The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  “I assume this cubicle I’m in has its own self-contained air recycler, like a space suit,” I said.

  He didn’t look up from what he was doing. He was far too interested in a flap of skin he’d cut from my arm. “No, it’s filtered from the air in here. The contents of the air are passed through radioactive, freeze-drying, and thermic sterilizers.”

  “That won’t do any good. You need to open the air filter and check through it.” He looked blank. “This organism is airborne, right? The air filters in these cells are sucking out all our air and concentrating it, right? So the organism goes into the air filters too. There might be more of the organism in there than there is on your patients. You shouldn’t be sterilizing the air. You should be collecting it.”

  I could see by his expression that I had him hooked.

  “But what would we collect it in?”

  Just at that moment the door opened and Marine Girl walked back in wearing a paper mask, stared at me through the glass, maybe for telltale signs of the disease, frowned as if she were disappointed I didn’t have any yet, and then left, making a note on her all-important clipboard. The doctor’s eyes followed her down the corridor.

  “One of your colleagues just died. It had reached his chest before he passed out,” he confided.

  I didn’t ask him which one. It didn’t really matter.

  “Saturate the filter in water,” I said. “Water will contain any airborne dust component, and you’ve got plenty of water available; but it’s unlikely to kill the organism. Take a slide and dab some of your water on it with a pipette, and you’ve got a microscopy sample. Remember, you’ve got to keep the organism alive, or you’ll never be able to study it properly.”

  He nodded vigorously. Maybe laboratory work wasn’t his strong point.

  My hand moved up to scratch an itch on my chin that I had been ignoring in the hope that it was psychosomatic.

  “That’s how it starts,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  He went out.

  He was very interested in his slides, and made many of them. He kept them out of the sight of Marine Girl, who I suspected was his superior and would disapprove. He studied the effect his slides had on samples of suspiciously nordic-looking skin and muscle tissue.

  Then, on the second day, he began scratching his chin. By this time, you understand, I was in real pain, feeling as if the lower part of my face were already being cauterized down to the bone, at which point I began to understand how the ancient Romans, if they had indeed contracted this disease, had felt justified in resorting to such extreme measures. Needless to say, no curative procedures of even that drastic nature were attempted on me. They wanted a live specimen for as long as it took for one to die.

  They began making what they called “firebreak incisions,” skinless areas through which the disease would not spread. This was successful in channelling the infection into a long, narrow strip of skin that spiralled out from the point of initial infection on the chin. Later on, they said, they would make similar cuts around my neck and chest to stop the pestilence spreading lower than the head. That wouldn’t stop it spreading entirely, of course – they had found from previous cases that a point of escape was needed for the infection in order to prevent it from spreading upwards. Victims whose entire heads were affected suffered such pain that they had frequently driven their heads against the walls of their cells, I was told. That, of course, would never have done. We had to be made to live out our usefulness to medical science to the full. When I say ‘they’, of course, I still mean only the two doctors I had seen to date; since we had been marched out of our secure container below decks, I had not seen another living soul besides those two.

  I was instructed on literal pain of death not to scratch. I would, for hours on end, rather have died and scratched, but somehow I managed to convince myself not to do it. Maybe it was the indomitable human spirit that did it, but I somehow think it was more likely the immense feeling of satisfaction I got out of watching the doctor turn up to the lab one morning with a Band-aid over his chin, and hide his face furtively from the other workers. He was infected, and he knew it. I caught him stealing scalpels and syringes. He didn’t quite manage to steal a syringe – Marine Girl walked in before he was able to, and he had to put the packet back on the shelf quickly. I rejoiced that night, elated in the fact that, whilst he’d accorded me the decency of a jab, he was going to attempt to cut a firebreak incision in his own face that very night without an anaesthetic. And each morning, his Band-aid and mine alike grew larger.

  One morning, he walked into the lab and marched right up to the glass.

  “You are killing me,” he said.

  “Ditto,” I replied.

  “How did you know it would infect me?”

