The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

She answered without thinking. “All of them over eighty. Is Henry —”

  “He’s breathing normally. his colour’s good, and he’s not clammy. I don’t think he’s in shock. He’s just . . . out. All of them over eighty?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know, I mean, about the age, but all the older ones in the lobby just collapsed and the younger residents seem fine . . . Jake, what is it?”

  “I don’t know. Carrie, do this now: Go to one of the common rooms and turn the TV to the local news channel. See if there’s been a . . . a plane crash —”

  He stopped. Both of them heard the sirens.

  Henry did not wake. All of Redborn Memorial Hospital’s ambulances had gone to the crash site. The St Sebastian staff moved afflicted residents to the dining room, which looked like a very peaceful war hospital. The residents didn’t wake, moan, or need emergency treatment with the exception of one woman who had broken a hip falling to the floor. She was sent over to Memorial. Monitors couldn’t be spared from the Nursing floor, where nearly everyone had fallen into the coma, but a few spare monitors were carried down from the Infirmary. They showed no anomalies in heart rate or blood pressure.

  Relatives summoned family doctors, sat by cots, screamed at St Sebastian staff, who kept repeating, “Redborn Memorial is aware of the situation and they’ll get the St Sebastian residents over there as soon as they can. Please, sir, if you’d just —”

  Just be patient. Just believe that we’re doing our best. Just be reassured by your mother’s peaceful face. Just accept that we don’t know any more than you do. Just leave me alone!

  Carrie checked on her resident-assignees, one by one. They were all affected, most collapsed in their apartments. They were all moved into the Infirmary. They were all over eighty.

  She was hurrying from Al Cosmano’s apartment – empty, he must have been elsewhere when it happened – back to the Infirmary when a man caught at her arm. “Hey! Ms Vesey!”

  One of the detectives who’d investigated Jim’s death. Carrie’s belly clenched. “Yes?”

  “Where do I find the hospital administrator? Caldwell?”

  “He’s not here, he went out of town for the weekend, they sent for him – why?”

  “I need to see him. Who’s in charge? And what the hell happened here?”

  So not about Jim’s death. Still – a cop. Some part of her mind shuddered – Jim had been a cop – but at the same time, she seized on this. Official authority. Someone who investigated and found answers. Security. There was a reason she’d married Jim in the first place.

  She said as calmly as she could manage, “We’ve had an . . . an epidemic of collapses among the very old. All at the same time. About a half hour ago.”

  “Disease?”

  “No.” She heard how positive she sounded. Well, she was positive. “When the plane went down.”

  He looked baffled, as well he might. She said, “I’ll take you to Dr Jamison. He’s the St Sebastian’s physician.”

  Jamison wasn’t in the dining room. Carrie, leading Detective Geraci, found the doctor in the kitchen, in a shouting match with Jake DiBella. “No, damn it! You’re not going to further upset the relatives for some stupid, half-baked theory – No!” Jamison stalked off.

  Carrie said, “Dr Jamison, this is —” He pushed past her, heading back to his patients. She expected the detective to follow him, but instead Geraci said to Jake, “Who are you?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  She had never seen Jake so rude. But he was angry and frustrated and scared – they were all scared.

  “Detective Geraci, RPD. You work here?”

  Carrie said quickly, before the two men could get really nasty, “This is Dr DiBella. He’s doing a medical research project at St Sebastian’s, on . . . on brain waves.”

  Geraci said, “I received an anonymous call. Me, not the Department, on my cell, from the St Sebastian front desk. The caller said there was information here about the plane crash. You know anything about that, doctor?”

  Carrie saw that Vince Geraci believed Jake did have information. How did she know that? How did he know that? But it was there in every line of the detective’s alert body: He knew that Jake knew something.

  Jake didn’t answer, just stared at Geraci. Finally Geraci said, “The plane went down half a mile from here. A U.S. Air commuter plane carrying forty-nine passengers, including thirty-one members of the Aces High Senior Citizen Club. They were on a three-day trip to the casinos at Atlantic City. Everyone on board is dead.”

