The Year’s Best Science Fiction

by Gardner Dozois

  Ellis and Gary were looking at each other, their heated exchange apparently forgotten. “Autophagy,” Ellis said.

  Gary nodded, although he was visibly repulsed by the sight. “I should have known. Let me check the other specimen.”

  “Hold on a second,” Trip said to Ellis. “You’re saying you’ve seen this before?”

  “Not exactly, but I’ve heard of it,” Ellis said. “Octopuses are occasionally known to cannibalize themselves. It’s called autophagy. Nobody knows what causes it, but it seems to involve a viral infection of the nervous system. It’s a disease. When you have several octopuses in a single tank, if one starts to eat itself, the others will follow. Death ensues within days.”

  Gary returned to the salon. “The third octopus looks fine. It was never in contact with this specimen, so maybe—”

  Ellis shook his head. “If we’re dealing with infectious autophagy, it may have spread to the entire school. For all we know, this is what brought them to the surface. The lights are coordinating their behavior. It’s a mass suicide.”

  Although his voice remained calm, Ellis was clearly upset. He thrust his bleeding knuckles into his mouth. Trip looked at him, then looked back at the maddened octopus, which had finished eating its own arm. Finally, he looked at his own hands, and felt the last piece fall into place.

  “We need to discuss something right now,” Trip said to the others. “Where’s Meg?”

  Meg was brought from the stateroom, a fresh bandage on her inside elbow. The crew sat around the table in the salon, looking at Trip. Through the windows, the lights seemed to press against the yacht on all sides.

  Trip laid his hands on the table, showing them to the others. “You see this? I’ve been biting my nails for the past couple of days. It’s something I haven’t done in years, but ever since we entered this part of the ocean, I’ve been gnawing them like a maniac. Why? I’m not sure, but I can guess.”

  Before anyone else could speak, Trip turned to Ellis. “A moment ago, you punched the wall so hard that your knuckles started to bleed. Is this something that you normally do?”

  If Ellis saw where this was going, he was not inclined to play along. “I was upset. I don’t think it means anything.”

  “But it wasn’t the first time you’ve done it. I saw the bruises on your hands. This is part of a larger pattern of behavior, and it’s been happening to all of us.” Trip turned to Meg. “Meg, you felt the urge to cut yourself. Stavros, I saw you bite your lip until it drew blood.”

  Gary was looking at him with open skepticism. “What exactly are you trying to say?”

  “We’re being affected by something in the environment,” Trip said. “This octopus is eating itself for the same reason. Meg, you were a medical student. Have you ever seen a disease that could cause behavior like this?”

  “Not firsthand,” Meg said slowly. “But infections of the nervous system can result in psychotic or suicidal behavior. Genetic disorders can also lead to violence. Children bite off their lips and fingers, or attack those around them as a form of displacement. In the end, they need to be physically restrained.”

  “A form of displacement,” Trip said, underlining the phrase. “What does that mean?”

  “They feel driven to destroy their own bodies, so they redirect their aggression toward others. The violence is often concentrated on their family and friends, which may be another way of hurting themselves.”

  “What about murder?” Trip asked. “Could this displacement go far enough so that the person was forced to kill?”

  “It’s possible,” Meg said. “In theory, it could lead to murder by someone who was not in control of his actions.”

  “Like the octopus,” Trip said. “It climbed out of its tank to kill its neighbor, but as soon as it ran out of victims, it turned on itself. And if this disease is affecting the entire school, we’re right in the middle of it. It’s like Ray said. Every drop of seawater contains millions of viruses. If this is a disease, it must be transmitted in the sea. And where do we get our drinking water?”

  “The watermaker,” Stavros said. “It purifies seawater, but won’t screen out viruses.”

  “We have an emergency cache of water in drums,” Kiran said. “It’s designed to sustain the crew for two weeks. We might even be able to modify our sampling system to purify water for drinking—”

  “But if we’re already infected, fixing the water supply won’t be enough,” Trip said. He turned to Ellis. “The octopus in the wet lab hasn’t displayed any symptoms. Can you think of any reason why?”

