The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten

by Jonathan Strahan

  “It’s not that simple. You’re making the same mistake as the others,” Clara said.

  “What did the others say, about the story?”

  Belle tried to nuzzle Clara, to draw her back into an embrace, but Clara moved away slightly. There was a tightness in her gut that wouldn’t allow her to look at her lover. “I didn’t mean them,” Clara said. “I meant the other writers. Godwin. All those men. It’s a false equation.”

  “But you sent it to the others, didn’t you? To the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club? What did they say?”

  Clara shook her head, appalled.

  “You didn’t send it to them,” Belle said. “Just to me? Or... perhaps they don’t exist, those others,” she said softly, squeezing the flesh of Clara’s thigh. “Perhaps there’s only me. Perhaps I’m the stowaway in your spaceship to Walden.”

  “Stop it,” Clara said, pushing Belle away. Her rough, insistent touch. “Why are you being like this?”

  “Like what?” Belle said, sliding closer, curling her tail, pushing herself against Clara in a mocking, vulgar way. “I just want to get inside you. Inside your pretty head where all the other women meet.” She began to herd Clara against the wall, to wipe her horn on the floor with a terrible scraping noise.

  Clara told her to leave. She said that if Belle didn’t leave now, then she would go herself. She moved away, stiffened herself. Belle pressed her horn into the ridge between Clara’s shoulder and her neck, pushed the point in with a soft, ugly curse. The same word she sometimes cried out when they were lying together. Then she pulled away, gave Clara a sour and pitying look, and left.

  Clara stayed in the library for some time, wondering what had happened, exactly. What had gone wrong. When she thought about it afterwards – when she had become a solitary wanderer – she decided that Belle had been frightened of what it meant for the love they made to be incapable of producing a future. That was the whole point of love, for Belle, for it to create the possibility of lineage. To gesture towards Walden, when in reality whether they remained in the ship or arrived at some fantastical destination made no difference. What did it mean, to save Alice, when there was no future into which she might travel? Or perhaps Belle had just wanted to humiliate Clara because she was frightened. Or was it all just a part of loving a woman, after all, some ordinary consequence of lying down together?

  A WEEK LATER, there was a knock at the door, and Clara was sure it would be Belle. She had been thinking all week that Belle would call to explain herself, to ask for forgiveness, to say that she had been frightened, or even uncertain, and that the uncertainty had made her cruel. Clara had rehearsed their conversation in her head. She would listen, she had decided, patiently and kindly, though she would not forgive her lover too quickly.

  But when she opened the door it was only her daughter, Alice.

  “Belle sent me a message,” Alice said. “Your Belle. How did she even know my name?”

  “I don’t know,” said Clara.

  She had told Belle about Alice, of course. She had offered up the story of her lost, wild daughter as a kind of intimacy. Or in order to make herself seem more interesting, more strange and unfamiliar than she otherwise might have seemed.

  “She wants to come and talk to me,” Alice said. “What’s the matter with her? What does she want?”

  “We had a fight,” Clara said, wondering if that was true, after all.

  “Does she want to punish you, by talking to me? Or have me convince you to forgive her?”

  Clara shook her head. “She’s not like that,” she said. But she wasn’t sure if it was true.

  “I’m going to meet her at the café,” Alice said. “It’s closed, but Belle says we can sit in the garden and talk. I’ll send you a message afterwards and tell you what happens.”

  Clara tried not to pay too much attention to the time. Several hours passed. The day ended. She sat in the library, not reading the book they were planning to discuss at book club. She turned the pages one at a time, then in batches, going backwards, going forwards. It didn’t seem to matter.

  It was almost morning by the time she decided to walk to Alice’s house. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, but at least the walking would give her something to do.

  As she walked, she tried to remember, and silently recite, the lines of the rhinoceros sutra. Only fragments of the already-fragmented text would come to her. She remembered that there was something about a kovilara tree that has shed its leaves. She could remember that one of the sutras was: Seeing the danger that comes from affection, wander alone like a rhinoceros. And another: Give up your children, and your wives, and your money, wander alone like a rhinoceros.

  She walked down the long drive towards Alice’s house, which was lined on both sides with overgrown black bamboo. There were no lights on in the house. She could see that all the windows were open to let in any cool breeze.

  Clara looked in at the windows and saw that Alice had left the children she cared for alone, and the doors unlocked. None of them woke and saw her looking in at them. Some of the creatures were unfamiliar to her; had they come from other reserves? Other continents? Were they all, like Alice, the last of their kind?

  Clara found an open door at the back of the house and went in, closing it behind her. She lay on the cool stone floor of the living area. She lay still, listening to the snuffling and breathing of the children, until she heard the birds outside the house waking. She was stiff and tired. She got up and opened the front door, looking up the driveway for a sign of her daughter. Nothing.

  She could not quite identify what she was feeling. She was restless, but wanted to be still. She was impatient, but did not want to hear what Belle and Alice had had to say to each other. She longed for the feeling she was already having trouble recalling, of being in the long, cool channel of the library. With light behind her, and light ahead, and this moment, this now, always just a thing she was passing through.

