The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Lolimel nodded reluctantly. “Yes, I see that.”

  Berutha said to Kenin, “We need to find the secondary virus. Because if it is infectious through any other vector besides fetal or sexual . . .” He didn’t finish the thought.

  “I know,” Kenin said, “but it isn’t going to be easy. We don’t have cadavers for the secondary. The analyzer is still working on the cerebral-spinal fluid. Meanwhile – ” She began organizing assignments, efficient and clear. Mia stopped listening.

  Esefeb had finished her meal and walked up to the circle of scientists. She tugged at Mia’s tunic. “Mia . . . Esefeb etej efef.” Esefeb come home.

  “Mia eb Esefeb etej Esefeb efef,” Mia said, and the girl gave her joyous smile.

  “Mia – ” Kenin said.

  “I’m going with her, Kenin. We need more behavioral data. And maybe I can persuade another native or two to submit to examination,” Mia argued, feebly. She knew that scientific information was not really her motive. She wasn’t sure, however, what was. She just wanted to go with Esefeb.

  “Why did you first enter the Corps?” Lolimel’s question stuck in Mia’s mind, a rhetorical fishbone in the throat, over the next few days. Mia had brought her medkit, and she administered broad-spectrum micro-bials to Esefeb, hoping something would hit. The parasites were trickier, needing life-cycle analysis or at least some structural knowledge, but she made a start on that, too. I entered the Corps to relieve suffering, Lolimel. Odd how naive the truest statements could sound. But that didn’t make them any less true.

  Esefeb went along with all Mia’s pokings, patches, and procedures. She also carried out minimal food-gathering activities, with a haphazard disregard for safety or sanitation that appalled Mia. Mia had carried her own food from the ship. Esefeb ate it just as happily as her own.

  But mostly Esefeb talked to Ej-es.

  It made Mia feel like a voyeur. Esefeb was so unselfconscious – did she even know she had a “self” apart from Ej-es? She spoke to, laughed at (with?), played beside, and slept with her phantom in the brain, and around her the hut disintegrated even more. Esefeb got diarrhea from something in her water and then the place smelled even more foul. Grimly, Mia cleaned it up. Esefeb didn’t seem to notice. Mia was eket. Alone in her futile endeavors at sanitation, at health, at civilization.

  “Esefeb eb Mia etej efef – ” How did you say “neighbors?” Mia consulted the computer’s lexicon, steadily growing as the translator program deciphered words from context. It had discovered no word for “neighbor.” Nor for “friend” nor “mate” nor any kinship relationships at all except “baby.”

  Mia was reduced to pointing at the nearest hut. “Esefeb eb Mia etej efef” over there.

  The neighboring hut had a baby. Both hut and child, a toddler who lay listlessly in one corner, were just as filthy and diseased as Esefeb’s house. At first the older woman didn’t seem to recognize Esefeb, but when Esefeb said her name, the two women spoke animatedly. The neighbor smiled at Mia. Mia reached for the child, was not prevented from picking him up, and settled the baby on her lap. Discreetly, she examined him.

  Sudden rage boiled through her, as unexpected as it was frightening. This child was dying. Of parasites, of infection, of something. A preventable something? Maybe yes, maybe no. The child didn’t look neglected, but neither did the mother look concerned.

  All at once, the child in her arms stiffened, shuddered, and began to babble. His listlessness vanished. His little dirty face lit up like sunrise and he laughed and reached out his arms toward something not there. His mother and Esefeb turned to watch, also smiling, as the toddler had an unknowable limbic seizure in his dying, ecstatic brain.

  Mia set him down on the floor. She called up the dictionary, but before she could say anything, the mother, too, had a seizure and sat on the dirt floor, shuddering with joy. Esefeb watched her a moment before chattering to something Mia couldn’t see.

  Mia couldn’t stand it anymore. She left, walking as fast as she could back to Esefeb’s house, disgusted and frightened and . . . what?

  Envious?

  “Why did you first enter the Corps?” To serve humanity, to live purposefully, to find, as all men and women hope, happiness. And she had, sometimes, been happy.

  But she had never known such joy as that.

  Nonetheless, she argued with herself, the price was too high. These people were dying off because of their absorption in their rapturous phantoms. They lived isolated, degraded, sickly lives, which were undoubtedly shorter than necessary. It was obscene.

