The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 25

by Gardner Dozois

Ken MacLeod

  Here’s another story by Ken MacLeod, whose “Earth Hour” appears elsewhere in this anthology. In this one, he takes us back to Cold War Russia for a story about a creepy Lovecraftian intrusion into our reality that is not only top secret but something that you legitimately Don’t Want to Know . . . and will regret knowing if you do.

  I

  Tentacles and Tomes

  It was in 19—, that unforgettable year, that I first believed that I had unearthed the secret cause of the guilt and shame that so evidently burdened Dr. David Rigley Walker, Emeritus Professor of Zoology at the University of G—. The occasion was casual enough. A module of the advanced class in Zoology dealt with the philosophical and historical aspects of the science. I had been assigned to write an essay on the history of our subject, with especial reference to the then not quite discredited notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Most of my fellow students, of a more practical cast of mind than my own, were inclined to regard this as an irrelevant chore. Not I.

  With the arrogance of youth, I believed that our subject, Zoology, had the potential to assimilate a much wider field of knowledge than its current practice and exposition was inclined to assume. Is not man an animal? Is not, therefore, all that is human within, in principle, the scope of Zoology? Such, at least, was my reasoning at the time, and my excuse for a wide and – in mature retrospect – less than profitable reading. Certain recent notorious and lucrative popularizations – as well as serious studies of sexual and social behaviour, pioneered by, of all people, entomologists – were in my view a mere glimpse of the empire of thought open to the zoologist. In those days such fields as evolutionary psychology, Darwinian medicine, and ecological economics still struggled in the shattered and noisome eggshell of their intellectually and – more importantly – militarily crushed progenitors. The great reversal of the mid-century’s verdict on this and other matters still slumbered in the womb of the future. These were, I may say, strange times, a moment of turbulent transition when the molecular doctrines were already established, but before they had become the very basis of biology. In the minds of older teachers and in the pages of obsolete textbooks certain questions now incontrovertible seemed novel and untried. The ghost of vitalism still walked the seminar room; plate tectonics was solid ground mainly to geologists; notions of intercontinental land bridges, and even fabled Lemuria, had not been altogether dispelled as worthy of at least serious dismissal. I deplored – nay, detested – all such vagaries.

  So it was with a certain zeal, I confess, that I embarked on the background reading for my modest composition. I walked into the University library at noon, bounded up the stairs to the science floor, and alternated browsing the stacks and scribbling in my carrel for a good five hours. Unlike some of my colleagues, I had not afflicted myself with the nicotine vice, and was able to proceed uninterrupted save for a call of nature. I delved into Lamarck himself, in verbose Victorian translation; into successive editions of The Origin of Species; and into the Journal of the History of Biology. I had already encountered Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, that devastating but regretful demolition of the Lamarckian claims of the fellow-traveling biologist, fraud, and suicide Viktor Kammerer – the book, in well-thumbed paperback, was an underground classic among Zoology undergraduates, alongside Lyall Watson’s Supernature. I read and wrote with a fury to discredit, for good and all, the long-exploded hypothesis that was the matter of my essay. But when I had completed the notes and outline, and the essay was as good as written, needing only some connecting phrases and a fair copy, a sense that the task was not quite finished nagged.

  I leaned back in the plastic seat, and recollected of a sudden the very book I needed to deliver the coup de grace. But where had I seen it? I could almost smell it – and it was the sense of smell that brought back the memory of the volume’s location. I stuffed my notes in a duffel bag, placed my stack of borrowings on the Returns trolley, and hurried from the library. Late in the autumn term, late in the day, the University’s central building, facing me on the same hilltop as the tall and modern library, loomed black like a gothic mansion against the sunset sky. Against the same sky, bare trees stood like preparations of nerve-endings on an iodine-stained slide. I crossed the road and walked around the side of the edifice and down the slope to the Zoology Department, a granite and glass monument to the 1930s. Within: paved floors, tiled walls and hardwood balustrades, and the smell that had reminded me, a mingled pervasive waft of salt-water aquaria, of rat and rabbit droppings, of disinfectant and of beeswax polish. A porter smoked in his den, recognized me with a brief incurious glance. I nodded, turned, and ascended the broad stone staircase. On the first landing a portrait of Darwin overhung the door to the top of the lecture hall; beneath the window lay a long glass case containing a dusty plastic model of Architeuthys, its two-metre tentacles outstretched to a painted prey. The scale of the model was not specified. At the top of the stairs, opposite the entrance to the library, stood another glass case, with the skeleton of a specimen of Canis dirus from Rancho La Brea. As I moved, the shadow and gleams of the dire wolf’s teeth presented a lifelike snarl.

