The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

“As good as ‘blood relative,’ ” Madeline said.

  “Who’s the wimp cutting off her circulation?”

  “The man I live with.” So easily was Henri relegated to a bloodless description.

  “Oh.” Bob put an arm about Madeline’s shoulder, ushered her upstairs to his office, and materialized two cups of coffee. They nursed the coffee in silence. She stared at the decorations on the wall, the diplomas and certificates, the framed portraits. In one, a dozen men and women in formal attire faced the camera; Bob wore blue jeans. In another, he was the one beard in a sea of clean-shaven faces.

  Bob said finally, “My place is pretty nice. Lots of posters of trees and all. The bed is big, too.”

  She said, “Thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.”

  “No commitments or anything. I can’t get caught; it would leave too many broken hearts from Boise to Mars. Just temporary quarters, you know?”

  She nodded. “We wouldn’t want to upset your girlfriends.”

  “Right. God, I love the French. You understand things so well.”

  “You’re a good man, Bob.”

  “Hey, what do you expect from the last of the red-blooded men? Are you going to fight for him?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Then keep this in mind about Giselle. She has a combined immunodeficiency.”

  “So?”

  “So that means that only her lymphocytes were useless. She still had stem cells that became perfectly good red cells and platelets and polys.”

  Madeline put down her coffee. “You mean—”

  “Yeah. Giselle grew up as rosy and healthy as me. She looked like an Outsider, an Earthie. She took elective chemo, wiped out her stem cells voluntarily. Just to look ‘normal.’ ”

  Standing, he kissed Madeline’s hand. “Be careful. Giselle is a very determined young lady.”

  —

  Henri haunted the hospital, sleeping in the lounge, pacing catlike through the halls, until Giselle went home. Then he moved to the couch in his studio. Whenever Madeline passed the open door he would jump before a canvas, holding the brush poised as if in decision. But the painting never progressed.

  And finally, one morning when Madeline went in to work, her friends did not speak to her. When she sat down to lunch, her neighbors moved to another table. Returning to the lab, she found her white coat shredded, her locker opened, and its contents smashed.

  “Why are you doing this?” she screamed. The others kept to their tasks, plating samples, staring into microscopes. She grabbed a coworker and spun him around. “Why!”

  “Fido,” he said, wrenching loose. “Bow wow.” The others in the lab took up the barking call.

  She fled to the transport, running the final quarter kilometer home. The front door was unlocked, Henri’s studio vacant. The painting had progressed since morning.

  She went to the bedroom and flung open the door. Henri looked at her guiltily. Giselle sat up, long hair ebony against her yellow-ivory skin, and smiled. “Woof woof.”

  “You told them!”

  “It was your cousin’s latest letter. I’m glad you persuaded me to read it. She hoped we’d be good friends, you and I, and talked about your long, idyllic marriage to a famous painter. Henri confirmed it. Can’t keep a secret, can you, my angel?” She leaned over and kissed him, then looked back at Madeline. Henri’s expression was as blank as unsculpted marble.

  “You would stoop so low…”

  Giselle said, “You have no rights here. Outsider.”

  “Henri!”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Henri—you as well? All right, she’s young and pretty and amusing, but, Henri, it’s empty glamour. It’s the sparkle of a castle in a fishbowl.”

  He spoke at last. “They have your marrow frozen in the lab. You can return to Earth. I—I’m the fish; I can’t leave the fishbowl. So I’ll settle for the castle.”

  She fled.

  —

  She clung to the spoke, in the still center without gravity. Near her a father and daughter played with fighting kites. She could see the entirety of the O’Neill module below her, curving up and above her. With ponds, forests, meadows, it might have been beautiful. Instead it was all shiny metal and muted pastels.

  “Get me,” the father urged. “That’s it.” And they giggled.

  Madeline remembered the oncologist, a large-boned woman with eyes that crinkled when she smiled. She had not been smiling then. “Don’t do it,” she’d said.

  “Henri’s afraid to go alone.”

