Nature Futures 2 (5 page)

That's not my name.

I have to go.

I think I've met all of Annie Webber.

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. When coupled with a childhood tendency to read the dictionary for fun, this led her inevitably to penury, intransigence and the writing of speculative fiction. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus and Campbell Award winning author of 25 novels and more than 100 short stories. Her dog lives in Massachusetts; her partner, writer Scott Lynch, lives in Wisconsin. She spends a lot of time on planes.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Panda

Jacey Bedford

There were no two ways about it: he clunked when he walked. It was the near hind that was causing the problem. He'd noticed it days ago, soon after crossing the Bering Strait, some 85 relentless kilometres of icy salt water. Pad, pad, pad, clunk. Pad, pad, pad, clunk. Yes, definitely the hip. Too much exercise and way too much salt water.

He'd not been made for this kind of travel, just a little gentle shuffling between bamboo groves, avoiding too many ups and downs. He'd heard them talking about him in the lab before he was released. A bear, they'd called him,
Ailuropoda melanoleuca
, black and white cat-foot, a living fossil. They said his closest ursine relative was the spectacled bear of South America,
Tremarctos ornatus
. He'd checked his GPS, still functioning after all this time, and pondered in the manner of his kind. China to South America was a long walk for a panda, but he could do it if he had to.

It had been many years since he'd walked out of the Qinling Mountains in hilly Sichuan Province and set off to find more of his kind, but although he'd walked north though China to Siberia, he'd found no organic creature larger than a cockroach and no one like himself. He didn't know what had happened to his makers, but it must have happened a long time ago. They'd gone the way of the panda at last.

Back in the early twenty-first century, the International Union for Conservation of Nature had declared his species as
endangered
and
conservation reliant
, but hadn't followed through until it was too late. Maybe they'd thought it enough that the giant panda genome had been sequenced in 2009, but it took more than that to keep a whole species viable. It took bamboo and more bamboo and the resources shrank each year.

That's when they'd made him and others like him. Giant pandas, able to live in the wild on fresh air — a sop to national pride. Something for the tourists to gawp at, perfect in all respects, on the outside at least. On the inside, however, their hearts were tiny fusion reactors; their skeletons, foam-metal; their joints, ceramic; and their muscles, skin and fur woven from various polymers.

He could access his internal clock if he really wanted to and find out how long it had been since the others ceased to function. He was the last of his kind, and pretty soon he'd be unable to walk. Pad, pad, pad, clunk! What would happen then? He imagined himself stranded in this land of glaciers. How long would it take for his fuel cell to run down? Too long. He wondered if it was possible for a creature like him to go mad.

Alaska's broken coastline caused him detour after detour and he stopped checking his clock, fearful of seeing years pass while he relentlessly plodded south. Always south. Pad, pad, pad, clunk through Alaska and British Columbia until the pad, pad, pad, clunk became pad, pad, clank, clunk.

He had to skirt an active volcano where Seattle used to be. Its rumbling and occasional belch of acrid smoke set off his alarm systems and the volcanic grit irritated his retractable claw beds, causing him delays for cleaning and maintenance. Pad, pad, clank, clunk became pad, pad, clank-drag and he was grateful when he reached the benign forests of Oregon.

He was resting his rear hind servo when he heard a whine above him and felt the sudden tug of an antigrav hauler. He was whisked up to a laboratory in the sky. Surprise wasn't one of his inbuilt emotions and he knew all about laboratories, even alien ones, so he settled down feeling only mild curiosity. They shot him with a cryo-anaesthetic that might have worked if he'd been organic, or might have killed him, as the aliens, themselves crystalline blobs, seemed to know so little of Earth-based physiology that they couldn't tell the difference between biological and mechanical. At least they didn't seem interested in taking him apart to see how he worked.

