The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "A miracle?"

  "Yes."

  "That's like saying cancer is a miracle."

  Ben shook his head. “Not at all. Cancer is the emergent property of the accumulated errors in an ordered system. It's the consequences of random events."

  Norma shook her head. The way he talked made her dizzy. “How's this any different?"

  "Cancer in a system makes the system untenable. It doesn't do anything to make the system any better. It's not creative. This is going to make you something better."

  "It's going to kill me. That's what it's going to do."

  Ben shrugged. “There's a risk to everything. But we come from the earth. So do these mites. The earth speaks through us. They speak through the mites, too.” He pointed to the radiographs. “That low pass filter looks a lot like filters used to integrate circuits into nerve cells. I didn't design it. None of the programming in any of the contaminant mites had anything like it. They developed this on their own. This is no cancer."

  "But like cancer it's going to kill me."

  "You were going to let the cancer do that anyway, or you wouldn't have walked out of Peabody's office."

  "That was different.” Norma thought for a moment. “The cancer was mine. It was my own body telling me it was time to go. These things are ... invading me."

  "A cluster is made up of a few hundred mites. It's about the size of a mustard seed. It took root in you—not just anybody. It's making something in you—nobody else."

  "You're saying these things chose me?"

  "No. They can't choose anything. They're just little automatons. Like chromosomes or sperm. A baby is the emergent property of the genes but the genes didn't have any choice in the matter. Out of such automata comes you and me. The mites didn't choose you. The earth itself chose you."

  "You are nuts. These things are still going to kill me."

  "We can stack the odds.” He brought out an inhaler from his briefcase. “This is FTV. All mites are designed so they stop operation when FTV is present. FTV saturates the air in mite factories as a safety precaution. If you inhale this, it might at least slow down their progress."

  "That goes against your plan, doesn't it?"

  "No. Think of it as prenatal care. It gives the mites an opportunity to more thoroughly understand their environment."

  Norma thought of the singing again.

  "What if they escape? I don't want to destroy the world or something."

  Ben brought a square instrument out of his briefcase. “This has been sampling the air for the whole time I've been here. Look for yourself. No mites."

  "They could be waiting. Like fungus spores."

  "Now who's nuts?"

  She considered. “Could Peabody cut them out?"

  Ben shook his head. “I don't think so. The mites are cooperating. If you cut out a chunk of the network, they'll just try to rebuild it and they'll have to relearn what they lost plus figure out the new topology resulting from the surgery. I think it would just make things worse."

  "That's what you would say regardless, isn't it?"

  Ben shrugged again and said nothing.

  She had been ready to just die and be gone. At least, this way would make it more of an adventure.

  She drew a ragged breath. She had no difficulty breathing yet. No more than usual.

  "Okay,” she said. “I'm in."

  Life seemed to settle back to normal. She didn't cough anything up anymore. Her voice cracked and quavered as she spoke. Which, she supposed, was a small price to pay for robots living in her lungs.

  Reginald Cigarettes suddenly disappeared from the market. Ben had given Norma prior warning. She had a dozen cases packed carefully in the basement.

  About a month after she'd first spoken with Ben, she woke up from a deep sleep jumpy and irritated. When Lenny came by for his morning visit she told him to go away. Her voice was breaking like a fifteen-year-old boy.

  "Ma,” called Lenny. “Let me in."

  She opened the door a crack. “What do you want?"

  "Come on, Ma. Don't get crazy on me. Let me in. I'm your son, remember?"

  "I know who you are.” She stood back to let him in.

  "That was a pretty nice station you had on,” he said as he stepped in. “Who was singing?"

  "Oh, come on!” She held up her hands in exasperation. “You have something to say. It's written all over your face. What is it?"

  "Well, Ma. Your birthday is coming up and all—” He stopped and held out an envelope to her. “Happy birthday."

  She opened the envelope and slipped on her reading glasses. They were tickets to Opera Southwest. Two of them. To see Don Giovanni.

