He’d not been made for this kind of travel, just a little gentle shuffling between bamboo groves, avoiding too many ups and downs. He’d heard them talking about him in the lab before he was released. A bear, they’d called him, Ailuropoda melanoleuca, black and white cat-foot, a living fossil. They said his closest ursine relative was the spectacled bear of South America, Tremarctos ornatus. He’d checked his GPS, still functioning after all this time, and pondered in the manner of his kind. China to South America was a long walk for a panda, but he could do it if he had to.
It had been many years since he’d walked out of the Qinling Mountains in hilly Sichuan Province and set off to find more of his kind, but although he’d walked north though China to Siberia, he’d found no organic creature larger than a cockroach and no one like himself. He didn’t know what had happened to his makers, but it must have happened a long time ago. They’d gone the way of the panda at last.
Back in the early twenty-first century, the International Union for Conservation of Nature had declared his species as endangered and conservation reliant, but hadn’t followed through until it was too late. Maybe they’d thought it enough that the giant panda genome had been sequenced in 2009, but it took more than that to keep a whole species viable. It took bamboo and more bamboo and the resources shrank each year.
That’s when they’d made him and others like him. Giant pandas, able to live in the wild on fresh air — a sop to national pride. Something for the tourists to gawp at, perfect in all respects, on the outside at least. On the inside, however, their hearts were tiny fusion reactors; their skeletons, foam-metal; their joints, ceramic; and their muscles, skin and fur woven from various polymers.
He could access his internal clock if he really wanted to and find out how long it had been since the others ceased to function. He was the last of his kind, and pretty soon he’d be unable to walk. Pad, pad, pad, clunk! What would happen then? He imagined himself stranded in this land of glaciers. How long would it take for his fuel cell to run down? Too long. He wondered if it was possible for a creature like him to go mad.
Alaska’s broken coastline caused him detour after detour and he stopped checking his clock, fearful of seeing years pass while he relentlessly plodded south. Always south. Pad, pad, pad, clunk through Alaska and British Columbia until the pad, pad, pad, clunk became pad, pad, clank, clunk.
He had to skirt an active volcano where Seattle used to be. Its rumbling and occasional belch of acrid smoke set off his alarm systems and the volcanic grit irritated his retractable claw beds, causing him delays for cleaning and maintenance. Pad, pad, clank, clunk became pad, pad, clank-drag and he was grateful when he reached the benign forests of Oregon.
He was resting his rear hind servo when he heard a whine above him and felt the sudden tug of an antigrav hauler. He was whisked up to a laboratory in the sky. Surprise wasn’t one of his inbuilt emotions and he knew all about laboratories, even alien ones, so he settled down feeling only mild curiosity. They shot him with a cryo-anaesthetic that might have worked if he’d been organic, or might have killed him, as the aliens, themselves crystalline blobs, seemed to know so little of Earth-based physiology that they couldn’t tell the difference between biological and mechanical. At least they didn’t seem interested in taking him apart to see how he worked.
He lay awake for the 90 years it took for their ark ship to return home, grateful that the enforced rest gave his depleted nanites time to repair most of the damage to his hip joints. Occasionally he would open one eye and watch the aliens at work, gleaning an understanding of their communications system, a mixture of audible sounds and electronic impulses. They never seemed to figure out his recorded system responses, though, which were in Mandarin.
In the alien zoo they gave him a huge enclosure that exactly replicated the forest they’d found him in, and put up a communication repeater that he deciphered as Dominant species of Planet 40698-C. He shrugged and methodically deleted his GPS database to make room for new information, then set off in a southerly direction. Pad, pad, pad, clink.
He found her on the fourth day, staring round-eyed and hopeful from the lower branches of a tall tree. He’d walked up one side of Earth and back down again to find another of his kind, and here she was, halfway round the galaxy in an alien zoo. From her black coat to her lighter eye markings, she was a prime example of the spectacled bear of South America. He dipped his head in acknowledgement and she dipped hers in return. She climbed down her tree and walked towards him shyly. The faint sound of her servos, pad-clunk, pad, pad, drifted towards him and it made his little fusion reactor glad within his breast.
