The Year’s Best Science Fiction (St Martin's) 26

by Gardner Dozois

  But some things you learn, you wish you could un-learn.

  Like Diane, the new researcher from down the hall, leaning over my shoulder. “I realize it may be politically incorrect,” she said, then paused. Or perhaps I put the pause in there. Perhaps I heard what wasn’t there, because I am so used to what came next, in its almost endless variation. And how I hated that term, politically incorrect, hated the shield it gave racists who got to label themselves politically incorrect, instead of admitting what they really were. Even to themselves.

  “I know it may be politically incorrect,” she said, then paused. “But sometimes I just wish those slope-heads would stop stirring up trouble all the time. I mean, you’d think they’d be grateful.”

  I said nothing. I wished I could unlearn this about her.

  I heard David’s voice in my head, peace at all costs.

  But David, I thought, you don’t have to hear it, the leaned-forward, look-both-ways, confidential revelations—the inside talk from people who don’t know you’re outside, way outside. People look at you, David, and have sense enough not to say something.

  And the new researcher continued, “I know the coalition is upset about what alderman Johnson said, but he’s entitled to his opinion.”

  “And people are entitled to respond to that opinion,” I said.

  “Sometimes I think people can be too sensitive.”

  “I used to think that too,” I said. “But it’s a fallacy”

  “It is?”

  “Yes, it is impossible to be too sensitive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Each person is exactly as sensitive as life experience has made them. It is impossible to be more so.”

  When I was growing up, I helped my grandfather prune his apple trees in Indiana. The trick, he told me, was telling which branches helped grow the fruit, and which branches didn’t. Once you’ve studied a tree, you got a sense of what was important. Everything else you could cut away as useless baggage.

  You can divest yourself of your ethnic identity through a similar process of selective ablation. You look at your child’s face, and you don’t wonder whose side you’re on. You know. That side.

  I read in a sociology book that when someone in the privileged majority marries a minority, they take on the social status of that minority group. It occurred to me how the universe is a series of concentric circles, and you keep seeing the same shapes and processes wherever you look. Atoms are little solar systems; highways are a nation’s arteries, streets its capillaries—and the social system of humans follows Mendelian genetics, with dominants and recessives. Minority ethnicity is the dominant gene when part of a heterozygous couple.

  There are many Neanderthal bones in the Field Museum.

  Their bones are different than ours. It is not just their big skulls, or their short, powerful limbs; virtually every bone in their body is thicker, stronger, heavier. Each vertebrae, each phalange, each small bone in the wrist, is thicker than ours. And I have wondered sometimes, when looking at those bones, why they need skeletons like that. All that metabolically expensive bone and muscle and brain. It had to be paid for. What kind of life makes you need bones like chunks of rebar? What kind of life makes you need a sternum half an inch thick?

  During the Pleistocene, glaciers had carved their way south across Europe, isolating animal populations behind a curtain of ice. Those populations either adapted to the harsh conditions, or they died. Over time, the herd animals grew massive, becoming more thermally efficient, with short, thick limbs, and heavy bodies—and so began the age of the Pleistocene megafauna. The predators, too, had to adapt. The saber-tooth cat, the cave bear. They changed to fit the cold, grew more powerful in order to bring down the larger prey. What was true for other animals was true for genus Homo, nature’s experiment, the Neanderthal—the ice-age’s ultimate climax predator.

  “A reading from the first letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians.” The priest clears his throat. “Brothers and sisters: strive eagerly for the greatest spiritual gifts. But I shall show you a still more excellent way. If I speak in human and angelic tongues but have not love, I am a resounding gong, or a clashing cymbal.”

  I watch the priest’s face while he speaks, this man in black.

  “And if I have the gift of prophecy and comprehend all the mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

  Dr. Michaels is still rocking my son in his arms. The boy is awake now. His blue eyes move to mine.

  “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

  Three days ago, the day David died, I woke to an empty bed. I found him naked at the window in our living room, looking out into the winter sky, his leonine face wrapped in shadow.

  From behind, I could see the V of his back against the gray light. I knew better than to disturb him. He became a silhouette against the sky, and in that instant, he was something more and less than human—like some broad human creature adapted for life in extreme gravity. A person built to survive stresses that would crush a normal man.

  He turned back toward the sky. “There’s a storm coming today,” he said.

  The day David died, I woke to an empty bed. I wonder about that.

  I wonder if he suspected something. I wonder what got him out of bed early. I wonder at the storm he mentioned, the one he said was coming.

  If he’d known the risk, we never would have gone to the rally—I’m sure of that, because he was a cautious man. But I wonder if some hidden, inner part of him didn’t have its ear to the railroad tracks; I wonder if some part of him didn’t feel the ground shaking, didn’t hear the freight train barreling down on us all.

  The day David died, I woke to an empty bed—a thing I will have to grow used to. We ate breakfast that morning. We drove to the babysitter’s and dropped off our son. David kissed him on the cheek and tousled his hair. There was no last look, no sense this would be the final time. David kissed the boy, tousled his hair, and then we were out the door, Mary waving goodbye.

