The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  * * *

  Norma gave up smoking when she found out she was pregnant with Lenny. Everybody congratulated her and said how important it was not to smoke when you were pregnant. It was bad for the baby. Norma understood and promised herself she'd start the day he was born. But, heck. He looked so small and wrinkly in the preemie ward of the Albuquerque Hospital and was trying so hard to just to breathe and stay alive, she decided she'd give him a couple of years. Get him past nursing and stuff. Once he was strong enough, she'd go back. Tomas didn't approve of smoke inhalation. Nothing that didn't go up the nose was a good idea. He was ecstatic that she stayed off tobacco. Or, he would have been if he hadn't been shot down the week before she found out she was pregnant. He was fronting for the Turban-Kings but had developed a deep affection for their brand of cocaine. Tomas had been pretty but Norma had always known he wouldn't last long.

  With Tomas gone, Norma had to get a job. She sighed and hit the streets. She would have had to find one anyway. After six weeks of fruitless searching, Norma landed a job as a clerk for Frost Fabrications near the University.

  She contented her lapsed habit by lingering in the cigarette fumes from the Indians selling turquoise brooches and rings at the corner of Old Town. She could often be found standing in front of the cantina down the street next to an old Mexican smoking a gloriously obnoxious cigar. With the occasional secondhand smoke from disgruntled office workers grabbing a quick one on the loading dock, Norma managed to keep herself on the low end of satisfied. Just a couple of years, she told herself. Then, she'd light up and everything would be fine.

  But when Lenny turned five, a whole series of commercials about how secondhand smoke caused learning disabilities were broadcast. Norma was pretty sure that once she started back again she wouldn't be able to keep from smoking in the house. She grimly decided she could stick it out until Lenny got into the habit of studying.

  Norma was fifty when Lenny turned ten: the danger years, said the magazines. When anybody could suddenly drop dead of a heart attack. Cigarettes caused heart attacks, didn't they? She didn't want Lenny to have to bury her, did she? Not a ten-year-old boy.

  By the time Lenny was thirty and had been on the Albuquerque police force for a while, Norma figured she'd done enough. If she died, she died. She was seventy now. It was now Lenny's duty to bury her. He'd do it eventually one way or the other. Her first puff was everything she'd remembered: the burn down the throat, the tingling all the way to her fingers and toes, the quick, sharp rush up into her face and behind her eyes. She felt brighter and happier than she'd been in years. It was like the first time she lit up, way back when she was thirteen and living in Portales. And, just like when she was thirteen, after a minute or two she turned green and threw up. Oh, well, she thought philosophically. You pay for your pleasures.

  In no time at all she was back up to a couple of packs a day.

  Lenny, of course, was appalled.

  He came over to her house and tried to talk over the music. There was always music in Norma's house: blues, country, classical, rock. If she could sing it, she had it on. Not that Norma could sing. Her voice had been described as having all the subtlety and color of a downtown bus at rush hour. Norma didn't care.

  First Lenny tried desperately to talk her out of it. “Come on, Ma,” he pleaded. “It's been years. You're over seventy. Don't throw it away now.” Then, he got belligerent and refused to let her come over to his house to see her grandkids. That lasted a week. They lived down the street in the same sort of four-room bungalow she did. If she couldn't go over there, they came over here. Once pleading and threats didn't work, he tried covert operations. He broke into her house after duty and threw away every pack of cigarettes he could find.

  This last trick might have worked. Cigarettes were eleven dollars a pack now and she was still at the same job after thirty years. What she needed was a way to smoke cigarettes without having them in the house. Or, better, cigarettes cheap enough she could afford to lose a few packs a month as the cost of doing business.

  The Internet, she discovered, holds the answer to all things.

  Reginald Cigarettes, a tiny company based in the Sandwich Islands (which used to be Hawaii until they seceded) sold cigarettes by direct mail. This had many advantages. First, she gave them the address of a packing services company nearby—that way Lenny couldn't take them out of the mailbox before she could get to them. Second, they were cheaper since they were being sold from another country (no taxes!). Third, they were also artificial. When she was finally found out and cornered, she could use the site's propaganda about how much better they were than real cigarettes.

