Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  And out of that wreck I made a life, Lisa reminded herself fiercely. Graduate school, Carlo, the internship at Kenton. The alien animals. Talk about world-changing events! If Danilo knew about the aliens … but he wouldn't. It was her knowledge, her life, and no whiff of masculine pheromones would ruin it for her. Not now, not ever.

  "The beard feels strangey," Carlo said. It was his latest pet word.

  "Oh, it's strangey, all right," Lisa said, and Danilo looked at her.

  She fed Carlo and Danilo too (inescapable), read Carlo a story, put him to bed. Danilo watched silently from his chair at the table. After Lisa closed the bedroom door, she said, "Now go. I have work to do."

  "Work? Now?"

  "All the time, Danilo."

  "And you think it does anybody any good, this work? This studying minute details of ecosystems even as the exploiters destroy them out from under you?"

  "Probably as much actual good as your 'non-violent confrontations' at Greenpeace."

  "I'm not with Greenpeace any more," he said, and something grim in his tone, coming through despite the soft accent, made Lisa look directly at him.

  "You're not?"

  "No. You're right—non-violent confrontations accomplish nothing substantial. I am with EarthAction now."

  "Never heard of them."

  "You will," he said, and that tone was there again. "Lissy, I don't have anyplace to stay."

  "You're not staying here. See that sofa? That unfolds to create my bedroom, and in another few hours I'll be using it. Bye, Danilo."

  He didn't argue. Picking up the knapsack, he moved with his fluid gait toward the door. Watching him, Lisa suddenly remembered that she still had dried mud in her hair from the boat survey, still smelled of swamp and lab. Well, she'd shower later; the reports in her briefcase were too exciting too wait.

  She'd already started to work by the time Danilo closed the apartment door.

  · · · · ·

  "Washington wants even tighter security," Paul said to the assembled Kenton staff, plus the visiting scientists, Washington representatives, and whoever those others were that Lisa couldn't identify. "That's why we have an increased guard. I know all the checkpoints are inconvenient, people, but consider the benefits. We're getting another month of study before any announcement is made and we're overrun with outsiders."

  Hal said bluntly, "Could have fooled me. There are already far too many outsiders in the Preserve. It's starting to look like O'Hare Airport out there. At this rate we're going to irreparably damage the ecosystem."

  Paul looked embarrassed. People shifted on their chairs, crowded uncomfortably into the too-small break room. Nobody looked directly at the visiting scientists.

  "Hal, we appreciate your concerns, but we have to be practical here as well. This is perhaps the single most important event in the history of humankind. You can't really expect it to stay confined to a bunch of academic swamp rats like us."

  People laughed obligingly, but the tension wasn't broken.

  Paul continued, "We have a full agenda this morning, and a very exciting one, so let's—"

  "If you're really trying for tight security," Hal persisted doggedly, "then all these soldiers and checkpoints and cars going in and out isn't exactly the best way to get it. Don't you think the locals, including the local journalists, are going to notice?"

  Lisa had to agree with him. Just last night she'd heard two women at the grocery store speculating about what could be going on "down to the Preserve, with all them crazy tree-huggers." And the off-duty soldiers went in and out of Flaherty's, the town's most popular bar. She'd seen them.

  "I think we can leave security to the professionals whose job it is," Paul said smoothly, "and get on with our own job. First, a really exciting report from Dr. Mary Clark of Harvard."

  "Thanks, Paul," Dr. Clark said. "Hang onto your hats, guys. We've finished the water analyses. Our alien footed snakes are not the only extraterrestrials in the Preserve."

  Gasps, chatter, shouted questions. Dr. Clark held up her hand, eyes gleaming at the sensation she'd produced. "There are one-celled organisms with the same non-DNA genetic structure out there in the swamp water. There are also multi-celled organisms and some primitive worms."

  Over the fresh buzz, someone called out, "Nothing in between? In evolutionary terms?"

  "No," Dr. Clark said, "and of course we still don't understand that."

