The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Less than chaff in a breeze.

  Smith didn’t reply. In the silence, I could hear the monotonous click of beetles, from all directions. Bogotá, high on a plateau, had been almost chilly. Here, it was as sweltering as Washington itself.

  I glanced at Smith; she said, “You’re right, of course.” But she didn’t sound convinced at all.

  * * *

  In the morning, over breakfast, I reassured Smith that I’d found everything to be in order. She smiled warily. I think she suspected that I wasn’t what I claimed to be, but that didn’t really matter. I’d listened carefully to the gossip of the scientists, technicians and soldiers; the name Guillermo Largo hadn’t been mentioned once. If they didn’t even know about Largo, they could hardly have guessed my real purpose.

  It was just after nine when I departed. On the ground, sheets of light, delicate as auroral displays, sliced through the trees around the compound. When we emerged above the canopy, it was like stepping from a mist-shrouded dawn into the brilliance of noon.

  The pilot, begrudgingly, took a detour over the centre of El Nido. “We’re in Peruvian air space, now,” he boasted. “You want to spark a diplomatic incident?” He seemed to find the possibility attractive.

  “No. But fly lower.”

  “There’s nothing to see. You can’t even see the river.”

  “Lower.” The broccoli grew larger, then suddenly snapped into focus; all that undifferentiated green turned into individual branches, solid and specific. It was curiously shocking, like looking at some dull familiar object through a microscope, and seeing its strange particularity revealed.

  I reached over and broke the pilot’s neck. He hissed through his teeth, surprised. A shudder passed through me, a mixture of fear and a twinge of remorse. The autopilot kicked in and kept us hovering; it took me two minutes to unstrap the man’s body, drag him into the cargo hold, and take his seat.

  I unscrewed the instrument panel and patched in a new chip. The digital log being beamed via satellite to an air force base to the north would show that we’d descended rapidly, out of control.

  The truth wasn’t much different. At a hundred metres, I hit a branch and snapped a blade on the front rotor; the computers compensated valiantly, modelling and remodelling the situation, trimming the active surfaces of the surviving blades—and no doubt doing fine for each five-second interval between bone-shaking impacts and further damage. The sound absorbers went berserk, slipping in and out of phase with the motors, blasting the jungle with pulses of intensified noise.

  Fifty metres up, I went into a slow spin, weirdly smooth, showing me the thickening canopy as if in a leisurely cinematic pan. At 20 metres, free fall. Air bags inflated around me, blocking off the view. I closed my eyes, redundantly, and gritted my teeth. Fragments of prayers spun in my head—the detritus of childhood, afterimages burned into my brain, meaningless but unerasable. I thought: If I die, the jungle will claim me. I am flesh, I am chaff. Nothing will remain to be judged. By the time I recalled that this wasn’t true jungle at all, I was no longer falling.

  The airbags promptly deflated. I opened my eyes. There was water all around, flooded forest. A panel of the roof between the rotors blew off gently with a hiss like the dying pilot’s last breath, and then drifted down like a slowly crashing kite, turning muddy silver, green and brown as it snatched at the colours around it.

  The life raft had oars, provisions, flares—and a radio beacon. I cut the beacon loose and left it in the wreckage. I moved the pilot back into his seat, just as the water started flooding in to bury him.

  Then I set off down the river.

  * * *

  El Nido had divided a once-navigable stretch of the Rio Putumayo into a bewildering maze. Sluggish channels of brown water snaked between freshly raised islands of soil, covered in palms and rubber plants, and the inundated banks where the oldest trees—chocolate-coloured hardwood species (predating the geneticists, but not necessarily unmodified)—soared above the undergrowth and out of sight.

  The lymph nodes in my neck and groin pulsed with heat, savage but reassuring; my modified immune system was dealing with El Nido’s viral onslaught by generating thousands of new killer T-cell clones en masse, rather than waiting for a cautious antigen-mediated response. A few weeks in this state, and the chances were that a self-directed clone would slip through the elimination process and burn me up with a novel autoimmune disease—but I didn’t plan on staying that long.