Jacey Bedford is a British writer with a string of short story publication credits on both sides of the Atlantic. She has three SF novels due from DAW, beginning with Empire of Dust in November 2014. Find her at www.jaceybedford.co.uk.
Gifts of the Magi
Anatoly Belilovsky
Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. The metamorphosis startled him in a casual, momentary way, much as waking up in a strange hotel room might have, as did the darkness into which he woke. He flexed his limbs; with a crackling noise his chrysalis fractured, and morning sunlight flooded his compound eyes. He tried to blink, but although he could not feel his eyelids close, his eyes adjusted to the light much faster than his old ones could; in an instant, the whole room came into sharp, clear focus.
He did not need to dip his head to see each chitinous shard fall spinning to the floor, sparkling in the sunlight. He saw each dust mote in the slanted sunbeams, each flower on the wallpaper, each wrinkle on his bed.
The door inched open. Samsa’s daughter poked her head into the room. “Hi Daddy!” she shouted and disappeared. He heard her steps distinctly, and new harmonics in her timbre. He tried to memorize her face as he now saw it, and her voice.
Smells registered next, his wife’s familiar scent first of all and, after that, the aroma of dark, strong coffee, laden with sugar, wafted from the kitchen. There was a clinking noise, slower, heavier steps, the door creaked, opened wider —
Samsa’s wife came through the doorway with the coffee, holding with both hands a half-full bowl. She carried it slowly, placed it in front of him on the floor, sat down on the bed. For a moment, Samsa turned to bring the densest part of his eye towards her. He saw new wrinkles, bloodshot eyes, drying tears. He turned and dipped his proboscis into the coffee, taking her out of focus, but not out of sight.
“I know you can’t talk,” she said. She looked down, smoothed her hair back, then looked at him again. “I’ll talk for both of us. You’ll say, ‘it’s only for a month, you know’.” She sniffled. “And I’ll think, a whole month. I’ll imagine the pipes and the tunnels and the dangers, and you’ll tell me that you’re now a highly trained professional, and…”
She tried to caress his carapace; her hands shook, and for a moment her fingers drummed on the unyielding thorax. Her hand recoiled.
“It’s the thought of you being underground,” she said. “And, honestly, of you not being here. I wish you didn’t have to do this. You always used to worry about me flying, and I always told you I’m the best pilot in the sky. I always paid attention to everything, always knew what everyone was doing.” Her mouth tightened. “Except you.” Her hands wandered as if searching for something familiar: instruments, propulsion controls, handholds; anything.
“Why didn’t … Oh hell, I know why you didn’t tell me. You wanted to pay off the house by December, so I wouldn’t have to take the Saturn run. I didn’t tell you I quit, either. I wanted it to be a surprise, that we’d never be apart that long again. So did you. We both love surprises. Remember how I proposed?”
Gregor remembered. A chartered suborbital to Paris. Twenty minutes of a ballistic should have been time enough, she’d thought: she would propose, he would accept, then they would make love in zero-G. Except for his nineteen and three-quarter minutes of space sickness.
They got it right, finally, in the Royal Suite at Hotel George V, but he never shook off the feeling she’d been left disappointed. You should see them weightless, she had said wistfully, cupping her breasts as she dressed the next morning.
“And you will tell me that this body is damn near indestructible, doesn’t even need to breathe or eat,” she continued, “and —” her voice cracked “— reactor maintenance pays great.” She paused to wipe a tear. “Better than any desk job I could get. Not easy to find work for an ex-spacer with a family to feed,” she finished in a whisper.
I should have said something, Samsa thought, last night. I should have kissed her.
