Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 4

"It tells you everything, does it?" said a deep voice behind him. Vulpius turned. A small bald-headed man, broad shouldered and c.o.c.ky looking, grinned at him in a powerfully insinuating way. His obsidian eyes were like augers. Vulpius had never seen eyes like those. A second man, much taller, darkly handsome, smiling lazily, stood behind him. The little bald one pointed toward the place in the water where six graceful minarets came thrusting upward into the air from a single vast building just below the surface. "What's that one, for instance?"

Vulpius, who was of an obliging nature, ma.s.saged the mnemone. "The famous Blue Mosque," he was told. "Built by the architect Mehmed A?ga by order of Sultan Ahmed I in the 17th century. It was one of the largest mosques in the city and perhaps the most beautiful. It is the only one with six minarets."

"Ah," said the small man. "A famous mosque. Six minarets. What, I wonder, could a mosque have been? Would you know, Ernest?" He looked over his shoulder at his hulking companion, who merely shrugged. Then, quickly, to Vulpius: "But no, no, don't bother to find out. It's not important. Those things are the minarets, I take it?" He pointed again. Vulpius followed the line of the pointing hand. It seemed to him, just then, that the slender towers were gently swaying, as though they were mere wands moving in the breeze. The effect was quite weird. An earthquake, perhaps? No, the hillside here was altogether steady. Some hallucination, then? He doubted that. His mind was as lucid as ever.

The towers were definitely moving from side to side, though, whipping back and forth now as if jostled by a giant hand. The waters covering the flooded city began to grow agitated. Wavelets appeared where all had been calm. A huge stretch of the surface appeared almost to be boiling. The disturbance was spreading outward from a central vortex of churning turmoil. What strange kind of upheaval was going on down there?

Two minarets of the Blue Mosque tottered and fell into the water, and three more went down a moment later. And the effect was still expanding. Vulpius, stunned, appalled, scanned the sunken metropolis from one side to the other, watching the fabled ruins crumble and collapse and disappear into the suddenly beclouded Bosporus.

He became aware then of two more men clambering up to the observation parapet, where they were exuberantly greeted by the first pair. The newcomers-one of them short, bushy-haired, soft-eyed, the other long and lean and fiercely energetic-seemed flushed, excited, oddly exhilarated.

Much later, it was determined that vandalous parties unknown had placed a turbulence bomb just offsh.o.r.e, the sort of device that once had been used to demolish the useless and ugly remains of the half-drowned urban settlements that had been left behind in every lowland coastal area by the teeming populace of Industrial times. A thing that had once been employed to pulverize the concrete walls and patios of hideous tract housing and the squat squalid bulks of repellent cinder-block factory buildings had been utilized to shake to flinders the fantastic fairy-tale towers of the great imperial capital by the Golden Horn.

Vulpius had no reason to connect the calamity that had befallen sunken Istanbul with the presence of the four men on the hillside across the way. Not until much later did that thought enter his mind. But the event would not leave him. He went over and over it, replacing its every detail in a kind of chilled fascination. He was deeply unsettled, of course, by what he had witnessed; but at the same time he could not deny having felt a certain perverse thrill at having been present at the moment of such a bizarre event.

The shattering of the age-old city was the final paragraph of its long history, and he, Strettin Vulpius, had been on the scene to see it written. It was a distinction of a sort.Other equally mysterious disasters followed in subsequent months.

The outer wall of the Park of Extinct Animals was breached and many of the inner enclosures were opened, releasing into the wilderness nearly the entire extraordinary collection of carefully cloned beasts of yesteryear: moas, quaggas, giant ground sloths, dodos, pa.s.senger pigeons, aurochs, oryxes, saber-toothed cats, great auks, cahows and many another lost species that had been called back from oblivion by the most painstaking manipulation of fossil genetic material. Though the world into which they now had been so brusquely set loose was as close to a paradise as its human population could imagine, it was no place for most of these coddled and cherished creatures, for in their resuscitated existences at the Park they never had had to learn the knack of fending for themselves. All but the strongest met swift death in one fas.h.i.+on or another, some set upon by domestic cats and dogs, others drowned or lost in quagmires, a few killed inadvertently during attempts at recapturing them, many peris.h.i.+ng quickly of starvation even amid the plenty of the garden that was the world, and still others expiring from sheer bewilderment at finding themselves on their own in unfamiliar freedom. The loss was incalculable: the best estimate was that it would take a hundred years of intense work to restock the collection.

