Nanotech Read online

  In the morning, he and Barbry lay contentedly side-by-side. The remnants of some bad dream nibbled at the edges of his mind; but he could not remember what it was. Something terrible. Something too distressing to be borne. He felt like a swimmer who had been sucked under by a sinking ship; who had kicked desperately toward the shining surface above until, lungs bursting, he had broken through into the cool, pure air.

  Everything was going to be all right now.

  Barbry was still asleep and Henry watched her silently for a while, admiring the smoothness of her body, the peacefulness of her face, the way her breasts rose and fell. He kept thinking that there was something he was supposed to do for her. Something important that he had forgotten. Well, it would come to him.

  He eased out of bed and put his housecoat on. Then he slipped out of the room to the kitchen, where he made breakfast for the two of them. He felt like he was on his honeymoon, but that was ridiculous. Barbry and he had been married for donkey's years. He put the breakfasts on a tray and carried them back to the bedroom.

  Barbry was awake when he entered, just beginning to get out of bed. She saw he was bringing her breakfast and laughed. "Breakfast in bed? Oh, Henry. No one ever done that for me." She put herself back under the covers, sitting up against the pillows.

  Henry knew that the accident had given her partial amnesia, so he didn't make an issue of how often they had done this in the past. He opened the legs of the tray and set it across her, then he crawled in next to her.

  She explored her breakfast with her fork. "What's this?" she asked.

  "Poached eggs. Just the way you like them."

  "Just the way— Course. Forgot."

  While they ate, Henry noticed her giving him sidelong glances out of the corners of her eyes. She was watching him. Waiting for him, to do what? Henry took a bite of his toast and chewed. When he glanced back at her, he noticed a tear had worked its way down the side of her right cheek.

  "Barbry! What's wrong? Why are you crying?"

  "Nothing." She shook her head. "Nothing. Someone's died, is all."

  "Died?" An unaccountable shiver ran through him. "Who?"

  She looked at him and he saw there were tears in both her eyes. Tiny tears. She seemed more wistfully sad than bereaved. She shook her head again. "No one you ever knew," she said. "No one you ever knew."

  She was in the library, sitting in her chair, but with her legs pulled up under her. She had a book open and she was reading it intently. A frown creased her brows and her lips moved silently as she followed the words across the page. He came up behind her and leaned on the back of the chair.

  "What are you reading?" he asked.

  "The poems of Tennyson," she replied. "Tennyson was h—Tennyson is my favorite poet, but I don't remember any of his poems."

  He rubbed her shoulders with his hands. "It was a bad accident," he told her. "It will take a long time to remember everything. The doctors didn't have much hope for you, you know. But we showed them, didn't we?"

  She twisted and looked at him. She patted his hand. "Yes, we showed them. You'll play the tapes for me again tonight, won't you, dear?"

  "Of course."

  "Good. Meanwhile . . ." She turned back and reopened her book. She found her place and ran her finger down the page. "This poem. Could you explain what it means? It's called 'Tears, Idle Tears.' I'll read it to you."

  She hefted the book and cleared her throat. Then she began to recite:

  'Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

  And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign 'd

  On lips that are for others; deep as love,

  Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

  O Death in Life, the days that are no more.'

  He felt it rise in his throat. A feeling of intense longing and loneliness. There was no question about it. The old Brit knew how to string words together. But why should those words affect him so?

  He felt the tears warm his cheeks. He tried to excuse himself to Barbry, but no words came out, only uncontrollable sobbing. It was embarrassing. He was crying like a baby. He had not cried like this since . . . since . . .

  There was something that was supposed to have made him cry like this, but he had forgotten what it was. Forgotten when it was. Forgotten everything, except that he was supposed to have cried; and that now the crying may have come too late.

  Bill Canazetti fidgeted nervously by the front door, waiting for . . . her to get his coat. Dinner had been uncomfortable. A mostly silent affair, broken only by the tink of glasses and silverware. Afterwards, a few awkward sallies into conversation. Then he had made his excuses to leave.

  She brought his coat to him and helped him into it. "Now, be sure to button up, Bill. It's chilly outside. The leaves are all off the trees. It's a lot colder here than where we used to live. It's too bad we don't get together more often."

  "It's a long trip to Morristown," he agreed. He only wanted to leave. To get away from this place. To forget everything he had seen.

  When he looked at his hostess, he saw Barbara Carter, smiling, waiting. He had always kissed her when leaving their house. A quick pass across the lips and a murmured quip about her husband finding out. It was a little game they had played between themselves; but there was no way this woman would know about it. Henry's theories about the seven hidden dimensions holding a person's soul and memories were just so much nonsense. Weren't they?

  He put his hand on the doorknob and twisted. The chill autumn air swirled in around him. He hesitated. He had to know.

  "Barbara," he said, turning around. "Tell me one thing." He searched her eyes. "Are you Barbara?"

  Changes chased themselves across her eyes. Surprise. Curiosity. Wonder. Perhaps, wistfulness. "Most of the time," she said. "More and more nowadays."

