The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I understand,” Abby4 said to Mr. Kim. “And the time-frame?”

  “We would like to have Shanghai totally clean ten years from now.”

  Abby4’s face didn’t change. “That is very soon.”

  “Yes. Can you do it?”

  “I need to consult with my scientists,” she said, and Mal felt his chest fill with lightness. She hadn’t said no, and when Abby4 didn’t say no, the answer was likely to be yes. The ten-year deadline—only ten years!—would make the fee enormous, and Mal’s company’s small percentage of it would rise accordingly. A promotion, a bonus, a new car … .

  “Then until I hear back from you, we can go no farther,” Mr. Kim said. “Shall we take my car to the Alien Craft?”

  “Certainly,” Abby4 said. “Mr. Goldstone? Can you accompany us? I’m told you know exactly where this curious object is.” As a busy and important Biomensa executive like me would not, was the unstated message, but Mal didn’t mind. He was too happy.

  The Alien Craft, as Mr. Kim persisted in calling it, was not easy to find. Northern Minnesota had all been cleaned up, of course; as valuable farm and dairy land, it had had priority, and anyway, the damage hadn’t been too bad. But, once cleaned, the agrisolution companies wanted the place for farming, free of outside interference. The government, the weak partner in all that biotech corporations did, reluctantly agreed. The Alien Craft lay under an inconspicuous foamcast dome at the end of an obscure road, with no identifying signs of any kind.

  Mal saw immediately why Mr. Kim had suggested going in his car, which had come with him from China. The Chinese were forced to buy all their biosolutions from others. In compensation, they had created the finest engineering and hard-goods manufactories in the world. Mr. Kim’s car was silent, fast, and computer-driven, technology unknown in the United States. Mal could see that even Abby4 was unwillingly impressed.

  He leaned back against the contoured seats, which molded themselves to his body, and watched farmland flash past at an incredible rate. There were government officials and university professors who said that the United States should fear Chinese technology, even if it wasn’t based on biology. Maybe they were right.

  In contrast, the computer-based security at the Alien Craft looked primitive. Mal had arranged for entry, and they passed through the locks into the dome, which was only ten feet wider on all sides than the Alien Craft itself. Mal had never seen it before, and despite himself, he was impressed.

  The Craft was dull silver, as big as a small bedroom, a slightly irregular oval. In the artificial light of the dome, it shimmered. When Mal put out a hand to touch it, his hand stopped almost a foot away.

  “A force field of some unknown kind, unknown even before the Collapse,” Abby4 said, with such authority you’d think she’d done field tests herself. “The shield extends completely around the Craft, even below ground, where it is also impenetrable. The Craft was very carefully monitored in the decades between its landing and the Collapse, and never once did any detectable signal of any kind go out from it. No outgoing signals, no aliens disembarking, no outside markings to decode … no communication of any kind. One wonders why the aliens bothered to send it at all.”

  Mr. Kim quoted, “‘The wordless teaching, the profit in not doing—not many people understand it.’”

  “Ah,” Abby4 said, too smart to either agree or disagree with a philosophy—Taoist? Buddhist?—she patently didn’t share.

  Mal walked completely around the Craft, wondering himself why anybody would bother with such a tremendous undertaking without any follow-up. Of course, maybe it hadn’t been tremendous to the aliens. Maybe they sent interstellar silvery metal ovals to other planets all the time without follow-up. But why?

  When Mal reached his starting point in the circular dome, Mr. Kim was removing an instrument from his leather bag.

  Mal had never seen an instrument like it, but then, he’d hardly seen any scientific instruments at all. This one looked like a flat television, with a glass screen on one side, metal on the other five. Only the “glass” clearly wasn’t, since it seemed to shift as Mr. Kim lifted it, as if it were a field of its own. As Mal watched, Mr. Kim applied the field side of the device onto the side of the Craft, where it stayed even as he stepped back.

