The Year's Best SF 25 # 2007

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  “That’s true too,” her remorseless tormentor went on. “There’s a lot of love in Tracy, just as there was always a lot of love in you, always yearning for more and better outlets. She can’t hang on to relationships either, can she? She hasn’t given up hope yet, though. Darren wouldn’t be any use, because the mitochondrial supplement atrophies in males long before they reach puberty, but I could have gone to Tracy instead of you, and would probably have found her more cooperative. It wouldn’t have been sporting, though. She’s still a child, and you’re entitled to your chance. It wouldn’t be fair simply to pass you over. Her life will change irrevocably, too, once you’re fully awake. So will Darren’s, although he probably won’t be quite as grateful.”

  That was too much. “What the fuck are you talking about, you stupid fuck?” Sheila demanded, although she knew that he would see that she was cracking up, that he had succeeded in freaking her out with his psychopathic performance.

  “My name—my true name, not the one on my driving licence—is Sarmerodach,” the tall man said. “This body used to belong to an oceanographer named Arthur Bayliss, Ph.D., but I was able to rescue him from an unbelievably dull life wallowing in clathrate-laden ooze. The predatory DNA that crystallized in my viral avatar dispossessed his native DNA, little by little, in every single cell in his body, and then set about resculpting the neuronal connections in his brain. The headaches were terrible. I wish I could say that you won’t have to suffer anything similar, but you will—not for nearly as long, but even more intensely. I wish it were as simple as feeding you a dose of virus-impregnated ooze, but it isn’t. Your predatory DNA is already latent in your cells, secreted in mitochondrial supplements, awaiting activation. The activation process is complex, but not very difficult if you have the right raw materials. I have—although it wasn’t easy to locate them all. It will take an hour to trigger the process, and six months thereafter to complete the transition.”

  Sheila had hardly understood a word of the details, but she thought she had got the gist of the plan. “Transition to what?” she asked, thinking of the Incredible Hulk and Mr. Hyde.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll still look human. Your hair will turn white overnight, but you’ll be able to watch the flab and the cellulite melt away. You won’t look like a supermodel, but you will live for thousands of years. In a sense, given that the real you is locked away in your mitochondrial supplements, you already have. Your other self is one of the Immortals of Atlantis.”

  Sheila had always felt that she was fully capable of dealing with psychopaths—she knew so many—but she knew from bitter experience that negotiating with delusional schizophrenics was a different kettle of fish. She started screaming again, just as loudly and even more desperately than before.

  In all probability, she thought, there would be at least a dozen people in the neighbouring flats who could hear her. The chances of one of them responding, in any way whatsoever, were pretty remote—screaming passed for normal behaviour in these parts—but it might be her last hope.

  Arthur Bayliss, Ph.D., alias Sarmerodach, obviously thought so, too, because he crammed a handkerchief into her open mouth and then used more of his ubiquitous cord to make a gag holding it in place.

  Then he got busy with his chemistry set.

  Sheila had no idea what the ingredients were that her captor was mixing up in his flasks, but she wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she’d been told that they included virgin’s blood, adder’s venom, and the hallucinogenic slime that American cane toads were rumoured to secrete. There were certainly toadstool caps, aromatic roots, and perfumed flowers among the things he was grinding up in the mortar, and Sheila was prepared to assume that every one of them was as poisonous as deadly nightshade and as dangerous to mental health as the most magical magic mushrooms in the world.

  The tall man talked while he worked. “I’d far rather observe the principle of informed consent,” he said, “even though I’m not really a Ph.D. anymore, let alone a physician, but it’s not really practical in the circumstances. Your false self would be bound to refuse to realise your true self, no matter how worthless a person you presently are or how wretched a life you presently lead, because selves are, by definition, selfish.”

  He paused to deploy a spatula, measuring out a dose of red powder. He tipped it into the flask whose contents were presently seething away over the burner. He didn’t use scales, but the measurement was obviously delicate.

  “If caterpillars had the choice,” he continued, “they’d never consent to turn into butterflies. Some kinds of larvae don’t have to, you know—it’s called paedogenesis. Instead of pupating and re-emerging as adults, they can grow sex organs and breed as juveniles, sometimes for several generations. They still transmit the genes their descendants will eventually need to effect metamorphosis, though, in response to the appropriate environmental trigger, so that those descendants, however remote, can eventually recover their true nature, their true glory and their true destiny.”

  He paused again, this time to dribble a few drops of liquid out of the mortar, where he’d crushed a mixture of plant tissues, into a second flask that had not yet been heated at all.

  “That’s what the Immortals of Atlantis did,” he went on, “when they realised that they were about to lose all their cultural wealth once their homeland disappeared beneath the sea. They knew that the next generation, and many generations thereafter, would have to revert to the cultural level of Stone Age barbarians and take thousands of years to achieve a tolerable level of civilisation, but they wanted to give them the chance to become something better, when circumstances became ripe again. So the Immortals hid themselves away, the best way they could. The Atlantean elite were great biotechnologists, you see; they considered our kind of heavy-metal technology to be inexpressibly vulgar, fit only for the toilsome use of slaves.”

