Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 36

"Those huge tusks!" breathes Vincent.

"Berlin has 140 mammoths now," says Franz.

"New York has 12," says Renate. "Even Tokyo only has 60, and of course the j.a.panese have much freer access to the frozen carca.s.ses in Siberia than we do because of the Eastern Pact."

Another huge male lumbers by, and Franz nods in its direction. "They have a few in Russia itself of course, but they are really rather a cheat. Less than 20 percent of the genes are actually authentic mammoth. They are really just Indian elephants with big tusks and added hair. The Berlin mammoths are 80 or 90 percent pure."

"Even the New York mammoths are only 70-percent genuine," says Renate, "and they are having considerable difficulty in successfully breeding from them for that reason..."

"Something to do with incompatible chromosomes I believe, and most of them have defective kidneys..."

But Vincent the quiet Englishman suddenly gives a strangled bellow of rage: "For G.o.d's sake can't you just shut up for a moment and look at the things!"

Franz and Renate gape at him in amazement, along with a whole segment of the crowd. Just as amazed as they are, but still boiling with anger, Vincent turns his back and walks away.

A little later a thought occurs to him, he takes the battered visiting card out of his pocket and heads for the Kreuzberg apartment of Dr. Heinrich Gruber.

"Come in, my friend, come in!"

It is musty and dark, like a brown cave, full of wood and the smell of pipe smoke, and Vincent has the feeling that he is the first visitor for quite some time.

"Come on through!"

The old man's eyebrows bristle with pleasure and animation as he ushers Vincent into his small sitting room, and dives off into a grubby little kitchen to fetch beer. Vincent looks around, feeling uncomfortable and embarra.s.sed and wondering why he came.

Half the floor-s.p.a.ce is covered in books. (Is this man unaware that he can access the whole Library of Europa from a simple lap-top linked into the Net?) And there are jumbled piles of print-outs, covered with an unreadable gobbledegook of letters, numbers and punctuation marks.

XXQPeNU'BVFF6VVG'NNLPPP*JJVNKL'LJGDSF'E) XMX9*MMML XVXVOG?KK'BKQQZ....

"This is Ca.s.siopeian?" Vincent asks as Gruber returns with the beer.

"Ja, Ja, that is the standard notation of Ca.s.siopeian."

The elderly man rummages through a stack of files. "You probably remember that the message contains a repet.i.tive element. Every 422 days it repeats the same five-day-long pa.s.sage known as the Lexicon, which turns out to be a 'Teach Yourself' guide to the language. The key to understanding it was when we discovered that part of the Lexicon consisted of co-ordinates for a spatial grid. When these were mapped out, they produced pictures. The Ca.s.siopeians taught us the basics of their language by sending us pictures and accompanying each picture with the appropriate word or words..."

He goes to a computer and taps on keys.

Suddenly a face stares out at Vincent, thin and long, utterly inscrutable, crowned with spiky horns...

"This one is a female," says Gruber, tapping another key. "This is a male. This belongs to the third s.e.x, which I call promale. If you remember, the Ca.s.siopeians have a triploid reproductive system, a simple biological fact which permeates the whole of their language, their culture, their metaphysics. Theysimply do not see the world in terms of black and white, yes or no, positive or negative. Everything is in mutually exclusive threes..."

He taps more keys and new images roll across the screen: plants and strange animals, buildings strung like spiders' webs between enormous diagonal struts...

"They are incredible pictures," says Vincent. "I've seen them before of course, but you're quite right, it's amazing how quickly we've all just forgotten them."

Gruber smiles. "The images are fascinating of course, but they are really only the key to the text..."

Vincent smiles. "Which is truly nothing but philosophy?"

He is dimly aware that this is where the controversy lies: the extent to which the text has really been translated or just guessed at.

After all, who would think of beaming philosophy out to the stars?

Gruber nods. "Even though they have made a powerful radio transmitter, the Ca.s.siopeians are not especially sophisticated technologically. They simply don't put such a high store by science and technology as we do: they consider all that to be only one of three different and separate fields of knowledge."

Vincent asks what the other two are but Gruber is too preoccupied with his own train of thought to answer. He leaps to his feet with alarming agility for such an old man.

"The point about the Ca.s.siopeians is that they are not afraid to think. They still trust themselves to do something more imaginative than count! As a result their ideas are beautiful and they know it, so they beam them out for anyone who wants to listen."

He laughs angrily. "Which on this planet at least, sometimes seems to be about eight people among all the seven billion inhabitants!"

