The Big Book of Science Fiction

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

  The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life-form.

  Not the Edge lecture again, I said.

  Maas isn’t like that, he said, ignoring me.

  Maas was small, fast, ruthless. An atavism. Maas was all Edge.

  I remember Fox talking about the nature of Hiroshi’s Edge. Radioactive nucleuses, monoclonal antibodies, something to do with the linkage of proteins, nucleotides…Hot, Fox called them, hot proteins. High-speed links. He said Hiroshi was a freak, the kind who shatters paradigms, inverts a whole field of science, brings on the violent revision of an entire body of knowledge. Basic patents, he said, his throat tight with the sheer wealth of it, with the high, thin smell of tax-free millions that clung to those two words.

  Hosaka wanted Hiroshi, but his Edge was radical enough to worry them. They wanted him to work in isolation.

  I went to Marrakech, to the old city, the Medina. I found a heroin lab that had been converted to the extraction of pheromones. I bought it, with Hosaka’s money.

  I walked the marketplace at Djemaa-el-Fna with a sweating Portuguese businessman, discussing fluorescent lighting and the installation of ventilated specimen cages. Beyond the city walls, the high Atlas. Djemaa-el-Fna was thick with jugglers, dancers, storytellers, small boys turning lathes with their feet, legless beggars with wooden bowls under animated holograms advertising French software.

  We strolled past bales of raw wool and plastic tubs of Chinese microchips. I hinted that my employers planned to manufacture synthetic beta-endorphin. Always try to give them something they understand.

  Sandii, I remember you in Harajuku, sometimes. Close my eyes in this coffin and I can see you there—all the glitter, the crystal maze of the boutiques, the smell of new clothes. I see your cheekbones ride past chrome racks of Paris leathers. Sometimes I hold your hand.

  We thought we’d found you, Sandii, but really you’d found us. Now I know you were looking for us, or for someone like us. Fox was delighted, grinning over our find: such a pretty new tool, bright as any scalpel. Just the thing to help us sever a stubborn Edge, like Hiroshi’s, from the jealous parent-body of Maas Biolabs.

  You must have been searching a long time, looking for a way out, all those nights down Shinjuku. Nights you carefully cut from the scattered deck of your past.

  My own past had gone down years before, lost with all hands, no trace. I understood Fox’s late-night habit of emptying his wallet, shuffling through his identification. He’d lay the pieces out in different patterns, rearrange them, wait for a picture to form. I knew what he was looking for. You did the same thing with your childhoods.

  In New Rose, tonight, I choose from your deck of pasts.

  I choose the original version, the famous Yokohama hotel room text, recited to me that first night in bed. I choose the disgraced father, Hosaka executive. Hosaka. How perfect. And the Dutch mother, the summers in Amsterdam, the soft blanket of pigeons in the Dam Square afternoon.

  I came in out of the heat of Marrakech into Hilton air-conditioning. Wet shirt clinging cold to the small of my back while I read the message you’d relayed through Fox. You were in all the way; Hiroshi would leave his wife. It wasn’t difficult for you to communicate with us, even through the clear, tight film of Maas security; you’d shown Hiroshi the perfect little place for coffee and kipferl. Your favorite waiter was white-haired, kindly, walked with a limp, and worked for us. You left your messages under the linen napkin.

  All day today I watched a small helicopter cut a tight grid above this country of mine, the land of my exile, the New Rose Hotel. Watched from my hatch as its patient shadow crossed the grease-stained concrete. Close. Very close.

  I left Marrakech for Berlin. I met with a Welshman in a bar and began to arrange for Hiroshi’s disappearance.

  It would be a complicated business, intricate as the brass gears and sliding mirrors of Victorian stage magic, but the desired effect was simple enough. Hiroshi would step behind a hydrogen-cell Mercedes and vanish. The dozen Maas agents who followed him constantly would swarm around the van like ants; the Maas security apparatus would harden around his point of departure like epoxy.

