The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II

by David G. Hartwell

  “What do you do when you’re not busy being a Shaper?” she asked him.

  “The same things most people do – eat, drink, sleep, talk, visit friends and not-friends, visit places, read . . .”

  “Are you a forgiving man?”

  “Sometimes. Why?”

  “Then forgive me. I argued with a woman today, a woman named De Ville.”

  “What about?”

  “You – and she accused me of such things it were better my mother had not born me. Are you going to marry her?”

  “No, marriage is like alchemy. It served an important purpose once, but I hardly feel it’s here to stay.”

  “Good.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I gave her a clinic referral card that said, ‘Diagnosis: Bitch. Prescription: Drug therapy and a tight gag.’”

  “Oh,” said Render, showing interest.

  “She tore it up and threw it in my face.”

  “I wonder why?”

  She shrugged, smiled, made a gridwork on the tablecloth.

  “‘Fathers and elders, I ponder,’” sighed Render, “‘what is hell?’”

  “‘I maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love,’ ” she finished. “Was Dostoevsky right?”

  “I doubt it. I’d put him into group therapy myself. That’d be real hell for him – with all those people acting like his characters and enjoying it so.”

  Render put down his cup and pushed his chair away from the table.

  “I suppose you must be going now?”

  “I really should,” said Render.

  “And I can’t interest you in food?”

  “No.”

  She stood.

  “Okay, I’ll get my coat.”

  “I could drive back myself and just set the car to return.”

  “No! I’m frightened by the notion of empty cars driving around the city. I’d feel the thing was haunted for the next two and a half weeks.

  “Besides,” she said, passing through the archway, “you promised me Winchester Cathedral.”

  “You want to do it today?”

  “If you can be persuaded.”

  As Render stood deciding, Sigmund rose to his feet. He stood directly before him and stared upward into his eyes. He opened his mouth and closed it, several times, but no sounds emerged. Then he turned away and left the room.

  “No,” Eileen’s voice came back, “you will stay here until I return.”

  Render picked up his coat and put it on, stuffing the medkit into the far pocket.

  As they walked up the hall toward the elevator Render thought he heard a very faint and very distant howling sound.

  In this place, of all places, Render knew he was the master of all things.

  He was at home on those alien worlds, without time, those worlds where flowers copulate and the stars do battle in the heavens, falling at last to the ground, bleeding, like so many split and shattered chalices, and the seas part to reveal stairways leading down, and arms emerge from caverns, waving torches that flame like liquid faces – a midwinter night’s nightmare, summer go a-begging, Render knew – for he had visited those worlds on a professional basis for the better part of a decade. With the crooking of a finger he could isolate the sorcerers, bring them to trial for treason against the realm – aye, and he could execute them, could appoint their successors.

  Fortunately, this trip was only a courtesy call . . .

  He moved forward through the glade, seeking her.

  He could feel her awakening presence all about him.

  He pushed through the branches, stood beside the lake. It was cold, blue, and bottomless, the lake, reflecting that slender willow which had become the station of her arrival.

  “Eileen!”

  The willow swayed toward him, swayed away.

  “Eileen! Come forth!”

  Leaves fell, floated upon the lake, disturbed its mirror-like placidity, distorted the reflections.

  “Eileen?”

  All the leaves yellowed at once then dropped down into the water. The tree ceased its swaying. There was a strange sound in the darkening sky, like the humming of high wires on a cold day.

  Suddenly there was a double file of moons passing through the heavens.

  Render selected one, reached up and pressed it. The others vanished as he did so, and the world brightened, the humming went out of the air.

  He circled the lake to gain a subjective respite from the rejection-action and his counter to it. He moved up along an aisle of pines toward the place where he wanted the cathedral to occur. Birds sang now in the trees. The wind came softly by him. He felt her presence quite strongly.

  “Here, Eileen. Here.”

  She walked beside him then, green silk, hair of bronze, eyes of molten emerald; she wore an emerald in her forehead. She walked in green slippers over the pine needles, saying: “What happened?”

  “You were afraid.”

  “Why?”

  “Perhaps you fear the cathedral. Are you a witch?” he smiled.

  “Yes, but it’s my day off.”

  He laughed, and he took her arm, and they rounded an island of foliage, and there was the cathedral reconstructed on a grassy rise, pushing its way above them and above the trees, climbing into the middle air, breathing out organ notes, reflecting a stray ray of sunlight from a plane of glass.

  “Hold tight to the world,” he said. “Here comes the guided tour.” They moved forward and entered.

  “‘. . . With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge tree trunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces,’” he said. “ – Got that from the guidebook. This is the north transept . . .”

  “‘Greensleeves,’ ” she said, “the organ is playing ‘Greensleeves.’”

  “So it is. You can’t blame me for that though. – Observe the scalloped capitals – ”

  “I want to go nearer to the music.”

  “Very well. This way then.”

  Render felt that something was wrong. He could not put his finger on it.

  Everything retained its solidity . . .

  Something passed rapidly then, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render smiled at that, remembering now; it was like a slip of the tongue: for a moment he had confused Eileen with Jill – yes, that was what had happened.