  Jake said, “I can’t talk to you now. I have to take some brain scans while these people are unconscious. After that idiot Jamison realizes what I’m doing and throws me out, we can talk. Carrie, I’ll need your help. Go to my office and put all the equipment in the corner onto the dolly, throw a blanket over it, and bring it the back way into the kitchen. Quickly!”

  She nodded and hurried off, so fast that she didn’t realize Geraci was behind her until they reached Jake’s office.

  “Let me get that, it’s heavy,” he said.

  “No, it’s not.” She lugged the console onto its dolly. “Shouldn’t you be asking people questions?”

  “I am. Does DiBella always order you around like that?”

  Did he? She hadn’t noticed. “No.” She added the helmet and box of peripherals on top of the console, then looked around for a blanket. There wasn’t one.

  “Do you work for DiBella or for St Sebastian’s?”

  “St Sebastian’s. I have to go to the linen closet.”

  When she returned with a blanket, Geraci was reading the papers on Jake’s desk. Wasn’t that illegal? Carrie threw the blanket over the equipment. Geraci grabbed the handle of the dolly before she could.

  “You need me,” he said. “Anybody stops you, I’ll just flash my badge.”

  “Okay,” she said ungraciously. She could have done this, for Jake, by herself.

  They brought the equipment into the kitchen. Jake set it up on the counter, ignoring the cook who said helplessly, “So nobody’s having lunch, then?” All at once she ripped off her apron, flung it onto the floor, and walked out.

  Jake said to Carrie, “Hold the door.” He slipped through to the dining room and, a moment later, wheeled in a gurney with an elderly woman lying peacefully on it. “Who is she, Carrie?”

  “Ellen Parminter.” After a moment she added, “Eighty-three.” Jake grunted and began attaching electrodes to Mrs Parminter’s unconscious head.

  Geraci said, “Come with me, Carrie.”

  “No.” Where did she get the nerve? But, somehow, he brought that out in her.

  He only smiled. “Yes. This is an official police investigation, as of this minute.”

  She went, then, following him back to Jake’s office. Carrie was shaking, but she didn’t want him to see that. He did, though; he seemed to see everything. “Sit down,” he said gently. “There, behind the desk – you didn’t like me reading DiBella’s papers before, did you? It’s legal if they’re in plain sight. You seem like a really good observer, Carrie. Now, please tell me everything that’s been happening here. From the very beginning, and without leaving anything out. Start with why you told DiBella that woman’s age. Does her age matter to what he’s doing?”

  Did it? She didn’t know. How could it . . . people aged at such different rates! Absolute years meant very little, except that —

  “Carrie?”

  All at once it seemed a relief to be able to pour it all out. Yes, he was trained to get people to talk, she knew that, and she didn’t really trust his sudden gentleness. It was merely a professional trick. But if she told it all, that might help order her chaotic thoughts. And maybe, somehow, it might help the larger situation, too. All those people dead on the plane —

  She said slowly, “You won’t believe it.”

  “Try me anyway.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  This time he just waited, looking expectant. And it all poured out of
her, starting with Henry’s “seizure” on the way home from the university. The vomiting epidemic among seven or so patients, that wasn’t the food poisoning that St Sebastian’s said it was. Evelyn Krenchnoted’s functional MRI. Anna Chernov’s necklace, what Evelyn thought the necklace looked like and what Bob Donovan said it really was. The secret meeting this morning in Henry’s apartment. What Carrie had overheard: Henry’s words about photons and how human observation affected the paths of fundamental particles. Jake’s lecture on “emergent complexity”. Henry’s appearance at Jake’s office, saying just before he collapsed, “Call the police. We just brought down a plane.” The mass collapse of everyone over eighty and of no one younger than that. The brain scans Jake was taking now, undoubtedly to see if they looked normal or like Evelyn’s. The more Carrie talked, the more improbable everything sounded.

  When she finished, Geraci’s face was unreadable.

  “That’s it,” she said miserably. “I have to go see how Henry is.”

  “Thank you, Carrie.” His tone was unreadable. “I’m going to find Dr Jamison now.”

