The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Daddy appears onscreen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. “Hi—Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you’re calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

  “No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

  “Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember to never, ever call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get her lawyers to come after me with thumb screws and hot pincers, because she’ll say I made you call me. Understand?”

  “Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Don’t you want to know why I called?”

  “Um.” For a moment he looks taken aback. Then he nods, seriously. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmates’ phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything because she’s only a kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest? How’ve things been, anyway?”

  She’s going to have to be brief: the disposaphone comes prepaid, the international tariff it’s using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting loopier every week: she’s dragging me around to all these churches now, and yesterday she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can’t do what she wants; I’m not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt—I can’t even think straight anymore!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. “Get me out of here!”

  The view of her father shakes, pans around to show her aunt Annette looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

  Amber sniffs. “Can you help?” she asks.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.

  An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claimjumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.

  Amber, wearing a black sleeping-sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, his wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience, restful: life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slacktime (at least, not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high bandwidth dish is pointing at Earth). They’re unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling: the expedition relies on shamelessly exploitative child labor—they’re lighter on the life-support consumables than adults—working the kids twelve-hour days to assemble a toe-hold on the shore of the future. (When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be rich—but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.

  “Hey, slave,” she calls idly: “how you doing?”

  Pierre sniffs. “It’s going okay.” He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He’s thirteen: isn’t he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary: he shows no sign of noticing it but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. “Got cruise speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tons of metal, ceramics, and diamond-phase weirdness hurtles toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me: there’s a three-second lag and I don’t want to get into a feedback control-loop with it.”

  “I’ll shove if I want, slave.” She sticks her tongue out at him.

  “And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious—“Are we supposed to be doing this?”

  “You cover your ass and I’ll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright red. “You know what I mean.”

  “I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: “Aww, that’s no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you’ve given control of your speech centers to: they’re putting out way too much double-entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”

  “You stick to your business and I’ll stick to mine,” she says, emphatically. “And you can start by telling me what’s happening.”

  “Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. “It’s going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there’s the midcourse correction and a deceleration burn before touchdown. And then it’s going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?”

  “Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her bat-wings and lies back in midair, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her dayshift. “Wake me when there’s something interesting to see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic: but right now just knowing he’s her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there’s something to this whispering-and-giggling he really likes you stuff the older girls go in for—

  The window rings like a gong and Pierre coughs. “You’ve got mail,” he says dryly. “You want me to read it for you?”

  “What the—” A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to page-in the grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.

  “You bitch, Mom! Why’d you have to go and do a thing like that?”

  The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: it happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

  She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the delivery man’s clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA; afterward, she drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. “You’re Amber?” it mrowls.

  “Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from Tanté ‘Nette?’”

  “No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.” It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. “Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”

  “Mom doesn’t believe in seafood,” says Amber: “it’s all foreign junk, she says. It’s my birthday today, did I tell you?”

  “Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. “Here’s your dad’s present. Bastard put me in hibernation and blogged me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you’ll trash the fucker. No good will come of it.”

  Amber interrupts the cat’s grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully. “So what is it?” she demands. “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”

  “Naaah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. “It’s some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though—he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise.”

  “Wow. Like, how totally cool!” In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday, but Mom’s at work and Amber’s home alone,
with just the TV in moral-majority mode for company. Things have gone so far downhill since Mom discovered religion that absolutely the best thing in the world tante Annette could have sent her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If he doesn’t, Mom will take her to Church tonight (and maybe to an IRS compliance-certified restaurant afterward, if Amber’s good and does whatever Pastor Wallace tells her to).

  The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer: “Why dontcha fire it up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There’s a whirr and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership.

  “What do I do now?” she asks.

  “Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions,” the cat recites in a bored sing-song voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: “Le READ ME contains directions pour l’execution instrument corporate dans le boîte. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying aineko for clarification.” The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it’s about to bite an invisible insect. “Warning: don’t rely on your father’s cat’s opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its même base, back when they were married. Ends.” It mumbles on for a while: “fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I’ll piss in her knicker drawer, I’ll molt in her bidet. ...”

  “Don’t be vile.” Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards: a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of subsapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law—the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for—or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semidigestible chunks of LISP: but that the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning slaves.

  “What’s going on?” she asks the cat. “What’s this all about?”

  The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. “This wasn’t my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy and your mother hates him lots because she’s still in love with him. She’s got kinks, y’know? Or maybe she’s sublimating them, if she’s serious about this church shit she’s putting you through. He thinks that she’s a control freak. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dome, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he’s got her wrapped right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer—which isn’t hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom’s—specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that’s what you want to do.”

  Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README—boring static UML diagrams, mostly—soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari’a law and a limited-liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal—the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer’s future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off—and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave, and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument—about 90 percent of it, in fact—is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract: at the far end of the corporate firewall is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust funds (which she essentially owns) oversee the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.

  “You think I should take this?” she asks uncertainly. It’s hard to tell how smart the cat really is—there’s probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough—but it tells a pretty convincing tale.

  The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: “I’m saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. But it won’t stop your ma coming after him with a horse whip and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you’ll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your dad and the frog bitch, they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They’re out all hours of the night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your tante ’Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they’re not having noisy sex on the balcony. They’d cramp your style, kid: you shouldn’t have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do.”

  “Huh.” Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat’s transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I’d better think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household net feed. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she’s thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren’t supposed to have sex: isn’t there a law, or something? “Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?”

  The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard-vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero: by superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level—there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic, nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to its exhaust ducts.

  “Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born: your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved, and the estate trustees are trying to recreate his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants. They’re sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they-he are building a spacehab that they’re going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three refineries. It’s that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they’ve got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term.”

  This is mostly going right over Amber’s head—she’ll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later—but the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that’s what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle-America that never was—the one her mom wants to retreat into. “Is Jupiter fun?” she asks. “I know it’s big and not very dense, but is it, li
ke, a happening place?”

  “You could say that,” says the cat, as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber’s immature immune system. “Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let’s get going: we’ve got a flight to catch.”

  * * *

  Sadeq is eating his dinner when the lawsuit rolls in.

  Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he contemplates the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: the supplicant is American, a woman, and—oddly—claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not: as the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.

  A woman who leads a God-fearing life—not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding—is deprived of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one’s behavior, which is degenerate: an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: he doesn’t take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari’a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed “progress.” The same forces that Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the Ummah in orbit around Jupiter.