Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 39

She scrolled deeper into the archives now, searching the name Zoe Fisher.

Zoe, the doomed colonist who had died in the digger warrens. Yes, here was Zoe, the records fragmentary, rescued from decaying atomic memory abandoned for years or pieced together from Terrestrial records equally incomplete. But enough to sense the shape of Zoe Fisher, a clonal baby raised in the hothouse politics of twenty-second-century Earth, young, fragile, terribly naive. Zoe Fisher, born into a Devices and Personnel creche in North America; lost for a time in the brothels of Tehran; educated in Paris, Madrid, Brussels- Brussels.

Fat drops of rain pelted her face. Chaia hardly noticed them. The rain was bad, but the rain would inevitably get worse. A ridge of low pressure was flowing from the west, moisture from the equatorial oceans breaking against the Copper Mountains like a vast, slow wave.

She walked as if in a trance and found herself once more in the wildwood.

Had she been dreaming? Walking in her sleep? She was alone in the forest, well before dawn in the rainy dark. The darkness was nearly absolute; even with her corneal enhancements she could see only the scrim of foliage around her, and a glint that must have been the Copper River far down a slope of rock and slipgra.s.s.

It was dangerous to be out at night in this weather. The rain and wind made it impossible for her insect-sized guardian remensors to follow her. She could not even say where she was or how she had come here, except that it looked like, now that she thought of it, the glade, her private glade where she came to be alone-the glade where she had seen the spiders take a human shape.

The spiders.

Chaia heard a rustly movement behind her.

She turned, knowing what she must expect to see.

She was not afraid this time; or if she was, the fear was submerged in a thousand other incomprehensible feelings. She turned and saw the looming bulk of something as large as herself. It glistened in the rain that rushed from the forest canopy leaf-by-leaf, reflecting the firefly lamps she wore on her clothing. Its darkness was a deep amber darkness, and it smelled earthy and familiar.

She understood, now, that this was not something the spiders had done. The spiders were simply a vehicle. They were moved by something else, something vastly larger, something which had taken ZoeFisher to its incomprehensible breast a hundred years ago and had recreated her now for some dire and essential purpose.

The creature spoke.

And Chaia Martine, at last, was ready to listen.

Gray McInnes found her in the glade a little before dawn, shivering and semiconscious; he carried her back through the wind-tossed forest to Humantown, to the infirmary, where she was dressed in warm hospital whites and put to bed with graduated doses of some gentle anxiolytic drug.

Chaia slept long and hard, oblivious to the wild wind beating at the shelters of Humantown.

She was aware, periodically, of the doctors at her bedside, of Gray (from time to time) or Werner Eastman, and once she thought she saw her therapy-mother Lizabeth Chopra, though nowadays Lizabeth worked in the orbital station a hundred miles above the Isian equator, so this must have been a dream.

She dreamed constantly and copiously. She dreamed about the ten million worlds of the Galactic Bios.

Zoe had explained all this to her in the glade above the Copper River.

Before the Earth was born, simple unicellular life had swept across the galaxy in a slow but inexorable panspermia. It was life doing what life always did, adapting to diverse environments, hot and frozen worlds, the icy rings of stars or their torrid inner planets. And all of this life carried within it something Zoe called a "resonance," a connection that linked every cell to every sibling cell in the way coherent subatomic particles linked Isis to Earth.

Life was pervasive, and life was a medium (immense, invisible) in which, in time, minds grew. Minds like flowers in a sunny meadow, static but ethereally beautiful.

Chaia was awake when the doctor (it was Dr. Plemyanikov, she saw, who wore a beard and sang tenor at the weekly Universalist services) told her he would be taking a sample of her cerebrospinal fluid for a.n.a.lysis.

She felt the needle in her neck just as the robotic anasthistat eased her back into dreamtime.

You have to warn them , Zoe Fisher insisted.

The walls of the clinic rattled with rain.

When she woke again, she found that the drugs, or something, had enhanced her sense of hearing.

She could hear the rain battering the clinic with renewed intensity. She could hear the blood pulsing through her body. She could hear a cart rattling down the corridor outside her room. And she could hear Dr. Plemyanikov in the corridor with Werner Eastman, discussing her case.

