Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

  Her eyes went blind, and she turned and walked away.

  I stopped, and my Chrome stopped. We watched the old woman marching toward the big doors of the temple, and when she was out of earshot, I heard my lover say, “She wasn't there when Dr.Corvus made the breakthrough.”

  I swallowed and said, “No?”

  “She was called home suddenly. In the middle of the term.” My Chrome took me by the shoulder and squeezed too hard, telling me, “Her family here, and everywhere else… all the Chromatellas in the world were just beginning to die.…”

  A stupid pesticide was to blame.

  It was sold for the first time just after Mother Chrome left for school. It was too new and expensive for most farmers, but the Chromatellas loved it. I can never remember its name: Some clumsy thing full of ethanes and chlorines and phenyl-somethings. Her sisters sprayed it on their fields and their animals, and they ate traces of it on their favorite foods, and after the first summer, a few of the oldest Chromes complained of headaches that began to turn into brain tumors, which is how the plague showed itself.

  At first, people considered the tumors to be bad luck.

  When Mother Chrome's great and grand died in the same winter, it was called a coincidence, and it was sad. Nothing more.

  Not until the next summer did the Plague Bureau realize what was happening. Something in the Chromatella blood wasn't right. The pesticide sneaked into their bodies and brains, and fast-growing tumors would flare up. First in the old, then the very young. The Bureau banned the poison immediately. Whatever was left unused was buried or destroyed. But almost every Chromatella had already eaten and breathed too much of it. When Mother Chrome finally came home, her mother met her at the train station, weeping uncontrollably. Babies were sick, she reported, and all the old people were dying. Even healthy adults were beginning to suffer headaches and tremors, which meant it would all be over by spring. Her mother said that several times. “Over by spring,” she said. Then she wiped at her tears and put on a brave Chromatella face, telling her daughter, “Dig your grave now. That's my advice. And find a headstone you like, before they're all gone.”

  But Mother Chrome never got ill.

  “The Institute grew their own food,” my Chrome told me.

  We were in bed together, warm and happy and in love, and she told the story because it was important for me to know what had happened, and because she thought that I was curious. Even though I wasn't. I knew enough already, I was telling myself.

  “They grew their own food,” she repeated, “and they used different kinds of pesticides. Safer ones, it turns out.”

  I nodded, saying nothing.

  “Besides,” she told me,” “Mother spent that summer in the wilderness. She ate clean deer and berries and the like.”

  “That helped too?” I asked.

  “She's never had a sick day in her life,” my Chrome assured me. “But after she came home, and for those next few months, she watched everyone else get sicker and weaker. Neighbor communities sent help when they could, but it was never enough. Mother took care of her dying sisters and her mother, then she buried them. And by spring, as promised, it was over. The plague had burnt itself out. But instead of being like the old plagues, where a dozen or fifty of us would survive…instead of a nucleus of a town, there was one of us left. In the entire world, there was no one exactly like my mother.”

  I was crying. I couldn't help but sob and sniffle.

  “Mother has lived at home ever since.” My Chrome was answering the question that she only imagined I would ask. “Mother felt it was her duty. To make a living, she reopened the old mothering house. A traveler was her lover, for a few nights, and that helped her conceive. Which was me. Until my twin sisters were born, I was the only other Chromatella in the world.”

  And she was my Chrome.

  Unimaginably rare, and because of it, precious.

  Five sisters and better than a dozen children were waiting inside the temple, sitting together up front, singing loudly for the Solstice.

  But the place felt empty nonetheless.

  We walked up the long, long center aisle. After a few steps, Mother Chrome was pulling away from us. She was halfway running, while I found myself moving slower. And between us was my Chrome. She looked ahead, then turned and stared at me. I could see her being patient. I could hear her patience. She asked, “What?” Then she drifted back to me, asking again, “What?”

  I felt out of place.

  Lonely, and lost.

  But instead of confessing it, I said, “I'm stupid. I know.”

  “You are not stupid,” she told me. Her patience was fraying away. Too quietly, she said, “What don't you understand? Tell me.”

