the last two decades of the twentieth century. His first novel, A Hidden Place, appeared in 1986. He won the Philip K. Dick Award for his 1.995 novel Mysterium, and the Aurora Award for his story “The Perseids.” His other books include the novels Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, The Harvest, A Bridge of Y
ears, Bios and Darwinia. His most recent book is a new novel, The Chronoliths. He lives in Toronto, Canada.

  THE HARDEST PART OF THE Great Goodbye, for me, was knowing I wouldn’t see my grandfather again. We had developed that rare thing, a friendship that crossed the line of the post-evolutionary divide, and I loved him very much.

  Humanity had become, by that autumn of 2350, two very distinct human species—if I can use that antiquated term. Oh, the Stock Humans remain a “species” in the classical evolutionary sense: New People, of course, have forgone all that. Post-evolutionary, post-biological, budded or engineered, New People are gloriously free from all the old human restraints. What unites us all is our common source, the Divine Complexity that shaped primordial quark plasma into stars, planets, planaria, people. Grandfather taught me that.

  I had always known that we would, one day, be separated. But we first spoke of it, tentatively and reluctantly, when Grandfather went with me to the Museum of Devices in Brussels, a day trip. I was young and easily impressed by the full-scale working model of a “steam train” in the Machine Gallery—an amazingly baroque contrivance of ancient metalwork and gas-pressure technology. Staring at it, I thought (because Grandfather had taught me some of his “religion&8221;): Complexity made this. This is made of Stardust, by Stardust.

  We walked from the Machine Gallery to the Gallery of the Planets, drawing more than a few stares from the Stock People (children, especially) around us. It was uncommon to see a New Person fully embodied and in public. The Great Goodbye had been going on for more than a century; New People were already scarce on Earth, and a New Person walking with a Stock Person was an even more unusual sight—risque, even shocking. We bore the attention gamely. Grandfather held his head high and ignored the muttered insults.

  The Gallery of the Planets recorded humanity’s expansion into the Solar System, and I hope the irony was obvious to everyone who sniffed at our presence there: Stock People could not have colonized any of these forbidding places (consider Ganymede in its primeval state!) without the partnership of the New. In a way, Grandfather said, this was the most appropriate place we could have come. It was a monument to the long collaboration that was rapidly reaching its end.

  The stars, at last, are within our grasp. The grasp, anyhow, of the New People. Was this, I asked Grandfather, why he and I had to be so different from one another?

  “Some people,” he said, “some families, just happen to prefer the old ways. Soon enough Earth will belong to the Stocks once again, though I’m not sure this is entirely a good thing.” And he looked at me sadly. “We’ve learned a lot from each other. We could have learned more.”

  “I wish we could be together for centuries and centuries,” I said.

  I saw him for the last time (some years ago now) at the Shipworks,where the picturesque ruins of Detroit rise from the Michigan Waters, and the star-travelling Polises are assembled and wait like bright green baubles to lift, at last and forever, into the sky. Grandfather had arranged this final meeting—in the flesh, so to speak.

  We had delayed it as long as possible. New People are patient: in a way, that’s the point. Stock Humans have always dreamed of the stars, but the stars remain beyond their reach. A Stock Human lifetime is simply too short; one or two hundred years won’t take you far enough. Relativistic constraints demand that travellers between the stars must be at home between the stars. Only New People have the continuity, the patience, the flexibility to endure and prosper in the Galaxy’s immense voids.

  I greeted Grandfather on the high embarkation platform where the wind was brisk and cool. He lifted me up in his arms and admired me with his bright blue eyes. We talked about trivial things, for the simple pleasure of talking. Then he said, “This isn’t easy, this saying goodbye. It makes me think of mortality—that old enemy.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “Perhaps you could still change your mind?”

  I shook my head, no. A New Person can transform himself into a Stock Person and vice versa, but the social taboos are strong, the obstacles (family dissension, legal entanglements) almost insurmountable, as Grandfather knew too well. And in any case that wasn’t my choice. I was content as I was. Or so I chose to believe.

  “Well, then,” he said, empty, for once, of words. He looked away. The Polis would be rising soon, beginning its aeons-long navigation of our near stellar neighbours. Discovering, no doubt, great wonders.

  “Goodbye, boy,” he said.

  I said, “Goodbye, Grandfather.”

