The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Exactly.” I fixed him with a look. “Now how do we go about it?”

  He grinned. “We follow our family traditions: we tell stories.”

  “You think if I hang around for a week or so that’ll make it a safe monster?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Good,” I said. “Susan? What’s the verdict? Are you going off to the lab? If I’m going to stay here, somebody’ll have to help Mike coddle those red daffodils.”

  No squeak this time. Her mouth dropped open but what came out was, “Uh, yes. Uh, Elly?”

  Elly nodded with a smile, sad but proud all in one.

  So while they bustled about packing, I had a chance to read through all the material in ship’s records on both moose and Nessie. By the time they were ready to leave for town, I had a pretty good idea of our game plan. I sent Susan off with instructions to run a full gene-read on both creatures. Brute force on the moose, to make sure it wouldn’t chain up to something bigger and nastier.

  Then we co-opted the rest of Elly’s kids. Leo gave each of them a different version of our monster tale to tell.

  Jen, I thought, did it best. She got so excited when she told it that her eyes popped and she got incoherent, greatly enhancing the tale of how Leonov Opener Denness had saved Annie Jason Masmajean from the monster in Loch Moose.

  Leo brought bells from his workshop. They’d been intended to keep beast-lies away in the northern territory but there was no reason they wouldn’t do just as good a job against a monster that was Earth authentic.

  Two days later, the inn was full of over-nighters—much to Elly’s surprise and delight—all hoping for a glimpse of the Loch Moose monster.

  In my room, late night and by novalight, Leo got his first peek at the creature. Once again it was swimming in the loch. He stared long and hard out the window. After a long moment, he remembered the task we’d set ourselves. “Should I wake the rest of the lodgers, do you think?”

  “No,” I said, “you just tell them about it at breakfast. Anybody who doesn’t see it tonight will stay another night, hoping.”

  “You’re a wicked old lady.”

  I raised Ilanith’s camera to the window. “Yup,” I said, and, twisting the lens deliberately out of focus, I snapped a picture.

  “Hope that didn’t come out well,” I said.

  —for Chip and Beth

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  The Magic Bullet

  Here’s an intense and frightening look at a chilling—and chillingly possible—escalation in the age-old War of the Sexes, one that may be just around the corner …

  One of the most respected as well as one of the most prolific British SF writers, Brian Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In the Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The Paradox of the Sets, and The Realms of Tartarus. His nonfiction books include The Sociology of Science Fiction and, with David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World A.D. 2000-3000. His most recent book is the acclaimed novel The Empire of Fear. His stories “The Man Who Loved the Vampire Lady” and “The Growth of the House of Usher” were both in our Sixth Annual Collection. A biologist and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading, England.

  The Magic Bullet

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Lisa had never before had such a strange feeling when going out on a case. She hadn’t expected to be called out on any more cases. She was due for retirement in a matter of weeks, having nearly reached her sixtieth birthday, and had been desk-anchored for the best part of two years.

  This wasn’t exactly a case, though. The call she’d received hadn’t made her position entirely clear, but she was not to be part of the forensic team examining the scene. She would be, in essence, an advisor—perhaps best described as an expert witness. She had special knowledge of both the place and the victim. She had been a student in the Applied Genetics Department herself, nearly forty years before, and she’d visited it many times since for purely social reasons. She knew Morgan Miller as well as anyone did, though that wasn’t saying a great deal.

  Had it just been a police matter the invitation would have been couched in more respectful terms, but it wasn’t. Although Miller hadn’t been working directly for the Ministry of Defence, any attempt to sabotage research in genetic engineering was construed as a hazard to National Security. Men from the Ministry would be in control, and they would want to question her.

  She wasn’t looking forward to discussing her relationship with Morgan Miller—it had been part of her private life for far too long, and had never before touched her work as a police scientist.

  They hadn’t told her over the phone whether anything had happened to Miller—they’d said that they were still trying to make contact with him. She inferred, though, that something had. Whatever the true extent of this affair turned out to be, it surely wouldn’t stop with arsonous assault on Morgan Miller’s mice.

  When she thought of it like that, it seemed simply absurd; firebombing a thousand mice was one of the most ridiculous crimes imaginable. The apparent stupidity of it, though, was sinister. Miller’s mice had been breeding away, generation after generation, for nearly four decades, undisturbed and unconsidered by anyone else except Miller himself. Now, it seemed, they had become important enough to be worth destroying. Lisa found that thought profoundly disturbing. It suggested that Morgan Miller had been keeping secrets from her.

  One secret, anyhow.

  She didn’t like that idea. It hurt her pride. It might also make her look stupid to the Men from the Ministry, which was bad from a personal point of view, and bad because of her position in the police force. It was little consolation to know that Morgan Miller had always been, by nature, a very secretive man—a man who liked to be a law unto himself.

