Year's Best SF 17

by David G. Hartwell

  After a course of further indifferent years, word arrived in Vale that the Godfather of Selder had perished in his own turn. He had died of sickness in a war camp, plague and war being much the same thing. There were certain claims that he had been poisoned.

  After some further tiresome passage of years, the reviving realm of Selder began to distribute traders, bankers, and ambassadors. They were a newer and younger-spirited people. They were better dressed and brighter-eyed. They wrote everything down. They observed new opportunities in places where nothing had happened for ages. They had grand plans for those places, and the ability to carry them out.

  These new men of Selder seemed to revel in being a hundred things at once. Not just poets, but also architects. Not just artists, but also engineers. Not just bankers, but gourmands and art collectors. Even their women were astonishing.

  Julian had no desire to return to the damp glassy shadows of Selder. He had come to realize that a Sustainable City that could never forget its past could become an object of terror to simpler people. Also, he had grown white-haired and old.

  But he was not allowed to ignore a velvet invitation—a polite command, really—from Godfather Magnanimous Jef the First. Practical Jeffrey had outlasted his city’s woes with the stolid grace that was his trademark. Jef’s shrewd rise to power had cost him a brother and two bodyguards, but once in command, he never set his neatly shod foot wrong.

  In his reign, men and women breathed a new air of magnificence, refinement, and vivacity. Troubles that would have crushed a lesser folk were made jest of, simply taken in stride.

  Men even claimed that the climate was improving. This was delusional, for nothing would ever make the climate any better. But the climate within the hearts of men was better. Men were clearly and simply a better kind of man.

  Julian had never written a book, for he had always said that his students were his books. And with the passage of years, Julian’s students had indeed become his books. They were erudite like books, complex like books, long-lasting like books. His students had become great men. Their generation was accomplishing feats that the ancients themselves had never dreamt of. Air wells, ice-ponds and aqueducts. Glass palaces of colored light. Peak-flashing heliographs and giant projection machines. Carnivals and pageants. Among these men, greatness was common as dirt.

  It was required, somehow, that the teacher of such men should himself be a great man. So the great men delighted in honoring Julian. He was housed in a room in one of their palaces, and stuffed with creature comforts like a fattened capon. His only duty was to play the sage for his successors, to cackle wise inanities for them. To sing the praises of the golden present, and make the darkest secrets of a dark age more tenaciously obscure.

  Futurity could never allow the past to betray it again.

  Home Sweet Bi’Ome

  PAT MACEWEN

  Pat MacEwen is a physical anthropologist by trade with more than a decade’ s worth of experience as a crime scene investigator. “My central field of research, however, is genocide,” she says. “I’ve also worked on war crimes investigations in the former Republic of Yugoslavia (now the independent nation of Kosovo) for the International Criminal Tribunal. I’m deeply interested in global warming, which I think is likely to spawn more genocides, and I’m something of a science geek.” She has published short fiction in several genres: fantasy, sf, horror, and mystery. A new sf novelet, “Taking the Low Road,” is out in 2012. Her forensic/urban-fantasy trilogy, Rough Magic, is forthcoming, with the first volume, The Fallen, out in 2012. Likewise, a YA series about a crippled boy who can’t talk to people but finds out he can talk to dragons. The first volume in that series, The Dragon’s Kiss, is also out in 2012.

  “Home Sweet Bi’Ome” was published in F&SF. It is an amusing story about future allergies, biotech solutions, and more. MacEwen says in an interview, “as for the story itself, I dreamed it. A friend of mine has a daughter living in a stripped-down cabin on the slopes of Mt. Shasta because she has hyperallergic syndrome and can’t tolerate the synthetic side of modern life … my subconscious made hay with it.”

  I woke up feeling itchy, and started to scratch my face before I’d quite gotten my eyes open.

  Oh, no. As soon as I was conscious, I balled my hand up and made a fist. It’s a trained reflex, one I’ve acquired through long practice. You can’t scratch an itch with a fist. You can rub hard, but your knuckles don’t set off the histamine complexes, making them worse than they already are. You won’t tear open tender skin and start off all those nasty secondary infections.