  Inside, the departmental library was empty, its long windows catching the sun’s last light. From the great table that occupied most of its space, the smell of beeswax rose like a hum, drowning out the air’s less salubrious notes save that of the books that lined the walls. Here I had skimmed Schrödinger’s neglected text on the nerves; here I had luxuriated in D’Arcy Thomson’s glorious prose, the outpoured, ecstatic precision of On Growth and Form; here, more productively, I had bent until my eyes had watered over Mayr and Simpson and Dobzhansky. It was the last, I think, who had first sent me to glance, with a shudder, at the book I now sought.

  There it was, black and thick as a Bible; its binding sturdy, its pages yellowing but sound, like a fine vellum. The Situation in Biological Science: Proceedings of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the U.S.S.R., July 31 – August 7, 1948, Complete Stenographic Report. This verbatim account is one of the most sinister in the annals of science: it documents the conference at which the peasant charlatan Lysenko, who claimed that the genetic constitutions of organisms could be changed by environmental influences, defeated those of his opponents who still stood up for Mendelian genetics. genetics in the Soviet Union took decades to recover.

  I took the volume to the table, sat down, and copied to my notebook Lysenko’s infamous, gloating remark toward the close of the conference: “The Central Committee of the CPSU has examined my report and approved it”; and a selection from the rush of hasty recantations – announcements, mostly, of an overnight repudiation of a lifetime’s study – that followed it and preceded the closing vote of thanks to Stalin. I felt pleased at having found – unfairly perhaps – something with which to sully further the heritage of Lamarck. At the same time I felt an urge to wash my hands. There was something incomprehensible about the book’s very existence: was it naivety or arrogance that made its publishers betray so shameful a demonstration of the political control of science? The charlatan’s empty victory was a thing that deserved to be done in the dark, not celebrated in a complete stenographic report.

  But enough. As I stood to return the book to the shelf I opened it idly at the flyleaf, and noticed a queer thing. The sticker proclaiming it the property of the Department overlaid a handwritten inscription in broad black ink, the edges of which scrawl had escaped the bookplate’s obliteration. I recognised some of the fugitive lettering as Cyrillic script. Curious, I held the book up to the light and tried to read through the page, but the paper was too thick.

  The books were for reference only. The rule was strict. I was alone in the library. I put the book in my duffel bag and carried it to my bedsit. There, with an electric kettle on a shaky table, I steamed the bookplate off. Then, cribbing from a battered second-hand copy of The Penguin Russian Course, I deciphered the inscription. The Russian original has faded from my mind. The tran
slation remains indelible:

  To my dear friend Dr. Dav. R. Walker,

  in memory of our common endeavour,

  yours,

  Ac. T. D. Lysenko.

  The feeling that this induced in me may be imagined. I started and trembled as though something monstrous had reached out a clammy tentacle from the darkness of its lair and touched the back of my neck. If the book had been inscribed to any other academic elder I might have been less shocked: many of them flaunted their liberal views, and hinted at an earlier radicalism, on the rare occasions when politics were discussed; but Walker was a true-blue conservative of the deepest dye, as well as a mathematically rigorous Darwinian.

  The next morning I trawled the second-hand bookshops of the University district. The city had a long, though now mercifully diminishing, “Red” tradition; and sure enough, I found crumbling pamphlets and tedious journals of that persuasion from the time of the Lysenko affair. In them I found articles defending Lysenko’s views. The authors of some, the translators of others, variously appeared as: DRW, Dr. D R Walker, and (with a more proletarian swagger) Dave Walker. There was no room for doubt: my esteemed professor had been a Lysenkoist in his youth.

