Best Science Fiction of the Year 1984 Part 26

"Yes," the priest said. "Yes, you are."

"And if you're given orders to do something wrong, you're still accountable, right? The orders don't change it."

"That's right."

"Hmph." January smoked awhile. "So they say, anyway. But look what happens." He waved at the office. "I'm like the guy in a story I read-he thought everything in books was true, and after reading a bunch of westerns he tried to rob a train. They tossed him in jail." He laughed shortly. "Books are full of c.r.a.p."

"Not all of them," the priest said. "Besides, you weren't trying to rob a train."

They laughed at the notion. "Did you read that story?"

"No."

"It was the strangest book-there were two stories in it, and they alternated chapter by chapter, but they didn't have a thing to do with each other! I didn't get it."

"... Maybe the writer was trying to say that everything connects to everything else.""Maybe. But it's a funny way to say it."

"I like it."

And so they pa.s.sed the time, talking.

So it was the priest who was the one to come by and tell January that his request for a Presidential pardon had been refused. Getty said awkwardly, "It seems the President ap-proves the sentence."

"That b.a.s.t.a.r.d," January said weakly. He sat on his cot.

Time pa.s.sed. It was another hot, humid day.

"Well," the priest said. "Let me give you some better news. Given your situation I don't think telling you matters, though I've been told not to. The second mission-you know there was a second strike?"

"Yes."

"Well, they missed too."

"What?" January cried, and bounced to his feet. "You're kidding!"

"No. They flew to Kokura, but found it covered by clouds. It was the same over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, so they flew back to Kokura and tried to drop the bomb using radar to guide it, but apparently there was a-a genuine equipment failure this time, and the bomb fell on an island."

January was hopping up and down, mouth hanging open, "So we n-never-"

"We never dropped an atom bomb on a j.a.panese city. That's right." Getty grinned. "And get this-I heard this from my superior-they sent a message to the j.a.panese government telling them that the two explosions were warn-ings, and that if they didn't surrender by September first we would drop bombs on Kyoto and Tokyo, and then wherever else we had to. Word is that the Emperor went to Hiroshima to survey the damage, and when he saw it he ordered the Cabinet to surrender. So..."

"So it worked," January said. He hopped around, "It worked, it worked!"

"Yes."

"Just like I said it would!" he cried, and hopping before the priest he laughed.

Getty was jumping around a little too, and the sight of the priest bouncing was too much for January.

He sat on his cot and laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.

"So-" He sobered quickly. "So Truman's going to shoot me anyway, eh?"

"Yes," the priest said unhappily. "I guess that's right."

This time January's laugh was bitter. "He's a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, all right. And proud of being a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, which makes it worse.'' He shook his head. "If Roosevelt had lived..."

"It would have been different," Getty finished. "Yes. Maybe so. But he didn't." He sat beside January.

"Ciga-rette?" He held out a pack, and January noticed the white wartime wrapper. He frowned.

"You haven't got a Camel?"

"Oh. Sorry."

"Oh well. That's all right." January took one of the Lucky Strikes, lit up. "That's awfully good news."

He breathed out. "I never believed Truman would pardon me anyway, so mostly you've brought good news. Ha. They missed. You have no idea how much better that makes me feel."

"I think I do."

January smoked the cigarette."... So I'm a good American after all. I am a good American," he insisted. "No matter what Truman says."

"Yes," Getty replied, and coughed. "You're better than Truman any day."

"Better watch what you say, Father." He looked into the eyes behind the gla.s.ses, and the expression he saw there gave him pause. Since the drop every look directed at him had been filled with contempt.

He'd seen it so often during the court-martial that he'd learned to stop looking; and now he had to teach himself to see again. The priest looked at him as if he were... as if he were some kind of hero. That wasn't exactly right. But seeing it...

January would not live to see the years that followed, so he would never know what came of his action. He had given up casting his mind forward and imagining possibilities, because there was no point to it. His planning was ended. In any case he would not have been able to imagine the course of the post-war years. That the world would quickly become an armed camp pitched on the edge of atomic war, he might have predicted. But he never would have guessed that so many people would join a January Society. He would never know of the effect the Society had on Dewey during the Korean crisis, never know of the Society's successful cam-paign for the test ban treaty, and never learn that thanks in part to the Society and its allies, a treaty would be signed by the great powers that would reduce the number of atomic bombs year by year, until there were none left.

Frank January would never know any of that. But in that moment on his cot looking into the eyes of young Patrick Getty, he guessed an inkling of it-he felt, just for an instant, the impact on history.

