Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “Old Rakakurri fumed. But he could not forbid the request, not if his mother chose to honor it. She did. She was old enough to believe that even tradition should be subordinate to her will, and besides, she had never met an offworld barbarian, and she was curious. She received Ned in the garden. The thukri stood behind her, holding a bare curved knife as a reminder to the dishra kukri of her position.

  “She sat on an embroidered mat; she was wearing silken robes, a red mask, and a great jeweled headdress. All Ned could see of her was her black eyes and her hands, which were as soft and delicate as a young girl’s.

  “He said—Suniya had told him what to say—‘O most august lady, I bring you loving greetings from your miserable granddaughter Suniya.’

  “Chiyasathi Rakakurri said, frowning at Ned, ‘What have you, a barbarian, to do with my granddaughter, and why is she miserable?’

  “And Ned took a deep breath and told her Everything. Chiyasathi Rakakurri listened and was angered and deeply grieved. Her excitable son had neglected to consult either her or the shaman about her granddaughter’s transgression. Such behavior was unfilial and untraditional. It was also, she reflected, stupid. She wondered what the barbarian thought he could do about it.

  “But she was not a woman to display her emotions like goods at a fair. She studied Ned blandly and said—Suniya had warned that she would—‘Suniya has been wronged, but my granddaughter is now ekukri. There is nothing to be done.’

  “Ned bowed low to her and said softly, ‘O grandmother of my beloved, but what if there is?’

  “The next week Ned was gone from the embassy, taking, the secretary let it be known, some overdue leave. He went to Enchanter—he had, after all, been born there—and Suniya went with him.”

  “Enchanter,” I repeated. The Enchanter labs specialize in medical transformations. If you want to change your smile or sex, they can do that; if you want to look like an elephant, or a tiger, or your own mother, they can do that. “Of course. Were they married then?”

  “Later,” said the f.a.s. “When they came back to Tanderai.”

  “How did old Rakakurri take it?”

  The f.a.s. shrugged. “He was furious. But Chiyasathi Rakakurri had given the lovers her permission. Not only that, she deposed Rakakurri as titular head of the family. Inani has that honor now. The barbarians, she said, had more sense than her son did.”

  He looked at his watch. “But come.” He rose. I followed him as he weaved his way expertly around the booths, glad that I had not accepted that third drink.

  We entered another booth. It was large enough for four, and there were two people in it already. The f.a.s. made introductions. The ambassador rose and shook my hand. He was lean, not tall, with steady, gray eyes. Enchanteans tend to be beautiful, and his mask—a simple blue panohi, with two diamonds set at the left-hand corner—did not conceal his good looks.

  “A pleasure,” he said cordially. “May I present my wife, Suniya?”

  Her skin was flawless amber. Her eyes and hair were black. Her lips were rose petals. She smiled and stretched out a hand; I stammered and bowed over it. We sat for a time, and then the ambassador said he would see me in the morning for the interview, the f.a.s. would tell me the time, and was he keeping me entertained? I said yes.

  The f.a.s. and I said our good-byes and went back to our booth, and I bought the f.a.s. a drink.

  “Did she look like that before?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said the f.a.s. “I was only a clerk. I never met her.”

  “That’s one hell of a mask,” I said. And we drank bissea while I meditated upon love and masks and the skills of the Enchanter labs and upon the two diamonds—like scars made by a knife—set, one on the left, one on the right side, of Suniya Rakakurri’s perfect face.

  RENA YOUNT

  Pursuit of Excellence

  Most people want the best for their children, to give them every possible advantage in life, and to be able to boast that “my kids are better off than I was” has been a point of special pride for generations of Americans. But, as the following powerful story by new writer Rena Yount demonstrates, the pursuit of excellence often has a price, and that price is sometimes more than we ought to be willing to pay …

  Rena Yount is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop, and is currently a data librarian in Washington, D.C. Although she has published articles on topics ranging from women-owned businesses to music to zookeeping, and co-authored two resource books on health care and housing for community organizers, “Pursuit of Excellence” was her first professional fiction sale.

  It was a late summer afternoon, and the city of Washington lay quiet in a warm light rain. A minibus hissed over wet pavement, gliding driverless through the traffic loop at Calvert Street, past the towers and multilevel malls, the pedwalks where shoppers rode with their bright umbrellas. Evelyn Barr sat by a bus window: a slender woman in her thirties, with wide cheekbones and a pointed chin.

  She was tired. She worked days as a chemist and most evenings as a waitress. She would just have time, today, to stop by home and make sure everything was all right before heading on to her second job. But she watched the rain-blurred mosaic of the passing city with an almost proprietary sense of satisfaction. It was a smoother, cleaner, brighter city than it had been when she moved into it fifteen years before. Make better people, she thought, and they will put the rest of the world in order.

  My daughter will be one of them, she thought, the familiar tingle of anticipation coming warm and strong. The time was getting close at last.

  As she let herself into her apartment, she called, “Randy?”

  “In here, Mom,” her nine-year-old answered. She went into his room to give him a kiss. His terminal was on and covered with graphs. “Homework?” she asked.

