The Year's Best SF 08 # 1990

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  It was Catherine who answered first. She shook her head, not quite laughing. “No, Dan! Andreas won’t hurt us! He loves us both!”

  The man came towards me. Had Andreas Lindhquist faked his death? His gait was not an old man’s gait.

  “Mr. Segel, please, calm yourself. Would I harm my own creations? Would I waste all those years of hard work, by myself and so many others?”

  I sputtered, confused. “You’ve killed people. You’ve kidnapped us. You’ve broken a hundred different laws.” I almost shouted at Catherine, “He arranged Freda’s death!” but I had a feeling that would have done me a lot more harm than good.

  The computer that disguised his voice laughed blandly. “Yes, I’ve broken laws. Whatever happens to you, Mr. Segel, I’ve already broken them. Do you think I’m afraid of what you’ll do when I release you? You will be as powerless then to harm me as you are now. You have no proof as to my identity. Oh, I’ve examined a record of your inquiries. I know you suspected me—”

  “I suspected your son.”

  “Ah. A moot point. I prefer to be called Andreas by intimate acquaintances, but to business associates, I am Gustave Lindhquist. You see, this body is that of my son—if son is the right word to use for a clone—but since his birth I took regular samples of my brain tissue, and had the appropriate components extracted from them and injected into his skull. The brain can’t be transplanted, Mr. Segel, but with care, a great deal of memory and personality can be imposed upon a young child. When my first body died, I had the brain frozen, and I continued the injections until all the tissue was used up. Whether or not I ‘am’ Andreas is a matter for philosophers and theologians. I clearly recall sitting in a crowded classroom watching a black and white television, the day Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, fifty-two years before this body was born. So call me Andreas. Humor an old man.”

  He shrugged. “The masks, the voice filters—I like a little theater. And the less you see and hear, the fewer your avenues for causing me minor annoyance. But please, don’t flatter yourself; you can never be a threat to me. I could buy every member of your entire force with half the amount I’ve earned while we’ve been speaking.

  “So forget these delusions of martyrdom. You are going to live, and for the rest of your life you will be, not only my creation, but my instrument. You are going to carry this moment away inside you, out into the world for me, like a seed, like a strange, beautiful virus, infecting and transforming everyone and everything you touch.”

  He took me by the arm and led me toward Catherine. I didn’t resist. Someone placed a winged staff in my right hand. I was prodded, arranged, adjusted, fussed over. I hardly noticed Catherine’s cheek against mine, her paw resting against my belly. I stared ahead, in a daze, trying to decide whether or not to believe I was going to live, overcome by this first real chance of hope, but too terrified of disappointment to trust it.

  There was no one but Lindhquist and his guards and assistants. I don’t know what I’d expected; an audience in evening dress? He stood a dozen meters away, glancing down at a copy of the painting (or perhaps it was the original) mounted on an easel, then calling out instructions for microscopic changes to our posture and expression. My eyes began to water, from keeping my gaze fixed; someone ran forward and dried them, then sprayed something into them which prevented a recurrence.

  Then, for several minutes, Lindhquist was silent. When he finally spoke, he said, very softly, “All we’re waiting for now is the movement of the sun, the correct positioning of your shadows. Be patient for just a little longer.”

  I don’t remember clearly what I felt in those last seconds. I was so tired, so confused, so uncertain. I do remember thinking: How will I know when the moment has passed? When Lindhquist pulls out a weapon and incinerates us, perfectly preserving the moment? Or when he pulls out a camera? Which would it be?

  Suddenly he said, “Thank you,” and turned and walked away, alone. Catherine shifted, stretched, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “Wasn’t that fun?” One of the guards took my elbow, and I realized I’d staggered.

  He hadn’t even taken a photograph. I giggled hysterically, certain now that I was going to live after all. And he hadn’t even taken a photograph. I couldn’t decide if that made him twice as insane, or if it totally redeemed his sanity.

