The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  We watched the lions, the ibex, the white bears. We watched the long-legged wolf, the harp seals, the rheas. We watched the tapes stop and repeat, stop and repeat; and then she said, “Let’s go,” pulled at my hand, and we moved on to the most important cage of all.

  There, the hologram walked back and forth looking out at us, looking through us, its red sagittal crest and furrowed brow so convincing. Alive, its name had been Mark Anthony, the plaque said. It had weighed two hundred kilos. It had lived to be ten. It wasn’t one of the two whose child was growing inside her, but she seemed to know this, and it didn’t matter.

  “They all died the same way,” she said to me. “That’s what counts, Jo.” Inbred depression, I remembered reading. Petechial hemorrhages, cirrhosis, renal failure.

  Somewhere in the nation the remaining fertilized ova were sitting frozen in a lab, as they had for thirty years. A few dozen had been removed, thawed, encouraged to divide to sixteen cells, and finally implanted that day seven months ago. Ten had taken. As they should have, naturally, apes that we are. “Sure, it could’ve been done back then,” the cocky young resident with insubordination written all over him had said. “All you’d have needed was an egg and a little plastic tube. And, of course,”—I didn’t like the way he smiled—“a woman who was willing.…”

  I stopped her. I asked her if she knew what The Arks were, and she said no. I started to tell her about the intensive-care zoos where for twenty years the best and brightest of them, ten thousand species in all, had been kept while two hundred thousand others disappeared—the toxics, the new diseases, the land-use policies of a new world taking them one by one—how The Arks hadn’t worked, how two thirds of the macrokingdom were gone now, and how the thing she carried inside her was one of them and one of the best.

  She wasn’t listening. She didn’t need to hear it, and I knew the man in the suit had gotten his yes without having to say these things. The idea of having it inside her, hers for a little while, had been enough.

  She told me what she was going to buy with the money. She asked me whether I thought the baby would end up at this zoo. I told her I didn’t know but could check, and hated the lie. She said she might have to move to another city to be near it. I nodded and didn’t say a thing.

  I couldn’t stand it. I sat her down on a bench and told her what the County was going to do to her.

  When I was through she looked at me and said she’d known it would happen, it always happened. She didn’t cry. I thought maybe she wanted to leave, but she shook her head.

  We went through the zoo one more time. We didn’t leave until dark.

  * * *

  “Are you out of your mind, Jo?” Antalou said.

  “It’s not permanent,” I said.

  “Of course it’s not permanent. Everyone’s been looking everywhere for her. What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I said it didn’t matter, did it? The County homes and units weren’t safe, and we didn’t want her with Mendoza, and who’d think of a soc worker’s house—a P.D. safe house maybe, but not a soc worker’s because that’s against policy, and everyone knows that soc workers are spineless, right?

  “Sure,” Antalou said. “But you didn’t tell anybody, Jo.”

  “I’ve had some thinking to do.”

  Suddenly Antalou got gentle, and I knew what she was thinking. I needed downtime, maybe some psychiatric profiling done. She’s a friend of mine, but she’s a professional, too. The two of us go back all the way to corrections, Antalou and I, and lying isn’t easy.

  “Get her over to County holding immediately—that’s the best we can do for her,” she said finally. “And let’s have lunch soon, Jo. I want to know what’s going on in that head of yours.”

  * * *

  It took me the night and the morning. They put her in the nicest hole they had and doubled the security, and when I left she cried for a long time, they told me. I didn’t want to leave, but I had to get some thinking done.

  When it was done, I called Antalou.

  She swore at me when I was through but said she’d give it a try. It was crazy, but what isn’t these days?

  * * *

  The County bit, but with stipulations. Postpartum wipe. New I.D. Fine, but also a fund set up out of our money. Antalou groaned. I said. Why not.

  Someone at County had a heart, but it was our mention of Statute Forty-A, I found out later, that clinched it. They saw the thing dragging on through the courts, cameras rolling forever, and that was worse than any temporary heat from state or the feds.