  Fish disturbed the murky water, rising up to snatch surface-dwelling insects or floating seed pods. In the distance, the thick coils of an anaconda slid from an overhanging branch and slipped languidly into the water. Between the rubber plants, hummingbirds hovered in the maws of violet orchids. So far as I knew, none of these creatures had been tampered with; they had gone on inhabiting the prosthetic forest as if nothing had changed.

  I took a stick of chewing gum from my pocket, rich in cyclamates, and slowly roused one of my own sets of White Knights. The stink of heat and decaying vegetation seemed to fade, as certain olfactory pathways in my brain were numbed, and others sensitized—a kind of inner filter coming into play, enabling any signal from the newly acquired receptors in my nasal membranes to rise above all the other, distracting odours of the jungle.

  Suddenly, I could smell the dead pilot on my hands and clothes, the lingering taint of his sweat and faeces—and the pheromones of spider monkeys in the branches around me, pungent and distinctive as urine. As a rehearsal, I followed the trail for 15 minutes, paddling the raft in the direction of the freshest scent, until I was finally rewarded with chirps of alarm and a glimpse of two skinny grey-brown shapes vanishing into the foliage ahead.

  My own scent was camouflaged; symbionts in my sweat glands were digesting all the characteristic molecules. There were long-term side-effects from the bacteria, though, and the most recent intelligence suggested that El Nido’s inhabitants didn’t bother with them. There was a chance, of course, that Largo had been paranoid enough to bring his own.

  I stared after the retreating monkeys, and wondered when I’d catch my first whiff of another living human. Even an illiterate peasant who’d fled the violence to the north would have valuable knowledge of the state of play between the factions in here, and some kind of crude mental map of the landscape.

  The raft began to whistle gently, air escaping from one sealed compartment. I rolled into the water and submerged completely. A metre down, I couldn’t see my own hands. I waited and listened, but all I could hear was the soft plop of fish breaking the surface. No rock could have holed the plastic of the raft; it had to have been a bullet.

  I floated in the cool milky silence. The water would conceal my body heat, and I’d have no need to exhale for ten minutes. The question was whether to risk raising a wake by swimming away from the raft, or to wait it out.

  Something brushed my cheek, sharp and thin. I ignored it. It happened again. It didn’t feel like a fish, or anything living. A third time, and I seized the object as it fluttered past. It was a piece of plastic a few centimetres wide. I felt around the rim; the edge was sharp in places, soft and yielding in others. Then the fragment broke in two in my hand.

  I swam a few metres away, then surfaced cautiously. The life raft was decaying, the plastic peeling away into the water like skin in acid. The polymer was meant to be cross-linked beyond any chance of biodegradation—but obviously some strain of El Nido bacteria had found a way.

  I floated on my back, breathing deeply to purge myself of carbon dioxide, contemplating the prospect of completing the mission on foot. The canopy above seemed to waver, as if in a heat haze, which made no sense. My limbs grew curiously warm and heavy. It occurred to me to wonder exactly what I might be smelling, if I hadn’t shut down 90 per cent of my olfactory range. I thought: If I’d bred bacteria able to digest a substance foreign to El Nido, what else would I want them to do when they chanced upon such a meal? Incapacitate whoever had brought it in? Broadcast news of the
event with a biochemical signal?

  I could smell the sharp odours of half a dozen sweat-drenched people when they arrived, but all I could do was lie in the water and let them fish me out.

  * * *

  After we left the river, I was carried on a stretcher, blindfolded and bound. No one talked within earshot. I might have judged the pace we set by the rhythm of my bearers’ footsteps, or guessed the direction in which we travelled by hints of sunlight on the side of my face … but in the waking dream induced by the bacterial toxins, the harder I struggled to interpret those cues, the more lost and confused I became.

  At one point, when the party rested, someone squatted beside me—and waved a scanning device over my body? That guess was confirmed by the pinpricks of heat where the polymer transponders had been implanted. Passive devices—but their resonant echo in a satellite microwave burst would have been distinctive. The scanner found, and fried, them all.

