Year's Best Scifi 6 Part 8

"Nemanthus gregarius?" I asked in the elevator on the way down.

Suddenly he punched 6. He walked straight to Polly's cubicle and stuck out his hand. "I owe you an apology," he said.

Polly just sat there. She was facing her own little Waterloo, and she did it bravely.

"I thought your Nemanthus gregarius might be a sub-species not before described, but it isn't. It's the common variety. A nice specimen, though."

We left quickly. At least he didn't give her any watering tips.

Abba, Faltskog Listing 47:"Dancing Queen," day 5. Wandering the streets.

The thing about Benny is, if it doesn't work out and we've studied every plant on thirty floors of an office tower without finding even a Calathea Iancifolia, he can't stand it. He wanders up and down the streets, poking into every little shop. He never buys anything-he isn't shopping. I think he's hoping to spot some rare plant in the odd tobacconist or magazine shop and to do it fast. I have a hard time keeping up with him then, and heaven forbid I should decide to buy something on sale for a Mother's Day gift.

We rushed through two used bookstores, an oriental rug store, four art galleries, three fast food joints. "Benny," I said. "Let's get something to eat."

"It's here," he said.

"What's where?"

"There's something here, and we just haven't found it."

The Dancing Queen was resonating, I supposed. Shops were closing all around us.

"You check the Indian jewelry store while I check Mr. Q's Big and Tall," he told me. "We meet outside in five."

I did like I was told. I smiled at the Navajo woman in traditional dress, but she did not smile back.

She wanted to lock up. I made a quick sweep of the store and noted the various species of endangered cacti and left. Benny was not on the sidewalk. I went into Mr. Q's after him.

He was standing perfectly still in front of a rack of s.h.i.+rts on sale, hands in his pockets.

"These are too big for you," I said.

"Window display, southeast corner."

Well, I walked over there. It was a lovely little display of Rhipsalis salicornioides, Phalaenopsis lueddemanniana, and Streptocarpus saxorum. Nothing unusual.

Then I looked closer at the Streptocarpus saxorum. The flowers weren't the typical powder blue or lilac. They were a light yellow.

The proprietor walked up to me. "I'm sorry," he said. "But we're closing. Could you bring your final purchases to the register?"

"I'm just admiring your cape primrose," I said. "Where do they come from?"

"My mother grows them," he said. "She gave me these plants when I opened the store."

"Did she travel in Africa or Madagascar?"

"Her brother was in the foreign service. She used to follow him around to his postings. I don't remember where she went-I'd have to ask her."

"Do you mind if I touch one of the plants?" I asked.

He said sure. The leaves were the typical hairy, gray-green ovals; the flowers floated above the leaves on wire-thin stems. It was definitely Streptocarpus, but I'd never seen anything like it described.

"I think you should call your mother," I said, and I explained who Benny and I were.

The store closed, but Mr. Proprietor and his staff waited with us for the mother to arrive. The whole time Benny just stood by the sale rack, eyes closed, hands in his pockets. "You've done it again," I whispered to him.

He didn't answer me. Just as I turned to walk back over to the cape primrose, he opened his eyes.

"Streptocarpus agnethum," he whispered.

And he smiled.

Abba, Faltskog Listing 32: "I Have a Dream," day 2. Agnetha's grave.

The thing about Benny is, he's generous. He took me to Sweden with him, and we planted Streptocarpus agnethum, or "dancing queen," around Agnetha's gravestone. Turns out the flower wasn't a cure for anything, but it was a new species and Benny got to name it.

"Agnetha would have loved these flowers," I told Benny.He just kept planting. We had a nice sound system on the ground beside us, playing her music-well, just one of her songs. It talks about believing in angels. I don't know if I believe in angels, but I can see the good in Benny's work. n.o.body's bringing back the world we've lost, but little pieces of it have survived here and there. Benny was saving some of those pieces.

"G.o.d, these flowers are pretty," I told him.

Of course he didn't say anything.

