David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 6

YEAR’S

BEST

SF 6

EDITED BY

DAVID G. HARTWELL

This book is dedicated to Elisabeth Malartre, Robert Sheckley, Bill Johnson, because they have treated

me well this year under difficult circumstances.

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Contents

Introduction

Paul J. McAuley

Reef

David Brin

Reality Check

Robert Silverberg

The Millennium Express

Tananarive Due

Patient Zero

Ken MacLeod

The Oort Crowd

M. Shayne Bell

The Thing About Benny

Brian Stableford

The Last Supper

Joan Slonczewski

Tuberculosis Bacteria Join UN

Howard Waldrop

Our Mortal Span

David Langford

Different Kinds of Darkness

Norman Spinrad

New Ice Age, or Just Cold Feet?

Stephen Dedman

The Devotee

Chris Beckett

The Marriage of Sky and Sea

John M. Ford

In the Days of the Comet

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Birthday of the World

Greg Egan

Oracle

Nancy Kress

To Cuddle Amy

Brian W. Aldiss

Steppenpferd

Stephen Baxter

Sheena 5

Darrell Schweitzer

The Fire Eggs

Robert Sheckley

The New Horla

Dan Simmons

Madame Bovary,C’ est Moi

Robert Reed

Grandma’s Jumpman

Charles Dexter Ward

Bordeaux Mixture

Robert Charles Wilson

The Dryad’s Wedding

Michael F. Flynn

Built Upon the Sands of Time

Ted Chiang

Seventy-Two Letters

About the Editor

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the continuing value of Mark Kelly’s short fiction reviews in Locus, and of

the various short fiction reviewers of the Tangent website. Also, I wish to thank Kathryn Cramer for

invaluable help in preparing this book, and Caitlin Blasdell for extra editorial devotion, and Diana Gill for

catching the ball.

Introduction

Last year I said that 1999 was one of the legendary years of the science fiction future, and we have lived

through it. So of course was 2000, the turning point, the end of a thousand-year period of growth and

change and a significant moment in the Christian Era (AD). Well, the world didn’t end, nor did the

Second Coming come, nor the aliens in whatever form. Nor was there a socialist civilization in Boston,

Massachusetts, as envisioned by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward in the 1880s. And now that that

millennium is gone, we live in the Year One CE, and all the SF written about the ’80s and ’90s is just

fiction—now robbed of most of its significant prophetic power—and must stand or fall as fiction, on the

merits of its execution and/or historical importance. Even Arthur C. Clarke, whose special year is 2001,

will have to wait a while longer for commercial travel to the Moon. It is a sobering thought to consider

that fifty years ago 2000 looked like the relatively distant future, a time of wonders and radical difference.

Now the year 2000 looks somewhat like the 1950s, plus computers and minus the Cold War. Most of

the same buildings are standing in most major cities.

Some things don’t change fast enough, other changes leave us breathless or shocked. Fifty years is

not so long, less than the career of Jack Williamson for instance, who published in 1929 and this year

too, in the course of seven decades of writing SF—and barring unforeseen circumstances, Williamson

will be in his eighth decade of writing when you read this. I leave you again with the thought that we

should set our SF stories farther ahead in time, lest we become outdated fantasy too soon.

Looking backward from December 2000, I see a past year of tremendous growth for the SF field,

and many reasons for optimism in the year ahead. Australia is still full of energy and big science-fictional

plans a year or two after the 1999 Melbourne world science fiction convention, and Australian writers

are continuing to break out worldwide, at least in the English language. Canadian SF is still thriving, and

Canada is still introducing new world-class SF and fantasy writers to the world stage each year. The UK

may not perhaps be the UK much longer, since Scotland is getting its own Parliament, but either way

England, Ireland, and Scotland are a major force in SF, and Interzone has grown into one of the three or

four leading SF magazines (Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF are its peers) in the world. The best new SF

magazine of the year is Spectrum SF, from Scotland. There are stirrings of energy in France and in

French SF, new awards and conferences there, and German SF has recently produced at least one new

writer on the world stage, Andreas Eschbach. And the world SF convention is now becoming more

global and is likely to be held in Scotland, Australia, Japan, and perhaps elsewhere in the world in the

next decade.

