Year's Best Scifi 2 Part 32

"Thanks a lot. I guess we should head back now; I've got more than I can hold."

She turned back toward Skyhook, some hundred meters off, his spidery landing gear splayed out into the phycoids. Methodically she made her way back, with more difficulty now that she had so much to carry.

She was sweating now, but Pelt handled it beautifully, keeping her skin cool and refreshed. The distant forest of tall blue phycoids sang in her ears. The Singing Planet, they should call it, she thought.

"Andra... something's not right," Pelt said suddenly.

"What is it?" She was having more trouble plowing through the foliage; her legs were getting stiff.

"Something that baby zooid sprayed is blocking my nanoprocessors. Not the chemicals; I can screen out anything. I'm not sure what it is."

"What else could it be?"

Skyhook said, "Just get back to my cabin. We'll wash you down."

"I'm trying," said Andra, breathing hard. "My legs are so stiff." The shuttle craft stood hopefully ahead of her. Only about ten meters to go, she thought.

"It's not your legs," Pelt's voice said dully. "It's my nanoplast. I'm losing control over the lower part, where the spray hit. I can't flex at your joints any more."

Her scalp went cold, then hot again. "What about your air filter?"

"So far it's okay. The disruption has not reached your face yet."

"Just get back here," Skyhook urged again. "You're almost here." Obligingly the doorway appeared on the craft's surface, molding itself open in a rim of nanoplast."I'm trying, but my legs just won't bend." She pushed as hard as she could.

"Drop your backpack," Skyhook added.

"I won't give up my samples. How else will we learn what's going on here?" She fell onto her stomach and tried to drag herself through.

"It's microbes," Pelt exclaimed suddenly. "Some kind of microbes-they're cross-linking my processors."

"What? How?" she demanded. "Microbes infecting nanoplast-I've never heard of it."

"They messed up the probe before."

"Quantum?" called Andra. "What do you think?"

"It could be," the radio voice replied. "The nanoprocessors store data in organic polymers-which might be edible to a truly omnivorous microbe. There's always a first time."

"Microbes eating nanoplast!" Skyhook exclaimed. "What about other sentients? Are the microbes contagious?"

"You'll have to put us in isolation," said Andra.

"Andra," said Pelt, "the cross-linking is starting to disrupt my entire system." His voice came lower and fainter. "I don't know how long I can keep my filters open."

Andra stared desperately at the door of the shuttle, so near and yet so far. "Quantum, how long could I last breathing unfiltered air?"

"That's hard to say. An hour should be okay; we'll clean your lungs out later."

She tried to recall how long the first rat had lived. Half a day?

"I'm shutting down," Pelt warned her. "I'm sorry, Andra...."

Skyhook said, "Pelt, you'll last longer in rest mode. We'll save you yet-there's got to be an antibiotic that will work. They've got DNA-we'll throw every DNA a.n.a.logue we've got at them."

The nanoplastic skin opened around Andra's mouth, shrinking back around her head and neck. An otherworldly scent filled her lungs, a taste of ginger and other unnameable things, as beautiful as the vision of golden ringlets. Planet Ginger, she thought, smelled as lovely as it looked. She was the first human to smell it; but would these breaths be her last?

Pelt's skin shriveled down her arms, getting stuck at her waist near the spot that got sprayed. She tried again to pull herself through the phycoids, grabbing their tough loops. Suddenly she had another idea.

Pulling in her arms, she sank down and rolled herself over and over, just like the zooids. This worked much better, for the phycoid foliage proved surprisingly elastic, bending easily beneath her and bouncing back again. Perhaps those zooids were not quite so silly after all.

At the door, Skyhook had already extruded sheets of quarantine material, to isolate her and protect his own nanoplast from whatever deadly infection Pelt harbored. The doorway extended and scooped her up into the cabin.

As the doorway constricted, at last closing out the treacherous planet, Andra let out a quick sigh of relief.

"Skyhook, we've got to save Pelt. Have you got anything to help him?"Two long tendrils were already poking into the quarantine chamber, to probe the hapless skinsuit. "I'm spreading what antibiotics we have on board," said Skyhook, from the cabin speaker now. "Nucleotide a.n.a.logues, anything likely to block DNA synthesis and stop the microbes growing. It's bizarre, treating a sentient for infection."

Andra carefully peeled off the remaining nanoplast, trying to keep as much of it together as possible, although she had no idea whether it was beyond repair. "Pelt," she whispered. "You did your best for me."

By the time they returned to the station, there was still no sign that any of the antibiotics had curbed the microbes. Quantum was puzzled. "I have a few more to try," she said, "but really, if the chromosomes are regular DNA, something should have worked."

"Maybe the microbes' DNA is s.h.i.+elded by proteins."

"That wouldn't help during replication, remember? The double helix has to open and unzip down the middle, to let the new nucleotides pair. There's no way around it."

