The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  The bastards cut her housing benefit. Ten was distraught. Home was everything to her. Her life had been one long search for a place of her own; safe, secure, stable.

  “You have two options,” I said. “One, give up working here.”

  “Never,” she said. “I work. I like to work.” I saw Wynton smile, polishing the glasses behind the bar.

  “Option two, then.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Move in with me.”

  It took her a week to decide. I understood her hesitation. It was a place, safe, secure, stable, but not her own. On the Saturday I got a phone call from her. Could I help her move? I went around to her flat in Salford. The rooms were tatty and cold, the furniture charity-shop fare, and the decor ugly. The place stank of dope. The television blared, unwatched; three different boomboxes competed with each other. While Ten fetched her stuff, her flatmates stared at me as if I were something come out of the Chaga. She had two bags—one of clothes, one of music and books. They went in the back of the car and she came home with me.

  Life with Ten. She put her books on a shelf and her clothes in a drawer. She improvised harmonies to my music. She would light candles on any excuse. She spent hours in the bathroom and used toilet paper by the roll. She was meticulously tidy. She took great care of her little money. She would not borrow from me. She kept working at I-Nation, she sang every Friday. She still killed me every time she got up on that stage.

  She said little, but it told. She was dark and intensely beautiful to me. She didn’t smile much. When she did it was a knife through the heart of me. It was a sharp joy. Sex was a sharpness of a different kind—it always seemed difficult for her. She didn’t lose herself in sex. I think she took a great pleasure from it, but it was controlled … it was owned, it was hers. She never let herself make any sound. She was a little afraid of the animal inside. She seemed much older than she was; on the times we went dancing, that same energy that lit her up in singing and sex burned out of her. It was then that she surprised me by being a bright, energetic, sociable eighteen-year-old. She loved me. I loved her so hard it felt like sickness. I would watch her unaware I was doing it … watch the way she moved her hands when she talked on the phone, how she curled her legs under her when she watched television, how she brushed her teeth in the morning. I would wake up in the night just to watch her sleep. I would check she was still breathing. I dreaded something insane, something out of nowhere, taking her away.

  She stuck a satellite photograph of Africa on the fridge. She showed me how to trace the circles of the Chaga through the clouds. Every week she updated it. Week by week, the circles merging. That was how I measured our life together, by the circles, merging. Week by week, her home was taken away. Her parents and sister were down there, under those blue and white bars of cloud; week by week the circles were running them out of choices.

  She never let herself forget she had failed them. She never let herself forget she was a refugee. That was what made her older, in ways, than me. That was what all her tidiness and orderliness around the house were about. She was only here for a little time. It could all be lifted at a moment’s notice.

  She liked to cook for me on Sundays, though the kitchen smelled of it for a week afterward. I never told her her cooking gave me the shits. She was chopping something she had got from the Caribbean stores and singing to herself. I was watching from the hall, as I loved to watch her without being watched. I saw her bring the knife down, heard a Kalenjin curse, saw her lift her hand to her mouth. I was in like a shot.

  “Shit shit shit shit,” she swore. It was a deep cut, and blood ran freely down her forefinger. I rushed her to the tap, stuck it under the cold, then went for the medical bag. I returned with gauze, plasters and a heal-the-world attitude.

  “It’s okay,” she said, holding the finger up. “It’s better.”

  The cut had vanished. No blood, no scab. All that remained was a slightly raised red weal. As I watched, even that faded.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” Ten said. “But it’s better.”

  I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want there to be anything more difficult or complex in Ten’s life. I wanted what she had from her past to be enough, to be all. I knew this was something alien; no one healed like that. I thought that if I let it go, it would never trouble us again. I had not calculated on the bomb.

  Some fucking Nazis or other had been blast-bombing gay bars. London, Edinburgh, Dublin so far, always a Friday afternoon, work over, weekend starting. Manchester was on the alert. So were the bombers. Tuesday, lunch time, half a kilo of semtex with nails and razor blades packed around it went off under a table outside a Canal Street bar. No one died, but a woman at the next table lost both legs from the knees down and there were over fifty casualties. Ten had been going in for the afternoon shift. She was twenty meters away when the bomb went off. I got the call from the hospital same time as the news broke on the radio.

  “Get the fuck over there,” Willy the boss ordered. I didn’t need ordering. Manchester Royal Infirmary casualty was bedlam. I saw the doctors going around in a slow rush and the people looking up at everyone who came in, very very afraid and the police taking statements and the trolleys in the aisles and I thought: It must have been something like this in Nairobi, at the end. The receptionist showed me to a room where I was to wait for a doctor. I met her in the corridor, a small, harassed-looking Chinese girl.

  “Ah, Mr. Giddens. You’re with Ms. Bi, that’s right?”

  “That’s right, how is she?”

  “Well, she was brought in with multiple lacerations, upper body, left side of face, left upper arm and shoulder …”

  “Oh Jesus God. And now?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Ten walked down the corridor. If she had not been wearing a hospital robe, I would have sworn she was unchanged from how I had left her that morning.

  “Shone.”

  The weals were already fading from her face and hands. A terrible prescience came over me, so strong and cold I almost threw up.

