Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 37

Only one face doesn't belong to an idiot. That's what I'm thinking right now.

Bordeaux Mixture

CHARLES DEXTER WARD.

According to the Nature Web site (www.nature.com/nsu/pro-files/profiles.html), "Henry Gee's birth was accompanied by eldritch psychical phenomena and several outbreaks of random happiness, but things have quietened down a lot since then. Henry has a B.Sc. in zoology and genetics from the University of Leeds, and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Cambridge.

Having set up the Nature News Service he now devotes most of his time as a senior biology editor specializing in integrative and comparative biology and evolution. He is the author of Before the Backbone: Views on the Origin of the Vertebrates (Chapman and Hall, 1996); In Search of DeepTime: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (Free Press 1999/Fourth Estate 2000); and innumerable popular science articles." During 2000, the distinguished science journal Nature generously allowed him to commission and edit a weekly series of SF 800-word short fictions ent.i.tled "Futures." Many SF luminaries contributed, including Arthur C. Clarke, Greg Bear, Frederik Pohl, Michael Moorc.o.c.k, Ted Chiang and Bruce Sterling (and see Brin, Ford, Simmons, Slonczewski, Spinrad).

"Bordeaux Mixture" was one that Gee wrote himself, under the Lovecraftian pseudonym Charles Dexter Ward. It is a piece of deadpan scientific humor with a submerged literary reference to the metaphysical poetry of Andrew Marvell that HPL himself might have enjoyed.

I'm spraying my tomatoes with bordeaux mixture and it feels great. My wife says I do the tomatoes a disservice, dousing them with Bergerac, when our pension could easily spare Clydebank Cabernet. But the tomatoes love it. No sooner do I get to their row with the sprayer, than their desiccated leaves flush with green; their blooms perk up; their ripening fruits blush with a richer glow. They love me, my tomatoes, and I love them back. Today is special-it's 2090, and my tomatoes and I are celebrating the safe pa.s.sage of our life-giving Sun through yet another total eclipse.

Anyway, while I'm up there schmoozing, I think how far we've come in just one lifetime. Once upon a time, tomatoes were monotonous plants that took a lot of looking after; constant watering and spraying against greenfly and rot. Today's GM tomatoes are as different from the crop of my youth as the einkorn and emmer they harvested in the Fertile Crescent with obsidian sickles.

I've got rows of them-tomatoes, that is-all the latest kinds: juicy blue ones as big as canteloupes; fluorescent orange fruits the size of pinheads but as hot as habaneros; long thin ones like cuc.u.mbers; tetrahedral ones; ones with edible roots; ones that grow like trees which I harvest like apples. And they look after themselves, pretty much; they farm their own mycorrhizae, nurse their own symbionts, kill off the weeds with endogenous antibiotics, and suck what little water they need out of the air. No, I only spray my tomatoes with bordeaux mixture because they enjoy it. They want me to, and, willingly, I oblige.

These days, the word "tomato" seems almost redundant, as everything else in the garden has undergone much the same kind of transformation. If every plant can be made into anything you want, and made to taste like any other crop, it rather breaks down the barriers. If you have lettuces that look like onions and taste like lemon meringue pie, who cares about horizontal gene transfer?

You'd think that this uncertainty about what's what in the garden would worry me, given that I've always seen myself as something of a tomato connoisseur and never knew my onions. What if I found myself growing an aubergine by mistake, an aubergine that looks like a tomato? But the fact is I don't care: the tomatoes themselves see to that. It gives me such a thrill to see them practically whoop with solanaceous pleasure as they see me advancing up the garden; such a feeling of contentment as I can hardly describe.

It hardly seems possible that, less than a century ago, people objected so violently to genetic modification, when subsequent history shows it to have been such a wonderful innovation. How silly it all now seems: all those people who trashed test crops seem, in retrospect, like those weavers who broke up power looms. But then, I was doing some of the modification, so perhaps I'm biased.

Now I'm long since retired, and the company I was working for back in 2007-when everything changed-has gone the way of Microsoft and Tharsis Telomerase, I can tell all. In 2007, GM was so unpopular with the public that bioscience companies had to fund research and development almost in secret. Progress advanced in giant steps, but all behind the scenes. Unknown to the public, there were plants that did everything except talk back; plants that created their own self-sufficient ecospheres. A few were dropped on the martian South Pole. There were no announcements, no press releases. I hear that a few small stands of martian maize still thrive.