  Late in the afternoon, they removed the blindfold. Certain that I was totally disoriented? Certain that I’d never escape? Or maybe just to rub my face in El Nido’s triumphant architecture.

  The approach was a hidden path through swampland; I kept looking down to see my captors’ boots not quite vanishing into the mud, while a dry, apparently secure stretch of high ground nearby was avoided.

  Closer in, the dense thorned bushes blocking the way seemed to yield for us; the chewing gum had worn off enough for me to tell that we moved in a cloud of a sweet, ester-like compound. I couldn’t see whether it was being sprayed into the air from a cylinder—or emitted bodily by a member of the party with symbionts in his skin, or lungs, or intestine.

  The village emerged almost imperceptibly out of the impostor jungle. The ground—I could feel it—became, step by step, unnaturally firm and level. The arrangement of trees grew subtly ordered—defining no linear avenues, but increasingly wrong nonetheless. Then I started glimpsing “fortuitous” clearings to the left and right, containing “natural” wooden buildings, or shiny biopolymer sheds.

  I was lowered to the ground outside one of the sheds. A man I hadn’t seen before leaned over me, wiry and unshaven, holding up a gleaming hunting knife. He looked to me like the archetype of human as animal, human as predator, human as unself-conscious killer.

  He said, “Friend, this is where we drain out all of your blood.” He grinned and squatted down. I almost passed out from the stench of my own fear, as the glut overwhelmed the symbionts. He cut my hands free, adding, “And then put it all back in again.” He slid one arm under me, around my ribs, raised me up from the stretcher, and carried me into the building.

  * * *

  Guillermo Largo said, “Forgive me if I don’t shake your hand. I think we’ve almost cleaned you out, but I don’t want to risk physical contact in case there’s enough of a residue of the virus to make your own hyped-up immune system turn on you.”

  He was an unprepossessing, sad-eyed man; thin, short, slightly balding. I stepped up to the wooden bars between us and stretched my hand out towards him. “Make contact any time you like. I never carried a virus. Do you think I believe your propaganda?”

  He shrugged, unconcerned. “It would have killed you, not me—although I’m sure it was meant for both of us. It may have been keyed to my genotype, but you carried far too much of it not to have been caught up in the response to my presence. That’s history, though, not worth arguing about.”

  I didn’t actually believe that he was lying; a virus to dispose of both of us made perfect sense. I even felt a begrudging respect for the Company, for the way I’d been used—there was a savage, unsentimental honesty to it—but it didn’t seem politic to reveal that to Largo.

  I said, “If you believe that I pose no risk to you now, though, why don’t you come back with me? You’re still considered valuable. One moment of weakness, one bad decision, doesn’t have to mean the end of your career. Your employers are very pragmatic people; they won’t want to punish you. They’ll just need to watch you a little more closely in future. Their problem, not yours; you won’t even notice the difference.”

  Largo didn’t seem to be listening, but then he looked straight at me and smiled. “Do you know what Victor Hugo said about Colombia’s first constitution? He said it was written for a country of angels. It only lasted 23 years—and on the next attempt, the politicians lowered their sights. Considerably.” He turned away, and started pacing back and forth in front of the bars. Two Mestizo peasants with automatic weapons stood by the door, looking on impassively. Both incessantly chewed what looked to me like ordinary coca leaves; there was something almost reassuring about their loyalty to tradition.

  My cell was clean and well furnished, right down to the kind of bioreactor toilet that was all the rage in Beverly Hills. My captors had treated me impeccably, so far, but I had a feeling that Largo was planning something unpleasant. Handing me over to the Mother barons? I still didn’t know what deal he’d done, what he’d sold them in exchange for a piece of El Nido and a few dozen bodyguards. Let alone why he thought this was better than an apartment in Bethesda and a hundred grand a year.

  I said, “What do you think you’re going to do, if you stay here? Build your own country for angels? Grow your own bioengineered utopia?”

