Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Fires were spreading with unnatural speed. Small puffs of smoke rose from a dozen places, striking large heaps of wood with uncanny precision. Her altered brain searched for a pattern. The fires springing up in the mantis sector were well beyond the reach of any falling debris.

  In the spider’s zone, flames had leapt the firebreaks without leaving a mark. The pattern felt wrong to her, eerily wrong, as if the destruction had a force all its own, a raging synergy that fed upon itself.

  The pattern spread into a devouring crescent. Mirasol felt the dread of lost control—the sweating fear an orbiter feels at the hiss of escaping air or the way a suicide feels at the first bright gush of blood.

  Within an hour the garden sprawled beneath a hurricane of hot decay. The dense columns of smoke had flattened like thunderheads at the limits of the garden’s sunken troposphere. Slowly a spark-shot gray haze, dripping ash like rain, began to ring the crater. Screaming birds circled beneath the foul torus, falling by tens and scores and hundreds. Their bodies littered the garden’s sea, their bright plumage blurred with ash in a steel-gray sump.

  The landcraft of the others continued to fight the flames, smashing unharmed through the fire’s charred borderlands. Their efforts were useless, a pathetic ritual before the disaster.

  Even the fire’s malicious purity had grown tired and tainted. The oxygen was failing. The flames were dimmer and spread more slowly, releasing a dark nastiness of half-combusted smoke.

  Where it spread, nothing that breathed could live. Even the flames were killed as the smoke billowed along the crater’s crushed and smoldering slopes.

  Mirasol watched a group of striped gazelles struggle up the barren slopes of the talus in search of air. Their dark eyes, fresh from the laboratory, rolled in timeless animal fear. Their coats were scorched, their flanks heaved, their mouths dripped foam. One by one they collapsed in convulsions, kicking at the lifeless Martian rock as they slid and fell. It was a vile sight, the image of a blighted spring.

  An oblique flash of red downslope to her left attracted her attention. A large red animal was skulking among the rocks. She turned the crawler and picked her way toward it, wincing as a dark surf of poisoned smoke broke across the fretted glass.

  She spotted the animal as it broke from cover. It was a scorched and gasping creature like a great red ape. She dashed forward and seized it in the crawler’s arms. Held aloft, it clawed and kicked, hammering the crawler’s arms with a smoldering branch. In revulsion and pity, she crushed it. Its bodice of tight-sewn ibis feathers tore, revealing blood-slicked human flesh.

  Using the crawler’s grips, she tugged at a heavy tuft of feathers on its head. The tight-fitting mask ripped free, and the dead man’s head slumped forward. She rolled it back, revealing a face tattooed with stars.

  The ornithopter sculled above the burned-out garden, its long red wings beating with dreamlike fluidity. Mirasol watched the Sorienti’s painted face as her corporate ladyship stared into the shining viewscreen.

  The ornithopter’s powerful cameras cast image after image onto the tabletop screen, lighting the Regal’s face. The tabletop was littered with the Sorienti’s elegant knickknacks: an inhaler case, a half-empty jeweled squeezebulb, lorgnette binoculars, a stack of tape cassettes.

  “An unprecedented case,” her ladyship murmured. “It was not a total dieback after all but merely the extinction of everything with lungs. There must be strong survivorship among the lower orders: fish, insects, annelids. Now that the rain’s settled the ash, you can see the vegetation making a strong comeback. Your own section seems almost undamaged.”

  “Yes,” Mirasol said. “The natives were unable to reach it with torches before the fire storm had smothered itself.”

  The Sorienti leaned back into the tasseled arms of her couch. “I wish you wouldn’t mention them so loudly, even between ourselves.”

  “No one would believe me.”

  “The others never saw them,” the Regal said. “They were too busy fighting the flames.” She hesitated briefly. “You were wise to confide in me first.”

  Mirasol locked eyes with her new patroness, then looked away. “There was no one else to tell. They’d have said I built a pattern out of nothing but my own fears.”

