Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 9

The Majority Games were on then so the streets were more crowded than usual.

Most people were out all the time, excited and eager and happy to be in the great mobs that thronged the squares. The Games took up everybody's time-except, of course, the three hours of work everyone had to put in, no exceptions, every laborday. Klair and Qent broke up to cover more ground and spent a full week on the search. Many times Klair blamed herself for not pressing Marq about where he lived, but the man was obsessively secretive. "Suppose they grab you, make you tell about me?" he had always countered.

Now she wondered what the Spectors would do if they uncovered a lode of books like Marq's. Send him to Advanced Treatment? Or was there something even worse?

She came home after a day of dogged searching and Qent was not there. He did not appear that evening. When she awoke the next morning she burst into tears. He was gone that day and the one after.

On her way back from work, a routine counseling job, she resolved to go to the Spector. She halfheartedly watched the crowds, hoping to see Marq or Qent, and that was how she noticed that three men and a woman were moving parallel to her as she crossed the Plaza of Promise. They were all looking some other way but they formed four points of the compa.s.s around her with practiced precision.

She walked faster and they did too. They looked stern and remorseless and she could not lose them in the warrens of streets and corridors near the two-room apartment she shared with Qent. They had waited five years to get one with a tiny balcony. Even then it was just two levels up from the muddy floor of the air shaft.

But if you hooked your head over to the side you could see some sky that way.

Klair kept moving in an aimless pattern and they followed. Of course she did not want to go to the apartment, where she would be trapped. But she was tired and she could not think of anything else to do.

They knocked a few minutes after she collapsed on the bed. She had hoped theymight hold off for a while. She was resigned. When she spun the door open the person she least expected to see was Marq.

"You won't believe what's going on," he said, brus.h.i.+ng past her.

"What? Where have you-"

"The Meritocrats want us."

"For what?"

"Reading!"

"But the Voice-"

"Keeps people out of touch and happy. Great idea-but it turns out you can't run everything with just the Voice." He blinked, the merest hesitation. "Somebody's got to be able to access info at a higher level. That was our gut feeling, remember-that reading was different."

"Well, yes, but the Specters-"

"They keep people damped down, is all." A slight pause. "Anybody who's got the savvy to see the signs, the grit to learn to piece together words on their own, to process it all- those are the people the Merits want. Us!"

Klair blinked. This was too much to encompa.s.s. "But why did they take you away, and Qent-"

"Had to be sure." He gave his old familiar shrug. "Wanted to test our skills, make sure we weren't just posing. People might catch on, only pretend to read, y'know?"

"I... see." There was something about Marq that wasn't right. He had never had these pauses before... because he wasn't listening to the Voice then?

She backed away from him. "That's marvelous news. When will Qent be back?"

"Oh, soon, soon." He advanced and she backed out onto the balcony.

"So what job will you do? I mean, with reading in it?"

They were outside. She backed into the railing. The usual distant clatter and chat of the air shaft gave her a momentary sense of security. Nothing could happen here, could it?

"Oh, plenty. Looking up old stuff, comparing, y'know." He waved his hands vaguely.

It wasn't much of a drop from here. Over the railing, legs set right...

"It's good work, really."

Could she could get away if she jumped? Marq wasn't the athletic type and she knew that if she landed right on the mud below she wouldn't twist an ankle or anything. She had on sensible shoes. She could elude him. If she landed right.

She gave him a quick, searching look. Had he come here alone? No, probably there were Spectors outside her door, just waiting for him to talk her intosurrendering. Stall for time, yes.

"How bad is it?"

He grinned. "You won't mind. They just access that part of your mind for three hours a day. Then they install a shutdown on that cerebral sector."

"Shutdown? I-"

"So you don't need to read any more. Just during work, is all. You get all you need that way. Then you're free!"

She thought it through. Jump, get away. Couldn't use the Voice for help because they could undoubtedly track her if she had her receiver on. Could she get by just reading the old signs?

Suppose she could. Then what? Find some friends she could trust. Stay underground? How? Living off what?

"It's much better. Qent will be back soon and-"

"Hold it. Don't move."

She looked down the air shaft. Was the jump worth it?

You spool out of the illusion and snap-back into the tight coc.o.o.n. The automatic sensory leads retract, giving your skin momentary pinp.r.i.c.k goodbye kisses. Once more you feel the cool clasping surfaces of the coc.o.o.n. Now you turn and ask, "Hey, where's the rest?"

Myrph shrugs her shoulders, still busy undoing her leads. "That's all there was, I told you."

"Maybe it's just damaged?"

"No, that's the end of the cube. There must be another cube to finish the story, but this was the only one I found back in that closet."

"But how does it end? What's she do?" You lean toward her, hoping maybe she's just teasing.

"I dunno. What would you do? Jump?"

You blink, not ready for the question. "Uh, this reading thing. What is it, really?"

Myrph frowns. "It felt like a kind of your own silent voice inside your head."

"Is it real? I mean, does reading exist?"

"Never heard of it."

"So this isn't an historical at all, right? It's a fantasy."

"Must be. I've never seen those things on walls."

