The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  I sat down at my mother’s table, waiting for quiet. The table was smooth and worn, heavy and well crafted. My father had made it for her just before he died. I remembered hanging around underfoot when he built it. He didn’t mind. Now I sat leaning on it, missing him. I could have talked to him. He had done it three times in his long life. Three clutches of eggs, three times being opened and sewed up. How had he done it? How did anyone do it?

  I got up, took the rifle from its hiding place, and sat down again with it. It needed cleaning, oiling.

  All I did was load it.

  “Gan?”

  She made a lot of little clicking sounds when she walked on bare floor, each limb clicking in succession as it touched down. Waves of little clicks.

  She came to the table, raised the front half of her body above it, and surged onto it. Sometimes she moved so smoothly she seemed to flow like water itself. She coiled herself into a small hill in the middle of the table and looked at me.

  “That was bad,” she said softly. “You should not have seen it. It need not be that way.”

  “I know.”

  “T’Khotgif—Ch’Khotgif now—she will die of her disease. She will not live to raise her children. But her sister will provide for them, and for Bram Lomas.” Sterile sister. One fertile female in every lot. One to keep the family going. That sister owed Lomas more than she could ever repay.

  “He’ll live then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder if he would do it again.”

  “No one would ask him to do that again.”

  I looked into the yellow eyes, wondering how much I saw and understood there, and how much I only imagined. “No one ever asks us,” I said. “You never asked me.”

  She moved her head slightly. “What’s the matter with your face?”

  “Nothing. Nothing important.” Human eyes probably wouldn’t have noticed the swelling in the darkness. The only light was from one of the moons, shining through a window across the room.

  “Did you use the rifle to shoot the achti?”

  “Yes.”

  “And do you mean to use it to shoot me?”

  I stared at her, outlined in moonlight—coiled, graceful body. “What does Terran blood taste like to you?”

  She said nothing.

  “What are you?” I whispered. “What are we to you?”

  She lay still, rested her head on her topmost coil. “You know me as no other does,” she said softly. “You must decide.”

  “That’s what happened to my face,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It didn’t turn out very well.” I moved the gun slightly, brought the barrel up diagonally under my own chin. “At least it was a decision I made.”

  “As this will be.”

  “Ask me, Gatoi.”

  “For my children’s lives?”

  She would say something like that. She knew how to manipulate people, Terran and Tlic. But not this time.

  “I don’t want to be a host animal,” I said. “Not even yours.”

  It took her a long time to answer. “We use almost no host animals these days,” she said. “You know that.”

  “You use us.”

  “We do. We wait long years for you and teach you and join our families to yours.” She moved restlessly. “You know you aren’t animals to us.”

  I stared at her, saying nothing.

  “The animals we once used began killing most of our eggs after implantation long before your ancestors arrived,” she said softly. “You know these things, Gan. Because your people arrived, we are relearning what it means to be a healthy, thriving people. And your ancestors, fleeing from their homeworld, from their own kind who would have killed or enslaved them—they survived because of us. We saw them as people and gave them the Preserve when they still tried to kill us as worms.”

  At the word worms I jumped. I couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help noticing it.

  “I see,” she said quietly. “Would you really rather die than bear my young, Gan?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Shall I go to Xuan Hoa?”

  “Yes!” Hoa wanted it. Let her have it. She hadn’t had to watch Lomas. She’d be proud….Not terrified.

  T’Gatoi flowed off the table onto the floor, startling me almost too much.

  “I’ll sleep in Hoa’s room tonight,” she said. “And sometime tonight or in the morning, I’ll tell her.”

  This was going too fast. My sister. Hoa had had almost as much to do with raising me as my mother. I was still close to her—not like Qui. She could want T’Gatoi and still love me.

  “Wait! Gatoi!”

  She looked back, then raised nearly half her length off the floor and turned it to face me. “These are adult things, Gan. This is my life, my family!”

  “But she’s…my sister.”

  “I have done what you demanded. I have asked you!”

  “But—”

  “It will be easier for Hoa. She has always expected to carry other lives inside her.”

  Human lives. Human young who would someday drink at her breasts, not at her veins.

  I shook my head. “Don’t do it to her, Gatoi.” I was not Qui. It seemed I could become him, though, with no effort at all. I could make Xuan Hoa my shield. Would it be easier to know that red worms were growing in her flesh instead of mine?

  “Don’t do it to Hoa,” I repeated.

  She stared at me, utterly still.

  I looked away, then back at her. “Do it to me.”

  I lowered the gun from my throat and she leaned forward to take it.

  “No,” I told her.

  “It’s the law,” she said.

  “Leave it for the family. One of them might use it to save my life someday.”

  She grasped the rifle barrel, but I wouldn’t let go. I was pulled into a standing position over her.

  “Leave it here!” I repeated. “If we’re not your animals, if these are adult things, accept the risk. There is risk, Gatoi, in dealing with a partner.”

  It was clearly hard for her to let go of the rifle. A shudder went through her and she made a hissing sound of distress. It occurred to me that she was afraid. She was old enough to have seen what guns could do to people. Now her young and this gun would be together in the same house. She did not know about our other guns. In this dispute, they did not matter.

