The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  “I heard about it on the news,” she said finally. “I came on the next plane. I’m so sorry, Mandy.”

  There are things I wanted to say then—things that rose up inside of me like a bubble ready to burst, and I opened my mouth to scream at her, but what came out belonged to a different person: it came out a pathetic sob, and she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around me, my sister again after all these years.

  The limo slows near the top of the hill, and the procession tightens. Headstones crowd the roadway. I see the tent up ahead, green; its canvass sides billowing in and out with the wind, like a giant’s breathing. Two-dozen gray folding chairs crouch in straight rows beneath it.

  The limo stops.

  “Should we wake the boy?” my sister asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to carry him?”

  “Can you?”

  She looks at the child. “He’s only three?”

  “No,” I say. “Not yet.”

  “He’s big for his age. I mean, isn’t he? I’m not around kids much.”

  “The doctors say he’s big.”

  My sister leans forward and touches his milky white cheek. “He’s beautiful,” she says. I try not to hear the surprise in her voice. People are never aware of that tone when they use it, revealing what their expectations had been. But I’m past being offended by what people reveal unconsciously. Now it’s only intent that offends. “He really is beautiful,” she says again.

  “He’s his father’s son,” I say.

  Ahead of us, mourners climb from their cars. The priest is walking toward the grave.

  “It’s time,” my sister says. She opens the door and we step out into the cold.

  They came first out of Korea. But that’s wrong, of course. History has an order to its telling. It would be more accurate to say it started in Britain. After all, it was Harding who published first; it was Harding who shook the world with his announcement. And it was Harding who the religious groups burned in effigy on their church lawns.

  Only later did the Koreans reveal they’d accomplished the same goal two years before, and the proof was already out of diapers. And it was only later, much later, that the world would recognize the scope of what they’d done.

  When the Yeong Bae fell to the People’s Party, the Korean labs were emptied, and there were suddenly thousands of them—little blond and red-haired orphans, pale as ghosts, starving on the Korean streets as society crumbled around them. The ensuing wars and regime changes destroyed much of the supporting scientific data—but the children themselves, the ones who survived, were incontrovertible. There was no mistaking what they were.

  It was never fully revealed why the Yeong Bae had developed the project in the first place. Perhaps they’d been after a better soldier. Or perhaps they’d done it for the oldest reason: because they could.

  What is known for certain is that in 2001 disgraced stem cell biologist Hwang Woo-Suk cloned the world’s first dog, an afghan. In 2006, he revealed that he’d tried and failed to clone a mammoth on three separate occasions. Western labs had talked about it, but the Koreans had actually tried. This would prove to be the pattern.

  In 2011 the Koreans finally succeeded, and a mammoth was born from an elephant surrogate. Other labs followed. Other species. The Pallid Beach Mouse. The Pyrenean Ibex. And older things. Much older.

  The best scientists in the US had to leave the country to do their work. US laws against stem cell research didn’t stop scientific advancement from occurring; it only stopped it from occurring in the United States. Instead Britain, China and India won patents for the procedures. Many cancers were cured. Most forms of blindness, MS and Parkinson’s. Rich Americans had to go overseas for procedures that had become commonplace in other parts of the industrialized world. When Congress eventually legalized the medical procedures, but not the lines of research which lead to them, the hypocrisy was too much, and even the most loyal American cyto-researchers left the country.

  Harding was among this final wave, leaving the United States to set up a lab in the UK. In 2013, he was the first to bring back the Thylacine. In the winter of 2015, someone brought him a partial skull from a museum exhibit. The skull was doliocephalic—long, low, large. The bone was heavy, the cranial vault enormous—part of a skullcap that had been found in 1857 in a quarry in the Neander valley.

  Snow crunches under our feet as my sister and I move outside the limo. The wind is freezing, and my legs grow numb in my thin slacks. It is fitting he is being buried on a day like today; David was never bothered by the cold.

  My sister gestures toward the limo’s open door. “Are you sure you want to bring the boy? I could stay with him in the car.”

  “He should be here,” I say. “He should see it.”

  “He won’t understand.”

  “No, but later he might remember he was here,” I say. “Maybe that will matter.”

  “He’s too young to remember.”

  “He remembers everything.” I lean into the shadows and wake the boy. His eyes open like blue lights. “Come, Sean, it’s time to wake up.”

  He rubs a pudgy fist into his eyes and says nothing. He is a quiet boy, my son. Out in the cold, I pull a hat down over his ears. He’s still half asleep as we climb the hill. The boy walks between my sister and me, holding our hands.

  At the top, Dr. Michaels is there to greet us, along with other faculty from Stanford. They offer their condolences, and I work hard not to break down. Dr. Michaels looks like he hasn’t slept. David was his best friend. I introduce my sister and hands are shaken.

  “You never mentioned you had a sister,” he says.

  I only nod. Dr. Michaels looks down at the boy and tugs the child’s hat.

  “Do you want me to pick you up?” he asks.

  “Yeah.” Sean’s voice is small and scratchy from sleep. It is not an odd voice for a boy his age. It is a normal voice. Dr. Michaels lifts him, and the child’s blue eyes close again.

