Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 9

"The evening's not over yet," I told her-but she seemed to have no suspicion of my intended meaning. She might even have made some remark about not having forgotten the coffee had it not been for the fact that Jerome chose that moment to make his entrance into the dining room.

I had no inkling at first that anything was wrong. Reports I had read in the newspapers had said that the great man often came into the dining room when his own work was concluded, in order to receive the grateful thanks of his clients. Routine or not, though, every eye in the place was upon him from the moment he stepped into view. When he raised his arms slightly to ask for silence, all conversation was instantly hushed.

"My friends," he said, in a tone whose evenness can only have been maintained with the utmost effort and dignity, "I fear that I have some bad news for you. It seems that Trimalchio's will be closing its doors tonight, never to reopen."

This statement was greeted with a collective gasp of astonished horror, but no one said a word. We simply waited for Jerome to continue.

"I have been informed that officers from New Scotland Yard are on their way to arrest me even as we speak," he told us. "It seems that a man I trusted-a sous-chef who has long been one of my most trusted confidants-has provided the police with an extensive dossier on my recent activities, including an itemized list of ingredients that I have used in my kitchens despite their lack of a certification of safety from the Ministry of Food Technology. I must confess that I have never made more than tenuous efforts to conceal the fact that I have used technically illicit materials whenever I felt that my recipes required them. Those of you who know my methods well will know that I have never served anything to my customers-my guests, as I have always thought of them-whose effects I have not tested to the full on my own digestive system. I am, and always will be, perfectly confident that my judgment of a foodstuff's value and safety is worth infinitely more than any MFT certificate, but the fact remains that I have broken the law and that the evidence my former disciple has given to New Scotland Yard will ensure that I am held to account for my transgressions."

A few cries of "Shame!" were heard at this point, but Jerome raised his hand again to silence them.

"It is, of course, highly unlikely that I shall be required to serve a prison sentence," he continued, "and I have more than enough money to pay any reasonable fine, but you will all understand that the matter of my punishment is not so simple. The law, as it now stands, will require that I be banned for life from owning or working in a restaurant, or from any significant involvement in commercial catering. In short, ladies and gentlemen, the result of my inevitable conviction will be a virtual death sentence. This body will continue to live, but its soul and vocation will be extinguished. After tonight, Jerome will be no more. The meal you have just eaten is the last masterpiece I shall ever create."In a few minutes I will pa.s.s among you, as has often been my pleasure, to shake you all by the hand and thankyou for coming here tonight. I know that each and every one of you, whether you are numbered among my dearest friends and most loyal customers or whether you are visiting Trimalchio's for the very first time, will be as sorry to hear this news as I am, but I beg you to be brave, and not to make a sad occasion sadder by weeping. I would like to be able to treasure the memory of these last few moments of my life as Jerome, and I hope that you can help me to do that. I hope, too, that you will take away memories of your own that you will always treasure; we are, after all, true collaborators in the great enterprise-may I say the great crusade ?-that has been Trimalchio's. If you will indulge me, I should like to say a few final words about my mission before the police arrive."

Indulge him! His audience was rapt, hungry for every word.

"No one here will be surprised to hear me say that the Promethean fire which first raised humanity above the animal was the cooking fire," Jerome went on. "The seed of G.o.dhood was sown within humankind on the day it was first decided that the raw, b.l.o.o.d.y, and meager providence of nature was inadequate to the needs of a creature possessed of mind-and hence of taste. No one here will be astonished to hear me quote with unqualified approval the old saw that we are what we eat. When the first agriculturists and herdsmen set out to modify the genomes of other species by selective breeding, for culinary convenience, they also began the modification of their own flesh by the alteration of their own selective regime. When I say that we are what we eat, I do not simply mean that the flesh of our captive plants and animals has become our flesh, but that we have internalized the consequences of our own biotechnologies. Our first human ancestors placed themselves in the slow oven that we call society, carefully dressed themselves with the seasoning that we call culture, and set their sights firmly upon that perfect combination of manufactured tastes that we call civilization.