  He left, but she stayed. It suddenly took too much energy to move. Carrie put her head in her hands. When she straightened again, her gaze fell on Jake’s desk.

  He’d been writing when she’d burst in with the news of the meeting in Henry’s apartment. Writing on paper, not on a computer: thick pale green paper with a faint watermark. The ink was dark blue. “My dearest James, I can’t tell you how much I regret the things I said to you on the phone last night, but, love, please remember —”

  Carrie gave a short, helpless bark of laughter. My dearest James . . . God, she was such a fool!

  She shook her head like a dog spraying off water, and went to look for Henry.

  The new being was quiet now. That made this a good time to try to reach it. That was always best done through its own culture’s symbols. But ship had had so little time to prepare . . . This should have been done slowly, over a long time, a gradual interaction as the new entity was guided, shaped, made ready. And ship was still so far away.

  But it tried, extending itself as much as possible, searching for the collective symbols and images that would have eased a normal transition – and roiled in horror.

  TWELVE

  Evelyn Krenchnoted lay on a cot jammed against the dining room window. She lay dreaming, unaware of the cool air seeping through the glass, or the leaves falling gold and orange in the tiny courtyard beyond. In her dream she walked on a path of light. Her feet made no sound. She moved toward more light, and somewhere in that light was a figure. She couldn’t see it or hear it, but she knew it was there. And she knew who it was.

  It was someone who really, truly, finally would listen to her.

  Al Cosmano squirmed in his sleep. “He’s waking,” a nurse said.

  “No, he’s not.” Dr Jamison, passing yet again among the rows of cots and gurneys and pallets on the floor, his face weary. “Some of them have been doing that for hours. As soon as the ambulances return, move this row next to the hospital.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  Al heard them and didn’t hear them. He was a child again, running along twilight streets toward home. His mother was there, waiting. Home . . .

  The stage was so bright! The stage manager must have turned up the lights, turned them up yet again – the whole stage was light. Anna Chernov couldn’t see, couldn’t find her partner. She had to stop dancing.

  Had to stop dancing.

  She stood lost on the stage, lost in the light. The audience was out there somewhere in all that brightness, but she couldn’t see them any more than she could see Bennet or the corps de ballet. She felt the audience, though. They were there, as bright as the stage, and they were old. Very, very old, as old as she was, and like her, beyond dancing.

  She put her hands over her face and sobbed.

  Erin Bass saw the path, and it led exactly where she knew it would: deeper into herself. That was where the buddha was, had always been, would always be. Along this path of light, curving and spiraling deeper into her own being, which was all being. All around her were the joyful others, who were her just as she was them —

  A jolt, and she woke in an ambulance, her arms and legs and chest strapped down, a young man leaning over her saying, “Ma’am?” The path was gone, the others gone, the heavy world of maya back again around her, and a stale taste in her dehydrated mouth.

  Lights and tunnels – where the hell was he? An A-test bunker, maybe, except no bunker was ever this brightly lit, and where was Teller or Mark or Oppie? But, no, Oppie hadn’t ever worked on this project, Henry was confused, that was it, he was just confused —

  And then he wasn’t.

  He woke all at once, a wrenching transition from sleep-that-wasn’t-really sleep to full alertness. In fact, his senses seemed preternaturally sharp. He felt the hard cot underneath his back, the slime of drool on his cheek, the flatness of the dining room fluorescent lights. He heard the roll of rubber gurney wheels on the low-pile carpet and the clatter of cutlery in the kitchen dishwashers. He smelled Carrie’s scent, wool and vanilla and young skin, and he could have described every ligament of her body as she sat on the chair next to his cot in the dining room of St Sebastian’s, Detective Geraci beside her.

  “Henry?” Carrie whispered.

  He said, “It’s coming. It’s almost here.”

  Ship withdrew all contact. It had never encountered anything like this before. The pre-being did not coalesce.

