The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection Read online

  It turned out that the breeders had never made much headway against virus disease in muskmelons, and since the introduction of row covers and beetle traps the subject had been generally slighted. Commercial growers had been getting around the problem of pollination for quite a while by constructing great tents of Ultramay over their fields and putting a hive of honeybees inside with the melons. As this was hardly practical for the home gardener, the state agricultural extension services recommended several pesticides for use on the beetles (and aphids, another serious virus vector for cucurbits) during the two or three weeks when the plants would have to come out from under cover to be pollinated. Spraying at dusk was suggested, to spare the bees. But these were persistent toxins and I doubted all the bees would be spared, though they might pollinate the vines before they died.

  I also read up on the life cycle of the striped cucumber beetle, then built a clever cage in which to rear as many generations of virus-bearing beetles as necessary to carry the critters through the winter—they hibernate in garden trash, but I wanted to guarantee my supply. When the cage was ready I rigged a shelf-and-fluorescent-tube setup in which to raise a sequence of zucchini plants to feed the beetles—nothing grows faster than a zucchini, and nothing’s easier to grow, and the beetles love them. As each plant in turn began to sicken I would transplant a new, healthy seedling into the soil on the bottom of the rearing cage, then cut through the stem of the sick zucchini, shake off the beetles, and remove the plant. The roots had to be left undisturbed, because the soil around them contained eggs, feeding larvae, and pupae, but by the time the space was needed for a new transplant the roots would have died or been eaten up.

  It worked beautifully. My quarter-inch black-and-yellow beetles spent that winter, and the next four winters, living the life of Riley.

  And throughout that hard late winter of 2001 I spent all my spare time thinking out my project, its objectives and procedures, until I knew exactly what I wanted to do. By April a small ranked and labeled army of cantaloupe seedlings stood waiting in my basement, under lights, for the day when they could safely be set out in their carefully prepared beds and tucked under Ultramay. Assuming no spectacular early success, the plan would organize my summers for the next five years. Plant breeding is not an enterprise for impatient people. It is a gesture of faith in the (personal) future.

  In early May, just as the azaleas were at their peak of bloom, a week before the last frost date in Delaware County, Jacob Lowenfels and his team of American and French researchers announced their discovery of the AIDS vaccine.

  The announcement threw me, and the rest of the Company with me, into a profound funk. Except for us and several thousand dying people, the whole city seemed to rejoice around us; even the war news yielded pride of place. Thank God the spring quarter had ended, except for some finals I could grade with one hand tied behind me. Watering cantaloupe seedlings before turning in, on the night of May 15, I came within a hair of wrenching the table over and dumping the lot of them, smash, onto the concrete floor. Why should these frivolous Cucurbita live when so many innocents were dead?

  I know, I know: the Lowenfels vaccine was of enormous importance even to us—even, for that matter, to those who had developed the disease but would not begin dying seriously for months or years; for overnight the fear of discovery and persecution ended. We were no longer lepers. People could acquire immunity to us now. Only those already in the final stages of dying from AIDS benefitted not at all, so that the AIDS wings of the hospitals lay for weeks beneath a blanket pall of sorrow.

  And of course I knew all this really, even at the time. I carried out my trays of cantaloupes and honeydews on the sixteenth after all, and planted them on schedule. The beds beneath their Ultramay covers looked so peculiar that I decided to fence the yard, discourage the neighbor’s curiosity. I planted with a leaden heart that day, but the melons didn’t seem to mind; in their growing medium of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite dug well into my heavy clay soil they soon sent out runners and began to produce male flowers. When the female flowers appeared about ten days later I pulled the Ultramay off of some beds just long enough to rub the anthers of the male flowers against the pistils of the female ones. At other beds I sent in the beetle troops. At the same time I was growing a year’s supply of vegetables in my kitchen garden. My computer kept daily records for both garden and field trials. In August I gave my control melons away by the cartrunkload to the Companions, ate tons of them myself, froze some, saved the rest to rot peacefully till they could be blended with autumn leaves into a giant compost tower. (The vines that died of mosaic, and the malformed fruit they produced, if any, went out with the trash.) And I preserved, packaged, labeled, and froze my hybrid seeds.