  In her clenched hand was a greasy hair sample she’d unobtrusively cut from the toddler’s head as he sat on her lap. Hair, that dead tissue, was a person’s fossilized past. Mia intended a DNA scan.

  Esefeb strolled in an hour later. She didn’t seem upset at Mia’s abrupt departure. With her was Lolimel.

  “I met her on the path,” Lolimel said, although nothing as well-used as a path connected the huts. “She doesn’t seem to mind my coming here.”

  “Or anything else,” Mia said. “What did you bring?” He had to have brought something tangible; Kenin would have used the wrister to convey information.

  “Tentative prophylactic. We haven’t got a vaccine yet, and Kenin says it may be too difficult, better to go directly to a cure to hold in reserve in case any of us comes down with this.”

  Mia caught the omission. “Any of us? What about them?”

  Lolimel looked down at his feet. “It’s, um, a borderline case, Mia. The decision hasn’t been made yet.”

  “‘Borderline’ how, Lolimel? It’s a virus infecting the brains of humans and degrading their functioning.”

  He was embarrassed. “Section Six says that, um, some biological conditions, especially persistent ones, create cultural differences for which Corps policy is noninterference. Section Six mentions the religious dietary laws that grew out of inherited food intolerances on – ”

  “I know what Section Six says, Lolimel! But you don’t measure a culture’s degree of success by its degree of happiness!”

  “I don’t think . . . that is, I don’t know . . . maybe ‘degree of success’ isn’t what Section Six means.” He looked away from her. The tips of his ears grew red.

  Poor Lolimel. She and Kenin had as much as told him that out here regs didn’t matter. Except when they did. Mia stood. “You say the decision hasn’t been made yet?”

  He looked surprised. “How could it be? You’re on the senior Corps board to make the decision.”

  Of course she was. How could she forget . . . she forgot more things these days, momentary lapses symbolic of the greater lapses to come. No brain functioned forever.

  “Mia, are you all – ”

  “I’m fine. And I’m glad you’re here. I want to go back to the city for a few days. You can stay with Esefeb and continue the surveillance. You can also extend to her neighbors the antibiotic, antiviral, and anti-parasite protocols I’ve worked through with Esefeb. Here, I’ll show you.”

  “But I – ”

  “That’s an order.”

  She felt bad about it later, of course. But Lolimel would get over it.

  At base, everything had the controlled frenzy of steady, unremitting work. Meek now, not a part of the working team, Mia ran a DNA scan on the baby’s hair. It showed what she expected. The child shared fifty per cent DNA with Esefeb. He was her brother; the neighbor whom Esefeb clearly never saw, who had at first not recognized Esefeb, was her mother. For which there was still no word in the translator deebee.

  “I think we’ve got it,” Kenin said, coming into Mia’s room. She collapsed on a stone bench, still beautiful after two and a half centuries. Kenin had the beatific serenity of a hard job well done.

  “A cure?”

  “Tentative. Radical. I wouldn’t want to use it on one of us unless we absolutely have to, but we can refine it more. At least it’s in reserve, so a part of the team can begin creating and disseminating medical help these p
eople can actually use. Targeted microbials, an antiparasite protocol.”

  “I’ve already started on that,” Mia said, her stomach tightening. “Kenin, the board needs to meet.”

  “Not tonight. I’m soooo sleepy.” Theatrically she stretched both arms; words and gesture were unlike her.

  “Tonight,” Mia said. While Kenin was feeling so accomplished. Let Kenin feel the full contrast to what she could do with what Esefeb could.

  Kenin dropped her arms and looked at Mia. Her whole demeanor changed, relaxation into fortress. “Mia . . . I’ve already polled everyone privately. And run the computer sims. We’ll meet, but the decision is going to be to extend no cure. The phantoms are a biologically based cultural difference.”

  “The hell they are! These people are dying out!”

  “No, they’re not. If they were heading for extinction, it’d be a different situation. But the satellite imagery and population equations, based on data left by the generation that had the plague, show they’re increasing. Slowly, but a definite population gain significant to the point-oh-one level of confidence.”

  “Kenin – ”

  “I’m exhausted, Mia. Can we talk about it tomorrow?”

  Plan on it, Mia thought grimly. She stored the data on the dying toddler’s matrilineage in her handheld.

