Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  “No. It’s Perri whose time is being wasted.”

  “I’m sorry about that. There was never any intention that she be charged with anything. I had no idea she’d take a genemod plant.”

  “You merely took her fetal tissue,” Dee said.

  “Yes. It’s the best tissue for human genetic engineering, you know. Stem cells are malleable, the amniotic sac grows organs well, the placenta . . . but I don’t think you’re interested in scientific details. It should have been a mutual gain. Perri wanted to abort, I wanted the tissue.”

  “To create plant ‘art’ that has her eyes.”

  “No,” Victor said. He shifted on the back seat of the car. “I don’t dabble in decorative perversity. I sell the girls’ fetal tissue to whoever can pay well for it. Our real work requires money. No, don’t ask questions now. I want to show you.” And, incredibly, he leaned into a corner of the car and went to sleep.

  Dee tested the door, her bonds, the seat belt. Nothing gave. Victor snored softly. She could probably kick him with both feet, but belted in like this, it would be a kick so feeble as to be pointless. Slack, his face looked oddly older. Forties, maybe. Even through her fear and outrage, he puzzled her. Something was off about him. He didn’t seem like any criminal she’d ever seen, not even the smooth-talking, easy-sleeping sociopaths.

  The car stopped. Victor woke and carried Dee along a deserted dock. A remote boat waited, barely big enough for the two of them. Victor untied the mooring lines and pressed a hand-held, and the boat took off silently across the dark water.

  The night was cloudy. Dee could see various lights, but she had no idea what they were. Ships? Land? Buoys? A wind blew and the sea became choppy. Water sloshed into the boat. Dee felt herself growing seasick.

  Victor must have known the signs. Expertly he held her head over the side while she vomited. “Almost there!” he called over the rising wind. Dee threw up again.

  The storm looked ready to break in earnest by the time they drew up alongside what seemed to her a huge ship, completely dark. A metal basket was lowered and Victor dumped her into it. Dee hated feeling helpless. Almost she would rather be knocked out than trussed up and hauled in like mackerel or cod.

  She got her wish. Someone on deck leaned into the metal basket and slapped a patch onto her neck. No way to dislodge it, and in ten seconds everything disappeared.

  She woke in a narrow cabin as steady as if on land. Victor, looking much more rested, sat in a chair beside her bunk. Dee struggled for the dignity of sitting upright. “Where are we?”

  “At sea. The storm passed while you were out. It’s a lovely day.” He lifted her and carried her into a narrow corridor where a wheelchair waited. The blanket slipped off her. Her pajamas smelled, but at least she’d been wearing them. What if she’d been naked when he kidnapped her? And what about her expensive, carefully installed nerve gas? This was the second time it had been disabled. Apparently all of underground New York had become security experts.

  “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  “Yes. Just a minute.” He wheeled her to another door, pushed the whole chair in, and closed the door.

  Cursing, Dee stood up, still bound at wrists and ankles. She managed to get her pjs down and everything accomplished, after which there was no choice except to kick at the door.

  “It’s less stuffy on deck,” Victor said cheerfully. Dee scowled at him.

  It was less stuffy on deck. Also painfully bright. Sunlight glared off a blue ocean. If there hadn’t been a breeze, the heat would have been unbearable. Dee said, “I can’t stay out here long. I assume that you have on sunblock.”

  “So do you. Put on before you woke up. Anyway, we’re almost there.”

  Where? Nothing but water in every direction. Dee folded her arms and said nothing. She wasn’t going to cooperate in his elaborate games. If he killed her, he killed her.

  She knew she wasn’t really indifferent to death.

  No one else appeared on this section of deck. Nor were the abundant plants that Perri had described anywhere in evidence. Maybe Victor thought that Dee, too, would steal one.

  The ship moved over the ocean, although without reference points Dee had no idea how fast it was traveling. After about twenty minutes, Victor, who’d been lounging at the railing, straightened. “There. Four o’clock.”

  At first Dee saw nothing. Then she did. The sea was changing color, from blue to a dense, oily black. She said, “An oil spill?”

  “I wish.”