  “Yeah. I want to get done before Dad gets home so he can help me with my model satellite.”

  “Good thinking,” she said. She ruffled his hair. It was dark, like hers, but curly and unruly, while hers was straight and fine. He had her brown eyes, and her dimples when he smiled.

  “Did you lay out your clothes to wash?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh. Then I put them in the washer with the other stuff. Then I washed them. It seemed like a good idea. They’re in the dryer now.”

  “Wonderful!” she said. “Now I’ll have time for a cup of coffee before I go.”

  He looked up at her sideways. “Can I have some too?”

  “Coffee? Now, you know that’s not for children. It’d keep you awake all night.”

  “Just a little? I did the laundry.”

  “Well—just a little. With milk.”

  She hung up her raincoat and went into the kitchen to check the freezer. She and her husband Michael cooked on the weekends and froze portions for dinner during the week. Usually Michael would be home on nights when she worked, but sometimes his own job as production manager for a small publisher kept him late. Randy had had to mature more quickly than a lot of kids; they counted on him to take care of himself when he had to, and to help with work around the apartment.

  “What would you like for dinner?” she called to him. “Chicken casserole or nut loaf?”

  “Which one did I cut up the mushrooms for?” he asked.

  “Nut loaf,” she said.

  “I want that one.”

  “Fine,” she said, smiling. She began making a salad. The kitchen was small, like all the rooms in their apartment; housing was expensive. But it was neat and well organized, an easy place to work. She moved quickly from sink to counter, rinsing and chopping lettuce and green peppers. Randy called from his room. “Guess what I got for homework.”

  She set one oven compartment on Thaw/Cook and started the timer. “What?” she asked.

  “I get to be president this week.”

  “Of the class?”

  “No, silly. Of Skolania. That’s the country our class gets to be, for simulation. Come and look.”

  “Just a minute.
” She put Michael’s dinner in another compartment and set the controls. As she went into Randy’s room she said, “Now, your dinner will be ready in half an hour, so listen for the bell. And don’t forget to start Dad’s at eight, because he’ll be home at eight-thirty and he’ll be hungry. It’s all set—just push ‘Start.’”

  “Look at this,” Randy said.

  “And there’s salad in the refrigerator. Are you listening?”

  “Sure. Eight o’clock. In the refrigerator. I’ll remember. Look here.”

  He was standing before his terminal. There was a stool for him to sit on, but he rarely used it. He preferred to bounce from foot to foot, jiggling, his slim body full of energy.

  “Okay,” she said, perching on the stool. “I’m looking.”

  “See, for this project we have five variables. There’s population—that’s how many people you have. And there’s money for agriculture—that’s how much you spend for seeds and tractors and stuff. Then there’s money for defense, to buy planes and everything, and workers for agriculture, and workers for defense. And if you’re president you have to mess around with all of those so they come out right. Only Kenny Blake was president last week, and boy, did he leave everything in a mess.”

  Evelyn smiled. Even kids blamed the previous administration.

  “See, if you put more money in for agriculture, you get more soybeans.” He moved a control, and little rows of green soybean plants ran up one side of the screen. “For a while. But then you don’t get any more unless you put more workers in too. To use all the tractors and junk. But that means less workers for defense.” Sure enough, little blue figures with rifles were disappearing from the DEFENSE graph as he turned a knob. “And Botania, that’s the other fourth-grade class, they might start a war. I mean, maybe they won’t, but they might. Mary Sue’s in that class, and she loves to start wars. But, see, if you don’t get enough soybeans then people will starve. Only, you know what?”

  “What?” she asked.

  He leaned close to the stool and whispered to her. A secret. “I hate soybeans.”

  Suddenly he was bouncing up and down, twirling knobs, yelling, “Yukh! Die, soybeans! Down with soybeans!” Evelyn laughed. Little green plants blipped off the screen by the dozen, the population chart began to glow a warning red, and then a yellow neon flashing began: FAMINE. FAMINE.

  Randy giggled, looking at her sideways. “I wouldn’t really do that,” he explained.

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t.”

  “I just like to hear what the vice-president’s going to say.” He flicked a switch, and a voice began. It was deep, grave, adult. “Mr. President, I must direct your attention to a matter of the utmost seriousness. Famine has now reached the following levels—”

  Randy cut off the voice, giggling again. “He sounds just like a news announcer.”

  He punched BREAK and CLS, wiping the screen. Then he pushed RUN and started over, this time in earnest.

  Evelyn watched him for a few minutes as he stood, frowning a little, absorbed in the balance he was seeking on the screen. She remembered when school had been like that for her: a challenge and an adventure. She remembered discovering chemistry when she was not much older than Randy. She had loved it even then. How enthralled she had been by the orderly mystery of the world’s workings. What a grand kingdom science had seemed to her then; what dreams she had had of the work she would do someday. She had set her heart on being a discoverer, a creator—back when she still thought someone like her could be a real scientist. Watching Randy, her heart ached with pity and loss. Too late, too late, for Randy and for her. A generation ago, she would have been so proud of this boy.

