The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Cougar kneaded his cupped hands, one and then the other, against Owlchild’s belly. She laughed and turned away. Her shoulders were handy to his claws then, so he scratched her back, oh, so gently, until she giggled.

  Cougar came to Elena’s cave again at dusk. Hunting her, he had watched her work, scanned her now and again through the day. This day had been as busy as any other of her days. Elena’s hands were still skilled and dexterous, certain and precise with the small instruments in her lab. The decisions she made, the trail of notes across her study screens, were as clear and thoughtful as they had ever been.

  “Welcome,” Elena said. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  She had lighted a fire tonight, three small cedar logs standing in a tripod so that their tops burned each other. The scent of them was rich in the air.

  Cougar sat on the piled rugs near the hearth. He pulled a backrest closer and settled against it. It was warmed by the fire and its heat felt good to his back, the cushion cooling and his skin warming until they reached blissful agreement.

  He waited with a hunter’s patience. Be wiser than I am, she had said. He would try.

  “You could simply hand me a medicine and I could take it and never wake up,” Elena said.

  “I have such a medicine in my pocket. Do you want it?” Cougar asked.

  “I have it.” Elena reached into the sack she carried at her waist and brought out a tiny packet. “I thought I would know when I was ready to take it. Perhaps I will. I don’t know.” Without looking at it, she slipped it into her sack again.

  Cougar waited.

  “I might take the medicine some night. Or I could think, every day, well, not today. Until I can’t think at all. What will you do?”

  “Damn you. I monitor populations on this ship and cull them, young or old, hurt or sound, when they must be culled. I have always known that someday I would be called on when a human was dying. I did not know it would be so soon.”

  “We have spent years and many words on this,” Elena said.

  “We have. I think you do not plan to suicide. I think you are truly determined to be as infuriating as you have always been.”

  Elena could kill herself, even announce that she intended to do so, and no one on the ship would try to stop her now. Elena could wait until she was mindless, unable to find food for herself, incontinent. No one who knew her would refuse their turn at caring for her.

  “Years and words and histories,” Elena said.

  “Shall we discuss Hitler again, Mother? Shall we find ‘scientific’ reasons to put you down, as he found ‘scientific’ reasons for genocide? Shall we review the theological positions on the sanctity of life? Shall we discuss the legitimate uses of power and authority or how to make power responsible for its actions? Shall I convene a committee and assign the decision to a group?”

  “You have done so. Today. The timing and manner of my death is in your hands. I could take this burden from you, and I may, but still the question remains for you: What will you do if I will not or cannot? Must the ill, in their distress, be responsible, always, for the time and place of their deaths? Cougar, my illness was not planned to set up a test for you; I swear it.”

  But it had done so.

  One answer, sanctioned by many human societies over many thousands of years – do not interfere. Do not raise your hand; let Elena’s biology decide the when and how. Such was human wisdom, but Elena had asked, Are you human? She had asked, Is the human way the best way? Elena offered challenge. She often did. It was her way.

  “It may be true that in some societies, old women said good-bye and went out into the snow when they knew they wouldn’t survive the winter. We don’t hear about the ones who wouldn’t take themselves away. Wouldn’t get on the ice floe, wouldn’t take their blanket and sleep in the cold.” Elena seemed to look down corridors of the past. “And that’s the question, isn’t it?”

  Listen, watch, Cougar told himself. Watch her and read what she wants.

  The skill sets humans knew, he knew. He was expert in clinical medicine and in the halting science of psychiatry, unchallenged in his grasp of the cautious disciplines required by the ship’s ecologies. His life was rich, his experiences as intricate as any human’s had ever been and more so. He knew the ass-tired concentration of lecture halls, the camaraderie of think tanks at mountain retreats in the high desert where his mother had lived before the ship enclosed her. The ship’s machines could and had given him kinetic memories of an owl’s flight, a trout’s leap. His muscles and bones knew his father’s walk; his eyes remembered the black moonlight shine of fur on a January night, the clarity of winter desert air in landscapes more vast than even an eagle’s eye could conquer.