  * * *

  So they let her have the baby. I slept in the waiting room of the maternity unit, and it took local troops as well as hospital security to keep the press away. We used a teaching hospital down south—approved by the group that was funding her—but even then the media found out and came by the droves.

  We promised full access at a medically approved moment if they cooled it, which they did. The four that didn’t were taken bodily from the building under one penal code section or another.

  At the beginning of the second stage of labor, the infant abruptly rotates from occiput-posterior to right occiput-anterior position; descent is rapid, and a viable two-thousand-gram female is delivered without episiotomy. Interspecific Apgar scores are nine and ten at one and five minutes, respectively.

  The report would sound like all the others I’d read. The only difference would be how the thing looked, and even that wasn’t much.

  The little head, hairless face, broad nose, black hair sticking up like some old movie comic’s. Human eyes, hairless chest, skinny arms. The feet would look like hands, sure, and the skin would be a little gray, but how much was that? To the girl in the bed it wasn’t anything at all.

  * * *

  She said she wanted me to be there, and I said sure but didn’t know the real reason.

  When her water broke, they told me, and I got scrubbed up, put on the green throw-aways like they said, and got back to her room quickly. The contractions had started up like a hammer.

  It didn’t go smoothly. The cord got hung up on the baby’s neck inside, and the fetal monitor started screaming. She got scared; I got scared. They put her up on all fours to shift the baby, but it didn’t work. They wheeled her to the O.R. for a C-section, which they really didn’t want to do; and for two hours it was fetal signs getting better, then worse, doctors preparing for a section, then the signs somehow getting better again. Epidural block, episiotomy, some concerted forceps work, and the little head finally starts to show.

  Lissy was exhausted, making little sounds. More deep breaths, a few encouraging shouts from the doctors, more pushing from Lissy, and the head was through, then the body, white as a ghost from the vernix, and someone was saying something to me in a weak voice.

  “Will you cut the cord, please?”

  It was Lissy.

  I couldn’t move. She said it again.

  The doctor was waiting, the baby slick in his hands. Lissy was white as a sheet, her forehead shiny with the sweat, and she couldn’t see it from where she was. “It would be special to me, Jo,” she said.

  One of the nurses was beside me saying how it’s done all the time—by husbands and lovers, sisters and mothers and friends—but that if I was going to do it I needed to do it now, please.

  I tried to remember who had cut the cord when Meg was born, and I couldn’t. I could remember a doctor, that was all.

  I don’t remember taking the surgical steel snips, but I did. I remember not wanting to cut it—flesh and blood, the first of its kind in a long, long time—and when I finally did, it was tough, the cutting made a noise, and then it was over, the mother had the baby in her arms, and everyone was smiling.

  * * *

  A woman could have carried a Gorilla gorilla beringei to term without a care in the world a hundred, a thousand, a million years ago. The placenta would have known what to do; the blood would never have mixed. The gestation was the same nine mon
ths. The only thing stopping anyone that winter day in ’97 when Cleo, the last of her kind on the face of this earth, died of renal failure in the National Zoo in DC, was the thought of carrying it.

  It had taken three decades, a well-endowed resurrection group, a slick body broker, and a skinny twenty-one-year-old girl who didn’t mind the thought of it.

  * * *

  She wants money for the operation, my daughter says to me that day in the doorway, shoulders heavy, face puffy, slurring it, the throat a throat I don’t know, the voice deeper. I tell her again I don’t have it, that perhaps her friends—the ones she’s helped out so often when she had the money and they didn’t—could help her. I say it nicely, with no sarcasm, trying not to look at where she hurts, but she knows exactly what I’m saying.

  She goes for my eyes, as if she’s had practice, and I don’t fight back. She gets my cheek and the corner of my eye, screams something about never loving me and me never loving her—which isn’t true.

  She knows I know how she’ll spend the money, and it makes her mad.

