The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  There was a murmur in the room. It was a tradition that all bonuses were pooled and shared out between the various science crews at the end of a mission.

  Opie Kindred was a clever, successful man, yet somehow soured, as if the world was a continual disappointment. He rode his team hard, was quick to find failure in others. Margaret was a natural target for his scorn, a squat muscle-bound unedited dwarf from Earth who had to take drugs to survive in micro-gravity, who grew hair in all sorts of unlikely places. He stared at her with disdain and said, “I’m surprised at the tone of this briefing, Dr. Wu. Wild speculations built on nothing at all. I have sat here for an hour and heard nothing useful. We are paid to get results, not generate hypotheses. All we hear from your crew is excuses when what we want are samples. It seems simple enough to me. If something is upsetting your proxies, then you should use robots. Or send people in and handpick samples. I’ve worked my way through almost all you’ve obtained. I need more material, especially in light of my latest findings.”

  “Robots need transmission relays too,” Srin Kerenyi pointed out.

  Orly Higgins said, “If you ride them, to be sure. But I don’t see the need for human control. It is a simple enough task to program them to go down, pick up samples, return.” She was the leader of the crew that had unpicked the AI’s corrupted code, and was an acolyte of Opie Kindred.

  “The proxies failed whether or not they were remotely controlled,” Margaret said, “and on their own they are as smart as any robot. I’d love to go down there myself, but the Star Chamber has forbidden it for the usual reasons. They’re scared we’ll get up to something if we go where they can’t watch us.”

  “Careful, boss,” Srin Kerenyi whispered. “The White Mice are bound to be monitoring this.”

  “I don’t care,” Margaret said. “I’m through with trying polite requests. We need to get down there, Srin.”

  “Sure, boss. But getting arrested for sedition isn’t the way.”

  “There’s some interesting stuff in the upper levels,” Arn Nivedta said. “Stuff with huge commercial potential, as you pointed out, Opie.”

  Murmurs of agreement throughout the crowded room. The Reef could make the Ganapati the richest habitat in the Outer System, where expansion was limited by the availability of fixed carbon. Even a modest-sized comet nucleus, ten kilometers in diameter, say, and salted with only one hundredth of one percent carbonaceous material, contained fifty million tons of carbon, mostly as methane and carbon monoxide ice, with a surface dusting of tarry long chain hydrocarbons. The problem was that most vacuum organisms converted simple carbon compounds into organic matter using the energy of sunlight captured by a variety of photosynthetic pigments, and so could only grow on the surfaces of planetoids. No one had yet developed vacuum organisms that, using other sources of energy, could efficiently mine planetoids interiors, but that was what accelerated evolution appeared to have produced in the reef. It could enable exploitation of the entire volume of objects in the Kuiper Belt, and beyond, in the distant Oort Cloud. It was a discovery of incalculable worth.

  Arn Nivedta waited for silence, and added, “Of course, we can’t know what the commercial potential is until the reef species have been fully tested. What about it, Opie?”

  “We have our own ideas about commercial potential,” Opie Kindred said. “I think you’ll find that we hold the key to success here.”

  Boos and catcalls at this from both the biochemists and the survey crew. The room was polarizing. Margaret saw one of her crew unsheathe a sharpened screwdriver, and she caught the man’s hand and squeezed it until he cried out. “Let it ride,” she told him. “Remember that we’re scientists.”

  “We hear of indications of more diversity in the depths, but we can’t seem to get there. One might suspect,” Opie said, his thin upper lip lifting in a supercilious curl, “sabotage.”

  “The proxies are working well in the upper part of the Rift,” Margaret said, “and we are doing all we can to get them operative further down.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Opie Kindred said. He stood, and around him his crew stood too. “I’m going back to work, and so should all of you. Especially you, Dr. Wu. Perhaps you should be attending to your proxies instead of planning useless expeditions.”

  And so the seminar broke up in uproar, with nothing productive coming from it and lines of enmity drawn through the community of scientists.

