The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “But I want to get out of here,” I pleaded.

  “Listen to me, daughter. I could show them the crib sheet and explain it to them, but then they would know the code, and that is a terrifying possibility. There are people who have tried to design illnesses that attack only Jews or only blacks, but so far they have failed. The reason why they have failed is that there is no serological marker for black or Jewish blood. Now we stupid Muslims, and I count myself among the fools, have identified ourselves. In my blood is a code that says that I am a Muslim, not just by birth, but by active faith. I have marked myself. I might as well walk into a neo-Nazi rally wearing a Star of David.

  “Maybe I am just a pessimist,” he continued. “Maybe no one will ever design an anti-Muslim virus, but it is now technically possible. The longer it takes the dhimmis to find out how, the better.”

  I looked up at my father. He had called himself a fool. “Da, I thought you were smart!”

  “Most of the time, darling. But sometimes faith means you have to do the dumb thing.”

  “I don’t want to be dumb,” I said.

  Da laughed. “You know you can choose whatever you want to be. But there is a small hope I have for you. To do it you would need to be very, very smart.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I want you to grow up to be smart enough to figure out how to stop the illnesses I’m talking about. Mark my words, racial plagues will come one day, unless someone can stop them.”

  “Do you think I could?”

  Da looked at me with utter conviction. “I have never doubted it.”

  Da’s leukaemia recurred a few years later. The chemotherapy had failed to cure him after all, although it had given him seven good years: just long enough to see me to adulthood, and enrolled in genetics. I tried to figure out a way to cure Da, but I was only a freshman. I understood less than half the words in my textbooks. The best I could do was hold his hand as he slowly died.

  It was then that I finally understood what he meant when he said that sometimes it was important not to be smart. At the climax of our haj we had gone around the Kaabah seven times, moving in a human whirlpool. It made no sense at all intellectually. Going around and around a white temple in a throng of strangers was about as pointless a thing as you could possibly do, and yet I still remember the event as one of the most moving in my life. For a brief moment I felt a part of a greater community, not just of Muslims, but of the Universe. With that last ritual, Da and I became haji and hajjah, and it felt wonderful.

  But I could not put aside my thoughts the way Da could. I had to be smart. Da had asked me to be smart. And when he died, after four months and two failed chemo cycles, I no longer believed in Allah. I wanted to maintain my faith, as much as for my father as for me, but my heart was empty.

  The event that finally tipped me, although I did not even realize it until much later, was seeing his blood in a sample tube. The oncology nurse had drawn 8 mls from his central line, then rolled the sample tube end over end to mix the blood with the anticoagulant. I saw the blood darken in the tube as it deoxygenated, and I thought about the blood cells in there. The white cells contained the suras of the Qur’an, but they also carried the broken code that turned them into cancer cells.

  Da had once overcome leukaemia years before. The doctors told me it was very rare to have a relapse after seven years. And this relapse seemed to be more aggressive than the first one. The tests, they told me, indicated this was a new mutation.

  Mutation: a change in genetic code. Mutagen: an agent that promotes mutation.

  Bloodwriting, by definition, was mutagenic. Da had injected one hundred and fourteen suras into his own DNA. The designer had been very careful to make sure that the bloodwriting virus inserted itself somewhere safe so it would not disrupt a tumour suppressor gene or switch on an oncogene – but that was for normal people. Da’s DNA was already damaged by leukemia and chemotherapy. The virus had written a new code over the top, and I believe the new code switched his leukaemia back on.

  The Qur’an had spoken to his blood, and said: “He it is Who created you from dust, then from a small lifegerm, then from a clot, then He brings you forth as a child, then that you may attain your maturity, then that you may be old – and of you there are some who are caused to die before – and that you may reach an appointed term, and that you may understand./ He it is who gives life and brings death, so when He decrees an affair, He only says to it: Be, and it is.”

  I never forgave Allah for saying “Be!” to my father’s leukaemia.