  “Let me out,” I said, “and I’ll tell you.”

  “Now everyone on the ship will get infected.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe everyone in the world.”

  “That doesn’t have to happen. Let me out.”

  He went to open the door to the confinement area.

  When the gun went off, it was like having my ears boxed with a pair of cymbals. The cell I was in was mainly metal, and it carried on clanging obscenely long after I saw the Navy doctor slide down the glass wall of the cubicle leaving a snail-trail of blood from a bullet-hole.

  On the other side of a great deal of glass and a great deal of blood stood the Marine doctor, staring at him with eyes that were more than ever so slightly crazy. As always, it was only her eyes that were visible over the ever-present paper mask. She was still holding a Service automatic in both hands.

  “Oooh dear,” I said. “Look what you did.”

  Her eyes moved down to where mine were already resting – on the tiny crazed gap in the glass where her bullet had hit and knocked a hole in my cage without penetrating.

  “All those nasty little pathogens,” I said, “spreading through that little tiny hole. Could be you’re already breathing them in. Better shore up that hole quick, sister, or you might get infected.”

  Then she smiled, and I didn’t doubt her sincerity now. The grin filled her face ear to ear. Without taking her trigger hand off the weapon, she reached behind her head, unhooked the straps of the surgical mask, and let it fall away.

  She did not have much of a lower face left to smile with. She’d been contaminated longer than the Navy guy. Probably since before we’d even been taken on board the ship.

  I leapt aside before she fired again. The glass, weakened by the first shot, shattered this time. She continued to fire. I was able to huddle into one corner of the window housing, where the window bolts met the metal. I felt bullets thudding against myself with only a quarter inch of steel between us. She could have walked across the room and killed me at any time she wanted. She wasn’t even trying. Instead, she was screaming every time she pulled the trigger. I didn’t blame her. Her face – her very beautiful face – had started disintegrating maybe from the very first day she had begun to study the plague organism, and she hadn’t been able to do anything about it, hadn’t even been able to explain it. All her years of military and medical training had been useless. Whatever she’d planned to do with her life, and probably also her life itself, wasn’t going to happen any more.

  The military had trained her well in one respect, though; she knew exactly how many rounds she had in her weapon. The last one went into her own head. As I hadn’t been quite so sure how many rounds she’d had left, I carried on cowering for a good few seconds more before poking my head back out into the sickbay.

  I decided against keeping the weapon, I had no idea how guns worked, and a gun in my hand might only get me killed by someone else who did. I ignored the rows of medical cabinets in the sickbay, with their glass doors holding rows of tempting genetically-engineered medicines.

  The corridor outside confirmed my suspicions. There were bodies lying slumped everywhere, every one with their circulatory system clearly mappe
d out on their faces. Some, but not all, of them had been carefully bundled into polythene body bags, but no further efforts had been made for their disposal. It looked like there had been more infection outside the controlled area than inside it for quite some time. Somewhere distant, engines were still thrumming faintly, but I had a distinct suspicion there was no hand at the tiller.

  Poking around belowdecks, it took me a surprisingly long time to find the quartermaster’s stores. I sat what was left of the quartermaster on a comfy seat in the corner before locating what I wanted on the shelves. It took me a good few minutes to find my way through the Navy’s byzantine filing system. What I wanted was dark green and slopped around inside the big canister I found it in. The canister was labelled WARNING, KEEP AWAY FROM CHILDREN, DO NOT INGEST, and, for some arcane reason, HIGHLY TOXIC TO MARINE WILDLIFE AND BEES.

  I ripped open the canister with a Stanley knife and stuck my head in it. I held my head under, well beneath the surface, and felt a slight tingling sensation on my skin. I did not go as far as opening my eyes. No victim’s eyes had yet been affected.

  After removing my head from the canister, I splashed the stuff around my neck and shoulders like an expensive cologne. Then, I carried a few more canisters of the same green gunk to the nearest bathing area and had a shower in the stuff.