  “You have your faction to think of,” the Sorienti said with an air of sympathy. “With such a bright future ahead of them, they don’t need a renewed reputation for paranoid fantasies.”

  She studied the screen. “The Patternists are winners by default. It certainly makes an interesting case study. If the new garden grows tiresome we can have the whole crater sterilized from orbit. Some other faction can start again with a clean slate.”

  “Don’t let them build too close to the edge,” Mirasol said.

  Her corporate ladyship watched her attentively, tilting her head.

  “I have no proof,” Mirasol said, “but I can see the pattern behind it all. The natives had to come from somewhere. The colony that stocked the crater must have been destroyed in that huge landslide. Was that your work? Did your people kill them?”

  The Sorienti smiled. “You’re very bright, my dear. You will do well, up the Ladder. And you can keep secrets. Your office as my secretary suits you very well.”

  “They were destroyed from orbit,” Mirasol said. “Why else would they hide from us? You tried to annihilate them.”

  “It was a long time ago,” the Regal said. “In the early days, when things were shakier. They were researching the secret of star flight, techniques only the Investors know. Rumor says they reached success at last, in their redemption camp. After that, there was no choice.”

  “Then they were killed for the Investors’ profit,” Mirasol said. She stood up quickly and walked around the cabin, her new jeweled skirt clattering around her knees. “So that the aliens could go on toying with us, hiding their secret, selling us trinkets.”

  The Regal folded her hands with a clicking of rings and bracelets. “Our Lobster King is wise,” she said. “If humanity’s efforts turned to the stars, what would become of terraforming? Why should we trade the power of creation itself to become like the Investors?”

  “But think of the people,” Mirasol said. “Think of them losing their technologies, degenerating into human beings. A handful of savages, eating bird meat. Think of the fear they felt for generations, the way they burned their own home and killed themselves when they saw us come to smash and destroy their world. Aren’t you filled with horror?”

  “For humans?” the Sorienti said. “No!”

  “But can’t you see? You’ve given this planet life as an art form, as an enormous game. You force us to play in it, and those people were killed for it! Can’t you see how that blights everything?”

  “Our game is reality,” the Regal said. She gestured at the viewscreen. “You can’t deny the savage beauty of destruction.”

  “You defend this catastrophe?”

  The Regal shrugged. “If life worked perfectly, how could things evolve? Aren’t we posthuman? Things grow; things die. In time the cosmos kills us all. The cosmos has no meaning, and its emptiness is absolute. That’s pure terror, but it’s also pure freedom. Only our ambitions and our creations can fill it.”

  “And that justifies your actions?”

  “We act for life,” the Regal said. “Our ambitions have become this world’s natural laws. We blunder because life blunders. We go on because life must go on. When you’ve taken the long view, from orbit—when the power we wield is in your own hands—then you can judge us.” She smiled. “You will be judging yourself. You’ll be Regal.”

  “But what about your captive factions? Your agents, who do your will? Once we had our own ambitions. We failed, and now you isolate us, indoctrinate us, make us into rumors. We must have something of our own. Now we have nothing.”

  “That’s not so. You have what we’ve given you. You have the Ladder.”

  The vision stung Mirasol: power, light, the hint of justice, this world with
its sins and sadness shrunk to a bright arena far below. “Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, we do.”

  NANCY KRESS

  Trinity

  People have been searching for God for thousands of years, perhaps from the very beginnings of the human species, but until now it hasn’t occurred to anyone that it might be possible to use the sophisticated tools of modern high technology as an aid to that search.

  That thought does occur to the characters in the fascinating story that follows; what doesn’t occur to them is that if you look hard enough for something, you just might be unlucky enough to find it …

  Born in Buffalo, Nancy Kress now lives in Brockport, New York. She began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine; she has also appeared in Omni, Universe, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Prince of Morning Bells, appeared in 1981. Her most recent novel was last year’s well-received The Golden Grove. Upcoming are a novel, The White Pipes, and a collection of her short fiction, Trinity, both from Bluejay books.