  An educated, intelligent biologist, Da must have suspected that the Qur’an had killed him. Still, he never missed a prayer until the day he died. My own faith was not so strong. It shattered like fine china on concrete. Disbelief is the only possible revenge for omnipotence.

  An infidel I was by then, but I had made a promise to my father, and for my postdoc I solved the bloodwriting problem. He would have been proud.

  I abandoned the crib sheet. In my scheme the codons were assigned randomly to letters. Rather than preordaining TAT to mean zen in Arabic or “k” in English, I designed a process that shuffled the letters into a new configuration every time. Because there are 64 codons, with three {stop} marks and eight blanks, that comes to about 5 × 1083 or 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000 combinations. No one could design a virus specific to the Qur’an suras any more. The dhimmi bastards would need to design a different virus for every Muslim on the face of the Earth. The faith of my father was safe to bloodwrite.

  In my own blood I have written the things important to me. There is a picture of my family, a picture of my wedding, and a picture of my parents from when they were both alive. Pictures can be encoded just as easily as text.

  There is some text: Crick and Watson’s original paper describing the double-helix of DNA, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I also transcribed Cassius’s words from Julius Caesar:

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

  But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

  For the memory of my father, I included a Muslim parable, a sunnah story about Mohammed: One day, a group of farmers asked Mohammed for guidance on improving their crop. Mohammed told the farmers not to pollinate their date trees. The farmers recognized Mohammed as a wise man, and did as he said. That year, however, none of the trees bore any dates. The farmers were angry, and they returned to Mohammed demanding an explanation. Mohammed heard their complaints, then pointed out that he was a religious man, not a farmer, and his wisdom could not be expected to encompass the sum of human learning. He said, “You know your worldly business better.”

  It is my favourite parable from Islam, and is as important in its way as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

  At the end of my insert, I included a quote from the dhimmi Albert Einstein, recorded the year after the atomic bombing of Japan.

  He said, “The release of atom power has changed everything but our way of thinking,” then added, “The solution of this problem lies in the heart of humankind.”

  I have paraphrased that last sentence into the essence of my new faith. No God was ever so succinct.

  My artificial intron reads:

  8 words, 45 codons, 135 base pairs that say:

  CTA AGC GAC GAA TGT AGT CAT TAC GGA AGC TAA CAT CAG TGT TAC TAA GAA AGT TGT TAA CAG TGT AGC GAC GAA TGT GAC GAA AAA AGG AGC TGT CAT GAG TGT GAC GGA CAA AAA CAG TAT TAA CAG AAC TGC

  The solution lies in the heart of humankind.

  I whisper it to my children every night.

  HATCHING THE PHOENIX

  Frederik Pohl

  A seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF, Frederik Pohl has been one of the genre’s major shaping forces – as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist – for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the Ga
laxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he has won Nebula and Hugo Awards several times (making him the only person ever to have won the Hugo both as editor and as writer), as well as the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth – such as The Space Merchants, Wolfbane, and Gladiator-at-Law – and many solo novels, including Man Plus, The Coming of the Quantum Cats, A Plague of Pythons, Slave Ship, Jem, The World at the End of Time, and Mining the Oort. Among his many collections are The Gold at the Starbow’s End, The Years of the City, Critical Mass (in collaboration with Kornbluth), In the Problem Pit, Pohlstars, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. He also wrote a nonfiction book in collaboration with the late Isaac Asimov, Our Angry Earth, and an autobiography, The Way the Future Was. His most recent books are the novels O Pioneer!, The Siege of Eternity, and The Far Shore of Time. Coming up soon is a new nonfiction book, Chasing Science.

  Pohl’s most famous book is probably Gateway, a book which won both the Nebula and the Hugo, and which is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the ’70s. It’s also the book in which he introduced the Heechee, a race of enigmatic and (seemingly) long-vanished aliens whose discarded technology enables humanity to begin the exploration of the Galaxy – a series that Pohl would return to several times throughout the rest of the ’80s and into the ’90s, with sequels such as Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Heechee Rendezvous, The Annals of the Heechee, and The Gateway Trip.