- The contamination must have taken place during her initial injuries, Plemyanikov said, almost twenty years ago ....

She opened her eyes sleepily and saw that Gray McInnes was with her, occupying a chair at her bedside. He smiled when he found her looking at him. "The doctors tell me you've been sick."

- Some microorganism we didn't manage to flush out of her body after she was rescued from the river all those years ago, something almost unimaginably subtle and elusive. Lying dormant, or worse, riding on her neurological rebuild, feeding on it. A miracle it didn't kill her....

The minds that grew on and between the living worlds of the galaxy were sentient, but it was not a human sentience- it was nothing like a human sentience. Human sentience was a novelty, an accident.

Once the minds of the Bios understood this, understood that mind could grow inside the bodies of animals, they regretted the deaths Isis had imposed on her first colonists and had attempted some small rest.i.tution by absorbing the mind of Zoe Fisher.

Gray McInnes took Chaia's hand and smiled. "You should have told me you were having problems."

- Once we localized and identified the infectious agent, it was simple enough to engineer a cure ....

Zoe Fisher had lived inside the Isian bios for more than a century, without body or location, preserved as a ghost, or a specimen, or an amba.s.sador, or a pet-or some combination of all these things. She had even learned to control the local bios a little, in ways that never would have occurred toits native minds. The spiders, for instance, that had spoken to Chaia, or the delicately manipulated unicells that had invaded Chaia's broken skull and had made her meeting with Zoe possible.

"Chaia, there's nothing to be afraid of. Because the doctors say they can cure-"

- cure the dementia - The meeting was important, because humanity needed to know that it was expanding into territory already occupied by minds hugely strange and not necessarily benign, minds diffuse and achingly beautiful but so different from human minds that their motives and desires could not always be predicted. The history of the future would be the history of the interaction between mankind and the Bios, between orphaned humanity and its ancient progenitors.

Gray said, "I couldn't sleep because of the storm. Too many bad memories, I guess. So I headed for the robotics bay to get a little work done. I saw the light in your shelter, but when I knocked and no one answered..."

- In fact, Plemyanikov said, we've already administered a vaccine ....

It was all alive with voices: the s.p.a.ces between the stars, the s.p.a.ces between any two living cells.

The things that live there are the Lords of the Bios, Zoe had said, but they're invisible to human beings, and you have to tell people, Chaia, tell people about the Bios, warn people....

"So I had the Humantown computer locate you, and I knew there was something wrong because you were out in the woods in a storm-G.o.d knows why-"

- She was rapidly approaching a crisis, and if Gray McInnes hadn't brought her out of the rain - "But this time," Gray said, unable to conceal his pleasure, the gratification that welled out of him like fast white river water, "this time I wasn't too late."

- Fortunately the vaccine is already doing its work - And something lurched inside Chaia, the voices fading now, even Zoe's strange and urgent voice, the voice of the forest, growing dim and oddly distant, and the word cure hung in her consciousness like a bright unpleasant light, and she struggled against the watery pressure of the sedatives and tried to tell Gray what was wrong, why they mustn't cure her, but all she could manage was "No, not like this, not this," before the tide of drugs took her and she slept again.

The storm broke during the night. By morning the winds had gentled. The air was cool, and the clouds were rag-ends and afterthoughts in the blue Isian sky.

It had been postponed a month while Chaia recovered, but in the end the wedding was a simple and pretty ceremony.

The vaccine had flushed the infection from her body. Her hallucinations were as distant now as bad dreams, fading memories, feverish delusions, and she knew who she was: she was Chaia Martine, nothing more, and she was marrying the man who loved her.

She walked up the aisle with Gray McInnes-good and loyal Gray, who had finally saved her from the river. Rector Gooding stood beneath the black circle that was the symbol of the Mysteries and said the binding words. Then Gray took the golden yubiwa from a filigreed box, and he placed one ring on her finger and she placed one on his, and they kissed.

She was fully recovered, the doctors had told her. She was sane now. The delusions were finished, and she recognized them as symptoms of her lingering illness, refractions of half-learned history, a peculiarly Isian madness that had ridden into her brain when she was opened to the planet like a broken egg.