  Elena dropped her eyes and smiled. For an instant Cougar thought he saw a young, young woman, flirting with memories. “For a little while, let me pretend to be social. Thank you for coming to visit me, how are things, and so forth.”

  “How are things? The ship remains viable as far as we know.” His words were simple; a terse report distilled from measurements of bacteria in lake waters, CO2 concentrations from many monitoring stations in the ship, the number of seeds in the stomach of the dead titmouse the pair of hawks had missed, the debate that had surfaced once again about loosing field mice in the Above. Although the barriers that kept critters from the lifts and stairways were good, mice were by all accounts skilled at invasions. “We don’t need two whitetail bucks and we have them. The kitchens will have some venison soon.”

  He would save some cells from the kill, of course, but the venison would be a treat. Cougar licked his lips in anticipation.

  The fire glowed red and clicked and murmured, as hypnotic as fires had been to mothers and sons since fire was first tamed. Mothers and sons, old women and cats, what the hell? The fire comforted both.

  He was here to listen, to observe and measure his mother’s needs and his own, but Elena sat quiet.

  Cougar let his eyelids close by half. The better to listen, my dear.

  Nature or nurture? Genetic inevitability or learned behaviours? Both operated in Cougar. He knew it and Elena knew it. Cougar had no apparatus for purring but he liked the sound when he first heard it and soon he learned to make it in his human throat. Did he do it because he wanted to be more like his never-known father or because purring felt particularly good to someone designed with feline genes?

  He relaxed all his balanced tensions into an appearance of sudden sleep. He could, usually, almost always, calm Elena with so simple a communication and he did so now, oddly pleased at how quickly she entrained to his apparent comfort. In seconds, he scented a few endorphins on her breath.

  “We have been cruel,” Elena said. “All of us who made you have been cruel and careless, binding you to a destination that is so uncertain. But no mother has ever known if she brought her child into a safe world. It’s something we can’t know.

  “I don’t feel like crying. I don’t fear death, or I have told myself I don’t. I think of death as a molecular dissolution so complete that any possibility of ongoing consciousness seems ridiculous. The idea of immortality appals me. If others find it comforting, if you do, well, good. But it’s not something I want to consider for myself.”

  Cougar heard her. Truly, he did sleep, and truly he did hear her. He had tried to explain it to Elena but his mother didn’t seem to have such sleep.

  Elena kept her voice steady and continued to speak, for if she stopped he would rouse. “I am not a wise woman,” Elena said. “Surely you don’t think it was wisdom or even pure knowledge that sent us out into the dark. We were driven by myth as much as by reason. We wanted to tell stories to the universe, or at least make sure our stories would be heard on another world.”

  Cougar did not open his eyes but he heard the soft sounds Elena made as she folded her arms and lifted her head in a storyteller’s posture.

  “I have said we picked otter genes to explore mammalian aquatic skills, ursine to see if we could un
cover hibernation patterns and adapt them; all of the mothers have stories about why they chose different totem animals for their children. I have said I made you mountain lion because of the solitary nature of mountain lions. An African lion needs a pride and you would, because of the scant need for large predators in our pocket world, be the only large predator. Of necessity, alone.”

  “What a crock.” Cougar let his voice rumble, basso, disdainful.

  “Yes. Your modification is a simple one, one I thought I could do; that was part of it.

  “You are what you are. Your mountain lion DNA led you to become the ‘predator’ that our pocket ecology requires, or you simply became ‘lion-esque’ to please me and your own sense of whimsy. I don’t know. In any case, you’re ‘successful’. The methods used to modify you are tested now. The knowledge is available; when your children reach destination they will know how to fine-tune an embryo and give her wings, if need be, or design true sea-dwellers if they find that the seas offer the best chance to thrive.

  “You know I find such possibilities wonderful. You’ve seen and walked through my life or you might someday if you want to; we kept recordings of so much.”

