The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  I don’t even pretend to think of going back to my room. I get on the tube and go to Mardin’s house. I climb the stairs from the tube—these are newer, but, like the floor of the moussin, they are unevenly worn, sagging in the centers from the weight of this crowded city. What would it be like to cross the sea and go north? To the peninsula, Ida, or north from there, into the continent? I used to want to travel, to go to a place where people had yellow hair, to see whole forests of trees. Cross the oceans, learn other languages. I told Kari that I would even like to taste dog, or swine, but she thought I was showing off. But it’s true, once I would have liked to try things.

  I am excited, full of energy and purpose. I can do anything. I can understand Fhassin, standing in the street with his razor, laughing. It is worth it, anything is worth it for this feeling of being alive. I have been jessed, I have been asleep for so long.

  There are people on Mardin’s street. It’s Sunday and people are visiting. I stand in front of the house across the street. What am I going to say if someone opens the door? I am waiting to meet a friend. What if they don’t leave, what if Akhmim sees them and doesn’t come out. The sun bakes my hair, my head. Akhmim, where are you? Look out the window. He is probably waiting on the mistress. Maybe there is a bismek party and those women are poisoning Akhmim. They could do anything, they own him. I want to crouch in the street and cover my head in my hands, rock and cry like a widow woman from the Nekropolis. Like my mother must have done when my father died. I grew up without a father, maybe that’s why I’m so wild. Maybe that’s why Fhassin is in prison and I’m headed there. I pull my veil up so my face is shadowed. So no one can see my tears.

  Oh my head. Am I drunk? Am I insane? Has the Holy One, seeing my thoughts, driven me mad?

  I look at my brown hands. I cover my face.

  “Diyet?” He takes my shoulders.

  I look up at him, his beautiful familiar face, and I am stricken with terror. What is he? What am I trusting my life, my future to?

  “What’s wrong,” he asks, “are you ill?”

  “I’m going insane,” I say. “I can’t stand it, Akhmim, I can’t go back to my room—”

  “Hush,” he says, looking up the street and down. “You have to. I’m only a harni. I can’t do anything, I can’t help you.”

  “We have to go. We have to go away somewhere, you and I.”

  He shakes his head. “Diyet, please. You must hush.”

  “You said you wanted to be free,” I say. My head hurts so bad. The tears keep coming even though I am not really crying.

  “I can’t be free,” he says. “That was just talk.”

  “I have to go now,” I say. “I’m jessed, Akhmim, it is hard, if I don’t go now I’ll never go.”

  “Your mistress—”

  “DON’T TALK ABOUT HER!” I shout. If he talks about her I may not be able to leave.

  He looks around again. We are a spectacle, a man and a woman on the street.

  “Come with me, we’ll go somewhere, talk,” I say, all honey. He cannot deny me, I see it in him. He has to get off the street. He would go anywhere. Any place is safer than this.

  He lets me take him into the tube, down the stairs to the platform. I clutch my indigo veil around my face. We wait in silence, he has his hands in his pockets. He looks like a boy from the Nekropolis, standing there in just his shirt, no outer robe. He looks away, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, ill at ease. So human. Events are making him more human. Taking away all the uncertainties.

  “What kind of genes are in you?” I ask.

  “What?” he asks.

  “What kinds of genes?”

  “Are you asking for my chart?” he says.

  I shake my head. “Human?”

  He shrugs. “Mostly. Some artificial sequences.”

  “No animal genes,” I say. I sound irrational because I can’t get clear what I mean. The headache makes my thoughts skip, my tongue thick.

  He smiles a little. “No dogs, no monkeys.”

  I smile back, he is teasing me. I am learning to understand when he teases. “I have some difficult news for you, Akhmim. I think you are a mere human being.”

  His smile vanishes. He shakes his head. “Diyet,” he says. He is about to talk like a father.

  I stop him with a gesture. My head still hurts.

