“Mine, Sylvie,” he said. “It’s my blood!” There was something hilarious about it. He started to laugh. He turned to look back toward the showers, back to where Sylvie’s voice had come from. The bit of sky he saw had cleared. There was a bright rainbow arching above the concrete wall, blue to red, and a fainter one above it, red to blue. He took one step toward the courtyard, and everything went red, then black.
“I’m a shape-shifter, Sylvie.”
“You dope!” She was changing the dressing again. Her face hovered above him. She was biting her lip. He could see that she was working hard not to cry.
“Where are we?” He was lying on a bed made of two chairs pushed together and covered with a white sheet. He had been undressed. He lay naked under another sheet.
“Someplace, that’s all. I took you to a doctor. It’s the first time in my whole life I missed a booking, and it’s your fault, little man.”
“Did I tell you what happened?”
“Yeah. Who needs those crooks, anyway?” She kissed him on the forehead. “Milo … you were a champ. I can’t believe how brave you are. I’m sorry I put you in that spot.”
“I’m a shape-shifter, Sylvie. I remember everything. I breathed, and I remembered my sister, Dede. I did stuff for her. I was keys and credit cards and … money …” He stopped talking. Then he said it again: “The money!”
Sylvie looked away. “I’m sorry.” The room was dark behind her.
“It was you!”
Sylvie shrugged.
“You were the money!” Milo said.
“I do stuff for Lenny sometimes. He had a press going somewhere, all set to turn out fifties, hundreds, deluxe items, Milo, really good work, but they needed some front money. I provided Lenny with a sample, is all. Like a grant application, see? They weren’t ready to print yet. He was just supposed to show it and collect the advance. Then he pays me. Anyway, that was the idea.”
“Was that Lenny Zorn?”
“What?” Sylvie looked at him with a slightly shocked expression, like a hoer who has struck an unexpected rock in a well-cultivated field. “Lenny who … ? Wait a minute. How do you know about that? You mean Zorn’s Lemma, don’t you? How did you hear about Zorn’s Lemma?” She stared at him, her mouth hanging open. Slowly, it closed. Her brows descended. She grabbed Milo’s arm. “You little rat! What do you think you are, some kind of a damned spy? You were listening in on me and the doctor, weren’t you? You knew the whole time, didn’t you?”
“You’re a shape-shifter, too,” Milo said, “you and Devore! What do you want from me?”
“God damn you, Milo! What is it with you? You think I want to hurt you? You think I want to use you? What the hell do I need you for? I’m rich as fucking Croesus!”
“You already used me, Sylvie. You nearly got me killed. Why?”
“I needed some money, damn it, that’s all. And you’re the one who nearly got you killed. You stabbed yourself, for pity’s sake! It was a simple setup. Failsafe!”
“You blew the borders, Sylvie. The guy said they were fuzzy.”
“Well, it couldn’t be perfect, could it? The guy would think it was regular dough. You think you could do better?”
Milo knew fifty-dollar bills pretty well. Sylvie insisted on cash from her puppet show patrons, and Milo had been doing most of the collecting lately. They often paid with a fifty, which was a headache for Sylvie to break, but easy for the sponsors to carry. In his mind, Milo could see a fifty dollar bill as clearly as he could see his own hand. He could look right through it and all around it, on both sides. He felt the pattern of ink on its surface as if it were a network of varicose veins. He felt the rough surface like a hairy pelt, like his own hairy pelt.
Suddenly, he felt the sheets collapse around him, his skin shrivel and implode. He felt as if he were becoming all tongue, and the tongue was sucking an unripe fruit that sucked back at him, drying him out till he winked out of existence entirely. It was very quiet, very dark, very still. Milo was gone. There was only a vague electricity, a tension, slight at first, but it became more and more irritating, until it was unbearable. Then he burst into mundane awareness again, like a frogman bursting above the surface, gasping, shocked by the sudden light and air.
“Damn you,” Sylvie was saying. “Don’t you ever, ever do that again.”
