The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  Cletus was one of the few people in the world she could love, or even talk to one-on-one, without condescending. His IQ was so high that its number would be meaningless. Compared to her, though, he was slow, and barely literate. It was not a situation he would tolerate for long.

  The rest is history, as they say, and anthropology, as those of us left who read with our eyes must recognize every minute of every day. Cletus was the second person to have the operation done, and he had to accomplish it while on the run from medical ethics people and their policemen. There were four the next year, though, and twenty the year after that, and then two thousand and twenty thousand. Within a decade, people with purely intellectual occupations had no choice, or one choice: lose your eyes or lose your job. By then the “secondsight” operation was totally automated, totally safe.

  It’s still illegal in most countries, including the United States, but who is kidding whom? If your department chairman is secondsighted and you are not, do you think you’ll get tenure? You can’t even hold a conversation with a creature whose synapses fire six times as fast as yours, with whole encyclopedias of information instantly available. You are, like me, an intellectual throwback.

  You may have an excuse, being a painter, an architect, a naturalist, or a trainer of guide dogs. Maybe you can’t come up with the money for the operation, but that’s a weak excuse, since it’s trivially easy to get a loan against future earnings. Maybe there’s a good physical reason for you not to lie down on that table and open your eyes for the last time.

  I know Cletus and Amy through music. I was her keyboard professor once, at Juilliard, though now, of course, I’m not smart enough to teach her anything. They come to hear me play sometimes, in this run-down bar with its band of ageing firstsight musicians. Our music must seem boring, obvious, but they do us the favor of not joining in.

  Amy was an innocent bystander in this sudden evolutionary explosion. And Cletus was, arguably, blinded by love.

  The rest of us have to choose which kind of blindness to endure.

  MORTIMER GRAY’S HISTORY OF DEATH

  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, The Carnival of Destruction, Serpent’s Blood, Inherit the Earth, The Omega Expedition, and Dark Ararat. 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 A.D. 2000-3000. His novella “Les Fleurs Du Mal” was a finalist for the Hugo Award in 1994. He has had stories in our Third, Fourth, Ninth, Eleventh and Fourteenth annual collections. His most recent books are the novels The Fountains of Youth and Architects of Emortality. Coming up are a new novel, The Gateway of Etemity, and two new collections, Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies and Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution. 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, covering the development of posthumanity in story after story, including such stories as “Out of Touch,” “The Magic Bullet,” “Age of Innocence,” “The Tree of Life,” “The Pipes of Pan,” “Hidden Agendas,” “The Color of Envy,” the abovementioned “Les Fleurs Du Mal,” and many, many others, including recent novels such as Inherit the Earth, The Fountains of Youth, and Architects of Emortality. Never has he explored the posthuman future in more detail or with more passion or conviction than in the complex and compelling novella that follows, though, perhaps his best story and certainly one of the very best novellas of the ’90s, taking us to an ultrarich, ultracivilized far-future world where we’ve almost – almost – conquered the oldest and coldest enemy of them all. . . .

  1

  I WAS AN UTTERLY UNEXCEPTIONAL child of the twenty-ninth century, comprehensively engineered for emortality while I was still a more-or-less inchoate blastula, and decanted from an artificial womb in Naburn Hatchery in the country of York in the Defederated States of Europe. I was raised in an aggregate family which consisted of six men and six women. I was, of course, an only child, and I received the customary superabundance of love, affection, and admiration. With the aid of excellent internal technologies, I grew up reasonable, charitable, self-controlled, and intensely serious of mind.

  It’s evident that not everyone grows up like that, but I’ve never quite been able to understand how people manage to avoid it. If conspicuous individuality – and frank perversity – aren’t programmed in the genes or rooted in early upbringing, how on earth do they spring into being with such determined irregularity? But this is my story, not the world’s, and I shouldn’t digress.

  In due course, the time came for me – as it comes to everyone – to leave my family and enter a community of my peers for my first spell at college. I elected to go to Adelaide in Australia, because I liked the name.

  Although my memories of that period are understandably hazy, I feel sure that I had begun to see the fascination of history long before the crucial event which determined my path in life. The subject seemed – in stark contrast to the disciplined coherency of mathematics or the sciences – so huge, so amazingly abundant in its data, and so charmingly disorganized. I was always a very orderly and organized person, and I needed a vocation like history to loosen me up a little. It was not, however, until I set forth on an ill-fated expedition on the sailing-ship Genesis in September 2901, that the exact form of my destiny was determined.

  I use the word “destiny” with the utmost care; it is no mere rhetorical flourish. What happened when Genesis defied the supposed limits of possibility and turned turtle was no mere incident, and the impression that it made on my fledging mind was no mere suggestion. Before that ship set sail, a thousand futures were open to me; afterward, I was beset by an irresistible compulsion. My destiny was determined the day Genesis went down; as a result of that tragedy, my fate was sealed.

