The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “We, after all, are merely nature’s humans,” I told them. “We’re a product of the rough-and-ready process of natural selection, and control of the expression of our genes has been left to other genes. Homeotic genes were never an ideal solution to the problem of embryo-formation—they were just the best improvisation that DNA could come up with on its own. Alice’s humanity is the product of relatively unskilled artifice—and the evidence we’ve so far seen suggests that relatively unskilled artifice might already be the slightly better maker of men. If it isn’t, then it certainly will be, just as soon as we bring our ingenuity fully to bear on the problem.

  “The genie’s out of the bottle, gentlemen. We can pass all the laws we like against the genetic engineering of human beings, and we can make sure if we care to that what Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby have actually done to pig embryos will in future fall within the scope of those laws—but that won’t alter the fact that human beings and the world they have made are imperfect in more ways than any of us would care to count, and that Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby have found a new way to allow us to set to work on those imperfections. If Alice is telling the truth, we’ve already passed through the looking-glass, and there’s no way back. You might be able to stop the animals walking and talking, but you won’t be able to stop the people. If a mere pig can be a better human than any of us, imagine what our own children might become, with the proper assistance!”

  The minister and his junior nodded gravely, but that was just the legacy of good schooling by their image-consultants. The chief inspector looked dumbfounded. The permanent under-secretary was the only one who was keeping up, after his own crude fashion. “You’re talking about building a Master Race,” he said reflexively. If in doubt, hoist a scarecrow.

  “I’m talking about D-I-Y supermen,” I told him, frankly. “I’m talking about something that can be done with standard equipment on a chicken-feed budget, after a little bit of practice on the family pet. I’m talking anarchy, not mad dictators. If you intend to make a deal with the Three Musketeers, you need to know what cards they’re holding. It’s still conceivable that they’re bluffing, and that Alice was just feeding us a line, but I can’t believe that—and if they’re not bluffing, the old world has already ended. The GE-Crime Unit will catch up with the runaways eventually, but it’s already too late. Their story has been told, and will be told, again and again and again.”

  Nobody told me I was crazy. The policeman might have lacked imagination, but he wasn’t stupid enough to continue to argue that his reflexive prejudices were worth more than my educated judgment. “We could still shoot the lot,” he muttered—but he knew, deep down, that it wouldn’t do the trick, even if that option could be put back on the agenda.

  “What can we do?” asked the permanent under-secretary, who had already moved reluctantly onto the next stage.

  I knew that it wouldn’t be easy to persuade him, but nobody ever said that working for the Home Office was going to be easy. The instinct of government is to govern, to take control, to keep as tight a hold on the reins as humanly possible.

  “Basically,” I said, “we have two options. We can be Napoleon, or we can be Snowball. Neither way will be easy—in fact, I suspect that all hell has already been let loose—so I figure that we might as well try to do the right thing. For once in our lives, let’s not even try to stand in the way of progress. I know you’re not going to be grateful for the advice, but my vote is that we simply let them all go and let them get on with it.”

  “Let public opinion take care of them, you mean,” the junior minister said, still trying his damnedest to misunderstand. “Let the mob take care of them, the way they take care of child molesters.”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, let artifice take its course. Let the pioneers of Applied Homeotics do what they have to, and what they can. Even the pigs.”

  It wasn’t easy to persuade them, but Hemans and his collaborators had a battery of lawyers on their side as well as reason and stubbornness, and in the end, the situation simply wasn’t governable, even by the government. Eventually, I made them see that.

  They weren’t grateful, of course, but I never expected them to be. Sometimes, you just have to settle for being right.

  By the time I saw Alice again she was twenty-two and famous, although she never went anywhere without her bodyguards. She came to my lab to see what I was working on, and to thank me for the small part I had played in winning her precarious freedom.

  “You did save my life,” I pointed out, when we’d done the tour and had time to reflect.

  “That was Ed and Kath,” she admitted. “They were the ones who picked you up and dragged you down the stairs. All I did was hit you with the axe when you tried to grab it.”

  “But you hit me with the flat bit, not the edge,” I said. “If you’d hit me with the edge, I’d be dead—and so, I suspect, would you.”

  “They really wanted to kill us all,” she said, as if it were still very hard for her to comprehend.

