The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  “You didn’t find her?” I said.

  “I did. She and I went over to my office at Tilden. She’s upstairs now. No –” He reached out to prevent me from standing up. “Don’t try to go to her. You and I have to talk.”

  “I have to make sure that she is all right.”

  “She is. Take my word for it. Look, do you want to talk to Cyrus Walker in Bryceville?”

  “No!” My stomach turned over at the idea.

  “That was how I thought you’d feel. So I called him, from my office.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you are here. That Naomi is here, too. Not a word about your role in what happened. So far as he is concerned, you ran away and you took Naomi because you were scared.”

  “I am scared.”

  “You don’t need to be.” Walter motioned me to move over and sat down beside me on the bench. “I talked this whole thing over with my bosses at Tilden, and I have their approval for what I’m about to say. When I called Cyrus Walker, I told him I knew about the way that he and the Blessed Order had violated both the law and their agreement with us by doing drug tests on humans without FDA approval. Legally, I said, we have you guys on toast. But we’re willing to cut you some slack under certain conditions. We’ll even keep giving you royalty payments. Only from now on, we control the work that Rachel Stafford does. The Order has to cut out all the crap about interrogating you, and they stop delving into your files.”

  “Did he agree?”

  “Not at first. And not without a condition of his own. He pleads to have Naomi back in Bryceville. I agreed.”

  “Never. You can’t agree to that, you have no idea what it’s like there.”

  “You’re right, I don’t have any idea. But Naomi does, and she’s dead keen to go back – desperate to go back.”

  “She’s too young to make that decision. Too young to know what’s best for her.”

  “Not too young to know what she wants. And what she wants is to go back home.” He raised his hand to cut off my response. “It is her home, you know, even if you hate to think of it that way. She loves you a lot, but she wants to go back to her mother.”

  “I’m her mother.”

  “Legally and biologically, of course you are. But the person who raised her, from the time she was two years old, is her grandmother. Rachel, I have to ask you a hard question. You had to go to Bryceville every six months, so they could check up on you. And you saw Naomi then. Now, did you ever make special trips to see her apart from that?”

  “No. But I had –”

  “Were there reasons why you didn’t go to see her? Like, you wouldn’t have been permitted to visit, or you didn’t have the money?”

  “I had enough money. But with my work in the lab, I was the only one who knew what to do and when to do it. I couldn’t just walk out.”

  “Couldn’t you have scheduled your experiments so that you had a couple of days, every month or two, when it was all right to leave?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t – I never . . .”

  “Never tried? Rachel, I realize that Naomi means a lot to you. When you were a teenager, she was the centre of your life. But it hasn’t been that way for a long time.” Walter put his hand on my shoulder. “How long have you and I known each other?”

  “Nearly 14 years.”

  “That long? God. Anyway, I’ve spoken to you on the phone, or I’ve seen you in person, an average of once a week for all that time. And you know something? When you were in Bryceville you talked about Naomi constantly: how bright she was, how pretty she was, what new things she had learned. But once you moved to St George you hardly mentioned your daughter. It was all molecular biology, new discoveries, possible protocols, exciting experiments.”

  “That’s what I was supposed to talk to you about.”

  “True. But it didn’t stop you babbling about Naomi before. Rachel, you may think that I’m criticizing you, but I’m not. I’m trying to tell you who you are. You’re the witch-woman. Your life revolves around the research work that you do – work that no one in the world but you can do. I hear it from Raoul, I hear it from Wolf, I hear it from all our scientists: There’s only one Rachel Stafford. And Naomi, smart and nice as she may be, is nothing like her amazing mother.”

  “She means the world to me.” I stopped, before I could say, “Everything to me.” Since I was an infant I have been damned by a sense of remorseless logic. I hated what Walter Cottingham was telling me, but I could not deny its truth.

  “She should not go back,” I said.

  “She wants to go back, and she should. But you can stay and work here –”

  “Is that what you’re after? To have me under your thumb instead of Cyrus Walker’s?”

