The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  “An invasive species is native to Earth. It’s just not in the ecological niche it evolved for.”

  “Dr. Jenner?” the Ambassador repeated. “Are you all right?”

  Ryan, his passion about purple loosestrife a family joke. Ryan, interested in the Embassy, as Connie was not, asking questions about the facilities and the layout while Marianne cuddled her new grandson. Ryan, important enough in this terrorist organization to have selected its emblem from a sheet of drawings in a kitschy bathroom.

  Ryan, her son.

  “Dr. Jenner, I must insist—”

  “Yes. Yes. I recognize that thing. I know who—what group—you should look for.” Her heart shattered.

  Smith studied her through the glass. The large, calm eyes—Noah’s eyes now, except for the color—held compassion.

  “Someone you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We shall not look for them.”

  The words didn’t process. “Not . . . not look for them?”

  “No. It will not happen again. The embassy has been sealed and the Terrans removed except for a handful of scientists directly involved in immunology, all of whom have chosen to stay, and all of whom we trust.”

  “But—”

  “And, of course, those of our clan members who wish to stay.”

  Marianne stared at Smith through the glass, the impermeable barrier. Never had he seemed more alien. Why would this intelligent man believe that just because a handful of Terrans shared a mitochondrial haplotype with him, they could not be terrorists, too? Was it a cultural blind spot, similar to the Terran millennia-long belief in the divine right of kings? Was it some form of perception, the product of divergent evolution that let his brain perceive things she could not? Or did he simply have in place such heavy surveillance and protective devices that people like Noah, sequestered in a different part of the Embassy, presented no threat?

  Then the rest of what he had said struck her. “Immunologists?”

  “Time is short, Dr. Jenner. The spore cloud will envelop Earth in merely a few months. We must perform intensive tests on you and the other infected people.”

  “Other?”

  “Dr. Ahmed Rafat and two lab technicians, Penelope Hodgson and Robert Chavez. They are, of course, all volunteers. They will be joining you soon in quarantine.”

  Rage tore through her, all the rage held back, pent up, about Evan’s death, about Ryan’s deceit, about Noah’s defection. “Why not any of your own people? No, don’t tell me that you’re all too valuable—so are we! Why only Terrans? If we take this risk, why don’t you? And what the fuck happens when the cloud does hit? Do you take off two days before, keeping yourselves safe and leaving Earth to die? You know very well that there is no chance of developing a real vaccine in the time left, let alone manufacturing and distributing it! What then? How can you just—”

  But Ambassador Smith was already moving away from her, behind the shatterproof glass. The ceiling said, without inflection or emotion, “I am sorry.”

  Noah

  Noah stood in the middle of the circle of Terrans. Fifty, sixty—they had all come aboard the Embassy in the last few days, as time shortened. Not all were L7s; some were families of clan brothers, and these too had been welcomed, since they’d had had the defiance to ask for asylum when the directives said explicitly that only L7s would be taken in. There was something wrong with this system, Noah thought, but he did not think hard about what it might be.

  The room, large and bare, was in neither the World quarters nor the now-sealed part of the Embassy where the Terran scientists worked. The few scientists left aboard, anyway. The room’s air, gravity, and light were all Terran, and Noah again wore an energy suit. He could see its faint shimmer along his arms as he raised them in welcome. He hadn’t realized how much he was going to hate having to don the suit again.

  “I am Noah,” he said.

  The people pressed against the walls of the bare room or huddled in small groups or sat as close to Noah as they could, cross-legged on the hard floor. They looked terrified or hopeful or defiant or already grieving for what might be lost. They all, even the ones who, like Kayla and Isabelle, had been here for a while, expected to die if they were left behind on Earth.

  “I will be your leader and teacher. But first, I will explain the choice you must all make, now. You can choose to leave with the people of World, when we return to the home world. Or you can stay here, on Earth.”

  “To die!” someone shouted. “Some choice!”

