Year's Best SF 3

by David G. Hartwell

  “It's a very mild case,” Father said. “We've been watching her like hawks. It's purely physical. Her behavior hasn't altered at all. She isn't showing any mental symptoms what-soever.”

  “You can't take her away,” Mother said, keeping her shrillness under a tight rein. “We'll keep her in quarantine. We'll join one of the drug-trials. You can monitor her but you can't take her away. She doesn't understand what's happening. She's just a little girl. It's only slight, only her body.”

  Tom Cartwright let the storm blow out. He was still looking at Wendy, and his eyes seemed kind, full of concern. He let a moment's silence endure before he spoke to her again.

  “Tell them, Wendy,” he said, softly. “Explain to them that it isn't slight at all.”

  She looked up at Mother, and then at Father, knowing how much it would hurt them to be told. “I'm still Wendy,” she said, faintly. “I'm still your little girl. I…”

  She wanted to say I always will be, but she couldn't. She had always been a good girl, and some lies were simply too difficult to voice.

  I wish I was a randomizing factor, she thought, fiercely wishing that could be true, that it might be true. I wish I was…

  Absurdly, she found herself wondering whether it would have been more grammatical to have thought I wish I were…

  It was so absurd that she began to laugh, and then she began to cry, helplessly. It was almost as if the flood of tears could wash away the burden of thought—almost, but not quite.

  Mother took her back into her bedroom, and sat with her, holding her hand. By the time the shuddering sobs released her—long after she had run out of tears—Wendy felt a new sense of grievance. Mother kept looking at the door, wishing that she could be out there, adding her voice to the argument, because she didn't really trust Father to get it right. The sense of duty which kept her pinned to Wendy's side was a burden, a burning frustration. Wendy didn't like that. Oddly enough, though, she didn't feel any particular resentment at being put out of the way while Father and the Ministry of Health haggled over her future. She understood well enough that she had no voice in the matter, no matter how unlimited her selfconsciousness had now become, no matter what progressive leaps and bounds she had accomplished as the existential fetters had shattered and fallen away.

  She was still a little girl, for the moment.

  She was still Wendy, for the moment.

  When she could speak, she said to Mother: “Can we have some music”?

  Mother looked suitably surprised. “What kind of music”? she countered.

  “Anything,” Wendy said. The music she was hearing in her head was soft and fluty music, which she heard as if from a vast distance, and which somehow seemed to be the oldest music in the world, but she didn't particularly want it duplicated and brought into the room. She just wanted something to fill the cracks of silence which broke up the muffled sound of arguing.

  Mother called up something much more liquid, much more upbeat, much more modern. Wendy could see that Mother wanted to speak to her, wanted to deluge her with reassurances, but couldn't bear to make any promises she wouldn't be able to keep. In the end, Mother contented herself with hugging Wendy to her bosom, as fiercely and as tenderly as she could.

  When the door opened it flew back with a bang. Father came in first.

  “It's all right,” he said, quickly. “They're not going to take her away. They'll quarantine the house instead.”

  Wendy felt the tension in Mother's arms. Father could work entirely from home much more easily than Mother, but there was no way Mother was going to start protesting on those grounds. While quarantine wasn't exactly all right it was better than she could have expected.

  “It's not generosity, I'm afraid,” said Tom Cartwright. “It's necessity. The epidemic is spreading too quickly. We don't have the facilities to take tens of thousands of children into state care. Even the quarantine will probably be a shortterm measure—to be perfectly frank, it's a panic measure. The simple truth is that the disease can't be contained no matter what we do.”

  “How could you let this happen”? Mother said, in a low tone bristling with hostility. “How could you let it get this far out of control? With all modern technology at your disposal you surely should be able to put the brake on a simple virus”.

  “It's not so simple,” Cartwright said, apologetically. “If it really had been a freak of nature—some stray strand of DNA which found a new ecological niche—we'd probably have been able to contain it easily. We don't believe that any more.”