  With the ick still running down me, I soaked a set of Navy blues in it, put them on, and, dripping, made my way back for’ard to the place I and my companions had been being held, all the time not seeing a single living soul. My companions were all dead, which came as little surprise – after all, I’d been staring at Navy Boy examining dissected bits of them under a microscope for the past three or four days. I looked into the eyes of Meddy Pedersen staring back at me as he floated in a tank of preserving fluid, recognizable by the sapphire wedding ring on his right hand, the rest of him as skinless as the Visible Man. Some of the skinless area had been removed by the pathogen, and some, more clumsily, by human beings using scalpels. One piece of surgically removed Meddy was pinned out under a microscope, kept under water to separate it from the outside air.

  I peered into the microscope. Adjusting the magnification downwards from cell-size, I was eventually rewarded with a glimpse of what I wanted, inert and paralysed by their immersion, but still only dormant, waiting for the time when the sun dried them out and they could eat and scurry once again.

  “Couldn’t see the wood for the trees,” I said, to nobody in particular.

  Dermatophagoides. The common dust mite. Except that these dust mites weren’t quite so common.

  Your average dust mite – 500 of which can happily live in a single gramme of dust – spends its entire lifetime feasting on human flesh. Or, to be more exact, human skin, the main component of domestic dust. One of the main reasons for peoples’ allergies to the creatures’ fecal pellets is the fact that dust mites are among the most beautifully adapted creatures in the animal kingdom for feeding on human tissue. Their saliva quite simply is designed to break us down.

  Normally, of course, human dust mites feed on dead skin flakes. But there was never anything stopping any dust mite genus from developing an ability to feed on live skin.

  Not a virus, or a bacterium, or a Martian meteor – but a creature these so-called scientists had evidently been unsurprised to see crawling across these samples in their thousands. Every healthy human being is, after all, covered in them. No antibiotics, of course, would have done their victims any good. What was needed was a good strong dose of insecticide (or, more strictly, acaricide).

  When Navy boy had started examining the contents of the air filters under water – or maybe through some other, completely unconnected route, looking at the extent of the epidemic in the outer corridors – he’d been infested. Dust mites, unlike bacteria, are capable of scurrying out of petri dishes. But I hadn’t killed him. As God is my judge, I’d been preparing to save his life when I had been unfortunately prevented from doing so.

  In any case, I needed to leave the ghost ship.

  I found a ladder leading upwards, and eventually, a hatch. I had, on my travels, spotted a surprisingly small number of unlocked ladders leading up to hatches, and had been annoyed at being continually, inexplicably thwarted in my upward progress. Opening the hatch cover, I pulled myself upward into fresh air and sea mist. The sky was white and roaring.

  I should have realized. A submarine. They would never have allowed research on something this serious to take place on a vessel not capable of being ordered to take its cargo to the bottom of the ocean. I was standing right on top of the conning tower. The boat was running slowly on the surface. I knew she was running slowly, because she had a sailing vessel keeping pace with her. They’d seen the sub steering erratically, and, although they were running like hell for safe haven in Port Stanley or Ushuaia, they’d still stopped to flash messages at the boat asking if it needed assistance. Thor Amundsen’s good heart would be the death of him yet. Only a half mile distant, the running lights of two other, larger vessels – Argentine trawlermen, I learned later – showed through the fog. It seemed there was more than one Good Samaritan at sea today.

  I waved at the figures on deck on the Fram. They waved back. It took me some time to locate a liferaft, since they were all contained below decks, but the thing inflated most satisfactorily once I pulled the toggle, and I was able, once I had liberally doused it with insecticide, to kick it into the water streaming past the sub’s gleaming hull and, running along the deck, to leap into it myself.

  A cheer went up from the decks of the Fram as I approached her, and nets were lowered. I allowed them to help me out of the liferaft, then stopped them from lifting the raft itself up out of the water after me. The Mighty Thor was on deck to greet me.