The Museum of Industrial Culture was attacked next. This treasury of medieval technological artifacts was only perfunctorily guarded, for who would care to steal from a place that was everyone's common storehouse of quaint and delightful objects? Society had long since evolved past such pathetic barbarism.

All the same, a band of masked men broke into the building and ransacked it thoroughly, carrying off a mountain of booty, the curious relics of the harsh and bustling age that had preceded the present one: devices that had been used as crude computers, terrifying medical implements, machines that once had disseminated aural and visual images, weaponry of various sorts, simple vision-enhancing things worn on hooks that went around one's ears, instruments used in long-distance communication, gla.s.s and ceramic cooking vessels and all manner of other strange and oddly moving detritus of that vanished day. None of these items was ever recovered. The suspicion arose that they had all gone into the hands of private holders who had hidden them from sight, which would be an odd and troublesome revival of the seeking and secret h.o.a.rding of possessions that had caused so much difficulty in ancient times.

Then came the undermining of the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, the nearly simultaneous aerial explosion that ruptured the thousands of gleaming windows still intact in the gigantic abandoned buildings marking the watery site where Manhattan island had been in the days before the great warming, the destruction through instantaneous metal fatigue of the Great Singapore Tower, and the wholly unexpected and highly suspicious eruption of Mount Vesuvius that sent new lava spilling down over the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum.

By this time Vulpius, like a great many other concerned citizens the world over, had grown profoundly distressed by these wanton acts of desecration. They were so primitive, so cra.s.s, so horrifyingly atavistic. They negated all the great achievements of the third millennium.

After all those prior centuries of war and greed and unthinkable human suffering, mankind had attained true civilization at last. There was an abundance of natural resources and a benevolent climate from pole to pole. Though much of the planet had been covered by water during the time of the great warming, humanity had moved to higher ground and lived there happily in a world without winter. A stable population enjoyed long life and freedom from want of any kind. One respected all things living and dead, one did no harm, one went about one's days quietly and benignly. The traumas of previous epochs seemed unreal, almost mythical, now. Why would anyone want to disrupt the universal harmony and tranquility that had come to enfold the world here in the days just before the dawning of the 31st century?

It happened that Vulpius was in Rome, standing in the huge plaza in front of St. Peter's, when a great column of flame sprang into the sky before him. At first he thought it was the mighty basilica itself that was on fire. But no, the blaze seemed to be located to the right of the building, in the Vatican complex itself. Sirens now began to shriek; people were running to and fro in the plaza. Vulpius caught at the arm of a portly man with the florid jowly face of a Roman Caesar. "What's going on? Where's the fire?"

"A bomb," the man gasped. "In the Sistine Chapel!"

"No," cried Vulpius. "Impossible! Unthinkable!""The church will go next. Run!" He broke free of Vulpius' grasp and went sprinting away.

Vulpius, though, found himself unable to flee. He took a couple of wobbly steps toward the obelisk at the center of the plaza. The pillar of fire above the Vatican roof was growing broader. The air was stiflingly hot. It will all be destroyed, he thought, the Chapel, the Rooms of Raphael, the Vatican Library, the entire dazzling horde of treasures that he had visited only a few hours before. They have struck again, it seems. They. They.

He reached the steps at the base of the obelisk and paused there, panting in the heat. An oddly familiar face swam up out of the smoky haze: bald head, prominent nose, intensely penetrating eyes.

Unforgettable eyes.

The little man from Istanbul, the day when the ruins had been destroyed.

Beside him was the other little man, the one with the thick bushy hair and moody, poetic gaze.

Leaning against the obelisk itself was the very big one, the handsome man with the immense shoulders.

And, next to him, the wiry, long-legged one.

The same four men Vulpius had seen at Istanbul. Staring wide-eyed, transfixed by the sight of the burning building. Their faces, red with the reflection of the fiery glow overhead, displayed a kind of grim joy, an almost ecstatic delight.

Another catastrophe, and the same four men present at it? That went beyond the possibilities of coincidence.

No. No.

Not a coincidence at all.

He has been pursuing them around the world ever since, traveling now not as a tourist but as a secret agent of the informal governmental police that maintains such order as is still necessary to be enforced in the world. He has seen them at their filthy work, again and again, one monstrous cataclysm after another.

