Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Read online

  “I know.”

  No one said anything. Iseminger stared at her.

  “Is Herman okay?” she asked.

  “Marj is still working on him,” I said. “She thinks we got him across okay.”

  “Good.”

  A series of yellow lamps blinked on across the pilot’s console. We had two minutes. “Damn,” I said, suddenly aware of another danger: Amity was rotating, turning toward its new course. Would Greenswallow even survive the ignition? I looked at McGuire, who understood. His fingers flicked over press pads, and rows of numbers flashed across the navigation monitor. I could see muscles working in Cathie’s jaws; she looked down at Mac’s station as though she could read the result.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “She’ll be clear.”

  “Cathie …” Iseminger’s voice was almost strangled. “If I’d known you intended anything like this …”

  “I know, Ed.” Her tone was gentle, a lover’s voice, perhaps. Her eyes were wet: she smiled anyway, full face, up close.

  Deep in the systems, pumps began to whine. “I wish,” said Iseminger, absolutely without expression, “that we could do something.”

  She turned her back, strode with unbearable grace across the command center, away from us, and passed into the shadowy interior of the cockpit. Another camera picked her up there, and we got a profile: she was achingly lovely in the soft glow of the navigation lamps.

  “There is something … you can do,” she said. “Build Landolfi’s engine. And come back for me.”

  For a brief moment, I thought Mac was going to abort the burn. But he sat frozen, fists clenched, and did the right thing, which is to say, nothing. It struck me that McGuire was incapable of intervening.

  And I knew also that the woman in the cockpit was terrified of what she had done. It had been a good performance, but she’d utterly failed to conceal the fear that looked out of her eyes. And I realized with shock that she’d acted, not to prolong her life, but to save the Program. I watched her face as Amity’s engines ignited, and we began to draw away. Like McGuire, she seemed paralyzed, as though the nature of the calamity which she’d embraced was just becoming clear to her. Then it—she—was gone.

  “What happened to the picture?” snapped Iseminger.

  “She turned it off,” I said. “I don’t think she wants us to see her just now.”

  He glared at me, and spoke to Mac. “Why the hell,” he demanded, “couldn’t he have brought her back with him?” His fists were knotted.

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “How could I know?” And I wondered, how could I not?

  When the burn ended, the distance between the two ships had opened to only a few kilometers. But it was a gulf, I thought, wider than any across which men had before looked at each other.

  Iseminger called her name relentlessly. (We knew she could hear us.) But we got only the carrier wave.

  Then her voice crackled across the command center. “Good,” she said. “Excellent. Check the recorders: make sure you got everything on tape.” Her image was back. She was in full light again, tying up her hair. Her eyes were hooded, and her lips pursed thoughtfully. “Rob,” she continued, “fade it out during Ed’s response, when he’s calling my name. Probably, you’ll want to reduce the background noise at that point. Cut all the business about who’s responsible. We want a sacrifice, not an oversight.”

  “My God, Cathie,” I said. I stared at her, trying to understand. “What have you done?”

  She took a deep breath. “I meant what I said. I have enough food to get by here for eight years or so. More if I stretch it. And plenty of fresh air. Well, relatively fresh. I’m better off than any of us would be if six people were trying to survive on Amity.”

  “Cathie!” howled McGuire. He sounded in physical agony. “Cathie, we didn’t know for sure about life support. The converters might have kept up. There might have been enough air! It was just an estimate!”

  “This is a hell of a time to tell me,” she said. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. Listen, I’ll be fine. I’ve got books to read, and maybe one to write. My long-range communications are kaput, Rob knows that, so you’ll have to come back for the book, too.” She smiled. “You’ll like it, Mac.” The command center got very still. “And on nights when things really get boring, I can play bridge with the computer.”

  McGuire shook his head. “You’re sure you’ll be all right? You seemed pretty upset a few minutes ago.”

  She looked at me and winked.

  “The first Cathie was staged, Mac,” I said.

  “I give up,” McGuire sighed. “Why?” He swiveled round to face the image on his screen. “Why would you do that?”

