All three gave me a look.
“—alone, on the couch,” I finished.
“Yes, perhaps you did make things worse,” Lapp said. “Your style of investigation—Mo Buhler’s—can’t do any good here. These people will have you running around chasing your own tail. They’ll taunt you with vague suggestions of possibilities of what they’re up to—what they’ve been doing. They’ll give you just enough taste of truth to keep you interested. But when you look for proof, you’ll find you won’t know which end is up.”
Which was a pretty good capsule summary of what I’d being feeling like.
“They introduced long-term allergen catalysts into our bloodstreams, our biosphere, years ago,” Lapp went on. “Everyone in this area has it. And once you do, you’re a sitting duck. When they want to kill you, they give you another catalyst, short-term, any one of a number of handy biological agents, and you’re dead within hours of a massive allergic attack to some innocent thing in your environment. So the two catalysts work together to kill you. Of course, neither one on its own is dangerous, shows up as suspicious on your blood tests, so that’s how they get away with it. And no one even notices the final innocent insult—no one is ordinarily allergic to an autumn leaf from a particular type of tree against your skin, or a certain kind of beetle on your finger. That’s why we developed the antidote to the first catalyst—it’s the only way we know of breaking the allergic cycle.”
“Please, Phil, drink this.” Amos pushed the bottle on me again.
“Any side effects I should know about? Like I’ll be dead of an allergic attack in a few hours?”
“You’ll probably feel a little more irritable than usual for the next week,” Lapp said.
I sighed. “What else is new.”
Decisions … Even if I had the first catalyst, I could live the rest of my life without ever encountering the second. No, I couldn’t go on being so vulnerable like that. I liked autumn leaves. But how did I know for sure that what Amos was offering me was the antidote, and not the second catalyst? I didn’t—not for sure—but wouldn’t Amos have tried to leave me in Mo’s house to burn if he’d wanted me dead? Decisions …
I drank it down, and looked around the barn. Incredible scene of high Victorian science, like a nineteenth-century trade card I’d once seen for an apothecary. Enough to make my head spin. Then I realized it was spinning—was this some sort of reaction to the antidote? Jeez, or was the antidote the poison after all? No—the room wasn’t so much spinning, as the light, the fireflight, was flickering … in an oddly familiar way.
Lapp was suddenly talking, fast, arguing with someone.
Sarah!
“There’s a Mendel bomb here,” she was shouting. “Please. You all have to leave.”
Lapp looked desperately around the room, back at Sarah, and finally nodded. “She’s right,” he said and caught my eye. “We all have to leave now.” He grabbed on to Sarah’s shoulder, and beckoned me to follow.
Amos had his arm around Laurie, and was already walking quickly with her towards the door. Everyone else was scurrying around, grabbing what netted cages they could.
“No,” I said. “Wait.” An insight was just nibbling its way into my mind.
“Doctor, please,” Lapp said. “We have to leave now.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “I know how to stop the bomb.”
Lapp shook his head firmly. “I assure you, we know of no remedy to stop this. We have perhaps seven, maybe eight minutes at most. We can rebuild the barn. Human lives we cannot rebuild.”
Sarah looked at me with pleading eyes.
“No,” I insisted, looking past Sarah at Lapp. “You can’t just keep running like this from your enemies, letting them burn you out. You have incredible work going on here. I can stop the bomb.”
Lapp stared at me.
“OK, how’s this,” I said. “You clear out of here with your friends. No problem. I’ll take care of this with my science and then we’ll talk about it, all right? But let me get on with it already.”
Lapp signalled the last of his people to leave. “Take her,” he said, and passed custody of Sarah along to a big burly man with a gray-flecked beard. She tried to resist but was no match for him.
Lapp squinted at the flickering fireflies. They were much more distinct now, as if the metamorphosis into bomb mode had coarsened the nature of the mesh.
He turned to me. “I’ll stay here with you. I’ll give you two minutes and then I’m yanking you out of here. What does your science have to offer?”
