The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She told me how she’d slept with the kitten and the little dog and, when she didn’t have them anymore, with the two or three toys she’d had so long that most of their fur was worn off. How she could smell the kitten for months in her room just as if it were still there. How the dog had died in the shower. How her husband had gotten mad, hit her, and taken the thing away. But you could tell she was glad when the body wasn’t there in the shower anymore.

  * * *

  “This man was watching me in the park,” she said. “He always watched me.”

  “Why were you in the park, Lissy?”

  She looked at me out of the corner of her eye and gave me a smile, the conspiratorial kind. “There’s more than one squirrel in those trees. Maybe a whole family. I like to watch them.”

  I was surprised there were any animals at all in the park. You don’t see them anymore, except for the domesticates.

  “Did you talk to this man?”

  She seemed to know what I was asking. She said, “I wasn’t scared of him. He smiled a lot.” She laughed at something, and we all jumped. “I knew he wanted to talk to me, so I pretended there was a squirrel over by him, and I fed it. He said, Did I like animals and how I could make a lot of money and help the animals of the world.”

  It wasn’t important. A dollar. A thousand. But I had to ask.

  “How much money did he tell you?”

  “Nine thousand dollars. That’s how much I’m going to get, and I’ll be able to see it when it’s born, and visit it.”

  She told me how they entered her, how they did it gently while she watched, the instrument clean and bright.

  The fertilized egg would affix to the wall of her uterus, they’d told her, and together they would make a placenta. What the fetus needed nutritionally would pass through the placental barrier, and her body wouldn’t reject it.

  Her eyes looked worried now. She was remembering things—a beating, men in uniforms with guns, a man with a microphone pushed against her belly. Had her husband hit her there? If so, how many times? I wondered.

  “Will the baby be okay?” she asked, and I realized I’d never seen eyes so colorless, a face so trusting.

  “That’s what the doctors say,” I said, looking up at the side arms, putting it on them.

  Nine thousand. More than a man like her husband would ever see stacked in his life, but he’d beaten her anyway, furious that she could get it in her own way when he’d failed again and again, furious that she’d managed to get it with the one thing he thought he owned—her body.

  Paranoid somatopaths are that way.

  I ought to know. I married one.

  * * *

  I’m thinking of the mess we’ve made of it, Lissy. I’m thinking of the three hundred thousand grown children of the walking wounded of an old war in Asia who walk the same way.

  I’m thinking of the four hundred thousand walljackers, our living dead. I’m thinking of the zoos, the ones we don’t have anymore, and what they must have been like, what little girls like Lissy Tomer must have done there on summer days.

  I’m thinking of a father who went to war, came back, but was never the same again, of a mother who somehow carried us all, of how cars and smog and cement can make a childhood and leave you thinking you can change it all.

  * * *

  I wasn’t sure, but I could guess. The man in the park was a body broker for pharmaceuticals and nonprofits, and behind him somewhere was a species resurrection group that somehow had the money. He’d gotten a hefty three hundred percent, which meant the investment was already thirty-six grand. He’d spent some of his twenty-seven paying off a few W&I people in the biggest counties, gotten a couple dozen names on high-V.R. searches, watched the best bets himself, and finally made his selection.

  The group behind him didn’t know how such things worked or didn’t particularly care; they simply wanted consenting women of childbearing age, good health, no substance abuse, no walljackers, no suicidal inclinations; and the broker’s reputation was good, and he did his job.

  Somehow he’d missed the husband.

  As I found out later, she was one of ten. Surrogates for human babies were a dime a dozen, had been for years. This was something else.

  In a nation of two hundred eighty million, Lissy Tomer was one of ten—but in her heart of hearts she was the only one. Because a man who said he loved animals had talked to her in a park once. Because he’d said she would get a lot of money—money that ought to make a husband who was never happy, happy. Because she would get to see it when it was born and get to visit it wherever it was kept.

  The odd thing was, I could understand how she felt.

  * * *

  I called Antalou at three A.M., got her mad but at least awake, and got her to agree we should try to get the girl out that same night—out of that room, away from the press, and into a County unit for a complete fetal check. Antalou is the kind of boss you only get in heaven. She tried, but Mendoza stonewalled her under P.C. Twenty-two, the Jorgenson clause—he was getting all the publicity he and his new unit needed with the press screaming downstairs—and we gave up at five, and I went home for a couple hours of sleep before the paperwork began.

  I knew that sitting there in the middle of all that glass with two armed medics was almost as bad as the press, but what could I do, Lissy, what could I do?

  I should have gone to the hotel room that night, but the apartment was closer. I slept on the sofa. I didn’t look at the bedroom door, which is always locked from the outside. The nurse has a key. Some days it’s easier not to think about what’s in there. Some days it’s harder.

  I thought about daughters.

  * * *

  We got her checked again, this time at County Medical, and the word came back okay. Echomytic bruises with some placental bleeding, but the fetal signs were fine. I went ahead and asked whether the fetus was a threat to the mother in any case, and they laughed. No more than any human child would be, they said. All you’re doing is borrowing the womb, they said. “Sure,” this cocky young resident says to me, “it’s low-tech all the way.” I had a lot of homework to do, I realized.