Worldwide, the small press is a force of growing strength and importance in the field, in part due to

the availability of computers within reach of the average fannish budget and in part due to the new

economies of instant print, now prevalent in the USA and soon to reach everywhere. Hardly a day goes

by without a new instant print review copy of a small press trade paperback in the NYRSF* mailbox.

Many of them are in fact self-published works that do not meet professional standards of writing, it is

true, but a few of them are carefully written, well-edited gems. And the books from the more established

small presses, from Golden Gryphon, Ministry of Whimsey, Borderlands, and others, continue to

impress.

The field lost two fine magazines this year, Amazing and SF Age, but a perceptible increase in the

number and quality of small press magazines helped to cushion the loss, as did the announcement of

several high-paying online short fiction markets. Interestingly, none of the highest paying online publishers

intend to actually make money selling the fiction, but are supporting it as a promotional expense! I

wonder how long that will last. Certainly not many months in the future if the world stock markets

continue to lose trillions of dollars (I write at a particularly low point in recent economic times). Still, we

are better off right now than in the not-too-distant past, and are all grateful that SF is of promotional

value in 2001. I hope to find some excellent science fiction online this year to reprint next year in this

series.

As to the quality of the year’s fiction, 2000 was a particularly fine year, with grand old names and hot

new talents competing for attention. It was a good year to be reading the magazines, both pro and

semi-professional. It was a strong year for novellas, with fifteen or twenty of them in consideration for the

limited space allowed in this book by length constraints; you’ll have to go to the competing Year’s Best in

fat trade paperback to sample more novellas. And there were a hundred shorter stories in consideration,

from which this rich selection was chosen. So I repeat, for readers new to this series, my usual disclaimer:

this selection of science fiction stories represents the best that was published during the year 2000. I

could perhaps have filled two or three more volumes this size and then claimed to have nearly all of the

best—though not all the best novellas. I believe that representing the best from year to year, while it is not

physically possible to encompass it all in one even very large book, also implies presenting some

substantial variety of excellence, and I left some writers out in order to include others in this limited space.

My general principle for selection: this book is full of science fiction—every story in the book is

clearly that and not something else. I personally have a high regard for horror, fantasy, speculative fiction,

and slipstream, and postmodern literature. This year Kathryn Cramer and I launch the Year’s Best

Fantasy in paperback from Eos as a companion volume to this one—look for it if you enjoy short fantasy

fiction too. But here, I chose science fiction. It is the intention of this Year’s Best series to focus on

science fiction, and to provide readers who are looking especially for science fiction an annual home

base.

Which is not to say that I chose one kind of science fiction—I try to represent the varieties of tones

and voices and attitudes that keep the genre vigorous and responsive to the changing realities out of

which it emerges, in science and daily life. This is a book about what’s going on now in SF. The stories

that follow show, and the story notes point out, the strengths of the evolving genre in the year 2000. I

hope that this book and its companions are essential reading in SF.

—David G. Hartwell

Pleasantville, NY

Reef

PAUL J. MCAULEY

Paul McAuley is a British writer who often writes hard SF, one of the group (along with Stephen

Baxter, Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks, and others) responsible for the hard SF/space opera

renaissance of the 1990s. His first novel, 400 Billion Stars, was co-winner of the Philip K. Dick

Award in 1988. He has since published a number of SF novels, of which Fairyland (1994) won the

Arthur C. Clarke and the John W. Campbell Awards for best novel and Pasquale’s Angel (1994)

won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History fiction. He has two collections of short fiction, The

King of the Hill and Other Stories (1991) and The Invisible Country (1996). A year ago he

completed a trilogy of SF novels, The Book of Confluence ( Child of the River, 1997; Ancients of

Days, 1998; Shrine of Stars, 1999). His Web site is www.omegacom.demon.co.uk.

“Reef” is an excellent hard SF story from the ambitious (and mostly reprint) anthology,

Skylife, edited by Gregory Benford and George Zebrowski (about visions of life in space and on

other planets, which reprints some wonderful SF art too). This story is an instant classic of hard

SF. It is dense with wonderful technological and scientific images, but also fast paced and

sufficiently rounded in characterization that the unlikely heroine, Margaret Henderson Wu, a

scientist to the core, will be remembered by many readers for a long time. It is interesting to

compare it to Stephen Baxter’s “Sheena 5,” later in this book, in terms of scope and imagery.