  I sat up and balled the other fist. I was itching, all right. All over. But I didn’t have a rash. Wonder of wonders, when I took a look at myself, my skin was a nice even pink everywhere. There were faint welts where I’d begun to scratch, but nothing more.

  What on Earth?

  As I examined myself, the itch intensified. It traveled. Into my mouth. My ears. My … well, never mind where. Let’s just say that all of my mucosal tissues were staging a riot, and for no apparent reason.

  Not knowing what else to do, I got up. Tea, I told myself. Chamomile. Or white. White tea is soothing, and there’s nothing in it that sets me off. I get mine from a guy in Sri Lanka, who grows the stuff without pesticides. He packs the tea in plain old-fashioned wax paper, inside a tin. No plastics, no dyes or preservatives. No excess packaging, covered with ink and shellac and God knows what else.

  I padded through the house, careful to keep my hands off my hide. Just walking, however, set off a fresh round of itching, this time on the balls of my feet. Couldn’t quite keep myself from doing a circular Sufi dance across the coarse black fur that serves as a carpet, letting the friction of skin against wiry hair turn the prickling heat into definite inflammation.

  The cold enamel tooth-tiles on the kitchen floor calmed it down some but there was no denying the fact that I was having some kind of allergic reaction. To what? There was no nylon in the house. No plastic of any kind. No paint. No fragrance. No synthetic anything. That’s the whole point of a Bi’Ome. Everything is totally organic and completely familiar to me, or at least to my immune system.

  Nervously, I checked my fingers. When I get the hives, it shows up first in my hands. I get ugly red blotches (what doctors call urticaria). Then my fingers swell up like stubby pink sausages. My lips, too. I start looking like a Ubangi, except there’s no clay saucer stretching my mouth out of shape. Just oedema. Good old Mother Nature. And when it gets bad, well, my throat closes up. Or I pass out. Then my throat closes up. Where had all my EpiPens gone?

  I reached out, grabbed the edge of a pouch underneath the nearest kitchen counter, and felt my fingers slide across half a dozen small hard bumps. Like Braille, only bigger.

  I looked down. The rash was an odd one, the bumps looking weirdly transparent and delicate rather than small, hard, and red. Whatever. It speckled half the cabinets, the walls, the ceiling, and most of the pouches I use for drawers.

  I spat, “Son of a bug-eater!”

  It wasn’t me that had the rash. It was my house.

  It took them five hours to send me an EMT—three solid hours to find the clown and another two to get his sorry ass up the mountain. You know how long that is, when you’re fighting a desperate need to scratch where it itches?

  Then, when he did show up, he didn’t even have a truck. What he had was all these piercings and implants and crap. He even had a LoJack locked into his skull right behind his left ear. Swear to God, the guy looked like a Borg who’d mated with a mess of fishing tackle. Worse than that, he had a uniform on, a polyester mix. I could tell as soon as the tech climbed off his freakin’ motorcycle. Worse than that, even. Aftershave.

  Oh my God. One whiff and my throat closed up.

  Not that he noticed. The goof came rambling up to my front door just like some demented encyclopedia salesman, all smiling, eyebrow-beringed, and happy-faced.

  I met him with a loaded crossbow.

  Seeing tha
t, he stopped dead. Both hands flew up, aerating armpits awash with some kind of deodorant. Fresh Scent, Extra Dry something or other. I started wheezing, fell to my knees, and found myself aiming at the point directly in front of me, which happened to be his crotch.

  He definitely noticed that.

  “Hey, take it easy.” He turned his hips sideways, acting like he didn’t know he’d just threatened my life.

  “Don’t you come any closer,” I gasped.

  “I won’t! But you … you called for a tech, right?”

  I stared up at him over the length of the quarrel. “You’re it? Where’s Chen? Or Fredo? Or Saylah?”

  I got a sheepish smile this time, along with a shrug. “All the regular guys are tied up. If you wanna wait—”

  “No! I can’t!”

  “Okay, then.” He gathered up some confidence and pulled out a business card, which I did not even think of accepting. After a moment’s embarrassment, he let his hand drop. He introduced himself. “I’m Rey Fox. R-E-Y. Short for Reynard. It’s kind of a joke. See, Moms was French.”