  “That young woman,” she replied, “was committing an act of uncommon valor, as they say in the Marines. And she had to be vulnerable.” And compellingly lovely, I thought. In those last moments, I was realizing what it might mean to love Cathie Perth. “This Cathie,” she grinned, “is doing the only sensible thing. And taking a sabbatical as well. Do what you can to get the ship built. I’ll be waiting. Come if you can.” She paused. “Somebody should suggest they name it after Victor.”

  This is the fifth Christmas since that one on Callisto. It’s a long time by any human measure. We drifted out of radio contact during the first week. There was some talk of broadcasting instructions to her for repairing her long-range transmission equipment. But she’d have to go outside to do it, so the idea was prudently tabled.

  She was right about that tape. In my lifetime, I’ve never seen people so singlemindedly aroused. It created a global surge of sympathy and demands for action that seem to grow in intensity with each passing year. Funded partially by contributions and technical assistance from abroad, NASA has been pushing the construction of the fusion vessel that Victor Landolfi dreamed of.

  Iseminger was assigned to help with the computer systems, and he’s kept me informed of progress. The most recent public estimates had anticipated a spring launch. But that single word September in Iseminger’s card suggests that one more obstacle has been encountered; and it means still another year before we can hope to reach her.

  We broadcast to her on a regular basis. I volunteered to help, and I sit sometimes and talk to her for hours. She gets a regular schedule of news, entertainment, sports, whatever. And, if she’s listening, she knows that we’re coming.

  And she also knows that her wish that the fusion ship be named for Victor Landolfi has been disregarded. The rescue vehicle will be the Catherine Perth.

  If she’s listening: we have no way of knowing. And I worry a lot. Can a human being survive six years of absolute solitude? Iseminger was here for a few days last summer, and he tells me he is confident. “She’s a tough lady,” he said, any number of times. “Nothing bothers her. She even gave us a little theater at the end.”

  And that’s what scares me: Cathie’s theatrical technique. I’ve thought about it, on the long ride home, and here. I kept a copy of the complete tape of that final conversation, despite McGuire’s instructions to the contrary, and I’ve watched it a few times. It’s locked downstairs in a file cabinet now, and I don’t look at it anymore. I’m afraid to. There are two Cathie Perths on the recording: the frightened, courageous one who galvanized a global public; and our Cathie, preoccupied with her job, flexible, almost indifferent to her situation. A survivor.

  And, God help me, I can’t tell which one was staged.

  OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

  Bloodchild

  Here’s as powerful a story as you’re likely to see this (or any other) year: strange, grotesque, disturbing … and ultimately moving.

  Octavia E. Butler sold her first novel in 1976, and has subsequently emerged as one of the foremost writers of her generation. Her critically-acclaimed novels include Patternmaster, Mind of my Mind, Survivor, Kindred, and Wild Seed. Her most recent novel was Clay’s Ark. In 1984, she won a Hugo Award for her short story “Speech Sounds.” She is currently at work on a new novel,
tentatively entitled Exogenesis. Born in Pasadena, California, she now lives and works in Los Angeles.

  My last night of childhood began with a visit home. T‘Gatoi’s sisters had given us two sterile eggs. T’Gatoi gave one to my mother, brother, and sisters. She insisted that I eat the other one alone. It didn’t matter. There was still enough to leave everyone feeling good. Almost everyone. My mother wouldn’t take any. She sat, watching everyone drifting and dreaming without her. Most of the time she watched me.

  I lay against T’Gatoi’s long, velvet underside, sipping from my egg now and then, wondering why my mother denied herself such a harmless pleasure. Less of her hair would be gray if she indulged now and then. The eggs prolonged life, prolonged vigor. My father, who had never refused one in his life, had lived more than twice as long as he should have. And toward the end of his life, when he should have been slowing down, he had married my mother and fathered four children.