  * * *

  I never discovered what became of Catherine. Perhaps she stayed with Lindhquist, shielded from the world by his wealth and seclusion, living a life effectively identical to that she’d lived before, in Freda Macklenburg’s basement. Give or take a few servants and luxurious villas.

  Marion and I were returned to our home, unconscious for the duration of the voyage, waking on the bed we’d left six months before. There was a lot of dust about. She took my hand and said, “Well. Here we are.” We lay there in silence for hours, then went out in search of food.

  The next day I went to the station. I proved my identity with fingerprints and DNA, and gave a full report of all that had happened.

  I had not been assumed dead. My salary had continued to be paid into my bank account, and mortgage payments deducted automatically. The department settled my claim for compensation out of court, paying me three quarters of a million dollars, and I underwent surgery to restore as much of my former appearance as possible.

  It took more than two years of rehabilitation, but now I am back on active duty. The Macklenburg case has been shelved for lack of evidence. The investigation of the kidnapping of the three of us, and Catherine’s present fate, is on the verge of going the same way; nobody doubts my account of the events, but all the evidence against Gustave Lindhquist is circumstantial. I accept that. I’m glad. I want to erase everything that Lindhquist has done to me, and an obsession with bringing him to justice is the exact opposite of the state of mind I aim to achieve. I don’t pretend to understand what he thought he was achieving by letting me live, what his insane notion of my supposed effect on the world actually entailed, but I am determined to be, in every way, the same person as I was before the experience, and thus to defeat his intentions.

  Marion is doing fine. For a while she suffered from recurring nightmares, but after seeing a therapist who specializes in detraumatizing hostages and kidnap victims, she is now every bit as relaxed and carefree as she used to be.

  I have nightmares, now and then. I wake in the early hours of the morning, shivering and sweating and crying out, unable to recall what horror I’m escaping. Andreas Lindhquist injecting samples of brain tissue into his son? Catherine blissfully closing her eyes, and thanking me for saving her life while her claws rake my body into bloody strips? Myself, trapped in The Caress; the moment of the realization infinitely, unmercifully prolonged? Perhaps; or perhaps I simply dream about my latest case—that seems much more likely.

  Everything is back to normal.

  CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  A Braver Thing

  One of the best contemporary “hard science” writers, British-born Charles Sheffield is a theoretical physicist who has worked on the American space program, and is currently chief scientist of the Earth Satellite Corporation. Sheffield is also the only person who has ever served as president of both the American Astronautical Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. His books include the bestselling non-fiction title Earthwatch, the novels Sight of Proteus, The Web Between the Worlds, Hidden Variables, My Brother’s Keeper, The McAndrew Chronicles, Between the Strokes of Night, The Nimrod Hunt, Trader’s World, and Proteus Unbound, and the collection Erasmus Magister. His most recent novels are Summertide and Divergence. His story “Out of Copyright” was in our Seventh Annual Collection. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

  Here he offers us a few melancholy thoughts about the price of progress—which may sometimes turn out to be more than you really want to spend.…

  A Braver Thing

  CHARLES SHEFFIELD

  The palace banquet is predictably dull, but while the formal speeches roll on with their oblig
atory nods to the memory of Alfred Nobel and his famous bequest, it is not considered good manners to leave or to chat with one’s neighbors. I have the time and opportunity to think about yesterday; and, at last, to decide on the speech that I will give tomorrow.

  A Nobel Prize in physics means different things to different people. If it is awarded late in life, it is often viewed by the recipient as the capstone on a career of accomplishment. Awarded early (Lawrence Bragg was a Nobel Laureate at twenty-five) it often defines the winner’s future; an early Prize may also announce to the world at large the arrival of a new titan of science (Paul Dirac was a Nobel Laureate at thirty-one).

