The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  A long silence; but not deep, only as deep as the soft drum of the ship’s systems, steady and unconscious as the circulation of the blood.

  Another voice.

  “They were thoughts in the mind; what else had they ever been? So they could be in Ve and at the brown planet, and desiring flesh and entire spirit, and illusion and reality, all at once, as they’d always been. When he remembered this, his confusion and fear ceased, for he knew that they couldn’t be lost.”

  “They got lost. But they found the way,” said another voice, soft above the hum and hushing of the ship’s systems, in the warm fresh air and light inside the solid walls and hulls.

  Only nine voices had spoken, and they looked for the tenth; but the tenth had gone to sleep, thumb in mouth.

  “That story was told and is yet to be told,” the mother said. “Go on. I’ll churten here with Rig.”

  They left those two by the fire, and went to the bridge, and then to the hatches to invite on board a crowd of anxious scientists, engineers, and officials of Ve Port and the Ekumen, whose instruments had been assuring them that the Shoby had vanished, forty-four minutes ago, into nonexistence, into silence. “What happened?” they asked. “What happened?” And the Shobies looked at one another and said, “Well, it’s quite a story.…”

  GREG EGAN

  The Caress

  This was a good year for hot new Australian writer Greg Egan. Although he’s been publishing for a year or two already, 1990 was the year when Egan suddenly seemed to be turning up everywhere with high-quality stories. In fact, Egan published several strong stories in 1990, any one of which might well have been worthy of inclusion in a “Best” anthology in another year. I finally narrowed the field down to two stories, though—“Learning to Be Me,” from Interzone, which appears elsewhere in this anthology, and the story that follows, my favorite Egan this year, the taut, suspenseful, and darkly powerful story of a high-tech future cop attempting, against heavy odds, to prevent a bizarre and unsettling crime …

  Born in 1961, Greg Egan lives in Australia, and to date has made a number of sales to Interzone and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, as well as to Pulphouse, Analog, The Year’s Best Fantasy, and elsewhere. He currently works part-time programming computers for a Perth hospital, but I doubt if that will remain true for long—my guess is that he is on his way, and with considerable velocity, to establishing a career for himself as a full-time writer … and probably a formidable reputation as well.

  The Caress

  GREG EGAN

  Two smells hit me when I kicked down the door: death, and the scent of an animal.

  A man who passed the house each day had phoned us, anonymously; worried by the sight of a broken window left unrepaired, he’d knocked on the front door with no results. On his way to the back door, he’d glimpsed blood on a kitchen wall through a gap in the curtains.

  The place had been ransacked; all that remained downstairs were the drag marks on the carpet from the heaviest furniture. The woman in the kitchen, mid fifties, throat slit, had been dead for at least a week.

  My helmet was filing sound and vision, but it couldn’t record the animal smell. The correct procedure was to make a verbal comment, but I didn’t say a word. Why? Call it a vestigial need for independence. Soon they’ll be logging our brain waves, our heart beats, who knows what, and all of it subpoenable. “Detective Segel, the evidence shows that you experienced a penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate response?”

  Upstairs was a mess. Clothes scattered in the bedroom. Books, CDs, papers, upturned drawers, spread across the floor of the study. Medical texts. In one corner, piles of CD periodicals stood out from the jumble by their jackets’ uniformity: The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Embryology. A framed scroll hung on the wall, awarding the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to Freda Anne Macklenburg in the year two thousand and twenty-three. The desktop had dust-free spaces shaped like a monitor and a keyboard. I noticed a wall outlet with a pilot light; the switch was down but the light was dead. The room light wasn’t working; ditto elsewhere.

  Back on the ground floor, I found a door behind the stairs, presumably leading to a basement. Locked. I hesitated. Entering the house I’d had no choice but to force my way in; here, though, I was on shakier legal ground. I hadn’t searched thoroughly for keys, and I had no clear reason to believe it was urgent to get into the basement.