  “We want to keep her in for further tests, Mr. Giddens,” the doctor said. “As you can imagine, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before.”

  “Shone, I’m fine, I want to go home.”

  “Just to be sure, Mr. Giddens.”

  When I brought Ten back a bag of stuff, the receptionist directed me to Intensive Care. I ran the six flights of stairs to ICU, burning with dread. Ten was in a sealed room full of white equipment. When she saw me, she ran from her bed to the window, pressed her hands against it.

  “Shone!” Her words came through a speaker grille. “They won’t let me out!”

  Another doctor led to me a side room. There were two policemen there, and a man in a suit.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “Mr. Giddens. Ms. Bi, she is a Kenyan refugee?”

  “You fucking know that.”

  “Easy, Mr. Giddens. We’ve been running some tests on Ms. Bi, and we’ve discovered the presence in her bloodstream of fullerene nanoprocessors.”

  “Nanowhat?”

  “What are commonly know as Chaga spores.”

  Ten, Dust Girl, firing and firing and firing at the glider, the gun blossoming in her hand, the shanty town melting behind her as her clothes fell apart, her arm sticking through the shield wall as she shouted, I’m chipped, I’m chipped! The soldiers shaving her head, hosing her down. Those things she had carried inside her. All those runs for the Americans.

  “Oh my God.”

  There was a window in the little room. Through it I saw Ten sitting on a plastic chair by the bed, hands on her thighs, head bowed.

  “Mr. Giddens.” The man in the suit flashed a little plastic wallet. “Robert McGlennon, Home Office Immigration. Your, ah …” He nodded at the window.

  “Partner.”

  “Partner. Mr. Giddens, I have to tell you, we cannot be certain that Ms. Bi’s continued prese
nce is not a public health risk. Her refugee status is dependent on a number of conditions, one of which is that …”

  “You’re fucking deporting her …”

  The two policemen stirred. I realized then that they were not there for Ten. There were there for me.

  “It’s a public health issue, Mr. Giddens. She should never have been allowed in in the first place. We have no idea of the possible environmental impact. You, of all people, should be aware what these things can do. Have done. Are still doing. I have to think of public safety.”

  “Public safety, fuck!”

  “Mr. Giddens …”

  I went to the window. I beat my fists on the wired glass.

  “Ten! Ten! They’re trying to deport you! They want to send you back!”

  The policemen prised me away from the window. On the far side, Ten yelled silently.

  “Look, I don’t like having to do this,” the man in the suit said.

  “When?”

  “Mr. Giddens.”

  “When? Tell me, how long has she got?”

  “Usually there’d be a detention period, with limited rights of appeal. But as this is a public health issue …”

  “You’re going to do it right now.”

  “The order is effective immediately, Mr. Giddens. I’m sorry. These officers will go with you back to your home. If you could gather up the rest of her things …”

  “At least let me say goodbye, Jesus, you owe me that!”

  “I can’t allow that, Mr. Giddens. There’s a contamination risk.”

  “Contamination? I’ve only been fucking her for the past six months.”

  As the cops marched me out, the doctor came up for a word.

  “Mr. Giddens, these nanoprocessors in her bloodstream …”

  “That are fucking getting her thrown out of the country.”

  “The fullerenes …”

  “She heals quick. I saw it.”

  “They do much more than that, Mr. Giddens. She’ll probably never get sick again. And there’s some evidence that they prevent telomere depletion in cell division.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, she ages very much more slowly than we do. Her life expectancy may be, I don’t know, two, three hundred years.”

  I stared. The policemen stared.

  “There’s more. We observed unfamiliar structures in her brain; the best I can describe them is, the nanoprocessors seem to be re-engineering dead neurons into a complementary neural network.”

  “A spare brain?”

  “An auxiliary brain.”

  “What would you do with that?”

  “What wouldn’t you do with that, Mr. Giddens.” He wiped his hand across his mouth. “This bit is pure speculation, but …”

  “But.”

  “But in some way, she’s in control of it all. I think—this is just a theory—that through this auxiliary brain she’s able to interact with the nanoprocessors. She might be able to make them do what she wants. Program them.”

  “Thank you for telling me that,” I said bitterly. “That makes it all so much easier.”

  I took the policemen back to my house. I told them to make themselves tea. I took Ten’s neatly arranged books and CDs off my shelves and her neatly folded clothes out of my drawers and her toilet things out of my bathroom and put them back in the two bags in which she had brought them. I gave the bags to the policemen, they took them away in their car. I never got to say goodbye. I never learned what flight she was on, where she flew from, when she left this country. A face behind glass. That was my last memory. The thing I feared—insane, out of nowhere—had taken her away.

  After Ten went, I was sick for a long time. There was no sunshine, no rain, no wind. No days or time, just a constant, high-pitched, quiet whine in my head. People at work played out a slightly amplified normality for my benefit. Alone, they would ask, very gently, How do you feel?

  “How do I feel?” I told them. “Like I’ve been shot with a single, high velocity round, and I’m dead, and I don’t know it.”