There was a knock on the door. Samsa’s wife smiled. “You raised her right. Always knock first when your parents are together in the bedroom.” She stood up. “I know what you’d say if you could,” she said. “You would tell me that you love me, and that you are doing this for us. And I’d say, I love you too. And I’ll miss you. Very much. I’ll think of nothing else all day.”
Yes you will, Samsa thought. You’ll think of flying the way you never thought of it before, just like I never thought of air until I stopped breathing.
She shambled towards the kitchen with a spacer’s graceless gait, but although she’d always been awkward under gravity, for the first time Samsa thought of a long-forgotten line: “… as if treading upon knife blades so sharp that blood must flow.”
She stopped in the doorway, one hand on the jamb, turned to face him. He could see her perfectly well without moving his head, but it seemed right to raise it. She swam into full focus again: porous skin, sagging cheeks; but he could see her, too, all of her. She was so beautiful.
“I’m glad we had this talk,” she said, willing a smile. “Have a nice day at work, dear.”
Samsa nodded. It was the least he could do. And the most.
Anatoly Belilovsky was born in a city that went through six or seven owners in the past century, all of whom used it to do a lot more than drive to church on Sundays; he is old enough to remember tanks rolling through it on their way to Czechoslovakia in 1968. After being traded to the United States for a shipload of grain, he learned English from Star Trek reruns and went on to become a paediatrician in an area of New York where English is only the fourth most commonly used language. He has neither cats nor dogs, but was admitted into SFWA in spite of this deficiency, having published stories in Nature, Ideomancer, Immersion Book of Steampunk, Daily SF, Kasma, UFO, Stupefying Stories, Cast of Wonders and other markets. He blogs about writing at loldoc.net, paediatrics at belilovsky.com, and his medical practice website is babydr.us.
Caveat time traveller
Gregory Benford
He was easy to spot — clothes from the twenty-first century, dazed look. I didn’t have to say anything. He blurted out, “Look, I’m from the past, a time traveller. But I get snapped back there in a few minutes.”
“I know.” We stood in a small street at the edge of the city, dusk creeping in. Distant, glazed towers gleamed in the sunset and pearly lights popped on down along the main road. Jaunters always chose to appear at dawn or dusk, where they might not be noticed but could see a town. No point in transporting into a field somewhere, which could be any time at all, even the far past. Good thing he couldn’t see the city rubble, too. Or realize this was how I made my living.
His mouth twisted in surprise. “You do? I thought I might be the first to come here. To this time.”
I gave him a raised eyebrow. “No. There was another last week.”
“Really? The professor said the other experiments failed. They couldn’t prove they’d been into the future at all.”
They always want to talk, though they’d learn more with their mouths closed.
He rattled on, “I have to take something back, to show I was here. Something —”
“How about this?” I pulled out a slim metal cylinder. “Apply it to your neck five times a day and it extracts cancer precursors. In your era, that will extend your average lifetime by several years.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Wow! Sure —” He reached for it but I snatched it back.
“What do I get in exchange?” I said mildly.
That startled him. “What? I don’t have anything you could use…” He searched his pockets in the old fashioned wide-label jacket. “How about money?” A fistful of bills.
“I’m not a collector, and those are worthless now, inflated away in value.”
The time jaunter blinked. “Look, this is one of the first attempts to jump forward and back. I don’t have —”
“I know, we’ve seen jaunters from your era already. Enough to set up a barter system. That’s why I had this cancer-canceller.”
Confusion swarmed in his face. “Lady, I’m just a guinea pig here. A volunteer. They didn’t give me —”
I pointed. “Your watch is a pleasant anachronism, I’ll take that.” I gave him the usual ceramic smile.
He sighed with relief. “Great —” But I kept the cylinder away from him.
“That’s an opener offer, not the whole deal.” A broader smile.
He glanced around, distracted by my outfit. I always wore it when the chron-senser networks said there was a jaunt about to happen. Their old dress styles were classic, so they weren’t prepared for my peekaboo leggings, augmented breasts and perfectly symmetric face. The lipstick was outrageous for our time, but fit right into the twenty-first century kink.