  But what would one more broken door change? Cops have been sued for failing to wipe their boots clean on the doormat. If a citizen wants to screw you, they’ll find a reason, even if you came in on your knees, waving a handful of warrants, and saved their whole family from torture and death.

  No room to kick, so I punched out the lock. The smell had me gagging, but it was the excess, the concentration, that was overwhelming; the scent in itself wasn’t foul. Upstairs, seeing medical books, I’d thought of guinea pigs, rats and mice, but this was no stink of caged rodents.

  I switched on the torch in my helmet and moved quickly down the narrow concrete steps. Over my head was a thick, square pipe. An air-conditioning duct? That made sense; the house couldn’t normally smell the way it did, but with the power cut off to a basement air conditioner—

  The torch beam showed a shelving unit, decorated with trinkets and potted plants. A TV set. Landscape paintings on the wall. A pile of straw on the concrete floor. Curled on the straw, the powerful body of a leopard, lungs visibly laboring, but otherwise still.

  When the beam fell upon a tangle of auburn hair, I thought, it’s chewing on a severed human head. I continued to approach, expecting, hoping, that by disturbing the feeding animal I could provoke it into attacking me. I was carrying a weapon that could have spattered it into a fine mist of blood and gristle, an outcome which would have involved me in a great deal less tedium and bureaucracy than dealing with it alive. I directed the light toward its head again, and realized that I’d been mistaken; it wasn’t chewing anything, its head was hidden, tucked away, and the human head was simply—

  Wrong again. The human head was simply joined to the leopard’s body. Its human neck took on fur and spots and merged with the leopard’s shoulders.

  I squatted down beside it, thinking, above all else, what those claws could do to me if my attention lapsed. The head was a woman’s. Frowning. Apparently asleep. I placed one hand below her nostrils, and felt the air blast out in time with the heavings of the leopard’s great chest. That, more than the smooth transition of the skin, made the union real for me.

  I explored the rest of the room. There was a pit in one corner that turned out to be a toilet bowl sunk into the floor. I put my foot on a nearby pedal, and the bowl flushed from a hidden cistern. There was an upright freezer, standing in a puddle of water. I opened it to find a rack containing thirty-five small plastic vials. Every one of them bore smeared red letters, spelling out the word SPOILED. Temperature sensitive dye.

  I returned to the leopard woman. Asleep? Feigning sleep? Sick? Comatose? I patted her on the cheek, and not gently. The skin seemed hot, but I had no idea what her temperature ought to be. I shook her by one shoulder, this time with a little more respect, as if waking her by touching the leopard part might somehow be more dangerous. No effect.

  Then I stood up, fought back a sigh of irritation (Psych latch on to all your little noises; I’ve been grilled for hours over such things as an injudicious whoop of triumph), and called for an ambulance.

  * * *

  I should have known better than to hope that that would be the end of my problems. I had to physically obstruct the stairway to stop the ambulance men from retreating. One of them puked. Then they refused to put her on the stretcher unless I promised to ride with her to the hospital. She was only about two meters long, excluding the tail, but must have weighed a hundred and fifty kilos, and it took the three of us to get her up the awkward stairs.

  We covered her compl
etely with a sheet before leaving the house, and I took the trouble to arrange it to keep it from revealing the shape beneath. A small crowd had gathered outside, the usual motley collection of voyeurs. The forensic team arrived just then, but I’d already told them everything by radio.

  At the Casualty Department of St Dominic’s, doctor after doctor took one look under the sheet and then fled, some muttering half-baked excuses, most not bothering. I was about to lose my temper when the fifth one I cornered, a young woman, turned pale but kept her ground. After poking and pinching and shining a torch into the leopard woman’s forced-open eyes, Dr. Muriel Beatty (from her name badge) announced, “She’s in a coma,” and started extracting details from me. When I’d told her everything, I squeezed in some questions of my own.

  “How would someone do this? Gene splicing? Transplant surgery?”

  “I doubt it was either. More likely she’s a chimera.”