  My crossbow wobbled a bit but I did my best to keep it centered on his private parts while I checked his company ID card. Reynard, indeed.

  “ ‘Fox’ Fox?” I couldn’t help asking, though I didn’t have much air to spare.

  The doofus nodded, his smile spreading out like my getting the stupid joke made everything okay between us.

  “You see the signs?” I demanded. Hack. Wheeze.

  “Uh … signs?”

  I rolled my eyes, which were nearly as itchy as everything else. “The No Trespassing signs. I have them posted all over the place.”

  “Oh. Um, I didn’t look. On the bike, I get kinda … well. …” He gave me that same silly shrug again. “Curvy mountain roads and me, I kind of get into it.”

  Great. Just great.

  “Well, what about your work order? Didn’t that say anything?”

  “About what?”

  Oh, Lord. I started coughing up a lung. I guess it sounded pretty bad. He peered at me, and in the process he took a step nearer.

  I nearly shot him, right then and there.

  “About hyperallergic syndrome!” I wheezed, as soon as the coughing jag eased up. Waving the point of the quarrel at three of the signs, I read them for him. “Do not approach if you are wearing any kind of perfume or fragrance. NO PLASTIC! NO NYLON!”

  His dark eyes flicked back and forth.

  “Why d’you think I live up here on the mountain?” I asked him. “Why do you think I bought a Bi’Ome? You idiot! I’m allergic. To practically everything.”

  “But I—”

  “You’re wearing plastic,” I told him. “If I let you into my house, if I touch your shirt, I could go into anaphylactic shock.” Pant. Wheeze. “I could die.”

  His mouth fell open. His lower lip flapped in the breeze, amid a faint jangle of the six chromed rings looping around its middle reaches.

  “All that stinkum on you—Good God, I’m that close to choking on that shit alone. From here. What on Earth were you thinking?”

  He shook his head, the lower lip still flapping. “They, uh, they said it was an emergency.”

  “It is, you moron! Just look at my house!”

  Only then did I let go of the crossbow with one hand and wave at the pink skin/wall behind me, the rosy expanse that would normally be turning golden green this time of year, as the sunshine of early spring spurred tanning as well as some serious photosynthetic power generation. Instead, the whole eastern side was covered with spots. I could barely restrain myself from reaching out to touch them, to rub them … to scratch.

  Again, he took a step forward. I brought the crossbow back up to bear on his family jewels.

  He raised a hand, Indian powwow style, but he didn’t say, “How.” Instead, he quietly told me, “Ma’am, I need a closer look.”

  Ma’am. That made me feel older than shit, on top of everything else. But I was the one who’d yelled for help, wasn’t I? Sourly, congested and starting to wheeze again, I backed off and closed the door. Then I watched through the corneal window set into it while Reynard the Fox peered and poked at my wall. While he fetched a small med kit out of the bike’s saddlebags and took swabs off the affected surfaces. While he stuck a giant hypodermic into my siding. That gave me a twinge, so I turned away rather than watch him take his biopsy samples. When he was done, he knocked on the door and backed away a careful ten paces.

  “How long will it take?” I demanded as soon as I’d opened the door, still on the defensive although I’d left the crossbow sitting on the kitchen table.

  “I’m not done yet. I need to see what’s going on inside.”

  “The hell you say!”

  He won, of course. But he also went back to the bike and pulled on a cleansuit—a pure white cotton and silk blend with breathing apparatus, a full hood, gloves and booties, the outfit he should have been wearing before he came anywhere near me.

  Grudgingly, still trying hard not to inhale when a breeze wafted past him, I let Fox enter.

  By now, the whole living room, ceiling and walls and a patch of the floor, was adorned with the rash. The inflamed bit of flooring intrigued him the most. He stroked the wiry black hair with a gloved hand, and smiled when nearly half the room developed goose bumps in response. “Living carpet,” he said. “That’s so cool. But it’s not scalp hair, is it? Too dark.” He glanced up at my dirty-blond mane.