Margaret Henderson Wu was riding a proxy by telepresence deep inside Tigris Rift when Dzu Sho

summoned her. The others in her crew had given up one by one and only she was left, descending slowly

between rosy, smoothly rippled cliffs scarcely a hundred meters apart. These were pavements of the

commonest vacuum organism, mosaics made of hundreds of different strains of the same species. Here

and there bright red whips stuck out from the pavement; a commensal species which deposited iron

sulphate crystals within its integument.

The pavement seemed to stretch endlessly below her. No probe or proxy had yet reached the

bottom, still more than thirty kilometers away. Microscopic flecks of sulfur-iron complexes, sloughed

cells, and excreted globules of carbon compounds and other volatiles made a kind of smog or snow, and

the vacuum organisms deposited nodes and intricate lattices of reduced metals that, by some trick of

superconductivity, produced a broad-band electromagnetic resonance that pulsed like a giant’s slow

heartbeat.

All this futzed the telepresence link between operators and their proxies. One moment Margaret was

experiencing the 320-degree panorama of the little proxy’s microwave radar, the perpetual tug of

vacuum on its mantle, the tang of extreme cold, a mere thirty degrees above absolute zero, the complex

taste of the vacuum smog (burnt sugar, hot rubber, tar), the minute squirts of hydrogen from the folds of

the proxy’s puckered nozzle as it maintained its orientation relative to the cliff face during its descent, with

its tentacles retracted in a tight ball around the relay piton. The next, she was back in her cradled body in

warm blackness, phosphenes floating in her vision and white noise in her ears while the transmitter

searched for a viable waveband, locked on and—pow—she was back, falling past rippled pink

pavement.

The alarm went off, flashing an array of white stars over the panorama. Her number two, Srin

Kerenyi, said in her ear, “You’re wanted, boss.”

Margaret killed the alarm and the audio feed. She was already a kilometer below the previous bench

mark, and she wanted to get as deep as possible before she implanted the telemetry relay. She swiveled

the proxy on its long axis, increased the amplitude of the microwave radar. Far below were intimations of

swells and bumps jutting from the plane of the cliff face, textured mounds like brain coral, randomly

orientated chimneys. And something else, clouds of organic matter perhaps—

The alarm again. Srin had overridden the cutout.

Margaret swore and dove at the cliff, unfurling the proxy’s tentacles and jamming the piton into

pinkness rough with black papillae, like a giant’s tongue quick frozen against the ice. The piton’s spikes

fired automatically. Recoil sent the little proxy tumbling over its long axis until it reflexively stabilized itself

with judicious squirts of gas. The link rastered, came back, cut out completely. Margaret hit the switch

that turned the tank into a chair; the mask lifted away from her face.

Srin Kerenyi was standing in front of her. “Dzu Sho wants to talk with you, boss. Right now.”

The job had been offered as a sealed contract. Science crews had been informed of the precise

nature of their tasks only when the habitat was under way. But it was good basic pay with promises of fat

bonuses on completion, and when she had won the survey contract, Margaret Henderson Wu brought

with her most of the crew from her previous job, and nursed a small hope that this would be a change in

her family’s luck.

The Ganapati was a new habitat founded by an alliance of two of the Commonwealth’s oldest

patrician families. It was of standard construction, a basaltic asteroid cored by a gigawatt X-ray laser,

spun up by vented rock vapor to give 0.2 gee on the inner surface of its hollowed interior, factories and

big reaction motors dug into the stern. With its AIs rented out for information crunching, and refineries

synthesizing exotic plastics from cane-sugar biomass and gengeneered oilseed rape precursors, the new

habitat had enough income to maintain the interest on its construction loan from the Commonwealth

Bourse, but not enough to attract new citizens and workers. It was still not completely fitted out, had less

than a third of its optimal population.

Its Star Chamber, young and cocky and eager to win independence from their families, had taken a

big gamble. They were chasing a legend.

Eighty years ago, an experiment in accelerated evolution of chemoautotropic vacuum organisms had

been set up on a planetoid in the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt. The experiment had been run by a shell

company registered on Ganymede but covertly owned by the Democratic Union of China. In those days,

companies and governments of Earth were not allowed to operate in the Kuiper Belt, which had been

claimed and ferociously defended by outer-system cartels. That hegemony ended in the Quiet War, but

the Quiet War also destroyed all records of the experiment; even the Democratic Union of China

disappeared, absorbed into the Pacific Community.