  I don’t remember the ten-year-old ever wanting to get even with anyone, but this one always does. She hurts. She wants to hurt back. If she knew, if she only knew what I’d carry for her.

  I’ll find her, I know—tonight, tomorrow morning, the next day or two—sitting at a walljack somewhere in the apartment, her body plugged in, the little unit with its Medusa wires sitting in her lap, her heavy shoulders hunched as if she were praying, and I’ll unplug her—to show I care.

  But she’ll have gotten even with me, and that’s what counts, and no matter how much I plead with her, promise her anything she wants, she won’t try a program, she won’t go with me to County—both of us, together—for help.

  Her body doesn’t hurt at all when she’s on the wall. When you’re a walljacker you don’t care what kind of tissue’s hanging off you, you don’t care what you look like—what anyone looks like. The universe is inside. The juice is from the wall, the little unit translates, and the right places in your skull—the medulla all the way to the cerebellum, all the right centers—get played like the keys of the most beautiful synthesizer in the world. You see blue skies that make you cry. You see young men and women who make you come in your pants without your even needing to touch them. You see loving mothers. You see fathers that never leave you.

  I’ll know what to do. I’ll flip the circuit breakers and sit in the darkness with a hand light until she comes out of it, cold-turkeying, screaming mad, and I’ll say nothing. I’ll tell myself once again that it’s the drugs, it’s the jacking, it’s not her. She’s dead and gone and hasn’t been the little girl on that train with her hair tucked behind her ears for a long time, that this one’s a lie but one I’ve got to keep playing.

  So I walk into the bedroom, and she’s there, in the chair, like always. She’s got clothes on for a change and doesn’t smell, and I find myself thinking how neat she looks—chic even. I don’t feel a thing.

  As I take a step toward the kitchen and the breaker box, I see what she’s done.

  I see the wires doubling back to the walljack, and I remember hearing about this from someone. It’s getting common, a fad.

  There are two ways to do it. You can rig it so that anyone who touches you gets ripped with a treble wall dose in a bypass. Or so that anyone who kills the electricity, even touches the wires, kills you.

  Both are tamperproof. The M.E. has twenty bodies to prove it, and the guys stuck with the job downtown don’t see a breakthrough for months.

  She’s opted for the second. Because it hurts the most.

  She’s starving to death in the chair, cells drying out, unless someone I.V.’s her—carefully. Even then the average expectancy is two months, I remember.

  I get out. I go to a cheap hotel downtown. I dream about blackouts in big cities and bodies that move but aren’t alive and about daughters. The next morning I get a glucose drip into her arm, and I don’t need any help with the needle.

  That’s what’s behind the door, Lissy.

  * * *

  We gave them their press conference. The doctors gave her a mild shot of pergisthan to perk her up, since she wouldn’t be nursing, and she did it, held the baby in her arms like a pro, smiled though she was pale as a sheet, and the conference lasted two whole hours. Most of the press went away happy, and two of Mendoza’s girls roughed up the three that tried to hide out on the floor that night. “Mendoza says hello,” they said, grinning.

  The floor returned to normal. I went in.

  The mother was asleep. The baby was in the incubator. Three nurses were watching over them.

  The body broker came with his team two days later and looked happy. Six of his ten babies had made it.

  * * *

  Her name is Mary McLoughlin. I chose it. Her hair is dark, and she wears it short. She lives in Chula Vista, just south of San Diego, and I get down there as often as I can, and we go out.

  She doesn’t remember a thing, so I was the one who had to suggest it. We go to the zoo, the San Diego Zoo, one of the biggest once. We go to the primates. We stand in front of the new exhibit, and she tells me how the real thing is so much better than the holograms, which she thinks she’s seen before but isn’t sure.

  The baby is a year old now. They’ve named her Cleo, and they keep her behind glass—two or three vets in gauze masks with her at all times—safe from the air and diseases. But we get to stand there, watching her like the rest, up close, while she looks at us and clowns.

