The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  “You can’t put us off that easily! Who made you the little brass-plated general? We don’t have to take orders from you.”

  The bystanders shuffled uncomfortably, not leaving, waiting to take their cue from each other. Their suits were as good as identical in this crush, their helmets blank and expressionless. They looked like so many ambulatory eggs.

  The crowd’s mood balanced on the instant, ready to fall into acceptance or anger with a featherweight’s push. Gunther raised an arm. “General!” he said loudly. “Private Weil here! I’m awaiting my orders. Tell me what to do.”

  Laughter rippled through the room, and the tension eased. Ekatarina said, “Take whoever’s nearest you, and start clearing the afflicted out of the administrative areas. Guide them out toward the open, where they won’t be so likely to hurt themselves. Whenever you get a room or corridor emptied, lock it up tight. Got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tapped the suit nearest him, and its helmet dipped in a curt nod. But when they turned to leave, their way was blocked by the crush of bodies.

  “You!” Ekatarina jabbed a finger. “Go to the farmlocks and foam them shut; I don’t want any chance of getting them contaminated. Anyone with experience running factories – that’s most of us, I think – should find a remote and get to work shutting the things down. The CMP will help direct you. If you have nothing else to do, buddy up and work at clearing out the corridors. I’ll call a general meeting when we’ve put together a more comprehensive plan of action.” She paused. “What have I left out?”

  Surprisingly, the CMP answered her: “There are twenty-three children in the city, two of them seven-year-old pre-legals and the rest five years of age or younger, offspring of registered-permanent lunar components. Standing directives are that children be given special care and protection. The third-level chapel can be converted to a care center. Word should be spread that as they are found, the children are to be brought there. Assign one reliable individual to oversee them.”

  “My God, yes.” She turned to the belligerent man from the Center, and snapped, “Do it.”

  He hesitated, then saluted ironically and turned to go.

  That broke the logjam. The crowd began to disperse. Gunther and his co-worker – it turned out to be Liza Nagenda, another ground-rat like himself – set to work.

  In after years Gunther was to remember this period as a time when his life entered a dark tunnel. For long, nightmarish hours he and Liza shuffled from office to storage room, struggling to move the afflicted out of the corporate areas and into the light.

  The afflicted did not cooperate.

  The first few rooms they entered were empty. In the fourth, a distraught-looking woman was furiously going through drawers and files and flinging their contents away. Trash covered the floor. “It’s in here somewhere, it’s in here somewhere,” she said frantically.

  “What’s in there, darling?” Gunther said soothingly. He had to speak loudly so he could be heard through his helmet. “What are you looking for?”

  She tilted her head up with a smile of impish delight. Using both hands, she smoothed back her hair, elbows high, pushing it straight over her skull, then tucking in stray strands behind her ears. “It doesn’t matter, because I’m sure to find it now. Two scarabs appear, and between them the blazing disk of the sun, that’s a good omen, not to mention being an analogy for sex. I’ve had sex, all the sex anyone could want, buggered behind the outhouse by the lizard king when I was nine. What did I care? I had wings then and thought that I could fly.”

  Gunther edged a little closer. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

  “You know, Tolstoy said there was a green stick in the woods behind his house that once found would cause all men to love one another. I believe in that green stick as a basic principle of physical existence. The universe exists in a matrix of four dimensions which we can perceive and seven which we cannot, which is why we experience peace and brotherhood as a seven-dimensional greenstick phenomenon.”

  “You’ve got to listen to me.”

  “Why? You gonna tell me Hitler is dead? I don’t believe in that kind of crap.”

  “Oh hell,” Nagenda said. “You can’t reason with a flick. Just grab her arms and we’ll chuck her out.”

  It wasn’t that easy, though. The woman was afraid of them. Whenever they approached her, she slipped fearfully away.

  If they moved slowly, they could not corner her, and when they both rushed her, she leaped up over a desk and then down into the knee-hole. Nagenda grabbed her legs and pulled. The woman wailed, and clutched at the knees of her suit. “Get offa me,” Liza snarled. “Gunther, get this crazy woman off my damn legs.”