  They know how to do business promptly in Berlin. I was even able to arrange a last night with you. I kept it secret from Fox; he might not have approved. Now I’ve forgotten the town’s name. I knew it for an hour on the autobahn, under a gray Rhenish sky, and forgot it in your arms.

  The rain began, sometime toward morning. Our room had a single window, high and narrow, where I stood and watched the rain fur the river with silver needles. Sound of your breathing. The river flowed beneath low, stone arches. The street was empty. Europe was a dead museum.

  I’d already booked your flight to Marrakech, out of Orly, under your newest name. You’d be on your way when I pulled the final string and dropped Hiroshi out of sight.

  You’d left your purse on the dark old bureau. While you slept I went through your things, removed anything that might clash with the new cover I’d bought for you in Berlin. I took the Chinese .22, your microcomputer, and your bank chip. I took a new passport, Dutch, from my bag, a Swiss bank chip in the same name, and tucked them into your purse.

  My hand brushed something flat, I drew it out, held the thing, a diskette. No labels.

  It lay there in the palm of my hand, all that death. Latent, coded, waiting.

  I stood there and watched you breathe, watched your breasts rise and fall. Saw your lips slightly parted, and in the jut and fullness of your lower lip, the faintest suggestion of bruising.

  I put the diskette back into your purse. When I lay down beside you, you rolled against me, waking, on your breath all the electric night of a new Asia, the future rising in you like a bright fluid, washing me of everything but the moment. That was your magic, that you lived outside of history, all now.

  And you knew how to take me there.

  For the very last time, you took me.

  While I was shaving, I heard you empty your makeup into my bag. I’m Dutch now, you said, I’ll want a new look.

  Dr. Hiroshi Yomiuri went missing in Vienna, in a quiet street off Singerstrasse, two blocks from his wife’s favorite hotel. On a clear afternoon in October, in the presence of a dozen expert witnesses, Dr. Yomiuri vanished.

  He stepped through a looking glass. Somewhere, offstage, the oiled play of Victorian clockwork.

  I sat in a hotel room in Geneva and took the Welshman’s call. It was done, Hiroshi down my rabbit hole and headed for Marrakech. I poured myself a drink and thought about your legs.

  Fox and I met in Narita a day later, in a sushi bar in the JAL terminal. He’d just stepped off an Air Maroc jet, exhausted and triumphant.

  Loves it there, he said, meaning Hiroshi. Loves her, he said, meaning you.

  I smiled. You’d promised to meet me in Shinjuku in a month.

  Your cheap little gun in the New Rose Hotel. The chrome is starting to peel. The machining is clumsy, blurry Chinese stamped into rough steel. The grips are red plastic, molded with a dragon on either side. Like a child’s toy.

  Fox ate sushi in the JAL terminal, high on what we’d done. The shoulder had been giving him trouble, but he said he didn’t care. Money now for better doctors. Money now for everything.

  Somehow it didn’t seem very important to me, the money we’d gotten from Hosaka. Not that I doubted our new wealth, but that last night with you had left me convinced that it all came to us naturally, in the new order of things, as a function of who and what we were.

  Poor Fox. With his blue oxford shirts crisper than ever, his Paris suits darker and richer. Sitting there in JAL, dabbing sushi into a little rectangular tray of green horseradish, he had less than a week to live.

  Dark now, and the coffin racks of New Rose are lit all night by floodlights, high on painted metal masts. Nothing here seems to serve its original purpose. E
verything is surplus, recycled, even the coffins. Forty years ago these plastic capsules were stacked in Tokyo or Yokohama, a modern convenience for traveling businessmen. Maybe your father slept in one. When the scaffolding was new, it rose around the shell of some mirrored tower on the Ginza, swarmed over by crews of builders.

  The breeze tonight brings the rattle of a pachinko parlor, the smell of stewed vegetables from the pushcarts across the road.

  I spread crab-flavored krill paste on orange rice crackers. I can hear the planes.

  Those last few days in Tokyo, Fox and I had adjoining suites on the fifty-third floor of the Hyatt. No contact with Hosaka. They paid us, then erased us from official corporate memory.