  They drew closer. The blackness grew, until Dee could see it was actually a deep purple. It seemed to extend to the horizon. The ship moved a short way into the purple and stopped.

  Victor lowered a grapple-looking thing over the side. “We can’t go in any farther without risk to the screws. But aerial surveillance shows that the bloom already covers sixty thousand square miles. Do you have any idea how big that is, Dee? Half the size of New Mexico. Here, look.”

  He pulled up the grappler and held it toward her. It dripped what looked to Dee like seaweed; she was no marine expert.

  “It’s not ordinary seaweed,” Victor said. “It’s genemod. Made from altered bacteria. It replicates at ideal bacterial rate, which is to say it doubles every twenty minutes. It has no natural enemies. Nothing eats it. But it blocks sunlight almost totally, and so everything underneath it dies. Do you understand about the food chain, Dee? Do you know what happens if the oceans die?”

  “Who made it?”

  “Unknown. Best guess is that it was an accident, a mistake. It might have been designed to blanket Third World estuary breeding grounds of malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Or not. Anyway, it’s out.” Victor studied the dripping purple mass and Dee studied Victor. His expression was sad and thoughtful, not at all what she’d expected. How good an actor was he?

  She said, “Did you put a genemod plant in my apartment to kill me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No. But I can guess.”

  “Who?”

  He laid the seaweed on the deck. “What would have happened if that genemod plant had succeeded in killing you, Dee?”

  She snapped, “Don’t play games with me. If it had killed me, I’d be dead.”

  “Right. Then what? Eventually somebody would have broken into your apartment, if only because your corpse would have begun to smell. A friend, your landlord, a neighbor . . . somebody. They’d have called the cops. The media monitor police reports, and genemod hysteria grows worse all the time. You’d have been a news sensation: “Ex-Cop Murdered In Bed By Killer Engineered Plant!’ Full re-creation sims on every channel.”

  “Mike din’t send that plant to kill you in your apartment,” Gum had said. “T’other side did. It was in all the newspapers. You was dead.”

  Victor pulled a vial from his pocket. “The publicity would have aided anti-genemod funding as well as antigenemod feeling. It could have been GMFA supporters, it could have been one of the more fanatic of those activist groups you’ve gotten so fond of, it could have been a corporation that gains from public hysteria by keeping genemod products illegal.”

  “The government wouldn’t—”

  “I don’t think so, either. Watch, Dee.” Victor unstoppered the vial and poured it over the purple seaweed on the deck.

  “I don’t see anything.” She was still shaken over Victor’s casual list of people who might have murdered her.

  “Wait a bit.”

  The purple seaweed began to dissolve. Only one corner of the mass, and then the reaction stopped.

  “It’s a genemod bacteria,” Victor said. “It eats the bloom. Unfortunately, the toxins emitted by the dying bloom cells kill the eaters. But it’s a start. Now that we have the right organism, we can go on tailoring it until it can successfully eliminate the entire bloom.”

  Dee stared at the seaweed. “And you created that? Here?”

  “Yes. We did. Because we’re not allowed to create it onshore.
”

  “Victor, that doesn’t make sense. Something like this, that could help clean up the ocean.”

  “And that will in turn replicate and, maybe, create its own crisis. Who knows the effect of releasing this unknown bacteria into the sea? That’s what the activists say, and they’re right. Only I happen to think that once the pomegranate seeds are eaten, the only cure is more genetically engineered pomegranate seeds.”

  “What? ‘Pomegranates’?”

  “Forget it. The point is, this is vital work that can’t go forward if I, and people like me, have to spend half our time evading tracking by people like you. And like the FBI, of course.”

  She shifted in her wheelchair. The deadly sunlight was growing hotter. Victor noticed and took the handles of her chair, pushing it along the deck. “But, Victor, even if the United States won’t or can’t let you do this genemod work, then surely other countries—the oceans affect everybody!”

  “True. And so does international trade. The Keller Pact forbids any trade with any country trafficking in genetically modified organisms . . . remember? A very popular piece of legislation in an election year. Even so, we get some surreptitious funding from a few foreign companies. Not much.”