  “I’m begging you—stay on Earth.”

  “He’s my husband.”

  The doctor had shrugged. “All right; you won’t be the first. But you’ll do it our way. You’ll need a cover story to fit in—lupus. We haven’t used that before. We’ll say your mother died from SLE. When you developed it you decided to emigrate early, before the steroid side effects. You’ll undergo the same treatments your husband does—we’ll kill every blood cell in your body. But there’ll be one difference. We’ll keep some of your marrow, for when you change your mind and decide to come home. It will be in the freezer, waiting for you.”

  “Then it will wait forever.”

  “Forever,” Madeline repeated now. She could push off from the tower, glide slowly to her doom. And when she landed—there would be no telltale red spot on the pavement.

  She looked down at the colony, people visible only as abstractions. She’d thought of it as a colony, like a colony of bacteria growing on an artificial medium, but from this height it seemed more like a body. A cylinder full of life, in pieces so small the individual components were meaningless. And herself? The Outsider. The infective particle.

  The people without individual immune systems had formed a larger, more potent immune system to reject her. What could she do? Stay, like Bob, and become an abscess walled off by hate? Or let them win. The short flight downward…

  The body cannot tolerate an invader. One or the other must die.

  —

  She left everything for Henri and Giselle, taking only the old brandy—Napoleon fleeing the winter. She knocked and entered, carrying the bottle. Bob, wearing only a pair of jeans, stood staring into a hologram of a redwood forest.

  “For you,” she said, and put down the bottle.

  He spoke to the wall. “A going-away present?”

  She took one step forward, then stopped. “Bob, come with me. Choose life. Why stay and be destroyed?”

  Laughing, he turned to face her. She saw the large, hasty scar of an emergency laparotomy bisecting his abdomen.

  He grinned. “Drunk driver. My spleen looked like hamburger.”

  “After the splenectomy—”

  “Yeah. Recurrent pneumococcal infections.”

  “Antibiotics—”

  He cut her off. “I’m allergic to sulfa and the beta-lactams. The others were too toxic for long-term prophylaxis.”

  “Then—you’re immunocompromised; Earth would kill you. You belong on Blues.”

  He laughed again. “Belong? I’m the last of the red-blooded men. I never belong.”

  —

  The art show was the expected babble of voices, clink of glasses. She left the paintings and let the crowd drift her toward the sculptures in the center. She paused before the crenulated sphere engulfing the small rod, both carved out of heart of cedar. She’d become very fond of hues of red.

  A ruddy-faced young man was studying the piece carefully. “Looks real symbolic,” he said.

  “It’s a macrophage, phagocytosing a salmonella.”

  The man chuckled. “Come on. It’s obviously some sort of Jungian allegory about the female swallowing the male or something. I’m a photographer; I can’t understand anything more symbolic than a traffic sign. What do you do?”

  “I sculpt,” she said, and pointed to her name on the stand.

  He barely blushed, then examined her name and looked pointedly at her unadorned fingers.

  “Weren
’t you married?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a widow. More wine?”

  New Rose Hotel

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  William Gibson (1948– ) is a highly influential US-Canadian science fiction novelist and essayist who has been called the “noir prophet” of cyberpunk; critics credit Gibson with creating the term cyberspace in his 1982 story “Burning Chrome,” and The Guardian has called him “probably the most important novelist of the past two decades.” His first novel, Neuromancer (1984), had a revolutionary effect on science fiction, expanding upon the themes in his short stories. The first line of Neuromancer—“The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel”—has become as memorable as Thomas Pynchon’s “A screaming comes across the sky” from Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Gibson’s more recent bestselling novels—Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), Zero History (2010), and The Peripheral (2014)—are set in a version of our reality, although The Peripheral in particular has speculative elements. The later novels tend to tackle the inequities of the information age in the context of capitalism and computer technology.