  No one recognizes the dark-haired girl I’m with. The other one, the one who’d have good reason to be here, disappeared long ago, the media says. Sometimes the spotlight is just too great, they said.

  “I can almost smell her, Jo,” she says, remembering a dream, a vague thing, a kitten slept with. “She’s not full-grown, you know.”

  I tell her, yes, I know.

  “She’s sure funny looking, isn’t she.”

  I nod.

  “Hey, I think she knows me!” She says it with a laugh, doesn’t know what she’s said. “Look at how she’s looking at me!”

  The creature is looking at her—it’s looking at all of us and with eyes that aren’t dumb. Looking at us, not through us.

  “Can we come back tomorrow, Jo?” she asks when the crowd gets too heavy to see through.

  Of course, I say. We’ll come a lot, I say.

  I’ve filed for guardianship under Statute Twenty-seven, the old W&I provisions, and if it goes through, Lissy will be moving back to L.A. with me. I’m hetero, so it won’t get kicked for exploitation, and I’m in the right field, I think. I can’t move myself, but we’ll go down to the zoo every weekend. It’ll be good to get away. Mendoza has asked me out, and who knows, I may say yes.

  But I still have to have that lunch with Antalou, and I have no idea what I’m going to tell her.

  CONNIE WILLIS

  The Last of the Winnebagoes

  Connie Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family. She first attracted attention as a writer in the late ’70s with a number of outstanding stories for the now-defunct magazine Galileo, and in the subsequent few years has made a large name for herself very fast indeed. In 1982, she won two Nebula Awards, one for her superb novelette “Fire Watch,” and one for her poignant short story “A Letter from the Clearys”; a few months later, “Fire Watch” went on to win her a Hugo Award as well. Her short fiction has appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Berkley Showcase, The Twilight Zone Magazine, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Her books include the novel Water Witch, written in collaboration with Cynthia Felice, and Fire Watch, a collection of her short fiction. Her most recent book was Lincoln’s Dreams, her first solo novel. Upcoming is another novel in collaboration with Cynthia Felice, and a new solo novel. Her story “The Sidon in the Mirror” was in our First Annual Collection, her story “Blued Moon” was in our Second Annual Collection, and her s
tory “Chance” was in our Fourth Annual Collection.

  In the ingenious, bittersweet, and powerful story that follows, she takes us to near-future Arizona to unravel a mystery of the hidden depths of the human heart.

  THE LAST OF THE WINNEBAGOES

  Connie Willis

  On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road. I was in the far left lane of Van Buren, ten lanes away from it, and its long legs were facing away from me, the squarish muzzle flat against the pavement so it looked narrower than it really was, and for a minute I thought it was a dog.

  I had not seen an animal in the road like that for fifteen years. They can’t get onto the divideds, of course, and most of the multiways are fenced. And people are more careful of their animals.

  The jackal was probably somebody’s pet. This part of Phoenix was mostly residential, and after all this time, people still think they can turn the nasty, carrion-loving creatures into pets. Which was no reason to have hit it and, worse, left it there. It’s a felony to strike an animal and another one to not report it, but whoever had hit it was long gone.

  I pulled the Hitori over onto the center shoulder and sat there awhile, staring at the empty multiway. I wondered who had hit it and whether they had stopped to see if it was dead.

  Katie had stopped. She had hit the brakes so hard she sent the car into a skid that brought it up against the ditch, and jumped out of the jeep. I was still running toward him, floundering in the snow. We made it to him almost at the same time. I knelt beside him, the camera dangling from my neck, its broken case hanging half open.

  “I hit him,” Katie had said. “I hit him with the jeep.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t even see over the pile of camera equipment in the back seat with the eisenstadt balanced on top. I got out. I had come nearly a mile, and looking back, I couldn’t see the jackal, though I knew now that’s what it was.

  “McCombe! David! Are you there yet?” Ramirez’s voice said from inside the car.