  Security at the hospital reported a visit by a man who was not her husband, and they didn’t let him through. The same man called me an hour later. He was all smiles and wore a suit.

  I told him we’d have to abort if County, under the Victims’ Rights Act, decided it was best or the girl wanted it. He pointed out with a smile that the thing she was carrying was worth a lot of money to the people he represented, and they could make her life more comfortable, and we ought to protect the girl’s interests.

  I told him what I thought of him, and he laughed. “You’ve got it all wrong, Doctor.”

  I let it pass. He knows I’m an MPS-V.R., no Ph.D., no M.D. He probably even knows I got the degree under duress, years late, because Antalou said we needed all the paper we could get if the department was going to survive. I know what he’s doing, and he knows I know.

  “The people I represent are caring people, Doctor. Their cause is a good one. They’re not what you’re accustomed to working with, and they’ve retained me simply as a program consultant, a ‘resource locator.’ It’s all aboveboard, Doctor, completely legal, I assure you. But I really don’t need to tell you any of this, do I?”

  “No, you don’t.”

  I added that, legal or not, if he tried to see her again I would have him for harassment under the D.A.’s cooperation clause.

  He laughed, and I knew then he had a law degree from one of the local universities. The suit was right. I could imagine him in it at the park that day.

  “You may be able to pull that with the mopes and 5150’s you work with on the street, Doctor, but I know the law. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll stay away for the next three months, as long as you look after the girl’s best interests, how’s that?”

  I knew there was more, so I waited.

  “My people will go on paying for weekly visits up to the
eighth month, then daily through to term, the clinic to be designated by them. They want ultrasound, CVS, and amniotic antiabort treatments, and the diet and abstinence programs the girl’s already agreed to. All you have to do is get her to her appointments, and we pay for it. Save the county some money.”

  I waited.

  His voice changed as I’d known it would. The way they do in the courtrooms. I’d heard it change like that a hundred times before, years of it, both sides of the aisle.

  “If County can’t oblige,” he said, “we’ll just have to try Forty-A, right?”

  I told him to take a flying something.

  Maybe I didn’t know the law, but I knew Forty-A. In certain circles it’s known simply as Fucker-Forty. Under it—the state’s own legislation—he’d be able to sue the county and this V.R. advocate in particular for loss of livelihood—his and hers—and probably win after appeals.

  This was the last thing Antalou or any of us needed.

  The guy was still smiling.

  “You’ve kept that face for a reason, Doctor. What do young girls think of it?”

  I hung up on him.

  * * *

  With Antalou’s help I got her into the Huntington on Normandy, a maternal unit for sedated Ward B types. Some of the other women had seen her on the news two evenings before; some hadn’t. It didn’t matter, I thought. It was about as good a place for her to hide as possible, I told myself. I was wrong. Everything’s on computer these days, and some information’s as cheap as a needle.

  I get a call the next morning from the unit saying a man had gotten in and tried to kill her, and she was gone.

  * * *

  I’m thinking of the ones I’ve lost, Lissy. The tenth-generation maggot casings on the one in Koreatown, the door locked for days. The one named Consejo, the one I went with to the morgue, where they cut up babies, looking for hers. The skinny one I thought I’d saved, the way I was supposed to, but he’s lying in a pool of O-positive in a room covered with the beautiful pink dust they used for prints.

  Or the ones when I was a kid, East L.A., Fontana, the drugs taking them like some big machine, the snipings that always killed the ones that had nothing to do with it—the chubby ones, the ones who liked to read—the man who took Karenna and wasn’t gentle, the uncle who killed his own nephews and blamed it on coyotes, which weren’t there anymore, hadn’t been for years.

  I’m thinking of the ones I’ve lost, Lissy.

  * * *

  I looked for her all day, glad to be out of the apartment, glad to be away from a phone that might ring with a slick lawyer’s face on it.

  When I went back to the apartment that night to pick up another change of clothes for the hotel room, she was sitting crosslegged by the door.

  “Lissy,” I said, wondering how she’d gotten the address.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  She had her hand on her belly, holding it not out of pain but as if it were the most comforting thing in the world.

  “He wants to kill me. He says that anybody who has an animal growing in her is a devil and’s got to die. He fell down the stairs. I didn’t push him, I didn’t.”

  She was crying, and the only thing I could think to do was get down and put my arms around her and try not to cry myself.

  “I know, I know,” I said. The symptoms were like Parkinson’s, I remembered. You tripped easily.

  I wasn’t thinking clearly. I hadn’t had more than two or three hours of sleep for three nights running, and all I could think of was getting us both inside, away from the steps, the world.

  * * *

  Maybe it was fatigue. Or maybe something else. I should have gotten her to a hospital. I should have called Mendoza for an escort back to his unit. What I did was get her some clothes from the bedroom, keep my eyes on the rug while I was in there, and lock the door again when I came out. She didn’t ask why neither of us were going to sleep in the bedroom. She didn’t ask about the lock. She just held her belly, and smiled like some Madonna.