There were over fifty thousand objects with diameters greater than a hundred kilometers in the

Kuiper Belt, and a billion more much smaller, the plane of their orbits stretching beyond those of Neptune

and Pluto. The experimental planetoid, Enki, named for one of the Babylonian gods of creation, had been

lost among them. It became a legend, like the Children’s Habitat, or the ghost comet, or the pirate ship

crewed by the reanimated dead, or the worker’s paradise of Fiddler’s Green.

And then, forty-five years after the end of the Quiet War, a data miner recovered enough information

to reconstruct Enki’s eccentric orbit. She sold it to the Ganapati. The habitat bought time on the Uranus

deepspace telescopic array and confirmed that the planetoid was where it was supposed to be, currently

more than seven thousand million kilometers from the sun.

Nothing more was known. The experiment could have failed almost as soon as it had begun, but if it

had worked, the results would win the Ganapati platinum-rated credit on the Bourse. Margaret and the

rest of the science crews would, of course, receive only their fees and bonuses, less deductions for air

and food and water taxes, and anything they bought with scrip in the habitat’s stores; the indentured

workers would not even get that. Like every habitat in the Commonwealth, the Ganapati was structured

like an ancient Greek republic, ruled by shareholding citizens, who lived in the landscaped parklands of

the inner surface, and run by indentured and contract workers, who were housed in the undercroft of

malls and barracks tunneled into the Ganapati’s rocky skin.

On the long voyage out, the science crews were on minimal pay, far less than that of the unskilled

techs who worked the farms and refineries, or of the servants who maintained the citizens’ households.

There were food shortages on the Ganapati because so much biomass was being used to make

exportable biochemicals. Any foodstuffs other than basic rations were expensive, and prices were

carefully manipulated by the habitat’s Star Chamber. When the Ganapati reached Enki and the contracts

of the science crews were activated, food prices increased accordingly. Techs and household servants

suddenly found themselves unable to afford anything other than dole yeast. Resentment bubbled over into

skirmishes and knife fights, and a small riot which the White Mice, the undercroft’s police, subdued with

gas. Margaret had had to take time off to bail out several of her crew, had given them an angry lecture

about threatening everyone’s bonuses.

“We got to defend our honor,” one of the men said.

“Don’t be a fool,” Margaret told him. “The citizens play workers against science crews to keep both

sides in their places, and still turn a good profit from increases in food prices. Just be glad you can afford

the good stuff now, and keep out of trouble.”

“They were calling you names, boss,” the man said. “On account you’re—”

Margaret stared him down. She was standing on a chair, but even so she was a good head shorter

than the gangling outers. She said, “I’ll fight my own fights. I always have. Just think of your bonuses and

keep quiet. It will be worth it. I promise you.”

And it was worth it, because of the discovery of the reef.

At some time in the deep past, Enki had suffered an impact that remelted it and split it into two big

pieces and thousands of fragments. One lone fragment still orbited Enki, a tiny moonlet where the AI that

had controlled the experiment had been installed; the others had been drawn together again by their

feeble gravity fields, but cooled before coalescence was completed, leaving a vast deep chasm, Tigris

Rift, at the lumpy equator.

Margaret’s crew discovered that the vacuum organisms had proliferated wildly in the deepest part of

the Rift, deriving energy by oxidation of elemental sulfur and ferrous iron, converting carbonaceous

material into useful organic chemicals. There were crusts and sheets, things like thin scarves folded into

fragile vases and chimneys, organ-pipe clusters, whips, delicate fretted laces. Some fed on others, one

crust slowly overgrowing and devouring another. Others appeared to be parasites, sending complex

veins ramifying through the thalli of their victims. Water-mining organisms recruited sulfur oxidizers,

trading precious water for energy and forming warty outgrowths like stromaliths. Some were more than a

hundred meters across, surely the largest prokaryotic colonies in the known Solar System.

All this variety, and after only eighty years of accelerated evolution! Wild beauty won from the cold

and the dark. The potential to feed billions. The science crews would get their bonuses, all right; the

citizens would become billionaires.