  “Don’t kill me!” the woman screamed. “I’ve always voted twice – you know I did. I told them you were a gangster, but I was wrong. Don’t take the oxygen out of my lungs!”

  They got the woman out of the office, then lost her again when Gunther turned to lock the door. She went fluttering down the corridor with Nagenda in hot pursuit. Then she dove into another office, and they had to start all over again.

  It took over an hour to drive the woman from the corridors and release her into the park. The next three went quickly enough by contrast. The one after that was difficult again, and the fifth turned out to be the first woman they had encountered, wandered back to look for her office. When they’d brought her to the open again, Liza Nagenda said, “That’s four flicks down and three thousand, eight hundred fifty-eight to go.”

  “Look—” Gunther began. And then Krishna’s voice sounded over his trance chip, stiffly and with exaggerated clarity. “Everyone is to go to the central lake immediately for an organizational meeting. Repeat: Go to the lake immediately. Go to the lake now.” He was obviously speaking over a jury-rigged transmitter. The sound was bad and his voice boomed and popped on the chip.

  “Alright, okay, I got that,” Liza said. “You can shut up now.”

  “Please go to the lake immediately. Everyone is to go directly to the central—”

  “Sheesh.”

  By the time they got out to the parklands again, the open areas were thick with people. Not just the suited figures of the survivors, either. All the afflicted were emerging from the caves and corridors of Bootstrap. They walked blindly, uncertainly, toward the lake, as if newly called from the grave. The ground level was filling with people.

  “Sonofabitch,” Gunther said wonderingly.

  “Gunther?” Nagenda asked. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s the trance chips! Sonofabitch, all we had to do was speak to them over the chips. They’ll do whatever the voice in their heads tells them to do.”

  The land about the lake was so crowded that Gunther had trouble spotting any other suits.

  Then he saw a suited figure standing on the edge of the second level waving broadly. He waved back and headed for the stairs.

  By the time he got to level two, a solid group of the unafflicted had gathered. More and more came up, drawn by the concentration of suits. Finally Ekatarina spoke over the open channel of her suit radio.

  “There’s no reason to wait for us all to gather. I think everyone is close enough to hear me. Sit down, take a little rest, you’ve all earned it.” People eased down on the grass. Some sprawled on their backs or stomachs, fully suited. Most just sat.

  “By a fortunate accident, we’ve discovered a means of controlling our afflicted friends.” There was light applause. “But there are still many problems before us, and they won’t all be solved so easily. We’ve all seen the obvious. Now I must tell you of worse. If the war on Earth goes full thermonuclear, we will be completely and totally cut off, possibly for decades.”

  A murmur passed through the crowd.

  “What does this mean? Beyond the immediate inconveniences – no luxuries, no more silk shirts, no new seed stock, no new videos, no way home for those of us who hadn’t already decided to stay – we will be losing much that we require for survival. Al
l our microfacturing capability comes from the Swiss Orbitals. Our water reserves are sufficient for a year, but we lose minute quantities of water vapor to rust and corrosion and to the vacuum every time somebody goes in or out an airlock, and those quantities are necessary for our existence.

  “But we can survive. We can process raw hydrogen and oxygen from the regolith, and burn them to produce water. We already make our own air. We can do without most nanoelectronics. We can thrive and prosper and grow, even if Earth . . . even if the worst happens. But to do so we’ll need our full manufacturing capability, and full supervisory capability as well. We must not only restore our factories, but find a way to restore our people. There’ll be work and more for all of us in the days ahead.”

  Nagenda touched helmets with Gunther and muttered, “What a crock.”

  “Come on, I want to hear this.”

  “Fortunately, the Crisis Management Program has contingency plans for exactly this situation. According to its records, which may be incomplete, I have more military command experience than any other functional. Does anyone wish to challenge this?” She waited, but nobody said anything. “We will go to a quasimilitary structure for the duration of the emergency. This is strictly for organizational purposes. There will be no privileges afforded the officers, and the military structure will be dismantled immediately upon resolution of our present problems. That’s paramount.”