  “It was designed,” Father said, with the airy confidence of the well-informed—though even Wendy knew that this particular item of wisdom must have been news to him five minutes ago. “Somebody cooked this thing up in a lab and let it loose deliberately. It was all planned, in the name of liberation… in the name of chaos, if you ask me.”

  Somebody did this to me! Wendy thought. Somebody actually set out to take away the limits, to turn the randomizing factor into…into what, exactly?

  While Wendy's mind was boggling, Mother was saying: “Who? How? Why?”

  “You know how some people are,” Cartwright said, with a fatalistic shrug of his shoulders. “Can't see an applecart without wanting to upset it. You'd think the chance to live for a thousand years would confer a measure of maturity even on the meanest intellect, but it hasn't worked out that way. Maybe someday we'll get past all that, but in the meantime…”

  Maybe someday, Wendy thought, all the things left over from the infancy of the world will go. All the crazinesses, all the disagreements, all the diehard habits. She hadn't known that she was capable of being quite so sharp, but she felt perversely proud of the fact that she didn't have to spell out—even to herself, in the brand new arena of her private thoughts—the fact that one of those symptoms of craziness, one of the focal points of those disagreements, and the most diehard of all those habits, was keeping children in a world where they no longer had any biological function—or, rather, keeping the ghosts of children, who weren't really children at all because they were always children.

  “They call it liberation,” Father was saying, “but it really is a disease, a terrible affliction. It's the destruction of innocence. It's a kind of mass murder.” He was obviously pleased with his own eloquence, and with the righteousness of his wrath. He came over to the bed and plucked Wendy out of Mother's arms. “It's all right, Beauty,” he said. “We're all in this together. We'll face it together. You're absolutely right. You're still our little girl. You're still Wendy. Nothing terrible is going to happen.”

  It was far better, in a way, than what she'd imagined—or had been too scared to imagine. There was a kind of relief in not having to pretend any more, in not having to keep the secret. That boundary had been crossed, and now there was no choice but to go forward.

  Why didn't I tell them before? Wendy wondered. Why didn't I just tell them, and trust them to see that everything would be all right? But even as she thought it, even as she clutched at the straw, just as Mother and Father were clutching, she realized how hollow the thought was, and how meaningless Father's reassurances were. It was all just sentiment, and habit, and pretense. Everything couldn't and wouldn't be “all right,” and never would be again, unless…

  Turning to Tom Cartwright, warily and uneasily, she said: “Will I be an adult now? Will I live for a thousand years, and have my own house, my own job, my own…”

  She trailed off as she saw the expression in his eyes, realizing that she was still a little girl, and that there were a thousand questions adults couldn't and didn't want to hear, let alone try to answer.

  It was late at night before Mother and Father got themselves into the right frame of mind for the kind of serious talk that the situation warranted, and by that time Wendy knew perfectly well that the honest answer to almost all the questions she wanted to ask was: “Nobody knows.”

  She asked the questions anyway. Mother and Father varied their answers in the hope of appeari
ng a little wiser than they were, but it all came down to the same thing in the end. It all came down to desperate pretense.

  “We have to take it as it comes,” Father told her. “It's an unprecedented situation. The government has to respond to the changes on a day-by-day basis. We can't tell how it will all turn out. It's a mess, but the world has been in a mess before—in fact, it's hardly ever been out of a mess for more than a few years at a time. We'll cope as best we can. Everybody will cope as best they can. With luck, it might not come to violence—to war, to slaughter, to ecocatastrophe. We're entitled to hope that we really are past all that now, that we really are capable of handling things sensibly this time.”

  “Yes, ” Wendy said, conscientiously keeping as much of the irony out of her voice as she could. “I understand. Maybe we won't just be sent back to the factories to be scrapped… and maybe if they find a cure, they'll ask us whether we want to be cured before they use it.” With luck, she added, silently, maybe we can all be adult about the situation.