  Not that Norma cared. She figured she could empty a few packs of Reginalds and stuff them with Marlboros.

  But when the Reginalds came, she found she liked them. True, they didn't taste quite as good as Marlboros. But the tingle was better and, as had to happen eventually, when Lenny found out about them and she showed him the pack—

  "See?” she cried shrilly. “See? They're better for me."

  "Ma,” protested Lenny. He looked at the pack. “They still got tobacco in them."

  "But look at the numbers on the side. They're way better than Marlboros."

  Lenny sighed. By that, Norma knew she had won.

  She had her cigarettes. All was right with the world.

  Five years later, she got up with her usual morning cough. She rolled out of bed and padded downstairs to put on the coffee. While she waited for it to perk, she put on the morning classics station. It was opera week, which she loved, and they were working their way through some ancient recordings of Enrico Caruso—The Great Caruso, as her mother had said when she was a girl. Still coughing, Norma hacked around the house for a while. Well, she certainly coughed like the Great Caruso. While she waited for the really deep one that signaled the start of the day, she thought about renting that old film about him, the one starring Mario Lanza.

  Something stuck in her throat. Something that wouldn't come out. Panicky, she went to the sink to get a drink of water, but the spasms in her chest nearly knocked her off her feet. It was all she could to hold on and stand upright. Whatever it was, it clawed its way up her throat and she spat it out into the sink, bloody and covered in mucous.

  It was perhaps a quarter of an inch across and twice that in length. She reached down and picked it up. It was spongy and felt surprisingly firm. Norma rinsed it off.

  She guessed this was it, then. Just like Lenny had always told her. Lung cancer. Not that she hadn't expected it eventually. Only not so soon. She sighed. You pay for your pleasures.

  The radio dimmed a little and Norma reached over and turned it up, still looking at the bit of diseased flesh that had come from inside her.

  It vibrated in her hand.

  Curious, Norma put her ear to it. Faintly, but unmistakably, it was singing along with Caruso on the radio.

  Doing a pretty good job, too.

  The doctor had no explanation. They sat in his office as he went over the test results. Norma was dying for a smoke.

  Hm. She thought to herself. That was pretty good. She giggled.

  Dr. Peabody looked up at her and frowned so Norma stifled herself. This was clearly no laughing matter. She'd laugh later. When she had a cigarette.

  "Mrs. Carstairs—"

  "Miss."

  "Beg pardon?"

  "I've never married. Miss will do."

  Dr. Peabody nodded. “The truth is I'm not sure what's in your ... lungs. Something's in there. Something's up your trachea and into your larynx. We'll have to run more tests. Do you smoke?"

  "Sure do. Two packs a day of Reginalds."

  "I see."

  Norma could see the effort Dr. Peabody made not to look disgusted.

  "Tests.” She picked up her purse. “You might want this, then.” Norma brought an envelope out of her purse and put it on his desk. It looked a little dry so Norma got up and wet a paper towel and moistened the little thing. Even with t
he water, it was still dead.

  "This is...?"

  She put it in his hand and shrugged. “I have no idea. But that's what I got inside me. Coughed it up yesterday. Thought it might help."

  Dr. Peabody didn't answer. He was staring at the fleshy bit in his hand.

  Dr. Peabody asked her to come back the following week. When she did, he wasn't alone. There were at least three other doctors there for moral support. The medical consensus was, apparently, that she had lung cancer of a rare if not unknown type. She should be admitted at once. In his office, Norma stared at the radiographs as if she were interested. Then she smiled at them sweetly and asked if she could go to the bathroom. They nodded, all together as if they were attached to the same string.

  Outside the office, Norma walked down the hall and out through the parking garage. She went home and sat at her kitchen table, drinking a glass of wine and smoking one of her Reginalds.