She left the church with Gray at her side, flower petals strewn at her feet, and she thought nothing of the spider that had nested at the side of the rectory, or the sound of the wind in the brella trees, or the white clouds that moved through the clearing sky like the letters of an unknown language.

Built Upon theSands of Time

MICHAEL F. FLYNN.

Michael Flynn's first story appeared in a.n.a.log in 1984, and, according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, he "soon became identified as one of the most sophisticated and stylistically acute 1980s a.n.a.log regulars." A statistician by profession, in his fiction Flynn is interested in technology and the people who work with it. So he's a perfect match for the traditional image of the hard SF writer, except that his interest in characterization goes deeper than most. His first novel was In the Country of the Blind (1990), now revised and reissued in hardcover in 2001; his second novel was Fallen Angels (1991) in collaboration with Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. His third, The Nanotech Chronicles (1991), is a series of linked stories. His major work of the 1990s began with Firestar (1996), Rogue Star (1998), Lodestar (2000) and Falling Star (2001), four volumes in an ongoing future history, done in a very Heinleinesque manner. Many of his best stories, including the excellent novella "Melodies of the Heart," are collected in The Forest of Time and Other Stories (1997).

"Built Upon the Sands of Time" is Flynn the a.n.a.log writer doing a bar story about scientists and ordinary people. It is notable for its characterization, humor, scientific twist, and also as a contrast to the Nancy Kress story "To Cuddle Amy." There were a number of excellent SF stories about parents and parenting this year and this is also one of the best of that strain.

A wise man once said that we can never step in the same river twice. A very wise man, indeed; because by that he did not mean we should refrain from bathing, as some half-wits at the Irish Pub have suggested, but that times change and the same circ.u.mstances are never fully repeated. You are not the same person you were yesterday; nor am I.

But perhaps that old Greek was not half so wise as he thought. Perhaps you cannot step into the same river even once; and you may not be the same person yesterday as you were yesterday.

Friday nights at the Irish Pub are busier than a husband whose wife has come home early. When The O Neil and myself arrived, the neighborhood crowd was there bending elbows with the University folks from down the street and making, as they like to say, a joyful noise. It was so busy, in fact, that Hennesey, O Daugherty's partner, had joined him behind the bar and even so they were barely keeping ahead of the orders. There were another dozen or so boyos in the back room, watching the progress of the pool table and providing encouragement or not to the players, as the case might be. The O Neil placed his challenge by laying a quarter down on the rail and promised to call me in for a game as soon as he won the table. Then he set himself to study the opposition. Seeing as how the quarters were lined up on the rail like so many communion children, I knew it would be a long, sad time before I held a cue in my hand, so I took myself back out to the bar.

O Daugherty Himself was a wise man, for he had saved a stool for my sitting and, more quickly than I could order it, had placed a pint of Guinness before me. O Daugherty is a man who knows his manners; and his customers, as well. After a polite nod to the man on my right, whom I did not know, I occupied myself with the foamy stout.

Hennesey was a contrast to his partner. Where O Daugherty was short, dark, and barrel-chested, Hennesey was tall, fair, and dour, one of the "red-haired race" from the North of Ireland. His long, thick, drooping face seemed always on the verge of tears, though never quite crossing over into the real thing.

His shoulders were stooped because, tall as he was, he had to bend over to communicate with the common ruck. He gave me a smile, which for him consisted of raising the corners of his mouth from the vicinity of his chin to a nearly horizontal position. I hoisted my own mug in reply.

But no sooner had I taken the first, bitter sip than I heard Doc Mooney, on the far side of the oval bar, complain. In itself, this was no unusual thing, since complaint is the blood and spit of the man. But thenature of his complaint was more than a little out of the ordinary.

"Which of ye spalpeens," he cried, "has taken my jawbone?"

Danny Mulloney, sitting two stools to his left, looked at him. "Why, no one, you omadhaun, seeing as how you're still flapping it."