  “I will implant the first egg tonight,” she said as I put the gun away. “Do you hear, Gan?”

  Why else had I been given a whole egg to eat while the rest of the family was left to share one? Why else had my mother kept looking at me as though I were going away from her, going where she could not follow? Did T’Gatoi imagine I hadn’t known?

  “I hear.”

  “Now!” I let her push me out of the kitchen, then walked ahead of her toward my bedroom. The sudden urgency in her voice sounded real. “You would have done it to Hoa tonight!” I accused.

  “I must do it to someone tonight.”

  I stopped in spite of her urgency and stood in her way. “Don’t you care who?”

  She flowed around me and into my bedroom. I found her waiting on the couch we shared. There was nothing in Hoa’s room that she could have used. She would have done it to Hoa on the floor. The thought of her doing it to Hoa at all disturbed me in a different way now, and I was suddenly angry.

  Yet I undressed and lay down beside her. I knew what to do, what to expect. I had been told all my life. I felt the familiar sting, narcotic, mildly pleasant. Then the blind probing of her ovipositor. The puncture was painless, easy. So easy going in. She undulated slowly against me, her muscles forcing the egg from her body into mine. I held on to a pair of her limbs until I remembered Lomas holding her that way. Then I let go, moved inadvertently, and hurt her. She gave a low cry of pain and I expected to be caged at once within her limbs. When I wasn’t, I held on to her again, feeling oddly ashamed.

  “
I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  She rubbed my shoulders with four of her limbs.

  “Do you care?” I asked. “Do you care that it’s me?”

  She did not answer for some time. Finally, “You were the one making choices tonight, Gan. I made mine long ago.”

  “Would you have gone to Hoa?”

  “Yes. How could I put my children into the care of one who hates them?”

  “It wasn’t…hate.”

  “I know what it was.”

  “I was afraid.”

  Silence.

  “I still am.” I could admit it to her here, now.

  “But you came to me…to save Hoa.”

  “Yes.” I leaned my forehead against her. She was cool velvet, deceptively soft. “And to keep you for myself,” I said. It was so. I didn’t understand it, but it was so.

  She made a soft hum of contentment. “I couldn’t believe I had made such a mistake with you,” she said. “I chose you. I believed you had grown to choose me.”

  “I had, but…”

  “Lomas.”

  “Yes.”

  “I have never known a Terran to see a birth and take it well. Qui has seen one, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Terrans should be protected from seeing.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that—and I doubted that it was possible. “Not protected,” I said. “Shown. Shown when we’re young kids, and shown more than once. Gatoi, no Terran ever sees a birth that goes right. All we see is N’Tlic—pain and terror and maybe death.”

  She looked down at me. “It is a private thing. It has always been a private thing.”

  Her tone kept me from insisting—that and the knowledge that if she changed her mind, I might be the first public example. But I had planted the thought in her mind. Chances were it would grow, and eventually she would experiment.

  “You won’t see it again,” she said. “I don’t want you thinking any more about shooting me.”

  The small amount of fluid that came into me with her egg relaxed me as completely as a sterile egg would have, so that I could remember the rifle in my hands and my feelings of fear and revulsion, anger and despair. I could remember the feelings without reviving them. I could talk about them.

  “I wouldn’t have shot you,” I said. “Not you.” She had been taken from my father’s flesh when he was my age.

  “You could have,” she insisted.

  “Not you.” She stood between us and her own people, protecting, interweaving.

  “Would you have destroyed yourself?”

  I moved carefully, uncomfortably. “I could have done that. I nearly did. That’s Qui’s ‘away.’ I wonder if he knows.”

  “What?”

  I did not answer.

  “You will live now.”

  “Yes.” Take care of her, my mother used to say. Yes.

  “I’m healthy and young,” she said. “I won’t leave you as Lomas was left—alone, N’Tlic. I’ll take care of you.”

  Variation on a Man

  PAT CADIGAN

  Pat Cadigan (1953– ) is a US science fiction writer associated with the cyberpunk movement who has won two Arthur C. Clarke Awards and a Hugo Award. From the beginning, Cadigan focused on near-future, usually urban, and usually Californian settings, often intensified by a sense of windswept, prairie desolation—and used them as highly charged gauntlets that her protagonists do not so much run through as cling to, surviving somehow. Certainly her immersion of her female protagonists in traditionally masculine venues has been useful in subverting some tropes of the subgenre. In addition to writing cyberpunk fiction, Cadigan edited the anthology The Ultimate Cyberpunk in 2002, an attempt to show historical antecedents and also provide examples of contemporary cyberpunk stories.

  Cadigan’s first novel, Mindplayers (1987), blurred the line between objective reality and subjective experience. Her second novel, Synners (1991), expands upon this idea and constituted a breakthrough for the author. Synners translates the cyberpunk aspects of her best short fiction into a comprehensive vision—linguistically acute, simultaneously pell-mell and precise in its detailing—of a world dominated by the intricacies of the human/computer interface. The plot, which is extremely complicated, is an early exploration of the interface disease trope, where computer viruses that pass for artificial intelligence are beginning to cause numerous human deaths and to fragment human identity.