Then a few of us at the lab hit on an idea. We transfected maize with genes for human pheromones.

With our corporate heads, we thought that this would do wonders for brand loyalty. The thing is, humanpheromones influence behaviour subconsciously. To tell people what we were doing would defeat the object, wouldn't it? Late one night we planted a stand of GM maize in California (I forget exactly where) and within weeks there were activists pounding the door of the Capitol in Sacramento demanding GM crops. Success breeds success-we got the same encouraging results with courgettes in Chihuahua, tomatoes in Thailand and greengages in Glasgow.

But that was long ago, and anyway, when I'm up here with the tomatoes, all that matters is the continuous present, when I am surrounded by the rapturous cacophony of my gorgeous plants-all mine-the plant I love and that love me so much in return, filling the green ether with triumphant shout of radiant joy.

The Dryad's Wedding

ROBERT CHARLES WILSON.

Robert Charles Wilson lives in Toronto, Ontario, and is one of the leading Canadian SF writers.

His first SF novel, The Hidden Place, appeared in 1986 and his seventh, Mysterium (1994), won a Philip K. d.i.c.k Award. His big breakthrough novel however was Darwinia (1998). Bios (1999) is his most recent novel and he published his first collection, The Perseids, all SF stories set in Toronto, in 2000. In an interview a couple of years ago, he said: "I've been reading some of the British and Australian hard SF-Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan. I tend to like the hard SF, because it seems to me disciplined in a certain way. We can do all kinds of things in SF, but these guys keep us honest.... I admire that kind of disciplined work. In some ways it's the heart of the field. We need it there, even if that's not what interests us at the time-even if we're exploring over here, writing more humanist SF, more poetic SF, we need that solid core of hard SF" (from Challenging Destiny #7 ). It seems to me this gives a good idea of Wilson's stance as a writer of SF.

"The Dryad's Wedding" is a prequel to Wilson's novel, Bios, and is a tale of strange adventures on an alien planet in the distant future. It was published in the paperback anthology Star Colonies, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin A. Greenberg, and John Helfers . Its lush setting and moody concentration on the inner life of the central character remind me of the fiction of Brian Aldiss, perhaps his Hothouse series.

Chaia Martine was nineteen years old. In seven days she would marry the man she had been married to once before, in another life. And she suspected that something was terribly wrong with her.

Not the familiar something. She was actually thirty-five years old, not nineteen. She felt nineteen because nineteen years ago her skull had been fractured by a falling tree in a fierce summer storm. She had lain in the flooded Copper River for almost an hour before her rescuers reached her, and had lost so much dura mater and brain tissue that her memories could not be saved. The Humantown clinic had salvaged her body, but not her mind. She had had to wear diapers and learn to walk and talk all over again, as nano-bacters built her a new cerebral hemisphere from fetal stem cells out of the colony's medical reserves. She had almost died and had been born a second time-awkwardly, painfully. Yes, certainly, that was wrong with her. (And problem enough for one person, Chaia thought.) But that didn't explain why she sometimes heard the voice of the forest calling her name. And it didn't explain, above all else, the way the spiders had a.s.sembled themselves into the shape of a man.

The spider incident happened in a glade uphill from the Copper River. The Copper was a gentle river now, herds of epidonts grazing peacefully at the gra.s.ses and faux-lilies that grew along the banks. Chaia loved the look of it, at least at the end of a placid Isian summer. (She was inevitably nervous, frightened on some fundamental physiological level, whenever mountain rains made the river run fast and white.) This glade was one of Chaia's private places, a place she came to be alone, away from the crowds andconfusing expectations of Humantown, away from the hovering mystery of her once-and-future husband Gray McInnes. Standing, she could watch the river unfold like a perfect blue ribbon into the western prairies.

For the most part she was enclosed here, wrapped in green shade. Chaia was not now and never had been afraid of the Isian forest. Guardian remensors, small as sandflies, flew a twenty-meter perimeter around her wherever she went. They would warn her if any dangerous animal-a triraptor or a digger-came too close; they would sting and bite the creature if it attempted to stalk her.

There were Isian insects in the glade, a great many of them, but Chaia wasn't troubled by insects.