  Mal said uncertainly, “I don’t think you should—”

  Abby4 said, “O, it doesn’t matter, Mr. Goldstone. Nothing anyone has ever done has penetrated the Craft’s force field, even before the Collapse.”

  Mr. Kim just smiled.

  Mal said, “You don’t understand. The clearance I arranged with the State Department … it doesn’t include taking any readings or … or whatever that device is doing. Mr. Kim?”

  “Just taking some readings,” Mr. Kim said blandly.

  Mal’s unease grew. “Please stop. As I say, I didn’t obtain clearances for this!”

  Abby4 scowled at him fiercely. Mr. Kim said, “Of course, Mr. Goldstone,” and detached his device. “I am sorry to alarm you. Just some readings. Shall we go now? A most interesting object, but rather monotonous.”

  On the way back to St. Paul, Mr. Kim and Abby4 discussed the historic cleanups of Boston, Paris, and Lisbon, as if nothing had happened.

  What had?

  AbbyWorks got the Shanghai contract. Mal got his promotion, his bonus, and his new car. Someone else handled the follow-up for the contract while Mal went on to new projects, but every so often, he checked to see how the clean-up of Shanghai was proceeding. Two years into the agreement, the job was actually ahead of projected schedule, despite badly deteriorating relations between the two countries. China invaded and annexed Tibet, but China had always invaded and annexed Tibet, and only the human-solidarity people objected. Next, however, China annexed the Kamchatka Peninsula, where American biosolutions companies were working on the clean-up of Vladivostock. The genemod engineers brought back frightening stories of advanced Chinese engineering: room-temperature superconductors. Maglev trains. Nanotechnology. There were even rumors of quantum computers, capable of handling trillions of operations simultaneously, although Mal discounted those rumors completely. A practical quantum computer was still far over the horizon.

  AbbyWorks was ordered out of Shanghai by the United States government. The company did not leave. Abbyl was jailed, but this made no difference. The Shanghai profits were paid to offshore banks. AbbyWorks claimed to have lost control of its Shanghai employees, who were making huge personal fortunes, enough to enable them to live outside the United States for the rest of very luxurious lives. Then, abruptly, the Chinese government itself terminated the contract. They literally threw AbbyWorks out of China in the middle of the night. They kept for themselves enormous resources in patented scientific equipment, as well as monies due for the last three months’ work, an amount equal to some state budgets.

  At three o’clock in the morning, Mal received a visit from the Office of National Security.

  “Mallings Goldstone?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need to ask you some questions.”

  Recorders, intimidation. The ONS had information that in 2175 Mr. Goldstone had conducted two people to the Minnesota site of the space object: Abby4 Abbington, president of AbbyWorks Biosolutions, and Mr. Kim Mao Xun of the Chinese government.

  “Yes, I did,” Mal said, sitting stiffly in his nightclothes. “It’s on record. I had proper clearances.”

  “Yes. But during that visit, did Mr. Kim take out and attach to the space object an unknown device, and then return it to his briefcase?”

  “Yes.” Mal’s stomach twisted.

  “Why wasn’t this incident reported to the State Department?”

  “I didn’t think it was important.” Not entirely true. Abby4 must have reported it … but why now? Because of the lost monies and confiscated equipment, of course. Adding to the list of Chinese treacheries; a longer list was more likely to compel government reaction.

  “Do you have any idea what the device was, or
what it might have done to the space object?”

  “No.”

  “Then you didn’t rule out that its effects might have been dangerous to your country?”

  “Dangerous’? How?”

  “We don’t know, Mr. Mallings—that’s the point. We do know that in nonbiological areas the Chinese technology is far ahead of our own. We have no way of knowing if that device you failed to report turned the space object into a weapon of some kind.”

  “A weapon? Don’t you think that’s very unlikely?”

  “No, Mr. Mallings. I don’t. Please get dressed and come with us.”