Doc gave him the squint-eye. "It's not my own jawbone I'm speaking of, ye lout; as you would know if you applied what little thought you have to it; but the jawbone we keep at the medical school for purposes of demonstration. I had put it in my pocket when I left for the day."

"Ah," said Danny with a sad shake of his head, "and I would hate to be your wife, then, after turning out your pockets for the laundering. Sure, a pathologist should never take his work home with him."

There was a ripple of laughter at our end of the bar. I confess that I smiled, myself, though it is my constant purpose never to encourage the wit of Danny Mulloney.

Doc turned a shade darker and tapped the bar top with a stiff finger. "I had set it right there, and now it is gone. Someone has taken it."

"You weren't thinking of leaving it as a tip, Doc?" I asked, getting into the spirit of the thing.

Doc gave me a look of betrayal. Et tu, Mickey? But Himself spoke up, a twinkle in his eye. "It would depend, I'm thinking, on how many teeth were yet in the jaw. Placed under my pillow, it might draw a tidy sum from the wee folk."

Hennesey only shook his head at the blathering of mortals. "Now, who would wish to steal such a thing?" he asked, contraba.s.so.

"Samson," Danny suggested, "were there any Philistines about?" Danny being of a religious frame of mind, a Biblical example came most naturally to him.

Doc, who knows a little of Scripture himself, leaned past the poor man who sat between him and Danny and consequently had to listen to the argument with both his ears, and said sweetly, "Nor is it your own jawbone we're speaking of."

"There is too much foam," said the man sitting between them.

Both Danny and Doc pulled away, puzzled at the nonce of the sequitur. Himself reared up. "Too much foam, d'you say? Why, I give honest measure; and the man who says I do not is a liar."

The man blinked several times. "What? Oh." He glanced at the st.u.r.dy gla.s.s mug before him. "Oh, no, I did not mean your fine beer. I was responding to this gentleman's question concerning his jawbone.

I meant the quantum foam."

Hennesey scratched his jaw. "The quantum foam, is it? And that would be an Australian beer?"

"No. I mean the timelessness that came 'before' the Big Bang. We call it the quantum foam."

O Daugherty drew a fresh mug and set it down with a flourish before the man. "Sure and it is worth the price of a good pint to hear what connection there might be between the Big Bang and Doc Mooney's jawbone."

Doc protested again, "It's not my jawbone," but no one paid him any heed.

"Well," said the man, "not to the jawbone, but to the disappearance of the jawbone." He seemed hesitant and a little sad. For a moment, he managed to make even Hennesey look cheerful. Then he sighed and picked up the mug. "It's like this," he said.

"My name is Owen fitzHugh. I am a physicist at the University, but my hobby has always been the oddities of the Universe. Quirks, as well as quarks, as a colleague of mine has remarked...

"One of these quirks is what I call 'phantom recollections' and 'causeless objects.' Non-Thomistic events, if you must have a fine philosophical name for it. Have you ever looked in vain, as your friend here, for an object you clearly recall having placed in a certain spot? Or, conversely, found small objects for which you cannot account? Or recalled telephone numbers or appointments that turned out not to exist?"

"I had a key on my key chain, once," said Maura Lafferty, "that I did not recognize and that fit no lock that I own. I still have no idea where it came from."

"I had a date one time with Bridey Lynch," said Danny, "but when I called on her, she had no recollection of it."

Doc made an evil grin. "Why, there is no mystery at all in that."FitzHugh nodded. "They are usually small objects or bits of information, these anomalies of mine.

Usually, when we notice them at all, we ascribe them to a faulty recollection; but I'm a natural contrarian.

I wondered: What if it is the Universe, and not ourselves, that sometimes forgets."

Danny and Doc flanked the poor man with a bookend of skeptical looks. Danny, I was sure, believed in G.o.d's Infallible Memory; while Doc reasoned from the predictability of Natural Law. Still their thoughts had come to rest in the same place. Himself shifted his ap.r.o.n and c.o.c.ked his head in interest. "Now what might that mean?"

"History is contingent," said fitzHugh.

Himself nodded. "Aye, so it is." But Danny scratched his head. "If it is, I've never caught it." Doc leaned past the unfortunate physicist once more.