  * * *

  The scene, when she got there, was chaotic. The fire was out, but the firemen were still wandering around, and the mess they had made was awful. There was wreckage everywhere, and stinking foam soaked the walls and the floor. The forensic team had already moved in, and they acknowledged her arrival with embarrassed nods of recognition. The only other familiar face was the caretaker, Tommy, who had been in the job for twenty years, and knew her as an occasional caller. Now, she obviously seemed to him a sympathetic figure—a possible ally against the uniformed officers and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. The mournful look he gave her was a faint but heart-rending echo of her own feelings.

  “Hell, Miss Friemann,” he said, desolately. “That’s his whole damn life. What in the world is he going to do?”

  He always called her “Miss,” never “Doctor” (let alone “Superintendent,” which was her theoretical rank as a senior police scientist). She didn’t mind in the least—she felt that she was a partner in the tragedy, not just a part of the bureaucracy of investigation.

  Lisa looked around at the blasted cages: the smashed glass, the twisted wire, the shards of plastic: everything blackened, the odour of a thousand roasted mice mingling with the last traces of the acrid smoke and the vapour from the slimy foam.

  “Did you try to call him?” asked Lisa. It was four in the morning, and Professor Miller ought to be tucked up safely in his lonely bed, though she was rather afraid that he wasn’t.

  “He doesn’t answer his phone,” said Tommy, sadly.

  “Is he away?”

  “Not that I know of,” the old man replied, still shaking his head in disbelief. “Why, Miss…?”

  “Who else did you try? Did you manage to contact Stella?” Stella Filisetti was Miller’s latest research fellow. Lisa presumed that Miller had been conducting a desultory affair with her, in parallel with the desultory affair which he had been conducting with Lisa. It tended to be his habit. Lisa didn’t mind—not in a strictly jealous fashion—but she couldn’t help wondering whether Stella was in on the secret that had made Morgan Miller a target.

  “I phoned her ri
ght after I called the fire brigade, but she didn’t answer. I’m sorry, Miss—maybe I should’ve called you, too, but I don’t have your number. I didn’t know at first it was a police matter. All I saw was the smoke. I phoned the brigade right away, then the Professor and Dr. Filisetti. Then I came to see if there was anythin’ to be done. Not a damn thing, Miss. Couldn’t get past the door. Saw no one. Sorry.”

  The fire chief, who recognized Lisa from way back, came over to tell her that it had been a well-made bomb, with explosives as well as the incendiary material. Someone had certainly intended to make a mess. Lisa let him finish before telling him that she wasn’t officially in charge. She would have liked to put some questions to the uniformed men, and to her own team, but had to be careful of protocol, and decided to wait for a more convenient moment.

  The heavy mob arrived, in dark raincoats that were meant to be unobtrusive, but seemed as distinctive as any uniform. Lisa had some contact with the Ministry on a regular basis, but she didn’t know these men, and didn’t even know what cryptic initials would be used to identify their Department.

  It was easy enough to work out why they’d involved themselves so quickly. When someone tried to destroy the work of an experimental scientist, the most likely reason was that he’d discovered something which it was to someone’s advantage to know. Commercial advantage might be the relevant issue—commercial concerns had motivated many a firebomb in the past—but where genetic engineers were concerned, the Ministry was always anxious, always sensitive.

  One man—a tall, dapper individual in his fifties—introduced himself to Lisa as Peter Smith. It had to be true; no one used Smith as a nom de guerre any more. It was utterly passe.

  “We may have to warn your people off this one, Dr. Friemann,” said Smith. He was trying, but not too hard, to sound apologetic. “It could be our baby.”

  “Have you found Miller?” asked Lisa, not wanting to get involved in a discussion about jurisdiction.

  “Not yet. Your people and mine have already gone to his home. I’m on the way there myself—I came here to collect you. We understand that you knew Professor Miller well and could tell us something about his work.”

  “Stella Filisetti could tell you more.”

  “We haven’t been able to locate her yet.”

  Lisa took this to imply that Stella Filisetti was suspect number one, but she didn’t pursue the point,

  * * *

  Lisa let Smith guide her out of the lab, and back down to the car park, where a black Renault was waiting for them. The Ministry didn’t like to use Japanese cars.

  It wasn’t far to Morgan Miller’s house—the Professor liked to be able to walk to work. Lisa had been there many times before; Miller had lived in the same place throughout the years that she’d known him. It was a big house, with a small but lushly overgrown garden, and ivy crawling all over the walls. It looked horribly decrepit in the cold grey light of dawn, but it always had. It had been built at the very end of the nineteenth century, more than a hundred and fifty years ago, and no amount of regular patching-up could conceal the fact that it was ancient. Miller must have bought it soon after the turn of the Millennium.

  As Lisa got out of the car and walked to the door she tried to remember how old Morgan Miller was. She added it up, and made it seventy-seven, give or take a year. It was a wonder he was still working, but the University wouldn’t force him to retire. He’d been trained during the golden age of genetic engineering, before the greenhouse crisis and the energy drought and the Great Economic Collapse. His skills were worth retaining, even though he’d never really fulfilled his early potential as a researcher. He’d won no prizes, had made no breakthrough to fame. He was just the eccentric man with the mice: an institution; a legend in his own lifetime.