He lay awake for the 90 years it took for their ark ship to return home, grateful that the enforced rest gave his depleted nanites time to repair most of the damage to his hip joints. Occasionally he would open one eye and watch the aliens at work, gleaning an understanding of their communications system, a mixture of audible sounds and electronic impulses. They never seemed to figure out his recorded system responses, though, which were in Mandarin.

In the alien zoo they gave him a huge enclosure that exactly replicated the forest they'd found him in, and put up a communication repeater that he deciphered as
Dominant species of Planet 40698-C
. He shrugged and methodically deleted his GPS database to make room for new information, then set off in a southerly direction. Pad, pad, pad, clink.

He found her on the fourth day, staring round-eyed and hopeful from the lower branches of a tall tree. He'd walked up one side of Earth and back down again to find another of his kind, and here she was, halfway round the galaxy in an alien zoo. From her black coat to her lighter eye markings, she was a prime example of the spectacled bear of South America. He dipped his head in acknowledgement and she dipped hers in return. She climbed down her tree and walked towards him shyly. The faint sound of her servos, pad-clunk, pad, pad, drifted towards him and it made his little fusion reactor glad within his breast.

Jacey Bedford is a British writer with a string of short story publication credits on both sides of the Atlantic. She has three SF novels due from DAW, beginning with
Empire of Dust
in November 2014. Find her at
www.jaceybedford.co.uk
.

Gifts of the Magi

Anatoly Belilovsky

Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. The metamorphosis startled him in a casual, momentary way, much as waking up in a strange hotel room might have, as did the darkness into which he woke. He flexed his limbs; with a crackling noise his chrysalis fractured, and morning sunlight flooded his compound eyes. He tried to blink, but although he could not feel his eyelids close, his eyes adjusted to the light much faster than his old ones could; in an instant, the whole room came into sharp, clear focus.

He did not need to dip his head to see each chitinous shard fall spinning to the floor, sparkling in the sunlight. He saw each dust mote in the slanted sunbeams, each flower on the wallpaper, each wrinkle on his bed.

The door inched open. Samsa's daughter poked her head into the room. “Hi Daddy!” she shouted and disappeared. He heard her steps distinctly, and new harmonics in her timbre. He tried to memorize her face as he now saw it, and her voice.

Smells registered next, his wife's familiar scent first of all and, after that, the aroma of dark, strong coffee, laden with sugar, wafted from the kitchen. There was a clinking noise, slower, heavier steps, the door creaked, opened wider —

Samsa's wife came through the doorway with the coffee, holding with both hands a half-full bowl. She carried it slowly, placed it in front of him on the floor, sat down on the bed. For a moment, Samsa turned to bring the densest part of his eye towards her. He saw new wrinkles, bloodshot eyes, drying tears. He turned and dipped his proboscis into the coffee, taking her out of focus, but not out of sight.

“I know you can't talk,” she said. She looked down, smoothed her hair back, then looked at him again. “I'll talk for both of us. You'll say, ‘it's only for a month, you know'.” She sniffled. “And I'll think, a whole month. I'll imagine the pipes and the tunnels and the dangers, and you'll tell me that you're now a highly trained professional, and…”

She tried to caress his carapace; her hands shook, and for a moment her fingers drummed on the unyielding thorax. Her hand recoiled.

“It's the thought of you being underground,” she said. “And, honestly, of you not being here. I wish you didn't have to do this. You always used to worry about me flying, and I always told you I'm the best pilot in the sky. I always paid attention to everything, always knew what everyone was doing.” Her mouth tightened. “Except you.” Her hands wandered as if searching for something familiar: instruments, propulsion controls, handholds; anything.

“Why didn't … Oh hell, I know why you didn't tell me. You wanted to pay off the house by December, so I wouldn't have to take the Saturn run. I didn't tell you I quit, either. I wanted it to be a surprise, that we'd never be apart that long again. So did you. We both love surprises. Remember how I proposed?”