  With a certain malice (forgivable in view of my shock and indeed dismay) I made a point of including these articles in my references when I typed up the essay and handed it in to my tutor, Dr. F———. A week passed before I received a summons to Professor Walker’s office.

  II

  Alcohol, Tobacco, and Ultraviolet Radiation Exposure

  The Emeritus Professor was, as his title suggests, semi-retired; he took little part in the administration, and devoted his intermittent visits to the Department to the occasional sparkling but well-worn lecture; to shuffling and annotating off-prints of papers from his more productive days with a view to an eventual collection; and to some desultory research of his own into the anatomy and relationships of a Jurassic marine crocodile. Palaeontology had been his field. In his day he had led expeditions to the Kalahari and the Gobi. He had served in the Second World War. In some biographical note I had glimpsed the rank of Lieutenant, but no reference to the Service in which it had been attained: a matter on which rumor had not been reticent.

  The professor’s office was at the end of one of the second storey’s long corridors. Dust, cobwebs, and a statistically significant sample of desiccated invertebrates begrimed the frosted glass panel of the door. I tapped, dislodging a dead spider and a couple of woodlice.

  “Come in!”

  As I stepped through the door the professor rose behind his desk and leaned forward. Tall and stooping, very thin, with weathered skin, sunken cheeks, and a steely spade of beard, he seemed a ruin of his adventurous youth – more Quatermass than Quartermain, so to speak – but an impressive ruin. He shook hands across his desk, motioned me to a seat, and resumed his own. I brushed tobacco ash from friction-furred leather and sat down. The room reeked of pipe smoke and of an acetone whiff that might have been formaldehyde or whisky breath. Shelves lined the walls, stacked with books and petrified bones. Great drifts of journals and off-prints cluttered the floor. A window overlooking the building’s drab courtyard sifted wan wintry light through a patina similar to that on the door. A fluorescent tube and an Anglepoise diminished even that effect of daylight.

  Walker leaned back in his chair and flicked a Zippo over the bowl of his Peterson. He tapped a yellow forefinger nail on a sheaf of paper, which I recognized without surprise as my essay.

  “Well, Cameron,” he said, through a gray-blue cloud, “you’ve done your homework.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said.

  He jabbed the pipe-stem at me. “You’re not at school,” he said. “That is no way for one gentleman to address another.”

  “OK, Walker,” I said, a little too lightly.

  “Not,” he went on, “that your little trick here was gentlemanly. You’re expected to cite peer-reviewed articles, not dredge up political squibs and screeds from what you seized on as another chap’s youthful folly. These idiocies are no secret. If you’d asked me, I’d have told you all about them – the circumstances, you understand. And I could have pointed you to the later peer-reviewed article in which I tore these idiocies, which I claimed as my own, to shreds. You could have cited that too. That would have been polite.”

  “I didn’t intend any discourtesy,” I said.

  “You intended to embarrass me,” he said. “Did you not?”

  I found myself scratching the back of my head, embarrassed myself. My attempt at an excuse came out as an accusation.

  “I found the inscription from Lysenko,” I said.

  Walker rocked back in his seat. “What?”

  “ ‘To my dear friend Dr. Dav. R. Walker, in memory of our common endeavour.’ ” Against my conscious will, the words came out in a jeering tone.

  Walker planted his elbow-patches on his desk and cupped his chin in both hands, pipe jutting from his yellow teeth. He glared at me through a series of puffs.

  “Ah, yes,” he said at last. “That common endeavour. Would it perhaps pique your curiosity to know what it was?”

  “I had assumed it was on genetics,” I said.

  “Hah!” snorted Walker. “You’re a worse fool than I was, Cameron. What could I have done on genetics?”

  “You wrote about it,” I said, again sounding more accusing than I had meant to.

  “I wrote rubbish for The Modern Quarterly,” he said, “but I think you would be hard pressed to find in it anything about original work on genetics.”