The tras.h.i.+ng of the Taj Mahal, the attack on Tibet's lofty Potala, the tumbling of the Parthenon, high on its acropolis above the lake that once was Athens. They are always present at these acts of premillennial vandalism. So is he, now. He has taken care, though, not to let them see him.

By this time he knows their names.

The little one with the terrifying staring eyes is called Pablo Pica.s.so. He had been cloned from the remains of some famous artist of a thousand years before. Vulpius has taken the trouble to look up some of the original Pica.s.so's work: There is plenty of it in every museum, wild, stark, garish, utterly incomprehensible paintings, women shown in profile with both eyes visible at once, humanoid monsters with the heads of bulls, jumbled gaudy landscapes showing scenes not to be found anywhere in the real world. But of course this Pica.s.so is only a clone, fabricated from a sc.r.a.p of the genetic material of his ancient name-sake; whatever other sins he may have committed, he cannot be blamed for the paintings.

Nor does he commit new ones of the same disagreeable sort, or of any sort at all. No one paints pictures anymore.

The other little man is Albert Einstein, another clone fas.h.i.+oned from a man of the previous millennium-a thinker, a scientist, responsible for something called the theory of relativity. Vulpius has been unable to discover precisely what that theory was, but it hardly matters, since the present Einstein probably has no idea of its meaning either. Science itself is as obsolete as painting. All that was in need of discovering has long since been discovered.

The big husky man's name is Ernest Hemingway. He too owes his existence to a shred of DNA retrieved from the thousand-years-gone corpse of a celebrated figure, this one a writer. Vulpius has retrieved some of the first Hemingway's work from the archives. It means little to him, but perhaps it has lost something in translation into modern Anglic. And in any case the writing and reading of stories are diversions that are no longer widely practiced. The 20th century historical context that Vulpius consults indicates that in his own time, at least, Hemingway was considered an important man of letters.

Vjong Cleversmith, the fourth of the vandals, has been cloned from a man dead a little less than 200 years, which means that no grave-robbing was necessary in order to obtain the cells from which he was grown. The ancestral Clever-smith, like nearly everyone else in recent centuries, had left samples of hisgenetic material on deposit in the cloning vaults. The record indicates that he was an architect. The Great Singapore Tower, brought now to ruination by his own posthumous gene-bearer, was regarded as his masterwork.

The very concept of cloning makes Vulpius queasy. There is a ghoulishness about it, an eeriness, that he dislikes.

There is no way to replicate in clones the special qualities, good or bad, that distinguished the people from whom they were drawn. The resemblance is purely a physical one. Those who specify that they are to be cloned after death may believe that they are attaining immortality of a sort, but to Vulpius it has always seemed that what is achieved is a facsimile of the original, a kind of animated statue, a mere external simulation. Yet the practice is all but universal. In the past 500 years the people of the third millennium have come to dislike the risks and burdens of actual childbearing and child rearing. Even though a lifetime of two centuries is no longer unusual, the increasing refusal to reproduce and the slow but steady emigration to the various artificial satellite planetoids have brought the number of earth's inhabitants to its lowest level since prehistoric times. Cloning is practiced not only as an amus.e.m.e.nt but as a necessary means of fending off depopulation as well.

Vulpius himself has occasionally played with the notion that he too is a clone. He has only vague memories of his parents, who are mere blurred elongated shadows in his mind, faceless and unknowable, and sometimes he thinks he has imagined even those. There is no evidence to support this: His progenitors' names are set down in the archives, though the last contact he had with either of them was at the age of four. But again and again he finds himself toying with the thought that he could not have been conceived of man and woman in the ancient sweaty way, but instead was a.s.sembled and decanted under laboratory conditions. Many people he knows have this fantasy.

But for this quartet, these men whom Vulpius has followed across the world all this year, clonehood is no fantasy. They are genuine replicas of men who lived long ago. And now they spend their days taking a terrible revenge against the world's surviving antiquities. Why was that? What pleasure did this rampage of destruction give them? Could it be that clones were different from naturally conceived folk, that they lacked all reverence for the artifacts of other times?

Vulpius wants very much to know what drives them. More than that, they must be stopped from doing further mischief. The time has come to confront them directly, straightforwardly, and command them in the name of civilization to halt.

