The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  At the top of the cliff grows a large yew tree. You can see it very clearly. It has a short horizontal trunk, and contorted limbs perhaps eighteen inches thick curving out over the drop as if they had just that moment stopped moving. When you reach it you will be safe. But at this stage on a climb, the top of anything is an empty hypothesis. You look up: it might as well be the other side of the Atlantic. All that air is burning away below you like a fuse. Suddenly you’re moving anyway. Excitement has short-circuited the normal connections between intention and action. Where you look, you go. No effort seems to be involved. It’s like falling upwards. It’s like that moment when you first understood how to swim, or ride a bike. Height and fear have returned you to your childhood. Just as it was then, your duty is only to yourself. Until you get safely down again, contracts, business meetings, household bills, emotional problems will mean nothing.

  When you finally reach that yew tree at the top of the climb, you find it full of grown men and women wearing faded shorts and T-shirts. They are all in their forties and fifties. They have all escaped. With their bare brown arms, their hair bleached out by weeks of sunshine, they sit at every fork or junction, legs dangling in the dusty air, like child-pirates out of some storybook of the 1920s: an investment banker from Greenwich, an AIDS counsellor from Bow; a designer of French Connection clothes; a publishers’ editor. There is a comfortable silence broken by the odd friendly murmur as you arrive, but their eyes are inturned and they would prefer to be alone, staring dreamily out over the valley, the curve of the river, the woods which seem to stretch away to Tintern Abbey and then Wales. This is the other side of excitement, the other pleasure of height: the space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space without anxiety. The space with –

  You are left with this familiar glitch or loop in the MAX ware. Suicide Coast won’t play any farther. Reluctantly, you abandon Mick to his world of sad acts, his faith that reality can be relied upon to scaffold his perceptions. To run him again from the beginning would only make the frailty of that faith more obvious. So you wait until everything has gone black, unplug yourself from the machine, and walk away, unconsciously rolling your shoulders to ease the stiffness, massaging the sore place at the back of your neck. What will you do next? Everything is flat out here. No one drives themselves any more.

  HUNTING MOTHER

  Sage Walker

  That the old must give way to the new is a truth that has been known since the dawn of the human race, but, as the evocative story that follows demonstrates, in spite of our awareness of that inevitability, it’s not always an easy or a comfortable transition . . .

  Sage Walker lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A graduate of Clarion West, she has made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Not of Woman Born, Event Horizon, and elsewhere. Her first novel, Whiteout, was one of the most critically acclaimed debut novels of 1996, and she is at work on several others.

  RUNNING HERE IN THE long corridors had its joys but it was better Above. On the inner surface of the spinning world Cougar could race across wide stretches of open country. Distance could tire his legs and there were obstacles to leap over or dodge around. He thought exercise and fatigue would make it easier to approach the old woman.

  The lights that woke at his motion were dim, timed for evening. The animals Above would be readying themselves for night.

  Cougar loved motion. In the dim corridor, the flex of his toes and the slip of the tendons in his feet were smooth and silent against chill stone. Tensions and relaxations of muscles in his calves and thighs, counter-balance offered by small ripples of the muscles in his back and shoulders, reflex arcs between neuron and neuron and muscle cell; the sensations blended and gave him joy. He delighted in the slight alarm, the constantly arrested falls, of walking.

  The corridor where he walked circled the world. As he walked he was always at the centre of a great curve. Before him and behind him the corridor rose until it seemed to narrow to a point and vanish. Just ahead was a lift that would take him to the Above or down, out, into the thick rind of the ship, to the cave his mother had made of her quarters.

  Cougar wanted to hunt. He wanted to run, but he was a dutiful son, he told himself. The hunt would wait. He would run as a reward after he had dealt with his mother.

  He stepped inside the lift and rode down.