  She glanced down at her peecee. “To that purpose, I am establishing beneath me a triumvirate of subordinate officers, consisting of Carlos Diaz-Rodrigues, Miiko Ezumi, and Will Posner. Beneath them will be nine officers, each responsible for a cadre of no more than ten individuals.”

  She read out names. Gunther was assigned to Cadre Four, Beth Hamilton’s group. Then Ekatarina said, “We’re all tired. The gang back at the Center have rigged up a decontamination procedure, a kitchen and sleeping spaces of sorts. Cadres One, Two and Three will put in four more hours here, then pull down a full eight hours sleep. Cadres Four through Nine may return now to the Center for a meal and four hours rest.” She stopped. “That’s it. Go get some shut-eye.”

  A ragged cheer arose, fell flat and died. Gunther stood. Liza Nagenda gave him a friendly squeeze on the butt and when he started to the right yanked his arm and pointed him left, toward the service escalators. With easy familiarity, she slid an arm around his waist.

  He’d known guys who’d slept with Liza Nagenda, and they all agreed that she was bad news, possessive, hysterical, ludicrously emotional. But what the hell. It was easier than not.

  They trudged off.

  There was too much to do. They worked to exhaustion – it was not enough. They rigged a system of narrow-band radio transmissions for the CMP and ran a microwave patch back to the Center, so it could direct their efforts more efficiently – it was not enough. They organized and rearranged constantly. But the load was too great and accidents inevitably happened.

  Half the surviving railguns – small units used to deliver raw and semiprocessed materials over the highlands and across the bay – were badly damaged when the noonday sun buckled their aluminum rails; the sunscreens had not been put in place in time. An unknown number of robot bulldozers had wandered off from the strip mines and were presumably lost. It was hard to guess how many because the inventory records were scrambled. None of the food stored in Bootstrap could be trusted; the Center’s meals had to be harvested direct from the farms and taken out through the emergency locks. An inexperienced farmer mishandled her remote, and ten aquaculture tanks boiled out into vacuum, geysering nine thousand fingerlings across the surface. On Posner’s orders, the remote handler rigs were hastily packed and moved to the Center. When uncrated, most were found to have damaged rocker arms.

  There were small victories. On his second shift, Gunther found fourteen bales of cotton in vacuum storage and set an assembler to sewing futons for the Center. That meant an end to sleeping on bare floors and made him a local hero for the rest of that day. There were not enough toilets in the Center; Diaz-Rodrigues ordered the flare storm shelters in the factories stripped of theirs. Huriel Garza discovered a talent for cooking with limited resources.

  But they were losing ground. The afflicted were unpredictable, and they were everywhere. A demented systems analyst, obeying the voices in his head, dumped several barrels of lubricating oil in the lake. The water filters clogged, and the streams had to be shut down for repairs. A doctor somehow managed to strangle herself with her own diagnostic harness. The city’s ecologics were badly stressed by random vandalism.

  Finally somebody thought to rig up a voice loop for continuous transmission. “I am calm,” it said. “I am tranquil. I do not want to do anything. I am happy where I am.”

  Gunther was working with Liza Nagenda trying to get the streams going again when the loop came on. He looked up and saw an uncanny quiet spread over Bootstrap. Up and down the terraces, the flicks stood in postures of complete and utter impassivity. The only movement came from the small number of suits scurrying like beetles among the newly catatonic.

  Liza put her hands on her hips. “Terrific. Now we’ve got to feed them.”

  “Hey, cut me some slack, okay? This is the first good news I’ve heard since I don’t know when.”

  “It’s not good anything, sweetbuns. It’s just more of the same.”

  She was right. Relieved as he was, Gunther knew it. One hopeless task had been traded for another.

  He was wearily suiting up for his third day when Hamilton stopped him and said, “Weil! You know any electrical engineering?”

  “Not really, no. I mean, I can do the wiring for a truck, or maybe rig up a microwave relay, stuff like that, but . . .”

