The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Wet sand. The murmur of the surf. The chilly breeze. It was a lovely equatorial dawn. “Henry,” I said, “record this.”

  Relax, Sam. I always record the best of everything.

  “I’m sure you do, Henry.”

  In the distance, the island’s canopy dome shimmered like a veil of rain falling into the sea. The edges of the sea, the waves that surged up the beach to melt away in the sand at my feet, carried the ripe, salty smell of fish and seaweed and whales and lost sailors moldering in the deep. The ocean had proven to be a good delivery medium for molecular nasties, which can float around the globe indefinitely, like particularly rude messages in tiny bottles, until they washed up on someone’s—hopefully the enemy’s—shore. The island’s defense canopy, more a sphere than a dome, extended through the water to the ocean floor, and deep into bedrock.

  “So tell me, Henry, how are you and the cabinet getting along?” I had taken his advice, bought him more neural paste, and allowed the protocol games to continue.

  The cabinet is a beautiful intelligence. I consider emulating it.

  “In what way?”

  I may want to bifurcate my personality bud.

  “So that there’s two of you? Why would you want to do that?”

  Then I would be more like you.

  “You would? Is that good?”

  I believe so. I have recently discovered that I have but one point-of-view, while you have several that you alternate at will.

  “It sounds like I bought you more paste than you know what to do with.”

  I don’t think so, Sam. I think my thinking is evolving, but how am I to know?

  It was. I recognized the symptoms.

  Think of how much more flexible I could be if I could question myself, disagree with myself.

  I’d rather not. All I needed was a pair of philosophy students inside my head with their tiresome discourse and untimely epiphanies. Still, I had to be careful how I handled this situation—artificial personalities bruised as easily as organic ones, and they evolved whether or not we gave them permission.

  “Henry, couldn’t you and I discuss things, you know, like we always have? Couldn’t you just ask me the questions?”

  No offense, Sam, but you wouldn’t be able to keep up.

  “Thank you, Henry. I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

  Sam, the calendar secretary is hailing us. How shall I respond?

  “Tell her we’ll return to the bungalow soon.”

  Before long, Eleanor walked up the beach. She knelt behind me and massaged my shoulders. “I’ve been neglecting you,” she said, “and you’ve been wonderful. Can you forgive me?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive. You’re a busy person. I knew that from the start.”

  “Still, it must be hard.” She sat in the sand next to me and wrapped her arms around me. “It’s like a drug. I’m drunk with success. But I’ll get over it.”

  “There’s no need. You’ve earned it. Enjoy it.”

  “You don’t want to go offplanet, do you?”

  “I’ll go anywhere to be with you.”

  “Yes, I believe you would. Where do men like you come from?”

  “From Saturn. We’re Saturnian.”

  She laughed. “I’m sure I could draw a post there if you’d like.”

  “Wherever.” I leaned my head on her shoulder. “I’ve given up trying to escape you. I surrender.”

  “Oh? What are your terms of surrender?”

  “Treat me fair, don’t ever hurt me—or Henry—and don’t ever leave me.”

  “Done.”

  * * *

  Not long after our return to our Connecticut townhouse and before El received her posting, we heard some good news. Good for us anyway. Ms. Angie Rickert, Tri-Discipline Governor, posted in Indiana, had been missing for three hours. Eleanor raised her hands to deny any complicity as she told me the news, but she was barely able to stifle her glee. Ms. Rickert had been at her post for fifty-three years.

  “But she’s only missing,” I said.

  “For three hours? Come on, Sam, be realistic.”

  Over the next twenty-four hours, Eleanor’s security chief discreetly haunted the high-security nets to feed us details and analyses as they emerged. A militia slug, on routine patrol, found Ms. Rickert’s remains in and around a tube car in a low security soybean field outside the Indianapolis canopy. She was the victim of an unidentified molecular antipersonnel smartactive—a nastie. Her belt system, whose primary storage container was seized by the militia and placed under the most sanitary interrogation, claimed that Ms. Rickert was aware of her infection when she entered the tube car outside her Indianapolis apartment. The belt used Ms. Rickert’s top security privileges to jettison the car and its stricken passenger out of the city and out of the tube system itself. So virulent was the attacking nastie and so stubborn Ms. Rickert’s visola induced defenses, that in the heat of battle her body burst. Fortunately, it burst within the car and contaminated only two or three square miles of farmland. Ms. Rickert’s reliable belt system had prevented a disaster within the Indianapolis canopy. The militia collected her scattered remains, and the coroner declared Ms. Rickert irretrievable.