  "You always have music around,” Lenny said shyly. “I thought you might like to go."

  Norma didn't say anything for a moment. “Nearly forty years I've known you,” she said and kissed him on the cheek. “And you can still surprise me."

  All the next week, she sang along with everything that came over the radio, tuneless or not. Belted it out with Patsy Cline. Harmonized with a Hunk of Burnin’ Love. She was a Werewolf in London Born in America seeing Paradise by the Dashboard Lights for the very first time.

  Norma was so excited waiting for Lenny to pick her up she made herself pee three times. Just to be sure she wouldn't have to get up in the middle and go to the bathroom.

  Lenny wore a tie for the occasion and looked so handsome that Norma decided she'd forgo cigarettes for the night. Just so he'd be happy. She left her pack of Reginalds in the dresser drawer just to make sure.

  The drive downtown, the walk into the Hiland Theater, finding their seats in the middle just in front of the orchestra, passed in a happy, warm blur. She settled back in her chair when the lights dimmed and put one hand on Lenny's. The music came up.

  I must have heard this a hundred times, she thought. But now, in front of her, sung by people no less flesh and blood than she, it came to life.

  In the middle of the second act, where Elvira began her angry solo, Norma leaned forward. For a moment, she had an uncontrollable urge to cough. It subsided before she could do anything to stop it. Then, it came again. Stronger, this time. She was going have one of those hacking fits like when she coughed up the fleshy bit. She could feel it coming on. Norma had to get out of there.

  She put one hand over her mouth, stood and walked quickly up the aisle. Lenny stared after her but she was outside in the lobby before he could react.

  A bathroom. She couldn't find one. Instead, she walked outside onto Central Street, thinking to cough or throw up in the gutter.

  When she filled her lungs, the pain eased and in her mind, she could still hear Elvira's rage, haunted by the Don and her own weakness. She opened her mouth, and it welled up and out of her like clear running water. The vibrating power of it shook her, made her heart pound and her lungs rejoice. Every day she had listened to the radio, the music had been captured and woven into her cells. Now, they were free.

  She stopped when Elvira stopped. Lenny was standing in front of her.

  "Ma?” he asked. “You okay?"

  Norma nodded. She didn't want to speak.

  "That was good,” he said softly. “Unnatural, of course. But good."

  "You think so?"

  "Yeah.” He nodded. “I do.” Lenny didn't say anything for a minute. “Tomorrow we go see Dr. Peabody."

  "Hush.” She was smiling. Norma felt like a girl again and the world was bright with possibility. She was sixteen, sitting in an old Chevy, smoking and grinning and driving down a road straight as a runway and smooth as a glass table.

  In 1711, for his first opera in London, George Handel advertised he would bring to the stage a chariot pulled across the stage by live horses, fireworks, a raft of tenors sailing through the storm in midair and not one, but two fire-breathing dragons. Consequently, opera, even opera in Albuquerque, was no stranger to novelty.

  Ben told Norma she had two advantages going into the audition. One, she was old. It was
hard to take a pretty, thirty-year-old diva and make her look seventy-five. Not only was it easier to do the same thing to Norma, she didn't mind and the diva usually did. The second was she had the pipes. Once the director was persuaded to hear her, she had a spot.

  Not to say she got the front line roles. She was the old dowager, the mother-in-law, the comic innkeeper's wife, the ancient fortuneteller—in short, any role that suited her age and wasn't big enough to make the younger singers want it. This was fine with Norma. She was having a ball.

  Hey, she thought to herself as she sprayed the inhaler down her throat. Look at me. I'm the Great Caruso.

  The next two years passed quickly. Norma expected her voice to have a metal, inhuman quality, given its origin. Instead, it was an intensely human voice. “A dark warm revelry,” said one critic in Keystone. “Lustrous,” said another in Scottsdale. That was as far as she traveled. Opera Southwest had funding problems those years and their concert tours went only as far east as Amarillo and as far west as Needles.