  Noah found the shouter: a young man standing close behind him, fists clenched at his side. He wore ripped jeans, a pin through his eyebrow, and a scowl. Noah felt the shock of recognition that had only thrilled through him twice before: with the nurse on the Upper West Side of New York and when he’d met Mee^hao¡. Not even Llaa^moh¡, who was a geneticist, could explain that shock, although she seemed to think it had to do with certain genetically determined pathways in Noah’s L7 brain coupled with the faint electromagnetic field surrounding every human skull. She was fascinated by it.

  Lisa Guiterrez, Noah remembered, had also attributed it to neurological pathways, changed by his heavy use of sugarcane.

  Noah said to the scowler, “What is your name?”

  He said, “Why?”

  “I’d like to know it. We are clan brothers.”

  “I’m not your fucking brother. I’m here because it’s my only option to not die.”

  A child on its mother’s lap started to cry. People murmured to each other, most not taking their eyes off Noah. Waiting, to see what Noah did about the young man. Answer him? Let it go? Have him put off the Embassy?

  Noah knew it would not take much to ignite these desperate people into attacking him, the alien-looking stand-in for the Worlders they had no way to reach.

  He said gently to the young man, to all of them, to his absent and injured and courageous mother: “I’m going to explain your real choices. Please listen.”

  Marianne

  Something was wrong.

  One day passed, then another, then another. Marianne did not get sick. Nor did Ahmed Rafat and Penny Hodgson. Robbie Chavez did, but not very.

  The lead immunologist left aboard the Embassy, Harrison Rice, stood with Ann Potter in front of Marianne’s glass quarantine cage, known as a “slammer.” He was updating Marianne on the latest lab reports. In identical slammers, two across a narrow corridor and one beside her, Marianne could see the three other infected people. The rooms had been created, as if by alchemy, by a Deneb that Marianne had not seen before—presumably an engineer of some unknowable building methods. Ahmed stood close to his glass, listening. Penny was asleep. Robbie, his face filmed with sweat, lay in bed, listening.

  Ann Potter said, “You’re not initially viremic but—”

  “What does that mean?” Marianne interrupted.

  Dr. Rice answered. He was a big, bluff Canadian who looked more like a truck driver who hunted moose than like a Nobel Prize winner. In his sixties, still strong as a mountain, he had worked with Ebola, Marburg, Lassa fever, and Nipah, both in the field and in the lab.

  He said, “It means lab tests show that as with Namechek and Lloyd, the spores were detectable in the first samples taken from your respiratory tract. So the virus should be present in your bloodstream and so have access to the rest of your body. However, we can’t find it. Well, that can happen. Viruses are elusive. But as far as we can tell, you aren’t developing antibodies against the virus, as the infected mice did. That may mean that we just haven’t isolated the antibodies yet. Or that your body doesn’t consider the virus a foreign invader, which seems unlikely. Or that in humans but not in mice, the virus has dived into an organ to multiply until its offspring burst out again. Malaria does that. Or that the virus samples in the lab, grown artificially, have mutated into harmlessness, differing from their wild cousins in the approaching cloud. Or it’s possible that none of us know what the hell we’re doing wit
h this crazy pathogen.”

  Marianne said, “What do the Denebs think?” Supposedly Rice was co-lead with Deneb Scientist Jones.

  He said, his anger palpable even through the glass wall of the slammer, “I have no idea what they think. None of us have seen any of them.”

  “Not seen them?”

  “No. We share all our data and samples, of course. Half of the samples go into an airlock for them, and the data over the LAN. But all we get in return is a thank-you onscreen. Maybe they’re not making progress, either, but at least they could tell us what they haven’t discovered.”

  “Do we know . . . this may sound weird, but do we know that they’re still here at all? Is it possible they all left Earth already?” Noah.

  He said, “It’s possible, I suppose. We have no news from the outside world, of course, so it’s possible they pre-recorded all those thank-yous, blew up New York, and took off for the stars. But I don’t think so. If they had, they’d have least unsealed us from this floating plastic bubble. Which, incidentally, has become completely opaque, even on the observation deck.”