  His mother’s quarters were near her labs; she lived close to her work. Cougar remembered waking in the night, small and alone. The slap of his feet had sounded so loud on the cold stone that he knew some monster would come out of the dark corridor to eat him, but he’d run to the lab anyway, run for mother. Mother, Elena, peered into the watery depths of a womb machine. Its lights made the high ledges of her cheekbones and the dark hollows of her eyes seem strange and terrible. An embryo floated dead in the translucent cylinder, the thick pancake shape of its placenta loose from the womb wall and slowly spinning in bloody fluid.

  “Hey, boy. The alarms woke me so I came to find out what was happening,” Elena said. She picked him up and held him close. “Did you have a bad dream?”

  Cougar wasn’t sure what a bad dream was, but he nodded and pushed his nose against the comforting smell of his mother’s shoulder. He heard gurgles and hisses as Elena did something to the womb machine. He saw, above his mother’s shoulder, frost crystals forming on the womb’s glassy windows. “Something went wrong. I’ll do the tests on it tomorrow,” Elena said.

  Beneath the frost he had seen tiny clawed fingers, wet fur swirling, the strange bald swellings of twinned labia between flexed legs. It was the first time he remembered being afraid of his mother.

  Fully adult now, long past childhood terrors, Cougar pulled the scents of the lab across his nose and palate. He sensed albumin, wet down and eggshell. He wondered which chicks had hatched.

  Ahead in the corridor, he saw the old, old woman. She walked toward him, slender and not stooped, still graceful although she moved with the deliberate caution of the aged. Cougar stood still and the lights around him faded.

  Elena, it was Elena, stared ahead at the darkness. She looked helpless and blind.

  “Cougar?” she asked. “Is that you?”

  In answer, he stepped forward to wake the corridor’s lights. He knew, reading the tensions of the woman’s motionless body, that she thought to flee him but she had forced herself not to run.

  “I was going to look for you,” Elena said. “Come in.”

  Following her, he entered home. Her home now, and fusty as human places tended to get after so many years. These rooms had been his childhood and he hated them and loved them and had not been here for a long time.

  Cougar read Elena’s breath. It carried molecular traces of chicos, the roasted corn she had stewed and eaten not two hours ago. She shed a trace of lactate from anoxic muscles and Cougar realized that even the walk into the corridor must have tired her. Elena’s skin smelled of the cave; clean cedar boughs freshly broken, bitter herbs, coffee, yeast. Her sweat was rich with the horsey reek of synthetic estrogens and an alarming trace of ammonia; renal failure was beginning. More urgent than any of these, the small sharp molecules of her fear rushed across his palate. The muscles of his face wanted to lift his lips away from his teeth but he did not let them.

  “I didn’t know you were out there until you moved. You’re always so quiet,” Elena said.

  “Yes.”

  He thought, Oh, tell her now! Admit you don’t have the wisdom for this. “Yes. Mother –”

  “Would you have some tea?” Elena’s words tumbled out to block his unfinished plea. She lifted her palm and brushed the air as if to brush his lips closed. “I’m having some. Sit down.”

  He sat on the cushioned rugs by the fireplace. Cougar wondered why Elena offered a social ritual. Greetings were usually momentary between them and then they plunged headlong into whatever topic came to hand; they were seldom formal wi
th each other. He realized Elena sought delay and perhaps she also wanted to lengthen the time he would spend here. He felt a wash of guilt, knowing he had often found reasons not to visit her.

  Elena busied herself with mugs and tea. The laboured motion of her damaged gait, a tiny tremor in her hands, made certain tendons in Cougar’s forearms flex. He did not let his claws extend but they twitched once. He hoped she didn’t see.

  “How are the otters?” she asked.

  The woman and her son had business, the business of her death and their acceptance of it, and she asked about otters. Cougar was angry but then he realized that Elena was as hesitant as he was, that she had gone out into the corridor to look for him but hoped not to find him.