  “Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief!”

  —Mark 9:24

  At first I didn’t recognize Devrie.

  Devrie—I didn’t recognize Devrie. Astonished at myself, I studied the wasted figure standing in the middle of the bare reception room: arms like wires, clavicle sharply outlined, head shaved; dressed in that ugly long tent of light-weight gray. God knew what her legs looked like under it. Then she smiled, and it was Devrie.

  “You look like shit.”

  “Hello, Seena. Come on in.”

  “I am in.”

  “Barely. It’s not catching, you know.”

  “Stupidity fortunately isn’t,” I said and closed the door behind me. The small room was too hot; Devrie would need the heat, of course, with almost no fat left to insulate her bones and organs. Next to her I felt huge, although I am not. Huge, hairy, sloppy-breasted.

  “Thank you for not wearing bright colors. They do affect me.”

  “Anything for a sister,” I said, mocking the old childhood formula, the old sentiment. But Devrie was too quick to think it was only mockery; in that, at least, she had not changed. She clutched my arm and her fingers felt like chains, or talons.

  “You found him. Seena, you found him.”

  “I found him.”

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  “Sit down first, before you fall over. God, Devrie, don’t you eat at all?”

  “Tell me,” she said. So I did.

  Devrie Caroline Konig had admitted herself to the Institute of the Biological Hope on the Caribbean island of Dominica eleven months ago, in late November of 2017, when her age was 23 years and 4 months. I am precise about this because it is all I can be sure of. I need the precision. The Institute of the Biological Hope is not precise; it is a mongrel, part research laboratory in brain sciences, part monastery, part school for training in the discipline of the mind. That made my baby sister guinea pig, postulant, freshman. She had always been those things, but, until now, sequentially. Apparently so had many other people, for when eccentric Nobel Prize winner James Arthur Bohentin had founded his Institute, he had been able to fund it, although precariously. But in that it did not differ from most private scientific research centers.

  Or most monasteries.

  I wanted Devrie out of the Institute of the Biological Hope.

  “It’s located on Dominica,” I had said sensibly—what an ass I had been—to an unwasted Devrie a year ago, “because the research procedures there fall outside United States laws concerning the safety of research subjects. Doesn’t that tell you something, Devrie? Doesn’t that at least give you pause? In New York, it would be illegal to do to anyone what Bohentin does to his people.”

  “Do you know him?” she had asked.

  “I have met him. Once.”

  “What is he like?”

  “Like stone.”

  Devrie shrugged, and smiled. “All the participants in the Institute are willing. Eager.”

  “That doesn’t make it ethical for Bohentin to destroy them. Ethical or legal.”

  “It’s legal on Dominica. And in thinking you know better than the participants what they should risk their own lives for, aren’t you playing God?”

  “Better me than some untrained fanatic who offers himself up like an exalted Viking hero, expecting Valhalla.”

  “You’re an intellectual snob, Seena.”

  “I never denied it.”

  “Are you sure you aren’t really objecting not to the Institute’s dangers but to its purpose? Isn’t the ‘Hope’ part what really bothers you?”

  “I don’t think scientific method and pseudo-religious mush mix, no. I never did. I don’t think it leads to a perception of God.”

  “The holotank tapes indicate it leads to a perception of something the brain hasn’t encountered before,” Devrie said, and for a moment I was silent.

  I was once, almost, a biologist. I was aware of the legitimate studies that formed the basis for Bohentin’s megalomania: the brain wave changes that accompany anorexia nervosa, sensory deprivation, biological feedback, and neurotransmitter stimulants. I have read the historical accounts, some merely pathetic but some disturbingly not, of the Christian mystics who achieved rapture through the mortification of the flesh and the Eastern mystics who achieved anesthesia through the control of the mind, of the faith healers who succeeded, of the carcinomas shrunk through trained will. I knew of the research of focused clairvoyance during orgasm, and of what happens when neurotransmitter number and speed are increased chemically.