He didn't need to.

The Last Supper

BRIAN STABLEFORD.

Brian Stableford is one of the finest critics and historians of SF and fantasy, a significant novelist, and is one of the six or eight leading short fiction writers in SF today who year after year publishes five or ten stories in contention for inclusion in this annual book. For most of the 1990s he wrote stories in a large future history setting developed in the 1980s in collaboration with David Langford, spanning centuries and focussing on immense changes in human society and in humanity due primarily to advances in the biological sciences. Four of these have been rewritten as novels thus far, Inherit the Earth, The Architects of Emortality, The Fountains of Youth, and The Ca.s.sandra Complex, with Dark Ararat and one more in the works.

"The Last Supper" appeared in Science Fiction Age, one of the two leading SF magazines that ceased publication in mid-year. It is Stableford at his most acerbically Swiftian. He weaves together the celebrity chefs, who are coming into prominence today, with gourmet food at the edge of disgusting, bioengineered art for exquisite pleasure, adds political repression of scientific advances, and protesters; presents an outrageously cool and rational central character and his food-fan, chef-wors.h.i.+pping date as the sympathetic avant garde.

I had reserved the table at Trimalchio's way back in January, three months in advance. It was Tamara's birthday treat, and I figured that it would also be the perfect occasion to ask her to marry me. I wanted the circ.u.mstances to be as favorable as possible to maximize my chances of success. Rumor has it that a lot of celebrities were clamoring to get in, not because they had any inkling of what was about to happen but simply because it was Sat.u.r.day night-and ever since Jerome had joined the hallowed ranks of superstar chefs, Trimalchio's was the place to be seen-but Jerome wasn't the kind of man to start canceling reservations in order to accommodate TV personalities. He was a man of honor.

We had to run the gauntlet when we arrived, of course, but we weren't in the least frightened. We didn't feel that we were in any real danger from the anti-GM brigade who were baying for Jerome's blood. They were very noisy, of course-their cause had been on the skids for years, and the hardcore had responded by becoming even more fanatical and dogmatic-but they knew from bitter experience that attacking customers qualified as an instant PR disaster. The only ones in physical danger were members of the increasingly vociferous counter demonstration: Jerome's most ardent fans. For every banner proclaiming that he was a "Frankenstein Chef " or a "Kitchen Devil," there was one proclaiming him to be the messiah of the new gastronomy. There were even a few innocently hyperbolic placards carrying forward a grand old south London tradition that went way back to the 1960s and the first rock superstars, which simply said: JEROME IS G.o.d.

I found the sprint from the taxi quite exhilarating, although Tamara was a little bit annoyed that none of the paparazzi bothered to aim a flashbulb in our direction. I a.s.sured her that she looked as good as any of the models who were distracting their attention, and apologized for the fact that mere riches didn't make me as newsworthy as the sons of hereditary peers. She did look wonderful. Her peac.o.c.kblue evening dress and pastel hosiery were smart in the old sense as well as the new: a perfect refutation of thefas.h.i.+on-dinosaur argument that no matter how useful and hygienic they might be, active fibers would never look as good as ancient silks and velvets.

We didn't get the best table, of course. I suppose anyone who was there to be seen would have reckoned it the worst, and there was a distinct frown on Tamara's face as we were shown to it, but it suited my purposes very well. I wanted to be in a quiet corner, where Tamara and I would have eyes only for one another.

We didn't have to worry about being unable to catch the waiter's eye-the staff at Trimalchio's were the best in London and it wasn't as if we had any choices to make. Jerome's clients were expected to eat and drink exactly what he provided and be grateful, and that was fine by us.

