The Year's Best SF 21 # 2003

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Phil settles back in his chair. He shrugs. “All those reasons, I guess. Who sent the chromatographs?”

  Hammett spreads his hands. “I never found out. I looked—I hear you looked, too. Dalton looked harder than both of us put together. Whoever did it covered his tracks extremely well and then let seventeen years destroy whatever was left. By now, the trail is so cold we’ll never know.”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “I came here to give you a piece of my priceless wisdom,” Hammett snaps. He pulls an ancient, bulging envelope out of his jacket. “And to give you this.”

  Phil opens it and pulls out a collection of pictures. Each one is a study in blacks and grays, barred and spreading into one another. “The chromatographs.”

  “I figure I owed you at least that much.”

  Phil stares at the pictures. He’d seen pictures like this before, when Robinson had compared his DNA against Gordie Howe’s, his own and Chela’s, compared against little Jake the day after he was born. But these were the originals that had changed his life. They felt heavy in his hands. Gently, he put them back in the envelope.

  “Thanks, Frank,” he says sincerely.

  Hammett waves him away. “I don’t regret what I did. But I wish it hadn’t been so hard on you.”

  They sit wrapped in silence for a while. Phil sips his coffee thoughtfully.

  “You said you had emphysema?”

  “Yeah,” Hammett says shortly. “Both lungs shot and I’m a poor transplant candidate.”

  “Nobody’s a good transplant candidate.” Phil thinks of his father and drinks his coffee. “Why do you think they did it?”

  “Which? Clone you or send the pictures to me?”

  “I don’t know. Both, I guess.”

  “Good questions,” Hammett says. “I’ve been considering those very questions for over twenty-five years. I still don’t have an answer, but here’s what I know. The cost of the cover-up, large as it must have been, is a whole lot less than it must have taken to clone you in the first place, so whoever did it had resources. They didn’t do just anybody. They chose a minor celebrity. A man people might know, but not an overwhelming star. Since no one is a villain in their own mind, we’ve got to figure they thought they were doing something good. So, they cloned you and kept you a secret for a long time. Then, selectively, they revealed you. Just you. Maybe you were the only one. Maybe there were hundreds of attempts. Hundreds of Howes. Maybe not—a lot of people tried to see if they were Gordie Howe after the feeds picked you up. But you were the only one reported and you were the only one they exposed. Who knows what other people they might have cloned?”

  Phil realizes that Hammett never found out about Danny. He resolves not to reveal that secret now. “Go on.”

  Hammett works his hands in front of him like a man building a house. “The rest is speculation. Maybe they cloned you because they wanted to know before anybody else if it could be done. Or it could have been for future profit, or some rich old man’s fancy. Once it was done and the secret kept, they had an ongoing experiment they could watch for years.”

  “Why Gordie Howe?”

  “Why not? If you’re going to go through all that expense, who should you clone? Some unknown guy from Medford?” Hammett shakes his head. “Once you’re going to make the investment, it makes sense to choose somebody important. They wanted Howe for some reason, and got him.”

  Phil nods. “Okay.”

  “Then, when you’re seventeen years old, they reveal you. That’s the interesting part.” Hammett stops and drinks some coffee, swirls the cup for a moment, gathering his thoughts. “Britain okayed human cloning research in 2000 as long as it didn’t go to term. The USA was much more restrictive. A bunch of people in Italy cloned some kids for a few couples and it was a complete disaster. By the time you were in high school, nobody was cloning anymore, but the research had gotten almost routine and the payoffs were big: continuing stem cell lines, natural skin and corneas, a cure for myopia, transplant organs. People were starting to talk all over again about getting past the birth defects and other problems and starting human clone lines. Then, you were revealed and the debate changes. It’s not abstract anymore. Your career was over and you disappeared. But the debate went on. People who were ready to roll on cloning projects were suddenly putting on the brakes. Until, years later, we’re sitting here and clone lines aren’t even discussed anymore.”