“Don’t tell him that,” a low voice said from behind Sylvie. A door had opened. Light poured in. Someone was walking in, silhouetted in the doorway. Milo could see only that he was a small man and, from the light flashing from his head, that he wore glasses. “His father told him that once. He won’t like to hear that, will you, Milo? Tell the truth now, Sylvie. Was he any good?”
Sylvie was fuming. She swallowed. She breathed. She calmed herself for the small man’s sake. “He’s fabulous. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“That’s what I figured.” The man came closer and put his hand on Sylvie’s shoulder. “You know who I am, don’t you, Milo?”
“Sure,” Milo said. “You’re Dr. Devore.”
“That’s right, Milo. I don’t know much materia medica anymore, but I can still do first aid okay. How’s the belly?”
“I’m all right. Do you own The Grass and Trees?”
“You’re a smart boy, Milo. We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to use you. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite, you know?”
Now he made out the drapes, the rolltop, the chairs he lay on. “I jumped out that window. I was a bat. I flew down.”
“I didn’t expect that,” Devore said. “I didn’t know you were still here. I wasn’t in a position to know anything at that moment.”
“The doctor was a rainbow,” Sylvie said.
Devore clucked his tongue. “Ach! My small talent!”
“But you called Sylvie,” Milo said.
“Yes, I had already called her to tell her about you, you know? She was on her way here when she saw you fly down. She improvised.”
Milo started to tremble. He shut his eyes, then forced them open again. “Sylvie, Dr. Devore, there’s something I remembered from a long time ago …”
Devore cut in, “You don’t have to tell us this, Milo. You don’t have to say anything you’re not ready to say …”
“I killed my sister. I killed Dede.” He began to sob.
Sylvie kissed him on the forehead and cradled his head in her arms. “It wasn’t you, little man. It was a mountain lion. You were a little boy! You couldn’t control it! You didn’t know anything! Dede was an operator! She would have used you up and thrown you away like an old Kleenex!”
Devore spoke in his low, soothing voice, the voice that held Milo just this side of panic when he retold his dreams. “We knew, Milo. All that talking in your sleep! We followed the leads. We traced your history, well, up until you disappeared, after your sister’s death.
“Milo, you were no more at fault for Dede’s death than you were for wrecking that car in your dream about the Dumpster. For a child as young as you were then, shape-shifting is the same as dreaming, you know? It’s all make-believe!”
“She was my big sister! She took care of me!” Milo’s face, like his throat, was tightening into a knot. “She read to me. She tucked me in at night.”
Sylvie shook her head. “Milo! Milo!”
All at once, it was too much—the arch of Sylvie’s brow, Dr. Devore’s sad smile, the sweet warmth of Sylvie’s hand stroking his head. Milo braved the pain in his stomach and bolted upright. “I’m no good! I’m some kind of monster, is all! You don’t understand!”
Sylvie tried to hold him, but he swung his legs over the side of the makeshift bed and pulled away from her. He flinched and started to double over, then braced himself and ran to the window, clutching the sheet about him. Devore followed him.
Milo pressed his forehead against the glass. “She wanted me to kill that guy. It wasn’t the first time. The guy wouldn’t do what she wanted. I was the only one who always did what she wanted—except ju
st that once. I didn’t mean to kill her, though!”
“You didn’t kill her, you jerk!” Sylvie was crying too now. “It was the goddamn mountain lion, Milo! It wasn’t your fault!”
Milo pushed open the window and leaned out. He let his head hang, panting, dripping tears. Tears slid down his nose and cheeks and chin. “I could jump. I deserve it.”
Devore’s hand on his shoulder. “You already tried that, Milo. Inside you, you’re too smart, you’re too good to do that to yourself. When you jump, Milo, you fly! In your heart you know you must live. Dede used you, Milo. You protected yourself.”
“Why are you so good to me? Nobody’s ever been so good to me!” He turned around, trusting them to see his face, so ugly, he thought, with tears and spasms of grief.