  And so a vacant post in the heartland was up for grabs. Eleanor turned her bedroom into a war room. She sent her entire staff into action. She lined up every chit, every favor, and every piece of dirt she had collected in her long career.

  One morning, several sleepless days later, she brought me coffee, a Danish, my morning dose of visola, and a haggard smile. “It’s in the bag,” she said.

  And she was correct. Ten days later, CNN carried a story that the Tri-Discipline Council’s newest governor designate, Ms. Eleanor Starke, spouse of noted package designer Sam Harger, had been stationed in Bloomington, Indiana, to replace Ms. Angie Rickert who’d recently died under undisclosed circumstances. A host of pundits and experts debated for days the meaning of such a move and speculated on Eleanor’s victory over hundreds of her senior offplanet colleagues for the plum post. Eleanor, as per Tri-D policy, respectfully declined all interviews. In my own interviews, I set the precondition that I be asked only about my own career. When asked if I could pursue my work in Indiana, I could only grin and say, Indiana is not the end of the world. And how had my work been going lately? Miserably, I replied. I am the type of artist that seems to work best while in a state of mild discontent, and lately I’d been riding a streak of great good fortune.

  Smug bastard.

  * * *

  We moved into temporary quarters, into an apartment on the 207th floor of the Williams Towers in Bloomington. We planned to eventually purchase a farmstead in an outlying county surrounded by elm groves and rye fields. El’s daily schedule, already at marathon levels, only intensified, while I pottered about the campus town trying to figure out why—if I was so lucky—did I feel so apprehensive.

  Then the event occurred that dwarfed all that came before it. Eleanor and I, although we’d never applied, were issued a permit to retro-conceive a baby. These permits were impossible to come by, as only about twelve hundred were issued each year in all of North America. We knew no one who’d been issued a permit. I hadn’t even seen a baby in realbody for decades (although babies figured prominently in most holovids and comedies). We were so stunned at first we didn’t know how to respond. “Don’t worry,” said the under secretary of the Population Division, “most recipients have the same reaction. Some faint.”

  Eleanor said, “I don’t see how I could take on the additional responsibility at this time.”

  The under secretary frowned. “Does that mean you wish to refuse the permit?”

  Eleanor blanched. “I didn’t say that.” She glanced at me, uncharacteristically pleading for help.

  I didn’t know what to say either. “A boy or a girl?”

  “That’s entirely up to you, now isn’t it?” The under secretary favored us with a fatuous grin. “I’ll tell you what.” In his voice I h
eard forced spontaneity; he’d been over this ground many times before, and I wondered if that was the sum total of his job, to call twelve hundred strangers each year and grant them one of life’s supreme gifts. “We’ll provide background information. When you’re ready, call the National Orphanage in Trenton.”

  For the next hour or so, El and I sat arm-in-arm on the couch in complete silence. Suddenly El began to weep. Tears gushed from her eyes and coursed down her face. She hugged herself—like a lost child, I thought—and fought for breath between sobs. I watched in total amazement. Was this my Eleanor?

  After a while, she looked at me, smiled, and said through bubbles of snot, “Well?”

  I had to be truthful. “Let’s not rush into anything.”

  She studied me and said, “I agree with you.”

  “Let’s think about it.”

  “My thought exactly.”

  * * *

  At the National Orphanage in Trenton, the last thing they did was take tissue samples for recombination. Eleanor and I sat on chromium stools, side-by-side, in a treatment room as the nurse, a middle-aged jenny, scraped the inside of Eleanor’s cheek with a curette. We had both been off visola for forty-eight hours, dangerous but necessary to obtain a pristine DNA sample. Henry informed me that Eleanor’s full cabinet was on red alert. Eleanor was tense. This was coitus mechanicus, but it was bound to be the most fruitful sex we would ever have.