  But my mother seemed content to age before she had to. I saw her turn away as several of T‘Gatoi’s limbs secured me closer. T’Gatoi liked our body heat, and took advantage of it whenever she could. When I was little and at home more, my mother used to try to tell me how to behave with T’Gatoi—how to be respectful and always obedient because T’Gatoi was the Tlic government official in charge of the Preserve, and thus the most important of her kind to deal directly with Terrans. It was an honor, my mother said, that such a person had chosen to come into the family. My mother was at her most formal and severe when she was lying.

  I had no idea why she was lying, or even what she was lying about. It was an honor to have T‘Gatoi in the family, but it was hardly a novelty. T’Gatoi and my mother had been friends all my mother’s life, and T’Gatoi was not interested in being honored in the house she considered her second home. She simply came in, climbed onto one of her special couches and called me over to keep her warm. It was impossible to be formal with her while lying against her and hearing her complain as usual that I was too skinny.

  “You’re better,” she said this time, probing me with six or seven of her limbs. “You’re gaining weight finally. Thinness is dangerous.” The probing changed subtly, became a series of caresses.

  “He’s still too thin,” my mother said sharply.

  T’Gatoi lifted her head and perhaps a meter of her body off the couch as though she were sitting up. She looked at my mother and my mother, her face lined and old-looking, turned away.

  “Lien, I would like you to have what’s left of Gan’s egg.”

  “The eggs are for the children,” my mother said.

  “They are for the family. Please take it.”

  Unwillingly obedient, my mother took it from me and put it to her mouth. There were only a few drops left in the now-shrunken, elastic shell, but she squeezed them out, swallowed them, and after a few moments some of the lines of tension began to smooth from her face.

  “It’s good,” she whispered. “Sometimes I forget how good it is.”

  “You should take more,” T’Gatoi said. “Why are you in such a hurry to be old?”

  My mother said nothing.

  “I like being able to come here,” T’Gatoi said. “This place is a refuge because of you, yet you won’t take care of yourself.”

  T’Gatoi was hounded on the outside. Her people wanted more of us made available. Only she and her political faction stood between us and the hordes who did not understand why there was a Preserve—why any Terran could not be courted, paid, drafted, in some way made available to them. Or they did understand, but in their desperation, they did not care. She parceled us out to the desperate and sold us to the rich and powerful for their political support. Thus, we were necessities, status symbols, and an independent people. She oversaw the joining of families, putting an end to the final remnants of the earlier system of breaking up Terran families to suit impatient Tlic. I had lived outside with her. I had seen the desperate eagerness in the way some people looked at me. It was a little frightening to know that only she stood between us and that desperation that could so easily swallow us. My mother would look at her sometimes and say to me, “Take care of her.” And I would remember that she too had been outside, had seen.

  Now T’Gatoi used four of her limbs to push me away from her onto the floor. “Go on, Gan,” she said. “Sit down there with your sisters and enjoy not being sober. You had most of the egg. Lien, come warm me.”

  My mother hesitated for no reason that I could see. One of my earliest memories is of my mother stretched alongside T‘Gatoi, talking about things I could not understand, picking me up from the floor and laughing as she sat me on one of T’Gatoi’s segments. She ate her share of eggs then. I wondered when she had stopped, and why.

  She lay down now against T’Gatoi, and the whole left row of T’Gatoi’s limbs closed around her, holding her loosely, but securely. I had always found it comfortable to lie that way but, except for my older sister, no one else in the family liked it. They said it made them feel caged.

  T’Gatoi meant to cage my mother. Once she had, she moved her tail slightly, then spoke. “Not enough egg, Lien. You should have taken it when it was passed to you. You need it badly now.”

  T’Gatoi’s tail moved once more, its whip motion so swift I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been watching for it. Her sting drew only a single drop of blood from my mother’s bare leg.

  My mother cried out—probably in surprise. Being stung doesn’t hurt. Then she sighed and I could see her body relax. She moved languidly into a more comfortable position within the cage of T’Gatoi’s limbs. “Why did you do that?” she asked, sounding half asleep.

