The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales - [SSC]

by Brian Stableford

  “WPC Lowther didn’t think he was a likely candidate for one of those,” Meg observed, although she knew that Miss Tomlinson hadn’t meant the word to carry any religious connotations.

  “It might not be as rare as we suppose, of course,” Miss Tomlinson said, “given that we’ve only just started doing these kinds of tests, but even if it’s not unique it’s the first time anything like this has ever been identified. So you see, Gary Cordling is a very interesting specimen—and so is his child.”

  “He’s still a rapist,” Meg pointed out, “and the child is the product of a violent crime—something that was forced on me against my will.”

  “I’m not offering any excuses for him,” Miss Tomlinson told her. “I haven’t the slightest idea whether his behavioral problems have anything to do with his abnormal genetic make-up, or whether he’d have been as nice as pie if his mother hadn’t been so convinced of his unnaturalness. Nor am I saying that the fact that he might be genetically unique puts him above the law. But this is something important—a problem that requires a unique solution. If we’re to investigate this properly, we need you, not just as a specimen but as a collaborator. It’s a hell of a way to get recruited, I know, but it happened. If you absolutely insist that you don’t want anything to do with it, we’ll understand—in which case we’ll transplant the fetus— but we really don’t want to take that risk unless we have to. We’d rather you carried it to term, and to be perfectly honest we’d like you to stick with us beyond that point....maybe for life.”

  Meg looked at the woman from the Home Office very carefully. “I don’t suppose Gary will get much choice about helping you out,” she said.

  “No, he won’t. But for that very reason, he might not be as helpful as you. His mother might be difficult too. But you’re brighter than they are, and tougher too. You can understand what’s at stake.”

  Flattery, Meg thought, will get you almost anywhere, or so it’s said. “What about Emily?” she asked.

  “We’re not planning to separate you,” Miss Tomlinson said. “You’ll raise her just as you would whatever job you were doing.”

  “But she’ll be part of it, won’t she?” Meg pointed out. “Whatever I’m mother to, she’ll be sister to. She’ll be involved, almost as intimately as me.”

  I can see why they don’t want me to tell my mother, she thought. By the way, Mum, I’ve taken this job in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, and your next grandchild is going to be a lovely little monster. Won’t that be fun? Even at her calmest, even at her most supremely reasonable, her mother would surely say: “They can’t do this to you. It isn’t fair.” And she’d be right. It wouldn’t be fair. The main difference between Meg and her mother was that Meg knew far better than to expect fairness, in people or in the wayward works of time and chance.

  I’ve always been a bad girl, Meg reminded herself, always a misfit, always a failure as a respectable human being. Who could be better qualified to raise an alien child, and to love it cleverly and conscientiously, no matter where it came from?

  “You mentioned compensation before,” Meg said, pleased with the evenness of her tone. “Anything within reason.”

  “Yes I did,” Miss Tomlinson said, just as evenly. “You can name your price—anything within reason.”

  Meg laughed briefly. “The policewoman said that this case was so straightforward it wouldn’t fall apart even if I were on the game,” she told the civil servant. “Looks like she was wrong about that too, doesn’t it?”

  “It’s not like that,” the black-haired woman said, just a trifle primly.

  “No,” said Meg, “it never is. It’s more like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, isn’t it? The rape of all mankind, of the earth itself, of the holy empire of Gaia. Was Gary Cordling’s mother abducted by a flying saucer, do you think? They say it happens all the time.”

  “No, she wasn’t,” said Miss Tomlinson. “As far as we can ascertain, she just liked swimming a lot. At present, we think that whatever got into her was probably in the sea....that’s our best guess, anyhow. Maybe it fell into the sea from above, maybe it came up from below—but we fear that, whatever it was and wherever it came from, it had been carefully designed by natural selection to do exactly what it did: latch on to the egg-cell of a totally unrelated species, and reproduce itself by causing the egg-cell to develop. One of our scientific advisers described it as a kind of super-virus, another as the ultimate venereal disease.”

  So all my guesses were right, Meg thought, except the one about it all being a dream. And it really might be something incredibly odd, something from outside, from another planet, something authentically alien. I couldn’t just get raped, could I? Oh no. I had to go the whole hog...one small step for a girl, one giant leap for life on earth. Sod Kafka, this is....

  But she couldn’t think of anything to compare it to.

  Miss Tomlinson was still talking, sounding more ordinary and more conventional with every well-worn phrase she uttered. “We may never be sure about its origins,” she said, beginning to carve out her clichés on a wholesale basis, “but it’s the future that concerns us now. It’s what happens next that’s important. This is just the beginning.”

  “You’d better ban swimming in Swansea Bay,” Meg advised, “in case it happens again. Maybe you could arrange for an oil spillage or something, to poison the entire coastline. Obviously the raw sewage isn’t an adequate deterrent.” That’s the whole trouble, she added, silently. We live in an age of inadequate deterrents. She was glad that she wasn’t mindlessly scared by the thought that there was something unnatural inside her, something perverse and maybe wicked: a bad seed. She was proud of herself for having that kind of courage.