  So he told her about the otters, sleek and clever in the water, the shellfish they caught and the stones they used to break them open. The otters were new, a test pair, and they harvested mussels and fish. They had been awake long enough to breed. Fat otter pups played now in the bright water.

  If he didn’t look quite so much like me, Elena thought, he would be the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. Most of his beauty is in his musculature, his superb reflexes. I found I couldn’t give him fur, or tufted ears. Skin and neural tissue arise from the same embryonic layers; humans have a sort of fur. It should not have been a problem to thicken it but the embryos I tested with that modification were not close enough to human to ever have learned speech. There is so much we still don’t know.

  But, oh, the retractable claws are superb. Cougar uses them with a speed and precision far beyond human. The hand modifies the brain and the parts of his brain mapped for those hands are marvellous to see.

  He’s as puzzled as I am by this death of mine, I think.

  Cougar took the mug of tea, a slightly smoky blend appropriate for autumn. He breathed its steam and blew on the amber liquid to roughen its surface. The old woman sat down on her cushion. She pulled her legs up and tucked her feet together neatly.

  In the fireplace, a twig snapped. The coals glowed yellow-red and then dulled to red again. The night was like any other and his mother was as familiar as his breath, but she was going to die and he wasn’t sure how to help her, or what to say.

  “I remember –” Elena began.

  “Are you beginning a death song?” Cougar asked.

  “I thought I might.”

  “Damn it, don’t! This matter is not decided. It’s not as simple as I think you would like, certainly not as simple as a point on a graph where all parameters are predictable. I am not a disinterested bystander. You are my mother.”

  “No, it’s not simple,” Elena said.

  “I have doubts about becoming an executioner. Every human culture has always said, Thou shalt not kill. There are good reasons for such a prohibition.”

  “Every human culture has said, Don’t kill within the tribe. As the ages went by we extended the boundaries of the tribe and now we are all one tribe,” Elena said. “So we say. Are you human?”

  Am I? Possible angry answers clashed in Cougar’s throat. He coughed to stifle them. “My father is a mountain lion. You are my mother.” There were other chimeras in the ship but Cougar did not know and his mother could not know what she had made when she made them. Otter and Bear and Owlchild and the others, all were tools, prototypes, test models on which improvements might be based.

  Cougar tightened his grip on the mug of tea, letting the steel blades he’d fitted to his claws snap against the porcelain. He was skilled, very skilled, with scalpels or larger knives, but his claws were more skilful at some tasks, more sensitive than any knife.

  A kinetic memory surfaced, a bench in a corridor alcove and he so small it seemed huge, his delight when he found he was big enough to climb up to where Elena waited. But he’d slipped and caught at the smooth skin of her forearm. Drops of blood from his claws appeared one by one on her white skin, ruby dark pomegranate seeds. The salt taste of her blood as he licked the drops away one by one, the cautious, puzzled look on Elena’s face. Her face had looked old to him then but now he knew it had been young.

  “We bred you,” Elena said. “We knew you would never know Earth. We knew you would have only this tiny worldlet and the promise of unknown futures. If anyone survives on the world the ship will reach, they will survive because they design themselves to do so. You are among the first of the designed. I wonder how much you hate us.”

  Elena swallowed, slip of trachea under wrinkled skin. Her carotid throbbed under the thinned skin at the curve of her jaw.

  “You had a choice whether to go or stay. None of us have that choice. I hate you for that, perhaps, but also I love you. My studies tell me all children hate their parents and love them,” Cougar said.

  “I certainly did.” Elena pressed her hands together and then opened them as if they were a book.

  My own mother “read a book” in her hands sometimes, Elena remembered. Of course I hated my mother, and loved her. Of course I hated what my mother asked of me. Of course I learned to love what she longed for.

  We walked sometimes on the mesa at night and we could see this ship where I live now as a point of light in the sky, a captured asteroid brought into smooth orbit to be altered for our use. It was impossibly far away but I imagined I could hear the explosions and the drills, the violent midwifery the artificers practised as they exploded a solid chunk of rock into a hollow home.