“Nothing all that advanced,” I said, and pulled my little halogen flashlight out of my pocket. “Those are fireflies, right? If they’ve retained anything of the characteristics of the family Lampyridae I know about, then they make their light only in the absence of daylight, when the day has waned—they’re nocturnal. During the day, bathed in daylight, they’re just like any other damn beetle. Well, this should make the necessary adjustment.” I turned up the flashlight to its fullest daylight setting, and shone it straight at the center of the swirling starlight fountain, which now had a much harsher tone, like an ugly light over an autopsy table. I focused my halogen on the souped-up fireflies for a minute and longer. Nothing happened. The swirling continued. The harsh part of their light got stronger.
“Doctor, we can’t stay here any longer,” Lapp said.
I sighed, closed my eyes, and opened them. The halogen flashlight should have worked—it should have put out the light of least some of the fireflies, then more, disrupting their syncopated overlapping pattern of flashing. I stared hard at the fountain. My eyes were tired. I couldn’t see the flies as clearly as I could a few moments ago …
No … of course!
I couldn’t see as clearly because the light was getting dimmer!
There was no doubt about it now. The whole barn seemed to be flickering in and out, the continuous light effect had broken down, and each time the light came back, it did so a little more weakly … I kept my halogen trained on the flies. It was soon the only light in the barn.
Lapp’s hand was on my shoulder. “We’re in your debt, Doctor. I almost made the fool’s mistake of closing my mind to a source of knowledge I didn’t understand—a fool’s mistake, as I say, because if I don’t understand it, then how can I know it’s not valuable?”
“Plato’s Meno Paradox strikes again,” I said.
“What?”
“You need some knowledge to recognize knowledge, so where does the first knowledge come from?” I smiled. “Wisdom from an old Western-style philosopher—I frequently consult him—though actually he probably had more in common with you.”
Lapp nodded. “Thank you for giving us this knowledge of the firefly, that we knew all along ourselves but didn’t realize. From now on, the Mendel bombs won’t be such a threat to us—once we notice their special flicker, all we’ll need to do is flood the area with daylight. Plain daylight. Sometimes we won’t even need your flashlight to do it—daylight is after all just out there, naturally for the asking, a good deal of the time.”
“And in the evenings, you can use the flashlight—it’s battery operated, no strings attached to central electric companies,” I said. “See, I’ve picked up a few things about your culture after all.”
Lapp smiled. “I believe you have, Doctor. And I believe we’ll be all right now.”
“Yeah, but it was a good thing you had Sarah Fischer to warn you this time, anyway,” I said.
Of course, the enemies of John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus would no doubt come up with other diabolical breedings of weapons. No one ever gets a clear-cut complete victory in these things. But at least the scourge of Mendel bombs would be reduced. I guess I’d given them an SDI for these pyro-fireflies—imperfect, no doubt, but certainly a lot better than nothing.
I was glad, too, about how Sarah Fischer had turned around. She’d come back to the barn to warn us. Said she couldn’t take the killing anymore. She said she had nothing directly to do with Mo’s or Ja
cob’s—her father’s—deaths, but she could no longer be part of a community that did such things. She had started telling me about the allergens—the irritation ones—because she wanted the world to know. I wanted to believe her.
I’d thought of calling the Pennsylvania police, having them take her into custody, but what was the point? I had no evidence on her whatsoever. Even if she had set the Mendel bomb in John Lapp’s barn—which I didn’t believe—what could I do about that anyway? Have her arrested for setting a bomb made of incendiary flies I’d been able to defuse by shining my flashlight—a bomb that Lapp’s people were unwilling in any way to even acknowledge to the outside world, let alone testify about in court? No thank you—I’ve been laughed out of court enough times as is already.
And Lapp said his people had some sort of humane program for people like Sarah—help her find her own people and roots again. She needed that. She was a woman without community now. Shunned by all parties. The worst thing that could happen to someone of Sarah’s upbringing. It was good that John Lapp and Amos Stoltzfus were willing to give her a second chance—offer her a lamp of hope, maybe the real meaning of the Mendelian lamp, as Lapp had aptly put it.
