The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 17

by Gardner Dozois

  Unless it occurred to them that she would be suiting up, and someone would be waiting outside as soon as the outer door opened . . .

  She spent a few bad minutes waiting for the air to leak to the outside. It didn’t help her state of mind when the Bellman began to speak to her.

  “Your situation is hopeless. I presume you know that.”

  She jumped, then realized he was speaking to her through the intercom, and it was being relayed to her suit radio. He didn’t know she was in the suit then.

  “I don’t know anything of the kind,” she said. “The police will be here in a few minutes. You’d better get going while you’ve got the chance.”

  “Sorry. That won’t work. I know you got through, but I also know they didn’t trace you.”

  The air pressure dial read zero. Bach held the chain knife and pulled the door open. She stuck her head out. No one was waiting for her.

  She was fifty meters away across the gently rolling plain when she suddenly stopped.

  It was at least four kilometers to the nearest airlock that did not lead back into the plantation. She had plenty of air, but was not sure about her strength. The midwife mercifully spared her the pain she should have been going through, but her arms and legs felt like lead. Could they follow her faster than she could run? It seemed likely.

  Of course, there was another alternative.

  She thought about what they had planned for Joanna, then loped back to the dome. She moved like a skater, with her feet close to the ground.

  It took three jumps before she could grab the upper edge of the metal wall with one gauntlet, then she could not lift her weight with just the one arm. She realized she was a step away from total exhaustion. With both hands, she managed to clamber up to stand on a narrow ledge with her feet among the bolts that secured the hold-down cables to the top of the wall. She leaned down and looked through the transparent vacuplast. A group of five people stood around the inner lock door. One of them, who had been squatting with his elbows on his knees, stood up now and pressed a button beside the lock. She could only see the top of his head, which was protected by a blue cap.

  “You found the suit, didn’t you?” the Bellman said. His voice was quiet, unemotional. Bach said nothing. “Can you still hear me?”

  “I can hear you,” Bach said. She held the chain knife and squeezed the handle; a slight vibration in her glove was the only indication that it was working. She put the edge of the blade to the plastic film and began to trace the sides of a square, one meter wide.

  “I thought you could,” he said. “You’re on your way already. Of course, I wouldn’t have mentioned the suit, in case you hadn’t found it, until one of my own men reached the next lock and was on his way around the outside. Which he is.”

  “Um-hmm.” Bach wanted him to keep talking. She was worried they would hear the sound of the knife as it slowly cut its way through the tough plastic.

  “What you might like to know is that he has an infrared detector with him. We used it to track you inside. It makes your footprints glow. Even your suit loses heat enough through the boots to make the machine useful. It’s a very good machine.”

  Bach hadn’t thought of that, and didn’t like it at all. It might have been best to take her chances trying to reach the next airlock. When the man arrived he would quickly see that she had doubled back.

  “Why are you telling me all this?” she asked. The square was now bordered with shallow grooves, but it was taking too long. She began to concentrate just on the lower edge, moving the knife back and forth.

  “Thinking out loud,” he said, with a self-conscious laugh. “This is an exhilarating game, don’t you agree? And you’re the most skilled quarry I’ve pursued in many years. Is there a secret to your success?”

  “I’m with the police,” Bach said. “Your people stumbled into a stakeout.”

  “Ah, that explains a lot,” he said, almost gratefully.

  “Who are you, anyway?” she asked.

  “Just call me the Bellman. When I heard you people had named me that, I took a fancy to it.”

  “Why babies? That’s the part I can’t understand.”

  “Why veal? Why baby lamb chops? How should I know? I don’t eat the stuff. I don’t know anything about meat, but I know a good racket, and a fertile market, when I see them. One of my customers wants babies, that’s what he gets. I can get any age.” He sighed again. “And it’s so easy, we grow sloppy. We get careless. The work is so routine. From now on we’ll kill quickly. If we’d killed you when you got out of the tube, we’d have avoided a lot of bother.”

  “A lot more than you expect, I hope.” Damn! Why wasn’t the knife through yet? She hadn’t thought it would take this long. “I don’t understand, frankly, why you let me live as long as you did. Why lock me up, then come to kill me hours later?”