“We just want to look out for you, Milo.” Sylvie cupped his cheek, wet with tears, in the palm of her hand, and all at once his ugliness vanished: he didn’t look like anything, he was only this touch, this gazing into Sylvie’s gaze. It wasn’t a shape-shifter’s trick but the most human thing he had ever felt.
“We all look out for one another,” she said. “We’re all finding out what we are, what we can do.”
Like a knot pulled free, Milo’s breath shuddered once, then steadied. The sheet wrapped around him opened slightly: his movement had irritated the wound, and blood trickled below the dressing.
“Take a good look, Sylvie,” Devore said, “and next time you need pin money, ask me.”
“I said I was sorry,” she said, “and I meant it. But I can’t be told what to do, not by you, not by anybody. I got my own plans, you know. Your fellowship won’t take me to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival or Amsterdam for the Festival of Fools or to the Carnival in Venice or any of those other big venues that are goddam dying to experience the Moon and Stars!” Devore half-smiled, looked down, and shook his head.
Milo blinked. For a split second, Dede was there, pale and doughy. She was lingering in the corner with a hangdog look. She wasn’t as big as Milo used to think, nor as subtle. As his big sister, then as a nameless forbidden dream, she had been mighty: volcanoes, oceans, storming skies, or a hot dry wind. Now she was just a shadow. “You used me, Dede! I was just a baby, and you were my big sister! Oh, Dede, you shouldn’t have done that! That wasn’t right!” Bookish, wan, small-hearted, eaten up by jealousy and desire, she simply faded from view.
Milo had been whispering to himself, he realized. He caught Sylvie and Devore’s eyes on him; they looked away, embarrassed for him perhaps, but Milo didn’t mind that they had heard him. We all look out for one another, Sylvie had said. We! There were others like him! Milo breathed. Milo breathed. He was innocent.
He felt like someone suddenly waking after a long fever and rummaging for food. “Tell me about the painting in the waiting room. Is it … somebody?”
“Yes,” said Devore. “I guess you’d have to say so. At least, she was somebody. She seems to be caught in there, like Narcissus staring into the lake. We can’t get her back. Maybe she doesn’t want to come back.”
Milo shut his eyes; tears streamed down his cheeks.
Sylvie squeezed his hand. “Milo … ?”
“I was caught like that, Sylvie. I belonged to Dede, even though she was dead. She said I’d be all hers forever.”
“Milo, you’re going to be all yours forever,” said Devore. “We’re going to see to it. We’re going to teach you everything. And you’re going to teach us, too.”
“Yes, I will.” Milo took Sylvie’s other hand in his. He looked at her, then at Devore, then Sylvie again. He had the extraordinary sensation of recognizing himself behind their eyes. “I love you, both of you!” he blurted out.
Sylvie smiled. Her face sparkled so, he thought he was looking at the moon and stars.
Snowball in Hell
BRIAN STABLEFORD
Critically acclaimed British “hard-science” writer Brian Stableford is the author of more than thirty books, including Cradle of the Sun, The Blind Worm, Days of Glory, In the Kingdom of the Beasts, Day of Wrath, The Halcyon Drift, The Paradox of the Sets, The Realms of Tartarus, The Empire of Fear, The Angel of Pain, and The Carnival of Destruction, Serpent’s Blood, and Inherit the Earth. His short fiction has been collected in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution. His nonfiction books include The Sociology of Science Fiction, and, with David Langford, The Third Millennium: A History of the World AD 2000—3000. His acclaimed novella “Les Fleurs du Mal” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1994. His most recent books are the novels The Fountains of Youth and Architects of Emortality. A biologist and sociologist by training, Stableford lives in Reading, England.
Stableford may have written more about how the ongoing revolutions in biological and genetic science will change the very nature of humanity itself than any other writer of the last decade. Here he takes a penetrating look at what really makes us human—and comes to a few conclusions that may surprise you.