To do that, he supposes, he will have to hike up the flank of the Matterhorn to their secluded lodge close to the summit. He has been there once already to plant the spy-eye and found it a long and arduous walk that he is not eager to make a second time. But luck is with him. They have chosen to descend into the town of Zermatt this bright warm afternoon. Vulpius encounters Hemingway and Einstein in the cobbled, swaybacked main street, outside a pretty little shop whose dark half-timbered facade gives it a look of incalculable age: a survivor, no doubt, of that long-ago era when there were no palm trees here, when this highland valley and the mighty Alpine peak just beyond it were part of winter's bleak realm, a land eternally imprisoned in ice and snow, a playground for those who thrived on chilly pleasures.

"Excuse me," Vulpius says, approaching them boldly.

They look at him uneasily. Perhaps they realize that they have seen him more than once before.

But he intends to be nothing if not forthright with them. "Yes, you know me," he tells them. "My name is Strettin Vulpius. I was there the day Istanbul was destroyed. I was in the plaza outside St.

Peter's when the Vatican burned."

"Were you, now?" says Hemingway. His eyes narrow like a sleepy cat's. "Yes, come to think of it, you do look familiar."

"Agra," Vulpius says. "Lhasa. Athens."

"He gets around," says Einstein.

"A world traveler," says Hemingway, nodding.

Pica.s.so now has joined the group, with Cleversmith just behind him. Vulpius says, "You'll be departing soon for Paris, won't you?"

"What's that?" Cleversmith asks, looking startled. Hemingway leans over and whispers something in his ear. Cleversmith's expression darkens.

"Let there be no pretense," says Vulpius stonily. "I know what you have in mind, but the Louvre must not be touched."

Pica.s.so says, "There's nothing in it but a lot of dusty junk, you know."

Vulpius shakes his head. "Junk to you, perhaps. To the rest of us the things you've been destroying are precious. I say, enough is enough. You've had your fun. Now it has to stop."

Cleversmith indicates the colossal ma.s.s of the Matterhorn above the town. "You've been eavesdropping on us, have you?"

"For the past five or six days."

"That isn't polite, you know."

"And blowing up museums is?"

"Everyone's ent.i.tled to some sort of pastime," says Cleversmith. "Why do you want to interfere with ours?"

"You actually expect me to answer that?"

"It seems like a reasonable question to me."

Vulpius does not quite know, for the moment, how to reply to that. Into his silence Pica.s.so says, "Do we really need to stand here discussing all this in the public street? We've got some excellent brandy in our lodge."

It does not occur to Vulpius except in the most theoretical way that he might be in danger. Touching off an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, causing the foundation of the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument to give way, dropping a turbulence bomb amid the ruins of Byzantium, all these are activities of one certain sort: actually taking human life is a different kind of thing entirely. It is not done. There has not been an instance of it in centuries.

The possibility exists, of course, that these four might well be capable of it. No one has destroyed any museums in a long time either, perhaps not since the savage and brutal 20th century in which the originals of three of these four men lived their lives. But these are not actual men of the 20th century, and, in any case, from what Vulpius knows of their originals he doubts that they themselves would have been capable of murder. He will take his chances up above.

The brandy is, in fact, superb. Pica.s.so pours with a free hand, filling and refilling the sparkling bowl-shaped gla.s.ses. Only Hemingway refuses to partake. He is not, he explains, fond of drinking.

Vulpius is astonished by the mountaintop villa's elegance and comfort. He had visited it surrept.i.tiously the week before, entering in the absence of the conspirators to plant his spy-eye, but stayed only long enough then to do the job. Now he has the opportunity to view it in detail. It is a magnificent aerie, a chain of seven spherical rooms clinging to a craggy out-thrust fang of the Matterhorn. Great gleaming windows everywhere provide views of the surrounding peaks and spires and the huge breathtaking chasm that separates the mountain from the town below. The air outside is moist and mild. Tropical vines and blossoming shrubs grow all about. It is hard even to imagine that this once was a place of glittering glaciers and killing cold.

"Tell us," Cleversmith says after a while, "why it is you believe that the artifacts of the former world are worthy of continued preservation. Eh, Vulpius? What do you say?"

"You have it upside down," Vulpius says. "I don't need to do any defending. You do."

"Do I? We do as we please. For us it is pleasant sport. No lives are lost. Mere useless objects are swept into nonexistence, which they deserve. What possible objection can you have to that?"

"They are the world's heritage. They are all we have to show for 10,000 years of civilization."