  “Greed, I’m afraid,” the Bellman said. “You see, they were not coming to kill you. You over-reacted. I was attempting to combine one business with another. There are uses for live pregnant women. I have many customers. Uses for live babies, too. We generally keep them for a few months.”

  Bach knew she should question him about that, as a good police officer. The department would want to know what he did. Instead, she bore down on the knife with all her strength and nearly bit through her lower lip.

  “I could use someone like you,” he said. “You don’t really think you can get away, do you? Why don’t you think it over? We could make . . .”

  Peering down through the bubble, Bach saw the Bellman look up. He never finished his offer, whatever it was. She saw his face for an instant – a perfectly ordinary face that would not have seemed out of place on an accountant or a bank teller – and had the satisfaction of seeing him realize his mistake. He did not waste time in regrets. He instantly saw his only chance, abandoned the people working on the lock without warning them, and began to run at full speed back into the cornfield.

  The bottom edge of the square parted at that moment. Bach felt something tugging on her hand, and she moved along the narrow ledge away from the hole. There was no sound as the sides of the square peeled back, then the whole panel broke free and the material began to tear from each of the corners. The surface of the bubble began to undulate sluggishly.

  It was eerie; there was nothing to hear and little to see as the air rushed out of the gaping hole. Then suddenly storms of cornstalks, shorn of leaves and ears, erupted like flights of artillery rockets and flung themselves into the blackness. The stream turned white, and Bach could not figure out why that should be.

  The first body came through and sailed an amazing distance before it impacted in the gray dust.

  The place was a beehive of activity when Lisa Babcock arrived. A dozen police crawlers were parked outside the wall with dozens more on their way. The blue lights revolved silently. She heard nothing but her own breathing, the occasional terse comment on the emergency band, and the faint whirring of her legs.

  Five bodies were arranged just outside the wall, beside the large hole that had been cut to give vehicle access to the interior of the plantation. She looked down at them dispassionately. They looked about as one would expect a body to look that had been blown from a cannon and then quick-frozen.

  Bach was not among them.

  She stepped inside the dome for a moment, unable to tell what the writhing white coating of spongy material was until she picked up a handful. Popcorn. It was twenty centimeters deep inside, and still growing as raw sunlight and vacuum caused the kernels to dry and explode. If Bach was in there, it could take days to find her body. She went back outside and began to walk along the outer perimeter of the wall, away from where all the activity was concentrated.

  She found the body face down, in the shadow of the wall. It was hard to see; she had nearly tripped over it. What surprised her was the spacesuit. If she had a suit, why had she died? Pursing her lips, she grabbed one shoulder and rolled it over.

  It was a man,
looking down in considerable surprise at the hilt of a chain knife growing from his chest, surrounded by a black, broken flower of frozen blood. Babcock began to run.

  When she came to the lock she pounded on the metal door, then put her helmet to it. After a long pause, she heard the answering taps.

  * * *

  It was another fifteen minutes before they could bring a rescue truck around and mate it to the door. Babcock was in the truck when the door swung open, and stepped through first by the simple expedient of elbowing a fellow cop with enough force to bruise ribs.

  At first she thought that, against all her hopes, Bach was dead. She sprawled loosely with her back propped against the wall, hugging the baby in her arms. She didn’t seem to be breathing. Mother and child were coated with dirt, and Bach’s legs were bloody. She seemed impossibly pale. Babcock went to her and reached for the baby.

  Bach jerked, showing surprising strength. Her sunken eyes slowly focused on Babcock’s face, then she looked down at Joanna and grinned foolishly.

  “Isn’t she the prettiest thing you ever saw?”

