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

by Gardner Dozois

  Two of the mice lay flat, twitching and making short whooshing sounds, much amplified by the audio system. No, not amplified—those were desperate gasps as the creatures fought for air. Their tails lashed and their front paws scrambled. They were, Marianne realized, trying to swim away from whatever was drowning them.

  “In humans,” Yu continued, “we would call this ARDS—Adult Respiratory Distress Syndrome, a catch-all diagnosis used when we don’t know what the problem is. The mouse lung tissue is becoming heavier and heavier as fluid from the blood seeps into the lungs and each breath takes more and more effort. X-rays of lung tissue show ‘white-out’—so much fluid in the lungs increasing the radiological density that the image looks like a snowstorm. The viral incubation period in mice is three days. The time from onset of symptoms until death averages 2.6 hours.”

  The third mouse began to twitch.

  Yu continued, her whole tiny body rigid, “As determined thus far, the infection rate in mice is about seventy-five percent. We can’t, of course, make any assumptions that it would be the same in humans. Nor do we have any idea why mice are infected but monkeys are not. The medical data made available from the Deneb colonies do indicate similar metabolic pathways to those of the mice. Those colonies had no survivors. Autopsies on the mice further indicate—”

  A deep nausea took Marianne, reaching all the way from throat to rectum. She was surprised; her training was supposed to inure her. It did not. Before her body could disgrace her by retching or even vomiting, she squeezed past Evan with a push on his shoulder to indicate he should stay and hear the rest. In the corridor outside the auditorium she leaned against the wall, lowered her head between her knees, breathed deeply, and let shame overcome horror.

  No way for a scientist to react to data—

  The shame was not strong enough. It was her children that the horror brought: Elizabeth and Ryan and Noah, mouths open as they tried to force air into their lungs, wheezing and gasping, drowning where they lay … and Connie and the as-yet-unborn baby, her first grandchild.…

  Stop. It’s no worse for you than for anybody else.

  Marianne stood. She dug the nails of her right hand into the palm of her left. But she could not make herself go back into the auditorium. Evan would have to tell her what other monstrosities were revealed. She made her way back to her lab.

  Max sat at the computer, crunching data. Gina looked up from her bench. “Marianne, we found two more L7 donors.”

  “Good,” Marianne said, went through the lab to her tiny office behind, and closed the door firmly. What did it matter how many L7s she found for Smith? Earth was finished. Eight-and-a-half months left, and the finest medical and scientific brains on the planet had not even begun to find any way to mitigate the horror to come.

  Gina knocked on the office door. “Marianne? Are you all right?”

  Gina was the same age as Ryan, a young woman with her whole life still ahead of her. If she got that life. Meanwhile, there was no point in making the present even worse. Marianne forced cheerfulness into her voice. “Yes, fine. I’ll be right out. Put on a fresh pot of coffee, would you please?”

  NOAH

  Noah stood with his clan and prepared to lllathil.

  There was no word for it in English. Part dance, part religious ceremony, part frat kegger, and it went on for two days. Ten L7s stood in a circle, all in various stages of drunkenness. When the weird, atonal music (but after two months aboard the Embassy it no longer sounded weird or atonal to his ears) began, they weaved in and out, making precise figures on the floor with the red paint on their feet. Once the figures had been sacred, part of a primitive religion that had faded with the rapid growth of science nurtured by their planet’s lush and easy environment. The ritual remained. It affirmed family, always matrilineal on World. It affirmed connection, obligation, identity. Whenever the larger of World’s moons was lined up in a certain way with the smaller, Worlders came together with their families and joyously made lllathil. Circles always held ten, and as many circles were made as a family needed. It didn’t matter where you were on World, or what you were doing, when lllathil came, you were there.

  His mother would never have understood.