  None of the varieties I’d inoculated with the virus that first year had resisted it worth a damn. I saved seed from only one mosaic-stunted hybrid cultivar, a Cucumis melo called “Mi ting tang,” which had shown good resistance to cucumber mosaic (plus gummy stem blight and downy mildew) in field trials in Japan. That one had managed to struggle to maturity and produce a crop despite its illness. The fruit, though dwarfed, had a fair flavor and good thick flesh, and I thought I might backcross and then cross it with other varieties after I saw the results of my hybridizing the following year. Resistance in the Ano strains of muskmelon appeared to vary according to the weather; I wanted to find out more about that too.

  Between times I canned and froze and dried my garden produce as one after another the overlapping crops came in. Once I’d gotten over the shock of the vaccine it was a wonderful summer, the best of my life, full of pleasurable outdoor work; and the four that followed resembled it pretty closely.

  Each fall and winter I would overhaul my records and revise my schedules; compost plant residues; treat the soil of the inoculated beds to kill any leftover beetles; care for the next year’s beetle crop and manage their supply of zucchini plants; clean and oil my tools; consume my preserved stock of organically grown, squeaky-clean food; teach my classes and run my labs; put in my afternoon at the hospitals every week; meet with the Company; and take my treatments. In a small way I’d also begun to write for gardening magazines, mainly Rodale’s and National Gardening, though occasionally for Horticulture or even Harrowsmith. I’d never been so busy nor interested nor free of anxiety, and I think now that unconsciously I’d come to believe that I was safe. “Magical thinking,” sure—but it was a much healthier and better-rounded way of life, no question.

  It was the fifth year of the research, the spring of 2006, that two events occurred to shatter the even tenor of my days. The arrival of the ship from outer space was the big news; but the Hefn delegation was still in England, and in the daily headlines, when devastating news broke upon us in the Company: for our counselor Elizabeth had developed the bodily wasting and red-rimmed eyes of AIDS-Related Complex, and confessed at last that all this while she had been keeping a secret of her own.

  One and all we were stricken anew with terror, my eight surviving Companions and I. Elizabeth who had been our mother, our guardian, our stay against destruction, who had held us together and wedged the door shut against the world’s cruelty, could not be dying—for if she were dying we could none of us feel safe. Our reaction was infantile and total: we were furious. Who would take care of us when she was dead? When an accountant who called himself “Phil” promptly developed skin lesions, we all blamed Elizabeth.

  “Phil’s” symptoms turned out to be hysterical; his apparent defeat had been the medium through which we had collectively expressed our virulently reactivated panic and dread. After that episode we pulled ourselves together and stopped whining long enough to think a little of Elizabeth, and not so much about our miserable selves.

  She had been admitted to Graduate Hospital, the one our psychoneuroimmunology team was affiliated with. I sat with her for a while one afternoon, a sulky, resentful child and her mortally ill mother. When I apologized for my behavior Elizabeth smiled tiredly. “Oh,
I know how you all feel, you’re reacting exactly like I thought you would. Listen, Sandy, this had to happen sometime. You folks have all been much too dependent and you know it. Now’s your chance to stand on your own, ah, eighteen feet—but I’m sorry you feel let down.” She grimaced. “I feel pretty bad about that myself.”

  Her generosity dissolved my fretful resentment; and love, shocking as the dream-love of Gregor Mendel, flooded into the vacancy. I choked and burst into wrenching tears; Elizabeth patted my arm, which made me cry harder; in a moment I was crouching beside her bed, my hot, wet face pressed against her shoulder, the first time in twenty years that I had touched another human being intimately. A surreal moment. It was glorious, to tell the truth, though I felt as if my chest would burst with grief.