  “– or if you prefer it,” he continued as though I had not spoken, “you can return to St George and work in your old lab. In either case, you will not be troubled by the Blessed Order. And I have to add that there is one other condition. It comes from Naomi, not from Cyrus Walker. You must seek a treatment to reverse the loss of virility and sex drive caused by your phallicide drug.”

  If I was hesitating before, his words put an end to that. “Walter, you’re crazy. I could never agree to such a thing. The Blessed Order is an abomination. Its practices are illegal and disgusting and an insult to all women. If I did what Naomi asks – something I have no idea how to do – I would be strengthening the Order.”

  “It looks that way to you. But I’ve been watching the Order from outside for 14 years, and I’ve seen what’s happening. Members drift away. So long as the Patriarch was alive, the organization held together. Now that he’s gone, it will fall apart.”

  “It has lasted over a hundred years.”

  “So it has. And you, Rachel, who were born to the Blessed Order – and still fear it – think it will last for ever. But it won’t. It’s diseased, and an abomination, and disgusting, all the things you said and a lot more, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for being associated with it in any way. Maybe I am. But the Order is dying.” He stared at me with those dark, hypnotic eyes that had only increased in intensity over the years. “I’ll make you a wager, Rachel. Long before you and I, or even Cyrus Walker, are dead and gone, Bryceville will be a ghost town. Naomi will grow up, and mature, and find her own future. Perhaps she’ll make her own decision to leave. You may not like it, whatever she does; on the other hand, I’m not sure I’ll approve of my own children’s choices. None of my friends seem to.”

  He stood up. “Think about what I said. I’m going to get Naomi. I believe it’s time that you and she discussed this, just the two of you.”

  What was there to discuss? Naomi hated me for what I had done, when all I wanted was to save her. I had nothing left.

  I wandered over to the table and sat down. At this time of day the sun was lower in the sky and shone through the porch windows. Its light showed two drying circles of water where the wet bottom of my teacup had rested. I reached out my forefinger and converted each of the circles into the hexagonal form of the benzene ring. The addition of other atoms and side chains felt idle and automatic, following no conscious plan. Only when I had finished did I realize that I had sketched the compound resulting from the combination of the airborne chemical gas with the phallicide.

  I stared at it, visualizing the protein’s complicated shape in three dimensions. It was one that could permit conformational variation – the same atomic composition, but with several different molecular shapes. Two tetrahedral and trigonal plane bonds could be interchanged, a collinear bond would become bent. The results ought to be stable. A transforming agent should exist to induce that change.

  What I had told Walter Cottingham was wrong. The phallicidal drug might be purged, and its effects reversed. But the nature of the transforming agent . . .

  Within my mind, a subgroup flexed and changed from left- to right-handedness. The whole molecule twisted and deformed. Atoms swam into view, locking into place at ne
wly available receptor sites. Other atoms, their bonds weakened, drifted away.

  I felt a rising tension. I was far from a full answer, but the search created a pleasurable ache within me like nothing else in the world.

  When the door opened I did not hear it. I was not aware of Naomi’s presence until she came up behind me, leaned over, and placed her soft cheek next to mine.

  DADDY’S WORLD

  Walter Jon Williams

  Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives in Belen, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Wheel of Fortune, Global Dispatches, Alternate Outlaws, When the Music’s Over, Event Horizon, and in other markets, and has been gathered in two collections, Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, and Aristoi. His novel Metropolitan garnered wide critical acclaim in 1996 and was one of the most talked-about books of the year. His most recent books are a sequel to Metropolitan, City on Fire, and a huge disaster thriller, The Rift. He has a web site at www.walterjonwilliams.net.