  * * *

  At the National Orphanage in Trenton, the first thing they did was sit us down in Dr. Deb Armbruster’s office to warn us that raising a child today was nothing like it used to be. “Kids used to grow up and go away,” said Dr. Armbruster. “Nowadays, they tend to get stuck around age eight and then again at thirteen. And it’s not considered good parenting, of course, to force them to age. We think it’s all the attention they get. Everyone—your friends, your employer, well-wishing strangers, militia officers—everyone comes to steal a kiss from the baby, to make funny faces at the toddler, to play catch or hoops with the five-year-old. Gifts arrive by the vanload. The media wants to be included in every decision and invited to every birthday party.

  “Oh, but you two know how to handle the media, I imagine.”

  Eleanor and I sat in antique chairs in front of Dr. Armbruster’s neatly arranged desk. There was no third chair for Eleanor’s chief of staff, who stood patiently next to Eleanor. Dr. Armbruster was a large, fit woman, with a square jaw, rounded nose, and pinpoint eyes that glanced in all directions as she spoke. No doubt she had arranged her belt system in layers of display monitors around the periphery of her vision. Many administrative types did. With the flick of an iris, they could page through reams of reports, graphs, and archives. And they looked down their noses at projected valets with personality buds, like Eleanor’s chief of staff.

  “So,” Dr. Armbruster continued, “you may have a smart-mouthed adolescent on your hands for twenty or thirty years. That, I can assure you, becomes tiresome. And expensive. You, yourselves, could be two or three relationships down the road before the little darling is ready to leave. So we suggest you work out custody now, before you go any further.

  “In any case, protectorate law mandates a three-day cooling-off period between this interview and our initiation of the conversion process. You have three days—till Thursday—to change your minds. Think it over.”

  * * *

  At the National Orphanage in Trenton, the second thing they did was take us to the storage room to see the chassis that would become our baby.

  One wall held a row of carousels, each containing hundreds of small drawers. Dr. Armbruster rotated a carousel and told a particular drawer to unlock itself. She removed from it a small bundle wrapped in a rigid red tetanus blanket (a spin-off of my early work for the National Militia). She placed it on a ceramic gurney, commanded the blanket to relax, and unwrapped it to reveal a near-term human fetus, curled in repose, a miniature thumb stuck in its perfect mouth. It was remarkably lifelike, but rock still, like a figurine. I asked how old it was. Dr. Armbruster said it had been in stasis seven-and-a-half years; it was confiscated in an illegal pregnancy. Developmentally, it was thirty-five weeks old; it had been doused in utero. She rotated the fetus—the chassis—on the gurney. “It’s normal on every index. We should be able to convert it with no complications.” She pointed to this and that part of it and explained the order of rewriting. “The integumentary system—the skin, what you might call our fleshy package,” she smiled at me acknowledging my reputation, “is a human’s fastest growing organ. A person sheds and replaces it continuously throughout her life. In the conversion process, it’s the first one completed. For a fetus, it takes about a week. Hair color, eye color, the liver, the heart, the digestive system convert in two to three weeks. The nervous system, major muscle groups, reproductive organs—three to four weeks. Cartilage and bones—two to three months. Long before its first tooth erupts, the baby is biologically yours.”

  I asked Dr. Armbruster if I could hold the chassis.

  “Certainly,” she said with a knowing smile. She placed her large hands carefully under the baby and handed it to me. It was surprisingly heavy, hard, and cold. “The fixative is very dense,” she said, “and makes it brittle, like eggshell.” I cradled it in my arms awkwardly. Dr. Armbruster said to Eleanor, “They always look like that, afraid they’re going to break it. In this case, however, that’s entirely possible. And you, my dear, look typically uncomfortable as well.”