  She went from room to room looking in at the children. How carelessly they slept, with the windows open and the doors unlocked. They lay tangled together, sleeping. So fearless. When had she last slept that way?

  Alice appeared at the door behind her, looking in at the sleeping babies. “I told you they were beautiful,” she said.

  Clara did not answer. She could barely remember the conversations they had had, so many years ago, about Alice’s decision not even to try to have children of her own. She tried to pretend that Alice had not come home yet, and that as the children woke – they were starting to turn and itch in their sleep – they would come to Clara, climbing up and over her. She would prepare breakfast for them, and watch them play on the wide back lawn.

  “She didn’t say anything, really,” Alice said. “We had a bottle of wine and Belle said that she wasn’t sure what had happened between you, but that she hoped it would be alright again soon. She said she thought it was too late now, for any of us, to hold grudges or fall in love.”

  She said. “Mum, listen. It’s nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. One day, you’ll forget her name. We’ll have to call her That Woman From The Café. We’ll laugh about it.”

  Then, “Mum, what are you going to do? There’s nothing you can do. It’s done.”

  One of the children came sleepily out of their room and leant against Alice, then clambered up onto her back. Clara smiled at the way Alice moved to accommodate the child; at how natural and easy it seemed for her to do so.

  “I have to go,” Clara said. She felt disconnected from all of it, now that she had seen the house with Alice in it, and all the children sleeping so quietly together. All these years there had been a kind of wire connecting her to Alice. A twinging in her ribs whenever she thought of her, and what her future might contain, and now it was gone. Things were exactly as they were, exactly as they were supposed to be.

  Clara never saw Belle, or Alice, again. She left Alice’s house and went home, walked through the rooms in which
she had spent her life and did not recognise a thing. Even the library, with its walls of unread books, seemed unfamiliar.

  So she left the house and started wandering, alone, like a rhinoceros.

  The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club were due to meet in a few months’ time, and if she reached them, that was fine. And if not, that would be fine as well. She got a powerful sense of pleasure out of walking away. She was pleased with herself, with the controlled and deliberate way in which she managed it. She scraped Belle out of herself, all those tangled and uncertain emotions, and found that the hollow that was left behind was a good and simple thing.

  She saw that she had been living in a false equation: she had believed, like Belle and all the others, like Janet and her husband, that love and futurity were connected. That without a future, love was no longer possible; without Walden as their destination, there was no reason to jettison the hatchling, and no reason not to.

  But love does not require a future in order to exist. And the future exists, whether you furnish it with love or not. The second rhinoceros sutra, after all, was clear: Renouncing violence for all living beings, harming not even a one, you would not wish for offspring, so how a companion? Wander alone like a rhinoceros.

  Clara turns onto an unfamiliar path. She has passed, finally, beyond the reserve. She does not think about the future, or love, as she walks through the waist-high grass, with its smell of summer and heat. Past the kovilara trees, past the view of the mountain washed in late afternoon light. She doesn’t think about Belle, or Alice, or her husband. The path is shaded, but warm. She can see where it disappears ahead of her.

  As she wanders, she thinks about being in the library late in the day. The light from the forest lying complicated, shifting patterns on the floor. And herself, passing through, from one end of the story to the other.

  ORAL ARGUMENT

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is the author of nineteen novels and eight collections of short fiction. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, he is best known for the award-winning Mars trilogy – Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Robinson, science fiction’s foremost utopian writer, has published important novels on ecological, cultural and political themes including the Orange Country trilogy, the Science in the Capital trilogy, Antarctica, The Years of Rice and Salt, Galileo’s Dream, 2312, and Shaman. His most recent books are Green Earth (a revision of Science in the Capital) and Aurora, a major generation starship novel. Robinson lives in Davis, California, with his wife of more than 30 years, environmental chemist Lisa Howland Nowell, and their two sons.

  MR. CHIEF JUSTICE, and may it please the court:

  Thank you, it’s good to be here. A special hearing convened by you is very special. I’m happy to answer your questions.

  Well, yes, the subpoena. But I’m happy too.

  No, I did not represent them in those years. And now I’m only serving as their spokesperson while their legal standing is being clarified.

  No, I don’t know where they are. But if I did, that would be a matter of attorney-client privilege.

  Spokesperson confidentiality, yes. Like protecting my sources. That’s what I meant to say.

  I do know what contempt of court means, yes. I brought my toothbrush.

  No, I’m happy to answer any questions you have. Really.

  Okay, sure. I met them when they were finishing their postdocs at MIT. I should clarify that they had no affiliation with MIT at the time they did the work in question, as MIT has proved.

  Their project involved identifying and removing problem parts in the biobricks catalog. After MIT shifted the catalog to the iGEM website –

  No, I don’t think repudiated is the right word for that. MIT might have been worried about legal repercussions, but I don’t know. I came in later.