  No one did. It was the central mystery about the alien snakers—how had whoever sent them known what environment they would find when the craft landed? Had the snakers been chosen because, miraculously, they were perfectly adapted to a swamp environment at this latitude? That could be true only if their planet of origin were very similar to Earth, which seemed too much of an unlikely coincidence. (In fact, as the NASA rep had said, the odds against it were so high that the possibility was meaningless.)

  Had the snakers been engineered for this environment? But that argued a detailed knowledge of an Earth swamp ecosystem, and how could the genetic engineers have that unless they'd been here? If they had, why not just appear themselves? Why send these non-sentient but apparently harmless creatures as forerunners?

  And now these much more primitive non-DNA creatures. Too primitive to serve as food for the snakers, which in any case were eating sedges and Lemna minor just fine. And that brought the questions full circle to the central issue: How could the snakers be metabolizing food they had not evolved to metabolize?

  The rest of the meeting produced no answer. The Harvard geneticist gave a long and detailed progress report of the research into the peculiar, scattered genetic structures in the alien cells. Lisa listened intently. After forty-five minutes she discerned the central point: Nobody knew anything definitive.

  There were other reports and what promised to be an intense give-and-take, but she couldn't stay. She had to get Carlo from Mrs. Belling. Paul turned his head as she went out the door, and she saw him frown.

  But, then, Paul had a wife looking after his children.

  · · · · ·

  Danilo showed up while she was feeding Carlo. He opened the apartment door, walked in, and dropped his knapsack on the floor. Carlo sang out, "Hi, Uncle Danilo!" and Lisa was stuck being semi-polite.

  "I brought some veggies," Danilo said. "Did you know you have an organic farmer just the other side of town?"

  "No," Lisa said. "I don't shop around much."

  "Good stuff. No pesticides, no fertilizers. I thought I'd make a salad. Do you like salad, Carlo?"

  "Yes!" said Carlo, who liked everything.

  "I got some peaches and cherries, too."

  Lisa's mouth filled with sweet water. She made herself say, "Thank you, Danilo. But you should knock, you know. It's good manners." She looked pointedly at Carlo.

  "You're right. I will. Carlo, watch this."

  Danilo tossed cherries in the air, caught them in his mouth, mimed exaggerated satisfaction. Carlo laughed, and so Danilo hammed it up more, until the little boy was whooping with laughter. "Now Carlo's turn."

  "Pit them first, Danny," Lisa said quickly. He had always swallowed the cherry pits. Oh God, Danny… it had just slipped out.

  Danilo played with Carlo all evening. It wasn't until Carlo was in bed that Lisa could throw Danilo out. "You can't do this."

  "Do what?" he said.

  "Get Carlo used to you, enjoying you, then disappear again."

  "Isn't that what 'uncles' do?" Danilo said, and they were facing each other, bristling like cats.

  "Danilo, what are you really doing here? I looked up EarthAction on the web. They're suspected in half a dozen environmental bombings. A pesticide factory in Mexico, a supermarket in Germany that refused to remove genetically modified foods from its shelves, a Monsanto distributor in South Africa, a whaling operation in Japan."

  "Nothing proven whatsoever," Danilo said.

  "Mostly because you haven't hit anything in the United States. God, Danilo, a supermarket?"

&n
bsp; "Do you know how dangerous those genetically modified foods are? The growers use two to five times the pesticides that regular farmers use. Worse, nobody knows the long-term effects of introducing organisms into the environment that didn't develop there naturally. We could be looking at global disaster down the road, just so the agri-industrial complex can boost its profits now."

  "You used to believe that violence was descending to the level of the enemy!"

  "And all that peaceful confrontation failed, didn't it? Did you breast-feed Carlo, Lisa? You probably had toxic organochlorines in your breast milk. Do you read the newspaper when you're not in that swampy ivory tower of yours? Did you read about the fish depletion on the Grand Banks because of overfishing? The drought in Africa because of climate shifts due to the actions of industrial countries? The destruction of sustainable, diverse agriculture because of one-crop genetically engineered planting with God-knows-what side effects? The ninety-six people in Manila—" He stopped, breathing hard.