Her skin exuded pheromones that repelled the most dangerous species. If one should somehow chance to bite, her enhanced immune system would quickly neutralize the poison. In fact, she had grown familiar with the insect population of the glade, some species of which she had studied in her bios and taxonomy cla.s.ses. She often spent a lazy afternoon here doing nothing more than watching the bugs: the black noonbugs, like tiny pompous cartoon men, rolling b.a.l.l.s of sticky fungal spores; or the diogenes flies, with their pollen sacs like miniature Victorian lanterns.

The spiders were less obvious but no less plentiful. They were called "spiders" because they resembled a namesake Terrestrial insect Chaia had never seen (or could not remember seeing, though she had once, in her lost life, lived on Earth). They looked like b.u.t.ton-sized, rust-red marbles equipped with a radial ma.s.s of legs. The spiders were harvesters, cutting leaves and taking the fragments back to their ground nests, which rose like ankle-high pyramids from the forest floor.

She was not ordinarily aware of the spiders-they pa.s.sed through the fallen leaves and green reeds as lightly as idle thoughts-but today they were numerous and active, as if vying for her attention. Chaia sat on a fallen log and watched, fascinated, as they marched among the damp thread-mosses, gathering in pale clumps and clinging together.

This was unusual behavior, and Chaia supposed it must reflect some event of great significance in the spider universe, a ma.s.s mating or the founding of a new colony. She lifted her feet so that she would not inadvertently disturb the complex protocols of the creatures.

A breeze from the west rattled the long brella leaves above her head. Chaia was due back at Humantown for the evening meal (and a wedding rehearsal at the Universalist chapel), but that was still two hours away. Her afternoon was her own, and she meant to spend it doing absolutely nothing useful or productive. She watched the spiders gather in the glade, watched them idly at first but then with increasing attention, until it became obvious that what was happening here was not, perhaps, wholly natural.

Still, the feverish activity of the insects fascinated her. Spiders poured into the glade from several directions and several nests at once, parade lines of them. They avoided Chaia systematically but gathered before her in lacy sheets, stacked one atop another until the combined ma.s.s of their pale bodies took on a smoked-gla.s.s color and they rose in a seething mound to half her own height.

Carefully-disquieted but not yet terrified-Chaia stood and took a step backward. The spider-ma.s.s moved in response, s.h.i.+fting its borders until it became (and now Chaia's fear began to intensify) a nearly human shape. The spiders had made a man. Well, not a man, exactly, but a human form, neither male nor female, really just the suggestion of a torso, arms, a head. The head was the most detailed part of the spider-sculpture. Its eyes were a shadowed roundness, its nose a pale protruberance.

Chaia was about to flee the glade when the spider-thing opened its uncertain mouth and spoke.

The voice was very faint, as if the ma.s.sed insects had enclosed a volume of air in a kind of leaky lung, expelling moist breezes through vocal cords made of insect parts or dried reeds. Or perhaps only Chaia heard the voice; she thought this was possible. But the spider-thing spoke, and the awful thing about this was, Chaia recognized its voice.

She hadn't heard it for a long time. But she had heard it often when she was younger, in the woods, in her dreams. She called it the voice of the forest because it had no real name, and she never spoke of it because she knew, somehow, she mustn't.

"Chaia," the spider-thing whispered.

It knew her name. It had always known her name. It had called her name from wind-tossed trees,from the rippling flow of the Copper River. She sensed an uneasiness in the voice, an anxiety, an unfulfilled need.

"Chaia," the spider-thing said. (The voice of the forest said.) That was all. That was enough.

Then the man-shaped ma.s.s began to lose its form, to collapse into a collection of mere insects, thousands of them flowing like water at her feet, and she thought she heard the voice say, "No, not like this, not this." Chaia tried to answer it, to say something, because surely a sound of her own would disperse the hallucination (it must be a hallucination) and jolt the forest back to reality. But her throat was as dry and breathless as a sealed room. Her courage collapsed; she turned and ran downhill until she found the trail to Human-town, a cloud of guardian remensors following her like agitated gnats; ran all the way back with the forest singing in her ears, certain that something was wrong with her, that some part of her was deeply and permanently broken... and how could she bring herself to marry Gray McInnes, how could she even have contemplated it, when she was probably not even sane?

Humantown had been established half a century ago, deep in the arboreal hinterland of the Great Western Continent. It was the first truly successful human settlement on Isis. But it was not, strictly speaking, the first.