  On the third morning, after everyone had slept off the celebration, came the second part of lllathil, which Marianne would have understood even less. Each person gave away one-fifth of everything he had earned or made since the last lllathil. He gave it, this “thumb” as it was jokingly called, to someone in his circle. Different clans gave different percentages and handled that in different ways, but some version of the custom mostly held over the mostly monocultural World. The Denebs were a sophisticated race; such a gift involved transfers of the Terran equivalent of bank accounts, stock holdings, real estate. The Denebs were also human, and so sometimes the gift was made grudgingly, or with anger at a cousin’s laziness, or resignedly, or with cheating. But it was made, and there wasn’t very much cheating. Or so said Mee^hao¡, formerly known to Noah as Smith, who’d told him so in the trilling and clicking language that Noah was trying so hard to master. “We teach our children very intensively to follow our ways,” Smith said wryly. “Of course, some do not. Some always are different.”

  “You said it, brother,” Noah said in English, to Smith’s total incomprehension.

  Noah loved lllathil. He had very little—nothing, really—to give, but his net gain was not the reason he loved it. Nor was that the reason he studied the Worldese for hours every day, aided by his natural ear for languages. Once, in his brief and abortive attempted at college, Noah had heard a famous poet say that factual truth and emotional truth were not the same. “You have to understand with your belly,” she’d said.

  He did. For the first time in his life, he did.

  His feet made a mistake, leaving a red toe print on the floor in the wrong place. No one chided him. Cliclimi, her old face wrinkling into crevasses and hills and dales, a whole topography of kinship, just laughed at him and reached out her skinny arm to fondly touch his.

  Noah, not like that. Color in the lines!

  Noah, this isn’t the report card I expect of you.

  Noah, you can’t come with me and my friends! You’re too little!

  Noah, can’t you do anything right? When he’d danced until he could no longer stand (Cliclimi was still going at it, but she hadn’t drunk as much as Noah had), he dropped onto a large cushion beside “Jones,” whose real name he still couldn’t pronounce. It had more trills than most, and a strange tongue sound he could not reproduce at all. She was flushed, her hair unbound from its usual tight arrangement. Smaller than he was but stockier, her caramel-colored flesh glowed with exertion. The hair, rich dark brown, glinted in the rosy light. Her red tunic—everybody wore red for lllanthil—had hiked high on her thighs.

  Noah heard his mother’s voice say, “A hundred fifty thousand years is not enough time for a species to diverge.” To his horror, he felt himself blush.

  She didn’t notice, or else she took it as warmth from the dancing. She said, “Do you have trouble with our gravity?”

  Proud of himself that he understood the words, he said, “No. It small amount big of Earth.” At least, he hoped that’s what he’d said.

  Apparently it was. She smiled and said something he didn’t understand. She stretched luxuriously, and the tunic rode up another two inches.

  What were the kinship taboos on sex? What were any of the taboos on sex? Not that Noah could have touched her skin-to-skin, anyway. He was encased, so unobtrusively that he usually forgot it was there, in the “energy suit” that protected him from alien microbes.

  Microbes. Spores. How much time was left before the cloud hit Earth? At the moment it didn’t seem important. (Noah, you can’t just pretend problems don’t exist! That had usually been Elizabeth.)

  He said, “Can—yes, no?—make my—” Damn it, what was the word for microbes? “—my inside like you? My inside spores?”

  IV: S MINUS 6.5 MONT
HS

  MARIANNE

  Gina had not returned from Brooklyn on the day’s last submarine run. Marianne was redoing an entire batch of DNA amplification that had somehow become contaminated. Evan picked up the mail sack and the news dispatches. When he came into the lab, where Marianne was cursing at a row of beakers, he uncharacteristically put both hands on her shoulders. She looked at his face.

  “What is it? Tell me quickly.”

  “Gina is dead.”

  She put a hand onto the lab bench to steady herself. “How?”

  “A mob. They were frighteningly well armed, almost a small army. End-of-the-world rioters.”

  “Was Gina … did she…?”

  “A bullet, very quick. She didn’t suffer, Marianne. Do you want a drink? I have some rather good Scotch.”

  “No. Thank you, but no.”