  Ellis thought for a moment. “This afternoon, I wanted to examine it more closely, so I anesthetized it with magnesium chloride. It’s a standard anesthetic for cephalopods. In humans, it’s a nervous system depressant that blocks neuromuscular transmissions. And if you’re right, and this impulse to hurt ourselves is a sort of seizure, something like magnesium may inhibit the reaction.”

  “It’s possible,” Meg said excitedly. “And we have a lot of magnesium salts on board. Maybe we can use it as a temporary treatment—”

  Gary seemed unconvinced. “I still don’t buy it. Even if you’re right about the virus, it’s hard to believe that it could affect humans and octopuses in the same way. Besides, we’ve all been drinking the same water, and I’m fine. And you haven’t mentioned Kiran or Dawn at all.”

  “That’s because he never asked,” Dawn said quietly. As the rest of the crew watched, she removed her cap and shook loose her hair. Tilting her head to one side, she pointed to an area of her scalp not far from the crown. A patch of hair, less than half an inch in diameter, was missing.

  “I chew my hair and swallow it,” Dawn said, sounding embarrassed. “Trichophagia. A bad habit. I haven’t done it since I was a girl, but last night, it started up again, just before we found Ray.”

  Trip turned to Kiran. He found that his heart was pounding. “What about you?”

  Without speaking, Kiran yanked up the sleeve of his shirt, revealing his forearm. The marks of several recent burns were visible against his dark skin. In a few places, they had begun to blister.

  “I’ve been burning myself with my lighter,” Kiran said flatly. “I didn’t know why.”

  The crew looked at the burns for a long moment. Then, as if the same thought had occurred to everyone at once, their eyes turned to Gary.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Gary said. “I haven’t felt at all out of the ordinary.”

  Trip was about to reply when he noticed something strange. Although the salon was comfortably warm, Gary was wearing a pair of gloves. When he thought back to it now, Trip couldn’t remember the last time he had seen Gary without them. In Ray’s stateroom, Gary had been wearing his lab gloves and smock. He had spent most of the following day in the water, wearing scuba gloves, and had suggested that they eat dinner on deck, forcing all of them to bundle up. Trip cleared his throat. “Gary, would you mind taking off your gloves?”

  Gary only glared at him. “I can’t believe you’re saying this. This is totally crazy.”

  “It doesn’t seem so unreasonable to me,” Kiran said. “Why don’t you want to take them off?”

  Gary opened his mouth, as if to respond. Then, in a movement that caught all of them off guard, he was up and on his feet. Before he could get far, Kiran tackled him, pinning his arms behind his back. There was a brief struggle, punctuated by curses on both sides, before Gary finally surrendered.

  “Let’s have a look,” Ellis said. Going forward, he took hold of Gary’s left arm. Trip seized the cuff of the glove, yanking it off, then paused. Gary’s fingers were unblemished and clean.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” Gary said. “Do we need to go through this a second time?”

  Trip glanced at the others. Ellis and Kiran had lost some of their certainty, but they shifted their grip on Gary, thrusting his right arm forward. Trip seized his wrist, took hold of the remaining glove, and gave it a good tug.

  As soon as
the glove was off, it fell, forgotten, to the floor. Gary closed his eyes.

  His fingertips were missing. All of the nails were gone, torn or gnawed away, and the first joint of his index finger had been bitten off completely, the wounds cauterized to stop the bleeding.

  At the sight of the ravaged hand, Ellis released Gary’s arm, his face gray. Looking at those burnt stumps, Trip remembered the blowtorch that Gary used to sterilize his shears, and realized what should have been obvious long ago. Gary had spent the previous day in the lab, working with samples that had been taken from the water, cutting up the filters, processing them with enzymes. Whatever was in the ocean would have been concentrated by the filtration process.

  And if there was a pathogen in the water, Gary had received by far the greatest dose.

  “I’m sorry,” Gary said, addressing no one in particular. “I really can’t help myself.”

  His ruined hand went for his pocket. There was a flash of silver, and an instant later, blood was streaming from Ellis’s throat.

