The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  She stood there in the gray sunlight, taking deep breaths of churned earth and fumes, and felt her body go vague again. It was sudden and strange, like a wind had blown through her.

  She knew she should go down to Intake and tell Horace everything, but she was afraid to. It seemed sickeningly obvious now that she should have made the Hiller people stay. Even if what N’Lykli had told her was true, she should have gone over to the Indians arguing around their campfires and made them talk to her. If The Cure for Everything could speak a little Portuguese, so could a few of the others.

  Was she so desperate in her ghostliness that she would betray herself like this, give up her job, her life, her colleagues and friends—everything for a cure? For frozen sperm?

  Yes, she was that desperate. Yes, she was.

  She turned away from the gate and the diminishing sounds of the truck. It’s too late, she told herself, and felt the lie in that as well.

  She drove off with the Toyota Land Cruiser without telling anyone, before the diesel stink of the Hiller truck was gone. The Toyota was the newest of the Xingu vehicles and the only one with a full tank. She plunged it down the muddy hill after the Hiller truck. There weren’t that many ways to get to Xavantina.

  She caught up with the truck in less than half an hour, but stayed out of sight, a klick or so behind. Xingu’s rutted jungle access turned to a graded lumber trail, and she dropped even further back. When the scraggly trees gave way to burned stumps and abandoned timber, she gave herself more distance, until the Hiller truck was a speck behind the speck of the Jeep, forging along the muddy curves in the ruined hillsides.

  She followed them through grim little settlements of displaced Indians and rubber tappers who lived in squalor downstream from the local plantations, past islands of pristine jungle where monkeys screamed at her and brilliant parrots burst out of the trees in clouds of pure color.

  Fourteen hours from Xingu, long after the moon went down, the truck turned off the half-paved local Xavantina highway onto a dirt road along a narrow river. In the pitch blackness, it made a sharp right and came to a stop.

  Maria pulled into the last stand of trees. Doors slammed and there was a brief silence. Then a bank of floodlights came on overhead and she could see the truck sitting by the Jeep in a cleared area at the foot of a high chain-link fence. The Indians peered out of the back, pointing into the darkness while N’Lykli pulled the gates open and the vehicles drove through.

  There were no signs to identify the place. Maria hunched over the Toyota’s steering wheel, stiff in her shoulders, thick in her head, tired beyond even the desire for coffee. She lit her last cigarette and dragged deep for energy and ideas as N’Lykli swung the gates shut, locked them, tugged on them, and vanished into the dark.

  In a minute, the floods went out, leaving Maria with the glowing tip of her cigarette. She waited a while longer, turned on the dome light and crawled into the back of the car where the tool box was. She dug until she found a heavy-duty pair of wire cutters.

  Inside the gate, the road deteriorated into a wasteland of bulldozed ruts. Weeds and young trees grew to shoulder height. Small animals scurried away as Maria groped through the dark. Bloodthirsty insects found her bare neck, her ankles, and the backs of her hands. Finally, she saw the glow of sulfur-colored floodlights, and at the top of the next rise, she got her first glimpse of the “facility.”

  A huddle of blocky, windowless buildings surrounded a fenced central courtyard. It had the look of an unfinished prison. Wire-topped fences glinted in the security floods.

  She expected dogs, but didn’t hear any. She made her way through the weeds expecting snakes, but decided that N’Lykli and his blood-sucking colleagues at Hiller had probably eliminated every poisonous thing for miles around—no accidental losses in their gene pool of cures. The whole idea made her furious—at them for such a blatant exploitation, and at herself for so badly needing what they’d found.

  She circled the compound, trying to find an inconspicuous way to get into the inner courtyard, but the fences were new and some of them were electrified. When she had come almost all the way around to the front again, she found a lit row of barred windows on the ground floor of one of the blockhouses.

  There was no one inside. The lights were dim, for security, not workers or visitors. Maria climbed up a hard dirt bank to the window sill and hung onto the bars with both hands.