  And I knew all that was known about the twin trance.

  Fifteen years earlier, as a doctoral student in biology, I had spent one summer replicating Sunderwirth’s pioneering study of drug-enhanced telepathy in identical twins. My results were positive, except that within six months all eight of my research subjects had died. So had Sunder-wirth’s. Twin-trance research became the cloning controversy of the new decade, with the same panicky cycle of public outcry, legal restrictions, religious misunderstandings, fear, and demagoguery. When I received the phone call that the last of my subjects was dead—cardiac arrest, no history of heart disease, forty-three Goddamn years old—I locked myself in my apartment, with the lights off and my father’s papers clutched in my hand, for three days. Then I resigned from the neurology department and became an entomologist. There is no pain in classifying dead insects.

  “There is something there,” Devrie had repeated. She was holding the letter sent to our father, who someone at the Institute had not heard was dead. “It says the holotank tapes—”

  “So there’s something there,” I said. “So the tanks are picking up some strange radiation. Why call it ‘God’?”

  “Why not call it God?”

  “Why not call it Rover? Even if I grant you that the tape pattern looks like a presence—which I don’t—you have no way of knowing that Bohentin’s phantom isn’t, say, some totally ungodlike alien being.”

  “But neither do I know that it is.”

  “Devrie—”

  She had smiled and put her hands on my shoulders. She had—has, has always had—a very sweet smile. “Seena. Think. If the Institute can prove rationally that God exists—can prove it to the intellectual mind, the doubting Thomases who need something concrete to study … faith that doesn’t need to be taken on faith …”

  She wore her mystical face, a glowing softness that made me want to shake the silliness out of her. Instead I made some clever riposte, some sarcasm I no longer remember, and reached out to ruffle her hair. Big-sisterly, patronizing, thinking I could deflate her rapturous interest with the pin-prick of ridicule. God, I was an ass. It hurts to remember how big an ass I was.

  A month and a half later Devrie committed herself and half her considerable inheritance to the Institute of the Biological
Hope.

  “Tell me,” Devrie whispered. The Institute had no windows; outside I had seen grass, palm trees, butterflies floating in the sunshine, but inside here in the bare gray room there was nowhere to look but at her face.

  “He’s a student in a Master’s program at a third-rate college in New Hampshire. He was adopted when he was two, nearly three, in March of 1997. Before that he was in a government-run children’s home. In Boston, of course. The adopting family, as far as I can discover, never was told he was anything but one more toddler given up by somebody for adoption.”

  “Wait a minute,” Devrie said. “I need … a minute.”

  She had turned paler, and her hands trembled. I had recited the information as if it were no more than an exhibit listing at my museum. Of course she was rattled. I wanted her rattled. I wanted her out.

  Lowering herself to the floor, Devrie sat cross-legged and closed her eyes. Concentration spread over her face, but a concentration so serene it barely deserved that name. Her breathing slowed, her color freshened, and when she opened her eyes, they had the rested energy of a person who has just slept eight hours in mountain air. Her face even looked plumper, and an EEG, I guessed, would show damn near alpha waves. In her year at the Institute she must have mastered quite an array of biofeedback techniques to do that, so fast and with such a malnourished body.

  “Very impressive,” I said sourly.

  “Seena—have you seen him?”

  “No. All this is from sealed records.”

  “How did you get into the records?”

  “Medical and governmental friends.”

  “Who?”

  “What do you care, as long as I found out what you wanted to know?”

  She was silent. I knew she would never ask me if I had obtained her information legally or illegally; it would not occur to her to ask. Devrie, being Devrie, would assume it had all been generously offered by my modest museum connections and our dead father’s immodest research connections. She would be wrong.