  “Opie is scheming to come out of this on top,” Arn Nivedta said to Margaret afterward. He was a friendly, enthusiastic man, tall even for an outer, and as skinny as a rail. He stooped in Margaret’s presence, trying to reduce the extraordinary difference between their heights. He said, “He wants desperately to become a citizen, and so he thinks like one.”

  “Well, my god, we all want to be citizens,” Margaret said. “Who wants to live like this?”

  She gestured, meaning the crowded bar, its rock walls and low ceiling, harsh lights and the stink of spilled beer and too many people in close proximity. Her parents had been citizens, once upon a time. Before their run of bad luck. It was not that she wanted those palmy days back—she could scarcely remember them—but she wanted more than this.

  She said, “The citizens sleep between silk sheets and eat real meat and play their stupid games, and we have to do their work on restricted budgets. The reef is the discovery of the century, Arn, but God forbid that the citizens should begin to exert themselves. We do the work, they fuck in rose petals and get the glory.”

  Arn laughed at this.

  “Well, it’s true!”

  “It’s true we have not been as successful as we might like,” Arn said mournfully.

  Margaret said reflectively, “Opie’s a bastard, but he’s smart, too. He picked just the right moment to point the finger at me.”

  Loss of proxies was soaring exponentially, and the proxy farms of the Ganapati were reaching a critical point. Once losses exceeded reproduction, the scale of exploration would have to be drastically curtailed, or the seed stock would have to be pressed into service, a gamble the Ganapati could not afford to take.

  And then, the day after the disastrous seminar, Margaret was pulled back from her latest survey to account for herself in front of the chairman of the Ganapati’s Star Chamber.

  “We are not happy with the progress of your survey, Dr. Wu,” Dzu Sho said. “You promise much, but deliver little.”

  Margaret shot a glance at Opie Kindred, and he smiled at her. He was immaculately dressed in gold-trimmed white tunic and white leggings. His scalp was oiled and his manicured fingernails were painted with something that split light into rainbows. Margaret, fresh from the tank, wore loose, grubby work grays. There was sticky electrolyte paste on her arms and legs and shaven scalp, the reek of sour sweat under her breasts and in her armpits.

  She contained her anger and said, “I have submitted daily reports on the problems we encountered. Progress is slow but sure. I have just established a relay point a full kilometer below the previous datum point.”

  Dzu Sho waved this away. He lounged in a blue gel chair, quite naked, as smoothly fat as a seal. He had a round, hairless head and pinched features, like a thumbprint on an egg. The habitat’s lawyer sat behind him, a young woman neat and anonymous in a gray tunic suit. Margaret, Opie Kindred and Arn Nivedta sat on low stools, supplicants to Dzu Sho’s authority. Behind them, half a dozen servants stood at the edge of the grassy space.

  This was in an arbor of figs, ivy, bamboo and fast-growing banyan at the edge of Sho’s estate. Residential parkland curved above, a patchwork of spindly, newly planted woods and meadows and gardens. Flyers were out, triangular rigs in primary colors pirouetting around the weightless axis. Directly above, mammoths the size of large dogs grazed an upside-down emerald green field. The parkland stretched away to the ring lake and its slosh barrier, three kilometers in diameter, and the huge farms that dominated the inner surface of the habitat. Fields of lentils, wheat, cane fruits, tomatoes, rice and exotic
vegetables for the tables of the citizens, and fields and fields and fields of sugar cane and oilseed rape for the biochemical industry and the yeast tanks.

  Dzu Sho said, “Despite the poor progress of the survey crew, we have what we need, thanks to the work of Dr. Kindred. This is what we will discuss.”

  Margaret glanced at Arn, who shrugged. Opie Kindred’s smile deepened. He said, “My crew has established why there is so much diversity here. The vacuum organisms have invented sex.”

  “We know they have sex,” Arn said. “How else could they evolve?”

  His own crew had shown that the vacuum organisms could exchange genetic material through pili, microscopic hollow tubes grown between cells or hyphal strands. It was analogous to the way in which genes for antibiotic resistance spread through populations of terrestrial bacteria.

