21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century

by David G. Hartwell

“It must have taken you a long time.”

  “Months.”

  “My parents don’t let me have pets.”

  “Neither do mine,” Paul answered. “But anyway, these aren’t pets.”

  “Then what are they?”

  “An experiment.”

  “What kind of experiment?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  • • • •

  Mr. Finley stood at the projector, marking a red ellipse on the clear plastic sheet. Projected on the wall, it looked like a crooked half-smile between the X and Y axis.

  “This represents the number of daughter atoms. And this . . .” He drew the mirror image of the first ellipse. “This is the number of parent atoms.” He placed the marker on the projector and considered the rows of students. “Does anyone know what the point of intersection represents?”

  Darren in the front row raised his hand. “It’s the element’s half-life.”

  “Exactly. In what year was radiometric dating invented?”

  “1906.”

  “By whom?”

  “Rutherford.”

  “What method did he use?”

  “Uranium lead—”

  “No. Wallace, can you tell us?”

  “He measured helium as an intermediate decay product of uranium.”

  “Good, so then who used the uranium-lead method?”

  “That was Boltwood, in 1907.”

  “How were these initial results viewed?”

  “With skepticism.”

  “By whom?”

  “By the evolutionists.”

  “Good.” Mr. Finley turned to Paul. “In what year did Darwin write On the Origin of Species?”

  “1859,” Paul said.

  “Yes, and in what year did Darwin’s theory finally lose the confidence of the larger scientific community?”

  “That was 1932.” Anticipating the next question, Paul continued. “When Kohlhorster invented potassium-argon dating. The new dating method proved the earth wasn’t as old as the evolutionists thought.”

  “And in what year was the theory of evolution finally debunked completely?”

  “1954, when Willard F. Libby invented carbon-14 dating at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel prize in 1960 when he used carbon dating to prove, once and for all, that the Earth was 5,800 years old.”

  • • • •

  Paul wore a white lab coat when he entered the attic. It was one of his father’s old coats, so he had to cut the sleeves to fit his arms. Paul’s father was a doctor, the PhD kind. He was blond and big and successful. He’d met Paul’s mother after grad school while consulting for a Chinese research firm. They had worked on the same projects for a while, but there was never any doubt that Paul’s father was the bright light of the family. The genius, the famous man. He was also crazy.

  Paul’s father liked breaking things. He broke telephones, and he broke walls, and he broke tables. He broke promises not to hit again. One time, he broke bones; and the police were called by the ER physicians who did not believe the story about Paul’s mother falling down the stairs. They did not believe the weeping woman of porcelain who swore her husband had not touched her.

  Paul’s father was a force of nature, a cataclysm as unpredictable as a comet strike or a volcanic eruption. The attic was a good place to hide, and Paul threw himself into his hobby.

  Paul studied his mice as though they were Goodall’s chimps. He documented their social interactions in a green spiral notebook. He found that within the large habitats, they formed packs like wolves, with a dominant male and a dominant female—a structured social hierarchy involving mating privileges, territory, and almost-ritualized displays of submission by males of lower rank. The dominant male bred most of the females, and mice, Paul learned, could kill each other.

  Nature abhors a vacuum, and the mouse populations expanded to fill the new worlds he’d created for them. The babies were born pink and blind, but as their fur came in, Paul began documenting colors in his notebook. There were fawns, blacks, and grays. Occasional agoutis. There were Irish spotted, and banded, and broken marked. In later generations, colors appeared that he hadn’t purchased, and he knew enough about genetics to realize these were recessive genes cropping up.

  Paul was fascinated by the concept of genes, the stable elements through which God provided for the transfer of heritable characteristics from one generation to the next. In school they called it divine transmission.

  Paul did research and found that the pigmentation loci of mice were well-mapped and well-understood. He categorized his population by phenotype and found one mouse, a pale, dark-eyed cream that must have been a triple recessive: bb, dd, ee. But it wasn’t enough to just have them, to observe them, to run the Punnett squares. He wanted to do real science. And because real scientists used microscopes and electronic scales, Paul asked for these things for Christmas.

  Mice, he quickly discovered, did not readily yield themselves to microscopy. They tended to climb down from the stand. The electronic scale, however, proved useful. He weighed every mouse and kept meticulous records. He considered developing his own inbred strain—a line with some combination of distinctive characteristics, but he wasn’t sure what characteristics to look for.

  He was going over his notebook when he saw it. January-17. Not a date, but a mouse—the seventeenth mouse born in January. He went to the cage and opened the door. A flash of sandy fur, and he snatched it up by its tail—a brindle specimen with large ears. There was nothing really special about the mouse. It was made different from the other mice only by the mark in his notebook. Paul looked at the mark, looked at the number he’d written there. Of the more than ninety mice in his notebook, January-17 was, by two full grams, the largest mouse he’d ever weighed.

  • • • •

  In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God’s words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G. That’s not why Paul did it though, to get closer to God. He did it for the simplest reason, because he was curious.

  It was early spring before his father asked him what he spent his time doing in the attic.