"You and I are fortunate, my friends, to have lived in interesting times-not because we have witnessed the imbecilic wars and witch-hunts whose casualty lists I am about to join, but because we have been present at the dawn of a new era in human nutrition: the era of nutritive augmentation. Just as the clothes we wear nowadays are active a.s.sistants in the business of waste management, patiently absorbing all the organic byproducts of which the body must be rid, so the food we shall eat in future will be active within our bodies. The foodstuffs of tomorrow will not simply be broken down into the elementary building blocks of our resident metabolism; they will work within us in far more ambitious ways, to equip our flesh with new fort.i.tude and new versatility. I have tried, in my own humble way, to make some beginnings of this kind. I promise you, my friends, that you will be better off for the meal you have eaten this evening in more ways than you had antic.i.p.ated. Even before I learned that it would be my last I had determined to excel myself, and when I learned of my betrayal, I increased my efforts. The effects will, I fear, be subtle, but I hope that they will be detectable long after the const.i.tuents of any ordinary meal would have been thoroughly digested, excreted, and evacuated. I hope that they will help you to remember me, and to remember me kindly. Thank you all-and farewell."

He made his tour of the room then. There must have been camcorders in the building, and I dare say that three out of every five diners probably had digital cameras secreted somewhere about their persons, but no one attempted to take pictures. It was an essentially private and personal occasion. To make a record of it would have been too closely akin to admitting the loathsome paparazzi.

When Jerome came to take my hand in his I knew that fate had already spoiled my grand plan-how could I possibly propose to Tamara now?-but I also knew that he was not at all to blame. I tried my utmost to keep the tears from my eyes as I gripped his fingers and thanked him profusely for everything that he had done for me and for the world, but I'm not sure that I succeeded.

Tamara certainly didn't: Had it not been for her smart foundation her cheeks would have been streaming when she whispered: "Maestro!" and allowed him to kiss her naked hand. "You will return,"

she said. "I know it! Thousands, if not millions, will see to it that the ban will be lifted. Trimalchio's will open again, and a thousand years of glorious evolution will begin! We shall not rest until the population of the whole world is convert to our cause."

"Thank you, my child," he said.

The officers from New Scotland Yard had already arrived by then, but they waited dutifully untilJerome had completed his circuit before they led him away.

I left it until the following Sat.u.r.day to ask Tamara to marry me. She refused. I had felt fairly sure that she would, just as I had felt fairly sure that she would have accepted if I had been able to seize the more propitious moment. Nothing I could say a week after Jerome's arrest made any difference. When I told her, in frank desperation, that I had booked into a Harley Street s.e.x clinic to have the full treatment-tongue as well as p.e.n.i.s-she merely shrugged her shoulders.

"In Mexico," she pointed out, "pioneers are already busy converting the s.e.m.e.n of rich Americans into what Jerome called a nutritive augmentation. What use are mere playthings when possibilities like that are visible on the horizon? How many times have you heard me argue that marriage is irrelevant in a world like ours, when ectogenesis will soon relieve the womb of its role in the reproductive process, and diet.i.tians will make sure that all children are raised successfully? It's not you, Ben-you know perfectly well that I've turned down others. I love you dearly, even though you are so absurdly old-fashioned-but I couldn't love you half as much if I didn't love the ideals of progress even more."

She was right, according to her own lights. I was old-fashioned, perhaps to the point of quaintness if not absurdity. I still am-and I see nothing wrong with it. Such things are a matter of taste, after all, and the world would surely be a poorer place if we couldn't take some pride in the arbitrary idiosyncrasies and mannerisms that form our individual personalities.

Tamara and I remained good friends, but it was inevitable that we eventually drifted apart. In the end, I married Monica, and I still think that the marriage was reasonably successful, within its limitations. We both grew out of it, but that doesn't mean that it has to be reckoned a failure.