  Williams is a highly eclectic writer, and has probably written a wider range of fiction than almost any other writer of his generation, ranging from some of the best Alternate History stories of the ’80s to gritty Mean Streets hard-as-nails cyberpunk, from stories featuring scenarios quirky enough to rank with the most off-the-wall stuff by Howard Waldrop to some of the most inventive Wide Screen Modern Space Opera of recent times – as well as lots of stuff that refuses to fit into any category, including stories that mix genres with breath-taking audacity and daring, including genres no one ever thought of mixing before, such as a hybrid of sword & sorcery and the Horatio Hornblower-like sea story, or mixing fantasy with technologically oriented “hard” science fiction. The fact is, one Walter Jon Williams story is rarely much like any other Walter Jon Williams story . . . something which is certainly true of the fascinating and scary story that follows, one which takes us to explore a new world where no one has ever gone before, boldly or not.

  ONE DAY JAMIE WENT with his family to a new place, a place that had not existed before. The people who lived there were called Whirlikins, who were tall thin people with pointed heads. They had long arms and made frantic gestures when they talked, and when they grew excited threw their arms out wide to either side and spun like tops until they got all blurry. They would whirr madly over the green grass beneath the pumpkin-orange sky of the Whirlikin Country, and sometimes they would bump into each other with an alarming clashing noise, but they were never hurt, only bounced off and spun away in another direction.

  Sometimes one of them would spin so hard that he would dig himself right into the ground, and come to a sudden stop, buried to the shoulders, with an expression of alarmed dismay.

  Jamie had never seen anything so funny. He laughed and laughed.

  His little sister Becky laughed, too. Once she was laughing so hard that she fell over onto her stomach, and Daddy picked her up and whirled her through the air, as if he were a Whirlikin himself, and they were both laughing all the while.

  Afterwards, they heard the dinner bell, and Daddy said it was time to go home. After they waved good-bye to the Whirlikins, Becky and Jamie walked hand-in-hand with Momma as they walked over the grassy hills towards home, and the pumpkin-orange sky slowly turned to blue.

  The way home ran past El Castillo. El Castillo looked like a fabulous place, a castle with towers and domes and minarets, all gleaming in the sun. Music floated down from El Castillo, the swift, intricate music of many guitars, and Jamie could hear the fast click of heels and the shouts and laughter of happy people.

  But Jamie did not try to enter El Castillo. He had tried before, and discovered that El Castillo was guarded by La Duchesa, an angular forbidding woman all in black, with a tall comb in her hair. When Jamie asked to come inside, La Duchesa had looked down at him and said, “I do not admit anyone who does not know Spanish irregular verbs!” It was all she ever said.

  Jamie had asked Daddy what a Spanish irregular verb was – he had difficulty pronouncing the words – and Daddy had said, “Someday you’ll learn, and La Duchesa will let you into her castle. But right now you’re too young to learn Spanish.”

  That was all right with Jamie. There were plenty of things to do without going into El Castillo. And new places, like the country where the Whirlikins lived, appeared sometimes out of nowhere, and were quite enough to explore.

  The colour of the sky faded from orange to blue. Fluffy white clouds coasted in the air above the two-storey frame house. Mister Jeepers, who was sitting on the ridgepole, gave a cry of delight and soared towards them through the air.

  “Jamie’s home!” he sang happily. “Jamie’s home, and he’s brought his beautiful sister!”

  Mister Jeepers was diamond-shaped, like a kite, with his head at the topmost corner, hands on either sides, and little bowlegged comical legs attached on the bottom. He was bright red. Like a kite, he could fly, and he swooped through in a series of aerial cartwheels as he sailed towards Jamie and his party.

  Becky looked up at Mister Jeepers and laughed from pure joy. “Jamie,” she said, “you live in the best place in the world!”

  At night, when Jamie lay in bed with his stuffed giraffe, Selena would ride a beam of pale light from the Moon to the Earth and sit by Jamie’s side. She was a pale woman, slightly translucent, with a silver crescent on her brow. She would stroke Jamie’s forehead with a cool hand, and she would sing to him until his eyes grew heavy and slumber stole upon him.

  “The birds have tucked their heads

  The night is dark and deep

  All is quiet, all is safe,

  And little Jamie goes to sleep.”

