Full Spectrum 3 Part 1

Full Spectrum.

Ed By Lou Aronica, Amy Stout, and Betsy Mitch.e.l.l.

Introduction.

LOU ARONICA.

I.

RECENTLY FOUND MYSELF under circ.u.mstances where I needed to spend about six months without reading fantastic fiction of any kind. My job situation had changed and I needed to sh.o.r.e up my knowledge in other areas of fiction. The experience was a pleasurable one, much like going on a long journey where you see firsthand things you had only read about.

When I began to feel comfortable enough in my new job, I picked up a copy of a ma.n.u.script Betsy Mitch.e.l.l had just finished editing. As I read it, I became rather more emotional than I was accustomed to being while reading. The metaphors, the imagination, the unabashed quest for the unknown, left me literally tingling. My choice for reentry had been well made, as this was a very good novel, but I realized that science fiction and fantasy could do something for me that no other form of literature could do. And I realized all over again how much I loved it.

You, of course, probably don't need to go through an exercise this extreme in order to understand the beauty of fantastic fiction. You have, after all, chosen to read a book with no unifying element at all other than the promise from three editors that the stories within represent excellence in this genre. That means you are open to the demands of variety and to the challenges writers present when they are stretching themselves. In other words, you are open to the fantastic fiction experience in its purest form. I can't promise you that we will give you that experience, only that we believe we will.

As was true with the first two volumes of this anthology series, Full Spectrum 3 is our celebration of the genre that enriches us. There is no agenda here. We read hundreds of stories over the past year and a half, and have chosen these twenty-three as the best of that group. They represent quite a range: magic realism, hard sf, allegory, even a No play.

We have only one regret. In each of the first two volumes of this anthology, we published five writers who had never published fiction before. In Full Spectrum 5, there isn't a single story by a previously unpublished writer. We read some very good submissions, but none were at the level of the stories which are included here. I find this unfortunate, but I think it would have been more unfortunate to lower our standards in order to keep our record intact. Nevertheless, it is something we will seek to rectify in Full Spectrum 4.

Thank you for wanting to read this book.

-Lou Aronica.

Full Spectrum.

Daughter Earth.

JAMES MORROW.

W.

E'D BEEN TRYING to have another child for over three years, carrying on like a couple from one of those movies you can rent by going behind the beaded curtain at Jake's Video, but it just wasn't working out. Logic, of course, says a second conception should prove no harder than a first. Hah. Mother Nature can be a sneaky old b.i.t.c.h, something we've learned from our twenty-odd years of farming down here in central Pennsylvania.

Maybe you've driven past us, Garber Farm, two miles outside of Boalsburg on Route 322. Raspberries in the summer, apples in the fall, Christmas trees in the winter, asparagus in the spring-that's us. The ba.s.set hound puppies appear all year round. We'll sell you one for three hundred dollars, guaranteed to love the children, chase rabbits out of the vegetable patch, and always appear burdened by troubles greater than yours.

We started feeling better after Dr. Borealis claimed he could make Polly's uterus "more hospitable to reproduction," as he put it. He prescribed v.a.g.i.n.al suppositories, little nuggets of progesterone packed in cocoa b.u.t.ter. You store them in the refrigerator till you're ready to use one, and they melt in your wife the way sugar melts in your mouth.

That very month, we got pregnant.

So there we were, walking around with clouds under our feet. We kept remembering our son's first year out of the womb, that sense of power we'd felt, how we'd just gone ahead and thought him up and made him, by d.a.m.n.

Time came for the amniocentesis. After putting Polly's belly to sleep, the ultrasound technician hooked her up to the TV monitor so Dr. Borealis could keep his syringe on target and make sure it didn't skewer the fetus. I liked Borealis. He reminded me of Norman Rockwell's painting of that tubby and fastidious old country doctor listening to the little girl's doll with his stethoscope.

Polly and I were hoping for a girl.

Thing was, the fetus wouldn't come into focus. Or, if it was in focus, it sure as h.e.l.l didn't look like a fetus. I was awfully glad Polly couldn't see the TV.