  For the first time, Mal noticed the two men’s builds. Genemod for strength and agility, no doubt, as well as maximum possible longevity. He remembered Mr. Kim, scrawny and wrinkled. Their bodies far outclassed Mr. Kim’s, far outclassed Mal’s as well. But Mr. Kim’s body was somewhere on the other side of the world, along with his superior “devices,” and Mal’s body was marked “scapegoat” as clearly as if it were spelled out in DNA-controlled birthmarks on his forehead.

  He went into his bedroom to get dressed.

  Mal had been interrogated with truth drugs—painless, harmless, utterly reliable—recorded, and released by the time the news hit the flimsies. He had already handed in his resignation to his company. The moving truck stood outside his apartment, being loaded for the move to someplace he wasn’t known. Mal, flimsy in hand, watched the two huge stevies carry out his furniture.

  But he couldn’t postpone reading the flimsy forever. And, of course, this was just the first. There would be more. The tempaper rustled in his hand. It would last forty-eight hours before dissolving into molecules completely harmless to the environment.

  CHINESE ARMED “SPACE OBJECT” TO DESTROY US!!!

  “MIGHT BE RADIATION, OR POLLUTANTS, OR A SUPER-BOMB,” SAY SCIENTISTS

  TROJAN HORSE UNDER GUISE OF BIOSOLUTIONS CONTRACT

  TWO YEARS AND NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE!!!!

  Flimsies weren’t subtle. But so far as Mal could see, his name hadn’t yet been released to them.

  Mal said, “Please be careful with that desk, it’s very old. It belonged to my great-grandfather.”

  “O, yes, friend,” one of the stevies said. “Most careful.” They hurled it into the truck.

  A neighbor of Mal’s walked toward Mal, recognized him, and stopped dead. She hissed at him, a long ugly sound, and walked on.

  So some other flimsy had already tracked him down and published his name.

  “Leave the rest,” Mal said suddenly, “everything else inside the house. Let’s go.”

  “O, just a few crates,” said one stevie.

  “No, leave it.” Mal climbed into the truck’s passenger cubicle. He hoped that he wasn’t a coward, but like all meeting brokers he was an historian, and he remembered the historical accounts of the “Anti-Polluters’ Riots” of the Collapse. What those mobs had done to anyone suspected of contributing to the destruction of the environment … Mal pulled the curtains closed in the cubicle. “Let’s go!”

  “O, yes!” the stevies said cheerfully, and drove off.

  Mal moved five states away, pursued all the way by flimsies. He couldn’t change his retinal scan or DNA ID, of course, but he used a legal corporate alias with the new landlord, the grocery broker, the bank. He read the news every day, and listened to it on public radio, and it progressed as any meeting broker could foresee it would.

  First, set the agenda: Demonize the Chinese, spread public fear. Second, canvass negotiating possibilities: Will they admit it? What can we contribute? Third, eliminate the possibilities you don’t like and hone in on the one you do: If the United States had been attacked, it has the right to counterattack. Fourth, build in safeguards against failure: We can’t yet attack China, they’ll destroy us. We can attack the danger they’ve placed within our borders, and then declare victory for that. Fifth, close the deal.

  The evacuation started two weeks later, and covered most of northern Minnesota and great swathes of southern Ontario. It included people and farm animals, but not wildlife, which would, of course, be replaced from cloned embryos. As the agrisolution inhabitants, many protesting furiously, were trucked out, the timed-release drops of engineered organisms were trucked in. Set loose after the bomb, they would spread over the entire affected area and disassemble all radioactive molecules. They were the same biosolutions that had cleaned up Boston, the very best AbbyWorks could create. In five years, Minnesota would be as sweet and clean as Kansas.

  Or Shanghai.

  The entire nation, Mal included, watched the bomb drop on vid. People held patriotic parties; wine and beer flowed. We were showing the Chinese that they couldn’t endanger us in our own country! Handsome genemod news speakers, who looked like Viking princesses or Zulu warriors or Greek gods, speculated on what the space object might reveal when it was blasted open. If anything survived, of course, which was not likely … and here scientists, considerably less gorgeous than the news speakers, explained fusion and the core of the sun. The bomb might be antiquated technology, they said, but it was still workable, and would save us from Chinese perfidy.