  I took two Dalmanes from the medicine cabinet, thinking they might be enough to get the pictures of what was in that room out of my head.

  I don’t know whether they did or not. Lissy was beside me, her shoulder pressing against me, as I got the futon and the sofa ready.

  Her stomach growled, and we laughed. I said, “Who’s growling? Who’s growling?” and we laughed again. I asked her if she was hungry and if she could eat sandwiches. She laughed again, and I got her a fresh one from the kitchen.

  She took the futon, lying on her side to keep the weight off. I took the sofa because of my long legs.

  I felt something beside me in the dark. She kissed me, said “Goodnight,” and I heard her nightgown whisper back into the darkness. I held it in for a while and then couldn’t anymore. It didn’t last long. Dalmane’s a knockout.

  * * *

  The next day I took her to the designated clinic and waited outside for her. She was happy. The big amino needle they stuck her with didn’t bother her, she said. She liked how much bigger her breasts were, she said, like a mother’s should be. She didn’t mind being careful about what she ate and drank. She even liked the strange V of hair growing on her abdomen, because—because it was hairy, she said, just like the thing inside her. She liked how she felt, and she wanted to know if I could see it, the glow, the one expectant mothers are supposed to have. I told her I could.

  * * *

  I’m thinking of a ten-year-old, the one that used to tag along with me on the median train every Saturday when I went in for caseloads while most mothers had their faces changed, or played, or mothered. We talked a lot back then, and I miss it. She wasn’t going to need a lot of work on that face, I knew—maybe the ears, just a little, if she was picky. She’d gotten her father’s genes. But she talked like me—like a kid from East L.A.—tough, with a smile, and I thought she was going to end up a D.A. or a showy defense type or at least an exec. That’s how stupid we get. In four years she was into molecular opiates and trillazines, and whose fault was that? The top brokers roll over two billion a year in this city alone; the local capi net a twentieth of that, their street dealers a fourth; and God knows what the guys in the labs bring home to their families.

  It’s six years later, and I hear her letting herself in one morning. She’s fumbling and stumbling at the front door. I get up, dreading it. What I see tells me that the drugs are nothing, nothing at all. She’s running with a strange group of kids, a lot of them older. This new thing’s a fad, I tell myself. It’s like not having your face fixed—like not getting the nasal ramification modified, the mandibular thrust attended to—when you could do it easily, anytime, and cheaply, just because you want to make a point, and it’s fun to goose the ones who need goosing. That’s all she’s really doing, you tell yourself.

  You’ve seen her a couple of times like this, but you still don’t recognize her. She’s heavy around the chest and shoulders, which makes her breasts seem a lot smaller. Her face is heavy; her eyes are puffy, almost closed. She walks with a limp because something hurts down low. Her shoulders are bare, and they’ve got tattoos now, the new metallic kind, glittery and painful. She’s wearing expensive pants, but they’re dirty.

  So you have a daughter now who’s not a daughter, or she’s both, boy and girl. The operation cost four grand, and you don’t want to think how she got the money. Everyone’s doing it, you tell yourself. But the operation doesn’t take. She gets an infection, and the thing stops being fun, and six months later she’s got no neurological response to some of the tissues the doctors have slapped on her, and pain in the others. It costs money to reverse. She doesn’t have it. She spends it on other things, she says.

  She wants money for the operation, she says, standing in front of you. You owe it to her, she says.

  You try to find the ten-year-old in those eyes, and you can’t.

  Did you ever?

  * * *

  The call came through at six, and I knew
it was County.

  A full jacket—ward status, medical action, all of it—had been put through. The fetus would be aborted—“for the mother’s safety … to prevent further exploitation by private interests … and physical endangerment by spouse.”

  Had Antalou been there, she’d have told me how County had already gotten flack from the board of supervisors, state W&I, and the attorney general’s office over a V.R. like this slipping through and getting this much press. They wanted it over, done with. If the fetus were aborted, County’s position would be clear—to state, the feds, and the religious groups that were starting to scream bloody murder.

  It would be an abortion no one would ever complain about.

  The husband was down at County holding with a pretty fibercast on his left tibia, but they weren’t taking any chances. Word on two interstate conspiracies to kill the ten women had reached the D.A., and they were, they said, taking it seriously. I was, I said, glad to hear it.

  Mendoza said he liked sassy women as much as the next guy, but he wanted her back in custody, and the new D.A. was screaming jurisdiction, too. Everyone wanted a piece of the ten o’clock news before the cameras lost interest and rolled on.

  Society wasn’t ready for it. The atavistic fears were there. You could be on trillazines, you could have an operation to be both a boy and a girl for the thrill of it, you could be a walljacker, but a mother like this, no, not yet.

  I should have told someone but didn’t. I took her to the zoo instead. We stood in front of the cages watching the holograms of the big cats, the tropical birds, the grass eaters of Africa—the ones that are gone. She wasn’t interested in the real ones, she said—the pigeons, sparrows, coyotes, the dull hardy ones that will outlast us all. She never came here as a child, she said, and I believe it. A boyfriend at her one and only job took her once, and later, because she asked her to, so did a woman who wanted the same thing from her.