  Lisa said quietly, "What about the people in Manila, Danilo? Which people?"

  "Nothing. Forget it."

  "It was the garbage dump, wasn't it? I saw it on the news. A dump collapsed outside Manila, burying the shanties of people who lived by scavenging in the garbage."

  "Men, women, children," Danilo said. "Buried under huge mounds of rotten garbage. Burned when fires broke out from the pathetic makeshift stoves they used to cook their food in the shanties. Cooking food there. Rescue people couldn't even get the bodies out right away because of the stench."

  Lisa waited.

  "My family owns that dump, Lisa. Just like they own most of that Manila suburb."

  "Danilo, you—"

  "Come out of your bog once in a while and see what's going on with the planet. Which we're not going to have indefinitely unless somebody gets through to the people exploiting it for profit."

  He was right, she knew he was right. And yet all she could think was, He talks like a propaganda leaflet. Was Danilo still in there somewhere, a real person?

  "See you," Danilo said, picking up his knapsack. "Tell Carlo I said good-bye."

  · · · · ·

  Lisa was the first one in at Kenton the next day, a miracle. She couldn't sleep, and when she saw Mrs. Belling's light go on at 4:00 A.M., she took a chance and asked her if she could take Carlo this early. An emergency at work, Lisa babbled, they'd just phoned, she hated to ask, wouldn't let it happen again.…

  Mrs. Belling, blinking in either sleep or surprise, agreed. Lisa carried the unconscious Carlo next door. In Mrs. Belling's shabby, comfortable kitchen she noted on the counter a jar of peanut butter, plastic food containers, a receipt for dry cleaning. Genetically modified foodstuffs, persistent organic pollutants, environmental toxins. That's what Danilo would have said.

  Screw Danilo.

  The lab was cool and sweet-smelling, a window open to the moist night air. Lisa shrugged off her irritation at once again being ribbed by the guard. She pulled out her notes on analyses of snaker fecal matter.

  Thrashing sounded from the snaker cage.

  A snaker sat in a shallow pool of water smack up against the mesh wall. It ignored Lisa as she approached. Again it thrashed with the back half of its long body. Something was emerging. The snaker was giving birth.

  Unable to believe her luck, Lisa grabbed a camcorder. She put it right against the mesh, hoping the fine carbon-filament netting wouldn't interfere too much with the picture. The snaker paid no attention. It was totally absorbed in the excruciating pushing process of mammalian birth, supplemented by a snake-like thrashing.

  Finally, something emerged. Lisa gasped and almost dropped the camera.

  Not possible.

  A brief rest, and the snaker resumed pushing. Lisa could barely hold the camera steady. The offspring looked nothing like the parent, a phenomenon associated with reptiles and amphibians and insects. Tadpoles, larvae. Egg layers. But the snaker was a warm-blooded pseudo-mammal, and its offspring was …

  Its offspring looked orders more complex than the parent. It had long, far more developed legs, with knee joints and toes. Toes. It had a shorter body. It had … not possible.

  It had a prehensile tail.

  This didn't happen. Offspring were not more evolutionarily advanced than their parents, not likethis. This looked like an entirely different animal. No, that wasn't true, either. It looked like a plausible development from this animal but several million years up the evolutionary ladder.

  Not possible.

  But there it was, a second one, emerging from the snaker. Who then gave a last enormous thrash, curled up, and went to sleep. Apparently completely certain that her two offspring could fend for themselves.

  Which they could. They leaned over and both gently bit their mother on the head. A few minutes later, they began to eat her.

  · · · · ·

  "I have a conjecture," Paul said.

  It came after a long silence. The few scientists who had arrived by 5:30 A.M. looked at Lisa's video, gasped in disbelief, looked again, stampeded to the mesh cage, where there was nothing to see. The infant snakers…no, you couldn't call them that, they were clearly something else besides snakers…had disappeared into the cage's lush interior. For the first time, Lisa regretted the large, ecologically correct environments lab animals got at Kenton.