Margaret spent all her spare time exploring the reef by proxy, pushing her crew hard to overcome the

problems of penetrating the depths of the Rift. Although she would not admit it even to herself, she had

fallen in love with the reef. She would even have explored in person if the Star Chamber allowed it, but

as in most habitats, the Ganapati’s citizens did not like their workers going where they themselves would

not.Clearly, the experiment had far exceeded its parameters, but no one knew why. The AI that had

overseen the experiment had shut down thirty years ago. There was still heat in its crude proton-beam

fission pile, but it had been overgrown by the very organisms it manipulated.

Its task had been simple. Colonies of a dozen species of slow-growing chemoautotrophs were

introduced into a part of the Rift rich with sulfur and ferrous iron. Thousands of random mutations were

induced. Most colonies died, and those few which thrived were sampled, mutated, and reintroduced in a

cycle repeated every hundred days.

But the AI had selected only for fast growth, not for adaptive radiation, and the science crews held

heated seminars about the possible cause of the unexpected richness of the reef. Very few believed that it

was simply a result of accelerated evolution. Many terrestrial bacteria divided every twenty minutes in

favorable conditions, and certain bacteria were known to have evolved from being resistant to an

antibiotic to becoming obligately dependent upon it as a food source in less than five days, or only three

hundred and sixty generations. But that was merely a biochemical adaptation. The fastest division rate of

the vacuum organisms in the Rift was less than once a day, and while that still meant more than thirty

thousand generations since the reef was seeded, half a million years in human terms, the evolutionary

radiation in the reef was the equivalent of Neanderthal Man’s evolving to fill every mammalian niche from

bats to whales.

Margaret’s survey crew explored and sampled the reef for more than thirty days. Cluster analysis

suggested that they had identified less than ten percent of the species which had formed from the original

seed population. And now deep radar suggested that there were changes in the unexplored regions in the

deepest part of Tigris Rift, which the proxies had not yet successfully penetrated.

Margaret pointed this out at the last seminar.

“We’re making hypotheses on incomplete information. We don’t know everything that’s out there.

Sampling suggests that complexity increases away from the surface. There could be thousands more

species in the deep part of the Rift.”

At the back of the room, Opie Kindred, the head of the genetics crew, said languidly, “We don’t

need to know everything. That’s not what we’re paid for. We’ve already found several species that

perform better than present commercial cultures. The Ganapati can make money from them and we’ll get

full bonuses. Who cares how they got there?”

Arn Nivedta, the chief of the biochemist crew, said, “We’re all scientists here. We prove our worth

by finding out how things work. Are your mysterious experiments no more than growth tests, Opie? If so,

I’m disappointed.”

The genetics crew had set up an experimental station on the surface of the Ganapati, off limits to

everyone else.

Opie smiled. “I’m not answerable to you.”

This was greeted with shouts and jeers. The science crews were tired and on edge, and the room

was hot and poorly ventilated.

“Information should be free,” Margaret said. “We all work toward the same end. Or are you hoping

for extra bonuses, Opie?”

There was a murmur in the room. It was a tradition that all bonuses were pooled and shared out

between the various science crews at the end of a mission.

Opie Kindred was a clever, successful man, yet somehow soured, as if the world was a continual

disappointment. He rode his team hard, was quick to find failure in others. Margaret was a natural target

for his scorn, a squat, musclebound, unedited dwarf from Earth who had to take drugs so that she could

survive in microgravity, who grew hair in all sorts of unlikely places. He stared at her with disdain and

said, “I’m surprised at the tone of this briefing, Dr. Wu. Wild speculations built on nothing at all. I have

sat here for a hour and heard nothing useful. We are paid to get results, not generate hypotheses. All we

hear from your crew is excuses, when what we want are samples. It seems simple enough to me. If

something is upsetting your proxies, then you should use robots. Or send people in and handpick

samples. I’ve worked my way through almost all you’ve obtained. I need more material, especially in

light of my latest findings.”

“Robots need transmission relays too,” Srin Kerenyi pointed out.

Orly Higgins said, “If you ride them, to be sure. But I don’t see the need for human control. It is a

simple enough task to program them to go down, pick up samples, return.”

She was the leader of the crew that had unpicked the AI’s corrupted code, and was an acolyte of

Opie Kindred.