"Glitch in the circuitry?" ventured the ultrasound technician, a tense and humorless youngster named Leo.

"Don't think so," muttered Borealis.

I used to be a center for my college basketball team, the Penn State Nittany Lions, and I'll be d.a.m.ned if our baby didn't look a great deal like a basketball.

Possibly a soccerball.

Polly said, "How is she?"

"Kind of round," I replied.

"Round, Ben? What do you mean?"

"Round," I said.

Borealis furrowed his brow, real deep ridges; you could've planted corn up there. "Now don't fret, Polly. You neither, Ben. If it's a tumor, it's probably benign."

"Round?" Polly said again.

"Round," I said again.

"Let's go for the juice anyway," the doctor told Leo the technician. "Maybe the lab can give us a line on this."

So Borealis inserted his syringe, and suddenly the TV showed the needle poking around next to our fetus like a dipstick somebody was trying to get back into a Chevy. The doctor went ahead as if he were doing a normal amnio, gently p.r.i.c.king the sac, though I could tell he hadn't made peace with the situation, and I was feeling pretty miserable myself.

"Round?" said Polly.

"Right," I said.

Later that month, I was standing in the apple orchard harvesting some Jonafrees-a former basketball center doesn't need a ladder-when Asa, our eleven-year-old redheaded Viking, ran over and told me Borealis was on the phone. "Mom's napping," my son explained. "Being knocked up sure makes you tired, huh?"

I got to the kitchen as fast as I could. I snapped up the receiver, my questions spilling out helter-skelter-would Polly be okay, what kind of pregnancy was this, were they planning to set things right with in utero surgery?

Borealis said, "First of all, Polly's CA-125 reading is only nine, so it's probably not a malignancy."

"Thank G.o.d."

"And the fetus's chromosome count is normal-forty-six on the money. The surprising thing is that she has chromosomes at all."

"She? It's a she?"

"We'd like to do some more ultrasounds."

"It's a she?"

"You bet, Ben. Two X chromosomes."

"Zen.o.bia."

"Huh?"

"If we got a girl, we were going to name her Zen.o.bia."

So we went back down to Boalsburg Gynecological. Borealis had called in three of his friends from the university: Gordon Hashigan, a spry old coot who held the Raymond Dart Chair in Physical Anthropology; Susan Croft, a stern-faced geneticist with a lisp; and Abner Logos, a skinny, devil-bearded epidemiologist who somehow found time to be Centre County's Public Health Commissioner. Polly and I remembered voting against him.

Leo the technician connected Polly to his machine, snapping more pictures than a j.a.panese extended family takes when it visits Epcot Center, and then the three professors huddled solemnly around the printouts, mumbling to each other through thin, tight lips. Ten minutes later, they called Borealis over.

The doctor rolled up the printouts, tucked them under his arm, and escorted Polly and me into his office-a nicer, better-smelling office than the one we'd set up in the ba.s.set barn back home. He seemed nervous and apologetic. Sweat covered his temples like dew on a toadstool.

Borealis unfurled an ultrasound, and we saw how totally different our baby was from other babies. It wasn't just that she was so much on the spherical side-no, the real surprise was her complexion.

"It's like one of those Earth shots the astronauts send back when they're heading toward the moon," Polly noted.

Borealis nodded. "Here we've got a kind of ocean, for example. And this thing is like a continent."

"What's this?" I asked, pointing to a white ma.s.s near the bottom.

"Ice cap on the southern pole," said Borealis. "We can do the procedure next Tuesday."

"Procedure?" said Polly.

The doctor appeared to be experiencing a nasty odor. "Polly, Ben, the simple fact is that I can't encourage you to bring this pregnancy to term. Those professors in the next room all agree."

My stomach churned sour milk.

"I thought the amnio was normal," said Polly.

"Try to understand," said Borealis. "This fetal tissue cannot be accurately labeled a baby."

"So what do you call it?" Polly demanded.

The doctor grimaced. "For the moment... a biosphere."

"A what?"

"Biosphere."