  “It’ll have to do. Drop what you’re on, and help Krishna set up a system for controlling the flicks. Some way we can handle them individually.”

  They set up shop in Krishna’s old lab. The remnants of old security standards still lingered, and nobody had been allowed to sleep there. Consequently, the room was wonderfully neat and clean, all crafted-in-orbit laboratory equipment with smooth, anonymous surfaces. It was a throwback to a time before clutter and madness had taken over. If it weren’t for the new-tunnel smell, the raw tang of cut rock the air carried, it would be possible to pretend nothing had happened.

  Gunther stood in a telepresence rig, directing a remote through Bootstrap’s apartments. They were like so many unconnected cells of chaos. He entered one and found the words BUDDHA = COSMIC INERTIA scrawled on its wall with what looked to be human feces. A woman sat on the futon tearing handfuls of batting from it and flinging them in the air. Cotton covered the room like a fresh snowfall. The next apartment was empty and clean, and a microfactory sat gleaming on a ledge. “I hereby nationalize you in the name of the People’s Provisional Republic of Bootstrap, and of the oppressed masses everywhere,” he said dryly. The remote gingerly picked it up. “You done with that chip diagram yet?”

  “It will not be long now,” Krishna said.

  They were building a prototype controller. The idea was to code each peecee, so the CMP could identify and speak to its owner individually. By stepping down the voltage, they could limit the peecee’s transmission range to a meter and a half so that each afflicted person could be given individualized orders. The existing chips, however, were high-strung Swiss Orbital thoroughbreds, and couldn’t handle oddball power yields. They had to be replaced.

  “I don’t see how you can expect to get any useful work out of these guys, though. I mean, what we need are supervisors. You can’t hope to get coherent thought out of them.”

  Bent low over his peecee, Krishna did not answer at first. Then he said, “Do you know how a yogi stops his heart? We looked into that when I was in grad school. We asked Yogi Premanand if he would stop his heart while wired up to our instruments, and he graciously consented. We had all the latest brain scanners, but it turned out the most interesting results were recorded by the EKG.

  “We found that the yo
gi’s heart did not, as we had expected, slow down, but rather went faster and faster, until it reached its physical limits and began to fibrillate. He had not slowed his heart; he had sped it up. It did not stop, but went into spasm.

  “After our tests, I asked him if he had known these facts. He said no, that they were most interesting. He was polite about it, but clearly did not think our findings very significant.”

  “So you’re saying . . . ?”

  “The problem with schizophrenics is that they have too much going on in their heads. Too many voices. Too many ideas. They can’t focus their attention on a single chain of thought. But it would be a mistake to think them incapable of complex reasoning. In fact, they’re thinking brilliantly. Their brains are simply operating at such peak efficiencies that they can’t organize their thoughts coherently.

  “What the trance chip does is to provide one more voice, but a louder, more insistent one. That’s why they obey it. It breaks through that noise, provides a focus, serves as a matrix along which thought can crystallize.”

  The remote unlocked the door into a conference room deep in the administrative tunnels. Eight microfactories waited in a neat row atop the conference table. It added the ninth, turned, and left, locking the door behind it. “You know,” Gunther said, “all these elaborate precautions may be unnecessary. Whatever was used on Bootstrap may not be in the air anymore. It may never have been in the air. It could’ve been in the water or something.”

  “Oh, it’s there all right, in the millions. We’re dealing with an airborne schizomimetic engine. It’s designed to hang around in the air indefinitely.”

  “A schizomimetic engine? What the hell is that?”

  In a distracted monotone, Krishna said, “A schizomimetic engine is a strategic nonlethal weapon with high psychological impact. It not only incapacitates its target vectors, but places a disproportionately heavy burden on the enemy’s manpower and material support caring for the victims. Due to the particular quality of the effect, it has a profoundly demoralizing influence on those exposed to the victims, especially those involved in their care. Thus, it is particularly desirable as a strategic weapon.” He might have been quoting from an operations manual.