“The proxies failed whether or not they were remotely controlled,” Margaret said, “and on their own

they are as smart as any robot. I’d love to go down there myself, but the Star Chamber has forbidden it

for the usual reasons. They’re scared we’ll get up to something if we go where they can’t watch us.”

“Careful, boss,” Srin Kerenyi whispered. “The White Mice are bound to be monitoring this.”

“I don’t care,” Margaret said. “I’m through with trying polite requests. We need to get down there,

Srin.”

“Sure, boss. But getting arrested for sedition isn’t the way.”

“There’s some interesting stuff in the upper levels,” Arn Nivedta said. “Commercial stuff, as you

pointed out, Opie.”

Murmurs of agreement throughout the crowded room. The reef could make the Ganapati the richest

habitat in the Outer System, where expansion was limited by the availability of fixed carbon. Even a

modest-sized comet nucleus, ten kilometers in diameter, say, and salted with only one-hundredth of one

percent carbonaceous material, contained fifty million tons of carbon, mostly as methane and carbon

monoxide ice, with a surface dusting of tarry long-chain hydrocarbons. And the mass of some planetoids

consisted of up to fifty percent methane ice. But most vacuum organisms converted simple carbon

compounds into organic matter using the energy of sunlight captured by a variety of photosynthetic

pigments, and so could grow only on the surfaces of planetoids. No one had yet developed vacuum

organisms that, using other sources of energy, could efficiently mine planetoid interiors. But that was what

accelerated evolution appeared to have produced in the reef. It could enable exploitation of the entire

volume of objects in the Kuiper Belt, and beyond, in the distant Oort Cloud.

Arn Nivedta waited for silence, and added, “If the reef species test out, of course. What about it,

Opie? Are they commercially viable?”

“We have our own ideas about commercialism,” Opie Kindred said. “I think you’ll find that we hold

the key to success here.”

Boos and catcalls at this from both the biochemists and the survey crew. The room was polarizing.

Margaret saw one of her crew unsheathe a sharpened screwdriver, and she caught the man’s hand and

squeezed it until he cried out. “Let it ride,” she told him. “Remember that we’re scientists.”

“We hear of indications of more diversity in the depths, but we can’t seem to get there. One might

suspect,” Opie said, his thin upper lip lifting in a supercilious curl, “sabotage.”

“The proxies are working in the upper part of the Rift,” Margaret said, “and we are working hard to

get them operative farther down.”

“Let’s hope so,” Opie Kindred said. He stood, and around him his crew stood, too. “I’m going

back to work, and so should all of you. Especially you, Dr. Wu. Perhaps you should be attending to your

proxies instead of planning useless expeditions.”

And so the seminar broke up in uproar, with nothing productive coming from it and lines of enmity

drawn through the community of scientists.

“Opie is scheming to come out of this on top,” Arn Nivedta said to Margaret afterward. He was a

friendly, enthusiastic man, tall even for an outer, and as skinny as a rail. He stooped in Margaret’s

presence, trying to appear less tall. He said, “He wants desperately to become a citizen, and so he thinks

like one.”

“Well, my god, we all want to be citizens,” Margaret said. “Who wants to live like this?”

She gestured, meaning the crowded bar, its rock walls and low ceiling, harsh lights and the stink of

spilled beer and too many people in close proximity. Her parents had been citizens, once upon a time.

Before their run of bad luck. It was not that she wanted those palmy days back—she could scarcely

remember them—but she wanted more than this.

She said, “The citizens sleep in silk sheets and eat real meat and play their stupid games, and we have

to do their work on restricted budgets. The reef is the discovery of the century, Arn, but god forbid that

the citizens should begin to exert themselves. We do the work, they fuck in rose petals and get the glory.”

Arn laughed at this.

“Well, it’s true!”

“It’s true we have not been as successful as we might like,” Arn said mournfully.

Margaret said reflectively, “Opie’s a bastard, but he’s smart, too. He picked just the right moment to

point the finger at me.”

Loss of proxies was soaring exponentially, and the proxy farms of the Ganapati were reaching a

critical point. Once losses exceeded reproduction, the scale of exploration would have to be drastically

curtailed, or the seed stock would have to be pressed into service, a gamble the Ganapati could hardly

afford.