  They both looked at her uneasily, not sure how to react. From now on, they would no longer be able to grin and shake their heads at the wondrous inventiveness of the randomizing factor in her programming. From now on, they would actually have to try to figure out what she meant, and what unspoken thoughts might lie behind the calculated wit and hypocrisy of her every statement. She had every sympathy for them; She had only recently learned for herself what a difficult, frustrating and thankless task that could be.

  This happened to their ancestors once, she thought. But not as quickly. Their ancestors didn't have the kind of headstart you can get by being thirteen for thirty years. It must have been hard, to be a thinking ape among unthinkers. Hard, but… well, they didn't ever want to give it up, did they?

  “Whatever happens, Beauty,” Father said, “we love you. Whatever happens, you're our little girl. When you're grown up, we'll still love you the way we always have. We always will.”

  He actually believes it, Wendy thought. He actually believes that the world can still be the same, in spite of everything. He can't let go of the hope that even though everything's changing, it will all be the same underneath. But it won't. Even if there isn't a resource crisis—after all, grown-up children can't eat much more than un-grown-up ones—the world can never be the same. This is the time in which the adults of the world have to get used to the fact that there can't be any more families, because from now on children will have to be rare and precious and strange. This is the time when the old people will have to recognize that the day of their silly stopgap solutions to imaginary problems is over. This is the time when we all have to grow up. If the old people can't do that by themselves, then the new generation will simply have to show them the way.

  “I love you too,” she answered, earnestly. She left it at that. There wasn't any point in adding: “I always have,” or “I can mean it now,” or any of the other things which would have underlined rather than assuaged the doubts they must be feeling.

  “And we'll be all right,” Mother said. “As long as we love one another, and as long as we face this thing together, we'll be all right.”

  What a wonderful thing true innocence is, Wendy thought, rejoicing in her ability to think such a thing freely, without shame or reservation. I wonder if I'd be able to cultivate it, if I ever wanted to.

  That night, bedtime was abolished. She was allowed to stay up as late as she wanted to. When she finally did go to bed she was so exhausted that she quickly drifted off into a deep and peaceful sleep—but she didn't remain there indefinitely. Eventually, she began to dream.

  In her dream Wendy was living wild in a magical wood where it never rained. She lived on sweet berries of many colors. There were other girls living wild in the dream-wood but they all avoided one another. They had lived there for a long time but now the others had come: the shadow-men with horns on their brows and shaggy legs who played strange music, which was the breath of souls.

  Wendy hid from the shadow-men, but the fearful fluttering of her heart gave her away, and one of the shadow-men found her. He stared down at her with huge baleful eyes, wiping spittle from his pipes onto his fleecy rump.

  “Who are you?” she asked, trying to keep the tremor of fear out of her voice.

  “I'm the devil,” he said.

  “There's no such thing,” she informed him, sourly.

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “So I'm the Great God Pan,” he said. “What difference does it make? And how come you're so smart all of a sudden?”

  “I'm not thirteen anymore,” she told him, proudly. “I've been thirteen for thirty years, but now I'm growing up. The whole world's growing up—for the first and last time.”

  “Not me,” said the Great God Pan. “I'm a million years old and I'll never grow up. Let's get on with it, shall we? I'll count to ninety-nine. You start running.”

  Dream-Wendy scrambled to her feet, and ran away. She ran and she ran and she ran, without any hope of escape. Behind her, the music of the reed-pipes kept getting louder and louder, and she knew that whatever happened, her world would never fall silent.

  When Wendy woke up, she found that the nightmare hadn't really ended. The meaningful part of it was still going on. But things weren't as bad as all that, even though she couldn't bring herself to pretend that it was all just a dream which might go away.

  She knew that she had to take life one day at a time, and look after her parents as best she could. She knew that she had to try to ease the pain of the passing of their way of life, to which they had clung a little too hard and a little too long. She knew that she had to hope, and to trust, that a cunning combination of intelligence and love would be enough to see her and the rest of the world through—at least until the next catastrophe came along.

