The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

  She was silent for a moment, then turned to him seriously. “Rafiel, dear,” she said. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “I know,” he said reluctantly.

  “No, I don’t think you do. I didn’t come here by accident. Mosay—”

  He was beside her by then, and closed her lips with a kiss. “But I do know,” he said. “Mosay called you to tell you, didn’t he? Why else would you come all the way back to Earth in such a great hurry? That little episode I had, it wasn’t just fatigue, was it? It meant that they can’t keep me going much longer, so the bad news is that I don’t have much time left, do I? I’m going to die.”

  “Oh, Rafiel,” she said, woebegone.

  “But I’ve known that this was going to happen all my life,” he said reasonably, “or at least since you told me. It’s all right.”

  “It isn’t!”

  He shrugged, almost annoyed. “It has to be all right, because I’m mortal,” he explained.

  She was shaking her head. “Yes. But no.” She seemed almost near tears as she plunged on. “Don’t you see, that’s why I came here like this. You don’t have to die completely. There’s a kind of immortality that even short-timers have open to them if they want it. Like your Docilia.”

  He frowned at her, and she reached out and touched his lips. “Will you give me a baby?” she whispered. “A son? A boy who will look just like you when he grows up – around Tau Ceti?”

  11

  Although the Sonora arcology is far tinier and dingier than some of those in the busy, crowded north, it naturally does not lack any of the standard facilities – including a clinic for implanting a human fetus into a nurturing animal womb. On the fourth day after the donation the new parents (or, usually, at least one of them) may come up to the sunny brightly painted nursery to receive their fetus. It is true that the circumstances for Rafiel and Alegretta are a bit unusual. Most fetuses are implanted at once into the large mammal – a cow most often, or a large sow – that will bring them to term and deliver them. Their child has a more complicated incubation in store. He (it is definitely to be a boy, and they have spent a lot of time thinking of names for him) must go with Alegretta to the interstellar ship Hakluyt, which means that the baby’s host must go there too. Cows are not really very portable. So, just for now, for the sake of ease in transportation, their fetus has been temporarily implanted in a much smaller mammal, which is now spending as much time as it is allowed sitting purring in Alegretta’s lap, a bit ruffled at recent indignities, but quite content.

  They didn’t just talk and make love and babies. On the second day Alegretta announced she was temporarily going to be a doctor again.

  “But you’ve probably forgotten how to do it,” Rafiel said, half joking.

  “The computer hasn’t,” she told him, not joking at all. She got his medical records from the datafile and studied them seriously for a long time. Then she sent the server out for some odds and ends. When they came she pressed sticky sensor buttons on his chest and belly – “I hope I remember how to do this without pulling all your hair off,” she said – and pored over the readings on the screen. Then she had long conversations over the tel with someone, from which Rafiel was excluded and which wound up in the server bringing him new little bottles of spansules and syrups to take. “These will make you feel better,” she told him.

  But they both knew that even the best efforts of loving Alegretta could not possibly make him be better.

  They were also both well aware that they could not stay long together in Sonora. If they hadn’t known that, they would have been told so, because the callback lists kept piling up on the communications screen – Mosay and Jeftha and ten or twelve others for Rafiel, faxed messages from Hakluyt for Alegretta. Once a day they took time to read them, and occasionally to answer them. “They’re putting the frozen stocks on board now,” Alegretta announced to her lover, between callbacks.

  “Frozen food for the trip? You must need a lot—”

  “No, no. Not food – well, a little bit of frozen food, yes, but we couldn’t carry enough to last out the trip. Most of the food we need we’ll grow along the way. What I’m talking about is frozen sperm and ova – cats, dogs, livestock, birds – and frozen seeds and clones for planting. We’ll need them when we get there.”

  “And what if there’s no good planet there to plant them on?” he asked.

  “Bite your tongue,” she said absently, making him smile at her as she sat huddled over the manifest. He found himself smiling a good deal these days. His kitten, which had not let either of them out of its sight while its mother was off in the implantation clinic, was licking its left forepaw with concentrated attention. The lovers touched a lot, sometimes talking, sometimes just drowsing in the scents and warmths of each other. They looked at each other a lot, charmed to see in each other a prospective parent of a shared child.