  Hammett leans on his hands, his face close to Phil’s. “When people first started buying cars, they drove them like they were buggies. They didn’t care about the sides of the road. There weren’t any stop signs or seat belts. Drivers were so unsophisticated they thought getting out of the way compromised their manly pride and preferred head-on collisions. People had to live with cars for years before they were smart enough to properly navigate a city street. Fifty years after cars were invented, you could certainly drive the wrong way down a one way street but only a fool or a drunk would do it.”

  He waves his hand in the air. “It’s the same thing. Sure we could clone people now, and if you’re willing to wait the twenty years or so for them to grow up they might somewhat resemble their clone parent. But we don’t need to clone people. The way clones work is part of the world consciousness. The only reason you ever would clone a person is to get that person as a clone. You, Phil Berger, proved that was a pipe dream. You are not Gordie Howe, regardless of how much I ever wanted you to be. Now, we all know that: a clone isn’t a copy of the original. Its heritage is strong, but ultimately it’s just another person. Back when you were seventeen, that knowledge wasn’t part of people’s thinking.” Hammett stops, struggling for breath.

  Phil leans back and laughs. “Calm down, big guy! So, you think they were doing us a favor?”

  Hammett rests his hands on the table and smiles. “I think they were trying to buy us time until we were smart enough to drive on the right side of the road.”

  “Then who could they have been?”

  “Lord only knows, Phil. But they were smart. They figured us out root and branch.”

  It’s early morning in February. The sky is still dark. Phil parks his car in front of the rink and waits until the manager opens the door. He hefts his equipment out of the back and follows him into the locker room. As always, he’s the first member of the team to arrive.

  He quickly dons the equipment: shin pads, skates, and pants, elbow pads, shoulder pads, helmet and gloves. He leaves the locker room and steps out on the ice, warming up. He likes these first moments alone on the ice. It makes him reflective.

  This is adult recreational hockey, not the NHL. He’s forty-nine, not eighteen. He wonders, not for the first time, what his life might have been like if he had never been revealed. Would he have been another Gordie Howe? Would he have had any career at all? It’s all chance, Chela said. He thinks of her. He thinks of Danny.

  After this morning’s game, he will pick up Jake and take him to middle school. He’s lucky to have Jake. He’s lucky to have had Chela. And now, he’s lucky to have the ice again. But then, he thinks, the ice was always there.

  After he warms up, he stretches. Then, he takes off his glove, kneels, and draws his fingertips across the surface.

  It is smooth and hard; perfect hockey ice.

  Ej-es

  Nancy Kress

  Nancy Kress began selling her elegant and incisive stories in the mid-70s, and has since become a frequent contributor to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, and elsewhere. Her books include the novels The Prince of Morning Bells, The Golden Grove, The White Pipes, An Alien Light, Brain Rose, Oaths & Miracles, Stinger, Maximum Light, the novelization of her Hugo and Nebula-winning story, Beggars in Spain, a sequel, Beggars and Choosers, and a popular recent sequence of novels, Probability Moon, Probability Sun, and Probability Space. Her short work has been collected in Trinity and Other Stories, The Aliens of Earth, and Beaker’s Dozen. Her most recent books are two n
ew novels, Crossfire and Nothing Human. Upcoming is a new novel, Crucible. She has also won Nebula Awards for her stories “Out of All Them Bright Stars” and “The Flowers of Aulit Prison.” She has had stories in our Second, Third, Sixth through Fifteenth, Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Annual Collections.

  Here she takes us to a distant planet where a medical mystery must be unraveled—no matter how high the cost.

  “Jesse, come home

  There’s a hole in the bed

  where we slept

  Now it’s growing cold

  Hey Jesse, your face

  in the place where we lay

  by the hearth, all apart

  It hangs on my heart …

  Jesse, I’m lonely

  Come home”

  — from “Jesse,” by Janis Ian, 1972

  Why did you first enter the Corps?” Lolimel asked her as they sat at the back of the shuttle, just before landing. Mia looked at the young man helplessly, because how could you answer a question like that? Especially when it was asked by the idealistic and worshipful new recruits, too ignorant to know what a waste of time worship was, let alone simplistic questions.