  We were en route from Brisbane to tour the Creationist Islands of Micronesia, which were then regarded as artistic curiosities rather than daring experiments in continental design. I had expected to find the experience exhilarating, but almost as soon as we had left port, I was struck down by seasickness.

  Seasickness, by virtue of being psychosomatic, is one of the very few diseases with which modern internal technology is sometimes impotent to deal, and I was miserably confined to my cabin while I waited for my mind to make the necessary adaptation. I was bitterly ashamed of myself, for I alone out of half a hundred passengers had fallen prey to this strange atavistic malaise. While the others partied on deck, beneath the glorious light of the tropic stars, I lay in my bunk, half-delirious with discomfort and lack of sleep. I thought myself the unluckiest man in the world.

  When I was abruptly hurled from my bed, I thought that I had fallen – that my tossing and turning had inflicted one more ignominy upon me. When I couldn’t recover my former position after having spent long minutes fruitlessly groping about amid all kinds of mysterious debris, I assumed that I must be confused. When I couldn’t open the door of my cabin even though I had the handle in my hand, I assumed that my failure was the result of clumsiness. When I finally got out into the corridor, and found myself crawling in shallow water with the artificial bioluminescent strip beneath instead of above me, I thought I must be mad.

  When the little girl spoke to me, I thought at first that she was a delusion, and that I was lost in a nightmare. It wasn’t until she touched me, and tried to drag me upright with her tiny, frail hands, and addressed me by name – albeit incorrectly – that I was finally able to focus my thoughts.

 
; “You have to get up, Mr. Mortimer,” she said, “The boat’s upside down.”

  She was only eight years old, but she spoke quite calmly and reasonably.

  “That’s impossible,” I told her. “Genesis is unsinkable. There’s no way it could turn upside down.”

  “But it is upside down,” she insisted – and, as she did so, I finally realized the significance of the fact that the floor was glowing the way the ceiling should have glowed. “The water’s coming in. I think we’ll have to swim out.”

  The light put out by the ceiling-strip was as bright as ever, but the rippling water overlaying it made it seem dim and uncertain. The girl’s little face, lit from below, seemed terribly serious within the frame of her dark and curly hair.

  “I can’t swim,” I said, flatly.

  She looked at me as if I were insane, or stupid, but it was true. I couldn’t swim, I’d never liked the idea, and I’d never seen any necessity. All modern ships – even sailing-ships designed to be cute and quaint for the benefit of tourists – were unsinkable.

  I scrambled to my feet, and put out both my hands to steady myself, to hold myself against the upside-down walls. The water was knee-deep. I couldn’t tell whether it was increasing or not – which told me, reassuringly, that it couldn’t be rising very quickly. The upturned boat was rocking this way and that, and I could hear the rumble of waves breaking on the outside of the hull, but I didn’t know how much of that apparent violence was in my mind.

  “My name’s Emily,” the little girl told me. “I’m frightened. All my mothers and fathers were on deck. Everyone was on deck, except for you and me. Do you think they’re all dead?”

  “They can’t be,” I said, marveling at the fact that she spoke so soberly, even when she said that she was frightened. I realized, however, that if the ship had suffered the kind of misfortune which could turn it upside down, the people on deck might indeed be dead. I tried to remember the passengers gossiping in the departure lounge, introducing themselves to one another with such fervor. The little girl had been with a party of nine, none of whose names I could remember. It occurred to me that her whole family might have been wiped out, that she might now be that rarest of all rare beings, an orphan. It was almost unimaginable. What possible catastrophe, I wondered, could have done that?

  I asked Emily what had happened. She didn’t know. Like me she had been in her bunk, sleeping the sleep of the innocent.

  “Are we going to die too?” she asked. “I’ve been a good girl. I’ve never told a lie.” It couldn’t have been literally true, but I knew exactly what she meant. She was eight years old, and she had every right to expect to live till she was eight hundred. She didn’t deserve to die. It wasn’t fair.

  I knew full well that fairness didn’t really come into it, and I expect that she knew it too, even if my fellow historians were wrong about the virtual abolition of all the artifices of childhood, but I knew in my heart that what she said was right, and that insofar as the imperious laws of nature ruled her observation irrelevant, the universe was wrong. It wasn’t fair. She had been a good girl. If she died, it would be a monstrous injustice.

  Perhaps it was merely a kind of psychological defense mechanism that helped me to displace my own mortal anxieties, but the horror that ran through me was all focused on her. At the moment, her plight – not our plight, but hers – seemed to be the only thing that mattered. It was as if her dignified fear and her placid courage somehow contained the essence of human existence, the purest product of human progress.

  Perhaps it was only my cowardly mind’s refusal to contemplate anything else, but the only thing I could think of while I tried to figure out what to do was the awfulness of what she was saying. As that awfulness possessed me, it was magnified a thousandfold, and it seemed to me that in her lone and tiny voice there was a much greater voice speaking for multitudes: for all the human children that had ever died before achieving maturity; all the good children who had died without ever having the chance to deserve to die.

  “I don’t think any more water can get in,” she said, with a slight tremor in her voice. “But there’s only so much air. If we stay here too long, we’ll suffocate.”

