The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Well. I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway. Your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?”

  “Yes.” Amber tenses up. “It’s a lie. Distortion of the facts.”

  “Hmm.” Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims—”

  “She’s trying to use you as a weapon!” Amber interrupts. “I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She’s trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don’t believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!”

  “A mother’s love—”

  “Fuck love!” Amber snarls, “she wants power.”

  Sadeq’s expression hardens. “You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation: you should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?” He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly, “Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?” Pause. “You must understand, I need an answer to these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do.”

  “My mother—” Amber stops. Spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so that he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war-paint, leaning over Amber, promising to take her to church so that Reverend Beeching can pray the devil out of her. Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat—“My mother likes control.”

  “Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of—no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”

  “My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him—they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t understand. You know that the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.”

  “Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know that your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says that this makes you my problem. Hmm.”

  “I’m not Moslem.” Amber stares at the screen. “I’m not a child, either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don’t believe in any god, mister judge. I don’t believe in any limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can’t speak for me.”

  “Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.” He catches her eye: his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for.”

  “Same to you too,” she mutters darkly as the connection goes dead. “Now what?” she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

  “I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says helpfully. “Is it down yet?”

  She rounds on him. “Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!”

  “What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her impishly. “Amber’s got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody. ...”

  Sleep cycles pass: the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney’s surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers. (There are no clunky nano-assemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles—just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s momentum into power: small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by preteens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.

  High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal firewalls for space colonies. The Sanger’s bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable—since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of a sovereign planetary body. The Borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium three from Jupiter: they’re so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them their messianic drive.

  Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: if replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of theotechnological inquiry.

  More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: social chaos caused by cheap antiaging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly greying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t handle implants aren’t really conscious: their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.

  The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over 20 percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design sea walls. With cellphone ownership near-ing 80 percent and literacy at 90, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: another generation, a
nd they’ll be richer than Japan in 2001.

  Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extraterrestrial intelligence: cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass—like gold—loses it: the degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas and the barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.

  An outbreak of green goo—a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path—is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpetbombing with fuel-air explosives: the USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization’s announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath.

  “Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five.”

  “Shut the fuck up, ’Neko, I’m trying to concentrate.” Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way: high orbit spacesuits—little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe—are easy, but this deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt, she has to wear an old moon suit that comes in about thirteen layers, and the gloves are stiff. It’s Chernobyl weather, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void. “Got it.” She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down: because the wall she’s tying herself to has no floor, just a cut-off two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

  The ground sings to her moronically: “I fall to you, you fall to me, it’s the law of gravity—”

  She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide’s ledge: metalized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body around until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tons, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing?” someone says over the intercom.

  “Of course I—” she stops. Alone in this TsUP-surplus iron maiden with its low bandwidth comms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: parts of her mind don’t work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west: when the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens her, it’s the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her, there are no minds, and even on the surface there’s not much but a moronic warbling of bots. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind her, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors this capsule to the Sanger. “I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though she’s unsure that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it. “It’s just leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”

  There’s a funny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns, she recognizes the sound: the heretofore-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

  “Let’s go,” she says, “time to roll the wagon.” A speech macro deep in the Sanger’s docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas thrusters pop, deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.

  “Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in her ears: she blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

  “Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”

  “Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”

  “How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump in her throat, she isn’t sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mothership. Watching over her as she falls.

  “Pretty much like always,” he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. “This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way.”

  “Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up—up relative to her feet, not her vector—and see if the ship’s still visible.

  “Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave!”

  “Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns. Su Ang and her over-engineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. “Listen, you going to come visiting?”

  “Visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be ready?”

  “Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, a bucket conveyor to bury it with, an airlock. It’s all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. “Once the Borg get back from Amalthea.”

  “Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you figure that?”

  “Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: she wants to be alone in comms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

  “Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

  “You too,” she says, a little too fast. “Come visit when I’ve got the life-support cycle stabilized.”

  “I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser-line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.

  Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.

  The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic-control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were less than two hundred people here: now there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply—trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks—and studies the map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.

  “Your slot: cleared to commence final approach in six nine five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.

  Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in on Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?”

  “Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”

  “Praise the Prophet, peace be unto him.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last, he can leave the ship to lo
ok after itself for a bit. He glances around: for two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.

  The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. “Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over.”

  Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty’s subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m listening, over.”

  “Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven four zero and slaved to our control.”

  He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system’s settings. “Control, all in order.”

  “Bravo One One, stand by.”

  The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: a kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.

  Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the battered Almaz module like a rust-stained snowflake half-a-kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of greyish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals; a cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive cluster. Already, he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma: the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.