  “But it isn’t going to stop you.”

  “I can’t let it stop me. Here you are.”

  They’d reached a section of deck with a remote boat winched up level with the railing. Victor dumped Dee into the tiny boat and pressed a button. The boat began to lower.

  “Wait!” Dee called, panicked. “I can’t take that much sunlight all the way back—the ultraviolet—”

  “Yes, you can,” Victor called down over the railing. “Your sunblock is genetically engineered. Good-bye, Demetria Stavros. Stop destroying the abundance that mankind creates in its new gardens and fields.”

  The boat detached itself from the winch, turned itself around, and took off. On this flat sea Dee wasn’t sick. She noted the position of the sun; with that and the time elapsed before landing, maybe she could estimate where the ship had been. Although by that time, it would have already moved.

  The involuntary boat ride was a long one. Dee had plenty of time to think.

  When she entered the Cotsworth visitors’ room, Eliot was already seated with Perri.

  Dee scowled; this was supposed to be her time with her sister, not that self-righteous prick Eliot’s. But then Dee looked again at Perri. Still thin, still sunken-eyed, but now Perri’s amazing blue-green eyes glowed. Something had happened.

  “Dee!” Perri said from her side of the table. “Eliot and I are engaged!”

  Dee froze.

  “Aren’t you going to congratulate us?” Eliot said. She recognized the battle call in his voice.

  “On what? Another screw-up for Perri, this time dragging you along with it? Or are you the one leading? You two can never make it work, Eliot, and you at least should have the experience and intelligence to know that.”

  “And why can’t we make it?” Eliot asked in his attorney voice. Calm. Seeking information. Deceptive. “You’re too different! God, you’re an upcoming defense lawyer and Perri is—”

  “A criminal?” Eliot said. “A screw-up? That’s what you just called her. Your own sister. What are you afraid of, Dee?”

  “ ‘Afraid’ my ass! Don’t try any lawyer rhetoric on me!”

  “You are afraid. You’re terrified. You think you’ll lose her, and then whose life will you periodically and heroically rescue from ruin to justify your own life?”

  “You don’t know anything about—”

  “I know you’ve done it to Perri all her life.”

  “You think you—”

  “Stop!” Perri shouted, loud enough that nearby inmates and their visitors stopped talking and turned to stare. The guard started toward them.

  “Stop, Perri repeated, more calmly. “Dee, this isn’t your decision. It’s mine. Eliot, be quiet. I can justify my own decisions to my sister.”

  The guard said, “Problem here, counselor?”

  “No,” Eliot said. “Thank you.”

  Perri said, “Dee, I wrote you something. Take it. And I’m going to marry Eliot.” She held out a small, tightly folded piece of paper toward Dee. On her left hand sparkled a diamond ring.

  “Don’t tell me I can’t wear the ring in here without somebody stealing it,” Perri said. “I know that. Eliot will take it with him. But in another three months I’ll be out, if I keep my nose clean. I can last that long. I can do this, Dee.”

  But I can’t, Dee thought, and was suddenly afraid to know what she meant. She turned away. “I’m going, Perri. I’ll see you next time.”

  “All right,” Perri said softly. Not panicking at Dee’s anger, not pleading with her to stay. Not needing her.

  Dee passed through the tedious series of prison gates, checkpoints, locked areas. Outside, she walked toward the train. The air wasn’t too bad today, but it was very hot. She thought of Victor, out on the open sea, working to engineer an organism to stop the death of the oceans. To bring more changes, but different ones, known in purpose but not in consequence. How long would it take? A hunnert years, Gum had rambled. But even Dee, no scientist, knew that a hundred years would be far too long.

  She unfolded Perri’s note. To Dee’s surprise, it was a poem:

  Another love. I am weary of

  The starts of things. Too many springs,

  Too little winter make a bitter

  Everlasting yellow-green.

  Stop. Enough. Let harvest come.

  She hadn’t even known that Perri wrote poetry.

