The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I see.” She didn’t. She had been in her room, pulling herself together after the harrowing interview with her son. Her adopted son. She hadn’t been able to tell Noah anything about his parentage because she hadn’t known anything: sealed adoption records. Was Noah the way he was because of his genes? Or because of the way she’d raised him? Because of his peer group? His astrological sign? Theories went in and out of fashion, and none of them explained personality.

  She said, “What is Noah going to do here? He’s not a scientist, not security, not an administrator…” Not anything. It hurt her to even think it. Her baby, her lost one.

  Evan said, “I have no idea. I imagine he’ll either sort himself out or leave. The other news is that the Biology Team has made progress in matching Terran and Deneb immune-system components. There were a lot of graphs and charts and details, but the bottom line is that ours and theirs match pretty well. Remarkably little genetic drift. Different antibodies, of course, for different pathogens, and quite a lot of those, so no chance we’ll be touching skin without their wearing their energy shields.”

  “So cancel the orgy.”

  Evan laughed. Emboldened by this as much as by the drink, Marianne said, “Are you gay?”

  “You know I am, Marianne.”

  “I wanted to be sure. We’ve never discussed it. I’m a scientist, after all.”

  “You’re an American. Leave nothing unsaid that can be shouted from rooftops.”

  Her fuzzy mind had gone back to Noah. “I failed my son, Evan.”

  “Rubbish. I told you, he’ll sort himself out eventually. Just be prepared for the idea that it may take a direction you don’t fancy.”

  Again that shadow in Evan’s eyes. She didn’t ask; he obviously didn’t want to discuss it, and she’d snooped enough. Carefully she rose to leave, but Evan’s next words stopped her.

  “Also, Elizabeth is coming aboard tomorrow.”

  “Elizabeth? Why?”

  “A talk with Smith about shore-side security. Someone tried a second attack at the sample collection site shore-side.”

  “Oh my God. Anybody hurt?”

  “No. This time.”

  “Elizabeth is going to ask the Denebs to give her the energy-shield technology. She’s been panting for it for border patrol ever since the Embassy first landed in the harbor. Evan, that would be a disaster. She’s so focused on her job that she can’t see what will happen if—no, when—the street finds its own uses for the tech, and it always does.” Who had said that? Some writer. She couldn’t remember.

  “Well, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Elizabeth can ask, but that doesn’t mean that Smith will agree.”

  “But he’s so eager to find his ‘clan’—God, it’s so stupid! That Korean mitochondrial sequence, to take just one example, that turns up regularly in Norwegian fisherman, or that engineer in Minnesota who’d traced his ancestry back three hundred years without being able to account for the Polynesian mitochondrial signature he carries—nobody has a cure ‘plan.’ I mean, ‘clan.’”

  “Nobody on Earth, anyway.”

  “And even if they did,” she barreled on, although all at once her words seemed to have become slippery in her mouth, like raw oysters, “There’s no sig … sif … significant connection between two people with the same mitochondrial DNA than between any other two strangers!”

  “Not to us,” Evan said. “Marianne, go to bed. You’re too tipsy, and we have work to do in the morning.”

  “It’s not work that matters to protection against the shore cloud. Spore cloud. Spore cloud.”

  “Nonetheless, it’s work. Now, go.”

  NOAH

  Noah stood in a corner of the conference room, which held eleven people and two aliens. Someone had tried to make the room festive with a red paper tablecloth, flowers, and plates of tiny cupcakes. This had not worked. It was still a utilitarian, corporate-looking conference room, filled with people who otherwise would have no conceivable reason to be together at either a conference or a party. Lisa Gutierrez circulated among them: smiling, chatting, trying to put people at ease. It wasn’t working.

  Two young women, standing close together for emotional support. A middle-aged man in an Armani suit and Italian leather shoes. An unshaven man, hair in a dirty ponytail, who looked homeless but maybe only because he stood next to Well-Shod Armani. A woman carrying a plastic tote bag with a hole in one corner. And so on and so on. It was the sort of wildly mixed group that made Noah, standing apart with his back to a wall, think of worshippers in an Italian cathedral.