  Whenever Jamie woke during the night, Selena was there to comfort him. He was glad that Selena always watched out for him, because sometimes he still had nightmares about being in the hospital. When the nightmares came, she was always there to comfort him, stroke him, sing him back to sleep.

  Before long the nightmares began to fade.

  Princess Gigunda always took Jamie for lessons. She was a huge woman, taller than Daddy, with frowsy hair and big bare feet and a crown that could never be made to sit straight on her head. She was homely, with a mournful face that was ugly and endearing at the same time. As she shuffled along with Jamie to his lessons, Princess Gigunda complained about the way her feet hurt, and about how she was a giant and unattractive, and how she would never be married.

  “I’ll marry you when I get bigger,” Jamie said loyally, and the Princess’s homely face screwed up into an expression of beaming pleasure.

  Jamie had different lessons with different people. Mrs Winkle, down at the little red brick schoolhouse, taught him his ABCs. Coach Toad – who was one – taught him field games, where he raced and jumped and threw against various people and animals. Mr McGillicuddy, a pleasant whiskered fat man who wore red sleepers with a trapdoor in the back, showed him his magic globe. When Jamie put his finger anywhere on the globe, trumpets began to sound, and he could see what was happening where he was pointing, and Mr McGillicuddy would take him on a tour and show him interesting things. Buildings, statues, pictures, parks, people. “This is Nome,” he would say. “Can you say Nome?”

  “Nome,” Jamie would repeat, shaping his mouth around the unfamiliar word, and Mr McGillicuddy would smile and bob his head and look pleased.

  If Jamie did well on his lessons, he got extra time with the Whirlikins, or at the Zoo, or with Mr. Fuzzy or in Pandaland. Until the dinner bell rang, and it was time to go home.

  Jamie did well with his lessons almost every day.

  When Princess Gigunda took him home from his lessons, Mister Jeepers would fly from the ridgepole to meet him, and tell him that his family was ready to see him. And then Momma and Daddy and Becky would wave from the wi
ndows of the house, and he would run to meet them.

  Once, when he was in the living room telling his family about his latest trip through Mr. McGillicuddy’s magic globe, he began skipping around with enthusiasm, and waving his arms like a Whirlikin, and suddenly he noticed that no one else was paying attention. That Momma and Daddy and Becky were staring at something else, their faces frozen in different attitudes of polite attention.

  Jamie felt a chill finger touch his neck.

  “Momma?” Jamie said. “Daddy?” Momma and Daddy did not respond. Their faces didn’t move. Daddy’s face was blurred strangely, as if it had been caught in the middle of movement.

  “Daddy?” Jamie came close and tried to tug at his father’s shirtsleeve. It was hard, like marble, and his fingers couldn’t get a purchase at it. Terror blew hot in his heart.

  “Daddy?” Jamie cried. He tried to tug harder. “Daddy! Wake up!” Daddy didn’t respond. He ran to Momma and tugged at her hand. “Momma! Momma!” Her hand was like the hand of a statue. She didn’t move no matter how hard Jamie pulled.

  “Help!” Jamie screamed. “Mister Jeepers! Mr Fuzzy! Help my momma!” Tears fell down his face as he ran from Becky to Momma to Daddy, tugging and pulling at them, wrapping his arms around their frozen legs and trying to pull them towards him. He ran outside, but everything was curiously still. No wind blew. Mister Jeepers sat on the ridgepole, a broad smile fixed as usual to his face, but he was frozen, too, and did not respond to Jamie’s calls.

  Terror pursued him back into the house. This was far worse than anything that had happened to him in the hospital, worse even than the pain. Jamie ran into the living room, where his family stood still as statues, and then recoiled in horror. A stranger had entered the room – or rather just parts of a stranger, a pair of hands encased in black gloves with strange silver circuit patterns on the backs, and a strange glowing opalescent face with a pair of wraparound dark glasses drawn across it like a line.