  A week in base, and Mia could convince no one, not separately nor in a group. Medicians typically had tolerant psychological profiles, with higher-than-average acceptance of the unusual, divergent, and eccentric. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have joined the Corps.

  On the third day, to keep herself busy, Mia joined the junior medicians working on refining the cure for what was now verified as “limbic seizures with impaired sensory input causing Charles Bonnet Syndrome.” Over the next few weeks it became clear to Mia what Kenin had meant; this treatment, if they had to use it, would be brutally hard on the brain. What was that old ditty? “Cured last night of my disease, I died today of my physician.” Well, it still happened enough in the Corps. Another reason behind the board’s decision.

  She felt a curious reluctance to go back to Esefeb. Or, as the words kept running through her mind, Mia ek etej Esefeb efef. God, it was a tongue twister. These people didn’t just need help with parasites, they needed an infusion of new consonants. It was a relief to be back at base, to be working with her mind, solving technical problems alongside rational scientists. Still, she couldn’t shake a feeling of being alone, being lonely: Mia eket.

  Or maybe the feeling was more like futility.

  “Lolimel’s back,” Jamal said. He’d come up behind her as she sat at dusk on her favorite stone bench, facing the city. At this time of day the ruins looked romantic, infused with history. The sweet scents of that night-blooming flower, which Mia still hadn’t identified, wafted around her.

  “I think you should come now,” Jamal said, and this time Mia heard his tone. She spun around. In the alien shadows Jamal’s face was as set as ice.

  “He’s contracted it,” Mia said, knowing beyond doubt that it was true. The virus wasn’t just fetally transmitted, it wasn’t a slow-acting retrovirus, and if Lolimel had slept with Esefeb . . . But he wouldn’t be that stupid. He was a medician, he’d been warned . . .

  “We don’t really know anything solid about the goddamn thing!” Jamal burst out.

  “We never do,” Mia said, and the words cracked her dry lips like salt.

  Lolimel stood in the center of the ruined atrium, giggling at something only he could see. Kenin, who could have proceeded without Mia, nodded at her. Mia understood; Kenin acknowledged the special bond Mia had with the young medician. The cure was untested, probably brutal, no more really than dumping a selection of poisons in the right areas of the brain, in itself problematical with the blood-brain barrier.

  Mia made herself walk calmly up to Lolimel. “What’s so funny, Lolimel?”

  “All those sandwigs crawling in straight lines over the floor. I never saw blue ones before.”

  Sandwigs. Lolimel, she remembered, had been born on New Carthage. Sandwigs were always red.

  Lolimel said, “But why is there a tree growing out of your head, Mia?”

  “Strong fertilizer,” she said. “Lolimel, did you have sex with Esefeb?”

  He looked genuinely shocked. “No!”

  “All right.” He might or might not be lying.

  Jamal whispered, “A chance to study the hallucinations in someone who can fully articulate – ”

  “No,” Kenin said. “Time matters with this . . .” Mia saw that she couldn’t bring herself to say “cure.”

  Realization dawned on Lolimel’s face. “Me? You’re going to . . . me? There’s nothing wrong with me!”

  “Lolimel, dear heart . . .” Mia said.

  “I don’t have it!”

  “And the floor doesn’t have sandwigs. Lolimel – ”

  “No!”

  The guards had been alerted. Lolimel didn’t make it out of the atrium. They held him, flailing and yelling, while Kenin deftly slapped on a tranq patch. In ten seconds he was out.

  “Tie him down securely,” Kenin said, breathing hard. “Daniel, get the brain bore started as soon as he’s prepped. Everyone else, start packing up, and impose quarantine. We can’t risk this for anyone else here. I’m calling a Section Eleven.”

  Section Eleven: If the MedCorps officer in charge deems the risk to Corps members to exceed the gain to colonists by a factor of three or more, the officer may pull the Corps off-planet.

  It was the first time Mia had ever seen Kenin make a unilateral decision.

  Twenty-four hours later, Mia sat beside Lolimel as dusk crept over the city. The shuttle had already carried up most personnel and equipment. Lolimel was in the last shift because, as Kenin did not need to say aloud, if he died, his body would be left behind. But Lolimel had not died. He had thrashed in unconscious seizures, had distorted his features in silent grimaces of pain until Mia would not have recognized him, had suffered malfunctions in alimentary, lymphatic, endocrine, and parasympathetic nervous systems, all recorded on the monitors. But he would live. The others didn’t know it, but Mia did.