  The train whispers in, sounding like wind. Oh the lights. I sit down, shading my eyes, and he stands in front of me. I can feel him looking down at me. I look up and smile, or maybe grimace. He smiles back, looking worried. At the Moussin of the White Falcon, we get off. Funny that we are going into a cemetery to live. But only for awhile, I think. Somehow I will find a way we can leave. We’ll go north, across the sea, up to the continent, where we’ll be strangers. I take him through the streets and stop in front of a row of death houses, like the Lachims’, but an inn. I give Akhmim money and tell him to rent us a place for the night. “Tell them your wife is sick,” I whisper.

  “I don’t have any credit. If they take my identification, they’ll know,” he says.

  “This is the Nekropolis,” I say. “They don’t use credit. Go on. Here you are a man.”

  He frowns at me but takes the money. I watch him out of the corner of my eye, bargaining, pointing at me. Just pay, I think, even though we have so little money. I just want to lie down, to sleep. And finally he comes out and takes me by the hand and leads me to our place. A tiny place of rough whitewashed walls, a bed, a chair, a pitcher of water and two glasses. “I have something for your head,” he says. “The man gave it to me.” He smiles ruefully. “He thinks you are pregnant.”

  My hand shakes when I hold it out. He puts the white pills in my hand and pours a glass of water for me. “I’ll leave you here,” he says. “I’ll go back. I won’t tell anyone that I know where you are.”

  “Then you were lying to me,” I say. I don’t want to argue, Akhmim, just stay until tomorrow. Then it will be too late. “You said if you could be free, you would. You are free.”

  “What can I do? I can’t live,” he says in anguish. “I can’t get work!”

  “You can sell funeral wreaths. I’ll make them.”

  He looks torn. It is one thing to think how you will act, another to be in the situation and do it. And I know, seeing his face, that he really is human, because his problem is a very human problem. Safety or freedom.

  “We will talk about it tomorrow,” I say. “My head is aching.”

  “Because you are jessed,” he says. “It is so dangerous. What if we don’t make enough money? What if they catch us?”

  “That is life,” I say. I will go to prison. He will be sent back to the mistress. Punished. Maybe made to be conscript labor.

  “Is it worth the pain?” he asks in a small voice.

  I don’t know, but I can’t say that. “Not when you have the pain,” I say, “but afterward it is.”

  “Your poor head.” He strokes my forehead. His hand is cool and soothing.

  “It’s all right,” I say. “It hurts to be born.”

  MARGIN OF ERROR

  Nancy Kress

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Nancy Kress now lives in Brockport, New York. She began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-seventies, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Omni, and elsewhere. Her books include the novels The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, and Brain Rose, and the collection Trinity and Other Stories. She is also a regular contributor to Writer’s Digest and has written one book on fiction writing, Beginnings, Middles and Ends. Her most recent books are the novel version of her Hugo and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, and a new collection, The Aliens of Earth. She has also won a Nebula Award for her story “Out of All Them Bright Stars.” She has had stories in our Second, Third, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Annual Collections.


  In the chilling little story that follows, she reaffirms the truth of that old saying about revenge. It is a dish best served cold.

  Paula came back in a blaze of glory, her institute uniform with its pseudomilitary medals crisp and bright, her spine straight as an engineered diamond-fiber rod. I heard her heels clicking on the sidewalk and I looked up from the bottom porch step, a child on my lap. Paula’s face was genemod now, the blemishes gone, the skin fine-pored, the cheekbones chiseled under green eyes. But I would have known that face anywhere. No matter what she did to it.

  “Karen?” Her voice held disbelief.

  “Paula,” I said.

  “Karen?” This time I didn’t answer. The child, my oldest, twisted in my arms to eye the visitor.

  It was the kind of neighborhood where women sat all morning on porches or stoops, watching children play on the sidewalk. Steps sagged; paint peeled; small front lawns were scraped bare by feet and tricycles and plastic wading pools. Women lived a few doors down from their mothers, both of them growing heavier every year. There were few men. The ones there were didn’t seem to stay long.