  Marianne hadn’t known there was an observation deck. She and Evan had not found it during their one exploration of the Embassy.

  Dr. Rice continued. “Your cells are not making an interferon response, either. That’s a small protein molecule that can be produced in any cell in response to the presence of viral nucleic acid. You’re not making it.”

  “Which means . . . ”

  “Probably it means that there is no viral nucleic acid in your cells.”

  “Are Robbie’s cells making interferon?”

  “Yes. Also antibodies. Plus immune responses like—Ann, what does your chart on Chavez show for this morning?”

  Ann said, “Fever of a hundred and one, not at all dangerous. Chest congestion, also not at dangerous levels, some sinus involvement. He has the equivalent of mild bronchitis.”

  Marianne said, “But why is Robbie sick when the rest of us aren’t?”

  “Ah,” Harrison Rice said, and for the first time she heard the trace of a Canadian accent, “that’s the big question, isn’t it? In immunology, it always is. Sometimes genetic differences between infected hosts are the critical piece of the puzzle in understanding why an identical virus causes serious disease or death in one individual—or one group—and little reaction or none at all in other people. Is Robbie sick and you not because of your respective genes? We don’t know.”

  “But you can use Robbie’s antibodies to maybe develop a vaccine?”

  He didn’t answer. She knew the second the words left her mouth how stupid they were. Rice might have antibodies, but he had no time. None of them had enough time.

  Yet they all worked on, as if they did. Because that’s what humans did.

  Instead of answering her question, he said, “I need more samples, Marianne.”

  “Yes.”

  Fifteen minutes later he entered her slammer, dressed in full space suit and sounding as if speaking through a vacuum cleaner. “Blood samples plus a tissue biopsy, just lie back down and hold still, please . . . ”

  During a previous visit, he had told her of an old joke among immunologists working with lethal diseases: “The first person to isolate a virus in the lab by getting infected is a hero. The second is a fool.” Well, that made Marianne a fool. So be it.

  She said to Rice, “And the aliens haven’t . . . Ow!”

  “Baby.” He withdrew the biopsy needle and slapped a bandage over the site.

  She tried again. “And the aliens haven’t commented at all on Robbie’s diagnosis? Not a word?”

  “Not a word.”

  Marianne frowned. “Something isn’t right here.”

  “No,” Rice said, bagging his samples, “it certainly is not.”

  Noah

  Nothing, Noah thought, had ever felt more right, not in his entire life.

  He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at Llaa^moh¡. She still slept, her naked body and long legs tangled in the light blanket made of some substance he could not name. Her wiry dark hair smelled of something like cinnamon, although it probably wasn’t. The blanket smelled of sex.

  He knew now why he had not felt the same shock of recognition at their first meeting that he had felt with Mee^hao¡ and the unnamed New York nurse and surly young Tony Schrupp. After the World geneticists had done their work, Mee^hao¡ had explained it to him. Noah felt profound relief. He and Llaa^moh¡ shared a mitochondrial DNA group, but not a nuclear DNA one. They were not too genetically close to mate.

  Of course, they could have had sex anyway; World had early, and without cultural shame or religious prejudice, discovered birth control. But for the first time in his life, Noah did not want just sex. He wanted to mate.

  The miracle was that she did, too. Initially he feared that for her it was mere novelty: be the first Worlder to sleep with a Terran! But it was not. Just yesterday they had signed a five-year mating contract, followed by a lovely ceremony in the garden to which every single Worlder had come. Noah had never known exactly how many were aboard the Embassy; now he did. They had all danced with him, every single one, and also with her. Mee^hao¡ himself had pierced their right ears and hung from them the wedding silver, shaped like stylized versions of the small flowers that had once, very long ago, been the real thing.

  “Is better,” Noah had said in his accented, still clumsy World. “We want not bunch of dead vegetation dangle from our ears.” At least, that’s what he hoped he’d said. Everyone had laughed.

  Noah reached out one finger to stroke Llaa^moh¡’s hair. A miracle, yes. A whole skyful of miracles, but none as much as this: Now he knew who he was and where he belonged and what he was going to do with his life.