  “We’re ready for him, Mia,” the young tech said. “Are you on this shuttle, too?”

  “No, the last one. Move him carefully. We don’t know how much pain he’s actually feeling through the meds.”

  She watched the gurney slide out of the room, its monitors looming over Lolimel like cliffs over a raging river. When he’d gone, Mia slipped into the next building, and then the next. Such beautiful buildings: spacious atria, beautifully proportioned rooms, one structure flowing into another.

  Eight buildings away, she picked up the pack she’d left there. It was heavy, even though it didn’t contain everything she had cached around the city. It was so easy to take things when a base was being hastily withdrawn. Everyone was preoccupied, everyone assumed anything not readily visible was already packed, inventories were neglected and the deebees not cross-checked. No time. Historically, war had always provided great opportunities for profiteers.

  Was that what she was? Yes, but not a profit measured in money. Measure it, rather, in lives saved, or restored to dignity, or enhanced. “Why did you first enter the Corps?” Because I’m a medician, Lolimel. Not an anthropologist.

  They would notice, of course, that Mia herself wasn’t aboard the last shuttle. But Kenin, at least, would realize that searching for her would be a waste of valuable resources when Mia didn’t want to be found. And Mia was so old. Surely the old should be allowed to make their own decisions.

  Although she would miss them, these Corps members who had been her family since the last assignment shuffle, eighteen months ago and decades ago, depending on whose time you counted by. Especially she would miss Lolimel. But this was the right way to end her life, in service to these colonists’ health. She was a medician.

  * * *

  It went better than Mia could have hoped. When the ship had gone – she�
�d seen it leave orbit, a fleeting stream of light – Mia went to Esefeb.

  “Mia etej efef,” Esefeb said with her rosy smile. Mia come home. Mia walked toward her, hugged the girl, and slapped the tranq patch on her neck.

  For the next week, Mia barely slept. After the makeshift surgery, she tended Esefeb through the seizures, vomiting, diarrhea, pain. On the morning the girl woke up, herself again, Mia was there to bathe the feeble body, feed it, nurse Esefeb. She recovered very fast; the cure was violent on the body but not as debilitating as everyone had feared. And afterward Esefeb was quieter, meeker, and surprisingly intelligent as Mia taught her the rudiments of water purification, sanitation, safe food storage, health care. By the time Mia moved on to Esefeb’s mother’s house, Esefeb was free of most parasites, and Mia was working on the rest. Esefeb never mentioned her former hallucinations. It was possible she didn’t remember them.

  “Esefeb ekebet,” Mia said as she hefted her pack to leave. Esefeb be well.

  Esefeb nodded. She stood quietly as Mia trudged away, and when Mia turned to wave at her, Esefeb waved back.

  Mia shifted the pack on her shoulders. It seemed heavier than before. Or maybe Mia was just older. Two weeks older, merely, but two weeks could make a big difference. An enormous difference.

  Two weeks could start to save a civilization.

  Night fell. Esefeb sat on the stairs to her bed, clutching the blue-green sheet of plastic in both hands. She sobbed and shivered, her clean face contorted. Around her, the unpopulated shadows grew thicker and darker. Eventually, she wailed aloud to the empty night.

  “Ej-es! O, Ej-es! Ej-es, Esefeb eket! Ej-es . . . etej efef! O, etej efef!”

  THE BELLMAN

  John Varley

  John Varley appeared on the SF scene in 1974, and by the end of 1976, had produced as concentrated an outpouring of first-rate stories as the genre has ever seen, stories such as “Retrograde Summer,” “In the Bowl,” “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance,” “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” “Equinoctial,” “The Black Hole Passes,” “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” “The Phantom of Kansas,” and many other smart, bright, fresh, brash, audacious, and effortlessly imaginative stories. It’s hard to think of a group of short stories that has had a greater, more concentrated impact on the field, with the exception of Robert Heinlein’s early work for John W. Campbell’s Astounding, or perhaps Roger Zelazny’s early stories in the mid-1960s. It was a meteoric rise to prominence even for a field known for meteoric rises.