  The thought brought him a strained smile. A man nearby, perhaps emboldened by the smile, sidled closer and whispered, “They will let us go back to New York, won’t they?”

  Noah blinked. “Why wouldn’t they, if that’s what you want?”

  “I want them to offer us shields for the spore cloud! To take back with us to the city! Why else would I come here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The man grimaced and moved away. But—why had he even come, if he suspected alien abduction or imprisonment or whatever? And why didn’t he feel what Noah did? Every single one of the people in this room had caused in him the same shock of recognition as had Ambassador Smith. Every single one. And apparently no one else had felt it at all.

  But the nervous man needn’t have worried. When the party and its ceiling delivered speeches of kinship and the invitation to make a longer visit aboard the Embassy were all over, everyone else left. They left looking relieved or still curious or satisfied or uneasy or disappointed (no energy shield offered! No riches!), but they all left, Lisa still chattering reassuringly. All except Noah.

  Ambassador Smith came over to him. The Deneb said nothing, merely silently waited. He looked as if he were capable of waiting forever.

  Noah’s hands felt clammy. All those brief, temporary lives on sugarcane, each one shed like a snakeskin when the drug wore off. No, not snakeskins; that wasn’t the right analogy. More like bread crumbs tossed by Hansel and Gretel, starting in hope but vanishing before they could lead anywhere. The man with the dirty pony tail wasn’t the only homeless one.

  Noah said, “I want to know who and what you are.”

  The ceiling above Smith said, “Come with me to a genuine celebration.”

  * * *

  A circular room, very small. Noah and Smith faced each other. The ceiling said, “This is an airlock. Beyond this space, the environment will be ours, not yours. It is not very different, but you are not used to our microbes and so must wear the energy suit. It filters air, but you may have some trouble breathing at first because the oxygen content of World is like Earth’s at an altitude of 12,000 feet. If you feel nausea in the airlock, where we will stay for a few minutes, you may go back. The light will seem dim to you, the smells strange, and the gravity less than you are accustomed to by one-tenth. There are no built-in translators beyond this point, and we will speak our own language, so you will not be able to talk to us. Are you sure you wish to come?”

  “Yes,” Noah said.

  “Is there anything you wish to say before you join your birthright clan?”

  Noah said, “What is your name?”

  Smith smiled. He made a noise that sounded like a trilled version of meehao, with a click on the end.

  Noah imitated it.

  Smith said, in trilling English decorated with a click, “Brother mine.”

  MARIANNE

  Marianne was not present at the meeting between Elizabeth and Smith, but Elizabeth came to see her afterward. Marianne and Max were bent over the computer, trying to account for what was a mitochondrial anomaly or a sample contamination or a lab error or a program glitch. Or maybe something else entirely. Marianne straightened and said, “Elizabeth! How nice to—”

  “You have to talk to him,” Elizabeth demanded. “The man’s an idiot!”

  Marianne glanced at the security officer who had escorted Elizabeth to the lab. He nodded and went outside. Max sai
d, “I’ll just … uh … this can wait.” He practically bolted, a male fleeing mother-daughter drama. Evan was getting some much-needed sleep; Gina had gone ashore to Brooklyn to see her parents for the first time in weeks.

  “I assume,” Marianne said, “you mean Ambassador Smith.”

  “I do. Does he know what’s going on in New York? Does he even care?”

  “What’s going on in New York?”

  Elizabeth instantly turned professional, calmer but no less intense. “We are less than nine months from passing through the spore cloud.”

  At least, Marianne thought, she now accepts that much.

  “In the last month alone, the five boroughs have had triple the usual rate of arsons, ten demonstrations with city permits of which three turned violent, twenty-three homicides, and one mass religious suicide at the Church of the Next Step Forward in Tribeca. Wall Street has plunged. The Federal Reserve Bank on Liberty Street was occupied from Tuesday night until Thursday dawn by terrorists. Upstate, the governor’s mansion has been attacked, unsuccessfully. The same thing is happening everywhere else. Parts of Beijing have been on fire for a week now. Thirty-six percent of Americans believe the Denebs brought the spore cloud with them, despite what astronomers say. If the ambassador gave us the energy shield, that might help sway the numbers in their favor. Don’t you think the president and the UN have said all this to Smith?”