  “I won’t ask why you look like a seabird covered in oil,” he grinned. He pointed up at the sky. “They’ve been up there for about half an hour now, just going round in circles. They told us not to go anywhere near the submarine for our own safety, but they cannot stop us picking people up who are in liferafts.”

  That was the roaring noise. And it was growing louder. Someone shouted from the front of the ship. Looking up, I saw a grey patch of fog harden into hard diamond patterns of wings. Wings with stars and stripes printed across them.

  The roaring in the sky reached a crescendo, and two streaks of fire detached from the aircraft, lancing down towards a billion dollars’ worth of US Navy property. There was an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Bits of steam and submarine came up like a geyser.

  “Are they mad?” said Thor, staring at the spectacle with eyes wider than those of a rabbit in a cosmetics lab. “That’s a nuclear submarine! The reactor!” He began yelling over his shoulder for the helmsman to steer us away from what might become a fallout cloud.

  “No,” I said. “They’re not mad. Just very, very scared. When we next get to a port with a population over a million, remind me to send a letter to head of the World Health Organization in Geneva. And don’t get off the ship until I’ve done it. I may know something the best and brightest in Washington and Moscow need to be told at a discreet distance.”

  “May know?”

  “It all depends on whether or not I decompose slowly over the next twenty-four hours. Watch me carefully.”

  I went down below to decompose.

  AND THE DISH RAN AWAY WITH THE SPOON

  Paul Di Filippo

  Some future-shocked folk claim that they’re afraid to try to program their VCRs, but they haven’t seen anything yet – here’s a bright, funny, and inventive look at a not-too-distant future where they’d have a good reason to be afraid of everyday household objects . . . and not just the fear that their favorite program would fail to tape, either!

  Although he has published novels, including two in collaboration with Michael Bishop, Paul Di Filippo shows every sign of being one of those rare writers, like Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury, who establish their reputations largely through their short work. His short fict
ion popped up with regularity almost everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s and continues to do so into the Oughts, a large body of work that has appeared in such markets as Interzone, Sci Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Realms of Fantasy, The Twilight Zone Magazine, New Worlds, Amazing, Fantastic, and Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in many small-press magazines and anthologies. His short work has been gathered into critically acclaimed collections such as The Steampunk Trilogy, Ribofunk, Calling All Brains!, Fractal Paisleys, Strange Trades. Di Filippo’s other books include the novels Ciphers, Lost Pages, Joe’s Liver, and A Mouthful of Tongues: Her Totipotent Tropicanalia, and, in collaboration with Michael Bishop, Would It Kill You to Smile?, and Muskrat Courage. His most recent book is the novel Fuzzy Dice. Upcoming are two new books, Harp, Pipe and Symphony and Neutrino Drag. Di Filippo is also a well-known critic, working as a columnist for two of the leading science fiction magazines simultaneously, with his often wry and quirky critical work appearing regularly in both Asimov’s Science Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – a perhaps unique distinction; in addition, he frequently contributes reviews and other critical work to Science Fiction Weekly, Locus Online, Tangent Online, and other Internet venues.

  FACING MY RIVAL that fateful afternoon, I finally realized I was truly about to lose my girlfriend Cody.

  Lose her to a spontaneous assemblage of information.

  The information was embedded in an Aeron chair mated with several other objects: a Cuisinart, an autonomous vacuum cleaner with numerous interchangeable attachments, an iPod, and a diagnostic and therapeutic home medical tool known as a LifeQuilt. As rivals go, this spontaneous assemblage – or “bleb,” as most people called such random accretions of intelligent appliances and artifacts, after the biological term for an extrusion of anomalous cells – wasn’t particularly handsome. Rather clunky looking, in fact. But apparently, it had been devoted to Cody from the day it was born, and I guess women appreciate such attention. I have to confess that I had been ignoring Cody shamefully during the period when the Aeron bleb must’ve been forming and beginning to court her, and so I have no one to blame for the threat of losing her but myself. Still, it hurt. I mean, could I really come in second to a bleb? That would truly reek.