  "But—"

  "But am I really her?" She laughed and shook her head. "No. I'm just an old junkie bag lady, me. He gave me something. A nano—"

  "Nanomachine."

  "Yes, thank you. A nanomachine. It rebuilt my body. It rewired my brain. I remember Sadie, but it's faint, like an old dream. And I remember some other things. Things that happened to Barbry. They're faint, too. Did they come from the tapes? Or from somewhere else? I don't know. And there are other odd memories. Things that never happened at all, either to Barbry or Sadie."

  Canazetti's throat felt tight. "Sadie's memories patched onto different circuits. They're hallucinatory, those memories."

  "Maybe. Still. I know who I am. Most of the time, anyway."

  "Then why do you do it? Why do you stay with him and pretend? I've done some experimental work. With frogs. The nerves. When they change. It—" He didn't know how to put it. "It must have been painful," he said, not looking at her.

  "Yes. Yes, it was. Very painful. But Henry saw me through it."

  He turned to her. "He might have killed you," he blurted out. "He didn't know enough to try it. We still don't know enough to try it. Dammit, he had no right to do what he did to you!"

  "Bill, do you know what my life was like before he rescued me?"

  He shook his head.

  "How can I explain it? I can go to sleep and not be afraid that I'll freeze to death before morning, or that some kids will set me on fire just for the hell of it. And my new body, it's healthy. It doesn't need snow or crack like my old body did. And I can see and understand so much that I couldn't before, because my brain has been de-toxed."

  Canazetti looked past her shoulder, down the hallway, into the kitchen where he saw Henry carrying dinner dishes to the sink. He was humming to himself.

  "Do you love him, then?"

  "Yes. Both of us do."

  His head jerked and he looked at her.

  "When I'm Barbry," she explained, "I love him for Barbry's sake. But Sadie loved him, too. Because he had saved her life. Because he took care of her. He's given her more than she ever dared to dream about. Except for one thing."

  Canazetti's voice was choked. "Wh
at's that?"

  "He never told Sadie that he loved her. He never saw her."

  "Damn him!"

  "No, don't say that."

  "But, what he did to you. What he put you through. The selfishness."

  "He couldn't love anyone else. He loved Her. He wasn't rational. What would you have done in his place?"

  "I feel responsible, you know. It was my invention."

  She put a hand on his arm. "Don't blame yourself for that, Bill. He would have tried something, even without your nano. I don't know. Brainwashing, maybe."

  "I just can't help thinking that he did something wicked. A crime. And he should be punished."

  She turned and watched Henry through the kitchen doorway while he rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. He noticed them watching him and grinned and waved.

  "He is being punished," she said. "The worst punishment of all. He thinks he's happy."

  RECORDING ANGEL

  Ian McDonald

  If we can invent nanotechnology, perhaps aliens can as well, and the uses to which they put that technology might be, well—alien. Beyond our human understanding. Here's a look at a vivid and terrifying future where something enigmatic and implacable is eating Africa, and the people in the way are just going to have to come to terms with it—however they can.

  British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, and since then he has appeared with some frequency in Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, New Worlds, Zenith, Other Edens, Amazing, and elsewhere. He was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award in 1985, and in 1989 he won the Locus "Best First Novel" Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six and Hearts, Hands and Voices, and two collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams and Speaking In Tongues. His most recent books include the well-received new novel Evolution's Shore, as well as several graphic novels, and he is at work on another new novel, tentatively entitled Necroville. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

  For the last ten miles she drove past refugees from the xenoforming. Some were in their own vehicles. Many rode town buses that had been commandeered to take the people south, or the grubby white trucks of the UNHCR. Most walked, pushing the things they had saved from the advancing Chaga on handcarts or barrows, or laden on the heads and backs of women and children. That has always been the way of it, the woman thought as she drove past the unbroken file of people. The world ends, the women and children must carry it, and the United Nations sends its soldiers to make sure they do not drop it. And the news corporations send their journalists to make sure that the world sees without being unduly disturbed. After all, they are only Africans. A continent is being devoured by some thing from the stars, and I am sent to write the obituary of a hotel.

  "I don't do gossip," she had told T. P. Costello, SkyNet's Nairobi station chief when he told her of the international celebrities who were coming to the deathparty of the famous Treehouse Hotel. "I didn't come to this country to cream myself over who's wearing which designer dress or who's having an affair with or getting from whom."

  "I know, I know," T. P. Costello had said. "You came to Kenya to be a player in Earth's first contact with the alien. Everyone did. That's why I'm sending you. Who cares what Brad Pitt thinks about the Gas Cloud theory versus the Little Gray Men theory? Angles are what I want. You can get angles, Gaby. What can you get?"

  "Angles, T. P.," she had replied, wearily, to her editor's now-familiar litany.

  "That's correct. And you'll be up there with it, right on terminum. That's what you want, isn't it?"

  That's correct, T. P., she thought. Three months in Kenya and all she had seen of the Chaga had been a distant line of color, like surf on a far reef, under the clouded shadow of Kilimanjaro, advancing imperceptibly but inexorably across the Amboseli plain. The spectator's view. Up there, on the highlands around Kirinyaga where the latest biological package had come down, she would be within touching distance of it. The player's view.