"Signs, she called them." You think back. "They would have worn away a long time ago, anyway."

"I guess. Felt kinda strange, didn't it, being able to find out things without the Voice?"You bite your lip, thinking. Already the illusion of being that woman is slipping away, hard to fix in memory. She did have a kind of power all on her own with that reading thing. You liked that. "I wonder what she did?"

"Hey, it's just a story."

"What would you do?"

"I don't have to decide. It's just a story."

"But why tell it then?"

Myrph says irritably, "It's just an old illusion, missing a cube."

"Maybe there was only one."

"Look, I want illusions to take me away, not stress me out."

You remember the power of it. "Can I have it, then?"

"The cube? Sure."

Myrph tosses it over. It is curiously heavy, translucent and chipped with rounded corners. You cup it in your hand and like the weight of it.

That is how it starts. You know already that you will go and look for the signs in the corridors and that for good or ill something new has come into your world and will now never leave it.

Chapter 8 - Yeyuka by Greg Egan.

Greg Egan is one of the leading SF writers to emerge in recent decades from Australian SF onto the world stage, and the most prominent of them in the 1990s as the decade moves on toward the World SF convention in Australia in 1999. His novels include Quarantine, Permutation City, Distress, and Diaspora, and some of his best stories are collected in Axiomatic. This story appeared in the Australian literary magazine, Meanjin, and was one of several of his in 1997 that might have been chosen for this book. He is one of the strong and individual new voices in SF this decade with an invariably high level of execution in recent years. This story has an intimate quality, yet balanced (paradoxically?) by an ironic distance. More than many of his other stories it gets to the heart of cultural, social, and technological barriers that divide and segment our world today and raises the questions of those divisions, real and artificial. What do we have to give up to save others?

On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an hour, then lay on the sand and stared at the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there were half a dozen booths set up amid the sun bathers, dispensing the latest fas.h.i.+on: solar tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror, you could choose a design and then customize it, or create onefrom scratch with software a.s.sistance. Computer-controlled jets sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your skin, then an hour of UV exposure rendered all the colors visible.

As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow b.u.t.terflies perched between shoulder blades, torsos wrapped in green-and-violet dragons, whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching these images materialize around me, I couldn't help thinking of them as banners of victory. Throughout my childhood, there'd been nothing more terrifying than the threat of melanoma-and by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than neck-to-knee lycra. Twenty years later, these elaborate decorations were designed to encourage, to boast of, irradiation. To proclaim, not that the sun itself had been tamed, but that our bodies had. To declare that cancer had been defeated.

I touched the ring on my left index finger, and felt a rea.s.suring pulse through the metal. Blood flowed constantly around the hollow core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The ring's inner surface was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded funnel-shaped structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms wide. Every sizeable molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these traps was seized and shrink-wrapped, long enough and tightly enough to determine its shape and its chemical ident.i.ty before it was released.

So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew what belonged, and what didn't. Under its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a microscopic tumor far downstream, could never escape detection for long-and once a diagnosis was made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were programmable catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer control.

The ring could manufacture a wide range of drugs from raw materials circulating in the blood, just by choosing the right sequence of shapes for these catalysts-trapping the necessary ingredients together in nooks and crannies molded to fit like plaster casts around their combined outlines.

With medication delivered within minutes or seconds, infections were wiped out before they could take hold, tiny cl.u.s.ters of cancer cells destroyed before they could grow or spread. Linked by satellite to a vast array of medical databases, and as much additional computing power as it required, the ring gave me a kind of electronic immune system, fast enough and smart enough to overcome any adversary.

Not everyone on the beach that morning would have had their own personal HealthGuard, but a weekly session on a shared family unit, or even a monthly check-up at their local GP, would have been enough to reduce their risk of cancer dramatically. And though melanoma was the least of my worries-fair-skinned, I was covered in sunscreen as usual; fatal or not, getting burnt was painful-with the ring standing guard against ten thousand other possibilities, I'd come to think of it as a vital part of my body. The day I'd installed it, my life expectancy had risen by fifteen years-and no doubt my bank's risk-a.s.sessment software had a.s.sumed a similarextension to my working life, since I'd be paying off the loan I'd needed to buy the thing well into my sixties.

I tugged gently at the plain metal band, until I felt a sharp warning from the needle-thin tubes that ran deep into the flesh. This model wasn't designed to be slipped on and off in an instant like the shared units, but it would only take a five minute surgical procedure under local anaesthetic to remove it. In Uganda, a single HealthGuard machine served forty million people-or rather, the lucky few who could get access to it. Flying in wearing my own personal version seemed almost as cra.s.s as arriving with a giant solar tattoo. Where I was headed, cancer had very definitely not been defeated.

Then again, nor had malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, schistosomiasis. I could have the ring immunize me against all of these and more, before removing it... but the malaria parasite was notoriously variable, so constant surveillance would provide far more reliable protection. I'd be no use to anyone lying in a hospital bed for half my stay. Besides, the average villager or shanty-town dweller probably wouldn't even recognize the thing, let alone resent it. I was being hypersensitive.