"Listen to him," says Einstein, laughing. "Civilization!"

"Civilization," says Hemingway, "gave us the great warming. There was ice up here once, you know.

There were huge ice packs at both poles. They melted and flooded half the planet. The ancients caused that to happen. Is that something to be proud of, what they did?"

"I think it is," Vulpius says with a defiant glare. "It brought us our wonderful gentle climate. We have parks and gardens everywhere, even in these mountains. Would you prefer ice and snow?""Then there's war," Cleversmith says. "Battle, bloodshed, bombs. People dying by tens of millions.

We barely have tens of millions of people anymore, and they would kill off that many in no time at all in their wars. That's what the civilization you love so much accomplished. That's what all these fancy temples and museums commemorate, you know. Terror and destruction."

"The Taj Mahal, Sistine Chapel--"

"Pretty in themselves," says Einstein. "But get behind the prettiness and you find that they're just symbols of oppression, conquest, tyranny. Wherever you look in the ancient world, that's what you find: oppression, conquest, tyranny. Better that all of that is swept away, wouldn't you think?"

Vulpius is speechless.

"Have another brandy," Pica.s.so says, and fills everyone's gla.s.s unasked.

Vulpius sips. He's already had a little too much, and perhaps there's some risk in having more just now, because he feels it already affecting his ability to respond to what they are saying. But it is awfully good.

He shakes his head to clear it and says, "Even if I were to accept what you claim, that everything beautiful left to us from the ancient world is linked in some way to the terrible crimes of the ancients, the fact is that those crimes are no longer being committed. No matter what their origin, the beautiful objects that the people of the past left behind ought to be protected and admired for their great beauty, which perhaps we're incapable of duplicating today. Whereas if you're allowed to have your way, we'll soon be left without anything that represents--"

"What did you say?" Cleversmith interrupts. " 'Which perhaps we're incapable of duplicating today,'

wasn't it? Yes. That's what you said. And I quite agree. It's an issue we need to consider, my friend, because it has bearing on our dispute. Where's today's great art? Or great science, for that matter?

Pica.s.so, Einstein, Hemingway-the original ones- who today can match their work?"

Vulpius says, "And don't forget your own ancestor, Cleversmith, who built the Great Singapore Tower, which you yourself turned to so much rubble."

"My point exactly. He lived 200 years ago. We still had a little creativity left, then. Now we function on the acc.u.mulated intellectual capital of the past."

"What are you talking about?" Vulpius says, bewildered.

"Come. Here. Look out this window. What do you see?"

"The mountainside. Your villa's garden, and the forest beyond."

"A garden, yes. A glorious one. And on and on right to the horizon, garden after garden. It's Eden out there, Vulpius. That's an ancient name for paradise. Eden. We live in paradise."

"Is there anything wrong with that?"

"Nothing much gets accomplished in paradise," Hemingway says. "Look at the four of us: Pica.s.so, Hemingway, Einstein, Cleversmith. What have we created in our lives, we four, that compares with the work of the earlier men who had those names?"

"But you aren't those men. You're nothing but clones." They seem stung by that for an instant. Then Cleversmith, recovering quickly, says, "Precisely so. We carry the genes of great ancient overachievers, but we do nothing to fulfill our own potential. We're superfluous men, mere genetic reservoirs. Where are our great works? It's as though our famous forebears have done it all and nothing's left for us to attempt."

"What would be the point of writing Hemingway's books all over again, or painting Pica.s.so's paintings, or--"

"I don't mean that. There's no need for us to do their work again, obviously, but why haven't we even done our own? I'll tell you why. Life's too easy nowadays. I mean that without strife, without challenge--"

"No," Vulpius says. "Ten minutes ago Einstein here was arguing that the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel had to be destroyed because they're symbols of a b.l.o.o.d.y age of tyranny and war. That thesis made very little sense to me, but let it pa.s.s, because now you seem to be telling me that what we need most in the world is a revival of war--"

"Of challenge," says Cleversmith. He leans forward. His entire body is taut. His eyes now have takenon some of the intensity of Pica.s.so's. In a low voice he says, "We are slaves to the past, do you know that? Out of that grisly brutal world that lies a thousand years behind us came the soft life that we all lead today, which is killing us with laziness and boredom. It's antiquity's final joke. We have to sweep it all away, Vulpius. We have to make the world risky again. Give him another drink, Pablo."

"No. I've had enough."