  Occasionally, Pohl writes about the Heechee in shorter format as well. There were two Heechee stories published this year, for instance, including the intriguing novella that follows, in which he takes us far across the galaxy and deep into the past to show us that, no matter how alien the setting, some things don’t change – alas!

  CHAPTER I

  WE WERE ONLY about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab supernova. I wouldn’t even have noticed it, but my shipmind, Hypatia, is programmed to notice things that might interest me. So she asked me if I wanted to take a look at it, and I did.

  Of course I’d already seen the star blow up two or three times in simulations, but as a flesh-and-blood human being I like reality better than simulations – most of the time, anyway. Hypatia had already turned on the Heechee screen, but it showed nothing other than the pebbly grey blur that the Heechee use. Hypatia can read those things, but I can’t, so she changed the phase for me.

  What I was seeing then was a field of stars, looking exactly like any other field of stars to me. It’s a lack in me, I’m sure, but as far as I’m concerned every star looks like all the other stars in the sky, at least until you get close enough to it to see it as a sun. So I had to ask her, “Which one is it?”

  She said, “You can’t see it yet. We don’t have that much magnification. But keep your eyes open. Wait a moment. Another moment. Now, there it is.”

  She didn’t have to say that. I could see it for myself. Suddenly a point of light emerged and got brighter, and brighter still, until it outshone everything else on the screen. It actually made me squint. “It happens pretty fast,” I said.

  “Well, not really that fast, Klara. Our vector velocity, relative to the star, is quite a lot faster than light, so we’re speeding things up. Also, we’re catching up with the wavefront, so we’re seeing it all in reverse. It’ll be gone soon.”

  And a moment later it was. Just as the star was brightest of all, it unexploded itself. It became a simple star again, so unremarkable that I couldn’t even pick it out. Its planets were unscorched again, their populations, if any, not yet whiffed into plasma. “All right,” I said, somewhat impressed but not enough to want Hypatia to know it, “turn the screen off and let’s get back to work.”

  Hypatia sniffed – she has built herself a whole repertoire of human behaviours that I had never had programmed into her. She said darkly, “We’d better, if we want to be able to pay all the bills for this thing. Do you have any idea what this is costing?”

  Of course, she wasn’t serious about that. I have problems, but being able to pay my bills isn’t one of them.

  I wasn’t always this solvent. When I was a kid on that chunk of burned-out hell they call the planet Venus, driving an airbody around its baked, bleak surface for the tourists all day and trying not to spend any of my pay all night, what I wanted most was to have money. I wasn’t hoping for a whole lot of money. I just wanted enough money so that I could afford Full Medical and a place to live that didn’t stink of rancid seafood. I wasn’t dreaming on any vast scale.

  It didn’t work out that way, though. I never did have exactly that much money. First I had none at all and no real hopes of ever getting any. Then I had much, much more than that, and I found out something about having a lot of money. When you have the kind of money that’s spelled M*O*N*E*Y, it’s like having a kitten in the house. The money wants you to play with it. You can try to leave it alone, but if you do it’ll be crawling into your lap and nibbling at your chin for attention. You don’t have to give in to what the money wants. You can just push it away and go about your business, but then God knows what mischief it’ll get into if you do, and anyway then where’s the fun of having it?

  So most of the way out to the PhoenixCorp site, Hypatia and I played with my money. That is, I played with it while Hypatia kept score. She remembers what I own better than I do – that’s her nature, being the sort of task she was designed to do – and she’s always full of suggestions about what investments I should dump or hold or what new ventures I should get into.

  The key word there is “suggestions”. I don’t have to do what Hypatia says. Sometimes I don’t. As a general rule I follow Hypatia’s suggestions about four times out of five. The fifth time I do something different, just to let her know that I’m the one who makes the decisions here. I know that’s not smart, and it generally costs me money when I do. But that’s all right. I have plenty to spare.