  Dr. Peabody called Lenny, of course. Before the afternoon was finished, Lenny was pounding on her door.

  "What do you want, Lenny?” she asked from the other side.

  "For Christ's sake, Mom. You know what I want. I want you to go to the doctor."

  She sipped her wine—the bottle was mostly gone now, dissolved into Norma's healthy glow.

  "I don't want to."

  "What kind of answer is that? You want to die? Peabody said you got a good chance if you get some treatment now."

  She shook her head. Remembered Lenny couldn't see her and said, “No."

  "Are you drunk, Mom?"

  "No!” she said defensively.

  "You shouldn't be drinking at your age."

  "I had a deprived childhood and now I'm making up for it."

  "Come on, Mom! You got to go."

  Norma leaned her head against the door. “No,” she said clearly and quietly. “No, I don't."

  "Mom!"

  "This is my choice,” she shouted back at him. “It's my lungs. They were my cigarettes. If I can't choose whether or not to die, what choice do I have?"

  "Look. If you want to go all Christian Scientist on me, let's call up the Mother Church and ask them. They'll tell you to get your ass up to the hospital."

  "That's no way to talk to your Mother."

  "This is no kind of conversation to have through a door."

  "Why not?” She knocked on the wood. “It's a perfectly good door."

  He was silent for a minute. She could almost see him rubbing his forehead. “Let me come in."

  She shook her head again. “I'll talk to you tomorrow."

  Norma left him shouting at the door and walked unsteadily upstairs to bed. You should always have a good, hard bed, Norma reasoned. That way when you get too drunk to stand, you won't roll off.

  She couldn't keep Lenny out of her house forever. She didn't even want to. Norma was proud of her son, shy and thin when he was young, now so strong and tall. She always did have a thing for a man in a uniform. That was what had attracted her to Tomas in the first place. The Turban-Kings had uniforms of a sort.

  Lenny wanted a good, reasoned argument why she wouldn't go in for treatment. Norma didn't have one. Just a strong feeling that this was the body she came in with; it ought to be the body she went out with.

  But he was wearing her down.

  A week after she'd left Dr. Peabody, she went to the 7-11 for her regular rations of bread and ice cream. She came home to see a young man sitting on her stoop, a briefcase next to him.

  He stood up as she came near. He was odd looking—too thin, for one. His obviously expensive suit that had been cleverly cut to hide it but still, like light through a window, his thinness shone through. His cheekbones were apparent and were it not for the fullness of his lips and his large eyes, he might have looked gaunt. As it was, he had a haunted, shadowed look, like a monk who regretted his vow.

  He stepped forward.

  "Miss Carstairs?” he asked, holding out his hand.

  "Yes,” she said warily, stepping back.

  "I'm Ben Cori.” He dropped his hand to his side. “I'm Reginald Cigarettes."

  She looked at him for a moment. Things clicked together in her mind. “This has something to do with my lung cancer."

  He smiled at her. “It does."

  "What's special about lung cancer if you're a smoker?"

  "Can we talk inside?"

  Norma shrugged. “Can't hurt me, I suppose."

  Ben's hands were long and delicate and his wrists seemed lost in the sleeves of his jacket. Now that he was sitting at her table, Norma had a sudden respect for Ben's tailor. The suit fooled the eye so that he merely appeared to be thin. Ben was a bundle of sticks in a sack.

  "So, are you a lawyer?"

  Ben put down his coffee. “No. Just the engineer. Also, CEO, COO and CFO. President and Board of Directors. Salesman and website designer. I had to hire a lawyer."

  She sat up. “I don't get it."

  Ben leaned back in his chair. The chair didn't so much as creak under his weight. “I designed the tobacco product. It's made in a small factory down in Cuba. Then, the factory ships the resulting product to a cigarette packing company in North Carolina. From there, the packs go to a shipping company in New Jersey. The website is hosted by a company in South Africa and sends the orders to New Jersey. The U.S. Mail delivers it to you. Reginald is incorporated in Hawaii. The only part of Reginald that really exists is an office in my home in Saint Louis.” Ben sipped his coffee.