And with that he relaxed. In his last week everyone who met him carried away the same impression, that of a calm, quiet man, angry at Truman and others, but in a withdrawn, matter-of-fact way. Patrick Getty, a strong force in the Janu-ary Society ever after, said January was talkative for some time after he learned of the missed attack on Kokura. Then he became quieter and quieter, as the day approached.

On the morning that they woke him at dawn to march him out to a hastily constructed execution shed, his MPs shook his hand. The priest was with him as he smoked a final cigarette, and they prepared to put the hood over his head. January looked at him calmly. "They load one of the guns with a blank cartridge, right?"

"Yes," Getty said.

"So each man in the squad can imagine he may not have shot me?"

"Yes. That's right."

A tight, unhumorous smile was January's last expression. He threw down the cigarette, ground it out, poked the priest in the arm. "But I know." Then the mask slipped back into place for good, making the hood redundant, and with a firm step January went to the wall. One might have said he was at peace.

GREEN HEARTS

Lee Montgomerie

Genetics is a field that has seen major discoveries in recent years, so it isn't surprising that science fiction writers have increasingly written about the possibilities arising from them. Here we visit the solar system of a future in which not only cloning but also morphological control of plants has become common. It's a very strange place, and this is the story of a strange love.

Lee Montgomerie was born and brought up in Zambia; she has lived in England for over a decade. "Green Hearts," which appeared in the adventurous British magazine Interzone, is her first professionally published story.When I can no longer bear the cramped tunnels of the colony and my mother's accusing presence (like billions of mothers before her, she cannot understand, she says, how her own daughter has changed overnight into this awkward, defi-ant and irascible creature), I often volunteer to go topside to check the terraforming project.

Weltering in p.u.b.escent irritability, I stumble in my heavy suit through the invisible bloom of lichens, amoebae and bacteria that suffuses the blushing sands, occasionally taking a sample for a.n.a.lysis. I oil the yellow robots that roam the red dunes.

Sometimes I pa.s.s the mirror dome in which Bionics Inter-planetary are working on their secret project. It winks at me. My reflective suit winks back.

I wonder how Beanshoot is getting on.

The colonists have long since lost interest in the events which momentarily disturbed our smug autonomy, but the strange arrival of BI's protege still haunts me like an enig-matic dream.

I was in the infirmary for psychiatric a.s.sessment at the time.

On one of my mother's infrequent visits, she was suddenly vibrant with anger. "Bionics Interplanetary have returned!"

A fleet of ships bearing the green heart logo had arrived unannounced, disgorging huge quant.i.ties of equipment.

"A dome is being constructed in the desert," she told me on her next visit. The team refused to discuss their mission. Their communications personnel had taken over our radio tower, incessantly sending scrambled messages to some ship which was imminently expected.

"Intelligent alien emissaries from another system?" I heard the hospital staff conjecturing. They had been told nothing. Although the terraforming project, the colony's raison d'etre, was an official BI enterprise, most of the colonists had come to Mars to get away from Bionics Interplanetary and the damage they had done. My mother never tired of telling me that she had kept me frozen as an embryo for years; had smuggled me to the colony as an undetected pregnancy be-cause Earth had been no place to bring up a child.

Lying in the hospital, 1 heard the antic.i.p.ated ship landing. It was an ancient rusty tub, I was told later, from which stepped a half-dozen ageing agoraphobic astronauts, forgotten survivors of some nationalistic showpiece expedition of the pre-Bionic age. They stood blinking and confused on the tarmac while the BI delegation heedlessly shouldered past them, manipulated a large metallic canister from the hold, loaded it into a waiting ambulance and rushed it, lights flashing and sirens screaming, through the tunnels to the hospital.

An anxious BI medical team had been bustling around my ward all day, tensely erecting resuscitation equipment, when the container arrived, accompanied by all the rest of the visitors in a state of extreme nervousness. The Chief Techni-cian was panicking, her fingers fumbling with the unfamiliar clasps, foul-smelling liquid slopping on the floor. At last she prised the crate apart to reveal a man-size, peeling foetus floating in a pool of fluid filled with sloughed skin and moulted hair.

The hospital staff crowded round. "What is it?" they asked. They recognised the container as the type that would have been used for transporting large extraterrestrial lifeforms, had any ever been found, but they did not recognise the etiolated creature with the hideous gasmask head as a human being.