  Miss Tomlinson shook her head. “I know it all sounds like some bad B-movie,” she said, “but it isn’t really. It’s not Rosemary’s Baby and it’s not Invasion of the Body-Snatchers or I Married a Monster from Outer Space. As I said before, it’s better regarded as a kind of miracle: something rare and strange and infinitely precious. It might have taken a rape to reveal it, but that was just bad luck. We shouldn’t think of this as a violation of our precious species by some monstrous thing. We have to see it as an opportunity: a chance to learn, and a chance to discover something new.”

  “That’s not how a lot of people would see it,” Meg pointed out. “Even if it didn’t actually drop out of the sky—even if it’s a product of some incredible mutational freak here at the surface—Cordling’s mother was right to call it unnatural, and calling it a super-virus or the ultimate venereal disease isn’t going to help its PR any. And it is an insidious predator of sorts. It’s something that can take over the genetic complement of a human egg-cell—maybe any kind of egg-cell—and produce a viable organism, which looks like others of its kind but isn’t really. Whatever the calculus of probability says, paranoia will say that it really did come from outside—that it’s some kind of spore adapted to the task of world-colonization. And paranoia will tell us that we don’t know how far it’s already spread. We know about Cordling, but we don’t know how many more like him there are, and we don’t know about the fish that aren’t really fish and the crabs that aren’t really crabs....in fact, the only thing we know for sure is that even poisoning the Bristol Channel might be locking the stable door long after most of the horses have bolted. You can practice your uplifting speeches all you want, but you aren’t ever going to convince people like my mother to be glad that this thing’s popped up out of nowhere.”

  “You might be right,” Miss Tomlinson agreed, uneasily—and not without a trace of admiration in the expression of her dark eyes, which Meg gladly drank in—”but you and I know that the paranoid way of looking at things isn’t the only way. You and I know that there are other analogies to be drawn, apart from invasions and takeovers and rapes. For the moment, at least, we have the choice of treating this as a miracle—or, if it really is a visitor from elsewhere, as an honored guest, extending the hand of friendship across the void
; or as the basis of a whole new branch of biotechnology: a whole new set of biological systems to explore and domesticate and turn to our advantage.”

  “So we do,” Meg said, lukewarmly. All of that, she realized, had been put together with the immediate aim of persuading her to play her part, willingly—but in time, the world at large would have to be persuaded too. She knew that if she did play her part, if she did throw in with Miss Tomlinson, she would have to stay with it for a long time. She would have to be more than tough. But she could see that even if Miss Tomlinson’s optimistic reassurances were just so much hot air and this really were phase one of the body-snatcher invasion—especially if this were phase one of the body-snatcher invasion—it had to be studied as carefully and as cleverly as possible.

  Through the window of her nicely-decorated sick-room, Meg could see Emily poking around in the flower-beds with a stick she had picked up, concentrating fiercely on whatever she was stirring up. Emily, at least, was taking everything in her stride—as she always did. Emily was not yet old enough to be afraid of rape, to be afraid of life collapsing around her, to be afraid of life itself.

  Serene, Meg thought. That’s what she is. Did I do that, or was it just the lottery of fate? Can I take the credit for her, or was she just thrown up haphazardly by life’s unfolding pattern? How will she turn out, when she‘s got an alien for a brother—and would she turn out any different if we went back Swansea, so that Mum could breathe down our necks all the time, hanging over us like some awful black shadow, trying to stifle us with tender loving care and her mistaken sense of certainty?

  All of a sudden, despite the cloying warmth of the September afternoon, she shivered. She regretted having agreed to come here, having half-agreed to take all this on board and become a part of it. She should have known that there would be no comforting revelation to be obtained here, no healing abreaction. There were no final explanations here, no promises that everything was going to be all right, or even that she was doing really well. There was nothing here but brutally honest uncertainty, and something strange, something alien.

  She raised a hand to touch the eyebrow that hid a faint but all-too-tangible scar. “I bet she didn’t feel a thing,” she said, meaning Gary Cordling’s mother. “She wasn’t that unlucky.”

  “But she couldn’t cope,” said Miss Tomlinson, who was very quick on the uptake. “You can. At the end of the day, it’s better to know the truth than to be ignorant, and better to be tough than to be lucky.”

  “The trouble is,” Meg said, “nobody actually has the choice.” But her mind was already made up. She was in, entirely and wholeheartedly—not necessarily for life, but for anything within reason.

  <>

  * * * *

  THE MAN WHO CAME BACK

  There was a pool of light above him and he was staring straight into it. His eyes refused to focus and the pool seemed to eddy and swirl gently. The light seemed to emanate from a brighter, but still indistinct patch, which he thought was a light bulb. There was something wrong with his eyes, as though he couldn’t use them properly.