  "I see,” said Norma. “You design cigarettes?"

  "No,” Ben said carefully. “Tobacco product. More precisely, I design small machines whose nature it is to take tobacco, tear it apart and rebuild it with reduced carcinogens and toxins. Dried tobacco leaves from all over the South come into the factory and something that resembles dried tobacco leaves come out of the factory. Tobacco product."

  "What's that got to do with me?"

  Ben opened his briefcase and brought out two radiographs. He carefully placed the first one in front of Norma. “That's your lungs."

  "I've seen it. How did you get this?"

  "I've been working the net for a while. You can find anything if you have enough time and money.” He placed a second radiograph next to the first. “That's a normal case of lung cancer."

  Next to each other, the differences were obvious. The normal lung cancer—if such a disease could actually be called normal—looked splotchy and irregular. Her lungs had something in them made up of lines and polygons.

  Ben pointed to an irregular rectangle. “I'm pretty sure that's an amplifier. Next to it is a low pass filter. A pretty sophisticated filter from what I can tell. These circles are sensors of some kind."

  Looking at the picture made her chest hurt. “What the hell have I got inside of me?"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you know how it happened?"

  Ben nodded. “No. Whatever happened is impossible."

  "Impossible?” She pointed at the pictures. “It's right there in front of me."

  Ben nodded, smiled at her. “That it is."

  "Pretty big stretch to be impossible."

  "I know that."

  Norma stared at him for a minute. “Okay. Explain it to me."

  Ben pulled some more papers from his briefcase. “In my business, mites, tiny machines about the size of a cell, do all the work. We got a bad shipment of mites. Somehow they went ahead and did all the work the normal mites did and left some clusters in the tobacco that got through all of the quality control mechanisms, the heating, the cutting and packaging, the irradiation, until the finished cigarettes reached you. Then, they suddenly started working inside of you, not in some random destructive manner but in a controlled construction. I can guess what might have happened but, in point of fact, it's impossible."

  Norma spoke slowly. “I have tiny machines in my lungs? Machines you built?"

  "Close. I don't know what they're encoded to do. Nobody knows."

  "How many ... clusters got out?"


  "From what I can tell, only one."

  "How do you know that?"

  Ben spread his hands. “So far, you, and only you, have shown anything.” He pointed at Norma.

  "Pretty long odds."

  "Not as long as some."

  "So what are your mites doing to me?"

  "I'm not sure. My mites were contaminated with other mites with different natures. Mites are built to cooperate so I'm not sure what they are doing."

  "What were they supposed to do?” asked Norma.

  "All different things. One set built musical instruments,” said Ben, leaning on the table. “Oboes. Flutes. Tubas. Or, since they came from India, sitars or something. Some were designed to implement a communication system designed in Germany. There were banana preparation mites ordered from Malaysia. Others."

  Norma remembered the singing of the fleshy bit.

  "I have tiny machines making music in my lungs. Your tiny machines."

  "As I said, they're not my mites. My mites died properly."

  "Are you sure you're not a lawyer?"

  "If I was a lawyer, I wouldn't be here."

  "Why are you here?"

  He stared at his hands and didn't speak for a few seconds. “To be present at the creation."

  "What does that mean?"

  Ben leaned toward her. “By any stretch of the imagination, the mites should have just consumed you, made you into some intermediate random product. My mites, acting out of my programming, would try to make you into tobacco product. Something that, to you, would be invariably gruesome and fatal. But that's not what the mites inside of you are doing. They're building something inside you. Something integrated—which I can see from the pictures, as well as noticing that you're still walking around."

  "Walking right down to the clinic so Dr. Peabody can cut them out."

  "That's why I'm here. To try to persuade you not to."

  Norma stared at him. “Are you nuts?"

  Ben smiled. “Maybe. Mites and humans are made up of much the same things: carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, some metals. If we come from the dust of the earth, then so do they. But we created them. Now, something unexpected and impossible has happened. A miracle."