He raised a flat ceramic thing and it whirred. Taking pictures, like the rest. They still hadn’t learned, whenever this guy came from.
“Your pictures won’t develop,” I told him with a seemingly sympathetic smile.
“Huh? They gave me this —”
“You’ve heard of time paradoxes, yes? Space-time resolves those nicely. You can’t take back knowledge that alters the past. All that gets erased automatically, a kind of information cleansing. Very convenient physics.”
Startled, he glanced at his compact camera. “So … it’ll be blank?”
“Yes,” I said crisply. My left eye told me the chron-senser network was picking up an approaching closure. I leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. “Thanks! It’s such a thrill to meet someone from the ancient times.”
That shook him even more. Best to keep them off balance.
“So how do I get that cancer thing?” he said, eyes squinting with a canny cast.
“Let me have your clothes,” I shot back.
“What? You want me … naked?”
“I can use them as antiques. That cancer stick is pretty expensive, so I’m giving you a good deal.”
He nodded and started shucking off his coat, pants, shoes, wallet, coins, cash, set of keys. Reached for his shorts —
“Never mind the underwear.”
“Oh.” He handed me the bundle and I gave him the cancer stick. “Hey, thanks. I’ll be back. We just wanted to see if —”
Pop. He vanished. The cancer stick rattled on the ground. It was just a prop, of course. Cancer was even worse now.
They never caught on. Of course, they don’t have much time. That made the fifth this month, from several different centuries.
Time was like a river, yes. Go with the flow, it’s easy. Fight against the current and space-time strips you of everything you’re carrying back — pictures, cancer stick, memories. He would show up not recalling a thing. Just like the thousands of others I have turned into a nifty little sideline.
The past never seemed to catch on. Still, they stimulated interest in those centuries where time jaunters kept hammering against the laws of physics, like demented moths around a light bulb.
I hefted the clothes and wallet. These were in decent condition, grade 0.8 at least. They should fetch a pretty price. Good; I needed to eat soon. Time paid off, after all. A sucker born every minute, and so many, many moments in the rich past.
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine, and a novelist. His best-known
novel is Timescape.
Eating with Integrity
David Berreby
So, how was the big dinner party?
A complete disaster! Geoff and I haven’t spoken since …
Not since Friday?
That’s right. You know, sometimes we joke about divorce when we’re arguing, but this time … it doesn’t feel safe to kid about that. It’s just so silent and grim. I think he thinks I’ve ruined his career.
Look, I’m sure you did your best. It was a lot of pressure. All three of his new colleagues, plus the Big Boss. I’m sure you did everything right.
I thought I had. I checked everyone for allergies. Religious covenants. Lipid and corticosterone metabolism. Medications, immunizations …
Well, you can’t be too careful.
And I social-vetted the menu: everyone checked off everything. And there was nothing to offend anyone. Tempeh-salmon, made by our own ’bot, right here. All ingredients grown sterile, no contact with organic matter or pollutants …
You don’t have to tell me. I know how careful we have to be. How careful you are. No one’s been sick from your place in years, and how many of us can say that?
Thanks. I appreciate that, especially after what’s happened. God, I don’t even want to tell. It’s just so mortifying.
I think you’d better, though.
Sigh. Well, then, from the top. The table is set and the containers are all sealed and ready to be opened, the dining tents are over the chairs …
You used the good ones?
Of course! Pressurized, sterilized, totally safe, near-transparent. The ones we got for our tenth anniversary. So there I am, all ready and Geoff is wandering around resterilizing forks because everything’s perfect and he has nothing to do and then bing! In walks our first guest, who is also the Big Boss, and he’s carrying several things that look like food boxes and I think, uh-oh. Then I think, well, of course, those must be gifts, maybe a floral hologram or something, because it can’t be what I’m afraid it is. It just can’t be!
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