  Not to mention, Mal thought, saving face for the United States and lost revenues for AbbyWorks. It might not earn them as much to clean up Minnesota as to clean up Shanghai, but it was still a lot of money.

  The bomb fell, hit the space object, and sent up a mushroom cloud. When it cleared, the object lay there exactly as before.

  Airborne robots went in, spraying purifying organisms as they went, recording every measurement possible. Scientists compared the new data about the space object to the data they already had. Not one byte differed. When robotic arms reached out to touch the object, the arms still stopped ten inches away at an unseen, unmoved force field of some type not even the Chinese understood.

  Mal closed his eyes. How long would Chinese retaliation take? What would they do, and when?

  They did nothing. Slowly, public opinion swung to their side, helped by the flimsies. Journalists and viddies, ever eager for the next story, discovered that AbbyWorks had falsified reports on the clean-up of Shanghai. It had not been progressing as the corporation said, or as the contract promised. Eventually, AbbyWorks—already too rich, too powerful, for many people’s tastes—became the villain. They had tried to frame the Chinese, who were merely trying to do normal clean-up of their part of the planet. Clean-up was our job, our legacy, our sacred stewardship of the living Earth! And anyway, Chinese technological consumer goods, increasingly available in the United States, were so much better than ours—shouldn’t we be trying to learn from them?

  So business partnerships were formed. The fragile Chinese-American alliance was strengthened. AbbyWorks was forced to move offshore. Mal, in some way he didn’t quite understand, became a cult hero. Mr. Kim would have, too, but shortly after the bomb was dropped on the space object, he died of a heart attack, not having the proper genemods to clear out plaque from his ancient cardiac arteries.

  When Minnesota was clean again, the space object went back under a new foamcast dome, and in two more generations, only historians remembered what it may or may not have saved.

  Transmission: There is nothing here yet.

  Current probability of occurrence: 78%.

  IV:2264

  Few people understood why KimWorks was built in such a remote place. Dr. Leila Jian-fen Kim was one of the few who did.

  She liked family history. Didn’t Lao Tzu himself say, “To know what endures is to be openhearted, magnanimous, regal, blessed”? Family endures, family history endures. It was the same reason she liked the meditation garden at KimWorks, which was where she headed now with her great secret, to compose her mind.

  They had done it. Created the programmable replicator. One of the two great prizes hovering on the engineering horizon, and KimWorks had captured it.

  Walking away from the sealed lab, Leila tried to empty her mind, to put the achievement to one side and let the myste
ry flow in. The replicator must be kept in perspective, in its rightful place. Calming herself in the meditation garden would help her remember that.

  The garden was her favorite part of KimWorks. It lay at the northern end of the vast walled complex, separated from the first security fence by a simple curve of white stone. From the stone benches, you couldn’t see security fences, or even most of the facility buildings. So cleverly designed was the meditation garden that no matter where you sat, you contemplated only serene things. A single blooming bush, surrounded by raked gravel. A rock, placed to catch the sun. The stream, flowing softly, living water, always seeking its natural level. Or the egg, mystery of mysteries.

  It was the egg, unexplained symbol of unexplained realms beyond Earth, that brought Leila the deepest peace. She had sat for hours when the replicator project was in its planning stage, contemplating the egg’s dull silvery oval, letting her mind empty of all else. From that, she was convinced, had come most of the project’s form. Form was only a temporary manifestation of the ten thousand things, and in the egg’s unknowability lay the secret of its power.

  Her great-grandfather, Kim Mao Xun, had known that power. He had seen the egg on an early trip to the United States, before the Alliance, even. His son had made the same visit, and his granddaughter, Leila’s mother, had chosen the spot for this KimWorks facility and had the meditation garden built at its heart. Leila’s father, Paul Wilkinson, had gently teased his wife about putting a garden in a scientific research center, but Father was an American. They did not always understand. With the wiser in the world lies the responsibility for teaching the less wise.