  When I forced myself to report this scene on Company time, the story was received in a glum silence tinged with embarrassment. Finally “Larry,” a balding, thickening physical therapist I’d known since he was a skinny teenager, puffed out a breath and said disgustedly, “Well, don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Sandy. I never touch anybody either, except on the job. Hell, we all love Elizabeth! But I never let myself know that. I haven’t taken an emotional risk in so many years I literally can’t remember when the last time was, and you people aren’t any better than me.”

  “I’ve often thought,” said “Phil,” “that it’s funny we don’t love each other. I mean, as much as we need each other, you’d think…”

  He trailed off, and we glanced obliquely (and guiltily) at one another, except for the two couples present—who naturally couldn’t help looking a little smug—and the one father who blurted defensively, “I love my kids!”

  “Elizabeth knows we love her,” said “Sherry,” over against the far wall.

  “Maybe she does,” “Larry” growled, “but we need to know it. That’s my point, goddammit.”

  “Other groups do better. Some of them are really close,” I put in. “Maybe we fuss over ourselves so much we can’t connect, except to spot weaknesses.”

  “Other groups don’t have our survival rate either,” “Mitch” reminded me.

  Breaking the gloomy silence, “Phil” roused himself to say, “What about these spacemen, anything doing in that direction?”

  When the Hefn first arrived, half the world’s people had recoiled in panicky dismay; the other half had seemed to expect them to provide a magical cure for all our ills: war, cancer, pollution, overpopulation, famine, AIDS. So far they had shown no interest in us whatever. The landing party was presently in London because the mummified corpse of one of their relations, stranded here hundreds of years ago, had been discovered in a Yorkshire bog; but suggestions that they set up some sort of cultural and scientific exchange with humanity had been politely ignored and I doubted there was any chance at all that Elizabeth’s life was going to be saved by ET intervention. The AIDS Task Force in New York had already sent them a long, pleading letter, but had received no reply. We were all aware of these facts. Nobody bothered to answer “Phil,” and after a while the hour was over and we broke up; and when the Hefn ship took off from the moon a few weeks later, having neither helped nor harmed us by their visit, we weren’t surprised. It was what we’d expected.

  Just as we expected Elizabeth to waste and decline, and finally die, and she did—leaving the Companions rudderless and demoralized. At least we’d rallied and borne up pretty well throughout the last weeks of her dying. We must have done her, and ourselves, a little good.

  Surprisingly, despite even this trauma none of the rest of us became ill. Apparently we who were still alive were the hardiest of the lot, or at least the ones who had taken the best care of ourselves. But the emotional jolt of Elizabeth’s death—the one death we had not protected ourselves from being badly hurt by—showed me, as the dream of Mendel had showed me all those years ago, that something was still wrong with my life. It was still a loveless life, and just when I seemed to need it least it now appeared that I was no longer willing to do without love. I’d failed to acknowledge Elizabeth alive; now that she was dead I wanted at least to keep alive the emotion—the capacity for feeling and showing emotion—that she had released in me at the end.

  It didn’t have to be romantic love, in fact I rather thought that any other sort would probably be preferable, though I was still determined not to teach lovingly. It seems odd now that I never thought of getting a pet—or maybe the image of a dog wouldn’t readily superimpose itself upon the image of a backyard carpeted with melon vines? And I’m allergic to cat dander … anyway, whatever the reasons, the idea never crossed my mind. The months glided by as usual, and became years, before anything changed.

  III

  What happened was that I broke a small bone in my left ankle in a common type of running accident: one foot came down at the edge of a pothole and twisted beneath me as I fell. The X-ray showed a hairline fracture. They put me in a cast and crutches and ordered me off the foot for a month, and this was May.

  May 2010; Year Four of my second five-year plan. With the whole season’s research at stake I had no choice but to hire some help.