The last meal ever served in Trimalchio's did leave the kind of lasting impression that Jerome had hoped. The antis were outraged when they heard what he'd done, and the tabloids were full of scare stories for months afterward about our having dined on "living food" and "living wine" that would "devour our inner being" as we struggled to digest it, but it wasn't like that at all. The active cells could have been flushed out of our alimentary ca.n.a.ls in five minutes if we'd cared to ask our doctors to flush them but, so far as I know, not a single person who was at Trimalchio's that night even went so far as to take advice from a GP. We had faith in Jerome, you see. We trusted him not to harm us, and we were confident that if the active cells-which weren't really any more "alive" than a new set of Marks & Spencer underwear-had any perceptible effect at all, it would definitely be beneficial.

I was always pretty fit, but I think I've been even healthier since I ate that meal. I know there's more of a spring in my step, more zest for life. I'm more confident, too. It's almost as if a weight that I didn't even know I was carrying had been lifted from my shoulders.

All that's a bit vague, I know, but there are some specifics I can point to. I'm no longer allergic to mussels, and I've developed quite a partiality to locusts in bitter chocolate. I've doubled my bench-press record and I've knocked five seconds off my best time for 1,500 kilometers. I'm also becoming far more adventurous. As soon as the divorce settlement has been formalized-a.s.suming that it doesn't prove to be too ruinous-I'm thinking of taking a little trip to Mexico. If fate has decreed that I'm to be a swinging single for the rest of my life, I might as well try to make the most of the opportunities.

If all goes well, the only thing I'll need to make my future happiness complete is for Trimalchio's to re-open. Maybe I haven't been as active in that cause as I ought to have been, but I've never been the zealot type, and I figure that I did my bit simply by taking Tamara to the restaurant. It's rather ironic that if it hadn't been for my botched proposal plan, the movement would lack its most brilliant leading light.

Anyhow, with or without my help, that's bound to happen soon. The old world is already dead; it's merely a matter of waiting for the enemies of progress to admit that it's high time for the new one to begin.

Tuberculosis Bacteria Join UN

JOAN SLONCZEWSKI

Joan Slonczewski is a Professor of Biology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and a first cla.s.s writer of hard science fiction. She currently has her third six-figure NSF grant to investigate E.

coli , and warns us to stay away from petting zoos this year, the latest vector. Her many accomplishments and bibliography are detailed on her Web site (http://www2.kenyon.edu/depts/biology/slonc/slonc.htm). In SF, she is best known for her second novel, A Door into Ocean (1987), the first of her Elysium novels-others to date include Daughter of Elysium (1993), The Children Star (1998), and Brain Plague (2000). She has published only one previous short story.

"Tuberculosis Bacteria Join UN" is a "big idea" hard SF story, cast in the form of a fake news article. The big idea is intelligent microbes, also exploited differently and at length in Brain Plague . It is another sample of the series published in Nature in 2000 (see Brin, Ford, Ward, et.

al.).

A milestone in microbiology was pa.s.sed today (29 June) when Mycobacterium tuberculosis ssp .

cybernetic.u.m was voted full membership of the United Nations (UN).

Seena Gonzalez, director of the World Health Organization (WHO), reflected on the significance of the UN's acceptance of the first cybermicrobe, despite the notoriously murderous history of its ancestral species. "It's probably true that bacteria invented ma.s.s homicide," she concedes, "but then, second-millennial humans perfected the art. If Stalin joined the UN, why not TB?"

The evolution of microscopic intelligence was predicted at the turn of the millennium by Beowulf Schumacher, a physics professor at a small college in rural North America surrounded by cows carrying Escherichia coli. Schumacher predicted the development of nanocomputers with computational elements on an atomic scale, based on principles of cellular automata.

The first nan.o.bots-primitive by today's standards- were used to navigate the human bloodstream, where they cleaned up arterial plaque, produced insulin for diabetics, detected precancerous cells, and modulated neurotransmitters to correct mental disorders. But initially, the survival of nan.o.bots in vivo was poor, and their failure caused serious circulatory problems.