  She didn't care. The music never palled. The singing never lost its luster. But one day, she was listening to a recording of Rigoletto as she prepared for the role of Maddalena—being able to read music didn't come with the deal—when she looked up in the mirror. She looked the same. But what was going on inside of her? The quality of her singing seemed to get better over the last two years. She never coughed anymore. The only reminders she had were the daily dose of the inhaler and the two radiographs she had framed and mounted on her wall.

  Norma stared at her image in the mirror. She was pushing eighty and could see it in her face. “What's going on in there?"

  I should have died two years ago. I'm living on borrowed time.

  Norma had a feeling deep inside that the mites were only waiting for her.

  "Waiting for me to do what?” she asked Ben as she sipped her coffee. It was a warm March and they had come to an outdoor coffee shop near the theater. It was her birthday.

  "What do you mean?” Ben leaned back in his chair, bemused. He was still thin by normal standards but in the last few years, he had filled out. Now, his eyes seemed properly proportioned and his mouth fit in his face. “Aren't you happy?"

  "Of course I am."

  "Then don't question it."

  Norma snorted and stirred her coffee. “This was the miracle you wanted to be present at?"

  Ben smiled back at her serenely. “I'm present enough."

  "These mites went through a lot of effort to do this to me. Why? What do they have in mind? Why did they stop?"

  "The FTV stopped them."

  "I don't believe it. I don't think the FTV was much more than a suggestion. I think they chose to stop. For some reason."

  "You're making them more intelligent than they are.” Ben closed his eyes in the spring sun.

  "I'm not sure intelligence has anything to do with it.” Norma drummed her fingers on the table. “You don't need intelligence to have a purpose. They had a purpose. What was the word you used? My singing was an ... emergent property of their purpose."

  "What do you think it is?"

  "How should I know? Send messages to the moon? A voyage to Arcturus? A better subway?” Norma mulled it over in her mind. “I owe them for this."

  "You don't owe them a thing. Think of it as a reward for a life well spent."

  Norma chuckled. She had a clockwork sense of time passing. It was her choice. They had made sure of it. Well, she was eighty now. When should she choose? Once the mind and gums went, there wouldn't be much left. Why not now, when she still had it?

  "Heck,” she muttered out loud. “I was ready to let lung cancer kill me. Why not these guys?"

  Ben leaned forward, suddenly alert. “What are you talking about?"

  Norma watched the way a bicyclist worked his way down the crowded street. “I quit using the inhaler."

  "When?"

  "Just now."

  It didn't take long. The mites were ready. A month after she stopped using the inhaler she woke up in her bed, too weak to reach the phone. Lenny came by on his way to work to say hi and found her. The paramedics came into her room in slow motion. Their hands left trails in the air as they drifted over her; the instruments resting on her chest and face felt as light as down. It made her smile as she drifted off.

  She awoke in the hospital, a mask on her face, a crucified Jesus across the room from her. Jesus appeared to be an understanding sort—as understanding, she supposed, as one could be hanging in the air from iron nails driven through wrists and feet.

  Norma must have been wired. A moment after she awoke a nurse came in the room and started examining her. Ten minutes later Dr. Peabody entered the room.

  Dr. Peabody looked as if he'd been waiting for years to tell her she needed his and only his procedures and therapies. Only his surgery would save her.

  Norma pulled the mask off her face. “When can I go home?” she wheezed.

  Peabody stopped, his mouth open. It was worth the black spots in her vision to see his face. “Miss Carstairs—"

  "Yes. I'm dying. I know. Prescribe a home health aide for me so I can get oxygen at home."

  Peabody seemed to gasp for air.

  "Is there anything else?” she asked sweetly.

  Peabody fled.

  Ben came in as Peabody left the room. “Let me guess. You didn't want to do what he said."

  Norma nodded and lay back, spent. “Get me out of here. I'll die at home, thank you very much."

  Lenny told her she was lucky. Norma's pneumonia wasn't difficult. The pain she expected from lung cancer never materialized. She was spared the emphysemic experience of drowning in her own fluids. There was only a deep and abiding weakness. The lifting of an arm or rolling over in bed became too much effort. Lucky? She thought so.