  “Just messing around.”

  They were in his father’s car on the way home from piano lessons. “Your mother said you built something up there.”

  Paul fought back a surge of panic. “I built a fort a while ago.”

  “You’re almost twelve now. Aren’t you getting a little old for forts?’

  “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “I don’t want you spending all your time up there.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t want your grades slipping.”

  Paul, who hadn’t gotten a B in two years, said “All right.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence, and Paul explored the walls of his newly shaped reality. Because he knew foreshocks when he felt them.

  He watched his father’s hands on the steering wheel. Though large for his age, like his father, Paul’s features still favored his Asian mother; and he sometimes wondered if that was part of it, this thing between his father and him, this gulf he could not cross. Would his father have treated a freckled, blond son any differently? No, he decided. His father would have been the same. The same force of nature; the same cataclysm. He couldn’t help being what he was.

  Paul watched his father’s hand on the steering wheel, and years later, when he thought of his father, even after everything that happened, that’s how he thought of him. That moment frozen. Driving in the car, big hands on the steering wheel, a quiet moment of foreboding that wasn’t false, but was merely what it was, the best it would ever be between them.

  • • • •

  “What have you done?” There was wonder in John’s voice. Paul had snuck him up to the attic, and now Paul held Bertha up by her tail for John to see. She was a beautiful golden brindle, long whiskers twitching.

  “She’s the most recen
t generation, an F4.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Paul smiled. “She’s kin to herself.”

  “That’s a big mouse.”

  “The biggest yet. Fifty-nine grams, weighed at a hundred days old. The average weight is around forty.”

  Paul put the mouse on John’s hand.

  “What have you been feeding her?” John asked.

  “Same as the other mice. Look at this.” Paul showed him the charts he’d graphed, like Mr. Finley, a gentle upward ellipse between the X and Y axis—the slow upward climb in body weight from one generation to the next.

  “One of my F2s tipped the scales at forty-five grams, so I bred him to the biggest females, and they made more than fifty babies. I weighed them all at a hundred days and picked the biggest four. I bred them and did the same thing the next generation, choosing the heaviest hundred-day weights. I got the same bell-curve distribution—only the bell was shifted slightly to the right. Bertha was the biggest of them all.”

  John looked at Paul in horror. “That works?”

  “Of course it works. It’s the same thing people have been doing with domestic livestock for the last five thousand years.”

  “But this didn’t take you thousands of years.”

  “No. Uh, it kind of surprised me it worked so well. This isn’t even subtle. I mean, look at her, and she’s only an F4. Imagine what an F10 might look like.”

  “That sounds like evolutionism.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s just directional selection. With a diverse enough population, it’s amazing what a little push can do. I mean, when you think about it, I hacked off the bottom ninety-five percent of the bell curve for five generations in a row. Of course the mice got bigger. I probably could have gone the other way if I wanted, made them smaller. There’s one thing that surprised me though, something I only noticed recently.”

  “What?”

  “When I started, at least half of the mice were albino. Now it’s down to about one in ten.”

  “Okay.”

  “I never consciously decided to select against that.”

  “So?”

  “So, when I did culls . . . when I decided which ones to breed, sometimes the weights were about the same, and I’d just pick. I think I just happened to pick one kind more than the other.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “So what if it happens that way in nature?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s like the dinosaurs. Or woolly mammoths, or cavemen. They were here once; we know that because we find their bones. But now they’re gone. God made all life about six thousand years ago, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But some of it isn’t here anymore. Some died out along the way.”

  • • • •

  It happened on a weekend. Bertha was pregnant, obscenely, monstrously. Paul had isolated her in one of the aquariums, an island unto herself, sitting on a table in the middle of the room. A little tissue box sat in the corner of her small glass cage, and Bertha had shredded bits of paper into a comfortable nest in which to give birth to the next generation of goliath mice.

  Paul heard his father’s car pull into the garage. He was home early. Paul considered turning off the attic lights but knew it would only draw his father’s suspicion. Instead he waited, hoping. The garage was strangely quiet—only the ticking of the car’s engine. Paul’s stomach dropped when he heard the creak of his father’s weight on the ladder.

  There was a moment of panic then—a single hunted moment when Paul’s eyes darted for a place to hide the cages. It was ridiculous; there was no place to go.

  “What’s that smell?” his father asked as his head cleared the attic floor. He stopped and looked around. “Oh.”

  And that was all he said at first. That was all he said as he climbed the rest of the way. He stood there like a giant, taking it in. The single bare bulb draped his eyes in shadow. “What’s this?” he said finally. His dead voice turned Paul’s stomach to ice.

  “What’s this?” Louder now, and something changed in his shadow eyes. Paul’s father stomped toward him, above him.

  “What’s this?” The words more shriek than question now, spit flying from his mouth.

  “I, I thought—”

  A big hand shot out and slammed into Paul’s chest, balling his t-shirt into a fist, yanking him off his feet.

  “What the fuck is this? Didn’t I tell you no pets?” The bright light of the family, the famous man.