  “I do not mean genetic exchange, but genetic recombination,” Opie Kindred said. “I will explain.”

  The glade filled with flat plates of color as the geneticist conjured charts and diagrams and pictures from his slate. Despite her anger, Margaret quickly immersed herself in the flows of data, racing ahead of Opie Kindred’s clipped explanations.

  It was not normal sexual reproduction. There was no differentiation into male or female, or even into complementary mating strains. Instead, it was mediated by a species that aggressively colonized the thalli of others. Margaret had already seen it many times, but until now she had thought that it was merely a parasite. Instead, as Opie Kindred put it, it was more like a vampire.

  A shuffle of pictures, movies patched from hundreds of hours of material collected by roving proxies. Here was a colony of the black crustose species found all through the explored regions of the Rift. Time speeded up. The crustose colony elongated its ragged perimeter in pulsing spurts. As it grew, it exfoliated microscopic particles. Margaret’s viewpoint spiraled into a close-up of one of the exfoliations, a few cells wrapped in nutrient storing strands.

  Millions of these little packages floated through the vacuum. If one landed on a host thallus, it injected its genetic payload into the host cells. The view dropped inside one such cell. A complex of carbohydrate and protein strands webbed the interior like intricately packed spiderwebs. Part of the striated cell wall drew apart and a packet of DNA coated in hydrated globulins and enzymes burst inward. The packet contained the genomes of both the parasite and its previous victim. It latched onto protein strands and crept along on ratchetting microtubule claws until it fused with the cell’s own circlet of DNA.

  The parasite possessed an enzyme that snipped strands of genetic material at random lengths. These recombined, forming chimeric cells that contained genetic information from both sets of victims, with the predator species’ genome embedded among the native genes like an interpenetrating text.

  The process repeated itself in flurries of coiling and uncoiling DNA strands as the chimeric cells replicated. It was a crude, random process. Most contained incomplete or noncomplementary copies of the genomes and were unable to function, or contained so many copies than transcription was halting and imperfect. But a few out of every thousand were viable, and a small percentage of those were more vigorous than either of their parents. They grew from a few cells to a patch, and finally overgrew the parental matrix in which they were embedded. There were pictures that showed every stage of this transformation in a laboratory experiment.

  “This is why I have not shared the information until now,” Opie Kindred said, as the pictures faded around him. “I had to ensure by experimental testing that my theory was correct. Because the procedure is so inefficient we had to screen thousands of chimeras until we obtained a strain that overgrew its parent.”

  “A very odd and extreme form of reproduction,” Arn said. “The parent dies so that the child might live.”

  Opie Kindred smiled. “It is more interesting than you might suppose.”

  The next sequence showed the same colony, now clearly infected by the parasitic species—leprous black spots mottled its pinkish surface. Again time speeded up. The spots grew larger, merged, shed a cloud of exfoliations.

  “Once the chimera overgrows its parent,” Opie Kindred said, “the genes of the parasite, which have been reproduced in every cell of the thallus, are activated. The host cells are transformed. It is rather like an RNA virus, except that the virus does not merely subvert the protein and RNA making machinery of its host cell. It takes over the cell itself. Now the cycle is completed, and the parasite sheds exfoliations that will in turn infect new hosts.

  “Here is the motor of evolution. In some of the infected hosts, the parasitic genome is prevented from expression, and the host becomes resistant to infection. It is a variation of the Red Queen’s race. There is an evolutionary pressure upon the parasite to evolve new infective forms, and then for the hosts to resist them, and so on. Meanwhile, the host species benefit from new genetic combinations that by selection incrementally improve growth. The process is random but continuous, and takes place on a vast scale. I estimate that millions of recombinant cells are produced each hour, although perhaps only one in ten million are viable, and of those only one in a million are significantly more efficient at growth than their parents. But this is more than sufficient to explain the diversity we have mapped in the reef.”

  Arn said, “How long have you known this, Opie?”

  “I communicated my findings to the Star Chamber just this morning,” Opie Kindred said. “The work has been very difficult. My crew has to work under very tight restraints, using Class Four containment techniques, as with the old immunodeficiency plagues.”