There had been human beings on Isis more than a century earlier. That had been when the great Trusts ruled the Earth, when the outer solar system had been a checkerboard of independent republics (Mars, the asteroids, the Uranian moons, and the Kuiper kibbutzim), when a single interstellar launch had consumed a significant fraction of the system's gross economic product. People had come to Isis because Isis was one of the few biologically active worlds within practical reach, and because it seemed so invitingly Earth-like in its size, ma.s.s, climate, and atmosphere.

The problem: Isis was toxic.

It was, in fact, deadly. Its biosphere had evolved far before the Earth's, and without the periodic ma.s.sive diebacks that punctuated Terrestrial evolution. The Isian ecology was deeply complex, driven by predation and parasitism. The Isian equivalents of viruses, bacteria, and prions made short work of any unprotected Terrestrial organic matter. From an Isian point of view, human beings were nothing more than an ambulatory buffet of choice long-chain proteins waiting pa.s.sively to be devoured.

The first settlers-scientists living in the sterile cores of multilayered biohazard facilities-had underestimated the virility of the Isian bios. They had died. All of them, including thousands in the Isian orbital station, when their defenses were breached. Lovely as she was, Isis was also a murderess.

Humanity had not returned to the planet for a hundred years, by which time the oligarchy of the Trusts had collapsed and a gentler regime controlled the Earth.

And still, no unprotected human being could survive more than a few minutes in the Isian bios. But protection had grown more subtle, less intrusive. Chaia, for instance, possessed immune system prostheses cl.u.s.tered in genned sacs around her abdominal aorta; countless genetic fixes had hardened her cellular barriers against Isian invasion as well. With periodic upgrades, she could live here indefinitely.

She felt as if she had lived here all her life. She was not a true Isian, like the babies born in Humantown, because she had lived another life on Earth; but that life was lost to her. All she remembered was Isis. She knew the forests and uplands around Humantown intimately because they were her cradle and her home. She knew the wildlife. She knew the town itself, almost too well. And she knew the people.

She knew there was no one she could talk to about the spiders.

Humantown had grown up above an S-curve in the Copper River, a ploughed terrace dotted with simple Turing-fabricated structures. It was fenced to keep dangerous wild animals away, but the fence recognized Chaia and opened to admit her (chiming "Welcome, Chaia Martine!" from a hidden sonodot).

Chaia suppressed her anxiety as she walked down dusty Main Street. She pa.s.sed the hardware shelter, where Gray McInnes wrote Turing protocols for the a.s.sembly robots; she was obscurely relieved not to see him there. She pa.s.sed the health center where she had spent her first five years under the care of her trauma-mother Lizabeth Chopra and a half-dozen surrogate fathers in the form of therapists and doctors.She pa.s.sed the Universalist Chapel, where all the religious people except Orthodox Jews and Reform Mormons gathered once a week to wors.h.i.+p... then she turned back, rang the rectory bell, and told Clergyman Gooding to cancel tonight's rehearsal. She wasn't feeling well, she said. No, nothing serious.

A headache. She just needed to lie down.

Then she walked up Main Street, past Reyes Avenue where her own small private shelter stood, and down a back lane through a stand of cultivated brella trees where children played with brightly-colored mentor robots, and then-surprising herself-through the fence and out into the wild-wood once more.

Dusk was slow on Isis. Sunsets lingered. The forest grew shadows as Chaia walked. She would be missed at the evening meal at the town kitchen, but perhaps Rector Gooding would make excuses for her.

That would not prevent Gray McInnes (wonderful, patient, enduring Gray) from seeking her out. And she wouldn't be at home, but she didn't think Gray would be terribly surprised at that. Chaia often went walking late in the woods and had even spent some nights there. After all, she had her remensors to protect her; the Humantown computers could pinpoint her location if some need arose. Would Gray follow her into the woods? No, she thought, not likely. He understood her periodic need to be alone. He understood all her quirks. If Gray had a fault, it was this relentless understanding. It suggested he still thought of her as a kind of invalid, as if she were the original Chaia Martine he had married back on Earth, only suffering from a long-term amnesia.

But she was not that Chaia Martine. She was only the sum of what she had been on Isis. Plus a few random delusions.

She followed an old path up the foothills above the human settlement and the river. She had no destination in mind, at least not consciously; but she walked for more than an hour, and when she awoke to herself she saw lights in the distance. Glaring portable flarelights, much brighter than the setting sun.

This was a remote research site, an abandoned digger complex where the planetary ecologist Werner Eastman had excavated a nest of ancient tunnels.