  “How can those lizards survive? If half of them are like you say, how do they ever lay enough eggs?”

  “Because the eggs they lay have remixed genes,” she told me, as if nothing could be simpler. “Every whiptail born is different from every other one. Each is unique. A lot of them are weaker than their parents, sure. But if their world decides to change around them—which can happen in the mountains—then a few of them will thrive.”

  But the earth is a mild place, mostly. Our sun has always been steady, and our axis tilts only a few degrees. Which was why I had to point out, “God knew what she was doing, making us the way we are. Why would anyone need to change?”

  “My Chrome almost spoke. Her mouth came open, then her face tilted, and she slowly turned away from me, saying nothing.

  The singing had stopped.

  Mother Chrome was speaking with a quick quiet voice, telling everyone about the telephone call. She didn't need to explain it to her daughters for them to understand. Even the children seemed captivated, or maybe they were just bored with singing and wanted to play a new game.

  My Chrome took one of her sisters downstairs to retrieve the old television.

  I sat next to one of the twins, waiting.

  There was no confusing her for my Chrome. She had a farmer's hands and solid shoulders, and she was six months pregnant. With those scarred hands on her belly, she made small talk about the fog and the frost. But I could tell that her mind was elsewhere, and after a few moments, our conversation came to a halt.

  The television was set up high on the wooden altar, between Winter's haggard face and Spring's swollen belly.

  My Chrome found an electrical cord and a channel, then fought with the antenna until we had a clear picture and sound. The broadcast was from Boreal City, from one of the giant All-Family temples. For a moment, I thought there was a mistake. My Chrome was walking toward me, finally ready to sit, and I was thinking that nothing would happen. We would watch the service from Boreal, then have our feast, and everyone would laugh about this very strange misunderstanding.

  Then the temple vanished.

  Suddenly I was looking at an old person standing behind a forest of microphones, and beside her, looking young and strange, was a very homely girl.

  Huge, she was.

  She had a heavy skull, and thick hair sprouted from both her head and her face.

  But I didn't say one word about her appearance. I sat motionless, feeling more lost than ever, and my Chrome slid in beside me, and her mother sat beside her.

  Everyone in the temple said, “Oh my!” when they saw that ugly girl.

  They sounded very impressed and very silly, and I started laughing, then bit down on my tongue.

  To the world, the old woman announced, “My name is Corvus. This is my child. Today is her sixteenth birthday.”

  The pregnant sister leaned and asked her mother, “How soon till we get ours?”

  Mother Chrome leaned, and loud enough for everyone to hear, she said, “Very soon. It's already sent.”

  I asked my Chrome, “What's sent?”

  “The pollen,” she whispered. “We're supposed to get one of the very first shipments. Corvus promised it to Mother years ago.”

  What pollen? I wondered.


  “I'll need help with the fertilizations,” said her mother. “And a physician's hands would be most appreciated.”

  She was speaking to my Chrome.

  On television, the woman was saying, “My child represents a breakthrough. By unlocking ancient, unused genes, then modifying one of her nuclear bodies, we have produced the first of what should be hundreds, perhaps thousands of special children whose duty and honor it will be to prepare us for our future!”

  “I'll stay here with you,” I promised my Chrome. “As long as necessary.”

  Then the hairy girl was asked to say something. Anything. So she stepped up to the microphones, gave the world this long, strange smile, then with the deepest, slowest voice that I had ever heard, she said, “Bless us all. I am pleased to serve.”

  I had to laugh.

  Finally.

  My Chrome's eyes stabbed at me.

  “I'm sorry,” I said, not really meaning it. Then I was laughing harder, admitting, “I expected it to look prettier. You know? With a nice orange neck, or some brightly colored hair.”

  My Chrome was staring.

  Like never before, she was studying me.

  “What's wrong?” I finally asked.

  Then I wasn't laughing. I sat up straight, and because I couldn't help myself, I told all the Chromatelas, “I don't care how smart you know you are. What you're talking about here is just plain stupid!”

  I said, “Insane.”

  Then I said, “It's my world, too. Or did you forget that?”