  My parents were insane. Their insanity was grandiose and desperate and I love them for it. In this honeycombed spinning rock they cached all they could; cell samples and embryos of creatures and plants whose codes are known and some that are yet unmapped, inert salts of every biologically useful trace element that might someday be needed, libraries of wisdom and foolishness; anything they thought might ever be useful.

  We know there’s a planet where we’re going. It has some of the things we need to live; we know that much. But we don’t know everything. When we reach our faraway new world, we will not have time to terraform it, certainly not completely. Therefore, we will change ourselves to survive there. We’ll change the world we find; humans always do.

  Or we’ll die encysted here in this rock, backing down the scales of complexity, degrading over time until only bacteria are left of us, and then –

  I hope for a different outcome, a successful one. I’m as mad as my mother was.

  “You saw the diagnostics,” Elena said. “I am going to die and there is no treatment strategy that will change that fact. I am suffering.”

  “You do not appear to be suffering.”

  “I suffer wondering if you will suffer when my physical and mental decline becomes more apparent. We can’t know I will die with my brain intact. I may become mindless. I have seen the eyes of humans whose bodies have outlived their minds.” She had seen rows and rows of warehoused ancients waiting, waiting. “Even to my last breath, my body will not want to die.”

  “I have seen such in my studies,” Cougar said.

  “I have seen such with my own eyes,” Elena said. “In the best of our human and social wisdom, we didn’t know what to do.”

  “But you want me to know what’s best and do it,” Cougar said.

  “I want you to be wiser than I am.” She stared into the dying fire and whatever corridors of the past she looked down were far away and long ago.

  “There is no reason to settle this tonight,” Elena said.

  Cougar left her there.

  Cougar paced, back two steps, forward two steps, in the cage of the lift. Through its walls he heard the rumbles of the factories, sighs of winds as the worldlet breathed, ordinary, soothing sounds. The lift took him Above. He stripped to a pair of trunks and left his clothes at the gate. The cool air of Above’s night chilled his skin in a pleasant way.

  He walked to loosen the tightness in his shoulders and neck and then he found a loping stride, a tireless ground-covering pace. He ran past fenced grain fields and bare-limbed orchards (the scent of windfall apples sharp and fermentin
g). Past the waternoise of a stream made to fall over rocks (waving waterweeds, healthy fingerlings in the shallows, milk-scent of a snoozing otter cub).

  He ran within the real physical boundaries of a damned small ecosphere and he worked as he ran. In his pleasant exertion he measured the health and the delicate balances of the enclosed fields and wildernesses (no more wild than any zoo, but larger than most) that slumbered through an artificial night. The consequences of ignoring imbalances in life and growth here were likely to be deadly.

  Cougar opened his mouth to the night wind and scented Owlchild, waiting on a bluff above the mouth of the stream. Stalking her, Cougar came across the whitetail doe and her twin fawns, both male, grazing a night meadow. Cougar marked in his mind their differences, one larger and plumper, the other more agile.

  He left the deer and went to Owlchild. They talked of the fawns and of sundry things, but not of Elena, although Owlchild knew the old woman faced death, and soon. For a murmuring time, Cougar hid his past and future in the immediacy of Owlchild’s now, in the present wonder of her silky skin and secret heats.

  Later, lying on his back and staring up at the shuttered ball of the moon (no true moon, only the sun with its energies diverted to engines and factories for the night), Owlchild’s hands on his arms felt like fetters. He pushed them away.

  “What?” Owlchild whispered.

  “I will miss Elena,” Cougar said.

  “So will I.”

  Cougar let the night drift around him. He did not want to talk to Owlchild, not for a moment. Here in this little pocket world, as in all places and all times, he knew the social bonds that defined his behaviours to be as critical, as potentially deadly, as stringent as any in history.