  Inside, modern desks and new computers lined one side of a huge white room. At the other end, there was a small lab with racks of glassware and a centrifuge. Color-coded gene charts covered the walls. Yellow lines braided into red, producing orange offspring. Bright pink Post-it notes followed one line and dead-ended with a handwritten note and an arrow drawn in black marker. She could read the print without effort: Autism?

  Mitten-handed mutants. Ghostly spirit children.

  She let herself down from the windowsill and crept through brittle grass to the edge of the wire fence.

  Inside, she could see one end of the compound and the lights of the blockhouse beyond. Dark human shapes were silhouetted against small fires and she realized she’d expected them to be treated as inmates, locked up for the night and under constant guard. Instead she could smell the wood smoke and hear their muffled voices. Women laughing. A baby squalling, then shushed. Hands pattered on a drum.

  She touched the fence with the back of her hand, testing for current.

  Nothing.

  She listened, but there was no alarm that she could hear.

  Someone chanted a verse of a song. A chorus of children sang in answer. For the first time, Maria saw the enormity of what she was about to do.

  The Cure for Everything. Not just Lucknow’s.

  She pulled out the cutters and started working on the fence. The gene chart. Autism. The way his voice had sounded, shrieking Jamarikuma! None of this was right.

  She crawled through the hole in the fence and they saw her right away. The singing and conversation stopped. She got to her feet, brushed off her knees and went near enough to the closest fire to be seen, but not close enough to be threatening. The Cure for Everything gave Maria a quick, urgent nod but he didn’t stand up. Around him, a few heads cocked in recognition of her face, her skin.

  The withered old woman Maria had seen at Xingu hobbled over from one of the other fires, leaning on her walking stick. She frowned at Maria and started speaking in accented Portuguese.

  “We saw you at Xingu. You’re the Jamarikuma. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m here to help,” said Maria.

  “Help us do what?” said the old woman.

  “You don’t have to stay in this place,” said Maria. “If you do, you and your children and your grandchildren’s children won’t ever be allowed to leave.”

  The old woman—and half a dozen other older members of the tribe—glanced at the Cure. Not in a particularly friendly way.

  “What’s this all about?” said the old woman to the Cure, still in Portuguese. “You’ve got a spirit arguing for you now?”

  He replied in their own language. To Maria he sounded sulky.

  “Do you understand why you’re here?” said Maria. “These people …” She gestured at the looming buildings. “They want your blood, your …” Genes might mean souls to them. “You have a—a talent to cure diseases,” said Maria. “That’s why they want your blood.”

  Guarded eyes stared back from around the fire.

  The old woman nodded. “What’s so bad about that?”

  “You won’t ever be able to go back home,” said Maria.

  The old woman snorted. “At home they were trying to shoot us.” She spat into the fire. “We’re afraid to go back there.”

  “But here we’re animals.” The Cure pushed himself to his feet. “We’re prisoners!”

  “We’ve had this discussion,” said the old woman sharply and turned to Maria. “We made a decision months ago. We said he didn’t have to stay if he didn’t want to, but he st
ayed anyway, and now he’s bringing in spirits to make an argument that no one else agrees with. We’re safer right here than we’ve been for years. No one’s shooting at us. So we have to wear their ugly jewelry.” She touched the ruby sampler in her ear. “So we lose a little blood now and then. It’s just a scratch.”

  “But you’re in a cage,” said Maria.

  “I don’t like that part,” said the old woman. “But you have to admit, it’s a big cage, and mostly it keeps the bandits and murderers out.”

  The Cure jabbed a finger at Maria, making his point in harsh staccato tones. Maria only caught the word Xingu.

  The old woman eyed Maria. “What would happen to us at Xingu?”

  “We’d teach you how to be part of the world outside,” said Maria. “We’d show you what you need to know to be farmers, or to live in the city if that’s what you want.”

  “Are there guns in the world outside?”

  It was a patronizing question. Maria felt sweat break out at the small of her back. “You know there are.”

  “Would we all be able to stay together, the entire tribe?” asked the old woman.