  Gina. Marianne could picture her so clearly, as if she still stood in the lab in the wrinkled white coat she always wore even though the rest of them did not. Her dark hair just touched with gray, her ruddy face calm. Brisk, pleasant, competent.… What else? Marianne hadn’t known Gina very well. All at once, she wondered if she knew anyone, really knew them. Two of her children baffled her: Elizabeth’s endemic anger, Noah’s drifty aimlessness. Had she ever known Kyle, the man he was under the charming and lying surface, under the alcoholism? Evan’s personal life was kept personal, and she’d assumed it was his British reticence, but maybe she knew so little about him because of her limitations, not his. With everyone else aboard the Embassy, as with her university department back home, she exchanged only scientific information or meaningless pleasantries. She hadn’t seen her brother, to whom she’d never been close, in nearly two years. Her last close female friendship had been over a decade ago.

  Thinking this way felt strange, frightening. She was glad when Evan said, “Where’s Max? I’ll tell him about Gina.”

  “Gone to bed with a cold. It can wait until morning. What’s that?”

  Evan gave her a letter, addressed by hand. Marianne tore it open. “It’s from Ryan. The baby was born, a month early but he’s fine and so is she. Six pounds two ounces. They’re naming him Jason William Jenner.”

  “Congratulations. You’re a nan.”

  “A what?”

  “Grand-mum.” He kissed her cheek.

  She turned to cling to him, without passion, in sudden need of the simple comfort of human touch. Evan smelled of damp wool and some cool, minty lotion. He patted her back. “What’s all this, then?”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Don’t be sorry.” He held her until she was ready to pull away.

  “I think I should write to Gina’s parents.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I want to make them understand—” Understand what? That sometimes children were lost, and the reasons didn’t necessarily make sense. But this reason did make sense, didn’t it? Gina had died because she’d been aboard the Embassy, died as a result of the work she did, and right now this was the most necessary work in the entire world.

  She had a sudden memory of Noah, fifteen, shouting at her: “You’re never home! Work is all you care about!” And she, like so many beleaguered parents, had shouted back, “If it weren’t for my work, we’d all starve!”

  And yet, when the kids had all left home and she could work as much as she wanted or needed without guilt, she’d missed them dreadfully. She’d missed the harried driving schedules—I have to be at Jennifer’s at eight and Soccer practice is moved up an hour Saturday! She’d missed their electronics, cells and iPods and tablets and laptops, plugged in all of the old house’s inadequate outlets. She’d missed the rainbow laundry in the basement, Ryan’s red soccer shirts and Elizabeth’s white jeans catastrophically dyed pink and Noah’s yellow-and-black bumblebee costume for the second-grade play. All gone. When your children were small you worried that they would die and you would lose them, and then they grew up and you ended up losing the children they’d been, anyway.

  Marianne pulled at the skin on her face and steeled herself to write to Gina’s parents.

  NOAH

  There were three of them now. Noah Jenner, Jacqui Young, Oliver Pardo. But only Noah was undergoing the change.

  They lounged this afternoon in the World garden aboard the Embassy, where the ceiling seemed to be open to an alien sky. A strange orange shone, larger than Sol and yet not shedding as much light, creating a dim glow over the three Terrans. The garden plants were all dark in hue (“To gather as much light as possible,” Mee^hao¡ had said), lush leaves in olive drab and pine and asparagus. Water trickled over rocks or fell in high, thin streams. Warmth enveloped Noah even through his energy suit, and he felt light on the ground in the lesser gravity. Some nearby flower sent out a strange, musky, heady fragrance on the slight breeze.

  Jacqui, an energetic and enormously intelligent graduate student, had chosen to move into the alien section of the Embassy in order to do research. She was frank, with both Terrans and Denebs, that she was not going to stay after she had gathered the unique data on Deneb culture that would ensure her academic career. Smith said that was all right, she was clan and so welcome for as long as she chose. Noah wondered how she planned on even having an academic career after the spore cloud hit.