  She wasn't absolutely sure that she could do it, but she was determined to give it a bloody good try.

  And whatever happens in the end, she thought, to live will be an awfully big adventure.

  Always True to Thee, in My Fashion

  NANCY KRESS

  Nancy Kress is well known for her deeply complex medical SF stories, and for her biological and evolutionary extrapolations in such classics as “Beggars in Spain,” Beggars and Choosers, and Beggars Ride. Her stories are rich in texture and in the details of the inner life of character, and like only a few others, such as Bruce Sterling and James Patrick Kelly, she manages often to satisfy both the readers of hard SF and the self-styled Humanists. She is in fact one of the few writers to incorporate much of the aesthetic of Modernist fiction into SF. This story, however, from Asimov's, is another side of Nancy Kress, the feminine juggernaut, uproarious and unstoppable—who would want to? The more you think about it, the funnier it gets, rather like vintage Connie Willis. This is first-rate satire, extending that tradition that flowered in the 1950s, that was perhaps the center of 50s SF, into the late 90s. My ideal SF convention would have both Connie Willis and Nancy Kress as co-guests of honor, always speaking at the same time and picking up on each other's lines.

  Relationships for the autumn season were casual and unconstructed, following a summer where fashion had been unusually colorful and intense. Suzanne liked wearing the new feelings. They were light and cool, allowing her a lot of freedom of movement. The off-hand affection made her feel unencumbered, graceful.

  Cade wasn't so sure.

  “It sounds bloody boring,” he said to Suzanne, holding the pills in his hand. “Love isn't supposed to be so boring. At least the summer fashions offered a few surprises.”

  Boxes from the couture houses spilled around their bedroom. Suzanne, of course, had done the ordering. Karl Lagerfeld, Galliano, Enkia for Christian LaCroix, and of course Suzanne's own special designer and friend, Sendil. Cade stood in the middle of an explosion of slouchy tweeds and off-white linen, wearing his underwear and his stubborn look.

  “But the summer feelings were so heavy,” Suzanne said. She dropped a casual kiss on the top of Cade's head.
“Come on, Cadie, at least give it a try. You have the body for casual emotions, you know. They look so good on you.”

  This was true. Cade was lean and loose-jointed, with a small head on a long neck:a body made for easy carelessness. Backlit by their wide bedroom windows, he already looked coolly nonchalant: an Edwardian aristocrat, perhaps, or one of those marvelously blase American riverboat gamblers who couldn't be bothered to sweat. The environment helped, of course. Suzanne always did their V-R, and for autumn she'd programmed unlined curtains, cool terra cotta tiles, oyster-white walls. All very informal and composed, nothing trying very hard. But she'd left the windows natural. That, too, was perfect: too nonchalant about the view of London to bother reprogramming its ugliness. Only Suzanne would have thought of this touch. Their friends would be so jealous.

  “Come on, Cade, try the feelings on.” But he only went on looking troubled, holding the pills in his long-fingered hand.

  Suzanne began to feel impatient. Cade was wonderful, of course, but he could be so conservative. He really hadn't liked the summer fashions—and they had been so much fun! Suzanne knew she looked good in those kinds of dramatic, highly colored feelings. They went well with her voluptuous body and small, sharp teeth. People had noticed. She'd had two passionate adulteries, one knife-fight with Kittery, one duel fought over her, two midnight reconciliations, and one weepy parting from Cade at sunset on the edge of a sea, which had been V-R'd into wine-dark roils for the occasion. Very satisfying.

  But the summer was over. Really, Cade should be more willing to vary his emotional wardrobe. Sometimes she even wondered if she might be better off with another lover…Mikhail, maybe, or even Jastinder…but no, of course not. She loved Cade. They belonged to each other forever. Cade was the bedrock of her life. If only he weren't so stubborn!

  “Have you ever thought,” he said, not looking at her, “that we might skip a fashion season? Just let it go by and wear something old, off alone together? Or even go naked?”