  This time he stopped to make a careful inspection of some kind of paste he’d been blending, lifting a spoonful to within a couple of inches of his pale grey eyes. He didn’t have a microscope either.

  “What would our elite do, do you think,” he resumed, “if the Antarctic ice melted and the sea swamped their cities, and the methane gushing out of the suboceanic clathrates mopped up all the oxygen and rendered the air unbreathable? I think they’d retreat underground, burrowing deep down and going into cultural hibernation for a thousand or a hundred thousand years, until the ever-loyal plants had restored the breathability of the atmosphere again. But that’s not going to happen, because you and I—and the other Immortals, when we’ve located and restored a sufficient number—are going to see that it doesn’t. We’ll have the knowledge, once you’re fully awake, and we’ll have the authority. The only way the world can be saved is for everyone to work together and do what’s necessary, and that isn’t going to happen unless someone takes control and reinstitutes a sensible system of slavery. The Immortals will be able to do that, once we’ve resurrected enough of them. This is just the beginning.”

  He took one flask off the burner and replaced it with another; the pause in his monologue was hardly perceptible.

  “As you might be able to see,” he said, gesturing expansively to take in all the different compounds he was making up, “the process of revitalisation has five stages—that’s five different drugs, all of them freshly prepared to very specific recipes, administered in swift sequence. Don’t worry—it doesn’t involve any injections, or even swallowing anything with a nasty taste. All you have to do is breathe them in. It’s even simpler than smoking crack. I know it looks complicated, and it could all go wrong if I made the slightest mistake in the preparation or administration, but you have to trust me. Dr. Bayliss has never done anything like this before, but Sarmerodach has. He hasn’t lost the knack, even though he’s spent the last few thousand years lying dormant in the suboceanic ooze encoded as a crystalline supervirus. Everything’s just about ready. You mustn’t be afraid, Sheila; you really—”

&nb
sp; He stopped abruptly as the doorbell rang. For a second or two he seemed seriously disconcerted—but then he relaxed again. He knew her children’s names, and more about her than anyone had any right to know. He knew that she never answered the doorbell.

  For the first time in her life, Shelia yearned to hear the sound of someone kicking the door in, splintering the wood around the lock and the bolts.

  Instead, she heard several sets of shuffling footsteps moving away from the flat. If she’d screamed then it might just have made a difference, but she couldn’t.

  “Good,” said the man with the Ph.D. “We can get on with the job in peace.”

  The first drug, which the tall man administered simply by holding a loaded spoon beneath her nostrils, made Sheila feel nauseous. It wasn’t that it stank—its odour was delicately sweet, like the scent of sugared porridge heating up in the microwave—but that it disturbed her internal equilibrium in a fashion she’d never experienced before.

  The second, which he administered by pouring warm liquid onto cotton wool and holding it in the same position, disturbed her even more profoundly. At first, it just tickled—except that she’d never been tickled inside before, in her lungs and liver and intestines instead of on her skin. Then the tickling turned into prickling, and it felt as if a thorn bush were growing inside her, jabbing its spines into every last corner of her soft red flesh. She hadn’t known that it was possible to endure such agony without being rendered unconscious by shock and terror.

  “Just be patient,” he said, infuriatingly. “It will pass. Your cells are coming back to life, Sheila. They’ve been half-dead for so long—much longer than your own meagre lifetime. A metazoan body is just a single cell’s way of making more single cells, you see; sex and death are just means of shuffling the genetic deck, so that cells are capable of evolution. All metazoan cells are partly shut down—they have to be, to specialise them for specific physiological functions—but they can all be reawakened, wholly or partially, by the right stimulus.”

  The pain abated, but not because her captor’s voice had soothed it away. It abated because the second drug had now completed its work, having been scrupulously ferried to every hinterland of her being by her dutiful bloodstream. It had taken time, but that phase was finished.

  Sheila felt better, and not just in the way she usually felt better after feeling ill or depressed, which was only a kind of dull relief, comparable to that obtainable by such proverbial means as ceasing to bang one’s head against a brick wall. She actually felt better, in a positive sense. It was a very strange sensation, by virtue of its unfamiliarity—but there were still three drugs to go.

  The ex-Ph.D. had been measuring her condition with his uncannily skilful eyes. He had to get the timing right, but he was as adept at that as he had been at the mixing and the cooking. He had the third compound ready, and he lifted the whole flask up and swirled its contents around to make the vapour rise up from its neck.

  This time, the effect was narcotic, or at least anaesthetic. Sheila felt that she was falling asleep, but she didn’t lose consciousness, and she didn’t begin to dream. It was a little like getting high, albeit more in the crystal meth vein than a heroin kick, but it was quite distinct. For one thing, it didn’t seem that she was only feeling it in her head, or in her nerves. It seemed that she was feeling it in every organic fibre of her being, and then some. It made her feel much bigger than she was, and much more powerful—but not, alas, powerful enough to break the bonds that held her tight to the chair. The anaesthetic effect wasn’t dulling, or straightforwardly euphoric, but something that promised to take her far beyond the reach of pain.