  THE BEAR’S BABY

  Judith Moffett

  Judith Moffett made her first professional sale in 1986, won the John W. Campbell Award as Best New Writer of 1987, and the Theodore Sturgeon Award for her story “Surviving.” She was a major figure in the genre for about a decade, selling critically acclaimed stories to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Asimov’s Science Fiction, and publishing novels such as the well-received Pennterra, and collections (or fix-up novels, depending on how you squinted at them) such as The Ragged World and Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream. Moffett is also a nationally recognized poet (she was once given a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship Grant for her poetry). She is the author of two books of poetry, a book of criticism, a book of translations from the Swedish, and a book on organic gardening. Her stories have appeared in our Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh Annual Collections. Born in Louisville, she has returned to her home state after years of residency in Pennsylvania, Utah, and Illinois, and now lives in Lawrenceburg, Kentucky.

  After the middle years of the 1980s, Moffett fell into a long period of silence, and many assumed that the book was closed on her, but, happily, they seem to have been wrong, as she returned to print this year with the powerful and engrossing story that follows, showing the conflict – one with far-reaching implications – between a young man who just wants to do his job and the forces – some of them literally out of this world – that are trying to prevent him from doing it.

  DENNY HEARD THE muffled whacking of the chopper blades and the motor’s deep roar, but he was underground and almost upside down, working by flashlight to detach a fuzzy bear cub from a dangerous nipple, and couldn’t have dropped everything to scamper obediently back along the ridge trail right that minute even if he’d wanted to. Which, frankly, he didn’t.

  The cub let go, rasping a complaint. Denny backpedaled on his elbows out of the black cavern – and out of immediate range of the huge, rank, snoring heap of mother bear who had given birth to this baby in her sleep – holding the little cub off the ground in his gloved right hand. As usual he scraped his stomach. Being short and scrawny was an advantage in his line of work, but this maneuver wasn’t easy even for him.

  Out in the pale winter daylight, he knelt in a pile of oak leaves to dump the baby gently into the pan of the scales and hold them up by the hook at the top. Pulling off his right glove with his teeth, he recorded the weight, 1.3 kilos, on a PocketPad, drew a blood sample, and stapled an ear tag into the now-squawling baby’s left ear – left for male. “Sorry, Rocket. Sorry, little guy.”

  His movements were neat and practiced, and he was also hurrying. It was always best to reduce stress on the infant bears by being quick, but today Denny had a couple of extra reasons for hurrying. The winter, like most winters nowadays, was mild. Too mild. Denny had waited for the coldest weather he could, but the mother bear might not be all that deeply asleep. The other reason, of course, was that he couldn’t hear the helicopter any more, meaning that it had landed and that the Hefn Observer would be at the cabin by now, probably pacing back and forth on the deck, increasingly irritated as Denny continued to fail to show up. Punctuality mattered to the Hefn. In four years, this Hefn – Innisfrey, the Observer for Wildlife Habitat Recovery – had never been late for a rendezvous.

  Denny wiggled his hand back into its gauntlet, picked up the cub, and wormed his way back into the den. His body almost completely blocked what little light seeped through the entrance, but he’d left the flashlight just inside, and so could see where to press the cub against his mother’s chest until he started to suckle. The other baby turned loose more cooperatively; but as it did so the mother bear made a harsh sound deep in her throat and moved her massive shoulder. Denny froze, his heart leaping into his own throat, the purloined cub complaining and squirming in the leather gauntlet. But it was okay, she settled down again, so he backed the rest of the way out and sat puffing until his pulse rate returned to normal. He had always been against tranquilizing the mothers for the cubs’ first couple of physicals – the sedative got into their milk and affected the babies – but for the first time he wondered seriously if it mightn’t be a good idea to reevaluate that policy in the light of how the animals were being affected by the warming climate.

  Or maybe reevaluate Fish and Wildlife’s whole approach to black bear management. At least in rural areas like this one, that the bears had been quick to recolonize as the aging, dwindling human population had abandoned their fields and pastures and moved into the towns, where there were services and the roads were maintained. Not even a wagon and team could get around very well over roads as bad as the ones around here had gotten to be, all potholes and big broken chunks of macadam. Even plain dirt would be better. Denny himself rode a horse (Rocinante) and led a pack mule (Roscoe) when he went into town for provisions. He wasn’t much of a rider, but then he didn’t have much of a choice.