  And that's when my Chrome finally told me, “Shut up,” with the voice that ended everything. “Will you please, for once, you idiot-bitch, think and shut up!”

  MANEKI NEKO

  Bruce Sterling

  "I can't go on," his brother said.

  Tsuyoshi Shimizu looked thoughtfully into the screen of his pasokon. His older brother's face was shiny with sweat from a late-night drinking bout. "It's only a career," said Tsuyoshi, sitting up on his futon and adjusting his pajamas. "You worry too much."

  "All that overtime!" his brother whined. He was making the call from a bar somewhere in Shibuya. In the background, a middle-aged office lady was singing karaoke, badly. "And the examination hells. The manager training programs. The proficiency tests. I never have time to live!"

  Tsuyoshi grunted sympathetically. He didn't like these late-night videophone calls, but he felt obliged to listen. His big brother had always been a decent sort, before he had gone through the elite courses at Waseda University, joined a big corporation, and gotten professionally ambitious.

  "My back hurts," his brother groused. "I have an ulcer. My hair is going gray. And I know they'll fire me. No matter how loyal you are to the big companies, they have no loyalty to their employees anymore. It's no wonder that I drink."

  "You should get married," Tsuyoshi offered.

  "I can't find the right girl. Women never understand me." He shuddered. "Tsuyoshi, I'm truly desperate. The market pressures are crushing me. I can't breathe. My life has got to change. I'm thinking of taking the vows. I'm serious! I want to renounce this whole modern world."

  Tsuyoshi was alarmed. "You're very drunk, right?"

  His brother leaned closer to the screen. "Life in a monastery sounds truly good to me. It's so quiet there. You recite the sutras. You consider your existence. There are rules to follow, and rewards that make sense. It's just the way that Japanese business used to be, back in the good old days."

  Tsuyoshi grunted skeptically.

  "Last week I went out to a special place in the mountains ... Mount Aso," his brother confided. "The monks there, they know about people in trouble, people who are burned out by modern life. The monks protect you from the world. No computers, no phones, no faxes, no e-mail, no overtime, no commuting, nothing at all. It's beautiful, and it's peaceful, and nothing ever happens there. Really, it's like paradise."

  "Listen, older brother," Tsuyoshi said, "you're not a religious man by nature. You're a section chief for a big import-export company."

  "Well ... maybe religion won't work for me. I did think of running away to America. Nothing much ever happens there, either."

  Tsuyoshi smiled. "That sounds much better! America is a good vacation spot. A long vacation is just what you need! Besides, the Americans are real friendly since they gave up their handguns."

  "But I can't go through with it," his brother wailed. "I just don't dare. I can't just wander away from everything that I know, and trust to the kindness of strangers."

  "That always works for me," Tsuyoshi said. "Maybe you should try it."

  Tsuyoshi's wife stirred uneasily on the futon. Tsuyoshi lowered his voice. "Sorry, but I have to hang up now. Call me before you do anything rash."

  "Don't tell Dad," Tsuyoshi's brother said. "He worries so."

  "I won't tell Dad." Tsuyoshi cut the connection and the screen went dark.

  Tsuyoshi's wife rolled over, heavily. She was seven months pregnant. She stared at the ceiling puffing for breath. "Was that another call from your brother?" she said.

  "Yeah. The company just gave him another promotion. More responsibilities. He's celebrating."

  "That sounds nice," his wife said tactfully.

  Next morning, Tsuyoshi slept late. He was self-employed, so he kept his own hours. Tsuyoshi was a video format upgrader by trade. He transferred old videos from obsolete formats into the new high-grade storage media. Doing this properly took a craftsman's eye. Word of Tsuyoshi's skills had gotten out on the network, so he had as much work as he could handle.

  At ten A.M., the mailman arrived. Tsuyoshi abandoned his breakfast of raw egg and miso soup, and signed for a shipment of flaking, twentieth-century analog television tapes. The mail also brought a fresh overnight shipment of strawberries, and a homemade jar of pickles.

  "Pickles!" his wife enthused. "People are so nice to you when you're pregnant."