  To read the names of the Nobel Prize winners in physics is almost to recapitulate the history of twentieth-century physics, so much so that the choice of winners often seems self-evident. No one can imagine a list without Planck, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Dirac, Fermi, Yukawa, Bardeen, Feynman, Weinberg, or the several Wilson’s (though Rutherford is, bizarrely, missing from the Physics roster, having been awarded his Nobel Prize in Chemistry).

  And yet the decision-making process is far from simple. A Nobel Prize is awarded not for a lifetime’s work, but explicitly for a particular achievement. It is given only to living persons, and as Alfred Nobel specified in his will, the prize goes to “the person who shall have made the most important discovery or invention within the field of physics.”

  It is those constraints that make the task of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences so difficult. Consider these questions:

  • What should one do when an individual is regarded by his peers as one of the leading intellectual forces of his generation, but no single accomplishment offers the clear basis for an award? John Archibald Wheeler is not a Nobel Laureate; yet he is a “physicist’s physicist,” a man who has been a creative force in half a dozen different fields.

  • How does one weight a candidate’s age? In principle, not at all. It is not a variable for consideration; but in practice every committee member knows when time is running out for older candidates, while the young competition will have opportunities for many years to come.

  • How soon after a theory or discovery is it appropriate to make an award? Certainly, one should wait long enough to be sure that the accomplishment is “most important,” as Nobel’s will stipulates; but if one waits too long, the opportunity may vanish with the candidate. Max Born was seventy-two years old when he received the Nobel Prize in 1954—for work done almost thirty years earlier on the probabilistic interpretation of the quantum mechanical wave function. Had George Gamow lived as long as Born, surely he would have shared with Penzias and Wilson the 1978 prize, for the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921, at the age of forty-two. But it cited his work on the photoelectric effect, rather than the theory of relativity, which was still considered open to question. And if his life had been no longer than that of Henry Moseley or Heinrich Hertz, Einstein would have died unhonored by the Nobel Committee.

  So much for logical choices. I conclude that the Nobel rules allow blind Atropos to play no less a part than Athene in the award process.

  My musings can afford to be quite detached. I know how the voting must have gone in my own case, since although the work for which my award is now being given was published only four years ago, already it has stimulated an unprecedented flood of other papers. Scores more are appearing every week, in every language. The popular press might seem oblivious to the fundamental new view of nature implied by the theory associated with my name, but they are very aware of its monstrous practical potential. A small test unit in orbit around Neptune is already returning data, and in the tabloids I have been dubbed Giles “Starman” Turnbull. To quote The New York Times: “The situation is unprecedented in modern physics. Not even the madcap run from the 1986 work of Müller and Bednorz to today’s room-temperature superconductors can compete with the rapid acceptance of Giles Turnbull’s theories, and the stampede to apply them. The story is scarcely begun, but already we can say this, with confidence: Professor Turnbull has given us the stars.”

  The world desperately needs heroes. Today, it seems, I am a hero. Tomorrow? We shall see.

  In a taped television interview last week, I was asked how long my ideas had been gestating before I wrote out the first version of the Turnbull Concession Theory. And can you recall a moment or an event, asked the reporter, which you would pinpoint as seminal?

  My answer must have been too vague to be satisfactory, since it did not appear in the final television clip. But in fact I could have provided a very precise location in space-time, at the start of the road that led me to Stockholm, to this dinner, and to my first (and, I will guarantee, my last) meeting with Swedish royalty.

  Eighteen years ago, it began. In late June, I was playing in a public park two miles from my home when I found a leather satchel sitting underneath a bench. It was nine o’clock at night, and nearly dark. I took the satchel home with me.

  My father’s ideas of honesty and proper behavior were and are precise to a fault. He would allow me to examine the satchel long enough to determine its owner, but not enough to explore the contents. Thus it was, sitting in the kitchen of our semi-detached council house, that I first encountered the name of Arthur Sandford Shaw, penned in careful red ink on the soft beige leather interior of the satchel. Below his name was an address on the other side of town, as far from the park as we were but in the opposite direction.