  Rafiel said meditatively, “It would have been fun to conceive it in the old-fashioned way.”

  She looked up. “It’s safer when they do it in the laboratory. Not to mention this way we can be sure it’s a boy.” She came over and kissed him. “Anyway, we can – well, in a day or two we can – do all of that we want to.”

  Rafiel rubbed his ear against her cheek, quite content. It was a very minor inconvenience that sexual intercourse had to be postponed a bit, Alegretta’s womb tender from the removal of the ovum.

  “Are you getting restless?” she asked.

  “Me? No, I’m happy to stay right here in the condo. Are you?”

  She said, “Not really, but there is something I’d like to do outside.”

  “Name it.”

  “It’s so you’ll know what my work’s like,” she explained. “If you think you’d like to, I’d enjoy showing you what this arcology’s powerplant looks like.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  He would have said the same to almost anything Alegretta proposed. Still, it wasn’t the kind of “of course” he felt totally confident about, because one of Mosay’s calls had been to warn him that the paparazzi knew he was still in the arcology. They somehow even knew that he and Alegretta had conceived a child. Someone in the clinic had let the news out. But Rafiel took what precautions he could to preserve their privacy. They chose their time – it was after midnight – and the doorwarden reported no one in the area when they stole out and down into the lowest reaches of the arcology.

  It turned out that the powerplant wasn’t particularly hot. It didn’t look dangerous at all; everything was enameled white or glittering steel, no more worrisome in appearance than a kitchen. It was noisy, though; they both had to put on earplugs when the shift engineer, as a professional courtesy to his colleague, Alegretta, let them in. With all the roaring and whining around them they couldn’t talk very well, but Alegretta had explained some of it on the way down, and pointed meaningfully to this great buzzing cylinder and that red-striped blank wall, and Rafiel was nearly sure he understood what he was seeing. He knew it was muon-catalysed fusion. He even knew that it was, in fact, the most desperately desired dream of powerplant designers for generations, a source of power that took its energy from the commonest of all elements: hydrogen, the same universal fuel that stoked the fires of the stars themselves, and delivered it in almost any form anyone could wish – heat, kinetic energy or electricity – without fuss or bother. Well, not entirely without bother. It had taken a long time and a lot of clever engineering to figure out how to get the pions to make the muons that would make the reaction go; but there it was. Lukewarm fusion operated without violent explosions, impossible containment or deadly radioactive contamination. It worked best at an optimal temperature of 700 degrees Celsius (instead of many thousands!), and so it was intrinsically both safe and convenient. It was, really, the fundamental reason why the living members of the human race now outnumbered the dead. The fetal procedures could extend life, but it was only the cheap and easy energy that would never run out that could keep all
ten trillion human beings alive.

  “Thanks,” Alegretta said to the shift engineer as she collected their dosimeters and earplugs on the way out. Rafiel wasn’t looking at the engineer as she checked the dosimeters and nodded to Alegretta to show they were all right. He was looking at Alegretta, so small and pretty and well, yes, so young to be the master of so much energy.

  And so damned intelligent. She was explaining the system to him, pleased and flushed, as they moved toward the exit door. “It’s not really hydrogen we burn; it’s muonized deuterium; you know, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, but with a muon replacing its electron.”

  He didn’t know, but he said, “Yes. Yes, I see.”

  She was going right on. “So, since the muon is heavier, it orbits closer to the nucleus. This means that two atoms of deuterium can come closer to each other than electron-hydrogen ever could, and thus they fuse very easily into helium – oh, hell!” she finished, looking out the door. “Who are they?”

  He swore softly and took her arm. “Come on,” he said, pushing their way through the swarm of paparazzi.

  “We must have been seen going in,” he told her, once they were safely back in the condo. “Or your friend the engineer called somebody.”

  “It is always like this, Rafiel?”