  "Any idea who sent us that,"

  "Just someone on the network."

  "Great."

  Tsuyoshi booted his mediator, cleaned his superconducting heads and examined the old tapes. Home videos from the 1980s. Someone's grandmother as a child, presumably. There had been a lot of flaking and loss of polarity in the old recording medium.

  Tsuyoshi got to work with his desktop fractal detail generator, the image stabilizer, and the interlace algorithms. When he was done, Tsuyoshi's new digital copies would look much sharper, cleaner, and better composed than the original primitive videotape.

  Tsuyoshi enjoyed his work. Quite often he came across bits and pieces of videotape that were of archival interest. He would pass the images on to the net. The really big network databases, with their armies of search engines, indexers, and catalogues, had some very arcane interests. The net machines would never pay for data, because the global information networks were noncommercial. But the net machines were very polite, and had excellent net etiquette. They returned a favor for a favor, and since they were machines with excellent, enormous memories, they never forgot a good deed.

  Tsuyoshi and his wife had a lunch of ramen with naruto, and she left to go shopping. A shipment arrived by overseas package service. Cute baby clothes from Darwin, Australia. They were in his wife's favorite color, sunshine yellow.

  Tsuyoshi finished transferring the first tape to a new crystal disk. Time for a break. He left his apartment, took the elevator and went out to the comer coffeeshop. He ordered a double iced mocha cappuccino and paid with a chargecard.

  His pokkecon rang. Tsuyoshi took it from his belt and answered it. "Get one to go," the machine told him.

  "Okay," said Tsuyoshi, and hung up. He bought a second coffee, put a lid on it and left the shop.

  A man in a business suit was sitting on a park bench near the entrance of Tsuyoshi's building. The man's suit was good, but it looked as if he'd slept in it. He was holding his head in his hands and rocking gently back and forth. He was unshaven and his eyes were red-rimmed.

  The pokkecon rang agai
n. "The coffee's for him?" Tsuyoshi said.

  "Yes," said the pokkecon. "He needs it."

  Tsuyoshi walked up to the lost businessman. The man looked up, flinching warily, as if he were about to be kicked. "What is it?" he said.

  "Here," Tsuyoshi said, handing him the cup. "Double iced mocha cappuccino."

  The man opened the cup, and smelled it. He looked up in disbelief. "This is my favorite kind of coffee ... Who are you?"

  Tsuyoshi lifted his arm and offered a hand signal, his fingers clenched like a cat's paw. The man showed no recognition of the gesture. Tsuyoshi shrugged, and smiled. "It doesn't matter. Sometimes a man really needs a coffee. Now you have a coffee. That's all."

  "Well ... " The man cautiously sipped his cup, and suddenly smiled. "It's really great. Thanks!"

  "You're welcome." Tsuyoshi went home.

  His wife arrived from shopping. She had bought new shoes. The pregnancy was making her feet swell. She sat carefully on the couch and sighed.

  "Orthopedic shoes are expensive," she said, looking at the yellow pumps. "I hope you don't think they look ugly."

  "On you, they look really cute," Tsuyoshi said wisely. He had first met his wife at a video store. She had just used her credit card to buy a disk of primitive black-and-white American anime of the 1950s. The pokkecon had urged him to go up and speak to her on the subject of Felix the Cat. Felix was an early television cartoon star and one of Tsuyoshi's personal favorites.

  Tsuyoshi would have been too shy to approach an attractive woman on his own, but no one was a stranger to the net. This fact gave him the confidence to speak to her. Tsuyoshi had soon discovered that the girl was delighted to discuss her deep fondness for cute, antique, animated cats. They'd had lunch together. They'd had a date the next week. They had spent Christmas Eve together in a love hotel. They had a lot in common.

  She had come into his life through a little act of grace, a little gift from Felix the Cat's magic bag of tricks. Tsuyoshi had never gotten over feeling grateful for this. Now that he was married and becoming a father, Tsuyoshi Shimizu could feel himself becoming solidly fixed in life. He had a man's role to play now. He knew who he was, and he knew where he stood. Life was good to him.