When she had first read about him in the Style section of the Sunday Times, Tamara had been as fervent in her support of Jerome's insistence on a set menu as she was of his determination to experiment with the best Genetically Modified foodstuffs that the world had offer. "The man is a great artist," she had a.s.sured me, way back on New Year's Eve, in the course of what was then a purely hypothetical discussion. "He plans a meal as a perfect ensemble. He leaves pick-and-mix to the sweetie counter in Woolworth's, where it belongs. I was at uni with one of the geneticists he works with, and the firm has regular dealings with his suppliers. A lot of the GM chefs are content to use modern subst.i.tutes for the ingredients in traditional recipes, but Jerome's a genuine inventor. He's right at the cutting edge of food science, and that puts him at the cutting edge of biotech itself. There'd be no point in offering his customers a choice of dishes because he uses so many ingredients that none of his clients-even his regulars-have ever had the opportunity of tasting. Even if they've encountered the raw materials, they can't possibly have the slightest idea what a master chef can do with them."

"I'm not sure I like the sound of that," I'd said at the time. "Individual tastes do differ-one man's meat and all that."

"Don't be silly, Ben," she'd said. "Faddy eating is the sign of a bad upbringing. Your petty prejudices are quite irrational. They have nothing to do with matters of individual taste."

I loved her very dearly. It would only have spoiled our mood to press the point that, however irrational it might be, there were certain foods I simply hated, especially anchovies and escargots, and certain others to which I strongly suspected that I might be allergic-including mussels and locusts, no matter what modifications had been made to their genomes.

"A great chef is a great artist," Tamara had added. "His customers have to have faith in him. He has every right to demand that they trust his judgment."

"I guess you're right," I had admitted, as the seeds of my plan had taken root. As we took our seats and the waiter handed Tamara a card headed SUPPER: DIRECTORY OF COURSES, I crossed my fingers, hoping that if anything turned up that I didn't like I would either be able to stomach it in spite of my inclinations or dispose of it surrept.i.tiously. The one thing I couldn't do, of course, was leave it on the plate. Newspaper reports alleged that Jerome was wont to emerge from his kitchen wielding a heavy ladle in response to that kind of insult. I could certainly expect a negative answer to my proposal if we were asked to leave in mid-meal-and the bored paparazzi inevitably took a great and exceedingly unflattering interest in anyone coming out of Trimalchio's in advance of the sated and spiritually uplifted crowd.

Our table was lit by two candles-molded in GM tallow, of course-and decorated by a discreet bouquet of flowers set in a tiny vase. I couldn't put a name to the flowers, but that was hardly surprising.

Jerome only used originals. It was entirely possible that there was at least one species in the array that had only existed for a matter of weeks and would become extinct that very night.

The aperitif was as clear and colorless as water, but its texture suggested that it was a complex organic c.o.c.ktail. When I remarked that I found it refres.h.i.+ng but oddly tasteless, Tamara explained that that was the whole point. It was intended to restore the "virginity of the tongue" by clearing away the lingering legacy of past experience.

The hors d'oeuvres were served in little silver dishes mounted on the heads of rampant chimeras formed from some kind of acrylic plastic. The workmans.h.i.+p was exceptionally fine; you could almost seethe individual scales in the chimera's hind-parts. I didn't bother to point this out to Tamara in case she took it as another example of what she called "nanotechnologist's disease." "The trouble with you, Ben,"

she had said during the big row we had had after Christmas, "is that you're obsessed with tiny things.

With you, it's not just a matter of not being able to see the forest for the trees-it's a matter of not being able to see the forest for the cracks in the bark of a fallen twig." For much the same reason, I didn't bother to point out the marvelous intricacy of the patterns engraved in black and white on the skins of the olives. Tamara made up for my reticence by waxing lyrical about the technical difficulties that Jerome's geneticists had had to overcome in order to ensure that the honeyed poppy-seeds used to season the roast dormice could be grown in situ, within the flesh of the living animal.

The dormice were a trifle too sweet for my taste and the olives too oily, but I did like the little toroidal sausages-al-though I might have liked them even better if they hadn't been wrapped around black figs. Tamara loved all of it, to the extent that she ate at least twice as much as me. I didn't mind. It was her treat, and it's not every day that a woman reaches her 25th birthday and receives her fourth proposal of marriage. I had wondered whether it was worth quipping that it was a lot better than receiving her 25th proposal on her fourth birthday, but I'd abandoned the plan because she would only have looked at me as if I were mad. "It's a joke," I would have said, the way I always did. "Is it?" she would have replied, implying that if there were such a thing as a joking test I would probably have failed it nearly as often as I'd failed my driving test.