  We stand in silence in the cold. Mourners gather around the grave.

  “I still can’t believe it,” Dr. Michaels says. He’s swaying slightly, unconsciously rocking the boy. It is something only a man who has been a father would do, though his own children are grown.

  “It’s like I’m another kind of person now,” I say. “Only, nobody’s told me how to be her yet.”

  My sister grabs my hand, and this time I do break down. The tears burn in the cold.

  The priest clears his throat; he’s about to begin. In the distance the sounds of protestors grows louder, the rise and fall of their chants not unpleasant—though from this distance, thankfully, I cannot make out the hateful words.

  When the world first learned of the Korean children, it sprang into action. Humanitarian groups swooped into the war-torn area, monies exchanged hands, and many of the children were adopted out to other countries. They went to prosperous house-holds in America, and Britain, and different countries all over the globe—a new worldwide Diaspora. They were broad, thick-limbed children; usually slightly shorter than average, though there were startling exceptions to this.

  They looked like members of the same family, and some of them, assuredly, were more closely related than that. There were more children, after all, than there were fossil specimens from which they’d derived. Duplicates were inevitable.

  From what limited data remained of the Koreans’ work, there had been more than sixty different DNA sources. Some even had names: the Old Man La Chappelle aux Saints, Shanidar IV and Vindija. There was the handsome and symmetrical La Ferrassie specimen. And even Amud I. Huge Amud I, who had stood 1.8 meters tall and had a cranial capacity of 1740ccs—the largest Neanderthal ever found.

  The techniques perfected on dogs and mammoths had worked easily, too, within the genus Homo. Extraction, then PCR to amplify. After that came IVF with paid surrogates. The success rate was high, the only complication frequent cesarean births. And that was one of the things popular
culture had to absorb, that Neanderthal heads were larger.

  Tests were done. The children were studied and tracked and evaluated. All lacked normal dominant expression at the MC1R locus—all were pale-skinned, freckled, with red or blonde hair. All were blue-eyed. All were Rh negative.

  I was six years old when I first saw a picture. It was the cover of Time—what is now a famous cover. I’d heard about these children but had never seen one—these children who were almost my age, from a place called Korea; these children who were sometimes called ghosts.

  The magazine showed a pale, red-haired Neanderthal boy standing with his adoptive parents, staring thoughtfully up at an outdated anthropology display at a museum. The wax Neanderthal man in the display carried a club. He had a nose from the tropics, dark hair, olive-brown skin and dark brown eyes. Before Harding’s child, the museum display designers had supposed they knew what primitive looked like, and they had supposed it was decidedly swarthy.

  Never mind that Neanderthals had spent ten times longer in light-starved Europe than a typical Swede’s ancestors.

  The boy looked up at the display with a confused expression.

  When my father walked into the kitchen and saw the Time cover, he shook his head in disgust. “It’s an abomination,” he said.

  I studied the boy’s jutting face. I’d never seen anyone with face like that. “Who is he?”

  “A dead-end. Those kids are going to be a drain for the rest of their lives. It’s not fair to them, really.”

  That was the first of many pronouncements I’d hear about the children.

  Years passed and the children grew like weeds—and as with all populations, the first generation exposed to a western diet grew several inches taller than their ancestors. While they excelled at sports, their adopted families were told they could be slow learners and might be prone to aggression. The families were even told, in the beginning, that the children could be antisocial and might never fully grasp the nuances of complex language.

  They were primitive after all.

  A prediction which turned out to be as accurate as the museum displays.

  When I look up, the priest’s hands are raised into the cold, white sky. “Blessed are you, O God our father; praised be your name forever.” He breathes smoke, reading from the book of Tobit.

  It is a passage I’ve heard at both funerals and marriage ceremonies, and this, like the cold on this day, is fitting. “Let the heavens and all your creations praise you forever.”

  The mourners sway in the giant’s breathing of the tent.

  I was born Catholic, but found little use for organized religion in my adulthood. Little use for it, until now, when its use is so clearly revealed—and it is an unexpected comfort to be part of something larger than yourself; it is a comfort to have someone to bury your dead.

  Religion provides a man in black to speak words over your loved one’s grave. It does this first. If it does not do this, it is not religion.

  “You made Adam and you gave him your wife Eve to be his love and support; and from these two, the human race descended.”

  They said together, Amen, Amen.

  The day I learned I was pregnant, David stood at our window, huge, pale arms draped over my shoulders. He touched my stomach as we watched a storm coming in across the lake.

  “I hope the baby looks like you,” he said in his strange, nasal voice.

  “I don’t.”

  “No, it would be easier if the baby looks like you. He’ll have an easier life.”

  “He?”

  “I think it’s a boy.”

  “And is that what you’d wish for him, to have an easy life?”

  “Isn’t that what every parent wishes for?”

  “No,” I said. I touched my own stomach. I put my small hand over his large one. “I hope our son grows to be a good man.”

  I’d met David at Stanford when he walked into class five minutes late.