  “Many reasons,” Mia said gravely, vaguely. He looked like so many medicians she had worked with, for so many decades on so many planets … intense, thick-haired, genemod beautiful, a little insane. You had to be a little insane to leave Earth for the Corps, knowing that when (if) you ever returned, all you had known would have been dust for centuries.

  He was more persistent than most. “What reasons?”

  “The same as yours, Lolimel,” she said, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Now be quiet, please, we’re entering the atmosphere.”

  “Yes, but —”

  “Be quiet.” Entry was so much easier on him than on her; he had not got bones weakened from decades in space. They did weaken, no matter what exercise one took or what supplements or what gene therapy. Mia leaned back in her shuttle chair and closed her eyes. Ten minutes, maybe, of aerobraking and descent; surely she could stand ten minutes. Or not.

  The heaviness began, abruptly increased. Worse on her eyeballs, as always; she didn’t have good eye socket muscles, had never had them. Such an odd weakness. Well, not for long; this was her last flight. At the next station, she’d retire. She was already well over age, and her body felt it. Only her body? No, her mind, too. At the moment, for instance, she couldn’t remember the name of the planet they were hurtling toward. She recalled its catalog number, but not whatever its colonists, who were not answering hails from ship, had called it.

  “Why did you join the Corps?”

  “Many reasons.”

  And so few of them fulfilled. But that was not a thing you told the young.

  The colony sat at the edge of a river, under an evening sky of breathable air set with three brilliant, fast-moving moons. Beds of glorious flowers dotted the settlement, somewhere in size between a large town and a small city. The buildings of foamcast embedded with glittering native stone were graceful, well-proportioned rooms set around open atria. Minimal furniture, as graceful as the buildings; even the machines blended unobtrusively into the lovely landscape. The colonists had taste and restraint and a sense of beauty. They were all dead.

  “A long time ago,” said Kenin. Officially she was Expedition Head, although titles and chains of command tended to erode near the galactic edge, and Kenin led more by consensus and natural calm than by rank. More than once the team had been grateful for Kenin’s calm. Lolimel looked shaken, although he was trying to hide it.

  Kenin studied the skeleton before them. “Look at those bones—completely clean.”

  Lolimel managed, “It might have been picked clean quickly by predators, or carnivorous insects, or …” His voice trailed off.

  “I already scanned it, Lolimel. No microscopic bone nicks. She decayed right there in bed, along with clothing and bedding.”

  The three of them looked at the bones lying on the indestructible mattress coils of some alloy Mia had once known the name of. Long clean bones, as neatly arranged as if for a first-year anatomy lesson. The bedroom door had been closed; the dehumidifying system had, astonishingly, not failed; the windows were intact. Nothing had disturbed the woman’s long rot in the dry air until nothing remained, not even the bacteria that had fed on her, not even the smell of decay.

  Kenin finished speaking to the other team. She turned to Mia and Lolimel, her beautiful brown eyes serene. “There are skeletons throughout the city, some in homes and some collapsed in what seem to be public spaces. Whatever the disease was, it struck fast. Jamal says their computer network is gone, but individual rec cubes might still work. Those things last forever.”

  Nothing lasts forever, Mia thought, but she started searching the cabinets for a cube. She said to Lolimel, to give him something to focus on, “How long ago was this colony founded, again?”

  “Three hundred sixty E-years,” Lolimel said. He joined the search.

  Three hundred sixty years since a colony ship left an established world with its hopeful burden, arrived at this deadly Eden, established a city, flourished, and died. How much of Mia’s lifetime, much of it spent traveling at just under c, did that represent? Once she had delighted in figuring out such equations, in wondering if she’d been born when a given worldful of colonists made planetfall. But by now there were too many expeditions, too many colonies, too many accelerations and decelerations, and she’d lost track.