The possibility of being out-eaten didn't arise again, of course, because the other courses were served in carefully measured individual portions on separate plates. The possibility of being out-drank remained-the decanters containing the first white wine were brought out in advance of the second course-but Tamara was sufficiently old-fas.h.i.+oned to think that it was a gentleman's duty to pour, so I was confident that I could share it out with as much exact.i.tude as my slightly unsteady hand could contrive. I was so nervous that I would have liked an extra gla.s.s to settle me down, but I also wanted to make sure that Tamara was as mellow as possible by the time the big moment arrived, so scrupulous evenhandedness seemed politic as well as polite.

"Happy, darling?" I asked, as we paused with our gla.s.ses to savor the bouquet of the wine.

"Ecstatic," she a.s.sured me. She closed her eyes for a while, saying: "I'm trying to make the most of the pleasures of antic.i.p.ation, so that they'll be redoubled by those of satiation."

"Me too," I a.s.sured her, although I was thinking about the ring in my pocket rather than the food.

The second course was what I'd normally have thought of as a starter, although the hors d'oeuvres had been far too substantial to qualify as a mere tease. It looked like an unusually coherent terrine, but there was no trace of token green stuff except for a light sprinkle of chopped herbs. The central blob was surrounded by a ring of eggs smaller than a quail's and the whole thing was bedded on what looked like unleavened bread.

According to the directory, the blob was compounded from the "v.u.l.v.a" and "sumen" of a virgin sow-some kind of fancy pork, I deduced. The herbal seasoning was allegedly laserpitium, although a dutiful footnote pointed out that because no one now knew what plant the laserpitium of the ancients had been, the name had been considered free for application to an entirely new herb devised by Jerome's geneticists.

All in all, it didn't taste too bad. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I liked it, but it was on the sunny side of tolerable.

"Brilliant," Tamara said, as she finished. "Magical, even. I thought it would just be the taste, but it isn't, is it? You can actually feel the food settling into your stomach, can't you? It's as if this is what our alimentary systems have been crying out for ever since the first cooking fires were lit."

Tamara had strong feelings about the folly of the anti-GM brigade. "Everything we now think of as human nature is the product of the primal biotechnologies," she was fond of saying. "Anyone who thinks that biotechnology is an offense against nature is delusional as well as stupid." The primal biotechnologies, in the jargon of her trade, were cooking and clothing. Both innovations, in Tamara's firmly held but not-quite-conventional view, had been introduced by women; according to her, the entire panoply of"masculine hardware"-including all the stone, ceramic, and metal tools in whose evolution old-fas.h.i.+oned male archaeologists were wont to trace the progress of preliterate societies-had been nothing more than a series of technical tricks developed to served the imperatives of the primal biotechnologies.

Tamara further contended-and how could a mere technical trickster like me disagree with an ace biotechnologist?- that the entire history of civilization had followed the same pattern. Everything men had ever made or done had been devised to serve the insatiable demands of the "feminine imperative"-a valiant but inadequate tribute to the twin maternal devices that had broken nature's cruel yoke and set humankind on the road of intellect and artistry. My colleague and ex-friend Steve Semple had once opined that that was exactly the kind of thing a mad domineering b.i.t.c.h might be expected to say to a lovesick puppy, but he was just jealous.

I had once-and only once-made the mistake of pointing out to Tamara that in the modern world the "primal biotechnologies" seemed to have been hijacked by men, who still supplied the great majority of the 21st century's finest chefs and couturiers in spite of the victories of late 20th-century feminism.