  “Only some of them—and only because they didn’t understand,” I told her, hoping that it was the truth. “None of us understood, not even Hemans, Rawlingford, and Bradby, although they’d had longer to think about it than anybody else. None of us really understood what it meant to be human, because we’d never had to explore the limits of the argument before—and none of us understood what scope there was for us to be more than human. We simply didn’t realize how easy it is to be creative, once you have the basic stock of protein-producing genes— and protogenes—to work with. Maybe we should have, given what we knew about the diversity of Earthly species and the unreliability of mutation as a means of change, but we didn’t. We needed a lesson to bring it home to us. How does it feel to be accepted as human just as the species is becoming obsolete?”

  “My children will have the same chances as anyone else’s,” she pointed out. I wasn’t so sure about that. She was now as human as anyone else, in law as well as in fact, but there were an awful lot of people who hadn’t yet conceded the point. My children, on the other hand, really would have opportunities of which I had never dreamed ten years before; the people who wanted to reserve the privileges of creativity to imaginary gods wouldn’t be able to stop me making sure of that.

  “I was sorry to hear about Hemans,” I said. Hemans had been taken out by a sniper eight months before. I had no reason to think that he and Alice were particularly close, but it seemed only polite to offer my condolences.

  “Me too,” she said. “It always upsets me to hear about my friends being shot.”

  “What happened at the manor really wasn’t a conspiracy,” I told her, although I’d never been entirely sure. “It was a genuine mistake. It’s in the nature of Armed Response Units that they sometimes make mistakes, especially when they’re working in the dark.”

  “I remember Dr. Hemans saying the same thing, afterward,” she admitted. “But some mistakes work out better than others, don’t they?” She wasn’t talking about the wayward ways of mutation. She was talking about the freak of chance that made me go on when I should have turned back, and the one that had made Ed and Kath pause to pull me out of the fume-filled corridor and down the cellar steps to safety. She was talking about the freak of chance that had made me go on when things got tough at the Home Office, blowing my career in government in order to make sure that nobody could put a lid on it even for a little while, and that the government couldn’t even make a convincing show of governing the unfolding situation. She was talking about the mistake that Hemans and his colleagues had made when they decided to try something wildly ambitious, and found that it succeeded far too well. She was talking about the fact that science proceeds by trial and error, and that the errors sometimes turn out to be far more important than the intentions.

  “Yes they do,” I agreed. “If that weren’t the case, progress wouldn’t be possible at all. But it is. In spite of the fact that every significant advance in biotechnology is seen by t
he vast majority of horrified onlookers as a hideous perversion, we do make progress. We keep on passing through the looking glass, finding new worlds and new selves.”

  “You’ve been practicing,” she said. “Do you really think you can talk yourself back into the corridors of power?”

  “Not a snowball’s chance in hell,” I admitted. “But I did my bit for the revolution when I had the chance—and there aren’t many of nature’s humans who can say that, are there?”

  “There never used to be,” Alice admitted. “But things are different now. Human history is only just beginning.”

  On the Orion Line

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Here’s a harrowing look at the proposition that a soldier’s first duty is to survive, especially when trapped behind enemy lines, especially when those “enemy lines” are in the depths of interstellar space, thousands of light-years from Earth, and you have no ship, no shelter, and only a quickly dwindling supply of air. In those circumstances, you do anything you have to do to survive—if you’re strong enough to actually do it, that is!

  Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century—Greg Egan comes to mind, as do people like Paul J. McAuley, Michael Swanwick, lain Banks, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, David Marusek, Geoff Ryman, and a half dozen others—British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for the last ten years or so with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the Cutting Edge of science which bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.

  Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels, Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, and the three books of the Mammoth sequence, and the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence and Traces. His most recent books are the novels Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, and a novel written in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, The Light of Other Days.

  The Brief Life Burns Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.

  The lifedome of the Brightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters—and a few low-grade tars like me—were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyond that from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line—six thousand light years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm—and the stellar explosions marked battles that must have concluded years ago.

  And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope. Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.

  The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From the Brightly I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it—an open lattice with struts half a million kilometers long—thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.

  I had a lot of time to watch all this. I was just a tar. I was fifteen years old.

  My duties at that moment were non-specific. I was supposed to stand to, and render assistance any way that was required—most likely with basic medical attention should we go into combat. Right now the only one of us tars actually working was Halle, who was chasing down a pool of vomit sicked up by Pael, the Academician, the only non-Navy personnel on the bridge.

  The action on the Brightly wasn’t like you see in Virtual shows. The atmosphere was calm, quiet, competent. All you could hear was the murmur of voices, from the crew and the equipment, and the hiss of recycling air. No drama: it was like an operating theater.

  There was a soft warning chime.

