Year’s Best SF 15

by David G. Hartwell; Kathryn Cramer

  The man to her right watched every move she made. His eyes were hungry for her in a way that—“You’re the clone, aren’t you?”

  She had interrupted the one on her left. The two men shared a look before nodding, almost in unison. The clone said, “How did you know?”

  “The way you look at me…” Elise faltered. He looked at her like he was trying to memorize her.

  The clone grimaced and blushed. “Sorry. It’s just that, I haven’t seen you in months. I miss you.”

  Myung, the original Myung picked at his cuticle. “I told you she could tell the difference.”

  “But you were wrong about the reason.” The clone smirked. “She could tell because you don’t love her as much as you used to.”

  “That is a lie.” Myung tensed visibly, his fist squeezing without his seeming awareness.

  “Is it?” The clone shook his head. “Everything else is the same, why would my emotional memories be any different? The only difference between us is that absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “Stop.” Elise stood abruptly, her chair squeaking against the floor. She pressed her hand against her forehead.

  Both of them looked abashed. In stereo they said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Her thoughts were fragmenting. The reflection in the window moved, a child trying to get her attention. Elise shook her head. “You brought me down to see if I could tell the difference. Now you know that I can.”

  Her Myung said, “But not when we were separate.”

  “No.” Elise fingered the paper on the table. “Which of you came in first?”

  “I did,” the clone said.

  They sat in silence, Elise tried to fold the paper into another square. “I think I’m ready to go home.”

  “Of course.” Her Myung stood, chair scraping across the floor.

  The clone leaned forward on his. “Won’t you stay for lunch?” His voice cracked as he asked, as if the request were more urgent than just a meal.

  Elise raised her eyes from the paper to his face. The way his brows curled in the middle. The way his eyes widened to show a rim of white under the dark iris. The way his soft lips hung a little open. All of the minute elements that made the whole of her husband pulled, begging her to stay.

  And the other Myung, the original, stood next to him, legs spread wide with a slight tension in his arms as if ready to protect her.

  No. Not to protect her, but to protect his right to have her.

  “Yes.” She put her hand on the clone’s, startled by the familiarity of the contact. “Yes, of course I’ll stay.”

  The smell of sautéing onions wafted in from the kitchen. Myung had offered to cook breakfast before going to work, his usual ploy when he felt like he needed to make up for something. Clearly, he had no idea that breakfast was like a confession that the clone was right; Myung did not love her as much as he used to.

  That wasn’t quite true. Myung loved her the same as before—what had changed was that now there was a version of him that missed her all the time. Elise stretched under the covers and the cotton caressed her body like a lover. “I am the forbidden fruit.”

  Myung’s cell phone rang on the bedside table where he’d left it. Rolling over, she picked it up. Caller ID showed the office. Elise got out of bed, not bothering with a bathrobe, and carried it toward the kitchen.

  Myung met her partway down the hall. He took it, mouthing his thanks even as he answered.

  Elise lifted the hair away from her neck, knowing that it would raise her breasts and make her torso look longer, daring him to choose work over her. His eyes followed the movement. Lips parting, he reached for her. Stopped.

  His face shut down. Myung put one hand on the wall and squeezed his eyes closed. Dropping her arms, Elise shivered at the sudden tension in his frame.

  “No. No, I heard you.” He leaned against the wall and slid down to sit on the floor. “Did he leave a note or…” His eyes were still closed but he covered them with his hand.

  Elise crouched next to him. Her heart sped up, even though there was nothing she could do.

  “No. I haven’t checked email yet.” Myung nodded as if the person on the other end of the line could see him. “I’ll do that. Thanks for handling this. Tell Larry not to do anything until I get in.”

  He hung up. Cautious, Elise touched his thigh. “Myung?”

  Her husband slammed his head against the wall. Elise jumped at the horrible thud. Cursing, Myung threw his phone down the hall and it ricocheted off the floor. Tears glittering on his cheeks, he hurtled to his feet. “He killed himself. Sent us all a video. By email.”

  Myung was halfway to the office before Elise could pull herself together enough to stand.

  On the monitor, the image of Myung leans close to the screen.

  “This is the clone of Dr. Myung Han. I am about to kill myself by lethal injection. You will find my body in the morgue.

  “Before I do, I want to make it perfectly clear why I am taking this step. With the animals we tested, the next step in this process is dissection. We must do this to be certain that the cloning has no unexpected side effects and to fully understand the mechanism by which the consciousness transfer works. My original knows this. I know this. He will not do it because the experiment has been a 100 percent success. We are identical, more so than any set of twins. He sees terminating the experiment as murder.

  “Make no mistake, he is correct.

  “Which is why I am terminating the experiment myself. I am not depressed. I am not irrational. I am a scientist. The experiment needs to continue.”

  He stands and walks out of the room.

  Elise stood behind Myung’s chair, scarcely breathing. He reached to restart the video.

  “Don’t.” She stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. It was bad enough seeing it once, but to dwell on it courted madness.