  “Yah, of course,” Arn said. “We don’t know how the exfoliations might contaminate the ship.”

  “Exactly,” Opie Kindred said. “That is why the reef is dangerous.”

  Margaret bridled at this. She said sharply, “Have you tested how long the exfoliations survive?”

  “There is a large amount of data about bacterial spore survival. Many survive thousands of years in vacuum close to absolute zero. It hardly seems necessary—”

  “You didn’t bother,” Margaret said. “My God, you want to destroy the reef and you have no evidence. You didn’t think.”

  It was the worst of insults in the scientific community. Opie Kindred colored, but before he could reply Dzu Sho held up a hand, and his employees obediently fell silent.

  “The Star Chamber has voted,” Dzu Sho said. “It is clear that we have all we need. The reef is dangerous, and must be destroyed. Dr. Kindred has suggested a course of action that seems appropriate. We will poison the sulfur-oxidizing cycle and kill the reef.”

  “But we don’t know—”

  “We haven’t found—”

  Margaret and Arn had spoken at once. Both fell silent when Dzu Sho held up a hand again. He said, “We have isolated commercially useful strains. Obviously, we can’t use the organisms we have isolated because they contain the parasite within every cell. But we can synthesize useful gene sequences and splice them into current commercial strains of vacuum organism to improve quality.”

  “I must object,” Margaret said. “This is a unique construct. The chances of it evolving again are minimal. We must study it further. We might be able to discover a cure for the parasite.”

  “It is unlikely,” Opie Kindred said. “There is no way to eliminate the parasite from the host cells by gene therapy because they are hidden within the host chromosome, shuffled in a different pattern in every cell of the trillions of cells that make up the reef. However, it is quite easy to produce a poison that will shut down the sulfur-oxidizing metabolism common to the different kinds of reef organism.”

  “Production has been authorized,” Sho said. “It will take, what did you tell me, Dr. Kindred?”

  “We require a large quantity, given the large biomass of the reef. Ten days at least. No more than fifteen.”

  “We have not studied it properly,” Arn said. “So we cannot yet say what and what is not possible.”r />
  Margaret agreed, but before she could add her objection, her earpiece trilled, and Srin Kerenyi’s voice said apologetically, “Trouble, boss. You better come at once.”

  The survey suite was in chaos, and there was worse chaos in the Rift. Margaret had to switch proxies three times before she found one she could operate. All around her, proxies were fluttering and jinking, as if caught in strong currents instead of floating in vacuum in virtual free fall.

  This was at the four-thousand-meter level, where the nitrogen ice walls of the Rift were sparsely patched with yellow and pink marblings that followed veins of sulfur and organic contaminants. The taste of the vacuum smog here was strong, like burnt rubber coating Margaret’s lips and tongue.

  As she looked around, a proxy jetted toward her. It overshot and rebounded from a gable of frozen nitrogen, its nozzle jinking back and forth as it tried to stabilize its position.

  “Fuck,” its operator, Kim Nieye, said in Margaret’s ear. “Sorry, boss. I’ve been through five of these, and now I’m losing this one.”

  On the other side of the cleft, a hundred meters away, two specks tumbled end for end, descending at a fair clip toward the depths. Margaret’s vision color-reversed, went black, came back to normal. She said, “How many?”

  “Just about all of them. We’re using proxies that were up in the tablelands, but as soon as we bring them down they start going screwy too.”

  “Herd some up and get them to the sample pickup point. We’ll need to do dissections.”

  “No problem, boss. Are you okay?”

  Margaret’s proxy had suddenly upended. She couldn’t get its trim back. “I don’t think so,” she said, and then the proxy’s nozzle flared and with a pulse of gas the proxy shot away into the depths.

  It was a wild ride. The proxy expelled all its gas reserves, accelerating as straight as an arrow. Coralline formations blurred past, and then long stretches of sulfur-eating pavement. The proxy caromed off the narrowing walls and began to tumble madly.