  I said, “How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” Paula said, and I knew she didn’t understand my smile. Of course it wasn’t hard. I had never intended it should be. This was undoubtedly the first time in nearly five years that Paula had looked.

  She lowered her perfect body onto the porch steps. My little girl, Lollie, gazed at her from my lap. Then Lollie opened her cupped hands and smiled. “See my frog, lady?”

  “Very nice,” Paula said. She was trying hard to hide her contempt, but I could see it. For the sad imprisoned frog, for Lollie’s dirty face, for the worn yard, for the way I looked.

  “Karen,” Paula said, “I’m here because there’s a problem. With the project. More specifically with the initial formulas, we think. With a portion of the nanoassembler code from five years ago, when you were … still with us.”

  “A problem,” I repeated. Inside the house, a baby wailed. “Just a minute.”

  I set Lollie down and went inside. Lori cried in her crib. Her diaper reeked. I put a pacifier in her mouth and cradled her in my left arm. With the right arm I scooped Timmy from his crib. When he didn’t wake, I jostled him a little. I carried both babies back to the porch, deposited Timmy in the portacrib, and sat down next to Paula.

  “Lollie, go get me a diaper, honey. And wipes. You can carry your frog inside to get them.”

  Lollie went; she’s a sweet-natured kid. Paula stared incredulously at the twins. I unwrapped Lori’s diaper and Paula grimaced and slid farther away.

  “Karen … are you listening to me? This is important!”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The nanocomputer instructions are off, somehow. The major results check out, obviously…” Obviously. The media had spent five years exclaiming over the major results. “… but there are some odd foldings in the proteins of the twelfth-generation nanoassemblers.” Twelfth generation. The nanocomputer attached to each assembler replicates itself every six months. That was one of the project’s checks and balances on the margin of error. It had been five and a half years. Twelfth generation was about right.

  “Also,” Paula continued, and I heard the strain in her voice, “there are some unforeseen macrolevel developments. We’re not sure yet that they’re tied to the nanocomputer protein folds. What we’re trying to do now is cover all the variables.”

  “You must be working on fairly remote variables if you’re reduced to asking me.”

  “Well, yes, we are. Karen, do you have to do that now?”

  “Yes.” I scraped the shit off Lori with one edge of the soiled diaper. Lollie danced out of the house with a clean one. She sat beside me, whispering to her frog. Paula said, “What I need … what the project needs…”

  I said, “Do you remember the summer we collected frogs? We were maybe eight and ten. You’d become fascinated reading about that experiment where they threw a frog in boiling water but it jumped out, and then they put a frog in cool water and gradually increased the temperature to boiling until the stupid frog just sat there and died. Remember?”

  “Karen…”

  “I collected sixteen frogs for you, and when I found out what you were going to do with them, I cried and tried to let them go. But you boiled eight of them anyway. The other eight were controls. I’ll give you that—proper scientific method. To reduce the margin of error, you said.”

  “Karen … we were just kids…”

  I put the clean diaper on Lori. “Not all kids behave like that. Lollie doesn’t. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Nobody in your set has children. You should have had a baby, Paula.” She barely hid her shudder. But, then, most of the people we knew felt the same way. She said, “What the project needs is for you to come back and work on the same small area you did originally. Looking for something—anything—you might have missed in the proteincoded instructions to successive generations of nanoassemblers.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It’s not really a matter of choice. The macrolevel problems—I’ll be frank, Karen. It looks like a new form of cancer. Unregulated replication of some very weird cells.”

  “So take the cellular nanomachinery out.” I crumpled the stinking diaper and set it out of the baby’s reach. Closer to Paula.

  “You know we can’t do that! The project’s irreversible!”

  “Many things are irreversible,” I said. Lori started to fuss. I picked her up, opened my blouse, and gave her the breast. She sucked greedily. Paula glanced away. She has had nanomachinery in her perfect body, making it perfect, for five years now. Her breasts will never look swollen, blue-veined, sagging.