  I frowned. “That’s some kind of mythical—”

  “Yes, but it’s also a bioengineering term. You can physically mix the cells of two genetically distinct early embryos, and obtain a blastocyst that will develop into a single organism. If they’re both of the same species, there’s a very high success rate; for different species it’s trickier. People made crude sheep/goat chimeras as far back as the nineteen sixties, but I’ve read nothing new on the subject for five or ten years. I would have said it was no longer being seriously pursued. Let alone pursued with humans.” She stared down at her patient with unease and fascination. “I wouldn’t know how they guaranteed such a sharp distinction between the head and the body; a thousand times more effort has gone into this than just stirring two clumps of cells together. I guess you could say it was something half-way between fetal transplant surgery and chimerization. And there must have been genetic manipulation as well, to smooth out the biochemical differences.” She laughed drily. “So both your suggestions I dismissed just then were probably partly right. Of course!”

  “What?”

  “No wonder she’s in a coma! That freezer full of vials you mentioned—she probably needs an external supply for half a dozen hormones that are insufficiently active across species. Can I arrange for someone to go to the house and look through the dead woman’s papers? We need to know exactly what those vials contained. Even if she made it up herself from off-the-shelf sources, we might be able to find the recipe—but chances are she had a contract with a biotechnology company for a regular, pre-mixed supply. So if we can find, say, an invoice with a product reference number, that would be the quickest, surest way to get this patient what she needs to stay alive.”

  I agreed, and accompanied a lab technician back to the house, but he found nothing of use in the study, or the basement. After talking it over with Muriel Beatty on the phone, I started ringing local biotech companies, quoting the deceased woman’s name and address. Several people said they’d heard of Dr. Macklenburg, but not as a customer. The fifteenth call produced results—deliveries for a company called Applied Veterinary Research had been sent to Macklenburg’s address—and with a combination of threats and smooth talking (such as inventing an order number they could quote on their invoice), I managed to extract a promise that a batch of the “Applied Veterinary Research” preparation would be made up at once and rushed to St Dominic’s.

  Burglars do switch off the power sometimes, in the hope of disabling those (very rare) security devices that don’t have battery back-up, but the house hadn’t been broken into; the scattered glass from the window fell, in an undisturbed pattern, onto carpet where a sofa had left clear indentations. The fools had forgotten to break a window until after they’d taken the furniture. People do throw out invoices, but Macklenburg had kept all her videophone, water, gas, and electricity bills for the last five years. So, it looked like somebody had known about the chimera and wanted it dead, without wishing to be totally obvious, yet without being professional enough to manage anything subtler, or more certain.

  I arranged for the chimera to be guarded. Probably a good idea anyway, to keep the media at bay when they found out about her.

  Back in my office, I did a search of medical literature by Macklenburg, and found her name on only half a dozen papers. All were more than twenty years old. All were concerned with embryology, though (to the extent that I could understand the jargon-laden abstracts, full of “zonae pellucidae” and “polar bodies”) none were explicitly about chimeras.

  The papers were all from one place; the Early Human Development Laboratory at St Andrew’s Hospital. After some standard brush-offs from secretaries and assistants, I managed to get myself put through to one of Macklenburg’s one time co-authors, a Dr. Henry Feingold, who looked rather old and frail. News of Macklenburg’s death produced a wistful sigh, but no visible shock or distress.

  “Freda left us back in ’32 or ’33. I’ve hardly set eyes on her since, except at the occasional conference.”

  “Where did she go to from St Andrew’s?”

  “Something in industry. She was rather vague about it. I’m not sure that she had a definite appointment lined up.”

  “Why did she resign?”

  He shrugged. “Sick of the conditions here. Low pay, limited resources, bureaucratic restrictions, ethics committees. Some people learn to live with all that, some don’t.”

  “Would you know anything about her work, her particular research interests, after she left?”

  “I don’t know that she did much research. She seemed to have stopped publishing, so I really couldn’t say what she was up to.”