  Oliver Pardo would have been given the part of geek by any film-casting department with no imagination. Overweight, computer-savvy, and a fan of superheroes, he quoted obscure sixty-year-old science fiction books and drew endless pictures of girls in improbable costumes slaying dragons or frost giants. Socially inept, he was nonetheless gentle and sweet-natured, and Noah preferred his company to Jacqui’s, who asked too many questions.

  “Why?” she said.

  “Why what?” Noah said, even though he knew perfectly well what she meant. He lounged back on the comfortable moss and closed his eyes.

  “Why are you undergoing this punishing regime of shots just so you can take off your shield?”

  “They’re not shots,” Noah said. Whatever the Denebs were doing to him, they did it by having him apply patches to himself when he was out of his energy suit and in an isolation chamber. This had happened once a week for a while now. The treatments left him nauseated, dizzy, sometimes with diarrhea, and always elated. There was only one more to go.

  Jacqui said, “Shots or whatever, why do it?”

  Oliver looked up from his drawing of a barbarian girl riding a lion. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Jacqui said, “Not to me.”

  Oliver said, “Noah wants to become an alien.”

  “No,” Noah said. “I was an alien. Now I’m becoming … not one.”

  Jacqui’s pitying look said You need help. Oliver shaded in the lion’s mane. Noah wondered why, of all the Terrans of L7 mitochondrial haplotype, he was stuck with these two. He stood. “I have to study.”

  “I wish I had your fluency in Worldese,” Jacqui said. “It would help my work so much.”

  So study it. But Noah knew she wouldn’t, not the way he was doing. She wanted the quick harvest of startling data, not … whatever it was he wanted.

  Becoming an alien. Oliver was more correct than Noah’s flip answer. And yet Noah had been right, too, which was something he could never explain to anyone, least of all his mother. Whom he was supposed to visit this morning, since she could not come to him.

  All at once Noah knew that he was not going to keep that appointment. Although he flinched at the thought of hurting Marianne, he was not going to leave the World section of the Embassy. Not now, not ever. He couldn’t account for this feeling, so strong that it seemed to infuse his entire being, like oxygen in the blood. But he had to stay here, where he belonged. Irrational, but—as Evan would have said—there it was, musn’t grumble, at least it made a change, no use going on about it.

  He had never liked Evan.

  In his room, Noah took a pen and a pad of paper to write a note to his mother. The words did not come easy. All his life he had disa
ppointed her, but not like this.

  Dear Mom—I know we were going to get together this afternoon but—

  Dear Mom—I wish I could see you as we planned but—

  Dear Mom—We need to postpone our visit because Ambassador Smith has asked me if this afternoon I would—

  Noah pulled at the skin on his face, realized that was his mother’s gesture, and stopped. He looked longingly at the little cubes that held his language lessons. As the cube spoke Worldese, holofigures in the cube acted out the meaning. After Noah repeated each phrase, it corrected his pronunciation until he got it right.

  “My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” a smiling girl said in the holocube, in Worldese. Two boys, one younger than she and one much older, appeared beside her with a much older woman behind them, all four with similar features, a shimmering dome behind them.

  “My two brothers live with my mother and me in this dwelling,” Noah repeated. The Worldese tenses were tricky; these verbs were the ones for things that not only could change, but could change without the speaker’s having much say about events. A mother could die. The family could be chosen for a space colony. The older brother could marry and move in with his wife’s family.

  Sometimes things were beyond your control and you had no real choice.

  Dear Mom—I can’t come. I’m sorry. I love you. Noah

  MARIANNE

  The work—anybody’s work—was not going well.

  It seemed to be proceeding at an astonishing pace, but Marianne—and everyone else—knew that was an illusion. She sat in the auditorium for the monthly report, Evan beside her. This time, no Denebs were present—why not? She listened to Terence Manning enumerate what under any other circumstances would have been incredibly rapid triumphs.

  “We have succeeded in isolating the virus,” Manning said, “although not in growing it in vitro. After isolation, we amplified it with the usual polymerase processes. The virus has been sequenced and—only a few days ago!—captured on an electromicrograph image, which, as most of you know, can be notoriously difficult. Here it is.”