The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  It is the aural equivalent of a warm bed—soft, and soothing, and you loll in its sound. But if you have to work, it somehow eases you upright. I washed and looked out of the window of the House to see flashlights and candles like fireflies everywhere among the walkways.

  The pavements were made mirrors by the rain, blue and gold puddles. A steady train of women were moving down the steps to set up the shops or open the Library. Evie was waiting for me, holding a candle. I wore my lab trousers and coat. I felt like a native, getting up in drizzle and crossing the Plaza to my place of work. Only, Evie made me veer away from my clinic, steering me toward the Civil Palace where I was to be introduced to the Council, or maybe just a council. I couldn’t be too sure.

  It was just like In the Country of Women. There they sat, as described in 1867—the slim, wise, implacable, and sometimes kindly elders of Colinas Bravas. They, too, wore simple formal clothes made of reed beaten into linen, soft and gray with subtle patterns in the weave or embroidery. The jackets did indeed look like quilts, there were so many pockets. One of the councilors was wearing a tool belt of wrenches, chisels, and a hammer. The elders looked calm, with dim smiles and alert eyes, and their gestures for me to sit were hearty and not to be gainsaid.

  “Hello and welcome to Colinas Bravas,” said the one in the center, speaking English with an American accent. She had a high, round, polished forehead that reflected light. I gave her the nickname La Señora Luminosa. The name stuck for me. I responded politely, said how glad I was to be there. They asked about my accommodation. Another woman, who spoke with a South African (?) accent, expressed gratitude that I was there, and to SingleHelix for being willing to share etc.

  It came down to how long I would need to stay on the island.

  “As long as you need me,” I said in Spanish, the official second language. I told them that I was unmarried, the head of SingleHelix’s Research Division in the Dominican Republic. They nodded glacially. I think they knew what that meant. We in SoloHebra RD do things that Our Friendly Neighbors to the North would rather not do themselves.

  They insisted. “How long do you estimate?”

  I said six months.

  They asked if two might be enough for them to master the basic technology. “Nos tenemos biólogos en nuestro propio país.” The technique does not require that all who carry out the procedure need to be microbiologists?

  I had to smile. I shook my head. That gesture means nothing to the Colinas. I said, I stay time you want. They were very grateful, and they wanted me gone.

  It was still dark and cool when we walked in a group to my clinic. Luminosa took my hand and strolled with me as if we were old friends.

  “I know this is basically a business proposition for your…” For some reason she had difficulty finding the word company. “But for us, we still experience your visit with deep personal gratitude to you. This is not your home; these are not your people.” She stopped and put my hand in both of hers and looked directly into my eyes. “But you help us. We will make sure you see more of us than most foreigners do.”

  “That would be great honor.”

  So Luminosa strode on with me, and asked me what I would like to see. I told her that I had read the 1867 text and its sequel about the managed forests—fruit, nuts, hemp all growing as if untended. Is it true that their orange trees stand as high as oaks? The plateau is flat but rolling like England with large forests and open pastures. It is never seen from the air. Its airspace is closed and there is no airport. I hinted I might like to see where the SingleHelix equipment would be made, in the industrial northern port. Her smile didn’t change.

  That day, my clinic was bigger. The building has movable internal walls. Rows of beds had been added; my fridge preserving the samples buzzed, and I saw that the thermidor’s light was on. The operating theatre lights were standing ready.

  “Show us how,” said Luminosa. “No need to do an extraction. We have the two ova ready for you.” Evie stepped forward and covered her mouth with both hands, laughing. There is no way to say in her language, “The egg is mine.”

  I panicked. “We can’t do it now! The donor material has to be thawed, inspected, be at the same exact temperature. It has to be from a different matrilineal line…”

  Luminosa took my hand again. “We know, we know.”

  “But you don’t understand. If Evie only has one ovum…” I glanced at Evie, looking so innocent. “If anything goes wrong, she’ll have lost this chance!”

