Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” I said. “I didn’t sleep too well last night.”

  “Nor me,” he agreed.

  “Was that Sam I saw going off?”

  “Yes, he has gone to reconnoiter downstream. The lake started to spill over at about four this morning. That was later than we had expected.”

  “And how are the paddies?”

  “They seem to be clear, thank God. But we shall go over them once more just to be doubly sure. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Wouldn’t I just,” I said.

  We sat on the veranda of the cookhouse, sipping scalding black coffee and talking over the events of the previous day. Long, slim fingers of silvery light thrust themselves abruptly through a band of clouds low down on the eastern horizon, showing where the sun was about to rise. “I expect you are very disappointed by what has happened,” he said. “All those years of hard work gone up the spout.”

  “D’you know, I hadn’t even begun to think of that side of it,” I said. “But I daresay it’ll hit me soon enough. At this moment every hope I have is riding on Sam and those drums of biotoxin.”

  “Yes, indeed,” he murmured. “Has it not struck you as strange, Clive, that you experienced no such side effects in your trials at home?”

  “That’s what tropical trials are all about,” I said. “And I don’t mind telling you I still wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. It really was such a beautiful piece of applied biotechnology, Ami—a truly sweet equation. It should have been worth a couple of dozen Nobel prizes any day. Jesus, I’ll bet our overlords are feeling pretty sick right now.”

  “You are forgetting that Monagri is into phosphates, too,” he observed with a wry smile.

  After we’d drunk our coffee we went up to take another look at the paddies. They were truly a dismal sight. The water had all been diverted into the main channel, and the drying plots lay shrouded under a sort of graveyard quilting of yellowy gray cobweb. The effect was curiously alien—sinister. I surveyed it for a few minutes, then walked the hundred or so yards across to the arterial channel and peered down into the stream. Almost at once I saw a splodge of blue-green algal bloom about the size of a dinner plate sailing down the center of the channel. Another followed it, and then a third. I shouted to Ami. He hurried over, saw what had alarmed me, and smiled reassuringly. “Oh, that is perfectly innocent, Clive. It is coming down from the reservoir. When we shut off the main sluice, the water level rose. Now it is spilling over. That is just surface alga. It has been coming down like that since early this morning.”

  I gazed down at a fresh lump that was trundling cheerfully along. “Have you been up there to check?” I asked.

  “No,” he admitted. “But what is the point? The alga could never move upstream against the current. So how could the lake be infected?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I’ve just got a heavy attack of the jitters. But I’m going up to take a look. Just for my own piece of mind, you understand. Will you come with me?”

  He shook his head. “I have promised Sam I will organize the respraying of the paddies. I will see you at breakfast.”

  I set off up the track beside the stream. In one place a thick clot of algal bloom had piled up against some invisible obstruction. When I saw that it was pieces of this mass that the current was prizing loose and launching down the channel, I breathed more easily. Ami was right. Our problem, if it still existed, lay down at the far end of the valley where Sam was investigating. But having come this far I did not turn back.

  The tallest of the trees that covered the hills were already catching the early sunlight as I started to plod my way up the face slope of the dam. A single invisible bird was making a strange, sad, two-noted call—lo-ee, lo-ee, lo-ee—on and on in the depths of the forest, but that apart, there was only the noise of the stream to break the silence.

  And then I saw the lake!

  The sensation I experienced at that moment was purely physical. I felt exactly as if my stomach had been ripped open and all my intestines were spilling out around my ankles. I remember that I lifted my hands and began pushing childishly at the air in front of my face as though by so doing I could make the vision go away, not be. Above all, I wanted to wake myself up out of my nightmare.

  Where, the day before, there had been a few small islands of water hyacinth floating serenely on a cloud-dappled,sky-blue mirror, now, except for one small patch of clear water close to the mouth of the sluice, the surface was completely covered in a dense, mantling bloom of Anabaena. All across its seething skin little bubbles of gas were constantly forming and breaking. They seemed to wink at me like a billion tiny, bright, incurious eyes.

  I stood as though I had been nailed to the ground, staring out across that evil broth with a feeling of such horror in my heart that I can’t even begin to express it. And then I threw back my head and gave a sort of wild-animal howl of terror and anguish. Startled a pair of ducks rose clattering from the slime, circled once above the nearby trees, and then flew off toward the south.

  As I watched them grow small and vanish in the distance, I suddenly realized what must have happened, what was going to happen again, and what would surely go on happening unless some miracle could be found to prevent it. Just one small shred of rogue alga clinging to the foot of one of those birds would have been enough. Doubling itself every fifteen minutes in the warm waters of the lake, knowing nothing but its own insatiable appetite to feed and to grow, in twenty-four hours or maybe even less it would have engulfed the whole surface.

  Then I saw that in places it had already begun to expand outward across the margin of reed and grass that separated the lake from the nearby trees. The sight unlocked my rigor. I turned my back on the sickening scene and fled away down the path toward the distant station. And all the way down my mind was filled with an appalling vision of those two birds planing down through the calm air somewhere far away, and rinsing off their trailing ribbons of slime into some quiet marsh or stream whose waters were just beginning to feel the first mothering warmth of the morning sun.