  I was already breathless and frozen in place by my own sudden onslaught of gooseflesh. But then, catching up with his question, I flushed a hot scarlet that would have put a full-blown case of strep A to shame. Wheezing, wide-eyed, I sputtered, “No! No, it’s, uh, pubic. It stands up better … to wear and tear.”

  To my surprise, he did not bust a gut over that one. Just nodded at me, looking owlish. “Yeah, that makes sense. As long as your hair growth is dense enough.”

  Density, I thought, just might be the problem here. But not with the carpet.

  “Is that itching too?” he asked, pointing at a hair-free slightly swollen strip of bare floor that served as a threshold, a lip between the inner and outer surfaces of the house.

  Just thinking about it set off a furious prickling in the corresponding reaches of my anatomy. “Yes!” I snapped, forbidding my hands to go anywhere near the relevant body part. “What is it? And why is it making me itch? I don’t have the freakin’ rash!”

  “A sympathetic reaction. Your nervous system is picking up on the symptoms affecting your better half.”

  “My what?”

  “The house.”

  I planted my fists on my hips. “I think you’d better explain yourself, mister. I’m not married to this house.”

  He grinned. “Oh, no. Your relationship is way closer than that.” Then, as he took in my unhappy reaction, he sobered up. “Look, you do know that this house was grown from your own stem cells, right?”

  I nodded.

  “We had to tweak the growth and development genes pretty hard. But underneath all that … the house is your twin. The DNA is the same. The nervous system—all the same. So, yeah, there have been some cases where Bi’Omes and their, uh, sources, have turned out to be just a little too sympatico.”

  “That was not disclosed,” I told him. “Not when I bought mine.”

  “Well, there’s still a big hairy argument. …” He broke off, flushing, trying real hard not to look at the carpet while his brain caught up with his mouth. “Uh, begging your pardon, ma’am, no pun intended—”

  Impatience swept over me like a tidal wave. “Get on with it!” I nearly shouted. “What argument?!”

  “Um, well, about whether the side effects are, ah, real, or, uh, psychosomatic.”

  I glared at him, then barely managed to whisper the word, I was so stinking mad. “Psychosomatic?”

  He nodded, bobbing his head up and down like a fifties-style hula girl off somebody’s dashboard.

  “Are you aware that hyper
allergic syndrome has, itself, been called psychosomatic?”

  “Yeah, sure. I mean, after all, you people do have … a lot of … neuroses.”

  It was like watching a train wreck in slow motion—him realizing what he was about to say, and yet not quite able to stop himself.

  “ ‘You people,’ ” I repeated, feeling dangerous. “Neuroses?”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said.

  “Didn’t you? Listen, I think you’d better leave.”

  He didn’t argue, just gathered up all his stuff and walked out the door. I slammed it behind him, threw the lock, and went to check on my supply of oatmeal soap. A soothing bath might calm my skin down enough to let me think.

  I was lolling in the tub, enjoying some blessed relief from the itching while I used a deep-breathing exercise to try and get my lungs back under control. I was just getting into the zone when I heard a knock on the front door. For Christ’s sake. He’d only been gone half an hour, so now what?

  Pulling a robe on, I padded out to the foyer to confront Fox. “Yes?” I inquired.

  He just stood there, staring at me while his faceplate steamed up.

  “What?”

  “Uh. …”

  Whoops. I hadn’t bothered to towel off all of the oatmeal. The robe was stuck to me here and there. I pulled it tighter, which was the wrong thing to do. Made his eyes bug out.

  I snapped my fingers in front of his faceplate. “Hey! Fox! What … Do … You … Want?”

  “Ma’am, if I tell you that … I’m afraid you’re gonna shoot me.”

  Which is as close to a compliment as I’ve had in the last seven years, up here on the mountain. Yeah, so I glanced at the crossbow. I’ll admit that, but just for a second. Then I sighed. “I promise. I will not shoot you. Okay?”

  Bozo nodded, but needed another half-minute or so to get back to the point. “Um, sorry to bother you.”

  “Which you did because … ?”

  “Oh. I, uh, I got a prelim diagnosis. On the house.”