  He wanted to be honest with her. “Sometimes we tip the paps off ourselves,” he admitted. “I mean, I don’t personally do it. I don’t have to. Jeftha or Mosay or somebody will, because we want the paparazzi there, you know? They’re good for business. They’re the source of the publicity that makes us into stars.”

  “Did you?”

  “Did I tip them off? No. No, this time they found us out on their own. They’re good at that.”

  So he had no secrets any more; the paparazzi knew that his life was nearing its end and that he had started a child he would not live to see grow, all of which made him more newsworthy than ever, for the same reasons; because he was Rafiel, the short-timer; because he was going to do that black-comic thing, to die. Since hardly anybody really suffered, people like Rafiel filled a necessary niche in the human design: they did the suffering for everyone else to enjoy vicariously – and with the audience’s inestimable privilege of turning the suffering off when they chose.

  “Yes, but is it always like this?”

  He picked up the kitten and cradled it in his arms, upside down, its blue eyes looking up warily at him.

  “It will be as long as we’re here together,” he said.

  She did not respond to that. She just walked silently over to the communications screen.

  It seemed to Rafiel that his beloved wanted not to be beloved, or not actively beloved, right then. Her back was significantly turned toward him. She had taken some faxes from Hakluyt and was poring over them, not looking at him. He took his cue from her and went into the other room to deal with a couple of callbacks. He did not think he had satisfactorily explained the situation to her. On the other hand, he didn’t think he had to.

  When he came back she was sitting with a fax in her hand, purring Nicolette in her lap, her head down. He stood there for a moment, looking not at Alegretta but at the cat. The little animal showed no sign of the human gene splices that let her be a temporary incubator for their child. She was just a cat. But inside the cat was the child which would see such wonders, forever denied to himself – a new sun in the sky, planets (perhaps planets, anyway) where no human had ever set foot – all the things that were possible to someone with an endless life ahead of him.

  He knew that the thing in the cat’s belly was not actually a child yet, hardly even a real fetus; it was no larger than a grain of dust, but already it was richer in powers and prospects than its father would ever be.

  Then, as Alegretta moved, he saw that she was weeping.

  He stood staring at her, more embarrassed than he had ever been with Alegretta before. He couldn’t remember ever seeing an adult cry before. Not even himself. He moved uncomfortably and must have made some small noise, because she looked up and saw him there.

  She beckoned him over and put her hand on his. “My dear,” she said, still weeping, “I can’t put it off any longer. I have to be there for the final tests, so – I have to leave tomorrow.”

  “Come to bed,” he said.

  In the morning he was up before her. He woke her with a kiss. She smiled up at him as she opened her eyes, then let the smile slip away as she remembered, finally saw what he was holding in his hand. She looked at him in puzzlement. “What’s that thing for?”

  He held up the little cage. “I sent the server out for it first thing this morning,” he said, “It’s to put the kitten in for the trip. We don’t want to break the family up again, do we?”

  “We?”

  He shrugged. “The you and me we. I decided I really wanted to see your Hakluyt before it takes you away from me.”

  “But Rafiel! It’s such a long trip to Hakluyt!”

  “Kosmojets go there, don’t they?”

  “Of course they do, but” – she hesitated, then plunged on – “but are you up to that kind of stress, Rafiel? I mean physically? Just to get into orbit is a strain, you know; you have to launch to orbit through the railgun, and that’s a seven-gee acceleration. Can you stand seven gees?”

  “I can,” he said, “stand anything at all, except losing you so soon.”

  12

  Rafiel is excited over the trip. Their first leg is an airplane flight. It’s his first time in a plane in many years, and there’s no choice about it; no maglev trains go to the Peruvian Andes. That’s where the railgun is, on the westward slope of a mountain, pointing toward the stars. As the big turboprop settles in to its landing at the base of the railgun, Rafiel gets his first good look at the thing. It looks like a skijump in reverse: its traffic goes up. The scenery all around is spectacular. Off to the north of the railgun there’s a huge waterfall which once was a hydroelectric dam supplying power to half Peru and almost all of Bolivia. Lukewarm-fusion put the hydropower plants out of business and now it is just a decorative cataract. When they get out Rafiel finds his heart pounding and his breath panting, for even the base of the railgun is nearly 2,500 meters above sea level, but he doesn’t care. He is thrilled.