  Why, then . . .

  A burst of white was the altar. He had never seen it before, anywhere. All the walls were dark and cold about them. Candles flickered in corners and high niches. The organ chorded thunder under invisible hands.

  Render knew that something was wrong.

  He turned to Eileen Shallot, whose hat was a green cone towering up into the darkness, trailing wisps of green veiling. Her throat was in shadow, but . . .

  “That necklace – Where?”

  “I don’t know,” she smiled.

  The goblet she held radiated a rosy light. It was reflected from her emerald. It washed him like a draft of cool air.

  “Drink?” she asked.

  “Stand still,” he ordered.

  He willed the walls to fall down. They swam in shadow.

  “Stand still!” he repeated urgently. “Don’t do anything. Try not even to think.

  “Fall down!” he cried. And the walls were blasted in all directions and the roof was flung over the top of the world, and they stood amid ruins lighted by a single taper. The night was black as pitch.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked, still holding the goblet out toward him.

  “Don’t think. Don’t think anything,” he said. “Relax. You are very tired. As that candle flickers and wanes so does your consciousness. You can barely keep awake. You can hardly stay on your feet. Your eyes are closing. There is nothing to see here anyway.”

  He willed the candle to go out. It continued to burn.

  “I’m not tired. Please have a drink.”

  He heard organ music through the night. A different tune, one he did not recogniz
e at first.

  “I need your cooperation.”

  “All right. Anything.”

  “Look! The moon!” he pointed

  She looked upward and the moon appeared from behind an inky cloud.

  “. . . And another, and another.”

  Moons, like strung pearls, proceeded across the blackness.

  “The last one will be red,” he stated.

  It was.

  He reached out then with his right index finger, slid his arm sideways along his field of vision, then tried to touch the red moon.

  His arm ached, it burned. He could not move it.

  “Wake up!” he screamed.

  The red moon vanished, and the white ones.

  “Please take a drink.”

  He dashed the goblet from her hand and turned away. When he turned back she was still holding it before him.

  “A drink?”

  He turned and fled into the night.

  It was like running through a waist-high snowdrift. It was wrong. He was compounding the error by running – he was minimizing his strength, maximizing hers. It was sapping his energies, draining him.

  He stood still in the midst of the blackness.

  “The world around me moves,” he said. “I am its center.”

  “Please have a drink,” she said, and he was standing in the glade beside their table set beside the lake. The lake was black and the moon was silver, and high, and out of his reach. A single candle flickered on the table, making her hair as silver as her dress. She wore the moon on her brow. A bottle of Romanee-Conti stood on the white cloth beside a wide-brimmed wine glass. It was filled to overflowing, that glass, and rosy beads clung to its lip. He was very thirsty, and she was lovelier than anyone he had ever seen before, and her necklace sparkled, and the breeze came cool off the lake, and there was something – something he should remember . . .

  He took a step toward her and his armor clinked lightly as he moved. He reached toward the glass and his right arm stiffened with pain and fell back to his side.

  “You are wounded!”

  Slowly, he turned his head. The blood flowed from the open wound in his biceps and ran down his arm and dripped from his fingertips. His armor had been breached. He forced himself to look away.

  “Drink this, love. It will heal you.”

  She stood.

  Beggars in Spain

  NANCY KRESS

  Nancy Kress (1948– ) entered science fiction in the early 1980s but flowered by the early 90s. Kress’s early novels were genre fantasy, but her short fiction, which gained her initial recognition, was SF, collected in Trinity and Other Stories (1985). Her most ambitious work, in which it became clear that she was determined to develop both character and science in her fiction, began with the novel An Alien Light (1988), and then Brain Rose (1990). Meanwhile, she continued to write an impressive body of short fiction, much of it collected in The Aliens of Earth (1993). With the publication of her Beggars novels (Beggars in Spain [1993], Beggars and Choosers [1994], and Beggars Ride [1996]), and in the techno-thriller Oaths and Miracles (1996), she showed the full strength of her powers.

  Kress, as much as any SF writer today, is an heir to the tradition of H. G. Wells. Nowhere in her work is this more evident than in “Beggars in Spain” and the novels that have grown out of it. With this story, she began her magnum opus. In this story she deals with human and social evolution, with class and economic issues, and with ordinary characters, as Wells did in “A Story of the Days to Come.”

  ———————————

  With energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.

  – Abraham Lincoln, to Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker, 1863

  I

  They sat stiffly on his antique Eames chairs, two people who didn’t want to be here, or one person who didn’t want to and one who resented the other’s reluctance. Dr. Ong had seen this before. Within two minutes he was sure: the woman was the silently furious resister. She would lose. The man would pay for it later, in little ways, for a long time.

  “I presume you’ve performed the necessary credit checks already,” Roger Camden said pleasantly. “So let’s get right on to details, shall we, Doctor?”

  “Certainly,” Ong said. “Why don’t we start by your telling me all the genetic modifications you’re interested in for the baby.”