  “Then check everything,” said Luminosa, stroking the back of my hand. I went and scanned both sets of donated material, hands shaking. I was annoyed that they had done so much of my work for me, unasked and unsupervised. I didn’t like it. I felt rushed. I felt denigrated. I was simultaneously relieved and disgruntled when both ova were fine. “Well, yes, I can start work. Do … does Evie know who the other egg belongs to?”

  Luminosa looked blank. “Why would Evie want to know that?”

  That brought me up short. Well … but … no need to know who the other mother was?

  La Señora swept us on. “No need to explain much to us. We are familiar with the basics. Just show us how to carry out the procedure swiftly and well.”

  The same images that guided my instruments were shown on the screen. They watched as I micromanaged the translucent needle into the donor ovum, and then slipped the cradle underneath the DNA to carry it out.

  “It’s just a question of practice,” I said. “Hand-eye coordination.” The gantry slowly moved between microscope surgeries.

  I switched screens. There was Evie’s daughter, on the screen unmade, as transparent as a ghost. “This is the delicate bit. Like making lace.”

  More like joining two halves of a zipper for the first time, link by link. There is always a moment when the two halves somehow snap together and fuse. That’s when a new person is created. I told them when it happened. They applauded.

  The transfer probe is full of water-based jelly, rich with nutrients. The trick is to gently lower the egg into the very tip, so that it is the first thing presented. I looked around. Evie was already on one of the beds, already naked.

  “It’s all right,” said Luminosa. “No embarrassment. We have no need of that kind of modesty.”

  I began to feel shivery and a bit sick. I looked down at Evie, at her smile, into her black eyes, and all I saw was trust and hope. I stroked her hair; couldn’t help it. I eased stage one into her; stage two was the probe itself extended. I nicknamed the egg Luminosa as well—it was all glowing, the probe has a light. I couldn’t watch. I had to. I saw where the egg needed to be placed and lowered it.

  “That’s it. That’s all. We’ll know in two days at most.” Again, applause.

  I had a reaction—the corners of my vision went dark, my legs weak. I needed somewhere to sit, but all my chairs had been pulled back, with the women cross-legged on the tiles. I nearly fell. Luminosa caught me by the shoulder, lowered me to the floor, and as she stroked my shoulder, her eyes asked me a worried question.

  “It’s a little bit overwhelming,” I said, and didn’t like to say why. Luminosa kept stroking my shoulder.

  * * *

  Outside, it was still only 8 am and cool. We sat on the pavement in the Plaza as the first of the tourists strolled past. One of the councilors brought me a cup of coffee. “Sorry,” I kept saying, “sorry.” They asked if I wanted to put off our visit, and I said, “No! No!”

  After my coffee, as the heat swelled, we made our way to the end of the canyon through its grove of trees, climbing steps along the creek full of rainwater. We attained the plateau surprisingly quickly and I walked out into the shade of giant trees, smelling of citrus blossom. A fleet of Škodas waited for us. They make Škodas here on license; Škodas are everywhere except in Ciudad itself.

  I waved the cars away. It was so cool in the shade, shafts of light through the leaves, moss underfoot, even bluebells. All the trees were outsized, huge, lemon bushes the size of m
angoes. Yes, there were houses carved out of fallen trunks, left open for anyone who needed them. We went into one for a rest. It had shelves, wooden plates, bowls, serving implements, a working flush toilet, electric lights, dried herbs and spices, even clothes neatly folded.

  Evie had slipped into some damp moss that had smeared green down her tunic. She simply stepped out of it in front of me, unfolded another tunic from a shelf, and slipped it over her head. I found that so accepting, accepting of me, this galumphing foreigner who smelled so different.

  We ate a lunch of raisins, nuts, and about the only cheese they can stand, a very mild sweet cream a bit like mascarpone. Shade-resistant hemp grew on the lower levels. La Señora rolled the leaves into a kind of impromptu cigar and passed it to me. This I had not been expecting. The leaves weren’t cured, but were sweet and mild. After lunch, we walked for about an hour, the Škodas rattling indiscreetly behind us.