  There was a uniformed inspector waiting on the threshold—waiting, obviously, for Peter Smith. Lisa’s heart sank as the inspector caught her eye and looked up, indicating that she should follow his gaze. One of the first-floor windows was doubly spider-webbed with cracks where two bullets had gone through it. Smith nodded to the waiting policeman, and the door was opened for him. Lisa followed him in, knowing what they were going to find.

  It wasn’t as bad as she expected. He wasn’t dead. Both bullets had hit, but neither wound was fatal. He had bled all over the bed, but he was still breathing. It wasn’t difficult to work out where the bullets had come from: a roof over the road. The mobile hospital arrived less than a minute after the Renault, and the duty surgeon moved past them, clearing the room while the support staff erected a sterile tent.

  Lisa, with an entire career of examining corpses behind her, was by no means squeamish. To see someone you’ve known all your life go under the knife is hard for anybody, though. She felt frozen up inside, too stunned to begin thinking seriously about the questions that came into her mind. She knew, though, that Peter Smith would soon be directing those questions at her. The fact that she didn’t have the ghost of an answer was unexpectedly distressing. Morgan Miller had been shot, and she—his friend, lover and supposed confidante—couldn’t begin to guess why.

  She sat down in an armchair that she remembered only too well, in the room he used as a study, and stared at the mute screen of the word-processor on the desk. Smith was still talking to the men outside, in the hallway, and she relaxed into the moment’s respite, letting her eyes roam over the disc library that filled two walls of the study. Thirty thousand discs, Miller had boasted to her. His own notes and records filled several hundred; the rest was all published stuff—journals, textbooks, reports, theses. There was no fiction, no light relief. For that, he watched broadcast TV or bought videotapes. He had once told her, unashamedly, that he had never read a novel since leaving school.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for the Men from the Ministry to catch up with the state of play. They had no real witnesses to question, but they had Lisa. From their point of view, she was their only lead, until they could find Stella Filisetti—which might well take some time, if she really was involved. If she was, she was obviously not alone. The firebomb and the shooting presumably had different perpetrators. Lisa knew that one plus one added up to a conspiracy, and that Mr. Smith from the Ministry was going to be worried about it.

  Amazingly, Smith—who was still being scrupulously polite—made her a cup of tea.

  “While we wait,” he said evenly, “I’d be obliged if you could tell me all that you can about Professor Miller’s work. We have no file, you see, and I understand that you…?” He left the sentence dangling, with polished discretion.

  “I knew him socially,” said Lisa. “We did talk about his work—but all his records are here. They could tell you far more than I.”

  Smith let his own gaze travel over the serried ranks of discs. “In time,” he said, “we can have a team go through them. But we need to act in the meantime, and we need everything you can give us, as I’m sure you understand. Had he any enemies?”

  “He had one,” replied Lisa, levelly. “But I haven’t the slightest idea who or why. I assure you that I’m not being uncooperative. I really don’t know.”

  Smith smiled, weakly. “You know more than we do,” he pointed out. “Suppose you tell me just what kind of man he was?”

  Lisa sipped tea, and wondered what the answer to that question really was.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” she promised. “I want to work it out in my own mind, too. He was a friend of mine. A very good friend.”

  Smith smiled at her—not knowingly, but smoothly, and she realized that she wasn’t just a witness. Until they had checked her file very carefully, she was suspect number two.

  Clearly, even the Men from the Ministry always began their investigations with cherchez la femme.

  * * *

  “I suppose it was unusual in those days,” said Lisa, “for a student of biology to get a police scholarship. But police work and forensic science were becoming ever more intricately involved with one ano
ther, and identification by gene-typing was on its way to becoming standard. Most of the police scholarships were going to computer scientists, because computer-related crime was seen as the boom area. I suppose I was interested in Applied Genetics first and police work second, and it was really a way of financing my studies that made me take up the police scholarship.

  “Before the Crash there was a flood of research money for all aspects of applied genetics. Genetic engineering of bacteria and plants was already making an economic impact on food-production, and there was intense interest in the possibility of engineering animals for meat production. We could see the energy crisis coming, of course, and the rise in sea level due to the greenhouse effect had already begun. Everyone knew that the entire world agricultural system was on the brink, and the developed nations all wanted to make progress in factory farming, to take food production out of the fields. So the Department, in the days when I was a student here, was heavily committed to the development of techniques for animal engineering.

  “Morgan Miller, in those days, was in the very forefront of his profession. His mice have become a bit of a joke over the years, but at that time animal engineering was all the rage. What the engineers were learning to do to mice was just the first step toward engineering pigs, cattle—and it was all the more exciting because of the difficulties.”

  “Don’t get too technical,” Smith warned. “I’m no expert.”

  “Bacteria and plants are easy to engineer,” Lisa explained, “because they can reproduce asexually. You can only introduce new genes into a very small number of bacterial cells in a culture, but if you introduce a gene conferring immunity to a particular antibiotic you can easily isolate the transformed cells and obtain a pure culture which multiplies very rapidly. Plants produce vast quantities of seed, and it’s not difficult to inject new genetic material into the seeds—when they develop you only need one usefully transformed plant, because you can then clone it easily.