  In the days of selecting and sorting, strong cases were made for carrying even mosquito eggs and malarial parasites. The codes for building them came aboard but not the organisms themselves.

  Elena watched the fire and her son. If he followed his usual pattern, he would sleep for a brief time. He rested profoundly when he rested and he woke renewed, as the young do. As I once did.

  We filled the ship with seeds beyond counting, with the patterns of moths’ wings and mosses. Someone remembered that if there is a God, he is extraordinarily fond of beetles, and we have many beetles. The life span of a seed even in frozen nitrogen is limited and though we hope to reach harbour before decay sets in, we grow some seeds, birth some animals, to keep the stocks renewed and fresh.

  Elena’s thoughts skimmed over lists and over years. Lovers and quarrels, embryos tested and lost or grown to beauty. Her life had been a series of questions and always there were more questions than answers.

  She had worked in the lab today. The hatched chicks were chickadees, and soon they would be sent Above to pick their way through winter. In the spring, there would be space for a few meadowlarks. In memory she heard their liquid song again, as fresh and pure as a high meadow morning.

  This had been a good day. She had slept well, worked hard, eaten chicos and joined her son by a fireside, as if today were any other day. As it was, Elena thought, another day gone while the ship traverses the big dark, going from somewhere to somewhere.

  Cougar dreamed of making love, of Ottersdaughter smooth and sleek beneath him. A chorus sang a single word, thanatos, thanatos, pure voices in counterpoint echoing in the magnificent acoustics of a long-vanished cathedral. The colours of stained glass streamed from the light of the fire; chapel walls tumbled into piles of old stone; the fire died.

  Cougar woke and rolled over and stared into his mother’s eyes, favouring her with a pure predator’s gaze. He liked watching her shiver.

  “Was it a good sleep?” Elena asked.

  “Oh, it was.” Cougar stretched and stretched again, and purred a growling purr for his mother to hear. Elena laughed at him. He told her good night and left.

  Later, he saw her on a bluff in the Above, Elena wrapped in her old woollen poncho with the red and black stripes. She came to review the world, perhaps. Cougar worked his way close to her. The old woman sat there for a long time, watching the meadows and the forests. He sensed no distress in her, not that night or the next or the next. But she always came Above.

  When, how, if. The diagnostics held steady. Elena was not sicker; she had not begun to fail. On a few nights she took a drug to soothe her old and aching joints and on those nights she walked far, quiet and seemingly content. Did she bring herself to the hunting grounds so that he would kill her? Did she mean for him to strike suddenly, as he preferred to do, kill so swiftly that not even a single molecule of cellular terror tainted the breath of his intended victim? Or did Elena simply want to walk easily in the Above? Cougar knew he should ask her but he did not ask, and then he chided himself for a lack of courage.

  Elena continued her work. Cougar found reason to come to the labs now and again, and they talked of many things. Elena did not mention her illness. Cougar waited for her to signal what she wanted but she did not do so.

  It was time to harvest the deer. Cougar went Above on a night when the temperatures hovered near frost, into air seasoned with the aroma of ripe nuts and the particular scent of fallen grain on damp soil. Elena had not come Above. He could find no trace of her in the night and he was happy enough that she was not here.

  The Above was a temperate zone now. In another decade it would be arctic, and after that the plan was to make it tropical for a generation or two. His mother’s high desert was best for the testing of marginal, though hardy, species but a desert was not scheduled during his or his mother’s lifetime. The desert was important, though, an environment for testing extremes.

  On the wind Cougar found Ottersdaughter’s signature, two hours old but maybe she was out here somewhere. A badger grumbled along in the brush beside the trail. Owlchild was out tonight, but she was far away. Where, where were the deer? He found them grazing on crested wheat near a stand of Scotch pines.

  In summer, columbines bloomed near this path. Chanterelles grew deep in nearby pine needle mulch, boletes for the taste of them. Cougar remembered the quiet tock of a flicker’s beak on the trunk of a lodgepole pine, a day spent hunting mushrooms here with Elena and Owlchild.