  But Fox couldn’t let go. Hiroshi was his baby, his pet project. He’d developed a proprietary, almost fatherly, interest in Hiroshi. He loved him for his Edge. So Fox had me keep in touch with my Portuguese businessman in the Medina, who was willing to keep a very partial eye on Hiroshi’s lab for us.

  When he phoned, he’d phone from a stall in Djemaa-el-Fna, with a background of wailing vendors and Atlas panpipes. Someone was moving security into Marrakech, he told us. Fox nodded. Hosaka.

  After less than a dozen calls, I saw the change in Fox, a tension, a look of abstraction. I’d find him at the window, staring down fifty-three floors into the imperial gardens, lost in something he wouldn’t talk about.

  Ask him for a more detailed description, he said, after one particular call. He thought a man our contact had seen entering Hiroshi’s lab might be Moenner, Hosaka’s leading gene man.

  That was Moenner, he said, after the next call. Another call and he thought he’d identified Chedanne, who headed Hosaka’s protein team. Neither had been seen outside the corporate arcology in over two years.

  By then it was obvious that Hosaka’s leading researchers were pooling quietly in the Medina, the black executive Lears whispering into the Marrakech airport on carbon-fiber wings. Fox shook his head. He was a professional, a specialist, and he saw the sudden accumulation of all that prime Hosaka Edge in the Medina as a drastic failure in the zaibatsu’s tradecraft.

  Christ, he said, pouring himself a Black Label, they’ve got their whole bio section in there right now. One bomb. He shook his head. One grenade in the right place at the right time…

  I reminded him of the saturation techniques Hosaka security was obviously employing. Hosaka had lines to the heart of the Diet, and their massive infiltration of agents into Marrakech could only be taking place with the knowledge and cooperation of the Moroccan government.

  Hang it up, I said. It’s over. You’ve sold them Hiroshi. Now forget him.

  I know what it is, he said. I know. I saw it once before.

  He said that there was a certain wild factor in lab work. The edge of Edge, he called it. When a researcher develops a breakthrough, others sometimes find it impossible to duplicate the first researcher’s results. This was even more likely with Hiroshi, whose work went against the conceptual grain of his field. The answer, often, was to fly the breakthrough boy from lab to corporate lab for a ritual laying on of hands. A few pointless adjustments in the equipment, and the process would work. Crazy thing, he said, nobody knows why it works that way, but it does. He grinned.

  But they’re taking a chance, he said. Bastards told us they wanted to isolate Hiroshi, keep him away from their central research thrust. Balls. Bet your ass there’s some kind of power struggle going on in Hosaka research. Somebody big’s flying his favorites in and rubbing them all over Hiroshi for luck. When Hiroshi shoots the legs out from under genetic engineering, the Medina crowd’s going to be ready.

  He drank his scotch and shrugged.

  Go to bed, he said. You’re right, it’s over. I did go to bed, but the phone woke me. Marrakech again, the white static of a satellite link, a rush of frightened Portuguese.

  Hosaka didn’t freeze our credit, they caused it to evaporate. Fairy gold. One minute we were millionaires in the world’s hardest currency, and the next we were paupers. I woke Fox.

  Sandii, he said. She sold out. Maas security turned her in Vienna. Sweet Jesus.

  I watched him slit his battered suitcase apart with a Swiss Army knife. He had three gold bars glued in there with contact cement. Soft plates, each one proofed and stamped by the treasury of some extinct African government.

  I should’ve seen it, he said, his voice flat.

  I said no. I think I said your name.

  Forget her, he said. Hosaka wants us dead. They’ll assume we crossed them. Get on the phone and check our credit.

  Our credit was gone. They denied that either of us had ever had an account.

  Haul ass, Fox said.

  We ran. Out a service door, into Tokyo traffic, and down into Shinjuku. That was when I understood for the first time the real extent of Hosaka’s reach.

  Every door was closed. People we’d done business with for two years saw us coming, and I’d see steel shutters slam behind their eyes. We’d get out before they had a chance to reach for the phone. The surface tension of the underworld had been tripled, and everywhere we’d meet that same taut membrane and be thrown back. No chance to sink, to get out of sight.