  Gibson’s father died when he was six, his mother when he was eighteen. His father worked in middle management for a construction company in South Carolina. “They’d built some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities, and paranoic legends of ‘security’ at Oak Ridge were part of our family culture,” Gibson wrote in his short biographical essay “Since 1948.” The world Gibson grew up in was one “of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science fiction themes.”

  Later, Gibson stumbled upon “a writer named Burroughs—not Edgar Rice but William S.” Gibson read Kerouac and Ginsberg soon thereafter, making him, as he puts it, “Patient Zero of what would later become the counterculture.”

  Gibson’s short fiction is quite diverse and includes work that could be classified as horror or fantasy or cross-genre. “New Rose Hotel,” which appeared in Omni in 1984, is classic cyberpunk, and in many ways a more interesting story than the iconic “Burning Chrome.”

  NEW ROSE HOTEL

  William Gibson

  Seven rented nights in this coffin, Sandii. New Rose Hotel. How I want you now. Sometimes I hit you. Replay it so slow and sweet and mean, I can almost feel it. Sometimes I take your little automatic out of my bag, run my thumb down smooth, cheap chrome. Chinese .22, its bore no wider than the dilated pupils of your vanished eyes.

  Fox is dead now, Sandii.

  Fox told me to forget you.

  —

  I remember Fox leaning against the padded bar in the dark lounge of some Singapore hotel, Bencoolen Street, his hands describing different spheres of influence, internal rivalries, the arc of a particular career, a point of weakness he had discovered in the armor of some think tank. Fox was point man in the skull wars, a middleman for corporate crossovers. He was a soldier in the secret skirmishes of the zaibatsus, the multinational corporations that control entire economies.

  I see Fox grinning, talking fast, dismissing my ventures into intercorporate espionage with a shake of his head. The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you bear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists.

  You can’t put Edge down on paper, Fox said, can’t punch Edge into a diskette.

  The money was in corporate defectors.

  Fox was smooth, the severity of his dark French suits offset by a boyish forelock that wouldn’t stay in place. I never liked the way the effect was ruined when he stepped back from the bar, his left shoulder skewed at an angle no Paris tailor could conceal. Someone had run him over with a taxi in Berne, and nobody quite knew how to put him together again.

  I guess I went with him because he said he was after that Edge.

  And somewhere out there, on our way to find the Edge, I found you, Sandii.

  The New Rose Hotel is a coffin rack on the ragged fringes of Narita International. Plastic capsules a meter high and three long, stacked like surplus Godzilla teeth in a concrete lot off the main road to the airport. Each capsule has a television mounted flush with the ceiling. I spend whole days watching Japanese game shows and old movies. Sometimes I have your gun in my hand.

  Sometimes I can hear the jets, laced into holding patterns over Narita. I close my eyes and imagine the sharp, white contrails fading, losing definition.

  You walked into a bar in Yokohama, the first time I saw you. Eurasian, half gaijin, long-hipped and fluid in a Chinese knockoff of some Tokyo designer’s original. Dark European eyes, Asian cheekbones. I remember you dumping your purse out on the bed, later, in some hotel room, pawing through your makeup. A crumpled wad of new yen, dilapidated address book held together with rubber bands, a Mitsubishi bank chip, Japanese passport with a gold chrysanthemum stamped on the cover, and the Chinese .22.

  You told me your story. Your father had been an executive in Tokyo, but now he was disgraced, disowned, cast down by Hosaka, the biggest zaibatsu of all. That night your mother was Dutch, and I listened as you spun out those summers in Amsterdam for me, the pigeons in Dam Square like a soft, brown carpet.

  I never asked what your father might have done to earn his disgrace. I watched you dress; watched the swing of your dark, straight hair, how it cut the air.

  Now Hosaka hunts me.

  The coffins of New Rose are racked in recycled scaffolding, steel pipes under bright enamel. Paint flakes away when I climb the ladder, falls with each step as I follow the catwalk. My left hand counts off the coffin hatches, their multilingual decals warning of fines levied for the loss of a key.

  I look up as the jets rise out of Narita, passage home, distant now as any moon.