  Anyway, after that change of host, the iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts grew much larger, and the parties for whom I am speaking found that there were questionable parts in the catalog, for instance a luminous bacteria that emitted lased light which unfortunately burned retinas, or –

  Sorry. I’ll try to be brief. While going through the biobricks catalog, my former clients found a seldom-used plasmid backbone called DragonSpineXXL, much longer than typical plasmid backbones. The DragonSpine’s designers apparently had hoped to enable bigger assemblages, but they encountered in vitro problems, including one that they called spina bifida –

  It’s a metaphor. I’m not a biochemist, I’m doing the best I can here. But to get to the point at your level of patience and understanding, as you so aptly put it, our bodies obtain their energy when the food we eat gets oxidized, producing ATP inside our mitochondria. ATP is the energy source used by all our cells. In plants, on the other hand, light striking the chloroplasts in leaves powers the production of ATP. Despite the different processes, the ATP is the same – Yes, I too was surprised. But all life forms on Earth share 938 base pairs of DNA, so it makes sense that there are some family resemblances. So, it occurred to my almost clients that –

  They consisted of a microbiologist, a systems biologist, a synthetic biologist, and an MD specializing in biochemistry and nutritional disorders –

  Yes, no doubt a good joke about the four of them walking into a bar could be concocted. But instead of that they found biobricks in the catalog that could be combined to make a synthetic chloroplast. They felt it would be possible to attach this synthetic chloroplast to a DragonSpine, and still have room to attach another assemblage they concocted, one where fascia cells formed hollow fibroblasts –

  Sorry. Fascia are bands of connective tissue. The bands are stretchy, and they’re all over inside us. They kind of hold our bodies together. Like your feet, have you ever had plantar fasciitis? No? You’re lucky. I guess you sit down on the job more than I do. Anyway, fascia consist of wavy bands of collagen blobs called fibroblasts. So, my acquaintances loaded DragonSpines with fibroblasts containing chloroplasts –

  Yes, I know it’s confusing. You are not biologists, I know. It’s easy to remember that. What it comes down to is that my sometime clients, using nothing but synthetic parts found in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, created photosynthesizing human cells.

  Wait, excuse me, what you say is not correct. They didn’t want to patent it. They knew that the registry was an open source collection.

  I don’t think they suspected that the idea itself would be patentable. The law there is ambiguous, I think that can be said. You might have judged their idea a business method only, you’ve done that before. An idea for a dating service, a new way to teach a class, a new way to replenish your energy – they’re the same, right? They’re ideas, and you can’t patent an idea, as you ruled in Bilski and elsewhere.

  Yes, there were some physical parts in this case, but the parts in question were all open source. If you type out your idea on a computer, that doesn’t make it patentable just because a computer was involved, isn’t that how you put it in Bilski?

  Quoting precedent is not usually characterized as sarcasm, Your Honor. The patent law is broadly written, and your decisions concerning it haven’t helped to narrow or clarify it. Some people call that body of precedent kind of ad hoc-ish and confusing, not to say small-minded. Whatever keeps business going best seems to be the main principle, but the situation is tricky. It’s like you’ve been playing Twister and by now you’ve tied yourselves into all kinds of contortions. Cirque du Soleil may come knocking any day now –

  Sorry. Anyway the patent situation wasn’t a problem for my erstwhile clients, because they didn’t want a patent. At that point they were focused on the problem so many new biotechnologies encounter, which is how to get the new product safely into human bodies. It couldn’t be ingested or injected into the bloodstream, because it had to end up near the skin to do its work. And it couldn’t trigger the immune system –

  Yes, in retrospect the solution looks perfectly obvious, even to you, as you put it so aptl
y. The people I am speaking for contacted a leading firm in the dermapigmentation industry. Yes, tattooing. That methodology introduces liquids to precisely the layer of dermis best suited for the optimal functioning of the new product. And once introduced, the stuff stays there, as is well known. But my putative clients found that the modern tattoo needle systems adequate to their requirements were all patent protected. So they entered negotiations with the company that owned the patent entitled ‘Tattoo Needle Tip Equipped with Capillary Ink Reservoir, Tattoo Tube Having Handle and Said Tattoo Needle Tip, and Assembly of Said Tattoo Needle Tip and Tattoo Needle.’

  This device was modified by the parties involved to inject my future clients’ chloroplast-fibroblasts into human skin, in the manner of an ordinary tattoo. When experiments showed the product worked in vivo, the two groups formed an LLC called SunSkin, and applied for a new patent for the modified needle and ink. This patent was granted.

  I don’t know if the patent office consulted the FDA.

  No, it’s not right to say the nature of the tattoo ink was obscured in the application. Every biobrick was identified by its label, as the records show.

  Yes, most of the tattoos are green. Although chlorophyll is not always green. It can be red, or even black. But usually it’s green, as you have observed.

  No wait, excuse me for interrupting, there were no deaths. That was the hair follicle group. Thermoencephalitis, yes. It was a bad idea.

  No, I’m not saying that no one with SunSkin tattoos ever died. I’m saying that no deaths suffered by those customers was proved to be caused by the tattoos. I refer you to that entire body of criminal and civil law.

  Of course some of them did in fact die. No one ever claimed photosynthesis would make you immortal.

  I do not speak for SunSkin, which in any case went bankrupt in the first year of the crash. My association is with my potential clients only.