  Gary pulled out the shears, their blades streaked with crimson, and let them drop. As Ellis fell to his knees, Gary broke loose and dashed for the companionway. Trip ran after him, the other men following close behind, as Meg screamed for Dawn to bring the medical kit. As he left the salon, Trip had just enough time to notice that the octopus was lying, dead, at the bottom of its tank.

  Outside, a stinging rain had begun to fall. Around the boat, the lights from the octopus school were shining even more brightly than before. In their cold luminescence, Trip saw someone moving at the stern of the yacht. He turned to see Gary standing in the dive cockpit, a harpoon gun clutched in his good hand.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Gary said, his voice breaking. “If you do, I’ll put a harpoon through your heart. I like you, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do it. It may even make it easier.”

  “I know,” Trip said, the rain trickling down his face. “I won’t take it personally.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Kiran said. He was standing next to Trip, ready to spring, but for the moment, he held back. Stavros took up a position nearby. They stood in silence, watching and waiting in the rain.

  “I never wanted this to happen,” Gary said at last. “I killed Ray, but I had no choice.”

  “I believe you,” Trip said, knowing that the longer they kept Gary talking, the better their chances of taking him by surprise. “If you hurt him, it was because you didn’t want to hurt yourself.”

  Gary shook his head. “I was angry with him, too. He was holding back our most crucial findings. Did you know this? I realized it when I saw the first paper he published. I’d been in the lab since day one, and knew exactly what we’d found. Ray was selfish. Like Ellis. Like me.”

  The hand with the harpoon gun fell slightly. Trip felt Kiran tense up at his side, but Gary, sensing this as well, raised the gun again. “You weren’t selfish,” Trip said. “You wanted to do what was right.”

  “Did I?” Gary asked. “The other day, when I heard Ray talking about how he was going to make his research freely available, I couldn’t take it anymore. As I worked in the lab, I got madder and madder. I didn’t know where the anger was coming from. I thought about killing myself, cutting my own throat, just so I wouldn’t be a party to this web of lies—”

  “It wasn’t about you,” Trip said. “It was in the water. It had nothing to do with Ray.”

  “But the betrayal was real. After dinner, I tried to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. I saw myself doing horrible things, like tearing off my fingers. So I came up here to be alone. I was thinking about throwing myself overboard, just to stop the noise in my head, when Ray appeared.”

  His eyes grew clouded. “Ray was here to look at the lights, but when he saw me, we started to talk. I wanted to speak to him privately, so we went down the hatchway to his cabin. I confronted him about the missing results. He denied it at first, then threatened to take me off the project if I refused to go along, I wanted to kill myself, and then I wanted to kill him, too—”

  Without lowering the harpoon gun, Gary picked up a dive belt and looped it over his body. He did the same with a second belt, one across each shoulder, so that they crossed his chest like a pair of bandoliers. “I didn’t even know I had the shears in my pocket. All I could think of were the lights in the sea. When he was dead, I went to the dive cockpit to wash up, then headed back to the lab. Nobody saw me, but while I was waiting for you to find the body, I chewed off the ends of my fingers.”

  Gary’s face was obscured by the rain. “So I was the most selfish of all. I killed Ray so that I wouldn’t hurt myself. Now I’ve done the same to Ellis.” He swallowed hard. “It’s time to do something selfless for a change.”

  He tossed the harpoon gun aside. Before anyone else could move, Gary climbed over the railing of the yacht, the dive belts looped across both his shoulders, and leapt into the ocean.

  Trip and the others ran to the railing. Gary was already gone, the weight of the dive belts dragging him below the surface, the sea closing rapidly over his head. Trip stared at the water for a long time, his eyes smarting from the rain, but Gary did not appear again. All around the ship, the ghostly lights continued to fluoresce, the octopus school glowing as it had done for millions of years, casting its cold radiance across the unmarked shroud of the sea.

  * * *

  On a trellised arcade at Holbertson Hospital, a yellow wall gave back the sun’s rays. Trip sat in a wickerwork chair under a ceiling fan, hands folded, looking out at the garden. He was thinking of nothing in particular.