  “I have no idea what the president and the UN have said, and neither do you.”

  “Mom—”

  “Elizabeth, do you suppose that if what you just said is true and the ambassador said no to the president, that my intervention would do any good?”

  “I don’t know. You scientists stick together.”

  Long ago, Marianne had observed the many different ways people responded to an unthinkable catastrophe. Some panicked. Some bargained. Some joked. Some denied. Some blamed. Some destroyed. Some prayed. Some drank. Some thrilled, as if they had secretly awaited such drama their entire lives. Evidently, nothing had changed.

  The people aboard the Embassy met the unthinkable with work, and then more work. Elizabeth was right that the artificial island had become its own self-contained, self-referential universe, every moment devoted to the search for something, anything, to counteract the effect of the spore cloud on mammalian brains. The Denebs, understanding how good hackers could be, blocked all Internet, television, and radio from the Embassy. Outside news came from newspapers or letters, both dying media, brought in the twice-daily mail sack and by the vendors and scientists and diplomats who came and went. Marianne had not paid attention.

  She said to her enraged daughter, “The Denebs are not going to give you their energy shield.”

  “We cannot protect the UN without it. Let alone the rest of the harbor area.”

  “Then send all the ambassadors and translators home, because it’s not going to happen. I’m sorry, but it’s not.”

  “You’re not sorry. You’re on their side.”

  “It isn’t a question of sides. In the wrong hands, those shields—”

  “Law enforcement is the right hands!”

  “Elizabeth, we’ve been over and over this. Let’s not do it again. You know I have no power to get you an energy shield, and I haven’t seen you in so long. Let’s not quarrel.” Marianne heard the pleading note in her own voice. When, in the long and complicated road of parenthood, had she started courting her daughter’s agreement, instead of the other way around?

  “Okay, okay. How are you, Mom?”

  “Overworked and harried. How are you?”

  “Overworked and harried.” A reluctant half-smile. “I can’t stay long. How about a tour?”

  “Sure. This is my lab.”

  “I meant of the Embassy. I’ve never been inside before, you know, and your ambassador”—somehow Smith had become Marianne’s special burden—“just met with me in a room by the submarine bay. Can I see more? Or are you lab types kept close to your cages?”

  The challenge, intended or not, worked. Marianne showed Elizabeth all over the Terran part of the Embassy, accompanied by a security officer whom Elizabeth ignored. Her eyes darted everywhere, noted everything. Finally she said, “Where do the Denebs live?”

  “Behind these doors here. No one has ever been in there.”

  “Interesting. It’s pretty close to the high-risk labs. And where is Noah?”

  Yesterday’s bitter scene with Noah, when he’d been so angry because she’d never told him he was adopted, still felt like an open wound. Marianne didn’t want to admit to Elizabeth that she didn’t know where he’d gone. “He stays in the Terran visitors’ quarters,” she said, hoping there was such a place.

  Elizabeth nodded. “I have to report back. Thanks for the Cook’s tour, Mom.”

  Marianne wanted to hug her daughter, but Elizabeth had already moved off, heading toward the submarine bay, security at her side. Memory stabbed Marianne: a tiny Elizabeth, five years old, lips set as she walked for the first time toward the school bus she must board alone. It all went by so fast, and when the spore cloud hit, not even memory would be left.

  She dashed away the stupid tears and headed back to work.

  III: S MINUS 8.5 MONTHS

  MARIANNE

  The auditorium on the Embassy had the same thin, rice-paper-like walls as some of the other non-lab rooms, but these shifted colors like some of the more substantial walls. Slow, complex, subtle patterns in pale colors that reminded Marianne of dissolving oil slicks. Forty seats in rising semicircles faced a dais, looking exactly like a lecture room at her college. She had an insane desire to regress to undergraduate, pull out a notebook, and doodle in the margins. The seats were filled not with students chewing gum and texting each other, but with some of the planet’s most eminent scientists. This was the first all-hands meeting of the scientists aboard. The dais was empty.