Andra frowned. Something was missing; there was still something wrong, about the growing microbes with their three daughter cells. How could they unzip their DNA, fill in each complementary strand, and end up with three helixes? She thought she had figured it out before, but now it did not add up. She coughed once, then again harder. Her lungs were starting to react to the dust-she had to start treatment now.

"We've got some data on your samples," Quantum added. "The microbial cells concentrate acid inside, instead of excreting it, like most of our cells do. I still find only fifteen amino acids, but some of them-"

"I've got it!" Andra leapt to her feet. "Don't you see? The chromosome is a triple helix. That's why each cell divides in three-each daughter strand synthesizes two complements, and you end up with three new triple helixes, one for each cell." A fit of coughing caught up with her.

"It could be," Quantum said slowly. "There are many ways to make a DNA triple helix. One found in human regulatory genes alternates A-T-T triplets with G-C-C."

"Then it has a two-letter code, not four." Double-helical DNA has four possible pairs, since A-T is distinguished from T-A; likewise G-C differs from C-G.

Quantum added, "The triple helix is most stable in acid, just what we found in these cells."

"Just hurry up and design some triplet a.n.a.logues." Quantum's sentient brain could do this far faster than any human. "Triple helix," Andra repeated. "It would resist ultraviolet damage much better, with the planet's thin ozone layer. But how to encode proteins, with only two 'letters'?" The triple helix had only two possible triplets; its three-letter "words" could only specify eight amino acids to build protein.

"Maybe it uses words of four letters. With two possible triplets at each position, that would encode two to the fourth power, that is, sixteen possible amino acids."

"Fifteen," corrected Quantum, "if one is a stop signal."

The next day, after an exhaustive medical workout, Andra felt as if a vacuum cleaner had gone through her lungs. Pelt still had a long way to recover, but at least the pesky microbes were cleaned out.

"It's hopeless," complained Skyhook's eye speaker. "If even sentients aren't safe, we'll never explore that planet.""Don't worry," said Quantum's voice above the holostage. "Pelt's nanoplast has an exceptionally high organic content. A slight redesign will eliminate the problem. Machines have that advantage."

Still, Pelt had nearly died, thought Andra.

"Your phycoid and zooid samples all have toroid cells, too," Quantum added. "They have circular chromosomes, with no nuclear membranes: They're all prokaryotes. Just wait till the Free Fold hears about this," Quantum added excitedly. "I've got the perfect name for the planet."

Andra looked up. "Planet of the Bagels?"

"Planet Prokaryon."

Prokaryon-yes, thought Andra, it sounded just pompous enough that the Fold would buy it.

Still, she thought uneasily about those regular garden rows of phycoid forest and fields, with all kinds of creatures yet to be discovered. "I wonder," she mused. "Some one else just might have named it first."

Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is in our time producing the finest continuing body of short fiction in the SF field since Theodore Sturgeon. Like Sturgeon, Wolfe is an aesthetic maverick, whose stories are sometimes fantasy, sometimes horror, sometimes hard SF, sometimes fine contemporary realism (neat, or with magic). His novels include the four volume Book of the New Sun, The Fifth Head of the Cerberus, Peace, Soldier of the Mist, Urth of the New Sun. His fiction is collected in The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories, Endangered Species, Storeys from the Old Hotel, and several other volumes. When he turns his hand to SF, as in "The Ziggurat," he can write contemporary science fiction of unique power. In a year of exceptionally strong novella length work in the SF field, this one still stands out. It is selected from the fine original anthology, Full Spectrum 5.

The Ziggurat

Gene Wolfe

It had begun to snow about one-thirty. Emery Bainbridge stood on the front porch to watch it before going back into the cabin to record it in his journal.

13:38 Snowing hard, quiet as owl feathers. Radio says stay off the roads unless you have four-wheel.

Probably means no Brook.

He put down the lipstick-red ballpoint and stared at it. With this pen... He ought to scratch out Brook and write Jan over it.

"To h.e.l.l with that." His harsh voice seemed loud in the silent cabin. "What I wrote, I wrote. Quod scripsi whatever it is."That was what being out here alone did, he told himself. You were supposed to rest up. You were supposed to calm down. Instead you started talking to yourself. "Like some nut," he added aloud.

Jan would come, bringing Brook. And Aileen and Alayna. Aileen and Alayna were as much his children as Brook was, he told himself firmly. "For the time being."

If Jan could not come tomorrow, she would come later when the county had cleared the back roads.

And it was more than possible that she would come, or try to, tomorrow as she had planned. There was that kind of a streak in Jan, not exactly stubbornness and not exactly resolution, but a sort of willful determination to believe whatever she wanted; thus she believed he would sign her papers, and thus she would believe that the big Lincoln he had bought her could go anywhere a jeep could.

Brook would be all for it, of course. At nine, Brook had tried to cross the Atlantic on a Styrofoam dinosaur, paddling out farther and farther until at last a lifeguard had launched her little catamaran and brought him back, letting the dinosaur float out to sea.