  “Karen, listen…”

  “No … you listen.” I said quietly. “Eight years ago you convinced Zweigler I was only a minor member of the research team, included only because I was your sister. I’ve always wondered, by the way, how you did that—were you sleeping with him, too? Seven years ago you got me shunted off into the minor area of the project’s effect on female gametes—which nobody cared about because it was already clear there was no way around sterility as a side effect. Nobody thought it was too high a price for a perfect, self-repairing body, did they? Except me.” Paula didn’t answer. Lollie carried her frog to the wading pool and set it carefully in the water. I said, “I didn’t mind working on female gametes, even if it was a backwater, even if you got star billing. I was used to it, after all. As kids, you were always the cowboy; I got to be the horse. You were the astronaut, I was the alien you conquered. Remember? One Christmas you used up all the chemicals in your first chemistry set and then stole mine.”

  “I don’t think trivial childhood incidents matter in…”

  “Of course you don’t. And I never minded. But I did mind when five years ago you made copies of all my notes and presented them as yours, while I was so sick during my pregnancy with Lollie. You claimed my work. Stole it. Just like the chemistry set. And then you eased me off the project.”

  “What you did was so minor…”

  “If it was so minor, why are you here asking for my help now? And why would you imagine for half a second I’d give it to you?” She stared at me, calculating. I stared back coolly. Paula wasn’t used to me cool. I’d always been the excitable one. Excitable, flighty, unstable—that’s what she told Zweigler. A security risk.

  Timmy fussed in his portacrib. I stood up, still nursing Lori, and scooped him up with my free arm. Back on the steps, I juggled Timmy to lie across Lori on my lap, pulled back my blouse, and gave him the other breast. This time Paula didn’t permit herself a grimace.

  She said, “Karen, what I did was wrong. I know that now. But for the sake of the project, not for me, you have to…”

  “You are the project. You have been from the first moment you grabbed the headlines away from Zweigler and the others who gave their life to that work. ‘Lovely Young Scientist Injects Self With Perfe
ct-Cell Drug!’ ‘No Sacrifice Too Great To Circumvent FDA Shortsightedness, Heroic Researcher Declares.’”

  Paula said flatly, “You’re jealous. You’re obscure and I’m famous. You’re a mess and I’m beautiful. You’re…”

  “A milk cow? While you’re a brilliant researcher? Then solve your own research problems.”

  “This was your area…”

  “Oh, Paula, they were all my areas. I did more of the basic research than you did, and you know it. But you knew how to position yourself with Zweigler, to present key findings at key moments, to cultivate the right connections. And, of course, I was still under the delusion we were partners. I just didn’t realize it was a barracuda partnering a goldfish.”

  From the wading pool Lollie watched us with big eyes. “Mommy…”

  “It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s not mad at you. Look, better catch your frog—he’s hopping away.”

  She shrieked happily and dove for the frog. Paula said softly, “I had no idea you were so angry after all this time. You’ve changed, Karen.”

  “But I’m not angry. Not any more. And you never knew what I was like before. You never bothered to know.”

  “I knew you never wanted a scientific life. Not the way I did. You always wanted kids. Wanted … this.” She waved her arm around the shabby yard. David left eighteen months ago. He sends money. It’s never enough.

  “I wanted a scientific establishment that would let me have both. And I wanted credit for my work. I wanted what was mine. How did you do it, Paula—end up with what was yours and what was mine, too?”

  “Because you were distracted by baby shit and frogs!” Paula yelled, and I saw how scared she really was. Paula didn’t make admissions like that. A tactical error. I watched her stab desperately for a way to retain the advantage. A way to seize the offensive. I seized it first. “You should have left David alone. You already had Zweigler; you should have left me David. Our marriage was never the same after that.”

  She said, “I’m dying, Karen.”

  I turned my head from the nursing babies to look at her.