  “We do the best we can,” said Maria. “Sometimes it isn’t possible to keep everyone together, but we try.”

  The old woman made a wide gesture into the dark. “We didn’t lose one single person on the trip. You’re saying you can’t guarantee that for us at Xingu, though. Is that right?”

  “Right,” said Maria.

  “But we’d be free.”

  Maria didn’t say anything.

  The old woman made a sharp gesture. “It’s time for the Jamarikuma spirit to leave. If that’s what she actually is.” She closed her eyes and began to hum, a spirit-dismissing song, Maria supposed, and she glanced at the Cure, who leaped to his feet.

  “I am leaving. With the Jamarikuma.”

  The old woman nodded, still humming, as though she was glad he’d finally made up his mind.

  The Cure took a step away from the fire. He walked—no, he sauntered around his silent friends, family, maybe even his wife. No one said anything and no one was shedding any tears. He came over to Maria and stood beside her.

  “I will not come back,” he said.

  The old woman hummed a little louder, like she was covering his noise with hers.

  When they got back to the Toyota, Maria unlocked the passenger side and let him in. He shut the door and she walked slowly around the back to give herself time to breathe. Her heart was pounding and her head felt empty and light, like she was dreaming. She leaned against the driver’s side, just close enough to see his dim reflection in the side mirror. He was rubbing his sweaty face, hard, as though he could peel away his skin.

  In that moment, she felt as though she could reach into the night, to just the right place and find an invisible door which would open into the next day. It was the results of a night with him that she wanted, she realized. He was like a prize she’d just won. For the first time, she wondered what his name was.

  She pulled the driver’s side open and got in beside him. She turned the key in the ignition and checked the rearview mirror as the dashboard lit up. All she could see of herself was a ghostly, indistinct shape.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked.

  “Everything’s fine.” She said and let the truck blunder forward into the insect-laden night.

  Later, when the access road evened out to pavement, he put his hot palm on her thigh. She kept driving, watching how the headlights cut only so far ahead into the darkness. She stopped just before the main road, and without looking at him, reached out to touch his fingers.

  “Are we going to Xingu?” he asked, like a child.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t go back.”

  “Neither can I,” he said, and let her kiss him. Here. And there.

  The Suspect Genome

  PETER F. HAMILTON

  Here’s an absorbing and intricately plotted mystery set in a troubled future England, a story that expertly and effortlessly mixes two genres to produce a hybrid worthy of the best of either: a science fiction mystery full of surprises, where nothing is as it seems to be.

  Prolific new British writer Peter F. Hamilton has sold to Interzone, In Dreams, New Worlds, Fears, and elsewhere. He sold his first novel, Mindstar Rising, in 1993, and quickly followed it up with two sequels, A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower, all detailing further adventures of Greg Mendel, who also features in “The Suspect Genome.” Hamilton’s first three books didn’t attract a great deal of attention, on this side of the Atlantic, at least, but that changed dramatically with the publication of his next novel, The Reality Dysfunction, a huge modern Space Opera (it needed to be divided into two volumes for publication in the United States) that is itself only the start of a projected trilogy of staggering size and scope, the Night’s Dawn trilogy. The Reality Dysfunction has been attracting the reviews and the acclaim that his prior novels did not, and has suddenly put Hamilton on the map, perhaps a potential rival for writers such as Dan Simmons, Iain Banks, Paul J. McAuley, Greg Benford, C. J. Cherryh, Stephen R. Donaldson, Colin Greenland, and other major players in the expanding subgenre of Modern Baroque Space Opera, an increasingly popular area these days. The subsequent novel in the trilogy, The Neutronium Alchemist, generated the same kind of excited critical buzz. Hamilton’s most recent books include his first collection, A Second Chance at Eden, the third novel in the Night’s Dawn trilogy, The Naked God, and a novella chapbook, Watching Trees Grow.