  Lenny moved in. Ben visited daily. Every other day, a home health aide came in and helped bathe her and checked the oxygen.

  Norma grew accustomed to the oxygen cannula. While it didn't alter the progress of things, it did make them pass more easily. She imagined the mites accepting the help as they worked.

  "You said it was the earth,” she said to Ben, smiling. “The earth speaking through me."

  "I changed my mind. This is stupidity given substance,” said Ben, exasperated. “It's not too late. We can use the FTV."

  Lenny was behind him, an anguished look on his face. “Don't leave me, Mama,” he said softly.

  "Everything leaves,” she said softly as she drifted off. “Me, too."

  Norma drifted over a forest or factory. She couldn't quite tell. The world was in furious motion: great trees grew and intertwined with one another, their branches mingling without discernible boundaries. Roads melted into bushes melted into seas. The air was filled with the sound of labor: the percussion of hammers, whistling of saws, voices talking. Spider things were working everywhere but turned their faces up to her as she passed in what could only have been a smile, were they so equipped that a smile was possible.

  A bench grew out of the earth. She floated down to it and rested.

  It's all me, she thought, proud of herself. Every little spider, machine, and factory. All me.

  Enrico Caruso sat down next to her. Not the heavy, ham-fisted Caruso of the old photographs. This was a more handsome and gentler looking, Mario Lanza-esque sort of Caruso.

  She stared at him. “What? You're a ghost now?"

  He laughed, a rich vanilla sound. “Hardly. Your brain cells are dying one by one. We thought this the least we could do.” He waved his gentle hands toward the sea. “Nothing here reflects anything like reality, since you're making it up. But, since you're making it up, it's what you want to see."

  "Ah,” she said and smiled. The music resolved itself into Verdi's Il Trovatore. It seemed appropriate.

  She had no desire to sing with it. At this moment, it was enough to listen. “Do you know what's happening in my room?"

  Enrico thought for a moment. “I know what you know. You'
ve lapsed into a coma. Lenny is telling Ben what you want done with your remains. Ben is resourceful so it will likely be done."

  "We'll sing for them?"

  "All across the net."

  "Is that what you wanted?"

  Enrico shrugged. “It's enough. How about you?"

  She smiled into the evening sun. “It's enough."

  The dusk was coming. She could see the ocean dim into a gauzy purple haze. Like sunset. Like night. Whatever imaginary vision she had possessed was fading.

  The night darkened as she listened to the music of their work.

  "You won't be here to see it, of course,” Enrico said regretfully as night fell.

  Norma took his hand in the darkness to reassure him. It was a warm, strong hand. She held on strongly and laughed. “Just you wait. You ain't seen nothing yet."

  * * *

  Softly Spoke the Gabbleduck

  Neal Asher

  Born and still living in Essex, England, Neal Asher started writing at the age of sixteen, but didn't explode into public print until a few years ago; a quite prolific author, he now seems to be everywhere at once. His stories have appeared in Asimov's, Interzone, The Agony Column, Hadrosaur Tales, and elsewhere, and have been collected in Runcible Tales, The Engineer, and Masons Rats. His extremely popular novels include Gridlinked, Cowl, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Brass Man, and, most recently, The Engineer Reconditioned. Coming up are a slew of new novels, including The Voyage of the Sable Keech and Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity.

  In the skin-crawlingly tense adventure that follows, he takes us to a dangerous planet where a party of hunters encounter far bigger—and more enigmatic —game than they ever counted on…

  * * *

  Lost in some perverse fantasy, Tameera lovingly inspected the displays of her Optek rifle. For me, what happened next proceeded with the unstoppable nightmare slowness of an accident. She brought the butt of the rifle up to her shoulder, took careful aim, and squeezed off a single shot. One of the sheq slammed back against a rock face, then tumbled down through vegetation to land in the white water of a stream.