I gathered up my things and headed for the cycle rack. Looking back across the sand, I felt the kind of stab of regret that came upon waking from a dream of impossible good fortune and serenity, and for a moment I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and rejoin it.

Lisa saw me off at the airport.

I said, "It's only three months. It'll fly past." I was rea.s.suring myself, not her.

"It's not too late to change your mind." She smiled calmly; no pressure, it was entirely my decision. In her eyes, I was clearly suffering from some kind of disease-a very late surge of adolescent idealism, or a very early mid-life crisis- but she'd adopted a scrupulously non-judgmental bedside manner. It drove me mad.

"And miss my last chance ever to perform cancer surgery?" That was a slight exaggeration; a few cases would keep slipping through the HealthGuard net for years. Most of my usual work was trauma, though, which was going through changes of its own. Computerized safeguards had made traffic accidents rare, and I suspected that within a decade no one would get the chance to stick their hand in a conveyor belt again. If the steady stream of gunshot and knife wounds ever dried up, I'd have to re-train for nose jobs and reconstructing rugby players. "I should have gone into obstetrics, like you."

Lisa shook her head. "In the next twenty years, they'll crack all the molecular signals, within and between mother and fetus. There'll be no premature births, no Caesarians, no complications. The HealthGuard will smooth my job away, too." She added, deadpan, "Face it, Martin, we're all doomed to obsolescence."

"Maybe. But if we are... it'll happen sooner in some places than others."

"And when the time comes, you might just head off to some place where you're still needed?"She was mocking me, but I took the question seriously. "Ask me that when I get back. Three months without mod cons and I might be cured for life."

My flight was called. We kissed goodbye. I suddenly realized that I had no idea why I was doing this. The health of distant strangers? Who was I kidding? Maybe I'd been trying to fool myself into believing that I really was that selfless-hoping all the while that Lisa would talk me out of it, offering some face-saving excuse for me to stay. I should have known she'd call my bluff instead.

I said plainly, "I'm going to miss you. Badly."

"I should hope so." She took my hand, scowling, finally accepting the decision.

"You're an idiot, you know. Be careful."

"I will." I kissed her again, then slipped away.

I was met at Entebbe airport by Magdalena Iganga, one of the oncologists on a small team that had been put together by Medecins Sans Frontieres to help overburdened Ugandan doctors tackle the growing number of Yeyuka cases. Iganga was Tanzanian, but she'd worked throughout eastern Africa, and as she drove her battered ethanol-powered car the thirty kilometers into Kampala, she recounted some of her brushes with the World Health Organization in Nairobi.

"I tried to persuade them to set up an epidemiological database for Yeyuka.

Good idea, they said. Just put a detailed proposal to the cancer epidemiology expert committee. So I did. And the committee said, we like your proposal, but oh dear, Yeyuka is a contagious disease, so you'll have to submit this to the contagious diseases expert committee instead. Whose latest annual sitting I'd just missed by a week." Iganga sighed stoically. "Some colleagues and I ended up doing it ourselves, on an old 386 and a borrowed phone line."

"Three eight what?"

She shook her head. "Paleocomputing jargon, never mind."

Though we were dead on the equator and it was almost noon, the temperature must have been thirty at most; Kampala was high above sea level. A humid breeze blew off Lake Victoria, and low clouds rolled by above us, gathering threateningly then dissipating, again and again. I'd been promised that I'd come for the dry season; at worst there'd be occasional thunderstorms. On our left, between patches of marshland, small cl.u.s.ters of shacks began to appear. As we drew closer to the city, we pa.s.sed through layers of shanty towns, the older and more organized verging on a kind of bedraggled suburbia, others looking more like out-and-out refugee camps. The tumors caused by the Yeyuka virus tended to spread fast but grow slowly, often partially disabling people for years before killing them, and when they could no longer manage heavy rural labor, they usually headed for the nearest city in the hope of finding work. Southern Uganda had barely recovered from HTV when Yeyuka cases began to appear, around 2013; in fact, some virologists believed that Yeyuka had arisen from a less virulent ancestor after gaining a foothold within the immune-suppressed population. And though Yeyuka wasn't as contagious ascholera or tuberculosis, crowded conditions, poor sanitation and chronic malnourishment set up the shanty towns to bear the brunt of the epidemic. As we drove north between two hills, the center of Kampala appeared ahead of us, draped across a hill of its own. Compared to Nairobi, which I'd flown over a few hours before, Kampala looked uncluttered. The streets and low buildings were laid out in a widely-s.p.a.ced plan, neatly organized but lacking any rigid geometry of grid lines or concentric circles. There was plenty of traffic around us, both cycles and cars, but it flowed smoothly enough, and for all the honking and shouting going on the drivers seemed remarkably good humored.

Iganga took a detour to the east, skirting the central hill. There were lushly green sports grounds and golf courses on our right, colonial-era public buildings and high-fenced foreign emba.s.sies on our left. There were no high-rise slums in sight, but there were makes.h.i.+ft shelters and even vegetable gardens on some stretches of parkland, traces of the shanty towns spreading inward.