That was what was happening everywhere, Emery thought-boys and men were being brought back to sh.o.r.e by women, though for thousands of years their daring had permitted humanity to survive.

He pulled on his red-plaid double mackinaw and his warmest cap, and carried a chair out onto the porch to watch the snow.

Suddenly it wasn't... He had forgotten the word that he had used before. It wasn't whatever men had. It was something women had, or they thought it was. Possibly it was something n.o.body had.

He pictured Jan leaning intently over the wheel, her lips compressed to an ugly slit, easing her Lincoln into the snow, coaxing it up the first hill, stern with triumph as it cleared the crest. Jan about to be stranded in this soft and silent wilderness in high-heeled shoes. Perhaps that streak of hers was courage after all, or something so close that it could be subst.i.tuted for courage at will. Little pink packets that made you think whatever you wanted to be true would be true, if only you acted as if it were with sufficient tenacity.

He was being watched.

"By G.o.d, it's that coyote," he said aloud, and knew from the timbre of his own voice that he lied. These were human eyes. He narrowed his own, peering through the falling snow, took off his gla.s.ses, blotted their lenses absently with his handkerchief, and looked again.

A higher, steeper hill rose on the other side of his tiny valley, a hill clothed in pines and crowned with wind-swept ocher rocks. The watcher was up there somewhere, staring down at him through the pine boughs, silent and observant.

"Come on over!" Emery called. "Want some coffee?"

There was no response.

"You lost? You better get out of this weather!"

The silence of the snow seemed to suffocate each word in turn. Although he had shouted, he could not be certain he had been heard. He stood and made a sweeping gesture: Come here.

There was a flash of colorless light from the pines, so swift and slight that he could not be absolutely certain he had seen it. Someone signaling with a mirror-except that the sky was the color of lead above the downward-drifting whiteness of the snow, the sun invisible."Come on over!" he called again, but the watcher was gone.

Country people, he thought, suspicious of strangers. But there were no country people around here, not within ten miles; a few hunting camps, a few cabins like his own, with n.o.body in them now that deer season was over.

He stepped off the little porch. The snow was more than ankle-deep already and falling faster than it had been just a minute before, the pine-clad hill across the creek practically invisible.

The woodpile under the overhang of the south eaves (the woodpile that had appeared so impressive when he had arrived) had shrunk drastically. It was time to cut and split more. Past time, really. The chain saw tomorrow, the ax, the maul, and the wedge tomorrow, and perhaps even the jeep, if he could get it in to snake the logs out.

Mentally, he put them all away. Jan was coming, would be bringing Brook to stay. And the twins to stay, too, with Jan herself, if the road got too bad.

The coyote had gone up on the back porch!

After a second or two he realized he was grinning like a fool, and forced himself to stop and look instead.

There were no tracks. Presumably the coyote had eaten this morning before the snow started, for the bowl was empty, licked clean. The time would come, and soon, when he would touch the rough yellow-gray head, when the coyote would lick his forgers and fall asleep in front of the little fieldstone fireplace in his cabin.

Triumphant, he rattled the rear door, then remembered that he had locked it the night before. Had locked both doors, in fact, moved by an indefinable dread. Bears, he thought-a way of a.s.suring himself that he was not as irrational as Jan.

There were bears around here, that was true enough. Small black bears, for the most part. But not Yogi Bears, not funny but potentially dangerous park bears who had lost all fear of Man and roamed and rummaged as they pleased. These bears were hunted every year, hunted through the golden days of autumn as they fattened for hibernation. Silver winter had arrived, and these bears slept in caves and hollow logs, in thickets and thick brush, slept like their dead, though slowly and softly breathing like the snow-motionless, dreaming bear-dreams of the last-men years, when the trees would have filled in the old logging roads again and shouldered aside the cracked asphalt of the county road, and all the guns had rusted to dust.

Yet he had been afraid.

He returned to the front o the cabin, picked up the chair he had carried onto the porch, and noticed a black spot on its worn back he could not recall having seen before. It marked his finger, and was sc.r.a.ped away readily by the blade of his pocketknife.

Shrugging, he brought the chair back inside. There was plenty of Irish stew; he would have Irish stew tonight, soak a slice of bread in gravy for the coyote, and leave it in the same spot on the back porch.

You could not (as people always said) move the bowl a little every day. That would have been frightening, too fast for any wild thing. You moved the bowl once, perhaps, in a week; and the coyote's bowl had walked by those halting steps from the creek bank where he had glimpsed the coyote in summer to the back porch.

Jan and Brook and the twins might-would be sure to-frighten it. That was unfortunate, but could notbe helped; it might be best not to try to feed the coyote at all until Jan and the twins had gone. As inexplicably as he had known that he was being watched, and by no animal, he felt certain that Jan would reach him somehow, bending reality to her desires.

He got out the broom and swept the cabin. When he had expected her, he had not cared how it looked or what she might think of it. Now that her arrival had become problematic, he found that he cared a great deal.