"The greatest ambition of the male of the species has always been to cultivate as much effeminacy as testosterone will permit," she informed me. "How many great chefs and couturiers are straight, do you think? The trouble is that those unlucky souls who can't measure up to mature standards of effeminacy tend to express their defensive masculinity in a frank refusal to learn to cook or dress themselves properly."

There was none of that at Trimalchio's, of course. By that time I knew exactly which topics of conversation were safe and comfortable, and I was able to steer the chat in all the right directions.

Tamara was happy that night, and when she was happy she was breathtakingly beautiful. People like Steve were incapable of understanding a woman like her, and resentment transformed their l.u.s.t into hostility. I, on the other hand, loved her as honestly and as absolutely as anyone could. If she were ever going to marry anyone, I thought as I gulped my first mouthful of the red wine, it would definitely be me-and for all her affectations of independence, she needed love and stability just as much as anyone else.

Ever since I had first glanced at Jerome's directory of courses, I had known that the third would be the most substantial challenge to my const.i.tution. There is not a dessert in the world that can intimidate me, but when it comes to entrees I candidly admit that I am what Tamara likes to call "a Stone Age meat-and-two-veg-man." I love the roast beef, potatoes, and carrots my mother used to make, with or without the Yorks.h.i.+re pudding, and I see no need to apologize for the fact.

I had been hoping all week that I might strike it lucky and catch Jerome in a traditional mood, taking what comfort I could from the knowledge that my wishes were likely to be at least partially granted.

Jerome was well known as a great fan of the potato. He'd been waxing lyrical on its virtues for 10 years, and had presumably been doing so even before he got heavily into GM cuisine. The so-called "degradation of the potato" had always been the favorite object of his particular version of that fiery anger which is every great chef's prerogative and duty. When Columbus first reached the Americas, he told the world, there were six hundred different species of potato distributed from the heights of the Andes to the plains of Patagonia, and all but a handful had been driven to extinction by chip-addicted dullards. One of the key projects he had set his scientific collaborators was to recover and then to surpa.s.s the natural variability of the potato-so it's hardly surprising that the main course on that epoch-making evening was accompanied by no less than three different kinds of potato, one served mashed, one boiled, and one sauteed.

Having been granted that, how could I then complain about the fact that they were accompanying tentacles of young giant squid stuffed with mutton brains?

I found, once I'd steeled myself to try it, that the flesh of young giant squid wasn't nearly as rubbery as the kind of calamari my mother used to foist on me when she wasn't in a roast beef mood. The engineers modifying squid species were still engaged in a headlong dash to produce the biggest living organism ever, so the culinary possibilities of the species had been virtually relegated to the economically important but crudely utilitarian realms of pet food production. Jerome was one of the first people tofigure out that the tender meat of very young individuals had possibilities undreamed of by geneticists fixated on issues of size, and I had to admit that he had a point.

As it turned out, I had slightly more difficulty with the stuffing. My maternal grandmother had an aunt who'd died of the same strain of CJD that was implicated in the infamous beef ban of the 1990s and Gran was always insistent- in spite of all the scientific evidence that later came to light proving that the cattle had caught it from us, not the other way around-that it had been sc.r.a.pie-infected sheep that had been the source of the trouble. According to her, mutton brains were just about the most dangerous foodstuff in the world. "No good will come of it!" she'd cried, when the proven effectiveness of GM-mutton brains as an intelligence-enhancer in infants had delivered the first effective left hook to the jutting chin of anti-GM prejudice. Alas, her protests hadn't prevented Mum from feeding it to me throughout my teens, as if quant.i.ty might somehow make up for the fact that she'd missed the window of real opportunity by a good 10 years.

At the end of the day, though, the stuffing was something I could eat, and I tucked the lot away without bothering to inquire too carefully as to the contents of the sauce, which were conveniently disguised by esoteric French and Latin in the directory. When I washed the last mouthful down with the last of the red wine, I felt positively triumphant-as if my success in dealing with the food were an infallible omen of success in the evening's greater enterprise.

"Wasn't that simply extraordinary?" I said to Tamara.