  Paul didn't respect the philosophy behind this, not this time. He removed the top and beat the swamp reeds and fished under the lily pads and pond scum until one of the offspring was found. Unceremoniously he hoisted it with a net into a small bench cage, and everyone had gasped a second time.

  "I have a conjecture," Paul repeated. Lisa recognized the reluctance of a scientist to make a fool of himself, coupled with the honesty that was going to let him do so. "I think they were genetically engineered to do this. The entire genome—maybe several genomes—exists in the one-celled organisms released from the spacecraft. In fact, one-celled organisms may have been the only things released from the spacecraft. They had the best chance of survival in many conditions, and could subsist on the widest array of chemicals available.

  "The genome is in so many pieces in the alien cells because it's so huge. It contains multiple possible evolutionary paths for future organisms, depending on what environment the craft finds itself in. And that same environment triggers which genes kick in for each subsequent generation, advancing as fast up the evolutionary ladder as biology and environment permit."

  Immediately objections broke out, some of them vehement. "I didn't say it was a polished theory," Paul finally said angrily. Lisa had never heard him get angry. "I said it was a conjecture!"

  More objections, more arguments. Someone else came in—Dr. Clark—and someone else explained to her what had happened. The birth film was run again. People ran back and forth from the bench cage containing the new creature, the totally impossible creature, which had gone to sleep. The NASA rep arrived, looking stunned as he listened to the scientists.

  Amid the din, Lisa sat quietly. I believe Paul, she thought. Not because the theory was tight, or well-supported, or inevitably logical. She believed it, she realized, because if she were going to send terrestrial life to the stars, that's the way she would do it. The way that respected the unknown ecologies so abruptly intruded upon. The way with the largest possibility of success.

  · · · · ·

  The next weeks filled with frenzied work. Lab staff and visiting scientists had divided into camps. Only the tremendous excitement of the discovery itself kept the arguing from deteriorating into turf wars. And sometimes, Lisa observed wryly, not even that. Kenton's previous major concern, controlling the invasion of loosestrife into the wetlands, was forgotten. The purple Eurasian weed begat and burgeoned.

  Lisa stayed at the lab all she could. Unlike some people, she couldn't physically move in. Paul and Stephanie spent most nights in their offices. One of the CDC scientists, Lisa suspected, was sleeping on the very hard sofa in the break room. She hers
elf drew more money from her small, precious hoard to pay Mrs. Belling as much overtime as Lisa could conscionably allow herself away from Carlo. The child grew cranky with missing her, and Mrs. Belling grew stiffer as Lisa picked him up later and later, but she couldn't stay away from Kenton.

  They found more of the new creatures—"post-snakers"—in the Preserve.

  The geneticists isolated a few specific sections of the alien genetic material responsible for producing a few specific proteins. A tentative but definite beginning on mapping the genome.

  Technicians installed heavy encryption programs for all data flowing between Kenton, Washington, the CDC, and the university research centers involved in the discovery.

  A post-snaker was painstakingly dissected. Internal organs and systems were logical but startlingly advanced versions of its parents'.

  Paul and Hal got into a public fight—it was not an argument, it was a fight—on the missing links between the worms they'd found in the Preserve and the snakers. From worm to pseudo-mammal with nothing in between? Impossible, said Hal. Irresponsible sensationalism.

  The missing forms disappeared because they were no longer needed, Paul said. Just as the eaten maternal snakers were no longer needed after the snaker population had reached a certain level. They'd accomplished their purpose, so they stopped being produced.

  Evolution doesn't work that way, Hal retorted. Species don't disappear because they're not "needed"—they disappear because their habitat changes, and not always then. We still have primitive, clumsy birds like hoatzins along with superb flyers like gulls and hawks. We still have alternate-branch primates even though man exists. We still have crocodiles, for God's sake, that were around in the Triassic. National Enquirerscience is no science at all.

  This isn't Terran evolution, Paul replied coldly, and the two men parted in anger.