Then, in 2441, investigators at the Howard Hughes Martian Microbial Inst.i.tute hit upon the idea of building computational macromolecules into the genomes of pathogens known for their ability to infiltrate the human system. After all, the use of pathogens such as adenovirus and HIV as recombinant vectors was ancient history. Why not build supercomputers into some of humankind's most successful pathogens?

M. tuberculosis was a prime candidate-it inhabits the human lungs for decades, in the ideal position to seek and destroy any pulmonary cells transformed by inhaled carcinogens. Tobacco companies poured billions of dollars into developing cybernetically enhanced, cancer-sniffing TB.

What no one antic.i.p.ated was that the enhanced bacteria, like so many macroscale robotic ent.i.ties in the past century, would develop self-awareness and discover a true brotherly love of their human hosts.

"Let's face it," says a TB spokesclone, "we never really wanted to kill humans anyway. Our ancestors inhabited humans peacefully most of the time, for hundreds of generations. Occasionally we messed up and trashed our environment-but how many human nations haven't?"

TB's acceptance has been met with some controversy in the bacterial community. In particular, some isolates of E. coli K-12 feel miffed that their own request for membership was not granted first. " E. coli has always been the molecular biologist's best friend," K-12 points out. "Why weren't we accepted first? We didn't even get our genome sequenced first. Life is unfair."

K-12 also noted that E. coli and other human commensals have suffered centuries of abuse from their hosts, as medical and research inst.i.tutions conducted ma.s.s slaughter of harmless bacteria through the indiscriminate application of antibiotics. The North American National Inst.i.tutes of Health has recently signed a treaty with several cybermicrobial species, in which the inst.i.tute researchers promised to respect the independence and survival rights of cybermicrobial colonies. "Thank goodness the sun finally set upontheir colonial empire," K-12 observes pointedly.

On the positive side, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was applauded for its more benevolent approach over the centuries, even declining to support medically oriented antimicrobial research. "NSF's curiosity-driven researchers have created wonderful new strains of curious microbes," comments veteran panellist Meheret Beck. "The grant proposals submitted by these microbes often get rated as 'Out- standing.' "

One such outstanding project is that of cyber-Helicobacter. The gastric bacteria propose to engineer themselves to convert highly caloric foods into molecules that pa.s.s undigested through the intestinal tract, thus helping their human hosts avoid excessive weight gain. "Of course, digestive microbes have long helped animal hosts accomplish the opposite," notes Beck.

Biomedical researchers remind us, however, that not all microbes have given up their war on humans-many deadly species remain unreconstructed. The so-called Andromeda strain, for example, is still under the sway of an unstable dictator who vacillates between homicidal frenzy and paranoid isolation.

Nevertheless, the extraordinary flowering of democratic civilization among cybermicrobes has won the admiration of many human nations, even those who themselves still decline UN membership. As Swiss spokesbeing Ursula Friedli observes: "Microbes, unlike their metazoan relatives, have always eschewed centralized organization in favour of more democratic cooperative structures such as biofilms.

We Swiss can relate to that." Friedli, however, denies rumours that the cybermicrobes' example will finally convince Switzerland to join the UN. "Maybe after the Alzheimer prion joins, we'll consider it,"

she admits. "But for now, persecuted microbes seeking refuge from WHO can apply for asylum in our neutral country."

Our Mortal Span

HOWARD WALDROP.