  Then he rose to his full height on his many translucent legs, winked one dish-sized glacial blue eye, and walked with a slow machinely dignity to the vessel that would carry him away. And I watched, desolate, alone on the platform with the wind in my hair, as his ship rose into the arc of the high clean noonday sky.

  TENDELEO’S STORY

  Ian McDonald

  Here’s a powerful, compassionate, and darkly lyrical story of a young girl’s coming-of-age in a future Africa that is literally being eaten by an alien invader, and, after passing through that invader’s alien guts, as it were, is being transformed into something rich and strange and totally unexpected. A sea change that extends as well to the lives of the people who find themselves in its way…

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus “Best First Novel” Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out on Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools and the acclaimed Evolution’s Shore, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking in Tongues. His most recent book is a new novel, Kirinya, and a chapbook novella Tendeleo’s Story, both sequels to Evolution’s Shore. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast. He has a web site at http://www.lysator.liu.se/ unicorn/mcdonald/.

  I shall start my story with my name. I am Tendeleo. I was born here, in Gichichi. Does that surprise you? The village has changed so much that no one born then could recognize it now, but the name is still the same. That is why names are important. They remain.

  I was born in 1995, shortly after the evening meal and before dusk. That is what Tendeleo means in my language, Kalenjin: early-evening-shortly-after-dinner. I am the oldest daughter of the pastor of St. John’s Church. My younger sister was born in 1998, after my mother had two miscarriages, and my father asked the congregation to lay hands on her. We called her Little Egg. That is all there are of us, two. My father felt that a pastor should be an example to his people, and at that time the government was calling for smaller families.

  My father had cure of five churches. He visited them on a red scrambler bike the bishop at Nakuru had given him. It was good motorbike, a Yamaha. Japanese. My father loved riding it. He practised skids and jumps on the back roads because he thought a clergyman should not be seen stunt-riding. Of course, people did, but they never said to him. My father built St. John’s. Before him, people sat on benches under trees. The church he made was sturdy and rendered in white concrete. The roof was red tin, trumpet vine climbed over it. In the season flowers would hang down outside the window. It was like being inside a garden. When I hear the story of Adam and Eve, that is how I think of Eden, a place among the flowers. Inside there were benches for the people, a lectern for the sermon and a high chair for when the bishop came to confirm children. Behind the altar rail was the holy table covered with a white cloth and an alcove in the wall for the cup and holy communion plate. We didn’t have a font. We took people to the river and put them under. I and my mother sang in the choir
. The services were long and, as I see them now, quite boring, but the music was wonderful. The women sang, the men played instruments. The best was played by a tall Luo, a teacher in the village school we called, rather blasphemously, Most High. It was a simple instrument: a piston ring from an old Peugeot engine which he hit with a heavy steel bolt. It made a great, ringing rhythm.

  What was left over from the church went into the pastor’s house. It had poured concrete floors and louvre windows, a separate kitchen and a good charcoal stove a parishioner who could weld had made from a diesel drum. We had electric light, two power sockets and a radio/cassette player, but no television. It was inviting the devil to dinner, my father told us. Kitchen, living room, our bedroom, my mother’s bedroom, and my father’s study. Five rooms. We were people of some distinction in Gichichi; for Kalenjin.

  Gichichi was a thin, straggly sort of village; shops, school, post-office, matatu office, petrol station and mandazi shop up on the main road, with most of the houses set off the footpaths that followed the valley terraces. On one of them was our shamba, half a kilometre down the valley. The path to it went past the front door of the Ukerewe family. They had seven children who hated us. They threw dung or stones and called us see-what-we-thought-of-ourselves-Kalenjin and hated-of-God-Episcopalians. They were African Inland Church Kikuyu, and they had no respect for the discipline of the bishop.

  If the church was my father’s Eden, the shamba was my mother’s. The air was cool in the valley and you could hear the river over the stones down below. We grew maize and gourds and some sugar-cane, which the local rummers bought from my father and he pretended not to know. Beans and chillis. Onions and potatoes. Two trees of finger bananas, though M’zee Kipchobe maintained that they sucked the life out of the soil. The maize grew right over my head, and I would run into the sugar-cane and pretend that two steps had taken me out of this world into another. There was always music there; the solar radio, or the women singing together when they helped each other turn the soil or hoe the weeds. I would sing with them, for I was considered good at harmonies. The shamba too had a place where the holy things were kept. Among the thick, winding tendrils of an old tree killed by strangling fig the women left little wooden figures gifts of money, Indian-trader jewellery and beer.