  Hosaka let us run for most of that first day. Then they sent someone to break Fox’s back a second time.

  I didn’t see them do it, but I saw him fall. We were in a Ginza department store an hour before closing, and I saw his arc off that polished mezzanine, down into all the wares of the new Asia.

  They missed me somehow, and I just kept running. Fox took the gold with him, but I had a hundred new yen in my pocket. I ran. All the way to the New Rose Hotel.

  Now it’s time.

  Come with me, Sandii. Hear the neon humming on the road to Narita International. A few late moths trace stop-motion circles around the floodlights that shine on New Rose.

  And the funny thing, Sandii, is how sometimes you just don’t seem real to me. Fox once said you were ectoplasm, a ghost called up by the extremes of economics. Ghost of the new century, congealing on a thousand beds in the world’s Hyatts, the world’s Hiltons.

  Now I’ve got your gun in my hand, jacket pocket, and my hand seems so far away. Disconnected.

  I remember my Portuguese business friend forgetting his English, trying to get it across in four languages I barely understood, and I thought he was telling me that the Medina was burning. Not the Medina. The brains of Hosaka’s best research people. Plague, he was whispering, my businessman, plague and fever and death.

  Smart Fox, he put it together on the run. I didn’t even have to mention finding the diskette in your bag in Germany.

  Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said. The thing was there for the overnight construction of just the right macromolecule. With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii. But not as expensive as you turned out to be for Hosaka.

  I hope you got a good price from Maas.

  The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn’t face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you.

  So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka researchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered permanent brain damage.

  Hiroshi hadn’t worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the synthesizer hummed to itself all night long building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH.

  Maas. Small, fast, ruthless. All Edge.

  The airport road is a long, straight shot. Keep to the shadows.

  And I was shouting at that Portuguese voice, I made him tell me what happened to the girl, to Hiroshi’s woman. Vanished, he said. The whir of Victorian clockwork.

  So Fox had to fall, fall with his three pathetic plates of gold, and snap his spine for the last time. On the floor of a Ginza department store, every shopper staring in the instant before they screamed.

  I just can’t hate you, baby.

  And Hosaka’s helicopter is b
ack, no lights at all, hunting on infrared, feeling for body heat. A muffled whine as it turns, a kilometer away, swinging back toward us, toward New Rose. Too fast a shadow, against the glow of Narita.

  It’s all right, baby. Only please come here. Hold my hand.

  Pots

  C. J. CHERRYH

  Carolyn Janice Cherry (1942– ), writing as C. J. Cherryh, is an influential US science fiction writer who lives in Spokane, Washington, and holds a master’s degree in classics from Johns Hopkins; Greek and Roman mythology have been a major influence on her work. She started writing fiction at the age of ten, after her favorite television show, Flash Gordon, was canceled, and she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1976. Cherryh is best known for her novels set in the Alliance-Union Universe, especially Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988)—both of which won Hugo Awards. The Alliance-Union novels are set throughout most of the home galaxy during the third and fourth millennia, during which period the Alliance, structured around merchant cultures that operate huge interstellar freighters necessary for trade, manages to survive at the heart of the more ruthless, expansionist Union. Cherryh has used this backdrop to good effect repeatedly, exploring ever more widely both the milieu and the socioeconomic implications of the situation.

  Her first novel was Gate of Ivrel (1976), the beginning of the Morgaine series, which continued with Well of Shiuan (1978), Fires of Azeroth (1979), and the much later Exile’s Gate (1988). In these novels, Cherryh fused interplanetary intrigue with tropes more usual to fantasy, including a romantic heroic quest. An underlying rationality counterbalances the stylistic flourish of the series; Cherryh could be said to have renovated and modernized the planetary romance with the series.

  Cherryh’s first short story, the much-anthologized “Cassandra” (1978), won the Hugo Award. Eventually she published enough short fiction to release The Collected Short Fiction of C. J. Cherryh (2004), comprising her prior collections Sunfall (1981) and Visible Light (1986) plus sixteen additional stories.