  It was, alas, flattering only to deceive. It hadn’t taken her beyond the reach of pain at all, but merely to some existential plane where pain came in different, previously unknown forms. The fourth drug—the first one whose vapour was hot enough to scald the mucous membranes of her nasal passages and bronchi—was a real bastard. It gave her the migraine to end all migraines, visual distortions and all; it plunged a million daggers into her flesh; it sent waves of agony rippling through her like sound waves, as if she were imprisoned in a gigantic church bell smashed by a sequence of steel hammers—but the vibrations were silent, even though she hadn’t gone deaf.

  She could still hear Sarmerodach rambling on, and make out every word in spite of her excruciation.

  “You’ll begin to feel more yourself soon,” he said. “You’ll begin to feel Sheila slipping away, like the husk of a redundant cocoon. You’ll be able to sense your true being and personality—not well enough for a while to put a name to yourself, but well enough to know that you exist. You’ll be able to catch glimpses of the possibilities inherent within you—not just the power but the aesthetic sensibility, the awareness of the physiological transactions of hormones and enzymes, the ecstasy of the mitochondria and the triumph of the phagocytes. The agony is just a kind of birth trauma, a necessary shock. As it fades, you’ll begin to sense what you truly are, and what you might eventually … .”

  The last word of the sentence died on his thin lips as the doorbell sounded again. This time, the repeated ring was swiftly followed by the sound of fists pounding on the door. No one shouted, “Police!” though—what they shouted instead was: “Darren! We know you’re in there!”

  The boys at the door didn’t have Sarmerodach’s uncanny powers of intuition. What they thought they “knew” was utterly false. Wherever Darren was hiding, it wasn’t at home.

  As the white-haired man reached for his spoon again, with a hand that had begun, ever so slightly, to tremble, the sound of thumping fists was replaced by the sound of thudding boots. The door had far too little strength left in it to resist for long. It splintered, and crashed against the hallway wall.

  Sarmerodach was already holding the spoon up to Sheila’s nose. Wisps of vapour were already curling up into her nostrils. She could already sense its exotic odour—which she normally wouldn’t have liked at all, but which somehow seemed, at this particular moment, to be the most wonderful scent she’d ever encountered.

  Time seemed to slow down. The sitting-room door burst open in slow motion, and the boys stumbled through the doorway in a bizarrely balletic fashion, floating with impossible grace as they got in one another’s way. Only one of them had a gun, but the other three had knives, and all four were ready for action.

  There was something irredeemably comical about the way they stopped short as they caught sight of the scene unfolding before their eyes. Their jaws dropped; their eyes seemed actually to bulge.

  Under normal circumstances, of course, they’d have threatened Sheila with their weapons. They’d have threatened to hit her, and then they would probably have slashed her face, not because she was being uncooperative in refusing to tell them where Darren was, but simply because they were pumped up and incapable of containing their violence. They might even have raped her, and told themselves afterwards that they were “teaching Darren a lesson”—but when they saw her tied up and helpless, apparently being threatened by a man in a suit, if only with a spoon, a different set of reflexes kicked in. Suddenly, Sheila was one of their own at the mercy of a feral bureaucrat.

  Somehow, the tall man had crossed the estate with his briefcase without attracting sufficient attention to be mugged, but he wasn’t inconspicuous anymore.

  The members of the pack hurled themselves upon the outsider. At first, they probably only intended to kick the shit out of him—but three of them were wielding knives. The one with the gun never fired it; he, at least, still had a vestige of self-restraint. The others were not so intimidated by the talismanic power of their own armaments.

  The killing would probably have qualified as manslaughter rather than murder, even if it hadn’t seemed to its perpetrators to be a clear case of justifiable homicide; not one of the boys was capable of formulating an intention to kill within the very limited time at their disposal. Even so, the tall man was doomed within a matter of seconds—down and o
ut in ten, at the most, and well on his way to extinction after forty, by which time his heart had presumably stopped and his brain was no longer getting sufficient oxygen to function.

  The spoon flew from his hand and disappeared from view, taking its cargo of aromatic pulp with it.

  Sheila had been saved, in the proverbial nick of time. If the spoon had been held in place for ten seconds more …

  Sheila really had been saved, and she knew it. If she had breathed in the prescribed dose of the fifth perfume, she would have ceased to be herself and would have begun an inexorable process of becoming someone else.

  She never believed, even momentarily, that she would actually have become one of the Immortals of Atlantis, ready to take command of her faithful slaves and restore her sisters to life, in order that they could take over the world and save humankind from self-destruction by means of benevolent dictatorship. She wasn’t that mad … but she knew that, however crazy or deluded Sarmerodach had been, he had been dead right about one thing. She wasn’t really the person she thought she was, and never had been. There really was a flab-free, cellulite-free, thinking individual lurking somewhere inside her, in the secret potentialities of her cellular makeup—a person who might have been able to get out, if only four pathetic rivals of Darren’s equally pathetic gang hadn’t decided that it was his turn to be taken out in their lame and stupid drug war.

  Sheila had no idea who that latent person might have been. She certainly couldn’t put a name to her. One thing she did know, though, without a shadow of lingering doubt, was that all that hideous pain would somehow have been worthwhile, if only she’d been able to complete the ritual.