  Cadigan’s work has increasingly seemed to be prescient, in some part through the sense of entrapment it conveys. Like William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels—and unlike Bruce Sterling’s—Synners offers no sense that the technological breakthroughs in the story will in any significant sense transform the overwhelmingly urbanized world, though there is some hint that the system may begin to fail through its own internal imbalances.

  She began publishing short fiction with “Death from Exposure,” in the second issue of Shayol (1978), a much-lauded magazine Cadigan edited throughout its existence (1977–85). She later assembled much of her best shorter work in Patterns (1989), with later stories appearing in Home by the Sea (1992) and Dirty Work: Stories (1993). Most of these collected stories were published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Omni.

  “Variation on a Man” (Omni, 1984) is classic Cadigan cyberpunk and later became part of her novel Mindplayers.

  VARIATION ON A MAN

  Pat Cadigan

  I was convinced (still am) that it was the pearl-necklace episode that caused Nelson Nelson to give me the Gladney case.

  All mindplayers can pretty much count on getting pearl necklaced sooner or later, but it’s a far more vivid experience for pathosfinders than it is for neurosis-peddlers, say, or belljarrers, who don’t spend as much time in direct mind-to-mind contact with their clients as we do.

  It seems the more time you spend working as a disembodied mind, the more intensely you get pearl necklaced.

  My pearl necklace came during a routine reality affixing. Reality affixing is mandatory for mindplayers by federal law, though I don’t really believe we’re more prone to delusional thinking than anyone else. And there’s something about having to have my perceptions stamped ACCEPTABLE PER GOVERNMENT REGULATORY STANDARDS that makes me a touch uneasy. On the other hand—or lobe, if you will—a mindplayer who is convinced everybody must accept the water buffalo as a personal totem is not someone you’d want fooling around in people’s minds.

  Still, I didn’t look forward to having my reality affixed, in spite of Nelson Nelson’s reassurance that government standards were broad enough to encompass all the varieties of normal. I always wanted to ask him what made him so sure about that. But there was no room for argument—either I had my reality affixed or I lost my job at the mind-play agency and my license to practice pathosfinding.

  All I had to do was go headfirst into the agency’s system and let it probe me for perhaps ten minutes, if that. Of course, it can seem like days when you’re lying on the slab with your eyes out and the system hooked into your mind via the optic nerves, body awareness blocked off so that you’re completely alone with yourself. NN was always telling me that I should look at it as a particularly intense kind of meditation and that as long as I was myself, I certainly had nothing to feel uneasy about.

  As long as I was myself. And who else would I be? The system had apparently stimulated this particular question, and out came the pearl necklace. That was exactly how it appeared to my inner eye, as a long, long line of pearls, each one holding a moment in the life of Alexandra Victoria Haas, a.k.a. Deadpan Allie, separate, self-contained, unrelated to those on either side of it. The connecting thread running through them was suddenly gone, and I was looking at a series of strangers who shared my face but nothing more, as though I had popped in and out of being every moment I had been alive instead of existing continuously. The realization flared like sudden pain: I have not always been as I am now.

  I couldn’t remember being any different. Nor could I conceive of wha
t I would be like in the next moments—the future me was as much a stranger as the past one.

  The pearls began moving away from one another, the sequence going from ordered to random. I lunged to gather them up, and panic sent them flying apart as I fell toward disintegration.

  The next thing I knew, I was fine again, and the pearl necklace was gone. The foundation of everything I’d lived was under me again; I was no longer a stranger to myself. The system ran through the rest of the affixing procedure and then disengaged. I put my eyes back in and went off to have a nap.

  Naturally, the crisis was reported to Nelson Nelson. I knew it would be, but he never mentioned it. Instead he called me into his office to give me an assignment.

  “In your work with artists,” he said, while I lay on the gold-lamé interview couch and tried not to be obvious about the rash the tacky upholstery was giving me, “what would you say your primary objective as a pathosfinder is?”

  I rested my cheek on my left hand and thought it over. “To assist them in reaching a level where inward and outward perceptions balance well enough against each other so that—“

  “Allie.” He gave me a look. “This is me you’re talking to.”

  “Help them move past irrelevant and superficial mental trash.”

  NN raised himself up on one elbow, his own couch creaking and groaning, and actually shook his finger at me. “Never, never, never essay-answer me.”

  “Sorry.”

  His eyes narrowed. He had brand-new pink-jade biogem eyes, and they made him look like a geriatric rabbit. “Don’t be sorry. In spite of your initial choice of words, you’re right.” The wrinkled old face took on a thoughtful expression. “Would you say that in many cases the pathosfinder is responsible for helping an artist locate the creative generator’s ON button as well as helping to enhance the soul of the work?”

  For someone who didn’t like essay answers, he was pretty fond of essay questions. “In many cases, sure.”

  Now he looked satisfied. “That’s why I’d like to put you on the Gladney case.”