Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  And that's good, because right now, she's your only hope. You see, you're infected with both of the strains she made, the 1.0 and 2.0 versions. Right now, about a hundred billion of the little guys are writing her brain pattern into yours, and about a hundred billion or so of the other kind are busy copying down your synapse pattern before they eat it.

  Some of her memories are yours now (soon enough all of them will be). You'll discover you know your way around a lab. Do a little work with plasmids, zip some DNA around. The 1.0 bacteria don't propagate very well, but you can engineer them to deliberately infect people. You'll still die—sorry—but if you make your little passengers infectious, you'll wake up in somebody else's brain.

  For a while, anyway. Then you'll have to move on.

  Well, yes, that means you'll be a parasite. Is that so bad? Intelligence has always been a parasite. But now you can pass along more than just language, cultural values, and religions. Now you can pass along your entire personality.

  It's beginning to infect other animals too, I think. The other day I saw a dog pawing at a computer, trying to log into Amanda Quinn's files. And I'm a little worried about the raccoons.

  But that doesn't matter to you now. You want to live? It's easy enough. Learn to be infectious.

  It's your only hope.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  THE SKYSAILOR'S TALE

  Michael Swanwick

  Of all the many things that this life has stolen from me, the one which bothers me most is that I cannot remember burying my father.

  Give that log a poke. Stir up the embers. Winter's upon us—hear how the wind howls and prowls about the rooftops, as restless as a cat!—and I, for one, could use some light and a little more warmth. There'll be snow by morning for sure. Scoot your chair a bit closer to the fire. Is your mother asleep? Good. We'll keep our voices low. There are parts of this tale she would not approve of. Things that I must say which she thinks you'd be better off not knowing.

  She's right, no doubt. Women usually are. But what of that? You're of an age to realize that your parents were never perfect, and that in their youths they may have done some things which ... well. Right or wrong, I'm going to tell you everything.

  Where was I?

  My father's burial.

  I was almost a man when he finally died—old enough, by all rights, to keep that memory to my dying day. But after the wreck of the Empire, I lay feverish and raving, so they tell me, for six weeks. During that time I was an exile in my own mind, lost in the burning deserts of delirium, wandering lands that rose and fell with each labored breath. Searching for a way back to the moment when I stood before my father's open grave and felt its cool breath upon my face. I was convinced that if I could only find it, all would be well.

  So I searched and did not find, and forgot I had searched, and began again, returning always to the same memories, like a moth relentlessly batting itself against a lantern. Sometimes the pain rose up within me so that I screamed and thrashed and convulsed within my bed. Other times (all this they told me later), when the pain ebbed, I spoke long and lucidly on a variety of matters, sang strange songs, and told stranger tales, all with an intensity my auditors found alarming. My thoughts were never still.

  Always I sought my father.

  By the time I finally recovered, most of my life had been burnt to ashes and those ashes swept into the ash pit of history. The Atlantis of my past was sunk; all that remained were a few mountain tops sticking up out of the waters of forgetfulness like a scattered archipelago of disconnected islands. I remembered clambering upon the rusted ruins of a failed and demented steam dredging device its now forgotten inventor had dubbed the “Orukter Amphibolus,” a brickyard battle fought alongside my fellow river rats with a gang of German boys who properly hated us for living by the wharves, a furtive kiss in the dark (with whom, alas, I cannot say), a race across the treacherously rolling logs afloat in the dock fronting the blockmaker's shop, and the catfish-and-waffles supper in a Wissahickon inn at which my mother announced to the family that she was to have a fifth child. But neither logic nor history unites these events; they might as well have happened to five separate people.

  There are, too, odd things lacking in what remains: The face of my youngest sister. The body of equations making up the Calculus. All recollection whatsoever of my brother save his name alone. My father I can remember well only by contrast. All I know of him could be told in an hour.