  The events of the next twenty-four hours are still a sort of hazy chaos in my memory. I remember the expression of Ami’s face as I blurted out what I had discovered, I remember helping to load up a truck with half a dozen drums of biocide and ordering two of the men to drive up to the top of the lake and pour the stuff straight into the feeder streams, then to start hand-spraying wherever they found signs of the alga spreading under the trees. I remember a white-faced Sam returning an hour later with the grim news that they’d found unmistakable evidence of Anabaena on a quite different stream over three miles away. And I remember most vividly how he swore and banged his fists against his forehead when I told him what I suspected about the birds.

  He gave immediate orders for the helicopter’s tanks to be refilled and told the pilot to douse any patch of open water he could find between us and the gulf, because “if ever it finds its way down to the sea, we haven’t got a hope in hell of holding it!” Then he took me with him into the radio room, and we spent the next four hours pleading desperately for help from the government, from the army, from Monagri, from anyone we thought we might persuade to take us seriously.

  That evening Sam summoned a council of war in the main lab. By then four more helicopters had flown in, together with a fuel-supply tanker and just about enough biocide to transform the whole valley into a sterile desert. A map of the surrounding district was projected onto a screen. Sam divided it up into half a dozen operation areas and detailed off the pilots. These men, all of whom worked for state agricultural combines, couldn’t seem to grasp just how desperate the situation was. One of them asked Sam what he was so scared of. “Hell, we’re talking about that stuff that grows on the top of duck ponds, aren’t we?”

  Sam agreed that we were, more or less.

  “And that’s dangerous?”

  Sam nodded. “I could be wrong,” he said. “I hope to God I am
wrong. But what I think we’ve got here is something that could make all the atom bombs in the world look about as dangerous as a cold in the head. Unless we wipe this stuff out absolutely, totally and completely, here and now, within the next couple of days, then in a month’s time I’ll lay you odds there won’t be anything left that you’d recognize as Queensland—no forests, no rivers, no fields, no sea, no animals, nothing. Just a blanket of blue-green scum over everything. And after us it’ll be the turn of the rest of the world.”

  “Jesus,” breathed his questioner, visibly shaken. “How the hell did this thing start?”

  Sam glanced across at me. “I guess you’d have to say it’s a direct result of doing the wrong deed for the right reasons,” he said. “The point is, are we going to be able to stop it?”

  All next day from sunup to sundown, the helicopters droned up and down and back and forth across the valley, laying down a dense mist of biocide. No longer was it a question of selecting targets. This was an obliteration attack designed to wipe out every last trace of Anabaena across an area of some four miles by five of hinterland. While it was in progress, Sam contacted Canberra, reported on what was happening, and demanded to speak directly with the prime minister. Somehow he managed it, though I never discovered exactly how. Nor do I know for certain what he said—Sam’s own account of their conversation was not particularly coherent—but I do know that he did his utmost to persuade Prime Minister Brownlee that, should all else fail, he must order an immediate and total evacuation of the whole Arnhem peninsula and then drop a thermonuclear bomb on it. The plea was turned down flat. At the time I thought Sam was just trying to give the ultimate emphasis to his point. Which simply goes to show that even I still could not bring myself to face up to the true nature of the situation.

  I don’t think I slept at all that night. At first light I joined Sam and Ami in the radio room and listened to the helicopter pilots calling in their dawn reports. As they patrolled farther and farther out and the ring of red crosses finally petered out on Sam’s map, Ami and I looked at one another with an unspoken question in our eyes. Neither of us cared to tempt fate by saying that it looked as if the operation had succeeded. Sam further extended the perimeter of the search by three miles, and still there was nothing. When the final report came in “all clear,” Ami said: “Someone is going to have to say it. We’ve won, haven’t we, Sam?”

  Sam gazed down abstractedly at the map on the table and began hatching in a grid of scarlet lines across the blue triangle that represented the lake. “Maybe we have,” he said. “But with cancer it’s always the secondaries you can never be quite sure of. If Clive hadn’t spotted those bloody ducks yesterday, I think I’d have to agree with you. As it is … .” And he left the sentence unfinished.

  The helicopters, their mission completed, returned to the station. Over breakfast the pilots confirmed their reports. Anabaena—and just about everything else, too—had been wiped out. Sam told them they had done a first-rate job, and then followed this up with the news that they were going to have to go out and spray it all over again. They took it better than I had expected, but then I didn’t know what they were being paid.

  In the afternoon I flew with Sam down to the coast. We found the shore littered with dead fish and seabirds, innocent victims of the tons of poison we’d poured into the water. But there was no sign of live Anabaena anywhere. We flew south as far as Bickerton, then swung inland. It was all clear. “Go on, you’ve got to admit it now, Sam,” I said. “You’ve won.”

  He turned toward me and was, I know, on the point of agreeing with me, when the radio crackled. “Sam? Sam? Ami here.”

  “Go ahead, Ami.”

  “We’ve just had a report in from Nhulunbuy, Sam. They say there’s Anabaena in Arnhem Bay!”

  “Arnhem Bay! Sweet Mother of Christ! Are they sure?”