She came out of the woods into a blizzard of light and sound.

Most of the heavy work here had been done by construction and mining robots. The huge yellow machines still roamed the site, sectioning the earth with a delicacy that belied their great size and noise.

They sorted what they found, excreting chipped flint and knapping stones into neat mesh trays.

Werner and his two apprentices should have been finished for the night, but they seemed absorbed in their work, huddling in a polyplex shelter over some choice discovery. Chaia simply stood at the edge of the excavation, peering down the steeply terraced border into a layer of resected tunnels like limestone wormtracks. A cooling breeze tangled her long hair.

Werner must have noticed her at some point. She looked up from her thoughts and he was there, gazing at her with a gentle concern. "h.e.l.lo, Chaia. Come to watch?"

"Not really. Just...walking."

"Late for that, isn't it? You'll be missing dinner."

"I felt restless."

She liked Werner Eastman. He was an old Isis hand, dedicated to his work. A tall man, graying at the temples after at least two juvenation cycles. He was older than Humantown itself, though still young by Terrestrial standards. He had been one of her surrogate fathers.

They had drifted apart in recent years. Werner disapproved of her marriage to Gray McInnes. He felt that Gray was taking advantage of her, exploiting the fact of his prior marriage to that other Chaia Martine, the one who had died in the Copper River. Gray wanted everything to slide back in time to the way it had been before, Werner insisted. And that was maybe true, Chaia thought. But she couldn't forget or ignore Gray's many kindnesses. And Gray, after all, had been the only courtier in her brief new life. The only one not repelled or at least dismayed by her strangeness, her awkward in-betweenness.

But Werner meant no harm. His concern had always touched her, even when she considered it misplaced. She said, "You're working late, too."

"Yes. Well, we found something quite interesting in the lower excavations. Care to have a look?"She agreed, but only to be polite. What could be interesting, except to a specialist, about these old digger tunnels? She had seen diggers often enough-live ones, clutching crude spears in their manipulating arms. They were occasionally dangerous, but nothing about them inspired her curiosity.

They were not truly sentient, though they manufactured simple levers and blades. In fact they were emotionally affectless, bland as turtles. She couldn't imagine befriending a digger, even the way she might befriend an ordinary animal. They had no true speech. They lived in tunnels lined with hardened excreta, and their diet consisted of rotting carrion and a few roots and vegetables. If food was scarce, they would devour their own young.

Werner took her to the shelter where the day's discoveries were laid out on a table. Here were the usual simple flint tools, the kind Werner had been cataloguing since Chaia was young. But a few other items, too. The ones he had called "interesting." Bits of corroded metal. (Diggers weren't metalworkers.) This one, for instance, clotted with clay, looked like the kind of firefly lamp every colonist carried in his pouch. Here, a sort of buckle. Chipped fragments of gla.s.s.

"Humans made these," Chaia said, an odd uneasiness haunting her.

"Yes. But they're old. They date from the first Isian settlement, almost two hundred years ago."

"What are they doing in these old digger tunnels?"

"That's the interesting question, isn't it? But we also found this."

Werner reached into a specimen box and withdrew something already washed free of its embedding mud and clay, something smooth and white.

A jawbone.

A human jawbone.

"My G.o.d," Chaia breathed.

Werner began to explain what the jawbone represented... something about the first research colonists who had occupied the modern site of Humantown, and how one of them must have ventured into the digger colony when it was still active, or had been carried there, or...

But Chaia didn't really hear him.

The jawbone-dead, motionless on the table-spoke to her.

Werner went on talking. Werner couldn't hear.

But Chaia heard it quite plainly.

"Chaia," the jawbone said.

And Chaia fainted.

There is a phenomenon in the universe called, loosely, "sentience." It occurs in quasi-homeostatic systems of a certain complexity. Human beings are an example of such a system. Certain of their machines are also sentient. Elsewhere in the known universe, sentience is elusive.

Chaia, dreaming, remembered this much from her bios textbooks.

She dreamed of herself, of her brain regrown from fetal stem cells. Sentience requires communication. Nerve cells talk to nerve cells. They talk electrically; they talk chemically. Her fresh, new neurons had exfoliated into a mind.

"Mind," the textbooks said, was what happened in the gaps between the neurons. Signals were exchanged or inhibited. But the s.p.a.ce between neurons is essentially empty. "Mind" was a hollowness where patterns bloomed and died.