From the very beginning I had a niggling feeling that the operation was going to go wrong, but I put it down to nerves. Scientific advisors to the Home Office rarely get a chance to take part in Special Branch operations, and I always knew that it would be my first and last opportunity to be part of a real Boy’s Own adventure.
I calmed my anxieties by telling myself that the police must know what they were doing. The plan looked so neat and tidy when it was laid out on the map with colored dots: blue for the lower ranks, red for the Armed Response Unit, green for the likes of yours truly and black for the senior Special Branch officers who were supervising and coordinating the whole thing. We deeply resented the fact that the reports from the surveillance team had been carefully censored, according to the sacred principle of NEED TO KNOW, but there seemed to be no obvious reason to suppose that the raid itself wouldn’t go like clockwork.
“But what are they actually supposed to have done, exactly?” one of my juniors was reckless enough to ask.
“If we knew exactly,” came the inevitable withering reply, “we wouldn’t need to include you in the operation, would we?”
I could tell from the reports we had been allowed to see that the so-called investigation into the experiments at Hollinghurst Manor had been a committee product, and that no one had ever had a clear idea exactly what was going on. Warrants for surveillance had been obtained on the grounds that the Branch’s GE-Crime Unit had “compelling reasons” to suspect that Drs. Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby were using “human genetic material” in the creation of “transgenic animals,” but it was mostly speculation. What they really had to go on was gossip and rumor, and the rumors in question seemed to me to be suspiciously akin to the urban legends that had sprung up everywhere since the tabloids’ yuck factor campaign had finally forced the government to pass stringent laws controlling the uses of genetic engineering and to set up the GE-Crime Unit to enforce them. Once it existed, the Unit had to do something to justify its budget, and its senior staff obviously reckoned that whatever was going on at Hollinghurst Manor had to be yucky enough to allow them to get that invaluable first goal on the great scoresheet.
It seemed to me that the whole affair had always had a faint air of surreal absurdity about it. The illegal experiments that Hemans and his fellows were alleged by rumor to be conducting were unfortunately conducive to silly jokes, ranging from lame references to flying pigs to covert references to the raid as the Boar War. Even the Home Office joined in the jokey name game; it was some idiot undersecretary who decided to code-name the “target” Animal Farm, borrowing the most popular of the derisory nicknames it had accumulated during the surveillance. It was, alas, my own people who took some delight in explaining to anyone who would listen why the people inside had allegedly taken to calling the project “Commoner’s Isle.” (It was because the place where the ambitious scientist had conducted his unsuccessful experiment in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau had been called Noble’s Isle.) When the inspector in charge of the A
rmed Response Unit assured us at the final briefing that the people in the manor didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men he couldn’t understand why the men from the ministry snickered. (In Animal Farm, Snowball is the idealist who gets purged by the ruthless Napoleon.)
In a sense, the inspector was right. When the Animal Farmers found out that they were being raided and ran like hell they didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting past his men. Unfortunately, that didn’t make them stop running and give up.
The part of the plan that included me involved uniformed policemen smashing their way through the main door and making as many arrests as possible while my people went for the computers and any paper files that were still around. We didn’t expect to get all the records out—we’d been told at the briefing that Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby would probably start crunching diskettes and reformatting hard disks as soon as they were roused from sleep—but we figured that there’d be more than enough left to salvage. They were scientists, after all; keeping backup files ought to have been second nature to them.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple. The Animal Farmers didn’t bother with shredding and reformatting; they just torched the place. Nobody had thought to give us gas-masks, and the fumes that met us in the corridors of the manor were so foul and instantly dizzying that we should have known that they were toxic and turned back immediately. Actually, that was what most of my colleagues did. I was the only thoroughly stupid one. I kept on going, determined to get to the office that was my designated objective. It was hopeless—but it was my one and only Boy’s Own adventure and I hadn’t been trained to an adequate sense of self-preservation. I was just on the point of blacking out when I heard shots fired in the woods, and realized just how badly awry the operation had gone.
The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection Page 68