  The woman shifted suddenly on her chair. She was in her late twenties – clearly a second wife – but already had a faded look, as if keeping up with Roger Camden was wearing her out. Ong could easily believe that. Mrs. Camden’s hair was brown, her eyes were brown, her skin had a brown tinge that might have been pretty if her cheeks had had any color. She wore a brown coat, neither fashionable nor cheap, and shoes that looked vaguely orthopedic. Ong glanced at his records for her name: Elizabeth. He would bet people forgot it often.

  Next to her, Roger Camden radiated nervous vitality, a man in late middle-age whose bullet-shaped head did not match his careful haircut and Italian-silk business suit. Ong did not need to consult his file to recall anything about Camden. A caricature of the bullet-shaped head had been the leading graphic of yesterday’s on-line edition of the Wall Street Journal: Camden had led a major coup in cross-border data-atoll investment. Ong was not sure what cross-border data-atoll investment was.

  “A girl,” Elizabeth Camden said. Ong hadn’t expected her to speak first. Her voice was another surprise: upper-class British. “Blond. Green eyes. Tall. Slender.”

  Ong smiled. “Appearance factors are the easiest to achieve, as I’m sure you already know. But all we can do about ‘slenderness’ is give her a genetic disposition in that direction. How you feed the child will naturally – ”

  “Yes, yes,” Roger Camden said, “that’s obvious. Now: intelligence. High intelligence. And a sense of daring.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Camden – personality factors are not yet understood well enough to allow genet – ”

  “Just testing,” Camden said, with a smile that Ong thought was probably supposed to be lighthearted.

  Elizabeth Camden said, “Musical ability.”

  “Again, Mrs. Camden, a disposition to be musical is all we can guarantee.”

  “Good enough,” Camden said. “The full array of corrections for any potential gene-linked health problem, of course.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Ong said. Neither client spoke. So far theirs was a fairly modest list, given Camden’s money; most clients had to be argued out of contradictory genetic tendencies, alteration overload, or unrealistic expectations. Ong waited. Tension prickled in the room like heat.

  “And,” Camden said, “no need to sleep.”

  Elizabeth Camden jerked her head sideways to look out the window.

  Ong picked a paper magnet off his desk. He made his voice pleasant. “May I ask how you learned whether that genetic-modification program exists?”

  Camden grinned. “You’re not denying it exists. I give you full credit for that, Doctor.”

  Ong held onto his temper. “May I ask how you learned whether the program exists?”

  Camden reached into an inner pocket of his suit. The silk crinkled and pulled; body and suit came from different social classes. Camden was, Ong remembered, a Yagaiist, a personal friend of Kenzo Yagai himself. Camden handed Ong hard copy: program specifications.

  “Don’t bother hunting down the security leak in your data banks, Doctor – you won’t find it. But if it’s any consolation, neither will anybody else. Now.” He leaned suddenly forward. His tone changed. “I know that you’ve created twenty children so far who don’t need to sleep at all. That so far nineteen are healthy, intelligent, and psychologically normal. In fact, better than normal – they’re all unusually precocious. The oldest is already four years old and can read in two languages. I know you’re thinking of offering this genetic modification on the open market in a few years. All I want is a chance to buy it for my daughter now. At whatever price you name.”

  Ong
stood. “I can’t possibly discuss this with you unilaterally, Mr. Camden. Neither the theft of our data – ”

  “Which wasn’t a theft – your system developed a spontaneous bubble regurgitation into a public gate, have a hell of a time proving otherwise – ”

  “ – nor the offer to purchase this particular genetic modification lies in my sole area of authority. Both have to be discussed with the Institute’s board of directors.”

  “By all means, by all means. When can I talk to them, too?”

  “You?”

  Camden, still seated, looked at him. It occurred to Ong that there were few men who could look so confident eighteen inches below eye level. “Certainly. I’d like the chance to present my offer to whoever has the actual authority to accept it. That’s only good business.”

  “This isn’t solely a business transaction, Mr. Camden.”

  “It isn’t solely pure scientific research, either,” Camden retorted. “You’re a for-profit corporation here. With certain tax breaks available only to firms meeting certain fair-practice laws.”

  For a minute Ong couldn’t think what Camden meant. “Fair-practice laws . . .”

  “. . . are designed to protect minorities who are suppliers. I know, it hasn’t ever been tested in the case of customers, except for redlining in Y-energy installations. But it could be tested, Dr. Ong. Minorities are entitled to the same product offerings as nonminorities. I know the Institute would not welcome a court case, Doctor. None of your twenty genetic beta-test families is either black or Jewish.”

  “A court . . . but you’re not black or Jewish!”

  “I’m a different minority. Polish-American. The name was Kaminisky.” Camden finally stood. And smiled warmly. “Look, it is preposterous. You know that, and I know that, and we both know what a grand time journalists would have with it anyway. And you know that I don’t want to sue you with a preposterous case, just to use the threat of premature and adverse publicity to get what I want. I don’t want to make threats at all, believe me I don’t. I just want this marvelous advancement you’ve come up with for my daughter.” His face changed, to an expression Ong wouldn’t have believed possible on those particular features: wistfulness. “Doctor – do you know how much more I could have accomplished if I hadn’t had to sleep all my life?”