  “I mean,” I said, “your defence of him.”

  Walker narrowed his eyes. “These articles were written after I had received the book,” he said. “So they were not what old Trofim was remembering me for, no indeed.”

  “So what was it?”

  He straightened up. “A most disquieting experience,” he said. “One that weighs on me even now. If I were to tell you of it, it would weigh on you for the rest of your life. And the strange thing is, Cameron, that I need not swear you to secrecy. The tale is as unbelievable as it is horrible. For you to tell it would merely destroy whatever credibility you have. Not only would nobody believe the tale – nobody would believe that I had told it to you. The more you insisted on it, the more you would brand yourself a liar and a fantasist of the first water.”

  “Then why should I believe it myself?”

  His parchment skin and tombstone teeth grinned back his answer like a death’s head illuminated from within.

  “You will believe it.”

  I shrugged.

  “You will wish you didn’t,” he added mildly. “You can walk out that door and forget about this, and I will forget your little jape. If you don’t, if you stay here and listen to me, let me assure you that I will have inflicted upon you a most satisfactory revenge.”

  I squared to him from my seat. “Try me, Walker,” I said.

  III

  Walker’s Account

  Stalin’s pipe was unlit – always a bad sign. Poskrebyshev, the General Secretary’s sepulchral amanuensis, closed the door silently behind me. The only pool of light in the long, thickly curtained room was over Stalin’s desk. Outside that pool two figures sat on high-backed chairs. A double glint on pince-nez was enough to warn me that one of these figures was Beria. The other, as I approached, I identified at once by his black flop of hair, his hollow cheeks, and his bright fanatic eyes: Trofim Lysenko. My knees felt like rubber. I had met Stalin before, of course, during the war, but I had never been summoned to his presence.

  It was the summer of ’47. I’d been kicking my heels in Moscow for weeks, trying without success – and, more frustratingly, without definite refusal – to get permission to mount another expedition to the Gobi. It was not, of course, the best of times to be a British citizen in the Soviet capital. (It was not the best of times to be a Soviet citizen, come to that.) My war time work in liaison may have been both a positive and a negative factor: positive,
in that I had contacts, and a degree of respect; negative, in that it put me under suspicion – ludicrous though it may seem, Cameron – of being a spy. I might, like so many others, have gone straight from the Kremlin to the Lubianka.

  Stalin rose, stalked towards me, shook hands brusquely, pointed me to a low seat – he was notoriously sensitive about his height – and returned to his desk chair. I observed him closely but covertly. He had lost weight. His skin was loose. He seemed more burdened than he had at Yalta and Tehran.

  “Lieutenant Walker—” he began. Then he paused, favoured me with a yellow-eyed, yellow-toothed smile, and corrected himself. “Doctor Walker. Rest assured, you were not invited here in your capacity as a British officer.”

  His sidelong glance at Beria told me all I needed to know about where I stood in that regard. Stalin sucked on his empty pipe, frowned, and fumbled a packet of Dunhills from his tunic. To my surprise, he proffered the pack across the desk. I took one, with fingers that barely trembled. A match flared between us; and for a moment, in that light, I saw that Stalin was afraid. He was more afraid than I; and that thought terrified me. I sank back and drew hard.

  “We need your help, Dr. Walker. In a scientific capacity.”

  I hesitated, unsure how to address him. He was no comrade of mine, and to call him by his latest title, “Generalissimo”, would have seemed fawning. My small diplomatic experience came to my aid.

  “You surprise me, Marshal Stalin,” I said. “My Soviet colleagues are more than capable.”

  Lysenko cleared his throat, but it was Beria who spoke. “Let us say there are problems.”

  “It is not,” said Stalin, “a question of capability. It is important to us that the task we wish you to take part in be accomplished by a British scientist who is also a . . . former . . . British officer, who has – let us say – certain connections with certain services, and who is not – again, let us say – one who might, at some future date, be suspected of being connected with the organs of Soviet state security.” Another sidelong glance at Beria.