I rolled my window down to pay the George Washington Bridge toll. It felt good to finally be back in my own beat-up car again, I had to admit. Corinne was off with the girls to resettle in California. I’d said a few words about Mo at his funeral, and now his little family was safely on a plane out West. I couldn’t say I’d brought his murderers to justice, but at least I’d put a little crimp in their operation. Laurie had kissed Amos goodbye, and promised she’d come back and see him, certainly for Christmas …
“Thanks, Chief.” I took the receipt and the change. I felt so good to be back I almost told him to keep the change. I left the window rolled down. The air had its customary musky aroma—the belches of industry, the exhaust fumes of even EPA-clean cars still leaving their olfactory mark. Damn, and didn’t it feel good to breathe it in. Better than the sweet air of Pennsylvania, and all the hidden allergens and catalysts it might be carrying. It had killed both Jacob and Mo. They’d been primed with a slow-acting catalyst years ago. Then the second catalyst had been introduced, and whoosh … some inconsequential something in their surroundings had set the last short fuse. Just as likely a stray firefly of a certain type that buzzed at their ankles, or landed on their arm, as anything else. Jacob’s barn had been lit by them. The lamp was likely the other thing Mo had wanted to show me. There were likely one or two fireflies that had gotten into our car on the farm, and danced unseen around our feet as we drove to Philadelphia that evening … A beetle for me, an assassin for Mo.
The virtue of New York, some pundit on the police force once had said, is that you can usually see your killers coming. Give me the soot and pollution, the crush of too many people and cars in a hurry, even the mugger on the street. I’ll take my chances.
I unconsciously slipped my wallet out of my pocket. This thinking about muggers must have made me nervous about my money. It was a fine wallet—made from that same special lamp-weave as Laurie’s handbag. John Lapp had given it to me as a little present—to remember Jacob’s work by. For a few months, at least, I’d be able to better see how much money I was spending.
Well, it was good to have a bit more light in the world—even if it, like the contents it illuminated, was ever-fleeting …
KINDS OF STRANGERS
Sarah Zettel
Sarah Zettel (born 1966) lives in Michigan with her husband Tim. She has published five SF novels to date, Reclamation (1996), Fools War (a New York Times Notable Book for 1997), Playing God (1998), The Quiet Invasion (2000), and Kingdom of Cages (2001). A Sorcerer’s Treason is the first of a fantasy trilogy, new in 2002. Most of her short fiction has appeared in Analog, as did this story. She sold her first story in 1986 to a small press magazine. “About six years and a billion and three rejection slips later,” she says, “Stan Schmidt at Analog bought my story ‘Driven by Moonlight’ (1991), and truly launched my professional career.”
She says on her Web site, “I’m mainly known as a hard science fiction author. I used to wonder how that happened. I used to say ‘I love science fiction, but I hate science. I know nothing about science.’ Then, the truth came to me. What I actually hate is physics, which bores me to tears. On the other hand, I love biology, sociology, psychology, sociobiology, anthropology, archeology and planetology, and will cheerfully delve into any and all of them for hours, if not days, at a time. And, as I’ve found, I will equally cheerfully write about them.”
And in a Locus interview, she says:
I wrote a lot of short fiction, did a bunch of stories for Stan Schmidt at Analog— now there’s a learning experience! One he sent back because I didn’t have the lunar calendar right. One he sent back because my engines were impossible—he said it was “an improbably neat trick. How would you do that?” And another he sent back because I didn’t have the right type of fish. One person is not allowed to know all this, but he does! And you have to keep writing and working to get the answers to the questions that your reader (as voiced by Stan) is going to have. And that is a tremendous way to learn your craft. I regard him as a really great teacher …
Analog isn’t part of the main SF dialog any more, but we still need what is being said in Analog. Maybe not the strong libertarian philosophy, but it’s a rarified atmosphere. It’s the people who are still in love with the technology and still believe technology holds all the answers. If we can get the hardware working properly, all will be good and right with the world. Newton and Schroedinger and Einstein will be at the controls, and we’ll have it all sorted out! We want to teach people to use the machines better, rather than taking into account humanity’s needs, rather than teaching the technology to fit human beings more.