  Should we telephone Arthur Sandford Shaw’s house, tell him that we had his satchel, and advise him where he could collect it?

  No, said my father gruffly. Tomorrow is Saturday. You cycle over in the morning and return it.

  To a fifteen-year-old, even one without specific plans, a Saturday morning in June is precious. I hated my father then, for his unswerving, blinkered attitude, as I hated him for the next seventeen years. Only recently have I realized that “hate” is a word with a thousand meanings.

  I rode over the next morning. Twice I had to stop and ask my way. The Shaw house was in the Garden Village part of the town, an area that I seldom visited. The weather was preposterously hot, and at my father’s insistence I was wearing a jacket and tie. By the time that I dismounted in front of the yellow brick house with its steep red-tile roof and diamond glazed windows, sweat was trickling down my face and neck. I leaned my bike against a privet hedge that was studded with sweet-smelling and tiny white flowers, lifted the satchel out of my saddlebag, and rubbed my sleeve across my forehead.

  I peered through the double gates. They led to an oval driveway, enclosing a bed of well-kept annuals.

  I saw pansies, love-in-a-mist, delphiniums, phlox, and snapdragons. I know their names now, but of course I did not know them then.

  And if you ask me, do I truly remember this so clearly, I must say, of course I do; and will, until my last goodnight. I have that sort of memory. Lev Landau once said, “I am not a genius. Einstein and Bohr are geniuses. But I am very talented.” To my mind, Landau (1962 Nobel Laureate, and the premier Soviet physicist of his generation) was certainly a genius. But I will echo him, and say that while I am not a genius, I am certainly very talented. My memory in particular has always been unusually precise and complete.

  The sides of the drive curved symmetrically around to meet at a brown-and-white painted front door. I followed the edge of the gravel as far as the front step, and there I hesitated.

  For my age, I was not lacking in self-confidence. I had surveyed the students in my school, and seen nothing there to produce discomfort. It was clear to me that I was mentally far superior to all of them, and the uneasy attitude of my teachers was evidence—to me, at any rate—that they agreed with my assessment.

  But this place overwhelmed me. And not just with the size of the house, though that was six times as big as the one that I lived in. I had seen other big houses; far more disconcerting were the trained climbing roses and espaliered fruit trees, the weed-fre
e lawn, the bird-feeders, and the height, texture and improbable but right color balance within the flower beds. The garden was so carefully structured that it seemed a logical extension of the building at its center. For the first time, I realized that a garden could comprise more than a hodge-podge of grass and straggly flowers.

  So I hesitated. And before I could summon my resolve and lift the brass knocker, the door opened.

  A woman stood there. At five feet five, she matched my height exactly. She smiled at me, eye to eye.

  Did I say that the road to Stockholm began when I found the satchel? I was wrong. It began with that smile.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  The voice was one that I still thought of as “posh,” high-pitched and musical, with clear vowels. The woman was smiling again, straight white teeth and a broad mouth in a high-cheekboned face framed by curly, ash-blond hair. I can see that face before me now, and I know intellectually that she was thirty-five years old. But on that day I could not guess her age to within fifteen years. She could have been twenty, or thirty, or fifty, and it would have made no difference. She was wearing a pale-blue blouse with full sleeves, secured at the top with a mother-of-pearl brooch and tucked into a grey wool skirt that descended to mid-calf. On her feet she wore low-heeled tan shoes, and no stockings.

  I found my voice.

  “I’ve brought this back.” I held out the satchel, my defense against witchcraft.

  “So I see.” She took it from me. “Drat that boy, I doubt he even knows he lost it. I’m Marion Shaw. Come in.”

  It was an order. I closed the door behind me and found myself following her along a hall that passed another open door on the left. As we approached, a piano started playing rapid staccato triplets, and I saw a red-haired girl crouched over the keyboard of a baby grand.