  Three Denebs entered from a side door.

  Marianne had never seen so many of them together at once. Oddly, the effect was to make them seem more alien, as if their minor differences from Terrans—the larger eyes, spindlier limbs, greater height—increased exponentially as their presence increased arithmetically. Was that Ambassador Smith and Scientist Jones? Yes. The third alien, shorter than the other two and somehow softer, said through the translator in the ceiling, “Thank you all for coming. We have three reports today, two from Terran teams and one from World. First, Dr. Manning.” All three aliens smiled.

  Terrence Manning, head of the Spore Team, took the stage. Marianne had never met him, Nobel Prize winners being as far above her scientific level as the sun above mayflies. A small man, he had exactly three strands of hair left on his head, which he tried to coax into a comb-over. Intelligence shone through his diffident, unusually formal manner. Manning had a deep, authoritative voice, a welcome contrast to the mechanical monotony of the ceiling.

  From the aliens’ bright-eyed demeanor, Marianne had half expected good news, despite the growing body of data on the ship’s LAN. She was wrong.

  “We have not,” Manning said, “been able to grow the virus in cell cultures. As you all know, some viruses simply will not grow in vitro, and this seems to be one of them. Nor have we been able to infect monkeys—any breed of monkey—with spore disease. We will, of course, keep trying. The better news, however, is that we have succeeded in infecting mice.”

  Good and bad, Marianne thought. Often, keeping a mouse alive was actually easier than keeping a cell culture growing. But a culture would have given them a more precise measure of the virus’s cytopathic effect on animal tissue, and monkeys were genetically closer to humans than were mice. On the other hand, monkeys were notoriously difficult to work with. They bit, they fought, they injured themselves, they traded parasites and diseases, and they died of things they were not supposed to die from.

  Manning continued, “We now have a lot of infected mice and our aerosol expert, Dr. Belsky, has made a determination of how much exposure is needed to cause
spore disease in mice under laboratory conditions.”

  A graph flashed onto the wall behind Manning: exposure time plotted versus parts per million of spore. Beside Marianne, Evan’s manicured fingers balled into a sudden fist. Infection was fast, and required a shockingly small concentration of virus, even for an airborne pathogen.

  “Despite the infected mice,” Manning went on, and now the strain in his voice was palpable, “we still have not been able to isolate the virus. It’s an elusive little bugger.”

  No one laughed. Marianne, although this was not her field, knew how difficult it could be to find a virus even after you’d identified the host. They were so tiny; they disappeared into cells or organs; they mutated.

  “Basically,” Manning said, running his hand over his head and disarranging his three hairs, “we know almost nothing about this pathogen. Not the r nought—for you astronomers, that is the number of cases that one case generates on average over the course of its infectious period—nor the incubation period nor the genome nor the morphology. What we do know are the composition of the coating encapsulating the virus, the transmission vector, and the resulting pathology in mice.”

  Ten minutes of data on the weird, unique coating on the “spores,” a term even the scientists, who knew better, now used. Then Dr. Jessica Yu took Manning’s place on the dais. Marianne had met her in the cafeteria and felt intimidated. The former head of the Special Pathogens branch of the National Center for Infectious Diseases in Atlanta, Jessica Yu was diminutive, fifty-ish, and beautiful in a severe, don’t-mess-with-me way. Nobody ever did.

  She said, “We are, of course, hoping that gaining insight into the mechanism of the disease in animals will help us figure out how to treat it in humans. These mice were infected three days ago. An hour ago they began to show symptoms, which we wanted all of you to see before.… well, before.”

  The wall behind Jessica Yu de-opaqued, taking the exposure graphic with it. Or some sort of view screen now overlay the wall and the three mice now revealed were someplace else in the Embassy. The mice occupied a large glass cage in what Marianne recognized as a BSL4 lab.