We have to do both, which is why I think it’s a shame Analog’s not fully into the SF dialog anymore.
“Kinds of Strangers” is a problem-solving story in the Analog tradition, with a satisfyingly spectacular action climax, but it also deals with human issues often left out of SF stories. Why shouldn’t a space crew marooned without hope of rescue experience depression?
Margot Rusch pulled open the hatch that led to the Forty-Niner’s sick bay. “Paul?” she asked around the tightness building in her throat. She pulled herself into the sterile, white module. She focused slowly on the center of the bay, not wanting to believe what she saw.
Paul’s body, wide-eyed, pale-skinned, limp and lifeless floated in mid-air. A syringe hovered near his hand, pointing its needle toward the corpse as if making an accusation.
“Oh, Christ.” Margot fumbled for a handhold.
The ventilation fans whirred to life. Their faint draft pushed against the corpse, sending it toward the far wall of the module. Margot caught the acrid scent of death’s final indignities. Hard-won control shredded inside her, but there was nowhere to turn, no one to blame. There was only herself, the corpse and the flat, blank screen of the artificial intelligence interface.
“Damn it, Reggie, why didn’t you do something!” she demanded, fully aware it was irrational to holler at the AI, but unable to help it.
“I did not know what to do,” said Reggie softly from its terminal. “There are no case scenarios for this.”
“No, there aren’t,” agreed Margot, wearily. “No, there sure as hell aren’t.”
The crew of the Forty-Niner had known for three months they were going to die. The seven of them were NASA’s pride, returning from the first crewed expedition to the asteroid belt. They had opened a new frontier for humanity, on schedule and under budget. Two and a half years of their four-year mission were a raving success, and now they were headed home.
There had been a few problems, a few red lights. Grit from the asteroid belt had wormed its way into the works on the comm antenna and the radio telescope. No problem. Ed MacEvoy and Jean Kramer replaced the damaged parts in no time. This was a NASA project. They had backups
and to spare. Even if the reaction control module, which was traditional methane/oxygen rockets used for course corrections, somehow failed completely all that would mean was cutting the project a little short. The long-distance flight was handled by the magnetic sail; a gigantic loop of high-temperature superconducting ceramic cable with a continuous stream of charged particles running through it. No matter what else happened, that would get them home.
“Margot?” Jean’s voice came down the connector tube. “You OK?”
Margot tightened her grip on the handle and looked at the corpse as it turned lazily in the center of the bay. No, I am not OK.
The mag sail, however, had found a new way to fail. A combination of radiation and thermal insulation degradation raised the temperature too high and robbed hundreds of kilometers of ceramic cable of its superconductivity.
Once the mag sail had gone, the ship kept moving. Of course it kept moving. But it moved in a slow elliptical orbit going nowhere near its scheduled rendezvous with Earth. They could burn every atom of propellant they carried for the RCM and for the explorer boats, and they’d still be too far away for any of the Mars shuttles to reach by a factor of five. Frantic comm bursts to Houston brought no solutions. The Forty-Niner was stranded.
“Margot?” Jean again, calling down the connector.
“I’ll be right up,” Margot hoped Jean wouldn’t hear how strangled her voice was.
Margot looked at the empty syringe suspended in mid-air. Drunk all and left no friendly drop to help me after. She swallowed hard. Stop it, Margot. Do not even start going there.
“Is there another request?” asked Reggie.
Margot bit her lip. “No. No more requests.”
Margot pushed herself into the connector and dragged the hatch shut. She had the vague notion she should have done something for the body—closed its eyes or wrapped a sheet around it, or something, but she couldn’t make herself turn around.
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