  Fox was quick to see how we could use you, but not sharp enough to credit you with ambition. But then he never lay all night with you on the beach at Kamakura, never listened to your nightmares, never heard an entire imagined childhood shift under those stars, shift and roll over, your child’s mouth opening to reveal some fresh past, and always the one, you swore, that was really and finally the truth.

  I didn’t care, holding your hips while the sand cooled against your skin.

  Once you left me, ran back to that beach saying you’d forgotten our key. I found it in the door and went after you, to find you ankle-deep in surf, your smooth back rigid, trembling; your eyes faraway. You—couldn’t talk. Shivering. Gone. Shaking for different futures and better pasts.

  Sandii, you left me here.

  You left me all your things.

  This gun. Your makeup, all the shadows and blushes capped in plastic. Your Cray microcomputer, a gift from Fox, with a shopping list you entered. Sometimes I play that back, watching each item cross the little silver screen.

  A freezer. A fermenter. An incubator. An electrophoresis system with integrated agarose cell and transilluminator. A tissue embedder. A high-performance liquid chromatograph. A flow cytometer. A spectrophotometer. Four gross of borosilicate scintillation vials. A microcentrifuge. And one DNA synthesizer, with inbuilt computer. Plus software.

  Expensive, Sandii, but then Hosaka was footing our bills. Later you made them pay even more, but you were already gone.

  Hiroshi drew up that list for you. In bed, probably. Hiroshi Yomiuri. Maas Biolabs GmbH had him. Hosaka wanted him.

  He was hot. Edge and lots of it. Fox followed genetic engineers the way a fan follows players in a favorite game. Fox wanted Hiroshi so bad he could taste it.

  He’d sent me up to Frankfurt three times before you turned up, just to have a look-see at Hiroshi. Not to make a pass or even to give him a wink and a nod. Just to watch.

  Hiroshi showed all the signs of having settled in. He’d found a German girl with a taste for conservative loden and riding boots polished the shade of a fresh chestnut. He’d bought a renovated town house on just the right square. He’d taken up fencing and given up kendo.

&
nbsp; And everywhere the Maas security teams, smooth and heavy, a rich, clear syrup of surveillance. I came back and told Fox we’d never touch him.

  You touched him for us, Sandii. You touched him just right.

  Our Hosaka contacts were like specialized cells protecting the parent organism. We were mutagens, Fox and I, dubious agents adrift on the dark side of the intercorporate sea.

  When we had you in place in Vienna, we offered them Hiroshi. They didn’t even blink. Dead calm in an LA hotel room. They said they had to think about it.

  Fox spoke the name of Hosaka’s primary competitor in the gene game, let it fall out naked, broke the protocol forbidding the use of proper names.

  They had to think about it, they said.

  Fox gave them three days.

  I took you to Barcelona a week before I took you to Vienna. I remember you with your hair tucked back into a gray beret, your high Mongol cheekbones reflected in the windows of ancient shops. Strolling down the Ramblas to the Phoenician harbor, past the glass-roofed Mercado selling oranges out of Africa.

  The old Ritz, warm in our room, dark, with all the soft weight of Europe pulled over us like a quilt. I could enter you in your sleep. You were always ready. Seeing your lips in a soft, round O of surprise, your face about to sink into the thick, white pillow—archaic linen of the Ritz. Inside you I imagined all the neon, the crowds surging around Shinjuku Station, wired electric night. You moved that way, rhythm of a new age, dreamy and far from any nation’s soil.

  When we flew to Vienna, I installed you in Hiroshi’s wife’s favorite hotel. Quiet, solid, the lobby tiled like a marble chessboard, with brass elevators smelling of lemon oil and small cigars. It was easy to imagine her there, the highlights on her riding boots reflected in polished marble, but we knew she wouldn’t be coming along, not this trip.

  She was off to some Rhineland spa, and Hiroshi was in Vienna for a conference. When Maas security flowed in to scan the hotel, you were out of sight.

  Hiroshi arrived an hour later, alone.

  Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.