  Shortly after that (with unusual speed), clearance came through to access her taxation records. Since ’35 she had been self-employed as a “freelance biotechnology consultant”; whatever that meant, it had provided her with a seven-figure income for the past fifteen years. There were at least a hundred different company names listed by her as sources of revenue. I rang the first one and found myself talking to an answering machine. It was after seven. I rang St Dominic’s, and learnt that the chimera was still unconscious, but doing fine; the hormone mixture had arrived, and Muriel Beatty had located a veterinarian at the university with some relevant experience. So I swallowed my deprimers and went home.

  * * *

  The surest sign that I’m not fully down is the frustration I feel when opening my own front door. It’s too bland, too easy: inserting three keys and touching my thumb to the scanner. Nothing inside is going to be dangerous or challenging. The deprimers are meant to work in five minutes. Some nights it’s more like five hours.

  Marion was watching TV, and called out, “Hi Dan.”

  I stood in the living room doorway. “Hi. How was your day?” She works in a child care center, which is my idea of a high-stress occupation. She shrugged. “Ordinary. How was yours?”

  Something on the TV screen caught my eye. I swore for about a minute, mostly cursing a certain communications officer who I knew was responsible, though I couldn’t have proved it. “How was my day? You’re looking at it.” The TV was showing part of my helmet log; the basement, my discovery of the chimera.

  Marion said, “Ah. I was going to ask if you knew who the cop was.”

  “And you know what I’ll be doing tomorrow? Trying to make sense of a few thousand phone calls from people who’ve seen this and decided they have something useful to say about it.”

  “That poor girl. Is she going to be okay?”

  “I think so.”

  They played Muriel Beatty’s speculations, again from my point of view, then cut to a couple of pocket experts who debated the fine points of chimerism while an interviewer did his best to drag in spurious references to everything from Greek mythology to The Island of Doctor Moreau.

  I said, “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

  * * *

  I woke at half past one, shaking and whimpering. Marion was already awake, trying to calm me down. Lately I’d been suffering a lot from delayed reactions like this. A few months earlier, two nights
after a particularly brutal assault case, I’d been distraught and incoherent for hours.

  On duty, we are what’s called “primed.” A mixture of drugs heightens various physiological and emotional responses, and suppresses others. Sharpens our reflexes. Keeps us calm and rational. Supposedly improves our judgment. (The media like to say that the drugs make us more aggressive, but that’s garbage; why would the force intentionally create trigger-happy cops? Swift decisions and swift actions are the opposite of dumb brutality.)

  Off duty, we are “deprimed.” That’s meant to make us the way we would be if we’d never taken the priming drugs. (A hazy concept, I have to admit. As if we’d never taken the priming drugs, and never spent the day at work? Or, as if we’d seen and done the very same things, without the primers to help us cope?)

  Sometimes this seesaw works smoothly. Sometimes it fucks up.

  I wanted to describe to Marion how I felt about the chimera. I wanted to talk about my fear and revulsion and pity and anger. All I could do was make unhappy noises. No words. She didn’t say anything, she just held me, her long fingers cool on the burning skin of my face and chest.

  When I finally exhausted myself into something approaching peace, I managed to speak. I whispered, “Why do you stay with me? Why do you put up with this?”

  She turned away from me and said, “I’m tired. Go to sleep.”

  * * *

  I enrolled for the force at the age of twelve. I continued my normal education, but that’s when you have to start the course of growth factor injections, and weekend and vacation training, if you want to qualify for active duty. (It wasn’t an irreversible obligation; I could have chosen a different career later, and paid off what had been invested in me at a hundred dollars or so a week over the next thirty years. Or, I could have failed the psychological tests, and been dropped without owing a cent. The tests before you even begin, however, tend to weed out anyone who’s likely to do either.) It makes sense; rather than limiting recruitment to men and women meeting certain physical criteria, candidates are chosen according to intelligence and attitude, and then the secondary, but useful, characteristics of size, strength, and agility, are provided artificially.