When Polly gets angry, she starts inflating-like a beach toy, or a puff adder, or a randy tree frog. "You're saying we can't give her a good home, is that it? Our other kid's turning out just fine. His project took second prize in the Centre County Science Fair."

"Organic Control of Gypsy Moths," I explained.

Borealis issued one of his elaborate frowns. "You really imagine yourself giving birth to this material?"

"Uh-huh," said Polly.

"But it's a biosphere."

"So what?"

The doctor squinched his cherubic Norman Rockwell face. "There's no way it's going to fit through the ca.n.a.l," he snapped, as if that settled the matter.

"So we're looking at a cesarean, huh?" said Polly.

Borealis threw up his hands as if he were dealing with a couple of dumb crackers. People think that being a farmer means you're some sort of rube, though I've probably rented a lot more Ingmar Bergman videos than Borealis-with subt.i.tles, not dubbed-and the newsletter we publish, Down to Earth, is a d.a.m.ned sight more literate than those Pregnancy Pointers brochures the doctor kept shoveling at us. "Here's my home number," he said, scribbling on his prescription pad. "Call me the minute anything happens."

The days slogged by. Polly kept swelling up with Zen.o.bia, bigger and bigger, rounder and rounder, and by December she was so big and round she couldn't do anything except crank out the Christmas issue of Down to Earth on our Macintosh SE and waddle around the farm like the Hindenburg looking for New Jersey. And of course we couldn't have the expectant couple's usual fun of imagining a new baby in the house. Every time I stumbled into Zen.o.bia's room and saw the crib and the changing table and the Cookie Monster's picture on the wall, my throat got tight as a stone. We cried a lot, Polly and me. We'd crawl into bed and hug each other and cry.

So it came as something of a relief when, one frosty March morning, the labor pains started. Borealis sounded pretty woozy when he answered the phone -it was 3 a.m.-but he woke up fast, evidently pleased at the idea of getting this biosphere business over with. I think he was counting on a stillbirth.

"The contractions-how far apart?"

"Five minutes," I said.

"Goodness, that close? The thing's really on its way."

"We don't refer to her as a thing," I corrected him, politely but firmly.

By the time we got Asa over to my parents' house, the contractions were only four minutes apart. Polly started her Lamaze breathing. Except for its being a cesarean this time, and a biosphere, everything happened just like when we'd had our boy: racing down to Boalsburg Memorial; standing around in the lobby while Polly panted like a hot collie and the computer checked into our insurance; riding the elevator up to the maternity ward with Polly in a wheelchair and me fidgeting at her side; getting into our hospital duds-white gown for Polly, green surgical smock and cap for me. So far, so good.

Borealis was already in the OR. He'd brought along a mere skeleton crew. The a.s.sistant surgeon had a crisp, hawkish face organized around a nose so narrow you could've opened your mail with it. The anesthesiologist had the kind of tanned, handsome, Mediterranean features you see on condom boxes. The pediatric nurse was a gangly, owl-eyed young woman with freckles and pigtails. "I told them we're antic.i.p.ating an anomaly," Borealis said, nodding toward his team.

"We don't call her an anomaly," I informed the doctor.

They positioned me by Polly's head-she was awake, anesthetized from the diaphragm down-right behind the white curtain they use to keep cesarean mothers from seeing too much. Borealis and his sidekick got to work. Basically, it was like watching a reverse-motion movie of somebody stuffing a turkey; the doctor made his incision and started rummaging around, and a few minutes later he scooped out an object that looked like a Rand McNally globe covered with vanilla frosting and olive oil.

"She's here," I shouted to Polly. Even though Zen.o.bia wasn't a regular child, some sort of fatherly instinct kicked in, and my skin went p.r.i.c.kly all over. "Our baby's here," I gasped, tears rolling down my cheeks.

"Holy mackerel!" said the a.s.sistant surgeon.

"Jesus!" said the anesthesiologist. "Jesus Lord G.o.d in heaven!"

"What the f.u.c.k?" said the pediatric nurse. "She's a f.u.c.king ball."

"Biosphere," Borealis admonished.