  A chair beside him creaked as someone sat down. It was Meg. “How are you doing?”

  Trip considered the question. Looking at his hands, he noted with some satisfaction that his fingers were healing, although the nails were still torn. “I’m all right. What about you?”

  “I thought I’d pay a visit to our friend in the next ward. Want to come along?”

  Trip only rose in reply. As they walked along the arcade, they passed a pair of nurses wearing white surgical masks. At their approach, the nurses inclined their heads politely, but kept their distance.

  They had arrived in Antigua two days ago. With the yacht repaired, the journey had taken three days, with frequent breaks to keep the engine from overheating. Purified water and magnesium salts had kept their destructive impulses at bay, but it was unclear what the lasting effects would be.

  As they walked, Meg said softly, “You know, when I close my eyes, I still see them.”

  Trip knew what she meant. Whenever his own eyes were closed, he saw the octopus lights blinking softly in the darkness. The pattern had been permanently branded onto his subconscious, broadcasting a message that would always be there. Magnesium controlled the urge, but did not eliminate it entirely.

  And he was not the only one. Meg’s elbow, he saw, had been freshly bandaged.

  They reached a room in the adjoining ward. Inside, Ellis was seated in bed, his notes spread across his lap. His throat was swathed in gauze. The shears had missed his carotid artery by only a few millimeters.

  As they entered, Ellis looked up. When they asked him how he was doing, he studied his own hands before speaking. The bruises on his knuckles had faded. “I’m well enough, I suppose.”

  Looking at the notes on the bedspread, Trip recognized the pictures and sketches that he had taken of the octopus school. “I hope you aren’t having second thoughts about your decision.”

  Ellis made a dismissive gesture. When the yacht was a few miles from shore, he had taken the bucket with the last remaining octopus and tipped it overboard, watching as it slid under the glassy surface. Even if they took precautions to avoid infection, the risk of contagion had been too great.

  “It’s a big ocean,” Ellis said now, his voice a whisper. “There are other discoveries to be made. And as you said, our first responsibility is to the living. Although the dead deserve our respect as well.”

  Trip merely nodded. A
fter another minute of small talk, he left the others alone, sensing that they wanted to speak privately. As he headed for the door, he caught Meg’s eye. She smiled at him, a trace of sadness still visible in her face, then turned back to the man in the hospital bed.

  Outside, on the covered walk, the sun was setting, its last rays shining through the trellis. As Trip headed down the arcade, the slats of the trellis alternately hid and revealed the sunset, reminding him, briefly, of the lights that he had seen in the sea. He had almost reached the end of the walkway when he realized that his left hand was creeping toward his lips.

  Trip halted. Up ahead, the garden was only a few steps away. With an effort, he lowered his hand, his gaze fixed on the tips of his fingers. He waited for the impulse to fade, as it always did. Finally, after what seemed like a long time, it passed. He exhaled. Then, stuffing his hands in his pockets, he headed for the garden, keeping his eyes turned away from the light.

  Dying Young

  PETER M. BALL

  A graduate of Clarion South, Peter M. Ball published his first story in Dreaming Again in 2007. Since then, his short fiction has appeared in Eclipse Four, Electric Velocipede, Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Apex Magazine, Interfictions II, Daily Science Fiction, Shimmer, and elsewhere. His faerie-noir novella Horn was published in 2009, and was followed by Bleed in 2010. He lives in Brisbane, Australia, and can be found online at www.petermball.com.

  Here he spins a vivid and violent tale that starts out seeming like a mix of fantasy and spaghetti western, but which instead is really science fiction set in the wake of an apocalyptic future war—in spite of the presence of dragons.

  I smelt him coming long before he arrived, the musty odor of sulphur and dust cutting through the sweat-stink in Cassidy’s Saloon. Smelling things is part of it, that thing I inherited from my Da, but it weren’t just me who noticed it by the time he got close. The dragon stank bad enough that everyone breathed him in; the entire room hushin’ up, listening to the tick-tick of claws on hardwood, lookin’ at the door as he shouldered his way through.