  Lolimel said abruptly, “Here’s a rec cube.”

  “Play it,” Kenin said, and when he just went on staring at it in the palm of his smooth hand, she took the cube from him and played it herself.

  It was what she expected. A native plague of some kind, jumping DNA-based species (which included all species in the galaxy, thanks to panspermia). The plague had struck after the colonists thought they had vaccinated against all dangerous micros. Of course, they couldn’t really have thought that; even three hundred sixty years ago doctors had been familiar with alien species-crossers. Some were mildly irritating, some dangerous, some epidemically fatal. Colonies had been lost before, and would be again.

  “Complete medical data resides on green rec cubes,” the recorder had said in the curiously accented International of three centuries ago. Clearly dying, he gazed out from the cube with calm, sad eyes. A brave man. “Any future visitors to Good Fortune should be warned.”

  Good Fortune. That was the planet’s name.

  “All right,” Kenin said, “tell the guard to search for green cubes. Mia, get the emergency analysis lab set up and direct Jamal to look for burial sites. If they had time to inter some victims—if they interred at all, of course—we might be able to recover some micros to create vacs or cures. Lolimel, you assist me in —”

  One of the guards, carrying weapons that Mia could not have named, blurted, “Ma’am, how do we know we won’t get the same thing that killed the colonists?”

  Mia looked at her. Like Lolimel, she was very young. Like all of them, she would have her story about why she volunteered for the Corps.

  Now the young guard was blushing. “I mean, ma’am, before you can make a vaccination? How do we know we won’t get the disease, too?”

  Mia said gently, “We don’t.”

  No one, however, got sick. The colonists had had interment practices, they had had time to bury some of their dead in strong, water-tight coffins before everyone else died, and their customs didn’t include embalming. Much more than Mia had dared hope for. Good Fortune, indeed.

  In five days of tireless work they had the micro isolated, sequenced, and analyzed. It was a virus, or a virus analogue, that had somehow gained access to the brain and lodged near the limbic system, creating destruction and death. Like rabies, Mia thought, and hoped this virus hadn’t caused the terror and madness of that stubborn disease. Not even Earth had been able to eradicate rabies.

  Two more days yielded the vaccine. Kenin dispensed it outside the large building o
n the edge of the city, function unknown, which had become Corps headquarters. Mia applied her patch, noticing with the usual distaste the leathery, wrinkled skin of her forearm. Once she had had such beautiful skin, what was it that a long-ago lover had said to her, what had been his name … Ah, growing old was not for the gutless.

  Something moved at the edge of her vision.

  “Lolimel … did you see that?”

  “See what?”

  “Nothing.” Sometimes her aging eyes played tricks on her; she didn’t want Lolimel’s pity.

  The thing moved again.

  Casually Mia rose, brushing imaginary dirt from the seat of her uniform, strolling toward the bushes where she’d seen motion. From her pocket she pulled her gun. There were animals on this planet, of course, although the Corps had only glimpsed them from a distance, and rabies was transmitted by animal bite ….

  It wasn’t an animal. It was a human child.

  No, not a child, Mia realized as she rounded the clump of bushes and, amazingly, the girl didn’t run. An adolescent, or perhaps older, but so short and thin that Mia’s mind had filled in “child.” A scrawny young woman with light brown skin and long, matted black hair, dressed carelessly in some sort of sarong-like wrap. Staring at Mia with a total lack of fear.

  “Hello,” Mia said gently.

  “Ej-es?” the girl said.

  Mia said into her wrister, “Kenin … we’ve got natives. Survivors.”

  The girl smiled. Her hair was patchy on one side, marked with small white rings. Fungus, Mia thought professionally, absurdly. The girl walked right toward Mia, not slowing, as if intending to walk through her. Instinctively Mia put out an arm. The girl walked into it, bonked herself on the forehead, and crumpled to the ground.