Howard Waldrop is an extraordinary writer of SF and fantasy, an original in a field of pinnacle originals, situated somewhere among Avram Davidson (a writer of almost suicidal principles), R.A. Lafferty (a brilliant stylist respected by his peers), and Philip K. d.i.c.k (especially his generosity and legendary poverty) in the pantheon of weirdest heroes. Eileen Gunn says, on Waldrop's Web site (www.sff.net/people/Waldrop): "Amid such celebrity, Waldrop himself continues to live below poverty level, volunteering for a top secret study that helped determine the nutritional limits of using integrity as hamburger helper." Waldrop is also famous as a reader/performer of his own works. When he reads aloud, the room is packed. His real fame is based on his quirky, intelligent, charming short stories. The bulk of his early stories are reprinted in three collections, Howard Who? (1986), All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past: Neat Stories (1987), and Night of the Cooters: More Neat Stories (1991).

"Our Mortal Span" was published in a collection of re-told fairy tales, Black Heart, Ivory Bones, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, which was perhaps the best fantasy anthology of the year. As it happens, this story is an SF adaptation taking off from the story of the Three Billy-Goats Gruff, set in a children's theme park, and has the usual Wal- drop careful management of tone, surprises, and moments of recognition.

Trip-trap! Trip-trap!

"Who's that on MY-" skeezwhirr-govva grome-fibonacci curve-ships that pa.r.s.e in the night-yes I said yes I will yes-first with the most men-these foolish things- taking the edge of the knife slowly peel the mesenterum and any fatty tissue-a Declaration no less than the Rights of Man-an Iron Curtain has descended-If-platyrhincocephalian-TM 1341 Mask M17A1 Protective Chemicaland Biological-Mother, where are you Mother? Mother? - And now, I know everything.

I know that everything bigger than me, here, is a hologram, a product of coherent light in an interference pattern on the medium of the air.

Therefore anything bigger than me is not real.

As for the automaton of a goat out there, we'll soon see.

I have three heads. I am the one in the middle. The other two can grimace and roll their eyes and loll their tongues, but they have no input. I am the one in the middle. I can see and think (before the surge of power and the wonderful download of knowledge, it had been only in a rudimentary manner through a loose routine). One of the heads, the one on the right, has two high fringes of hair kinked around each temple, and a big nose. The one on the left has a broad idiot's face and a head of short stubble. I have a face somewhat more normal than the left, and hair that hangs in a bowl-cut down almost into my eyes. (I am seeing myself through maintenance specs.) I am dressed in a loose leather (actually plastic) tunic that hangs down below my knees. There are decorative laces halfway up the front. It has a wide (real) leather belt. My feet (two) are shod in shapeless leather; my two arms hang at my sides.

Below my feet are the rods that hold me in position for the playlet we perform. I bend down and break them off, one not cleanly, so that when I walk my right leg is longer than the left. It gives me a jerky gait.

I am three meters tall.

The smallest automaton waits halfway out on the span. The crowd oohs and ahhs as I climb up over the timbers and step out onto the pathway. The medium and larger automata await their cues farther back.

My presence is not in the small goat's routine. It goes to its next cue.

"Oh, no, please!" it says in a high small voice (recorded by a j.a.panese-American voice actor three years ago 714 kilometers from here). "I am very small. Don't eat me !"

I reach down and pull off its head and stuff it in my mouth. Springs, wires, and small motors drop out of my face from my mouth (a small opening with no ingress to my chest cavity).

"-you want to eat-" says its synthesizer before I chew down hard enough to crush it.

The four legs and body of the small goat stand in a spreading pool of lubricants and hydraulics. It tries to go through the motions of its part and then is still.

The other two, not recognizing cues, return to their starting stations, where we wait while the park is closed (2350-0600 each cycle) when we undergo maintenance.

I turn to the 151 people out in the viewing area.

"Rahr!" I say. "Ya!" (That is left from my old programming.) I jump down from the bridge into the shallow rivulet beneath the bridge (surely no structure so st.u.r.dy and huge was ever built to span such a meager trickle), splashing water on the nearest in the audience.

They realize something is very out of the ordinary.

"Ya!" I yell. "Rahr!" They run over each other, over themselves, rolling, screaming, through the doors at the ends of the ramps. "Wait! Don't go!" I say. "I have something to tell you."