  A round object appeared at the side of the pool. He couldn’t make it out, but be knew that it was a human face, looking down on him. A second dark blob eclipsed another section of his pool of light.

  Oh God! They‘re here again.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Don’t answer. Perhaps they‘ll go away.

  “Hello? Jason, can you hear me?”

  “Yes. Away.” The words were slurred, as if pronounced through a mouth full of saliva.

  “Now, Jason, listen carefully. You know me. I’m Doctor Yorke. This is Doctor Angeli. You remember us, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” You were here yesterday with your bloody questions. And I’m not answering them today either.

  “You must try to remember, Jason.” Yorke was pronouncing the words slowly and deliberately. They echoed hollowly in the pool of light. “Try to remember exactly what happened. We’ll try to help you, as much as we can. You were on a ship—the Stella. Remember?”

  “Yes.” Of course I remember. I remember everything. But I’m not telling. You go on thinking I can‘t remember. Pleased, he nodded his head.

  “What is he doing?” asked a new voice—Doctor Angeli.

  “I think he probably imagines that he’s nodding his head,” replied Yorke, in a low voice, which Jason found hard to make out.

  You think. Can’t you see? You know what a head looks like, don’t you? Well, I’m nodding mine.

  “At least,” Yorke amended, “I think that’s what he’s trying to do.”

  “Remember, Jason.” The voice was slow and clear again. “The Stella. All right? You were traveling to Vesta. Vesta is an asteroid.”

  I know what Vesta is. I haven’t lost my mind. Stop talking to me as though I were a bloody child.

  “While you were going to Vesta, the alarms rang, didn’t they?”

  He nodded his head again. There was no question or commentary this time.

  “Those alarms meant that a slug ship was on the screens. Did you know that?”

  Another nod. Of course I know that. I’m an officer in the navy. I told you that. Do you think I’m mad?

  “Now, when the ship was attacked, you escaped in a liferaft. The liferaft was picked up by the slugs after they blasted the Stella apart. They took you prisoner. Is that all right so far?”

  Nothing. No, it isn’t right. Imbecile. And that’s where I stop answering, and your logic goes off the rails.

  Yorke started talking in his low voice again, addressing himself to Angeli. “He always stops there. I don’t know what happened then or afterwards. He closes up entirely, and I can’t worm even another nod out of him. The only thing he says is ‘Away’.”

  “Try again,” requested Angeli.

  “Jason, I’m talking again. Understand?”

  “Yes.” Nod.

  “You were captured by slugs. What does a slug look like, Jason?”

  Nothing. A slug looks like a colossal coenocytic mass, with thousands of nuclear blobs, including one major protuberance with modifications to serve for eyes and ears, and a mouth with no lips. It can repeat most of the things we say, but it can’t make all the sounds we can. Its vocal apparatus is too different. God what an understatement! All of its apparatus is too different. Alien. But I’m not going tell you any of that, in case there’s something you don’t know, something you might use. You can’t be allowed to hurt the slugs.

  “Could it be just that he can’t speak?”

  “Oh, he can speak all right—after a fashion, anyway. He can’t say everything we can, but with a little improvisation and indistinct mutter, he can manage enough syllables to get along. He did quite a lot of talking in the beginning. About his family and his naval career, mostly. He had to, in order to convince us that he was—or, rather, is—William Jason.”

  “Then why won’t he tell us what happened after the ship was attacked, when he was taken prisoner?”

  “I don’t know. We can only keep trying.” Louder again. “Jason, what did the slugs do to you after they picked up your liferaft?”

  Nothing. There was no liferaft.

  “Jason, you must tell us. We’re at war with the slugs, now that they’ve begun attacking our ships. You’re the only man, so far as we know, who might have seen one in the flesh. We need every last little bit of information you can give us. Now, what did they do to you to make you look like this?”

  Look like what? I’m Bill Jason. I’ve always been Bill Jason. I look like Bill Jason.

  “Jason, this body you have. Is it a slug’s body?”

  A slug’s body? What the hell? Of course it’s not a slug’s body. I’m Bill Jason, human being. I always have been. I’m tired. Go away. He tried to shake his head, but he wasn’t sure that he’d achieved it.

  Angeli chipped in again. “How can we be sure that it is Jason, anyhow, wearing a body like that. Couldn’t the slugs have picked Jason’s mind c
lean, and sent a spy with his knowledge, maybe even his memories?”

  “What would be the point?” said Yorke tiredly. “What good would a spy be to them, locked up in this place. He isn’t ever going to get out, whether he’s Jason or not.”

  “Then why won’t he talk about the slugs?”

  “I don’t know. If he can talk, and he can, I can only think of one possible reason, and that’s that he doesn’t want to talk about the slugs. But that doesn’t fit either. Why should he withhold valuable information after they did this to him?”