  The Augustus, where Evelyn worked evenings, was a small, discreetly inconspicuous restaurant near the Capitol. It was elegantly furnished in dark wood and leather. Evelyn changed into her uniform and began laying out silverware in preparation for the dinner rush. A busboy, passing her, whispered, “Watch out for Jordan; he’s in a real mood tonight.”

  Evelyn nodded. Jordan, the owner, was touchy and harsh with the staff. Perhaps he felt their contempt for one of the bioengineered who had not made anything of himself. But it was undoubtedly because of Jordan that the Augustus had developed its particular clientele.

  There was not any one thing to set them apart, yet it was impossible to walk into the restaurant and not recognize that almost everyone there was engineered. Their height was part of it, the healthy vigor and perfect proportions, and the ease of those born to prosperity. Each was striking. Some were the slender, flawless blonds so popular when bioengineering began. But it had not taken long for more exotic looks to catch on. The senator at the table nearest Evelyn was massively built, with a regal African face and blue-black skin. She wondered if his parents were black. The woman across from him looked like an Incan princess, gold jangling from her wrists and ears. In the corner sat a young woman, a federal judge, with the perfect oval face and delicate figure of a woman in a seventeenth-century Chinese painting. Her skin, like that of ladies in such paintings, was dead white.

  Evelyn had come to dislike her own face in the mirror. A crowd of norms on the street looked to her like a rough sketch of humanity, with their splotchy complexions and brownish hair, their bodies lumpy, slouched, unfinished. The people in the restaurant were as elegant and vivid as portraits in stained glass.

  She went to wait on a man with sand-pale skin and a wiry mane of golden hair. She thought of ancient walls carved with winged lions when she saw his face: beaked nose, deep lines curving down around the full lips, fierce upswept brows. He looked up to give his order, and his eyes were blood-red.

  She walked back toward the kitchen, disturbed by those eyes. They gave him a mad look. There was more and more experimentation going on with appearance, and probably with other things as well. Not everyone would be stopped by the official limits on bioengineering. The engineered were mostly the children of the powerful, and they gathered more power by their own abilities. Where there was power enough, rules would bend.

  Waitresses are invisible people. In her work Evelyn heard bits of talk about corporate dealings and government policy centers, universities, publishing, research—all the places where the engineered naturally concentrated. She knew what it meant when a name was mentioned, and someone said, “A five?” and someone else nodded: one of the five percent, one of us.

  She and Michael had argued for a long time about engineering their child’s appearance. “All this money to engineer high intelligence, good health—I can see that,” Michael said. “It’s not that important how she looks.” Evelyn said, “She has to be recognized as one of them. It’ll make a difference in whether she forms the relationships she’ll need, whether she really belongs.” He shook his head in disapproval and disbelief. “You make it sound like some kind of exclusive club.”

  “It is!” she said. “The most exclusive club that’s ever existed. Members recognize each other instantly, across a room. They give jobs to each other and marry each other and have kids like themselves, or better. The engineered are different from us, Michael. They know it. The difference gets bigger all the time. We can push our daughter across the line before it’s too late … .”

  Evelyn picked up a drink for the red-eyed man, soup for the senator and the princess. She thought of Michael in his production department, supervising other norms. He rarely had direct contact with the engineered writers and editors. Maybe he really did not understand what was happening. Maybe he was too much of an idealist to want to.

  But he had to understand. He must not stand in the way of the child.

  When she got back to her apartment after work, Michael was stretched out in a chair in the living room, half asleep. He got up to kiss her, and took her raincoat.

  “Thanks, dear,” she said. “How’s Randy?”

  “Fast asleep. We almost finished his satellite.”

  She smiled. “I’m surprised he let you stop at ‘almost.’”

  She slipp
ed into Randy’s room, whispered the light on low, and looked down at him. His dark hair curled over his forehead; his arms were flung above his head in sleep.

  When she came back out, Michael had fixed her a drink. While she sat and sipped it, he told her about the new graphics designer at his office. She watched him across the tiny living room: a lanky man with receding hair and a homely, gentle face. She thought, I really am lucky. The five years of their marriage had been hard, with the extra work and constant saving. But Michael had taken it cheerfully. And he was wonderful with Randy.

  When she finished her drink, she reached automatically for the shelf near her chair and got out the chart.

  Michael shook his head with a touch of exasperation. “Hey—we won’t get any farther on that tonight.”

  “But there are so many decisions to make.”

  “After we talk to the geneticist. It’s nearly midnight, anyway, and we’re getting up early. Do you want to be late for your first appointment?”

  She thought with a flash of sympathy, He’ll be so glad when this is all over and the baby’s really on its way. And he was right; she should go to bed. After all the preliminary steps—the Applications Review Board, the interviews with social workers—they had finally been assigned to the geneticist who would do their engineering. They would be meeting the geneticist for the first time in the morning, and she wanted to be fresh for that interview. Still, she couldn’t resist opening the chart and running her fingers down it lovingly.

  SEX. Female. She had one son. And Michael considered Randy his own, so there was no quarrel.

  SOMA-TYPE. Height, build, pigmentation. Hair, skin, eyes. With so many possibilities, how would they ever choose?