Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

The regrown beer tasted awful, but after Burgewick choked down a half glass he did feel more relaxed, enough to start enjoying himself a little. The others were enjoying themselves very much, Mortice and Breesha in particular. Mortice had peeled Breesha’s mask away from her hyde so he could peer through its eyeholes from the wrong side, and Breesha, despite what she’d said about fuck Mortice and his fancy cloak , was giggling madly. Burgewick felt an odd twist in his stomach at the sight.

Once the servants cleared the tables, a slow hush crept into the hall. Burgewick realized that the Old Madam had made her way to the front of the room and was waiting to speak, one leg of her chair pawing at the floor. Father gave two booming claps to silence the last chattering voices. The cousins wormed back in their seats to listen; Breesha pushed Mortice away.

The Old Madam surveyed them all for a moment, all the Houses, before she opened her mouth. “Well, here we are again,” she whispered. The black sponges around her head caught and amplified her voice, sending it all through the banquet hall. Burgewick felt the hairs on his arms stand up. “It used to bore me horribly, telling the same story every year, but lately I enjoy it. Like slipping into a familiar groove. I suppose I must be getting old.”

There was polite laughter from the adults; Burgewick joined a beat late.

“Three centuries ago, the world swayed on the brink of disaster, my children,” the Old Madam said, and the familiar words made Burgewick remember back to being much younger, back to sitting on his mother’s knee while he listened. “The summers were scorching hot, and the tides were rising higher, and all the cities of the world were swollen and teeming with parasites. Parasites who bred and bred in the filthy slums and begged for food to fill their children’s fat stomachs so they could grow up to breed all over again. The world could sustain no more of them. So there were wars, and there were famines, and there were floods that ate entire islands. And who did the parasites blame?”

Burgewick mouthed the next word on automatic:

“Us.” The Old Madam’s voice was jagged with contempt. “They blamed the ones who were strong and smart enough to rise to the top of all that human waste, and strong and smart enough to stay there. They blamed us for the poisoned skies and the dying oceans. The parasites were weak and they were stupid, but there were hordes of them and they were hideously angry. They would have hunted us down, my children, and murdered us even as the world collapsed all around them.

“There were many families, back then. Hundreds of Houses, all with different names, scattered all across the globe. But only ours survived. When the hordes came for us, we were already gone, hidden away below the ground in concrete palaces. But we left the parasites a parting gift: the Contagion.”

Ferrick made a small whoop of excitement; the Old Madam’s eyes traveled over to him and she gave an indulgent smile.

“And so all there was left to do was wait, my children,” she said. “We waited beneath the earth while the Contagion cleansed the world. A century, we waited. Our family found the genetic keys to turn that let us survive without sunlight or greenery, to propagate without outsiders, even to push back the hands of death. For a while, at least.”

She stroked one of the tubes in her neck with a pensive finger.

“My father, Wendell, and his twin brother, Eddard, were the heads of our House on the day we finally emerged, on the hundredth anniversary of the Contagion. They found a new world. A clean world, waiting for us. But the parasites weren’t all gone. A few of them were still scrabbling in the dirt, clinging to life, immune to the Contagion but vulnerable to everything else. To all the ills we overcame during our long isolation.

“They had been returned to their rightful place. But Eddard didn’t see it that way. He looked at them with pity. He regretted the Contagion. He renounced his own family.” The Old Madam’s voice turned low and venomous. “My father tried to reason with his twin. He showed him that the parasites could live as our servants, how they once did in the past. But Eddard would not be satisfied by that. He wanted to freely grant the parasites the gifts we had so arduously earned. He would have turned the genetic keys to let them reknit their flesh, grow hydes of their own, stave off hunger and disease. He would have made them our equals.

“Eddard’s kindness would have been the death of us, my children,” the Old Madam said solemnly. “It would have restarted a doomed cycle. And so my father’s hand was forced. He banished his twin brother, his half-self, from the family. But when Eddard went, he took the genetic keys with him, a thief in the night. My father realized, then, that given the chance, Eddard would let the parasites spread again, more powerful than ever, and end the world a second time.”

The hair at the back of Burgewick’s neck stood up—Mortice was gone from the table. He had been intent on the Contagion’s Eve story, too intent to notice his brother leave. Breesha was gone, too. He scanned the banquet hall but saw neither of them under the deadlight. He was only half-listening as the Old Madam finished the story.

“So my father followed his twin out into the dead forest, behind which the fine House Noctambulous now sits, and he retrieved the keys. He killed Eddard and left his body to rot under the trees.” The Old Madam leaned forward; her chair crouched to compensate. “Eddard’s kindness, his weakness, could have infected the family and all the Houses. We have to guard against it. So each year on Contagion’s Eve, we remember our history and we safeguard our future. We kill the weak part of ourselves. How my father did.”

The Old Madam fell silent. The hall waited to see if she was finished; her eyes flickered open and shut. Finally she stroked the arm of her chair and ambled back to her place at the long table. Her words had left a layer of frost. Burgewick was still searching for his brother and Breesha, suspicion growing in his gut, when his father stood up.

“The hunt is one of our most important traditions,” he said. “And lucky for us, it’s a hell of a good time. Let’s see the doppels.”

The frost whisked away and murmurs of anticipation ran through the room. Guests shifted in their seats for a better view and Burgewick saw Ferrick clambering up onto the greenman’s shoulders, Freya scrabbling after him. Then the doors at the far end of the hall glided open, and servants ushered the doppels through with long black prods. For a moment, Burgewick forgot all about Mortice’s absence.

There were almost two dozen of them, one for each participant in the hunt. Burgewick and Gib had snuck into the incubation room a few weeks earlier to see the doppels growing in their red-lit embryonic tanks, bathed in cell-knitters and enzyme gel. Even the largest had only been the size of a baby then, but the accelerants had done their work. Each doppel was now about as big as its originator, though the forced growth had warped them somewhat: many limped on crooked legs or had odd truncated necks.

The cousins started trying to figure out whose was whose almost immediately. The doppels were costumed, of course, dressed in gaudy reflective bodysuits that would make them easier to spot among the trees, and they wore masks with beaks or antlers or long upright ears like the extinct animals that once roamed the forest.

“There’s yours, Orry!” Fennela hooted. “He’s got a big rump just like you do!”

Burgewick found his own quickly and easily: it was the smallest of the lot, wobbly on its feet, dressed like a plague bird with artificial feathers and a beaked mask. He knew some of the older relatives despised the masks. He’d heard them, in snatches of conversation, saying that the masks made it all too easy, and that it wasn’t a true Doppelhunt if you didn’t look the thing right in the eye as it bled and writhed.