  Under her hand, he trembled. “I didn’t want this.”

  “I know.”

  He slammed his fist against the table. “If it had been me, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  “But—” Elise stopped herself, not wanting to blame him.

  “What?”

  She saw again the clone begging her to stay for lunch. “He’s trapped in the lab all the time. Were you ever going to let him out?”

  Myung slumped forward, cradling his head in his hands. After a moment, his shoulders shook with sobs. Elise knelt by the side of the chair and pulled him into her arms. The rough stubble on his cheek scraped her bare skin. She pressed closer to the solidity of him, as if she could pull him inside to safety. An ache tore at her center as she rocked him gently and murmured nothings in his ear.

  She had known the clone for a matter of hours, or for as long as she had known Myung depending on how you counted it. The two men had only a few months of differing experience. The bulk of the man who had died belonged to her husband. But the differences mattered. Even something as simple as a number. “Thirty-six,” she whispered. In that number lies the essence.

  As Myung went to the elevator, Elise stood in the door to watch him. She could not quite shake the feeling that he wouldn’t come home. That something about the place would compel him to repeat his clone’s actions. When the doors slid shut, she went inside the apartment.

  In the kitchen, Elise pulled out the matte black knives that the clone had sent her and laid them out on the counter. He had known her. He had loved her. She picked up the paring knife, twisting it in her hands. It wasn’t right to mourn him when her husband was alive.

  “Elise?” Myung stood in the doorway.

  “Forget som—” Adrenaline threaded its way through all her joints, pulling them tight. He wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans; his face was smooth and freshly shorn. Myung had not had time to shave. This man was leaner than her husband. “I thought…How many clones are there?”

  He picked at the cuticle on his thumb. “Myung made just one.”

  “You didn’t answer
my question.” Elise gripped the paring knife harder.

  “I’m a clone of the one you met. Unrecorded. I started the process as soon as the building was empty last night.” He swept his hand through his hair and it fell over his eyes. “We have about ten minutes of different memories, so for practical purposes, I’m the same man.”

  “Except he’s dead.”

  “No. Ten minutes of memory and that physical body are all that is dead. “Myung—she could not think of him any other way—crossed his arms over his chest. “It was the only way to escape the lab. I had a transponder and a tattoo that I couldn’t get rid of. So I printed this body from an older copy. Imprinted it with my consciousness and then…that’s where our memories deviate. As soon as we were sure it was a clean print, he went to the morgue and I left.”

  She should call the office. But she knew what they would do to him. Insert a transponder and lock him up. “Why are you here?”

  His eyes widened as if he were startled that she would ask. “Elise—the place where the original and I differ, the thing he cannot understand is what it is like to live in the lab, knowing that I’d never be with you. He doesn’t know what it’s like to lose you and, believe me, knowing that, I hold you more precious than I ever did before. I love you.”

  The raw need in his eyes almost overwhelmed her. The room tilted and Elise pressed her hand against the counter to steady herself. “I can’t go with you.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you to.”

  “But you were going to ask me for something.”

  He nodded and inhaled slowly. “Would you clone yourself? So I’m not alone.”

  Elise set the knife on the counter, in a careful row with the others. She walked across the room to stand in front of Myung. The vein in his neck throbbed faster, pulsing with life. “Is it any different? Being a clone?”

  “There’s a certain freedom from knowing that I’m not unique. But otherwise, no. I feel like I am Myung Han.”

  Putting one hand on his chest, the heat of his body coursed up her arm. “I need to know something.”

  He raised his eyebrows in question.

  “After the accident…” She did not want to know but she had to ask. “Am I a clone?”

  “Elise, there’s only one of you.”

  “That’s not what I asked. The original won’t tell me, but you—you have to. Am I a clone?”

  “No. You are the original and only Elise.” He brushed the hair away from her face. “Everything else is head trauma. You’ll get better.”

  She had braced herself for him to say that she was a clone. That she had died in the crash and the reason she couldn’t think straight was because the process had been too new, that she was a failed experiment.

  Elise leaned forward to kiss him. His lips melted against hers, breath straining as if he were running a race. She let her bathrobe fall open and pressed against him. Myung slipped his trembling hands inside the robe, caressing her with the fervor of their first date.

  Parting from him burned, but Elise stepped back, leaving him swaying in front of her. She closed the robe. “When I’m well, if I can. I will.”

  Myung closed his eyes, forehead screwing up like a child about to cry. “Thank you.” He wiped his hand across his face and straightened.

  “They’ll notice that another body was printed and come after you.”

  “Not right away.” He picked at his cuticle. “I took my original’s passport from the office. Knowing me, it’ll take him awhile to realize it’s missing.”

  She felt herself splitting in two. The part of her that would stay here and see her husband tonight, and the part of her that already missed him. At some point, the two halves would separate. “Where are you going?”

  He tucked a loose hair behind her ear. “Yellowstone.”

  Elise caught his hand and kissed it. “I will see you there.”