  “They’re not pets, they’re—”

  “God, it fucking stinks up here. You brought these things into the house? You brought this vermin into the house? Into my house!”

  The arm flexed, sending Paul backward into the cages, toppling one of the tables—wood and mesh crashing to the floor, the squeak of mice and twisted hinges, months and months and months of work.

  His father saw Bertha’s aquarium and grabbed it. He lifted it high over his head—and there was a moment when Paul imagined he could almost see it, almost see Bertha inside, and the babies inside her, countless generations that would never be born. Then his father’s arms came down like a force of nature, like a cataclysm. Paul closed his eyes against exploding glass, and all he could think was, this is how it happens. This is exactly how it happens.

  • • • •

  Paul’s father died the summer after high school. It was sudden, leaving a thousand things unsaid.

  At Stanford Paul double-majored in genetics and anthropology, taking eighteen credit hours a semester. He read transcripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Apocryphal verses; he took classes in Comparative Interpretation and Biblical Philosophy. He experimented with fruit flies and amphioxus and, while still an undergraduate, won a prestigious summer internship working under renowned geneticist Michael Poore.

  Paul sat in classrooms while men in dark suits spun theories about Kibra and T-variants; about microcephalin-1 and haplogroup D. He was taught that researchers had identified structures within a family of proteins called AAA+ that were shown to initiate DNA replication, and he learned these genetic structures were conserved across all forms of life, from men to archaebacteria—the very calling card of the great designer.

  Paul also studied the banned writings. He studied balancing equilibriums and Hardy-Weinburg; but alone at night, walking the dark halls of his own head, it was the trade-offs that fascinated him most. Paul was a young man who understood trade-offs.

  He read about the recently discovered Alzheimer’s gene, APOE4—a gene common throughout much of the world; and he learned theories about how deleterious genes grew to such high frequencies. Paul learned that although APOE4 caused Alzheimer’s, it also protected against the devastating cognitive consequences of early childhood malnutrition. The gene that destroys the mind at seventy, saves it at seven months. He learned that people with sickle cell trait are resistant to malaria; and heterozygotes for cystic fibrosis are less susceptible to cholera; and people with type A blood survived the plague at higher frequencies than other blood types, altering forever, in a single generation, the frequency of blood types in Europe. A process, some said, now being slow-motion mimicked by the gene CKR5 and HIV.

  In his anthropology courses, Paul learned that all humans alive today could trace their ancestry back to Africa, to a time almost six thousand years ago when the whole of human diversity existed within a single small population. And there had been at least two dispersions out of Africa, his professors said, if not more—a genetic bottleneck in support of the Deluvian Flood Theory. But each culture had its own beliefs. Muslims called it Allah. Jews, Yahweh. The science journals were careful not to call it God anymore; but they spoke of an intelligent designer—an architect, lowercase “a.” Though in his heart of hearts, Paul figured it all amounted to the same thing.

  Paul read that they’d scanned the brains of nuns, looking for the God spot, and couldn’t find it. He learned about evolutionism. Although long debunked by legitim
ate science, adherents of evolutionism still existed—their beliefs enjoying near immortality among the fallow fields of pseudo-science, cohabitating the fringe with older belief systems like astrology, phrenology, and acupuncture. Modern evolutionists believed the various dating systems were all incorrect; and they offered an assortment of unscientific explanations for how the isotope tests could all be wrong. In hushed tones, some even spoke of data tampering and conspiracies.

  The evolutionists ignored the accepted interpretation of the geological record. They ignored the miracle of the placenta and the irreducible complexity of the eye.

  During his junior and senior years, Paul studied archaeology. He studied the ancient remains of Homo erectus, and Homo neanderthalensis. He studied the un-Men; he studied afarensis, and Australopithecus, and Pan.

  In the world of archeology, the line between Man and un-Man could be fuzzy—but it was never unimportant. To some scientists, Homo erectus was a race of Man long dead, a withered branch on the tree of humanity. To those more conservative, he wasn’t Man at all; he was other, a hiccup of the creator, an independent creation made from the same toolbox. But that was an extreme viewpoint. Mainstream science, of course, accepted the use of stone tools as the litmus test. Men made stone tools. Soulless beasts didn’t. Of course there were still arguments, even in the mainstream. The fossil KNM ER 1470, found in Kenya, appeared so perfectly balanced between Man and un-Man that a new category had to be invented: near-Man. The arguments could get quite heated, with both sides claiming anthropometric statistics to prove their case.

  Like a benevolent teacher swooping in to stop a playground fight, the science of genetics arrived on the scene. Occupying the exact point of intersection between Paul’s two passions in life—genetics and anthropology—the field of paleometagenomics was born.

  Paul received a bachelor’s degree in May and started a graduate program in September. Two years and an advanced degree later, Westin Genomics flew him to the East Coast for a job interview. Hands were shook over a glossy table.

  Three weeks after that, he was in the field in Tanzania, learning the proprietary techniques of extracting DNA from bones 5,800 years old. Bones from the very dawn of the world.