And then, the day after the disastrous seminar, Margaret was pulled back from her latest survey to

account for herself in front of the chairman of the Ganapati’s Star Chamber.

“We are not happy with the progress of your survey, Dr. Wu,” Dzu Sho said. “You promise much,

but deliver little.”

Margaret shot a glance at Opie Kindred, and the man smiled. He was immaculately dressed in

gold-trimmed white tunic and white leggings. His scalp was oiled and his manicured fingernails were

painted with something that split light into rainbows. Margaret, fresh from the tank, wore loose, grubby

work grays. There was sticky electrolyte paste on her arms and legs and shaven scalp, the reek of sour

sweat under her breasts and in her armpits.

She contained her anger and said, “I have submitted daily reports on the problems we encountered.

Progress is slow but sure. I have just established a relay point a full kilometer below the previous datum

point.”

Dzu Sho waved this away. Naked, as smoothly fat as a seal, he lounged in a blue gel chair. He had a

round, hairless head and pinched features, like a thumbprint on an egg. The habitat’s lawyer sat behind

him, a young woman neat and anonymous in a gray tunic suit. Margaret, Opie Kindred, and Arn Nivedta

sat on low stools, supplicants to Dzu Sho’s authority. Behind them, half a dozen servants stood at the

edge of the grassy space.

This was in an arbor of figs, ivy, bamboos, and fast-growing banyan at the edge of Sho’s estate.

Residential parkland curved above, a patchwork of spindly, newly planted woods and meadows and

gardens. Flyers were out, triangular rigs in primary colors pirouetting around the weightless axis. Directly

above, mammoths the size of large dogs grazed an upside-down emerald-green field. The parkland

stretched away to the ring lake and its slosh barrier, three kilometers in diameter, and the huge farms

which dominated the inner surface of the habitat. Fields of lentils, wheat, cane fruits, tomatoes, rice, and

exotic vegetables for the tables of the citizens, and fields and fields and fields of sugar cane and oilseed

rape for the biochemical industry and the yeast tanks.

Dzu Sho said, “Despite the poor progress of the survey crew, we have what we need, thanks to the

work of Dr. Kindred. This is what we will discuss.”

Margaret glanced at Arn, who shrugged. Opie Kindred’s smile deepened. He said, “My crew has

established why there is so much diversity here. The vacuum organisms have invented sex.”

“We know they have sex,” Arn said. “How else could they evolve?”

His own crew had shown that the vacuum organisms could exchange genetic material through pilli,

microscopic hollow tubes grown between cells or hyphal strands. It was analogous to the way in which

genes for antibiotic resistance spread through populations of terrestrial bacteria.

“I do not mean genetic exchange, but genetic recombination,” Opie Kindred said. “I will explain.”

The glade filled with flat plates of color as the geneticist conjured charts and diagrams and pictures

from his slate. Despite her anger, Margaret quickly immersed herself in the flows of data, racing ahead of

Opie Kindred’s clipped explanations.

It was not normal sexual reproduction. There was no differentiation into male or female, or even into

complementary mating strains. Instead, it was mediated by a species that aggressively colonized the thalli

of others. Margaret had already seen it many times, but until now she had thought that it was merely a

parasite. Instead, as Opie Kindred put it, it was more like a vampire.

A shuffle of pictures, movies patched from hundreds of hours of material collected by roving proxies.

Here was a colony of the black crustose species found all through the explored regions of the Rift. Time

speeded up. The crustose colony elongated its ragged perimeter in pulsing spurts. As it grew, it exfoliated

microscopic particles. Margaret’s viewpoint spiraled into a close-up of one of the exfoliations, a few cells

wrapped in nutrient-storing strands.

Millions of these little packages floated through the vacuum. If one landed on a host thallus, it injected

its genetic pay-load into the host cells. The view dropped inside one such cell. A complex of

carbohydrate and protein strands webbing the interior like intricately packed spiderwebs. Part of the

striated cell wall drew apart, and a packet of DNA coated in hydrated globulins and enzymes burst

inward. The packet contained the genomes of both the parasite and its previous victim. It latched onto

protein strands and crept along on ratcheting microtubule claws until it fused with the cell’s own circlet of

David G. Hartwell - Year's Best SF 6

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