  I don’t know what I expected of the Quatoletcyl Mah—a wire-mesh fence, perhaps, or confining rooms. Instead I suddenly noticed that Evie was not with me, only La Señora Luminosa. I did hear a sound ahead of us like children playing. And then I saw Evie walking quickly toward me, beaming so pleased, holding the hand of someone almost as tall as she was, but with loping, spidery limbs and a head that looked like the top of it had been cut off. The mouth and chin were outsize as if infected, bristling with teeth.

  This is child, Evie said. Call her Queesi. She told her daughter my name as they say it: Mah-ree-rah! Queesi bellowed my name, gave a belly laugh, and flapped her hands. She liked the name or maybe me, and clumped me with a forehead kiss. Then she darted back and hid her face in her mother’s shoulder.

  Mahreerah equals elder. She helps us.

  Queesi said, No more sad children. She knew exactly why I was there, and what she was. Evie was smiling at her daughter with such an expression, mingled kindness and pain.

  Sad children were climbing trees picking fruit, or sitting in a circle pounding fibers for linen, or standing on concrete platforms raking what looked like walnuts but which from the smell were surely fermenting cocoa beans, the fruit flesh ragged around them. If the Colinas have a cash crop, it is chocolate. But for them it is a religious drink, unsweetened and used only for the holy days of their religion.

  There were thalidomide-like deformities, nearly limbless little things carried on the backs of blind giants. There were tiny ancient-looking crones but with merry grins and goblin eyes, elderly women who were ten years old. Every imaginable genetic disease or infirmity.

  Queesi gamboled back to her friends and grabbed a pestle.

  Not bad sad children, Evie said. Not bad. I took her hand, and she looked up at me, blinking.

  Little little sad to see them go, I said.

  Little little, she said, and I knew she’d understood what I meant. The sad children were lovely as they were—there was a sadness that there would be fewer of them.

  It was now past noon, so we took the Škodas and drove to see one of the mobile towns. Queesi clambered in next to us and bounced up and down on the springed seats.

  The cars jostled over the ruts in a causeway between rice paddies. In the distance, we saw people carrying the mobile houses like oversized Arks of the Covenant. One house rested on its carrying rods between the bumpers of two Škodas. Frank Lloyd Wright called the houses architectural masterpieces. What he didn’t say or perhaps even know was that each house is also a book, the writings and drawings burned into the wood.

  The seasonal rice-harvest town was gathering like a herd of bison. We drove into it past houses radiating outward from one of the conical temples. You see them all across the landscape like factory chimneys. They are made of rocks cleared from fields, each tower centuries old, as rugged as their elders.

  The new town was expecting me. My neck was ringed round with leis. There was another lunch—rice, manioc, nuts, and fruit. I was served a boiled duck egg (there were ducks everywhere in the rice fields). I gave a talk about the clinic and the project, mostly in Spanish. When I spoke in Colinas, there was a sigh and applause. I told them how the Council would be setting up clinics all across the country, and how the Council had a license to produce the equipment on the island. After the lecture, Colinas gave me hugs or showed me their babies. Children ran up to me and asked me questions about New York. How did they know I’d lived there? They said New York like they were from north Manhattan.

  I’ve spent a lot of my life battling things—my mom, Santiago de los Caballeros, indeed the whole damn Cibao with its cowboy-hatted men and its shacks and the giant monument Trujillo built to himself and the lies we tell ourselves about our history. This valley looks almost the same as El Cibao, as if I’d remade the DR in a dream.

  After lunch Evie and I separated—I was to go on, but she had to drop her daughter off at Quatoletcyl Mah. I felt bereft for a minute or two watching her car bounce away, but it was a spectacular drive back—my car zigzagged down the cliff over a sparkling sea and the clusters of bladed turbines marking shallow water, and for one heart-stopping moment DOWN onto Ciudad itself, looking more like garden terraces than a town. It had been a wonderful day. I felt as if I had been given everything I ever wanted all at once. I have been living off that day ever since.