  I asked for someone else to take over the I-Nation account. Wynton called me but I could not speak with him. He sent around a bottle of that good Jamaican import liqueur, and a note, “Come and see us, any time.” Willy arranged me a career break and a therapist.

  His name was Greg, he was a client-centered therapist, which meant I could talk for as long as I liked about whatever I liked and he had to listen. I talked very little, those first few sessions. Partly I felt stupid, partly I didn’t want to talk, even to a stranger. But it worked, little by little, without my knowing. I think I only began to be aware of that the day I realized that Ten was gone, but not dead. Her last photo of Africa was still on the fridge and I looked at it and saw something new: down there, in there, somewhere, was Ten. The realization was vast and subtle at the same time. I think of it like a man who finds himself in darkness. He imagines he’s in a room, no doors, no windows, and that he’ll never find the way out. But then he hears noises, feels a touch on his face, smells a subtle smell, and he realizes that he is not in a room at all—he is outside: the touch on his face is the wind, the noises are night birds, the smell is from night-blooming flowers, and above him, somewhere, are stars.

  Greg said nothing when I told him this—they never do, these client-centered boys, but after that session I went to the net and started the hunt for Tendeléo Bi. The Freedom of Information Act got me into the Immigration Service’s databases. Ten had been flown out on a secure military transport to Mombasa. UNHCR in Mombasa had assigned her to Likoni Twelve, a new camp to the south of the city. She was transferred out on November Twelfth. It took two days searching to pick up a Tendeléo Bi logged into a place called Samburu North three months later. Medical records said she was suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, but responding to sugar and salt treatment. She was alive.

  On the first Monday of winter, I went back to work. I had lost a whole season. On the first Friday, Willy gave me print-out from an on-line recruitment agency.

  “I think you need a change of scene,” he said. “These people are looking for a stock accountant.”

  These people were Medecins Sans Frontiers. Where they needed a stock accountant was their East African theater.

  Eight months after the night the two policemen took away Ten’s things, I stepped off the plane in Mombasa. I think hell must be like Mombasa in its final days as capital of the Republic of Kenya, infrastructure unravelling, economy disintegrating, the harbor a solid mass of boat people and a million more in the camps in Likoni and Shimba Hills, Islam and Christianity fighting a new Crusade for control of this chaos and the Chaga advancing from the west and now the south, after the new impact at Tanga. And in the middle of it all, Sean Giddens, accounting for stock. It was good, hard, solid work in MSF Sector Headquarters, buying drugs where, when, and how we could; haggling down truck drivers and Sibirsk jet-jockeys; negotiating service contracts as spare parts for the Landcruisers gradually ran out, every day juggling budgets always too small against needs too big. I loved it more than any work I’ve ever done. I was so busy I sometimes forgot why I was there. Then I would go in the safe bus back to the compound and see the smoke going up from the other side of the harbor, hear the gunfire echo off the old Arab houses, and the memory of her behind that green wired glass would gut me.

  My boss was a big bastard Frenchman, Jean-Paul Gastineau. He had survived wars and disasters on every continent except Antarctica. He liked Cuban cigars and wine from the valley where he was born and opera, and made sure he had them, never mind distance or expense. He took absolutely no shit. I liked him immensely. I was a fucking thin-blooded number-pushing black rosbif, but he enjoyed my creative accounting. He was wasted in Mombasa. He was a true frontline medic. He was itching for action.

  One lunchtime, as he was opening his red wine, I asked him how easy it would to find someone in the camps. He looked at me shrewdly, then asked, “Who is she?”


  He poured two glasses, his invitation to me. I told him my history and her history over the bottle. It was very good.

  “So, how do I find her?”

  “You’ll never get anything through channels,” Jean-Paul said. “Easiest thing to do is go there yourself. You have leave due.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Yes you do. About three weeks of it. Ah. Yes.” He poked about in his desk drawers. He threw me a black plastic object like a large cell-phone.

  “What is it?”

  “US ID chips have a GPS transponder. They like to know where their people are. Take it. If she is chipped, this will find her.”

  “Thanks.”

  He shrugged.

  “I come from a nation of romantics. Also, you’re the only one in this fucking place appreciates a good Beaune.”

  I flew up north on a Sibirsk charter. Through the window I could see the edge of the Chaga. It was too huge to be a feature of the landscape, or even a geographical entity. It was like a dark sea. It looked like what it was … another world, that had pushed up against our own. Like it, some ideas are too huge to fit into our everyday worlds. They push up through it, they take it over, and they change it beyond recognition. If what the doctor at Manchester Royal Infirmary had said about the things in Ten’s blood were true, then this was not just a new world. This was a new humanity. This was every rule about how we make our livings, how we deal with each other, how we lead our lives, all overturned.

  The camps, also, are too big to take in. There is too much there for the world we’ve made for ourselves. They change everything you believe. Mombasa was no preparation. It was like the end of the world up there on the front line.

  “So, you’re looking for someone,” Heino Rautavana said. He had worked with Jean-Paul through the fall of Nairobi; I could trust him, Jay-Pee said, but I think he thought I was a fool, or, all at best, a romantic. “No shortage of people here.”