  Tempest 43

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  Stephen Baxter (www.stephen-baxter.com) is a prolific hard science fiction writer who lives in Morpeth, England. He is the author of a number of multibook series, and novels, sometimes in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. He has published more than twenty SF novels to date, starting with Raft (1989). He has remained on the cutting edge of British hard SF. He is also among SF’s most reliably good short-fiction writers, though he considers himself more a novelist than a short story writer. His novel Ark, the second book in the Flood series, came out in 2009. Most years he gives us several fine stories to choose from for this volume, and this year is no exception, with at least four candidates.

  “Tempest 43” was published in We Think, Therefore We Are, edited by Peter Crowther. It is the second story in this volume from that book about future artificial intelligences. It is a post-singularity story set centuries hence, in which an archaic space station run by AIs always prevents hurricanes. But a storm has been allowed to happen.

  From the air, Freddie caught the first glimpse of the rocket that was to carry her into space.

  The plane descended toward a strip of flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, despite crumbling concrete levees that lined the coast, a defense against the risen sea. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old Europe an launch center, on the eastern coast of South America. It was only a few hundred kilometers north of the mouth of the Amazon. Inland, the hills were entirely covered by swaying soya plants.

  Freddie couldn’t believe she was here. She’d only rarely traveled far from Winchester, the English city where she’d been born, and Southampton where she worked. She’d certainly never flown before, hardly anybody traveled far let alone flew, and she had a deep phobic sense of the liters of noxious gases spewing from the plane’s exhaust.

  But now the plane banked, and there was her spaceship, a white delta-wing standing on its tail, and she gasped.

  Antony Allen, the UN bureaucrat who had recruited her for this unlikely assignment, misread her mood. Fifty-something, sleek, corporate, with a blunt Chicago accent, he smiled reassuringly. “Don’t be afraid.”

  The plane came down on a short smart-concrete runway. Allen hurried Freddie onto a little electric bus that drove her straight to a docking port at the base of the shuttle, without her touching the South American ground, or even smelling the air.

  And before she knew it she was lying on her back in an immense foam-filled couch, held in place by thick padded bars. The ship smelled of electricity and, oddly, of new carpets. A screen before her showed a view down the shuttle’s elegant flank, to the scarred ground.

  Allen strapped in beside her. “Do you prefer a count-down? It’s optional. We’re actually the only humans aboard. Whether you find that reassuring or not depends on your faith in technology, I suppose.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s so—archaic! I feel I’m locked into an AxysCorp instrumentality.”

  He didn’t seem to appreciate the sharpness of her tone. Perhaps he’d prefer to be able to patronize her. “This shuttle’s got nothing to do with AxysCorp, which was broken up long ago.”

  “I know that.”

  “And you’re a historian of the Heroic Solution. That’s why you’re here, as I couldn’t find anybody better qualified to help resolve this problem on Tempest 43. So look on it as field work. Brace yourself.”

  With barely a murmur the shuttle leaped into the air. No amount of padding could save Freddie from the punch of acceleration.

  The ground plummeted away.

  Tempest 43 was a weather control station, one of a network of fifty such facilities thrown into space in the 2070s, nearly a century ago, by the now maligned AxysCorp geoengineering conglomerate. An island in the sky over the Atlantic, Tempest 43 was locked into a twenty-four-hour orbit, to which Freddie would now have to ascend.

  But before proceeding up to geosynchronous, the shuttle went through one low-orbit checkout. For Freddie, snug in her theme-park couch, it was ninety magical minutes, as the cabin walls turned virtual-transparent, and the
Earth spread out below her, bright as a tropical sky.

  The ship sailed over the Atlantic toward western Europe. She wished she knew enough geography to recognize how much of the coastline had been bitten into by the risen sea. At the Spanish coast Freddie saw vapor feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Mediterranean was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. On the far side of the Gibraltar Strait, the Sahara bloomed green, covered in straight-edged plantations fed by desalinated ocean water. And as she headed into evening she saw the great old cities of southern Europe, the conurbations’ brown stain pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed.

  Asia was plunged in night, the land darker than she had expected, with little waste light seeping out of the great metropolitan centers of southern Russia and China and India. The Pacific was vast and darkened too, and it was a relief to reach morning and to pass over North America. She was disappointed that they traveled too far south to have a chance of glimpsing the camels and elephants and lions of Pleistocene Park, the continent’s reconstructed megafauna.

  And as they reached the east coast they sailed almost directly over the Florida archipelago. Freddie was clearly able to see the wound cut by the hurricane. She called for a magnification. There was Cape Canaveral, venerable launch gantries scattered like matchsticks, the immense Vehicle Assembly Building broken open like a plundered bird’s egg. The hurricane was the reason for her journey—and, incidentally, the ruin of Canaveral was the reason she had had to launch from Guiana. Hurricanes weren’t supposed to happen, not in 2162. Stations like Tempest 43 had put a stop to all that a century ago. Something had gone wrong.