  “The pilot of the mail plane from Darwin reported it. He went down and took a close look. He says its covering both rivers and spreading along about five miles of the south shore.”

  If ever I’ve seen death in a man’s face, I saw it in Sam’s at that moment. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then drew in a deep breath and said: “We’ll be with you inside fifteen minutes, Ami. Get Mike to put out that total-panic call to Darwin. And get hold of Bill Rawlings. Hold him till I get there. See you, boy.”

  “Where’s Arnhem Bay, Sam?” I said.

  “Over on the far side of the peninsula. All of forty bloody miles from here!”

  We looked at one another, and then, lost for words, we looked away.

  All that happened four months ago. Perhaps if we had been believed, then it might still have been prevented. But by the time the Australian government was at last convinced that we had not all gone stark raving mad, it was much too late. Carried by the southern equatorial current, the alga was already well on its way to the Indian Ocean. When I flew back to England three days before Christmas, I could see the green stain spread right out across the Timor Sea. The bitterest irony of all is that when Sam and I flew down to Canberra and made our last desperate and ineffectual appeal for a hydrogen bomb to be dropped on Arnhem Land, there were no fewer than four nuclear subs on exercise in the Coral Sea, each one capable of sterilizing the whole of Queensland twenty times over. As Sam said to me that night while we were doing our best to drink ourselves into oblivion in the airport bar: “There’s one gulf in the human imagination that’s deeper than the Mariana Trench. Although men are prepared to insult Nature, to abuse her, even to rape her, they just can’t conceive the possibility that she isn’t immortal. But why in God’s name should you and I have been the ones chosen to prove them wrong?”

  I don’t know if he was expecting me to supply an answer. I don’t even know if there is an answer. All I know for sure is what I’ve written down here.

  Since then, every one of his predictions has come true. For the past six weeks the atmospheric sulfur count has been climbing steadily, and the last satellite scan I saw a week ago showed infestation well out into the Pacific and as far south as Madagascar. We have passed a sentence of death on the biosphere, and there is no court of appeal. It is only a question of time—or God. Fifty years from now, all trace of Anabaena and Phosphomonas sancharezii will have vanished as though they had never been: in destroying the world, it will destroy itself, too. Ultimately, inevitably, the planet Earth will become indistinguishable from any other sterile satellite trailing its lifeless way through the empty corridors of space until the end of time.

  As for “that most Pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever Suffered to crawl upon the face of the Earth”—which was how the King of Brobdingnag finally summed us up—my own rough estimate is that we have about a year left. So it will be somewhere around Cissie’s first and last birthday that I’ll be in a position to send Dad’s message back: “Your Majesty’s sacred mission is finally accomplished. Over and out.”

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  The Affair

  Absence makes the heart grow fonder? Well … perhaps. But in the sly and elegant story that follows, Robert Silverberg portrays a love affair for which absence is an absolute necessity …

  One of the most prolific authors alive, Robert Silverberg can lay claim to more than 450 fiction and nonfiction books and over 3,000 magazine pieces. Within SF, Silverberg rose to his greatest prominence during the late ‘60s and early ’70s, winning four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award, publishing dozens of major novels and anthologies—1973’s Dying Inside in particular is widely considered to be one of the best novels of the ’70s—and editing New Dimensions, perhaps the most influential original anthology series of its time. In 1980, after four years of self-imposed “retirement,” Silverberg started writing again, and the first of his new novels, Lord Valentine’s Castle, became a nationwide bestseller. Silverberg’s other books include The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrach in the Furnace, Lord of Darkness (a historica
l novel), and Valentine Pontifex, the sequel to Lord Valentine’s Castle. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, and The Best of Robert Silverberg. His most recent books are Gilgamesh the King, a historical novel, and At The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, a collection. His story “Multiples” was in our First Annual Collection. Silverberg lives in Oakland, California.

  He found her by accident, the way it usually happens, after he had more or less given up searching. For years, he had been sending out impulses like messages in bottles; random waves of telepathic energy; hello, hello, hello, one forlorn SOS after another from the desert isle of the soul on which he was a castaway. Occasionally, messages came back; but all they amounted to was lunacy, strident nonsense, static, spiritual noise, gabble up and down the mind band. There were, he knew, a good many like him out there—a boy in Topeka, an old woman in Buenos Aires, another one in Fort Lauderdale, someone of indeterminate sex in Manitoba and plenty of others, each alone, each lonely. He fell into short-lived contact with them, because they were, after all, people of his special kind. But they tended to be cranky, warped, weird, often simply crazy, all of them deformed by their bizarre gift, and they could not give him what he wanted, which was communion, harmony, the marriage of true minds. Then one Thursday afternoon, when he was absent-mindedly broadcasting his identity wave—not in any way purposefully trolling the seas of perception but only humming, so to speak—he felt a sudden startling click as of perfectly machined parts locking into place. Out of the grayness in his mind an unmistakably warm, eager image blossomed, a dazzling giant yellow flower unfolding on the limb of a gnarled, spiny cactus, and the image translated itself instantly into Hi, there. Where’ve you been all my life?