  “Utopia?” Largo stopped pacing, and flashed his crooked smile again. “No. How can there ever be a utopia? There is no right way to live, which we’ve simply failed to stumble upon. There is no set of rules, there is no system, there is no formula. Why should there be? Short of the existence of a creator—and a perverse one, at that—why should there be some blueprint for perfection, just waiting to be discovered?”

  I said, “You’re right. In the end, all we can do is be true to our nature. See through the veneer of civilization and hypocritical morality, and accept the real forces which shape us.”

  Largo burst out laughing. I actually felt my face burn at his response—if only because I’d misread him, and failed to get him on side; not because he was laughing at the one thing I believed in.

  He said, “Do you know what I was working on, back in the States?”

  “No. Does it matter?” The less I knew, the better my chances of living.

  Largo told me anyway. “I was looking for a way to render mature neurons embryonic. To switch them back into a less differentiated state, enabling them to behave the way they do in the foetal brain: migrating from site to site, forming new connections. Supposedly as a treatment for dementia and stroke … although the work was being funded by people who saw it as the first step towards viral weapons able to rewire parts of the brain. I doubt that the results could ever have been very sophisticated—no viruses for imposing political ideologies—but all kinds of disabling or docile behaviour might have been coded into a relatively small package.”

  “And you sold that to the cartels? So they can hold whole cities to ransom with it, next time one of their leaders is arrested? To save them the trouble of assassinating judges and politicians?”

  Largo said mildly, “I sold it to the cartels, but not as a weapon. No infectious military version exists. Even the prototypes—which merely regress selected neurons, but make no programmed changes—are far too cumbersome and fragile to survive at large. And there are other technical problems. There’s not much reproductive advantage for a virus in carrying out elaborate, highly specific modifications to its host’s brain; unleashed on a real human population, mutants which simply ditched all of that irrelevant shit would soon predominate.”

  “Then…?”

  “I sold it to the cartels as a product. Or rather, I combined it with their own biggest seller, and handed over the finished hybrid. A new kind of Mother.”

  “Which does what?” He had me hooked, even if I was digging my own grave.

  “Which turns a subset of the neurons in the brain into something like White Knights. Just as mobile, just as flexible. Far better at establishing tight new synapses, though, rather than just flooding the interneural space
with a chosen substance. And not controlled by dietary additives; controlled by molecules they secrete themselves. Controlled by each other.”

  That made no sense to me. “Existing neurons become mobile? Existing brain structures … melt? You’ve made a version of Mother which turns people’s brains to mush—and you expect them to pay for that?”

  “Not mush. Everything’s part of a tight feedback loop: the firing of these altered neurons influences the range of molecules they secrete—which in turn, controls the rewiring of nearby synapses. Vital regulatory centres and motor neurons are left untouched, of course. And it takes a strong signal to shift the Grey Knights; they don’t respond to every random whim. You need at least an hour or two without distractions before you can have a significant effect on any brain structure.

  “It’s not altogether different from the way ordinary neurons end up encoding learned behaviour and memories—only faster, more flexible … and much more widespread. There are parts of the brain which haven’t changed in 100,000 years, which can be remodelled completely in half a day.”

  He paused, and regarded me amiably. The sweat on the back of my neck went cold.

  “You’ve used the virus—?”

  “Of course. That’s why I created it. For myself. That’s why I came here in the first place.”

  “For do-it-yourself neurosurgery? Why not just slip a screwdriver under one eyeball and poke it around until the urge went away?” I felt physically sick. “At least … cocaine and heroin—and even White Knights—exploited natural receptors, natural pathways. You’ve taken a structure which evolution has honed over millions of years, and—”

  Largo was greatly amused, but this time he refrained from laughing in my face. He said gently, “For most people, navigating their own psyche is like wandering in circles through a maze. That’s what evolution has bequeathed us: a miserable, confusing prison. And the only thing crude drugs like cocaine or heroin or alcohol ever did was build short cuts to a few dead ends—or, like LSD, coat the walls of the maze with mirrors. And all that White Knights ever did was package the same effects differently.