"Marvelous," she confirmed.

"I suppose we ought to feel slightly guilty about s.n.a.t.c.hing good mutton brain out of the mouths of the tinies who derive such benefit from it," I said, "but I can't. I can feel it doing me good, even though I'm way too old."

"You're right," she said. It wasn't a phrase that pa.s.sed her lovely lips very often, so I was delighted to hear it. "The wine sets it off perfectly, don't you think? To think that our parents used to value wine for its age! Do you think there'll ever come a time again when this year's vintage isn't the finest ever?"

"My Mum and Dad used to drink that Beaujolais nouveau stuff," I remembered.

"Vile red ink!" she retorted. "It might have helped in some small way to pioneer the change of att.i.tude necessary to introduce GM wine, but no true connoisseur would have touched it. This is entirely different. Entirely!"

"Oh, absolutely," I said, as the third decanter was deposited in the middle of the table. "Who knew what true intoxication was in those days? Who understood the real subtleties of psychotropic artistry?"

"We owe Jerome and his disciples a tremendous debt," she confirmed. "When I think about those demonstrators outside-the antis, I mean, not his supporters-it makes me want to cry. They're dogmatists of the worst stripe, incapable of seeing sense-the stuff of which witch-hunters and inquisitors are made. Did you see that item on last night's Sky News about the chef in New York who was shot?"

"Yes, I did," I confirmed. "Yet another martyr to the cause of progress. There's always a mindless mob, isn't there? It's as if the lunatics just moved two doors down the road on the day the last abortion clinic closed. It's not as if there isn't an effective system of monitoring and control, is it?"

That was a slight mistake. I should have known better than to use the word "effective."

"Well, yes it is, actually," Tamara snapped. "We got saddled with far, far too many bad laws in the first decade of the new millennium, and far too many of them are still on the statute book. There's too much insistence on formulaic testing. That obsolete monitoring system has become a millstone around the neck of the nation's scientists-bioscientists, I mean. You specialists in inorganic nanotech don't know how lucky you are not to have to deal with all that s.h.i.+t."

Mercifully, the arrival of the dessert cut the lecture short.

I had been looking forward to what I still insisted, if only privately, of thinking of as "pudding." The dessert on offer on that fateful night at Trimalchio's was one of those ingenious dishes that take advantage of the fact that ice crystals are poor absorbers of microwave radiation and poor conductors of heat. This allows ingenious ice-cream sculptures to contain nested compotes of fruit heated to a temperature that can easily burn the mouth of an unwary diner. Needless to say, there were no such fools present at Trimalchio's that evening. We all knew that the art of eating such concoctions was all in the timing. EvenTamara knew how to manage the various components of the dessert as she dissected its complex architecture, savoring its gradual dissolution as well as its medley of tastes.

It is, I suppose, one of the great ironies of GM cuisine that it remains subject to the basic elements of the sense of taste. Although the gastronomic employment of saltiness and bitterness has always been relatively subtle, there is a certain inevitable crudity about sweetness. The only natural substance on which genetic engineers have not yet managed to improve is sucrose, and there is thus a sense in which the dessert is the most "primitive" part of any modern meal. In my personal opinion, however, the miracles that the engineers have wrought in cultured animal flesh are outweighed by those applied to soft fruits. I would gladly have swallowed a few garlic-laden snails or risked the effects of a few deep-fried locusts in order to have the privilege of having Jerome's raspberries and blueberries melt on my tongue.

The dessert wine was equally fine. Even Tamara said so, although if it had been something I'd brought home from the hypermarket the merest glance would have been enough to convince her that it was too syrupy. It's slightly absurd, now that slimness is a straightforward matter of somatic management, that so many willowy women still profess to dislike the taste of sugar, but in Tamara's case the idiosyncrasy was authentic. She was never one to follow fas.h.i.+on blindly.

"The perfect end to a perfect meal," was Tamara's judgment, as she laid her spoon aside for the final time.