  The second cub was a female. “Rodeo,” Denny told her, “that’s your name, little bear.” At 1.45 kilos she was slightly chubbier than her brother. Rodeo’s “real” name was Number 439, the number on her tag. She was half of the third pair of cubs produced by Number 117, the sow presently enjoying her long winter’s nap down in the den, a huge healthy animal and an excellent mother; all but one of her cubs had survived to adulthood. She was six years old, the one hundred seventeenth female to be radio-collared in the state of Kentucky since the Hefn had established the management program, and her “call name” was Rosetta. Like hurricanes, study bears were call-named by cycling through the letters of the alphabet. Cubs kept the first two letters of their mother’s name through subsequent generations, which allowed each initial to be used many times. If by some chance all the children and children’s children of a particular bear should die, the pair of letters would not be retired but would go back into service, available for use by the next young bear who wandered across the state line from Tennessee or West Virginia. To change state of residence was to become part of a different study and get a whole new identity.

  Rosetta hadn’t done that; she was a Kentuckian born and bred, like Denny himself, though (also like Denny) she had wandered about for a good while before settling down in Denny’s district and digging herself this excellent den under a huge oak blown over in a tornado. He hadn’t named her or her first pair of cubs, who’d still been traveling with her when she’d moved into the county. But he’d named the next pair (Rocannon and Rotorooter), and was keeping a whole list of Ro- names in reserve.

  Rodeo, having protestingly donated some blood and acquired a numbered ear tag of her own, resumed suckling the instant Denny put her back on the nipple, and this time her mother didn’t stir. Rosetta’s collar appeared to be in decent shape and was still sending a good clear signal. Denny made a judgment call against taking samples of Rosetta’s blood today and exited the den. He poked his syringes and test tubes
into the fingers of the gauntlets and stuffed them into his daypack, along with the scales and PocketPad and flashlight, and headed for the cabin at once, walking briskly, shrugging on the pack. The air was pretty cold, a little below freezing; he fished a watch cap out of his jacket pocket to pull down over his bald spot and his ears, and jammed his hands into his pockets.

  Now that he was done with the bears, he looked at his watch and shifted mental gears. The Hefn Observer had been kept waiting for nearly an hour. Denny walked faster, almost jogging, a short wiry man with an anxious, rather ferretty face. The view from the ridge through gaps in the cedars, folded hills dusted over with snow under a pale sky, was lovely in its bareness, but Denny had scant attention to spare for it this day. Hurrying past the viewpoint with the nicest prospect without a sideways glance, he plunged into a tunnel formed by cedar trees lining the sides of what had once been a wagon road.

  The Hefn had ordered field studies of bears, coyotes, elk, and white-tailed deer in the eastern United States, it was their initiative; they were monitoring the ecological health of the planet by monitoring its apex predators and their prey species as these reclaimed or moved into habitat that year by year was returning to a wild state. But funding for Denny’s particular field study in Anderson County depended on satisfying the Hefn Observer to whom he reported, and failing to pay this fact due notice (by being dilatory) was not good politics. Denny had been on the job since the beginning of the project, and knew he was very good at what he did, but you still had to kowtow on a regular basis to the goddamned Hefn. He basically hated the Hefn, something he had in common with just about everybody else in the world. Answering to them was the disagreeable part of the bear study.

  His whole situation was conflicted. It was probably the worst time in human history to be a human being, but it was also, he had to acknowledge it, one of the best to be a wildlife biologist in your own backyard. If it weren’t for the Hefn, and their Directive, and the Baby Ban Broadcast that had sterilized just about every person on the planet, there would be no black bear population in east central Kentucky – or elk population, or population of coyotes approaching the size of wolves, all busily subspeciating in the fascinating ways they were doing. Without the Hefn Takeover, east central Kentucky – now a recovering climax oak-hickory forest – would still be growing tobacco and Black Angus steers, and spindling big round bales of tall-fescue hay. The state’s black bears would still be in the Daniel Boone National Forest on the West Virginia border, way over in the Appalachian foothills, with far too few bears to go around for the numbers of local people eager to study them.