  “It’s a big ship,” I told her. “If we’re trapped in an air-bubble, it must be a very large one.”

  “But it won’t last forever,” she told me. She was eight years old and hoped to live to be eight hundred, and she was absolutely right. The air wouldn’t last forever. Hours, certainly; maybe days – but not forever.

  “There are survival pods under the bunks,” she said. She had obviously been paying attention to the welcoming speeches that the captain and the chief steward had delivered in the lounge the evening after embarkation. She’d plugged the chips they’d handed out into her trusty handbook, like the good girl she was, and inwardly digested what they had to teach her – unlike those of us who were blithely careless and wretchedly seasick.

  “We can both fit into one of the pods,” she went on, “but we have to get it out of the boat before we inflate it. We have to go up – I mean down – the stairway into the water and away from the boat. You’ll have to carry the pod, because it’s too big for me.”

  “I can’t swim,” I reminded her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, patiently. “All you have to do is hold your breath and kick yourself away from the boat. You’ll float up to the surface whether you can swim or not. Then you just yank the cord and the pod will inflate. You have to hang on to it, though. Don’t let go.”

  I stared at her, wondering how she could be so calm, so controlled, so efficient.

  “Listen to the water breaking on the hull,” I whispered. “Feel the movement of the boat. It would take a hurricane to overturn a boat like this. We wouldn’t stand a chance out there.”

  “It’s not so bad,” she told me. She didn’t have both hands out to brace herself against the walls, although she lifted one occasionally to stave off the worst of the lurches caused by the bobbing of the boat.

  But if it wasn’t a hurricane which turned us over, I thought, what the hell was it? Whales have been extinct for eight hundred years.

  “We don’t have to go just yet,” Emily said, mildly, “but we’ll have to go in the end. We have to get out. The pod’s bright orange, and it has a distress beacon. We should be picked up within twenty-four hours, but there’ll be supplies for a week.”

  I had every confidence that modern technology could sustain us for a month, if necessary. Even having to drink a little seawater if your recycling gel clots only qualifies as a minor inconvenience nowadays. Drowning is another matter; so is asphyxiation. She was absolutely right. We had to get out of the upturned boat – not immediately, but some time soon. Help might get to us before then, but we couldn’t wait, and we shouldn’t. We were, after all, human beings. We were supposed to be able to take charge of our own destinies, to do what we ought to do. Anything less would be a betrayal of our heritage. I knew that, and understood it.

  But I couldn’t swim.

  “It’s okay, Mr. Mortimer,” she said, putting her reassuring hand in mine. “We can do it. We’ll go together. It’ll be all right.”

  Emily was right. We could do it, together, and we did – not immediately, I confess, but, in the end, we did it. It was the most terrifying and most horrible experience of my young life, but it had to be done, and we did it.

  When I finally dived into that black pit of water, knowing that I had to go down and sideways before I could hope to go up, I was carried forward by the knowledge that Emily expected it of me, and needed me to do it. Without her, I’m sure that I would have died. I simply would not have had the courage to save myself. Because she was there, I dived, with the pod clutched in my arms. Because she was there, I managed to kick away from the hull and yank the cord to inflate it.

  It wasn’t until I had pulled Emily into the pod, and made sure that she was safe, that I paused to think how remarkable it was that the sea was hot enough t
o scald us both.

  We were three storm-tossed days afloat before the helicopter picked us up. We cursed our ill-luck, not having the least inkling how bad things were elsewhere. We couldn’t understand why the weather was getting worse instead of better.

  When the pilot finally explained it, we couldn’t immediately take it in. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that the geologists were just as astonished as everyone else. After all, the seabed had been quietly cracking wherever the tectonic plates were pulling apart for millions of years; it was an ongoing phenomenon, very well understood. Hundreds of black smokers and underwater volcanoes were under constant observation. Nobody had any reason to expect that a plate could simply break so far away from its rim, or that the fissure could be so deep, so long, and so rapid in its extension. Everyone thought that the main threat to the earth’s surface was posed by wayward comets; all vigilant eyes were directed outward. No one had expected such awesome force to erupt from within, from the hot mantle which lay, hubbling and bubbling, beneath the earth’s fragile crust.

  It was, apparently, an enormous bubble of upwelling gas that contrived the near-impossible feat of flipping Genesis over. The earthquakes and the tidal waves came later.

  It was the worst natural disaster in six hundred years. One million, nine hundred thousand people died in all. Emily wasn’t the only child to lose her entire family, and I shudder to think of the number of families which lost their only children. We historians have to maintain a sense of perspective, though. Compared with the number of people who died in the wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, or the numbers of people who died in epidemics in earlier centuries, nineteen hundred thousand is a trivial figure.

  Perhaps I would have done what I eventually set out to do anyway. Perhaps the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe would have appalled me even if I’d been on the other side of the world, cocooned in the safety of a treehouse or an apartment in one of the crystal cities – but I don’t think so.