The respirator came off to reveal a grey, gluey, uncon-scious face under a bald, veined skull. He was not breathing. The BI team were struggling to insert him into the resuscita-tion apparatus and the frail creature was blue and writhing, rolling blank eyes and racking his birdcage ribcage. At last he groaned and gasped and flushed and stabilised, and the BI people relaxed, embraced each other in an ecstasy of self-congratulation, and rushed off to organise a briefing conference.I called my new companion Beanshoot. A can of these pale, embryonic delicacies had once found its way into our supplies. Beanshoot was to lie, helpless and pampered as a newborn, in the bed opposite mine until the establishment under the dome could be completed.

My mother was suddenly a constant visitor. "Imagine," she said, whispering excitedly as if that thing foggily groping and gurgling in the bed across the ward could understand human speech, "that boy is Nole Whard's legal heir! He is probably the richest person in the known universe!" And she looked at Beanshoot with a considerably more fascinated species of disgust than she had before the briefing conference- when she had averted her eyes in contempt from the huge, lolling head mindlessly dribbling synthetic milk all over the BI Chief Technician's biotechnical smock.

"I heard that his survival has been touch and go," she confided. One could not really blame the astronauts. They had left Earth in the pre-Bionic age, had been shocked to find on their return journey a bacterial jungle on Ganymede where at the time of their outward journey not the simplest amino acid had condensed on the icy rocks. More shocked still to discover in the midst of this multicoloured riot, a crashed lifeboat inscribed SS t.i.tanic.

Carefully penetrating the airlock, they had searched the tiny capsule, filled with wild hydroponics, for hours before they noticed the naked adolescent, immobile, not bothering to watch them from among the overgrown tomatoes and grapes.

They had never heard of the t.i.tanic. Even after their computer had translated the doc.u.ments, the name Nole Whard had meant nothing to them. Some incomprehensible human man had lived alone on this airless moon, had given birth to a son and then had carefully ventured out into the vacuum by converting himself, cell by cell, into an anaerobic nerve net. Their landing and take-off jets had inadvertently destroyed the delicate intelligent web that guarded the mysterious boy.

They had carried Beanshoot unresisting to their craft but he would not eat, neglected to look at them and seemed unbear-ably distressed by his non-organic surroundings. Sharing their confined ship with an unresponsive, incontinent, cringing youth was soon unbearable for the astronauts too. They had decided to suspend him until they could get help.

Now, revived by what is called a miracle, he lies opposite me until the complex is completed and the BI team gently pack him in a transparent pressurised coffin and carry him away from the colony, never to return. The astronauts go back to an Earth changed beyond recognition. The hospital finds nothing seriously wrong with me.

"Impossible," my mother insists-"you must be insane." I have defiled my human purity with the Bionic Interface. She found the used scalpel in the recycling bin and insisted on inspecting me naked.

Even so, she almost missed the tightly-curled pink flower bud on my left breast that almost perfectly matched my right nipple.

How many times she has told me about the youth of Earth and how they have abused their bodies-thrown them away, even-their worthless brains inhabiting the savage chimerae that terrorise the forests of Earth's once-peaceful cities? How dare I secretly violate my unique phenotype? The bud con-stantly accuses her through my shabby s.p.a.cesuit liners. She cannot bear the sight of me.

I resume my solitary rambles on the dunes, communing with the lichens, pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing the enigmatic dome. One day a pressure-suited figure emerges from the winking bubble and beckons me in.

I am weak. The inside of the dome is a sickening holo-gram. I have never before stood on anything more vertiginous than a rock. Now my brain refuses to believe that I am not perched on a dizzy platform high up among the swaying floral pinnacles of an Earthly city. The BI Chief Technician takes her helmet off and invites me to do the same. "Ah. You are Jeni, are you not? I am sure you must remember Nole Whard Junior. Would you like to meet him?"

We go inside the complex. Beanshoot is sitting staring out of the window at the perilous towers of theillusory city. He turns his head when I walk in, fixing me with a penetrating stare but saying nothing. I am silent in return, avoiding the scenery, searching for a resemblance to his famous father in those sad eyes burning in a stubbly skull furrowed with fresh scars. The BI team gather round to observe our interaction.

I cannot bear it. I leave. I say nothing to mother.

For nights I dream that I am losing my grip among the foliage of a precipitous Earthly skysc.r.a.per. I wake with thun-dering heart and sweaty hands. A few days later I am back outside the mirror dome that reflects my mirror helmet, knocking.

BI are pleased to see me. Beanshoot suddenly has his famous father's famous head of red-gold hair (I had seen it growing in the outdoor garden which blends into the holo-gram, I suddenly realise). "It is Jeni!" he says. He smiles at me. Disconcerting to be greeted so eagerly by the long-lost consensual overlord of Earth. I am too shy to smile back. I leave early. For a long time, I ramble through the sands within the virtual limits of the hologram, imagining myself a winged bio-abuser floating among those perfumed floral turrets.