  A bright, possibly talented sophomore in my botany course took the job. His name was Eric Meredith, and he was the first person other than my unobservant parents, a dishwasher repairer, and the water meter reader to have entered my house in the ten years I had owned it. I bitterly resented the need that had brought him there; but I knew the source of this bitterness (apprehension: what other infirmities would be violating my privacy in future summers?) and made a perfunctory effort not to work it out on Eric.

  He seemed not to take my unfriendliness personally—I had a certain reputation at the college as a grump—and willingly did what I told him to without trying to chat me up. I showed him once how to handle the transplants, how big and how far apart to make the holes, how to work fertilizer and compost into the loose earth, dump in a liter of water, and firm the soil around the stem. He never forgot, never did it wrong, even beneath my jealous eye; he seemed to discover a knack for the work in the process of performing it that pleased him as much as it mollified me. He was scrupulously careful with the labeling and weighed the Ultramay at the beds’ edges with earth, leaving no gaps for wandering bees or beetles to find. In a week the entire lot of transplants was in the ground. I recorded the data myself—I could sit at a keyboard, anyway—but Eric did everything else.

  He grew so earnestly interested in the experiment, what’s more, that after the second week he couldn’t help asking questions; and I found his interest so irresistible that before I knew it I’d invited him to review the records.

  For I did, finally, really appear to be getting someplace. Several hybrids of the “Mi ting tang” (Ano II) strain had done unusually well the previous year; I thought I knew now which of their parents to cross with Perfection and Honey Dew to produce at least one variety which would show exceptional tolerance to mosaic in the field. Immunity now looked impossible, resistance unlikely; but I felt I would be more than satisfied with a strain that could tolerate the presence of the virus in its system without being killed or crippled too much—that could go on about its business of making a pretty good crop of sweet, firm-fleshed melons in spite of the disease.

  Eric sat for an hour while the screen scrolled through the records of a near-decade. I jumped when he spoke. “This whole thing is just beautifully conceived.” His amazement was understandable; why expect anything good from a professor as mediocre in class as I? “You’re just about there, aren’t you?”

  He had a plain, narrow face, much improved by enthusiasm. I felt my own face growing warm. “Mm-hm, I think so. One more season. Of course, this isn’t a very exciting experiment—not like what they do in the labs, genetic manipulation, that sort of thing.”

  “Well,” said Eric, “but it’s not so much the experiment itself as the experimental model. Heck, you could apply this model to any traits you were trying to select for. Did you work it out yourself?” I suspected t
hat this was doubt, but when I nodded he did too. “I thought so, I never came across this system of notation before and I bet everybody’ll be using it after you publish.”

  I’d been working in isolation a long time, without admiration, and the traitorous balloon of gratitude that swelled my chest undid me. “Come have something cold to drink,” I offered gruffly, and as I went before him into the kitchen the rubber tip of my crutch slipped on a wet patch of linoleum and I fell, whacking my head hard on the corner of a shelf on the way down.

  For a few seconds the pain in both ankle and scalp was blinding. Then as I struggled to rise, embarrassed and angry, and as Eric leaned over me to help, I saw the drops of blood on the floor, brilliant against the pale tiles. “Get away!” I shouted, shoving him so hard he stumbled against the counter and I fell flat on my back. In rage I hauled myself upright, holding to the counter, and managed to rip off some paper toweling to blot my head with. Again Eric moved instinctively to help, and again I snapped, “No, get back I said, keep away from me. Did you get any blood on yourself?”

  “Unh-unh,” said Eric, looking at his hands and arms, bewildered and then—bright student—suddenly comprehending. “Oh, hey, it’s okay—I’m vaccinated.”

  I froze and stared at him, my head singing. “What did you say?”

  “I’m vaccinated against AIDS. A bone punch in the sixth grade, see?” He pulled down the neck of his tee shirt and showed me the little V-shaped scar on his collarbone.

  Vaccinated. Immune. Of course he was. Everybody was vaccinated nowadays. Eric had been in no danger from me—but in my instinctive panic I’d given myself away. For exactly the third time that decade I burst into tears, and I couldn’t have told you which of the two of us was the more embarrassed.