  While they were dressing in their cushiony railgun suits, Rafiel paused to listen to the scream of a capsule accelerating up the rails to escape velocity. Alegretta stopped what she was doing, too, to look at him. “Are you sure you can handle this?” she asked. His offhand wave said that he was very, very sure. She checked him carefully as he got into each item of the railgun clothes. What they wore was important – no belts for either of them, no brassiere for Alegretta, slippers rather than shoes, no heavy jewelry – because the seven-gee strain would cost them severely for any garment that pressed into their flesh or constrained their freedom. When Alegretta was satisfied about that, she got to the serious problem of fitting baskets to the cats.

  “Will she be all right?” Rafiel asked anxiously, looking at Nicolette – meaning, really, will the almost-baby in her belly be all right?

  “I’ll make her be all right,” Alegretta promised, checking the resilience of the padding with her knuckles. “That’ll do. Anyway, cats stand high-gee better than people. You’ve heard stories of them falling out of tenth-story windows and walking away? They’re true – sometimes true, anyway. Now let’s get down to the loading platform.”

  That was busier than Rafiel had expected. Four or five other passengers were saying good-byes to friends on the platform, but it wasn’t just people who were about to be launched into space. There were crates and cartons, all padded, being fitted carefully into place in the cargo section, and servers were strapping down huge Dewars of liquid gas. “Inside,” a guard commanded, and when they were in the capsule a steward leaned over them to help with the straps and braces. “Just relax,” he said, “and don’t turn your heads.” Then he bent to check the cat baskets. The kitten was already asleep, but her mother was obviously dis
contented with what was happening to her. However, there wasn’t much she could do about it in the sweater-like restraint garment that held her, passive . . . No, Rafiel thought, not a sweater; more like a straitjacket –

  And then they were on their way.

  The thrust squeezed all the breath out of Rafiel, who had not fully remembered what seven gees could do to him. The padded seat was memory plastic and it had molded itself to his body; the restraints were padded; the garments were without wrinkles or seams to cut into flesh. But still it was seven gees. The athletic dancer’s body that had never gone over seventy-five kilograms suddenly and bruisingly weighed more than half a ton. Breathing was frighteningly difficult; his chest muscles were not used to expanding his ribcage against such force. When he turned his head, ever so minutely, he was instantly dizzied as the bones of the inner ear protested at being twisted so viciously. He thought he was going to vomit; he forced himself to breathe.

  It lasted only for a few minutes. Then they were free. The acceleration stopped. The railgun had flung the capsule off its tip, and now they were simply thrown free into the sky, weightless. The only external force acting on the railgun launch capsule now was the dwindling friction of the outside air; that pressed Rafiel’s body against the restraining straps at first, but then it, too, was gone.

  “Congratulations, dear Rafiel,” said Alegretta, smiling. “You’re in space.”

  Once they had transhipped to a spacecraft it was eight days to Mars-orbit, where Hakluyt hung waiting for them. There were a few little sleeping cabins in the ship, in addition to the multi-bunk compartments. The cabins were expensive, but that was not a consideration for Rafiel, who was well aware that he had far more money than he would ever live to spend. So he and Alegretta and the cats had their own private space, just the four of them – or five, if you counted the little cluster of cells that was busily dividing in the white cat’s belly, getting ready to become a person.

  Their transport was a steady-thrust spacecraft, accelerating at a sizeable fraction of a gee all the way to turnaround, and decelerating from then on. It was possible to move around the ship quite easily. It was also pointless, because there was nothing much to do. There was no dining room, no cabaret, no swimming pool on the aft deck, no gym to work out in. The servers brought meals to the passengers where they were. Most of the passengers spent their time viewing vid programs, old and new, on their personal screens. Or sleeping. In the private cabin Rafiel and Alegretta had several other options, one of which was talking; but even they slept a lot.