  I do not mourn the loss of his funeral. I've attended enough to know how it went. Words were surely spoken that were nothing like the words that should have been said. The air was heavy with incense and candle-wax. The corpse looked both like and unlike the deceased. There were pallbearers, and perhaps I was one. Everybody was brave and formal. Then, after too long a service, they all left, feeling not one whit better than before.

  A burial is a different matter. The first clods of dirt rattle down from the grave diggers’ shovels onto the roof of the coffin, making a sound like rain. The earth is drawn up over it like a thick, warm blanket. The trees wave in the breeze overhead, as if all the world were a cradle endlessly rocking. The mourners’ sobs are as quiet as a mother's bedtime murmurs. And so a man passes, by imperceptible degrees, to his final sleep. There is some comfort in knowing that a burial came off right.

  So I trod the labyrinth of my fevered brain, dancing with the black goddess of pain, she of the bright eyes laughing and clutching me tight with fingers like hot iron, and I swirling and spinning and always circling in upon that sad event. Yet never quite arriving.

  Dreaming of fire.

  Often I came within minutes of my goal—so close that it seemed impossible that my next attempt would not bring me to it. One thought deeper, a single step further, I believed, and there it would be. I was tormented with hope.

  Time and again, in particular, I encountered two memories bright as sunlight in my mind, guarding the passage to and from that dark omphalos. One was of the voyage out to the Catholic cemetery on Treaty Island in the Delaware. First came the boat carrying my father's coffin and the priest. Father Murphy sat perched in the bow, holding his hat down with one hand and with the other gripping the gunwale for all he was worth. He was a lean old hound of a man with wispy white hair, who bobbed and dipped most comically with every stroke of the oars and wore the unhappy expression of the habitually seasick.

  I sat in the second dory of the procession with my mother and sisters, all in their best bonnets. Jack must have been there as well. Seeing Father Murphy's distress, we couldn't help but be amused. One of us wondered aloud if he was going to throw up, and we all laughed.

  Our hired doryman turned to glare at us over his shoulder. He did not understand what a release my father's death was for all of us. The truth was that everything that had gone into making John Keely the man he was—his upright character, his innkeeper's warmth, his quiet strength, his bluff good will—had died years before, with the dwindling and extinction of his mind. We were only burying his body that day.

  When he was fully himself, however, a better or godlier man did not exist in all the Americas—no, not in a thousand continents. I never saw him truly angry but once. That was the day my elder sister Patricia, who had been sent out to the back alley for firewood, returned empty-handed and said, “Father, there is a black girl in the shed, crying.”

  My parents threw on their roquelaures and put up the hoods, for the weather was foul as only a Philadelphia winter downpour can be, and went outside to investigate. They came back in with a girl so slight, in a dress so drenched, that she looked to my young eyes like a half-drowned squirrel.

  They all three went into the parlor and closed the doors. From the hall Patricia and I—Mary was then but an infant—tried to eavesdrop, but could hear only the murmur of voices punctuated by occasional sobs. After a while, the tears stopped. The talk continued for a very long time.

  Midway through the consultation, my mother swept out
of the room to retrieve the day's copy of the Democratic Press, and returned so preoccupied that she didn't chase us away from the door. I know now, as I did not then, that the object of her concern was an advertisement on the front page of the paper. Patricia, always the practical and foresightful member of the family, cut out and saved the advertisement, and so I can now give it to you exactly as it appeared:

  * * * *

  SIX CENTS REWARD

  RANAWAY on the 14th inst., from the subscriber,

  one TACEY BROWN, a mulatto girl of thirteen years

  age, with upwards of five years to serve on her

  indenture. She is five feet, one inch in height,

  pitted with the Small Pox, pert and quick spoken,

  took with her one plain brown dress of coarse cloth.

  In personality she is insolent, lazy, and disagreeable.