  Waiting for the train, Dee put her hands over her face. She didn’t know who was right. Victor, changing whole ecologies like some sort of god. Paula’s friends, preserving through destruction. The FBI, blindly enforcing a popular, vindictive law. Which one was bitter spring, which one healing winter? Dee couldn’t tell. No more than she could tell if Eliot’s terrible accusations about her were true. When was love actually destruction? Could he be so sure that his love for Perri was not?

  There was a raid tonight, a hit on a farm in Pennsylvania that engineered biomodified trees to increase photosynthesis capacity. Some of the trees, Dee’s group leader had said, incorporated human genes as well as plant genes. Dee didn’t know if that was true, either. She knew only one thing for sure.

  She wasn’t going on the raid. Not tonight, not ever.

  Let harvest come.

  SUN-CLOUD

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  TO HUMAN EYES, THE system would have been extraordinary:

  The single, giant Sun was so vast that its crimson flesh would have embraced all of Sol’s scattered planets. Across its surface, glistening vacuoles swarmed, each larger than Sol itself.

  There was a planet.

  It was a ball of rock no larger than a small asteroid. It skimmed the Sun’s immense photosphere, bathed in ruddy warmth. It was coated with air, a thick sea.

  The world-ocean teemed with life.

  Beyond the Sun’s dim glow, the sky was utterly dark.

  She rose to the Surface. Thick water slid smoothly from her carapace.

  She let her impeller-corpuscles dissociate briefly; they swam free of her main corpus in a fast, darting shoal, feeding eagerly, reveling in their brief liberty.

  She lifted optically sensitive corpuscles to the smoky sky. The Sun was a roof over the world, its surface pocked by huge dark pits.

  She was called Sun-Cloud: for, at her Coalescence, a cloud of brilliant white light had been observed, blossoming over the Sun’s huge, scarred face.

  Sun-Cloud was seeking her sister, the one called Orange-Dawn.

  Sun-Cloud raised a lantern-corpuscle. The subordinate creature soon tired and began sending quiet chemical-complaints through her corpus; but she ignored them and waited, patiently, as her sphere of lantern light rolled out, spreading like a liquid over the oleaginous Surface.

  The light moved slowly enough for a human eye to follow.

/>   Sun-Cloud’s people were not like humans.

  Here, people assembled from specialized schools of corpuscles: mentalizers, impellers, lanterns, structurals, others. Obeying their own miniature imperatives of life and death, individual corpuscles would leave the aggregate corpus and return to their fish-like shoals, to feed, breed, die. But others would join, and the pattern of the whole could persist, for a time.

  Still, Sun-Cloud’s lifespan was finite. As the cycle of corpuscle renewal wore on, her pattern would degrade, mutate.

  Like most sentient races, Sun-Cloud’s people sustained comforting myths of immortality.

  And, like most races, there was a minority who rejected such myths.

  Sun-Cloud returned to the Ocean’s deep belly.

  The light here was complex and uncertain. Above Sun-Cloud the daylight was already dimming. And below her, from the Deep at the heart of the world, the glow of a billion lantern-corpuscles glimmered up, white and pure.

  Sun-Cloud watched as Cold-Current ascended toward her.

  They were going to discuss Sun-Cloud’s sister, Orange-Dawn. Orange-Dawn was a problem.

  Cold-Current was a lenticular assemblage of corpuscles twice Sun-Cloud’s size, who nevertheless rose with an awesome unity. The ranks of impellers at Cold-Current’s rim churned at the thick waters of the Ocean, their small cilia vibrating so rapidly that they were blue-shifted.

  The Song suffused the waters around Sun-Cloud, as it always did; but as Cold-Current lifted away from the Deep the complex harmonics of the Song changed, subtly.

  Sun-Cloud, awed, shrank in on herself, her structural corpuscles pushing in toward their sisters at her swarming core. Sun-Cloud knew that she herself contributed but little, a few minor overtones, to the rich assonance of the Song. How must it be to be so grand, so powerful, that one’s absence left the Song—the huge, world-girdling Song itself—audibly lacking in richness?

  Cold-Current hovered; a bank of optic-corpuscles swiveled, focusing on Sun-Cloud. “You know why I asked to meet you,” she said.