  His only regret was that his mother had not been at the mating ceremony. And—yes, forgiveness was in order here!—Elizabeth and Ryan, too. They had disparaged him his entire life and he would never see them again, but they were still his first family. Just not the one that any longer mattered.

  Llaa^moh¡ stirred, woke, and reached for him.

  Marianne

  Robbie Chavez, recovered from Respirovirus sporii, gave so many blood and tissue samples that he joked he’d lost ten pounds without dieting. It wasn’t much of a joke, but everyone laughed. Some of the laughter held hysteria.

  Twenty-two people left aboard the Embassy. Why, Marianne sometimes wondered, had these twenty-two chosen to stay and work until the last possible second? Because the odds of finding anything that would affect the coming die-off were very low. They all knew that. Yet here they were, knowing they would die in this fantastically equipped, cut-off-from-the-world lab instead of with their families. Didn’t any of them have families? Why were they still here?

  Why was she?

  No one discussed this. They discussed only work, which went on eighteen hours a day. Brief breaks for microwaved meals from the freezer. Briefer—not in actuality, but that’s how it felt—for sleep.

  The four people exposed to R. sporii worked outside the slammers; maintaining biosafety no longer seemed important. No one else became ill. Marianne relearned lab procedures she had not performed since grad school. Theoretical evolutionary biologists did not work as immunologists. She did now.

  Every day, the team sent samples data to the Denebs. Every day, the Denebs gave thanks, and nothing else.

  In July, eight-and-a-half months after they’d first been given the spores to work with, the scientists finally succeeded in growing the virus in a culture. There was a celebration of sorts. Harrison Rice produced a hoarded bottle of champagne.

  “We’ll be too drunk to work,” Marianne joked. She’d come to admire Harrison’s unflagging cheerfulness.

  “On one twenty-second of one bottle?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, maybe not everyone drinks.”

  Almost no one did. Marianne, Harrison, and Robbie Chavez drank the bottle. Culturing the virus, which should have been a victory, se
emed to turn the irritable more irritable, the dour more dour. The tiny triumph underlined how little they had actually achieved. People began to turn strange. The unrelenting work, broken sleep, and constant tension created neuroses.

  Penny Hodgson turned compulsive about the autoclave: It must be loaded just so, in just this order, and only odd numbers of tubes could be placed in the rack at one time. She flew into a rage when she discovered eight tubes, or twelve.

  William Parker, Nobel Laureate in medicine, began to hum as he worked. Eighteen hours a day of humming. If told to stop, he did, and then unknowingly resumed a few minutes later. He could not carry a tune, and he liked lugubrious country and western tunes.

  Marianne began to notice feet. Every few seconds, she glanced at the feet of others in the lab, checking that they still had them. Harrison’s work boots, as if he tramped the forests of Hudson’s Bay. Mark Wu’s black oxfords. Penny’s Nikes—did she think she’d be going for a run? Robbie’s sandals. Ann’s—

  Stop it, Marianne!

  She couldn’t.

  They stopped sending samples and data to the Denebs and held their collective breath, waiting to see what would happen. Nothing did.

  Workboots, Oxfords, Nikes, sandals—

  “I think,” Harrison said, “that I’ve found something.”

  It was an unfamiliar protein in Marianne’s blood. Did it have anything to do with the virus? They didn’t know. Feverishly they set to work culturing it, sequencing it, photographing it, looking forward in everyone else. The protein was all they had.

  It was August.

  The outside world, with which they had no contact, had ceased to exist for them, even as they raced to save it.

  Workboots—

  Oxfords—

  Sandals—

  Noah

  Rain fell in the garden. Noah tilted his head to the artificial sky. He loved rainy afternoons, even if this was not really rain, nor afternoon. Soon he would experience the real thing.

  Llaa^moh¡ came toward him through the dark, lush leaves open as welcoming hands. Noah was surprised; these important days she rarely left the lab. Too much to do.