  The captain raised an arm and called over Academician Pael, First OfficerTill, and Jeru, the commissary assigned to the ship. They huddled close, conferring—apparently arguing. I saw the way flickering nova light reflected from Jeru’s shaven head.

  I felt my heart beat harder.

  Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, had come back out again.

  One way or the other, it would all be resolved soon.

  Captain Teid cut short the debate. She leaned forward and addressed the crew. Her voice, cast through the ship, was friendly, like a cadre leader whispering in your ear. “You can all see we can’t catch that swarm of Ghosts this side of the cordon. And you all know the hazard of crossing a cordon. But if we’re ever going to break this blockade of theirs we have to find a way to bust open those forts. So we’re going in anyhow. Stand by your stations.”

  There was a half-hearted cheer.

  I caught Halle’s eye. She grinned at me. She pointed at the captain, closed her fist and made a pumping movement. I admired her sentiment but she wasn’t being too accurate, anatomically speaking, so I raised my middle finger and jiggled it back and forth.

  It took a slap on the back of the head from Jeru, the commissary, to put a stop to that. “Little morons,” she growled.

  “Sorry, sir—”

  I got another slap for the apology. Jeru was a tall, stocky woman, dressed in the bland monastic robes said to date from the time of the founding of the Commission for Historical Truth a thousand years ago. But rumor was she’d seen plenty of combat action of her own before joining the Commission, and such was her physical strength and speed of reflex I could well believe it.

  As we neared the cordon the Academician, Pael, started a gloomy count-down. The slow geometry of Ghost cruiser and tinsel-wrapped fortress star swiveled across the crowded sky.

  Everybody went quiet.

  The darkest time is always just before the action starts. Even if you can see or hear what is going on, all you do is think. What was going to happen to us when we crossed that intangible border? Would a fleet of Ghost ships materialize all around us? Would some mysterious weapon simply blast us out of the sky?

  I caught the eye of First Officer Till. He was a veteran of twenty years; his scalp had been burned away in some ancient close-run combat, long before I was born, and he wore a crown of scar tissue with pride.

  “Let’s do it, tar,” he growled.

  All the fear went away. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of togetherness, of us all being in this crap together. I had no thought of dying. Just: let’s get through this.

  “Yes, sir!”

  Pael finished his countdown.

  All the lights went out. Detonating stars wheeled.

  And the ship exploded.

  I was thrown into darkness. Air howled. Emergency bulkheads scythed past me, and I could hear people scream.

  I slammed into the curving hull, nose pressed against the stars.

  I bounced off and drifted. The inert
ial suspension was out, then. I thought I could smell blood—probably my own.

  I could see the Ghost ship, a tangle of rope and silver baubles, tingling with highlights from the fortress star. We were still closing.

  But I could also see shards of shattered lifedome, a sputtering drive unit. The shards were bits of the Brightly. It had gone, all gone, in a fraction of a second.

  “Let’s do it,” I murmured.

  Maybe I was out of it for a while.

  Somebody grabbed my ankle and tugged me down. There was a competent slap on my cheek, enough to make me focus.

  “Case. Can you hear me?”

  It was First Officer Till. Even in the swimming starlight that burned-off scalp was unmistakable.

  I glanced around. There were four of us here: Till, Commissary Jeru, Academician Pael, me. We were huddled up against what looked like the stump of the First Officer’s console. I realized that the gale of venting air had stopped. I was back inside a hull with integrity, then—

  “Case!”

  “I—yes, sir.”

  “Report.”

  I touched my lip; my hand came away bloody. At a time like that it’s your duty to report your injuries, honestly and fully. Nobody needs a hero who turns out not to be able to function. “I think I’m all right. I may have a concussion.”

  “Good enough. Strap down.” Till handed me a length of rope.

  I saw that the others had tied themselves to struts. I did the same.

  Till, with practiced ease, swam away into the air, I guessed looking for other survivors.

  Academician Pael was trying to curl into a ball. He couldn’t even speak. The tears just rolled out of his eyes. I stared at the way big globules welled up and drifted away into the air, glimmering.

  The action had been over in seconds. All a bit sudden for an earthworm, I guess.

  Nearby, I saw, trapped under one of the emergency bulkheads, there was a pair of legs—just that. The rest of the body must have been chopped away, gone drifting off with the rest of the debris from Brightly. But I recognized those legs, from a garish pink stripe on the sole of the right boot. That had been Halle. She was the only girl I had ever screwed, I thought—and more than likely, given the situation, the only girl I ever would get to screw.