  He had arms like legs. And legs like torsos. His torso was the trunk of an oak seventy-five years old, grown in the sun. A full-sleeve tattoo swarmed up one bulging, ghost-pale arm, disappearing under his shirt. He had an earring in one ear, and a shaved head. A thick red goatee balanced the enormous bulk of his convex nose and gave some dimension to his receding chin. The eyes beneath his thick brows were large and intense—as blue as a husky’s.

  It wasn’t that he was handsome, because I couldn’t decide if he was. It was that I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I stared at him. All the girls stared at him.

  He sat near the aisle and didn’t take notes like the rest of the students. As far as I could tell, he didn’t even bring a pen.

  On the second day of class, he sat next to me. I couldn’t think. I didn’t hear a single word the professor said. I was so aware of the man sitting next to me, his big arms folded in front of him like crossed thighs. He took up a seat and a half, and his elbow kept brushing mine.

  It was me who spoke first, a whisper. “You don’t care if you fail.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Why do you say that?” He never looked at me and replied so quickly that I realized we’d already been in a kind of conversation, sitting here, without speaking a word.

  “Because you aren’t taking notes,” I said.

  “Ah, but I am.” He tapped his temple with a thick index finger.

  He ended up beating me on the first two tests, but I beat him on the third. By the third test, I’d found a good way to distract him from studying.

  It was harder for them to get into graduate programs back then. There were quotas—and like Asians, they had to score better to get accepted.

  There was much debate over what name should go next to the race box on their entrance forms. The word “Neanderthal” had evolved into an epithet over the previous decade. It became just another N-word polite society didn’t use.

  I’d been to the clone rights rallies. I’d heard the speakers. “The French don’t call themselves Cro-Magnons, do they?” the loudspeakers boomed.

  And so the name by their box had changed every few years, as the college entrance questionnaires strove to map the shifting topography of political correctness. Every few years, a new name for the group would arise—and then a few years later sink again under the accumulated freight of prejudice heaped upon it.

  They were called Neanderthals at first, then archaics, then clones—then, ridiculously, they were called simply Koreans, since that was the country in which all but one of them had been born. Sometime after the word “Neanderthal” became an epithet, there was a movement by some militants within the group to reclaim the word, to use it within the group as a sign of strength.

  But over time, the group gradually came to be known exclusively by a name that had been used occasionally from the very beginning, a name which captured the hidden heart of their truth. Among their own kind, and finally, among the rest of the world, they came to be known simply as the ghosts. All the other names fell away, and here, finally, was a name that stayed.

  In 2033, the first ghost was drafted into the NFL. What modem weight training could do to Neanderthal physiology was nothing short of astonishing.

  He stood 5' 10" and weighed almost 360 1bs. He wore his red hair braided tight to his head, and his blue-white eyes shone out from beneath a helmet that had been specially designed to fit his skull. He spoke three languages. By 2035—the year I met David—the front line of every team in the league had one. Had to have one, to be competitive. They were the highest paid players in sports.

  As a group, they accumulated wealth at a rate far above average. They accumulated degrees, and land, and power. The men—beginning mostly during their youth, and continuing after—accumulated women, and subsequently, children. And they accumulated, finally, the attentive glare of the racists, who found them a group no longer to be ignored.

  In the 2040 Olympics, ghosts took gold in wrestling, in power lifting, in almost every event in which they were entered. Some individuals took golds in m
ultiple sports, in multiple areas.

  There was an outcry from the other athletes who could not hope to compete. There were petitions to have ghosts banned from competition. It was suggested they should have their own Olympics, distinct from the original. Lawyers for the ghosts pointed out, carefully, tactfully, that out of the fastest 400 times recorded for the 100 yard dash, 386 had been achieved by persons of at least partially sub-Saharan African descent, and nobody was suggesting they get their own Olympics.

  Of course, racist groups like the KKK and the neo-Nazis actually liked the idea and advocated just that. Blacks, too, should compete against their own kind, get their own Olympics. After that, the whole matter degenerated into chaos.

  One night, I brought a picture home from work. I turned the light on over the bed, waking him.

  “Smile,” I told him.

  “Why?” David asked.

  “Just do it.”

  He smiled. I looked at the picture. Looked at him.

  “It’s you,” I said.

  Still smiling, he snatched the picture from my hand. “What is this?”

  When he looked at the picture, his face changed. “Where’d you get this?” he snapped.

  “It’s a photocopy from one of the periodicals in the archive. From one of the early studies at Amud.”

  “Why do you think it’s me? This could be any of us.”

  “The bones,” I said.

  He crinkled up the paper and threw it across the room. “You can’t see my bones.”

  “Teeth,” I said, “are bones I can see.”

  “That’s not me.” He rolled onto his side. “I’m me.”

  And then I realized something. I realized that he’d already known he was Amud. And I realized, too, why he kept his head shaved—because there must have been another two or three of them out there, other athletes whose faces he recognized from the mirror, and shaving his head kept him distinct.

  In some complex way, I’d embarrassed him. “I’m sorry,” I said. I ran my hand across his bare shoulder, up his broad neck to his jaw. I leaned down, and nibbled on his ear. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.