He perches on a table, takes out his pipe and begins to fill it, but presently leaps up again, thrusting the still unlit pipe at the young Englishman.

"My dear friend, what the Ca.s.siopeians offer us is something that we desperately need: wisdom! Our own ideas have grown stale. We are in a blind alley. Christianity was once a brilliant new liberating leap.

So once was scientific rationalism. But they have grown old. We have no real ideas any more-not even us Germans, for whom ideas were once almost a vice. Especially not us Germans. All we have is the pursuit of cleverer and cleverer technologies-all quite pointless of course in the absence of any system of values that could tell us what all this cleverness is for."

He laughs and sits down again, wiping a speck of spittle from his lower lip. "But as you can see this is something of an obsession with me. Have some more beer. It comes from my homeland of Swabia. Not bad, do you agree?"

Vincent smiles. The beer is indeed good, and very strong. He feels quite at ease. He finds himself liking the old man.

Gruber picks up a file and begins to read aloud: "Just as there are three s.e.xes, three states of matter and three Modes of Being-Substance, Life and Soul-so there are three principles in the universe constantly at war: Gentleness, Valour and Evil. There can be no reconciliation between these three, no final resolution of their perpetual conflict, only temporary alliances. Those who hate Evil must surely hope for an alliance of Gentleness and Valour, full of contradictions though such an Alliance will inevitably be.

But oftentimes in history it is Valour and Evil that come together against Gentleness and we see cruel, harsh and war-like nations, preoccupied with honor, indifferent to suffering."

He flips over the page: "At other times it is Gentleness and Evil that form an alliance against Valour.

Nations become timid. They fear pa.s.sion. They try to hide themselves away from the reality of suffering and death..."

"That sounds a bit like Europa!" observes Vincent, and the old scholar beams at him delightedly.

"Precisely, my friend, precisely. We are obsessed with the fruitless struggle to eliminate disease and accident and death. We cordon off all that is distressing and unruly in the Undercla.s.s Estates. We have our wars in faraway countries, and watch them from the comfort and safety of our living rooms. We confine adventure to the Virtual Reality arcades, where no one ever gets hurt and nothing is ever achieved. We do not trouble one another any more with our untidy s.e.xual pa.s.sions, but release them (ifwe must) in the hygienic liebespielen, or in the new synthetik brothels, which everyone says are so 'civilized,' because they do not spread disease..."

When he has finally left the old man, Vincent spends some time wandering the busy Kreuzberg streets, reluctant to return to Franz and Renate's apartment. He feels embarra.s.sed by his earlier outburst, embarra.s.sed, now that it is over, by his evening with the old philosopher in his squalid little bachelor's lair.

He pa.s.ses VR arcades, video galleries. He pa.s.ses an establishment which he suddenly realizes with alarm is a Puppehaus, a state brothel staffed by specially adapted synthetiks. He walks quickly past.

Three police cars whoop by, heading Eastwards to put the lid back on some bubbling outbreak of violence and mayhem in Lichtenberg, or one of the other big UC estates.

I'll stop for a drink and wait until Franz and Renate are in bed, Vincent decides. Sort it out in the morning.

He turns into a street called Moritzstra.s.se.

("Empire of Charlemagne!" exclaims a poster put up by the Carolingian Party for the recent senatorial elections. They stand for a smaller unified Europa consisting of France, Germany, Lombardy, the Low Countries-the area of Charlemagne's long-dead empire. Tired, old Europa is rummaging in the attic of her own history for ideas, but the ideas are stale and empty. No one votes for the Carolingians.

Those who turn out for elections vote dutifully for Federation, the Market and the Social Compromise.) He finds a small bar and orders a gla.s.s of red wine. There is a TV on in the corner showing an extended news programme about the antic.i.p.ated bloodbath in Central Asia.

Vincent sips his wine and looks around the room. In the far corner a young man is fighting chimeras in a small head-and-hands VR machine. A fat red man at the bar is loudly extolling the virtues of a one-and-a-half percent reduction in interest rates, currently the hot issue in Europa's political life.

At the next table, a woman about Vincent's own age is sitting by herself. She is very beautiful, with a certain sad, unselfconscious grace. Vincent stares and unexpectedly she turns and sees him, meeting his eyes for a moment and giving him a small wistful smile.

Vincent looks away hastily, takes another sip from his gla.s.s.

But suddenly he is aware of the three warring principles of the Ca.s.siopeians struggling for control within his mind.

"Go over to her!" says Valour.