The next time we meet, we talk.

I tell Beanshoot about our minimal microbial ecology. He takes me into the garden and shows me his clumsy bionic experiments. He is converting a cactus into a kitten. It comes leaping over the sessile vegetation to greet us, awkward on four legs all different lengths. Its eyes, matched neither in colour nor in size, are both on the same side of its head. I pick it up. Its Green Heart flutters. I stroke its petal ears.

"I think it needs a tail," I tell him. Together we work on it with the Bionic Interface and a muscular tendril from a predatory vine. The scalpel cuts cleanly through the flesh, spreading a layered red/green paste which seals the wound and glues the organisms together. We upholster the tail with the furry fungus which covers the rest of the cat. The kitten loves its tail. It chases it around the garden. We laugh. BI approve.

I become a frequent visitor to the dome.

Sometimes Beanshoot is not around to greet me. Asleep, or studying, the team say. "A good time for a chat," says the Chief Technician, sitting me down and offering me some of the wild food to which I am growing accustomed. We talk about the colony, my mother, the microscopic culture we are establishing in the sand.

I explore the compartments of the complex. One day I open the door of an untidy cubicle, littered with toys and books. Beanshoot is curled up on the rumpled bed, kitten snoring on the pillow, his thumb in his mouth, a tangle of wires leading from his tousled hair to a rack of boxes under the bed. Poor puppet.

"There are things you need to understand," the Chief Technician says. "Beanshoot it not Nole Whard's child. He is his clone. He is Earth's most precious a.s.set. His brain is an exact duplicate of the one that held the most brilliant intellect the world had ever willingly harboured, but he has spent his formative years bathed in the morphogenetic influence of brainless sessile vegetables. All BI are doing in this secret project on Mars is to recapitulate a childhood for him before he returns to take his place as the master of Earth. Nothing sinister. We are so glad to have found him a friend of his own age to share his experience.

"I have never seen you in anything but a suit or liner," she reminds me. "Would you like to try some Earthly clothes?" She fetches me a shapeless suit, woven from gut, muscle, nerve and chameleon.

As soon as I step into the flaccid pinkish-grey bag, it blushes with brilliant colour and contracts to fit my shape. It seems to enhance my movements somehow. I feel less awkward. When I leave for home, I put my clothes on top of it, not wishing to take it off. It immediately changes colour to perfectly match my skin, imperceptible joints at wrists, ankles and waist. I peer down the neck of my liners. Even if my mother discovers that I am wearing a biotechnical artefact, she will probably approve of the way I haveeliminated my s.e.xual characteristics. How like a child I am again.

I wear my Earthly outfit constantly. It never needs wash-ing. It digests all the dirt and produces a thin thread of excrement which I add to the diet of my microorganisms. When I reach the dome, I shed my suit and liners and wear it alone. Its colour and pattern vary with the weather and my mood, and alter as I move. Its hints to my muscles enliven the athletic games that Beanshoot and I now play in the garden, brachiating among the more climbable trees, project-ing our fantasies into the hologram, imagining ourselves to be regressed gorillas swinging through the dizzy skysc.r.a.pers of Earth.

Sometimes Beanshoot is uneasy and wary of me. "A sign of maturity," the Chief Technician says.

Soon they will take Nole Whard Junior back to Earth, leaving the dome to my microforms and Mars to my mother and her friends.

I don't want them to leave. I am happy. The biological food has cleared my skin. The biotechnical suit makes me graceful and shapely. My mother is more at ease with me now, a.s.suming that my handpicked genes are a.s.serting them-selves at last. Until the day comes when she decides (not suspecting anything, of course, she is to tell me) to follow me on one of my outings.

How surprised she is to find me consorting with the enemy! She gasps at the hologram in disbelief.

She boggles at my vivid biotechnical garments, the garden filled with our wild experiments, my companion, startling in his likeness to his progenitor. "My G.o.dl No wonder you have been looking so smug!" She pushes into the complex. Beanshoot and I are left outside. For hours we sit against the wall, mindlessly rea.s.sembling the vegetation at hand, while they talk inside.

Beanshoot is lucky to have spent his whole childhood without parents, I tell him. Of course he has a dozen of them now, manipulating him not just with words but with wires, drugs, surgery, hypnotism, morphogenetic generators. I stroke his hair and feel the honeycomb of raw sockets beneath. He twitches my hand away.

Hours later my mother emerges. She does not look at me. She snaps into her mirror suit and leads me back to the colony, maintaining radio silence.