  She was right. Eleanor and her chief of staff stood side-by-side, twins (but for their ages), arms crossed stiffly. Dr. Armbruster said to her, “You might find the next few months immensely more tolerable, enjoyable even, under hormonal therapy. Fathers, it would seem, have always had to learn to bond with their offspring. For you we have something the pharmaceutical companies call ‘Mother’s Medley.’”

  “No, thank you, Doctor,” said Eleanor, glaring at her chief of staff, who immediately uncrossed her arms. Eleanor came over to me and I transferred the chassis to her. “Heavy,” she said. “And look, it’s missing a finger!” One of its tiny fingers was indeed missing, the stub end rough like plaster.

  “Don’t be concerned,” said Dr. Armbruster. “Fingers and toes grow back in days. Just don’t break off the head,” she laughed.

  “Sam, look,” Eleanor exclaimed. “Look at this tiny little penis. Isn’t it the cutest thing?”

  As I looked, something funny happened to me. I had a vivid impression or image, as I do when at work in my studio, in which I saw the chassis, not as a brittle lump of fixed flesh, but as a living, warm, squirming, naked butterball of a baby. And I looked between its chubby legs and saw it was a he, a little guy. He looked up at me, chortled, and waved his tiny fists. Right then I felt a massive piece of my heart shift in my chest. The whole situation finally dawned on me. I was about to become a parent, a father. I looked at the chassis and saw my son. Why a son, I couldn’t say, but I knew I must have a son.

  Eleanor touched my arm. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, it’s nothing. By the way, that’s one piece I hope doesn’t chip off.”

  She laughed, but when she saw that I was serious she said, “We’ll have to see about that.” She drilled me with her terribly old eyes and said, “About that we’ll just have to see.”

  * * *

  Back at the Williams Towers in Bloomington, we lay on the balcony in the late afternoon sun and skimmed the queue of messages. Our friends had grown tired of our good fortune: the congratulations were fewer and briefer and seemed, by-and-large, insincere, even tinged with underlying resentment.

  And who could blame them? Of all the hundreds of people we knew, none of them had a real child. Many people, it was true, had had children in the old days, before the Population Treaties when babies were considered an ecological nuisance, but that was almost sixty years ago, and sixty years was a long time to live outside the company of children. Probably no one begrudged us our child, although it was obvious to everyone�
��especially to us—that major strings had been pulled for us at the Department of Health and Human Services. String pulling, itself, did not bother El, but anonymous string-pulling did. She had sent her security chief into the nets, but he was unable to identify our benefactor. El insisted that whoever was responsible was surely not a benefactor, for a baby could hardly be considered a reward. Most likely an enemy, perhaps an off-planet rival she had aced out of the Indianapolis post, which meant the baby was bait in some as yet unsprung plot. Or perhaps the baby was simply a leash her superiors at the Tri-D council had decided to fit her with. In any case, Eleanor was convincing herself she was about to make the worst mistake of her life.

  She deleted the remaining queue of messages and turned to me. “Sam, please talk me out of this baby thing.” We lay on our balcony halfway up the giant residential tower that ended, in dizzying perspective, near the lower reaches of the canopy. The canopy, invisible during the day, appeared viscous in the evening light, like a transparent gel that a stiff breeze caused to ripple and fold upon itself. In contrast, our tower had a matte surface encrusted with thousands of tiny black bumps. These were the building’s resident militia slugs, absorbing the last light of the setting sun to top off their energy stores for a busy night patrolling living rooms and bedrooms.

  “You’re just nervous,” I said to Eleanor.

  “I have impeccable instincts.”

  “Did you ever have children before?”

  “Not that it’s relevant, but yes, two, a boy and a girl, in my old life. Tom died as a child in an accident. Angie grew up, moved away, married, led a successful career as a journalist, and died at age fifty-four of breast cancer. A long time ago.” Eleanor turned over, bare rump to the sky, chin resting on sun-browned arms. “I grieved for each of them forever, and then one day I stopped. All that’s left are memories, which are immaterial to this discussion.”

  “Would you like to have another?”

  “Yes, desperately.”

  “Why ‘desperately’?”