"What about Lizzie?" says Gentleness.

"If it's s.e.x you want," says Evil, "why not just go back to that Puppehaus?"

But "Go over!" says Valour, that new and unfamiliar voice.

Vincent is terrified. Never in his whole life has he ever done anything as audacious as to approach a beautiful stranger in a bar. He and Lizzie only went out together after months of working side by side.

Even now, after four years together, their s.e.xual life is crippled by fear...

"Go!" says Valour.

Grasping his winegla.s.s firmly, Vincent stands up. He clears his throat. He tries to a.s.semble in his mind a coherent opening sentence. (The entire German language seems to be rapidly deleting itself from his brain...) "I...I...".

She smiles delightedly and Vincent grins back amazed, only to find that she isn't smiling at him at all...

"Clara! I'm sorry to be late!" says a big blond man behind him, crossing the room and exchanging a kiss with the beautiful woman.

The clenched winegla.s.s shatters in Vincent's hand. He feels an excruciating stab of pain. Blood wells from a deep gash between his fingers.

Clara looks round. Everyone in the bar looks round-some amused, some puzzled, some afraid.

This crazy figure clutching broken gla.s.s, what will he do next?

What can he do? Staring straight ahead of him, dripping blood, Vincent stalks out into the cold street. No one challenges him to pay his bill.

KILL ALL WOPS, says a scrawl on the wall opposite.EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE, says another.

KEEP BERLIN TIDY, says a munic.i.p.al sign.

But, just over the rooftops, the bold W of Ca.s.siopeia s.h.i.+nes down from a starry sky.

From somewhere up there, fainter than gossamer, fainter than the silvery tenuous voices of the stars, whispers the Ca.s.siopeian signal. It is a ripple from a single small pebble dispersing slowly across an enormous ocean, yet even at the far sh.o.r.e of the ocean it still bears the unmistakable signature of its origin. It is still a message. It is still purposeful. It is still without question the product of intelligent minds.

"Valour?" says Vincent to those intelligent minds, nursing his copiously bleeding hand. "Valour is it?

Do you realize you've just made me look a complete idiot!"

He chuckles a bit at this, then laughs out loud.

And then he crashes unconscious to the ground.

Clara and her blond brother Hans are the first to come to Vincent's aid. He is flat on his face on the cold Kreuzberg pavement, under the frosty stars.

"We need to do something about that hand," says Clara. "He's lost an awful lot of blood."

Huddle

STEPHEN BAXTER.

Stephen Baxter is known as one of the 90s best new hard SF writers, the author of a number of highly-regarded novels (he has won the Philip K. d.i.c.k Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British SF a.s.sociation Award, and others for his novels) and many short stories. His tenth novel, Manifold: Time, has recently appeared and his eleventh, a collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, is out in spring 2000. He has been particularly interested in s.p.a.ce travel. He has also been attracted to the alternate history subgenre, a vein that has captured his serious interest, in a number of stories often involving the history of SF, or alternate versions of the s.p.a.ce program of the sixties and seventies. In the mid and late 1990s he produced nearly ten short stories a year in fantasy, SF, & horror venues, and in 1999 he again published a broad spectrum of works of SF and fantasy, not sticking to one subgenre. He appeared in most of the major magazines, sometimes twice, and there were two or three of his stories in contention for a place in this book.

"Huddle" is a story of the far future, in which segments of humanity have been genetically engineered to survive a long Ice Age, and what happens to one individual when it has begun to end. It appeared in F&SF.

His birth was violent. He was expelled from warm red-dark into black and white and cold, a cold that dug into his flesh immediately.

He hit a hard white surface and rolled onto his back.

He tried to lift his head. He found himself inside a little fat body, gray fur soaked in a ruddy liquid that was already freezing.

Above him there was a deep violet-blue speckled with points of light, and two gray discs. Moons.

The word came from nowhere, into his head. Moons, two of them.

There were people with him, on this surface. Shapeless mounds of fat and fur that towered over him.

Mother. One of them was his mother. She was speaking to him, gentle wordless murmurs.

He opened his mouth, found it clogged. He spat. Air rushed into his lungs, cold, piercing.

Tenderly his mother licked mucus off his face.

But now the great wind howled across the ice, unimpeded. It grew dark. A flurry of snow fell across him.

His mother grabbed him and tucked him into a fold of skin under her belly. He crawled onto her broad feet, to get off the ice. There was bare skin here, thick with blood vessels, and he snuggled against.i.ts heat gratefully. And there was a nipple, from which he could suckle.