  “I could not watch you sitting and suffering any longer.”

  My mother managed to move her shoulders in a small shrug. “Tomorrow,” she said.

  “Yes. Tomorrow you will resume your suffering—if you must. But for now, just for now, lie here and warm me and let me ease your way a little.”

  “He’s still mine, you know,” my mother said suddenly. “Nothing can buy him from me.” Sober, she wouldn’t have permitted herself to refer to such things.

  “Nothing,” T’Gatoi agreed, humoring her.

  “Did you think I would sell him for eggs? For long life? My son?”

  “Not for anything,” T’Gatoi said stroking my mother’s shoulders, toying with her long, graying hair.

  I would like to have touched my mother, shared that moment with her. She would take my hand if I touched her now. Freed by the egg and the sting, she would smile and perhaps say things long held in. But tomorrow, she would remember all this as a humiliation. I did not want to be part of a remembered humiliation. Best just to be still and know she loved me under all the duty and pride and pain.

  “Xuan Hoa, take off her shoes,” T’Gatoi said. “In a little while I’ll sting her again and she can sleep.”

  My older sister obeyed, swaying drunkenly as she stood up. When she had finished, she sat down beside me and took my hand. We had always been a unit, she and I.

  My mother put the back of her head against T’Gatoi’s underside and tried from that impossible angle to look up into the broad, round face. “You’re going to sting me again?”

  “Yes, Lien.”

  “I’ll sleep until tomorrow noon.”

  “Good. You need it. When did you sleep last?”

  My mother made a wordless sound of annoyance. “I should have stepped on you when you were small enough,” she muttered.

  It was an old joke between them. They had grown up together, sort of, though T‘Gatoi had not, in my mother’s lifetime, been small enough for any Terran to step on. She was nearly three times my mother’s present age, yet would still be young when my mother died of age. But T’Gatoi and my mother had met as T’Gatoi was coming into a period of rapid development—a kind of Tlic adolescence. My mother was only a child, but for a while they developed at the same rate and had no better friends than each other.

  T‘Gatoi had even introduced my mo
ther to the man who became my father. My parents, pleased with each other in spite of their very different ages, married as T’Gatoi was going into her family’s business—politics. She and my mother saw each other less. But sometimes before my older sister was born, my mother promised T‘Gatoi one of her children. She would have to give one of us to someone, and she preferred T’Gatoi to some stranger.

  Years passed. T‘Gatoi traveled and increased her influence. The Preserve was hers by the time she came back to my mother to collect what she probably saw as her just reward for her hard work. My older sister took an instant liking to her and wanted to be chosen, but my mother was just coming to term with me and T’Gatoi liked the idea of choosing an infant and watching and taking part in all the phases of development. I’m told I was first caged within T‘Gatoi’s many limbs only three minutes after my birth. A few days later, I was given my first taste of egg. I tell Terrans that when they ask whether I was ever afraid of her. And I tell it to Tlic when T’Gatoi suggests a young Terran child for them and they, anxious and ignorant, demand an adolescent. Even my brother who had somehow grown up to fear and distrust the Tlic could probably have gone smoothly into one of their families if he had been adopted early enough. Sometimes, I think for his sake he should have been. I looked at him, stretched out on the floor across the room, his eyes open, but glazed as he dreamed his egg dream. No matter what he felt toward the Tlic, he always demanded his share of egg.

  “Lien, can you stand up?” T’Gatoi asked suddenly.

  “Stand?” my mother said. “I thought I was going to sleep.”

  “Later. Something sounds wrong outside.” The cage was abruptly gone.

  “What?”

  “Up, Lien!”

  My mother recognized her tone and got up just in time to avoid being dumped on the floor. T’Gatoi whipped her three meters of body off her couch, toward the door, and out at full speed. She had bones—ribs, a long spine, a skull, four sets of limbbones per segment. But when she moved that way, twisting, hurling herself into controlled falls, landing running, she seemed not only boneless, but aquatic—something swimming through the air as though it were water. I loved watching her move.