  There was a checkpoint up at Nanyuki. The South African soldiers in blue UN helmets at first did not know how to treat her, thinking that with her green eyes and long mahogany hair she might be another movie star or television celebrity. When her papers identified her as Gaby McAslan, on-line multimedia journalist with SkyNet East Africa, they stopped being respectful. A woman they could flirt with, a journalist they could touch for bribes. Gaby endured their flirtations and gave their commanding officer three of the dwindling stock of duty-free Swatches she had bought expressly for the purpose of petty corruption. In return she was given a map of the approved route to the hotel. If she stayed on it she would be safe. The bush patrols had orders to shoot suspected looters or loiterers.

  Beyond the checkpoint there were no more refugees. The only vehicles were carrying celebrities to the party at the end of the world, and the news corporations following them. The Kikuyu shambas on either side of the road had been long abandoned. Wild Africa was reclaiming them. For a while, then something else would reclaim them from wild Africa. Reverse terraforming, she thought. Instead of making an alien world into Earth, Earth is made into an alien world. In her open-top SkyNet 4x4, Gaby could sense the Chaga behind the screen of heavy high-country timber, and edgy presence of the alien, and electric tingle of anticipation. She had never been this close before.

  When the first biological package came down on the summit of Kilimanjaro, she had known, in SkyNet Multimedia News's UK office among the towers of London's Docklands, that this fallen star had her name written on it. The stuff that had come out of it, that looked a little like rain forest and a little like drained coral reef but mostly like nothing anyone had ever seen before, that disassembled terrestrial vegetation into its component molecules and incorporated them into its own matrix at an unstoppable fifty meters every day, confirmed her holy business. The others that came down in the Bismarck Archipelago, the Ruwen-zori, in Ecuador and Papua New Guinea and the Maldives, these were only memos from the star gods. It's here, it's waiting for you. Hurry up now.

  Now, the Nyandarua package, drawing its trail of plasma over Lake Victoria and the Rift Valley, would bring her at last face-to-face with life from the stars.

  She came across a conga-line of massive tracked transporters, each the size of a large house, wedged into the narrow red-dirt road. Prefabricated accommodation cabins were piled up on top of the transporters. Branches bent and snapped as the behemoths ground past at walking pace. Gaby had heard that UNECTA, the United Nations agency that coordinated research into the Chagas, had dismantled its O1 Tukai base, one of four positioned around Kilimanjaro, all moving backward in synchrony with the advance of the southern Chaga, and sent it north. UNECTA's pockets were not deep enough, it seemed, to buy a new mobile base, especially now that the multinationals had cut their contributions in the absence of any exploitable technologies coming out of the Chaga.

  UNECTA staff on the tops of the mobile towers waved as she drove carefully past in the red muddy verges. They can probably see the snows of Kirinyaga from that height, she thought. Between the white mountains. We run from the south, we run from the north but the expanding circles of vegetation are closing on us and we cannot escape. Why do we run? We will all have to face it in the end, when it takes everything we know and changes it beyond recognition. We have always imagined that because it comes down in the tropics it is confined here. Why should climate stop it? Nothing else has. Maybe it will only stop when it closes around the poles. Xenoforming complete.

  The hotel was one of those buildings that are like animals in zoos, that by their stillness and coloration can hide from you even when you are right in front of them, and you only know they are there because of the sign on the cage. Two Kenyan soldiers far too young for the s
ize of their weapons met her from the car park full of tour buses and news-company 4x4s. They escorted her along a dirt path between skinny, gray-trunked trees. She could still not see the hotel. She commented on the small wooden shelters that stood every few meters along the path.

  "In case of charging animals," the slightly older soldier said. "But this is better." He stroked his weapon as if it were a breast. "Thirty heavy-caliber rounds per second. That will stop more than any wooden shelter."

  "Since the Chaga has come there are many more animals around," the younger soldier said. He had taken the laces out of his boots, in the comfortable, country way.

  "Running away," Gaby said. "Like any sane thing should."

  "No," the young, faceless soldier said. "Running into."

  There was a black-painted metal fire escape at the end of the track. As Gaby squinted at the incongruity, the hotel resolved out of the greenery before her. Many of the slim, silver tree trunks were wooden piles, the mass of leaves and creepers concealed the superstructure bulking over her.

  The steward met her at the top of the stairs, checked her name against the guest list, and showed her her room, a tiny wooden cabin with a view of leaves. Gaby thought it must be like this on one of the UNECTA mobile bases; minimal, monastic. She did something to her face and went up to the party on the roof. It had been running for three days. It would only end when the hotel did. The party at the edge of the end of the world. In one glance she saw thirty newsworthy faces and peeked into her bag to check the charge level on her disc recorder. She talked to it as she moved between the faces to the bar. The Out of Africa look was the thing among the newsworthy this year: riding breeches, leather, with the necessary twist of twenty-first-century knowing with the addition of animal-skin prints.