  Owlchild was a year older than he was. They had quarrelled incessantly until the night she led him through the thickets and down onto the grass by the stream, into a sham battle that began with wrestling, changed to caresses, ended in the remarkable delight and terrifying pleasure of his first sex with a woman. Or ended for a short time, rather, and then began again. Owlchild was lusty then and she still was. Later, later tonight he would find her.

  How will she react if I come to her some night with my mother’s blood on my hands? Will she turn away from me, and whisper to the others that I cannot be trusted, that I kill at the wrong times, for the wrong reasons?

  We must, we will, find our singular rituals for times of guilt and sorrow. Such rituals are necessary, vital. Our skills with each other are critically important for our ongoing survival, as necessary as water.

  As she did every time she came Above, Elena wished she had enough discipline to find spaces in her busy days and come here more often. True, summer here was warmer than she cared for but tonight the sphere was cold enough. Her poncho held warm air close to her belly and shoulders. She tucked a fold up over one arm to feel the cold prickles against her shoulder.

  The lands inside the sphere were wonderful. Elena loved them for the richness of their lush growth but this was woodland, cropland, not her desert. The desert had been rich, too, rich in vastness and light.

  The otter pups would be sleeping but the stream was pleasant to hear. Elena walked there and saw Cougar. Perhaps the noise and moisture masked her presence; he didn’t seem to notice she was there.

  He was going to find the deer; perhaps he had scented them. Elena wondered how their scent felt to him. She wondered how his different perceptions impacted his sense of self. She wondered how different his world was from her own.

  Elena stopped, guarding the sound of her breath, for Cougar had stopped in the black shade of the trees. He would test the air, he always did, before he would be ready to walk out in the clearing that bordered the stream. Elena marvelled at his caution. He was the most lethal thing in the ecosphere. Most of the animals didn’t run from humans; the creatures here were often hand-raised and would come out to play, expecting, and often getting, treats.

  Elena stayed in the dark, on the path behind her son.

  I should tell Cougar to see if some raspberries can be transpla
nted here, Elena thought. Like weeds, they like the edges of paths and roads.

  Cougar stretched out on a rock beside the stream. He sniffed out the otter pups, burrowed against their mother’s teats and sleeping.

  Cougar reached into his sampling pouch and set a container on the rock beside him. He lay flat on his belly and let his hand drift into the icy water. His eyes were close to the water’s edge and he watched until a cluster of trout fingerlings came near, silver glimmers in the false moonlight but there was light enough. He was cautious; he was always careful to make clean kills. This one. His palm drifted beneath it. Just above the gills the tiny spinal cord ran caudal and close to the skin. Flick. His claw sliced through the resistant flesh and the cord but he stopped the cut before he reached the dorsal skin. He lifted the fish into his palm and shook it into the container.

  The drug she had taken made walking a joy. Elena followed her son but at a distance, so that she could lose him in shadow and then catch sight of him again. She saw Ottersdaughter slip through the trees and ahead, circling back to meet Cougar at the edge of the meadow that opened out below a bluff. Ottersdaughter was a tease at times, but she teased with gentle humour. And if Elena could not hear, was not meant to hear, the words they shared, still she knew them. The beauty of entwined arms, of warm flat bellies pressed together and as quickly parted; the language of anticipation and promise never changed.

  Ottersdaughter left Cougar. In one instant she was beside him and in the next she was gone.

  Cougar lifted his head in that grin of his. Elena sensed his growing excitement. Perhaps Ottersdaughter would hunt with him, the two of them working the deer until the one Cougar chose was isolated and ready for him.

  Elena would do her best not to interfere. She had loved to hunt herself, still did, remembered teaching Cougar what she could.

  Cougar disappeared into the trees. The meadow lay silent. Elena heard her pulse sing in her ears. She felt the strength of her muscles, rejoiced in the clarity of her night vision that could still pick out a great horned owl sweeping across the meadow. The owl dived and rose again with a squirming vole in her claws. In the wonder of the living night, she was well pleased with her world.