  The above reward and no thanks will be given to any

  person who will take her up and return her to

  Thos. Cuttington

  No. 81, Pine street, Philadelphia

  * * * *

  This at a time, mind you, when the reward for a runaway apprentice often ran as high as ten dollars! Mr. Thomas Cuttington obviously thought himself a man grievously ill-served.

  At last my father emerged from the parlor with the newspaper in his hand. He closed the door behind him. His look then was so dark and stormy that I shrank away from him, and neither my sister nor I dared uncork any of the questions bubbling up within us. Grimly, he fetched his wallet and then, putting on his coat, strode out into the rain.

  Two hours later he returned with one Horace Potter, a clerk from Flintham's counting house, and Tacey's indenture papers. The parlor doors were thrown wide and all the family, and our boarders as well, called in as witnesses. Tacey had by then been clothed by my mother in one of Patricia's outgrown dresses, and since my sister was of average size for a girl her age, Tacey looked quite lost in it. She had washed her face, but her expression was tense and unreadable.

  In a calm and steady voice, my father read the papers through aloud, so that Tacey, who could neither read nor write, might be assured they were truly her deed of service. Whenever he came to a legal term with which she might not be familiar, he carefully explained it to the child, with Mr. Potter—who stood by the hearth, warming his hands—listening intently and then nodding with judicious approval. Then he showed her the signature of her former master, and her own mark as well.

  Finally, he placed the paper on the fire.

  When the indenture went up in flame, the girl made a sound unlike anything I have ever heard before or since, a kind of wail or shriek, the sort of noise a wild thing makes. Then she knelt down before my father and, to his intense embarrassment, seized and kissed his hand.

  So it was that Tacey came to live with us. She immediately became like another sister to me. Which was to say that she was a harsh, intemperate termagant who would take not a word of direction, however reasonably I phrased it, and indeed ordered me about as if it were I who was her servant! She was the scourge of my existence. When she was seventeen—and against my mother's horrified advice—she married a man twice her age and considerably darker-skinned, who made a living waiting upon the festivities of the wealthy. Julius Nash was a grave man. People said of him that even his smile was stern. Once, when he was courting her and stood waiting below-stairs, I, smarting from a recent scolding, angrily blurted out, “How can you put up with such a shrew?”

  That solemn man studied me for a moment, and then in a voice so deep it had often been compared to a funerary bell replied, “Mistress Tacey is a woman of considerable strength of character and that, I have found, is far to be preferred over a guileful and flattering tongue.”

  I had not been looking to be taken seriously, but only venting boyish spleen. Now I stood abashed and humbled by this Negro gentleman's thoughtful reply—and doubly humiliated, I must admit, by the source of my mortification. Then Tacey came stepping down the stairs, with a tight, triumphant smirk and was gone, to reappear in my tale only twice more.

  Yet if this seems to you an unlikely thing that my father would be so generous to a mulatto girl he did not know and who could do him no conceivable benefit, then I can only say that you did not know this good man. Moreover, I am convinced by the high regard in which he was held by all who knew him that this was but one of many comparable deeds, and notable only in that by its circumstances we were made aware of it.

  How changed was my poor father's condition when last I saw him alive! That was the time my mother took me to the insane ward at Pennsylvania Hospital to visit him.

  It was a beautiful, blue-skyed day in June.

  I was fifteen years old.

  * * * *

  Philadelphia was a wonderful place in which to be young, though I did not half appreciate it at that time. Ships arrived in the harbor every day with silk and camphor from Canton, hides from Valparaiso, and opium from Smyrna, and departed to Batavia and Malacca for tin, the Malabar coast for sandalwood and pepper, and around the Cape Horn with crates of knives and blankets to barter with credulous natives for bales of sea otter skins. Barbarously tattooed sailors were forever staggering from the groggeries singing oddly cadenced chanteys and pitching headlong into the river, or telling in vivid detail of a season lived naked among cannibals, married to a woman whose teeth had been filed down to points, all the while and with excruciating exactitude slowly unwrapping an oilcloth packet unearthed from the bottom of a sea-chest to reveal at the climax of the yarn: a mummified human ear. The harbor was a constant source of discontent for me.