  We drove to the hall in silence. David’s mind was on the coming afternoon and the speech he had to give. We parked our car in the crowded lot, ignoring the counterrally already forming across the street.

  We shook hands with other guests and found our way to the assigned table. It was supposed to be a small luncheon, but the alderman’s inflammatory statements, and his refusal to apologize, had swelled the crowd.

  These things were usually civilized affairs, with moneyed men in expensive suits. David was the second speaker.

  Up on the podium, David’s expression changed. Before his speeches, there was this moment, this single second, where he glanced out over the crowd, and his eyes grew sad.

  David closed his eyes, opened them, and spoke. He began slowly. He spoke of the flow of history and the symmetry of nature. He spoke of the arrogance of ignorance; and in whispered tones, he spoke of fear. “And out of fear,” he said, “grows hatred.” He let his eyes wander over the crowd. “They hate us because we’re different,” he said, voice rising for the first time. “Always it works this way, wherever you look in history. And always we must work against it. We must never give in to violence. But we are right to fear, my friends. We must be vigilant, or we’ll lose everything we’ve gained for our children, and our children’s children.” He paused.

  The specific language of this speech was new to me, if not the theme. David rarely wrote his speeches ahead of time, preferring to pull the rhythms out of his head as he went—assembling an oratorical structure from nothing at all, building it from the ground up. He continued for another ten minutes before finally going into his close.

  “They’ve talked about restricting us from athletic competition,” he said, voice booming. “They’ve eliminated us from receiving most scholarships. They’ve limited our attendance of law schools, and medical schools, and PhD programs. These are the soft shackles they’ve p
ut upon us, and we cannot sit silently and let it happen.”

  The crowd erupted into applause. David lifted his hands to silence them and he walked back to his seat.

  Other speakers took the podium, but none with David’s eloquence. None with his power.

  When the last speaker sat, dinner was brought out and we ate. An hour later, when the plates were clean, more hands were shaken, and people started filing out to their cars. The evening was over.

  David and I took our time, talking with old friends, but we eventually worked our way into the lobby. Ahead of us, out in the parking lot, there was a commotion. The counterrally had grown.

  Somebody mentioned vandalized cars, and then Tom was leaning into David’s ear, whispering as we passed through the front doors and out into the open air.

  It started with thrown eggs. Thomas turned, egg-white drooling down his broad chest. The fury in his eyes was enough to frighten me. David rushed forward and grabbed his arm. There was a look of surprise on some of the faces in the crowd, because even they hadn’t expected anybody to throw things—and I could see, too, the group of young men, clumped together near the side of the building, eggs in hand, mouths open—and it was like time stopped, because the moment was fat and waiting—and it could go any way, and an egg came down out of the sky that was not an egg, but a rock, and it struck Sarah Mitchell in the face—and the blood was red and shocking on her ghost-white skin, and the moment was wide open, time snapping back the other way—everything moving too fast, all of it happening at the same time instead of taking turns the way events are supposed to. And suddenly David’s grip on my arm was a vise, physically lifting me, pulling me back toward the building, and I tried to keep my feet while someone screamed.

  “Everybody go back inside!” David shouted. And then another woman screamed, a different kind of noise, like a shout of warning—and then I heard it, a shout that was a roar like nothing I’d ever heard before—and then more screams, men’s screams. And somebody lunged from the crowd and swung at David, and he moved so quickly I was flung away, the blow missing David’s head by a foot.

  “No!” David yelled at the man. “We don’t want this.”

  Then the man swung again and this time David caught the fist in his huge hand. He jerked the man close. “We’re not doing this,” he hissed and flung him back into the crowd.

  David grabbed Tom’s arm again, trying to guide him back toward the building. “This is stupid, don’t be pulled into it.”

  Thomas growled and let himself be pulled along, and someone spit in his face, and I saw it, the dead look in his eyes, to be spit on and do nothing. And still David pulled us toward the safety of the building, brushing aside the curses of men whose necks he could snap with the single flex of his arm. And still he did nothing. He did nothing all the way up to the end, when a thin, balding forty-year-old man stepped into his path, raised a gun, and fired point blank into his chest.

  The blast was deafening.

  —and that old sadness gone. Replaced by white-hot rage and disbelief, blue eyes wide.

  People tried to scatter, but the crush of bodies prevented it. David hung there, in the crush, looking down at his chest. The man fired three more times before David fell.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Accept our brother David into your warm embrace.” The priest lowers his hands and closes the bible. The broad casket is lowered into the ground. It is done.

  Dr. Michaels carries the boy as my sister helps me back to the limo.

  The night David was killed, after the hospital and the police questions, I drove to the sitter’s to pick up my son. I drove there alone. Mary hugged me and we stood crying in the foyer for a long time.

  “What do I tell my two-year old?” I said. “How do I explain this?”

  We walked to the front room, and I stood in the doorway. I watched my son like I was seeing him for the first time. He was blocky, like his father, but his bones were longer. He was a gifted child who knew his letters and could already sound out certain words.