  One—The Dodgy Deal

  It was only quarter past nine on that particular Monday morning, but the September sun was already hot enough to soften the tarmac of Oakham’s roads. The broad deep-tread tires of Richard Townsend’s Mercedes were unaffected by the mildly adhesive quality of the surface, producing a sly purring sound as they crossed the spongy black surface.

  Radio Rutland played as he drove. The station was still excited by the news about Byrne Tyler—the celebrity’s death was the biggest thing to happen in the area all month. A newscaster was interviewing some detective about the lack of an arrest. The body had been found on Friday, and the police still had nothing.

  Richard turned onto the High Street, and the road surface improved noticeably. The heart of the town was thriving again. Local shops were competing with the national brand-name stores that were muscling in on the central real estate, multiplying in the wake of the economic good times that had come to the town. Richard always regretted not having any interests in the new consumerism rush, but he’d been just too late to leap on that gravy train. Real money had been very short in the immediate aftermath of the PSP years, which was when the retail sector began its revival.

  He drove into the Pillings Industrial Precinct, an area of small factories and warehouses at the outskirts of the town. Trim allotments down the right hand side of the road were planted with thick banana trees, their clumps of green fruit waving gently in the muggy breeze. The sturdy trunks came to a halt beside a sagging weed-webbed fence that sketched out a jumble of derelict land. All that remained of the factory that once stood there was a litter of shattered bricks and broken concrete footings half glimpsed among the tangle of nettles and rampant vines. A new sign had been pounded into the iron-hard ocher clay, proclaiming it to be Zone 7, and Ready For Renewal, a Rutland Council/Townsend Properties partnership.

  Zone 7 was an embarrassment. It was the first site anyone saw when they entered the Pillings Precinct: a ramshackle remnant of the bad old days. The irony being Pillings was actually becoming quite a success story. Most of the original units, twentieth-century factories and builders’ merchants, had been refurbished to house viable new businesses, while the contemporary zones, expanding out into the verdant cacao plantations that encircled the town, were sprouting the uniform blank sugar-cube structures of twenty-first-century construction. Seamless weather-resistant composite walls studded with mushroom-like air-conditioning vents, and jet-black solar-cell roofs. Whatever industry was conduc
ted inside, it was securely masked by the standardized multipurpose facades. Even Richard wasn’t sure what some of the companies did.

  He parked the Merc outside his own offices, a small brick building recently renovated. Colm, his assistant, was already inside, going through the datapackages that had accumulated overnight on his desktop terminal.

  “The architect for Zone 31 wants you to visit,” he said as Richard walked in. “There’s some problem with the floor reinforcements. And a Mr. Alan O’Hagen would like to see you. He suggested 10:30 this morning.”

  Richard paused. “Do I know him?”

  Colm consulted his terminal. “We don’t have any file on record. He said he may be interested in a zone.”

  “Ah.” Richard smiled. “Fine, 10:30.”

  It was a typical morning spent juggling data. Builders, suppliers, clients, accountants, local planning officials; they all expected him to clear up the mess they were making of their own jobs. He’d spent a lot of his own money over the last four years, schmoozing and paying off the county and town councillors to get his partnership with the precinct project, and it had paid off. Townsend Properties was currently involved in developing eight of the zones, with architects working on plans for another three. Having the massive Event Horizon corporation open a memox processing facility on Zone 12 a year ago had been a real triumph for the town; other smaller corporations had immediately begun to nose around, eager for subcontracts. Quite how the council development officers managed to pull off that coup always baffled Richard. He’d never known a supposedly professional team quite as incompetent as the people who worked at Rutland Council. Every job he undertook was besieged by official delays and endless obstructionist revisions.

  The man who walked in at 10:30 prompt wasn’t quite what Richard had expected. He was in his late fifties, nothing like any of those eager young business types who normally came sniffing around the precinct. Alan O’Hagen wore a gray business suit with a pale purple tie. He had a sense of authority which made Richard automatically straighten up in his chair and reach to adjust his own tie. Even the man’s handshake was carefully controlled, an impression of strength held in reserve.