Gregor remembered. A chartered suborbital to Paris. Twenty minutes of a ballistic should have been time enough, she'd thought: she would propose, he would accept, then they would make love in zero-G. Except for his nineteen and three-quarter minutes of space sickness. They got it right, finally, in the Royal Suite at Hotel George V, but he never shook off the feeling she'd been left disappointed.
You should see them weightless
, she had said wistfully, cupping her breasts as she dressed the next morning.

“And you will tell me that this body is damn near indestructible, doesn't even need to breathe or eat,” she continued, “and —” her voice cracked “— reactor maintenance pays great.” She paused to wipe a tear. “Better than any desk job I could get. Not easy to find work for an ex-spacer with a family to feed,” she finished in a whisper.

I should have said something,
Samsa thought,
last night. I should have kissed her.

There was a knock on the door. Samsa's wife smiled. “You raised her right. Always knock first when your parents are together in the bedroom.” She stood up. “I know what you'd say if you could,” she said. “You would tell me that you love me, and that you are doing this for us. And I'd say, I love you too. And I'll miss you. Very much. I'll think of nothing else all day.”

Yes you will,
Samsa thought.
You'll think of flying the way you never thought of it before, just like I never thought of air until I stopped breathing.

She shambled towards the kitchen with a spacer's graceless gait, but although she'd always been awkward under gravity, for the first time Samsa thought of a long-forgotten line: “
… as if treading upon knife blades so sharp that blood must flow.
”

She stopped in the doorway, one hand on the jamb, turned to face him. He could see her perfectly well without moving his head, but it seemed right to raise it. She swam into full focus again: porous skin, sagging cheeks; but he could see her, too, all of her. She was so beautiful.

“I'm glad we had this talk,” she said, willing a smile. “Have a nice day at work, dear.”

Samsa nodded. It was the least he could do. And the most.

Anatoly Belilovsky was born in a city that went through six or seven owners in the past century, all of whom used it to do a lot more than drive to church on Sundays; he is old enough to remember tanks rolling through it on their way to Czechoslovakia in 1968. After being traded to the United States for a shipload of grain, he learned English from
Star Trek
reruns and went on to become a paediatrician in an area of New York where English is only the fourth most commonly used language. He has neither cats nor dogs, but was admitted into SFWA in spite of this deficiency, having published stories in
Nature
,
Ideomancer
,
Immersion Book of Steampunk
,
Daily SF
,
Kasma
,
UFO
,
Stupefying Stories
,
Cast of Wonders
and other markets. He blogs about writing at
loldoc.net
, paediatrics at
belilovsky.com
, and his medical practice website is
babydr.us
.

Caveat time traveller

Gregory Benford

He was easy to spot — clothes from the twenty-first century, dazed look. I didn't have to say anything. He blurted out, “Look, I'm from the past, a time traveller. But I get snapped back there in a few minutes.”

“I know.” We stood in a small street at the edge of the city, dusk creeping in. Distant, glazed towers gleamed in the sunset and pearly lights popped on down along the main road. Jaunters always chose to appear at dawn or dusk, where they might not be noticed but could see a town. No point in transporting into a field somewhere, which could be any time at all, even the far past. Good thing he couldn't see the city rubble, too. Or realize this was how I made my living.

His mouth twisted in surprise. “You do? I thought I might be the first to come here. To this time.”

I gave him a raised eyebrow. “No. There was another last week.”

“Really? The professor said the other experiments failed. They couldn't prove they'd been into the future at all.”

They always want to talk, though they'd learn more with their mouths closed.

He rattled on, “I have to take something back, to show I was here. Something —”

“How about this?” I pulled out a slim metal cylinder. “Apply it to your neck five times a day and it extracts cancer precursors. In your era, that will extend your average lifetime by several years.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Wow! Sure —” He reached for it but I snatched it back.

“What do I get in exchange?” I said mildly.

That startled him. “What? I don't have anything you could use…” He searched his pockets in the old fashioned wide-label jacket. “How about money?” A fistful of bills.