  Its components were not uniform, but scattered among undisciplined and varied matter-specks who were wildly heterozygotic. Unlike the components of every other pre-being that ship had detected, had guided, had become. All the other pre-ships had existed as one on the matter plane, because they were alike in all ways. These, too, were alike, built of the same physical particles and performing the same physical processes, but somewhere something had gone very wrong, and from that uniform matter they had not evolved uniform consciousness. They had no harmony. They used violence against each other.

  Possibly they could, if taken in, use that violence against ship.

  Yet ship couldn’t go away and leave them. Already they were changing space-time in their local vicinity. When their melding had advanced further, the new being could be a dangerous and powerful entity. What might it do?

  Ship pondered, and feared, and recoiled from what might be necessary: the destruction of what should have been an integral part of itself.

  THIRTEEN

  Jake DiBella clutched the printouts so hard that the stiff paper crumpled in his hand. Lying on the sofa, Henry Erdmann frowned at the tiny destruction. Carrie had pulled her chair close enough to hold Henry’s hand, while that RPD detective, Geraci, stood at the foot of the couch. What was he doing here, anyway? DiBella didn’t know, but he was too agitated to care for more than a fleeting second.

  Carrie said to Henry, “I still think you should go to the hospital!”

  “I’m not going, so forget it.” The old man struggled to sit up. She would have stopped him, but Geraci put a hand on her shoulder and gently restrained her. Throwing around his authority, DiBella thought.

  Henry said, “Why at St Sebastian’s?”

  The same question that Carrie had asked. DiBella said, “I have a theory.” His voice sounded strange to himself. “It’s based on Carrie’s observation that nobody under eighty has been . . . affected by this. If it is some sort of uber-consciousness that’s . . . that’s approaching Earth . . .” He couldn’t go on. It was too silly.

  It was too real.

  Henry Erdmann was apparently not afraid of either silliness or reality – which seemed to have become the same thing. Henry said, “You mean it’s coming here because ‘uber-consciousness’ emerges only among the old, and nowadays there’s more old than ever before.”

  “For the first time in history, you over-eighties exceed one per cent of the population. A 140 million people world-wide.”

 
“But that still doesn’t explain why here. Or why us.”

  “For God’s sake, Henry, everything has to start somewhere!”

  Geraci said, surprising DiBella, “All bifurcation is local. One lungfish starts to breathe more air than water. One caveman invents an axe. There’s always a nexus. Maybe that nexus is you, Dr Erdmann.”

  Carrie tilted her head to look up at Geraci.

  Henry said heavily, “Maybe so. But I’m not the only one. I wasn’t the main switch for the energy that brought down that airplane. I was just one of the batteries linked in parallel.”

  The science analogies comfort Erdmann, DiBella thought. He wished something would comfort him.

  Carrie said, “I think Evelyn was the switch to open the safe for Anna Chernov’s necklace.”

  Geraci’s face sharpened. But he said, “That doesn’t really make sense. I can’t go that far.”

  Henry’s sunken eyes grew hard. “You haven’t had to travel as far as I have in order to get to this point, young man. Believe me about that. But I experienced the . . . the consciousness. That data is anecdotal but real. And those brain scans that Dr DiBella is mangling there aren’t even anecdotal. They’re hard data.”

  True enough. The brain scans DiBella had taken of the unconscious oldsters, before that irate idiot Jamison had discovered him at work and thrown him out, were cruder versions of Evelyn Krenchnoted’s under the fMRI. An almost total shut-down of the thalamus, the relay station for sensory information flowing into the brain. Ditto for the body-defining posterior parietal lobes. Massive activity in the back of the brain, especially in the tempoparietal regions, amygdalae, and hippocampus. The brain scan of an epileptic mystical state on speed. And as unlike the usual scan for the coma-state as a turtle was to a rocketship to the stars.

  DiBella put his hands to his face and pulled at his skin, as if that might rearrange his thoughts. When he’d dropped his hands, he said slowly, “A single neuron isn’t smart, isn’t even a very impressive entity. All it really does is convert one type of electrical or chemical signal into another. That’s it. But neurons connected together in the brain can generate incredibly complex states. You just need enough of them to make consciousness possible.”