  There’s a limit to how long I’m willing to go on tickling the money’s tummy, though. When I had just about reached that point, Hypatia put down her pointer and waved the graphics displays away. She had made herself optically visible to humour me, because I like to see the person I’m talking to, wearing her fifth-century robes and coronet of rough-cut rubies and all, and she gave me an inquiring look. “Ready to take a little break, Klara?” she asked. “Do you want something to eat?”

  Well, I was, and I did. She knew that perfectly well. She’s continually monitoring my body, because that’s one of the other tasks she’s designed to do, but I like to keep my free will going there, too. “Actually,” I said, “I’d rather have a drink. How are we doing for time?”

  “Right on schedule, Klara. We’ll be there in ten hours or so.” She didn’t move – that is, her simulation didn’t move – but I could hear the clink of ice going into a glass in the galley. “I’ve been accessing the PhoenixCorp shipmind. If you want to see what’s going on . . . ?”

  “Do it,” I said, but she was already doing it. She waved again – pure theatre, of course, but Hypatia’s full of that – and we got a new set of graphics. As the little serving cart rolled in and stopped just by my right hand, we were looking through PhoenixCorp’s own visuals, and what we were looking at was a dish-shaped metal spiderweb, with little things crawling across it. I could form no precise picture of its size, because there was nothing in the space around it to compare it with. But I didn’t have to. I knew it was big.

  “Have one for yourself,” I said, lifting my glass.

  She gave me that patient, exasperated look and let it pass. Sometimes she does simulate having a simulated drink with me while I have a real one, but this time she was in her schoolteacher mode. “As you can see, Klara,” she informed me, “the shipment of optical mirror pieces has arrived, and the drones are putting them in place on the parabolic dish. They’ll be gett
ing first light from the planet in an hour or so, but I don’t think you’ll care about seeing it. The resolution will be poor until they get everything put together; that should take about eighteen hours. Then we should have optimal resolution to observe the planet.”

  “For four days,” I said, taking a pull at my glass.

  She gave me a different look – still the schoolteacher, but now a schoolteacher putting up with a particularly annoying student. “Hey, Klara. You knew there wouldn’t be much time. It wasn’t my idea to come all the way out here anyway. We could have watched the whole thing from your island.”

  I swallowed the rest of my nightcap and stood up. “That’s not how I wanted to do it,” I told her. “The trouble with you simulations is that you don’t appreciate what reality is like. Wake me up an hour before we get there.”

  And I headed for my stateroom, with my big and round and unoccupied bed. I didn’t want to chat with Hypatia just then. The main reason I had kept her busy giving me financial advice so long was that it prevented her from giving me advice on the thing she was always trying to talk me into, or that one other big thing that I really needed to make up my mind about, and couldn’t.

  The cart with my black coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice – make that quote “fresh-squeezed” unquote orange juice, but Hypatia was too good at her job for me to be able to tell the difference – was right by my bed when she woke me up. “Ninety minutes to linkup,” she said cheerily, “and a very good morning to you. Shall I start your shower?”

  I said, “Um.” Ninety minutes is not a second too long for me to sit and swallow coffee, staring into space, before I have to do anything as energetic as getting into a shower. But then I looked into the wall mirror by the bed, didn’t like what I saw, and decided I’d better spruce myself up a little bit.

  I was never what you’d call a pretty woman. My eyebrows were a lot too heavy, for one thing. Once or twice over the years I’d had the damn things thinned down to fashion-model proportions, just to see if it would help any. It didn’t. I’d even messed around with my bone structure, more cheekbones, less jaw, to try to look a little less masculine. It just made me look weak-faced. For a couple of years I’d gone blonde, then tried redhead once but checked it out and made them change it back before I left the beauty parlour. They were all mistakes. They didn’t work. Whenever I looked at myself, whatever the cosmetologists and the medical fixer-uppers had done, I could still see the old Gelle-Klara Moynlin hiding there behind all the trim. So screw it. For the last little while I’d gone natural.