  And that was our secret, that he was not yet three and already learning to read. And there were thousands more like him—a new generation, the best of two tribes.

  Perhaps David’s mistake was that he hadn’t realized there was a war. In any war, there are only certain people who fight it—and a smaller number who understand, truly, why it’s being fought. This was no different.

  Fifty thousand years ago, there were two walks of men in the world. There were the people of the ice, and there were the people of the sun.

  When the climate warmed, the ice sheets retreated. The broad African desert was beaten back by the rains, and the people of the sun expanded north.

  The world was changing then. The European megafauna were disappearing. The delicate predator/prey equilibrium slipped out of balance and the world’s most deadly climax predator found his livelihood evaporating in warming air. Without the big herds, there was less food. The big predators gave way to sleeker models that needed fewer calories to survive.

  The people of the sun weren’t stronger, or smarter, or better than the people of the ice; Cain didn’t kill his brother, Abel. The people of the North didn’t die out because they weren’t good enough. All that bone and muscle and brain. They died because they were too expensive.

  But now the problems are different. The world has changed again. Again there are two kinds of men in the world. But in this new age of plenty, it will not be the economy version of man who wins.

  The limo door slams shut. The vehicle pulls away from the grave. As we near the cemetery gates, the shouting grows louder. The protestors see us coming.

  The police said that David’s murder was a crime of passion. Others said he was a target of opportunity. I don’t know which is true. The truth died with the shooter, when Tom crushed his skull with a single right-hand blow.

  The shouting spikes louder as we pass the cemetery gates. The protestors surge forward, and a snowball smashes into the window.

  “Stop the car!” I shout.

  I fling open the car door. I climb out and walk up to the surprised man. He’s standing there, another snowball already packed in his hands.

  I’m not sure what I’m going to do as I approach him. I’ve gotten used to the remarks, the small attacks. I’ve gotten used to ignoring them. I’ve gotten used to saying nothing.

  I slap him in the face as hard as I can.

  He’s too shocked to react at first. I slap him again.

  This time he flinches away from me, wanting no part of this. I walk back to my car as the crowd find’s its voice. People start screaming at me. I climb back into the limo and they close around me. Hands and faces on the glass. The driver pulls away.

  My son looks at me, and it’s not fear in his eyes like I expect; it’s anger. Anger at the crowd. My huge, brilliant son—these people have no idea what they’re doing. They have no idea the storm they’re calling down.

  I see a sign held high as we pass the last of the protestors at the gate. They are shouting again, having found the full flower of their outrage. The sign says only one word: Die.

  Not this time, I think to myself. Your turn.

  An Eligible Boy

  IAN MCDONALD

  Here’s a story by Ian McDonald, whose “The Tear” appears later in this anthology. In this one, he takes us to visit a vivid and evocative future India, where ancient customs and dazzlingly sophisticated high-tech exist side by side, and where the age-old game of courtship has become far more complex and strange than anybody ever thought that it could.

  Arobot is giving Jasbir the whitest teeth in Delhi. It is a precise, terrifying procedure involving chromed steel and spinning, shrieking abrasion heads. Jasbir’s eyes go wide as the spidery machine-arms flourish their weapons in his face, a demon of radical dentistry. He read about the Glinting Life! Cosmetic Dentistry Clinic, (Hygienic, Quick and Modern) in the February edition of Shaadi! for Eligible Boys. In double-page spread it looked nothing like these
insect-mandibles twitching inside his mouth. He’d like to ask the precise and demure dental nurse (married, of course) if it’s meant to be like this but his mouth is full of clamps and anyway an Eligible Boy never shows fear. But he closes his eyes as the robot reaches in and spinning steel hits enamel.

  Now the whitest teeth in Delhi dart through the milling traffic in a rattling phatphat. He feels as if he is beaming out over an entire city. The whitest teeth, the blackest hair, the most flawless skin and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Jasbir’s nails are beautiful. There’s a visiting manicurist at the Ministry of Waters, so many are the civil servants on the shaadi circuit. Jasbir notices the driver glancing at his blinding smile. He knows; the people on Mathura Road know, all Delhi knows that every night is great game night.

  On the platform of Cashmere Café metro station, chip-implanted police-monkeys canter, shrieking, between the legs of passengers, driving away the begging, tugging, thieving macaques that infest the subway system. They pour over the edge of the platform to their holes and hides in a wave of brown fur as the robot train slides in to the stop. Jasbir always stands next to the Women Only section. There is always a chance one of them might be scared of the monkeys—they bite—and he could then perform an act of Spontaneous Gallantry. The women studiously avoid any glance, any word, any sign of interest but a true Eligible Boy never passes up a chance for contact. But that woman in the business suit, the one with the fashionable wasp-waist jacket and the low-cut hip-riding pants, was she momentarily dazzled by the glint of his white white teeth?

  ‘A robot, madam,’ Jasbir calls as the packer wedges him into the 18:08 to Barwala. ‘Dentistry of the future.’ The doors close. But Jasbir Dayal knows he is a white-toothed Love God and this, this will be the shaadi night he finally finds the wife of his dreams.