Brave New Worlds

We're on the first pass — I'm entering an incisor — and all of a sudden, Ali's teeth, all of them at once, begin to spray. Eight or nine of them: these fine, crisscrossing sprays arching straight up in the air from the holes in his teeth. Like we'd struck oil.

You ever seen this? I say, sort of to the room. No: nobody's ever seen it. We're all just fascinated, observing this phenomenon. The blood loss is minimal, but the spray is getting pretty far, inking Ali's bib, turning it a very pale pink. Something about this image seems familiar to me — deja-vu-type familiar — and then I figure it out: Ali looks disconcertingly like the heads from Pier Pierson's Geysers bodywork. From thirty years back. Pierson was the guerilla artist and serial killer who plastinated his victims' heads and installed them, rigged with lights and fountains, in public spaces. A twisted descendant, in some ways, of my father — but let's not start down that road right now.

What's Ali's drug situation? I finally think to ask my Technician.

Euphoric, the Technician says. He's drifting.

I wavered. Let him drift, I finally said. Ali was a CI, I should add, and also just a kid: fourteen, if even that. It wasn't going to hurt to let him float around for a few minutes.

And as he floats, Ali starts smiling — his eyes narrowing like this is the happiest he's ever been. As I'm sure it is. That's one of the uncanny things about this job: in moments like these — and at the end of long sessions, when we inject the Nurturer — our guys have never felt so good in their entire lives.

For a long time, then — a mysteriously long time — we all just stood around Ali and watched. One of my PFCs took off her goggles, and I didn't reprimand her. A little later — it's obvious in retrospect — we figured out the mist from Ali's mouth was leaching Nurturer into the air; that's why we were feeling giddy, and why, for a short time, I was almost hypnotized, was actually seeing rainbows reaching into the room from Ali's mist. At the time, though, it seemed to me that it was just something about the strange sight of that fountain of pink, its queer resemblance to the Pierson heads, that was making me feel this way. Ali, meanwhile, is smiling so hard — so happy — that he's started to cry.

In moments like these — when art intrudes, unexpected, like a ghost — it's easy for me to think that my father is speaking to me. That he's reminding me of why I'm here.

I don't deny the truth of men like Muhyi Al-Din — of the men who've spent, and will spend, their last long years in my interrogation Chairs: there can be heroism in destruction — heroism, as well as art. There was art in my father's murder — in the transformation of a major American city into a primordial swirl of liquid color — just as there was art in my CI's smiling face, the gentle sprays of blood. But it was a destructive art.

My father, who could never have aligned himself with the destroyers, was blessed by his opportunity to stand with the creators. That's the American opportunity, isn't it? And that's the opportunity I fight for here. All of us. We're fighting for the triumph of a civilization that lets its heroes be creative heroes. My own destiny, determined from the day my father melted into color like one of his own brilliant creations, is to stand against the destroyers by becoming a destroyer myself. The sacrifice is worthwhile only if we win.

Twenty thousand years from now, when people marvel, as they will, at father's Apple, nobody will see an advertisement for a laptop or a phone; when they see the apple, they'll assume, perhaps, that the shape had some religious significance, or maybe they'll conclude that it was chosen for its inherent aesthetic properties. And what will they be able to think, if not that the people who lived here at this time, however primitive, were a questing people, reaching through their blindness, and the limitations of the real, in an attempt to touch the divine?

And it was these kinds of thoughts, sentimental and a little grandiose, that cycled through my head as, drunk on Nurturer and surrounded by rainbows, I laughed and cried with my Innocent Ali.

Just Do It by HEATHER LINDSLEY

Heather Lindsley's short fiction has appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Greatest Uncommon Denominator, and Strange Horizons. This story first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, was reprinted in Year's Best SF #12 and Escape Pod, and has been translated into Polish and Romanian. Lindsley is also a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop.

As America's largest chemical company, DuPont is best known for its work creating fibers like nylon, Kevlar, and Teflon. and for developing CFCs, the refrigerants responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. But beyond its products, DuPont has given society a special gift. In 1935, DuPont adopted the slogan 'Better things for Better Living. Through Chemistry. ' Other advertisers and cultural figures immediately jumped on this slogan, creating the infamous phrase better living through chemistry.

Chemistry has a bad rap these days. The late twentieth-century is riddled with environmental and health disasters stemming from human abuse of chemistry. From thalidomide babies to endangered eagles, it's difficult to see a good side of the chemical industry.

And our next tale turns a scathing eye upon it. Lindsley says 'it's about desire and how easy that is to manipulate. But I'll go a bit further and say I was also thinking about the ongoing conflict between doing the right thing and doing the comfortable, pleasurable thing. It's about having a compelling excuse to take the easier, ethically questionable path. To just do it and blame somebody else's chemical. '

* * *

Sometimes the only warning is a flash of sun on the lens of a sniper's scope. Today I'm lucky enough to catch the mistake.

Funny, I think as I duck down behind the nearest parked car, I don't feel lucky.

The car is a tiny thing, an ultra enviro-friendly Honda Righteous painted an unambiguous green. Good for the planet, bad for cover. Ahead there's an

H5 so massive and red I first take it for a fire truck. The selfish bastard parked illegally, blocking an alley, and for that I'm grateful.

I take a quick look at the roof of the building across the street before starting my dash to the Hummer. Halfway there a woman in plastic devil horns steps into my attempt to dodge her and her clipboard.

'Would-you-care-to-sign-our-petiton-in-favor-of-the-effort-against-ending-the-Florida-blockade?' Damn, she's good. She sounds like she trained with a preBay auctioneer.

I feint left and dart right, putting her between me and the Shooter and countering, 'I-already-signed-it- thanks!' so she won't follow. It's not the first lie I've told today, and it's not likely to be the last.

Temporarily safe behind the Hummer, I lean against the heavily tinted windows of the far back seat door, glad to be standing upright but panting and sweating and wishing I wasn't wearing the black jumpsuit I reserve for funerals and job interviews. Nanofiber, my ass — it can't even keep up with a little physical activity on a hot April day.

I start the long walk toward the front bumper, figuring I'll duck into the alley and continue on my way one block over. It seems like a good plan until another Shooter steps out of the alley.

This one has a pistol. I'd go cross-eyed if I tried to look down the barrel.

'Oh, come on,' I say, backing away slowly. 'Not the face. '

He dips the barrel down a bit. I sigh and start pulling the zipper at the high neck of my jumpsuit in the same direction. I stop just shy of revealing cleavage — I'll get shot in the face before I give this punk an eyeful.

He shrugs and fires.

'You little bastard!' I yell at his retreating back as I pull out the dart out of my forehead. 'I want your license number!'

Of course he doesn't bother to stop. They never do.

The itching starts almost immediately, and I reflexively reach up and touch the bump above my eyes. I know better than to scratch it, but I do anyway. The scratching releases a flood of chemicals that create a powerful and specific food craving. I brace myself.