  Sometimes countries become your own Magic Kingdom. Every detail of what people wear, how they move and laugh, what they eat, how they eat (with their fingers, scooping up soup with mashed yam or manioc even sometimes maize), their buildings and the brushed red earth between them, or the sectioned fruit drying in the sun along the unpaved roads, and the way you can pick up the dried plums or apricots with no one to call it stealing. The island is big enough to generate its own rivers, and the water is clean enough to drink from the palm of your hand. There are windmills everywhere, of course—most of the world’s windmills are built in Colinas Bravas.

  All that electricity. The transatlantic phone cables surfaced here; now there are giant relay towers. Colinas Bravas has the most copious broadband in the world and they hardly use it for anything. They don’t talk to us much. They watch wildlife films. And they have a ministry that keeps an eye on world news.

  If there was a zombie apocalypse it couldn’t get to Colinas Bravas. If the sea levels rise, we might lose the Precinct, but the town itself would climb higher up into the hills. The harbor might even improve. If there is a nuclear war, the prevailing winds will carry most of the radiation away.

  * * *

  The next morning, Evie was waiting for me outside the café. We started work again on another volunteer. Even more people crowded in, looking at the screens or over my shoulders. Too many, perhaps—I made a mess of the extraction. I just about got it out undamaged. Their ova are precious—four in a lifetime—so I said, “Let’s leave it. We can wait.” But they urged me on. The recipient was sitting up, watching me. They all just watched me—none of them took notes. They appear to have a very different attitude to text and books.

  Evie stood next to me as I worked. You do well well. It was the strangest thing. She really did have the power to steady my hand. I did it for her. If anything, the next procedure was the neatest extraction and implant I’d ever done.

  I kept explaining what I was doing. Right at the end, Luminosa announced, “The children will be knocked clean of genetic faults.” And then in Colinas … This child be not sad. They don’t have a future tense.

  My audience had all left; I was turning off the lights and the evening bell was sounding when two tourists walked into my clinic to poke around. They wanted something. They wouldn’t leave—a man and a woman, both Italian. Their English was terrible and their Spanish good enough to make bad mistakes, but they understood when I made imploring gestures and shoved my palms toward the doorway. They asked, “Trabajo?” and pointed at me. The woman pointed to her husband, to herself, eyes glittering. “Medico! Medico!”

  Evie came back to fetch me and I signaled for help. She spun away. I said in any language I could think of, “Closed.
Cerrado. Chiuso…”

  Evie returned with two Colinas wearing thick leather aprons and trousers. Hanging from their shoulders were polished things the color of teak that looked like flutes.

  Trouble? they asked me.

  I want they go. I pointed my finger.

  The flute-things were their guns. Guns were the very first thing the Colinas made once they understood who and what we were.

  “Passports,” the police demanded. The tourists understood that.

  * * *

  It’s all in the sequel that Juan Emmanuel Medrano wrote—Return to the Country of Women. He was the most decent of the men who had first landed on the island. Juan Emmanuel fell in love with one of them, a woman nicknamed Zena. Being a man of his time, he thought her lack of interest in sex was natural to all women who had not been corrupted. He was proud of his ability to learn how to do without sex, prescribed it in fact as the straight route to wholesomeness—chastity in marriage.

  As for the Colinas, they were already aware that parthenogenesis was accumulating mutations. They have a word that means literally unfolding snake for a seed that sheds its skin to become something else. They were aware that their First Mother was a product of an Unfolding Snake and that they all descended from her—or rather what we know, that there must have been at a minimum five women, five different matrilineal lines. It’s quite eerie now to read Juan Emmanuel’s description of their beliefs. It would appear that they understood everything about DNA save for its double helix shape.

  Zena married him in a spirit of self-sacrifice to see if bisexual reproduction brought health. Of course, they could not interbreed. She didn’t ovulate for the duration of the marriage.

  He really is a brick, poor Juan Emmanuel. He became as much of a Colina as is possible for a man. He waxes syrupy about how Motherhood is the driving engine of Colinas society, how they all dream of being a mother. Irony alert: all women dream of nothing but being mothers, and even if they think they don’t want to be one, they are overcome with mother love the moment they see the infant. Irony ends here.