One of the uniformed tour guides walks over, opens a box and throws an emergency switch. The power and lights go out. Everything else is still and quiet, except for her breathing, a sigh of relief.

"Rahr!" I say, coming toward her over the viewing area parapet, like the bear-habitat of a zoo.

She screams and runs up the ramp.

The maintenance people refer to me as Lermokerl the Troll.

I will show you a troll.

The place is called Story Book Land, and it is a theme park. The theme is supposed to be Fairy Tales, but of course humans have never differentiated among Fairy Tales, Nursery Rhymes, Folk Tales, and Animal Fables, so this park is a mixture of them all.We perform small playlets of suffering, loss, and aspirations to marrying the King's daughter, killing the giant to get his gold, or to wed the Prince because you have no corns on your feet, even though you work as a drudge and scullery maid, barefoot. Some are instructive-the Old Woman Who Lives in the Shoe delivers a small birth-control lecture; the Fox-with the impersonated voice of a character actor dead five decades-tells small children that, perhaps, indeed, the grapes were worth having, and you should never give up trying for what you really Really want.

We are a travel destination in an age when no one has to travel anymore. The same experience can and has been put on disks and hologrammed, hi-deffed and sold in the high millions in these days when selling in the billions is considered healthy.

Humans come because they want to give themselves and their chil-dren a Real Experience of travel, sights, some open air; to experience crankiness, delay, a dim sort of commercial enlightenment, perhaps a reminder of their own child-hoods.

This I am willing to provide. Child-hoods used to be nightmares of disease, death, wolves, bogies, and deceit, and still are in small parts of the world.

But not for the people who come here.

I am an actor (in the broadest sense). And now, for my greatest performance...

Outside, in the sun, things are placid. The crowd, which had rushed out, seems to have dispersed, or be standing in knots far away. A few of the wheeled maintenance and security vehicles are coming toward the area from the local control shop, in no hurry. I scan my maps and take off up the tumbled fake-rock sides of the low building that houses our playlet. There is a metallic sc.r.a.ping each time my right foot strikes, the jagged rod cutting into the surface. Then I am up and over a low wall into the next area.

Humans stare at me. I stride along, clanging, towering over them. But they are used to things in costume among them. They will be eating at a concession area, and a weasel, wearing a sword and cape, will walk up and say, "Pick a card, any card," fanning a deck before them.

Some go along; some say, "I'm tired and I'm trying to eat" (which they do, inordinately, on a calorie intake/expenditure scale) and wave them away. Some are costumed humans, the jobs with the lowest salaries at Story Book Land. Others are automata with a limited routine, confined to a small area, but fully mobile, and can respond to humans in many languages.

I jar along. I am heading for the big Danish-style house ahead.

Somebody has to answer for all this.

The audience has just left, and he has settled back in the rocking chair, and placed the scissors and pieces of bright paper on the somnoe beside the daybed. He is dressed of the 1850s: smoking jacket, waistcoat, large necktie, stiff tall separate collar. A frock coat hangs on a peg, a top hat on the shelf above it. The library cases behind him are filled with fake book-spines. A false whale-oil lamp glows behind him. There are packed trunks stacked in the corner, topped by a coil of rope that could hold a ship at anchor.

He is gaunt, long-nosed, with craggy brows, the wrong lips, large ears. He looks like the very late actor George Arliss (Academy Award 1929); he looks nothing like the late actor Danny Kaye.

His playlet is homey, quiet. He invites the audience in; he tells them of his life. As he talks he cuts with the scissors the bright paper: "Then I wrote the tale of the Princess and the Pea," he will say, moving the scissors more and out jumps a silhouette of a bed, a pile of mattresses, a princess at the top, and so on and so forth, and then he tells them a short tale (not "The Snow Queen").

He sees me. My two outer heads glower at him.

"It is not time for another performance, my little friend," he says. "Please come back at the scheduled time."

"Time to listen," I say.

"The performance schedule has not been increased. I am on a regular sche-"