  As were the grain wagons which came down the turnpike from Lancaster and returned west laden with pioneers and missionaries bound for the continental interior to battle savage Indians or save their souls for Christ, each according to his inclination. Those who stayed behind received packages from their distant relations containing feathered head-pieces, cunningly woven baskets, beadwork cradleboards, and the occasional human scalp. Every frontiersman who headed up the pike took a piece of my soul with him.

  Our hotel was located in that narrow slice of streets by the Delaware which respectable folk called the wharflands, but which, because a brick wall two stories high with an iron fence atop it separated Water street from Front street, (the two ran together; but Water street served the slow-moving wagon trade of the wharves, and Front street the dashing gigs and coaches of the social aristocracy), we merchants’ brats thought of as the Walled City. Our streets were narrow and damp, our houses and stores a bit ramshackle, our lives richly thronged with provincial joys.

  Philadelphia proper, by contrast, was the sort of place where much was made of how wide and clean and grid-like the streets were, and a Frenchman's casual gallant reference to it as “the Athens of America” would be quoted and re-quoted until Doomsday. Yet, within its limits, it was surprisingly cosmopolitan.

  The European wars had filled the city with exiles—the vicomte de Noailles, the duc d'Orléans, a hundred more. The former Empress Iturbide of Mexico could be seen hurrying by in her ludicrously splendid carriage. In the restaurants and bookshops could be found General Moreau, a pair of Murats, and a brace of Napoleons, were one to seek them out. The count de Survilliers, who had been King of Spain, had his own pew in St. Joseph's Church off Willing's alley. We often saw him on the way there of a Sunday, though we ourselves went to St. Mary's, half a block away, for our family had sided with the trustees in the church fight which had resulted in the bishop being locked out of his own cathedral. Charles Lucien Bonaparte, who was a naturalist, could be encountered stalking the marshes at the edge of town or along the river, in forlorn search of a new species of plover or gull to name after himself.

  Still, and despite its museums and circuses, its (one) theater and (one) library and (three) wax-works, the city was to a young river rat little more than an endless series of enticements to leave. Everything of any interest at all to me had either come from elsewhere or was outwa
rd bound.

  * * * *

  But I seem to have lost the thread of my tale. Well, who can blame me? This is no easy thing to speak of. Still, I set out to tell you of my final memory—would to God it were not!—of my father when he was alive.

  And so I shall.

  My mother and I walked to the hospital together. She led, concentrated and brisk, while I struggled not to lag behind. Several times she glared me back to her side.

  For most of that mile-and-some walk from our boarding-house, I managed not to ask the question most vexing my mind, for fear it would make me sound lacking in a proper filial piety. Leaving the shelter of the Walled City at Market street, we went first south on Front then up Black Horse alley, while I distracted myself by computing the area between two curves, and then turning down Second past the malt houses and breweries to Chestnut and so west past the Philadelphia Dispensary, where I tried to recall the method Father Tourneaux had taught me for determining the volume of tapering cylindrical solids. South again on Third street, past the tannery and the soap-boiler's shop and chandlery, I thought about Patricia's husband, Aaron, who was in the China trade. Somebody—could it have been Jack?—had recently asked him if he planned someday to employ me as a navigator on one of his ships, and he had laughed in a way that said neither yea nor nay. Which gave me much to ponder. We cut through Willing's alley, my mother being a great believer that distances could be shortened through cunning navigation (I ducked my head and made the sign of the cross as we passed St. Joseph's), and jogged briefly on Fourth. One block up Prune street, a tawny redhead winked at me and ducked down Bingham's court before I could decide whether she were real or just a rogue memory. But I was like the man commanded not to think about a rhinoceros, who found he could think of nothing else. At last, the pressures of curiosity and resentment grew so great that the membrane of my resolve ruptured and burst.